Verbal-discrimination learning: Varied familiarization on correct and incorrect items.

80 Ss in 4 groups were given 12 trials on a 30-pair verbal-discrimination (VD) list of very low-frequency words. The groups received different familiarization training prior to the VD task. Differential familiarization, given on correct and incorrect items, was initially beneficial, but more so when the correct item received the greater familiarization. More familiarization of incorrect than correct items resulted in a slower rate of improvement across trials than occurred when equal familiarization was given on correct and incorrect items, or when Ss received irrelevant familiarization. Equal familiarization of correct and incorrect items led to faster VD acquisition than irrelevant familiarization. (French summary) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Verbal-discrimination learning following a free-recall familiarization training procedure.

Investigated the effects of transfer from a modified free-recall task to verbal-discrimination (VD) learning. The free-recall procedure was designed to impact increments in experimental frequency to specific words that appeared in VD. 4 experimental groups, with 30 undergraduates in each, were given prior free-recall exposure to either all right VD items (A-R), all wrong (A-W), both the right and wrong items from same VD pairs (B-S), or both the right and wrong items from different VD pairs (B-D). A 5th group of 30 Ss served as a control and learned a free-recall list which did not contain any VD items (C). In terms of number of correct responses during VD learning, the groups were ordered as follows: A-R, C, A-W, B-S, and B-D. Results are interpreted as being consistent with derivations from the frequency theory of VD learning. (French summary) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perceptual learning of noise vocoded words: Effects of feedback and lexicality.

Speech comprehension is resistant to acoustic distortion in the input, reflecting listeners' ability to adjust perceptual processes to match the speech input. This adjustment is reflected in improved comprehension of distorted speech with experience. For noise vocoding, a manipulation that removes spectral detail from speech, listeners' word report showed a significantly greater improvement over trials for listeners that heard clear speech presentations before rather than after hearing distorted speech (clear-then-distorted compared with distorted-then-clear feedback, in Experiment 1). This perceptual learning generalized to untrained words suggesting a sublexical locus for learning and was equivalent for word and nonword training stimuli (Experiment 2). These findings point to the crucial involvement of phonological short-term memory and top-down processes in the perceptual learning of noise-vocoded speech. Similar processes may facilitate comprehension of speech in an unfamiliar accent or following cochlear implantation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Verbalization effects in discrimination learning of pictures and words.

Compared discrimination learning of pairs of pictures (line drawings) and their verbal labels as a function of various verbalization conditions in a study with 128 undergraduates. Ss either (a) verbalized each item of a pair once (condition C1) or twice (condition C2), (b) verbalized the right item 3 times and the wrong item once (condition R), or (c) verbalized the right item once and the wrong item 3 times (condition W). The R and W conditions affected discrimination learning of both pictures and words in a way predictable from frequency theory, but pictures were easier to discriminate than words in conditions C1, R, and W. It is suggested that the results reflect the joint operation of verbal frequency and visual encoding processes in picture discrimination. (French summary) (17 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The internship crisis: An uncommon urgency to build a common solution.

The internship imbalance is a problem of grave individual and professional concern. As the imbalance continues and deepens, many concerted efforts have been directed toward mitigating the imbalance by addressing factors associated with increased demand and insufficient supply of internship positions. These efforts have required the collaboration of groups and organizations that in the past pursued different aims and agendas. Hatcher (this issue, pp. 126–140) moves these efforts forward greatly, by conceptualizing the internship imbalance as a specific example of a scarce resource shared by a large community (a Common Pool Resource) and by providing a framework for development of a governance structure to manage this common resource. This commentary expands on Hatcher (this issue) by highlighting important structural and attitudinal issues underlying the imbalance problem that are evoked by attempts to address the imbalance, and which must be considered when formulating a comprehensive and integrated solution, particularly one that includes an additional governance structure dependent on interorganizational collaboration. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Developmental models of learning to read Chinese words.

What is the nature of learning to read Chinese across grade levels? This study tested 199 kindergartners, 172 second graders, and 165 fifth graders on 12 different tasks purportedly tapping constructs representing phonological awareness, morphological awareness, orthographic processing, and subcharacter processing. Confirmatory factor analyses comparing alternative models of these 4 constituents of Chinese word reading revealed different patterns of metalinguistic underpinnings of children's word recognition across grade levels: The best-fitting model for kindergartners represented a print–nonprint dichotomy of constructs. In contrast, 2nd graders showed a fine-grained sensitivity to all 4 hypothesized constructs. Finally, the best-fitting model for 5th graders consisted of a phonological sensitivity construct and a broad lexical morphological–orthographic processing construct. Findings suggest that Hong Kong Chinese children progress from a basic understanding of print versus nonprint to a diversified sensitivity to varied word-reading skills, to a focus on meaning-based word recognition, to the relative exclusion of phonological sensitivity in more advanced readers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Knowledge inhibition and N400: a study with words that look like common words

In addition to their own representations, low frequency words, such as BRIBE, can covertly activate the representations of higher frequency words they look like (e.g., BRIDE). Hence, look-alike words can activate knowledge that is incompatible with the knowledge corresponding to accurate representations. Comparatively, eccentric words, that is, low frequency words that do not look as much like higher frequency words, are less likely to activate incompatible knowledge. This study focuses on the hypothesis that the N400 component of the event-related potential reflects the inhibition of incompatible knowledge. This hypothesis predicts that look-alike words elicit N400s of greater amplitudes than eccentric words in conditions where incompatible knowledge is inhibited. Results from a single item lexical decision experiment are reported which support the inhibition hypothesis.     

