Criteria-Based Content Analysis: A Qualitative Review of the First 37 Studies.

Statement Validity Assessment (SVA) is used to assess the veracity of child witnesses' testimony in trials for sexual offences. The author reviewed the available SVA research. Issues addressed include the accuracy of Criteria-Based Content Analysis (CBCA; part of SVA), interrater agreement between CBCA coders, frequency of occurrence of CBCA criteria in statements, the correlations between CBCA scores and (i) interviewer's style and (ii) interviewee's age and social and verbal skills, and issues regarding the Validity Checklist (another part of SVA). Implications for the use of SVA assessments in criminal courts are discussed. It is argued that SVA evaluations are not accurate enough to be admitted as expert scientific evidence in criminal courts but might be useful in police investigations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Let Me Inform You How to Tell a Convincing Story: CBCA and Reality Monitoring Scores as a Function of Age, Coaching, and Deception.

The first aim of this experiment was to examine whether being informed about a method of detecting deception called Criteria-Based Content Analysis (CBCA) would increase participants' CBCA scores when deceptive so that they might then be classified as truthful. The second aim was to investigate whether Reality Monitoring could be used as an alternative tool for verbal lie detection. The third aim was to examine whether participants' social skills (social anxiety, self-monitoring, and social adroitness) affected their CBCA scores. Participants (aged 6-8, 11-12, 14-15, and undergraduates) participated in a "rubbing the blackboard" event. In a subsequent interview they told the truth or lied about the event, after they were or were not taught some CBCA criteria. Truth-tellers obtained higher CBCA scores than liars, and those who were informed about CBCA obtained higher scores than those who were not, except for the 6-8 year-olds. CBCA scores were also significantly correlated with social skills. Finally, Reality Monitoring was a useful alternative to CBCA for distinguishing between liars and truth-tellers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Peer interaction in young deaf children: The effect of partner hearing status and familiarity.

14 deaf 54–83 mo olds were videotaped playing once with each of 4 partners: a familiar deaf playmate, a familiar hearing playmate, an unfamiliar hearing child who was a playmate of another deaf child, and an unfamiliar hearing child who had little experience playing with deaf children. 21 hearing and 7 deaf playmates participated. Deaf Ss rarely used language, and formal language use was not related to measures of interaction or play even when playing with another deaf child. Instead, interaction and pretense seemed to be related to the deaf Ss' nonlinguistic communication abilities. Partner hearing status primarily affected communication, with communication between deaf playmates being more visual (both linguistic and nonlinguistic) and less object-based than communication between deaf and hearing playmates. Familiarity played a larger role than experience in improving interaction between deaf and hearing children. The hearing children were more responsive to and used more visual communication devices with their deaf playmate than an unfamiliar deaf child. But the hearing playmates were no better at playing with an unfamiliar deaf child than were hearing children who had little experience playing with deaf children. Implications for the understanding of young children's communication abilities and for deaf educational programs are discussed. (20 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Duration sensitivity depends on stimulus familiarity.

When people are asked to assess or compare the value of experienced or hypothetical events, one of the most intriguing observations is their apparent insensitivity to event duration. The authors propose that duration insensitivity occurs when stimuli are evaluated in isolation because they typically lack comparison information. People should be able to evaluate the duration of stimuli in isolation, however, when stimuli are familiar and evoke comparison information. The results of 3 experiments support the hypothesis. Participants were insensitive to the duration of hypothetical (Experiment 1) and real (Experiment 2) unfamiliar experiences but sensitive to the duration of familiar experiences. In Experiment 3, participants were insensitive to the duration of an unfamiliar noise when it was unlabeled but sensitive to its duration when it was given a familiar label (i.e., a telephone ring). Rather than being a unique phenomenon, duration neglect (and perhaps other forms of scope insensitivity) appears to be a particular case of insensitivity to unfamiliar attributes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Children's reading processes revealed by pronunciation latencies and errors.

