The purpose of the present study was to explore the usefulness of an objectively scored self-rating sentence completion test in the development of objective prognostic statements regarding marital counseling.

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The topic of the diploma thesis is the reasoning of the criminal judgment, especially with regard to the sentence imposed. The obligation for judges to reason a sentence arises from the Code of Criminal Procedure and the principles of the rule of law; therefore, with some exceptions, it is an essential part of the judgment. The first part focuses on the aspects of the reasoning of the judgment in general (Chapters 1-6), explaining the reasons why judgments need to be justified, the different approaches to reasoning, the principles of good reasoning, and the problems that arise in reasoning. The next part of the thesis (chapter 7) deals with the justification of the sentence in the criminal judgment. The purpose of punishment, principles that influence the process of punishment of offenders, as well as factors (circumstances) that influence the selected punishment are discussed. The next part of the thesis (chapter 8) is devoted to the empirical part: the research which analyzes a representative sample of 366 judgments of Czech district courts in terms of the sentence imposed. Based on the law and the literature used, the data and factors that will be recorded during the analysis whereas the main research question is: How and to what extent do Czech district courts justify imposing sentences? This...

Children are negatively affected by parental incarceration, and peoples’ discretion in sentencing determines for how long parents are taken away from their children. Although federal laws explicitly state that people should not consider family responsibilities and defendant gender when sentencing, psychological theory and research suggests that people might be sensitive to defendants’ gender and the age of their children. The novel question is whether child age influences sentencing decisions. To test these effects, the age of the defendant’s child and defendant gender were manipulated in two experiments – in a 3-sentence vignette in Study 1 and a presentence investigation report in Study 2. Study 1 tested a 2 (gender: man, woman) X 8 (age of child: 6-months, 1-year, 3-years, 5-years, 8-years, 13-years, 15-years, no child) between- subjects design, and Study 2 tested a 2 (defendant gender: man, woman) X 3 (no child, 1-year- old, 13-year-old) design. Participants in both studies were adults in the United States recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk, n = 461 in Study 1 and n = 362 in Study 2.Results revealed that in Study 1, defendants with a 1-year-old received less prison time than defendants with a 13-year-old; defendants with a 1-year-old received less prison time than defendants with no children; and defendants with a 13-year-old and defendants with no children received similar prison times. Contrary to prior work, women did not receive more lenient sentences than did men. As in Study 1, Study 2 found that men and women received similar prison times. Thus, results from both studies suggest that perhaps people are becoming more egalitarian in their sentencing decisions for men and women, and thus, are not influenced by traditional gender rolesResults from Study 2 revealed that defendants with a 1-year-old child received similar sentences to defendants with a 13-year-old child. Further, defendants without children received similar sentences to defendants with children. Thus, Study 1 and Study 2 found inconsistent results of whether child age influenced sentencing decisions. Therefore, results from both studies suggests that child age might influence sentencing decisions when little information is given. However, when more information is given (e.g., criminal history and details about the crime), child age does not influence sentencing decisions.Another important component of the present research was to determine why people might sentence defendants differently based on child age and defendant gender. Results from Study 2 revealed that people’s general concern for the child did not mediate the relationship between child age and prison time, and perceptions of the defendant’s moral character did not mediate the relationship between parental status and prison time. However, people’s general concern for the child and defendants’ moral character predicted prison time for the defendant, suggesting that people are influenced by their concern for the child and their perceptions of the defendants’ moral character when making sentencing decisions. Considering the defendant’s moral character when sentencing is a biased decision that impacts defendants’ outcomes, creating a disparity between defendants who are perceived to be more moral than others. However, considering the concern of the child when making sentencing decisions is desirable because children of parents who offend are less likely to be separated from their parents, thus protecting them from a whole host of negative outcomes (e.g., future delinquency, internalizing and externalizing problems).

