Diminutives in child-directed speech supplement metric with distributional word segmentation cues

In two experiments, we explored whether diminutives (e.g.,birdie, Patty, bootie), which are characteristic of child-directed speech in many languages, aid word segmentation by regularizing stress patterns and word endings. In an implicit learning task, adult native speakers of English were exposed to a continuous stream of synthesized Dutch nonsense input comprising 300 randomized repetitions of six bisyllabic target nonwords. After exposure, the participants were given a forced choice recognition test to judge which strings had been present in the input. Experiment 1 demonstrated that English speakers used trochaic stress to isolate strings, despite being unfamiliar with Dutch phonotactics. Experiment 2 showed benefits from invariance introduced by affricates, which are typically found at onsets of final syllables in Dutch diminutives. Together, the results demonstrate that diminutives contain prosodic and distributional features that are beneficial for word segmentation.     

Physical activity and responses to projective stimuli in neurotic vs. psychotic depression

Responses to projective material by neurotically and psychotically depressed patients were scored for fluency, movement, and primary process during light physical activity and inactivity. A depression measure was also obtained. Significant positive correlations were found between fluency, movement, and primary process. Movement scores did not increase significantly during physical activity for either group. No significant correlations were found between level of depression and production of movement and primary process. However, primary process, controlled for fluency, increased significantly during physical activity for neurotic, but not for psychotic depressives.     

Examination of the Extent to which Employment Factors are Associated with Reduced Child Maltreatment Potential and Drug Use

Job assistance programs are commonly recommended for parents of children who have been victimized by child maltreatment, particularly when illicit drugs are indicated. However, the relationship between employment factors, substance abuse, and risk of child maltreatment has received limited empirical attention. Therefore, the current study examines employment factors in a sample of 72 mothers, who were referred by child protective services for treatment of substance abuse and child neglect. Child maltreatment potential was found to be negatively associated with number of hours employed and self-reported happiness with employment. The association between child abuse potential and personal income of participants approached significance (p?=?.057), and the results were not influenced by social desirability. Employment satisfaction significantly contributed to the prediction of child maltreatment potential over and above other employment factors and control variables. These findings suggest that when mothers are involved in child protective services their risk of perpetrating child maltreatment may be reduced when they are assisted in gainful employment that is personally satisfying. Happiness with employment was the only employment factor correlated (inversely) with substance use (biological testing, self-report of participants). Future directions are discussed in light of the results, including the importance of considering employment satisfaction when conducting vocational assistance programs in this population.     

Medicine and Humanities: Voicing Connections

Accepting as a given that the humanities disciplines are not product or "results" driven, this paper argues that the core of an interdisciplinary field of medicine and humanities, or medical humanities, is an interpretive enterprise that is not readily open to quantitative assessment. A more humanistically oriented medical practice can derive, however, from the process that produces new insights and works toward the development of a new, mutually shared, and humanizing language.     

Densidad,delincuencia y diseño: Control formal e informal y ambiente edificado

Resumen

Este trabajo revisa la literatura acerca del impacto general del ambiente físico sobre la desorganización social, el crimen y la delincuencia juvenil, centrándose más específicamente en la relación de la densidad por vivienda, la densidad en el diseño del edificio y la delincuencia juvenil. Se muestra que en el contexto ambiental se han desarrollado dos perspectivas de control. Una destaca la capacidad de impedir el control social informal del medio edificado, y la otra, la atracción que ejerce este mismo ambiente sobre los agentes de control social formal (la policía). Se presenta un modelo de senderos que muestra que la densidad en el diseño de los edificios predice de modo independiente el consumo de marihuana y apoya la noción de que el ambiente físico puede afectar al control informal. El modelo muestra también que la densidad en el diseño del edificio predice de modo significativo la presencia de la policía, ofreciendo así un apoyo empírico a la noción de que el ambiente físico puede afectar al control formal.     

New and Familiar Roles for Clinical Psychologists in the Effective Treatment for Children With an Autism Spectrum Disorder

Alongside the increased prevalence of autism spectrum disorders (ASD), there is a greater likelihood of clinical psychologists having a role in the treatment of children with these disorders. Population heterogeneity with respect to ASD-specific symptomatology, comorbid medical and psychiatric issues, level of cognitive functioning, and presence of adaptive behaviors, all add to the complexity of providing treatment to this population. Consequently, psychologists often find themselves in multiple roles in order to effectively manage treatment for children with ASD and their families. The purpose of this article is to increase awareness of three major roles for clinical psychologists working with this population: assisting families with treatment coordination, identifying and treating comorbid psychopathology, and addressing parental stress.     

Dutch plural inflection: the exception that proves the analogy

We develop the view that inflection is driven partly by non-phonological analogy and that non-phonological information is of particular importance to the inflection of non-canonical roots, which in the view of [Marcus, G. F., Brinkmann, U., Clahsen, H., Wiese, R., & Pinker, S. (1995). German inflection: the exception that proves the rule. Cognitive Psychology, 29, 189-256.] are inflected by a symbolic rule process. We used the Dutch plural to evaluate these claims. An analysis of corpus data shows that a model using non-phonological information (orthography) produces significantly fewer errors on plurals of non-canonical Dutch nouns, in particular borrowings, than a model that includes only phonological information. Moreover, we show that a double default system, as proposed by Pinker [Pinker, S. (1999). Words and rules. London: Phoenix.], does not offer an advantage over the latter model. A second study, examining the use of orthography in an online plural production task, shows that, in Dutch, the chosen pseudoword plural is significantly affected by non-phonological information. A final simulation study confirms that these results are in line with a model of inflectional morphology that explains the inflection of non-canonical roots by non-phonological analogy instead of by a default rule process.     

Diminutives facilitate word segmentation in natural speech: Cross-linguistic evidence

Final-syllable invariance is characteristic of diminutives (e.g., doggie), which are a pervasive feature of the child-directed speech registers of many languages. Invariance in word endings has been shown to facilitate word segmentation (Kempe, Brooks, & Gillis, 2005) in an incidental-learning paradigm in which synthesized Dutch pseudonouns were used. To broaden the cross-linguistic evidence for this invariance effect and to increase its ecological validity, adult English speakers (n=276) were exposed to naturally spoken Dutch or Russian pseudonouns presented in sentence contexts. A forced choice test was given to assess target recognition, with foils comprising unfamiliar syllable combinations in Experiments 1 and 2 and syllable combinations straddling word boundaries in Experiment 3. A control group (n=210) received the recognition test with no prior exposure to targets. Recognition performance improved with increasing final-syllable rhyme invariance, with larger increases for the experimental group. This confirms that word ending invariance is a valid segmentation cue in artificial, as well as naturalistic, speech and that diminutives may aid segmentation in a number of languages.     

“Seeing the Difference”: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Death, Dying, Humanities, and Medicine

This essay explores how strategies integral to inquiry in the humanities provide insights into developing an interdisciplinary approach to studies of death and dying that will be relevant to medical practice as well as to humanistic study. The author asks how we can produce new modes of knowledge in an area where "knowing" is highly problematized and argues that while a putative field of death and dying studies must include a range of disciplinary approaches it must also account for lived, subjective experience and the ways that we, as individuals and as a culture, create meaning.