The procrastination assessment scale for students (PASS) has been used widely in evaluating the patterns of university students’ procrastination on academic tasks and their procrastination behavior. The present study validated the psychometric properties of a Chinese version of the PASS (PASS-C) by recruiting two representative independent sample of Hong Kong Chinese university students (S1 used in the EFA study: 506; S2 used in the CFA study: 506). The results confirmed that this modified Chinese version is a valid and appropriate tool to assess university students’ procrastination tendencies in Chinese educational settings.
An X;Y translocation chromosome was detected in a male fetus during prenatal diagnosis for family history of spina bifida.The breakpoints were interpreted as Xp24 and 7qll.The fetus therefore had a duplication of the major part of the long arm of the Y chromosome, and was lacking a small region from the short arm of the X.The translocation chromosome was found to be inherited from the mother and was also present in a clinically normal sister.The pregnancy was continued and a male infant was born.The clinical findings, family studies, and cytogenetics are described.Studies with BUdR incorpora- tion showed that in the mother X inactivation was random.The results of Xg blood grouping studies showed that the mother had failed to inherit the Xg locus from her father, indicating that this locus is situated in the region Xp24--Xpter.
A revised version of the Learning and Study Strategies Inventory was used to examine the relation of study strategies with academic performance of 100 Hong Kong university students. Analysis indicated the high academic-achieving group differed significantly from the low academic-achieving group in terms of intrinsic disposition factors of motivation, scheduling, concentration, and selecting main ideas.
This paper examined the priming effects of the sentential context and other lexical factors in the processing of ambiguous words. A cross-modal naming task was employed in which listeners named aloud a visual probe as fast as they could, at a pre-designated point upon hearing the sentence, which ended with a spoken Chinese homophone. Results from the experiment in general support the context-dependency hypothesis that selection of the appropriate meaning of an ambiguous word depends on the simultaneous interaction of both sentential and lexical information during lexical access.
What is similar in phonological-similarity effect? Michael C. W. YIP School of Arts & Social Sciences, The Open University of Hong Kong myip@ouhk.edu.hk Introduction A robust finding in working memory research is that to recall a set of phonologically similar words is much more difficult than to recall a set of phonologically dissimilar words, which is the well-known phonological-similarity effect (Conrad & Hull, 1964). This finding points out that the capacity of information retention in our working memory store more or less depends on the phonological nature of the to-be-memorized information. The more similar (phonologically) of the to-be-memorized item, the more difficult to retain in the working memory store. However, most of the Chinese people have the subjective experience that to immediately recall a set of colloquial slogans in television advertisement is much more easier than to immediately recall a set of common sentences due to the similarity of prosody. There is also evidence showing that rhyming of verbal information usually enhances our memorization ability (Fallon, Groves, & Tehan, 1999). Therefore, how to explain these contradicting observations is very important in order to get a fuller understanding to the operation of the working memory model (Baddeley, 1992). In the memory study done by Saito (1998), he reported that intonation of a sentence might make a contribution to participants’ recall performance (see also Pennington & Ellis, 2000). Following to this point and together with our aforementioned subjective experience, we can see that prosodic information may be useful to our recall performance to the verbal information to an extent, simply like to recall a colloquial slogan in advertisement for a brief period of time. Reviewing the relevant literature so far, there are a lot of empirical works conducted on this issue in the domain of language research: comprehension and production (Sevald & Dell, 1994; Slowiaczek, McQueen, Soltano, & Lynch, 2000; Soto-Faraco, Sebastian-Galles & Cutler, 2001). However, little consideration has been given to how these different phonological characteristics of a word affect the recall performance in working memory so far despite of their interdependency. Hence, the major objective in the present study is to examine how the phonological characteristics of a word influence the recall performance in working memory, which is a theoretically interesting but still unexplored question. their verbal responses at the end of each list. Altogether, each participant received forty lists with a total of 400 Chinese words in the experiment within two sessions with a break. Each session included 100 phonologically similar items and 100 phonologically dissimilar items. The order of presentation for the lists was randomly assigned in the two sessions. The whole experiment lasted for forty minutes. Results and Discussion Two main findings in the present study were concluded. First, the present results indicate that one major source of phonological-similarity decrement comes from the overlapping of the segmental information of the to-be-memorized materials. This phonological overlapping among the to-be-memorized words poses difficulties for participants to perceive and to rehearse because of the acoustic confusion among the words, which is consistent with the previous research findings. Second, the prosodic information of the to-be-memorized materials seems to be retained longer in the working memory. This overlapping of tonal information among words even produces a phonological-similarity facilitatory effect. Finally, based on the present results, the traditional concept of the term “similar” in the phonological-similarity effect should be re-conceptualized. Because similarity in prosodic information, unlike the similarity in segmental information, will not create any interference effect in working memory, but a facilitatory effect will occur in working memory instead. References Baddeley, A. D. (1992). Working memory. Science, 255, Conrad, R. & Hull, A. J. (1964). Information, acoustic confusion, and memory span. British Journal of Psychology, 55, 429-432. Fallon, A. B., Groves, K. & Tehan, G. (1999). Phonological similarity and trace degradation in the serial recall task: When CAT helps RAT, but not MAN. International Journal of Psychology, 34, 301-307. Pennington, M. C. & Ellis, N. C. (2000). Cantonese speakers’ memory for English sentences with prosodic cues. Modern Language Journal, 84, 372-389. Saito, S. (1998). Effects of articulatory suppression on Experiment immediate serial recall of temporarily grouped and A typical word span task with Chinese words as the materials intonated lists. Psychologia, 41, 95-101. was used to examine the phonological characteristics of a word Sevald, C. A. & Dell, G. S. (1994). The sequential cuing effect on the recall performance. The main variable in the present in speech production. Cognition, 53, 91-127. experiment is the different degree of phonological similarity, Slowiaczek, L. M., McQueen, J. M., Soltano, E. G. & Lynch, whether those Chinese words presented in the testing lists M. (2000). Phonological representations in prelexical shared any phonological characteristics (onset, rime and tone) speech processing: Evidence from form-based priming. among themselves or not (see Yip, 2004 for details). Journal of Memory and Language, 43, 530-560. Procedure Soto-Faraco, S., Sebastian-Galles, N. & Cutler, A. (2001). Participants were asked to read aloud lists of displayed Chinese Segmental and suprasegmental cues for lexical access in words on the computer screen one by one. And then, they were Spanish. Journal of Memory and Language, 45, 412-432. asked to recall the Chinese words from the list out loud as many 1659 Yip, M. C. W. (2004). How similar is phonological-similarity as possible, and the experimenter counted the correctness of effect? Manuscript.
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