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.     

Bingo! Externally supported performance intervention for deficient visual search in normal aging, Parkinson's disease, and Alzheimer's disease

External support may improve task performance regardless of an individual's ability to compensate for cognitive deficits through internally generated mechanisms. We investigated if performance of a complex, familiar visual search task (the game of bingo) could be enhanced in groups with suboptimal vision by providing external support through manipulation of task stimuli. Participants were 19 younger adults, 14 individuals with probable Alzheimer's disease (AD), 13 AD-matched healthy adults, 17 non-demented individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD), and 20 PD-matched healthy adults. We varied stimulus contrast, size, and visual complexity during game play. The externally supported performance interventions of increased stimulus size and decreased complexity resulted in improvements in performance by all groups. AD also obtained benefit from increasing contrast, presumably by compensating for their contrast sensitivity deficit. The general finding of improved performance across healthy and afflicted groups suggests the value of visual support as an easy-to-apply intervention to enhance cognitive performance.     

Sleep problems,anxiety and cognitive style in school‐aged children

The associations between sleep problems, anxiety, anxiety sensitivity and attributional style were examined in self‐report data from 79 children aged 8–11 years. Total anxiety score was associated with different types of sleep problems (bedtime resistance, sleep anxiety and nightmares). Conversely, total sleep problem score was associated with different sub‐scales of anxiety (from r(78) = 0.15, p = NS to r(79) = 0.47, p < 0.01). Symptoms of anxiety correlated significantly with anxiety sensitivity, but not with attributional style. After controlling for other symptoms of anxiety, school phobias (Beta = 0.26, p < 0.05), the mental incapacitation concerns scale of anxiety sensitivity (Beta = 0.26, p < 0.05), and attributional style (Beta = −0.31, p < 0.01, R² = 0.45) predicted sleep problems. These results suggest that anxiety is associated with a range of sleep problems, and that sleep problems are associated with different types of anxiety. Furthermore, certain cognitive styles are associated with both anxiety and sleep problems and may be good candidates for further research into the association between sleep problems and anxiety in children. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Stress and dietary practices in adolescents.

Baseline data from the Health and Behavior in Teenagers Study (HABITS) were used to investigate associations between stress and dietary practices in a socioeconomically and ethnically diverse sample of 4,320 schoolchildren (mean age = 11.83 years). Male (n = 2,578) and female (n = 1,742) pupils completed questionnaire measures of stress and 4 aspects of dietary practice (fatty food intake, fruit and vegetable intake, snacking, and breakfast consumption) and also provided demographic and anthropometric data. Multivariate analyses revealed that greater stress was associated with more fatty food intake, less fruit and vegetable intake, more snacking, and a reduced likelihood of daily breakfast consumption. These effects were independent of individual (gender, weight) and social (socioeconomic status, ethnicity) factors. Stress may contribute to long-term disease risk by steering the diet in a more unhealthy direction.     

Psychometric evaluation of the Negative Religious Coping (NRC) Scale of the Brief RCOPE in the Czech environment

ABSTRACT

The Negative Religious Coping (NRC) Subscale is a part of the Brief RCOPE Scale, but can also be used separatelly. It is a brief measure assessing negative religous coping. The aim of this study was to psychometrically evaluate the NRC in Czech conditions. The NRC was administered to 531 religious respondents (25.5?±?3.4 years, 43.5% male). Negative religious coping and religiosity, together with basic sociodemographic information, were measured. The non-parametric comparison of different sociodemographic groups showed no differences between genders and almost no differences among the age groups. Significantly lower NRC scores were obtained by widows/widowers. The Czech version of the NRC showed a coherent one-dimensional factor structure and high reliability, with Cronbach’s α?=?.84 (95% CI .83–.85) and McDonald’s ω_t?=?.90. Our findings indicate that the Czech version of the NRC scale may reliably assess religious coping. This instrument might be useful both for research and clinical praxis.     

Response-time dynamics: Evidence for linear and low-dimensional nonlinear structure in human choice sequences

Response time (RT) is a commonly used measure of cognitive performance, which is usually characterized as stochastic. However, useful information may be hidden in the apparently random fluctuations of RT. Dynamical systems analysis techniques allow an exploration of the alternative hypothesis that RT fluctuations are deterministic, albeit in a complex manner. We applied careful task construction and noise-reduction and surrogate series tests to show that RT series from a forced-pace serial response-time task have low-dimensional chaotic characteristics. In Experiment 1, 80% of subjects' filtered RT series had low dimensionality, sensitive dependence on initial conditions, spectra close to 1/ f , and stable attractor geometry across sessions. In Experiment 2, we showed that the size of the inter-stimulus interval (ISI) determined the number of subjects with low-dimensional chaotic series. A small ISI caused 100% of subjects to respond in the chaotic regime, whereas only 25% had a low-dimensional chaotic RT component when the ISI was large. We argue that demanding task requirements cause a reduction in the dimensionality of the dynamics, producing RT fluctuations that may reflect a response strategy for controlling RT.     

ENVISIONING ONESELF AS A LEADER: COMPARISONS OF WOMEN AND MEN IN SPAIN AND THE UNITED STATES

In an examination of aspirations for leadership in the United States and Spain, male and female students envisioned themselves as a chief executive officer, vice president, or mid-level manager in an industry with a feminine image (clothing manufacturing) or a masculine image (auto manufacturing). Although men and women perceived these roles as equally positive, women perceived them as less possible and less facilitative of close relationships and gender relationships. Other gender effects included more positive perceptions of the roles by women in the feminine industry and by men in the masculine industry. Cross-nationally men perceived the roles as more positive than women did only in Spain, and U.S. students perceived the roles as more possible than Spanish students did.     

Achievement Arousal Inhibits Helping Behavior Only in Males

The experiment reported here tested the hypothesis that achievement arousal inhibits the helping behavior of males but not females. Subjects were given 20 minutes to work on a task while faced with an opportunity to help a graduate student by stapling questionnaires. Performance on the task was described in the high-achievement-arousal condition as assessing intelligence and leadership ability, and in the no-achievement-arousal condition as merely yielding research data on processing verbal information. Males proved significantly more likely to help in the no-achievement-arousal condition than in the high-arousal condition, whereas females'helping was not affected by achievement-arousal. Yet, consistent with other research on helping, the majority of both male and female subjects did not help at all.