自闭症幼儿的情感认知特点的实验研究

本实验采用3(组别)×4(基本情绪)×3(实验材料)×2(实验条件)的混合设计的方法对平均心理年龄24个月的6名自闭症幼儿和心理年龄与之相近的6名正常儿童和6名弱智儿童的情感认知特点进行了比较性的研究。实验结果表明:在“语言提示”条件下,自闭症幼儿的正答率远远低于正常儿童和弱智儿童,但在“表情提示”条件下,自闭症幼儿与弱智幼儿几乎没差距,在对“愤怒”和“惊恐”等情绪的认知中,正答率高于弱智幼儿。这意味着自闭症幼儿可能运用了其他的替代策略进行情感认知。     

English for Bible and Theology: Understanding and Communicating Theology Across Cultural and Linguistic Barriers

This article introduces English for Bible and Theology (EBT), an inherently interdisciplinary field that merges English language learning with the content of biblical and theological studies in a context that is, by nature, cross‐cultural. Within this collaboration there exists the possibility not only to enable theological study, but also to enhance it through a focus on personal meaning and its communication, both of which are foundational to the communicative language classroom. That is, EBT seeks both to aid students worldwide in attaining the specialized language and cultural proficiency necessary to access English theological resources and to provide a community in which students can connect theological content to their lives. It is this second aim that provides EBT its relevance across a range of theological contexts, as native English‐speaking students likewise stand to benefit from the application of EBT's principles.     

Sincerely Asserting What You Do Not Believe

I offer examples showing that, pace G. E. Moore, it is possible to assert ‘Q and I don't believe that Q’ sincerely, truly, and without any absurdity. The examples also refute the following principles: (a) justification to assert p entails justification to assert that one believes p (Gareth Evans); (b) the sincerity condition on assertion is that one believes what one says (John Searle); and (c) to assert (to someone) something that one believes to be false is to lie (Don Fallis).     

On the Emotions

Art historians and philosophers often talk about the interpretive significance of titles, but few have bothered with their historical origins. This omission has led to the assumption that an artwork's title is its proper name, since names and titles share the essential function of facilitating reference to their bearers. But a closer look at the development of our titling practices shows a significant point of divergence from standard analyses of proper names: the semantic content of a title is often crucial to the identification, individuation, and interpretation of its associated artwork. This paper represents a first step towards an empirically centred study of our titling practices. I argue that, in order to accept titles as proper names, we must first recognize the social, rather than the referential, function of naming.     

Temporal and spatial concepts in child language: conventional and configurational

The purpose of this research was to study the temporal and spatial systems of child language. Configurational time/space refers to the location of events/objects relative to referent events/objects (e.g., before/after or across/along) and conventional time/space refers to the specification of cycles/directions and the measurement of duration/distance (e.g., winter/fall or North/South). The research was designed to determine how configurational and conventional notions of time and space emerge in the child's language. The average age of the children in the cross-sectional design was: 3;9, 6;7, and 8;7. The children received a comprehension test that required them to match a sentence with a picture. In general, configurational contrasts were easier to comprehend than conventional contrasts, and, within the configurational problems, location requiring a single referent was easier than location requiring multiple referents. There was no overall difference between temporal and spatial dimensions. The role of conceptual development was discussed within the context of a comparison between first and second language acquisition.     

Communicative development in Swedish children 16-28 months old: the Swedish early communicative development inventory--words and sentences

To describe the development of words and sentences in Swedish children 16-28 months old, 900 parental reports on 336 children were analyzed. Subjects were randomly selected from the national birth register, and there was a response rate of 88%. The assessments were made using the Swedish Early Communicative Development Inventory--words and sentences (SECDI--w&s). Age-based norms for productive vocabulary, pragmatic skills, grammar skills, and maximum length of utterance (MaxLU) were determined. We describe the development of feedback morphemes, semantic categories, and single words and tasks. Correlation across measures was significant, and especially strong between vocabulary size and grammar skills. Optimized positive predictive values were high for 25 to 28 month predictions (71%-88%), and vocabulary scores were found to be of particular predictive importance. No significant gender differences were detected. The clinical relevance of the instrument is discussed.     

Temporal landmarks: proximity prevails

Subjects in conditioning experiments time their conditioned responses relative to the onsets of the conditioned stimuli (CSs). These onsets are temporal landmarks, by reference to which subjects may estimate the location of the unconditioned stimulus (US) in time. In a serial compound conditioning paradigm, a long duration CS comes on first, followed later by a second shorter CS, creating both a long-range and a short-range predictor of the US. We ask whether displacing the short-range predictor relative to the long-range predictor causes subjects to strike a compromise between the different temporal locations predicted by the two CSs. In three experiments with pigeons, we varied the training conditions so as to favor or militate against this outcome. However, in all conditions, there was no compromise; after the onset of the displaced short-range CS, the timing of conditioned responding was governed by it alone. This result contrasts with the compromises that are seen when the feeding time predicted by a CS is put in conflict with the time predicted by the circadian clock, and with the similar compromises sometimes seen when a nearby spatial landmark is displaced relative to a larger spatial context. Electronic Publication     

Studying the grammatical aspects of word recognition: lexical priming,parsing, and syntactic ambiguity resolution

Two experiments are reported examining the relationship between lexical and syntactic processing during language comprehension, combining techniques common to the on-line study of syntactic ambiguity resolution with priming techniques common to the study of lexical processing. By manipulating grammatical properties of lexical primes, we explore how lexically based knowledge is activated and guides combinatory sentence processing. Particularly, we find that nouns (like verbs, see Trueswell & Kim, 1998) can activate detailed lexically specific syntactic information and that these representations guide the resolution of relevant syntactic ambiguities pertaining to verb argument structure. These findings suggest that certain principles of knowledge representation common to theories of lexical knowledge—such as overlapping and distributed representations—also characterize grammatical knowledge. Additionally, observations from an auditory comprehension study suggest similar conclusions about the lexical nature of parsing in spoken language comprehension. They also suggest that thematic role and syntactic preferences are activated during word recognition and that both influence combinatory processing.     

The Acquisition of Temporal Reference Cross-Linguistically Using Two Acting-Out Comprehension Tasks

The acquisition of temporal event referencing, encoded by the temporal connectives: then, before, after, when, while, together, until, and since in English, Thai and Lisu was investigated using two acting-out comprehension tasks, a Marble task and a Toy task. Forty children aged 3.6-7.6 years from each language participated. The Marble and Toy tasks differed in their cognitive complexity: in the Marble task the child had to act out only one clause, whereas in the Toy task the child had to act out both clauses. This task manipulation affected performance in Lisu children only. Language-general effects were found, namely "then" and "together" were relatively early and "since" was relatively late in acquisition. Language-specific effects were found for Thai and Lisu. Results confirm that characteristics of task and test sentences affect children's comprehension of sentences expressing temporal relations and can partially account for the disparity in acquisition order found in previous studies.