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This paper addresses the necessary complementarity between a translanguaging and named language-perspective by critically examining risks of 'overshooting' when a translanguaging view is theoretically posited as the ultimately superior (sociolinguistic) theory of language use and learning in today's multilingual world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has long been customary to refer to Lacan's theory of the four discourses as a theory of four specific forms of social link. An understanding of each of the terms in question, however – both 'discourse' and 'social link' – must be developed in its own right in order to develop a fuller understanding of the meaning of this formula. In this essay, we will explore the employment of the term 'social link' in the work of Émile Durkheim and Ferdinand de Saussure, in an effort to better grasp the manner in which Lacan can be understood to have drawn from each. By clarifying the understanding of the term 'social link 'that was operative in Lacan's work, we can restore the centrality of the sociological influence upon Lacan, which has important implications both conceptually and clinically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several conceptual and linguistic conventions in Portuguese Sociology are grounded on gendered exclusions and stereotypes which can skew knowledge and reinforce inequalities. In this article, I problematise some of those conventions, analysing their scientific effects and demonstrating their potential impacts on participants and society. Arguing that it is urgent to reflect consciously and critically on the construction of gender within Sociology in Portugal, I draw on insights from feminist critiques to propose strategies that can be applied by sociologists across all areas of expertise to think and write about gender in a more reflexive, rigorous and responsible way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An editorial is presented that discusses the topic of critical theory as a post-Marxist discourse, which is a type of academic thought that aims to analyze and question the structures and discourses of power in various areas of society and encompasses interdisciplinary thinkers from cultural studies, linguistics, sociology, philosophy, psychoanalytic critiques.

Linguistic repertoire is regarded as one of the foundational concepts of sociolinguistics but despite its prominence during the early years of the discipline, it is commonly believed that for decades scant theoretical development on repertoire occurred. This situation is seen to change in the early 2000s when several (Northern) researchers increasingly advocated that linguistic repertoire could be more productive to theorize contemporary communicative practices than language. In this paper, I aim to foreground the South/North entanglements in the coinage and development of linguistic repertoire and present erased, forgotten, or obscured parts of the linguistic repertoire story. I show how Southern thinkers, both linguists and non-linguists came up with precursors to the way in which repertoires are currently conceptualized. By presenting this obscured narrative from the South, I want to offer critical questions about the trajectories of concepts and the kind of knowledge that gets excluded by the sidelining of Southern thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of computational methods and rich textual data has spawned a series of studies that map the contours of academic knowledge produced in various fields. However, while many fields span academic cultures, studies have neglected disciplinary dynamics that may be especially useful for understanding knowledge production in fields with subject matter that is the central focus of a core discipline. We study the knowledge reflected in doctoral dissertations of multiple disciplines that constitute the broader field of linguistics from 1980 to 2010 to produce a novel intellectual topography that reveals linguistics' disciplinary core, which we analyze with respect to theory on disciplinary differences and identity. Using natural language processing, we identify and note trends of how language is used with respect to different disciplines in the field. The topography shows how linguistics' core—language that is distinctively used by the discipline of linguistics— gravitates toward theoretically abstract topics constituted largely by the language of syntax and other topics that reflect hard, pure knowledge. We find that higher-status STEM disciplines in the field are more likely to engage with the core over time than lower-status social science, behavioral science, and humanities disciplines that show no significant engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Child marriage is a problem that has continued to attract global attention. The media have been identified as critical to the fight against the scourge as it discusses the capacity to raise awareness of the issue as well as trigger action in solving the problem. The report of the alleged abduction of a minor, Ese Oruru by one Yunusa Dahiru for marriage jolted the nation and sparked public outcry for her release. This study explored newspaper framing of the incident. Drawing from qualitative frame analysis, it examined how Punch and Daily Trust newspapers framed the alleged abduction saga. The study found that there was contrastive framing of the incident with Punch newspaper portraying the issue as abduction while Daily Trust newspaper depicted it as elopement. The influence of socio-cultural leanings of these papers on the contrastive framing is discussed. The implication of the divergent framing of the saga on the fight against child marriage is highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports that Macrosyntax is a label that in a transparent way wants to name an existing field in any type of linguistic message in any discourse that of the existing units and relationships beyond the sentence level which allow to understand the structure and configuration of The texts. Topics include examines without them the syntax is diminished and before a macrogrammar since the syntagmatic encompasses the entire message communicated.

This paper provides a geolinguistic analysis of family language use in Taiwan, based on the census carried out in 2010 by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (Executive Yuan, Republic of China - Taiwan). We present four maps for this study, displaying the distribution of the three main native languages, the spreading of Mandarin, the relatively dominant languages in Taiwan, and an overview of the distribution of languages in Taiwan. We then proceed to a comparative analysis. We hope this study can contribute to both the linguistic sociology and linguistic geography of Taiwan and provide a scientific basis for language regionalization and compartmentalization in the language planning of Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article revisits Saussure's work by highlighting the importance of his reflections on social matters, as well as his decisive role in the transformation of social theory. Specifically, it shows how Saussure lay the foundations for the passage from Durkheimian functionalism to structuralism and poststructuralism. For this purpose, we analyze his under-explored conceptions about social topics and reconstruct his hypotheses about language as a social system of differences, pointing out the main consequences for the understanding of the social as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines two interrelated issues: (i) how considering generics within their social contexts of use contributes to theories of generics, and (ii) how contemporary work on generics provides promising directions for the study of language as an aspect of social life. Examining the function of generics in meaningful interactions stands in contrast to standard treatments, which consider generics as isolated, context-free propositions. Additionally, recent psychological approaches suggest new questions that can enrich sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological research. These