Speech recognition by second language (L2) learners in optimal and suboptimal conditions has been examined extensively with English as the target language in most previous studies. This study extended existing experimental protocols ( Wang et al., 2013 ) to investigate Mandarin speech recognition by Japanese learners of Mandarin at two different levels (elementary vs. intermediate) of proficiency. The overall results showed that in addition to L2 proficiency, semantic context, F0 contours, and listening condition all affected the recognition performance on the (...) Mandarin sentences. However, the effects of semantic context and F0 contours on L2 speech recognition diverged to some extent. Specifically, there was significant modulation effect of listening condition on semantic context, indicating that L2 learners made use of semantic context less efficiently in the interfering background than in quiet. In contrast, no significant modulation effect of listening condition on F0 contours was found. Furthermore, there was significant interaction between semantic context and F0 contours, indicating that semantic context becomes more important for L2 speech recognition when F0 information is degraded. None of these effects were found to be modulated by L2 proficiency. The discrepancy in the effects of semantic context and F0 contours on L2 speech recognition in the interfering background might be related to differences in processing capacities required by the two types of information in adverse listening conditions. (shrink)

Morally contoured empathy is a form of reasonable partiality essential to the healthy care of dependents. It is critical as an epistemic aid in determining proper moral responsiveness; it is also, within certain richly normative roles and relationships, itself a crucial constitutive mode of moral connection. Yet the achievement of empathy is no easy feat. Patterns of incuriosity imperil connection, impeding empathic engagement; inappropriate empathic engagement, on the other hand, can result in self-effacement. Impartial moral principles and constraints offer at (...) best meager protection against these perils, and hence serve poorly in securing morally contoured empathy. More nuanced and practical guidance should be sought in normatively substantive conceptions of our roles and relationships and their defining moral stakes. These, joined with more abstract moral tools, can facilitate rich, narratively textured interpretations of moralitys demands. While the content of our normative conceptions must be continually debated, engaging in this debate is vital to the achievement of proper empathy, and thus to effective, respectful, morally healthy care of dependents. (shrink)

Previous work has shown that children with dyslexia are impaired in speech recognition in adverse listening conditions. Our study further examined how semantic context and fundamental frequency (F0) contours contribute to word recognition against interfering speech in dyslexic and non-dyslexic children. Thirty-two children with dyslexia and 35 chronological-age-matched control children were tested on the recognition of words in normal sentences versus wordlist sentences with natural versus flatF0contours against single-talker interference. The dyslexic children had overall poorer recognition performance than non-dyslexic children. (...) Furthermore, semantic context differentially modulated the effect ofF0contours on the recognition performances of the two groups. Specifically, compared with flatF0contours, naturalF0contours increased the recognition accuracy of dyslexic children less than non-dyslexic children in the wordlist condition. By contrast, naturalF0contours increased the recognition accuracy of both groups to a similar extent in the sentence condition. These results indicate that access to semantic context improves the effect of naturalF0contours on word recognition in adverse listening conditions by dyslexic children who are more impaired in the use of naturalF0contours during isolated and unrelated word recognition. Our findings have practical implications for communication with dyslexic children when listening conditions are unfavorable. (shrink)

This paper outlines new work in cross-cultural psychology largely drawn from Nisbett, Choi, and Smith (Cognition, 65, 15–32, 1997); Nisbett, Peng, Choi, & Norenzayan, Psychological Review, 108(2), 291–310, 2001; Nisbett, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why. New York: Free Press 2003), Ji, Zhang and Nisbett (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87(1), 57–65, 2004), Norenzayan (2000) and Peng (Naive Dialecticism and its Effects on Reasoning and Judgement about Contradiction. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan (...) 1997) Peng and Nisbett (Cross-Cultural Similarities and Differences in the Understanding of Physical Causality. Paper presented at the Science and Culture: Proceedings of the Seventh Interdisciplinary Conference on Science and Culture, Frankfort, K. Y. 1996), and Peng, Ames, & Knowles (Culture and Human Inference: Perspectives from three traditions. In: D. Matsumoto (Ed.), Handbook of Cross-Cultural Psychology (pp. 1–2). Oxford: Oxford University Press 2000). The paper argues that the findings on cultural influences on inference-making have implications for teaching and education generally, and specifically for the debate on conceptions and misconceptions of Asian students studying in western tertiary institutions around the world. The position defended is that, while there seems to be compelling empirical evidence for intercultural differences in thought patterns, these patterns are, for the most part, insignificant in everyday exchanges, though language and culture might subtlety modulate our inference-making at the margins. Linguistic determinism however is not defended. Nonetheless, the evidence provides food for thought, and it needs to inform the recent debates about international students studying overseas. (shrink)

We report on rapid perceptual learning of intonation contour categories in adults and 9- to 11-year-old children. Intonation contours are temporally extended patterns, whose perception requires temporal integration and therefore poses significant working memory challenges. Both children and adults form relatively abstract representations of intonation contours: Previously encountered and novel exemplars are categorized together equally often, as long as distance from the prototype is controlled. However, age-related differences in categorization performance also exist. Given the same experience, adults form narrower (...) categories than children. In addition, adults pay more attention to the end of the contour, while children appear to pay equal attention to the beginning and the end. The age range we examine appears to capture the tail-end of the developmental trajectory for learning intonation contour categories: There is a continuous effect of age on category breadth within the child group, but the oldest children are adult-like. (shrink)

Brain lateralization of lexical tone processing remains a matter of debate. In this study we used a dichotic listening paradigm to examine the influences of the knowledge of Jyutping, linguistic-processing demand and tone type on the ear preference pattern of native tone processing in Hong Kong Cantonese speakers. While participants with little knowledge of Jyutping showed a previously reported left-ear advantage, those with a good level of Jyutping expertise exhibited either a right-ear advantage or bilateral processing during lexical tone identification (...) and contour tone discrimination, respectively. As for the effect of linguistic-processing demand, while an LEA was found in acoustic/phonetic perception situations, this advantage disappeared and was replaced by a bilateral pattern in conditions that involved a greater extent of linguistic processing, suggesting an increased involvement of the left hemisphere. Regarding the effect of tone type, both groups showed an LEA in level tone discrimination, but only the Jyutping group demonstrated a bilateral pattern in contour tone discrimination. Overall, knowledge of written codes of tones, greater degree of linguistic processing and contour tone processing seem to influence the brain lateralization of lexical tone processing in native listeners of Cantonese by increasing the recruitment of the left-hemisphere language network. (shrink)

