Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

This study recruited English monolinguals, Mandarin monolinguals, and Mandarin–English bilinguals to examine whether native English and native Mandarin speakers think about time differently and whether the acquisition of L2 English could reshape native Mandarin speakers’ mental representations of temporal sequence. Across two experiments, we used the temporal congruency categorization paradigm which involved two-alternative forced-choice reaction time tasks to contrast experimental conditions that were assumed to be either compatible or incompatible with the internal spatiotemporal associations. Results add to previous studies by (...) confirming that native English and native Mandarin speakers do think about time differently, and the significant crosslinguistic discrepancy primarily lies in the vertical representations of time flow. However, current findings also clarify the existing literature, demonstrating that the acquisition of L2 English does not appear to affect native Mandarin speakers’ temporal cognition. ME bilinguals, irrespective of whether they attained elementary or advanced level of English proficiency, exhibited temporal thinking patterns commensurate with those of Mandarin monolinguals. Some theoretical implications regarding the effect of bilingualism on cognition in general can be drawn from the present study, a crucial one being that it provides evidence against the view that L2 acquisition can reshape habitual modes of thinking established by L1. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2018 Heft: 225 Seiten: 293-311.

According to usage-based theories, children initially acquire surface-level constructions and then abstract representations. If so, bilingual children might show lags relative to monolingual children early in acquisition, but not later on, once they rely on abstract representations. We tested this prediction with comprehension of passives in 3- to 6-year-old children: French–English bilinguals and English monolinguals. As predicted, younger bilingual children tended to be less accurate than monolingual children. In contrast, the older bilingual children scored equivalently to monolinguals, (...) despite less exposure to English. When the children made errors, the bilingual children were more likely to interpret the subject as the agent of the action than the monolingual children. These results are consistent with the argument that children develop increasingly abstract representations of linguistic constructions with usage. They further suggest that bilingual children might catch up with monolingual through use of selective attention and/or a semantic bias. (shrink)

The context-based use of terminology and phraseology is one of the essential building blocks of legal translation. The contextual nature of both components has implications when it comes to designing resources that are adapted to the needs of translators. For Arabic legal translation, there are a multitude of different print and online resources available, however, they do not integrate the context-related parameter for term choice acceptability. In this article, we will describe the main features of certain bilingual legal dictionaries (...) with the English-Arabic and French-Arabic language pairs. We will then make a descriptive assessment of the tools available online, highlighting their limitations. Taking into consideration all the contextual parameters involved in making a translation choice, we will put forward the value of developing bilingual ontologies with Arabic. With the rapid expansion of information technologies, a move towards formalizing legal knowledge will help fill existing gaps in the representation of Arabic legal content and the retrieval of information, providing legal translators with a tool that provides specific details that will enable translators to make informed and relevant decisions, in addition to opening new research perspectives for Arabic legal translation. (shrink)

The study of code-switching speech has produced a wealth of knowledge in the understanding of bilingual language processing and representation. Here, we approach this issue by using a novel network science approach to map bilingual spontaneous CS speech. In Study 1, we constructed semantic networks on CS speech corpora and conducted community detections to depict the semantic organizations of the bilingual lexicon. The results suggest that the semantic organizations of the two lexicons in CS speech are (...) largely distinct, with a small portion of overlap such that the semantic network community dominated by each language still contains words from the other language. In Study 2, we explored the effect of clustering coefficients on language choice during CS speech, by comparing clustering coefficients of words that were code-switched with their translation equivalents in the other language. The results indicate that words where the language is switched have lower clustering coefficients than their TEs in the other language. Taken together, we show that network science is a valuable tool for understanding the overall map of bilingual lexicons as well as the detailed interconnections and organizations between the two languages. (shrink)

