Search

Learning in any domain depends on how the data for learning are represented. In the domain of language acquisition, children's representations of the speech they hear determine what generalizations they can draw about their target grammar. But these input representations change over development as a function of children's developing linguistic knowledge, and may be incomplete or inaccurate when children lack the knowledge to parse their input veridically. How does learning succeed in the face of potentially misleading data? We address this issue using the case study of "non‐basic" clauses in verb learning. A young infant hearing What did Amy fix? might not recognize that what stands in for the direct object of fix, and might think that fix is occurring without a direct object. We follow a previous proposal that children might filter nonbasic clauses out of the data for learning verb argument structure, but offer a new approach. Instead of assuming that children identify the data to filter in advance, we demonstrate computationally that it is possible for learners to infer a filter on their input without knowing which clauses are nonbasic. We instantiate a learner that considers the possibility that it misparses some of the sentences it hears, and learns to filter out those parsing errors in order to correctly infer transitivity for the majority of 50 frequent verbs in child‐directed speech. Our learner offers a novel solution to the problem of learning from immature input representations: Learners may be able to avoid drawing faulty inferences from misleading data by identifying a filter on their input, without knowing in advance what needs to be filtered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Natural languages like English connect pronunciations with meanings. Linguistic pronunciations can be described in ways that relate them to our motor system (e.g., to the movement of our lips and tongue). But how do linguistic meanings relate to our nonlinguistic cognitive systems? As a case study, we defend an explicit proposal about the meaning of most by comparing it to the closely related more: whereas more expresses a comparison between two independent subsets, most expresses a subset–superset comparison. Six experiments with adults and children demonstrate that these subtle differences between their meanings influence how participants organize and interrogate their visual world. In otherwise identical situations, changing the word from most to more affects preferences for picture–sentence matching (experiments 1–2), scene creation (experiments 3–4), memory for visual features (experiment 5), and accuracy on speeded truth judgments (experiment 6). These effects support the idea that the meanings of more and most are mental representations that provide detailed instructions to conceptual systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lila Gleitman's body of work on word learning raises an apparent paradox. Whereas work on syntactic bootstrapping depends on learners retaining information about the set of distributional contexts that a word occurs in, work on identifying a word's referent suggests that learners do not retain information about the set of extralinguistic contexts that a word occurs in. I argue that this asymmetry derives from the architecture of the language faculty. Learners expect words with similar meanings to have similar distributions, and so learning depends on a memory for syntactic environments. The referential context in which a word is used is less constrained and hence contributes less to the memories that drive word learning. Lidz also ponders the theory of syntactic bootstrapping by asking why it is that learners are considered to retain little of extralinguistic environments (i.e., their observations) during word learning, while being able to retain detailed representations of linguistic context, for example, the multiple syntactic frames in which a verb appears. Lidz argues that learners value syntactic information over extralinguistic context from the beginning of learning, consistent with syntactic bootstrapping as a key device for verb learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to a policy of the National Institutes of Health and requirements in the revised Common Rule, a protocol for a multisite study must be reviewed by a single institutional review board (IRB), rather than by the IRB at each study site. The goal of the single IRB approach is to increase the efficiency of IRB review of multisite research without jeopardizing protections for research subjects. Yet the extent to which these joint goals are being achieved is unclear. To better understand how single IRBs function, we recruited academic, government, and commercial single IRBs (N = 49) to participate in a study involving observation of protocol review meetings and/or interviews with their members, chairs, and administrators. Twenty (40.8%) agreed to participate, of which 50% agreed to both interviews and observation. While 81.8% (9/11) of academic and 50% (4/8) of government single IRBs participated in some way, only 23.3% (7/30) of commercial single IRBs did so. The four largest commercial single IRBs declined to participate. Because evaluation of single IRBs is important to inform development, implementation, monitoring, and refinement of federal policies, single IRBs should be encouraged to participate in research that examines how they function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do children learn the meanings of propositional attitude verbs? We argue that children