Humans are highly social animals, and the ability to cater to the preferences of other individuals is encouraged by society. Preference-inferring is an important aspect of the theory of mind (TOM). Many previous studies have shown that attachment style is closely related to TOM ability. However, little is known about the effects of adult attachment style on preferences inferring under different...

this study examined whether processing ambiguous sentences containing relative clauses (rcs) following a complex determiner phrase (dp) by persian-speaking learners of l2 english with different proficiency and working memory capacities (wmcs) is affected by semantic priming. the semantic relationship studied was one between the subject/verb of the main clause and one of the dps in the complex d...

This paper tests the validity of the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis (IPH) (Fodor 1998, 2002) based on production and perception experiments on Korean data. IPH states that attachment of a relative clause (RC) in a sentence with a complex noun phrase is influenced by a default prosodic contour of the structure projected in silent reading. It predicts that speakers of a language who prefer high atta...

This study examines the nature of adolescent attachment to parents and peers during adolescence. A projective measure was used to classify 99 11th and 12th grade students into secure, insecure dismissing, and insecure preoccupied attachment groups. Respondents identified their primary attachment figure by nomination and by rating the level of attachment support they received from mothers, fathe...

Four experiments investigated attachment preferences in constructions involving 3 verb phrases (VPs) followed by an attaching modifier. Readers preferred attachment to the most recent (lowest) VP site overall and preferred to attach the modifier to the middle VP over the highest VP, demonstrating a monotonic recency-based preference ordering. This pattern could not be attributed to lexical or p...

This study tested Bowlby and Ainsworth's hypothesis that a hierarchy of caregivers exists whereby infants prefer one caregiver over another when distressed. We examined parent gender (mother vs. father), primary caregiver status (defined as the parent who spent most time with the infant and performed most of the caregiving tasks), and role of toddlers' history of attachment security with each p...

In an eye-tracking experiment we investigated the influence of referential context on the attachment of a relative clause to two possible hosts (as in "Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony"). The attachment of the relative clause was disambiguated grammatically at the first word after the onset of the ambiguity in order to investigate immediate effects of discourse. Th...

This paper presents results from a self-paced reading experiment in Japanese investigating attachment preferences for relative clauses to three ensuing potential nominal heads. Similar to previous results from the processing of English, Spanish and German, we observed the following non-monotonic preference ordering among the three attachment sites: most local, least local, intermediate. We disc...

Clinical data suggests a strong negative impact of traumatic attachments on adult mental illness, presumably through organizing brain development. To further explore this clinical issue, a mammalian model of imprinting was developed to characterize the neural basis of attachment in both healthy and traumatic attachments. The altricial neonatal rat must learn the mother's odor for nipple attachm...