Distributive justice in marriage: Equality or equity?

Experimental studies of distributive justice suggest that men prefer an equity rule for allocating rewards, whereas women prefer equality. These differences are likely to carry implications for distributive justice in the context of marriage. There is a popular view in Western societies that marriage should be regarded as a partnership of equals, and this is also an implicit assumption in microeconomic accounts of the family. However, inequality between spouses is still commonplace, with the husband more likely to have overall financial control and greater access to money for personal spending (PSM). This paper investigates the issue of sharing in marriage, with particular reference to PSM, using data from an in-depth interview study supplemented by some follow-up questionnaires. The participants were 13 women and nine of their partners, mainly ‘middle class’ and aged between 30 and 50. After classifying each couple's system of financial management, the paper focuses upon eight couples with a philosophy of sharing. The findings show that, despite attempts to equalize outcomes for both partners, a sense of ‘ownership’ associated with having earned the money seemed to render it more salient than other, non-financial contributions to the marriage. As a result, patterns of control and personal spending appeared to be based upon equity rather than equality.     

The gender-marking effect in spoken word recognition

In this paper we examine whether the recognition of a spoken noun is affected by the gender marking—masculine or feminine—that is carried by a preceding word. In the first of two experiments, the gating paradigm was used to study the access of French nouns that were preceded by an appropriate gender marking, carried by an article, or preceded by no gender marking. In the second experiment, subjects were asked to make a lexical decision on the same material. A very strong facilitatory effect was found in both cases. The origin of the gender-marking effect is discussed, as well as the level of processing involved—lexical or syntactic.     

On the process of understanding idioms

This paper presents arguments against the idea that people normally analyze the literal meanings of idiomatic expressions during understanding. A number of empirical studies are reviewed which suggest that people do not compute the literal interpretations of idioms either before or simultaneous to comprehending their figurative meanings. This seems particularly true given that many idiomatic expressions do not have well-defined literal meanings. Finally, it is suggested that although idioms are understood directly as if single words, it is premature to accept the idea that all idioms are represented with equal status in the lexicon.Preparation of this paper was supported by a Faculty Research Grant from University of California, Santa Cruz. I thank Gayle Gonzales for her comments on a draft of this paper.     

Understanding “because”: How important is the task?

The causal connective because requires the order of clauses within a sentence to violate the order of events in the real world; i.e., effect because cause is correct. Children's (4, 6, and 8 years of age) ability to comprehend because was explored in a series of four studies. The first, a replication with variations of existing studies, assessed children's ability to judge as anomalous sentences in which the order of clauses is reversed. Comprehension of impersonal sentences is better than of sentences derived from narratives of their own experiences, although children do poorly at this task until age 8. However, results of study 2 suggest that children's poor understanding of task requirements is partly responsible, since increased task instructions and modeling led to significant improvement in the ability of preschoolers to judge sentences as anomalous. In the third study, children named the cause event after being told a causal sequence (involving either psychological or physical causality) of the form: Event A, Event C (effect) because Event B (cause), Event D. Comprehension of physical causality sequences is superior, but again, only 8-year-olds showed good performance. In Study 4, children were asked to find the cause event in four-clause sequences of the same form as in Study 3, but memory props were added in the form of pictures of events A, B, and D. Near perfect performance was shown by all children. Overall, comprehension studies of because are judged to be rife with methodological problems, and memory demands are seen to be particularly important.The authors wish to thank Lynn Anne Pye for her contributions to Study 4, which formed part of her undergraduate honors degree research, as well as F. Michael Rabinowitz for his comments and statistical aid. This research was supported by NSERC grant A7911 to the senior author.     

Written language acquisition after left or right hemidecortication in infancy

When written language is acquired in only one hemisphere because of hemidecortication in infancy, the left hemisphere is superior to the right at using morphophonemic rules to read and spell unfamiliar words, and at exploiting the structure of sentence units to achieve rapid reading of meaning in prose. The ability to learn names for logographs, however, is better in the right hemisphere than in the left. The greater mastery of written language in the left hemisphere is a result, not of an enhanced facility for making cross-modal associations between sounds and signs, but of a superior access to the morphophonemic rule system and the higher-order textual constraints of English.     

The “Flash” System: A Field Study of Altruism1

This study evaluated the effectiveness of an experimental automated highway-help system for stranded motorists (the Flash system). Direct and indirect helping behavior rates as a function of the race and sex of supposedly stranded drivers on the Flash-equipped highway were compared to helping rates on a comparable, non-Flash-equipped highway. The results indicated that the automated system produced (a) higher overall helping rates and (b) higher helping rates for white persons, with type of help (direct or indirect) interacting with confederate sex.     

The reviewing of object files: object-specific integration of information.

A series of experiments explored a form of object-specific priming. In all experiments a preview field containing two or more letters is followed by a target letter that is to be named. The displays are designed to produce a perceptual interpretation of the target as a new state of an object that previously contained one of the primes. The link is produced in different experiments by a shared location, by a shared relative position in a moving pattern, or by successive appearance in the same moving frame. An object-specific advantage is consistently observed: naming is facilitated by a preview of the target, if (and in some cases only if) the two appearances are linked to the same object. The amount and the object specificity of the preview benefit are not affected by extending the preview duration to 1 s, or by extending the temporal gap between fields to 590 ms. The results are interpreted in terms of a reviewing process, which is triggered by the appearance of the target and retrieves just one of the previewed items. In the absence of an object link, the reviewing item is selected at random. We develop the concept of an object file as a temporary episodic representation, within which successive states of an object are linked and integrated.     

Gender role stereotyping in children's literature: An update

The impact of gender role stereotyping in children's literature has been examined in numerous studies over the past two decades. The purpose of this study was to determine whether the sex bias portrayed in picture books is still as prevalent as in the past. In particular, we were interested in whether the frequency of males and females in pictures and their characterizations had changed. One hundred and fifty children's picture books were analyzed for gender role content. It was found that while the frequency of males and females depicted in the stories had indeed become more evenly distributed over the past 50 years, the roles played by males and females have changed in a more subtle way. Girls are now being pictured in more instrumental activities, but are as passive dependent as 50 years ago. Boys are occasionally shown as passive dependent today, but are no less instrumental than 50 years ago. The findings suggest that increased effort is needed on the part of publishers and authors to provide children with literature that more closely parallels the roles of males and females in contemporary society.Preparation of this article was supported in part by a Faculty Grant from Monmouth College awarded to the second author.     

On the gender differential use of listener responsiveness

It is argued that claims of gender differences in back channel behavior should not be uncritically accepted; there are limitations in previous research that make such acceptance questionable. The frequency of back channel behavior was examined over a portion of the early life span (Grades 4 and 9, and college). Twenty-minute structured conversations of 90 dyads (30 male, 30 female, and 30 mixed gender) were scored for eight types of back channels. There was a nonsignificant dyad gender effect for all measures, indicating that back channel frequency did not vary across dyads of different gender composition. The Age × Dyad Gender interaction was significant for only one of the eight back channel types, indicating that age had little effect on the gender-related use of back channel behavior. Although females produced more of some types of back channels than males, there was no difference in back channel frequency between males and females in opposite-gender interaction for any of the eight measures. We conclude that wholesale acceptance of gender differences in back channel behavior is not warranted.