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While many studies have investigated how autism spectrum disorder (ASD) impacts how children identify the meanings of new words, this task alone does not constitute learning. Here we investigate fast (referent selection) and slow (retention, generalisation) word learning processes as an integrated system and explore relationships between these mechanisms in ASD and typical development. In Study 1, children with ASD and typically developing (TD) children matched on receptive vocabulary utilised mutual exclusivity to identify referents of unfamiliar words, but showed substantially reduced accuracy on delayed retention and generalisation trials. Thus, Study 2 investigated whether re-directing children’s attention to target objects following referent selection would enhance delayed retention. Participants received either social feedback (target objects were labelled and highlighted via social cues) or non-social feedback (target objects were labelled and highlighted via a flashing light). In both conditions, children with ASD were less accurate in their use of mutual exclusivity to fast-map novel words than TD children. However, children with ASD who received social feedback responded more accurately on delayed retention and generalisation trials than TD controls, and children with ASD who received non-social feedback or no feedback (in Study 1). Our findings imply that fundamental word learning mechanisms, and the relationships between them, are not qualitatively different in ASD. We argue that ASD may affect the efficiency of these mechanisms by disrupting children’s intake of linguistic input in natural environments, but difficulties may be mitigated by presenting visual and auditory stimuli in a way that appeals to the population’s strengths.

Generating consumer acceptance for incrementally new food products remains a challenge. Drawing on analogical learning theory, we explore the combined effect of providing information about the new product’s closest referent (‘the product is like…’) and the instrumental value of store’s frontline employees (FLEs) as credible source of this information on a new food product’s acceptance. Using the context of aquaculture, two consecutive experimental studies with a joint data collection have been conducted among UK consumers. Study 1 focuses on the adoption of fillets of an unfamiliar fish species with the FLE communicating newness, or newness including closest referent information. Results confirm that information provided by the FLE has a positive effect on consumer attitude and willingness to buy the new product, but a similar rather than stronger effect is found for the condition including closest referent information. Using a subsample of the data of Study 1, Study 2 explores the underlying learning mechanisms involved. The findings show that the influence of the FLE’s information on the consumer’s attitude towards the new product is positively mediated by the consumer’s attitude towards FLE’s advice. Additionally, the positive indirect effect of the FLE’s information regarding closest referent on willingness to buy is conditional on the consumer’s (dis)liking of the referent product and his/her need to taste the new product first. These findings confirm that offering information on closest referent by FLEs is powerful and can be a useful variable in consumer segmentation.

The purpose of this chapter is to describe Whole Trait Theory (WTT) as a modern theory of traits—one that puts dynamics at the core of structure. Personality psychology would benefit from an account of traits that emphasizes dynamic mechanisms underlying those traits (Baumert & Schmitt, 2012; Baumert et al., 2017; Fleeson, 2012). Given the impressive discoveries of the structure of traits (Ashton & Lee, 2012; Goldberg, 1992; Saucier, 2009), the most useful exploration of dynamics would be deeply connected to structure. WTT is intended to connect dynamics to structure by locating the dynamics within a structural model of traits. Furthermore, a dynamic model of traits may enhance the connection of normal personality to clinical personality, and may also find a means to connect the many diverse (and typically dynamic) approaches to personality to each other, including motivational, narrative, and trait approaches. WTT starts with the proposition that the trait term has two rather than a single referent. One referent is the description of how the person actually acts. WTT calls this TraitDES, and defines it as the degrees to which a person manifests the trait across all actions in large portions of life. The other referent of the trait term is the explanatory processes that produce these manifestations. WTT calls this TraitEXP, and defines it as the total set of cognitive, affective, biological, and motivational processes that influence the degree to which a person manifests the trait at any given moment. We elaborate WTT, review evidence regarding testable claims of WTT, and finish with ten future research directions valuable for investigating WTT and the dynamic approach to traits.

Introduction We present a methodology to automatically evaluate the performance of patients during picture description tasks. Methods Transcriptions and audio recordings of the Cookie Theft picture description task were used. With 25 healthy elderly control (HC) samples and an information coverage measure, we automatically generated a population‐specific referent. We then assessed 517 transcriptions (257 Alzheimer's disease [AD], 217 HC, and 43 mild cognitively impaired samples) according to their informativeness and pertinence against this referent. We extracted linguistic and phonetic metrics which previous literature correlated to early‐stage AD. We trained two learners to distinguish HCs from cognitively impaired individuals. Results Our measures significantly (P

A major challenge in second language acquisition is to build up new vocabulary. How is it possible to identify the meaning of a new word among several possible referents? Adult learners typically use contextual information, which reduces the number of possible referents a new word can have. Alternatively, a social partner may facilitate word learning by directing the learner's attention toward the correct new word meaning. While much is known about the role of this form of 'joint attention' in first language acquisition, little is known about its efficacy in second language acquisition. Consequently, we introduce and validate a novel visual word learning game to evaluate how joint attention affects the contextual learning of new words in a second language. Adult learners either acquired new words in a constant or variable sentence context by playing the game with a knowledgeable partner, or by playing the game alone on a computer. Results clearly show that participants who learned new words in social interaction (i) are faster in identifying a correct new word referent in variable sentence contexts, and (ii) temporally coordinate their behavior with a social partner. Testing the learned words in a post-learning recall or recognition task showed that participants, who learned interactively, better recognized words originally learned in a variable context. While this result may suggest that interactive learning facilitates the allocation of attention to a target referent, the differences in the performance during recognition and recall call for further studies investigating the effect of social interaction on learning performance. In summary, we provide first evidence on the role joint attention in second language learning. Furthermore, the new interactive learning game offers itself to further testing in complex neuroimaging research, where the lack of appropriate experimental set-ups has so far limited the investigation of the neural basis of adult word learning in social interaction.

