DOCSLIB.ORG

Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text

Load more

GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY ROUND TABLE ON LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTICS Language Teaching, Testing, and Technology: Lessons from the Past with a View Toward the Future James E. Alatis, Editor GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY ROUND TABLE ON LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTICS 1989 Language Teaching, Testing, and Technology: Lessons from the Past with a View Toward the Future James E. Alatis, Editor Georgetown University Press, Washington, D.C. Bibliographic notice Since this series has been variously and confusingly cited as: Georgetown University Monograph Series on Languages and Linguistics, Monograph Series on Languages and Linguistics, Reports of the Annual Round Table Meetings on Linguistics and Language Study, etc., beginning with the 1973 volume the title of the series was changed. The new title of the series includes the year of a Round Table and omits both the monograph number and the meeting number, thus: Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 1988, with the regular abbreviation GURT '89. Full bibliographic references should show the form: Lado, Robert. 1989. Acquisition vs. learning in reading pronunciation by adult EFL students. In: Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 1989. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press. 000-000. Copyright ©1989 by Georgetown University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Catalog Number: 58-31607 ISBN 0-87840-124-5 ISSN 0196-7207 To WILGA M. RIVERS TEACHER, AUTHOR, SCHOLAR IN RECOGNITION OF HER SELFLESS DEDICATION TO THE TEACHING OF LANGUAGES Contents The Georgetown University Bicentennial and the fortieth Round Table on Languages and Linguistics James E. Alatis, Dean, Georgetown University School of Languages and Linguistics and Chair, Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 1989 Welcoming remarks 1 Charles A. Ferguson, Stanford University On behalf of the Center for Applied Linguistics 5 Charles L. Currie, S.J., Director, Bicentennial Celebration On behalf of the Georgetown University Bicentennial 7 James E. Alatis, Chair, Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 1989 Presentation of Bicentennial Medals to Henry and Renée Kahane 9 Sir John Lyons, LittD., F.BA., Cambridge University The last forty years: Real progress or not? 13 Language teaching G. Richard Tucker, and JoAnn Crandall, Center for Applied Linguistics The integration of language and content instruction for language minority and language majority students 39 Veronica Lawson, London, England Practice makes less imperfect: Users' needs and their influence on machine translation development 51 Robert Lado, Dean emeritus, Georgetown University Acquisition vs. learning in reading pronunciation by adult EFL students 59 Claire J. Kramsch, Massachussetts Institute of Technology Discourse and text: A narrative view of the foreign language lesson 69 Charles A. Ferguson, Stanford University Language teaching and theories of language 81 vi / Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 1989 Muriel Vasconcellos, Pan American Health Organization Cohesion and coherence in the presentation of machine translation products 89 Richard Lutz, Georgetown University Second language acquisition: Do we really want a unified theory? 106 Karin C. Ryding, Georgetown University Less commonly taught languages: The current situation 114 Peter Strevens, Wolf son College, Cambridge and the University of Illinois Towards a rationale for language teaching technology 122 Ali Hajjaj and Balkees Al-Najjar, Kuwait University ESL program evaluation: Realities and perspectives 133 Frederick Bosco and Anna De Meo, Georgetown Univeristy Discourse frames and the cycle of instruction 142 Ross Steele, University of Sydney Teaching language and culture: Old problems, new approaches 153 Henry Kahane, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The role of language in the immigrant's Ufe 163 Maria Ibba, Universitá Cattolica del Sacro Cuore New trends in foreign language teaching: Teaching English in the Italian medical school curriculum 167 Irene Thompson, George Washington University Lexical search strategies in L2: A developmental analysis 177 Wilga M. Rivers, Harvard University Interaction and communication in the language class in an age of technology 186 Language testing Ray T. Clifford, Defense Language Institute Technological, methodological, and assessment challenges: Can the foreign language teacher survive? 198 John L. D. Clark, Defense Language Institute Multipurpose language tests: Is a conceptual and operational synthesis possible? 