A small-to-large unit progression in metaphonological awareness and reading?

The paper reports a series of studies of reading and metaphonological processing by children in their second year in primary school(aged 6 years). An earlier study had established that, in the first year of learning, performance was characterized by a small-unit approach in which graphemes and phonemes were emphasized. In the second year, reading became more sensitiveto the frequencies of rime structures in the lexicon. Capacity to generate word analogies for nonwords also showed increasing commitment to rime-based responses, and this trend was strongly linked to reading age. The present results suggest that a small-unit approach to reading is augmented by a large-unit approach as development proceeds. This trend was reflected in performance on a test of explicit phonological awareness. When asked to report the segment of sound shared by two spoken words, Primary 1 children were poor in reporting shared rimes but relatively adept in reporting shared phonemes. During Primary 2 there was an improvement in ability to report shared rimes, and this trend was also related to reading age. These results are discussed in relation to the influence of instruction and the nature of the orthography in determining the course of reading development.     

Empirical evaluation of a model of global psychophysical judgments: III. A form for the psychophysical function and intensity filtering

In part I, a concept of ratio estimation is defined and it is shown that if such estimates depend only upon the physical ratio of the signal to the reference signal, the psychophysical function must be a power function. Assuming the same exponents for each component, an invariance condition, equivalent to a sum of power functions, is studied empirically for binaural loudness. It is fully or partially sustained for 19 of 22 respondents. Since failures may be attributable to different exponents in the two ears, the ratio of the two exponents is estimated but that fails to explain the failures. Other possible explanations are suggested. In part II, an intensity filtering model is presented, accounting for the phenomenon where monaural loudness matches show a bias depending on the matching ear. We show (a) that the existence of such a bias does not alter the prior experimental results; and (b) assuming the power function, that five respondents attenuate the opposite ear and two enhance it.     

An expert–novice comparison of feature choice

Perceptual experts have learned to rapidly and accurately perceive the structural regularities that define categories and identities within a domain. They extract important features and their relations more efficiently than novices. We used fingerprint examination to investigate expert–novice differences in feature choice. On each fingerprint within our set, experts and novices selected one feature they thought was most useful for distinguishing a particular print and one feature they thought was least useful. We found that experts and novices often differed in the features they chose, and experts tended to agree more with each other. However, any such expert–novice difference appeared to depend on the image at hand typically emerging when salient or more conspicuous features of a fingerprint were unclear. We suggest that perceptual training ought to direct attention to useful features with the understanding that what is useful may change depending on the clarity of the stimuli.     

Community mental health ideology of preprofessional students

Adherence to the ideology of mental health was measured in a cluster sample of preprofessional students in four majors: psychology, social work, rehabilitation and health education. Mean inventory scores for the four groups did not differ significantly.