Generalizing the use of descriptive adjectives through modelling. (17/508)

Two retarded children were exposed to daily imitation training in which teacher or nurse modelled and instructed each child to imitate 12 sentences containing one of six animal names. The subjects were praised for correct verbal imitation. Across three phases of a multiple-baseline design, sentences varied as to the presence or absence of size and/or color adjectives describing the animals. In probe sessions at another time of day and in a different setting, the experimenter twice asked each subject to dfescribe 12 different animal pictures. The subjects' use of descriptive adjectives (color and/or size) greatly increased during probe sessions as a function of the sentence content (presence or absence of color and/or size adjectives) in modelling and imitation training sessions. Generalization to descriptions of animals also not used in imitation training sentences was also obtained..  (+info)

Teaching generative use of sentence answers to three forms of questions. (18/508)

Three retarded and four economically disadvantaged children were taught, through modelling and reinforcement procedures, to produce complete sentences in response to three types of questions involving changes in verb inflections. To evaluate generalization of training, new but similar questions were periodically asked, answers to which were never modelled or reinforced. Modelling and reinforcement effectively taught correct sentence answers to training questions and produced new sentence answers to questions for which no specific training had been given.  (+info)

Relation between parental restrictions on movies and adolescent use of tobacco and alcohol. (19/508)

CONTEXT: Viewing smoking and drinking in movies may prompt adolescents to initiate these behaviors. Movies with R ratings contain more smoking than do movies in all other rating categories. OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the extent to which parents restrict the exposure of adolescents to R-rated movies and to determine whether such restrictions are associated with decreased tobacco and alcohol use in adolescents. DESIGN: Cross-sectional, self-administered survey. PARTICIPANTS: Students in grades 5 through 8 enrolled in New Hampshire and Vermont schools. SAMPLING STRATEGY: Fifteen schools in Vermont and New Hampshire were randomly selected from all middle schools with > or = 150 students. OUTCOME MEASURES: Students who had tried smoking cigarettes or tried drinking alcohol without parental knowledge. RESULTS: Of 4544 students surveyed, 18% had tried cigarettes and 23% had tried alcohol. Although 90% were younger than 14 years of age, only 16% were completely restricted from viewing R-rated movies. The prevalence of having tried smoking was 35% for those with no restrictions on viewing R-rated movies, 12% for those with partial restrictions, and 2% for those with complete restrictions. The prevalence of having tried alcohol was 46% for those with no restrictions on viewing R-rated movies, 16% for those with partial restrictions, and 4% for those with complete restrictions. Even after controlling for other factors, including grade, parental disapproval of smoking, maternal supervision, maternal responsiveness, peer and family smoking, and child personality characteristics, children who were completely restricted from viewing R-rated movies were significantly less likely to smoke (relative risk, 0.29; 95% CI, 0.19 to 0.45) or drink (relative risk, 0.30; CI, 0.21 to 0.42) compared with those who had no restrictions on viewing R-rated movies. CONCLUSION: Limiting the exposure of adolescents to R-rated movies may prevent early use of alcohol and tobacco.  (+info)

Imitation of nonwords by deaf children after cochlear implantation: preliminary findings. (20/508)

Fourteen prelingually deafened pediatric users of the Nucleus-22 cochlear implant were asked to imitate auditorily presented nonwords. The children's utterances were recorded, digitized, and broadly transcribed. The target patterns and the children's imitations were then played back to normal-hearing adult listeners in order to obtain perceptual judgments of repetition accuracy. The results revealed wide variability in the children's ability to repeat the novel sound sequences. Individual differences in the component processes of encoding, memory, and speech production were strongly reflected in the nonword repetition scores. Duration of deafness before implantation also appeared to be a factor associated with imitation performance. Linguistic analyses of the initial consonants in the nonwords revealed that coronal stops were imitated best, followed by the coronal fricative /s/, and then the labial and velar stops. Labial fricatives were poorly imitated. The theoretical significance of the nonword repetition task as it has been used in past studies of working memory and vocabulary development in normal-hearing children is discussed.  (+info)

Discrete-trial training for autistic children when reward is delayed: a comparison of conditioned cue value and response marking. (21/508)

Three children with autism were taught to identify pictures of objects. Their speed of acquisition of receptive speech skills was compared across two conditions. In the cue-value condition, a compound audiovisual stimulus was presented after correct responses and again when a primary reinforcer was delivered after a 5-s delay; in the response-marking condition, a second stimulus was presented after both correct and incorrect responses, but not prior to the primary reinforcer. In both conditions primary reinforcement was delayed for 5 s. Although the children learned receptive speech skills in both conditions, acquisition was faster in the cue-value condition.  (+info)

The importance of eyes: how infants interpret adult looking behavior. (22/508)

Two studies assessed the gaze following of 12-, 14-, and 18-month-old infants. The experimental manipulation was whether an adult could see the targets. In Experiment 1, the adult turned to targets with either open or closed eyes. Infants at all ages looked at the adult's target more in the open- versus closed-eyes condition. In Experiment 2, an inanimate occluder, a blindfold, was compared with a headband control. Infants 14- and 18-months-old looked more at the adult's target in the headband condition. Infants were not simply responding to adult head turning, which was controlled, but were sensitive to the status of the adult's eyes. In the 2nd year, infants interpreted adult looking as object-directed--an act connecting the gazer and the object.  (+info)

Media coverage as a risk factor in suicide. (23/508)

A total of 293 findings from 42 studies on the impact of publicized suicide stories in the media on the incidence of suicide in the real world were analyzed by logistic regression analysis. Studies measuring the effect of either an entertainment or political celebrity suicide story were 14.3 times more likely to find a copycat effect than studies that did not. Studies based on a real as opposed to fictional story were 4.03 times more likely to uncover a copycat effect. Research based on televised stories was 82% less likely to report a copycat effect than research based on newspapers. A review of recent events in Austria and Switzerland indicates that suicide prevention organizations can successfully convince the media to change the frequency and content of their suicide coverage in an effort to reduce copycat effects.  (+info)

Viewing lip forms: cortical dynamics. (24/508)

Viewing other persons' actions automatically activates brain areas belonging to the mirror-neuron system (MNS) assumed to link action execution and observation. We followed, by magnetoencephalographic cortical dynamics, subjects who observed still pictures of lip forms, on-line imitated them, or made similar forms in a self-paced manner. In all conditions and in both hemispheres, cortical activation progressed in 20-70 ms steps from the occipital cortex to the superior temporal region (where the strongest activation took place), the inferior parietal lobule, and the inferior frontal lobe (Broca's area), and finally, 50-140 ms later, to the primary motor cortex. The signals of Broca's area and motor cortex were significantly stronger during imitation than other conditions. These results demonstrate that still pictures, only implying motion, activate the human MNS in a well-defined temporal order.  (+info)