Iconicity and Diachronic Language Change

Iconicity, the resemblance between the form of a word and its meaning, has effects on behavior in both communicative symbol development and language learning experiments. These results have invited speculation about iconicity being a key feature of the origins of language, yet the presence of iconicity in natural languages seems limited. In a diachronic study of language change, we investigated the extent to which iconicity is a stable property of vocabulary, alongside previously investigated psycholinguistic predictors of change. Analyzing 784 English words with data on their historical forms, we found that stable words are higher in iconicity, longer in length, and earlier acquired during development, but that the role of frequency and grammatical category may be less important than previously suggested. Iconicity is revealed as a feature of ultra-conserved words and potentially also as a property of vocabulary early in the history of language origins.     

Visuospatial and verbal memory in mental arithmetic

Working memory allows complex information to be remembered and manipulated over short periods of time. Correlations between working memory and mathematics achievement have been shown across the lifespan. However, only a few studies have examined the potentially distinct contributions of domain-specific visuospatial and verbal working memory resources in mental arithmetic computation. Here we aimed to fill this gap in a series of six experiments pairing addition and subtraction tasks with verbal and visuospatial working memory and interference tasks. In general, we found higher levels of interference between mental arithmetic and visuospatial working memory tasks than between mental arithmetic and verbal working memory tasks. Additionally, we found that interference that matched the working memory domain of the task (e.g., verbal task with verbal interference) lowered working memory performance more than mismatched interference (verbal task with visuospatial interference). Findings suggest that mental arithmetic relies on domain-specific working memory resources.     

Children’s Perspectives and Evaluations of Safety in Diverse Settings and Their Subjective Well-Being: A Multi-National Approach

There is a need to explore variations in children’s safety perceptions for different settings (home, school and neighbourhood) and their relationship with subjective well-being (this including satisfaction with safety and satisfaction with life as whole) by comparing a variety of cultural contexts. A further objective is to explore to what extent gender, age group (10 and 12-year-olds) and level of SWB (measured using the SLSS -Student’s Life Satisfaction Scale- and the BMSLSS -Brief Multidimensional Student’s Life Satisfaction Scale) play a role in this prediction. Results obtained through binary logistic models with samples from Spain (n = 2,724), Algeria (n = 2432), South Africa (n = 2192) and Israel (n = 1914), show that children’s perceptions of safety are predicted by their different perceptions and evaluations of school, home and the nearby area. Perceptions of safety in the nearby area and satisfaction with safety (O.R. = 1.080) contribute to predicting higher levels of satisfaction with life as a whole to a greater extent than scores on the SLSS (O.R. = 1.036) and the BMSLSS (O.R. = 1.050) scales. The country participants live in (especially when combined with satisfaction with safety) and, to a lesser extent gender, also make important contributions. The age group they belong to plays a significant role in predicting higher perceptions of safety at home, in the area nearby, at school, and in predicting higher satisfaction with safety. Results open the door to the introduction of specific interventions (e.g. improving parent-child communication, enhancing public spaces for children to play and promoting children’s participation at school), aimed at promoting higher satisfaction with safety and also indirectly at higher satisfaction with life as a whole, on the basis of achieving positive changes of those factors which make the highest contribution.

     

Can We Hear Silence?

Philosophia - We can hear silence because silence, an absence of sound, causes our hearing of it. Advocating this position, Roy Sorensen puts to use his own theory of the direct perception of...     

Dysmorphic concern and behavioural impairment related to body image in adolescents

This study examined a moderated mediation model testing whether dysmorphic concern is related to behaviour altered to change appearance. This relationship is potentially mediated by depressive symptomatology (dysphoria and self-esteem) and ideas of reference about “laughing, commenting” and “attention, appearance,” and each mediated relationship moderated by sex. The sample was made up of 3377 adolescents from 12 to 18 years old (M_age = 14.52; SD = 1.65, 56.5% girls). The results showed that dysphoria and ideas of reference about “laughing, commenting” and “attention, appearance” partially mediated the relationship between dysmorphic concern and behavioural impairment related to body image. The relationship with dysphoria was moderated by sex, such that the mediation effect was stronger in girls than in boys. This result implies that girls who are worried about some characteristic of their appearance and show dysphoria are at greater risk of altered behaviour involving avoidance or controlling their appearance than boys. In addition, a possible risk of body dysmorphic disorder (3.45% of the sample) was found, with very prominent hiding behaviour using clothing or control behaviours, such as frequent weighing and looking at oneself in the mirror too much. Implications of these findings are discussed.