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...

This study examined strategies for initiating social interactions with peers, among 4 children with hearing impairment, aged 33 to 36 months, attending a special early education center or a regular kindergarten. The study investigated initiation type (related to partner's hearing status) and rates of initiation success/failure vis-a-vis hearing and deaf partners. Results revealed (a) more initi...

A growing number of researchers in the sentence processing community are using eye movements to address issues in spoken language comprehension. Experiments using this paradigm have shown that visually presented referential information, including properties of referents relevant to specific actions, influences even the earliest moments of syntactic processing. Methodological concerns about task...

Before designing a product and selecting marketing strategies, a company must conduct consumer studies in order to determine the optimum combination of product benefits desired by consumers. Due to large market size and the various sought-after product benefits, a company may also need to properly analyze different market segments in order to survive and succeed in a competitive environment. It...

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...