Polysemy and the subjective lexicon: Semantic relatedness and the salience of intraword senses

Subjective perceptions of the senses of polysemous English words are collected in questionnaire studies and the effects of variability in semantic distances among these senses are examined in an experiment. In the first of two questionnaire studies, native speakers produce meanings for 175 polysemous words; from their responses, the most frequently produced meaning for each word is identified as its dominant sense. In a second questionnaire, independent subjects rate the semantic relatedness between the dominant meaning and the other senses generated for each word in the first study. Relatedness measures vary, raising the possibility that polysemous words vary in terms of the salience of their different senses in different contexts. This is confirmed in an experiment showing that salience ratings are influenced by the interacting factors of sentential context, extent of relatedness of the senses, and the dominance status of the senses.This research was supported by a grant from the Special Research Fund, University of Western Australia, to Kevin Durkin.     

EFFECTS OF AN ORAL HYGIENE PUNISHMENT PROCEDURE ON CHRONIC RUMINATION AND COLLATERAL BEHAVIORS IN MONOZYGOUS TWINS

This study investigated the suppressive effects of an oral hygiene punishment procedure on the ruminative behavior of profoundly retarded monozygous twins. Rumination, fingers in mouth/tongue out, appropriate behavior, and stereotyped behavior were measured before and during treatment with oral hygiene. Treatment was introduced for each meal in succession across the twins in a multiple-baseline design. Results showed that the rate of rumination of both twins was dramatically reduced to very low levels and stereotyped behavior increased spontaneously with the introduction of oral hygiene. Maintenance data showed that response reduction was maintained over a six-month period and, when compared to baseline levels, increased rates of socially appropriate behavior were evident in both children.     

Young people's theories of anorexia nervosa and obesity

One hundred and forty-seven participants completed a 108-item questionnaire, based on that used by Fumham and Hume-Wright in 1992 aournal of Clinical Psychology, 48, 20-36) that looked at their beliefs about the causes and cures of anorexia neruosa and obesity. The four parts of the questionnaire were individually factor analysed and an intevretable factor structure emerged for each. while age and knowing someone with anorexia neruosa or obesity did not correlate with the factors obtained, sex, actual body size, estimated body size and having experience of an eating disorder were found to correlate significantly with a number of factors. Factors of cause and cure were not correlated regarding anorexia neruosa, but were for obesity. Several correlations within cause and cure, across both disorders, were also significant. The implications of these jindings and how they relate to the theories described in the Introduction are considered in the Discussion.     

Children on the autism spectrum update their behaviour in response to a volatile environment

Typical adults can track reward probabilities across trials to estimate the volatility of the environment and use this information to modify their learning rate (Behrens et al., 2007). In a stable environment, it is advantageous to take account of outcomes over many trials, whereas in a volatile environment, recent experience should be more strongly weighted than distant experience. Recent predictive coding accounts of autism propose that autistic individuals will demonstrate atypical updating of their behaviour in response to the statistics of the reward environment. To rigorously test this hypothesis, we administered a developmentally appropriate version of Behrens et al.'s (2007) task to 34 cognitively able children on the autism spectrum aged between 6 and 14 years, 32 age‐ and ability‐matched typically developing children and 19 typical adults. Participants were required to choose between a green and a blue pirate chest, each associated with a randomly determined reward value between 0 and 100 points, with a combined total of 100 points. On each trial, the reward was given for one stimulus only. In the stable condition, the ratio of the blue or green response being rewarded was fixed at 75:25. In the volatile condition, the ratio alternated between 80:20 and 20:80 every 20 trials. We estimated the learning rate for each participant by fitting a delta rule model and compared this rate across conditions and groups. All groups increased their learning rate in the volatile condition compared to the stable condition. Unexpectedly, there was no effect of group and no interaction between group and condition. Thus, autistic children used information about the statistics of the reward environment to guide their decisions to a similar extent as typically developing children and adults. These results help constrain predictive coding accounts of autism by demonstrating that autism is not characterized by uniform differences in the weighting of prediction error.     

Physical attractiveness and health: comment on Weeden and Sabini (2005)

Evolutionary behavioral biology suggests that certain characteristics of the human face and body are important for mate preferences and are therefore subject to sexual selection. J. Weeden and J. Sabini identify a number of weaknesses in the association between traits' attractiveness and health. In contrast, the authors argue that (a) studies on preferences for physical characteristics that rely on 1 trait permit only limited interpretation, (b) limitations placed on J. Weeden and J. Sabini's review exclude important associations, (c) there are misconceptions in their treatment of some traits, and (d) their selected literature provides an inaccurate picture regarding effect size. The authors suggest that future research in this field should seek conceptual and methodological constancy in trait selection and in the evaluation of attractiveness- and health-related traits.     

A Qualitative Study of the Supports Women Find Most Beneficial When Dealing with a Spouse’s Sexually Addictive or Compulsive Behaviors: Insights for Pastoral Counselors and Clergy

There is currently a void in the literature regarding the kinds of support women find most beneficial when dealing with a spouse’s sexually addictive or compulsive behaviors. Addressing this void is particularly relevant for clergy, seeing as they are increasingly sought out as an initial and/or primary support for dealing with this marital issue. Using grounded theory methodology, 22 women from Canada and the USA were interviewed to find out what they found most helpful as they sought support to cope with a spouse’s sexually addictive and compulsive behaviors. Insights for pastoral counselors and clergy were highlighted.     

Syllable similarity: The effects of differences in vowels, consonants, and order

In five experiments with synthetic and natural speech syllables, a rating task we used to study the effects of differences in vowels, consonants, and segment order on judged syllable similarity. The results of Experiments I-IV support neither a purely phonemic model of speech representation, in which vowel, consonant, and order are represented independently, nor a purely syllabic model, in which the three factors are integrated. Instead, the data indicate that subjects compare representations in which adjacent vowel and consonant are independent of one another but are not independent of their positions in the syllable. Experiment V provided no support for the hypothesis that this position-sensitive coding is due to acoustic differences in formant transitions.