Psycholinguistics has provided numerous theories that explain how a person acquires a language, produces and perceives both spoken and written language, including theories of proceduralization. Learners of English as a foreign language (hereafter referred to as EFL learners) often find it difficult to achieve oral fluency, a key construct closely related to the mental state or even mental health of learners. According to previous research, this problem could be addressed by the mastery of formulaic sequences, since the employment (...) of formulaic sequences could often promote oral fluency in the long run, reflected in the positive relationship between formulaic sequence use and oral fluency. However, there are also findings contradicting the abovementioned ones, without adequate explanations. This study aims to explore the roles of formulaic sequences in oral fluency, taking into account the relationship between formulaic sequence use and oral fluency. This study investigated 120 pieces of spoken narratives by Chinese EFL learners, using both quantitative and qualitative methods, combined with artificial intelligence techniques. Results of canonical correlation analysis showed that the frequency of formulaic sequences was significantly related to speed fluency (r = 0.563,p = 0.000) and breakdown fluency (r = 0.360,p = 0.001), while the variety of formulaic sequences was significantly related to repair fluency (r = 0.292,p = 0.035). Case studies further demonstrated that formulaic sequences could contribute to oral fluency development by promoting speed and reducing pausing when retrieved holistically, but they sometimes lost processing advantages when retrieved and processed in a word-by-word manner. The inappropriate use of formulaic sequences also neutralized the facilitative effects of formulaic sequences on repair fluency and could mirror speakers’ occasional tendency to sacrifice repair fluency for the improvement of speed and breakdown fluency when using formulaic sequences. Pedagogical implications were provided accordingly to promote sustainable oral fluency development through the use of formulaic sequences. (shrink)

It has been suggested that there is a close relationship between visual attention span (VAS) and fluent reading. This relation may be modulated by participants’ age, and exhibits various patterns in different reading modes (i.e. oral v.s. silent reading) and different reading levels (e.g. sentence v.s. character/word levels). Moreover, the modulation effects from the above factors might be more remarkable in the framework of languages with a deep orthography. Therefore, the present study investigated the developmental pattern of the relationship (...) between VAS skills and reading fluency in Chinese, a language with particularly deep orthography, by recruiting 292 participants from primary schools, middle schools and universities. Two tests were utilized to assess fluent reading skills at the single-character and sentence levels with oral and silent reading modes. A visual 1-back task was adopted to reflect VAS capacity with non-verbal stimuli and no verbal response. Results showed that the VAS capacity of low-grade primary school students could significantly account for the variance in single-character reading fluency in the oral mode and that it was a significant predictor of sentence reading fluency in the oral mode among high-grade primary school students. VAS abilities of middle school students allowed a unique and stable prediction of their silent sentence reading. With increasing reading ability, VAS skills of adults showed significant and similar predictive power for estimating the variations in fluent sentence reading in both silent and oral modes. These results revealed developmental changes in the contribution of VAS to fluent reading in Chinese, and provided evidence unveiling whether the underlying mechanisms of oral and silent reading were shared or different. (shrink)

The study of pragmatic competence has gained increasing importance within second language assessment over the last three decades. However, its study in L2 language testing is still scarce. The aim of this paper is to research the extent to which pragmatic competence as defined by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) has been accommodated in the task descriptions and rating scales of two of the most popular Oral Proficiency Interviews (OPIs) at a C1 level: Cambridge’s Certificate (...) in Advanced English (CAE) and Trinity’s Integrated Skills in English (ISE) III. To carry out this research, OPI tests are first defined, highlighting their differences from L2 pragmatic tests. After pragmatic competence in the CEFR is examined, focusing on the updates in the new descriptors, CAE and ISE III formats, structure and task characteristics are compared, showing that, while the formats and some characteristics are found to differ, the structures and task types are comparable. Finally, we systematically analyse CEFR pragmatic competence in the task skills and rating scale descriptors of both OPIs. The findings show that the task descriptions incorporate mostly aspects of discourse and design competence. Additionally, we find that each OPI is seen to prioritise different aspects of pragmatic competence within their rating scale, with CAE focusing mostly on discourse competence and fluency, and ISE III on functional competence. Our study shows that the tests fail to fully accommodate all aspects of pragmatic competence in the task skills and rating scales, although the aspects they do incorporate follow the CEFR descriptors on pragmatic competence. It also reveals a mismatch between the task competences being tested and the rating scale. To conclude, some research lines are proposed. (shrink)

Students’ Quality Circles (SQCs) are considered in the context of English Language Teaching in Pakistan, with a focus on oral expression. SQCs offer many educational benefits.

