Testing the concurrent and predictive relations among articulation accuracy, speech perception, and phoneme awareness

The relations among articulation accuracy, speech perception, and phoneme awareness were examined in a sample of 97 typically developing children ages 48 to 66 months. Of these 97 children, 46 were assessed twice at ages 4 and 5 years. Children completed two tasks for each of the three skills, assessing these abilities for the target phoneme /r/ and the control phoneme /m/ in the word-initial position. Concurrent analyses revealed that phoneme-specific relations existed among articulation, awareness, and perception. Articulation accuracy of /r/ predicted speech perception and phoneme awareness for /r/ after controlling for age, vocabulary, letter-word knowledge, and speech perception or phoneme awareness for the control phoneme /m/. The longitudinal analyses confirmed the pattern of relations. The findings are consistent with a model whereby children's articulation accuracy affects preexisting differences in phonological representations and, consequently, affects how children perceive, discriminate, and manipulate speech sounds.     

Two-way interactions between music and language: Evidence from priming recognition of tune and lyrics in familiar songs

A priming technique was employed to study the relations between melody and lyrics in song memory. The procedure involved the auditory presentation of a prime and a target taken from the same song, or from unrelated but equally familiar songs. To promote access to memory representations of songs, we varied the format of primes and targets, which were either spoken or sung, using the syllable /1a/. In each of the four experiments, a prime taken from the same song as the target facilitated target recognition, independently of the format in which it occurred. The facilitation effects were also found in conditions close to masked priming because prime recognizability was very low, as assessed in Experiment 1 by d' measures. Above all, backward priming effects were observed in Experiments 2, 3, and 4, where song order was reversed in the prime-target sequence, suggesting that words and tones of songs are not connected by strict temporal contingencies. Rather, the results indicate that, in song memory, text and tune are related by tight connections that are bidirectional and automatically activated by relatively abstract information. Rhythmic similarity between linguistic stress pattern and musical meter might account for these priming effects.     

The Self-in-Relation Theory and Women for Sobriety: Female-Specific Theory and Mutual Help Group for Chemically Dependent Women

This article discusses the self-in-relation theory as it applies to chemically dependent women. The theory provides an alternative way of understanding and viewing chemically dependent women. The self-in-relation model (or theory) states that relationships are extremely important in women's psychological development and functioning and that women's connection with others is fundamental to self-concept. Women for Sobriety, a mutual help group for chemically dependent women, offers an alternative way of supporting women in trying to achieve recovery, and this is also discussed in a relational context.     

Encoding and Maintaining Reference in Oral Discourse

This study deals with information management and reference encoding modes in oral discourse production. Three potentially influential factors were the distance between the first occurrence of an item and its later occurrences, a topic change that takes the focus off that item, and the span of the conceptual information available for verbalization. French-speaking adult subjects were asked to tell stories from comic strips to a listener who was unfamiliar with them. The frames in each strip were presented simultaneously or in succession. Four versions were generated for each comic strip: a given version was either short (three frames) or long (eight frames), and either did or did not have a topic change. The results showed that the target character was usually marked as a given, regardless of the version. This was more often true, however, when the topic did not change. When the character was treated as a given, referent accessibility marking was dependent on (1) topic change alone when the frames were presented simultaneously, and (2) topic change and comic strip length when the frames were presented in succession. The discussion analyzes the results in terms of the allocation of cognitive resources to maintaining coreference and to assisting addressees in their processing.     

Cognitive factors and adaptation to auditory-visual discordance

Subjects pointed blindfolded at auditory targets before and after exposure to spatial conflict between the sound of a percussion instrument and images on a TV screen. Four experimental conditions were obtained by combining two levels of realism, in which sound was paired with either the image of the hands playing the instrument or with synchronously modulated light, and two levels of suggestion, in which a dummy loudspeaker from which the subjects had been told the sound would come was placed either in front of the TV screen or on top of the actual hidden loudspeaker. Adaptation occurred in all four conditions, but no difference between them was detected. These results confirm and extend the previous finding that auditory adaptation, unlike the impression of fusion (ventriloquism), is little influenced by cognitive factors.     

