This article presents a brief overview of the literature pertaining to the use of objects of reference by people with deaf-blindness. It suggests that the establishment of nonsymbolic object use in appropriate routines may facilitate the acquisition of the symbolic use of objects. (MDM)

Describes two experiments which examined how supplementing specific practice experiences with variable practice experiences influenced motor skill retention. Participants received varying trials of acquisition practice on a criterion force production task. Acquisition practice with variations of the criterion task led to better retention than…

Examined preschool children's inferences about the likely appearance of a target figure based on information about the figure's occupation or personality traits. Without explicit gender-category information, girls' performance on gender-consistent and gender-inconsistent trials was equivalent; boys performed better on same-sex attributes. With…

Two studies examined whether 1-year olds' name learning during joint attention was guided by expectation that names will be in the form of spoken words. Results showed that 13-month olds, but not 20-month olds, learned a new sound/object correspondence, as evidenced by their choosing targets reliably in responses to hearing the word or sound on…

Examines the relations between research about processes of learning and thinking and educational practices that attempt to achieve that aim. Three research perspectives, behaviorist, cognitive, and situative, that characterize thinking and learning to think differently are discussed. It argues that the situative perspective can provide a framework…

This article presents the eight laws of association theory and applies four of them to strategies for teaching transferable skills to individuals with visual impairments. Strategies described include situation forecasting, generalization, sense shifting, performing skills repetitively to facilitate the transfer habit, and assigning an intensity…

Investigated in 6 experiments how 4.5-month-old infants' perception of a display is affected by an immediate prior experience with an object similar to part of the test display. Found that infants' use of a prior experience is disrupted by changes in the features of the object, but not by change in its spatial orientation. (JPB)

Argues for an informational processing explanation for young infants' ability to use featural cues to differentiate objects, centering on the development of infants' ability to integrate both featural and object information. Considers information processing propositions and evidence on object segregation. (JPB)

Discusses connections between infants' use of object knowledge in recognition to computational, psychophysical, and neurophysiological research on adult perceptual segmentation and grouping. Considers these connections through a framework of the tasks and information involved in adult object segregation, and interprets Needham's results in this…

Discusses responses to Needham's research on infants' use of featural, physical and experiential information to segregate displays. Considers characterization of different kinds of information infants use when segregating objects. Discusses relations between processes underlying object segregation. Considers the roles of visual versus linguistic…

Describes an easy-to-administer test of productive vocabulary that requires subjects to produce a set of word association responses to a small set of stimulus words. Argues that such a test might tap the extent of nonnative speakers' productive vocabulary more effectively than other tests in current use. (Author/VWL)

Two experiments examined whether associating an imitation task with an operant task affected 6-month-olds' memory for either task. Results indicated that infants successfully imitated a puppet's action for up to 2 weeks only if the associated operant task (pressing a lever to activate a miniature train) was retrieved first. Follow-up study…

In the past, some teachers treated word learning as an isolated subject--a list of words that were not connected to content or literature studies. This article describes how Candy Mulligan, a teacher at the Center for Reading and Writing at Rider University in Lawrenceville, NJ, teaches vocabulary by selecting words from the students' seventh and…

After repeated associations between two events, E1 and E2, responses to E2 can be facilitated either because participants consciously expect E2 to occur after E1 or because E1 automatically activates the response to E2, or because of both. In this article, the authors report on 4 experiments designed to pit the influence of these 2 factors against…

If first language is rational in the sense that acquisition produces an end-state model of language that is a proper reflection of input and that optimally prepares speakers for comprehension and production, second language is usually not. This paper considers the apparent irrationalities of L2 acquisition, that is the shortcomings where input…