Form-focused instruction can help second language learners notice the forms of language, which is conducive to the acquisition of linguistic forms. Two types of FFIs had been proposed, including focus-on-formS and focus-on-form. Previously, studies on FFI in L2 classroom teaching have focused mainly on the influence of two types of FFIs on the L2 acquisition of grammar and vocabulary. The influence of FonFs and FonF on L2 oral production, however, has been addressed less often. The advantages and disadvantages of (...) different teaching methods in FonFs and FonF have not been well investigated. On the basis of Schmidt’s noticing hypothesis, VanPatten’s input processing hypothesis, and Long’s interactive hypothesis, we investigated the effects of teaching goals, teaching steps, and interactive activities in FonFs and FonF on the complexity, accuracy, and fluency of 32 native Korean speakers’ L2 Chinese oral production. We found that FFI significantly improved the performance of L2 Chinese oral production, although different FFIs had different effects on complexity, accuracy, and fluency. FonF and FonFs could improve both complexity and accuracy, whereas FonF also significantly improved fluency, which was not observed in FonFs. Furthermore, we found that the level of L2 proficiency could modulate the interaction between instruction methods and learning outcomes. For low-proficiency learners, FonF was more helpful for the improvement of fluency. For high-proficiency learners, FonFs was more helpful for the improvement of accuracy. These results demonstrated that teachers should pay attention to the interaction between specific teaching conditions with different L2 proficiency and learning outcomes when implementing FFI. The findings of this study have important implications for the design of procedures and interactive activities of L2 spoken Chinese teaching. (shrink)

In this study, multidimensional feature extraction is performed on the U-language recordings of the test takers, and these features are evaluated separately, with five categories of features: pronunciation, fluency, vocabulary, grammar, and semantics. A deep neural network model is constructed to model the feature values to obtain the final score. Based on the previous research, this study uses a deep neural network training model instead of linear regression to improve the correlation between model score and expert score. The method (...) of using word frequency for semantic scoring is replaced by the LDA topic model for semantic analysis, which eliminates the need for experts to manually label keywords before scoring and truly automates the critique. Also, this paper introduces text cleaning after speech recognition and deep learning-based speech noise reduction technology in the scoring model, which improves the accuracy of speech recognition and the overall accuracy of the scoring model. Also, innovative applications and improvements are made to key technologies, and the latest technical solutions are integrated and improved. A new open oral grading model is proposed and implemented, and innovations are made in the method of speech feature extraction to improve the dimensionality of open oral grading. (shrink)

The ventrolateral prefrontal cortex plays a pivotal role in cognitive reappraisal. Previous studies suggested a functional asymmetry of the bilateral VLPFC, but the evidence is still insufficient during cognitive reappraisal. In this study, we conducted an online single-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation to investigate the causal and distinct roles of the left and right VLPFC in reappraisal. Participants were instructed to reappraise or attend to pictures depicting social exclusion scenarios while the spTMS was applied over the left or right VLPFC of (...) the participants’ brains. The results showed that spTMS of either the left or the right VLPFC would increase reappraisal difficulty. Meanwhile, the outcome of reappraisal significantly deteriorated when the right VLPFC was temporally interrupted by spTMS, while the verbal fluency during oral reporting of the reappraisal strategy was significantly reduced when the left VLPFC was interrupted by spTMS. Taken together, these findings provide causal evidence for the involvement of left and right VLPFC with distinct roles: while the left VLPFC is responsible for the linguistic especially semantic process of generating and selecting appraisals according to the goal of emotion regulation, the right VLPFC plays a critical role in inhibiting inappropriate negative emotions and thoughts generated by the effective scenarios. These findings deepen our understanding of the neurocognitive mechanism of emotion regulation. (shrink)

Language experience shapes the gradual maturation of speech production in both native and second languages. Structural aspects like the connectedness of spontaneous narratives reveal this maturation progress in L1 acquisition and, as it does not rely on semantics, it could also reveal structural pattern changes during L2 acquisition. The current study tested whether L2 lexical retrieval associated with vocabulary knowledge could impact the global connectedness of narratives during the initial stages of L2 acquisition. Specifically, the study evaluated the relationship between (...) graph structure and L2 learners’ oral production in the L2 and L1. Seventy-nine college-aged students who were native speakers of English and had received classroom instruction in either L2-Spanish or L2-Chinese participated in this study. Three tasks were used: semantic fluency, phonemic fluency and picture description. Measures were operationalized as the number of words per minute in the case of the semantic and phonemic fluency tasks. Graph analysis was carried out for the picture description task using the computational tool SpeechGraphs to calculate connectedness. Results revealed significant positive correlations between connectedness in the picture description task and measures of speech production in the phonemic and semantic fluency tasks. These correlations were only significant for the participants’ L2- Spanish and Chinese. Results indicate that producing low connectedness narratives in L2 may be a marker of the initial stages of L2 oral development. These findings are consistent with the pattern reported in the early stages of L1 literacy. Future studies should further explore the interactions between graph structure and second language production proficiency, including more advanced stages of L2 learning and considering the role of cognitive abilities in this process. (shrink)

