The puzzle of language evolution

Linguistics must again concentrate on the evolutionary nature of language, so that language models are more realistic with respect to human natural languages and have a greater explanatory force. Multi-agent systems are proposed as a possible route to develop such evolutionary models and an example is given of a concrete experiment in the origins and evolution of word-meaning based on a multi-agent approach.     

Acquisition of Related and Unrelated Factual Information Delivered by a Teacher Within an Inclusive Setting

Two secondary students with moderate disabilities (one per classroom) attended Advanced English classes with peers without disabilities in a rural high school. In additional to conducting planned daily instruction, each English teacher also systematically presented three sets of information (two facts per set) to each student with disabilities during the course of the class using a parallel treatments design. Each set of information included a fact related to the English class (e.g., Begin each sentence with a capital letter.) and a fact not related to the English class (e.g., The governor of Kentucky is Paul Patton.). The special education teacher conducted daily probe sessions to document acquisition. Of the six facts presented to each student with disabilities, one student acquired two related facts and one unrelated fact, while the other student acquired two related and two unrelated facts. This investigation implies that students who are fully included can acquire information presented by the regular classroom teacher during the course of a typical class and that teachers can facilitate learning by planning to present such information in a systematic fashion.     

Health care as an essential building block for a free society: the convergence of the Catholic and secular American imperative

As the twentieth century closes, marked by triumphal strides in medical advances, the American society has yet to ensure that each person has access to affordable health care. To correct this injustice, this article calls on the nation's political and corporate leaders, providers, and faith-based groups to join all Americans in a new national conversation on systemic health care reform. The Catholic faith tradition is one that compels both a proclamation to ministry values and a commitment to speak out against the challenges or threats to what are essential to the well-being of individuals and society. The Catholic health ministry must therefore be both a voice for the voiceless and an agent of transformation. The nation's goal should be to "reposition" health care from its status as an important, but ultimately optional building block to one that is essential.     

Case Report—Loyalty, Legacy, and Ledger: Contextual Therapy in a Patient with a Family History of Ovarian Cancer

A client's emotional experiences and reactions to those experiences are influenced by his/her family of origin and direct or indirect interactions with various family members. Contextual therapists propose that a client's satisfaction with a relationship depends on the equity of his/her emotional interactions with family members. When relationships are inequitable, trust between individuals disintegrates. In order to reestablish trust in a relationship, a balance of interests must be restored. If not, imbalances may be passed down to future generations. A case of a woman with a family history of ovarian cancer is reviewed with the principles of contextual therapy in mind. In her family, several legacies have resulted in unbalanced relationships between family members that lead to difficulty in establishing trust within the genetic counseling session.     

Familiarity and pronounceability of nouns and names

Ratings of familiarity and pronounceability were obtained from a random sample of 199 surnames (selected from over 80,000 entries in the Purdue University phone book) and 199 nouns (from the Ku?era-Francis, 1967, word database). The distributions of ratings for nouns versus names are substantially different: Nouns were rated as more familiar and easier to pronounce than surnames. Frequency and familiarity were more closely related in the proper name pool than the word pool, although both correlations were modest. Ratings of familiarity and pronounceability were highly related for both groups. A production experiment showed that rated pronounceability was highly related to the time taken to produce a name. These data confirm the common belief that there are differences in the statistical and distributional properties of words as compared to proper names. The value of using frequency and the ratings of familiarity and pronounceability for predicting variations in actual pronunciations of words and names are discussed.     

MESA: a new configuration for measuring electromagnetic field fluctuations

This paper describes how the multi-energy sensor array has been refitted to meet the needs of measuring geomagnetic and other types of electromagnetic phenomena in an environment. This portable laptop computer system was designed to measure the interaction of multiple frequencies with the psychological and physiological processes that underlie human exposure to electromagnetic fields across the spectra. New sensors and analytical software have been implemented in the new configuration.     

Remote delivery of cognitive science laboratories: A solution for small disciplines in large countries

Numerically small disciplines can be jeopardized by geographic difficulties, if student populations at universities are small and distances between them large. This problem could be addressed, if teaching resources could be shared among several universities and students in several locations could be taught simultaneously. We present the results of a trial in simultaneous Internet and videoconferencing delivery of an introductory cognitive science laboratory. The trial relied on off-the-shelf software and hardware. Students found the delivery nearly as effective as a locally run laboratory, despite a noticeable difference in the level of interactivity between the remote and other, local laboratory classes. We discuss possible further improvements in teaching efficiency and efficacy.     

Adults’ perception of native and nonnative vowels: Implications for the perceptual magnet effect

Two experiments were conducted to evaluate the perceptual magnet effect. In Experiment 1, Amer-ican English speakers representing diverse dialects were presented with a fine-grained set of stimuli (varying in just noticeable differences forF1 andF2) and indicated whether they heard “/i/” or “not /i/,” thus delimiting the /i/ portion of the vowel space for individual subjects. Then these same subjects selected their own /i/ prototype with a method-of-adjustment procedure. The data from this experiment were used to synthesize customized prototype and nonprototype stimulus sets for Experiment 2. In Experiment 2,24 of our original 37 subjects completed a discrimination task for each of three conditions, in which vector stimuli varied from the subject’s prototype, the nonprototype, or a foreign vowel (/y/) in 15-mel steps. Subjects displayed higher discrimination, as indexed byd′, for the nonprototype condition than they did for both the prototype and the foreign conditions. In addition, discrimination was better for variants further away from the referent in each condition. However, discrimination was not especially poor for stimuli close to subjects’ individual prototypes—a result that would have yielded the strongest support for the operation of a magnet effect. This negative finding, together with other aspects of our results, raises problems for any theory of vowel perception that relies solely on “one-size-fits-all” prototype representations.     

Weakening the robustness of perspective: Evidence for a modified theory of compensation in picture perception

Viewed from the center of projection, a perspective picture presents the pictorial depth information of a scene. Knowing the center of projection, one can reconstruct the depicted scene. Assuming another viewpoint is the center of projection will cause one to reconstruct a transformed scene. Despite these transformations, we appreciate pictures from other viewpoints. The compensation hypothesis states that the visible picture surface allows observers to compensate for transformations by locating the center of projection and experiencing pictorial space from there. We show that observers neither completely compensate for nor experience transformations of space as geometry would predict. We propose a modified compensation hypothesis according to which different degrees of visibility of the picture surface invoke different degrees of compensation.