include, for example, when and why generics serve not just negative functions (such as stereotyping) but also positive functions (such as meaning-making), how generics gain their power from what is unstated as opposed to stated, and how generic language distorts academic writing. Ultimately, the study of language in society has the potential to enrich the study of generics beyond what has been learned from their study in linguistics, philosophy, and psychology. (Generics, concepts, categories, stereotyping, induction) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on language teacher emotion has gained attention inspired by the "affective turn" since the 1990s, calling for a comprehensive understanding of the extant literature. The current study sought to trace the characteristics of existing empirical studies on language teacher emotion in terms of research foci, methods, and theoretical perspectives through a systematic literature review. Based on evidence from a corpus of 161 empirical studies on language teacher emotion published between 2005 and 2022, a descriptive and quantitative data analysis approach was adopted and a Language Teacher Emotion Model was constructed highlighting three dominant patterns in language teacher emotion research, namely the nature, antecedents, and effects of language teacher emotions. However, the research foci on language teacher emotion shows a notable imbalance. Specifically, the number of studies on language teachers' intrapersonal factors is much more substantial than that on language teachers' interpersonal factors. Results also revealed a dominance of qualitative methods in the existing language teacher emotion research, and interviews constituted a dominant tool of qualitative data collection. Although various theoretical perspectives under sociological and psychological perspectives were identified, emotion was rarely discussed through a linguistic perspective. This review helps depict the landscape and highlights the directions for future research. • A Language Teacher Emotion Model was constructed highlighting research patterns. • Intrapersonal factors of language teacher emotion were more frequently discussed. • A dominance of qualitative methods in language teacher emotion research was revealed. • Emotion was rarely discussed through a linguistic lens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1980s, a growing body of scholarship suggests that societal concerns and management of risk have become a central feature of modernising societies. Most prominently Ulrich Beck has asserted that modern societies were increasingly confronted with the side-effects of social progress challenging the modern machinery, such as science and insurance, to manage risk. Since this early focus on technological advancement and environmental degeneration, there have been little systematic empirical analyses of the forces that drove the proliferation of risk in the public sphere. Following suggestions by Luhmann, among others, that the risk semantic is central to modernisation and Skolbekken's description that since 1945 medical journals have experienced a 'risk epidemic', this article examines the developments and events responsible for the social proliferation of health risk. In particular, I utilise The Times corpus (1790–2009) provided by the Corpus Approaches to Social Sciences research centre at Lancaster University, and the corpus linguistics tool CQPweb, for a detailed quantitative and qualitative analysis of language in its social contexts. I argue that the occurrence and increasingly widespread use of the 'at risk'-expression indicate a transformation of public consciousness related to a growing social prominence of health and well-being, the normalisation of rational management of health, and the definition of social reality by its 'at risk'-status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses that few people would disagree with the idea that teaching should be informed by science, decisions should be based on research, and various tools and materials should have clear evidence supporting their use. It mentions that many fields contribute to knowledge for the teaching of reading education, psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, and sociology. It also mentions that hierarchies of both gender and science are at play in discussions about the sciences of reading.

Research problem: With the extensive use of the internet, cyber language management has become a critical issue for international organizations (IOs). IOs’ language choices on their official websites represent the very interests of member nations and form a key factor in organizational image construction. However, research on IOs’ cyber language management is rather limited. Literature review: Previous studies examined the use of different languages on websites of large corporations, state institutions, and organizations that aim to reach linguistically diverse populations, but discussions of language management of international organizations generally focus on traditional offline language policies. This article attempts to examine the choices of languages on IOs’ official websites. Research questions: 1. What languages are used on international organizations’ official websites? 2. How do intergovernmental organizations differ from nongovernmental organizations in such language choices and cyber language management? Methodology: Data from the official websites of 50 intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and 20 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) were collected, and both qualitative and quantitative approaches were adopted to analyze the data. Results: The findings show that English is the dominant language on IOs’ official websites, and is especially preferred by NGOs; inconsistency of IOs’ cyber language policy is found among the languages used on specific pages, e-documents, and the general available languages; and IGOs’ language choices are more diversified, unified, and standardized than NGOs’. Conclusion: Accordingly, the effect of technology on IOs’ language policy is further analyzed, and suggestions for IOs’ language management are presented concerning the linguistic ecology at supra-national levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explains the appropriation of a timid change from below, initiated in the first decades of the sixteenth century, by the social elites in the next century. Within the framework of comparative historical sociolinguistics, and through the use of a corpus composed entirely of texts close to the pole of communicative immediacy, this article analyses the extension of the Spanish adverbial forms a(h)ora instead of the traditional agora between 1500 and 1700. In this process, two clearly differentiated moments can be foreseen: a first period (most of the sixteenth century) in which change advances slowly, and a later stage in which it accelerates considerably in the course of a few years. Therefore, by the end of the seventeenth century, almost categorical uses of the innovative forms are noticed, as well as the definitive cornering of agora as an archaism. In this process, social elites are revealed responsible not only for the abrupt diffusion of the novel variant throughout the entire society, but also for some important qualitative changes in the grammar of variation. In this way, either the linguistic predictors that are revealed significant in the first phases of change are neutralized or their explanatory direction has changed in the most expansive stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid development of the internet, social media has become an essential tool for getting information, and attracted a large number of people join the social media platforms because of its low cost, accessibility and amazing content. It greatly enriches our life. However, its rapid development and widespread also have provided an excellent convenience for the range of fake news, people are constantly exposed to fake news and suffer from it all the time. Fake news usually uses hyperbole to catch people’s eyes with dishonest intention. More importantly, it often misleads the reader and causes people to have wrong perceptions of society. It has the potential for negative impacts on society and individuals. Therefore, it is significative research on detecting fake news. In the paper, we built a model named SMHA-CNN (Self Multi-Head Attention-based Convolutional Neural Networks) that can judge the authenticity of news with high accuracy based only on content by using convolutional neural networks and self multi-head attention mechanism. In order to prove its validity, we conducted experiments on a public dataset and achieved a precision rate of 95.5% with a recall rate of 95.6% under the 5-fold cross-validation. Our experimental result indicates that the model is more effective at detecting fake news. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Twitter was an integral part of Donald Trump’s communication platform during his 2016 campaign. Although its topical content has been examined by researchers and the media, we know relatively little about the style of the language used on the account or how this style changed over time. In this study, we present the first detailed description of stylistic variation on the Trump Twitter account based on a multivariate analysis of grammatical co-occurrence patterns in tweets posted between 2009 and 2018. We identify four general patterns of stylistic variation, which we interpret as representing the degree of conversational, campaigning, engaged, and advisory discourse. We then track how the use of these four styles changed over time, focusing on the period around the campaign, showing that the style of tweets shifts systematically depending on the communicative goals of Trump and his team. Based on these results, we propose a series of hypotheses about how the Trump campaign used social media during the 2016 elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In low-level perceptual tasks and reading tasks, deaf individuals show a redistribution of spatial visual attention toward the parafoveal and peripheral visual fields. In the present study, the experiment adopted the modified flanker paradigm and utilized a lexical decision task to investigate how these unique visual skills may influence foveal lexical access in deaf individuals. It was predicted that irrelevant linguistic stimuli presented in parafoveal vision, during a lexical decision task, would produce a larger interference effect for deaf college student readers if the stimuli acted as distractors during the task. The results showed there was a larger interference effect in deaf college student readers compared to the interference effect observed in participants with typical levels of hearing. Furthermore, deaf college student readers with low-skilled reading levels showed a larger interference effect than those with high-skilled reading levels. The current study demonstrates that the redistribution of spatial visual attention toward the parafoveal visual regions in deaf students impacts foveal lexical processing, and this effect is modulated by reading skill. The findings are discussed in relation to the potential effect that enhanced parafoveal attention may have on everyday reading for deaf individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the process of adapting the Stanford Coreference resolution module to the Basque language, taking into account the characteristics of the language. The module has been integrated in a linguistic analysis pipeline obtaining an end-to-end coreference resolution system for the Basque language. The adaptation process explained can benefit and facilitate other languages with similar characteristics in the implementation of their coreference resolution systems. During the experimentation phase, we have demonstrated that language-specific features have a noteworthy effect on coreference resolution, obtaining a gain in CoNLL score of 7.07 with respect to the baseline system. We have also analysed the effect that preprocessing has in coreference resolution, comparing the results obtained with automatic mentions versus gold mentions. When gold mentions are provided, the results increase 11.5 points in CoNLL score in comparison with results obtained when automatic mentions are used. The contribution of each sieve is analysed concluding that morphology is essential for agglutinative languages to obtain good performance in coreference resolution. Finally, an error analysis of the coreference resolution system is presented which have revealed our system’s weak points and help to determine the improvements of the system. As a result of the error analysis, we have enriched the Basque coreference resolution adding new two sieves, obtaining an improvement of 0.24 points in CoNLL F1 when automatic mentions are used and of 0.39 points when the gold mentions are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Social media has become increasingly important for communication among young people. It is also often used to communicate suicidal ideation. Aims: To investigate the link between acute suicidality and language use as well as activity on Instagram. Method: A total of 52 participants, aged on average around 16 years, who had posted pictures of non-suicidal self-injury on Instagram, and reported a lifetime history of suicidal ideation, were interviewed using Instagram messenger. Of those participants, 45.5% reported suicidal ideation on the day of the interview (acute suicidal ideation). Qualitative text analysis (software ATLAS.ti 7) was used to investigate experiences with expressions of active suicidal thoughts on Instagram. Quantitative text analysis of language use in the interviews and directly on Instagram (in picture captions) was performed using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software. Language markers in the interviews and in picture captions, as well as activity on Instagram were added to regression analyses, in order to investigate predictors for current suicidal ideation. Results: Most participants (80%) had come across expressions of active suicidal thoughts on Instagram and 25% had expressed active suicidal thoughts themselves. Participants with acute suicidal ideation used significantly more negative emotion words (Cohen’s d = 0.66, 95% CI: 0.088–1.232) and words expressing overall affect (Cohen’s d = 0.57, 95% CI: 0.001–1.138) in interviews. However, activity and language use on Instagram did not predict acute suicidality. Conclusions: While participants differed with regard to their use of language in interviews, differences in activity and language use on Instagram were not associated with acute suicidality. Other mechanisms of machine learning, like identifying picture content, might be more valuable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Distinguishing certain and uncertain information is of crucial importance both in the scientific field in the strict sense and in the popular scientific domain. In this paper, by adopting an epistemic stance perspective on certainty and uncertainty, and a mixed procedure of analysis, which combines a bottom-up and a top-down approach, we perform a comparative study (both qualitative and quantitative) of the uncertainty linguistic markers (verbs, non-verbs, modal verbs, conditional clauses, uncertain questions, epistemic future) and their scope in three different corpora: a historical corpus of 80 biomedical articles from the British Medical Journal (BMJ) 1840–2007; a corpus of 12 biomedical articles from BMJ 2013, and a contemporary corpus of 12 scientific popular articles from Discover 2013. The variables under observation are time, structure (IMRaD vs no-IMRaD) and genre (scientific vs popular articles). We apply the Generalized Linear Models analysis in order to test whether there are statistically significant differences (1) in the amount of uncertainty among the different corpora, and (2) in the categories of uncertainty markers used by writers. The results of our analysis reveal that (1) in all corpora, the percentages of uncertainty are always much lower than that of certainty; (2) uncertainty progressively diminishes over time in biomedical articles (in conjunction with their structural changes–IMRaD–and to the increase of the BMJ Impact Factor); and (3) uncertainty is slightly higher in scientific popular articles (Discover 2013) as compared to the contemporary corpus of scientific articles (BMJ 2013). Nevertheless, in all corpora, modal verbs are the most used uncertainty markers. These results suggest that not only do scientific writers prefer to communicate their uncertainty with markers of possibility rather than those of subjectivity but also that science journalists prefer using a third-person subject followed by modal verbs rather than a first-person subject followed by mental verbs such as think or believe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Good hearing is a fundamental skill that allows children to develop properly, both socially and intellectually. In contrast to defects in inner ear function, however, auditory processing disorders (APDs)–which can affect up to 2–3% of school-children–are not easily identified with basic screening programs and must be diagnosed using special tests. Although such psychoacoustic tests are available, the scores achieved depend highly on the social, cultural, and linguistic characteristics of the population, and norms must be established for each population separately. Reference values are still lacking for the Polish population, especially for children in school-age, so that practitioners must interpret test scores themselves, often intuitively or using potentially biased thresholds from other countries. Materials and methods: We investigated a sample of 94 Polish schoolchildren with normal hearing, divided into four age groups: from 7 years-olds to 10 years-olds. All children had no speech or language development disorder, learning problem, or symptom of APD. Participants were volunteers who had previously taken part in a large screening study. The group consisted of 56 girls (60%) and 38 boys (40%) with an average age of 8.6 years (SD = 1.1). The test battery included the Duration Pattern Test (DPT), Frequency Pattern Test (FPT), Time-Compressed Speech Test (CST), and Dichotic Digit Test (DDT). Results: The scores on all tests increased consistently with age. The difference between each age-group for DPT, CST, and left- and right-ear DDT tests was significant (Kruskal–Wallis test, p-values = 0.002, 0.006, 0.005, 0.020, respectively), but the effect of age on the FPT test was not (p-value = 0.143). The analysis showed a clear and significant separation between a merged group of ages 7 and 8 and another of ages 9 and 10. We, therefore, propose, for each test, separate reference values for these two particular age-groups. Using thresholds based on a 10% quantile, we offer the following reference values for ages 7–8 and 9–10 respectively: DPT, 28.5% and 53.8%; FPT, 18.5% and 27.5%; CST, 68.6% and 77.2%; left-ear DDT, 34.3% and 52.5%; right-ear DDT, 56% and 72.5%. Conclusion: The scores on psychoacoustic tests to diagnose APD differ between cultures and linguistic backgrounds. Clinicians should, therefore, use norms that have been designed for the population most similar to their patients. Here, we report the use of a test battery designed for the Polish language that accounts for various aspects of APD when screening school children. Together with a full methodology of those tests, we provide norms that can be used as cut-offs in clinical diagnosis. Practitioners are invited to use them to obtain more accurate, evidence-based decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Positive Behaviour Support (PBS) for challenging behaviour is a complex intervention. Process evaluation is pivotal in fully understanding the mechanisms and contextual factors that impact on participant outcomes. Aims: To conduct a process evaluation of a national clinical trial investigating the impact of PBS-based staff training on the level of challenging behaviour in adults with intellectual disability. Method: The Medical Research Council guidance for process evaluation of complex interventions was followed. Semi-structured interviews with 62 stakeholders from the intervention arm (service users, family and paid carers, service managers, staff who delivered the intervention and PBS trainers), quantitative data from the study database and an external evaluation of the quality of the PBS plans were used. Results: Twenty-one health staff volunteered to be trained in delivering PBS. Available log data from 17 therapists revealed that they worked with 63 participants a median of 11.50 hours (IQR 8–32). Only 33 out of 108 reports had included all elements of the intervention. Another 47 reports had some elements of the intervention. All PBS plans were rated weak, indicating insufficient quality to impact challenging behaviour. Stakeholders reported an appreciation of PBS and its potential to impact quality of care and engagement with the participant. However, they also identified important challenges including managing PBS-related caseloads, paid carer turnover and service commitment to the delivery of PBS. Conclusions: PBS-based staff training was well received, but therapists found it difficult to undertake all the elements of the intervention in routine care. Implementing a workforce training strategy is important to better define the active components of PBS, and resource implications if the intervention is no better than usual care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Big web data from sources including online news and Twitter are good resources for investigating deep learning. However, collected news articles and tweets almost certainly contain data unnecessary for learning, and this disturbs accurate learning. This paper explores the performance of word2vec Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to classify news articles and tweets into related and unrelated ones. Using two word embedding algorithms of word2vec, Continuous Bag-of-Word (CBOW) and Skip-gram, we constructed CNN with the CBOW model and CNN with the Skip-gram model. We measured the classification accuracy of CNN with CBOW, CNN with Skip-gram, and CNN without word2vec models for real news articles and tweets. The experimental results indicated that word2vec significantly improved the accuracy of the classification model. The accuracy of the CBOW model was higher and more stable when compared to that of the Skip-gram model. The CBOW model exhibited better performance on news articles, and the Skip-gram model exhibited better performance on tweets. Specifically, CNN with word2vec models was more effective on news articles when compared to that on tweets because news articles are typically more uniform when compared to tweets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As online content continues to grow, so does the spread of hate speech. We identify and examine challenges faced by online automatic approaches for hate speech detection in text. Among these difficulties are subtleties in language, differing definitions on what constitutes hate speech, and limitations of data availability for training and testing of these systems. Furthermore, many recent approaches suffer from an interpretability problem—that is, it can be difficult to understand why the systems make the decisions that they do. We propose a multi-view SVM approach that achieves near state-of-the-art performance, while being simpler and producing more easily interpretable decisions than neural methods. We also discuss both technical and practical challenges that remain for this task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Effective speech communication is critical to everyday quality of life and social well-being. In addition to the well-studied deficits in cognitive and motor function, depression also impacts communication. Here, we examined speech perception in individuals who were clinically diagnosed with major depressive disorder (MDD) relative to neurotypical controls. Forty-two normal-hearing (NH) individuals with MDD and 41 NH neurotypical controls performed sentence recognition tasks across three conditions with maskers varying in the extent of linguistic content (high, low, and none): 1-talker masker (1T), reversed 1-talker masker (1T_tr), and speech-shaped noise (SSN). Individuals with MDD, relative to neurotypical