Hong Kong Chinese kindergartners learn to read English analytically

We examined the extent to which young Hong Kong Chinese children, taught to read English as a second language via a logographic "look and say" method, used information about letter names and letter sounds to learn English words. Forty children from each of three kindergarten grade levels (mean ages 3.8, 5.0, and 5.9 years old, respectively) were taught to pronounce novel English spellings that were based on letter-name (e.g., DK = Deke), letter-sound (DK = Dick), or visual (Dk= Jean) cues. By the 2nd year of kindergarten, children performed significantly better in the name condition than the other conditions. The 3rd-year kindergartners performed better in the sound condition than the visual condition as well. The results point to the importance of letter-name and letter-sound knowledge for learning to read English, regardless of native-language background or method of instruction.     

Zones of consensus and zones of conflict: questioning the "common morality" presumption in bioethics

Many bioethicists assume that morality is in a state of wide reflective equilibrium. According to this model of moral deliberation, public policymaking can build upon a core common morality that is pretheoretical and provides a basis for practical reasoning. Proponents of the common morality approach to moral deliberation make three assumptions that deserve to be viewed with skepticism. First, they commonly assume that there is a universal, transhistorical common morality that can serve as a normative baseline for judging various actions and practices. Second, advocates of the common morality approach assume that the common morality is in a state of relatively stable, ordered, wide reflective equilibrium. Third, casuists, principlists, and other proponents of common morality approaches assume that the common morality can serve as a basis for the specification of particular policies and practical recommendations. These three claims fail to recognize the plural moral traditions that are found in multicultural, multiethnic, multifaith societies such as the United States and Canada. A more realistic recognition of multiple moral traditions in pluralist societies would be considerable more skeptical about the contributions that common morality approaches in bioethics can make to resolving contentious moral issues.     

Cochlear implants in young children

The cochlear implant is best characterized as a device that provides access to the sound environment. The device enables the hearing pathway to respond to environmental and speech sounds, providing informational cues from the surroundings and from others that may escape visual detection. As the developmental effects of a profound hearing loss are multiple, cochlear implants have been applied to ever younger children in an attempt to promote a more normal level of developmental learning through audition. In deafness, transducer elements of the inner ear fail to trigger auditory nerve afferent nerves in the presence of sound input. However, large reserves of afferent fibers exist even in the auditory nerve of a profoundly deaf patient. Furthermore, these nerve fibers retain the ability to respond to prosthetic activation. Through developmental learning in the early, formative years, auditory centers of the brain appear capable of processing information from the implant to provide speech comprehension and oral language development. Multichannel implants have replaced original single channel designs. multichannel devices enable larger percentages of recipients to recognize the spoken word without visual cues because they provide spectral information in addition to temporal and intensity cues. Testing under conditions of auditory (implant)-only input reveals significant open-set speech understanding capabilities in more than 75% of children after three years of device use. The benefit provided by implants may vary with a number of conditions including: hearing history, age of deafness onset, age at implantation, etiology of deafness, linguistic abilities, and the presence of a motivated system of support of oral language development. Patient variables should be given individual consideration in judging candidacy for a cochlear implant and in planning rehabilitative and education services after surgery and activation of the device.     

Brain areas sensitive to coherent visual motion

Detection of coherent motion versus noise is widely used as a measure of global visual-motion processing. To localise the human brain mechanisms involved in this performance, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to compare brain activation during viewing of coherently moving random dots with that during viewing spatially and temporally comparable dynamic noise. Rates of reversal of coherent motion and coherent-motion velocities (5 versus 20 deg s-1) were also compared. Differences in local activation between conditions were analysed by statistical parametric mapping. Greater activation by coherent motion compared to noise was found in V5 and putative V3A, but not in V1. In addition there were foci of activation on the occipital ventral surface, the intraparietal sulcus, and superior temporal sulcus. Thus, coherent-motion information has distinctive effects in a number of extrastriate visual brain areas. The rate of motion reversal showed only weak effects in motion-sensitive areas. V1 was better activated by noise than by coherent motion, possibly reflecting activation of neurons with a wider range of motion selectivities. This activation was at a more anterior location in the comparison of noise with the faster velocity, suggesting that 20 deg s-1 is beyond the velocity range of the V1 representation of central visual field. These results support the use of motion-coherence tests for extrastriate as opposed to V1 function. However, sensitivity to motion coherence is not confined to V5, and may extend beyond the classically defined dorsal stream.     

