Graphemic analysis underlying literacy

Three experiments are described that studied the role of detailed graphemic analysis upon the ability to read text. College students named letters in various approximations to English, with frequency of individual letters constant. Findings were that later skill at reading varied with the order of approximation to English of the letters that were named, that the spacing of the letter sequences was important to this result, and, finally, that the influence of specific visual practice extended to the typeface on which the naming and reading were carried out. Hence, rather than a letter-by-letter process or its opposite, a wholly semantic analysis, reading is shown to be intimately dependent upon details of visual analysis of patterns or letter sequences.     

Representation of inflected nouns in the internal lexicon

The lexical representation of Serbo-Croatian nouns was investigated in a lexical decision task. Because Serbo-Croatian nouns are declined, a noun may appear in one of several grammatical cases distinguished by the inflectional morpheme affixed to the base form. The grammatical cases occur with different frequencies, although some are visually and phonetically identical. When the frequencies of identical forms are compounded, the ordering of frequencies is not the same for masculine and feminine genders. These two genders are distinguished further by the fact that the base form for masculine nouns is an actual grammatical case, the nominative singular, whereas the base form for feminine nouns is an abstraction in that it cannot stand alone as an independent word. Exploiting these characteristics of the Serbo-Croatian language, we contrasted three views of how a noun is represented: (1) the independent-entries hypothesis, which assumes an independent representation for each grammatical case, reflecting its frequency of occurrence; (2) the derivational hypothesis, which assumes that only the base morpheme is stored, with the individual cases derived from separately stored inflectional morphemes and rules for combination; and (3) the satellite-entries hypothesis, which assumes that all cases are individually represented, with the nominative singular functioning as the nucleus and the embodiment of the noun’s frequency and around which the other cases cluster uniformly. The evidence strongly favors the satellite-entries hypothesis.     

A comparison of the reliability and validity of the standard MFF and MFF20 with learning-disabled children

A direct comparison was made of the reliability and validity of the standard Matching Familiar Figures Test (MFF) to a recent longer version of the task (MFF20). Subjects comprised two samples of learning-disabled children, matched on age, sex, IQ, and SES. The Salkind and Wright (1977) formulation was used to generate continuous data, and IQ was statistically controlled. Internal reliability estimates showed the MFF20 to be more consistent that the standard version on both error and latency scores. Validity was addressed by comparing the two versions of the task in their ability to predict cognitive and behavioral skills of conceptual relevance to impulsivity. Results indicated that the MFF20 is a more sensitive predictor of academic achievement and attention as observed in a natural setting than is the standard version of the task.This study was supported by a contract (300-77-0495) from the Bureau of Education for the Handicapped, Office of Education, for the University of Virginia Learning Disabilities Research Institute. The authors would like to express appreciation to the school officials who generously assisted in the present study: Elizabeth Bailey, Thomas Cox, Charles Dempsey, Julian King.     

Auditory processing of brain-damaged adults under competitive listening conditions

Right CVAs, mild left CVAs, and non-brain-damaged adults received the Token Test under three conditions: quiet, white noise, and speech babble. Left CVAs performed most poorly of all groups in all conditions experiencing difficulty with subtests III, IV, and V. Right CVAs were inferior to controls on each of these three subtests in the speech babble condition only. Thus, right CVA difficulty with both memory and syntactic tasks was demonstrated in speech babble. These results are explained by the hypothesis that both hemispheres are necessary to process auditory information under complex listening conditions. Total brain capacity of right CVA patients may be overloaded if either memory load or linguistic complexity is increased in the presence of certain types of listening competition.     

Pupillometric assessment of retrieval operations in factual long-term memory

The process involved in recall from long-term memory were studied through the use of a general knowledge questionnaire and the technique of pupillometry. Degree of processing of the components of the retrieval process was inferred from second-by-second monitoring of pupil size. Measurements were recorded during subjects' attempts to retrieve the answer to the query, or if unsuccessful, from clues of the target (first and last letters), and if still unsuccessful, to recognize the presented target word as being associated with the question (the “Of course”, or “That's it!” experience). Pupil size differed according to the nature of the three task demands. Additionally, there were differences based on the type of outcome within the question trial (e.g., between target known but blocked — feeling-of-knowing/tip-of-tongue — and target not known), and the answer trial (recognize vs not recognize the question—answer relationship). The results were related to the search and decisional processes of retrieval.     

The availability explanation of excessive plausibility assessments

The assessment of hypotheses in hypothesis generation involves a comparison between those hypotheses that have been generated (specified) and those that are not generated (unspecified). Experiment 1 was an investigation of an “availability explanation” for subjects' overconfidence in the probability of specified hypotheses. The conjecture is that subjects have difficulty retrieving unspecified hypotheses from memory. Therefore, the underpopulated set of unspecified hypotheses is assessed as less probable then it actually is and the specified set is assessed as more probable. Two manipulations to increase the availability of unspecified hypotheses were investigated. One involved explicitly requesting subjects to populate the unspecified set; the other was a computer presentation of candidate unspecified hypotheses. Results of experiment 1 were that assessment overconfidence for both experimental groups was reduced. The results support the conjecture that the availability heuristic is at least partially responsible for subjects' overconfidence. The main result of experiment 2 was that the overconfidence bias persisted with different assessment methods for both subject-generated and experimenter-supplied hypotheses.     

Efficacy of self-instructional training for reducing children''s anxiety in an evaluative situation

Fifty-six fourth-grade children were categorized as either high or low in trait anxiety and then assigned to a self-instruction treatment, minimal-treatment, or no-treatment control condition. At both pretest and posttest, the subjects recited a memorized poem while being videotaped with the expectation that they would be judged on their performance. State anxiety measures, a behavior rating of anxiety, a measure of performance accuracy and the time involved in reciting a poem were obtained at both pretest and posttest. Contrary to expectation, the self-instructional training resulted in subjects' exhibiting greater signs of behavioral anxiety, subjects' hurrying through the task (taking less time to recite the poem) and high trait-anxiety subjects' reporting more state anxiety while anticipating reciting the poem. Correlational analyses indicated that trait anxiety was significantly related to the measures of state anxiety and the behavior rating of anxiety but not to performance accuracy.