Media Effects on Ethnic Identity Among Linguistic Majorities and Minorities

Research on media effects has documented the media's influence on beliefs and behavior while cross‐cultural psychology has documented the effects of the language used in communication on identification with the ingroup and the outgroup. Media usage in the outgroup language should, therefore, affect identification patterns. This research investigates media effects in the acculturation process through a longitudinal design involving minority and majority group members evolving in the same bilingual environment. Subjects were Francophone students (N= 235) from minority and majority settings attending a bilingual (French–English) university. Results revealed that majority students increased significantly written and public media consumption in English whereas minority students increased French written media consumption. Furthermore, increased usage of English written and audiovisual media was related to identity changes in favour of the Anglophone group. Finally, path analysis emphasized the mediating role played by English language confidence and the determining role of ethnolinguistic vitality.     

Neural Network Models as Evidence for Different Types of Visual Representations

Cook (1995) criticizes the work of Jacobs and Kosslyn (1994) on spatial relations, shape representations, and receptive fields in neural network models on the grounds that first-order correlations between input and output unit activities can explain the results. We reply briefly to Cook's arguments here (and in Kosslyn, Chabris, Marsolek, Jacobs & Koenig, 1995) and discuss how new simulations can confirm the importance of receptive field size as a crucial variable in the encoding of categorical and coordinate spatial relations and the corresponding shape representations; such simulations would testify to the computational distinction between the different types of representations.