206 Contents / vii Peter H. Lowenberg, Georgetown University Testing English as a world language: Issues in assessing normative proficiency 216 Richard T. Thompson, Center for Applied Linguistics Oral proficiency in the less commonly taught languages: What do we know about it? 228 J. Michael O'Malley, Evaluation Assistance Center, Georgetown University Language proficiency testing with limited English-proficient students 235 Thea C. Bruhn, Foreign Service Institute 'Passages': Life, the universe, and language proficiency assessment 245 Rebecca M. Valette, Boston College Language testing in the secondary schools: Past experience and new directions 255 Heidi Byrnes, Georgetown University Who is in charge in the learner-curriculum-testing connection? 265 Language technology Sue K. Otto, University of Iowa Assessment, articulation, accountability: New roles for the language lab 276 Nina Garrett, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The synergism of technology and theory in classroom second language acquisition research 288 Michael Zarechnak, Georgetown University Semantic subclasses of temporal nouns 295 Protase E. Woodford, Educational Testing Service From wire recorder to satellite dish: The impact of technology on language teaching 304 June K. Phillips, Tennessee Foreign Language Institute Challenging teachers and harnessing technology 312 Frank Otto, Brigham Young University Building on the past: New directions in CAI/IL 320 Judith G. Frommer, Harvard University Language learning, cultural understanding, and the computer 332 viii / Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 1989 Sergei Nirenberg, Carnegie-Mellon University New developments in knowledge-based machine translation 344 Ricardo M. Paiva, Georgetown University Culture in the language class: Videos to bridge the gap 358 Margaret King, Université de Généve Using unification grammars for analysis and synthesis 364 Reinhold Freudenstein, Philipps - Universitat, Marburg Testing and technology in Germany revisited: What is left? What can be hoped for? 372 Makato Nagao, Kyoto University New directions of machine translation 378 Winfred P. Lehmann, University of Texas at Austin Machine translation: Achievements, problems, promise 385 Stephen Krashen, University of Southern California Language teaching technology: A low-tech view 393 G. Richard Tucker, Center for Applied Linguistics Michael Zarechnak, Georgetown University Appendix: Three historical notes 408 Welcoming remarks James E. Alatis Dean, Georgetown University School of Languages and Linguistics Chair, Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 1989 Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My tasks this evening are simple and happy: to welcome, to thank, to announce, and to introduce. 1. Welcome to Georgetown University, to our School of Languages and Linguistics, and to the Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 1989. We are delighted that since 1950 we have been able to host scholars and teachers interested and committed to languages and linguistics. Our colleagues in this year's Round Table 1989 will discuss Language Teaching, Testing and Technology: Lessons from the Past with a View to the Future. A word of welcome also to those who participated in the Round Table pre-sessions. These pre-session meetings allow us all to include a wide range of quite specialized topics which a more general conference could hardly hope to address. We are delighted to provide a setting for such groups, some of which, such as the Interagency Roundtable, have met here for many years. We are grateful to the organizers of these pre-sessions and congratulate them. 2. Now let me thank all of you who have come: speakers, scholars, teachers, students. This is our fortieth annual Round Table meeting. We are grateful that you could join us for this anniversary and we welcome your participation. I would like to express my special gratitude to Mrs. Carol Kreidler, the conference coordinator, who helped identify and invite to our meeting so many of the finest scholars concerned with various aspects of language study. Unfortunately she is not here this evening; for as a member of the Executive Board of TESOL, she was committed to attend their annual conference in San Antonio, and I insisted that she honor that commitment. But her assistant coordinator, Mrs. Jackie M. Tanner, Director of Language Learning Technology in the School of Languages and Linguistics, is here together with Round Table assistants Susan Huss and Laura Klos Sokol, Fellows in the Linguistics Department. Let me express to them our joint gratitude for the assistance I know they will provide during the next few days. 3. My first announcement is that this year's Round Table meeting again coincides with the National Foreign Language Week proclaimed by President George Bush. I am sure you share with me gratitude for his gracious words 2 / Georgetown University Round Table on Languages
Recommended publications
  • Is Machine Translation Post-Editing Worth the Effort? a Survey of Research Into Post-Editing and Effort Maarit Koponen, University of Helsinki

