bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Joint attention on actions: acquiring verbs in ostensive and non-ostensive contexts
Authors: Tomasello Michael , Kruger Ann Cale 
Published: February 2009

ABSTRACTTwo studies of verb learning are reported. The focus of both studies was on children in their second year of life learning verbs in various pragmatic contexts. Of particular interest was the comparison of ostensive contexts – in which word and referent were simultaneously present in the child's perceptual field – to non-ostensive contexts. In a naturalistic study of 24 children at 1;3 and 1;9, it was found that mothers modelled verbs for their children most often BEFORE the referent action actually occurred. Over 60% of maternal verbs were used to refer to actions that mothers wished children to perform or that they were anticipating their performing (IMPENDING actions). Some verbs were also used to refer to current actions (ONGOING actions) or actions that had just been completed (COMPLETED actions). Children responded with comprehension most often to impending models. Impending and completed models, but not ongoing models, were correlated with children's verb vocabularies at 1;9. The second study was a lexical training study of 48 two-year-olds. Children learned to produce a novel verb best when it was modelled in the impending condition. They learned to comprehend it equally well in the impending and completed conditions. Children showed no signs of superior learning in the ostensive (ongoing) learning context. Results of the two studies are discussed in terms of the different learning processes involved in acquiring nouns and verbs, and, more broadly, in terms of a social-pragmatic view of language acquisition in which the ostensive teaching paradigm is but one of many contexts in which children learn to establish a joint attentional focus with mature language users.
Refining transcriptions: the significance of transcriber ‘errors’
Authors: Pye Clifton , Wilcox Kim A. , Siren Kathleen A. 
Published: February 2009

ABSTRACTThis work describes the importance of the transcription process in studies of speech and language acquisition. Using data collected from a hearing child of deaf parents, the three authors derived independent transcriptions of the same speech sample and systematically compared their transcripts with each other and with the best estimate of the speaker's actual productions. The resultant transcripts were used to produce two descriptions of this child's phonological system, one based on a liberal estimate and one on a conservative estimate of the potential error in the transcripts. Discussion includes suggestions for deriving percentages of inter-transcriber agreement and the utility of such figures as a metric of transcription difficulty as well as transcriber ability.
The semantic development of negation: a cross-linguistic longitudinal study
Authors: Choi Soonja 
Published: February 2009

ABSTRACTNegative utterances were collected longitudinally from two English-, five French- and four Korean-speaking children between 1;7 and 3;4. An analysis focusing on both non-verbal context and linguistic form led to the distinction of nine semantic/pragmatic categories which could capture cognitive and linguistic development in some detail: non-existence, prohibition, rejection, failure, denial, inability, epis-temic negation, normative and inferential negation. The nine categories were found in all three languages and their developmental order was similar across the languages. Different patterns were shown concerning the form-function relationship for different categories; for some categories, the distinct form emerged gradually after the function was acquired, while for others, the distinct form emerged simultaneously with the new function. Thus new forms emerged to subdivide an old category or to express a new function. This pattern was most typical for categories developed at later periods. It is suggested that whereas cognitive development precedes language development at an early period, at later periods cognitive and language development interact with each other.
The effect of animacy on children's noun order in verb-final sequences
Authors: Lempert Henrietta 
Published: February 2009

ABSTRACTThis study examined whether pragmatic ordering factors account for the apparent preference for ANIMATE-INANIMATE (AI) order in passive and active sentences. If so, learning noun order relations in NNV sequences with an INANIMATE PATIENT + ANIMATE AGENT (It's the drum the boy plays) should be more difficult than with an ANIMATE PATIENT + ANIMATE AGENT (It's the girl the boy chases). Seventy children aged 3;0 to 5;3 were trained with either AAV or IAV exemplars, and then tested for their noun order in NNV utterances when describing animate agent + animate patient and animate agent + inanimate patient pictures. As judged by post-training performance, AAV and AIV training had comparable effects at age three, but IAV resulted in better learning at ages four and five. It was argued that the latter benefited from the correlation between animacy and subject in English sentences.
Local and topological processing in sentence comprehension by French and Spanish children
Authors: Kail Michèle , Charvillat Agnès 
Published: February 2009

