Temporal and causal reasoning in deaf and hearing novice readers

Temporal and causal information in text are crucial in helping the reader form a coherent representation of a narrative. Deaf novice readers are generally poor at processing linguistic markers of causal/temporal information (i.e., connectives), but what is unclear is whether this is indicative of a more general deficit in reasoning about temporal/causal information. In Study 1, 10 deaf and 63 hearing children, matched for comprehension ability and age, were compared on a range of tasks tapping temporal/causal reasoning skills. In Study 2, 20 deaf and 32 hearing children, matched for age but not reading comprehension ability, were compared on revised versions of the tasks. The pattern of performance of the deaf was different from that of the hearing; they had difficulties when temporal and causal reasoning was text-based, but not when it was nonverbal, indicating that their global temporal/causal reasoning skills are comparable with those of their hearing counterparts

The influence of television stories on narrative abilities in children

This research explores the narrative abilities demonstrated by children aged between 8 and 12 in the production of television stories. The results reveal that not all television stories viewed by children foster the informal education process. One type of story, termed narrativizing, enables children to produce coherent stories which clearly articulate the causal, temporal and motivational relations, as well as the means-end structures, the proximal relations of the intrigue and the distal relations of the plot. Other television stories, denarrativizing stories, tend to induce disarrangements and incoherence at all structural levels of the stories produced by children. This in turn hampers the development of their narrative abilities, which are necessary to the correct development of narrative thought. These results indicate the need to exercise social control over this latter type of fictional television narrative, to which children are exposed throughout their development within the framework of informal education.University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), EHU 13/65 Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea (UPV/EHU), GIU 15/14 Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea (UPV/EHU), UFI 11/04 MINECO. Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, BES-2015-071923 Fondo Social Europeo, BES-2015-07192

The Effects of a Narrative-Based Social Problem-Solving Intervention with High-Risk Adolescent Males

Adolescents with emotional disturbance and those incarcerated present high risks for poor outcomes in high school, and as adults (e.g., Walker, Ramsey, & Gresham, 2004). Poor social competence is often a characteristic of this group of students (e.g., Kauffman, 2005; Maag, 2006). Historically, schools have responded to the social needs of this group of students through opportunities to participate in social problem-solving interventions (e.g., Cook, et al., 2008). Results of the research investigating these interventions, though, have shown moderate gains in student social problem-solving skills, yet limited to no effect on behavior in authentic social contexts (e.g., Maag, 2006; Quinn, Kavale, Mathur, Rutherford, & Forness, 1999; Smith & Travis, 2001). One explanation for the limited success of interventions may be the frameworks used to guide understanding of social problem solving and intervention practices. Social problem-solving frameworks may be conceptualizing the components and processes in too simplistic of terms. Other factors that influence behavior in social interactions were not represented in these instructional frameworks and as a result have not been attended to in intervention frameworks and curricula. To address this gap viii between research and practice, three studies were conducted to (1) establish the social validity of the cognitive and behavioral components of the proposed social problem-solving intervention model, (2) examine the characteristics of high-risk adolescents and the ways high-risk adolescents include social reflection, social problem-solving and social decision making in their narratives, (3) investigate the efficacy and effectiveness of an individual, narrative-based, cognitive-behavioral, social problem-solving intervention. The model was established as socially valid by both adolescent and adult respondents. Student personal oral narratives were analyzed and found to reflect limited narrative structure and limited inclusion of social problem-solving skill components. A single-subject, multiple-baseline across participants design was used to assess the efficacy of the intervention. Results of this study showed significant positive effects for inclusion of social problem-solving steps, inclusion of story grammar elements, and landscape of consciousness words in personal narratives following intervention. Students reported being satisfied with the program and skills learned. The replication of these findings, in other settings and with other interventionists, is recommended for future studies

When Do Discourse Markers Affect Computational Sentence Understanding?

