Short Narratives Research Articles

The facilitative effect of gestures on the neural processing of semantic complexity in a continuous narrative

Gestures are elemental components of social communication and aid comprehension of verbal messages; however, little is known about the potential role of gestures in facilitating processing of semantic complexity in an ecologically valid setting. The goal of this study was to investigate whether cognitive load, as indexed by semantic complexity, is modulated by the presentation of gestures accompanying speech. Twenty healthy participants watched 16 video clips of a short narrative while instructed to carefully listen to and watch the narrator while functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data were acquired. The videos contained passages with and without various co-speech gestures, as well as passages where the semantic complexity was either low or high, as measured by the metric of idea density. Increasing semantic complexity led to reduced activation within the default mode network (DMN); whereas, presents of gestures decreased activation in language-related regions (left middle temporal gyrus and left inferior frontal gyrus) and increased activation in high-level visual and multimodal regions of occipitotemporal cortex. Most interestingly, an interaction between semantic complexity and gestures was observed in a language-related area in left anterior temporal cortex; specifically, increasing gestures led to a greater drop in activation with high vs. Low semantic complexity. These results provide evidence that the facilitation of gestures on semantic processing, particularly for complex narratives, is reflected in the neural substrates of language processing.

Semi-automated text mining strategies for identifying rare causes of injuries from emergency room triage data

Human coders, in many organizations conducting injury surveillance, routinely assign External-cause-of-injury codes (E-codes) to short narratives describing the incident, transcribed by triage nurses or others in hospital emergency rooms or other settings. Machine learning (ML) models trained on coded injury narratives can accurately assign E-codes to a large portion of the data, but tend to poorly predict cases falling into rare categories. In this study, we examined several ways of filtering out cases for human review that were likely to belong to rare categories from the predictions of Logistic Regression and Naïve Bayes classifiers for a manually-coded emergency department triage dataset of approximately 500,000 cases, collected between years 2002–2012, provided by the Queensland Injury Surveillance Unit. The ML models were trained using 90% of the data and the filtering approaches were evaluated on a prediction set comprised of the remaining cases. Cost analysis was also performed to compare the efficiency of each filtering method. The results showed that each filtering method greatly improved the ability to detect rare categories. Filtering using expert-designed causal linguistic rules combined with Logistic Regression prediction strength was found to be the most efficient approach. Several completely automated filtering approaches were also found to be effective.

