Determinants of Parental Guidance of Children\u27s Television Viewing for a Special Subgroup: Mass Media Scholars

This study examines the level and nature of parental guidance regarding television exercised by mass media scholars. It also focuses on the relationship of that guidance to beliefs the scholars hold about the effects of television, to characteristics of their scholarship, and to basic demographic information

Music Therapists and Work: Experiences of Occupational Oppression in the Profession of Music Therapy

Occupational oppression is a system of invisible barriers created by those in power that reduces the professional’s ability to perform work at the highest level. Barriers result from a combination of beliefs related to the value or worth of set occupations and their members. Occupational oppression is based on the assumption that certain professions are inherently superior or inferior. Barriers result from a combination of beliefs related to the value or worth of set occupations and their members. Oppressive experiences have been described within music therapy literature on burnout. However, the phenomenon of occupational oppression has not been explored within the profession of music therapy. The purpose of this mixed-method study was to establish and describe the phenomenon of occupational oppression within the profession of music therapy. Experiences of oppression were described using Young’s five categories of oppression – marginalization, cultural imperialism, exploitation, violence, and powerlessness (1990). Participants, 634 currently practicing board-certified music therapists, completed an online survey that was comprised of multiple choice, Likert-scale, and short-answer questions. Results support the existence of occupational oppression within the profession of music therapy. A majority of participants identified as having experienced oppression within their workplaces (56%) and identified the profession as being oppressed (76.6%). All of Young’s five categories of oppression (1990) were reported within participants’ responses. Forms of cultural imperialism were described most frequently, followed by marginalization, exploitation, powerlessness, and violence. Descriptions of experienced oppression occurred both in respondents who did and did not identify as having experienced oppression, suggesting that music therapists may have difficulty labeling oppressive experiences. Acknowledging occupational oppression within the profession of music therapy may be a critical first step towards developing solutions to improve workplace experiences for music therapists

El desarrollo larvario de Sabellastarte spectabilis (Grube, 1878) (Polychaeta: Sabellidae) en Hawaii

The sabellid polychaete Sabellastarte spectabilis is common in bays and harbours throughout Hawaii. It has become one of the most harvested marine ornamental species in the State. Collection can be difficult and potentially damaging to the reef community. Understanding the reproduction and life history of this polychaete will benefit the marine ornamental trade by facilitating aquaculture of the species and coral reef conservation by decreasing destructive collecting practices. There is very little known about the biology of this species. Experiments were conducted at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology to induce and document spawning and larval development. Oocytes range between 150-200 µm in diameter and sperm have spherical heads. Cell division in fertilized eggs begins approximately twenty minutes after spawning. Developmental stages were documented using light and scanning electron microscopy. Swimming larvae are first seen 7-8 h after spawning. Larvae have a well-developed prototroch and a less conspicuous neurotroch and metatroch. Two chaetigers develop sequentially on days 4 and 5 and settlement occurs 6-7 days after spawning. Metamorphosis occurs gradually from days 6-8. This is the first reported induction of spawning and description of larval development from fertilized egg to settlement and metamorphosis for this species.El poliqueto sabélido Sabellastarte spectabilis es común en bahías y puertos de Hawaii. Este sabélido ha llegado a ser una de las especies ornamentales marinas más recolectadas en el estado, pero su recolección es difícil y en muchos casos ocasiona daño a la comunidad arrecifal. Pese a ello, el conocimiento sobre su biología es escaso. El estudio de la reproducción y ciclo de vida de estos sabélidos facilitará su cultivo y beneficiará al mercado de especies ornamentales, a la vez que la diminución de la recogida destructiva se espera pueda contribuir a la conservación de los arrecifes coralinos. En el Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology se realizaron algunos experimentos con la finalidad de inducir y documentar su reproducción y desarrollo larvario. Los huevos miden entre 150-200 μm de diámetro y los espermatozoos presentan cabezas redondas. La división celular de huevos fertilizados comienza aproximadamente 20 minutos después del desove. Los estadios larvarios se documentaron con microscopios de luz y microscopia electrónico de barrido. Las primeras larvas aparecen 7-8 horas después del desove. Las larvas tienen una prototroca muy bien desarrollada y una neurotroca y metatroca menos conspicua. Entre los días 4 y 5 se desarrollan dos setígeros y el reclutamiento ocurrió 6-7 días después del desove. La metamorfosis ocurre gradualmente entre los días 6-8. Este estudio describe por primera vez la inducción del desove y la descripción del desarrollo larvario desde la fertilización del huevo hasta el establecimiento y metamorfosis de la especie. &nbsp

