The French Lexicon Project: Lexical decision data for 38,840 French words and 38,840 pseudowords

The French Lexicon Project involved the collection of lexical decision data for 38,840 French words and the same number of nonwords. It was directly inspired by the English Lexicon Project (Balota et al., 2007) and produced very comparable frequency and word length effects. The present article describes the methods used to collect the data, reports analyses on the word frequency and the word length effects, and describes the Excel files that make the data freely available for research purposes. The word and pseudoword data from this article may be downloaded from http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.     

The Punishment Gap: Racial/Ethnic Comparisons in School Infractions by Objective and Subjective Definitions

This research examines the differences between ethnic groups when school infractions are subjective/objective. Using school discipline incident data, eight categories of infractions are analyzed: disobedience, violence, substance abuse, vandalism, theft, truancy, safety, and miscellaneous. Within these eight categories there are 32 specific infractions. Specific infractions were then classified as either subjective or objective by a committee. Population proportion criteria (PPC; minus or plus 10% of a group’s overall population) is used. Findings indicated that only black students exceeded the criteria with infractions having subjective definitions. All other groups only exceeded PPC with infractions having objective definitions.     

For HE tells me so: Techniques of neutralization applied to Christian domestic discipline

ABSTRACT

Christian Domestic Discipline (CDD) advocates wifely submission and male dominance through religiously justified punishment. Using publicly available anonymous testimonials and websites devoted to CDD this research examines how male heads of household, their female partners and the CDD community use techniques of neutralization to rationalize this practice. Our research shows how techniques of neutralization draw upon larger cultural norms, disseminated through organizations, and used in relationships to maintain hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity. In so doing we emphasize how the recreation of gender inequality is accomplished in relations of domination and subordination at the macro, meso, and micro levels of analysis. We find that hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity as a cultural ideal is embedded in institutions, in this case religion, promulgated by religious organizations (CDD and churches) and used as a resource in interaction in the formation of an identity as Christian that centers on the idea that men are in power and have control over women.     

"Perceptual scotomas": a functional account of motion-induced blindness

ABSTRACT— In motion-induced blindness (MIB), salient objects in full view can repeatedly fluctuate into and out of conscious awareness when superimposed onto certain global moving patterns. Here we suggest a new account of this striking phenomenon: Rather than being a failure of visual processing, MIB may be a functional product of the visual system's attempt to separate distal stimuli from artifacts of damage to the visual system itself. When a small object is invariant despite changes that are occurring to a global region of the surrounding visual field, the visual system may discount that stimulus as akin to a scotoma, and may thus expunge it from awareness. We describe three experiments demonstrating new phenomena predicted by this account and discuss how it can also explain several previous results.     

Category transfer in sequential causal learning: the unbroken mechanism hypothesis

The goal of the present set of studies is to explore the boundary conditions of category transfer in causal learning. Previous research has shown that people are capable of inducing categories based on causal learning input, and they often transfer these categories to new causal learning tasks. However, occasionally learners abandon the learned categories and induce new ones. Whereas previously it has been argued that transfer is only observed with essentialist categories in which the hidden properties are causally relevant for the target effect in the transfer relation, we here propose an alternative explanation, the unbroken mechanism hypothesis. This hypothesis claims that categories are transferred from a previously learned causal relation to a new causal relation when learners assume a causal mechanism linking the two relations that is continuous and unbroken. The findings of two causal learning experiments support the unbroken mechanism hypothesis.