School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences

About: School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences is a facility organization based out in Villejuif, France. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Politics. The organization has 1230 authors who have published 2084 publications receiving 57740 citations. The organization is also known as: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales & EHESS.

Three- to Four-Year-Old Children Rapidly Adapt Their Predictions and Use Them to Learn Novel Word Meanings.

Abstract: Adults create and update predictions about what speakers will say next. This study asks whether prediction can drive language acquisition, by testing whether 3- to 4-year-old children (n = 45) adapt to recent information when learning novel words. The study used a syntactic context which can precede both nouns and verbs to manipulate children's predictions about what syntactic category will follow. Children for whom the syntactic context predicted verbs were more likely to infer that a novel word appearing in this context referred to an action, than children for whom it predicted nouns. This suggests that children make rapid changes to their predictions, and use this information to learn novel information, supporting the role of prediction in language acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teaching the Dog and Learning from the Dog: Interactivity in Herding Dog Training and Use

Abstract: Recent trends in social sciences advocate the recognition of interactive properties in human–animal relationships. Based on an ethnographic study, this paper explores the interactive properties of the relationships between herding dogs and their trainer-users, and how the dogs' behaviors participate in the construction of trainer-users' knowledge. Trainer-users' discourses and practices revealed a common theoretical axis, portraying the herding dog as a social predator descended from the wolf and driving the game towards his pack-leader. The dog's hunting skills are used to turn him/her into a working tool, through minimally constrained education and training. Once trained, the dog should become an autonomous but controllable worker, who helps livestock breeders lead their flock quietly. Two training modes were identified and used simultaneously by the trainers: contextual training (teaching the human–dog–livestock relationship to the dog) and conditioned training (teaching the commands to the dog...