The effects of creative,expressive, and reflective writing on career learning: An explorative study

This study investigates whether creative, expressive, and reflective writing contributes to the formation of a work-life narrative that offers both meaning and direction among students in higher education. The content of writing done by students who participated in a two-day writing course at the start (or in preparation) of their work placements and of a control group who did not take part in the course were compared. Writing samples were analysed using the Linguistic Index Word Count program (Pennebaker, Booth, & Francis, 2007) and an instrument based on Dialogical Self Theory (Hermans & Hermans-Konopka, 2010). Results show writing promotes the development of career narratives.     

Planned Missing Data Designs for Research in Cognitive Development

Data collection can be the most time- and cost-intensive part of developmental research. This article describes some long-proposed but little-used research designs that have the potential to maximize data quality (reliability and validity) while minimizing research cost. In planned missing data designs, missing data are used strategically to improve the validity of data collection in one of two ways. Multiform designs allow one to increase the number of measures assessed on each participant without increasing each participant's burden. Two-method measurement designs allow one to reap the benefits of a cost-intensive gold-standard measure, using a larger sample size made possible by a rougher, cheaper measure. We explain each method using examples relevant to cognitive development research. With the use of analysis methods that produce unbiased results, planned missing data designs are an efficient way to manage cost, improve data quality, and reduce participant fatigue and practice effects.     

The processing of English regular inflections: Phonological cues to morphological structure

Previous studies suggest that different neural and functional mechanisms are involved in the analysis of irregular (caught) and regular (filled) past tense forms in English. In particular, the comprehension and production of regular forms is argued to require processes of morpho-phonological assembly and disassembly, analysing these forms into a stem plus an inflectional affix (e.g., {fill}+{-ed}), as opposed to irregular forms, which do not have an overt stem+affix structure and must be analysed as full forms [Marslen-Wilson, W. D., & Tyler, L. K. (1997). Dissociating types of mental computation. Nature, 387, 592-594; Marslen-Wilson, W. D., & Tyler, L. K. (1998). Rules, representations, and the English past tense. Trends in Cognitive Science, 2, 428-435]. On this account, any incoming string that shows the critical diagnostic properties of an inflected form - a final coronal consonant (/t/, /d/, /s/, /z/) that agrees in voicing with the preceding segment as in filled, mild, or nilled - will automatically trigger an attempt at segmentation. We report an auditory speeded judgment experiment which explored the contribution of these critical morpho-phonological properties (labelled as the English inflectional rhyme pattern) to the processing of English regular inflections. The results show that any stimulus that can be interpreted as ending in a regular inflection, whether it is a real inflection (filled-fill), a pseudo-inflection (mild-mile) or a phonologically matched nonword (nilled-nill), is responded to more slowly than an unambiguously monomorphemic stimulus pair (e.g., belt-bell). This morpho-phonological effect was independent of phonological effects of voicing and syllabicity. The findings are interpreted as evidence for a basic morpho-phonological parsing process that applies to all items with the criterial phonological properties.     

Toilet training for a young boy with pervasive developmental disorder

We employed a variation of the Azrin–Foxx ( 1971 ) procedure with a 3.5‐year‐old boy diagnosed with Pervasive Developmental Disability (PDD). Unique features of our design included tailoring to the in‐home environment, training without systematically increasing fluid intake, introduction under circumstances that facilitated generalization and transfer without special procedures, the elimination of some specialized equipment, and use of social and activity reinforcers. Training was successful and was reported to have generalized to the inclusive school environment. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Basic-level kinds and object persistence

In three experiments, we explored the basis of adults’ judgments of individual object persistence through transformation. Participants watched scenarios in which an object underwent a transformation into an object belonging to the same or a different basic-level kind. Participants were queried about the object’s persistence through the transformation as an individual (indexed by its proper name) and as a member of the original kind (indexed by its basic-level count noun in Experiments 1 and 2, or by its superordinate-level noun in Experiment 3). In all experiments, participants rated objects that were altered in a way that maintained basic-level kind to be less likely to retain their proper name than those that were altered in a way that changed basic-level kind. These findings suggest that shared basic-level kind membership serves as a dimension of similarity over which objects’ unique individual identities are highlighted. We discuss the implications of the results for existing theoretical accounts of adults’ judgments of individual object persistence.     

Programming experiments on a TERAK 8510/A microcomputer

In the course of bringing up one’s first experimental microcomputer system, certain standard problems occur that are trivial to the experienced programmer but are great blocks to the novice. In this spirit, some paradigms that were implemented on a TERAK 8510/a microcomputer, and the related problems, are described. Specific topics include some consideration of timing procedures for reaction time experiments and how to handle large text files on small floppy disk systems.