controls, demonstrated lower recognition accuracy in the 1T condition but not in the 1T_tr or SSN condition. To examine the nature of the listening condition-specific speech perception deficit, we analyzed speech recognition errors. Errors as a result of interference from masker sentences were higher for individuals with MDD (vs. neurotypical controls) in the 1T condition. This depression-related listening condition-specific pattern in recognition errors was not observed for other error types. We posit that this depression-related listening condition-specific deficit in speech perception may be related to heightened distractibility due to linguistic interference from background talkers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Haptic sound symbolism has been found in adults, between ideophones and various textures, between words and shape, and between written words and texture. However, associations between the sound of nonwords and features other than shape and in early stages of development have been less explored. The present study investigates the haptic manifestation of sound symbolism in an early developmental stage. We examined associations between nonwords and the rough-smooth tactile dimension in 3.5-to-4.5-year-old children. Two experiments were conducted: a pointing selection task and a naming task. Sound symbolic associations were found in the naming task, but not in the pointing task. On the other hand an unexpected bias towards smoothness was found in the pointing task. We explain these results by suggesting that the articulation of nonwords may facilitate or intensify sound symbolism, and that hedonic biases are manifested in the pointing task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An increasing number of studies reveal crossmodal correspondences between speech sounds and perceptual features such as shape and size. In this study, we show that an interjection Koreans produce when downing a shot of liquor reliably triggers crossmodal associations in American English, German, Spanish, and Chinese listeners who do not speak Korean. Based on how this sound is used in advertising campaigns for the Korean liquor soju, we derive predictions for different crossmodal associations. Our experiments show that the same speech sound is reliably associated with various perceptual, affective, and social meanings. This demonstrates what we call the ‘pluripotentiality’ of iconicity, that is, the same speech sound is able to trigger a web of interrelated mental associations across different dimensions. We argue that the specific semantic associations evoked by iconic stimuli depend on the task, with iconic meanings having a ‘latent’ quality that becomes ‘actual’ in specific semantic contexts. We outline implications for theories of iconicity and advertising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zipf’s law of abbreviation, relating more frequent signals to shorter signal lengths, applies to sounds in a variety of communication systems, both human and non-human. It also applies to writing systems: more frequent words tend to be encoded by less complex graphemes, even when grapheme complexity is decoupled from word length. This study documents an exception to this law of abbreviation. Observing European heraldic motifs, whose frequency of use was documented for the whole continent and over two large corpora (total N = 25115), one medieval, one early modern, we found that they do not obey a robust law of abbreviation. In our early modern corpus, motif complexity and motif frequency are positively, not negatively, correlated, a result driven by iconic motifs. In both our corpora, iconic motifs tend to be more frequent when more complex. They grew in popularity after the invention of printing. Our results suggest that lacking iconicity may be a precondition for a graphic code to exhibit Zipf’s Law of Abbreviation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Students’ writing constitutes a topic of major concern due to its importance in school and in daily life. To mitigate students’ writing problems, school-based interventions have been implemented in the past, but there is still a need to examine the effectiveness of different types of writing interventions that use robust design methodologies. Hence, the present study followed a longitudinal cluster-randomized controlled design using a multilevel modeling analysis with 370 fourth-grade students (nested in 20 classes). The classes were randomly assigned to four conditions: one comparison group and three writing types of writing interventions (i.e., week-journals, Self-Regulation Strategy Development (SRSD) instruction and SRSD plus Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) program using a story-tool), with five classes participating in each condition. Data supports our hypothesis by showing differences between the treatment groups in students’ writing quality over time. Globally, the improvement of students’ writing quality throughout time is related to the level of specialization of the writing interventions implemented. This is an important finding with strong implications for educational practice. Week-journals and writing activities can be easily implemented in classrooms and provides an opportunity to promote students’ writing quality. Still, students who participated in the instructional programs (i.e., SRSD and SRSD plus story-tool) exhibited higher writing quality than the students who wrote week-journals. Current data did not find statistical significant differences between results from the two instructional writing tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several studies have recently applied sentiment-based lexicons to Twitter to gauge local sentiment to understand health behaviors and outcomes for local areas. While this research has demonstrated the vast potential of this approach, lingering questions remain regarding the validity of Twitter mining and surveillance in local health research. First, how well does this approach predict health outcomes at very local scales, such as neighborhoods? Second, how robust are the findings garnered from sentiment signals when accounting for spatial effects? To evaluate these questions, we link 2,076,025 tweets from 66,219 distinct users in the city of San Diego over the period of 2014-12-06 to 2017-05-24 to the 500 Cities Project data and 2010–2014 American Community Survey data. We determine how well sentiment predicts self-rated mental health, sleep quality, and heart disease at a census tract level, controlling for neighborhood characteristics and spatial autocorrelation. We find that sentiment is related to some outcomes on its own, but these relationships are not present when controlling for other neighborhood factors. Evaluating our encoding strategy more closely, we discuss the limitations of existing measures of neighborhood sentiment, calling for more attention to how race/ethnicity and socio-economic status play into inferences drawn from such measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined profiles of participation in extracurricular activities (ECAs) in 4th grade children (N = 27,121; Mean age = 9.20 years; SD = .54; 51% male) in British Columbia, Canada. Latent class analyses were used to establish activity profiles and determine class membership; ANCOVA was used to investigate differences in mental wellbeing (optimism, life satisfaction, self-concept) and perceived overall health between groups. Data came from a cross-sectional, population-level child self-report survey (i.e., the Middle Years Development Instrument) implemented with 4th grade children in public schools. We found four distinct ECA profiles: participation in “All Activities”, “No activities”, “Sports” (i.e., individual and team sports), and “Individual activities” (i.e., educational programs, arts/music, individual sports). Wellbeing and health scores were highest for children in the “All Activities” and the “Sports” clusters, and lowest for those in “No Activities” and the cluster reflecting individual activities (i.e., “Individual activities”). Results are discussed in the context of previous research, and with respect to practical