Equating the social desirability of Bem Sex-Role Inventory masculinity and femininity subscales

Two experiments investigated the social desirability of Bem Sex-Role Inventory (BSRI) items. Mean social desirability of the masculinity subscale was significantly higher than that of the femininity subscale in both experiments. A revision of the BSRI femininity subscale was suggested which replaced three items of questionable social value with three more socially desirable items and virtually eliminated the social desirability difference between masculinity and femininity subscales.     

Systems approach to the concept of niche

Conclusion The systems approach to niche presented herein stands as an example of the unifying potential of mathematical system theory when applied to concepts and principles of ecology. Beginning with subjective concepts from the naturalistic tradition, the niche was framed in the formalism of general system theory. So modeled, it appeared as a restriction of a more general construct, the environ. Both niches and environs are implementable in the context of ecosystem models, and with the growing ability of ecologists to construct such models, system theoretic niches and environs both should serve in the future to clarify old problems of ecology, and make it possible to raise new classes of problems. The nature of niches, always difficult conceptually for the ecologist, may now give way to further development, both theoretical and empirical.     

Representation of inflected nouns in the internal lexicon

The lexical representation of Serbo-Croatian nouns was investigated in a lexical decision task. Because Serbo-Croatian nouns are declined, a noun may appear in one of several grammatical cases distinguished by the inflectional morpheme affixed to the base form. The grammatical cases occur with different frequencies, although some are visually and phonetically identical. When the frequencies of identical forms are compounded, the ordering of frequencies is not the same for masculine and feminine genders. These two genders are distinguished further by the fact that the base form for masculine nouns is an actual grammatical case, the nominative singular, whereas the base form for feminine nouns is an abstraction in that it cannot stand alone as an independent word. Exploiting these characteristics of the Serbo-Croatian language, we contrasted three views of how a noun is represented: (1) the independent-entries hypothesis, which assumes an independent representation for each grammatical case, reflecting its frequency of occurrence; (2) the derivational hypothesis, which assumes that only the base morpheme is stored, with the individual cases derived from separately stored inflectional morphemes and rules for combination; and (3) the satellite-entries hypothesis, which assumes that all cases are individually represented, with the nominative singular functioning as the nucleus and the embodiment of the noun’s frequency and around which the other cases cluster uniformly. The evidence strongly favors the satellite-entries hypothesis.     

Language acquisition context and language organization in bilinguals

A distinction between compound and coordinate bilingualism has been employed to conceptualize linguistic organization in bilinguals. Compound bilinguals are those who acquired their languages in a joint context and therefore are presumed to store linguistic information interdependently. Coordinates include those who acquired their languages in separate contexts and therefore are presumed to maintain independent linguistic stores. To study the usefulness of this distinction, Spanish-English and English-Spanish, compound, and coordinate bilinguals were asked to give intra-and interlingual free and restricted word associations to equivalent English and Spanish stimuli for which the responses of monolingual speakers were not equivalent. As predicted, compound bilinguals gave significantly more equivalent responses and responded significantly faster than did coordinates. However, since these differences were only modest in size, they cannot be interpreted as supporting the usefulness of the compound-coordinate distinction. None of the predictions regarding the effect of proficiency on performance were supported. Differences as a function of native language, type of association task, and association conditions were obtained and are discussed.This research was supported by USPHS Grant HD 01368 to Dr. Klaus Riegel, University of Michigan, and was included as one portion of a doctoral dissertation submitted by the author to the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies at the University of Michigan.