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Papers by Neiloufar Family

Journal of Psychopharmacology, 2022

Background: Classic psychedelics hold promise as therapeutics for psychiatric disorders, but requ... more Background: Classic psychedelics hold promise as therapeutics for psychiatric disorders, but require scalable intervention protocols. This proof-of-concept study evaluated the safety, tolerability, pharmacokinetics, and subjective effects of 50, 75, and 100 µg lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) in healthy adults within a novel intervention paradigm. Methods: Up to three participants were administered LSD on the same day in separate rooms, each with a single attendant, after 1 day of preparation. An open-label design and a double-blind placebo-controlled design were used. Results: Ninety-one percent of participants completed the study. Thirty-two adults (mean age = 28.8 years) received 50 (n = 3), 75 (n = 7), 100 (n = 3) LSD, 50 µg followed by 75 µg LSD (n = 9) 1 week apart, or placebo followed by a 75 µg LSD (n = 10) 1 week apart. There were no serious adverse events. Twenty-eight percent of participants experienced at least one expected mild adverse event, with one expected moderate ...

Journal of Psychopharmacology, 2022

Background: Classic psychedelics show promise in the treatment of mental health conditions; howev... more Background: Classic psychedelics show promise in the treatment of mental health conditions; however, more scalable intervention protocols are needed to maximize access to these novel therapeutics. In this proof-of-concept study, perceptions of safety, subjective effects, and beliefs about the clinical utility of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) were evaluated among healthy participants ( N = 31) administered 50 to 100 µg LSD in a treatment paradigm conceptualized as more scalable than traditional approaches to administering classic psychedelics. Methods: Semi-structured interviews assessed participants’ expectations, experience, and thoughts on the safety and efficacy of the study design. These interviews were transcribed for thematic analysis relating to perceptions of safety, subjective effects, and beliefs about the clinical utility of LSD. Results: Most participants felt safe throughout the study, with a minority reporting concerns related to having a challenging experience that...

Psychopharmacology, 2019

Research has shown that psychedelics, such as lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), have profound ant... more Research has shown that psychedelics, such as lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), have profound anti-inflammatory properties mediated by 5-HT2A receptor signaling, supporting their evaluation as a therapeutic for neuroinflammation associated with neurodegenerative disease. Objective This study evaluated the safety, tolerability, pharmacokinetics, and pharmacodynamics of orally repeated administration of 5 μg, 10 μg, and 20 μg LSD in older healthy individuals. In the current paper, we present safety, tolerability, pharmacokinetics, and pharmacodynamic measures that relate to safety, tolerability, and dose response. Methods This was a phase 1 double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized study. Volunteers were randomly assigned to 1 of 4 dose groups (5 μg, 10 μg, 20 μg LSD, and placebo), and received their assigned dose on six occasions (i.e., every 4 days). Results Forty-eight older healthy volunteers (mean age = 62.9 years) received placebo (n = 12), 5 μg (n = 12), 10 μg (n = 12), or 2...

Psychopharmacology, 2018

Rationale Previous research demonstrating that lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) produces alterati... more Rationale Previous research demonstrating that lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) produces alterations in time perception has implications for its impact on conscious states and a range of psychological functions that necessitate precise interval timing. However, interpretation of this research is hindered by methodological limitations and an inability to dissociate direct neurochemical effects on interval timing from indirect effects attributable to altered states of consciousness. Methods We conducted a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled study contrasting oral administration of placebo with three microdoses of LSD (5, 10, and 20 μg) in older adults. Subjective drug effects were regularly recorded and interval timing was assessed using a temporal reproduction task spanning subsecond and suprasecond intervals. Results LSD conditions were not associated with any robust changes in self-report indices of perception, mentation, or concentration. LSD reliably produced over-reprod...

Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 2016

In two cross-linguistic priming experiments with native German speakers of L2 English, we investi... more In two cross-linguistic priming experiments with native German speakers of L2 English, we investigated the role of constituent order and level of embedding in cross-linguistic structural priming. In both experiments, significant priming effects emerged only if prime and target were similar with regard to constituent order and also situated on the same level of embedding. We discuss our results on the basis of two current theoretical accounts of cross-linguistic priming, and conclude that neither an account based on combinatorial nodes nor an account assuming that constituent order is directly responsible for the priming effect can fully explain our data pattern. We suggest an account that explains cross-linguistic priming through a hierarchical tree representation. This representation is computed during processing of the prime, and can influence the formulation of a target sentence only when the structural features specified in it are grammatically correct in the target sentence.

