Children's Productivity in the English Past Tense: The Role of Frequency, Phonology, and Neighborhood Structure

The productive use of English past tense morphology in school-aged children (N = 74; 3 years, 8 months to 13 years, 5 months) is explored using an elicited production task. Errors represented 20% of the responses overall. Virtually all of the children demonstrated productivity with regular (e.g., good) and irregular patterns (zero-marking, e.g., sit → sit; vowel-change, e.g., ride → rid). Overall frequency of errors decreased with age, yet the tendency for certain types of irregularizations increased in the older groups. Analyses across items indicated that all error types were predicted by combinations of item frequency, phonological characteristics of stems and past tense forms, and aspects of phonological past tense "neighborhoods". Contrary to "hybrid" or dual-mechanism models incorporating a phonologically-insensitive default mechanism (e.g., Prasada & Pinker, 1993), these results suggest that children's productivity with regular and irregular patterns is consistent with a phonologically-based constraint satisfaction system similar to that implemented in connectionist models (Daugherty & Seidenberg, 1992; Plunkett & Marchman, 1991, 1993).     

How can a heterosexual man remove his body hair and retain his masculinity? Mapping stories of male body hair depilation

ABSTRACT

This study explores the gendered body hair removal norm and the meanings of male body hair by examining young people’s sense-making around male body hair removal. The novel technique of story completion was used to collect data from 102 psychology undergraduates. They were presented with a story “stem” featuring a young man (David) deciding to start body hair removal and asked to complete the stem. David was most often portrayed as a young heterosexual man who was excessively hairy, in the “wrong” places, was often subject to teasing and bullying, and was concerned about his diminished sexual capital. Hair removal did not always end “happily ever after” for David. While in some stories he “got the girl,” he was punished for his vanity and foolishness in others. These different endings arguably reflect currently ambivalent meanings around male body hair depilation. The production of a hairless, or less hairy, male body is both desirable and a potential threat to masculinity. The data spoke strongly to the power of social norms surrounding body hair practices and suggest that story completion provides a useful tool in interrogating the discourses that sustain these norms.     

Memory discrimination for self-performed and imagined acts: Bizarreness effects in false recognition

Two experiments investigated the susceptibility of common and unusual action events to memory distortion under incidental learning and delayed testing conditions. Experiment 1 tested the influence of imaginal and enactment instructions at testing on memory discrimination for self-performed and imagined acts. The influence of hypnotic procedures at testing on memory discrimination for action events was tested in Experiment 2. The results of both experiments suggest that the likelihood of confusing details associated with separate, previously experienced unusual action events is greater than the likelihood of confusing details associated with separate, previously experienced common action events. Based on the results of both experiments, it is concluded that bizarreness has both memory-facilitating and memory-inhibiting qualities.