The Validity and Reliability of the Language Battery in Comprehensive Aphasia Test-Turkish (CAT-TR)

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research - Aphasia assessment is the initial step of a well-structured language therapy. Therefore, it is reasonable to underline that the assessment tools need to...     

Fluency in L2: Read and Spontaneous Speech Pausing Patterns of Turkish,Swahili, Hausa and Arabic Speakers of English

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research - Language learners’ actual speech performances constitute an essential aspect of studies on second language learning and teaching. Although there is...     

A test of theory of planned behavior in type II diabetes adherence: The leading role of perceived behavioral control

Current Psychology - Diabetes mellitus is a health complication that millions of people suffer from all over the world. Type II (non-insulin dependent) diabetes requires many changes in the daily...     

Arguments from Aesthetic Merit to Fictional Content

Often, part of the fictional content of a narrative is not stated explicitly. Interpreters are frequently concerned with establishing this content. In doing so, they sometimes argue that, fictionally, something is the case because under that interpretation, the aesthetic merit of the work would be greater than under an alternative interpretation. The move from what would be of greater aesthetic merit to what is (fictionally) the case raises questions regarding the argumentative force of such arguments: How exactly do the premises of arguments from aesthetic merit to fictional content (for short: Afams) establish their conclusions? This paper spells out four ways to reconstruct the argumentative structure of Afams: In Section ii , we analyze two possibilities to establish Afams as deductive arguments; Section iii is concerned with a reconstruction based on a constructivist picture of literature and literary interpretation; and in Section iv, we look at a nondeductive reconstruction of Afams in accordance with an intentionalist framework. While we conclude that all four reconstructions can account for the argumentative force of Afams, the ultimate acceptability of each reconstruction rests on the readers’ commitment to background assumptions concerning the theory of interpretation.     

The Role of Reasoning and Pragmatics in the Modifier Effect

The modifier effect refers to the fact that the perceived likelihood of a property in a noun category is diminished if the noun is modified. For example, “Pigs live on farms” is rated as more likely than “Dirty pigs live on farms.” The modifier effect has been demonstrated in many studies, but the underlying cognitive mechanisms are still unclear. This paper reports two series of experiments that jointly point to the conclusion that the modifier effect is the result of a superposition of three cognitive mechanisms: (a) probabilistically softened default inheritance, (b) pragmatic implicatures due to Gricean relevance assumptions, and (c) inference based on world knowledge. We present evidence that the pragmatic effects operate largely on an unconscious level and that their influence can be reduced by changing the presentation format of the cognitive task.     

Alignment in Multimodal Interaction: An Integrative Framework

When people are engaged in social interaction, they can repeat aspects of each other’s communicative behavior, such as words or gestures. This kind of behavioral alignment has been studied across a wide range of disciplines and has been accounted for by diverging theories. In this paper, we review various operationalizations of lexical and gestural alignment. We reveal that scholars have fundamentally different takes on when and how behavior is considered to be aligned, which makes it difficult to compare findings and draw uniform conclusions. Furthermore, we show that scholars tend to focus on one particular dimension of alignment (traditionally, whether two instances of behavior overlap in form), while other dimensions remain understudied. This hampers theory testing and building, which requires a well-defined account of the factors that are central to or might enhance alignment. To capture the complex nature of alignment, we identify five key dimensions to formalize the relationship between any pair of behavior: time, sequence, meaning, form, and modality. We show how assumptions regarding the underlying mechanism of alignment (placed along the continuum of priming vs. grounding) pattern together with operationalizations in terms of the five dimensions. This integrative framework can help researchers in the field of alignment and related phenomena (including behavior matching, mimicry, entrainment, and accommodation) to formulate their hypotheses and operationalizations in a more transparent and systematic manner. The framework also enables us to discover unexplored research avenues and derive new hypotheses regarding alignment.