The Development of a Linkage between Count Nouns and Object Categories: Evidence from Fifteen- to Twenty-One-Month-Old Infants

Recent research suggests that, although young children appreciate many different kinds of conceptual relations among objects, they focus specifically on taxonomic relations in the context of word learning. However, because the evidence for children's appreciation of this linkage between words and object categories has come primarily from children who have made substantial linguistic and conceptual advances, it offers limited information concerning the development of this linkage. In the experiments reported here, we employ a match-to-sample task to focus specifically on the development of an appreciation of the linkage between words (here, count nouns) and object categories in infants in the period just prior to and just subsequent to the naming explosion. The results demonstrate that, for 21-month-old infants, most of whom have recently entered the vocabulary explosion (Experiment 1), and for 16-month-old infants, most of whom have yet to commence the vocabulary explosion (Experiment 2), novel nouns focus attention on taxonomic relations among objects. This is important because it reveals a nascent appreciation of a linkage between words and object categories in infants who are at the very onset of language production. Results are interpreted within a developmental account of infants' emerging appreciation of a specific linkage between count nouns and object categories.     

Auditory Context and Memory Retrieval in Young Infants

Three-month-old infants were trained to move an overhead crib mobile while 1 of 2 musical selections was played. Retention was assessed 1 or 7 days later in the presence of either the same music or a different musical selection. in Experiment 1, the musical selections were very different (classical versus jazz); in Experiment 2, they were much more similar (two classical pieces). Infants in both experiments displayed 1 day retention regardless of wich music was played during the retention test. At 7 days, retention was seen only when the music played during the retention test matched the training music. These data are consistent with similar findings showing that 3-month-old infants'memory is disrupted at long retention intervals when the context present during retention testing does not match the learning context. As the infant's memory wanes, context appears to function as a necessary cue for the retrieval of acquired expectancies.     

Young Children''s Disambiguation of Object Name Reference

Children show a disambiguation effect--a tendency to select unfamiliar rather than familiar things as the referents of new names. In previous studies, this effect has been reversed in young 2-year-olds, but not older children, by preexposing the unfamiliar objects, suggesting that attraction to novelty controls 2-years-olds' choices of referents for new names, but a mutual exclusivity and/or lexical gap-filling principle determines preschoolers' selections. Both the disambiguation effect and its reversal by preexposure were replicated in the present study; however, 24-month-olds' rate of selecting unfamiliar over familiar kinds was less when they were simply asked to choose between the items than when they were asked to identify the referents of unfamiliar names. Thus, some young children may have both an attraction to novel tokens and a tendency to honor an abstract lexical principle. Referent selections were also affected by object typicality and word similarity. Correlations between the tendency to acknowledge a new name's unfamiliarity and to treat it like a similar-sounding familiar name suggested that youngsters' phonological matching skills affect their interpretation of new names. Also, 4-year-olds who most often mapped distinctive-sounding new names to unfamiliar kinds tended to admit their unfamiliarity with these names most frequently, suggesting that children's increasing awareness of their own knowledge begins to affect their lexical processing during the preschool years.     

The Control of Reaching Movements by Young Infants

Samples of reaches were obtained from groups of infants aged 4.5, 6, and 7.5 months. Split-screen video recordings were transcribed as sequences of (x,y,z) hand coordinates, and the hand path was examined for evidence of initial aiming and subsequent correction of the movement path. At all ages, the initial direction of the movement was correlated with target direction, providing evidence that the hand was aimed toward the target. Additionally, changes in movement direction made after the commencement of the movement tended to curve the hand path toward the target, providing evidence of error correction. Local minima of hand speed evident within segments of continuous motion were associated with turn toward the target. However, the movement path was also curved toward the target within the movement elements bounded by these minima. This finding was seen as consistent with "continuous" correction of movement errors and as contrary to the suggestion that infant movements are concatenations of ballistic movement units whose boundaries are marked by troughs in the speed profile.     

