Psycholinguistic Research Articles

Psychology between science and common sense: William James and the problems of psychological language in the Principles

The suspicion that language can become an obstacle to human knowledge is not new in the Western intellectual tradition. Following the empiricist legacy, many authors have suggested the perils and pitfalls of common sense language for science. Applied to psychology, this leads to the issue of the reliability of psychological language for scientific psychology. William James, in his Principles of Psychology, was one of the first psychologists to address this problem explicitly. The goal of this paper is to situate his position and contrast it with contemporary debates over the status of folk psychology. The results indicate that James conceived of common sense psychology in a very complex manner, and pointed to a kind of illusion that remains ignored in the current literature, with negative consequences for psychology. I conclude by suggesting the relevance of James for contemporary debates in theoretical and philosophical psychology.

A comparative framework for culturally differentiated digital game-based learning

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore culture as the unit of analysis in comparative education in the context of technology-mediated learning known as digital game-based learning (DGBL). Design/methodology/approach – Two digital games for Chinese language learning were purposefully designed and produced following existing studies in cross-cultural psychology, learning theories and second language acquisition. To corroborate the assumption that culture affects user’s preference of DGBL learning interface, the two newly developed instructional tools were evaluated with eastern and western learners to find out their perceptions and choices through direct observation, pre-/post-assessments and a group interview. Findings – The evaluation indicates the validity of the key assumptions in the theoretical framework: eastern learners were fond of the type of digital game that involves social cues and situational factors, whereas, western learners preferred a simple design and goal-oriented learning game in which they had the power of control. Originality/value – This paper suggests a theoretical and technical framework to design, and produce culturally sensitive DGBL learning tools. Extant studies on the relationship between culture and DGBL are usually on how digital games generate unique learning experiences and culture. Looking at the same phenomenon but in a reverse direction, this study reports on how learners’ culture determines their preferences in DGBL.

Language and the body – psycholinguistics in Denmark

Language and the body – psycholinguistics in Denmark

April 2016 - This Month in JoVE: Cell Migration, Bacterial Motility, Psycholinguistics, and In Vitro Eye Model for Contact Lenses

Here's a look at what's coming up in the April 2016 issue of JoVE: The Journal of Visualized Experiments. In JoVE Developmental Biology, cell migration is a vital process in multicellular organisms. It is not only essential during embryonic development, but also in adult life, when it contributes to physiological processes like wound healing and immunity. It is also involved in pathological situations, such as cancer growth and metastasis. Cell migration has been studied for decades in vitro; but in vivo studies have proven to be more difficult. This month Giger et al. use cell transplantation to create mosaic zebrafish embryos, and taking advantage of the embryos' optical clarity, they analyze the migration of the prospective prechordal plate as a model system for studying gene function. In JoVE Immunology & Infection, many bacteria can also move, and in some species, motility contributes to the capacity to invade and replicate in host tissues. The bacterium Xylella fastidiosa causes a number of diseases in economically important plants, and its twitching motility provides the means for long-distance travel and colonization. To study the mechanisms of twitching motility in X. fastidiosa, Shi and Lin use a nano-microfluidic flow chamber integrated with a time-lapse image recording system. This allows long-term spatial and temporal observations of bacterial aggregation and migration. This system also provides a new approach for studying gene function in bacterial motility. In JoVE Behavior, it's well known that the more often a word occurs, the faster it can be identified. This phenomenon is known as the frequency effect. This month, Gao et al. study the frequency effect using Chinese characters and two experimental paradigms in the field of psycholinguistic research: the lexical decision task, which measures how long it takes a subject to decide whether or not a character is an actual word; And the naming task, which measures how long it takes to speak a written word out loud. By using both methods, researchers can paint a more complete and precise picture of character and word recognition. In JoVE Bioengineering, vision researchers have been striving to create an in vitro eye model to test contact lenses. Most models to date have many limitations in terms of physiological relevance, but this month Phan et al. present an ocular platform that simulates physiological tear flow, tear volume, air exposure and mechanical wear. This system is highly versatile and can be applied to various in vitro analyses with contact lenses. You've just had a sneak peek of the April 2016 issue of JoVE. Visit the website to see the full-length articles, plus many more, in JoVE: The Journal of Visualized Experiments.