\ud \ud Background\ud \ud There is conflicting evidence regarding whether children with Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) and intellectual disabilities (ID) follow social pragmatic cues such as a speaker’s eye gaze or pointing towards a novel object to assist mapping a new word onto a new object (e.g. fast mapping).\ud \ud Aims\ud \ud We test fast mapping from a speaker’s gaze and pointing towards objects in children with ASC and ID with varying chronological and receptive language ages compared with receptive language matched groups of typically developing (TD) children.\ud \ud Methods and Procedure\ud \ud Across eight trials, a speaker gazed and/or pointed towards one out of two objects while saying a new word. Pointing was either ‘referential’ (with intention), or ‘incidental’ (without obvious intention). To investigate whether children formed more robust word-to-object links rather than associative word-to-location ones, we reversed the original location of the objects in half of the test trials.\ud \ud Outcomes and Results\ud \ud Children with ASC were as successful as TD children using social cues to form word-to-object mappings. Surprisingly, children with ID did not fast map from referential pointing, or when objects changed location.\ud Conclusions and Implications\ud \ud Children with ID may use different processes to facilitate word learning compared to TD children and even children with ASC.

Word learning happens in everyday contexts with many words and many potential referents for those words in view at the same time. It is challenging for young learners to find the correct referent upon hearing an unknown word at the moment. This problem of referential uncertainty has been deemed as the crux of early word learning (Quine, 1960). Recent empirical and computational studies have found support for a statistical solution to the problem termed cross-situational learning. Cross-situational learning allows learners to acquire word meanings across multiple exposures, despite each individual exposure is referentially uncertain. Recent empirical research shows that infants, children and adults rely on cross-situational learning to learn new words (Smith & Yu, 2008; Suanda, Mugwanya, & Namy, 2014; Yu & Smith, 2007). However, researchers have found evidence supporting two very different theoretical accounts of learning mechanisms: Hypothesis Testing (Gleitman, Cassidy, Nappa, Papafragou, & Trueswell, 2005; Markman, 1992) and Associative Learning (Frank, Goodman, & Tenenbaum, 2009; Yu & Smith, 2007). Hypothesis Testing is generally characterized as a form of learning in which a coherent hypothesis regarding a specific word-object mapping is formed often in conceptually constrained ways. The hypothesis will then be either accepted or rejected with additional evidence. However, proponents of the Associative Learning framework often characterize learning as aggregating information over time through implicit associative mechanisms. A learner acquires the meaning of a word when the association between the word and the referent becomes relatively strong. In this chapter, we consider these two psychological theories in the context of cross-situational word-referent learning. By reviewing recent empirical and cognitive modeling studies, our goal is to deepen our understanding of the underlying word learning mechanisms by examining and comparing the two theoretical learning accounts.

One challenge of using an interesting object such as a scale model as a symbol for something else is children's deep interest in the object itself. Attending to the model (the symbol) as a toy, children do not use information about where in the model a tiny dog is hiding to mentally represent where a larger dog is hiding in the full-sized room (the referent). Young children use pictures in this way because they are relatively uninteresting as objects. Today, interactive images on touchscreens function as virtual objects on which to act and which respond to the user's actions. In this chapter, we examine how interactive symbolic media (e.g., touchscreens, video chat, augmented reality) might affect children's symbolic development and the way that psychologists think about representational objects. Young children's learning about and from interactive media may depend upon adults scaffolding children's use of these new cultural tools.

We contrasted two hypotheses concerning how speakers determine adjective order during referential communication. The discriminatory efficiency hypotheses claims that speakers place the most discriminating adjective early to facilitate referent identification. By contrast, the availability-based ordering hypothesis assumes that speakers produce most available adjectives early to ease production. Experiment 1 showed that speakers use more pattern-before-color modifier orders (than the reversed) when pattern, not color, distinguished the referent from alternatives, providing support for the discriminatory efficiency hypothesis. Participants also overspecified color more often than pattern, and they generally favored color-before-pattern orders, in support of the availability-based ordering hypothesis. Experiments 2 and 3 replicated both effects in a dialogue setting, where speakers’ adjective ordering was also primed by their partner’s ordering, using conjoined and non-conjoined constructions. We propose a novel model ( PASS ) that explains how discriminability and availability simultaneously influence adjective selection and ordering via competition in the speaker’s message representation.

