Learning letter names and sounds: Effects of instruction, letter type, and phonological processing skill

Preschool-age children (N = 58) were randomly assigned to receive instruction in letter names and sounds, letter sounds only, or numbers (control). Multilevel modeling was used to examine letter name and sound learning as a function of instructional condition and characteristics of both letters and children. Specifically, learning was examined in light of letter name structure, whether letter names included cues to their respective sounds, and children’s phonological processing skills. Consistent with past research, children receiving letter name and sound instruction were most likely to learn the sounds of letters whose names included cues to their sounds regardless of phonological processing skills. Only children with higher phonological skills showed a similar effect in the control condition. Practical implications are discussed.     

Anchoring,Familiarity, and Confidence in the Detection of Deception

Anchoring in judgments is the tendency for the final judgment to be biased toward the initial estimate through insufficient adjustment. In the context of the detection of deception, it has been used to explain phenomena such as negative absolute leakage and the truthfulness bias. We examined the influence of order of judgment type on attitude ratings, accuracy, and the truthfulness bias. Receivers of communications should tend to anchor their judgments on the sender's attitudinal position if asked to make attitude judgments first and on the sender's behavior if asked to make truthfulness judgments first. The results partly support these predictions. Negative absolute leakage, accuracy, and the truthfulness bias were not significantly different for those who made attitude judgments before truthfulness judgments. However, results show that accuracy decreased as the session continued and there was no difference in the confidence with which truth and deception judgments were made, but there was a positive relation between confidence and truthfulness bias.     

The Reading Fluency and Comprehension of Fifth- and Sixth-Grade Struggling Readers Across Brief Tests of Various Intervention Approaches

Although several different reading fluency intervention approaches appear promising for adolescents who are struggling readers, few studies have directly compared various approaches. The purpose of this study was twofold: 1) to determine the relative effects of word-oriented, fluency-oriented, comprehension-oriented, and multi-component interventions on the reading fluency performance of fifth and sixth grade struggling readers; and 2) to examine the concomitant effects of each intervention approach on comprehension. A within participant design, where all 29 participants received all interventions, was used. Outcomes were measured using instructional and transfer materials. The results provide support for a fluency-oriented and multi-component approach.     

The relationship between self-reported oral symptoms and life-events

Abstract

This paper investigates whether eight specific life-events were related to self-reported chronic (persistent trouble over the last 12 months) and acute (trouble in the last 14 days) oral symptoms in a sample of 3861 civil servants aged 35-44 years. The results of a logistic regression analysis taking age, social class and gender into account showed that a range of life-events—marital or family problems other than divorce, death of a relative, personal serious illness, serious illness of a close relative, major financial difficulty and mugging and robbery—were significantly associated with either acute or chronic oral symptoms. Further analysis showed that marital or family problems other than divorce was found to be the most important life event studied. The results support the argument that marital dissatisfaction leads to poorer physical and psychological health.     

The precuneus and the insula in self-attributional processes

Attributions are constantly assigned in everyday life. A well-known phenomenon is the self-serving bias: that is, people’s tendency to attribute positive events to internal causes (themselves) and negative events to external causes (other persons/circumstances). Here, we investigated the neural correlates of the cognitive processes implicated in self-serving attributions using social situations that differed in their emotional saliences. We administered an attributional bias task during fMRI scanning in a large sample of healthy subjects (n = 71). Eighty sentences describing positive or negative social situations were presented, and subjects decided via buttonpress whether the situation had been caused by themselves or by the other person involved. Comparing positive with negative sentences revealed activations of the bilateral posterior cingulate cortex (PCC). Self-attribution correlated with activation of the posterior portion of the precuneus. However, self-attributed positive versus negative sentences showed activation of the anterior portion of the precuneus, and self-attributed negative versus positive sentences demonstrated activation of the bilateral insular cortex. All significant activations were reported with a statistical threshold of p ≤ .001, uncorrected. In addition, a comparison of our fMRI task with data from the Internal, Personal and Situational Attributions Questionnaire, Revised German Version, demonstrated convergent validity. Our findings suggest that the precuneus and the PCC are involved in the evaluation of social events with particular regional specificities: The PCC is activated during emotional evaluation, the posterior precuneus during attributional evaluation, and the anterior precuneus during self-serving processes. Furthermore, we assume that insula activation is a correlate of awareness of personal agency in negative situations.     

Observing the transformation of experience into memory

The ability to remember one's past depends on neural processing set in motion at the moment each event is experienced. Memory formation can be observed by segregating neural responses according to whether or not each event is recalled or recognized on a subsequent memory test. Subsequent memory analyses have been performed with various neural measures, including brain potentials extracted from intracranial and extracranial electroencephalographic recordings, and hemodynamic responses from functional magnetic resonance imaging. Neural responses can predict which events, and which aspects of those events, will be subsequently remembered or forgotten, thereby elucidating the neurocognitive processes that establish durable episodic memories.