This study is a qualitative case study investigation of the expanded use of the voice in the treatment of trauma. It examines the Deep Story process, a treatment for traumatic memory using both languaged narrative and pre-language sounding, or PLS. The Deep Story process uses an interactive team protocol with a story teller, a reflector, and a witness, involving repeated tellings of the trauma story both in and out of language. The use of the embodied voice in the treatment of trauma is under-researched and the purpose of this study is to provide an experiential data base to generate knowledge about how the intentional use of vocal frequencies might alleviate the stress of trauma. In-depth interviews were conducted with five women, two Germans and three Americans, ages thirty-seven to forty-eight, who had participated in a therapy training which included Deep Story trauma work. Data collection also included a follow-up questionnaire, meetings and phone contacts. Thematic analysis, using the constant comparative method, defined the experience of the participants and provided data for emerging implications and further study. Participants reported a lessening of anxiety around the trauma after the Deep Story work, and a stronger sense of empowerment, authenticity, and voice in the world. For all the participants, the locus of therapeutic change was in the pre-language sounding component of the protocol. These findings suggest that such extended use of the voice in the Deep Story treatment lessens the toxity of traumatic memory and can be an effective intervention in the treatment of trauma.

There is considerable evidence to show that computerized-adaptive testing (CAT) and multi-stage testing (MST) are viable frameworks for testing. With many testing organizations looking to move towards CAT or MST, it is important to know what framework is superior in different situations and at what cost in terms of measurement. What was needed is a comparison of the different testing procedures under various realistic testing conditions. This dissertation addressed the important problem of the increase or decrease in accuracy of ability estimation in using MST rather than CAT. The purpose of this study was to compare the accuracy of ability estimates produced by MST and CAT while keeping some variables fixed and varying others. A simulation study was conducted to investigate the effects of several factors on the accuracy of ability estimation using different CAT and MST designs. The factors that were manipulated are the number of stages, the number of subtests per stage, and the number of items per subtest. Kept constant were test length, distribution of subtest information, method of determining cut-points on subtests, amount of overlap between subtests, and method of scoring total test. The primary question of interest was, given a fixed test length, how many stages and many subtests per stage should there be to maximize measurement precision? Furthermore, how many items should there be in each subtest? Should there be more in the routing test or should there be more in the higher stage tests? Results showed that, in general, increasing the number of stages from two to three decreased the amount of errors in ability estimation. Increasing the number of subtests from three to five increased the accuracy of ability estimates as well as the efficiency of the MST designs relative to the P&P and CAT designs at most ability levels (–.75 to 2.25). Finally, at most ability levels (–.75 to 2.25), varying the number of items per stage had little effect on either the resulting accuracy of ability estimates or the relative efficiency of the MST designs to the P&P and CAT designs.

This work investigates the processing of Italian subject pronouns, both the null and the overt pronoun, in intra-sentential anaphora. A processing hypothesis is proposed, the Position of Antecedent Hypothesis, based on the assumption that there is a division of labor, with the null pronoun preferring a more prominent antecedent than the overt one. Furthermore, it is argued that in intra-sentential anaphora antecedent prominence is determined by syntactic position, with the Spec IP position, the pre-verbal position of the subject, being more prominent than other positions lower in the syntactic tree. The predictions of the Position of Antecedent Hypothesis are tested in a series of off-line and on-line experiments investigating a variety of antecedents standardly assumed to occupy Spec IP at s-structure: referential nominative and dative subjects, expletive subjects (tested in impersonal sentences, seem-sentences, existential-there and post-verbal subject sentences), and quantified subjects. One-referent and two-referent ambiguous and unambiguous contexts are investigated. Overall, the findings support the Position of Antecedent Hypothesis, as opposed to a hypothesis based on an economy principle (favoring the null pronoun generally), or one based on avoidance of ambiguity (favoring the overt pronoun). The findings show, however, that the antecedent bias of the overt pronoun is less stable and more context-dependent than that of the null pronoun. The processing of bound variable pronouns is also investigated. The results refute Montalbetti (1984). Differences between intra- and extra-sentential anaphora are explored. It is shown that pronoun resolution in extra-sentential anaphora is less sensitive to surface syntactic position than in intra-sentential anaphora, suggesting that the representations involved in the two types of anaphora are not isomorphic. It is also argued that the Feature Hierarchy (person > number > gender) has processing reflexes in pronoun resolution: features high on the Feature Hierarchy are better pronoun disambiguators than features low on the hierarchy. Overall this research supports the view that intra-sentential anaphora resolution in Italian is primarily sensitive to structural factors and that being in a Spec IP position confers special prominence on an antecedent. The cross-linguistic implications for the processing of pronouns in pro-drop and non-pro languages are discussed.

