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Advice giving in psychotherapy has been an area of interest for theorists and practitioners for a long time. However, clear and distinct answers to questions concerning the role of advice in client outcomes have not been as available as one would expect. This state of art may be related to discrepant theoretical positions and the lack of consistent empirical evidence. This chapter argues that some evidence does support advice giving in psychotherapy, depending on the cultural and social context as well as on client and therapist variables. This chapter reviews the literature, recommends a specific model for advice giving, and outlines future research directions.

This chapter examines the psychology of advice recipients, focusing on research predominantly conducted using the Judge Advisor System, in which a participant “judge” receives advice from one or more advisors but has ultimate responsibility for making the decision. First, it reviews methods of typical Judge Advisor System experiments. Next, it surveys the research to explore why decision makers often do not seek out advice, focusing on the costs of advice and decision-maker overconfidence. It then examines why decision makers underutilize the advice they receive due to factors like confirmation bias, egocentric discounting, and power. In addition, factors that increase the utilization of advice, such as trust, advisor confidence, and advisor expertise, are considered. Finally, the influence of advice-recipient power and reception to computerized advice are examined in depth. Finally, advice to decision makers about how to seek and utilize advice to make better decisions is provided.

The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of current as well as past special education regulations, litigation, professional association guidelines, clinical models, and best practice approaches for the clinical speech and language skills of African American English (AAE) for zero-three, preschool and school-age child speakers. It also provides a summary of current AAE child language research within the field of Communication Sciences and Disorders that has implications for: a) the selection of appropriate formal and informal speech-language assessment procedures, b) accurate differential diagnosis of disorder vs. normal dialect difference in children with suspected language impairment and c) the identification of appropriate therapy goals when relevant. Implications for the development of future theoretical frameworks and standardized assessments that help to minimize the historical misdiagnosis and disproportionate over-identification of African American students for speech-language and other special education placements is also addressed.

This article reviews two kinds of experimental evidence from laboratories that challenge the adequacy of prototypes for representing human concepts. First, experiments suggesting that prototype theory does not distinguish adequately among concepts of maximally variant types, such as formal vs. natural kind and artifact concepts. Second, a more recent experimental line demonstrating how theories of conceptual combination with lexical prototypes fail to predict actual phrasal interpretations, such as language users' doubts as to whether Lithuanian apples are likely to be as edible as apples. An extensive body of empirical research seems to provide evidence for the psychological validity of the prototype position. The default to the compositional stereotype strategy (DS) mentions that barring information, to the contrary, assumes that the typical adjective–noun combination satisfies the noun stereotype.

Speech production involves the transformation of a to-be-expressed idea, or message, into lexical and grammatical content. Given the generally recognised separation of functional and positional processes, it has been argued that case assignment is within the domain of functional processes (or within Dell's syntactic stage). This article focuses on case assignment, which is achieved during the grammatical encoding stage of utterance planning. Early proposals for sentence production models were highly influenced by the distribution and characteristics of naturally occurring speech errors. More recent revisions of these models have been further influenced by experimental investigations into structural and word order alternations using a method called syntactic priming. This article first lays out in gross terms the general views of the stages necessary for sentence production. It then discusses the evidence that has supported the various stages of the production models and how they directly or indirectly inform us about the processes responsible for case assignment in sentence production. This includes evidence for and against (radical or weak) incrementality and evidence for lexical guidance (or verb primacy) in functional assignment.

Research on human language comprehension has been heavily influenced by properties of the English language. Since case plays only a minor role in English, its role for language comprehension has only recently become a topic for extensive research on psycholinguistics. In the psycholinguistic literature, these processes are called the human parsing mechanism or the human sentence processing mechanism (HSPM). According to the Strong Competence Hypothesis, the syntactic structures computed by the HSPM are exactly those structures that are specified by the competence grammar. This article assumes that the HSPM computes phrase-structure representations enriched by various syntactic features, in particular case features on noun phrases. After providing a short introduction into current research concerned with the HSPM, it explores how syntactic functions are assigned in the face of morphological case ambiguity, the role of case for identifying clause boundaries in languages like Japanese and Korean, the problem of syntactic ambiguity resolution, and whether markedness distinctions that have been postulated to obtain between different cases are reflected in language comprehension.

