The detectability of a tone added to a masker is superior when the detection trial is preceded by the masker than the signal-plus-masker. This auditory enhancement can withstand long temporal gaps between the precursor and the trial, suggesting that for yes/no trials sensitivity may depend on the stimulus presented in the prior trial. The results from an experiment examining the detectability o...

OBJECTIVE Two studies examined the effects of the oath or reassurance ("truth induction") on 5- to 7-year-old maltreated children's true and false reports of a minor transgression. METHODS In both studies an interviewer elicited a promise to tell the truth, reassured children that they would not get in trouble for disclosing the transgression, or gave no instructions before questioning the ch...

PURPOSE Using the Problem Oriented Screening Instrument for Teenagers (POSIT), the effect of mode of administration on (1) students' willingness to disclose sensitive information and (2) response rates was investigated. DESIGN A 2 × 2 unequal N factorial analysis of variance (ANOVA) design was employed. Mode of administration (paper-and-pencil vs. Web-based) was crossed with grade level (midd...

The present article is a case study in which participation is investigated in terms of the use of interactional practices that enhance the involvement of a man with severe aphasia in activities that aim to capture his and his wife's experiences of everyday communication, and their views of his speech and language intervention. Five practices are identified: 1) collaborative telling, 2) formulat...

A psychometric function describes the relation between some physical measure of a stimulus and the probability of a particular psychophysical response. The physical measure is usually stimulus strength, and the response is "yes" (in a yes/no experiment) or "correct" (in a forced-choice experiment). More generally, there are several possible responses, each with its own psychometric function (e....

Delayed matching to sample is typically a two-alternative forced-choice procedure with two sample stimuli. In this task the effects of varying the probability of reinforcers for correct choices and the resulting receiver operating characteristic are symmetrical. A version of the task where a sample is present on some trials and absent on others is analogous to a yes/no recognition task. We desc...

We investigated whether and how sublexical units such as phonological syllables mediate access to the lexicon in French visual word recognition. To do so, two lexical decision task (LDT) experiments examined the nature of the syllabic neighbourhood effect. In Experiments 1a and b, the number of higher frequency syllabic neighbours was manipulated while controlling for the first bigram. The resu...

Marshallese, an Oceanic language spoken on the atolls of the Marshall Islands, has a question particle, ke, which may appear in one of a number of positions in yes/no interrogatives. Interestingly, the availability of certain positions depends upon whether the sentential context is affirmative or negative. In (1), we demonstrate the various grammatical and ungrammatical positions of ke in affir...

Current prediction models for risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) incidence incorporate smoking as a dichotomous yes/no measure. However, the risk of CVD associated with smoking also varies with the intensity and duration of smoking and there is a strong association between time since quitting and the risk of disease onset. This study aims to develop improved risk prediction equations for CVD ...