Degree of explanation

Partial explanations are everywhere. That is, explanations citing causes that explain some but not all of an effect are ubiquitous across science, and these in turn rely on the notion of degree of explanation. I argue that current accounts are seriously deficient. In particular, they do not incorporate adequately the way in which a cause’s explanatory importance varies with choice of explanandum. Using influential recent contrastive theories, I develop quantitative definitions that remedy this lacuna, and relate it to existing measures of degree of causation. Among other things, this reveals the precise role here of chance, as well as bearing on the relation between causal explanation and causation itself

Formant transitions in fricative identification: The role of native fricative inventory

The distribution of energy across the noise spectrum provides the primary cues for the identification of a fricative. Formant transitions have been reported to play a role in identification of some fricatives, but the combined results so far are conflicting. We report five experiments testing the hypothesis that listeners differ in their use of formant transitions as a function of the presence of spectrally similar fricatives in their native language. Dutch, English, German, Polish, and Spanish native listeners performed phoneme monitoring experiments with pseudowords containing either coherent or misleading formant transitions for the fricatives / s / and / f /. Listeners of German and Dutch, both languages without spectrally similar fricatives, were not affected by the misleading formant transitions. Listeners of the remaining languages were misled by incorrect formant transitions. In an untimed labeling experiment both Dutch and Spanish listeners provided goodness ratings that revealed sensitivity to the acoustic manipulation. We conclude that all listeners may be sensitive to mismatching information at a low auditory level, but that they do not necessarily take full advantage of all available systematic acoustic variation when identifying phonemes. Formant transitions may be most useful for listeners of languages with spectrally similar fricatives

Mechanisms and Difference-Making

I argue that difference-making should be a crucial element for evaluating the quality of evidence for mechanisms, especially with respect to the robustness of mechanisms, and that it should take central stage when it comes to the general role played by mechanisms in establishing causal claims in medicine. The difference- making of mechanisms should provide additional compelling reasons to accept the gist of Russo-Williamson thesis and include mechanisms in the protocols for Evidence- Based Medicine (EBM), as the EBM+ research group has been advocatin

SOCIAL CONSTRAINTS ON ADULT LANGUAGE LEARNING

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/73181/1/j.1749-6632.1981.tb42015.x.pd

Feature integration in natural language concepts

Two experiments measured the joint influence of three key sets of semantic features on the frequency with which artifacts (Experiment 1) or plants and creatures (Experiment 2) were categorized in familiar categories. For artifacts, current function outweighed both originally intended function and current appearance. For biological kinds, appearance and behavior, an inner biological function, and appearance and behavior of offspring all had similarly strong effects on categorization. The data were analyzed to determine whether an independent cue model or an interactive model best accounted for how the effects of the three feature sets combined. Feature integration was found to be additive for artifacts but interactive for biological kinds. In keeping with this, membership in contrasting artifact categories tended to be superadditive, indicating overlapping categories, whereas for biological kinds, it was subadditive, indicating conceptual gaps between categories. It is argued that the results underline a key domain difference between artifact and biological concepts

The Search for Invariance: Repeated Positive Testing Serves the Goals of Causal Learning

Positive testing is characteristic of exploratory behavior, yet it seems to be at odds with the aim of information seeking. After all, repeated demonstrations of one’s current hypothesis often produce the same evidence and fail to distinguish it from potential alternatives. Research on the development of scientific reasoning and adult rule learning have both documented and attempted to explain this behavior. The current chapter reviews this prior work and introduces a novel theoretical account—the Search for Invariance (SI) hypothesis—which suggests that producing multiple positive examples serves the goals of causal learning. This hypothesis draws on the interventionist framework of causal reasoning, which suggests that causal learners are concerned with the invariance of candidate hypotheses. In a probabilistic and interdependent causal world, our primary goal is to determine whether, and in what contexts, our causal hypotheses provide accurate foundations for inference and intervention—not to disconfirm their alternatives. By recognizing the central role of invariance in causal learning, the phenomenon of positive testing may be reinterpreted as a rational information-seeking strategy

American or British? L2 speakers’ recognition and evaluations of accent features in English

Recent language attitude research has attended to the processes involved in identifying and evaluating spoken language varieties. This article investigates the ability of second-language learners of English in Spain (N=71) to identify Received Pronunciation (RP) and General American (GenAm) and their perceptions of linguistic variation between these speech varieties. Data were gathered using a verbal-guise experiment in which respondents identified speakers’ places of origin and stated the reasons for their categorisations. Quantitative data analysis demonstrated high recognition rates for RP speakers, more often correctly identified than GenAm speakers. Qualitative data analysis showed that respondents’ knowledge of phonological variation informed the identification process and they often stated which linguistic features formed part of their mental representations of RP and GenAm. Additional resources informed accent recognition, including perceived linguistic quality, intelligibility, familiarity, and cultural associations. Patterns of misidentification revealed that, when GenAm was inaccurately identified as RP, it was ascribed high status. The findings provide an insight into the strategies, conceptual frameworks, and linguistic features which inform the accent identification process as performed by English-language learners in Spain. The results also highlight the usefulness of variety recognition items in interpreting attitudinal evaluations, especially with regard to patterns of misidentification