The Sound of Mute Vowels in Auditory Word-Stem Completion

Some studies have argued that orthography can influence speakers when they perform oral language tasks. Words containing a mute vowel provide well-suited stimuli to investigate this phenomenon because mute vowels, such as the second <e> in <vegetable>, are present orthographically but absent phonetically. Using an auditory word-stem completion task, we tested whether subjects were influenced by the presence of mute vowels. We ran experiments in two languages which contain numerous mute-vowel words: Tigrinya, which uses a syllabic/moraic writing system, and French, which uses an alphabetic writing system. We argue that Tigrinya and French speakers based their completion on the sound form of words, rather than the written one. We suggest that the presence of mute vowels at the underlying phonological level, rather than their orthographic representation, influences speakers in the word-stem completion task. Some effects previously attributed to orthography may instead be attributable to underlying phonological representations.     

Developmental Links Between Trajectories of Physical Violence,Vandalism, Theft,and Alcohol-Drug Use from Childhood to Adolescence

Differences in developmental trajectories of physical violence, vandalism, theft, and alcohol-drug use from ages 10 to 15 were studied. For females and for males, three trajectories of theft and of alcohol-drug use increased from 10 years to 15 years, while only the high trajectory of vandalism increased from ten to 14. All trajectories of physical violence decreased. Children who engaged in the high trajectories of vandalism, theft, and alcohol-drug use had a high probability of also being high in physical violence. Compared to males, females were less likely to be on the high trajectory of physical violence, and their trajectories of other antisocial behaviors were less strongly associated with high levels of physical violence. The results suggest that physical violence during pre-adolescence and adolescence has a different developmental pattern than other forms of antisocial behavior, and that its relation to these other forms of antisocial behavior differs by sex.     

Genetic and environmental etiology of emotional and social behaviors in 5-month-old infant twins: influence of the social context

The study investigated the genetic and environmental contributions to individual differences in measures of socioemotional reactivity and emotion regulation with a sample of 115 monozygotic (MZ) and 156 dizygotic (DZ) 5-month-old twin pairs. Twins' zygosity was determined by a combination of DNA typing and physical similarity. Twins' behaviors (motor activity level, social gaze, gaze aversion, positive expression, negative expression, and self-comfort) were videotaped in a laboratory while infants were presented televised sequences of neutral and happy emotional expressions posed by their mother (familiar condition) and a female stranger (unfamiliar condition). Regardless of the social context, the findings based on model-fitting analyses indicated that nonshared environmental influences explained most of the variance of behavioral data. However, there was evidence that motor activity level (an index of emotional arousal) and the latency and frequency of gaze aversion (an index of emotional regulation) were best represented by a model incorporating both additive genetic and nonshared environmental (i.e., AE) influences when infants were exposed to the unfamiliar adult (heritability estimates ranging from 19% to 31%). The results suggest the importance of nonshared environmental influences during early infancy and stress the role of social context for revealing moderate genetic contributions to individual differences in emotional arousal and emotion regulation.     

Expectancies for social contingency in 2-month-olds

In a classic report, Murray and Trevarthen (Emotional regulation of interaction between two-month-olds and their mothers. In T. Field & N. Fox (Eds), Social perception in infants (pp. 101–125). Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1985) suggested that 6- to 12-week-olds were sensitive to contingency in maternal stimulation because they became upset during the replay of their mothers’ behavior during an initial period of live interaction over closed circuit TV. However, a number of concerns were raised about the procedure and it was argued that infants may simply have become increasingly fussy over time. To clarify this very important issue, we adopted a three-condition design (live–replay–live) and modified Murray and Trevarthen’s procedure by inserting a seamless shift from the initially live interaction period to a replay period of good maternal behavior. This was followed by a seamless shift back to a subsequent live interaction. Two-month-old smiling and gaze decreased while frowning and mouth closures increased during the replay period relative to the initial live interaction period, replicating Murray and Trevarthen’s results. Fussiness over time did not account for these results because seven of the ten babies increased their positive behaviors and decreased negative behaviors during the second live interaction period, and there was a significant increase in their visual attention to their mothers, thus suggesting a renewed interest in the previously noncontingent partner.     