Experiencing Selfhood Is Not “A Self”

Kohut’s lasting and most important contribution to psychoanalytic clinical theory was his recognition that the experiencing of selfhood is always constituted, both developmentally and in psychoanalytic treatment, in a context of emotional interrelatedness. The experiencing of selfhood, he realized, or of its collapse, is context-embedded through and through. The theoretical language of self psychology with its noun, “the self,” reifies the experiencing of selfhood and transforms it into a metaphysical entity with thing-like properties, in effect undoing Kohut’s hard-won clinical contextualizations. The language of such decontextualizing objectifications bewitches intelligence in order to evade the tragic dimension of finite human existing.

The ABCs of the Psychology of Language

The ABCs of the Psychology of Language

Corporate Style of Life: An Adlerian Conceptualization Told in a Personal Account

Corporate Style of Life:An Adlerian Conceptualization Told in a Personal Account Allan Cox (bio), Eva Dreikurs Ferguson (bio), Linda J. Page, and Eva Dreikurs Ferguson, Column Editors In the working environment, relations among people can be far more complex than in other spheres of human life. The focus of this column is to show how the ideas and methods of Individual Psychology are useful in the workplace as well as to compare Adlerian methods with other approaches. Individual dynamics as well as organizational and group dynamics issues are discussed in detail. Potential contributors are encouraged to submit manuscripts, including case studies, illustrating the application of Individual Psychology to business and organizational settings. Send manuscripts to Linda J. Page, Adler International Learning, 890 Yonge Street, 9th Floor, Toronto, Ontario, M4W 3P4, Canada, ljpage@adler.ca. The concept of style of life is central to the way Alfred Adler (1939, 1952, 1959) described personality. As described by Ferguson (2015, p. 2), lifestyle refers to “a person’s long-term orientation over his or her life span … to a person’s basic concepts of self and others and to the person’s basic life goal.” Lifestyle is the core of personality, shaped in the early years of childhood. Adlerian-trained psychotherapists and counselors working with an individual understand that a client’s lifestyle shapes the way the individual feels, thinks, and functions (Dreikurs, 2000). Through therapy, lifestyles can change. Moreover, if parents raise their children with democratic shared decision making, the child will develop a lifestyle that even in adulthood has resilience, courage, and high social interest (Dreikurs, 2010). [End Page 333] Because groups also tend to have characteristics that an individual has, one can think of a corporation as having a corporate style of life that contains core beliefs of self, in terms of self-identity, and a long-term goal. Allan Cox describes (in personal communication, 2015) that an individual’s lifestyle can be structured in the following way: I am: (self-image) Life is: (world view) My central goal: (the all-powerful one that shapes my every thought and action, that pulls me like a magnet into the future) Allan Cox learned the Adlerian diagnostic approach to identifying an individual’s lifestyle, including the use of early recollections (Ferguson, 1964; Mosak, 1958). The present article describes a model developed by Allan Cox for helping corporations realize their best potential by using concepts and methods that are key in Adlerian psychology: style of life (SOL), early recollections, and social interest (Adler, 1939). Please note all names used within are pseudonyms. Throughout the bulk of my 50-year career as a management consultant and author who specializes in working closely with CEOs and their top teams, I have turned implicitly and explicitly to these lights for guidance. Let me explain with a personal story. Late summer, 1976, on a client assignment, I was having dinner alone in a Philadelphia hotel dining room. I got to thinking about early recollections and chided myself for never having “translated” my own to myself. So then and there over about an hour, I did so using the Dreikurs format and came up with my SOL in seven words, avoiding business jargon or psychological language: I am: an observer Life is: out there My central goal: to be invited What clarity this brought me. What brevity. What insight. What power to understand myself! My conclusion was that, without being aware of it, I was living a passive, compromised life. I made changes and found strength in reclaiming much of myself that I had buried by means of what Adler termed the creative self—the life making me, for better or worse. There was much more evolution from there over several years to the point where my stabilized SOL became: I am: a laser Life is: full of baffles My central goal: to get to the core An SOL in 10 words that I’m fully aware of and is my guardian presence. [End Page 334] In a course called “Family Constellation” at the Adler School of Professional Psychology—taught by the late psychiatrist Bina Rosenberg—I learned the power and method of early recollections. After my...

