When children write nonwords to dictation

Skill in written spelling of simple, monosyllabic nonwords was investigated in 9- to 11-year-old English children. Two aspects of their spellings were of interest: first, could they spell these nonwords so that they sounded correct (nonword spelling accuracy), and second, did their spellings show evidence of biasing from words heard earlier in the test sequence? Nonword spelling was poorer for children of this age than for tested adults. Nevertheless, significant biasing occurred in these children's spellings, though not to the same extent as in adults' nonword spellings, and significant correlations emerged between reading age, nonword spelling skill, susceptibility to biasing, and real word spelling skill. Children with a reading age greater than 11 years showed biasing from word spellings that was within range of that reported for adults, and, for these more skilled readers, word spelling accuracy correlated significantly with both susceptibility to biasing and with nonword spelling accuracy. These children were not as accurate as tested adults at spelling nonwords. Children with a reading age below 11 years were poorer at nonword spelling and showed no overall biasing, yet they also showed a significant correlation between word spelling skill and nonword biasing. Together with evidence from the same task from adults with specific spelling disorders, these results suggest that word knowledge had a direct (biasing) and an indirect (general word spelling knowledge) effect on the performance of the nonword spelling task. But although skill in word spelling may be a necessary prerequisite for nonword spelling, it need not always be sufficient.     

Agency and the Other: On the intersubjective roots of self-identity

The essay argues that a systematic reconstruction of the intersubjective grounds of self-consciousness and self-identity will yield a complex non-reductive notion of agency. Core features of human agency include intentional causality, conscious understanding thereof, as well as the capacity to distinguish self-caused from externally caused phenomena. By analyzing how self-consciousness emerges from intersubjective perspective-taking and dialogue, a socially embedded and symbolically mediated notion of self-identity—one which is able to preserve the core features of human agency—becomes viable. G.H. Mead’s work serves as heuristic framework to articulate the extent to which the Other’s irreducible agency is constitutive of the self’s capacity to establish an identity, now understood as a socially situated narrative self-interpreting process. Self-identity reveals to be an essential open yet not fragmented dynamic, a socially situated yet agent-driven phenomenon, and ethically indebted to the Other as providing the essential gift of selfhood.     

Three experiences affecting spatial discrimination learning by ambulatory children

Children 1 and 3 years of age were given a two-choice spatial discrimination task. They were placed in front of a barrier and encouraged to walk around it; one route around the barrier was blocked. Three experiments studied the effects of different types of experience with this spatial problem. The first examined trial and error experience, in which the child was allowed to walk the route he or she had chosen. Although most children readily learned to choose the open route, the pattern of choices indicated that 3-year-olds were more likely to achieve a learning criterion after an error than 1-year-olds. A second experiment looked at the effects of showing the children the layout of the problem prior to trial and error experience. The 3-year-olds were again more likely than the 1-year-olds to achieve criterion after an error; furthermore, they were likely to know the correct route on the first trial. The third experiment let the children watch their parents take the correct route. This procedure eliminated age differences in performance. The initial choices of the 1-year-olds indicated that they were likely to know the correct route, and if they did not, they were just as likely to learn from their mistakes as the 3-year-olds. The data were interpreted within a mathematical model of learning. Based upon these analyses, we propose two developmental trends. One involves a growth in sensitivity to the consequences of a choice of route. The other is a progression from social learning to more independent and ideational methods of spatial problem solving.     

The “lag effect” in dichoptic viewing

Ten subjects were asked to report both of two different consonant-vowels (CVs) presented to the same foveal area, but in different eyes (“dichoptically”). Stimuli were presented at stimulus-onset asynchronies (SOAs) ranging from 0 to 150 msec in 25-msec steps. Correct identifications were significantly depressed for the eye receiving the leading stimulus at SOAs of 25 to 75 msec. Monoptic data from three subjects indicated no significant reductions in correct identification as a function of SOA. The dichoptic results can be understood in terms of current theories of visual backward masking and are similar to the “lag effect” observed with dichotic listening to speech stimuli. Similarity of results for the two modalities suggests a similar “two-process” explanation may underlie both phenomena.     

Firm Affinities

Jung apparently had learned Enghsh by the time he went to the Burgholzli Clinic, in 1900. There he worked with American and British psychiatrists, wrote papers in Enghsh, and treated his first American analysands. Through one of these, Medill McCormick, Jung came to know influential Americans and his curiosity about the United States grew. In 1909, he first visited the States, along with Freud, and by the time of their break Jung had established 'firm atfinities' with America. His relations with Great Britain took root about then. The first Jungian group was formed under the leadership of Constance Long, who was effective also in organizing American Jungians. After the Great War, Jung fiequently visited England to lecture and lead seminars arranged by H. G. Baynes and M. Esther Harding. He travelled to the American Southwest, East Afiica, and India in the company of American and Enghsh fiiends. After World War 11, Jung's association with Mary and Paul Mellon's Bollingen Foundation and the publishers Routledge and Kegan Paul led to the joint project of the Collected Works . In 1976, fifieen years after Jung's death, the twentieth and final volume appeared, and work on editions of Jung's letters, interviews, and seminars, also under American and British auspices, was well advanced.     

Jung and White and the God of terrible double aspect

This paper discusses theoretical, historical and personal issues in the ill-fated friendship and intellectual collaboration between C.G. Jung and the Dominican scholar Victor White, O.P., based on primary documents in their correspondence, 1945 to 1960. The collaboration of Jung and White began with high expectations but fell into painful disagreements about the nature of God, the problem of evil, and shadow aspects of the Self. They made a rapid commitment to their working alliance based on personal and professional hopes, but paying scant attention to their divergent underlying assumptions. White hoped to build theoretical and practical connections between Jungian psychology and Catholic theology for the sake of modern Catholics. Jung needed learned theological support as he explored the psychological meanings of Christian symbols, including the central symbol of Christ. At the grandest level, they both hoped to transform the Christian West, after the moral disaster of World War II. Their collaboration was risky for both men, especially for White in his career as a Dominican, and it led to considerable suffering. The Self is prominent in the relationship, symbolically present in the text of the correspondence and consciously forming their major topic of debate. From the start, the Self is an archetypal field, drawing the friends into their visionary task at the risk of unconscious inflation. Later the Self is revealed with its shadow as a burden, a puzzle, and a basis for estrangement. Finally, with the intervention of feminine wisdom, mortal suffering is transformed by an attitude of conscious sacrifice.