Metacognitive Strategies for Developing Complex Geographical Causal Structures—An Interventional Study in the Geography Classroom

This article examines the impact of applied metacognition on the development of geographical causal structures by students in the geography classroom. For that, three different metacognitive strategies were designed: a. action plan, activating meta-knowledge prior to problem-solving and simultaneously visualizing action steps for dealing with the task (A); b. circular thinking (C), a loop-like, question-guided procedure applied during the problem-solving process that supports and controls content-related and linguistic cognition processes; c. reflexion (R), aiming at evaluating the effectivity and efficiency of applied problem-solving heuristics after the problem-solving process and developing strategies for dealing with future tasks. These strategies were statistically tested and assessed as to their effectiveness on the development of complex geographical causal structures via a quasi-experimental pre-posttest design. It can be shown that metacognitive strategies strongly affect students’ creation of causal structures, which depict a multitude of elements and relations at a high degree of interconnectedness, thus enabling a contentually and linguistically coherent representation of system-specific properties of the human–environment system. On the basis of the discussion of the results, it will be demonstrated that metacognitive strategies can provide a significant contribution to initiating systemic thinking-competences and what the implications might be on planning and teaching geography lessons.

CULTURAL AND AESTHETIC KNOWLEDGE - A QUALITATIVE BASIS OF HUMAN CAPITAL

The article is aimed at defining cognitive concepts and principles in Kazakh linguistics based on research papers that measure the nature of the language and the semantics of the word in the context of their functioning. The analysis of the conceptual system and cognitive paradigm in the cognitive theory of the Kazakh language is becoming an urgent problem of modern interdisciplinary science with the national identity and world practice. The cognitive theory, which originates from the spiritual and value heritage of the Kazakh people harmoniously combined the foundations of linguistic cognition, and also substantiated a wide conceptual block of the human capital’s cognition. Its complex patterns contributed to the accumulation of social, psychological, ethnic and cultural methodological foundations of normalized general and private linguistics. The possibility of comparing linguistic universals using the relationship between language and cognition also characterized the influence of anthropological, axiological, anthropo-typological, areal, and geneological factors. Thus, in the history of cognitive linguistics, which studies the laws of the environment and its linguistic picture, Kazakh linguistics has designated its research format, taking into account a number of conceptual operations.

A private language argument to elucidate the relation between mind and language

I will defend the claim that we need to differentiate between thinking and reasoning in order to make progress in understanding the intricate relation between language and mind. The distinction between thinking and reasoning will allow us to apply a structural equivalent of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Private Language Argument to the domain of mind and language. This argumentative strategy enables us to show that and how a certain subcategory of cognitive processes, namely reasoning, is constitutively dependent on language. The final outcome and claim of this paper can be summarized as follows: We can think without language, but we cannot reason without language. While this still leaves several questions about the relation between mind and language unanswered, I hold that the insights defended in this paper provide the basis and proper framework for further investigation about the relationship between language and the mind.Keywords: Private language argument, Wittgenstein, thought/mind and language, reasoning, linguistic relativity, non-linguistic cognition.

GRAMMATICAL SCHEMAS OF SECONDARY LINGUISTIC INTERPRETATION

The author analyses grammatical forms of linguistic cognition which are used for primary and secondary interpretation of the world in the process of its mental construal in language, i.e. cognitive schemas of direct interpretation of variety of objects, events and of their characteristics as they are perceived in the world around (primary interpretation), on the one hand, and those of interpretation of previously gained and verbalized conventional knowledge about the world, on the other. He argues that structuring world and world knowledge in the processes of conceptualization and categorization is always interpretative and follows some general, or conventional, and specific, or individual, cognitive schemas. This argument is derived from the author-suggested three-member pattern of language functions, claiming ‘the interpretive function’ to be a basic one along with the cognitive and communicative functions. It is the interpretive function of language that requires a broad choice of schemas to structure the world and the world knowledge and to trigger basic processes of linguistic interpretation. Among the conventional grammatical schemas employed in these processes are certain types of concepts and categories, propositional, metaphoric, and metonymic models represented by different types of syntactic structures, simple or complex, as well as the structure of various types of texts. Individually specific can be human particular systems of conceptualization and categorization, complex propositions, newly-construed metaphors, and modified conventional schemas which are specifically represented in language.

Metafizyka poznania lingwistycznego

What is linguistic cognition and how does it relate to metaphysics? All the threads of this book revolve around this question. One of these themes is crucial: the rational soul and its cognitive powers. Another but no less important theme is the diagnosis of what linguists call (the sense of) communication. In this understanding, communication is viewed predominantly in relation to abstract concepts.

