Children's perception of melodies: the role of contour, frequency, and rate of presentation

Children 4 to 6 years of age were exposed to repetitions of a six-tone melody, then tested for their detection of transformations that either preserved or changed the contour of the standard melody. Discrimination performance was examined as a function of contour condition, magnitude of contour change, rate of presentation, and the presence of novel frequencies. Performance was superior for transformations that changed contour compared to those that did not, for greater changes in contour, and for faster presentation rates. Melodies transformed by a reordering of component tones were no less discriminable than those transformed by the addition of novel frequencies.     

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.     

Decision making in a case of mixed uncertainty: A normative model

We consider a case of uncertainty which is frequently met in various fields, e.g., in parametric statistics: Events {θ}, θ ∈ ∵, are members of family $\text{E}$ on which the decision maker possesses no information at all; however, conditionally on the realization of {θ}, he is able to affix probabilities to all members of another family of events, $\text{F}$. We assume that the decision maker: (1) has a rational behavior under complete ignorance, for decisions whose results only depend on events of $\text{E}$; (2) with {θ} known, maximizes his conditional expected utility for decisions whose results only depend on events of $\text{F}$; (3) has (unconditional) preferences which are consistent with his conditional ones. These assumptions are shown to be sufficient to ensure an approximate representation of the decision maker's preference by a real-valued function W which has the form $\text{W(f) = v[}\text{Inf}{}_{\mathrm{\theta \in \because }}\text{E}{}_{\mathrm{\theta }}\text{(u°f),}\text{Sup}{}_{\mathrm{\theta \in \because }}\text{E}{}_{\mathrm{\theta }}\text{(u°f)]}$, where u and v, respectively, characterize the decision maker's attitudes toward risk and toward complete ignorance.     

Ethnic group-by-generation interactions in WAIS scores in the Hawaii family study of cognition

This paper is a comparatively small-scale replication of a paper by DeFries, Corley, Johnson, Vandenberg, & Wilson (1982), using that subset of the DeFries subject group that was administered the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) and comparing parent vs. offspring performance of Americans of European and of Japanese Ancestry. Like DeFries et al., significant ethnic group-by-generation interactions were obtained in WAIS scores, suggesting the existence of substantial cultural influences on cognitive-test performance.     

On the development of color naming in young children: data and theory

Among the semantics of different common attributes of the environment, consistent and correct color naming seems to develop paradoxically late in children, for even young infants discriminate and categorize colors well, color is a salient feature of the child's world, and children are aware of color as a separate domain, know color terms, and respond to color questions with color names. Several specific anomalies characterize early linguistic development in this domain: Errors in beginning color naming are perseverative or random, there seems to be a minimum age for correct and consistent color naming, developmental rate shows wide individual differences, and acquisition among girls is generally faster than among boys. This essay reviews data that support these observations, and evaluates three traditional explanations for them--including the perceptual salience of color for children, experience and learning in the child, and cognitive development--against a fourth new possibility. It is hypothesized that appropriate color naming may depend on the maturation and integration of specific cortical neurological structures; among several interpretations, the neurological one accounts best for diverse characteristics of early color naming.     

Grammatical class effects in relation to normal and aphasic sentence processing

Agrammatic, Broca's aphasic patients, Wernicke's aphasic patients, and neurologically intact control subjects were asked to detect target letters in prose passages and in a scrambled word passage. The targets were embedded, in some instances, in content words (open-class vocabulary items), and in other instances, in function words (closed-class vocabulary items). With respect to the prose passages, both the control subjects and Wernicke's aphasic patients were more apt to notice target letters when they appeared in the open-class items than when in closed-class items; by contrast, the agrammatic Broca's patients showed no vocabulary class detection difference. The Wernicke's patients were not entirely normal, however: Whereas the normal subjects showed a much smaller vocabulary class effect for letter detection in the scrambled condition, the Wernicke's maintained the pattern they had shown in the prose condition. These and other findings obtained on the letter cancellation task are discussed in relation to lexical access mechanisms geared to sentence parsing.     

Development of speech and language following bilateral frontal lesions

Language and speech were studied in a young child with perinatally acquired bifrontal lesions. Bilateral frontal pathology seriously interfered with the development of intelligible speech and resulted in a persistent expressive aphasia. Analysis of the neuropsychological profile indicated impairments in intelligence and language comprehension. These deficits, however, were considered secondary to the profound speech programming disorder. The findings indicate that, despite the plasticity of the immature central nervous system, bilateral frontal injury sustained at an early age precludes the development of intelligible speech. Furthermore, structurally intact cortical regions outside the territories of the speech zones fail to mediate normal speech and language development.     

Parafoveal attention in congenitally deaf and hearing young adults

This reaction-time study compared the performance of 20 congenitally and profoundly deaf, and 20 hearing college students on a parafoveal stimulus detection task in which centrally presented prior cues varied in their informativeness about stimulus location. In one condition, subjects detected a parafoveally presented circle with no other information being present in the visual field. In another condition, spatially complex and task-irrelevant foveal information was present which the subjects were instructed to ignore. The results showed that although both deaf and hearing people utilized cues to direct attention to specific locations and had difficulty in ignoring foveal information, deaf people were more proficient in redirecting attention from one spatial location to another in the presence of irrelevant foveal information. These results suggest that differences exist in the development of attentional mechanisms in deaf and hearing people. Both groups showed an overall right visual-field advantage in stimulus detection which was attenuated when the irrelevant foveal information was present. These results suggest a left-hemisphere superiority for detection of parafoveally presented stimuli independent of cue informativeness for both groups.     

Extension of caution indices to mixed-format tests

Tatsuoka suggested several extended caution indices and their standardized versions, and these have been used as person-fit statistics by various researchers. However, these indices are only defined for tests with dichotomous items. This paper extends two of the popular standardized extended caution indices for use with polytomous items and mixed-format tests. Two additional new person-fit statistics are obtained by applying the asymptotic standardization of person-fit statistics for mixed-format tests. Detailed simulations are then performed to compute the Type I error rate and power of the four new person-fit statistics. Two real data illustrations follow. The new person-fit statistics appear to be satisfactory tools for assessing person fit for polytomous items and mixed-format tests.