Holding on to childhood language memory

While early language experience seems crucial for mastering phonology, it remains unclear whether there are lasting benefits of speaking a language regularly during childhood if the quantity and quality of speaking drop dramatically after childhood. This study explored the accessibility of early childhood language memory. Specifically, it compared perception and production of Korean speech sounds by childhood speakers who had spoken Korean regularly for a few years during childhood to those of two other groups: (1) childhood hearers who had heard Korean regularly during childhood but had spoken Korean minimally, if at all; and (2) novice learners. All three groups were enrolled in first-year college Korean language classes. Childhood speakers were also compared to native speakers of Korean to see how native-like they were. The results revealed measurable long-term benefits of childhood speaking experience, underscoring the importance of early language experience, even if such experience diminishes dramatically beyond childhood.     

Four programs of research in scientific communication

Selected studies of scientific communication, philosophy and sociology of science, sociology of knowledge, and information science are reviewed according to the assumptions they make about scientific information. Based on these assumptions and their historical order of development, the studies are organized into four distinct “programs” of research: artifact studies, user studies, network studies, and laboratory studies. The four programs represent a continuum of definitions of information, from the information-as-commodity definition that is embodied in the artifact studies, to the contextual, meaning-based definition that is characteristic of the laboratory studies. They also provide a rich framework for a renewal of research interest in this area among communication scholars and others interested in the social impacts of information. “When I studied scientific communication back in the sixties, it was a great field to be in ... we thought we knew just about everything there was to know about scientific communication.”¹ Bill Paisley, 1985 Leah A. Lievrouw is assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Rutgers University. Dr. Lievrouw received her PhD from the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include scientific communication and the social aspects of telecommunications technologies.     

Divorce in the kibbutz: Affective responses to separation

This article is part of a comprehensive research project in which the central characteristics of the process of divorce in the kibbutz were examined. It appears that the framework of the kibbutz, free as it is from socio-economic pressures and boundary factors not directly connected with the marital relationship as such, provides an excellent and perhaps unique opportunity to investigate the pure emotional effects of the marital breakup.     

Communication,representation, and scientific knowledge: A conceptual framework and case study

What is the significance of communication in science? Though the question has been addressed by researchers in a number of fields, most have tended to see communication as an intermediary step on the way to some other phenomenon of interest, aprocess that is only interesting insofar as it produces some other structural or functionalproduct, e.g., documents, organizations, or social groups. From a communication research perspective, however, the communication processes themselves are the object of study. The diversity and flexibility of scientists’ communication behavior, and the complexity of their communication channels, styles, messages and networks, have not been assessed as a set of related phenomena. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to draw together several analytical concepts regarding scientific communication processes that have been proposed by the author elsewhere, including the issue of social representations (Lievrouw, 1990), the scientific communication cycle (Lievrouw and Carley, 1991), and the scholarly research narrative (Lievrouw, 1989, and Mokros and Lievrouw, 1991). The concepts are combined here into one conceptual framework and applied to the case of a single biomedical specialty, lipid metabolism research, which has developed from an esoteric biochemical subfield to a large and well-funded specializaiton with a great deal of influence on American culture’s preoccupation with heart disease.     

Coercive uses of mandatory reporting in therapeutic relationships

Mandatory reporting legislation was enacted with little consideration of its consequences for ongoing therapeutic relationships. One consequence is the unanticipated and coercive uses of the law in mental health settings. Thirty therapists and 25 child protective service workers were interviewed about their experiences with mandatory reporting in therapy relationships. The interviews revealed unanticipated as well as coercive uses of mandatory reporting in therapeutic relationships, including prompting crisis in family systems to promote change, and using reporting or threats of it to enforce attendance and engagement in therapy. Therapists'd anger and view of reporting as a form of power or tool for social control also related to coercive uses of mandatory reporting. The special case of coercion in mandated cases resulting from mandatory reporting legislation is discussed as well.     

