Speech rate and the development of short-term memory span

Two experiments are reported which examine the effects of word duration on memory span in subjects of different ages. The same linear function relating recall to speech rate (assessed by the speed of repeating words) fits the results of subjects ranging in age from 4 years old to adulthood. It is concluded that developmental increases in short-term memory span can be explained in terms of increases in speech rate and that there is no evidence for an increase in short-term memory capacity. Analyses of the children's speech suggests that increases in speech rate with age reflect increases in the speed of articulation of individual words, rather than any change in the duration of pauses between successive words or changes in coarticulation between words.     

Time urgency and the Type A behavior pattern: Implications for time investment and psychological entrapment

Type A's have been described as more time urgent than Type B's, and research indicates that they underestimate the passage of fixed time intervals. The present study examined the implications of these differences in time perception for decisions where time is a resource that can be invested. Type A's and B's were given an initial stake of $4 and provided the opportunity to invest some or all of that amount for the chance to win an additional $2. Investment occurred as a function of time, with subjects believing they would win the additional $2 if a counter reached a randomly determined number. Each unit increment on the counter also resulted in the loss of 1¢ from the initial stake, thus as the counter progressed, goal attainment became more certain, but expenses also increased. Subjects could stop the counter at any time and keep the remainder of their initial stake or continue to invest until the initial stake was depleted (the counter was programmed to never hit the “jackpot”). Half of the subjects could monitor the counter directly, while the other half could not and had to rely on their subjective time estimates. Results indicated that when objective time passage cues were present, Type A's and B's did not differ in their investment decisions. When subjects had to estimate time passage, however, Type A's invested far more than Type B's. These results indicate that under appropriate conditions, Type A's are more susceptible than Type B's to psychological entrapment.     

Psychological studies of children who have cancer

Increasingly, more optimistic prognoses for children who have cancer have led investigators to study the adjustment reactions of children who survive this traumatic experience. There is considerable evidence that the experience of having cancer, receiving prolonged and often painful treatment, and the uncertain condition of cancer survivorship have profound emotional effects on children. The characteristic features of the psychological impact of cancer are the experience of continuing uncertainty in a life-threatening crisis and the resultant search for meaning. Studies are beginning to find that even very young children actively struggle to organize and make sence of this experience.     

Infants' perception of pictorially specified interposition

Five- and seven-month-olds were tested for sensitivity to pictorial interposition in two experiments. Reaching was used as the dependent measure. Seven-month-olds gave evidence of sensitivity to pictorial interposition. In both experiments they showed a significant preference to reach for the pictorially nearer side of a flat interposition display which stimulated three overlapping surfaces and showed no reaching preferences when viewing control displays. Five-month-olds' reaching tendencies did not differ significantly between experimental (interposition) and control conditions in the second experiment. This result indicated that their responses may have been due to nonspatial proximal stimulus variables in the displays. Five-month-olds, therefore, gave no evidence of sensitivity to pictorial interposition. The finding that 7-month-olds are sensitive to pictorial interposition and the failure to find sensitivity in 5-month-olds is consistent with findings from other studies on infants' sensitivity to pictorial depth information. The cumulative results of these studies suggest that sensitivity to pictorial depth information first appears between 5 and 7 months of age.     

A developmental sequence in preschool children's acquisition of reading readiness skills and print awareness concepts

While various attempts have been made to explain the relationships among preschool children's acquisition of various aspects of print-related knowledge, studies have generally employed statistical procedures appropriate for linear relationships. Yet the relationships among measures of print-related knowledge may not be linear. One technique that has not been employed in this area but which provides a means for identifying nonlinear hierarchical relationships among measures is order analysis. The purpose of this paper was to examine empirically the acquisition of preschool children's print-related knowledge through order analysis. A data set that consisted of 60 preschool children's performances on five measures which assessed concepts about the purposes and processes of reading and the reading readiness skills of letter naming and visual and auditory discrimination was reanalyzed using ordering procedure. A multivariate analysis indicated a multidimensional relationship among the three reading readiness and two print awareness measures that differed across the three age groups. The hierarchical orderings of the five measures indicated that mastery of the reading readiness skills occurred prior to the mastery of the print awareness concepts.     

Inspection time and its relation to intelligence

Inspection time, defined as the minimum duration for which two different stimuli must be presented if they are to be perceived as different, was measured for both auditory and visual stimuli. The minimum durations were determined by means of a two- alternative forced-choice task for 50 children whose average age was 12 years 2 months. The times were correlated with the children's verbal (Mill-Hill vocabulary) and nonverbal (Raven matrices) intelligence. The Kendall correlation coefficients were ?.3188 and ?.0929 for the auditory and visual inspection times with verbal intelligence, and ?.2322 and ?.2676 for those times with nonverbal intelligence. Auditory and visual inspection times were correlated .1721 with each other. These results do not support earlier claims that inspection time is closely related to conventional measures of intelligence.     

Development of the Career Exploration Survey (CES)

The development, properties, and uses of the Career Exploration Survey (CES) are described. The CES is intended to (a) facilitate further theory development and empirical research on how exploration affects career decisions, development, and job outcomes, such as job satisfaction, commitment, and turnover; (b) provide a network of variables for investigating the dynamics of the exploration process; and (c) provide a set of criterion measures for examining the effects of personal characteristics and educational treatments on career exploration behaviors and beliefs. The CES is based on a conceptual framework derived from theories of exploration, stress, motivation, and career preference. It consists of seven measures of the career exploration process, three reactions to exploration, and six beliefs about exploration. Dimensionality, reliability, and validity data are presented for four studies comprising 680 observations across 601 individuals.     

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.