Aspects of grammatical development in young French children with SLI

This paper presents an exploratory study of the spontaneous production of 11 French children clinically diagnosed as specific language impaired (SLI). In a cross‐sectional study of the children under and over 5 years of age, we investigate the production of finite and non‐finite verbal forms, of sentences with overt and null subjects, and of pronominal clitics. A comparison between younger and older children with SLI highlights developmental patterns which parallel normal syntactic development in important respects, though at a slower pace. An area of difficulty which clearly persists for the older group involves the domain of pronominal complement clitics.     

Teachers' Epistemic Authority: Perceptions of Students and Teachers

The present study examines students' perception of the teacher's role as epistemic authorities, that is, a source of determinative influence on the formation of individuals' knowledge, from three perspectives. First, it examines 7th and 10th graders' perception of their teachers as epistemic authorities. The results showed that a teacher's subject matter, as well as students' age and gender, influence perception of him/her as an epistemic authority. In addition, interest in the subject matter was found to be an important predictor of students' perception. The second part focuses on teachers' self-perceptions as epistemic authorities. The results indicated that teachers' personal efficacy is the most powerful predictor of their self-perception. Finally, the study compares students' perceptions of teachers as epistemic authorities, teachers' self-perceptions in these terms and teachers' perceptions of how their students perceive them. Two main findings showed the following: (a) teachers perceive themselves as being more of an epistemic authority than their students consider them; (b) teachers believe that students perceive them as being more of an epistemic authority than the students actually think.     

Integrating New Members into an Ongoing Therapy Group: The Life-Line Technique

Integrating a new member into an existing group poses many problems, both for the new member and the group as a whole. To address these, the authors propose use of a life-line technique to introduce a new member to the group. Following review of the basic narrative assumptions, a specific procedure that utilizes the life-line is described. Comments of new and old members after one typical life-line presentation are given. These comments are representative of those made on other occasions. They indicate that this life story review is therapeutically helpful and assists the process of integration of a new member into an ongoing group. Some limitations of this method are addressed in the discussion.     

To see the invisible messiah: Messianic socialization in the wake of a failed prophecy in Chabad

The study explores how the meshichistim (messianics) among the Jewish ultra-orthodox Chabad (Lubavitch) Hasidim manage the rupture entailed by the death of their leader, the Rebbe, whom they uphold as the King Messiah. Based on ethnographic research of contemporary pilgrimage to the Rebbe's court in Brooklyn, whose rituals and pedagogical framework are constructed by the meshichistim, the study problematizes the functional assumptions and implications of the rich literature on failed prophecies in millenarian movements, a literature heavily influenced by the theoretical model of cognitive dissonance. The case of Chabad meshichistim suggests that a millenarian group can reinvent itself through multifaceted cultural, pedagogical and ritual endeavors that are rife with internal contradictions. Moreover, these endeavors reveal that the rupture has not been balanced, regularized or normalized, but rather expresses the continuous complexity of life in its shadow.     

Adolescent Place Attachment, Social Capital, and Perceived Safety: A Comparison of 13 Countries

In adolescence, children become increasingly independent and autonomous, and spend more time in neighborhood settings away from home. During mid-to-late adolescence, youth often become more critical about the place they live. Their attachment to home and even community may decrease as they explore and develop new attachments to other specific places. The aim of this study is to understand how 15-year-old students from 13 countries perceive their local neighborhood area (place attachment, social capital and safety), and how these different community cognitions are interrelated. We hypothesize that their place attachment predicts safety, and that the relationship is mediated in part by social capital. Result show that, despite cross-cultural differences in neighborhood perceptions, the proposed theoretical model fits robustly across all 13 countries.     

