Analyses Of Judgments Research Articles

How long can naturalistic L2 pronunciation learning continue in adults? A 10-year study

We examined the naturalistic pronunciation development of two groups of L2 speakers over 10 years. Initially, 50 beginner ESL students participated in production tasks; despite attrition, the tasks were administered eight more times. Here we report listener judgements of accentedness, comprehensibility and fluency for the remaining six Mandarin and 12 Slavic language speakers at Year 10. Analyses of listener judgments of accentedness, comprehensibility, and fluency of utterances recorded at the 2-month, 1-year, 2-year, 7-year and 10-year points revealed that the Slavic language speakers improved in comprehensibility and fluency at each comparison point, while the Mandarin speakers’ results were variable; there was improvement in comprehensibility from Year 7 to Year 10, but only after worsening at earlier points. The Slavic language group showed improvement in accentedness several times, whereas the Mandarin group showed no improvement in accentedness at any point. The data were examined for individual differences in learning trajectories. Interview responses and a survey of language use were compared to participants’ trajectories. Some speakers showed steady improvement from Year 7 to Year 10, but the majority plateaued or regressed. We also elicited speakers’ views of their progress. The results are interpreted through Complexity Theory and the Willingness to Communicate framework. Suggestions are made for research and teaching interventions.

A Content Analysis of Clinical Indicators and Etiological Factors of Ineffective Infant Feeding Patterns

PurposeTo analyze the content of the concepts present in the nursing diagnosis of Ineffective infant feeding pattern. Design and methodsContent validation of nursing diagnosis based on the predictive diversity model. A methodological study of the content validation of a nursing diagnosis was based on the predictive diversity model and performed in the following three stages: conceptual definition of the phenomenon of interest; organization of the phenomenon of interest; and analysis by judges of the concepts of the phenomenon of interest. ResultsThe first two stages identified 13 clinical indicators and 12 etiological factors, which were evaluated by 23 judges. The analyses of judgments were performed according to the level of expertise of the judges. All the clinical indicators were relevant to nursing diagnosis under study. Nine causal factors were analyzed, including the level of importance to the occurrence of Ineffective infant feeding pattern. ConclusionsThis study analyzed the diagnostic structure of Ineffective infant feeding pattern, which were considered representative of the phenomenon of interest after evaluation by the judges. Practice implicationsThe use of nursing diagnosis with accurate elements facilitates clinical reasoning and favors the development of an adequate care plan.

Solving contradictions in semantic prosody analysis with prosody concord

AbstractUsing collocation-based approaches, semantic prosody analyses of lemmas likealleviateandcureyield judgments of negative prosody, which contradict common sense. This poses a challenge to the concept of semantic prosody and the principle of co-occurrence. To solve such contradictions, this paper proposes a new approach to semantic prosody analysis named ‘prosody concord’. The approach adopts collostruction as the locus of analysis on the basis of the explication of the unit of meaning model, and uses a mechanism for semantic prosody determination that incorporates multiple sources of information such as interactions of words, collocations, colligations and semantic preferences. Case studies of the lemmasbudge, credibility, causeandalleviateshow that the proposed approach can solve the contradictions and provide a consistent means for semantic prosody analysis.

Poking Left To Be Right? A Model-Based Analysis of Temporal Order Judged by Mice.

The theory of visual attention (TVTVA) provides a formal framework for the assessment of visual attention and related processes. Its center is a mathematical model of visual encoding processes and discretely defined components of attention. Building on this model, TVTVA offers quantitative and process-related explanations for a variety of phenomena in the domain of visual attention. Because the theory relies on very general assumptions which might hold true for other domains of sensory processing, we tested its possible explanatory value for tactile processing in mice. Reanalyzing published data of temporal-order judgments by mice, we show how a TVTVA-based analysis identifies the processes which drive observable behavior and that it comes to conclusions quite different from those of conventional analyses of temporal-order judgments. According to this analysis, despite the same overall capacity dedicated to the task, some mice assume attentional biases toward one side, possibly to optimize their overall performance. We suggest that TVTVA's concepts provide a powerful point of vantage to find explanations for observable behavior where conventional analysis easily leads to dead ends.

