DEVELOPING FLUENCY AND ENDURANCE IN A CHILD DIAGNOSED WITH ATTENTION DEFICIT HYPERACTIVITY DISORDER

We examined the effect of a teaching method on skill fluency and on‐task endurance of a 9‐year‐old boy who had been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. An academic task that occurred at low fluency during 10‐min baseline sessions was taught to fluency. When responding was not yet fluent, brief reversals to baseline showed that the learner's rate of responding decreased and that he did not spend entire sessions on task. However, once a fluency goal had been reached, responding remained fluent and he remained on task in the third reversal condition.     

动态视觉加工与儿童汉字阅读

使用视觉阈限测验、图片命名、字形相似性判断实验和语音意识等测验 ,考察了小学五年级儿童视觉加工技能与汉字阅读之间的关系。结果发现 :动态视觉加工与图片命名错误率、字形判断反应时和错误率、语音意识均有显著相关 ,静态视觉加工只与图片命名错误率相关显著 ;控制识字量后的偏相关分析显示 ,动态视觉加工与其他变量的相关关系不变 ,静态视觉加工与图片命名错误率的相关不再显著 ;回归分析发现动态视觉加工在识字量和语音意识的影响控制后 ,能够分别解释阅读流畅性、字形判断反应时和图片命名错误率 7%、2 5 %和 5 6 %的变化 ;语音意识能够解释识字量和阅读流畅性 9%和 10 %的变化 ;对差读者的动态视觉加工和语音意识分析发现 ,儿童在这两种测验上的个体差异很大。上述结果表明 ,阅读过程受基本知觉技能影响 ,动态视觉加工作用于汉字阅读的特定过程。     

类别指称对象提取过程的眼动研究

采用眼动记录法,探讨了语篇理解中类别指称对象的可提取性。实验采用3（实验材料：指称对象、非指称对象、特别控制条件）×2（兴趣区：兴趣区1、兴趣区2）×2（工作记忆容量：高、低）3因素混合设计。通过分析第一次注视时间、总的阅读时间和回视次数等眼动指标发现,类别指称对象提取过程中包含激活和抑制两种过程。被试在阅读完上指示表达之后,立即激活了可能的指称对象,但是对非指称对象的抑制却发生在后来的整合过程中;高工作记忆容量的被试能更有效地抑制非指称对象,更容易形成语篇的完整表征,有效提取类别指称对象。     

Promoting Generalization of Oral Reading Fluency: Providing Drill versus Practice Opportunities

Extensive evidence exists demonstrating the benefits of repeated readings (RR) interventions at increasing students’ fluency on intervention passages. Few studies however have examined the extent to which repeatedly reading one passage improves students’ reading fluency on similar passages. Using an alternating treatment design, we examined the extent to which two interventions resulted in improvements in students’ fluency on generalization passages. While both interventions incorporated RR, one intervention involved students reading one passage four times and the other involved students reading two similar passages each twice. Intervention effects were evaluated by having students read a generalization passage prior to and following intervention implementation. Results indicate that both interventions were effective in increasing students reading fluency on generalization passages. For 3 participants the RR intervention produced greater gains in fluency on the generalization passages, while data for the remaining 3 participants are inconclusive. Implications of these findings for practice and for better understanding application of the instructional hierarchy to the development of reading interventions are discussed.

Improving reading outcomes for children with learning disabilities: using brief experimental analysis to develop parent-tutoring interventions

The present study assessed the effects of summer parent tutoring on 3 children with learning disabilities using empirically derived reading interventions. Brief experimental analyses were used to identify customized reading fluency interventions. Parents were trained to use the intervention strategies with their children. Parents implemented the procedures during parent-tutoring sessions at home and results were measured continuously in high-word-overlap and low-word-overlap passages to determine whether generalization occurred. Parent and child satisfaction with the procedures was assessed. Results demonstrated generalized increases in reading fluency in both high-word-overlap and low-word-overlap passages as a function of parent tutoring. Also, acceptability ratings by children and their parents indicated that they viewed the interventions as acceptable and effective. Results are discussed in terms of structuring reading fluency interventions that promote generalization and maintenance of treatment effects.     

