Validation of the Child Speech Test using the Heidelberg Speech Development Test with six-year-old preschool children]

We present and discuss results from researches to validate a new test for diagnosing speech-competences of preschool children KISTE. 41 children (6;0-6;11) were tested both with KISTE and HSET. Correlations, factor- and clusteranalysis showed that the structure of both tests is different and that KISTE has a good differential validity for both aspects of speech: communicative and structural.     

A world from brave to new: Talcott Parsons and the war effort at Harvard University.

This article argues that for Parsons and some of his colleagues at Harvard, the Second World War and the post-war period provided a context in which their work contributed to the transformation from totalitarianism to democracy in Central Europe (especially Germany) and Japan. The various agendas of Parsons' work are shown, supplemented by that of three of his colleagues with whom he collaborated (Gordon W. Allport, Carl J. Friedrich, Clyde Kluckhohn). The immediate effect of this work, for Parsons, however, meant frustration rather than fame, and his eventual reputation, I maintain, came unexpectedly with the third of his three attempts in the immediate post-war period to sum up what he believed were crucial insights that the Second World War had yielded concerning the ways in which sociology could contribute to the analytical understanding of democracy. The significance of this work is that it was both political and scientific. Because of the world situation of the 1940s, when the Holocaust in Germany was the nadir of civilization, Parsons believed that social science could contribute to the cause of making the world safe for future democracy. In the 1940s, this future depended on brave citizens, or such might have been Parsons' worldview. Targets envisaged for the 1950s, then, were community and citizenship in the newly democratic societies such as (West) Germany, the land that defeated Nazism.     

Wakes and spokes: new motion-induced brightness illusions

Under certain conditions, high-contrast moving figures induce adjacent illusory regions, 'wakes' and 'spokes', which have contrast polarity opposite the inducing figures. In this paper we document properties of these novel phenomena. When the illusions are induced by a moving bar, spokes appear on the side of the bar closer to fixation and connect the bar to the fixation point, regardless of the momentary position of the bar or whether it is moving to the left or to the right. Although spokes often extend up to the fixation point, they never extend beyond it. This is not due to blocking of the spoke's spread by the fixation point, because in another experiment spokes extend directly through an intervening figure. Whereas spokes emanate from the end of a horizontally moving bar closest to fixation, wakes emanate from the end farthest from fixation. In contrast to spokes, wakes do not show a towards-fixation bias. Instead, the wake's end trails the position of the bar, like a ship's wake. The higher the bar velocity, the more the end of the wake appears to trail it, suggesting that wakes are caused by a process which spreads from the edge of moving figures. Wakes and spokes, as distinct illusions, should provide significant constraints on theories of human motion and brightness perception processes.     

Orthographic analogies and phonological priming: a comment on Bowey, Vaughan, and Hansen (1998)

J. A. Bowey, L. Vaughan, and J. Hansen (1998, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 68, 108-133) carried out two experiments on 6- and 7-year-old children's use of orthographic analogies in word reading. They reported that, following apparently stringent controls for phonological priming effects, beginning analogies (beak-bean) were more frequent in this age group than rime (beak-peak) analogies. From this, they concluded that beginning readers do not reliably use orthographic rimes in reading, even in the clue word task (p. 129). However, the clue word task was not used in this study. This comment highlights two problems with Bowey et al.'s paper. The first is a theoretical one, and the second is methodological. Firstly, Bowey et al. base their investigation on a misunderstanding of U. Goswami and P. E. Bryant's (1990, Phonological skills and learning to read, Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum) claims about the role of rhyme and analogy in beginning reading. Secondly, methodological weaknesses, in particular unintended intralist priming effects, seriously limit the conclusions that can be drawn from Bowey et al.'s booklet analogy task.     

A neuropsychological theory of positive affect and its influence on cognition.

Positive affect systematically influences performance on many cognitive tasks. A new neuropsychological theory is proposed that accounts for many of these effects by assuming that positive affect is associated with increased brain dopamine levels. The theory predicts or accounts for influences of positive affect on olfaction, the consolidation of long-term (i.e., episodic) memories, working memory, and creative problem solving. For example, the theory assumes that creative problem solving is improved, in part, because increased dopamine release in the anterior cingulate improves cognitive flexibility and facilitates the selection of cognitive perspective.     

