Parenting at home and bullying at school

The present study aimed at examining the relationship that may exist between specific parental practices at home and the child’s bullying and victimization experiences at school. This study attempted to go beyond parental styles, a variable that most of the earlier studies have used and introduce three, relatively new parameters of bullying and victimization; namely, parent–child conflict, parental monitoring and child disclosure. It was found that parenting at home seems to be related to bullying at school. However, not all aspects of parenting are related, and not in the same way. Parent–child conflict was found to be positively correlated to, and a potent predictor of both bullying and victimization; child disclosure was found to be negatively correlated to and also a potent predictor of bullying (not victimization), while parental monitoring, unlike earlier reports, was found to be statistically unrelated to either bullying or victimization.     

Listening to speech at two levels at once

Monitoring performance was compared when subjects were asked to listen simultaneously for two different targets embedded in a sentence and when they listened only for one. The effects of different combinations of targets (phonemes, words, or meanings) were investigated and an attempt was made to separate the effects of particular combinations from the effects of difficulty of the two component targets. Performance was worse when either of two targets might occur than when subjects knew which single type to listen for. However there were no differences attributable to which particular types of targets were being combined. Listening for a phonemic target was as difficult to combine with listening for a semantic target as for another phonemic target. The result is consistent with a central speech analysing system whose limited processing capacity must be shared (at least in this monitoring task) both between and within all relevant levels of linguistic analysis, rather than with relatively independent subsystems for each type of listening.     

Taking a new look at looking at nothing

A crucial question in cognitive science is how linguistic and visual information are integrated. Previous research has shown that eye movements to objects in the visual environment are locked to linguistic input. More surprisingly, listeners fixate on now-empty regions that had previously been occupied by relevant objects. This 'looking at nothing' phenomenon has been linked to the claim that the visual system constructs sparse representations of the external world and relies on saccades and fixations to extract information in a just-in-time manner. Our model provides a different explanation: based on recent work in visual cognition and memory, it assumes that the visual system creates and stores detailed internal memory representations, and that looking at nothing facilitates retrieval of those representations.     

Strategy instruction for writing composition at school and at home

Abstract

The objectives of this study are 1) to analyze the effectiveness of a writing composition intervention program aimed to increase children's writing performance and other personal variables; 2) to analyze whether implementation in the environment (school and home) or responsible figures (parents and teachers) produced different effects in program effectiveness; and 3) to check whether increasing parental involvement in doing homework was sufficient to improve children's outcomes or whether prior family training is required to enable them to be efficient. The sample consisted of 112 students (5th-6th grade) and their families. 26 of them made up the EFP group (mothers implementing a writing program), 25 of them were assigned to the PAD group (mothers increasing help with writing homework), 35 to the PRO group (teachers applying a writing program) and 26 to the OC group (ordinary curriculum). We analyze the results and present and discuss our conclusions.     

Predicting literacy at age 7 from preliteracy at age 4

Early literacy experience and preliteracy knowledge have been shown to predict later literacy outcomes. Using a representative sample of 3,052 same-sex twin pairs (6,104 children) in the United Kingdom, we explored phenotypic and etiological interrelationships among early literacy experience, preliteracy knowledge, and school-based literacy outcomes (reading and writing). Both literacy experience and preliteracy knowledge at age 4 significantly and independently predicted literacy at age 7. Both measures also showed genetic influence that significantly predicted literacy at age 7, although genetic mediation was stronger for preliteracy knowledge than for early literacy experience. However, for both measures, shared environmental factors explained most of the association with literacy at age 7.     

Indicatives at stake

Several authors have claimed that indicative conditionals are sensitive to the epistemic perspective of agents. According to this sort of view, the truth of an indicative conditional depends on the background evidence of some relevant agent or group of agents. In this paper, I argue that the context-dependence of indicative conditionals goes beyond this. Indicative conditionals are not only sensitive to the evidence of agents, but also to contextual factors that determine what is inferable from such background evidence (plus the antecedent of the conditional). More specifically, my proposal is that when the inference associated with a conditional is defeasible, the truth of that conditional is sensitive to practical stakes (in a similar way that knowledge claims are sensitive to practical stakes).