Previous chapters have focused primarily on factual issues bearing on theories of constitutional interpretation. This chapter turns toward perceptions as it explores how both elite and popular opinion influence the justices’ perspectives on interpretive issues. These perception issues fall generally into the Court’s need for what Richard Fallon has called “sociological legitimacy,” along with the individual justices’ views of their “fidelity to role,” as described by Lawrence Lessig. The specific issues addressed are aspects of what are sometimes considered “conventional wisdom,” and they turn out not to be true. The first is the notion that any interpretive approach based on the Framers’ understandings is so far out of step with the contemporary thinking in the international community of judges and scholars that it represents little more than a peculiarly American form of “ancestor worship,” and the second is the belief that calling on the Framers’ understandings is principally a tool for advancing conservative social and political views.

The current chapter focuses on two main stakeholders of corrective feedback: teachers and learners, and it discusses whether and how teachers’ and learners’ beliefs or attitudes toward corrective feedback impact the effectiveness of corrective feedback. Previous research on both oral and written corrective feedback is reviewed. In terms of teachers’ beliefs of corrective feedback and their feedback practices, some research findings showed that teachers’ beliefs are not always in line with their actual classroom practices related to the use of different types of oral corrective feedback. Learners’ beliefs about the effectiveness of corrective feedback, particularly written corrective feedback, were found to be an important factor of learner engagement with corrective feedback. Recent corrective feedback research claims that teacher and learner beliefs are not static. Accordingly, the current literature review shows methodological changes over time, capturing the situational and dynamic patterns of learners’ and teachers’ beliefs about corrective feedback. The overall findings suggest that teachers’ and learners’ beliefs about CF are multifaceted and could be impacted by various contextual factors.

In this chapter, I provide two positive arguments in favour of my sophisticated Neo-Davidsonian treatment of negative action sentences and against the Deflationist alternative. I argue that my view can accommodate a range of data about the behaviour of adverbs in negative action sentences and their interaction with perceptual locutions, which Deflationism can’t. Thus, we can solve the problem of negative action by rejecting Deflationism, and with it the thought that (at least some) negative actions aren’t events. Instead, we should claim that negative actions are simply events which play the ensuring role. I close by comparing my view to two recent alternatives.

The authors run through the major arguments for the existence of God: Anselm’s ontological argument (and also Descartes’s version), arguing that the very notion of God a priori proves hs existence; Aquinas’s cosmological (or causal) argument, that God is needed to stop an infinite regression of causes from the present to the past; and the teleological argument or the argument from design, that the design-like natural objects of this world demand a designer. Then they raise the standard objections: Gaunilo’s criticism that the ontological argument proves the existence of perfect islands, which is ridiculous, and Kant’s objection that you cannot infer matters of fact by a priori reasoning; Dawkins’s criticism that the cosmological argument raises the unanswered question of what causes God; and Hume’s criticism of the design argument, and Darwin’s subsequent demonstration that natural selection can explain final causes naturalistically, and so there is no need to invoke a Designer God.

In this chapter, we explore whether perceptual adjustments for gender are equally strong for Japanese- and English-speaking listeners’ categorization of the sibilant fricatives /s/ and /ʃ/ in CV sequences. These stimuli were created by combining a set of eight fricatives with a set of natural vocalic bases produced by a variety of men. We hypothesized that Japanese listeners’ categorization would be more strongly influenced by gender typicality, given the overall heightened attention to gendered speech features in Japanese speakers and the greater role that vocalic features play in fricative categorization in Japanese compared to English. Some evidence is found that Japanese listeners’ categorization of fricatives is influenced more heavily on the gender typicality of men’s voices in the vocalic portion of the stimulus than is English listeners, but the effects are neither consistent nor in the direction predicted by previous research. Results point to the need for more research on how talker attributes affect the way that L2 listeners perceive L1 speech.

