Caregiving by low‐income adolescent mothers and the language abilities of their 30‐month‐old children

The primary question of interest in this study was: Are the caregiving practices of low‐income, teenage mothers during the first 2 years of their children's lives predictive of individual differences in the language abilities of their 30‐month‐old children? This question was addressed with a sample of 76 teenage mothers and their children who were participating in a family support program. Various measures of caregiving behavior, assessed when the children were 6, 12, and 24 months old, were significantly related to scores on the Preschool Language Scale—3, the Expressive One Word Picture Vocabulary Test, and Receptive One‐Word Picture Vocabulary Tests of the children.     

Relationship between intelligence and vocabulary

This study explored the correlations of scores on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-III in screening language problems and scores on the three Comprehensive Receptive and Expressive Vocabulary Test subscales. Participants were 243 students ages 6 to 17 years in Grades K-11 who were identified as learning disabled, learning disabled with speech impairment, mentally retarded, and speech impaired. Analysis indicated strong correlations between the two measures, particularly between the CREVT General Vocabulary and WISC-III Verbal IQ (r = .80), WISC-III Verbal Comprehension Index (r =.83), and the Vocabulary subtest (r =.76). These results held across the grades. Supporting earlier studies of relationships of Verbal IQ and Receptive Vocabulary, correlations were lower between participants in Grades K through 2 than those in higher grades on the WISC-III Verbal IQ and the Receptive Vocabulary subtest. An analysis of the accuracy of the WISC-III for classifying students with language problems indicated improvement in classification over chance. These findings suggest that the WISC-III may be an effective screen for language problems.     

Facilitation of early speech development in a dysphatic child by use of signed Norwegian

Non-vocal language intervention is mostly used to develop communication skills in severely dysfunctional children. In the present study, a 3-year-old dysphatic boy was taught signs to facilitate his speech development. After 6 months of sign instruction, he showed substantial improvement in spoken language, and had gained one year on the Receptive and the Expressive scales of Reynell Developmental Language Scales in half a years time. Behavior problems were markedly reduced. It is concluded that sign instruction may be used with a wider range of subjects than is usual today.     

Influence of stimulus repetition on negative priming.

Potential age-related differences in the influence of stimulus repetition on negative and positive priming were investigated in a same-different picture comparison task. Forty-eight young adults and 48 old adults compared a target picture of a familiar object with a standard picture of a familiar object to determine if they were the same or different, while ignoring an overlapping distractor picture presented in a different color. Negative priming effects increased in magnitude with the repetition of the experimental stimuli in a similar fashion for both young and old adults. Conversely, positive priming effects decreased in magnitude with increases in stimulus repetition for both young and old adults. These data suggest that identity-based inhibition develops in a similar fashion from young adulthood to old age. Furthermore, these data add to the growing body of studies that suggest age invariance in the ability to inhibit task-irrelevant information in the environment on the basis of stimulus identity.     

Different confidence-accuracy relationships for feature-based and familiarity-based memories

Participants studied naturalistic pictures presented for varying brief durations and then received a recognition test on which they indicated whether each picture was old or new and rated their confidence. In 1 experiment they indicated whether each "old"/"new" response was based on memory for a specific feature in the picture or instead on the picture's general familiarity; in another experiment, we defined pictures that tended to elicit feature versus familiarity responses. Thus, feature/familiarity was a dependent variable in 1 experiment and an independent variable in the other. In both experiments feature-based responses were more accurate than those that were familiarity based, and confidence and accuracy increased with duration for both response types. However, when confidence was controlled for, mean accuracy was higher for familiarity-based than for feature-based responses. The theoretical implication is that confidence and accuracy arise from different underlying information. The applied implication is that confidence differences should not be taken as implying accuracy differences when the phenomenal basis of the memory reports differ.     

Development of ability to perceive and produce pictorial depth cue of overlapping.