イヌはヒトの行動に何を見ているのか?

Dogs are known to be extremely sensitive to human behavior. They use human gestures such as pointing as a cue better than great apes. A question here is whether this wonderful human companion simply reads apparent of us, or, like humans, more deeply some sort of indirect information the behavior implies. In three separate tests, including pointing games with a non-trustworthy person, inference of the door function from human behavior toward it, and third-party affective evaluation of human interactions, we show that dogs often utilize more than superficial actions they observe. Dogs are at least somewhat cognitivists rather than pure behaviorists that learn everything by simple association with observable stimuli. Copyright © 2016 by Japanese Society for Animal Psychology Language: ja

Language in mind: An introduction to psycholinguistics by Julie Sedivy (review)

Language in mind: An introduction to psycholinguistics by Julie Sedivy (review)

Improvement of spontaneous language in stroke patients with chronic aphasia treated with music therapy: a randomized controlled trial

Aim of the study: The aim of this research is to evaluate the effects of active music therapy (MT) based on free-improvisation (relational approach) in addition to speech language therapy (SLT) compared with SLT alone (communicative-pragmatic approach: Promoting Aphasic's Communicative Effectiveness) in stroke patients with chronic aphasia. Materials and methods: The experimental group (n = 10) was randomized to 30 MT individual sessions over 15 weeks in addition to 30 SLT individual sessions while the control group (n = 10) was randomized to only 30 SLT sessions during the same period. Psychological and speech language assessment were made before (T0) and after (T1) the treatments. Results: The study shows a significant improvement in spontaneous speech in the experimental group (Aachener Aphasie subtest: p = 0.020; Cohen's d = 0.35); the 50% of the experimental group showed also an improvement in vitality scores of Short Form Health Survey (chi-square test = 4.114; p = 0.043). Conclusions: The current trial highlights the possibility that the combined use of MT and SLT can lead to a better result in the rehabilitation of patients with aphasia than SLT alone.

Прецедентность как психолингвистическая категория

Прецедентность как психолингвистическая категория

Maintenance of the Heritage Language: Examination of its Effects on Psychological Status, Family Relations, and Language Development in Children and Adolescents

The purpose of this article is to review the literature on maintenance of the heritage language (HL) and its multiple benefits across academic, linguistic, and psychological outcomes. We hope to reduce the fears of immigrant parents regarding use of their native language in the home and inform professionals across disciplines such as speech-language pathology, education, and psychology of the tremendous benefits of HL maintenance. Use of the HL is often abandoned after children begin formal schooling due to peer pressure, biases against minority languages, or parental fears that exposure to two languages is somehow harmful or confusing. The overriding argument in this review is that use of the HL benefits individuals and families as a whole, which in turn assists in a child’s overall success both in and out of academic settings. Speech-language, education, and psychology based professionals should promote parent and child use of the HL, as well as incorporate it into therapy/teaching/counseling when appropriate. In addition, the authors will provide a theoretical framework for facilitation of maintenance of the heritage language and provide suggestions for parents.

After the Great War: Nationalism, Degenerationism and Mass Psychology

This article explores the influence of psychological language and discourses on the contemporary view of nationalism, an issue that has only begun to be studied in recent years (García-García, 2013; Sluga, 2006). On this occasion, the author focuses on two currents or schools that contributed decisively to the new view of nationalism after the Great War: first, degenerationist medicine and psychiatry, highly accepted in the European social and political debate since the late 19th century; second, and no less penetrating, the crowd or mass psychology of Taine, Tarde, Sighele, and, above all, Gustave Le Bon. After the Great War, as we shall see, nationalism was often represented as a form of degeneration, or a barbarous and cruel regression to a prior stage of development, embodied by the masses. This discourse and rhetoric was to condition the area of study for generations. In fact, the voices of medicine, psychiatry and mass psychology have not disappeared from the debate and continue to directly and indirectly influence the academic and popular comprehension of nationalism.