With the rapid development of sports science, human motion recognition technology, as a new biometric recognition technology, has many advantages, such as noncontact target, long recognition distance, secret recognition process, and so on. Traditional human motion recognition technology is affected by environmental factors such as motion background, which is prone to rough edges of the recognized objects and loss of motion tracking information, thus further reducing the recognition accuracy. In this paper, the traditional snake model will be improved and optimized (...) to improve the defect of human motion model contour extraction, so as to realize the accurate repair of image contour; in terms of algorithm running time, this paper innovatively improves the construction process of the snake model, further improves the running time of model evaluation, and solves the concave contour problem of corresponding moving objects in the snake model. In order to solve the problem of accurate convergence, this paper improves the snake model of the average moving algorithm and sets the corresponding weight coefficient to distinguish the corresponding moving target background, so as to achieve the convergence of the differential concave contour. In order to verify the superiority of the improved optimized snake model, experiments are carried out in the corresponding database. The experimental results show that the contour of the moving object extracted by the improved snake model algorithm is complete and the segmentation effect is obvious. At the same time, the running speed of the whole algorithm has been significantly improved. (shrink)

Spatial facilitation has been observed with luminance-defined, achromatic stimuli on achromatic backgrounds as well as with targets and inducers defined by colour contrast. This paper reviews psychophysical results from detection experiments with human observers showing the conditions under which spatially separated contour inducers facilitate the detection of simultaneously presented target stimuli. The findings point towards two types of spatial mechanisms: (i) Short-range mechanisms that are sensitive to narrowly spaced stimuli of small size and, at distinct target locations, selective to (...) the contrast polarity of targets and inducers. (ii) Long-range mechanisms that are triggered by longer stimuli, generate facilitation across wider spatial gaps between targets and inducers, and are insensitive to their contrast polarity. Spatial facilitation with chromatic stimuli requires a longer inducer exposure than spatial facilitation with achromatic stimuli, which is already fully effective at inducer exposures of 30 ms. This difference in temporal dynamics indicates some functional segregation between mechanisms for colour and luminance contrast in the perception of space. (shrink)

There is a continuing debate in the field of perceptual organization as to whether the locus of global processing is early or late perceptual, as previous studies have yielded contrary results. The conducted behavioural study explored this issue with the paradigm of collating global processing with other process of perceptual organization, namely illusory contours processing. Interaction between these two processes of perceptual organization would indicate that global processing has an early perceptual locus, whereas the lack of such interaction would suggest (...) the late perceptual locus of global processing. In experiment 1, the effect of global dominance was obtained with the use of a compound figure composed of geometrical shapes with real edges. Results showed that the processing of the figure at the global level was faster and that it disrupted the processing of the figures from the local level. In experiment 1b, the compound figure was composed of local geometrical shapes generated with the use of the line-end induced illusory contours. Local elements with illusory contours did not affect the processing of the hierarchical structure and the effect of global precedence occurred without any changes. In experiment 2a, a global advantaged effect within a compound figure with local elements with real edges was obtained in the paradigm of attention divided between levels of the hierarchical structure. When illusory contours of local elements of a compound figure were introduced to this paradigm, this again had no effect on the perceptual global advantage. The results demonstrate the lack of interaction between global processing and illusory contour processing, indicating that the locus of global processing is rather late perceptual. (shrink)

Experiments are presented showing that visual search for Mueller-Lyer (ML) stimuli is based on complete configurations, rather than component segments. Segments easily detected in isolation were difficult to detect when embedded in a configuration, indicating preemption by low-level groups. This preemption—which caused stimulus components to become inaccessible to rapid search—was an all-or-nothing effect, and so could serve as a powerful test of grouping. It is shown that these effects are unlikely to be due to blurring by simple spatial filters (...) at early visual levels. It is proposed instead that they are due to more sophisticated processes that rapidly bind contour fragments into spatially-extended assemblies. These results support the view that rapid visual search cannot access the primitives formed at the earliest stages of visual processing; rather, it can access only higher-level, more ecologically-relevant structures. (shrink)

This study investigates the phonetics of German nuclear rise-fall contours in relation to contexts that trigger either a contrastive or a non-contrastive interpretation in the answer. A rise-fall contour can be conceived of a tonal sequence of L-H-L. A production study elicited target sentences in contrastive and non-contrastive contexts. The majority of cases realized showed a nuclear rise-fall contour. The acoustic analysis of these contours revealed a significant effect of contrastiveness on the height/alignment of the accent peak as (...) a function of focus context. On the other hand, the height/alignment of the low turning point at the beginning of the rise did not show an effect of contrastiveness. In a series of semantic congruency perception tests participants judged the congruency of congruent and incongruent context-stimulus pairs based on three different sets of stimuli: (i) original data, (ii) manipulation of accent peak, and (iii) manipulation of the leading low. Listeners distinguished nuclear rise-fall contours as a function of focus context (Experiment 1 and 2), however not based on manipulations of the leading low (Experiment 3). The results suggest that the alignment and scaling of the accentual peak are sufficient to license a contrastive interpretation of a nuclear rise-fall contour, leaving the rising part as a phonetic onglide, or as a low tone that does not interact with the contrastivity of the context. (shrink)

