The power of the written word: Comparing word meaning inferencing from auditory and written modalities throughout grade school

Previous research indicates that word learning from auditory contexts may be more effective than written context at least through fourth grade. However, no study has examined contextual differences in word learning in older school-aged children when reading abilities are more developed. Here we examined developmental differences in children’s ability to deduce the meanings of unknown words from the surrounding linguistic context in the auditory and written modalities and sought to identify the most important predictors of success in each modality. A total of 89 children aged 8–15 years were randomly assigned to either read or listen to a narrative that included eight novel words, with five exposures to each novel word. They then completed three posttests to assess word meaning inferencing. Children across all ages performed better in the written modality. Vocabulary was the only significant predictor of success on the word inferencing task. Results indicate support for written stimuli as the most effective modality for novel word meaning deduction. Our findings suggest that the presence of orthographic information facilitates novel word learning even for early, less proficient readers.     

Evolution of word meanings through metaphorical mapping: Systematicity over the past millennium

One way that languages are able to communicate a potentially infinite set of ideas through a finite lexicon is by compressing emerging meanings into words, such that over time, individual words come to express multiple, related senses of meaning. We propose that overarching communicative and cognitive pressures have created systematic directionality in how new metaphorical senses have developed from existing word senses over the history of English. Given a large set of pairs of semantic domains, we used computational models to test which domains have been more commonly the starting points (source domains) and which the ending points (target domains) of metaphorical mappings over the past millennium. We found that a compact set of variables, including externality, embodiment, and valence, explain directionality in the majority of about 5000 metaphorical mappings recorded over the past 1100 years. These results provide the first large-scale historical evidence that metaphorical mapping is systematic, and driven by measurable communicative and cognitive principles.     

不同适应水平小学生情绪体验评价比较--关于小学生自我调节机制的一项研究

本研究选取发展良好与适应不良的三－－五年级小学生为被试，用问卷形式向他们呈现各种情景，要求被试评价自己对情景的情绪体验。通过比较分析两组被试的情绪评价得分，揭示被试的主观意义特征。被试的反应显示，两组被试之间存在着内部强化机制差异和交往价值取向差异，适应不良学生表现出对负性意义敏感和表达的淡化。     

Language knowledge and event knowledge in language use

This paper examines how semantic knowledge is used in language comprehension and in making judgments about events in the world. We contrast knowledge gleaned from prior language experience (“language knowledge”) and knowledge coming from prior experience with the world (“world knowledge”). In two corpus analyses, we show that previous research linking verb aspect and event representations have confounded language and world knowledge. Then, using carefully chosen stimuli that remove this confound, we performed four experiments that manipulated the degree to which language knowledge or world knowledge should be salient and relevant to performing a task, finding in each case that participants use the type of knowledge most appropriate to the task. These results provide evidence for a highly context-sensitive and interactionist perspective on how semantic knowledge is represented and used during language processing.     

Introduction What aptitudes,values, and behaviors for an already present future?

Abstract

Evolution, in particular demographic growth, and progress in the world of science and technology, has led to deep‐seated transformations on economic, social and political levels. How are we to teach the young to build the 21st century in the most suitable way? What are the values, what are the aptitudes and behaviors which will enable them to flourish as actors on the stage of a changing, complex and uncertain world?     

The problem with descriptive correctness

In the 1980s and early 1990s, the normativity of meaning was thought to be more-or-less ‘incontestable.’ But in the last 25 years, many philosophers of mind and language have contested it in several seemingly different ways. This, however, is somewhat illusory. There is an unappreciated commonality among most anti-normativist arguments, and this commonality, I argue, poses a problem for anti-normativism. The result, however, is not a wholesale rejection of anti-normativism. Rather, an insight from the anti-normativist position can be harnessed to reveal an unappreciated position in the normativity of meaning debate.     

Participants and researchers searching for meaning: Conceptual developments for interpretative phenomenological analysis

ABSTRACT

In this article I offer a theoretical account of interpretative phenomenological analysis’s (IPA’s) position in relation to meaning-making by participant and researcher. In doing this, I draw on a range of theoretical writing on meaning. I then apply these ideas to a series of empirical studies on pain which I have been involved in. The intention, therefore, is for the article to contribute a theoretically informed and empirically grounded extension to the literature on IPA.     

Search for meaning and responsibility

It is essential to restore the sense of action, if efficiency is not to become an end in itself, leading to selfish behavior and exclusion.

In parallel the notion of responsibility must be taken into account in training, in particular intergenerational responsibility, through the promotion of those links which bind us to the world.     

BIOLOGY: WHAT ONE NEEDS TO KNOW

Abstract. Biology on this planet represents an astonishing experiment in carbon-based chemistry which, over billions of years, has generated billions of species adapted to countless major and minor fluctuations in ecological circumstances. In one sense there is no way to generalize about biology. While biological activities can all be ultimately explained by physical laws (like everything else in the universe), it is the emergent intensely particular properties of organisms that most interest us. This essay represents an attempt to describe some of the more prominent patterns that emerge from the sea of biological particularities, patterns that present many opportunities for religous reflection.