Relationship between language skills and academic achievement in first grade

The ability of scores on the Early Prevention of School Failure battery to predict Stanford Achievement Test scores was examined. Participants included 280 first-grade students who were administered the battery at the beginning of kindergarten and the Stanford Achievement Test at the end of first grade. Principal factor analysis based on the oblique rotation exhibited simple structure between scores on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised, the Preschool Language Scale, and the Stanford Achievement Test (verbal or language factor), with the Draw-A-Man test and the Developmental Test of Visual-Motor Integration-Revised loading on a separate factor (motor factor). Results suggest that language-based skills were highly associated with later academic performance in school-aged children.     

Multidimensional scaling of the TAT and the measurement of achievement motivation

Subjects rated all pairs of eight TAT cards and ten Rorschach cards for similarity. They were also scored for n-Ach using imagery scoring on stories to TAT cards. Two similarity dimensions were found for the TAT stimuli, identified as number of persons and degree of strong affect. Those high and low on need for achievement for both sexes differed significantly on degree of salience afforded to each dimension, those high weighting the affect dimension more, and those low the person dimension more. Dimensions of the Rorschach found by Wainer et al. (1976) were replicated, but did not discriminate individuals on need for achievement. The results are discussed in terms of the interpretation of the dimensions, the possible relationship of affect to achievement motivation, and the possible practical implications for the use and measurement properties of projective tests.     

Assessing the validity of the achievement motive in the presence of random measurement error

The presence of random measurement error in indicators of theoretical constructs biases observed estimates of relations among those constructs. Correcting for this bias is particularly important when random measurement error is substantial, or is substantially different for indicators of distinct constructs included in a theoretical model. Validity assessment in the case of thematic apperceptive measures of the achievement motive (TAT n Achievement) has been vulnerable to interpretive errors because these indicators of the achievement motive are typically much less reliable than indicators of other constructs to which the motive may be related, and no correction has been made for the bias introduced by such differential measurement error. Here we illustrate a causal modeling approach to validity assessment for TAT n Achievement that incorporates explicit true-score measurement models of theoretical constructs. We confirm the hypothesis that the achievement motive construct is positively related to work satisfaction in a representative sample of adult males in the United States, taken in 1976 (N = 413). Evidence for the discriminant validity of story content versus story length, an issue raised in the literature on the TAT, is also presented in this nomological network.     

Correlations for the Stroop Color and Word Test with measures of reading and language achievement

The present investigation examined the relationships for scores on the Stroop Color and Word Test with measures of reading and language achievement within an adult population. The Stroop Color and Word Test, Nelson-Denny Reading Test, Woodcock-Johnson Psycho-Educational Battery-Revised, and Wide Range Achievement Test-3 were administered to 99 men ranging in age from 18 to 27 years. Pearson product-moment correlations indicated that the Stroop Word task was positively associated with scores on the WRAT-3 Spelling task, the Woodcock-Johnson Basic and Broad Reading tasks, and the Nelson-Denny Rcading Rate and Comprehension tasks. These and other significant relationships were discussed in terms of possible implications regarding the assessment of reading achievement.     

Linking preschool language and sustained attention with adolescent achievement through classroom self-reliance

This study examined self-reliant classroom behaviors during middle childhood as a mechanism through which early language and sustained attention become associated with academic achievement in adolescence. Participants were enrolled in the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (N = 1364). Path analyses revealed that preschool language and sustained attention predicted self-reliant classroom behaviors during middle childhood and that self-reliant classroom behaviors predicted changes in math achievement in adolescence. Self-reliant classroom behaviors mediated the relations of preschool sustained attention and linguistic ability with adolescent math achievement, but not reading achievement. These findings extend research highlighting the importance of self-reliant classroom behaviors for children's academic outcomes.     

Extracommunicative functions of language: Verbal interference causes selective categorization impairments

In addition to its communicative functions, language has been argued to have a variety of extracommunicative functions, as assessed by its causal involvement in putatively nonlinguistic tasks. In the present work, I argue that language may be critically involved in the ability of human adults to categorize objects on a specific dimension (e.g., color) while abstracting over other dimensions (e.g., size). This ability is frequently impaired in aphasic patients. The present work demonstrates that normal participants placed under conditions of verbal interference show a pattern of deficits strikingly similar to that of aphasic patients: impaired taxonomic categorization along perceptual dimensions, and preserved thematic categorization. A control experiment using a visuospatial-interference task failed to find this selective pattern of deficits. The present work has implications for understanding the online role of language in normal cognition and supports the claim that language is causally involved in nonverbal cognition.     

