Siblingship And Continuity Of The Family In The Balinese Houseyard

This article investigates yafuni (‘witchcraft’ or female sorcery) accusations among the Maisin people living in Collingwood Bay, Oro Province, Papua New Guinea. It takes as its primary case a public meeting at which two women were accused of killing a man. During the meeting, reasons for the victim's unexpected death and why he was subjected to ‘witchcraft’ were questioned and explored. While sorcery and witchcraft accusations might have violent outcomes, I argue that among Maisin they can be understood as performative rituals in which tensions and frustrations are vented in controlled ways, effectively preventing aggression and violence towards those accused. Accusations must be understood in the context of local identity politics that entail the questioning and redefining of relations and boundaries between gender, clans and cultural groups. In the case examined in this paper, the meeting provided a forum for the predominantly male accusers to re-establish gender hierarchies and social boundaries in order to restore social balance, albeit at the cost of victimising two women.     

Effects of Seeing and Hearing Vowels on Neonatal Facial Imitation

For several decades, many authors have claimed the existence, early in life, of a tight link between perceptual and productive systems in speech. However, the question whether this link is acquired or is already present at birth remains open. This study aimed at investigating this question by employing the paradigm of neonatal facial imitation. We compared imitative responses of newborn infants presented either visual‐only, audiovisual congruent, or audiovisual incongruent models. Our results revealed that the newborns imitated significantly more quickly the movements of the model's mouth when this model was audiovisual congruent rather than visual‐only. Moreover, when observing an audiovisual incongruent model, the newborns did not produce imitative behavior. These findings, by highlighting the influence of speech perception on newborns' imitative responses, suggest that the neural architecture for perception–production is already in place at birth. The implications of these results are discussed in terms of a link between language and neonatal imitation, which could represent a precursor of more mature forms of vocal imitation and speech development in general.     

Developmental Change in Infants' Detection of Visual Faces that Match Auditory Vowels

Infants demonstrate robust audiovisual (AV) perception, detecting, for example, which visual face matches auditory speech in many paradigms. For simple phonetic segments, like vowels, previous work has assumed developmental stability in AV matching. This study shows dramatic differences in matching performance for different vowels across the first year of life: 3‐, 6‐, and 9‐month‐olds were familiarized for 40 sec with a visual face articulating a vowel in synchrony with auditory presentations of that vowel, but crucially, the mouth of the face was occluded. At test, infants were shown two still photos of the same face without occlusion for 1 min in silence. One face had a static articulatory configuration matching the previously heard vowel, while the other face had a static configuration matching a different vowel. Three auditory vowels were used: /a/, /i/, and /u/. Results suggest that AV matching performance varies according to age and to the familiarized vowel. Interestingly, results are not linked to the frequency of vowels in auditory input, but may instead be related to infants' ability to produce the target vowel. A speculative hypothesis is that vowel production in infancy modulates AV vowel matching.     

Coaching für Wissenschaftler in der au?eruniversit?ren Forschung

The author presents a concept for introducing a coaching programme in a non-university research institute with the aim to strengthen scientific excellence. The paper analyzes requirements for coaching that result from characteristics of scientific work and derives steps for implementation. The results are: (1) There is a tension between individual career objectives and short time organizational goals related to external research funding and commissioned research; (2) coaching should be introduced primarily as individual career coaching; (3) an important challenge exists in sensitizing leading scientists to address this tension between individual career objectives and organizational goals more actively. The paper discusses the relationship between individual consulting and more general organizational goals in science coaching.