Loving and angry? Happy and sad? Understanding and reporting of mixed emotions in mother–child relationships by 6‐ to 12‐year‐olds

The Evaluative Space Model of emotions allows for the coactivation of positive‐appetitive and negative‐avoidant systems, but few studies have examined mixed emotions in child development. Existing research suggests children's understanding of opposite valence emotion combinations emerges by approximately 11 years of age. However, it is not yet clear whether various opposite valence combinations are understood at different ages, nor whether children can understand them in others before they have experienced such mixed emotions themselves. Semi‐structured interviews with 97 children investigated whether they regarded six combinations of opposite valence mixed emotions as possible, could provide reasons for them, and report their own experience of each in the context of mother–child relationships. Both understanding that such combinations are possible and ability to provide reasons for them increased after age 6 and up to age 11, but were still incomplete in 12‐year‐olds. Understanding of different opposite valence combinations developed at different rates. At each age, fewer children who showed understanding of these combinations in others reported having had a similar experience themselves. The findings suggest a need to systematically examine a range of mixed emotions in order to develop a comprehensive theory of the development of mixed emotion understanding. They also suggest extending research into adolescence.     

The Faulty Magnitude Detector: Why SNARC‐Like Tasks Cannot Support a Generalized Magnitude System

Do people represent space, time, number, and other conceptual domains using a generalized magnitude system (GMS)? To answer this question, numerous studies have used the spatial‐numerical association of response codes (SNARC) task and its variants. Yet, for a combination of reasons, SNARC‐like effects cannot provide evidence for a GMS, even in principle. Rather, these effects support a broader theory of how people use space metaphorically to scaffold their understanding of myriad non‐spatial domains, whether or not these domains exhibit variation in magnitude.     

语法的进化连续性及进化起源解释

语法是人类交流系统有别于其他动物的关键特征之一。行为比较研究表明, 除人类外的其他灵长目动物也能理解并掌握抽象的顺序排序规则; 神经生物学比较研究表明, 支持排序处理的神经机制来自人类与其他灵长目动物共同具有的脑区。因此语法所依赖的序列学习能力在人类与其他灵长目动物间具有进化连续性。词汇限制假说、事件感知假说与自我驯化假说分别从不同角度对人类语法的进化起源进行了解释。未来研究需要探讨人工语法任务中所发现的脑神经机制是否是层级结构加工的通用处理器, 并进一步澄清语义加工与语法加工的关系。     

Quantitative analysis of aphasic sentence production: further development and new data

The narrative production of patients with Broca's aphasia and age-and education-matched control subjects was analyzed using the Quantitative Production Analysis (Saffran et al., 1989), a procedure designed to provide measures of morphological and structural characteristics of aphasic production. In addition to providing data for a larger number of subjects than in the original study, we provide data on interrater and test-retest reliability. The data were also submitted to factor and cluster analyses. Two factors characterized the data and the cluster analysis yielded four sets of patients who performed differently on these factors. In particular, there is evidence that agrammatic patients can differ in their production of free and bound grammatical morphemes, substantiating earlier claims in the literature.     

Antecedent reactivation by surface and deep anaphora in Norwegian

Anaphora are expressions in language that depend on other linguistic entities for their full meaning. They can furthermore be divided into two types according to the level of representation where they find their antecedents: Surface anaphora, which resolve their reference at the sentence representation level, and deep anaphora, which resolve their reference at the non-grammatical level of discourse representation. The linguistic theory of these two anaphor types, and recent findings about processing differences at these two levels, combine to predict that surface anaphora should show fast and immediate reactivation of their antecedents, whereas deep anaphora should have a slower time course of antecedent re-access. These predictions were confirmed with two lexical decision task experiments with Norwegian stimuli.     

Syntactic working memory and the establishment of filler-gap dependencies: insights from ERPs and fMRI

In this contribution, we review an ERP experiment and an fMRI experiment which investigated the processing of German wh-questions. On the basis of the ERP results, we will discuss current models of sentence processing and resource distribution during sentence comprehension. We argue that there exists a separate cognitive or neural resource that supports syntactic working memory processes necessary for the temporary maintenance of syntactic information for the parser. In the context of wh-movement, such a memory component is necessary for establishing filler-gap dependencies. The data obtained from the fMRI experiment will be used to discuss the results of previous neuroimaging studies of sentence processing. It is claimed that syntactic working memory, rather than syntactic processing per se, is supported by Broca's Area.     

Grammer and Social Interaction in Japanese and Anglo-American English: The Display of Context, Social Identity and Social Relation

This paper employs conversation analysis to examine the inter-connection between grammar and displays of contextual understanding, social identity, and social relationships as well as other activities clustering around turn-endings in Japanese talk-in-interaction, while undertaking a restricted comparison with the realisation of similar activities in English. A notable feature of turn-endings in Japanese is the particular salience of grammatical construction on the interactional activities they accomplish. Complete turns which are also syntactically complete are shown to be associated with the explicit display of contextual features, whereas syntactically incomplete turns are designed to circumvent or minimise such displays. The explicit or implicit display of one's social and contextual relationship to the interactional environment is therefore seen to be an integral part of the performance of social actions in Japanese. On the other hand, in English, it is more difficult to establish a clear association between grammar and the inclusion or avoidance of contextual displays.     

Handedness shapes children's abstract concepts

Can children’s handedness influence how they represent abstract concepts like kindness and intelligence? Here we show that from an early age, right‐handers associate rightward space more strongly with positive ideas and leftward space with negative ideas, but the opposite is true for left‐handers. In one experiment, children indicated where on a diagram a preferred toy and a dispreferred toy should go. Right‐handers tended to assign the preferred toy to a box on the right and the dispreferred toy to a box on the left. Left‐handers showed the opposite pattern. In a second experiment, children judged which of two cartoon animals looked smarter (or dumber) or nicer (or meaner). Right‐handers attributed more positive qualities to animals on the right, but left‐handers to animals on the left. These contrasting associations between space and valence cannot be explained by exposure to language or cultural conventions, which consistently link right with good. Rather, right‐ and left‐handers implicitly associated positive valence more strongly with the side of space on which they can act more fluently with their dominant hands. Results support the body‐specificity hypothesis ( Casasanto, 2009 ), showing that children with different kinds of bodies think differently in corresponding ways.     

What Does Children's Spatial Language Reveal About Spatial Concepts? Evidence From the Use of Containment Expressions

Children's overextensions of spatial language are often taken to reveal spatial biases. However, it is unclear whether extension patterns should be attributed to children's overly general spatial concepts or to a narrower notion of conceptual similarity allowing metaphor‐like extensions. We describe a previously unnoticed extension of spatial expressions and use a novel method to determine its origins. English‐ and Greek‐speaking 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds used containment expressions (e.g., English into, Greek mesa) for events where an object moved into another object but extended such expressions to events where the object moved behind or under another object. The pattern emerged in adult speakers of both languages and also in speakers of 10 additional languages. We conclude that learners do not have an overly general concept of Containment. Nevertheless, children (and adults) perceive similarities across Containment and other types of spatial scenes, even when these similarities are obscured by the conventional forms of the language.     

Space Exploration: Current Thinking on the Notion of Otherness

Space appears today as one of the major limits of human knowledge and experience. It offers a challenge for philosophy and theology to offer answers to the questions of the other, of origins, of faith, of image of God.