It's the way that you, er, say it: hesitations in speech affect language comprehension

Everyday speech is littered with disfluency, often correlated with the production of less predictable words (e.g., Beattie & Butterworth [Beattie, G., & Butterworth, B. (1979). Contextual probability and word frequency as determinants of pauses in spontaneous speech. Language and Speech, 22, 201-211.]). But what are the effects of disfluency on listeners? In an ERP experiment which compared fluent to disfluent utterances, we established an N400 effect for unpredictable compared to predictable words. This effect, reflecting the difference in ease of integrating words into their contexts, was reduced in cases where the target words were preceded by a hesitation marked by the word er. Moreover, a subsequent recognition memory test showed that words preceded by disfluency were more likely to be remembered. The study demonstrates that hesitation affects the way in which listeners process spoken language, and that these changes are associated with longer-term consequences for the representation of the message.     

Psychometric Properties and Responsiveness to Change of 15‐ and 28‐Item Versions of the SCORE: A Family Assessment Questionnaire

The SCORE (Systemic Clinical Outcome and Routine Evaluation) is a 40‐item questionnaire for completion by family members 12 years and older to assess outcome in systemic therapy. This study aimed to investigate psychometric properties of two short versions of the SCORE and their responsiveness to therapeutic change. Data were collected at 19 centers from 701 families at baseline and from 433 of these 3–5 months later. Results confirmed the three‐factor structure (strengths, difficulties, and communication) of the 15‐ and 28‐item versions of the SCORE. Both instruments had good internal consistency and test–retest reliability. They also showed construct and criterion validity, correlating with measures of parent, child, and family adjustment, and discriminating between clinical and nonclinical cases. Total and factor scales of the SCORE‐15 and ‐28 were responsive to change over 3–5 months of therapy. The SCORE‐15 and SCORE‐28 are brief psychometrically robust family assessment instruments which may be used to evaluate systemic therapy.     

No Fault Couples Therapy

A conceptual framework for treating couples who come into therapy desirous of changing the behavior of their partner. A case history is cited wherein sensitivity towards equality of input, power and responsibility for the couples' plight is continuously emphasized for each member of the pair. The histories of both partners are described in order to stress the no fault nature of the couples' conditions.     

From Projective Identification to Empathic Connection

SUMMARY

This article examines the challenging journey of successful coupling by understanding the marital relationship within a developmental framework. The process of Projective Identification is viewed as a useful concept found at the confluence of family systems and psycho-dynamic streams of thought, bridging the interpersonal and intrapsychic experience of couples whose individuative strivings are stalled. A map is offered for the transformation of a marriage from the stages of Idealization and Disillusionment toward the stage of Acceptance and empathic connection.     

The Role of Trauma in Conduct Disorder

Summary

Trauma is proposed as a key to understanding the development and persistence of conduct disorder, in conjunction with other contributing factors. Trauma history is ubiquitous in the conduct disordered population, and trauma effects can help to account for many features of conduct disorder, including lack of empathy, impulsivity, anger, acting-out, and resistance to treatment. The current standard of care fails to fully address trauma, which may partially explain the low success rate of extant treatment approaches. A trauma-informed perspective is introduced to current models of conduct disorder. Research, prevention, and treatment implications are discussed.     

Fostering Strength and Resiliency in Same-Sex Couples

Abstract

Same-sex couples are presented widiin tiieir cultural contexts to examine how those contexts might influence me strength and resilience of their relationships. We are particularly interested in the ability of the couple relationship to fulfill family functions that serve the social, psychological, and physical needs of each of the partners and society (Patterson, 2002a). Three family functions: family formation and membership, nurturance and socialization, and protection of vulnerable members, are particularly germane to same-sex couples. We examine several topic areas related to these three functions in order to assist clinicians in identifying factors that may prohibit same-sex couples from becoming and remaining strong and resilient.     

Spiritual,Religious, Nonspiritual,and Nonreligious Narratives in Marginalized Older Adults: A Typology of Coping Styles

SUMMARY

Narrative therapy is an important tool in the phenomenological framing of life events with older clients. Seventy-nine older adults who lived independently in four subsidized high-rise housing facilities in Chicago were interviewed in a research project about managing life challenges. Cases represent four types in a spiritual-religious typology: religious and spiritual, religious only, spiritual only, and neither religious nor spiritual (Zinnbauer, 1997). This article explores how older adults managed adversity and maintained a sense of self-efficacy. Findings indicate that older adults use many references to religion and spirituality in their narratives, either embracing these domains or defining themselves in contrast to them. Narrative therapy suggests that the implications of religious and spiritual resources addressed in client stories may reinforce coping capacity and promote aging well.     

Infant perception of audio-visual speech synchrony in familiar and unfamiliar fluent speech

We investigated the effects of linguistic experience and language familiarity on the perception of audio-visual (A-V) synchrony in fluent speech. In Experiment 1, we tested a group of monolingual Spanish- and Catalan-learning 8-month-old infants to a video clip of a person speaking Spanish. Following habituation to the audiovisually synchronous video, infants saw and heard desynchronized clips of the same video where the audio stream now preceded the video stream by 366, 500, or 666 ms. In Experiment 2, monolingual Catalan and Spanish infants were tested with a video clip of a person speaking English. Results indicated that in both experiments, infants detected a 666 and a 500 ms asynchrony. That is, their responsiveness to A-V synchrony was the same regardless of their specific linguistic experience or familiarity with the tested language. Compared to previous results from infant studies with isolated audiovisual syllables, these results show that infants are more sensitive to A-V temporal relations inherent in fluent speech. Furthermore, the absence of a language familiarity effect on the detection of A-V speech asynchrony at eight months of age is consistent with the broad perceptual tuning usually observed in infant response to linguistic input at this age.     

Different mechanisms for role relations versus verb–action congruence effects: Evidence from ERPs in picture–sentence verification

Extant accounts of visually situated language processing do make general predictions about visual context effects on incremental sentence comprehension; these, however, are not sufficiently detailed to accommodate potentially different visual context effects (such as a scene–sentence mismatch based on actions versus thematic role relations, e.g., (Altmann & Kamide, 2007; Knoeferle & Crocker, 2007; Taylor & Zwaan, 2008; Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998)). To provide additional data for theory testing and development, we collected event-related brain potentials (ERPs) as participants read a subject–verb–object sentence (500 ms SOA in Experiment 1 and 300 ms SOA in Experiment 2), and post-sentence verification times indicating whether or not the verb and/or the thematic role relations matched a preceding picture (depicting two participants engaged in an action). Though incrementally processed, these two types of mismatch yielded different ERP effects. Role–relation mismatch effects emerged at the subject noun as anterior negativities to the mismatching noun, preceding action mismatch effects manifest as centro-parietal N400s greater to the mismatching verb, regardless of SOAs. These two types of mismatch manipulations also yielded different effects post-verbally, correlated differently with a participant's mean accuracy, verbal working memory and visual-spatial scores, and differed in their interactions with SOA. Taken together these results clearly implicate more than a single mismatch mechanism for extant accounts of picture–sentence processing to accommodate.