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This article aims to relate urban identity and its individual components to urban planning practices and interventions in the urban fabric through international examples of urban areas. Every city has a unique identity, which becomes perceptual through images and memories whether they are positive or negative. For that reason, central idea in the theoretical framework of identity is that of uniqueness. Whereas, also important are the concepts of continuity, meaning and experience. At the same time, urban identity could be defined as “place identity”, “place image”, “place character”, “sense of place”, “spirituality of place”, expressing its distinctiveness. For example, the historical urban centres play an important role in strengthening place identity, memory and sense of belonging for the entire city. The study of place identity is associated with the interventions that take place in the urban fabric, whether are single urban interventions into sites of interest (e.g. reconfiguration of urban public spaces), or for the implementation of integrated policies and tools in urban planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes complex words, morphologically and semantically, within the Perceptual approach introduced by Safavi (2020). The authors aim to examine the possibilities of word formation of complex words in Persian as their first objective. To achieve this goal, they examined 2850 complex words selected randomly from the Sokhan Dictionary (Anvari, 2004). Following the mentioned approach, wordformation patterns are determined based on whether the morphemes belong to closed or open classes. According to a predetermined agreement, A stands for closed class units and B stands for open class units. This study reveals 57 patterns of word formation, with 'B + B' appearing to be the most common among all the patterns examined. Next, the authors investigated how much closed-class units help Persian speakers interpret the semantic head of complex words examined. To reach this aim, 20 Persian speakers not having any knowledge of linguistics were given a questionnaire of 120 words made up of eight affixes selected by the authors and questioned about interpreting each word. Finally, data analysis related to the questionnaire revealed that the meaning interpretation of the words appeared to be significantly impacted by the morphemes belonging to the closed class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advancing theorization of the perceptual approach to EU foreign policy, this study develops a new notion of critical expectation gaps, intended to reflect on the depth and intensity of the rapture between expectations/hopes and perceived performance of the EU. In our focus is the correlation between the degree of externally perceived 'Otherness' and the likelihood of EU external action to be considered effective, whereas the EU adapts (or not) to existing perception gaps (in this research, the expectation–performance and hope–performance gaps). We propose a novel conceptual apparatus to understand the gaps in terms of the locus of expectations and types of causal factors. Empirically, we engage with a 13‐country dataset of external perceptions of the EU amongst tertiary educated youth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study aims to analyze the process of homonym morphemes interpretation in Persian on the basis of a Perceptual approach. There have been two dominant approaches in the history of word meaning studies namely Word-based and Morpheme-based approaches which have been used by many researches in word and morphemes meaning studies until now. This research first studies the disadvantages of each of the two approaches, then with the help of 20 homonyms taken from farhang-e fešorde-ye soxan and by interviewing 50 non linguistics graduates using the Perceptual approach framework introduced by Safavi concludes that Persian speakers interpret the meaning of homonyms based on word meaning. According to this issue, unlike what has been introduced in the traditional studies of meaning known as meaning 'compositionality' (part - whole), the meaning of morphemes is interpreted by using meaning 'decompositionality' (whole - part) with the help of contextual information including perceptual context A (Linguistic context), B (The present situation in which the context A is produced), and specifically context C (The background information) based on the Perceptual approach. In fact, not having accessibility to contextual information makes language speakers confused in interpreting the morphemes in these words. So, homonym interpretation in Persian relies on the word interpretation by means of the present contextual information inside the words based on meaning decompositionality.

The short answer to the question in the title is: not exactly, no. This paper examines the confusion between phonetics on the one hand and pronunciation on the other. It looks at what phonetics actually is (its acoustic, articulatory and auditory components), and attempts to dispel the popular myth that studying or teaching ‘(English) phonetics’ and studying or teaching ‘(English) pronunciation’ are one and the same thing – in fact, the former is general phonetics, the latter applied phonetics. Reviewing 100 years of thoughts about English pronunciation teaching (from Daniel Jones to Geoff Lindsey) it examines the contribution phonetics is considered to make in this field, looking at the roles of both phonetic theory and ear-training in pronunciation acquisition from teachers’ and learners’ perspectives. It concludes by summarizing what phonetics today can offer the language learner.

