Implicit Gender Bias in Linguistic Descriptions for Expected Events: The Cases of the 2016 United States and 2017 United Kingdom Elections.

Gender stereotypes influence subjective beliefs about the world, and this is reflected in our use of language. But do gender biases in language transparently reflect subjective beliefs? Or is the process of translating thought to language itself biased? During the 2016 United States (N = 24,863) and 2017 United Kingdom (N = 2,609) electoral campaigns, we compared participants' beliefs about the gender of the next head of government with their use and interpretation of pronouns referring to the next head of government. In the United States, even when the female candidate was expected to win, she pronouns were rarely produced and induced substantial comprehension disruption. In the United Kingdom, where the incumbent female candidate was heavily favored, she pronouns were preferred in production but yielded no comprehension advantage. These and other findings suggest that the language system itself is a source of implicit biases above and beyond previously known biases, such as those measured by the Implicit Association Test.

How adults understand what young children say.

Children's early speech often bears little resemblance to that of adults, and yet parents and other caregivers are able to interpret that speech and react accordingly. Here we investigate how adult listeners' inferences reflect sophisticated beliefs about what children are trying to communicate, as well as how children are likely to pronounce words. Using a Bayesian framework for modelling spoken word recognition, we find that computational models can replicate adult interpretations of children's speech only when they include strong, context-specific prior expectations about the messages that children will want to communicate. This points to a critical role of adult cognitive processes in supporting early communication and reveals how children can actively prompt adults to take actions on their behalf even when they have only a nascent understanding of the adult language. We discuss the wide-ranging implications of the powerful listening capabilities of adults for theories of first language acquisition.

Evaluating the delivery of Problem Management Plus in primary care settings in rural Rwanda: a study protocol using a pragmatic randomised hybrid type 1 effectiveness-implementation design.

INTRODUCTION: Evidence-based low-intensity psychological interventions such as Problem Management Plus (PM+) have the potential to expand treatment access for depression and anxiety, yet these interventions are not yet effectively implemented in rural, public health systems in resource-limited settings. In 2017, Partners In Health adapted PM+ for delivery by primary care nurses in rural Rwanda and began integrating PM+ into health centres in collaboration with the Rwandan Ministry of Health, using established implementation strategies for mental health integration into primary care (Mentoring and Enhanced Supervision at Health Centers for Mental Health (MESH MH)). A gap in the evidence regarding whether low-intensity psychological interventions can be successfully integrated into real-world primary care settings and improve outcomes for common mental disorders remains. In this study, we will rigorously evaluate the delivery of PM+ by primary care nurses, supported by MESH MH, as it is scaled across one rural district in Rwanda. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: We will conduct a hybrid type 1 effectiveness-implementation study to test the clinical outcomes of routinely delivered PM+ and to describe the implementation of PM+ at health centres. To study the clinical effectiveness of PM+, we will use a pragmatic, randomised multiple baseline design to determine whether participants experience improvement in depression symptoms (measured by the Patient Health Questionnaire-9) and functioning (measured by the WHO-Disability Assessment Scale Brief 2.0) after receiving PM+. We will employ quantitative and qualitative methods to describe and evaluate PM+ implementation outcomes using the Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation and Maintenance framework, using routinely collected programme data and semistructured interviews. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: This evaluation was approved by the Rwanda National Ethics Committee (Protocol #196/RNEC/2019) and deemed exempt by the Harvard University Institutional Review Board. The results from this evaluation will be useful for health systems planners and policy-makers working to translate the evidence base for low-intensity psychological interventions into practice.

Lossy-Context Surprisal: An Information-Theoretic Model of Memory Effects in Sentence Processing.

A key component of research on human sentence processing is to characterize the processing difficulty associated with the comprehension of words in context. Models that explain and predict this difficulty can be broadly divided into two kinds, expectation-based and memory-based. In this work, we present a new model of incremental sentence processing difficulty that unifies and extends key features of both kinds of models. Our model, lossy-context surprisal, holds that the processing difficulty at a word in context is proportional to the surprisal of the word given a lossy memory representation of the context-that is, a memory representation that does not contain complete information about previous words. We show that this model provides an intuitive explanation for an outstanding puzzle involving interactions of memory and expectations: language-dependent structural forgetting, where the effects of memory on sentence processing appear to be moderated by language statistics. Furthermore, we demonstrate that dependency locality effects, a signature prediction of memory-based theories, can be derived from lossy-context surprisal as a special case of a novel, more general principle called information locality.

Do domain-general executive resources play a role in linguistic prediction? Re-evaluation of the evidence and a path forward.

Most current accounts of language comprehension agree on a role for prediction, but they disagree on the importance of domain-general executive resources in predictive behavior. In this opinion piece, we briefly review the evidence for linguistic prediction, and the findings that have been used to argue that prediction draws on domain-general executive resources. The most compelling evidence is an apparent reduction in predictive behavior during language comprehension in populations with lower executive resources, such as children, older adults, and second language (L2) learners. We propose that these between-population differences can be explained without invoking executive resources. Instead, differences in the quantity and kind of language experience that these populations bring to bear may affect the probability of engaging in predictive behavior, or simply make prediction effects more difficult to detect in paradigms designed for young adult native speakers. Thus, domain-specific prediction mechanisms remain a viable possibility. We discuss ways to further test accounts of linguistic prediction that do vs. do not require domain-general executive resources, using behavioral, computational, and brain imaging approaches.

Expectation and Locality Effects in German Verb-final Structures.

Probabilistic expectations and memory limitations are central factors governing the real-time comprehension of natural language, but how the two factors interact remains poorly understood. One respect in which the two factors have come into theoretical conflict is the documentation of both locality effects, in which more dependents preceding a governing verb increase processing difficulty at the verb, and anti-locality effects, in which more preceding dependents facilitate processing at the verb. However, no controlled study has previously demonstrated both locality and anti-locality effects in the same type of dependency relation within the same language. Additionally, many previous demonstrations of anti-locality effects have been potentially confounded with lexical identity, plausibility, and sentence position. Here, we provide new evidence of both locality and anti-locality effects in the same type of dependency relation in a single language-verb-final constructions in German-while controlling for lexical identity, plausibility, and sentence position. In main clauses, we find clear anti-locality effects, with the presence of a preceding dative argument facilitating processing at the final verb; in subject-extracted relative clauses with identical linear ordering of verbal dependents, we find both anti-locality and locality effects, with processing facilitated when the verb is preceded by a dative argument alone, but hindered when the verb is preceded by both the dative argument and an adjunct. These results indicate that both expectations and memory limitations need to be accounted for in any complete theory of online syntactic comprehension.