The differential validity of hyperactivity/attention deficits and conduct problems among mentally retarded children

The independence of hyperactivity, attention deficits, and conduct problems among mentally retarded children was addressed using factors of the Conners' Teacher Rating Scale-39 (CTRS-39) and the more recently developed IOWA Conners' inattention/overactivity (IO) and aggression (A) subscales. CTRS-39 ratings were obtained for children of normal intelligence and for mentally retarded children. Differences between the groups were examined as were intercorrelations of the Conners' factors and IOWA subscales. Conduct problems proved to be less strongly associated with hyperactivity and attention deficits among mentally retarded children compared to children of normal intelligence. However, attention problems and conduct problems may be associated with mental retardation in general. Implications of these data and CTRS scoring system recommendations for mentally retarded children are discussed.     

Steady as a rock: Does the steady state represent cognitive fossilization?

A study was performed in which data were obtained from adults and children with respect to their control of the inflexional morphology of the Spanish verbal system. Results indicate that adults have inferior knowledge of the paradigm compared to the children. Based on the types of errors committed, it is argued that linguistic knowledge may be more an ability to analogize correctly than to follow (unconscious) rules. Implications for GB (Government and Binding) theory and first and second language acquisition are discussed.     

Lesbian,gay, and bisexual youth in community settings: Personal challenges and mental health problems

Studied 194 lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth aged 21 and younger who attended programs in 14 community centers to determine the personal challenges they face due to their sexual orientation and their responses to these stresses. First awareness of sexual orientation typically occurred at age 10, but disclosure to another person did not occur until about age 16. There was much variability in sexual behavior, and many youths reported both same-sex and opposite-sex sexual experiences. Although most had told at least one family member about their sexual orientation, there remained much concern about family reactions. Suicide attempts were acknowledged by 42% of the sample. Attempters significantly differed from nonattempters on several milestones of sexual orientation development, social aspects of sexual orientation, parents' knowledge of sexual orientation, and mental health problems. The following organizations participated in this project and are thanked for their assistance: Affirmations (Detroit), the Atlanta Gay Center, Baltimore Gay and Lesbian Community Center, Boston Alliance of Gay and Lesbian Youth, Gay Alternative Youth (Pittsburgh), the Gay and Lesbian Youth Association of Dallas, Gay Youth Alliance — San Diego, the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center of Los Angeles, Horizons Community Services (Chicago), the Indianapolis Youth Group, the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center of Cleveland, Lavender Youth Recreation and Information Center (San Francisco), Outright (Denver), and Sexual Minority Youth Assistance League (Washington, DC). The following individuals associated with these groups are gratefully thanked for their help: Danny Barutta, Adriene Corbin, Tom Eversole, Chris Gonzalez, Bill Gripp, Rory Lopez, Phil Rector, Jamie Schield, Cheryl Schwartz, Jan Stephenson, Sterling Stowell, Amy Vitro, and Aubrey Wertheim. Gene Thomas is thanked for helping with data collection, as are Michael LaFlam, Patrick McNamara, and Mark Shiner, who processed the surveys. We also thank Rainer Silbereisen for his comments. This project was supported by funds from the Center for the Study of Child and Adolescent Development of the College of Health and Human Development at Pennsylvania State University.     

Sex Roles, Interpersonal Control, and Depression: Who Can Get Their Way?

This study is one of a series of investigations examining the contribution of sex roles to the development of depression within a learned helplessness framework. Utilizing 143 pairs of undergraduate female participants, the present study explored subjects′ abilities to gain and maintain control in an interpersonal context. Interpersonal control was operationalized as successful persuasion in a two-person discussion task, wherein one participant had hidden instructions to be maximally persuasive in discussing a questionnaire about social behavior. The results indicated that less successful persuasion was associated with increases in depressed mood. Furthermore, women with high masculinity and low femininity were able to gain interpersonal control regardless of the sex role of their partner. The results also suggested that high femininity is associated both with giving up control in interpersonal tasks and with increases in depressed mood when one is faced with the task of exerting interpersonal control. The findings were interpreted in terms of the importance of sex role characteristics in learned helplessness and depression.     

