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Developing narrative structure in parent-child reminiscing across the preschool years.

This study is a longitudinal exploration of relations between parents' and children's provision of narrative structure in joint retellings of the past and children's developing personal narrative skills. Fifteen White, middle-class families participated when children were 40 and 70 months old. At both ages, mothers and fathers talked separately with children about shared past events and uniformed experimenters elicited children's personal narratives. Whereas mothers and fathers did not differ in how they structured past narratives, children narrated differently with fathers than with mothers. Further, even at 40 months, girls' narratives were more contexted and evaluative than boys, but parents' provision of narrative structure increased similarly with daughters and sons over time. Children's early abilities to provide evaluative narratives was a strong predictor of their later abilities to provide evaluative narratives; maternal emphasis on evaluations also predicted children's later narrative structure. Parental and child influences on personal narrative skill development are discussed.

Affect↗

Young children learn to produce passives with nonce verbs.

Younger and older children (mean ages = 2 years 11 months and 3 years 5 months) learned 2 nonce verbs in a full passive or active transitive construction. When asked patient-focused questions encouraging passive-voice replies (e.g., "What happened to the ball?") or agent-focused questions encouraging active-voice replies (e.g., "What did Elmo do?"), children used a variety of strategies to meet the demands of the questions, usually without changing the construction in which the verb occurred. In Study 2 in which passive and active constructions were primed, 40% of the almost 3-year-old children used an active-introduced verb in a passive construction and 35% used a passive-introduced verb in an active transitive construction when discourse demands encouraged them to do so. Thus, before their 3rd birthdays, some children have an understanding of the passive and active transitive constructions general enough to support productive usages with newly learned verbs.

Age Factors↗

Young children's use of syntactic cues to learn proper names and count nouns.

In 6 experiments, 144 toddlers were tested in groups ranging in mean age from 20 to 37 months. In all experiments, children learned a novel label for a doll or a stuffed animal. The label was modeled syntactically as either a count noun (e.g., "This is a ZAV") or a proper name (e.g., "This is ZAV"). The object was then moved to a new location in front of the child, and a second identical-looking object was placed nearby. The children's task was to choose 1 of the 2 objects as a referent for the novel word. By 24 months, both girls (Experiment 2) and boys (Experiment 5) were significantly more likely to select the labeled object if they heard a proper name than if they heard a count noun. At 20 months, neither girls (Experiments 1 and 6) nor boys (Experiment 1) demonstrated this effect. By their 2nd birthdays, children can use syntactic information to distinguish appropriately between labels for individual objects and those for object categories.

Child Language↗

Effects of focus of attention on anxiety levels and social performance of individuals with social phobia.

Self-focused attention has been linked to social anxiety and poor social performance, but the causal direction of this relationship has not been established. For this study, focus of attention was manipulated during a speech task, conducted in pairs for 38 individuals with generalized social phobia. Results indicated that intensifying self-focused attention increased anticipated anxiety and anxious appearance, regardless of whether the individual was giving a speech or passively standing before the audience. The self-focus manipulation also increased self-reported anxiety during the task, but only for individuals assigned to a passive role. Contrary to expectation, self-focused attention did not affect any measure of social performance. These results indicate that self-focused attention may play a causal role in exacerbating social anxiety.

Adult↗

Misattribution and speech anxiety.

It has been reported that misattribution can enhance the social behavior of shy subjects. By extrapolation, misattribution should also calm speech-anxious subjects and improve their speechmaking. We therefore crosscut misattribution versus control and high versus low speech anxiety, and assessed the impact on nervous behavior and speechmaking. Misattribution did not significantly affect most of the behavior of subjects making speeches. We discuss the implications of these findings for misattribution when personality traits are involved.

Adult↗

Transitions in learning: evidence for simultaneously activated strategies.

Children in transition with respect to a concept, when asked to explain that concept, often convey one strategy in speech and a different one in gesture. Are both strategies activated when that child solves problems instantiating the concept? While solving a math task, discordant children (who produced different strategies in gesture and speech on a pretest) and concordant children (who produced a single strategy) were given a word recall task. All of the children solved the math task incorrectly. However, if discordant children are activating two strategies to arrive at these incorrect solutions, they should expend more effort on this task than concordant children, and consequently have less capacity left over for word-recall and perform less well on it. This prediction was confirmed, suggesting that the transitional state is characterized by dual representations, both of which are activated when attempting to explain or solve a problem.

Attention↗

Inhibiting word generation with word presentations.

