Grading the ‘cultural literacy’ project

The essay examines the argument advanced by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., for instituting ‘cultural literacy’ as a fundamental priority of schools. A number of confusions and equivocations in Hirsch's reasoning are identified, and the propensity of his project to indoctrinate is exposed. Among the features of Hirsch's argument shown to be troubling are his shifting construal of ‘language’, his inconsistency about the requirements of cultural literacy, and his uncritical relation to traditional images of the American past and present. The upshot is to raise the question why Hirsch's project has elicited wide support and praise.     

Referenzsemantik in der Partnermodellierung

How can we explain that an assertion on something perceived can be understood in the same manner by somebody who cannot perceive that scene? This problem bases the interest in computational linguistics in how listener modeling could possibly be harmonized with reference semantics. Mental images substituting real perception appear as a way out. The architecture of the listener model has to be adapted to the creation and use of such pictorial data structures. Furthermore, the relation between the latter and a verbal (i. e., propositional) representation must be understood. The resulting architecture of a listener model with reference semantics can be employed to solve communicational problems from three general classes in a better way, as is demonstrated by an example implementation.     

Long-term repetition priming with symmetrical polygons and words

In two different tasks, subjects were asked to make lexical decisions (word or nonword) and symmetry judgments (symmetrical or nonsymmetrical) about two-dimensional polygons. In both tasks, every stimulus was repeated at one of four lags (0, 1, 4, or 8 items interposed between the first and second stimulus presentations). This paradigm, known as repetition priming, revealed comparable short-term priming (Lag 0) and long-term priming (Lags 1, 4, and 8) both for symmetrical polygons and for words. A shorter term component (Lags 0 and 1) of priming was observed for nonwords, and only very short-term priming (Lag 0) was observed for nonsymmetrical polygons. These results indicate that response facilitation accruing from repeated exposure can be observed for stimuli that have no preexisting memory representations and suggest that perceptual factors contribute to repetition-priming effects.     

Rules, risk and self-disclosure

The notions of rules and risk are inextricably involved with self-disclosure in counselling and in personal relationships. A hundred single British male under-graduates were asked to rate 120 self-referent items in terms of whether, if that item were true of them, they would like or dislike that aspect of themselves; and then to assess the degree of risk that might be entailed in disclosing it to a close male friend, a close female friend, a male acquaintance, and a female acquaintance. The characteristics most positively valued included happiness, health, heterosexuality, agood' job, and getting on well with others (including parents). In general, subjects anticipated greater risk in disclosing negative than positive characteristics, though there were some exceptions. The degree of friendship with the recipient of the disclosure appeared to lessen the anticipated risk of disclosure, while the sex of the disclosee generally made only a marginal difference. The findings are discussed in terms both of students' self-esteem and also of their relevance to counselling. Additionally, the social exchange implications of positive and negative self-disclosure are considered.