Perceptions of Chicano/Latino Students Who Have Dropped Out of School

Chicano/Latino drop out was investigated in a qualitative study, conducting focus group interviews with Chicano/Latinos who had dropped out of high school. Participant responses revealed themes of alienation and discrimination in the school setting. The roles of school counselors as multicultural advocates and community-family-school liaisons are discussed.     

Online processing of native and non-native phonemic contrasts in early bilinguals.

There is considerable debate about whether bilinguals can distinguish L2 phonemic contrasts as efficiently as first language speakers can. To test this issue, a group of highly proficient Spanish-dominant Catalan-Spanish bilinguals (who had been exposed to Catalan between the ages of 3 and 4, but who, previous to this age, had been exposed only to Spanish) and another group of Catalan-dominant bilinguals (who had been exposed to Catalan from birth) were compared in a gating task. We developed a variation of the gating procedure that included a two-alternative forced choice test after each fragment was played. The differences between the two alternatives consisted of phonemic contrasts existing in Catalan but not in Spanish. Four contrasts were tested: two vocalic contrasts [symbols: see text] and two consonantal contrasts [symbols: see text]. The results showed that Spanish-dominant bilinguals, even the subset who were able to make correct identifications at the last gate, systematically performed worse than the group of Catalan-dominant bilinguals, needing longer portions of the signal to be able to correctly identify the stimuli. We argue that these results support the hypothesis that L1 shapes the perceptual system at early stages of development in such a way that it will determine the perception of non-native phonemic contrasts, even if there is extensive and early exposure to L2.     

Goal attribution without agency cues: the perception of 'pure reason' in infancy.

The proper domain of naive psychological reasoning is human action and human mental states but such reasoning is frequently applied to non-human phenomena as well. The studies reported in this paper test the validity of the currently widespread belief that this tendency is rooted in the fact that naive psychological reasoning is initially restricted to, and triggered by, the perception of self-initiated movement of agents. We report three habituation experiments which examine the necessary conditions under which infants invoke a psychological principle, namely the principle of rational action, to interpret behaviour as goal directed action. Experiment 1 revealed that the principle of rational action already operates at 9 (but not yet at 6) months of age. Experiment 2 demonstrated that perceptual cues indicating agency, such as self-propulsion, are not necessary prerequisites for interpreting behaviour in terms of the principle of rational action. Experiment 3 confirmed that this effect cannot be attributed to generalisation of agentive properties from one object to another. These results suggest that the domain of naive psychology is initially defined only by the applicability of its core principles and its ontology is not restricted to (featurally identified) object kinds such as persons, animates, or agents. We argue that in its initial state naive psychological reasoning is not a cue-based but a principle-based theory.     

Masked orthographic priming in bilingual word recognition

Two lexical decision experiments tested the influence of briefly presented orthographically related primes on target word recognition in bilinguals. The prime stimuli were high-frequency words either from the same language as that of the target or from the other language known by the bilingual subjects. When the prime and target were from the same language, orthographically related primes systematically inhibited target word recognition, whereas orthographically dissimilar primes did not. When the prime and target were words from different languages, the amount of inhibition increased as a function of subjects’ level of proficiency in the prime word’s language, with highly proficient bilinguals showing practically equivalent amounts of within and across language inhibitory priming. These results strongly suggest that a printed string of letters can simultaneously activate lexical representations in both of the bilingual’s languages (insofar as these share the same alphabet), even when subjects are performing a monolingual task.     

Memory-conjunction errors: Miscombination of stored stimulus features can produce illusions of memory

We demonstrate that subjects will often claim to have previously seen a new stimulus if they have previously seen stimuli containing its component features. Memory for studied stimuli was measured using a "yes"/"no" recognition test. There were three types of test stimuli: target stimuli, which had been presented during study, conjunction stimuli, constructed by combining the features of separate study stimuli, and feature stimuli, in which studied stimulus features were combined with new, unstudied, features. For both nonsense words and faces, the subjects made many more false alarms for conjunction than for feature stimuli. Additional experiments demonstrated that the results were not due to physical similarity between study and test stimuli and that conjunction errors were much more common than feature errors in recall. The results demonstrate that features of stored stimuli maintain some independence in memory and can be incorrectly combined to produce recognition errors.     

