Energy Transport for Thick Holographic Branes

Universal properties of two-dimensional conformal interfaces are encoded by the flux of energy transmitted and reflected during a scattering process. We develop an innovative method that allows us to use results for the energy transmission in thin-brane holographic models to find the energy transmission for general smooth domain-wall solutions of three-dimensional gravity. Our method is based on treating the continuous geometry as a discrete set of branes. As an application, we compute the transmission coefficient of a Janus interface in terms of its deformation parameter.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures; v2: journal versio

The impact of information structure on the emergence of differential object marking:An experimental study

Many languages exhibit differential object marking (DOM), where only certain types of grammatical objects are marked with morphological cases. Traditionally, it has been claimed that DOM arises as a way to prevent ambiguity by marking objects that might otherwise be mistaken for subjects (e.g., animate objects). While some recent experimental work supports this account, research on language typology suggests at least one alternative hypothesis. In particular, DOM may instead arise as a way of marking objects that are atypical from the point of view of information structure. According to this account, rather than being marked to avoid ambiguity, objects are marked when they are given (already familiar in the discourse) rather than new. Here, we experimentally investigate this hypothesis using two artificial language learning experiments. We find that information structure impacts participants’ object marking, but in an indirect way: atypical information structure leads to a change in word order, which then triggers increased object marking. Interestingly, this staged process of change is compatible with documented cases of DOM emergence. We argue that this process is driven by two cognitive tendencies. First, a tendency to place discourse given information before new information, and second, a tendency to mark noncanonical word order. Taken together, our findings provide corroborating evidence for the role of information structure in the emergence of DOM systems

Infant-directed speech becomes less redundant as infants grow: implications for language learning

Scripts and supplementary material for calculating entropy rates for the NewmanRatner Corpus and the Providence Corpus (both from the CHILDES database). Relevant scripts and material appear separately for each corpus in the respective components. Entropy rate functions were calculated using https://gist.github.com/shhong/1021654/ (Bentz et al., 2017)

Providence Corpus

This folder contains all materials to calculate entropy rate for samples taken from the Providence Corpus. The estimates taken to establish sample size and number of samples appear in the "estimates for stabilization" folder. The data collected from the samples taken, as well as the scripts used to analyse and visualize the data, are in this main folder

Adult learners (Study 2)

adults_full_transcripts_with_pronouns_coding.csv contains all speech produced by participants in the adult study, coded for pronoun references. adults_debrief.csv contains participants’ response to the debrief questionnaire given to them after the experiment, where they rated their addressee’s estimated proficiency level. adults_references_data.csv contains all references used for the analysis including manual coding done for previous mention status (whether there was a reference in the most previous clause, and if so, whether it was in the subject position) and plurality (singular vs. plural reference). adults.r contains the code to process the data in adults_debrief.csv and adults_references_data.csv, make statistical analyses and figures

NewmanRatner Corpus

This folder contains all materials to calculate entropy rate for samples taken from the NewmanRatner Corpus. The estimates taken to establish sample size and number of samples appear in the "estimates for stabilization" folder. The data collected from the samples taken, as well as the scripts used to analyze and visualize the data, are in this main folder

Estimates for stabilization

These files are the products of functions of the Hrate Package (https://gist.github.com/shhong/1021654/ ), and were used in the following R script: Sampling and calculating Hrate_NewmanRatner.r Files starting with "stab" present the entropy rate measures taken for different sizes of samples. Files starting with "criterion" present SDs of the entropy rate of each ten consecutive sample sizes. For full description of the procedures, see sections "Determining sample size" and "Comparing entropy rate between age groups" in the paper