Summary: This article contributes to the theorisation of collaborative public diplomacy by introducing a perceptual approach. Engaging with the collaborative diplomacy paradigm developed to conceptualise public diplomacy in the context of non-traditional security threats and conflicts, as well as nation building, the article explores and compares perceptions of the European Union (EU) as a public diplomacy actor in Ukraine (tracked in 50 elite interviews) and in Brussels (13 interviews with EU practitioners). The article engages with a concept of a 'perception gap' hypothesising a gap between the Others' perception of the EU and the EU's self-perception. It furthers the conceptualisation of a perception gap by suggesting to consider it at cognitive, normative and emotive levels in the image structure and arguing variation between the levels. The article contends that a perception gap is a critical factor in preventing genuine dialogue, engagement and listening — key concepts proposed by the collaborative diplomacy paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Team cognition plays an important role in predicting team processes and outcomes. Thus far, research has focused on structured cognition while paying little attention to perceptual cognition. The lack of research on perceptual team cognition can be attributed to the absence of an appropriate measure. To address this gap, we introduce the construct of perceived mutual understanding (PMU) as a type of perceptual team cognition and describe the development of a respective measure – the PMU-scale. Based on three samples from different team settings (NTotal = 566), our findings show that the scale has good psychometric properties – both at the individual as well as at the teamlevel. Item parameters were improved during a multistage process. Exploratory as well as confirmatory factor analyses indicate that PMU is a one-dimensional construct. The scale demonstrates sufficient internal reliability. Correlational analyses provide initial proof of construct validity. Finally, common indicators for inter-rater reliability and inter-rater agreement suggest that treating PMU as a team-level construct is justified. The PMU-scale represents a convenient and versatile measure that will potentially foster empirical research on perceptual team cognition and thereby contribute to the advancement of team cognition research in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The different offered definitions of “Neighborhood Unit” in various approaches and viewpoints by different specialized views, on the one hand; and excessive attention to expert-oriented and reduced viewpoints as well as neglecting residents’ perception of the neighborhood on the other hand necessitate providing a complete and exact definition of neighborhood which can cover all approaches and viewpoints. Therefore, this paper applied the content analysis research method – descriptive content analysis- to analyze the numerous important neighborhood definitions meticulously. It scrutinizes two different approaches, specialized views (expert-oriented) and the perceptual approach (resident-oriented) in order to extract the most appropriate and repeated indicators, and finally introduce a comprehensive definition of neighborhood according to these indicators. Result show significant differences exist between neighborhood characteristics according to the definitions given by experts, famous theories and perceptual understanding of residents. For instance the definitions of neighborhood center(s), land uses, boundaries of neighborhood and etc. were used to derive the final appropriate indicators obtained from both approaches. The indicators are: neighborhood boundaries including streets and traffic roads; natural elements and social distinctions such as racial or ethnical distinctions; neighborhood area as it is perceptible for residents (50-500 acres); neighborhood land use (providing daily and weekly needs, appropriate access); economic- social homogeneity (social class, and income level of residents, land value); social interaction (social relations and residents’ participation); and semantic and particular symbols of neighborhood (natural and historical characteristics and neighborhood meanings). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The city of Doha is growing rapidly with emerging urban nodes and centers, housing development. Little attention however has been paid to several growth aspects including the understanding of urban space diversity and the resulting inhabitants' spatial experience, their attitudes toward emerging urbanized spaces. Utilizing a perceptual approach in the form of an attitude survey, this paper explores urban spaces in the city of Doha as perceived and experienced by different groups. An investigation of a number of key urban spaces is undertaken through the identification of key urban nodes that are identified based on parameters that include density, commercial activity, and public accessibility. Spaces are examined from the perspective of Doha's inhabitants using 490 responses to a survey questionnaire. The results delineate that urban spaces lack key conditions amenable to creating urban diversity. Nevertheless, they corroborate the postulation that urban spaces are perceived and experienced differently by different groups based on their gender, age, and cultural background. The paper concludes with suggestions toward a more inclusive approach to the design of the city's urban spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A humanoid robot is always flooded by sensed information when sensing the environment, and it usually needs significant time to compute and process the sensed information. In this paper, a selective attention-based contextual perception approach was proposed for humanoid robots to sense the environment with high efficiency. First, the connotation of attention window (AW) is extended to make a more general and abstract definition of AW, and its four kinds of operations and state transformations are also discussed. Second, the attention control policies are described, which integrate intension-guided perceptual objects selection and distractor inhibition, and can deal with emergent issues. Distractor inhibition is used to filter unrelated information. Last, attention policies are viewed as the robot’s perceptual modes, which can control and adjust the perception efficiency. The experimental results show that the presented approach can promote the perceptual efficiency significantly, and the perceptual cost can be effectively controlled through adopting different attention policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]