Parallel structure: A source of facilitation in sentence comprehension

Reading time for the second clause of a conjoined sentence was found to be faster when the clause was structurally similar to the first clause than when the clausal structures differed. This “parallel structure” effect was found for each of several types of structures, including active versus passive constructions, direct object versus sentential complement (minimal vs. nonminimal attachment), nonshifted versus shifted heavy noun phrase, agent versus theme, and animate versus inanimate noun phrase. The pervasiveness of the effect ruled out some hypotheses about its basis, including the hypothesis that it would occur only when a subject’s just having processed a structure would affect how temporary ambiguities are resolved. Detailed analysis of the data suggested the existence of several distinct sources of the effect and provided indirect evidence that people typically compute both a surface structure and an S-structure representation of a sentence.     

Growing up with severe learning difficulties: A longitudinal study of young people and their families

The paper reports on a longitudinal study of young people with severe learning difficulties. Two types of comparison are made: changes between Time 1 and Time 2, and comparisons with the younger age group in the study. The young adults acquired considerably more self-help and communication skills between Time 1 and Time 2. They were less likely to require help with self care than the younger age group and their carers were less stressed. Parents' needs for additional service provision fell into three categories: information needs, help with communication and other skills, and practical help. The greatest need was for information. The main concerns of the mothers at Time 1 and Time 2 are documented. The young adults' preparation for leaving school, current day placements at Social Education Centres and employment prospects are discussed. It is concluded that there are few opportunities to move on to less sheltered environments.     

Filling gaps: Decision principles and structure in sentence comprehension

The correct grammatical characterization of sentences containing filler-gap dependencies is a topic of considerable theoretical interest in linguistics. In some grammatical frameworks, these dependencies are representef in terms of conditions on the permissible indexing of structures (or alternative structure evaluation conditions) which a representation must adhere to in order to be well-formed. In other frameworks, constraints on permissible filler-gap dependencies are simply inherent in the set of phrase structure rules contained in the grammar of a language.The processing of sentences with multiple (potential) filler-gap dependencies was investigated in two experiments. The first experiment provided evidence for three claims. First, the human sentence processor abides by a strategy of assigning the most recent potential filler to a gap. Hence, ‘recent filler’ sentences where this assignment proves to be correct takes less time to comprehend than ‘distant filler’ sentences where this decision turns out to be incorrect. Second, the recent filler strategy is itself just a special case of a more general strategy of assigning the most salient potential filler to a gap. Third, unambiguous sentences in which a filler-gap assignment is disambiguated by ‘control’ information specified by individual verbs gives rise to the same recent filler errors as ambiguous sentences. This suggests that tentative filler-gap assignments are made by the processor before all of the relevant constraints on permissible filler-gap dependencies are consulted by the processor.The second experiment tested an alternative hypothesis that the more complex ‘distant filler’ sentences took longer to comprehend in the first experiment only because these sentences often contained verbs which license two adjacent gaps. The experiment showed that there was a significant recent filler effect in sentences that did not contain adjacent gaps and that this effect did not interact with verb class.The finding that the processor delays use of verb-control information is extremely surprising. It may be explained by the fact that this information is only relevant to one type of gap (‘equi-gaps’) and what type of gap the processor is dealing with often can not be determined unambiguously at the time when it initially encounters a gap in its left-to-right processing of a sentence.If our interpretation of these findings is correct, they argue for a considerable amount of structure in the sentence comprehension system. Further, they favor a view of sentence processing in which processing operations involving constraints on the permissible indexing (or evaluation) of structures lag behind the processor's structure building operations. Hence, the results favor those grammatical theories which preserve this distinction over grammatical theories which provide a uniform characterization of all syntactic well-formedness conditions.     

Problem-solving deficits and depressive symptoms among children

Depressive symptoms among 40 fourth- and fifth-grade students as measured by the Children's Depression Inventory, correlated highly with impaired problem solving at block designs (r = .64) and anagrams (r = .67). Similar impairments have been found among depressed adults, suggesting that depression among children may be continuous with depression among adults.     

Factor structure of Classroom Behavior problems for mainstreamed and regular students

The purpose of this study was twofold: (1) to examine the factor structure of behavior exhibited in the regular classroom in order to provide a conceptual framework for classifying problem behavior relevant to the classroom setting, and (2) to determine the extent to which the factors generated from ratings of regular classroom children are similar to those generated from ratings of mainstreamed special education children. Thirty-five elementary-school teachers completed behavior ratings of all of their 876 students utilizing a group-administered adapted version of the Devereux Elementary School Behavior Rating Scale. The factor analysis yielded five factors defined as Conduct Problem, Personality Problem, Adaptive Classroom Behavior, Inadequacy-Immaturity, and Achievement Anxiety. Coefficients of factorial congruence confirmed the similarity between the pattern generated from ratings of regular students and that of mainstreamed students.     

