When stereotypes disadvantage boys: Strength of stereotypes in mathematics and language arts and their relations with grades

There is growing concern about boys' lagging performance in school, not only in language arts, where the gap is particularly pronounced, but also in mathematics. Stereotypes associating one gender with language arts or with mathematics are likely to contribute to these gaps. Such stereotypes can translate into explicit beliefs such as the extent to which students are aware of societal stereotypes or the extent to which they personally believe stereotypes to be true, but also indirectly into performance following a stereotype threat manipulation. However, few studies have considered these multiple stereotype expressions in both mathematics and language arts to examine their importance in predicting boys' and girls' actual grades in school. To fill this gap, two complementary studies examined high school boys' and girls' awareness and endorsement of stereotypes about both language arts (n = 299) and mathematics (n = 243), as well as whether stereotype threat impaired boys' performance on a spelling test. Although the effect of stereotype threat was not significant overall, our results showed that students were aware of and endorsed strong stereotypes advantaging girls in language arts. In mathematics, students endorsed counter-traditional stereotypes slightly advantaging girls. Our results also showed that these multiple expressions of stereotypes related to students' grades. In doing so, our work provides insights regarding possible targets for interventions to reduce gender gaps disadvantaging boys in school.     

What some effects might not be: The time to verify membership in 'well-defined' categories

Armstrong, Gleitman, and Gleitman (1983) reported shorter categorization times for members of well-defined categories judged more typical. They concluded that these effects could not originate in a graded, similarity-based category representation and consequently that the typicality effects obtained with natural categories might not be indicative of such a structure either. In this article, we re-examine this conclusion, focusing first on the performance obtained with well-defined categories of different sizes. Only the larger categories used showed variations in typicality ratings and produced typicality effects on categorization times. However,multiple regression analyses showed the effects on categorization times to be better explained by a measure of associative strength, called category dominance. The range of various predictor variables was equated in a follow-up experiment involving large, natural, and well-defined categories. Results obtained with well-defined categories showed pronounced dominance effects when typicality was controlled, but no reliable typicality effect when category dominance and instance familiarity were controlled. Results were opposite for natural categories. By showing that well-defined categories fail to produce unbiased typicality effects, our results bring added support to the hypothesis that the effects obtained with natural categories originate in a graded, similarity-based category structure.     

Explicit syllable and phoneme segmentation in the young child

To write a language, one must first abstract the unit to be used from the acoustic stream of speech. Writing systems based on the meaningless units, syllables and phonemes, were late developments in the history of written language. The alphabetic system, which requires abstraction of the phonemic unit of speech, was the last to appear, evolved from a syllabary and, unlike the other systems, was apparently invented only once. It might therefore be supposed that phoneme segmentation is particularly difficult and more difficult, indeed, than syllable segmentation. Speech research suggests reasons why this may be so. The present study provides direct evidence of a similar developmental ordering of syllable and phoneme segmentation abilities in the young child. By means of a task which required preschool, kindergarten, and first-grade children to tap out the number of segments in spoken utterances, it was found that, though ability in both syllable and phoneme segmentation increased with grade level, analysis into phonemes was significantly harder and perfected later than analysis into syllables. The relative difficulties of the different units of segmentation are discussed in relation to reading acquisition.     

��Is Getting Well Ever An Art?��: Psychopharmacology and Madness in Robert Lowell��s Day by Day

On the publication of Robert Lowell's Life Studies in 1959, some critics were shocked by the poet's use of seemingly frank autobiographical material, in particular the portrayal of his hospitalizations for bipolar disorder. During the late fifties and throughout the sixties, a rich vein, influenced by Lowell, developed in American poetry. Also during this time, the nascent science of psychopharmacology competed with and complemented the more established somatic treatments, such as psychosurgery, shock treatments, and psychoanalytical therapies. The development of Thorazine was a remarkable breakthrough allowing patients previously thought incurable to leave hospital. In 1955, the release of Miltown, the first 'minor' tranquilizer, was heralded with a media fanfare promising a new dawn of psychological cure-all. These two events blurred the boundary between 'normality' and madness by making treatment in the community more widely possible and by medicalizing more commonplace distress. Lowell's early depictions of madness situate it as emblematic of the cultural malaise of 'the tranquilized fifties.' By his final collection, Day by Day (1977), mental illness had lost its symbolic power. These late poems explore the power of art as a way of representing and remedying suffering in a culture where psychopharmacology has normalized madness.     

Strategy selection and aging: impact of item concreteness in paired-associate task

The aim of this study was to examine the effect of aging on strategy selection in a paired-associate word task. Twenty-eight younger adults (mean age = 20.68 years) and 28 older adults (mean age = 68.46 years) studied 39 pairs of concrete, middle and abstract words. The concreteness level was manipulated in order to modify the benefit of imagery and sentence strategies in relation to task characteristics. The results showed an age difference in strategy selection in relation to concreteness level. Older adults showed less adaptive strategy selection for the imagery strategy but not for the sentence strategy. Change in strategy selection did not seem to be explained by better efficiency of sentence than imagery, so this study suggests a partial reduction of strategy adaptivity during aging.     

Transmettre la relation de service par l’interaction tutorale: le cas des facteurs

Based on data gathered from naturalistic observation, the article analyses the communicative activity implemented by postmen involved in tutoring users and their apprentices. The occupational situation observed is that of mail distribution, and the critical moments selected are those which bring customer relations into play. We examine the role of the other in the way three tutors pass on their customer relations skills. We show that their means of interaction and understanding situations differ widely.     

Preschoolers use phrasal prosody online to constrain syntactic analysis

Two experiments were conducted to investigate whether young children are able to take into account phrasal prosody when computing the syntactic structure of a sentence. Pairs of French noun/verb homophones were selected to create locally ambiguous sentences ([la petite ferme ] [est très jolie] ‘the small farm is very nice’ vs. [la petite] [ ferme la fenêtre] ‘the little girl closes the window’ – brackets indicate prosodic boundaries). Although these sentences start with the same three words, ferme is a noun (farm) in the former but a verb (to close) in the latter case. The only difference between these sentence beginnings is the prosodic structure, that reflects the syntactic structure (with a prosodic boundary just before the critical word when it is a verb, and just after it when it is a noun). Crucially, all words following the homophone were masked, such that prosodic cues were the only disambiguating information. Children successfully exploited prosodic information to assign the appropriate syntactic category to the target word, in both an oral completion task (4.5‐year‐olds, Experiment 1) and in a preferential looking paradigm with an eye‐tracker (3.5‐year‐olds and 4.5‐year‐olds, Experiment 2). These results show that both groups of children exploit the position of a word within the prosodic structure when computing its syntactic category. In other words, even younger children of 3.5 years old exploit phrasal prosody online to constrain their syntactic analysis. This ability to exploit phrasal prosody to compute syntactic structure may help children parse sentences containing unknown words, and facilitate the acquisition of word meanings.