When we encounter a new word, there are often multiple objects that the word might refer to [1]. Nonetheless, because names for concrete nouns are constant, we are able to learn them across successive encounters [2, 3]. This form of "cross-situational" learning may result from either associative mechanisms that gradually accumulate evidence for each word-object association [4, 5] or rapid propose-but-verify (PbV) mechanisms where only one hypothesized referent is stored for each word, which is either subsequently verified or rejected [6, 7]. Using model-based representation similarity analyses of fMRI data acquired during learning, we find evidence for learning mediated by a PbV mechanism. This learning may be underpinned by rapid pattern-separation processes in the hippocampus. Our findings shed light on the psychological and neural processes that support word learning, suggesting that adults rely on their episodic memory to track a limited number of word-object associations.

Measurements may be performed directly or indirectly. Physical, biological, and chemical characteristics can be measured directly, whereas social, psychological, and health-outcome phenomena without a physical referent have to be measured indirectly. For a better understanding of the direct and the indirect approach to health measurement, abstractions such as concepts, constructs, and latent variables will be explained. Other notions that are difficult to grasp will be discussed and clarified, including attitude, preference, judgment, and choice. Rating scales and a simple direct-response scale, the Likert scale, will be introduced.

Background and objectives - Biased processing of negatively valenced, and particularly threat-related material plays an important role in the development of paranoid thinking. This has been demonstrated by superior memory for threat-related information in patients with persecutory delusions and in non-clinical paranoia-prone participants. This study examined how emotional material was recalled having been encoded in relation to one self or to another person, in people high or low in paranoid ideation. It was predicted that people high in paranoia would recall more threat related material about others than people low in paranoia owing to being particularly alert to threats from other people.\ud \ud Methods - Participants who reported high (N = 30) or low (N = 30) levels of sub-clinical paranoid thinking were presented with a series of threat-related and positive words and were asked to process them in terms of the self, or in terms of a fictional character.\ud \ud Results - As predicted, when words were processed in terms of another person, the high paranoia group recalled more threat-related words than positive words, but when words had been processed in terms of the self, recall of threat-related and positive words did not differ. In contrast, there was no interaction between word-valence and referent in the low paranoia group.\ud \ud Limitations - These findings are drawn from an analogue sample. Replication in a sample of clinical participants who report persecutory delusions is required.\ud \ud Conclusions - People high in sub-clinical paranoid ideation recalled threat preferentially in relation to other people. Such information processing biases may help understand the development and maintenance of persecutory beliefs.

This paper builds on Belk's notions of the extended, social, family and dialogic selves in an attempt to explore the transformation of the self during the Arab Spring phenomena. From the perspective of the respondents in Egypt\ud and Libya, this paper provides a reading of how images of self are related to artifacts of consumption, rituals, and\ud symbols and how consumer values are navigated through this difficult landscape. The paper uses a three phase\ud history, happening, and hopes narratives to show that the self in a liminal period of flux is referent to history and\ud hopes and proposes a notion of a transitional self that incorporates this observation of reference to past and future. In particular, the findings suggest that consumption, especially Western consumption can be transcendental during a liminal period of flux and that such revelatory incidents offer an opportunity to access the candid thoughts of consumers.

The electrophysiology of language comprehension has long been dominated by research on syntactic and semantic integration. However, to understand expressions like "he did it" or "the little girl", combining word meanings in accordance with semantic and syntactic constraints is not enough--readers and listeners also need to work out what or who is being referred to. We review our event-related brain potential research on the processes involved in establishing reference, and present a new experiment in which we examine when and how the implicit causality associated with specific interpersonal verbs affects the interpretation of a referentially ambiguous pronoun. The evidence suggests that upon encountering a singular noun or pronoun, readers and listeners immediately inspect their situation model for a suitable discourse entity, such that they can discriminate between having too many, too few, or exactly the right number of referents within at most half a second. Furthermore, our implicit causality findings indicate that a fragment like "David praised Linda because..." can immediately foreground a particular referent, to the extent that a subsequent "he" is at least initially construed as a syntactic error. In all, our brain potential findings suggest that referential processing is highly incremental, and not necessarily contingent upon the syntax. In addition, they demonstrate that we can use ERPs to relatively selectively keep track of how readers and listeners establish reference.

Research has shown that direct current stimulation (tDCS) over left temporoparietal cortex - a region implicated in phonological processing - aids new word learning. The locus of this effect remains unclear since (i) experiments have not empirically separated the acquisition of phonological forms from lexical-semantic links and (ii) outcome measures have focused on learnt associations with a referent rather than phonological stability. We tested the hypothesis that left temporoparietal tDCS would strengthen the acquisition of phonological forms, even in the absence of the opportunity to acquire lexical-semantic associations. Participants were familiarised with nonwords paired with (i) photographs of concrete referents or (ii) blurred images where no clear features were visible. Nonword familiarisation proceeded under conditions of anodal tDCS and sham stimulation in different sessions. We examined the impact of these manipulations on the stability of the phonological trace in an immediate serial recall (ISR) task the following day, ensuring that any effects were due to the influence of tDCS on long-term learning and not a direct consequence of short-term changes in neural excitability. We found that only a few exposures to the phonological forms of nonwords were sufficient to enhance nonword ISR overall compared to entirely novel items. Anodal tDCS during familiarisation further enhanced the acquisition of phonological forms, producing a specific reduction in the frequency of phoneme migrations when sequences of nonwords were maintained in verbal short-term memory. More of the phonemes that were recalled were bound together as a whole correct nonword following tDCS. These data show that tDCS to left temporoparietal cortex can facilitate word learning by strengthening the acquisition of long-term phonological forms, irrespective of the availability of a concrete referent, and that the consequences of this learning can be seen beyond the learning task as strengthened phonological coherence in verbal short-term memory.

