Psycholinguistics: a half century of monologism

The contention of this article is that, since its inception in the mid-twentieth century, mainstream psycholinguistics has been monologistic, that is, has concentrated on monologue as its source of empirical material and has, largely implicitly, involved a monologistic epistemology. The article is not a comprehensive history of psycholinguistics but does attempt to establish a historical perspective. Monologism has been the historical bias of Cartesianism, positivism, behaviorism, and cognitivism. Monologism is concerned only with the person in whom cognition takes place and from whom communication proceeds. It is essentially asocial. By contrast, the merits of dialogism include an openness to the sociocultural, interactive nature of all cognition and communication and an empirical engagement of contextualized discourse situations. Dialogism is presented here not as a supplement to mainstream psycholinguistics but as a radical innovation that construes mainstream psycholinguistics as "strongly misleading if presented as a full theory of communication through spoken interaction" (Linell, 1998, p. 23). Some approaches to dialogism and research on dialogue are critically reviewed.     

The increasing relevance of European rural young people in policy agendas: Contributions from community psychology

Our paper aims to provide a short guide on how community psychologists can contribute to the improvement of rural young people's prospects. After briefly introducing the demographic trends of these young people in continental Europe for the past decade, we list the current challenges faced by rural European young generations, as well as the opportunities emerging for them from the twin transition that can inspire the community psychology field. We then contextualize community psychologists' interventions in this domain according to an ecological-systemic standpoint and by embracing a Participatory Action Research (PAR) perspective on research and practice. We further detail the reasons for adopting a PAR approach in research and practice to address rural young people's challenges and opportunities. Finally, we highlight four potential intermediation missions to uphold community psychologists' rural youth development input, based on the adopted theoretical and methodological standpoint. We conclude that our short guide can facilitate community psychology professionals' complete understanding of rural young generations' prospects, in line with the expected increase in the need for rural young people's participation. Our proposal may also have long-term benefits for rural communities by contributing to the redesigning of intergenerational relationships and securing critical mass.     

Significant others: Italian adolescents' rankings compared with their parents.

In a study of social context in which adolescents live from an intergenerational perspective, the purpose was comparison of significant others of the generation of Italian adolescents (n = 595) and their parents' recalled others significant during adolescence (397 fathers and 416 mothers). Analysis showed the predominance of parents and above all the mother as the most significant others for both generations during adolescence. Further, today's adolescent generation attributed less importance to other unrelated adults than their parents recalled.     

The range effect as a function of stimulus set,presence of a standard,and modulus

The intramodal range effect (an inverse relationship between stimulus range and exponent in Stevens’s power law) has been well documented, but its conditions have not been tested. Both the estimates of stimulus magnitudes and their exponents are affected by context, stimulus location, and different standards and moduli, but how these variables might interact with the variable of stimulus range has not been studied. In the present research, exponents were derived from magnitude estimates of line length for each of three different stimulus: ranges at two different locations on the scale of length, with or without a modulus. Moduli of 50 and 500 permitted an analysis of the effect of response magnitude on the range effect. Because different ranges had stimulus values in common, the effect of range and location on exponents from those common values could be determined. Exponents decreased as stimulus range increased, but only in the free-modulus condition. For that condition, exponents derived from magnitude estimates of only the common stimuli also showed the range effect and response magnitude did not influence the range effect. Exponents were higher for stimulus ranges at the lower location, but location does not appear to contribute to the range effect. Although the range effect is not explained, the conditions under which it holds and some factors that may influence it are considered.     

Apparent duration of long meaningful events and meaningless intervals

Time estimates of 1 1/2-, 5¼-, and 14 1/2-min intervals were obtained from 12 American graduate students and 12 Indian graduate students by the methods of verbal estimation and cross-modality matching. Material presented during stimulus intervals varied in degree of meaningfulness. Each subject was tested on 4 successive days with basically the same material in order to determine the effects of repetition. The relationship between perceived and physical time was found to follow Stevens’ power law, and confidence limits of exponents obtained in this study include the exponents previously reported for short durations. Neither actual judgments nor exponents were affected by cultural background or by cognitive factors such as memory for material presented in the interval, familiarity, complexity, degree of meaningfulness, and repetition. It had previously been reported that time judgments were dependent on these cognitive factors. In light of the present research, it is necessary to review and replicate those studies which support a cognitive view of time perception.     

