Pragmatic word learning in monolingual and bilingually exposed children

Humans are highly adaptable to a variety of challenging situations, as shown for example by increased echolocation abilities in the visually impaired (Schenkman & Nilsson, 2010). Multilingual input and interactions arguably create a particularly demanding environment, with added complexity and variation in the linguistic signal, a higher risk of communication failures and an increased amount of word forms to acquire. Despite this, and a lesser ability to rely on mutual exclusivity, bilingual children are able to quickly acquire a similar, and often greater vocabulary than their monolingual peers (De Houwer, Bornstein, & Putnick, 2014; Umbel, Pearson, Fernández, & Oller, 1992). A range of studies investigating attention to socio-pragmatic speaker cues found increased reliance on speaker cues in bilinguals (Colunga, Brojde, & Ahmed, 2012; Yow & Markman, 2011a, 2015). However, since these studies involved ignoring another conflicting cue, the results could have been related to inhibitory skills or to better attention to speaker generally, rather than to pragmatic inference per se, which relies on reasoning about communicative intentions. In five separate studies, we investigated the ability of a first (n=270, range=4;1- 6;2, mean age=5;3) and second (n=120, range=4;0-5;11, mean age=5;5) sample of monolingual and bilingually exposed children to use pragmatic cues to learn the meaning of a novel word in five different tasks where success could not be achieved by ignoring a salient cue. The tasks were: contrastive inference with prosodic stress, inference based on relative frequency of a referent, ostensive teaching of a subordinate category, ostensive teaching of an action word, and use of emotional affect. We found several developmental effects, and bilinguals to be more adult-like and to significantly outperform monolinguals (compared to a baseline control condition) in all tasks which involved reasoning about communicative intentions (or why the cue was provided, i.e., the first four tasks) but not when word referent mapping could be achieved without pragmatic reasoning (directly mapping emotional valence to referent valence, i.e., fifth task). We conclude that this thesis provides evidence for differences in the processing of pragmatic cues by bilingual and monolingual children which are not due solely to better inhibitory skills or to a general sensitivity to social cues such as prosody, eye gaze and pointing, but to performing true pragmatic inference by reasoning about communicative intentions in the context of word learning. In addition, we believe a distinction needs to be made between using social cues and reasoning about intentions, which might help provide insights about separate developmental timelines for exerting different types of pragmatic competence, with early abilities demonstrated by the bilingually exposed, particularly in acquisition contexts

Epic formula : a Balkan perspective

Special Editions 130. Institute for Balkan Studies of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Art

Obiter Dicta

"Stitched together over five years of journaling, Obiter Dicta is a commonplace book of freewheeling explorations representing the transcription of a dozen notebooks, since painstakingly reimagined for publication. Organized after Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia, this unschooled exercise in aesthetic thought—gleefully dilettantish, oftentimes dangerously close to the epigrammatic—interrogates an array of subject matter (although inescapably circling back to the curiously resemblant histories of Western visual art and instrumental music) through the lens of drive-by speculation. Erick Verran’s approach to philosophical inquiry follows the brute-force literary technique of Jacques Derrida to exhaustively favor the material grammar of a signifier over hand-me-down meaning, juxtaposing outer semblances with their buried systems and our etched-in-stone intuitions about color and illusion, shape and value, with lessons stolen from seemingly unrelatable disciplines. Interlarded with extracts of Ludwig Wittgenstein but also Wallace Stevens, Cormac McCarthy as well as Roland Barthes, this cache of incidental remarks eschews what’s granular for the biggest picture available, leaving below the hyper-specialized fields of academia for a bird’s-eye view of their crop circles. Obiter Dicta is an unapologetic experiment in intellectual dot-connecting that challenges much long-standing wisdom about everything from illuminated manuscripts to Minecraft and the evolution of European music with lyrical brevity; that is, before jumping to the next topic.