Recasting the Past: An Early Modern “Tales of Ise” for Children by Laura Moretti

Reviewed by: Recasting the Past: An Early Modern “Tales of Ise” for Children by Laura Moretti Peter MacMillan Recasting the Past: An Early Modern “Tales of Ise” for Children. By Laura Moretti. Leiden: Brill, 2016. 130 pages. Hardcover, €59.00/$65.00. Though written by multiple hands over a long time span, Tales of Ise (hereafter referred to as the Tales) is a work of great profundity, at once original, experimental, subversive, and filled with wit and humor as well as elegance and beauty. Along with The Tale of Genji, Hyakunin isshu, and the Kokin waka shū, the Tales is one of the four most important works in Japanese classical literature, and knowledge of it is a prerequisite for understanding Japanese cultural and literary history. Constructed as a series of poem tales (uta monagatari), the Tales comprises 125 short narratives that function as suitable contexts for the poems they incorporate, which are mostly love poems. The diverse episodes, many of which depict the famous real-life poet Ariwara no Narihira (825–880), together present a unified picture of the cultural mores, aesthetics, and “way of love” of aristocratic society in the early part of the Heian period. The Tales became a basic text in the éducation sentimentale of the Japanese and a fundamental part of the literary education of poets and other men and women of learning for a thousand years. Ever since it was written, it has influenced all aspects of art and literature, from waka poetry and noh theater to diaries and fiction. Indeed, without the Tales it is difficult to imagine the creation of the greatest novel of Japanese literature, the eleventh-century Tale of Genji. Over three hundred editions of the Tales were issued in the Edo period (1600–1868), making it an outstanding success and the best-selling book of that era. Unlike [End Page 258] the long chapters of The Tale of Genji, the episodes in the Tales are short and highly readable, and the work was often quoted in poetry, plays, and other literature, making it required reading for sophisticated Edoites who would have been expected to recognize such allusions. Much recent research on the Tales focuses on its reception, including its history of translation; on its inspiration of multiple works of art from paintings and screens to noh plays; and on gender issues. So broad was its readership that the Tales was even used as a textbook for teaching children, as revealed in Laura Moretti’s recent study Recasting the Past: An Early Modern “Tales of Ise” for Children, a re-creation in image and text of the 1766 picture book Ise fūryū: Utagaruta no hajimari (The Fashionable Ise: The Origins of Utagaruta). Scholarship until now has not examined the reading age of the Tales, and Moretti makes an important contribution to filling this gap. Part 1 of the book reviews scholarship on chapbooks and the similar kusazōshi, discusses Utagaruta in relation to the reception history of the original Tales, and contextualizes the former work within children’s literature. It concludes with a coda that concisely summarizes the current state of research on Japanese children’s literature, pointing out that the field is still in its formative stage. Part 2, the heart of the book, consists of a diplomatic transcription and a translation of the Utagaruta, accompanied by extensive and informed annotations to each of the picture book’s images. These annotations explain the differences between the original Tales and this version for children and provide detailed analyses of the visual iconography and motifs. In this section Moretti allocates four pages to each two-page spread in the original. The first pair of pages reproduces the original illustration and text from the National Institute of Japanese Literature on the left with the transcription on the right. The next two pages provide the English translation of the text followed by commentary on the illustration. Some would surely have preferred an edited transcription (kōtei) that would have made the text more readable by substituting hiragana with kanji and adding punctuation. By choosing the diplomatic transcription, however, Moretti offers scholars of Japanese studies the opportunity to relish a text that approximates the...

The Lessons Learned from Patients We Didn't Help.

This short narrative is a reflection of an unintended, adverse outcome, and the lessons to be learned.

Unplugged Craftivism: A Story of Humans and Environmental Education

This is a written account of a keynote presentation given at the Council of Outdoor Educators of Ontario, annual conference in Canada. The conference themes included revival of the hand-made and Folk Schools. This article outlines the dramatic effects and hand-made props used to present an “unplugged” presentation that was simultaneously humourous and educational. The presentation began by drawing upon research from the field of anthropology that links the historical development of the brain with early flint-knapping skills. Following the introduction a rationale for understanding the importance of fibre and edge technology was conveyed. An exploration of hand skills was further explored by examining some materials and the design aspects involved in making clothing. The later part of the article describes the child developmental ideas that correspond with Waldorf Handwork programs and outlines the origin of two of North America’s largest Folk Schools. Short narrations occur throughout the paper and are used to emphasize the way making things with our hands link human’s environmental survival to human development and education. The paper concludes with three short stories that emphasize the importance of using our hands in conjunction with our minds to make the stuff of life we need to live.

Short narrative review on main winter sports-related accidents: epidemiology, injury patterns, arguments for prophylactic behavior to avoid orthopedic and catastrophic neurological injuries

Short narrative review on main winter sports-related accidents: epidemiology, injury patterns, arguments for prophylactic behavior to avoid orthopedic and catastrophic neurological injuries

Iamblichos’ <i>Babyloniaka</i>, the Greek Novel and Satire

Iamblichos’ lost novel of love and horror, as we know it from its Byzantine summary and a few manuscript fragments, is firmly footed in the tradition of the Greek romance, as well as possessing an oriental flair. The present article summarises the similarities of the Babyloniaka (2nd c. AD) to the extant romances and draws attention to a number of hitherto unnoticed points of contact between this novel and Achilles Tatios’ Leukippe and Kleitophon (also 2nd c. AD). It is then argued that, like Achilles’ novel, the Babyloniaka plays with humour and parody in the characterisation of its heroes, its erotic ideology and its exaggerated presentation of the horrific and the supernatural.Nikoletta Kanavou holds a research fellowship of the German Research Foundation (DFG) at the University of Heidelberg. Her most recent publications include an article on the short fragmentary narrative Panionis (Archiv für Papyrusforschung 64/1, 13-31), as well as a monograph on the fictitious biography of Apollonius of Tyana by Philostratus (Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana and its Literary Context, C.H. Beck 2018).

