title: Rehearsal training and short-term free-recall of sign and word labels by severely handicapped children.
abstract: An experiment is reported in which eight severely handicapped children were taught to rehearse lists of five manual sign labels or five word labels during the delay periods of a short-term, free-recall task. The results showed that the rehearsal training had an overall facilitatory effect on recall and that this effect was more pronounced for signs than for words, especially in the recency portion of the serial position curve. Follow-up after 3 weeks showed that the differential facilitatory effect for signs was maintained. The findings are discussed in the context both of existing memory studies for signed stimuli and in terms of their implications for the use of signs in educational settings.
authors.affiliation: Department of Social Sciences, City University, London, England.
authors.forename: D M
authors.initials: DM
authors.lastname: Bowler
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention; D002648:Child; D004495:Education of Persons with Intellectual Disabilities; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007100:Imitative Behavior; D007805:Language Development Disorders / Q000523:psychology / Q000534:rehabilitation*; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D011939:Mental Recall; D010153:Paired-Associate Learning; D011214:Practice, Psychological; D012813:Sign Language; D014825:Vocabulary