Psychology
The Best Laid Plans: Consequences Of Form Preparation In Speech Production
The form preparation procedure reveals the effective units of speech planning. We extend this paradigm to examine the robustness of planning itself and the consequences of planning on plan-external responses.Participants prepared homogeneous sets of four words that shared onsets, or heterogeneous sets, and then were cued to produce these and other unprepared words. Prepared words showed a homogeneity advantage. Unprepared words showed a homogeneity disadvantage. Form preparation is robust and its consequences are revealing.
Discrete Recitation: A New Window On Word Production
Continuous recitation of related word pairs (e.g. webwell) shows phonological competition exacerbated by lexical frequency in global measures but not in local duration measures. We devised a discrete variation where participants produced pairs to variable interval cues. Initiation times were sensitive, across eight consecutive productions, to relatedness, but only when high frequency words were present. Thus high frequency words trigger premonitory competition, and all words incur a slower phonological competition process during production.
Syllables are chunks in Mandarin, not in Spanish or English
Uncertainty still characterizes the role of syllables in language production within and across languages. We examined the hypotheses that syllables channel phonological encoding in European languages, perhaps more strongly in Romance than in Germanic languages, and that syllables are themselves primary encoding units in Chinese. We report parallel disyllable word-pair recitation experiments in three languages using variants of a classic design in which first syllable alignment is crossed with phonological overlap (e.g., aligned CVC: ham.let ham.per; unaligned CV ma.lice mag.net). › Continue reading
Ingroup Identity Moderates the Impact of Social Explanations on Prejudice: External Explanations for the Low Status of an Outgroup are not Necessarily a Good Thing
Whereas the Social Explanations Framework (Gill & Andreychik, 2007a) suggests that external explanations regarding a low status group (e.g., discrimination) will foster positive attitudes, Social Identity Theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1986) suggests that such explanations can increase prejudice. Two studies suggest that the Social Explanations Framework captures the psychology of dominant group members who are weakly identified with the dominant ingroup, whereas Social Identity Theory captures the psychology of high identifiers.
Parental discipline in adolescent development: The role of guilt and shame
The tendency to experience the moral emotion of guilt is an important aspect of human development. The experience of guilt preserves relationships after a real or perceived wrongdoing by motivating individuals to repair the situation or apologize (Eisenberg, 2000). But immoral acts do not always elicit guilt in individuals. Oftentimes people experience other emotions, such as shame, after a transgression. However, the experience of shame brings about self-focused behaviors, such as avoidance, rather than reparation (Eisenberg, 2000). Therefore, it is evident that the tendency to experience guilt is critical in the formation and preservation of relationships. Some insight on how to foster guilt development in children can be extremely useful for parents. One way parents may be able to foster guilt in children is by employing appropriate discipline techniques. However, research examining a link between parental discipline and the self-conscious moral emotions has been scarce. Most of the work that has been done focuses on young children. Prior research has shown that inductive discipline and/or guilt development in childhood leads to positive outcomes, such as higher levels of empathy and prosocial behavior (Gibbs, 1996). The current study emphasizes the importance of examining such links in adolescence, as well.
It is crucial to understand how entering adolescence affects the links that have previously been shown to exist between parental discipline and guilt in children. In addition, it is important to know whether the experiences of inductive discipline and/or guilt in adolescence lead to the same positive outcomes as they do in childhood. The current study utilized measures of parental discipline (Loeber, Stouthamer-Loeber, van Kammen & Farrington, 1991 and Holden & Zambrano, 1992), guilt and shame (Tangney, Wagner, & Gramzow, 1989), empathy (Davis, 1983), and prosocial behavior (Carlo & Randall, 2002). 112 adolescents (M age = 15.88 years, SD= 1.35 years, 55.4% Caucasian) in urban Pennsylvania public high schools completed the measures in paper-and-pencil questionnaire format with the aim of broadening the scope of research on these topics. › Continue reading