This chapter investigates the role that syntax plays in guiding the acquisition of word meaning. It reviews data that reveal how children can use the syntactic distribution of a word as evidence for its meaning and discusses the principles of grammar that license such inferences. We delineate the role of thematic linking generalizations in the acquisition of action verbs, arguing that children use specific links between subject and agent and between object and patient to guide initial verb learning. In the domain of attitude verbs, we show that children’s knowledge of abstract links between subclasses of attitude verbs and their syntactic distribution enable learners to identify the meanings of their initial attitude verbs, such as think and want. Finally, we show that syntactic bootstrapping effects are not limited to verb learning but extend across the lexicon.

This article examines the relation between the study of comparative syntax and language disorders. It aims to demonstrate ways in which research on impaired language interacts with syntactic theory. The article shows that the study of impaired language interacts with comparative syntax in particular, a research program which aims at understanding human language by comparing and contrasting the behavior or properties of several languages with respect to certain syntactic structures or types of phenomena. It also discusses several types of language therapy.

This chapter focuses on the problem of concept composition: to obtain a complex concept such as RED SQUARE, the mind has to be able to combine simple concepts, RED and SQUARE. It is argued here that compositionality constraint is a necessary element of any cognitively plausible theory of concepts. The chapter provides an overview of the theories of concepts that have been particularly influential in cognitive science, such as the Inferential Roles Semantics and the Prototype theory. At the same time, it aims to show how these theories still fall short of providing a satisfying solution for compositionality constraint. The chapter concludes by emphasizing the importance of compositionality constraint by stating that it should be regarded as a critical (rather than a secondary) concern that guides both theoretical and empirical research on concept representations.

This article addresses the issue of compositionality of mental representations from the perspective of a foundational framework for cognitive science. The dynamical cognition framework (DC framework) is inspired partially by connectionism and partially by the persistence of the problem of relevance within classical computational cognitive science. It treats cognition in terms of the mathematics of dynamical systems: total occurrent cognitive states are mathematically/structurally realized as points in a high-dimensional dynamical system, and these mathematical points are physically realized by total-activation states of a neural network with specific connection weights. The framework repudiates the classicist assumption that cognitive-state transitions conform to a tractably computable transition function over cognitive states. Computational Theory of Mind (CTM) states that the causal role of a mental representation is syntactically determined, but this idea of syntactic determination of causal role is ambiguous.

This chapter focuses on the role of pragmatic reasoning in language learning and interpretation. The first half of the chapter assesses the extent to which young children use pragmatic mechanisms of intention recognition to build a mental lexicon (i.e., to learn new words). The second half discusses the extent to which children use pragmatic inference to employ their mental lexicon in conversation (i.e., to interpret known words). The evidence reviewed points to rich and massive effects of pragmatic reasoning in both domains. The sophistication of children’s pragmatic system and its relation to the mature adult system are discussed throughout the chapter.

This chapter describes causes and consequences of individual differences in young children’s word learning. For decades, research has documented qualitative and quantitative differences in children’s language input, and it has been convincingly demonstrated that across different communities, children’s vocabulary growth can be linked to their language experiences. However, children also actively shape their own learning environment, and it is important to consider how their cognitive abilities, as well as their interests, shape their language experiences and their learning. Only by examining children with a wide range of experiences (e.g., children growing up in multilingual communities) and abilities (e.g., children with developmental delays or disorders) will it be possible to develop theories that adequately capture and explain differences in children’s word learning and vocabulary growth.

