Maternal Psychological Absence and Toddlers' Social‐Emotional Development: Interpretations From the Perspective of Boundary Ambiguity Theory

The current study tests a novel latent construct reflecting psychological absence and examines its relations with maternal depression, mother–toddler interactions, and toddlers' social‐emotional outcomes in a low‐income sample (N = 2,632). Structural equation modeling confirmed a psychological absence construct and revealed that psychological absence, measured at the child's 36‐month birthday‐related assessment, is a significant predictor of children's social‐emotional development at 36 months, mediated by mother–child interaction. Results are interpreted within a boundary ambiguity framework.     

Problems with the Seeing = Knowing Rule

The view that children understand the mind via a coherent theory is supported by evidence that children rigidly follow a Seeing = Knowing Rule: seeing, and only seeing, leads to knowing. This paper presents two kinds of evidence that children do not follow this rule. First, we critically review previous findings that children neglect the role of inference and argue that these studies do not in fact support the view that children follow a Seeing = Knowing Rule. We then present two studies in which children who correctly attributed ignorance and false belief to an observer in a false belief task also attributed ignorance (Study 1) and false belief (Study 2) in true belief tasks. These findings demonstrate that children sometimes attribute ignorance and false belief to an observer who is granted visual access, an outcome that should not occur if children rigidly follow the Seeing = Knowing Rule. We end by discussing some problems associated with modifying the Seeing = Knowing Rule to account for children's failure on the true belief task.     

Grammatical class effects in relation to normal and aphasic sentence processing

Agrammatic, Broca's aphasic patients, Wernicke's aphasic patients, and neurologically intact control subjects were asked to detect target letters in prose passages and in a scrambled word passage. The targets were embedded, in some instances, in content words (open-class vocabulary items), and in other instances, in function words (closed-class vocabulary items). With respect to the prose passages, both the control subjects and Wernicke's aphasic patients were more apt to notice target letters when they appeared in the open-class items than when in closed-class items; by contrast, the agrammatic Broca's patients showed no vocabulary class detection difference. The Wernicke's patients were not entirely normal, however: Whereas the normal subjects showed a much smaller vocabulary class effect for letter detection in the scrambled condition, the Wernicke's maintained the pattern they had shown in the prose condition. These and other findings obtained on the letter cancellation task are discussed in relation to lexical access mechanisms geared to sentence parsing.     

Home-based intervention for infants with developmental disorders

A hom-based therapeutic program for infants with developmental disorders is described. The program is used at the Institute for Psychophysiological and Speech Disorders, Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Significant changes in infant developmental competence provide support for the use of parents as direct intervention agents for their infants. Positive changes in marital and family relationships are important side effects of parent involvement in the therapeutic habilitation of their children.     

Spontaneous head positions in infants during the first 9 postnatal months

The developmental organization of spontaneous head positioning over the first 9 postnatal months of life was investigated in a study of 35 infants. Head positions assumed by infants while at rest were recorded at 11 observation period: at 1 week, 2 weeks, 4 weeks of age, and every 4 weeks thereafter until the infant was 36 weeks old. Results indicated an overall tendency toward a head-right position, which was strongest during the neonatal period, but declined with age. The head-right position bias was qualified by familial handedness.     

Comprehension of humorous and nonhumorous materials by left and right brain-damaged patients

Right hemisphere-damaged (RHD) and left hemisphere-damaged (LHD) aphasic patients were tested on a nonverbal cartoon completion task that included a humorous (Joke) and a nonhumorous (Story) condition. In both conditions, RHD patients performed worse than LHD patients. More importantly, the qualitative difference between the errors produced by the two groups suggests that right and left hemisphere brain damage impairs different components of narrative ability. RHD patients showed a preserved sensitivity to the surprise element of humor, and a diminished ability to establish coherence. Conversely, LHD patients, when they erred, showed an impaired sensitivity to the surprise element of humor, and a preserved ability to establish coherence by integrating content across parts of a narrative. These results suggest that the observed humor comprehension deficits of RHD patients result specifically from right hemisphere disease and not from brain damage irrespective of locus. The performances of the RHD and LHD patients groups together support a separation of narrative ability from the traditional aspects of language ability typically disrupted in aphasia.     

Inference deficits in right brain-damaged patients

The inferential reasoning ability of right hemisphere-damaged (RHD) patients was tested by presenting pairs of sentences which were to be treated as single, integrated units. The two sentences treated together made one interpretation likely (a correct inference); one of the sentences in isolation encouraged a different interpretation (an incorrect inference). The position of the misleading sentence was systematically varied. Results showed that, in contrast to normal controls, RHD patients have more trouble answering inference questions, especially those concerning incorrect inferences, than answering questions about the factual content of the passages. Also, RHD patients made significantly more errors when the misleading information was contained in the first rather than in the second sentence; this finding indicates that these patients have difficulty revising previously acquired knowledge in light of new information. These results suggest the impairment of several components of normal discourse processing subsequent to right hemisphere brain damage.