Career stages: A partial test of Levinson's model of life/career stages

This study purports to test a theory of life and career stages developed by Daniel Levinson and his associates. The theory suggests four distinct stages between ages 20 and 45 each with their own developmental tasks and related behaviors and attitudes. Subjects (759 managerial, professional, and technical employees) were selected randomly from levels and departments of a major public sector employer in the midwest United States. The measure of career stage asked respondents to indicate whether they had passed through, were still in, or had not yet reached each stage as operationalized by a short vignette. Attitudinal and behavioral measures were abstracted from previously developed instruments. Only moderate support for the theory was found with little or no evidence to support the age-linked notion of these stages. Stages were found to be discriminable in terms of certain attitudes (upward mobility, career and overall job satisfaction, and job commitment) as predicted. Suggestions are given for improvements in measurement, research design, and theory refinement.     

Development of comprehension of sentences with “because” or “if”

The comprehension of sentences with “because” or “if” was investigated in children aged 2;9–11;11. Imitation, comprehension (choosing one of two picture sequences to go with a sentence), recognition (judging sentences with connective or structure differences as heard before or not), and synonymy (judging equivalence of meaning in sentences with different connectives or structures) tasks were administered, along with logical ordering, reversibility, and classification tasks. Above-chance responding in the comprehension task occurred by age 8, and in recognition and synonymy by age 10. Cognitive performance predicted 28.4% of the variance in the linguistic scores and cognitive success was concurrent with or preceded linguistic success. Comprehension of “because” and “if” appears to develop gradually, and is related to the development of certain operative rules.     

On knowing how well one is remembering: The persistence of strategy use during transfer

A potential cause for children's failure to transfer learning strategies was explored in the present study. A self-monitoring process was suggested to be essential for evaluating one's own level of performance and the effectiveness of various mnemonic strategies. Matched on free recall scores in this study's first sort-and-recall phase, first, third, and fifth graders (ages 7, 9, and 11 years, respectively) were assigned to one of three treatment groups or a control group. During Phase II, the treatment groups received instruction in sorting pictures according to semantic similarities in preparation for future recall. In addition, Groups 3 and 4 later received feedback indicating their Phase II improvement in performance. A cause-and-effect relationship between strategy use and enhanced recall was further suggested to Group 4. Among third graders, only those provided with feedback and strategy instruction continued to rely upon the input organization strategy when faced with transfer tasks in Phase III. Both enhanced recall and improved sorting styles were observed for these subjects in Phase III. Some first graders also showed improved sorting styles and improved recall following feedback, while fifth graders showed enhanced recall even without experimenter-provided feedback. Subject's responses to a metamemory interview provided additional support for the hypothesis that the self-monitoring of memory performance is more likely to be part of fifth graders' (than first graders') memory abilities.     

The morphological asymmetry of the hemispheres and cerebral dominance for speech: A possible relationship

The asymmetry of the posterior Sylvian branches of the middle cerebral artery was examined on the carotid angiograms of 59 patients in whom the lateralization of speech representation was known from sodium amobarbital (Amytal) studies. The usual asymmetry of these vessels was found to be present in the group of patients with left-hemisphere speech representation but significantly reduced in patients with atypical cerebral dominance for speech. A model of the inheritance of handedness and cerebral dominance is extended to take account of these results.     

Right-hemisphere speech representation and comprehension of syntax after left cerebral injury

Comprehension of language and visuo-spatial abilities were studied in 12 surgical patients with left cerebral lesions and right-hemisphere speech representation verified by sodium amobarbital tests. When left-hemisphere symptoms preceded the acquisition of speech, impaired understanding of syntactically complex sentences was associated with an early, but not late, onset of convulsive seizures. Other behavioral measures did not show a similar effect of age at seizure onset. Sparing or loss of comprehension could not be related to any aspects of the neurological histories in cases with right-hemisphere speech acquired before the onset of left-hemisphere symptoms. Factors which may have influenced the development of right-hemisphere language comprehension are discussed.     