    Is Machine Translation Post-Editing Worth the Effort? a Survey of Research Into Post-Editing and Effort Maarit Koponen, University of Helsinki

    The Journal of Specialised Translation Issue 25 – January 2016 Is machine translation post-editing worth the effort? A survey of research into post-editing and effort Maarit Koponen, University of Helsinki ABSTRACT Advances in the field of machine translation have recently generated new interest in the use of this technology in various scenarios. This development raises questions over the roles of humans and machines as machine translation appears to be moving from the peripheries of the translation field closer to the centre. The situation which influences the work of professional translators most involves post-editing machine translation, i.e. the use of machine translations as raw versions to be edited by translators. Such practice is increasingly commonplace for many language pairs and domains and is likely to form an even larger part of the work of translators in the future. While recent studies indicate that post-editing high-quality machine translations can indeed increase productivity in terms of translation speed, editing poor machine translations can be an unproductive task. The question of effort involved in post-editing therefore remains a central issue. The objective of this article is to present an overview of the use of post-editing of machine translation as an increasingly central practice in the translation field. Based on a literature review, the article presents a view of current knowledge concerning post-editing productivity and effort. Findings related to specific source text features, as well as machine translation errors that appear to be connected with increased post-editing effort, are also discussed. KEYWORDS Machine translation, MT quality, MT post-editing, post-editing effort, productivity.
  • Translating the Post-Editor: an Investigation of Post-Editing Changes and Correlations with Professional Experience Across Two Romance Languages

    Translating the Post-Editor: an Investigation of Post-Editing Changes and Correlations with Professional Experience Across Two Romance Languages

    Translating the post-editor: an investigation of post-editing changes and correlations with professional experience across two Romance languages Giselle de Almeida Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies Dublin City University January 2013 Supervisors: Dr Sharon O’Brien and Phil Ritchie I hereby certify that this material, which I now submit for assessment on the programme of study leading to the award of Doctor of Philosophy is entirely my own work, that I have exercised reasonable care to ensure that the work is original, and does not to the best of my knowledge breach any law of copyright, and has not been taken from the work of others save and to the extent that such work has been cited and acknowledged within the text of my work. Signed: ______________________ ID No.: ______________________ Date: ______________________ ii Abstract With the growing use of machine translation, more and more companies are also using post-editing services to make the machine-translated output correct, precise and fully understandable. Post-editing, which is distinct from translation and revision, is still a new activity for many translators. The lack of training, clear and consistent guidelines and international standards may cause difficulties in the transition from translation to post- editing. Aiming to gain a better understanding of these difficulties, this study investigates the impact of translation experience on post-editing performance, as well as differences and similarities in post-editing behaviours and trends between two languages of the same family (French and Brazilian Portuguese). The research data were gathered by means of individual sessions in which participants remotely connected to a computer and post-edited machine-translated segments from the IT domain, while all their edits and onscreen activities were recorded via screen-recording and keylogging programs.
  • INTRINSIC and EXTRINSIC SOURCES of TRANSLATOR SATISFACTION: an EMPIRICAL STUDY Mónica Rodríguez-Castro University of North Carolina at Charlotte (Estados Unidos)

    INTRINSIC and EXTRINSIC SOURCES of TRANSLATOR SATISFACTION: an EMPIRICAL STUDY Mónica Rodríguez-Castro University of North Carolina at Charlotte (Estados Unidos)

