AN ECOBEHAVIORAL EXAMINATION OF A SIMPLE STRATEGY FOR INCREASING MEALTIME LANGUAGE IN RESIDENTIAL FACILITIES

Typically in large residential facilities for retarded persons, meals are served in an institutional style that does not appear to encourage appropriate peer interactions. An ecological program alternative is serving meals in a family style. The present study was designed to examine both the feasibility of serving family style meals and the effects of family style meal service on mealtime language. Five retarded young adult male residents, who had some conversational skills and appropriate table manners, participated in this study. The experimental design involved a multiple baseline analysis across meals (dinner, lunch, and breakfast). Observers coded the youths' mealtime verbalizations according to the type, content, and direction of the verbalizations and they recorded the length of the meals. The analysis of the verbalization data indicated that during family style meals the participants spoke substantially more often than during institutional style meals. Increases in peer-directed conversation about the meals primarily accounted for the verbalization changes. Family style serving also resulted in the youths spending more time with their meals. In addition, social validation measures suggested that the family style procedures were preferred by the consumers (participants, staff, and concerned community members).     

The development of derived stimulus relations through training in arbitrary-matching sequences

Five-year-old children were taught three-stage sequences of arbitrary matching: A-C, B-C, A-D; A-C, B-D, B-C; or A-C, A-D, B-C. Each stage refers to a sample-comparison relation between stimuli. Unreinforced test probes revealed untrained arbitrary matches (B-D, A-D, and B-D, respectively), derivable by substitution of stimuli with a common sample or comparison function. Additional probes revealed further untrained sample-comparison relations derivable by substitution and identity, including the commuted relations D-B, D-A, and D-B, respectively. These processes may have relevance to conceptual and verbal behavior.     

GOD'S ACTION IN THE REAL WORLD1

Abstract. The scientific and theological enterprises are regarded as interacting and mutually illuminating approaches to reality. The theological consequences of the transformation of the scientific worldview through twentieth-century physics and cosmology are considered with respect to notions of God's transcendence, time, continuous creation, determinism, and multiple universes. The theological implications of the worldview of biology are similarly assessed with respect to certain features of biological evolution: its continuity, its open-endedness, its mechanism, and the role of "chance" and law. The model of human agency for the agency of God in the hierarchy of natural systems is examined. The article concludes with some reflections on a science-informed understanding of God's relation to the world as transcendent, incarnate, and immanent.     

THE COMMUNITY VIEW REVISITED

Abstract: Joining a vast Wittgensteinian anti‐theoretical movement, John Canfield has argued that it is possible to read the claims that (1) “language is essentially communal” and (2) “it is conceptually possible that a Crusoe isolated from birth should speak or follow rules” in such a way that they are perfectly compatible, and, indeed, that Wittgenstein held them both at once. The key to doing this is to drain them of any theoretical content or implications that would put each claim at odds with the other. I argue here, first of all, that it is not possible to detheorize both (1) and (2) and still hope to say anything illuminating about the nature of language. In fact, Canfield himself does not succeed in detheorizing both (1) and (2) but ends up trivializing (1) and leaving (2) with quite a bit of theoretical content. I further argue, however, that this is getting the matter the wrong way around. Contra Canfield et al., it is only when we recognize this that we can appreciate how radical and innovative Wittgenstein's claims about language really are.     

A CULTURAL EVOLUTIONARY APPROACH TO MODERNITY: WHAT MIGHT IT MEAN FOR CHRISTIAN FAITH?

This essay introduces, for theological consideration, some recent work in the field of cultural evolutionary theory, specifically the kin-influence hypothesis. This theory holds that, following the beginnings of industrialization and economic growth, a nation's fertility rate commences a decline, which is further abetted by the consequent and increasing imbalance in the relative influence of kin versus nonkin influences on individuals in favor of the latter. It is further proposed that this process is itself a major independent factor in the emergence of many of the features of what is called modernity, among which is that of secularization. Extending further this work, I argue that, given the historic alignment of family and religious values in Christian nations, a loss of religious belief and practice is, at least in part, the spill over effect of the opposing influence of values emerging from ever more dominant nonfamily social interaction. I conclude with some reflections on possible theological implications.     