relevance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An increasing body of evidence shows the importance of accommodating relational information within implicit measures of psychological constructs. Whereas relational variants of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) have been proposed in the past, we put forward the Truth Misattribution Procedure (TMP) as a relational variant of the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP) that aims to capture implicit beliefs. Across three experiments, we demonstrate that TMP effects are sensitive to the relational information contained within sentence primes, both in the context of causal stimulus relations of a known truth value (e.g., “smoking causes cancer” vs. “smoking prevents cancer”), as well as in the domain of gender stereotypes (e.g., “men are arrogant” vs. “men should be arrogant”). The potential benefits of the TMP are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Despite offering little overall benefit and emerging concerns about their safety, dietary supplements have become increasingly popular. Trust in advertising them may contribute to high confidence in dietary supplements in public opinion. Aim: To develop and validate a screening questionnaire intended for the general public regarding knowledge about dietary supplements and a questionnaire on trust in advertising dietary supplements, and to identify the association between these constructs. Materials and methods: The development and validation of the measures was overseen by the panels of experts. The conceptual frameworks of the constructs were scientifically well grounded. A set of semi-structured interviews and anonymous web-based surveys was performed. The final questionnaire was applied to 220 non-medically educated people and 121 medically educated people. Results: A 17-item questionnaire on knowledge about dietary supplements and eight-item questionnaire on trust in advertising dietary supplements were developed. The measures presented satisfactory proof of validity, however, the psychometric properties of the questionnaire on knowledge were modest. Both the knowledge about dietary supplements in the study group and trust in advertising them were low. A significant negative relationship was found between knowledge about dietary supplements and trust in advertising them among the general public (Pearson’s r = -0.42, 95%CI: -0.52 to -0.30, p<0.0001). This association was especially pronounced in people who reported not taking dietary supplements (Pearson’s r = -0.61, 95%CI: -0.76 to -0.39, p<0.0001). Conclusions: The extensive advertising of dietary supplements appears to be in conflict with promoting evidence-based knowledge about them, which raises substantial concerns for the public health. The results of the study are only preliminary and require further confirmation and exploration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beauty is the single most frequently and most broadly used aesthetic virtue term. The present study aimed at providing higher conceptual resolution to the broader notion of beauty by comparing it with three closely related aesthetically evaluative concepts which are likewise lexicalized across many languages: elegance, grace(fulness), and sexiness. We administered a variety of questionnaires that targeted perceptual qualia, cognitive and affective evaluations, as well as specific object properties that are associated with beauty, elegance, grace, and sexiness in personal looks, movements, objects of design, and other domains. This allowed us to reveal distinct and highly nuanced profiles of how a beautiful, elegant, graceful, and sexy appearance is subjectively perceived. As aesthetics is all about nuances, the fine-grained conceptual analysis of the four target concepts of our study provides crucial distinctions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Online health information, if evidence-based and unbiased, can improve patients’ and caregivers’ health knowledge and assist them in disease management and health care decision-making. Objective: To identify standards for the development of health information resources on the internet for patients. Methods: We searched in MEDLINE, CINAHL, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar for publications describing evaluation instruments for websites providing health information. Eligible instruments were identified by three independent reviewers and disagreements resolved by consensus. Items reported were extracted and categorized into seven domains (accuracy, completeness and comprehensiveness, technical elements, design and aesthetics, usability, accessibility, and readability) that were previously thought to be a minimum requirement for websites. Results: One hundred eleven articles met inclusion criteria, reporting 92 evaluation instruments (1609 items). We found 74 unique items that we grouped into the seven domains. For the accuracy domain, one item evaluated information provided in concordance with current guidelines. For completeness and comprehensiveness, 18 items described the disease with respect to various topics such as etiology or therapy, among others. For technical elements, 27 items evaluated disclosure of authorship, sponsorship, affiliation, editorial process, feedback process, privacy, and data protection. For design and aesthetics, 10 items evaluated consistent layout and relevant graphics and images. For usability, 10 items evaluated ease of navigation and functionality of internal search engines. For accessibility, five items evaluated the availability of websites to people with audiovisual disabilities. For readability, three items evaluated conversational writing style and use of a readability tool to determine the reading level of the text. Conclusion: We identified standards for the development of online patient health information. This proposed instrument can serve as a guideline to develop and improve how health information is presented on the internet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large proportion of Depression Disorder patients do not receive an effective diagnosis, which makes it necessary to find a more objective assessment to facilitate a more rapid and accurate diagnosis of depression. Speech data is easy to acquire clinically, its association with depression has been studied, although the actual predictive effect of voice features has not been examined. Thus, we do not have a general understanding of the extent to which voice features contribute to the identification of depression. In this study, we investigated the significance of the association between voice features and depression using binary logistic regression, and the actual classification effect of voice features on depression was re-examined through classification modeling. Nearly 1000 Chinese females participated in this study. Several different datasets was included as test set. We found that 4 voice features (PC1, PC6, PC17, PC24, P<0.05, corrected) made significant contribution to depression, and that the contribution effect of the voice features alone reached 35.65% (Nagelkerke's R2). In classification modeling, voice data based model has consistently higher predicting accuracy(F-measure) than the baseline model of demographic data when tested on different datasets, even across different emotion context. F-measure of voice features alone reached 81%, consistent with existing data. These results demonstrate that voice features are effective in predicting depression and indicate that more sophisticated models based on voice features can be built to help in clinical diagnosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health literacy is increasingly recognized as an important determinant of health outcomes, but definition, measurement tools, and interventions are lacking. Conceptual frameworks must include both individual and health-systems domains which, in combination, determine an individual’s health literacy. Validated tools lack applicability in marginalized populations with very low educational levels, such as migrant worker communities on the Myanmar-Thailand border. We undertake a comprehensive health literacy assessment following a