ABSTRACTThis cross-linguistic study investigates the relative importance of validity in terms of the strengths of syntactic cues and cue processing cost in sentence comprehension by French and Spanish children (4; 6–6; 6). The notion of cue cost refers to the distinction between local and topological processing types. Choices of the agent (cue strength) and latencies (cue cost) were collected through the acting out of sentences containing different syntactic cues. These cues (word order, clitic pronoun, verbal agreement plus accusative prepositionain Spanish) are ordered on a continuum from the most topological (word order) to the most local (prepositiona). The analysis of cue strengths reveals that, while for French children a linguistic cue is all the stronger the more topological it is (verbal agreement < clitic pronoun < word order), for Spanish children a cue is all the stronger the more local it is (word order < clitic pronoun < verbal agreement < prepositiona). The fact that Spanish children's latencies are always shorter (2150 msec) than those of French children (3110 msec) must be related to the effect of the prepositionawhich permits efficient role assignments with minimal cost. These results stress the importance of locality in sentence processing. On the other hand, a comparison with our similar adult cross-linguistic data demonstrates that the impact of cue cost changes over time.
The influence of dialectal variation on phonological acquisition: a case study on the acquisition of Cantonese
Authors: Tse Sou-Mee , Ingram David 
Published: February 2009

ABSTRACTThe phonological acquisition of a young girl whose parents spoke two dialects of Cantonese was examined. The father's dialect had a phonological distinction between initial /l/ and /n/ which was merged into /l/ in the mother's dialect. The child was followed bi-weekly for approximately one year. The results indicate that she acquired neither the mother's nor the father's dialect. Instead, she acquired [l] and [n] as freely varying allophones of a single phoneme. In the first months, [n] was the most frequent realization of the phoneme, with [l] becoming the most frequent one in later sessions. The results are interpreted as supporting the claim that children use all available input in acquiring language rather than limiting themselves to a primary language model.
The comprehension of metaphor by preschool children
Authors: Pearson Barbara Zurer 
Published: February 2009

ABSTRACTComprehension of metaphor in preschoolers was studied through an elicited repetition task. Subjects were 52 children aged 3;0 to 5;2. Repetition performance on metaphors was compared to repetitions of semantically well-formed literal sentences as well as semantically anomalous sentences, all matched for length, vocabulary and sentence structure. Accuracy on literal and metaphoric stimuli was comparable, and both were significantly better than performance on anomalous sentences. There were no effects for age or sex. It was shown that the metaphors were not semantically anomalous to the children and that they were processed on a par with literal language. The argument is advanced from a review of the literature that imitation implicates understanding of the material imitated. If metaphor is thus shown to emerge early in the child's linguistic repertory, figurative language, it may be argued, occupies a more central position in linguistic theory than it has been accorded.
Development of forms and functions of negation in the early stages of language acquisition: a study in Tamil
Authors: Vaidyanathan R. 
Published: February 2009

ABSTRACTThe development of forms and functions of negation in parent–child interactions in the early stages of language acquisition is discussed with illustrative examples from field data relating to two Tamil-speaking children and their parents. An attempt is made to provide a scheme for analysing the negatives in children's speech, maintaining the three basic functions of Bloom (1970) unaltered. Subcategories of these functions are introduced, taking into consideration the interactional situations as they are perceived by the parents and children. Children, it is observed, acquire the forms and functions of negation in a clear developmental sequence. They acquire and use the free forms naanaa (veeṇḍaam) ‘No, I don't want’ first, followed by negatives involving bound forms. Certain forms like maaṭṭeen ‘I won't’, muḍiyaadi' I can't’ and even veeṇḍaam are used in isolation (as free forms) first. Only later are they used with verb infinitives. The development of functions of negation follows the sequence: rejection, non-existence, prohibition and denial. Thus the children of this study show preference for rejection over non-existence as observed by earlier scholars.
A crosslinguistic investigation of vowel formants in babbling
Authors: de Boysson-Bardies Bénédicte , Halle Pierre , Sagart Laurent , Durand Catherine 
Published: February 2009

ABSTRACTA cross-cultural investigation of the influence of target-language in babbling was carried out. 1047 vowels produced by twenty 10-month-old infants from Parisian French, London English, Hong Kong Cantonese and Algiers Arabic language backgrounds were recorded in the cities of origin and spectrally analysed. F1-F2 plots of these vowels were obtained for each subject and each language group. Statistical analyses provide evidence of differences between infants across language backgrounds. These differences parallel those found in adult speech in the corresponding languages. Implications of an early build-up of target-language-oriented production skills are discussed.
Induction and the acquisition of English auxiliaries: the effects of differentially enriched input
Authors: Shatz Marilyn , Hoff-Ginsberg Erika , Maciver Douglas 
Published: February 2009

ABSTRACTChildren aged 2;0 to 2;6 participated in a longitudinal study examining their acquisition of the English auxiliary system following a six-week period in which they were exposed to additional auxiliary input in varying sentence contexts. Groups of children received enrichment utterances with the auxiliarycouldeither in first position in the sentence, in middle position, or in both positions. Children in the front position group were significantly advanced over the other experimental groups in acquiring modal auxiliaries but not non-modals. However, none of the experimental groups differed significantly from a baseline group which received no additionalcouldinput. The implications of these findings for understanding the mechanisms of auxiliary acquisition and the nature of children's grammatical categories are discussed.
Canonical and non-canonical syllable discrimination by two-day-old infants
Authors: Moon Christine , Bever Thomas G. , Fifer William P. 
Published: February 2009

