Socialization of Language Through Family Language Policy: A Case Study

Challenges of heritage language maintenance and benefits of bilingualism have been widely acknowledged. Heritage language maintenance research most oft en focuses on heritage languages in English-dominant societies. This paper presents a case study on family language policy experiences, strategies, and outcomes led by an American-born mother in her effort to maintain and promote English, her heritage language, within the home in the Hebrew-dominant environment in Israel

Brief Report: The Role of Psychological Language in Children’S Theory of Mind and Self-Concept Development

Children’s self-concept and theory of mind are both important factors in children’s social, cognitive and emotional development. Research on gender differences in children’s theory of mind understanding reveals contradictory findings such as higher degree of social understanding or theory of mind in girls (Villaneuva Badenes, Clemente Estevan, & Garcia Bacete 2000), boys score higher than girls (Russell et al., 2007), or no gender differences at all (Villaneuva Badenes, Clemente Estevan, & Garcia Bacete, 2000). This research study is part of a larger 3-year longitudinal study, investigating children’s social and emotional development during middle childhood. This study explores the gendered relations between self-concept and social understanding (including psychological language) in middle school aged children (n = 49, ages 11-13). Results suggest a negative correlation between boys’ sense of self-worth and psychological language. Implications for curriculum development that promotes socio-emotional literacy within middle school are discussed

Language as a Tool Creating and Dividing Communities. Dangerous use of Asymmetric Counterconcepts

The paper discusses the role of language in shaping social and political reality. Referring to the theory of the sociology of knowledge, symbolic interactionism and theory related to sociolinguistics, the author makes the assumption that language understood as a tool that assigns meaning and defines reality has a decisive influence on individual awareness and knowledge about reality, and simultaneously also on activities undertaken by individuals. Moreover, in the opinion of many theoreticians who represent the above disciplines of knowledge, the knowledge about reality transferred by means of language creates cognitive schemes in awareness through which an individual perceives and defines reality. In this sense it may be said that manipulation of images of reality through language is also a manipulation of social reality

The Discursive Mind Model

The paper proposes the model of discursive mind and describes the cognitive architecture of the dialogically structured mind. The model draws on Hermans’ (1999) theory of the dialogical self (DS) and Wertsch’s (1991) vision of mind as a “tool kit” with socio-cultural instruments, and also on the socio-cognitive approach to personality in experimental psychology. An I-position is understood here as an active totality of experience, shaped in a particular social context and represented in a separate representation module. Th ere are many modules in the mind because in the course of socialization, the individual comes across many different social contexts. Th e described model and its preliminary empirical verification not only gives support to the DS theory, but can also be a leverage of its contribution to general theories of mind stemming from other theoretical traditions

Strategies of Translation

The paper is concerned with the strategies of written translation. The first section deals with various definitions of the notion of translation strategy, terms used to describe that notion and classifications of translation strategies. The second section presents the results of some empirical studies on translation strategies. In the third section, Krzysztof Hejwowski’s concept of translation strategies is laid out and the results of a pilot study based on this concept are described

The relationship between pitch discrimination and Romanian students’ spelling performance

Previous studies have shown that music can have a positive impact on phonological awareness and on foreign language acquisition. The present research investigates specifically the role of pitch discrimination ability in native and foreign language spelling performance. Two groups of elementary school children were selected based on their pitch discrimination abilities (high and low). Their spelling performance in their native and a foreign (fictional) language was assessed. The results indicate that pitch discrimination ability can be linked to spelling ability in both the native and a foreign language. They also suggest that studying a musical instrument might predict enhanced spelling performance ability

Non-literal speech comprehension in preschool children – an example from a study on verbal irony

The study aims to answer questions about the developmental trajectories of irony comprehension. The research focuses on the problem of the age at which ironic utterances can first be understood. The link between ironic utterance comprehension and early Theory of Mind (ToM) is examined as well. In order to approach the topic, 46 preschool children were tested with the Irony Comprehension Task (Banasik & Bokus, 2013) and the Reflection on Thinking Test (Białecka-Pikul, 2012) in three age groups: four-year-olds, five-year-olds and six-year-olds. The study showed no age effect in the Irony Comprehension Task and a significant effect in the Reflection on Thinking Test. On some of the measures, irony comprehension correlates with theory of mind. Also, an analysis of children’s narratives was conducted to observe how children explain the intention of the speaker who uttered the ironic statement. The children’s responses fall into four categories, one of which involves a function similar to a white lie being ascribed to the utterance.

Limitations in reasoning about false beliefs in adults: the effect of priming or the curse of knowledge?

Birch & Bloom (2007) suggest that adults’ reasoning about other people’s mental states is influenced by their privileged knowledge about reality. When asked where a person described in a story would search for a missing object, participants tend to judge with higher probability that the person would search in a particular box when they know that the object is indeed in that box. However, the results of that experiment could be an effect of unintended priming in the experimental materials. The increased attention towards the box might be caused by reading about it in the task instructions. In a new version of the experiment, we controlled for this factor by priming different locations in the instructions. The results show that it is unlikely that priming is the source of Birch and Bloom’s observations: only knowledge about reality changed the participants’ strategies in reasoning about the actions of others.

Do referential problem spaces affect the frequency of imperative pointing by infants?

Before speaking language, infants produce pointing gestures. To elucidate the mechanism promoting imperative pointing by infants, we investigated whether referential problem spaces, which are eco-cultural contexts in which subjects are reliant on others to obtain desirable but unreachable objects, affect the parental awareness of the frequency of imperative pointing by infants. Through a survey questionnaire, we asked parents of infants aged 8-30 months about the kinds of objects they place away from their infants and the frequency of their infants’ imperative pointing. The results show that parents who mentioned placing tiny objects or objects mainly used by adults or older children away from their infants reported higher frequencies of imperative pointing by their infants than those who did not. This suggests that the frequency of infants’ imperative pointing is increased by referential problem spaces, which are constructed by placing tiny objects or objects mainly used by adults or older children away from the infants.