Didactic adjustments in fathers' and mothers' speech to their 3-month-old infants

Vocal dialogues of 3-month-old infants with their mothers and fathers were recorded during dyadic interactions in the laboratory. Six-minute speech samples were analyzed for syntacticlexical and temporal-melodic features. Both parents adopted strikingly similar speech registers. Segmentation, reduction in syntactic complexity, repetitiveness, and slow tempo were more marked than reported for parental speech to children above 1 year. However, rather than providing proper linguistic models, parents utilized simplified patterns of expressive melodic contours as the most salient units of speech. This tendency is interpretable as age-specific adjustment to infants' integrative capacities. Structural similarities between maternal and paternal baby talk by far outweighed a few quantitative differences. The intuitive nature of recourse to basic nonverbal properties of vocal communication, together with universality across sex, favors the assumption that baby talk is a part of species-specific didactic support to infant communicative development.     

T. G. Masaryk’s The Spirit of Russia: between Positivism,Axiology and Orientalism

The article discusses Masaryk’s work The Spirit of Russia. In terms of methodology, The Spirit of Russia is based in Positivism, in a faith in progress and a forward-looking orientation of European development. At the same time, however, it also displays certain axiological positions that condemn conservative, monarchist or religious ideas present in Russian thought. Masaryk is critical of Russian spirituality and traditional elements of Orthodox devotion. The Orthodox faith in his view represents an antipode to progress, being non-European in character. Russia itself is presented as split internally into a progressive, European tendency, and a stagnant traditionalist segment. Masaryk’s view of Russia bears some traits of Orientalism, in particular the notion of the superiority of the European West over traditionalist Russia and the negative aspects of its traditional cultural and religious forms. He also anticipates the notion of internal colonialism within Russia itself.