The input to verb learning in Mandarin Chinese: a role for syntactic bootstrapping

The authors investigated the role of syntax in verb learning in Mandarin Chinese, which allows pervasive ellipsis of noun arguments. Two questions were investigated using the Beijing corpus on CHILDES: (a) Does the input to young children manifest syntactic-semantic correspondences as needed for acquiring verb meanings? (b) Are verbs presented in multiple frames? Over 6,000 child-directed utterances were parsed. Analyses revealed that transitive verbs, motion verbs, and internal/communication verbs were distinguished syntactically; moreover, the 60 target verbs were used in multiple sentence frames. These findings support a role for syntactic bootstrapping in Mandarin verb learning.     

Mea culpa: predicting stock prices from organizational attributions

People's causal attributions for events in their lives have been shown to relate to individual and interpersonal outcomes. Groups and organizations also make causal attributions, and this article examines whether their publicly communicated attributions predict organizational-level outcomes. By content analyzing attributions contained in corporate annual reports from 14 companies during a 21-year period, the authors found that organizations that made "self disserving" attributions- internal and controllable attributions for negative events-had higher stock prices 1 year later. The authors argue that claiming personal responsibility for negative events made the organizations appear more in control, leading to more positive impressions.     

Use of phonological codes for Chinese characters: evidence from processing of parafoveal preview when reading sentences

The role of phonological coding for character identification was examined with the benefit of processing parafoveal characters in eye fixations while reading Chinese sentences. In Experiment 1, the orthogonal manipulation of phonological and orthographic similarity can separate two types of phonological benefits for homophonic previews, according to whether these previews share the same phonetic radical with the targets or not. The significant phonological benefits indicate that phonological coding is activated early when the character is in the parafovea. Experiment 2 manipulated the character's consistency value and found that the phonological preview benefits are reliable only when the targets are high consistency characters. The results of two experiments suggest that phonological computation is rapid and early at both character and radical levels for Chinese character identification.     

Initial behavior outcomes for the peacebuilders universal school-based violence prevention program

PeaceBuilders is a universal, elementary-school-based violence prevention program that attempts to alter the climate of a school by teaching students and staff simple rules and activities aimed at improving child social competence and reducing aggressive behavior. Eight matched schools (N > 4,000 students in Grades K-5) were randomly assigned to either immediate postbaseline intervention (PBI) or to a delayed intervention 1 year later (PBD). Hierarchical linear modeling was used to analyze results from assessments in the fall and spring of 2 consecutive school years. In Year 1, significant gains in teacher-rated social competence for students in Grades K-2, in childself-reported peace-building behavior in Grades K-5, and reductions in aggressive behavior in Grades 3-5 were found for PBI but not PBD schools. Differential effects in Year 1 were also observed for aggression and prosocial behavior. Most effects were maintained in Year 2 for PBI schools, including increases in child prosocial behavior in Grades K-2. Implications for early universal school-based prevention and challenges related toevaluating large-scale prevention trials are discussed.     

Negative self-efficacy and goal effects revisited

The authors address the verification of the functional properties of self-efficacy beliefs and document how self-efficacy beliefs operate in concert with goal systems within a sociocognitive theory of self-regulation in contrast to the focus of control theory on discrepancy reduction. Social cognitive theory posits proactive discrepancy production by adoption of goal challenges working in concert with reactive discrepancy reduction in realizing them. Converging evidence from diverse methodological and analytic strategies verifies that perceived self-efficacy and personal goals enhance motivation and performance attainments. The large body of evidence, as evaluated by 9 meta-analyses for the effect sizes of self-efficacy beliefs and by the vast body of research on goal setting, contradicts findings (J. B. Vancouver, C. M. Thompson, & A. A. Williams, 2001; J. B. Vancouver, C. M. Thompson, E. C. Tischner, & D. J. Putka 2002) that belief in one's capabilities and personal goals is self-debilitating.     

Ethical issues surrounding human participants research using the Internet

The Internet appears to offer psychologists doing research unrestricted access to infinite amounts and types of data. However, the ethical issues surrounding the use of data and data collection methods are challenging research review boards at many institutions. This article illuminates some of the obstacles facing researchers who wish to take advantage of the Internet's flexibility. The applications of the APA ethical codes for conducting research on human participants on the Internet are reviewed. The principle of beneficence, as well as privacy and confidentiality, informed consent, deception, and avoiding harm are all illustrated through the use of a hypothetical online study.     

Silent letters and phonological priming

Many written English words contain silent letters. Omitting them produces nonwords pronounced identically to the original words, for example, SALM for PSALM and COLUM for COLUMN. We report two naming and two lexical decision experiments in which targets of 4–11 letters followed primes exposed for 100 ms in mask-prime-mask-target sequences. Priming in SALM-psalm and COLUM-column pairs exceeded priming in orthographic control pairs such as ASTA-pasta and COUSI-cousin, pairs in which pronounced letters are omitted to form the primes. SALM and COLUM, however, were less effective primes than PSALM and COLUMN. Results were discussed in terms of the phonological coherence hypothesis, the role of orthographic codes in filtering phonologically activated representations, and graphemes as reading units.     

The gender congruency effect and the selection of freestanding and bound morphemes: evidence from croatian

The authors report 3 picture-word interference experiments in which they explore some properties of the agreement process in speech production. In Experiment 1, Croatian speakers were asked to produce utterances in which the noun's gender value had an impact on the selection of gender-marked freestanding morphemes (pronouns) while ignoring the presentation of same- or different-gender distractor words. In Experiments 2 and 3, Croatian speakers were asked to name the same pictures using noun phrases in which the noun's gender value surfaced as an inflectional suffix. Different-gender distractors interfered more than same-gender distractors (the gender congruency effect) in Experiment 1, but not in Experiments 2 and 3. These contrasting results show that the cause of the gender congruency effect is not at the level where lexical-grammatical information is selected but at the level of selection of freestanding morphemes.     

Separate personality traits from states to predict depression

Results have been inconsistent regarding the ability of personality measures to predict future depression severity levels, leading some researchers to question the validity of personality assessment, especially when patients are acutely depressed. Using a combination of regression and factor analytic techniques, we separated the variance of personality measures into stable trait and variable state-affect components. Findings supported the hypotheses that depression severity measured at different time points would correlate with both stable trait and concurrent state-affect components in personality measures, whereas change in depression severity would correlate with state changes but not with stable trait scores. Thus, personality assessments tap both state affect and trait variance, with the state-affect variance masking the trait variance when patients are depressed.