Middle School Children's Perceptions on Welfare and Poverty: An Exploratory, Qualitative Study

This study was undertaken to determine how middle school children assess the effects of welfare reform on their daily lives. The study consisted of thirty interviews with children and their mothers recruited from a middle school in a large, metropolitan area. From the children's perspective, multiple jobs and evening/night hours interfered with the child-parent relationship. Other consequences included grades going down and not getting to school on time. All the children stated that mothers should work, but most children felt mothers should only work when their children are in school. Welfare and poverty were issues about which children were teased at school.     

Living Arrangements, Employment Status, and the Economic Well-Being of Mothers: Evidence from Brazil, Chile, and the U.S

Using data from Brazil, Chile, and the U.S., we estimate country specific models of household income that characterize mothers according to their marital status, living arrangement, and employment status. We assess the predicted economic well-being of each type of mother relative to a benchmark of married mothers in the same country, and at various points in the income distribution. We find dramatic cross-country differences in the distribution of mothers across categories, but few differences in each type's relative economic status. In all three countries and at all points in the income distribution, mothers who are the only adults in their households have the lowest levels of predicted income, while married mothers—followed closely by cohabitors—have the highest levels.     

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.     

New methods for fitting multiple sinusoids from irregularly sampled data

A novel framework is proposed for the estimation of multiple sinusoids from irregularly sampled time series. This spectral analysis problem is addressed as an under-determined inverse problem, where the spectrum is discretized on an arbitrarily thin frequency grid. As we focus on line spectra estimation, the solution must be sparse, i.e. the amplitude of the spectrum must be zero almost everywhere. Such prior information is taken into account within the Bayesian framework. Two models are used to account for the prior sparseness of the solution, namely a Laplace prior and a Bernoulli–Gaussian prior, associated to optimization and stochastic sampling algorithms, respectively. Such approaches are efficient alternatives to usual sequential prewhitening methods, especially in case of strong sampling aliases perturbating the Fourier spectrum. Both methods should be intensively tested on real data sets by physicists.     

Who Gets What From Government? Distributional Consequences of Child‐Care Assistance Policies

Given the fragmented structure of child‐care assistance in the United States, it has been difficult to obtain accurate estimates of which families are assisted, through which mechanisms, and at what level. Making use of survey data from New York City, we analyze the distribution of several forms of public child‐care assistance. Results suggest that about 40% of all families with young children receive some form of child‐care assistance. Considering all forms of assistance, the distribution of child‐care help is targeted in both expected and some unexpected ways. Implications of these results are discussed in the context of U.S. child‐care policies governing access and benefit levels.     

国内外阅读障碍研究对比分析与国内研究前景展望

阅读障碍亦称诵读障碍或拼写障碍,是一种与脑部相关的学习障碍。阅读障碍研究集心理语言学、心理学、认知科学、医学等诸多学科于一体,是近年来国内外学术界的研究热点之一。梳理国内外阅读障碍的研究团队发展状况,分析国内外阅读障碍研究在诊断、表征、成因以及干预四个方面的异同,探讨国内阅读障碍研究的发展前景,对促进本领域的深入研究大有裨益。     

Role of Temperament,Parenting Behaviors,and Stress on Turkish Preschoolers’ Internalizing Symptoms

Child‐ and family‐related factors that predict internalizing symptoms are understudied in preschool years and have a negative influence on children's functioning. We examined observational assessments of preschoolers' temperamental fearfulness and exuberance, mother reports of negative control, warmth, and parenting stress in a sample of 109 Turkish preschoolers. High temperamental fearfulness and low joyful/exuberant positive affectivity in addition to low warmth and high parenting stress had significant effects on internalizing symptoms. Parenting stress had both direct and indirect relations to internalizing symptoms via lower maternal warmth. When comorbid elevations in externalizing symptoms were controlled, the results were consistent with the interpretation that poor parenting practices and stress associated with the parenting role predict maladaptation in general but that the specific form of maladaptation may be best predicted by individual differences in children's temperamental characteristics. This study contributes to our understanding of risk and protective factors that predict preschoolers' internalizing symptoms with a sample from a non‐Western population. These findings can guide early prevention and intervention programs to address internalizing problems in a culturally‐sensitive way.     

外语词汇磨蚀的语言学表征分析

语言磨蚀的突出表现是词汇提取失败。大学一年级新生的高中英语词汇磨蚀的测试结果表明：在语音和词形上相似或相同,语义关系复杂的词汇易被磨蚀。受蚀词汇的语言学表征为：在语音上,弱音节的、音素组合关系为“聚合”关系的、总体韵律相似的词汇易磨蚀;词形上,词缀的语义易被磨蚀,词形相似且伴有语音相似的词汇易磨蚀,词汇的首尾成份相似的词汇也易磨蚀;语义上,语义范畴的层级关系复杂的词汇易磨蚀。词汇磨蚀可以根据其语言学表征分为四类：耐蚀词汇、易蚀词汇、半蚀词汇和全蚀词汇。