use information contained in both syntactic distribution and pragmatic function to zero in on the appropriate meanings. Specifically, we identify a potentially universal link between semantic subclasses of attitude verbs, their syntactic distribution and the kinds of indirect speech acts they can be used to perform. As a result, children can use the syntax as evidence about the meaning, which in turn constrains the kinds of pragmatic enrichments they do and do not make in understanding these verbs in conversation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New federal policies require single IRB review for multisite studies, but many questions remain about how these IRBs will use local knowledge. The findings from our study, the first to examine how single IRBs perceive needs for local knowledge, reveal several challenges. Study respondents identified four potentially relevant types of local knowledge: about culture and linguistics, about geography and socioeconomics, about the researchers, and about the institutions. Such knowledge can potentially be obtained through local sites, but single IRBs may be unaware of potentially relevant local information, and lack of informal relationships may impede single IRBs' reviews and interactions with researchers. While a recent, commonly used, standardized single-IRB form asks three basic questions about local information, our findings suggest potential needs for additional information and, thus, have important implications for practice, policy, and research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Propositional attitude verbs, such as think and want, have long held interest for both theoretical linguists and language acquisitionists because their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties display complex interactions that have proven difficult to fully capture from either perspective. This paper explores the granularity with which these verbs’ semantic and pragmatic properties are recoverable from their syntactic distributions, using three behavioral experiments aimed at explicitly quantifying the relationship between these two sets of properties. Experiment 1 gathers a measure of 30 propositional attitude verbs’ syntactic distributions using an acceptability judgment task. Experiments 2a and 2b gather measures of semantic similarity between those same verbs using a generalized semantic discrimination (triad or “odd man out”) task and an ordinal (Likert) scale task, respectively. Two kinds of analyses are conducted on the data from these experiments. The first compares both the acceptability judgments and the semantic similarity judgments to previous classifications derived from the syntax and semantics literature. The second kind compares the acceptability judgments to the semantic similarity judgments directly. Through these comparisons, we show that there is quite fine‐grained information about propositional attitude verbs’ semantics carried in their syntactic distributions—whether one considers the sorts of discrete qualitative classifications that linguists traditionally work with or the sorts of continuous quantitative classifications that can be derived experimentally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a 2006 Institute of Medicine report highlights, surprisingly little empirical attention has been paid to how prisoners arrive at decisions to participate in modern research. With our study, we aimed to fill this gap by identifying a more comprehensive range of factors as reported by prisoners themselves during semistructured interviews. Our participants described a diverse range of motives, both favoring and opposing their eventual decision to join. Many are well-recognized considerations among nonincarcerated clinical research participants, including a desire for various forms of personal benefit, altruism, and concern about study risks and inconveniences. However, a number of influences seem unique to prisoners. Participants did not report that they were not coerced into enrolling, and they have even been under pressure not to enroll. However, many sought to enroll in order to obtain access to better health care, raising a concern about whether they were unfairly exploited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children acquiring languages with noun classes (grammatical gender) have ample statistical information available that characterizes the distribution of nouns into these classes, but their use of this information to classify novel nouns differs from the predictions made by an optimal Bayesian classifier. We use rational analysis to investigate the hypothesis that children are classifying nouns optimally with respect to a distribution that does not match the surface distribution of statistical features in their input. We propose three ways in which children's apparent statistical insensitivity might arise, and find that all three provide ways to account for the difference between children's behavior and the optimal classifier. A fourth model combines two of these proposals and finds that children's insensitivity is best modeled as a bias to ignore certain features during classification, rather than an inability to encode those features during learning. These results provide insight into children's developing knowledge of noun classes and highlight the complex ways in which statistical information from the input interacts with children's learning processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little is known about the coercive pressures brought to bear on psychiatric patients in