The effect of pictorial detail and elaboration on children's retention.

In a visual memory task, two degrees of stimulus detail were compared to test Reese's hypothesis that stimulus detail would facilitate retention of paired associates for young children. Stimuli were presented in an elaborated or nonelaborated fashion so that the effect of detail on retention of both types of materials could be investigated. Four and 5 year-old children were included to assess a reported developmental trend that elaboration facilitates retention for older children but fails to do so for younger children. Both age groups performed equally well, and detail had no effect. Elaboration aided retention significantly. A second study, in which difficulty of the task was increased, yielded equivalent results. The constraints on performance by recall and recognition tasks were discussed.     

The development of communication: Attribute variation leads to contrast failure

Groups of 5-year-olds in two experiments described multidimensional triangles for a listener. The attribute differentiating referent triangles from nonreferent triangles in Experiment I was constant across trials for the simple condition group, while any one of three attributes was distinctive on a given trial for the complex condition group. One-adjective messages by subjects in the simple condition were virtually always informative; in the complex group, such messages were predominantly ambiguous. The boundaries of the variation effect were assessed in Experiment II. In addition to the simple-complex variation of the relevant attributes, the values of the irrelevant attributes either varied across trials in the diverse groups or remained constant in the constant groups. One-adjective messages were informative only in the simple-constant group; in the other groups, such messages were predominantly ambiguous. Thus, young children can base their communications on a comparative analysis of stimulus arrays, but performance deteriorates when there is any variation in relevant or irrelevant attributes. These results were discussed in relation to various theories of the development of meaning and communication: the cognitive overload theory, the broad context theory, and the perceptual saliency theory.     

Speech versus sign comprehension in autistic children: analysis and prediction

Autistic children have severe problems in acquiring language. For this reason, special techniques have been developed to teach them speech and sign language. It is not known, however, whether these children will profit more from speech or sign training. The research literature implies that verbal imitative ability may predict language learning characteristics particularly in the speech modality. In view of this possibility, two groups of autistic children--good versus poor verbal imitators--were studied within the context of a receptive label acquisition task. Good imitators acquired receptive speech whereas poor imitators typically did not. Both groups acquired receptive signs. The results were discussed in terms of the role that imitative ability may play with respect to language acquisition in this population.