This chapter describes the ontology of the Relational Paradigm. This ontology consists of types and instances of objects, states and events, and types and instances of the properties of these things and the relationships among them. These types and instances are the upper levels of an ontology which is applicable across all relational databases.

This chapter describes how, in the future, relational databases might more completely and explicitly manage both time and types. It is a future in which people are associated with statements by means of different speech acts they perform with those statements, and in which speech acts, statements, and inscriptions are each associated with one of three distinct and orthogonal temporal dimensions. It is a future in which relational databases are linked to an extended ontology whose upper-level categories are common to all of them.

This chapter assesses the theories and related empirical evidence regarding the factors that explain cultural innovation by cultural organizations. It begins by defining key concepts, including what is meant by a cultural organization, cultural innovation, and the innovation referent. The chapter identifies two main disciplines that have been interested in cultural innovation or innovative programming by cultural organizations: sociology and economics. The focus, contributions, and overlap of these two disciplinary approaches to cultural innovation are discussed, and the chapter concludes by identifying some gaps and putting forward some suggestions for future research.

This chapter begins by distinguishing between objects and events, and explains how change can be represented as either a succession of states of objects, or as a succession of events in which those objects take part. This chapter also describes the conventions used in this book to show examples of database tables, and of rows in those tables.

This chapter describes referential integrity as it applies to bitemporal tables and to state-time tables, as well as to conventional tables. It describes bitemporal referential integrity as the constraint that the bitemporal area of any child row must be fully contained within the bitemporal area of a set of related parent rows, and explains the semantics which this constraint implements. It provides similar explanations of state-time referential integrity and of conventional referential integrity, and of the semantics they implement.

This paper investigates preschool children's errors in their use of definite vs. indefinite determiners to encode the newness of referents. It focuses on so-called “egocentric errors” (whereby a definite is used for a referent not previously introduced in the discourse) and explores possible cognitive sources for such errors. 45 children acquiring French as their first language (between the ages of 2;6.22 and 5;6.15) were made to perform two tests: a picture-based story-elicitation task and a Theory of Mind (ToM) test. The latter aimed to evaluate their ability to perceive differences between their own perspective and that of their addressee. No straightforward correlation was found between the rate of egocentric errors and performance on the ToM test, suggesting that egocentric errors cannot be due simply to children's inability to appreciate that their listener can have a different perspective to their own. It is suggested that ToM development could nonetheless be one among several factors conspiring (perhaps indirectly) to the production of egocentric errors. Other likely factors are (i) preschool children's tendency to monitor insufficiently the difference in perspective between themselves and their addressee – something which adults are also found to do, but to a much lesser extent – and (ii) their over-reliance on the visual context.

Despite English being traditionally classified as a non-null subject language, there are certain discourse contexts in which subject pronouns may be left non-overt. While previous analyses of this phenomenon have focused on syntactic explanations, each has acknowledged that pragmatics plays a vital role in understanding their production and interpretation. This paper takes up where the syntactic analyses leave off, and offers an analysis of the pragmatic motivation behind null subjects in non-null subject languages, focusing particularly on English. It is argued that, far from being exceptional, pragmatically motivated null subjects are not surprising on a relevance-theoretic approach to utterance production and interpretation ( Sperber and Wilson, 1986 /95). Three categories of null subject are identified, each driven by the balance between hearer's effort and cognitive effects, while allowing for the speaker's abilities and preferences. It is argued that pronouns encode procedural information which guides the hearer to the intended subject referent. Furthermore, the analysis of the discourse contexts in which these subjects may be optionally omitted sheds light not only on the nature of the pronouns themselves, but on the nature of the utterance interpretation process generally, and has important implications for the study of style.

The history of the positive/negative terminology, as applied to psychiatric symptoms, can be divided into an early period of original meanings, a second one of French elaboration, and the current revival. This report addresses issues concerning the meaning, referent, and nature of the link between the positive and the negative as dealt with in French publications by Ribot, Janet, de Clérambault, Nayrac, Von Monakow and Mourgue, and Ey. It is shown how these authors modified the old Reynoldian terminology to meet ongoing epistemological needs, and in doing so exhausted the conceptual permutations through which the positive/negative dichotomy can be put. To render their views intelligible, the historical origin of concepts such as evolutionism, Jacksonian, inhibition, psychological automatism, and synchrony and diachrony is briefly mentioned. It is suggested that the French writers helped to bridge the gap between Reynolds and the present, but that the conceptual subtlety that characterized their work has not been matched by the leaders of the current revival.