This study focuses on a 12-year-old girl diagnosed with a pragmatic disorder caused by Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Following an initial evaluation, a pragmatic rehabilitation program was implemented using a combined approach in 15 therapeutic sessions over a 4-month period. The program consisted of structured formats organized into modules to train the verbal, paralinguistic, and nonverbal aspects of communication. The results of the re-evaluation demonstrated the program’s effectiveness, with improvements in communicative intention, proxemic skills, prosodic variations, physical contact with the (...) interlocutor, and verbal fluency in oral messages. Consequently, the implementation of the intervention program significantly enhanced the patients’ pragmatic communication skills in therapeutic, familial, and social contexts. (shrink)

The aim of the study was to develop a new comprehensive reading assessment battery for multi-ethnic and multilingual learners in Malaysia. Using this assessment battery, we examined the reliability, validity, and dimensionality of the factors associated with reading difficulties/disabilities in the Malay language, a highly transparent alphabetic orthography. In order to further evaluate the reading assessment battery, we compared results from the assessment battery with those obtained from the Malaysian national screening instrument. In the study, 866 Grade 1 children from (...) multi-ethnic and multilingual backgrounds from 11 government primary schools participated. The reading assessment battery comprised 13 assessments, namely, reading comprehension, spelling, listening comprehension, letter name knowledge, letter name fluency, rapid automatized naming, word reading accuracy, word reading efficiency, oral reading fluency, expressive vocabulary, receptive vocabulary, elision, and phonological memory. High reliability and validity were found for the assessments. An exploratory factor analysis yielded three main constructs: phonological-decoding, sublexical-fluency, and vocabulary-memory. Phonological-decoding was found to be the most reliable construct that distinguished between at-risk and non-at-risk children. Identifying these underlying factors will be useful for detecting children at-risk for developing reading difficulties in the Malay language. In addition, these results highlight the importance of including a range of reading and reading-related measures for the early diagnosis of reading difficulties in this highly transparent orthography. (shrink)

Background Analysis of aphasic narratives can be a challenge for clinicians. Previous studies have mainly employed measures that categorized speech samples at the word level. They included quantification of the use and misuse of different word classes, presence and absence of narrative contents and errors, paraphasias, and perseverations, as well as morphological structures and errors within a narrative. In other words, a great amount of research has been conducted in the aphasiology literature focusing on micro-linguistic structures of oral narratives. (...) Aspects of macro- linguistic structures, such as the analysis of content information by a speaker, consistency of using cohesive devices to present information within a narrative, and order of presenting information necessary to form a coherent discourse, have not been extensively investigated. The current investigation proposes a clinical analytic system to target three aspects of macro-linguistic structures in narratives among speakers with aphasia. Specifically, (1) the presence of search events (i.e., the mentioning of key events that allow the listener to understand; Capilouto, Wright, &Wagovich, 2006) within a narrative, (2) the sequence of the mentioned events, and (3) the informativeness (i.e., the fulfillment of lexical items that allow the user to understand what the event is detailing) of the event contents, were focused in the proposed framework. Method Ten controls transcripts from were selected from the AphasiaBank (MacWhinney, Fromm, Forbes, & Holland, 2011). Three narrative tasks, including sequential picture description of ‘Refused Umbrella’, procedural narrative of making a ‘Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich’, and telling of ‘Cinderella’ story, were used to establish normative data for the basis of analysis. Specifically, the Search Events (e) and Informative Words (i) used by at least 70% of the speakers were listed for each genre. The sequential order of mentioning the Search Events, i.e., common order of events in 90% of the speakers, (s.total) was determined. Twelve speakers with aphasia (nine fluent and three non-fluent) were recruited and administered the Western Aphasia Battery and Object and Action Naming Battery. Their performance in the above three discourse tasks were orthographically transcribed and analyzed using the following measures: e.total, e.matched with norm, e.missed, e.irrlevant, e.extra, s.total, i.pb&j, i.umbr, i.cind, and i.total. Three samples were randomly chosen to be re-analyzed for inter- and intra-rater reliability. Results Results of an independent t-test suggested significant differences between the fluent and non-fluent subjects in sequential order of Search Events for all genres (s.total) and i.total, suggesting sensitivity of this framework to differentiate between the two fluency groups. Results of Pearson product-moment correlations revealed significant relation between Informative Words and WAB spontaneous speech scores, AQ, as well as OAB scores, for both aphasic groups. The mean value of coefficients for intra-rater reliability (0.992), with significant correlations on e.match, e.miss, and e.extra, was higher than that of inter-rater reliability (0.897). Discussion Based on our preliminary results, this objective framework allowed clinical evaluation of impairment in macro-linguistic structures present in aphasic discourse. Further extension should involve more subjects encompassing a wider range of severity with different types of aphasia. (shrink)

