“生生”、“感通”、“偕行”——《易传》的天人共生哲学

天人问题是中国哲学的基本问题,天人的基本含义之一相当于我们现在通常说的自然与人;基本含义之二是视天人为有德性(道德)的、有能动性的动态的、协调的存在。中国哲学中的这种天人观在《易传》中表现为"生生"——"感通"——"偕行"的天人共生态。《易传》既将天人视为一个"生生不息"的自然的生命有机体,又充分发掘天人的德性,并使二者相资相长,"日新之谓盛德,生生之谓易",天地人各有其位,各尽其能,各循其道,"各正性命",一体偕行,共生共存共荣。     

Reading development in agglutinative languages: Evidence from beginning,intermediate, and adult Basque readers

Do typological properties of language, such as agglutination (i.e., the morphological process of adding affixes to the lexeme of a word), have an impact on the development of visual word recognition? To answer this question, we carried out an experiment in which beginning, intermediate, and adult Basque readers (n = 32 each, average age = 7, 11, and 22 years, respectively) needed to read correctly versus incorrectly inflected words embedded in sentences. Half of the targets contained high-frequency stems, and the other half contained low-frequency stems. To each stem, four inflections of different lengths were attached (-a, -ari, -aren, and -arentzat, i.e., inflectional sequences). To test whether the process of word recognition was modulated by the knowledge of word structure in the language, half of the participants’ native language was Basque and the other half’s native language was Spanish. Children showed robust effects of frequency and length of inflection that diminished with age. In addition, the effect of length of inflection was modulated by the frequency of the stem and by the native language. Taken together, these results suggest that word recognition develops from a decoding strategy to a direct lexical access strategy and that this process is modulated by children’s knowledge of the inflectional structure of words from the beginning of their reading experience.     

The development of grapheme-phoneme correspondence in normal and dyslexic readers

The present experiment was concerned with the development of grapheme-phoneme conversion ability in normal and reading-age matched dyslexic readers. The use of grapheme-phoneme correspondences was observed in a recognition memory task for pronounceable nonwords. The nonwords were presented in either the visual or auditory modality and had to be recognized immediately from the converse modality, thus necessitating decoding of stimuli across modalities. The use of grapheme-phoneme correspondences increased with reading age in the normal readers but not in the dyslexics. It was postulated that dyslexics have a specific difficulty in grapheme-phoneme conversion. For them an increase in reading age is attributable mainly to an increase in size of sight vocabulary.     

小学五年级语文学优生与学困生阅读知觉广度的眼动研究

本研究以眼动仪为工具,采用移动窗口范式来考察小学五年级语文学优生和学困生的阅读知觉广度。实验结果发现,小学五年级语文学优生的阅读知觉广度范围为注视字左侧一个汉字到注视字右侧三个汉字,小学五年级语文学困生的阅读知觉广度范围为注视字左侧一个汉字到注视字右侧两个汉字。小学五年级语文学优生的阅读知觉广度比学困生更大。     

Individual differences in mature readers in reading,spelling, and grapheme-phoneme conversion

Individual differences in word recognition, spelling, verbal reasoning, frequency of print exposure, phonological skills, Gestalt processing and semantic processing were examined in 110 university undergraduates. Most reading and phonological tasks involved making sequences of lexical decisions through lists of common stimuli within set time limits. The test measures were percentages correct adjusting for chance. The main findings were as follows: First, there is a substantial “Matthew effect” in that good readers were also good at spelling, good at handling the meaning of words, and appeared to have had the most print exposure. Second, phonological skills appear to be independent of lexical skills. Furthermore, within these phonological skills there appear to be two components, one that is automatic, and one that is more of a conscious operation.     

