Idiodynamic sets as determinants of children's false recognition errors.

Reports 2 experiments in which the object-referent and dimension-referent response sets identified from the word association data of children were used to investigate the basis for false recognition errors by kindergartners and by 2nd and 6th grade Ss (n = 32 each). Word association data from these Ss were consistent with previous findings, validating the developmental changes in the dominant dimensions of associative organization. The false recognition data involving object-referent associations paralleled the word association data, but the results for dimension-referent associations did not. Instead, kindergartners made more errors to dimension-referent than to object-referent associates, and there was a significant decrease in the number of errors to both types of associates with increasing age. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Lexical ambiguity and children's word recognition.

Conducted 2 experiments to examine the word recognition processes of 2nd, 4th, and 6th graders. In Exp I, 72 Ss named target words that were primed by words that had more than 1 meaning. Targets were related either to the more or less frequent sense of the ambiguous prime or were unrelated to it. Findings indicate that older Ss were more likely than younger Ss to restrict processing of ambiguous words to the most frequent meaning. While younger Ss showed approximately equal facilitation for words related to either meaning, regardless of each one's relative frequency, 6th graders apparently retrieved only the most frequent meaning. Exp II, with 36 Ss, was similar to Exp I but included neutral primes and varied the interval between presentation of prime and target. Results show that all groups showed automatic retrieval of both meanings of the ambiguous word. For 6th graders, however, this retrieval was followed by a 2nd stage, in which attention was allocated to the more frequent meaning, maintaining it, while the less frequent meaning was inhibited. Overall data indicate that older children use meaning frequency to narrow the amount of information kept active following word recognition. (34 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Motivational and informational functions and consequences of children's attention to peers' work.

Two studies (331 children aged 9–11 yrs) examined the proposal that the functions served by children's attention to peers' work differ both in their informational focus (whether children seek information either to improve their products or to evaluate their ability) and in their goal focus (whether information seeking serves either mastery or performance achievement strivings). In both studies responses to a self-report measure of reasons for looking at peers' work supported this hypothesis. Study 2 also examined the effect of a mastery vs a performance goal condition on reasons for looking at peers' work, subsequent information seeking, and interest in the task. Goal condition affected goal, but not informational, functions of looking at peers' work. Both goal condition and individual differences in endorsement of mastery vs performance reasons predicted later information seeking and interest. Implications for social comparison theory and for classroom learning and motivation are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of alphabet-letter instruction on young children's word recognition.

This study examined the influence of letter-name instruction on beginning word recognition. Thirty-three preschool children from low-socioeconomic-status families participated in 16 weeks of letter-name or comprehension-focused instruction. After instruction, children's ability to learn 3 types of word spellings was examined: words phonetically spelled with letters children had been taught (e.g., BL for ball), words phonetically spelled with letters children had not been taught, and words with visually distinct letter spellings that were nonphonetic. Children who received letter-name instruction learned words phonetically spelled with letters included in instruction significantly better than other words. Children receiving comprehension instruction performed significantly better on visually distinct word spellings. Results demonstrate the beneficial effects of alphabet-letter instruction on beginning phonetic word recognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Discriminating alternative conceptions of false recognition: The cases of word concreteness and word frequency.

A classical finding in recognition memory is that participants falsely recognize new high-frequency words more than new low-frequency words. Similarly, participants falsely recognize new abstract words more than new concrete words. The authors contrast a memory-based explanation of these effects to a decision-based explanation. In the former explanation, differences in false recognition arise because some sets of new items have properties that discriminate them from study-list items stored in memory. In the latter explanation, differences in false recognition arise because some sets of old items are especially well remembered. This strong memory influences decision processes, with resulting effects on false recognition of new items. The authors test these views by examining the relationship between relative hit rates and relative false-alarm rates under a variety of encoding conditions. The results of 7 experiments support the memory-based approach. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Home grown for reading: Parental contributions to young children's emergent literacy and word recognition.

This article provides an integrative review of key aspects of emergent literacy and specific home activities that empirical research has shown to support their development. Given the importance of word recognition in reading development, home contributions to word recognition as well as to four areas of emergent literacy that contribute to word recognition are highlighted. These include phonological awareness, letter knowledge, print concepts, and vocabulary. Particular attention is devoted to the activity of shared book reading to outline its different facets, changing nature, and potential impact on emergent literacy and word recognition skill. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Modality effects in false recall and false recognition.