The Sum and Substance of It: The Appreciation of Mass and Count Quantifiers in Parkinson′s Disease

We performed three experiments in order to determine whether patients with Parkinson′s disease (PD) have a sentence comprehension impairment. In the first experiment, we found that nondemented PD patients were impaired at matching a short sentence containing a mass or count quantifier (e.g., "Point to the jar with many") with one of four pictures. Patients erred by pointing to the incorrect mass or count type of substance, but pointed correctly to the large or small amount of a substance in the picture. In the second experiment, we asked the same PD patients to judge short sentences containing mass or count nouns modified by mass or count adjectives (e.g., *"The glass contains many milk"). PD patients were significantly impaired at detecting errors in the agreement between a noun and a quantifying adjective and errors in the appropriate use of the plural associated with a noun. A sentence completion task was performed in order to determine whether patients impaired on both sentence-picture matching and sentence judgment tasks are also compromised in their expression of quantifiers. Some patients impaired on both tasks also had difficulty expressing quantifiers, and it is these patients who may have difficulty performing grammatical computations. Other patients were selectively impaired in their sentence-picture matching or their sentence judgments, suggesting a performance deficit concerned with a particular task. We conclude that sentence comprehension impairments in PD are multifactorial in nature.     

The effect of maternal depression on maternal ratings of child behavior

There have been continuing concerns about the extent to which maternal depression may influence maternal reports of child behavior. To examine this issue, a series of structural equation models of the relationships between maternal depression and errors in maternal reports of child behavior was proposed and tested. These models assumed that (a) maternal depression was unrelated to maternal reporting behavior; (b) maternal depression causally influenced maternal reporting accuracy; (c) maternal depression was correlated with reporting accuracy. These models were fitted to data on maternal depression and multipleinformant (mother, teacher, child) reports of conduct disorder and attention deficit behaviors for a birth cohort of 12 and 13yearold New Zealand children. The results of model fitting suggested the presence of small to moderate correlations (@#@ r=+.13 to+.40) between maternal depression and maternal reporting errors, indicating the presence of a tendency for increasing maternal depression to be associated with a tendency for mothers to overreport child behavior problems. However, independently of any effects of maternal depression on maternal reporting errors there was evidence of small but significant associations (r=.10 to .17; p<.05)between maternal depression and child conduct disorder and attention deficit behaviors.This research was funded by grants from the Health Research Council of New Zealand.     

The use of partial temporal information in dating personal events

Memory & Cognition - The use of different types of partial temporal information is shown to affect dating accuracy and the distribution of errors in event dating. Several different types of...     

Variations on incremental interpretation

The strict competence hypothesis has sparked a small dialogue among several researchers attempting to understand its ramifications for human sentence processing and incremental interpretation in particular. In this paper, we review the dialogue, reconstructing the arguments in an attempt to make them more uniform and crisp, and provide our own analyses of certain of the issues that arise. We argue that strict competence, because it requires a synchronous computation mechanism, may actually lead to more complex, rather than simpler, models of incremental interpretation. Asynchronous computation, which is arguably both psychologically more plausible and conceptually more basic, allows for incremental interpretation to fall out naturally, without additional machinery for interpreting partial constituents. We show that this is true regardless of whether the presumed interpretation mechanism is top-down or bottom-up, contra previous conclusions in the literature, and propose a particular implementation of some of these ideas using a novel representation based on tree-adjoining grammars.The research in this paper was supported in part by grant IRI-9157996 from the National Science Foundation to the first author. The authors would like to thank Fernando Pereira, Edward Stabler, and Mark Steedman for discussions on the topic of this paper and for their comments on previous drafts.