Mental health issues among Ph.D. students are prevalent and on the rise, with multiple studies showing that Ph.D. students are more likely to experience symptoms of mental health-related issues than the general population. However, the data is still sparse. This study aims to investigate the mental health of 589 Ph.D. students at a public university in Germany using a mixed quantitative and qualitative approach. We administered a web-based self-report questionnaire to gather data on the mental health status, investigated mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety, and potential areas for improvement of the mental health and well-being of Ph.D. students. Our results revealed that one-third of the participants were above the cut-off for depression and that factors such as perceived stress and self-doubt were prominent predictors of the mental health status of Ph.D. students. Additionally, we found job insecurity and low job satisfaction to be predictors of stress and anxiety. Many participants in our study reported working more than full-time while being employed part-time. Importantly, deficient supervision was found to have a negative effect on Ph.D. students’ mental health. The study’s results are in line with those of earlier investigations of mental health in academia, which likewise reveal significant levels of depression and anxiety among Ph.D. students. Overall, the findings provide a greater knowledge of the underlying reasons and potential interventions required for advancing the mental health problems experienced by Ph.D. students. The results of this research can guide the development of effective strategies to support the mental health of Ph.D. students.

Mental health issues among Ph.D. students are prevalent and on the rise, with multiple studies showing that Ph.D. students are more likely to experience symptoms of mental-health related issues than the general population. However, the data is still sparse and does not account for different situations. This study aims to investigate the mental health of 589 Ph.D. students at a public university in Germany with a mixed quantitative and qualitative approach. We administered a web-based self-report questionnaire to gather data on the causes of mental health problems, for instance, depression and anxiety, and potential areas for improvement. Our results revealed that one-third of the participants were above the cut-off for depression and that factors such as perceived stress and self-doubt were prominent predictors of the mental health status of Ph.D. students. Additionally, we found job insecurity and low job satisfaction to be predictors of stress and anxiety. A large number of participants in our study reported working more than full-time while being employed part-time. Importantly, deficient supervision was found to have a negative effect on Ph.D. students’ mental health. The study’s results are in line with those of earlier investigations of mental health in academia, which likewise reveal significant levels of depression and anxiety among Ph.D. students. Overall, the findings provide a greater knowledge of the underlying reasons and potential interventions required for advancing the mental health problems experienced by Ph.D. students. The results of this research can guide the development of effective strategies to support the mental health of Ph.D. students.

This paper experimentally investigates the two generalizations for multiple sluicing (MS) recently presented by Klaus Abels and Veneeta Dayal: first, that wh-remnants must have clausemate correlates in the antecedent utterance and, second, that wh-remnants in MS can have correlates in the antecedent clause that are contained in a strong syntactic island. The fact that MS displays both of these properties is puzzling since island insensitivity under sluicing favors a non-sententialist approach to MS, while the clausemate requirement on MS is most straightforwardly explained by postulating a silent structure at the ellipsis site. Even though the clausemate condition has been reported in several languages, no experimental work has been conducted so far to examine its precise effects on the acceptability of MS constructions. In this paper, I will present the results of a series of experiments in German, English, and Spanish (employing both acceptability judgment tasks and a self-paced reading task), where the factors of clausemateness and islandhood have been examined systematically. The results provide solid cross-linguistic support for Abels and Dayal’s generalizations by showing that multiple sluices originating from islands and non-islands are equally acceptable and do not exhibit online processing differences. Furthermore, the acceptability judgment tasks show a significant degradation in acceptability when the correlates in the antecedent do not stem from the same finite clause, thus violating the clausemate condition. I will interpret these results as supporting a particular strand of sententialist research known as the island evasion approach and, in particular, defend that MS is derived from a non-isomorphic short source sluice.

This paper examines multiple sluicing constructions in Mandarin Chinese (henceforth, MC) experimentally. The acceptability status of such constructions in MC is controversial, and the judgments reported in the previous literature vary. Obtaining experimental evidence on the acceptability status is, therefore, important to advance the research on multiple sluicing in MC. Consequently, the present study conducts two sets of experiments to investigate factors affecting the acceptability of multiple sluicing sentences and the influence of the distribution of shi preceding wh-remnants on acceptability ratings. The results show that multiple sluicing in MC is generally a marked construction. Nevertheless, factors including prepositionhood and specificity have ameliorating effects on the acceptability of such constructions. Moreover, the influence of the distribution of shi on the acceptability ratings is related to the nature of wh-remnants; that is, its presence significantly improves the acceptability of cases of multiple sluicing when it precedes bare wh-arguments. We argue that the observed ameliorating effects on multiple sluicing can be explained by a cue-based retrieval approach to cross-linguistic elliptical constructions. Compared to bare wh-arguments, prepositional and discourse-linked wh-phrases provide cues to facilitate the retrieval of information from antecedent clauses.