Of mice and men: The comparative assumption in psychology

Surprisingly, little theoretical attention has so far been paid to the ‘Comparative Assumption’: the attempt to extrapolate from species to species in psychology (and particularly to the human species). This paper examines the problems and the possibilities inherent in the Comparative Assumption. Perhaps the most important conclusion of the paper is that much more work is needed on this intriguing question.     

Nonword naming: further exploration of the pseudohomophone effect in terms of orthographic neighborhood size, graphemic changes, spelling-sound consistency, and reader accuracy.

Five experiments examined nonword pronunciation. As reported by McCann and Besner (1987), accurate, regular pronunciations increased as the number of orthographic neighbors (N) increased. Adults read pseudohomophones (nonwords that sound like a word) more accurately than other nonwords only when the nonwords were low n, shared the consonants with the words on which they were based, and overall accuracy was lower. Children showed a pseudohomophone advantage even when N was high. Adults pronounced nonwords comprised of inconsistent endings (with existing regular and irregular pronunciations) in an irregular fashion when this resulted in a word; this applied to relatively high-N items.