case study of a recent public health campaign promoting preconceptual folic acid uptake in this community. A mixed-methods design utilized quantitative analysis of the prevalence and predictors of low Health literacy, and focus group discussions to gather qualitative data from women about proposed and actual posters used in the campaign. Health literacy was measured with a locally developed tool that has been used in surveys of the population since 1995. Health literacy was low, with 194/525 (37.0%) of tested women demonstrating adequate health literacy, despite 63.1% (331/525) self-reporting being literate. Only one third of women had completed 4th grade or above and reported grade level attained in school was more predictive of health literacy than self-reported literacy. Focus group discussions revealed that low literacy, preconceived associations, and traditional health beliefs (individual domain) interacted with complex images, subtle concepts, and taboo images on posters (health-systems domain) to cause widespread misunderstandings of the visuals used in the campaign. The final poster still required explanation for clarity. Low health literacy is prevalent among pregnant women from this migrant community and barriers to communication are significant and complex. Public health posters need piloting prior to implementation as unanticipated misperceptions are common and difficult to overcome. Verbal communication remains a key method of messaging with individuals of low health literacy and educational system strengthening and audiovisual messaging are critical for improvement of health outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Companies need to ensure that customers perceive their brands as intended, with strong and unique associations, when facing a competitive market. Traditionally, brand associations are measured using conventional techniques such as surveys and questionnaires albeit both conscious and unconscious factors can influence the collected data and the outcome of a campaign. Neuromarketing can shed light on how the customer’s brain processes marketing stimuli. We report here on an EEG study aimed at gauging mental associations with brands. We focus on the N400 event-related potential, an EEG component most strongly elicited in response to a concept unrelated to a preceding concept. We considered two video on demand brands, Netflix and Rex&Rio, and selected a set of words grouped in 4 categories that were either related (Television, Relaxation, and Price), in varying degrees, or unrelated (Unrelated) to the said brands. The experiment started with both brands’ TV commercials, as a common reference for our participants. We then applied a semantic priming paradigm in which a brand logo (“prime”) was followed by a word (“target”), and the strength of the N400 response to the word used as an inverted measure of the association strength with the brand logo. We clustered N400 responses to identify, for each brand, natural groups of associated words. As a result, for Netflix the cluster with the smallest N400 responses (i.e., strongest associations) consisted of words related to Television but for Rex&Rio it consisted of words related to Relaxation. We also evaluated the relationship between the two brands and determined which associations they share or which ones not. It turned out that associations related to Relaxation and Television distinguish the two brands. Interestingly, survey data did not show any difference between the two brands as they were equally associated with Television and Relaxation. These findings show that our N400 technique can reveal brand associations, and natural categories thereof, that would otherwise go unnoticed when using conventional surveys. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This investigation focuses on how the tag questions are distributed in PRESEEASeville corpus (high and low sociolects) from a sociolinguistic point of view. These mechanisms allow the speaker to make sure that the contact with the interlocutor remains open and, at the same time, to show agreement, to confirm following or knowledge of what it is being reported. The results showed that the most employed form in Seville was ¿no?, along with other units which were halfused such as ¿eh?, ¿sabes?, ¿entiendes? and ¿vale?, or on a low frequency like ¿de acuerdo?, ¿um?, ¿verdad?, ¿ves?, ¿comprendes? and ¿me explico? The sociolinguistic analysis brought to light the influence that the educational level and age factors had over the distribution of these markers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the relative importance of the three dimensions of need-supportive teaching (NST) and students’ self-efficacy to gain new knowledge about students’ achievement in higher education. NST assumes that teachers are key to the motivation of students, providing autonomy support, structure (support of competence), and involvement (support of relatedness). In turn, self-efficacy raises students’ confidence in their ability to succeed in academic tasks. Drawing on 86,000 records of teaching evaluations by students at the University of Girona (Spain), we present evidence that teachers’ involvement and students’ self-efficacy are the two elements most strongly and positively related to achievement. Students obtain higher marks when they believe that their teachers are dependable and available to offer resources, and when they feel capable of organizing and implementing the courses of action necessary to acquire knowledge. We also find that students’ experience of autonomy support and structure are negatively (or not) correlated with achievement. Subgroup analyses also indicate that students have different needs in different knowledge areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aimed at evaluating the impact of a classic music training program (Démos) on several aspects of the cognitive development of children from low socio-economic backgrounds. We were specifically interested in general intelligence, phonological awareness and reading abilities, and in other cognitive abilities that may be improved by music training such as auditory and visual attention, working and short-term memory and visuomotor precision. We used a longitudinal approach with children presented with standardized tests before the start and after 18 months of music training. To test for pre-to-post training improvements while discarding maturation and developmental effects, raw scores for each child and for each test were normalized relative to their age group. Results showed that Démos music training improved musicality scores, total IQ and Symbol Search scores as well as concentration abilities and reading precision. In line with previous results, these findings demonstrate the positive impact of an ecologically-valid music training program on the cognitive development of children from low socio-economic backgrounds and strongly encourage the broader implementation of such programs in disadvantaged school-settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A father’s involvement in prenatal care engenders health benefits for both mothers and children. While this information can help practitioners improve family health, low paternal involvement in prenatal care remains a challenge. The present study tested a simple, easily scalable intervention to promote father involvement by increasing men’s feelings of comfort and expectations of involvement in prenatal settings through three randomized control trials. Borrowing from social psychological theory on identity safety, the three studies tested whether the inclusion of environmental cues that represent men and fatherhood in prenatal care offices influenced men’s beliefs and behavioral intentions during the perinatal period. Men in studies 1 and 3 viewed online videos of purported prenatal care offices, while men in study 2 visited the office in person. Those who viewed or were immersed in a father-friendly prenatal care office believed that doctors had higher expectations of father involvement compared to treatment-as-usual. This perception predicted greater parenting confidence, comfort, and behavioral intentions to learn about the