An important challenge in bilingualism research is to understand the mechanisms underlying sentence processing in a second language and whether they are comparable to those underlying native processing. Here, we focus on verb-particle constructions (VPCs) that are among the most difficult elements to acquire in L2 English. The verb and the particle form a unit, which often has a non-compositional meaning (e.g., look up or chew out), making the combined structure semantically opaque. However, bilinguals with higher levels of English proficiency (...) can develop a good knowledge of the semantic properties of verb-particle constructions (Blais and Gonnerman, 2013). A second difficulty is that in a sentence context, the particle can be shifted after the direct object of the verb, (e.g., The professor looked it up). The processing is more challenging when the object is long (e.g. The professor looked the student’s last name up.). This shifted structure favors syntactic processing at the expense of VPC semantic processing. We sought to determine whether or not bilinguals’ reading time (RT) patterns would be similar to those observed for native monolinguals (Gonnerman and Hayes, 2005) when reading VPCs in sentential contexts. French-English bilinguals were tested for English language proficiency, working memory and explicit VPC semantic knowledge. During a self-paced reading task, participants read 78 sentences with verb-particle constructions that varied according to parameters that influence native speakers’ reading dynamics: verb-particle transparency, particle adjacency and length of the object noun phrase (NP; 2, 3, or 5 words). RTs in a critical region that included verbs, NPs and particles were measured. Results revealed that RTs were modulated by participants’ English proficiency, with higher proficiency associated with shorter RTs. Examining participants’ explicit semantic knowledge of VPCs and working memory, only readers with more native-like knowledge of VPCs and a high working memory presented RT patterns that were similar to those of monolinguals. Therefore, given the necessary lexical and computational resources, bilingual processing of novel structures at the syntax-semantics interface follows the principles influencing native processing. The findings are in keeping with theories that postulate similar representations and processing in L1 and L2 modulated by processing difficulty. (shrink)

As there are more and more bilingual couples who ran vlogs to share their bilingual and intercultural lives on the internet, this paper seeks to delineate the sources of motivation for these couples to disclose their privacy through vlogging. Based on the sample of selected vlogs, a qualitative analysis has been conducted to obtain the sociolinguistic picture of the bilingual couples’ motivations to attract wider audiences via the internet. The analysis of vlogs, informed by a multimodal theoretical (...) framework, focused on the audiovisual and textual content of vlogs with regard to the subjective representations of films and texts resulting from these couples’ individual stories. The conducted study spotlights vlogging activities of bilingual couples who feel the need to share their intercultural and bilingual experiences on the internet. Our data suggest that bilingual couples vlog to express their hybrid identities by sharing how they cope with challenges and overcome linguistic barriers, as well as find ways to enjoy cross-cultural understanding. The paper explores the linguistic and cultural diversity from a new perspective of private vlogs created and maintained by bilingual couples. It unfolds an account of the less studied online context in which partners of different ethnic backgrounds make their private lives public, and illustrates how bilingual couples generate ideas to filming and sharing online. (shrink)

Current research suggests that conceptual in?uences are primarily responsible for inducing synaesthesia, since numerous synaesthetic variants are triggered by linguistic symbols. These linguistic synaesthesias are the focus of the present review article. This article examines the literature on the transfer of synaesthetic colour-associations across languages and shows the scope of the linguistic mechanisms that are implicated. We review known evidence about the interaction between grapheme-colour synaesthesia and the acquisition of a second language, and specifically, we discuss cases of cross-linguistic transfer (...) in which a second language is learned later in life. Research on bilingual subjects has uncovered distinct representations in the brain for a mother tongue and for a later-acquired foreign language. Consequently, these differences have implications for synaesthesia associated with the writing systems of these different languages. By reviewing several individual cases of bilingual synaesthetes, we conclude that synaesthesia might have different types of influences on the acquisition of a second language, ranging from effects that support this learning to those that disturb it. (shrink)

Are idioms stored in memory in ways that preserve their surface form or language or are they represented amodally? We examined this question using an inci- dental cued recall paradigm in which two word idiomatic expressions were presented to adult bilinguals proficient in Russian and English. Stimuli included phrases with idiomat- ic equivalents in both languages (e.g. “empty words/пycтыe cлoвa”) or in one language only (English—e.g. “empty suit/пycтoй кocтюм” or Russian—e.g. “empty sound/пycтoй звyк”), or in neither language (e.g. “empty rain/пycтoй (...) дoждь”). If idioms are stored in a language-specific format, then phrases with idiomatic equivalents in both languages would have dual representation, and should therefore be more easily recalled than phrases with idiomatic meaning in only one language. This result was obtained. As such, the findings support the dual-coding theory of memory and are also compatible with models of the bilingual lexicon that include language tags or nodes. (shrink)

