Role adjustment as the unit of analysis for researching child development during the transition to school

While child development is well-recognized as a complex process which could hardly be decomposed into separate lines or domains in contemporary psychological theories, the decomposition approach is widely used in empirical studies. Based on the cultural-historical theory, this study argues for adopting the unit of analysis as a way to bridge this gap, and finds “role adjustment” as a suitable unit to analyse child development during the transition to school. The case of a 5-year-old second-generation Chinese Australian child's transition to school (with a total of 34 h of observation and 5 h of interview) is presented to verify its feasibility and to illustrate how it could be achieved in a research practice. The case study demonstrates that a child's role adjustment is in essence a process of transforming his/her role system, during which his/her major roles, the relation of the major roles, as well as his/her role-taking patterns change as a whole, and by tracing a child's role adjustment trajectory, how the child is learning and developing, what difficulties he/she encounter, and why these difficulties appear become clear.     

An Incomplete Relevant Modal Logic

The relevant modal logic G is a simple extension of the logic RT, the relevant counterpart of the familiar classically based system T. Using the Routley–Meyer semantics for relevant modal logics, this paper proves three main results regarding G: (i) G is semantically complete, but only with a non-standard interpretation of necessity. From this, however, other nice properties follow. (ii) With a standard interpretation of necessity, G is semantically incomplete; there is no class of frames that characterizes G. (iii) The class of frames for G characterizes the classically based logic T.     

语义认知的习得、发展和老化及其神经机制

作为语言系统的重要组成部分, 探究语义认知发展机制及其神经机理对揭示人类语言发展、认知机制有着重要意义。以语义认知能力的习得、发展、老化认知机制为主线, 在系统阐释词汇-语义系统的习得、语义认知能力和策略发展的基础上, 进一步探讨了语义认知老化的认知机制及其神经机理。最后, 围绕儿童和成人的语义认知差异、句法和语义认知老化的差异、语义认知老化的影响因素等问题上进行了思考和展望。     

Exploring What Is Encoded in Distributional Word Vectors: A Neurobiologically Motivated Analysis

The pervasive use of distributional semantic models or word embeddings for both cognitive modeling and practical application is because of their remarkable ability to represent the meanings of words. However, relatively little effort has been made to explore what types of information are encoded in distributional word vectors. Knowing the internal knowledge embedded in word vectors is important for cognitive modeling using distributional semantic models. Therefore, in this paper, we attempt to identify the knowledge encoded in word vectors by conducting a computational experiment using Binder et al.'s (2016) featural conceptual representations based on neurobiologically motivated attributes. In an experiment, these conceptual vectors are predicted from text-based word vectors using a neural network and linear transformation, and prediction performance is compared among various types of information. The analysis demonstrates that abstract information is generally predicted more accurately by word vectors than perceptual and spatiotemporal information, and specifically, the prediction accuracy of cognitive and social information is higher. Emotional information is also found to be successfully predicted for abstract words. These results indicate that language can be a major source of knowledge about abstract attributes, and they support the recent view that emphasizes the importance of language for abstract concepts. Furthermore, we show that word vectors can capture some types of perceptual and spatiotemporal information about concrete concepts and some relevant word categories. This suggests that language statistics can encode more perceptual knowledge than often expected.     

Assessing unit-price related remifentanil choice in rhesus monkeys

Given a commodity available at different prices, a unit-price account of choice predicts preference for the cheaper alternative. This experiment determined if rhesus monkeys preferred remifentanil (an ultra-short-acting micro-opioid agonist) delivered at a lower unit price over a higher-priced remifentanil alternative (Phases 1 and 3). Choice between equal-priced alternatives also was assessed (Phase 2). A discrete-trials procedure was arranged in which three monkeys chose between two remifentanil alternatives by responding on one of two levers. Different prices were arranged by manipulating drug dose (0.3 and 0.1 microg/kg/injection) and/or the ratio requirement. Monkeys usually chose the larger-dose alternative even when it was more expensive. Only when unit prices were relatively high (e.g., large response requirements) did monkeys choose the cheaper (or equally priced) smaller-dose alternative. Employing larger doses (0.9 and 0.3 microg/kg/injection) attenuated the larger-dose preference. The results demonstrate that choice was not determined simply by unit price. An alternative model that employs demand-function analysis to generate choice predictions is proposed.     

