The word order problem in agrammatism : II. Production

This study demonstrates that agrammatic aphasics have difficulty describing relations that are signified by the order of noun phrases around verbs or prepositions. The word order deficit is found in a Sentence Order Task, in which written words must be arranged linearly to form a sentence, as well as in oral production. Ordering tendencies reflect factors like animacy or potency, rather than the systematic use of syntactic rules. These results point to a fundamental syntactic disorder in agrammatism.     

The infant's acquisition of knowledge of bimodally specified events

Four-month-old infants viewed, for a duration of several minutes, two objects that bounced in synchrony with two percussion sounds. This synchrony was the only information tying each sound to its respective object. During the viewing the infants learned about the relationships between sound and object. Learning was revealed in two ways. In a search test, infants looked for an object when its sound was played. In a transfer test, infants' declining interest in a sound presented alone generalized to the visible object that the sound specified. Studies that reversed the spatial locations of the objects revealed that sound-object learning, rather than place or response learning, guided infants' perceptual exploration.     

The word order problem in agrammatism : I. Comprehension

The results of a picture-pointing comprehension test show that agrammatic aphasics have difficulty understanding sentences in which the underlying semantic roles are marked by the order of noun phrases around a verbal element. Agrammatic patients performed poorly on reversible constructions involving spatial prepositions (e.g., “The square is above the circle”) and verbs (e.g., “The dancer applauds the clown”). These results have significance for the interpretation of the underlying disturbance in agrammatism—whether the deficit is syntactic or purely phonological.     

Commentary on social class differences in sociodramatic play in historical context: A reply to McLoyd

Historical origins of the research on the cultural correlates of imaginative behavior by the Israeli psychologists Feitelson, Smilansky, and Eifermann are presented. It is argued that despite McLoyd's searching analysis of the deficiencies in studies which attempt to relate level of imaginative play to social class, those earlier cross-cultural studies, together with some 50 years of prior research on social class and play in general, provide a context which gives support to those studies despite their particular methodological deficiencies.     

Cognitive task effects on hemispheric blood flow in humans: Evidence for individual differences in hemispheric activation

Evidence from two indirect measures of hemispheric activity, EEG α and conjugate lateral eye movements, has pointed to the existence of individual differences in hemispheric activation. Results from a more direct indicator of hemispheric activity, regional cerebral blood flow as measured by the ¹³³Xe inhalation method, show that such individual differences can be detected in the distribution of blood in the two hemispheres and that the amount of increase in blood flow in the right relative to the left hemisphere is correlated with performance on a spatial task. These results corroborate and extend the findings from the EEG and eye movement studies and suggest that the dimension of individual differences in hemispheric activation may exert significant influence on cognitive performance and on problem-solving strategies.     

On the possibility of the reemergence of a dysgenic trend with respect to intelligence in American fertility differentials

This paper examines the relationship between IQ and fertility in a sample of men and women aged 25–34 as of the late 1970s. This sample is of unusual interest for two reasons: (1) it is a national probability sample, representative of the non-institutional civilian population of the U.S. as a whole, and (2) it is for a post-World War II cohort. Most previous studies of the IQ/fertility relationship have employed nationally unrepresentative samples of cohorts born in the pre-war period, 1910–1940. The bias, in both time and place, of the samples used in these studies has not been adequately grasped by those who cite them as evidence of a eugenic trend with respect to intelligence.The major finding of these previous studies was that the IQ/fertility relationship is slightly positive, contrary to expectations though confirmatory of the so-called Eugenic Hypothesis. My working hypothesis is that this finding is special to the cohort chosen for study, i.e., one whose child-bearing took place during a period of rising birth rates (cohorts born between 1910 and 1940 were largely responsible for the baby boom after World War II). That is, in periods of rising birth rates, persons with higher intelligence tend to have fertility equal to, if not exceeding, that of the population as a whole. In periods of falling birth rates, the opposite is the case, according to my thesis.This thesis is generally supported by the data set described above. Fertility differentials to date within the post-World War II cohort, which entered its reproductive years during a period of falling birth rates, show a negative relationship between intelligence and fertility. The relationship is less negative for white men than for white women and for white women than for black women (black men are omitted from this study due to deficiencies in the data). The stated intentions of this cohort with respect to future fertility, if realized, will moderate the degree of this relationship, particularly for whites, but not change its sign.     

Feedback during exposure to inescapable shocks and subsequent shock-escape performance

In two experiments, we assessed the ability of a feedback stimulus during helplessness training to reduce the performance deficits common to inescapable shock. In each experiment, four groups of rats were exposed to either escapable shock (E), inescapable shock with a feedback stimulus following shock termination (Y-FS), inescapable shock with no feedback stimulus (Y-NFS), or no shock (N). The feedback stimulus eliminated the interference effects of inescapable shock when tested with an FR-3 lever press escape task (Experiment 1) or on an FR-1 task with a 3-s delay between the response and shock termination (Experiment 2). These results suggest that stress-induced biochemical changes may mediate the interference effects seen in inescapably shocked rats.     

