Friend matters: sex differences in social language during autism diagnostic interviews

Background Autistic individuals frequently experience social communication challenges. Girls are diagnosed with autism less often than boys even when their symptoms are equally severe, which may be due to insufficient understanding of the way autism manifests in girls. Differences in the behavioral presentation of autism, including how people talk about social topics, could contribute to these persistent problems with identification. Despite a growing body of research suggesting that autistic girls and boys present distinct symptom profiles in a variety of domains, including social attention, friendships, social motivation, and language, differences in the way that autistic boys and girls communicate verbally are not yet well understood. Closely analyzing boys’ and girls’ socially-focused language during semi-structured clinical assessments could shed light on potential sex differences in the behavioral presentation of autistic individuals that may prove useful for identifying and effectively supporting autistic girls. Here, we compare social word use in verbally fluent autistic girls and boys during the interview sections of the ADOS-2 Module 3 and measure associations with clinical phenotype. Methods School-aged girls and boys with autism (N = 101, 25 females; aged 6–15) were matched on age, IQ, and parent/clinician ratings of autism symptom severity. Our primary analysis compared the number of social words produced by autistic boys and girls (normalized to account for differences in total word production). Social words are words that make reference to other people, including friends and family. Results There was a significant main effect of sex on social word production, such that autistic girls used more social words than autistic boys. To identify the specific types of words driving this effect, additional subcategories of friend and family words were analyzed. There was a significant effect of sex on friend words, with girls using significantly more friend words than boys. However, there was no significant main effect of sex on family words, suggesting that sex differences in social word production may be driven by girls talking more about friends compared to boys, not family. To assess relationships between word use and clinical phenotype, we modeled ADOS-2 Social Affect (SA) scores as a function of social word production. In the overall sample, social word use correlated significantly with ADOS-2 SA scores, indicating that participants who used more social words were rated as less socially impaired by clinicians. However, when examined in each sex separately, this result only held for boys. Limitations This study cannot speak to the ways in which social word use may differ for younger children, adults, or individuals who are not verbally fluent; in addition, there were more autistic boys than girls in our sample, making it difficult to detect small effects. Conclusions Autistic girls used significantly more social words than boys during a diagnostic assessment—despite being matched on age, IQ, and both parent- and clinician-rated autism symptom severity. Sex differences in linguistic markers of social phenotype in autism are especially important in light of the late or missed diagnoses that disproportionately affect autistic girls. Specifically, heightened talk about social topics could complicate autism referral and diagnosis when non-clinician observers expect a male-typical pattern of reduced social focus, which autistic girls may not always exhibit.

Investigation into Common Errors in English Writing among Non-Academic Staff at a Malaysian Public University

The Malaysian government has long recognized the significance of mastering the English language among its citizenry. The government has planned, and subsequently, implemented many policies to ensure Malaysians master the English language. Although civil servants have a strong desire to master the English language to perform their duties more efficiently, poor English communication skills have become a major concern in this regard. Therefore, this research aims to investigate common errors in writing the English language among non-academic staff at Universiti Sultan Zainal Abidin (UniSZA), a public university in Malaysia. The study employed an Error Analysis approach by conducting document analysis where every respondent was required to write a paragraph in the English language in about 150-200 words on the topic“My greatest challenge as a UniSZA officer”. The findings revealed that a sizeable number of non-academic staff committed different types of errors in writing the English language, including errors related to subject-verb agreement, passive voice, plurality, choice of word, omission of word, use of article, tense sequence, word ordering, gerund, addition of word/redundancy, and comparison of adjective. It was observed that lack of linguistic skills, lack of exposure, and inadequate practices in written English were the main factors contributing to the English writing errors among the non-academic staff. These findings could help the university management to develop appropriate programs that can assist the non-academic staff to develop English writing competence. However, this study is limited to English writing errors. Further research may focus on other language skills such as speaking and listening.