    Entreculturas 7-8 (enero 2016) ISSN: 1989-5097 Mónica Rodríguez Castro INTRINSIC AND EXTRINSIC SOURCES OF TRANSLATOR SATISFACTION: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY Mónica Rodríguez-Castro University of North Carolina at Charlotte (Estados Unidos) ABSTRACT This paper discusses the main results from an online questionnaire on translator satisfaction—a theoretical construct that conceptualizes leading sources of task and job satisfaction in the language industry. The proposed construct distinguishes between intrinsic and extrinsic sources of satisfaction using Herzberg’s two-factor framework and enumerates the constituents of translator satisfaction. Statistical analysis allows this study to quantify these constituents and their correlations. Preliminary results reveal that crucial sources of task satisfaction include task pride, ability to perform a variety of tasks, and successful project completion. Major sources of job satisfaction include professional skills of team members, a continuous relationship with clients, and clients’ understanding of the translation process. Low income and requests for discounts are found to be some of the sources of dissatisfaction. The findings from this study can be used to investigate new approaches for retention and human resource management. KEY WORDS: translation, language industry, task satisfaction, job satisfaction, outsourcing, sociology of translation. RESUMEN Este artículo presenta los principales resultados de una encuesta en línea que se enfoca en la satisfacción laboral del traductor en la actual industria de la lengua. La conceptualización teórica de la satisfacción laboral se divide en dos categorías fundamentales: satisfacción por tareas y satisfacción en el trabajo. El marco teórico establece una distinción entre fuentes intrínsecas y extrínsecas de satisfacción laboral adoptando como base los principios de la Teoría Bifactorial de Herzberg y enumera cada uno de los componentes de la satisfacción del traductor.
  • Machine Translation Post-Editing and Effort, Empirical Studies on the Post-Editing Process

    Machine Translation Post-Editing and Effort, Empirical Studies on the Post-Editing Process

    CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by Helsingin yliopiston digitaalinen arkisto Department of Modern Languages Faculty of Arts University of Helsinki Machine Translation Post-editing and Effort Empirical Studies on the Post-editing Process Maarit Koponen ACADEMIC DISSERTATION to be publicly discussed, by due permission of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Helsinki, in Auditorium XII, Main Building, on the 19th of March, 2016 at 10 o'clock. Helsinki 2016 Supervisor Prof. Lauri Carlson, University of Helsinki, Finland Pre-examiners Dr. Sharon O'Brien, Dublin City University, Ireland Dr. Jukka M¨akisalo,University of Eastern Finland, Finland Opponent Dr. Sharon O'Brien, Dublin City University, Ireland Copyright c 2016 Maarit Koponen ISBN 978-951-51-1974-2 (paperback) ISBN 978-951-51-1975-9 (PDF) Unigrafia Helsinki 2016 Abstract This dissertation investigates the practice of machine translation post-editing and the various aspects of effort involved in post-editing work. Through analy- ses of edits made by post-editors, the work described here examines three main questions: 1) what types of machine translation errors or source text features cause particular effort in post-editing, 2) what types of errors can or cannot be corrected without the help of the source text, and 3) how different indicators of effort vary between different post-editors. The dissertation consists of six previously published articles, and an introduc- tory summary. Five of the articles report original research, and involve analyses of post-editing data to examine questions related to post-editing effort as well as differences between post-editors.
  • Psychometric G: Definition and Substantiation

    Psychometric G: Definition and Substantiation

    Psychometric g: Definition and Substantiation Arthur R. Jensen University of Culifornia, Berkeley The construct known as psychometric g is arguably the most important construct in all of psychology largelybecause of its ubiquitous presence in all tests of mental ability and its wide-ranging predictive validity for a great many socially significant variables, including scholastic performance and intellectual attainments, occupational status, job performance, in- come, law abidingness, and welfare dependency. Even such nonintellec- tual variables as myopia, general health, and longevity, as well as many other physical traits, are positively related to g. Of course, the causal con- nections in the whole nexus of the many diverse phenomena involving the g factor is highly complex. Indeed, g and its ramifications cut across the behavioral sciences-brainphysiology, psychology, sociology-perhaps more than any other scientific construct. THE DOMAIN OF g THEORY It is important to keep in mind the distinction between intelligence and g, as these terms are used here. The psychology of intelligence could, at least in theory, be based on the study of one person,just as Ebbinghaus discov- ered some of the laws of learning and memory in experimentswith N = 1, using himself as his experimental subject. Intelligence is an open-ended category for all those mental processes we view as cognitive, such as stimu- lus apprehension, perception, attention, discrimination, generalization, 39 40 JENSEN learning and learning-set acquisition, short-term and long-term memory, inference, thinking, relation eduction, inductive and deductive reasoning, insight, problem solving, and language. The g factor is something else. It could never have been discovered with N = 1, because it reflects individual di,fferences in performance on tests or tasks that involve anyone or moreof the kinds of processes just referred to as intelligence.
  • Margaret Thomas Department of Slavic & Eastern Languages