The perception of the pictorial depth cue of overlapping was studied in children 3, 5, and 7 yr. old. Both a sequential and a simultaneous picture/object-matching task were used to test sensitivity. All age groups successfully perceived the depth relation information provided by pictorial overlapping. Height on the picture plane, which projectively covaries with overlapping, was not consistently used as a depth cue by any age group. Children's drawings were also analyzed for the presence of distance information. The drawings of the 3- and 5-yr. old children contained no overlapping cues and indicated a general lack of understanding of the third demension behind the picture plane. Seven-yr.-old children showed the beginnings of this understanding through their use of size perspective and height on the picture plane as depth cues. For all ages the production of the overlapping cue lags behind its perception.     

Organizational factors in picture recognition memory

Since humans have been shown to have a large capacity for dealing with pictures but not for more abstract forms of visual information, it follows that humans must rely on existing mental structures in picture recognition tasks. A series of experiments were designed to examine some characteristics of that structure. The results indicate that something analogous to categories exists for pictures and that when subjects view pictures they tag these categories. The decision in a recognition task that they have or have not seen a picture appears to be based on whether or not an existing category has been tagged. For example, the results indicate subjects can detect a new picture as new with a high degree of certainty. Further, the results show that subjects use information contained in or associated with the new member of the pair in a forced-choice procedure for deciding which member of the pair is old. Since other research has shown that figure-ground ratings made by one group of subjects is a reliable predictor of errors for subjects ranging in age from five to adult, there is evidence that whatever the exact nature of these categories they are not only common between individuals but are established at a very early age.     

Maternal Expressive Style and Children's Emotional Development

Maternal expressive styles, based on a combination of positive and negative expressive patterns, were identified at two points in time and related to multiple aspects of preschool children's emotional development. Mother–child pairs from 260 families participated when the children were 3 years old, and 240 participated again at aged 4 years. Expressive styles were identified at age 3 using cluster analysis, replicated at age 4 and examined in relation to children's emotional understanding, expressiveness and regulation. Three expressive styles were identified: high positive/low negative, very low positive/average negative and average positive/very high negative. Cluster membership was stable in 63% of families from age 3 to 4 years; no systematic patterns of change were evident in the remaining families. Expressive style was related to aspects of children's emotional expression at 3 years and to emotion expression and regulation at 4 years. Children's expressiveness and regulation at age 3 were also related to changes in mothers' expressive styles over 1 year. Identifying mothers' expressive styles provides a unique way to understand the potential role of the emotional climates in which preschool‐aged children learn to express and regulate their own emotions. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The effects of age and divided attention on spontaneous recognition

Studies of recognition typically involve tests in which the participant’s memory for a stimulus is directly questioned. There are occasions however, in which memory occurs more spontaneously (e.g., an acquaintance seeming familiar out of context). Spontaneous recognition was investigated in a novel paradigm involving study of pictures and words followed by recognition judgments on stimuli with an old or new word superimposed over an old or new picture. Participants were instructed to make their recognition decision on either the picture or word and to ignore the distracting stimulus. Spontaneous recognition was measured as the influence of old vs. new distracters on target recognition. Across two experiments, older adults and younger adults placed under divided-attention showed a greater tendency to spontaneously recognize old distracters as compared to full-attention younger adults. The occurrence of spontaneous recognition is discussed in relation to ability to constrain retrieval to goal-relevant information.     

Identifying Attitudes and Behaviors in Intimate Relationships: Psychometric Properties of the Relationship Evaluation and Analysis Link

This study examined the psychometric properties of the Relationship Evaluation and Analysis Link (REAL), a survey that assesses attitudes and behaviors in intimate relationships including Cognitive Complexity, Expressive/Receptive, Intimacy, Negotiative, Sexual, Self-Knowledge, and Separateness. It was designed for individuals in counseling to identify key areas of functioning in intimate relationships. Four hundred and fifty-one volunteers participated from two U.S. universities. A four-week test-retest examined the consistency of responses over time. The scales demonstrated stability over a four-week period. The factor structure yielded eight factors. The REAL is a reliable instrument that can be used for its intended purposes. Future revisions may involve reducing the number of items.     

