Semantic focus and sentence comprehension.

Reaction time to detect a phoneme target in a sentence was found to be faster when the word in which the target occurred formed part of the semantic focus of the sentence. Focus was determined by asking a question before the sentence; that part of the sentence which comprised the answer to the sentence was assumed to be focussed. This procedure made it possible to vary position of focus within the sentence while holding all acoustic aspects of the sentence itself constant. It is argued that sentence understanding is facilitated by rapid identification of focussed information. Since focussed words are usually accented, it is further argued that the active search for accented words demonstrated in previous research should be interpreted as a search for semantic focus.     

Standardized classroom management program: Social validation and replication studies in Utah and Oregon

A comprehensive validation study was conducted of the Program for Academic Survival Skills (PASS), a consultant-based, teacher-mediated program for student classroom behavior. The study addressed questions related to: (a) brief consultant training, (b) subsequent teacher training by consultants using PASS manuals, (c) contrasts between PASS experimental teachers and students and equivalent controls on measures of teacher management skills, student classroom behavior, teacher ratings of student problem behaviors, and academic achievement, (d) reported satisfaction of participants, and (e) replication of effects across two separate school sites. Results indicated that in both sites significant effects were noted in favor of the PASS experimental group for (a) teacher approval, (b) student appropriate classroom behavior, and (c) four categories of student inappropriate behavior. Program satisfaction ratings of students, teachers, and consultants were uniformly positive, and continued use of the program was reported a year later. Discussion focused upon issues of cost-effectiveness, differential site effects, and the relationship between appropriate classroom behavior and academic achievement.     

Models of word recognition

Major hypotheses about the processes involved in word recognition are reviewed and then assessed through four experiments. The purpose of the first experiment was to examine some basic aspects of the processing of words, pseudowords, and nonwords, and beyond that, to discover basic differences in their processing that might underlie the word advantage. The second experiment was designed to assess the contribution of whole-word and letter cluster cues to the word advantage. Finally, Experiments III and IV were focused on the question of whether the word advantage can be wholly explained in terms of response bias or sophisticated guessing. Taken together, the results of these experiments were most compatible with criterion bias models. A version of the criterion bias model is suggested wherein the word advantage is attributed to interfacilitation among single letter and lexical units in memory.     

The psychological representation of musical pitch in a tonal context

In this series of experiments, evidence was found for a complex psychological representation of musical pitch. The results of a scaling study, in which subjects judged the similarities between pairs of tones presented in an explicitly tonal context, suggest that musical listeners extract a pattern of relationships among tones that is determined not only by pitch height and chroma, but also by membership in the major triad chord and the diatonic scale associated with the tonal system of the context. Multidimensional scaling of the similarity ratings gave a three-dimensional conical structure around which the tones were ordered according to pitch height. The major triad components formed a closely related cluster near the vertex of the cone; the remaining diatonic scale tones formed a less closely related subset farther from the vertex; and, the nondiatonic tones, still farther from the vertex, were widely dispersed. The results also suggest that, in the psychological representation, tones less closely related to the tonality are less stable than tones closely related to the tonality, and that the representation incorporates the tendency for unstable tones to move toward the more stable tones in time, reflecting the dynamic character of musical tones. In the similarity ratings of the scaling study, tones less related to the tonality were judged more similar to tones more related to the tonality than the reverse temporal order. Furthermore, in a delayed recognition task memory performance for nondiatonic tones was less accurate than for diatonic tones, and nondiatonic tones were more often confused with diatonic tones than diatonic tones were confused with nondiatonic tones. These results indicate the tonality-specific nature of the psychological representation and argue that the perception of music depends not only on psychoacoustic properties of the tones, but also on processes that relate the tones to one another through contact with a well-defined and complex psychological representation of musical pitch.     

A reappraisal of the relation between performances of quantitative identity and quantitative equivalence conservation tasks

Previous studies of children's performance on quantitative identity and equivalence conservation problems in the number domain are suggested to be flawed because of the low numbers of items in the arrays. In Experiment 1, children were tested on three different number versions of identity and equivalence conservation tasks. Their performance varied with the number of items and no child was found to pass a large number version of an equivalence conservation task and fail the corresponding version of an identity conservation task. In Experiment 2 the notion that the contextual effect of asking two similar questions might underlie the difference in performance on the two tasks was tested and rejected. The results are discussed in relation to recent analyses of conservation problems.     

