Relations among cognitive,semantic, and syntactic variables in children's comprehension of the minimum distance principle: A 2-year developmental study

Theoretical issues regarding cognitive aspects of the semantic interpretation of two syntactic structures were examined. A 2-year study was conducted investigating possible developmental trends in children's sentence-processing strategies. Experimental materials incorporated two levels of role expectations and two levels of syntactic complexity. Subjects were initially 6–10 years old; 12 original subjects from each age group were retested a year later. Exceptional and typical syntactic structures were not of significantly different difficulty either year. Semantic and cognitive complexity, as reflected in the two levels of expectation, was significant both years (p<0.001). Performance improved, over the 12-month period, in all but the 7- to 8-year-old group (p<0.005). Results are discussed with reference to cognitive strategies in sentence processing.This article is based on research reported at the annual meeting of the Northeastern Educational Research Association, Ellenville, New York, October 29–31, 1975.     

Black Women and the Pleasures of Intellectual Work

What does it mean for a Black woman to choose to do intellectual work? In the twenty‐first century, Black women, either by virtue of their academic careers or their vocations outside of institutional settings, pursue intellectual work for its own sake as well as in pursuit of collective goals. That is to say, they can acknowledge intellectual work as a source of personal fulfillment, indeed a source of joy in ways that earlier generations of Black women could not. At least that should be true. In fact, it remains difficult for Black women to own the joy that their engagement with ideas produces.     

Counter-argument self-efficacy predicts choice of belief-defense strategies

Research has identified many strategies people use to defend against belief-inconsistent information. However, little research has identified factors that predict which defense strategy people will use when more than one is available. Two experiments tested whether people choose to counter-argue belief-inconsistent information because they believe arguing will be successful, but resort to weaker defense strategies because they believe arguing will be unsuccessful. Exposure to strong versus weak belief-inconsistent information caused a decrease in counter-arguing and an increase in ignoring (Experiment 1) or claiming a belief to be a matter of opinion (untestable) rather than a matter of fact (testable; Experiment 2). Consistent with self-efficacy theory, expectations of successful counter-arguing was the mechanism responsible for both effects. When people feel less capable of successfully counter-arguing because the information is too difficult to refute, they resort to epistemically weaker defense strategies in order to preserve their belief.     

Beyond bruises and broken bones: the joint effects of stress and injuries on battered women's health

We investigated the joint mediating effects of injuries and stress on the relationship between abuse and women's health. A community sample of 397 women, half of whom had been assaulted by an intimate partner within the prior 6 months, was interviewed about their experience of intimate partner violence, injuries, stress, income, depression, and physical health problems. Structural equation modeling techniques confirmed the complex model of hypothesized indirect effects of abuse on women's physical health problems through injuries, stress, and depression. Stress accounted for 80% of the indirect effect of abuse on women's physical health. Its direct effect on physical health was somewhat larger than its indirect effect through depression, but both processes played a key role in determining the effect of abuse on women's physical health problems. Furthermore, abuse was a stronger predictor of women's stress than was poverty. Implication and future research are discussed.     

Do orthographic cues aid language recognition? A laterality study with French-English bilinguals

Sixteen French-English late bilinguals performed a speeded language recognition task on lateralized words that were either marked or unmarked for language on the basis of digram frequency. Response latencies were faster to orthographically marked than unmarked words, particularly in the second language (English). Furthermore, L2 marked words were responded to faster than L1 marked words. These effects were especially prominent for words presented in the left visual field. It is suggested that subjects made use of different strategies in performing the task of language recognition task, with a perceptual search strategy deployed to identify orthographically marked words, resulting in an L2 advantage for such words, and a lexical search strategy deployed for unmarked words, resulting in an L1 advantage for such words.     

The effects of encoding task on age-related differences in the functional neuroanatomy of face memory

Age-related differences in brain activity mediating face recognition were examined using positron emission tomography. Participants encoded faces using a pleasant-unpleasant judgment, a right-left orientation task, and intentional learning. Scans also were obtained during recognition. Both young and old groups showed signficant effects of encoding task on recognition accuracy, but older adults showed reduced accuracy overall. Increased brain activity in older adults was similar to that seen in young adults during conditions associated with deeper processing, but was reduced during the shallow encoding and recognition conditions. Left prefrontal activity was less in older adults during encoding, but greater during recognition. Differential correlations of brain activity and behavior were found that suggest older adults use unique neural systems to facilitate face memory.     

Adaptation to disability: applying selective optimization with compensation to the behaviors of older adults with osteoarthritis

This research extends the use of P. B. Baltes and M. M. Baltes's (1990) theory of selective optimization with compensation (SOC) in an effort to conceptually integrate the adaptational behaviors of 248 older adults with disability arising from osteoarthritis. The authors also studied the relationship of SOC to age, illness variables, disability, illness perceptions, and support. The results highlight the variability and plasticity of older adults' efforts to manage disability, with most efforts aimed at compensation and optimization rather than selection. The benefit of using SOC to study adaptation to chronic illness and disability is discussed.     

Do Executive Function Deficits Differentiate Between Adolescents with ADHD and Oppositional Defiant/Conduct Disorder? A Neuropsychological Study Using the Six Elements Test and Hayling Sentence Completion Test

Two neuropsychological measures of executive functions—Six Elements Tests (SET) and Hayling Sentence Completion Test (HSCT)—were administered to 110 adolescents, aged 12–15 years. Participants comprised four groups: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) only (n = 35), ADHD and Oppositional Defiant Disorder/Conduct Disorder (ODD/CD) (n = 38), ODD/CD only (n = 11), and a normal community control group (n = 26). Results indicated that adolescents with ADHD performed significantly worse on both the SET and HSCT than those without ADHD, whether or not they also had ODD/CD. The adolescents with ADHD and with comorbid ADHD and ODD/CD were significantly more impaired in their ability to generate strategies and to monitor their ongoing behavior compared with age-matched controls and adolescents with ODD/CD only. It is argued that among adolescents with clinically significant levels of externalizing behavior problems, executive function deficits are specific to those with ADHD. The findings support the sensitivity of these two relatively new tests of executive functions and their ecological validity in tapping into everyday situations, which are potentially problematic for individuals with ADHD.     

Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) intentional communication is not contingent upon food

Studies of great apes have revealed that they use manual gestures and other signals to communicate about distal objects. There is also evidence that chimpanzees modify the types of communicative signals they use depending on the attentional state of a human communicative partner. The majority of previous studies have involved chimpanzees requesting food items from a human experimenter. Here, these same communicative behaviors are reported in chimpanzees requesting a tool from a human observer. In this study, captive chimpanzees were found to gesture, vocalize, and display more often when the experimenter had a tool than when she did not. It was also found that chimpanzees responded differentially based on the attentional state of a human experimenter, and when given the wrong tool persisted in their communicative efforts. Implications for the referential and intentional nature of chimpanzee communicative signaling are discussed.