RESUMEN
Human figure drawing tasks such as the Draw-a-Person test have long been used to assess intelligence (F. Goodenough, 1926). The authors investigate the skills tapped by drawing and the risk factors associated with poor drawing. Self-portraits of 345 preschool children were scored by raters trained in using the Draw-a-Person Intellectual Ability test (DAP:IQ) rubric (C. R. Reynolds & J. A. Hickman, 2004). Analyses of children's fine motor, gross motor, social, cognitive, and language skills revealed that only fine motor skill was an independent predictor of DAP:IQ scores. Being a boy and having a low birth weight were associated with lower DAP:IQ scores. These findings suggest that although the DAP:IQ may not be a valid measure of cognitive ability, it may be a useful screening tool for fine motor disturbances in at-risk children, such as boys who were born at low birth weights. Furthermore, researchers who use human figure drawing tasks to measure intelligence should measure fine motor skill in addition to intelligence.
Asunto(s)
Desarrollo Infantil/fisiología , Pruebas de Inteligencia , Inteligencia/fisiología , Destreza Motora/fisiología , Peso al Nacer/fisiología , Preescolar , Femenino , Humanos , Masculino , Factores SexualesRESUMEN
This paper investigates how detailed a linguistic representation is formed for descriptions of visual events. In two experiments, participants watched captioned videos and decided whether the captions accurately described the videos. In both experiments, videos depicted geometric shapes moving around the screen. In the first experiment, all of the captions were active sentences, and in the second experiment, half of the captions were active and half were passive. Results of these experiments indicate that participants who only encountered active sentences performed less detailed analyses of the sentences than participants who encountered both active and passive sentences, suggesting that the level of linguistic detail encoded reflects the complexity of the task that participants have to perform. These results are consistent with "good enough" models of language processing in which people process sentences heuristically or syntactically depending on the nature of the task they must perform.
Asunto(s)
Comprensión , Lenguaje , Lectura , Conducta de Elección , Humanos , Lingüística , Estimulación Luminosa , Tiempo de ReacciónAsunto(s)
Factores de Transcripción Forkhead/genética , Trastornos del Lenguaje/genética , Proteínas de la Membrana/genética , Proteínas del Tejido Nervioso/genética , Niño , Regulación hacia Abajo , Factores de Transcripción Forkhead/metabolismo , Regulación de la Expresión Génica , Humanos , Proteínas de la Membrana/metabolismo , Proteínas del Tejido Nervioso/metabolismoRESUMEN
Results of twin studies clearly demonstrate that genetic factors play an important role in the rate of language acquisition and linguistic proficiency attained by normal and impaired children and adults [see Stromswold, K. (2001). The heritability of language: A review and meta-analysis of twin, adoption and linkage studies. Language, 77, 647-723.]. That said, twin-based heritability estimates for language rarely exceed .6 and monozygotic (MZ) twins (who are usually assumed to have identical genetic and environmental endowments) sometimes have very different linguistic profiles. In addition, twins are more likely to suffer linguistic delays and impairments than singletons. Postnatal factors, such as differences in linguistic input twins receive, are usually assumed to be the major reason for these findings. This paper discusses how genetic, epigenetic, and perinatal environmental factors can lower heritability estimates for language, cause MZ twins to be linguistically discordant, and increase the risk of language impairments in twins. We present results from our ongoing Perinatal Environment and Genetic Interaction (PEGI) study that suggest that perinatal environmental factors affect linguistic development more than postnatal factors, and that postnatal factors affect cognitive development more than perinatal factors. Because perinatal factors are overwhelming biological, whereas postnatal factors tend to be psychosocial (e.g., how and how much parents speak to their children), these results support nativist/biological theories of language and language development and call into question empiricist/emergentist theories. These results are also consistent with modularist theories of language. We end by suggesting new methods that can be used to tease apart the effects of prenatal and postnatal environment and to investigate how these factors interact with genetic factors.
Asunto(s)
Lenguaje , Perinatología , Gemelos/genética , Desarrollo Infantil , Humanos , Lactante , Recién NacidoRESUMEN
In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigate adults' and children's on-line processing of referentially ambiguous English pronouns. Sixteen adults and 16 four-to-seven-year-olds listened to sentences with either an unambiguous reflexive (himself) or an ambiguous pronoun (him) and chose a picture with two characters that corresponded to those in the sentence. For adults, behavioural data, responses and reaction times indicate that pronouns are referentially ambiguous. Adults' eye movements show a competition between the looks to sentence-internal and -external referents for pronouns, but not for reflexives. Children overwhelmingly prefer the sentence-internal referent in the off-line picture selection task. However, their eye movements reveal implicit awareness of referential ambiguity that develops earlier than their explicit knowledge in the picture selection task. This discrepancy between performance on a looking measure and a pointing measure in the children's processing system is explained by a general dissociation between implicit and explicit knowledge proposed in recent literature on cognitive development.