This study investigates the perceptual accuracy of eight English obstruents in the onset and coda position by Mandarin and Korean-speaking L2 learners and by a control group of native English speakers. According to the current theoretical models on second language speech learning, L1 Mandarin and Korean speakers are expected to differ in their perception of English obstruents due to the different correspondence between their respective L1 obstruents and those in English. On the other hand, theories based on intrinsic differences in the difficulty of different linguistic skills imply that some L2 sounds would be more difficult than others regardless of the L1 background. The results showed that all three groups were significantly more accurate in perceiving obstruents in the onset than in the coda position, voiceless than voiced targets, stops than fricatives, and labials than coronals. /θ/ and /ð/ were particularly poorly identified. The two learner groups were equally accurate in the onset position, but the Mandarin group outperformed the Korean group in the coda position. Regarding the specific obstruents, some patterns were predicted by mapping to the L1. Nonetheless, the general similarity between the two groups suggests a robust and pervasive language-independent tendency in speech perception.

This chapter considers the relation between production and perception of L2 tone in speakers of Kiên Giang Khmer who are fluent to varying degrees in Southern Vietnamese. In addition to directly comparing L2 to L1 performance in tonal production and perception, we explore how perception might be related to the internal organization of a speaker’s own production system by comparing distances between f0 curves to accuracy in a speeded AX discrimination task. Relative to native speakers, we found considerable individual variation among speakers of Kiên Giang Khmer with L2 knowledge of Vietnamese in the degree to which they approximated Vietnamese tonal targets. Production accuracy was most strongly related to age, while discrimination performance correlated best with education. In addition, we observed a weak correlation between the acoustic distance of a Khmer speaker’s production of tone T to the native Vietnamese production of T, and the ability to discriminate tone T from other tones. However, speakers who acoustically separated two tones in their own productions were also more accurate at discriminating those tones in perception, regardless of how well those productions approximated native speaker targets.

This chapter provides a critical review of the research on L2 learners’ lexical stress production and perception conducted over the past three decades, which has sought to explain cross-linguistic variability in L2 learners’ ability to reach target-like generalizations in their stress placement and to encode stress lexically. The chapter begins with a discussion of generative approaches to the study of lexical stress in L2 learners, which focused on the influence of the native-language (L1) phonological grammar on L2 learners’ stress placement. These approaches were subsequently challenged by the seminal work of Susan Guion and colleagues, which examined the influence of statistical regularities on L2 learners’ (and native speakers’) stress placement in novel words. The chapter then discusses phonological approaches to L2 learners’ perception and processing of lexical stress, focusing on Peperkamp and Dupoux (2002)’s Stress Parameter Model and the predictions it made for the encoding of stress in lexical representations by listeners from different L1 backgrounds. These approaches were later refined in studies investigating the importance of phonetic cues to lexical contrasts in the L1 for determining whether L2 learners can perceive lexical stress. The chapter concludes with directions for future research on L2 lexical stress.

Vowels are said to be less distinctive in prenasal context. The “pin/pen” merger in the Southern United States is a good example. This study attempts to investigate the effects of the postvocalic nasal on the identification and discrimination of American English vowels by native speakers of American English (NE) and Japanese (NJ). These two groups of participants identified six American English (AE) monophthongs /i, ɪ, ɛ, æ, ɑ, ʌ/ and discriminated six vowel pairs /i/-/ɪ/, /ɛ/-/ɪ/, /æ/-/ɛ/, /æ/-/ɑ/, /æ/-/ʌ /, and /ɑ/-/ʌ / in prenasal context. NJ also identified these American English vowels in terms of Japanese vowel categories. The results revealed that, overall, NE outperformed NJ in both identification and discrimination. In addition, how AE vowels were perceptually mapped to Japanese vowels predicted NJ’s discrimination. However, both groups’ performances were found to be poorer in the prenasal context when compared to their previous performances in the preplosive context, and NJ were more adversely (but differently) affected by nasalization than NE.