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In the legal domain, depositions help lawyers and paralegals to record details and recall relevant information relating to a case. Depositions are conversations between a lawyer and a deponent and are generally in Question-Answer (QA) format. These documents can be lengthy, which raises the need for applying summarization methods to the documents. Though many automatic summarization methods are available, not all of them give good results, especially in the legal domain. This creates a need to process the QA pairs and develop methods to help summarize the deposition. For further downstream tasks like summarization and insight generation, converting QA pairs to canonical or declarative form can be helpful. Since the transformed canonical sentences are not perfectly readable, we explore methods based on heuristics, language modeling, and deep learning, to improve the quality of sentences in terms of grammaticality, sentence correctness, and relevance. Further, extracting important entities and keywords from a deposition will help rank the candidate summary sentences and assist with extractive summarization. This work investigates techniques for enhanced generation of canonical sentences and extracting relevant entities and keywords to improve deposition summarization. / Master of Science / In the legal domain, depositions help lawyers and paralegals to record details and recall relevant information relating to a case. Depositions are conversations between a lawyer and a deponent and are generally in Question-Answer format. These documents can be lengthy, which raises the need for applying summarization methods to the documents. Typical automatic summarization techniques perform poorly on depositions since the data format is very different from standard text documents such as news articles, blogs. To standardize the process of summary generation, we convert the Question-Answer pairs from the deposition document to their canonical or declarative form. We apply techniques to improve the readability of these transformed sentences. Further, we extract entities such as person names, locations, organization and keywords from the deposition to retrieve important sentences and help in summarization. This work describes the techniques used to correct transformed sentences and extract important entities and keywords to improve the summarization of depositions.

