A comparison of semantic. acoustic and visual criteria for matching of word pairs

Ss judged the some pairs of words “same” or “different” under semantic, acoustic and visualcriteria. RTs were compared for each criterion, and the effects of different kinds of confusabittty, such as acoustic similarity in the semantic matching task, or semantic similarity in the acoustic matching task, were also studied.     

Language comprehension in old age

Three experiments examined the effects of aging on comprehension of spoken language. Integrative and constructive aspects of comprehension showed much more marked age-related deficits than registration of surface meaning. Experiment 1 showed that old subjects had difficulty in making inferences based on presented facts. Experiment 2 revealed a similar deficit in old people's ability to detect anomalies in newly presented information by reference to prior everyday knowledge. And Experiment 3, which tested story recall, showed that old subjects were less well able to extract and retain gist information than younger subjects. These difficulties are interpreted as reflecting a limitation in processing capacity such that the demands of concurrently registering surface meaning and simultaneously carrying out integrative and constructive processes exceed capacity in old age.     

Cross-modal matching and association under sodium amytal

Anatomical and theoretical considerations, as well as experimental findings, have yielded conflicting points of view regarding the abilities of the right hemisphere in man to accomplish cross-modal transfer of information. Auditory—visual cross-modal matching (CMM) and association (CMA) abilities of the left and right hemisphere (LH and RH) were tested, using the Wada intracarotid sodium amytal technique. It was found that the RH performed slightly better on these tasks than the LH. These findings contrast with results of other techniques which indicate that the RH cannot perform CMM and CMA.     

Dichotic speech perception: A comparison between stuttering and nonstuttering children

A stop consonant-vowel dichotic listening task was administered to 90 right- handed boys, 30 in each age group of 5, 7, and 9 yr. Half in each group were stutterers, half nonstutterers. Two and a half times as many stutterers as nonstutterers were found to display either a left-ear advantage (LEA) or no ear advantage (NEA). This finding suggested a greater tendency on the part of stutterers, as opposed to nonstutterers, for reversed or bilateral representation of the auditory speech areas of the brain. In addition, both stutterers and nonstutterers displayed significant developmental increases in the number of times they were able to identify both dichotic speech stimuli, thereby supporting the hypothesis of an age-related increase in children's total information processing capacity. The results are discussed in terms of the differences between stutterers and nonstutterers with respect to the issues of motor representation, cognitive modes, and higher-order linguistic processes.     

Organizing factors in remembering and comprehending: A developmental analysis

This report describes an experiment that emphasizes: (a) the influence of organizing factors in remembering and comprehending and (b) the development of those skills that are related to the ability to organize. The analysis of the data was based on a theory of comprehension that emphasized a pair of interrelated processes, one providing for the construction of a schema or plan and the other for the semantic integration of items into the evolving plan. As predicted, adults perform more accurately with the paragraphs vs. the scrambled paragraphs and with the word lists as compared to the scrambled word lists. Accuracy with unrelated words is generally greater than with related words, a finding that is consistent with a reconstructive theory of remembering. The pattern of results for the 5th grade Ss is quite different: they perform more accurately with the scrambled paragraphs than with the paragraphs and somewhat more accurately with scrambled word lists rather than with word lists. These results were interpreted as evidence for a problem of control for the 5th grade Ss. We have assumed that the ability to process certain forms of information depends upon the ability to select and maintain an appropriate focus of attention. The results for these younger Ss suggest that their ability to file information into a schema as a filing system is compromised by the need to change or modify the filing system.     

Language and imitation in development

Noting the central role accorded imitation in the origins of symbolic functioning, language development, and identity formation, as well as its relationship to aspects of individuation, the authors have reviewed the problem of imitation from both cognitive developmental and psychoanalytic perspectives. They have specifically delineated piagetian views regarding the origins of imitation and traced its relationship to the emergence of language, while attempting to clarify various psychoanalytic formulations on this topic. This dual theoretical perspective is then reconsidered within the framework of the current empirical infancy literature. Pathological sequelae of imitation are also reviewed in relation to their impact upon ego formation and the process of socialization. Tracing a cognitive developmental line, the authors then discuss the relationship between imitation and the emergence of language; language is also considered as an important vehicle of communication which furthers and enhances ego development and object relations. The authors conclude with a partial integration of piagetian and psychoanalytic hypotheses regarding imitation and identity formation with the aim of stimulating further discussion on this topic.     

Inferential reasoning in old age

Two experiments examined the effects of aging on the kind of inferential reasoning required in comprehending discourse. In Experiment 1 old subjects made more errors than young subjects in solving logical problems framed in everyday language. Unlike the young subjects they had more difficulty when the problems were spoken than when they were written. Experiment 2 revealed that old subjects are inefficient at extracting implicit information during reading; they fail to generate bridging inferences to supply missing information, so that comprehension is restricted to explicitly stated information. The results show that verbal reasoning ability is impaired in old age and that this affects language comprehension in both listening and reading although the deficit is more marked in listening.