The Nature of Syntactic Gender Processing in Spanish: An ERP StudySyntactic gender as a lexical feature has been studied via picture-word interference paradigms in many languages. While effects have been found for noun phrase production in many languages, no effects have been found in Spanish, despite the fact that articles, nouns, and adjectives have a syntactic gender. Cubelli et al. (2005) found inhibitory effects in bare noun production in Italian which led to the hypothesis that such effects could be found for Spanish. Experiments 1 and 2 represented attempts replicate Cubelli et al.'s findings (Experiment 1 used an auditory distractor word and Experiment 2 a visual distractor), however no gender congruency effects were found. Experiment 3 attempted to generate congruency effects by requiring subjects to utilize gender-marked demonstratives and adjectives but still no effects were found. The lack of effects gave rise to the proposal that gender is not accessed during noun phrase production in Spanish and that the extreme regularity of the gender-marking system makes an article-plus-noun phrase more akin to a single lexical unit that can be accessed without an explicit synthetic process. Experiment 4 contrasted simple noun phrases that might be directly retrieved to constructions with long-distance dependencies, for which access to abstract gender features is relevant to parsing hierarchical sentence structure and aimed to distinguish these distinct cognitive processes via event-related potentials. The hypothesis was that a local gender violation in a sentence like "la piano" (the-fem piano-masc) would elicit a LAN as compared to the correct alternative, while a long-distance violation like "el piano que compré ayer es antigua" (the-masc piano-masc that I bought yesterday is antique-fem) would elicit a P600. All violations elicited a LAN and all violations involving adjacent segments elicited a P600; critically, the long-distance violation did not elicit a P600. It was concluded that the P600 reflects a repair process which occurs when such repair is not costly to the parser. Experiment 5 was a behavioral study using the stimuli from Experiment 4 with an error detection task which confirmed that subjects were sensitive to all error types.

This thesis presents an account of some of the mental mechanisms and processes that take the addressee from a linguistic input to the interpretation of that input. Because on-line interpretation involves our knowledge of language, the relation between input processing and grammar is evaluated. The full interpretation of a linguistic input also involves pragmatic, i.e. central cognitive processes, but these processes are the least well understood within psycholinguistics. Relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1986) gives us a way of making our understanding of these processes more explicit. However, Relevance theory claims turn out to be incompatible with psycholinguistic models which postulate an autonomous syntactic parser, such as the 'Garden-path' model. A review of the experimental literature reveals that the findings claimed to support the 'Garden-path' model do not in fact support it. Likewise, the principle of Lexical Preference, proposed to account for how verb subcategorization frames are accessed, turns out not to be supported by the experimental evidence. Full interpretation involves computing a conceptual representation, and an account is given of what constitutes conceptual structure. This leads to the proposal that verbs are represented as structured concepts. This view of verb representation together with Relevance theory can account for when arguments of verbs can be left implicit. Finally, an account is given of how the addressee computes the propositional form communicated by an utterance, by building hypotheses about the conceptual structure of the proposition on-line. These hypotheses are based on structural information stored under the concepts referred to by the utterance. This proposal can account for psycholinguistic research findings, with pragmatics playing an integral role in the explanations: it is no longer grafted onto the model as a psycholinguistic afterthought.

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Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2009. / Title from title screen (site viewed January 12, 2010). PDF text: xi, 118 p. : ill. ; 668 K. UMI publication number: AAT 3360498. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in microfilm and microfiche formats.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1962. / Vita. Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 151-159).

Research has revealed a relation between phonological working memory (PWM) and language abilities, showing that children with language-learning impairments have poorer PWM than their typically-developing peers (Montgomery et al., 2010). Limited work has examined PWM in relation to sentence production abilities in school-aged children. We hypothesized that PWM abilities would predict performance on the Formulated Sentences (FS) subtest of the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals – IV, of typically-developing and language-learning impaired school-aged children (N=273). Additionally, we hypothesized that the children's PWM abilities would correlate with characteristics of their correct formulated sentences, measured by lexical diversity, length, and complexity (hypothesis 2), and that PWM would correlate with processing fluency, measured by mazes (hypothesis 3) and pauses (hypothesis 4). For our fifth hypothesis, we predicted there would be group differences in PWM and sentence characteristics when comparing the typically-developing children to children with language-learning impairment. We examined these hypotheses with data from a subset of 27 children with language-learning impairment and 27 typically-developing peers. Results support our first and third hypotheses and partially support our fifth hypothesis but not our second or fourth hypotheses. These results suggest that PWM can be used to predict FS scores and that PWM may be more closely related to the types of errors in children’s sentences. Furthermore, results from our fifth hypothesis suggest that deficits in PWM and sentence production may simply co-occur but not interact in children with language-learning impairment.

The imposition of penalties on the concurrence of criminal offenses Abstract This work deals with the issue of punishing the concurence of criminal offenses. In its introduction, the most important criminal law institutes are briefly analyzed, knowledge of which is a prerequisite for a proper understanding of the following chapters. This defines the concepts of concurrence of crimes, recidivism and the continuation of a criminal offense. Similarly, the general issues of sentencing are outlined. The very core of the thesis is devoted to the gradual analysis of the individual aspects of penalisation of concurrent criminal offenses, together with the questions of combining with other special cases of punishment, especially with the punishment of the continuation of the crime. In addition, some procedural issues and selected special cases are dealt with, consisting of the subject's specialty, the consequences of a misappropriation of the punishment, and finally the question of punishment for the crime of drunkenness. The thesis is supplemented by an international comparison of the issues studied with common law countries. The main aim of the work is to create a complex processing of the topic, which would allow its possible practical application. In addition to the conclusions of the doctrine, the work puts a...

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The purpose of this study is to explore a possible method of diagnosing marital difficulties. This is an exploratory investigation into the possibility of developing a particular method for marital diagnosis rather than a specific test for such a diagnosis. This method consists of a series of related sentence stems which the subject completes and then rates as to their degree of difficulty.

The purpose of my thesis is to analyse the life imprisonment and answer basic questions related to issue of this criminal sanction. It is necessary to study the life imprisonment from the perspective of the criminal law, but in the light of psychological and social aspects that are connected with the long-term imprisonment. The thesis is composed of six main chapters, which are divided into different subchapters. Each of these chapters is dedicated to several aspects of life imprisonment and this work is trying to give a global view of the life imprisonment. The Introduction is followed by Chapter One which defines the term and purpose of the punishment. This Chapter presents the history of the evolution of the punishment. This work describes development of the concept of the punishment from retribution and frighten to the modern comprehension that respects human rights and liberties. The work is pointing out the example of the remarkable Italian scientist Cesare Beccaria, who came with the modern comprehension of the punishment in the era of the Enlightenment. However, the modern view prevailed not earlier than in the 19th century. The Chapter One also explains the system of the punishment. The Chapter Two examines the death penalty. The death penalty is a sanction that must be compared with the...