Predicted errors in children's early sentence comprehension

Children use syntax to interpret sentences and learn verbs; this is syntactic bootstrapping. The structure-mapping account of early syntactic bootstrapping proposes that a partial representation of sentence structure, the set of nouns occurring with the verb, guides initial interpretation and provides an abstract format for new learning. This account predicts early successes, but also telltale errors: Toddlers should be unable to tell transitive sentences from other sentences containing two nouns. In testing this prediction, we capitalized on evidence that 21-month-olds use what they have learned about noun order in English sentences to understand new transitive verbs. In two experiments, 21-month-olds applied this noun-order knowledge to two-noun intransitive sentences, mistakenly assigning different interpretations to "The boy and the girl are gorping!" and "The girl and the boy are gorping!". This suggests that toddlers exploit partial representations of sentence structure to guide sentence interpretation; these sparse representations are useful, but error-prone.     

Infants' search for visible objects: implications for the interpretation of early search errors

This study examined the error patterns of 9-month-old infants searching for hidden objects and objects that were visible within a container. Although errors occurred in both conditions, there were important differences between them. When the object was hidden, infants showed significant perseveration in that they searched more often at the object's previous hiding place than at a control location. When the object was visible, however, they made fewer errors and the errors they did make were as likely to be to the control location as to the previous hiding place. These results suggest that infants' errors in searching for a visible object reflect lapses of attention rather than systematic misunderstandings of objects or space and so are not incompatible with an information-processing account of early search.     

Everyday scale errors

Young children occasionally make scale errors – they attempt to fit their bodies into extremely small objects or attempt to fit a larger object into another, tiny, object. For example, a child might try to sit in a dollhouse-sized chair or try to stuff a large doll into it. Scale error research was originally motivated by parents' and researchers' informal accounts of these behaviors. However, scale errors have only been documented using laboratory procedures designed to promote their occurrence. To formally document the occurrence of scale errors in everyday settings, we posted a survey on the internet. Across two studies, participants reported many examples of everyday scale errors that are similar to those observed in our labs and were committed by children of the same age. These findings establish that scale errors occur in the course of children's daily lives, lending further support to the account that these behaviors stem from general aspects of visual processing.     

Shakespeare's Sonnets: A Case of and for Single–Case Historiometry

ABSTRACT The two oldest forms of psychohistory, as generically defined, are psychobiography (Idiographic, qualitative, and single-case) and historiometry (nomothetic, quantitative, and multiple-case) In practice this distinction gets blurred, both because psychobiography is often nomothetic (e g, psychoanalytic) and because historiometry may work with N = 1 After outlining the assets of single-case historiometry, a specific case is given in an analysis of the 154 sonnets of William Shakespeare These sonnets were first reliably differentiated on aesthetic success according to an archival popularity measure, and then this relative ment was predicted using content analytical measures suggested by research on artistic creativity The superior sonnets (a) treat specific themes, (b) display considerable thematic richness in the number of issues discussed, (c) exhibit greater linguistic complexity as gauged by such objective measures as the type-token ratio and adjective-verb quotient, and (d) feature more primary process imagery (using Martindale's Regressive Imagery Dictionary) After discussing how these results can enlarge our general understanding of artistic creativity as well as our specific appreciation of Shakespeare's creativity, the potential application of single-case historiometry to intrinsically psychobiographical problems is examined     

The death of a mind: a study of Shakespeare's Richard III

Some of the most difficult aspects of our work involve our encounters with states of mind which are steeped in and spread violence. In these circumstances, we experience our best efforts to offer empathic presence and thought to avoid being assaulted and obliterated. In these instances, a figure from literature depicting the details in question may come to our aid. In the play popularly known as Richard III,William Shakespeare depicts how the state of mind which is etched by grievance and committed to revenge may impose the 'winter of (its) discontent' upon the sunny dispositions of others' healthy, integrated functioning. Shakespeare masterfully depicts Richard's cunning and malice, but he also illustrates how this vengeful state uses guile and 'changes of shape' to seduce its way past protective boundaries, utilizing the human qualities of trust, open-heartedness and longing as pathways for invasion, betrayal and emotional devastation. This paper will view excerpts of the play's text from a psychoanalytic perspective which suggests that several clear lessons about this obliterative state of mind may be gleaned: that grievance can only operate to spread grievance and destruction; that our open-hearted and trusting qualities do make us vulnerable to such invasion and betrayal, but that our humanity is also the only avenue for rescue from this plight. In addition a clear lesson is offered about the value of protected 'sanctuary', that is, mental space where our most potent tool in these circumstances, our discerning minds, might find residence.     

Syntactic errors in speech

Speech errors can be used to examine the nature of syntactic processing in speech production. Using such evidence, Fay (1980a, 1980b) maintains that deep structure and transformations are psychologically real. However, an interactive activation model that generates surface syntactic structures directly can account for all the data. Most syntactic errors are substitutions: The target phrase structure is replaced by a semantically related structure. Blends of two syntactic structures are also common. Transformations cannot account for much of the data and are not necessary to explain any of them. While it is impossible to prove that transformations do not exist, syntactic theories that do not include transformations have the potential to be psychologically valid.