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The role of gestures in determining the use of familiar and novel tools was explored. In the first study, participants were shown gestures for tools corresponding either to tool design, or to the physical affordances of a puzzle designed for each tool. In the second study, two additional conditions were added. In the first, gestures were used that did not correspond to tool design or the puzzle affordances. The second was a control condition in which no gestures were shown. Results indicate that the demonstration of gestures appropriate to a novel problem situation facilitate creative use of tools. Additionally, attention to tool and puzzle affordances is effective for creative tool use when no gestural input is present. However, knowledge of tool design may interfere with this creative application. Performance is further hindered by the demonstration of gestures consistent with tool design, which may prime individuals to rely on the design stance. / by Robert R. Freund. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2010. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2010. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Orientador: Nina Virgínia de Araújo Leite / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-19T21:51:14Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Bonanca_RitadeCassiaSegantini_M.pdf: 568765 bytes, checksum: 23c451058efea1587e8277235d5529c1 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012 / Resumo: Uma pergunta advém ao analista no exercício mesmo de sua práxis ao se deparar, em sua escuta, com uma palavra que escapa da fala do paciente. Uma palavra que tem o poder de velar e desvelar o sujeito que ali está confrontado com uma questão e diante da impossibilidade de fazer algo com isso. A construção de um saber sobre o estatuto da palavra na estruturação do sujeito que compreende sua concepção, nascimento e constituição subjetiva, está atrelada à sua condição de ser falante. A potência e a eficácia da palavra na transmissão da tradição cultural através das gerações possibilitam um dizer sobre o sujeito, sua história e a verdade de sua origem. As leis que regem seus pensamentos e afetos estão submetidas às palavras que o falaram desde sempre no desejo inconsciente de seus pais. Esse saber constituído possibilita ao analista um manejo da escuta que ele opera na transferência em análise. Os estudos linguísticos e psicanalíticos possibilitaram um recorte na investigação sobre a palavra. Porém, não fora da sua condição de funcionamento, ou seja, a partir de uma língua - a materna e, pela fala que só se estabelece dentro do campo da linguagem. Essa constatação esclarece que o poder da palavra não está naquilo que ela comunica pelo seu enunciado, mas pelo efeito significante no sujeito por sua enunciação. O fato de não existir sujeito fora do campo da linguagem é que estabelece o vínculo e determina o estatuto da palavra que opera na sua estruturação. O percurso teórico que deu consistência a essa pesquisa nos permite algumas considerações. Primeiro que uma palavra, mesmo que proferida na língua materna no exercício da fala dentro do campo da linguagem na sua intenção de transmitir uma verdade, é sempre um lance ao acaso. Segundo que jamais podemos prever os seus efeitos. E por fim, que a única possibilidade é, pela palavra num ato de fala, desdobrá-los no só - depois / Abstract: A question comes to the analyst's mind in her clinical work when she hears a word spring out of the patient's speech. A single word has the power to veil or unveil the subject that is there facing a question and without being able to do anything about it. The construction of knowledge regarding the status of the word in the structuring of the subject, including her conception, birth and subjective constitution, is related to her condition as a speaking being. The strength and effectiveness of the word in transmitting cultural tradition from one generation to the next allows something to be said about the subject, her history and the truth of her origins. The laws that govern her thoughts and affects are subordinated to the words that have spoken this subject ever since she was in her parents' unconscious desire. This constituted knowledge enables the analyst to listen in the transference in analysis. Studies in linguistics and psychoanalysis have provided a perspective for studying the word, but not outside its manner of functioning. In other words, words operate on the basis of a language, namely the mother tongue, and through speech that can only come to be in the field of language. This perception means that the power of the word is not in what it communicates through its statements, but through the signifying effect in the subject by stating it. The fact that no subject exists outside the field of language establishes the bond and determines the status of the word that operates in the structuring word. The theoretical history on which this study is based allows for three important considerations. First, even if a word is spoken in the mother tongue in the exercise of speech in the field of language, and has the intention to convey the idea of a truth, it nevertheless always depends on chance. Secondly, we can never foresee the effect a word will have. Finally, the only possibility is to evaluate its effects post-factum / Mestrado / Linguistica / Mestre em Linguística

