Deafness, spelling and rhyme: How spelling supports written word and picture rhyming skills in deaf subjects

Orally trained, congenitally deaf adolescents and hearing, reading-age-matched control subjects made rhyme judgements for pictures and for written words. Hearing children performed the task accurately. By contrast, the deaf group were very poor at rhyme judgement for words and for pictures. For hearing children, word rhyme judgement was more accurate when the words were congruent in their spelling pattern (e.g. bat/hat), less accurate when the spelling pattern of the rhyming words was incongruent (hair/bear). Deaf subjects showed an even more pronounced effect of spelling congruence; their ability to match for rhyme when written words did not share the same spelling pattern was extremely poor. Moreover, spelling congruence predicted deaf subjects' picture rhyming skills.

We conclude that oral training for deaf people does not always permit them to achieve a reliable phonological representation of speech from lip-reading and residual hearing alone. Instead they use the written spelling of the word. This result is not predicted from some previous results that suggest that orally trained deaf people can make direct, spontaneous use of rhyme in the processing of visually presented material.     

Path analysis of variables affecting 36-month outcome in a population of multi-risk children

Path analysis was employed with data collected during a longitudinal neuro-behavioral follow-up study of multi-risk children. The relative impact of maternal medical history, drug abuse, and day-to-day functioning during pregnancy on the course of labor and delivery and on neonatal outcome was examined. The subsequent impact of each of these sets of variables on the child's developmental status at 36 months was then explored. An additional factor, which incorporated postnatal environmental and family functioning characteristics, was also included in the model. Maternal drug abuse had a significant effect on the course of labor and delivery, due in part to the impact of maternal drug abuse on family functioning. The results indicate that in this multi-risk population, environmental and psychosocial variables are important predictors of the child's developmental prospects.     

Social Support, Counselling, and Cancer

Maintenance of self-esteem and of social relationships are major tasks for cancer patients, and are facilitated by supportive interactions with a variety of others. Different sources potentially provide different forms of support. Patients value informational support from doctors, with concurrent emotional support; family members and confidants specialise in the provision of empathy, reassurance of personal worth, and encouragement; and other cancer patients may act as supplementary sources of both information and empathy. Counsellors may provide direct social support in the forms of empathy and access to material help and information, and may also facilitate socially supportive interactions between the patient and other natural providers of support such as doctors, family, and peers.     

When grammar wins over sense: Children's judgments of extraposed relatives

A sentence judgment task was used to test 4-to 5-year-old children's knowledge of coreference possibilities for extraposed relatives. The overall pattern of children's performance in the first experiment reported here is similar to that of a control group of adult subjects and is consistent with knowledge of the linguistic constraints that restrict extraposition in the adult grammar. Performance on a follow-up experiment argues against a nongrammatical explanation of the results of the first experiment. Children's performance on the judgment task shows, that they are capable of abstracting away from the pragmatics of the immediate situation in making judgments and can be construed as evidence that children construct mental representations for the sentences they judge in which an NP over NP S structure is constructed for relative clauses at a level distinct from the surface structure string. The comparative lack of response patterns found in some previous work is discussed in the context of models of sentence processing.     

Event-related potentials in neuropsychological studies of language

Experiments are described in which event-related potentials (ERPs) are employed to study the specialization of functions between and within the cerebral hemispheres during the performance of language and nonlanguage tasks by normal adults. Similar studies of deaf subjects suggest that the functional organization of the brain may be altered after different early language and sensory experiences. Studies of patients with alexia without agraphia suggest that the ERP may be a valuable tool with which to study cerebral reorganization after brain damage.     

Theangular function of arod-and-frame illusion

It was predicted that vertical settings of a rod surrounded by a square frame would be in error in the direction of the frame axis closest to true vertical as the frame varied in tilt. Results were in accord with this hypothesis. The implications of the results are discussed.     

When is a weight not illusory?

Weight illusions occur whenever some aspect of an object--such as its size, material or colour--arouses the expectation that its weight will be heavier or lighter than it actually is. The direction of the illusion normally contrasts with the expected weight. When objects are hidden from sight and lifted by strings they can provide no misleading cues, and a correct weight-expectation should be achieved after one or two trials. When a visible object has the same physical and apparent weight as a hidden object, it can be defined as non-illusory. Weighted tins and polystyrene blocks of various sizes were compared with hidden weights. Tins were found to be non-illusory when their density was about 1.7, and polystyrene blocks when their density was about 0.14.

Weight illusions may be due to a central scaling process which enables a wide range of weights to be estimated, different ranges being selected according to the expected value of the weight. If the selected range is inappropriate an illusion occurs. Changes in expected value could also allow for the operation of “weight-constancy” during changes in proprioceptive stimulation.     

Stability and Change in the Career Plans of Ninth Grade Girls

Changes in career plans occurring between the ninth grade and one year after high school were examined in a sample of 7,061 girls from the Project talent Data Bank. Longitudinal changes for five career groups (Natural Sciences, Professions, Teaching, Office Work, and Housewife) were examined as a function of selected aptitude and interest measures. Girls who change differ from girls who maintain the same plans over time in each career group on most of the measures employed. There is a tendency for the brighter girls to change from initial careers in Office Work and Housewife more frequently than the less able girls, whereas those who shift out of the career-oriented groups, Sciences, Professions, and Teaching, are scholastically less capable than those who maintain these same plans over time.     

Is the weber fraction a function of physical or perceived input?

It is well known that a given physical input (e.g. intensity of light or sound, length or weight of an object) does not always give rise to the same sensation. For example, arrow heads affect the perceived length of lines (Muller-Lyer illusion) and size affects the apparent weight of an object (size-weight illusion). It is generally assumed that the differential threshold is a simple function of the physical intensity of the stimulus. We may however ask whether the differential threshold is affected by illusions.

To try to answer this question we estimate differential thresholds under a pair of conditions in which the relevant input is the same but appears different. Using the size-weight illusion, we have found that the differential threshold for weight is greater for a set of small weights than for a set of larger and apparently lighter weights.     

Factors Associated with the Participation of Women Doctorates in the Labor Force

Participation in the labor force by 1,547 women doctorates of 1957 and 1958 and the factors associated with their career development and commitment were examined. 91 per cent of the women doctorates of 1957 and 1958 are in the labor force at present, and of those, 81 per cent work full time. When a woman doctorate's family responsibilities are greatest, i.e., during the rearing of her pre-school children, she is not as likely to participate fully in the labor force. However, if the married woman doctorate has demonstrated an early career commitment, she persists likewise later on.