字形系联与幼稚园的识字教学

本研究根据汉字形义系联的特性设计字形系联识字法,并且进行教学实验。研究发现采用字形系联识字法较诸传统识字法,无论在形音义的辨认正确率都有显著差异．而且时问越久,差异越大。字形系联识字法的形音义相关系数很高,但教材编排的次序对辨识正确率无显著差异。     

Interference in Immediate Spatial Memory: Shifts of Spatial Attention or Central executive Involvement?

Interference in serial spatial memory was investigated in six experiments. Experiment 1 replicated Experiment 2 by Smyth and Scholey (1994) in showing that listening to tones that originated from different directions interfered with spatial memory. Experiment 2 showed, however, that the effect of mere listening was not observed when this was the only interference condition experienced by the subject. In Experiment 3, a binary pitch discrimination task performed on spatially separated tones impaired recall performance to the same extent as did left-right decisions. The same disrupting effect was also observed when the tones were presented from the same direction in the pitch discrimination task (Experiment 4) as well as in a binary loudness discrimination task (Experiment 5). Finally, repeating heard words did not interfere, whereas a pitch discrimination performed on these same words disrupted recall (Experiment 6). It is argued that the disrupting effects reflect not a specifically spatial interference, but a central executive involvement in the rehearsal process in serial spatial memory.     

Right-nostril advantage for discrimination of odors

Olfactory discrimination was tested with eight pairs of odors presented to each nostril of each subject. Ninety-nine subjects were tested; there were equal numbers of left- and right-handers, as well as both sexes. Detection thresholds for phenylethyl alcohol were measured separately in each nostril using a forced-choice staircase procedure. In addition, a verbal dichotic listening test known to be sensitive to language lateralization was administered. Results indicated that discrimination performance was significantly better when the stimuli were presented to the right nostril than when they were presented to the left, but no differences between the nostrils in detection thresholds were found. The right-nostril advantage did not vary as a function of sex or handedness, and did not bear any relation to language lateralization as measured via dichotic listening. The asymmetry for olfactory discrimination replicates an earlier study and is interpreted in terms of a possible specialization of function within the right cerebral hemisphere.     

Activation of premotor vocal areas during musical discrimination

Two same/different discrimination tasks were performed by amateur-musician subjects in this functional magnetic resonance imaging study: Melody Discrimination and Harmony Discrimination. Both tasks led to activations not only in classic working memory areas--such as the cingulate gyrus and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex--but in a series of premotor areas involved in vocal-motor planning and production, namely the somatotopic mouth region of the primary and lateral premotor cortices, Broca's area, the supplementary motor area, and the anterior insula. A perceptual control task involving passive listening alone to monophonic melodies led to activations exclusively in temporal-lobe auditory areas. These results show that, compared to passive listening tasks, discrimination tasks elicit activation in vocal-motor planning areas.     

Acuity of sound localisation: a topography of auditory space. III. Monaural hearing conditions

A study is reported in which the acuity of azimuth and elevation discrimination under monaural listening conditions was measured. Six subjects localised a sound source (white noise through a speaker) which varied in position over a range of elevations (-40 degrees to +40 degrees) and azimuths (0 degrees to 180 degrees), at 10 degrees intervals, on the left side of the head. Monaural listening conditions were established by the fitting of an ear defender and one earmuff to the right ear. The absolute and algebraic, azimuth and elevation errors were measured for all subjects at each position of the source. The results indicate that all subjects suffered a marked reduction of azimuth acuity under monaural conditions, although a coarse capacity to discriminate azimuth still remained. Considerable between-subject variability was observed. Front/back discrimination was retained, although it was slightly impaired compared to that observed under normal listening conditions. Elevation discrimination was, on the whole, quite good under monaural conditions. However, a comparison of the performance of these subjects under monaural conditions with that observed under normal listening conditions indicated that some reduction in elevation localisation acuity occurred in the frontal quadrants in the median plane and in the upper quadrants of more lateral source positions. The reduction in acuity seen in these regions is attributed to the loss of information from the pinna of the occluded ear rather than to the observed reduction in azimuth error. The results provide partial support for the binaural pinna disparity model.     

Overlap and Uniqueness: Linguistic Componential Traits Contributing to Expressive Skills in English as a Foreign Language

This study identified robust predictors of expressive skills in academic English as a foreign language. The participants were 92 Korean-speaking learners of English. The field test of the Pearson Test of English Academic was used as a secondary data analysis. Four communicative skills (reading, writing, listening, and speaking) and six enabling linguistic traits (written discourse, oral fluency, grammar, pronunciation, spelling, and vocabulary) were analyzed using writing and speaking skills as dependent variables. The greatest overlapping variance was found in the relationship between reading and writing. When listening and speaking skills were controlled, the unique variance accounted by reading in the prediction of writing became marginal. The results of this study demonstrated that L2 oral language skills became increasingly important to L2 writing outcomes as language proficiency improved over time.     