English has gradually become the lingua franca of medical publications and conferences across Europe, with scholars from ‘smaller’ languages opting for English because of the greater scientific impact and prestige associated with a wide international audience; at the same time, however, this transition has disrupted well-established textual traditions, hybridising local written and spoken practices. The case of Italian medical journals is especially enlightening, as shown by entries in PubMed (U.S. National Library of Medicine) over the last two decades. The rhetorical implications of this shift are investigated in a sample of medical editorials consisting of Italian texts, NNS English texts from Italian journals, and NS English texts from Anglo-American journals. Cross-linguistic variation in the genre appears to be particularly noticeable in the wording of opening and closing sentences and in the frequency/referent of first-person markers. The analysis of such features suggests that insecurity and decontextualisation are experienced by Italian editors writing in English and that the structural demands placed on NS English texts are more stringent than those placed on their NNS and Italian counterparts. In a way, NNS editorials may thus be seen as intertexts mediating between two different NS models.

Publisher Summary Embodied theories of cognition propose that simulation is the basis for cognitive representation. Simulation is assumed to use the same sensory–motor systems that are engaged during real experience; when this principle is applied to the representation of linguistic meaning (semantics) theories propose that semantic content is achieved by recreating, usually in weaker form, the sensory and motor information produced when the referent of a word or sentence is actually experienced. Simulations are content-specific; for example, words referring to motion, such as rise and fall, are thought to recruit sensory systems involved in perceiving motion, and words referring to motor actions, such as kick and walk, are thought to recruit the motor systems used for those actions. Therefore, embodied theories of semantic representation focus on semantic content, rather than the structure of the semantic system as a whole, how words are related to one another, or how categories are represented. At a basic level, embodiment extends the non-controversial idea that we learn from experience, so semantics must be grounded in our sensations and actions; however, it appears to be a departure from the commonly accepted view that semantic content is amodal and thus not dependent on sensory–motor information. This chapter reviews different theories of semantic representation placing them on a continuum as regards to their proposals about the role of sensory and motor information. A brief review of behavioral and neuroscientific evidence is then presented and the chapter ends with a discussion of what the implications are for semantic representation.

Publisher Summary This chapter presents analyses of a large set of eye–movement data that examine how factors associated with the processing of visual information affect eye movements to displayed pictures during the processing of the referent's name. Eye movements have increasingly become a measure of choice in the study of spoken language comprehension, providing fine-grained information about how the acoustic signal is mapped onto linguistic representations as speech unfolds. Research has established that eye movements are a powerful tool for investigating the processes by which speech is perceived and interpreted, especially the time course of these processes. It is found that phonetically driven fixations are affected by display preview, by the ongoing uptake of visual information, and by the position of pictures in the visual display. Importantly, lexical frequency associated with a picture's name affects the likelihood of refixating this picture and the timing of initiating a saccade away from this picture, thus supporting the use of eye movements as a measure of lexical processing. The chapter also describes how the display might influence lexical processing and help mitigate concerns about potential task-specific strategies. The results are encouraging for researchers who want to exploit the properties of the eye-tracking paradigm to explore issues of representation and process in spoken-word recognition.

In a narrow sense, articles can be said to be grammatical elements that, in many languages, encode as their core meaning the identifiability of a referent in a noun phrase. Hence, by using the English definite article the, the speaker implies that the recipient should be able to identify the intended referent, and by using the indefinite article a/an, the speaker implies that this is not necessarily the case. This article discusses the functional and distributional variation found in the languages of the world as regards the use of both definite and indefinite articles.

Publisher Summary Conversation is one of the primary settings of category learning and category use. People spend a large portion of their lives in conversation with other people, and these conversations invariably involve numerous categorizations of entities and situations. Referential communication involves relating language to the world. In reference, the goal of categorization is to establish joint attention on some entity with an interlocutor. Most categorization research can be said to have accepted the labeling as categorization hypothesis, given that the vast majority of studies signal category membership to the learner through the use of a symbolic label. An alternative to viewing labeling as a kind of categorization would be to view it as a kind of social mnemonic that allows people to share attention to an object without bearing the strong entailments involved in nonlinguistic categorization. The simplest definite description involves mentioning the name of a category to which the referent belongs. The lexicon of a language provides a rich, ready-made system of distinctions for classifying referents. This system is characterized by a hierarchical reorganization that makes it possible to classify referents at various levels of specificity: superordinate, basic, and subordinate.

The pragmatic determinants of what is said are those elements drawn from the context of utterance which contribute to the literal meaning, sometimes called the ‘semantic content,’ of linguistic utterances. These contributions come in two varieties: those which are triggered by something in the syntax of the sentence (e.g., the referent for an indexical or a demonstrative) and those which are not. It is the latter kind of pragmatic determinants, often known as ‘unarticulated constituents,’ which have become the focus of much recent discussion as they appear problematic for a key claim of formal semantics, namely that the route to meaning runs along exhaustively syntactic trails.