The goal of this dissertation was to test the hypothesis that great apes can solve both visible and invisible displacements, whereas monkeys can solve only visible displacements. First, rhesus monkeys, squirrel monkeys, and orangutans received visible and invisible displacement tests that correspond to Stages 4, 5, and 6 of object permanence. Monkeys and orangutans were successful on the visible displacement tests. Most orangutans were successful on all invisible displacement tests except the double displacements. The monkeys were not successful on invisible displacement tests and they had a location preference. Subsequent testing revealed that (1) rhesus monkeys eventually solved single and control invisible displacements, (2) two rhesus monkeys eventually solved double displacements, (3) using a familiar containment device improved performance on invisible displacements and (4) most orangutans eventually solved double invisible displacements when the object was concealed in a cup. In the second part of the dissertation, I determined if poorer performance on invisible displacements was related to increased memory requirement. The primates received three types of problems that had equivalent memory requirement. On Invisible transfer problems, the object was hidden in a box and then invisibly transferred to another box, whereas on Visible transfer problems the object was visibly transferred, and on No transfer problems, it was not transferred. The rhesus monkeys and the squirrel monkeys solved the Visible and the No transfer problems. Only one monkey was successful on the Invisible transfer problems. Given that all problems had equivalent memory requirements, this variable cannot account for poorer performance on Invisible transfer problems. Most orangutans solved all three types of problems. Nevertheless, the performance of the orangutans on Invisible transfer problems was poorer than that on the other problems. Next, cueing sessions were instituted during which a clear box was used in order to allow the primates to see if and how the object was transferred. Then, the primates were re-tested on the three problems. Cuing helped monkeys and orangutans find the object on Invisible transfer problems. In summary, the results of this dissertation indicated that overall, the orangutans outperformed the monkeys on invisible displacements. However, a few orangutans performed as poorly as the monkeys on invisible displacements, and a few monkeys performed as well as the orangutans. Thus, individual differences must be taken into account to adequately portray the distribution of object permanence skills in non-human primates.

This work examines the role of topic and focus in sentence processing, with particular attention to Hungarian. It is proposed that sentence topic and contrastive focus have a privileged relation to any prior discourse-related phrases, allowing them to influence the processing of the current sentence. The dissertation describes a series of experiments designed to test a distinction in processing of the discourse-related phrases topic and focus on the one hand, and non-discourse-related (background) constituents on the other. I argue that topic and focus receive discourse-interpretation during their initial processing; by contrast, elements in the background (other than inherently discourse-related ones) are incorporated into the discourse only after the entire proposition has been processed. This has important consequences for the types of information used by the parser when processing topic and focus vs. background. In particular, I propose that topic plays a distinguished role in constructing the contrast set for a contrastively focused item. The privileged role of topic and focus is argued to follow from a syntactic property of Hungarian, namely, the structural marking of topic and focus. This allows the parser to identify the discourse-related status of topic and focus as soon as they are encountered. Immediate discourse interpretation of topic and focus is further related to the possibility of multiple filler-gap dependencies in Hungarian, which raises special issues in processing complexity and memory limitations. I examine some grammatical and parsing principles necessary to interpret simultaneous dependencies between two topics or wh-phrases and their traces. I propose that the parser constructs temporary memory buffers on the spot for each type of A$\sp\prime$-dependency (topic, wh-phrase) separately, to help relieve the burden on immediate memory posed by a series of unassigned fillers.

