On the surface, the recent mobilization of opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) over the internet appears to be yet another cyberactivism success. Yet, the antiSOPA movement should have been doomed to failure for two reasons. First, the issue was too abstract to mobilize local kinship and friendship groups. Second, because mass media interests were served by the bill, mass media was ...

In this paper, we examine three interrelated issues: designing for teaching instructional design, the feasibility of constructivist ID methods and the multifaceted evaluation of computer-supported learning environments. After a brief review of the available literature, we present our own course which mixes traditional ID methods with the Crossley and Green’s practical guide for developing compu...

Steingrimsson and Luce (2005a, 2005b, 2006, 2007) evaluated Luce's (2002, 2004) proposed psychophysical theory of loudness and found it substantially supported. The aim of the present research is to begin an extension of this research to brightness. Luce's (2002, 2004) theory deals with the global percept of subjective intensity, in which there is a psychophysical function Psi that maps pairs o...

Existing evidence shows that more abstract mental representations are formed and more abstract language is used to characterize phenomena that are more distant from the self. Yet the precise form of the functional relationship between distance and linguistic abstractness is unknown. In four studies, we tested whether more abstract language is used in textual references to more geographically di...

Evidence for the absolute nature of long-term auditory memory is provided by analyzing the production of familiar melodies. Additionally, a two-component theory of absolute pitch is presented, in which this rare ability is conceived as consisting of a more common ability, pitch memory, and a separate, less common ability, pitch labeling. Forty-six subjects sang two different popular songs, and ...

Child productions of two-syllable strong-weak words like baby and cookie are observed to exhibit a wide range of implementations of the medial stop consonant compared to adult productions. Detailed acoustic analysis of these consonants reported here lays the groundwork for prosodic analysis of the role of foot structure in the development of production of bisyllabic words. Acoustic details of t...

This investigation explores perceptual and acoustic characteristics of children's successful and unsuccessful productions of /t/ and /k/, with a specific aim of exploring perceptual sensitivity to phonetic detail, and the extent to which this sensitivity is reflected in the acoustic domain. Recordings were collected from 4- to 8-year-old children with a speech sound disorder (SSD) who misarticu...

Child-directed speech (CDS) is a talking style adopted by caregivers when they talk to toddlers (Snow, 1995). We consider the role of distributional semantic features of CDS in language acquisition. We view semantic structure as a manifold on which words lie. We compare the semantic structure of verbs in CDS to the semantic structure of child speech (CS) and adult-directed speech (ADS) by measu...

This study examines the acoustic correlates of stress in children’s productions of bisyllabic and trisyllabic words, differing in stress placement. Acoustic results of the data of two children aged 4;11 to 6;1 are reported as a part of a more comprehensive study on the acquisition of stress in German. In contrast to recent findings that infants show an early preference in perception for rhythmi...