Researchers investigated the relationship between parental attributions for children's disabilities and the quality of parent-child relationships, in both U.S. and Pakistani families. Parents of children with disabilities identified potential causes of the disability and rated their parent-child relationships. Factor analysis of the causal attributions resulted in 7 factors which became the subscales used to predict parent-child relationships. Findings indicate (a) Pakistani parents rated their relationships more negatively, (b) parents who rated “Something I Did” as an influential cause rated their parent-child relationships more negatively, and (c) parents who rated “Parent's Age” as an influential cause rated their parent-child relationships more positively. More important, parent education potentially could decrease self-blame and improve the parent-child relationship for the parents and the children.

Humans were trained to categorize problem non-native phonemes using an animal psychoacoustic procedure that trains monkeys to greater than 90% correct in phoneme identification [Sinnott and Gilmore, Percept. Psychophys. 66, 1341-1350 (2004)]. This procedure uses a manual left versus right response on a lever, a continuously repeated stimulus on each trial, extensive feedback for errors in the form of a repeated correction procedure, and training until asymptotic levels of performance. Here, Japanese listeners categorized the English liquid contrast /r-l/, and English listeners categorized the Middle Eastern dental-retroflex contrast /d-D/. Consonant-vowel stimuli were constructed using four talkers and four vowels. Native listeners and phoneme contrasts familiar to all listeners were included as controls. Responses were analyzed using percent correct, response time, and vowel context effects as measures. All measures indicated nativelike Japanese perception of /r-l/ after 32 daily training sessions, but this was not the case for English perception of /d-D/. Results are related to the concept of "robust" (more easily recovered) versus "fragile" (more easily lost) phonetic contrasts [Burnham, Appl. Psycholing. 7, 207-240 (1986)].