Test of the validity of the Vando R-A Scale

The purpose of this study was to gather evidence on the validity of the Vando R-A Scale, a paper-and-pencil measure of perceptual reactance. The Vando R-A Scale and Petrie's kinesthetic aftereffect measure of perceptual reactance were administered to 46 participants drawn from university undergraduates. The Vando R-A Scale was not a valid measure of perceptual reactance. The continued use of the Vando R-A Scale as an alternate measure of perceptual reactance is contraindicated.     

Perceptions by the aged of crime, criminals, and the criminal justice system

A general fear of crime victimization led to modified activities in the community and feelings of relative safety in their own area for 132 elderly respondents on a 24-item questionnaire. They held sympathetic views of crime perpetrators as disadvantaged victims of society themselves, but came to the unlikely conclusions that more police control and harsher prison sentences are needed.     

Effects of auditory masking by white noise on primary stressing during spontaneous speech

6 adult subjects (3 men, 3 women) produced highly similar spontaneous speech utterances in quiet and with 90-dB SPL white noise. The frequency of occurrence of perceptual judgments of primary stressing in an utterance was not affected by the masking noise. This finding supplements our previous report that variability for stress production of fundamental frequency (fo) during spontaneous speech was preserved under short-term auditory disruption. Also, it adds further support to the contention that fo is under open-loop regulation.     

Is mental rotation controlled or automatic?

A task requiring the mental rotation of letters was performed either alone or during the retention interval of two short-term memory tasks. The retention of eight digits or random configurations of eight dots slowed overall reaction time on the mental-rotation task, but did not significantly alter the estimated rate of mental rotation. Conversely, performance on the memory tasks did not vary with the angle of mental rotation. These results support the view that attentional control is required to set up the mental structures required in mental rotation, but that the actual execution of the mental-rotation component can be relegated to subordinate systems that do not compete for attentional resources.     

The role of phonemes and syllables in the perceived similarity of speech sounds for children

In two experiments, we investigated the factors that influence the perceived similarity of speech sounds at two developmental levels. Kindergartners and second graders were asked to classify nonsense words, which were related by syllable and phoneme correspondences. The results support the existence of a developmental trend toward increased attention to individual phonemic segments. Moreover, one significant factor in determining the perceived similarity of speech sounds appears to be the position of the component correspondences; attention to the beginning of utterances may have developmental priority. An unexpected finding was that the linguistic status of the unit involved in a correspondence (whether it was a syllable or a phoneme) did not seem particularly important. Apparently, the factors which contribute to the perceived similarity of speech sounds in the classification task are not identical to those which underlie performance in explicit segmentation and manipulation tasks, since in the latter sort of task, syllables are more accessible than phonemes for young children. The present task may tap a level of processing that is closer to the one entailed in word recognition and lexical access.     

Predicting which words get recalled: Measures of free recall,availability, goodness,emotionality, and pronunciability for 925 nouns

To investigate the properties that make a word easy to recall, we added to existing norms for 925 nouns measures of availability, goodness, emotionality, pronunciability, and probability of recall in multiple-trial free recall. Availability, imagery, and emotionality were found to be the best predictors of which words were recalled. This result, which is stable across recall data collected in three separate laboratories, argues for the importance of availability as a predictor of recall and questions the role of the correlated variables of word frequency and meaningfulness. Consistent with earlier work on a smaller sample of words, six factors describe the numerous properties of words studied by psychologists. The six factors are composed of variables based on orthography, imagery and meaning, word frequency, recall, emotionality, and goodness.     

From page to program: Some typographical and temporal variables in radio homilies

Punctuation in 20 radio homilies by four speakers accounted for 76% of pause time and 64% of pause number. Pause duration varied systematically according to punctuation type. Commas accounted for 82% of punctuated positionsnot used for pausing.RRelevance for theories of text unitization is discussed. Both typographical and temporal measures are compared with a similar corpus of German homilies.     

On ranking sets of statements in terms of plausibility

The axioms adopted by Packard (1981) and Heiner and Packard (1983) for plausibility ranking of sets of statements are critically examined. It is shown that the informational requirement of the Heiner-Packard (1983) framework is much stronger than Packard's (1981) framework and hence both axiomatic setups are examined separately. A characterization of the leximin rule is provided in Packard's framework and the nonintuitive implications of the Heiner-Packard (1983) axioms are discussed. It is also demonstrated that in both frameworks, minor variations of some of the axioms convert the characterization results into logical impossibilities.I am grateful to Prof. P. K. Pattanaik for many helpful suggestions.