Language‐specific stress perception by 9‐month‐old French and Spanish infants

During the first year of life, infants begin to have difficulties perceiving non‐native vowel and consonant contrasts, thus adapting their perception to the phonetic categories of the target language. In this paper, we examine the perception of a non‐segmental feature, i.e. stress. Previous research with adults has shown that speakers of French (a language with fixed stress) have great difficulties in perceiving stress contrasts ( Dupoux, Pallier, Sebastián & Mehler, 1997 ), whereas speakers of Spanish (a language with lexically contrastive stress) perceive these contrasts as accurately as segmental contrasts. We show that language‐specific differences in the perception of stress likewise arise during the first year of life. Specifically, 9‐month‐old Spanish infants successfully distinguish between stress‐initial and stress‐final pseudo‐words, while French infants of this age show no sign of discrimination. In a second experiment using multiple tokens of a single pseudo‐word, French infants of the same age successfully discriminate between the two stress patterns, showing that they are able to perceive the acoustic correlates of stress. Their failure to discriminate stress patterns in the first experiment thus reflects an inability to process stress at an abstract, phonological level.     

Internal conflict,language, and metaphor: Implications for psychotherapy

The term conflict has only metaphorical validity when applied to internal dynamics, because an organism can never actually be at war with itself. Drawing upon Maturana's theory of living systems, we argue that the concept of conflict has been taken too literally by therapists and clients. Instead of eliminating conflict, we urge therapists to focus on the interpersonal implications of language habits and to explore with clients the options for more effective action in the social community.The authors would like to express their appreciation to G. Craig Caputo, Elsa R. Efran, Joseph Fiorito, Charles E. Gallagher, Christopher K. Germer, Richard J. Leffel, M. Penny Levin, Alan J. Lipman, Michael D. Lukens, Robert J. Lukens, and Richard Sadowsky, each of whom read earlier drafts and contributed valuable suggestions.     

Postmodern Illusions and the Challenges of African Theology: The Ecclesial Tactics of Resistance

Contemporary African theological reflection has not sufficiently paid attention to the reality of postmodernism in general, its cultural expressions in particular. In this essay, I depict some of the illusions of a postmodern culture and how their power to shape the economic, cultural and imaginative visions of Africans remains one of the key theological challenges. Accordingly, the crucial test for African theology today will be whether it can generate enough critical skills and inspire new forms of community, which are capable of challenging, as well as offering alternatives to, the dangerous and playful nihilism of a postmodern culture.     

Using mnemonic images and explicit sound contrasting to help Japanese children learn English alphabet sounds

Although mnemonics have been shown to be effective in remembering letter-sound associations, the use of foreign words as cues for English phonemes had not been investigated. Learning phonemes in Japan is challenging because the Japanese language is based on a different sound unit called mora (mostly consonant-vowel combinations). This study investigated the effectiveness of using mnemonic images utilizing Japanese words as cues for the phonemes, and explicit sound contrasting of phonemic sounds with morae they could be confused with, in facilitating children's acquisition of knowledge about alphabet letter-sound correspondence. The participants were 140 6th-grade Japanese students who were taught phoneme-consonant correspondence, with or without the use of mnemonics or explicit sound contrasting. Analysis of the students’ pre- and post-instruction assessments revealed significant interaction effects between types of instruction provided and instruction phase, indicating better performance in letter-sound association as a consequence of the inclusion of both mnemonics and explicit sound contrasting.