The standard interpretation of cognitive reflection tests assumes that correct responses are reflective and lured responses are unreflective. However, prior process-tracing of mathematical reflection tests has cast doubt on this interpretation. In two studies (N = 201), we deployed a validated think-aloud protocol in-person and online to test how this assumption is satisfied by the new, validated, less familiar, and less mathematical verbal Cognitive Reflection Test (vCRT). Importantly, thinking aloud did not disrupt test performance compared to a control (...) group. Moreover, verbalized thoughts in both studies revealed that most (but not all) correct responses involved reflection and that most (but not all) lured responses lacked reflection. These data suggest that the vCRT usually satisfies the standard interpretation of the reflection tests (albeit not without exceptions) and that the vCRT can be a good measure of the construct theorized by the two-factor explication of ‘reflection’ (as deliberate and conscious). (shrink)

The central problem which cognitive scientists face in studying thinking is that thinking cannot be observed directly by other people. The traditional solution has been to rely on introspective methods, where individuals observe their own thinking and reflect on its characteristics. In everyday life, the most common technique involves asking people questions about their thinking, knowledge, and strategies. Psychologists have refined the methods for questioning individuals by designing questionnaires and structured interviews. However, these two ways of obtaining information about thinking (...) share two fundamental methodological problems. First, the accuracy of the reports cannot be assessed, because in naturally occurring situations in everyday life the investigator doesn't have any other empirical evidence against which to evaluate the validity of the subjects' reported information. Hence, psychologists are forced to trust the subjects to provide valid information. The second issue concerns whether even those individuals who strive to give accurate reports are able to access and supply valid information on the cognitive processes that mediate their behavior. (shrink)

Recent developments in pattern analysis research have made this methodology suitable for the study of the processes that are set in motion in psychological interventions. Outcome research, based on the comparison between clinical results from treatment and control groups, has leveraged our empirical knowledge about the efficacy of psychological interventions. However, these methods of research are not precise enough for the analysis of these processes. On the contrary, pattern analysis could be a powerful tool to study moment-to-moment (...) interactions typical of psychological interventions. This is methodology is relevant because clinical psychology is experiencing a paradigm shift from a protocol for syndrome perspective to a principle-based and person-centered intervention. This evidence-based, theory-grounded, and process-oriented paradigm of clinical intervention needs new research methods to thrive. The analysis of the therapeutic relationship built into the verbal interaction between the clinician and the client is one of the cornerstones of this new era of research. So, the purpose of this article is three-fold: to discuss the role of the verbal interaction pattern analysis in the clinical context to the development of the principle-based clinical psychology, to analyze the patterns of verbal interaction in a clinical case, and to compare the results using two different methods. To reach these purposes, using the observational methodology, we have coded the verbal interaction of 16 clinical sessions with a person diagnosed with a borderline personality disorder. We have analyzed the data using sequential analysis and pattern recognition algorithms. We have been able to detect typical patterns during different phases of psychological intervention. Finally, the conceptual, methodological, and empirical implications of this study will be discussed within the realms of pattern analysis research and principle-based clinical psychology. (shrink)

Verbal protocol methodology is used to examine how fourth-grade students construct meaning as they read and respond to two informational social studies texts. Results indicate most students are active readers, often engaging in higher-level comprehension strategies and critical thinking as they read independently. However, critical thinking and comprehension processes are not often captured in their responses to end-of-reading questions (ERQ), which as a result have limited scope and utility for guiding social studies instruction. Results also indicate that when (...) students change their patterns of strategy use for reading and responding to text in response to a change in text, they are more successful on the ERQ than when their strategy use remains stagnant. (shrink)

This article introduces the Verbal Irony Procedure (VIP), a first systematic method for identifying irony in natural discourse. The first section discusses previous operationalizations of irony and demonstrates that these are not explicit about which criteria were used to separate irony from non-irony. The second section argues why irony can be defined as an “utterance with a literal evaluation that is implicitly contrary to its intended evaluation.” This section also explains why ironic utterances can be placed on an evaluation (...) scale. In the third section, clauses are proposed as a good unit of analysis when looking at irony in natural discourse. The different steps of the VIP are then introduced in the fourth section and subsequently applied in a sample analysis of a natural text in the fifth section. The sixth section discusses a reliability analysis of the VIP protocol. The article ends with an outlook on how future research on verbal irony might benefit from applying the VIP. (shrink)

The use of protocol analysis in the traning of cognitive skills.