CUE COMPETITION EFFECTS:

Abstract— The ability to predict future consequences on the basis of previous experience with the current yet of environmental cues is one of the most fundamental of all cognitive processes. Thix sttidv investigated how the validity of one cue influences the effectiveness of another cue for predicting a criterion. The results demonstrate a cue competition effect—increasing the validity of one cue decreased the effectiveness of another cue in a linear prediction task, even though the two cues were statistically independent.     

Mathematical statistics and metastatistical analysis

This paper deals with meta-statistical questions concerning frequentist statistics. In Sections 2 to 4 I analyse the dispute between Fisher and Neyman on the so called logic of statistical inference, a polemic that has been concomitant of the development of mathematical statistics. My conclusion is that, whenever mathematical statistics makes it possible to draw inferences, it only uses deductive reasoning. Therefore I reject Fisher's inductive approach to the statistical estimation theory and adhere to Neyman's deductive one. On the other hand, I assert that Neyman-Pearson's testing theory, as well as Fisher's tests of significance, properly belong to decision theory, not to logic, neither deductive nor inductive. I then also disagree with Costantini's view of Fisher's testing model as a theory of hypothetico-deductive inferences.In Section 5 I disapprove Hacking₁'s evidentialists criticisms of the Neyman-Pearson's theory of statistics (NPT), as well as Hacking₂'s interpretation of NPT as a theory of probable inference. In both cases Hacking misses the point. I conclude, by claiming that Mayo's conception of the Neyman-Pearson's testing theory, as a model of learning from experience, does not purport any advantages over Neyman's behavioristic model.     

The structure of social attitudes in three countries: Tests of a criterial referent theory(1)

A criterial referents theory of attitudes was tested cross-culturally by administering a social attitude referents (single words and short phrases) summated-rating scale, suitably “transformed”, to 500 graduate students of education in the United States, 470 mature students of psychology in Spain, and 270 students of the social sciences and a stratified random sample of 685 persons in the Netherlands. The theory claims a dualistic (two second-order factors) structure of social attitudes, thus challenging the common assumption of attitude bipolarity, which arises from the notion that differing attitude orientations oppose each other, e. g., conservatism versus liberalism. First-order factor analysis of the correlations among the items and second-order factor analysis of the correlations among the first-order obliquely rotated factors supported the theoretical predictions with certain exceptions. In general, the first-order factors of the referents scales contained only conservatism or only liberalism items; negative loading were mostly low in magnitude. Four similar conservative factors and four similar liberalism factors appeared in the three countries, with one, two, or three unique factors in each sample. The second-order factor analyses yielded two main orthogonal factors, one identifiable as conservatism, the other as liberalism; a third factor was complementary to one of the two main factors. Bipolarity was a relatively minor phenomenon. Thus the results indicated the empirical cross-cultural validity of the theory, but also the need for its further specification.     

An approach to the problem of meaning: Semantic networks

An approach to the problem of meaning through the postulation of semantic networks is presented. Subjects generated them for ten concrete and ten abstract nouns with two different procedures. Comparisons were made between the semantic network and the set of associations given to each concept. Finally, both the concrete concepts' and the abstract concepts' networks were compared. It was suggested that a form of meaning is given by the semantic network of the concept, by a reconstructive memory process.     

ÉTUDE INTERCULTURELLE DES PRÉFÉRENCES MUSICALES

The question of socio-cultural relativism or universalism in aesthetic judgment is dealt with in a cross-cultural study of musical preferences. Four groups of subjects were compared: Japanese expert musicians, French professional musicians, French students in music and French non-musician students. Their task was to state their preference for one of the elements in ten pairs of excerpts of traditional Japanese music, representing three levels of complexity (Koto, Trio, Gagaku). In addition, the subjects were asked to give a general appreciation of the three styles. The analysis of the preferences was performed in three ways: intra-group and inter-groups variabilities were computed as well as the variability due to the musical style. The results can be summarized as follows: as far as a group judgment is possible in one or another culture (intra-group agreement), the preferences of two culturally different groups do not contrast as long as the judgment concerns rather simple objects; the degree of inter-cultural agreement, far from increasing with musical competence, decreases. On the other hand, the judgments of more complex pieces show an agreement only in groups with musical skill and, in this case, the preference of Japanese and French musicians are contrasting. Finally, it is pointed out that a minimal attractiveness of the material presented is necessary to obtain from the subjects valid comparisons instead of artificial.