Volume 13 (2009): Issue 2 (January 2009)

Studies on personality-related Chinese adjectives suggest either a five-factor or seven-factor structure. In the current investigation, we selected a bigger adjective pool of personality-related adjectives, and tested them on the university students in Northern, Southern, Western and Eastern China. In Study 1, we administered the the self-rating scales of the 650 adjectives in 610 subjects. Five factors emerged clearly, and named as "Intelligent", "Emotional", Conscientious", "Unsocial" and "Agreeable". We then selected 20 adjectives with highest target loadings for each factor to develop a short version of the self-report rating scales, the Chinese Adjective Descriptors of Personality (CADP). In study 2, we administered the 100-adjective CADP to 720 university students in the four areas of China. Again, five-factor structures were confirmed. Loadings of the individual adjectives on the target factor were satisfactory, and the internal alphas for each personality scale were high. Most CADP scales were intercorrelated. There were, however, no significant gender differences in regard to CADP scales. The five-factor structures found in our report were comparable to the Openness to Experiences (or Intellect), Neuroticism, Conscientiousness, Extraversion and Agreeableness found in other cultures. The normative data of the CADP is presented.

The paper reports two studies of the development of false belief reasoning in bilingual Roma children in Bulgaria. No previous work has considered Roma children. Two studies were conducted, and in the second study the Roma children spoke a dialect of Romani that contains evidential markers, as does Bulgarian, their second language. Results reveal no advantage of bilingualism, and similar results with age to that found in other groups across the world. The bilingual group had better understanding of evidentials than the monolingual Bulgarian group, possibly related to the linguistic character of the markings. There is contradictory evidence about the relation of ToM and understanding of evidentiality.

In the article the fact is verified that the list of words selected by formal statistical methods (frequency and functional genre unrestrictedness) is not a conglomerate of non-related words. It creates a system of interrelated items and it can be named the "lexical base of language". This selected list of words covers all the spheres of human activities. To verify this statement the invariant synoptical scheme common for ideographic dictionaries of different languages was determined.

In this paper we examine the "jumbled words" effect which denotes human ability to easily read words whose internal letters have been re-arranged as long as external letters remain in their positions. Hitherto, many explanations for this effect have focussed on the processes that operate "bottom-up". Here we suggest that "top-down" processes also play an important role and demonstrate this experimentally. First, we briefly describe the main types of word-recognition models and consider which model best explains the effect. Then, we present an experiment in which jumbled words of different frequency of occurrence were immersed in various types of contexts. Results indicate that both the frequency and semantic sentential context are involved in jumbled word recognition. The implications of these findings for word recognition models are discussed.

Broca's aphasia is still a relatively poorly understood phenomenon. The Trace Deletion Hypothesis is one of the attempts made to explain linguistically comprehension deficits observable in this disorder. The article presents the main assumptions, claims and consequences of this hypothesis, as well as criticisms it has raised in the literature. This hypothesis offers an opportunity for shedding more light on the issue of agrammatism in Broca's aphasia, and also for improving our understanding of the phenomenon of aphasia as such and, consequently, our understanding of language processing in the human mind.