For native English readers, masked presentations of past-tense verb primes produce faster lexical decision latencies to their present-tense targets than orthographically related or unrelated primes. This facilitation observed with morphologically related prime-target pairs is generally taken as evidence for strong connections based on morphological relationships in the L1 lexicon. It is unclear, however, if similar, morphologically based, connections develop in non-native lexicons. Several earlier studies with L2 English readers have reported mixed results. The present experiments examine whether past-tense verb primes (...) significantly facilitate target lexical decisions for Japanese-English bilinguals beyond any facilitation provided by prime-target orthographic similarity. Overall, past-tense verb primes facilitated lexical decisions to their present-tense targets relative to both orthographically related and unrelated primes. Replicating previous masked priming experiments with L2 readers, orthographically related primes also facilitated target recognition relative to unrelated primes, confirming that orthographic similarity facilitates L2 target recognition. The additional facilitation from past-tense verb primes beyond that provided by orthographic primes suggests that, in the L2 English lexicon, connections based on morphological relationships develop in a way that is similar to how they develop in the L1 English lexicon even though the connections and processing of lower level, lexical/orthographic information may differ. Further analyses involving L2 proficiency revealed that as L2 proficiency increased, orthographic facilitation was reduced, indicating that there is a decrease in the fuzziness in orthographic representations in the L2 lexicon with increased proficiency. (shrink)

How does a child rapidly acquire and develop a structured mental organization for the vast number of words in the first years of life? How does a bilingual individual deal with the even more complicated task of learning and organizing two lexicons? It is only until recently have we started to examine the lexicon as a dynamical system with regard to its acquisition, representation, and organization. In this article, I outline a proposal based on our research that takes (...) the dynamical approach to the lexicon, and I discuss how this proposal can be applied to account for lexical organization, structural representation, and competition within and between languages. In particular, I provide computational evidence based on the DevLex model, a self‐organizing neural network model, and neuroimaging evidence based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies, to illustrate how children and adults learn and represent the lexicon in their first and second languages. In the computational research, our goal has been to identify, through linguistically and developmentally realistic models, detailed cognitive mechanisms underlying the dynamic self‐organizing processes in monolingual and bilingual lexical development; in the neuroimaging research, our goal has been to identify the neural substrates that subserve lexical organization and competition in the monolingual and the bilingual brain. In both cases, our findings lead to a better understanding of the interactive dynamics involved in the acquisition and representation of one or multiple languages. (shrink)

In this paper we examine how English and Mandarin speakers think about time, and we test how the patterns of thinking in the two groups relate to patterns in linguistic and cultural experience. In Mandarin, vertical spatial metaphors are used more frequently to talk about time than they are in English; English relies primarily on horizontal terms. We present results from two tasks comparing English and Mandarin speakers’ temporal reasoning. The tasks measure how people spatialize time in three-dimensional space, including (...) the sagittal (front/back), transverse (left/right), and vertical (up/down) axes. Results of Experiment 1 show that people automatically create spatial representations in the course of temporal reasoning, and these implicit spatializations differ in accordance with patterns in language, even in a non-linguistic task. Both groups showed evidence of a left-to-right representation of time, in accordance with writing direction, but only Mandarin speakers showed a vertical top-to-bottom pattern for time (congruent with vertical spatiotemporal metaphors in Mandarin). Results of Experiment 2 confirm and extend these findings, showing that bilinguals’ representations of time depend on both long-term and proximal aspects of language experience. Participants who were more proficient in Mandarin were more likely to arrange time vertically (an effect of previous language experience). Further, bilinguals were more likely to arrange time vertically when they were tested in Mandarin than when they were tested in English (an effect of immediate linguistic context). (shrink)

