Sensorimotor influences on speech perception in pre-babbling infants: Replication and extension of Bruderer et al. (2015)

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - The relationship between speech perception and production is central to understanding language processing, yet remains under debate, particularly in early...     

THE VIEW FROM DOWN HERE

In this article, graduate students and one faculty member respond to the innovative methods presented in this issue. We identify three theoretical and methodological tensions that shape our interest in and willingness to work with these methods. The first questions whether the strengths of doing qualitative research outweigh the limitations. The second involves feminist research ideals and how attainable they are. The third explores epistemological tensions between qualitative and quantitative research. Although intrigued by the data these methods generated and by their underlying epistemology, we question the status of certain qualitative research in psychology. We contend that the criteria by which qualitative research is evaluated must be made more explicitly before quantitatively trained researchers will incorporate these methods into their own work.     

The Role of Expectations of Future Performance

The present study examined the relationships among gender, causal attributions for success, and the distribution of organizational rewards. In this study, which attempted to control for methodological deficiencies of previous research, male and female undergraduates reviewed the performance of four stimulus managers: three men and one woman. Participants were asked to make causal attributions for the stimulus manager's success, and to rate how effectively they believed the manager would perform in the future. They were then asked to nominate a manager for an organizational reward. Bias against the female manager was exhibited by females only. Results indicated that lower expectations of future performance for the female manager significantly predicted the bias against her in reward allocation.     

Complex Concepts

For some time cognitive anthropology, and indeed cognitive science generally, have been concerned with issues of conceptual representation. Inadequacies in classical and more recent approaches, in particular, prototype theories, have motivated a search for alternative accounts. We propose an approach to conceptual representation that requires the specification of domain theories, from which conceptual definitions are generated, and within which the relations among concepts can be formalized. We demonstrate the utility of a formal characterization of this view of domains and concepts in the analysis of an aspect of the basic metaphysics constructed by the people of West Futuna, Vanuatu. In the process, we expand the set of formal devices traditionally relied upon by anthropologists and others involved in cognitive studies, and thereby gain insight into the complexity of the metaphysical beliefs of an Oceanic people.     

Book reviews

Cleeremans, A. (1993). Mechanisms of implicit learning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pp. 227. ISBN 0-262-03205-8. £26.95.

Manktelow, K.l., & Over, D.E. (Eds.) (1993). Rationality: psychological and philosophical perspectives. London: Routledge. Pp. 322. ISBN 0-415-06955-6. £40.00.

Parkin, A. (1993). Memory. Oxford: Blackwell, Pp. 272. ISBN 0-631-15711-5. £40 (Hbk); ISBN 0-631-15712-3. £12.99 (Pbk).

Hellige, J.B. (1993). Hemispheric asymmetry: What's right and what's left. (Perspectives in cognitive neuroscience series.) Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pp. 396. ISBN 0-674-38730-9. £27.95 (Hbk).     

A program for studies of altered sleep-wake schedules and performance

Studies of the effects of variations in sleep-wake schedules on human performance tend to run for several days and involve extensive repeated testing in order to take into account time-of-day and cumulative cross-day effects (Broughton & Ogilvie, 1992; Monk, 1991; Webb, 1982). Such research typically addresses issues pertaining to sustained operations and shift work and is often more appropriately conducted in the field. The present paper describes a computer-automated system designed to administer sleep-wake schedules and performance tests, and to store results of such testing in file formats that are easy to access with commercially available statistical packages.     

PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS

This article reviews policy issues involved in maternity leave or parental leave. Findings from the Wisconsin Maternity Leave and Health Project, a longitudinal interview study of 570 women and 550 of their husbands/partners, are discussed, focusing especially on the issues of maternity leave and women's mental health, and fathers' patterns of taking parental leave. I stress the importance of empirical research if feminist psychologists are to have an impact on public policy.     

Spanish-speaking caregivers’ use of referential labels with toddlers is a better predictor of later vocabulary than their use of referential gestures

Variation in how frequently caregivers engage with their children is associated with variation in children's later language outcomes. One explanation for this link is that caregivers use both verbal behaviors, such as labels, and non-verbal behaviors, such as gestures, to help children establish reference to objects or events in the world. However, few studies have directly explored whether language outcomes are more strongly associated with referential behaviors that are expressed verbally, such as labels, or non-verbally, such as gestures, or whether both are equally predictive. Here, we observed caregivers from 42 Spanish-speaking families in the US engage with their 18-month-old children during 5-min lab-based, play sessions. Children's language processing speed and vocabulary size were assessed when children were 25 months. Bayesian model comparisons assessed the extent to which the frequencies of caregivers’ referential labels, referential gestures, or labels and gestures together, were more strongly associated with children's language outcomes than a model with caregiver total words, or overall talkativeness. The best-fitting models showed that children who heard more referential labels at 18 months were faster in language processing and had larger vocabularies at 25 months. Models including gestures, or labels and gestures together, showed weaker fits to the data. Caregivers’ total words predicted children's language processing speed, but predicted vocabulary size less well. These results suggest that the frequency with which caregivers of 18-month-old children use referential labels, more so than referential gestures, is a critical feature of caregiver verbal engagement that contributes to language processing development and vocabulary growth.

Research Highlights

• We examined the frequency of referential communicative behaviors, via labels and/or gestures, produced by caregivers during a 5-min play interaction with their 18-month-old children.
• We assessed predictive relations between labels, gestures, their combination, as well as total words spoken, and children's processing speed and vocabulary growth at 25 months.
• Bayesian model comparisons showed that caregivers’ referential labels at 18 months best predicted both 25-month vocabulary measures, although total words also predicted later processing speed.
• Frequent use of referential labels by caregivers, more so than referential gestures, is a critical feature of communicative behavior that supports children's later vocabulary learning.