PERCEPTION OF TEACHER’S LEADERSHIP BY PRE-SERVICE AND IN-SERVICE TEACHERS IN KAZAKHSTAN

The study describes the content and structure of the concept of teachers’ leadership from the pre-service and in-service teachers’ perspective. The method of obtaining data is a free-associative experiment with the registration of answers given to the verbal stimulus “teachers’ leadership”. The results are presented in the form of an associative field where we distinguish the nucleus, near, far, and outer periphery, compiled based on frequency analysis of the respondents’ reactions. By cognitive analysis of the associative field “teachers’ leadership” in the verbal consciousness of the pre-service and in-service teachers, semantic zones in its structure are distinguished.

Cartoon Image of the Mother, Its Perception by Elementary School Students and Correction in the Process of Media Education

This article presents a psychological study of the mother image projected in cartoons and its perception by elementary school students. The research provides evidence for the importance of an integral approach to the analysis of media texts addressed to children, as well as for the necessity of considering their narrative, verbal, and descriptive components. A psychological analysis was conducted on the material of three cartoons: “Chunya” (USSR), “Barboskiny” [The Barkers] (Russia), and “Peppa Pig” (UK). Hypotheses were formulated about the potential influence of the cartoons on the younger audience. 70 elementary school students (ꭓ̅ = 9.5 years old) took part in the study. The research was conducted using the method of semantic differential; the data obtained were processed using factor analysis. The results show that the categorization of images follows the factors of “education”, “love”, “patience”, and “respect”. Differences in the semantic assessment of the cartoons under study are presented. Children perceive the events taking place in a cartoon directly, without reflection. Artistic mediation—polysemy, metaphors, and the category of the comic—does not evoke an aesthetic reaction in children, as assumed by the authors. It was found that the semantic assessment of the word “mother” by elementary school students did not agree with the traditional cultural status of a mother. Thus, the respondents ranked such indicators as “understanding” and “prestige” at a low level. A developmental experiment was conducted to correct the mother image as perceived by elementary school students. During the experimental program (8 lessons in total), the schoolchildren watched and discussed the cartoons together with a psychologist. At the end of the experiment, the semantic assessment of the verbal stimulus “mom” by the respondents showed a statistically significantly increase (р≤0.05) in the indicators of “understanding” and “prestige”.

The click is not the trick: the efficacy of clickers and other reinforcement methods in training naïve dogs to perform new tasks

Background A handheld metal noisemaker known as a “clicker” is widely used to train new behaviors in dogs; however, evidence for their superior efficacy compared to providing solely primary reinforcement or other secondary reinforcers in the acquisition of novel behavior in dogs is largely anecdotal. Methods Three experiments were conducted to determine under what circumstances a clicker secondary reinforcer may result in acquisition of a novel behavior more rapidly or to a higher level compared to other readily available reinforcement methods. In Experiment 1, three groups of 30 dogs each were shaped to emit a novel sit and stay behavior of increasing duration with either the delivery of food alone, a verbal stimulus paired with food, or a clicker with food. The group that received only a primary reinforcer reached a significantly higher criterion of training success than the group trained with a verbal secondary reinforcer. Performance of the group experiencing a clicker as a secondary reinforcer was intermediate between the other two groups, but not significantly different from either. In Experiment 2, three groups of 25 dogs each were shaped to emit a nose targeting behavior and then perform that behavior at increasing distances from the experimenter using the same three methods of positive reinforcement as in Experiment 1. No statistically significant differences between the groups were found. In Experiment 3, three groups of 30 dogs each were shaped to emit a nose-targeting behavior upon an array of wooden blocks with task difficulty increasing throughout testing using the same three methods of positive reinforcement as previously tested. No statistically significant differences between the groups were found. Results Overall, the findings suggest that both primary reinforcement alone as well as a verbal or clicker secondary reinforcer can be used successfully in training a dog to perform a novel behavior, but that no positive reinforcement method demonstrated significantly greater efficacy than any other.

SPECIFIC FEATURES OF THE COMPREHENSION OF TEXTS AND STORY PICTURES BY ADOLESCENTS WITH INTELLECTUAL DISTURBANCES

The present article addresses the peculiarities of comprehending visual stimuli by adolescents with intellectual disturbances. We have studied the ability of school students to analyse and synthesise the meaning of the text and a series of story pictures, to successively retell their content, and distinguish the main semantic constructs. We examined 60 adolescents: 20 normatively developing students from secondary school, 20 students with learning disabilities and 20 children with a clinical diagnosis of "intellectual disturbances". The age of the students ranged from 15 to 19 years old (the average age was 16 years 1 month old). The age range was due to the presence of adolescents with intellectual disturbances. The examination involved 25 girls and 35 boys. The main method of research is authorial questionnaire. A small excerpt from the Russian folk tale "The Wolf and the Seven Young Goats" is used as a verbal stimulus, and Bidstrup comic cartoons – as a non-verbal stimulus. The technique of eye-tracking is used as a research method that allows registering the number of fixations, duration of gaze and length of saccades. The differences in the comprehension of text and picture visual stimuli in students with different levels of intelligence have been determined. In the case of intellectual disturbances, the duration of fixations significantly increases when perceiving the texts. The level of intelligence affects the parameters of the recognition and decoding of the visual information significantly. It was found that the specifics of understanding texts and subject pictures by adolescents with intellectual disturbances are due to thinking passivity and different formats of information.