Recognition memory for related pictures

This study presents a test of the notion of semantic integration of information m pictures. In Experiment 1. subjects were presented pictures which comprised various subsets of the elements in one of four standard pictures. In the test phase. recognition confidence tor old and new items was a direct function of the number of figures in the test picture. However. recognition confidence was significantly higher for old than for new pictures, contrary to predictions of the integration model of Bransford and Franks (1971). In Experiment 2, the differential predictions of the integration model and the tally model (Reitman & Bower, 19731 were tested. The information for a key standard picture was presented solely as ONEs during acquisition. For the other three standard pictures. information was presented as ONEs, TWOs, and THREEs. The results were that recognition confidence increased with complexity at the test item with regular items but decreased with increasing complexity with key items. Together. these experiments support the tally model and demonstrate the generalizabilitv of this model to handle pictorial materials. Implications regarding the nature of picture memory are also discussed.     

The given-new structure of cleft sentences and their influence on picture viewing

Summary In three experiments the influence of the given-new structure of cleft sentences on picture viewing was examined. Subjects heard cleft sentences and subsequently inspected pictures depicting the agent and the patient of the action mentioned in the sentence. Each sentence-picture pair was preceded by an adequate context sentence and a context picture. It was demonstrated that the delineation of the agent or of the patient in the sentence was looked at longer when it was marked as new information in the sentence that described the picture than when it was marked as old information. We interpret these findings to mean that the new information of a cleft sentence sets up a focus of attention in the cognitive structure and that this prolongs the time spent in the inspection of a delineation of the focal concept.     

Referential communication abilities of learning-disabled, language-learning-disabled, and normal school-age children

Past research in referential communication has indicated normally developing children show developmental progression in ability to communicate a specific referent to a listener. In one paradigm subjects were given lists of word-pairs in which one member of each pair was designated as the referent. It was shown that communicating about referents found in word-pairs associated in some way was more difficult than communicating about referents in dissimilar word-pairs. The present study extended this methodology to learning-disabled children. Learning-disabled, language-learning-disabled, and normally achieving children were asked to communicate about 30 pictured referents on three different tasks. On Tasks 1 and 2 each subject was asked to give a clue for the referent that would distinguish it from the other picture. Stimuli for Task 1 were 30 pairs of pictures that were related in some way and the stimuli for Task 2 were 30 pairs of unrelated pictures. Task 3 required the subjects to evaluate the adequacy of the examiner's clues for Task 1 stimuli. The disabled subjects were matched to the normally achieving subjects on the basis of receptive vocabulary age. Few differences were noted among the groups' performances on these referential communication tasks. Implications include the importance of vocabulary and concept development to referential communication.     

Quality child care supports the achievement of low-income children: Direct and indirect pathways through caregiving and the home environment

Existing studies of child care have not been able to determine whether higher quality child care protects children from the effects of poverty, whether poverty and lower quality child care operate as dual risk factors, or whether both are true. The objective of the current study was to test two pathways through which child care may serve as a naturally occurring intervention for low-income children: a direct pathway through child care quality to child outcomes, and an indirect pathway through improvements in the home environment. Children were observed in their homes and child care settings at 6, 15, 24, and 36 months. An interaction between family income-to-needs ratio and child care quality predicted School Readiness, Receptive Language, and Expressive Language, as well as improvements in the home environment. Children from low-income families profited from observed learning supports in the form of sensitive care and stimulation of cognitive development, and their parents profited from unobserved informal and formal parent supports. Policy implications are discussed.     

