Quality and Correlates of Parental Attachment Among Late Adolescents

The value of attachment theory (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978) in describing parental relationships of late adolescents (N = 139) in trade and technical school programs was explored. Overall, students described positive attachments to parents, viewing them both as facilitating their autonomy and as being available as a source of emotional support. Male students who were attending schools farther away from their parents' homes described their parental attachments more positively than did students who attended schools closer to their parents' homes. Parental facilitation of autonomy was associated with self-reports of assertion for female students.     

Text Comprehension Training for Disabled Readers: An Evaluation of Reciprocal Teaching and Text Analysis Training Programs

Forty-six reading disabled adolescents were randomly assigned to one of three 25-hr instructional programs. Two programs provided training in expository text comprehension, and a third offered training in academic problem solving and organizational and study skills (an alternative treatment control). One reading comprehension program was designed to remediate a deficient knowledge base, forcing disabled readers to elaborate and further process new text knowledge, focusing on both specific informational content in a text and knowledge of text structure per se. The second program was patterned after the Palincsar and Brown (1984) reciprocal teaching techniques and focused on training four text comprehension strategies used by skilled comprehenders. Both the “knowledge-base” and the “strategy” training approaches were associated with significant improvement in disabled readers' comprehension skills, although training effects did not generalize across all aspects of reading comprehension performance. Strategy-trained readers applied the trained strategies with equal success on instructed and uninstructed text materials, providing strong evidence of transfer of learning. Knowledge-base readers also demonstrated successful transfer of specifically trained procedures (semantic mapping, text analysis) to unfamiliar text. In both programs, the best outcomes were obtained when specific strategies and operations were targeted for training.     

Effects of visual familiarity on “same” and “different” decision processes

An experiment was conducted in which subjects matched upper and lower case versions of well-known abbreviations, such as BBC and etc, and meaningless controls. “Same” RT showed a familiarity effect for upper case versions of abbreviations such as BBC and GPO, but not for the lower case versions bbc and gpo. The converse did not occur for abbreviations such as etc, which were thought to occur most frequently in lower case. The “different” RT was inhibited by familiarity, with pairs such as IBM GPO being classified less rapidly than their lower case versions or controls. These effects occurred for subjects instructed to report “No” for “same” displays and “Yes” for “different” displays as well as for subjects given a conventional decision-report assignment. Some implications of these results for an account of the manner in which familiarity affects graphemic comparison processes are considered.     

Effect of situational factors on the self-attributions of females and males

The simultaneous effects of the sex-role appropriateness of the task and the presence or absence of competition upon the attributions made by males and females were studied with 192 college students. Contrary to predictions, males rated themselves as luckier than females in the competitive conditions. However, as predicted, females made fewer self-serving attributions for the male than the female task.     

Language acquisition following hemidecortication: Linguistic superiority of the left over the right hemisphere

The language development of three 9- and 10-year-old children possessing only a right or a left hemisphere was studied. Surgical removal of one brain half antedated the beginning of speech, so each child has acquired speech and language with only one hemisphere. Different configurations of language skill have developed in the two isolated hemispheres: phonemic and semantic abilities are similarly developed but syntactic competence has been asymmetrically acquired. In relation to the left, the right brain half is deficient in understanding auditory language, especially when meaning is conveyed by syntactic diversity; detecting and correcting errors of surface syntactic structure; repeating stylistically permuted sentences; producing tag questions which match the grammatical features of a heard statement; determining sentence implication; integrating semantic and syntactic information to replace missing pronouns; and performing judgments of word interrelationships in sentences. Language development in an isolated right hemisphere, even under seizure-free conditions, results in incomplete language acquisition.