An Estimable Model of Farmer Choice With Observed Price, Weather and Pest Expectations

Farm Management,

Structured Access in Sentence Comprehension

This thesis is concerned with the nature of memory access during the construction of long-distance dependencies in online sentence comprehension. In recent years, an intense focus on the computational challenges posed by long-distance dependencies has proven to be illuminating with respect to the characteristics of the architecture of the human sentence processor, suggesting a tight link between general memory access procedures and sentence processing routines (Lewis & Vasishth 2005; Lewis, Vasishth, & Van Dyke 2006; Wagers, Lau & Phillips 2009). The present thesis builds upon this line of research, and its primary aim is to motivate and defend the hypothesis that the parser accesses linguistic memory in an essentially structured fashion for certain long-distance dependencies. In order to make this case, I focus on the processing of reflexive and agreement dependencies, and ask whether or not non-structural information such as morphological features are used to gate memory access during syntactic comprehension. Evidence from eight experiments in a range of methodologies in English and Chinese is brought to bear on this question, providing arguments from interference effects and time-course effects that primarily syntactic information is used to access linguistic memory in the construction of certain long-distance dependencies. The experimental evidence for structured access is compatible with a variety of architectural assumptions about the parser, and I present one implementation of this idea in a parser based on the ACT-R memory architecture. In the context of such a content-addressable model of memory, the claim of structured access is equivalent to the claim that only syntactic cues are used to query memory. I argue that structured access reflects an optimal parsing strategy in the context of a noisy, interference-prone cognitive architecture: abstract structural cues are favored over lexical feature cues for certain structural dependencies in order to minimize memory interference in online processing

Facing the challenge: the impact of recession and unemployment on men’s health in Ireland.

The economic recession with its accompanying rise in unemployment rates is linked to extremely adverse effects for men’s mental health. This research report Facing the Challenge – The Impact of the Recession and Unemployment on Men’s Health in Ireland identifies a strong expectation of increased mental health problems for men given the very strong correlation between unemployment and male mental ill health. The report is the result of a research and consultation process carried out, in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, by Nexus Research Co-operative on behalf of IPH. 93% of frontline organisations, North and South, in contact with unemployed men linked health challenges to unemployment and recession and all organisations surveyed noted adverse health challenges for men they work with. In addition to health challenges being higher for unemployed men, they were also very high for men who saw themselves as being threatened with unemployment. The organisations surveyed and the men who were interviewed identified the challenges to health as: • High levels of stress or anxiety • Dependency on or over-use of alcohol/other drugs • Deterioration in physical health • Development of conflict in family or close personal relationships • Isolation (including sharing or communicating problems) • A reluctance to approach services or seek hel

Definitely Islands? Experimental investigation of definite islands

Experimental work on islands has used formal acceptability judgment studies to quantify the severity of different island violations. This current study uses this approach to probe the (in-)violability of definite islands, an understudied island, in offline and online measures. We conducted two acceptability judgment studies and find a modest island effect. However, rating distributions appear bimodal across definites and indefinites. We also conducted a self-paced reading experiment, but found no sig- nificant effects. Overall, offline, definite islands differ from other uniform islands, but online, the results are more complicated

Teagasc National Farm Survey Preliminary Estimates 2016

PresenationThis presentation provides an overview of the preliminary results of the National Farm Survey for 201

Principle B constrains the processing of cataphora: Evidence for syntactic and discourse predictions

We tested whether comprehenders can use Binding Principle B (Chomsky, 1981) to guide antecedent search during the processing of cataphoric pronouns. We ran two self-paced reading experiments using the gender mismatch paradigm (van Gompel & Liversedge, 2003) as an index of active prediction of coreference between a cataphor and a main clause subject. In both experiments, we find gender mismatch effects at the main clause subject when coreference with the cataphor is grammatically acceptable. We do not find comparable gender mismatch effects in conditions where coreference is ruled out by Principle B. Our results are broadly consistent with models in which grammatical constraints serve as early filters on anaphora resolution processes in comprehension. We illustrate how the parser can integrate syntactic and discourse-level information to achieve grammatical sensitivity during incremental referential processing

Agricultural economists and world poverty: progress and prospects

New development paradigms come and go, seemingly with increasing rapidity, yet poverty remains the scourge of the developing nations. As we enter the new millennium, we fear that still more development fads and fancies will emerge, to be taken up and then dropped by the development community. These swings in fashion bring with them the danger that the ‘basics’ of effective development strategies for poverty reduction will be neglected. In this article, we advance some personal and perhaps controversial views about the virtues of getting agriculture moving as a means of reducing poverty, and about the role that agricultural economists can and should play in that endeavour.Food Security and Poverty,

No longer an orphan: evidence for appositive attachment from sentence comprehension

In this paper, we investigate the comprehension of appositive relative clauses and nominal appositives. First, we present experimental evidence that suggests that nominal appositives and appositive relative clauses behave like other adjunct phrases with respect to ambiguity resolution (Experiment 1). Second, we show that an ambiguous nominal appositive can modify a distant syntactic head as easily across an appositive relative clause as across a restrictive relative clause (Experiment 2). Last, we show that syntactic repair is as successful across an appositive relative clause or parenthetical as it is across an at-issue restrictive relative clause (Experiment 3). Taken together, our results suggest that i) appositive relative clauses and nominal appositives are syntactically sited in a fashion comparable to restrictive relative clauses and ii) appositive phrases do not substantially reduce the availability of the syntactic material that precedes the appositive phrase as might have been expected if processing an appositive involved shifting attention to a higher structure, away from local preceding constituents. These results constitute an argument from sentence comprehension for a local syntactic attachment of appositive relative clauses and nominal appositives (cf. Jackendoff 1977; Potts 2005; de Vries 2006), and against so-called orphan analyses of appositive content (e.g. Ross 1967; Haegeman 1988)

Teagasc National Farm Survey 2016 Estimates

Background Notes: The National Farm Survey (NFS) has been conducted by Teagasc on an annual basis since 1972. The survey is operated as part of the Farm Accountancy Data Network of the EU and fulfils Ireland’s statutory obligation to provide data on farm output, costs and income to the European Commission. A random, nationally representative sample is selected annually in conjunction with the Central Statistics Office (CSO). Each farm is assigned a weighting factor so that the results of the survey are representative of the national population of farms. These preliminary estimates are based on a sub sample of 805 farms which represents 83,377 farms nationally. Farms are assigned to six farm systems on the basis of farm gross output, as calculated on a standard output basis. Standard output measures are applied to each animal and crop output on the farm and only farms with a standard output of €8,000 or more, the equivalent of 6 dairy cows, 6 hectares of wheat or 14 suckler cows, are included in the sample. Farms are then classified as one of the six farm systems on the basis of the main outputs of the farm. Farms falling into the Pigs and Poultry System are not included in the survey, due to the inability to obtain a representative sample of these systems. Due to the small number of farms falling into the Mixed Livestock system these farms are not reported here