The format of representation of recognized words in infants' early receptive lexicon

Eleven-month-olds can recognize a few auditorily presented familiar words in experimental situations where no hints are given by the intonation, the situation, or the presence of possible visual referents. That is, infants of this age (and possibly somewhat younger) can recognize words based on sound patterns alone. The issue addressed in this article is what is the type of mental representations infants use to code words they recognize. The results of a series of experiments with French-learning infants indicate that word representations in 11-month-olds are segmentally underspecified and suggest that they are all the more underspecified when infants engage in recognizing words rather than merely attending to meaningless speech sounds. But underspecification has limits, which were explored here with respect to word-initial consonants. The last two experiments show the way to investigating further these limits for word-initial consonants as well as for segments in other word positions. In French, infants' word representations are flexible enough to allow for structural changes in the voicing or even in the manner of articulation of word-initial consonants. Word-initial consonants must be present, however, for words to be recognized. In conclusion, a parallel is proposed between the emerging capacities to ignore variations that are irrelevant for word recognition in a “lexical mode” and to ignore variations that are phonemically irrelevant in a “neutral mode” of listening to native speech.     

Relational Turbulence Theory: Explaining Variation in Subjective Experiences and Communication Within Romantic Relationships

This essay extends the relational turbulence model as a framework for understanding communication in romantic relationships. Following the relational turbulence model, relational turbulence theory identifies relational uncertainty and interdependence as parameters that shape subjective experiences, but the theory clarifies the theoretical processes underlying their distinctive effects. In addition, relational turbulence theory articulates causal processes linking cognitive appraisals and emotions to communication. Relational turbulence theory also describes how episodes characterized by biased appraisals, intense emotions, and volatile communication coalesce into global evaluations of relationships as turbulent. In turn, the theory addresses the effect of relational turbulence on personal, relational, and social outcomes. Finally, the theory explains how communication can contribute to the development of both turbulence and resilience in romantic relationships.     

Musings about beauty

In this essay, I explore how cognitive science could illuminate the concept of beauty. Two results from the extensive literature on aesthetics guide my discussion. As the term “beauty” is overextended in general usage, I choose as my starting point the notion of “perfect form.” Aesthetic theorists are in reasonable agreement about the criteria for perfect form. What do these criteria imply for mental representations that are experienced as beautiful? Complexity theory can be used to specify constraints on mental representations abstractly formulated as vectors in a high‐dimensional space. A central feature of the proposed model is that perfect form depends both on features of the objects or events perceived and on the nature of the encoding strategies or model of the observer. A simple example illustrates the proposed calculations. A number of interesting implications that arise as a consequence of reformulating beauty in this way are noted.     

Conceptual and linguistic representations of kinds and classes

We investigate the hypothesis that our conceptual systems provide two formally distinct ways of representing categories by investigating the manner in which lexical nominals (e.g., tree, picnic table) and phrasal nominals (e.g., black bird, birds that like rice) are interpreted. Four experiments found that lexical nominals may be mapped onto kind representations, whereas phrasal nominals map onto class representations but not kind representations. Experiment 1 found that phrasal nominals, unlike lexical nominals, are mapped onto categories whose members need not be of a single kind. Experiments 2 and 3 found that categories named by lexical nominals enter into both class inclusion and kind hierarchies and thus support both class inclusion (is a) and kind specification (kind of) relations, whereas phrasal nominals map onto class representations which support only class inclusion relations. Experiment 4 showed that the two types of nominals represent hierarchical relations in different ways. Phrasal nominals (e.g., white bear) are mapped onto classes that have criteria of membership in addition to those specified by the class picked out by the head noun of the phrase (e.g., bear). In contrast, lexical nominals (e.g., polar bear) specify one way to meet the criteria specified by the more general kind concept (e.g., bear). Implications for the language-conceptual system interface, representation of hierarchical relations, lexicalization, and theories of conceptual combination are discussed.     

Using Social Representations Theory to Examine Lay Explanation of Contemporary Social Crises: The Case of Ireland's Recession

Social actors operate under a basic imperative to construct explanations for the events that surround them. Many issues that dominate the societal agenda today are not available to direct perception, derive from traditionally expert domains and are relatively remote from immediate local experience. This presents a challenge for lay explanation of these issues. Social representations theory offers a useful framework through which the construction of lay explanation for such issues can be examined. The current study recruited this theoretical framework to investigate lay explanations of the recent economic recession in Ireland. Data consisted of semi‐structured interviews with 14 members of the public and a web‐based survey (N = 138). The data suggested that explanations for the recession could be organised into three major themes: Power, Ordinary People and Fatalism. Strictly economic explanations were eschewed; instead, people drew upon a wide range of ideas about society, politics, morality, public spheres and personhood. The implications of these findings for understanding lay explanation of contemporary social crises are discussed. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Ce que la crise sanitaire révèle du rapport à l’espace : le cas de la fermeture de la frontière franco-allemande en Alsace