Nos últimos anos, os deslocamentos forçados de pessoas têm crescido em grandes proporções ao redor do mundo. Reflexos dessa situação são observados à medida que cidades como Francisco Beltrão, no estado do Paraná – Brasil, passam a receber indivíduos que vêm de países longínquos, com etnias, línguas, culturas distintas uns dos outros e mesmo das de imigrantes que no passado também contribuíram para a formação da paisagem social brasileira. Nessa reconhecida heterogeneidade, uma coisa permanece comum: a necessidade de desenvolvimento sociolinguístico, uma vez que muitos imigrantes não entendem a Língua Portuguesa (PL) e outros, ainda, desconhecem o alfabeto latino. Considerando experiências de outras cidades brasileiras como em Bordignon (2016) e Giacomini (2017), na acolhida de imigrantes com ações formais e informais de ensino-aprendizagem de LP, decidimos compreender se o mesmo ocorre em Francisco Beltrão, locus da pesquisa. Assim, delineamos como objetivo de pesquisa, investigar as oportunidades de desenvolvimento sociolinguístico de imigrantes internacionais estabelecidos em Francisco Beltrão – PR, considerando a existência de uma relação interlocutiva entre os imigrantes e a comunidade local. A pesquisa se caracteriza essencialmente como uma pesquisa de campo do tipo exploratória aliada a pesquisas bibliográficas e documentais. Para a pesquisa de campo, realizamos entrevistas com três imigrantes durante visitas em seu local de trabalho e com outros três imigrantes durante visitas a duas escolas do sistema de público de Educação de Jovens e Adultos (EJA). Nas escolas, além de conhecer a realidade de sala de aula, entrevistamos quatro docentes que tem/tiveram imigrantes como alunos. O corpus textual produzido foi analisado considerando-se os demais dados levantados sob o prisma da semiótica conforme Peirce (1973) e Santaella (1983); das teorias bakhtinianas (1993, 1999, 2003 e 2006), especialmente a teoria da responsividade ativa do enunciado; de Vygotsky (2007); e das técnicas de análise de material qualitativo de Minayo (2008). As análises, portanto, são de cunho qualitativo e interpretativo. Os resultados mostram que o município de Francisco Beltrão, atualmente, responde à necessidade de desenvolvimento sociolinguístico desses imigrantes pelo cumprimento legal do direito ao acesso aos sistemas públicos de ensino, ou seja, ações formais de ensino que contempla disciplinas de LP. Contudo, os resultados também mostram que há uma discrepância entre a real necessidade de aprendizado desses alunos estrangeiros e o que o sistema EJA tem a oferecer, considerando que é formatado para atender a alunos brasileiros, já falantes fluentes da LP, em processo de alfabetização. Não encontramos no município oferta de ações ensino de LP especificamente voltadas à acolhida de estrangeiros. / For the last years, forced displacements of people have increased in great proportions around the world. Reflections of such situation are observed in Brazilian towns like Francisco Beltrão - Paraná State, as they become destination for individuals who come from distant countries with ethnicities, languages, cultures that differ from each other and even from the immigrants who contributed to the formation of Brazilian social environment in the past. Despite recognized heterogeneity, one thing remains common: the need for sociolinguistic development, since many immigrants do not understand the Portuguese Language (PL) and others, still, are not aware of the Latin alphabet. Considering experiences of welcoming immigrants with formal and informal PL-teaching-learning actions in other Brazilian towns as in Bordignon (2016) and Giacomini (2017), we decided to understand if such actions also took place in Francisco Beltrão. Thus, the outlined objective of the research is to investigate the opportunities of sociolinguistic development of international immigrants established in Francisco Beltrão - PR, considering the existence of an interlocutive relation occurring between those immigrants and the local community. The present work results from an exploratory field research allied to bibliographical and documentary investigations. For field research, we applied interviews to three immigrants during visits to their workplace and to three immigrants during visits to public schools that offer Education for Youth and Adults (EJA in Portuguese short form). In schools, we observed classrooms routine and interviewed four teachers who have/had immigrants as their students.Textual corpus produced from interviews was analyzed considering the following theories/theorists: semiotics, as in Peirce (1973) and Santaella (1983); Bakhtinian theories (1993, 1999, 2003 and 2006), especially the theory of active utterance responsibility; Vygotskian’s (2007) human development theories; and Minayo’s (2008) qualitative material analysis techniques. Analysis, therefore, are qualitative and interpretative. Results have shown that the community from Francisco Beltrão currently responds to the need for sociolinguistic development of resident immigrants only by fulfilling their legal rights to public education systems access, that is to say, enrolling in formal PL-teaching disciplines. However, we also have found that there is great dissemblance between foreign students real learning needs and what EJA education system has to offer them, considering that it is formatted to receive Brazilian students who are already fluent in PL and who are in process of literacy acquisition. We did not find other types of PL-teaching actions that welcome foreign students.

