A comparison between the development of the appearance-reality distinction in the People's Republic of China and the United States

A study of the appearance-reality distinction in American 3- to 5-year-olds was replicated with Chinese 3- to 5-year-olds. The error patterns, age changes, and absolute levels of performance were similar in the two samples. It was speculated that the acquisition of this distinction may be a universal, possibly age-linked development that is probably fueled by experiences with appearance-reality discrepancies that are available in all cultures.     

The development of discourse mapping processes: the on-line interpretation of anaphoric expressions

The present research focuses on how children integrate the antecedent of different kinds of anaphor into their on-going interpretation of an utterance, and on the kinds of cues they use to help them to do this. These issues were studied by examining the on-line processing of three types of anaphoric devices—repeated noun phrases, general terms and pronoun anaphors. The data showed that by the age of five, anaphoric mapping processes in general are well-mastered, although all age-groups (5, 7, 10 year olds and adults) found general term anaphors more difficult to interpret. The major developmental differences concerned the processing of anaphoric pronouns. For five year olds, pronouns were primarily interpreted as devices which maintained the thematic subject of the discourse, but when there was no thematic subject they relied primarily on pragmatic plausibility in their assignment of pronominal co-reference. As children get older, they are able to take advantage of the lexical properties of pronouns and all three sources of information—lexical, pragmatic inference and the thematic structure of the discourse—play contributory roles in the assignment of reference to a pronoun.     

The role of attentional resources in automatic detection

The question of whether an automatic detection task requires the use of limited-capacity resources was investigated in a series of dual-task experiments. The automatic task required subjects to detect a consistently mapped target digit in a display of letters. This task was paired with a variety of concurrent visual discriminations that could either occur in close proximity to the automatic target or in a disparate display area. The main finding was that accuracy in each task was higher in conditions allowing attention to be shared than when it had to be divided between separate areas. These results indicate that detection of automatic targets depends on the allocation of spatial attention to the target's area.     

The development of young children's awareness of logical inconsistencies

Research by Markman (1979) suggests that children up to 12 years of age do not spontaneously detect logical inconsistencies. The present study was directed to factors which may limit children's ability to recognize their failures to understand. A task was devised which involved materials that were clearly based on children's experiences, and which involved premises and conclusions which were presented contiguously, rather than being interspersed among other sentences. Ninety-six 5-, 6-, and 7-year-old children were asked to judge the acceptability of eight three-sentence “stories” told by a puppet, and were asked to justify their responses. The stories differed in whether they were consistent or inconsistent, and in whether the principle upon which a story's consistency depended was implicitly or explicitly stated. The results showed developmental differences. By Age 7 years, most children were quite capable of evaluating sentences for their logical consistency. Five-year-olds, however, did not perform as well on the task, especially when the information upon which the logical cohesiveness of the stories rested was implicitly, rather than explicitly, stated. An examination of the justifications provided by these children revealed that they tended to question the empirical validity of individual sentences, rather than integrate the story as a whole and examine its overall logical structure.     

Phonological processing during silent reading in aphasic patients

In a task involving the detection of a predesignated letter during the silent reading of a series of passages, left-brain-damaged aphasic patients and right-brain-damaged patients showed patterns of performance consistent with those of normal individuals. Both of the brain-damaged groups were more likely to detect letters when they were pronounced in a typical way (e.g., g in "ago") than in an atypical way (e.g., g in "through"), suggesting the use of phonological recoding during silent reading. In addition, both of these groups were more likely to detect letters when they occurred in content than in function words, suggesting a differential processing of these word types. Possible differences in the strategies predominantly relied on for phonological recoding and for the differential processing of content and function words by different groups of patients are discussed.     

Attentional biases and the right-ear effect in dichotic listening

Most dichotic listening experiments permit subjects to deploy attention in any way they choose. We argue that this adds uncontrolled variance to the observed right-ear advantage. In the first experiment, more robust laterality effects were obtained in an identification task with focused than with divided attention. Such differences were not found in the second experiment, when a detection procedure was used. Virtually all the laterality effect observed in the second study could be attributed to subjects who were biased attenders, in the sense that they exhibited more intrusions from the right ear to the left than vice versa. However, rather than indicating that laterality effects are simply attentional bias, this effect can be attributed to an asymmetry of perceptual discrimination.     

An awareness approach to the covert symptoms of stuttering

Speech-language clinicians working with the confirmed stuttering client are often faced with the clinical management of the covert symptoms of stuttering in addition to the more observable and measurable overt symptoms. The authors report the successful use of awareness techniques to exaggerate the subjective experience of these covert symptoms and encourage the use of these techniques as an adjunct to the counseling and desensitization procedures traditionally employed. A transcribed clinical management session in which several awareness techniques are used to aid the client in an introspective examination of “anticipation of stuttering,” is analyzed in order to reach some specific recommendations for using awareness techniques in the clinical management of the covert symptoms of stuttering.     

Symbol complexity and symbol identification with rotated symbols

Previous studies of the identification of rotated symbols have been restricted to either alphanumeric characters or symbols designed to be similar in complexity and type to alphanumerics. These researches have found identification response times to be independent of the magnitude of a symbol's angular displacement from a standard upright position, such findings being typically interpreted as supporting a feature extraction model of identification. In the present experiment complex Japanese characters were used to assess whether such a feature extraction interpretation could be generalized to identifying complex rotated symbols. Identification response times were also found to be constant across all non-standard orientations of the characters, supporting a feature extraction interpretation, but quicker times for standard cases suggested that some qualifications might be necessary.     

Towards a model of stress and human performance

An outline is presented of a model that aims to relate energetical and structural mechanisms of human information processing and to incorporate an interactionally defined stress notion in performance research. The first section summarizes objections to unidimensional notions of arousal and stress. It is concluded that further progress requires the analysis of joint cognitive-energetical processing structures. In the second section two current performance models - in terms of linear stages and resources - are briefly reviewed. Despite a number of problems and objections, it is decided to base the model upon linear stage notions of information processing. This is further elaborated in the third section. In accord with Pribram and McGuinness (1975) three energetical supply systems are proposed which are selectively related to specific cognitive processing mechanisms. Stress is defined as a state of imbalance in the energetical supply which is difficult to restore or to compensate. The final section is devoted to the discussion of some lines of evidence and to suggestions for future research.     

Conditioning functional enuresis: follow-up after retraining

Of 52 enuretics treated with bell-and-pad, 44 (84.6%) were initial successes. One year after training, 16 (30.8%) remained continually dry. Positive outcomes increased to 24 (46.2%) with the addition of successful retrainees and to 29 (55.8%), including 5 unretrained relapses who subsequently were found dry. Most clients reach initial success, but less than one third remain continually dry.

In retraining, over 84.2% (16/19) of the clients were again successful, but training time was shorter, and half relapsed a second time. Retraining is an appropriate and relatively easy approach for modifying relapse, at least for many enuretics. More rigorous assessment of retraining requires a balanced follow-up design and comparison with other approaches.