Since the 1980s, the term “Japanese management accounting” has attracted serious attention, not in the least because of Japanese companies’ international competitiveness. However, the term is often used without defining its exact referent. What is Japanese management accounting? Where does it come from? Are there any defining characteristics that make it “Japanese,” which enhance Japanese companies’ international competitiveness? Is Japanese management accounting particularly socially and culturally determined, and therefore, rarely applicable in foreign companies? After examining the evolution of Japanese management accounting, from the mid–nineteenth century to the year 2000, this chapter addresses the aforementioned questions from historical perspectives.

Publisher Summary This chapter describes the role of convention in visual representation, which is essential not only in determining which objects are representations, but also in determining which visible properties of a symbol are correlated with properties of the referent. The chapter highlights the relevance of relations between symbol form and content, including resemblance. In this context, all visual representations stand in an isomorphic relation to the content they convey. Goodman's analysis of symbol systems identifies the differences between visual symbol systems, and shows what some visual symbols have in common with linguistic representations. Some visual representations in science have the syntactic character of text. Other figures have the syntactic and semantic features of pictorial representations. These results conflict with a tacit assumption that influence many of those trying to account for the difference between pictorial representations and text: the assumption that symbol types can be defined in terms of exclusive sets of properties. Isomorphic relations between symbol form and content determine the referents of individual symbols of a visual system. Such a relation holds between the form of the symbol and the features represented. In addition, Goodman's analysis might lead to a radical conclusion: in spite of the dramatic difference in how pictures look compared to text or diagrams, pictorial representations simply refer to very complicated properties..

Traditional multinational team (MNT) research has concentrated on negative phenomena such as in-group/out-group distinctions, social loafing, and pressures for convergence. In contrast, we examine instances where MNT members exhibit cross-national inclusive behavior, cross-national responsiveness, and cross-national divergence of ideas, which in turn result in positive outcomes such as cohesion, trust, and innovation. Furthermore, we identify important catalyzing mechanisms that effectively encourage these functional behaviors. For example, we highlight the importance of social categorization based on common group membership, social comparisons to referent others outside the team from other nations, and suspension of attributions based on national stereotypes – all of which will help turn the tide of the current research on MNTs.

Publisher Summary This chapter reviews three specific elements that constitute the notion of a scale—cartographic scale, sampling frequency, and spatial extent— and highlights the way in which 3D visualization may be used to explore these elements. These elements are shown to affect both the measurements of spatial phenomena, as well the way in which such phenomena can be represented in a visualization environment. Visual techniques that highlight these scale dependencies are considered. In particular, the rendering heuristic of mipmapping is suggested as a way of allowing intelligent surface generalization techniques to be rendered and explored in real-time in a dynamic 3D visual environment. Cartographic scale (the ratio between a referent's size and its representation's size), level of detail (resolution or sampling frequency), and spatial extent all affect the measurements and observations that are taken from a phenomenon. By taking advantage of the heuristics designed to improve the efficiency of 3D surface rendering, the scale dependent measures in a dynamic 3D environment can be explicitly mapped. This offers new opportunities to create environments in which scale dependencies can be explored.

Discussions on the human ‘home’ and related categories always oscillates between emotionally charged categories of belonging and more practical reasonings about the location of persons and groups in the world—one argument today being represented by the ‘invention of tradition’ approach, the other recently tending towards sociobiological and ethological claims about the existence of a human instinct which orientates us towards total ‘environs’ or natural habitats. This article enquires into very different ways of constructing material and spiritual homes, trying to show that the striving for a ‘home’ might be a human universal, but that, on the other side, the ideal is never totally realized, as human fragility and dispersal drives us always and again away from our homes. In the era of ‘moving targets,’ anthropological fieldwork has partly lost its central referent: the small group presumably inhabiting a restricted area since immemorial times. However, we should acknowledge that humans all over the world are struggling to recreate homes under the impact of growing mobility and globalization. The anthropological field therefore re-emerges over again, sometimes ‘under fire,’ sometimes through more peaceful visits of anthropologists to other people's homes.

This chapter describes perceptual and cognitive processes that are involved in the organization, interpretation and comprehension of graphics. The notational symbol system of graphics provides an unambiguous one-to-one relationship between each symbol and a referent in the content domain as well as relatively clear indications of the relations among symbols. Perceptual processes, operating on these symbols and inter-symbol relations, allow the viewer to detect, discriminate among and configure graphic symbols into patterns. Cognitive processes, to some extent influenced by the organization imposed by perception, operate iteratively on information organized by perception leading to the identification, interpretation and comprehension of what has been perceived. Studies that illustrate the operation of these processes are described. Research questions for future study are offered as a conclusion. Resume Ce chapitre decrit les processus perceptifs et cognitifs qui sont impliques dans ľorganisation, ľinterpretation et la comprehension des graphiques. Le systeme de symboles notationnels des graphiques fournit aussi bien une relation terme a terme entre chaque symbole et un referent dans le domaine du contenu, que des indications relativement claires sur les relations parmi les symboles. Les processus perceptifs, operant sur ces symboles et sur les relations inter-symboles, permettent a la personne qui regarde de detecter, de discriminer et de configurer les symboles graphiques en patterns. Les processus cognitifs, influences jusqu'a un certain point par ľorganisation imposee par la perception, operent de facon iterative sur ľinformation organisee par la perception, aboutissant a ľidentification, ľnterpretation et la comprehension de ce qui a ete percu. Des etudes qui illustrent la mise en oeuvre de ces processus sont decrites. En conclusion, des questions de recherche sont proposees pour des etudes futures.

