To investigate how orthography and semantics interact during bilingual visual word recognition, Dutch–English bilinguals made lexical decisions in two masked priming experiments. Dutch primes and English targets were presented that were either neighbour cognates (boek – BOOK), noncognate translations (kooi – CAGE), orthographically related neighbours (neus – NEWS), or unrelated words (huid - COAT). Prime durations of 50 ms (Experiment 1) and 83 ms (Experiment 2) led to similar result patterns. Both experiments reported a large cognate facilitation effect, a smaller facilitatory noncognate translation effect, and the absence of inhibitory orthographic neighbour effects. These results indicate that cognate facilitation is in large part due to orthographic-semantic resonance. Priming results for each condition were simulated well (all r's >.50) by Multilink+, a recent computational model for word retrieval. Limitations to the role of lateral inhibition in bilingual word recognition are discussed.

The article argues that Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics presents human ‘neediness’ as the constitutive element of his theological anthropology. Since this element has had little notice in Barth scholarship, the article focuses on describing the consistent reiteration of this theme in theologically substantive locations throughout the Dogmatics. It begins with Barth's observation that the emergence of humanity on the sixth day discloses humans to be ‘the neediest of all creation’. Barth elaborates the dimensions of human neediness in his discussion of ‘the readiness of humanity for God’, propounding the human need for God as the precondition of knowledge of God that is in actuality undercut by the sin that denies any such neediness. Barth thus describes a potential ‘blessed neediness’ and an actual ‘wretched neediness’ that together define the glory and the tragedy of all that is human, and which inform not only Barth's epistemology and hamartiology, but also his accounts of christology, forgiveness, redemption, worship and Christian witness.

We suggest a new pretopological model for pattern recognition which was introduced to study complex economic systems. The model has its origin in the concept of “neighbour”, which is both primitive and fundamental in pattern recognition. Pretopology enables us to develop a perceptive and topological approach for patterns and to see that problems, apparently different, are in fact identical e.g. clustering and recognition, search of skeletons in image processing and search of an informative learning set. It should be noted that the suggeted model is more than a descriptive one.