Chronic beryllium disease: uncommon disease, less common diagnosis

Chronic beryllium disease (CBD) is typically considered only when occupational exposure to beryllium is a certainty; however, CBD has also occurred in occupational and environmental settings where exposure was unexpected. When the etiology of a case of granulomatous pulmonary disease is not determined, sarcoidosis is the "diagnosis of exclusion." This diagnosis does not communicate much information about the patient's prognosis, the disease's etiology, or even what disease etiologies were specifically excluded. Some cases of CBD have been called sarcoidosis, allowing exposure to continue for the patient and (at times) other individuals. The granulomatous changes of sarcoidosis are thought to result from an abnormal immune response. While the etiologic agents that can initiate this response are largely unknown, the immunopathogenesis of CBD has been well described, and laboratory methods are available in a few centers that can (if used) identify beryllium hypersensitivity. The potential for exposure and disease to be widely separated in time and location makes it important for health-care and environmental health professionals to be aware of these new diagnostic methods.     

Learning color words involves learning a system of mappings.

This research examines the difficulty children encounter when acquiring 2 specific sets of adjectives, color and size words, and suggests that children must acquire a system of mapping in learning these words. Children were assessed on 4 types of mappings (word–word maps, property–property maps, word–property maps, and word–word–property maps) by completing 3 color tasks. Children also participated in comparable tasks for size words. In Study 1, 13 two-year-olds were followed longitudinally at 3-week intervals. In Study 2, 56 two-year-olds participated in a cross-sectional replication. The results indicate that children acquire color maps in a characteristic order. Children demonstrated a different pattern of acquisition for size words. The results suggest that learning word associations may promote color word acquisition and that learning color words may promote selective attention to color. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Letter–sound complexity in learning to identify words.

Conducted a longitudinal study of 65 1st, 2nd, and 3rd graders who were good readers and 41 older pupils who were reading on 1st-, 2nd-, or 3rd-grade levels to examine how complexity of letter–sound correspondence rules and instruction affect reading acquisition. Ss were given the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Tests and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test and were tested 3 times during a school year with 10 identification tasks on the Kennedy Institute Phonics Test. A hierarchy of difficulty was found, including consonant vowel combinations, short vowel words, long vowel words, special rule words, and nonsense words. Two phases of acquisition occurred. Short vowel words and simpler tasks were learned before long vowel words and more difficult tasks. Sequence of classroom instruction could not have caused this effect, since it included simultaneous instruction on words at different levels of difficulty. Acquisition was based on the complexity of the rules. (16 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Toddlers' attention to intentions-in-action in learning novel action words.

Toddlers' ability to use cues such as eye gaze and gestures to infer the meaning of novel action words was examined. In Experiment 1, 21- and 27-month-olds were taught labels for pairs of videotaped actions that were either similar or dissimilar in appearance. Similar actions differed mainly in the presence of behavioral cues related to the agents' intentions (e.g., extended arms). Only the older children were able to learn the labels for the similar actions. In Experiment 2, 3 new pairs of labels (2 similar, 1 dissimilar) were taught to children in the same age range. Eye gaze and gestures were the main features distinguishing the similar events. The same developmental effect was observed, with only the older children showing learning of both types of verbs and the younger children being impeded by the appearance of the actions. The results show that by the middle of the 2nd year, children begin to consider intentions-in-action when acquiring the meaning of novel action verbs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Internal ophthalmoparesis: an uncommon complication of varicella, a common disease

Two cases are represented with ocular complications after varicella. In one case the complication was diagnosed as internal ophthalmoparesis and in the second patient the complication could be the same; at any rate an iridoplegia was present. From the cases presented in the literature we found that there seems to be a predilection for males to contract this type of ocular complication. The association of this complication and meningo-encephalitis is rare. Recovery of the pupillary reactions and accommodative power is almost never complete. The interesting observation that decrease in cell-mediated immunity but not in humoral immunity decides whether the clinical disease will manifest itself as herpes zoster or varicella is brought forward.     

Infants’ learning of novel words in a stochastic environment.

In everyday word learning words are only sometimes heard in the presence of their referent, making the acquisition of novel words a particularly challenging task. The current study investigated whether children (18-month-olds who are novice word learners) can track the statistics of co-occurrence between words and objects to learn novel mappings in a stochastic environment. Infants were briefly trained on novel word–novel object pairs with variable degrees of co-occurrence: Words were either paired reliably with 1 referent or stochastically paired with 2 different referents with varying probabilities. Infants were sensitive to the co-occurrence statistics between words and referents, tracking not just the strongest available contingency but also low-frequency information. The statistical strength of the word–referent mapping may also modulate real-time online lexical processing in infants. Infants are thus able to track stochastic relationships between words and referents in the process of learning novel words. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The instructive animation: Helping students build connections between words and pictures in multimedia learning.