Attentional Selectivity in Short-term Memory: Similarity of Process,Not Similarity of Content,Determines Disruption

Background sound substantially disrupts serial recall, even under conditions where participants are explicitly told to ignore it. Study of such a phenomenon may serve to illuminate the manner in which information from various sources interacts in memory, as well as the extent to which unattended information is processed. A review of the literature is presented that points to a number of conclusions. First, that interference occurs in memory, not on the basis of similarity of content between relevant and irrelevant material, but rather on the basis of similarity of process. Specifically, in a serial recall task, the key memory process is that of order retention, and therefore, order information in the sequence of auditory events interferes with the process of ordering within the rehearsal set. Second, that organisation and interference within memory are intimately connected with perceptual processes.     

Why Do People Fail to Adopt Environmental Protective Behaviors? Toward a Taxonomy of Environmental Amotivation1

Individuals' reasons for their lack of motivation toward environmental protective behaviors were proposed: amotivation because of strategy, capacity, effort, and helplessness beliefs. Confirmatory factor analyses and correlations between the four types of amotivation and constructs related to the environment supported the validity of the constructs. A structural model in which helplessness beliefs could be predicted by the other sets of beliefs, and wherein strategy and ability beliefs resulted from effort beliefs, was tested. All estimated parameters were significant, with the exception of one link: amotivation because of effort beliefs did not display a significant relationship with helplessness beliefs. The importance of understanding why individuals may be amotivated and the strategies liable to help reduce their lack of motivation are discussed.     

Phonetic recoding and reading difficulty in beginning readers

The results of a recent study (Liberman, Shankweiler, Liberman, Fowler, & Fischer, 1977) suggest that good beginning readers are more affected than poor readers by the phonetic characteristics of visually presented items in a recall task. The good readers made significantly more recall errors on strings of letters with rhyming letter names than on nonrhyming sequences; in contrast, the poor readers made roughly equal numbers of errors on the rhyming and nonrhyming letter strings. The purpose of the present study was to determine whether the interaction between reading ability and phonetic similarity is solely determined by different rehearsal strategies of the two groups. Accordingly, good and poor readers were tested on rhyming and nonrhyming words using a recognition memory paradigm that minimized the opportunity for rehearsal. Performance of the good readers was more affected by phonetic similarity than that of the poor readers, in agreement with the earlier study. The present findings support the hypothesis that good and poor readers do differ in their ability to access a phonetic representation.     

Consumption and community: choices for women over forty

• Women in their 40s face a range of issues regarding how they choose to present themselves to the world; often these choices involve forms of consumption. We talked to two groups of British women and discussed how they felt about themselves and the pressures upon them. We present a discussion which aims to synthesize some of the key features of how these women face their futures and suggest potential theoretical positions to help encapsulate women's present and future selves. We suggest that there are a number of pressures that may engender alternative consumption choices and these are often set within a wider sense of female community. The concept of community should prove useful for further theorising on women's future consumption choices.

Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Frequency-range discriminations and absolute pitch in black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus), mountain chickadees (Poecile gambeli), and zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata)

The acoustic frequency ranges in birdsongs provide important absolute pitch cues for the recognition of conspecifics. Black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus), mountain chickadees (Poecile gambeli), and zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) were trained to sort tones contiguous in frequency into 8 ranges on the basis of associations between response to the tones in each range and reward. All 3 species acquired accurate frequency-range discriminations, but zebra finches acquired the discrimination in fewer trials and to a higher standard than black-capped or mountain chickadees, which did not differ appreciably in the discrimination. Chickadees' relatively poorer accuracy was traced to poorer discrimination of tones in the higher frequency ranges. During transfer tests, the discrimination generalized to novel tones when the training tones were included, but not when they were omitted.