语言产生中词频效应老化的神经基础与时间进程

词频效应指语言产生中人们对高频词汇的加工比低频词汇更快更准确的一种现象,它可能发生在语言产生中的不同阶段。对青年人和老年人词频效应的不同特点和加工机制进行比较,可以考察语言产生的认知老化机制。通过语言产生理论可对词频效应的老化进行预测,提出词频效应在个体发展和老化阶段的相对稳定性,分析老化导致词频效应相关的神经基础和加工时间进程的改变。未来研究可进一步分离词频效应与习得年龄效应对语言产生老化的影响,并扩展至神经退行性疾病患者中。     

Discrimination of picture requests for missing items among young children with developmental disabilities

Two experiments were conducted to assess discrimination of picture requests for missing items among young children with developmental disabilities. In Experiment 1, three children were first taught to request one object when it was missing from a set of two related leisure items. In Experiment 2, two children were taught to request one object belonging to a set of three leisure items. In both studies the requesting response consisted of pointing to a photograph of the missing item. After acquisition of the initial request, discrimination of picture requests was assessed when the second item (Experiment 1) and second or third item (Experiment 2) was missing. Requests for the untrained items emerged in the presence of natural maintaining contingencies and in the absence of instructional prompts for all but the third child in Experiment 1. This child required continued intervention on the initial request. The results suggest that for some children a sequence of intervention and the programming of natural maintaining contingencies may prove effective in promoting the discrimination of picture requests for missing items among young children with developmental disabilities.     

汉字加工的基本单元:来自笔画数效应和部件数效应的证据

用命名作业和真假字判断作业考察了笔画数和部件数对汉字加工的影响,发现,当部件数保持恒定时,笔画数少的汉字较笔画数多的汉字加工快,这种笔画数效应和字频之间不存在交互作用;当笔画数被控制时,部件数效应也存在,但和字频有交互作用,表现在低频少部件汉字的加工要快于低频多部件汉字的加工,而高频汉字中的部件数效应不显著。实验还发现独体字（只有一个部件）的加工和合体字（部件数大于等于二）的加工有差异。作者认为,汉字的加工要经过笔画、部件和整字三个层次,其中单位部件的笔画数和部件数影响着汉字加工时间     

Schedule-induced drinking as a function of interreinforcement interval in the rhesus monkey

Lever presses by two rhesus monkeys produced food pellets that were assigned by both an ascending and descending series of fixed-interval schedules whose values varied between 1 and 512 sec. The amount of schedule-induced drinking was bitonically related to interreinforcement interval, reaching a maximum at approximately 120 sec and declining at longer fixed intervals. The relation between water intake and interreinforcement interval was complexly related to two drinking measures: (1) the probability of drinking following a pellet and (2) the amount drunk per bout. Drinking rate was also bitonically related to interreinforcement interval.     

Choice and foraging: the effects of accessibility on acceptability.

Pigeons responded in a successive-encounters choice procedure in which accessibility of the less profitable of two outcomes varied either in terms of probability of encounter or search time to encounter (keeping search time to the more profitable outcome constant). When the less profitable outcome was made more probable its acceptance became more likely. However, when search time to encounter the less profitable outcome was shortened, its acceptance became less likely. Both results are consistent with the delay-reduction hypothesis and with an optimality model developed for application to the successive-encounters choice procedure.     

Concurrent schedules: Interaction of reinforcer frequency and reinforcer duration

Six pigeons were trained on concurrent variable-interval schedules with unequal reinforcer durations for the two responses. The schedules arranged on the two keys were kept equal while they were varied in absolute size. As the overall reinforcer rate was increased, both response-allocation and time-allocation measures of choice showed a trend toward indifference, and measures of sensitivity to reinforcer-duration ratios significantly decreased. Recent reports have shown that the generalized matching law cannot describe the changes in behavior allocation under constant delay-, duration-, or rate-ratios when changes are made in the absolute levels of each of these variables. The present results complement these findings by demonstrating that the concatenated generalized matching law cannot describe the interactions of two reinforcer variables on behavior allocation.     

Religion and mental health among Nepal earthquake survivors in temporary tent villages

The aim of this study was to explore the relationship between mental health and the perceived importance of religion and the frequency of prayer among 200 children ages 10–18 years who lived in temporary camps for earthquake survivors in Nepal. The participants were examined using the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) 6–18 and were asked about the importance of religion in their lives. In contrast to expectation that high perceived importance of religion and prayer frequency have positive impacts on mental health after earthquakes, the results indicated significantly higher levels of withdrawal/depression. The group that prayed less frequently after the earthquakes had significantly higher scores for somatic symptoms, withdrawal/depression, anxiety/depression, social immaturity, internalising problems, and total CBCL scores. However, the clinical risk group (T score of 65 or higher in the CBCL total score), no significant difference according to the importance of religion showed and frequency of daily prayer.     

Does frequency trajectory influence word identification? A cross-task comparison

In a series of six experiments, the influence of frequency trajectory in visual word recognition was investigated. In Experiment 1, frequency trajectory was found to exert a strong and reliable influence on age of acquisition (AoA) ratings. In word reading (Experiment 2), lexical decision (Experiments 3 and 6), proper name decision (Experiment 4), progressive demasking (Experiment 5), and a multiple regression analysis of lexical decision times taken from the French Lexicon Project, the effect of frequency trajectory was not reliable. In contrast, in all the experiments and in the multiple regression analysis, cumulative frequency had a strong and reliable influence on word recognition times. The findings firmly establish that in alphabetic languages such as French, age-limited learning effects do not surface readily in word recognition. In contrast, the total exposure to words across the lifetime is a strong determinant of word recognition speed. The implications of the findings are discussed.     

Categorizing facial identities, emotions, and genders: attention to high- and low-spatial frequencies by children and adults

Three age groups of participants (5-6 years, 7-8 years, adults) matched faces on the basis of facial identity. The procedure involved either low- or high-pass filtered faces or hybrid faces composed from two faces associated with different spatial bandwidths. The comparison stimuli were unfiltered faces. In the three age groups, the data indicated a significant bias for processing of low-pass information in priority. In a second task, participants were asked to identify the emotion (smiling or grimacing) or gender (male or female) of hybrid high-pass/low-pass faces. Opposite results emerged in the two tasks irrespective of the age group; the gender discrimination task indicated a bias for low-pass information, and the emotion task indicated a bias for high-pass information. These differences suggest independent processing routes for functionally different types of information such as emotion, gender, and identity. These routes are already established by 5 years of age.