Meaning Selection and the Subcortex: Evidence of Reduced Lexical Ambiguity Repetition Effects Following Subcortical Lesions

Recent research indicates that individuals with nonthalamic subcortical (NS) lesions can experience difficulties processing lexical ambiguities in a variety of contexts. This study examined how prior processing of a lexical ambiguity influences subsequent meaning activation in 10 individuals with NS lesions and 10 matched healthy controls. Subjects made speeded lexical decisions on related or unrelated targets following homophone primes. Homophones were repeated with different targets biasing the same or different meanings on the second presentation. The effects of prime-target relatedness, interstimulus interval (200 or 1250 ms), and same vs. different meaning repetition were examined. Both the patient and control groups showed priming when the same homophone meaning was biased on repetition. When a different meaning was biased on the second presentation, no priming was evident in the controls, while facilitation remained present for the NS group, consistent with aberrant meaning selection and deactivation processes. These findings are discussed in terms of age and task-related repetition effects and current conceptions of frontal–subcortical involvement in cognition.David Copland is supported by the Australian Research Council     

Novel metaphors appear anomalous at least momentarily: evidence from N400

This study addresses a central question in perception of novel figurative language: whether it is interpreted intelligently and figuratively immediately, or only after a literal interpretation fails. Eighty sentence frames that could plausibly end with a literal, truly anomalous, or figurative word were created. After validation for meaningfulness and figurativeness, the 240 sentences were presented to 11 subjects for event related potential (ERP) recording. ERP's first 200 ms is believed to reflect the structuring of the input; the prominence of a dip at around 400 ms (N400) is said to relate inversely to how expected a word is. Results showed no difference between anomalous and metaphoric ERPs in the early window, metaphoric and literal ERPs converging 300-500 ms after the ending, and significant N400s only for anomalous endings. A follow-up study showed that the metaphoric endings were less frequent (in standardized word norms) than were the anomalous and literal endings and that there were significant differences in cloze probabilities (determined from 24 new subjects) among the three ending types: literal > metaphoric > anomalous. It is possible that the low frequency of the metaphoric element and lower cloze probability of the anomalous one contributed to the processes reflected in the early window, while the incongruity and near-zero cloze probability of the anomalous endings produced an N400 effect in them alone. The structure or parse derived for metaphor during the early window appears to yield a preliminary interpretation suggesting anomaly, while semantic analysis reflected in the later window renders a plausible figurative interpretation.     

Loose but normal: a semantic association study

An abnormal facilitation of the spreading activation within semantic networks is thought to under-lie schizophrenics' remote associations and referential ideas. In normal subjects, elevated magical ideation (MI) has also been associated with a style of thinking similar to that of schizotypal subjects. We thus wondered whether normal subjects with a higher MI score would judge "loose associations" as being more closely related than do subjects with a lower MI score. In two experiments, we investigated whether judgments of the semantic distance between stimulus words varied as a function of MI. In the first experiment, random word pairs of two word classes, animals and fruits, were presented. Subjects had to judge the semantic distance between word pairs. In the second experiment, sets of three words were presented, consisting of a pair of indirectly related, or unrelated nouns plus a third noun. Subjects had to judge the semantic distance of the third noun to the word pair The results of both experiments showed that higher MI subjects considered unrelated words as more closely associated than did lower MI subjects. We conjecture that for normal subjects high on MI "loose associations" may not be loose after all. We also note that the tendency to link uncommon, nonobvious, percepts may not only be the basis of paranormal and paranoid ideas of reference, but also a prerequisite of creative thinking.     

左前额叶参与非相关词对的语义编码过程──来自光学成像的佐证

通过研究左前额叶在非相关同对的语义编码过程中的作用,探讨近红外光学成像技术用于脑高级认知活动检测的可行性。被试在两种实验条件下分别学习视觉呈现的20个汉字非相关词对,要求被试或将词对组成一个有意义的句子(深加工),或判断两个词是否具有相同的结构组合(浅加工)。光学成像器即时记录连续光透过额骨及前额皮层后760nm和850nm的漫射光强变化,以此推测相应脑组织的血容量变化。结果表明,与浅加工相比,左下前额叶在深加工时的血容量增多,尤其是背外侧部分。