Background: Post-traumatic stress disorder is a prevalent, debilitating, and costly psychiatric disorder. Evidenced-based psychotherapies, including Cognitive Processing Therapy, are effective in treating PTSD, although a fair proportion of individuals show limited benefit from such treatments. CPT requires cognitive demands such as encoding, recalling, and implementing new information, resulting in behavioral change that may improve PTSD symptoms. Individuals with PTSD show worse cognitive functioning than those without PTSD, particularly in acquisition of verbal memory. Therefore, memory dysfunction may limit treatment gains (...) in CPT in some individuals with PTSD. Methods and Analysis: Here, we present a protocol describing the Cognition and PsychoTherapy in PTSD study, a prospective, observational study examining how cognitive functioning affects treatment response in CPT for PTSD. The study aims to recruit 105 outpatient veterans with PTSD between the ages of 18 and 70 years. Prior to beginning 12 sessions of CPT, Veteran participants will have standardized assessments of mood and functioning and complete a comprehensive neurocognitive battery assessing episodic learning, attention and speed of processing, language ability, executive control, and emotional functioning. This study aims to fill gaps in the current literature by: examining the specificity of memory effects on treatment response; exploring how baseline cognitive functioning impacts functional outcomes; and examining potential mechanisms, such as memory for treatment content, that might explain the effects of baseline memory functioning on PTSD symptom trajectory. Discussion: If successful, this research could identify clinically relevant neurocognitive mechanisms that may impact PTSD psychotherapy and guide the development of individualized treatments for PTSD. (shrink)

Despite the importance of knowing the cognitive capabilities of children with neurodevelopmental conditions, less than one-third of children with cerebral palsy participate in standardized assessments. Globally, approximately 50% of people with cerebral palsy have an intellectual disability and there is significant risk for domain-specific cognitive impairments for the majority of people with cerebral palsy. However, standardized cognitive assessment tools are not accessible to many children with cerebral palsy, as they require manual manipulation of objects, verbal response and/or speeded response. (...) As such, standardised assessment may result in an underestimation of abilities for children with significant motor and/or speech impairment. The overall aim of the project is to examine and compare the psychometric properties of standardised cognitive assessment tools that have been accommodated for use with either a switch device or eye-gaze control technologies, with the specific aims to: Examine the psychometric properties of accommodated assessment tools by comparing the performance of typically developing children on six cognitive assessment tools administered via standardised versus accommodated administration; Describe and compare the performance and user experience of children with cerebral palsy on six accommodated cognitive assessments administered via switch or eye-gaze control technologies. Secondary aims are to: Describe the completion rates and time to complete assessments of participants in each group; Within the group with cerebral palsy, examine the effects of condition-specific characteristics and demographics on participation. This protocol paper describes a two-phase validation and acceptability study that utilizes a mixed-model design. This study will collect concurrent data from 80 typically developing children and 40 children with cerebral palsy, who use switch or eye-gaze control technology as alternate access communication methods. The set of instruments will measure receptive vocabulary, fluid reasoning, sustained attention, vision perception, visuospatial working memory and executive functions. Data analyses will be conducted using SPSS v. 25 and R v 4.1.0. SPSS Sample Power 3 was used for power computation and allows for a 10% drop out rate. Quantitative descriptive statistics, measurement agreement data plotting, bivariate and multiple regressions analysis will be conducted using appropriate methods. (shrink)