Perception of synthetic nasal consonants in initial and final syllable position

Identification and discrimination of synthesized syllable-initial and syllable-final nasal consonants (/mæ-næ-ηæ/ and æm-æn-æη) by adult American subjects were assessed to determine (1) whether place-of-articulation contrasts in nasals, cued only by second and third formant transition variations, were perceived categorically, and (2) if linguistic experience affected_ the perception of this acoustic dimension. In two experiments, subjects produced consistent identification functions with sharp boundaries between familiar phoneme categories. Corresponding discrimination functions showed “peaks” of relatively accurate perception for cross-category comparison pairs, indicating categorical perception. Identification consistency and discrimination accuracy were inferior for the/n/-/η/ contrast in the unfamiliar (and phonologically inappropriate) syllable-initial condition compared to the familiar syllable-final condition. No such difference was found in identification and discrimination of the acoustically comparable oral stop consonant contrast/d/-/g/in syllable-initial and syllable-final position. These results provide evidence that perception of linguistically relevant acoustic dimensions by adults is constrained, at least in part, by their familiarity with those acoustic (and phonetic) contrasts in specific phonological contexts.     

The effect of response choice relatedness on pantomime and verbal recognition ability in aphasic patients

Twenty aphasic and twenty control subjects were examined on two versions of a pantomime recognition and a verbal recognition test; one version containing response choices conceptually/semantically related to target responses, the other containing unrelated response choices. The aphasic group was inferior to controls on the pantomime and verbal recognition tests, although the magnitude and consistency of the differences between aphasics and controls were greater for the pantomime test. The presence of conceptually/semantically related response choices on the pantomime recognition test significantly reduced test scores of aphasic patients, and this reduction was related to the magnitude of the effect of response choice relatedness on their verbal recognition test performance. The findings are consistent with an interpretation of aphasia as an impairment of a central symbolic ability which can affect processing for meaning in both verbal and nonverbal modes of communication.     

Guessing Strategies, Aging, and Bias Effects in Perceptual Identification

In the typical single-stimulus perceptual identification task, accuracy is improved by prior study of test words, a repetition priming benefit. There is also a cost, inasmuch as previously studied words are likely to be produced (incorrectly) as responses if the test word is orthographically similar but not identical to a studied word. In two-alternative forced-choice perceptual identification, a test word is flashed and followed by two alternatives, one of which is the correct response. When the two alternatives are orthographically similar, test words identical to previously studied items are identified more accurately than new words (a benefit) but tests words orthographically similar to studied words are identified less accurately than new words (a cost). Ratcliff and McKoon (in press) argue that these are bias effects that arise in the decision stage of word identification. We report five experiments that examined the alternative hypothesis that these bias effects arise from postperceptual guessing strategies. In single-stimulus perceptual identification, repetition priming benefits were equally great for young and older adults who claimed to use deliberate guessing strategies and those who did not (Experiment 1). In contrast, only groups of young and older people who claimed to deliberately guess studied words in a two-alternative forced-choice task (Experiments 2 and 5) showed reliable benefits and costs. Costs and benefits were abolished in the two-alternative forced-choice task when a very long study list was used, presumably because the increased retrieval burden made the use of deliberate guessing strategies less attractive (Experiment 3). Under conditions similar to those of Experiment 3, repetition priming was observed in single-stimulus perceptual identification (Experiment 4). These results are consistent with the view that costs and benefits in the forced-choice perceptual identification task arise from deliberate guessing strategies but that those in the single-stimulus task do not. The possibility that the observed relationship between strategy reports and priming effects reflects erroneous postexperimental assessments of strategies by participants is also considered.     

Neighborhood Risk Factors for Recidivism: For Whom do they Matter?

Justice‐involved people vary substantially in their risk of reoffending. To date, recidivism prediction and prevention efforts have largely focused on individual‐level factors like antisocial traits. Although a growing body of research has examined the role of residential contexts in predicting reoffending, results have been equivocal. One reason for mixed results may be that an individual’s susceptibility to contextual influence depends upon his or her accumulated risk of reoffending. Based on a sample of 2218 people on probation in San Francisco, California, this study draws on observational and secondary data to test the hypothesis that individual risk moderates the effect of neighborhood factors on recidivism. Results from survival analyses indicate that individual risk interacts with neighborhood concentrated disadvantage and disorder—and these factors increase recidivism among people relatively low in individual risk, but not those at higher risk. This is consistent with the disadvantage saturation perspective, raising the possibility that some people classified as low risk might not recidivate but for placement in disadvantaged and disorderly neighborhoods. Ultimately, residential contexts “matter” for lower risk people and may be useful to consider in efforts to prevent recidivism.     

Evaluation of the Self-Report Inventory of Callous-Unemotional Traits in a Sample of Urban Middle School Students: a Multidimensional Rasch Analysis

Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment - Callous-Unemotional (CU) traits are characterized by limited empathy, lack of guilt, and callous use of others. The Inventory of Callous...