Reconsidering Luria's speech mediation: Verbalization and haptic picture identification in children with congenital total blindness

Current accounts of behavioral and neurocognitive correlates of plasticity in blindness are just beginning to incorporate the role of speech and verbal production. We assessed Vygotsky/Luria's speech mediation hypothesis, according to which speech activity can become a mediating tool for perception of complex stimuli, specifically, for encoding tactual/haptic spatial patterns which convey pictorial information (haptic pictures). We compared verbalization in congenitally totally blind (CTB) and age-matched sighted but visually impaired (VI) children during a haptic picture naming task which included two repeated, test-retest, identifications. The children were instructed to explore 10 haptic schematic pictures of objects (e.g., cup) and body parts (e.g., face) and provide (without experimenter's feedback) their typical name. Children's explorations and verbalizations were videorecorded and transcribed into audio segments. Using the Computerized Analysis of Language (CLAN) program, we extracted several measurements from the observed verbalizations, including number of utterances and words, utterance/word duration, and exploration time. Using the Word2Vec natural language processing technique we operationalized semantic content from the relative distances between the names provided. Furthermore, we conducted an observational content analysis in which three judges categorized verbalizations according to a rating scale assessing verbalization content. Results consistently indicated across all measures that the CTB children were faster and semantically more precise than their VI counterparts in the first identification test, however, the VI children reached the same level of precision and speed as the CTB children at retest. Overall, the task was harder for the VI group. Consistent with current neuroscience literature, the prominent role of speech in CTB and VI children's data suggests that an underlying cross-modal involvement of integrated brain networks, notably associated with Broca's network, likely also influenced by Braille, could play a key role in compensatory plasticity via the mediational mechanism postulated by Luria.

Continuity and Discontinuity between the Psychological World and the Biological World

In this commentary paper I try to make complementarily more discussion on two question. First, the target paper (Zagaria, Andò, & Zennaro, 2020) points out the lack of continuity in the concepts used in psychology. The authors aim for a rigorous definition which is necessary to rebuild mud figures of psychology, but is that the only direction? Second, the evolutionary psychology seems to allow for a diversity of methodologies, but is there any limitations and possibilities of approaching the origin of the mind from biologically based methods? To answer this question, I went back and examined Freud's earlier studies and Vygotsky's theoretical considerations from the history of psychology. As a result, it was pointed out that the shift from the biological world to the psychological world had a fundamental problem of conversion from quantity to quality. As a clue to its elucidation, I considered on the semiotic mediation, the psychological causality, and the work of apperception.

Dramatizing Living-in-the-World: Affective Generalization in Drama-in-Education Workshop

Drama-in-Education workshops (DiE) emphasize on balancing between teacher's delicate structuring and participants' spontaneous exploration and creation in dramatic activities and thus can be a powerful liminoid space to scaffold and facilitate young people's development. Still, more researches are needed to dig into and understand such a dynamic and complex process happening in the workshop. In this article, we presented the theoretical background of conceptualizing drama as a hybrid cultural-aesthetic form to identify its potential in educational guidance. The perspective of developmental cultural psychology was introduced to frame DiE practice as a catalytic process working on releasing and transforming participants' developmental forces. The hierarchical levels of semiotic mediation in cultural psychology can help to capture participants' affective and cognitive generalizations in semiotic forms and to perform a micro-genetic analysis of the flow of participants' subjective experiences. We also provided a step-by-step analysis of a DiE practice working with young Chinese immigrants to illuminate our theoretical proposal.

SILENCE: Capturing the Feeling of Inner Quietude

Silent experiences are integral parts of human life, and despite such moments of silence-phenomena may falsely be perceived as moments of "nothings", they are in fact an essential part of human apperception and meaning-making. The significance of moments of silence (an internal, timeless state of being often perceived as solitary, spiritual-mystical, and unconscious, involuntary experiences) and silences (contextual states of temporally oriented and social experiences) is supported by the principles behind the concepts of Gestalten and zero signifiers, in that such absence can lead to greater understanding of meaning than any explicit and direct element ever could. The human experience of life is inseparably linked with the function of apperception as experiencing the presence in a combination with reconstruction of the past and imagination of the future. And as this dynamic across irreversibility of time is in any human experience it is as well present within experiences of silence. Furthermore, is the phenomenon of Einfühlung (the process of feeling in and through others, objects, and oneself) a crucial part of silence-phenomena, as it is uncovered to be connected with both silence as a facilitator of emergence of silence as well as silences affect the act of Einfühlung. Aesthetic experiences can in the form of poetic instants lead to moments of silence, through the human function of Einfühlung. Finally, an analysis of a passage from Lev Vygotsky's personal notebooks will support the line of reasoning the centrality of the existence of silence.

Discursive and Non-discursive Symbolization during couple's Conflict

The purpose of this article was exploring the role of discursive and non-discursive symbolization - specifically gestures - in the negotiation of differences in couples´ interactions. Five married heterosexual couples were invited to hold a conversation about an unsolved problem in their relationship. A videographic analysis was carried out to explore gestures in dialogical sequences and Microgenetic Semiotic Analysis (ASM) was conducted. The results showed that gestures complemented verbal signs as semiotic devices in the regulation of meaning construction and differences in negotiation, displaying strategies for facing and avoiding conflict, as well as resources for undergoing tension dealing with personal objectives and emotional difficulties; Its role is discussed as preparation of the verbal communicative expression, as devices for self-regulation and access to tension relief. Further, the discussion addresses their function as paths for encounter, mutuality and closeness.

The Semiotic Construction of the Sense of Agency. The Modal Articulation in Narrative Processes

The sense of agency is an ongoing process of semiotic construction of the action starting from the affective, cognitive, intersubjective and cultural matrix of experience. A person narratively constructs the sense of her agentive experience and in doing so does not refer exclusively to the "what", but also to the "how". There is always a specific "modus" to experience one's own action. We present the psychological notion of the Modal Articulation Process (MAP), namely the way through which a person orients and configures in a contextual frame the sense of her actions by means of modal operators of necessity, possibility, impossibility, contingency, but also knowledge, will, capability, constrain and opportunity. The notion of Modal Articulation Process is proposed as a semiotic, dynamic and recursive process that articulates narratively many aspects of the agency: the relational positionings and the way of experiencing them, the constraints and the resources present in the socio-symbolic context, the inherent temporality of every human phenomenon. Although the study of modal operators has an ancient and solid tradition of research in the fields of modal logics, analytical philosophy and narrative semiotic disciplines as well, yet in the field of the psychological sciences - except for a few authoritative isolated cases (Kurt Lewin, Rom Harrè, Jaan Valsiner) - there is not a great deal of attention on the relevance of these symbolic devices and their function in constructing the sense of action in a narrative way. Indeed modal articulation processes are at stake both during daily common routines and during exceptional turning point experiences that request a reconfiguration of the sense of one's own agency (e.g. the experiences of illness demand a new modal re-articulation). Our discussion is aimed at deepening and developing the notion of modal articulation, its functions and its specificities.