Performance on phonological and grammatical awareness metalinguistic tasks by children who stutter and their fluent peers

This study was undertaken to examine the performance of 23 children who stutter (CWS) and 23 children who do not stutter (CWNS) on three metalinguistic tasks. These included two phonological awareness assessment procedures (The Lindamood Auditory Conceptualization Test (LAC) and a Phoneme Reversal Task) and one modified Grammar Judgments Task where syntactic and semantic appropriateness of sentences was evaluated. Differences between groups were significant for the grammar judgment task, where CWNS outperformed CWS in judging syntactically and semantically anomalous sentences. Group differences were not significant for the phonological awareness tasks. The results underscore the importance of examining metalinguistic abilities of CWS through a variety of tasks. EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES: The reader will learn about and be able to: (1) recognize the relevance of examining metalinguistic abilities within the context of research on language-stuttering dynamics; and (2) identify measures of metalinguistic abilities that can be used to compare the performances of CWS and CWNS.     

Girls' use of defense mechanisms following peer rejection

This study explores the relation between girls' social adjustment and their use of defense mechanisms. We recruited girls representing four sociometric status classifications (rejected, neglected, average, and popular), and assessed their use of defense mechanisms both before and after encountering a peer rejection experience in the laboratory. We hypothesized that increasing degrees of social maladjustment would be associated with higher levels of defense use, particularly after encountering a rejection experience. Our results supported these hypotheses. There was a significant negative relationship between social adjustment and defense use, both prior to and immediately following the rejection experience. Categorical analyses revealed that rejected and neglected girls used more defenses following the rejection experience than did popular and average girls.     

What does visual agnosia tell us about perceptual organization and its relationship to object perception?

The authors studied 2 patients, S.M. and R.N., to examine perceptual organization and its relationship to object recognition. Both patients had normal, low-level vision and performed simple grouping operations normally but were unable to apprehend a multielement stimulus as a whole. R.N. failed to derive global structure even under optimal stimulus conditions, was less sensitive to grouping by closure, and was more impaired in object recognition than S.M. These findings suggest that perceptual organization involves a multiplicity of processes, some of which are simpler and are instantiated in lower order areas of visual cortex (e.g., collinearity). Other processes are more complex and rely on higher order visual areas (e.g., closure and shape formation). The failure to exploit these latter configural processes adversely affects object recognition.     

Constructing knowledge. The role of graphs and tables in hard and soft psychology

Because graphs provide a compact, rhetorically powerful way of representing research findings, recent theories of science have postulated their use as a distinguishing feature of science. Studies have shown that the use of graphs in journal articles correlates highly with the hardness of scientific fields, both across disciplines and across sub-fields of psychology. In contrast, the use of tables and inferential statistics in psychology is inversely related to subfield hardness, suggesting that the relationship between hardness and graph use is not attributable to differences in the use of quantitative data in subfields or their commitment to empiricism. Enhanced "graphicacy" among psychologists could contribute to the progress of psychological science by providing alternatives to significance testing and by facilitating communication across subfields.     

Psychology without p values. Data analysis at the turn of the 19th century

Although the fledgling psychology of 100 years ago was assertively empirical, there were no inferential statistics to guide psychologists' data analyses. However, 19th-century developments had left psychology with a rich array of techniques for analyzing and presenting data, some of which remain underutilized today. These include comparisons across replications, within-subject designs, reanalysis of data, analyses of factorial designs, and especially the use of tables and graphs. As the merits of hypothesis-testing statistics are debated at the turn of the 21st century, the history of data-handling practices can remind psychologists that there are many ways to overcome the current uniformity of statistical practice.     

Iconic Prosody in Story Reading

Recent experiments have shown that people iconically modulate their prosody corresponding with the meaning of their utterance (e.g., Shintel et al., 2006). This article reports findings from a story reading task that expands the investigation of iconic prosody to abstract meanings in addition to concrete ones. Participants read stories that contrasted along concrete and abstract semantic dimensions of speed (e.g., a fast drive, slow career progress) and size (e.g., a small grasshopper, an important contract). Participants read fast stories at a faster rate than slow stories, and big stories with a lower pitch than small stories. The effect of speed was distributed across the stories, including portions that were identical across stories, whereas the size effect was localized to size‐related words. Overall, these findings enrich the documentation of iconicity in spoken language and bear on our understanding of the relationship between gesture and speech.     

School Counselors' Ways of Knowing and Social Orientation in Relationship to Poverty Beliefs

The beliefs about poverty, ways of knowing, and social relationship orientation of 513 American School Counselor Association members were evaluated using canonical correlation analysis. Results indicated a relationship between the beliefs that poverty is caused by individuals' internal characteristics, connected knowing, and social hierarchies. A relationship also exists for school counselors who believe that poverty is caused by external factors, use a combination of connected and separate knowing, and embrace social equality.     

Discursive Construction of Political Categories and Moral Fields: God Versus Rights and Access in a Reproductive Health Legislative Debate

Using a discursive lens, we argue that politicians rhetorically construct categories, storylines, and moral fields. We further claim that such discursive products are action‐oriented toward gaining popular support in a public sphere that is politically fault lined along similar moral orders. As a case in point, we analyze speeches delivered during congressional voting on a Reproductive Health bill (RH bill). Employing a mixed methods strategy, we first implement a quantitative lexical analysis of frequently used words, followed by a qualitative detection of cohering storylines on both sides of the debate. Results show that oppositionists mark their speeches with a deployment of the word God, while bill supporters use the word access conspicuously. One storyline claims that The RH bill stands against God, while the other purports that The RH bill advocates rights and access. Although both storylines assert moral righteousness, they invoke two different moral orders backed by power blocs and the public at large. The God story appeals to a Catholic discourse and the moral order loudly supported by the politically powerful Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines. The rights/access narrative references a liberal morality frame maintained by social liberals and Philippine President Aquino. We end our paper by introducing the idea of an intrastate discursive lens to analyze moral fields constructed by politicians, oriented toward winning support from the public at large.     

Using a Constant Family in Role-Plays for Training MFTs

Marriage and Family Therapy training programs use role-plays and simulations to train their students in interviewing skills and in various therapeutic models. A review of literature shows that these training tools do not allow student-therapists to experience therapy beyond the first session. This article presents a modified version of the role-play, in which a constant family is used in preparing student-therapists for clinical work. This article describes a training scenario using the constant family role play and includes feedback from student-therapists. The authors present the benefits, limitations, and potential training considerations that can enhance use of the constant family role play.     

Role of Attention and Perceptual Grouping in Visual Statistical Learning

Statistical learning has been widely proposed as a mechanism by which observers learn to decompose complex sensory scenes. To determine how robust statistical learning is, we investigated the impact of attention and perceptual grouping on statistical learning of visual shapes. Observers were presented with stimuli containing two shapes that were either connected by a bar or unconnected. When observers were required to attend to both locations at which shapes were presented, the degree of statistical learning was unaffected by whether the shapes were connected or not. However, when observers were required to attend to just one of the shapes' locations, statistical learning was observed only when the shapes were connected. These results demonstrate that visual statistical learning is not just a passive process. It can be modulated by both attention and connectedness, and in natural scenes these factors may constrain the role of stimulus statistics in learning.