A scale-invariant treatment for recursive path models

A reparameterization is formulated that yields estimates of scale-invariant parameters in recursive path models with latent variables, and (asymptotically) correct standard errors, without the use of constrained optimization. The method is based on the logical structure of the reticular action model.     

Politeness and social signals

In the literature, politeness has been researched within many disciplines. Although Brown and Levinson's theory of politeness (1978, 1987) is often cited, it is primarily a linguistic theory and has been criticized for its lack of generalizability to all cultures. Consequently, there is a need for a more comprehensive approach to understand and explain politeness. We suggest applying a social signal framework that considers politeness as a communicative state. By doing so, we aim to unify and explain politeness and its corresponding research and identify further research needed in this area.     

Evangelism as Discipleship

This article gives attention to the challenges that the missional and conversational relationship of the church poses in the intercourse between evangelism, discipleship, theological education and leadership formation in its ministry and mission. This multi‐faceted and complex process brings together competing interests with different agendas that, in a number of contexts, have resulted in mis‐evangelization. This has called into question issues about human dignity and respect and the need for reciprocity to inform all missional response of the churches. The article argues that an appropriate model of theological education is needed to equip leaders for effective witness to the gospel. This necessitates the recruitment and mentoring of emerging leaders who have had a life‐changing encounter with the life‐giving Spirit of Jesus that controls their identity, vocation and witness. Some experiences of formal and informal theological education and formation within the Anglo‐Caribbean context were identified that disconnected and disorientated leaders from the Church's missional task of bearing effective witness to the gospel. This article calls for an overhaul of seminary‐ and university‐based theological education careerism, because they serve as an encumbrance to nurturing effective contextual witness of churches. The article argues that if Jesus calls and makes us into his disciples, then faithfulness in discipleship necessitates that (1) authentic evangelism must be grounded in humility and respect for all, (2) leadership formation must be infectiously relational, and (3) the gospel must be communicated through genuine interpersonal and community‐affirming relationships. The article ends with an invitation to all churches to embrace a missional model of witnessing that invests in living with, learning from and sharing with people in communities depending on the Spirit of God in Christ to lead and bear fruit in God's time.     

Book Reviews

There is long-standing evidence for verbal working memory impairments in both children and adults with dyslexia. By contrast, spatial memory appears largely to be unimpaired. In an attempt to distinguish between phonological and central executive accounts of the impairments in working memory, a set of phonological and spatial working memory tasks was designed to investigate the key issues in working memory, task type, task demands (static, dynamic, and updating), and task complexity. Significant differences emerged between the dyslexic and nondyslexic participants on the verbal working memory tasks employed in Experiment 1, thereby providing further evidence for continuing dyslexic impairments of working memory into adulthood. The nature of the deficits suggested a problem with the phonological loop, with there being little evidence to implicate an impairment of the central executive. Due to the difficulties associated with separating verbal working memory and phonological processing, however, performance was investigated in Experiment 2 using visuospatial measures of working memory. The results of the visuospatial tasks indicated no between-group differences in static spatial memory, which requires the short-term storage of simultaneously presented information. In almost all conditions there were no between-group differences in dynamic spatial memory that demands the recall of both location and order of stimuli presented sequentially. However, a significant impairment occurred on the dynamic task under high memory updating load, on which dyslexic adults showed nonphonological working memory deficits. In the absence of an explanation involving verbal recoding, this finding is interpreted in terms of a central executive or automaticity impairment in dyslexia.     

Performance of Dyslexic Children on Cerebellar and Cognitive Tests

In a previous study (A. J. Fawcett, R. I. Nicolson, & P. Dean, 1996), the authors had found strong behavioral evidence for cerebellar deficit in a panel of children with dyslexia. In the present study, the generality of those results was assessed. A battery of clinical tests for cerebellar dysfunction was administered, together with selected cognitive tests, to a further 59 dyslexic and 67 control children. The dyslexic children showed highly significant impairments on the cerebellar tests, with deficits on postural stability and muscle tone comparable in magnitude with their reading and spelling deficits. Furthermore, over 95% of the dyslexic children showed clear evidence of deficit on muscle tone or stability. The findings provide further evidence of the generality of cerebellar impairment in dyslexia. The implications of the cerebellar tests for screening in dyslexia are discussed.     

The role of illustrations in children’s inferential comprehension

Illustrations are a salient source of information in children’s books, yet their effect on children’s reading comprehension has been studied only through literal factual recall. The purpose of the current study was to determine the effect of illustrations on bridging inferences, an important aspect of meaning making in comprehension models. Identical short stories were presented under different illustration conditions with pictures that represented different parts of the story. Participants were 73 7- to 11-year-olds. Illustrations both facilitated and interfered with inferencing depending on the type of information depicted; however, this effect was reduced as grade increased. Additional findings were that the overall ability to make inferences increased with age and working memory was a significant predictor of this skill. Results are discussed in relation to cognitive and developmental models of comprehension.     

Mirror neurons, the representation of word meaning, and the foot of the third left frontal convolution

Previous neuroimaging research has attempted to demonstrate a preferential involvement of the human mirror neuron system (MNS) in the comprehension of effector-related action word (verb) meanings. These studies have assumed that Broca's area (or Brodmann's area 44) is the homologue of a monkey premotor area (F5) containing mouth and hand mirror neurons, and that action word meanings are shared with the mirror system due to a proposed link between speech and gestural communication. In an fMRI experiment, we investigated whether Broca's area shows mirror activity solely for effectors implicated in the MNS. Next, we examined the responses of empirically determined mirror areas during a language perception task comprising effector-specific action words, unrelated words and nonwords. We found overlapping activity for observation and execution of actions with all effectors studied, i.e., including the foot, despite there being no evidence of foot mirror neurons in the monkey or human brain. These "mirror" areas showed equivalent responses for action words, unrelated words and nonwords, with all of these stimuli showing increased responses relative to visual character strings. Our results support alternative explanations attributing mirror activity in Broca's area to covert verbalisation or hierarchical linearisation, and provide no evidence that the MNS makes a preferential contribution to comprehending action word meanings.     

Eye movements during scene inspection: A test of the saliency map hypothesis

Both attentional difficulties and rapid processing deficits have recently been linked with dyslexia. We report two studies comparing the performance of dyslexic and control teenagers on attentional tasks. The two studies were based on two different conceptions of attention. Study 1 employed a design that allowed three key components of attention--focusing, switching, and sustaining--to be investigated separately. One hypothesis under investigation was that rapid processing problems--in particular impaired ability to switch attention rapidly--might be associated with dyslexia. However, although dyslexic participants were significantly less accurate than their controls in a condition where they had to switch attention between two target types, the nature of the deficit suggested that the problem was not in switching attention per se. Thus, in Study 2, we explored an alternative interpretation of the Study 1 results in terms of the classic capacity-limited models of "central" attention. We contrasted two hypotheses: (1) that dyslexic teenagers have reduced cognitive resources versus (2) that they suffer from a general impairment in the ability to automatise basic skills. To investigate the automaticity of the shape recognition component of the task a similar attention paradigm to that used in Study 1 was employed, but using degraded, as well as intact, stimuli. It was found that stimulus degradation led to relatively less impairment for dyslexic than for matched control groups. The results support the hypothesis that dyslexic people suffer from a general impairment in the ability to automatise skills--in this case the skill of automatic shape recognition.