Remembrance of things parsed: Story structure and recall

An analysis of the underlying structure of simple stories is presented. It is claimed that this type of representation of stories is used to form schemata which guide encoding and retrieval. A type of tree structure containing basic units and their connections was found to be adequate to describe the structure of both single and multi-episode stories. The representation is outlined in the form of a grammar, consisting of rewrite rules defining the units and their relationships. Some transformational rules mapping underlying and surface structures are discussed. The adequacy of the analysis is first tested against Bartlett's protocols of “The War of the Ghosts.” Then a developmental study of recall is presented. It is concluded that both children and adults are sensitive to the structure of stories, although some differences were found. Finally, it is suggested that the schemata used to guide encoding and recall are related but not identical and that retrieval is dependent on the schemata operative at the time of recall.     

The development of elaborative propensity in adolescence

A series of three experiments was conducted to verify the hypothesis that age differences in paired-associate learning proficiency across adolescence stem from the development of increasing elaborative propensity. An auxiliary aim was to determine whether previous study-to-study discrepancies in the pertinent age functions should be attributed to corresponding variations in learning materials or in characteristics of the populations sampled. Taken together, the results of the experiments provided support for the hypothesis. They also indicated, however, that students in late adolescence vary markedly in elaborative propensity, to the point that a substantial proportion of them are hardly distinguishable from preadolescents.     

An information-processing approach to attribution of responsibility

The research literature on defensive attribution of responsibility is reviewed within the framework of a nonmotivational information-processing model which proposes that attributed responsibility is a function of the difference between the perceived contingent probability (congruence) of an outcome, given a perpertrator's behavior, and the noncontingent probability (prior expectancy) of that outcome. Results of previous research on effects of the characteristics of outcomes, perpetrator, and victim on responsibility ratings are reinterpreted in terms of the influence these factors have on estimates of congruence and prior expectancy. Secondary analyses of data from a recent study of causal reasoning resulted in a correlation of .78 between attribution of responsibility and a simple additive model of estimated contingent and prior probabilities of an accident.     

“Penis envy” and attitudes toward castration-like punishment of sexual aggression

Psychoanalytic hypotheses that relate the construct of “penis envy” to the enactment of castration responses toward sexual aggressors were examined by requiring females to evaluate an anthropological film that presented multilations of male genitals. High or low penis envy was determined from responses to Blacky Cartoon VI; the mutilations were presented as cultural rites de passage or as tribal punishments for sexual misconduct. Evaluations of the film showed that interactions predicted by psychoanalytic theory were obtained for subjects' approval of the mutilations, approval of their adoption in the United States, belief that other women should view the film, and desire to see the film again. The analog suggests that penis envy leads to the punishment of sexual aggression, and several psychoanalytic hypotheses for further experimentation on this construct are presented.     

Anatomic and environmental dimensions of stimulus-response compatibility: implication for theories of memory coding.

Reaction time was higher when the relation between stimulus location and anatomic hand was reversed (e.g., left light-right hand) rather than direct (e.g., left light-left hand), even though the environmental location of the hand (up or down) was unrelated to the location of the stimulus (left or right). This effect was shown to be due primarily to decision processes, rather than to interhemisphere transfer delay. This result does not support the view that long-term memory for responses encodes environmental but not anatomic dimensions.     

The development of the category-recall relationship in the sorting-recall task

The relationship between categorical organization and recall for children in grades two, four, and six (ages 8, 10 and 12 years, respectively), and for adults was investigated using the sorting-recall procedure. Subjects sorted unrelated words on individual cards into either two, four, or six categories prior to output, and recall performance improved significantly as a function of increased numbers of sorting categories. The category-recall relationship was shown to be independent of the effects of subject-determined item exposure time in sorting. This result was taken as evidence for a basic structural property of memory (“chunking”) that does not vary as a function of age. We further speculated that the slopes of the category-recall function obtained in this study suggest a limit on the size of organizational units in young children's memory.     

Functional significance of stimulus orientation: effects on orientation discrimination.

Children (6- and 9-year-olds) and adults were required to discriminate identical pairs of visual stimuli from mirror images. It was hypothesized that a key factor in performance would be the extent to which orientation was a functionally significant attribute of the stimuli. Two variables were manipulated, type of orientation discrimination and stimulus class. The first variable refers to the fact that the mirror images could be produced by either left/right or top/bottom reversals. Three classes of stimuli, varying in the extent to which a particular orientation was emphasized, were used: mobile objects (for which left/right orientation is assumed to be important); stationary objects (which lack comparable relevance for left/right orientation); and novel, abstract forms. The prediction was that if the discrimination task involved left/right reversals, as contrasted with top/bottom reversals, subjects would show an advantage for mobile objects, producing an interaction between stimulus class and orientation discrimination. In the first study, the subjects were children and performance was measured in terms of error rates. In the second study adults were tested, and reaction times were measured. Both studies manifested the predicted interaction. Results are discussed in terms of an information-processing framework, in which the incorporation of orientation-related features in the code representing a stimulus varies with the functional significance of the orientation to the stimulus class.     

A cross-linguistic study of the processing of causative sentences

The comprehension of sentences expressing instigative causation (e.g., The horse makes the camel run) was investigated in children between the ages of 2;0 and 4;4, speaking English, Italian, Serbo-Croatian and Turkish. Cross-linguistic differences in development reveal the roles of morphological (causative particle, case inflection) and syntactic devices (periphrasis, word order) in guiding children's processing of such constructions. It is suggested that local cues (inflectional suffixes, particles, specialized causative verb forms) contribute to the more rapid development of sentence processing strategies in Serbo-Croatian and Turkish. The word order systems of English and Italian, which require that the listener hold the entire sentence pattern in mind in order to determine underlying semantic relations, contribute to slower development on this task.     

A component model for diagnosing and treating children who stutter

Nine components of stuttering and their distribution among 54 children who stutter are described. The components are arranged into a model that includes four neurologic components (attending disorder, auditory-processing disorder, sentence-formulation disorder, and oral-motor disorder) and five traditional components (high self-expectations, manipulative stuttering, disruptive communication environment, unrealistic parental expectations, and abnormal parental need for the child to stutter). Diagnostic and treatment usefulness of the model are discussed. Thirty-two of the children have been followed through component-based treatment and 12 mo post termination. Results indicate that treatment was successful with 27 (84%) of the 32 children. Only one child regressed during the 12 mo after treatment ended. These results suggest that treating the neurologic and traditional factors which disrupt fluency improves maintenance and carry-over.     

Spectral versus temporal features in dichotic listening

Ear advantage for the processing of dichotic speech sounds can be separated into two components. One of these components is an ear advantage for those phonetic features that are based on spectral acoustic cues. This ear advantage follows the direction of a given individual's ear dominance for the processing of spectral information in dichotic sounds, whether speech or nonspeech. The other factor represents a right-ear advantage for the processing of temporal information in dichotic sounds, whether speech or nonspeech. The present experiments were successful in dissociating these two factors. Since the results clearly show that ear advantage for speech is influenced by ear dominance for spectral information, a full understanding of the asymmetry in the perceptual salience of speech sounds in any individual will not be possible without knowing his ear dominance.