Stutter events and linguistic stress

In the research reporting the concurrence between stuttering and linguistic stress the identification of stress loci has been established regularly through intuitive judgment of the experimenter. The present study reports on a more objective determination of stress loci, and their concurrence with stutter events, which strengthens justification of the usual procedure for identifying stress loci.     

Nonregulation of food intake in restrained,emotional, and external eaters

In the present study, regulation of ice cream intake after a preload was examined in 20 high and 20 low scorers (median split) on subscales of the Restraint Scale (RS) (Herman, Polivy, Pliner, Threshold, & Munic, 1978) and the Dutch Eating Behavior Questionnaire (DEBQ) (van Strien, 1986). For each subscale it was hypothesized that low scorers would regulate their ice cream intake. High scorers on disinhibitive scales (i.e., the RS and the DEBQ-emotional and -external subscales) were expected to counterregulate after a preload. In contrast, high scorers on the inhibitive DEBQ-restraint scale were expected to regulate their ice cream intake. A robust effect was found: high scorers never regulated ice cream intake after a preload on either the disinhibitive or the inhibitive scales, while low scorers always did. For the RS a significant interaction effect was found [F(1,39)=4.97, p=.03]. None of the other subscales showed interaction effects. The t tests showed that low scorers on all subscales ate significantly less after a preload than without one, while high scorers on all subscales did not differ in intake after a preload or without one. This nonregulation appears to be characteristic of people preoccupied with caloric intake, regardless of the content of the preoccupation.     

Self-paced learning in children with attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity

Attention deficit (ADDH) children self-paced the delivery of response pairs for paired-associate learning at about the rate previously shown to be conducive to relatively good learning in attention deficit. The self-pacing opportunity did not seem either to impair or to enhance the learning performance. On methylphenidate they paced themselves at about the same rate but learned much more. Stimulant therapy does not help by slowing the child down but permits more effective memorizing at the same presentation rate.     

Comparative studies of comprehension: An investigation of Chinese,Norwegian, and English

Memory & Cognition - The present paper compared the processing of complex embedded sentences in Chinese, Norwegian, and English to determine if the underlying mental operations are similar in...     

The relation between comprehending and remembering some complex sentences

This research concerns the distinction between processes in sentence comprehension and those in sentence memory. Comprehension was monitored by timing subjects while they decided whether a sentence was true or false of their knowledge of the world. The memory process was tapped by examining subjects' incidental memory for the sentences they had previously verified. The verification latencies indicated that at the time of comprehension, sentences likeIt is true that a fire isn't cold were often recoded into an equivalent affirmative form, namely,It is true that a fire is hot. However, negative sentences likeIt isn't true that a fire is cold were not recoded during comprehension. Recoding in recall occurred only for those types of sentences that were recoded at the time of comprehension.     

Eye fixations and cognitive processes

This paper presents a theoretical account of the sequence and duration of eye fixation during a number of simple cognitive tasks, such as mental rotation, sentence verification, and quantitative comparison. In each case, the eye fixation behavior is linked to a processing model for the task by assuming that the eye fixates the referent of the symbol being operated on.     

Prompting a consumer behavior for pollution control

A field application of behavior modification studied the relative effectiveness of different prompting procedures for increasing the probability that customers entering a grocery store would select their soft drinks in returnable rather than nonreturnable containers. Six different 2-hr experimental conditions during which bottle purchases were recorded were (1) No Prompt (i.e., control), (2) one student gave incoming customers a handbill urging the purchase of soft drinks in returnable bottles, (3) distribution of the handbill by one student and public charting of each customer's bottle purchases by another student, (4) handbill distribution and charting by a five-member group, (5) handbills distributed and purchases charted by three females. The variant prompting techniques were equally effective, and in general increased the percentage of returnable-bottle customers by an average of 25%.     

Semantic cueing in recognition and recall

This study is concerned with the recognition and recall of semantically ambiguous words (homographs) presented in a semantic context. Changing the semantic context lowered test scores relative to test conditions both without context and with the same semantic context. This effect was found to obtain in both recognition and recall. The results are discussed in terms of the role of retrieval in recognition and recall.     

Agraphia selective for written spelling : An experimental case study

A 56-year-old right-handed man suffered left posterior parieto-temporal ischemia leading to mild aphasia, Gerstmann syndrome, and a novel variant of agraphia. This variant compromised his spelling by writing and manual sorting of letters more than his oral spelling. The dissociation was experimentally documented. It principally involved the intrusion of extraneous letters, independent of input modality. It did not generalized to numbers or an arbitrary code. Postoperatively the disability disappeared. It was concluded that the programs which translate letter choice into visual terms for purposes of written (as distinct from oral) spelling either originate or are transmitted in a distinct cerebral location. This location, which may be the left posterior parasagittal parietal area, can be selectively impaired by a focal lesion.