Language loss in bilingual Chicano children

The results of two studies on language loss in bilingual Chicano children are reported. In Study I, focusing on normal language acquisition in balanced bilinguals, 41 children in kindergarten through fourth grade were administered the Bilingual Language Acquisition Scale (BLAS), an instrument testing comprehension and production of the following features: number, gender, word order, relatives, conditionals, and Spanish subjunctive and its English equivalents. Most development occurred between kindergarten and the upper grades in the English Comprehension and Production subscales. In the production of Spanish, significant differences appeared between kindergarten and the upper grades to grade three. Unexpectedly, in the fourth grade, performance dropped sharply, with children performing almost at the kindergarten level. There were no significant differences by grade in Spanish comprehension. Most significant differences among grades were produced in the more complex categories (conditionals, Spanish subjunctive/English equivalents, and relatives) in the production subscales in English and Spanish. By fourth grade, in Spanish (and sometimes by third grade), children were performing with significantly lower accuracy than the younger children, particularly in the more complex structures (subjunctive and conditionals, for example). In Study II, 32 of the original subjects were retested two years later using the same instruments and procedures. While performance in English continued to improve for the sample as a whole, performance in Spanish production deteriorated to a significant degree. In Spanish, significant differences in performance between the two administrations were found, both for the scale as a whole and for the following categories: past tense, relatives, and the subjunctive. The influence of personal history and language use patterns was tested. The most severe incidence of loss occurred among children who tended to use both English and Spanish with the same speaker.     

Caregiver behavior in center and family day care

In an effort to examine relationships between variations within day care settings and adult caregiving behaviors the social experiences of 40 toddlers and their caregivers in family and center care were systematically observed. Caregivers were interviewed and conditions of caregiving recorded. Caregivers in both settings with fewer children in their care, who worked shorter hours, with less housework responsibilities engaged in more facilitative social stimulation, expressed more positive affect, were more responsive, and less restrictive and negative. Family day care caregivers who worked in spaces specifically designed to be safe and appropriate for children were less restrictive of toddler activity. Adult-child ratio and caregiver training appeared to be the best indicators of quality care in center day care, while a safe and appropriate caregiving environment and small groups appeared as quality indicators in family day care.     

Reaction time, intelligence, and attention

The roles of attention in reaction time and in the relationships among reaction time, intelligence, and achievement were analyzed. The subjects were 105 seventh-grade children. The results were generally consistent with most studies involving the Hick paradigm: both mean reaction time and the standard deviation of reaction time correlated with the intelligence and achievement measures used. Reaction time measures were correlated with attention and perceptual speed as well as with general intelligence, or g. Implications of these results for current theories linking reaction time and intelligence are discussed.     

Aphasic adults' use of heuristic and structural linguistic cues for sentence analysis

Eight aphasic adults with relatively preserved auditory comprehension and 12 normal adults were tested for their ability to analyze sentences in which the functional relations between the verb and nouns was either directly reflected by word order expectancies, or marked by a functor or non-NVN word order. The subjects' task was to designate the agent of each sentence. Results indicated that aphasics utilize word order expectancies but are impaired in their ability to exploit functors and particularly, word order markers for sentence analysis. Results are discussed in terms of aphasics' use of heuristic versus structural linguistic cues for interpreting sentences.     

Hemispheric alpha asymmetries of words with positive, negative, and neutral arousal values preceding tasks of recall and recognition: Electrophysiological and behavioral results from stuttering males and nonstuttering males and females

Hemispheric alpha asymmetries were obtained for stuttering males and nonstuttering males and females for words of positive, negative, and neutral arousal values. Electroencephalographic data were gathered during the presentations of stimulus words and during the actual nonoral recall and recognition of the stimulus items. Stuttering males demonstrated right-hemispheric alpha suppression across stimulus words and tasks as contrasted with left-hemispheric alpha suppression for the nonstuttering males and females. Stuttering males were also shown to recall and recognize fewer words than the nonstuttering subjects across arousal categories. Subjects were also administered a modified version of A. Paivio's (1971, In B. Randhawa & W. Coffman, Eds., Visual thinking, learning, and communication, New York: Academic Press) Individual Differences Questionnaire (IDQ). Results showed our stuttering males to have obtained lower scores on the verbal and imagery questions of the IDQ as compared to the nonstuttering groups. Hemispheric alpha asymmetry results and memory performance from the stuttering males are discussed relative to nonsegmental, right-hemispheric processing strategies.     

