The genesis of reading ability: What helps children learn letter-sound correspondences?

Knowledge of letter-sound correspondences underpins successful reading acquisition, and yet little is known about how young children acquire this knowledge and what prior information they bring to the learning process. In this study, we used an experimental training design to examine whether either prior letter awareness or prior phonemic awareness directly assists preliterate children in subsequently learning letter-sound correspondences. Here 76 preschoolers received 6 weeks of training in either letter awareness, phonemic awareness, or control tasks and then received a further 6 weeks of training in either letter-sound correspondences or control tasks. There was limited evidence that prior training in either phoneme or letter awareness directly assisted learning of letter-sound correspondences, although phonemically trained children appeared to show some advantage on recognition tasks. Overall, the data suggest that there is little value in training preschoolers in either letter forms or sounds in isolation in advance of providing instruction on the links between the two.     

Self-esteem depends on the beholder: Effects of a subtle social value cue

The idea that self-esteem functions as a gauge or “sociometer” of social value [Leary, M. R., Baumeister, R. F. (2000). The nature and function of self-esteem: Sociometer theory. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 32, pp. 1-62). San Diego: Academic Press] is supported by research on direct social feedback. To examine if the sociometer model is relevant to more subtle social value cues, the implicit self-esteem of women was assessed a week after an interaction with an experimenter. Consistent with the sociometer model, Week 2 self-esteem depended on a subtle social value cue encountered during Week 1. When the Week 1 experimenter wore a t-shirt celebrating larger bodies (i.e., “everyBODY is beautiful”), heavier women had higher self-esteem than lighter women in Week 2. As hypothesized, this effect was relationship-specific, occurring only when the same experimenter administered Week 1 and 2 sessions.     

How predictable is spelling? Developing and testing metrics of phoneme-grapheme contingency

Prior research has purported to show that words with infrequent phoneme-grapheme correspondences are more difficult to spell than words with frequent phoneme-grapheme correspondences. Defining exactly what a phoneme-grapheme relationship is, however, is not necessarily straightforward. There are a number of different assumptions that can be made. In this study, we developed four metrics of sound-spelling contingency based on all monosyllabic English words, including those with complex morphology. These metrics differed in the extent to which they included assumptions about spelling. The psychological reality of these different metrics was evaluated against data from a large-scale study of skilled adult spelling and a nonword spelling experiment. The results suggest that when spelling, people are sensitive to positional information, morphological status, vowel type, and a number of more idiosyncratic constraints.     

Longitudinal effects of retirement on men's well-being and health

The National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience of Mature Men provided the opportunity to look at the effects of retirement on longitudinal well-being in a sample of men aged 54 to 69 in 1976. A conceptual model predicted that the decision to retire would affect subsequent well-being through the effect of retirement on such resources as income and health. The retirement decision in turn, was predicted to be a function of prior well-being and resources. Five categories of retirees were established: voluntary early age, voluntary normal age, health, mandatory, and discouraged. The analysis restricted the sample to men who were in the labor force at the 1976 interview, had not retired before that time, and who were interviewed in 1981. About half of the sample retired in the five years between interviews. Using several different measures of well-being, voluntary retirees were found to consider themselves better off than did other retirees or comparable men still working. Negative responses to retirement were concentrated among men who retired for health reasons, probably due to their continued ill-health. The effect of retirement on well-being seems highly related to the other circumstances (especially financial security and health) surrounding the individual, rather than to the event of retirement, per se.The research reported in this paper was conducted under a contract with the Employment and Training Administration, U. S. Department of Labor, under authority of the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act. Researchers undertaking such projects under government sponsorship are encouraged to express their own judgements. Interpretations stated in this report do not necessarily represent the official position or policy of the U. S. Department of Labor. This paper was presented to the 92nd annual convention of the American Psychological Association, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, August, 1984.     

Selective responsiveness of chronically ill children to assessments of depression.

