Families in China: an undervalued resource for mental health?

This article is based on 37 interviews with patients and family members in a psychiatric hospital in Hubei, the People's Republic of China. The main goal was to investigate the explanatory models that families used in understanding the causes of mental illness. Case material is provided to illustrate some of the issues concerning family dynamics and problems. Families use a holistic framework for understanding psychiatric disturbance. Doctors' explanatory framework is largely medical and they show no interest in family relationships. Equally, families make it clear that they need more information and support from medical practitioners, which is not forthcoming.     

Grading the ‘cultural literacy’ project

The essay examines the argument advanced by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., for instituting ‘cultural literacy’ as a fundamental priority of schools. A number of confusions and equivocations in Hirsch's reasoning are identified, and the propensity of his project to indoctrinate is exposed. Among the features of Hirsch's argument shown to be troubling are his shifting construal of ‘language’, his inconsistency about the requirements of cultural literacy, and his uncritical relation to traditional images of the American past and present. The upshot is to raise the question why Hirsch's project has elicited wide support and praise.     

Referenzsemantik in der Partnermodellierung

How can we explain that an assertion on something perceived can be understood in the same manner by somebody who cannot perceive that scene? This problem bases the interest in computational linguistics in how listener modeling could possibly be harmonized with reference semantics. Mental images substituting real perception appear as a way out. The architecture of the listener model has to be adapted to the creation and use of such pictorial data structures. Furthermore, the relation between the latter and a verbal (i. e., propositional) representation must be understood. The resulting architecture of a listener model with reference semantics can be employed to solve communicational problems from three general classes in a better way, as is demonstrated by an example implementation.     

Evaluations of Tests Used for Making Selection and Promotion Decisions

Participants (N= 212) rated the fairness, job relevance, appropriateness, and invasiveness of 16 tests that could be used to select or promote people into production or management positions. Fairness, job relevance and appropriateness were highly correlated, and were combined to form a composite evaluation scale. Evaluations and invasiveness ratings varied among the 16 tests, with the most positive ratings given to interviews and work samples and the most negative ratings given to astrology, graphology and polygraphs. Evaluations of four tests were affected by the position (manager vs. production worker). Evaluations of 11 tests and invasiveness ratings of two tests were affected by respondent experience with the test. Respondents who had experienced the tests evaluated them more positively and considered them to entail a smaller invasion of privacy. Responses were not affected by whether the test was to be used for selection versus promotion decisions.     

The role of assembled phonology in reading comprehension

The contribution of assembled phonology to phonological effects in reading comprehension was assessed. In Experiment 1, subjects judged the acceptability of sentences with regular, exception, and nonword homophone substitutions and orthographic controls. Significantly more errors occurred to sentences with regular-word homophones than to exception words, and error rates for nonword homophones were low and not significant. Experiment 2 showed that this was not due to differences in the sentence frames. In Experiment 3, the subjects judged as unacceptable those sentences containing an exception word that sounded correct when read according to spelling-to-sound rules. Significantly higher error rates occurred only for low-frequency exception words. Experiment 4 showed that task conditions affect semantic-categorization error rates for nonword homophones. These results indicate that both assembled and addressed phonology contribute to sentence and word comprehension, but the low error rate for nonwords suggests that an early lexical check may be applied.