Current Directions in Psychological Science

Six types of studies show that father love sometimes explains as much or more of the variation in specific child and adult outcomes as does mother love. Sometimes, however, only father love is statistically associated with specific aspects of offsprings' development and adjustment, after controlling for the influence of mother love. Recognition of these facts was clouded historically by the cultural construction of fatherhood and fathering in America.

Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is a theory of how word meaning—and possibly other knowledge—is derived from statistics of experience, and of how passage meaning is represented by combinations of words. Given a large and representative sample of text, LSA combines the way thousands of words are used in thousands of contexts to map a point for each into a common semantic space. LSA goes beyond pair-wise co-occurrence or correlation to find latent dimensions of meaning that best relate every word and passage to every other. After learning from comparable bodies of text, LSA has scored almost as well as humans on vocabulary and subject-matter tests, accurately simulated many aspects of human judgment and behavior based on verbal meaning, and been successfully applied to measure the coherence and conceptual content of text. The surprising success of LSA has implications for the nature of generalization and language.