Weathered Words : Formulaic Language and Verbal Art

Formulaic phraseology presents the epitome of words worn and weathered by trial and the tests of time. Scholarship on weathered words is exceptionally diverse and interdisciplinary. This volume focuses on verbal art, which makes Oral-Formulaic Theory (OFT) a major point of reference. Yet weathered words are but a part of OFT, and OFT is only a part of scholarship on weathered words. Each of the eighteen essays gathered here brings particular aspects of formulaic language into focus. No volume on such a diverse topic can be all-encompassing, but the essays highlight aspects of the phenomenon that may be eclipsed elsewhere: they diverge not only in style, but sometimes even in how they choose to define “formula.” As such, they offer overlapping frames that complement one another both in their convergences and their contrasts. While they view formulaicity from multifarious angles, they unite in a Picasso of perspectives on which the reader can reflect and draw insight.Peer reviewe

History of Psychology

Openly licensed anthology focused on the theme of the History of Psychology. Contains: The Mind and the Brain by Alfred Binet; Dream Psychology: Psychoanalysis for Beginners by Sigmund Freud; The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (of 2) by William James; The Principles of Psychology, Volume 2 (of 2) by William James; Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology by C. G. Jung; Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay; The Psychology of Arithmetic by Edward L. Thorndike

Driven under the Influence: Selected Essays in Theology, 1974-2004

The Dutch-born Father Frans Jozef van Beeck has been a Jesuit for nearly 60 years. A respected theologian and teacher, he has written several books on ecclesiology and on the Catholic Church’s relationship with Judaism. Father van Beeck’s multi-volume project, God Encountered: A Contemporary Catholic Systematic Theology, is still a work in progress. Driven Under the Influence is a provocative sampling of his unpublished ideas over a 30-year period. The essays chosen here suggest the breadth and depth of his scholarly interests. They range from fundamental issues such as Christology and Trinitarian theology to encounters with non-Christians, especially Jews, to thorny contemporary issues such as the ordination of women, to very personal reflections on literature and faith. It is a collection sure to stimulate and inspire.https://digitalcommons.sacredheart.edu/shupress_bks/1010/thumbnail.jp

How Cartoons Became Art: Exhibitions and Sales of Animation Art as Communication of Aesthetic Value

Animation has risen from a commercially and aesthetically marginalized medium to one that is gaining recognition as an art form worthy of adult appreciation. Three realms of this recognition are: the Museum of Modern Art\u27s film department, which has supported animation in a variety of ways since its inception in 1935; exhibitions of the art contributing to Disney animation, which began in 1932; the market for artworks related to animation, which has grown from early gallery sales in the late 1930s to a broad base of collectors in the 1980s and 1990s. Exhibit materials, critical reviews, news coverage, and interviews with animation art market participants provided a basis to analyze these sites of aesthetic legitimation in terms of the barriers to acceptance animation faced, the strategies employed to overcome them, and the effects of legitimacy on the current state of animation. Curators, critics, and dealers have overcome prejudices that animation is merely a children\u27s mass medium by locating original pieces of production art within animation that are like fine art. Some have argued that animation\u27s basis in technology and mass production should not disqualify it from serious attention as art, nor should emotional satisfaction be a lesser aspect of aesthetic appreciation than disinterested analysis of form. Whereas commercially produced animation has gained both respect and economic vitality, independent and foreign animation has primarily gained prestige within the boundaries of festivals, museums, and art house theaters

Animation & Cartoons

An animated cartoon is a short, hand-drawn (or made with computers to look similar to something hand-drawn) moving picture for the cinema, TV or computer screen, featuring some kind of story or plot. Animation is the optical illusion of motion created by the consecutive display of images of static elements. In film and video production, this refers to techniques by which each frame of a film or movie is produced individually. Computer animation is the art of creating moving images via the use of computers. It is a subfield of computer graphics and animation. Anime is a medium of animation originating in Japan, with distinctive character and background aesthetics that visually set it apart from other forms of animation. An animated cartoon is a short, hand-drawn (or made with computers to look similar to something hand-drawn) moving picture for the cinema, TV or computer screen, featuring some kind of story or plot (even if it is a very short one). Manga is the Japanese word for comics and print cartoons. Outside of Japan, it usually refers specifically to Japanese comics. Special effects (abbreviated SPFX or SFX) are used in the film, television, and entertainment industry to visualize scenes that cannot be achieved by normal means, such as space travel. Stop motion is a generic gereral term for an animation technique which makes static objects appear to move