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"This study investigates the overlaps between political discourse and literary and cinematic fiction, arguing that both are informed by, and contribute to, the cultural imaginary of terrorism. It explores the ways in which clandestine political violence stimulates the collective imagination, a fact that has received little attention despite its cultural prominence. Whenever mass-mediated acts of terrorism occur, they tend to trigger a proliferation of threat scenarios not only in the realm of literature and film, but also in the statements of policymakers, security experts, and journalists. In the process, the discursive boundary between the factual and the hypothetical can become difficult to discern. To illuminate this phenomenon, this book proposes that terror is a halfway house between the real and the imaginary. For what characterizes terrorism is less the single act of violence than it is the fact that this act is perceived to be the beginning, or part, of a potential series, and that further acts are expected to occur. This gives terror a fantastical dimension, a fact reinforced by the clandestine nature of both terrorist and counter-terrorist operations as well as by the general reluctance to engage with the actual causes and circumstances of political violence. Supported by contextual readings of selected texts and films from The Dynamiter and The Secret Agent through late-Victorian science fiction to post-9/11 novels and films, this study argues that literary scholarship can make a genuine contribution to the interdisciplinary field of terrorism studies. Employing a discourse-analytical approach, it introduces the concept of the "cultural imaginary of terrorism" to explain the complex interplay between terrorist acts, public discourse, and literary and cinematic fiction. It will be a valuable resource for those with interests in the areas of Literature and Film, Terrorism Studies, Peace and Conflict Studies, Trauma Studies, and Cultural Studies. "--Provided by publisher.

This study investigates the overlaps between political discourse and literary and cinematic fiction, arguing that both are informed by, and contribute to, the cultural imaginary of terrorism. It explores the ways in which clandestine political violence stimulates the collective imagination, a fact that has received little attention despite its cultural prominence. Whenever mass-mediated acts of terrorism occur, they tend to trigger a proliferation of threat scenarios not only in the realm of literature and film, but also in the statements of policymakers, security experts, and journalists. In the process, the discursive boundary between the factual and the hypothetical can become difficult to discern. To illuminate this phenomenon, this book proposes that terror is a halfway house between the real and the imaginary. For what characterizes terrorism is less the single act of violence than it is the fact that this act is perceived to be the beginning, or part, of a potential series, and that further acts are expected to occur. This gives terror a fantastical dimension, a fact reinforced by the clandestine nature of both terrorist and counter-terrorist operations as well as by the general reluctance to engage with the actual causes and circumstances of political violence. Supported by contextual readings of selected texts and films from The Dynamiter and The Secret Agent through late-Victorian science fiction to post-9/11 novels and films, this study argues that literary scholarship can make a genuine contribution to the interdisciplinary field of terrorism studies.

Neben verschiedenen Repräsentationen des Anderen Europas hat die koloniale Reiseliteratur auch das Fremdbild des enteuropäisierten Europäers hervorgebracht. Dieser Typus gibt Aufschluss über ein bisher noch kaum erfasstes Phänomen, das als kulturelle Einflussangst beschrieben werden kann. Insbesondere im 19. Jahrhundert lässt sich eine intensive Auseinandersetzung mit den möglichen Folgen von Akkulturation, 'Rassenmischung' und Klimaeinflüssen für weiße Reisende und Kolonisten in den Tropen beobachten. Literarische Texte inszenieren den kolonialen Raum als ein Feld interkultureller Begegnungen, das von einer klaren Grenze durchzogen ist - die zu überschreiten tabu bleibt.

AbstractChildren learn their earliest words through social interaction, but it is unknown how much they rely on social information. Some theories argue that word learning is fundamentally social from its outset, with even the youngest infants understanding intentions and using them to infer a social partner's target of reference. In contrast, other theories argue that early word learning is largely a perceptual process in which young children map words onto salient objects. One way of unifying these accounts is to model word learning as weighted cue combination, in which children attend to many potential cues to reference, but only gradually learn the correct weight to assign each cue. We tested four predictions of this kind of naïve cue combination account, using an eye‐tracking paradigm that combines social word teaching and two‐alternative forced‐choice testing. None of the predictions were supported. We thus propose an alternative unifying account: children are sensitive to social information early, but their ability to gather and deploy this information is constrained by domain‐general cognitive processes. Developmental changes in children's use of social cues emerge not from learning the predictive power of social cues, but from the gradual development of attention, memory, and speed of information processing.