R. E. Smith and R. R. Hunt (1998) reported a dramatic reduction in false remembering in a list-learning paradigm by switching from auditory to visual presentation at study. The current authors replicated these modality effects in college students, using written recall and visual recognition tests but obtained smaller effects than those in Smith and Hunt's study. In contrast, no modality effect occurred on auditory recognition tests. Manipulating study and test modality within-subjects (Experiment 2) and between-subjects (Experiment 3) yielded similar results. It was also found that subjectss frequently judged critical nonstudied words as having been presented in the modality of their corresponding study lists. The authors concluded that subjects could retrieve distinctive information about a study list's presentation modality to reduce false remembering but only did so under certain conditions. The modality effect on false remembering is a function of both encoding and retrieval factors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Forced-choice word associations in schizophrenia.

This study, based on Freudian theory, used a forced-choice word association format to test the hypothesis that regressed schizophrenic Ss would prefer children's to adult's association. 16 schizophrenic, 16 sociopathic, and 16 normal male patients matched for age and education were tested on a 51-item test in which they were forced to choose their associations from among randomly arranged adult preferred, children preferred, and irrelevant alternatives. Using choice of children's responses minus choice of irrelevant response as a measure to control for random error markings, schizophrenic Ss differed significantly from normal Ss as predicted. Normal and sociopathic Ss did not differ. Sociopathic and schizophrenic Ss differed at p     

Young children's emerging ability to make false statements.

This study examined the origins of children's ability to make consciously false statements, a necessary component of lying. Children 2 to 5 years of age were rewarded for claiming that they saw a picture of a bird when viewing pictures of fish. They were asked outcome questions (“Do you win/lose?”), recognition questions (“Do you have a bird/fish?”), and recall questions (“What do you have?”), which were hypothesized to vary in difficulty depending on the need for consciousness of falsity (less for outcome questions) and self-generation of an appropriate response (more for recall questions). The youngest children (2? to 3? years old) were above chance on outcome questions, but it was not until age 3? that children performed above chance on recognition questions or were capable of maintaining false claims across question types. Findings have implications for understanding the emergence of deception in young children. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Personal space and its relation to extraversion-introversion.

Employed behavioral and questionnaire measures to test the hypothesis that extroverts would prefer to be physically closer to people with whom they were interacting than would introverts. Ss were 40 male extrovert and introvert undergraduates, selected on the basis of either a high or low score on the Extraversion scale of the MMPI and a score close to the group mean on the Neuroticism scale. It was found that extroverts did not generally differ from introverts in their distance preferences but did consistently indicate that they could comfortably allow people to get closer to them than did introverts. (French summary) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Expression of superordinates in children's word definitions.

This study investigated developmental changes in the expression of superordinates in children's word definitions. Children in Grades 1, 3, and 5 attempted to define words from 3 parts of speech (i.e., nouns, verbs, and adjectives) and 4 morphologically defined word types (i.e., compound, root, inflected, and derived words). Superordination increased significantly and changed qualitatively with age, but across grades children produced greater proportions of superordinates for nouns than adjectives and verbs, and for compound and root words than inflected and derived words. These findings may be accounted for by increases in the size or changes in the organization of the mental lexicon with grade, children's increasing awareness that superordinates are conventionally used in definitions, and the differential organization of concepts in the mental lexicon for different kinds of words. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perceptual false recognition in Alzheimer's disease.

Previous research has found that patients with probable Alzheimer's disease (AD) show lower levels of false recognition of semantic associates than do healthy older adults. To investigate whether this finding is attributable to semantic impairments in patients with AD, the authors examined false recognition of perceptually related novel objects with little semantic content in patients with AD and healthy older adults. By using corrected recognition scores to control for unrelated false alarms, it was found that patients with AD showed lower levels of both true and false recognition of novel objects than did older adults. These results suggest that the previous difference in false recognition of semantic associates observed between patients with AD and older adults is not entirely attributable to semantic memory deficits in patients with AD but may also involve poorly developed gist information in these patients. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Toward a strong phonological theory of visual word recognition: true issues and false trails

A strong phonological theory of reading is proposed and discussed. The first claim of this article is that current debates on word recognition are often based on different axioms regarding the cognitive structures of the mental lexicon rather than conflicting empirical evidence. These axioms lead to different interpretations of the same data. It is argued that once the implicit axioms of competing theories in visual word recognition are explicated, a strong phonological model presents a viable and coherent approach. The assumptions underlying a strong phonological theory of reading are outlined, and 4 theoretical questions are examined: Is phonological recoding a mandatory phase of print processing? Is phonology necessary for lexical access? Is phonology necessary for accessing meaning? How can phonology be derived from orthographic structure? These issues are integrated into a general theory that is constrained by all of the findings.     

