Inside-of-the-Body test drawings performed by patients with neuromuscular diseases: a preliminary report.

Inside-of-the-Body test drawings were obtained from 50 individuals with various neuromuscular diseases. A mean of 18.0 +/- 5.1 body parts were identified in the drawings. Diseased body structures were emphasized by most patients; for example, thymus was only drawn by individuals with myasthenia gravis, while muscle was only identified by individuals with polymyositis. In contrast, drawings by individuals with neuropathic atrophy omitted the atrophic extremities.     

Memory for item order and phonetic recoding in the beginning reader

A defect in immediate memory for item order is often attributed to poor beginning readers. We have supposed that this problem may be a manifestation of an underlying deficiency in the use of phonetic codes. Accordingly, we expected good and poor readers to differ in their ability to order stimuli that can be easily recoded as words and stored in phonetic form, but not in their ability to order nonlinguistic stimuli that do not lend themselves to phonetic recoding in short-term memory. The purpose of the present study was to test this hypothesis by examining the ability of good and poor readers to reconstruct the order of sets of briefly presented stimuli that varied in the extent to which they could be distinctively recoded into phonetic form: pictures of common objects versus nonrepresentational, “doodle” drawings. As expected, an interaction between reading ability and type of stimulus item was found, demonstrating the material-specific nature of poor readers' ordering difficulties. These findings support the hypothesis that a function of the phonetic representation is to aid in retention of order information, and that poor readers' ordering difficulties are related to their deficient use of phonetic codes.     

Some effects of later-occurring information on the perception of stop consonant and semivowel

In three experiments, we determined how perception of the syllable-initial distinction between the stop consonant [b] and the semivowel [w], when cued by duration of formant transitions, is affected by parts of the sound pattern that occur later in time. For the first experiment, we constructed four series of syllables, similar in that each had initial formant transitions ranging from one short enough for [ba] to one long enough for [wa], hut different in overall syllable duration. The consequence in perception was that, as syllable duration increased, the [b-w] boundary moved toward transitions of longer duration. Then, in the second experiment, we increased the duration of the sound by adding a second syllable, [da], (thus creating [bada-wada]), and observed that lengthening the second syllable also shifted the perceived [b-w] boundary in the first syllable toward transitions of longer duration; however, this effect was small by comparison with that produced when the first syllable was lengthened equivalently. In the third experiment, we found that altering the structure of the syllable had an effect that is not to be accounted for by the concomitant change in syllable duration: lengthening the syllable by adding syllable-final transitions appropriate for the stop consonant [d] (thus creating [bad-wad]) caused the perceived [b-w] boundary to shift toward transitions of shorter duration, an effect precisely opposite to that produced when the syllable was lengthened to the same extent by adding steady-state vowel. We suggest that, in all these cases, the later-occurring information specifies rate of articulation and that the effect on the earlier-occurring cue reflects an appropriate perceptual normalization.     

The association between psychological distance and construal level: evidence from an implicit association test

According to construal level theory (N. Liberman, Y. Trope, & E. Stephan, in press; Y. Trope & N. Liberman, 2003), people use a more abstract, high construal level when judging, perceiving, and predicting more psychologically distal targets, and they judge more abstract targets as being more psychologically distal. The present research demonstrated that associations between more distance and higher level of construal also exist on a pure conceptual level. Eight experiments used the Implicit Association Test (IAT; A. G. Greenwald, D. E. McGhee, & J. L. K. Schwartz, 1998) to demonstrate an association between words related to construal level (low vs. high) and words related to four dimensions of distance (proximal vs. distal): temporal distance, spatial distance, social distance, and hypotheticality. In addition to demonstrating an association between level of construal and psychological distance, these findings also corroborate the assumption that all 4 dimensions of psychological distance are related to level of construal in a similar way and support the notion that they all are forms of psychological distance.     

Linguistic coding by deaf children in relation to beginning reading success

The coding of printed letters in a task of consonant recall was examined in relation to the level of success of prelingually and profoundly deaf children (median age 8.75 years) in beginning reading. As determined by recall errors, the deaf children who were classified as good readers appeared to use both speech and fingerspelling (manual) codes in short-term retention of printed letters. In contrast, deaf children classified as poor readers did not show influence of either of these linguistically based codes in recall. Thus, the success of deaf children in beginning reading, like that of hearing children, appears to be related to the ability to establish and make use of linguistically recoded representations of the language. Neither group showed evidence of dependence on visual cues for recall.     

Explicit syllable and phoneme segmentation in the young child

To write a language, one must first abstract the unit to be used from the acoustic stream of speech. Writing systems based on the meaningless units, syllables and phonemes, were late developments in the history of written language. The alphabetic system, which requires abstraction of the phonemic unit of speech, was the last to appear, evolved from a syllabary and, unlike the other systems, was apparently invented only once. It might therefore be supposed that phoneme segmentation is particularly difficult and more difficult, indeed, than syllable segmentation. Speech research suggests reasons why this may be so. The present study provides direct evidence of a similar developmental ordering of syllable and phoneme segmentation abilities in the young child. By means of a task which required preschool, kindergarten, and first-grade children to tap out the number of segments in spoken utterances, it was found that, though ability in both syllable and phoneme segmentation increased with grade level, analysis into phonemes was significantly harder and perfected later than analysis into syllables. The relative difficulties of the different units of segmentation are discussed in relation to reading acquisition.     

The role of attribution of motivation in producing postsuppressional rebound

Three studies demonstrated that postsuppressional rebound (PSR) may be both reduced and enhanced by manipulating people's attributions about why they experience difficulty during suppression. Telling participants that suppression failures indicate a high motivation to use the suppressed construct produced more PSR than telling them that suppression failures indicate a low motivation to use the construct (Study 1). Telling participants that an external stimulus would make suppression easy produced more PSR than telling them that it would make suppression difficult (Study 2). Telling participants that suppressing a stereotype is difficult and unindicative of prejudice eliminated PSR (Study 3). These results support the notion that PSR occurs because people infer from the difficulty experienced during suppression and from suppression failures that they are motivated to use the suppressed construct.     

Completed vs. interrupted priming: Reduced accessibility from post-fulfillment inhibition

We conceptualized an interrupted priming task as a state of an unfulfilled goal and a completed priming task as a post-fulfillment state. The accessibility of a primed construct was measured with both lexical decision and impression formation procedures. Lexical decisions showed enhanced accessibility of prime-related constructs after interrupted priming and reduced accessibility of the prime-related construct after completed priming. Replicating previous findings [Martin, L. L. (1986). Set/reset: Use and disuse of concepts in impression formation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51, 493-504], an ambiguous target was assimilated to the primed construct after interrupted priming, and was contrasted away from the primed construct after completed priming. Together, these results suggest that task fulfillment instigates inhibition of accessible constructs, in addition to (or instead of) a process of suppressing accessible constructs upon encountering a new target. These findings demonstrate how motivation can affect accessibility through inhibition as well as through suppression.