The present study was designed to investigate the effect of amount of original training upon conceptual shift learning in kindergarten children.
A 2 (shift types)×3 (amount of original training)×2 (number of instances item condition) factorial design was used. The Ss were 120 kindergarteners with a mean age of 5 years and 9 months. The Ss were trained on a 2-conceptual category (e. g. animals and fruits), successive sorting problem to reach one of the 3 following criterions: 4, 8 successive correct responses, and 8 successive correct responses+24 responses. The Ss were given verbal informations,“correct” or wrong about their responses. After training, half of the Ss were given a full-reversal shift problem, and the remaining Ss half-reversal shift problem to reach a criterion of 8 successive correct responses.
The Ss in full-reversal shift condition were required to change their mode of responding from training to shift entirely, while those in half-reversal shift condition required to change only half of previous mode of responding in shift problem.
The main findings were that (a) positive effect of amount of original training was found in fullreversal shift, but negative effect in half-reversal shift,(b) conceptual organization was increased as a function of amount of original training, and (c) as for full-reversal shift, 8-item-condition was more difficult than 4-item-condition in 4 correct criterion, but performances in both item conditions didn't differ significantly in 8 and 8+24 correct criterions.
The results were interpreted as supporting the hypothesis that overtraining strengthened conceptual mediating response and were discussed with reference to related studies.

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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Two experiments were conducted to examine the effects of some types of contextual cues on the understanding of compound sentences.
In experiment I, 8 Japanese compound sentences were used as materials, each of which was a string of three constituents as follows: statement (1)+conjunctive+statement (2). Tasks for each 10 subjects of college student were to infer the content of the statement (2) from the statement (1) conjunctive (namely, from a “context”). All possible combinations of the form of the statement (1)+(affirmative or negative) and the form of conjunction (causal or adversative) produced four types of context: affirmative-causal, affirmative-adversative, negative-causal and negative-adversative types. Each types contained 2 sentences. In advance of the tasks, 5 subjects (IP-Group) were trained to memorize and recall 2 verbal representations of implicational propositions as follows: “If..., then..., must...”, which were set up so that the usage of a causal or an adversative conjunctive in each sentences was semantically acceptable. Another 5 subjects (AP-Group) were presented the correct answer once for 8 contexts each by mean of the paired-association procedure, before the tasks.
In both cases of IP-Group and AP-Group, response times were significantly varied between the context types, in particular, between the forms of conjunction: Response times were prolonged dominantly by the adversative conjunctive.
In experiment II, the general form of a sentence material was as follows: statement (0)+statement (1) conjunctive+statemet (2). And the conjunctive was always a temporal one. In this case, the context available for cues was statement (0)+statement (1). The content value of statement (0)(“the following is good”, or “the following is bad”) designated the value of the form of a conjunction (causal or adversative, respectively), which was ambiguously represented by the temporal conjunctive. Therefore, the information of the conjunction was given by statement (0), in advance of the information of statement (1). In this sequential order between two kinds of informations, the materials used in exp. II were different from that used in exp. I. Ten subjects (EXP. II-Group) underwent the same pretraining as IP-Group did. Response times were influenced by the form of conjunction in exp. II, too. The frequency of errors was varied, regardless of the kind of information, by the information given in a relatively advanced order of sequence, that is, was varied between the forms of statement (1) in exp. I, and between the forms of conjunction in exp. II.
Results were interpreted as follows:(a) processing of a negative statement and/or an adversative conjunction requires some cognitive load;(b) a negative statement can be transformed into a new affirmative statement, whereas an adversative conjunction is not able to reduced to such an easy form as to be processed. By the reason of these different manners of being processed, the form of conjunction is superior to the form of statement in the degree of contribution to the variance of response times;(c) retaining of a negative statement and/or an adversative conjunction increases the chance of errors.

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The possibility was examined that grammatical structure was acquired by “contextual generalization”
Experiment 1 was the Verbal Group using sentences accompanied with particles “i”,“ga”,“to.”
Experiment 2 was the Verbal Group using sentences not accompanied with particles.
Experiment 3 was the Non-Verbal Gtoup.
Each Experimental Group had eight subgroups: 2 (normal order sentence vs. reversed order sentence)×2 (two words sentence vs. four words sentence)×2 (five year old infants vs. four year old infants).
Ss were 288 kindergarten infants. Half of them were five years old, and the others were four years old. They were divided into 24 subgroups.
They were required to arrange picture cards.
Results:
(1) The Verbal Group was better than the Non- Verbal Group.
(2) The Verbal Group using sentences accompanied with particles was better than the Verbal Group using sentences not accompanied with particles.
(3) Five year old infants could do reversed order sentence as well as normal order sentence. But four year old infants could not do so.
(4) Two words sentence was easier than four words sentence.
(5) Five year old infants were better than four year old infants.

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The present study was planned to investigate the structure of loneliness which is a basic feeling in adolescence.
Procedure:
An original sentence completion test was made to explore the contents of lonelinss in adolescensts It was applied to 47 subjects of Ist grade students in senior high school. And from the result a hypothesis that there are two factors in the structure of loneliness was built up.
Then the hypothesis was tested by Q-technique. The subjects were 84 senior high students.
Results;
By the test the hypothesis was partly modified, but it proved mostly valid. There are at least two dimensions, which produced the aspects of the loneliness, in the structure of loneliness.
Dimension 1) Whether or not they believe in mutual sympathy among human beings.
Dimension 2) Whether or not they are conscious of “der Einzelne” of each individual.“Der Einzelne ”is;
one of the notions that appear in Kierkegaard, and it means one's own existence that cannot be substituted for another. I tentatively applied unexchangeable being to it.
It was researched next how to classify the feature of loneliness. And the loneliness in adolescence is classified into 4 types by the combination of these two dimensions.
Type 1: Loneliness from lack of an appreciative person... the loneliness of those who cannot believe in sympathy and have not become conscious of “der Einzelne”.
Type 2: Loneliness from separation from others... the loneliness of those who have become coscious of “der Einzelne” but cannot believe in sympathy. Type 3: Loneliness from independence... the loneliness of those who can believe in sympathy and have become conscious of “der Einzelne”.
Type 4: Loneliness from conformity to others... the loneliness of those who can believe in sympathy but have not become conscious of “der Einzelne”.
And the research for distinctive features in current adolescents on the basis of these four types showed that there were many who were aware of “der Einzelne”.

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[in Japanese]

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