Volume 20 (2016): Edition 1 (October 2016)

Recent evolutionary experimental psychological research found that high verbal proficiency (VP) increased the perceived attractiveness of individuals (more so for males than females), especially in the context of a long-term relationship. Our study had the objective of replicating and extending this research. Similar to previous studies, audio files in which speakers performed scripted self-presentations that had equal content but varied on VP were used as stimuli for opposite-sex participants. VP was found to increase attractiveness ratings. The effects were mostly small for numerous variables relating to short-term mating, whereas they were moderate to large for long-term mating. Our participants attributed more future income, but not more total number of mates to speakers with higher VP. Female menstrual cycle effects on attractiveness ratings were not found. Contrary to former research, being more verbally proficient was not found to be more beneficial for one sex over the other.

The analysis of collaborative exchanges of couples during their household activities is at the core of this paper. Although the management of responsibilities around household tasks is a potential source of contention within the decision-making process about home activities, another complementary perspective considers practices of communication during household activities as ways to build or reinforce the family educational processes. Our goal is to capture these daily interactions as indicators of collaborative relationships among couples, exemplifying how communicative exchanges contribute to the creation of frames for family participation in routines. In the first part of the paper, a review of issues regarding the division of labor within the family setting will be introduced in order to examine how these aspects relate to the ongoing negotiation of responsibilities and expectations between women and men. Thereafter, the methodological design of the study will be presented, as well as the qualitative analysis of data based on the argumentative topic model. A discussion of participants’ responsibilities in household tasks will be presented as indicators of their collaborative relationships during everyday activities. Lastly, implications for family studies will be highlighted in order to illustrate how family members ascribe meanings during routines.

This study examined the roles of child gender and attachment in mother-child narrative conversations and child independent narratives. Children (M_age = 56 months) told personal narratives independently and while engaged in narrative conversations with their mothers. The Attachment Story Completion Task-Revised (Verschueren & Marcoen, 1994) measured child attachment representations. Results indicated that attachment was linked to maternal conversational style and child independent narratives. Mothers with secure sons continued their topics more than mothers of secure daughters, and secure boys’ independent narratives were less elaborative than those of secure girls. However, no gender differences were found among insecure dyads. We argue that mothers of secure boys sensitively recognize their sons’ cues within the conversational context and respond to the need for further verbal assistance, thus providing more on-topic replies in narrative conversations.

This study offers an experimental perspective to investigate the word order and animacy effects of intransitives in Turkish, an agglutinative language with a canonical, flexible Subject-Object-Verb order. Four experiments were conducted to investigate a total of 528 Turkish speakers’ acceptability judgments using rating scales (Experiments 1 and 3; 7-point Likert scales) and forced choice tasks (Experiments 2 and 4; choosing one of two sentences) for various orders of linguistic forms in a simple intransitive sentence. Results from scalar acceptability judgments showed that there were significant main effects of order and subject, indicating that participants gave significantly higher ratings to SV sentences than VS sentences and that their ratings changed significantly according to the animacy of the subjects. Results from the forced choice tasks showed that participants preferred SV sentences to VS sentences. These findings suggest that Turkish speakers prefer SV order over VS order even though both are readily available.