Two experiments replicate and extend Luria's (1959, 1961) findings on the development of verbal self-regulation during early childhood. Results support Luria's hypothesis that overt verbalizations facilitate control of motor behavior in young children and that language can play an active and integrative role in the development of behavioral and…

One problem with readability formulas is that they are generally calculated on factors at the sentence and subsentence level. However, the representation of text through information structures is equally important. The complexity of information structures and their realizations will affect reading difficulty and should be incorporated into…

Examines the proposition that low frequency monosyllabic words are more difficult to spell than high frequency monosyllabic words having the same vowel phoneme-grapheme spelling patterns. Results obtained from 1,704 second-, third-, and fourth-grade children did not support the proposition. (MP)

The Perceived Task Complexity Measuring Instrument can be used as a management training tool and can provide managers insights into their job environments. (Author/MLF)

Reports two experiments examining the contents and accessibility of a subset of the knowledge represented in long-term memory by preschool-age children. The knowledge domain of object locations in the home was selected for study. Among the results, very young children revealed considerable knowledge in this domain. (Author/RH)

Presents excerpts from institutional publications to demonstrate the pompous and overly complicated nature of the prose used in college catalogs. Suggests that reading specialists analyze and revise catalogs so that they will be understood by the average high school student. (JP)

Responds to doubts raised in the preceding article about the author's readability graph. Defends the orthodoxy of the procedures used to develop the graph and presents data showing that it correlates quite well with the other formulas on first- and second-grade materials and is just a little high on third- grade materials. (ET)

Examined the effectiveness of repertory grids in assessing cognitive complexity as a correlate of creativity. Literary personnel and audiovisual representatives completed grids. Significant differences were found between creative writers and their literary controls; the grids failed to discriminate between greater and lesser creativity in the…

It is reported that research on the socioeconomic achievement process has begun to generate anomalous findings, many of which involve occupational status as conventionally measured. The author proposes a theory of vertical occupational differentiation based on the role activities of occupational incumbents. (Author/RLV)

Undergraduate judges were assigned to groups that differed in information-processing loads. Correct observations decreased and reports of illusory correlation increased as the information-processing load increased. (Author)

Predictions of divergent effects of individual task and subunit workflow technologies on staff characteristics and subunit structures were tested. (Author/IRT)

Two studies used sentence-picture matching tests of sentence comprehension in 69 adults with aphasia. Clustering analysis yielded groups of patients whose performance steadily deteriorated and was affected by sentence types that were harder for the overall group. Results provide data relevant to the determinants of the complexity of a sentence in…

This study investigated whether syntactic complexity exerts an influence on the frequency of stuttering in the speech of seven adolescents who stuttered and seven who were normally fluent. Although normal disfluencies and errors in repetition accuracy increased as syntactic complexity increased, stuttering frequency did not appear to be affected…

A simple approximation to the conditional distribution of goodness-of-fit statistics for the Rasch model is presented that is used when item difficulties are known. The approximation, which is easily programmed, gives relatively accurate assessments of conditional p-values for tests of 10 or more items. (Author/SLD)

In the approach to latent trait models for pure speed tests presented in this article, the subject parameters are treated as random variables with a common gamma distribution, and marginal maximum likelihood estimators are derived for the test difficulties and the parameters of the latent subject distribution. An application of this model to…