Some syntactic determinants of sentential complexity,II : Verb structure

The effect of the lexical complexity of verbs on the processing of sentences was evaluated in two experiments. Verb complexity was indexed by the number of types of grammatical structure a verb permits (e.g., a verb may be transitive or intransitive and may permit various types of complement structures). Ss’ performances in paraphrasing sentences and in solving anagrams containing complex verbs were significantly poorer than their performances with the same sentences and anagrams containing less complex verbs.     

Young Freud's linkage with Persia

Abstract

Sigmund Freud's hands helped to mutilate a volume containing a series of “colored plates” like the one replicated in Figure 1 in the text. As a young adult, his personal library included a fairytale whose German text was entitled Die Träumleiter: Ein Marchen. No one has yet been able to authenticate the author's identity beyond the following imprint: “S. Andreas (1832).” The poetic play centers upon a celestial meeting featuring Shakespeare, Goethe, and Dschami. It has been translated into English (The dream ladder: A fairy tale), but still awaits a psychoanalytically informed exegesis.     

Of words and uses 1

This paper is devoted to an investigation of one variant of the ‘use theory of meaning’. It explores the possibility of characterizing the use of a linguistic unit in terms of non‐linguistic facts regularly associated with utterances of the unit in question. It is argued that such regularities are associated with only a small sub‐set of English sentences, and then only when these sentences occur in ‘standard’ contexts. An attempt is then made to characterize the relevant sense of ‘standard‐ness’ in terms of the role of this concept in a theory of language. In the final section of the paper, some consideration is given to the problem of generalizing the theory to cover sentences which are not regularly associated with recurrent non‐linguistic features.     

Why we are so good at catching cheaters

Data that appear to exhibit a 'cheater detection' effect on performance in the Wason Selection task are widely interpreted as implying that deontic reasoning is effected by a domain specific, cognitive module. The 'cheater detection module' is said to offer a clear example of an effect of evolutionary selection on human cognitive architecture. This interpretation depends critically on assuming that deontic conditionals and their indicative controls are identical in structure; hence that the asymmetries in S's performance must be effects of content variables. I argue that this assumption is untrue and that structural features of deontic conditionals predict the 'cheater detection' data without assumptions about either the architecture or the history of cognition. According to this analysis, the putative cheater detection effect on the Wason task is actually a materials artifact.