The cognitive identity of a media culture carrier as a subject of education in the information society

The paper supports the idea that the growth of media education is based on the temporality of the topic as synchronization of communicative, cognitive demands on a person with dynamic changes of information reality. It is understandable that developing the necessary skills to be a carrier of modern culture is challenging, as the main threats posed by the deterioration of critical conditions for cognitive activity, the proliferation of communicative interaction models, and the complexity of media culture's semiotic systems fall within the purview of abilities like critical thinking, independent judgment of the quality of content, and safeguards against communication risks, among others. The modern subject of information activity's identified symptomatic cognitive characteristics point to the need for an urgent educational response, which includes the development of requirements and criteria for media literacy, a balanced approach to taking temporality into consideration, procedural thinking in terms of knowledge, memory, and self-identification. It is claimed that a key component of media education is acquiring the semantics, topology, and navigation of the fundamentals of audiovisual communication. The article focuses on how crucial it is for the educational system to respond comprehensively to the issues facing civilization brought on by the shift to the information society.The paper supports the idea that the growth of media education is based on the temporality of the topic as synchronization of communicative, cognitive demands on a person with dynamic changes of information reality. It is understandable that developing the necessary skills to be a carrier of modern culture is challenging, as the main threats posed by the deterioration of critical conditions for cognitive activity, the proliferation of communicative interaction models, and the complexity of media culture's semiotic systems fall within the purview of abilities like critical thinking, independent judgment of the quality of content, and safeguards against communication risks, among others. The modern subject of information activity's identified symptomatic cognitive characteristics point to the need for an urgent educational response, which includes the development of requirements and criteria for media literacy, a balanced approach to taking temporality into consideration, procedural thinking in terms of knowledge, memory, and self-identification. It is claimed that a key component of media education is acquiring the semantics, topology, and navigation of the fundamentals of audiovisual communication. The article focuses on how crucial it is for the educational system to respond comprehensively to the issues facing civilization brought on by the shift to the information society

Contextual diversity favors the learning of new words in children regardless of their comprehension skills

Available online 6 November 2021Recent research has shown the benefits of high contextual diversity, defined as the number of different contexts in which a word appears, when incidentally learning new words. These benefits have been found both in laboratory settings and in ecological settings such as the classroom during regular hours. To examine the nature of this effect in young readers aged 11–13 years, we analyzed whether these benefits are modulated by the individuals’ reading comprehension scores; that is, would better comprehenders benefit the most from contextual diversity? The manipulation of contextual diversity was done by inserting the novel words into three different contexts/topics, or into only one of them, while keeping constant their frequency of occurrence. Results showed that words encountered in different contexts were learned more effectively than those presented in the same context. More important, the effect of contextual diversity was similar regardless of the participants’ comprehension skills. We discuss the implications of these findings for models of word learning and the practical applications in curriculum design.Funding was provided by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation, and Universities (PSI2017- 86210-P)

Embodied creativity: a process continuum from artistic creation to creative participation

This thesis breaks new ground by attending to two contemporary developments in art and science. In art, computer-mediated interactive artworks comprise creative engagement between collaborating practitioners and a creatively participating audience, erasing all notions of a dividing line between them. The procedural character of this type of communicative real-time interaction replaces the concept of a finished artwork with a ‘field of artistic communication’. In science, the field of creativity research investigates creative thought as mental operations that combine and reorganise extant knowledge structures. A recent paradigm shift in cognition research acknowledges that cognition is embodied. Neither embodiment in cognition nor the ‘field of artistic communication’ in interactive art have been assimilated by creativity research. This thesis takes an interdisciplinary approach to examine the embodied cognitive processes in a ‘field of artistic communication’ using a media artwork called Sim-Suite as a case study research strategy. This interactive installation, created and exhibited in an authentic real-world context, engages three people to play on wobble-boards. The thesis argues that creative processes related to Sim-Suite operate within a continuum, encompassing collaborative artistic creation and cooperative creative participation. This continuum is investigated via mixed methods, conducting studies with qualitative and quantitative analysis. These are interpreted through a theoretical lens of embodied cognition principles, the 4E approaches. The results obtained demonstrate that embodied cognitive processes in Sim-Suite’s ‘field of artistic communication’ function on a continuum. We give an account of the creative process continuum relating our findings to the ‘embedded-extended-enactive lens’, empirical studies in embodied cognition and creativity research. Within this context a number of topics and sub-themes are identified. We discuss embodied communication, aspects of agency, forms of coordination, levels of evaluative processes and empathetic foundation. The thesis makes conceptual, empirical and methodological contributions to creativity research

