Sex-role effects (if any)

Two studies that seem to show conflicting effects of sex role on psychomotor reminiscence and performance are reviewed, and an effort is made to reconcile the discrepant results.     

The role of phonemes and syllables in the perceived similarity of speech sounds for children

In two experiments, we investigated the factors that influence the perceived similarity of speech sounds at two developmental levels. Kindergartners and second graders were asked to classify nonsense words, which were related by syllable and phoneme correspondences. The results support the existence of a developmental trend toward increased attention to individual phonemic segments. Moreover, one significant factor in determining the perceived similarity of speech sounds appears to be the position of the component correspondences; attention to the beginning of utterances may have developmental priority. An unexpected finding was that the linguistic status of the unit involved in a correspondence (whether it was a syllable or a phoneme) did not seem particularly important. Apparently, the factors which contribute to the perceived similarity of speech sounds in the classification task are not identical to those which underlie performance in explicit segmentation and manipulation tasks, since in the latter sort of task, syllables are more accessible than phonemes for young children. The present task may tap a level of processing that is closer to the one entailed in word recognition and lexical access.     

Logics of some kripke frames connected with Medvedev notion of informational types

Intermediate prepositional logics we consider here describe the setI() of regular informational types introduced by Yu. T. Medvedev [7]. He showed thatI() is a Heyting algebra. This algebra gives rise to the logic of infinite problems from [13] denoted here asLM ₁. Some other definitions of negation inI() lead to logicsLM _n (n ). We study inclusions between these and other systems, proveLM _n to be non-finitely axiomatizable (n ) and recursively axiomatizable (n < ). We also show that formulas in one variable do not separateLM from Heyting's logicH, andLM _n (n < ) from Scott's logic (H+S).     

Self-Control: Essence and Development

The paper surveys practical knowledge about the act of self-control, particularly how to cultivate it. The discussion is organized around four totally interrelated components: awareness, intervention, sense of self, and sense of will.

     

Interparent agreement on the Personality Inventory for Children: Are substantial correlations sufficient?

Mothers' and fathers' responses on the Personality Inventory for Children (PIC) were compared for 360 clinic-referred children and adolescents. Interparent agreement was measured by several different indices. Correlations between parental pairs of scale T-scores derived from each parent averaged .66 for 13 of the profile scales; 9 of the scales exceeded this value. In contrast, mothers and fathers agreed in the classification of the presence of clinical significance an average of 77% of the time across these 13 scales, and pairs of parental PIC profiles contained an average of 3 scales in disagreement. The type of index used to measure interparent agreement was found to affect the results. The discussion examines the nature of interparent disagreement and addresses the implications regarding the use of fathers as informants on this instrument.This article is based on Thomas A. Hulbert's master's thesis. The authors extend their appreciation to James Orisell and Dena Mussaff for their assistance in data preparation and analysis.     

Pupillary responses to syntactic ambiguity of sentences

Pupillary responses have proven to be reliable physiological correlates of cognitive effort in a variety of tasks, including language processing. To investigate the relation between psychological and syntactic complexity 20 syntactically ambiguous sentences, balanced for bias, were presented to 16 subjects, while their pupil size was continuously measured. These sentences could be read as verb oriented (syntactically more complex) or object oriented (syntactically less complex). Principal components analysis of pupillary movements revealed that verb-oriented readings, resulted in greater pupillary dilations than object-oriented readings, indicating that syntactically more complex sentences, as determined via a formal grammar, require greater cognitive effort in processing. This is viewed as further evidence for the notion that syntactic and psychological complexity are related. High- and low-bias sentences did not induce comparable differences in pupillary movements, indicating that the "multiple meaning theory" may have to be modified.