Specificity in the development of language structure

The nature of children's productive structures can be investigated via two types of structural error which are manifest in their surface data: the overextension of a very general adult rule to a context from which it is excluded, and the introduction of a novel rule in a specific context. Examples of these two types of errors are shown, on the one hand, to undermine theories which treat language development largely as a process of projecting and testing innately specified hypotheses; on the other hand, they provide support for more recent theories which conceive of abstract linguistic structure as the outcome of a process relating specifically acquired items and combinations of items. The implications of this conception for the goals and tasks of developmental psycholinguistics are explored.This paper is based on research undertaken for the Ph.D degree under the supervision of Dr. N. V. Smith, University College, London, and with the financial support of the Social Science Research Council of Great Britain.     

Life satisfaction and sex-role concept

The purpose of the present survey study was to investigate the relationship between life satisfaction and sex-role concept. Two hundred and seventeen respondents completed a two-part questionnaire, which consisted of the Life Satisfaction Survey, designed by the authors, and the Bem Sex Role Inventory. General satisfaction with life was found to be a function of the level of satisfaction derived from various aspects of life, particularly aspects chosen as the most important. Consistent with previous studies, general satisfaction with life is positively associated with education level, income level, and being married. In contrast to previous findings, age is not negatively correlated with overall satisfaction, and a significant difference between males and females showed up. As predicted, sex-role concept was found to be a useful construct in explaining the differential importance of various domains of life as well as the relative contribution of those domains to the individual's overall satisfaction with life. Psychologically masculine people choose as important and enjoy more the instrumental aspects of life; psychologically feminine people choose as important and enjoy more the socioemotional aspects of life; psychologically androgynous people choose as important and enjoy more both the instrumental and socioemotional aspects of life.The research presented here was supported by NSF Grant 77-160107, principal investigator Morton Deutsch. The authors wish to thank Morton Deutsch and Gary Bridge for their guidance and helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. The assistance of Gidi Shichman. Kenneth Kressel, Joan Grosser, Lotti Tartell, Derry Ann Moritz, and Trinity Church on the Green—New Haven is also gratefully acknowledged.     

Perceptuomotor functioning in preschool children with symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

Given limited research on perceptual-motor functioning of preschool children with symptoms of ADHD, the purpose of this study was to compare the fine motor, gross motor, visuomotor, and oral-motor functioning of 49 4- to 6-yr.-old children with symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and 48 typically developing children. Analysis showed scores of the ADHD group were significantly lower than those of the control group on all perceptuomotor measures. In addition, scores on all measures yielded significant correlations with scores on the Hyperactive-Inattentive scale of the Preschool Behavior Questionnaire. Regression analyses indicated that the scores of gross motor and visuomotor functioning were significant predictors of group classification (with and without ADHD). These findings extend the well documented findings of perceptuomotor deficits among school-age children with ADHD into the preschool period and emphasize the importance of early assessment and treatment of these deficits in young children with symptoms of ADHD.     

Phoneme frequency effects in jargon aphasia: a phonological investigation of nonword errors

This study investigates the nonwords produced by a jargon speaker, LT. Despite presenting with severe neologistic jargon, LT can produce discrete responses in picture naming tasks thus allowing the properties of his jargon to be investigated. This ability was exploited in two naming tasks. The first showed that LT's nonword errors are related to their targets despite being generally unrecognizable. This relatedness appears to be a general property of his errors suggesting that they are produced by lexical rather than nonlexical means. The second naming task used a set of stimuli controlled for their phonemic content. This allowed an investigation of target phonology at the level of individual phonemes. Nonword responses maintained the English distribution of consonants and showed a significant relationship to the target phonologies. A strong influence of phoneme frequency was identified. High frequency consonants showed a pattern of frequent but indiscriminate use. Low frequency consonants were realised less often but were largely restricted to target related contexts rarely appearing as error phonology. The findings are explained within a lexical activation network with the proposal that the resting levels of phoneme nodes are frequency sensitive. Predictions for the recovery of jargon aphasia and suggestions for future investigations are made.     

Book reviews

Clark, M. S. and Fiske, S. T. (Eds.). Affect and cognition: The Seventeenth Annual Cornegie Symposium on Cognition. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 1982. Pp. 357. ISBN 0-89859-212-7. £24.00.