Journal of child language, Jan 3, 2015

The acquisition of systematic patterns and exceptions in different languages can be readily exami... more The acquisition of systematic patterns and exceptions in different languages can be readily examined using the causative construction. Persian allows four types of causative structures, including one productive multiword structure (i.e. the light verb construction). In this study, we examine the development of all four structures in Persian child speech between the ages of 1;11 and 6;7, in correspondence with their caregivers' speech. We define developmental stages based on dendrograms derived from variability clustering (Gries & Stoll, 2009). These stages are further substantiated by qualitative data, including overgeneralization errors and alternating structures. We find that Persian-speaking children learn to exploit two (i.e. lexical and light verb construction causatives) of the four constructions. They go from relying on lexical causatives to forming progressively constrained templates for the more complex light verb construction. This first study of the development of Per...

In this study, we present and analyze co-constructions from L2 English data collected at the Euro... more In this study, we present and analyze co-constructions from L2 English data collected at the European School in Luxembourg. Co-constructions are morpho-syntactic structures split across two speakers, in which a second speaker completes a grammatical structure initiated by the first speaker in conversation. The corpus features multilingual 13-14 year old language learners interacting in an English classroom as they work on a collaborative group-writing task. Five types of co-constructions emerge in our data: locative phrases, want/let, copulas, transitives, and nominal compounds. The analysis centers on the morpho-syntactic structures involved, with consideration of the sequential environment where co-constructions occur. The featured examples complement and expand what we know about co-constructions in two ways. First, the data suggest that L2 language learners engage in co-constructions just as native speakers (NS) do, irrespective of their L2 learner status. Second, L2 co-construc...

Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) is a classic psychedelic drug that alters cognition in a charact... more Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) is a classic psychedelic drug that alters cognition in a characteristic way. It has been suggested that psychedelics expand the breadth of cognition via actions on the central nervous system. Previous work has shown changes in semantic processing under psilocybin (a related psychedelic to LSD) that are consistent with an increased spread of semantic activation. The present study investigates this further using a picture-naming task and the psychedelic, LSD. Ten participants completed the task under placebo and LSD. Results revealed significant effects of LSD on accuracy and error correction that were consistent with an increased spread of semantic activation under LSD. These results are consistent with a generalised “entropic” effect on the mind. We suggest incorporating direct neuroimaging measures in future studies, and to employ more naturalistic measures of semantic processing that may enhance ecological validity.

Psychopharmacology, 2015

Rationale There is renewed interest in the therapeutic potential of psychedelic drugs such as lys... more Rationale There is renewed interest in the therapeutic potential of psychedelic drugs such as lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). LSD was used extensively in the 1950s and 1960s as an adjunct in psychotherapy, reportedly enhancing emotionality. Music is an effective tool to evoke and study emotion and is considered an important element in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy; however, the hypothesis that psychedelics enhance the emotional response to music has yet to be investigated in a modern placebo-controlled study.

The acquisition of systematic patterns and exceptions in different languages can be readily exami... more The acquisition of systematic patterns and exceptions in different languages can be readily examined using the causative construction. Persian allows four types of causative structures, including one productive multiword structure (i.e. the light verb construction). In this study, we examine the development of all four structures in Persian child speech between the ages of ; and ;, in correspondence with their caregivers’ speech. We define developmental stages based on dendrograms derived from variability clustering (Gries & Stoll, ). These stages are further substantiated by qualitative data, including overgeneralization errors and alternating structures. We find that Persian-speaking children learn to exploit two (i.e. lexical and light verb construction causatives) of the four constructions. They go from relying on lexical causatives to forming progressively constrained templates for the more complex light verb construction. This first study of the development of Persian causatives supports a usage-based account of verb-by-verb learning in child language development.

