Situation‐sensitive use of insincerity: Pathways to communication in young children

The present research focused on the development of children's ability to spontaneously suspend sincerity or tell a lie according to different communicative contexts. The issue of sincerity in communication is rather complex since in everyday interactions sincerity is expected, while there are specific communicative acts where sincerity is not prescribed or even banished. This study investigated how children (N= 80, ranging in age from 3 to 6.5 years) handled communications involving insincerity: fantasy stories, lies, and politeness situations. The results showed that the ability to deal with insincerity emerges gradually during the preschool years with an increasing trend of difficulty, from fantasy to politeness situations, and a notable amount of variability not equally distributed among the tasks.     

Hallucinations in the psychotic state: Psychoanalysis and the neurosciences compared

In this contribution, which takes account of important findings in neuroscientific as well as psychoanalytic research, the authors explore the meaning of the deep‐going distortions of psychic functioning occurring in hallucinatory phenomena. Neuroscientific studies have established that hallucinations distort the sense of reality owing to a complex alteration in the balance between top‐down and bottom‐up brain circuits. The present authors postulate that hallucinatory phenomena represent the outcome of a psychotic's distorted use of the mind over an extended period of time. In the hallucinatory state the psychotic part of the personality uses the mind to generate auto‐induced sensations and to achieve a particular sort of regressive pleasure. In these cases, therefore, the mind is not used as an organ of knowledge or as an instrument for fostering relationships with others. The hallucinating psychotic decathects psychic (relational) reality and withdraws into a personal, bodily, and sensory space of his own. The opposing realities are not only external and internal but also psychic and sensory. Visual hallucinations could thus be said to originate from seeing with the ‘eyes’ of the mind, and auditory hallucinations from hearing with the mind's ‘ears’. In these conditions, mental functioning is restricted, cutting out the more mature functions, which are thus no longer able to assign real meaning to the surrounding world and to the subject's psychic experience. The findings of the neurosciences facilitate understanding of how, in the psychotic hallucinatory process, the mind can modify the working of a somatic organ such as the brain.     

Mapping language to the world: the role of iconicity in the sign language input

Most research on the mechanisms underlying referential mapping has assumed that learning occurs in ostensive contexts, where label and referent co‐occur, and that form and meaning are linked by arbitrary convention alone. In the present study, we focus on iconicity in language, that is, resemblance relationships between form and meaning, and on non‐ostensive contexts, where label and referent do not co‐occur. We approach the question of language learning from the perspective of the language input. Specifically, we look at child‐directed language (CDL) in British Sign Language (BSL), a language rich in iconicity due to the affordances of the visual modality. We ask whether child‐directed signing exploits iconicity in the language by highlighting the similarity mapping between form and referent. We find that CDL modifications occur more often with iconic signs than with non‐iconic signs. Crucially, for iconic signs, modifications are more frequent in non‐ostensive contexts than in ostensive contexts. Furthermore, we find that pointing dominates in ostensive contexts, and suggest that caregivers adjust the semiotic resources recruited in CDL to context. These findings offer first evidence for a role of iconicity in the language input and suggest that iconicity may be involved in referential mapping and language learning, particularly in non‐ostensive contexts.     

Selective impairment of living things and musical instruments on a verbal 'Semantic Knowledge Questionnaire' in a case of apperceptive visual agnosia