Nation, subject and psyche: the psychological construction of nationalism

The main objective of the research has been to explore the close, complex and understudied relationship between the sciences of the mind and the political doctrine of nationalism, between the academic languages of the psyche and the ideological voices of the Nation. With this aim, we have traced the multiple imprints of psychological language in the academic literature on nationalism produced in the past one and half centuries, from the first contributions of the psychology of peoples and the studies on the national character, to degenerationist psychiatry, the psychology of the masses or multitudes, the social psychology of prejudice and psychoanalysis. Although psychology has often claimed to be a discipline ultimately capable of explaining the adhesion of individuals to the Nation or the passion that nationalism stirs in mass followings, our objective here has been to present the languages of psychology as part of the ideological accounts or discourses that have contributed to the social and cultural construction of nations and nationalisms.

AN INVESTIGATION OF INDONESIAN STUDENTS’ ABILITY IN PRODUCING THE THIRD PERSON SINGULAR /S/ IN SPEAKING

This study examined the ability of Indonesian students in producing the third person /s/ in speaking. Seven respondents were presented with two speaking tasks and questions related to their daily activity and picture descriptions. Overall, results showed that the majority of the respondents were able to produce agreement in speaking, although only five respondents could produce agreement correctly above 30%. Therefore, the study suggested that strategies other than speaking should be examined if they could better facilitate students’ production of the third person singular /s/. In the last decade, psycho linguistics has shown strong interest in the production of subject-verb agreement. Several studies have identified the types of errors that most frequently occur in language production. These studies report observations on agreement errors in oral English (Haskel & Macdonald 2005; Hartsuiker & Barkhusyen 2006; Johnson, Villiers & Seymour 2005; Johnson 2005), written French (Hupet, Fayol & Schelstraete 1998; Fayol, Hupet &Largy 1999; Largy & Fayol 2001) and written German (Hemforth & Konieczny 2003). One example of a study which observed agreement errors in oral English was conducted by Haskel and Macdonald (2005). They examined agreement with disjunctive subjects which contained plurality nouns (singular-plural noun and plural- singular noun, e.g. have/has the president or the senators read the documents yet?). The research proved that in relation to agreement with disjunctions like „the president or the senators‟, English speakers tend to prefer a verb form that agrees with the nearer of the two nouns (Haskel & Macdonald, 2005). An investigation of working memory affecting the production of agreement errors in speaking was conducted by Hartsuiker & Barkhusyen (2006). To manipulate the availability of working memory, half of the participants had to remember the list of words while performing the primary (load condition) and half of the others performed the primary task without a memory load. All participants were given the speaking span test and had to perform under specific time constraints. The researchers assumed that agreement errors would occur more frequently in the load condition than in the no-load condition. In this study, there were 64 subjects from the University of Nijmegen participating; they were all native speakers of Dutch. In the presentation of the speaking span test in the load condition, the participants were presented with an adjective (e.g. large) that was followed by a sentence fragment (e.g. the cup for the winners). In the no-load condition, the adjective and sentence fragment were presented at the same time. Then, the participants were instructed to repeat and complete each fragment so they berita terkini indonesia had a full sentence, using the adjective (e.g. the cup for the winners was large) before the deadline. In this experiment, the result confirmed the researchers’ hypothesis that agreement errors were more common in the load condition than in the no-load condition, and the errors occurred more frequently when the head noun was mismatched in the number with the local noun (e.g. the colour on the canvasses). Though there are many research studies on verb agreement, in my study, a different attempt was made to elicit the respondents’ ability in producing the third person /s/ in speaking. I chose not to use complex subjects (which have plurality of the head noun and the local noun). I preferred obvious subjects, for example, ‘she, he, the girl, the boy’ (from which the number of the subjects is clear). The goal of the study was to examine the ability of Indonesian students to produce third person singular /s/ in speaking. I analyzed only the productive of agreement markers (there is /s/ inflection), such as, she walks, the girl works, he cleans. In conjunction with this stated purpose, the following research questions guide the current study: 1. Do advanced learners produce third person /s/ in speaking? 2. How well do they produce the third person /s/ in speaking?

