Age at onset of blindness and the development of the semantics of color names

The relationship between multiple measures of response inhibition and variations in young (age 5–7 years) children's short-term learning history was examined in a laboratory setting. Exposure to experimenter-directed delay periods (of either increasing, decreasing, or fixed durations) and to various rules for behavior management during the delay intervals was manipulated. Subsequent measures of resistance to temptation, an index of conceptual tempo (the Matching Familiar Figures Test), children's preference for delay vs immediate reward, and a test of motor control was obtained. Results indicated: (a) that the effects of rule provision extended to all resistance measures and to MFFT latency, while delay experiences significantly influenced only the latency to first transgression in the resistance task; (b) that a general and positive rationale for response inhibition was superior to an arbitrary rule or no rule structure; (c) that experience with gradually increasing delay of reward assisted children in inhibiting their first transgression significantly longer than the other delay patterns or no treatment; and (d) that experimental effects showed temporal stability over one week.     

Stutterer''s scaled attitudes and their prognostic significance in therapy

Thirty individuals who manifested stuttering behavior participated in an intensive therapy program. Measures of pretherapy attitudes on the Attitude and Behavioral Observation Scale, which consists of self-evaluations of attitudes on a scale of five equal-appearing intervals and also two questionnaires, the Iowa Scale of Attitude Toward Stuttering and the Stutterer's Self-Ratings of Reactions to Speech Situations were utilized. These three scales were found to be significantly correlated. A difference score from the Motor Performance Scale, a speech proficiency scale of one to five was completed at pre- and posttherapy, as a measure of the client's success from therapy. Generally, pretherapy attitudes did not correlate significantly with success from therapy.     

Emotional stimulation, defensive orientation, and hemispheric activation

Lateral eye movements (LEM) were measured for 32 right-handed subjects while responding to questions rated for verbal and visual-spatial cognitive content and for varying levels of emotionally stimulating content. The results indicated that eye movements were distributed to the right and left in response to verbal and spatial items, respectively, and that emotional content enhanced leftward responding. In addition, the defensive style of subjects, as measured by a defense mechanism inventory, interacted with the cognitive and affective dimensions of questions and was a determinant of LEM.     

Cerebral excitation profiles in language processing: The photic probe paradigm

A photic probe paradigm was developed in order to assess the cerebral excitation patterns corresponding to acoustic and linguistic operations independently of specific signal parameters. Average Evoked Potentials (AEPs) to a photic stimulus were recorded at the anterior temporal and posterior regions of both hemispheres of subjects engaged in acoustic, phonetic, and semantic processing of verbal material. Patterns of attenuation and enhancement of the probe AEP amplitudes were observed over the left and right hemispheres, respectively, with the magnitude of change varying reliably as a function of processing task. The implications of these findings for models of cerebral specialization for language are discussed.     

Component processes of an overt rehearsal strategy in young children

The locus of facilitation due to rehearsal was investigated in three experiments with first-grade children. Several different overt acquisition strategies in a four-item sequential memory task were compared, including ordered repetition, item repetition, item labeling, and free strategy conditions. Experiment 1 showed that ordered repetition yields most of the facilitation due to rehearsal, and Experiment 2 demonstrated that the facilitation cannot be attributed to spaced practice. Experiment 3 showed that retrieval practice during study may improve memory performance but that the facilitation due to ordered repetition and retrieval practice is relatively short term. Mere repetition and labeling were not found to be significant component processes of rehearsal in any of the experiments. These results were discussed in terms of their relevance to rehearsal training studies and a differentiation between maintenance and elaborative rehearsal.     

Memory strategies used by young normal and retarded children in a directed forgetting paradigm

Two experiments were reported investigating the possibility that normal children (6- to 7-years old) and retarded children (9- to 10-years old) equated for immediate memory performance may not use effective strategies to eliminate interference from irrelevant information in memory. In both experiments a directed forgetting paradigm was used in which the children were presented with two sets of four pictures, and recalled only one set on each trial. On some trials, there was a cue to forget the first four and to remember only the last four pictures. In the first experiment both groups adopted a passive-active strategy in which the to-be-remembered items were processed actively only after a forget cue. Experiment 2 replicated this pattern of results. The use of sophisticated directed forgetting strategies seemed to be beyond the immediate abilities of these children. Two possible interpretations of the passive-active strategy were offered: (a) The strategy was an attempt to cope with the presence of occasionally irrelevant information and (b) The strategy was an attempt to cope with memory overload.     

The understanding of young children and adults of the deictic adequacy of communications

When a communication is used in a discourse context, the deictic information in the communication may be important in achieving a successful speech act. This information includes the temporal and spatial coordinates of the speech act that locate the communication in a context. In the present study, first- and fourth-grade children (6 and 9 years of age) and college adults were read short stories and asked to evaluate the adequacy of deictically ambiguous or informative communications (Experiment 1) or situations (Experiment 2). The results showed that subjects in all the grades discriminated among the deictically adequate and inadequate communications and situations, though the first graders made fewer correct judgments than did the other subjects of the adequacy of the informative communications and situations.     

