Social Categorization and the Influence of Drug Involvement on Drug Attitude Structures: Implications for Assessing Drug Use and Tolerance in the Workplace1

Theories of social categorization were used to generate hypotheses concerning the impact of drug involvement on the attitudes and knowledge structures that people use in making drug-related judgments. Data indicated that greater drug exposure tended to foster more complex knowledge structures for drugs and drug users as revealed by subjects’ perceptions of drug users, tolerance for drug use, and perceptions of drug seriousness. Basically, high drug involvement in terms of personal alcohol use and associating with illicit drug users was related to greater individuation of drug user types. Therefore, high-involved subjects, relative to low-involved individuals, were better able to discriminate between different drug user subtypes and drug user subtypes were more important to high-involved subjects when responding to drug-related survey items.     

片段再认任务在内隐序列学习研究中的有效性检验

内隐序列学习到底能习得何种知识呢？已有研究从任务分离范式发展到加工分离程序试图来捕获习得的知识。本研究根据信号检测论原理把三元素再认测验的成绩离析成击中率和虚报率, 再试图运用加工分离程序的思想来分离习得的意识知识和无意识知识, 为示区别将这种测验命名为片段再认任务, 并以序列生成任务为效标, 通过两个实验来检验片段再认任务的效度和敏感性。实验1以反应–刺激间隔(RSI)为自变量来检验片段再认任务和序列生成任务在测量习得知识上的效度, 结果显示前者的效度高于后者; 实验2进行测验的敏感性分析, 以参与度为自变量, 结果表明前者更为灵敏所以测量效度高。总之, 与序列生成任务相比, 片段再认任务是一种高效而灵敏的测量工具。     

Listeners' cognitive and affective reactions to English speakers with standard American English and Asian Accents

Using a 2 (speaker accent: standard American, Asian) x 2 (speakers' sex: male, female) between-subjects design, the present study examined the effects of accent and sex on listeners' cognitive and affective reactions towards speakers with standard American English accents and Asian accents. 70 female and 27 male college students (M = 21.8 yr., SD = 4.7) listened to the audio recording of a monologue by one of the speakers in the early 20s who differed in accent and sex. Standard American English was operationalized as nonaccented English, typical of the western part of the USA, and Vietnamese-accented English was used as an exemplar of Asian-accented English. Results showed that relative to standard American-accented English speakers, Asian-accented English speakers were perceived as poorer communicators who were less potent, less threatening, and more concerned about others. These cognitive reactions to Asian-accented English speakers include (a) the general stereotype associated with an accent, status and solidarity, as well as (b) the stereotype unique to Asians as an ethnic group, being concerned for others and poorer communicators. Analysis also showed that speakers with an Asian accent evoked more negative affect and required more attention from listeners than did speakers with a standard American English accent. Implications of the study are discussed.     

Referential Form and Memory for the Discourse History

The way we refer to things in the world is shaped by the immediate physical context as well as the discourse history. But what part of the discourse history is relevant to language use in the present? In four experiments, we combine the study of task-based conversation with measures of recognition memory to examine the role of physical contextual cues that shape what speakers perceive to be a part of the relevant discourse history. Our studies leverage the differentiation effect, a phenomenon in which speakers are more likely to use a modified expression to refer to an object (e.g., dotted sock) if they had previously described a similar object (e.g., striped sock) than when they had not described a similar object. Two physical cues—the background that framed the to-be-described pictures and the position of the pictures in the display—were manipulated to alter perceptions about the relevant discourse context. We measured the rate with which speakers modify referring expressions to differentiate current from past referents. Recognition memory measures following the conversation probed what was and was not remembered about past discourse referents and contexts. Analysis of modification rates indicated that these contextual grouping cues shaped perceptions about the relevant discourse context. The contextual cues did not affect memory for the referents, but the memory for past referents was better for speakers than for listeners. Our findings show that perceptions about the relevant discourse history are a key determinant of how language is used in the moment but also that conversational partners form asymmetric representations of the discourse history.     

Cognitive strategies in discourse processing: A comparison of Chinese and English speakers

Three experiments tested the hypothesis that, when processing a normative language, individuals tend to adopt the discourse processing strategies that they use in their native language. In a natural language processing task, native speakers of English and Chinese read English passages that were heavily loaded with zero anaphora. Native Chinese speakers found the passages more comprehensible than did native English speakers, presumably because zero anaphora occurs much more often in Chinese than in English. However, in an artificial laboratory task, native Chinese speakers did not find it easier to recover the missing referents than did native English speakers, suggesting that the two groups were equally capable of reference retrieval although they differed in their natural language discourse-processing strategies. These results suggest that the strategies used for processing foreign-language discourse are influenced by those used to process native-language discourse.This research was supported in part by Dean's Small Grants from the Graduate School of the University of Colorado to Liang Tao and United States Army Research Institute Contracts MDA903-90-K-0066 and MDA903-93-K-0010 to the University of Colorado (Alice Healy, Principal Investigator).We thank Barbara Fox, Lise Menn, and Nanfang Jiang for stimulating discussions about this research.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the First International Conference on Chinese Linguistics held in Singapore, 1992.     