Publisher Summary This chapter aims to study the comprehension of indeterminate or “abstract” sentences included in short texts. It explores how subjects build a representation of the reference for these indeterminate sentences, with an emphasis on the time course of the process. The processing of abstract versus concrete words has been a common topic of research within the framework of mental imagery. The chapter explores how sentences involving an indeterminate word are processed in the context of short narratives. The chapter aims to reveal the time course of instantiation in late context situations. Two possibilities are discussed. First is the immediate instantiation hypothesis: The reader computes the referent on-line while reading the indeterminate word/s. Second is the delayed instantiation hypothesis: The instantiation of the indeterminate sentence takes places several sentences after the word has been read.

Publisher Summary This chapter derives word norms for imageability in visual, auditory, olfactory and touch modalities and investigates the effects of these separable factors in (1) incidental learning whilst the subjects were rating the words, (2) intentional learning followed by either null, picture imagery, or sound imagery interference, (3) Paired-Associate Learning (PAL), and (4) the Stroop effect. The subjects were asked to consider prototypically visual, auditory, smell, and touch words for their meaningfulness and their attributes and to imagine the referents in their “home” sensory modality. They were asked to report the attributes that they perceive through this home sensory modality, all other percepts that are simultaneously available in that imagery episode, and as many items as possible that are perceptually similar to the referent in that modality. Their generated responses are then analyzed for modality differences and for the degree to which the different modalities and aspects (similarity, contemporaneity, etc.) contribute to meaningfulness and memorability.

Publisher Summary One of the most basic functions of language is to communicate information to other people about particular referents. A referent could be, for example, an object, a location or an idea. Referential communication, as it is termed, can be distinguished from other functions of communication. The referential function of language has received the greatest research attention to date because of its relative simplicity, apparent pervasiveness, and also because it is probably a component of other, more complex types of communication functions. Considerable research efforts have been devoted to studying the development of referential communication performance, and it is clear from a variety of studies that referential communication performance improves over age. However, the specific skills that contribute to improvement over age are not well understood. The chapter highlights three broad capacities that appear to underlie successful communication performance: (1) the speaker's ability to analyze the perspective of his or her listener and formulate a message with this perspective in mind, (2) the listener's analytic skills, and (3) task analytic skills.

We expect that many readers encountered this article with the beliefs that maps are highly specialized devices primarily used for wayfinding; that they represent the spatial world in a single, correct form; that they are readily transparent; and that their sole contribution to psychology is their role in externalizing environmental cognition. By discussing the myriad functions and forms of maps, by highlighting their symbolic nature, and by considering some of the misconceptions about maps, we have attempted to demonstrate the value of maps for addressing a wide range of developmental questions. Our review of past research literature suggests that research conducted within individual disciplines has both strengths and limitations. Work in the psychological tradition is characterized by attention to important subject characteristics and to carefully described and implemented research designs, procedures, coding, and analyses. At the same time, this work reveals, at best, highly restricted views about maps, and at worst, fundamental misconceptions about maps. Work in the geographic and environmental traditions, in contrast, samples a broader range of map forms and functions, but it suffers from inattention to procedural details that makes the conclusions less compelling than they might otherwise be. A conventional wisdom is emerging from the work in both traditions: That children's map understanding occurs extremely early and extremely easily. The limitations of both research traditions, however, suggest the need for caution in accepting this view. Developmental and cartographic theories provide a compelling reason to reexamine the early and easy view and suggest the need for alternative conceptual and empirical approaches. We have argued that future work should integrate the traditions of psychology and geography. Illustrative data from an interdisciplinary program of research were presented. We described work demonstrating the gradual and difficult process of mastering the representational and geometric correspondences that link the map to its referent in the world. Our data suggest that there are significant achievements in map conceptualization (the understanding of the concept of a map), map identification (understanding the formal components of a map), and map utilization (the ability to use maps). Our data support the view that maps are not transparent and that children's abilities to understand, use, and create maps are linked to their developing representational and spatial skills. In concluding, we should acknowledge that we have deliberately pushed interpretations about understanding maps as symbolic representations to the extreme. The reason for this strategy is simple: We believe that work on maps--both in the public schools and in academia--is assumed to be an expendable and irrelevant luxury.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)

Publisher Summary This chapter reviews five aspects of a full-scale story comprehension model. It highlights the main issues of full-scale story comprehension model architecture: (1) language analysis is best done by collections of relatively autonomous word sense experts who are assembled together on demand from each input utterance or sentence, (2) meaning representation for a inferentially complex tasks is best done using a compressionist technique, (3) reference, and specifically referent creation, should be an active process that passes each newly created token through a hierarchy of pattern matching, (4) building and maintaining personality models of the characters in the story, and two-character relationship models between each pair of characters is vital for inference and prediction conditioning, and (5) prediction fulfillment must be based on a sink pattern matching paradigm, which actively rescans the prediction set each time a new fact or belief enters the model or is generated by the model's inferential component.

