Training non-native speech contrasts in adults: Acquisition of the English /ð/-/θ/ contrast by francophones

Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics - Speech perception abilities are modified by linguistic experience to maximize sensitivity to acoustic contrasts that are important for one’s...     

Minicomputer-administered tasks in the study of effects of sustained work on human performance

Six tasks administered on a MINC-11 minicomputer were used in studying the effects of long, continuous work periods and fatigue on physical and cognitive task performance. Submaximal physiological workload measurement was done during one of these tasks for a subject walking on a treadmill. The MINC-11 system is described, as are the six tasks programs. Four of these tasks measured various types of reaction times, another involved complex information processing, and one appraised moods, physical symptoms, fatigue, and the physiological status of subjects.     

Concurrent validity of the Woodcock-Johnson psycho-educational battery with regular and learning-disabled students

A comparison of the WISC-R and the Woodcock-Johnson Psycho-Educational Educational Battery (W-J) was made for children with regular and learning-disabled (LD) class placement. The W-J and Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R) evidence low to moderate correlations and significant mean differences, indicating that the two tests are measuring somewhat different abilities to somewhat differing degrees. W-J—WISC-R correlations for the regular students exceed those of the LD students in the greater majority of the cases. Rank ordering of the WISC-R subtests and the W-J clusters indicate, as might be expected, that the LD students fare the worst in the WISC-R academic subtests (Arithmetic, Information and Vocabulary) and in the W-J academic clusters. More research needs to be conducted with the W-J before it should be adopted for use in the placement of exceptional children.     

Midi-level measurement of social anxiety in psychiatric and non-psychiatric samples

This paper reports the development and assessment of midi-level behavioral measures of social anxiety in the context of two experiments, one studying an analog student sample, the other a psychiatric sample. Judgments on nine categories of clinically practical midi-level behaviors (e.g. Facial Expression, Orienting, Sense of Timing), based on a review of the literature on human ethology and on pilot research, were compared to global judgments of social anxiety and social skill and to physiological arousal. Intraclass correlations exceeded 0.80 for judgments of the global and midi-level behavioral ratings on both samples. Results of correlational analyses indicated that while there were several significant predictors of global skill and anxiety among the midis, the magnitude of the relationship between midis and globals was stronger for the patient than the student sample. Further analyses based on S's heart rate (HR) reactivity suggested that while global ratings did not significantly predict H R in a high social anxiety situation, one midi-level behavioral rating (self-manipulations) did. The clinical utility of the newly developed measures is discussed with particular attention to their practicality for behavior therapy.     

The empirical base of Trope's position on achievement-task choice: A critique

The empirical base of Trope's position on achievement-task choice is critiqued here. Attention is focused on Trope's earliest studies (Trope, 1975; Trope & Brickman, 1975) because they provide this position's most critical tests. Support for the following three propositions of the position is assessed: (1) diagnosticity information, rather than task difficulty information, is the basis of task selection; (2) desire for information about one's ability, not the wish for certain affective consequences, is what motivates achievement-task choice; and (3) the success of the Atkinson model is owed to the adventitious confounding existing between task diagnosticity and task difficulty, and the resulting confounding between ability-informational and affective consequences. The major findings are that (1) the tests of all propositions have such serious logical flaws that they cannot answer the questions they seek to answer, (2) the task choice situation containing the diagnosticity manipulation employed by Trope is so different from real-life task choice situations as to call into question the relevance of Trope's findings for the latter situations, (3) Trope's diagnosticity manipulation is a meaningless one as it gives rise to situations that are logical impossibilities (e.g., skill tasks that are performed equally well by high- and low-skilled people), and (4) the tests of Atkinson's position are invalidated by a serious misinterpretation of that position by Trope.     

Adaptive reasoning: Componential and eye movement analysis of geometric analogy performance

The present study explored individual differences in performance of a geometric analogies task. Whereas past studies employed true/false or two-alternative items, the present research included four-alternative items and studied eye movements and confidence judgements for each item performance as well as latency and error. Item difficulty proved to be a function of an interaction between the number of response alternatives and the number of elements in items, especially for subjects lower in fluid-analytic reasoning ability. Results were interpreted using two hypothesized performance strategies: constructive matching and response elimination. The less efficient of these, response elimination, seemed to be used more by lower ability subjects on more difficult items. While two previous theories resemble one or the other of these strategies, neither alone seems to capture the complexity of adaptive problem solving. It appears that a comprehensive theory should incorporate strategy shifting as a function of item difficulty and subject ability.Componential models, based in part on past research, revealed that a justification component was activated and deactivated depending upon the nature of the analogy being solved. In addition, two new components, spatial inference and spatial application, were identified as important on some items, suggesting that different geometric analogy items invoke different cognitive processing components. Thus, a comprehensive theory should also describe component activation and deactivation.     

A word’s meaning affects the decision in lexical decision

The influence of an isolated word’s meaning on lexical decision reaction time (RT) was demonstrated through four experiments. Subjects in two experiments made lexical decision judgments, those in a third experiment pronounced the words used in the lexical decision task, and those in a fourth experiment quickly pronounced their first associative response to the words. Differences in lexical access time for the words were measured with the pronunciation task, and differences in meaning were assessed with the association task. Multiple regression analyses of lexical decision RT were conducted using associative RT, pronunciation RT, and other target word properties (printed frequency, length, instance dominance, and number of dictionary meanings) as predictor variables. These analyses revealed a relationship between lexical decision RT and associative RT after the effects of other variables had been partialed out. In addition, word frequency continued to have a significant relationship to lexical decision RT beyond that shared with pronunciation RT and the other variables. The results of these experiments indicate that at least some of the effect of word meaning and word frequency in lexical decision is attributable to a decision stage following lexical access.     

Schizotypy and hemisphere function—III : Performance asymmetries on tasks of letter recognition and local-global processing

Two experiments are reported comparing high and low schizotypal normals on divided field tasks of (a) letter recognition and (b) local-global processing. On the former, low schizotypal Ss showed an expected right visual-field superiority, whereas high schizotypal Ss showed the opposite, in that respect resembling schizophrenic patients. A similar reversed asymmetry was found when the two personality types were compared for local and global processing of letter stimuli, high schizotypals being especially unusual in showing superior local processing for stimuli presented in the left visual field. The results are taken as providing further support for the theory of schizotypy put forward in a previous paper.