    Margaret Thomas Department of Slavic & Eastern Languages

    CURRICULUM VITAE Margaret Thomas Department of Slavic & Eastern Languages & Literatures Boston College 24 Hemlock Road Chestnut Hill, MA 02467 Newton, MA 02464 (617) 552-3697 (617) 244-3105 [email protected] Education Ph.D. 1991 Harvard University Linguistics A.M. 1985 Harvard University Linguistics M.Ed. 1983 Boston University Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages B.A. 1974 Yale University Japanese Language and Literature Employment 2006– Professor, Slavic and Eastern Languages and Literatures, Boston College 1996–06 Associate Professor, Slavic and Eastern Languages Department, Boston College 1992–96 Assistant Professor, Slavic and Eastern Languages Department, Boston College 1991–92 Visiting Assistant Professor, Slavic and Eastern Languages, Boston College 1986–90 Teaching Fellow, Linguistics Department, Harvard University Publications 2013 ‘Air writing’ and second language learners’ knowledge of Japanese kanji. Japanese Language and Literature, 47: 59–92. Otto Jespersen and ‘The Woman’, then and now. Historiographia Linguistica, 40: 377–208. The doctorate in second language acquisition: An institutional history. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 3: 509–531. History of the study of second language acquisition. In Martha Young-Scholten and Julia Herschensohn (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition, 26–45. Cambridge University Press.. 2011 Fifty Key Thinkers on Language and Linguistics, pp. xvii + 306. Routledge Press. Gender and the language scholarship of the Summer Institute of Linguistics in the context of mid twentieth-century American linguistics. In Gerda Hassler (Ed.), History of Linguistics 2008: Selected Papers from the XI International Conference on the History of the Language Margaret Thomas 2 Sciences (ICHOLS XI), Potsdam, 28 August–2 September 2008, 389–397.
  • Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 1973

    Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 1973

    Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 1973 Language and International Studies Kurt R. Jankowsky Editor Georgetown University School of Languages and Linguistics Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 7 973 Language and International Studies Kurt R. Jankowsky Editor Georgetown University Press, Washington, D.C. 20007 Bibliographical Notice Since this series has been variously, and confusingly, cited as Georgetown University Monograph Series on Languages and Linguistics, Monograph Series on Languages and Linguistics, Reports of the Annual Round Table Meetings on Linguistics and Language Study, etc., beginning with the present volume the title of the series is being changed. The new title of the series includes the year of a Round Table and omits both the monograph number and the meeting number, thus: Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 1973, with the regular abbreviation GURT 1973. Full bibliographical references should show the form: Kiihlwein, W. 1973. Some social implications of language study. In: Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 1973. Edited by Kurt R. Jankowsky. Washington, D.C., Georgetown University Press. 19-24. Copyright © 1973 by Georgetown University Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 58-31607 ISBN 0-87840-108-3 TO ROBERT LADO FOR HIS INSPIRING LEADERSHIP AS DEAN OF THE SCHOOL OF LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTICS 1960-1973 111 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The twenty papers presented in the sessions of the twenty-fourth annual Georgetown University Round Table, March 15-17, 1973, appear in this volume. Unfortunately Melvin F. Fox, of the Ford Foundation, and Wolfgang Kuhlwein, of the University of Trier, previously announced as panelists, were unable to be present, al- though Professor Kiihlwein's paper is included in the present volume.
  • Machine Translation and Monolingual Postediting: the AFRL WMT-14 System Lane O.B

