Privileged Ground Research Articles

Spontaneous perspective-taking in real-time language comprehension: evidence from eye-movements and grain of coordination

Linguistic communication requires interlocutors to consider differences in each other’s knowledge (perspective-taking). However, perspective-taking might either be spontaneous or strategic. We monitored listeners’ eye movements in a referential communication task. A virtual speaker gave temporally ambiguous instructions with scalar adjectives (“big” in “big cubic block”). Scalar adjectives assume a contrasting object (a small cubic block). We manipulated whether the contrasting object (a small triangle) for a competitor object (a big triangle) was in common ground (visible to both speaker and listener) or was occluded so it was in the listener’s privileged ground, in which case perspective-taking would allow earlier reference-resolution. We used a complex visual context with multiple objects, making strategic perspective-taking unlikely when all objects are in the listener’s referential domain. A turn-taking, puzzle-solving task manipulated whether participants could anticipate a more restricted referential domain. Pieces were either confined to a small area (requiring fine-grained coordination) or distributed across spatially distinct regions (requiring only coarse-grained coordination). Results strongly supported spontaneous perspective-taking: Although comprehension was less time-locked in the coarse-grained condition, participants in both conditions used perspective information to identify the target referent earlier when the competitor contrast was in privileged ground, even when participants believed instructions were computer-generated.

On the Basis of Migratory Vulnerability: Augmenting Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights in the Context of Migration

AbstractThe fact that migration cases seldom raise any questions under Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is neither inevitable nor justified. This article reaffirms the equality provision as a useful and indeed necessary mechanism for the European Court of Human Rights to deal with such applications. More concretely, we build on our previous work, which identified a legal tool suitable for achieving this reorientation in judicial practice: the principle that we call ‘migratory vulnerability’, once recalibrated away from a group-based approach to a notion of vulnerability as situational and socially induced. In this article, we explain how the principle of migratory vulnerability, even if it does not represent an inherently suspect ground of differentiation, enables us to identify instances of discrimination defined as a measurable disadvantage that is disproportionate or arbitrary and cannot, therefore, be reasonably justified on the basis of the Convention. This presupposes a move away from nationality as a privileged ground in migration-related cases and from the ‘comparator’ test to determine Article 14 ECHR violations, to also encompass situational experiences. We end with two examples that show that this reconceptualization is both workable in practice and of added value, enabling the Court to find violations that presently go undetected.

The Role of Perspective-Taking in Children’s Quantity Implicatures

ABSTRACT Young children excel at pragmatic inferences known as ad hoc quantity implicatures: they can infer, for example, that a speaker who said “the card with apples” meant the card with nothing but apples. However, it is not known whether children take into account the speaker’s perspective in deriving such inferences, as adults are able to do, and as the received theories of pragmatics claim. In two experiments, we tested children (5–7 years, N = 33 and N = 25) and adults using a picture-matching director task, in which participants played a game giving cards to the speaker, with some cards being in common ground and some in privileged ground. We found that adults can both derive implicatures when all information is in common ground and not derive them when relevant information is in privileged ground. Children also derive ad hoc implicatures when relevant information is in common ground but, crucially, fail to not derive them when it is in privileged ground. Children’s difficulty with integrating perspective-taking with pragmatic inferencing challenges the received theories about the necessity of perspective-taking in pragmatics.

Common Ground Information Affects Reference Resolution: Evidence From Behavioral Data, ERPs, and Eye-Tracking.