ABSTRACTCanonical syllables may be important units in early speech perception as well as production. Twenty infants (mean age 51 hours) (and twenty controls) were tested for their ability to discriminate between members of syllable pairs which were either canonical (pæt and tæp) or non-canonical (pst and tsp). A discrimination learning method was used in which syllables signalled the availability of either a recording of the mother's voice or silence – one of which was presented if the infant began a sucking burst. Infants in the canonical condition changed sucking patterns during signals over an 18-minute experimental session and activated their mother's voice more than silence, consistent with previous experiments using mother's voice as a reinforcer. In the non-canonical condition, infants also changed sucking patterns but sucked more during the signal for quiet than mother's voice, contrary to previous findings. Differential sucking during the syllables indicated discrimination in both conditions, but infants responded differently depending upon whether the syllables were canonical or non-canonical. The activation of silence in the non-canonical condition may be the result of a preference for quiet, but it is better explained as a failure to progress to a level of differential responding that was reached by the canonical group.
How referential are ‘referential’ children? Relationships between maternal-report and observational measures of vocabulary composition and usage
Authors: Pine Julian M. 
Published: February 2009

ABSTRACTThis study examines the relationship between maternal-report measures of referential vocabulary and observational measures of referential vocabulary and usage in eight first-born middle-class children at 50 and loo words. The results indicate that although maternal-report measures of vocabulary composition can be reasonably reliable, provided some attempt is made to restrict variation in the number of vocabulary items upon which they are based, such measures tend to exaggerate the relative importance of common nouns for the child in two ways; firstly, in the sense that they reflect differential maternal sensitivity to such word-types in comparison with other less-‘referential’ items; and, secondly, in the sense that they overestimate the extent to which such word-types actually occur in the child's spontaneous speech.
Incidence of verbal comparisons in beginners' books and in metaphor comprehension research: a search for ecological validity
Authors: Broderick Victor 
Published: February 2009

ABSTRACTExplicit verbal comparisons in 53 popular children's books were syntactically and semantically classified. Comparison types found in these books were contrasted with comparisons used as comprehension stimuli in extant developmental research. Although noun-phrase metaphor has been a popular syntactic form in research, it is a rare form in children's literature. Implications for the design of future stimulus sets are discussed.
Can children use a verb without exposure to its argument structure?
Authors: Braine Martin D. S. , Brody Ruth E. , Fisch Shalom M. , Weisberger Mara J. , Blum Monica 
Published: February 2009

ABSTRACTWe hypothesize that canonical sentence schemas (e.g. Agent—verb-Patient) can sometimes assign argument structure to verbs. In particular, they provide a default argument structure early in learning when a verb's lexical entry may record the nature of the action but lack a specific argument structure. To test the theory and its application to causative verb errors (e.g. stay it there), novel action verbs were modelled, some as causative, some as intransitive, and some unmarked for transitivity. Spontaneous usage was recorded, along with responses to agent-questions (‘What is the [Agent] doing?’) and patient-questions (‘What is the [Patient] doing?’). Comparable data were obtained for familiar English verbs, some of fixed and some of optional transitivity. Subjects were willing to use all novel verbs both transitively and intransitively, although adults respected assigned transitivity more than children. All subjects largely respected the transitivity of familiar verbs. The discourse pressure of the agent- and patient-questions greatly affected observed transitivity. No evidence was found for the intransitive-to-causative derivational process postulated by Bowerman. We propose that the kind of causativity error observed by Bowerman is due to assignment of argument structure from canonical sentence schemas, especially under pressure of a need to make a sentence with a particular argument (Agent or Patient) as subject. The theory has the advantage of explaining errors without postulating the acquisition of erroneous lexical entries that have to be unlearned, and it can be extended to other kinds of errors in the choice and placement of arguments.
Children use syntax to learn verb meanings
Authors: Naigles Letitia 
Published: February 2009

ABSTRACTVerb learning is clearly a function of observation of real-world contingencies; however, it is argued that such observational information is insufficient to account fully for vocabulary acquisition. This paper provides an experimental validation of Landau & Gleitman's (1985) syntactic bootstrapping procedure; namely, that children may use syntactic information to learn new verbs. Pairs of actions were presented simultaneously with a nonsense verb in one of two syntactic structures. The actions were subsequently separated, and the children (MA = 2;1) were asked to select which action was the referent for the verb. The children's choice of referent was found to be a function of the syntactic structure in which the verb had appeared.
How to measure development in corpora? An association strength approach
Authors: STOLL SABINE , GRIES STEFAN TH. 
Published: February 2009