Perception in dynamic scenes: What is your Heider capacity?

The classic animation experiment by Heider and Simmel (1944) revealed that humans have a strong tendency to impose narrative even on displays showing interactions between simple geometric shapes. In their most famous animation with three simple shapes, observers almost inevitably interpreted them as rational agents with intentions, desires, and beliefs ("That nasty big triangle!"). Much work on dynamic scenes has identified basic visual properties that can make shapes seem animate. Here, we investigate the limits on the ability to use narrative to share information about animated scenes. We created 30 second Heider-style cartoons with 3-9 items. Item trajectories were generated automatically by a simple set of rules, but without a script. In Experiments 1 and 2, 10 observers wrote short narratives for each cartoon. Next, new observers were shown a cartoon and then presented with a narrative generated for that specific cartoon or one generated for a different cartoon having the same items. Observers rated the fit of the narrative to the cartoon on a scale from 1 (clearly does not fit) to 5 (clearly fits). Performance declined markedly when the number of items was larger than 3. Experiment 3 had observers determine if a short clip of a cartoon came from a longer clip. Experiment 4 had observers determine which of two narratives fit a cartoon. Finally, in Experiment 5, narratives always mentioned every item in a display. In all cases of matching narrative to cartoon, performance drops most dramatically between 3 and 4 items. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Current Research on Telemonitoring In Patients with Diabetes Mellitus: A Short Pragmatic Narrative Review

Current Research on Telemonitoring In Patients with Diabetes Mellitus: A Short Pragmatic Narrative Review

The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: a European framework for foreign language speech development

Author/s
 Bettina BeinhoffAnglia Ruskin University Cambridge, United Kingdom
 
 ABSTRACT
 This paper explores the representation of speech development and particularly perceptive skills in the CEFR level descriptions. The speech-related CEFR sections and related level descriptions are vague and none of the assumptions made therein (such as the supposed linear progression between levels) have been sufficiently tested yet. This paper presents an exploratory study on speech perception in language learners at different levels of proficiency and from different first language (L1) backgrounds (Spanish and German). The study is based on transcriptions in response to short narratives, and investigates what kind of influence listeners’ levels of proficiency in the second language (in this case English) and their L1 backgrounds have on how intelligibility is perceived. The results suggest that proficiency levels and L1 background do indeed influence intelligibility (though not always as anticipated) and partially confirm the idea of a linear progression as proposed in the CEFR.

Testing the Role of Narrative and Gain-Loss Framing in Messages to Promote Sleep Hygiene among High School Students

Insufficient sleep is common during high school and associated with adverse developmental and health outcomes. School-based health promotion efforts hold promise for improving student sleep health. This study examines two message strategies, short personal narratives and gain versus loss message framing, in shaping intentions to get healthy sleep and intentions to talk about the information received. We also examine the mediating roles of transportation and positive emotions (happy, content) and negative emotions (fear, anger). We utilize a 2 (narrative vs. non-narrative) by 2 (gain vs. loss framing) between-subjects, randomized experimental design, to test the effect of print messages on these outcomes among a sample of high school students (N = 378). Exposure to the narrative message was directly associated with greater talk intentions but not sleep intentions. Message framing was not directly associated with sleep intentions or talk intentions. Mediation analyses revealed that exposure to the narrative was indirectly associated with sleep intentions and talk intentions via transportation, and indirectly with talk intentions via both participant-reported happiness and fear. Exposure to gain-framed messages was indirectly associated with talk intentions via positive emotion. These findings extend and complicate our understanding of the roles of narrative and equivalence framing in shaping key health promotion outcomes.

