Twelve‐month‐olds’ comprehension and production of pointing

This study explored whether infants aged 12 months already recognize the communicative function of pointing gestures. Infants participated in a task requiring them to comprehend an adult's informative pointing gesture to the location of a hidden toy. They mostly succeeded in this task, which required them to infer that the adult was attempting to direct their attention to a location for a reason – because she wanted them to know that a toy was hidden there. Many of the infants also reversed roles and produced appropriate pointing gestures for the adult in this same game, and indeed there was a correlation such that comprehenders were for the most part producers. These findings indicate that by 12 months of age infants are beginning to show a bidirectional understanding of communicative pointing.     

Women Derive Collective Self-Esteem from Their Feminist Identity

Women's self-esteem is more strongly related to social acceptance and inclusion than to accomplishments. We investigated the extent to which women derive self-esteem from being women, that is, from their membership in a collective gender group. We hypothesized and found that women's collective self-esteem (i.e., self-esteem derived from their gender group) would systematically vary for women showing differing degrees of feminist development. Thus, women's self-esteem derived from womanhood seems to depend on the "meaning" of womanhood to the individual woman.     

A model of the time course and content of reading

This paper describes a computer simulation of reading that is strongly driven by eye fixation data from human readers. The simulation, READER, is a natural language understanding system that reads a text word by word and whose processing cycles on each word have some correspondence with the human gaze duration on that word. READER operates within a newly developed information processing architecture, a Collaborative, Activation-based, Production System (CAPS) that permits the modeling of the temporal properties of human comprehension. CAPS allows for concurrent, collaborative execution of processes operating at different levels of analysis. As READER encounters each successive word, the word is operated on by processes at the levels of word encoding, lexical access, syntactic and semantic analysis, and referential and schema-level processes. Like human readers, READER uses a strategy of immediacy of comprehension, attempting to interpret each word as soon as it is encountered, rather than unnecessarily buffering information. A major contribution of this simulation is its use of human performance characteristics in constraining and determining the model's mechanisms.