Children's Gestures from 18 to 30 Months

This thesis concerns the nature of the gestures performed by five Swedish children. The children are followed from 18 to 30 months of age: an age range which is characterized by a rapid succession of developmental changes in children's abilities to communicate by means of both spoken language and gesture. There are few studies of gesture in children of these ages, making it essential to ask a number of basic questions: What sort of gestural actions do the children perform? How does the use of gesture change over time, from 18 to 30 months of age? How are the gestures performed in coordination with speech? The answers provided to these questions are both quantitative and qualitative in kind. Several transitions in the use of gesture are identified, relating to developmental changes in the organization of speech — highlighting the symbiotic relationship between gesture and speech in the communicative ecology. Considerable attention is paid to the even more basic question of what sort of actions qualify for the label "gesture". Instead of treating gestural qualities as a matter of a binary distinction between actions counting as gesture and those that do not, a multi-level approach is advocated. This approach allows for descriptions of gestures in terms of several different levels of complexity. Furthermore, a distinction is made between levels of communicative explicitness on the one hand, and levels of semiotic complexity on the other. This distinction allows for the recognition that some gestural actions are semiotically complex, without being explicitly communicative, and vice versa: that some gestural actions are explicitly communicative, without being semiotically complex. The latter is particularly consequential for this thesis, since a large number of communicative gestural actions reside in the borderland between practical action and expressive gesture. Hence, the gestures analyzed include not only the prototypical "empty-handed" gestures, but also gestures that involve handling of physical objects. Overall, the role of conventionality in children's gestures is underscored. The approach is (a) cognitive in the sense that it pays attention to the knowledge and bodily skills involved in the performance of the gestures, (b) social and interactive in the sense that it views gestures as visible and accountable parts of mutually organized social activities, and (c) semiotic in the sense that the analysis tries to explicate how signification is brought about, in contrast to treating the meanings of gestures as transparently given, the way participants themselves often do when engaged in social interaction

Roots of language

Roots of language was originally published in 1981 by Karoma Press (Ann Arbor). It was the first work to systematically develop a theory first suggested by Coelho in the late nineteenth century: that the creation of creole languages somehow reflected universal properties of language. The book also proposed that the same set of properties would be found to emerge in normal first-language acquisition and must have emerged in the original evolution of language. These proposals, some of which were elaborated in an article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (1984), were immediately controversial and gave rise to a great deal of subsequent research in creoles, much of it aimed at rebutting the theory. The book also served to legitimize and stimulate research in language evolution, a topic regarded as off-limits by linguists for over a century. The present edition contains a foreword by the author bringing the theory up to date; a fuller exposition of many of its aspects can be found in the author’s most recent work, More than nature needs (Harvard University Press, 2014)

Development of Spanish L2 competence in a synchronous CMC (chat room) environment: the role of visually-enhanced recasts in fostering grammatical knowledge and changes in communicative language use

Taking into consideration some gaps observed in SLA research –noticing, recasts, input enhancement (IE),…– and in CALL/CMC research, a study was conducted among 12 advanced FL Spanish learners to assess whether and how, by communicating with a Spanish native speaker in 5 chat-room sessions, their language competence would develop in the following areas: 1) communication strategies; 2) communicative acts; and 3) grammatical knowledge of verb tense-aspect-mood (TAM) assignation. Subjects were assigned to a specific feedback condition/group (A: +recast, -enhancement; B: +recast, +enhancement; and C: no feedback) under which their TAM errors were treated in the sessions. Few research studies have concentrated on the effectiveness of recasts for grammatical acquisition; rather, they tend to focus on conversational aspects (e.g. Lyster & Ranta, 1997; Ohta, 2000) while the scarce grammar-based recast research has yielded positive results (e.g. Doughty & Varela, 1998; Ishida, 2004; Mackey & Philp, 1998). On the other hand, IE, typically an enhancement of the perceptual salience of input in applying the “input flooding” technique (Francis, 2003), has yielded mixed results, but some studies have found a facilitative effect for IE (Doughty, 1991; Francis, 2003; Jourdenais et al., 1995; Shook, 1994). Because of their relatively ineffective, rather implicit nature when used in isolation, in this study recasts were combined with IE assuming that IE –a tool not traditionally used in SLA as an additional measure of feedback– might strengthen the recast and render it more effective for uptake of the linguistic forms. Based on the properties of the resulting combined feedback (group B: enhanced recast), it was anticipated that enhanced recasts would be a more powerful tool, and, as a result, the following sequence of gain in grammatical knowledge would be found: group B (enhanced) \u3e group A (non-enhanced) \u3e group C (no feedback). The findings reveal that groups B and C had the highest overall gains in verb TMA assignation, and group B was superior in most grammatical contexts. As for communication strategy and communicative act use, the sequence of gain was: A \u3e B \u3e group C

