Complement structures in the language of deaf students

Four hundred and twenty-seven deaf students (age 10 to 19 years) and 60 hearing children (age eight to 10 years) judged the grammaticality of sample sentences which contained infinitival or gerundive complements. Results indicated improvement with increasing age for deaf students. Even the youngest hearing students consistently obtained higher scores than most of the deaf students. Although the function of the complement (as subject or object) did not make a difference in performance, the type of complement did. POSS-ing complements were easier than for-to complements. Verb type also influenced performance.     

English as the second language of deaf children.

Administered the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) to 13 deaf adolescents with deaf parents and to 13 deaf adolescents with hearing parents. Scores achieved by all Ss on the Paragraph Meaning and Language subtests of the Stanford Achievement Test were also available. Ss with deaf parents scored significantly higher than Ss with hearing parents on all but 1 measure. Performance by hearing, foreign students on the TOEFL was more highly correlated with the performance by Ss with deaf parents than with the performance by Ss with hearing parents. Results indicate that English may be a 2nd language for deaf children and that early experience with sign language may facilitate later learning of English. (27 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Alcohol use among college students as a function of their typical social drinking context.

This study investigated the relations among frequency of drinking in different social contexts; alcohol consumption, expectancies, and problems; and psychosocial characteristics among college students. Social drinking contexts were defined by the size and gender composition of social groups. Participants were 98 men and 98 women who endorsed current alcohol use. The results showed that typical social drinking contexts were associated with men's average daily number of drinks and frequency of drunkenness but were not associated with women's alcohol consumption. Controlling for alcohol expectancies and personality factors did not obscure significant social context effects for men's alcohol consumption or problems, supporting the importance of considering social context variables in studies of drinking. Future research with regard to alcohol education, intervention, and prevention strategies is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mathematics achievement as a function of language.

The superior mathematics performance of Asian Americans has been documented by recent reports of standardized test results and supported by cross-national comparisons of mathematics achievement. Cultural emphasis on education, parental support for learning, and innate ability have been cited as factors contributing to this exceptional performance. In this study, in which American and Japanese children residing in the United States were compared, variations in cognitive representation of number were examined in an attempt to understand these cultural and ethnic differences in students' mathematics scores from the perspective of differential cognitive organization of number resulting from differences in primary-language characteristics. Results showed that the cognitive representation of number for children whose only language was English differed from those whose primary language was Japanese. The relation between cognitive representation of number and mathematics achievement was also explored. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive level as a function of defensive isolation.

Evaluated the possibility that a failure to coordinate perspectives on the role-taking task (RTT) occurs when the TAT figures represent defensively isolated aspects of the self-structure. The Ss were given the RTT under 2 conditions: (1) Ss were assigned defensively isolated attributes, asked to tell a story built around TAT figures endowed with those attributes, and then required to take the perspectives of these figures in their role taking; (2) in the other, the assigned attributes were not defensively isolated. Ss showed more difficulty in coordinating perspectives under the defensive isolation condition than under the nonisolated condition. (17 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Development of comprehension monitoring as a function of context.

Two studies with 59 Ss (preschoolers–4th graders) explored the effects of stimulus factors on children's ability to monitor comprehension of messages as listeners in a referential communication situation. Results of Exp I show that both complexity of the stimulus array and degree of message ambiguity affected performances. In line with previous findings, 4th graders but not younger Ss showed evidence of effective comprehension monitoring. Data from Exp II show that when conducive stimulus conditions were arranged, even 1st graders demonstrated considerable skill in comprehension monitoring. In addition to investigating comprehension monitoring per se, the studies also examined the role of comprehension monitoring in directing the overall comprehension process. (10 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Some aspects of the verb system in the language of deaf students

Approximately 480 deaf students (age 10 to 19 years) and 60 hearing students (age eight to 10 years) were asked to judge the grammaticality of sentences containing auxiliary verbs, of sentences where the verb had been deleted, and of sentences in which the verb tense was not marked. The results indicated that deaf students have considerable difficulty with the verb system of English. This difficulty was most pronounced in the formation of tense and voice and in agreement in number and tense. A possible ordering for the acquisition of tense did emerge; from earliest to latest it is: simple past, future, present progressive, perfective, and passive. Improvement in grammaticality judgments appeared to come from an increase in recognition that incorrect sentences were ungrammatical.     