the hospitalization process. Significant methodological hurdles stand in the way of this research. Most notably, reliable and valid methods of ascertaining and quantifying perceptions of coercion have not been developed. This report summarizes the findings of an exploratory study designed to gather data needed to refine the conceptualization and measurement of coercion. Multiple perspectives on admission incidents for forty-three patients (26% of whom were involuntarily hospitalized) were obtained. Patients were administered research interviews and completed a self-administered inventory shortly after the admission decision. The admitting clinician and a family member involved in the admission were administered parallel interviews. In addition, focus groups comprised of outpatients, former patients, family members, and clinical staff were conducted to uncover the terminology and description of coercion commonly used. The implications of these preliminary quantitative and qualitative findings for future research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We administered a semi-structured interview to 157 patients shortly after their admission to a psychiatric hospital. In the first, and open-ended, part of the interview, patients were asked to talk about what had been going on in their lives that led to their coming into the hospital. Then, in a more structured format, they were asked more specific details about who was involved, the patients' relationships with those involved, whether any attempts were made to influence the patient to come into the hospital, and whether such attempts were perceived as fair by the patient. This article presents a qualitative review of the transcripts of a subset of these interviews. It attends specifically to patients' perceptions of the morality of attempts by others--primarily family members, friends and mental health professionals--to influence them to be admitted to the hospital, and of the morality of the process by which these influence attempts resulted in admission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legal and extra-legal coercion are pervasive in mental hospital admission and there are sharp disputes about its appropriate role. This article presents two scales for measuring psychiatric patients' perceptions of coercion during hospital admission and reports data on these scales' internal consistency. We measure patients' perceptions of coercion by asking questions, in either an interview or questionnaire format, about their experience of lack of control, choice, influence, and freedom in hospital admission. Patients' responses to questions about their perceptions of coercion were highly internally consistent. The internal consistency of the scale was robust with respect to variation in site, instrument format, patient population, and interview procedure. Correspondence analysis was used to construct two numerical scales of perceived coercion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2007, we began an outreach program in Linguistics with psychology students in a local majority-minority high school. In the years since, the initial collaboration has grown to include other schools and nurtured a culture of community engagement in the language sciences at the University of Maryland. The program has led to a number of benefits for both the public school students and the University researchers involved. Over the years, our efforts have developed into a multi-faceted outreach program targeting primary and secondary school as well as the public more broadly. Through our outreach, we attempt to take a modest step toward increasing public awareness and appreciation of the importance of language science, toward the integration of research into the school curriculum, and giving potential first-generation college students a taste of what they are capable of. In this article, we describe in detail our motivations and goals, the details of the activities, and where we can go from here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The meaning of ‘most’ can be described in many ways. We offer a framework for distinguishing semantic descriptions, interpreted as psychological hypotheses that go beyond claims about sentential truth conditions, and an experiment that tells against an attractive idea: ‘most’ is understood in terms of one-to-one correspondence. Adults evaluated ‘Most of the dots are yellow’, as true or false, on many trials in which yellow dots and blue dots were displayed for 200 ms. Displays manipulated the ease of using a ‘one-to-one with remainder’ strategy, and a strategy of using the Approximate Number System to compare of (approximations of) cardinalities. Interpreting such data requires care in thinking about how meaning is related to verification. But the results suggest that ‘most’ is understood in terms of cardinality comparison, even when counting is impossible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the application of the legal doctrine of informed consent as a model for voluntariness of consent to human subjects research. Informed consent to research derives from a legal doctrine that calls for potential research subjects to have meaningful choice, and it comprises three elements that include relevant information on voluntariness that is provided to a person who is competent to make a decision, and who is situated to do so voluntarily. The article describes the constraints on voluntariness that may appear in the research setting and suggests a research agenda to advance understanding of voluntariness in practice.

