“Advancing Evidence-based Policy in Crisis Management: Field Survey Findings

This report presents preliminary findings from the field surveys conducted as part of the project led by AUB and funded by the National Endowment for Democracy: “Advancing Evidence-Based Policy in Crisis Management.” The project aims to monitor the impact of the multi-dimensional crises Lebanon is facing, on multiple economic sectors, and subsequently advance evidence-based policy reforms that respond to citizens’ priorities. For this purpose, the assessment carried out had two main objectives: (i) gathering information about the socio-economic impacts of the crisis, and (ii) data on coping mechanisms. This preliminary report will be followed by a more detailed final report containing analysis of qualitative and quantitative data collected through surveys and interviews. Studies have found that collecting more information (qualitative and quantitative) on households’ vulnerability to poverty could help inform policy. The final report will present a more comprehensive analysis and make some policy recommendations

A cross-linguistic study of the acquisition of clitic and pronoun production

This study develops a single elicitation method to test the acquisition of third-person pronominal objects in 5-year-olds for 16 languages. This methodology allows us to compare the acquisition of pronominals in languages that lack object clitics (“pronoun languages”) with languages that employ clitics in the relevant context (“clitic languages”), thus establishing a robust cross-linguistic baseline in the domain of clitic and pronoun production for 5-year-olds. High rates of pronominal production are found in our results, indicating that children have the relevant pragmatic knowledge required to select a pronominal in the discourse setting involved in the experiment as well as the relevant morphosyntactic knowledge involved in the production of pronominals. It is legitimate to conclude from our data that a child who at age 5 is not able to produce any or few pronominals is a child at risk for language impairment. In this way, pronominal production can be taken as a developmental marker, provided that one takes into account certain crosslinguistic differences discussed in the article