Delegitimisation of Disliked Political Organisations Through Biased Language and Acronyming

The study investigated the use of biased language and acronyming in political organisations in South Africa and Zimbabwe. The study surveyed the discourses of political parties that were posted on the internet. Thematic content analysis was used to analyse the discourses of the political parties. The results indicated that political organisations used biased language to delegitimise the opposition. The ingroup and outgroup stereotypes were evident in the discourses. Acronyms of opposition political parties were used pejoratively. The findings of this study suggest that political parties in developing democracies have a tendency of using biased language and acronyming to disparage the opposition. Biased language and acronyming of the outgroup in African politics could result in hate speech directed at individuals and political violence.     

Sexual languages/cultural bodies: Transforming psychoanalysis

Abstract

This paper explores what transformation is necessary for a psychoanalytic practice that is sensitive to the languages of lesbian, gay and bisexual identities in their cultural and historical specificity. It draws on phenomenological texts, in particular Merleau-Ponty, the writing of the psychoanalyst Franz Fanon and also of the feminist theorist and novelist, Audre Lorde. It argues for a practice that challenges the dominant language of psychoanalysis with its dualisms of inner/outer, conscious/unconscious, mind/body, and universal notions of drives and mechanisms. The clinical example of the work of women in a therapy workshop entitled ‘Am I a Lesbian?’ highlights the critical importance of the specificity of language, whether verbal, visual or gestural, and its relation to embodiment in psychotherapy.     

Blessed fetishism: Language ideology and embodied worship among Pentecostals in Java

A prominent trend of late Christianity has been a cultivation of ‘unmediated’ inspiration realised in embodied worship, notably glossolalia, ecstasy and verbal exuberance. Speaking unfathomable language and embracing spontaneous feelings, Pentecostals in Java have relied on and reworked local language ideologies by passionately employing both the babbling and yelling forms of code-switching in Indonesian, English, Hebrew and glossolalia, in an aspiration to achieve ‘true worshiper-hood’. A closer scrutiny of some elements of this embodied worship against the larger religiously heterogeneous context, furthermore, reveals the salient impacts of cross-religious relations on the process of shaping Pentecostal Christianity. This article argues that specific forms of Pentecostal worship can be better understood when situated in Muslim–Christian relations. Specifically, they speak to a thriving form of religious fetishism that is locally primed for a distinct voice out of the flourishing movements of Islamic resurgence.     

Fetal Testosterone,Socio‐Emotional Engagement and Language Development

The present study investigated the relations among fetal testosterone, child socio‐emotional engagement and language development in a sample of 467 children (235 boys) from the Western Australian Pregnancy Cohort (Raine) Study. Bioavailable testosterone concentration measured in umbilical cord blood taken at birth was found to be significantly negatively correlated with socio‐emotional engagement and vocabulary development for boys but not for girls. Socio‐emotional engagement mediated the effect of boys' fetal testosterone levels on their vocabulary development. However, the size of the effects was small, and fetal testosterone and socio‐emotional engagement were no longer significant predictors of boys' vocabulary scores after accounting for the effects of other predictors including maternal age and education, parity, and parent–child book reading. It is concluded that further research into these associations is warranted in both typical and atypical development and that this research would profit from including a broader focus on the role that proximal processes such as socio‐emotional engagement, joint attention and imitation have in mediating the developmental effects of prenatal factors such as fetal testosterone exposure. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Short article one's own face is hard to ignore

One's own face possesses two properties that make it prone to grab attention: It is a face, and, in addition, it is a self-referential stimulus. The question of whether the self-face is actually an especially attention-grabbing stimulus was addressed by using a face–name interference paradigm. We investigated whether interference from a flanking self-face on the processing of a target classmate's name was stronger than interference from a classmate's flanking face on the processing of one's own name as the target. In a control condition a third familiar face served as the flanker for both decisions from the participant's own name and from the classmate's name. The presentation of the self-face as a flanker produced significantly more interference on the identification of a classmate's name than the presentation of that classmate's face did on the identification of one's own name. This result was due to the interfering power of the self-face and not to a particular resistance of one's name to interfering facial stimuli. We argue that the emotional value or the high familiarity of one's own face may explain its attention-grabbing property.     

