Comprehension of directly and indirectly stated main ideas and details in discourse by brain-damaged and non-brain-damaged listeners

Aphasic, right-hemisphere-damaged, and non-brain-damaged subjects heard short narrative paragraphs. Each paragraph contained four main ideas and one or more details related to each main idea. After each paragraph was presented, subjects' comprehension and retention of main ideas and details from the paragraph were tested. Some of the test items directly restated information from paragraphs and others paraphrased information from paragraphs. All groups of subjects remembered main ideas better than they remembered details, and no group of subjects was significantly affected by whether test items directly or indirectly stated information from paragraphs. Disfluent aphasic and right-hemisphere-damaged subjects' overall paragraphs comprehension scores were not significantly poorer than those of non-brain-damaged subjects. Fluent and mixed aphasic subjects' overall paragraph comprehension scores were significantly worse than those of non-brain-damaged and right-hemisphere-damaged subjects. Token Test and Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination auditory comprehension scores did not predict aphasic subjects' paragraph comprehension scores. right-hemisphere-damaged subjects' overall paragraph comprehension scores were not significantly those of non-brain-damaged and right-hemisphere-damaged subjects. Token Test and Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination auditory comprehension scores did not predict aphasic subjects' paragraph comprehension scores.     

Comprehension of main ideas and details in coherent and noncoherent discourse by aphasic and nonaphasic listeners

Aphasic and nonaphasic listeners' comprehension of main ideas and details within coherent and noncoherent narrative discourse was examined. Coherent paragraphs contained one topic to which all sentences in the paragraph related. Noncoherent paragraphs contained a change in topic with every third or fourth sentence. Each paragraph contained four main ideas and one or more details that related to each main idea. Listeners' responses to yes/no questions following each paragraph yielded the following results: (1) Nonaphasic listeners comprehended the paragraphs better than aphasic listeners. (2) Both aphasic and nonaphasic listeners comprehended main ideas better than they comprehended details. (3) Coherence did not affect comprehension of main ideas for either group. (4) Coherence did not affect comprehension of details by nonaphasic subjects. (5) Coherence affected comprehension of details by aphasic subjects, and their comprehension of details in coherent paragraphs was worse than their comprehension of details in noncoherent paragraphs. There was no significant correlation between Token Test scores and measures of paragraph comprehension.     

Message therapy: Language approach to stuttering therapy with children

Message therapy is a clinical procedure designed to be used as a carry-over technique with school-age stutterers or as a sole technique with the preschooler. The focus of therapy is on a unit of communication rather than on the moment or place of stuttering. One of the basic assumptions of the procedure is that the child is beginning to monitor how he/she is speaking rather than what is being communicated (i.e., the “message”)—each task requiring a different cognitive process. The emphasis of the therapy is to redirect the child's attention to “what he/she is saying.” The clinical procedures are discussed as they relate to the specific population.     

Performance differences following exposure to predictable and unpredictable noncontingent outcomes in high and low achievers

Two experiments are described in which subjects rated as high or low in achievement motivation were exposed to uncontrollable outcomes on a cognitive task. Effects on subsequent performance on a different cognitive task were shown to depend on level of achievement motivation, on whether the uncontrollable outcomes were predictable or unpredictable, and on whether the uncontrollable outcomes were positive or negative. These findings have important theoretical implications which are discussed.     

Sensitivity in spectral structures

Invariance of matching is shown to be necessary and sufficient for the existence of sensitivity functions that are unique up to multiplication by arbitrary positive real numbers. Examples from auditory and visual psychophysics are discussed.     

