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Attitude verbs like "think" and "want" describe mental states (belief and desire) that lack reliable physical correlates that could help children learn their meanings. Nevertheless, children succeed in doing so. For this reason, attitude verbs have been a parade case for syntactic bootstrapping. We assess a recent syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis, in which children assign belief semantics to verbs whose complement clauses morphosyntactically resemble the declarative main clauses of their language, while assigning desire semantics to verbs whose complement clauses do not. This hypothesis, building on the cross-linguistic generalization that belief complements have the morphosyntactic hallmarks of declarative main clauses, has been elaborated for languages with relatively rich morphosyntax. This article looks at Mandarin Chinese, whose null arguments and impoverished morphology mean that the differences necessary for syntactic bootstrapping might be much harder to detect. Our corpus analysis, however, shows that Mandarin belief complements have the profile of declarative main clauses, while desire complements do not. We also show that a computational implementation of this hypothesis can learn the right semantic contrasts between Mandarin and English belief and desire verbs, using morphosyntactic features in child-ambient speech. These results provide novel cross-linguistic support for this syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis.

Background: Alcohol misuse among college students remains a pervasive problem. Relatively little is known about alcohol consumption by incoming students during the summer between high school graduation and the start of the freshman year. It is possible that many students bring unhealthy drinking habits with them to college. Purpose: The present study examined patterns of alcohol use and related consequences among incoming college students during the summer before their freshman year. Methods: The dataset consisted of self-reported two-week drinking histories from 4,539 incoming freshmen at three universities during the summer of 2003. An average of 80% of all incoming students at the schools was surveyed. In the present study, drinking patterns, risk and protective factors, and alcohol-related consequences were examined. Results: Roughly 50% of college-bound students consumed alcohol in the two weeks before the survey. Nearly 30% of all students met or exceeded the threshold for binge drinking (4+ drinks for females; 5+ drinks for males). Among those who drank during the two weeks before the survey, roughly 50% of males and females consumed shots, 50% played drinking games, and 36% suffered hangovers. More than one in ten males and females experienced memory blackouts during the two-week period. Fourteen percent of males and 10% of females drove after drinking. Females were twice as likely as males to drink on an empty stomach to get drunk faster (8.2% and 4.1%) and four times as likely to drink on an empty stomach to save calories (12.8% and 2.9%). Discussion: Many students bring unhealthy drinking habits with them to college and experience blackouts, hangovers, and other consequences during the summer before they arrive on campus. Translation to Health Education Practice: Alcohol education and prevention programs should target students prior to their arrival on college campuses. (Contains 3 tables.)

Propositional attitude verbs, such as "think" and "want," have long held interest for both theoretical linguists and language acquisitionists because their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties display complex interactions that have proven difficult to fully capture from either perspective. This paper explores the granularity with which these verbs' semantic and pragmatic properties are recoverable from their syntactic distributions, using three behavioral experiments aimed at explicitly quantifying the relationship between these two sets of properties. Experiment 1 gathers a measure of 30 propositional attitude verbs' syntactic distributions using an acceptability judgment task. Experiments 2a and 2b gather measures of semantic similarity between those same verbs using a generalized semantic discrimination (triad or "odd man out") task and an ordinal (Likert) scale task, respectively. Two kinds of analyses are conducted on the data from these experiments. The first compares both the acceptability judgments and the semantic similarity judgments to previous classifications derived from the syntax and semantics literature. The second kind compares the acceptability judgments to the semantic similarity judgments directly. Through these comparisons, we show that there is quite fine-grained information about propositional attitude verbs' semantics carried in their syntactic distributions--whether one considers the sorts of discrete qualitative classifications that linguists traditionally work with or the sorts of continuous quantitative classifications that can be derived experimentally.

Drug poisoning is the leading method of suicide-related deaths among females and third among males in the United States. Alcohol can increase the severity of drug poisonings, yet the prevalence of alcohol overdoses in suicide-related drug poisonings (SRDP) remains unclear. Data from the Nationwide Inpatient Sample was examined to determine rates of inpatient hospital stays for SRDP and co-occurring alcohol overdoses in adolescents (ages 12-17) and young adults (ages 18-24) between 1999 and 2008. Among adolescents, there were 14,615 hospitalizations for drug poisonings in 2008, of which 72% (10,462) were suicide-related at a cost of $43 million. Rates of SRDP in this age group decreased between 1999 and 2008. The prevalence of co-occurring alcohol overdoses increased from 5% in 1999 to 7% in 2008. Among young adults, there were 32,471 hospitalizations for drug poisonings in 2008, of which 64% (20,746) were suicide-related at a cost of $110 million. Rates of SRDP did not change significantly between 1999 and 2008. The prevalence of co-occurring alcohol overdoses increased from 14% in 1999 to 20% in 2008. Thus, while rates of SRDP decreased for adolescents and remained unchanged for young adults, the prevalence of co-occurring alcohol overdoses increased for both age groups. Such hospitalizations provide important opportunities to employ intervention techniques to prevent further suicide attempts. (Contains 2 tables and 2 figures.)

Adolescence is the transition from childhood to adulthood, a period during which an individual acquires the skills necessary to survive on his or her own, away from parents or other caregivers. Adolescence can be a very confusing time. They experience changes in sleep, diet, mood, weight and attitude and a decreased pleasure from daily activities. These changes are all normal and, in many ways, crucial to healthy adolescent development. Recent research has shown that changes in brain function underlie many of these behavioural changes. These findings have important implications for understanding both normal and abnormal adolescent behavioural patterns, promoting communication between parents and young people, and helping adolescents make the most of their educational opportunities and developing brains. This article discusses the developmental reasons for the consistent behavioural patterns that occur during adolescence and how dramatic changes in brain development and function give rise to these behaviours.

Surveyed college students about their experiences with blackouts following binge drinking. About half of those who had ever consumed alcohol had experienced a blackout at some time. Many learned later that during the blackout they had engaged in risky behaviors. Experiencing three or more blackouts related to such other experiences as heavier drinking, lower grades, earlier drinking onset, and having others express concern about their drinking. Gender differences were evident. (SM)