Recognition of Moving and Static Faces by Young Infants

This study compared 3- to 4-month-olds' recognition of previously unfamiliar faces learned in a moving or a static condition. Infants in the moving condition showed successful recognition with only 30 s familiarization, even when different images of a face were used in the familiarization and test phase (Experiment 1). In contrast, infants in the static condition showed successful recognition only when the familiarization duration was lengthened to 90 s and when the same image was used between the familiarization and test phase (Experiments 2 and 3). Furthermore, presentation of multiple static images of a face did not yield the same level of performance as the moving condition (Experiment 4). These results suggest that facial motion promotes young infants' recognition of unfamiliar faces.     

Electrophysiological Evidence of Space-Number Associations in 9-Month-Old Infants

Infant research is providing accumulating evidence that number-space mappings appear early in development. Here, a Posner cueing paradigm was used to investigate the neural mechanisms underpinning the attentional bias induced by nonsymbolic numerical cues in 9-month-old infants (N = 32). Event-related potentials and saccadic reaction time were measured to the onset of a peripheral target flashing right after the offset of a centered small or large numerical cue, with the location of the target being either congruent or incongruent with the number’s relative position on a left-to-right oriented representational continuum. Results indicated that the cueing effect induced by numbers on infants’ orienting of eye gaze brings about sensory facilitation in processing visual information at the cued location.     

民办高校青年教师的培养和继续教育

本文分析了青年教师在民办高校师资力量中占较大比例的现状,提出青年教师的培养和继续教育工作是民办高校可持续发展的关键环节。文章针对民办高校青年教师的特点,提出做好青年教师的培养和继续教育工作实施策略。     

The Development of Object Permanence in Children with Intellectual Disability,Physical Disability,Autism, and Blindness

This article presents a review of the literature on object permanence with an emphasis on research on children with severe disabilities. Object permanence is the realisation that objects continue to exist in time and place even when they are no longer visible. This understanding is achieved across Stages IV(VI of Piaget’s Sensorimotor Period. Children with intellectual disability, physical disabilities, blindness, and autism develop object permanence in a similar sequence although at a slower rate than children without disabilities. Challenges with regulation make it difficult for children with autism to demonstrate object permanence knowledge in Stage VI tasks. There is ample evidence that children with severe disabilities benefit from direct and systematic instruction of object permanence. Assessment‐based instruction, establishment of visual attention, consideration of the characteristics of the object to be hidden (including the impact on differential attention), repeated naming of the object, individually appropriate prompting procedures, and direct reinforcement have been found to support mastery of object permanence in children with disabilities.     

Developmental Attainment of Infants and Young Children with Down Syndrome

INFANTS and young children with Down syndrome who were living at home and attending exemplary early intervention programs were assessed by trained examiners in the five domains of the Battelle Developmental Inventory. Data was compared to the 50th percentile attainment and found that infants and young children with Down syndrome are more similar to other children in Personal Social and Adaptive Domains and less similar in Communication and Cognitive Domains. These differences begin to show more dramatically as the child reaches the age of 36 months. The older the child the greater the measured differences. Documenting and understanding this uneven developmental path is significant in program planning.     

The Relation of Body Motility in Young Infants to Some Physical Traits

Fourth grade children learned consonant-digit associates of their choice from two novel, distinctive lists during daily, five-minute study sessions. Points exchangeable for free time reinforced correct responses on corresponding tests under high (80%) and low (20%) reinforcement conditions. Equivalent novel high- and low-reinforcement lists were also studied each day as homework on which, unlike session materials, correct test responses were reinforced equally (100%). Results showed that children preferred to study and learned more on the highly reinforced lists during the experimental sessions. Children also displayed a generalized nonreinforced preference for learning the “highly reinforced” homework material.     

