Language Culture and Communication Research Papers (original) (raw)

2025, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

2025, Literary and Linguistic Computing

This paper describes work undertaken by the VERA project to investigate how archaeologists work with information technology (IT) on excavation sites. We used a diary study to research the usual patterns of behaviour of archaeologists digging the Silchester Roman town site during the summer of 2007. Although recording had previously been undertaken using pen and paper, during the 2007 season a part of the dig was dedicated to trials of IT and archaeologists used digital pens and paper and Nokia N800 handheld PDAs to record their work. The goal of the trial was to see whether it was possible to record data from the dig whilst still on site, rather than waiting until after the excavation to enter it into the Integrated Archaeological Database, (IADB) and to determine whether the archaeologists found the new technology helpful. The digital pens were a success, however, the N800s were not successful given the extreme conditions on site. Our findings confirmed that it was important that technology should fit in well with the work being undertaken rather than being used for its own sake, and should respect established work flows. We also found that the quality of data being entered was a recurrent concern as was the reliability of the infrastructure and equipment.

2025

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

2025

A great number of methods for multichannel audio source separation are based on probabilistic approaches in which the sources are modeled as latent random variables in a Time-Frequency (TF) domain. For reverberant mixtures, it is common to approximate the time-domain convolutive mixing process as being instantaneous in the short-term Fourier transform domain, under a short mixing filters assumption. The TF latent sources are then inferred from the TF mixture observations. In this paper we propose to infer the TF latent sources from the time-domain observations. This approach allows us to exactly model the convolutive mixing process. The inference procedure relies on a variational expectation-maximization algorithm. In significant reverberation conditions, our approach leads to a signal-to-distortion ratio improvement of 5.5 dB compared with the usual TF approximation of the convolutive mixing process.

2025

Multiplicative update algorithms have encountered a great success to solve optimization problems with nonnegativity constraints, such as the famous non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) and its many variants. However, despite several years of research on the topic, the understanding of their convergence properties is still to be improved. In reference [1], we show that Lyapunov's stability theory provides a very enlightening viewpoint on the problem. We prove the exponential or asymptotic stability of the solutions to general optimization problems with non-negative constraints, including the particular case of supervised NMF, and finally study the more difficult case of unsupervised NMF. The theoretical results presented in the paper are confirmed by numerical simulations involving both supervised and unsupervised NMF, and the convergence speed of NMF multiplicative updates is investigated. In this supporting document, we present the proofs of some theoretical results presented in . This document, written as a sequel of [1], is not intended to be read separately.

2025, Discourse & Communication

While a lot of attention has been paid to online branding and the construction and communication of a company’s identity via its website, there is only very little research that looks at the processes involved in these activities from a discourse analytical perspective. This article aims to address this gap by conducting a case study of innocent, a UK producer of fruit juices. Combining corpus analytical tools with discourse analytical techniques and considering both text and multimodal features, we explore some of the strategies through which innocent creates a set of inter-related and closely intertwined identities on its website, thereby constructing the company’s brand image. However, our findings also reveal that some of the company’s identity claims (especially in relation to being an inclusive and welcoming ‘family’) are relativised and to some extent contradicted by the discursive processes through which these claims are articulated.

2025, Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics

has marked and evidenced the importance of effectively using linguistic features as a major component in expressing stances and as an essential part of the shared knowledge of a professional discourse community by giving space for negotiation and evaluation of viewpoints. The present study is concerned with the use of the expression of evaluation in academic discourse, focusing on some communicative strategies for indicating stance. With the corpus-based approach, research articles on applied linguistics and language teaching selected from top-ten journals were systematically complied and analyzed. The results revealed that professional and experienced writers variably exploit stance markers including epistemic modality, extraposed ‗it', communication verbs, and personal pronouns in terms of different functional types of evaluative stance. The findings highlight the importance of understanding the use of stance devices in academics, facilitating a better understanding of novice readers and writers when writing academic productions. Pedagogically, the description of this study contributes to ways to improvement of practical language and academic writing courses to suit the discourse community.

2025, American Anthropologist

2025, Journal for the Study of Judaism

The present article analyzes the various texts concerning Jacob's image engraved on the throne of glory. It compares the Jacob texts with previous traditions regarding Adam's special status as the image of God or the equivalent of a cultic representation of an ancient Near Eastern king or of a Roman emperor. The Jacob texts reveal a similar anthropology that emphasizes the dichotomy of humanity. On one hand the earthliness of the functionality of the human body is associated with angelic opposition, and, on the other, the body's divine likeness gives rise to angelic veneration. The investigation of the two traditions demonstrates a conspicuous dependence of the Jacob texts on the Adamic traditions.