Proximate and ultimate explanations of individual differences in language use and language acquisition

I evaluate three schools in linguistics (structuralism; generative linguistics; usage based linguistics) from the perspective of Karl Popper’s critical rationalism. Theories (providing proximate explanations) may be falsified at some point in time. In contrast, metatheories, such as Darwin’s theory of evolution and the theory of Language as a Complex Adaptive System (LCAS) (providing ultimate explanations) are falsifiable in principle, but not likely to be falsified. I then argue that LCAS provides a fruitful framework for the explanation of individual differences in language acquisition and use. Unequal frequency distributions of linguistic elements constitute a necessary characteristic of language production, in line with LCAS. However, explaining individual differences implies explaining commonalities (Hulstijn, 2015, 2019). While attributes such as people’s level of education and profession are visible in knowledge of the standard language (declarative knowledge acquired in school), they may be invisible in the spoken vernacular (linguistic cognition shared by all native speakers).

Universal linguistic hierarchies are not innately wired. Evidence from multiple adjectives

Background Linguists and psychologists have explained the remarkable similarities in the orderings of linguistic elements across languages by suggesting that our inborn ability for language makes available certain innately wired primitives. Different types of adjectives, adverbs, and other elements in the functional spine are considered to occupy fixed positions via innate hierarchies that determine orderings such as A>B>C, banning other permutations (*B>C>A). The goal of this research is to tap into the nature and rigidity of such hierarchies by comparing what happens when people process orderings that either comply with them or violate them. Method N = 170 neurotypical, adult speakers completed a timed forced choice task that featured stimuli showing a combination of two adjectives and a Spelke-object (e.g., ‘I bought a square black table’). Two types of responses were collected: (i) acceptability judgments on a 3-point Likert scale that featured the options ‘correct’, ‘neither correct nor wrong’, and ‘wrong’ and (ii) reaction times. The task featured three conditions: 1. size adjective > nationality adjective, 2. color adjective > shape adjective, 3. subjective comment adjective > material adjective. Each condition had two orders. In the congruent order, the adjective pair was ordered in agreement with what is traditionally accepted as dictated by the universal hierarchy. In the incongruent order, the ordering was reversed, thus the hierarchy was violated. Results In the first experiment, the results of n = 140 monolinguals showed that across conditions, both congruent and incongruent orders were generally accepted as correct. For 2/3 conditions, the difference in acceptability ratings between congruent and incongruent orders did not reach statistical significance. Using time as a window to processing, reaction times showed that incongruent orders do not take longer to process than congruent ones, as should be the case if the former were treated as being licensed under some type of special condition (e.g., contrastive focus) that reverses the unmarked order and legitimizes the violation of the hierarchy. In the second experiment, the results of n = 30 bidialectals, tested in both language varieties, corroborated the findings of the first experiment. Conclusions Our findings do not provide evidence for an innate hierarchy for adjective ordering that imposes one rigid, unmarked order. We discuss the importance of notions such as subjectivity and inherentness, and show that for some conditions, not only is there no evidence for a hard constraint that bans incongruent orders, but even simple preferences of congruent orders over incongruent ones are hard to discern. Capturing the bigger picture, given that both the hierarchies and their legit permutations have been described as innate, our results reduce the amount of primitives that are cast as innate, eventually offering a deflationist approach to human linguistic cognition.

Mental imagery in psychiatry: conceptual & clinical implications

Mental imagery refers to the experience of perception in the absence of external sensory input. Deficits in the ability to generate mental imagery or to distinguish it from actual sensory perception are linked to neurocognitive conditions such as dementia and schizophrenia, respectively. However, the importance of mental imagery to psychiatry extends beyond neurocognitive impairment. Mental imagery has a stronger link to emotion than verbal-linguistic cognition, serving to maintain and amplify emotional states, with downstream impacts on motivation and behavior. As a result, anomalies in the occurrence of emotion-laden mental imagery has transdiagnostic significance for emotion, motivation, and behavioral dysfunction across mental disorders. This review aims to demonstrate the conceptual and clinical significance of mental imagery in psychiatry through examples of mood and anxiety disorders, self-harm and suicidality, and addiction. We contend that focusing on mental imagery assessment in research and clinical practice can increase our understanding of the cognitive basis of psychopathology in mental disorders, with the potential to drive the development of algorithms to aid treatment decision-making and inform transdiagnostic treatment innovation.