Generalizing About Striking Properties: Do Glippets Love to Play With Fire?

Two experiments investigated whether 4- and 5-year-old children are sensitive to whether the content of a generalization is about a salient or noteworthy property (henceforth "striking") and whether varying the number of exceptions has any effect on children's willingness to extend a property after having heard a generalization. Moreover, they investigated how the content of a generalization interacts with exception tolerance. Adult data were collected for comparison. We used generalizations to describe novel kinds (e.g., "glippets") that had either a neutral (e.g., "play with toys") or a striking property (e.g., "play with fire") and measured how willing participants were to extend the property to a new instance of the novel kind. Experiment 1 demonstrated that both adults and children show sensitivity to strikingness in that striking properties were extended less than neutral ones, although children extended less than adults overall. The responses of both age groups were significantly different from chance. Experiment 2 introduced varying numbers of exceptions to the generalization made (minimal: 1 exception; maximal: 3 exceptions). Both adults and children extended both types of properties even in the face of exceptions, but to a lower degree than in Experiment 1. Striking properties were extended less than neutral ones, as in Experiment 1. We observed that the greater the number of exceptions, the lower the rates of extension we obtained, for both types of properties in adults, but only with striking properties in children. Children seemed to keep track of varying numbers of exceptions for striking properties, but their performance did not differ from chance. The findings underscore that 4- and 5-year-old children are sensitive to strikingness and to exception tolerance for generalizations and are developing toward an adult-like behavior with respect to the interplay between strikingness and exception tolerance when they learn about novel kinds. We discuss the implications of these results with regards to how children make generalizations

Illusory vowels in Spanish-English sequential bilinguals : Evidence that accurate L2 perception is neither necessary nor sufficient for accurate L2 production

Altres ajuts: British Academy - SG112797Spanish native speakers are known to pronounce onset /sC/ clusters in English with a prothetic vowel, as in esport for sport, due to their native language phonotactic constraints. We assessed whether accurate production of e.g. spi instead of espi, was related to accurate perceptual discrimination of this contrast in L2 speech of Spanish-English sequential bilinguals. A same-different discrimination task in stimulus pairs such as spi-espi assessed speech perception and a phonemic verbal fluency task elicited speech production. Logistic mixed model regressions revealed significant differences in accuracy between the bilinguals and the English monolinguals, although some bilinguals performed within the monolingual range. For the production task, but not for the perception task, bilinguals with more exposure to English and greater grammatical knowledge of English performed significantly more accurately than those with less exposure and lower grammatical knowledge. There was no significant correlation between production accuracy and perception accuracy. Through examining phonotactic constraints, these results expand a growing body of research into single sounds which suggests dissociations between L2 perception and production. In contrast to predictions made by L2 speech models, the findings indicate that accurate L2 perception is neither necessary nor sufficient for accurate L2 production, and instead are interpreted to indicate that the two capacities recruit different executive control mechanisms and are acquired - at least to a certain extent - independently in L2 acquisition

Illusory vowels in Spanish-English sequential bilinguals: Evidence that accurate L2 perception is neither necessary nor sufficient for accurate L2 production

Spanish native speakers are known to pronounce onset /sC/ clusters in English with a prothetic vowel, as in esport for sport, due to their native language phonotactic constraints. We assessed whether accurate production of e.g. spi instead of espi was related to accurate perceptual discrimination of this contrast in second language (L2) speech of Spanish–English sequential bilinguals. A same–different discrimination task in stimulus pairs such as spi–espi assessed speech perception and a phonemic verbal fluency task elicited speech production. Logistic mixed model regressions revealed significant differences in accuracy between the bilinguals and the English monolinguals, although some bilinguals performed within the monolingual range. For the production task, but not for the perception task, bilinguals with more exposure to English and greater grammatical knowledge of English performed significantly more accurately than those with less exposure and lower grammatical knowledge. There was no significant correlation between production accuracy and perception accuracy. Through examining phonotactic constraints, these results expand a growing body of research into single sounds which suggests dissociations between L2 perception and production. In contrast to predictions made by L2 speech models, the findings indicate that accurate L2 perception is neither necessary nor sufficient for accurate L2 production, and instead are interpreted to indicate that the two capacities recruit different executive control mechanisms and are acquired – at least to a certain extent – independently in L2 acquisition.Peer Reviewe

Magnetoencephalographic investigations of morphological identity and irregularity

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 2004.Includes bibliographical references (p. 105-111).This thesis addresses the longstanding debate in the psycholinguistics literature about the correct way to characterize the psychological status of morphological relatedness and irregular allomorphy. The model argued for here is one in which the mental lexicon consists of lexical roots (sound -meaning pairs that are arbitrary in the Saussurian sense, such as CAT: 'feline'/kaet/) and functional morphemes (affixes such as the plural marker -s, that carry purely grammatical information). Complex words are assembled by the grammar out of these roots and affixes. We argue that this is true even for words like "gaze" which don't clearly separate into two pieces, but are abstractly parallel to "walked," which does. Evidence for this full, across the board decomposition model is provided in a series of priming experiments that use magnetoencephalography to measure the earliest stages of lexical processing. Both regular and irregular allomorphs of a root are shown to access their root equally. These results, then, are incompatible both with connectionist models which treat all morphological relatedness as similarity, and with dual mechanism models which argue that regular allomorphy and irregular allomorphy arise from completely different systems, and only regular allomorphy involves root activation and composition. In this model, morphological relatedness is argued to be an identity relation between various allomorphs of a single, shared root, and is therefore clearly distinguished from semantic and phonological relatedness, which merely involve similarity between the meaning, or form, of different roots. The experiments reported in this dissertation support this model: the neural responses evoked by identity are significantly distinct from(cont.) the neural responses evoked by similarity.by Linnaea C. Stockall.Ph.D

Structuring the Argument : Introduction

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Structuring the Argument: Multidisciplinary Research on Verb Argument Structure

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