Are Words Easier to Learn From Infant‐ Than Adult‐Directed Speech? A Quantitative Corpus‐Based Investigation

We investigate whether infant‐directed speech (IDS) could facilitate word form learning when compared to adult‐directed speech (ADS). To study this, we examine the distribution of word forms at two levels, acoustic and phonological, using a large database of spontaneous speech in Japanese. At the acoustic level we show that, as has been documented before for phonemes, the realizations of words are more variable and less discriminable in IDS than in ADS. At the phonological level, we find an effect in the opposite direction: The IDS lexicon contains more distinctive words (such as onomatopoeias) than the ADS counterpart. Combining the acoustic and phonological metrics together in a global discriminability score reveals that the bigger separation of lexical categories in the phonological space does not compensate for the opposite effect observed at the acoustic level. As a result, IDS word forms are still globally less discriminable than ADS word forms, even though the effect is numerically small. We discuss the implication of these findings for the view that the functional role of IDS is to improve language learnability.     

Compensating for an Inattentive Audience

The common ground that conversational partners share is thought to form the basic context for language use. According to the classic view, inferences about common ground, or mutual knowledge, are guided by beliefs about the physical, cognitive, and attentional states of one's communicative partners. Here, we provide a first test of the attention assumption for common ground, the proposal that common ground for a co‐present entity—such as an object or an utterance—can only be formed if a person has evidence that his or her partner has also attended to it. In three experiments, a participant speaker and two partners learned names for novel monster pictures as a group. The speaker was then asked to describe the monsters to each partner separately in a referential communication task. The critical manipulation was the (in)attentiveness of one partner at different points in the study. Analysis of the speaker's referring expressions revealed that speakers assumed their partner shared common ground for the monster names only when that partner exhibited engaged attention as the names were learned. These findings provide key and novel support for the classic proposal that formation of common ground critically depends on assumptions about the attentional state of one's conversational partner.     

Cultural Effects Rather Than a Bilingual Advantage in Cognition: A Review and an Empirical Study

The bilingual advantage hypothesis contends that the management of two languages in the brain is carried out through domain‐general mechanisms, and that bilinguals possess a performance advantage over monolinguals on (nonlinguistic) tasks that tap these processes. Presently, there is evidence both for and against such an advantage. Interestingly, the evidence in favor has been thought strongest in children and older adults, leading some researchers to argue that young adults might be at peak performance levels, and therefore bilingualism is unable to confer an improvement. We conducted a large‐scale review of the extant literature and found that the weight of research pointed to an absence of positive evidence for a bilingual advantage at any age. We next gave a large number of young adult participants a task designed to test the bilingual advantage hypothesis. Reasoning from the literature that young adults from an East Asian (Korean) culture would likely outperform those from a Western (British) culture, we also compared participants on this factor. We found no evidence for a bilingual advantage but did find evidence for enhanced performance in the Korean group. We interpret these results as further evidence against the bilingual advantage hypotheses.     

A Phenomenological Analysis of the Invisibility Syndrome

Interpretative phenomenological analysis was used to explore 10 African American men's perceptions of invisibility. Participants perceived invisibility as an extra unwarranted burden that is accompanied by feelings of hopelessness, anxiety, and anger. Participants also coped with invisibility by finding safe havens within the Black community. Implications for counselors are discussed. Se empleó el análisis interpretativo fenomenológico para explorar las percepciones de invisibilidad de 10 varones Afroamericanos. Los participantes percibían la invisibilidad como una carga extra injustificada que va acompañada de sentimientos de desesperanza, ansiedad y rabia. Los participantes también afrontaban la invisibilidad encontrando refugio entre la comunidad Negra. Se discuten las implicaciones para consejeros.     

No Right to Resist? Elise Reimarus's Freedom as a Kantian Response to the Problem of Violent Revolt

One of the greatest woman intellectuals of eighteenth‐century Germany is Elise Reimarus, whose contribution to Enlightenment political theory is rarely acknowledged today. Unlike other social contract theorists, Reimarus rejects a people's right to violent resistance or revolution in her philosophical dialogue Freedom (1791). Exploring the arguments in Freedom, this paper observes a number of similarities in the political thought of Elise Reimarus and Immanuel Kant. Both, I suggest, reject violence as an illegitimate response to perceived political injustice in a way that opposes Locke's strong voluntarism and the absolutism of Hobbes. First, they emphasize the need to maintain the legal state as a precondition for the possibility of external right. Second, they share an optimistic view of the inherently “just” nature of the tripartite republican state. And finally, Reimarus and Kant both outline an alternative, nonviolent response to political injustice that consists in the freedom of public expression and a discourse on the moral enlightenment of man.     

Domestic Abuse as Terrorism

A number of philosophers and feminist authors have recently equated domestic abuse with the ubiquitous and ill‐defined concept of “terrorism.” Claudia Card, for instance, argues that domestic abuse is a frequently ignored form of terrorism that creates and maintains “heterosexual male dominance and female dependence and service” (Card 2003). Alison Jaggar, in a recent article, also concludes that an acceptable definition of terrorism will find rape and domestic violence to be terrorist acts (Jaggar 2005). Yet there seem to be several obstacles to any simple appropriation of the term “terrorism” for cases of domestic abuse. In this paper I will address what I take to be three significant problems that might be raised with regard to any attempt to identify domestic abuse as an act of terrorism. These problems include the fact that a) definitions of terrorism usually require clear political motivations, b) definitions of terrorism normally require that the terrorist intend to create a climate of terror, and c) adopting the term terrorism for cases of domestic abuse might appear simply inappropriate or unhelpful. I will argue, however, that each of these possible objections can be answered effectively and that domestic abuse rightly falls under the rubric of terrorism.     

Perceived stress in prodromal Huntington disease

This study examines perceived stress and its relationship to depressive symptoms, life changes and functional capacity in a large sample of individuals who are positive for the Huntington disease (HD) gene expansion but not yet diagnosed. Participants were classified by estimated proximity to HD diagnosis (far, mid, near) and compared with a non-gene-expanded comparison group. Persons in the mid group had the highest stress scores. A significant interaction between age and time since HD genetic testing was also found. Secondary analyses using data from a different data collection point and including a diagnosed group showed the highest stress scores in the diagnosed group. Possible explanations and implications are discussed.     

Risk and Prisoner's Dilemma: A Reinterpretation of Coombs' Re‐parameterization

We propose a model to measure risk in a prisoner's dilemma based on Coombs' (1973) re‐parameterization of the game as an individual risk decision‐making task that chooses between a gamble of cooperation and another gamble of defection. Specifically, we propose an index, r, to represent the risk associated with cooperation relative to defection. In conjunction with Rapoport's (1967) index of cooperation (K), our formulation of risk allows us to construct games that vary in risk (as indexed by r) while controlling for cooperativeness (as indexed by K). Following utility analysis that models risk seeking as a convex utility function and risk averse as a concave function, we predict that risk‐seeking people cooperate more in games that the cooperation choice is more risky, whereas risk‐averse people cooperate more in games that the cooperation choice is less risky. In the three studies that we varied game parameters, used different measures of risk orientation and prosocial orientation and used different experimental procedures, we found robust results supporting our predictions. Theoretical analysis of our formulation further suggests that risk and cooperativeness of a prisoner's dilemma game is not entirely independent. Games that have a higher cooperativeness index are necessarily more risky. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.