This article will argue that the church is the mystic body of Christ that believers must guard from purveyors bend on twisting the truth. There is no doubt that the Catholic social teaching on medical and moral matters has proven to be pertinent and applicable to the ever-changing circumstances of health care and its delivery. In response to today’s challenges, these same moral principles of Catholic teaching provide the rationale and direction for the community of faith. In times of coronavirus (...) characterized by falsehoods, the truth is a virtue the church must strive for: “… If you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”(John 8: 31-32). The truth is Christ; it is Christological. Christians must understand the clash of worldviews that is changing the face of Zimbabwean society. A worldview is simply the sum total of our beliefs about the world; Christianity is a worldview that directs our daily decisions and actions. Worldviews affect the way we think. A worldview is a well-reasoned framework of beliefs and convictions that gives a true and unified perspective on the meaning of human existence. To paraphrase from the book of First Samuel (16: 7) – to see as God sees and not how the world sees. Beliefs are not simple propositions held inside us which drive our outward behaviour in predictable ways, they are more of acts of commitment than anything else. There is no doubt that the future of Catholicism lies in the hands of the church’s leadership and the believing Christians. Catholics look to their faith leaders for guidance on big decisions as regards COVID-19 issues. Conspiracy theories around COVID-19 deny that the COVID-19 pandemic is a biological virus. Catholics require direction from the Pope down to the episcopal leadership to chart the way forward. A worldview not only impacts how one understands and makes sense of the world but also influences how one expresses oneself in the world. The constellation of personal values, beliefs, assumptions, attitudes, and ideas that make up our worldview have an effect on our understanding of reality. Coronavirus has caused uncertainty among believers and confusion as to how to cope with the complex problems that arise in COVID-19 related issues. This article will aver that the nature of drawing the contours of catholicity regarding the biblical foundations of the health falls in the hands of orthodox Catholic teachings. (shrink)

Does self-control require willpower? The question cuts to the heart of a debate about whether self-control is identical with some psychological process internal to the agents or not. Noticeably absent from these debates is systematic evidence about the folk-psychological category of self-control. Here, we present the results of two behavioral studies (N = 296) that indicate the structure of everyday use of the concept. In Study 1, participants rated the degree to which different strategies to respond to motivational conflict exemplify (...) self-control. Participants distinguished between intra-psychic and externally-scaffolded strategies and judged that the former exemplified self-control more than the latter. In Study 2, participants provided various solutions to manage motivational conflict and rated their proposals on effectiveness. Participants produced substantially more intra-psychic strategies, rated them as more effective, and advised them at a higher rate than externally-scaffolded strategies. Taken together, these results suggest that while people recognize a plurality of strategies as genuine instances of self-control, purely internal exercises of self-control are considered more prototypical than their externally-scaffolded counterparts. This implies a hierarchical structure for the folk psychological category of self-control. The concept encompasses a variety of regulatory strategies and organizes these strategies along a hierarchical continuum, with purely intra-psychic strategies at the center and scaffolded strategies in the periphery. (shrink)

The paper investigates Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of body and space and Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Francis Bacon’s work, in order to derive a renegotiated interrelation between habitual body, phenomenal space, preferential plane and constructive line. The resulting system is ap- plied as a filter to understand the sartorial fashion of Rei Kawakubo and Hussein Chalayan and their potential as a spatial prosthesis: the operative third skin. If the evolutionary nature of culture demands a constant change, how does the surface of (...) a third skin, which embodies the generative of stable/ unstable, respond to changes of context? The fleeting, shifting conditions of contemporary culture/ lifestyle rely upon, result in, and reflect one constant, change: change of working conditions, family structures, modes of inhabitation, relation networks, of userprofile and identity, of social and territorial boundaries. We occupy the shift- ing spatial parameters of a transitional supermodern environment. Culture, as enacted or embodied through each of these fields, is regulated by a number of abstract and factual variables that interplay constantly: time, space, movement, surface, individual, and data. Elizabeth Grosz argues that culture is an evolutionary effect: it regenerates itself in order to ensure the survival of the species. Each “prosthetic” expression of culture – language, fashion, architecture, etc. – changes repeatedly. Here change is not an end in itself, but a means. And the most successful prosthesis may not be the one that is able to answer the largest number of challenges, but one which itself undergoes a process of learning, self-modification, and differentiation – in short, a process of evolution. Any prosthesis is by nature an extension of the body. In the case of architecture and fashion the prosthesis addressing change is most often external to the body – a “cultural fur” or a surface phenomenon, that is, a highly profiled supplementary skin. As with all prostheses, their respective life-span depends on their ability to reflect a change in context and value systems. They are adapted or updated, if not, they vanish. Any situation of change is processed as a differentiation between the actual and the virtual of a given context. Grosz identifies distinctions between the actual and virtual, the real and the possible: the possible is a preformed real that has not yet received its final materiality, and thus delineates a range of options of becoming. The real is the blueprint of the possible, negotiated by factual limitations, and it is conjoint with the actual through a process of differentiation and divergence. The virtual comprises alternate variations of the actual, it defines a realm of deviation from the blueprint. In order to be responsive to change, the balance between the actual and virtual thus must be rendered unstable: “The virtual requires the actual to diverge, to differentiate itself, to proceed by way of division and disruption, forging modes of actualisation that will transform this virtual into others unforeseen or uncontained within it.” 4 The integration of the virtual allows a re-ordering of the blueprint, a return to the crossroad of possibilities, unlimiting and processing an alternative real, and establishing a state of continual change. A repeated change – not as a choice between a number of options but as a gradual process – marks the moment of evolution, and requires a dynamic system. Such a dynamic can be rendered as an adaptable, flexible, modular, mobile, or morphing system of change. The key lies with the fluency and ability of adaptation for the proposed differentiation between actual and virtual – thus it is an elastic change that is required. The nature of this elasticity is encoded in a repeated repositioning of the variables: a constant fine-tuning of a maximum number of parameters that engineer, alter and define the blueprint. When looking for a dynamic system that incorporates a transformation of skin or space, we are in search of dynamics through an operative surface, controlled by means of the constructive line. Both operative surface and constructive line are generative methods for the formation and form finding of the second and third skin of sartorial fashion and architecture respectively, as they both produce inhabitable or wearable envelopes with a specific responsiveness. Both professions share communication, coding and signage, form information programs, pattern charts, volume outlines, texture fields, surface operations, and implement electronic or digital extensions. In both, the constructive line shapes the surface twice: before production and in operation. The surface demarcates space, spatial envelope, enclosing garment, field of action. In which way can an operative system of the surface with stable/ unstable conditioning generate a phenomenological or evolutionary change in the reconstruction of body and context? How do time, space, movement, surface, individual and data interact in this framework? What is the impact of surface strategies and constructive line on that system? (shrink)

