This article describes the development of a measure of schizotypic referential thinking. The authors present a 34-item questionnaire that includes a wide variety of referential thoughts and experiences, including both simple and guilty ideas of reference. The Referential Thinking Scale (REF) displays adequate internal consistency and strong relations with other measures of Schizotypy, such as t...

Young children are readily able to use known labels to constrain hypotheses about the meanings of new words under conditions of referential ambiguity. At issue is the kind of information children use to constrain such hypotheses. According to one theory, children take into account the speaker's intention when solving a referential puzzle. In the present studies, children with autism were impair...

Previous research has shown that rapid vocal repetition of a one-word version of negative self-referential thought reduces the stimulus functions (e.g., emotional discomfort and believability) associated with that thought. The present study compares the effects of that defusion strategy with thought distraction and distraction-based experimental control tasks on a negative self-referential thou...

This paper proposes a framework for evaluating coreference resolution systems, taking into account the contribution of subcomponents. Our goal is to have a way to quickly identify bottlenecks so that the development effort can focus on the weakest part of the processing chain. We describe experiments on the contribution of the module for searching potential referential expressions using two typ...

The present study sought to investigate the acquisition of referential, quasi and expletive subject pronouns, three different types of obligatory subjects in English, by adult Persian speaking L2 learners of English at different stages of L2 acquisition. A Grammaticality Judgment Test and a Translation Test were designed and developed to elicit the participants' knowledge of obligatory subjects...

Abstract Referentially vague (or ‘ignorance’) indefinites are known to exhibit apparently conflicting behavior: in the singular, they referentially (Giannakidou and Quer 2013, Alonso-Ovalle Menéndez-Benito 2010, 2011, 2013), but plural appear depend on a discourse given set. The phenomenon is typically discussed context of Spanish algún/algunos (Gutiérrez-Rexach 2001, Martí 2008, 2009); this pa...

Self-referential processing is a key cognitive process, associated with the serotonergic system and the default mode network (DMN). Decreased levels of serotonin and reduced activations of the DMN observed in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) suggest that self-referential processing might be altered in patients with ALS. Here, we investigate the effects of ALS on the electroencephalography co...

In 2 studies, we investigated how peers establish a referential pact to call something, for example, a cushion versus a pillow (both equally felicitous). In Study 1, pairs of 4- and 6-year-old German-speaking peers established a referential pact for an artifact, for example, a woman's shoe, in a referential communication task. Six-year-olds, but not 4-year-olds, continued to use these same expr...