From macw at cmu.edu Tue Jun 1 23:10:31 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 19:10:31 -0400 Subject: French-English bilingual study Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, I am happy to announce the addition of a new corpus of French-English bilingual data from Charles Watkins of the University of Paris XIII. The data are to be found in /bilingual/watkins.sit. The study focused on the acquisition of deictic terms, as the following documentation indicates. --Brian MacWhinney This corpus was collated and scripted for a doctoral thesis in English Linguistics at the Université de Paris XIII entitled ³The Acquisition of deixis in English by children brought up in a bilingual environment². The focus of the reasearch is theoretical linguistics rather than psycholinguistics. The corpus is made up of scripted conversations in a naturalistic setting (often family videos not initially intended for research purposes) involving 7 subjects from three families over a range of ages between 1;9 to 7;2. The subjects are all simultaneously bilingual, being exposed to both French and English in the home setting from birth. The corpus contains some 1400 child utterances in 72 CHAT files, each file corresponding to an uninterrupted sequence of dialogue. The transcript contains coding tags on the main line, coding tiers and GEM markers for the purposes of the research project. All deictics are flagged on the main line with @ed (English deictic), @frd (French deictic) or @fred (Franco-English deictic) postcodes according to the phonetic form of the deictic. Two coding tiers, %dei (DEIctic) and %ana (pragmatic ANAlysis) further develop the analysis. The %ana line is not language specific, and simply codes whether the deictic is used deictically (either symbolically or gesturally) or non-deictically (anaphorically or non-anaphorically). The %dei tier has the codes described in the following table which gives the codes for English. A parallel set of codes was also used for French From marinis at ling.uni-potsdam.de Tue Jun 1 17:07:04 1999 From: marinis at ling.uni-potsdam.de (Theodor Marinis) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 19:07:04 +0200 Subject: abstractness classification Message-ID: Dear Joost, in most of the cases, the classification within each category of words (nouns, verbs, etc.) is not on the base of abstractness, as you would, in order to test your hypothesis. However, as far as nouns are concerned, there is the traditional distinction which is based on the denotation of nouns and distinguishes between proper names and common nouns, the classification of common nouns in nouns denoting abstract concepts, properties, etc and nouns denoting concrete objects and the classification of nouns denoting concrete objects in count nouns, mass nouns and collective nouns. Nouns: 1. Proper Names (i.e. Peter) 2. Common Nouns Common Nouns: i. Nouns denoting abstract concepts, properties, etc (i.e. freedom) ii. Nouns denoting concrete objects Nouns denoting concrete objects a. Count Nouns (i.e. ball) b. Mass Nouns (i.e. water, sand) c. Collective Nouns (i.e. furniture) Many studies have been carried out since the early 70s, looking at the acquisition of nouns belonging to different classes showing among others that different types of bias are at work, when children learn new words, i.e. taxonomic bias, whole-object bias, mutual exclusivity bias, etc. Moreover studies dealing with the acquisition of nouns have been testing the idea of semantic and syntactic bootstrapping. Below you can find some literature on this topic. However, I don't quite understand your hypothesis: Why should language directed to a prelingual infant be more abstract and contain many words that cannot easily be related to the concept they refer to than language directed to a child who already has started to produce or understand words? Wouldn't we expect exactly the opposite, namely, that language directed to a prelingual infant should contain more concrete words, e.g. words that denote objects that are present at the speaking time, objects that are familiar and/or belong to the child and words referring to the actions that take place? Best wishes, Theodore Marinis -------------------------------------------------- Literature on the acquisition of noun classes: Bloom, Paul (1994): Possible names: The role of syntax-semantics mappings in the acquisition of nominals. - In: Lingua 92, 297-329. Carey, S. (1994): Does learning a language require the child to reconceptualize the world? - In: Lingua 92, 143-167 Chierchia, G. (1994): Syntactic Bootstrapping and the acquisition of noun meanings: the mass-count issue. - In: Lust, B., M. Suner & J. Whitman (eds.): Heads, Projections, and Learnability. Vol. 1. Hollsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 301- 318. Clark, E. V. (1973): What's in a word ? On the child's acquisition of semantics in his first language. - In: T. E. Moore (ed.): Cognitive development and the acquisition of language, 65-110. New York: Academic Press. Clark, E. V. (1993): The lexicon in acquisition. - New York: Cambridge University Press. Gathercole, V. (1986): Evaluating competing Linguistic Theories with child language data: The case of the Mass-Count distinction. Linguistics and Philosophy 9, 151-190. Gelman, S.A. & M. Taylor (1984): How Two-Year-Old Children Interpret Proper and Common Names for Unfamiliar Objects. - In: Child Development 55, 1535-1540. Golinkoff, R.M., K. Hirsh-Pasek, L.M. Bailey & N.R. Wenger (1992): Young Children and Adults Use Lexical Principles to Learn New Nouns. - In: Developmental Psychology 28, 99-108. Gordon, P. (1985): Evaluating the semantic categories hypothesis: The case of the count/mass distinction. - In: Cognition 20, 209-242. Gordon, P. (1988): Count/mass category acquisition: distributional distinctions in children's speech. Journal of Child Language 15, 109-128. Hall, G. (1991): Acquiring proper names for familiar and unfamiliar animate objects: Two-year-olds' word-learning biases. In: Child Development 62, 1142-1154. Huttenlocher, J. & P. Smiley (1987): Early Word Meanings: The Case of Object Names. - In: Cognitive Psychology 19, 63-89. Jones, S.S., L.B. Smith & B. Landau (1991): Object Properties and Knowledge in Early Lexical Learning. - In: Child Development 62, 499-516. Katz, N., E. Baker & J. Macnamara (1974): What's in a Name? A study of how children learn common and proper names. - In: Child Development 45, 469-473. Macnamara, J. (1972): The cognitive basis of language learning in children. Psychological Review 79, 1-13. Macnamara, J. (1982): Names for Things. - Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books. Markman, E. (1994): Constraints on word meaning in early language acquisition. Lingua 92, 199-227. Soja, N.N. (1994): Evidence for a distinct kind of noun. - In: Cognition 51, 267-284. There are also some articles on this topic in Child Development 1990, 1991 and in the Journal of Child Language 1993. ---------------------------------------------- >Dear Info-childes members, > >I was wondering if anyone could help me with the following: > >I have collected a corpus of linguistic input to a prelingual infant which >includes language spoken not only directly to the infant but also to >others who were usually in the infant's environment, including an older >sister, the parents, and other caretakers. > >I want to use my corpus to test the following hypothesis: assuming that >adults adapt their way of speaking to the child's linguistic level, I >expect that language to a prelingual infant is more abstract (i.e., it >contains relatively many words that cannot easily be related to the >concept they refer to) than language to a child who already has started to >produce or understand words. > >In order to test this hypothesis, I made a basic classification of words, >dividing them into nouns, adjectives, adverbs, verbs, pronouns, proper >nouns, auxiliaries, determiners, and prepositions, because I thought that >the distribution of these categories would give me a preliminary >indication of how well the hypothesis is supported by the data. For >instance, perhaps the percentage of nouns is higher in language to the >older sister than to the infant because, in general, nouns are relatively >concrete compared to verbs or adjectives. > >However, I am aware that within each category, there are differences too, >a noun like 'ball' being easier than 'side' for instance. My question >therefore is: does anyone have a suggestion about how to make a >classification within the categories, or can anyone give me references of >comparable studies where I can find information on how to proceed? > >Any responses are more than welcome, > > > >Joost van de Weijer >Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics >PO Box 310 >6500 AH Nijmegen >The Netherlands >Tel: +31-(0)24-3521307 >Fax: +31-(0)24-3521213 >email: vdweijer at mpi.nl ------------------ MIME Information follows ------------------ --============_-1283868752==_ma============ Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" ; format="flowed" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable <<<<<< See above "Message Body" >>>>>> --============_-1283868752==_ma============ Content-Type: text/enriched; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable <<<<<< See Enclosure named "text.enriched" >>>>>> --============_-1283868752==_ma============-- From ctswtang at polyu.edu.hk Wed Jun 2 02:30:51 1999 From: ctswtang at polyu.edu.hk (Sze-Wing Tang) Date: Wed, 2 Jun 1999 10:30:51 +0800 Subject: call for papers Message-ID: INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON TOPIC AND FOCUS IN CHINESE The Hong Kong Polytechnic University CALL FOR PAPERS We are pleased to announce that 'International Symposium on Topic and Focus in Chinese' will be held at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University in late June or early July 2000. The date will be announced as soon as the details are finalized. The symposium is jointly organized by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong and Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Abstracts are invited for 20-minute talks (with 10 minutes for discussion) in all areas of research on topic and focus from any theoretical perspectives with special emphasis on Chinese or Chinese in comparison with other languages. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to, syntax, semantics, phonology, and language acquisition. Papers from interdisciplinary areas are encouraged. Abstracts may be written in Chinese or English and should be no more than one standard size page (A4 or letter size) in length. Abstracts should be in at least 12-point type with margins of at least 1-inch, single-spaced. Please provide four copies of an anonymous abstract and one camera-ready original with the name(s) of author(s) and affiliation. Along with the abstract send a 3" x 5" card listing: (1) title of the paper, (2) name(s) of the author(s), (3) affiliation(s), (4) mailing address, and (5) email address. Submissions are limited to a maximum of one individual and one joint abstract per author. Abstracts should be sent to the following address. Email and fax submissions cannot be accepted. International Symposium on Topic and Focus in Chinese Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Hung Hom, Kowloon HONG KONG Deadline for receipt of abstracts is December 31, 1999. Notification of acceptance will be sent by email by March 15, 2000. A selection of papers will be considered for publication after the symposium. Inquiries can be addressed to 'ctswtang at polyu.edu.hk'. For more information, visit our website at 'http://www.polyu.edu.hk/~cbs/conference.htm'. Dingxu Shi and Sze-Wing Tang on behalf of the Organizing Committee, International Symposium on Topic and Focus in Chinese From macw at cmu.edu Tue Jun 1 14:26:38 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 10:26:38 -0400 Subject: abstractness Message-ID: Dear Joost, The dimension of abstractness of individual content words has been extensively examined in the field that is now called psycholinguistics and was earlier known as verbal learning. In 1971 Allan Paivio published an extremely comprehensive examination of much of this literature in his book "Imagery and Verbal Processes". Paivio's particular goal was to find support for his dual code (vision and language) theory. However, one of the important points he makes is that concrete words are processed more thoroughly and quickly than are abstract words. He believes this is because they have better access to imagery and the quicker, faster visual system. Between pages 65 and 80, Paivio reviews the work on norms for the concreteness-abstractness dimension. There are lists from Gorman, Paivio and Yuille, and others. Morton Gernsbacher found in her dissertation work that was eventually published in Psych Review that the dimensions of concreteness and imageability are highly correlated and that both are also related to other dimensions. So this is a big literature, but it tends to focus on nouns and adjectives and the bulk of the words included are not even relevant to children. However, you may find some of the principles relevant and a few of the norms may provide guidance. --Brian MacWhinney From Joost.vandeWeijer at mpi.nl Tue Jun 1 11:41:32 1999 From: Joost.vandeWeijer at mpi.nl (Joost van de Weijer) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 13:41:32 +0200 Subject: abstractness classification Message-ID: Dear Info-childes members, I was wondering if anyone could help me with the following: I have collected a corpus of linguistic input to a prelingual infant which includes language spoken not only directly to the infant but also to others who were usually in the infant's environment, including an older sister, the parents, and other caretakers. I want to use my corpus to test the following hypothesis: assuming that adults adapt their way of speaking to the child's linguistic level, I expect that language to a prelingual infant is more abstract (i.e., it contains relatively many words that cannot easily be related to the concept they refer to) than language to a child who already has started to produce or understand words. In order to test this hypothesis, I made a basic classification of words, dividing them into nouns, adjectives, adverbs, verbs, pronouns, proper nouns, auxiliaries, determiners, and prepositions, because I thought that the distribution of these categories would give me a preliminary indication of how well the hypothesis is supported by the data. For instance, perhaps the percentage of nouns is higher in language to the older sister than to the infant because, in general, nouns are relatively concrete compared to verbs or adjectives. However, I am aware that within each category, there are differences too, a noun like 'ball' being easier than 'side' for instance. My question therefore is: does anyone have a suggestion about how to make a classification within the categories, or can anyone give me references of comparable studies where I can find information on how to proceed? Any responses are more than welcome, Joost van de Weijer Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics PO Box 310 6500 AH Nijmegen The Netherlands Tel: +31-(0)24-3521307 Fax: +31-(0)24-3521213 email: vdweijer at mpi.nl From macw at cmu.edu Thu Jun 3 23:39:18 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Thu, 3 Jun 1999 19:39:18 -0400 Subject: UNIBET, SAMPA, IPA Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, I have received feedback from 8 people regarding replacing UNIBET with SAMPA. No one recommends keeping UNIBET, so it is now gone. We will have to write a program that replaces UNIBET in current transcripts with SAMPA. However, it may be up to a year before that work is completed. The next years should see an emerging Unicode standard with an included IPA standard and methods for including diacritics. This, along with a growth in sonic CHAT, will reduce our reliance on stop-gap notations like SAMPA and UNIBET. --Brian MacWhinney From macw at cmu.edu Fri Jun 4 19:05:08 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1999 15:05:08 -0400 Subject: new Spanish corpus, new Spanish-Catalan bilingual corpus Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, I am happy to announce the arrival of a new longitudinal corpus of data on the acquisition of Castillian Spanish, as well as a parallel corpus from a Spanish-Catalan bilingual child. The data were collected under the supervision of Ignasi Vila and prepared for CHILDES by Elisabet Serrat Sellabona of the University of Gerona. The monolingual Spanish data are now in spanish.sit and spanish.zip. The bilingual corpus is in vila.sit and vila.zip on the server. Here are the two readme files: This is a corpus of data from Emilio, a Spanish-speaking boy who was audiorecorded (with some gaps) from 0;11. to age 4;08. Emilio was born 20-MAY-1980. The project has been partially supported by a grant from Spanish Government (DGICYT PB89-0624-C02-01). The head of the project was Ignasi Vila, and the work was carried out in the ICE (Institute of Educational Sciences) in the University of Barcelona. Associate researchers were Montserrat Cortes, Montserrat Moreno, Carme Muñoz, and Elisabet Serrat. The collection and transcription of the data would have not been possible without the help of: Carme Mena, Ana Novella, and Joaquim Romero. **** This is a corpus of data from Maria del Mar, a Spanish-Catalan bilingual girl who was audiorecorded (with some gaps) from 1;9 to 5;4. Maria was born 16-FEB-1980. The project has been partially supported by a grant from Spanish Government (DGICYT PB89-0624-C02-01). The head of the project was Ignasi Vila, and the work was carried out in the ICE (Institute of Educational Sciences) in the University of Barcelona. Associate researchers were Montserrat Cortes, Montserrat Moreno, Carme Muñoz, and Elisabet Serrat. The collection and transcription of the data would have not been possible without the help of: Carme Mena, Ana Novella, and Joaquim Romero. --Brian MacWhinney From gleason at bu.edu Fri Jun 4 21:19:50 1999 From: gleason at bu.edu (Jean Berko Gleason) Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1999 