African American Children's Adjustment: The Roles of Maternal and Teacher Depressive Symptoms

This study examined the unique and interactive roles of mother and teacher depressive symptoms in child adjustment in 277 African American single mother‐headed families, as well as whether the associations differed depending on the age and gender of the child. Findings revealed a significant association between maternal depressive symptoms and child depressive symptoms in girls, but not boys. Moreover, the combination of higher levels of both mother and teacher depressive symptoms was associated with the highest level of child depressive symptoms and, for younger children, externalizing symptoms. The importance of considering the multiple social contexts in which children interact is discussed.     

Reasoning With Partial Knowledge

We investigate how sociological argumentation differs from classical first–order logic. We focus on theories about age dependence of organizational mortality. The overall pattern of argument does not comply with the classical monotonicity principle: Adding premises overturns conclusions in an argument. The cause of nonmonotonicity is the need to derive conclusions from partial knowledge. We identify metaprinciples that appear to guide the observed sociological argumentation patterns, and we formalize a semantics to represent them. This semantics yields a new kind of logical consequence relation. We demonstrate that this new logic can reproduce the results of informal sociological theorizing and lead to new insights. It allows us to unify existing theory fragments, and it paves the way toward a complete classical theory.     

Infants' Ability to Learn Phonetically Similar Words: Effects of Age and Vocabulary Size

What do novice word learners know about the sound of words? Word‐learning tasks suggest that young infants (14 months old) confuse similar‐sounding words, whereas mispronunciation detection tasks suggest that slightly older infants (18–24 months old) correctly distinguish similar words. Here we explore whether the difficulty at 14 months stems from infants' novice status as word learners or whether it is inherent in the task demands of learning new words. Results from 3 experiments support a developmental explanation. In Experiment 1, infants of 20 months learned to pair 2 phonetically similar words to 2 different objects under precisely the same conditions that infants of 14 months (Experiment 2) failed. In Experiment 3, infants of 17 months showed intermediate, but still successful, performance in the task. Vocabulary size predicted word‐learning performance, but only in the younger, less experienced word learners. The implications of these results for theories of word learning and lexical representation are discussed.     

Childhood Developmental Risk for Teen Childbearing in Britain

Adolescence is often assumed to be the most important period of life for understanding teen childbearing risk. Developmental perspectives challenge that assumption, offering the possibility that early childhood characteristics may have unique and lasting effects on the risk for teen childbearing. This study examined family life risk factors (socioeconomic status, family stress, and parental involvement in education) and how their effects on teen childbearing risk varied, depending on the childhood age at which they were experienced. Prospective life history data from the National Child Development Study of Great Britain were used to study a birth cohort of 4,928 British women, 15.3% of who became pregnant as teens. This study demonstrated that data from early childhood significantly contribute to the understanding of teen childbearing risk.     

Review Essay: What Is Left of the Left?

Sociological Forum -     

A Comparison of Partially Adaptive and Reweighted Least Squares Estimation

The small sample performance of least median of squares, reweighted least squares, least squares, least absolute deviations, and three partially adaptive estimators are compared using Monte Carlo simulations. Two data problems are addressed in the paper: (1) data generated from non-normal error distributions and (2) contaminated data. Breakdown plots are used to investigate the sensitivity of partially adaptive estimators to data contamination relative to RLS. One partially adaptive estimator performs especially well when the errors are skewed, while another partially adaptive estimator and RLS perform particularly well when the errors are extremely leptokur-totic. In comparison with RLS, partially adaptive estimators are only moderately effective in resisting data contamination; however, they outperform least squares and least absolute deviation estimators.