The present study investigates the relations between L2-English proficiency and L1-Turkish lexical property evaluations. We asked whether L2 proficiency affects lexical properties, including imageability and concreteness ratings of 600 Turkish words selected from the Word Frequency Dictionary of Written Turkish. Seventy-two participants provided ratings of concreteness and imageability for 600 words on a 7-point scale. In order to assess their L2 proficiency, we administered Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-IV. We divided categories into two subcategories as high and low for the frequency, (...) concreteness, imageability, and age of acquisition. The relationship between these subcategories and imageability-concreteness was examined by mixed effects linear regression analyses. We found that L2 proficiency and imageability ratings were positively correlated and specifically, this positive association was evident for low-frequency words and later acquired words. Results are in line with the interaction of bilingual representation under the dual-coding theory which suggests that bilinguals develop an interconnected imaginal representation for two languages as opposed to separate verbal representations. As L2 proficiency increased, the imageability also increased. These findings have implications for literature investigating the relationship between L2 proficiency and linguistic outcomes. Additionally, findings point to the importance of considering the L2 proficiency of participants when lexical tasks that involve cue words or word lists are used. (shrink)

There are two contending models regarding the processing of negation: the fusion model and the schema-plus-tag model. Most previous studies have centered on negation in languages such as English and Mandarin, where negators are positioned before predicates. Mongolian, quite uniquely, is a language whose negators are post-verbal, making them natural replicas of the schema-plus-tag model. The present study aims to investigate the representation process of Mongolian contradictory negative sentences to shed light on the debate between the models, meanwhile verifying (...) the post-verbal effect of negators. A series of experiments using the sentence–picture verification paradigm supports the fusion model: Mongolian contradictory negative sentences were processed by representing the actual conditions rather than the negated state of affairs at 250 ISI, and despite the fact that a post-verbal effect of negators was measured at 250 ISI when Mongolian and Mandarin negative sentences were compared, Mongolian–Mandarin bilinguals adopted the same representational strategy for contradictory negation in both languages. (shrink)

The hypothesis that word representations are emotionally impoverished in a second language (L2) has variable support. However, this hypothesis has only been tested using tasks that present words in isolation or that require laboratory-specific decisions. Here, we recorded eye movements for 34 bilinguals who read sentences in their L2 with no goal other than comprehension, and compared them to 43 first language readers taken from our prior study. Positive words were read more quickly than neutral words in the L2 across (...) first-pass reading time measures. However, this emotional advantage was absent for negative words for the earliest measures. Moreover, negative words but not positive words were influenced by concreteness, frequency and L2 proficiency in a manner similar to neutral words. Taken together, the findings suggest that only negative words are at risk of emotional disembodiment during L2 reading, perhaps because a positivity bias in L2 experiences ensures that positive words are emotionally grounded. (shrink)

'beauty has purport and significance only for human beings, for beings at once animal and rational' In the Critique of Judgement Kant offers a penetrating analysis of our experience of the beautiful and the sublime, discussing the objectivity of taste, aesthetic disinterestedness, the relation of art and nature, the role of imagination, genius and originality, the limits of representation and the connection between morality and the aesthetic. He also investigates the validity of our judgements concerning the apparent purposiveness of (...) nature with respect to the highest interests of reason and enlightenment. The work profoundly influenced the artists and writers of the classical and romantic period and the philosophy of Hegel and Schelling. It has remained a central point of reference from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche through to phenomenology, hermeneutics, the Frankfurt School, analytical aesthetics and contemporary critical theory. J. C. Meredith's classic translation has been revised in accordance with standard modern renderings and provided with a bilingual glossary. This edition also includes the important 'First Introduction' that Kant originally composed for the work. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. (shrink)