Piaget (1953) believed object permanence emerges through a series of stages at approximately 18-months. Contemporary researchers have suggested infants achieve object permanence by 3.5-months. A series of studies by Baillargeon (1987) utilized a violation-of-expectation paradigm habituating infants to a paddle moving 180$\sp\circ$. During test trials, a block was positioned in the path of the paddle. During "possible" trials, the paddle moved 120$\sp\circ$, stopped at the block and returned. During the "impossible" trials, the paddle moved 180$\sp\circ$, seemingly through the block. Infants looked longer at the impossible events suggesting an understanding that one object cannot occupy the space of another object contiguously. Looking times could not be explained by detecting perceptual novelty because the impossible event was the more familiar of the test events. Hunter and Ames (1988) have demonstrated that infants look longer at familiar stimuli if they have not thoroughly encoded habituation stimuli. These researchers believed that habituation is a function of time, age, and task difficulty. The current research examines the possibility that infants look longer at impossible events because these events are perceptually familiar. To test whether infants had sufficient opportunity to encode habituation events using the moving paddle paradigm, the number of habituation trials and infants' age were manipulated. Four-month-olds who received 7-180$\sp\circ$ habituation trials looked longer at the 180$\sp\circ$ test event (a significant familiarity preference). Four-month-olds receiving 7-112$\sp\circ$ habituation trials looked longer at the 112$\sp\circ$ test event (a significant familiarity preference). Four-month-olds receiving 12-180$\sp\circ$ habituation events looked significantly longer at the 112$\sp\circ$ test event (a significant novelty preference). A group of 6-month-olds habituated to 7-180$\sp\circ$ trials showed no preterential looking during the test trials. For the four-month-olds, looking times during the test trials were a function of the type of familiarity event and whether there were enough trials to fully encode the habituation events. Looking time was not necessarily a function of an inferred violation of physics. Performance on the moving paddle paradigm might be more easily explained by perceptual mechanisms.

Although it has been hypothesized that children's attention is mediated by their comprehension (Anderson & Lorch, 1983), very little research has examined what toddlers actually understand of what they see on television, mostly due to their limited verbal abilities. Research on the comprehension of other symbolic media (i.e., pictures or scale models) indicates a rapid developmental change between two and three years of age in the realization that a symbol represents something other than itself. Two experiments were designed to non-verbally test whether 2- to 3-year-olds showed a similar developmental progression in understanding the correspondence between television and reality. In Study One, 2-, 2.5-, and 3-year-olds were shown a video of a toy being hidden in a room. Subsequently, they were asked to find the toy. Their performance was compared to that of children who saw the same event through a window. At all ages, children who watched through the window were able to find the toys. Three-year-olds who watched the events on TV were also able to find the toys. Two- and 2.5-year-olds who watched the events on TV were able to find the toy during their first trial but on subsequent trials frequently made an error of going to the location where the toy had previously been hidden. The 2.5-year-olds were able to correct such errors but 2-year-olds had difficulty doing so. In Study Two, 2-year-olds' ability to use televised information was examined with an easier task. They watched on video or through a window as a person placed a toy on a piece of furniture. They were subsequently asked to imitate the toy placement. Performance was again superior after watching presentations through a window than on TV. Two-year-olds performed better with this imitation task than they had with the searching task. Performance was better during the first 2 trials than during the latter 2 trials. The findings from this research indicate that toddlers have some sense of the correspondence between TV and reality. Nevertheless, there are considerable developmental advances in the stability of this understanding between two and three years of age. It was suggested that young toddlers' difficulty with using televised information was due to a weaker representation, requiring them to use alternative strategies. Understanding of the correspondence between television and reality appears to show a developmental progression similar to that seen with other symbol systems, suggesting that there are underlying cognitive changes that are necessary in order for children to be able to understand the representational function.

The characterization of the relationship between morphological and syntactic properties of sentences is central to current linguistic theories, for example, suggesting that morphological features play a central role in determining verb movement and the occurrence of null and expletive subjects. Given such a theory of competence, many questions arise about the role of these features in performance, such as: Is there a primary role for morpho-syntactic feature information in parsing sentences? How is feature checking accomplished and at what stage of the parse? The thesis addresses these questions with on and off-line studies of the comprehension of subject-verb agreement in English. Two general views are contrasted: (1) agreement information constrains initial parsing decisions (the “Structure Building” hypothesis) and (2) agreement is checked on structure which has been built using only major category information and structural parsing principles (the “Structure Evaluation” hypothesis). Evidence presented in this thesis, as well as previously reported results, are argued to support the Structure Evaluation hypothesis. A detailed statement of the checking process (the Structural Agreement Check) is developed within the Structure Evaluation approach. The SAC assumes (following previous work) that the nominal singular is underspecified and that feature checking is initiated at the verb. Evidence is presented that checking is enforced by passing agreement features through the links of the phrase structure tree between the subject and verb. Further evidence in favor of the Structure Evaluation hypothesis and the SAC will come from on- and off-line data in three previously uninvestigated domains: agreement with ambiguous Pseudo-partitive DPs, agreement with Pseudo-partitive and Coordinate DPs in verb-subject order constructions and agreement in more complex structural contexts (subject-verb agreement embedded in a filler-gap feature dependency and verb agreement in ambiguous subject relative clauses). In addition to providing a more detailed characterization of the role of agreement features and representation of the agreement relation in parsing, the results contribute to the analysis of the structure of Pseudo-partitive DPs and the Existential construction (as compared to other post-verbal subject constructions). Finally, it is shown in two case studies that the processing mechanisms proposed here may play a role in destabilizing perceivers' intuitions about grammaticality and possibly lead to language change.

