Television viewing and the learning of sex-role stereotypes

This study was designed to determine the relationship between the amount of time children spend watching television and their knowledge of adult sex-role stereotypes. Males and females in grades 1, 3, 5, and 7 who were classified as heavy television viewers (25 or more hours per week) or light viewers (10 or less hours per week) both at the time of the study and 15 months previously were administered the Sex Stereotype Measure, an instrument designed to determine children's awareness of stereotyped sex-role perceptions held by adults. Heavy viewers were found to have more stereotyped perceptions than light viewers. A significant interaction effect indicated that among low viewers the perception of male stereotypes steadily declines with increasing age; among heavy viewers, stereotypic responses to male items are maintained with increasing age. No comparable interaction effect was obtained for perception of female stereotypes. The role of interaction with live models in breaking down stereotypic perceptions of males is discussed.A modified version of this paper was presented at the meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Denver, April 1975.     

Rapid processing of the meaning of sentences

It has been shown (Fischler & Bloom, 1979) that sentence contexts facilitate a lexical decision task for words that are highly likely sentence completions and inhibit the decision for words that are semantically anomalous sentence completions. In the present experiment, the sentence contexts were presented 1 word at a time, at rates from 4 to 28 words/sec. The facilitation for words that were likely sentence completions was marginal at the slower rates and absent at higher rates. In contrast, the inhibitory effects of semantic anomaly were apparent at all presentation rates. Several analyses suggested that the sentence contexts were becoming ineffective at the very highest presentation rates, but the high rates at which the sentence contexts still affected word recognition were taken as evidence that semantic information accrues at an early stage of sentence processing. Implications for Posner and Snyder’s (1975) theory of attention and for models of reading were discussed.     

Graphemic analysis underlying literacy

Three experiments are described that studied the role of detailed graphemic analysis upon the ability to read text. College students named letters in various approximations to English, with frequency of individual letters constant. Findings were that later skill at reading varied with the order of approximation to English of the letters that were named, that the spacing of the letter sequences was important to this result, and, finally, that the influence of specific visual practice extended to the typeface on which the naming and reading were carried out. Hence, rather than a letter-by-letter process or its opposite, a wholly semantic analysis, reading is shown to be intimately dependent upon details of visual analysis of patterns or letter sequences.     

Prevalence and constituency of behavioral disturbance taxonomies in the regular school population

The Bristol Social Adjustment Guides (BSAG) are widely employed in research and in the identification of maladjustment in school children. The BSAG provides scores on several indices including five homogeneous behavioral syndromes and one associated grouping. Field experience suggests that maladjusted children frequently manifest problems in more than one syndrome. In order to discover what patterns of syndromic profiles may commonly exist among children, the data for the most recent revision of the BSAG are reanalyzed. The syndrome scores for all 2,527 5- to 15-year-old regular school children in the standardization sample were grouped into similar profile patterns by hierarchical cluster analysis. Sixteen homogeneous syndromic profile types emerged. The resultant profile types were described on the basis of their component behaviors and examined for membership trends by sex and age groups. Multiple syndromic profiles represented 60% of all maladjusted children.The author wishes to thank Dr. Denis H. Stott, former professor of psychology at the University of Guelph, Ontario, for kindly making the Bristol Social Adjustment Guides data available for this study.     

Very rapid forgetting

Human forgetting can be much more rapid than previous experiments have indicated. Subjects who do not expect a test after a filled retention interval can rarely recall three consonants correctly after 2 sec of distraction. If there are two kinds of memory, primary and secondary, the present technique provides a purer method of studying forgetting from primary memory.     

Completion norms for 329 sentence contexts

Completion responses were collected for two sets of sentence contexts, which were designed to produce different distributions of probabilities for the primary responses. The subject population consisted of undergraduate college students. For each context, responses and their respective probability of occurrence are listed, and an index of the primary responses is provided. It is hoped that these normative materials will facilitate comparison among future studies of the effects of sentence contexts on word processing.     

Auditory processing of brain-damaged adults under competitive listening conditions

Right CVAs, mild left CVAs, and non-brain-damaged adults received the Token Test under three conditions: quiet, white noise, and speech babble. Left CVAs performed most poorly of all groups in all conditions experiencing difficulty with subtests III, IV, and V. Right CVAs were inferior to controls on each of these three subtests in the speech babble condition only. Thus, right CVA difficulty with both memory and syntactic tasks was demonstrated in speech babble. These results are explained by the hypothesis that both hemispheres are necessary to process auditory information under complex listening conditions. Total brain capacity of right CVA patients may be overloaded if either memory load or linguistic complexity is increased in the presence of certain types of listening competition.     

Memory comparison time for complex digit stimuli: The effect of number length

Woodworth (1938) reported that naming latency increased linearly with the number of digits per number (number length). In the present study, the Sternberg memory scanning paradigm was utilized to investigate this effect. It was found that the slope of the memory scanning function increased linearly with number length: memory scanning time was 40 msec for one-digit numbers, 70 msec for two-digit numbers and 101 msec for 3 digit numbers. The intercepts of the memory scanning functions did not differ for the three types of numbers. Thus the increase in latency may be due to the memory comparison stage of processing. The data suggest that a memory comparison operation occurs for each digit position of the complex memory items composed of more than one digit.     

Effect of compatibility of S-R mapping on reactions toward the stimulus source

This research was concerned with separating the effects of three varieties of S-R compatibility: reactions toward the stimulus source, compatibility of S-R mapping, and display-control arrangement correspondence. In experiments 1 and 2, subjects pressed a green or red key located on the left and right in response to the onset of a green or red stimulus presented in a left or right window. Half of the subjects pressed the key which corresponded to the color of the stimulus (compatible S-R mapping) while the other half pressed the alternate colored key (incompatible S-R mapping). In the compatible mapping task, reactions were faster when location of stimulus and response corresponded than when they did not while, in the incompatible task, reactions were faster when location of stimulus and response did not correspond. This apparent reversal in the tendency to react toward the stimulus source was attributed to display- control arrangement correspondence rather than to logical recoding of the directional cue. Experiment 3 established that faster reactions toward the stimulus source occured only under compatible mapping instructions.