1,721,006 research outputs found
Monodialectal and multidialectal infants’ representation of familiar words
No full textMonolingual infants are typically studied as a homogenous group and compared to bilingual infants. This study looks further into two subgroups of monolingual infants, monodialectal and multidialectal, to identify the effects of dialect-related variation on the phonological representation of words. Using an Intermodal Preferential Looking task, the detection of mispronunciations in familiar words was compared in infants aged 1;8 exposed to consistent (monodialectal) or variable (multidialectal) pronunciations of words in their daily input. Only monodialectal infants detected the mispronunciations whereas multidialectal infants looked longer at the target following naming whether the label was correctly produced or not. This suggests that variable phonological input in the form of dialect variation impacts the degree of specificity of lexical representations in early infancy
Children’s scale errors: A by-product of lexical development?
No full textScale errors occur when young children seriously attempt to perform an action on an object which is impossible due to its size. Children vary substantially in the incidence of scale errors with many factors potentially contributing to these differences, such as age and the type of scale errors. In particular, the evidence for an inverted U-shaped curve of scale errors involving the child's body (i.e., body scale errors), which would point to a developmental stage, is mixed. Here we re-examine how body scale errors vary with age and explore the possibility that these errors would be related to the size and properties of children's lexicon. A large sample of children aged 18–30 months (N = 125) was tested in a scale error elicitation situation. Additionally, parental questionnaires were collected to assess children's receptive and expressive lexicon. Our key findings are that scale errors linearly decrease with age in childhood, and are more likely to be found in early talkers rather than in less advanced ones. This suggests that scale errors do not correspond to a developmental stage, and that one determinant of these errors is the speed of development of the linguistic and conceptual system, as a potential explanation for the individual variability in prevalence
Decreased attention to object size information in scale errors performers
No full textYoung children sometimes make serious attempts to perform impossible actions on miniature objects as if they were full-size objects. The existing explanations of these curious action errors assume (but never explicitly tested) children's decreased attention to object size information. This study investigated the attention to object size information in scale errors performers. Two groups of children aged 18–25 months (N = 52) and 48–60 months (N = 23) were tested in two consecutive tasks: an action task that replicated the original scale errors elicitation situation, and a looking task that involved watching on a computer screen actions performed with adequate to inadequate size object. Our key finding – that children performing scale errors in the action task subsequently pay less attention to size changes than non-scale errors performers in the looking task – suggests that the origins of scale errors in childhood operate already at the perceptual level, and not at the action level
Children in a wonderland:How language and scale errors may be linked.
No full textPrevious research showed that young children sometimes fail to use information about object size and make a serious attempt to perform impossible actions on miniature objects. Such scale errors have been hypothesized to result from immaturity in the interaction of the two visual streams, namely the visual stream for action and the visual stream for perception, coupled to a lack of inhibitory control in children. Here we propose that such dissociation in the action-perception system may be influenced by the developing language skills and report new evidence showing that children in a particular period of their language development are more prone to show scale errors. The results showed that the total number of nouns, but not adjectives in children's productive vocabulary seems to be an important factor for predicting scale errors. We argue that realising a model of scale errors is essential for understanding the relationship between language, object representation and motor system, and especially their interaction during development
Children’s scale errors are a natural consequence of learning to associate objects with actions: a computational model
No full textYoung children sometimes attempt an action on an object, which is inappropriate because of the object size -- they make scale errors. Existing theories suggest that scale errors may result from immaturities in children’s action planning system, which might be overpowered by increased complexity of object representations or developing teleofunctional bias. We used computational modelling to emulate children’s learning to associate objects with actions and to select appropriate actions, given object shape and size. A computational Developmental Deep Model of Action and Naming (DDMAN) was built on the dual-route theory of action selection, in which actions on objects are selected via a direct (non-semantic or visual) route, or an indirect (semantic) route. As in case of children, DDMAN produced scale errors: the number of errors was high at the beginning of training and decreased linearly but did not disappear completely. Inspection of emerging object-action associations revealed that these were coarsely organized by shape, hence leading DDMAN to initially select actions based on shape rather than size. With experience, DDMAN gradually learned to use size in addition to shape when selecting actions. Overall, our simulations demonstrate that children’s scale errors are a natural consequence of learning to associate objects with actions
How much exposure to English is necessary for a bilingual toddler to perform like a monolingual peer in language tests?
No full textBackground
Bilingual children are under‐referred due to an ostensible expectation that they lag behind their monolingual peers in their English acquisition. The recommendations of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists (RCSLT) state that bilingual children should be assessed in both the languages known by the children. However, despite these recommendations, a majority of speech and language professionals report that they assess bilingual children only in English as bilingual children come from a wide array of language backgrounds and standardized language measures are not available for the majority of these. Moreover, even when such measures do exist, they are not tailored for bilingual children.
Aims
It was asked whether a cut‐off exists in the proportion of exposure to English at which one should expect a bilingual toddler to perform as well as a monolingual on a test standardized for monolingual English‐speaking children.
Methods & Procedures
Thirty‐five bilingual 2;6‐year‐olds exposed to British English plus an additional language and 36 British monolingual toddlers were assessed on the auditory component of the Preschool Language Scale, British Picture Vocabulary Scale and an object‐naming measure. All parents completed the Oxford Communicative Development Inventory (Oxford CDI) and an exposure questionnaire that assessed the proportion of English in the language input. Where the CDI existed in the bilingual's additional language, these data were also collected.
Outcomes & Results
Hierarchical regression analyses found the proportion of exposure to English to be the main predictor of the performance of bilingual toddlers. Bilingual toddlers who received 60% exposure to English or more performed like their monolingual peers on all measures. K‐means cluster analyses and Levene variance tests confirmed the estimated English exposure cut‐off at 60% for all language measures. Finally, for one additional language for which we had multiple participants, additional language CDI production scores were significantly inversely related to the amount of exposure to English.
Conclusions & Implications
Typically developing 2;6‐year‐olds who are bilingual in English and an additional language and who hear English 60% of the time or more, perform equivalently to their typically developing monolingual peers
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
An Adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates CDI in 17 Arabic Dialects for Children Aged 8 to 30 Months
No full textAssessing a child’s language in the early years is critical to plan for an early intervention and maximize their learning potential. In a unique pan-Arabic approach to language development, we developed a new Arabic assessment tool, usable by parents and Early Years professionals to screen vocabulary in children between 8 months and 30 months across 17 Arab countries. Departing from the two relevant original Communicative Development Inventory forms (CDI: Words and Gestures and CDI: Words and Sentences, Fenson, Marchman, Thal, Reznick, & Bates, 2007), our Arabic CDI focuses on Words Only (Short Form), and assesses comprehension and production of a list of 100 words in 17 main dialects or Arabic, through a parental report. Data were collected from 436 Egyptian children and 168 children from the remaining 16 countries. Quasi-binomial model fits on Egyptian and Other Dialects comprehension and production data showed that Egyptian vocabulary norms could be reasonably extrapolated to the Other Dialects sample, as a first indication that the tool might be usable across the different countries
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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