2025, Conference: IPPA, World Congress on Positive Psychology, 2-5 July 2025, Brisbane, Australia

Positive authoethnography (PosAE) is a pragmatic form of autoethnography. Autoethnography merges the autobiographical and ethnographic, i.e. the socio-cultural-political; written alone, or collaboratively often as a constructivist, self-scrutinising, critique-oriented narrative. The epistemological flexibility of PosAE widens its use, making it of particular interest to positive psychologists.

2025, Discourse & Society

This article emphasises the need to devote more attention to concepts and theories in critical discourse studies (CDS). We are particularly eager to emphasise that CDS theory of the second decade of 2000s – often known as the post-crisis era or as the period of ‘late neoliberalism’ – faces a number of challenges that are both real world (social) and academic in nature. On the one hand, CDS theory must be reconsidered from the point of view of socio-political challenges and the necessity to tackle new (public and private) discourses as well as their trajectories that no longer undergo the once long-standing socio-political or politico-economic dynamics. On the other hand, we see the need for embracing new ways of theorising and conceptualising discourse in late modernity in the wider landscape of the social theories and their engagement with discourse. This article emphasises the need to address some voices that come from beyond the ‘core’ CDS community with the aim to enrich CDS the...

2025, EDULEARN proceedings

In order to measure students' learning performance, research on higher education mainly relies on the use of knowledge mastery tests. Although these tests are widely being used, the psychometric quality of these measurements has been given little attention. The aim of this study is to outline the development and validation of two knowledge mastery tests, serving as indicators for learning performance, through the use of item response theory. As studying academic texts is a major source for learning domain-specific content in higher education, both tests focus on knowledge mastery after studying an academic text on, respectively "problem solving theory" and "metacognition". Both tests were administered to first-year university students (n=180 for problem solving; n=249 for metacognition) enrolled for a Bachelor programme in Educational Sciences. The items were controlled for dimensionality, model-data fit, local item dependence and monotonicity. The final measure consisted of 16 out of 30 items for the knowledge test about the problem solving text. For the knowledge test about metacognition, 21 out of 30 items remained relevant and informative. The final results indicate that both knowledge tests are reliable, in particular for median ability levels. This study highlights the importance of developing knowledge mastery tests that provide accurate and valid measures for learning from academic tests.

2025, The American Historical Review

Unfortunately, due to the book's unusual backstory-it began life as a history commissioned by a Swiss bank-Cassis wrote the bulk of the text several years ago. Hence, he did not have the opportunity to integrate several important recent contributions, including William Silber, When Washington Shut Down Wall Street (Princeton, 2006), which shows, using exchange-rate movements (a type of data that Cassis ignores) that World War I led to New York's ascendance over London more quickly than Cassis argues. He also missed Wright, The First Wall Street (Chicago, 2005), which would have strengthened his thin discussion of the early U.S. ªnancial system. The book's genesis also explains the writing, which, though competent, is hardly a paragon of style, much apparently having been lost in translation from the original French. The book also suffers because it is almost entirely devoid of people, of memorable characters doing and saying interesting things. As beªtting a scholarly tome, the analysis is kept a safe distance from any inkling of human involvement, though certain key economic constructs, like the "impossible trinity" or monetary system "trilemma," are curiously underutilized. But mere quibbles are these. Anyone interested in the historical background of the world's most important international ªnancial centers will prize this book enormously.

2025

This study assesses the learning styles of law students at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill (UWICH) Faculty of Law (FOL) in the Caribbean, based on age, gender and academic performance, using the Grasha-Riechmann Student Learning Style Scale. The study also compared the learning styles of UWICH FOL students with the learning styles of UWICH management students, using a comparator study by Corbin (2017). In our study, using the Grasha-Riechmann rating norms, there was no dominant preferred learning style for law students with all results falling within the moderate range. Within this moderate range, the Collaborative learning style was "first among equals", as the strongest within the moderate range. Contrastingly, in Corbin's study, the Collaborative learning style was preferred for management students. In our study, Independent and Collaborative learning styles were significant predictors of academic performance, with the Independent learning style resulting in higher grade point averages (GPAs), and the Collaborative learning style being a predictor of lower GPAs. Contrastingly, Independent and Avoidant learning styles were predictors of academic performance in Corbin's study. A further longitudinal study into learning styles of UWICH law students and the teaching styles of lecturers is recommended.