The feasibility of the draw-and-write technique in exploring the resilience of children orphaned by AIDS

Worldwide, researchers routinely study children indirectly through adults who act as proxies for such children. The call for researchers to rather study children directly and adopt less intrusive child-friendly methodologies has become louder. The draw-and-write technique is regarded as a less intrusive child-friendly method of collecting data that can be used for this purpose. This paper reports the findings of a qualitative study that sought to establish the feasibility of the draw-and-write technique in exploring the resilience of children orphaned by AIDS. This study involved a convenience sample of 23 IsiXhosa-speaking orphaned children aged from 13 to 17. The participants were in grades 6 to 10 and they resided in two child and youth care centres in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. As part of the draw-and-write technique the participants were asked to make drawings of what enabled them to cope with their lives and to write short narratives in which they explained their drawings. Inductive content analysis was used to analyse the data and this process yielded two main themes, namely: personal protective resources and socio-ecological protective resources. The findings show that complex combinations of personal and socio-ecological resilience resources enabled the resilience of the orphaned children. The findings challenge researchers not to be oblivious to alternative child-friendly methods of research such as the draw-and-write technique when young people are the unit of analysis. The findings of this study have implications for research as well as practice in the field of education and psychology.

Southern Splendor: Saving Architectural Treasures of the Old South by Marc R. Matrana, Robin S. Lattimore, and Michael W. Kitchens

Reviewed by: Southern Splendor: Saving Architectural Treasures of the Old South by Marc R. Matrana, Robin S. Lattimore, and Michael W. Kitchens Bethany Jay Southern Splendor: Saving Architectural Treasures of the Old South. By Marc R. Matrana, Robin S. Lattimore, and Michael W. Kitchens. ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2018. Pp. xii, 391. $40.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-1100-4.) Southern Splendor: Saving Architectural Treasures of the Old South surveys an impressive number of plantation museums and venues from nine states and details the various ways that they have been restored. These homes range from famous sites such as Monticello to lesser known homes. Organized by state, the book provides stand-alone narratives that discuss the history of each house and its owners, each site's architectural details, and the methods used to preserve and restore each home. The authors' knowledge of architecture and passion for preservation are evident in these short narratives. Readers looking for these details and lovely photographs will not be disappointed. The authors' focus, as the title suggests, is solely on the preservation of the homes of the region's elite, and they ably meet their goal to "celebrate restoration and preservation success stories" (p. 368). The book details public and private restorations and provides insight into the talented craftsmen and dedicated individuals at the heart of each initiative. The authors excel in discussing each home's architectural details, the circumstances that have affected each site's physical condition, and the time and expense that has gone into restoring and maintaining these homes. While the authors' focus is on preservation, their depictions of the antebellum and Civil War era history of each house distract from Southern Splendor's otherwise thoughtful narrative. Though the authors acknowledge that these homes can contribute to "a more balanced view of the region's history," the book does not reflect current scholarship on either the role of enslaved labor in funding, building, and maintaining these homes or the lives of individual enslaved people within these shared spaces (p. 7). When taken as a whole, the historical narratives reflect an earlier vision of an idyllic Old South and an uncritical depiction of slavery. Many of the house narratives, for example, render slavery virtually invisible, only discussing the growing enslaved population as evidence of antebellum wealth. In a section on Homestead House in York County, South Carolina, the authors remark that after the Civil War, "the halcyon days were over" (p. 263). The authors also write that Laura plantation's owner "bought thirty teenage female slaves from New Orleans and brought them to the plantation to have them impregnated. Within a few years, her breeding program resulted in what she called her 'crop of children'" (p. 29). This framing of sexual assault as an example of successful plantation management demonstrates how the narrative would benefit from attention to current slavery studies. Southern Splendor would better reflect contemporary scholarship and preservation initiatives if the authors had discussed the efforts to restore [End Page 752] enslaved spaces and to interpret enslaved lives alongside those of the elite. Preservationists are scrambling to save the region's remaining slave cabins, which were integral parts of the plantation landscapes at the heart of this book. Many museums also have incorporated discussions of slavery into their interpretations, but, with few exceptions, the authors do not discuss this practice. The discussion of Monticello's architecture, for example, excludes the attached dependencies and the museum's painstaking recreation of Mulberry Row, where enslaved people labored to support the plantation. Discussion of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation's extensive research into and interpretation of the lives of enslaved individuals is also absent. The authors' expertise in preservation and architecture is evident in this beautifully designed book. But their focus only on elite lives and spaces puts Southern Splendor behind the current scholarship of the era and neglects the work of those who are trying to preserve and interpret a more inclusive history. Bethany Jay Salem State University Copyright © 2019 The Southern Historical Association

Dendritic shrinkage after injury: a cellular killer or a necessity for axonal regeneration?