In this case study, I address the procedural ethics of conversation analysis (CA) and the collection of naturally occurring mundane interactions. I draw from the challenges that emerged from the institutional ethics review of the HIV, health and interaction study (the H2I Study), a CA project that sought to identify the practices through which normative assumptions of HIV and other health conditions are produced in conversations. Consistent with CA’s preference for naturally occurring interactions, the H2I Study collected and analysed (...) everyday telephone calls involving people living with HIV. This article offers practical strategies CA researchers might use to navigate two ethical concerns raised about the collection of naturally occurring mundane interactions. The first questions the merits of collecting naturally occurring mundane interactions. For those unfamiliar with CA, the specific advantages of analysing naturally occurring mundane interactions may not be self-evident. This places an evidentiary burden on CA researchers to warrant the collection of this type of data. To address this concern, I suggest demonstrating in ethics applications the analytic value of CA using publicly available interactions. The second concern questions the use of verbal consent necessary for the collection of naturally occurring mundane interactions. Like most CA research, the H2I Study required flexible informed consent protocols appropriate for spontaneous and unpredictable interactions. Drawing from within and outside the CA literature, I offer three rationales for the use of verbal consent. This article is written as a practical resource for conversation analysts seeking approval from their research ethics board (REB) and for REBs who might be unfamiliar with CA research. This article contributes to a small but growing body of literature that documents not only the kinds of challenges CA researchers encounter from institutional ethics review, but the specific procedural ethics they may employ to secure ethics approval. (shrink)

Sixteen Canadian men and women, part of eight intact couples who had experienced severe and recurrent wife assault, were interviewed individually regarding their worst experience of violence. The self-reports of both spouses of one of these couples is presented and analyzed with a view towards isolating the emerging constituents of their narratives. Additionally, preliminary findings resulting from the analysis of all of the couple's self-reports are presented in the second part of the paper. A gendered reconstruction of their narratives (...) emerges that mirrors the different positions men and women hold in experiences of wife assault. Finally, the main constituents derived from all the participant's selfreports are analyzed and discussed. (shrink)

A description of the author's application of protocol analysis in the teaching of philosophy.

Video games are ideal platforms for the study of skill acquisition for a variety of reasons. However, our understanding of the development of skill and the cognitive representations that support skilled performance can be limited by a focus on game scores. We present an alternative approach to the study of skill acquisition in video games based on the tools of the Expert Performance Approach. Our investigation was motivated by a detailed analysis of the behaviors responsible for the superior performance (...) of one of the highest scoring players of the video game Space Fortress. This analysis revealed how certain behaviors contributed to his exceptional performance. In this study, we recruited a participant for a similar training regimen, but we collected concurrent and retrospective verbal protocol data throughout training. Protocol analysis revealed insights into strategies, errors, mental representations, and shifting game priorities. We argue that these insights into the developing representations that guided skilled performance could only easily have been derived from the tools of the Expert Performance Approach. We propose that the described approach could be applied to understand performance and skill acquisition in many different video games and help reveal mechanisms of transfer from gameplay to other measures of laboratory and real-world performance. (shrink)

Video games are ideal platforms for the study of skill acquisition for a variety of reasons. However, our understanding of the development of skill and the cognitive representations that support skilled performance can be limited by a focus on game scores. We present an alternative approach to the study of skill acquisition in video games based on the tools of the Expert Performance Approach. Our investigation was motivated by a detailed analysis of the behaviors responsible for the superior performance (...) of one of the highest scoring players of the video game Space Fortress. This analysis revealed how certain behaviors contributed to his exceptional performance. In this study, we recruited a participant for a similar training regimen, but we collected concurrent and retrospective verbal protocol data throughout training. Protocol analysis revealed insights into strategies, errors, mental representations, and shifting game priorities. We argue that these insights into the developing representations that guided skilled performance could only easily have been derived from the tools of the Expert Performance Approach. We propose that the described approach could be applied to understand performance and skill acquisition in many different video games and help reveal mechanisms of transfer from gameplay to other measures of laboratory and real-world performance. (shrink)

As one approach to examining the way ethical decisions are made, we asked experts and novices to review a set of scenarios that depict some important ethical tensions in research. The method employed was “protocol analysis,” a talk-aloud technique pioneered by cognitive scientists for the analysis of expert performance. The participants were asked to verbalize their normally unexpressed thought processes as they responded to the scenarios, and to make recommendations for courses of action. We found that experts (...) spent more time working through the decision-making process than novices and also raised substantially more concerns than novices. Differences also exist among the three groups of experts. (shrink)

Why games? How could anyone consider action games an experimental paradigm for Cognitive Science? In 1973, as one of three strategies he proposed for advancing Cognitive Science, Allen Newell exhorted us to “accept a single complex task and do all of it.” More specifically, he told us that rather than taking an “experimental psychology as usual approach,” we should “focus on a series of experimental and theoretical studies around a single complex task” so as to demonstrate that our theories of (...) human cognition were powerful enough to explain “a genuine slab of human behavior” with the studies fitting into a detailed theoretical picture. Action games represent the type of experimental paradigm that Newell was advocating and the current state of programming expertise and laboratory equipment, along with the emergence of Big Data and naturally occurring datasets, provide the technologies and data needed to realize his vision. Action games enable us to escape from our field's regrettable focus on novice performance to develop theories that account for the full range of expertise through a twin focus on expertise sampling and longitudinal studies of simple and complex tasks. (shrink)

Providing individuals with the information necessary to make informed decisions is now considered an ethical standard for health systems and general practitioners.