Muslim religious oratory on Swedish public service radio

This article analyses religious Morning Services, delivered by eight Muslim speakers, broadcast on Swedish public service radio during 2013 and 2014. Morning Services have been broadcast on Swedish radio since 1930, but only in recent years have non-Christian speakers been invited to contribute. Inviting religious minority speakers is understood as a strategy for incorporating selected representatives of religious minorities into hegemonic practices and discourses. The analysis identifies four shared discourses produced in the material and relates these discourses to hegemonic views regarding legitimate public expressions of religiosity in Sweden. The discourses are: 1) a positive discourse on religious pluralism, 2) a discourse that emphasises practical self-help-like effects of Muslim religious practice, 3) a discourse that articulates religiosity as challenging purported negative aspects of current society, 4) a discourse that raises difficulties which Muslims in Sweden face. The Muslim Morning Services illustrate a complex dialectic, as, on the one hand, they endorse hegemonic values and ideals and thereby contribute to and legitimise the status quo, while, on the other hand, their individual voices, personal narratives, and religious messages signify change through their use of public space which was previously unavailable to Muslims.     

How Cognitive Load Influences Speakers' Choice of Referring Expressions

We report on two experiments investigating the effect of an increased cognitive load for speakers on the choice of referring expressions. Speakers produced story continuations to addressees, in which they referred to characters that were either salient or non‐salient in the discourse. In Experiment 1, referents that were salient for the speaker were non‐salient for the addressee, and vice versa. In Experiment 2, all discourse information was shared between speaker and addressee. Cognitive load was manipulated by the presence or absence of a secondary task for the speaker. The results show that speakers under load are more likely to produce pronouns, at least when referring to less salient referents. We take this finding as evidence that speakers under load have more difficulties taking discourse salience into account, resulting in the use of expressions that are more economical for themselves.     

Producing Pronouns and Definite Noun Phrases: Do Speakers Use the Addressee’s Discourse Model?

We report two experiments that investigated the widely held assumption that speakers use the addressee's discourse model when choosing referring expressions (e.g., Ariel, 1990; Chafe, 1994; Givón, 1983; Prince, 1985), by manipulating whether the addressee could hear the immediately preceding linguistic context. Experiment 1 showed that speakers increased pronoun use (and decreased noun phrase use) when the referent was mentioned in the immediately preceding sentence compared to when it was not, even though the addressee did not hear the preceding sentence, indicating that speakers used their own, privileged discourse model when choosing referring expressions. The same pattern of results was found in Experiment 2. Speakers produced more pronouns when the immediately preceding sentence mentioned the referent than when it mentioned a referential competitor, regardless of whether the sentence was shared with their addressee. Thus, we conclude that choice of referring expression is determined by the referent's accessibility in the speaker's own discourse model rather than the addressee's.     

Gender and Speech Rate in the Perception of Competence and Social Attractiveness

Abstract

The authors' hypotheses were that (a) listeners regard speakers whose global speech rates they judge to be similar to their own as more competent and more socially attractive than speakers whose rates are different from their own and (b) gender influences those perceptions. Participants were 17 male and 28 female listeners; they judged each of 3 male and 3 female speakers in terms of 10 unipolar adjective scales. The authors used 8 of the scales to derive 2 scores describing the extent to which the listener viewed a speaker as competent and socially attractive. The 2 scores were related by trend analyses (a) to the listeners' perceptions of the speakers' speech rates as compared with their own and (b) to comparisons of the actual speech rates of the speakers and listeners. The authors examined trend components of the data by split-plot multiple regression analyses. In general, the results supported both hypotheses. The participants judged speakers with speech rates similar to their own as more competent and socially attractive than speakers with speech rates slower or faster than their own. However, the ratings of competence were significantly influenced by the gender of the listeners, and those of social attractiveness were influenced by the gender of the listeners and the speakers.     

