Child acquisition of referring expressions

Children, like adults, use referring expressions to refer to specific objects, events, or people. Research has provided insights into how children use referring expressions and the appearance of forms developmentally (Radford, 1990; Abu-Akel, et al., 2004; Pine & Lieven, 1997). This study examined how three, four, and five year-old children use referring expressions across increasingly more decontextualized tasks as defined by the Situational-Discourse-Semantic (SDS) Model (Norris & Hoffman, 1993, 2002) . The participants included 4 three-year-old, 12 four-year-old, and 20 five-year-old children. Language samples were elicited using seven tasks of increasing difficulty. The referring expressions produced for each task were categorized based on their usage, and then analyzed for similarities and differences in the frequencies and types of referring expressions used within and between contextualized and decontextualized levels, tasks, and age groups. A significant difference was found in how participants across the three different ages used referring expressions in the contextualized tasks versus the decontextualized tasks. The relationship between the task and category also revealed that the task significantly affected the number of referring expressions found in a given category across all of the participant age groups. Lastly, the difference between the participants in the three different age groups and the tasks was examined. Tasks 3, 6, and 7 all showed a significant group difference for performance on these tasks. Through this study, we have gained insights into referring expressions, including what they are and how they are used in contextualized and decontextualized language samples. In examining the language samples, we have started to explore how children use referring expressions, including the use of cohesive ties and types of errors children produce. Although looking at the language samples from this syntactic perspective is useful, this study also considers the effects of context and meaning and how these semantic-pragmatic variables affect the use of referring expressions. In addition, this study provides some early insights into effects of changing context and how this interacts with age

Road Pricing and Older People: An In-depth Study of Attitudes, Pro-Social Values and Social Norms.

Understanding the socio-psychological mechanisms that determine the public acceptability of road pricing could be a key for its implementation in urban environments where this is a viable scenario. Studying the attitudes of older people is of particular importance due to the ageing of the populations in the industrialised democracies, the high political engagement of older people, and their vulnerability to transport-related social exclusion. Research by the present authors had previously identified that older people's beliefs about what is the normal, acceptable, or even expected choice in a particular social context (“social norms”) and their tendency to favour, more than any other age group, what is positively valued by society (“pro-social value orientation”) affect their attitudes to road pricing. The present paper aims to develop an in-depth understanding of these attitude-shaping determinants drawing on the findings of focus groups conducted in Bristol, UK. The findings suggest that there are three distinctive expressions of pro-sociality: pro-environmental values and generativity on the one hand, these two being drivers of support for road pricing, and pro-equity values on the other, which tend to drive opposition. Social norms have two particular expressions: subjective norms (i.e. norms reflecting people’s immediate social environment) and norms referring to others and society in general. Furthermore, a theory-driven thematic analysis indicates that trust in the integrity of the concept and older age as a life stage associated with ageing, retirement, lower income, mobility barriers and deteriorating health are important in how attitudes reflecting and affecting public acceptability to road pricing form

