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

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

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

A learning perspective on the emergence of abstractions:the curious case of phonemes

In the present paper we use a range of modeling techniques to investigate whether an abstract phone could emerge from exposure to speech sounds. In effect, the study represents an attempt for operationalize a theoretical device of Usage-based Linguistics of emergence of an abstraction from language use. Our quest focuses on the simplest of such hypothesized abstractions. We test two opposing principles regarding the development of language knowledge in linguistically untrained language users: Memory-Based Learning (MBL) and Error-Correction Learning (ECL). A process of generalization underlies the abstractions linguists operate with, and we probed whether MBL and ECL could give rise to a type of language knowledge that resembles linguistic abstractions. Each model was presented with a significant amount of pre-processed speech produced by one speaker. We assessed the consistency or stability of what these simple models have learned and their ability to give rise to abstract categories. Both types of models fare differently with regard to these tests. We show that ECL models can learn abstractions and that at least part of the phone inventory and grouping into traditional types can be reliably identified from the input.Comment: 36 page