Kinship terminologies are basic cognitive semantic systems that all human societies use for organizing kin relations. Diversity in kinship systems and their categories is substantial, but constrained. Rácz, Passmore, and Jordan explore hypotheses about such constraints from learning theories and social pressures, testing the impact of a community‐size driven learning bottleneck against the social coordination demands of different kinds of marriage and resource systems.

People learn language variation through exposure to linguistic interactions. The way we take part in these interactions is shaped by our lexical representations, the mechanisms of language processing, and the social context. Existing work has looked at how we learn and store variation in the ambient language. How this is mediated by the social context is less understood.We report on the results of an innovative experimental battery designed to test how learning variation is affected by a variable's social indexicality. Hungarian (...) native speakers played a co-operative game involving verb nonwords. These were built on existing inflectional variation in Hungarian. Participant behavior shifted in response to an automated co-player's preferences, and this reflected a change in the overall lexical patterns of the players, affected by the particular verbs introduced by the co-player. Patterns persisted in subsequent testing. Learning was similar for variables with or without social meaning.Results show that participants can learn and retain a range of variable morphological patterns in a simulated interaction. Participants seem to have equal capacity to pick up variables with and without social meaning. This suggests that the social meaning of a pattern does not clearly constrain learning morphological variation and becomes relevant downstream in learning. (shrink)

How do speakers learn the social meaning of different linguistic variants, and what factors influence how likely a particular social–linguistic association is to be learned? It has been argued that the social meaning of more salient variants should be learned faster, and that learners' pre‐existing experience of a variant will influence its salience. In this paper, we report two artificial‐language‐learning experiments investigating this. Each experiment involved two language‐learning stages followed by a test. The first stage introduced the artificial language and (...) trained participants in it, while the second stage added a simple social context using images of cartoon aliens. The first learning stage was intended to establish participants' experience with the artificial language in general and with the distribution of linguistic variants in particular. The second stage, in which linguistic stimuli were accompanied by images of particular aliens, was intended to simulate the acquisition of linguistic variants in a social context. In our first experiment, we manipulated whether a particular linguistic variant, associated with one species of alien in the second learning phase, had been encountered in the first learning phase. In the second experiment, we manipulated whether the variant had been encountered in the same grammatical context. In both cases we predicted that the unexpectedness of a new variant or a new grammatical context for an old variant would increase the variant's salience and facilitate the learning of its social meaning. This is what we found, although in the second experiment, the effect was driven by better learners. Our results suggest that unexpectedness increases the salience of variants and makes their social distribution easier to learn, deepening our understanding of the role of individual language experience in the acquisition of sociolinguistic meaning. (shrink)

It is possible to solve the Einstein constraint equations as an evolutionary rather than an elliptic system. Here we consider the Gauss constraint in electrodynamics as a toy model for this. We use a combination of the evolutionary method with the gluing construction to produce initial data for an electromagnetic pulse surrounded by vacuum. It turns out that solving the evolutionary form of the constraint is straightforward, and explicitly yields the desired type of initial data. In contrast, proving the existence (...) of a solution to the same problem within the elliptic setting requires sophisticated arguments based on functional analysis. (shrink)

Accurately assessing youth mental health involves obtaining reports from multiple informants who typically display low levels of correspondence. This low correspondence may reflect situational specificity. That is, youth vary as to where they display mental health concerns and informants vary as to where and from what perspective they observe youth. Despite the frequent need to understand and interpret these informant discrepancies, no consensus guidelines exist for integrating informants’ reports. The path to building these guidelines starts with identifying factors that reliably (...) predict the level and form of these informant discrepancies, and do so for theoretically and empirically relevant reasons. Yet, despite the knowledge of situational specificity, few approaches to integrating multi-informant data are well-equipped to account for these factors in measurement, and those that claim to be well-positioned to do so have undergone little empirical scrutiny. One promising approach was developed roughly 20 years ago by Kraemer and colleagues. Their Satellite Model leverages principal components analysis and strategic selection of informants to instantiate situational specificity in measurement, namely components reflecting variance attributable to the context in which informants observe behavior, the perspective from which they observe behavior, and behavior that manifests across contexts and perspectives. The current study represents the first construct validation test of the Satellite Model. A mixed-clinical/community sample of 134 adolescents and their parents completed six parallel surveys of adolescent mental health. Adolescents also participated in a series of simulated social interactions with research personnel trained to act as same-age, unfamiliar peers. A third informant viewed these interactions and completed the same surveys as parents and adolescents. We applied the Satellite Model to each set of surveys and observed high internal consistency estimates for each of the six-item trait, context, and perspective components. Scores reflecting the trait, context, and perspective components displayed distinct patterns of relations to a battery of criterion variables that varied in the context, perspective, and source of measurement. The Satellite Model instantiates situational specificity in measurement and facilitates unifying conceptual and measurement models of youth mental health. (shrink)

The present study explored the types of stressors faced by rhythmic gymnastics athletes, their parents, and coaches. Semi-structured interviews with 12 participants—four gymnasts, five coaches, and three parents—were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis in a theory-driven framework. The categorizations of sport-related stressors for the parents, coaches, and gymnasts were based on existing theories. The results showed that both the gymnasts and the coaches predominantly noted mastery-avoidance goals in terms of performance, while the interviews with parents mostly indicated performance-avoidance goals. All (...) three groups of participants consistently reported a detrimental atmosphere in rhythmic gymnastics. For instance, they emphasized the stress related to inadequate communication between the concerned parties. Moreover, all parties believed that having a lean body was linked to success in the competitive world of rhythmic gymnastics. The present study provides insight into some of the potential major stressors and the related subjective experiences affecting athletes socializing in the same sporting environment. (shrink)