Word Detection in Sung and Spoken Sentences in Children With Typical Language Development or With Specific Language Impairment

Background: Previous studies have reported that children score better in language tasks using sung rather than spoken stimuli. We examined word detection ease in sung and spoken sentences that were equated for phoneme duration and pitch variations in children aged 7 to 12 years with typical language development (TLD) as well as in children with specific language impairment (SLI ), and hypothesized that the facilitation effect would vary with language abilities. Method: In Experiment 1, 69 children with TLD (7–10 years old) detected words in sentences that were spoken, sung on pitches extracted from speech, and sung on original scores. In Experiment 2, we added a natural speech rate condition and tested 68 children with TLD (7–12 years old). In Experiment 3, 16 children with SLI and 16 age-matched children with TLD were tested in all four conditions. Results: In both TLD groups, older children scored better than the younger ones. The matched TLD group scored higher than the SLI group who scored at the level of the younger children with TLD . None of the experiments showed a facilitation effect of sung over spoken stimuli. Conclusions: Word detection abilities improved with age in both TLD and SLI groups. Our findings are compatible with the hypothesis of delayed language abilities in children with SLI , and are discussed in light of the role of durational prosodic cues in words detection.     

Subliminal stimulation, choice behavior and some personality correlates of subliminal sensitivity

The aim of this study was to investigate the possible relations between specific personality variables and the effect of subliminal stimulation on choice behavior. It was hypothesized that subjects with low anxiety, less neuroticism, and external locus of control and the trait of extraversion would be more susceptible to subliminal stimulation. 38 undergraduate students were exposed to subliminal messages urging them to choose symbols instead of numbers or letters. Analysis showed that subliminal stimulation did not generate a preference for symbols over numbers or letters. No support was observed for the hypothesis of an association between susceptibility and personality variables. These results may be explained in terms of symbol choice being a neutral message that did not relate to the subjects' needs and motivation.     

Are European and American golf players different? Reply to Engelhardt (1997)

Analysis of 1998 statistics for individual performance in the PGA European Tour yielded significant differences between some shot-making skills (drive distance, total driving, greens in regulation, and sand saves) between the top 10 and bottom 10 money winners, replicating (with partially different results) a result found for the 1995 American PGA Tour by Engelhardt.     

The psychological reality of word senses

This paper tests psychologists' frequent assumption that dictionaries are psychologically realistic models of polysemy in the mental lexicon. Psychologists have not often explored the nature of polysemy, and lexicographers' methods have not involved scientific sampling of usages or informants. It is argued, however, that the lexicographic technique of citation sorting is an effective way of discovering sense differences. Here this technique was used in three tasks involving usage samples for 24 high- and low-frequency nouns varying widely in degree of polysemy in the dictionary. Analyses of agreement within and between subjects showed that subjects consistently judged and substantially agreed upon the major senses of most nouns, but that few nouns in either frequency group were perceived to have more than three significant senses. Additionally, the possibility that larger usage samples will bias people to make more sense groupings was found not to be true, suggesting that the larger number of senses lexicographers create for high-frequency words are not artifacts of larger usage samples.This research was partially supported by grants from the Spencer and Sloan Foundations to George A. Miller.     

Tracks and affordances: The sources of a physical ontology

How is meaning assigned to those terms in a theory which are remote from direct observational instantiation? Models and analogies play a role, but close examination of theories in high energy physics shows that the design of experimental apparatus also influences the interpretation of such terms. Certain apparatus favours certain kinds of effects, and this affects the way mathematical theories are interpreted. In particular track producing apparatus becomes involved with theories in which photonic terms are picked out in the theory. A further conceptual constraint is thus introduced. It is argued that this situation favours the interpretation of dispositional properties as affordances rather than as simple dispositions.     

Getting engaged: A case study and a model of the engagement period as a process of conflict-resolution

This paper addresses the problem of why so many marriages end in divorce. It develops a preventative approach to marital breakdown by proposing pre-marital counselling as a resource to be made widely available to couples. The key psychological issues which a counsellor could use as the backbone of any such counselling or therapeutic work are outlined. It is suggested that these issues are part of the psychological ‘working-through’ period during an engagement, when the couple are preparing for marriage. The psychological difficulties that an individual may be struggling with are illustrated via an account of psychodynamic psychotherapy with a young woman during the year of her engagement.     

Do ‘literate’ pigeons (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Columba livia</Emphasis>) show mirror-word generalization?

Many children pass through a mirror stage in reading, where they write individual letters or digits in mirror and find it difficult to correctly utilize letters that are mirror images of one another (e.g., b and d). This phenomenon is thought to reflect the fact that the brain does not naturally discriminate left from right. Indeed, it has been argued that reading acquisition involves the inhibition of this default process. In the current study, we tested the ability of literate pigeons, which had learned to discriminate between 30 and 62 words from 7832 nonwords, to discriminate between words and their mirror counterparts. Subjects were sensitive to the left–right orientation of the individual letters, but not the order of letters within a word. This finding may reflect the fact that, in the absence of human-unique top-down processes, the inhibition of mirror generalization may be limited.     

Enhanced music sensitivity in 9-month-old bilingual infants

This study explores the influence of bilingualism on the cognitive processing of language and music. Specifically, we investigate how infants learning a non-tone language perceive linguistic and musical pitch and how bilingualism affects cross-domain pitch perception. Dutch monolingual and bilingual infants of 8–9 months participated in the study. All infants had Dutch as one of the first languages. The other first languages, varying among bilingual families, were not tone or pitch accent languages. In two experiments, infants were tested on the discrimination of a lexical (N = 42) or a violin (N = 48) pitch contrast via a visual habituation paradigm. The two contrasts shared identical pitch contours but differed in timbre. Non-tone language learning infants did not discriminate the lexical contrast regardless of their ambient language environment. When perceiving the violin contrast, bilingual but not monolingual infants demonstrated robust discrimination. We attribute bilingual infants’ heightened sensitivity in the musical domain to the enhanced acoustic sensitivity stemming from a bilingual environment. The distinct perceptual patterns between language and music and the influence of acoustic salience on perception suggest processing diversion and association in the first year of life. Results indicate that the perception of music may entail both shared neural network with language processing, and unique neural network that is distinct from other cognitive functions.