University of Texas bulletin

Report published in a scientific bulletin, describing the Lytton Springs oil fields

The source ambiguity problem: Distinguishing the effects of grammar and processing on acceptability judgments

Judgments of linguistic unacceptability may theoretically arise from either grammatical deviance or significant processing difficulty. Acceptability data are thus naturally ambiguous in theories that explicitly distinguish formal and functional constraints. Here, we consider this source ambiguity problem in the context of Superiority effects: the dispreference for ordering a wh-phrase in front of a syntactically “superior” wh-phrase in multiple wh-questions, e.g., What did who buy? More specifically, we consider the acceptability contrast between such examples and so-called D-linked examples, e.g., Which toys did which parents buy? Evidence from acceptability and self-paced reading experiments demonstrates that (i) judgments and processing times for Superiority violations vary in parallel, as determined by the kind of wh-phrases they contain, (ii) judgments increase with exposure, while processing times decrease, (iii) reading times are highly predictive of acceptability judgments for the same items, and (iv) the effects of the complexity of the wh-phrases combine in both acceptability judgments and reading times. This evidence supports the conclusion that D-linking effects are likely reducible to independently motivated cognitive mechanisms whose effects emerge in a wide range of sentence contexts. This in turn suggests that Superiority effects, in general, may owe their character to differential processing difficulty

Putting underspecification in context: ERP evidence for sparse representations in morphophonological alternations

Numerous studies have shown evidence for a sparse lexicon in speech perception, often in the guise of underspecification, where certain information is omitted in the specification of phonological forms. While previous work has made a good case for underspecifying certain features of single speech sounds, the role of phonological context in underspecification has been overlooked. Contextually-mediated underspecification is particularly relevant to conceptualizations of the lexicon, as it is couched in item-specific (as opposed to phoneme-specific) patterning. In this study, we present behavioural and ERP evidence that surrounding phonological context may trigger underspecified lexical forms, using regular morphophonological alternations in English

Utterance Selection Model of Language Change

We present a mathematical formulation of a theory of language change. The theory is evolutionary in nature and has close analogies with theories of population genetics. The mathematical structure we construct similarly has correspondences with the Fisher-Wright model of population genetics, but there are significant differences. The continuous time formulation of the model is expressed in terms of a Fokker-Planck equation. This equation is exactly soluble in the case of a single speaker and can be investigated analytically in the case of multiple speakers who communicate equally with all other speakers and give their utterances equal weight. Whilst the stationary properties of this system have much in common with the single-speaker case, time-dependent properties are richer. In the particular case where linguistic forms can become extinct, we find that the presence of many speakers causes a two-stage relaxation, the first being a common marginal distribution that persists for a long time as a consequence of ultimate extinction being due to rare fluctuations.Comment: 21 pages, 17 figure

Morphological variation and sensitivity to frequency of forms among native speakers of Czech

This article looks at inter-speaker variation in two environments: the genitive and locative singular cases of masculine ‘hard inanimate’ nouns in Czech, using a large-scale survey of native speakers that used two tasks to test their preferences for certain forms (acceptability) and their choices (gap filling). Our hypothesis that such variation exists was upheld, but only within limited parameters. Most biographical data (age, gender, education) played no role in respondents’ choices or preferences. Their region of origin played a small but significant role, although not the one expected. Relating the two types of tasks to each other, we found that respondents’ use of the ratings scale did not correlate to their choice of forms, but their overall strength of preference for one form over another did correlate with their choices. Inter-speaker variation does thus go some way to explaining the persistent diversity in this paradigm and arguably may contribute to its maintenance

Distinguishing underlying and surface variation patterns in speech perception

This study examines the relationship between patterns of variation and speech perception using two English prefixes: “in-”/“im-” and “un-”. In natural speech, “in-” varies due to an underlying process of phonological assimilation, while “un-” shows a pattern of surface variation, assimilating before labial stems. In a go/no-go lexical decision experiment, subjects were presented a set of “mispronounced” stimuli in which the prefix nasal was altered (replacing [n] with [m], or vice versa), in addition to real words with unaltered prefixes. No significant differences between prefixes were found in responses to unaltered words. In mispronounced items, responses to “un-” forms were faster and more accurate than to “in-” forms, although a significant interaction mitigated this effect in labial contexts. These results suggest the regularity of variation patterns has consequences for the lexical specification of words, and argues against radical underspecification accounts which argue for a maximally sparse lexicon