In 2 experiments, Ss studied an animation depicting the operation of a bicycle tire pump or an automobile braking system, along with concurrent oral narration of the steps in the process (concurrent group), successive presentation of animation and narration (by 4 different methods), animation alone, narration alone, or no instruction (control group). On retention tests, the control group performed more poorly than each of the other groups, which did not differ from one another. On problem-solving tests, the concurrent group performed better than each of the other groups, which did not differ from one another. These results are consistent with a dual-coding model in which retention requires the construction of representational connections and problem solving requires the construction of representational and referential connections. An instructional implication is that pictures and words are most effective when they occur contiguously in time or space. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Familiarization of Content and Different Response Modes in Programmed Instruction.

This study investigated attribute by treatment interactions between prior familiarity and response mode to programmed materials for college level subjects by manipulating subjects' familiarity. The programs were a revised version of Diagnosis of Myocardial Infarction in standard format and in a reading version. Materials to familiarize subjects with the technical vocabulary and electrocardiogram tracings were developed for this study. The critical measures were the scores attained on the verbal and technical posttest and the delayed posttest. The data, analyzed using multiple linear regression, yielded significant response mode by familiarity interactions on three of the four criteria. The sharpening of achievement differences on the delayed posttest is discussed in terms of Ausubel's theory of assimilation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The influence of hunger on the learning and recall of food related words.

To test the effect of drive state on learning in humans, Ss were presented with paired associates consisting of food and nonfood words, either before or after the evening meal. It was found that the premeal group learned faster, particularly when the paired associates was a food word, and the premeal group recalled food words, but failed to recall nonfood words. The effect of drive on learning was demonstrated. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Role of study strategy in recall of mixed lists of common and rare words.

Experiment 1 confirmed previous findings that common words are more recallable than are rare words when the 2 kinds of words are presented in separate lists but not when they are presented in the same list. Experiment 2 showed much the same pattern when an orienting task was performed during word presentation. In Experiment 3 common words were found to be more recallable than rare words even for mixed lists when no warning was given of the memory test, although the effect was less pronounced than for pure lists. In Experiment 4 stronger measures were taken to preclude anticipation of the memory test, and the effect of word commonness was found to be just as pronounced with mixed lists as it was with pure lists. It was suggested that lists are studied in a way believed to optimize recall and that mixed lists foster a strategy of favoring the rare words. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Why children learn color and size words so differently: Evidence from adults' learning of artificial terms.

An adult simulation study examined why children's learning of color and size terms follow different developmental patterns, one in which word comprehension precedes success in nonlinguistic matching tasks versus one in which matching precedes word comprehension. In 4 experiments, adults learned artificial labels for values on novel dimensions. Training mimicked that characteristic for children learning either color words or size words. The results suggest that the learning trajectories arise from the different frames in which different dimensions are trained: Using a comparison (size-like) training regimen helps learners pick out the relevant dimension, and using a categorization (color-like) training regimen helps the learner correctly comprehend and produce dimension terms. The results indicate that the training regimen, not the meanings of the terms or the specific dimensions, determines the pattern of learning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effect of the temporal structure of spoken words on paired-associate learning.

In a series of experiments, participants learned to associate black-and-white shapes with nonsense spoken labels (e.g., “joop”). When tested on their recognition memory, participants falsely recognized as correct a shape paired with a label that began with the same sounds as the shape’s original label (onset-overlapping lure; e.g., joob) more often than a shape paired with a label that overlapped with the original label at offset (offset-overlapping lure; e.g., choop). Furthermore, the false-alarm rate was modulated by the phonetic distance between the sounds that distinguished the original label and the lures. Greater false-alarm rates to onset-overlapping labels were not predicted by explicit similarity ratings or by consonant identification and were not dependent upon label familiarity. The asymmetry at erroneously recognizing onset- versus offset-overlapping lures remained unchanged as the presentation of the shape at test was delayed in time, suggesting that response anticipation based on the first sounds of the spoken label did not contribute much to the false recognition of onset-overlapping lures. Thus, learning 2 words whose names differ in their last sounds appears to pose greater difficulty than learning 2 words whose names differ in their first sounds because, we argue, people are biased to give more importance to the early sounds of a name than to its last sounds when learning a novel label–referent association. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effects of concomitant colored and uncolored pictorial representations on the learning of stimulus words.

To study the effect of varying degrees of compounding signs of objects denoted by the words, twenty-five stimulus words were presented under three learning conditions: (a) Words alone, (b) words with their uncolored pictures, (c) words with their colored pictures. It was concluded that support was given the hypothesis that "with the number of presentations… held constant, the number of… words recalled by Ss should vary positively within limits with the number of simultaneously presented additional signs." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)