Conducted an experiment with 30 8-yr-olds to discover under what circumstances, if any, children use whole words, syllables, letter clusters, or letters as units during reading. Using I. Firth's (1972) list of familiar words and syllables, 3 classes of stimulus words were constructed: familiar words, pseudowords consisting of familiar syllables, and pseudowords consisting of unfamiliar syllables. The number of syllables, letter clusters, and letters in these words was systematically varied. Familiar words were found to be easier to process than pseudowords; pseudowords consisting of familiar syllables were easier to process than those consisting of unfamiliar syllables. Results indicate that syllables and letter clusters are probably not processed as units for any type of word, but there was slight evidence that letters may function as units, particularly for pseudowords. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Positive thought disorder in a hypothetically psychosis-prone population.

Proverb interpretations of subjects who scored high on the Perceptual Aberration-Magical Ideation Scale (Per-Mags) (Chapman & Chapman, 1985) were compared with those of low-scoring controls. Responses to 10 familiar and 3 unfamiliar proverbs were scored for Bizarre-idiosyncratic thinking (J. Marengo et al; see record 1987-30079-001) and literalness (C. A. Hertler et al; see record 1979-12346-001). A Group by Type of Proverb (familiar versus unfamiliar) interaction was found for bizarre-idiosyncratic scores; Per-Mags scored higher than controls on unfamiliar, but not familiar proverbs. The Group?×?Familiarity interaction for bizarre-idiosyncratic scores indicates that the Per-Mag group displayed a subclinical, positive-thought disorder that is affected by the familiarity of the proverbs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Explanatory analogies can help children acquire information from expository text.

In this experiment, we investigated whether children can profit from the use of explanatory analogies to acquire information from expository text. Five-year-old (n?=?24) and seven-year-old (n?=?34) children listened to four texts describing relatively unfamiliar topics with or without explanatory analogies. The children were asked to recall the information described in the texts and to communicate this information to another child. They were also asked a number of inferential questions about the topics. The children in the analogy condition recalled and communicated more of the information contained in the texts and were more likely to remember the content units shared by the analogous concepts than were the children in the no-analogy condition. This effect was stronger for the older children than for the younger children. Although the children made a number of erroneous inferences about the topic, these inferences were not related to the presence of the analogies. These results show that analogies can help children acquire information from expository text, presumably because they make it possible for the children to transfer an explanatory structure from a familiar domain to an unfamiliar one. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Distorting children's reports and interpretations of events through suggestion.

54 children (aged 4–6 yrs old) participated in an experiment examining the effects of leading interviews on their interpretations and factual recall of an interaction with a teaching assistant (TA). Children were either familiar or unfamiliar with the TA and were interviewed in either an incriminating or a neutral manner. In comparison with neutral-interview children, incriminating-interview children made more cued-recall errors and endorsed more biased interpretations of the TA's actions. Familiarity with the TA had limited effects on free recall and interpretations of the TA's actions and had no effect on cued recall. Results indicated that 4- to 6-yr-olds will produce misleading reports about their interactions with either familiar or unfamiliar adults when they are prompted to do so by an opinionated adult interviewer. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

When less is not always more: Stereotype knowledge and reasoning development.

Developmental studies on heuristics and biases have reported controversial findings suggesting that children sometimes reason more logically than do adults. We addressed the controversy by testing the impact of children's knowledge of the heuristic stereotypes that are typically cued in these studies. Five-year-old preschoolers and 8-year-old children were tested with a card game version of the classic base-rate task. Problems were based on stereotypes that were familiar or unfamiliar for preschoolers. We also manipulated whether the cued stereotypical response was consistent (no-conflict problems) or inconsistent (conflict problems) with the correct analytic response that was cued in the problem. Results showed that an age-related performance decrease on the conflict problems was accompanied by an age-related performance increase on the no-conflict problems. These age effects were most pronounced for problems that adopted stereotypes that were unfamiliar for the 5-year-old preschoolers. When preschoolers were familiar with the stereotypes, their performance also started being affected. Findings support the claim that previously reported age-related performance decreases on classic reasoning tasks need to be attributed to the increased need to deal with tempting heuristics and not to a decrease in analytic thinking skills per se. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Explanations for visual cue primacy in judgments of honesty and deceit.