In this study, we present and analyze co-constructions from L2 English data collected at the Euro... more In this study, we present and analyze co-constructions from L2 English data collected at the European
School in Luxembourg. Co-constructions are morpho-syntactic structures split across two speakers, in which a
second speaker completes a grammatical structure initiated by the first speaker in conversation. The corpus
features multilingual 13-14 year old language learners interacting in an English classroom as they work on a
collaborative group-writing task. Five types of co-constructions emerge in our data: locative phrases, want/let,
copulas, transitives, and nominal compounds. The analysis centers on the morpho-syntactic structures involved,
with consideration of the sequential environment where co-constructions occur. The featured examples
complement and expand what we know about co-constructions in two ways. First, the data suggest that L2
language learners engage in co-constructions just as native speakers (NS) do, irrespective of their L2 learner
status. Second, L2 co-constructions, similar to previously reported NS examples, appear to orient to both a) the
morpho-syntactic constraints of the language used, as well as to b) the social-interactional context surrounding
and structuring the task-in-progress such as the back and forth of talk during a collaborative writing task.

Folia Linguistica, Jan 1, 2011

One of the most disputed issues in Iranian linguistics involves the analysis of light verb constr... more One of the most disputed issues in Iranian linguistics involves the analysis of light verb constructions (LVC). In Persian, a large number of different actions are expressed through a small set of basic action verbs used as light verbs (LV) combined with a semantically restricted but open ...

From polysemy to semantic change: towards a …, Jan 1, 2008

Books by Neiloufar Family

In Semantic Spaces of Persian Light Verbs, Neiloufar Family exposes the semantic organization of ... more In Semantic Spaces of Persian Light Verbs, Neiloufar Family exposes the semantic organization of light verb constructions in Persian. By clustering constructions based on semantic properties, she provides an insightful and more global view of a system that has been notoriously difficult to classify.

Using diagrams as visual aids, Neiloufar Family takes a novel, bottom-up approach to analysing the light verb system, starting from small sets of constructions and mapping out consistent patterns. Her analysis leads to a deeper understanding of the structure of semantic spaces within the verbal system in Persian, and other languages that use light verbs. This research provides a blueprint for understanding existing verbal constructions and productively creating new ones.

Journal of Psychopharmacology, 2022

Background: Classic psychedelics hold promise as therapeutics for psychiatric disorders, but requ... more Background: Classic psychedelics hold promise as therapeutics for psychiatric disorders, but require scalable intervention protocols. This proof-of-concept study evaluated the safety, tolerability, pharmacokinetics, and subjective effects of 50, 75, and 100 µg lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) in healthy adults within a novel intervention paradigm. Methods: Up to three participants were administered LSD on the same day in separate rooms, each with a single attendant, after 1 day of preparation. An open-label design and a double-blind placebo-controlled design were used. Results: Ninety-one percent of participants completed the study. Thirty-two adults (mean age = 28.8 years) received 50 (n = 3), 75 (n = 7), 100 (n = 3) LSD, 50 µg followed by 75 µg LSD (n = 9) 1 week apart, or placebo followed by a 75 µg LSD (n = 10) 1 week apart. There were no serious adverse events. Twenty-eight percent of participants experienced at least one expected mild adverse event, with one expected moderate ...

Journal of Psychopharmacology, 2022

Background: Classic psychedelics show promise in the treatment of mental health conditions; howev... more Background: Classic psychedelics show promise in the treatment of mental health conditions; however, more scalable intervention protocols are needed to maximize access to these novel therapeutics. In this proof-of-concept study, perceptions of safety, subjective effects, and beliefs about the clinical utility of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) were evaluated among healthy participants ( N = 31) administered 50 to 100 µg LSD in a treatment paradigm conceptualized as more scalable than traditional approaches to administering classic psychedelics. Methods: Semi-structured interviews assessed participants’ expectations, experience, and thoughts on the safety and efficacy of the study design. These interviews were transcribed for thematic analysis relating to perceptions of safety, subjective effects, and beliefs about the clinical utility of LSD. Results: Most participants felt safe throughout the study, with a minority reporting concerns related to having a challenging experience that...

