Weaving New Dreams From Old Cloth

This chapter discusses the significance of Gaiman's creative disruptions of scripts and schemas in two of his visual retellings for young adults: The Sleeper and the Spindle (2014) and the graphic novel The Sandman: The Dream Hunters (1999). By weaving the old, well-worn cloth of fairy tale narrative scripts together with new schematics, Gaiman and his collaborators present sometimes radical ideologies clothed in the comfortable garb of rehearsed, longstanding traditions. As much as this action masks the changing cultural attitudes represented by the "new cloth," Gaiman's weavings also reveal to careful readers how narratives become ubiquitous and achieve metanarrativity. To understand how our minds interpret scripts, schemas, and metanarratives, this chapter will bring to bear conceptual blending and schema theories on my examination of the verbal and visual interplay of source texts and Gaiman retellings

INTERRELATIONS OF GENDER SCHEMAS IN CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS: ATTITUDES, PREFERENCES, AND SELF-PERCEPTIONS

To test developmental aspects of gender schema theories, girls in grades 2 to 12 were given measures of gender role attitudes, self-perceptions on gender related traits, reported participation in gender related activities, preferred occupation, and adult family preferences. Both children's and adolescents' results showed a multifactor structure. Children's results differed from adolescents' in that children had more measures showing significant age trends, with a general pattern of decreasing stereotyping with age. Children also had stronger associations among diverse measures than did adolescents. Results were consistent with both multifactorial and cognitive-developmental approaches to the development of gender schemas, and provided limited support for adolescent gender intensification hypotheses.

The poem as complex blend: conceptual mappings of metaphor in Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Applicant’

This article aims to show that Fauconnier and Turner’s conceptual integration network or ‘blending’ theory can provide an integrated and coherent account of the cognitive mechanisms by which poetry is constructed and construed. Taking as its example Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘The Applicant’, a poem already analyzed by Elena Semino from the perspectives of discourse, possible worlds, and schema theories, this article shows how Fauconnier and Turner’s optimality constraints interact to provide a complex blending of conceptual metaphors in the poem that reveal the poet’s own conflicted attitudes about marriage and the empty promises of a consumer society just four months before her suicide. Far from providing a new critical reading of the poem, the article makes explicit the implicit mappings that readers adopt in drawing conclusions about the poem that are shared by many literary critics.

The dual-route account of German: Where it is not a schema theory, it is probably wrong

Clahsen's experimental data from generalization, frequency, and priming fail to support and even conflict with those aspects of his dual-route account that distinguish it from schema theories.

Memory for Natural Settings: Role of Diffuse and Focused Attention

Recall and recognition of various aspects of a real scene, a university corridor, were studied under three conditions. In the “low-attention” condition the subjects had to traverse the place in order to carry out aims attainable somewhere else; in the “medium-attention” condition instructions directed their attention to the place in a rather vague and unfocused manner; in the “high-attention” condition their attention was explicitly focused on all aspects of the corridor. An interaction of attention level with memory was investigated considering, according to schema theories, the distinction between expected, stable elements and unexpected, variable ones. It was predicted that memory of objects of furniture (variable elements) should be higher with medium than low, while memory of structural elements (stable elements) should be higher with medium than high attention. The results confirmed this hypothesis, suggesting that medium attention is well suited for investigating memory when the experimenter's aim is to induce attention to all aspects of the environment.