This study deals with inference processes in anaphora resolution. Subjects had to read sentences such as Alex lied to Andy because he smelled trouble and to indicate the referent of the pronoun. The gender of the pronoun and of the referents was varied so as to create conditions with and without a gender cue. Additionally, the conjunction was varied. The main data are the eye fixation durations on the conjunction, on the pronoun and on the verbphrase of the second clause in the first pass through the sentences as well as the number of fixations in later passes through the sentences. The results give evidence for the immediacy of processing as far as the lexical properties of the pronoun is concerned and can be interpreted in terms of a rational selection of information in reading sentences.

This chapter focuses on defining and assessing specified educational goals in formative and summative evaluation. If the accomplishment of educational goals cannot be assessed, then it makes little difference what the referent, level, function, or agent of the evaluation may be. The chapter also highlights the importance of specified goals that refer to domains of knowledge and skill for which states that are equivalent to full attainment or mastery can be defined and recognized in the performance of learners. The content that is required of all learners is usually of considerable importance to the learner and to the society. Instruction should be designed so as to maximize each learner's chances of success. It is suggested that in spite of arguments to the contrary by Ebel (1971), it does appear that both academic and vocational curricula are likely to include a significant proportion of specified educational goals.

Publisher Summary This chapter provides an overview of two major categories of research on nutrition and behavioral development; one that relates to the effects of different forms of undernutrition prevalent in the United States, while the other refers to the effects of a few selected constituents in the daily diet of American children. The studies on growth retardation and mental development are strictly correlational. Research on the effects of nutrition supplementation provides a stronger basis than the correlational studies as a source from which to draw inferential statements. Among infants and children in the low-income groups in the United States, growth faltering is generally associated with a qualitatively and quantitatively poor diet. At present, there is no scientific reason to believe, using behavior and cognitive function as referent criteria, that additives, sugar, and caffeine represent public health problems for the pediatric population in the United States; this needs further research.

Publisher Summary This chapter presents a schema based model of encoding and retrieval. Schemas are generic knowledge structures that guide the comprehender's interpretations, inferences, expectations, and attention. A schema consists of knowledge in that its properties typically apply to its referent. Thus, its components, attributes, and relationships may normally apply to a specific referent, but need not apply out of necessity. The content of a schema is highly structured, rather than being simply a list of features or properties. It is convenient to view schemas as having variables, which are eventually filled as a schema guides the comprehension of specific input. These variables are filled with contextually specific referents when someone comprehends a specific restaurant experience. A schema is instantiated when variables have been filled and conceptually interrelated in a specific context. The actions that characters perform in a script are ordered logically, conventionally, or in a manner constrained by the environment.

My experience is what I agree to attend to . Only those items which I notice shape my mind—without selective interest, experience is utter chaos [James, 1890, p. 402].

On February 5, 1951, a party of five, destined for the Soviet Embassy in Canberra, disembarked in Sydney from the liner Orcades. Amongst the group were Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov. An Australian Security Intelligence Organization ( ASIO) field officer noted Petrov as a round-faced, solidly built man of 35 years or 40 years of age and his wife as a 35 year old of ‘medium to stout build.’ Although Petrov's official position was merely Embassy ‘referent’ or clerk, detective Longbottom of the New South Wales special branch, who had an informant on board the Orcades, let ASIO know that Petrov gave the impression of ‘being the “boss” of the Soviet group.’ The new arrivals were greeted on the wharf by the Soviet Embassy second secretary, Sadovnikov, and the ‘Tass' correspondent, Pakhomov. Unbeknown to ASIO at that time, the group chatting on the Sydney dock that day included four full-time officers of the Soviet intelligence service, two of whom were to influence, not negligibly, the future course of Australian political history. While Petrov's passage from his village to a post in the OGPU or NKVD (as it was renamed in 1934) was more protracted than that of his future wife, Evdokia Kartseva, her origins were even harsher than his.

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses western apache writing system. It is essential to point out that problems may arise when etic concepts are applied a priori to the description of individual writing systems. Compound symbols are divided into five structural types according to the number of elements they contain and the classes to which these elements belong. The linguistic referent of a noncompound symbol is always isomorphic with the meaning of the element that forms it and can be learned in a single operation. Phonetic semantic signs are commonly partitioned into two subclasses—logographs and phraseographs. Apaches knowledge of Silas John's writing system is not widespread. The linguistic referents of compound symbols are never isomorphic with the names of the Class B and/or C elements that form them. The utility of kinetic sign and phonetic-kinetic sign as comparative concepts is judged on the basis of their capacity to clarify and describe emic distinctions in other systems of writing.