Personality and the psychology of learning

The aim of this article is to examine the interaction between personality and learning in order to find clues to the role that a student's personality plays in the process of adaptation and learning. To scrutinize such an expansive area requires that I cover a lot of territory in a small space, condensing many components and processes. Wherever meaningful, I will direct readers to sources that provide greater depth of coverage. The article is divided into four sections. The first section covers personality theories and models based on a structure-oriented view of personality. The second section addresses personality from a process-oriented viewpoint. Current research findings that relate personality characteristics explicitly to learning processes, strategy use, and metacognition are briefly reviewed. The third section goes one step further and discusses second-generation process-oriented personality models. These models are applied to student behaviour during actual learning episodes. A general outline of my model of the adaptable learning process is given and it is argued that the quality of subjective experience is not just an outcome of personality characteristics. It is influenced by student * situation transactions. In the fourth section, conclusions and suggestions for future research are given.     

Morphological knowledge as revealed in children's spelling accuracy and reports of spelling strategies

The goal of the current research was to assess whether children can make strategic use of morphological relations among words to spell. French-speaking children in Grade 4 spelled three word types: (a) phonological words that had regular phoneme-grapheme correspondences, (b) morphological words that had silent consonant endings for which a derivative revealed the silent ending, and (c) lexical words that had silent consonant endings for which no familiar derivative revealed the ending. Children were also asked to provide immediate retrospective reports of the strategies used to spell each word. Two experiments (Ns = 46 and 39) were conducted. As expected, children in Grade 4 spelled phonological words more accurately than they did words with silent consonant endings. In addition, children spelled morphological words more accurately than they did lexical words. Reports of using retrieval were associated with accurate performance across word types. Importantly, reports of using morphological strategies to spell morphological words were associated with a similar level of accuracy, as were reports of using retrieval. Even though children reported using a phonological strategy frequently across all word types, this strategy was associated with accurate performance only for spelling phonological words. Experiment 2 replicated the results of Experiment 1 with another set of stimuli and also showed that children's morphological awareness predicted their spelling accuracy for morphological words as well as the reported frequency of morphological strategy use. In sum, the findings revealed that most children showed evidence of adaptive strategy use.     

Introduction: New Directions in Educational Practice

Ce texte presente I'ensemble des articles d'un numero special sur la psychopedagogie. Les auteurs vanes y defendent le point-de-vue que les modtles d'enseignement qui sont couramment utilises dans les systtmes educatifs devraient être reconsiderks de fason drastique, parce qu'ils ont survtcu A leur utilite. Neanmoins, ils sont optimistes sur le fait que la psychopkdagogie est bien placke pour conseiller enseignants, tducateurs et politiciens dans la course A entreprendre. Je poserai en premier lieu la question: pourquoi un changement drastique? Ensuite, je presenterai les differentes notions Cmises par les auteurs et defendrai I'idee que I'acquisition du savoir est un processus graduel qui coQte des efforts et fait jaillir des emotions. Pour conclure je ferai le point sur les nouvelles directions de recherche et de pratique pkdagogique.
This article introduces the papers in the special issue on educational psycho-logy. The various contributions defend the view that instruction models that are currently in vogue in education should undergo drastic changes, because they have outlived their usefulness. Nevertheiess, they are oitimistic that educational psychology is in a position to advise teachers, educators, and policy makers about the course of action that should be taken. I will start with the question: Why is drastic change in order? Next, I will introduce the ideas presented by the various authors, and defend the view that knowledge acquisition is a gradual process that costs effort and elicits emotions. In the concluding section, I will point to some new directions for research and for educational practice.     

THE EFFECTS OF CHILDHOOD SEXUAL MESSAGES ON AFRICAN-AMERICAN AND WHITE WOMEN'S ADOLESCENT SEXUAL BEHAVIOR

To clarify the relationship between sexual communication and sexual behavior, multiple components of sexual messages recalled from child hood were examined in a community sample of 248 African-American and White women. Respondents were matched on a predesignated set of demographic variables and were interviewed using the Wyatt Sexual History Questionnaire. We anticipated that women's recollections of messages from parents and television would differ both individually and across ethnicity, and that messages recalled from parents would be multidimensional, varying in tone (positive vs. negative) across time (childhood vs. adolescence) and form (verbal vs. nonverbal). We also expected that the presence and tone of specific types of messages re called would be associated with risk-related sexual behavior. Results confirmed predictions concerning differential interpretations of messages, and ethnicity emerged as a strong mediating variable. The implications of the specific types of parental messages influencing behavior are discussed.