Unilateral brain lesions in childhood: performance on the Revised Token Test

Comprehension of connected language as assessed by the Revised Token Test (RTT) was studied in 17 children with left hemisphere lesions (LL) and 11 with right hemisphere lesions (RL). LL children's significantly lower performance on several subtests than left controls (LC) matched by age, sex, race, and social class appeared to be related to the memory demands of these subtests rather than the limited syntactic elements assessed by the RTT. LL subjects requested significantly more command repetitions than control or RL subjects and when a repetition was not requested LL subjects often responded with immediacy. Although RL children tended to perform lower than right matched controls (RC), these differences were not significant nor readily related to either the memory or specific linguistic structures assessed. RL subjects required fewer command repetitions than LL subjects and exhibited a significantly greater frequency of immediate responses than controls or LL subjects. While based on few children, a trend for LL children with retrorolandic lesions to perform more poorly than those with left prerolandic lesions was suggested. No systematic difference in performance was apparent for children with left cortical vs. left subcortical lesions or among discrete sites of lesions within the right hemisphere. Children with left lesions prior to 1 year of age performed no better and, in several instances, significantly poorer than LL patients sustaining lesions after 1 year of age. Among RL subjects, those sustaining lesions after 1 year of age had greater difficulty than those with lesion onset before 1 year of age, especially on linguistic elements which seemed to be dependent upon visual spatial properties. Further studies are needed to evaluate the comprehension of more complex linguistic structures among children with unilateral brain lesions as well as to study the role of more basic factors such as memory and attention in explaining the present findings.     

What does infant perception tell us about theories of perception?

The article begins with a summary of eight well-substantiated conclusions drawn from research on perception in infants that have implications for theories of perception. The following section examines several traditional and modern theories of perception in the light of these conclusions. Finally, some "big issues" that have divided perceptual and cognitive theories are discussed, with the suggestion that research on infants can help reconcile the divided camps. Research on perception in young infants not only flourishes but also presents a challenge to all theories of perception.     

Cognitive impairment in preschoolers: Identification using the personality inventory for children-revised

This study evaluated the clinical validity of the Intellectual Screening, Development, and Achievement scales of the Personality Inventory for Children-Revised (PIC-R), as well as the newly derived PIC-R Factor IV scale, in identifying cognitive impairment in a clinic-referred sample of preschoolers. The clinical validity of these PIC-R subscales was also compared to that of the Minnesota Child Development Inventory (MCDI). The results showed that the PIC-R scales and Factor IV were reasonably successful in identifying cognitively impaired preschoolers, but much less successful in identifying cognitively normal preschoolers. Overall, the MCDI was the most successful in correctly identifying the preschoolers' cognitive status.     

The word frequency effect in lexical decision: Finding a frequency-based component

Subjects making lexical decisions are reliably faster in responding to high-frequency words than to low-frequency words. This is known as the word frequency effect. We wished to demonstrate that some portion of this effect was due to frequency differences between words rather than to other dimensions correlated with word frequency. Three groups of subjects (10 engineers, 10 nurses, and I0 law students) made lexical decisions about 720 items, half words and half nonwords, from six different categories (engineering, medical, low-frequency nontechnical, medium-frequency nontechnical, and two groups of high-frequency nontechnical). Results of two analyses of variance revealed a crossover interaction such that engineers were faster in responding to engineering words than to medical words, whereas nurses were faster in responding to medical words than to engineering words. The engineering and medical words were equally long and equally infrequent by standard word counts. We take this as support for a frequency-based component in the word frequency effect. The practical implications of this research for estimating the readability of technical text are discussed.     

Discovery as correction

In recent years, there have been some attempts to defend the legitimacy of a non-inductive generative logic of discovery whose strategy is to analyze a variety of constraints on the actual generation of explanatory hypotheses. These proposed new theories, however, are only weakly generative (relying on sophisticated processes of elimination) rather than strongly generative (embodying processes of correction).This paper develops a strongly generative theory which holds that we can come to know something new only as a variant of what we already know — and that the novelty of this variant is not thereby eliminated nor beyond our powers of characterization, a double requirement that is vital for resolving the Meno paradox. In this light, the discovery of a new hypothesis is taken as the correction of an antecedent hypothesis in response to the discrepancies between the predictions generated by that antecedent hypothesis and the desired result (e.g. the actual data to be explained). This process comprises two parallel operations: the first, which demonstrates the positive role of the facts in generating new explanations, involves a mapping between multiple hypotheses and sets of predictions generated from those hypotheses, for the purpose of taking the actual data as a determinable variant of neighboring sets of predictions. This mapping permits the facts to indicate how corrective adjustments in the working hypothesis should be made; the second operation, which demonstrates the positive role of explanations in generating new facts, involves a mapping between differently construed versions of the actual data and the conceptualizations derived from those perceptual versions, for the purpose of taking the working hypothesis as a determinable variant of these neighboring conceptualizations. This mapping permits a given hypothesis to generate predictions increasingly closer to the actual facts.The proposed theory provides the basis for a reformed conception of justification. Because hypotheses are meaningful only as variants of neighboring hypotheses, and because such variation is corrective, their justification in the reformed sense will incorporate not only their justification in the traditional sense, but their generation as well.     