During 'cyclic' historical periods it would be correct to interpret religious processes in terms of interaction of two essentially different, but substantially, structurally and functionally comparative types of integrating cultural complexes that, in historical perspective, compete with each other on the effect on individuals and society in general. Such complexes represent secular and religious culture. Contemporary socio-cultural situation can be defined as an asymmetric representativeness of both secular and religious cultures. In a modern secular society, dominance of a secular culture (...) over a religious one can be manifested in three basic dimensions: substantial, regulative and subjective ones. Secular culture is adopted during the primary socialization process. However, religious culture is still adopted through conscious, voluntary selection in younger or more mature age. It may be possible to determine two basic attitudes of the contemporary man towards religion. The first attitude may be called 'reversive' and the other one 'conversive'. Za 'ciklicne' istorijske periode ispravna je interpretacija religijskih procesa u terminu uzajamnog dejstva dva sustinski razlicita ali sadrzajno, strukturalno i funkcionalno komparativna tipa integrisucih kulturnih kompleksa koji u istorijskoj perspektivi jedan drugom konkurisu u uticaju na pojedinca i drustvo. Takvi kompleksi su svetovna i religiozna kultura. Savremena sociokulturna situacija se moze definisati kao asimetrija reprezentativnosti svetovne i religiozne kulture. Dominacija svetovne nad religioznom kulturom u savremenom sekularizovnom drustvu manifestuje se u tri osnovne dimenzije: predmetnoj, regulativnoj i subjektivnoj. Svetovna kultrura se masovno usvaja u procesu primarne socijalizacije. Religiozna kultura se pak, usvaja samosvesnim, voljnim izborom u mladjem ili starijem uzrastu. Moguce je izdvojiti dva osnovna nacina obracanja savremenog 'sekularizovanog') coveka religiji. Prvi nacin mozemo nazvati 'reverzivnim' a drugi 'konverzivnim'. (shrink)

We explore the legalization of the cannabis industry in the US, and point at the conflicted path through which this emerging industry has traversed. In particular, we highlight how this industry has navigated controversy to become one of the fastest growing industries in the world. The paper also offers a theoretical model that explains the role played by social movements to propel and shape early antagonism towards increasing protagonism. Evidence of the latter is seen in the form of cannabis laws (...) passing at the state level in the US. We posit that resource mobilization and shaping effects were instrumental in laying the grounds for legalization. A detailed timeline of the legalization for over one and a half centuries is also provided. Our synergistic approach integrates a historical perspective with social movement theory to address a relatively new and under examined phenomenon in the emerging US legal cannabis industry and ensuing ethical implications. (shrink)

This paper exploits the modified simple equation and dynamical system schemes to integrate the Klein–Gordon model amid quadratic nonlinearity arising in nonlinear optics, quantum theories, and solid state physics. By implementing the modified simple equation technique, we develop some disguise adaptation of analytical solutions in terms of hyperbolic, exponential, and trigonometric functions with some special parameters. We apply the dynamical system to bifurcate the model and draw distinct phase portraits on unlike parametric constraints. Following each orbit of all phase portraits, (...) we originate bounded and unbounded solitary, periodic, and periodic rogue-type wave solutions of the KG model. These two schemes extract widespread classes of solitary, periodic, and periodic rogue-type wave solutions for the KG model jointly due to restrictions on parameters. We also analyze the effect of parameters on the obtained wave solutions and discuss why and when it changes its nature. We illustrate some dynamical features of the acquired solutions via the 3D, 2D, and contour graphics. (shrink)

Brincat and Westheimer [Journal of Neurophysiology 83 (2000) 1900] have reported facilitating interactions in the discrimination of spatially separated target orientations and co-linear inducing orientations by human observers. With smaller gaps between stimuli (short-range effects), facilitating interactions were found to depend on the contrast polarity of the stimuli. With larger gaps (longrange effects), only co-linearity of the stimuli seemed necessary to produce facilitation. In our study, the dependency of facilitating interactions on the intensity (luminance) of line stimuli is (...) investigated by measuring detection thresholds for a target line separated from the end of an inducing line by co-axial gaps ranging from 5 to 200 min of visual arc. We find facilitating interactions between target and inducing orientations, producing short-range and long-range effects similar to those reported by Brincat and Westheimer. In addition, detection thresholds as a function of the co-axial separation between target and inducing line reveal an interaction between the spatial regime of facilitating effects and the luminance of the stimuli. Short-range effects are found to be sensitive to changes in local intensity while long-range effects remain unaffected. (shrink)

This essay explores the metrical as well as rhythmical aspects of the acoustic contour of the Latin Alcaic, focusing on patterns of natural, audible, performed word accents in coincidence and syncopation with the fixed pattern of the meter, in both the ancient and modern scansions of the stanza. The meter was measured in antiquity with a learned, latent expectation or undercurrent of regular verse beats to scan aloud, to measure for the ear, the pattern of long and short syllables. (...) Within the fixed framework of the meter, variable patterns of accent provide a rhythm, and that rhythm is the focus of this essay. Very little attention falls on sound and sense: the coda argues that sound need not be subordinate to meaning, need not be sound effect, nor explicitly rhetorical, to be worth our attention. (shrink)