Individual differences in mature readers in reading, spelling, and grapheme-phoneme conversion

Individual differences in word recognition, spelling, verbal reasoning, frequency of print exposure, phonological skills, Gestalt processing and semantic processing were examined in 110 university undergraduates. Most reading and phonological tasks involved making sequences of lexical decisions through lists of common stimuli within set time limits. The test measures were percentages correct adjusting for chance. The main findings were as follows: First, there is a substantial “Matthew effect” in that good readers were also good at spelling, good at handling the meaning of words, and appeared to have had the most print exposure. Second, phonological skills appear to be independent of lexical skills. Furthermore, within these phonological skills there appear to be two components, one that is automatic, and one that is more of a conscious operation.     

A cheat in our midst: How people evaluate and respond to fellow group members who cheat

Having a group cheat within a group can violate group trust and reduce the benefits gained from group membership. However, group members will sometimes cheat to get an advantage over other in‐group members. In two experiments, the present research investigated how group members evaluate and respond to fellow group members who cheat, and whether group prototypicality or evaluators’ group identification moderate evaluations and behavioral recommendations toward group cheats. In Study 1 (N = 146 undergraduate students), group members evaluated group cheats more negatively than a comparable group deviant. However, highly identified group members would spare a cheat who had high group prototypicality. In Study 2 (N = 227 undergraduate students), highly identified group members rated a one‐time cheat with high prototypicality more favorably than a one‐time cheat with low prototypicality. However, prototypicality did not moderate evaluations toward a multiple time group cheat. In both studies, target evaluations were associated with changes in behavioral recommendations. Overall, results indicate a pattern similar to research on transgression or deviance credit: having group prototypicality can save a group cheat from an initial negative evaluation from highly identified group members, but prototypicality does not buffer against negative evaluations toward multiple time group cheaters.     

Trust in organismic development, autonomy support, and adaptation among mothers and their children

The current studies examined relations between mothers’ trust in organismic development, autonomy supportive parenting, and adaptation among mothers and their young children. Study 1 showed that trust in organismic development was distinct from optimism, neuroticism, and social desirability whereas it correlated with having relaxed expectations for developmental milestones and making fewer social comparisons about one’s child. Study 2 used observational methods to demonstrate a significant link between trust in organismic development and mothers behaving in an autonomy-supportive rather than controlling manner toward their 1-year-old child during puzzle solving activities. Study 3 used a 1 year prospective design to show that trust in first time mothers was associated with better maternal and child adaptation over time, controlling for initial levels of adaptation and child temperament. Study 4 explored possible social/political antecedents of trust in organismic development by comparing the beliefs of first time mothers from Canada and Norway. The four studies suggest that trust in organismic development fosters autonomy supportive parenting practices and positive maternal and child adaptation. These findings are discussed from the perspective of self-determination theory.

Word length,phonemic, and visual similarity effects in poor and normal readers

Serial order recall for visually and auditorily presented stimuli was examined in a group of 12-year-old poor readers and 7-year-old reading-age controls. With pictorial presentation, the poor readers showed a visual similarity effect, no word length effect, and a smaller phonemic similarity effect than that of controls. However, with visual presentation of printed words and with auditory presentation, poor readers showed word length and phonemic similarity effects of similar magnitude to that of controls. It is concluded that poor readers rely on visual information in tasks where the presented images are highly codable, and where verbal recoding is not obligatory, but that they will make use of phonological coding when the stimuli are not as easily codable visually in memory.     

Directional tendencies of Hebrew, Japanese, and English readers.

Consistent left-right and right-left reading habits are associated with corresponding directional tendencies in the reproduction of horizontally displayed visual stimuli. Inconsistent reading habits should therefore be associated with inconsis tent directional tendencies. This hypothesis was tested on Japanese readers whose reading habits were inconsistent by asking them to reproduce four series of 12-item horizontal stimulus arrays. The hypothesis was partially supported by the data which showed that, like Hebrew readers who also have inconsistent reading habits, the directional tendencies shown by the 68 Japanese readers were significantly weaker on some tasks that those shown by the 16 English readers whose left-right reading habits were consistent. The data were interpreted as showing that acquired reading habits may affect directionality in perception of visual stimuli.     