Toposes in Logic and Logic in Toposes

The purpose of this paper is to justify the claim that Topos theory and Logic (the latter interpreted in a wide enough sense to include Model theory and Set theory) may interact to the advantage of both fields. Once the necessity of utilizing toposes (other than the topos of Sets) becomes apparent, workers in Topos theory try to make this task as easy as possible by employing a variety of methods which, in the last instance, find their justification in metatheorems from Logic. Some concrete instances of this assertion will be given in the form of simple proofs that certain theorems of Algebra hold in any (Grothendieck) topos, in order to illustrate the various techniques that are used. In the other direction, Topos theory can also be a useful tool in Logic. Examples of this are independence proofs in (classical as well as intuitionistic) Set theory, as well as transfer methods in the presence of a sheaf representation theorem, the latter applied, in particular, to model theoretic properties of certain theories.     

Whose Consent is it Anyway? A Poststructuralist framing of the Person in Medical Decision-Making

Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - This paper explores the value of a Poststructuralist psychoanalytic model of persons, or “Subjects,” as an expanded frame for the question...     

Semantic determinants of pauses

Summary The following experiment presents evidence that variations in semantic context can produce changes in the rate and length of pauses in a situation in which syntactic and other variations are minimized. Each of 40 Ss read two paragraphs aloud and after each paragraph retold the story without further instructions. Each paragraph consisted of five sentences, each containing 23 syllables. The third sentence was either in accord with the story or an unusual occurrence (depending on exchange of subject and object). The most important experimental finding was that both number and length of unfilled pauses are more frequent throughout the unusual stories as compared with the usual ones. In the readings, the effect was limited to the critical sentence and the pauses immediately thereafter. The evidence supports the view of the authors that the role of semantic context has been underestimated in psycholiguistic research to date.

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Zusammenfassung Das folgende Experiment weist darauf hin, daß Variationen des semantischen Kontextes zu Veränderungen in der Anzahl und Länge von Pausen führen können, auch wenn syntaktische und andere Variationen kontrolliert werden. 40 Vpn lasen zwei Abschnitte laut vor und erzählten die Geschichte nach jedem Abschnitt ohne weitere Instruktion. Jeder Abschnitt bestand aus fünf Sätzen, jeder Satz enthielt 23 Silben. Der dritte Satz stimmte mit dem sonstigen Inhalt der Geschichte überein oder wich davon ab (durch Austausch von Subjekt und Objekt). Als wichtigster experimenteller Befund stellte sich heraus, daß bei den ungewöhnlichen Geschichten die Anzahl und Länge der ungefüllten Pausen größer waren als bei den normalen Geschichten. Bei den Lesungen trat dieser Effekt nur innerhalb des kritischen Satzes und unmittelbar danach auf. Die Ergebnisse unterstützen die Meinung der Autoren, daß die Rolle des semantischen Kontextes in der psycholinguistischen Forschung bisher vernachlässigt wurde.

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Abbreviations N Normal Sematic Context - A Abnormal Sematic Context - N_ Preceeded by Normal Sematic Context - A_ Preceeded by Anormal Sematic Context - S The Student Story - C The Child Story - UP Unfilled Pauses - FP Filled Pauses (e.g. uh) - UP_FP Unfilled Pauses accompanying FPs - R Repeats (e.g., the the) - FS False Starts (e.g., He went .... He came) - R₁ and R₂ First and Second Readings - S₁ and S₂ First and Second Stories - B UPs between Major Syntactic Units - W UPs within Major Syntactic Units The research reported in the following article has been supported partly by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and partly by the Psychological Institute of the Free University of Berlin. In addition, it was made possible through the generosity of Saint Louis University in granting a year's leave of absence to the first author for purposes of research.     

Event-related potential studies of cerebral specialization during reading: I. Studies of normal adults

A number of methodological features were incorporated in a paradigm designed to maximize the likelihood of finding reliable event-related potential (ERP) signs of functional specializations between and within the cerebral hemispheres. Every subject was more accurate in identifying words presented to the right than to the left visual field. The morphology of the ERPs elicited by these words varied considerably as a function of electrode position both within and between the hemispheres. Amplitude asymmetries of ERP components recorded from occipital regions of the two hemispheres varied systematically with the position of the word in the visual field. On the other hand, ERPs from more anterior (temporal and frontal) regions displayed large asymmetries which were in the same direction regardless of the visual field of word presentation. The most prominent such asymmetry was in the negativity in the region 300–500 msec (N410) which was larger in the left than the right hemisphere in every subject. These results demonstrate that in this paradigm which demands specialized language processing ERPs are sensitive to aspects of cerebral organization both within and between the two hemispheres.