Infants less than 8 months old appear to lack the concept of object permanence because they fail to search for hidden objects. However, when looking rather than reaching is assessed, infants appear to have object permanence long before 8 months. One explanation for the discrepancy is that young infants lack the means-end motor skill to retrieve objects hidden by covers. The present research tested the object permanence deficit hypothesis against the means-end deficit hypothesis. Direct-reach search tasks were used, which should result in increased search by young infants if the means-end deficit hypothesis is correct. In Experiment 1, 6- and 10-month-old infants were presented with an object visible in water, partly visible in milk hidden in milk, or hidden under a cloth. As predicted by the object permanence deficit hypothesis, 6-month-old infants were less likely to search when the object was hidden than when it was visible or partly visible, but there were no differences at 10 months. The means-end deficit hypothesis prediction that younger infants would be less likely to search when the object was hidden by a cloth than when it was hidden by milk was not confirmed. In Experiment 2, 6- and 10-month-old infants were presented with an object visible behind a transparent curtain, partly visible through a hole in an opaque curtain, partly visible (fit flashlight) under a cloth, and hidden behind a completely opaque curtain. As predicted by the object permanence deficit hypothesis, 6-month-old infants were less likely to search when the object was hidden than when it was visible or partly visible, but there were almost no differences at 10 months. Unexpectedly, measures of locomotor ability were not reliably related to infants' search at 6 months. In a comparison of the cloth event of Experiment 1 and the flashlight event of Experiment 2, half the results indicated that 6-month-old infants were more likely to search in the partly visible event. The results are more consistent with the object permanence deficit hypothesis than with the means-end deficit hypothesis.

This thesis investigates the processing of ellipsis sentences, focusing on the following questions: (i) are ellipsis sentences processed using special routines employed only for ellipsis or are they processed using the same principles needed for unelided sentences? (ii) does parallelism influence sentence processing? if so, what kinds of similarities matter? The interpretation of ambiguous gapping sentences (e.g., Janie asked my dad about careers and Sharon about politics) is explored first, finding that lexical and prosodic similarities between the DP remnant (Sharon) and either DP in the first clause raise the rate of analyses placing Sharon in a syntactic position corresponding to that of the most similar DP, supporting (1). (1) DP Parallelism Hypothesis. The processor favors analyses in which DPs that share internal properties (have similar syntactic, prosodic, and semantic features) share external properties (appear in similar structural positions within their respective clauses or phrases), and vice versa. The availability of a smaller syntactic structure for the object interpretation of Sharon, however, leads to an overall bias towards that analysis. These results show that parallelism between DPs is indeed favored by the processor, but it modulates the general preference for minimal structure (e.g., Frazier, 1978, 1987). Further experiments explore whether parallelism is only effective in structures containing and, or whether it has a broader domain of application. Experiments on comparative, stripping, and replacive ellipsis sentences show that (1) applies generally in a range of ellipsis types. The relationship between focus and prosodic parallelism is explored to investigate whether prosodic similarity of elements in the elided and antecedent clauses is due entirely to their focus structure. An experiment manipulating parallelism of pitch range shows that prosodic properties unrelated to focus can also affect processing. Finally, a production experiment finds that prosodic renditions of ellipsis sentences can be quite similar to those of full conjoined sentences. The overall conclusion is that parallelism between DPs can affect the processing of a range of ellipsis structures, as well as unelided structures (e.g., Black, Coltheart, & Byng, 1985; Frazier, Munn, & Clifton, 2000; Henstra, 1996), but that there is no need for construction-specific mechanisms in processing theory.