Vanishing cycle sheaves of one-parameter smoothings

We study the vanishing cycles of a one-parameter smoothing of a complex analytic space and show that the weight filtration on its perverse cohomology sheaf of the highest degree is quite close to the monodromy filtration so that its graded pieces have a modified Lefschetz decomposition. We also describe its primitive part using the weight filtration on the perverse cohomology sheaves of the constant sheaves. As a corollary we show in the local complete intersection case that 1 is not an eigenvalue of the monodromy on the reduced Milnor cohomology at any points if and only if the local complete intersection and the hypersurface defined by the function are both rational homology manifolds.