“Grænsekrydser, backstabber og opportunist”: Praksisbaseret etik som intimt grænsearbejde

“Boundary crossing, backstabbing opportunist”: Practice based ethics as intimate boundary work. The mediatisation of more and more aspects of everyday life presents ethnography with specific ethical challenges. The Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) recommends to rely less on procedural ethics and instead to adopt practice based ethics. As part of a turn to such practicebased ethics, the classical concept of ‘practical judgment’ has re-emerged, but due to the relative lack of work in this field, it remains unclear how it is to be practiced and evaluated in digital media saturated contexts. Addressing this vacuum, and drawing from theories of intimacy and affect, I offer the notion of ‘intimate boundary work’ as an analytical approach to conceptualizethe practical judgment that mediatized contexts involve. I show that the notion of intimate boundary work allows for rich descriptions and analyses of the practical judgments engaged in by both researcher and participants in media ethnographic fieldwork. Based on fieldwork among gay men using locative ‘hook-up apps’, two moments of practical judgment are explored, focusing on the ethical tensions between data and person, public and private, anonymizationand access, and built vs. media environmental presence.

Analyses of Acceptability Judgments Made Toward the Use of Nanocarrier-Based Targeted Drug Delivery: Interviews with Researchers and Research Trainees in the Field of New Technologies.

The assessment of nanotechnology applications such as nanocarrier-based targeted drug delivery (TDD) has historically been based mostly on toxicological and safety aspects. The use of nanocarriers for TDD, a leading-edge nanomedical application, has received little study from the angle of experts’ perceptions and acceptability, which may be reflected in how TDD applications are developed. In recent years, numerous authors have maintained that TDD assessment should also take into account impacts on ethical, environmental, economic, legal, and social (E3LS) issues in order to lead to socially responsible innovation. Semi-structured interviews (n = 22) were conducted with French and Canadian researchers and research trainees with diverse disciplinary backgrounds and involved in research related to emerging technologies. The interviews focussed on scenarios presenting two types of TDD nanocarriers (carbon, synthetic DNA) in two contexts of use (lung cancer, seasonal flu). Content and inductive analyses of interviews showed how facets of perceived impacts such as health, environment, social cohabitation, economy, life and death, representations of the human being and nature, and technoscience were weighed in acceptability judgments. The analyses also revealed that contextual factors related to device (nature of the treatment), to use (gravity of the disease), and to user (culture) influenced the weighting assigned to perceived impacts and thus contributed to variability in interviewees’ judgments of acceptability. Giving consideration to researchers’ perspective could accompany first steps of implementation and development of nanomedicine by producing a first, but wide, picture of the acceptability of nanocarrier-based TDD.

Facial expression judgments support a socio-relational model, rather than a negativity bias model of political psychology.

Self-reported opinions and judgments may be more rooted in expressive biases than in cognitive processing biases, and ultimately operate within a broader behavioral style for advertising the capacity - versus the trustworthiness - dimension of human reciprocity potential. Our analyses of facial expression judgments of likely voters are consistent with this thesis, and directly contradict one major prediction from the authors' "negativity-bias" model.

The Emergence of Individual Knowledge in a Group Setting: Mitigating Cognitive Fallacies

Research in psychology has found that subjects regularly exhibit a conjunction fallacy in probability judgments. Additional research has led to the finding of other fallacies in probability judgment, including disjunction and conditional fallacies. Such analyses of judgments are critical because of the substantial amount of probability judgment done in accounting, business and organizational settings. However, most previous research has been conducted in the environment of a single decision maker. Since business and other organizational environments also employ groups, it is important to determine the impact of groups on such cognitive fallacies. This paper finds that groups substantially mitigate the impact of probability judgment fallacies among the sample of subjects investigated. The key finding of this paper is the analysis of the apparent manner in which groups make such decisions. A statistical analysis, based on a binomial distribution, suggests that groups investigated here did not use consensus. Instead, if any one member of the group has correct knowledge about the probability relationships, then the group uses that knowledge and does not exhibit fallacy in probability judgment. Having a computational model of the group decision making process provides a basis for developing computational models that can be used to simulate “mirror worlds” of reality or model decision making in real world settings.

Adoption of an internal viewpoint following presentations of plan‐view diagrams and maps

This study investigated people's ability to adopt novel imagined viewpoints after studying plan-view diagrams and maps. In two experiments, university students were presented with a plan-view diagram of a character surrounded by nearby objects (Expt 1) or a character within a map of a multi-level shopping centre (Expt 2). Subsequently, participants' spatial knowledge of the diagrams/maps was tested by asking them about the location of six salient objects/places. In both experiments, the analyses of participants' spatial judgments suggested that they had adopted an imagined viewpoint internal to the character. The findings add to our understanding of imagined viewpoint switches along the vertical axis of space.

Judgments of Corporate Wrongdoing: The Influence of Age, Race, and Personal Effect on Third Party Appraisals and Expectations of Corporate Responses

A survey examined how a perceiver's age, race, and the potential to be personally affected by a corporate wrongdoing influence judgments of event severity, corporate responsibility, and the degree to which a corporate response is warranted. Repeated measures analyses of judgments of four wrongdoing scenarios indicated that situations potentially affecting judges were rated higher in severity and corporate responsibility, and were viewed as meriting a corporate response. College students judged some situations as more serious than older individuals, and African-Americans largely rated situations low in personal effect as more requiring of a response than others.

