Two-month-old infants’ sensitivity to allophonic differences

The present study investigated 2-month-olds’ abilities to discriminate allophonic differences that are potentially useful in segmenting fluent speech. Experiment 1 investigated infants’ sensitivity to the kind of distinction that may signal the presence or absence of a word boundary. When tested with the high-amplitude sucking procedure, infants discriminated pairs of items, such as “nitrate” versus “night rate” and “nikrate” versus “nike rate.” By greatly reducing the potential contribution of prosodic differences to these contrasts, Experiment 2 evaluated whether the allophonic differences for /t/ and /r/ were sufficient for infants to distinguish the “nitrate” versus “night rate” pair. Infants distinguished “nitrate” from a cross-spliced version of “night rate,” which differed only in the allophones for /t/ and /r/ that it included. Thus, infants appear to possess one of the prerequisite capacities (i.e., the ability to discriminate allophonic distinctions) necessary to use allophonic information in segmenting fluent speech.     

Eyewitness testimony and memory distortion

Abstract: Do memories change as we acquire new information? Recent research on memory distortion using implicit tests along with research using confidence is reviewed and new studies are presented. Two new studies asked misinformed subjects to provide reasons for their answers. In each study 15% to 27% of subjects said they remembered seeing items they had only read about. In another study subjects were asked to identify the source of misleading items they had seen in slides or read in misleading questions. Subjects were more likely to say they had seen in slides something they read about in the questions than they were to confuse information from two nearly identical sets of slides. Recent work shows that, not only is it possible to distort memory for events, it is possible to implant an entire memory for something that never happened. The evidence is now clear that we can become mentally tricked into making large as well as small changes in the way we recall the past.     

Children's Decisions About Substance Use: An Application and Extension of the Theory of Reasoned Action1

This research examines the applicability of Fishbein and Ajzen's (1975) theory of reasoned action (TRA) to intentions to use cigarettes and alcohol among 5th- and 6th-grade students. It also addresses the question of unidimensionality of outcome beliefs and referent norms. Results suggest that the TRA model describes children's decision making well, although the ability of income and race to add to prediction, net of the effects of attitude and perceived norm, are contrary to the theory's prediction. In addition, we find support for multidimensional components of both attitude and norm for both behaviors.     

Social-Cognitive and Behavioral Correlates of Aggression and Victimization in Boys' Play Groups

A contrived play group procedure was utilized to examine the behavioral and social-cognitive correlates of reactive aggression, proactive aggression, and victimization via peers. Eleven play groups, each of which consisted of six familiar African-American 8-year-old boys, met for 45-min sessions on five consecutive days. Social-cognitive interviews were conducted following the second and fourth sessions. Play group interactions were videotaped and examined by trained observers. High rates of proactive aggression were associated with positive outcome expectancies for aggression/assertion, frequent displays of assertive social behavior, and low rates of submissive behavior. Reactive aggression was associated with hostile attributional tendencies and frequent victimization by peers. Victimization was associated with submissive behavior, hostile attributional bias, reactive aggression, and negative outcome expectations for aggression/assertion. These results demonstrate that there is a theoretically coherent and empirically distinct set of correlates associated with each of the examined aggression subtypes, and with victimization by peers.     

DEPRESSION IN WOMEN AS RELATED TO ANGER AND MUTUALITY IN RELATIONSHIPS

Self-in-relation theory (Jordan, Kaplan, Miller, Stiver, & Surrey, 1991) proposes that a lack of mutuality in women's relationships predisposes them to depression and inhibits their ability to acknowledge and address effectively emotions such as anger. Research linking anger to depression has not examined women's emotional expressivity within the context of their partner relationships. Women's depression as a function of both their level of anger suppression or inappropriate anger expression and the level of perceived relationship mutuality was studied in a sample of 223 college women, aged 18 to 54. Lower levels of mutuality and higher levels of suppressed or inappropriately expressed anger were associated with depression. Moreover, mutuality made contributions to predicting depression beyond that explained by anger. Lower mutuality was also related to higher anger suppression, but unrelated to inappropriately expressed anger.     

Verb Comprehension Deficits in Probable Alzheimer's Disease

Studies of lexical comprehension in probable Alzheimer's disease (pAD) have focused almost exclusively on nouns. In the following preliminary study, we examined whether lexical comprehension for verbs is also impaired in 25 pAD patients. The semantic meaning of motion verbs, cognition verbs, and perception verbs was assessed with a triadic comparison task. Structural meaning associated with these verbs was evaluated by asking the patients to judge the coherence of sentence frames that accept these verbs naturally or awkwardly. We found that pAD patients are significantly impaired at identifying semantic relations among verbs. pAD patients also encountered significantly more difficulty judging the coherence of sentences than control subjects. Correlation and regression analyses demonstrated that semantic characteristics of verbs are projected from the verbs' sentence frames in control subjects, but there was minimal evidence for such a structural–semantic relationship in pAD. We consider several possible explanations for our preliminary observations of an impairment that has consequences for processing both semantic and structural aspects of verb meaning.     

Media use and political commitment: The 1992 U.S. presidential election

This study explores the relationship between media use and political commitment. Undergraduate participants answered an extensive political background questionnaire, which included measures of media use, perceived importance of information sources regarding the 1992 presidential election, and various political behaviors as an index of political commitment. Correlational analyses revealed that those who are more politically committed tend to select a variety of media sources regarding a presidential candidate. This study also investigated how informational and commitment variables were related to attitudes towards the major presidential candidates. Results observed for people expressing positive attitudes toward Perot are discussed in terms of the modern day “third party voter.”     

Chronic sorrow: A content analysis of parental differences

Sixty-eight mothers and 64 fathers of children with a neural tube defect responded to a questionnaire about chronic sorrow. Mothers reported a mood state change in very intense category from more pessimistic at time of diagnosis to more optimistic at current time. Fathers, although indicating a mood change in the very intense category to more optimistic, also had more pessimistic responses. Parental similarities and differences were also reported in both times and events that triggered the sorrow response. Categories across times and events were primarily related to health care, school/development concerns and social significance. Clinical and research implications of these findings are discussed.     

The impact of confederate responsivity on social skills assessment

The current investigation examined the degree to which judges' ratings of skill, anxiety, and attractiveness are influenced by the responsivity of the confederate. High-, medium-, and low-skilled subject-pool groupings, as well as self-referred clinical groups, were exposed to either a moderately or a minimally responsive confederate. Results indicated that subjects were rated as more skillful when interacting with a moderately responsive confederate than when interacting with a minimally responsive confederate. Further, there was a groups × condition interaction for anxiety ratings such that both the high- and the medium-skilled groups appeared more anxious under the minimal condition, whereas the low-skilled and self-referred groups did not. Self-referred subjects received significantly lower attractiveness ratings than did the high- or medium-skilled groups. Implications of these results and future directions for research are discussed.This research is based on a M.S. thesis carried out by the first author under direction of the second author.