Phonotactic acquisition in healthy preterm infants

Previous work has shown that preterm infants are at higher risk for cognitive/language delays than full‐term infants. Recent studies, focusing on prosody (i.e. rhythm, intonation), have suggested that prosodic perception development in preterms is indexed by maturational rather than postnatal/listening age. However, because prosody is heard in‐utero, and preterms thus lose significant amounts of prenatal prosodic experience, both their maturation level and their prosodic experience (listening age) are shorter than that of full‐terms for the same postnatal age. This confound does not apply to the acquisition of phonetics/phonotactics (i.e. identity and order of consonants/vowels), given that consonant differences in particular are only perceived after birth, which could lead to a different developmental pattern. Accordingly, we explore the possibility that consonant‐based phonotactic perception develops according to listening age. Healthy French‐learning full‐term and preterm infants were tested on the perception of consonant sequences in a behavioral paradigm. The pattern of development for full‐term infants revealed that 7‐month‐olds look equally at labial‐coronal (i.e. /pat/) compared to coronal‐labial sequences (i.e. /tap/), but that 10‐month‐olds prefer the labial‐coronal sequences that are more frequent in the French lexicon. Preterm 10‐month‐olds (having 10 months of phonetic listening experience but 7 months of maturational age) behaved as full‐term 10‐month‐olds. These results establish that preterm developmental timing for consonant‐based phonotactic acquisition is based on listening age (experience with input). This questions the interpretation of previous results on prosodic acquisition in terms of maturational constraints, and raises the possibility that different constraints apply to the acquisition of different phonological subcomponents.     

Specificity and transfer effects in time production skill: examining the role of attention

Two experiments examined transfer of a prospective, time production skill under conditions involving changes in concurrent task requirements. Positive transfer of the time production skill might be expected only when the attentional demands of the concurrent task were held constant from training to test. However, some positive transfer was found even when the concurrent task at retraining was made either easier or more difficult than the concurrent task learned during training. The amount and direction of transfer depended more on the pacing of the stimuli in the secondary task than on the difficulty of the secondary task, even though difficulty affects attentional demands more. These findings are consistent with the procedural reinstatement principle of skill learning, by which transfer from one task to another depends on an overlap in procedures required by the two skills.     

Associative priming effects with visible, transposed-letter nonwords: JUGDE facilitates COURT

Associative priming effects can be obtained with masked nonword primes or with masked pseudohomophone primes (e.g., judpe?CCOURT, tode?CFROG), but not with visible primes. The usual explanation is that when the prime is visible, these stimuli no longer activate the semantic representations of their base words. Given the important role of transposed-letter stimuli (e.g., jugde) in visual word recognition, here we examined whether or not an associative priming effect could be obtained with visible transposed-letter nonword primes (e.g., jugde?CCOURT) in a series of lexical decision experiments. Results showed a sizable associative priming effect with visible transposed-letter nonword primes (i.e., jugde?CCOURT faster than neevr?CCOURT) in Experiments 1?C3 that was close to that with word primes. In contrast, we failed to find a parallel effect with replacement-letter nonword primes (Experiment 2). These findings pose some constraints to models of visual word recognition.     

Perceptual averaging by eye and ear: Computing summary statistics from multimodal stimuli

Beyond perceiving the features of individual objects, we also have the intriguing ability to efficiently perceive average values of collections of objects across various dimensions. Over what features can perceptual averaging occur? Work to date has been limited to visual properties, but perceptual experience is intrinsically multimodal. In an initial exploration of how this process operates in multimodal environments, we explored statistical summarizing in audition (averaging pitch from a sequence of tones) and vision (averaging size from a sequence of discs), and their interaction. We observed two primary results. First, not only was auditory averaging robust, but if anything, it was more accurate than visual averaging in the present study. Second, when uncorrelated visual and auditory information were simultaneously present, observers showed little cost for averaging in either modality when they did not know until the end of each trial which average they had to report. These results illustrate that perceptual averaging can span different sensory modalities, and they also illustrate how vision and audition can both cooperate and compete for resources.     

Is Traditional Gender Ideology Associated with Sex-Typed Mate Preferences? A Test in Nine Nations

Social role theory (Eagly, Wood, & Diekman, 2000) predicts that traditional gender ideology is associated with preferences for qualities in a mate that reflect a conventional homemaker-provider division of labor. This study assessed traditional gender ideology using Glick and Fiske's (1996, 1999) indexes of ambivalent attitudes toward women and men and related these attitudes to the sex-typed mate preferences of men for younger mates with homemaker skills and of women for older mates with breadwinning potential. Results from a nine-nation sample revealed that, to the extent that participants had a traditional gender ideology, they exhibited greater sex-typing of mate preferences. These relations were generally stable across the nine nations.     

Growth mixture modelling in developmental psychology: overview and demonstration of heterogeneity in developmental trajectories of adolescent antisocial behaviour

Recent advances in statistical techniques for longitudinal data analysis have provided increased capabilities for elucidating individual differences in trajectories of change in child behaviours and abilities. However, most techniques still assume that there is a single underlying distribution with respect to changes over time, about which children are normally distributed. If there are multiple subgroups of youth following distinct developmental trajectories with unique predictors, however, the results of these statistical techniques may provide an incomplete analysis of the data. A newer class of statistical techniques, latent growth mixture modelling, provides a robust framework for examining heterogeneity in patterns of development. This paper illustrates the use of latent growth mixture modelling for examining heterogeneity in developmental trajectories of adolescent antisocial behaviour. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Anagram solving: Does effort have an effect?

The purpose of these studies was to explore the role of effort in remembering anagrams and their solutions. In Experiment 1, we compared the effects on memory of copying words, typing them as solutions for easy anagrams, or typing them as solutions for difficult anagrams. Solving anagrams involved more effort than did simply typing words, as indexed by response time. However, this effort facilitated recall for solutions to easy anagrams but not for solutions to difficult anagrams. In Experiment 2, we compared memory for anagrams and their solutions using a frequency-judgment task. Memory for solutions was better than memory for anagrams, and this difference was not affected by anagram difficulty. The results of these studies have implications for our understanding of the role of effort in remembering.     

On visual access to letter case and lexical/semantic information

Four experiments were designed to investigate automatic processing of letter case and lexical/ semantic information under forward and backward masking conditions that disallowed a visible image. Stimulus displays were letter string pairs; the letter case for each pair matched or mismatched, and the relationship between the two strings within pairs varied. Experiment I required direct Same-Different responses to stimulus pairs, and the results indicate that tasks requiring direct responses to stimulus inputs cannot distinguish between conscious response biases and unconscious use of information. Experiments 2 and 3 employed an indirect index of automatic prerecognition analyses of verbal-linguistic parameters and showed that, with 30-msec pre- and postmasked presentations, letter case, orthographic regularity, and lexical/semantic information are all analyzed in unconscious operations. Experiment 4 demonstrated that, under the viewing conditions of Experiments 2 and 3, subjects had no awareness of the stimulus input.     

REVITALIZATION MOVEMENTS AND THE HOPE OF PEACE

Abstract. Anthropological analysis of religion, following Bronislaw Mahowski, is founded in empirical observational data gained at least in part by participant observation. Malinowski described religion as a "sociological charter" which is a "retrospective moral pattern of behavior," constructed as a myth after the fact of behavior. Anthony F. C. Wallace's revitalization model provides the mechanism through which the Malinowskian charter is developed. Jack Wilson's Ghost Dance religion is briefly described as an example of a revitalization movement, and it is suggested that both contemporary peace movements and militant Christian movements are revitalization movements.