PURPOSE there is uncertainty regarding Hispanic individuals' depression treatment preferences, particularly regarding antidepressant medication, the most available primary care option. We assessed whether this uncertainty reflected heterogeneity among subgroups of Hispanic persons and investigated possible mechanisms. Specifically, we examined factors associated with medication preferences in n...

I aim to reconcile two apparently conflicting theses: 1. Everything that can be explained, can be explained in purely physical terms, that is, using the machinery of fundamental physics, and 2. Some properties that play an explanatory role in the higher-level sciences are irreducible in the strong sense that they are physically undefinable: their nature cannot be described using the vocabulary ...

It is generally assumed that hierarchical phrase structure plays a central role in human language. However, considerations of simplicity and evolutionary continuity suggest that hierarchical structure should not be invoked too hastily. Indeed, recent neurophysiological, behavioural and computational studies show that sequential sentence structure has considerable explanatory power and that hier...

Chomsky’s theory of syntax came after criticism of probabilistic associative models of word order in sentences. Immediate constituent structures are plausible but their description by generative grammars has met with difficulties. The type 2 (context-free) grammars account for constituent structure, but already trespass the mathematical capacity required by language, because they generate unnat...

This study is designed to investigate errors emerged in written texts produced by 30 Turkish EFL learners with an explanatory, and thus, qualitative perspective. Erroneous language elements were identified by the researcher first and then their grammaticality and intelligibility were checked by five native speakers of English. The analysis of the data showed that it is difficult to claim that a...

The biolinguistic perspective regards the language faculty as an ‘‘organ of the body,’’ along with other cognitive systems. Adopting it, we expect to find three factors that interact to determine (I-) languages attained: genetic endowment (the topic of Universal Grammar), experience, and principles that are languageor even organism-independent. Research has naturally focused on I-languages and ...

We argue that, from the perspective of a language-endowed social intelligent agent, processing metaphor – and figurative language in general – is an epiphenomenon of an agent’s ability to learn lexical senses on the fly and to postpone or disregard analysis of parts of input without compromising its functioning. This work is a step toward developing an explanatory theory of why people often ope...

We describe an extensive and versatile lexical resource for Latvian, an under-resourced Indo-European language, which we call Tezaurs (Latvian for ‘thesaurus’). It comprises a large explanatory dictionary of more than 250,000 entries that are derived from more than 280 external sources. The dictionary is enriched with phonetic, morphological, semantic and other annotations, as well as augmented...

The goal of a biological psychology is to undermine the autonomy of whatever it studies. For language, the goal is to derive its properties from other, presumably prior, properties of the human organism and its natural environment (cf. Lindblom, 1980). This does not mean that we should expect to reduce language to a mere collection of non-linguistic capacities in the individual, but it does mea...