The messianic temporality of theatre in I. L. Peretz’s At Night in the Old Marketplace

Theatre, as an art form that unfolds through time and moulds temporal experience, engages with its surrounding culture’s temporal imagination, the ways in which society conceives time, its movement, structures, and meaning. I. L. Peretz’s enigmatic and avant-garde Yiddish drama, At Night in the Old Marketplace, utilizes this potential of the theatre to tackle the question of messianic time and the ways in which it can be realized on the stage. By evoking Jewish traditions regarding the Messiah, religious nocturnal rituals, and the dynamics of Carnival, Peretz reconfigures messianic time as a radical, recurring yet fleeting, temporal experience. Theatrical temporality has affinities with messianic time because both are transitory and charged, condensed and ephemeral, and disjointed from the experience of time in everyday life. Rather than imagining messianic time as an eternal future to be awaited, Peretz’s play invites us to ponder in the theatre about the possibility of a messianically charged, albeit always fleeting, present.     

第二语言学习与脑可塑性

脑可塑性指人脑会因为环境刺激、认知需求和行为经验而产生功能或结构改变。近10年来的单双语者对比和语言训练研究结果表明, 不论儿童、青年或老年人, 第二语言学习和使用都能改变其脑运行模式并带来相应结构变化, 包括灰质(GM)体积和白质(WM)密度增加, 且长期持续的双语经验还能形成认知优势, 帮助抵制由老化导致的负面认知影响。基于脑可塑性概念及其研究证据, 从双语经验与语言训练两方面, 对比分析了长期和短期第二语言学习引起脑功能或结构变化及其内在机制, 并对未来相关研究进行了展望。     

Relationship between eight physiological variables and severity of stuttering

The results of this study illustrated the primacy of individual differences in the relationship between physiological responses before speech and stuttering severity.     

Processing the intensity of dichotic syllables

Subjects were required to match the intensity levels of the left- and right-ear members of dichotically presented nonsense syllables. When subjects matched the overall average intensities of a sequence of differing dichotic pairs no ear differences were observed. When repetitions of single dichotic pairs were matched right-ear syllables were judged louder than left-ear syllables. The results support a model predicting left-hemisphere superiority in a task permitting higher-level encoding of speech input.     

How translations of Freud’s writings have influenced French psychoanalytic thinking1

Translations of Freud ’s writings have had a lasting influence on psychoanalytic thinking in France. They have, all the same, given rise to some conceptual distortions as regards the ego and the id, the ideal ego and the ego ideal, and splitting. Lacan’s ‘return to Freud ’ certainly reawakened interest in Freud ’s writings; however, by focusing mainly on Freud ’s early work, Lacan’s personal reading played down the importance of the texts Freud wrote after his metapsychological papers of 1915. The fact that there is no French edition of Freud ’s complete works makes it difficult for French psychoanalysts to put them in a proper context with respect to his developments as a whole. The Oeuvres Complètes [Complete Works] edition may well turn out to be the equivalent of the Standard Edition, but it is as yet far from complete – and, since the vocabulary employed is far removed from everyday language, those volumes already in print tend to make the general public less likely to read Freud. In this paper, the author evokes certain questions that go beyond the French example, such as the impact that translations have within other psychoanalytic contexts. Now that English has become more or less the lingua franca for communication between psychoanalysts, we have to face up to new challenges if we are to avoid a twofold risk: that of mere standardization, as well as that of a ‘Babelization’ of psychoanalysis.     

Literal meaning and psychological theory

This paper evaluates the psychological status of literal meaning. Most linguistic and philosophical theories assume that sentences have well-specified literal meanings which represent the meaning of a sentence independent of context. Recent debate on this issue has centered on whether literal meaning can be equated with context-free meaning, or whether a sentence's literal meaning is determined only given a set of background assumptions. Neither of these positions meet the demands of a psychological theory of language understanding. Sentences do not have well-defined literal meanings, regardless of whether these are determined in light of a set of background assumptions. Moreover, the putative literal meanings of sentences do not contribute in systematic ways toward the understanding of speakers' utterance meanings. These observations suggest that the distinctions between literal and metaphoric meanings, and between semantics and pragmatics, have little psychological validity.     

Critical processes in serial short-term memory: A developmental study

Two experiments are described which were designed to test the possible involvement of two operations in developmental auditory serial short-term memory (SSTM), namely rehearsal proficiency and item identification. The experiments provided mainly negative support for the notion that these operations are critical in developmental SSTM. As an alternative, the possibility that developmental differences in SSTM might have their origins in the processing of speech sound patterns was discussed.     

Music draws attention to the left and speech draws attention to the right

Providing free-field music input prompts right-handers to attend to their left side in a loudness-matching task that requires no musical analysis. Conversely, speech prompts rightward attention. The processes inferred are akin to the attentional asymmetry demonstrated in the syndrome of hemispatial neglect.