Comprehension of embedded clauses in schizophrenia with and without formal thought disorder

Formal thought disorder (FTD) in schizophrenia (SZ) is clinically manifest primarily through language production, where linguistic studies have reported numerous anomalies including lesser use of embedded clauses. Here we explored whether problems of language may extend to comprehension and clause embedding in particular. A sentence-picture matching task was designed with two conditions in which embedded clauses were either presupposed as true (factive) or not. Performance across these two conditions was compared in people with SZ and moderate-to-severe FTD (SZ+FTD), SZ with minimal FTD (SZ-FTD), first degree relatives of people with SZ, and neurotypical controls. The SZ+FTD group performed significantly worse than all others in both conditions, and worse in the non-factive than the factive one. These results demonstrate language dysfunction in comprehension specific to FTD in a critical aspect of grammatical complexity and its associated meaning, which has been independently known to be cognitively significant as well

Computational Models of Anaphora

Interpreting anaphoric references is a fundamental aspect of our language competence that has long attracted the attention of computational linguists. The appearance of ever-larger anaphorically annotated data sets covering more and more anaphoric phenomena in ever-greater detail has spurred the development of increasingly more sophisticated computational models; as a result, the most recent state-of-the-art neural models are able to achieve impressive performance by leveraging linguistic, lexical, discourse, and en- cyclopedic information. This article provides a thorough survey of anaphora resolution (coreference) throughout this development, reviewing the avail- able data sets and covering both the preneural history of the field and—in more detail—current neural models, including research on less-studied as- pects of anaphoric interpretation such as bridging reference resolution and discourse deixis interpretation

"It Shouldn't Stick Out from Your Bikini at the Beach": Meaning, Gender, and the Hairy/Hairless Body

Women's and men's bodies and sexuality can be understood as socially situated and socially produced. This means they are affected by, and developed in relation to, patterned sociocultural meanings and representations. We aim here to understand a recently emergent, and potentially gendered, body practice-pubic hair removal-by examining the meanings people ascribe to pubic hair and its removal. Extending the widespread hairless bodily norm for Anglo/Western women, pubic hair removal is an apparently rapidly growing phenomenon. Men, too, are seemingly practicing pubic hair removal in significant numbers, raising the question of to what extent pubic hair removal should be understood as a gendered phenomenon. What we do not yet know is what people's understandings and perceptions of pubic hair are, and how they make sense of its removal. Using a qualitative survey, the current study asked a series of questions about pubic hair and its removal, both in general and related to men's and women's bodies. In total, 67 participants (100% response rate; 50 female; mean age 29, diverse ethnically, predominantly heterosexual) completed the survey. Thematic analysis identified five key themes in the way people made sense of pubic hair and pubic hair removal that related to choice, privacy, physical attractiveness, sexual impacts, and cleanliness. Meanings around pubic hair and its removal were not consistently gendered, but it was still situated as more of an issue for women. With potential impacts on sexual and psychological well-being, sexuality education provides an important venue for discussing, and questioning, normative ideas about pubic hair. © The Author(s) 2013

Crittenden's Dynamic-Maturational Model of Attachment and Adaptation

This article undertakes a systematic exposition and analysis of Patricia Crittenden's dynamic-maturational model of attachment and adaptation. It traces Crittenden's information-processing model of attachment behavior to her work with Mary Ainsworth, and shows how this account came to underpin her integration of insights from cognitive science with developmental psychology. The article draws surprising conclusions regarding the differences between the dynamic-maturational model and mainstream attachment theory, clarifying the meaning of contested concepts and identifying important flaws in previous interpretations of Crittenden's work.