Applications of computer-based instruction: using specialized software to aid letter-name and letter-sound recognition

We evaluated computerized training and testing programs with children who were having difficulties learning prereading skills. The programs were derived from equivalence research and were written in authoring software designed for educators. After learning to match uppercase and lowercase printed letters to the corresponding letter names (Tasks 1 and 2), the children matched the letters to one another (Tasks 4 and 5). Then, after learning to match uppercase letters to sounds (Task 3), they also matched lowercase letters to sounds (Task 6) and matched printed to spoken words (Tasks 7 and 8). The results recommend equivalence-based protocols and user-friendly software in further development of prereading instruction.     

A holistic account of the own-race effect in face recognition: evidence from a cross-cultural study

A robust finding in the cross-cultural research is that people's memories for faces of their own race are superior to their memories for other-race faces. However, the mechanisms underlying the own-race effect have not been well defined. In this study, a holistic explanation was examined in which Caucasian and Asian participants were asked to recognize features of Caucasian and Asian faces presented in isolation and in the whole face. The main finding was that Caucasian participants recognized own-race faces more holistically than Asian faces whereas Asian participants demonstrated holistic recognition for both own-race and other-race faces. The differences in holistic recognition between Caucasian and Asian participants mirrored differences in their relative experience with own-race and other-race faces. These results suggest that the own-race effect may arise from the holistic recognition of faces from a highly familiar racial group.     

Young children's sensitivity to probabilistic phonotactics in the developing lexicon

A series of three experiments examined children's sensitivity to probabilistic phonotactic structure as reflected in the relative frequencies with which speech sounds occur and co-occur in American English. Children, ages 212 and 312 years, participated in a nonword repetition task that examined their sensitivity to the frequency of individual phonetic segments and to the frequency of combinations of segments. After partialling out ease of articulation and lexical variables, both groups of children repeated higher phonotactic frequency nonwords more accurately than they did low phonotactic frequency nonwords, suggesting sensitivity to phoneme frequency. In addition, sensitivity to individual phonetic segments increased with age. Finally, older children, but not younger children, were sensitive to the frequency of larger (diphone) units. These results suggest not only that young children are sensitive to fine-grained acoustic-phonetic information in the developing lexicon but also that sensitivity to all aspects of the sound structure increases over development. Implications for the acoustic nature of both developing and mature lexical representations are discussed.     

The effects of noise and gender on children's episodic and semantic memory

The main objectives in the present study were to examine meaningful irrelevant speech and road traffic noise effects on episodic and semantic memory, and to evaluate whether gender differences in memory performance interact with noise. A total of 96 subjects, aged 13-14 years (n = 16 boys and 16 girls in each of three groups), were randomly assigned to a silent or two noise conditions. Noise effects found were restricted to impairments from meaningful irrelevant speech on recognition and cued recall of a text in episodic memory and of word comprehension in semantic memory. The obtained noise effect suggests that the meaning of the speech were processed semantically by the pupils, which reduced their ability to comprehend a text that also involved processing of meaning. Meaningful irrelevant speech was also assumed to cause a poorer access to the knowledge base in semantic memory. Girls outperformed boys in episodic and semantic memory materials, but these differences did not interact with noise.     

Resisting body dissatisfaction: fat women who endorse fat acceptance

Fat women who endorsed fat acceptance (N=128) were recruited from Radiance Magazine. Relationships between objectified body consciousness (OBC), body esteem, and psychological well-being for the mostly European American sample were similar to those found in other samples. OBC was independently related to body esteem when weight dissatisfaction was controlled. Those who endorsed the need for social change in attitudes towards fat people had higher body esteem and self-acceptance, and lower body shame, than those who endorsed personal acceptance of body size only.     

Developmental dyslexia in different languages: language-specific or universal?