The capabilities and use cases of automatic natural language processing (NLP) have grown significantly over the last few years. While much work has been devoted to understanding how humans deal with discourse connectives, this phenomenon is understudied in computational systems. Therefore, it is important to put NLP models under the microscope and examine whether they can adequately comprehend, process, and reason within the complexity of natural language. In this chapter, we introduce the main mechanisms behind automatic sentence processing systems step by step and then focus on evaluating discourse connective processing. We assess nine popular systems in their ability to understand English discourse connectives and analyze how context and language understanding tasks affect their connective comprehension. The results show that NLP systems do not process all discourse connectives equally well and that the computational processing complexity of different connective kinds is not always consistently in line with the presumed complexity order found in human processing. In addition, while humans are more inclined to be influenced during the reading procedure but not necessarily in the final comprehension performance, discourse connectives have a significant impact on the final accuracy of NLP systems. The richer knowledge of connectives a system learns, the more negative effect inappropriate connectives have on it. This suggests that the correct explicitation of discourse connectives is important for computational natural language processing.Comment: Chapter 7 of Discourse Markers in Interaction, published in Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monograph

Multimodal Writing of University Students: The Case of Academic Posters

After having been marginalized for a long time as a second-class genre or “the poor country cousin of papers” (Swales & Feak, 2000), academic posters have recently received remarkable attention as a special multimodal genre that is indispensable for the membership of the academic community. In line with the currently growing interest in multimodal writing, the present study seeks to contribute to the limited body of knowledge on academic posters in two ways: first by investigating the textual and visual communicative strategies employed by novice multimodal writers to facilitate the comprehension of their multimodal texts and guide readers through their discourse and second by exploring the perceptions of those young multimodal writers towards that special genre. To accomplish the first objective, a corpus of 100 academic posters gathered from freshmen university students enrolled in a second language research writing course was compiled and analyzed textually and visually drawing mainly on the framework of D’Angelo (2016a) that distinguishes between interactive and interactional resources. To fulfill the second objective, a questionnaire was filled out by 66 students, and four interviews were carried out. Both quantitative and qualitative methods were used in the analysis. Descriptive statistics was employed in the multimodal analysis of the posters as well as the analysis of the questionnaire responses, and a qualitative thematic analysis was conducted to interpret the responses of the interviewees. The quantitative textual and visual analysis revealed a clear dominance of the interactive resources and, to some extent, a lack of making the best use of all the available visual resources. The analysis of the self-reported data unveiled that young multimodal writers hold quite positive perceptions towards the academic poster as a multimodal genre. Further, they tended to decode the interrelation between textual and visual resources as an illustrative or code mixing relationship where both text and visuals complement each other to communicate the intended meaning. The study has pedagogical implications relevant to introducing novice multimodal writers to the available semiotic resources

Emotion-focused therapy

Emotion-focused therapy (EFT), also known as process-experiential therapy, integrates active therapeutic methods from gestalt and other humanistic therapies within the frame of a person-centred relationship (Elliott, Watson, Goldman & Greenberg, 2004). EFT updates person-centred and gestalt therapies by incorporating contemporary emotion theory and affective neuroscience, dialectical constructivism, and contemporary attachment theory. In this chapter, I review the current status of EFT, summarising its history, theory, practice, and outcome evidence

A Corpus-Based Analysis of Cohesion in L2 Writing by Undergraduates in Ecuador

In finding out the nature of cohesion in L2 writing, the present study set out to address three research questions: (1) What types of cohesion relations occur in L2 writing at the sentence, paragraph, and whole-text levels? (2) What is the relationship between lexico-grammatical cohesion features and teachers’ judgements of writing quality? (3) Do expectations of cohesion suggested by the CEFR match what is found in student writing? To answer those questions, a corpus of 240 essays and 240 emails from college- level students learning English as a foreign language in Ecuador enabled the analysis of cohesion. Each text included the scores, or teachers’ judgements of writing quality aligned to the upper-intermediate level (or B2) as proposed by the Common European Framework of Reference for learning, teaching, and assessing English as a foreign language. Lexical and grammatical items used by L2 students to build relationships of meaning in sentences, paragraphs, and the entire text were considered to analyse cohesion in L2 writing. Utilising Natural Language Processing tools (e.g., TAACO, TextInspector, NVivo), the analysis focused on determining which cohesion features (e.g., word repetition/overlap, semantical similarity, connective words) predicted the teachers’ judgements of writing quality in the collected essays and emails. The findings indicate that L2 writing is characterised by word overlap and synonyms occurring at the paragraph level and, to a lesser degree, cohesion between sentences and the entire text (e.g., connective words). Whilst these cohesion features positively and negatively predicted the teachers’ scores, a cautious interpretation of these findings is required, as many other factors beyond cohesion features must have also influenced the allocation of scores in L2 writing