Semantically reversible sentences, i.e., sentences wherein both characters can potentially perform the given action, have long been used to understand the various mechanisms involved in successful sentence comprehension. Over the decades, studies have established that sentences with non-canonical word-orders such as passive voice sentences are more difficult to process than canonical counterparts such as active voice sentences using psycholinguistic, neuroimaging, lesion-based, and more recently transcranial brain stimulation methods such as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). In addition to understanding the cognitive processes involved, these studies have also attempted to uncover the underlying neural correlates. Various parts of the frontal, temporal, and parietal lobes have been thought to be critical for different functions. In the recent years, the parietal regions have garnered considerable attention. In particular, various studies have found the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) to be involved in the comprehension of semantically reversible sentences, particularly when they have non-canonical word-orders. In this thesis, I attempted to build on this literature and further understand the role of the IPS in sentence comprehension. More specifically I followed-up on two TMS studies by Finocchiaro and colleagues that looked at reversible Italian active and passive sentences. Online repetitive TMS (rTMS) to the posterior portion of the left IPS (henceforth, l-pIPS) affected only the processing of passive sentences in both experiments. In fact, one of the studies also found an effect on ‘passive’ pseudosentences, thus, prompting the authors to suggest that the l-pIPS affects passive sentences irrespective of semantic meaningfulness. The authors concluded that this region is likely to be involved in sentence comprehension, particularly at the stage where thematic reanalysis, i.e., a revision of the initially ascribed thematic roles, occurs. However, these studies were unable to discern if these effects were seen on reversible passives due to their reversibility, passive voice, or the non-canonical word-order seen in passive sentences. They also raised questions regarding whether the region is important in processing only thematic reversibility or is also involved in comprehending reversible sentences without thematic roles (e.g., comparative sentences). I ran three experiments to better understand these factors. In Chapter 1 I summarise the literature on the comprehension of reversible sentences. I discuss findings from behavioural, lesion-based, neuroimaging, and TMS studies that have formed the basis of the current thesis. I conclude by bringing to attention some of the questions raised by these studies that I have attempted to answer in the subsequent chapters. In Chapter 2 I attempted to understand the role of passive voice and reversibility in reanalysis and sentence comprehension. To do this I used a sentence comprehension task while administering online rTMS to the l-pIPS. Participants performed a forced-choice task where they were required to read reversible and irreversible Italian active and passive voice sentences and identify either the agent or the theme in alternate blocks. The experiment showed an effect of rTMS only on reversible passive sentences. While these results are in line with the previous studies, they also draw attention to a critical aspect of comprehension of passive voice sentences. They suggest that passive voice in itself may be insufficient to trigger reanalysis. Instead, it is likely that reanalysis is triggered by the co-occurrence of numerous factors such as voice and reversibility. However, as with the previous studies, this study still does not clarify the role of non-canonical word-order or passive voice per se. In an attempt to distinguish between the two, I ran an rTMS experiment with a sentence-picture verification task in Chapter 3. The experiment used reversible active and passive voice sentences in Hindi. The advantage that Hindi offers in this regard is that both actives and passives are typically presented in the agent-theme-action order. Consequently, such passives may not require the reassigning of originally established thematic roles. Stimulation to the l-pIPS showed no effects on these actives or passives. Interestingly, these null results serve as supporting evidence (albeit, weak) that non-canonical word-order may be essential for thematic reanalysis. If passive voice alone, or even a combination of passive voice and reversibility were sufficient to engender reanalysis, stimulation should have had effects on the passives even in the absence of a non-canonical word-order (as seen in the stimuli of this experiment). Finally, I attempted to understand if the region was involved only in comprehending reversible sentences with thematic role assignment, or also played a role in reversible sentences without thematic role assignment such as comparative sentences (where one of the two characters is the owner of a given property/feature). To do this, I ran the final rTMS experiment reported in Chapter 4. Participants received online stimulation to the l-pIPS while performing a sentence-picture verification task. The stimuli sentences consisted of reversible Italian declarative active and passive sentences, and comparative of majority or minority sentences. Comparatives were used because unlike Italian actives and passives, both types of comparatives are identical in word-order and other morphosyntactic features. In an attempt to maintain the visual complexity across stimuli pictures, same pictures were used to depict the relationships in both declarative and comparative sentences. The results of this study are rather puzzling. Unlike previous studies no effects were found on passive sentences. In terms of the comparative sentences, a selective effect was seen on the ‘easier’ comparatives of majority. These results call into question previous findings which have found an effect on the more ‘difficult’ sentence type, i.e., the passives. The effect of TMS on the comparatives of majority indicates the involvement of the l-pIPS in sentence comprehension yet again. However, these results to do not clarify what specific features of a sentence the l-pIPS helps comprehend. Moreover, given the consistent effect of rTMS on reversible Italian passives in the previous experiments, and the effect on comparatives of majority, it is possible that the current results may have been confounded by the use of complex stimuli. Coupled with the findings from the Finocchiaro studies, this thesis establishes the role of the l-pIPS in sentence comprehension. In particular, the results of the two Finocchiaro studies and Chapter 2 suggest that the co-occurrence of passive voice and reversibility is essential for reanalysis. While the results of Chapter 3 concur with these findings, they also strongly indicate that these features must co-occur with a third factor, namely a non-canonical word-order, to trigger reanalysis. Lastly, the results of Chapter 4 clarify the l-pIPS’ involvement in sentence comprehension. However, it leaves the exact role of the l-pIPS unclear in comprehending reversible sentences without thematic role assignment. The current thesis has advanced our understanding of some key factors responsible for reanalysis, and its neural correlates. Future studies can aim to understand these factors better by exploiting parallel versions of the same sentence type, and by studying different sentence types in isolation. For example, Hindi passives can be presented in both agent-theme-action and theme-agent-action word-orders. Contrasting such versions may help answer questions pertaining to word-order. On the other hand, studying sentences like declaratives and comparatives in separate experiments or even separate sessions may help simplify stimuli, thereby giving us clearer results.

Two studies are reported investigating the role of articulation at input on the memory of visually presented sentences. The results of Experiment I indicated that irrelevant articulatory activity caused a decrement for the verbatim recall of both instructive sentences and word lists. However, there was no recall decrement for instructive sentences when the recall task consisted of carrying out the instructions given in the sentence. Experiment II indicated that irrelevant articulatory activity resulted in a decrement for sentence recognition with respect to both meaning and word changes. The results of the two experiments are discussed in terms of a differential need for the articulatory apparatus in the processing of "light" versus "heavy" information loads. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

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published_or_final_version / Social Work / Master / Master of Social Work