In previous work, we introduced a version of distributed temporal logic that is well-suited both for verifying security protocols and as a metalogic for reasoning about, and relating, different security protocol models. In this paper, we formally investigate the relationship between our approach and strand spaces, which is one of the most successful and widespread formalisms for analyzing security protocols. We define translations between models in our logic and strand-space models of security protocols, and we compare the results obtained (...) with respect to the level of abstraction that is inherent in each of the formalisms. This allows us to clarify different aspects of strand spaces that are often left implicit, as well as pave the way to transfer results, techniques and tools across the two approaches. (shrink)

Eric: “We were wondering if you could give a talk on DEL and Process Algebra (in the sense that both are languages to describe how the model changes).” Jan: “I will give it a try.”.

Toulmin’s (1958) model of argument was employed in the analysis of verbal protocols obtained during the solving of ill-structured problems. The participants were experts in the domain under study. For the analysis the Toulmin model was extended in order to enable description of lines of argument found in protocols as long as 10 paragraphs. Results included: (1) That while the protocol was comprised of a large number of specific arguments, the analysis provided for tracing a (...) solver’s line of argument. (2) On occasion datum and backing were difficult to distinguish. (3) Warrants essentially were not stated, although substantial backing was provided. However, as perhaps would be expected, the Toulmin model did not provide for delineation of components of the problem-solving process. A second analysis assuming a “higher level” problem-solving structure and a “lower level” argument structure produced an integrated problem-solving – argumentation structure depicting how reasoning is used in relation to particular task goals. Finally, at a more general level, problem solving was considered as a classical rhetorical structure. (shrink)

Six characteristics of effective representational systems for conceptual learning in complex domains have been identified. Such representations should: (1) integrate levels of abstraction; (2) combine globally homogeneous with locally heterogeneous representation of concepts; (3) integrate alternative perspectives of the domain; (4) support malleable manipulation of expressions; (5) possess compact procedures; and (6) have uniform procedures. The characteristics were discovered by analysing and evaluating a novel diagrammatic representation that has been invented to support students' comprehension of electricity—AVOW diagrams (Amps, Volts, Ohms, (...) Watts). A task analysis is presented that demonstrates that problem solving using a conventional algebraic approach demands more effort than AVOW diagrams. In an experiment comparing two groups of learners using the alternative approaches, the group using AVOW diagrams learned more than the group using equations and were better able to solve complex transfer problems and questions involving multiple constraints. Analysis of verbal protocols and work scratchings showed that the AVOW diagram group, in contrast to the equations group, acquired a coherently organised network of concepts, learnt effective problem solving procedures, and experienced more positive learning events. The six principles of effective representations were proposed on the basis of these findings. AVOW diagrams are Law Encoding Diagrams, a general class of representations that have been shown to support learning in other scientific domains. (shrink)

Six characteristics of effective representational systems for conceptual learning in complex domains have been identified. Such representations should: (1) integrate levels of abstraction; (2) combine globally homogeneous with locally heterogeneous representation of concepts; (3) integrate alternative perspectives of the domain; (4) support malleable manipulation of expressions; (5) possess compact procedures; and (6) have uniform procedures. The characteristics were discovered by analysing and evaluating a novel diagrammatic representation that has been invented to support students' comprehension of electricity—AVOW diagrams (Amps, Volts, Ohms, (...) Watts). A task analysis is presented that demonstrates that problem solving using a conventional algebraic approach demands more effort than AVOW diagrams. In an experiment comparing two groups of learners using the alternative approaches, the group using AVOW diagrams learned more than the group using equations and were better able to solve complex transfer problems and questions involving multiple constraints. Analysis of verbal protocols and work scratchings showed that the AVOW diagram group, in contrast to the equations group, acquired a coherently organised network of concepts, learnt effective problem solving procedures, and experienced more positive learning events. The six principles of effective representations were proposed on the basis of these findings. AVOW diagrams are Law Encoding Diagrams, a general class of representations that have been shown to support learning in other scientific domains. (shrink)