Conceptual issues in the reunion of development and evolution

Recently a growing number of biologists have begun to consider the causal role that processes of embryonic development may play in evolution. This constitutes a reunion of these phenomena which had been linked in the nineteenth century through Haeckel's biogenetic law. This reunion may result in a new subdiscipline of biology, if there is a set of unique concepts and methods which tie the various research approaches together. Such concepts as bauplan, canalization, and developmental constraint, may serve in such a capacity. The methods employed must combine comparative and experimental analyses, with special attention paid to the range of variation in developmental events within each taxon. These concepts and methods are also applicable to the problem of how development evolved, thus the evolution of development may also be considered part of the reunion. The reunion is discussed in terms of the potential participation of various schools of thought found in the current literature.This work was supported by the NEH and undertaken as part of an NEH summer seminar entitled Philosophy of Biology in a Cultural Context, which was directed by Richard Burian and Marjorie Grene in the summer of 1989 at Blacksburg, Virginia. The author wishes to thank Professors Burian and Grene and all the participants of the seminar for the tremendous intellectual stimulus afforded by that summer experience. Conversations with K. Elizabeth Atkinson, M. Balaban, and M. Zelditch have also contributed greatly in the preparation of this paper. Whatever shortcomings may exist within it are, of course, my responsibility.     

Mental evolution and development: evidence for secondary representation in children, great ages, and other animals

Recent interest in the development and evolution of theory of mind has provided a wealth of information about representational skills in both children and animals. According to J. Perner (1991), children begin to entertain secondary representations in the 2nd year of life. This advance manifests in their passing hidden displacement tasks, engaging in pretense and means-ends reasoning, interpreting external representations, displaying mirror self-recognition and empathic behavior, and showing an early understanding of "mind" and imitation. New data show a cluster of mental accomplishments in great apes that is very similar to that observed in 2-year-old humans. It is suggested that it is most parsimonious to assume that this cognitive profile is of homologous origin and that great apes possess secondary representational capacity. Evidence from animals other than apes is scant. This analysis leads to a number of predictions for future research.     

Proofreading errors in good and poor readers

Seven-year-old children classified as good and poor readers carried out a proofreading task on two passages varying in level of difficulty. Misspellings were introduced by transposing two adjacent letters in the work "the," other three-letter words, and longer words. While both groups of readers were able to identify the correct spelling of the misspelled words on a spelling test, poor readers made significantly more proofreading errors. Word length had a significant effect on performance, indicating that sensitivity to word configuration is important for successful proofreading. The pattern of proofreading errors did not reflect underlying differences which might relate to strategies used by the two groups in normal reading. The results are compared with those from other proofreading and letter detection experiments in order to highlight methodological implications when such tasks are used to verify hypotheses concerned with normal reading strategies.     

Naturalistic memory in learning-disabled and skilled readers

Three experiments compared learning-disabled and skilled readers' performance on naturalistic memory measures, as well as investigated the relationship between memory performance on everyday and laboratory tasks. In Experiment 1, the laboratory task (sentence span task) and everyday memory measures were correlated moderately for both ability groups. Compared to skilled readers, disabled readers performed poorly on the sentence span task, and were less likely than skilled readers to remember information related to common objects and consequential events. Disabled readers were also less likely to rely on external prompts to help them recall everyday information. Experiment 2 extended the previous findings to older subjects and found that the majority of significant correlations between the laboratory (word span task) and everyday memory tasks were isolated to disabled readers. When compared to chronological-age-matched subjects, disabled readers were inferior in recency performance on the laboratory (word span) and natural serial recall (e.g., recall of U.S. presidents) tasks. Experiment 3 showed that under conditions that facilitate item accessibility, ability group differences in recall were comparable. Taken together, the findings indicate that disabled readers' memory deficits are pervasive across naturalistic and laboratory measures at the younger age, but these deficits diminish for older students. Further, the deficits that occur at the older age are due to problems in accessing knowledge.