17:19:50 -0400 Subject: Early experiments Message-ID: I'm looking for a reference to an "experiment" carried out by one of the German kings (Frederick the ?), who purportedly raised children without allowing them to hear spoken language because he was sure that they would then speak the REAL language, German. Can anyone tell me which Fred it was and point me to a reference that details this? (I know all about Psammetichus, and really mean this story....) Thanks. Jean Berko Gleason From macw at cmu.edu Fri Jun 4 21:52:53 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1999 17:52:53 -0400 Subject: Early experiments Message-ID: Jean, What I know is that the chronicler Salimbene explained how Kaiser Friedrich II of Hohenzollern (ca. 1250) isolated two children with a nursemaid bound to silence. The experiment never ran to completion, since both children died before producing speech. I have also read that Muller (date unknown ) says that similar experiments were conducted by James IV of Scotland and the Emperor Akbar of India. In the case of the experiment by Akbar all 30 subjects failed to develop speech. James IV believed that the children should end up speaking Hebrew without any specific input. He was disappointed to find that they spoke no language at all, not even "very guid Ebrew." I have these references from reading notes. Years ago I tried to track down the chronicles of Salimbene with no luck. Nor have I ever located the Muller discussion. So, this takes us a little closer, but perhaps someone else can provide the real references. Maybe you have to travel to some far-off monastery in Bohemia and climb a dusty staircase to find the real reference. Or maybe they are in some article by Roger Brown on my shelf. --Brian MacWhinney From zukow at ucla.edu Sat Jun 5 05:08:14 1999 From: zukow at ucla.edu (Patricia Zukow-Goldring) Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1999 22:08:14 -0700 Subject: Early experiments Message-ID: Hi Jean and All, John Bonvillian, Amanda Garber, & Susan Dell have an article in _First Language_, _17_ (1997), 219-239 entitled "Language origin accounts: was the gesure in the beginning" that describes such experiments by Akbar, the emperor of Hindustan, in the 16th century. He, too, wanted to know what might be the natural language of children who had not been taught another. He had heard that the language would be Hebrew. The 12 children were raised by 12 mute nurses. Surprise=surprise, they gestured but did not speak some 12 years later. John told me he had another (similar?) publication on the topic. Regards, Pat Zukow-Goldring Patricia Zukow-Goldring, Ph. D. Center for the Study of Women, Kinsey 288 send mail to: UCLA 3835 Ventura Canyon Avenue 405 Hilgard Avenue Sherman Oaks CA 91423 Los Angeles CA 90095 (818) 905-6293 (310) 825-0590 FAX: (818) 905-8113 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jr111 at cus.cam.ac.uk Sun Jun 6 13:15:05 1999 From: jr111 at cus.cam.ac.uk (James Russell) Date: Sun, 6 Jun 1999 14:15:05 +0100 Subject: Early experiments Message-ID: At 17:19 -0400 4/6/99, Jean Berko Gleason wrote: >I'm looking for a reference to an "experiment" carried out by one of the >German kings (Frederick the ?), who purportedly raised children without >allowing them to hear spoken language because he was sure that they >would then speak the REAL language, German. Can anyone tell me which >Fred it was and point me to a reference that details this? (I know all >about >Psammetichus, and really mean this story....) Thanks. > >Jean Berko Gleason There were a number of royal experiments of this kind and they are very usefully reviewed in a paper by Robin Campbell and Robert Greive: "Royal investigations of the origin of language. Hitoriographia Linguistica, Volume IX, 43-74 (I was indeed Frederick the Great - but the 'Stupor Mundi' one who lived in Scicily rather than the flute-playing friend of Voltaire. James Russell From r.n.campbell at stir.ac.uk Mon Jun 7 11:07:39 1999 From: r.n.campbell at stir.ac.uk (r.n.campbell) Date: Mon, 7 Jun 1999 12:07:39 +0100 Subject: Early experiments Message-ID: >I'm looking for a reference to an "experiment" carried out by one of the >German kings (Frederick the ?), who purportedly raised children without >allowing them to hear spoken language because he was sure that they >would then speak the REAL language, German. Can anyone tell me which >Fred it was and point me to a reference that details this? (I know all >about >Psammetichus, and really mean this story....) Thanks. > >Jean Berko Gleason As Jim Russell says, see my paper with Bob Grieve (overlooked by Bonvillian et al, 1997, and curiously not mentioned in their communication to you):- Royal Investigations of the Origin of Language. Historiographia Linguistica IX:1/2 (1982). Pp. 43-74. Although Frederick II of Sicily was undoubtedly an interesting person who contributed substantially to avian biology (see references 1, 2 below), there is plenty of doubt about whether he conducted any language experiment. The only adequately authenticated isolation experiment is Akbar's, also described at length in our paper. What set us on the track, however, were Guilio Panconcelli-Calzia's papers 3 and 4 below. 1. Hauber, A. 1912. 'Kaiser Friedrich II der Staufer und der langlebige Fisch'. Archiv fur die Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften und der Technik 3: 315-29. 2. Wood, C.A. & F.M. Fyfe. 1943.'The Art of Falconry: the 'De venandi cum avibus' of Frederick II'. Stanford UP. 3. Panconcelli-Calzia, G. 1937.'Der 'wilde Knabe' in seiner Beziehung zu manchen Sprachstorungen im Kindesalter und zu der Entstehung von Mythen'. Medizinische Welt 11: 410-14 4. Panconcelli-Calzia, G. 1955. 'Das Motiv vom 'wilde Knaben'. Zur Sprache verwilderter Kinder.' Sprachforum 1: 272-77. Dr Robin N Campbell Dept of Psychology, University of Stirling STIRLING FK9 4LA, Scotland tele: 01786-467649 facs: 01786-467641 email: r.n.campbell at stir.ac.uk http://www.stir.ac.uk/departments/humansciences/psychology/Staff/rnc1/ From feldman at stripe.Colorado.EDU Mon Jun 7 21:46:29 1999 From: feldman at stripe.Colorado.EDU (FELDMAN ANDREA) Date: Mon, 7 Jun 1999 15:46:29 -0600 Subject: finite/nonfinite verbs Message-ID: > >Return-Path: >Received: from sgym52.Colorado.EDU (sgym52.Colorado.EDU [128.138.125.52]) > by spot.Colorado.EDU (8.9.3/8.9.3/ITS-5.0/standard) with SMTP id PAA21381 > for ; Thu, 3 Jun 1999 15:27:29 -0600 (MDT) >Date: Thu, 3 Jun 1999 15:27:29 -0600 (MDT) >Message-Id: <199906032127.PAA21381 at spot.Colorado.EDU> >X-Sender: mannn at spot.colorado.edu >X-Mailer: Windows Eudora Light Version 1.5.2 >Mime-Version: 1.0 >Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >To: afeldman at stripe.colorado.edu >From: Nancy Mann >Subject: Finite/nonfinite verbs > >Could you refer me to a *cross-linguistic* definition of the concept of >finiteness, and if possible a discussion of the ways in which finite and >nonfinite verb forms are used in a variety of languages? If possible, I'd >appreciate material that's accessible to a reasonably determined nonspecialist. > >Thanks, >Nancy > >nancy.mann at colorado.edu > > From dxk45 at psu.edu Tue Jun 8 16:29:53 1999 From: dxk45 at psu.edu (Deb Kelemen) Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1999 12:29:53 -0400 Subject: correction Message-ID: The service for Ann Brown will be held at 11a.m. on Thursday morning at St James Church not 11:30 as previously stated. apologies Deb Kelemen dxk45 at psu.edu Deb Kelemen Ph.D. Assistant Professor Department of Psychology 441 Moore Building The Pennsylvania State University University Park, PA 16802. Office: (814) 863 - 1712 Conceptual Development Lab: (814) 863 - 7391 Fax: (814) 863 -7002 From dxk45 at psu.edu Tue Jun 8 16:25:48 1999 From: dxk45 at psu.edu (Deb Kelemen) Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1999 12:25:48 -0400 Subject: sad news Message-ID: I am sorry to announce some very sad news. Ann Brown, Evelyn Lois Corey Professor of Education of the University of California, Berkeley passed away on Friday, 4th June after a brief illness. Much of Ann's most recent work had focussed on designing innovative learning environments, developing the concept of the classroom as a community of learners and refining her groundbreaking research with Annemarie Palinscar on reciprocal teaching. However, to the cognitive developmental community, Ann may be better known for her work in conceptual development She published broadly on causal and analogical reasoning in young children and the development of metacognition and learning transfer. She will be sadly missed. For those wishing to pay their respects or send flowers, a service is being held for Ann at 11:30 Thursday June 10th, St James Catholic Church, 1086 Guerrero, San Francisco. many thanks Deb Kelemen dxk45 at psu.edu Deb Kelemen Ph.D. Assistant Professor Department of Psychology 441 Moore Building The Pennsylvania State University University Park, PA 16802. Office: (814) 863 - 1712 Conceptual Development Lab: (814) 863 - 7391 Fax: (814) 863 -7002 From dxk45 at psu.edu Tue Jun 8 19:39:48 1999 From: dxk45 at psu.edu (Deb Kelemen) Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1999 15:39:48 -0400 Subject: Memorial fund for Ann Brown Message-ID: In response to requests for further information: The Thursday service for Ann Brown is relatively small family affair for family, friends, and close colleagues. However, an Ann Brown/Campione Teacher Research Fund has been set up in Ann's memory. Donations are welcome c/o Michael D. Reynolds,Chabot Observatory & Science Center, 10902 Skyline Blvd., Oakland, CA 94619. thanks Deb Kelemen dxk45 at psu.edu Deb Kelemen Ph.D. Assistant Professor Department of Psychology 441 Moore Building The Pennsylvania State University University Park, PA 16802. Office: (814) 863 - 1712 Conceptual Development Lab: (814) 863 - 7391 Fax: (814) 863 -7002 From au at psych.ucla.edu Tue Jun 8 19:47:33 1999 From: au at psych.ucla.edu (Terry Au) Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1999 12:47:33 -0700 Subject: summary of counting clauses Message-ID: Dear Colleagues: Earlier I posted a question about how to count clauses in frog stories and narratives in general. Here are my original query message and a summary of the responses. Thanks, Terry Au ************************************************************************ ORIGINAL QUERY: My lab is trying to get a handle on counting sentential clauses in Frog stories (and other narratives). Our criteria for clauses are: 1. A subject and a tensed verb (e.g., "he ran" will count as 1 clause; "he ran and she walked" will count as 2 clauses) OR 2. Small clauses (e.g., "I wanted him to run" would count as 2 clauses because the subject is different for the two lexical verbs: "I" being the subject for "wanted;" "he" being the subject for "run") We count the following as only one clause: 1. Simpe to-infinitives (e.g., "I want to run") 2. Conjoined verb (e.g., "I ate and drank;" "He cried and cried") 3. Conjoined subject (e.g., "John and Mary left") ************************************************************************** SUMMARY OF RESPONSES: 1. Several colleagues noted that "I ate and drank" should count as 2 clauses, whereas "I ate and ate" should count as 1 (the repetition marks aspect rather than a second situation. (See the next point.) 2. Most who replied said they have adopted Berman and Slobin's (1994) definition: "a unit that contains a unified predicate. By unified, we mean a predicate that expresses a single situation (activity, event, state)." Detailed criteria and examples can be found in Appendix II of "Relating Events in Narrative: A crosslinguistic developmental study (Berman & Slobin et al., 1994). 3. Different researchers' criteria vary somewhat on subtler points. Disagreements center on "I want to go" (one clause according to Berman & Slobin) versus "I want him to go" (two clauses according to B&S). The rationales for departing from B&S's criteria are: Lowry Hemphill : We don't count constructions like "I wanted him to run" as two clauses because only one narrative unit is accomplished, an expression of intention (we don't view this sort of clause as different from "I want to run" because the second person's agency is only hypothetical in "I wanted him to run", not actual). We do, however, consider something like "I ate and drank" to be two clauses because it reports two potentially separate narrative events. Labov's work with Waletzky has guided us here; we've also been influenced by Peterson and McCabe's work on children's acquisition of narrative structure. Judy Reilly : we have counted those verbs with infinitival clomplements and same subject as 2 clauses, but only one proposition as they reflect only one event. "Daniela O'Neill" : I have found a bit problematic are cases such as the one you mention with respect to small clauses such as "I wanted him to run". Breaking these up reduces the readability of the transcript considerably. Although I think it is correct to separate this into two clauses, I also wonder about whether this fits the definition of Bermin and Slobin's "single situation". I am not sure whether in an everyday sense we consider this utterance the expression of two situations rather than one. However, Bermin and Slobin do mention that utterances with subordinate complement clauses such as "he thought he could get the bees" be considered two situations and be treated as two clauses. And indeed, we have also treated instances of direct or indirect voicing as two clauses, as in "he said he would find the frog". Bermin and Slobin also note that when each verb has a different subject, then the utterance should be separated in to two clauses and give the example "I want you to go" which is almost identical to the one you gave. Claudia L. Ordonnez : I count 'I want to go...' and any other expression with a state-of-mind-verb as 2 clauses to make it easier to count evaluative features, which are quite important in my coding syste. The 'to go' would be a predicted event (another evaluative feature) or a story event, in case it really happens later in the story. Martha Shiro : I was interested in evaluative language, therefore it was important for me to mark the difference between 'I ran' and 'I wanted to run' and so, I divided the latter into 2 clauses. But in the case of 'I started to run' I considered it as 1 clause because it had an aspectual reference (it referred to a phase of the action of 'running' and not to a mental process as in the previous case). Barbara Zurer Pearson : "I plan to go" would be 2 (in my opinion). I'm not sure but I think "He tried to go" might also be 2, whereas I thought of "wanted to go" as "modal-like" (as did B&S) [and hence counts as one]. The more examples one gives, the slippery-er it feels. Sometimes that's the best way to clarify one's own thinking. 4. Lowry Hemphill sent me his clausing manual--easy to understand and similar to B & S on major points. Interesting ideas on how to deal with fragments and unfinished sentences. 5. Lois Bloom send me references for relevant articles to read (which I did and found them useful): Bloom, L., Lahey, M., Hood, L., Lifter, K., & Fiess, K. (1980). Complex sentences: Acquisition of syntactic connectives and the semantic relations they encode. Journal of Child Language, 7, 235-261. We called "complex sentences" those that "include two verbs" or that "theoretically combine the structures that underlie two simple sentences." We subsequently did a number of studies of kinds of complex sentences with different clausal relations, including those with complements and expressions of causality in particular. All of these papers are reprinted in Bloom, L. (1991). Language development from two to three. New York: Cambridge University Press. ******************************* Terry Kit-fong Au Professor Department of Psychology, UCLA Los Angeles, CA 90096-1563, U.S.A. Office: (310)206-9186 Lab: (310)206-7840 FAX: (310)206-5895 From macw at cmu.edu Tue Jun 8 22:09:00 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1999 18:09:00 -0400 Subject: Arabic, Turkish, Dutch bilingual narratives Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, I am happy to announce the inclusion in CHILDES of a major new corpus on narratives from bilingual children and their comparison control groups. The data come from Petra Bos and Jeroen Aarssen of Tilburg University. They are to be found in the aarssen/bos.sit and aarssen/bos.zip files in the /biling directory. I am not including them in the narrative directory, although they are clearly relevant to the study of narratives. Also, people may wish to note that these are the first data we have from Arabic speaking children. The corpus is quite large with a total of over 1000 narratives. Following is the beginning of the readme file. --Brian MacWhinney This database contains 1021 transcripts collected in the Netherlands, Turkey and Morocco by Jeroen Aarssen and Petra Bos, Tilburg University. Bilingual data (either Turkish-Dutch or Moroccan Arabic-Dutch) were collected within the framework of a longitudinal study into development of bilingualism among Turkish and Moroccan children in The Netherlands. The age range of the bilingual informants is from 4 to 10. The design of the study is pseudo-longitudinal, i.e. two consecutive cohorts of 25 informants were followed during a longer period of time: the younger cohort in four rounds (from age 4 to age 7) and the older cohort in three rounds (from 8 to 10). The first round of data collection took place in 1991, and data collection was repeated in 1992, 1993 and 1994. The interval between subsequent rounds of data collection was about one year. Turkish, Moroccan Arabic and Dutch monolingual control data were collected as well in, respectively, Turkey, Morocco and The Netherlands. The Dutch control data were collected according to the same pseudo-longitudinal design as described above. The Turkish and Moroccan control data, however, were collected cross-sectionally from three different age groups (age 5, 7 and 9). Each transcript contains retellings of six short six-picture stories and the frog story (Mayer, 1969). The six short stories were constructed according to the following set-up: two stories with a clearly