Phonological priming in auditory word recognition.

Used a priming technique to test specific predictions regarding cohort activation in 3 experiments involving 170 undergraduates. Ss identified target words embedded in noise at different signal-to-noise ratios. The target words were either presented in isolation or preceded by a prime item that shared phonological information with the target. In Exp I, primes and targets were English words that shared 0, 1, 2, 3, or all phonemes from the beginning of the word. In Exp II, nonword primes preceded word targets and shared initial phonemes. In Exp III, word primes and word targets shared phonemes from the end of a word. Reliable phonological priming was observed in all experiments. Results of Exps I and II support the assumption of activation of lexical candidates based on word-initial information, as proposed in cohort theory; however, results of Exp III, which showed increased probability of correctly identifying targets that shared phonemes from the end of words, did not support the predictions derived from the theory. (34 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Competitor priming in spoken word recognition.

Most models predict that priming a word should retard recognition of another sharing its initial sounds. Available short lag priming data do not clearly support the prediction. The authors report 7 continuous lexical-decision experiments with 288 participants. With lags of 1–5 min between prime and probe, response time increased for a monosyllabic word preceded by a word sharing its onset and vowel (but not one sharing its rime) and for a polysyllabic word preceded by another sharing its first syllable. The effect was limited to words primed by words, suggesting that identifying the prime strengthens its lexical attractor, making identification of a lexical neighbor more difficult. With lags of only a few trials, facilitatory effects of phonological similarity or familiarity bias effects were also seen; this may explain why clear evidence for inhibitory priming has been lacking hitherto. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Physically abused preschoolers' responses to peers' distress.

Response to peers' distress for which they were (target-caused) or were not (bystander) the cause were coded for 11 abused and nonabused preschoolers between the ages of 35 and 67 months. Each child was observed on a playground for an average of 115 min. Consistent with results of research with toddlers, abused preschoolers exhibited more inappropriate responses (aggression and withdrawal) toward distressed peers (bystander incidents) than did nonabused preschoolers. Also, abused children were more likely to cause distress of peers. These findings suggest that even among abused children who have had opportunities to interact with nonabusive caregivers and peers (i.e., regularly attended day care), differences in responses to peers' distress are obtained. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Fuzzy-trace theory and children's false memories

Fuzzy-trace theory's concepts of identity judgment, nonidentity judgment, and similarity judgment provide a unified account of the false-memory phenomena that have been most commonly studied in children: false-recognition effects and misinformation effects. False-recognition effects (elevated false-alarm rates for unpresented distractors that preserve the meanings of presented targets) are due to increased rates of similarity or false identity judgment about distractors or to decreased rates of nonidentity judgment. Misinformation effects (erroneous acceptance of misleading postevent information and erroneous rejection of actual events) are also due to variability in rates of similarity, identity, and nonidentity judgment. Two experimental paradigms are presented, one for false recognition (conjoint recognition) and one for misinformation (conjoint misinformation), that allow investigators to tease apart the contributions of these processes to children's false-memory reports. Each paradigm is implemented in a mathematical model that provides numerical estimates of the processes.     

Emotional factors in the forgetting of word associations.

Systematic explorations of the hypothesis that emotional factors influence memory has eventuated in both acceptance and rejection of the premise. The present study is patterned after the experimental model used by Rapaport et al. The modification introduced concerns the nature of the stimulus words; herein the "neutral" and "emotional" words are equated with regard to frequency of usage. The dependent variable included an evaluation of the emotionality of each word by Es, by Ss, and S's GRS. Factor analysis of the data revealed 2 factors affecting recall: emotionality and "response variability" (between Ss and between testing sessions) suggesting that "the forgetting of word associations is a function of both emotional and non-emotional determinants." From Psyc Abstracts 36:01:3CL99L. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Preschoolers' prosocial responses to their peers' distress.

52 preschoolers' (aged 36–56 mo) spontaneous responses to their crying peers were naturalistically observed, recorded, and analyzed in 3 child-care programs. Individual differences in age, gender, temperament, social competence, child-care experience, and friendship status were examined to understand how these variables shape children's prosocial behavior with peers. Variations in manner of responding were related to children's temperament, friendship status, and positive interactive style with peers. Results suggest that socioemotional functioning with peers and individual characteristics affect children's responses to a peer's distress. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)