What Sermons Can Tell Us

In this I essay I analyse four sermons delivered at Shan festivals that celebrates the end of the Rains Retreat (Waa). I first argue that sermons in general are important sources of information about lived Buddhism. I next provide background information necessary to understand the sermon events and the sermons. In conclusion, I compare the sermons and discuss what laypeople can learn from sermons and what we, as academics, can learn from them.     

感数——它能告诉我们什么?

研究者在列举任务中发现,被试对3个以内项目的报告既快又准确（一般称之为“感数”）,而对3个以上项目的报告既慢又容易出错误（“计数”）,由此他们提出感数和计数属于两种不同性质的加工过程,一系列行为数据的反应时和正确率指标支持了这一假设。此外,最近的脑成像、电生理研究还发现,感数和计数在对注意的需求上同样存在着分离——感数无需注意,只有计数过程才需注意的参与。在此基础上,研究者从不同角度提出了一些解释感数现象的理论     

Just Tell Us What Happened to You: Autobiographical Memory and Seeking Asylum

When someone flees their country and seeks the protection of another state, they usually have to describe what happened to make them afraid to return. This task requires many psychological processes, a key one being autobiographical memory. Memory for events of a specific time and place in one's personal past is the subject of a huge literature, much of it showing that recall is vulnerable to distortions and biases. We review selected areas of this literature, shedding light on some of the processes at work when someone seeks to be recognised as a refugee—in particular, the effects of emotion, including emotional disorder. We then turn to the differing types of memory styles seen in different cultures. Crucial to this area, we briefly examine the current literature on deception. Finally, we draw on the reviewed literature to present conclusions about the reliance on autobiographical memories in the asylum process. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

科学可以告诉过去

生活每天都在演绎不同的故事,可随着时光的流逝,有些事情如风吹云散,让后人难以了解其本来面目,历史为我们留下了很多遗憾。现代科技的飞速发展,却能够跨越时空的阻隔,开通我们与历史沟通的渠道,重新证实被歪曲或讹传的事实真相。美国一位著名的法医学家曾说过:死亡无法使我内心冷却……死者能对科学的探寻作出回答,诉说以往的故事。让死者“开口”证明其身份或诉说以往的故事的方法,有DNA指纹鉴定法,骨骼检验法及牙齿鉴定、毒物分析和人像还原等技术,这些现代科技可使历史上的一些悬案被重新盖棺定论,让真相大白于天下。     

What Studies of Actors and Acting Can Tell Us About Memory and Cognitive Functioning

ABSTRACT— The art of acting has been defined as the ability to live truthfully under imaginary circumstances. Our many years of researching theatrical expertise have produced findings relevant to text comprehension, learning theory, cognitive aging, and expert memory. In this article, we first discuss how large amounts of dialogue, learned in a very short period, can be reproduced in real time with complete spontaneity. We then turn to abstracting the essence of acting and applying it to diverse undertakings, from discovering optimal learning strategies to promoting healthy cognitive aging. Finally, we address the implications of acting expertise on current theories of embodied cognition.     

What Can Bilingual Children Tell Us About the Developmental Relationship Between Vocabulary and Grammar?

Strong correlations between vocabulary and grammar are well attested in language development in monolingual and bilingual children. What is less clear is whether there is any directionality in the relationship between the two constructs, whether it is predictive over time, and the extent to which it is affected by language input. In the present study, we analyzed data from 100 bilingual children with English as an additional language who were tested on measures of vocabulary breadth and depth, morphology, and syntax at three time points at 6-month intervals from the age of 5;8. We used bivariate growth models to test the directionality of the relationship between vocabulary breadth and depth, and measures of morphology and syntax; testing bilingual children allowed us to use measures of English input as covariates in the analyses. All the models showed a correlation between vocabulary and grammar, but no correlation between their growth slopes, suggesting that vocabulary and grammar grow independently. Three of the four bivariate models showed a significant correlation between the intercept of grammar skills and the slope of vocabulary growth. Length of exposure to English predicted the intercept of vocabulary breadth and grammar, suggesting that children exposed to English earlier had larger vocabularies and better morpho-syntactic skills. Current English input predicted the intercept of both measures of vocabulary as well as the slope for vocabulary depth, the only measure for which there was a significant relationship between intercept and slope, suggesting a Matthew effect for this dimension of vocabulary. All materials, data, and code are available at https://osf.io/x3wht/ . Research highlights

• Vocabulary breadth and morphological and syntactic skills increased linearly for all participants, without any difference between lower and higher achieving children.
• Vocabulary depth grew more over time for those children with deeper vocabulary knowledge and higher levels of current English input at the start of the study.
• All of the bivariate growth models showed a correlation between vocabulary and grammar, but failed to show any correlation between their growth.
• Significant relationships between the intercept of grammar and the growth of vocabulary showed steeper lexical growth in children with better grammar skills.
• Length of exposure to English had an effect on morphological and syntactic skills, while only current English input had an effect on vocabulary depth.

     

Sugar and Spice,and Everything Nice: What Rough Heroines Tell Us about Imaginative Resistance

This article examines the asymmetry between our engagement with male characters in fictional narratives who transgress moral norms and female characters who do the same. I claim that rough heroines present a new puzzling instance of resistance phenomena that cannot be accounted for by even the most recent accounts of imaginative resistance that incorporate considerations of narrative context, such as genre and narrative artistry. I sketch a solution that points to the violation of gender norms and the challenge to power dynamics as the source of resistance. I argue that rough heroines reveal an important element of narrative engagement that has been largely overlooked in the literature: appreciators’ interpretive horizons.     