Dendrites form an essential component of the neuronal circuit have been largely overlooked in regenerative research. Nevertheless, subtle changes in the dendritic arbors of neurons are one of the first stages of various neurodegenerative diseases, leading to dysfunctional neuronal networks and ultimately cellular death. Maintaining dendrites is therefore considered an essential neuroprotective strategy. This mini-review aims to discuss an intriguing hypothesis, which postulates that dendritic shrinkage is an important stimulant to boost axonal regeneration, and thus that preserving dendrites might not be the ideal therapeutic method to regain a full functional network upon central nervous system damage. Indeed, our study in zebrafish, a versatile animal model with robust regenerative capacity recently unraveled that dendritic retraction is evoked prior to axonal regrowth after optic nerve injury. Strikingly, inhibiting dendritic pruning upon damage perturbed axonal regeneration. This constraining effect of dendrites on axonal regrowth has sporadically been proposed in literature, as summarized in this short narrative. In addition, the review discusses a plausible underlying mechanism for the observed antagonistic axon-dendrite interplay, which is based on energy restriction inside neurons. Axonal injury indeed leads to a high local energy demand in which efficient axonal energy supply is fundamental to ensure regrowth. At the same time, axonal lesion is known to induce mitochondrial depolarization, causing energy depletion in the axonal compartment of damaged neurons. Mitochondria, however, become mostly stationary after development, which has been proposed as a potential underlying reason for the low regenerative capacity of adult mammals. Per contra, upon reduced neuronal activity, mitochondrial mobility enhances. In this view, dendritic shrinkage after axonal injury in zebrafish could result in less synaptic input and hence, a release of mitochondria within the soma-dendrite compartment that then translocate to the axonal growth cone to stimulate axonal regeneration. If this hypothesis proofs to be correct, i.e. dendritic remodeling serving as fuel for axonal regeneration, we envision a major shift in the research focus within the neuroregenerative field and in the potential uncovering of various novel therapeutic targets.

O horror do corpo em dois contos de Gastão Cruls

O ensaio objetiva refletir sobre os horrores relacionados ao corpo humano, ou, sendo mais específico, sobre os modos como o corpo humano é representado nas narrativas de horror. Para tanto, em um primeiro momento, situa-se a vertente do horror do corpo na tradição das narrativas que exploram o medo como prazer estético, para, em seguida, tomar como demonstração duas narrativas curtas do escritor carioca Gastão Cruls (1888-1959): “G.C.P.A.” (1920) e “O espelho” (1938).

Significance of protesters’ words during Gezi Park protests: finding implicit meanings in sticky notes and tweets

ABSTRACTOn 28 May 2013, an impromptu occupation in Istanbul’s Gezi Park turned into a nation-wide protest encompassing diverse forms of discontent towards the government. This study explores protesters’ accounts of their experiences. We examine these experiences using two lines of inquiry – how did the participants of the Gezi Park protests use linguistic cues when writing at the park and how did those writings differ from personal reflections posted on Twitter? Using a narrative inquiry framework, we employed significance analysis on short narratives written on sticky notes in the Gezi Park and a sample of tweets posted during the protests. Narrators of the sticky notes responded to two prompts: ‘before the resistance’ and ‘after the resistance.’ Results revealed that participants in the Park used low rates of cognitive and affective expressions, and negations in the after-narratives. The after-narratives were then compared with tweets posted on Twitter. Analysis of tweets showed higher rates of intensifiers and cognitive expressions, and notably less affective expressions than the after-narratives written on sticky notes. The differences in participants’ accounts are discussed in relation to qualities of technologies individuals were using, social contexts, potential audiences, and the country’s sociopolitical history.

