Effects of simultaneous speech and sign on infants’ attention to spoken language

Objectives: To examine the hypothesis that infants receiving a degraded auditory signal have more difficulty segmenting words from fluent speech if familiarized with the words presented in both speech and sign compared to familiarization with the words presented in speech only. Study Design: Experiment utilizing an infant-controlled visual preference procedure. Methods: Twenty 8.5-month-old normal-hearing infants completed testing. Infants were familiarized with repetitions of words in either the speech + sign (n = 10) or the speech only (n = 10) condition. Results: Infants were then presented with four six-sentence passages using an infant-controlled visual preference procedure. Every sentence in two of the passages contained the words presented in the familiarization phase, whereas none of the sentences in the other two passages contained familiar words.Infants exposed to the speech + sign condition looked at familiar word passages for 15.3 seconds and at nonfamiliar word passages for 15.6 seconds, t (9) = -0.130, p = .45. Infants exposed to the speech only condition looked at familiar word passages for 20.9 seconds and to nonfamiliar word passages for 15.9 seconds. This difference was statistically significant, t (9) = 2.076, p = .03. Conclusions: Infants\u27 ability to segment words from degraded speech is negatively affected when these words are initially presented in simultaneous speech and sign. The current study suggests that a decreased ability to segment words from fluent speech may contribute towards the poorer performance of pediatric cochlear implant recipients in total communication settings on a wide range of spoken language outcome measures

The Division of Labour: An Examination of Certification Requirements

Under Canadian and American labour law, organized workers must be divided into bargaining units. In order to negotiate with employers on behalf of workers, these bargaining units must be certified. This entails receiving the approval of the appropriate labour relations board. The author argues that this requirement informs the outcomes of collective bargaining. This article takes the position that certification is a subtle method for maintaining the existing social order and the consequent distribution of power, without actually appearing to do so. Certification can be understood as a tool for fragmenting the potential power of labour\u27s unity. The present analysis draws on and consolidates some of the major themes in the critical legal, sociological, and political literature on labour/industrial relations

What Keeps A Man Alive: Screenplay and Analysis

Set during WWII, What Keeps a Man Alive tracks the fate of a renowned filmmaker and a crew of concentration camp inmates after they are coerced into producing a fraudulent documentary to deceive inspectors from the Red Cross. Loosely based on events that transpired in Theresienstadt concentration camp in the summer of 1944, the screenplay explores themes of documentary bias, the thin line between truth and fiction, heroism and self-sacrifice, and the strength of familial bonds as they are tested in extreme conditions

Holding Responsible Reconsidered

Following Strawson, many philosophers have claimed that holding someone responsible necessitates its being appropriate to feel or express the negative reactive attitudes (e.g., resentment) toward her. This view, while compelling, is unable to capture the full range of cases in which we hold others responsible in ordinary life. Consider the parent who holds her five-year-old responsible for not teasing his sister, or the therapist who holds her patient responsible for avoiding self-injurious behavior. Holding responsible in such cases requires enforcing normative expectations, but these norms can (and typically should) be enforced without involving the negative reactive attitudes. To demonstrate this, I consider how responsibility attributions function in psychotherapy, as well as in other contexts where the negative reactive attitudes do not have a natural home

Responsibility and the Problem of So-Called Marginal Agents

Philosophical views of responsibility often identify responsible agency with capacities like rationality and self-control. Yet in ordinary life, we frequently hold individuals responsible who are deficient in these capacities, such as children or people with mental illness. The existing literature that addresses these cases has suggested that we merely pretend to hold these agents responsible, or that they are responsible to a diminished degree. In this paper, I demonstrate that neither of these approaches is satisfactory, and offer an alternative focused on the role relationships play in determining whether it is appropriate to hold someone responsible. I argue that relationships are sources of normative expectations about how parties in that relationship ought to behave, and that we can be responsible in virtue of being subject to these norms. This is so, not only for those who are impaired or immature, but for all of us

The Pseudo-RSA scheme : a suggested improvement to the RSA cryptography scheme

In this thesis, some suggested improvements are made to the RSA scheme of Rivest, Shamir, and Adieman. In particular, it is suggested that the primes , p , be selected using pseudoprimality testing with tests for small factors of p -1 and p + 1 as opposed to the Solovay-Strassen or Rabin Tests. This requires additional greatest common divisor tests. It is also suggested that the Euler function Φ(n) be replaced by the Carmichael function λ(n) (or its generalization L(n)) in the production of encryption and decryption keys. In addition, further greatest common divisor tests are proposed when encoding to increase security