Modeling stage-sequential change in ordered categorical responses

Although few would dispute the usefulness of looking at behavioral change from a stage-sequential perspective, until recently the lack of appropriate modeling techniques has hampered rigorous empirical tests of stage theories. In particular, for behavioral measurements that are ordinal, there is a need for methods that represent the underlying change processes in the form of qualitative and discontinuous shifts. This article introduces a stage-sequential ordinal model by postulating that at any point in time there are a finite number of latent stages. Panel members may shift among these stages over time. The authors show that the stage-sequential model provides a general approach for both the analysis of ordinal time-dependent data and tests of various competing theories and hypotheses about psychological change processes. An analysis of a 5-year study concerning attitudes toward alcohol consumption by teenagers is presented to illustrate the modeling approach.     

Simultaneous manipulation of propositional and analog codes in picture memory

Revealing a picture as a whole or as momentarily displayed strips presumably manipulated the propositional coding of the picture. Analog manipulation employed superimposition of a grid pattern. Effectiveness of simultaneous manipulations was tested via recognition with three foil categories, each of which presumably tapped the analog or propositional codes mainly, or both of them in detection. While figural units' perspective reversals should presumably be detected via the analog code, their locational displacements should be detected via the propositional code. Foils with novel item substitution should be detected by both codes. On the basis of such presumptions about encoding and recognition manipulations, certain predictions were made for scan and grid effects in "reversal," "displacement," and "novelty" foil categories. Full confirmation of these predictions was then taken as evidence that both analog and propositional codes do exist. Once such evidence was established, other issues were tackled, showing that target detection involves the propositional code only, while foil detection involves both codes. Further, recognition hypermnesia, where performance improves with repeated testing, was obtained only when both codes were attenuated. Data suggested that subjects might be switching from analog to propositional codes when both codes were strong, thereby preventing hypermnesia.     

Performance-psychologic cross-sectional study of young schizophrenic patients with a subchronic and chronic disease course

According to ICD-9 and DSM-III-R-criteria 14 subchronic schizophrenic male patients (duration of illness less than 2 years) and 17 chronically ill male schizophrenics (duration of illness between 5 to 12 years) matched for sex, age, education, type of illness, and medication were with the aid of 4 tests investigated with respect to time characteristics of performance parameters. Whereas subchronic patients revealed performance scores within the normal range of reference scores, chronically ill patients showed dissociative variations in performance (high scores in reasoning, low scores in speed factor). This can be interpreted as instability of brain functioning which characterizes schizophrenics suffering from a long duration of illness. Correlations between prolonged reactions to "crossmodal" choices and subjective basic symptoms in subchronic patients are hints at well established introspection ability of self regarded complaints.     

Psychopathology and criminal personality changes in patients with frontal lobe injuries

Proceeding from H. Cosack (1937), and in view of the fact that since then no further casuistic contributions relating to the crimogenic aspect of the psychopathological frontal brain syndrome or to the forensic psychiatry of persons with frontal brain damage have appeared, we take up the discussion with five of our own cases. Since modern procedures have made it possible to localise exactly the consequences of brain damage, a new round of investigations might be expected to resolve the problems still left open.     

EEG and evoked potential mapping

By spectral EEG-mapping and EP-mapping, especially the topologic dimension of electrical brain activity can be evaluated for clinical use. On the other hand, this method allows the highest solution from all functional imaging procedures within the time dimension of brain activity. On the other hand, the ability of topological solution is limited. But the latter is probably better than hitherto assumed and surprisingly well at least regarding neonates. However, several methodological prerequisites described here must be fulfilled. From the pathophysiological point of view, the limits must be considered besides the diagnostic possibilities. Meanwhile, spectral EEG-mapping and EP-mapping are diagnostically used in all main fields of traditional EEG-analysis, like seizures and in the preadiagnostics of tumors a.o. Also in the diagnostics of cerebrovascular disease including transient ischemic attacks, the EEG-mapping and/or EP-mapping are useful within the total diagnostics. There is a similar situation in the diagnostics of degenerative brain disorders. But the significance of frequently described changes inpsychoses, partly also neuroses and other functional disorders is not clear. Altogether, this non-invasive, economically most favourable method for the functional imaging procedures in brain diagnostics is promising to extent the routine diagnostics also to a more precise manner.