L1 transfer in the acquisition of manner and path in Spanish by native speakers of English

In this article the authors argue that L1 transfer from English is not only important in the early stages of L2 acquisition of Spanish, but remains influential in later stages if there is not enough positive evidence for the learners to progress in their development (Lefebvre, White, & Jourdan, 2006). The findings are based on analyses of path and manner of movement in stories told by British students of Spanish (N = 68) of three different proficiency levels. Verbs that conflate motion and path, on the one hand, are mastered early, possibly because the existence of Latinate path verbs, such as enter and ascend in English, facilitate their early acquisition by British learners of Spanish. Contrary to the findings of Cadierno (2004) and Cadierno and Ruiz (2006), the encoding of manner, in particular in boundary crossing contexts, seems to pose enormous difficulties, even among students who had been abroad on a placement in a Spanish-speaking country prior to the data collection. An analysis of the frequency of manner verbs in Spanish corpora shows that one of the key reasons why students struggle with manner is that manner verbs are so infrequent in Spanish. The authors claim that scarce positive evidence in the language exposed to and little or no negative evidence are responsible for the long-lasting effect of transfer on the expression of manner

Microstructure and magnetization of doped Y-Ba-Ca-O materials prepared by melt quench and post annealing method

Y-Ba-Cu-O bulk materials prepared using the melt quench and post annealing method were shown to have very high maximum as well as remanent magnetization. Studies were carried out on materials prepared using this method which deviate from the Y:Ba:Cu = 1:2:3 stoichiometry. In one series of materials, only the stoichiometry was changed, in particular by introducing an excess of yttrium. In other cases, dopants including several rare earths were introduced. Effects of variations in composition on microstructure and phase evolution are discussed, as well as effects on the magnetic susceptibility and on the magnetization. The results show that doped materials can exhibit improvements in magnetic properties. Furthermore, the use of dopants sheds light on the role of defect sites in flux pinning

Metaphoric coherence: Distinguishing verbal metaphor from `anomaly\u27

Theories and computational models of metaphor comprehension generally circumvent the question of metaphor versus “anomaly” in favor of a treatment of metaphor versus literal language. Making the distinction between metaphoric and “anomalous” expressions is subject to wide variation in judgment, yet humans agree that some potentially metaphoric expressions are much more comprehensible than others. In the context of a program which interprets simple isolated sentences that are potential instances of cross‐modal and other verbal metaphor, I consider some possible coherence criteria which must be satisfied for an expression to be “conceivable” metaphorically. Metaphoric constraints on object nominals are represented as abstracted or extended along with the invariant structural components of the verb meaning in a metaphor. This approach distinguishes what is preserved in metaphoric extension from that which is “violated”, thus referring to both “similarity” and “dissimilarity” views of metaphor. The role and potential limits of represented abstracted properties and constraints is discussed as they relate to the recognition of incoherent semantic combinations and the rejection or adjustment of metaphoric interpretations

Contrasting Controls on Microzooplankton Grazing and Viral Infection of Microbial Prey

The encounter and capture of bacteria and phytoplankton by microbial predators and parasites is fundamental to marine ecosystem organization and activity. Here, we combined classic biophysical models with published laboratory measurements to infer functional traits, including encounter kernel and capture efficiency, for a wide range of marine viruses and microzooplankton grazers. Despite virus particles being orders of magnitude smaller than microzooplankton grazers, virus encounter kernels and adsorption rates were in many cases comparable in magnitude to grazer encounter kernel and clearance, pointing to Brownian motion as a highly effective method of transport for viruses. Inferred virus adsorption efficiency covered many orders of magnitude, but the median virus adsorption efficiency was between 5 and 25% depending on the assumed host swimming speed. Uncertainty on predator detection area and swimming speed prevented robust inference of grazer capture efficiency, but sensitivity analysis was used to identify bounds on unconstrained processes. These results provide a common functional trait framework for understanding marine host-virus and predator-prey interactions, and highlight the value of theory for interpreting measured life-history traits

