Single exposure to the word “Loving” and implicit helping behavior

Recent studies have reported that exposure to appeals for help containing the word “Love” increased donations. In this study, the effect of exposure to the single word “Loving” was examined on spontaneous helping behavior. Participants in the parking lots of several hypermarkets saw a male or a female confederate who was having difficulty loading a large heavy carton into a car. The confederate wore a T-shirt with a single word printed on the back: “Loving,” “Helping,” or no word. It was reported that more participants spontaneously offered to help the confederate when exposed to the word “Loving.” The importance of this word and further concepts are used to explain these results.     

Vygotsky,Consciousness, and the German Psycholinguistic Tradition

This article argues that Vygotsky's choice of word meaning as the basic unit of analysis for cultural psychology connects him to a German psycholinguistic tradition—exemplified in the work of G. W. F. Hegel and J. G. Herder—distinct from the Marxist tradition. While later commentators criticize Vygotsky's reliance on word meaning, arguing that it cannot explain the formation of consciousness, this German psycholinguistic tradition provides intellectual resources for rethinking the relationship between language and consciousness. Consciousness, through this model, arises from linguistic interactions, and is therefore not separable from language. Thus, word meaning encapsulates consciousness itself, not just its mediation in the world.     

HERE WE GO AGAIN: MAPS, TERRITORIES, INTERPRETATIONS, AND THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN "THE" AND "A" OR "AN"

Humpty Dumpty was dead wrong when he said, "When I use a word hellip; it means just what I choose it to mean-neither more nor less.""The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things" (Carroll, 1972, p. 90).
And Humpty Dumpty was quite right when he continued, "The question is hellip; which is to be master-that's all" (Carroll, 1972, p. 90). And the answer is, it is the word that is master not its user. A word always means more and less than we, as users, as authors, mean it to mean.     

The influence of organizational social responsibility on involvement behavior in community sport membership associations

Membership‐based associations are critical to their local communities and the overall social impact of the nonprofit sector. This study examines how organizational social responsibility within nonprofit membership associations influences positive member involvement behaviors, including volunteering, speaking positively about the club, and member loyalty. Self‐administered online questionnaires were completed by 735 members within seven grassroots membership associations in Ontario, Canada offering community‐based sport programs. Results show that members are somewhat aware of and felt positively about their organization's socially responsible efforts. Awareness of these efforts had a positive direct effect on the involvement behaviors of members, including intention to stay involved with their club and speaking positively about their club to others (i.e., word of mouth). Members' level of social consciousness was found to have a positive direct effect on word of mouth. Furthermore, members' positive evaluation of sport clubs' socially responsible initiatives was found to partially mediate the positive relationship between social consciousness and involvement behavior, as well as partially mediate the positive relationship between awareness of those efforts and involvement behavior. Results of this research provide grassroots membership associations with an in‐depth understanding of how their organization's efforts toward social responsibility influence member perceptions and behaviors, which may help them focus their efforts and more effectively manage their social change agenda moving forward.     

Death,Modernity and Monuments: The Realities Expressed in the Monuments of the Hanshin–Awaji Earthquake*

Many monuments have been constructed to commemorate the Hanshin–Awaji earthquake. If a memorial represents the need to reaffirm one's ties to “a world,” each monument is supposed to provide an image of that “world.” An analysis of the monuments shows that they are greatly influenced by the character of the various organizations and groups that constructed them. Therefore, the monuments almost appear to be linked to the duties or functions of these groups. However, two realities appeared across these organizations. At first, there is a pattern in the monuments to mourn the death of those with whom one in familiar. It expresses a spiritual feeling about death. Second, we often find the word “we” in the monuments. The word “we” expresses reality in a homogeneous space. Although each reality does not correspond to a particular type of group or organization, they cannot be expressed simultaneously in the one monument. The result of the research shows that the two realities are constituted through different means.     

Is a Bird an Apple? The Effect of Speaker Labeling Accuracy on Infants' Word Learning,Imitation, and Helping Behaviors

This study examined infants' sensitivity to a speaker's verbal accuracy and whether the reliability of the speaker had an effect on their selective trust. Forty‐nine 18‐month‐old infants were exposed to a speaker who either accurately or inaccurately labeled familiar objects. Subsequently, the speaker administered a series of tasks in which infants had an opportunity to: learn a novel word, imitate the speaker's “irrational” actions, and help the speaker obtain an out‐of‐reach object. In contrast to infants in the accurate (reliable) condition, those in the inaccurate (unreliable) condition performed more poorly on a word‐learning task and were less likely to imitate. All infants demonstrated high rates of instrumental helping behavior. These results are the first to demonstrate that infants as young as 18 months of age cannot only detect a speaker's verbal inaccuracy but also use this information to attenuate their word recognition and learning of novel actions.     