identifiable main character; two with two equivalent main characters; and two without a clearly identifiable main character. This research was supported by the Linguistic Research Foundation (Grant No. 300-172-002), which is funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, NWO. This research resulted into the two PhD. theses cited below (Aarssen, 1996 and Bos, 1997). Publications using these data should cite: Aarssen, J. (1996). Relating events in two languages: Acquisition of cohesive devices by Turkish-Dutch bilingual children at school age. Studies in Multilingualism, Vol. 2. Tilburg: Tilburg University Press. Bos, P. (1997) Development of bilingualism: A study of school-age Moroccan children in the Netherlands. Studies in Multilingualism, Vol. 8. Tilburg: Tilburg University Press. Jeroen Aarssen Petra Bos Tilburg University - BABYLON, Center for Studies on Multilingualism in the Multicultural Society P.O. Box 90153 5000 LE Tilburg The Netherlands e-mail: J.Aarssen at kub.nl, P.H.F.Bos at kub.nl From macw at cmu.edu Tue Jun 8 23:20:45 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1999 19:20:45 -0400 Subject: major new English corpus Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, I am also happy to announce the addition to CHILDES of a very large new corpus of data on the acquisition of British English from Elena Lieven, Anna Theakston, Julian Pine, and Carolyn Reid, whose addresses are listed below. This large corpus includes a complete disambiguated %mor tier which should make it extremely interesting and useful for grammatical studies. Here is the beginning of the readme file for the corpus. --Brian MacWhinney This corpus consists of transcripts of audio-recordings from a longitudinal study of twelve English-speaking children between the ages of approximately 2-3 years. The children were recruited through newspaper advertisements and local nurseries. All the children were first borns, monolingual and were cared for primarily by their mothers. Although socioeconomic status was not taken into account with respect to recruitment, the children were from predominantly middle-class. There were six boys and six girls, half from Manchester and half from Nottingham. At the beginning of the study, the children ranged in age from 1;8.22 to 2;0.25 with MLUs ranging between 1.06 to 2.27 in morphemes. The children¹s dates of birth and ages are available in the headers to each transcript. The transcripts for each child are numbered from 1 to 34 corresponding to the tape number and labelled (a) and (b) to correspond to the two 30 minute sessions within each recording. The following recording sessions were missed and therefore have no corresponding transcript: Aran14a/b: Carl14b,24a/b: John15a/b,16a/b: Ruth4a/b: Warren3b. Contributors: Elena V. M. Lieven Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Inselstrasses 22 D-04103 Leipzig Germany lieven at eva.mpg.de Julian Pine Department of Psychology University of Nottingham NE7 2RCD Nottingham, UK jp at psych.nott.ac.uk Caroline Rowland Institute of Behavioural Sciences Mickleover Site University of Derby DE3 5GX Derby, UK c.rowland at derby.ac.uk Anna Theakston Department of Psychology University of Manchester Oxford Rd M13 9PL Manchester, UK theaksto at fs4.psy.man.ac.uk Publications that make use of this corpus should cite: Theakston, A. L., Lieven, E. V. M., Pine, J. M. & Rowland, C. F. (in press). The role of performance limitations in the acquisition of 'mixed' verb-argument structure at stage 1. To appear in M. Perkins & S. Howard (Eds.) New Directions in Language Development and Disorders. Plenum. From macw at cmu.edu Wed Jun 9 16:44:53 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Wed, 9 Jun 1999 12:44:53 -0400 Subject: new Spanish corpus, new Spanish data on SLI and Williams Syndrome Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, I am happy to announce the inclusion in CHILDES of three corpora from Eliseo Diez-Itza of the University of Oviedo. The first is a set of 20 transcripts from normally-developing children. These are in the spanish.zip and spanish.sit files on the server. The second and third are studies of children with SLI and Williams Syndrome. This are in /clinical/diez_itza.sit on the server. Many thanks to Eliseo. Here are the readme files. --Brian MacWhinney **** Normally-developing children ****** These data were contributed by Eliseo Diez-Itza. They are a small part of a much larger corpus being prepared at the University of Oviedo by Dr. Diez-Itza and his students, with assistance from Verónica Martínez, Raúl Cantora, and Manuela Miranda. This database has provided the basis for several cross-sectional descriptive studies on the acqusition of Spanish, with special focus on phonological, lexical and narrative issues. The directory currently contains 20 transcripts of dyadic conversations between children (10 girls and 10 boys in the age range from 3;0 to 3;11) and investigators trained in process of recording, transcribing, and analyzing spontaneous speech samples, using CHAT conventions. The taping sessions were conducted in the subjects¹ homes. Each one lasted approximately forty-five minutes. During this spontaneous verbal interaction, the children had to tell a story. They were also asked to talk about a visit to the doctor, and a birthday party. GEM header lines were used to mark these particular passages. The spontaneous speech parts (HES) were also marked. ***** SLI child ****** This directory contains the six transcripts from a short-term longitudinal study of a SLI child, conducted by Manuela Miranda, Verónica Martínez and Eliseo Diez-Itza at the University of Oviedo. The child pseudonym is Edgar and his age was 7.10 at the beginning of the study. Dyadic verbal interaction between Edgar and Manuela Miranda was videorecorded within monthly intervals during the speech therapy time in the school. The time duration of the sessions was approximately of thirty minutes. The activities included play and storytelling. The focus of the study was the phonological impairment. Cite: Miranda, Martínez & Diez-Itza (1998). ***** WS child ***** This directory contains two transcripts from a Williams Syndrome child. They are part of an ongoing research project on the linguistic and educational aspects of a Williams Syndrome (WS) population in Asturias (Spain) conducted by Eliseo Diez-Itza, Aránzazu Antón, Joaquín Fernández Toral and María Luisa García, at the University of Oviedo. Spontaneus verbal interaction between the child and the investigators was videotaped and transcribed in CHAT format. The child was recorded in two sessions at home with an interval of 8 months (at ages 9.3 and 10.0). The time duration of the samples is approximately of 90 and 60 minutes. Cite: Diez-Itza, Antón, Fernández & García (1988). From spowers at rz.uni-potsdam.de Thu Jun 10 12:25:38 1999 From: spowers at rz.uni-potsdam.de (Susan M. Powers) Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 14:25:38 +0200 Subject: Digit Span Message-ID: Dear all, Does anyone know a method for assessing the (verbal or non-verbal) digit span of children and norms? Thanks, Susan Powers From ann.dowker at psy.ox.ac.uk Thu Jun 10 19:03:42 1999 From: ann.dowker at psy.ox.ac.uk (Ann Dowker) Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 20:03:42 +0100 Subject: Digit Span Message-ID: Dear Susan, Both the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children and the British Abilities Scales contain (auditory) digit span subtests, with norms. There is also Elizabeth Koppitz' Visual-Aural Digit Span test, published by Grune and Stratton, 1977, which includes both visual and auditory digit span measures, with norms. Hope one of these is useful, Ann On Thu, 10 Jun 1999, Susan M. Powers wrote: > Dear all, > > Does anyone know a method for assessing the (verbal or non-verbal) digit > > span of children and norms? > > Thanks, > > Susan Powers > > > > > From nmayumi at msi.biglobe.ne.jp Fri Jun 11 07:44:33 1999 From: nmayumi at msi.biglobe.ne.jp (nmayumi at msi.biglobe.ne.jp) Date: Fri, 11 Jun 1999 16:44:33 +0900 Subject: change in e-mail address Message-ID: Please note a change in my e-mail address: Old:nmayumi at msi.biglobe.ne.jp New:j46077a at nucc.cc.nagoya-u.ac.jp Mayumi Nishibu Department of International Language and Culture Nagoya University, JAPAN From aholland at U.Arizona.EDU Fri Jun 11 19:31:46 1999 From: aholland at U.Arizona.EDU (audrey l holland) Date: Fri, 11 Jun 1999 12:31:46 -0700 Subject: Aphasia in Navajo speakers Message-ID: Dear Colleagues--I am involved in a project concerning aphasia and its effects on Navajo. I am unaware of any work done on Navajo aphasic speakers, and would appreciate any leads you might have. We are interested in test materials, trnascriptions of discourse, even myths about this interesting problem. I will collate material and distribute it to interested readers. Thank you in advance--Audrey Holland From macw at cmu.edu Fri Jun 11 19:56:04 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Fri, 11 Jun 1999 15:56:04 -0400 Subject: new corpus on autism Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, I am happy to announce the inclusion in CHILDES of a new corpus on the language of young children with autism. The corpus is from Pamela Rollins of UTDallas. It is rollins.sit in the /clinical directory. There are four files from each of five boys ages 2-3. Here is part of the readme file. --Brian MacWhinney This corpus consists of transcripts of video recordings of 5 boys with autism who attended a preschool program for children on the autistic spectrum at the University of Texas at Dallas. To be included this corpus, a child had to meet the following criteria: (a) have an initial diagnosis of autism by a psychologist or a neurologist; (b) have been preverbal at the time of intake; (c) have attended the preschool program for at least one year; and (d) have some conventional expressive vocabulary skills upon completion of the program. The preschool program routinely videotapes each participating child for the entire morning session several times during the school year. For each child, four videotapes were selected for later transcription and analysis (the first, last, and two intermediate tapes). The transcripts for each child are numbered 1-4 or 5 corresponding to the tape number. The header file indicates the date of the video recording as well as the child¹s age. To capture each child's optimal level of on-task communicative functioning, only intervals where the child was interacting one-on-one with his clinician were transcribed and coded for analyses. Therefore, activities such as small group, music, and snack time were, by definition, excluded from the analyses. This criterion was used because the language skills of children on the autistic spectrum are influenced by both the setting and the participants. Furthermore, efforts to capture the child's optimal level of on-task communicative behaviors were made by excluding from the total number of usable minutes the following intervals: (a) when the clinician or child was out of the room, (b) when another child or teacher talked with the target child and clinician, (c) when the clinician attempted to engage the target child in an activity but where the target child refused to cooperate for longer than 30 seconds, (d) when the target child actively avoided an activity or interactions with the clinician for longer than 30 seconds, (e) when the clinician and target child negotiated the next activity for longer than 60 seconds. This substantially reduced the total number of usable minutes available for Transcription. Videotapes were viewed and catalogued. The catalogue included a time record for each activity so that the total number of usable minutes for coding could be calculated. Activity header lines were used to mark each new activity on the transcript. Twenty minutes was the maximum number of usable minutes that was available for all children in the study at each time point. To ensure that the sample of 20 minutes was representative for each child the videotaped interactions were reviewed by persons familiar with each child. Because the corpus was originally collected to describe pragmatic skills in children with autism from the prelinguistic to early one word stage a good deal of nonverbal information is transcribed. The transcripts include %spa codes using the Ninio, Snow, Pan, & Rollins INCA system described in the CHAT manual. In order to be coded as communicative, each communicative act had to supported by behavioral evidence that the child had a plan/intention to achieve a goal with awareness that another person can be a means to that end. This behavioral evidence has been outlined by Prizant and Wetherby (1988) and includes the following: (a) alternating eye gaze between a goal and the listener, (b) persistent signaling until the goal has been met, (c) changing the quality of the signal until the goal has been met, (d) ritualizing or conventionalizing the form of signal within specific communicative contexts, (e) awaiting a response from the listener, (f) terminating the signal when the goal is met, (g) displaying satisfaction when the goal is attained or dissatisfaction when it is not. Communicative means is indicated on the third level of the speech act tier. Pamela Rosenthal Rollins University of Texas at Dallas Callier Center for Communication Disorders 1966 Inwood Road Dallas, TX 75214 214-905-3153 rollins at utdallas.edu From macw at cmu.edu Sat Jun 12 13:55:17 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Sat, 12 Jun 1999 09:55:17 -0400 Subject: new data on the acquisition of Russion Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, I am happy to announce the inclusion in CHILDES of a new corpus on the acquisition of Russian. This is a case study of a child learning Russian in a monolingual environment in the United States. It has been contributed by Eva Bar-Shalom and William Snyder of the University of Connecticut. It is in /noneng/russian.sit. Here is the readme file: --Brian MacWhinney The TANJA corpus was videotaped and transcribed by Eva Bar-Shalom in collaboration with William Snyder. The project was conducted in the Child Language Laboratory, Department of Linguistics, University of Connecticut, and was funded in part by the University of Connecticut Research Foundation. The TANJA corpus contains fifteen longitudinal, spontaneous-speech samples from a monolingual, Russian-learning girl (pseudonym 'Tanja', ages 2;05.14 - 2;11.20) who was recorded in her home in the United States at a rate of approximately twice per month. At the time of the study Tanja was an only child, and was cared for at home by her monolingual (native Russian) mother and her bilingual (native Russian, ESL) father. The language spoken at home was consistently Russian, and exposure to English was minimal. Tanya was born on 14-DEC-1993. The dates of the recordings, and Tanja's age at each recording, are as follows: Tanja01 28-MAY-1996 2;05.14 Tanja02 10-JUN-1996 2;05.27 Tanja03 18-JUN-1996 2;06.04 Tanja04 25-JUN-1996 2;06.11 Tanja05 23-JUL-1996 2;07.09 Tanja06 12-AUG-1996 2;07.29 Tanja07 29-AUG-1996 2;08.15 Tanja08 09-SEP-1996 2;08.26 Tanja09 20-SEP-1996 2;09.06 Tanja10 25-OCT-1996 2;10.11 Tanja11 08-NOV-1996 2;10.25 Tanja12 11-NOV-1996 2;10.28 Tanja13 15-NOV-1996 2;11.01 Tanja14 22-NOV-1996 2;11.08 Tanja15 04-DEC-1996 2;11.20 The TANJA corpus has been transcribed by Eva Bar-Shalom, a native Russian-speaker. Transcription follows CHAT conventions. The resulting transcripts must be considered preliminary, however, because they have not yet been subjected to rigorous reliability checking. Additionally, the system of Romanization employed in the transcripts is not yet entirely consistent. We hope to improve on these shortcomings in a future version. As of June 1999, analyses of Tanja's syntax and morphology appear in two research reports: Bar-Shalom, Eva and Snyder, William (1997) "Optional infinitives in Russian and their implications for the pro-drop debate." In Martina Lindseth and Steven Franks (eds.) _Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics: The Indiana Meeting 1996_. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, pp.38-47. Bar-Shalom, Eva and Snyder, William (1998) "Root infinitives in Child Russian: A comparison with Italian and Polish." In Richard Shillcock, Antonella Sorace, and Caroline Heycock (eds.) _Language Acquisition: Knowledge Representation and Processing. Proceedings of GALA '97._ Edinburgh, UK: The University of Edinburgh. The TANJA corpus is being made available to the larger research community in its current form, with acknowledgement that errors and inconsistencies in typography, Romanization, and possibly transcription may still be present. Comments and questions on the TANJA corpus should be directed to: barshalo at uconnvm.uconn.edu OR wsnyder at sp.uconn.edu Prof. Eva Bar-Shalom, Ph.D. Prof. William Snyder, Ph.D. Dept. of Linguistics, U-1145 Dept. of Linguistics, U-1145 University of Connecticut University of Connecticut 341 Mansfield Road 341 Mansfield Road Storrs, CT 06269-1145 Storrs, CT 06269-1145 USA USA Papers making use of the corpus should cite (Bar-Shalom & Snyder 1997, 1998). From macw at cmu.edu Sun Jun 13 18:47:57 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Sun, 13 Jun 1999 14:47:57 -0400 Subject: TalkBank Project Announcement Message-ID: Project Announcement for "TalkBank: A Multimodal Database of Communicative Interaction" The goal of TalkBank is to create a distributed, web-based data archiving system for transcribed video and audio data on communicative interactions. TalkBank builds on our experience with CHILDES and LDC corpora, and is expected to be a major new tool for the social sciences. TalkBank data will be stored in an XML-based transcription framework incorporating richly structured, time-aligned annotations. For detailed information, please consult: CMU - http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/talkbank.html Penn - http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/annotation/talkbank.html We believe that TalkBank will benefit four types of research enterprises: Cross-corpora comparisons. For those interested in quantitative analyses of large corpora, TalkBank will provide direct access to enormous amounts of real-life data, subject to strict controls designed to protect confidentiality. Folios. Other researchers wish to focus on qualitative analyses involving the collection of a carefully sampled folio or casebook of evidence regarding specific fine-grained interactional patterns. TalkBank programs will facilitate the construction of these folios. Single corpus studies. For those interested in analyzing their own datasets rather than the larger database, TalkBank will provide a rich set of open-source tools for transcription, alignment, coding, and analysis of audio and video data. Collaborative commentary. For researchers interested in contrasting theoretical frameworks, TalkBank will provide support for entering competing systems of annotations and analytic profiles either locally or over the Internet. The creation of this distributed database with its related analysis tools will free researchers from many tedious aspects of data analysis and will stimulate fundamental improvements in the study of communicative interactions. The initiative unites ongoing efforts from the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) at Penn, the Penn Database Group, the Informedia Project at CMU, and the CHILDES Project at CMU. The initiative also establishes an ongoing interaction between computer scientists, linguists, psychologists, sociologists, political scientists, criminologists, educators, ethologists, cinematographers, psychiatrists, and anthropologists. A variety of funding possibilities are being sought for TalkBank, and we have recently received a commitment of support from NSF for initial planning meetings. We are also using the initiative to foster wide-ranging cooperation between ongoing research efforts. The TalkBank homepage [http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/annotation/talkbank.html] lists current participants and has a pointer to a document giving a detailed exposition of our vision for TalkBank. We invite anyone who is interested in participating actively in TalkBank or even in just providing suggestions and criticism to contact one or more of us: Brian MacWhinney (Psychology, CMU) Howard Wactlar (Computer Science, CMU) Peter Buneman (Computer Science, U Penn) Mark Liberman (Linguistic Data Consortium, U Penn) Steven Bird (Linguistic Data Consortium, U Penn) *********************** This message is being posted on June 4, 1999 to the following mailing lists. Our apologies if you receive multiple copies. If you think this announcement should be posted to additional mailing lists, please send the addresses of those lists to Brian MacWhinney (macw at cmu.edu). It is particularly important to reach additional lists outside of the domains of linguistics and psycholinguistics. Many thanks. corpora at hd.uib.no elsnet-list at let.ruu.nl empiricists at unagi.cis.upenn.edu language-culture at cs.uchicago.edu linganth at cc.rochester.edu linguist at listserv.linguistlist.org ap-mate at mate.mip.ou.dk nl-kr at cs.rpi.edu info-childes at childes.psy.cmu.edu info-psyling at psy.gla.ac.uk funknet at rice.edu discours at linguist.ldc.upenn.edu comp.databases comp.databases.theory comp.speech.research comp.multimedia comp.theory.info-retrieval comp.ai.nat-lang From pispoli at club-internet.fr Tue Jun 15 08:47:03 1999 From: pispoli at club-internet.fr (David A. Cohen) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 1999 10:47:03 +0200 Subject: First Language at AAAL Message-ID: Dear All: I am the strand co-ordinator for first language acquisition papers to be presented at the AAAL conference in Vancouver , Canada, March 11th - 14th, 2000. When Pat Carrell asked be to serve, she said, 'Don't worry, Susan, we only had 6 submissions in L1 last year, so it won't be too much work.' Well, I got to thinking. That's terrible, only 6 submissions. I've been going to AAAL for years and giving papers in both L1 and L2, and it's a lovely conference. So, I've decided to issue this rallying call to all of you. Send in LOTS of abstracts on L1. We do Applied Linguistics. We should be properly represented! (N.B. AAAL is not TESOL, and it works hard to keep pure language teaching issues out of the conference.) The details of the conference, abstracts etc. can all be found at the AAAL website http://www.aaal.org The deadline for abstracts is August 16th 1999. Oh, and if anyone would like an offprint of a little review chapter I wrote on L1 and SLA research for the most recent Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, just let me know. I can be contacted at either pispoli at club-internet.fr or fosterco at ext.jussieu.fr All the best to all. Susan Foster-Cohen From kschaper at midwest.net Thu Jun 17 02:57:17 1999 From: kschaper at midwest.net (Kirsten Hodge) Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1999 21:57:17 -0500 Subject: post Message-ID: In the psych lab where I work (I'm a graduate student) we are using the Mercer Mayer frog stories to collect child speech. I have been discussing doing a joint thesis with another linguistics student on comparing 1st language acquistition of English and the Jamaicaian patois which is based on English. We wanted to collect samples of the patois in the same manner that we are collecting the English samples. However we had some concern whether or not those books would translate culturally. Does anyone know of any other books (ones without words) that might be usable for our study? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Kirsten Schaper Southern Illinois University at Carbondale From slobin at cogsci.Berkeley.EDU Thu Jun 17 03:54:27 1999 From: slobin at cogsci.Berkeley.EDU (Dan I. SLOBIN) Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1999 20:54:27 -0700 Subject: post Message-ID: The frog story has been used in a wide range of cultures, and appears to be useful in eliciting basic information about both linguistic and narrative structure. In Berman & Slobin (1994, Appendix III) we listed the following non-Western field sites where the frog story has been used: Morocco (Arabic), Australia (Arrernte, Guugu Yumithirr, Warlpiri), Botswana (Kgalagadi), US (Kickapoo, Lakhota), Papua New Guinea (Kilivila, Yupno), Solomon Islands (Longgu), Malaysia (Malay), China (Mandarin), Japan (Japanese), Belize (Mopan), Gabon (Myene), Uganda (several Western Nilotic languages), India (Tamil), Mexico (Totonac, Tzotzil, Tzeltal, Yucatec), Turkey (Turkish). It has also been used in several sign languages (American Sign Language, Sign Language of the Netherlands), as well as with various populations of language-impaired and developmentally-impaired speakers. (Berman, R. A., & Slobin, D. I. (1994). _Relating events in narrative: A crosslinguistic developmental study_. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.) For a useful discussion of cultural factors in use of the frog-story method, see: Wilkins, D. P. (1997). The verbalization of motion events in Arrernte (Central Australia). In E. V. Clark (Ed.), _The proceedings of the Twenty-eighth Annual Child Language Research Forum_ (pp. 295-308). Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information. -Dan Slobin Dept of Psychology University of California, Berkeley On Wed, 16 Jun 1999, Kirsten Hodge wrote: > In the psych lab where I work (I'm a graduate student) we are using the > Mercer Mayer frog stories to collect child speech. I have been discussing > doing a joint thesis with another linguistics student on comparing 1st > language acquistition of English and the Jamaicaian patois which is based > on English. We wanted to collect samples of the patois in the same manner > that we are collecting the English samples. However we had some concern > whether or not those books would translate culturally. Does anyone know of > any other books (ones without words) that might be usable for our study? > Any help would be greatly appreciated. > Kirsten Schaper > Southern Illinois University at Carbondale > > From n.hewlett at sls.qmced.ac.uk Mon Jun 21 09:32:24 1999 From: n.hewlett at sls.qmced.ac.uk (Nigel Hewlett) Date: Mon, 21 Jun 1999 10:32:24 +0100 Subject: Conference Announcement Message-ID: ICPLA 2000 CONFERENCE VIIIth meeting of the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association 16-19 August 2000 John MacIntyre Centre, Edinburgh, Scotland hosted by the Department of Speech & Language Sciences, Queen Margaret University College, Edinburgh The purpose of the VIIIth meeting of the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association (ICPLA), which will take place in Edinburgh in the year 2000, is to provide a forum for those who are interested in applying the techniques of phonetic and linguistic analysis to clinical data, with a view to exploring theories of disordered or normal language. We hope to make it an exciting and fruitful occasion for all those involved, or seeking to be involved, in this field. PLANNED SESSION THEMES Speech production, speech perception, linguistic theory and language disorder, psycholinguistics and aphasia, developmental psycholinguistics, neurology and language. Abstracts of papers or posters will be welcomed on any of these themes and on the application of any of the conventional areas of linguistics (phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics) to the analysis of disordered speech and language. KEYNOTE SPEAKERS Elizabeth Bates, Thierre Deonna, Fiona Gibbon, Heather van der Lely, John Locke, Susan Nittrouer, Lorraine Tyler IMPORTANT DATES First call for abstracts: 1 October 1999 Deadline for receipt of abstracts: 31 January 2000 Notification of acceptance of abstracts: 1 March 2000 Final date for discounted registration: 15 April 2000 Conference dates: 16-19 August 2000 VENUE John MacIntyre Centre, Edinburgh, Scotland WEBSITE http://sls.qmced.ac.uk/ICPLA2000/index.htm CONTACT ADDRESS (E-MAIL) icpla at sls.qmced.ac.uk ACCOMMODATION 140 rooms have been booked in the Pollock Halls accommodation adjacent to the conference centre in anticipation that most delegates will want to stay there. Alternative accommodation should be booked well in advance (at least six months). TRAVEL Edinburgh Airport is a 25 minute bus ride from the city centre. Most transatlantic flights operate from Glasgow, which is about 40 miles from Edinburgh. There are rail links to the rest of the UK from Edinburgh's Waverley Station. MAILING LIST If you wish to be put on our mailing list please e-mail us at: icpla at sls.qmced.ac.uk or write to us at: ICPLA 2000, Department of Speech and Language Sciences, Queen Margaret University College, Clerwood Terrace, Edinburgh, EH12 8TS, Scotland. Fax: +44 131 317 3689 CONFERENCE COMMITTEE Janet Beck, Bill Hardcastle, Nigel Hewlett, Fay Windsor, Sara Wood, Alan Wrench (Dept of Speech & Language Sciences, Queen Margaret University College), Wendy Cohen (Molecular Medicine Centre, Western General Hospital, Edinburgh), Louise Kelly (Dept of Psychology, University of Edinburgh), Anja Lowit (Dept of Speech and Language Therapy, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow), Anne O'Hare (Dept of Community Child Health, Royal Hospital for Sick Children, Edinburgh), Richard Shillcock (School of Cognitive Science, University of Edinburgh), Jocelynne Watson (Dept of Speech & Language Therapy, Royal Hospital for Sick Children, Edinburgh). Nigel Hewlett Lecturer and Laboratory Director Department of Speech and Language Sciences Queen Margaret University College Clerwood Terrace Edinburgh EH12 8TS e-mail: n.hewlett at sls.qmced.ac.uk phone: 0131 317 3690 From ddlsi at cunyvm.cuny.edu Wed Jun 23 18:10:01 1999 From: ddlsi at cunyvm.cuny.edu (David J. Lewkowicz, Ph.D.) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 14:10:01 -0400 Subject: No subject Message-ID: RESEARCH SCIENTIST: Recent Ph.D. sought for NIH-funded project investigating intersensory perceptual development in human infants. Seeking person with an experimental background to fill the position as soon as possible.. Competitive salary and benefits. For inquiries please contact the project director, David J. Lewkowicz, Ph.D. by e-mail at ddlsi at cunyvm.cuny.edu or by phone at (718) 494-5302. To apply send CV and 3 letters of recommendation to Personnel #865, Institute for Basic Research, 1050 Forest Hill Rd., Staten Island, NY 10314. David J. Lewkowicz, Ph.D. Senior Research Scientist NYS Institute for Basic Research 1050 Forest Hill Rd. Staten Island, NY 10314, USA Phone: (718) 494-5302 Fax: (718) 494-5395 From gillis at uia.ua.ac.be Wed Jun 23 23:11:57 1999 From: gillis at uia.ua.ac.be (Steven Gillis) Date: Thu, 24 Jun 1999 01:11:57 +0200 Subject: IASCL Congress - San Sebastian Message-ID: The program of the IASCL congress in San Sebastian can be found on the congress web-site, which can be reached via the IASCL home page: http://atila-www.uia.ac.be/IASCL/Inhoud.html The local organizers in San Sebastian can be reached via email: fvcongre at vc.ehu.es See you in San Sebastian, Steven Gillis & Annick De Houwer ======================================================= Steven Gillis University of Antwerp - UIA Department of Linguistics - GER Center for Dutch Language and Speech - CNTS Universiteitsplein 1 B-2610 Wilrijk (Belgium) Tel.: +32 (0)3 8202766 Fax: +32(0)3 8202762 E-mail: gillis at uia.ua.ac.be http://ger-www.uia.ac.be/webger/ger/cnts/main.html http://atila-www.uia.ac.be/IASCL/Inhoud.html ======================================================= From mcgregor at casbah.acns.nwu.edu Thu Jun 24 14:54:07 1999 From: mcgregor at casbah.acns.nwu.edu (Karla McGregor) Date: Thu, 24 Jun 1999 15:54:07 +0100 Subject: Language Science position at Northwestern University Message-ID: Position Announcement Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders Northwestern University Position: Assistant Professor Appointment: Full-time, nine-month, tenure track Starting Date: September 1, 2000 Duties: Responsibilities include conducting research in areas of interest, teaching graduate and undergraduate courses, as well as directing student research and advising graduate and undergraduate students. Qualifications: Ph.D. in Psycholinguistics, Linguistics, Cognitive Science/Neuroscience/Psychology or related area required. Applicants must have demonstrated expertise in experimental approaches to semantic and/or syntactic processing. Individuals with interests in either child or adult language processing are encouraged to apply. Preference will be given to candidates with research interests that mesh with those of the current faculty, in particular those whose work has implications for language disorders. Salary: Competitive, depending on qualifications and experience. Application procedure: The application should include a cover letter, CV (indicating an e-mail address), statements of research and teaching interests, reprints, and three letters of reference sent directly to the search committee by the application deadline. Send all materials to: Karla K. McGregor, Ph.D. Search Committee Chair Speech and Language Pathology 2299 North Campus Drive Northwestern University Evanston, IL 60208-3570 E-mail: k-mcgregor at nwu.edu Closing date: Consideration of applications will begin December 3, 1999 and continue until the position is filled. Northwestern University is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer. Women and minorities are encouraged to apply. Hiring is contingent upon eligibility to work in the United States. -- Karla Mcgregor Northwestern University k-mcgregor at nwu.edu From Sabine.Prechter at anglistik.uni-giessen.de Mon Jun 28 10:24:46 1999 From: Sabine.Prechter at anglistik.uni-giessen.de (Sabine Prechter) Date: Mon, 28 Jun 1999 12:24:46 +0200 Subject: Privacy - Content of Consent of Subjects Message-ID: Dear fellow researchers, I remember a very lively discussion about the question of how to handle recorded and processed language data in the era of electronic data handling, processing and storing (also with the participation of both Alison and Lois Bloom) a couple of months ago, to which I would like to get back briefly. We are currently re-designing a joint project in co-operation with a US university on spoken language processing *in adults* and would like to hand our subjects a form of consent that covers their need for privacy as well as our need for useful data handling. Since German universities deal with the problem of privacy in experimental settings in a way which is very different from the US system of Ethics Boards etc, I would be more than grateful to receive your comments and maybe even pre-formulated Declarations of Consent that you or your colleagues have been using to ensure a proper legal basis for our experiments, which would cover the following areas: * open recording of conversations in explicity experimental settings * anonymized demographic information according to project content (self-classification according to first and additional languages, degree of familiarity with topic domain, age, sex) * transcription of recordings * storage of transcriptios and recordings on mechanical as well as electronic storage devices * analysis of data and integration of data into a larger corpus * partial analysis of data in several anonymized sub-projects in both universities participating * (possibly:) use of data by researchers involved also after they have left either of the participating institutions * anonymized use of data in class If you can think of any additional points of concern that might be linked to our experiments, please let me know! Thanks in advance, Sabine Prechter Nao basta abrir a janela Sabine Prechter, Ass. Professor Para ver os campos e o rio *sabine.prechter at anglistik.uni-giessen.de* Nao e bastante nao ser cego Otto-Behaghel-Str. 10 B IV Para ver as arvores e as flores D-35394 Giessen 20 de abril de 1919 Fone: +49 641 99-30065 Alberto Caeiro Fax: +49 641 99-30159 From a.karmiloff-Smith at ich.ucl.ac.uk Mon Jun 28 17:10:15 1999 From: a.karmiloff-Smith at ich.ucl.ac.uk (Annette Karmiloff-Smith) Date: Mon, 28 Jun 1999 17:10:15 +0000 Subject: Postdoc at NDU-ICH Message-ID: PLEASE BRING TO THE ATTENTION OF POTENTIAL CANDIDATES A position of POSTDOC is to become available on 1/11/99 until 30/9/2001 at the recently created Neurocognitive Development Unit (NDU), Institute of