Synapses,Schizophrenia, and Civilization: What Made Homo Sapient?

Progress in technology has allowed dynamic research on the development of the human brain that has revolutionized concepts. Particularly, the notions of plasticity, neuronal selection, and the effects of afferent stimuli have entered into thinking about brain development. Here I focus on development from the age of four years to early adulthood, during which a 30 percent reduction in some brain synapses occurs that is out of proportion to changes in neuronal numbers. This corresponds temporally with changes in normal child behavior from the loose‐associative, almost schizoid, thinking and art of the four‐year‐old to the more trained, or disciplined, or acculturated—and restrained—personality of the young adult. I propose that the synaptic changes can best be thought of as a winnowing process likely subject to environmental influences. Acquisition of language and the ability to link linguistic cognition to the plastic development of the brain provide a potentially powerful means of explaining the evolutionally explosive development of human cognition and culture. Schizophrenia, a disease that can be envisioned as representing a derangement of synaptic maturation, may provide an entry into the search for genes controlling the processes mediating the unprecedented development of Homo sapiens over the past 40,000 to 70,000 years. The recently completed mapping of the genome of the chimpanzee provides a new frame of reference that may speed the search.     

Infants’ vocalizations at 6 months predict their productive vocabulary at one year

Long before their first words, children communicate by using speech-like vocalizations. These protophones might be indicative of infants’ later language development. We here examined infants’ (n = 56) early vocalizations at 6 months (vocal reactivity scale of the IBQ-R) as a predictor of their expressive and receptive language at 12 months (German version of the CDI). Regression analyses revealed vocalizations to significantly predict expressive, but not receptive language. Our findings in German-learning 6-month-olds extend previous predictive evidence of early vocalizations reported for older infants. Together these findings are informative in light of early assessments monitoring typical and atypical language development.     

Socially Situated Transmission: The Bias to Transmit Negative Information is Moderated by the Social Context

Cultural evolutionary theory has identified a range of cognitive biases that guide human social learning. Naturalistic and experimental studies indicate transmission biases favoring negative and positive information. To address these conflicting findings, the present study takes a socially situated view of information transmission, which predicts that bias expression will depend on the social context. We report a large-scale experiment (N = 425) that manipulated the social context and examined its effect on the transmission of the positive and negative information contained in a narrative text. In each social context, information was progressively lost as it was transmitted from person to person, but negative information survived better than positive information, supporting a negative transmission bias. Importantly, the negative transmission bias was moderated by the social context: Higher social connectivity weakened the bias to transmit negative information, supporting a socially situated account of information transmission. Our findings indicate that our evolved cognitive preferences can be moderated by our social goals.     

Bridging ears and eyes when learning spoken words: On the effects of bilingual experience at 30 months

From the very first moments of their lives, infants selectively attend to the visible orofacial movements of their social partners and apply their exquisite speech perception skills to the service of lexical learning. Here we explore how early bilingual experience modulates children's ability to use visible speech as they form new lexical representations. Using a cross‐modal word‐learning task, bilingual children aged 30 months were tested on their ability to learn new lexical mappings in either the auditory or the visual modality. Lexical recognition was assessed either in the same modality as the one used at learning (‘same modality’ condition: auditory test after auditory learning, visual test after visual learning) or in the other modality (‘cross‐modality’ condition: visual test after auditory learning, auditory test after visual learning). The results revealed that like their monolingual peers, bilingual children successfully learn new words in either the auditory or the visual modality and show cross‐modal recognition of words following auditory learning. Interestingly, as opposed to monolinguals, they also demonstrate cross‐modal recognition of words upon visual learning. Collectively, these findings indicate a bilingual edge in visual word learning, expressed in the capacity to form a recoverable cross‐modal representation of visually learned words.