“Piensa” twice: On the foreign language effect in decision making

In this article, we assess to what extent decision making is affected by the language in which a given problem is presented (native vs. foreign). In particular, we aim to ask whether the impact of various heuristic biases in decision making is diminished when the problems are presented in a foreign language. To this end, we report four main studies in which more than 700 participants were tested on different types of individual decision making problems. In the first study, we replicated Keysar et al.’s (2012) recent observation regarding the foreign language effect on framing effects related to loss aversion. In the second section, we assessed whether the foreign language effect is present in other types of framing problems that involve psychological accounting biases rather than gain/loss dichotomies. In the third section, we studied the foreign language effect in several key aspects of the theory of decision making under risk and uncertainty. In the fourth study, we assessed the presence of a foreign language effect in the cognitive reflection test, a test that includes logical problems that do not carry emotional connotations. The absence of such an effect in this test suggests that foreign language leads to a reduction of heuristic biases in decision making across a range of decision making situations and provide also some evidence about the boundaries of the phenomenon. We explore several potential factors that may underlie the foreign language effect in decision making.     

Fathers' and mothers' attachment representations as predictors of preadolescents' attachment security: A ten‐year follow‐up of Finnish families

The question of how mothers' and fathers' representations of attachment correlate ten years later with children's perceptions of attachment relationships was examined in a longitudinal study on Finnish families (N = 42). The parents completed the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) during the child's first year of life. At 11 years, the children filled out three scales on how secure they perceive the relationship with each parent. Parents' AAI classifications and AAI dimensions based on continuous scales were used as predictors of the preadolescents' attachment security. Regression analyses demonstrated that fathers' but not mothers' State‐of‐Mind and Experience dimensions predicted preadolescents' security of attachment to father. The discussion focuses on the predictive validity of the classical categorical versus the recently proposed continuous approach and the different roles of parents in transmitting security from one generation to another.     

A matter of font type: The effect of serifs on the evaluation of scientific abstracts

Text‐based communication is one of the substantial ways of spreading scientific information. While the content and contextual aspects of written words have been widely researched, the impact of font characteristics on text perception is an almost blank page. The following study deals with the influence of serifs on the evaluation of online‐presented scientific abstracts. Yet there is only evidence for faster reading times when texts are presented in sans‐serif fonts, although the opposite is stated in parts of the literature. The present work examines if the presence or absence of serifs also have an impact on the appraisal of scientific texts when all other important font characteristics do not change. For this purpose, 188 university students participated in an online experiment and rated different aspects of scientific abstracts as well as of the research outlined in the abstracts. The results show that missing serifs led to increased reading speed. However, and in contrast to the perceptual fluency hypothesis, the presence of serifs had a positive effect on all evaluation dimensions. The results of a second study with 187 participants also indicated that reading fluency counteracted the liking of texts. Implications for future studies and media production are discussed.     

Stability of the Positive Mood Effect on Creativity When Task Switching,Practice Effect,and Test Item Differences are Taken into Consideration

Although experimentally induced positive mood can generally last for 20 min and the induced mood is conducive to creative performance, it is still unclear whether the facilitation effect is stable during these 20 min. Two studies were conducted to examine this issue while controlling for the impacts of task switching, practice effect, and test item differences. In Study 1, participants (N = 42) were randomly assigned to positive, negative, and neutral mood conditions. After watching a short video clip, participants answered four items of the Alternate Uses Test (AUT) in 20 min, with 5 min allotted for each item. Creative performance during each 5‐min period was scored in terms of fluency and flexibility. Separate repeated‐measures analyses of variances on these creativity scores showed that positive mood consistently enhanced performance over 20 min. Study 2 further eliminated the effects of test item differences and test order. Participants (N = 131) underwent the same mood induction procedure and answered the same four items of the AUT, except that these items were presented in four different sequences in accordance with the Latin square design. Consistent with the findings in Study 1, Study 2 showed that the facilitation effect of positive mood lasted for 20 min when the interference of task switching, practice effect, and test item differences were minimized. This finding not only sheds light on the debate regarding the stability of experimentally induced positive mood effect, but also contributes to the body of empirical evidence that future studies may use to examine the positive mood effect over a relatively long period of time.     

Longitudinal Dynamics of Substance Use and Psychiatric Symptoms in Count Data with Zero Inflation

We examine the dynamics of substance use and psychiatric symptoms from childhood to adolescence using a longitudinal study of Mexican-origin families (N = 674). We present a longitudinal model capturing the trajectories of substance use and psychiatric symptoms (depression, conduct disorder), as well as the interrelations between these trajectories over time. Such a model is an extension of latent change score models designed to account for the occurrence of psychiatric symptoms while also accommodating a large amount of zeros for nonoccurrence and characterizing the changes over time in the count data. We compare this model with a more traditional approach based on a log transformation of the data. We describe differences between these approaches and highlight the benefits of using the two-part model when the data include a large amount of zeros for nonoccurrence of the behavior.