Attitude toward motherhood: Gender,generational, and religious comparisons

Attitudes toward mothering and motherhood are examined within a sample representative of college-educated young adults and their mothers. Factor structures are compared based upon response to the 40-item Motherhood Inventory. Two factors are indicated for males: a “chauvinism” factor describing women as appropriately serving and providing for men and children, and a factor that represents acceptance of contraceptive choice for women. For younger women, the theme of reproductive freedom includes autonomy in choice of motherhood as well as personal fulfillment; a second factor describes traditional rewards and responsibilities of motherhood. For older women, a single dominant factor represents a highly conventionalized definition of women's familial roles. On a scale of acceptance of reproductive freedom (the single common dimension observed for all groups), men score lower than women and Catholics score lower than non-Catholics.     

Experimental analysis of coding processes

The first part of the paper reports an investigation of the effects of the concreteness-imagery (C-I) value of stimuli and responses on the long-term retention of paired-associate lists. With degree of learning equated, the measures of retention after a 1-week interval showed a significant interaction of Stimulus by Response C-I: When the responses had a high value, recall was substantially better with low than with high stimuli; when the responses were low, there was no reliable difference as a function of stimulus value. Recall was best when abstract stimuli were paired with concrete responses. The second part of the paper is addressed to some current issues in the analysis of coding processes. Major emphasis is placed on the experimental and theoretical differentiation of encoding and decoding processes.     

The total time hypothesis,recall strategies,and memory for rapidly presented word strings

In three experiments the free recall of rapidly presented word strings was studied. The word strings were shown either in grammatical order or a scrambled order. It was found that the invariance of recall with various presentation times for grammatical sequences breaks down at presentation times between 175 and 250 msec. The order of recall, however, remains consistent with the type of sequence presented irrespective of presentation time. The amount of time requked to utilize syntactic information fully in free recall is of approximately the same order of magnitude as that required to read the words.     

A “labial” feature analyzer in speech perception

A selective adaptation experiment was conducted to determine the ability of various adapting stimuli to alter the perception of a series of 13 synthetic speech syllables. The synthetic test syllables, which varied acoustically in the starting frequency and direction of second- and third-formant transitions, included stop consonant distinctions ofplace of articulation for the syllable types [bae], [dae], and [gae]. A systematic adaptation effect was produced in the locus of the bae-bae phonetic boundary for these stimuli after repetitive listening to each of the following adapting syllables: [bae], [p^hae], [mae], and [vae], indicating that perception ofplace distinctions among the stop consonants can be altered even by repetitive listening to certain speech sounds not belonging to the stop-consonant class.     

God died and nobody gave a funeral

When childhood abuse trauma occurs in a Christian environment, the god representation is disrupted. Despite counseling, the impact of the god of childhood on the lives of child abuse survivors is often not resolved. The impact of the accumulation of child abuse trauma can seriously impair the development of the god image or even cause the god image to die. If a member of the family dies, there is a funeral and a period of socially supported grieving. When god dies, no one holds a funeral. The nature of the Christian god representation necessitates that Christian child abuse survivors grieve the loss of their childhood god if they are to resolve spiritual issues.An earlier form of this paper was given at the American Academy of Religion, November 1994.     

The role of distinctive features in the dichotic perception of vowels

A dichotic listening experiment was conducted to determine if vowel perception is based on phonetic feature extraction as is consonant perception. Twenty normal right-handed subjects were given dichotic CV syllables contrasting in final vowels. It was found that, unlike consonants, the perception of dichotic vowels was not significantly lateralized, that the dichotic perception of vowels was not significantly enhanced by the number of phonetic features shared, and that the occurrence of double-blend errors was not greater than chance. However, there was strong evidence for the use of phonetic features at the level of response organization. It is suggested that the differences between vowel and consonant perception reflect the differential availability of the underlying acoustic information from auditory store, rather than differences in processing mechanisms.     

Learning conversations: A person-centred approach to self-organised learning

A conversational approach to teaching and learning is described. Learning is viewed as a skill, which implies that individuals can learn how to learn. Awareness-raising techniques enable the development of new levels of competence. Significant improvements in reading, listening, thinking and feeling creatively, and in manual skills, have been achieved. A meta-language for articulating learning processes combines the functions of tutoring and counselling by focussing the learner's attention on reflection and review. To envisage the educational institution as a conversational network for personalising learning experiences involves fundamental changes in its aims and activities.     

Identification versus discrimination of distinctive features in speech perception

Dichotically presented CV syllables were presented to 24 normal subjects under two contrasting performance requirements: consonant identification and consonant discrimination. In the identification task, subjects made more errors identifying stimuli distinguished by two as opposed to one distinctive feature. Conversely, in the discrimination task, subjects made more errors for stimuli distinguished by one as opposed to two distinctive features. It was proposed that the results of the identification task reflect the degree of information load in short-term memory. The results of the discrimination task, on the other hand, reflect the degree of perceptual similarity between contrasting stimuli. Both results were accounted for within a distinctive feature framework. Analyses of the individual features which comprised one and two feature distinctions demonstrated the perceptual prominence of the feature [voice] in contrast to the two place features [compact] and [grave].     

Miami in the 1990s: “City of the future” or “City on the edge”?

No city in the United States, and few in the world, have been as profoundly affected by immigration in as short a period of time as Miami, Florida. The result is a complex pattern of ethnoracial politics among the city’s Hispanics, Blacks and Anglos–a pattern that defies conventional models of ethnic relations and immigrant adaptation. This article focuses on the latinization of Miami and the implications for ethnoracial relations of an immigrant group that achieves rapid economic and political ascendancy while challenging conventional assumptions about ethnic assimilation. The article also examines the role of local government structures in both shapping or responding to the dynamics of ethnoracial politics.