Variations on incremental interpretation

The strict competence hypothesis has sparked a small dialogue among several researchers attempting to understand its ramifications for human sentence processing and incremental interpretation in particular. In this paper, we review the dialogue, reconstructing the arguments in an attempt to make them more uniform and crisp, and provide our own analyses of certain of the issues that arise. We argue that strict competence, because it requires a synchronous computation mechanism, may actually lead to more complex, rather than simpler, models of incremental interpretation. Asynchronous computation, which is arguably both psychologically more plausible and conceptually more basic, allows for incremental interpretation to fall out naturally, without additional machinery for interpreting partial constituents. We show that this is true regardless of whether the presumed interpretation mechanism is top-down or bottom-up, contra previous conclusions in the literature, and propose a particular implementation of some of these ideas using a novel representation based on tree-adjoining grammars.The research in this paper was supported in part by grant IRI-9157996 from the National Science Foundation to the first author. The authors would like to thank Fernando Pereira, Edward Stabler, and Mark Steedman for discussions on the topic of this paper and for their comments on previous drafts.     

Teenage suicide in Zimbabwe

The teenage suicide rate in Zimbabwe did not change much during the 1970s, though the rate rose for female teenagers. Female teenagers used poison as a method of suicide more often than did adults, and self-immolation had increased in frequency among young women by the mid-1980s.     

Alcohol and correspondence between self-report and physiological measures of anxiety

The present study was designed to determine the main effects of alcohol intoxication on self-report and physiological measures of anxiety. Second, we aimed to assess the role of the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability (MCSD) scale in predicting the relationship between self-report and physiological indices of anxiety irrespective of drink content. A final purpose of the study was to determine whether the MCSD could account for discrepancies in the effects of alcohol on the two anxiety response systems. Subjects were male social drinkers who received an 0.70 g/kg dose of alcohol or placebo. Results indicated that irrespective of drink content, subjects with high MCSD scores reported lower levels of anxiety than did subjects with low MCSD scores. This relationship was not evident for heart rate. These results for measures of anxiety were not influenced by drink content.     

Lexical integration across saccades in reading

Summary Eye movements were recorded during sentence reading to examine the integration of parafoveal text across fixations. Four viewing conditions were used, each affording full view of the directly fixated word: no preview of the spatially adjacent parafoveal word; preview of its beginning trigram; preview of its beginning four letters; or preview of all its constituent letters. The magnitude of parafoveal-preview benefits (the difference between the no-preview condition and the different parafoveal-preview conditions) was examined as a function of the size of the saccade to the parafoveal target and as a function of the subsequent fixation location at the previewed target. The results revealed no effects of saccade size on parafoveal-preview benefits, but large effects of fixation position during the initial target fixation. Furthermore, parafoveal previews were used during the initial target fixation and during subsequent intratarget refixations. The results support a lexical-text-integration hypothesis which posits that lexical information is integrated across interword fixations and intraword refixations.     

The Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children (PC-DISC v.3.0): Parents and Adolescents Suggest Reasons for Expecting Discrepant Answers

To identify reasons for discrepancies between parent and child reports of child/adolescents's psychiatric symptoms, parents and adolescents (51 pairs) were asked to guess what the other would answer to questions from the PC-DISC about the adolescent's psychiatric symptoms, and to explain why they expected disagreement when the answer they provided for the other was different from their own. Adolescents' explanations for expecting (1) parental denial of symptoms the adolescent reported were: the parent was unaware of, forgot about, assumed the adolescent could not have, or trivialized the symptom; and (2) parental report of symptoms the adolescent denied were: the parent misread or exaggerated the adolescent's symptom, had too high expectations for the adolescent's behavior, put a negative label on or did not trust the adolescent. Parents' reasons for expecting their children to (1) deny symptoms the parents reported were: the adolescent did not remember how s/he felt, lied, did not recognize or minimized the importance or frequency of the symptom; and (2) report symptoms the parents denied were: the adolescent lied, exaggerated the importance of or interpreted the symptom differently.Support for this work was provided by National Institute of Drug Abuse grant number DA-05585 (Dr. Cottler, P.I.), and National Institute of Mental Health grants numbers MH-31302 (Dr. R. C. Cloninger, P.I.) and MH-17104 (Dr. Cottler, P.I.).Address all correspondence, including reprint requests, to Michelle Bidaut-Russell, Ph.D, MPH, MPE, Department of Psychiatry, Box 8134, Washington University School of Medicine, 4940 Children's Place, St. Louis, Missouri 63110.     

Depression and unemployment: Panel findings from the Epidemiologic Catchment Area study

Studies that have found an association between unemployment and psychological depression often fail to establish the direction of causal influence. Analyses of Epidemiologic Catchment Area panel data revealed that of employed respondents not diagnosed with major depression at first interview, those who became unemployed had over twice the risk of increased depressive symptoms and of becoming clinically depressed as those who continued employed. Although the increase in symptoms was statistically significant, the effect on clinical depression was not, possibly because of the low power of the test. The reverse causal path from clinical depression at Time 1 to becoming unemployed by Time 2 was not supported. The unemployment rate in the respondent's community at time of interview was not related directly to psychological depression but appeared associated indirectly with depression via its impact on the risk of becoming unemployed. Implications for policy and further research were discussed. The research described in this paper was supported by Grant #5 RO1 AA08379-02 from the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. The authors appreciate the suggestions provided by members of the Consortium for Research Involving Stress Processes sponsored by the W. T. Grant Foundation and by two anonymous journal reviewers.     

Working with older adults and their families – a review

This paper discusses family work with older adults by exploring some of the related literature published since Herr and Weakland's work in 1979, and compares psychoeducational and systems-based approaches to work with later life families. Issues of bias and omissions in the existing literature, and the definition of family therapy with this client group are raised. Areas for future research are indicated.     

Acceptance and commitment therapy: Altering the verbal support for experiential avoidance

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a behavior-analytically-based psychotherapy approach that attempts to undermine emotional avoidance and increase the capacity for behavior change. An overview of this approach is given, followed by several specific examples of the techniques used within ACT. In each instance the behavioral rationale of these techniques is described. A contemporary view of verbal relations provides the basis for new approaches to adult outpatient psychotherapy.