Effects of global and local context on lexical processing during language comprehension.

Nine experiments involving young adults (N?=?525) tested the roles of local (sentence) and global (discourse) contexts on lexical processing. Contextual material was presented auditorily, and naming times for the last (visually presented) word were collected. Experiment 1 tested the local contexts alone and found facilitation of naming latencies when local contexts were related to the target word. Subsequent experiments, using varying baseline conditions, found that globally related material affected naming latency in all cases, whereas the same locally related material that was used in the first study now had no facilitation effect. The globally related material had an immediate effect on naming times. The authors argue that the results are inconsistent with associatively based models and with various hybrid models of context effects and that a discourse-based model best accounts for the data. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Girls' dating behavior as a function of social context and maturation.

Examined how environmental and physical characteristics contribute to the emergence of adolescent girls' dating behavior. The premise was that one set of individual characteristics, pubertal processes, may have more influence on girls' dating behavior in one context than in another, specifically more in girls who attend dance schools than in those who do not. Seventh to ninth grade girls were seen, 59 who were enrolled in national classical ballet company school and 328 who were not. Body image, dating behavior, career aspirations, pubertal status, and maturational timing were assessed via self-report and maternal report. Dancers were less likely to date than nondancers. A Dance/Nondance Group?×?Pubertal Status interaction was found: Premenarcheal dancers had lower dating scores than postmenarcheal dancers, whereas menarcheal status was not related to dating in nondancers. With regard to body image, a Breast Development?×?Dance/Nondance Group interaction was found, with breast development being negatively related to body image in dancers and unrelated in nondancers. Findings are discussed in terms of interactions between environmental and physical characteristics and the goodness of fit between contextual demands and a girl's particular physical characteristics. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Interpretability of graphic symbols as a function of context and experience factors.

10 of the graphic symbols for vehicle and equipment operation developed by an industrial design firm were tested for ease of interpretation in context and in isolation. Ss were 30 male mechanical engineering students who differed in their extent of familiarity with such equipment. As hypothesized, the symbols were more often correctly identified in context and by Ss with relevant prior experience. Symbols maintained the same relative order of difficulty under both context and no-context conditions, a difficulty which ranged from 100% correct responses to only a few correct responses. It is concluded that empirical validation of effectiveness is a necessary, although often neglected, step in the symbol development process. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age-related differences in memory as a function of imagery processing.

The effects of aging on imagery production and use (following the learning of concrete and abstract words) and their relations to subsequent memory performance were explored in 2 experiments. Both experiments demonstrated better free recall of concrete than of abstract words (the concreteness effect). Exp 1 showed this superiority to be greater for young Ss only under explicit imagery instructions. Exp 2 revealed that the advantage of concrete over abstract words reflects the use of differential imagery production. The results are discussed in terms of age differences in imagery utilization and the effects of visual processing on recall. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Arousal level in repressors and sensitizers as a function of response context.

Gave 30 male and 30 female undergraduate repressors and sensitizers "noncontextual" and "contextual" tasks, with GSR as a measure of arousal. In the contextual situation, Ss were aware that they would be required to give free associations which might be self-revealing. In the noncontextual situation, Ss were not aware that they would eventually be required to form free associations. Results from the noncontextual task show that repressors had lower arousal levels than sensitizers during perception and verbal report, but higher during free association. Findings were reversed in the contextual condition. Analogies were drawn to the behavior of repressors (hysterics) and sensitizers (obsessive-compulsives) in psychoanalysis: repressors are more easily aroused by the free association condition, whereas sensitizers are able to use free association to diminish emotional reactivity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Single-incentive selective associations produced solely as a function of compound-stimulus conditioning context.