The definitive guide to 21st century investigations of multilingual neuroscience provides a comprehensive survey of neurocognitive investigations of multiple-language speakers. Prominent scholar John W. Schwieter offers a unique collection of works from globally recognized researchers in neuroscience, psycholinguistics, neurobiology, psychology, neuroimaging, and others, to provide a multidisciplinary overview of relevant topics. Authoritative coverage of state-of-the-art research provides readers with fundamental knowledge of significant theories and methods, language impairments and disorders, and neural representations, functions, and processes of the multilingual brain.Focusing on (...) up-to-date theoretical and experimental research, this timely handbook explores new directions of study and examines significant findings in the rapidly evolving field of multilingual neuroscience. Discussions on the bilingual advantage debate, recovery and rehabilitation patterns in multilingual aphasia, and the neurocognitive effects of multilingualism throughout the lifespan allow informed investigation of contemporary issues. Presents the first handbook-length examination of the neuroscience and neurolinguistics of multilingualism. Demonstrates how neuroscience and multilingualism intersect several areas of research, such as neurobiology and experimental psychology Includes works from prominent international scholars and researchers to provide global perspective Reflects cutting-edge research and promising areas of future study in the dynamic field of multilingual neuroscience. it is an invaluable resource for researchers and scholars in areas including multilingualism, psycholinguistics, second language acquisition, and cognitive science. This versatile work is also an indispensable addition to the classroom, providing advanced undergraduate and graduate students a thorough overview of the field. (shrink)

Wales uses languages with both regular (Welsh) and irregular (English) counting systems. Three groups of 6- and 8-year-old Welsh children with varying degrees of exposure to the Welsh language—those who spoke Welsh at both home and school; those who spoke Welsh only at home; and those who spoke only English—were given standardized tests of arithmetic and a test of understanding representations of two-digit numbers. Groups did not differ on the arithmetic tests, but both groups of Welsh speakers read and compared (...) 2-digit numbers more accurately than monolingual English children. A similar study was carried out with Tamil/English bilingual children in England. The Tamil counting system is more transparent than English but less so than Welsh or Chinese. Tamil-speaking children performed better than monolingual English-speaking children on one of the standardized arithmetic tests but did not differ in their comparison of two-digit numbers. Reasons for the findings are discussed. (shrink)

Introduction of deep neural networks to the machine translation research ameliorated conventional machine translation systems in multiple ways, specifically in terms of translation quality. The ability of deep neural networks to learn a sensible representation of words is one of the major reasons for this improvement. Despite machine translation using deep neural architecture is showing state-of-the-art results in translating European languages, we cannot directly apply these algorithms in Indian languages mainly because of two reasons: unavailability of the good corpus (...) and Indian languages are morphologically rich. In this paper, we propose a neural machine translation (NMT) system for four language pairs: English–Malayalam, English–Hindi, English–Tamil, and English–Punjabi. We also collected sentences from different sources and cleaned them to make four parallel corpora for each of the language pairs, and then used them to model the translation system. The encoder network in the NMT architecture was designed with long short-term memory (LSTM) networks and bi-directional recurrent neural networks (Bi-RNN). Evaluation of the obtained models was performed both automatically and manually. For automatic evaluation, the bilingual evaluation understudy (BLEU) score was used, and for manual evaluation, three metrics such as adequacy, fluency, and overall ranking were used. Analysis of the results showed the presence of lengthy sentences in English–Malayalam, and the English–Hindi corpus affected the translation. Attention mechanism was employed with a view to addressing the problem of translating lengthy sentences (sentences contain more than 50 words), and the system was able to perceive long-term contexts in the sentences. (shrink)

The success of deep learning in natural language processing raises intriguing questions about the nature of linguistic meaning and ways in which it can be processed by natural and artificial systems. One such question has to do with subword segmentation algorithms widely employed in language modeling, machine translation, and other tasks since 2016. These algorithms often cut words into semantically opaque pieces, such as ‘period’, ‘on’, ‘t’, and ‘ist’ in ‘period|on|t|ist’. The system then represents the resulting segments in a dense (...) vector space, which is expected to model grammatical relations among them. This representation may in turn be used to map ‘period|on|t|ist’ (English) to ‘par|od|ont|iste’ (French). Thus, instead of being modeled at the lexical level, translation is reformulated more generally as the task of learning the best bilingual mapping between the sequences of subword segments of two languages; and sometimes even between pure character sequences: ‘p|e|r|i|o|d|o|n|t|i|s|t’ → ‘p|a|r|o|d|o|n|t|i|s|t|e’. Such subword segmentations and alignments are at work in highly efficient end-to-end machine translation systems, despite their allegedly opaque nature. The computational value of such processes is unquestionable. But do they have any linguistic or philosophical plausibility? I attempt to cast light on this question by reviewing the relevant details of the subword segmentation algorithms and by relating them to important philosophical and linguistic debates, in the spirit of making artificial intelligence more transparent and explainable. (shrink)

