Construction and maintenance of parent–child relationships: Bidirectional contributions from the perspective of parents

The purpose of the present study was to investigate parents' perspectives of parent and child contributions to the construction and maintenance of the parent–child relationship. Twenty‐four mothers and fathers, with a child between 4‐ to 7‐years‐old, completed an open‐ended interview in which they described their parent–child relationship and commented on how they and their child strengthen, damage, and repair the relationship. Findings indicated that parents described their parent–child relationship with relatively similar emphasis on elements of authority, companionship, and intimacy. Parents reported that they were most likely to strengthen the parent–child relationship by interacting with their child in the companionship domain, whereas their overuse of power or authority and non‐responsiveness temporarily created damage in the relationship. Parents reported that their children were most likely to strengthen the relationship by complying with parent requests and engaging in companionate interactions, whereas not complying or challenging parent directives created relational tension. Parents indicated that both they and their children were most likely to repair interactional errors by restoring intimacy (e.g. apology, communication, or affection). Results are discussed from a framework of multiple relationship domains consisting of the interplay of vertical and horizontal dimensions of power. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Learning Signal in Perceptual Tuning of Speech: Bottom Up Versus Top-Down Information

Cognitive systems face a tension between stability and plasticity. The maintenance of long-term representations that reflect the global regularities of the environment is often at odds with pressure to flexibly adjust to short-term input regularities that may deviate from the norm. This tension is abundantly clear in speech communication when talkers with accents or dialects produce input that deviates from a listener's language community norms. Prior research demonstrates that when bottom-up acoustic information or top-down word knowledge is available to disambiguate speech input, there is short-term adaptive plasticity such that subsequent speech perception is shifted even in the absence of the disambiguating information. Although such effects are well-documented, it is not yet known whether bottom-up and top-down resolution of ambiguity may operate through common processes, or how these information sources may interact in guiding the adaptive plasticity of speech perception. The present study investigates the joint contributions of bottom-up information from the acoustic signal and top-down information from lexical knowledge in the adaptive plasticity of speech categorization according to short-term input regularities. The results implicate speech category activation, whether from top-down or bottom-up sources, in driving rapid adjustment of listeners' reliance on acoustic dimensions in speech categorization. Broadly, this pattern of perception is consistent with dynamic mapping of input to category representations that is flexibly tuned according to interactive processing accommodating both lexical knowledge and idiosyncrasies of the acoustic input.     

A Local Connectionist Account of Consonant Harmony in Child Language

This study represents an attempt to sketch a processing model of phonological development in children acquiring their first language. The investigation is framed within a local connectionist network in which activation spreads between levels and inhibition within levels. Three ways are focused on in which an emergent processing system may diverge from a fully developed one—hypoactivation (too little activation due to underdeveloped links), hyperactivation (too much activation due to overloaded links) and impaired self‐inhibition. With a view to determining how children's productions relate to these three “error mechanisms,” one widespread phonological process, consonant harmony, is subjected to examination. Hypoactivation is found to capture the great majority of harmonic patterns. Hyperactivation and impaired self‐inhibition play a more marginal role and are only needed to account for exceptional cases of harmony. The feasibility of the psycholinguistic model is demonstrated with the help of computer simulations that were run with noise on both fully developed and developing networks. The model makes a number of predictions including the claim that difficult sounds are acquired in coda positions first.