ABSTRACTIn this paper we propose a method for characterizing development in large longitudinal corpora. The method has the following three features: (i) it suggests how to represent development without assuming predefined stages; (ii) it includes caregiver speech/child-directed speech; (iii) it uses statistical association measures for investigating co-occurrence data. We exemplify the implementation of these proposals with data on the acquisition of the patterning of tense and grammatical aspect of four Russian children. The method, however, is suitable for a wide range of other acquisition questions as well.
Dynamics of rapid extinction in a lumped system with Arrhenius chemistry
Authors: Do D. D. , Weiland R. H. 
Published: February 2009

AbstractReacting systems with Arrhenius chemistry can exhibit multiple steady states for γ > 4(1 + β)/β where γ is activation energy and β is the heat of reaction. We give a detailed analysis of the extremely rapid jump which takes place as catalyst activity slowly decays through criticality. Previous analyses are asymptotic in the limit γ → ∞; here we relax the large γ assumption and only require that passage through criticality is slow.
Three dimensional similarity solutions of the nonlinear diffusion equation from optimization and first integrals
Authors: Parlange J.-Y. , Braddock R. D. , Sander G. , Stagnitti F. 
Published: February 2009

AbstractFor diffusion problems, the boundary conditions are specified at two distinct points, yielding a two end-point boundary value problem which normally requires iterative techniques. For spherical geometry, it is possible to specify the boundary conditions at the same points, approximately, by using an optimization principle for arbitrary diffusivity. When the diffusivity obeys a power or an exponential law, a first integral exists and iteration can be avoided. For those two exact cases, it is shown that the general optimization result is extremely accurate when diffusivity increases rapidly with concentration.
Stiff systems of ordinary differential equations. III. Partially stiff systems
Authors: Mahony J. J. , Shepherd J. J. 
Published: February 2009

AbstractThe partially stiff system of ordinary differential equationsis studied by the methods developed in the earlier papers in this series. Here e is a small positive parameter, x and y are n- and m-vectors respectively, and A is nonsingular. A useful basis for the solution space of the homogeneous system is constructed and the method of variation of parameters is used to obtain useful representations of all solutions. Sufficient conditions are derived under which the formal approximationis close to the actual solution. it is found that purely imaginary eigenvalues for A require more stringent requirements for the formal technique to be valid. A brief discussion of the case when A is singular shows that there are a great number of possibilities requiring consideration for a general theory. it is suggested that local computation of such cases is likely to be the most effective weapon for any specific system.
Input retrieval in finite dimensional linear systems
Authors: Howlett P. G. 
Published: February 2009

AbstractFor finite dimensional linear systems it is known that in certain circumstances the input can be retrieved from a knowledge of the output only. The main aim of this paper is to produce explicit formulae for input retrieval in systems which do not possess direct linkage from input to output. Although two different procedures are suggested the fundamental idea in both cases is to find an expression for the inverse transfer function of the system. In the first case this is achieved using a general method of power series inversion and in the second case by a sequence of elementary operations on a Rosenbrock type system matrix.
Double conductor line above a two-layered cylinder with varying properties
Authors: Kolyshkin A. A. , Vaillancourt Rémi 
Published: February 2009

AbstractThe change of impedance per unit length in a single or double conductor line situated parallel to an infinitely long two-layered metallic circular cylinder is found (within the quasistatic approximation) in the form of an infinite series. The cylinder consists of an inner core and an outer annulus. The properties of the inner core are assumed to be constant. The relative magnetic permeability, μ(r) = rα and the conductivity, σ(r) = σ(0)rκ, of the outer annulus vary with respect to the radial coordinate, r, and α and κ are arbitrary real numbers. Numerical results are presented in the form of figures and tables.
Oscillations of Interconnected Systems withC0Nonlinearities
Authors: He Xiangjian 
Published: February 2009

AbstractIn this paper we establish conditions which ensure the existence of self-excited oscillations in complex dynamical systems with nondifferentiable nonlinearities, by considering those types of systems which can be viewed as an interconnection of several simpler subsystems. We find that the nonlinear terms of the system in which we are interested do not need to satisfy the Lipschitz condition.
Generalized multi-peg tower of hanoi problem
Authors: Majumdar A. A. K. 
Published: February 2009

AbstractThis paper treats the multi-peg generalization of the Tower of Hanoi problem with n(≥ 1) disks and p(≥ 3) pegs, P1, P2,…, Pp. Denoting by M(n, p) the presumed minimum number of moves required to transfer the tower of n disks from the source peg, P1, to the destination peg, Pp, under the condition that each move transfers the topmost disk from one peg to another such that no disk is ever placed on top of a smaller one, the Dynamic Programming technique has been employed to find the optimality equation satisfied by M(n, p). Though an explicit expression for M(n, p) is given, no explicit expressions for the partition numbers (at which M(n, p) is attained) are available in the literature for p ≥ 5. The values of the partition numbers have been given in this paper.