2025, Cognition

present data from a study with baboons that they interpret in support of the idea that center-embedded structures in human language have their origin in low level memory mechanisms and associative learning. Critically, the authors claim that the baboons showed a behavioral preference that is consistent with center-embedded sequences over other types of sequences. We argue that the baboons' response patterns suggest that two mechanisms are involved: first, they can be trained to associate a particular response with a particular stimulus, and, second, when faced with two conditioned stimuli in a row, they respond to the most recent one first, copying behavior they had been rewarded for during training. Although 'experiment shows that the baboons' behavior is driven by low level mechanisms, it is not clear how the animal behavior reported, bears on the phenomenon of Center Embedded structures in human syntax. Hence, (1) natural language syntax may indeed have been shaped by low level mechanisms, and (2) the baboons' behavior is driven by low level stimulus response learning, as Rey et al. propose. But is the second evidence for the first? We will discuss in what ways this study can and cannot give evidential value for explaining the origin of Center Embedded recursion in human grammar. More generally, their study provokes an interesting reflection on the use of animal studies in order to understand features of the human linguistic system.

2025, Children and Youth Services Review

Ma ny studies indicate that health and well-being in the United States are likely to vary by ethnic or racial status (Williams, Lavizzo-Mourey, and Warren 1994; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 1985), and this has been well documented for adolescents in particular (Office of Technology Assessment 1991). The health status of American Indian and Alaska Native adolescents has also been identified as poorer than that of adolescents of other racial or ethnic groups (Office of Technology Assessment 1990 Indian Health Service 1998). For American Indian and Alaska Native adolescents, social and health indicators illustrate increased risk for poor outcomes on almost all well-being measures. Overall, in American Indian and Alaska Native adolescents (ages 15 to 24), the mortality ratio is approximately three times greater (2.7:1) than for U.S. all races (Office of Technology Assessment 1986). American Indian and Alaska Native adolescents are exposed to poverty and racial discrimination, which severely limit individual, family, and community prosperity. In these environments, personal values and integrity may be discouraged or corrupted and human potential limited. In a self-administered health survey of American Indian and Alaska Native adolescents, 2% reported poor health, and another 20% reported only fair health. The level of self-perceived health status was significantly correlated with social risk factors of physical and/or sexual

2025, Text & Talk

The current study presents the results of a discourse analysis research on the problem-solution pattern of textual organization (henceforth, the PS pattern) in a sample of English written newspaper editorials and op-eds. My main goal is to characterize the linguistic realization of the PS pattern in written opinion journalism and to describe its textual variations. The PS pattern is analyzed here as part of a wider framework, Tirkkonen-Condit's (1985) method of textual description, specifically designed to outline the global structure of argumentative texts. The application of Tirkkonen-Condit's method involves the dissection of texts into PS sequences and communicative acts. Both the PS sequences and the individualized communicative acts are assigned an illocutionary value and are analyzed in terms of the rhetorical relations holding between them. Findings reveal that the texts analyzed are complex networks of functionally arranged and interrelated PS sequences whose unmarked order can be purposely subverted with emphatic aims. In addition, an illocutionary and rhetorical analysis of each one of the PS textual components reveals di¤erent ways of addressing the reader in editorials and op-eds.

2025, Text & Talk - An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language, Discourse & Communication Studies

2025, Genre

Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors critique the use of metaphoric language, particularly military metaphors of invasion and battle, to describe illness experiences. Metaphors generate explanatory narratives, just as stories often use a resonant metaphor as shorthand for them. Metaphors and narratives can suggest reductive or stereotypical ways of imagining illness, disability, and other experiences of embodiment. However, rather than attempting to limit the metaphoric framing of illness, we should work to confer the agency to make metaphors on a larger constituency, one that always includes the patient. The author's first-person ovarian cancer narrative illustrates that not having the capacity to make metaphors for one's embodied experiences can affect the timing of diagnosis; the dearth of effective public metaphors for imagining some internal organs, such as the ovaries, contributes to the problem. Metaphors can be reductive, but they can als...