The ability to generate words of a given category is found to be impaired when other words of the same category are being heard (Experiments 1-4). Little if any impairment arises from hearing words of a different category (Experiments 1, 2, and 3). This pattern of results occurs with categories defined both semantically (Experiments 1, 2, and 4) and graphemically (Experiment 3). The extent of the impairment is found to be comparable to that which occurs when other words of the same category are studied and recalled prior to generation (Experiment 4). These findings are discussed in the context of other inhibitory phenomena.

Humans↗

Functional characteristics of the inner voice and the inner ear: single or double agency?

Double agency theories of short-term memory posit the functional independence of a phonological store (inner ear) and articulatory process (inner voice). A series of 5 experiments challenges this view. Articulatory suppression during retention of 9-item lists gives rise to a changing-state effect similar to that shown for irrelevant speech. Also, vocalized suppression is more disruptive than silently mouthed suppression, but this difference arises from vocalization itself rather than from any auditory feedback to which it gives rise. Class similarity between the to-be-remembered items and the articulatory material is not a critical determinant, but the effect occurs only with tests of serial order. For mouthed suppression, the irrelevant speech effect is only attenuated with changing-state suppression. Also, the presence of changing-state irrelevant speech abolishes the changing-state effect of articulatory suppression. Functional equivalence of codes from auditory, visual, and articulatory sources is claimed.

Adult↗

Collective memory: collaborative and individual processes in remembering.

Two experiments compared collaborative and individual recall. In Experiment 1, participants encoded pictures and words with a deep or shallow processing task, then recalled them twice either individually or collaboratively. Collaborative groups recalled more than individuals, but less than nominal groups (pooled individuals), thus exhibiting collaborative inhibition. However, group recall appeared to be more stable over time than individual recall. Groups and individuals both showed a picture-superiority effect, a level-of-processing effect, and hypermnesia. In Experiment 2, participants recalled the story "War of the Ghosts" (from F. C. Bartlett, 1932), and again collaborative groups recalled more than individuals, but less than nominal groups. Both the individual and collaborative recalls were highly organized. There was evidence that the collaborative groups tended to rely on the best individual to a greater extent in story than in list recall. Possible social and cognitive mechanisms are considered.

Adolescent↗

Event-based prospective memory and executive control of working memory.

In 5 experiments, the character of concurrent cognitive processing was manipulated during an event-based prospective memory task. High- and low-load conditions that differed only in the difficulty of the concurrent task were tested in each experiment. In Experiments 1 and 2, attention-demanding tasks from the literature on executive control produced decrements in prospective memory. In Experiment 3, attention was divided by different loads of articulatory suppression that did not ultimately lead to decrements in prospective memory. A high-load manipulation of a visuospatial task requiring performance monitoring resulted in worse prospective memory in Experiment 4, whereas in Experiment 5 a visuospatial task with little monitoring did not. Results are discussed in terms of executive functions, such as planning and monitoring, that appear to be critical to successful event-based prospective memory.

Adult↗

Single word production in english: the role of subsyllabic units during phonological encoding.

Five experiments investigated the role of sublexical units in English single word production. L. Ferrand, J. Segui, and G. W. Humphreys (1997) reported a priming effect that was most effective when primes and targets shared the first syllable. Experiments 1A and 1B failed to replicate this effect but Experiment 1B showed that subsyllabic units play a role in speech production. This role was further explored using a picture naming task in Experiment 2. Naming latencies were shortest when the segmental overlap between prime and target (the picture name) was largest, regardless of the syllable structure of the target. Experiments 3 and 4 replicated this segmental overlap effect with different sets of words as targets. Experiment 5 showed that the magnitude of the overlap effect increased with longer prime exposure duration. The implications of these results for theories of phonological encoding in speech production are discussed.

Attention↗

The influence of phonological similarity neighborhoods on speech production.

The influence of phonological similarity neighborhoods on the speed and accuracy of speech production was investigated with speech-error elicitation and picture-naming tasks. The results from 2 speech-error elicitation techniques-the spoonerisms of laboratory induced predisposition technique (B. J. Baars, 1992; B. J. Baars & M. T. Motley, 1974; M. T. Motley & B. J. Baars, 1976) and tongue twisters-showed that more errors were elicited for words with few similar sounding words (i.e., a sparse neighborhood) than for words with many similar sounding words (i.e., a dense neighborhood). The results from 3 picture-naming tasks showed that words with sparse neighborhoods were also named more slowly than words with dense neighborhoods. These findings demonstrate that multiple word forms are activated simultaneously and influence the speed and accuracy of speech production. The implications of these findings for current models of speech production are discussed.

Attention↗