Rehabilitation Outcome Following Acute Stroke: Considering Ideomotor Apraxia

Stroke is a leading cause of death and the leading cause of adult disability in the United States affecting approximately 795,000 people yearly. Stroke sequelae often span multiple domains, including motor, cognitive, and sensory subsystems. Impairments can contribute to difficulty participating in activities of daily living (ADLs) and translate into disability - a concern for patients and occupational therapists alike. The role of ideomotor apraxia (IMA) in stroke rehabilitation is unclear. Thus, the purpose of these two studies is to investigate stroke rehabilitation outcome while considering the presence of ideomotor apraxia. Stroke causes dysfunctional movement patterns arising from an array of potential etiologies. Agreement exists that understanding the patient's functioning serves as the basis for the rehabilitation process and it is insufficient for clinicians simply to determine functional movement problems without knowing how underlying impairments contribute. Stroke-induced paresis is a prevalent impairment and frequent target of traditional rehabilitation. Stroke rehabilitation often addresses paresis narrowly with little consideration for other stroke consequences. Ideomotor apraxia is one such disorder after stroke that could conceivably limit rehabilitation benefit of otherwise efficacious treatment interventions aimed at remediating paresis. This led us to an initial study of a subject who experienced a single left, ischemic stroke with paresis of his right upper extremity and comorbid ideomotor apraxia. The subject participated in combined physical and mental practice for six consecutive weeks to improve use of his right arm. After intervention, the subject demonstrated clinically significant improvements in functional performance of his more-affected right upper extremity and reported greater self-perception of performance. The subject continued to demonstrate improvements after four weeks with no intervention and despite persistent IMA. This single case report highlights the importance of recognizing that ideomotor apraxia does present after stroke, and traditional stroke rehabilitation efforts directed at paresis can be efficacious for subjects with IMA. Traditional beliefs suggested that ideomotor apraxia does not translate to disability in everyday life and that IMA resolves spontaneously. Despite accumulating evidence of the influence of IMA on functional ability, this topic remains relatively neglected. It is unclear how ideomotor apraxia affects the rehabilitation process. The second study reports rehabilitation outcomes of a group of subjects following acute stroke. The Florida Apraxia Battery gesture-to-verbal command test was used to detect IMA in subjects. Level of independence with a set of ADLs and motor impairment of the more-affected upper extremity was documented at admission and discharge. Study subjects participated in standard of care stroke rehabilitation in the inpatient rehabilitation units. A total of fifteen subjects who sustained a left hemisphere stroke participated in this study - ten with IMA and five without IMA. After rehabilitation, subjects with IMA improved ADL independence and displayed decreased motor impairment of their right upper extremity. Subjects with and without IMA exhibited comparable improvements in ADL independence, but subjects with IMA exhibited less ADL independence upon when compared to subjects without IMA. Additional findings suggested that subjects with IMA were not different with respect to motor impairments and length of stay; however, additional studies with larger sample sizes are needed. In summary, these two studies aid to elucidate the implications of ideomotor apraxia on traditional stroke rehabilitation efforts. Study subjects with ideomotor apraxia after acute stroke still derive benefit from traditional rehabilitation. Because traditional rehabilitation interventions narrowly target motor impairment, these findings support the need for considering IMA as a factor in developing interventions tailored to patients with IMA and possibly as a specific focus for interventions. A step toward addressing this need is to assess whether IMA is present after stroke on a regular basis. This work provides a framework for researchers and clinicians to investigate further how ideomotor apraxia translates into disability. These findings are important since consideration of ideomotor apraxia could influence selection and design of rehabilitation interventions to optimize patient daily functioning after stroke