Primary-school stutterers: Have attitudes changed?

How concerned are primary-school-aged stuttering children about their communication problem? What are the clinical implications of this concern?Fifteen years ago, Silverman (1970) suggested that primary-school-aged children who stuttered were not concerned about their disfluencies. A clinical implication of that report was that the interpreted lack of concern might negatively affect the children's motivation and desire for change in therapy. Scant research exists to support or refute this implication. While research is available on reactions to stuttering, pretherapeutic attitudes—especially those of children—have not been systematically reported. Guitar (1976) measured the pre-treatment attitudes of 38 adult stutterers and reported that, “those stutterers with more negative attitudes measured just prior to treatment, were most likely to have high levels of stuttering a year later, even though all subjects left therapy entirely fluent.” In related areas, research by Kolb, Winter, and Berlen (1968), McFall (1970), and McFall and Hammen (1971) has indicated that clients who are more motivated do better in behavior modification programs.Whether or not these findings may be generalized to children, in the midst of a developmental process, is purely speculative.     

Deep dyslexia in childhood?

Deep dyslexia is an acquired reading disorder in which semantic substitutions (e.g., city read as town) are made in reading single isolated words. In this paper, evidence for deep dyslexic-type errors is presented from the word-recognition responses of six children, aged 7 years and 0 month to 8 years and 9 months, with severe reading disorders. These semantic substitutions occur in the absence of phonological skills. Therefore, it appears that there exists a small subset of developmental dyslexics who at the beginning of acquisition of reading skills are able to engage in semantic processing, but who show severe impairment of phonological processing. The existence of these reading errors indicate that the use of a phonological code is not necessary to extract meaning from the printed word.     

Cognitive dissonance as a mechanism in vocational decision processes

This study examined changes in cognitive-dissonance-related variables during the professional training period. Differences in levels and change in satisfaction with career choice, importance of career, certainty of career decision, self-occupational perceptions, general attitude toward career, time since career decision, and past experience were observed when students who left a collegiate professional training program before program completion were compared with those who remained in the program. Data supports the validity of D. Hershenson and R. Roth's (1966, Journal of Counseling Psychology, 13, 368–370) and V. Harren's (1979, Journal of Vocational Behavior, 14, 119–133) theoretical models of vocational decision and the Assessment of Career Decision Making scale.     

Decision making styles and progress in occupational decision making

This study provides a reexamination of the role of different decisional strategies in facilitating progress in occupational decision making. Although the assumptions that a rational decision making style is the preferred mode of vocational functioning has been endorsed in a variety of career theories and interventions, there has been conflicting evidence about the validity of this assumption. To examine the role of different decisional approaches in the progress of making an occupational decision, the rational, intuitive, and dependent decision making style scores of 71 undergraduate students were used to predict progress in occupational decision making. The results of the regression analyses failed to provide support for the assumption that a rational style is the most effective in accomplishing this careerrelated task, but indicated strong support for the conclusion that the use of dependent decisional strategies is damaging, particularly in early stages of the decisional process.     

Children's relative number judgments: One-to-one correspondence,recognition of noncorrespondence,and the influence of cue conflict

Although one-to-one correspondence can be seen as a component of successful counting, number conservation, and relative number judgments, there is evidence of considerable discrepancies between children's competencies in these different tasks. Concerning relative number judgments there are strikingly different claims concerning the ability of young children to make one-to-one correspondence-based judgments. In part these discrepancies reflect differences in criteria. Four experiments are reported in which 5-year-olds' relative number judgments of small and large number displays with and without perceptual aids were studied. Children were found to respond to local rather than global density differences and to benefit from the provision of perceptual aids on both small and large number displays with one exception, namely, large number displays where the longer row is less numerous.     

Semantic and visual memory codes in learning disabled readers

Two experiments investigated whether learning disabled readers' impaired recall is due to multiple coding deficiencies. In Experiment 1, learning disabled and skilled readers viewed nonsense pictures without names or with either relevant or irrelevant names with respect to the distinctive characteristics of the picture. Both types of names improved recall of nondisabled readers, while learning disabled readers exhibited better recall for unnamed pictures. No significant difference in recall was found between name training (relevant, irrelevant) conditions within reading groups. In Experiment 2, both reading groups participated in recall training for complex visual forms labeled with unrelated words, hierarchically related words, or without labels. A subsequent reproduction transfer task showed a facilitation in performance in skilled readers due to labeling, with learning disabled readers exhibiting better reproduction for unnamed pictures. Measures of output organization (clustering) indicated that recall is related to the development of superordinate categories. The results suggest that learning disabled children's reading difficulties are due to an inability to activate a semantic representation that interconnects visual and verbal codes.     

More precisely defining and measuring the order-irrelevance principle

R. Gelman and C. Gallistel (1978, Young Children's Understanding of Number, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press) use two definitions of the order-irrelevance principle interchangeably: (1) count tags do not have to be assigned in a fixed order and (2) the order in which elements of a set are enumerated does not affect the cardinal designation of the set. A study involving 107 kindergarten and first grade children indicates that the two are actually distinct concepts. Apparently, a willingness to arbitrarily assign tags is a developmentally less sophisticated ability than--and hence does not necessarily imply--an ability to predict that differently ordered counts produce the same cardinal designation. Thus it appears that evidence of the second ability is necessary to infer a full understanding of the order-irrelevance principle. The first ability alone implies what might better be termed an "order-indifferent tagging scheme." Suggestions for measuring and further researching the order-irrelevance principle are discussed.     

The effect of television-mediated aggression and real-life aggression on the behavior of Lebanese children

This study investigated the effect of television-mediated aggression and real-life aggression on the behavior of Lebanese children. The sample consisted of 48 boys and 48 girls of Lebanese origin who were students in an elementary school in Beirut, Lebanon. After controlling for pre-experimental aggression, the subjects were randomly assigned to one of the following treatment conditions: human-film aggression, cartoon-film aggression, neutral film, or real-life (act of war) aggression. The results indicated that boys as a group were more aggressive than girls and exhibited more imitative aggression after viewing both violent film and real-life violence. Girls were not more violent after viewing filmed aggression but were affected by the real-life violence. Comparisons of Bandura's work within the Lebanese culture are made.