Separating the redundancy of voicing from nasality in American English

This paper reports the results of a study designed to separate the voicing redundancy from nasality in American English and to determine their individual saliencies. Sixty-seven subjects judged the similarity of nonnasal pairs versus nasal pairs of CV and VC nonsense syllables on a 5-point magnitude-estimation task. The 80 stimuli were constructed to control and to demand subjects' cognitive strategies for coping with redundancy rather than experimental manipulation of the data. They were developed from the consonantal repertoire of / b d g m n p t k / paired with the vowels / i a u /, totaling 72 pairs of dyads. Eight additional stimuli of similar structure, testing multifeature and identity contrasts, were included to monitor the validity of the experimental procedure. Results indicated that (a) speech redundancy can be circumvented cognitively, (b) nasality was more salient (different) than voicing, and (c) a recency effect was found. These findings are discussed in reference to existing data.     

Phonological coding in word reading: Evidence from hearing and deaf readers

The ability of prelingually, profoundly deaf readers to access phonological information during reading was investigated in three experiments. The experiments employed a task, developed by Meyer, Schvaneveldt, and Ruddy (1974), in which lexical decision response times (RTs) to orthographically similar rhyming (e.g., WAVE-SAVE) and nortrhyming (e.g., HAVE-CAVE) word pairs were compared with RTs to orthographically and phonologically dissimilar control word pairs. The subjects of the study were deaf college students and hearing college students. In Experiments 1 and 2, in which the nonwords were pronounceable, the deaf subjects, like the hearing subjects, were facilitated in their RTs to rhyming pairs, but not to nonrhyming pairs. In Experiment 3, in which the nonwords were unpronounceable, both deaf and hearing subjects were facilitated in their RTs to both rhyming and nonrhyming pairs, with the facilitation being significantly greater for the rhyming pairs. These results indicate that access to phonological information is possible despite prelingual and profound hearing impairment. As such, they run counter to claims that deaf individuals are limited to the use of visual strategies in reading. Given the impoverished auditory, experience of such readers, these results suggest that the use of phonological information need not be tied to the auditory modality.     

Risk factors and the Child Behavior Checklist in a child mental health center setting

The relationship between risk factors and the severity and type of childhood disorder, as measured by parent-completed Child Behavior Checklists, was examined for 768 children, ages 4–16, seen at a child mental health center. Regression analyses revealed no significant relationships between any combination of risk factors and the total number of behavior problems, internalizing, or externalizing scores for the entire group, males and females separately, or for the age and sex groupings of 6- to 11- and 12-to 16-yearolds. Chi-square tests revealed no relationship of profile type with any risk factor or with total number of risk factors. Implications for broad-based child assessment and risk factor research within a clinical population are discussed.We wish to thank Orin Bolstad, Linda Magnuson, and Julian Taplin for their assistance in this project.     

The interactional teaching patterns of mothers and fathers with their popular,moderately popular,or unpopular children

The interactional teaching strategies of mothers and fathers toward their sociometrically determined popular, moderately popular, or unpopular children, and children's responses to them were examined during a structured puzzle task in a laboratory setting. Parents of popular children used more explanations in aiding their children to complete the puzzle task than parents of moderately popular or unpopular children. Mothers were more likely to offer suggestions, use explanations, and ask questions during the puzzle task than fathers. Analysis of children's responses revealed that popular children were more likely to ignore imperatives by their parents compared with unpopular children, while unpopular children showed a tendency to be more cooperative following imperatives by parents than popular children. Finally, popular children were less likely to ignore but were more likely to go off task following suggestions by parents than either unpopular or moderately popular children. The data are discussed with respect to the possible link between parental socialization patterns and children's popularity in the peer group and the need to consider the interaction patterns in both the peer and parent-child systems for intervention purposes.Portions of this paper were presented by the first author at the Banff International Conference on Behavioral Science, Banff, Alberta, Canada, 1984. The research was supported through the Western Regional Project W144, Development of Social Competencies in Children, with funding from Science and Education Administration/Cooperative Research of the USDA and Utah State University Agricultural Experiment Station. We would like to thank the parents and children for their participation, and Nina Mounts, Maria Norton, Carla Seamons, Soheila Sobhani, and Joan Wareham for their assistance with varying aspects of coding and data analysis.     

Sexual experience and preference for males or females in the female rat

The influence of sexual experience on preference behavior was investigated in adult female rats. In the first experiment, preference behavior for sexually active males versus estrous females was investigated in female rats who were experienced with mounting behavior. Preference of these mount experienced females was compared to preference of females who were naive in this respect. Mount experience with estrous females induced a female-directed preference in ovariectomized female rats, irrespective of whether the females were treated with OIL or with testosterone-propionate (500 micrograms TP, injected once 48 h prior to testing). Sexually naive, OIL-treated females did not show a preference for males or females, but TP induced a preference for a male. Individual differences in mount frequency were not correlated with preference behavior. In the second experiment, the influence of experience with feminine sexual responses on preference behavior was investigated. OIL-treated and TP-treated females oriented equally toward males and females when they had been given the opportunity to copulate with males prior to the preference tests. The results strongly suggest that prior sexual experience is an important determinant of preference behavior. The female's behavior during sexual interactions was, however, not predictive of later preference.