Visual processing of multielement arrays and selective backward masking

In the first of two selective masking experiments, 7-letter rows were followed at several ISIs by a mask or no-mask and a bar-marker partial report cue. The results suggest that the arrays were processed ends-first and then, in general, from both ends towards the middle. In the second experiment, bar-marker partial report cues were presented at the onset or offset of 6-letter/1-digit or 7-letter rows. The subjects could not anticipate the category of the to-be-reported item with the alphanumeric displays. With a delayed cue, selective masking was obtained with both mixed category and pure letter arrays, but with simultaneous cuing, masking was always distributed across all serial positions. The results suggest that the subjects: (a) abstracted some information about category from the mixed arrays during an initial parallel stage of processing, (b) selectively attended to mainly the cued item with simultaneous probes with homeogeneous and mixed category displays, and (c) employed an ends-first processing strategy with both types of arrays when the bar-marker partial report cue was delayed.     

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 observational case study of failure in social problem-solving

An observationally based assessment of social problem-solving skill was contrasted with more traditional testing methods. A preschool child with low social success was chosen for a demonstration profile analysis. The relative frequencies of the social goals, strategies, and targets shown by this child during free play were plotted in relation to that of his same-sex peer group. Parallel profiles of his relative success with specific goals, strategies, and targets were also constructed and compared to relevant group means and standard deviations. Specific social problem-solving strengths and weaknesses were identified from these profiles, using both intra- and interindividual analyses. The benefits and limitations of this approach for measurement and treatment of social problem-solving deficits were discussed.     

Essential independence and likelihood-based ability estimation for polytomous items

A definition ofessential independence is proposed for sequences of polytomous items. For items satisfying the reasonable assumption that the expected amount of credit awarded increases with examinee ability, we develop a theory ofessential unidimensionality which closely parallels that of Stout. Essentially unidimensional item sequences can be shown to have a unique (up to change-of-scale) dominant underlying trait, which can be consistently estimated by a monotone transformation of the sum of the item scores. In more general polytomous-response latent trait models (with or without ordered responses), anM-estimator based upon maximum likelihood may be shown to be consistent for under essentially unidimensional violations of local independence and a variety of monotonicity/identifiability conditions. A rigorous proof of this fact is given, and the standard error of the estimator is explored. These results suggest that ability estimation methods that rely on the summation form of the log likelihood under local independence should generally be robust under essential independence, but standard errors may vary greatly from what is usually expected, depending on the degree of departure from local independence. An index of departure from local independence is also proposed.This work was supported in part by Office of Naval Research Grant N00014-87-K-0277 and National Science Foundation Grant NSF-DMS-88-02556. The author is grateful to William F. Stout for many helpful comments, and to an anonymous reviewer for raising the questions addressed in section 2. A preliminary version of section 6 appeared in the author's Ph.D. thesis.     

Verbal self-correction behaviors of fluent and nonfluent aphasic subjects

This investigation examined the use of six explicitly defined verbal self-correction behaviors by fluent and nonfluent aphasic subjects of high and low verbal ability, and by subjects further classified into six groups according to type of aphasia (Broca's, Anomic, Wernicke's etc.). Aphasic groups, on the average, generated some type of verbal self-correction effort on more than half of their initially erroneous responses, and the proportions of these efforts did not differ between aphasic patient groups. Significant differences in self-correction success were found, however, between groups classified according to fluency and severity, as well as among the six groups based on type of aphasia. In the former case, distinctions in self-correction skill favored high-verbal-ability groups regardless of fluency classification. In the latter instance, the subgroups typically formed by less severely impaired patients (Anomic and Broca's) had significantly higher proportions of successful self-correction behaviors than those comprised of individuals with more severe involvement (Wernicke's and Broca's plus severely limiting apraxia of speech). Between-group differences for specific types of self-correction behaviors occurred rarely, but those which were found could be related to characteristics of the particular aphasic groups under consideration. Verbal self-correction behavior is discussed as a behavioral reaction to an erroneous response or dissatisfaction with the quality of an intended response. These behaviors are viewed as indicators of the intactness of an aphasic individual's self-monitoring system, and of his tolerance for responses that are qualitatively limited by his verbal deficits.