138 research outputs found
Effects of semantic and syntactic complexities and aspectual class on past tense production
This paper reports results from a series of experiments that investigated whether semantic and/or syntactic complexity influences young Dutch childrenâs production of past tense forms. The constructions used in the three experiments were (i) simple sentences (the Simple Sentence Experiment), (ii) complex sentences with CP complements (the Complement Clause Experiment) and (iii) complex sentences with relative clauses (the Relative Clause Experiment). The stimuli involved both atelic and telic predicates. The goal of this paper is to address the following questions.
Q1. Does semantic complexity regarding temporal anchoring influence the types of errors that children make in the experiments? For example, do children make certain types of errors when a past tense has to be anchored to the Utterance Time (UT), as compared to when it has to be anchored to the matrix topic time (TT)?
Q2. Do different syntactic positions influence childrenâs performance on past-tense production? Do children perform better in the Simple Sentence Experiment compared to complex sentences involving two finite clauses (the Complement Clause Experiment and the Relative Clause Experiment)? In complex sentence trials, do children perform differently when the CPs are complements vs. when the CPs are adjunct clauses? (Lebeaux 1990, 2000)
Q3. Do Dutch children make more errors with certain types of predicate (such as atelic predicates)? Alternatively, do children produce a certain type of error with a certain type of predicates (such as producing a perfect aspect with punctual predicates)? Bronckart and Sinclair (1973), for example, found that until the age of 6, French children showed a tendency to use passé composé with perfective events and simple present with imperfective events; we will investigate whether or not the equivalent of this is observed in Dutch
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Bilingualism Accentuates Children's Conversational Understanding
BACKGROUND: Although bilingualism is prevalent throughout the world, little is known about the extent to which it influences children's conversational understanding. Our investigation involved children aged 3-6 years exposed to one or more of four major languages: English, German, Italian, and Japanese. In two experiments, we examined the children's ability to identify responses to questions as violations of conversational maxims (to be informative and avoid redundancy, to speak the truth, be relevant, and be polite). PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: In Experiment 1, with increasing age, children showed greater sensitivity to maxim violations. Children in Italy who were bilingual in German and Italian (with German as the dominant language L1) significantly outperformed Italian monolinguals. In Experiment 2, children in England who were bilingual in English and Japanese (with English as L1) significantly outperformed Japanese monolinguals in Japan with vocabulary age partialled out. CONCLUSIONS: As the monolingual and bilingual groups had a similar family SES background (Experiment 1) and similar family cultural identity (Experiment 2), these results point to a specific role for early bilingualism in accentuating children's developing ability to appreciate effective communicative responses
Evolution of the Genus Camellia Based on the Biological Interaction and the Historical Background
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Japanese two-year-olds use morphosyntax to learn novel verb meanings
ABSTRACTPrevious research has found that children who are acquiring argument-drop languages such as Turkish and Chinese make use of syntactic frames to extend familiar verb meanings (Göksun, KĂŒntay & Naigles, 2008; Lee & Naigles, 2008). This article investigates whether two-year-olds learning Japanese, another argument-drop language, make use of argument number and case markings in learning novel verbs. Children watched videos of novel causative and non-causative actions via Intermodal Preferential Looking. The novel verbs were presented in transitive or intransitive frames; the NPs in the transitive frames appeared âbareâ or with case markers. Consistent with previous findings of Morphosyntactic Bootstrapping, children who heard the novel verbs in the transitive frame with case markers reliably assigned those verbs to the novel causative actions.</jats:p
Magnetostriction studies up to megagauss fields using fiber Bragg grating technique
We here report magnetostriction measurements under pulsed megagauss fields
using a high-speed 100 MHz strain monitoring system devised using fiber Bragg
grating (FBG) technique with optical filter method. The optical filter method
is a detection scheme of the strain of FBG, where the changing Bragg wavelength
of the FBG reflection is converted to the intensity of reflected light to
enable the 100 MHz measurement. In order to show the usefulness and reliability
of the method, we report the measurements for solid oxygen, spin-controlled
crystal, and volborthite, a deformed Kagom\'{e} quantum spin lattice, using
static magnetic fields up to 7 T and non-destructive millisecond pulse magnets
up to 50 T. Then, we show the application of the method for the
magnetostriction measurements of CaVO, a two-dimensional
antiferromagnet with spin-halves, and LaCoO, an anomalous spin-crossover
oxide, in the megagauss fields.Comment: 9pages, 6 figures, Conference proceedings for MegaGauss16 at Kashiwa,
Japan in Sept. 201
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