One of the well-known theses of Alvin Plantinga’s epistemology of religious belief is his claim about the noetic effects of sin. But Plantinga does not clearly spell out how sin functions to undermine or weaken the believer’s natural knowledge of God. In this paper, I want to suggest a dispositional gloss on his account of religious epistemology that properly identifies the epistemic role of sin and other factors that may undermine knowledge of God. It will be further argued that (...) the dispositional framework provides us with a principled basis for deriving some of the main contours of Plantinga’s general epistemology. (shrink)

This study examines whether L1 English/L2 Spanish learners at different proficiency levels acquire a novel L2 phoneme, the Spanish palatal nasal /ɲ/. While alveolar /n/ is part of the Spanish and English inventories, /ɲ/, which consists of a tautosyllabic palatal nasal+glide element, is not. This crosslinguistic disparity presents potential difficulty for L1 English speakers due to L1 segmental and phonotactic constraints; the closest English approximation is the heterosyllabic sequence /nj/. With these crosslinguistic differences in mind, we ask: Do L1 English (...) learners of L2 Spanish produce acoustically distinct Spanish /n/ and /ɲ/ and Does the distinction of /n/ and /ɲ/ vary by proficiency? In the case that learners distinguish /n/ and /ɲ/, the second question investigates the acoustic quality of /ɲ/ to determine if learners' L2 representation patterns with that of an L1 Spanish representation or if learners rely on an L1 representation and if the acoustic quality of L2 Spanish /ɲ/ varies as a function of proficiency. Beginner and advanced L1 English/L2 Spanish speakers and a comparison group of 10 L1 Spanish/L2 English speakers completed delayed repetition tasks in which disyllabic nonce words were produced in a carrier phrase. English critical items contained an intervocalic heterosyllabic /nj/ sequence ; Spanish critical items consisted of items with either intervocalic onset /ɲ/ or /n/ ['xa.na]. We measured duration and formant contours of the following vocalic portion as acoustic indices of the /n/~/ɲ/ and /ɲ/ ~/nj/ distinctions. Results show that, while L2 Spanish learners produce an acoustically distinct /n/ ~ /ɲ/ contrast even at a low level of proficiency, the beginners produce an intermediate /ɲ/ that falls acoustically between their English /nj/ and the L1 Spanish /ɲ/ while the advanced learners' Spanish /ɲ/ and English /nj/ appear to be in the process of equivalence classification. We discuss these outcomes as they relate to the robustness of L1 phonological constraints in late L2 acquisition coupled with the role of perceptual cues, functional load, and questions of intelligibility. (shrink)

In recent years, the debate about the role of the Public Institutions in the fields of corporate social responsibility and sustainable development has gained momentum. Nevertheless, the ambiguity of the latter concepts makes it difficult both to measure them and to estimate the impact that the different public initiatives may have on them. In this sense, the present research has the aim to design a fuzzy logic-based methodology applied to the evaluation of the above-mentioned processes in relation to the state-aid (...) policies for the European industry. Regarding the study contour, the European Union state aids seems not to have introduced important changes leading to socially responsible results and, therefore, favourable for the sustainable development generated by the European manufacturing industry. (shrink)

Following the pioneering studies of the receptive field (RF), the concept gained further significance for visual perception by the discovery of input effects from beyond the classical RF. These studies demonstrated that neuronal responses could be modulated by stimuli outside their RFs, consistent with the perception of induced brightness, color, orientation, and motion. Lesion scotomata are similarly modulated perceptually from the surround by RFs that have migrated from the interior to the outer edge of the scotoma and in this (...) way provide filling-in of the void. Large RFs are advantageous to this task. In higher visual areas, such as the middle temporal and inferotemporal lobe, RFs increase in size and lose most of their retinotopic organization while encoding increasingly complex features. Whereas lowerlevel RFs mediate perceptual filling-in, contour integration, and figure–ground segregation, RFs at higher levels serve the perception of grouping by common fate, biological motion, and other biologically relevant stimuli, such as faces. Studies in alert monkeys while freely viewing natural scenes showed that classical and nonclassical RFs cooperate in forming representations of the visual world. Today, our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the RF is undergoing a quantum leap. What had started out as a hierarchical feedforward concept for simple stimuli, such as spots, lines, and bars, now refers to mechanisms involving ascending, descending, and lateral signal flow. By extension of the bottom-up paradigm, RFs are nowadays understood as adaptive processors, enabling the predictive coding of complex scenes. Top-down effects guiding attention and tuned to task-relevant information complement the bottom-up analysis. (shrink)

The article delves into the realm of child environmental activism, portraying it as a concerted response aimed at challenging the prevailing social and political status quo, which systematically underestimates the role of children in decision-making within political and social spheres. It highlights the paramount importance of the epistemological framework that encompasses children's experiences, emphasising how their exclusion from political and social discourse leads to epistemic marginalisation. This exclusion not only prevents children from assuming the role of epistemic agents but also (...) deprives them of agency and perpetuates existing inequalities. From a philosophical perspective, the article proposes a thorough analysis of children's epistemic agency, introducing the concept of 'epistemic capability'. It argues that, despite their social marginalisation, knowledgeable children can equip themselves with epistemic resources to interpret their reality and effect change. Furthermore, it posits that environmental activism plays a crucial role as an epistemic resource for children, facilitating the expression of their ideas, challenging dominant narratives, and addressing environmental and social issues head-on. The article emphasises the transformative potential of activism as an epistemic resource, enabling substantive participation and empowering children to navigate and transcend such marginalised circumstances. In conclusion, it highlights how child environmental activism not only challenges the status quo but also provides children with crucial tools for their development as epistemic and social agents, promoting significant change in power dynamics and in the fight for social and environmental justice. (shrink)

