Traumatic experience and the process of reconciliation

The paper present the results of the survey that was designed to examine attitudes towards reconciliation, traumatic experience, as well as some basic values, attitudes and stereotypes in two cities of the former Yugoslavia where the nationalities that were in conflict live together. The survey was conducted on 400 subjects in Vukovar (inhabited by Serbs and Croats) and 400 subjects in Prijedor (Serbs and Bosniaks). The results show that the level of traumatic experience, as a single variable, has no correlation with the readiness for reconciliation. On the other hand, in General Linear Model, best predictors of the readiness for reconciliation were attitudes and values represented by the factors “Non-Ethnocentric” and Non-Nationalistic/ Xenophobic”. Also, having friends among the “opposing” nationality and having positive experiences with the members of opposing national groups is highly related to a readiness for reconciliation. Finally, a belief in war crime trials, combined with a readiness to admit the war crimes among its own nationality, was a significant predictor of readiness for reconciliation

When there’s more than one elephant in the room:Interdisciplinary approaches to the study of language

This concise overview paper introduces the work done by the Out Of Our Minds research group at the University of Birmingham, highlighting the need for organic interdisciplinarity in contemporary language science. By summarizing two case studies, we underscore the need for compatible methodologies that address shared research objectives. Despite initial enthusiasm for a multidisciplinary approach to language in the 1950s, subsequent research efforts often remained confined within specific scientific traditions. Recently, however, we have been witnessing a resurgence of these foundational ideas. Crucially, Out Of Our Minds embodies a paradigm shift where linguists leverage rigorous operationalizations to test key theoretical notions, while psychologists broaden their understanding of empirical phenomena with ecological relevance and purposefulness. By synergizing the strengths of both disciplines, we advance our understanding of the complex and dynamic system of human language

Effects of proficiency and age of language acquisition on working memory performance in bilinguals

This study examined language proficiency and age of language acquisition influences on working memory performance in bilinguals. Bilingual subjects were administered reading span task in parallel versions for their first and second language. In Experiment 1, language proficiency effect was tested by examination of low and highly proficient second language speakers. In Experiment 2, age of language acquisition was examined by comparing the performance of proficient second language speakers who acquired second language either early or later in their lives. Both proficiency and age of language acquisition were found to affect bilingual working memory performance, and the proficiency effect was observed even at very high levels of language competence. The results support the notion of working memory as a domain that is influenced both by a general pool of resources and certain domain specific factors

On the nature and organisation of morphological categories:verbal aspect through the lens of associative learning

The process by which awareness and/or knowledge of linguistic categories arises from exposure to patterns in data alone, known as emergence, is the corner stone of usage-based approaches to language. The present paper zooms in on the types of patterns that language users may detect in the input to determine the content, and hence the nature, of the hypothesised morphological category of aspect.The large-scale corpus and computational studies we present focus on the morphological encoding of temporal information as exemplified by aspect (imperfective/perfective) in Polish. Aspect is so heavily grammaticalized that it is marked on every verb form, yielding the practice of positing infinitival verb pairs (‘do’ = ‘robićimpf/zrobićpf’) to represent a complete aspectual paradigm. As has been shown for nominal declension, however, aspectual usage appears uneven, with 90% of verbs strongly preferring one aspect over the other. This makes the theoretical aspectual paradigm in practice very gappy, triggering an acute sense of partialness in usage. Operationalising emergence as learnability, we simulate learning to use aspect from exposure with a computational implementation of the Rescorla-Wager rule of associative learning. We find that paradigmatic gappiness in usage does not diminish learnability; to the contrary, a very high prediction accuracy is achieved using as cues only the verb and its tense; contextual information does not further improve performance. Aspect emerges as a strongly lexical phenomenon. Hence, the question of cognitive reality of aspectual categories, as an example of morphological categories in general, should be reformulated to ask which continuous cues must be learned to enable categorisation of aspectual outcomes. We discuss how the gappiness of the paradigm plays a crucial role in this process, and how an iteratively learned, continuously developing association presents a possible mechanism by which language users process their experience of cue-outcome co-occurrences and learn to use morphological forms, without the need for abstractions

STABILITIY OF THE SYNTAGMATIC PROBABILITY DISTRIBUTIONS

The aim of the present study is to establish criteria for the optimal sizeof a corpus that can provide stable conditional probabilities of morphologicaland/or syntagmatic types. The optimality of corpus size is defined in terms ofthe smallest sample that generates probability distribution equal to distributionderived from the large sample that generates stable probabilities. The latterdistribution we refer to as “target distribution”. In order to establish theabove criteria we varied the sample size, the word sequence size (bigrams andtrigrams), sampling procedure (randomly chosen words and continuous text)and position of the target word in a sequence. The obtained distributions ofconditional probabilities derived from smaller samples have been correlatedwith target distributions. Sample size at which probability distribution reachesmaximal correlation (r=1) with the target distribution was taken as beingoptimal. The research was done on Corpus of Serbian language. In case ofbigrams the optimal sample size for random word selection is 65.000 words,and 281.000 words for trigrams. In contrast, continuous text sampling requiresmuch larger samples to reach stability: 810.000 words for bigrams and 868.000words for trigrams. The factors that caused these differences remain unclear andneed additional empirical investigation