Most of the research on developmental dyslexia comes from English-speaking countries. However, there is accumulating evidence that learning to read English is harder than learning to read other European orthographies (Seymour, Aro, & Erskine, 2003). These findings therefore suggest the need to determine whether the main English findings concerning dyslexia can be generalized to other European orthographies, all of which have less irregular spelling-to-sound correspondences than English. To do this, we conducted a study with German- and English-speaking children (n=149) in which we investigated a number of theoretically important marker effects of the reading process. The results clearly show that the similarities between dyslexic readers using different orthographies are far bigger than their differences. That is, dyslexics in both countries exhibit a reading speed deficit, a nonword reading deficit that is greater than their word reading deficit, and an extremely slow and serial phonological decoding mechanism. These problems were of similar size across orthographies and persisted even with respect to younger readers that were at the same reading level. Both groups showed that they could process larger orthographic units. However, the use of this information to supplement grapheme-phoneme decoding was not fully efficient for the English dyslexics.     

The effects of road traffic noise and meaningful irrelevant speech on different memory systems

To explore why noise has reliable effects on delayed recall in a certain text-reading task, this episodic memory task was employed with other memory tests in a study of road traffic noise and meaningful but irrelevant speech. Context-dependent memory was tested and self-reports of affect were taken. Participants were 96 high school students. The results showed that both road traffic noise and meaningful irrelevant speech impaired recall of the text. Retrieval in noise from semantic memory was also impaired. Attention was impaired by both noise sources, but attention did not mediate the noise effects on episodic memory. Recognition was not affected by noise. Context-dependent memory was not shown. The lack of mediation by attention, and road traffic noise being as harmful as meaningful irrelevant speech, are discussed in relation to where in the input/storing/output sequence noise has its effect and what the distinctive feature of the disturbing noise is.     

Responding for sucrose and wheel-running reinforcement: effects of sucrose concentration and wheel-running reinforcer duration

Six male albino rats were placed in running wheels and exposed to a fixed-interval 30-s schedule of lever pressing that produced either a drop of sucrose solution or the opportunity to run for a fixed duration as reinforcers. Each reinforcer type was signaled by a different stimulus. In Experiment 1, the duration of running was held constant at 15 s while the concentration of sucrose solution was varied across values of 0, 2.5. 5, 10, and 15%. As concentration decreased, postreinforcement pause duration increased and local rates decreased in the presence of the stimulus signaling sucrose. Consequently, the difference between responding in the presence of stimuli signaling wheel-running and sucrose reinforcers diminished, and at 2.5%, response functions for the two reinforcers were similar. In Experiment 2, the concentration of sucrose solution was held constant at 15% while the duration of the opportunity to run was first varied across values of 15, 45, and 90 s then subsequently across values of 5, 10, and 15 s. As run duration increased, postreinforcement pause duration in the presence of the wheel-running stimulus increased and local rates increased then decreased. In summary, inhibitory aftereffects of previous reinforcers occurred when both sucrose concentration and run duration varied; changes in responding were attributable to changes in the excitatory value of the stimuli signaling the two reinforcers.     

Tribal Participatory Research: Mechanisms of a Collaborative Model

Although much social science research has been conducted within American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) communities, relatively little research has been conducted by or for those communities. We describe an approach that facilitates the active involvement of AIAN communities in the research process, from conceptualizing the issues to be investigated to developing a research design, and from collecting, analyzing, and interpreting the data to disseminating the results. The Tribal Participatory Research (TPR) approach is consistent with recent developments in psychology that emphasize the inclusion of community members and the social construction of knowledge. We describe the foundations of the approach and present specific mechanisms that can be employed in collaborations between researchers and AIAN communities. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of the use of TPR regarding project timelines and budgets, interpretation of the data, and ultimately the relationships between tribes and researchers.     

《圣迹图》版本初探

多年来 ,研究孔子的专书中涉及《圣迹图》版本研究的几乎没有 ,且为之介绍的专文也难得一见。《圣迹图》有绘本、石刻本、木刻本三种类型 ,乃为画家及刻梓者出自以垂永久之思 ,以求望图而知所考据 ,入室如见其人之感受。从中国版画史的角度来看 ,《圣迹图》中孔子形象 ,为后人运用想像力 ,揣摩当时的情景 ,选取孔子生平事迹中最为人所津津乐道的难忘情节创造出来的。本文就传世的各种版本及内容作一些考证及探讨。