Mismatch Negativity Occurrence with Verbal and Nonverbal Stimuli in Normal-Hearing Adults

Introduction The mismatch negativity (MMN) is a long-latency auditory evoked potential related to a passive elicited auditory event. Objective To verify the occurrence of MMN with different stimuli, to describe reference values in normal-hearing adults with verbal and nonverbal stimuli and to compare them with each other, besides analyzing the latency, area, and amplitude regarding gender and between the ears. Method Normal-hearing individuals, aged between 18 and 59 years old, participated in the study. As inclusion criterion in the study, all of them underwent tone threshold audiometry, logoaudiometry, tympanometry, and the Dichotic Sentence Identification (DSI) test, and later the MMN with 4 different stimuli, being 2 verbal (da/ta and ba/di) and 2 nonverbal stimuli (750/1,000Hz and 750/4,000Hz), which are considered stimuli with low and high contrast. Results A total of 90 individuals composed the sample, being 39 males and 51 females, with an average age of 26.9 years old. In the analysis of the latency, amplitude, and area of the four stimuli between the ears, they were not considered statistically different. There was a significant difference between all of the stimuli in terms of latency, amplitude and area, with the highest latency found in da/ta, and the greatest amplitude and area in ba/di. Regarding gender, there was only difference in the latency of the da/ta stimulus. Conclusion The da/ta and 750/1,000Hz stimuli elicited the most MMN in the population of normal-hearing adults. Among the genders, there was difference only regarding the latency of the verbal stimulus da/ta, and there was no difference between the ears.

Development and Testing of Experimental Psychological Techniques for the Study of Unconscious Visual-Perceptual Processes

The work is devoted to the actual problem of research of visual-perceptual processes that take place on an unconscious level. There is a shortage of reliable and informative psychodiagnostic tools, specially designed to study unconscious perceptual and mnestic phenomena in mentally healthy people and in the persons with affective disorders. It is emphasized that when creating such techniques, it is necessary to take into account the influence of emotional disorders on the course of basic mental processes. Three new experimental psychological techniques have been developed, aimed at research and objectification of transient conscious and unconscious perceptual-informational processes. The technique of forming a subsensory stimulus is a step-by-step determination of the exact threshold time of exposure, in which one verbal stimulus out of three demonstrated ones remains unidentified at the conscious level, i.e. subsensory. The technique of psychophysiological confirmation of the significance of a subsensory stimulus is an automated registration-analytical procedure, which involves the use of a serial digital polygraph "Rheocom-stress" and allows you to identify the words most significant to the subject, regardless of the level of subjective awareness of that significance. The technique of detecting unconscious perceptual-mnestic fixation of subsensory stimuli is a method of studying the effect of involuntary memorization, retention and reproduction of subsensory stimuli. Approbation of the developed experimental psychological techniques was performed on the sample of 38 people, including 23 patients with affective disorders and 15 mentally healthy people. It is shown that the thresholds of visual perception in patients with affective disorders are almost three times higher than in the control group. The effect of perceptual-mnestic fixation was confirmed by one or more methods in 100% of the cases. The results of the approbation conclusively testify to the high sensitivity and informativeness of the approach used.

Similarities and Differences between Verbal and Visual Metaphor Processing: an EEG Study

This EEG study explores similarities and differences between verbal and visual metaphor comprehension processes. The results of the study show that interpreting either a verbal stimulus or a visual stimulus metaphorically activates similar brain areas, but there are significant differences between the two in terms of neural connectivity and resource allocation patterns. A greater intra-hemispheric connectivity was observed during verbal metaphor comprehension as compared to greater inter-hemispheric connectivity during visual metaphor comprehension. Results of our novel method, called µ index, suggested a distinct information processing mechanism for metaphor in verbal and visual modalities. We found that metaphorical interpretations, especially highly creative interpretations, of visual stimuli required allocation of greater resources when compared to highly creative interpretations of verbal stimuli. Overall, these results provide a deeper insight into the multimodal nature of metaphor processing.

L2-constructions that go together – more on valency constructions and learner language

This paper sets out to illustrate differences between learner language and the language of native speakers by a number of tests carried out with students of English at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. The first part of the experiment aims at testing knowledge of collocations: In order to compare to what extent combinations of certain words are stored in the constructica of native speakers and advanced learners of English, we used the test battery developed by Dąbrowska (2014): although, as was to be expected, on the whole, native speakers displayed a much greater competence at judging which combinations of words can be regarded as established collocations, interestingly, some learners outperformed some native speakers. The second part of the project was designed to explore the number and types of different valency constructions informants produce on being provided with a verbal stimulus. It is very interesting to see that, given the stimulus word caught, for example, the non-native speakers would predominantly produce sentences with police, thief, murderer, suspect etc. which do not rank amongst the 50 top collexemes of caught in the British National Corpus. We would thus argue that an analysis of the words used in particular slots of argument structure constructions (i.e. the collexemes or itecxes) provides a useful means of characterizing the language of advanced learners and to underscore the importance of collo-phenomena in language teaching.