The present study uses EEG time-frequency representations with a Flanker task to investigate if and how individual differences in bilingual language experience modulate neurocognitive outcomes in two bilingual group types: late bilinguals and early bilinguals. TFRs were computed for both incongruent and congruent trials. The difference between the two was then compared between the HSs and the L2 learners, modeled as a function of individual differences with bilingual experience within each group separately and probed for its potential (...) symmetry between brain and behavioral data. We found no differences at the behavioral and neural levels for the between-groups comparisons. However, oscillatory dynamics of inhibition and cognitive control were found to be modulated by individual differences in bilingual language experience, albeit distinctly within each bilingual group. While the results indicate adaptations toward differential brain recruitment in line with bilingual language experience variation overall, this does not manifest uniformly. Rather, earlier versus later onset to bilingualism—the bilingual type—seems to constitute an independent qualifier to how individual differences play out. (shrink)

L'étude porte sur quelques-uns des cachets à empreintes trouvés dans une maison délienne détruite au Ier siècle av. J.-C. — Une série s'inspire de la statue archaïque d'Apollon délien : ces représentations permettent de préciser certains traits de la statue mais, en flanquant le dieu d'un échafaudage de figures annexes, soulèvent la question d'une éventuelle réfection hellénistique. — Un cachet bilingue phénicien-grec constitue la première mention, pour les Séleucides, d'un koinodikion ou tribunal mixte.

Variability is pervasive in spoken language, in particular if one is exposed to two varieties of the same language. Unlike in bilingual settings, standard and dialectal forms are often phonologically related, increasing the variability in word forms. We investigate whether dialectal variability in children’s input affects their ability to recognize words in Standard German, testing non-dialectal vs. dialectal children. Non-dialectal children, who typically grow up in urban areas, mostly hear Standard German forms, and hence encounter little segmental variability in (...) their input. Dialectal children in turn, who typically grow up in rural areas, hear both Standard German and dialectal forms, and are hence exposed to a large amount of variability in their input. We employ the familiar word paradigm for German children aged 12–18 months. Since dialectal children from rural areas are hard to recruit for laboratory studies, we programmed an App that allows all parents to test their children at home. Looking times to familiar vs. non-familiar words were analyzed using a semi-automatic procedure based on neural networks. Our results replicate the familiarity preference for non-dialectal German 12–18-month-old children. Non-dialectal children in the same age range, on the other hand, showed a novelty preference. One explanation for the novelty preference in dialectal children may be more mature linguistic processing, caused by more variability of word forms in the input. This linguistic maturation hypothesis is addressed in Experiment 2, in which we tested older children. These children, who are not exposed to dialectal forms, also showed a novelty preference. Taken together, our findings show that both dialectal and non-dialectal German children recognized the familiar Standard German word forms, but their looking pattern differed as a function of the variability in the input. Frequent exposure to both dialectal and Standard German word forms may hence have affected the nature of lexical representations, leading to more mature processing capacities. (shrink)

Children learning to read in two different orthographic systems are exposed to cross-linguistic interferences. We explored the effects of school and grade on phonological activation during a visual word recognition task. Elementary school children from Spain completed a lexical decision task in English. The task included real words and pseudohomophones following Spanish or English phonological rules. Using the mouse-tracking paradigm, we analyzed errors, reaction times, and computer mouse movements. Children in the bilingual school performed better than children in the (...) monolingual school. Children in higher grades performed better than children in lower grades. The interference effect of Spanish phonology was weak and became weaker in higher grades. Spanish children differentiate between first and second language grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences since early on in the educational process. In 6th grade, children from the bilingual school responded better to words and Spanish pseudohomophones, while children from the monolingual school were less distracted by the English pseudohomophones. Children in the bilingual school had stronger inhibition of Spanish phonology and stronger activation of English phonology. Instructional method plays an important role on the processing strategies Spanish children rely on when reading in English. School and grade influence the link between orthographic and phonological representations. (shrink)

