This chapter will focus on the deep evolutionary history of the cognitive capacities underlying linguistic iconicity. The complex capacity for linguistic iconicity has roots in a more general cross-modal ability present throughout the animal kingdom, cross-modal transfer. Cross-modal transfer is the ability to make basic inferences about sensory properties of an object in multiple modalities based on experience from only one. This situates iconicity as a fundamentally cross-modal phenomenon; part of a broader, uniquely human cross-modal cognitive suite which includes relatively rare phenomena like synesthesia, alongside more ubiquitous phenomena like sensory metaphor and cross-modal correspondences. Evidence suggests the evolutionarily deep capacity for cross-modal transfer was honed into more sophisticated capacities underlying iconicity by an evolutionary ratchet of increased prosociality during human self-domestication. This period provided strong selective pressures for increasingly complex cross-sensory communication, and eventually, the predominantly arbitrary symbolic systems that underpin modern human language. This is a peer-reviewed preprint of the work below.Cuskley, Christine and Kees Sommer (forthcoming). The evolution of linguistic iconicity and the cross-modal cognitive suite. To appear in Olga Fisher, Kimi Akita, and Pamela Perniss (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Iconicity in Language. Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK.
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Background: Nutritional care for older adults provided by hospital and home care nurses and nursing assistants is suboptimal. This is due to several factors including professionals' lack of knowledge and low prioritisation. Affecting these factors may promote nurses' and nursing assistants' behavioral change and eventually improve nutritional care. To increase the likelihood of successfully targeting these factors, an evidence-based educational intervention is needed. Objectives: To develop an educational intervention for hospital and home care nurses and nursing assistants to promote behaviour change by affecting factors that influence current behaviour in nutritional care for older adults. In this paper, we describe the intervention development process. Design: A multi-methods approach using literature and expert input. Settings: Hospital and home care. Participants: Older adults, nurses, nursing assistants, experts, and other professionals involved in nutritional care. Methods: The educational intervention was based on five principles: 1) interaction between intervention and users, 2) targeting users on both individual and team level, 3) supporting direct and easy transfer to the workplace, and continuous learning, 4) facilitating learning within an appropriate period, and 5) fitting with the context. Consistent with these principles, the research team focussed on developing a microlearning intervention and they established consensus on seven features of the intervention: content, provider, mode of delivery, setting, recipient, intensity, and duration. Results: The intervention consisted of 30 statements about nursing nutritional care for older adults, which nurses and nursing assistants were asked to confirm or reject, followed by corresponding explanations. These can be presented in a snack-sized way, this means one statement per day, five times a week over a period of six weeks through an online platform. Conclusions: Based on a well-founded and comprehensive procedure, the microlearning intervention was developed. This intervention has the potential to contribute to nursing nutritional care for older adults.
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