1,720,994 research outputs found
Relativized Relatives: Types of intervention in the acquisition of A’-dependencies
No full textYoung children find (some) object relatives much harder to understand than subject relatives. The main finding of this article is that not all object relatives are difficult. The difficulty with object relatives (and object Wh-questions) is selective: it depends on the structural similarity between the A’-moved element and the intervening subject. We interpret this selective effect in terms of a proper extension of Relativized Minimality, the principle of syntactic theory which expresses locality effects linked to intervention, and whose
psycholinguistic relevance has been highlighted in Grillo’s work on agrammatism. Six experiments have been conducted with 22 Hebrew-speaking children aged 3;7–5;0 to substantiate our claims empirically. Experiments 1 and 2 tested the comprehension of headed subject and object relatives with and without a resumptive pronoun, in sentences with lexically restricted (D NP) subjects.
Subject relatives were comprehended well, but the performance on object relatives was at chance. The addition of resumptive pronouns did not improve comprehension. Experiments 3 and 4 manipulated the lexical restriction of the moved element and the intervening
subject, using free relatives and impersonal pro subjects, respectively. When the moved constituent and the intervening subject were structurally dissimilar in terms of lexical-NP restriction, the performance significantly improved. Experiment 5 showed a similar comprehension pattern in another type of A’ movement: Wh-questions. The comprehension of who and which subject and object questions was difficult only when both the crossing element and the intervener included a lexical NP restriction. Finally, a similar pattern emerged in production: in an elicited production study, children showed a tendency to avoid producing structures in which both
the moved element and the intervener are lexically restricted. We conclude suggesting a line of analysis of the difference between children and adults in dealing with object A’-dependencies
How Different Reading Habits Influence Lines, Words and Pseudowords Bisection: Evidence from Italian and Hebrew
Full text linkDoes gender make a difference? Comparing the effect of gender on children's comprehension of relative clauses in Hebrew and Italian
No full textIn this paper we assessed the effect of gender morphology on children's comprehension of object relatives in Hebrew and Italian. We compared headed object relative clauses in which the relative head (the moved object) and the intervening embedded subject have the same or different genders. The participants were 62 children aged 3;9–5;5, 31 speakers of Hebrew and 31 speakers of Italian. The comprehension of relative clauses was assessed using a sentence–picture matching task. The main result was that whereas gender mismatch sharply improved the comprehension of object relatives in Hebrew, it did not significantly affect comprehension in Italian. In line with our previous work (Friedmann et al., 2009), we propose that the children's problem in the comprehension of headed object relatives stems from the intervention of the embedded subject between the moved relative head and its trace. We ascribe the different behavior of children in Hebrew and in Italian to the different status of the gender feature in the two languages: in Hebrew, gender is part of the featural composition of the clausal inflectional head, hence it is part of the feature set attracting the subject, whereas in Italian, where tensed verbs are not inflected for gender, it is not. Under the assumption that intervention effects are amenable to the locality principle Relativized Minimality, it is expected that only features functioning as attractors for syntactic movement will enter into the computation of intervention. We thus account for the different effect of gender mismatch in object relative comprehension in the two developing systems. Thus, the main finding of this work is comparative in nature: there is no effect of gender per se; rather, the potential effect of gender is crucially modulated by the morphosyntactic status of the feature in each language
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe 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
Variations on the Author
Full text link“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
Professional or amateur? The phonological output buffer as a working memory operator
Full text linkThe Phonological Output Buffer (POB) is thought to be the stage in language production where phonemes are held in working memory and assembled into words. The neural implementation of the POB remains unclear despite a wealth of phenomenological data. Individuals with POB impairment make phonological errors when they produce words and non-words, including phoneme omissions, insertions, transpositions, substitutions and perseverations. Errors can apply to different kinds and sizes of units, such as phonemes, number words, morphological affixes, and function words, and evidence from POB impairments suggests that units tend to substituted with units of the same kind-e.g., numbers with numbers and whole morphological affixes with other affixes. This suggests that different units are processed and stored in the POB in the same stage, but perhaps separately in different mini-stores. Further, similar impairments can affect the buffer used to produce Sign Language, which raises the question of whether it is instantiated in a distinct device with the same design. However, what appear as separate buffers may be distinct regions in the activity space of a single extended POB network, connected with a lexicon network. The self-consistency of this idea can be assessed by studying an autoassociative Potts network, as a model of memory storage distributed over several cortical areas, and testing whether the network can represent both units of word and signs, reflecting the types and patterns of errors made by individuals with POB impairment
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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