Bilingualism and cognition VALIAN, VIRGINIA
Bilingualism (Cambridge, England),
01/2015, Letnik:
18, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The relation between bilingualism and cognition is informative about the connection between language and mind. From the perspective of language, the question is how bilingualism might help or hinder ...cognition – narrowly interpreted here as executive function. From the perspective of higher cognition, the question is what kinds of experiences improve executive function. Reported cognitive benefits from bilingualism range from none to substantial as a function of age, type of bilingualism (e.g., life-long balanced vs later-onset or infrequent use of the other language), syntactic relation between the two languages, socio-economic and immigrant status, task, and laboratory. To understand the variability and inconsistencies in results with bilingualism, I analyze concepts of executive function and cognitive reserve and examine the range of factors (such as active video game playing, education, musical training, and aerobic exercise) that are known to correlate with or to improve executive function. I suggest that a) “executive function” is a complex set of cognitive processes, the components of which are sometimes minimally correlated with each other, depending on the task; b) bilingualism is inconsistently correlated with superior executive function and delayed onset of dementia; c) all speakers (mono- or bilingual) have non-linguistic ways of improving executive function; and d) benefits from bilingualism – and all cognitively challenging activities – are inconsistent because individuals vary in the number and kinds of experiences they have that promote superior executive function.
How colleges and universities can live up to their ideals of diversity, and why inclusivity and excellence go hand in hand. Most colleges and universities embrace the ideals of diversity and ...inclusion, but many fall short, especially in the hiring, retention, and advancement of faculty who would more fully represent our diverse world--in particular women and people of color. In this book, Abigail Stewart and Virginia Valian argue that diversity and excellence go hand in hand and provide guidance for achieving both. Stewart and Valian, themselves senior academics, support their argument with comprehensive data from a range of disciplines. They show why merit is often overlooked; they offer statistics and examples of individual experiences of exclusion, such as being left out of crucial meetings; and they outline institutional practices that keep exclusion invisible, including reliance on proxies for excellence, such as prestige, that disadvantage outstanding candidates who are not members of the white male majority. Perhaps most important, Stewart and Valian provide practical advice for overcoming obstacles to inclusion. This advice is based on their experiences at their own universities, their consultations with faculty and administrators at many other institutions, and data on institutional change. Stewart and Valian offer recommendations for changing structures and practices so that people become successful in ways that benefit everyone. They describe better ways of searching for job candidates; evaluating candidates for hiring, tenure, and promotion; helping faculty succeed; and broadening rewards and recognition.
The gender gap lives on Valian, Virginia
Nature (London),
07/2023, Letnik:
619, Številka:
7969
Journal Article
Recenzirano
...the 2000s, women were under-represented, but in the past 20 years, women have been advantaged relative to similarly credentialed men in psychology, economics and mathematics. Big data The book ...isn't all numbers. Besides copious amounts of data, the book provides revealing vignettes of the experiences of women in science, along with telling examples of institutional practices, both past and present. According to various studies, women are on average more engaged in parenting than are men, especially "invisible" parenting - being on call, planning, monitoring children's emotional well-being and so on.
This paper describes the Gender Equity Project (GEP) at Hunter College of the City University of New York (CUNY), funded by the U. S. NSF ADVANCE Institutional Transformation Award (ITA) program. ...ADVANCE supports system-level strategies to promote gender equity in the social and natural sciences, but has supported very few teaching-intensive institutions. Hunter College is a teaching-intensive institution in which research productivity among faculty is highly valued and counts toward tenure and promotion. We created the GEP to address the particular challenges that faculty, especially White women and faculty of color, face in maintaining research programs and advancing in their careers at teaching-intensive institutions. During the course of the ADVANCE award, its centerpiece was the Sponsorship Program, a multifaceted paid mentorship/sponsorship program that paired each participant with a successful scholar in her discipline. It offered extensive professional development opportunities, including interactive workshops and internal grants to support research. The GEP helped change key policies and practices by ensuring that all faculty were treated fairly in areas like provision of research start-up funds and access to guidance on how to prepare for tenure and promotion. Qualitative and quantitative evidence suggests that participation in the Sponsorship Program boosted research productivity and advanced the careers of many of the women who participated; the Program was highly rated by all participants. Some of the policy and practice changes that the GEP helped bring about were sustained at Hunter beyond the award period and some were adopted and disseminated by the central office of CUNY. However, we were not able to sustain the relatively expensive (but cost-effective) Sponsorship Program. We share the lessons we learned, including that creating a diverse, successful social and natural scientific workforce requires sustained support of female faculty employed at teaching-intensive colleges. We acknowledge the difficulties of sustaining gains, and offer ideas about how to make the case for gender equity when women seem to be doing “well enough.” We underscore the imperative of building support for women’s research in teaching-intensive institutions, where most women scientists are employed, and well over 90% of all college students—a disproportionate percentage of whom are female, minoritized, or both—are educated.
We use syntactic priming to test the abstractness of the sentence representations of young 3-year-olds (35–42 months). In describing pictures with inanimate participants, 18 children primed with ...passives produced more passives (11 with a strict scoring scheme, 16 with lax scoring) than did 18 children primed with actives (2 on either scheme) or 12 children who received no priming (0). Priming was comparable to that reported for older children and adults. Comprehension of reversible passives with animate participants before and after priming was above chance but did not improve as a result of priming. Young 3-year-olds represent sentences abstractly, have syntactic representations for noun, verb, “surface subject”, and “surface object”, have semantic representations for “agent” and “patient”, and flexibly map the relation between syntax and semantics. Taken together with research on syntactic categories in 2-year-olds, our results provide empirical support for continuity in language acquisition.
The first stage of combinatorial speech is better described as variable than uniform. Talk of variants obscures two different aspects of language (knowledge and use) and two different aspects of ...language development - acquisition of the grammar (competence) and deployment of the grammar in speaking and listening (performance). Null subjects and Determiners are examples in English of early variability. The limited data in other languages make it impossible to make sweeping claims about early acquisition.
This work separately applies two psychology frameworks—the three dimensions along which people are evaluated (competence, morality, and warmth) and individual sociopolitical attitudes (modern sexism ...MS, right‐wing authoritarianism RWA, and social dominance orientation (SDO)—to explore voter evaluations of Donald Trump and Joseph Biden both prior to (Study 1), and in the month following (Study 2), the 2020 U.S. presidential election. At both time points, Democrats and Republicans rated their own party's candidate similarly on the three trait dimensions and overall favorability. They differed, however, in evaluations of the other party's candidate. Republicans viewed Biden more positively both overall and on the trait dimensions than Democrats viewed Trump. Favorability ratings and trait perceptions for one's own party candidate were comparable pre‐ and postelection but were more negative postelection for the opposite party's candidate. RWA predicted favorability toward Trump, above and beyond political affiliation and sociodemographic factors, at both time points in addition to MS preelection and SDO postelection; RWA negatively predicted favorability toward Biden pre‐ but not postelection. Moreover, RWA predicted a vote for Trump versus Biden above and beyond political affiliation, highlighting the importance of considering sociopolitical attitudes in political decision‐making.
PDF