Studies on the Formation of Perceptually Based Basic-Level Categories in Young Infants

A series of experiments examined the abilities of 3- and 4-month-old infants to form categorical representations to exemplars of natural kinds–cats and horses. These experiments also permitted assessment of the relative exclusivity of these representations—the extent to which they exclude exemplars from contrasting basic-level categories from the same superordinate category. We found that categorical representations could be formed for horses that excluded cats, zebras, and giraffes, and for cats that excluded horses and tigers but not female lions. Lions were, however, excluded from the representations of cats in 6- and 7-month-old infants. Evidence was also obtained for 2 a priori preferences for members of one category over another. The discussion examined the roles of similarity between the exemplars of the contrasting categories and those of the tested category on estimates of exclusivity and of spontaneous preferences on the formation and exclusivity of categorical representations.     

Extended Visual Fixation in Young Infants: Look Distributions, Heart Rate Changes, and Attention

Visual fixation in in ants from 3 to 6 months of age was examined for its fit to the theory of "attentional inertia." This theory posits that during the progression of a look there is increasing attention toward the stimulus and an "inertia" to continue looking. An extended audiovisual stimulus was presented for 20 min to infants while fixation was videotaped and heart rate (HR) was recorded. Consistent with the attentional inertia theory, look duration toward the stimulus had a lognormal distribution. Hazard functions describing these distributions showed a decreasing conditional probability of looking away with increases in look duration. Look onset and stimulus changes that occurred within a look were accompanied by HR deceleration. The average HR level continued to decrease over the duration of a look and returned to prestimuls level immediately look and returned to prestimulus level immediately prior to the fixation offset. Infant fixation has characteristics similar to fixation in children and adults, and attention appears to increase over to the course of a look in young infants.     

Novel Word Learning in Bilingual and Monolingual Infants: Evidence for a Bilingual Advantage

Previous studies revealing that monolingual and bilingual infants learn similar sounding words with comparable success are largely based on prior investigations involving single‐feature changes in the onset consonant of a word. There have been no investigations of bilingual infants' abilities to learn similar sounding words differentiated by vowels. In the current study, 18‐month‐old bilingual and monolingual infants (n = 90) were compared on their sensitivity to a vowel change when learning the meanings of words. Bilingual infants learned similar sounding words differing by a vowel contrast, whereas monolingual English‐ and Mandarin‐learning infants did not. Findings are discussed in terms of early constraints on novel word learning in bilingual and monolingual infants.     

Further Education Opportunities in Scotland for Young People with Special Needs

Abstract

In order to achieve rapid growth in student numbers, a number of Higher Education Institutions have borrowed some of the concepts of franchising from the private service sector. A franchise involves one party — the franchisor — developing a service and monitoring standards, whilst a second party — the franchisee, delivers the service in return for a share of the reward.

This article draws comparisons between private sector and higher education franchising and analyses the franchise strategies open to the HE sector. It concludes that if managed correctly, franchising will bring benefits to the higher education sector, colleges of further education and students alike. The uncertain start to higher education franchising mirrors the early days of private sector franchising, but like the latter, it has potential subsequently to achieve rapid mutually beneficial growth.     

The Categorization of Above and Below Spatial Relations by Young Infants

3 experiments using the familiarization-novelty preference procedure were conducted to investigate whether 3-month-old infants could form categorical representations of the spatial relations above and below. In Experiment 1, one group of infants familiarized with exemplars depicting a dot in different positions above a horizontal bar displayed a subsequent visual preference for a novel category exemplar (dot below bar) that was paired with a familiar category exemplar (dot in novel position above bar). A second group of infants presented with exemplars in which the dot appeared in variable locations below the bar also responded preferentially to a novel category exemplar (dot above bar) when it was paired with a familiar category exemplar (dot in new position below bar). These preferences did not result from the salience of vertical up-down changes in dot position or the encoding of dot positions relative to an internal horizontal midline (Experiment 3) or from an inability to discriminate the members of each category (Experiment 2), but rather would seem to be a consequence of the ability to represent categorically the spatial relations above and below. The data provide evidence for early categorical organization in human spatial memory.     

