Reference in single sentences and in texts

This study investigated the comprehension and production of reference terms in both sentences (Experiments 1 and 2) and texts (Experiments 3 and 4) using a sentence completion task. In Experiments 1 and 2, the use of a sentence-level strategy (subject assignment) was investigated. In Experiments 3 and 4, the use of a text-level strategy (topic assignment) was also investigated. There was a clear preference for continuing the sentences by referring to the subjects of the sentences regardless of the availability of gender cues, in both single sentences and in texts. There was also an influence of the topic of each text on both the choice of referent and the type of reference term used. However, the choice of reference term was affected by the number of potential antecedents in the preceding text. Overall, the results suggest that the sentence subject is a salient item in working memory. This salience is increased if the sentence subject is also the textual topic. In addition, it appears that the presence of a pronoun in a text triggers a specific strategy to assign the pronoun to the (salient) sentence subject.This work is based on a doctoral dissertation submitted by R. A. Crawley to the University of Durham and supported by the Medical Research Council of Great Britain.     

The use of heuristic strategies in the interpretation of pronouns

The aim of the two experiments reported here was to distinguish between two heuristic strategies that have been proposed to account for the assignment of pronouns: the subject assignment strategy and the parallel function strategy. According to the subject assignment strategy, a pronoun is assigned to a preceding subject noun phrase, whereas according to the parallel function strategy, a pronoun is assigned to a previous noun phrase in the same grammatical position as the pronoun. These two strategies were tested by examining the interpretation of single object pronouns, first in a reading task and second in an assignment task. In both experiments, there was a strong preference for assigning an object pronoun to the preceding subject noun phrase, thus supporting the subject assignment strategy. However, this was only the case for pronouns that were linguistically ambiguous. When assignment was constrained by gender, there was no effect of either strategy. It is suggested that heuristic strategies are only used in the absence of other strong cues to assignment.     

Fallacies and moral dilemmas

The continuing debate between utilitarians and deontologists often takes the form of disagreement over how particular moral dilemmas are to be resolved, but protagonists on both sides tend to overlook the possibility of resolving a dilemma with remainder, such as regret. The importance of remainder is also overlooked by critics of some absolutist ways of resolving or slipping between the horns of certain moral dilemmas. Moreover, deontologists, if not utilitarians, can be criticised for overlooking the possibility that, according to their theory, some dilemmas may be irresolvable. Virtue ethics, with its concentration on the agent, readily accommodates both mention of remainder and irresolvable dilemmas, and yields a specification of tragic dilemmas which the other two theories might like to take on.     

When did Mrs Thatcher resign? The effects of ageing on the dating of public events

Two experiments investigated whether, in light of the commonly reported phenomenon of subjective time acceleration with age, there would be an effect of age on the dating of public events. In the first experiment covering the past seven years there was the suggestion of a decrease in forward telescoping with age, and in the second covering the period from 1977-89 this trend was continued, with the over-60s group now showing a tendency to date events too distantly. This effect is uncommon in dating studies and may offer evidence for the existence of time acceleration. An additional finding was that adults in the age range 35-50 years showed greater accuracy in dating events than did university students and adults over the age of 60.     

Paralinguistic processing in children with callosal agenesis: emergence of neurolinguistic deficits

Recent research revealed impaired processing of both nonliteral meaning and affective prosody in adults with agenesis of the corpus callosum (ACC) and normal intelligence. Since normal children have incomplete myelination of the corpus callosum, it was hypothesized that paralanguage deficits in children with ACC would be less apparent relative to their peers. The Familiar and Novel Language Comprehension Test (FANL-C) and Prosody Test were given to 18 children with ACC and normal intelligence and 17 controls matched for age (7-13 years), education, and IQ (83-122). When controlling for age, children with ACC were significantly poorer in comprehension of the precise meaning of both literal and nonliteral items on the FANL-C. Adults with ACC had previously been shown to have difficulty only on nonliteral items. The effect size for nonliteral comprehension in children with ACC was smaller than that seen in adults. There was only a trend for the child ACC group to perform worse on the recognition of affective prosody. Thus, while deficits in paralinguistic processing were apparent, children with ACC were not as clearly different from age peers as adults, and were equally deficient at comprehending literal and nonliteral expressions. The differences in results between adults and children with ACC are thought to reflect incomplete callosal development in normal children, and the importance of the corpus callosum in the early stages of the development of the ability to process literal language.     

Enactments of Race in the UK’s Blood Stem Cell Inventory

Recent sociological analyses of the intersections of race and science recognise race’s quality as an enacted object. Through this analytic lens, race is always materialising in the practices and processes that enrol it and therefore enjoys a kind of multiplicity. The context of blood stem cell transplantation, a scientific domain marked by a more and less explicitly racialised logic, offers an opportunity to see the conceptual assertion of race’s multiplicity play out. Indeed, an exploration of the UK’s stem cell inventory reveals—through analysis of interviews, policy and parliamentary meetings—how race materialises in the various practices that comprise this increasingly popular cancer treatment option. Looking at practices of recruitment, inventory management and tissue selection in particular provides an interesting window to look upon race and the many signifiers that implicate it. These cases reveal moments of race’s stablisation and silencing; its oscillation between the status of vital information to the life of a public stem cell inventory, and of secondary data that provides little useful information to clinicians selecting tissue. Adopting an analytic lens that attends to race’s multiple enactments allows us to begin asking why enactments take the shape they do, and why the particular practices that mobilise them come to be.     

Paying for positive group esteem: how inequity frames affect whites' responses to redistributive policies

This article finds that, when faced with racial inequity framed as White advantage, Whites' desire to think well of their racial group increases their support for policies perceived to harm Whites. Across 4 studies, the article provides evidence that (a) relative to minority disadvantage, White advantage increases Whites' support for policies perceived to reduce their group's economic opportunities, but does not increase support for policies perceived to increase minority opportunities; and (b) the effect of White advantage on Whites' esteem for their ingroup drives the effect of inequity frame on support for policies perceived to reduce Whites' opportunities.     

Media, Empowerment and the ‘Sexualization of Culture’ Debates

Claims about ‘empowerment’ increasingly animate debates about the ‘sexualization of culture’. This article responds to Lamb and Peterson’s (2011) attempts to open up and complicate the notion of ‘sexual empowerment’ as it is used in relation to adolescent girls. Drawing on contemporary research from the UK, New Zealand and elsewhere, the article seeks to promote a dialogue between media and communications research and more psychologically oriented scholarship. The paper makes four arguments. First it points to the need to rethink conceptualizations of the media, and processes of media influence. Secondly it raises critical questions about the notion of ‘media literacy’ which has increasingly taken on the status of panacea in debates about young people and ‘sexualization’. Thirdly it highlights the curious absence of considerations of power in debates about sexual empowerment, and argues for the need to think about sexualization in relation to class, ‘race’, sexuality and other axes of oppression. Finally, it raises critical questions about the utility of the notion of sexual empowerment, given its individualistic framing, the developmentalism implicit in its use, and the difficulties in identifying it in cultures in which ‘empowerment’ is used to sell everything from liquid detergents to breast augmentation surgery.