Incrementality and Prediction in Human Sentence Processing

We identify a number of principles with respect to prediction that, we argue, underpin adult language comprehension: (a) comprehension consists in realizing a mapping between the unfolding sentence and the event representation corresponding to the real-world event being described; (b) the realization of this mapping manifests as the ability to predict both how the language will unfold, and how the real-world event would unfold if it were being experienced directly; (c) concurrent linguistic and nonlinguistic inputs, and the prior internal states of the system, each drive the predictive process; (d) the representation of prior internal states across a representational substrate common to the linguistic and nonlinguistic domains enables the predictive process to operate over variable time frames and variable levels of representational abstraction. We review empirical data exemplifying the operation of these principles and discuss the relationship between prediction, event structure, thematic role assignment, and incrementality.     

enriching careers and lives: introducing a positive,holistic, and narrative career counseling method that bridges theory and practice

CareerCycles (CC) career counseling framework and method of practice integrates and builds on aspects of positive psychology. Through its holistic and narrative approach, the CC method seeks to collaboratively identify and understand clients' career and life stories. It focuses on their strengths, desires, preferences, assets, future possibilities, and the influence others have had on their choices.     

Job loss as a blessing in disguise: The role of career exploration and career planning in predicting reemployment quality

Job loss is one of the most difficult work related situations that an individual may encounter. Yet, sometimes job loss may also turn into a blessing in disguise. Combining the careers literature with the literature on unemployment, the current paper addresses potential positive outcomes of job loss by focusing on specific career adaptability activities that individuals can undertake to obtain these outcomes. Three hundred and four unemployed outplacement attendees reported their use of self and environmental career exploration and career planning, as well as of job search (general and networking) and the availability of two resources that may foster these activities, general self-efficacy and social support. Six months later, 215 individuals reported their current reemployment status and, when applicable, the quality of that reemployment. Results replicate the positive effects of job search on finding reemployment but moreover outline the relevance of career planning and exploration during unemployment on ensuring the quality of this reemployment. Theoretical implications and directions for practice and future research are discussed.     

The power of politics: How political leaders in Serbia discursively manage identity continuity and political change to shape the future of the nation

The construction of national identities through political discourse is a growing field of interest to social psychologists, particularly as many countries face changing demographics, borders and social realities as part of globalization, immigration and continued political integration and conflict. Through an analysis of 17 key speeches by Serbian politicians over the past 25 years, the present paper explores the question of how politicians, as entrepreneurs of identity, discursively manage the relationship between identity continuity and political change over time, in attempts to construct the future of a nation. We particularly explore this issue in the context of Serbia's present political aspirations toward joining the European Union. The findings indicate that (i) political change becomes negotiated within the framework of established and legitimized identity discourses that have developed over time, and (ii) while history is frequently drawn on to support political agendas, it is successful to the extent that this history offers a sense of cultural continuity rather than a coherent narrative of historical events and time periods. We conclude by arguing for the benefits that a diachronic approach to political discourse can offer social psychologists interested in the discursive construction of national identity.     

Rules versus statistics: insights from a highly inflected language

Inflectional morphology has been taken as a paradigmatic example of rule-governed grammatical knowledge (Pinker, 1999). The plausibility of this claim may be related to the fact that it is mainly based on studies of English, which has a very simple inflectional system. We examined the representation of inflectional morphology in Serbian, which encodes number, gender, and case for nouns. Linguists standardly characterize this system as a complex set of rules, with disagreements about their exact form. We present analyses of a large corpus of nouns which showed that, as in English, Serbian inflectional morphology is quasiregular: It exhibits numerous partial regularities creating neighborhoods that vary in size and consistency. We then asked whether a simple connectionist network could encode this statistical information in a manner that also supported generalization. A network trained on 3,244 Serbian nouns learned to produce correctly inflected phonological forms from a specification of a word's lemma, gender, number, and case, and generalized to untrained cases. The model's performance was sensitive to variables that also influence human performance, including surface and lemma frequency. It was also influenced by inflectional neighborhood size, a novel measure of the consistency of meaning to form mapping. A word-naming experiment with native Serbian speakers showed that this measure also affects human performance. The results suggest that, as in English, generating correctly inflected forms involves satisfying a small number of simultaneous probabilistic constraints relating form and meaning. Thus, common computational mechanisms may govern the representation and use of inflectional information across typologically diverse languages.     

The eyes have it!: an fMRI investigation

For the past several years it has been thought that cues, such as eye direction, can trigger reflexive shifts in attention because of their biological relevance and their specialized neural architecture. However, very recently, reported that other stimuli, such as arrows, trigger reflexive shifts in attention in a manner that is behaviourally identical to those triggered by eyes. Nevertheless these authors speculated that reflexive orienting to gaze direction may be subserved by a neural system-the superior temporal sulcus (STS)-that is specialized for processing eyes. The present study presents fMRI data that provide direct and compelling empirical support to this proposal. Subjects were presented with fixation stimuli that, based on instruction, could be perceived as eyes or as another type of directional cue. Both produced equivalent shifts in reflexive attention, replicating Ristic et al. However, the neural systems subserving the two forms of orienting were not equivalent-with the STS being engaged exceptionally when the fixation stimulus was perceived as eyes.     

Developmental cascades: linking academic achievement and externalizing and internalizing symptoms over 20 years

A developmental cascade model linking competence and symptoms was tested in a study of a normative, urban school sample of 205 children (initially 8 to 12 years old). Internalizing and externalizing symptoms and academic competence were assessed by multiple methods at the study outset and after 7, 10, and 20 years. A series of nested cascade models was tested through structural equation modeling. The final model indicated 2 hypothesized cascade effects: Externalizing problems evident in childhood appeared to undermine academic competence by adolescence, which subsequently showed a negative effect on internalizing problems in young adulthood. A significant exploratory effect was consistent with internalizing symptoms containing or lowering the net risk for externalizing problems under some conditions. These 3 cascade effects did not differ by gender and were not attributable to effects of IQ, parenting quality, or socioeconomic differences. Implications are discussed for developmental models of cascades, progressions, and preventive interventions.