Search results for "meaning"

Telecollaboration in a secondary school context: Negotiation of meaning in English as a lingua franca/Spanish tandem interactions

2015

En este artículo presentamos nuestra investigación sobre la negociación de significado en dos interacciones con los mismos estudiantes españoles y alemanes de 16 años de edad en colegios de España y Alemania respectivamente. Las interacciones incluyen dos constelaciones de idioma, es decir, inglés como lengua franca y un tándem español. Nuestra investigación se llevó a cabo dentro del proyecto Telecollaboration for Intercultural Language Acquisition project (TILA). Nuestro análisis cualitativo de la interacción demuestra que la telecolaboración ofrece muchas oportunidades para la comprensión y el aprendizaje. No hemos encontrado pruebas concluyentes para apoyar la hipótesis de que la negoci…

Heteroglossia in Action: Sámi Children, Textbooks and Rap

2013

This chapter examines heteroglossia in the complex, continuously evolving multilingual context of Samiland, the historically and culturally central area for indigenous Sami culture and languages. The analytical discussion is of a rap about textbooks, created and performed by a group of Sami children with the help of their teachers and parents that they presented as their petition for more Sami language teaching materials. The rap is viewed as an example of heteroglossic practices, a strategic mobilization, mixture and recycling of multiple meaning making resources that result in a polyphonic performance.

Two ways to metaphor comprehension in comparison: towards a bidimensional account of metaphor comprehension - poster

In this paper we will discuss the role of literal meaning and mental imagery in metaphor comprehension, showing their link and the problematic nature of these notions in pragmatics (Wilson & Carston 2019). We will try to overcome these problems by putting in dialogue the typology of metaphors offered by Carston (2010, 2018), based on the parameter of literal meaning, and the typology offered by Green (2017) based on the parameter of mental imagery. Carston (2018) recognizes the existence of two kinds of metaphors: (1) local metaphors such as “Giulio is a professor” in which a single lexical item - PROFESSOR - is modulated pragmatically; (2) metaphors such as “The yellow fog that rubs it…

Aspirations and wellbeing in Romanian and US undergraduates.

2011

Updating cross-cultural research of the past decade on the relationship between life aspirations and wellbeing, we compared Romanian (N=69) and US (N=64) undergraduates on the contribution of the importance and likelihood of attaining intrinsic and extrinsic aspirations to psychological maladjustment and life satisfaction, and on the qualitative meaning they assign to financial success. Similarly to prior studies, we found that extrinsic and intrinsic aspirations tended to be either negatively or positively correlated with life satisfaction, respectively; however, wealth predicted life satisfaction for Romanian students. Unlike previous research, we found generally negative relationships be…

How the Context Matters. Literal and Figurative Meaning in the Embodied Language Paradigm

2014

The involvement of the sensorimotor system in language understanding has been widely demonstrated. However, the role of context in these studies has only recently started to be addressed. Though words are bearers of a semantic potential, meaning is the product of a pragmatic process. It needs to be situated in a context to be disambiguated. The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that embodied simulation occurring during linguistic processing is contextually modulated to the extent that the same sentence, depending on the context of utterance, leads to the activation of different effector-specific brain motor areas. In order to test this hypothesis, we asked subjects to give a moto…

Meaning in life among adolescents: Factorial invariance of the Purpose in Life Test and buffering effect on the relationship between emotional dysreg…

2019

Objective: The purpose of the present study was threefold: first, to analyse the psychometric properties of a 10‐item Spanish version of the Purpose in Life Test, which assesses meaning in life (MiL), in a sample of community adolescents; second, to analyse the differences between the age and gender groups; and third, to analyse whether MiL buffers the relationship between emotional dysregulation and hopelessness. Method: Participants were 1,599 adolescents from 12 to 19 years old, M = 15.69, SD = 2.14. The Purpose in Life Test‐10 Items, the Beck Hopelessness Scale, and the Difficulties in Emotional Regulation Scale were used. Results: A nine‐item version showed good fit, psychometric prope…

Meaning in life is associated with the psychopathology of eating disorders: differences depending on the diagnosis

2019

Previous studies indicated that meaning in life was inversely associated with eating behaviors and a negative attitude toward food, body satisfaction, and borderline symptoms. However, research on the association between meaning in life and eating disorder psychopathology is scarce, and there are no studies on the association between meaning in life and the eating disorder psychopathology depending on the diagnosis. The aim of the present study is to verify whether meaning in life is differentially associated with a broad range of psychopathology symptoms commonly observed in people with ED, depending on the diagnosis, in a sample of 240 ED patients. We found that meaning in life was negati…

Eating-related Intrusive Thoughts Inventory: exploring the dimensionality of eating disorder symptoms.

2011

The aims of this study were, first, to examine the structure and validity of the Eating-related Intrusive Thoughts Inventory (INPIAS), a self-report questionnaire designed to assess eating disorders related to intrusive thoughts (EDITs), and second, to explore the existence of a continuum ranging from normal to abnormal thought intrusions related to eating, weight, and shape. Participants were 574 (408 women) nonclinical community individuals. Analyses revealed that EDITs can be clustered into three sets: appearance-dieting, need to exercise, and thoughts-impulses related to eating disorders. EDITs' consequences showed a two-factor structure: emotional consequences/personal meaning and tho…

How Work Characteristics Are Related to European Workers’ Psychological Well-Being. A Comparison of Two Age Groups

2018

This study aimed to analyze the mechanisms through which work characteristics are related to psychological well-being, exploring the mediational role of work meaningfulness and job satisfaction, and investigating differences in the patterns of relationships between two age groups. The sample was composed of 36,896 workers from the 5th European Working Conditions Survey. Structural equation modeling analyses and multiple group analyses were performed. The results revealed a parallel mediational model, in which work meaningfulness and general job satisfaction mediate the relationships between work characteristics and well-being. Additionally, job satisfaction partially mediates the relationsh…

Meaningful physical changes mediate lexical-semantic integration: top-down and form-based bottom-up information sources interact in the N400

2011

Models of how the human brain reconstructs an intended meaning from a linguistic input often draw upon the N400 event-related potential (ERP) component as evidence. Current accounts of the N400 emphasise either the role of contextually induced lexical preactivation of a critical word (Lau, Phillips,& Poeppel, 2008) or the ease of integration into the overall discourse context including a wide variety of influencing factors (Hagoort & van Berkum, 2007). The present ERP study challenges both types of accounts by demonstrating a contextually independent and purely form-based bottom-up influence on the N400: the N400 effect for implausible sentence-endings was attenuated when the critical sente…