Pragmatic word learning in monolingual and bilingually exposed children

Humans are highly adaptable to a variety of challenging situations, as shown for example by increased echolocation abilities in the visually impaired (Schenkman & Nilsson, 2010). Multilingual input and interactions arguably create a particularly demanding environment, with added complexity and variation in the linguistic signal, a higher risk of communication failures and an increased amount of word forms to acquire. Despite this, and a lesser ability to rely on mutual exclusivity, bilingual children are able to quickly acquire a similar, and often greater vocabulary than their monolingual peers (De Houwer, Bornstein, & Putnick, 2014; Umbel, Pearson, Fernández, & Oller, 1992). A range of studies investigating attention to socio-pragmatic speaker cues found increased reliance on speaker cues in bilinguals (Colunga, Brojde, & Ahmed, 2012; Yow & Markman, 2011a, 2015). However, since these studies involved ignoring another conflicting cue, the results could have been related to inhibitory skills or to better attention to speaker generally, rather than to pragmatic inference per se, which relies on reasoning about communicative intentions. In five separate studies, we investigated the ability of a first (n=270, range=4;1- 6;2, mean age=5;3) and second (n=120, range=4;0-5;11, mean age=5;5) sample of monolingual and bilingually exposed children to use pragmatic cues to learn the meaning of a novel word in five different tasks where success could not be achieved by ignoring a salient cue. The tasks were: contrastive inference with prosodic stress, inference based on relative frequency of a referent, ostensive teaching of a subordinate category, ostensive teaching of an action word, and use of emotional affect. We found several developmental effects, and bilinguals to be more adult-like and to significantly outperform monolinguals (compared to a baseline control condition) in all tasks which involved reasoning about communicative intentions (or why the cue was provided, i.e., the first four tasks) but not when word referent mapping could be achieved without pragmatic reasoning (directly mapping emotional valence to referent valence, i.e., fifth task). We conclude that this thesis provides evidence for differences in the processing of pragmatic cues by bilingual and monolingual children which are not due solely to better inhibitory skills or to a general sensitivity to social cues such as prosody, eye gaze and pointing, but to performing true pragmatic inference by reasoning about communicative intentions in the context of word learning. In addition, we believe a distinction needs to be made between using social cues and reasoning about intentions, which might help provide insights about separate developmental timelines for exerting different types of pragmatic competence, with early abilities demonstrated by the bilingually exposed, particularly in acquisition contexts

Changing Times: The Renaissance, Scientific Revolution, and Reformation [6th grade]

This unit looks at the impact that the Renaissance, Scientific Revolution, and Reformation had on the world. It traces important people and ideas, and highlights the impact that each of these time periods had on the immediate and future world. For the Performance Task, the students create a newspaper, called The Changing Times that requires them to analyze the impact that inventions and ideas from these time periods had on the world, as well as look at futuristic inventions (to our time) and the possible impact they will have on our world

Border Disorder – Cultures in Conflict Throughout the World

This unit is designed to look at various cultures throughout the world and examine the reason for conflict in each of them. By looking at snapshots of information for various cultures and situations (e.g. Africa, Israel/Palestine, India/Pakistan, North/South Korea), students come to the understanding that conflict is due to many factors, but there is always a matter of different perspective for each situation. The students look at the history of each situation from a factual standpoint, but they also are stretched to investigate and explore the perspectives of each as well. The students’ performance task has them creating a news show that interviews representatives of each side of the conflict as well as a “scholar” on the situation who has developed a solution to bring peace to the area

Controlled dissolution of surface layers for elemental analysis by inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry

Determining the composition of thin layers is increasingly important for a variety of industrial materials such as adhesives, coatings and microelectronics. Secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS), Auger electron spectroscopy (AES), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), glow discharge optical emission spectroscopy (GDOES), glow discharge mass spectrometry (GDMS), and laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) are some of the techniques that are currently employed for the direct analysis of the sample surface. Although these techniques do not suffer from the contamination problems that often plague sample dissolution studies, they do require matrix matched standards for quantification. Often, these standards are not readily available. Despite the costs of clean hoods, Teflon pipette tips and bottles, and pure acids, partial sample dissolution is the primary method used in the semiconductor industry to quantify surface impurities. Specifically, vapor phase decomposition (VPD) coupled to ICP-MS or total reflection x-ray fluorescence (TXRF) provides elemental information from the top most surface layers at detection sensitivities in the 10{sup 7}-10{sup 10}atoms/cm{sup 2} range. The ability to quantify with standard solutions is a main advantage of these techniques. Li and Houk applied a VPD-like technique to steel. The signal ratio of trace element to matrix element was used for quantification. Although controlled dissolution concentrations determined for some of the dissolved elements agreed with the certified values, concentrations determined for refractory elements (Ti, Nb and Ta) were too low. LA-ICP-MS and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) measurements indicated that carbide grains distributed throughout the matrix were high in these refractory elements. These elements dissolved at a slower rate than the matrix element, Fe. If the analyte element is not removed at a rate similar to the matrix element a true representation of the sample layer cannot be realized. Specifically, the ratio of analyte signal to matrix element signal does not equal the actual ratio in the bulk sample. The objective of this work was to investigate the controlled dissolution of other materials, simpler than steel. Matrices of copper, high copper alloy and NIST C1100 brass were investigated but the matrix that showed the best agreement between measured and certified values was NIST 612 glass. Further studies were conducted to limit the amount of surface layers removed for the NIST 612 matrix