2025, Heliyon

Communication via a social network function enabled by social media has greatly empowered consumers' secondary crisis communication, as compared to a firm's crisis communication, and has thus changed corporate crisis management. This study aims to uncover consumers' decision process of engaging in secondary crisis communication in a social media context. Drawing on the social control perspective and impression management theory, this study examines the role of perceived morality violations and consumers' susceptibility to social influence in shaping consumers' secondary crisis communication in corporate crises. Moreover, leveraging cognitive dissonance theory, this study further examines the effects of corporate responses on the process of consumers' secondary crisis communication. A survey design with four scenarios was conducted to test a series of hypotheses relating to the decision process of secondary crisis communication. Our empirical results demonstrate that consumers' approach to secondary crisis communication on social media depends largely to the degree to which they perceive moral violations in the firms' crisis response. The findings also show that consumers tend to want to believe they are doing the "right thing" when considering secondary crisis communication and thus are afraid of being disliked by others for their purchasing decisions related to a firm in crisis. Such social conformance can result in a snowballing of negative word of mouth in product-harm crises cases. Findings contribute to the literature on social media crisis management and consumers' communication behavior on social media during product-harm crises.

2025, Brain and Language

In line bisection right-brain-damaged patients with left spatial neglect show a rightward deviation, with respect to the line's physical center. In word bisection ortho-phonological features of the stimulus' final (right-sided) part modulate performance of both patients and healthy participants . We investigated the role of linguistic factors in sentence bisection, in patients with and without neglect, and control participants. The effects of information in the rightsided part of the sentence (Experiment #1), and of lexical and syntactic violations (Experiment #2) were assessed. Neglect patients showed an overall rightward bias, larger than those of patients without neglect and controls. The neglect patients' bias was modulated by stimulus type, decreasing from lines, to letter strings and to all types of sentences. In sum, in visuo-manual sentence bisection a basic linguistic mechanism, such as sentence readability, brings about a more leftward appreciation of the stimulus, reducing the neglect patients' rightward bias.

2025, Studies in Laboratory Phonology. Language Science Press (langsci-press.org), pp.1-45.

What is prosody? What is rhythm? How does rhythm vary across languages? How can rhythm be taught to a second language learner? These are some of the topics addressed in this paper, specifically, prosody and rhythm in terms of acoustics, articulation, perception as well as phonological approaches to prosodic/rhythmic organization of speech. Briefly also discussed are methods for collecting articulatory data, including X-ray Microbeam, EMA (Electromagnetic Articulatograph), Video, Ultrasound, and a new method, involving a MARRYS cap. A strong focus is on articulation of rhythm: what is articulatory rhythm? How do languages vary in terms of rhythm articulation, and what are some possible kinesthetic approaches to teaching rhythm? This chapter is divided into the following sections: (1) introduction to prosody and rhythm; (2) articulation of rhythm and prominence levels in English; (3) articulatory prosody: an approach to modeling; (4) articulation of rhythm in other languages; (5) teaching rhythm to second language learners; (6) language rhythm and nested neural oscillations; (7) final comments; and (8) synopsis. The chapter is based on a mini-course offered through the Brazilian Federal University systems, Luso-Brazilian Association of Speech Sciences (LBASS) from March 16-26, 2021, thanks very much to Professor Tommaso Raso. Note that the chapter is not intended to completely cover everything about prosody, rather to introduce some concepts that may lead to some new insights, ideas, and questions in this field.

2025, Phonetica

The phenomenon of vowel reduction is investigated by modeling ‘gesture reduction’ with the use of the Distinctive Region Model (DRM). First, a definition is proposed for the term gesture, i.e. an acoustically efficient command aimed at deforming, in the time domain, the area function of the vocal tract. Second, tests are reported on the perception of vowel-to-vowel transitions obtained with reduced gestures. These tests show that a dual representation of formant transitions is required to explain the reduction phenomenon: the trajectory in the F1–F2 plane and the time course of the formant changes. The results also suggest that time-domain integration of the trajectories constitutes an integral part of the auditory processing of transitions. Perceptual results are also discussed in terms of the acoustic traces of DRM gestures.