pregnancy and engage in healthy habits, such as avoiding smoking and alcohol during their partner’s pregnancy. Study 3 replicated these studies with an online sample of expectant fathers. The results suggest that shifting environment office cues can signal fathering norms to men in prenatal settings, with healthier downstream behavior intentions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A child’s school achievement is influenced by environmental factors. The environmental factors, when represented by socio-economic status (SES) of the family, have been demonstrated to be related to the reading skills of a child. The neural correlates of the relation between SES and reading have been less thoroughly investigated. The present study expands current research by exploring the relation between SES, quantified by paternal educational level, reading of the offspring and the structure of white matter pathways in the left hemisphere as derived from DTI-based tractography analyses. Therefore, three dorsal white matter pathways, i.e. the long, anterior and posterior segments of the arcuate fasciculus (AF), and three ventral white matter pathways, i.e. the inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus (IFOF), the inferior longitudinal fasciculus (ILF) and the uncinate fasciculus (UF), were manually dissected in the left hemisphere of 34 adolescents with a wide range of reading skills. The results demonstrated a relation between word reading, SES quantified by paternal educational level, and fractional anisotropy (FA) within the left dorsal AF segment and the left ventral UF. Thus, the present study proposes a relationship between paternal educational level and a specific white matter pathway that is important for reading, aiming to guide future research that can determine processes underlying this relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses 'Notes on Language Games', written by Harold Garfinkel in 1960 and never before published, one of three distinct versions of his famous 'Trust' argument, i.e., that constitutive criteria define shared events, objects, and meanings. The argument stands in contrast to an approach to cultural anthropology that was becoming popular in 1960 called 'ethnoscience'. In this previously unknown manuscript, Garfinkel proposes that cultural events and language events are the same, in that both are created through constitutive commitments to interactional systems. The best-known version of the Trust argument (Garfinkel, 1963) emphasizes Schutz, while other versions build on Parsons (Garfinkel 2019). In this third version, the Trust conditions are elaborated in terms of Wittgenstein's language games. Various strands of Garfinkel's thinking about culture, language and interaction are interwoven. That Garfinkel was working with Parsons in 1960 to document a contractual basis for social events and their assembly practices in 'systems of interaction', a constitutive practice argument with roots in Durkheim's work, is yet another strand. The article highlights how the Trust argument is the key to everything, not only ethnomethodology, but also Garfinkel's attempt to develop a general sociology of culture, language and interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What concepts and words do communicative gestures activate in the minds of people who view them? It’s widely believed that many gestures grow from iconic origins—they look like what they mean—but also that at some point they may become emblematic—conventionalized as culturally agreed-upon symbols. How long do links between physical movements of the body and the things in the world they denote persist in the minds of gesture-users? A pair of experiments asks this question for the Middle-Finger, a cross-culturally recognized obscene gesture. The prevailing view is that the gesture originates in a phallic symbol. Yet it is now predominantly used as an emblematic gesture displaying contempt (among other things). It is currently unknown whether the iconic origins of gestures persist through the emblematic stage in the minds of gesture users. Two experiments tested the hypothesis that viewing the Middle-Finger primes thoughts about penises or the word penis. The results showed that the Middle-Finger induced no priming of penis compared with control, unlike another obscene penis-representing gesture (Finger-Bang), which did. This suggests that the Middle-Finger no longer activates thoughts of penises in the minds of contemporary American English speakers. Emblematic gestures with iconic origins may undergo historical change not just in the functions they serve but also in the effects they have on the minds of people who use them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information sharing can be regarded as a form of cooperative behavior protected by the work of a reputation system. Yet, deception in communication is common. The research examined the possibility that speakers use epistemic markers to preempt being seen as uncooperative even though they in fact are. Epistemic markers convey the speakers' certainty and involvement in the acquisition of the information. When speakers present a lie as indirectly acquired or uncertain, they gain if the lie is believed and likely do not suffer if it is discovered. In our study, speakers of English and Italian (where epistemic markers were presented lexically) and of Estonian and Turkish (where they were presented grammatically through evidentials) had to imagine being a speaker in a conversation and choose a response to a question. The response options varied 1) the truth of the part of the response addressing the question at issue and 2) whether the epistemic marker indicated that the speaker had acquired the information directly or indirectly. Across languages, if participants chose to tell a lie, they were likely to present it with an indirect epistemic marker, thus providing evidence for preemptive action accompanying uncooperative behavior. For English and Italian participants, this preemptive action depended respectively on resource availability and relationship with the addressee, suggesting cultural variability in the circumstances that trigger it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People interpret verbal expressions of probabilities (e.g. ‘very likely’) in different ways, yet words are commonly preferred to numbers when communicating uncertainty. Simply providing numerical translations alongside reports or text containing verbal probabilities should encourage consistency, but these guidelines are often ignored. In an online experiment with 924 participants, we compared four different formats for presenting verbal probabilities with the numerical guidelines used in the US Intelligence Community Directive (ICD) 203 to see whether any could improve the correspondence between the intended meaning and participants’ interpretation (‘in-context’). This extends previous work in the domain of climate science. The four experimental conditions we tested were: 1. numerical guidelines bracketed in text, e.g. X is very unlikely (05–20%), 2. click to see the full guidelines table in a new window, 3. numerical guidelines appear in a mouse over tool tip, and 4. no guidelines provided (control). Results indicate that correspondence with the ICD 203 standard is substantially improved only when numerical guidelines are bracketed in text. For this condition, average correspondence was 66%, compared with 32% in the control. We also elicited ‘context-free’ numerical judgements from participants for each of the seven verbal probability expressions contained in ICD 203 (i.e., we asked participants what range of numbers they, personally, would assign to those expressions), and constructed ‘evidence-based lexicons’ based on two methods from similar research, ‘membership functions’ and ‘peak values’, that reflect our large sample’s intuitive translations of the terms. Better aligning the intended and assumed meaning of fuzzy words like ‘unlikely’ can reduce communication problems between the reporter and receiver of probabilistic information. In turn, this can improve decision making under uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]