A third language in therapy: deconstructing sameness and difference

The paper draws on recent research and the first author’s personal story to show what happens when the language difference between therapist and client is brought to mutual awareness in the therapy room. Individual lived experiences of migrant psychotherapists and counsellors and the issues that arise in therapy practice when the practitioners use their second language as the means of communication with clients are explored. The notion of a third language – a dynamic communication system that is a result of developing a professional identity through a second language – is introduced. Unlike the psychoanalytic third, it is often conscious and may be used either defensively or purposefully as a concrete third point of reference in the intersubjective encounter. The paper explores how the concept of a ‘Third Language’ can be used as a tool to negotiate perceived sameness or difference in therapeutic encounters and to build a common language with a client, both literally and metaphorically. The study featured in the paper has implications for practice, theory and research.     

The accuracy–confidence relationship in an eyewitness task: anxiety as a modifier

The present study investigated the role of anxiety as a moderator of the relationship between accuracy and confidence in an eyewitness recall task. Participants selected as high or low anxious on a test anxiety scale viewed a video clip of a crime. One week later they answered verbally a series of questions about the video, rating their confidence in each answer. Observers were shown a video-recording of each participant's test session and rated how confident they appeared overall. It was argued that people high in test anxiety would appraise their performance to a greater degree than low-anxious people, resulting in a significant correlation between accuracy and subjective confidence for high-anxious but not for low-anxious participants. The results obtained supported this hypothesis, and found similar relationships between accuracy and perceived confidence. Highly anxious participants expressed less overall confidence in their answers than low anxious participants. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

FURTHER ANALYSIS OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SELF-INJURY AND SELF-RESTRAINT

It has been suggested that self-restraint, a phenomenon often correlated with self-injurious behavior (SIB), may be maintained by negative reinforcement in the form of escape from the aversive properties of SIB (e.g., pain). We examined the effects of blocking SIB (and presumably removing any aversive effects) on the self-restraint of a 19-year-old male with severe mental retardation. Consistent with the negative reinforcement hypothesis, blocking SIB resulted in near-zero levels of SIB and moderate reductions in self-restraint.     

Recombination unbound

Conclusion The realisation that Forrest/Armstrong style cardinality arguments are not successful allowsus to have a simpler and more intuitive principle of recombination, and dispenses with the need to postulate mysterious necessities in order to guarantee a maximum size of worlds. As we have seen, examining the options for possibilia to form a proper class also raises new issues to do with the connection of possible worlds and classes, and may provide the motivation for various theoretical commitments that seemed previously to have no application outside pure mathematics (Should any proper classes have singletons? Should the individuals form a set?). While this essay has proceeded as a discussion primarily of Lewis' theory, it can be more generally applied — any theory of possible worlds that would wish to endorse something like the unrestricted principle of recombination and wishes to be able to talk about possibilia from more than one world simultaneously will need a modal class theory where the possibilia form a proper class rather than a set, for example. Nearly every theory of possible worlds can, and in my opinion should, take advantage of the unrestricted principle of recombination rather than limit the size of possible worlds.     

An analysis of writing in a case of deep dyslexia

In tests of her ability to produce written and spoken language, this deep dyslexic patient produced semantic, visual, and derivational errors, including functor substitutions, and exhibited part-of-speech and abstractness effects in oral reading, oral and written naming, and writing to dictation, but not in repetition of single words and copying from memory. This patient therefore provides confirmation of the hypothesis presented in Nolan and Caramazza (1982) that the defining symptoms of deep dyslexia will be observed in responses to any task which requires lexical mediation. The patient's written responses in all tasks but direct copying were characterized by spelling errors which included transpositions, omissions, substitutions, and additions of letters. A model of writing is proposed which explains these errors in terms of a disruption of a phoneme-grapheme conversion process which normally functions to prevent decay of information from a Graphemic Buffer.     

Spontaneous segmentation in normal and in time-compressed speech

An experiment is reported in which subjects heard recorded speech passages at normal speaking rates and at various degrees of time compression, with instructions to interrupt the speech input for intermediate report by stopping the tape at points of their choosing. An analysis of subjects’ points of interruption as a function of speech rate eliminated temporal duration and number of words per segment as primary determiners of segmentation strategy. Formal linguistic constituents at all speech rates served as a good, but not perfect, predictor of segmentation boundaries. The results are interpreted in the light of on-line interactive and augmented transition network (ATN) models of speech perception.