Design revolutions: IASDR 2019 Conference Proceedings. Volume 3: People

In September 2019 Manchester School of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University was honoured to host the bi-annual conference of the International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR) under the unifying theme of DESIGN REVOLUTIONS. This was the first time the conference had been held in the UK. Through key research themes across nine conference tracks – Change, Learning, Living, Making, People, Technology, Thinking, Value and Voices – the conference opened up compelling, meaningful and radical dialogue of the role of design in addressing societal and organisational challenges. This Volume 3 includes papers from People track of the conference

Conceptualization and cognitive relativism on result in Mandarin Chinese: the case study of Mandarin Chinese bǎ construction using a cognitive and centering approach

This work adopts Langacker\u27s cognitive grammar approach and addresses the cognitive significance of result in Mandarin Chinese, as expressed in resultant construals in the Mandarin Chinese bă construction: X bă Y Z. I identify the semantic prime of result in Mandarin Chinese, and discuss its role in the resultative verbal compound construction, the V-de-EXT resultative construction, and the bèi construction, with particular focus on the bă construction. I provide evidence for the resultant nature of segment Z in the bă construction in (1) aspectual markers, (2) resultative suffixes, (3) resultative verbal compounds, (4) locative complements, (5) directional complements, (6) the double object gěi \u27give\u27 construction, (7) inalienable possession; (8) durative and frequentative markers; and (9) the regard predicate. I consider the semantic category of result in the Mandarin Chinese bă construction to be grounded in the conceptualization of the morpheme bă \u27to take, to hold.\u27 The manipulative sense of holding an object is transformed into a metaphorical resultative sense of holding a grammatical event. Comparisons with the English get/have + p.p. construction and the German inseparable prefixes reveal the shared cross-linguistic nature of agency and result. I utilize Grosz, Joshi, and Weinstein\u27s (1995) centering discourse approach to analyze the Mandarin Chinese bă construction X bă Y Z, and determine that segment Y is the backward-looking center. Prince\u27s assumed familiarity accounts for the cognitive constraints of segment Y. I ascribe the cognitive significance of result to the claim of construal differences. I apply cognitive relativism to pedagogical implications for SLA instruction of the Mandarin Chinese bă construction

Lexical simplification for the systematic support of cognitive accessibility guidelines

