Item response theory (IRT) is currently the dominant methodological paradigm in educational and psychological measurement. IRT models are based on assumptions about the relationship between latent traits and observed responses, so the accuracy of the methodology depends heavily on the reasonableness of these assumptions. This dissertation consists…

Social scientists have long agreed that satisficing behavior increases error and reduces the validity of survey data. There have been numerous reviews on detecting satisficing behavior, but preventing this behavior has received less attention. The current narrative review provides empirically supported guidance on preventing satisficing by…

Proportion compatible manipulations are often used to index strategic processes in selective attention tasks. Here, a subtle confound in proportion compatible manipulations is considered. Specifically, as the proportion of compatible trials increases, the ratio of complete repetitions and complete alternations to partial repetitions increases on…

With many children and adults affected by Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, researchers strive to understand the underpinnings of ADHD and associated factors on both a basic and applied level. The goal of this volume is to explore some of the broad array of research in the field of ADHD. The 12 chapters cover a variety of topics as varied…

The article summarizes results from two experimental studies on reactivity. In the first experiment, 24 college-age participants received a computerized treatment that delivered a grammar lesson, practice, and feedback on assignment of semantic functions in Latin. Verbalizations did not induce reactivity on accuracy, but they slowed down posttest…

The growing literature on semantic memory suggests that many concepts normally believed to belong to certain semantic categories functionally belong to other categories. This determination can be explored by a variety of priming methodologies in which a subject's reaction time is analyzed while making certain judgements about a visually presented…

Fourteen right-handed stutterers and 14 normal speakers responded to monaurally presented stimuli with their right and left hands. Results suggested a bilateral model of neurolinguistic organization for stutterers in which both hemispheres must participate simultaneously in the decoding process. (Author/DB)

Examined the effects of an audiovisual distractor on the visual attention paid to TV by preschool children characterized as distractible. The effectiveness of an audiovisual distractor eliciting a head turn from the TV was diminished when TV viewing had been maintained for at least 15 seconds. (PCB)

Fourteen individuals who stutter and 14 nonstuttering individuals were assessed for the magnitude of their eye blink responses to noise bursts as a measure of temperament. Eye blink response to the initial noise burst and the mean of 10 responses were significantly greater for the stuttering group. Additionally, the Nervous subscale of the…

Speech-related reaction time measures and fluency-related measures of 24 adult stutterers and a like number of nonstutterers were assessed to determine their diagnostic discriminative power. Findings suggested that both fluency failures and the duration of laryngeal adjustment time are useful diagnostic measures for discriminating stutterers from…

Although research has suggested that field dependency is a relatively stable characteristic of alcoholics, the results have been confounded by the use of different measures and different time intervals. To investigate the degree of organic brain impairment and its association with measured field dependency amongst alcoholics, 41 male alcoholics,…

Equally divided by sex and distributed equally across fourth/fifth, eighth/ninth, and college grade levels, 144 subjects performed a mental rotation task under instructions emphasizing either accuracy or speed of response, or both. Instructions had large and consistent effects on speed of response but were not as uniformly effective in their…

Attempts to isolate lexical access latencies by measuring word-naming times in two conditions: (1) words were preidentified and had only to be pronounced on signal; (2) words had to be both identified and pronounced. Results strengthen the conclusion that vocal programing is exempt from the age declines seen in other sensory-motor tracts.…

This study compared the auditory lexical decision times of children (N=46, mean age=7) with specific language impairment (SLI) to those of typically developing age peers. Although SLI children were significantly slower than peers, speed of word recognition was not correlated with measures of language comprehension for the SLI group. Possible…

Two experiments investigated sentence context effects on the naming times of sentence completion words by third-grade children and college students. The semantic acceptability of the word in the sentence context had a much greater influence on children's word identification times than adults'. (Author/CB)