One of the most important social cognitive skills in humans is the ability to “put oneself in someone else’s shoes,” that is, to take another person’s perspective. In socially situated communication, perspective taking enables the listener to arrive at a meaningful interpretation of what is said (sentence meaning) and what is meant (speaker’s meaning) by the speaker. To successfully decode the speaker’s meaning, the listener has to take into account which information he/she and the speaker share in their common ground (CG). We here further investigated competing accounts about when and how CG information affects language comprehension by means of reaction time (RT) measures, accuracy data, event-related potentials (ERPs), and eye-tracking. Early integration accounts would predict that CG information is considered immediately and would hence not expect to find costs of CG integration. Late integration accounts would predict a rather late and effortful integration of CG information during the parsing process that might be reflected in integration or updating costs. Other accounts predict the simultaneous integration of privileged ground (PG) and CG perspectives. We used a computerized version of the referential communication game with object triplets of different sizes presented visually in CG or PG. In critical trials (i.e., conflict trials), CG information had to be integrated while privileged information had to be suppressed. Listeners mastered the integration of CG (response accuracy 99.8%). Yet, slower RTs, and enhanced late positivities in the ERPs showed that CG integration had its costs. Moreover, eye-tracking data indicated an early anticipation of referents in CG but an inability to suppress looks to the privileged competitor, resulting in later and longer looks to targets in those trials, in which CG information had to be considered. Our data therefore support accounts that foresee an early anticipation of referents to be in CG but a rather late and effortful integration if conflicting information has to be processed. We show that both perspectives, PG and CG, contribute to socially situated language processing and discuss the data with reference to theoretical accounts and recent findings on the use of CG information for reference resolution.

La scienza dei premi Nobel per le scienze

In this short essay, two books recently published in Italy are examined: Massimiano Bucchi’s Come vincere un premio Nobel. Il premio piu famoso della scienza, and Emiliano Brancaccio and Giacomo Bracci’s Il discorso del potere. Il premio Nobel per l’Economia tra scienza, ideologia e politica. The books deal with complementary topics: the former is about the century-old history Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Physics, Physiology or Medicine, whereas the latter deals with the shorter history of the Prize in memory of Alfred Nobel for Economic Sciences. Both books provide insightful reflections for sociology of science and epistemology, and demonstrate (or recall) that the Nobel Prize makes a privileged ground for either teaching and doing research in these disciplines.

TARİHTEN GÜNÜMÜZE MÜZİK VE MATEMATİK İLİŞKİSİ

Music is a privileged ground for alliance between art and science, and mathematics plays a central role in this alliance. The questions and problems that have arisen in music theory have created a strong motivation for mathematical research at many points in history. The Greek mathematician Pythagoras drew attention to the holistic relationships between the frequencies of notes in a consonant range; 18th century musician J.S. Bach, on the other hand, studied the mathematical aspect of finding a practical way of tuning keyboard instruments. In the Western tradition, mathematics and music have been deeply linked for more than 2000 years. Music is a science that must have certain rules. Music theory as well as musical composition requires a certain abstract way of thinking and contemplation which are very close to mathematical pure thought. Mathematics and music are two phenomena encountered in almost every field. They are two indispensable facts of life. It offers a broad perspective from education to science and technology. For this reason, it is not unusual to encounter individuals who are interested in both subjects in today's world. The aim of this study is to provide an overview of this complex relationship between mathematics and music that encompasses different cultures and civilizations by making a wide literature review.

Information Technology and the Arts: The Evolution of Computer Choreography during the Last Half Century

This article explores the history of the relations between computer science, information technology, and the art of dance. In the early years of computer choreography, scientists envisaged the development of visual displays and software tools to help in choreographic design. They used random number generators to create a variety of spatial displacements and body movements for the dancers—work that suggested that computer programs could be customized to suit the preferences of the individual choreographer. Such projections fell woefully short of what a large number of choreographers, computer scientists, digital artists, and professionals from different fields eventually achieved during the last half-century, not to mention what we might expect in the future. The convergence of dance creation and performance with advances in information science and technology constitutes a privileged ground on which to explore deep philosophical implications of our embodied mind.

Sudden Awakening in Buddhism and the Effect of Gothic Literature: Developing Literary Criticism with an East-West Comparative Philosophy

This paper, in light of the sudden enlightenment in Mahayana Buddhism, explores how the sublime that Gothic fiction produces affects the reader giving him a glimpse of ultimate reality. All postmodern ways of reading literature disprove of traditional thematic approaches that depend on subjective interpretation. Therefore, I first argue, in detail, how literature is, like Buddhist meditation that goes with kongan, hwadu, and the experience of sudden awakening, a privileged ground for the realization of the ultimate reality or Emptiness (Sunyata). Especially the Gothic sublime awakens us to the fundamental affect or impersonal sensibility all of a sudden with a great impact as we are shocked, thrilled, and lose the sense of security that our ego has. Finally, the last part of the paper turns to Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray to demonstrate how the Gothic sublime experience of the novel offers us a deconstruction of binary opposition.