Many investigators have noted that depression is a common symptom among pediatric cancer patients. However, prevalence rates vary widely across studies. This variation in prevalence rates may be due, in part, to selective reporting of patients based on measures used and environmental cues. In this study, we evaluated 50 chronically ill pediatric patients (19 cancer and 31 diabetic patients) for their use of selective reporting of depression. Factors in the 2 x 2 design were Intervention (disclosure videotape and cartoon videotape) and Examiner (familiar examiner and unfamiliar examiner). In the Intervention manipulation, subjects were shown either a videotape prompting the child that self-disclosure was appropriate or a tape of a cartoon (control condition). In the Examiner manipulation, subjects were administered the experimental measures by either a familiar (parent) or unfamiliar (research assistant) examiner. Dependent variables were the Children's Depression Inventory (CDI; Kovacs, 1981), the Depression scale of the Roberts Apperception Test for Children (RATC; McArthur & Roberts, 1982), and a depression measure taken from the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL; Achenbach & Edelbrock, 1983). As hypothesized, the Examiner x Intervention interaction revealed that children who did not view the disclosure videotape and who were tested by an unfamiliar examiner gave significantly lower self-reports of depression on the CDI than children in the other conditions. However, parent and child projective reports of depression did not vary as a function of experimental condition. The results are interpreted as selective responding on the part of pediatric patients. Limitations of assessing internal psychological states in children are discussed.     

A mere exposure effect for transformed three-dimensional objects: Effects of reflection, size, or color changes on affect and recognition

If the mere exposure effect is based on implicit memory, recognition and affect judgments should be dissociated by experimental variables in the same manner as other explicit and implicit measures. Consistent with results from recognition and picture naming or object decision priming tasks (e.g., Biederman & E. E. Cooper, 1991, 1992; L. A. Cooper, Schacter, Ballesteros, & Moore, 1992), the present research showed that recognition memory but not affective preference was impaired by reflection or size transformations of three-dimensional objects between study and test. Stimulus color transformations had no effect on either measure. These results indicate that representations that support recognition memory code spatial information about an object’s left-right orientation and size, whereas representations that underlie affective preference do not. Insensitivity to surface feature changes that do not alter object form appears to be a general characteristic of implicit memory measures, including the affective preference task.     

Monoaminergic mediation of female sexual behavior.

Lordotic behavior was facilitated in estrogen-primed female rats by direct application of progesterone or serotonergic or beta-adrenergic receptor blockers to specific telencephalic, anterior hypothalamic-medial preoptic, or posterior hypothalamic sites. Blockade of the alpha-adrenergic system was ineffective in facilitating lordosis, as was the application of the active drugs to control sites in the thalamus or basal ganglia. Female soliciting behavior was not evoked by any of the treatments. It is concluded that the lordotic behavior component of the female rat's estrous behavior pattern is inhibited by a specific central monoaminergic system that also responds to progesterone. Soliciting behavior appears to be mediated by systems that are anatomically, and possibly neurochemically, separable from those regulating lordosis.     

Iconic memory: A reply to Professor Holding

Professor Holding has argued that the partial report superiority normally taken as evidence for the existence of iconic memory might instead be due to cue anticipation or output interference. I have suggested that both of these alternative explanations are inconsistent with the finding that the partial report superiority diminishes rapidly with increasing cue delay. In addition, Sperling’s original partial report experiment was designed in such a way that cue anticipation could not have occurred; and both his results with selection by letter vs number and Averbach and Coriell’s bar-marker results indicate that output interference effects are absent or negligible in tachistoscopic experiments. Consequently, I have concluded that the partial report superiority, and especially its decline with increasing delay, remains as strong evidence in favor of the conventional view of iconic memory. Furthermore, if this view were wrong, there would remain no way of giving a satisfactory account of (a) Averbach and Coriell’s results, (b) “direct” investigations of visual persistence, or (c) integration and interruption effects in backward visual masking.