Distributed learning is the iterative process of decision-making in the presence of other decision-makers. In recent years, researchers across fields as disparate as engineering, biology, and economics have identified mathematically congruous problem formulations at the intersection of their disciplines. In particular, stochastic processes, game theory, and control theory have been brought to bare on certain very basic and universal questions. What sort of environments are conducive to distributed learning? Are there any generic algorithms offering non-trivial performance guarantees for a large class of models? The first half of this thesis makes contributions to two particular problems in distributed learning, self-assembly and language. Self-assembly refers to the emergence of high-level structures via the aggregate behavior of simpler building blocks. A number of algorithms have been suggested that are capable of generic self-assembly of graphs. That is, given a description of the objective they produce a policy with a corresponding performance guarantee. These guarantees have been in the form of deterministic convergence results. We introduce the notion of stochastic stability to the self-assembly problem. The stochastically stable states are the configurations the system spends almost all of its time in as a noise parameter is taken to zero. We show that in this framework simple procedures exist that are capable of self-assembly of any tree under stringent locality constraints. Our procedure gives an asymptotically maximum yield of target assemblies while obeying communication and reversibility constraints. We also present a slightly more sophisticated algorithm that guarantees maximum yields for any problem size. The latter algorithm utilizes a somewhat more presumptive notion of agents' internal states. While it is unknown whether an algorithm providing maximum yields subject to our constraints can depend only on the more parsimonious form of internal state, we are able to show that such an algorithm would not be able to possess a unique completing rule--- a useful feature for analysis. We then turn our attention to the problem of distributed learning of communication protocols, or, language. Recent results for signaling game models establish the non-negligible possibility of convergence, under distributed learning, to states of unbounded efficiency loss. We provide a tight lower bound on efficiency and discuss its implications. Moreover, motivated by the empirical phenomenon of linguistic drift, we study the signaling game under stochastic evolutionary dynamics. We again make use of stochastic stability analysis and show that the long-run distribution of states has support limited to the efficient communication systems. We find that this behavior is insensitive to the particular choice of evolutionary dynamic, a fact that is intuitively captured by the game's potential function corresponding to average fitness. Consequently, the model supports conclusions similar to those found in the literature on language competition. That is, we expect monomorphic language states to eventually predominate. Homophily has been identified as a feature that potentially stabilizes diverse linguistic communities. We find that incorporating homophily in our stochastic model gives mixed results. While the monomorphic prediction holds in the small noise limit, diversity can persist at higher noise levels or as a metastable phenomenon. The contributions of the second half of this thesis relate to more basic issues in distributed learning. In particular, we provide new results on the problem of distributed convergence to Nash equilibrium in finite games. A recently proposed class of games known as stable games have the attractive property of admitting global convergence to equilibria under many learning dynamics. We show that stable games can be formulated as passive input-output systems. This observation enables us to identify passivity of a learning dynamic as a sufficient condition for global convergence in stable games. Notably, dynamics satisfying our condition need not exhibit positive correlation between the payoffs and their directions of motion. We show that our condition is satisfied by the dynamics known to exhibit global convergence in stable games. We give a decision-theoretic interpretation for passive learning dynamics that mirrors the interpretation of stable games as strategic environments exhibiting self-defeating externalities. Moreover, we exploit the flexibility of the passivity condition to study the impact of applying various forecasting heuristics to the payoffs used in the learning process. Finally, we show how passivity can be used to identify strategic tendencies of the players that allow for convergence in the presence of information lags of arbitrary duration in some games.