Individual differences in switching and inhibition predict perspective-taking across the lifespan

Studies exploring the influence of executive functions (EF) on perspective-taking have focused on inhibition and working memory in young adults or clinical populations. Less consideration has been given to more complex capacities that also involve switching attention between perspectives, or to changes in EF and concomitant effects on perspective-taking across the lifespan. To address this, we assessed whether individual differences in inhibition and attentional switching in healthy adults (ages 17–84) predict performance on a task in which speakers identified targets for a listener with size-contrasting competitors in common or privileged ground. Modification differences across conditions decreased with age. Further, perspective taking interacted with EF measures: youngest adults’ sensitivity to perspective was best captured by their inhibitory performance; oldest adults’ sensitivity was best captured by switching performance. Perspective-taking likely involves multiple aspects of EF, as revealed by considering a wider range of EF tasks and individual capacities across the lifespan.

Health, development and innovation: a contribution of the critical theory of technology to the discussion.

The relationships between health and socioeconomic development are diverse. These relationships find in the health economic complex a privileged ground for expression. The importance of health technologies increased exponentially since the middle of the 20th century, affecting health systems in terms of both, quality of care and economic aspects. In fact, the predominant model of care is based on fragmented, symptomatic therapy practices that encourages the use of products and services and promotes a passive participation of users rather than humanization of care. Overcoming this model requires changes in the health technology standards which, in turn, require changes in the technology standard of society. The critical theory of technology helps to understand the evolution of the industrial civilization. It enriches the discussion by suggesting the health economic complex be more sensibly adjusted to the requirements of comprehensive health care, and to inclusive and sustainable development. Resumo: As relações entre a saúde e o desenvolvimento socioeconômico são múltiplas. Essas relações têm o complexo econômico da saúde como o espaço privilegiado de sua expressão. A importância das tecnologias de saúde aumentou exponencialmente desde meados do século XX, com efeitos sobre os sistemas de saúde, tanto em qualidade da atenção, quanto em aspectos econômicos. Na realidade, predomina um modelo de atenção caracterizado por práticas fragmentadas, que enfatizam tratamentos sintomáticos, estimulam o consumismo de produtos e serviços e promovem, ao invés da humanização, uma participação passiva dos usuários. A superação desse modelo passa pela mudança do padrão tecnológico da saúde, que, por sua vez, exige a transformação do padrão tecnológico da sociedade. A teoria crítica da tecnologia ajuda a compreender a evolução da civilização industrial. Enriquece o debate, sugerindo uma conformação do complexo econômico da saúde mais sensível às exigências da atenção integral à saúde e do desenvolvimento inclusivo e sustentável.

The Main Issues on Gustatory Aesthetics

This article presents the main issues on gustatory aesthetics, a field which appeared recently in the academic programms. As shown in the first part, gustatory aesthetics is about the non-metaphorical use of taste. The second part is dedicated to issues that define this discipline at the present time: its involvement with gustatory practices; the creation of a radically expanding space for disinterestedness, creativity, freedom and imagination; the artified strategies for gustatory embodied meanings; the radical demand for narrative; the development of research in a medialab spirit. The article ends with the consideration of this new field as a privileged ground for revolutionizing old academic syllabuses.

Interpretation of informational questions modulated by joint knowledge and intonational contours

We examine processes by which dialogue partners form and use representations of joint knowledge, or common ground, during on-line language processing. Eye-tracked participants interpreted wh-questions that inquired about task-relevant objects during interactive conversation. Some objects were known to both speaker and listener, and thus in common ground, whereas others were only known to the listener, and thus in privileged ground. Questions were produced with a typical, falling intonation (Experiment 1) or with either falling or rising intonation (Experiments 2–3). Unlike the falling contour, the rising contour can indicate a request for clarification about previously mentioned information. Participants interpreted falling-contour questions as asking about privileged-ground objects. By contrast, rising questions elicited more consideration of common-ground objects. Directly comparing questions that were produced during live conversation vs. questions that were pre-recorded revealed that this sensitivity to common vs. privileged ground emerged only during live conversation. Finally, individual difference analyses in all three experiments did not support the claim that individuals fail to take perspective when executive function is limited. Taken together, these findings provide evidence for the on-line integration of perspective and intonation during conversational language processing. The lack of perspective effects in non-interactive settings speaks to the inherently interactive nature of conversational processes.