Self-punitive behavior in humans: Effects of a self-fulfilling prophecy

Human subjects were exposed to contingencies which programmed aversive tones (100 db). Two types of contingencies were employed: self-confirming (i.e., self-fulfilling prophecies), in which the aversive tone was occasioned by the prediction it was about to occur; and self-disconfirming, in which the tone was probable when subjects predicted it would not occur. Experiments 1 and 2 used a modified classical conditioning paradigm, and demonstrated that a self-confirming contingency maintained reliable self-punitive responding, i.e., subjects consistently predicted and therefore obtained tones on every trial. Subjects in Experiment 3 were instructed to express predictions continuously throughout four sessions to ensure adequate sampling of the various predictions. Subjects exposed to a self-disconfirming contnngency reliably evidenced awareness of the contingency in effect (judged by answers on a postexperimental questionnaire), whereas subjects exposed to a self-confirming contingency failed to show effective avoidance behavior or contingency awareness. Experiment 4 investigated free-operant self-punitive behavior, utilizing a single prediction response button, which subjects depressed repeatedly. Subjects were exposed to either periodic or aperiodic punishment schedules over as many as four sessions. In general, more persistent self-punitive responding was found in the groups receiving periodic punishment. The results from the four experiments show that self-confirming contingencies can effectively prolong self-punitive responding in human subjects. The findings are consistent with a blocking interpretation of self-punitive behavior, which asserts that when an aversive event is already predicted by stimuli in the situation (including temporal cues), the association between a response and punishment is impaired, and self-punitive responding is likely to be maintained. An integration of human and animal self-punitive research is proposed.     

The effects of communication,resource feedback,and identifiability on behavior in a simulated commons

This study examined the effects of communication, feedback, and identifiability on behavior in a simulated commons. To do this, 64 mixed-sex groups of four introductory psychology students participated in a commons dilemma simulation for 50 trials or until the group exhausted the commons pool. Half of the groups played under a free communication condition, while the other half were prohibited from communicating. Half of the groups in both communication conditions received visual feedback about the amount of the commons' resource (money) which remained after each trial while the other half received no feedback. Finally, half of the groups in each of these four conditions were made highly identifiable by the use of the name tags and feedback about the choices of each player. The remaining groups were assigned to a low identifiability condition in which no name tags were used, no feedback given and group members were separated by wooden dividers to prevent visual contact. Results showed that groups having the opportunity for resource feedback or for communication achieved greater total money harvests and maintained the commons for a greater number of trials than groups having neither. As expected, the largest totals and longest commons maintenance were achieved by groups having both. Identifiability had no influence on the length of commons maintenance except when there was neither resource feedback nor communication opportunities. When both were unavailable, groups in the high identifiability condition harvested more money and maintained the commons longer.     

Sequential item selection: Optimal and heuristic policies

This paper considers testing in which the goal is to minimize the number of test items required to establish a learner's state of ability. Focus is on optimal or near optimal selection over a well-defined universe of items or stimuli. Selection policies are determined for the case in which the items have hierarchical or partial hierarchical relationships. Derivation of an optimal policy rests upon techniques from dynamic programming. For situations in which an optimal policy may be too costly to compute, two heuristic approximations are offered. One heuristic counts the hypothetical estimates of ability that remain tenable following a response to each item and chooses the item that minimizes the expectation of that number. The other selects the item that maximizes the statistic of information.     

Lateralization of temporal lobe dysfunction and verbal encoding

The contribution of encoding deficits to verbal-learning difficulties known to be associated with temporal lobe dysfunction was investigated. Auditory and visual false-recognition tasks, which assess verbal encoding strategies, were given to patients with left-temporal-lobe (LTL) and right-temporal-lobe (RTL) surgical excisions and to a group of normal controls (NC). On both auditory and visual tasks, LTL patients made significantly more false-recognition errors than the other subjects on related, but not unrelated, words in the test list. The findings indicate that LTL patients are able to initially encode verbal material and that a breakdown in information processing occurs at a later stage. On the auditory tasks, the performance of RTL patients did not differ from that of NC subjects. However, on the visual tasks, RTL patients, as compared to both LTL and NC subjects, made fewer false-recognition errors. The performance of RTL patients, in contrast to LTL patients, could be interpreted as a reduced encoding of the visual attribute of verbal material. Another possible explanation considered was difficulty in familiarity discrimination.