Functional Parallelism of Detailed and Rough Speech Processing at the End of Infancy

Although realization of the same speech sound is far from being consistent across different contexts, speech recognition has to rely on phonetic detail in order to detect words. So far, it appeared that young infants cannot avoid noticing subtle speech sound variation whenever it occurs. Only later on, they are able to tolerate speech sound variation in some word recognition tasks. Here, we test whether this ability is associated with the time infants start storing their first word forms. We recorded event‐related potentials (ERPs) in a priming paradigm. German words (targets) followed syllables (primes) with a different amount of phoneme overlap. We tested infants at three, six, and nine months after birth. ERPs reflected sensitivity to prime‐target variation in a single phoneme in three‐month‐olds, tolerance to this in six‐month‐olds, and both processing aspects in nine‐month‐olds. Our findings reveal individual developmental priorities for different aspects of speech processing, with very detailed speech processing dominating at around 3 months, rough processing dominating at around half a year after birth, and an architecture of parallel rough and detailed processing at around 9 months. Functional parallelism at the end of infancy might explain the heterogeneous pattern of results regarding the degree of acoustic detail that toddlers appear to consider at different ages and across different paradigms.     

Diesseits von Coaching Situative Beratung als Führungsaufgabe

Before coaching: Situational counseling as management function Conflicts, crisis, bullying, weakness or separation: Critical situations for managers are not unusual in day to day business of organizations. Other than an external coach managers in these situations are not acting as professional counselors but as situational counselors. Situational counseling is understood as an organizational role which is activated in normative and critical management situations. There is a characteristic difference to the role of an external professional counselor. Accordingly, the development of competencies for a situational counselor needs its own approach. On the level of organization comprehensive principals for the behavior in critical situations should be developed and agreed by a process of communication. On the level of management development these principals can be transformed into individual strategies and trained.     

Career Maturity Levels of Male Intercollegiate Varsity Athletes

This study examined the readiness of male intercollegiate varsity athletes to make career-related decisions. The research questions compared students participating in revenue- and nonrevenue-producing sports as well as Caucasian and minority (Black, Asian American, Hispanic American, Native American, and other) student-athletes on eight dimensions of career maturity measured by the Career Development Inventory (Super, Thompson, Lindeman, Jordaan, & Myers, 1981). No significant differences were found in the overall career maturity of the student-athletes based either on the type of sport played or on their race. Also, the interaction of type of sport and race was not significant in determining differences in student-athletes' career maturity levels. Implications for career counseling programs for student-athletes and future research are discussed.     

Engaging girls with disabilities in Vietnam: making their voices count

This article addresses a theoretical and methodological intervention in support of inclusion for girls with disabilities in Vietnam. Drawing on an internationally collaborative project, Monitoring Educational Rights for Girls with Disabilities in Vietnamese schools, we critically engage the politics of inclusion and exclusion of girls with disabilities in education. Using a critical methodological framework that foregrounds the lived experiences of 21 girls with disabilities in Vietnam, we ask how we might strengthen participatory knowledge production through the work of monitoring rights in order to inform practices and policies related to disability and education. Through a preliminary analysis of the visual data emerging from our participatory visual methodologies, we demonstrate how these methods can contribute to constructing more inclusive practices and policies for girls with disabilities in both the Vietnamese and the global contexts.     

Residualization: justification,properties and application

Although it is usual to find collinearity in econometric models, it is commonly disregarded. An extended solution is to eliminate the variable causing the problem but, in some cases, this decision can affect the goal of the research. Alternatively, residualization not only allows mitigation of collinearity, but it also provides an alternative interpretation of the coefficients isolating the effect of the residualized variable. This paper fully develops the residualization procedure and justifies its application not only for dealing with multicollinearity but also for separating the individual effects of the regressor variables. This contribution is illustrated by two econometric models with financial and ecological data, although it can also be extended to many different fields.     

On a goodness-of-fit test for normality with unknown parameters and type-II censored data

We propose a new goodness-of-fit test for normal and lognormal distributions with unknown parameters and type-II censored data. This test is a generalization of Michael's test for censored samples, which is based on the empirical distribution and a variance stabilizing transformation. We estimate the parameters of the model by using maximum likelihood and Gupta's methods. The quantiles of the distribution of the test statistic under the null hypothesis are obtained through Monte Carlo simulations. The power of the proposed test is estimated and compared to that of the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test also using simulations. The new test is more powerful than the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test in most of the studied cases. Acceptance regions for the PP, QQ and Michael's stabilized probability plots are derived, making it possible to visualize which data contribute to the decision of rejecting the null hypothesis. Finally, an illustrative example is presented.     

Linear calibration in functional regression models

This paper discusses calibration in functional regression models. Classical and inverse type estimators are considered. First order approximation to the bias and to the mean squared error (MSE) of the estimators are considered. Numerical comparisons seem to indicate that the classical estimator obtained via maximum likelihood estimation performs better than the other estimators considered.     

A uniform central limit theorem for neural network-based autoregressive processes with applications to change-point analysis

We consider an autoregressive process with a nonlinear regression function that is modelled by a feedforward neural network. First, we derive a uniform central limit theorem which is useful in the context of change-point analysis. Then, we propose a test for a change in the autoregression function which – by the uniform central limit theorem – has asymptotic power one for a large class of alternatives including local alternatives not restricted to the correctly specified model.     

Supervision in einer Jugendhilfeeinrichtung

Die Autorin reflektiert die Ein- und Durchführungsbedingungen von Supervision in einer katholischen Jugendhilfeeinrichtung unter organisationstheoretischen und psychodynamischen Gesichtspunkten. Dargestellt werden die Vor- und Nachteile von Feldkompetenz sowie der Vertrautheit der Supervisoren mit der Einrichtung. Der Einfluss der Klientel auf die Zusammenarbeit und die Problemstellungen innerhalb des supervisorischen Kontextes werden als determinierende Variablen diskutiert, die je nach Arbeitsbereich verschiedene Auswirkungen mit sich bringen. Die Supervision sollte nicht zu einem eher neutralen Geschehen bereinigt werden, sondern in ihrer Involviertheit durch den Supervisor verstanden werden, und die übertragungsprozesse sollten genutzt werden.