Comparing two-digit numbers: the importance of being presented together

The effect of presentation mode on magnitude comparisons of two-digit (2D) numbers was examined using the stimuli set developed by Nuerk, Weger, and Willmes (2001). In Experiment 1, only number pairs from difference decades were presented either simultaneously or sequentially. In the former case there was evidence for the parallel processing of both the units and decades digits and for a components representation, consistent with previous findings. In contrast, in the latter case there was evidence for the processing of mainly the decades digits. In Experiment 2, within-decade number pairs were added to make both digits task relevant. The results from the simultaneous condition were again consistent with a components representation, while results from the sequential presentation were in line with a holistic representation, in line with Zhang and Wang's (2005) research. Results therefore suggest that the processing of 2D numbers depends on the way they are presented.     

Random dynamics and the research programme of classical mechanics

The modern mathematical theory of dynamical systems proposes a new model of mechanical motion. In this model the deterministic unstable systems can behave in a statistical manner. Both kinds of motion are inseparably connected, they depend on the point of view and researcher's approach to the system. This mathematical fact solves in a new way the old problem of statistical laws in the world which is essentially deterministic. The classical opposition: deterministic‐statistical, disappears in random dynamics. The main thesis of the paper is that the new theory of motion is a revolution in the research programme of classical mechanics. It is the revolution brought about by the development of mathematics.     

Is attention allocation sensitive to word informativeness?

Summary When two words are presented simultaneously, where one of them is predictable from the context and the other one is not, it is conceivable that attention is captured by the expected word (cf. Flowers, Polansky, & Kerl, 1981), or that attention is directed to where it is presumably more needed, namely to the unexpected word. To explore these possibilities we used a paradigm in which the subjects' primary task was to report either one or both of two simultaneously presented words, and attention was measured by performance on a secondary task, that is, detecting small gaps in a letter stroke. In a preliminary test, this measure of attention was found to be sensitive to the manipulation of attention by means of an arrow pointer. Word predictability was manipulated by presenting an incomplete sentence immediately before the two words. The sentence was either semantically congruent with one of the words or with neither of them. The mode of word report (partial vs. full) was manipulated between subjects. No difference was found in either mode between the gap detection scores in the expected and the unexpected words. Neither of those scores differed from the score for trials in which both words were unexpected. The results suggest that at the time of selection, or attention allocation, cues about word identity are not yet available, or are not utilized.Most of the work reported here was done as an M.A. thesis of the second author under the supervision of the first and third authors. The research was supported in part by a grant from the United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF), Jerusalem, Israel     

Learning from successful and failed experience: the moderating role of kind of after-event review

The claim that appropriate "after-event review (AER)" may increase the relative value of drawing lessons from successes, as compared with failures, was examined in the present study. The study was a laboratory experiment in which the effect of type of AER (failure-focused, success-focused, failure- and success-focused, and no AER review) on performance improvement and causal attributions was tested under conditions of earlier success and earlier failure. In general, 2 results were demonstrated: (a) Drawing lessons from successful experience is feasible, and its effectiveness is contingent upon the type of AER. More specifically, after successful events, the most effective review is that of wrong actions, whereas after failed events, any kind of event review (correct or wrong actions) is effective. (b) AERs elicit more internal (as opposed to external) and specific (as opposed to general) attributions. These 2 classifications moderate the effect of AERs on task performance.     

Skeletal structure of printed words: evidence from the stroop task

Do readers encode the sequencing of consonant (C) and vowel (V) phonemes (skeletal structure) in printed words? The authors used the Stroop task to examine readers' sensitivity to skeletal structure. In Experiment 1, CVC nonwords (e.g., pof) facilitated the naming of colors with congruent frames (e.g., red, a CVC word) but not with incongruent ones (e.g., green). In Experiment 2, the color black (a CCVC frame) was named faster with a congruent CCVC frame (e.g., grof) compared to either CCVCC (e.g., groft) or CVC (e.g., gof) incongruent controls. Finally, in Experiment 3, the color pink (a CVCC frame) was named faster with a CVCC frame (e.g., goft) compared to either CCVCC or CVC incongruent controls. In most cases, congruent frames shared no segments with the color name. These findings demonstrate that readers automatically assemble the skeletal structure of printed words.