Child Health, London, funded by Programme and Project Grants from the Medical Research Council, U.K., and studentships from the MRC, the Down's Syndrome Association, and the Williams Syndrome Foundation. We are a small, dynamic unit, focused on understanding atypical cognitive development in genetic disorders from infancy through adulthood. Our aims and interests are set out at the bottom of this ad. We are looking for a postdoc, with special interest and experience in infancy research and atypical development. The Institute of Child Health has excellent research facilities and is situated in the Bloomsbury area of central London, very close to a large community of researchers focused on cognitive neuroscience. Salary between 18,420 and 20,319 pounds sterling (including London weighting), depending on experience, qualifications, and age. Application closing date: 22nd July 1999. Please send your full CV, the names of two academic referees, and a description of your research experience and current research interests (no more than 1000 words please) to: Professor Annette Karmiloff-Smith Head, Neurocognitive Development Unit Institute of Child Health 30 Guilford Street London WC1N 1EH, U.K. tel: +44 171 905 2754 secretary: 242 9789 ext.0735 fax: +44 171 242 7717 The NDU has the following aims: - to map in detail the cognitive end state of a variety of developmental disorders - to trace these cognitive profiles to their origins in infancy - to explore the mechanisms underlying the developmental trajectories which connect the start state to the end state; - ultimately to devise remediation techniques useable in early infancy when the brain displays its maximum neocortical plasticity. Our current research focuses on infants, children and adults with Williams syndrome (WS) and Down's syndrome (DS). We plan subsequently to add a number of other syndromes, as a function of their different start and/or end states. In particular, we aim to explore the **cognitive** processes underlying **behavioural** outcomes, and we therefore focus on areas in which abnormal phenotypes show relative proficiency rather than solely on their areas of impairment. Indeed, even in areas where the output of the cognitive system looks normal (e.g., in the rather good language and face processing skills of people with WS), the processes underlying the behavioural output may be different. We are also particularly concerned with demonstrating that the initial state in infancy cannot be simply assumed from the end state in middle childhood and adulthood. This has an important theoretical bearing on the current use of atypical outcomes to make claims about innately specified, independently functioning modules in the starting state. Indeed, there has been a tendency to use the adult neuropsychological model of intact and impaired modules as an approach to the study of developmental disorders. When neuropsychologists find cognitive deficits in normal adults who have suffered brain damage, they try to isolate the 'components' of the cognitive system. The same approach is often taken with developmental disorders, particularly when these disorders are genetically based. So if a syndrome displays an uneven cognitive profile in the end state, it is frequently argued that this must be due to the child having started life with a pattern of preserved and impaired modules. We believe this assumption to be erroneous, in that it tends to neglect the role of development itself in ontogenetic outcomes (Karmiloff-Smith, 1998a). The relationship between genes and outcome is a very indirect one, with the environment playing an essential role in driving different developmental trajectories. A very subtle difference in the start state can gives rise to huge differences in the developmental outcome (Elman et al., 1996;Karmiloff-Smith, 1998a; Oliver, et al., in press; Thomas, in press; Thomas & Karmiloff-Smith, in press). This is why we are focusing a substantial part of our current research effort on infancy and why we are seeking a new Postdoc to join the team. We are also exploring via computational models a number of different hypotheses about the subtle impairment in the WS start state that may result in the pattern of deficits and behavioural proficiences seen in the WS end state. In general, we have found that the use of connectionist models helps clarify theoretical concepts and provides new empirical predictions for future research (Elman et al., 1996; Mareschal & Thomas, submitted). In general, we bring to bare a variety of different approaches, theoretical and empircal, on the questions we are addressing. Selected recent publications of the NDU team Brown, J., Paterson, S.J., Gsödl, M.KJ., Johnson, M.H., & Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1999) The development of bodyt-centered representations: Spatial frames of reference in infants with Williams and Down syndromes. Poster Presentation at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Alburquerque, New Mexico. Elman, J., Bates, E., Johnson, M.H., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Parisi, D. and Plunkett, K. (1996) Rethinking Innateness: A connectionist perspective on development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Grant, J., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Berthoud, I., & Christophe, A. (1996) Is the language of people with Williams syndrome mere mimicry? Verbal short-term memory in a foreign language. Cahiers de Psychologie Cognitive, 15, 615-628. Grant, J., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Gathercole, S., Howlin, P., Davies, M., & Udwin, O. (1997) Verbal Short-term Memory and its relation to Language Acquisition in Williams Syndrome. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 2, 2, 81-99. Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1997) Crucial differences between developmental cognitive neuroscience and adult neuropsychology. Developmental Neuropsychology, 13, 4, 513-524. Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1998) Development itself is the key to understanding developmental disorders. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2, 10, 389-398. Karmiloff-Smith, A., Grant, J., Berthoud, I., Davies, M., Howlin, P. & Udwin, O. (1997) Language and Williams Syndrome: How Intact is "Intact"? Child Development, 68, 2, 246-262. Karmiloff-Smith, A., Tyler, L.K., Voice, K., Sims, K., Udwin, O., Davies, M., and Howlin, P. (1998) Linguistic Dissociations in Williams Syndrome: Evaluating Receptive Syntax in on-line and off-line tasks. Neuropsychologia, 36, 4, 342-351. Laing, E., Hulme, C. & Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1999) A preliminary study of reading abilities in people with Williams syndrome. York Conference on Reading. Mareschal, D. & Thomas, M.S.C. (in press) Self-organization in normal and abnormal cognitive development. To appear The Handbook of Brain and Behaviour in Human Development. Oliver, A., Johnson, M.H., Karmiloff-Smith, A. & Pennington, B. (in press) Deviations in the emergence of representations: A neuro-constructivist framework for analysing developmental disorders. Developmental Science. Paterson, S.J., Brown, J., Gsödl, M.KJ., Johnson, M.H., & Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1999) A comparison of cognitive and language performance in 24, 30 and 36 month old infants with Down Syndrome and Williams Syndrome. Poster Presentation at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Alburquerque, New Mexico. Paterson, S., Brown, J., Gsodl, MK., Johnson, M.H., & Karmiloff-Smith, A. Brain modularity in genetic disorders: Infant profiles cannot be derived from phenotypic outcomes. (submitted). Rae. C., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Lee, M.A., Dixon, R.M., Blamire, A.M., Thompson, C.H., Grant, J., Styles, P. & Radda, G.K.. (1998) Brain Biochemistry in Williams Syndrome. Evidence for a role of the cerebellum in cognition? Neurology, 51, 33-40. Stevens, T. & Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1997) Word Learning in a Special Population: Do Individuals with Williams syndrome Obey Lexical Constraints? Journal of Child Language, 24, 737-765. Tassabehji, M., Metcalfe, K., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Carette, M.J., Grant, J., Dennis, N., Reardon, W., Splitt, M., Read, A.P., and Donnai, D. (1999) Williams Syndrome: Use of Chromosomal Microdeletions as a Tool to Dissect Cognitive and Physical Phenotypes. American Journal of Human Genetics, 64(1), 118-125. Thomas, M.S.C. (in press) Constructivism's promise: Commentary on O)liver, Johnson, Karmiloff-Smith, and Pennington. Developmental Science. T h o m a s , M . S . C . a n d K a r m i l o f f - S m i t h , A . ( i n p r e s s ) . Q u o v a d i s m o d u l a r i t y i n t h e 1 9 9 0 s ? I n : M . A n d e r s o n ( e d . ) S p e c i a l i s s u e o f L e a r n i n g a n d I n d i v i d u a l D i f f e r e n c e s . Thomas, M.S.C., & Mareschal, D. (1999) Metaphor as categorisation: A connectionist implementation. Proceedings of the AISB Symposium on Metaphor, Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive, pp: 1-10. Tyler, L.K., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Voice, K., Stevens, T., Grant, J., Udwin, O., Davies, M., Howlin, P. (1997) Do individuals with Williams syndrome have bizarre semantics? Evidence for lexical organization using an on-line task. Cortex, 33, 515-527. From a.karmiloff-Smith at ich.ucl.ac.uk Mon Jun 28 17:01:51 1999 From: a.karmiloff-Smith at ich.ucl.ac.uk (Annette Karmiloff-Smith) Date: Mon, 28 Jun 1999 17:01:51 +0000 Subject: Postdoc at NDU-ICH Message-ID: PLEASE BRING TO THE ATTENTION OF POTENTIAL CANDIDATES A position of POSTDOC is to become available on 1/11/99 until 30/9/2001 at the recently created Neurocognitive Development Unit (NDU), Institute of Child Health, London, funded by Programme and Project Grants from the Medical Research Council, U.K., and studentships from the MRC, the Down's Syndrome Association, and the Williams Syndrome Foundation. We are a small, dynamic unit, focused on understanding atypical cognitive development in genetic disorders from infancy through adulthood. Our aims and interests are set out at the bottom of this ad. We are looking for a postdoc, with special interest and experience in infancy research and atypical development. The Institute of Child Health has excellent research facilities and is situated in the Bloomsbury area of central London, very close to a large community of researchers focused on cognitive neuroscience. Salary between 18,420 and 20,319 pounds sterling (including London weighting), depending on experience, qualifications, and age. Application closing date: 22nd July 1999. Please send your full CV, the names of two academic referees, and a description of your research experience and current research interests (no more than 1000 words please) to: Professor Annette Karmiloff-Smith Head, Neurocognitive Development Unit Institute of Child Health 30 Guilford Street London WC1N 1EH, U.K. fax: +44 171 242 7717 The NDU has the following aims: - to map in detail the cognitive end state of a variety of developmental disorders - to trace these cognitive profiles to their origins in infancy - to explore the mechanisms underlying the developmental trajectories which connect the start state to the end state; - ultimately to devise remediation techniques useable in early infancy when the brain displays its maximum neocortical plasticity. Our current research focuses on infants, children and adults with Williams syndrome (WS) and Down's syndrome (DS). We plan subsequently to add a number of other syndromes, as a function of their different start and/or end states. In particular, we aim to explore the **cognitive** processes underlying **behavioural** outcomes, and we therefore focus on areas in which abnormal phenotypes show relative proficiency rather than solely on their areas of impairment. Indeed, even in areas where the output of the cognitive system looks normal (e.g., in the rather good language and face processing skills of people with WS), the processes underlying the behavioural output may be different. We are also particularly concerned with demonstrating that the initial state in infancy cannot be simply assumed from the end state in middle childhood and adulthood. This has an important theoretical bearing on the current use of atypical outcomes to make claims about innately specified, independently functioning modules in the starting state. Indeed, there has been a tendency to use the adult neuropsychological model of intact and impaired modules as an approach to the study of developmental disorders. When neuropsychologists find cognitive deficits in normal adults who have suffered brain damage, they try to isolate the 'components' of the cognitive system. The same approach is often taken with developmental disorders, particularly when these disorders are genetically based. So if a syndrome displays an uneven cognitive profile in the end state, it is frequently argued that this must be due to the child having started life with a pattern of preserved and impaired modules. We believe this assumption to be erroneous, in that it tends to neglect the role of development itself in ontogenetic outcomes (Karmiloff-Smith, 1998a). The relationship between genes and outcome is a very indirect one, with the environment playing an essential role in driving different developmental trajectories. A very subtle difference in the start state can gives rise to huge differences in the developmental outcome (Elman et al., 1996;Karmiloff-Smith, 1998a; Oliver, et al., in press; Thomas, in press; Thomas & Karmiloff-Smith, in press). This is why we are focusing a substantial part of our current research effort on infancy and why we are seeking a new Postdoc to join the team. We are also exploring via computational models a number of different hypotheses about the subtle impairment in the WS start state that may result in the pattern of deficits and behavioural proficiences seen in the WS end state. In general, we have found that the use of connectionist models helps clarify theoretical concepts and provides new empirical predictions for future research (Elman et al., 1996; Mareschal & Thomas, submitted). In general, we bring to bare a variety of different approaches, theoretical and empircal, on the questions we are addressing. Selected recent publications of the NDU team Brown, J., Paterson, S.J., Gsödl, M.KJ., Johnson, M.H., & Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1999) The development of bodyt-centered representations: Spatial frames of reference in infants with Williams and Down syndromes. Poster Presentation at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Alburquerque, New Mexico. Elman, J., Bates, E., Johnson, M.H., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Parisi, D. and Plunkett, K. (1996) Rethinking Innateness: A connectionist perspective on development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Grant, J., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Berthoud, I., & Christophe, A. (1996) Is the language of people with Williams syndrome mere mimicry? Verbal short-term memory in a foreign language. Cahiers de Psychologie Cognitive, 15, 615-628. Grant, J., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Gathercole, S., Howlin, P., Davies, M., & Udwin, O. (1997) Verbal Short-term Memory and its relation to Language Acquisition in Williams Syndrome. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 2, 2, 81-99. Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1997) Crucial differences between developmental cognitive neuroscience and adult neuropsychology. Developmental Neuropsychology, 13, 4, 513-524. Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1998) Development itself is the key to understanding developmental disorders. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2, 10, 389-398. Karmiloff-Smith, A., Grant, J., Berthoud, I., Davies, M., Howlin, P. & Udwin, O. (1997) Language and Williams Syndrome: How Intact is "Intact"? Child Development, 68, 2, 246-262. Karmiloff-Smith, A., Tyler, L.K., Voice, K., Sims, K., Udwin, O., Davies, M., and Howlin, P. (1998) Linguistic Dissociations in Williams Syndrome: Evaluating Receptive Syntax in on-line and off-line tasks. Neuropsychologia, 36, 4, 342-351. Laing, E., Hulme, C. & Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1999) A preliminary study of reading abilities in people with Williams syndrome. York Conference on Reading. Mareschal, D. & Thomas, M.S.C. (in press) Self-organization in normal and abnormal cognitive development. To appear The Handbook of Brain and Behaviour in Human Development. Oliver, A., Johnson, M.H., Karmiloff-Smith, A. & Pennington, B. (in press) Deviations in the emergence of representations: A neuro-constructivist framework for analysing developmental disorders. Developmental Science. Paterson, S.J., Brown, J., Gsödl, M.KJ., Johnson, M.H., & Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1999) A comparison of cognitive and language performance in 24, 30 and 36 month old infants with Down Syndrome and Williams Syndrome. Poster Presentation at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Alburquerque, New Mexico. Paterson, S., Brown, J., Gsodl, MK., Johnson, M.H., & Karmiloff-Smith, A. Brain modularity in genetic disorders: Infant profiles cannot be derived from phenotypic outcomes. (submitted). Rae. C., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Lee, M.A., Dixon, R.M., Blamire, A.M., Thompson, C.H., Grant, J., Styles, P. & Radda, G.K.. (1998) Brain Biochemistry in Williams Syndrome. Evidence for a role of the cerebellum in cognition? Neurology, 51, 33-40. Stevens, T. & Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1997) Word Learning in a Special Population: Do Individuals with Williams syndrome Obey Lexical Constraints? Journal of Child Language, 24, 737-765. Tassabehji, M., Metcalfe, K., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Carette, M.J., Grant, J., Dennis, N., Reardon, W., Splitt, M., Read, A.P., and Donnai, D. (1999) Williams Syndrome: Use of Chromosomal Microdeletions as a Tool to Dissect Cognitive and Physical Phenotypes. American Journal of Human Genetics, 64(1), 118-125. Thomas, M.S.C. (in press) Constructivism's promise: Commentary on O)liver, Johnson, Karmiloff-Smith, and Pennington. Developmental Science. T h o m a s , M . S . C . a n d K a r m i l o f f - S m i t h , A . ( i n p r e s s ) . Q u o v a d i s m o d u l a r i t y i n t h e 1 9 9 0 s ? I n : M . A n d e r s o n ( e d . ) S p e c i a l i s s u e o f L e a r n i n g a n d I n d i v i d u a l D i f f e r e n c e s . Thomas, M.S.C., & Mareschal, D. (1999) Metaphor as categorisation: A connectionist implementation. Proceedings of the AISB Symposium on Metaphor, Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive, pp: 1-10. Tyler, L.K., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Voice, K., Stevens, T., Grant, J., Udwin, O., Davies, M., Howlin, P. (1997) Do individuals with Williams syndrome have bizarre semantics? Evidence for lexical organization using an on-line task. Cortex, 33, 515-527. From bates at crl.ucsd.edu Tue Jun 29 01:07:45 1999 From: bates at crl.ucsd.edu (Elizabeth Bates) Date: Mon, 28 Jun 1999 18:07:45 -0700 Subject: child language readings Message-ID: Mike Tomasello and Elizabeth Bates have agreed to put together a book of essential readings in language acquisition, as part of a series for Blackwell. We have a preliminary list of our own ideas, but are anxious to hear from other researchers in the field about your teaching needs. If you are willing to help out, please send us any suggestions you might have for articles that you use in your own courses (in addition to or instead of textbooks), or any primary sources that (in your view) any undergraduate or graduate student in language development ought to read. You could, if you like, also send us the bibliographies that you give to your own classes as email attachments. We don't want to clog up info-childes with such attachments, so please address your thoughts to either of us at the following addresses: bates at crl.ucsd.edu tomas at eva.mpg.de Once we have collected your suggestions, we will be happy to post a list of the top twenty or so choices proposed by info-childes readers (although they may not all work out for the Blackwell reader). Thanks in advance. -Liz Bates & Mike Tomasello From macw at cmu.edu Tue Jun 29 16:29:43 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 12:29:43 -0400 Subject: books of readings Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, It turns out that I am also working on a set of readings in child language acquisition. In my case, it is for Psychology Press. So, if you have ideas on essential readings or course syllabi that you pass on to Mike and Liz, I would love to receive a copy too. Somewhere along the line, Michael, Liz, and I should be able to figure out how not to publish two books of readers that have the same content. There are so many good readings to be sampled that it should be pretty easy to avoid serious overlap. --Brian MacWhinney (macw at cmu.edu) From macw at cmu.edu Tue Jun 1 23:10:31 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 19:10:31 -0400 Subject: French-English bilingual study Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, I am happy to announce the addition of a new corpus of French-English bilingual data from Charles Watkins of the University of Paris XIII. The data are to be found in /bilingual/watkins.sit. The study focused on the acquisition of deictic terms, as the following documentation indicates. --Brian MacWhinney This corpus was collated and scripted for a doctoral thesis in English Linguistics at the Universit? de Paris XIII entitled ?The Acquisition of deixis in English by children brought up in a bilingual environment?. The focus of the reasearch is theoretical linguistics rather than psycholinguistics. The corpus is made up of scripted conversations in a naturalistic setting (often family videos not initially intended for research purposes) involving 7 subjects from three families over a range of ages between 1;9 to 7;2. The subjects are all simultaneously bilingual, being exposed to both French and English in the home setting from birth. The corpus contains some 1400 child utterances in 72 CHAT files, each file corresponding to an uninterrupted sequence of dialogue. The transcript contains coding tags on the main line, coding tiers and GEM markers for the purposes of the research project. All deictics are flagged on the main line with @ed (English deictic), @frd (French deictic) or @fred (Franco-English deictic) postcodes according to the phonetic form of the deictic. Two coding tiers, %dei (DEIctic) and %ana (pragmatic ANAlysis) further develop the analysis. The %ana line is not language specific, and simply codes whether the deictic is used deictically (either symbolically or gesturally) or non-deictically (anaphorically or non-anaphorically). The %dei tier has the codes described in the following table which gives the codes for English. A parallel set of codes was also used for French From marinis at ling.uni-potsdam.de Tue Jun 1 17:07:04 1999 From: marinis at ling.uni-potsdam.de (Theodor Marinis) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 19:07:04 +0200 Subject: abstractness classification Message-ID: Dear Joost, in most of the cases, the classification within each category of words (nouns, verbs, etc.) is not on the base of abstractness, as you would, in order to test your hypothesis. However, as far as nouns are concerned, there is the traditional distinction which is based on the denotation of nouns and distinguishes between proper names and common nouns, the classification of common nouns in nouns denoting abstract concepts, properties, etc and nouns denoting concrete objects and the classification of nouns denoting concrete objects in count nouns, mass nouns and collective nouns. Nouns: 1. Proper Names (i.e. Peter) 2. Common Nouns Common Nouns: i. Nouns denoting abstract concepts, properties, etc (i.e. freedom) ii. Nouns denoting concrete objects Nouns denoting concrete objects a. Count Nouns (i.e. ball) b. Mass Nouns (i.e. water, sand) c. Collective Nouns (i.e. furniture) Many studies have been carried out since the early 70s, looking at the acquisition of nouns belonging to different classes showing among others that different types of bias are at work, when children learn new words, i.e. taxonomic bias, whole-object bias, mutual exclusivity bias, etc. Moreover studies dealing with the acquisition of nouns have been testing the idea of semantic and syntactic bootstrapping. Below you can find some literature on this topic. However, I don't quite understand your hypothesis: Why should language directed to a prelingual infant be more abstract and contain many words that cannot easily be related to the concept they refer to than language directed to a child who already has started to produce or understand words? Wouldn't we expect exactly the opposite, namely, that language directed to a prelingual infant should contain more concrete words, e.g. words that denote objects that are present at the speaking time, objects that are familiar and/or belong to the child and words referring to the actions that take place? Best wishes, Theodore Marinis -------------------------------------------------- Literature on the acquisition of noun classes: Bloom, Paul (1994): Possible names: The role of syntax-semantics mappings in the acquisition of nominals. - In: Lingua 92, 297-329. Carey, S. (1994): Does learning a language require the child to reconceptualize the world? - In: Lingua 92, 143-167 Chierchia, G. (1994): Syntactic Bootstrapping and the acquisition of noun meanings: the mass-count issue. - In: Lust, B., M. Suner & J. Whitman (eds.): Heads, Projections, and Learnability. Vol. 1. Hollsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 301- 318. Clark, E. V. (1973): What's in a word ? On the child's acquisition of semantics in his first language. - In: T. E. Moore (ed.): Cognitive development and the acquisition of language, 65-110. New York: Academic Press. Clark, E. V. (1993): The lexicon in acquisition. - New York: Cambridge University Press. Gathercole, V. (1986): Evaluating competing Linguistic Theories with child language data: The case of the Mass-Count distinction. Linguistics and Philosophy 9, 151-190. Gelman, S.A. & M. Taylor (1984): How Two-Year-Old Children Interpret Proper and Common Names for Unfamiliar Objects. - In: Child Development 55, 1535-1540. Golinkoff, R.M., K. Hirsh-Pasek, L.M. Bailey & N.R. Wenger (1992): Young Children and Adults Use Lexical Principles to Learn New Nouns. - In: Developmental Psychology 28, 99-108. Gordon, P. (1985): Evaluating the semantic categories hypothesis: The case of the count/mass distinction. - In: Cognition 20, 209-242. Gordon, P. (1988): Count/mass category acquisition: distributional distinctions in children's speech. Journal of Child Language 15, 109-128. Hall, G. (1991): Acquiring proper names for familiar and unfamiliar animate objects: Two-year-olds' word-learning biases. In: Child Development 62, 1142-1154. Huttenlocher, J. & P. Smiley (1987): Early Word Meanings: The Case of Object Names. - In: Cognitive Psychology 19, 63-89. Jones, S.S., L.B. Smith & B. Landau (1991): Object Properties and Knowledge in Early Lexical Learning. - In: Child Development 62, 499-516. Katz, N., E. Baker & J. Macnamara (1974): What's in a Name? A study of how children learn common and proper names. - In: Child Development 45, 469-473. Macnamara, J. (1972): The cognitive basis of language learning in children. Psychological Review 79, 1-13. Macnamara, J. (1982): Names for Things. - Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books. Markman, E. (1994): Constraints on word meaning in early language acquisition. Lingua 92, 199-227. Soja, N.N. (1994): Evidence for a distinct kind of noun. - In: Cognition 51, 267-284. There are also some articles on this topic in Child Development 1990, 1991 and in the Journal of Child Language 1993. ---------------------------------------------- >Dear Info-childes members, > >I was wondering if anyone could help me with the following: > >I have collected a corpus of linguistic input to a prelingual infant which >includes language spoken not only directly to the infant but also to >others who were usually in the infant's environment, including an older >sister, the parents, and other caretakers. > >I want to use my corpus to test the following hypothesis: assuming that >adults adapt their way of speaking to the child's linguistic level, I >expect that language to a prelingual infant is more abstract (i.e., it >contains relatively many words that cannot easily be related to the >concept they refer to) than language to a child who already has started to >produce or understand words. > >In order to test this hypothesis, I made a basic classification of words, >dividing them into nouns, adjectives, adverbs, verbs, pronouns, proper >nouns, auxiliaries, determiners, and prepositions, because I thought that >the distribution of these categories would give me a preliminary >indication of how well the hypothesis is supported by the data. For >instance, perhaps the percentage of nouns is higher in language to the >older sister than to the infant because, in general, nouns are relatively >concrete compared to verbs or adjectives. > >However, I am aware that within each category, there are differences too, >a noun like 'ball' being easier than 'side' for instance. My question >therefore is: does anyone have a suggestion about how to make a >classification within the categories, or can anyone give me references of >comparable studies where I can find information on how to proceed? > >Any responses are more than welcome, > > > >Joost van de Weijer >Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics >PO Box 310 >6500 AH Nijmegen >The Netherlands >Tel: +31-(0)24-3521307 >Fax: +31-(0)24-3521213 >email: vdweijer at mpi.nl ------------------ MIME Information follows ------------------ --============_-1283868752==_ma============ Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" ; format="flowed" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable <<<<<< See above "Message Body" >>>>>> --============_-1283868752==_ma============ Content-Type: text/enriched; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable <<<<<< See Enclosure named "text.enriched" >>>>>> --============_-1283868752==_ma============-- From ctswtang at polyu.edu.hk Wed Jun 2 02:30:51 1999 From: ctswtang at polyu.edu.hk (Sze-Wing Tang) Date: Wed, 2 Jun 1999 10:30:51 +0800 Subject: call for papers Message-ID: INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON TOPIC AND FOCUS IN CHINESE The Hong Kong Polytechnic University CALL FOR PAPERS We are pleased to announce that 'International Symposium on Topic and Focus in Chinese' will be held at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University in late June or early July 2000. The date will be announced as soon as the details are finalized. The symposium is jointly organized by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong and Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Abstracts are invited for 20-minute talks (with 10 minutes for discussion) in all areas of research on topic and focus from any theoretical perspectives with special emphasis on Chinese or Chinese in comparison with other languages. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to, syntax, semantics, phonology, and language acquisition. Papers from interdisciplinary areas are encouraged. Abstracts may be written in Chinese or English and should be no more than one standard size page (A4 or letter size) in length. Abstracts should be in at least 12-point type with margins of at least 1-inch, single-spaced. Please provide four copies of an anonymous abstract and one camera-ready original with the name(s) of author(s) and affiliation. Along with the abstract send a 3" x 5" card listing: (1) title of the paper, (2) name(s) of the author(s), (3) affiliation(s), (4) mailing address, and (5) email address. Submissions are limited to a maximum of one individual and one joint abstract per author. Abstracts should be sent to the following address. Email and fax submissions cannot be accepted. International Symposium on Topic and Focus in Chinese Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Hung Hom, Kowloon HONG KONG Deadline for receipt of abstracts is December 31, 1999. Notification of acceptance will be sent by email by March 15, 2000. A selection of papers will be considered for publication after the symposium. Inquiries can be addressed to 'ctswtang at polyu.edu.hk'. For more information, visit our website at 'http://www.polyu.edu.hk/~cbs/conference.htm'. Dingxu Shi and Sze-Wing Tang on behalf of the Organizing Committee, International Symposium on Topic and Focus in Chinese From macw at cmu.edu Tue Jun 1 14:26:38 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 10:26:38 -0400 Subject: abstractness Message-ID: Dear Joost, The dimension of abstractness of individual content words has been extensively examined in the field that is now called psycholinguistics and was earlier known as verbal learning. In 1971 Allan Paivio published an extremely comprehensive examination of much of this literature in his book "Imagery and Verbal Processes". Paivio's particular goal was to find support for his dual code (vision and language) theory. However, one of the important points he makes is that concrete words are processed more thoroughly and quickly than are abstract words. He believes this is because they have better access to imagery and the quicker, faster visual system. Between pages 65 and 80, Paivio reviews the work on norms for the concreteness-abstractness dimension. There are lists from Gorman, Paivio and Yuille, and others. Morton Gernsbacher found in her dissertation work that was eventually published in Psych Review that the dimensions of concreteness and imageability are highly correlated and that both are also related to other dimensions. So this is a big literature, but it tends to focus on nouns and adjectives and the bulk of the words included are not even relevant to children. However, you may find some of the principles relevant and a few of the norms may provide guidance. --Brian MacWhinney From Joost.vandeWeijer at mpi.nl Tue Jun 1 11:41:32 1999 From: Joost.vandeWeijer at mpi.nl (Joost van de Weijer) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 13:41:32 +0200 Subject: abstractness classification Message-ID: Dear Info-childes members, I was wondering if anyone could help me with the following: I have collected a corpus of linguistic input to a prelingual infant which includes language spoken not only directly to the infant but also to others who were usually in the infant's environment, including an older sister, the parents, and other caretakers. I want to use my corpus to test the following hypothesis: assuming that adults adapt their way of speaking to the child's linguistic level, I expect that language to a prelingual infant is more abstract (i.e., it contains relatively many words that cannot easily be related to the concept they refer to) than language to a child who already has started to produce or understand words. In order to test this hypothesis, I made a basic classification of words, dividing them into nouns, adjectives, adverbs, verbs, pronouns, proper nouns, auxiliaries, determiners, and prepositions, because I thought that the distribution of these categories would give me a preliminary indication of how well the hypothesis is supported by the data. For instance, perhaps the percentage of nouns is higher in language to the older sister than to the infant because, in general, nouns are relatively concrete compared to verbs or adjectives. However, I am aware that within each category, there are differences too, a noun like 'ball' being easier than 'side' for instance. My question therefore is: does anyone have a suggestion about how to make a classification within the categories, or can anyone give me references of comparable studies where I can find information on how to proceed? Any responses are more than welcome, Joost van de Weijer Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics PO Box 310 6500 AH Nijmegen The Netherlands Tel: +31-(0)24-3521307 Fax: +31-(0)24-3521213 email: vdweijer at