2025, The European Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning

English Abstract The paper is a first presentation of the design and development of educational software implemented by the Department of Technology Education and Digital Systems of the University of Piraeus. Its aim was the development of educational software for teaching Greek as a second or foreign language to people coming from English-speaking countries. In this paper, the objectives and the target user group of the educational software are defined. Also, the structure of the educational software and its methodology are presented. Greek Abstract Το άρθρο αναφέρεται στην ανάπτυξη και κατασκευή ενός εκπαιδευτικού λογισμικού από ομάδα φοιτητών του Τμήματος ∆ιδακτικής της Τεχνολογίας και Ψηφιακών Συστημάτων του Πανεπιστημίου Πειραιώς, το οποίο απευθύνεται σε αλλοδαπούς μαθητές οι οποίοι διδάσκονται την ελληνική ως δεύτερη ή ξένη γλώσσα. Στο άρθρο αυτό, παρουσιάζονται οι στόχοι και η δομή του εκπαιδευτικού λογισμικού.

2025, Comparative Literature Studies

2025

As Yunnanese people immigrated in Thailand many years ago, nobody knows their language and where they are. This research aims to study Yunnanese dialect phonology and distribution in Thailand. The phonology of Yunnanese dialect data have been analyzed by phonemic approach and tones have been analyzed by computer software program PRAAT. Yunnanese language areas are presented on the map. This research found that Yunnanese in Thailand has five subdialects: Yunnanese phonology from Muang Hai of Xishuagbanna Autonomous Region of Tai Ethnic Group, Yunnanese phonology from Kunming, Yunnanese phonology from Longling, Yunnanese phonology from Simao, and the cities in the northern part of Yunnan, which are classified into two groups. The consonants, vowels and tones are difference both their number and characteristic depending on their origin places. At the present time, Yunnanese people settle down in four provinces: Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai, Mae Hong Son and Bangkok in Thailand.A partir de la...

2025, Media International Australia

khaki filter descended. Some journalists behaved like invaders, politicians bragged, and military briefings became the news -just as they have always done. Now, though, we can get the other side's version from the Internet and judge for... more

2025, Canadian Acoustics

This study investigates the production of three sibilant fricatives in Taiwan Mandarin, dental [s], retroflex [?], and alveolopalatal [?], using ultrasound recording. Previous studies have pointed out that the contrast between dental [s] and retroflex [?] tends to be lost in connected speech in Taiwan Mandarin [1, 2]. We ask whether the merger could happen in read speech as well. Two Taiwan Mandarin speakers (1 male and 1 female) read a list of nonse words, which contained one of the three fricatives, followed by one of three vowels [a], [?], and [o]. Tongue shape was traced at the mid-point of each fricative and SSANOVA was used to compare the three fricatives. The analysis revealed two major points. (1) In read speech, both speakers made clearly distinguishable tongue shapes for all of the three fricatives, suggesting that speaking style plays a role in determining the likelihood of the merger; however, more data are required for further verification. (2) The amount of variation i...

2025, ICASSP 2021 - 2021 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)

Speech communication systems based on Voice-over-IP technology are frequently used by native as well as non-native speakers of a target language, e.g. in international phone calls or telemeetings. Frequently, such calls also occur in a noisy environment, making noise suppression modules necessary to increase perceived quality of experience. Whereas standard tests for assessing perceived quality make use of native listeners, we assume that noise-reduced speech and residual noise may affect native and non-native listeners of a target language in different ways. To test this assumption, we report results of two subjective tests conducted with English and German native listeners who judge the quality of speech samples recorded by native English, German, and Mandarin speakers, which are degraded with different background noise levels and noise suppression effects. The experiments were conducted following the standardized ITU-T Rec. P.835 approach, however implemented in a crowdsourcing setting according to ITU-T Rec. P.808. Our results show a significant influence of language on speech signal ratings and, consequently, on the overall perceived quality in specific conditions.

2025, Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Abstract⎯This article contains a polemic with conclusions by B.N. Mironov. The author points out that the 1920s forced the authorities in the USSR to use the external signs of the federal structure to establish control over the national margins of the former Russian Empire. Federalism, in her opinion, was a lateral and induced branch of the party goal. During the 1920s, many national leaders who had previously collaborated with the Soviet government were replaced, killed, or exiled. A monopolistic organization of power, reliance on the administrative levers of control, a strict hierarchy of the political elite, and the ideologization of the political system as a whole were established in the country.

