Research on the function of color in instruction and learning is reviewed, and the rationale for its use in instructional materials and as an aid to learning is examined. Three points are made: (1) on the basis of research results, it is not yet possible to prescribe the use of color cues in instruction; (2) color is presently being used in…

The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of errorless discrimination training in teaching young retarded children to pair a given letter symbol with a specific sound. A secondary objective was to determine the extent to which the letter-sound discrimination would generalize to the skill areas of omitting the desired sound when…

A review of play in nonhuman animals indicates that play increases with phylogenetic status, is important for mature social development in more advanced species, reflects intentional activity, and is essential for the development of tool-using strategies. (Author)

Structural play-language relationships and diversity of symbolic play skills were compared with five language impaired and five nonimpaired children (ages 27-39 months). Findings indicated differences in mean length of utterance, mean length of sequence, and quantitative and qualitative aspects of symbolic play. (Author/DB)

Results indicate that verbalization is the preferred symbolic process in young children. Portions of this paper were presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Los Angeles, California, 1969. (MH)

Concludes that children in grades two through six can learn sound-symbol relationships even though they cannot define phonics terms or give examples of them. (DD)

In 3 studies, 2.5- and 3-year-olds transferred knowledge from an easy task that required appreciation of a symbolic relation to a more difficult task involving a symbolic relation that children their age typically do not appreciate. Results support the theory that young children use insight into one symbolic relation to understand other symbolic…

Challenges Smolensky's theory that human intuitive/nonconscious cognitive processes can only be accurately explained in terms of subsymbolic computations in artificial neural networks. Symbolic learning models of two cognitive tasks involving nonconscious acquisition of information are presented: learning production rules and artificial finite…

The ability of 24 children with autism (ages 3-12) to comprehend pretend acts, consisting of an experimenter pouring a pretend substance from a container onto a target figure, was explored. There was no significant difference between subjects and controls in ability to identify the pretend substance, predict the actions' pretend outcome, or…

The paper examines the use of concrete symbol systems to make the transition from presymbolic to formal symbolic communication for deaf blind students. Comments focus on expressive use of concrete symbols and address two issues requiring further research: (1) the critical features of referent objects, concrete symbols, and concrete symbol arrays…

Research supported in part by grants 1484-S and 198-T from U.S. Rehabilitation Services Administration.

It is suggested that instructional research in visual literacy focus on the study of the symbolic codes of pictorial media. (Author/STS)