Reaching agreement as a core syntactic process: Commentary of Bock & Middleton Reaching Agreement

In their paper Reaching Agreement, Bock and Middleton (2011) review a vast array of psycholinguistic experiments on semantic influences in agreement which they argue provide critical empirical evidence to the longstanding debate about the role of meaning in syntax. The authors propose to unify these findings within the Marking and Morphing model, the reference framework for many psycholinguistic studies of agreement production. In this commentary, I discuss four concerns about the approach advocated by Bock and Middleton: (1) the pervasive confusion with respect to the definition of agreement, and its conceptual consequences on the debate about the role of meaning in syntax, (2) the infelicitous comparison between pronouns and verbs providing the empirical foundations of Marking and Morphing, (3) the existence of a set of experimental findings invalidating the assumption of the model with respect to the relation between feature transmission and morphology, (4) the lack of assumptions of Marking and Morphing with respect to the process of feature transmission, hence its inability to account for the structural effects on attraction. In response to these concerns, I present an alternative model, Selection and Copy, and sketch a line of research that explores the workings of the Copy component. I then address the criticisms raised by Bock and Middleton against this research and question the explanatory force of Marking and Morphing as a model of agreement defined as a core syntactic proces

Looking at management through its instruments : A genealogical analysis of instrument-based approaches of management

working paperVarious social science disciplines are currently witnessing a revival of theoretical approaches based on management instruments. The common feature of these approaches is that they consider management instruments as a starting point to study organized, strategic action. This article introduces a framework to distinguish the notion of management instruments from that of management tools or settings. It then proposes a genealogy of these management instrument-based approaches, by placing them in the theoretical and practical contexts in which they emerged. The originality of contemporary developments concerning these instruments, compared to former studies, is thus evaluated. The article concludes by arguing for the broadening of the management science research agenda, beyond the micro-analysis of local instruments, to include the conception of strategic multi-level settings consisting of a combination of actors and instruments

Syntactic complexity in the comprehension of wh-questions and relative clauses in typical language development and autism

This study investigates effects of syntactic complexity operationalised in terms of movement, intervention and (NP) feature similarity in the development of A’ dependencies in 4-, 6-, and 8-year old typically developing (TD) French children and children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Children completed an off-line comprehension task testing eight syntactic structures classified in four levels of complexity: Level 0: No Movement; Level 1: Movement without (configurational) Intervention; Level 2: Movement with Intervention from an element which is maximally different or featurally ‘disjoint’ (mismatched in both lexical NP restriction and number); Level 3: Movement with Intervention from an element similar in one feature or featurally ‘intersecting’ (matched in lexical NP restriction, mismatched in number). The results show that syntactic complexity affects TD children across the three age groups, but also indicate developmental differences between these groups. Movement affected all three groups in a similar way, but intervention effects in intersection cases were stronger in younger than older children, with NP feature similarity affecting only 4-year olds. Complexity effects created by the similarity in lexical restriction of an intervener thus appear to be overcome early in development, arguably thanks to other differences of this intervener (which was mismatched in number). Children with ASD performed less well than the TD children although they were matched on non-verbal reasoning. Overall, syntactic complexity affected their performance in a similar way as in their TD controls, but their performance correlated with non-verbal abilities rather than age, suggesting that their grammatical development does not follow the smooth relation to age that is found in TD children

Poverty Simulations: Building Relationships Among Extension, Schools, and the Community

Poverty simulations can be effective experiential learning tools for educating community members about the impact of poverty on families. The project described here includes survey results from three simulations with community leaders and teachers. This project illustrated how such workshops can help Extension professionals extend their reach and impact by engaging coalitions and volunteers and building community partnerships with school systems and community leadership groups

Abstract knowledge of word order by 19 months: An eye-tracking study

Word order is one of the earliest aspects of grammar that the child acquires, because her early utterances already respect the basic word order of the target language. However, the question of the nature of early syntactic representations is subject to debate. Approaches inspired by formal syntax assume that the head-complement order, differentiating verb-object and object-verb languages, is represented very early on in an abstract, rulelike format. In contrast, constructivist theories assume that it is initially encoded as lexicalized, verb-specific knowledge. In order to address this issue experimentally, we combined the preferential looking paradigm using pseudoverbs with the weird word order paradigm adapted to comprehension. The results, based on highly reliable, coder-independent eye-tracking measures, provide the first direct evidence that as early as 19 months French-speaking infants have an abstract representation of the word order of their languag

Les systèmes d'information sur les marchés agricoles dans les pays en développement : nouveaux modèles, nouveaux impacts

Dans les pays en développement (PED), les systèmes d'information sur les marchés (SIM) agricoles se sont développés en deux phases. Une première génération de SIM est apparue dans les années 1980 au moment de la libéralisation des agricultures des PED et une seconde génération l'a suivie dans les années 2000 sous l'impulsion de différents facteurs, notamment les difficultés rencontrées par les SIM de la première génération pour atteindre leurs objectifs, les nouvelles possibilités offertes par le développement des TIC - Internet et téléphonie mobile - et l'organisation croissante des opérateurs privés (organisations de producteurs, interprofessions). Alors que les SIM de la première génération (SIM1G) étaient pour la plupart construits sur le même modèle, les SIM2G (qui ont développé de nombreuses innovations techniques et organisationnelles) présentent une grande diversité de modèles. Quelles sont les principales innovations développées par les SIM de seconde génération ? Quels sont les principaux modèles de SIM existant actuellement ? Dans quelle mesure ces nouveaux modèles permettent-ils de répondre plus efficacement que leur prédécesseur aux objectifs qui leur ont été assignés (améliorer le fonctionnement des marchés et/ou nourrir les politiques publiques en information de marché) ? Que sait-on des impacts de ces dispositifs ? Le présent article et le numéro thématique dont il constitue l'introduction tentent de répondre à ces questions. (Résumé d'auteur

A learning bias for word order harmony:Evidence from speakers of non-harmonic languages

Word order harmony describes the tendency, found across the world's languages, to consistently order syntactic heads relative to dependents. It is one of the most well-known and well-studied typological universals. Almost since it was first noted by Greenberg (1963), there has been disagreement about what role, if any, the cognitive system plays in driving harmony. Recently, a series of studies using artificial language learning experiments reported that harmonic noun phrase word orders were preferred over non-harmonic orders by English-speaking adults and children (Culbertson et al., 2012; Culbertson & Newport, 2015, 2017). However, this evidence is potentially confounded by the fact that English is itself a harmonic language (Goldberg, 2013). Here we sought to extend the results from these studies by exploring whether learners who have substantial experience with a non-harmonic language still showed a bias for harmonic patterns during learning. We found that monolingual French- and Hebrew-speaking children, whose language has a non-harmonic noun phrase order (N Adj, Num N) nevertheless preferred harmonic patterns when learning an artificial language. We also found evidence for a harmony bias across several populations of adult learners, although this interacted in complex ways with their L2 experience. Our results suggest that transfer from the L1 cannot explain the preference for harmony found in previous studies. Moreover, they provide the strongest evidence yet that a cognitive bias for harmony is a plausible candidate for shaping linguistic typology

Processus de conception multidisciplinaire dédié aux configurations Blended Wing Body

The Blended Wing Body (BWB) configuration seems to be one of the most promising concepts to replace the current passenger transport aircrafts with substantial improvement of their performance and reduction of their environmental footprint. However the expected gains still need to be precisely evaluated with airplanes to design. BWB concept is a highly coupled system because every sizing discipline is connected to a single system: the wing. This paper presents the multidisciplinary design analysis and optimization process of a blended wing body and its application to a long-haul commercial transport mission