Psychologization in talk and the perpetuation of racism in the context of the Greek school

It is often argued that the rise of psychological sciences has offered a new way of constructing subjectivity. Although this framework was used by institutions for regulatory and administrative purposes, soon it became part of common sense and psychological language and notions began to constitute an interpretative resource for social actors. Researchers argue that often discourses of psychologization have been used both by theorists and lay people to account for intergroup conflict, relegating intergroup processes to interpersonal or intrapersonal issues. In this paper, we examine how parents mobilize psychological notions to account for the behavior of children of immigrants within Greek schools. It is argued that psychological discourse was often used to frame “problematic” behavior as the result of interpersonal or intrapersonal processes. These constructions allowed participants to account for the children of immigrants’ behaviour avoiding accusations of prejudice, while at the same time the role of the Greek dominant group (both as a school institution and as the majority of the school population) in shaping intergroup relations within schools was omitted.

Diagnosing the National Neurosis: The Underground Journal Şizofrengi and Its Critique of 1990s Turkish Society

This paper examines the attempt by the Turkish underground journal Şizofrengi (1992–98) to provide a space for psychiatrists, artists, and mental patients to voice their personal concerns as a means to critique problems in Turkish society. Şizofrengi was founded by young psychiatrists in order to critique the problems they felt were endemic to their field. Rejecting the institutional practices and assumptions the editors found constraining in their psychiatric community, Şizofrengi sought to give the patient a space to speak for themselves in order to deconstruct the vaunted role of the psychiatrist in Turkey. But Şizofrengi also sought to appropriate the language of psychology and the “madnesses” of the patients it strives to cure in order to revitalize what the editors felt was a moribund literary culture. The journal gave a voice to marginalized, underground writers, critics, and film makers that would go on to become far better known outside the confines of the journals’ pages. While the result demonstrates that care must be taken when borrowing the discourse of the mentally ill, Şizofrengi presents an interesting case of a journal that was able to draw on issues of psychiatry in order to critique both literary and mainstream society.

The Role of Positive Psychological Capital Language in Crowdfunding Performance

Language conveying positive psychological capital reflects optimism, hope, resilience, and confidence. Use of this language in organizational narratives has been linked to key organizational outcom...

Conversations in the gap between mind and soul: Grammatical reflections 'in (the) place(s) of thinking.'

In December 2013, the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture sponsored a conference to celebrate the life and work of James Hillman. My article is an open letter to a colleague and friend that continues conversations we had over the years on the issue of the language of psychology and the logos of soul (ψυχολογία). In my letter, I suggest to James that psychology has a monumental problem in its addiction to nouns and, alongside him, I explore the possibility that the soul's speech is a verb the moods, tenses, and voices of which configure psychological life and its style of discourse in ways that offer an alternative to the dominant scientific paradigm and the mode of discourse in psychology today. This letter in memory of James compliments the article I wrote in memory of my mentor, friend, and colleague, J. H. van den Berg, that appeared in these pages last year. Over a period of 35 years, each has been a companion for me in the dialogue between phenomenology and depth psychology.

The mountain of cultural psychology and the mouse of empirical studies. Methodological considerations for birth control

Cultural psychology has built up a powerful theoretical edifice, but it has not yet consolidated its own methodology of analysis. Thus, cultural psychologists adopt models of empirical investigation borrowed from other social science domains, taking it for granted that the latter are consistent with their theoretical framework. As a result, the mountain of powerful theory ends up giving birth to the mouse of empirical analyses which runs the risk of being just the translation into the language of psychology of what is already stated by the normative canons of common sense. This paper is divided into two parts. In the first, I provide arguments in support of my criticisms, focusing on the problematic role played by the interpreting empirical investigation in terms of inductive generalization. In the second part of the paper, I propose abductive generalization as an alternative ground for the empirical investigation of psychological phenomena, providing arguments highlighting why and how it may sustain a valid methodology for cultural psychology. In particular, attention is paid to the form of generalization (abstractive generalization) that abduction leads to, as well as to the search of boundary variability as a basic strategy of investigation.