Children searching information on the Internet: Performance on children's interfaces compared to Google

Children frequently make use of the Internet to search for information. However, research shows that children experience many problems with searching and browsing the web. The last decade numerous search environments have been developed, especially for children. Do these search interfaces support children in effective information-seeking? And do these interfaces add value to today’s popular search engines, such as Google? In this explorative study, we compared children’s search performance on four interfaces designed for children, with their performance on Google. We found that the children did not perform better on these interfaces than on Google. This study also uncovered several problems that children experienced with these search interfaces, which can be of use for designers of future search interfaces for children

Family Cap Provisions and Changes in Births and Abortions

As part of welfare reform efforts in the 1990s, twenty-three states implemented family caps, provisions that deny or reduce cash assistance to welfare recipients who have additional births. We use birth and abortion records from 24 states to estimate effects of family caps on birth and abortion rates. We use age, marital status and completed schooling to identify women at high risk for use of public assistance, and parity (number of previous live births) to identify those most directly affected by the family cap. In family cap states, birth rates fell more and abortion rates rose more among high-risk women with at least one previous live birth compared to similar childless women, consistent with an effect of the family cap. However, this parity-specific pattern of births and abortions also occurred in states that implemented welfare reform with no family cap. Thus, the effects of welfare reform may have differed between mothers and childless women, but there is little evidence of an independent effect of the family cap.

Subjectivity in Spanish Discourse: Explicit and Implicit Causal Relations in Different Text Types

Corpus-based studies in various languages have demonstrated that some connectives are used preferentially to express subjective versus objective meanings, for example, omdat vs. want in Dutch. However, Spanish connectives have been understudied from this perspective. Moreover, most of the studies of subjectivity have focused on explicit relations and little is known about the subjectivity of implicit coherence relations. In addition, the role that text type plays in the meaning and use of causal relations and their connectives is still under discussion. This study aims to analyze the local contexts of Spanish causal explicit and implicit relations in different text types by carrying out manual analyses of subjectivity. 360 relations marked by three prototypical causal connectives and 120 implicit relations were extracted from academic and journalistic texts. The analytical model applied is based on an integrative approach to subjectivity. Statistical analyses indicate a particular behavior of Spanish connectives and implicit relations and a three-way interaction between subjectivity, text type, and linguistic marking in journalistic texts. Therefore, this study reveals new insights into subjectivity in Spanish discourse

The Use of Perspective Markers and Connectives in Expressing Subjectivity: Evidence from Collocational Analyses

This study explores how subjectivity is expressed in coherence relations, by means of a distinctive collocational analysis on two Chinese causal connectives: the specific subjective kejian ‘so’, used in subjective argument-claim relations, and the underspecified suoyi ‘so’, which can be used in both subjective argument-claim and objective cause-consequence relations. On the basis of both Horn’s pragmatic Relation and Quality principles and the Uniform Information Density Theory, we hypothesized that the presence of other linguistic elements expressing subjectivity in a discourse segment should be related the degree of subjectivity encoded by the connective. In line with this hypothesis, the association scores showed that suoyi is more frequently combined with perspective markers expressing epistemic stance: cognition verbs and modal verbs. Kejian, which already expresses epistemic stance, co-occurred more often with perspective markers related to attitudinal stance, such as markers of expectedness and importance. The paper also pays attention to similarities and differences in collocation patterns across contexts and genres

Scolding the child who threw the scissors:Shaping discourse expectations by restricting referents

Coherence relations are often assumed to hold between clauses, but restrictive relative clauses (RCs) are usually not granted discourse segment status because they are syntactically and conceptually integrated in their matrix clauses. This paper investigates whether coherence relations can be inferred between restrictive RCs and their matrix clauses. Three experiments provide converging evidence that restrictive RCs can indeed play a role at the discourse level and should not categorically be excluded from receiving discourse segment status in discourse annotation practices. At the same time, the studies provide new insights into implicit causality verb biases, specifically about next-mention biases in concessive coherence relations, and expectations about discourse structure, upcoming referents, and upcoming coherence relations

Using the Cognitive Approach to Coherence Relations for Discourse Annotation

The Cognitive approach to Coherence Relations (Sanders, Spooren, & Noordman, 1992) was originally proposed as a set of cognitively plausible primitives to order coherence relations, but is also increasingly used as a discourse annotation scheme. This paper provides an overview of new CCR distinctions that have been proposed over the years, summarizes the most important discussions about the operationalization of the primitives, and introduces a new distinction (disjunction) to the taxonomy to improve the descriptive adequacy of CCR. In addition, it reflects on the use of the CCR as an annotation scheme in practice. The overall aim of the paper is to provide an overview of state-of-the-art CCR for discourse annotation that can form, together with the original 1992 proposal, a comprehensive starting point for anyone interested in annotating discourse using CCR

Three types of children’s informational web sites: an inventory of design conventions

"Purpose: Research on Web design conventions has an almost exclusive focus on Web design for adults. There is far less knowledge about Web design for children. For the first time, an overview is presented of the current design conventions for children's informational Web sites. Method: In this study a large corpus of 100 children's international, informational Web sites from four different domains (science, pets, arts, and health) is analyzed. The instrument for analyzing the Web sites included categories on visual design, navigation and information architecture. Results: The design conventions identified in this study show that designers of children's informational Web sites often follow general Web design guidelines. This study also shows that there is still much confusion about how to design Web sites for children. A closer look at the data revealed three categories of informational Web sites especially designed for children, diverging from a classical to a playful design approach. Conclusion: An overview is presented of the current design conventions for children's informational Web sites. The identified design conventions should be further tested and validated as design standards for children's informational Web design. Further, the design of children's informational Web sites is determined by two dimensions of aesthetics; classical and expressive. In this study, expressive aesthetics results in playful visual design or in a total playful interaction design. The effects of playful design on children's affect and cognition will be an important topic in future research on children's digital search behavior.