Examined the validity of the distraction hypothesis (Maier & Thurber, 1968). Ss were undergraduate students who watched a videotaped interview and rated the veracity of an actress who played the role of a college student. Study 1 disconfirmed the distraction hypothesis. Ss relied on nonverbal cues to make judgments of veracity, but the presence of nonverbal cues did not distract Ss from processing verbal content. Study 2 tested an alternate explanation, the situational familiarity hypothesis. Study 2 found that judgments in familiar situations were influenced primarily by verbal content cues, whereas those in unfamiliar situations were influenced by both verbal and nonverbal cues. Findings indicate that situational factors influence information processing and affect the relative importance of verbal and nonverbal cues in judgments of veracity. Generalizability of prior deception research is questioned. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Children's beliefs about familiar and unfamiliar peers in relation to their sociometric status.

Examined children's general beliefs about familiar and unfamiliar peers in relationship to their sociometric status and their experience with parents. In the initial phase involving 886 4th and 5th graders, submissive rejected children but not aggressive rejected children reported less positive beliefs about peers than average status children. In the 2nd portion, which included 77 boys and girls from the larger sample, no relationship between children's sociometric status and their beliefs about unfamiliar peers was found. Beliefs about unfamiliar peers were related, however, to children's perception of the amount of acceptance and support they received from parents. Implications of these findings for children's social competence are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A dyspraxic deficit in specific language impairment and developmental coordination disorder? Evidence from hand and arm movements

The extent to which children with either specific language impairment (SLI) or developmental coordination disorder (DCD) could be considered dyspraxic was examined using three tasks involving either familiar, or unfamiliar actions. SLI is diagnosed in children who fail to develop language in the normal fashion for no apparent reason, while the DCD diagnosis is applied to a child who experiences problems with movement in the absence of other difficulties. Seventy-two children aged between 5 and 13 years participated, falling into one of four groups: (1) children with specific language impairment (SLI), (2) children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD), (3) age-matched control children, and (4) younger control children. The performance of the clinical groups resembled that of younger normally developing children. Children with SLI, DCD, and the younger controls showed significant difficulty on the task requiring the production of familiar, but not unfamiliar postures. The deficit observed in the SLI group is particularly striking because it was seen both in those with and those without recognized motor difficulties.     

Children's haptic and cross-modal recognition with familiar and unfamiliar objects.

Five-year-old children explored multidimensional objects either haptically or visually and then were tested for recognition with target and distractor items in either the same or the alternative modality. In Experiments 1 and 2, haptic, visual, and cross-modal recognition were all nearly perfect with familiar objects, but cross-modal recognition was less accurate. In experiment 3, cross-modal recognition was also less accurate than width-mode recognition with familiar objects that were members of the same basic-level category. The results indicate that children's haptic recognition is remarkably good, that cross-modal recognition is otherwise constrained, and that cross-modal recognition may be accomplished differently for familiar and unfamiliar objects. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Comprehension of familiar and unfamiliar native accents under adverse listening conditions.

This study aimed to determine the relative processing cost associated with comprehension of an unfamiliar native accent under adverse listening conditions. Two sentence verification experiments were conducted in which listeners heard sentences at various signal-to-noise ratios. In Experiment 1, these sentences were spoken in a familiar or an unfamiliar native accent or in two familiar native accents. In Experiment 2, they were spoken in a familiar or unfamiliar native accent or in a nonnative accent. The results indicated that the differences between the native accents influenced the speed of language processing under adverse listening conditions and that this processing speed was modulated by the relative familiarity of the listener with the native accent. Furthermore, the results showed that the processing cost associated with the nonnative accent was larger than for the unfamiliar native accent. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

What causes children's failures to detect inconsistencies in text? Representation versus comparison difficulties.