Irrelevant incentive learning revisited: Associating flavors and exteroceptive cues with positive incentives

In “irrelevant incentive learning” information stored about an incentive when it is not desired is used later when the incentive is desired. In “habit learning” responses learned under one motive state continue to be made under a new motive state even though they produce goal events that are not appropriate to that motive state. Experiment 1 showed that both types of learning occur simultaneously whether flavor or texture cues are used and whether or not position is also a relevant cue. Thus, contrary to previous suggestions, irrelevant incentive learning is not limited to interoceptive cues, nor is habit learning limited to exteroceptive cues. In both Experiments 1 and 2 it was also shown that motivation affects what is learned as well as affecting current performance. This contrasts with views of motivation as solely a determinant of performance.     

Ending social encouters

Certain classes of verbal behavior—content summary statements (S_c); affective summary statements (S_a); continuity (C), justification (J), and well-wishing (W) statements; and statements of positive affect (P)—were hypothesized to be constituents of interpersonal endings. These statements are shown to increase during the terminal phase of a social encounter as a function of whether the conversation is between friends or strangers and whether it is structured or unstructured. A hypothesis concerning the sequence in which these five classes of statements will occur during the ending of an interaction, namely, [S_c] → [J] → [_Sa^P] → [C] → [W], is tested and confirmed.     

Sensitivity to grammatical structure in so-called agrammatic aphasics

Comprehension failures in agrammatic aphasics, as well as their difficulties in sentence construction, have been attributed to an underlying deficit involving the retrieval of syntactic structure. In this study we show that four agrammatic patients display a remarkable sensitivity to structural information, as indicated by their performance on a grammaticality judgment task. These results indicate significant sparing of syntactic knowledge in agrammatism, and suggest that the sentence comprehension disturbances in these patients do not reflect loss of the capacity to recover syntactic structure. In particular, accounts of the comprehension deficit in agrammatism that implicate a failure to exploit information carried by the closed class (function word) vocabulary are called seriously into question. Alternative explanations of the comprehension problem in agrammatism are explored.     

Preschoolers' counting: principles before skill

Three- to 5-year-old children participated in one of 4 counting experiments. On the assumption that performance demands can mask the young child's implicit knowledge of the counting principles, 3 separate experiments assessed a child's ability to detect errors in a puppet's application of the one-one, stable-order and cardinal count principles. In a fourth experiment children counted in different conditions designed to vary performance demands. Since children in the errror-detection experiments did not have to do the counting, we predicted excellent performance even on set sizes beyond the range a young child counts accurately. That they did well on these experiments supports the view that errors in counting—at least for set sizes up to 20—reflect performance demands and not the absence of implicit knowledge of the counting principles. In the final experiment, where children did the counting themselves, set size did affect their success. So did some variations in conditions, the most difficult of which was the one where children had to count 3-dimensional objects which were under a plexiglass cover. We expected that this condition would interfere with the child's tendency to point and touch objects in order to keep separate items which have been counted from those which have not been counted.     

An analysis of writing in a case of deep dyslexia

In tests of her ability to produce written and spoken language, this deep dyslexic patient produced semantic, visual, and derivational errors, including functor substitutions, and exhibited part-of-speech and abstractness effects in oral reading, oral and written naming, and writing to dictation, but not in repetition of single words and copying from memory. This patient therefore provides confirmation of the hypothesis presented in Nolan and Caramazza (1982) that the defining symptoms of deep dyslexia will be observed in responses to any task which requires lexical mediation. The patient's written responses in all tasks but direct copying were characterized by spelling errors which included transpositions, omissions, substitutions, and additions of letters. A model of writing is proposed which explains these errors in terms of a disruption of a phoneme-grapheme conversion process which normally functions to prevent decay of information from a Graphemic Buffer.     

Sources of error in the psychoeducational diagnosis of children

A detailed exploration of the role of diagnostic practices is presented, with special attention given to such practices in school psychology. Basic principles related to diagnostic typology and concepts of reliability and validity are reviewed in the context of recent diagnostic decision-making research. Finally, the intrusion and eventual reduction of particular errors of consistency and inconsistency and psychodiagnosis are examined with a view toward improvements in future training and practice.     

Semantic aphasia: A neglected entity

Three cases of semantic aphasia are reported. Computerized brain tomography showed bilateral temporo-parieto-occipital junction hemorrhages in one patient, and left parieto-occipital junction infarctions in the other two patients. The auditory comprehension defect of the three patients was characterized by preserved understanding of single words and impaired understanding of grammatically complex constructions. It is suggested that this comprehension defect reflects an inability to fully grasp the meaning of words and grammatical constructions imbued with spatial or quasi-spatial significance. Each of the three patients showed a complex spatial disorder that included constructional apraxia, spatial agnosia, and elements of Gerstmann's syndrome. The aphasic as well as the spatial disorder of semantic aphasics may be manifestations of a common defect in the perception of spatial relationships produced by left temporo-parieto-occipital region damage.