Barpressing was maintained in a tone-plus-light (TL) condition in 2 groups of rats by shock-related contingencies and in 2 other groups by food-related contingencies. Responding ceased in TL absence (TL). Contingency arrangements made TL hedonically positive, relative to TL, for 1 shock group and for 1 food group and hedonically negative for 1 shock group and for 1 food group. In a stimulus-element test, the visual modality was dominant when TL was hedonically positive, whereas auditory control increased when TL was negative, irrespective of the reinforcers involved. Within-incentive contingency manipulations produced selective associations hitherto ascribed to stimulus-reinforcer interactions, suggesting that biological constraints on learning may operate at the level of conditioned psychological states. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Interaction among retarded children as a function of their relative language skills.

It has long been recognized that the quality of interpersonal relations affects the behavior of individuals with mental retardation. The question to be assessed here was the effect of the skill of individual reacting with the mental retardate upon the behavior of the retardate. This study is a modified replication of an earlier one (Rosenberg, 1959). Ss of an institution for mental retardates were categorized re: verbal facility. Group of Ss was then formed containing pairs of Highs and Lows on this test, and interpersonal behavior was assessed in a play room situation. The results indicate that Lows and Highs interact with each other effectively, whereas heterogeneity of grouping inhibits social interaction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Patterns of lexical processing in a nonnative language.

In three experiments, native Cantonese speakers were asked to read words aloud, name pictures, and translate words. In the study, subjects with different degrees of proficiency in their nonnative language were used (i.e., proficient subjects, adult beginners, and second- and fourth-grade child beginners). The results show that all subjects were more efficient in reading words than in naming pictures when responding in their native language. When the response was in the nonnative language, the proficient subjects were equally efficient in both translating and picture-naming tasks. For the adult beginners, however, translating was faster than picture naming, whereas naming was faster than translating for the child beginners. These results were consistent with the idea that proficient subjects could directly access the meanings of words in the nonnative language, whereas beginners tended to use either corresponding words in the native language (i.e., the adult beginners) or pictorial representations (i.e., the child beginners) as media for such end. These results thus suggest that the proficiency of the nonnative language and the age or method of acquisition of the language are important determinants for the pattern of lexical processing in the nonnative language. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The interpretation of praise and criticism as a function of their social context.

The effect of the interaction of praise and punishment with relative social status (superordinate, subordinate, peer) was studied by exposing college students to events occurring in different social contexts (family, occupation, military). It was assumed that the context would define the frame of reference in which the praise and punishment and social status would be evaluated. The data demonstrated that praise is reacted to more favorably than criticism regardless of context, but that context determines the relative effect of evaluative statements. From Psyc Abstracts 36:04:4GE91D. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Life-span differences in memory integration as a function of processing time.

K. Pezdek (see record 1981-03016-001) reported life-span differences in integration of semantically related pictures and sentences in memory; 6th-grade and high school Ss spontaneously integrated information across modalities, but 3rd graders and adults over 65 did not integrate this information. The present study extends these findings and tests the hypothesis that the 8-sec presentation rate in the previous study was not sufficient to allow the young children and older adults to perform integration processes in memory. Although 3rd graders and older adults (63–78 yrs) did not integrate pictures and sentences that were presented individually at an 8-sec rate, when the presentation rate was increased to 15 sec per item, cross-modality integration resulted. This result is interpreted to mean that the slower presentation rate was necessary for these Ss to actively rehearse different items together, and that this rehearsal strategy is necessary for integration of information in memory. (16 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attitudes toward disabled persons as a function of social context and specific disability.

191 nondisabled 18–64 yr olds completed the Disability Social Relationship Scale, which includes social situation subscales of Work, Dating, and Marriage, and disability subscales of Amputee, Epilepsy, Cerebral Palsy, and Blind. Results reveal significant differences across social situations and among specific disabilities, as well as a significant interaction between social situation and disability. Thus, situational context affects attitudes toward disabled persons. (26 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)