Investigated whether elementary school children's difficulties in detecting inconsistencies in text are related to their failure to represent each of two inconsistent propositions in memory or to their failure to compare the representations of the inconsistent propositions to each other once each has been represented in memory. Three kinds of inconsistencies were considered: falsehoods (a textual proposition conflicts with a potentially known fact), factual contradictions (one textual proposition conflicts with another textual proposition, and one of these propositions is a potentially known fact), and textual contradictions (one textual proposition conflicts with a 2nd textual proposition, and neither is a known fact). In Exp I, 80 1st-, 3rd-, and 5th-grade children were asked to detect familiar falsehoods and unfamiliar factual contradictions in narratives. Results show that the familiar falsehoods were easier to detect than the unfamiliar factual contradictions. However, in Exp II with 30 1st graders, when the familiarity variable was controlled, no differences in inconsistency detection were observed among falsehoods, factual contradictions, and textual contradictions. Detection failures were related more to incomplete recall of the inconsistent information than to difficulty in comparing the inconsistent propositions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Comprehension of texts with unfamiliar versus recently taught words: Assessment of alternative models.

Used modeling data from a study of M. G. McKeown et al (1983) in which approximately 160 4th graders recalled texts containing words that were either unfamiliar or recently taught to them through an intensive vocabulary instruction program. A suppression model, in which incomplete representations of propositions containing unfamiliar words were used during processing, predicted the pattern of recall of texts containing 11% unfamiliar words better than did a substitution model, in which propositions that contained only familiar words were substituted for those that contained unfamiliar words. A remind model, in which instructed words received additional processing, predicted the pattern of recall of texts containing 11% instructed words better than did a normal model, in which propositions that contained instructed words were processed in the same way as were propositions containing only familiar words. It is suggested that learning words through well-designed, direct instruction makes the instructed words salient and results in a greater ability to use the instructed rather than familiar words during comprehension. (30 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of talker familiarity on communication breakdown in conversations with adult cochlear-implant users

This investigation had three objectives: a) to determine the types of repair strategies that cochlear-implant users implement to rectify communication breakdowns during ongoing conversation when talking to either familiar or unfamiliar communication partners, b) to determine how communication partners respond to particular types of repair strategies, and c) to describe the use of conversational behaviors that might circumvent communication difficulties. In Experiment 1, cochlear-implant subjects were videotaped while talking to familiar and then unfamiliar communication partners. In Experiment 2, a second group of cochlear-implant subjects were videotaped while speaking with an unfamiliar partner for 6.5 minutes. Analysis of the videotapes revealed that the cochlear-implant subjects in the two experiments most commonly asked "what?," "huh," or "pardon?" after not recognizing a spoken message (e.g., following a communication breakdown), regardless of whether the communication partner was familiar or unfamiliar. Communication partners' more common response to this repair strategy was to repeat the original message. When cochlear-implant subjects repeated back the segment of a message that they understood, communication partners most often confirmed or corrected them. When they requested information, communication partners usually provided it. The cochlear-implant subjects were more likely to use controlling conversational behaviors when interacting with unfamiliar than familiar communication partners. We conclude that repair strategy-response adjacency pairs may emerge during spontaneous conversations. Use of both specific and nonspecific repair strategies may indicate cochlear-implant users' adherence to a cooperative principle.     

Ontogeny of dam–young recognition in captive Belding's ground squirrels (Spermophilus beldingi).

Investigated in 3 experiments the development of dam–young discrimination in Belding's ground squirrels by observing 8 dams retrieve unweaned young and by observing social interactions between dams and weaned young. Pups were cross-fostered at birth in order to examine how genetic relatedness (related or unrelated) and rearing association (familiar or unfamiliar) influenced discrimination. On Days 1 (24 hrs after fostering), 8, and 15 (Exp I), dams retrieved pups indiscriminately, but on Day 22 (about the time of weaning) dams retrieved familiar young (those they had reared) faster than unfamiliar young. On Day 29 (Exp II), familiar dam–young pairs were less agonistic during paired-encounter tests than were unfamiliar pairs. Results suggest that (a) dam–young discrimination is based on rearing association rather than genetic relatedness per se, and (b) discrimination emerges around weaning when dams and alien young first encounter each other under field conditions. In Exp III, olfactory cues seemed crucial to discrimination as determined by an olfactory impairment using zinc sulfate. (61 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)