A Pragmatic Study of Female and Male Discourse Use on Facebook

La comunicación virtual es un campo de estudio muy interesante e innovador que analiza las distintas estrategias comunicativas empleadas en este tipo de discurso que difieren de las empleadas en la comunicación verbal. Este trabajo empieza revisando investigaciones precedentes en este tema para posteriormente analizar, desde un punto de vista pragmático, las diferencias del uso del discurso femenino y masculino en Facebook, sin caer en una perspectiva sexista. El problema principal en este estudio ha sido intentar establecer dicha comparación. Para poder acometer este estudio, recurrimos primero al análisis descriptivo de un corpus creado con discursos reales sacados de la propia red social, para elaborar un cuestionario Likert de 5 puntos, y poder realizar así un estudio experimental que nos permitiera probar si los marcadores textuales utilizados por hombres y mujeres difieren en sus respectivos discursos. Los resultados revelaron una diferencia estadísticamente significativa entre ambos tipos de discursos al comunicarse en Facebook. Sin embargo, también obtuvimos algunos resultados inesperados en relación al uso de los marcadores discursivos utilizados por el grupo de mujeres jóvenes que eran muy parecidos a los utilizados por los hombres en ambas condiciones, tanto en los jóvenes como en los adultos. Por esta razón, la conclusión es que existen rasgos distintivos en los usos discursivos femeninos y masculinos, aunque en el caso de las mujeres jóvenes su discurso parece estar cambiando, puesto que se asemeja cada vez más al discurso masculino. No obstante, sería necesario llevar a cabo una investigación sobre el cambio discursivo de las mujeres jóvenes para tratar de establecer sus causas.Virtual communication is an interesting and innovative field study which analyses the communicative strategies used in this type of discourse, different from the ones used in face-to-face communication. This work first reviews some previous research on the topic to then analyse from a pragmatic perspective the differences between female and male discoursre uses on Facebook, without succumbing to a sexist perspective. To carry out this analysis, we resorted to a corpus made with real conversations from Facebook to elaborate a 5-pint Likert scale, and so conduct an experimental survey to test whether women and men actually use different discourse markers in their respective discourses. The results revealed that there was a statistically significant distinction in the female and male discourse use when communicating on Facebook. However, some unexpected results were also obtained regarding the discourse markers used by women in the female young adult group condition, which were very similar to those used by men in both the young adult and adult condition. Hence, the conclusion is that there are distinctive features of both female and male discourse use that allow us to identify the two different gender identities, though young women’s discourse use seems to be changing and increasingly resembling to the male discourse. Further research is needed to shed some more light on the change of discourse use found in young women to try to determine its causes.31 páginas y anex

Reference and Gestures in Dialogue Generation: Three Studies with Embodied Conversational Agents

This paper reports on three studies into social presence cues which were carried out in the context of the NECA (Net-environment for Embodied Emotional Conversational Agents) project and the EPOCH network. The first study concerns the generation of referring expressions. We adopted an existing algorithm for generating referring expressions such that it could run according to an egocentric and a neutral strategy. In an evaluation study, we found that the two strategies were correlated with the perceived friendliness of the speaker. In the second and the third study, we evaluated the gestures that were generated by the NECA system. In this paper, we briefly summarize the most salient results of these two studies. They concern the effect of gestures on perceived quality of speech and information retention

Cognitive Reserve and Its Effect in Older Adults on Retrieval of Proper Names, Logo Names and Common Nouns

Previous studies showed that high Cognitive Reserve (CR, years of education and experience and knowledge acquired in life) is correlated with language proficiency as measured with vocabulary size, verbal analogy, and semantic processing. The aim of the present study is to investigate the relationship between CR and the ability in retrieving different categories of words: Proper Names, Logo Names, and Common Nouns. The hypothesis is that CR contributes more in retrieving Common Nouns and Logo Names which are highly semantically interconnected, than retrieving Proper Names which are pure referring expressions. Forty-six Italian healthy older adults underwent the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) and their performances spanned from low to high global cognitive profile. They were also administered a picture naming task for Proper Names, Logo Names and Common Nouns. Latency and Accuracy were recorded. CR was measured with the Cognitive Reserve Index (CRI) questionnaire which provides a measure of education, working time activities, and leisure time activities. Participants were significantly faster and more accurate in name retrieval when CR was high. CRI and MoCA as interaction terms predicted naming Latency with a stronger effect of CRI when the global cognitive profile was in the low range. The effect of CRI on Accuracy was lower for Proper Names than for Common Nouns and Logo Names, which did not differ from each other. Our results show that name retrieval Accuracy can be predicted by CR, significantly more in the case of Logo Names and Common Nouns than in the case of Proper Names. As Proper Names have scarce semantic interconnections and are arbitrarily assigned to unique individuals, they are not much influenced by CR. Although Logo Names are also arbitrarily assigned to their bearers, they can be conceptually categorized and thus influenced by reserve. The weak relationship between Proper Names and CR might suggest a proper name task as a useful tool to detect early signs of dementia, in particular for persons with high CR