Probability as a psychological distance: Construal and preferences

We argue that probability, like space and time, instantiates psychological distance. Unlikely outcomes may seem more remote than likely outcomes and may therefore be construed at a relatively high level. Specifically, when the probability of an outcome is low, ends-related primary features should be more salient than means-related secondary features, but as the probability of the outcome increases, means-related features may become no less and even more salient than ends-related features. Thus, increases in probability should increase the weight of means-related features relative to the weight of ends-related features in decisions, thereby decreasing (or even reversing) the preference for a more desirable/less feasible outcome over a less desirable/more feasible outcome. We observed this pattern in two experiments. Analyses of judgments, monetary decisions, and self-reported reasons for decisions showed that the weight of means-related features was more sensitive to changes in probability than the weight of ends-related features in decisions.

A cognitive approach to soundscape research

The present research on cognitive categories for soundscapes focuses on their interpretations and can be seen as mediating between individual sensory experiences and collective representations shared in language and elaborated as knowledge. Results of field inquiries in Paris, Lyon, and Nantes are presented together with results from categorization of recorded soundscapes in laboratory conditions. Categories were identified by means of linguistic analyses of verbal comments and mathematical analyses of similarity judgments. Results indicate that people categorize environmental sounds on the basis of semantic features, namely source identity and pleasantness judgments, rather than perceptual features. Effects of noise on human subjectivity cannot be quantitatively measured thoroughly in terms of physical parameters: auditory judgments depend upon the meaning attributed to acoustic phenomena and noise sources, rather than on inherent properties of the acoustic signal. These findings highlight the fact that an acoustic phenomenon can be diversely conceptualized and lexicalized as cognitive representations. Finally, methodological and theoretical consequences of these findings are established as the basis for further research on soundscape, in order to account not only for noise annoyance but also for sound quality of urban life.

The meaning of city noises: Investigating sound quality in Paris (France)

The sound quality of Paris (France) was investigated by using field inquiries in actual environments (open questionnaires) and using recordings under laboratory conditions (free-sorting tasks). Cognitive categories of soundscapes were inferred by means of psycholinguistic analyses of verbal data and of mathematical analyses of similarity judgments. Results show that auditory judgments mainly rely on source identification. The appraisal of urban noise therefore depends on the qualitative evaluation of noise sources. The salience of human sounds in public spaces has been demonstrated, in relation to pleasantness judgments: soundscapes with human presence tend to be perceived as more pleasant than soundscapes consisting solely of mechanical sounds. Furthermore, human sounds are qualitatively processed as indicators of human outdoor activities, such as open markets, pedestrian areas, and sidewalk cafe districts that reflect city life. In contrast, mechanical noises (mainly traffic noise) are commonly described in terms of physical properties (temporal structure, intensity) of a permanent background noise that also characterizes urban areas. This connotes considering both quantitative and qualitative descriptions to account for the diversity of cognitive interpretations of urban soundscapes, since subjective evaluations depend both on the meaning attributed to noise sources and on inherent properties of the acoustic signal.

Aesthetic judgments of novel graphic patterns: analyses of individual judgments.

Aesthetic judgments were investigated using a combined nomothetic and idiographic approach. Participants judged novel graphic patterns with respect to their own personal definitions of "beauty." Judgment analysis was employed to derive individual case models of judgment strategies as well as a group model. As predicted, symmetry had the highest correlations with aesthetic judgments of beauty. Stimulus complexity was the second-highest correlate of a positive evaluation. Thus, there was agreement at the group level. The judgment analyses, however, indicated substantial individual differences. These included use of symmetry or complexity cues that were contrary to the main group use, e.g., a few participants considered nonsymmetric patterns more beautiful. These findings suggest that exclusive consideration of the group model would have leveled the individual differences and been misleading. The group model is significant; however, the individual judgment analyses represent individual patterns of judgment in a notedly more accurate way.

