Sequential letter and word recognition in deaf and hearing subjects

To examine the processing of sequentially presented letters of familiar and nonsense words, especially among Ss of vastly differing experience on sequential tasks, three groups of Ss were tested on letters of words spelled sequentially on an alphanumeric display and on letters of words fingerspelled. These were a deaf group (N=33) with little or no hearing and who varied in their fingerspelling ability; a staff group (N=12) who taught fingerspelling and were highly proficient; and a hearing group (N=19). Of principal interest was the finding that the hearing Ss did better on nonsense letter recognition, while the deaf group did better on word recognition. Word length was important except to the staff Ss on fingerspelled words, which also suggests that concentration on fingerspelling proficiency forces attention to the whole word and not its component letters. Hearing Ss, who are the group faced with an unfamiliar task, seemed to attend to each letter and hence had more difficulty with recognition of the longer unit.     

Mechanisms of aural encoding: I. Distinctive features for consonants

To examine the importance of distinctive features that are used to encode consonants (following Wickelgren’s analysis) in an immediate recall task, sequences of 5 consonants, all paired with the vowel /a/ were constructed and presented aurally for recall. The middle three items in each sequence all had either the same place of articulation (front, middle, or back of the vocal apparatus), orthe same manner of articulation (voiced, unvoiced, or nasal), or were unrelated in either place or manner (control). It was shown that, in comparison with the control sequences, consonants imbedded among others articulated similarly were recalled less accurately, suggesting that these distinctive features are important in encoding and memory maintenance. A comparison of the 3 manner and 3 place features showed that the greatest difficulty in recall occurred for the similar manner sequences (especially voiced and unvoiced, implicating manner of articulation as the critical distinctive feature in aural encoding. Some discussion is also presented of a distinction between articulation and acoustic factors in encoding processes.     

A replication and extension of the Eriksen and Steffy (1964) experiment on short-term visual storage

Eriksen and Steffy (1964) were critical of short-term visual storage effects (STVS) because they were unable to find any evidence for them. In their first experiment they found instead great interference in performance over the same ISIs in which STVS is usually found. Their second experiment eliminated the interference by avoiding a bright second flash, but it still produced no evidence for STVS. Keele and Chase (1967) demonstrated that Eriksen and Steffy’s second condition failed to find STVS because the memory load was too small, and perhaps because the luminance was too low. However, the design of Eriksen and Steffy’s second experiment is not the one typically used to find STVS. Eriksen and Steffy’s first experiment was replicated here, and a second condition was added in which each S was also tested in a light adapted version. Interference was found in the former, as Eriksen and Steffy also found, but not in the latter. Little STVS was found in either of these conditions, presumably for reasons similar to those demonstrated by Keele and Chase.     

How much help do repeated presentations give to recognition processes?

A recent experiment by Haber and Hershenson (1965) had shown that in a recognition task one long look at a stimulus was always superior to two or more shorter looks summing to the same total presentation time. In order to explore this more fully and to account for opposite results in a different type of recognition task, as well as in a serial learning task, an improved replication of the earlier study was carried out using very short durations and single letters as stimuli. The same non-reciprocity was found, again strongly favoring duration over repetition as a determinant of clarity of a percept, even though repetition alone was also shown to be a significant independent variable. As a subsidiary finding, an error analysis showed that when a letter was misnamed it was nearly always confused with one that looked like it rather than one that sounded like it. Some discussion was offered as to the role of an auditory information storage in low memory load tasks such as this one, as well as some general implications for information processing analyses of the non-reciprocity of duration and repetition.     

Attitudes and Experiences of High School Students Living in Turkey

A group of 105 tenth-grade high school students living in Turkey were studied to discover their attitudes toward their host nation and experiences while living away from the United States. It was hypothesized that neither the length of time a student resides in a country nor his sex would have an effect on either the number of experiences related to his host country or his attitude while living in a foreign country. The results indicated that the longer the students live overseas, the more experiences related to the culture of the host country they have. Their attitudes were the same regardless of their sex or length of residence.     

The effect of repetition on the perception of single letters)

Single letters were presented for from one to five flashes, with S required to report what he saw after each f1ash. The clarity of the letter increased sharply with repetition. Since the letters were no larger than one-third of a degree in size, clarity could not have .been increased by S making different fixations from f1ash to f1ash and combining them into a total percept. Nor was S guessing, since this could be ruled out by other indicators. Thus, it was concluded that repetition of the stimulus can have a direct effect on the clarity of a S’s percept of that stimulus.