Conquering print-sound mappings is vital for developing fluent reading skills. In neuroimaging research, this ability can be indexed by activation differences between audiovisual congruent against incongruent conditions in brain areas such as the left superior temporal cortex. In line with it, individuals with dyslexia have difficulty in tasks requiring print-sound processing, accompanied by a reduced neural integration. However, existing evidence is almost restricted to alphabetic languages. Whether and how multisensory processing of print and sound is impaired in Chinese dyslexia remains (...) underexplored. In this study, we applied a passive audiovisual integration paradigm with functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the possible dysfunctions in processing character-sound and pinyin-sound associations in Chinese dyslexic children. Unexpectedly, the dyslexic group did not show reduced neural integration compared with typically developing readers in either character or pinyin experiment. However, the results revealed atypical correlations between neural integration and different reading abilities in dyslexia. Specifically, while the neural integration in the left inferior frontal cortex in processing character-sound pairs correlated with silent reading comprehension in both children with and without dyslexia, it was associated with morphological awareness in controls but with rapid naming in dyslexics. This result indicates Chinese dyslexic children may not use the same grapho-semantic processing strategy as their typical peers do. As for pinyin-sound processing, while a stronger neural integration in the direction of “congruent > incongruent” in the left occipito-temporal cortex and bilateral superior temporal cortices was associated with better oral reading fluency in the control group, an opposite pattern was found in dyslexia. This finding may reflect dyslexia's dysfunctional recruitment of the regions in grapho-phonological processing, which further impedes character learning. (shrink)

In a situation of living-together such as an “ecole maternelle,” organized philosophical discussions help young children to construct their personalities in the context of the group, and thus promotes individual autonomy. This innovative methodology tends to promote in children skills of negotiation and capacities for self-restraint. It places the pupils in issue-situations that require working in groups, and coming to a reasoned understanding before proposing possible solutions. Philosophical discussions help children develop their own thinking processes, as well as increased (...) class='Hi'>fluency in oral communication, such that they can be better understood by and better understand others. This paper is divided between a description of our activities in the shape of workshops that determine everyone’s role in such discussions and provide experimental practice in the discourse; and an analysis of the experience itself, which identifies possible problems in implementation, and proposes solutions. We make it clear that we do not oppose the imaginary and syncretic thinking of children to a discourse about the “real” or the “reasonable,” since kindergarteners tend to live in a world that does not separate the two, and it would seem injudicious to arbitrarily cut children off from a natural form of concept exploration and psychological functioning. Rather, what is needed is to teach children to better control and navigate within their own thinking; this will not be a result of repressing the imaginary but rather of becoming conscious of their own poetic process, which develops in connection with the growth of reasoning and awareness. (shrink)

Bu çalışmanın temel amacı, Murray Bookchin’in “toplumsal ekoloji” anlayışını açıklamaktır. Bu amaç doğrultusunda okuyucuya öncelikle ekolojik sorunlar ve ekoloji hareketinin tarihsel gelişimi hakkında genel bir içgörü kazandırmak adına açıklamalar sunacağız. Daha sonra Bookchin’in, ekoloji hareketini oluşturan farklı yaklaşımlara, Marksizm’e ve anarşizme yönelik ortaya koyduğu eleştirilerini, diyalektik doğalcılık öğretisini, hiyerarşi ve sınıf olgusu hakkında gerçekleştirdiği çözümlemelerini ve komünalist ideolojisini inceleyeceğiz. Devamında toplumsal ekolojiye yöneltilmiş olan eleştirileri aktaracak ve çalışmamızın ikincil amacını gerçekleştirmeye geçeceğiz. Bu amaç, Bookchin’in hiyerarşi olgusu hakkındaki çözümlemelerinin teorik zemininin (...) yetersizliğine dikkat çekmektir. Kanaatime göre Bookchin hiyerarşiyi tarihsel, antropolojik, ekonomik, sosyal, biyolojik, psikolojik ve politik bir kategori olarak ele almış ancak hiyerarşinin metafiziksel temelleri hakkında bir açıklama sunamamıştır. Bu durum Bookchin’in hiyerarşi ve devlet karşıtlığının dolayısıyla komünalist ideolojisinin açıklamaya muhtaç sorularla yüz yüze olduğu anlamına gelmektedir. Söz konusu sorular cevaplanmadığı takdirde toplumsal ekoloji anlayışını savunmanın sürdürülemez olduğunu iddia edeceğim. (shrink)

