Faculty of Humanities

Publications

• Book

  Bondarenko D. M., Ladynin I. A., Vdovchenkov E. V. et al.

  Principles and Forms of Sociocultural Organization: Historical Contexts of Interaction

  Edited research collection
  
  One paragraph description of the project’s scope and content
  
  Societies are systems composed of a great number of various social institutions. Societies change as a result of emergence, transformation, and interaction of institutions. As systems of social institutions, societies have a fundamental characteristic that can be called a “basic principle of societal organization.” The principle of organization a society embodies depends on the way its institutions are arranged with respect to one another. Two basic principles can be distinguished: heterarchical, at which institutions interact being unranked with respect to one another or can be ranked in different ways, and the opposite principle, homoarchical, at which institutions interact being rigidly ranked in the only way and have no or very limited potential for being unranked or ranked in other ways. Societies of the same level of overall cultural complexity and with the same basic principle of organization can take different specific forms, as alternativeness exists not only between but also within the heterarchical and homoarchical macrogroups of societies. The division of societies into predominantly heterarchical and homoarchical is a constant fact of human sociocultural history. The dichotomy of heterarchy and homoarchy has considerably determined the non-linear and alternative nature of the global sociocultural process. This book examines the varied modes of interaction between societies shaped by different organizational principles, in a variety of historical and regional contexts.

  
  
  
  
  

  L.; NY: Anthem Press, 2026.

• Article

  Novoselova K., Lopukhina A., Gomozova M. et al.

  Difference in Language Profiles of Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder and Down Syndrome Is Not Driven by Non-Verbal Cognition

  Background

  Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Down syndrome (DS) are among the most common types of neurodevelopmental conditions that have co-occurring language impairments. Usually, non-verbal IQ has been reported as one of the main predictors of language functioning in children with these conditions. Although language abilities of children with ASD and DS have been described in the previous studies, there is still a lack of direct comparisons of language profiles in the non-verbal IQ-matched groups of children with these disorders, and, therefore, it is largely unexplored whether language difficulties in these populations are of similar or different origins.

  Aims

  The study provided a direct comparison of language profiles in non-verbal IQ-matched children with ASD and DS at different linguistic levels (phonology, vocabulary and morphosyntax) in both production and comprehension and explored the influence of different psycholinguistic variables on accuracy. Also, the study assessed whether non-language factors (non-verbal IQ and age) influence language skills in both groups of children.

  Methods and Procedures

  In total, 60 children participated in the study: 20 children with ASD, 20 children with DS and 20 typically developing controls (7–11 years old; all groups were age-matched). The language testing included seven tests from the Russian Child Language Assessment Battery, assessing expressive and receptive language skills at phonological, lexical and morphosyntactic levels.

  Outcomes and Results

  Overall, we revealed both similarities and differences in language profiles between children with ASD and DS. At the group performance level, children with ASD and DS were comparable in vocabulary and syntax but differed in phonological processing, on which children with ASD had higher accuracy. Some psycholinguistic variables that influenced accuracy in language test performance were present uniquely in the ASD group: for example, autistic children struggled more with verbs than nouns in naming or comprehended sentences with canonical SVO word order more accurately than sentences with noncanonical OVS word order. In comparison to children with DS, in the ASD group, non-verbal IQ was related to language skills in three out of seven tests, with evidence of a positive association between them.

  Conclusions and Implications

  This study provided new insights on the differences in language profiles of non-verbal IQ-matched children with ASD and DS and identified specific impairments related to linguistic levels and structural language characteristics in each group. These findings contributed to speech and language therapy strategies, as they highlighted specific ‘linguistic deficits’ that should be targeted during intervention and therapy.

  International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders. 2026. Vol. 61. No. 1. P. 1-14.

• Book chapter

  Gleb V. Aleksandrov, Bondarenko D. M.

  Conclusion

  The brief concluding chapter reiterates the theoretical framework of the book and presents a brief overview of every chapter, highlighting the way chronologically and geographically diverse research subjects tie into the general approach the work utilizes. The author stresses the importance of the overarching goal of this collective work, to showcase the applicability of the concept of foundational principles of social organization in a wide range of historical contexts, from what can be called “traditionally ethnographic” societies to contemporary Western states. Special attention is given to the methodological range of the works presented in this volume, showing that the core concept combines effectively with a wide range of methodologies, from classic anthropological participatory observation to historical analysis and statistical methods. This highlights the inherently transdisciplinary nature of the theoretical concept initially established through borrowing the key notion of heterarchy from natural sciences, and expanded with significant influences from history, since the connection between anthropology and history was always prominent in the Russian anthropological tradition. Summarizing the results of the collective work, the author concludes that the theoretical framework used in the book has proven to be a useful tool for the study of social evolution from an institutionary perspective, which avoids strict categorization prevalent in other evolutionist approaches and allows the study of social complexity to be grounded in the actual empirical historic evidence rather than in preexisting notions of what forms of social organization should emerge in particular conditions. This establishes the concept of foundational principles of social organization one of the few existing theoretical frameworks to take into account the full diversity of social forms and social experiences which existed throughout history and exist today, studying or even acknowledging which has become an increasingly obvious challenge for anthropology and other related disciplines in recent years.

  In bk.: Principles and Forms of Sociocultural Organization: Historical Contexts of Interaction. L.; NY: Anthem Press, 2026. Ch. 13. P. 251-259.

• Working paper

  Orekhov B.

  You shall know a piece by the company it keeps. Chess plays as a data for word2vec models

  In this paper, I apply linguistic methods of analysis to non-linguistic data, chess plays, metaphorically equating one with the other and seeking analogies. Chess game notations are also a kind of text, and one can consider the records of moves or positions of pieces as words and statements in a certain language. In this article I show how word embeddings (word2vec) can work on chess game texts instead of natural language texts. I don't see how this representation of chess data can be used productively. It's unlikely that these vector models will help engines or people choose the best move. But in a purely academic sense, it's clear that such methods of information representation capture something important about the very nature of the game, which doesn't necessarily lead to a win.

  arxiv.org. Computer Science. Cornell University, 2024