Drawing Boundaries

In “On Drawing Lines on a Map” (1995), I suggested that the different ways we have of drawing lines on maps open up a new perspective on ontology, resting on a distinction between two sorts of boundaries: fiat and bona fide. “Fiat” means, roughly: human-demarcation-induced. “Bona fide” means, again roughly: a boundary constituted by some real physical discontinuity. I presented a general typology of boundaries based on this opposition and showed how it generates a corresponding typology of the different sorts of objects which boundaries determine or demarcate. In this paper, I describe how the theory of fiat boundaries has evolved since 1995, how it has been applied in areas such as property law and political geography, and how it is being used in contemporary work in formal and applied ontology, especially within the framework of Basic Formal Ontology

Bridging the Gap: Cognitive and social approaches to research in second language learning and teaching.

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/139862/1/SSLA2014.pd

Acquisition of motion events in L2 Spanish by German, French and Italian speakers

This article explores the second language acquisition of motion events, with particular regard to cross-linguistic influence between first and second languages. Oral narratives in Spanish as a second language by native speakers of French, German and Italian are compared, together with narratives by native Spanish speakers. Previous analysis on the expression of motion events in these languages showed that Romance languages do not always follow the same pattern; for example, Italian tends to express the component of Path more frequently than French and Spanish. The results of the present study highlight evidence of intra-typological differences, even between languages that are genetically very close. These differences seem to lead speakers to produce cases of conceptual transfer into their second language, Spanish, even when their first language is another Romance language

The role of statistical learning in the acquisition of motion event construal in a second language

Learning to talk about motion in a second language is very difficult because it involves restructuring deeply entrenched patterns from the first language (Slobin 1996). In this paper we argue that statistical learning (Saffran et al. 1997) can explain why L2 learners are only partially successful in restructuring their second language grammars. We explore to what extent L2 learners make use of two mechanisms of statistical learning, entrenchment and pre-emption (Boyd and Goldberg 2011) to acquire target-like expressions of motion and retreat from overgeneralisation in this domain. Paying attention to the frequency of existing patterns in the input can help learners to adjust the frequency with which they use path and manner verbs in French but is insufficient to acquire the boundary crossing constraint (Slobin and Hoiting 1994) and learn what not to say. We also look at the role of language proficiency and exposure to French in explaining the findings

Being in front is good—but where is in front? Preferences for spatial referencing affect evaluation

Speakers of English frequently associate location in space with valence, as in moving up and down the “social ladder.” If such an association also holds for the sagittal axis, an object “in front of” another object would be evaluated more positively than the one “behind.” Yet how people conceptualize relative locations depends on which frame of reference (FoR) they adopt—and hence on cross‐linguistically diverging preferences. What is conceptualized as “in front” in one variant of the relative FoR (e.g., translation) is “behind” under another variant (reflection), and vice versa. Do such diverging conceptualizations of an object's location also lead to diverging evaluations? In two studies employing an implicit association test, we demonstrate, first, that speakers of German, Chinese, and Japanese indeed evaluate the object “in front of” another object more positively than the one “behind.” Second, and crucially, the reversal of which object is conceptualized as “in front” involves a corresponding reversal of valence, suggesting an impact of linguistically imparted FoR preferences on evaluative processes.publishedVersio

Contrasting Controls on Microzooplankton Grazing and Viral Infection of Microbial Prey

The encounter and capture of bacteria and phytoplankton by microbial predators and parasites is fundamental to marine ecosystem organization and activity. Here, we combined classic biophysical models with published laboratory measurements to infer functional traits, including encounter kernel and capture efficiency, for a wide range of marine viruses and microzooplankton grazers. Despite virus particles being orders of magnitude smaller than microzooplankton grazers, virus encounter kernels and adsorption rates were in many cases comparable in magnitude to grazer encounter kernel and clearance, pointing to Brownian motion as a highly effective method of transport for viruses. Inferred virus adsorption efficiency covered many orders of magnitude, but the median virus adsorption efficiency was between 5 and 25% depending on the assumed host swimming speed. Uncertainty on predator detection area and swimming speed prevented robust inference of grazer capture efficiency, but sensitivity analysis was used to identify bounds on unconstrained processes. These results provide a common functional trait framework for understanding marine host-virus and predator-prey interactions, and highlight the value of theory for interpreting measured life-history traits