Name Strategy: Its Existence and Implications

It is argued that colour name strategy, object name strategy, and chunking strategy in memory are all aspects of the same general phenomena, called stereotyping, and this in turn is an example of a know-how representation. Such representations are argued to have their origin in a principle called the minimum duplication of resources. For most the subsequent discussions existence of colour name strategy suffices. It is pointed out that the Berlin†- Kay† universal partial ordering of colours and the frequency of traffic accidents classified by colour are surprisingly similar; a detailed analysis is not carried out as the specific colours recorded are not identical. Some consequences of the existence of a name strategy for the philosophy of language and mathematics are discussed: specifically it is argued that in accounts of truth and meaning it is necessary throughout to use real numbers as opposed to bi-valent quantities; and also that the concomitant label associated with sentences should not be of unconditional truth, but rather several real-valued quantities associated with visual communication. The implication of real-valued truth quantities is that the Continuum Hypothesis of pure mathematics is side-stepped, because real valued quantities occur ab initio. The existence of name strategy shows that thought/sememes and talk/phonemes can be separate, and this vindicates the assumption of thought occurring before talk used in psycho-linguistic speech production models.

A psychometric measure of working memory capacity for configured body movement.

Working memory (WM) models have traditionally assumed at least two domain-specific storage systems for verbal and visuo-spatial information. We review data that suggest the existence of an additional slave system devoted to the temporary storage of body movements, and present a novel instrument for its assessment: the movement span task. The movement span task assesses individuals' ability to remember and reproduce meaningless configurations of the body. During the encoding phase of a trial, participants watch short videos of meaningless movements presented in sets varying in size from one to five items. Immediately after encoding, they are prompted to reenact as many items as possible. The movement span task was administered to 90 participants along with standard tests of verbal WM, visuo-spatial WM, and a gesture classification test in which participants judged whether a speaker's gestures were congruent or incongruent with his accompanying speech. Performance on the gesture classification task was not related to standard measures of verbal or visuo-spatial working memory capacity, but was predicted by scores on the movement span task. Results suggest the movement span task can serve as an assessment of individual differences in WM capacity for body-centric information

Symbols and the bifurcation between procedural and conceptual thinking

Symbols occupy a pivotal position between processes to be carried out and concepts to be thought about. They allow us both to d o mathematical problems and to think about mathematical relationships. In this presentation we consider the discontinuities that occur in the learning path taken by different students, leading to a divergence between conceptual and procedural thinking. Evidence will be given from several different contexts in the development of symbols through arithmetic, algebra and calculus, then on to the formalism of axiomatic mathematics. This is taken from a number of research studies recently performed for doctoral dissertations at the University of Warwick by students from the USA, Malaysia, Cyprus and Brazil, with data collected in the USA, Malaysia and the United Kingdom. All the studies form part of a broad investigation into why some students succeed yet others fail

Detecting Cognitive Load during Working Memory Tasks utilizing a Digitizer Tablet

The purpose of this line of research is to determine whether the ‘Digitizer’ is a reliable and valid way to measure cognitive load during dual working memory-drawing tasks. A quasi-experimental study was conducted at the University of Arkansas in a research laboratory, and participants included seven right-handed healthy adults with normal or corrected vision and no reading difficulty. The participants were selected on a volunteer basis. The study required participants to draw circles while continuously performing in three conditions – one baseline and two working memory experimental tasks, administered in counterbalanced order. The baseline task was to read an 8th grade level passage at comfortable speed and loudness level. The working memory tasks were symmetry span and operation span tasks. The operation span task required the participants to remember letters in sequence while simultaneously verifying arithmetic operations presented after each letter. The symmetry span task required participants to remember the position of the highlighted square in a grid in sequence while simultaneously determining the symmetricity of a figure presented afterwards. Both tasks were completed while drawing continuous circles on the ‘Digitizer’. A separate repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted for each measure. A significant omnibus effect was found for the stroke duration measure only. Post-hoc paired tests showed that baseline was higher (p=.01) in stroke duration than in operation span task and symmetry span task. In this literature review, the results and elements of the study are described in full to inform future research. It was initially assumed that the working memory load would be significantly less in the baseline task as compared to the two working memory tasks; however, the data alternatively indicated that it taxed working memory more. With reading comprehension as a reference condition, it is logical to conclude that there is evidence of cognitive load in working memory tasks as measured by manual disfluencies. This literature review outlines potential adaptations and highlights primary weaknesses for future study in this area