The doctrine of informed consent rests on empirical claims. This is true particularly of what commentators have characterized as the “strong” model of informed consent. This model assumes that if adequate information is given to a competent individual, understanding will result and, permitted to make a voluntary decision, the individual will make a rational decision. However, the “therapeutic misconception” posits that individuals may confuse the goals of research with those of treatment and may make decisions that do not rest on adequate understanding. This article reviews research suggesting that this may in fact be true, and concludes that, as a result, traditional notions of informed consent may not yield results consistent with the assumptions on which the doctrine of informed consent rests. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Coercion during psychiatric admissions has been a topic of debate for many years. Although there has been considerable research on patients' perceptions of coercion, there has been no work on who places pressures on patients to be admitted. Method: This article integrates interview data from interviews with patients, admitting staff and family and friends to describe the pressures brought to bear on patients to be admitted. Results: Health-care professionals appear to be the most important source of pressures on patients, and to have the most impact on patients' perceptions of coercion. However, there are differences in type of pressure, and the pressures used by family and friends appear to having the most longstanding impact. Conclusion: Legal and clinical efforts to reduce the level of coercive pressures on patients need to recognize the importance of mental-health professionals, including especially those who are not legally mandated to participate in the admission process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The inquiries of Weber and Parsons into the relationships between value freedom and value-relevance as elements in the methodology of the social sciences are renewed in the present essay. A major foundation of the discussion is provided by the Weber-Parsons distinction between Judgments pertaining to values, value-commitments, and the value-relevance of knowledge, on the one hand, and judgments of fact or logic, schemas of proof, and the value-freedom of intellectual disciplines, on the other hand. However, questions are raised about the methodological claims that value-relevance necessarily represents a relativistic element in a body of knowledge while any universality of its significance can be grounded only in pertinent schemas of proof. The factor of value-relevance is examined in a more differentiated fashion by two applications of the Parsonian four-function paradigm. In the first paradigm, four fundamental elements of the value-relevance of social scientific knowledge are identified. In the second paradigm, four levels in the cultural generalization of the value-relevance specifically of theoretical knowledge are distinguished. At the highest level of generalization, here called philosophical, value-relevance may be framed in transcendental terms that can impart a universality to the substantive significance of knowledge. This proposal is then bolstered by an examination of the ways in which Dilthey and then, with greater generality and precision, Simmel secured value-relevance for their theoretical schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on an enduring intellectual concern of the sociology of religion, which has been to gain understanding of the distinctive qualities of religious life in modern societies. The aim of this article is to sketch out a view of the modern religious situation that may provide an essential component of a new interpretation. The author argues that secularization especially in the modern era, must be regarded as more than the displacement of religious factors from the moral or normative regulation of social life. Given the partiality and imbalance of the conceptual schemes that sociology has brought to the study of secularization, it is hardly surprising that the phenomena under examination have not been well synthesized. The field has produced a wide variety of particularized ideas about the nature of secularization, but, aside from an empirically problematic notion of a generalized decline of religiosity, it has produced no broad conception of a fundamental sociocultural transformation.

The article examines the role of law in different moral complexes. It discusses the nature of law as categories or index, phenomenon and as an element. It mentions the views of sociologist Wilhelm Dilthey on law as a universal form of human efforts along with religion, science, art, economy and philosophy. It explains the universal nature of the law and mentions that the modes of law for achieving social order and managing social actions are present everywhere. It also discusses Dilthey's illustration of functional problems and social structures as the essential concepts of the law. Also analyzed is the interaction between different levels of the social structure.

This article focuses on social control of heroin. A central theme of sociological theory in the last two decades has been the revival of interest in societal development. This had led to a revival of interest in and an elaboration of earlier evolutionary theories. There is clear distinction between psychiatry and criminal law as systems of social control. While criminal law has understood deviance as a willed act and the sanction of the criminal justice system, punishment, has been legitimated usually only as a response to deviant acts, psychiatry formulated its conceptions of deviance around the actor and its sanction, treatment, was the appropriate response to deviant properties of the "actor," not the act. Psychiatry and social work have gained jurisdiction where rationality is not reflected in the agent's actions. For various classes of behavior, including the use of illegal drugs, plausible cases can be made both ways. Heroin may be thought to be so pleasurable that all the disadvantages of use are rationally justifiable to the addict. In this view, stiffer punishments are needed to prevent further use.