War and the Creation of the Northern Song State

This dissertation explores the way that war formed the Northern Song (960-1127) state. Earlier research on the Northern Song failed to explain how and why the Northern Song empire established a peaceful border with the Liao empire to its north. This dissertation, by means of a detailed military history of the period from 954-1005, concludes that the Liao state did not intend to destroy the Song state. It was the Liao\u27s limited military and political goals rather than the strength or weakness of the Song that created a peaceful border between the two empires

Not wacky vs. definitely wacky: A study of scalar adverbs in pretrained language models

Vector space models of word meaning all share the assumption that words occurring in similar contexts have similar meanings. In such models, words that are similar in their topical associations but differ in their logical force tend to emerge as semantically close, creating well-known challenges for NLP applications that involve logical reasoning. Modern pretrained language models, such as BERT, RoBERTa and GPT-3 hold the promise of performing better on logical tasks than classic static word embeddings. However, reports are mixed about their success. In the current paper, we advance this discussion through a systematic study of scalar adverbs, an under-explored class of words with strong logical force. Using three different tasks, involving both naturalistic social media data and constructed examples, we investigate the extent to which BERT, RoBERTa, GPT-2 and GPT-3 exhibit general, human-like, knowledge of these common words. We ask: 1) Do the models distinguish amongst the three semantic categories of MODALITY, FREQUENCY and DEGREE? 2) Do they have implicit representations of full scales from maximally negative to maximally positive? 3) How do word frequency and contextual factors impact model performance? We find that despite capturing some aspects of logical meaning, the models fall far short of human performance.Comment: Published in BlackBoxNLP workshop, EMNLP 202

A technique for producing calisthenic behavior in a rhesus monkey

Technique for exercise to counteract effect of zero gravity on skeletal muscles of rhesus monkeys during extended orbital spacefligh

Characterization of the rpoN global regulatory gene of Pseudomonas syringae pv. syringae B728a and its impact on the plant-pathogen interaction

Gene regulation in bacteria is highly complex and requires the activity of sigma factors that function as transcriptional regulators. In Pseudomonas syringae pv. syringae B728a, 14 sigma factors have been identified. One of the more interesting is rpoN, encoding Sigma 54, which was initially described for its role in nitrogen utilization and later shown to be involved in regulating adhesion, motility, toxin production, and pathogenicity. The only commonality identified amongst these genes is that gene regulation by Sigma 54 is not essential for normal growth and development because mutational inactivation of rpoN is not lethal. Unlike Sigma 70, which recognizes promoter sites located at positions -10/-35 upstream of the transcription initiation site, Sigma 54 recognizes sites located at positions -12/-24. P.s. pv. syringae B728a encodes an RpoN that shares 80-98% identity with other Pseudomonas species. Promoter scans were conducted on the B728a genome to look for probable binding sites of RpoN. Analysis revealed that RpoN may be involved in regulating genes encoding ABC transporters, drug efflux pumps, flagella proteins, nitrate transporters, and several regulatory proteins. An insertional mutation in the rpoN gene was constructed in the B728a genome and a phenotypic analysis was initiated. Decreased swarming and adhesion ability of the rpoN mutant was observed as compared to B728a. The ability to utilize sole nitrogen sources was also affected. The rpoN mutant showed little or no growth on sole nitrogen sources such as alanine, histidine, lysine, and serine. Pathogenicity was shown to require a functional RpoN, as both HR and disease development was effected by an rpoN mutation. Pseudomonas syringae pv. syringae is most known for the production of two phytotoxins. Unlike RpoN in other species, in P.s. pv. syringae B728a it appears to indirectly down regulate toxin production of syringomycin and syringopeptin. The goal of this study was to characterize some of the important roles RpoN is known to possess and to understand its role in the plant pathogenic and epiphytic lifestyle of P. s. pv. syringae B728a