Beneficial effects of the mother's voice on infants’ novel word learning

The maternal voice appears to have a special role in infants’ language processing. The current eye‐tracking study investigated whether 24‐month‐olds (n = 149) learn novel words easier while listening to their mother's voice compared to hearing unfamiliar speakers. Our results show that maternal speech facilitates the formation of new word–object mappings across two different learning settings: a live setting in which infants are taught by their own mother or the experimenter, and a prerecorded setting in which infants hear the voice of either their own or another mother through loudspeakers. Furthermore, this study explored whether infants’ pointing gestures and novel word productions over the course of the word learning task serve as meaningful indexes of word learning behavior. Infants who repeated more target words also showed a larger learning effect in their looking behavior. Thus, maternal speech and infants’ willingness to repeat novel words are positively linked with novel word learning.     

Frantz Fanon,poet: pleasure of the text,power of the text

ABSTRACT

Frantz Fanon’s writing represents a productive embrace of the political and the poetic. His ideas have had such a long afterlife, they live on in us, I submit, precisely because the language of their articulation, image-filled and rhythmic, is compelling. This article examines three elements of Fanonian poetics in Black Skin, White Masks: the use of metaphor and, in “By Way of Conclusion,” an ambiguous/multiple “I” as persona, and, finally, what Brent Edwards has called “anaphoric poetics,” the repetition of the same word or words at the beginning of successive phrases.     

Functional Elements in Infants' Speech Processing: The Role of Determiners in the Syntactic Categorization of Lexical Elements

How do children determine the syntactic category of novel words? In this article we present the results of 2 experiments that investigated whether German children between 12 and 16 months of age can use distributional knowledge that determiners precede nouns and subject pronouns precede verbs to syntactically categorize adjacent novel words. Evidence from the head‐turn preference paradigm shows that, although 12‐ to 13‐month‐olds cannot do this, 14‐ to 16‐month‐olds are able to use a determiner to categorize a following novel word as a noun. In contrast, no categorization effect was found for a novel word following a subject pronoun. To understand this difference we analyzed adult child‐directed speech. This analysis showed that there are in fact stronger co‐occurrence relations between determiners and nouns than between subject pronouns and verbs. Thus, in German determiners may be more reliable cues to the syntactic category of an adjacent novel word than are subject pronouns. We propose that the capacity to syntactically categorize novel words, demonstrated here for the first time in children this young, mediates between the recognition of the specific morphosyntactic frame in which a novel word appears and the word‐to‐world mapping that is needed to build up a semantic representation for the novel word.     

Children’s conceptions of the word ‘disabled’: a phenomenographic study

The aim of this study was to investigate the qualitative differences in children’s conceptions of the word ‘disabled’. Two hundred and thirty children, aged 7–12 years of age, were instructed to make a drawing of what came into their minds when they heard the word ‘disabled’. A brief written commentary on their drawing was also requested. The drawings and comments showed that the children had a positive attitude towards the word ‘disabled’. They drew and commented that a disability had medical causes, a technical device was a prerequisite for disabled people, a disability had social consequences and that a disabled person needed support. The children also explained that there were obstacles which impaired disabled people’s performance of activities. Access to some environments and being an active part of society was limited for some disabled people.     

Pretending to be a normal human being: Peep Show,sitcom, and the momentary invocation of disability

This interdisciplinary article presents research about the place of disability in the British sitcom Peep Show, whose 54 episodes span more than a decade in their transmission (2003–2015). The methodology of critical discourse analysis is employed to probe the relationship between casual word choice and broader themes such as normalcy, humour, and social attitudes. This analysis is informed by classic and new work in cultural disability studies, as well as by work in literary studies and television studies. The conclusion is that, despite its apparent irrelevance to disability studies, Peep Show reveals much about conversational invocations of disability.     

Theorizing with Archives: Contingency,Mistakes, and Plausible Alternatives

Qualitative Sociology - What are “good” kinds of archival evidence for theorizing? Surprisingly, the word archive and discussions of the archival process rarely appear in methods...     

Overcoming the Effects of Variation in Infant Speech Segmentation: Influences of Word Familiarity

Previous studies have shown that 7.5‐month‐olds can track and encode words in fluent speech, but they fail to equate instances of a word that contrast in talker gender, vocal affect, and fundamental frequency. By 10.5 months, they succeed at generalizing across such variability, marking a clear transition period during which infants' word recognition skills become qualitatively more mature. Here we explore the role of word familiarity in this critical transition and, in particular, whether words that occur frequently in a child's listening environment (i.e., “Mommy” and “Daddy”) are more easily recognized when they differ in surface characteristics than those that infants have not previously encountered (termed nonwords). Results demonstrate that words are segmented from continuous speech in a more linguistically mature fashion than nonwords at 7.5 months, but at 10.5 months, both words and nonwords are segmented in a relatively mature fashion. These findings suggest that early word recognition is facilitated in cases where infants have had significant exposure to items, but at later stages, infants are able to segment items regardless of their presumed familiarity.     

Tomb, temple, machine and self: the social construction of the body.

