Civic Stratification, ‘Plastic’ Citizenship and ‘Plastic Subjectivities’ in Greek Immigration Policy

This article critically discusses Greek immigration policy, its adaptation to current social conditions such as the extended stay of undocumented migrants, and political pressures from the EU, with special focus on three groups of migrants: Albanians, ethnic-Greek Albanians (Northern Epirotes) and ethnic-Greeks from former Soviet Union. Taking into account Greek immigration law, its implementation by public authorities and the diversity of immigration status and associated rights accorded to these three groups of migrants, we argue that there is a ‘plastic citizenship’ (from the notion of plasticity) developed, where boundaries are blurred and processes of becoming or not are fluid, changing over time and influenced by notions of who should belong and who should not, who is entitled to what rights and who is not. Plastic citizenship creates plastic subjectivities for migrants in Greece.     

Informal and Absolute Proofs: Some Remarks from a Gödelian Perspective

Topoi - After a brief discussion of Kreisel’s notion of informal rigour and Myhill’s notion of absolute proof, Gödel’s analysis of the subject is presented. It is shown how...     

Gödel,Carnap and the Fregean Heritage

Synthese - Thorough a detailed analysis of version III of Gödel's Is mathematics syntax of language?, we propose a new interpretation of Gödel's criticism against the...     

Conversation and Behavior Games in the Pragmatics of Dialogue

In this article we present the bases for a computational theory of the cognitive processes underlying human communication. The core of the article is devoted to the analysis of the phases in which the process of comprehension of a communicative act can be logically divided: (1) literal meaning, where the reconstruction of the mental states literally expressed by the actor takes place: (2) speaker's meaning, where the partner reconstructs the communicative intentions of the actor; (3) communicative effect, where the partner possibly modifies his own beliefs and intentions; (4) reaction, where the intentions for the generation of the response are produced; and (5) response, where an overt response is constructed. The model appears to be compatible with relevant facts about human behavior. Our hypothesis is that, through communication, an actor tries to exploit the motivational structures of a partner so that the desired goal is generated. A second point is that social behavior requires that cooperation be maintained at some level. In the case of communication, cooperation is, in general, pursued even when the partner does not adhere to the actor's goals, and therefore no cooperation occurs at the behavioral level. This important distinction is reflected in the two kinds of game we introduce to account for communication. The main concept implied in communication is that two agents overtly reach a situation of shared mental states. Our model deals with sharedness through two primitives: shared beliefs and communicative intentions.     

Functional and anatomical profile of visual motion impairments in stroke patients correlate with fMRI in normal subjects

We used six psychophysical tasks to measure sensitivity to different types of global motion in 45 healthy adults and in 57 stroke patients who had recovered from the initial results of the stroke, but a large subset of them had enduring deficits on selective visual motion perception tasks. The patients were divided into four groups on the basis of the location of their cortical lesion: occipito-temporal, occipito-parietal, rostro-dorsal parietal, or frontal-prefrontal. The six tasks were: direction discrimination, speed discrimination, motion coherence, motion discontinuity, two-dimensional form-from-motion, and motion coherence – radial. We found both qualitative and quantitative differences among the motion impairments in the four groups: patients with frontal lesions or occipito-temporal lesions were not impaired on any task. The other two groups had substantial impairments, most severe in the group with occipito-parietal damage. We also tested eight healthy control subjects on the same tasks while they were scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging. The BOLD signal provoked by the different tasks correlated well with the locus of the lesions that led to impairments among the different tasks. The results highlight the advantage of using psychophysical techniques and a variety of visual tasks with neurological patients to tease apart the contribution of different cortical areas to motion processing.     

Prosodic modulations in child-directed language and their impact on word learning

Child-directed language can support language learning, but how? We addressed two questions: (1) how caregivers prosodically modulated their speech as a function of word familiarity (known or unknown to the child) and accessibility of referent (visually present or absent from the immediate environment); (2) whether such modulations affect children's unknown word learning and vocabulary development. We used data from 38 English-speaking caregivers (from the ECOLANG corpus) talking about toys (both known and unknown to their children aged 3–4 years) both when the toys are present and when absent. We analyzed prosodic dimensions (i.e., speaking rate, pitch and intensity) of caregivers’ productions of 6529 toy labels. We found that unknown labels were spoken with significantly slower speaking rate, wider pitch and intensity range than known labels, especially in the first mentions, suggesting that caregivers adjust their prosody based on children's lexical knowledge. Moreover, caregivers used slower speaking rate and larger intensity range to mark the first mentions of toys that were physically absent. After the first mentions, they talked about the referents louder with higher mean pitch when toys were present than when toys were absent. Crucially, caregivers’ mean pitch of unknown words and the degree of mean pitch modulation for unknown words relative to known words (pitch ratio) predicted children's immediate word learning and vocabulary size 1 year later. In conclusion, caregivers modify their prosody when the learning situation is more demanding for children, and these helpful modulations assist children in word learning.

Research Highlights

• In naturalistic interactions, caregivers use slower speaking rate, wider pitch and intensity range when introducing new labels to 3–4-year-old children, especially in first mentions.
• Compared to when toys are present, caregivers speak more slowly with larger intensity range to mark the first mentions of toys that are physically absent.
• Mean pitch to mark word familiarity predicts children's immediate word learning and future vocabulary size.

     

Capturing Situational Information with Smartphones and Mobile Sensing Methods

Smartphones are pervasive companions to many people as they go about their daily lives. In addition, they are equipped with a wide array of sensors making it possible to measure objective information about people and situations, many times, with great fidelity, over long periods of time, in a way that is both unobtrusive and ecologically valid. Therefore, we argue that smartphones and other forms of mobile sensing are ideally suited to measuring situations. In particular, we describe how sensing methods can be used to assess situational cues, characteristics and classes. Copyright © 2015 European Association of Personality Psychology