Infant cognition includes the potentially human-unique ability to encode embedding

Human cognition relies on the ability to encode complex regularities in the input. Regularities above a certain complexity level can involve the feature of embedding, defined by nested relations between sequential elements. While comparative studies suggest the cognitive processing of embedding to be human specific, evidence of its ontogenesis is lacking. To assess infants’ ability to process embedding, we implemented nested relations in tone sequences, minimizing perceptual and memory requirements. We measured 5-month-olds’ brain responses in two auditory oddball paradigms, presenting standard sequences with one or two levels of embedding, interspersed with infrequent deviant sequences violating the established embedding rules. Brain potentials indicate that infants detect embedding violations and thus appear to track nested relations. This shows that the ability to encode embedding may be part of the basic human cognitive makeup, which might serve as scaffolding for the acquisition of complex regularities in language or music.

Unpacking the “political-institutional complex”: The role of physical and institutional infrastructures in Indonesia’s decentralization reform

The study looks into how governance qualities of decentralized governments mediate the impacts of decentralization on development. Based on a set-oriented approach, the study analyzed data from a nation-wide survey conducted with business managers from all provinces in Indonesia, and found evidence that, despite the country’s uniform decentralization reform, individual provinces exhibited great variation in the qualities of their various physical and institutional infrastructures. Notably, these qualities assumed nested relations, with order and security as well as accountability and rule of law seemingly being the preconditions of basic infrastructure provision as well as local governments’ coordination. Moreover, business investment decisions (measured as staff expansion and product innovation) were found to vary with some specific combinations of these infrastructural conditions. The result provides evidence supporting the argument that both physical and institutional infrastructures are instrumental to realize the supposed benefits of decentralization and supports the recent call of the literature to look into the political-institutional complex in the process of decentralization reform.

A systematic approach for identifying level-1 error covariance structures in latent growth modeling

It has been pointed out in the literature that misspecification of the level-1 error covariance structure in latent growth modeling (LGM) has detrimental impacts on the inferences about growth parameters. Since correct covariance structure is difficult to specify by theory, the identification needs to rely on a specification search, which, however, is not systematically addressed in the literature. In this study, we first discuss characteristics of various covariance structures and their nested relations, based on which we then propose a systematic approach to facilitate identifying a plausible covariance structure. A test for stationarity of an error process and the sequential chi-square difference test are conducted in the approach. Preliminary simulation results indicate that the approach performs well when sample size is large enough. The approach is illustrated with empirical data. We recommend that the approach be used in LGM empirical studies to improve the quality of the specification of the error covariance structure.

An Integrated Theory of Thinking and Speaking that Draws on Vygotsky and Bakhtin/Vološinov

Vygotsky’s social-psychological theory of human development and Bakhtin/Vološinov’s theory of language and the dialogical nature of thought have received increasing interest in the educational research literature but tend to remain unrelated even where co-citation occurs. In this article, I first present a model that integrates the fundamentally common features in the two approaches and present a table with the correspondences of the theoretical terms across four European languages; the model thereby integrates the psychological and sociological dimensions at the heart of the two approaches. I then articulate and elaborate on six main issues that are relevant to and have implications for research: (a) sensual life as integrative unit, (b) self-movement and development, (c) the nested relations between activity and living utterance, (d) signification, (e) vernacular as the origin and locus of development, and (f) unit analysis.

DocBase

This chapter introduces a complete storage and retrieval architecture for a database environment for XML documents. DocBase, a prototype system based on this architecture, uses a flexible storage and indexing technique to allow highly expressive queries without the necessity of mapping documents to other database formats. DocBase is an integration of several techniques that include (i) a formal model called Heterogeneous Nested Relations (HNR), (ii) a conceptual model XER (Extensible Entity Relationship), (ii) formal query languages (Document Algebra and Calculus), (iii) a practical query language (Document SQL or DSQL), (iv) a visual query formulation method with QBT (Query By Templates), and (v) the DocBase query processing architecture. This paper focuses on the overall architecture of DocBase including implementation details, describes the details of the query-processing framework, and presents results from various performance tests. The paper summarizes experimental and usability analyses to demonstrate its feasibility as a general architecture for native as well as embedded document manipulation methods.