Herbert D. Simons

Race and Penalized Sports Behaviors

There are a number of verbal and non-verbal behaviors exhibited by football and basketball players, such as trash talking, taunting, celebrating, dancing, etc. that are penalized and heavily criticized by the athletic officials, coaches, the media and fans. The amount of attention these behaviors receive seems out of proportion to their importance, since they provide little if any competitive advantage and seem to be only peripherally related to the actual competition. It is argued that the undue attention these behaviors receive is racially motivated in that African Americans are to an overwhelming degree responsible for the sanctioned behaviors. These behaviors are a reflection of urban African American cultural norms, which conflict with white mainstream norms. The sanctions represent white male mainstream society’s response to the threat to white masculinity represented by black athletic superiority and by African American athletes’ assertion of the right to define the meaning of their own behavior. In this contested terrain African Americans are resisting white male hegemony and asserting their manhood and cultural identity.

THE USE OF CONTEXTUAL AND GRAPHIC INFORMATION IN WORD RECOGNITION BY SECOND-, FOURTH-, AND SIXTH-GRADE READERS

This study evaluated the relative importance of graphic and contextual information in word recognition as well as the relative importance of several specific sources of contextual information (lexical, semantic, syntactic, discourse) among students at three different grade levels (second, fourth, and sixth). In addition, word recognition behavior was compared at both target word locations where various aspects of context were disrupted and at non-target word locations where naturally occurring oral reading errors appeared. Results indicated that all students used greater graphic than contextual information at target word locations. The use of graphic information during word recognition tended to increase with development. The use of contextual information tended to decrease with development. These results are interpreted as being generally consistent with recent work by Stanovich (1980) and others who emphasize the importance of automatic context-free word recognition ability. Context use at non-target word locations occurred largely at function word locations that were rich in syntactic context. These results suggest that word recognition processing varies not only with the proficiency level of a reader, as Stanovichs model suggests, but also with the amount of contextual richness that surrounds any particular word.

Children's elicited imitations of controlled and rewritten reading texts.

Elicited imitation was used to investigate suspected conflicts between the controlled language of beginning reading texts and the natural linguistic expectations of young children

Transformational Phonology and Reading Acquisitiona

This study examined the hypothesis by Chomsky and Halle (1968) and C. Chomsky (1970) that English spelling corresponds to an underlying lexical level of representation rather than to a surface phonetic level, i.e., pronunciation. And that learning to read involves learning the spelling-lexical level correspondences. This hypothesis was tested by comparing the performance of 87 second and third grade Ss on a paired-associate and reading task composed of a morphologically related list of word pairs (REL), e.g., hide—hid and an unrelated (UNR) list of word pairs, e.g., pine—pin. Both sets of pairs exhibit vowel alternations but are stored differently in the internal lexicon. It was predicted that REL would be superior on the tasks to UNR for all Ss and that the difference would be greater for the better readers over poorer readers and the grade 3 Ss over the grade 2 Ss. A multivariate and univariate analysis of the difference scores between the REL and UNR lists on three criterion measures failed with one exception to confirm these predictions. This study did not offer much support for the predictions of transformational theory about reading acquisition.