This paper unravels the diverse strands in the manifestations of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA, 2002), focusing not only on law’s words, i.e. the rules, principles and procedures, and its interpretations in judgments, but also on its effects. Adopting the violence of jurisprudence approach, it eschews the dichotomy between law and violence, examining the ‘effects of legal force’, in particular, the ways in which law becomes an integral part of the organization of state violence. Through an examination (...) of the unfolding of POTA and laws dealing with ‘organized crime’ and ‘unlawful activities’ (Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, 1967, 2005), the trajectory of specific cases and judgments by Trial Courts, the High Courts and the Supreme Court, this paper shows how through an interlocking of the ordinary and extraordinary, anti-terror laws erode both the procedural and substantive aspects of the rule of law, become the terrain where permutations in alliance politics and configuration of power are played out, and assume an antagonistic notion of politics which seeks resolution through the elimination and externalization of difference. Extraordinary laws, it argues, are manifestations of a politics of negation. Processes that prolong the lives of such laws, and procedural interlocking and intermeshing that seek to give them permanence, are symptomatic of a deepening of the politics of negation. (shrink)

In “Modern Moral Philosophy” Anscombe argues that the distinction between intention of an end or means and foresight of a consequentially comparable outcome proves crucial in act-evaluation. The deontologist J. J. Thomson disagrees. She asserts that Anscombe mistakes the distinction’s moral import; it bears on agent-evaluation, not act-evaluation. I map out the contours of this dispute. I show that it implicates other disagreements, some to be expected and others not to be expected. Amongst the expected, one finds the ethicists’ accounts (...) of action and understanding of how agent-assessment relates to act-assessment. Amongst the unexpected, one finds the moralists’ views about the possibility of self-imposed moral dilemmas and allied positions concerning temporal aspects of “ought implies can.” Anscombe’s employment of the distinction in act-evaluation withstands close scrutiny; Thomson’s denial of it does not. (shrink)

: The focus of questions of justice in health policy has shifted during the last 20 years, beginning with questions about rights to health care, and then, by the late 1980s, turning to issues of rationing. More recently, attention has focused on alternatives to cost-effectiveness analysis. In addition, health inequalities, and not just inequalities in access to health care, have become the subject of moral analysis. This article examines how such trends have transformed the philosophical landscape and encouraged some in (...) bioethics to seek guidance on normative questions from outside of the contours of traditional philosophical arguments about justice. (shrink)

Although symmetry has been discussed in terms of a major law of perceptual organization since the early conceptual efforts of the Gestalt school (Wertheimer, Metzger, Koffka and others), the first quantitative measurements testing for effects of symmetry on processes of Gestalt formation have seen the day only recently. In this study, a psychophysical rating study and a “foreground”-“background” choice response time experiment were run with human observers to test for effects of bilateral symmetry on the perceived strength of (...) figure-ground in triangular Kanizsa configurations. Displays with and without bilateral symmetry, identical physically-specified-to-total contour ratio, and constant local contrast intensity within and across conditions, but variable local contrast polarity and variable orientation in the plane, were presented in a random order to human observers. Configurations with bilateral symmetry produced significantly stronger figure-ground percepts reflected by greater subjective magnitudes and consistently higher percentages of “foreground” judgments accompanied by significantly shorter response times. These effects of symmetry depend neither on the orientation of the axis of symmetry, nor on the contrast polarity of the physical inducers. It is concluded that bilateral symmetry, irrespective of orientation, significantly contributes to the, largely sign-invariant, visual mechanisms of figure-ground segregation that determine the salience of figure-ground in perceptually ambiguous configurations. (shrink)

Previous studies have shown that Chinese speakers and non-Chinese speakers exhibit different patterns of cross-modal congruence for the lexical tones of Mandarin Chinese, depending on which features of the pitch they attend to. But is this pattern of language-specific listening a conscious cultural strategy or an automatic processing effect? If automatic, does it also apply when the same pitch contours no longer sound like speech? Implicit Association Tests (IATs) provide an indirect measure of cross-modal association. In a series of IAT (...) studies, conducted with participants with three kinds of language backgrounds (Chinese-dominant bilinguals, Chinese balanced bilinguals, and English speakers with no Chinese experience) we find language-specific congruence effects for Mandarin lexical tones but not for matched sine-wave stimuli. That is, for linguistic stimuli, non-Chinese speakers show advantages for pitch-height congruence (high-pointy, low-curvy); no congruence effects were found for Chinese speakers. For non-linguistic stimuli, all participant groups showed advantages for pitch-height congruence. The present findings suggest that non-lexical tone congruence (high-pointy, low-curvy) is a basic congruence pattern, and the acquisition of a language with lexical tone can alter this perception. (shrink)

What is the effect of age on the political participation of disabled people? The various statistical analyses (multiple correspondence analysis and regression) yield contradictory results. To understand the effect of age and disability on voting, it is necessary to break down these two dimensions to identify three types of population: elderly people who have become disabled, aging disabled people, and people who have lived for a long time with a disability. Voting behavior is useful to clarify the contours of these (...) populations. This allows us to affirm that older disabled persons behave electorally as they have been socialized to do. This analysis also shows how the problem of aging is not solely related to biological age. Finally, it shows that the population of people considered administratively as disabled includes very heterogeneous categories of people, whose fates are clearly differentiated. (shrink)

Over the past generation, the rise of East Asia and especially China, has brought about a sea change in the economic and political world order. At the same time, global warming, environmental degradation, food and water shortages, population explosion, and income inequities have created a perfect storm that threatens the very survival of humanity. It is clear now that the Westphalian model of individual sovereign states seeking their own self-interest will not be able to respond effectively to this win-win or (...) lose-lose crisis. In this volume, a cadre of distinguished scholars comes together to reflect on Confucianism and Deweyan pragmatism as possible resources for a new geopolitics that begins from an ontology of interdependence and recognizes the irreducibly ecological nature of the human experience at every level. Both Confucian and Deweyan traditions emphasize the primacy of experience, the importance of vital relationality, and the moral roots of good governance. The potential benefits of conceptually blending the two are many. Indeed, the contemporary Chinese philosopher Tang Junyi provides us with a cosmological understanding of the "idea" of Confucianism that, in parallel to Dewey's "idea" of democracy, can enable us to anticipate the core values, if not the specific contours, of a "Confucian democracy." Just as Dewey's "idea" of democracy is his vision of the flourishing communal life made possible by the contributions of the uniquely distinguished persons that constitute it, Tang Junyi's Confucianism is a pragmatic naturalism directed at achieving the most highly integrated cultural, moral, and spiritual growth for the individual-in-community. In both, we find an affirmation of communal harmony as a process "starting here and going there" through which those involved learn together to do ordinary things in extraordinary ways. Just such a cosmological understanding of democracy is one way of describing what will be needed to address the many predicaments characterizing the environmental, cultural, socioeconomic, and political dynamics of the twenty-first century. (shrink)