The commognitive perspective of teaching skills of prospective mathematics teachers in microteaching subjects

This study aims to describe the teaching skills of prospective mathematics education teachers in micro-teaching subjects from a commognitive perspective. This type of research is qualitative research. The research subjects consisted of 15 students of the 2015 Mathematics Education Study Program class, which were taking micro-teaching courses. The instrument used in this study was a rubric sheet—an assessment of prospective teachers' teaching skills. Data analysis techniques used are data reduction, data presentation, and conclusion collection. The results showed that: Prospective mathematics education teachers in preliminary activities often use the word usage component, visual mediator, routine and do not use the narrative component. In the core activities of learning mathematics, teacher candidates use four components commognitive, which are the use of words, visual mediators, routine, and narrative. In the selection of mathematics education, teacher candidates only use the word use component. Commognitive provides an overview of mathematical cognitive-communication and content in the learning carried out.

Terrorism and Technology

The globalization era, also known as the era of technological evolution, has changed the narrative of international, regional and national security strategy. Terrorism is an evitable word use to describe recent events in the world. the emergence of new technological devices has both negative and positive impact in the world challenged by transnational actors. The paper examines the definition and forms of acts of terrorism in connection with technology, in order to understand the continual existence of the menace despite measures adopted by states. Hence, there exist no generally accepted definition of terrorism. The paper analysis the link between terrorism and technology from two dimensions; first, exploring the impact of technology in relation to the rise of terrorist groups and as well the role of the media. The second part, examines the challenges and the advantage of technology in relation to national security.

Investigation into Common Errors in English Writing among Non-Academic Staff at a Malaysian Public University

The Malaysian government has long recognized the significance of mastering the English language among its citizenry. The government has planned, and subsequently, implemented many policies to ensure Malaysians master the English language. Although civil servants have a strong desire to master the English language to perform their duties more efficiently, poor English communication skills have become a major concern in this regard. Therefore, this research aims to investigate common errors in writing the English language among non-academic staff at Universiti Sultan Zainal Abidin (UniSZA), a public university in Malaysia. The study employed an Error Analysis approach by conducting document analysis where every respondent was required to write a paragraph in the English language in about 150-200 words on the topic“My greatest challenge as a UniSZA officer”. The findings revealed that a sizeable number of non-academic staff committed different types of errors in writing the English language, including errors related to subject-verb agreement, passive voice, plurality, choice of word, omission of word, use of article, tense sequence, word ordering, gerund, addition of word/redundancy, and comparison of adjective. It was observed that lack of linguistic skills, lack of exposure, and inadequate practices in written English were the main factors contributing to the English writing errors among the non-academic staff. These findings could help the university management to develop appropriate programs that can assist the non-academic staff to develop English writing competence. However, this study is limited to English writing errors. Further research may focus on other language skills such as speaking and listening.

Measuring engagement among older adults using a multidimensional analysis of communication: Method Design (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Characterising older adult engagement is important to determine the effectiveness of interventions. Engagement is the occupying of oneself in external stimuli and is observable across multiple dimensions of behaviour. Engagement of older adults is commonly investigated on a single behavioural dimension. OBJECTIVE In this article, we present a multidisciplinary approach for measuring and characterising engagement of older adults using techniques appropriate for people with varying degrees of dementia. METHODS Contexts for engagement included a dyadic reminiscence therapy interview and a 12-week technology driven group reminiscence therapy. Participants were older adults (8 female, 1 male, mean age: 79) who attended a day respite facility. Audio-visual recordings of the sessions were processed to analyse facial movement, lexical use, and prosodic patterns of speech. Facial movement was processed using OpenFace to measure the presence and intensity of facial movement. Lexical use was processed using the Linguistic Enquiry and Word Count to measure personal pronoun use, affective word use, and emotional tone of words in speech. Prosodic patterns of speech were processed using custom scripts written in Praat and Python, to measure mean duration of utterances, mean words per utterance, articulation rate and variability of F0. Mixed-effects modelling was used to assess effects of treatment conditions on dependent variable outcomes. RESULTS Results indicate measuring engagement through a multidimensional approach can sensitively capture older adults’ engagement. CONCLUSIONS Application of this method can enhance a researcher’s ability to measure older adult engagement, provide means to compare across interventions and contextual environments, and further develop the science of psychosocial intervention research.