The relative intelligibility threshold for one's own name compared with other names

Two recent experiments (Moray, 1959; Oswald, Taylor and Treisman, 1960) have shown that in dichotic listening, and in sleep one's own name seems to be responded to selectively. We have shown for 10 subjects, each listening binaurally to the same recording of a list of their names repeated at random 10 times, and masked by noise, that the subject's own name had a significantly lower threshold than other names. The effect we found was not significantly different from the one found by Oswald et al. during sleep and by Moray for the dichotic situation.

These three experiments taken together suggest that the same pattern-analysing mechanism is involved in normal listening, dichotic listening to the rejected message, and in discrimination during sleep.     

Interaction of semantic and perceptual processes in repetition blindness

Two experiments examined the effect of activation of higher-level semantic representations on lower-level perceptual representations. A forced-choice discrimination paradigm was used, a method known to produce repetition blindness (RB) for words unconfounded by memory demands or response bias. In Experiment 1, equivalent reductions in RB (as measured by omission error rate and by d') occurred when successive word pairs were identical in: (1) form, pronunciation, and meaning (both uppercase versions of the same word); (2) pronunciation and meaning but not form (lowercase versus uppercase; lexical identity); and (3) pronunciation, but not form or meaning (homonyms; phonological identity), relative to when the words were unrelated on all dimensions. The RB effect was markedly attenuated, but not eliminated, when the words were semantically related. Similar results were obtained in Experiment 2 using a larger group of subjects. These findings show that higher-order semantic representations can have a top-down influence on judgements based on lower-order perceptual representations. The results are discussed within the framework of a cascade model of object processing in the human brain.     

Auditory discrimination in conditions of noise and quiet by black and white disadvantaged children.

The auditory discrimination of first and third grade children of low socio-economic status was investigated. 17 black and 17 white children were randomly selected from the two grades. The condition for listening was varied, i.e., discrimination in condition of quiet and discrimination in condition of noise, through the use of the Goldman-Fristoe-Woodcock Test of Auditory Discrimination. White third graders were superior performers. The expectation, from the literature, that the auditory discrimination of children from low socio-economic levels would be depressed in conditions of noise was not supported. In fact, black children performed in an inferior manner in conditions of quiet.     

Speech discrimination and lip reading in patients with word deafness or auditory agnosia

The purpose of this study was to assess the ability of four patients with word deafness or auditory agnosia to discriminate speech by reading lips. The patients were studied using nonsense monosyllables to test for speech discrimination, a lip reading test, the Token Test for auditory comprehension, and the Aphasia test. Our results show that patients with word deafness or auditory agnosia without aphasia can improve speech comprehension by reading lips in combination with listening, as compared with lip reading or listening alone. In conclusion, lip reading was shown to be useful for speech comprehension among these patients.     

Discrimination of voice versus place contrasts in aphasia

A phoneme discrimination test based upon CCVC (consonant-consonant-vowel-consonant) syllables was administered to 36 aphasics, 91 brain-damaged subjects, and 42 normal controls, in normal listening conditions. Errors in the discrimination of voice and place contrasts were determined, and the scores (voice-minus-place errors) obtained by the four experimental groups were compared statistically. Aphasic patients, when compared with the other groups, show a greater difficulty in discriminating place than voice contrasts. Some implications of these findings are discussed.     

FEMINISM AS LIFE RAFT

We looked at relationships between academic women's feminist identity and their perceptions of discrimination. From a sample of self-labeled feminist professors of psychology who had participated in the Feminist Teaching Project, we examined previously transcribed interviews and also collected new, auxiliary information. We expected to find that our respondents would view feminism as both provoking discrimination and helping them cope with discrimination. We found that experiences with gender discrimination were common among our sample, but that feminism in isolation was not perceived by our respondents as a provocation for problems. Rather than making it hard for women to swim in academic waters, feminism seemed to serve as a life raft for many professors.     

Different speech-processing mechanisms can be reflected in the results of discrimination and dichotic listening tasks

The relative peakedness of diotic ABX discrimination functions for certain speech stimuli and the relative magnitude of the right ear advantage that they yield in dichotic listening tasks have been thought to be functionally parallel measures of speech processing. The results of the present study suggest that this is not always the case.     

A developmental study of pronouncing responses in the discrimination learning of words and pictures

Subjects at three age levels were administered picture pair or word pair discrimination lists. They pronounced or pointed as a method of choice, and they pronounced or pointed at the correct item (or remained silent) during rehearsal. The results indicated that with picture pairs, pronunciation facilitated learning as a method of choice and a type of rehearsal in nursery school Ss. For fifth grade and college Ss, there was no significant difference between pronouncing and pointing as a method of choice. However, spoken rehearsal was superior to control performance for fifth grade Ss. College Ss performed equally well in the control and pronouncing conditions, but pointing during rehearsal produced significantly more errors than pronouncing. Word pairs produced no significant pronunciation effects. These results were discussed within an internalization of speech perspective.     

