An overview of the involvement of women in fisheries activities in Oceania

Role of women, Fisheries, Oceania,

Implicit and explicit body representations

Several forms of perception require that sensory information be referenced to representations of the size and shape of the body. This requirement is especially acute in somatosensation in which the main receptor surface (i.e., the skin) is itself coextensive with the body. In this paper I will review recent research investigating the body representations underlying somatosensory information processing, including abilities such as tactile localisation, tactile size perception, and position sense. These representations show remarkably large and stereotyped distortions of represented body size and shape. Intriguingly, these distortions appear to mirror distortions characteristic of somatosensory maps, though in attenuated form. In contrast, when asked to make overt judgments about perceived body form, participants are generally quite accurate. This pattern of results suggests that higher-level somatosensory processing relies on a class of implicit body representation, distinct from the conscious body image. I discuss the implications of these results for understanding the nature of body representation and the factors which influence it

An Examination of Celtic Craft and the Creative Consciousness as a Contribution to Marketing Creativity

Examination of the Celtic craft sector identifies a creative form of marketing which has its foundations in imagination, intuition and innovation, rather than the linear prescriptions of formal marketing frameworks and language which still dominate contemporary marketing management texts. The creative marketing competencies identified in the sector are also grounded within a wider creative marketing paradigm where experimental forms of marketing are encouraged, postmodern ideals are embraced and artistic philosophy and practice encouraged. The controlled Saxon influenced Marketing Establishment is challenged by the freer, more creative fringe of Celtic marketing as the avant garde

Landholder Typologies Used in the Development of Natural Resource Management Programs in Australia - A Review

This article reviews the literature on the identification of landholder typologies that can be used to assist the design and delivery of natural resource management (NRM) programs. Australian researchers have developed typologies of landholders based on a variety of criteria. The rationale for developing landholder typologies is first discussed before reviewing the various approaches that have been used by Australian researchers and comparing their findings. The methods employed have differed according to the theories used to guide the research and the 'clients' or 'sponsors' of the research. The landholder types they describe, however, have a number of similarities. These similarities suggest that the studies have identified the same fundamental divisions in the rural community, and that it may be possible to integrate landholder typologies for a variety of NRM and non-NRM applications. It is concluded that further research could usefully investigate whether concepts of social class or sub-cultures may be appropriate to define and describe the variations in landholder types

Learning and Long-Term Retention of Large-Scale Artificial Languages

Recovering discrete words from continuous speech is one of the first challenges facing language learners. Infants and adults can make use of the statistical structure of utterances to learn the forms of words from unsegmented input, suggesting that this ability may be useful for bootstrapping language-specific cues to segmentation. It is unknown, however, whether performance shown in small-scale laboratory demonstrations of “statistical learning” can scale up to allow learning of the lexicons of natural languages, which are orders of magnitude larger. Artificial language experiments with adults can be used to test whether the mechanisms of statistical learning are in principle scalable to larger lexicons. We report data from a large-scale learning experiment that demonstrates that adults can learn words from unsegmented input in much larger languages than previously documented and that they retain the words they learn for years. These results suggest that statistical word segmentation could be scalable to the challenges of lexical acquisition in natural language learning.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (NSF DDRIG #0746251

Long-term associative learning predicts verbal short-term memory performance

Studies using tests such as digit span and nonword repetition have implicated short-term memory across a range of developmental domains. Such tests ostensibly assess specialized processes for the short-term manipulation and maintenance of information that are often argued to enable long-term learning. However, there is considerable evidence for an influence of long-term linguistic learning on performance in short-term memory tasks that brings into question the role of a specialized short-term memory system separate from long-term knowledge. Using natural language corpora, we show experimentally and computationally that performance on three widely used measures of short-term memory (digit span, nonword repetition, and sentence recall) can be predicted from simple associative learning operating on the linguistic environment to which a typical child may have been exposed. The findings support the broad view that short-term verbal memory performance reflects the application of long-term language knowledge to the experimental setting

Interactive Language Learning by Robots: The Transition from Babbling to Word Forms

The advent of humanoid robots has enabled a new approach to investigating the acquisition of language, and we report on the development of robots able to acquire rudimentary linguistic skills. Our work focuses on early stages analogous to some characteristics of a human child of about 6 to 14 months, the transition from babbling to first word forms. We investigate one mechanism among many that may contribute to this process, a key factor being the sensitivity of learners to the statistical distribution of linguistic elements. As well as being necessary for learning word meanings, the acquisition of anchor word forms facilitates the segmentation of an acoustic stream through other mechanisms. In our experiments some salient one-syllable word forms are learnt by a humanoid robot in real-time interactions with naive participants. Words emerge from random syllabic babble through a learning process based on a dialogue between the robot and the human participant, whose speech is perceived by the robot as a stream of phonemes. Numerous ways of representing the speech as syllabic segments are possible. Furthermore, the pronunciation of many words in spontaneous speech is variable. However, in line with research elsewhere, we observe that salient content words are more likely than function words to have consistent canonical representations; thus their relative frequency increases, as does their influence on the learner. Variable pronunciation may contribute to early word form acquisition. The importance of contingent interaction in real-time between teacher and learner is reflected by a reinforcement process, with variable success. The examination of individual cases may be more informative than group results. Nevertheless, word forms are usually produced by the robot after a few minutes of dialogue, employing a simple, real-time, frequency dependent mechanism. This work shows the potential of human-robot interaction systems in studies of the dynamics of early language acquisition

The Faces in Infant-Perspective Scenes Change over the First Year of Life

Mature face perception has its origins in the face experiences of infants. However, little is known about the basic statistics of faces in early visual environments. We used head cameras to capture and analyze over 72,000 infant-perspective scenes from 22 infants aged 1-11 months as they engaged in daily activities. The frequency of faces in these scenes declined markedly with age: for the youngest infants, faces were present 15 minutes in every waking hour but only 5 minutes for the oldest infants. In general, the available faces were well characterized by three properties: (1) they belonged to relatively few individuals; (2) they were close and visually large; and (3) they presented views showing both eyes. These three properties most strongly characterized the face corpora of our youngest infants and constitute environmental constraints on the early development of the visual system

Methods for Minimizing the Confounding Effects of Word Length in the Analysis of Phonotactic Probability and Neighborhood Density

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The original is available at http://jslhr.pubs.asha.org/article.aspx?articleid=1781521&resultClick=3Recent research suggests that phonotactic probability (the likelihood of occurrence of a sound sequence) and neighborhood density (the number of words phonologically similar to a given word) influence spoken language processing and acquisition across the lifespan in both normal and clinical populations. The majority of research in this area has tended to focus on controlled laboratory studies rather than naturalistic data such as spontaneous speech samples or elicited probes. One difficulty in applying current measures of phonotactic probability and neighborhood density to more naturalistic samples is the significant correlation between these variables and word length. This study examines several alternative transformations of phonotactic probability and neighborhood density as a means of reducing or eliminating this correlation with word length. Computational analyses of the words in a large database and reanalysis of archival data supported the use of z scores for the analysis of phonotactic probability as a continuous variable and the use of median transformation scores for the analysis of phonotactic probability as a dichotomous variable. Neighborhood density results were less clear with the conclusion that analysis of neighborhood density as a continuous variable warrants further investigation to differentiate the utility of z scores in comparison to median transformation scores. Furthermore, balanced dichotomous coding of neighborhood density was difficult to achieve, suggesting that analysis of neighborhood density as a dichotomous variable should be approached with caution. Recommendations for future application and analyses are discussed