Traditionally, Ancient Mesopotamian epistemic practices resulting in the vast corpus of cuneiform ‘lexical lists’ and other, similarly formatted treatises have been conceptualized as “Listenwissenschaft” in Assyriology. Introduced by the German Assyriologist Wolfram v. Soden in 1936, this concept has also been utilized in other disciplines of the Humanities as a terminological means to describe epistemic activity allegedly inferior to ‘Western’ modes of analytical and hypotactic scientific reasoning. Building on the exemplary evidence of a bilingual list of cuneiform compound graphemes (...) from the early 2nd millennium BCE as well as on recent conceptualizations of ‘epistemic cultures’ and the instrumental function of material ‘representations’ in the context of epistemic practices, the present paper attempts to replace the essentialistic and teleological concept of an Ancient Mesopotamian “Listenwissenschaft” with a new epistemological model describing the underlying epistemic practices as highly adaptive non-linear epistemic practices comparable to what has been described as ‘practices with »epistemic things«’ in recent epistemology and practice theory. (shrink)

Traditionally, Ancient Mesopotamian epistemic practices resulting in the vast corpus of cuneiform ‘lexical lists’ and other, similarly formatted treatises have been conceptualized as “ Listenwissenschaft ” in Assyriology. Introduced by the German Assyriologist Wolfram v. Soden in 1936 , this concept has also been utilized in other disciplines of the Humanities as a terminological means to describe epistemic activity allegedly inferior to ‘Western’ modes of analytical and hypotactic scientific reasoning. Building on the exemplary evidence of a bilingual list of (...) cuneiform compound graphemes from the early 2nd millennium BCE as well as on recent conceptualizations of ‘epistemic cultures’ and the instrumental function of material ‘representations’ in the context of epistemic practices, the present paper attempts to replace the essentialistic and teleological concept of an Ancient Mesopotamian “ Listenwissenschaft ” with a new epistemological model describing the underlying epistemic practices as highly adaptive non-linear epistemic practices comparable to what has been described as ‘practices with »epistemic things«’ in recent epistemology and practice theory. (shrink)

Rather than a simple transfer of words or texts from one language to another, on the model of the bilingual dictionary, translation has become understood as a translingual act of transcoding cultural material--a complex act of communication. Much recent work on translation in history grows out of interest in the effects of European colonialism, especially within Asian studies, where interest has been driven by the contrast between the experiences of China and Japan, which were never formally colonized, and the (...) alternative examples of peoples without strong, centralized states--those of the Indian subcontinent and the Tagalog in the Philippines--who were colonized by European powers. This essay reviews several books published in recent years, one group of which share the general interpretation that colonial powers forced their subjects to "translate" their local language, sociality, or culture into the terms of the dominant colonial power: because the colonial power controls representation and forces its subjects to use the colonial language, it is in a position to construct the forms of indigenous and subject identity. The other books under review here are less concerned with power in colonial situations than with the fact of different languages, cultures, or practices and the work of "translating" between the two--particularly the efforts of indigenous agents to introduce European ideas and institutions to their respective peoples. (shrink)

In this study, we examined the word superiority effect in Arabic and English, two languages with significantly different morphological and writing systems. Thirty-two Arabic–English bilingual speakers performed a post-cued letter-in-string identification task in words, pseudo-words, and non-words. The results established the presence of the word superiority effect in Arabic and a robust effect of context in both languages. However, they revealed that, compared to the non-word context, word and pseudo-word contexts facilitated letter identification more in Arabic than in English. (...) In addition, the difference between word and pseudo-word contexts was smaller in Arabic compared to English. Finally, there was a consistent first-letter advantage in English regardless of the context, while this was more consistent only in the word and pseudo-word contexts in Arabic. We discuss these results in light of previous findings and argue that the differences between the patterns reported for Arabic and English are due to the qualitative difference between word morphophonological representations in the two languages. (shrink)

A Persian translation of William Shakespeare's Hamlet along with the original text.