Norman, D. A. (Ed.). Perspectives on Cognitive Science. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex. 1981. Pp. 303. ISBN 0-89391-071-6. $19.95

Gollin, E. S. (Ed.). Developmental Plasticity: Behavioral and Biological Aspects of Variations in Development. New York: Academic Press. 1981. Pp. 282. ISBN 0-12-289620-3. £16.60.

Rapin, I. Children with Brain Dysfunction. New York: Raven Press. 1982. Pp. 300. ISBN 0-89004-844-4. $46.50.

Schank, R. C. Reading and Understanding: Teaching from the Perspective of Artificial Intelligence. Hillsdale, N. J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 1982. Pp. xii + 196. ISBN 0-89859-169-4. £13.95.

Sheehan, P. W. and McConkey, K. M. Hypnosis and Experience: The Exploration of Phenomena and Process. Hillsdale, N. J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 1982. Pp. 297. ISBN 0-89859-195-3. £17.50.

Burton, A. (Ed.). The Pathology and Psychology of Cognition. London: Methuen. 1983. Pp. 306. ISBN 0-416-30810-4. Hardback, £13.00; paperback, £5.95.

Otto, W. and White, S. (Eds.). Reading Expository Material. London: Academic Press. 1982. Pp. xiv + 303. ISBN 0-12-531050-1. £19.60.

Lerdahl, F. and Jackendoff, R. A Generative Theory of Tonal Music. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 1983. Pp. 368. ISBN 0-262-12094-1. £31.30.

Lewis, B. (Ed.). Bioacoustics: A Comparative Approach. London: Academic Press. 1983. Pp. 493. ISBN 0-12-446550-1. £29.50.

Carpenter, T. P., Moser, J. M. and Romberg, T. A. Addition and Subtraction: A Cognitive Perspective. Hillsdale, N. J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 1982. Pp. 245. ISBN 0-89859-171-6. £14.95.

Le Ny, J-F. and Kintsch, W. (Eds.). Language and comprehension. Amsterdam: North-Holland. 1982. Pp. 358. ISBN 0-444-86538-1.Dfl. 120.00.

Schwartz, B. and Lacey, H. Behaviorism, science and human nature. New York: W. W. Norton. 1982. Pp. 282. ISBN 0-393-01585-8. $19.95.

Cole, P. R. Language disorders in preschool children. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall. 1982. Pp. 178. ISBN 0-13-522862-X. £19.75.

Wood, M. L. Language disorders in school-age children. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall. 1982. Pp. 156. ISBN 0-13-522946-4. £19.75.

Baddeley, A. D. Your memory: A user's guide. London: Sidgwick & Jackson. 1982. Pp. 222. ISBN 0-283-98929-7. £9.95.

Lass, N. J. (Ed.). Speech and language: Advances in basic research and practice, Vol. 6. London: Academic Press. 1982. Pp. 477. ISBN 0-12-608606-0. £36.40.

Neisser, U. (Ed.). Memory observed: Remembering in natural contexts. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman. 1982. Pp. 433 + xiii. ISBN 07167-1 1371-3. £8.80 (paperback), £18.80 (hardback).

Gentner, D. and Stevens, A. L. Mental models. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 1983. Pp. viii + 348. ISBN 0-89859-242-9. £24.95.

Miles, T. R. Dyslexia: The pattern of diculties. London: Granada. 1983. Pp. 225. ISBN 0-246-11345-6. £9.95.

Humphrey, N. Consciousness regained. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1983. Pp. 222. ISBN 0-19-217732-X. £12.95.

Levinson, S. C. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1983. Pp. xvi + 420. ISBN 0-521-22235-4 (Case). £25.00. ISBN 0-521-29414-2 (Paper). £8.50.     

Why Mikey's right and my key's wrong: The significance of stress and word boundaries in a child's output system

The systematic errors children make in the course of phonological development, like adult production errors and adult phonological processes, can provide evidence of language production mechanisms. A detailed investigation of the environments in which velar stops are fronted by a phonologically delayed child reveals that fronting is dependent on both word stress and word boundaries; that it shows lexical exceptions; and that it occurs in output only. This distribution suggests that the child has output lexical representations which are independent of input lexical representations, and that the fronting error occurs in these output representations. It also suggests that prosodic features are crucial to the identification of articulatory features within these representations. Such an analysis has implications for theories of lexical access, and for the development of lexical access in children.