A comparison of mothers' and fathers' speech to their 3-year-old sons

The language patterns of 10 mothers and 10 fathers with their firstborn 3-year-old sons were compared. Ten-minute mother-son and father-son conversations were recorded independently in the home during a free-play session with standard play mterials. The findings of this study indicate that although mothers and fathers used a similar number of utterances in conversing with their sons over a 10-minute period, their patterns of speech were different on a number of quantitative measures including MLU, MLU of five longest utterances, percent of imperatives, and percent of questions. In general, fathers' communication was viewed as more controlling and involving the child less, while mothers' communication was viewed as more child-centered and involving the child more.     

The role of duration and rapid temporal processing on the lateral perception of consonants and vowels

This study explored the extent to which rapid temporal processing and duration contribute to the right-ear advantage (REA) and presumably left-hemisphere processing for stop consonants and the lack of clear-cut laterality effects for vowels. Three sets of synthetic stimuli were constructed: consonant vowel stimuli [ba da ga bi di gi bu du gu] of 300 msec duration (full stimuli) and two shortened stimuli consisting either of a noise burst and 40-msec transitions (40-msec stimuli), or a noise burst and 20-msec transitions (20-msec stimuli). Stimuli were presented dichotically for consonant, vowel, and syllable identification. Results indicated a significant REA for consonants in the full and 40-msec conditions and a non-significant REA in the 20-msec condition. Nevertheless, the magnitude of laterality did not change across the three conditions. These results suggest that although transition information including duration contributes to lateralization for stop consonants, it is the presence of abrupt onsets which crucially determines lateralized processing. For vowels, there was a significant REA only in the full stimulus condition, and a significant decrement in the magnitude of the laterality effect in the two shortened stimulus conditions. These results suggest that for vowel perception, it is the nature of the acoustic cue used for phonetic identification and not duration that seems to be the critical determinant of lateralization effects.     

Electrodermal responses to attended and nonattended significant stimuli during dichotic listening

Some investigators have found that words previously associated with shock elicit electrodermal responses (EDRs) when presented in the nonattended channel of a dichotic listening task. The present experiment tested for this phenomenon while closely monitoring for shifts in attention to the nonattended channel. College student volunteers verbally shadowed a series of unrelated words presented to the attended channel while words made significant by previous association with shock (and semantically related words) were occasionally presented to the nonattended channel. Three principal findings were obtained. Fist, when EDRs were averaged across all trials and across all subjects, it was found that EDRs were elicited by the significant words presented in the nonattended channel. Second, for the subgroup of subjects that had the significant words presented to the right ear (activating the left cerebral hemisphere), it was found that EDRs were elicited by the significant words presented to the left ear (activating the right cerebral hemisphere), it was found that EDRs were elicited by the significant word seven on trials on which there were no apparent shifts in attention. The results of this study indicate the importance of closely controlling and monitoring for shifts in attention and suggest the potential importance of cerebral laterality in mediating EDRs to stimuli presented in a nonatttended channel.     

Reading with and without eye movements: reply to Just, Carpenter, and Woolley

Just, Carpenter, and Woolley propose that measures of single-word processing times, such as gaze durations during normal reading or durations of reader-controlled exposures, can be used both for developing theories of comprehension and for determining the course of new reading technologies. We argue that better understanding of comprehension processes does not necessarily follow from observed correlations between text variables and eye-fixation parameters. Further, recent rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) research suggests that eye fixation data obtained from studies of normal reading might have little practical value in optimizing the readability of RSVP displays and other means of text presentation.     

Self-focused attention,facial behavior,autonomic arousal and the experience of emotion

Two experiments examined alternative explanations for the Scheier and Carver(1977) results linking self-focused attention to increased responsivity to emotional stimuli. In both studies autonomic, expressive, and self-report measures of emotional arousal failed to confirm the earlier findings. An individual difference measure reported by others to parallel the effects of situationally manipulated self-attention also failed to confirm the previously reported findings. Though in direct contradiction to Scheier and Carver's results, the results are consistent with a facial feedback hypothesis and with previous findings on the effects of expressive inhibition on self-reports of emotional arousal.This research was supported in part by NSF grant 77-08926 to the first author and by NIMH grant MH 29446 to the third author, as well as by funds from the Lincoln Filene Endowment to Dartmouth College.