Psychopharmacology, 2019

Research has shown that psychedelics, such as lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), have profound ant... more Research has shown that psychedelics, such as lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), have profound anti-inflammatory properties mediated by 5-HT2A receptor signaling, supporting their evaluation as a therapeutic for neuroinflammation associated with neurodegenerative disease. Objective This study evaluated the safety, tolerability, pharmacokinetics, and pharmacodynamics of orally repeated administration of 5 μg, 10 μg, and 20 μg LSD in older healthy individuals. In the current paper, we present safety, tolerability, pharmacokinetics, and pharmacodynamic measures that relate to safety, tolerability, and dose response. Methods This was a phase 1 double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized study. Volunteers were randomly assigned to 1 of 4 dose groups (5 μg, 10 μg, 20 μg LSD, and placebo), and received their assigned dose on six occasions (i.e., every 4 days). Results Forty-eight older healthy volunteers (mean age = 62.9 years) received placebo (n = 12), 5 μg (n = 12), 10 μg (n = 12), or 2...

Psychopharmacology, 2018

Rationale Previous research demonstrating that lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) produces alterati... more Rationale Previous research demonstrating that lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) produces alterations in time perception has implications for its impact on conscious states and a range of psychological functions that necessitate precise interval timing. However, interpretation of this research is hindered by methodological limitations and an inability to dissociate direct neurochemical effects on interval timing from indirect effects attributable to altered states of consciousness. Methods We conducted a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled study contrasting oral administration of placebo with three microdoses of LSD (5, 10, and 20 μg) in older adults. Subjective drug effects were regularly recorded and interval timing was assessed using a temporal reproduction task spanning subsecond and suprasecond intervals. Results LSD conditions were not associated with any robust changes in self-report indices of perception, mentation, or concentration. LSD reliably produced over-reprod...

Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 2016

In two cross-linguistic priming experiments with native German speakers of L2 English, we investi... more In two cross-linguistic priming experiments with native German speakers of L2 English, we investigated the role of constituent order and level of embedding in cross-linguistic structural priming. In both experiments, significant priming effects emerged only if prime and target were similar with regard to constituent order and also situated on the same level of embedding. We discuss our results on the basis of two current theoretical accounts of cross-linguistic priming, and conclude that neither an account based on combinatorial nodes nor an account assuming that constituent order is directly responsible for the priming effect can fully explain our data pattern. We suggest an account that explains cross-linguistic priming through a hierarchical tree representation. This representation is computed during processing of the prime, and can influence the formulation of a target sentence only when the structural features specified in it are grammatically correct in the target sentence.

Journal of child language, Jan 3, 2015

The acquisition of systematic patterns and exceptions in different languages can be readily exami... more The acquisition of systematic patterns and exceptions in different languages can be readily examined using the causative construction. Persian allows four types of causative structures, including one productive multiword structure (i.e. the light verb construction). In this study, we examine the development of all four structures in Persian child speech between the ages of 1;11 and 6;7, in correspondence with their caregivers' speech. We define developmental stages based on dendrograms derived from variability clustering (Gries & Stoll, 2009). These stages are further substantiated by qualitative data, including overgeneralization errors and alternating structures. We find that Persian-speaking children learn to exploit two (i.e. lexical and light verb construction causatives) of the four constructions. They go from relying on lexical causatives to forming progressively constrained templates for the more complex light verb construction. This first study of the development of Per...

In this study, we present and analyze co-constructions from L2 English data collected at the Euro... more In this study, we present and analyze co-constructions from L2 English data collected at the European School in Luxembourg. Co-constructions are morpho-syntactic structures split across two speakers, in which a second speaker completes a grammatical structure initiated by the first speaker in conversation. The corpus features multilingual 13-14 year old language learners interacting in an English classroom as they work on a collaborative group-writing task. Five types of co-constructions emerge in our data: locative phrases, want/let, copulas, transitives, and nominal compounds. The analysis centers on the morpho-syntactic structures involved, with consideration of the sequential environment where co-constructions occur. The featured examples complement and expand what we know about co-constructions in two ways. First, the data suggest that L2 language learners engage in co-constructions just as native speakers (NS) do, irrespective of their L2 learner status. Second, L2 co-construc...

Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) is a classic psychedelic drug that alters cognition in a charact... more Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) is a classic psychedelic drug that alters cognition in a characteristic way. It has been suggested that psychedelics expand the breadth of cognition via actions on the central nervous system. Previous work has shown changes in semantic processing under psilocybin (a related psychedelic to LSD) that are consistent with an increased spread of semantic activation. The present study investigates this further using a picture-naming task and the psychedelic, LSD. Ten participants completed the task under placebo and LSD. Results revealed significant effects of LSD on accuracy and error correction that were consistent with an increased spread of semantic activation under LSD. These results are consistent with a generalised “entropic” effect on the mind. We suggest incorporating direct neuroimaging measures in future studies, and to employ more naturalistic measures of semantic processing that may enhance ecological validity.

Psychopharmacology, 2015

Rationale There is renewed interest in the therapeutic potential of psychedelic drugs such as lys... more Rationale There is renewed interest in the therapeutic potential of psychedelic drugs such as lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). LSD was used extensively in the 1950s and 1960s as an adjunct in psychotherapy, reportedly enhancing emotionality. Music is an effective tool to evoke and study emotion and is considered an important element in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy; however, the hypothesis that psychedelics enhance the emotional response to music has yet to be investigated in a modern placebo-controlled study.

The acquisition of systematic patterns and exceptions in different languages can be readily exami... more The acquisition of systematic patterns and exceptions in different languages can be readily examined using the causative construction. Persian allows four types of causative structures, including one productive multiword structure (i.e. the light verb construction). In this study, we examine the development of all four structures in Persian child speech between the ages of ; and ;, in correspondence with their caregivers’ speech. We define developmental stages based on dendrograms derived from variability clustering (Gries & Stoll, ). These stages are further substantiated by qualitative data, including overgeneralization errors and alternating structures. We find that Persian-speaking children learn to exploit two (i.e. lexical and light verb construction causatives) of the four constructions. They go from relying on lexical causatives to forming progressively constrained templates for the more complex light verb construction. This first study of the development of Persian causatives supports a usage-based account of verb-by-verb learning in child language development.

In this study, we present and analyze co-constructions from L2 English data collected at the Euro... more In this study, we present and analyze co-constructions from L2 English data collected at the European
School in Luxembourg. Co-constructions are morpho-syntactic structures split across two speakers, in which a
second speaker completes a grammatical structure initiated by the first speaker in conversation. The corpus
features multilingual 13-14 year old language learners interacting in an English classroom as they work on a
collaborative group-writing task. Five types of co-constructions emerge in our data: locative phrases, want/let,
copulas, transitives, and nominal compounds. The analysis centers on the morpho-syntactic structures involved,
with consideration of the sequential environment where co-constructions occur. The featured examples
complement and expand what we know about co-constructions in two ways. First, the data suggest that L2
language learners engage in co-constructions just as native speakers (NS) do, irrespective of their L2 learner
status. Second, L2 co-constructions, similar to previously reported NS examples, appear to orient to both a) the
morpho-syntactic constraints of the language used, as well as to b) the social-interactional context surrounding
and structuring the task-in-progress such as the back and forth of talk during a collaborative writing task.

Folia Linguistica, Jan 1, 2011

One of the most disputed issues in Iranian linguistics involves the analysis of light verb constr... more One of the most disputed issues in Iranian linguistics involves the analysis of light verb constructions (LVC). In Persian, a large number of different actions are expressed through a small set of basic action verbs used as light verbs (LV) combined with a semantically restricted but open ...

From polysemy to semantic change: towards a …, Jan 1, 2008

In Semantic Spaces of Persian Light Verbs, Neiloufar Family exposes the semantic organization of ... more In Semantic Spaces of Persian Light Verbs, Neiloufar Family exposes the semantic organization of light verb constructions in Persian. By clustering constructions based on semantic properties, she provides an insightful and more global view of a system that has been notoriously difficult to classify.

Using diagrams as visual aids, Neiloufar Family takes a novel, bottom-up approach to analysing the light verb system, starting from small sets of constructions and mapping out consistent patterns. Her analysis leads to a deeper understanding of the structure of semantic spaces within the verbal system in Persian, and other languages that use light verbs. This research provides a blueprint for understanding existing verbal constructions and productively creating new ones.