Role of relationship context in influencing college students' responsiveness to HIV prevention videos.

This research examined the effectiveness of different HIV prevention videos for students as a function of whether they were in a dating relationship. Two hundred two college students completed pretest measures and were randomly assigned to watch one of three 42-min videos (communication skills, technical skills, combined skills). Posttest and 3-month follow-up data indicated that receiving the technical skills video was associated with greater self-efficacy for condom use across several different dimensions. However, students who received the combined skills video and were not currently in a dating relationship had the greatest proportion of protected acts of intercourse. These findings suggest that video-based interventions can be an effective way of decreasing risky sexual behavior, and that HIV prevention messages that focus on both technical and communication skills are the most successful in leading to behavioral change.     

Working Memory in the Acquisition of Vocabulary and Syntax: Putting Language in Good Order

This paper argues that working memory is heavily involved in language acquisition as (a) a major part of language learning is the learning of sequences, (b) working memory allows short-term maintenance of sequence information, and (c) short-term rehearsal of sequences promotes the consolidation of long-term memories of language sequences. It first reviews evidence supporting this position. Next it presents an experiment that demonstrates that subjects encouraged to rehearse foreign language (FL) utterances are better than both silent controls and subjects who are prevented from rehearsal by articulatory suppression at (a) learning to comprehend and translate FL words and phrases, (b) explicit metalinguistic knowledge of the detailed content of grammatical regularities, (c) acquisition of the FL forms of words and phrases, (d) accuracy in FL pronunciation, and (e) some aspects of productive (but not receptive) grammatical fluency and accuracy. Finally, it describes possible mechanisms underlying these effects.