mpi.nl From macw at cmu.edu Thu Jun 3 23:39:18 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Thu, 3 Jun 1999 19:39:18 -0400 Subject: UNIBET, SAMPA, IPA Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, I have received feedback from 8 people regarding replacing UNIBET with SAMPA. No one recommends keeping UNIBET, so it is now gone. We will have to write a program that replaces UNIBET in current transcripts with SAMPA. However, it may be up to a year before that work is completed. The next years should see an emerging Unicode standard with an included IPA standard and methods for including diacritics. This, along with a growth in sonic CHAT, will reduce our reliance on stop-gap notations like SAMPA and UNIBET. --Brian MacWhinney From macw at cmu.edu Fri Jun 4 19:05:08 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1999 15:05:08 -0400 Subject: new Spanish corpus, new Spanish-Catalan bilingual corpus Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, I am happy to announce the arrival of a new longitudinal corpus of data on the acquisition of Castillian Spanish, as well as a parallel corpus from a Spanish-Catalan bilingual child. The data were collected under the supervision of Ignasi Vila and prepared for CHILDES by Elisabet Serrat Sellabona of the University of Gerona. The monolingual Spanish data are now in spanish.sit and spanish.zip. The bilingual corpus is in vila.sit and vila.zip on the server. Here are the two readme files: This is a corpus of data from Emilio, a Spanish-speaking boy who was audiorecorded (with some gaps) from 0;11. to age 4;08. Emilio was born 20-MAY-1980. The project has been partially supported by a grant from Spanish Government (DGICYT PB89-0624-C02-01). The head of the project was Ignasi Vila, and the work was carried out in the ICE (Institute of Educational Sciences) in the University of Barcelona. Associate researchers were Montserrat Cortes, Montserrat Moreno, Carme Mu?oz, and Elisabet Serrat. The collection and transcription of the data would have not been possible without the help of: Carme Mena, Ana Novella, and Joaquim Romero. **** This is a corpus of data from Maria del Mar, a Spanish-Catalan bilingual girl who was audiorecorded (with some gaps) from 1;9 to 5;4. Maria was born 16-FEB-1980. The project has been partially supported by a grant from Spanish Government (DGICYT PB89-0624-C02-01). The head of the project was Ignasi Vila, and the work was carried out in the ICE (Institute of Educational Sciences) in the University of Barcelona. Associate researchers were Montserrat Cortes, Montserrat Moreno, Carme Mu?oz, and Elisabet Serrat. The collection and transcription of the data would have not been possible without the help of: Carme Mena, Ana Novella, and Joaquim Romero. --Brian MacWhinney From gleason at bu.edu Fri Jun 4 21:19:50 1999 From: gleason at bu.edu (Jean Berko Gleason) Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1999 17:19:50 -0400 Subject: Early experiments Message-ID: I'm looking for a reference to an "experiment" carried out by one of the German kings (Frederick the ?), who purportedly raised children without allowing them to hear spoken language because he was sure that they would then speak the REAL language, German. Can anyone tell me which Fred it was and point me to a reference that details this? (I know all about Psammetichus, and really mean this story....) Thanks. Jean Berko Gleason From macw at cmu.edu Fri Jun 4 21:52:53 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1999 17:52:53 -0400 Subject: Early experiments Message-ID: Jean, What I know is that the chronicler Salimbene explained how Kaiser Friedrich II of Hohenzollern (ca. 1250) isolated two children with a nursemaid bound to silence. The experiment never ran to completion, since both children died before producing speech. I have also read that Muller (date unknown ) says that similar experiments were conducted by James IV of Scotland and the Emperor Akbar of India. In the case of the experiment by Akbar all 30 subjects failed to develop speech. James IV believed that the children should end up speaking Hebrew without any specific input. He was disappointed to find that they spoke no language at all, not even "very guid Ebrew." I have these references from reading notes. Years ago I tried to track down the chronicles of Salimbene with no luck. Nor have I ever located the Muller discussion. So, this takes us a little closer, but perhaps someone else can provide the real references. Maybe you have to travel to some far-off monastery in Bohemia and climb a dusty staircase to find the real reference. Or maybe they are in some article by Roger Brown on my shelf. --Brian MacWhinney From zukow at ucla.edu Sat Jun 5 05:08:14 1999 From: zukow at ucla.edu (Patricia Zukow-Goldring) Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1999 22:08:14 -0700 Subject: Early experiments Message-ID: Hi Jean and All, John Bonvillian, Amanda Garber, & Susan Dell have an article in _First Language_, _17_ (1997), 219-239 entitled "Language origin accounts: was the gesure in the beginning" that describes such experiments by Akbar, the emperor of Hindustan, in the 16th century. He, too, wanted to know what might be the natural language of children who had not been taught another. He had heard that the language would be Hebrew. The 12 children were raised by 12 mute nurses. Surprise=surprise, they gestured but did not speak some 12 years later. John told me he had another (similar?) publication on the topic. Regards, Pat Zukow-Goldring Patricia Zukow-Goldring, Ph. D. Center for the Study of Women, Kinsey 288 send mail to: UCLA 3835 Ventura Canyon Avenue 405 Hilgard Avenue Sherman Oaks CA 91423 Los Angeles CA 90095 (818) 905-6293 (310) 825-0590 FAX: (818) 905-8113 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jr111 at cus.cam.ac.uk Sun Jun 6 13:15:05 1999 From: jr111 at cus.cam.ac.uk (James Russell) Date: Sun, 6 Jun 1999 14:15:05 +0100 Subject: Early experiments Message-ID: At 17:19 -0400 4/6/99, Jean Berko Gleason wrote: >I'm looking for a reference to an "experiment" carried out by one of the >German kings (Frederick the ?), who purportedly raised children without >allowing them to hear spoken language because he was sure that they >would then speak the REAL language, German. Can anyone tell me which >Fred it was and point me to a reference that details this? (I know all >about >Psammetichus, and really mean this story....) Thanks. > >Jean Berko Gleason There were a number of royal experiments of this kind and they are very usefully reviewed in a paper by Robin Campbell and Robert Greive: "Royal investigations of the origin of language. Hitoriographia Linguistica, Volume IX, 43-74 (I was indeed Frederick the Great - but the 'Stupor Mundi' one who lived in Scicily rather than the flute-playing friend of Voltaire. James Russell From r.n.campbell at stir.ac.uk Mon Jun 7 11:07:39 1999 From: r.n.campbell at stir.ac.uk (r.n.campbell) Date: Mon, 7 Jun 1999 12:07:39 +0100 Subject: Early experiments Message-ID: >I'm looking for a reference to an "experiment" carried out by one of the >German kings (Frederick the ?), who purportedly raised children without >allowing them to hear spoken language because he was sure that they >would then speak the REAL language, German. Can anyone tell me which >Fred it was and point me to a reference that details this? (I know all >about >Psammetichus, and really mean this story....) Thanks. > >Jean Berko Gleason As Jim Russell says, see my paper with Bob Grieve (overlooked by Bonvillian et al, 1997, and curiously not mentioned in their communication to you):- Royal Investigations of the Origin of Language. Historiographia Linguistica IX:1/2 (1982). Pp. 43-74. Although Frederick II of Sicily was undoubtedly an interesting person who contributed substantially to avian biology (see references 1, 2 below), there is plenty of doubt about whether he conducted any language experiment. The only adequately authenticated isolation experiment is Akbar's, also described at length in our paper. What set us on the track, however, were Guilio Panconcelli-Calzia's papers 3 and 4 below. 1. Hauber, A. 1912. 'Kaiser Friedrich II der Staufer und der langlebige Fisch'. Archiv fur die Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften und der Technik 3: 315-29. 2. Wood, C.A. & F.M. Fyfe. 1943.'The Art of Falconry: the 'De venandi cum avibus' of Frederick II'. Stanford UP. 3. Panconcelli-Calzia, G. 1937.'Der 'wilde Knabe' in seiner Beziehung zu manchen Sprachstorungen im Kindesalter und zu der Entstehung von Mythen'. Medizinische Welt 11: 410-14 4. Panconcelli-Calzia, G. 1955. 'Das Motiv vom 'wilde Knaben'. Zur Sprache verwilderter Kinder.' Sprachforum 1: 272-77. Dr Robin N Campbell Dept of Psychology, University of Stirling STIRLING FK9 4LA, Scotland tele: 01786-467649 facs: 01786-467641 email: r.n.campbell at stir.ac.uk http://www.stir.ac.uk/departments/humansciences/psychology/Staff/rnc1/ From feldman at stripe.Colorado.EDU Mon Jun 7 21:46:29 1999 From: feldman at stripe.Colorado.EDU (FELDMAN ANDREA) Date: Mon, 7 Jun 1999 15:46:29 -0600 Subject: finite/nonfinite verbs Message-ID: > >Return-Path: >Received: from sgym52.Colorado.EDU (sgym52.Colorado.EDU [128.138.125.52]) > by spot.Colorado.EDU (8.9.3/8.9.3/ITS-5.0/standard) with SMTP id PAA21381 > for ; Thu, 3 Jun 1999 15:27:29 -0600 (MDT) >Date: Thu, 3 Jun 1999 15:27:29 -0600 (MDT) >Message-Id: <199906032127.PAA21381 at spot.Colorado.EDU> >X-Sender: mannn at spot.colorado.edu >X-Mailer: Windows Eudora Light Version 1.5.2 >Mime-Version: 1.0 >Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >To: afeldman at stripe.colorado.edu >From: Nancy Mann >Subject: Finite/nonfinite verbs > >Could you refer me to a *cross-linguistic* definition of the concept of >finiteness, and if possible a discussion of the ways in which finite and >nonfinite verb forms are used in a variety of languages? If possible, I'd >appreciate material that's accessible to a reasonably determined nonspecialist. > >Thanks, >Nancy > >nancy.mann at colorado.edu > > From dxk45 at psu.edu Tue Jun 8 16:29:53 1999 From: dxk45 at psu.edu (Deb Kelemen) Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1999 12:29:53 -0400 Subject: correction Message-ID: The service for Ann Brown will be held at 11a.m. on Thursday morning at St James Church not 11:30 as previously stated. apologies Deb Kelemen dxk45 at psu.edu Deb Kelemen Ph.D. Assistant Professor Department of Psychology 441 Moore Building The Pennsylvania State University University Park, PA 16802. Office: (814) 863 - 1712 Conceptual Development Lab: (814) 863 - 7391 Fax: (814) 863 -7002 From dxk45 at psu.edu Tue Jun 8 16:25:48 1999 From: dxk45 at psu.edu (Deb Kelemen) Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1999 12:25:48 -0400 Subject: sad news Message-ID: I am sorry to announce some very sad news. Ann Brown, Evelyn Lois Corey Professor of Education of the University of California, Berkeley passed away on Friday, 4th June after a brief illness. Much of Ann's most recent work had focussed on designing innovative learning environments, developing the concept of the classroom as a community of learners and refining her groundbreaking research with Annemarie Palinscar on reciprocal teaching. However, to the cognitive developmental community, Ann may be better known for her work in conceptual development She published broadly on causal and analogical reasoning in young children and the development of metacognition and learning transfer. She will be sadly missed. For those wishing to pay their respects or send flowers, a service is being held for Ann at 11:30 Thursday June 10th, St James Catholic Church, 1086 Guerrero, San Francisco. many thanks Deb Kelemen dxk45 at psu.edu Deb Kelemen Ph.D. Assistant Professor Department of Psychology 441 Moore Building The Pennsylvania State University University Park, PA 16802. Office: (814) 863 - 1712 Conceptual Development Lab: (814) 863 - 7391 Fax: (814) 863 -7002 From dxk45 at psu.edu Tue Jun 8 19:39:48 1999 From: dxk45 at psu.edu (Deb Kelemen) Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1999 15:39:48 -0400 Subject: Memorial fund for Ann Brown Message-ID: In response to requests for further information: The Thursday service for Ann Brown is relatively small family affair for family, friends, and close colleagues. However, an Ann Brown/Campione Teacher Research Fund has been set up in Ann's memory. Donations are welcome c/o Michael D. Reynolds,Chabot Observatory & Science Center, 10902 Skyline Blvd., Oakland, CA 94619. thanks Deb Kelemen dxk45 at psu.edu Deb Kelemen Ph.D. Assistant Professor Department of Psychology 441 Moore Building The Pennsylvania State University University Park, PA 16802. Office: (814) 863 - 1712 Conceptual Development Lab: (814) 863 - 7391 Fax: (814) 863 -7002 From au at psych.ucla.edu Tue Jun 8 19:47:33 1999 From: au at psych.ucla.edu (Terry Au) Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1999 12:47:33 -0700 Subject: summary of counting clauses Message-ID: Dear Colleagues: Earlier I posted a question about how to count clauses in frog stories and narratives in general. Here are my original query message and a summary of the responses. Thanks, Terry Au ************************************************************************ ORIGINAL QUERY: My lab is trying to get a handle on counting sentential clauses in Frog stories (and other narratives). Our criteria for clauses are: 1. A subject and a tensed verb (e.g., "he ran" will count as 1 clause; "he ran and she walked" will count as 2 clauses) OR 2. Small clauses (e.g., "I wanted him to run" would count as 2 clauses because the subject is different for the two lexical verbs: "I" being the subject for "wanted;" "he" being the subject for "run") We count the following as only one clause: 1. Simpe to-infinitives (e.g., "I want to run") 2. Conjoined verb (e.g., "I ate and drank;" "He cried and cried") 3. Conjoined subject (e.g., "John and Mary left") ************************************************************************** SUMMARY OF RESPONSES: 1. Several colleagues noted that "I ate and drank" should count as 2 clauses, whereas "I ate and ate" should count as 1 (the repetition marks aspect rather than a second situation. (See the next point.) 2. Most who replied said they have adopted Berman and Slobin's (1994) definition: "a unit that contains a unified predicate. By unified, we mean a predicate that expresses a single situation (activity, event, state)." Detailed criteria and examples can be found in Appendix II of "Relating Events in Narrative: A crosslinguistic developmental study (Berman & Slobin et al., 1994). 3. Different researchers' criteria vary somewhat on subtler points. Disagreements center on "I want to go" (one clause according to Berman & Slobin) versus "I want him to go" (two clauses according to B&S). The rationales for departing from B&S's criteria are: Lowry Hemphill : We don't count constructions like "I wanted him to run" as two clauses because only one narrative unit is accomplished, an expression of intention (we don't view this sort of clause as different from "I want to run" because the second person's agency is only hypothetical in "I wanted him to run", not actual). We do, however, consider something like "I ate and drank" to be two clauses because it reports two potentially separate narrative events. Labov's work with Waletzky has guided us here; we've also been influenced by Peterson and McCabe's work on children's acquisition of narrative structure. Judy Reilly : we have counted those verbs with infinitival clomplements and same subject as 2 clauses, but only one proposition as they reflect only one event. "Daniela O'Neill" : I have found a bit problematic are cases such as the one you mention with respect to small clauses such as "I wanted him to run". Breaking these up reduces the readability of the transcript considerably. Although I think it is correct to separate this into two clauses, I also wonder about whether this fits the definition of Bermin and Slobin's "single situation". I am not sure whether in an everyday sense we consider this utterance the expression of two situations rather than one. However, Bermin and Slobin do mention that utterances with subordinate complement clauses such as "he thought he could get the bees" be considered two situations and be treated as two clauses. And indeed, we have also treated instances of direct or indirect voicing as two clauses, as in "he said he would find the frog". Bermin and Slobin also note that when each verb has a different subject, then the utterance should be separated in to two clauses and give the example "I want you to go" which is almost identical to the one you gave. Claudia L. Ordonnez : I count 'I want to go...' and any other expression with a state-of-mind-verb as 2 clauses to make it easier to count evaluative features, which are quite important in my coding syste. The 'to go' would be a predicted event (another evaluative feature) or a story event, in case it really happens later in the story. Martha Shiro : I was interested in evaluative language, therefore it was important for me to mark the difference between 'I ran' and 'I wanted to run' and so, I divided the latter into 2 clauses. But in the case of 'I started to run' I considered it as 1 clause because it had an aspectual reference (it referred to a phase of the action of 'running' and not to a mental process as in the previous case). Barbara Zurer Pearson : "I plan to go" would be 2 (in my opinion). I'm not sure but I think "He tried to go" might also be 2, whereas I thought of "wanted to go" as "modal-like" (as did B&S) [and hence counts as one]. The more examples one gives, the slippery-er it feels. Sometimes that's the best way to clarify one's own thinking. 4. Lowry Hemphill sent me his clausing manual--easy to understand and similar to B & S on major points. Interesting ideas on how to deal with fragments and unfinished sentences. 