On the basis of early transitivity judgments

This research had two aims. The first was to test three explanations of performance on N-term series tasks by young children: the labeling model of B.DeBoysson-Bardies and K. O'Regan (1973), Nature (London), 246, 531–534, the sequential-contiguity model of L. Breslow (1981, Psychological Bulletin, 89, 325–351), and the ordered array or image model of C. A. Riley and T. Trabasso (1974, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 17, 187–202). In the first experiment, 5-year-old children were taught additional premises which would interfere with labeling and sequential-contiguity processes, but not with forming an ordered array. Reasoning performance was essentially comparable to previous results with the paradigm, thus supporting the ordered array model. The second aim was to reexamine children's ability to learn sets of premises which can be assembled into an ordered array, since there was reason to believe that previous studies had created false positives. In the second experiment, 3- to 7-year-old children were taught either overlapping (a > b, b > c, …) or nonoverlapping (a > b, c > d, …) premises. Overlapping premises can be integrated into an ordered array (a, b, c, d, e), but nonoverlapping premises cannot. However, the overlapping condition proved more difficult, and the success rate for preschoolers ($\text{3}\text{1}\text{2}\text{-}\text{to 4}\text{1}\text{2}\text{-year-olds}$) was of zero order. This raises doubts about their ability to learn a set of premises of the kind required for transitive inference. These doubts were strengthened by the third experiment which showed that when premises were not presented in serial order, preschool ($\text{3}\text{1}\text{2}\text{-}\text{to 4}\text{1}\text{2}\text{-year-old}$) children could not learn the premises of an N-term series task.     

Electroencephalographic and dichotic indices of cerebral laterality in stutterers

To test the hypothesis that stuttering is the product of faulty cerebral laterality four experiments were performed on each of five adult stutterers and five fluent speakers. These tests were: (1) dichotic listening with consonant-vowel pairs, (2) alpha recording over both hemispheres during the performance of cognitive tasks intended to engage preferentially the left or right hemispheres, (3) contingent negative variation with either an articulatory or bilaterally symmetrical response, and (4) readiness potential with the same responses. The results fail to disconfirm the null hypothesis regarding stutterers and their fluent peers. All subjects showed consistent patterns of cerebral laterality indicative of localization of speech function in the left hemisphere. Suggestions are made regarding a possible contribution of deficient sensorimotor integration in stuttering.     

Organization of short-term verbal memory in language areas of human cortex: Evidence from electrical stimulation

Short-term verbal memory (STVM) performance was measured during electrical stimulation of human left frontal-parietal-temporal cortex, at craniotomy under local anesthesia for the treatment of medically intractable epilepsy. The areas of cortex where stimulation alters language, as measured by object naming, are separate but adjacent to the areas where stimulation alters STVM. There are differential effects of stimulation during input, storage, and output phases of STVM at different cortical sites. These suggest that cortex adjacent to the posterior language area is a site of storage of STVM, while cortex adjacent to anterior language area is involved in retrieval from STVM.     

Child performance on discrimination tasks: Effects of amount of stimulus variation

Two independently conducted studies investigated stimulus variation effects on children's discrimination learning. The stimuli in the first study were generated by a conjunctive rule and were presented in pairs. Mean trials to criterion was significantly lower for the single-feature change treatment (17.4) than for the multiple-feature change treatment (29.9). Single-feature change-treatment transfer scores were significantly higher only for stimuli that differed in terms of one of the features. The second study not only replicated the initial finding concerning the single-feature change treatment but also found that students made more errors in reaching criterion when stimuli were generated by an exclusive disjunctive rule and were presented singly. For all tasks, the single-feature change treatment with stimuli presented in pairs was accompanied by fewer errors to criterion than the other treatments.     

The multiple roles of Broca's discovery in the development of the modern neurosciences

Using the classical clinico-anatomical correlation method of the French clinical school, Paul Broca confirmed the localization of "language" in the frontal lobe. He actually discovered the lateralization of language in the left hemisphere. These contributions eventually led to the demise of the older concept of the "sensorium commune," because Broca's ideas implied the presence of motor functions in the hemispheres. Although Broca worked within the theoretical motif of the "faculty" psychology, the reflex-oriented "associationist" psychology soon became the predominant theoretical framework of localization, because it accommodated the motor aspect of hemispheric function. Since Broca's time, the study of the biology of language has proceeded along two parallel but sometimes separate lines in the experimental and clinical traditions.     

Effectiveness of social reinforcement as a function of contingent and noncontingent satiation

The social satiation effect is the inverse relation between the availability of a social stimulus and its subsequent efficacy in a reinforcing role. According to a suggested cognitive-interactive theory, the satiation effect is mediated by children's attributions of contingency between their own behavior and the experimenter's actions in the satiation treatments. Perceived contingencies depend, at least to an extent, on actual contingencies, and it was therefore predicted that a satiation effect would be observed only for groups presented in the satiation treatment with noncontingent social stimuli but not for groups presented with contingent stimuli. Middle-class 5- and 7-year-old children were subjected to a 10-min waiting period in which the stimulus word “Yafeh” (“good” in English) was presented 2 or 20 times, contingently or noncontingently. They were then given a 75-trial binary discrimination test: correct responses were reinforced with “Yafeh”. The hypothesis was confirmed in the analysis of variance. However, the predicted difference between the slopes of the contingency and noncontingency conditions was found clearly only in the older sample, while the younger children were more influenced by the number of social stimuli presented in the treatment (satiation) and less influenced by the method of stimulus presentation.