Examining the effectiveness of a community-based self-help program to increase women's readiness for smoking cessation

This study investigated the effectiveness of two components of a smoking cessation intervention: a reading manual and a series of televised programs. Female smokers in the Chicago metropolitan area with a high school education or less were interviewed at 4 different times: baseline, immediate postintervention, and 6 and 12 months. We examined the effects of several baseline measures (race, age, number of cigarettes smoked, and stage of readiness to change) and exposure to the intervention components on subsequent stage of change. Race, baseline smoking rate, baseline stage, and exposure to both intervention components had direct effects on stage at immediate postintervention, with both intervention components increasing readiness to quit. Furthermore, exposure to the manual interacted with baseline stage, such that the manual benefited women at earlier stages more than women at later stages. Effects of both components were sustained at 6 months, and the effects of the manual were sustained at 12 months.     

Age-of-acquisition and cumulative frequency have independent effects

Lewis (1999) argued that effects of age of acquisition (AoA) are entirely attributable to cumulative frequency. He reported an instance-based model in which the number of instances of the stimulus stored in memory predicts reaction time. We note four aspects of the literature on AoA that cannot be explained by this instance-based approach. Firstly, an effect of AoA has been observed in the absence of an effect of frequency. Secondly, an effect of AoA has been observed when cumulative frequency has been controlled. Thirdly, the effect of AoA is dependent on task. Fourthly, the effect of word frequency is dependent on stimulus modality. Lewis reported an experiment in which participants make a decision based on identity-specific semantic information to celebrity faces to demonstrate an effect of the number of instances in memory, which he interpreted as an effect of AoA. We note that effects of AoA have been found in lexical and perceptual tasks, but to date all attempts to demonstrate an advantage for early-acquired items in semantic classification tasks have failed. We conclude that the effects of AoA cannot be attributed solely to the effects of cumulative frequency.     

Influences of age, performance, and item relatedness on verbatim and gist recall of verb-noun pairs

Age differences in adults' memory for performed actions (e.g., wave hand) are sometimes smaller than age differences in memory for nonperformed phrases. In this study, we examined the conditions under which performance reduces age differences in recall. Younger and older adults performed or read verb-noun phrases that were either related (e.g., actions performed in a kitchen) or unrelated. Performance did not reduce age differences in recall of the exact verbs and nouns used to describe an action, but performance did reduce age differences in memory for the gist of related actions. Older adults especially had difficulty recalling the exact verb used to describe the action. These results suggest that older adults may have better memory for actions than is revealed by tests of verbatim recall. They may remember performing the action but not remember the exact words used to describe the action.     

Causal Explanation and Explanatory Selection

It is observed that in ordinary everyday causal explanations often just one causal factor is mentioned. One causal factor carries the explanatory burden, even if there are several causal factors that are responsible for the event to be explained. This paper deals with the question of how to account for this explanatory selection. I argue for a pragmatic stance towards explanation, that we must attend to the question–answer situation as a whole and the context of the explanation. The context of an explanation includes the inquirer's and the explainer's beliefs and presuppositions relevant for the explanation-seeking question, and these are encoded in a reference class. Furthermore I argue that the explanation-giving answer contains an implicit counterfactual claim, the explanation-giving counterfactual. The solution to the problem of explanatory selection is to be found in the presuppositions encoded by the reference class and the eg-counterfactual. In short we select as explanatory that factor which, together with the presupposition encoded in the reference class we believe will make the eg-counterfactual true. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.