Do Populist Leaders Mimic the Language of Ordinary Citizens? Evidence From India

Minimal understandings of populism focus on measuring explicit stances of antielitism and people centrism. What remains poorly understood is the way less overt forms of populist rhetoric enable leaders to emulate the language of common citizens to achieve electoral success. This article suggests that the study of the populist discourse also requires taking into account their implicit occurrences, that is, those conveying connect, closeness, commonness, and similarity with ordinary people. Expressed through performances of “layman likeness,” they enable populist politicians to dissociate from traditional ruling elites while enabling people leaders' identifications. Using a novel 261-million-word dataset of Indian political discourses—including the speeches of 11 Prime Ministers—to proxy such identifications, we argue that populist leaders rely on a mimesis of the common people. Three core mimetic speech items are quantified: intimacy, disintermediation, and simplicity. We use a replicable corpus-contextual multiword collocation technique to populate lexicons of pretested psychometric profiles as well as a threefold validation method. The analysis finds that current Prime Minister Narendra Modi communicates mimetic identification around his persona, indexing the linguistic markers of his stylistic, ideological, and institutional populist politics. We indicate that our context-aware method could also be of use to study the cross-regional variability of mimetic populism.     

Lexique 2 : A new French lexical database

In this article, we present a new lexical database for French:Lexique. In addition to classical word information such as gender, number, and grammatical category,Lexique includes a series of interesting new characteristics. First, word frequencies are based on two cues: a contemporary corpus of texts and the number of Web pages containing the word. Second, the database is split into a graphemic table with all the relevant frequencies, a table structured around lemmas (particularly interesting for the study of the inflectional family), and a table about surface frequency cues. Third,Lexique is distributed under a GNU-like license, allowing people to contribute to it. Finally, a metasearch engine,Open Lexique, has been developed so that new databases can be added very easily to the existing ones.Lexique can either be downloaded or interrogated freely fromhttp://www.lexique.org.     

Automaticity for numerical magnitude of two-digit Arabic numbers in children

This paper examines the automatic processing of the numerical magnitude of two-digit Arabic numbers using a Stroop-like task in school-aged children. Second, third, and fourth graders performed physical size judgments on pairs of two-digit numbers varying on both physical and numerical dimensions. To investigate the importance of synchrony between the speed of processing of the numerical magnitude and the physical dimensions on the size congruity effect (SCE), we used masked priming: numerical magnitude was subliminally primed in half of the trials, while neutral priming was used in the other half. The results indicate a SCE in physical judgments, providing the evidence of automatic access to the magnitude of two-digit numbers in children. This effect was modulated by the priming type, as a SCE only appeared when the numerical magnitude was primed. This suggests that young children needed a relative synchronization of numerical and physical dimensions to access the magnitude of two-digit numbers automatically.     

The cocktail party problem: what is it? How can it be solved? And why should animal behaviorists study it?

Animals often use acoustic signals to communicate in groups or social aggregations in which multiple individuals signal within a receiver's hearing range. Consequently, receivers face challenges related to acoustic interference and auditory masking that are not unlike the human cocktail party problem, which refers to the problem of perceiving speech in noisy social settings. Understanding the sensory solutions to the cocktail party problem has been a goal of research on human hearing and speech communication for several decades. Despite a general interest in acoustic signaling in groups, animal behaviorists have devoted comparatively less attention toward understanding how animals solve problems equivalent to the human cocktail party problem. After illustrating how humans and nonhuman animals experience and overcome similar perceptual challenges in cocktail-party-like social environments, this article reviews previous psychophysical and physiological studies of humans and nonhuman animals to describe how the cocktail party problem can be solved. This review also outlines several basic and applied benefits that could result from studies of the cocktail party problem in the context of animal acoustic communication.     

Female religious leadership in Switzerland: norms,power, and money

Women’s access to positions of leadership in religions is a highly contested issue in Western societies, both inside religions themselves and in societal discussions of religion. Reliable data on actual female leadership are, however, scarce, especially in European countries and regarding minority religions. This article describes and explains statistically the normative openness of congregations to female leadership as well as the actual existence, position, and financial remuneration of female leaders across the whole range of religious traditions in Switzerland. The study is based on data from the representative National Congregations Study of 2008/2009. Our results show that, despite considerable normative openness, female spiritual and administrative leadership remains scarce in most religious traditions. The highest percentage of female spiritual leaders can be found in the milieu of alternative spirituality, followed by the Reformed congregations. A generally high percentage of female leadership can be found on administrative boards. It is only leadership positions in certain Christian traditions (Reformed, Catholic, Evangelical-classical) that are normally remunerated for women; many other traditions do not have female leadership or, as in the case of the milieu of alternative spirituality, such leadership positions are not remunerated.     

On the social nature of global self-esteem: a replication study

Few researchers have considered the relationship between global self-esteem and the reflected appraisal of others in one's life, or how reflected appraisals and global self-esteem may change as a result of interpersonal feedback. In this study, the authors collected data from 110 undergraduate students on (a) their global self-esteem and the reflected appraisals of multiple others in their lives and (b) how these dimensions changed in hypothetical interpersonal-feedback situations. Results showed that participants' global self-esteem was related to the reflected appraisals of their fathers, teachers, and friends. The results also indicated that others' reflected appraisals and the individual's global self-esteem fluctuated according to the nature (i.e., positive vs. negative) of the hypothetical interpersonal feedback. Overall, the findings emphasize the social nature and regulation of global self-esteem.     

The effect of long-term working memory through personalization applied to free recall: Uncurbing the primacy-effect enthusiasm

In this study, a personalization method (Guida, Tardieu, & Nicolas, European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 21: 862–896 2009) was applied to a free-recall task. Fifteen pairs of words, composed of an object and a location, were presented to 93 participants, who had to mentally associate each pair and subsequently recall the objects. A 30-s delay was introduced on half of the trials, the presentation rate was manipulated (5 or 10 s per item), and verbal and visuospatial working memory tests were administered to test for their effects on the serial curve. Two groups were constituted: a personalized group, for whom the locations were well-known places on their university campus, and a nonpersonalized group, for whom the locations did not refer to known places. Since personalization putatively operationalizes long-term working memory (Ericsson & Kintsch, Psychological Review, 102: 211–245 1995)—namely, the capacity to store information reliably and rapidly in long-term memory—and if we take a dual-store approach to memory, the personalization advantage would be expected to be greater for pre-recency than for recency items. Overall, the results were compatible with long-term working memory theory. They contribute to validating the personalization method as a methodology to characterize the contribution of long-term memory storage to performance in working memory tasks.