2025, Journal of Psycholinguistic Research

Two types of meaning representation are described, symptom and criterion, and it is argued that both have psychological status in mental representations of kinship terms. Certain symptoms, such as old age and biofocals for grandmothers, are likely indicators of grandmotherhood, but they do not reliably pick out all positive instances, nor do they indicate negative ones. Criteria specify the necessary and sufficient conditions for grandmotherhood: having a grandchild. The psychological reality of these two representations was demonstrated by asking children and adults to select kin-term exemplars from pictures in which both age and reciprocal kin symptoms are displayed, and to justify their selections. In both tasks, there was change with age away from using typical age as the sole bas& for performance; older subjects selected pictures displaying reciprocal kin, and justified their choices by referring to the criterion. More important, at each age level, there was evidence for dual representation: Even subjects who selected pictures based on the age symptom often gave criterial justifications, and subjects who selected pictures based on the reciprocal kin symptom still preferred pictures displaying age symptoms in addition to the reciprocal kin.

2025, Cognition

A set of eight experiments demonstrate spatial knowledge in a 2-year-old congenitally blind child and sighted blindfolded controls. Once the blind child had traveled along specific paths between objects in a novel array, she was able to make spatial inferences, finding new routes between those objects (Experiment I). She could also do so when the routes were between places in space, not occupied by objects (Experiment II). Deviations from precisely straight routes in Experiments I and H were not due to faulty inferences, but probably came from imprecise motor control, since the same deviations occurred when inferences were not required--when the child moved to a place designated by a sound source (Experiment 111). This child's performances could not be accounted for by artifactual explanations: sound cues, experimenter bias, and echolocation were ruled out (Experiments IV, V, VI). Further. sighted blindfolded controls performed at roughly the same level (Experiment VII). Finally, Experiment VIII shows that the blind child could access her spatial knowledge for use in a simple map-reading task. We conclude that the young blind child has a system of spatial knowledge, including abstract, amodal rules *We wish to thank Lila R. Gieitman for extensive conceptual, editorial, and per,,;onal support in every phase of this project. 'We also thank C.R. Gallistel for suggesting several experimental ideas, and for pointing out the relevance of a geometrical approach to spatial knowledge. We thank the O'Brien family for their extensive commitment to this work. Finally, we thank Dr. G. Pereira and Ms. Anne Farren for locating our blind subject, and

2025, Cognition

We examined the relationship between spatial language and spatial memory by comparing native English, Japanese, and Korean speakers' naming of spatial locations and their spatial memory for the same set of locations. We focused on two kinds of spatial organization: axial structure of the reference object, and contact/support with respect to its surface. The results of two language (naming) tasks showed similar organization across the three language groups in terms of axial structure, but differences in organization in terms of contact/support. In contrast, the results of two memory tasks were the same across language groups for both axial structure and contact/support. Moreover, the relationship between spatial language and spatial memory in the two sets of tasks did not show a straightforward isomorphism between the two systems. We conclude that spatial language and spatial memory engage the same kinds of spatial properties, suggesting similarity in the foundations of the two systems. However, the two systems appear to be partially independent: the preservation of particular spatial properties was not mandatory across languages, nor across memory tasks, and crosslinguistic differences in spatial language did not lead to differences in the non-linguistic encoding of location. We speculate that the similarity in linguistic and non-linguistic representations of space may emerge as a functional consequence of negotiating the spatial world.

2025, Cognition

Four experiments demonstrated that certain fundamental principles of map use can be accessed without any specific training. Results showed that a 4-year-old congenitally blind child with no previous map-use experience could use a 2symbol map to directionally guide her locomotion in space, with successful location of objects in front of her, behind her, to her left, or to her right. She could do so under conditions where the map and space were aligned in front of her (canonical condition), and under various transformation conditions: sideways translation, front-behind translation, and vertical rotation. In these conditions, there was no straightforward spatial relationship between her position in space, and her represented position on the map; therefore, mental alignments of the map with external space were necessary. Control data from sighted children showed that, by 4 years, they too could interpret and use these maps. Analysis of the requirements of this simple map task suggests that a core of the knowledge required to use maps is a readily accessible product of a spatial knowledge system common to both the blind and sighted. This paper reports the performance of a 4 year-old congenitally blind child using simple tactile maps for the first time. Her performance suggests that certain fundamental components of map use are accessible without specific prior experience in map reading, and without previous visual experience.

