孔子是怎样解释《周易》的

孔子与《易》是有密切关系的,抛开《史记》和帛书的记载不言,仅就《论语》中两条最直接的材料来看确实如此。"加我数年……"当为孔子五十之前所说。五十之前,孔子也曾学《易》,而孔子认为知天命之年尤需学《易》。"不占而已"表明孔子解《易》以德,判定吉凶不需要占筮,而是取决于人的德性。孔子以"生生之德性"解《易》,以"道德必然性"解"天命",通过揭去《周易》的神秘外衣,发掘并发展其天人之学,将隐微难言的性与天道托诸于显著的人道德性,发展出天人合一的德性学说。     

Disruption of writing processes by the semanticity of background speech

Previous studies have noted that writing processes are impaired by task-irrelevant background sound. However, what makes sound distracting to writing processes has remained unaddressed. The experiment reported here investigated whether the semanticity of irrelevant speech contributes to disruption of writing processes beyond the acoustic properties of the sound. The participants wrote stories against a background of normal speech, spectrally-rotated speech (i.e., a meaningless sound with marked acoustic resemblance to speech) or silence. Normal speech impaired quantitative (e.g., number of characters produced) and qualitative/semantic (e.g., uncorrected typing errors, proposition generation) aspects of the written material, in comparison with the other two sound conditions, and it increased the duration of pauses between words. No difference was found between the silent and the rotated-speech condition. These results suggest that writing is susceptible to disruption from the semanticity of speech but not especially susceptible to disruption from the acoustic properties of speech.     

On comprehending idioms: Do children get the picture?

This study examines children's comprehension of idioms. First, third, and fifth grade children (6, 8, and 10 years old) and college adults were read short stories containing contextual information and a key terminal sentence. The contextual information biased either an idiomatic, a literal, or am ambiguous (neutral) interpretation of the terminal sentence. The terminal sentence contained either an idiom (“fix his wagon”) or a changed form (“repair his wagon”) of the idiom. These manipulations were used to determine the role of contextual information and the conventional forms of idioms in idiom comprehension. After each story, the subjects were asked to explain the terminal sentence and to answer a “yes-no” question about the action described in the story. The results showed that idiomatic explanations and interpretations occurred more frequently for the idiom than the changed forms, and that there were strong developmental increases in making idiomatic interpretations of both forms. The results are discussed in terms of two current models of idiom comprehension.     

Measuring rationality independent of social desirability

The development of a test to measure Elli's concept of rationality is described. In the first study discussed, a 58-item test is developed to measure rationality, and the reliability and convergent validity of the test is described. In a second study, the discriminant validity of the test is examined. An attempt is also made to reduce social-desirability content in the test by eliminating items most highly correlated with a Social Desirability Scale. The final 44-item test is found to be high in both reliability and validity. The factor structure of the test is also examined.