Disorders of lexical access are characterized by inconsistent lexical access such that individuals successfully comprehend or produce a word in some contexts but fail on other occasions. Therefore, the lexical representations are thought to be intact, but their retrieval or activation is impaired and/or competing representations are not effectively managed. Lexical access deficits are most well-studied in individuals with aphasia, though some degree of lexical access difficulty can occur in a wide variety of neurogenic and developmental disorders, as well as in typical aging. This chapter focuses on the intersections of language, cognitive control, and memory: (1) how inhibition of lexical competitors and selection among competitors may explain some lexical access deficit phenomena, and (2) learning and retrieval processes in lexical access deficits from both basic research and translational application perspectives.

The common sense notion of lexicon as a dictionary implies a static, fixed repository of information about the properties of individual words. This chapter discusses evidence from speech production suggesting that the lexicon in production is best characterized as a process: lexical access. This process involves the dynamic interaction of information from multiple lexical representations, resulting in the production of variable word forms. The corresponding theoretical framework is outlined within the context of single word production. This chapter then discusses a relatively less-well explored area: how lexical access changes when speakers plan and produce multiple words in connected speech. The conclusion points to open theoretical issues raised by new findings in connected speech.

The present chapter charts the course of the acquisition of logical expressions in child language. The focus is on the meanings that child language learners initially assign to logical expressions, how children’s meanings compare with the meanings assigned by adults, and how the meanings of the logical expressions of natural language correspond to the meanings that are assigned to the corresponding vocabulary of classical logic. We review the findings of several cross-linguistic experimental studies investigating children’s interpretation of sentences that contain different combinations of logical expressions. In general, the findings of research indicate a strong overlap in the meanings that children assign to logical expressions and the meanings assigned to the corresponding expressions in classical logic.

This chapter describes early stages in the acquisition of a first vocabulary by infants and young children. It distinguishes two major stages, the first of which operates by a stand-alone word-to-world pairing procedure and the second of which, using the evidence so acquired, builds a domain-specific syntax-sensitive structure-to-world pairing procedure. As we show, the first stage of learning is slow, restricted in character, and to some extent errorful, whereas the second procedure is determinative, rapid, and essentially errorless. Our central claim here is that the early, referentially based learning procedure succeeds at all because it is reined in by attention focusing properties of word-to-world timing and related indicants of referential intent.

This chapter applies a language design perspective to the lexicon. It reviews and synthesizes a body of work in cognitive science and linguistics that uses ideas from computer science, specifically information theory, to explore how structural features of lexicons can be explained by principles of efficient communication. It pays particular attention to four major properties of lexicons. The first is the structure of word frequency distributions, particularly the Zipfian structure of these distributions and the way that individual semantic spaces are carved up so as to be maximally efficient. The second is the relationship between word frequency and properties like word length and phonotactic probability. The third concerns lexical arbitrariness: the extent to which word forms contain information about their meanings. Finally, the chapter considers how lexicons are structured for child language learning.

This chapter provides a critical overview of experimental and computational research on the processing and representation of derived words. It begins with an introductory section addressing methodological issues: The pros and cons of various popular experimental tasks, issues with respect to the selection of materials, as well as the relevance of experimental research for morphological theory. The main section reviews two opposing classes of theories for the organization of the mental lexicon: theories building on the dictionary metaphor, and theories seeking to understand lexical processing without a mental dictionary and without theoretical constructs such as the morpheme.

This chapter investigates the phenomenon of how children acquire grammatical morphology, including both function words and inflectional morphemes. In particular, it shows that the phonology and prosodic structure of a language interact with how and when grammatical morphemes are perceived/comprehended and produced. With respect to function words such as articles, it shows that those that can be prosodified as part of a foot/prosodic word tend to be produced first, as do inflectional morphemes occurring at the ends of phrases/utterances. The fact that similar patterns of prosodic interactions between the perception/production of grammatical morphology and the lexicon appear crosslinguistically suggests that these are robust phenomena. This has both theoretical implications for understanding the interactions between children’s developing linguistic competencies at the phonology/syntax interface, as well as practical implications for clinicians working with children with language delay.