The Internet has come a long way in recent years, contributing to the proliferation of large volumes of digitally available information. Through user interfaces we can access these contents, however, they are not accessible to everyone. The main users affected are people with disabilities, who are already a considerable number, but accessibility barriers affect a wide range of user groups and contexts of use in accessing digital information. Some of these barriers are caused by language inaccessibility when texts contain long sentences, unusual words and complex linguistic structures. These accessibility barriers directly affect people with cognitive disabilities. For the purpose of making textual content more accessible, there are initiatives such as the Easy Reading guidelines, the Plain Language guidelines and some of the languagespecific Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). These guidelines provide documentation, but do not specify methods for meeting the requirements implicit in these guidelines in a systematic way. To obtain a solution, methods from the Natural Language Processing (NLP) discipline can provide support for achieving compliance with the cognitive accessibility guidelines for the language. The task of text simplification aims at reducing the linguistic complexity of a text from a syntactic and lexical perspective, the latter being the main focus of this Thesis. In this sense, one solution space is to identify in a text which words are complex or uncommon, and in the case that there were, to provide a more usual and simpler synonym, together with a simple definition, all oriented to people with cognitive disabilities. With this goal in mind, this Thesis presents the study, analysis, design and development of an architecture, NLP methods, resources and tools for the lexical simplification of texts for the Spanish language in a generic domain in the field of cognitive accessibility. To achieve this, each of the steps present in the lexical simplification processes is studied, together with methods for word sense disambiguation. As a contribution, different types of word embedding are explored and created, supported by traditional and dynamic embedding methods, such as transfer learning methods. In addition, since most of the NLP methods require data for their operation, a resource in the framework of cognitive accessibility is presented as a contribution.Internet ha avanzado mucho en los últimos años contribuyendo a la proliferación de grandes volúmenes de información disponible digitalmente. A través de interfaces de usuario podemos acceder a estos contenidos, sin embargo, estos no son accesibles a todas las personas. Los usuarios afectados principalmente son las personas con discapacidad siendo ya un número considerable, pero las barreras de accesibilidad afectan a un gran rango de grupos de usuarios y contextos de uso en el acceso a la información digital. Algunas de estas barreras son causadas por la inaccesibilidad al lenguaje cuando los textos contienen oraciones largas, palabras inusuales y estructuras lingüísticas complejas. Estas barreras de accesibilidad afectan directamente a las personas con discapacidad cognitiva. Con el fin de hacer el contenido textual más accesible, existen iniciativas como las pautas de Lectura Fácil, las pautas de Lenguaje Claro y algunas de las pautas de Accesibilidad al Contenido en la Web (WCAG) específicas para el lenguaje. Estas pautas proporcionan documentación, pero no especifican métodos para cumplir con los requisitos implícitos en estas pautas de manera sistemática. Para obtener una solución, los métodos de la disciplina del Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural (PLN) pueden dar un soporte para alcanzar la conformidad con las pautas de accesibilidad cognitiva relativas al lenguaje La tarea de la simplificación de textos del PLN tiene como objetivo reducir la complejidad lingüística de un texto desde una perspectiva sintáctica y léxica, siendo esta última el enfoque principal de esta Tesis. En este sentido, un espacio de solución es identificar en un texto qué palabras son complejas o poco comunes, y en el caso de que sí hubiera, proporcionar un sinónimo más usual y sencillo, junto con una definición sencilla, todo ello orientado a las personas con discapacidad cognitiva. Con tal meta, en esta Tesis, se presenta el estudio, análisis, diseño y desarrollo de una arquitectura, métodos PLN, recursos y herramientas para la simplificación léxica de textos para el idioma español en un dominio genérico en el ámbito de la accesibilidad cognitiva. Para lograr esto, se estudia cada uno de los pasos presentes en los procesos de simplificación léxica, junto con métodos para la desambiguación del sentido de las palabras. Como contribución, diferentes tipos de word embedding son explorados y creados, apoyados por métodos embedding tradicionales y dinámicos, como son los métodos de transfer learning. Además, debido a que gran parte de los métodos PLN requieren datos para su funcionamiento, se presenta como contribución un recurso en el marco de la accesibilidad cognitiva.Programa de Doctorado en Ciencia y Tecnología Informática por la Universidad Carlos III de MadridPresidente: José Antonio Macías Iglesias.- Secretario: Israel González Carrasco.- Vocal: Raquel Hervás Ballestero

The Syntax-Semantics Interface in the Production of Number Agreement: A Crosslinguistic Perspective

Agreement is a recurrent device in language which helps to add coherence in it. More in particular, number agreement (which constitutes the main focus of this thesis) is one of the most useful tools in language, and some form of it is present in the majority of the languages of the world. The present thesis’ aim is that of analyzing which are the inner (mental) mechanisms that lead to the resolution of number agreement in language. To this purpose, some potential forces have been analyzed, syntax and semantics being the most important ones. The literature on this topic has never reached a solid conclusion as regards the power exerted by each of the previously mentioned forces on the final resolution of agreement. Syntactocentric theories, as those exposed by Fodor (1983) and Chomsky (1995, 1999, 2001) among others, considered agreement as an encapsulated “phase” inserted within a purely morphosyntactic process in which semantics is completely absent. On the contrary, for cognitive grammar, agreement is deeply based on semantics and therefore this source of information cannot be disregarded (Pollard & Sag, 1988; Barlow, 1999; Vigliocco et al., 1996; Thornton & MacDonald, 2003; Haskell & MacDonald, 2003). Therefore, this thesis tries to shed some light on this debate by presenting some experimental research (based on language errors) in which (a priori) semantic variables such as emotionality or concreteness have been manipulated in a series of experimental tests in order to ascertain to what extent were they responsible for the final resolution of agreement marks. In addition, these tests were carried out in two structurally different languages (Spanish and English). The ultimate aim of this comparison was that of observing how two different morphological systems lead to two opposing agreement systems in which different forces are responsible for the final resolution of agreement marks