In this paper, I intend to discuss what I would like to call “the ideal of teaching as consummatory experience” in relation to John Dewey’s concept of “experience,” as the latter was elucidated in his later works, especially Art as Experience. What I have in mind with the phrase “the ideal of teaching as consummatory experience” basically points to what it means to be fully alive as a teacher and what happens when teaching is experienced in such a manner. In (...) other words, what is the relationship between teaching that is truly fulfilling for the teacher and experience that is truly educative for the student(s)? There is no doubt in my mind that the two are intimately connected. Truly fulfilling teaching and truly .. (shrink)

We are no longer in a position to attribute a positive essence to humanity and its presumed centrality. What it means to be human cannot be ascertained once and for all or in any a priori fashion....

In their defence of the school Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons define it as a source of ‘free time.’ Drawing on Catherine Malabou's compelling reading of Heidegger in her The Heidegger Change, I aim to provide a strong ontological justification for the claims made on behalf of the school concerning free time, common goods, and renewing (changing) the world: the school provides free time; it transforms knowledge and skills into common goods; and it has the potential to give everyone the (...) time and space to renew the world. The paper enquires into what ‘free time as non-productive time,’ ‘common goods,’ and ‘changing the world’ mean on an ontological register, and why therefore the school is so precious and warrants our utmost care in the face of its conservative and progressive critics alike. I discern a single underlying notion, the notion of essence as mutability, constituting the link connecting free time, common goods, and renewal of the world. (shrink)

This book presents an original exploration of philosophical questions pertaining to the ways we grasp the Absolute by bringing together the Buddhist notion of interpermeation of all phenomena into contemporary strains of thought in continental philosophy. This text introduces an ontological concept, granularity, deploying it to probe questions concerning the intersection of ontology, ethics, and education. A wide range of issues in metaphysics are covered—including being, nothingness, unity, plurality, truth, change, transformation, subjectivity, contradiction, coherence, potentiality—from the perspective of thinkers such (...) as Hegel, Heidegger, Badiou, Meillassoux, Malabou, Žižek, and Harman. The text deploys granularity in arguing for an ethics of unconditional hospitality within education. This volume is intended for students and researchers working in the areas of philosophy of education, philosophy of religion, and continental philosophy. (shrink)

This article is about a pedagogical movement I discern in Quentin Meillassoux’s ontology. The goal of the essay is to introduce his approach to reality in outline form and offer it as a possible route to conceptualize education as the practice of keeping the bodymind attentive and agile against its unsound ossification by way of providing a unified heightened sense of meaning, that is, consummatory experience, in a radically open and contingent world. Meillassoux offers a new conception of necessity and (...) contingency based on the Badioun principle that ‘nothing is inaccessible to reason.’ This move helps Meillassoux to claim that reason can access the absolute for there is no inaccessible necessary transcendence by providing an intriguing critique of the principle of sufficient reason. As a result, Meillassoux’s argument leads to the conclusion that the only necessity is contingency itself. By excluding any necessary being, but also maintaining the absolute necessity of contingency itself, Meillassoux establishes what he calls the “factial.” Meillassoux’s factiality induce pedagogical interventions that lead to acquiring a new point of view whereby ossification of bodymind is staved off and a state of mind that is endlessly fascinated by the immanence, or the most radical becoming, of the world is achieved. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics, and in particular, his concept of consummatory experience, should be engaged anew to rethink the merits of the Philosophy for Children programme, which arose in the 1970s in the US as an innovative educational programme that aims to use philosophy to help school children improve their ability to become more conscious of and make judgments about the aspects of their experience that have ethical, aesthetic, political, logical, or even metaphysical meaning. Although (...) an international success, the PFC programme has attracted many criticisms from a variety of directions. I claim that Deweyan concept of consummatory aesthetic experience is broad and flexible enough to provide a robust framework to make sense of the pedagogical horizon of PFC and therefore fruitfully engage the various critics of the movement coming from religious and social conservatives, educational psychologists, critical theorists, postmodernists/posthumanists, and professional philosophers themselves. The goal of this paper is to offer in a preliminary fashion the basic elements of Deweyan pragmatist aesthetics, which was principally elucidated in his Art as Experience, to defend PFC as a viable pedagogy. (shrink)

