Talker adaptation in speech perception: adjusting the signal or the representations?

Past research has established that listeners can accommodate a wide range of talkers in understanding language. How this adjustment operates, however, is a matter of debate. Here, listeners were exposed to spoken words from a speaker of an American English dialect in which the vowel /ae/ is raised before /g/, but not before /k/. Results from two experiments showed that listeners' identification of /k/-final words like back (which are unaffected by the dialect) was facilitated by prior exposure to their dialect-affected /g/-final counterparts, e.g., bag. This facilitation occurred because the competition between interpretations, e.g., bag or back, while hearing the initial portion of the input [bae], was mitigated by the reduced probability for the input to correspond to bag as produced by this talker. Thus, adaptation to an accent is not just a matter of adjusting the speech signal as it is being heard; adaptation involves dynamic adjustment of the representations stored in the lexicon, according to the characteristics of the speaker or the context.     

Color-function categories that prime infants to use color information in an object individuation task

There is evidence for developmental hierarchies in the type of information to which infants attend when reasoning about objects. Investigators have questioned the origin of these hierarchies and how infants come to identify new sources of information when reasoning about objects. The goal of the present experiments was to shed light on this debate by identifying conditions under which infants’ sensitivity to color information, which is slow to emerge, could be enhanced in an object individuation task. The outcome of Experiment 1 confirmed and extended previous reports that 9.5-month-olds can be primed, through exposure to events in which the color of an object predicts its function, to attend to color differences in a subsequent individuation task. The outcomes of Experiments 2-4 revealed age-related changes in the nature of the representations that support color priming. This is exemplified by three main findings. First, the representations that are formed during the color-function events are relatively specific. That is, infants are primed to use the color difference seen in the color-function events to individuate objects in the test events, but not other color differences. Second, 9.5-month-olds can be led to form more abstract event representations, and then generalize to other colors in the test events if they are shown multiple pairs of colors in the color-function events. Third, slightly younger 9-month-olds also can be led to form more inclusive categories with multiple color pairs, but only when they are allowed to directly compare the exemplars in each color pair during the present events. These results shed light on the development of categorization abilities, cognitive mechanisms that support color-function priming, and the kinds of experiences that can increase infants’ sensitivity to color information.     

Can children resist making interpretations when uncertain?

In two experiments, we examined young children's ability to delay a response to ambiguous input. In Experiment 1, 5- and 6-year-olds performed as poorly when they needed to choose between basing an interpretation on ambiguous input and delaying an interpretation as when making explicit evaluations of knowledge, whereas 7- and 8-year-olds found the former task easy. In Experiment 2, 5- and 6-year-olds performed well on a task that required delaying a response but removed the need to decide between strategies. We discuss children's difficulty with ambiguity in terms of the decision-making demands made by different procedures. These demands appear to cause particular problems for young children.     

High School Graduation Rates in the United States: Implications for the Counseling Profession

This article reviews a troubling report of a nationwide study of U.S. public high school graduation rates conducted by J. P. Greene (2001) of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. The statistics revealed that fewer students were graduating from high school in the United States than is being reported by school districts, states, and the National Center for Education Statistics. They also revealed that graduation rates were much lower for African American and Latino students than for White students. The author summarizes the research on the consequences of dropping out of school and discusses the implications of these findings for counselors and the counseling profession.     

Organizational Citizenship Behaviors and Organizational Effectiveness: Examining Relationships in Taiwanese Banks

Organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) describe actions in which employees are willing to go above and beyond their prescribed role requirements. Theory suggests and recent research supports the notion that these behaviors are correlated with indicators of organizational effectiveness. Studies have yet to explore whether relationships between OCB and organizational effectiveness are generalizable to non-United States samples. The present study examined relationships between OCB and indicators of organizational effectiveness—employee-level customer-service behavior; and unit-level measures of profit, efficiency, and customer perceptions of service quality—for bank branches in Taiwan. The results suggest significant relationships between OCB and a number of the indicators of effectiveness. Implications and limitations of these results are discussed.     

Nonadherence in Adolescent Oncology Patients: Preliminary Data on Psychological Risk Factors and Relationships to Outcome

Published nonadherence rates in the adolescent oncology population range from 33 to 60% though little is known about the psychological factors that contribute to adherence and the relationship between outcome and nonadherence. Our study was designed to investigate psychological and family factors related to adherence and the relationship between adherence and survival in this population. We evaluated 44 (27 males, 17 females) patients with cancer (13–17 years) who were at least 6-months postdiagnosis. Adherence with trimethoprim/sulfamethoxazole (TMP/SMX) was determined at one point in time, using serum assay. Twelve of the patients (27%) had no detectable TMP/SMX. Patients without detectable drug had higher levels of depression, lower self-esteem, and higher levels of parent–child incongruence. Survival rates, 6 years after the initiation of the study, were lower in the group of participants categorized as nonadherent. These findings, if confirmed, have implications for the management of nonadherence and mood in this population.