The effects of conflict role and intensity on preschoolers’ expectations about peer conflict

Using a puppet procedure depicting hypothetical conflict involving the participant and a peer, 96 preschoolers’ (48 boys and 48 girls; M 1/4 5.14 years, SD 1/4 0.78 years) expectations about peer conflict were assessed as a function of their role in the conflict (i.e., initiator of or responder to initial provocation) and the intensity level of the conflict. Initiators of conflict expected less conflict escalation and subsequent problems with the same peer from the conflict than did responders, particularly following low-intensity conflict. Findings also indicated that, for low-intensity but not high-intensity conflict, girls expected the same peer to provoke them during a subsequent interaction more often than did boys. Results provide further support for assessing preschoolers’ understanding of conflict and are consistent with previous work demonstrating a self-serving bias in young children’s perceptions and reports of their conflicts with other children. Moreover, findings are discussed in terms of their implications for the development of peer relations.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Statistical Language Modelling

Grammar-based natural language processing has reached a level where it can `understand' language to a limited degree in restricted domains. For example, it is possible to parse textual material very accurately and assign semantic relations to parts of sentences. An alternative approach originates from the work of Shannon over half a century ago [41], [42]. This approach assigns probabilities to linguistic events, where mathematical models are used to represent statistical knowledge. Once models are built, we decide which event is more likely than the others according to their probabilities. Although statistical methods currently use a very impoverished representation of speech and language (typically finite state), it is possible to train the underlying models from large amounts of data. Importantly, such statistical approaches often produce useful results. Statistical approaches seem especially well-suited to spoken language which is often spontaneous or conversational and not readily amenable to standard grammar-based approaches