Retroactive interference from translation equivalents: Implications for first language forgetting

First language vocabulary is vulnerable to forgetting after massive exposure to a second language. Two possible factors responsible for the forgetting are degree of semantic overlap between concepts in the two languages and amount of second language exposure. In a laboratory simulation of the language forgetting situation, participants received 10 exposures to a list of words in a foreign language, followed by 2, 5, 10, or 15 exposures to a list in a second foreign language. The second list consisted of either translation equivalents or new concepts. Participants were then tested for retention of the first list. More retroactive interference was found for translation equivalents than for new concepts and for higher degrees of exposure to the second list. When retention of the first list was broken down in terms of gains and losses, effects of both similarity of the second list to the first and amount of exposure to the second list were found only for losses--a fact that points to lack of discriminability as one of the underlying causes of forgetting. Overall, the experimental paradigm proved useful for exploring and developing theories about the causes of first language forgetting.     

Motivational beliefs,cognitive engagement,and achievement in language and mathematics in elementary school children

The contextual differences in the patterns of relations among various motivational, cognitive, and metacognitive components of self‐regulated learning and performance in two key curriculum subject areas, language and mathematics, were examined in a sample of 263 Greek primary school children of fifth‐ and sixth‐grade classrooms. Age and gender differences were also investigated. Students were asked to complete the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (Pintrich & De Groot, 1990 ), which comprised five factors: (a) Self‐efficacy, (b) Intrinsic Value, (c) Test Anxiety, (d) Cognitive Strategy Use, and (e) Self‐regulation Strategies. They responded to the statements of the questionnaire on a 7‐point Likert scale in terms of their behaviour in mathematics and language classes, respectively. Moreover, their teachers were asked to evaluate each of their students' academic achievement in Greek language and mathematics on a 1‐ to 20‐point comparative scale in relation to the rest of the class. The results of the study indicated very few differences in the pattern of relations among self‐regulated components within and across the two subject areas and at the same time revealed a context‐specific character of self‐regulated components at a mean level differences. Further, the current study (a) confirmed the mediatory role of strategies in the motivation‐performance relation, (b) stressed the differential role of cognitive and regulatory strategies in predicting performance in subject areas that differ in their structural characteristics of the content, and (c) pointed out the key motivational role of self‐efficacy. In fact, self‐efficacy proved the most significant predictor not only of performance but of cognitive and regulatory strategy use as well. Gender differences in motivation and strategy use were not reported, while motivation was found to vary mainly with age. The usefulness of these findings for promoting greater clarity among motivational and metacognitive frameworks and ideas for future research are discussed.     

Single-word predictions of upcoming language during comprehension: Evidence from the cumulative semantic interference task

Comprehenders predict upcoming speech and text on the basis of linguistic input. How many predictions do comprehenders make for an upcoming word? If a listener strongly expects to hear the word “sock”, is the word “shirt” partially expected as well, is it actively inhibited, or is it ignored? The present research addressed these questions by measuring the “downstream” effects of prediction on the processing of subsequently presented stimuli using the cumulative semantic interference paradigm. In three experiments, subjects named pictures (sock) that were presented either in isolation or after strongly constraining sentence frames (“After doing his laundry, Mark always seemed to be missing one …”). Naming sock slowed the subsequent naming of the picture shirt – the standard cumulative semantic interference effect. However, although picture naming was much faster after sentence frames, the interference effect was not modulated by the context (bare vs. sentence) in which either picture was presented. According to the only model of cumulative semantic interference that can account for such a pattern of data, this indicates that comprehenders pre-activated and maintained the pre-activation of best sentence completions (sock) but did not maintain the pre-activation of less likely completions (shirt). Thus, comprehenders predicted only the most probable completion for each sentence.     

Mothers’ attuned responses to infant affect expressivity promote earlier achievement of language milestones

To investigate infants’ affective expressivity and maternal attuned responsiveness to infant expressivity in relation to early language achievement, 77 dyads were visited in their homes at 9 and 13 months, and mothers were interviewed about their children’s language between 9 and 21 months. Maternal responses that were attuned to infant affect, by selectively matching either the gradient features or the valence of infants’ affective expressions, were more predictive of children’s language achievement than maternal nonmatching responses; and maternal matching responses at 9 months were more predictive of children’s language achievements than maternal responses at 13 months. Moreover, maternal matching responses at 9 months predicted second-year language achievements over and above infant affect expressivity at 9 and 13 months, and over and above maternal matching responses at 13 months. Infants’ affective expressivity per se was not predictive.     

