Spoken word recognition by eye

Spoken word recognition is thought to be achieved via competition in the mental lexicon between perceptually similar word forms. A review of the development and initial behavioral validations of computational models of visual spoken word recognition is presented, followed by a report of new empirical evidence. Specifically, a replication and extension of Mattys, Bernstein & Auer's (2002) study was conducted with 20 deaf participants who varied widely in speechreading ability. Participants visually identified isolated spoken words. Accuracy of visual spoken word recognition was influenced by the number of visually similar words in the lexicon and by the frequency of occurrence of the stimulus words. The results are consistent with the common view held within auditory word recognition that this task is accomplished via a process of activation and competition in which frequently occurring units are favored. Finally, future directions for visual spoken word recognition are discussed.     

LITURGICALLY TRAINED MEMORY: A READING OF SUMMA THEOLOGIAE III.83

Drawing on Ciceronian rhetorical tropes, Thomas Aquinas treats the rite of the Eucharist in terms of the classical ars memoriae. The Eucharist, for Aquinas, is the schooling in desire whereby we are trained to order the associations of our memory to their proper objects in terms of their relations to God. He thus conceives of the liturgy of the Mass as rhetoric proper, which truly teaches, moves and delights. Since memory is the condition of all thought, as both Thomas and Augustine claim, the Eucharist is the “site” of all theological production, and therefore the liturgy is the art of memory of which all other similar arts are derivative.     

Gender Differences in Persuasive Communication and Attribution of Success and Failure

This study examined the impact of gender on persuasive communication, considering the gender of both speaker and listener, and comparing the self-expectations and evaluations of the speakers before and after their communicative exchanges. Findings revealed that females expressed less confidence than males concerning their ability to communicate their arguments persuasively, even though trained communication raters indicated that both genders performed equally well. Subjects varied in their expressed self-confidence, however, depending upon whether they were addressing their arguments to a male or a female. In addition, males rated their communicative “performances” more positively than did females. In attributing their perceived success to various factors, men were more likely to acknowledge their natural communication ability than were women, while women were more inclined than men to point to their effort as the cause of their success. Finally, male and female subjects differed from each other in the way they argued, with males being more inclined to present criterion-based arguments and women more likely to invent their own. Again, both genders tended to use different types of arguments, depending upon the gender of the listener. Several issues raised by the study, especially the gender differences in argument type and the apparent gender-based audience assumptions, warrant further study.     

The supermom trap: Do involved dads erode moms' self‐competence?

Increasingly, husbands have been expected to share equally in the task of childrearing, especially when their wives are employed. This study examined reactions to these changes in a sample of 78 dual-earner couples with 8-month-old infants. When wives felt that their husbands were skillful caregivers, greater husbands' contribution to caregiving was associated with lower self-competence among wives. In contrast, wives' caregiving behavior was unrelated to their husbands' self-competence. None of these effects emerged for the self-liking component of self-esteem. Thus, despite increasingly egalitarian sex roles, employed mothers (but not their husbands) seem to be trapped between their desire for help with childrearing and the threat to their personal competence posed by failure to meet socially constructed ideals of motherhood.