Phonological Working Memory and Spoken Language Development in Young Children

This study investigated the relationship between phonological working memory and spoken language development in a large unselected sample of 4- and 5-year old children. Assessments were made of the language produced by the children on the Bus Story (Renfrew, 1969), a standard test of continuous speech. In this test, children listen to a story, which they then recount with the aid of visual clues. The amount of information recalled and the average length of the five longest utterances are taken as indices of children's expressive language abilities. Phonological working memory skills were indexed by memory span and the ability to repeat non-words. The ability to repeat non-words made a significant contribution to the variance in the children's speech independently of age, vocabulary knowledge, and nonverbal cognitive skills. The possible mechanisms by which skills assessed by phonological memory tasks may be linked to the development of speech production abilities are considered.     

Comprehension‐Based Skill Acquisition

We present a comprehension‐based computational model of UNIX user skill acquisition and performance in a training context (UNICOM). The work extends a comprehension‐based theory of planning to account for skill acquisition and learning. Individual models of 22 UNIX users were constructed and used to simulate user performance on successive command production problems in a training context. Comparisons of model and the human empirical data result in a high degree of agreement, validating the ability of UNICOM to predict user response to training.     

The patient exit interview as an assessment of physician-delivered smoking intervention: a validation study.

In evaluating the efficacy of physician-delivered counseling interventions for health behavior changes such as smoking cessation, a major challenge is determining the degree to which interventions are implemented by physicians. The Patient Exit Interview (PEI; J. Ockene et al., 1991) is a brief measure of a patient's perception of the content and quantity of smoking cessation intervention received from his or her physician. One hundred eight current smokers seen in a primary care clinic completed a PEI following their physician visit. Participants were 45% male, 95% Caucasian, with a mean age of 42 years and an average of 22 years of smoking. The PEI correlated well with a criterion measure of an audiotape assessment of the physician-patient interaction (r = .67, p < .001). When discrepancy occurred, in general it was due to patients' over-reporting of intervention as compared with the criterion measure. Implications and limitations of these findings are discussed.     

The Semantics of Fictional Names

Abstract: In this paper we defend a direct reference theory of names. We maintain that the meaning of a name is its bearer. In the case of vacuous names, there is no bearer and they have no meaning. We develop a unified theory of names such that one theory applies to names whether they occur within or outside fiction. Hence, we apply our theory to sentences containing names within fiction, sentences about fiction or sentences making comparisons across fictions. We then defend our theory against objections and compare our view to the views of Currie, Walton, and others.