Semantic interference in language production is due to graded similarity,not response relevance

There is an ongoing debate on the question whether semantic interference effects in language production reflect competitive processes at the level of lexical selection or whether they reflect a post-lexical bottleneck, occupied in particular by response-relevant distractor words. To disentangle item-inherent categorical relatedness and task-related response relevance effects, we combined the picture–word interference task with the conditional naming paradigm in an orthogonal design, varying categorical relatedness and task-related response relevance independent of each other. Participants were instructed to name only objects that are typically seen in or on the water (e.g. canoe) and refrain from naming objects that are typically located outside the water (e.g. bike), and vice versa. Semantic relatedness and the response relevance of superimposed distractor words were manipulated orthogonally. The pattern of results revealed no evidence for response relevance as a major source of semantic interference effects in the PWI paradigm. In contrast, our data demonstrate that semantic similarity beyond categorical relations is critical for interference effects to be observed. Together, these findings provide support for the assumption that lexical selection is competitive and that semantic interference effects in the PWI paradigm reflect this competition.     

Similarity-based interference during language comprehension: Evidence from eye tracking during reading

The nature of working memory operation during complex sentence comprehension was studied by means of eye-tracking methodology. Readers had difficulty when the syntax of a sentence required them to hold 2 similar noun phrases (NPs) in working memory before syntactically and semantically integrating either of the NPs with a verb. In sentence structures that placed these NPs at the same linear distances from one another but allowed integration with a verb for 1 of the NPs, the comprehension difficulty was not seen. These results are interpreted as indicating that similarity-based interference occurs online during the comprehension of complex sentences and that the degree of memory accessibility conventionally associated with different types of NPs does not have a strong effect on sentence processing.     

Eye position affects audio-visual fusion in darkness

We investigated the frame of reference involved in audio-visual (AV) fusion over space. This multisensory phenomenon refers to the perception of unity resulting from visual and auditory stimuli despite their potential spatial disparity. The extent of this illusion depends on the eccentricity in azimuth of the bimodal stimulus (Godfroy et al, 2003 Perception 32 1233-1245). In a previous study, conducted in a luminous environment, Roumes et al 2004 (Perception 33 Supplement, 142) have shown that variation of AV fusion is gaze-dependent. Here we examine the contribution of ego- or allocentric visual cues by conducting the experiment in total darkness. Auditory and visual stimuli were displayed in synchrony with various spatial disparities. Subjects had to judge their unity ('fusion' or 'no fusion'). Results showed that AV fusion in darkness remains gaze-dependent despite the lack of any allocentric cues and confirmed the hypothesis that the reference frame of the bimodal space is neither head-centred nor eye-centred.     

Detection and resolution of audio-visual incompatibility in the perception of vowels

If audio and video recordings of a talker speaking consonant-vowel syllables containing different consontants are approximately synchronised, observers may fail to detect conflict between the modalities and perceive consonants presented in neither individual modality. The present experiments demonstrate an analogous effect in the perception of vowels. Vision can bias the identity of an acoustical vowel to be more like the vowel presented visually, even when observers detect conflict and are instructed to report only what they hear. The size of the effect is positively related to the size of the physical difference between the visible configuration of the lips and the configuration that would naturally accompany the acoustical vowel. In demonstrating these and other phenomena in audio-visual speech perception, observers behave as if they compute a continuous estimate of the filter function of the vocal tract from both visual and acoustical evidence. If the visual evidence is potent, observers may appear to interpret the acoustical evidence in novel ways. However, these compromises can be predicted from known patterns of acoustical similarity and visual distinctiveness and do not require ad hoc explanations involving categorical levels of perceptual process.     

Individual differences in digit span, susceptibility to proactive interference, and aptitude/achievement test scores

Individual differences in digit span, susceptibility to proactive interference, and various aptitude/achievement test scores were investigated in two experiments with adults. Susceptibility to proactive interference was estimated from performance in a position task in Experiment 1, and from the Brown-Peterson task in Experiment 2. In contrast to previous research, digit span was strongly correlated with many of the aptitude/achievement scores in both experiments, suggesting that the digit span task taps some important components of mental ability. The results of both experiments were also consistent in offering no support for the hypothesis that susceptibility to proactive interference is an important source of span differences. Finally, the results of Experiment 2 suggest that susceptibility to proactive interference is a source of individual differences in reading comprehension and knowledge of word meanings, but not in grammar and word usage skills, reading rate, or quantitative ability.