Stress and coping in mothers caring for a child with severe learning difficulties: A test of Lazarus' transactional model of coping

The literature on psychological stress among women consistently points to the adverse effects of child rearing on mothers, particularly those caring for children with physical or mental handicaps. Early studies of the effects on family functioning of caring for a child with severe learning difficulties adopted a pathological approach in which it was assumed that psychological distress was inevitable among family members, particularly mothers. Recent research has emphasised that many families cope with and adapt to the stress they experience, and seeks to discover how they do so. The paper reports on a study of 166 mothers caring for a child with severe learning difficulties. The aim of the study was to investigate both the factors associated with maternal stress and those which might mediate or buffer the effects of stress. The study used the Folkman and Lazarus' (1979) transactional model of stress. Stress is the condition that results when person/environment transactions lead the individual to perceive a discrepancy between the demands of a situation and his/her resources or ability to cope with those demands. The nature and type of coping generated by a person will be determined by the coping resources in the person's environment. The model identifies five categories of coping resource: utilitarian resources, health/morale, social networks, general and specific beliefs, and problem solving skills. In our study, the five coping resources were represented by the mother's social class and appraisal of her financial worries, physical health, social support, acceptance of and adjustment to the child, and assessment of coping skills. Stress was measured by the Malaise Inventory (Rutter, 1970). Four of the five coping resources were found to be significant contributors in a hierarchical regression analysis of stress scores, contributing additional variance beyond that of behavioural and other child characteristics. Altogether, 55% of the variance in stress scores was explained.     

Measuring the quality of residential care

Administrative personnel require objective, reliable and valid information in order to monitor the effects of allocating resources to different components of the service that they are providing. The initial problem is to define and measure the dependent variable—the ‘quality of care’ —against which the effects of changing various independent variables can be evaluated. The paper describes an attempt to use the operant conditioning model as a basis for constructing such a measure of the quality of care provided in residential settings for severely mentally handicapped people. The rationale for adopting this model is described, against a background of other studies in which the same problem has been addressed. The hypothesis, the tasks generated, and the methodological problems encountered, are outlined and discussed.

A subsequent paper will present the results obtained when using the method to measure the quality of care, so defined, in two residential units for severely mentally handicapped children.     

Effects of teaching an introductory psychology laboratory using a computerized research tool

In the introductory psychology laboratory at Drexel University, we employ courseware modules that transform the computer into various pieces of psychological research equipment. Students enrolled in this course use the courseware modules in a series of experiments that investigate motor learning, perception, memory, and other psychological phenomena. In choosing this form of computerization, we have encountered challenges to our methods of instruction, both in the laboratory and in the lecture hall. Opportunities, in the form of financial and programming assistance, have also resulted from our computerization efforts.     

The use of syntactic information in filling gaps

Two sentence-comprehension time experiments replicated and extended previously reported research indicating that readers initially make a quick, heuristic assignment of fillers to gaps in temporarily ambiguous sentences such as “Who did John beg to sing?” and “Who did John beg to sing for?” The Most Recent Filler heuristic readers seemed to adopt made the former “distant filler” sentence harder to comprehend than the latter “recent filler” sentence. Readers did not in general use all available sources of information in making this assignment. In particular, they usually delayed their use of verb control information so that substituting the unambiguous-control verbs “force” or “begin” for “beg” did not eliminate the distant filler inferiority. the experiments counter some criticisms that have been made of the previously reported research. The possibility that readers delay using an interesting natural category of information was raised, and its implications for the mental grammar were considered.     

The sausage machine: A new two-stage parsing model

It is proposed that the human sentence parsing device assigns phrase structure to word strings in two steps. The first stage parser assigns lexical and phrasal nodes to substrings of roughly six words. The second stage parser then adds higher nodes to link these phrasal packages together into a complete phrase marker.This model of the parser is compared with ATN models, and with the two-stage models of Kimball (1973) and Fodor, Bever and Garrett (1974). Our assumption that the units which are shunted from the first stage to the second stage are defined by their length, rather than by their syntactic type, explains the effects of constituent length on perceptual complexity in center embedded sentences and in sentences of the kind that fall under Kimball's principle of Right Association. The particular division of labor between the two parsing units allows us to explain, without appeal to any ad hoc parsing strategies, why the parser makes certain ‘shortsighted’ errors even though, in general, it is able to make intelligent use of all the information that is available to it.