THE ACQUISITION OF GRAPHEME‐PHONEME CORRESPONDENCES IN A WORD LEARNING TASK

Abstract

The relationship between reading ability with receptive vocabulary level and the ability to induce grapheme‐phoneme relationships was investigated using grade one students. The ability to induce relationships was assessed by a word learning task in which the stimuli were six consonant‐vowel‐consonant trigrams composed of seven letter‐like forms with a 1:1 grapheme‐phoneme correspondence. The word learning task was followed by a test of each student's acquisition of the grapheme‐phoneme correspondences that appeared in the word stimuli. The ability to induce the relationships was found to be much more strongly related to reading ability than receptive vocabulary. The results suggest that good and poor readers applied different word learning strategies, with good readers appearing to apply more readily a principled solution and poor readers an associative solution. The results are consistent with the theory of reading acquisition advanced by Gibson and Levin.     

Non-binary and binary transgender youth: Comparison of mental health,self-harm,suicidality, substance use and victimization experiences

ABSTRACT

?Background: Little research has compared the mental health and victimization experiences of non-binary youth depending on their sex assigned at birth (SAAB), or compared these two groups with binary transgender youth.

Aims: To compare mental health, self-harm and suicidality, substance use and victimization experiences between non-binary and binary transgender young adults, both male assigned at birth (MAAB) and female assigned at birth (FAAB).

Methods: Online survey data from 677 participants from the “Youth Chances” community study of 16 to 25 year olds in the United Kingdom was analyzed, comparing across binary participants (transgender females (n = 105) and transgender males (n = 210)) and non-binary participants (MAAB (n = 93) and FAAB (n = 269)).

Results: Female SAAB participants (binary and non-binary) were more likely to report a current mental health condition and history of self-harm than male SAAB participants (binary and non-binary). Similarly, female SAAB participants (binary and non-binary) were more likely to report childhood sexual abuse than male SAAB participants (binary and non-binary); the reverse pattern was found for lifetime physical assault relating to being LGBTQ. Non-binary MAAB participants were less likely than the other groups to report past suicide attempts and previous help-seeking for depression/anxiety. Binary participants reported lower life satisfaction than non-binary participants. For all four groups, mental health problems, self-harm, suicidality, alcohol use and victimization experiences were generally higher than that of youth in general population studies.

Conclusions: These findings highlight the importance of considering both non-binary versus binary gender identity and SAAB in relation to mental health problems, self-harm, suicidality and substance use in transgender youth. The roles of sexual abuse, other abuse and discrimination in contributing to increased rates of mental illness and self-harm in non-binary and binary transgender individuals, particularly those who were assigned female at birth, relative to those assigned male, require investigation.     

Telling the Truth About Power

SUMMARY

In this culture, those in power do not usually talk about it and the rest of us tend not to recognize it either. A similar situation exists in therapy, where the therapist herself may not be aware of her own power-over tactics. This article suggests methods that may help therapists to acknowledge their power and also to change from power-over actions to mutually empowering relationships. From this line of thinking, there follows an exploration of altering the concept of boundaries in therapy into mutually constructed agreements between patient and therapist. This article was presented at the Summer Training Institute of the Jean Baker Miller Training Institute, June, 2003.     

Media Effects on Ethnic Identity Among Linguistic Majorities and Minorities

Research on media effects has documented the media's influence on beliefs and behavior while cross‐cultural psychology has documented the effects of the language used in communication on identification with the ingroup and the outgroup. Media usage in the outgroup language should, therefore, affect identification patterns. This research investigates media effects in the acculturation process through a longitudinal design involving minority and majority group members evolving in the same bilingual environment. Subjects were Francophone students (N= 235) from minority and majority settings attending a bilingual (French–English) university. Results revealed that majority students increased significantly written and public media consumption in English whereas minority students increased French written media consumption. Furthermore, increased usage of English written and audiovisual media was related to identity changes in favour of the Anglophone group. Finally, path analysis emphasized the mediating role played by English language confidence and the determining role of ethnolinguistic vitality.     

Neural Network Models as Evidence for Different Types of Visual Representations

Cook (1995) criticizes the work of Jacobs and Kosslyn (1994) on spatial relations, shape representations, and receptive fields in neural network models on the grounds that first-order correlations between input and output unit activities can explain the results. We reply briefly to Cook's arguments here (and in Kosslyn, Chabris, Marsolek, Jacobs & Koenig, 1995) and discuss how new simulations can confirm the importance of receptive field size as a crucial variable in the encoding of categorical and coordinate spatial relations and the corresponding shape representations; such simulations would testify to the computational distinction between the different types of representations.