TEACHING SOCIAL LANGUAGE TO MODERATELY HANDICAPPED STUDENTS

Three students with moderate handicaps were taught to initiate and expand on conversational topics. The teaching procedure used stimuli generated from actual conversations with nonhandicapped peers. Generalization was assessed by audiotaping conversations between the handicapped students and their peers in natural school contexts without adult supervision. Results indicated that training generalized to natural contexts. These results were socially validated by undergraduate special education students, who rated tapes of two of the students' conversations during training phases as more socially competent than during baseline. Results are discussed in terms of the evaluation of complex social behavior as multioperant behaviors.     

Classification of empirically derived prototypes as a function of category experience

In three experiments, subjects learned to classify dot patterns into three categories represented by either three, six, or nine exemplars. Following learning, subjects were tested on an additional set of patterns, which included patterns from the learning phase, the category objective prototypes, and new distortions of the objective prototypes. Also included in the test set were empirical prototypes and distortions of empirical prototypes. Empirical prototypes were derived by averaging feature values of category exemplars in the learning phase. The overall results revealed that empirical prototypes were classified more accurately than were objective prototypes. In addition, a pattern of convergence in error rates was observed for distortions of the objective and empirical prototypes as category set size increased, but this same pattern was not observed for the objective and empirical prototypes themselves. This lack of convergence for the prototypes is inconsistent with explanations of the category set size effect that rely on the central limit theorem.     

Concurrent validity of the Woodcock-Johnson psycho-educational battery with regular and learning-disabled students

A comparison of the WISC-R and the Woodcock-Johnson Psycho-Educational Educational Battery (W-J) was made for children with regular and learning-disabled (LD) class placement. The W-J and Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R) evidence low to moderate correlations and significant mean differences, indicating that the two tests are measuring somewhat different abilities to somewhat differing degrees. W-J—WISC-R correlations for the regular students exceed those of the LD students in the greater majority of the cases. Rank ordering of the WISC-R subtests and the W-J clusters indicate, as might be expected, that the LD students fare the worst in the WISC-R academic subtests (Arithmetic, Information and Vocabulary) and in the W-J academic clusters. More research needs to be conducted with the W-J before it should be adopted for use in the placement of exceptional children.     

The relationships among gender concepts and cognitive maturity in preschool children

Several aspects of gender concept development were investigated in 60 children of mixed socioeconomic background ranging in age from 3 to 6 years. Tasks were designed to assess gender constancy, knowledge of sex stereotypes, differential memory and preference for sex-typed material, and gender categorization. Cognitive maturity was assessed with a conservation task and total recall on a memory task. Performance improved linearly with age on the gender concepts, individual children of both sexes learned the gender concepts in the same sequence, and cognitive maturity measures were positively related to performance on the gender concept tasks.This research was supported by grants from the Graduate School and the Women's Studes Program, Indiana University. An earlier report of this research was presented at the meeting of the American Psychological Association, San Francisco, August 1977. The author thanks John E. Bates and Candace Schau for their advice and help throughout the project.     

Behavioral consequences of song learning: Discrimination of song types by male white-crowned sparrows

The functional significance of learned population differences in male song in the white-crowned sparrow was explored in natural populations using playback tests. Laboratory results have shown that learning of the population-specific song seems to take place in early life and is strongly dependent upon the nature of the auditory experience at that time. However, the varied results of recent studies make it difficult to reach a confident conclusion about the ecological functions of song learning. The present research took advantage of naturally occurring variation in the differences between songs of adjacent populations to determine a function relating degree of difference in song to intensity of territorial singing elicited. Applying a typological evaluation of syllable structure to the four segments of the song allowed a crude quantitative ranking of the differences between local songs and playback stimuli. These results, together with those of other studies, suggest a unimodal aggressive response function of males to songs of other males. A maximum response to songs slightly different from the local song environment suggests that male exclusion based upon acquired song components may contribute to the maintenance of discrete and stable song dialects.     

“mother is not holding competely respect”: Making social sense of schizophrenic writing

This paper provides a phenomenological account of the writing of a young woman diagnosed with schizophrenia. The method of interpretation is to put ourselves in the place of the author drawing upon a combination of sympathy, reason, common-sense, experience, and “an intersubjective world, common to us all” (Schutz, 1945: 536). The result is the recognition of the person as also capable of putting herself in the place of others so as to understand their behavior. This “role-taking success” identifies the limits of the current sociological understanding of insanity's significance in social interaction as an instance of “role-taking failure” (Rosenberg, 1992). The very appearance of a piece of writing often permits one to recognize the presence of schizophrenia. The use of space may be quite bizarre. The varying margins betray the writer's changing mood. The letter may start at the bottom or side of the paper or very close to the top .... Capital letters and all letters are employed without any apparent rules, the former even in the middle of a word. (Bleuler, 1950: 159) What we want to understand is not something hidden behind the text, but something disclosed in front of it. (Ricoeur, 1971: 557) Why do we need an art of guessing? Why do we have to “construe” the meaning? Not only — as I tried to say a few years ago — because language is metaphorical and because the double meaning of metaphorical language requires an art of deciphering which tends to unfold the several layers of meaning.... [But also] because [a text] is not a mere sequence of sentences, all on an equal footing and separately understandable. A text is a whole, a totality. (Ricoeur, 1971: 548)     

A DEVELOPMENTAL DEFICIT IN LOCALIZING OBJECTS FROM VISION

Abstract— We describe a college student, A. H., with a developmental deficit in determining the location of objects from vision. The deficit is selective in that (a) localization from auditory or tactile information is intact, (b) A H reports the identity of mislocalized objects accurately, (c) visual localization errors preserve certain parameters of the target location, and (d) visual localization is severely impaired under certain stimulus conditions, but nearly intact under other conditions. These results bear on the representation and processing of location information in the visual system, and also have implications for understanding developmental dyslexia.     

Nonstranger sexual aggression: A discriminant analysis of the psychological characteristics of undetected offenders

Sex Roles - Rape is an underreported and underconvicted crime. Therefore, many highly sexually aggressive men are missed by research employing judicial identification for sample selection. The...