Verbal reasoning test scores and their stability over time

As part of an extended study into school assessment practices the use of verbal reasoning tests and their possible contribution to measuring pupil progress is being investigated. One phase of the study has involved testing the stability of individual verbal reasoning scores over time. The findings of this phase are presented here and located within the broader context of intelligence testing. The discussion concludes with a number of questions relating to the use of pupils’ academic achievements as appropriate measures of school success. The ongoing work considers how pupil success could be measured fairly, taking into account individual pupil differences, including both genetic and socio-economic factors. The work being developed has potential for both formative and summative assessment procedures and also as a tool for reporting the achievements of individual pupils and educational establishments. The full work will be published in due course.     

Exploring the Effect of Verbal and Nonverbal Cues on Perceptions of Deception

How impressions of credibility are formed in trial type settings is examined using 173 participants. It is hypothesized that the severity of the penalty faced by an accused individual will increase participant involvement with the accused's testimony. Involvement is predicted to interact with verbal and nonverbal cues associated with deception to influence jurors’ honesty judgments. Although penalty severity did not influence participant involvement, results indicate that involvement moderates the effect of verbal cues, but not nonverbal cues, on perceptions of deception.     

Prospects for electronic publication in communication: A survey of potential users

This paper discusses the arguments for and against electronic publication and explores the potential acceptance for an electronic journal in the communication discipline. Using electronic mail, 85 users of a computer communication system were surveyed to determine the factors that would influence their decision to submit research reports to an electronic journal. The survey indicates that a majority of respondents would use an electronic journal to publish research reports and that most viewed publishing as a way to communicate about their work rather than a means for advancing in the field. The survey provides evidence that willingness to electronically publish decreased with higher occupational positions (from Masters student to Associate Professor) with this trend reversing itself at the level of Full Professor.     

Prevalence and Predictors of Cyberbullying Perpetration by High School Seniors

Cyberbullying is the deliberate and repeated misuse of communication technology by an individual or group to threaten or harm others. Guided largely by the communication skills deficiency model and previous research on cyberbullying, this study examins the effects of several predictor variables (i.e., verbal aggression, sex, risky behaviors, parental monitoring, parental limits, technology use, and scope of Internet activities) on cyberbullying perpetration. A total of 1,606 incoming freshmen at a large southwestern university completed an online survey measuring all predictor and dependent variables under investigation. Overall, 35% of these individuals reported that they had cyberbullied at least one person during their senior year of high school. Results indicated that verbal aggression, risky behaviors, and cyberbullying victimization emerged as significant predictors of cyberbullying perpetration. These results have important theoretical and practical implications for those interested in developing cyberbullying prevention interventions.     

Sexual abuse but not posttraumatic stress disorder is associated with neurocognitive deficits in South African traumatized adolescents

ObjectivesNeurocognitive impairments are commonly observed in adults suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The picture is less clear in adolescents. Childhood sexual abuse (CSA) may have an independent influence on neuropsychological test performance and provide partial explanatory power of the inconsistent findings. We hypothesized that adolescents with PTSD who have also suffered sexual abuse would have most pronounced deficits on neurocognitive testing.MethodsIn a cross-sectional design, 105 traumatized South African adolescents, of whom 52 fulfilled criteria of PTSD and 34 reported CSA, were studied. A comprehensive neurocognitive battery including tests of memory, executive functioning, and language was used to analyze the associations of neurocognitive impairments with PTSD and CSA.ResultsAdolescents reporting CSA manifested impairments in proactive and retroactive interference tasks on the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning test and in the copy condition of the Rey Osterrieth figure test, indicating deficits in attention and working memory. Against our hypothesis, no independent effects of PTSD were found on neurocognitive performance. Results were independent of comorbid psychiatric diagnoses.ConclusionsSexual abuse seems to have an independent influence on attention and working memory. This could be an early sign of hippocampal impairment.     

话语风格上的性别差异研究

在具体的言语交际中,要针对具体的交际对象来调整话语.性别作为交际对象的客观存在,是语境中不可忽视的一个因素.从语言实际来看,在男女两性的言语交际中,由于性别的不同,形成两性话语风格的差异.语言学家们对社会交往中话语状况的考察表明,在话题的选择、话题量的大小、话语方式与言语策略等方面,男女之间都存在着不同程度的差异.两性在话语风格上的差异,是有其社会文化方面的根源的.     

Dyslexia: Symbol processing difficulty in the Kannada language

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether among children who speak Kannada, a Dravidian language from South India, there are those who show the same pattern of specific dyslexia as has been found to occur in children who speak European languages. The performances of 14 dyslexic children, aged between 8 and 10 years, whose native language was Kannada, were compared on a variety of tasks with fourteen normal readers and fourteen non-dyslexic poor readers. There were no significant differences between the three groups on tests of visual discrimination, visual recognition, visual recall, memory for shapes in sequence, or auditory discrimination. There were differences, however, between the dyslexics and the normal readers on tests of recall of auditorily presented digits, word analysis, word synthesis, and on two tests of visual-verbal association. The non-dyslexic poor readers were more similar to the dyslexics on recall of auditorily presented digits and word synthesis but more similar to the normal readers on word analysis and on the two tests of visual-verbal association. It is argued that these results are evidence of a consistent pattern in specific dyslexia which does not depend on any one writing system or geographical location.     

Tutor learning: the role of explaining and responding to questions

Previous research on peer tutoring has found that students sometimes benefit academically from tutoring other students. In this study we combined quantitative and qualitative analyses to explore how untrained peer tutors learned via explaining and responding to tutee questions in a non-reciprocal tutoring setting. In support of our hypotheses, we found that tutors learned most effectively when their instructional activities incorporated reflective knowledge-building in which they monitored their own understanding, generated inferences to repair misunderstandings, and elaborated upon the source materials. However, tutors seemed to adopt a knowledge-telling bias in which they primarily summarized the source materials with little elaboration. Tutors’ reflective knowledge-building activities, when they occurred, were more frequently elicited by interactions with their tutee. In particular, when tutees asked questions that contained an inference or required an inferential answer, tutors’ responses were more likely to be elaborative and metacognitive. Directions for future research are also discussed.     

Structural invariance in the associations of naming speed,phonological awareness,and verbal reasoning in good and poor readers: A test of the double deficit hypothesis

The associations of multiple measures of speeded naming, phonological awareness, and verbal intelligence with word reading were examined in 51 poor readers and 74 good readers in third and fourth grade. Structural equation modeling was used to determine the extent to which these two groups exhibited structurally invariant patterns of associations among the constructs. Results revealed that for poor readers, both speeded naming and phonological awarencess were significantly associated with word reading, but verbal intelligence had no association with it. In contrast, for good readers, phonological awareness and verbal intelligence were significantly associated with word reading, but naming speed was not. Findings are discussed in light of the double deficit hypothesis.     

Need for Cognition as a Mediating Variable Between Aggressive Communication Traits and Tolerance for Disagreement

This study examined the need for cognition as a mediator between aggressive communication traits and tolerance for disagreement. Previous research suggests that argumentativeness is a positive predictor of tolerance for disagreement, while verbal aggressiveness is a negative predictor of tolerance for disagreement. Our findings indicate that need for cognition positively mediates the relationship between argumentativeness and tolerance for disagreement, as well as verbal aggressiveness and tolerance for disagreement.