Thinking aloud is the concurrent verbalization of thoughts while performing a task. The study of thinking-aloud protocols has a long tradition in cognitive psychology, the field of education, and the industrial-organizational context. It has been used rarely in cultural and cross-cultural psychology. This paper will describe thinking aloud as a useful method in cultural and cross-cultural psychology referring to a few studies in general and one study in particular to show the wide applications of this method. Thinking-aloud protocols can be (...) applied for a) improving the validity of cross-cultural surveys, b) process analysis of thoughts and the analysis of changes over time, c) theory development across cultures, d) the study of cultural meaning systems, and e) individual as well as group level analyses allowing hypothesis testing cross-culturally. Limitations of the thinking-aloud method are also discussed. (shrink)

Current conceptions of shame emphasize its negative communication value as a phenomenon of conscious experience. A tendency in our contemporary society is to view this phenomenon as an extremely disparaging and undesirable experience that every person should avoid or eliminate. It has become a cultural norm now that shame, perceived as human failure or sickness, is to be rejected, hidden, and not discussed. It is believed to stand in the way of personal progress and self-realization. The research literature mirrors not (...) only the lack of interest in understanding but the ignorance of this central-to-human-life experience. The present study examines the meaning and communicative structure of shame through an application of the phenomenological method of Merleau-Ponty and Lanigan. My analysis is grounded in empirical phenomenology and focuses on meaning as reflected in verbal protocols. The results obtained dispel the misleading notion of shame as primarily a negative, to-be-avoided experience. Rather, reflection on the empirical data indicates that the subjects do not adopt the negative theoretical model of shame but accept it as a universal positive experience of communication that is fundamental in their self-improvement process. (shrink)

The 2010 Nagoya Protocol is an international framework for access and benefit sharing (ABS) of the use of genetic and biological resources, with particular focus on indigenous communities. This is especially important in Africa, where local communities have a close reliance on environmental resources and ecosystems. However, national legislation and policies commonly lag behind international agreements, and this poses challenges for legal compliance as well as practical applications. This study reviews the academic literature on the Nagoya Protocol and (...) ABS applications, and then considers the implications of this analysis for research in Africa. Results show that there is uneven engagement with the principles of the Nagoya Protocol across different academic disciplines; local communities are sometimes sidelined in these studies; and only 8% of researchers in the literature analysed are located in Africa. Future developments should focus on ensuring national compliance with the Nagoya Protocol, and that researchers and industry work in partnership with local African communities on ABS issues. (shrink)

As one approach to examining the way ethical decisions are made, we asked experts and novices to review a set of scenarios that depict some important ethical tensions in research. The method employed was “protocol analysis,” a talk-aloud technique pioneered by cognitive scientists for the analysis of expert performance. The participants were asked to verbalize their normally unexpressed thought processes as they responded to the scenarios, and to make recommendations for courses of action. We found that experts (...) spent more time working through the decision-making process than novices and also raised substantially more concerns than novices. Differences also exist among the three groups of experts. (shrink)

The paper builds on a methodological idea from experimental philosophy and on findings from psycholinguistics, to develop and defend ordinary language analysis (OLA) as practiced in J.L. Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia. That attack on sense-datum theories of perception focuses on the argument from illusion. Through a case-study on this paradoxical argument, the present paper argues for a form of OLA which is psychologically informed, seeks to expose epistemic, rather than semantic, defects in paradoxical arguments, and is immune to the (...) main objections to ordinary language philosophising, including those arising from the semantic/pragmatics distinction: A key project in current experimental philosophy is to develop psychological explanations of philosophically relevant intuitions that help us determine what warrant thinkers have for accepting them. Psycholinguistic work on the role of stereotypes in verb-comprehension has shown that intuitive judgments can be generated by automatic cognitive processes that duplicate both semantic and pragmatic inferences and are shaped by dominant uses of words. For systematic reasons, philosophers are prone to unwittingly deviate from such dominant uses. Where this happens, they are liable to automatically infer unwarranted conclusions that strike them as intuitively compelling. OLA helps us to determine those dominant uses, to identify unwitting deviations from them, and thus to expose unwarranted intuitions – e.g., in the premises of paradoxical arguments. Ordinary language does not determine the bounds of sense but shapes our leaps of thought. The paper shows how this enables its ‘Austinian’ analysis to contribute to a novel, epistemic, resolution of philosophical paradoxes and problems. (shrink)

