A note on feminine plural inflection in spoken Israeli Hebrew

This is a report of results obtained in testing native Israeli students in the production and comprehension of inflected forms of adjectives that were not couched in sentences. The subjects performed according to normative rules in their production of adjective forms. In comprehension, however, they performed according to an acceptability scale of deviations from the norms. It is suggested that a change in the linguistic system first affects the speakers' processing of received language. Only later will their own production be affected as well.     

The verbal helping skills of trained and untrained human service paraprofessionals

The verbal helping skills of human service paraprofessionals in a youth service agency were studied. Workers who had previously completed a 10-week systematic training program in basic helping skills were compared to untrained volunteer staff. Using simulated helping interviews, it was found that training made a significant impact on trainees' verbal helping responses. Skill level was maintained at a 2-month follow-up for certain responses whereas others returned to pretraining levels. Trainees were found to use significantly more "helpful" responses than volunteers. The need for training even carefully selected paraprofessionals is discussed.     

Modeling on microcomputers

The instructional power of experimental models was recognized by the significant effort directed toward the development of EXPER SIM at several institutions. Owing to a number of factors, interest in these tools appeared to wane. The price/performance characteristics of some new microcomputers suggested that a rekindling of interest in the use of modeling as an inquiry/problem solving tool could possibly be achieved if the large timesharing versions could be successfully migrated to one or more popular micros. We have partially achieved these objectives, having both transported EXPER SIM to the LSI-11 computer and developed, tested, documented, and evaluated many new models in sensory, personality, and social psychology and psychobiology. In addition, we have begun devising techniques to migrate a version to the Apple II and III microcomputers.     

Taste aversions conditioned by the aversiveness of insulin and formalin: role of CS specificity

Experimenters in the past have reported that when insulin is used as the unconditioned stimulus (US), rats will learn an aversion to a sodium chloride but not a sucrose solution, whereas with formalin as the US, they will learn an aversion to a sucrose but not a saline solution. The present experiments failed to confirm these findings. Aversions to sucrose were conditioned with insulin and aversions to sodium chloride were conditioned with formalin. The use of a more concentrated sucrose solution in the present study may have been responsible for the successful sucrose-aversion conditioning with insulin. Although the source of the discrepancy in findings concerning aversion conditioning with formalin remains unclear, experiments ruled out numerous possibilities. These experiments also showed that sodium chloride aversion conditioning with formalin is a highly robust phenomenon that occurs with a variety of conditioned stimulus durations and formalin doses, with distributed and massed training, in male and female rats, and even if saline is not the only novel solution presented during conditioning. Furthermore, the aversion can be detected with both single-stimulus and choice test procedures.     

A developmental investigation of selective attention to graphic,phonetic, and semantic information in words

Second and fifth-grade and college-age subjects made similarity judgments on sets of three words that required attention to orthographic, phonetic, or semantic information. Accuracy and speed increased with age. Even the youngest subjects were able to perform the task of selecting a given feature of a word reasonably well. Differences in difficulty among the three tasks decreased with age, suggesting a developmental change (primarily between second and fifth grade) toward facility in extracting phonetic and semantic information from words. The presence of confusable, potentially relevant information had detrimental effects overall which decreased with age and varied with the type of task and type of distractor. For all ages, performance was better when all trials of a particular task were blocked together than when trials of the three tasks were randomly ordered.     

Gender-Typed and Non-Gender-Typed Category Awareness in Toddlers

Thirty toddlers (15 boys, 15 girls) participatedin a sequential touching task to examine their awarenessof own-sex and other-sex gender-typed, andnongender-typed, categories. Twenty-, 24-, and28-month-olds' awareness of gender-typed and non-gender-typedcategories were tested with contrasts of masculine,feminine, ball, and block categories. Toddlers' accuracyat labeling sex was also measured. Toddlers' patterns of touching to both nongender-typed (balls,blocks)and gender-typed (masculine toys, feminine toys)categories exceeded chance. Consistent with genderschema theory and research, boys and girls showedgreater than chance patterns of sequential touching toown-sexgender-typed category items, but notto other-sexgendertyped ones. Contrary to predictions, toddlers whocould accurately label sex (i.e., gender label) did not demonstrate greater sequential touchingof masculine or feminine gender-typed category itemsthan toddlers who could notgender label. Results suggesttoddlers possess greater awareness of gendertyped categories, particularly own-sex gender-typedones, than previously suggested. Additionally, toddlers'awareness of gender-typed categories does not appearrelated to their abilities to label accurately the sexes.