The role of phonology in processing morphologically complex words

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - This study investigated the role of phonology in the processing of morphologically complex words in a masked priming experiment. An English stem word target was...     

Infant Mental Health Intervention for Preterm Infants in Japan: Promotions of Maternal Mental Health,Mother–Infant Interactions,and Social Support by Providing Continuous Home Visits until the Corrected Infant Age of 12 Months

The aim of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of the Japanese Infant Mental Health Program (JIMHP) for preterm mother–infant dyads until the infants reached 12 months of corrected age. Mothers in the JIMHP group (n = 26) received one hospital visit in addition to standard care in the Growing Care Unit (GCU) and five home visits based on the principles of infant mental health (IMH) after discharge from the hospital, until the infant reached 12 months of corrected age. In contrast, mothers in the control program group (n = 40) received standard care in the GCU and three conventional home visits during the same period. The dyads were then compared across groups, revealing that the JIMHP dyads showed less maternal depressive symptoms, better maternal interaction, increased social support by medical workers and healthcare professionals, a high persistence rate for attending the program, and a more positive perception toward the program (p < .05). However, there were no significant differences in the impact of parenting stress or in child development. These results are discussed in terms of their significance and the practical/clinical availability of IMH principles and the JIMHP as a new support model for preterm infants in Japan.     

The Association Between Physical Functioning and Self-rated General Health in Later Life: The Implications of Social Comparison

Self-rated general health has been used widely in health surveys as a single-item measurement of health-rated quality of life. Heterogeneity in self-evaluation of health has been well documented, yet the causes of this heterogeneity are poorly understood. This study evaluated the moderating effects of age, aging, gender, race, education and income on the relationship between physical functioning and self-rated general health using social comparison theory as a guiding framework. A longitudinal mixed-effects regression model was used to analyze a cohort enrolled into the Health and Retirement Study in 1993 that was interviewed at baseline and during four subsequent waves. The results revealed that the association between physical functioning and self-rated general health is weaker among subgroups that tend to have lower health status; i.e., older individuals, non-Caucasians and less educated individuals. These findings suggest the usefulness of social comparison theory in explaining self-rated general health and provide the basis for future research.     

"The full story by no means all told": Harry Stack Sullivan at Sheppard-Pratt, 1922-1930

Harry Stack Sullivan (1892-1949) is well known for his interpersonal theory of mental illness, but little is known about how he actually worked as a clinician with patients. This article examines a pivotal time in Sullivan's career at Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital in Baltimore from 1922 to 1930. Using clinical records as well as published writings, the article focuses on 2 crucial issues that are not fully addressed either in Sullivan's published writings or in past studies of him: first, his treatment as a gay psychiatrist of patients who he believed had homosexual orientations; second, the intellectual and institutional paradigm in psychiatry that influenced his practice. Finally, this article addresses the circumstances surrounding Sullivan's departure from Sheppard-Pratt, suggesting psychiatry's limited confrontation with the social stigmatization of homosexuality.     

Is banara really a word?

Bowers, Davis, and Hanley (Bowers, J. S., Davis, C. J., & Hanley, D. A. (2005). Interfering neighbours: The impact of novel word learning on the identification of visually similar words. Cognition, 97(3), B45-B54) reported that if participants were trained to type nonwords such as banara, subsequent semantic categorization responses to similar words such as banana were delayed. This was taken as direct experimental support for a process of lexical competition during word recognition. This interpretation assumes that banara has been lexicalized, which predicts that masked form priming for items such as banara-banana should be reduced or eliminated. An experiment is reported showing that the trained novel words produced the same amount of priming as untrained nonwords on both the first and the second day of training, suggesting that the interference observed by Bowers et al was not due to word-on-word competition.     

Orthography and phonology in reading Japanese kanji words: Evidence from the semantic decision task with homophones

Correspondences between spelling and sound for Japanese kanji are complex and deep. The meaning of kanji words has generally been assumed to be accessed directly from orthography without phonological mediation. Experiment 1, however, replicated the findings of Van Orden (1987) that subjects made more false-positive errors on homophone foils than they did on nonhomophone controls in a semantic decision task, although they did so only when the foils were orthographically similar to the correct exemplars, which indicates both orthographic and phonological activations of meaning. Experiment 2 showed the same results when subjects were not required to pronounce the target words after semantic decisions, which indicates automatic phonological activation of kanji words. In Experiment 3, under pattern-masking conditions, this homophony effect was reduced but remained on errors, and the orthographic-similarity effect remained strong on both homophone and nonhomophone foils. These results suggest that both orthography and phonology play an important role in the comprehension of kanji words.     

Comparisons of Online Reading Paradigms: Eye Tracking, Moving-Window, and Maze

This study compares four methodologies used to examine online sentence processing during reading. Specifically, self-paced, non-cumulative, moving-window reading (Just et al. in J Exp Psychol Gen 111:228–238, 1982), eye tracking (see e.g., Rayner in Q J Exp Psychol 62:1457–1506, 2009), and two versions of the maze task (Forster et al. in Behav Res Methods 41:163–171, 2009)—the lexicality maze and the grammaticality maze—were used to investigate the processing of sentences containing temporary structural ambiguities. Of particular interest were (i) whether each task was capable of revealing processing differences on these sentences and (ii) whether these effects were indicated precisely at the predicted word/region. Although there was considerable overlap in the general pattern of results from the four tasks, there were also clear differences among them in terms of the strength and timing of the observed effects. In particular, excepting sentences that tap into clause-closure commitments, both maze task versions provided robust, “localized” indications of incremental sentence processing difficulty relative to self-paced reading and eye tracking.