Linguistic Determinism and the Understanding of False Beliefs

We intend in this chapter to put forward a radical proposition about the relationship between language and the understanding of false beliefs. We begin by contrasting the roles that language acquisition might play with respect to the development of theory of mind reasoning, separating out the language-for-the-task from the social constructivist view of language as one of several facilitators of social cognition, and both of these from the strongest position that certain linguistic structures make available a representational format for false beliefs. We then present empirical data from a longitudinal study of normally developing preschool children and from our work with language-delayed oral deaf children, to test among the rival hypotheses for the role of language in the development of false belief reasoning. The empirical data make a suprisingly coherent story, though many pieces remain to be worked into the puzzle. The empirical story is at least suggestive enough that it forces us to examine the strongest theoretical position seriously, and ask, is it viable

Finding Signatures of Linguistic Reasoning

Hinzen lays out the platform of un-Cartesian linguistics, and the ramifications threaten widespread beliefs about the relations between language and thought. The theoretical story is compelling but my commentary will address my concerns as a laborer in research

Unbiased Language Assessment: Contributions of Linguistic Theory

This review addresses several situations of language learning to make concrete the issue of fairness—and justice—that arises in designing assessments. First, I discuss the implications of dialect variation in American English, asking how assessment has taken dialect into consideration. Second, I address the question of how to assess the distributed knowledge of bilingual or dual-language learners. The evaluation of the language skills of children growing up in poverty asks whether the current focus on the quantity of caregiver input is misplaced. Third, I address a special case in which the young speakers of a minority language, Romani, are judged to be unfit for schooling because they fail tests in the state language. Finally, I examine the difficult issue of language assessments in countries with multiple official languages and few resources. In each of these areas, the involvement and expertise of linguists are essential for knowing how the grammar works and what might be important to assess

Assessing What Every 5-Year-Old Should Know

In this session we\u27re going to talk about assessing language skills in 5-year-olds, bascially assessing language skills in 4 to 8 year olds as it turns out, simply to introduce you to the area. This is part of a substantive project involving collaboration between Harry Seymour and Tom Roeper at UMass and Jill de Villiers and Peter de Villiers at Smith College. It is funded by the National Institutes of Health, trying to develop a comprehensive test of language functioning in children between ages of 4 and about 8 to 10, and in particular, trying to develop a test that is dialect neutral

Evolution of self-gravitating magnetized disks. I- Axisymmetric simulations

In this paper and a companion work, we report on the first global numerical simulations of self-gravitating magnetized tori, subject in particular to the influence of the magnetorotational instability (MRI). In this work, paper I, we restrict our calculations to the study of the axisymmetric evolution of such tori. Our goals are twofold: (1) to investigate how self-gravity influences the global structure and evolution of the disks; and (2) to determine whether turbulent density inhomogeneities can be enhanced by self-gravity in this regime. As in non self-gravitating models, the linear growth of the MRI is followed by a turbulent phase during which angular momentum is transported outward. As a result, self-gravitating tori quickly develop a dual structure composed of an inner thin Keplerian disk fed by a thicker self-gravitating disk, whose rotation profile is close to a Mestel disk. Our results show that the effects of self-gravity enhance density fluctuations much less than they smooth the disk, and giving it more coherence. We discuss the expected changes that will occur in 3D simulations, the results of which are presented in a companion paper.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in Ap

The emergence of bound variable structures

Even for aduelts, quantifiers such as all , some , every seem to involve difficult mapping between logic and grammar. A sentence like every boy ate every food requires a little concentration before the meaning comes through. One might think that there is no natural mapping of such sophisticated aspectes of cognition onto grammatical structure. Current linguistic theory, however, reveals that syntax puts sharp limits on how quantification works. The study of quantifiers might reveal how cognition connects to grammar and how they are intertwined int he process of acquisition. We will try to present the acquisition problem in a manner slightly abstracted from the technical details of linguistic theory

Does every child produce every correctly?

In this paper, we examine the classic phenomena associated with children\u27s interpretation of every and present an experimental study that looks at production and comprehension in the same children. Children in the age range five through seven years apparently do not have full competence in producing sentences containing every. Their mistakes in comprehension carry over to their production. Although these data are insufficient to decide among the three accounts examined, we hope to have inspired researchers to include production data in their models of how children learn every and other quantifiers