Because vocabulary control in children's reading materials is largely based on vocabulary lists and studies which are now obsolete, new areas of learning are being considered for developing beginning reading materials. Instead of basing vocabulary lists on frequency counts and adult reading materials, the three approaches examined here are…

The classroom presentation of authentic nonverbal behavior as a legitimate and useful activity in the teaching of the foreign culture is explored in this report. The author focuses on the need for cross-cultural inventories for each of the commonly taught languages in American schools and colleges. Means by which currently-used language texts can…

Seventy-two university students were exposed to one of four repetition treatments for one of three different amounts of information presented in a chunked format. Implicit chunk repetition, i.e., the presentation of words not present in the original word list but logically belonging to a previously seen chunk, facilitated acquisition and retention…

Three measures of verbal input organization (category clustering, associative clustering, and subjective organization) were employed to compare the performances of 30 normal and 30 educable mentally retarded (EMR) elementary school males of equal chronological age on various free recall learning tasks. Subjects were given 12 successive trials on…

The effectiveness of two types of retrieval cues was assessed with second- and sixth-grade children. After a single presentation of a list of words, the children first recalled as many of the words as they could. Following free recall, children in each grade were given either conceptual (category names for words on the input lists) or acoustic…

The hypothesis that disparities in children's associative responses are due to differences in verbal achievement was tested. Also tested was the assumption that for black inner-city children, conventionality in associative responding is accomplished at the expense of increasing verbal repertories and elaborating the meaning of words of varying…

Literature on forgetting in prose learning was reviewed to establish the relative importance of five variables: (1) the definition of prose and the organizational structure of the material implied in the definition; (2) the time factor; (3) the mode of criteria measurement; (4) the similarity factor; and (5) strength of learning. Each of these was…

Major tenets summarizing Jensen's two-level theory of mental abilities were examined in a static-group comparison, correlational study. Caucasian siblings in grades one through four from low- and middle-socioeconomic (SES) populations were administered five Level I (associative learning ability) tasks and Raven's Progressive Matrices. Consistent…

Linguistic, psycholinguistic, and sociolinguistic aspects of word knowledge are examined. Vocabulary techniques are discussed according to how they build up word frequency, vocabulary growth in native speakers, underlying forms, semantic structure, word association, and case relations. (SCC)

A study is reported in which pairs of synonyms, antonyms, coordinates, and super super-subordinates were presented dichotically to university students. After each pair the subject reported what he heard. In one condition the two members of a pair were presented simultaneously, and in another they were presented sequentially. (Author/RM)

A multiple baseline design was used to investigate the effects of simultaneous sign/verbal presentation on the acquisition of verbal labelling of two Down's syndrome girls, ages 6 and 7 years. (Author)

Taxonomic category encoding was studied in 160 second and fourth grade students, both low-socioeconomic status Blacks and middle-class Whites. Three items were displayed sequentially, to be recalled later. The results provided conclusive evidence of the availability of taxonomic encoding categories in the groups sampled. (Author/GDC)

Study of Danish language needs of an immigrant student leads to the assertion that concepts pertaining to first- and second-language vocabulary need revision, particularly regarding certain minority languages and certain fields, including the distinction between "active" and "passive" vocabulary and first-language and…

Twenty college students, naive to Blissymbols, were asked to "guess" the meaning of 64 Blissymbols presented without their word gloss. The influence of symbol representativeness and the concreteness of associated word labels on the symbols'"guessability" was analyzed. The guessability of a symbol's gloss was significantly…

Eight reading-disabled boys with subskill deficits in either oral reading, associative skills, or sequential skills received skill specific computer-assisted instruction emphasizing accuracy and speed of response for two and a half months. Comparison with controls indicated marked improvement which generalized to achievement measures of word…