This paper presents methods and challenges attendant on the use of protocol analysis to develop a model of heuristic processing applied to research ethics. Participants are exposed to ethically complex scenarios and asked to verbalize their thoughts as they formulate a requested decision. The model identifies functional parts of the decision-making task: interpretation, retrieval, judgment and editing and seeks to reliably code participant verbalizations to those tasks as well as to a set of cognitive tools generally useful in (...) such work. Important difficulties in the reliability and external validity of measurement are evaluated and a small set of illustrative data is used in support of that discussion. Results indicate that both intuitive emotional but also more deliberative cognition is present which is consistent with work in related literatures in expertise and in neuropsychology. Finally, the theoretical and practical potential of the approach is elaborated, particularly through links to a framing in Aristotelian ethics. (shrink)

Herbert Simon’s work on scientific discovery deserves serious attention by philosophers of science for several reasons. First, Simon was an early advocate of rational scientific discovery, contra Popper and logical empiricist philosophers of science (Simon 1966). This proposal spurred on investigation of scientific discovery in philosophy of science, as philosophers used and developed Simon’s notions of “problem solving” and “heuristics” in attempts to provide rational accounts of scientific discovery (See Nickles 1980a, Wimsatt 1980). Second, Simon promoted and developed many of (...) the crucial techniques and methods used in cognitive science. One is the use of computers to model internal psychological processes, a technique central to his account of scientific discovery. Another is protocol analysis, the use of the verbal reports of experimental subjects in psychology to construct accounts of their psychological processes. Protocol analysis is given a detailed formulation by Simon (Simon and Ericsson 1984), and is modified for use in the study of scientific cognition in the paper on Krebs (Kulkarni and Simon 1988). (shrink)

In this article we describe research methods that are used for the study of individual multiattribute evaluation processes. First we explain that a multiattribute evaluation problem involves the evaluation of a set of alternatives, described by their values on a number of alternatives. We discuss a number of evaluation strategies that may be applied to arrive at a conclusion about the attractiveness or suitability of the alternatives, and next introduce two main research paradigms in this area, structural modelling and process (...) tracing. We argue that the techniques developed within these paradigms all have their advantages and disadvantages, and conclude that the most promising technique to detect the true nature of the evaluation strategy used by a judge seems to be the analysis of verbal protocols. At the same time we think it is wise not to rely on just one technique, but to use a multimethod approach to the study of multiattribute evaluation processes whenever that is possible. (shrink)

This paper presents methods and challenges attendant on the use of protocol analysis to develop a model of heuristic processing applied to research ethics. Participants are exposed to ethically complex scenarios and asked to verbalize their thoughts as they formulate a requested decision. The model identifies functional parts of the decision-making task: interpretation, retrieval, judgment and editing and seeks to reliably code participant verbalizations to those tasks as well as to a set of cognitive tools generally useful in (...) such work. Important difficulties in the reliability and external validity of measurement are evaluated and a small set of illustrative data is used in support of that discussion. Results indicate that both intuitive emotional but also more deliberative cognition is present which is consistent with work in related literatures in expertise and in neuropsychology. Finally, the theoretical and practical potential of the approach is elaborated, particularly through links to a framing in Aristotelian ethics. (shrink)