Affective and cognitive mediators of reactions to spatial invasions

At a crosswalk on a busy street, a confederate, sketching a drawing or not, stood close or far from a pedestrian for 10 sec before the street light indicated “Walk.” In the first study, pedestrians were given the opportunity to subsequently help this confederate or another accomplice by calling attention to a dropped pen. In the second study, crossing speeds were timed and pedestrians were asked to record their mood and reactions to “another pedestrian,” who happened to be the confederate. These studies tested and found evidence for both cognitive and arousal explanations of reactions to spatial invasions. Cognitive and attributional theories imply that characteristics of the invader are important mediators of reactions to the invasion. The close nonartist was judged to be more inappropriate, produced faster escape speeds, and was helped less than the close artist or the far confederates. Arousal explanations imply that any invasion produces a generalized reaction which would be unrelated to characteristics of the invader. The other accomplice was helped less when the subject had been invaded and this reduction in helping was unaffected by the artist manipulation. These findings suggest a general arousal response to any invasion with a subsequent reliance on cognitive interpretations.     

Relative influence of sincere,insincere, and neutral symbolic models

The study investigated how the sincerity of models affects their influence, using a delay-of-reward paradigm. Subjects were 40 fifth and sixth graders (ages 9 and 10 years, respectively), selected for delayed gratification patterns. In the experimental manipulation, sincerity or insincerity was explicitly attributed to the model or, in a neutral-model condition, no information about the model's sincerity was given. Subjects then observed the symbolically presented model's immediatereward choices, opposed to their own preferences. Immediately after treatment, children in all model conditions and in a fourth, no-model control group responded to a second delay-preference test. It was found that the influence of models varied substantially as a function of experimentally attributed sincerity. Insincere models had considerably less effect than sincere and neutral models, who provoked substantial and equivalent changes. Insincere models did not evoke significantly different change than occurred in the control group. A postexperimental inquiry showed the experimental manipulation had affected perceptions of the model's sincerity and liking for the model, with the insincere model rated considerably lower than the sincere and neutral models. The relevance of cognitive appraisal in observational learning was discussed.     

Conceptual preference for thematic or taxonomic relations: A nonmonotonic age trend from preschool to old age

Two experiments examined the development of conceptual preference for either thematic (functional) or taxonomic relationships in a match-to sample task. In Experiment 1 twenty subjects from each of five age groups—preschool to old age—completed a method of triads preference test where they were forced to choose a thematic or taxonomic match. Young and old individuals preferred the thematic parings while school age and college adults preferred the taxonomic matches. Although the Age × Preference relation was pronounced, the majority of subjects at all ages could provide adequate justification of both the preferred and nonpreferred relationship. In addition, kindergarten subjects in Experiment 2 could readily be trained to respond on the basis of the nonpreferred mode. These data suggest that the pervasive shift in conceptual responding from syntagmatic to paradigmatic, thematic to taxonomic, etc., represents a change in preference rather than a shift to a fundamentally new way of organizing knowledge.     

Children's strategy preferences for resolving contradictory story information under two social conditions

This paper attempted to examine how children, when confronted with a literary implicature, resolve this implicature under two types of social conditions. More specifically, this paper identified five types of strategies which people employ to resolve text anomalies arising when old information in a story setting is incompatible with new information in a story ending. Two experiments demonstrated that third graders (8.4 and 8.6 years) and sixth graders (12.5 and 12.8 years) consistently selected certain strategies for resolving old and new, empirical and value, contradictory information. Although third and sixth graders demonstrated a similar strategy preference for resolving contradictory old and new information in formal conditions, the principal difference was that third graders modified old information to fit new information while sixth graders modified new information to fit old information. In contrasting the formal and informal conditions, third graders shifted their strategy preferences so as to minimize the amount of text restructuring in the formal condition; sixth graders, on the other hand, shifted their strategy preferences so as to maximize the amount of text restructuring in informal conditions. These findings suggest that story schema structures are more interpretive than story grammar psychologists presently assume.     

Development of cerebral dominance: dichotic listening asymmetry in normal and learning-disabled children

The magnitude of the dichotic right-ear advantage was assessed in 48 normal and 48 learning-disabled children representing an age range of approximately 5 years. All subjects were matched according to age, sex, and handedness. An analysis of results indicated a significant right-ear advantage in both the normal and learning-disabled children, but revealed no developmental trends for either group. Differences observed in the performance of the learning-disabled and normal children may reflect variability in selective attention rather than differences in the degree of cerebral lateralization. These results suggest a need for a reconceptualization of the causative factors affecting children with learning disorders and lend support to the notion that cerebral lateralization is not a developmental phenomenon.