A Study on Late Closure in Spanish: Principle-grounded vs. Frequency-based Accounts of Attachment Preferences

A much-debated issue in current research on sentence parsing concerns the resolution of attachment ambiguities. Parsing theories differ on the procedures used to guide on-line attachment decisions: principle-grounded theories (e.g. garden-path/ construal) propose universal principles that minimize processing load; frequency-based accounts (such as linguistic tuning) claim that attachment decisions are shaped by readers' previous experience with their particular language; lexically based models, in turn, assert that attachment choices are determined by the properties of individual lexical items in the sentence. This paper reports six studies on late closure in the resolution of attachment ambiguities in Spanish: a questionnaire study on attachment preferences and three self-paced reading experiments where ambiguous PPs could be attached as arguments of two VP-hosts in NP-VP1-NPVP2-PP structures. The results show a clear preference towards low attachment (late closure), thus supporting principle-grounded theories. In addition, two corpus studies were carried out to obtain records of relative frequencies of the attachment choices involved in the experiments. A coarse-grained measure revealed that, in accordance with linguistic tuning, low-attachment structures are more common in Spanish NP-VP1-NP-VP2-PP sentences. However, a fine-grained count showed that low-attachment preferences cannot be explained by arguing that the specific verbs positioned lower on the tree (VP2) are more likely to take an extra argument than those located at a higher position (VP1), as lexical models would assume.     

Using Rebt and Supportive Psychotherapy with Post-Stroke Patients

This paper discusses the benefits of using Calabro's (1990) three-stage cognitive-behavioral model, to determine when to use supportive Psychotherapy or Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) with post-stroke patients. It also discusses the benefits of using a support group and how to decide when to use a group and/or individual psychotherapy.     

Effect of irrelevant information on the processing of relevant information: Facilitation and/or interference? The influence of experimental design

Previous studies have provided conflicting evidence concerning the question of whether irrelevant information can facilitate the processing of relevant information in a choice reaction time task. Results of the present study demonstrated that indications of facilitation and/or interference were dependent on the context in which baseline trials were administered. Three groups of 24 subjects pressed a left-.or right-hand key in response to the onset of an X or 0 that was accompanied by a monaural or binaural tone. The monaural toneprovided an irrelevant directional cue since, oia some trials, it was ipsilateral to the correct response (corresponding trials), while, on other trials, it was contralateral Inoncorrasponding trials). When binaural (baseline) trials were presented in the same block as the monaural trials, data suggested that the directional cue produced both facilitation and interference. However, when baseline trials were presented in one block, and corresponding and noncorresponding trials were mixed together in another block, data suggested an interference effect only. The difference was attributed to differences in the degree of stimulus uncertainty within a block of trials.     

The role of variability in the property listing task

It is generally believed that concepts can be characterized by their properties (or features). When investigating concepts encoded in language, researchers often ask subjects to produce lists of properties that describe them (i.e., the Property Listing Task, PLT). These lists are accumulated to produce Conceptual Property Norms (CPNs). CPNs contain frequency distributions of properties for individual concepts. It is widely believed that these distributions represent the underlying semantic structure of those concepts. Here, instead of focusing on the underlying semantic structure, we aim at characterizing the PLT. An often disregarded aspect of the PLT is that individuals show intersubject variability (i.e., they produce only partially overlapping lists). In our study we use a mathematical analysis of this intersubject variability to guide our inquiry. To this end, we resort to a set of publicly available norms that contain information about the specific properties that were informed at the individual subject level. Our results suggest that when an individual is performing the PLT, he or she generates a list of properties that is a mixture of general and distinctive properties, such that there is a non-linear tendency to produce more general than distinctive properties. Furthermore, the low generality properties are precisely those that tend not to be repeated across lists, accounting in this manner for part of the intersubject variability. In consequence, any manipulation that may affect the mixture of general and distinctive properties in lists is bound to change intersubject variability. We discuss why these results are important for researchers using the PLT.     

Validation of the Working Alliance Inventory–Observer Short Version with male intimate partner violence offenders

The working alliance is a key element to increase intimate partner violence (IPV) offenders’ motivation, adherence to treatment, and active participation in batterer intervention programs (BIPs). The objective of the present study is to assess the psychometric properties and factor structure of the Working Alliance Inventory–Observer Short Version (WAI-O-S) with a sample of IPV offenders. The sample was 140 men convicted for IPV and court-mandated to a community-based BIP. Inter-rater agreement and reliability were evaluated by computing the intraclass correlation coefficient. To test the latent structure a Bayesian confirmatory factor analysis approach was used. To test criterion-related validity, the WAI-O-S factorial scores were correlated to protherapeutic behavior, stage of change and motivation to change. The WAI-O-S showed an adequate reliability. Results from Bayesian confirmatory factor analyses showed two first-order factors (Bond and Agreement), and a second-order factor (General working alliance) explaining the relationship between the first-order factors. Results also support the validity of this instrument. The availability of reliable and valid observational measure of the working alliance provides a useful tool to overcome self-report measurement limitations such as social desirability, deception, and denial among IPV offenders.