I present the contours of an explanatory model of legitimacy that directs the focus away from normative questions and onto specific mechanisms of reality construction at play in constituting social orders. The key assumption informing the model is that stable orders rely fundamentally on their capacities to construct separate spheres of social reality, by which they exempt critical parts of reality from the burden of legitimation. I argue that an order's legitimacy ultimately depends on its ability to confine the question (...) of legitimacy by relegating authorship of reality to opaque sources that are separated epistemically from the institutional order. The effective reification of critical zones of reality is shown to be a functional precondition for institutional stability. I show that capitalist democracy, in particular, depends on this mode of constructing ‘passive legitimacy’, which constitutes a key obstacle for any attempt to transform it towards an ecologically and socially sustainable formation. (shrink)

Musical systems develop associations over time between aspects of musical form and concepts from outside of the music. Experienced listeners internalize these connotations, such that the formal elements bring to mind their extra-musical meanings. An example of musical form-meaning mapping is the association that Western listeners have between the major and minor modes and happiness and sadness, respectively. We revisit the emotional semantics of musical mode in a study of 44 American participants (musicians and non-musicians) who each evaluated the relatedness (...) of 96 melody-word pairs. Among the tonal melodies, we manipulated mode (major and minor) and timbre (clarinet and flute) while systematically controlling for other musical factors including pitch register and melodic contour. Similarly, among the English words, we manipulated word affect (happy and sad) while systematically controlling for other lexical factors including frequency and word length. Results demonstrated that participants provided a higher proportion of related responses for major melodies paired with happy words and minor melodies paired with sad words than for the reverse pairings. This interaction between mode and word affect was highly significant for both musicians and non-musicians, albeit with a larger effect for the former group. Further interactions with timbre suggested that while both clarinet and flute conveyed happiness when in the major mode, the clarinet was somewhat more successful than the flute at conveying sadness in the minor mode. Debriefing questionnaires suggested that the majority of the participants, including all of the non-musicians, had no awareness of the major-minor manipulation, and instead directed their attention to register and contour. We argue that the affective character of the major and minor modes is but one example of form-meaning mapping in music, and suggest further exploration of the roles of timbre, register, and contour in conveying musical emotions. (shrink)

In _Vibrant Matter_ the political theorist Jane Bennett, renowned for her work on nature, ethics, and affect, shifts her focus from the human experience of things to things themselves. Bennett argues that political theory needs to do a better job of recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in events. Toward that end, she theorizes a “vital materiality” that runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman. Bennett explores how political analyses of public events might change were we to (...) acknowledge that agency always emerges as the_ _effect of ad hoc configurations of human and nonhuman forces. She suggests that recognizing that agency is distributed this way, and is not solely the province of humans, might spur the cultivation of a more responsible, ecologically sound politics: a politics less devoted to blaming and condemning individuals than to discerning the web of forces affecting situations and events. Bennett examines the political and theoretical implications of vital materialism through extended discussions of commonplace things and physical phenomena including stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal, and trash. She reflects on the vital power of material formations such as landfills, which generate lively streams of chemicals, and omega-3 fatty acids, which can transform brain chemistry and mood. Along the way, she engages with the concepts and claims of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Darwin, Adorno, and Deleuze, disclosing a long history of thinking about vibrant matter in Western philosophy, including attempts by Kant, Bergson, and the embryologist Hans Driesch to name the “vital force” inherent in material forms. Bennett concludes by sketching the contours of a “green materialist” ecophilosophy. (shrink)

