Mechanisms of aural encoding: VII. Differences in consonant and vowel recall in a Peterson and Peterson short-term memory paradigm

Ss either saw or heard lists of three syllables which differed by their initial consonant phoneme or their final vowel phoneme. After 5 or 15 sec of mental arithmetic, Ss were required to recall the syllables. Following auditory presentation, vowels were recalled more accurately than consonants in all serial positions and at both delays. In addition, spoken consonants and vowels showed primacy and recency effects. Following visual presentation, consonants and vowels were recalled with equal accuracy at both delays, and no recency effects were observed. These data suggest that superior recall of vowels over consonants results from differential decay of these stimuli in an acoustic storage. These data are consistent with previous experiments showing that, during serial recall, the final vowels in a sequence are recalled more accurately than the final consonants.     

A developmental study of factors influencing discrimination transfer

Reversal and non-reversal shifts were studied in rural Mexican children ranging in age from 4–10 years. Experimental variations within each group were arranged to provide for evaluation of the influence of temporal pairing and the presence of common attributes in different discriminanda on transfer. Under some presentation conditions, all of the groups studied manifested independent learning of subproblems which are ordinarily thought of as constituting a single problem by experimenters. The contributions of the various experimental factors change with age in ways that are consistent with a general “single-unit to mediational” formulation, but the details of the mediational behavior are not fully describable by any currently formulated theory.     

On the existence and occurrence of mediation in discrimination transfer: A critical note

Discrimination learning studies designed to study mediational processes of young children are discussed using a recent paper by Brown and Scott as a point of departure. It is urged that investigators lay aside demonstrations of the existence of mediation in young children as a focus of research, substituting a search for the conditions of its occurrence.     

Operant control of smoking in great apes

A methodology was developed for bringing smoking behavior in great apes under the control of a contingent food reinforcer. In this procedure, Ss were required to maintain long continuous draw durations (5 sec) against lighted cigarettes in order, to obtain candy rewards. By beginning with short criterional durations and gradually, working up to the desired response criterion, Ss were successfully habituated to the aversive aspects of smoking. The results indicated that it is possible to both shape and maintain smoking behavior with response-contingent reinforcement. The successful implementation of this procedure suggests that the pulmonary route can be used for drug administration with nonhuman primate species.     

Listening for mispronunciations: A measure of what we hear during speech

Ss heard a passage from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass and were asked to indicate, as quickly as possible, whenever they heard a mispronunciation. Mispronunciations were produced by changing one consonant sound in a three-syllable word by one, two, or four distinctive features (e.g., busily to “pizily,” “visily,” or “sizily”). Mispronunciations involving a single feature change were seldom detected, while two and four feature changes were readily detected. The syllable in which a mispronunciation occurred did not affect the probability of detecting a mispronunciation. However, reaction times to mispronounced words were at least a third of a second slower when they occurred in the-first syllable of the word. The results were taken to support the notion that words are identified by their distinctive features.     

Person-Placement Congruence: A Framework for Vocational Counselors

A common guideline for vocational counseling is the rule requiring congruence between a man and his job. The issue of person-placement congruence was studied utilizing 159 patients referred for vocational rehabilitation to the Mental Health and Manpower Project from the Fort Logan Mental Health Center. A 13-item scale devised by project research staff and completed by vocational counselors was shown to predict later job success. By separating the scale into two categories, those items dealing with abilities and those related to needs, it was possible to predict the nature of job termination, i.e., quit or was fired. There was demonstrated considerable validity for the man-job fit approach to counseling, and this research served as an initial step toward detailing this rather simple rule.     

Self-Concept and School Adjustment

This study attempted to relate self-concept to several dimensions of the child's experience that are deemed fundamental to effective academic adjustment. It was hypothesized that a child's conception of school would be related to his conception of himself, and thus might be construed as an extension of his self-concept. 80 6th-grade students were used as subjects for all phases of the investigation. Significantly positive correlations were obtained between self-concept measures and the following variables: conception of school, social status at school, emotional adjustment, mental ability, reading achievement, and mathematical achievement.     

Mechanisms of aural encoding III: Distinctive features for vowels

To determine the processing of vowel sounds in short-term memory for a serial recall task, 100 Ss heard either a short string of isolated vowel sounds, or a string in which each of these same sounds was embedded between the consonants “h” and “d”. In contrast to findings by Wickelgren, neither an articulatory or an acoustic distinctive-feature analysis predicted the pattern of intrusion errors found. The overall recall of the different sounds was predicted by the ease with which they could be labelled for rehearsal. However, ease of labelling would not explain the pattern of intrusion errors, nor would any other analysis tried. These results are consistent with a coding model presented by Liberman et al (J967). Surprisingly, the patterns of intrusion errors were very similar whether the sounds were presented alone or embedded in words. The implications of these findings for distinctive feature theory and the encoding process are discussed.