This study examines the effects of auditory priming on second language (L2) speech production. Mandarin learners of English were presented with an English vowel as an auditory prime followed by an English target word containing either a tenseness congruent (e.g., prime: /i/ – target: “peach”) or incongruent (e.g., prime: /i/ – target: “pitch”) vowel. Pronunciation of the target vowel was measured in terms of duration and formant frequency as well as intelligibility by native English listeners. Results show a more English-like formant frequency distribution and an increase in intelligibility of the /i/ and /ɪ/ productions in the congruent relative to incongruent condition, suggesting that auditory speech information can positively affect the pronunciation of difficult L2 speech contrasts.

This chapter examines how the situating of individuals and states in societal contexts holds implications for understanding the causes conflict and the generation of peace. It challenges the strict agent-centered state-centricity of traditionalist approaches and looks at the roles played by different societal constraints, norms, and processes at the international and domestic levels. I provide a discussion of the core assumptions of social constructivism and compare social constructivism’s approach to peace with the other major paradigms (and their subparadigms) assessed in this book. I consider how the rational default mechanisms of security studies and the realist or power political paradigms, which have dominated the discourse for much of the period of scientific study, have come to be critiqued. This will be followed by detailed discussion of the similarities and differences between social constructivism and liberal approaches, functionalism, English School rationalism, critical approaches, and cosmopolitanism. I assess the contribution of social constructivism to the transformation of conflictual relations between states and the social construction of peace.

Most empirical studies about chess have taken the happenstance of the cognitive or experimental paradigm within psychology. In this chapter, the past main research findings from this approach will be reviewed together with their contribution to psychological science. The chapter is structured into three main subsections, perception, memory, and thinking. Each of these sections describe more specific themes such as information processing models, eye movements, theories of memory in chess, and thinking methods such as pattern recognition and search. The main conclusions from this extensive body of research are summarized through the prism of the individual differences approach.

Chapter 2, “Temporal Consciousness and Inner Perception”, offers an interpretation of inner perception as the perception of distinctively inner appearances by drawing on resources from the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Transcendental Analytic (mainly the A-Deduction) of the first Critique. The chapter develops an interactional model of perception with three constitutive aspects: (1) affection through outer sense, (2) synthesis of apprehension through the active faculties of the mind, viz. imagination and understanding, and (3) self-affection through inner sense. Each of these constitutive aspects is shown to define a formal and a material condition of perception. By carving out the notion of transcendental self-affection, i.e., the a priori determination of the form of inner sense through the understanding, the chapter derives the a priori temporal conditions of perception. Applying the general model to the inner case, inner perception is construed as empirical consciousness of inner appearances, based on empirical self-affection.

Chapter 4 considers the complexities of how to judge paper, and paper’s affordances in making books. The chapter begins by surveying the writings of some medieval commentators on paper, from Peter the Venerable, through the Italian humanists, to the late-medieval English Paston family in their letters. This chapter then considers the variety of books written on paper and the problems associated with the interpretation of their value. It is all too easy to classify paper books as being of lower status, lower quality and ephemeral intent. Paper had a multiplicity of potential uses. The arguably aesthetic hierarchies often applied to paper manuscript production do not take into consideration the quality of paper, nor the different types of paper in circulation. This chapter considers how the differing sizes of paper work together in book production. I also return in this chapter to the question of choice, exploring whether, in the current state of research in medieval book production, scholars can find an alternative way of describing differences between materials and artefacts which does not involve judgements about superiority or status. The chapter argues for a more nuanced understanding of paper codices.

In chapter 25, changes taking place in our global village are evaluated and how intercultural research and training can both take a lead role in creating the changes and helping people to effectively work with the changes are discussed. The role of economic development, social changes, and the Internet are discussed. Following this, some of the theoretical and methodological innovations that are on the horizon are discussed. Some of the topics identified from the chapters in the Handbook are presented here, which include culture theories, cultural story-telling, social network analysis (SNA), perception, and emotional contagion. Finally, a number of research issues that are of concern in developing a science of intercultural training that is not only produces results that are repeatable but only account for significant amounts of variance. Many more can be identified and will emerge in the future. It is hoped that researchers and practitioners will use the ideas presented in the chapters of the Handbook, to guide future theory-based research and practice in the field of intercultural training.