Semantic and visual memory codes in learning disabled readers

Two experiments investigated whether learning disabled readers' impaired recall is due to multiple coding deficiencies. In Experiment 1, learning disabled and skilled readers viewed nonsense pictures without names or with either relevant or irrelevant names with respect to the distinctive characteristics of the picture. Both types of names improved recall of nondisabled readers, while learning disabled readers exhibited better recall for unnamed pictures. No significant difference in recall was found between name training (relevant, irrelevant) conditions within reading groups. In Experiment 2, both reading groups participated in recall training for complex visual forms labeled with unrelated words, hierarchically related words, or without labels. A subsequent reproduction transfer task showed a facilitation in performance in skilled readers due to labeling, with learning disabled readers exhibiting better reproduction for unnamed pictures. Measures of output organization (clustering) indicated that recall is related to the development of superordinate categories. The results suggest that learning disabled children's reading difficulties are due to an inability to activate a semantic representation that interconnects visual and verbal codes.     

The Conditions of Philosophy in Totalitarian and Post-Totalitarian Poland

This compound paper presents the views of two Polish philosophers on the strong international pressures influencing the development of Polish philosophy in recent times. The first part, by Leszek Koczanowicz, treats the philosophical situation and problems of totalitarian Poland under the influence of Soviet Marxism, while the second part, by Adam Chmielewski, focuses on the main trends and difficulties of post-totalitarian Poland, dominated by Western influence.     

Passport to Duke

Editor’s Introduction The following text was prepared by Pierre Bourdieu for delivery at a conference on his work held at Duke University, April 21–23, 1995. Entitled “Pierre Bourdieu: Fieldwork in Culture,” the conference was sponsored by the Duke Graduate Program in Literature and included such well-known literary scholars as Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Jonathan Culler, and Fredric Jameson. Bourdieu, of course, was the invited guest of honor, but was uncertain as to whether he should make the effort of attending, particularly since he was recovering from a short period of poor health. As I too had been invited (and seemed more familiar with the American scene), Bourdieu discussed the question with me in Paris. He was rather concerned about wrongheaded, trendy applications of his theories by American literary scholars, who often misunderstand his work because they simply do not know the intellectual landscape to which it relates. Reading such conference paper titles as “Cross-Dressing for Success: The Scramble for Symbolic Power in Tabitha Sweeney’s Female Quixotism,” Bourdieu confessed his fear of being taken as simply the French intellectual flavor of the month, one whose theory is used simply as grist for the American academy’s industrious mills of literary interpretation. He ultimately decided to send the following text to be read at the conference in his absence. It treats, with polite frankness, his worries about being misinterpreted through importation into the American theoretical field with its peculiar conception of French philosophy; Bourdieu’s paper situates these particular worries within a more general account of “allodoxic”distortions caused by the international travel of theory; but it also tries to prevent further misunderstanding by offering a brief contextualization of his theory and a brief summary of his method of analysis through fields. The translation of Bourdieu’s text was prepared by Loïc Wacquant, and is presented here with only minor adjustments.     

On optimal smoothing and derivative estimation from noisy displacement data in biomechanics

Estimating derivatives from noisy displacement data is a notoriously ill-posed problem in signal processing and biomechanics. Following the work of Wood and Jennings (1978) and Hatze (1979, 1981), the present paper describes the use of optimally regularized, natural quintic splines for estimating smoothed positions, velocities, and accelerations from equidistantly sampled, noisy position measurements. It appears that the nature of the boundary conditions of the data is of some importance, since various algorithms used hitherto result in artefacts throughout the data if the true derivatives at the record ends differ significantly from zero. Natural quintic splines do not suffer from this disadvantage below the third derivative.The ill-posed character of movement analysis has some interesting implications for movement synthesis and optimization, similar to the indeterminacy of muscular co-contraction from merely external, biomechanical measurements.     

Relationships between perceptions of organizational size and the organizational choice process

Expectancy theory concepts were used to predict (a) the attractiveness of, (b) the amount of effort directed toward entering, and (c) the eventual choice of a job in relatively big and small work organizations. It was found, among a group of graduating seniors from a technical college, that antecedent perceptions regarding organizational size (expectancy, valence, instrumentality) were significantly related to the relative attractiveness of different-sized organizations and the number of job interviews taken with relatively big and small companies. In addition, economically tied extrinsic outcomes were seen as more readily attainable in big organizations, whereas certain intrinsic outcomes were perceived to be more easily obtained in small organizations.