Effect of mutual acquaintance on the construction of conversation

In a previous investigation, we demonstrated the role of questions as an instructional resource in the social construction of conversation by depriving conversationalists of their use. The resulting conversational structure, measured in terms of the ability of third parties to reconstruct the dialogues after they had been randomized, was impaired. The importance of culturally shared knowledge for the reconstruction (and by implication the construction) task was apparent in the superiority of British over Canadian subjects in reconstructing unconstrained British dialogues. The present study was concerned with the effects of privately shared knowledge on the construction of conversation. Conversational structure and the frequency of questions were greater in strangers' than in mutual acquaintances' unconstrained dialogues. Strangers' dialogues, but not those of mutual acquaintances, were disrupted under a ban on questions. The results were taken to indicate that strangers need to provide one another with continual instruction in how to proceed, whereas mutual acquaintances, in virtue of their privately shared social knowledge, can construct orderly dialogue with less moment-to-moment guidance.     

A self-fulfilling prophecy in a competitive psychomotor task

Fifty-six pairs of male college students competed in games of electronic table tennis. The participants were led to expect a bias in the game equipment, such that one player would have an advantage and the other a disadvantage. All participants recorded levels of aspiration both before and after being informed of the alleged bias. Upon completion of the game, the subjects made ratings of causal attribution to five factors: ability, task difficulty, effort, luck, and equipment bias. The results showed that the students with the putative disadvantage set significantly lower aspiration levels and performed at a significantly lower level than those students with the supposed advantage. Thus the putative bias became a real bias, although a psychological rather than a physical one. It is suggested that the source of the bias and the performance differences was a self-fulfilling prophecy. In contrast to the results of earlier studies, there were no meaningful differences in ratings of causal attribution.     

Acting on one's attitudes: Procedures for linking attitude and behavior

Two investigations examined the determinants of correspondence between attitudes and behaviors. The first investigation examined the relationship between previously measured attitudes toward affirmative action and subsequent behavioral verdicts in a sex discrimination court case. In this basic situation, correspondence between measured attitudes and judicial decision-making behavior was minimal, for both low-self-monitoring individuals and high-self-monitoring individuals. Increasing the availability of attitudes generated substantial correspondence between attitudes and behavior for low-self-monitoring individuals, but not for high-self-monitoring individuals. Increasing the relevance of attitudes generated substantial correspondence between attitudes and behavior for both low-self-monitoring individuals and high-self-monitoring individuals. The second investigation examined the decisions of individuals with favorable attitudes toward psychological research to volunteer to participate in extra sessions of a psychology experiment. Once again, increasing the relevance of attitudes was an effective procedure for inducing individuals to translate existing attitudes into corresponding behaviors. These empirical outcomes are interpreted within a theoretical framework that specifies the interactive contributions of availability, relevance, and self-monitoring to the creation of “action structures” that link attitudes and behavior. Practical implications of this viewpoint are discussed.     

The effect of a commercial game on children's block design scores on the WISC-R IQ test

Two experiments investigated the extent to which 10-year old children's scores on the WISC-R Block Design subtest were affected by prior experience with a specific commercial game that involved blocks and matching patterns. Experiment 1 found that 12 10-year old children who happened to have experience with the particular commercial game scored approximately three scaled score points higher on the WISC-R Block Design subtest than 24 matched children without game experience. In Experiment 2, 24 children who did not have prior experience with this particular commercial game were randomly assigned either to a Game condition (involving two 15-minute sessions with the game) or to a No-Game condition (which involved no further game experience). Children in the Game condition subsequently increased their WISC-R Block Design scores more than children in the No-Game condition. Taken together, the experiments indicate that relatively brief interactions with a commercial game can cause a significant improvement in children's performance on an IQ subtest.     

Production of narrative and procedural discourse in aphasia

The study described the abilities of a group of 10 aphasics and 10 normals to produce narrative and procedural discourse. The experimental tasks included telling stories, producing summaries, giving morals to the stories, and producing procedures. The variables examined in the investigation included features of sentential grammars, such as amount of embedding, and features of discourse grammars, such as occurrence of elements of superstructure in narrative. Additionally, raters assessed the content and clarity of the discourses. The results showed that aphasics produced well-structured narrative and procedural discourse. Aphasics' discourse errors differed only in degree, not qualitatively, from those of normals. The language of the aphasics' discourses was reduced in both complexity and amount. It was found that the aphasics had difficulties in producing summaries and giving morals for the stories when compared with the normals. Both the content and clarity of the discourses produced by the aphasics were rated lower than those produced by the normals.     

The Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment: A rejoinder to Elardo and Bradley''s comment

The published and unpublished research pertaining to Caldwell's Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment (HOME) inventory was recently reviewed by R. Elardo and R. H. Bradley (Developmental Review, 1981, 1, 113–145). Their review was unfortunately deficient in a number of respects. For example, certain methodological issues bearing on the interpretation of the available data were either unrecognized or dismissed without adequate consideration. In addition, some of the data in the studies cited which contradicted or clouded their conclusions were omitted. An extension and reanalysis of the conclusions reached by Elardo and Bradley in light of recently published studies which were not included in their review, and data not discussed in the studies which were reviewed, is provided. Methodological problems are highlighted, and directions for future research are suggested.     