IntroductionThe COVID-19 crisis of 2020 has led authorities to re-establish measures at the French-German border. The media refer to a “closure” of the border. This constitutes a rapid and brutal event in terms of the cross-border practices and mobility of local inhabitants.ObjectiveBy considering the closure period as a socio-spatial crisis, we question, first, the thematic structure of media discourse during the period of border closure, and second, the psychological continuity of the crisis discourse, by comparing it with pre-crisis interviews.MethodA thematic analysis of the discourse is done on a corpus of 407 local press articles, and on 12 semi-structured interviews with young, local inhabitants.ResultsThe analysis identified five themes which support the discursive media structure, and which organize and enable the debate. The international comparison and the use of historical and memorial content in the discourse enable actors to take a position on the border closure. The analysis of the links with the interviews shows that the relationship to the border during the crisis is structured on representational dimensions already present in the pre-crisis discourse of the inhabitants.ConclusionResults show a psychological continuity in pre- and post-crisis discourse: the media discourse reveals preexisting representations of the border, which act as generators of opinions on its closure. Additionally, we discuss the results by focusing on the place of identity-based feelings in the representational relationship to the border: this phenomenon is analysed here on a group and positional level.     

Pliers,not fingers: Tool-action effect in a motor intention paradigm

Tool-use representations have been suggested to be supported by the representation of hand actions and/or by the representation of tool actions. A major issue is to know which one of these two representations is preferentially activated when people intend to use a tool. To address this issue, we developed a paradigm in which, in 20% of trials, participants had to press a button and actually use pliers to move an object in response to a predefined target symbol. Importantly, two masks hiding the symbols performed “opening” or “closing” actions before symbols appeared. In Experiment 1, participants used normal pliers: Hand’s opening actions induced pliers’ opening actions and vice versa for hands’ closing actions. Results indicated a compatibility effect between masks’ actions and pliers’ actions. Participants were faster to press the button in response to the target symbol when opening and closing actions of the masks were congruent with the corresponding actions of the hand. In Experiment 2 participants used inverse pliers: Hand’s opening actions involved pliers’ closing actions and vice versa. In this situation, results showed that the congruency of masks’ actions occurred with pliers’ actions and not hand’s actions. Altogether, these findings demonstrate that intention of use is preferentially based on the representation of tool actions, and have important implications for the domain of neuropsychology of tool use and the theories of goal-directed behavior.     

Stability of young children's attachment representations: Influence of children's and caregiver's characteristics

This research explores the stability of attachment representations, assessed by the Attachment Story Completion Task, within early childhood. Hypotheses were also formed about the influence of parenting, externalizing behavior and intelligence quotient (IQ) on the developmental course of children's attachment representations. Data were collected from 358 French-speaking Belgian children. Security and disorganization showed a linear improvement with age. The effect of time on the two growth curves was influenced by the child's externalizing behavior. When language abilities were controlled for in a subsample of referred children for externalizing behavior, the growth in security was found to be influenced by reasoning IQ, but the effects for disorganization were unchanged. The implications of the results for both research and clinical purposes are discussed.     

Anticipating action effects recruits audiovisual movement representations in the ventral premotor cortex

When table tennis players anticipate the course of the ball while preparing their motor responses, they not only observe their opponents striking the ball but also listen to events such as the sound of racket–ball contact. Because visual stimuli can be detected more easily when accompanied by a sound, we assumed that complementary sensory audiovisual information would influence the anticipation of biological motion, especially when the racket–ball contact is not presented visually, but has to be inferred from continuous movement kinematics and an abrupt sound. Twenty-six observers were examined with fMRI while watching point-light displays (PLDs) of an opposing table tennis player. Their task was to anticipate the resultant ball flight. The sound was presented complementary to the veracious event or at a deviant time point in its kinematics.Results showed that participants performed best in the complementary condition. Using a region-of-interest approach, fMRI data showed that complementary audiovisual stimulation elicited higher activation in the left temporo-occipital middle temporal gyrus (MTGto), the left primary motor cortex, and the right anterior intraparietal sulcus (aIPS). Both hemispheres also revealed higher activation in the ventral premotor cortex (vPMC) and the pars opercularis of the inferior frontal gyrus (BA 44). Ranking the behavioral effect of complementary versus conflicting audiovisual information over participants revealed an association between the complementary information and higher activation in the right vPMC. We conclude that the recruitment of movement representations in the auditory and visual modalities in the vPMC can be influenced by task-relevant cross-modal audiovisual interaction.