This book argues that the verbal aspect of the Greek Perfect is complex, involving not one but two aspects, where the perfective applies to events and the imperfective applies to states. These two aspects are connected to specific morphemes in the Perfect tense-form. This study analyses Perfect tense-forms in discursive text by focusing on the Pauline Corpus. The method is grounded in grammaticalisation studies and informed by morphology, comparative linguistics, and historical linguistics. The argument is further supported by a (...) corpus-based study showing both the Greek Perfect tense-form use in letters over an 800-year period and adverb collocations of the Perfect tense-form. The adverb collocations establish when a Perfect is used for an event or for a state. This study challenges other verbal aspect studies that find only one verbal aspect to explain the Greek Perfect. This study situates the Pauline Perfect tense-form usage within a spectrum of other letter writers, and finds that within the Pauline Corpus the Perfects within supplemental clauses are more likely to use active lexemes than other letter writers. This study also finds that most of the Perfects used in letters are supplemental to the mainline and are often backgrounded rather than foregrounded. (shrink)

In recent literature there is unanimous agreement about children's pragmatic competence in drawing scalar implicatures about some , if the task is made easy enough. However, children accept infelicitous some sentences more often than adults do. In general their acceptance is assumed to be synonymous with a logical interpretation of some as a quantifier. But in our view an overlap with some as a determiner in under-informative sentences cannot be ruled out, given the ambiguity of the experimental instructions and the (...) attitude of trust by children in adults. Our study investigated this hypothesis with different experimental manipulations. We found that when the experimenter's intentions are clear (Experiment 1, all / some order effect; Experiments 2 and 4, conditions 2 and 3), under-informative sentences are usually rejected; otherwise (Experiment 1, some / all order effect; Experiments 3 and 4, control condition) they are accepted. However, analysis of verbal protocols indicated that pragmatically infelicitous sentences are accepted, with some interpreted mostly as a determiner, irrespective of the function of some as a quantifier. Acceptance is not in itself synonymous with a logical interpretation of some as a quantifier. (shrink)

This article attends to “questionnaires” in linguistic fieldwork defined by the inclusion of sensory stimuli. It shows that such non-verbal protocols have been used to help elucidate and compare semantic content, which has generally been subordinated to formal analysis in the history of linguistics. To explain and exemplify this relationship, I target the color questionnaire developed by Hugo Magnus, which included ten standardized color chips and a long list of interview questions on language use. Magnus’s questionnaire (Fragebogen) decoupled (...) perception and denotation in its day, though similar protocols have recently been employed to restore the connection between meaning and form. (shrink)

BackgroundThe expectation of pandemic-induced severe resource shortages has prompted authorities to draft and update frameworks to guide clinical decision-making and patient triage. While these documents differ in scope, they share a utilitarian focus on the maximization of benefit. This utilitarian view necessarily marginalizes certain groups, in particular individuals with increased medical needs.Main bodyHere, we posit that engagement with the disability critique demands that we broaden our understandings of justice and fairness in clinical decision-making and patient triage. We propose the capabilities (...) theory, which recognizes that justice requires a range of positive capabilities/freedoms conducive to the achievement of meaningful life goals, as a means to do so. Informed by a disability rights critique of the clinical response to the pandemic, we offer direction for the construction of future clinical triage protocols which will avoid ableist biases by incorporating a broader apprehension of what it means to be human.ConclusionThe clinical pandemic response, codified across triage protocols, should embrace a form of justice which incorporates a vision of pluralistic human capabilities and a valuing of positive freedoms. (shrink)

China has a longstanding tradition of stressing the values of harmony and coherence, and Chinese society has often been portrayed as a culture in which conflict avoidance is viewed more positively than direct confrontation and argumentation. In order to evaluate the validity of this claim, this paper sketches Chinese people’s feelings and understandings about interpersonal arguing by reporting results of a data collection in China, using measures of argumentativeness, verbal aggressiveness, argument frames, and personalization of conflict. These results were (...) compared to those from a US sample. Chinese and US data differed in complex ways, but did not show Chinese respondents to be more avoidant. The Chinese correlations among variables were a reasonable match to expectations based on Western argumentation theories, although they did not replicate the US results precisely. The paper offers evidence that Chinese respondents had a more sophisticated understanding of interpersonal arguing than their US counterparts, and were more sensitive to the constructive possibilities of face-to-face disagreement. (shrink)

Submission of study protocols to research ethics committees constitutes one of the earliest stages at which planned trials are documented in detail. Previous studies have investigated the amendments requested from researchers by RECs, but the type of issues raised during REC review have not been compared by sponsor type. The objective of this study was to identify recurring shortcomings in protocols of drug trials based on REC comments and to assess whether these were more common among industry-sponsored or non-industry trials.