Segmentation by lexical subtraction in Hungarian speakers of second-language English

Using cross-modal form priming, we compared the use of stress and lexicality in the segmentation of spoken English by native English speakers (L1) and by native Hungarian speakers of second-language English (L2). For both language groups, lexicality was found to be an effective segmentation cue. That is, spoken disyllabic word fragments were stronger primes in a subsequent visual word recognition task when preceded by meaningful words than when preceded by nonwords: For example, the first two syllables of corridor were a more effective prime for visually presented corridor when heard in the phrase anythingcorri than in imoshingcorri. The stress pattern of the prime (strong–weak vs. weak–strong) did not affect the degree of priming. For L1 speakers, this supports previous findings about the preferential use of high-level segmentation strategies in clear speech. For L2 speakers, the lexical strategy was employed regardless of L2 proficiency level and instead of exploiting the consistent stress pattern of their native language. This is clear evidence for the primacy and robustness of segmentation by lexical subtraction even in individuals whose lexical knowledge is limited.     

The development of Japanese passive syntax as indexed by structural priming in comprehension

A number of previous studies reported a phenomenon of syntactic priming with young children as evidence for cognitive representations required for processing syntactic structures. However, it remains unclear how syntactic priming reflects children's grammatical competence. The current study investigated structural priming of the Japanese passive structure with 5- and 6-year-old children in a visual-world setting. Our results showed a priming effect as anticipatory eye movements to an upcoming referent in these children but the effect was significantly stronger in magnitude in 6-year-olds than in 5-year-olds. Consistently, the responses to comprehension questions revealed that 6-year-olds produced a greater number of correct answers and more answers using the passive structure than 5-year-olds. We also tested adult participants who showed even stronger priming than the children. The results together revealed that language users with the greater linguistic competence with the passives exhibited stronger priming, demonstrating a tight relationship between the effect of priming and the development of grammatical competence. Furthermore, we found that the magnitude of the priming effect decreased over time. We interpret these results in the light of an error-based learning account. Our results also provided evidence for prehead as well as head-independent priming.     

Morphological learning in a novel language: A cross-language comparison

Being able to extract and interpret the internal structure of complex word forms such as the English word dance+r+s is crucial for successful language learning. We examined whether the ability to extract morphological information during word learning is affected by the morphological features of one's native tongue. Spanish and Finnish adult participants performed a word–picture associative learning task in an artificial language where the target words included a suffix marking the gender of the corresponding animate object. The short exposure phase was followed by a word recognition task and a generalization task for the suffix. The participants' native tongues vary greatly in terms of morphological structure, leading to two opposing hypotheses. On the one hand, Spanish speakers may be more effective in identifying gender in a novel language because this feature is present in Spanish but not in Finnish. On the other hand, Finnish speakers may have an advantage as the abundance of bound morphemes in their language calls for continuous morphological decomposition. The results support the latter alternative, suggesting that lifelong experience on morphological decomposition provides an advantage in novel morphological learning.     

Advances in experimental psychopatholinguistics: What can we learn from simulation of disorder-like symptoms in human volunteers?

For more than a century, work on patients with acquired or developmental language disorders has informed psycholinguistic models of normal linguistic processing in healthy persons. On the other hand, such models of healthy language processing have been used as blue-prints to gain further insights into the impairments of patients with language pathologies. Against the exemplary background of language production, the first part of this paper reflects this relationship and formulates a desideratum for naturalistic albeit controlled experimental settings. Two recent examples of behavioural and neurofunctional research are presented in which aphasia-like speech symptoms were elicited in healthy control subjects. In the second part, this idea to investigate disorder-like symptoms which are being experimentally induced for the course of the study is further pursued in the field of reading and dyslexia research. Here, it is argued, again on the basis of behavioural and neurofunctional data, that such an approach is advantageous in at least two respects:1. It allows a much more stringent control of experimental factors and confounds than could be potentially achieved in a clinical setting.2. It allows in-extenso piloting of experiments with healthy volunteers before actually recruiting selected (and sometimes rare) patients.It will be concluded that the experimental simulation of disorder-like symptoms in easily accessible healthy volunteers may be a useful approach to understand novel aspects of a language disorder on the basis of a human neurocognitive model of this disorder.