Systematic evaluation of perceived spatial quality

The evaluation of perceived spatial quality calls for a method that is sensitive to changes in the constituent dimensions of that quality. In order to devise a method accounting for these changes, several processes have to be performed. This paper shows the development of scales by elicitation and structuring of verbal data, followed by validation of the resulting attribute scales

Beyond definition: Organising semantic information in bilingual dictionaries

This paper considers the process of organising semantic information in bilingual dictionaries with diachronic coverage, from selecting the textual source-material to designing the entries. The discussion centres on practical aspects of ancient Greek lexicography. First, the traditional semantic frameworks are described. Then, more recent approaches are noted, notably those of Adrados and of Chadwick, both of which aim to integrate contextual data within a semantic framework. Since the relevance of contextual information varies with lemma part of speech, different configurations are required for entries describing nouns, adjectives, and verbs. These are illustrated by three entries from a Greek-English dictionary currently being written at Cambridge. In order to organise data to this level of specificity, stylistic templates are indispensable, and digital software provides a means of providing them. However, systems designed for writing new dictionaries require different features from those designed for encoding pre-existing texts. A description is given of how the lexicographic requirements of the Cambridge dictionary were met by a user-designed system

The co-evolution of number concepts and counting words

Humans possess a number concept that differs from its predecessors in animal cognition in two crucial respects: (1) it is based on a numerical sequence whose elements are not confined to quantitative contexts, but can indicate cardinal/quantitative as well as ordinal and even nominal properties of empirical objects (e.g. ‘five buses’: cardinal; ‘the fifth bus’: ordinal; ‘the #5 bus’: nominal), and (2) it can involve recursion and, via recursion, discrete infinity. In contrast to that, the predecessors of numerical cognition that we find in animals and human infants rely on finite and iconic representations that are limited to cardinality and do not support a unified concept of number. In this paper, I argue that the way such a unified number concept could evolve in humans is via verbal sequences that are employed as numerical tools, that is, sequences of words whose elements are associated with empirical objects in number assignments. In particular, I show that a certain kind of number words, namely the counting sequences of natural languages, can be characterised as a central instance of verbal numerical tools. I describe a possible scenario for the emergence of such verbal numerical tools in human history that starts from iconic roots and that suggests that in a process of co-evolution, the gradual emergence of counting sequences and the development of an increasingly comprehensive number concept supported each other. On this account, it is language that opened the way for numerical cognition, suggesting that it is no accident that the same species that possesses the language faculty as a unique trait, should also be the one that developed a systematic concept of number

Semantic access in number word translation - The role of crosslingual lexical similarity

The revised hierarchical model of bilingualism (e.g., Kroll & Stewart, 1994) assumes that second language (1,2) words primarily access semantics through their first language (L1) translation equivalents. Consequently, backward translation from L2 to L1 should not imply semantic access but occurs through lexical wordform associations. However, recent research with Dutch-French bilinguals showed that both backward and forward translation of number words yields a semantic number magnitude effect (Duyck & Brysbaert, 2004), providing evidence for strong form-to-meaning mappings of L2 number words. In two number-word translation experiments with Dutch-English-German trilinguals, the present study investigated whether semantic access in L1-L2 and L1-L3 number-word translation depends on lexical similarity of the languages involved. We found that backward translation from these more similar language pairs to L1 still yields a semantic magnitude effect, whereas forward translation does not, in contrast with the Dutch-French results of Duyck and Brysbaert (2004). We argue against a dual route model of word translation and suggest that the degree of semantic activation in translation depends on lexical form overlap between translation equivalents