This paper describes the prevalence of coercive and non-coercive efforts to influence patients' admission decisions in a psychiatric emergency room. The findings are based on previously collected transcripts of the interaction between patients and families and emergency room staff in 405 cases. Although a significant perceptive of the patients were involuntarily admitted, otherwise the most prominent pressures were efforts by attending physicians to persuade patients about what would be the most appropriate disposition. However, a detailed qualitative analysis of the interaction suggest that the clinical staff's power to commit patients against their will affects the way all parties interpret the staff's ‘persuasion’ in such a way that it may be understood as quite coercive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise in the mental health movement coincides with a decline in prestige and importance of criminal law. While this may, in part, reflect the greater effectiveness of mental health treatment in dealing with overlapping problems, it also reflects certain problems that criminal law has with the individualistic values of modern society and the value-attractiveness of the mental health professions' commitment to helping the individual. However, many of the same value problems inherent in criminal punishment also apply to some aspects of mental health treatment, especially the paternalism of the doctor-patient relationship and involuntary treatment. Informed consent can be seen as a response to these value conflicts as well as part of the general extension of citizenship rights to the less privileged members of the society. This paper analyzes some of the conflicts inherent in the application of informed consent to mental health treatment from the above perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reports of fear and psychological distress on the part of nurses when caring for AIDS patients have drawn attention to the real possibility that care for this very sick group of patients may be less than adequate. This paper reviews what is currently known about the attitudes of nurses and the care provided to HIV-infected individuals. The authors reveal the paucity of empirical data concerning quality of care and how the concept of stima might serve to aid our understanding. The need for more research documenting the quality of care provided to HIV-infected patients is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article comments on some sociological concerns about radical sociology as proposed by sociologist Albert Szymanski. The focus of concern with Szymanski's proposals fell upon their propensity for what following sociologist Emile Durkheim, called idol worship, the tendency of undisciplined research to discover little aside from preconceptions associated with its substantive values. Idol-worship seems to be exemplified by Szymanski's use of sociology of knowledge. It conveniently offers him means of avoiding methodological problems and setting aside all matters of objectivity while also impugning the quality and integrity of broad ranges of natural and social science. Aside from some general remarks applying perhaps to all science, Szymanski analyzes specifically the cases of the physical sciences, the biological sciences, economics, conditioning psychology, and Parsonian sociology. For each discipline, he finds that there has been little, if anything, other than sophisticated social partisanship and pursuit of self-interest through the provision of general legitimation or narrowly practical knowledge.

The article presents criticism on sociologist Albert Szymanski's research paper "Toward a Radical Sociology." Szymanski is quite direct in setting aside as an ideal the establishment of conceptual frameworks that might ensure the objectivity of sociological knowledge. Central to his position is a rejection of sociologist Max Weber's methodology based on the sharp distinction between empirical judgments and evaluational judgments, a distinction that Szymanski recognizes to be "impeccable" in logic, yet holds to be a "philosophical sophism," and on the assertion that all intellectual disciplines must give strong primacy among their commitments to the ideal of objectivity. Citing the sociology of knowledge truth that all knowledge within the social sciences is in certain respects conditioned by the historical environment within which it is developed, hence not "objective" in the sense of being free of all social partisanship, Szymanski argues that a radical sociology would not be any the less objective were it to accept the constraints of adopting certain "humanistic" commitments among its fundamental values.

The conscientious and pragmatic forms of nonviolence are discussed as sanctioning strategies adapted to different phases in the development of a social movement. Some general factors affecting the evolution of a movement's relations with its institutional environment are also considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Issues associated with consent to clinical trials have attracted considerable attention recently, spurred in part by controversies over alleged inadequacies in the consent process. Professor Jansen's interesting essay is unusual in two ways. First, it raises issues about the conceptualization of one set of problems in informed consent (which Jansen subsumes under the term 'therapeutic error') and, more critically, about the methods and the data used to assess them. Second, she is unique in using the findings of academic experimental psychology to critique the empirical findings. This produces a thoughtful and original critique of the process of informed consent to research that, nonetheless, we believe, yields a model that does not reflect the reality of clinical research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents an overview of the articles published in the July 1993 issue of "Behavioral Sciences and the Law," Volume 11. Rise of interest in coercion in mental health care; Investigation of patients' reports of coercion; Development of a conceptual framework.