    Machine Translation and Monolingual Postediting: the AFRL WMT-14 System Lane O.B

    Machine Translation and Monolingual Postediting: The AFRL WMT-14 System Lane O.B. Schwartz Timothy Anderson Air Force Research Laboratory Air Force Research Laboratory [email protected] [email protected] Jeremy Gwinnup Katherine M. Young SRA International† N-Space Analysis LLC† [email protected] [email protected] Abstract test set for correctness against the reference translations. Using bilingual judges, we fur- This paper describes the AFRL sta- ther evaluate a substantial subset of the post- tistical MT system and the improve- edited test set using a more fine-grained ade- ments that were developed during the quacy metric; using this metric, we show that WMT14 evaluation campaign. As part monolingual posteditors can successfully pro- of these efforts we experimented with duce postedited translations that convey all or a number of extensions to the stan- most of the meaning of the original source sen- dard phrase-based model that improve tence in up to 87.8% of sentences. performance on Russian to English and Hindi to English translation tasks. 2 System Description In addition, we describe our efforts We submitted systems for the Russian-to- to make use of monolingual English English and Hindi-to-English MT shared speakers to correct the output of ma- tasks. In all submitted systems, we use the chine translation, and present the re- phrase-based moses decoder (Koehn et al., sults of monolingual postediting of the 2007). We used only the constrained data sup- entire 3003 sentences of the WMT14 plied by the evaluation for each language pair Russian-English test set.
  • Reproductions Supplied by EDRS Are the Best That Can Be Made from the Original Document

    Reproductions Supplied by EDRS Are the Best That Can Be Made from the Original Document

    DOCUMENT RESUME ED 482 489 FL 027 909 AUTHOR Liskin-Gasparro, Judith E., Ed. TITLE Patterns and Policies: The Changing Demographics of Foreign Language Instruction. Issues in Language Program Direction:A Series of Annual Volumes. ISBN ISBN-0-8384-5732-0 PUB DATE 1996-00-00 NOTE 246p.; Prepared by the American Association of University Supervisors, Coordinators, and Directors of ForeignLanguage Programs. AVAILABLE FROM Heinle & Heinle Publishers, 20 Park Plaza, Boston, MA 02116. Tel: 800-730-2214 (Toll Free); Fax: 800-730-2215 (TollFree); Web site: http://www.heinle.com. PUB TYPE Books (010) Collected Works General (020) EDRS PRICE EDRS Price MF01/PC10 Plus Postage. DESCRIPTORS Bilingualism; Case Studies; Chinese; *Curriculum Development; *Demography; Diversity (Student); Elementary Secondary Education; French; Gender Issues; German; Higher Education; Intercultural Communication; Literature; Native Language Instruction; Second Language Instruction; Spanish; Student Attitudes; Student Characteristics; Student Evaluation;Two Year Colleges IDENTIFIERS Georgia ABSTRACT This collection of papers is divided into threeparts. Part 1, "Changing Patterns: Curricular Implications," includes "Basic Assumptions Revisited: Today's French and Spanish Students at a Large Metropolitan University" (Gail Guntermann, Suzanne Hendrickson, and Carmen de Urioste) and "Le Francais et Mort, Vive le Francais: Rethinking the Function of French" (H. Jay Siskin, Mark A. Knowles, and Robert L. Davis) . Part 2, "Changing Patterns: Student Populations," includes "Do German Students Hold Gender Biases about Their TAs?" (Monika Chavez) ;"Teaching Chinese to the Chinese: The Development of an Assessment and Instructional Model" (Scott McGinnis); "Students Classified as Learning Disabled and the College Foreign Language Requirement: A Case Study of One University" (Richard L. Sparks, Lois Philips, and Leonore Ganschow); "Changing Demographics in Foreign Language Study and the Impact Upon Two-Year Colleges: A Case Study from Georgia" (Carol A.
  • Does a Fitness Factor Contribute to the Association Between Intelligence