Pooling the ground: understanding and coordination in collective sense making.

Common ground is most often understood as the sum of mutually known beliefs, knowledge, and suppositions among the participants in a conversation. It explains why participants do not mention things that should be obvious to both. In some accounts of communication, reaching a mutual understanding, i.e., broadening the common ground, is posed as the ultimate goal of linguistic interactions. Yet, congruent with the more pragmatic views of linguistic behavior, in which language is treated as social coordination, understanding each other is not the purpose (or not the sole purpose) of linguistic interactions. This purpose is seen as at least twofold (e.g., Fusaroli et al., 2014): to maintain the systemic character of a conversing dyad and to organize it into a functional synergy in the face of tasks posed for a dyadic system as a whole. It seems that the notion of common ground is not sufficient to address the latter character of interaction. In situated communication, in which meaning is created in a distributed way in the very process of interaction, both common (sameness) and privileged (diversity) information must be pooled task-dependently across participants. In this paper, we analyze the definitions of common and privileged ground and propose a conceptual extension that may facilitate a theoretical account of agents that coordinate via linguistic communication. To illustrate the usefulness of this augmented framework, we apply it to one of the recurrent issues in psycholinguistic research, namely the problem of perspective-taking in dialog, and draw conclusions for the broader problem of audience design.

Integration of communicative partner's visual perspective in patterns of referential requests

How do Turkish children differ from adults in sensitivity to the commonality of their partner's perspective with their own in producing referential language? Fifteen five- to six-year-olds, 15 nine- to ten-year-olds and 15 adults were asked to tell a confederate to pick up an object across three conditions: the common ground condition, in which two similar objects with one contrastive feature were visible to both the participants and the confederate; the privileged ground condition, in which one of the two similar objects was available only to the participant; and the baseline condition, in which there were no competing objects. Age-related increases were found from preschool ages into adulthood in the production of (a) discriminating adjectives in the common ground trials, and (b) requestive speech acts with verbal constructions, rather than noun-only labels. A follow-up study with preschoolers (N=15) prompted for requestive speech acts, leading to an increase in discriminating adjectives.

Pragmatic expectations and linguistic evidence: Listeners anticipate but do not integrate common ground

When listeners search for the referent of a speaker’s expression, they experience interference from privileged knowledge, knowledge outside of their ‘common ground’ with the speaker. Evidence is presented that this interference reflects limitations in lexical processing. In three experiments, listeners’ eye movements were monitored as they searched for the target of a speaker’s referring expression in a display that also contained a phonological competitor (e.g., bucket/buckle). Listeners anticipated that the speaker would refer to something in common ground, but they did not experience less interference from a competitor in privileged ground than from a matched competitor in common ground. In contrast, interference from the competitor was eliminated when it was ruled out by a semantic constraint. These findings support a view of comprehension as relying on multiple systems with distinct access to information and present a challenge for constraint-based views of common ground.

The effects of common ground and perspective on domains of referential interpretation

Addressees’ eye movements were tracked as they followed instructions given by a confederate speaker hidden from view. Experiment 1 used objects in common ground (known to both participants) or privileged ground (known to the addressee). Although privileged objects interfered with reference to an identical object in common ground, addressees were always more likely to look at an object in common ground than privileged ground. Experiment 2 used definite and indefinite referring expressions with early or late points of disambiguation, depending on the uniqueness of the display objects. The speaker’s and addressee’s perspectives matched when the speaker was accurately informed about the display, and mismatched when the speaker was misinformed. When perspectives matched, addressees identified the target faster with early than with late disambiguation displays. When perspectives mismatched, addressees still identified the target quickly, showing an ability to use the speaker’s perspective. These experiments demonstrate that although addressees cannot completely ignore information in privileged ground, common ground and perspective each have immediate effects on reference resolution.