Public acceptance of Covid-19 lockdown scenarios

By mid-March 2020, most countries had implemented nationwide lockdown policies aimed at decelerating the spread of SARS-CoV-2. At that time, nobody knew how long these policies would have to remain in force and whether they would have to be extended, intensified or made more flexible. The present study aimed to illuminate how the general public in Germany reacted to the prospect of increasing the length, the intensity and/or the flexibility of distancing rules implied by different lockdown scenarios. Endorsement of and compliance with five specific lockdown scenarios were assessed in a large (N = 14,433) German sample. Results showed that lockdown length affected respondents' reactions much more strongly than intensity or flexibility. Additional analyses (i.e., mixture distribution modelling) showed that half of the respondents rejected any further extensions or intensifications, while 20% would endorse long-term strategies if necessary. We argue that policy-makers and political communicators should take the public's endorsement of and compliance with such scenarios into account, as should simulations predicting the effects of different lockdown scenarios.     

THE SUPERNATURAL AS LANGUAGE GAME

Abstract. For many in the Anglo‐American tradition of language analysis, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the great progenitor of twentieth‐century philosophy of language, showed conclusively that theological terms lack any referent in reality and therefore represent a discourse that can do no more than manifest the existential attitudes that speakers take toward reality as a whole. To think that such terms represent more is to be bewitched by the use of language. Is it possible, however, that theological language references a fundamental human drive? In this article I reexamine the dyad of nature and supernature from the perspective of Wittgenstein's philosophy. Perhaps surprisingly, Wittgenstein's thought on the subject offers much more than his famous, terse aphorism at the conclusion of his first masterwork, the Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus ([1921] 1961, 74, §7): “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” Furthermore, the basic Tractarian drive to determine the relationship between language and reality, which is redirected but not extinguished in Wittgenstein's second, divergent, opus, the Philosophical Investigations ([1953] 1967), may be the place for a renewed examination of what the supernatural means in human discourse. Does talk of God give expression to the fundamental transcendence of human knowledge? Is it a language game we can eschew?     

Studies in dialogue and discourse: II. Types of discourse initiated by and sustained through questioning

A sociolinguistic approach to the study of language is described. Three types of discourse are defined empirically, each of them initiated and sustained by questions. It is provosed that these types are linguistic expressions or “realizations” of authority relationships between speakers. In the first, Chaining, a conversation is extended through successive questions by the initial questioner; in the second, Arching, it is extended by the respondent's questions; in the third, Embedding, there are two responses to the question. The general hypothesis about the relationship of the linguistic structure of discourse to differentials between speakers in power and authority is examined through an analysis of natural conversations in first-grade classrooms. The findings provide consistent support for this hypothesis. When adults initiate a conversation with a question, they retain control over its course by successive questioning, i.e., by Chaining: when children ask an adult a question, the adult regains control by responding with a question, i.e., by Arching. Children question each other through a more balanced use of Chaining and Arching that might be thought of as either more egalitarian or more competitive.     

Reasoning with Slippery Predicates

It is a commonplace that the extensions of most, perhaps all, vague predicates vary with such features as comparison class and paradigm and contrasting cases. My view proposes another, more pervasive contextual parameter. Vague predicates exhibit what I call open texture: in some circumstances, competent speakers can go either way in the borderline region. The shifting extension and anti-extensions of vague predicates are tracked by what David Lewis calls the “conversational score”, and are regulated by what Kit Fine calls penumbral connections, including a principle of tolerance. As I see it, vague predicates are response-dependent, or, better, judgement-dependent, at least in their borderline regions. This raises questions concerning how one reasons with such predicates. In this paper, I present a model theory for vague predicates, so construed. It is based on an overall supervaluationist-style framework, and it invokes analogues of Kripke structures for intuitionistic logic. I argue that the system captures, or at least nicely models, how one ought to reason with the shifting extensions (and anti-extensions) of vague predicates, as borderline cases are called and retracted in the course of a conversation. The model theory is illustrated with a forced march sorites series, and also with a thought experiment in which vague predicates interact with so-called future contingents. I show how to define various connectives and quantifiers in the language of the system, and how to express various penumbral connections and the principle of tolerance. The project fits into one of the topics of this special issue. In the course of reasoning, even with the external context held fixed, it is uncertain what the future extension of the vague predicates will be. Yet we still manage to reason with them. The system is based on that developed, more fully, in my Vagueness in Context, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006, but some criticisms and replies to critics are incorporated.     

Identifying Changes in Youth's Subgroup Membership Over Time Based on Their Targeted Communication About Substance Use with Parents and Friends

Using latent class/transition analyses, this study: (a) identified subgroups of youth based on their targeted communication about substance use with parents and friends, (b) examined subgroup differences in substance use, and (c) considered changes in subgroup membership over four years. Among 5,874 youth, five subgroups emerged, with parents‐only communicators having the lowest substance use. Friends‐only and consequence‐focused communicators reported the overall highest use. Subgroup membership was mostly stable across the four years. If, however, youth transitioned, those who began as parents‐only, consequence‐focused, or friends‐only communicators during the first year were most likely to transition to comprehensive communicators by the last year. Youth who started as noncommunicators or comprehensive communicators were most likely to end up as parents‐only communicators.     