Semantic memory was investigated in a patient (MR) affected by a severe apperceptive visual agnosia, due to an ischemic cerebral lesion, bilaterally affecting the infero-mesial parts of the temporo-occipital cortices. The study was made by means of a Semantic Knowledge Questionnaire (Laiacona, Barbarotto, Trivelli, & Capitani, 1993), which takes separately into account four categories of living beings (animals, fruits, vegetables and body parts) and of artefacts (furniture, tools, vehicles and musical instruments), does not require a visual analysis and allows to distinguish errors concerning super-ordinate categorization, perceptual features and functional/encyclopedic knowledge. When the total number of errors obtained on all the categories of living and non-living beings was considered, a non-significant trend toward a higher number of errors in living stimuli was observed. This difference, however, became significant when body parts and musical instruments were excluded from the analysis. Furthermore, the number of errors obtained on the musical instruments was similar to that obtained on the living categories of animals, fruits and vegetables and significantly higher of that obtained in the other artefact categories. This difference was still significant when familiarity, frequency of use and prototypicality of each stimulus entered into a logistic regression analysis. On the other hand, a separate analysis of errors obtained on questions exploring super-ordinate categorization, perceptual features and functional/encyclopedic attributes showed that the differences between living and non-living stimuli and between musical instruments and other artefact categories were mainly due to errors obtained on questions exploring perceptual features. All these data are at variance with the 'domains of knowledge' hypothesis', which assumes that the breakdown of different categories of living and non-living things respects the distinction between biological entities and artefacts and support the models assuming that 'category-specific semantic disorders' are the by-product of the differential weighting that visual-perceptual and functional (or action-related) attributes have in the construction of different biological and artefacts categories.     

Validity of Six Openness Facets in Predicting Work Behaviors: A Meta-Analysis

To illustrate the importance of facet-level investigations in predicting organizational outcomes and the need for more primary studies on this topic, we conducted a meta-analysis that took an exploratory look at differential relationships among 7 organizational criteria and Openness traits varying in breadth. Nine Openness predictors—the global dimension, 2 aspects (intellect and culture), and 6 facets (intellectual efficiency, ingenuity, curiosity, aesthetics, tolerance, and depth)—were examined in relations with various organizational criteria such as traditional performance outcomes (task performance, contextual performance, counterproductive work behavior), turnover, leadership effectiveness, training performance, and adaptive performance. Our results support the idea that Openness facets could exhibit differential validity for many organizational outcomes.     

Eye Movements Reveal the Dynamic Simulation of Speed in Language

This study investigates how speed of motion is processed in language. In three eye‐tracking experiments, participants were presented with visual scenes and spoken sentences describing fast or slow events (e.g., The lion ambled/dashed to the balloon). Results showed that looking time to relevant objects in the visual scene was affected by the speed of verb of the sentence, speaking rate, and configuration of a supporting visual scene. The results provide novel evidence for the mental simulation of speed in language and show that internal dynamic simulations can be played out via eye movements toward a static visual scene.     

Gödel on Concepts

This article is an attempt to present Gödel's discussion on concepts, from 1944 to the late 1970s, in particular relation to the thought of Frege and Russell. The discussion takes its point of departure from Gödel's claim in notes on Bernay's review of ‘Russell's mathematical logic’. It then retraces the historical background of the notion of intension which both Russell and Gödel use, and offers some grounds for claiming that Gödel consistently considered logic as a free-type theory of concepts, called intensions, considered as the denotations of predicate names.     

Semantic distance effects on object and action naming

Graded interference effects were tested in a naming task, in parallel for objects and actions. Participants named either object or action pictures presented in the context of other pictures (blocks) that were either semantically very similar, or somewhat semantically similar or semantically dissimilar. We found that naming latencies for both object and action words were modulated by the semantic similarity between the exemplars in each block, providing evidence in both domains of graded semantic effects.     

The interplay of meaning,sound, and syntax in sentence production

A discussion of modularity in language production processes, with special emphasis on processes for retrieving words and building syntactic structures for a to-be-uttered sentence, is presented. The authors' 1st goal was to assess the extent to which information processing is encapsulated between different processing stages. In particular, they assessed whether the input from one processing stage to the next is minimal and whether the flow of information in the system is strictly unidirectional. On the basis of the reviewed evidence, they conclude that both assumptions have to be revised. Their 2nd goal was to propose an altemative framework that does not assume strict encapsulation but that maintains multiple levels of integration for production.