What Speech Errors Can Tell Us About Word-Form Generation: The Roles of Constraint and Opportunity

The likelihood of occurrence of a speech error is influenced by constraints imposed on the word-form generation process as well as by characteristics of the words in the utterance. In three tongue twister experiments I investigated these roles of constraint and opportunity. In Experiments 1 and 2 word onsets were more likely to interact with each other in a speech error than with phonemes in other positions. However, phonemes in word-internal positions were less likely to interact with each other than with word onsets. These results indicate that word onsets are particularly error-prone and therefore often interact with each other, but are also very likely to engage in interactions with phonemes in other positions if the elicitation technique encourages these interactions. The fatal experiment aimed to create speech errors in which consonants and vowels interacted. These errors are rarely reported in the literature but were successfully generated in this experiment. The implications for a model of word-form generation are discussed.     

Interpreting What Speakers Say and Implicate

The traditional view in pragmatic theory is that a distinction exists between what speakers say and what they mean, communicate, or implicate in context. For example, when uttering Jane has three children, a speaker might only say that "Jane has three children but may have more than three," but the speaker implicates that "Jane has exactly three children." Under this view, pragmatics plays only a small role in determining what speakers say and has a primary part in interpreting speaker's intended messages. My aim in this article is to challenge this view. I describe empirical work showing that pragmatics has a fundamental role in determining both what speakers say and implicate. Thus, when a speaker utters Jane has three children, enriched pragmatic information is used to infer that the speaker says "Jane has exactly three children" and that in specific contexts, the speaker can go on to express additional pragmatic meanings, such as "Jane is married" or "Jane is very busy because she has three children." I also describe work on the importance of complex pragmatic, metarepresentational reasoning in understanding irony and metaphor. Finally, I briefly discuss the relevance of these new developments in pragmatics for neurolinguistic research.     

What New Wave Materialists Can't Say

Most phenomenal concept strategists, or concept dualists, trace the explanatory gap to “thin” phenomenal concepts that fail to represent phenomenal properties as physical entities. New Wave Materialists, a subgroup of concept dualists, claim that our physical and phenomenal concepts each represent experience completely and accurately, but nevertheless so differently that a priori links don't (and can't) hold between them. This paper argues that you can't have two distinct but nevertheless complete and accurate representations of the same thing. One (or both) of the representations must misrepresent, or the two representations must represent different things. The paper then puts its arguments in a wider context. It notes that our phenomenal concepts must be transparent, translucent, mildly opaque, or radically opaque (in senses reviewed in the paper). It canvasses arguments that a posteriori physicalists can't consider our phenomenal concepts opaque. Then it shows how its own arguments against New Wave Materialism have the result that a posteriori physicalists can't consider phenomenal concepts transparent or translucent. The paper thus advances its arguments as part of a broad‐based case against a posteriori physicalism.     

What Animated Cartoons Tell Viewers About Assault

Relying upon a content analysis of one specific type of medium to which young people are exposed beginning at an early age, on a regular basis, and for many years (i.e., animated cartoons), the present study examines what types of messages are provided about violence that takes the form of simple assault. Results indicate that assault is fairly prevalent in cartoons and that this prevalence has diminished over time. Most of the time, cartoons show assaults to “land” on their intended victims, but having done so, to cause few if any adverse effects. Moreover, assaults rarely backfire on the perpetrators. Anger, revenge, and inherent mean-spiritedness are the most common reasons implied for why characters commit acts of violent assault.     

What Does Psychological Autopsy Study Tell Us About Charcoal Burning Suicide—A New and Contagious Method in Asia?

Charcoal burning suicides in Hong Kong between 2002–2004 in the 15 to 59‐year‐old age group were investigated using the psychological autopsy method. The psychopathological profiles of charcoal burning suicides (N = 53) were compared against “other suicides” (N = 97). The two groups did not differ significantly in the prevalence of DSM‐IV axis I diagnoses with the exception of schizophrenic spectrum disorder which was less frequently associated with charcoal burning suicides. Score on “neuroticism” in the NEO‐five Factor Inventory (NEO‐FFI) was significantly higher in victims of charcoal burning suicide. There was also a trend toward higher score on “conscientiousness” in the NEO‐FFI among charcoal burners than victims of other suicide.     

What the Humean Should Say About Entanglement

Tim Maudlin has influentially argued that Humeanism about laws of nature stands in conflict with quantum mechanics. Specifically Humeanism implies the principle Separability: the complete physical state of a world is determined by the intrinsic physical state of each space‐time point. Maudlin argues Separability is violated by the entangled states posited by QM. We argue that Maudlin only establishes that a stronger principle, which we call Strong Separability, is in tension with QM. Separability is not in tension with QM. Moreover, while the Humean requires Separability to capture the core tenets of her view, there's no Humean‐specific motivation for accepting Strong Separability. We go on to give a Humean account of entangled states which satisfies Separability. The core idea is that certain quantum states depend upon the Humean mosaic in much the same way as the laws do. In fact, we offer a variant of the Best System account on which the systemization procedure that generates the laws also serves to ground these states. We show how this account works by applying it to the example of Bohmian Mechanics. The 3N‐dimensional configuration space, the world particle in it and the wave function on it are part of the best system of the Humean mosaic, which consists of N particles moving in 3‐dimensional space. We argue that this account is superior to the Humean account of Bohmian Mechanics defended by Loewer and Albert, which takes the 3N‐dimensional space, and its inhabitants, as fundamental.