Penelope B. Odom

Facial expressions and interpretation of emotion-arousing situations in deaf and hearing children

Deaf and hearing children were given two tasks: (a) sorting faces portraying nine emotions and (b) matching those faces with drawings of appropriate emotion-arousing situations. The deaf children performed as the hearing children did on the first task but did not match the faces to the situations as well as the hearing children. It appeared that the deaf children were unable to analyze and interpret emotion-arousing events adequately. Possible reasons for this finding are presented and discussed in detail.

Some possible interference and facilitation effects of pronunciability

The effect of pronunciability on the retention of trigrams was investigated by comparing the recall of high and low pronounceable CVCs by deaf and hearing S s. The hearing S s performed somewhat better on the high Pr items and worse on the low Pr items than the deaf S s, who performed equally on the high and low Pr trigrams. It was concluded that hearing S s are subject to interference effects in attempting to pronounce difficult items which reduces rate of learning.

Intralist association in paired-associate learning

An associative-mediation hypothesis predicts that associations between stimuli sharing a common response will facilitate learning, while the same associations between stimuli or responses paired with different responses or stimuli will interfere with learning. An experiment was conducted to test each of these predictions. In Exp. I, four pairs of strong bi-directional associates were learned as stimuli to digit responses; the members of each pair were assigned a common response. Control lists were constructed by substituting a nonassociated word for one member of each pair of associates. Intralist association significantly facilitated learning. In Exp. II, the same words were employed as stimuli or responses to digits, but each word was paired with a unique digit. Under these conditions, intralist association significantly retarded learning.