Correlations among family environment, academic achievement, and academic attainment in a large sample of young Australian adults

In a set of interrelated Australian and Spanish investigations in 2001-2004, relationships were examined among intellectual ability, family environment, and academic achievement. This follow-up study used longitudinal data from young Australian adults (4,397 men, 4,703 women; M age = 20.2 yr., SD = 0.4), to investigate relationships among earlier academic achievement, family influences, and academic attainment. From multiple regression and commonality analyses the findings indicated that earlier achievement and family influences were important as separate variables in explaining differences in later academic attainment (18.6% and 14.8%, respectively, for men; 14.5% and 11.5%, respectively, for women). In addition, earlier achievement and family influences reinforced each other to account for additional shared variance (9.1% for men, 6.3% for women) in young Australian adults' academic attainment.     

Making syntax of sense: number agreement in sentence production

Grammatical agreement flags the parts of sentences that belong together regardless of whether the parts appear together. In English, the major agreement controller is the sentence subject, the major agreement targets are verbs and pronouns, and the major agreement category is number. The authors expand an account of number agreement whose tenets are that pronouns acquire number lexically, whereas verbs acquire it syntactically but with similar contributions from number meaning and from the number morphology of agreement controllers. These tenets were instantiated in a model using existing verb agreement data. The model was then fit to a new, more extensive set of verb data and tested with a parallel set of pronoun data. The theory was supported by the model's outcomes. The results have implications for the integration of words and structures, for the workings of agreement categories, and for the nature of the transition from thought to language.     

Toward a more pragmatic approach to morality: a critical evaluation of Kohlberg's model

In this article, the authors evaluate L. Kohlberg's (1984) cognitive- developmental approach to morality, find it wanting, and introduce a more pragmatic approach. They review research designed to evaluate Kohlberg's model, describe how they revised the model to accommodate discrepant findings, and explain why they concluded that it is poorly equipped to account for the ways in which people make moral decisions in their everyday lives. The authors outline in 11 propositions a framework for a new approach that is more attentive to the purposes that people use morality to achieve. People make moral judgments and engage in moral behaviors to induce themselves and others to uphold systems of cooperative exchange that help them achieve their goals and advance their interests.     

Meaning through syntax is insufficient to explain comprehension of sentences with reduced relative clauses: comment on McKoon and Ratcliff (2003)

The authors argue that the meaning through syntax (MTS) model proposed by G. McKoon and R. Ratcliff fails to account for the comprehension of sentences with reduced relative clauses. First, the theory's core assumptions regarding verb-based event representations and how they link to constructions are incompatible with well-established analyses from the lexical semantics literature. Second, the MTS theory provides neither a principled nor a consistent account for why some reduced relatives are hard whereas others are easy. Finally, McKoon and Ratcliff's critique of constraint-based models is flawed in that sometimes they tested a nonexistent theory and sometimes they provided evidence for the constraint-based models against which they were arguing.     

Eye movements and word skipping during reading revisited

The authors examined word skipping in reading in 2 experiments. In Experiment 1, skipping rates were higher for a preview of a predictable word than for a visually similar nonword, indicating there is full recognition in parafoveal vision. In Experiment 2, foveal load was manipulated by varying the frequency of the word preceding either a 3-letter target word or a misspelled preview. There was again a higher skipping rate for a correct preview and a lower skipping rate when there was a high foveal load, but there was no interaction, and the pattern of effects in fixation times was the same as in the skipping data. Experiment 2 also showed significant skipping of nonwords similar to the target word, indicating skipping based on partial information.     

Interpretation of orthographic uniqueness point effects in visual word recognition

The orthographic uniqueness point (OUP) of a word is the position of the first letter from the left that distinguishes a word from all other words. In 2 recent studies (P. J. Kwantes & D. J. K. Mewhort, 1999a; A. K. Lindell, M. E. R. Nicholls, & A. E. Castles, 2003), it has been observed that words with an early OUP were processed more quickly than words with a late OUP. This has been taken to suggest that observers process the letters of words sequentially in a left-to-right order. In this article, it is shown that the OUP results do not provide selective evidence for left-to-right sequential processing in visual word recognition because the data are also compatible with an account in which letter processing occurs in random order.     

Perception of visual speed while moving

During self-motion, the world normally appears stationary. In part, this may be due to reductions in visual motion signals during self-motion. In 8 experiments, the authors used magnitude estimation to characterize changes in visual speed perception as a result of biomechanical self-motion alone (treadmill walking), physical translation alone (passive transport), and both biomechanical self-motion and physical translation together (walking). Their results show that each factor alone produces subtractive reductions in visual speed but that subtraction is greatest with both factors together, approximating the sum of the 2 separately. The similarity of results for biomechanical and passive self-motion support H. B. Barlow's (1990) inhibition theory of sensory correlation as a mechanism for implementing H. Wallach's (1987) compensation for self-motion.     

Impaired verb fluency: a sign of mild cognitive impairment

We assessed verb fluency vs. noun and letter-based fluency in 199 subjects referred for cognitive complaints including Subjective Cognitive Impairment, Mild Cognitive Impairment, and Alzheimer's disease. ANCOVAs and factor analyses identified verb, noun, and letter-based fluency as distinct tasks. Verb fluency performance in Mild Cognitive Impairment differed significantly from Subjective Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer's disease. Reduced verb fluency thus appears to be a linguistic marker for incipient dementia. One possibility is that the verb fluency deficit in Mild Cognitive Impairment results from degenerative processes known to occur in the parahippocampal region.     

Detection of sound rise time by adults with dyslexia

Low sensitivity to amplitude modulated (AM) sounds is reported to be associated with dyslexia. An important aspect of amplitude modulation cycles are the rise and fall times within the sound. In this study, simplified stimuli equivalent to just one cycle were used and sensitivity to varying rise times was explored. Adult participants with dyslexia or compensated dyslexia and a control group performed a detection task with sound pairs of different rise times. Results showed that the participants with dyslexia differed from the control group in rise time detection and a correlation was found between rise time detection and reading and phonological skills. A subgroup of participants with lower sensitivity to rise time detection characterized by low accuracy in syllable-level phonological skills was found within the dyslexic group. Short stimuli containing only one rise time produced associations with phonological skills and reading, even in a language where the perception of rise time contrasts are not crucial for the signaling of phonemic contrast.     

A new variant of the Ouchi illusion reveals Fourier-component-based processing

We report that anomalous motion illusion in a new variant of the Ouchi figure is well predicted by the strength of its Fourier fundamentals and harmonics. The original Ouchi figure consists of a rectangular checkerboard pattern surrounded by an orthogonal rectangular checkerboard pattern, in which illusory relative motion between the two regions is perceived. Although this illusion has been explained in terms of biases in integrating one-dimensional motion signals to determine the two-dimensional motion direction, the physiological mechanism has not been clarified. With our new stimuli, which consisted of thin lines instead of rectangles, we found that the perceived illusion is drastically reduced when the position of each line element is randomly shifted. This is not predicted by simple models of local motion integration along the visible edges. We demonstrate that the relative amplitude of the relevant Fourier fundamentals and harmonics leads to a quantitative prediction. Our analysis was successfully applied to other variants of the Ouchi figure (Khang and Essock 1997 Perception 26 585-597), closely predicting the reported rating. The results indicate that the underlying physiological mechanism is sensitive to the Fourier components of the stimuli rather than the visible edges.