In user cluster analysis, users with the same or similar behavior characteristics are divided into the same group by iterative update clustering, and the core and larger user groups are detected. In this paper, we present the formulation and data mining of the correlation rules based on the clustering algorithm through the definition and procedure of the algorithm. In addition, based on the idea of the K-mode clustering algorithm, this paper proposes a clustering method combining related rules with multivalued discrete (...) features. In this paper, we construct a method to calculate the similarity between users using Jaccard distance and combine correlation rules with Jaccard distances to improve the similarity between users. Next, we propose a clustering method suitable for MDF. Finally, the basic K-mode algorithm is improved by the similarity measure method combining the correlation rule with the Jaccard distance and the cluster center update method which is the ARMDKM algorithm proposed in this paper. This method solves the problem that the MDF cannot be effectively processed in the traditional model and demonstrates its theoretical correctness. This experiment verifies the correctness of the new method by clustering purity, entropy, contour, and other indicators. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.2 (2003) 478-480 [Access article in PDF] The German Aesthetic Tradition,by Kai Hammermeister; xv & 259 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002; $60.00 cloth; $22.00 paper. In some ways, aesthetic theory has become a thing of the past. With the exception of a kind of fascination with works such as T. W. Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, as a project, as a tradition, aesthetics has surrendered its once (...) monolithic and grandiose position as the philosophical contemplation of art and the notion of artistic beauty to more diminutive fields such as literary theory, poetics and cultural studies. In some ways, this is due to the very function of aesthetics: the philosophical investigation not simply of what is beautiful, but the formulation of prescriptive ideas about works of art and the judgement them according to these prescriptive ideas. This, in turn, has been looked upon with a certain degree of scorn with the rise of a more pluralistic art world and the bold denial that art needs the guidance of philosophy let alone have any prescriptive function or be able to be classified as "good" or "bad."But Kai Hammermeister's The German Aesthetic Tradition takes a very different view. A bold and difficult project, Hammermeister traces the complex and oftentimes abstruse contours of German aesthetic philosophy from its inception with Baumgarten in the eighteenth century through Adorno in the twentieth. In the process, he not only provides us with an excellent historical-philosophical account of the development of German aesthetic philosophy, he also implicitly argues for the relevance of aesthetics as a way not only of comprehending art, but of understanding the cohesive links between art, society, culture and philosophy.The German aesthetic tradition, as Hammermeister refers to it, was a prolonged intellectual argumentation with classical conceptions of art and beauty inherited from classical Greek thought during the eighteenth century. Classical aesthetics was dominated by two opposing conceptions of art and its function. For Plato, art mirrored the outside world (mimesis) and the judgement of good works of art was based on how well this mirroring of the objective world was carried out. Aristotle's idea was that art served a purgatory function (katharsis), cleansing the emotions of the individual through the identification of the observer with the work of art. All of the thinkers in the German tradition wrestle with this dual conception of art in some form privileging one over the other or, more often than not, combining them and extending their explanatory reach. But as in any tradition, they also struggle with the ideas and philosophies of previous thinkers within the tradition itself making Hammermeister's task more complex, one that he handles with adroitness and precision.The book's overarching argument and structure is triadic. Hammermeister sees the eighteenth century through German Idealism and Romanticism as [End Page 478] articulating a set of different paradigms for interpreting art. These are subsequently attacked in post-Hegelian philosophy and are then revived in different ways in the twentieth century as a reaction to Nietzsche's aestheticization of philosophy. Two paradigms emerge as central for the subsequent unfolding of the tradition. First, there is Immanuel Kant's conception of art as wholly separate from epistemology and from morality. For Kant, the work of art is centered in the experience of the subject and, in terms of form, exists outside its social context. This Hammermeister calls the "first strong paradigm of aesthetics" (p. 40). Next, there is the position of Friedrich Schiller who sees a connection between the work of art with culture, thought and morality. "[T]he culture of beauty demonstrates the freedom of man to turn himself into whatever being he envisions while remaining under the law of morality" (p. 57). For Schiller, there exists a kind of spillover effect of art into other domains of human thought and action—specifically in morality and politics—and this represents a crucial deviation from Kant's paradigm and another tendency within the tradition of German aesthetics, i.e., the aestheticization of other domains of human existence.Schelling and Hegel represent two other... (shrink)

ABSTRACTA distinction between hard-to-shake but rational convictions, on the one hand, and the rationality that calculates causal and logical consequences, on the other hand, can generate questions for the history of ethics. Most moral thinkers draw some such distinction but the contours of the line differ greatly, and, in drawing the line, past moral thinkers tend to be influenced by their own deeply held principles, which in turn tend to reflect their social world. Questions about where the line between values (...) and instrumental calculation are drawn and about the effect on this of the moral thinkers own social world are applied by way of illustration to Thomas Aquinas and Kant. The paper attempts to use Weberian social theory to elucidate a theme in the history of ethics, making every effort to keep the two kinds of theory distinct. (shrink)

Plato's concept of education raises the question of the conditions under which the epistemic quest and a change in the attitude of the soul actually correlate. The Platonic motifs of self-care and a good life, soul therapy and shame lead, as this study shows, to a self-reflective movement of knowledge, which has an orienting effect in view of the good and a mediating and ordering effect regarding the soul-body relationship. This work contours the dynamics of learning processes on specific, and (...) figurative, forms of representation and on transitions of knowledge. Plato's anchoring of his educational concept in a philosophical anthropology and his transformation of rhetoric and poetics become manifest through the figure of Eros in the ‘Phaedrus’. (shrink)

This study investigated the effect of obstructive sleep apnea on the neural mechanism of visual perception. A preliminary case-control study was conducted. Seventeen patients with moderate to severe OSA in the sleep center of Civil Aviation General Hospital and 20 healthy controls matched for age, sex, and education were recruited. The participants accepted the perceptual contour integration task, compared the differences in behavioral indicators between the two groups, and compared the differences in electroencephalography data between the two groups through (...) event-related potential technology. The groups did not differ significantly in age and gender, but they differed significantly in body mass index. The groups were not statistically different in terms of sleep structure and total sleep time. AHI, sleep efficiency, and minimal SaO2 value in the OSA group were significantly different from those of the control group. The results showed that the average reaction time of the OSA group was significantly longer than that of the healthy control group in the contour integration task. There was no significant difference in the accuracy rate. The results of EEG showed that the amplitudes of N100 of the OSA group were significantly higher than those of the control group at O1, Oz, and O2 electrodes. There was no significant difference in latency between the two groups. At the FCz electrode, the amplitudes of N200 of the OSA group were significantly higher than those of the control group. Therefore, we concluded that in the early stage of the perceptual integration task, although the neural response activity of patients with moderate and severe OSA was not accelerated, they need to call on more psychological resources, activate more neurons in the contour global recognition processing stage, and the compensatory effect of frontal lobe appeared in the stage of visual perception. (shrink)

What are the most useful lenses to wear and from which positioning is most effective to speak today, in order to answer the need for a paradigm shift within the critical thinking concerning the culture of Capitalism? An increasing number of authors support an interdisciplinary approach carried out, not only in academic environments, by political ecology and ecofeminism, connecting the critique of capitalism with that of patriarchy, and re-establishing a relationship between theory and praxis, in which the latter produces knowledge (...) through embodied experience. The following article agrees with this hypothesis, but its aim is not so much to delineate the contours of what feminist political ecology is and what new conceptual categories it introduces, but to understand instead what is the dialectical necessity that produces this approach and what it distances itself from. To do so, I will use the process of resignifying the category of vulnerability in the contemporary feminist debate in the poststructuralist approach, as an antithetical example to the feminist political ecology lens and posture. The aim is to begin paving an autonomous path for this critical matter, beginning by delineating the antagonism toward poststructural feminism as one of the conflicts which produces it. (shrink)