完善青年学生法律自由观

青年学生在法制理念上存在许多误区。崇尚自由的青年学生在价值取向上受到“个体权利至上”思潮的现实干扰。高校法制教育应着重于以下两个方面理念的塑造，以完善青年学生法律自由观：一、法律自由在本质是上国家统治者的自由；二、“社会责任本位”是现代法制的主导性理念。     

婴幼儿基于概念的归纳推理研究

近年来,关于婴幼儿归纳推理能力的发展研究受到国际心理学界的重视,其中婴幼儿是否能够基于概念进行归纳推理是一个焦点问题。Mandler等人利用概括化模仿技术对婴儿的归纳推理进行了研究,发现:9-20个月的婴儿的归纳推理受到领域水平的概念类别所限制,是一个基于概念的过程;Gelman等人探讨了类别成员关系、语言标签、心理本质主义在幼儿的归纳推理中的作用,发现:2-4岁幼儿的归纳推理受基本水平的类别成员关系所限制,也是一个基于概念的过程。二者的分歧可以用语言的作用加以解释。     

SRE and Young People in Further Education: A Review of Provision and Practice in England

Many initiatives relating to young people's sexual health have focused on under 16s. Yet, most young people become sexually active between the ages of 16 and 19 and 80 per cent of under-18 conceptions are to 16- and 17-year-olds. The shift from school to further education marks a time of transition in young people's lives. It is a time when information and support with sexual health issues is particularly relevant.
Reforms to the further education sector invite a fresh look at how every young person's health and well-being can best be supported. This is in the context of the government teenage pregnancy strategy, which aims to reduce under-18 conceptions. This paper reports on research conducted by the Sex Education Forum with young people and staff in further education settings across England. This research was used to write guidance on the provision of sexual health services for young people in further education settings, which was published by the Department for Education and Skills and with support from the Department of Health and ministerial backing in June 2007.     

思想政治教育学研究对象再探

目前,学术界关于思想政治教育学研完对象的讨论主要有“一个规律论”和“两个规律论”之争。“一个规律论”主要有思想与行为规律论、思想关系规律论、思想价值观念规律论、思想政治教育规律论四种观点;“两个规律论”主要有思想意识变化发展规律以及实施思想政治教育规律论、政治思想和行为规律以及进行思想政治教育规律论、思想品德和心理素质教育规律以及思想品德和心理素质变化发展规律论、思想品德形成发展规律以及进行思想政治教育规律论四种观点。思想政治教育学的研究对象应该是人的思想政治品德形成与发展规律。这样界定思想政治教育学的研完对象,不仅是思想政治教育学成为一门独立学科的需要,同时也是科学构建思想政治教育学内容体系的需要。     

Anticipatory Reaching by Infants and Adults: The Effect of Object Features and Apertures in Opaque and Transparent Screens

Perception of the manner in which objects may be grasped was examined in a series of experiments with adults and 10-month-old infants; visuomotor adjustment in hand orientation before making contact with objects served as the index throughout. In the first experiment, infants modified their hand orientation to match more closely the long axis of an object. They did so even though the target object could have been grasped by either end with hands oriented orthogonally to the long axis of the object. In two subsequent experiments involving reaching through narrow apertures to grasp the target, anticipatory adjustments in hand posture were evident for adults but not for infants. However, anticipatory adjustments by infants, sometimes appropriate and sometimes inappropriate, were made when the object was of such a size that it could neither be grasped nor retrieved through the aperture. In the final experiment, infants directed their hands first toward a handle, the only graspable part of an object, and oriented their hands so as to be nearly parallel with it prior to contact. This was the only orientation in which a grasp was possible. It was concluded that infants at 10 months respond more appropriately to object properties than to surface apertures that place limitations on how an object may be grasped.