Phonological information in immediate and delayed sentence recall

Potter and Lombardi (1990) state in their conceptual regeneration hypothesis that immediate sentence recall is only based on conceptual and lexical information; phonological information does not contribute. As experimental evidence for this hypothesis, they reported that if a sentence is followed by a word list that included a lure word similar to one of the content words of the sentence (target word), the lure word frequently intrudes into sentence recall. We demonstrated that Potter and Lombardi did not observe any influence of phonological information because list presentation followed sentence presentation, and phonological information was discarded. We observed that phonological information influenced the intrusion rate if recall was not delayed by the subsequent presentation of a word list. With immediate recall, the lure intrusion effect disappeared in auditorily presented sentences. This shows that, if available, phonological information contributes to sentence recall.     

Threat perception distortions and psychopathological symptoms in typically developing children

This study examined relationships between symptoms of anxiety, aggression, and depression, on the one hand, and threat perception distortions, on the other hand. A large sample of typically developing children aged 8–12 years (N=157) were interviewed with an instrument for assessing the main types of childhood psychopathology, and were then exposed to a series of ambiguous vignettes in order to measure threat perception. As all measures were obtained twice, some 8 weeks apart, it was also possible to study prospective relationships between threat perception distortions and psychopathological symptoms. Results showed that threat perception was associated with a broad range of psychopathological symptoms, although the connection with anxiety was the most robust. No support was found for the notion that threat perception scores were predictive for the persistence of psychopathological symptoms during the 8‐weeks period. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.