    Does a Fitness Factor Contribute to the Association Between Intelligence

    ARTICLE IN PRESS INTELL-00516; No of Pages 11 Intelligence xxx (2009) xxx–xxx Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Intelligence journal homepage: Does a fitness factor contribute to the association between intelligence and health outcomes? Evidence from medical abnormality counts among 3654 US Veterans Rosalind Arden a,⁎, Linda S. Gottfredson b, Geoffrey Miller c a Social, Genetic, Developmental and Psychiatry Centre, Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, London SE5 8AF, United Kingdom b School of Education, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716, USA c Psychology Department, Logan Hall 160, University of New Mexico, MSC03 2220 Albuquerque, NM 87131-1161, USA article info abstract Available online xxxx We suggest that an over-arching ‘fitness factor’ (an index of general genetic quality that predicts survival and reproductive success) partially explains the observed associations between health Keywords: outcomes and intelligence. As a proof of concept, we tested this idea in a sample of 3654 US Fitness Vietnam veterans aged 31–49 who completed five cognitive tests (from which we extracted a g Intelligence factor), a detailed medical examination, and self-reports concerning lifestyle health risks (such Cognitive epidemiology as smoking and drinking). As indices of physical health, we aggregated ‘abnormality counts’ of Health physician-assessed neurological, morphological, and physiological abnormalities in eight Mutation load categories: cranial nerves, motor nerves, peripheral sensory nerves, reflexes, head, body, skin condition, and urine tests. Since each abnormality was rare, the abnormality counts showed highly skewed, Poisson-like distributions. The correlation matrix amongst these eight abnormality counts formed only a weak positive manifold and thus yielded only a weak common factor.
  • UC Merced Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

    UC Merced Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

    UC Merced Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society Title Dynamical cognitive models and the study of individual differences. Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4sn2v2j0 Journal Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 31(31) ISSN 1069-7977 Authors Kan, Kees Jan Van Der Maas, Han L.J. Publication Date 2009 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Dynamical cognitive models and the study of individual differences Han van der Maas & Kees Jan Kan A large part of psychology concerns the study of individual differences. Why do people differ in personality? What is the structure of individual differences in intelligence? What are the roles of nurture and nature? Researchers in these fields collect data of many subjects and apply statistical methods, most notably latent structure modeling, to uncover the structure and to infer the underlying sources of the individual differences. Cognitive science usually does not concern individual differences. In cognitive models we focus on the general mechanisms of cognitive processes and not the individual properties. We believe that these two traditions of modeling cannot remain separated. Models of mechanisms necessarily precede models of individual differences. We argue against the use of latent structure models of individual differences in psychological processes that do not explicate the underlying mechanisms. Our main example is general intelligence, a concept based on the analysis of group data. Scores on cognitive tasks used in intelligence tests correlate positively with each other, i.e., they display a positive manifold of correlations. The positive manifold is arguably both the best established, and the most striking phenomenon in the psychological study of intelligence.
  • The Ravages of Reification: Considering the Iceberg and Cultural Intelligence, Towards De-Reifying Intercultural Competence

    The Ravages of Reification: Considering the Iceberg and Cultural Intelligence, Towards De-Reifying Intercultural Competence

    The Ravages of Reification: Considering the Iceberg and Cultural Intelligence, Towards De-reifying Intercultural Competence Keynote Presentation for FILE IV, Colle Val d’Elsa, Sept. 28, 2013. Milton J. Bennett, Ph.D. Intercultural Development Research Institute What I'd like to do with you today is to extend a conversation begun with a couple of blogs I have published recently, adding a specific application to the topic of assessing intercultural competence. One of blogs that I wrote in June held that was time to retire the iceberg as a metaphor for culture. There were dozens of responses to that blog, from far more people than I thought would be reading the blog. This led to a very interesting conversation that I think is related to intercultural competence. The other blog is one I wrote comparing intercultural competence to the idea of intelligence, particularly its measurement as IQ. The issue around both blogs is that of "reification" (I'll give you the definition in a moment) and it is also the issue I believe we are dealing with in trying to talk about the assessment of intercultural competence. Basically, we need to "de- reify" the ideas of culture and intercultural competence back to some original root definition that would allow us to reestablish a more coherent approach to assessment. To put this talk in cultural terms, I'll be taking a more European than American approach. Americans tend to start out very optimistic about everything and in the end they do a little criticism. Europeans tend to do the reverse; they start with being very critical and sometimes end up with constructive suggestions.