AbstractCognitive development is often characterized in terms of discontinuities, but these discontinuities can sometimes be apparent rather than actual and can arise from continuous developmental change. To explore this idea, we use as a case study the finding by Stager and Werker (1997) that children's early ability to distinguish similar sounds does not automatically translate into word learning skills. Early explanations proposed that children may not be able to encode subtle phonetic contrasts when learning novel word meanings, thus suggesting a discontinuous/stage‐like pattern of development. However, later work has revealed (e.g., through using more precise testing methods) that children do encode such contrasts, thus favoring a continuous pattern of development. Here, we propose a probabilistic model that represents word knowledge in a graded fashion and characterizes developmental change as improvement in the precision of this graded knowledge. Our model explained previous findings in the literature and provided a new prediction – the referents' visual similarity modulates word learning accuracy. The models' predictions were corroborated by human data collected from both preschool children and adults. The broader impact of this work is to show that computational models, such as ours, can help us explore the extent to which episodes of cognitive development that are typically thought of as discontinuities may emerge from simpler, continuous mechanisms.

AbstractBilingual environments present an important context for word learning. One feature of bilingual environments is the existence of translation equivalents (TEs)—words in different languages that share similar meanings. Documenting TE learning over development may give us insight into the mechanisms underlying word learning in young bilingual children. Prior studies of TE learning have often been confounded by the fact that increases in overall vocabulary size with age lead to greater opportunities for learning TEs. To address this confound, we employed an item‐level analysis, which controls for the age trajectory of each item independently. We used Communicative Development Inventory data from four bilingual datasets (two English–Spanish and two English–French; total N = 419) for modeling. Results indicated that knowing a word's TE increased the likelihood of knowing that word for younger children and for TEs that are more similar phonologically. These effects were consistent across datasets, but varied across lexical categories. Thus, TEs may allow bilingual children to bootstrap their early word learning in one language using their knowledge of the other language.Research highlights
Bilingual children must learn words that share a common meaning across both languages, that is, translation equivalents, like dog in English and perro in Spanish.
Item‐level models explored how translation equivalents affect word learning, in addition to child‐level (e.g., exposure) and item‐level (e.g., phonological similarity) factors.
Knowing a word increased the probability of knowing its corresponding translation equivalent, particularly for younger children and for more phonologically‐similar translation equivalents.
These findings suggest that young bilingual children use their word knowledge in one language to bootstrap their learning of words in the other language.

People perceive, think, and act in a multitude of different ways across cultures, and there is an extensive history of research documenting these differences. At the heart of much of this work is a contrast between Western and East Asian cultures that has inspired important efforts to document human psychology in populations outside of the WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic) demographic, which is much overrepresented within psychological research (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010). Recent recommendations for measuring cultural distance (Muthukrishna et al., 2020) profile the US and China as focal points for cultural comparisons, but define cultural distance using explicit self-report measures. Here, we evaluate cross-cultural differences between the US and China using implicit and experimental measures. We attempt to reproduce and test extensions of prior work demonstrating cross-cultural differences in reasoning, vision, and social cognition with convenience snowball samples of university students. Few of these differences appeared in our sample.

Why do children learn some words earlier than others? The order in which words are acquired can provide clues about the mechanisms of word learning. In a large-scale corpus analysis, we use parent-report data from over 32,000 children to estimate the acquisition trajectories of around 400 words in each of 10 languages, predicting them on the basis of independently derived properties of the words' linguistic environment (from corpora) and meaning (from adult judgments). We examine the consistency and variability of these predictors across languages, by lexical category, and over development. The patterning of predictors across languages is quite similar, suggesting similar processes in operation. In contrast, the patterning of predictors across different lexical categories is distinct, in line with theories that posit different factors at play in the acquisition of content words and function words. By leveraging data at a significantly larger scale than previous work, our analyses identify candidate generalizations about the processes underlying word learning across languages.

AbstractWe introduce a new resource: the SAYCam corpus. Infants aged 6–32 months wore a head-mounted camera for approximately 2 hr per week, over the course of approximately two-and-a-half years. The result is a large, naturalistic, longitudinal dataset of infant- and child-perspective videos. Over 200,000 words of naturalistic speech have already been transcribed. Similarly, the dataset is searchable using a number of criteria (e.g., age of participant, location, setting, objects present). The resulting dataset will be of broad use to psychologists, linguists, and computer scientists.