Are People Polite to Computers? Responses to Computer-Based Interviewing Systems1

The present studies were designed to test whether people are “polite” to computers. Among people, an interviewer who directly asks about him- or herself will receive more positive and less varied responses than if the same question is posed by a third party. Two studies were designed to determine if the same phenomenon occurs in human–computer interaction. In the first study (N= 30), participants performed a task with a text-based computer and were then interviewed about the performance of that computer on 1 of 3 loci: (a) the same computer, (b) a paper-and-pencil questionnaire, or (c) a different (but identical) text-based computer. Consistent with the politeness prediction, same-computer participants evaluated the computer more positively and more homogeneously than did either paper-and-pencil or different-computer participants. Study 2 (N= 30) replicated the results with voice-based computers. Implications for computer-based interviewing are discussed.     

Differences between multimedia and text-based assessments of emotion management: An exploration with the multimedia emotion management assessment (MEMA)

People process emotional information using visual, vocal, and verbal cues. However, emotion management is typically assessed with text based rather than multimedia stimuli. This study (N?=?427) presents the new multimedia emotion management assessment (MEMA) and compares it to the text-based assessment of emotion management used in the MSCEIT. The text-based and multimedia assessment showed similar levels of cognitive saturation and similar prediction of relevant criteria. Results demonstrate that the MEMA scores have equivalent evidence of validity to the text-based MSCEIT test scores, demonstrating that multimedia assessment of emotion management is viable. Furthermore, our results inform the debate as to whether cognitive saturation in emotional intelligence (EI) measures represents “noise” or “substance”. We find that cognitive ability associations with EI represent substantive variance rather than construct-irrelevant shared variance due to reading comprehension ability required for text-based items.     

Partner Orientation and Speaker's Knowledge as Conflicting Parameters in Language Production

Two parameters of language production, the partner model and the mentally represented knowledge about a spatial constellation, are investigated with respect to their influence on spatial reference. At issue is whether the verbally expressed point of view in route directions is primarily influenced by the needs of the partner or by the underlying mental representation of the speaker stemming from his or her own experience with an object. Two experiments in which participants (N = 90) were asked to produce a set of route directions are reported. The experimental situation was such that the point of view of the speaker did not correspond to the point of view of the partner. The results show that more participants localize from their own point of view than from the point of view of the partner. Discussion centers on the fact that speakers do not always behave in a truly partner-oriented manner.     

Written object naming,spelling to dictation,and immediate copying: Different tasks,different pathways?

Politeness theory posits that speakers can use verbal probabilities (e.g., there is a chance, it is likely) to hedge bad news. So far, only indirect evidence supports that claim: From the hearer's standpoint, verbal probabilities are interpreted either as plain likelihood-communication devices or as face-management devices, resulting in different risk perceptions. The present research aims to test more directly the postulate of politeness theory by focusing on the effects of speakers' intentions on risk communication. In three experiments, participants communicated a probability by choosing an expression from a list of verbal probabilities. Results consistently showed that polite speakers communicated a different risk magnitude than informative speakers. Further findings indicate that the effect of the speakers' intention depends on the valence of the uncertain outcome. The theoretical and applied implications of these findings are discussed.     

Infants' understanding of false labeling events: the referential roles of words and the speakers who use them

The four studies reported here examine whether 16-month-old infants' responses to true and false utterances interact with their knowledge of human agents. In Study 1, infants heard repeated instances either of true or false labeling of common objects; labels came from an active human speaker seated next to the infant. In Study 2, infants experienced the same stimuli and procedure; however, we replaced the human speaker of Study 1 with an audio speaker in the same location. In Study 3, labels came from a hidden audio speaker. In Study 4, a human speaker labeled the objects while facing away from them. In Study 1, infants looked significantly longer to the human agent when she falsely labeled than when she truthfully labeled the objects. Infants did not show a similar pattern of attention for the audio speaker of Study 2, the silent human of Study 3 or the facing-backward speaker of Study 4. In fact, infants who experienced truthful labeling looked significantly longer to the facing-backward labeler of Study 4 than to true labelers of the other three contexts. Additionally, infants were more likely to correct false labels when produced by the human labeler of Study 1 than in any of the other contexts. These findings suggest, first, that infants are developing a critical conception of other human speakers as truthful communicators, and second, that infants understand that human speakers may provide uniquely useful information when a word fails to match its referent. These findings are consistent with the view that infants can recognize differences in knowledge and that such differences can be based on differences in the availability of perceptual experience.