Manual asymmetry in weight discrimination: hand or spatial-field advantage?

Sixty subjects who were either left-handed or right-handed performed one-handed weight discrimination using their left and right hands in the left and right spatial fields. Differential thresholds, for the left and right hands of both left-handed and right-handed subjects, were found to be lower in the spatial field contralateral to the ear which proved superior in a dichotic listening test. It is concluded that manual asymmetry for weight discrimination results primarily from the mapping of sensorimotor events in the spatial fields onto contralateral cerebral cortex, with an advantage in the spatial field contralateral to the nonlanguage cerebral hemisphere.     

The perception of /r/ and /l/ in syllable-initial and syllable-final position

American English liquids /r/ and /l/ have been considered intermediate between stop consonants and vowels acoustically, articulatorily, phonologically, and perceptually. Cutting (1947a) found position-dependent ear advantages for liquids in a dichotic listening task: syllable-initial liquids produced significant right ear advantages, while syllable-final liquids produced no reliable ear advantages. The present study employed identification and discrimination tasks to determine whether /r/and /l/ are perceived differently depending on syllable position when perception is tested by a different method. Fifteen subjects listened to two synthetically produced speech series—/li/ to /ri/ and /il/ to /ir/—in which stepwise variations of the third formant cued the difference in consonant identity. The results indicated that: (1) perception did not differ between syllable positions (in contrast to the dichotic listening results), (2) liquids in both syllable positions were perceived categorically, and (3) discrimination of a nonspeech control series did not account for the perception of the speech sounds.     

When repeating aloud enhances episodic memory for spoken words: interactions between production- and perception-derived variability

We demonstrate that the phonetic detail of an original speaker’s pronunciation for a word can be detected with a memory measure even when a participant listens to and then repeats that word aloud (production). At study, native English participants heard English words pronounced by a native speaker of American-English or by a Chinese national. For half of the words they listened. For the others, they produced it. In both recall and old/new recognition tests in Experiment 1, production improved performance relative to listening alone. Effects of accent were present only in recognition and only in interaction with production. In Experiment 2, a source-monitoring recognition test where participants identified whether the speaker of a word changed from study to test, effects of accent and production were additive indicating that hearing an unfamiliar accent increased memory irrespective of production. An exemplar account including both production- as well as perception-derived experience describes the outcome.     

Perceptual and academic patterns of learning-disabled/gifted students.

This research explored ways gifted children with learning disabilities perceive and recall auditory and visual input and apply this information to reading, mathematics, and spelling. 24 learning-disabled/gifted children and a matched control group of normally achieving gifted students were tested for oral reading, word recognition and analysis, listening comprehension, and spelling. In mathematics, they were tested for numeration, mental and written computation, word problems, and numerical reasoning. To explore perception and memory skills, students were administered formal tests of visual and auditory memory as well as auditory discrimination of sounds. Their responses to reading and to mathematical computations were further considered for evidence of problems in visual discrimination, visual sequencing, and visual spatial areas. Analyses indicated that these learning-disabled/gifted students were significantly weaker than controls in their decoding skills, in spelling, and in most areas of mathematics. They were also significantly weaker in auditory discrimination and memory, and in visual discrimination, sequencing, and spatial abilities. Conclusions are that these underlying perceptual and memory deficits may be related to students' academic problems.     

Sink positive: Linguistic experience with th substitutions influences nonnative word recognition

We used eyetracking, perceptual discrimination, and production tasks to examine the influences of perceptual similarity and linguistic experience on word recognition in nonnative (L2) speech. Eye movements to printed words were tracked while German and Dutch learners of English heard words containing one of three pronunciation variants (/t/, /s/, or /f/) of the interdental fricative /θ/. Irrespective of whether the speaker was Dutch or German, looking preferences for target words with /θ/ matched the preferences for producing /s/ variants in German speakers and /t/ variants in Dutch speakers (as determined via the production task), while a control group of English participants showed no such preferences. The perceptually most similar and most confusable /f/ variant (as determined via the discrimination task) was never preferred as a match for /θ/. These results suggest that linguistic experience with L2 pronunciations facilitates recognition of variants in an L2, with effects of frequency outweighing effects of perceptual similarity.     

Perception of distance calls by budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus) and zebra finches (Poephila guttata): assessing species-specific advantages

Budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus) and zebra finches (Poephila guttata) share a common functional class of vocalizations called distance calls. The perception of species-specific distance calls by both species was measured with a habituation-dishabituation operant paradigm. Changes in discrimination performance were noted as listening conditions were modified or stimulus properties were altered. Both species showed better performance for calls of their own species. For zebra finches this tendency increased slightly when a background noise was added to the testing environment. Shifting the frequency region of the calls affected the discrimination performance of male budgerigars but not females or zebra finches. Reversing the temporal order of the calls affected the perceptual advantage for conspecific vocalizations in zebra finches but not in budgerigars. These results highlight species differences in perceiving acoustic communication signals.