En-gendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives (review)

Reviewed by: En-gendering India: Woman and Nation in Postcolonial Narratives Yumna Siddiqi Sangeeta Ray. En-gendering India: Woman and Nation in Postcolonial Narratives. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000. 198 pp. In Engendering India, Sangeeta Ray examines the ways in which a number of South Asian and British writers treat ideologies of gender in their fictional portrayals of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Indian nationalism. Her point of departure is the fiction of Bankimchandra Chatterjee, the nineteenth-century Bengali writer and nationalist whose name has an almost incantatory resonance [End Page 210] among scholars of Bengali culture. Ray argues that in the two novels Devi Chaudharani and Anandamath, Chatterjee offers us female protagonists who are veritable warrior women, rejecting at least in part conventional codes of domesticity and sexuality. However, Ray claims, ultimately the representation of these female rebels serves to shore up the “male religio-political subject of Hindu nationalism.” Interestingly enough, the characterization of Indian women as suttees by the Victorian writers Harriet Martineau, Philip Meadows Taylor, and Flora Annie Steele is, despite the protocols of the stereotype, far more ambivalent—but then, as Bhabha has pointed out, colonial stereotypes are ambivalent. In British Rule in India, Martineau exhibits a curious reticence about suttee although the trope of suttee was one of the commonplaces of Victorian writing about India. Ray regards this silence as a consequence of both the contradictory nature of British colonial policy (explored by Lati Mani), and the ambivalence that marks descriptions of Sati, and ambivalence that frustrates a Manichean, binary coding. Meadows Taylor’s representation of Seeta, the exceptional Hindu widow who becomes the domestic partner of an Englishman against the backdrop of the mutiny, is again complex and ambivalent, though the novel moves towards emphasizing her difference in order to “shore up the identification of English national character with the Englishwoman in the Empire.” Flora Annie Steele falls back upon a “reified image of the burning widow” in her Mutiny novel On The Face of the Waters, but even she offers momentary possibilities of identification between the Indian woman and her English counterpart. Ray’s chapter on Tagore’s The Home and the World and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein’s utopian feminist short story “Sultana’s Dream” is the most interesting in the book for its nuanced analysis of the complex relationship between an upper-class Indian woman, her forward-thinking aristocratic husband, and his self-serving, philandering nationalist friend. Ray builds on Partha Chatterjee’s work on the representation of woman as the untainted, inner essence of India that is advanced as the privileged ground for building the incipient nation to show how this ideology is, on the one hand, grappled with by Tagore, and on the other hand, rejected outright by Hossein. In the final chapter, Ray explores the ways in which ideologies of gender are treated in what has become a veritable academic cottage industry, partition fiction. She suggests (as have the historians Urvashi Bhutalia, Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin) that the violence of the partition was in fact gendered, and that Baapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India portrays the symbolic and literal gendering of partition violence, albeit from an elite perspective. Anita Desai’s Clear Lightof Day is only peripherally a novel of the partition, but according to Ray, it too portrays the elite negotiation of what turns out to be a persistent trope—that of the traditional, domestic dependent woman—upon which Indian nationalism is predicated. To conclude, while charting fairly familiar ground, both in the choice of novels and in the critical debates she draws from, En-gendering India is a useful contribution to the discussions of gender and nationalism in the Indian context. Yumna Siddiqi Middlebury College Copyright © 2002 symploke

Hypergamie féminine et population saint-simonienne

Les Mémoires de Saint-Simon, copieusement commentés par Boislisle, mettent en scène une dizaine de milliers de personnages ; ceux-ci appartiennent, sauf rare exception plébéienne, à l'élite française, voire européenne. Ils sont nés, pour quelques-uns d'entre eux, au XVIe siècle, et, pour le plus grand nombre, au xvne siècle ou dans les trois premières décennies du xvme. Cette population saint-simonienne peut être « mesurée » d'un point de vue démographique. Le présent article a pour but de donner un aperçu du système des mariages qui régit les échanges interpersonnels et interfamiliaux au sein de l'élite curiale du grand siècle, quelque peu élargie en la circonstance. Pour ce faire, il nous paraît nécessaire de rappeler brièvement, en manière d'ouverture, les résultats de deux articles précédents, qui ne manqueront pas d'éclairer notre démarche actuelle.