An intriguing interresonance plays out between various forms of Mahayana Buddhist ontology and Žižek’s dialectical materialism. His disdainful critique of Buddhism is well-known. As a cultural critic, Žižek might be onto something in his contention that Western Buddhism functions as the perfect ideology for late capitalism. As an ontologist, however, he seems to be ambivalent regarding the parallels between the Buddhist Void, to which the Western Buddhists supposedly withdraw, and his elaboration of a new foundation of dialectical materialism. Žižek is (...) one of the few contemporary continental philosophers who do not hesitate to engage Buddhism. My claim is that, notwithstanding his criticism, Žižek is much closer to Mahayana than he thinks. My aim therefore is to demonstrate how this is so. To do this, I will mainly focus on the following forms of Mahayana thought: śūnyatā in the context of Nāgārjuna's the Two-Truth doctrine, Tiantai School of Chinese Buddhist concept of li, and Nishida Kitarō’s philosophy of basho, which was heavily influenced by the Japanese Zen/Pure Land Buddhism. After going through some of the preliminary affinities among Mahayana forms and Žižek in its absolute contradiction, and materialism as the contradictory/paradoxical field conceived as an atheistic religious field, and so on), I will analyse each school of Mahayana mentioned above and point out the parallels between these and Žižek’s own thought. (shrink)

In this paper, an account of two novel ontologies is given to point to the need to revise the status of facts in school curriculum. It is argued that schooling is in dire need of re-enchantment. The way to re-enchant schooling is to re-enliven the world we inhabit. We need to fall head over heels in love with the world again. In order to do that, we need to shake up our conception of “the hard and cold facts of the (...) world” to make the latter come alive radiating vibrancy and luminosity out into the world. Facts have to be liberated from their “cold and hard” status and become things that captivate us with their uniqueness and dynamism. To the extent that facts enchant (instead of merely re/present the world), working with them leads to educative experience. To work out how to let the facts do that, two thinkers and two ways to reconceptualize ‘facts’ are discussed: Graham Harman and his objects, and Ken Wilber and his holons. (shrink)

In this article, it is argued that the inordinate amount of time and attention given to the use of textbooks in education inadvertently leads to deadening miseducative experiences and creates a learning environment where what Dewey calls ‘consummatory experience’ is thwarted. In order to unpack this thesis, Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics is engaged, and in particular, his concept of consummatory experience is defined and its temporal nature is elucidated by referring to two modes of time: chronological and phenomenological. Subsequently, the relation (...) between teaching and consummatory experience is elucidated to uncover the reason why using textbooks is counterproductive. (shrink)

This paper discusses the repercussions of a new metaphysics—speculative/weird realism—for education and pedagogy. A historic shift is taking place in present-day continental philosophy, which involves an explicit and renewed call for realism. One of the most salient features of this development is a revitalised interest in ontological questions. As part of this overall trend towards realist and materialist ontologies in current continental thinking, the paper particularly focuses on Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology, which claims that aesthetics is first philosophy. Harman’s object-oriented (...) philosophy is an approach to metaphysics and ontology that is enamored by the experience of the vibrant yet inscrutable autonomous reality of objects. In order to come to terms with this new approach to reality, I suggest education be conceived as the cultivation of an aesthetic attitude understood as the ability to uphold the tension between relational and non-relational aspects of objects understood in the Harmanian idiom. (shrink)

Many political and economic forces are driven by the desire to eliminate democratic plurality in today’s political juncture. Democratic republicanism itself in its contemporary forms has failed to address many of the daunting moral, political, economic, social, technological, and ecological challenges we face today. It is argued that to fulfill its essence of egalitarian freedom and social justice, democratic republicanism must first decouple from the global neoliberal capitalist regime and secondly embrace some form of postcapitalist and posthumanist orientation guided by (...) a new attractor, a teleological approach anchored in a new telos of superhumanity. Democracy without a telos of superhumanity is a democracy in name only. It is time to lay our teleophobia aside and propose a strong teleological account in the vein of a Buddhist no-self doctrine at the heart of the onto-politico-economy. (shrink)

Marianna PapastephanouUniversity of CyprusSince Plato’s allegory of the cave two educational-philosophical critical modes have stood out: the descriptive (reality as it is) and the normative (reali...

