Level of intellectual development and features of association activity of children of normal and schizophrenia conditions in response to stimuli of different modalities

The article contains results of comparison of level of intellectual development and features of verbal association measurements of young schoolchildren in normal and schizophrenia conditions in response to stimuli of different modalities. There have been examined two selections: schizophrenic children and mentally healthy children (60 schizophrenic children and 60 mentally healthy children at the age from 7 to 11 y.o.). There have been used experimental-psychological author’s complex of methods to research verbal associations in response to stimuli of different modalities (olfactory, audio-verbal, visual, tactile), as well as battery of K-ABC tests. The research results are discussed in the context of particularity of cognitive deficiency and manifestation of cognitive dysontogenesis of young school schizophrenic children. The article contains description of various combinations of connection/ absence of connection between intelligence level (according to Kauffman’s battery of K –ABC tests) and various measurements of association activity (productiveness, temporary indications of activity, commonality coefficient). The principal research result is relative independence of particularity of association activity of schizophrenic children (according to commonality coefficient) of their cognitive development level.

The Primacy of Beauty in Judging the Aesthetics of Objects

The conceptual structure of the aesthetics of objects was investigated. To this end, associative namings for the word “aesthetics” were collected from 311 nonartist German college students in a timed verbal association task. 590 different adjectives were produced, depicting diversification of the concept. The adjective “beautiful” was given by more than 90% of the participants. The adjective “ugly” was the second most frequent naming, used by almost half of the students. All other namings were markedly less frequently produced. It is argues that the beautiful–ugly dimension represents the primary concept in the aesthetics of objects, so that performing aesthetic judgments of the beauty of objects comes naturally to individuals. In other words, the most prototypical aesthetic judgments are those of beauty. Furthermore, the majority of generated words had a positive valence as measured by an additional valence-rating study including 41 participants. This result contrasts with comparable studies of emotion terms, as such studies typically show a negativity bias. Frequency in general language use and valence of the adjectives did not account for the results.

Solving the Vocabulary Retention Problem

The main problem in learning foreign language vocabulary is retention. There exists a considerable amount of evidence pointing to the superiority of mnemonic techniques over rote repetition in the learning of verbal material. An investigation was carried out comparing the learning of FL vocabulary in three different conditions : (1) making formal and semantic links with known words (2) making verbal links of a solemy semantic nature (3) using habitual methods. The first experimental group demonstrated superiority, although scores were not significant on an anamysis of variance. Indications were given by the data that training and encouragement in the use of formal and semantic verbal association will lead to better vocabulary retention.