The relationship between phonological and morphological deficits in Broca's aphasia: further evidence from errors in verb inflection

A previous study of 10 patients with Broca's aphasia demonstrated that the advantage for producing the past tense of irregular over regular verbs exhibited by these patients was eliminated when the two sets of past-tense forms were matched for phonological complexity (Bird, Lambon Ralph, Seidenberg, McClelland, & Patterson, 2003). The interpretation given was that a generalised phonological impairment was central to the patients' language deficits, including their poor performance on regular past tense verbs. The current paper provides further evidence in favour of this hypothesis, on the basis of a detailed analysis of the errors produced by these same 10 patients in reading, repetition, and sentence completion for a large number of regular, irregular, and nonce verbs. The patients' predominant error types in all tasks and for all verb types were close and distant phonologically related responses. The balance between close and distant errors varied along three continua: the severity of the patient (more distant errors produced by the more severely impaired patients); the difficulty of the task (more distant errors in sentence completion>reading>repetition); the difficulty of the item (more distant errors for novel word forms than real verbs). A position analysis for these phonologically related errors revealed that vowels were most likely to be preserved and that consonant onsets and offsets were equally likely to be incorrect. Critically, the patients' errors exhibited a strong tendency to simplify the phonological form of the target. These results are consistent with the notion that the patients' relatively greater difficulty with regular past tenses reflects a phonological impairment that is sensitive to the complexity of spoken forms.     

Service Needs of Foster Families with Children who have Disabilities

We examined the service needs of foster families with children who have disabilities. Foster parents in a large Canadian city were asked “What services or supports would be helpful to you?” The responses to this question were edited for clarity and to eliminate redundancies, and sorted into piles of like statements by a group of 15 foster care professionals. Two types of statistical analysis were applied to the sorting of the statements to describe the relationship between statements and their groupings. The major concepts were identified according to the contents of the cluster and a map was constructed to provide a graphic representation of the conceptualization process. The major services and supports identified in this study were: support in the community, financial support, accommodating school system, good relationships with social workers, responsive professionals, information, comprehensive medical care, services for aboriginal children and families, transitional services, and respite.     

Pigeons' discrimination of paintings by Monet and Picasso

Pigeons successfully learned to discriminate color slides of paintings by Monet and Picasso. Following this training, they discriminated novel paintings by Monet and Picasso that had never been presented during the discrimination training. Furthermore, they showed generalization from Monet's to Cezanne's and Renoir's paintings or from Picasso's to Braque's and Matisse's paintings. These results suggest that pigeons' behavior can be controlled by complex visual stimuli in ways that suggest categorization. Upside-down images of Monet's paintings disrupted the discrimination, whereas inverted images of Picasso's did not. This result may indicate that the pigeons' behavior was controlled by objects depicted in impressionists' paintings but was not controlled by objects in cubists' paintings.     

Responding changes systematically within sessions during conditioning procedures.

When the procedure is held constant within an experimental session, responding often changes systematically within that session. Many of these within-session changes in responding cannot be dismissed as learning curves or by-products of satiation. They have been observed in studies of positive reinforcement, avoidance, punishment, extinction, discrimination, delayed matching to sample, concept formation, maze and alley running, and laboratory analogues of foraging, as well as in the unconditioned substrates of conditioned behavior. When aversive stimuli are used, responding usually increases early in the session. When positive reinforcers are used, responding changes in a variety of ways, including increasing, decreasing, and bitonic functions. Both strong and minimal reinforcement procedures produce within-session decreases in positively reinforced behavior. Within-session changes in responding have substantial theoretical and methodological implications for research in conditioning.     

影响图画命名时间的因素

实验共测量了311张图片的H值、命名一致性百分数、概念一致性百分数、表象一致性、熟悉性、视觉复杂性、词长和图片命名的时间,主要探索影响图片命名潜伏期的因素,结果发现概念一致性、熟悉性、表象一致性、词频是影响图片命名时间的主要因素。并尝试建立了概念一致性、熟悉性、表象一致性和词频对图片命名时间的回归方程,其预测能力为55.5%。根据图片的命名时间对命名的难易程度进行了分级,希望能对利用图片作为实验材料的认知实验提供有价值的信息     

青少年心理健康素质的概念和结构初探

青少年心理健康素质是健康心理学中具有开创性和探索性的研究领域,因此涉及若干理论问题需要探讨。其中青少年心理健康素质的基本概念和基本结构是该研究领域首先应探讨的基本理论问题。     

On the Validity of Idiographic and Generic Self‐Concept Implicit Association Tests: A Core‐Concept Model

We present a core‐concept model (CCM) suggesting that stimulus centrality is an important factor in category representations in implicit measures. We tested the hypothesis that idiographic stimuli (first name, birthday) are more central and therefore assess self‐concept in Implicit Association Tests (IATs) more validly than generic and nonspecific stimuli (me, you). Superior validity of the idiographic variant emerged across three different domains of self‐concept. First, an idiographic self‐esteem IAT displayed higher correlations than a generic IAT with self‐assessments and observer‐assessments of self‐esteem. Second, an idiographic body scheme‐IAT predicted subjective ratings of body image and objective body‐mass index. Third, an idiographic aggressiveness‐IAT had higher incremental validity for unprovoked aggression when interacting with explicit measures of aggressiveness. We conclude that idiographic stimuli focus participants' attention on the core features of the self, hence, tapping into self‐related associations to a stronger degree than generic stimuli. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A novel argument for the Universality of Parsing principles

Previous work on Relative Clause attachment has overlooked a crucial grammatical distinction across both the languages and structures tested: the selective availability of Pseudo Relatives. We reconsider the literature in light of this observation and argue that, all else being equal, local attachment is found with genuine Relative Clauses and that non-local attachment emerges when their surface identical imposters, Pseudo Relatives, are available. Hence, apparent cross-linguistic variation in parsing preferences is reducible to grammatical factors. The results from two novel experiments in Italian are presented in support of these conclusions.     

The cultural background of the non‐academic concept of psychology in Japan: Its implications for introductory education in psychology

No research has empirically explored the non‐academic concept of psychology itself (implicit theories) in non‐Western cultures despite a widely held belief that this understanding differs cross‐culturally. This study examined whether the non‐academic concept of psychology among inexperienced Japanese students differed from the concept held by students of other countries. In Japanese, psychology is referred to as , which includes the ideographic character , literally meaning heart. This fact led us to hypothesize that psychology will be disproportionately associated with emotion among Japanese students. Indeed, our findings among Japanese students produced a J‐curve, indicating that our prediction was true. We posit that this issue has never been discussed in Japan because a majority of people share this concept of psychology. In our second study, we examined not only preference in students' association of intelligence or emotion but also heart or mind with psychology. Finally, we identified whether students' believe that psychology encompasses both the heart and the mind. We conclude with a discussion of the importance of explicitly defining the non‐academic concept of psychology in early psychology education in Japan.