Roots of language

Roots of language was originally published in 1981 by Karoma Press (Ann Arbor). It was the first work to systematically develop a theory first suggested by Coelho in the late nineteenth century: that the creation of creole languages somehow reflected universal properties of language. The book also proposed that the same set of properties would be found to emerge in normal first-language acquisition and must have emerged in the original evolution of language. These proposals, some of which were elaborated in an article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (1984), were immediately controversial and gave rise to a great deal of subsequent research in creoles, much of it aimed at rebutting the theory. The book also served to legitimize and stimulate research in language evolution, a topic regarded as off-limits by linguists for over a century. The present edition contains a foreword by the author bringing the theory up to date; a fuller exposition of many of its aspects can be found in the author’s most recent work, More than nature needs (Harvard University Press, 2014)

Finding Nonlinear Relationships in Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Data with Genetic Programming

The human brain is a complex, nonlinear dynamic chaotic system that is poorly understood. When faced with these difficult to understand systems, it is common to observe the system and develop models such that the underlying system might be deciphered. When observing neurological activity within the brain with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), it is common to develop linear models of functional connectivity; however, these models are incapable of describing the nonlinearities we know to exist within the system. A genetic programming (GP) system was developed to perform symbolic regression on recorded fMRI data. Symbolic regression makes fewer assumptions than traditional linear tools and can describe nonlinearities within the system. Although GP is a powerful form of machine learning that has many drawbacks (computational cost, overfitting, stochastic), it may provide new insights into the underlying system being studied. The contents of this thesis are presented in an integrated article format. For all articles, data from the Human Connectome Project were used. In the first article, nonlinear models for 507 subjects performing a motor task were created. These nonlinear models generated by GP contained fewer ROI than what would be found with traditional, linear tools. It was found that the generated nonlinear models would not fit the data as well as the linear models; however, when compared to linear models containing a similar number of ROI, the nonlinear models performed better. Ten subjects performing 7 tasks were studied in article two. After improvements to the GP system, the generated nonlinear models outperformed the linear models in many cases and were never significantly worse than the linear models. Forty subjects performing 7 tasks were studied in article three. Newly generated nonlinear models were applied to unseen data from the same subject performing the same task (intrasubject generalization) and many nonlinear models generalized to unseen data better than the linear models. The nonlinear models were applied to unseen data from other subjects performing the same task (intersubject generalization) and were not capable of generalizing as well as the linear

Tartu Ülikooli toimetised. Tööd semiootika alalt. 1964-1992. 0259-4668

http://www.ester.ee/record=b1331700*es

Discourses on Emotions: Communities, Styles, and Selves in Early Modern Mediterranean Travel Books Three Case Studies

The present study focuses on emotion discourses in early modern travel books. It attempts a close textual, intertextual, and contextual analysis of several embedded narratives on emotions in three late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century travel books: Kit?b N??ir al-D?n 'ala 'l-Qawm al-K?fir?n: Mukhta?ar Ri?lat al-Shih?b 'ila Liq?´ al-A?b?b by Andalusian traveller Ahmed bin Q?sim al-?ajar? (1570- c.1641), The Diary of Master Thomas Dallam by an English craftsman, Thomas Dallam (1575-1630), and Seyahâtnâme (The Book of Travels) by Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi (1611-1685). In these travel books, al-?ajar?, Dallam, and Evliya narrate their journeys as emotionally protean experiences. They associate emotions with the contexts of their journeys, their volition to travel, and their authorial motives to write about their journeys. They display their emotions in their dreams, humour, and other subjective experiences. Their narratives yield uncommon notions of emotions, namely the emotions of encounter. A love story between a Muslim traveller and a Catholic girl, an English craftsman's anxiety at the court of an Ottoman Sultan, a disgusting meal in a foreign land, are just a few examples of emotionally freighted situations which are unlikely to be found in any genre but a travel book. The close textual analysis aims to identify the role of the writers' cultures in shaping and regulating their discourses on emotions. The intertextual and contextual analysis of these narratives reveals that the meaning and function of these displayed emotions revolve around the traveller's community affiliation, religion, ideology, and other culture-specific discourses and practices such as Sufism, folk medicine, myths, folk traditions, natural and geographical phenomena, cultural scripts, social norms, and power relations. In a nutshell, reading the travellers' discourses on emotions means reading many cultural and historical aspects of the early modern world. To approach discourses on emotions in texts of the past, the present study draws on the theory of culture-construction of emotions. It uses three analytical notions from the fields of language, anthropology and history of emotions: 'emotional communities', 'emotional styles' and 'emotional self-fashioning'. The present study uses a theoretical framework defined by a recent wave of studies on self-narratives as sources for the history and cultural diversity of emotions in the medieval and early modern periods. Within this approach, travel writing is seen as a self-narrative, a communicative act, and a social practice. This approach to emotion discourses in Ri?la, travel journals and Seyahat genres allows us to project the transcultural and entangled history of the early modern Mediterranean, which as much it was a contested frontier between Islam and Christianity, was also a space of religious conversion and hybrid identities, the articulation of diplomacy and cultural exchange, mysticism and religious pluralism. This approach also pinpoints the diverse forms of cosmopolitanism, or rather cosmopolitanisms, in the plural