A notable feature of classical American pragmatism is its close association with the birth of experimental psychology. In particular, William James’ work as a psychologist influenced, and was influenced by, his pragmatism. This paper seeks to support this reading of the relation between Jamesian psychology and pragmatism, particularly through his “Sentiment of Rationality” and the later contention that the true is the satisfactory. In addition, James’ insights are tested and expanded through reference to contemporary research on processing fluency, as (...) well as concepts of ecological rationality. (shrink)

Predictive processing is an influential theoretical framework for understanding human and animal cognition. In the context of predictive processing, learning is often reduced to optimizing the parameters of a generative model with a predefined structure. This is known as Bayesian parameter learning. However, to provide a comprehensive account of learning, one must also explain how the brain learns the structure of its generative model. This second kind of learning is known as structure learning. Structure learning would involve true structural changes (...) in generative models. The purpose of the current paper is to describe the processes involved upstream of these structural changes. To do this, we first highlight the remarkable compatibility between predictive processing and the processing fluency theory. More precisely, we argue that predictive processing is able to account for all the main theoretical constructs associated with the notion of processing fluency (i.e., the fluency heuristic, naïve theory, the discrepancy-attribution hypothesis, absolute fluency, expected fluency, and relative fluency). We then use this predictive processing account of processing fluency to show how the brain could infer whether it needs a structural change for learning the causal regularities at play in the environment. Finally, we speculate on how this inference might indirectly trigger structural changes when necessary. (shrink)

Statements’ rated truth increases when people encounter them repeatedly. Processing fluency is a central variable to explain this truth effect. However, people experience processing fluency positively, and these positive experiences might cause the truth effect. Three studies investigated positivity and fluency influences on the truth effect. Study 1 found correlations between elicited positive feelings and rated truth. Study 2 replicated the repetition-based truth effect, but positivity did not influence the effect. Study 3 conveyed positive and negative correlations (...) between positivity and truth in a learning phase. We again replicated the truth effect, but positivity only influenced judgments for easy statements in the learning phase. Thus, across three studies, we found positivity effects on rated truth, but not on the repetition-based truth effect: We conclude that positivity does not explain the standard truth effect, but the role of positive experiences for truth judgments deserves further investigation. (shrink)

People can support abstract reasoning by using mental models with spatial simulations. Such models are employed when people represent elements in terms of ordered dimensions (e.g. who is oldest, Tom, Dick, or Harry). We test and find that the process of forming and using such mental models can influence the liking of its elements (e.g. Tom, Dick, or Harry). The presumed internal structure of such models (linear-transitive array of elements), generates variations in processing ease (fluency) when using the model (...) in working memory (see the Symbolic Distance Effect, SDE). Specifically, processing of pairs where elements have larger distances along the order should be easier compared to pairs with smaller distances. Elements from easier pairs should be liked more than elements from difficult pairs (fluency being hedonically positive). Experiment 1 shows that unfamiliar ideographs are liked more when at wider distances and therefore easier to process. Experiment 2 replicates this effect with non-words. Experiment 3 rules out a non-spatial explanation of the effect while Experiments 4 offers a high-powered replication. Experiment 5 shows that the spatial effect spontaneously emerges after learning, even without a task that explicitly focuses on fluency. Experiment 6 employed a shorter array, but yielded no significant results. (shrink)

Esta conferencia formó parte del encuentro “Archivos Sonoros y cultura popular” realizado el 17 de septiembre de 2019 en el marco del Coloquio sobre Memorias Populares organizado por Doctorado en Historia y la Maestría en Historia y Memoria de la FaHCE junto a la presencia del historiador italiano Alessandro Portelli. En dicha conferencia, las autoras presentaron el archivo oral “Memorias encontradas” de la Comisión por la Memoria (CPM). Por un lado, relataron la historia de la producción y recolección de (...) entrevistas surgidas a partir de los distintos trabajos de la CPM y, por el otro, reflexionaron sobre algunas particularidades de la serie “El archivo y el testigo”: el contexto de producción, el diálogo entre el relato oficial/policial y la voz de las y los testigos, los distintos modos de narrar, de contar. (shrink)

Research has shown that processing dynamics on the perceiver's end determine aesthetic pleasure. Specifically, typical objects, which are processed more fluently, are perceived as more attractive. We extend this notion of perceptual fluency to judgments of vocal aesthetics. Vocal attractiveness has traditionally been examined with respect to sexual dimorphism and the apparent size of a talker, as reconstructed from the acoustic signal, despite evidence that gender-specific speech patterns are learned social behaviors. In this study, we report on a series (...) of three experiments using 60 voices to compare the relationship between judgments of vocal attractiveness, stereotypicality, and gender categorization fluency. Our results indicate that attractiveness and stereotypicality are highly correlated for female and male voices. Stereotypicality and categorization fluency were also correlated for male voices, but not female voices. Crucially, stereotypicality and categorization fluency interacted to predict attractiveness, suggesting the role of perceptual fluency is present, but nuanced, in judgments of human voices. (shrink)

