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.”     

S&T indicators for strategic planning and assessment of public research institutions

This article presents an approach we have developed for the assessment of public research institutions in the natural sciences and engineering. The method consists in the exploitation of available S&T databases and indicators, including bibliometrics (databases of scientific as well as technical literature), patents, and internal data. Results are therefore derived through multiple databases. The objective is to profile a specific national R&D community in order to assess the positioning of a public institution or program within the community to which it belongs. It involves obtaining the profile of the evolution of an R&D area, the R&D performers, the financing and support institutions, the users of R&D results, and the interactions between all these actors. A case-study of Canadian research in polymers is presented. Part of this research was financed by the National Research Council of Canada, and by a strategic grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. The research benefited from the expertise of Robert Letellier, Robert H. Marchessault, Jacques Martel, and Marielle Piché, and from the technical assistance of Maryse Prud’homme, Marcel Parent, and Benoit Longpré.     

Social context,student's motivation,and academic achievement: Toward a process model

The purpose of the present research was to propose and test a motivational process model of academic achievement. The model posits that parental, teachers, and school administration support for students' autonomy positively influences students' perceived school competence and autonomy. In turn, perceived school competence and autonomy affect positively self-determined school motivation which in turn influences academic achievement. Two studies using a prospective design tested the adequacy of the model. In Study I, participants were 1,623 ninth-grade students. Results from structural equation modeling supported the motivational model. Participants in Study 2 were 1,098 tenth-grade students. Results from this study corroborated those of Study 1 controlling for students' prior achievement in the ninth grade. The role of self-determinod school motivation in academic achievement is discussed and avenues for future research are considered. This research is part of a larger project that is being funded by grants from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; the San Francisco Foundation; the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; the Danforth Foundation; the Smart Foundations; the Pew Charitable Trusts; the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; the Annenberg Foundation; Spunk Fund, Inc.; the DeWitt Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund, Inc.; Louise and Claude Rosenberg; and the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The views expressed in the paper are those of the authors and not necessarily of the funders. We are grateful to the many educators, students, and colleagues who cooperated with us on this project and to several anonymous reviewers who provided helpful suggestions.     

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.     

The effects of graphemic,phonetic, and semantic relationships on access to lexical structures

The question of whether or not lexical information is accessed directly from a visual code or by a process of phonetic mediation was investigated in three lexical decision experiments. Phonetic similarity influenced decisions about visually presented words only when they were to be discriminated from orthographically regular nonwords. When consonant strings or random letter strings were used as nonwords, phonetic similarity effects were absent, and graphemic similarity exerted a powerful effect while evidence of semantic priming was found. This pattern was interpreted as evidence of direct lexical access, which is probably the normal processing mode for skilled readers. Phonetic coding, when it occurs, may be a storage strategy rather than a part of the addressing chain for lexical structures.     

An alternative perspective on sex differences in organizational settings: The process of legitimation

This article takes a sociological approach to a problem that has usually been considered as a psychological phenomenon. It addresses the problem of male—female interactions in work situations utilizing the organizational concepts of division of labor and legitimacy. Traditional explanations evoking sex-role socialization are reviewed and rejected for purposes of experimentation and intervention. An alternative argument, focusing on the structural arrangements of organizational settings, is presented as an explanation for behavioral effects previously attributed to inherent sex differences. The results of a pilot study are briefly described, and directions for further experimentation and possible intervention strategies are suggested.The bibliographic search and initial conceptualization of this research was supported by a grant from the Ford Foundation under the auspices of the Center for Research on Women at Stanford University. We are grateful to Miriam Rosen for much of the bibliographic work. The pilot study was supported in part by funds from the Guggenheim Foundation and by a grant from the Spencer Foundation. We also wish to thank Richard Torres and Christie Timberlake for their invaluable assistance on this project.