Maltreated children use more grammatical negations

Many studies reveal a strong impact of childhood maltreatment on language development, mainly resulting in shorter utterances, less rich vocabulary, or a delay in grammatical complexity. However, different theories suggest the possibility for resilience – a positive adaptation to an otherwise adverse environment – in children who experienced childhood maltreatment. Here, we investigated different measures for language development in spontaneous speech, examining whether childhood maltreatment leads to a language deficit only or whether it can also result in differences in language use due to a possible adaptation to a toxic environment. We compared spontaneous speech during therapeutic peer-play sessions of 32 maltreated and 32 non-maltreated children from the same preschool and equivalent in gender, age (2 to 5 years), home neighborhood, ethnicity, and family income. Maltreatment status was reported by formal child protection reports, and corroborated by independent social service reports. We investigated general language sophistication (i.e., vocabulary, talkativeness, mean length of utterance), as well as grammatical development (i.e., use of plurals, tense, grammatical negations). We found that maltreated and non-maltreated children showed similar sophistication across all linguistic measures, except for the use of grammatical negations. Maltreated children used twice as many grammatical negations as non-maltreated children. The use of this highly complex grammatical structure shows an advanced linguistic skill, which shows that childhood maltreatment does not necessarily lead to a language deficit. The result might indicate the development of a negativity bias in the structure of spontaneous language due to an adaptation to their experiences

Search for Gravitational Waves from Primordial Black Hole Binary Coalescences in the Galactic Halo

We use data from the second science run of the LIGO gravitational-wave detectors to search for the gravitational waves from primordial black hole (PBH) binary coalescence with component masses in the range 0.2--$1.0 M_\odot$. The analysis requires a signal to be found in the data from both LIGO observatories, according to a set of coincidence criteria. No inspiral signals were found. Assuming a spherical halo with core radius 5 kpc extending to 50 kpc containing non-spinning black holes with masses in the range 0.2--$1.0 M_\odot$, we place an observational upper limit on the rate of PBH coalescence of 63 per year per Milky Way halo (MWH) with 90% confidence.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, to be submitted to Phys. Rev.

Beyond Refugia: New insights on Quaternary climate variation and the evolution of biotic diversity in tropical South America

Haffer’s (Science 165: 131–137, 1969) Pleistocene refuge theory has provided motivation for 50 years of investigation into the connections between climate, biome dynamics, and neotropical speciation, although aspects of the orig- inal theory are not supported by subsequent studies. Recent advances in paleocli- matology suggest the need for reevaluating the role of Quaternary climate on evolutionary history in tropical South America. In addition to the many repeated large-amplitude climate changes associated with Pleistocene glacial-interglacial stages (~40 kyr and 100 kyr cyclicity), we highlight two aspects of Quaternary climate change in tropical South America: (1) an east-west precipitation dipole, induced by solar radiation changes associated with Earth’s precessional variations (~20 kyr cyclicity); and (2) periods of anomalously high precipitation that persisted for centuries-to-millennia (return frequencies ~1500 years) congruent with cold “Heinrich events” and cold Dansgaard-Oeschger “stadials” of the North Atlantic region. The spatial footprint of precipitation increase due to this North Atlantic forcing extended across almost all of tropical South America south of the equator. Combined, these three climate modes present a picture of climate change with different spatial and temporal patterns than envisioned in the original Pleistocene refuge theory. Responding to these climate changes, biomes expanded and contracted and became respectively connected and disjunct. Biome change undoubtedly influenced biotic diversification, but the nature of diversification likely was more complex than envisioned by the original Pleistocene refuge theory. In the lowlands, intermittent forest expansion and contraction led to species dispersal and subsequent isolation, promoting lineage diversification. These pulses of climate-driven biotic interchange profoundly altered the composition of regional species pools and triggered new evolutionary radiations. In the special case of the tropical Andean forests adjacent to the Amazon lowlands, new phylogenetic data provide abundant evidence for rapid biotic diversification during the Pleistocene. During warm interglacials and intersta- dials, lowland taxa dispersed upslope. Isolation in these disjunct climate refugia led to extinction for some taxa and speciation for others.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/155561/1/Baker2020.pdfDescription of Baker2020.pdf : Main articl