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B P Ackerman

Publications and source records attributed to B P Ackerman.

9 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1990

Children's understanding of private keys in referential communication.

A private key is a referential utterance used to inform selectively. The ambiguity of the utterance conceals meaning from nonselected audience members. The purpose of this study was to examine three aspects of children's understanding of the use of private keys. Experiment 1 concerned children's sensitivity to information in the context of utterance (i.e., the common ground). Experiment 2 examined appreciation of audience design and the speaker's intent. Experiments 3, 4, and 5 explored some reasons for children's problems in understanding private keys. The results show that even first graders are sensitive to common ground information and the speaker's intent. However, audience design is troublesome even for second graders in some situations, probably because they fail to assess the knowledge of the audience members. Private keys are important theoretically because they represent an aspect of referential communication involving the uses of ambiguous utterances that have been ignored by developmental researchers.

Attention↗
PubMed1990

The relation between item identification difficulty and elaborative conceptual processing for children and adults.

The four experiments concerned the relation between the difficulty of item identification processes, elaborative conceptual processing, and developmental differences in cued recall. Elaborative conceptual processing was manipulated by asking related ("How many are related?"), category ("How many are vehicles?"), and analytic ("How many usually carry freight?") orienting questions about four-word stimuli in which the words were categorically related (Bus-Airplane-Car-Train). The measures of elaborative processing were the speed and accuracy of question answers. Cued recall for the targets (Train) was assessed for one-word (Bus) or two-word (Bus-Airplane) cues, which were varied to determine if elaborative processing affected cue discriminability or constructability, or both. The difficulty of item identification was varied in several ways. In Experiment 1, the graphemic information was degraded in the acquisition stimuli, or the retrieval cues, or the stimulus words were intact. In Experiments 2 and 3, acquisition presentation time was varied and the stimuli were read by the experimenter or the subject. Experiment 4 featured pictures to determine generalizability. The results showed that elaborative conceptual processing facilitates recall. Most important, item identification processes limit elaborative conceptual processing for both words and pictures, and more for children than for college students.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1990

Concept availability in the causal inferences of children and adults.

What supplies the concepts in causal inferences in story comprehension? This question was examined in 5 experiments. Elementary school children and college students listened to stories containing a "premise" sentence describing a character's intent in initiating a series of actions, followed by an unexpected "outcome." After each story, the subjects were asked inference questions about the reason for the outcome (Experiments 1-4) or asked to explain the outcome (Experiment 5). In the various experiments, the availability of object concepts for an inference was manipulated by providing 0 or 2 clues preceding the outcome, additional filler information that diluted the clue information, a mention of an object in the premise or no mention, and an object title for each story or no title. The results suggested that the availability of an object concept in sentences prior to the outcome was a critical determinant of whether an object inference occurred, especially for children. Given availability, the thematic prominence of the object influences whether the object will be used in an inference.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1989

Place and action in children's representations of stories.

The purpose of the four experiments was to examine the prominence of place and action information in the story representations of second (7-year-old), fifth (10-year-old), and sixth (11-year-old) grade children and college students. The subjects were read short stories in which the information in a premise and an outcome sentence were consistent or inconsistent in describing place or action information. Judgments about story adequacy and the conditional probability of an inadequacy judgment given inconsistency detection were measures of prominence in the story representation, and prominence was manipulated by providing place titles, action titles, or no titles. The results showed that place inconsistency is more important than action inconsistency in children's judgments of story adequacy, except when the action involves the story theme. Developmental differences in story judgments generally were larger for inconsistent actions than for inconsistent places, perhaps due to children's problems in abstracting an action theme early in story processing.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1989

The relation between resource limitations and optional conceptual processing by children and adults.

In some situations children fail to perform optional conceptual processing that they are able to perform. The purpose of the 4 experiments was to determine if the difficulty of word identification affects optional conceptual processing by second/third graders, fifth graders, and college students in a cued recall task. Conceptual processing was manipulated by presenting Hard (e.g., hawk eagle canary) or Easy (river lake canary) word triplets that varied in the contrastive processing necessary to identify the "odd" target word (canary). The orienting activity also varied: for the Oddity Choice activity, contrastive processing was obligatory because the subject had to identify the target; for the Read activity, contrastive processing was optional because the experimenter identified the target. A recall advantage for the Hard over the Easy triplets was the measure of contrastive processing. Finally, the difficulty of word identification varied in that the subjects read the stimuli or the experimenter read the stimuli, and all the words were degraded, only the nontarget words were degraded, or all the words were intact. The results established that contrastive processing facilitates recall, and that word identification difficulty may limit the extent of optional contrastive processing.

Adolescent↗