On processing chinese ideographs and english words: some implications from Stroop-Test results.

When Chinese subjects tried to name the color of characters which represented conflicting color words, they showed markedly greater interference than did English speaking readers performing an English version of the same task. This effect cannot be attributed to bilingualism among the Chinese subjects since bilinguals in other languages show smaller Stroop-interference than monolingual controls. Instead, there may be some fundamental differences in the perceptual demands of reading Chinese and English which can have widespread implications for human information processing.     

Language comprehension in old age

Three experiments examined the effects of aging on comprehension of spoken language. Integrative and constructive aspects of comprehension showed much more marked age-related deficits than registration of surface meaning. Experiment 1 showed that old subjects had difficulty in making inferences based on presented facts. Experiment 2 revealed a similar deficit in old people's ability to detect anomalies in newly presented information by reference to prior everyday knowledge. And Experiment 3, which tested story recall, showed that old subjects were less well able to extract and retain gist information than younger subjects. These difficulties are interpreted as reflecting a limitation in processing capacity such that the demands of concurrently registering surface meaning and simultaneously carrying out integrative and constructive processes exceed capacity in old age.     

Effect of sentence structure on stuttering

The elicited speech of 20 adult male stutterers was analyzed to determine the effect of the number, type, and location of relative clause structures on the frequency of stuttering. The selected structures were identified on the basis of transformational grammar. The findings indicate that the frequency of stuttering increases significantly with an increase in the number of relative clauses included in a matrix sentence structure. The results also indicate that the more severe the stuttering is, the more the stutterer is likely to be affected by this variable. Trends toward more frequent stuttering in the postverbal relative clause and the adjectival form of the relative clause were observed.     

An evaluation of speed management measures in Bangladesh based upon alternative accident recording,speed measurements,and DOCTOR traffic conflict observations

With 21,000 people annually killed in road traffic (estimated figure by World Health Organization), Bangladesh has one of the highest fatality rates in the world. Vulnerable road users (VRUs) account for over 50% of road traffic casualties, and 70% of casualties occur in rural areas. As in many Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs), the official road accident statistics are incomplete and biased.Safe Crossings (Netherlands) and the Centre for Injury Prevention and Research Bangladesh (CIPRB) (Bangladesh) received permission from the Bangladesh government in 2014 to design and implement an integrated speed management program (consisting of a combination of small-scale infrastructural measures, active community involvement and road user education) at three locations where a national highway intersects small communities. The infrastructural countermeasures to improve road safety consisted of speed humps, rumble strips, signs and road markings and were designed following the Dutch road design guidelines. In a Before–After study design, we used a combination of three research methods to monitor and evaluate the road safety interventions. We created our own traffic accident recording system with trained local record keepers, we conducted laser-gun speed measurements of motorized traffic (both at intervention and control locations), and we applied the Dutch Objective Conflict Technique for Operation and Research (DOCTOR) for observing serious traffic conflicts at the intervention locations. The latter was based upon DOCTOR scores from video recordings of the behaviour at the three experimental locations Before and After the interventions.Prior to installing the intervention program, the three locations combined had, on average, about 100 serious accidents, 10 deaths, and 200 injured people on a yearly basis. In April 2015, all infrastructural measures were completed. In the after period (till the end of January 2016), the alternative accident recording system showed a 66% reduction in the number of serious accidents, a 73% reduction in the number of injured people, and a 67% reduction in the number of people killed.The unobtrusive laser-gun speed measurements resulted in a net reduction of 13.3 km/h (or 20% in relative terms) on average at the intervention locations by taking the general speed development at the control locations into account. According to Nilsson’s power law this would result in a 59% reduction of the number of people killed, well in line with the actual accident figures.The total number of serious conflicts (only DOCTOR scores 3, 4, and 5) was significantly reduced from 64 serious conflicts per location in a 4.5 h period Before to 29 serious conflicts in the After period, on average (Poisson distributed variable, p < 0.01), or a 55% reduction in relative terms. By including the traffic volumes, the reduction in conflict risk overall is 54%. Moreover, the severity of conflicts was reduced in the After period with only one most severe conflict (DOCTOR score 5) left. Buses represent the largest portion of road users involved in serious conflicts at all three locations, followed by cars and CNGs (Compressed Natural Gas vehicle). By far, the most frequently occurring conflict is of the type head-on conflict between an overtaking bus or car that is encountering a road user in opposite direction (for the greater part a CNG).All three evaluation measures point to a similar impact of the intervention program and unveil an improvement in road safety between 54% and 60%. The speed-reducing measures indeed considerably reduce the speed of motorized traffic, both the mean speed and 85th percentile values, both the number and severity of serious conflicts are reduced, and the actual number of accidents has decreased. It appears that Nilsson’s power law for the relation between a difference in mean speed and the change in the number of accidents also applies to LMICs.Speed management measures as common in high-income countries appear to be also effective in LMICs. For evaluation purposes of road safety impacts, a Traffic Conflicts Technique approach (also developed in high-income countries) seems valid and effective as well for application in LMICs.As there are thousands of traffic black spots with similar characteristics as the three intervention locations in Bangladesh, this integrated approach may well offer similar road safety improvements elsewhere.