Grading the ‘cultural literacy’ project

The essay examines the argument advanced by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., for instituting ‘cultural literacy’ as a fundamental priority of schools. A number of confusions and equivocations in Hirsch's reasoning are identified, and the propensity of his project to indoctrinate is exposed. Among the features of Hirsch's argument shown to be troubling are his shifting construal of ‘language’, his inconsistency about the requirements of cultural literacy, and his uncritical relation to traditional images of the American past and present. The upshot is to raise the question why Hirsch's project has elicited wide support and praise.     

Referenzsemantik in der Partnermodellierung

How can we explain that an assertion on something perceived can be understood in the same manner by somebody who cannot perceive that scene? This problem bases the interest in computational linguistics in how listener modeling could possibly be harmonized with reference semantics. Mental images substituting real perception appear as a way out. The architecture of the listener model has to be adapted to the creation and use of such pictorial data structures. Furthermore, the relation between the latter and a verbal (i. e., propositional) representation must be understood. The resulting architecture of a listener model with reference semantics can be employed to solve communicational problems from three general classes in a better way, as is demonstrated by an example implementation.     

Dichotic listening during forced-attention in a patient with left hemispherectomy

A young left-handed girl with an extensive posttraumatic lesion in the left hemisphere was tested with dichotic listening (DL) under three different attentional instructions. The major aim of the study was to evaluate a structural vs attentional explanation for dichotic listening. As both her expressive and receptive language functions were intact after the lesion, it was assumed that the right hemisphere was the language-dominant one. In the free-report condition, she was free to divert attention to and to report from both ear inputs. In the forced-right condition, she was instructed to attend to and report only from the right ear input. In the forced-left condition, she was instructed to attend to and to report only from the left-ear input. Her performance was compared with data from a previously collected sample of normal left-handed females. Analysis showed that the patient, in contrast to the normal sample, revealed a complete right-ear extinction phenomenon, irrespective of attentional instruction. Furthermore, she showed superior correct reports from the left ear, compared with those of the normal sample, also irrespective of attentional instruction. It is concluded that these results support a structural, rather than attentional explanation for the right-ear advantage (REA) typically observed in dichotic listening. The utility of validating the dichotic listening technique on patients with brain lesions is discussed.