A confirmatory analysis of four acoustic correlates of timbre space

Exploratory multidimensional scaling studies of musical instrument timbres generally yield two- to four-dimensional perceptual spaces. Acoustic parameters have been derived that correlate moderately to highly with the perceptual dimensions. In a confirmatory study, two three-dimensional sets of synthetic, harmonic sounds equalized for fundamental frequency, loudness, and perceived duration were designed. The first two dimensions corresponded to attack time and spectral centroid in both sound sets. The third dimension corresponded to spectral flux (variation of the spectral centroid over time) in the first set and to the energy ratio of odd to even harmonics in the second set. Group analyses of dissimilarity judgments for all pairs of sounds homogeneously distributed in each space revealed a two-dimensional solution for the first set and a three-dimensional solution for the second set. Log attack time and spectral centroid were confirmed as perceptual dimensions in both solutions. The even/odd energy ratio was confirmed as a third dimension in the second set. Spectral flux was not confirmed in the first set, suggesting that this parameter should be re-examined. Analyses of individual data sets tested for differences across listeners in the mapping of acoustic parameters to perceptual dimensions. [Work supported by the CTI program of the CNRS.]

Work and Honor in the Law: Prestige and the Division of Lawyers' Labor

Two theories compete to explain the distribution of professional prestige among lawyers. Each theory arises out of a general theory of the social organization of the legal profession. Their disagreement centers on the source of the values that underlie lawyers'prestige order and on the aspects of the division of labor that are consequently salient in determining prestige. The client-type thesis holds that the profession is organized largely by its relationships with its clients, and so lawyers esteem service to socially powerful clients. The professional purity thesis holds that the profession is organized around a core of abstract knowledge, and so lawyers esteem work that is professionally pure, in the sense ofbeing free of non-legal considerations. Analyses of prestige judgments from a contemporary sample of lawyers in the city of Chicago reveal that some of lawyers' professional values are intrinsic to the profession, as predicted by the professional purity thesis. Lawyers' esteem for professionally pure work complements their tendency to derogate service to people-especially those with little wealth or power-and to esteem service to large, powerful, and wealthy organizations

Work and Honor in the Law: Prestige and the Division of Lawyers’ Labor

Two theories compete to explain the distribution of professional prestige among lawyers. Each theory arises out of a general theory of the social organization of the legal profession. Their disagreement centers on the source of the values that underlie lawyers’ prestige order and on the aspects of the division of labor that are consequently salient in determining prestige. The client-type thesis holds that the profession is organized largely by its relationships with its clients, and so lawyers esteem service to socially powerful clients. The professional purity thesis holds that the profession is organized around a core of abstract knowledge, and so lawyers esteem work that is “professionally pure,” in the sense of being free of non-legal considerations. Analyses of prestige judgments from a contemporary sample of lawyers in the city of Chicago reveal that some of lawyers’ professional values are intrinsic to the profession, as predicted by the professional purity thesis. Lawyers’ esteem for professionally pure work complements their tendency to derogate service to people—especially those with little wealth or power—and to esteem service to large, powerful, and wealthy organizations.

How do we communicate stereotypes? Linguistic bases and inferential consequences.

The linguistic expectancy bias is defined as the tendency to describe expectancy-consistent information at a higher level of abstraction than expectancy-inconsistent information. The communicative consequences of this bias were examined in 3 experiments. Analyses of judgments that recipients made on the basis of linguistically biased information generated by transmitters indicated that behavior in expectancy-consistent messages was attributed more to dispositional and less to situational factors than behavior in expectancy-inconsistent messages. Moreover, this effect was mediated by the level of linguistic abstraction of the messages. These findings provide direct evidence for the hypothesis that recipients are sensitive to variations in linguistic abstraction in spontaneous language use because of stereotypes. Results are discussed with respect to the interpersonal aspects of stereotyping.

How do we communicate stereotypes? Linguistic bases and inferential consequences.

The linguistic expectancy bias is defined as the tendency to describe expectancy-consistent information at a higher level of abstraction than expectancy-inconsistent information. The communicative consequences of this bias were examined in 3 experiments. Analyses of judgments that recipients made on the basis of linguistically biased information generated by transmitters indicated that behavior in expectancy-consistent messages was attributed more to dispositional and less to situational factors than behavior in expectancy-inconsistent messages. Moreover, this effect was mediated by the level of linguistic abstraction of the messages. These findings provide direct evidence for the hypothesis that recipients are sensitive to variations in linguistic abstraction in spontaneous language use because of stereotypes. Results are discussed with respect to the interpersonal aspects of stereotyping.

WORK VALUES OF COLLEGE BOUND AND OTHER HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS

ABSTRACTThis study identified the salient work values of college bound and noncollege bound high school students from their perceptions of occupations. Multidimensional scaling analyses of the students' judgments about the similarity of occupations extracted three factors in the college bound sample and seven in the noncollege bound sample. The same blue collar dimension appeared in both samples; additional dimensions in the noncollege bound sample were fragments of the broader dimensions in the college bound sample. These results indicate that the perceptions were more differentiated for the noncollege bound students than for the other students, but did not reflect different aspects of occupations, implying that the same work values were salient for both groups.