Verbal Short‐Term Memory Underlies Typical Development of “Thought Organization” Measured as Speech Connectedness

Formal thought organization obtained from free speech, a key feature for psychiatric evaluations, has been poorly investigated during typical development. Computational tools such as speech graph connectedness (LSC) currently allow for an accurate quantification in naturalistic settings. LSC's typical development is better predicted by years of education than by age. Among beginning readers, the LSC of stories composed of short‐term memory predicted reading independently from IQ. Here we set out to test a longitudinal sample (6–8 years old, n = 45, followed for 2 years) to verify whether the LSC is predictive of various memory measures, and whether such relations can explain the correlation with reading. The LSC was specifically correlated with verbal short‐term memory performance. The results support the notion that the short‐term storage of verbal information is necessary to plan a story. Given the limited sample size, the relationship of this interaction with reading remains inconclusive.     

Three-feature model to reproduce the topology of citation networks and the effects from authors’ visibility on their h-index

Various factors are believed to govern the selection of references in citation networks, but a precise, quantitative determination of their importance has remained elusive. In this paper, we show that three factors can account for the referencing pattern of citation networks for two topics, namely “graphenes” and “complex networks”, thus allowing one to reproduce the topological features of the networks built with papers being the nodes and the edges established by citations. The most relevant factor was content similarity, while the other two – in-degree (i.e. citation counts) and age of publication – had varying importance depending on the topic studied. This dependence indicates that additional factors could play a role. Indeed, by intuition one should expect the reputation (or visibility) of authors and/or institutions to affect the referencing pattern, and this is only indirectly considered via the in-degree that should correlate with such reputation. Because information on reputation is not readily available, we simulated its effect on artificial citation networks considering two communities with distinct fitness (visibility) parameters. One community was assumed to have twice the fitness value of the other, which amounts to a double probability for a paper being cited. While the h-index for authors in the community with larger fitness evolved with time with slightly higher values than for the control network (no fitness considered), a drastic effect was noted for the community with smaller fitness.     

Book reviews

Mobile technologies are becoming ubiquitous in education, yet the wider implications of this phenomenon are not well understood. The paper discusses how mobile lifelong learning (mLLL) may be defined, and the challenges of forging a suitable definition in an ever-shifting technological and socio-economic landscape. mLLL appears as a ubiquitous concept that puts together mobile learning, essentially an ensemble of didactic practices based on the use of mobile technologies, and lifelong learning, a general vision of education in the knowledge society. Starting from the results of an EU-funded project, MOTILL, the paper situates mLLL within the more complex framework of the network society. This illuminates the difficulties in formulating a comprehensive definition, but also the relevance of this concept in the future of learning. We conclude that the future of mLLL can be understood only as a 360 degree vision that is able to take into account a range of pedagogical, managerial, political and ethical issues.     

Children’s and adolescents’ moral emotion attributions and judgements about exclusion of peers with hearing impairments

Children and adolescents with hearing impairments are at risk of being excluded from activities with hearing peers. Moral emotion attributions may represent important indicators for children’s identification with the moral norm not to exclude peers based on disability. Against this background, we investigated how 10-, 12- and 15-year-olds (N?=?215) feel and judge about social exclusion of peers with hearing impairments. Emotion attributions and moral judgements were assessed using four different hypothetical scenarios about the exclusion of peers with hearing impairments (school vs. leisure time, group vs. dyad). Moreover, children’s and adolescents’ inclusive behaviour was assessed by a peer nomination procedure. Results revealed that moral emotion attributions differed as a function of exclusion context and grade. Moreover, participants with inclusive behaviour attributed moral emotions more often than participants with less inclusive behaviour. Implications of the results for moral education are discussed.     

Functional outcomes of maltreated children and adolescents in a community-based rehabilitation program in Brazil: Six-month improvement and baseline predictors

This study sought to implement outcomes monitoring and to review outcome data from a community-based rehabilitation program for maltreated children and adolescents in São Paulo, Brazil. Maltreated children and adolescents (N = 452) were enrolled in The Equilibrium Program (TEP), a multidisciplinary community-based rehabilitation program. About half (n = 230) of the participants were successfully evaluated using the Children's Global Assessment Scale (C-GAS) at entry, 3, and/or 6 months later. Analysis of outcomes used hierarchical linear modeling of functional change from baseline. With a baseline C-GAS score of 51.7 (SD = 14.22), average improvement was 2.8 and 5.5 points at 3 and 6 months, respectively (reflecting small to moderate effect sizes = 0.20 and 0.39). Improvement was associated with Problems related to upbringing (p < .02) at entry and absence of Physical abuse (p < .05) and Negative life events in childhood (p < .05) but was not associated with sociodemographics or any specific psychiatric diagnosis. This study showed that outcomes monitoring is feasible in a community-based program in a developing country. Although there was no untreated control group for comparison and specific evidence-based treatments were not used, it is notable that significant improvement, with small to moderate effect size, was observed.     

An unsupervised aspect extraction strategy for monitoring real-time reviews stream

One of the most important opinion mining research directions falls in the extraction of polarities referring to specific entities (aspects) contained in the analyzed texts. The detection of such aspects may be very critical especially when documents come from unknown domains. Indeed, while in some contexts it is possible to train domain-specific models for improving the effectiveness of aspects extraction algorithms, in others the most suitable solution is to apply unsupervised techniques by making such algorithms domain-independent and more efficient in a real-time environment. Moreover, an emerging need is to exploit the results of aspect-based analysis for triggering actions based on these data. This led to the necessity of providing solutions supporting both an effective analysis of user-generated content and an efficient and intuitive way of visualizing collected data. In this work, we implemented an opinion monitoring service implementing (i) a set of unsupervised strategies for aspect-based opinion mining together with (ii) a monitoring tool supporting users in visualizing analyzed data. The aspect extraction strategies are based on the use of an open information extraction strategy. The effectiveness of the platform has been tested on benchmarks provided by the SemEval campaign and have been compared with the results obtained by domain-adapted techniques.