CLARITY: comparing heterogeneous data using dissimilarity

Integrating datasets from different disciplines is hard because the data are often qualitatively different in meaning, scale and reliability. When two datasets describe the same entities, many scientific questions can be phrased around whether the (dis)similarities between entities are conserved across such different data. Our method, CLARITY, quantifies consistency across datasets, identifies where inconsistencies arise and aids in their interpretation. We illustrate this using three diverse comparisons: gene methylation versus expression, evolution of language sounds versus word use, and country-level economic metrics versus cultural beliefs. The non-parametric approach is robust to noise and differences in scaling, and makes only weak assumptions about how the data were generated. It operates by decomposing similarities into two components: a ‘structural’ component analogous to a clustering, and an underlying ‘relationship’ between those structures. This allows a ‘structural comparison’ between two similarity matrices using their predictability from ‘structure’. Significance is assessed with the help of re-sampling appropriate for each dataset. The software, CLARITY, is available as an R package from github.com/danjlawson/CLARITY .

Aspects of the Language and Thought of Four-Year-Old Maori Children: a Study Based on Bierwisch's Componential Analysis of a Set of Adjectives

<p>Using an analysis developed by the linguist Manfred Bierwisch of the semantic components of the set of spatial adjectives, big, little, long, short, high, low, wide, narrow, deep, shallow, far, near, thick, thin, fat, thin, tall and short, four series of tests were constructed in order to determine whether differences existed in the meaning systems of Maori and of Pakeha four-year-old children with respect to these words, and whether Maori and Pakeha performances were similar across all four series. The series were: (a) A word recognition series testing for components of meaning in which pairs of components were placed in binary opposition. (b) An implication series testing for understanding of the concepts referred to by the words of the set. (c) An anomaly series, designed to elicit words of the set and to explore the children's understanding of the use of words. (d) A feature series which explored the children's implicit understanding of normativity and proportion. In addition the children were asked to do a drawing of something big and something little. Their mothers were also interviewed in order to collect information about a number of background variables such as mother's education, father's occupation and the language background of the child. Maori and Pakeha samples were established by asking the mothers to give the ethnic identity of the child. The main findings were that the Pakeha performed better than the Maori sample on recognition of the set of target words but this difference did not reach a level of statistical significance. Two words of the set, low and wide were recognised significantly more often by Pakeha than by Maori. With regard to the range of the words of the set elicited the Pakeha children produced a greater variety of words but, again, this difference was not statistically significant. The two samples performed about equally with regard to comprehension of the concepts signified by the words of the set. Nor was any important difference detected in the feature series or the drawings. An analysis of choice patterns showed no significant difference between the two samples. These results were interpreted to mean that the four-year-old Maori children in the sample did not exhibit cognitive deficit relative to the Pakehas even though they showed differences in word recognition and word use. Nor were they hampered in their access to the meaning of the words in the study by acquaintance with the Maori language. In order to assess the possible effects of various background factors, measures of word recognition, concepts, and strategies (choice patterns) were correlated with the background variables. The age of the child was significantly associated with the concept scores and with number of words elicited. Father's occupation was associated significantly with words recognised in the Pakeha sample but not in the Maori sample. In addition to exploring possible Maori-Pakeha differences in interpretation of words and concepts, the semantic feature acquisition hypothesis was examined and found to be inadequate as an explanation of the acquisition of words and meaning. An alternative multi-level model based on a hierarchy of preferred interpretations was developed to suggest the way in which the words of the set and their meanings are acquired by the young child.</p>