Does Theory of Mind in Pre-kindergarten Predict the Ability to Think About a Reader’s Mind in Elementary School Compositions? A Longitudinal Study

A critical skill in emergent writing is the developing ability to take the perspective of different readers; however, the precursors of this skill have not yet been identified. In this longitudinal study, 105 children (90 after attrition) were tested at 3 time points: pre-kindergarten (3–4 years old, n = 105), kindergarten (5 years old, n = 97), and Grade 1 (6–7 years old, n = 90). Theory of mind (ToM) in pre-kindergarten significantly predicted children’s awareness of a reader’s epistemic state when they dictated letters in both kindergarten and Grade 1 even after controlling for language (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Task [PPVT]) and inhibitory control. In addition, ToM in pre-kindergarten remained a significant predictor of reader awareness in Grade 1 after further controlling for reader awareness in kindergarten. There was little relationship between higher-order ToM tasks in kindergarten and reader awareness, but higher-order ToM in Grade 1 concurrently predicted reader awareness. Receptive vocabulary (PPVT) was significantly related to reader awareness at all time points, longitudinally and concurrently. This study has both theoretical implications for the relationship between ToM and emergent literacy and practical implications for the early identification and remediation of children at risk for later writing difficulties.     

Honeybees (Apis mellifera) holding on to memories: response competition causes retroactive interference effects

Five experiments on honeybees examined how the learning of a second task interferes with what was previously learned. Free flying bees were tested for landmark-based memory in variations on a paradigm of retroactive interference. Bees first learned Task 1, were tested on Task 1 (Test 1), then learned Task 2, and were tested again on Task 1 (Test 2). A 60-min delay (waiting in a box) before Test 2 caused no performance decrements. If the two tasks had conflicting response requirements, (e.g., target right of a green landmark in Task 1 and left of a blue landmark in Task 2), then a strong decrement on Test 2 was found (retroactive interference effect). When response competition was minimised during training or testing, however, the decrement on Test 2 was small or nonexistent. The results implicate response competition as a major contributor to the retroactive interference effect. The honeybee seems to hold on to memories; new memories do not wipe out old ones.     

小而灵通，老而顽固？年龄信息对创造性观念评价的影响及其机制

创作者的年龄作为重要的社会线索信息,可能会影响大众对其观点的创造性评价。本研究以物品非常规用途想法作为评价材料,考察了4类年龄信息对创造性观念评价的影响,以及相关刻板印象在其中的作用。结果发现,10岁左右年龄信息会提升被试的新颖性和适用性评分;30岁左右的信息提升了新颖性评分,但刻板印象强弱对评分变化不具有预测作用。这表明,对于领域一般性产品,有关创作者的刻板印象不易被激活并应用于创造性评价。     

The Influence of Contextual Factors on Afro-American and Euro-American Children's Performance: Effects of Movement Opportunity and Music

The present study sought to further establish that contextual factors informed by certain postulated cultural experiences could influence performance on a learning task. Towards this end, low income Afro-American and Euro-American children learned to pair pictures in an acquisition context that allowed for them to coordinate movement with music (High Movement Expressive [HME]) and in an acquisition context which allowed for little movement opportunity and no music (Low Movement Expressive [LME]). Children were subsequently tested for picture pair retention in a context where music was present or in a context where music was absent. The findings revealed that Afro-American children's tested performance was superior with the HME acquisition context, while Euro-American children's performance was superior with the LME context. In addition, music present at testing context seemed to have an independent enhancing effect only on Afro-American children's performance. The cultural and educational implications of these findings are discussed as are recommendations for future research.     

Language outcome after perinatal stroke: does side matter?

The goal of this study was to examine structured language skills in children with perinatal strokes. Participants were 28 school-age children with early focal brain lesions (17 with left hemisphere [LH] damage, 11 with right hemisphere [RH] damage), and 57 controls. A standardized test of language (Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals-Revised) was administered. Receptive, Expressive, and Total Language scores, as well as subtest scores, were analyzed. Control participants scored within the normal range, whereas the LH and RH groups scored significantly more poorly than did controls. There were no differences between the LH and RH groups on any of the language scores, and all scores were below the 14th percentile. Within the lesion group as a whole, scores were not related to lesion laterality, site, or severity. Results also were not accounted for by socioeconomic status or IQ. However, children who experienced seizures demonstrated significantly poorer performance than did children who did not experience seizures. Damage to either the LH or RH early in development adversely affects later language abilities, particularly on tasks with structured and complex linguistic demands. Although lesion side has little effect, the presence or absence of seizures is a major contributor to language outcome.