On Bound Variable Interpretations: The LF-Only Hypothesis

Under what conditions do perceivers prefer to assign a bound variable interpretation to a pronominal that is ambiguous between a bound variable and a coreferential interpretation? Several experiments were designed to test the hypothesis that language perceivers prefer a bound variable over a coreferential interpretation of a pronoun because the former only requires consultation of a logical form (LF) representation, while the latter requires access to a discourse representation. The hypothesis was disconfirmed in two respects. First, although bound variable interpretations show a processing advantage over coreferential interpretations in VP ellipsis constructions, the preference for bound variable interpretations is not general--it does not extend to other quantificational contexts. Second, the preference for bound variable interpretations in VP ellipsis constructions is not limited to examples in which the antecedent and the ellipsis site occur in the same sentence. If the bound variable advantage were due to the ready availability of the LF for the current sentence, the advantage should disappear across sentence boundaries. An alternative hypothesis is then considered which could explain the source of the bound variable advantage in VP ellipsis contexts.     

Linguistic difficulties in language and reading development constrain skilled adult reading

This study investigated whether the quality and specification of phonological representations in early language development would predict later skilled reading. Two perceptual identification experiments were performed with skilled readers. In Experiment 1, spelling difficulties in Grade 1 were used as a proxy measure for poorly specified representations in early language development. In Experiment 2, difficulties in perceiving and representing liquid and nasalized phonemes in final consonant clusters were used for the same purpose. Both experiments showed that words that were more likely to develop underspecified lexical representations in early language development remained more difficult in skilled reading. This finding suggests that early linguistic difficulties in speech perception and structuring of lexical representations may constrain the long-term organization and dynamics of the skilled adult reading system. The present data thus challenge the assumption that skilled reading can be fully understood without taking into account linguistic constraints acting upon the beginning reader.     

Processing Coordinate Structures

Coordination often involves syntactically like categories. Based on the results of four reading time studies, it is argued here that the syntactic like-category restriction is not grammatical. Coordination of unlike categories can be just as acceptable as coordination of like categories. However, syntactically like category coordination is processed faster than coordination of unlike categories even when the two sentence types are judged to be fully acceptable. Further, parallelism of conjuncts facilitates processing regardless of whether it is parallelism in the category of the conjuncts (a property which the grammar might regulate) or parallelism in the internal structure of the conjuncts (a property which the grammar does not regulate, on anyone's view). Parallelism did not facilitate processing when the structure of a subject and object were manipulated, implying that parallelism effects are largely limited to the conjuncts of a coordinate structure and not due simply to the repetition of a phrase with a particular shape.     

Phonological and semantic information in word and nonword reading in a deep dyslexic patient

Deep dyslexia is diagnosed when brain-injured, previously literate adults make reading errors that include hallmark semantic paralexias (e.g., reading HEART as BLOOD) and are also impaired at reading nonwords (e.g., FRIP). The diversity of these symptoms have led most researchers to conclude that there are multiple sources of impairment in this syndrome and that one of the most critical is a failure to process phonological information at a sublexical level. The patient (SD) reported in this study fits the deep dyslexia profile to the extent that she makes several semantically related reading errors. She also shows the classic frequency and image ability effects of the syndrome. However, as we report, she does read some nonwords correctly and she shows a strong advantage for naming when phonemic cues are presented. We discuss the performance of SD, on these preliminary tasks, in terms of a phonological selection impairment.     

Distributional typicality: a new approach to estimating noun and verb usage from large scale text corpora

This paper reports a new approach to estimating the extent to which words have predominant noun and verb usages which do not require human judgments about parts of speech. The Hyperspace Analog to Language model (HAL, Lund & Burgess, 1996) was used to computationally estimate noun vs verb usage based on the statistical regularities present in a large-scale electronic text corpus. This measure can be used to estimate the extent to which a given word occurs in typical noun or verb sentence contexts (i.e., its distributional typicality) in informal contemporary discourse.     

Flexibility, inhibition, and planning: frontal dysfunctioning in schizophrenia

Neuropsychological tests known to reveal abnormalities in patients with frontal lobe damage were used to explore cognitive function in 20 chronic schizophrenic patients. Eleven control subjects, matched on age and NLV-IQ (NLV is the Dutch version of the NART) were also tested. No impairments of planning ability were found on either the Action Program test or the Zoomap test, both subtests from the BADS (Behavioural Assessment of the Dysexecutive Syndrome). No abnormalities were apparent on tests of reactive flexibility, measured by task-switching and by the Rule Shift Cards test, also a subtest of the BADS. Patients with schizophrenia, however, had significantly greater difficulty in inhibiting irrelevant information and in generating words in a verbal fluency task, a measure of spontaneous flexibility.     

Perception of genetic risk among genetic counselors

A mailed survey of female prenatal genetic counselors, obstetric nurses, and high school biology teachers was conducted to determine if these groups hold different attitudes toward genetic risk and to investigate the extent to which any differences result from the effect of different professional experiences. In this study, the participants were 166 genetic counselors, 116 obstetric nurses, and 78 biology teachers (n = 360). Survey participants completed a written questionnaire designed to assess their numeric estimate of the empiric risk for birth defects/genetic problems, their subjective perception of this risk, and their personal use of prenatal diagnosis. Genetic counselors were found to be less likely than the other groups to consider the frequency of birth defects/genetic problems as rare and were 10 times more likely than nurses and 8 times more likely than teachers to have had prenatal diagnosis. Furthermore, more than half of the prenatal diagnosis procedures had by genetic counselors were not medically indicated. These results suggest that genetic counselors have an increased perception of genetic risks relative to nurses or teachers. Possible explanations for this finding are discussed, and the potential role of discordant risk perception in creating biases in the genetic counseling process is explored.     

Qualitative block design analysis in posttraumatic stress disorder

Qualitative and quantitative Block Design performance was examined in Vietnam combat veterans with PTSD diagnoses (n = 23) and Vietnam combat veterans without PTSD or other mental disorders diagnoses (n = 19). Results indicated that PTSD-diagnosed veterans committed more single block rotations than the comparison sample, and that their errors occurred more frequently in right hemispace than errors made by the comparison sample. The two groups did not differ in the number of configural errors made, errors committed in left hemispace, or in quantitative performance measures. Findings are suggestive of relative left hemisphere hypoactivation and are congruent with prior research documenting cerebral asymmetries in emotional disorders.