Most models of lexical access assume that bilingual speakers activate their two languages even when they are in a context in which only one language is used. A critical piece of evidence used to support this notion is the observation that a given word automatically activates its translation equivalent in the other language. Here, we argue that these findings are compatible with a different account, in which bilinguals “carry over” the structure of their native language to the non-native language (...) during learning, and where there is no activation of translation equivalents. To demonstrate this, we describe a model in which language learning involves mapping native language phonological relationships to the non-native language, and we show how it can explain the results attributed to automatic activation of translation equivalents. (shrink)

Many debates in philosophy focus on whether folk or scientific psychological notions pick out cognitive natural kinds. Examples include memory, emotions and concepts. A potentially interesting type of kind is: kinds of mental representations (as opposed, for example, to kinds of psychological faculties). In this chapter we outline a proposal for a theory of representational kinds in cognitive science. We argue that the explanatory role of representational kinds in scientific theories, in conjunction with a mainstream approach to explanation in cognitive (...) science, suggest that representational kinds are multi-level. This is to say that representational kinds’ properties cluster at different levels of explanation and allow for intra- and inter-level projections. (shrink)

Arguably the most foundational principle in perception research is that our experience of the world goes beyond the retinal image; we perceive the distal environment itself, not the proximal stimulation it causes. Shape may be the paradigm case of such “unconscious inference”: When a coin is rotated in depth, we infer the circular object it truly is, discarding the perspectival ellipse projected on our eyes. But is this really the fate of such perspectival shapes? Or does a tilted coin retain (...) an elliptical appearance even when we know it’s circular? This question has generated heated debate from Locke and Hume to the present; but whereas extant arguments rely primarily on introspection, this problem is also open to empirical test. If tilted coins bear a representational similarity to elliptical objects, then a circular coin should, when rotated, impair search for a distal ellipse. Here, nine experiments demonstrate that this is so, suggesting that perspectival shapes persist in the mind far longer than traditionally assumed. Subjects saw search arrays of three-dimensional “coins,” and simply had to locate a distally elliptical coin. Surprisingly, rotated circular coins slowed search for elliptical targets, even when subjects clearly knew the rotated coins were circular. This pattern arose with static and dynamic cues, couldn’t be explained by strategic responding or unfamiliarity, generalized across shape classes, and occurred even with sustained viewing. Finally, these effects extended beyond artificial displays to real-world objects viewed in naturalistic, full-cue conditions. We conclude that objects have a remarkably persistent dual character: their objective shape “out there,” and their perspectival shape “from here.”. (shrink)

To understand Self-Representationalism you need to understand its family. Self-Representationalism is a branch of the Meta-Representationalist family, and according to theories in this family what distinguishes conscious mental representations from unconscious mental representations is that conscious ones are themselves the target of a mental meta¬-representational state. A mental state M1 is thus phenomenally conscious in virtue of being suitably represented by some mental state M2. What distinguishes the Self-Representationalist branch of the family is the claim that M1 and M2 must (...) be the same token mental state, so a mental state is phenomenally conscious in virtue of suitably representing itself. This Self-Representationalist branch of the family divides into further branches, giving us specific implementations of the Self-Representationalist approach. But before asking whether we should adopt Self-Representationalism, and in what form, we should reflect on why Meta-Representationalism is an attractive family in the first place. After all, Self-Representationalist theories trade on their family name, claiming to deliver on the promises that drive the Meta-Representationalist approach. The two most important promises of Meta-Representationalism are: a) the promise of capturing the transitivity of consciousness and; b) the promise of rendering consciousness naturalisable. I discuss each in turn. (shrink)

Under representation -- The aesthetic regime of representation -- The pathological sublime: pleasure and pain in the racial regime -- Race under representation -- Representation's coup -- The aesthetic taboo: aura, magic, and the primitive.

In Rules and Representations, first published in 1980, Noam Chomsky lays out many of the concepts that have made his approach to linguistics and human cognition so instrumental to our understanding of language.Chomsky arrives at his well-known position that there is a universal grammar, structured in the human mind and common to all human languages. Based on Chomsky's 1978 Woodbridge Lectures, this edition contains revised versions of the lectures and two new essays.