SOCIAL-PRAGMATIC COMMUNICATION IN WOMEN WITH AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDER: A MULTIPLE CASE STUDY

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is identified much later and less often in females than in males. Some researchers suspect that a different set of characteristics of ASD in females may not be consistent with the more established and widely recognized characteristics of ASD, leading to under-identification in women. In the present study, four women and one non-binary feminine-presenting person with ASD were interviewed. The five participants conveyed their experiences with social-pragmatic communication, and their views on gender, ASD, and gender differences in ASD. The results are discussed in relationship to the limited amount of past research on women with ASD

Social Context Modulates Tolerance For Pragmatic Violations In Binary But Not Graded Judgments

A common method for investigating pragmatic processing and its development in children is to have participants make binary judgments of underinformative (UI) statements such as Some elephants are mammals. Rejection of such statements indicates that a (not-all) scalar implicature has been computed. Acceptance of UI statements is typically taken as evidence that the perceiver has not computed an implicature. Under this assumption, the results of binary judgment studies in children and adults suggest that computing an implicature may be cognitively costly. For instance, children under 7 years of age are systematically more likely to accept UI statements compared to adults. This makes sense if children have fewer processing resources than adults. However, Katsos and Bishop (2011) found that young children are able to detect violations of informativeness when given graded rather than binary response options. They propose that children simply have a greater tolerance for pragmatic violations than do adults. The present work examines whether this pragmatic tolerance plays a role in adult binary judgment tasks. We manipulated social attributes of a speaker in an attempt to influence how accepting a perceiver might be of the speaker’s utterances. This manipulation affected acceptability rates for binary judgments (Experiment 1) but not for graded judgments (Experiment 2). These results raise concerns about the widespread use of binary choice tasks for investigating pragmatic processing and undermine the existing evidence suggesting that computing scalar implicatures is costly

Developing theoretical rigour in inter professional education

In this chapter, the author explores the meaning of theory and the role it plays in the development of interprofessional education. The chapter explores specifically the utility of the theory of social capital in the field and uses this as a case theory to present the dimensions of theoretical quality that is proposed as essential to the advancement of research, evaluation and curriculum development in this arena

Realtime market microstructure analysis: online Transaction Cost Analysis

Motivated by the practical challenge in monitoring the performance of a large number of algorithmic trading orders, this paper provides a methodology that leads to automatic discovery of the causes that lie behind a poor trading performance. It also gives theoretical foundations to a generic framework for real-time trading analysis. Academic literature provides different ways to formalize these algorithms and show how optimal they can be from a mean-variance, a stochastic control, an impulse control or a statistical learning viewpoint. This paper is agnostic about the way the algorithm has been built and provides a theoretical formalism to identify in real-time the market conditions that influenced its efficiency or inefficiency. For a given set of characteristics describing the market context, selected by a practitioner, we first show how a set of additional derived explanatory factors, called anomaly detectors, can be created for each market order. We then will present an online methodology to quantify how this extended set of factors, at any given time, predicts which of the orders are underperforming while calculating the predictive power of this explanatory factor set. Armed with this information, which we call influence analysis, we intend to empower the order monitoring user to take appropriate action on any affected orders by re-calibrating the trading algorithms working the order through new parameters, pausing their execution or taking over more direct trading control. Also we intend that use of this method in the post trade analysis of algorithms can be taken advantage of to automatically adjust their trading action.Comment: 33 pages, 12 figure

A Multivariate Study of T/V Forms in European Languages Based on a Parallel Corpus of Film Subtitles

The present study investigates the cross-linguistic differences in the use of so-called T/V forms (e.g. French tu and vous, German du and Sie, Russian ty and vy) in ten European languages from different language families and genera. These constraints represent an elusive object of investigation because they depend on a large number of subtle contextual features and social distinctions, which should be cross-linguistically matched. Film subtitles in different languages offer a convenient solution because the situations of communication between film characters can serve as comparative concepts. I selected more than two hundred contexts that contain the pronouns you and yourself in the original English versions, which are then coded for fifteen contextual variables that describe the Speaker and the Hearer, their relationships and different situational properties. The creators of subtitles in the other languages have to choose between T and V when translating from English, where the T/V distinction is not expressed grammatically. On the basis of these situations translated in ten languages, I perform multivariate analyses using the method of conditional inference trees in order to identify the most relevant contextual variables that constrain the T/V variation in each language

From simple predicators to clausal functors : The english modals through time and the primitives of modality

The ultimate goal of this paper is to find a representation of modality compatible with some basic conditions on the syntax-semantic interface. Such conditions are anchored, for instance, in Chomsky's (1995) principle of full interpretation (FI). Abstract interpretation of modality is, however - be it "only" in semantic terms - already a hard nut to crack, way too vast to be dealt with in any comprehensive way here. What is pursued instead is a case-study-centered analysis. The case in point are the English modals (EM) viewed in their development through time - a locus classicus for a number of linguistic theories and frameworks. The idea will be to start out from two lines of research - continuous grammaticalization vs. cataclysmic change - and to explain some of their incongruities. The first non-trivial point here consists in deriving more fundamental questions from this research. The second, possibly even less trivial one consists in answering them. Specifically, I will argue that regardless of the actual numerical rate of change, there is an underlying and more structured way to account for the notions of change and continuity within the modal system, respectively

\u3cem\u3eFrankenstein\u3c/em\u3e, Feminism, and Literary Theory

Cave ab homine unius libri, as the Latin epigram warns us: beware the author of one book. Frankenstein has so overshadowed Mary Shelley\u27s other books in the popular imagination that many readers believe - erroneously - that she is a one-book author. While this is decidedly not the case, Frankenstein has figured more importantly in the development of feminist literary theory than perhaps any other novel, with the possible exception of Charlotte Bronte\u27s Jane Eyre. This essay will discuss the major feminist literary interpretations of the novel, beginning with Ellen Moers\u27s landmark reading in Literary Women and then move to the more recent approaches taken by critics engaged in post-colonial theory, cultural studies, queer theory, and disability studies. In the process we will explore the provocative claim made by Fred Botting, who noted, Frankenstein is a product of criticism, not a work of literature