2025, Cognition

The arguments of a verb are commonly assumed to correspond to the event participants specified by the verb. That is, drink has two arguments because drink specifies two participants: someone who drinks and something that gets drunk. This correspondence does not appear to hold, however, in the case of instrumental participants, e.g. John drank the soda with a straw. Verbs such as slice and write have been argued to specify an instrumental participant, even though instruments do not pattern like arguments given other criteria. In this paper, we investigated how instrumental verbs are represented, testing the hypothesis that verbs such as slice encode three participants in the same way that dative verbs such as lend encode three participants. In two experiments Englishspeakers reported their judgments about the number of participants specified by a verb, e.g. that drink specifies two participants. These judgments indicate that slice does not encode three distinct arguments. Nonetheless, some verbs were systematically more likely to elicit the judgment that the instrument is specified by the verb, a pattern that held across individual subjects. To account for these findings, we propose that instruments are not independent verbal arguments but are represented in a gradient away: an instrument may be a more or less salient part of the force exerted by an agent. These results inform our understanding of the relationship between argument structure and event representation, raising questions concerning the role of arguments in language processing and learning.

2025, Journal of Psycholinguistic Research

2025, Cognition

2025, Journal of Cultural Economy

Speculation has become a normalized occupational strategy and quotidian economic rationality that extends throughout society. Although there are many contemporary articulations of speculation, this article focuses on contract labor as a domain of financialization. Seen through this lens, contract labor can be understood as a speculative investment strategy wherein individuals leverage whatever assets they have at their disposalsavings, time, bodily healthto capture economic advantages. In particular, we explore the speculative practices of healthy individuals who enroll in pharmaceutical drug trials as their primary or critical source of income. Mobilizing speculative logics to maximize the money they can earn from their clinical trial participation, these contract workers employ what we term a future-income-overimmediate-pay calculus. This speculative calculus valorizes fictional projections of significant long-term future income over present financial opportunities. For the economically precarious individuals in our study, we argue that rather than effectively increasing their income, speculation on contract work serves a compensatory function, providing an importantbut ultimately inadequatesense of control over market conditions that thrive upon workers' economic insecurity.

2025, Text - Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse

This article examines proportions of speaker contributions and turn-taking patterns in one type of radio sports commentating. The first part of this study uses transcriptions of two complete radio commentaries of an Australian rugby league match, which took place on 14 July 1996, and measures the proportion of speaker contributions to the commentary using the clause as the basic unit of analysis. The results indicate that there is a consistent pattern of speaker contributions and a specific order of magnitude in terms of the degree to which speakers contribute to the commentary, with the main commentator contributing the most number of clauses, the greatest number of turns and the highest number of clauses per turn. As for turn-taking patterns, this study shows that the main commentator acts as a bridge between the contributions of each of the other speakers. The second part of this study uses the construct of context of situation as proposed in systemic functional linguistic theory to interpret the findings. Extracts from the commentary are used to illustrate specific features of the context. The proportion of speaker contributions and the turn-taking patterns reflect, in particular, the institutionalized nature of the context of situation and the complexities of the mode in relation with the other contextual variables of field and tenor.

2025, New West Indian Guide

From telecenters, "One Laptop Per Child," and "WiMAX" to e-learning and "Free and Open Source Software" movements, Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) represent key tools in global and national efforts to reduce poverty and promote sustainable development. Within this context, ict policies and regulations play a pivotal role in creating the conditions and frameworks for the successful integration of ICTs within a variety of national and regional contexts. Ringtones of Opportunity explores the way policy practitioners are grappling with the development of Caribbean-relevant frameworks across a range of industries. Highlighting the dynamic pace of ict change and challenges of keeping up to date with the latest platforms, services, and innovations, Hopeton Dunn begins with an excellent overview of key policies over the past decade. The first of the volume's three main sections, "Strategic Issues," then focuses on trends with respect to regulatory frameworks and policy making across the region, including discussions of broadband access. The second section, "ict Application and Society," addresses the potential of different applications and programs, ranging from literacy programs, the use of cybercenters for education and training in Jamaica, the integration of mobile phones in the work of fisherfolk in Trinidad and Tobago and farmers in Jamaica, the emergence of telework across Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, and Jamaica, and the use of the internet by Civil Society Organizations. The final section, "Legal and Environmental Issues," analyzes interconnection agreements, intellectual property, cybercrimes, and the role of ICTs in contributing to climate change. The chapter by Dunn, Michael Thomas, and Allison Brown is particularly seminal in setting an agenda for twenty-first-century policymaking. Beginning with a review of the history of ict policy making in the Caribbean, they introduce policy as a dynamic, complex, and "living" endeavor that reflects the ways in which human-centered policymaking occurs in practice. Many of the subsequent contributions, especially those dealing with applications and legal frameworks (e.g., Arlene Bailey's chapter on community access and Dianne Daley and Nicole Foga's call for Intellectual Property Rights reform), deftly reinforce the intricacies of ict-driven policies and initiatives. Yet, as in many edited volumes, a few chapters fit less neatly into the broader focus, most notably Pieter Fourie's on new paradigms in media and communication research; while valuable for its introduction of a critical framework and the latest scholarship, it might better have been integrated into the introduction, situating the vol-