Narrative Skills of Bilingual Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

The study investigated how narratives are influenced by both autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and bilingualism. We analyzed the short narratives of school-age Quebec French-speaking children: bilinguals with and without ASD, and monolinguals with and without ASD. Children were given sets of three picture cards depicting a scenario, and were asked to sequence the cards and tell a story. We measured: (1) language production (number of utterances, total number of words), (2) macrostructure (appropriate sequencing of events, number of events mentioned, coherence), (3) microstructure (character introductions, maintenance of referential terms, use of grammatical gender, use of connectives), and (4) evaluative devices (both linguistic and non-linguistic), and mental state terms. With respect to language production, bilinguals produced more utterances than monolinguals, despite having marginally lower receptive vocabulary scores in French. With respect to macrostructure, typically-developing children provided more coherent narratives. No significant differences were found on microstructure or evaluative devices, but evaluative devices were infrequent for all groups. There were no decrements in the narratives of bilingual children relative to monolingual children, both with and without ASD; in fact we found an increased number of utterances in the narratives of bilinguals. The current findings suggest that bilingualism does not negatively affect narrative skills in children with ASD.

The Erotics of Urban Female Work in Anarchist Kiosk Literature and the Contradictions of Modernity

This essay explores an aspect of a narrative genre, kiosk literature, which has received very little critical attention in Spanish cultural studies, even though it was an extremely popular form of expression. The dimension of this genre (or sub-genre) that I propose to study is anarchist mass-produced fiction as a manifestation of the discourses of modernity in Silver Age Spain. Considering the notion that modernity is characterized by its manifold and contradictory responses to social change, my essay investigates the ways in which mass-produced anarchist short novels both subverted and perpetuated the economic, political, and gender hierarchies of their day. Specifically, I examine the narrative tensions and contradictions arising in the representation of the urban working woman in La aventurera (1935) by Federico Urales and Una mujer y dos hombres (1932) by Federica Montseny. My analysis reveals that, while these short narratives propose the sexually liberated female professional as a model of social modernity and progress, this representation also perpetuates the very gender and class prejudices that these freethinkers purported to overcome.

Cognitive grammar learning strategies in the acquisition of tense-aspect morphology in L3 Catalan

ABSTRACTThis study investigates grammar learning strategies and the acquisition of L2 tense-aspect morphology through the retrospective think-aloud processes of a group of L3 learners of Catalan. A total of 18 students of Catalan in a university setting in Catalonia were asked to select one of three tense-aspect forms (preterite, imperfect, and perfect) in a short narrative written in the past. Retrospective think-aloud protocols were used to investigate what they were thinking when they made the decision to choose the appropriate tense-aspect form. A bottom-up analysis identified nine grammar learning strategies that participants used to select the appropriate past tense forms. The results on the frequency of use of the strategies show that they were often used in combination and that the most common ones were translation, aspect, adverbial, and tense strategies. The analysis of strategy use according to type of morphology and selection of the correct form in the narrative showed that strategy use is related both to specific tense-aspect forms as well as to accuracy in the selection of forms.

Inconsistent operations: A weapon of math disruption

SummaryWord problems embed a math equation within a short narrative. Due to their structure, both numerical and linguistic factors can contribute to problem difficulty. The present studies explored the role of irrelevant information in word problems, to determine whether its negative impact is due to numerical (foregrounding hypothesis) or linguistic (inconsistent‐operations hypothesis) interference. Across three experiments, participants solved multiplication and division word problems containing irrelevant numerical information, which was either associated or disassociated with the protagonist. Results demonstrated increased solution errors on division problems when irrelevant numbers were disassociated with the protagonist. When memory for numerical information was emphasized, disassociation was specifically impacted low‐working memory individuals. The effect of disassociation on division performance persisted even when irrelevant numbers, but not words, were removed from problems. These results suggest that, even in the presence of numerically interfering information, it is the language of word problems that often drive their difficulty.