The Effect of Morphemic Homophony on the Processing of Japanese Two-kanji Compound Words

Two experiments investigated the effect of kanji morphemic homophony on lexical decision and naming. Effects were examined from both the left-hand and right-hand positions of Japanese two-kanji compound words. The number of homophones affected the processing of compound words in the same way for both tasks. For left-hand kanji, fewer morphemic homophones led to faster lexical decision and whole-word naming. For right-hand kanji, the number of morphemic homophones did not affect either lexical decision or naming. This effect of homophonic density suggested that, when a kanji-compound word is to be processed, phonological information of its kanji constituents is automatically activated and reverberates back to generate a series of orthographic representations of kanji morphemic homophones, but not in a completely parallel fashion.     

Development of argumentative discourse based on learning demand / Evolución del discurso argumentativo en función de la demanda de aprendizaje

Abstract

This study is part of a larger project focused on the development of argumentative competence and its effect on knowledge construction. It aims to analyse and compare the changes in the evolution of the claims and the quality of the written arguments used by university students in two learning scenarios: a first scenario where students participated in a debate with the aim of convincing; and a second scenario where the debate was aimed at achieving an agreement by consensus. The participants were 77 first-year university students in Education and Speech Therapy. A quasi-experimental design was adopted with repeated measures, in which students from the two groups wrote two argumentative texts (initial and final) for each type of debate. The results indicate that the initial claims evolved towards more moderate positions at the end of the process; and the quality of the arguments that students wrote in their texts varied significantly depending on the type of demand and the time of writing (initial or final).     

The efficiency of information transmission of sign and spoken language

Rhe study compares sign and oral language in terms of information transmission efficiency. The sample consisted of 36 hearing people with no knowledge of sign language and 36 deaf people reasonably fluent in sign language. (The deaf participants' level of hearing loss ranged from severe to profound.) Oral and sign language comprehension was assessed by means of texts at three different difficulty levels. After being exposed to the texts, the study participants had to tell what they had understood about them, answer a set of related questions, and offer a title for each text. When the hearing group's comprehension of oral versions of the texts was compared to the deaf group's comprehension of signed versions, the deaf group showed better comprehension of the explicit content of the texts but added more invented content and made more errors.     

为教育理念的合理性辩护

本文从构成教育理念的认知、情感两个要素出发,对构成要素和教育理念自身合理性做出证明,特别是指出了它们合理性的限度。随后,文章论述了教育理念和教育行为的复杂关系,通过平等这一教育理念的剖析,指出一般理念和教育理念的区别,这需要我们保持充分的谨慎。     

Surprise and change: Variations in the strength of present and absent cues in causal learning

It is said that “absence makes the heart grow fonder.” But, when and why does an absent event become salient to the heart or to the brain? An absent event may become salient when its nonoccurrence is surprising. Van Hamme and Wasserman (1994) found that a nonpresented but expected stimulus can actually change its associative status—and in the opposite direction from a presented stimulus. Associative models like that of Rescorla and Wagner (1972) focus only on presented cues; so, they cannot explain this result. However, absent cues can be permitted to change their value by assigning different learning parameters to present and absent cues. Van Hamme and Wasserman revised the Rescorla-Wagner model so that the α parameter is positive for present cues, but negative for absent cues; now, changes in the associative strength of absent cues move in the opposite direction as presented ones. This revised Rescorla-Wagner model can thus explain such otherwise vexing empirical findings as backward blocking, recovery from overshadowing, and backward conditioned inhibition. Moreover, the revised model predicts new effects. For example, explicit information about the absence of nonpresented cues should increase their salience (that is, their negative α value should be larger), leading to stronger associative changes than when no explicit mention is made of cue absence. Support for this prediction is detailed in a new causal judgment experiment in which participants rated the effectiveness of different foods’ triggering a patient’s allergic reaction. Overall, these and other findings encourage us to view human causal learning from an associative perspective.     

MFV-Class: a multi-faceted visualization tool of object classes

Classes are key software components in an object-oriented software system. In many industrial OO software systems,there are some classes that have complicated structure and relationships. So in the processes of software maintenance,testing,software reengineering,software reuse and software restructure,it is a challenge for software engineers to understand these classes thoroughly. This paper proposes a class comprehension model based on constructivist learning theory,and implements a software visualization tool(MFV-Class)to help in the comprehension of a class. The tool provides multiple views of class to uncover manifold facets of class contents. It enables visualizing three object-oriented metrics of classes to help users focus on the understanding process. A case study was conducted to evaluate our approach and the toolkit.     

Exploring the atmosphere with lidars

In Part 1¹, we described the basic principle of the lidar (Light Detection and Ranging), the different scattering processes in the atmosphere and the Mie and Rayleigh lidars. In this part, we describe three other types of lidars: Raman lidar, differential absorption lidar (DIAL) and doppler lidar. A lidar system consists of a pulsed laser which sends out pulses of laser light and a sensor that senses the scattered light from the different molecules and aerosols in the atmosphere. The characteristics of the scattered light are used to determine the nature and amount of the constituents.