Oral health is a critical part of overall health. The current COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of oral health. In this article, we describe how dental practice has been impacted by COVID-19, identify the public health response to COVID-19, and explain the gradual resumption of dental care after the initial disruption due to the pandemic. Finally, we discuss how long-standing health disparities in oral health have been exacerbated by the current pandemic.

Although widely studied in other domains, relatively little is known about the metacognitive processes that monitor and control behaviour during reasoning and decision-making. In this paper, we examined the conditions under which two fluency cues are used to monitor initial reasoning: answer fluency, or the speed with which the initial, intuitive answer is produced, and perceptual fluency, or the ease with which problems can be read. The first two experiments demonstrated that answer fluency reliably predicted Feeling (...) of Rightness judgments to conditional inferences and base rate problems, which subsequently predicted the amount of deliberate processing as measured by thinking time and answer changes; answer fluency also predicted retrospective confidence judgments. Moreover, the effect of answer fluency on reasoning was independent from the effect of perceptual fluency, establishing that these are empirically independent constructs. In five experiments with a variety of reasoning problems similar to those of Alter et al., we found no effect of perceptual fluency on FOR, retrospective confidence or accuracy; however, we did observe that participants spent more time thinking about hard to read stimuli, although this additional time did not result in answer changes. In our final two experiments, we found that perceptual disfluency increased accuracy on the CRT, but only amongst participants of high cognitive ability. As Alter et al.’s samples were gathered from prestigious universities, collectively, the data to this point suggest that perceptual fluency prompts additional processing in general, but this processing may results in higher accuracy only for the most cognitively able. (shrink)

South Africa has a long history of orality deeply embedded in the archival memory of the ‘Other’ or the history of the poor and oppressed. Their untold stories, undocumented histories with displacing identities are how the historical ‘Other’ has been perceived by colonialism and the apartheid regime. The ‘Other’ or primary oral communities in the context of this article can be seen by a name, a face and a particular identity, namely, indigenous people. This article will engage the work (...) of Finnegan on what is ‘Orality – if anything’. The term ‘orality’, as a conceptual tool, can help us to widen our horizons and attention to forms of human creativity and imagination which was neglected or unnoticed by scholars. Orality has forced scholars to ask new questions on what is the meaning of ‘text’ and encouraged and challenge scholars in orality and literacy research with a new analysis of what we thought we already knew. The article engages oral and written research and how it can assist in understanding the discourse of the ‘Other’ and the power relation in reconstructing and re-ordering of their social universe through collective memory, songs, rituals, satire, drama and political protest which at large was perceived by the apartheid era and Western colonisers as savage, uncivilised and barbaric. The oral discourse of the ‘Other’ has become part of the power struggles politically and educationally in South Africa. Orality has further reshaped the Christian discourse in South Africa and Africa as the poor and oppressed find new power in a discourse of metaphysics of presence of the Gospel through preaching and bearing witness of their new encounter spiritually. (shrink)

Our understanding of the complexity of the oral biome and of the role of the various constituent bacteria in the aetiology of dental disease is growing. Probiotics and their relationship with prebiotics, as well as other microbiome‐based interventions, could be useful in preventing and treating dental disease and in promoting oral health. However, given the promise and early stage of this treatment approach, there are also a number of ethical, social and regulatory issues associated with innovative probiotic therapy. (...) In this article, a brief update is given on contemporary theories of the aetiology and management of the two commonest dental diseases, and on the roles of pre‐ and probiotics and oral biome transplant in the management of these diseases. The focus is primarily on four core issues: informed consent, risk–benefit assessment, how to determine suitable healthy donors, and commercialization and regulation. We discuss the safety and benefits of oral probiotics, not only concerning the products and quality control during their manufacture, but also regarding the depth of public knowledge about this topic. We point out that the requirement of listing ingredients honestly might be insufficient, and that the prevalent rhetoric of ‘natural’ and ‘organic’ as well as some health claims in the translational, innovative probiotic industry and markets are themselves misleading and should be carefully scrutinized. Finally, we suggest an ethical imperative to find a balance between scientific research and industry, and public health in the regulation of probiotics. (shrink)