Regular and irregular inflection in the acquisition of German noun plurals.

In this paper we study the acquisition of German noun plurals in relation to the question of how children represent regular and irregular inflection. Pinker and Prince (1992) have demonstrated several dissociations between regular and irregular inflection in the English past tense system. However, in English, the default status of -ed is confounded with its high frequency; therefore inflectional systems other than English past tense formation must be examined. The noun plural system in German is particularly interesting, because most nouns have irregular plurals in German and the regular (default) plural is less frequent than several of the irregular plurals. Thus it is unclear how a language learner determines whether German even has a regular plural, and if so what form it takes. Based on longitudinal data from impaired and unimpaired monolingual German-speaking children, we find a striking, statistically significant correlation: plural affixes that are used in overregularizations, namely -n or -s, are left out within compounds. This correlation shows that even impaired children are sensitive to the distinction between regular and irregular morphology. We propose a linguistic analysis of the correlation in terms of Kiparsky's (1982, 1985) level-ordering model plus an additional ordering condition on affixes: default (regular) affixes cannot serve as input to compounding processes.     

PROMOTING LAW ENFORCEMENT FOR CHILD PROTECTION: A COMMUNITY ANALYSIS

The Colorado Occupant Protection Project (COPP) intervention provided police with brief instruction concerning the importance of citations for drivers' failure to use child safety seats and special coupons to accompany citations. Coupons were exchangeable by drivers for a safety seat and brief training in its use, plus a waiver of the $50 citation fine. Over 4.5 years of archival records were employed, using an ABA design and a comparison community to evaluate the program. Few tickets were issued for nonuse of safety seats during the 3-year baseline in either community. Citations for nonuse of safety seats increased to over 50 per month during the intervention period at the test site, whereas rates remained essentially zero at the comparison site. After the COPP intervention was removed at the intervention site, citation rates for nonuse of safety seats decreased to about 15 per month. Differences between intervention conditions and settings were statistically significant. During the intervention, officers were 44 times more likely to write citations than were controls. Results suggested that a behavioral program can increase police citation writing for child protection purposes.     

Pornography and Degradation

I have taken a Kantian approach to the issue of pornography and degradation. My thesis is that by perpetuating derogatory myths about womankind, for the sake of financial gain, the pornography industry treats the class of women as a means only, and not as composed of individuals who are ends in themselves. It thus de-grades all women, as members of this class, imputing to them less than full human status.     

Attitudes to new technology in relation to social beliefs and group memberships: A preliminary investigation

Though the term “new technology” is widely used and discussed, there has been very little systematic study of attitudes to technology and their relation to other beliefs and group memberships. This article describes an initial investigation into the nature of attitudes towards new technology (n=534 undergraduates) and demonstrates that, as yet, these attitudes are only weakly structured and are not fully integrated with other social beliefs. General evaluations of the benefits of technological advance appear to be almost unrelated to beliefs about the inevitability of these advances or the desire to acquire training to deal with them. Contrary to popular expectations, evaluations of video games are unrelated to other beliefs about technology while other social beliefs are, as yet, only weakly integrated with these attitudes. This study also identifies gender differences in the assessment of potential benefits and highlights other differences attributable to academic group memberships. These finding are discussed with reference to the literature on sex-role stereotyping and group socialization processes.     

Child of divorce: An overview

Children of divorce represent a diverse population at risk for subsequent psychological problems, whose interests are insufficiently understood or protected by the legal system or the mental health community. Although many children weather the stress of marital breakdown without psychopathological sequelae, a significant number show lasting difficulties. Information concerning the psychological adaptation of these children has increased rapidly during the past decade, but it remains unequel to the task of guiding family policy in this arena. Current knowledge identifies child gender and developmental stage as crucial factors that interact with the chronic stresses of postdivorce family life to produce short-and long-range impediments to the maturation of these vulnerable young people. There is a critical need to facilitate understanding and cooperation between the behavioral sciences and the legal profession on behalf of children in divorced families. The major research tasks relevant to enlightened public policy lie ahead.     

A process analysis of the effects of performance-contingent rewards on intrinsic motivation

In this study, the effects of performance-contingent rewards on intrinsic motivation were examined in comparison to no-reward controls receiving identical performance feedback. A path analytic process analysis was conducted to examine the mediation of reward effects on subsequent task interest. It was hypothesized that competence valuation, or the personal importance of doing well, would be an important mediator of interest in situations where performance feedback was available. Rewards were predicted to affect interest by influencing an individual's valuation of competence, and by altering the competence valuation mediation process. In addition, achievement orientation was hypothesized to interact with reward in affecting importance and the mediation process. Prior to performing an interesting puzzle, high school students were offered a performance-contingent reward, and then indicated how personally important it was to do well. After doing three puzzles, all subjects received positive feedback regarding their performance. Multiple regression analyses indicated that importance was affected by the experimental variables, and had a positive causal impact on subsequent intrinsic motivation. It was found that the promise of performance-contingent reward positively affected importance for low achievers relative to high achievers, and that the mediation of subsequent intrinsic interest by importance differed according to reward by achievement combinations. Additionally, a direct effect revealed that performance-contingent rewards significantly enhanced interest, relative to no-reward controls receiving identical performance feedback.     

Training of fast tapping with reduction of kinaesthetic, tactile, visual and auditory sensations

Five subjects were trained to tap on a light Morse-key during nerve compression block. The training sessions lasted for 40 sec., with a 5 sec. rest after the first 20 sec. work period. The group learning curve reached 89.5 per cent. level of normal performance by the eighth training session. In the ninth, the testing session, subjects tapped with visual and auditory sense reduction superimposed on the kinaesthetic and tactile impariment of the training condition. Performance in the testing session reached 40.9 per cent. of normal.

The sixth subject was trained in the same task as the other five subjects, but the training condition included elimination of cues from all four sensory channels. He reached 79.09 per cent. of his normal tapping performance in the seventh session.

These results show that the motor skill of tapping can be relearned in the absence of kinaesthetic cues. Furthermore when the subject has no conscious knowledge of any peripheral sensory cues connected with the ongoing motor activity, learning can nevertheless take place. These findings lead to the hypothesis, that skilled motor activity can be monitored by central processes alone.

During the training sessions subjects showed a tendency of tapping in groups of gradually increasing length. It is hypothesized that increased number of taps forming a group gives an indication to the possible mode of action of these central processes.     

Arguers as editors

People use editorial criteria to decide whether to say or to suppress potential arguments. These criteria constitute people's standards as to what effective and appropriate arguments are like, and reflect general interaction goals. A series of empirical investigations has indicated that the standards fall into three classes: those having to do with argument effectiveness, those concerned with personal issues for arguer and target, and those centered on discourse quality. The essay also sketches the affinities certain types of people have for the different criteria.     

Perceptions of maternal and paternal solicitude by birth children and adoptees: Relevance for maternal bonding theory

This study emanated from the long-standing question of whether a maternal bonding process similar to other mammalian species occurs in humans. The perceptions of adult adoptees and a matched sample of non-adoptees about their parents' behaviours towards them were compared on an original Parental Solicitude Scale. As hypothesized, birth children perceived their mothers as the more solicitous parent, but ratings of adoptive mothers showed a unilateral decline. Further, the differential ratings for birth and adoptive mothers occurred mostly for the factors labelled benignity vs abuse and tolerance vs control, rather than caretaking vs neglect, which was congruent to reported effects in prior studies of lack of mother-infant contact during the sensitive period for bonding. An alternative explanation of the data was also tested but not substantiated.