A Study on Late Closure in Spanish: Principle-grounded vs. Frequency-based Accounts of Attachment Preferences

A much-debated issue in current research on sentence parsing concerns the resolution of attachment ambiguities. Parsing theories differ on the procedures used to guide on-line attachment decisions: principle-grounded theories (e.g. garden-path/ construal) propose universal principles that minimize processing load; frequency-based accounts (such as linguistic tuning) claim that attachment decisions are shaped by readers' previous experience with their particular language; lexically based models, in turn, assert that attachment choices are determined by the properties of individual lexical items in the sentence. This paper reports six studies on late closure in the resolution of attachment ambiguities in Spanish: a questionnaire study on attachment preferences and three self-paced reading experiments where ambiguous PPs could be attached as arguments of two VP-hosts in NP-VP1-NPVP2-PP structures. The results show a clear preference towards low attachment (late closure), thus supporting principle-grounded theories. In addition, two corpus studies were carried out to obtain records of relative frequencies of the attachment choices involved in the experiments. A coarse-grained measure revealed that, in accordance with linguistic tuning, low-attachment structures are more common in Spanish NP-VP1-NP-VP2-PP sentences. However, a fine-grained count showed that low-attachment preferences cannot be explained by arguing that the specific verbs positioned lower on the tree (VP2) are more likely to take an extra argument than those located at a higher position (VP1), as lexical models would assume.     

On the autonomy of phonological encoding: Evidence from slips of the tongue in Spanish

The present study focuses on the relationship between the processes of lexical retrieval and phonological encoding in sentence production. An analysis of spontaneous slips of the tongue in Spanish reveals that (1) there is as yet no clear evidence for a lexical bias effect on sublexical errors (segment movement and substitution), and hence for positive feedback from phonological encoding to the level of lexical representation; and (2) meaning and form appear to be largely dissociated in lexical errors, which lends support to the hypothesis that lexical retrieval proceeds in two independent stages during sentence production. These findings are discussed in the light of two alternative accounts of language production mechanisms: the interactive activation model and the structural, processing-stages model.This research has been supported by grant no. PB87-0531 from the Dirección General de Investigación Científica y Técnica, Spanish Ministry of Education. We thank Kathryn Bock, Gary Dell, and David Swinney for helpful comments and discussion.     

Movement errors and levels of processing in sentence production

From a corpus of 3,530 slips of the tongue in Spanish, a sample of 753 cases of movement errors was analyzed, comprising those tokens that could be unambiguously assigned to the major categories of anticipations, perseverations, exchanges, and shifts. The analysis was performed according to two main criteria: (a) the degree of correspondence between the linguistic elements interacting in an error, and (b) the distance between such elements in terms of the type and number of the intervening linguistic boundaries. The results of this analysis converge with those obtained in English, supporting a model of sentence planning with different levels of representation and processing. Furthermore, Spanish provides a clear case to attest the role of syllabic structure in production processes, the constraints set by word boundaries in sublexical errors, and the contribution of inflectional suffixes to the assignment of grammatical category to the root morphemes.     

Psychological skills and mindfulness training effects on the psychological wellbeing of undergraduate music students: An exploratory study

This study explored the efficacy of psychological skills and mindfulness training intervention on the psychological wellbeing of undergraduate music students. Participants were undergraduate music students (n = 36) from the Department of Music at a South African university, 21 of whom were elected to take the psychological skills and mindfulness training intervention. Data on their self-reported psychological wellbeing, psychological skills, mindfulness and performance anxiety levels were collected pre-and post-intervention. The analysis applied non-parametric procedures to determine changes in students’ psychological wellbeing after the seven-week intervention programme. Findings suggest improvements in psychological wellbeing, psychological skills, mindfulness and performance anxiety with training. Psychological skills and mindfulness training may have benefits to the psychological wellbeing of music students.     

Changes in Behaviour and Body Weight Following a Single or Double Social Defeat in Rats

In a series of experiments, the consequences of a single and double social conflict on various behaviours and body weight in rats were studied. Animals were subjected to social defeat by placing them into the territory of an aggressive male conspecific for one hour, either once, or twice at the same time on two consecutive days. To assess the consequences of social defeat, three experiments were performed with independent groups of rats. In the first experiment, an open field test was performed two days after the last conflict. Locomotor activity was strongly reduced after social defeat. There were no differences between the single and double defeat group. To assess the effects of social defeat on subsequent social behaviour, a second experiment was performed in which experimental animals were confronted with an unfamiliar non-aggressive rat two days after a single or double conflict. Social defeat resulted in a reduction of social contact with the unfamiliar conspecific. There was no difference between the single and double conflict group. In the third experiment, the effects of social conflict on food intake, body weight and saccharine preference were measured. Food intake was not affected after a single conflict, but in the double conflict group food intake was decreased for several days. Body weight gain was decreased after both single and double social defeat. The decrease was stronger in the double conflict group. Water intake and saccharine preference were not significantly affected. This study revealed that social defeat in rats causes pronounced changes in various behaviours and body weight. Different aspects of behaviour are differentially affected by defeat with respect to the magnitude and time course of the changes induced. Moreover, different behavioural parameters are differentially sensitive to repetition of the stressor.     

On the Representation of Inflections and Derivations: Data from Spanish

The four experiments reported in this paper were designed to determine to what extent words are lexically represented in terms of their morphological structure. The experiments are carried out in Spanish, a language with rich morphological resources, using a priming paradigm and a lexical decision task. In particular, they examined the pattern of priming effects in regular inflected words with gender and in derived words, in comparison to those produced by orthographically and semantically related words, by manipulating form similarity and semantic transparency. The results showed, on the one hand, that regular inflected words produced reliable facilitatory effects which are not driven just by form relatedness (Experiments 1 and 2). On the other hand, they showed that both transparent and nontransparent derived forms produced facilitatory effects distinct from purely orthographic and semantic effects (Experiments 3 and 4.). In general, these findings suggest that morphological information is represented in the mental lexicon and may play a central role in the individuation and retrieval of lexical entries.