The Actions and Feelings Questionnaire in Autism and Typically Developed Adults

Open access via Springer Compact Agreement We are grateful to Simon Baron-Cohen and Paula Smith of the Cambridge Autism Centre for the use of the ARC database in distributing the questionnaire, to all participants for completing it, to Eilidh Farquar for special efforts in distributing the link and to Gemma Matthews for advice on using AMOS 23. JHGW is supported by the Northwood Trust.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Adults are more efficient in creating and transmitting novel signalling systems than children

Iterated language learning experiments have shown that meaningful and structured signalling systems emerge when there is pressure for signals to be both learnable and expressive. Yet such experiments have mainly been conducted with adults using language-like signals. Here we explore whether structured signalling systems can also emerge when signalling domains are unfamiliar and when the learners are children with their well-attested cognitive and pragmatic limitations. In Experiment 1, we compared iterated learning of binary auditory sequences denoting small sets of meanings in chains of adults and 5-7-year old children. Signalling systems became more learnable even though iconicity and structure did not emerge despite applying a homonymy filter designed to keep the systems expressive. When the same types of signals were used in referential communication by adult and child dyads in Experiment 2, only the adults, but not the children, were able to negotiate shared iconic and structured signals. Referential communication using their native language by 4-5-year old children in Experiment 3 showed that only interaction with adults, but not with peers resulted in informative expressions. These findings suggest that emergence and transmission of communication systems is unlikely to be driven by children, and point to the importance of cognitive maturity and pragmatic expertise of learners as well as feedback-based scaffolding of communicative effectiveness by experts during language evolution

The effect of perceptual availability and prior discourse on young children's use of referring expressions.

Choosing appropriate referring expressions requires assessing whether a referent is “available” to the addressee either perceptually or through discourse. In Study 1, we found that 3- and 4-year-olds, but not 2-year-olds, chose different referring expressions (noun vs. pronoun) depending on whether their addressee could see the intended referent or not. In Study 2, in more neutral discourse contexts than previous studies, we found that 3- and 4-year-olds clearly differed in their use of referring expressions according to whether their addressee had already mentioned a referent. Moreover, 2-yearolds responded with more naming constructions when the referent had not been mentioned previously. This suggests that, despite early social–cognitive developments, (a) it takes time tomaster the given/new contrast linguistically, and (b) children understand the contrast earlier based on discourse, rather than perceptual context

Who is afraid of constructivism? (¿Quién tiene miedo del constructivismo?)

Both generative and constructivist researchers agree that children are able to form abstractions and produce novel grammatically patterned utterances. Both approaches are able to explain such abilities, and hence their existence does not entail an innate Universal Grammar. However, generativists and constructivists differ in their views on the nature of early generalisations: while generative researchers assume that adult-like linguistic representations are present from the very beginning, constructivists argue that children begin with relatively specific, low level schemas and gradually extract more abstract patterns. There is considerable empirical evidence for the latter position. Moreover, constructivist theories provide a better explanation for principled behaviour -not just the observed patterns, but also the absence of certain constructions in children's early productions and various developmental asynchronies. Tanto los investigadores generativistas como constructivistas coinciden en que los niños son capaces de formar abstracciones y de producir emisiones novedosas gramaticalmente estructuradas. Ambos enfoques son capaces de explicar tales habilidades, y por eso su existencia no implica una Gramática Universal innata. Sin embargo, los investigadores generativistas y constructivistas difieren en su visión sobre la naturaleza de las generalizaciones tempranas: mientras que los investigadores generativistas asumen que las representaciones lingüísticas parecidas a las adultas están presentes desde edades tempranas, los constructivistas argumentan que los niños comienzan con esquemas de bajo nivel, relativamente específicos, y que gradualmente extraen esquemas más abstractos. Existe considerable evidencia empírica en apoyo de esta segunda posición. Además, las teorías constructivistas proporcionan una mejor explicación de las conductas basadas en reglas; no sólo de los patrones observados, sino también de la ausencia de ciertas construcciones en las producciones verbales tempranas de los niños y de diversas asincronías evolutivas