Verbal Sexual Coercion and Perceived Victim Responsibility: Mediating Effects of Perceived Control

Verbal coercion involves unwanted sexual penetration compelled by psychological pressure. It was hypothesized that, to the degree that verbal coercion is seen as controllable, victims may be held more responsible. Two samples of US undergraduates rated perceptions of hypothetical sexual coercion scenarios. In Study 1, participants (N = 120) read scenarios of either verbal coercion or rape by a male dating partner. Participants perceived verbal coercion as more controllable than rape, which accounted for the greater responsibility attributed to verbal coercion victims. In Study 2, participants (N = 275) read scenarios involving either male-to-female or female-to-male verbal coercion. Participants perceived female-to-male coercion as more controllable, which accounted for the greater responsibility attributed to a verbally coerced man.     

The effects of verbal information on children's fear beliefs about social situations

Two experiments explored the role of verbal information in changing children's fear-related beliefs about social situations. In Experiment 1, 118 6- to 8- and 12- to 13-year-olds heard positive, negative, or no information about individuals' experiences of three social situations. Fear beliefs regarding each situation were assessed before and after this manipulation. Verbal information had no significant influence on children's fear beliefs. In Experiment 2, the same paradigm was used with 80 12- to 13-year-olds, but the information took the form of multiple attitude statements about the situations expressed by groups of peers, older children, or adults. An affective priming task of implicit attitudes was used to complement the explicit questions about fear beliefs. Negative information influenced both explicit and implicit fear beliefs. The source of information and the child's own social anxiety did not moderate these effects. Implications for our understanding of the socialisation of childhood fears are discussed.     

Children's early productivity with verbal morphology

Three studies using the intermodal preferential looking paradigm examined onset of productive comprehension of tense/aspect morphology in English. When can toddlers understand these forms with novel verbs and novel events? The first study used familiar verbs and showed that 26–36-month olds correctly matched a past/perfective form (-ed or irregular past) to a completed version of an event and a present/imperfective (is V-ing) to the ongoing version of the same event. The second study used novel verbs and events and found that 33-month olds failed to use tense/aspect morphology to choose between completed and ongoing versions of the same event. The third study also used novel verbs and events but simplified the processing demands of the task in several ways (using initial priming of the events and classes of meaning, using different events within test pairs). This study found that 30-month olds successfully used tense/aspect morphology to choose between ongoing and completed novel events. The results demonstrate that children have productive command of tense/aspect morphology by 30 months and have therefore begun the process of creating an abstract grammar containing this element.     

On the language specificity of basic number processing: transcoding in a language with inversion and its relation to working memory capacity

Transcoding Arabic numbers from and into verbal number words is one of the most basic number processing tasks commonly used to index the verbal representation of numbers. The inversion property, which is an important feature of some number word systems (e.g., German einundzwanzig [one and twenty]), might represent a major difficulty in transcoding and a challenge to current transcoding models. The mastery of inversion, and of transcoding in general, might be related to nonnumerical factors such as working memory resources given that different elements and their sequence need to be memorized and manipulated. In this study, transcoding skills and different working memory components in Austrian (German-speaking) 7-year-olds were assessed. We observed that inversion poses a major problem in transcoding for German-speaking children. In addition, different components of working memory skills were differentially correlated with particular transcoding error types. We discuss how current transcoding models could account for these results and how they might need to be adapted to accommodate inversion properties and their relation to different working memory components.     

Impact of auditory selective attention on verbal short-term memory and vocabulary development

This study investigated the role of auditory selective attention capacities as a possible mediator of the well-established association between verbal short-term memory (STM) and vocabulary development. A total of 47 6- and 7-year-olds were administered verbal immediate serial recall and auditory attention tasks. Both task types probed processing of item and serial order information because recent studies have shown this distinction to be critical when exploring relations between STM and lexical development. Multiple regression and variance partitioning analyses highlighted two variables as determinants of vocabulary development: (a) a serial order processing variable shared by STM order recall and a selective attention task for sequence information and (b) an attentional variable shared by selective attention measures targeting item or sequence information. The current study highlights the need for integrative STM models, accounting for conjoined influences of attentional capacities and serial order processing capacities on STM performance and the establishment of the lexical language network.     

Musical and verbal memory in Alzheimer’s disease: A study of long-term and short-term memory

Musical memory was tested in Alzheimer patients and in healthy older adults using long-term and short-term memory tasks. Long-term memory (LTM) was tested with a recognition procedure using unfamiliar melodies. Short-term memory (STM) was evaluated with same/different judgment tasks on short series of notes. Musical memory was compared to verbal memory using a task that used pseudowords (LTM) or syllables (STM). Results indicated impaired musical memory in AD patients relative to healthy controls. The deficit was found for both long-term and short-term memory. Furthermore, it was of the same magnitude for both musical and verbal domains whether tested with short-term or long-term memory tasks. No correlation was found between musical and verbal LTM. However, there was a significant correlation between verbal and musical STM in AD participants and healthy older adults, which suggests that the two domains may share common mechanisms.     

Verbal intelligence and self-regulatory competencies: Joint predictors of boys’ aggression

Two studies examined the interactive effect of receptive verbal intelligence measured by the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test and self-regulatory competencies measured in the delay of gratification paradigm on boys’ aggression. Study 1 participants (N = 98) were middle school, low-income boys primarily ethnic minority. Participants for Study 2 (N = 59) were drawn from a treatment camp for boys from low-income neighborhoods with behavioral adjustment problems. In both studies, the interaction between verbal intelligence and self-regulation was significant such that verbal intelligence was associated with lower aggression to a greater extent among boys who had effective self-regulatory skills than among those who had ineffective self-regulatory skills. The implications of these findings for interventions and for a theory of risk factors in aggression are discussed.     

Direct Perceptual Access to Other Minds

It is sometimes claimed that we perceive people’s mental states in their expressive features. This paper clarifies the claim by contrasting two possible readings, depending on whether expression is conceived relationally or non-relationally. A crucial difference between both readings is that only a non-relational conception of expression ensures direct access to other minds. The paper offers an argument for a non-relational conception of expression, and therefore for the view that we directly perceive people’s mental states in their expressive features.     

De-polarizing verbal irony

In three studies participants were asked to rate the degree of irony perceived in comments relating to five variations of a scenario, ranging from one pole to the opposite pole and passing through three in-between states. In study 1, the comments pertained to the polar extremes of a dimension, e.g. “It’s uphill!” stated with reference to varying degrees of steepness both uphill and downhill (i.e. steep, slightly steep, flat, slightly sloping downhill and steeply sloping downhill). In study 2, the comments were of an “intermediate” nature (e.g. “This hill is neither uphill nor downhill!”) and, as in Study 1, they were used to refer to the same five varying degrees of the same dimension. Study 3 involved the stimuli from both of the first two experiments in a between-participants design.

The results consistently demonstrated that verbal irony does not only apply to (weakly or strongly) polarised statements and situations, but it can also apply to intermediate comments and experiences. The perceptual structure of the dimensions involved modulates the effect.