The body is socially constructed; and in this paper we explore the various and ever-changing constructions of the body, and thus of the embodied self, from the Greeks to the present. The one word, body, may therefore signify very different realities and perceptions of reality; and we consider briefly how and why these meanings changed. Plato believed the body was a 'tomb', Paul said it was the 'temple' of the Holy Spirit, the Stoic philosopher Epictetus taught that it was a 'corpse'. Christians believed, and believe, that the body is not only physical, but also spiritual and mystical, and many believed it was an allegory of church, state and family. Some said it was cosmic: one with the planets and the constellations. Descartes wrote that the body is a 'machine', and this definition has underpinned biomedicine to this day; but Sartre said that the body is the self. In sum, the body has no intrinsic meaning. Populations create their own meanings, and thus their own bodies; but how they create, and then change them, and why, reflects the social body.     

ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF GUEST REVIEWERS

This study explored 14‐month‐old infants' ability to form novel word‐spatial relation associations. During habituation, infants heard 1 novel word (e.g., teek) while viewing dynamic containment events (i.e., Big Bird placed in a box) and, on other habituation trials, a second novel word (e.g., blick) while viewing dynamic support events (i.e., Big Bird placed on the box). Each novel word was presented in a sentence (e.g., “She's putting Big Bird teek the box”). During the test, infants discriminated an event that maintained the habituation word‐relation pairing from one that presented a switch in this pairing. The results indicate that 14‐month‐olds can learn to form word‐relation associations quickly, requiring only a few minutes of experience with each word‐relation pairing.     

The expressive function of the eye flash

“Eye flash” is the name given to the facial display in which the eyelids are momentarily widened during conversation without the involvement of the eyebrows. The widening of the lids is usually sufficient to reveal the sclera surrounding the iris. The display lasts on average 0.75 seconds. Evidence is presented to show that the eye flash, when given by the speaker, emphasizes the word being spoken at that time. It occurs more often in conjunction with adjectives than other parts of speech and more often among women than men. It is argued that the display is an example of a facial expression which has similar functions to intonation: the meaning of a given word or phrase may be accentuated or changed by the occurrence of this display.     

Receptive Grammatical Knowledge of Familiar Content Words and Inflection in 16‐Month‐Olds

This study examines 16‐month‐olds' understanding of word order and inflectional properties of familiar nouns and verbs. Infants preferred grammatical sentences over ungrammatical sentences when the ungrammaticality was cued by both misplaced inflection and word order reversal of nouns and verbs. Infants were also sensitive to inflection alone as a cue to grammaticality, but not word order alone. The preference for grammatical sentence forms was also disrupted when adjacent function word cues were removed from the stimuli, and when familiar content words were replaced by nonce words. These results suggest that sensitivity to the relationship between functional morphemes and content words, rather than sensitivity to either independently, drives the development of early grammatical knowledge. Furthermore, infants showed some ability to generalize from familiar to nonce content word contexts.     

The Effectiveness of Word Parts Strategies in Vocabulary Learning and Memorizing

Word parts strategies are processes which split up words into affixes and roots, and then relate the meaning of the word parts to the meaning of the word(Nation 442). Current studies about word parts strategies mainly concentrate on the significance of word parts strategies, yet few researches have been done regarding effectiveness of word parts strategies in vocabulary learning and memorizing. This study, therefore, aims to investigate whether or not word parts strategies help Chinese EFL learners to learn and memorize unknown vocabularies effectively.     

A Broader Understanding of the Ethics of Listening: Philosophy,Cultural Studies,Media Studies and the Ethical Listening Subject

This study investigated the effects of Mozart's high-frequency-rich music and structured oral directions on third graders' auding and reading comprehension performance. The design was pre-post, with a control group and two experimental treatment groups. Mozart Symphonies Nos. 35, 38, 40, and 41, and four Frank Schaffer listening skills books were used with one experimental group. The second experimental group received the listening instruction without music. The control group worked assorted word searches. The Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test (Forms 1 and 2, Primary C) and the Addison-Wesley Sequential Test of Educational Progress (STEP) III (D) Listening Test (Form X) were used to measure reading comprehension and auding respectively. Instruction was administered by regular classroom teachers to intact classes for 30 minute morning periods, three times per week for eight weeks. Analysis of pretest and posttest scores from 63 students reveal that an organized instructional method using Mozart's music and oral directions significantly increases auding and reading comprehension, with music being the key independent variable.     

Statistical word segmentation: Anchoring learning across contexts

The present experiments were designed to assess infants' abilities to use syllable co-occurrence regularities to segment fluent speech across contexts. Specifically, we investigated whether 9-month-old infants could use statistical regularities in one speech context to support speech segmentation in a second context. Contexts were defined by different word sets representing contextual differences that might occur across conversations or utterances. This mimics the integration of information across multiple interactions within a single language, which is critical for language acquisition. In particular, we performed two experiments to assess whether a statistically segmented word could be used to anchor segmentation in a second, more challenging context, namely speech with variable word lengths. The results of Experiment 1 were consistent with past work suggesting that statistical learning may be hindered by speech with word-length variability, which is inherent to infants' natural speech environments. In Experiment 2, we found that infants could use a previously statistically segmented word to support word segmentation in a novel, challenging context. We also present findings suggesting that this ability was associated with infants' early word knowledge but not their performance on a cognitive development assessment.