Enhancing children's attitudes toward disabled peers using a multi-media intervention

Interventions are being developed to enhance children's attitudes toward disabled peers and thereby facilitate mainstreaming in schools. This study evaluates the impact of Feeling Free, a multi-media program of disability-related films, activities, discussions, and books. Participants were children from 16 classrooms, grades 3 through 6. Two classes at each grade level (N = 8) were randomly assigned to the six-session program and were compared on five outcome measures to the eight remaining classrooms. Treatment children demonstrated increased knowledge about disabilities, more positive perceptions of disabled persons, and greater awareness of appropriate behavioral responses to disabled peers. There were no long-lasting treatment effects on two measures of children's acknowledged willingness to interact with disabled peers, although treatment girls demonstrated short-term gains on one measure. Suggestions are made for increasing program impact and providing services to other participants in the mainstreaming process.     

Language and speech recovery in a case of viral encephalitis

The speech and language recovery course of a 47-year-old man with viral encephalitis is described. Over a 3-month period, the patient was evaluated six times using the same selected battery of tests. Results show that viral encephalitis can deleteriously affect communicative performance and that improvement in medical status is accompanied by rapid and dramatic gains on most standard speech and language measures. For this case changes appeared related to improved auditory attention and retention, increased efficiency in word retrieval, and improved mental status.     

Written language acquisition after left or right hemidecortication in infancy

When written language is acquired in only one hemisphere because of hemidecortication in infancy, the left hemisphere is superior to the right at using morphophonemic rules to read and spell unfamiliar words, and at exploiting the structure of sentence units to achieve rapid reading of meaning in prose. The ability to learn names for logographs, however, is better in the right hemisphere than in the left. The greater mastery of written language in the left hemisphere is a result, not of an enhanced facility for making cross-modal associations between sounds and signs, but of a superior access to the morphophonemic rule system and the higher-order textual constraints of English.     

Predictions of X-linked inheritance for human characteristics

The conclusion reached by H. Thomas and W. Jamison (Developmental Review, 1981, 1, 274–283) that an observed sex-related difference in water-level task performance is due to an X-linked major gene raises the question of whether available data would be consistent with X-linkage predictions other than the one tested. Several predictions of X-linked inheritance for human characteristics are presented and discussed. It was concluded that although water-level task performance may involve a heritable component, the available data from seven independent studies reviewed by Thomas and Jamison are insufficient for determining the specific mode of genetic transmission.     

A factor analytic validation of Holland's Vocational Preference Inventory

A principal components analysis was applied to a 135-item pool of the Holland Vocational Preference Inventory, Sixth Revision. The sample consisted of a cross section of 100 men and 200 women college students under the age of 25 yr. An eight-factor structure was defined for each of the sexes which is discussed in relation to Holland's clinically based scales, sex differences and criterion groups as defined by choice of major subject. The a priori clinical scales were partially upheld with differences attributed to the characteristics of the sample and sociopolitical time context during which the test was administered. A new scale emerged relating to an interest in professions involving law and politics.