The effects of elimination of hand gestures and of verbal codability on speech performance

Subjects were required to describe line drawings of two-dimensional shapes at two levels of verbal codability, with and without using hand gestures. Elimination of gesture affected speech performance by changing the semantic content of utterances and the proportion of speaking time spent pausing; numbers of words, numbers of pauses, mean pause length and semantic content were found to be related to the verbal codability of the stimulus material; and the number of hesitations was related to both gesture and level of codability.     

The role of attention in visual and auditory suffix effects

Memory & Cognition - The auditory suffix effect (SE), in which recall of the terminal items of a sequence is impaired by presenting a redundant item at the end of the sequence, has been...     

The Cartesian frame of reference: A structure unifying the description of dyslexia

It is shown that six phenomena often associated with dyslexia may be attributed to the lack of a visual, Cartesian frame of reference. These phenomena are (1) reading errors due to letter reversal, inversion, or rotation, (2) form recognition of all classes of mono-oriented objects which is independent of the figure's egocentric orientation, (3) defective visual sequential scanning, resulting in confused letter and word order (4) poor visual balance performance, (5) the failure to acquire nonspatial ordering relations, including temporal relations and tenses, and (6) the characteristics intellectual profile of severely retarded readers, namely, PIQ/VIQ greater than 1, where PIQ is the performance IQ score and VIQ the verbal IQ score on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC). The latter phenomenon is dependent on (2) and (5) above. A strategy for further research is outlined.     

The role of stimulus material in determining release from proactive inhibition

The release from proactive inhibition (PI) paradigm has been widely used as a technique for exploring the encoding dimensions of short-term memory for verbal items. PI release data have been used not only to infer particular memory codes but also to index their relative salience. In the present study, the effects of manipulating the colour (red or black) in which the stimulus material is printed were investigated in two separate experiments. No release effect was obtained in the first, where common two-syllable words were presented. In the second, where consonant trigrams were presented, a large effect was found. Since the same colour feature was manipulated in each experiment, it is argued that this pattern of results has serious implications for the use of PI release data as a technique for mapping the encoding dimensions of short-term memory.     

Auditory processing of relational information by young infants

The ability of 5-month-old infants to process relational information was assessed by means of a habituation-dishabituation paradigm with cardiac deceleration as the response measure. Infants were first habituated to a six-tone pattern and then shifted either to a transposition of the standard pattern or to a control pattern which comprised the elements of the transposed pattern in scrambled order. Dishabituation was not evident in the case of the transposed group but was clearly evident for the control group. These results indicate that infants can process relational information from tonal patterns.     

Developmental changes in memory: The effects of processing time and rehearsal instructions

An overt rehearsal procedure was used to investigate the relationship between children's rehearsal strategies and free recall performance. Previous work has shown that developmental differences in rehearsal content, rather than rehearsal frequency, affect recall performance. This experiment investigated the effects of increased processing time and rehearsal training upon recall. Third-grade girls (age 8) were able to use additional processing time to increase the activity of their rehearsal, and they showed corresponding improvement in recall. In contrast, third-grade boys (age 8) and sixth-grade boys and girls (age 12) did not take advantage of a slower presentation rate to rehearse more actively, and their recall did not change. Further, even without additional processing time, both the third-grade boys and girls were able to use an instructed active rehearsal strategy to facilitate their recall. The direct manipulation of rehearsal activity and the resulting improvement in recall provide experimental support for the proposed relationship between rehearsal content and recall from long-term memory store.     

Intellectual similarities within families of both adopted and biological children

The effects of genetic and environmental differences on intellectual differences among children were examined in a study of families with both biological and adopted children. IQ scores of all family members and education of natural parents were used to estimate intellectual similarities among related and unrelated persons, living together and apart. Comparisons of correlations between related and unrelated siblings produced negligible heritability values, whereas the parent-child data suggested moderate heritability for the children's IQ differences. The high mean values of the adopted children's IQ scores and the high degree of similarity among unrelated sibs suggest that IQ scores are more maleable than previously thought.