Aspects of the Language and Thought of Four-Year-Old Maori Children: a Study Based on Bierwisch's Componential Analysis of a Set of Adjectives

<p>Using an analysis developed by the linguist Manfred Bierwisch of the semantic components of the set of spatial adjectives, big, little, long, short, high, low, wide, narrow, deep, shallow, far, near, thick, thin, fat, thin, tall and short, four series of tests were constructed in order to determine whether differences existed in the meaning systems of Maori and of Pakeha four-year-old children with respect to these words, and whether Maori and Pakeha performances were similar across all four series. The series were: (a) A word recognition series testing for components of meaning in which pairs of components were placed in binary opposition. (b) An implication series testing for understanding of the concepts referred to by the words of the set. (c) An anomaly series, designed to elicit words of the set and to explore the children's understanding of the use of words. (d) A feature series which explored the children's implicit understanding of normativity and proportion. In addition the children were asked to do a drawing of something big and something little. Their mothers were also interviewed in order to collect information about a number of background variables such as mother's education, father's occupation and the language background of the child. Maori and Pakeha samples were established by asking the mothers to give the ethnic identity of the child. The main findings were that the Pakeha performed better than the Maori sample on recognition of the set of target words but this difference did not reach a level of statistical significance. Two words of the set, low and wide were recognised significantly more often by Pakeha than by Maori. With regard to the range of the words of the set elicited the Pakeha children produced a greater variety of words but, again, this difference was not statistically significant. The two samples performed about equally with regard to comprehension of the concepts signified by the words of the set. Nor was any important difference detected in the feature series or the drawings. An analysis of choice patterns showed no significant difference between the two samples. These results were interpreted to mean that the four-year-old Maori children in the sample did not exhibit cognitive deficit relative to the Pakehas even though they showed differences in word recognition and word use. Nor were they hampered in their access to the meaning of the words in the study by acquaintance with the Maori language. In order to assess the possible effects of various background factors, measures of word recognition, concepts, and strategies (choice patterns) were correlated with the background variables. The age of the child was significantly associated with the concept scores and with number of words elicited. Father's occupation was associated significantly with words recognised in the Pakeha sample but not in the Maori sample. In addition to exploring possible Maori-Pakeha differences in interpretation of words and concepts, the semantic feature acquisition hypothesis was examined and found to be inadequate as an explanation of the acquisition of words and meaning. An alternative multi-level model based on a hierarchy of preferred interpretations was developed to suggest the way in which the words of the set and their meanings are acquired by the young child.</p>

Does it matter whether we or I talk about us? Distinguishing we-talk in couples’ conflict discussions and partners’ private thoughts before and after conflict

According to extensive evidence, we-talk—couples’ use of first-person, plural pronouns—predicts better relationship quality and well-being. However, prior work has not distinguished we-talk by its context, which varies widely across studies. Also, little is known about we-talk’s consistency over time. To assess the stability and correlates of we-talk in private versus conversational contexts, 43 married couples’ language was captured during a marital problem discussion and in each partner’s privately recorded thoughts before and after conflict. Participants were asked to describe any current thoughts and feelings in the baseline thought-listing and to focus on their reaction to the conflict itself in the post-conflict sample. Couples repeated this protocol at a second study visit, approximately 1 month later. We-talk in baseline and post-conflict thought-listings was largely uncorrelated with we-talk during conflict discussions, but each form of we-talk was consistent between the two study visits. Their correlates were also distinct: more we-talk during conflict was associated with less hostility during conflict, whereas more baseline we-talk predicted greater closeness in both partners, as well as lower vocally encoded arousal and more positive emotion word use in partners after conflict. These novel data reveal that we-talk can be meaningfully distinguished by its context—whether language is sampled from private thoughts or marital discussions, and whether the study procedure requests relationship talk. Taken together, these variants of we-talk may have unique implications for relationship function and well-being.