2025, First Language

The analysis of conversational repair provides one route into understanding how young children learn the skills required for participating in talk. One key aspect of repair is the ability to respond appropriately to other participants. Employing a longitudinal case study approach, this article examines in detail the conversational repair skills of one child during the period where she is acquiring core conversational abilities and competencies (from 1;0 to 3;10). Focusing on the development of other-related conversational repair skills, 163 instances of other-related repair were examined and analysed. Extracts highlight the skills the child employed in self-repairs in response to others, as well as when repairing or correcting other people's conversation. The findings indicate that during the early years other-initiated self-repair is a more common occurrence than repairing others' talk. The findings provide insights into the significance of conversational repair for languag...

2025, Journal of Roman Studies

fought together against Rome in the second Samnite war, and remained loyal after Cannae. A similar pattern is identied in Apulia, although the textual evidence there is less robust (85-98, especially 89). F. draws on archaeological and numismatic material to argue that the communities who defected (namely Arpi and the neighbouring settlements of Herdonia, Salapia and Aecae) were bound together by economic and political ties stretching back to the fourth century B.C. Arpi's main rivals (Teanum Apulum and Canusium) remained loyal to Rome, echoing the pattern in Campania where rival powers adopted opposing sides, and dragged their 'satellite' settlements along with them. F. is nevertheless careful to leave room for contingent developments that deviate from this pattern. One important example is the case of Thurii and Taras, which were major rivals yet both revolted to . Practically all of the Italian states that F. takes into consideration are city-states. A slightly more peripheral place is given to the non-urban political communities of the central Apennines, where Hannibal seems to have had very limited success in eliciting defections. F. refers to central Apennine communities as 'tribes' (291-4), although there is evidence that by the late third century these communities were already complex polities which minted their own coins. F.'s treatment of the central Apennines is understandably less detailed, given the lack of written sources. Yet he rightly suspects that resentment towards Rome may have been more pervasive in the region than ancient historical writers suggest. For example, he challenges Livy's assertion that all of the Pentrian Samnites remained loyal after Cannae, by noting that the Pentrian settlement of Fagifulae defected to Hannibal (Liv. 24.20.5). This comes as a timely contribution to broader debates about the extent to which ethnic identity inuenced allegiance and political action in republican Italy, especially in areas where the city-state was absent. It is becoming increasingly clear that ethnic identity was one of several factors that shaped military and political action, as recently demonstrated by Isayev with regard to élite networks among the Hirpini in the second and early rst centuries (E. Isayev, 'Italian perspectives in the period of Gracchan land reforms and the Social War', in K. Lomas, E. Herring and A. Gardner (eds), Creating Ethnicities & Identities in the Roman World (2012)). The potential of F.'s approach to interstate relations goes beyond the Second Punic War, and opens up new interpretative possibilities for understanding Roman expansion in Italy. He makes some thought-provoking points about Rome's tumultuous relationship with the Samnites, suggesting that it may have resulted from an enduring rivalry where previous wars made subsequent wars more likely, rather than from any 'pathological' bellicosity on the part of Rome or, for that matter, the Samnites, who are often accused in ancient as well as modern historical writing of being distinctively prone to war. On a methodological level, F. makes a convincing case that aspects of Livy's narrative cannot be summarily dismissed as pro-Roman distortion, as upon closer inspection he reveals the complexity of relations among Italian communities. There is clearly some pro-Roman bias in Livy's image of Italic communities who repeatedly appeal to Rome for help. Yet, from the standpoint of realpolitik, F. convincingly argues that such an image is coherent with a highly competitive political setting such as that of Republican Italy, suggesting that it was by manipulating the local rivalries between Italian communities that the Romans justied their interference and extended their inuence. Overall, F.'s book contributes substantially to the history of the Roman Republic and appeals to a wide readership, from undergraduate students to specialists on the politics, society and culture of Republican Italy.

2025, Journal of Fluency Disorders

2025

The article is a short piece based on our EACD survey on the identity management practices of marketing and communication professeionals on how communications teams can harness the power of online impression management