The study of creative movement, dramatic expression, and kinesthetic awareness can develop students' skills not only in movement but also in communication and leadership. Suggested kinesthetic activities follow the four phases of: physical movement, examining student responses, stimulating the imagination, and analyzing and sharing the experience.…

Consideration of underlying neurological and psychological deficits suggests that the autistic syndrome results from the coexistence of at least two distinct constellations of functional impairments: deficits in mechanical language skills, as in the developmental dysphasias; and deficits in social relatedness, play, and nonverbal communication, as…

The paper reviews the nonverbal behaviors of students with severe/multiple handicaps and demonstrates parallels between their communication development and that of normally developing children. Discussed are the roles of the adult and child in the communicative exchange and examples of communicative behavior typically seen in children with…

Describes an experiment that examined the effect of nonverbal communication conveyed by touch, forward lean, and smile combined with the effect of gender on patrons perceptions of the library, librarians, and themselves. Possible reasons for the lack of correlation among these factors are discussed and the questionnaire used is appended. (35…

This study compared efforts of 20 deaf and 20 hearing infants to reengage their deaf or hearing mothers in a maternal "still-face" situation. When all kinds of infant signal behaviors were considered, few overall differences were found in eliciting efforts by deaf and hearing infants. (Author/DB)

The hypothesis that mental retardation is associated with specific deficits in decoding facially expressed emotions was tested with 16 adult subjects with mild to moderate mental retardation and control subjects matched for either chronological or mental age. Experimental subjects were significantly less accurate on the emotion task than both…

Comparison of the ability of 74 children with and 19 children without learning disabilities (LD) at three age levels to identify expressions of emotions through facial, posture, and gesture cues found that LD children identified fewer emotions but did show some age progression. Some emotions were more readily identified than others. Most gender…

Object play and communication development were studied with four infants with cerebral palsy, involving time spent with objects, types of object play, and object selection. As coordinated looking between object and adult emerged, children demonstrated increased interest in objects and sophistication in their play behaviors. (SW)

Explored the interplay between gestures and words in the early vocabulary of 12 normally developing Italian children at 16 and 20 months of age. Focused on spontaneous production of verbal and gestural types and tokens to assess the diversity and semantic content of the verbal and gestural vocabularies. Results indicated that gestures were used…

Sighted (n=37), partially sighted (n=20), and blind (n=17) participants answered questions about their expression and interpretation of verbal and nonverbal cues during telephone conversations, face-to-face encounters, and dating. The groups used an equal number of cues. Results have implications for developing specific communication skills of…

The prelinguistic intentional communicative behaviors of 10 noninstitutionalized children (ages 6-13) with profound mental retardation were analyzed according to communicative rate, communicative function, discourse structure, communicative means, and syllable shape. Findings are compared to data from children without mental retardation and…

Proposes that the value of formal writing conventions has diminished. Notes that, although formal conventions are important, the findings are hard to generalize. Uses content analysis to prove formal conventions are valuable and are often justified on rhetorical grounds, suggesting the dichotomy between formalist and rhetorical axiologies is…

Ways in which to revive and promote creativity in campus activities programming are offered. Specific steps to take, particularly in committee meetings, to energize individual thinking and group processes and to improve programming and publicity are detailed. (MSE)

The verbal and nonverbal behaviors of five children (ages seven and eight) with specific language impairments wishing to gain access into established social interactions were evaluated. Although comparative children without language impairments had no difficulty, three of the subjects were unable to gain access at all and the other two did so…

A correction procedure, including interruption, physical guidance, verbal instruction, and repetition, was used to train five students with severe/profound mental retardation to reject unmatching referents to their gesture mands. Trainers are urged to assess student response when items not matching the referent of a prior request are offered.…