Remembering plurals: Unit of coding and form of coding during serial recall

Subjects were required to recall lists of six words which had been presented visually in sequence. One or two of the words might be plural nouns. A substantial number of errors occurred in which the plural form became detached from its original root. This is taken as evidence for a morpheme-based code as opposed to a unitary word code. A significantly high proportion of these errors maintained the form of the plural ( /S/, /Z/ or (ЪZ/) which is considered evidence for a primarily phonological coding of the plural morpheme. There is however a suggestion that on some occasions the plural is coded morphemically—i.e., in a way which does not distinguish between the various plural endings.     

A reappraisal of the relation between performances of quantitative identity and quantitative equivalence conservation tasks

Previous studies of children's performance on quantitative identity and equivalence conservation problems in the number domain are suggested to be flawed because of the low numbers of items in the arrays. In Experiment 1, children were tested on three different number versions of identity and equivalence conservation tasks. Their performance varied with the number of items and no child was found to pass a large number version of an equivalence conservation task and fail the corresponding version of an identity conservation task. In Experiment 2 the notion that the contextual effect of asking two similar questions might underlie the difference in performance on the two tasks was tested and rejected. The results are discussed in relation to recent analyses of conservation problems.     

Aversive CS control of instrumental avoidance as a function of selected parameters and method of Pavlovian conditioning

Effects of aversive CSs upon dogs' instrumental avoidance responding were assessed as a function of the Pavlovian conditioning parameters using off-baseline (Experiment 1) and on-baseline (Experiment 2) conditioning procedures. In each experiment, three UCS intensitites (2, 6, and 10 mA) were crossed factorially with two CS-UCS intervals (10 and 90 sec) yielding six groups. After 4 days of conditioning, the CS-produced effects on avoidance were determined primarily by an interaction between Pavlovian procedure (off- versus on-baseline) and UCS intensity. With off-baseline conditioning, CS-produced facilitation of avoidance was an increasing function of the UCS intensity. However, with on-baseline conditioning, only the CS paired with weak UCS facilitated avoidance, and the CS paired with the strong UCS suppressed responding. This reversing parametric function poses problems for two-process motivational theories of avoidance.     

Through the looking glass: Sex differences in memory for self-facial poses

This study investigated recognition memory of photographs of the subject's own face. Male and female subjects were photographed as they projected sociable faces, trustworthy faces, and intelligent faces. After deciding which face of 10 best represented each characteristic, and judging which photograph best represented their “real self,” a recognition memory test of poses was given. Half of each sex were tested under intentional learning conditions and the remainder were tested under incidental learning conditions. Females demonstrated superior recognition memory of their own facial projections and, in particular, recalled photographs of their “real self” and “most sociable” self most easily. No differences were found between the two learning conditions. Subjects' recognition performance was not related to their confidence of judgments. The results were discussed in terms of sex differences and the role of self in memory.     

A general scheme for the analytic decomposition of objective test scores: Illustrative demonstrations using the Rod-and-Frame test and the Müller-Lyer illusion

Objective tests of personality typically include a number of items or trials; the total score on the test is the sum of the subject's “correct” responses across all such trials. Normally, the trials are varied systematically across various facets of the test design, so that the total score represents a composite measure of accuracy averaged across these test facets. However, since only one score is computed for each subject, some potentially important kinds of individual differences—namely all those associated with each particular variation in the test design—are treated solely as measurement unreliability. Such a psychometric stance may serve to obscure more differentiated types of individual differences, with the result that composite scores from trials based on one type of experimental design may not be highly related to such scores from trials using a somewhat different design. The present paper presents a general procedure for scoring objective tests more analytically. To illustrate this general rationale, and to demonstrate its potential utility, data have been reanalyzed from two previous studies, one using the Rod-and-Frame test, the other the Müller-Lyer illusion. In both cases, the traditional global accuracy score did not correlate significantly with other theoretically related variables, while a number of component scores were quite highly related.     

Factors affecting judgments of fluency: I. interjections

Six speech samples containing varying amounts of schwa interjections were tape-recorded and presented to 36 male and 36 female listeners. For each sample, listeners were asked to make judgments of fluent, disfluent, and stuttered speech, and to answer the question “Would you recommend speech therapy?” Results indicated that speech samples containing 5% or more interjections evoked a judgment of disfluent speech by a majority of listeners. The sample containing 20% interjections, however, was found to evoke judgments of disfluent and stuttered speech about equally. Varying numbers of listeners recommended clinical services for disfluent speech. In general, the results indicated that (1) the presence of interjections in connected speech is not normal regardless of frequency, (2) fluent speech may not contain interjections in excess of 5%, and (3) with 20% interjections in speech, the distinction between disfluency and stuttering may be blurred.     

What is right with “deep” dyslexic patients?

Two aphasic adults with a specific acquired dyslexia were given tests requiring the processing of written words and sentences. Despite the general severity of the patients' deficits, some aspects of such processing appear to be relatively well preserved. The patients have particular difficulty reading aloud function words and abstract words; yet in word/nonword discrimination tests, both patients showed normal recognition of function words and one showed normal performance with abstract words. The patients do have a deficit in comprehension of visually presented words and sentences; yet their performance on comprehension tests was considerable and, moreover, showed meaningful relationships with their ability to read aloud.     

Lateralization for reading musical chords: Disentangling symbolic, analytic, and phonological aspects of reading

It has been repeatedly shown that the left hemisphere (right visual field) is superior to the right hemisphere (LVF) in reading English, a bias possibly due to any or all of three confounded factors: (1) the symbolic nature of the coding system; (2) the analytic requirements of the decoding process; and (3) the phonological associations of the elements. Recent work on reading Japanese ideograms (Kanji) disentangles (1) from (2) and (3), but leaves the latter two confounded. We further disentangle (2) and (3) by examining visual field preference for reading musical chords, representatives of an analytic, nonphonological symbol system. The strong RVF advantage is interpreted as indicating that the left hemisphere is dominant for reading an analytic symbol system that is not phonologically based. We conclude that the left-hemisphere advantage traditionally found for reading phonological symbols is due to their analytic nature in addition to any effect due to their linguistic association.