5. Lois Bloom send me references for relevant articles to read (which I did and found them useful): Bloom, L., Lahey, M., Hood, L., Lifter, K., & Fiess, K. (1980). Complex sentences: Acquisition of syntactic connectives and the semantic relations they encode. Journal of Child Language, 7, 235-261. We called "complex sentences" those that "include two verbs" or that "theoretically combine the structures that underlie two simple sentences." We subsequently did a number of studies of kinds of complex sentences with different clausal relations, including those with complements and expressions of causality in particular. All of these papers are reprinted in Bloom, L. (1991). Language development from two to three. New York: Cambridge University Press. ******************************* Terry Kit-fong Au Professor Department of Psychology, UCLA Los Angeles, CA 90096-1563, U.S.A. Office: (310)206-9186 Lab: (310)206-7840 FAX: (310)206-5895 From macw at cmu.edu Tue Jun 8 22:09:00 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1999 18:09:00 -0400 Subject: Arabic, Turkish, Dutch bilingual narratives Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, I am happy to announce the inclusion in CHILDES of a major new corpus on narratives from bilingual children and their comparison control groups. The data come from Petra Bos and Jeroen Aarssen of Tilburg University. They are to be found in the aarssen/bos.sit and aarssen/bos.zip files in the /biling directory. I am not including them in the narrative directory, although they are clearly relevant to the study of narratives. Also, people may wish to note that these are the first data we have from Arabic speaking children. The corpus is quite large with a total of over 1000 narratives. Following is the beginning of the readme file. --Brian MacWhinney This database contains 1021 transcripts collected in the Netherlands, Turkey and Morocco by Jeroen Aarssen and Petra Bos, Tilburg University. Bilingual data (either Turkish-Dutch or Moroccan Arabic-Dutch) were collected within the framework of a longitudinal study into development of bilingualism among Turkish and Moroccan children in The Netherlands. The age range of the bilingual informants is from 4 to 10. The design of the study is pseudo-longitudinal, i.e. two consecutive cohorts of 25 informants were followed during a longer period of time: the younger cohort in four rounds (from age 4 to age 7) and the older cohort in three rounds (from 8 to 10). The first round of data collection took place in 1991, and data collection was repeated in 1992, 1993 and 1994. The interval between subsequent rounds of data collection was about one year. Turkish, Moroccan Arabic and Dutch monolingual control data were collected as well in, respectively, Turkey, Morocco and The Netherlands. The Dutch control data were collected according to the same pseudo-longitudinal design as described above. The Turkish and Moroccan control data, however, were collected cross-sectionally from three different age groups (age 5, 7 and 9). Each transcript contains retellings of six short six-picture stories and the frog story (Mayer, 1969). The six short stories were constructed according to the following set-up: two stories with a clearly identifiable main character; two with two equivalent main characters; and two without a clearly identifiable main character. This research was supported by the Linguistic Research Foundation (Grant No. 300-172-002), which is funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, NWO. This research resulted into the two PhD. theses cited below (Aarssen, 1996 and Bos, 1997). Publications using these data should cite: Aarssen, J. (1996). Relating events in two languages: Acquisition of cohesive devices by Turkish-Dutch bilingual children at school age. Studies in Multilingualism, Vol. 2. Tilburg: Tilburg University Press. Bos, P. (1997) Development of bilingualism: A study of school-age Moroccan children in the Netherlands. Studies in Multilingualism, Vol. 8. Tilburg: Tilburg University Press. Jeroen Aarssen Petra Bos Tilburg University - BABYLON, Center for Studies on Multilingualism in the Multicultural Society P.O. Box 90153 5000 LE Tilburg The Netherlands e-mail: J.Aarssen at kub.nl, P.H.F.Bos at kub.nl From macw at cmu.edu Tue Jun 8 23:20:45 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1999 19:20:45 -0400 Subject: major new English corpus Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, I am also happy to announce the addition to CHILDES of a very large new corpus of data on the acquisition of British English from Elena Lieven, Anna Theakston, Julian Pine, and Carolyn Reid, whose addresses are listed below. This large corpus includes a complete disambiguated %mor tier which should make it extremely interesting and useful for grammatical studies. Here is the beginning of the readme file for the corpus. --Brian MacWhinney This corpus consists of transcripts of audio-recordings from a longitudinal study of twelve English-speaking children between the ages of approximately 2-3 years. The children were recruited through newspaper advertisements and local nurseries. All the children were first borns, monolingual and were cared for primarily by their mothers. Although socioeconomic status was not taken into account with respect to recruitment, the children were from predominantly middle-class. There were six boys and six girls, half from Manchester and half from Nottingham. At the beginning of the study, the children ranged in age from 1;8.22 to 2;0.25 with MLUs ranging between 1.06 to 2.27 in morphemes. The children?s dates of birth and ages are available in the headers to each transcript. The transcripts for each child are numbered from 1 to 34 corresponding to the tape number and labelled (a) and (b) to correspond to the two 30 minute sessions within each recording. The following recording sessions were missed and therefore have no corresponding transcript: Aran14a/b: Carl14b,24a/b: John15a/b,16a/b: Ruth4a/b: Warren3b. Contributors: Elena V. M. Lieven Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Inselstrasses 22 D-04103 Leipzig Germany lieven at eva.mpg.de Julian Pine Department of Psychology University of Nottingham NE7 2RCD Nottingham, UK jp at psych.nott.ac.uk Caroline Rowland Institute of Behavioural Sciences Mickleover Site University of Derby DE3 5GX Derby, UK c.rowland at derby.ac.uk Anna Theakston Department of Psychology University of Manchester Oxford Rd M13 9PL Manchester, UK theaksto at fs4.psy.man.ac.uk Publications that make use of this corpus should cite: Theakston, A. L., Lieven, E. V. M., Pine, J. M. & Rowland, C. F. (in press). The role of performance limitations in the acquisition of 'mixed' verb-argument structure at stage 1. To appear in M. Perkins & S. Howard (Eds.) New Directions in Language Development and Disorders. Plenum. From macw at cmu.edu Wed Jun 9 16:44:53 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Wed, 9 Jun 1999 12:44:53 -0400 Subject: new Spanish corpus, new Spanish data on SLI and Williams Syndrome Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, I am happy to announce the inclusion in CHILDES of three corpora from Eliseo Diez-Itza of the University of Oviedo. The first is a set of 20 transcripts from normally-developing children. These are in the spanish.zip and spanish.sit files on the server. The second and third are studies of children with SLI and Williams Syndrome. This are in /clinical/diez_itza.sit on the server. Many thanks to Eliseo. Here are the readme files. --Brian MacWhinney **** Normally-developing children ****** These data were contributed by Eliseo Diez-Itza. They are a small part of a much larger corpus being prepared at the University of Oviedo by Dr. Diez-Itza and his students, with assistance from Ver?nica Mart?nez, Ra?l Cantora, and Manuela Miranda. This database has provided the basis for several cross-sectional descriptive studies on the acqusition of Spanish, with special focus on phonological, lexical and narrative issues. The directory currently contains 20 transcripts of dyadic conversations between children (10 girls and 10 boys in the age range from 3;0 to 3;11) and investigators trained in process of recording, transcribing, and analyzing spontaneous speech samples, using CHAT conventions. The taping sessions were conducted in the subjects? homes. Each one lasted approximately forty-five minutes. During this spontaneous verbal interaction, the children had to tell a story. They were also asked to talk about a visit to the doctor, and a birthday party. GEM header lines were used to mark these particular passages. The spontaneous speech parts (HES) were also marked. ***** SLI child ****** This directory contains the six transcripts from a short-term longitudinal study of a SLI child, conducted by Manuela Miranda, Ver?nica Mart?nez and Eliseo Diez-Itza at the University of Oviedo. The child pseudonym is Edgar and his age was 7.10 at the beginning of the study. Dyadic verbal interaction between Edgar and Manuela Miranda was videorecorded within monthly intervals during the speech therapy time in the school. The time duration of the sessions was approximately of thirty minutes. The activities included play and storytelling. The focus of the study was the phonological impairment. Cite: Miranda, Mart?nez & Diez-Itza (1998). ***** WS child ***** This directory contains two transcripts from a Williams Syndrome child. They are part of an ongoing research project on the linguistic and educational aspects of a Williams Syndrome (WS) population in Asturias (Spain) conducted by Eliseo Diez-Itza, Ar?nzazu Ant?n, Joaqu?n Fern?ndez Toral and Mar?a Luisa Garc?a, at the University of Oviedo. Spontaneus verbal interaction between the child and the investigators was videotaped and transcribed in CHAT format. The child was recorded in two sessions at home with an interval of 8 months (at ages 9.3 and 10.0). The time duration of the samples is approximately of 90 and 60 minutes. Cite: Diez-Itza, Ant?n, Fern?ndez & Garc?a (1988). From spowers at rz.uni-potsdam.de Thu Jun 10 12:25:38 1999 From: spowers at rz.uni-potsdam.de (Susan M. Powers) Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 14:25:38 +0200 Subject: Digit Span Message-ID: Dear all, Does anyone know a method for assessing the (verbal or non-verbal) digit span of children and norms? Thanks, Susan Powers From ann.dowker at psy.ox.ac.uk Thu Jun 10 19:03:42 1999 From: ann.dowker at psy.ox.ac.uk (Ann Dowker) Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 20:03:42 +0100 Subject: Digit Span Message-ID: Dear Susan, Both the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children and the British Abilities Scales contain (auditory) digit span subtests, with norms. There is also Elizabeth Koppitz' Visual-Aural Digit Span test, published by Grune and Stratton, 1977, which includes both visual and auditory digit span measures, with norms. Hope one of these is useful, Ann On Thu, 10 Jun 1999, Susan M. Powers wrote: > Dear all, > > Does anyone know a method for assessing the (verbal or non-verbal) digit > > span of children and norms? > > Thanks, > > Susan Powers > > > > > From nmayumi at msi.biglobe.ne.jp Fri Jun 11 07:44:33 1999 From: nmayumi at msi.biglobe.ne.jp (nmayumi at msi.biglobe.ne.jp) Date: Fri, 11 Jun 1999 16:44:33 +0900 Subject: change in e-mail address Message-ID: Please note a change in my e-mail address: Old:nmayumi at msi.biglobe.ne.jp New:j46077a at nucc.cc.nagoya-u.ac.jp Mayumi Nishibu Department of International Language and Culture Nagoya University, JAPAN From aholland at U.Arizona.EDU Fri Jun 11 19:31:46 1999 From: aholland at U.Arizona.EDU (audrey l holland) Date: Fri, 11 Jun 1999 12:31:46 -0700 Subject: Aphasia in Navajo speakers Message-ID: Dear Colleagues--I am involved in a project concerning aphasia and its effects on Navajo. I am unaware of any work done on Navajo aphasic speakers, and would appreciate any leads you might have. We are interested in test materials, trnascriptions of discourse, even myths about this interesting problem. I will collate material and distribute it to interested readers. Thank you in advance--Audrey Holland From macw at cmu.edu Fri Jun 11 19:56:04 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Fri, 11 Jun 1999 15:56:04 -0400 Subject: new corpus on autism Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, I am happy to announce the inclusion in CHILDES of a new corpus on the language of young children with autism. The corpus is from Pamela Rollins of UTDallas. It is rollins.sit in the /clinical directory. There are four files from each of five boys ages 2-3. Here is part of the readme file. --Brian MacWhinney This corpus consists of transcripts of video recordings of 5 boys with autism who attended a preschool program for children on the autistic spectrum at the University of Texas at Dallas. To be included this corpus, a child had to meet the following criteria: (a) have an initial diagnosis of autism by a psychologist or a neurologist; (b) have been preverbal at the time of intake; (c) have attended the preschool program for at least one year; and (d) have some conventional expressive vocabulary skills upon completion of the program. The preschool program routinely videotapes each participating child for the entire morning session several times during the school year. For each child, four videotapes were selected for later transcription and analysis (the first, last, and two intermediate tapes). The transcripts for each child are numbered 1-4 or 5 corresponding to the tape number. The header file indicates the date of the video recording as well as the child?s age. To capture each child's optimal level of on-task communicative functioning, only intervals where the child was interacting one-on-one with his clinician were transcribed and coded for analyses. Therefore, activities such as small group, music, and snack time were, by definition, excluded from the analyses. This criterion was used because the language skills of children on the autistic spectrum are influenced by both the setting and the participants. Furthermore, efforts to capture the child's optimal level of on-task communicative behaviors were made by excluding from the total number of usable minutes the following intervals: (a) when the clinician or child was out of the room, (b) when another child or teacher talked with the target child and clinician, (c) when the clinician attempted to engage the target child in an activity but where the target child refused to cooperate for longer than 30 seconds, (d) when the target child actively avoided an activity or interactions with the clinician for longer than 30 seconds, (e) when the clinician and target child negotiated the next activity for longer than 60 seconds. This substantially reduced the total number of usable minutes available for Transcription. Videotapes were viewed and catalogued. The catalogue included a time record for each activity so that the total number of usable minutes for coding could be calculated. Activity header lines were used to mark each new activity on the transcript. Twenty minutes was the maximum number of usable minutes that was available for all children in the study at each time point. To ensure that the sample of 20 minutes was representative for each child the videotaped interactions were reviewed by persons familiar with each child. Because the corpus was originally collected to describe pragmatic skills in children with autism from the prelinguistic to early one word stage a good deal of nonverbal information is transcribed. The transcripts include %spa codes using the Ninio, Snow, Pan, & Rollins INCA system described in the CHAT manual. In order to be coded as communicative, each communicative act had to supported by behavioral evidence that the child had a plan/intention to achieve a goal with awareness that another person can be a means to that end. This behavioral evidence has been outlined by Prizant and Wetherby (1988) and includes the following: (a) alternating eye gaze between a goal and the listener, (b) persistent signaling until the goal has been met, (c) changing the quality of the signal until the goal has been met, (d) ritualizing or conventionalizing the form of signal within specific communicative contexts, (e) awaiting a response from the listener, (f) terminating the signal when the goal is met, (g) displaying satisfaction when the goal is attained or dissatisfaction when it is not. Communicative means is indicated on the third level of the speech act tier. Pamela Rosenthal Rollins University of Texas at Dallas Callier Center for Communication Disorders 1966 Inwood Road Dallas, TX 75214 214-905-3153 rollins at utdallas.edu From macw at cmu.edu Sat Jun 12 13:55:17 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Sat, 12 Jun 1999 09:55:17 -0400 Subject: new data on the acquisition of Russion Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, I am happy to announce the inclusion in CHILDES of a new corpus on the acquisition of Russian. This is a case study of a child learning Russian in a monolingual environment in the United States. It has been contributed by Eva Bar-Shalom and William Snyder of the University of Connecticut. It is in /noneng/russian.sit. Here is the readme file: --Brian MacWhinney The TANJA corpus was videotaped and transcribed by Eva Bar-Shalom in collaboration with William Snyder. The project was conducted in the Child Language Laboratory, Department of Linguistics, University of Connecticut, and was funded in part by the University of Connecticut Research Foundation. The TANJA corpus contains fifteen longitudinal, spontaneous-speech samples from a monolingual, Russian-learning girl (pseudonym 'Tanja', ages 2;05.14 - 2;11.20) who was recorded in her home in the United States at a rate of approximately twice per month. At the time of the study Tanja was an only child, and was cared for at home by her monolingual (native Russian) mother and her bilingual (native Russian, ESL) father. The language spoken at home was consistently Russian, and exposure to English was minimal. Tanya was born on 14-DEC-1993. The dates of the recordings, and Tanja's age at each recording, are as follows: Tanja01 28-MAY-1996 2;05.14 Tanja02 10-JUN-1996 2;05.27 Tanja03 18-JUN-1996 2;06.04 Tanja04 25-JUN-1996 2;06.11 Tanja05 23-JUL-1996 2;07.09 Tanja06 12-AUG-1996 2;07.29 Tanja07 29-AUG-1996 2;08.15 Tanja08 09-SEP-1996 2;08.26 Tanja09 20-SEP-1996 2;09.06 Tanja10 25-OCT-1996 2;10.11 Tanja11 08-NOV-1996 2;10.25 Tanja12 11-NOV-1996 2;10.28 Tanja13 15-NOV-1996 2;11.01 Tanja14 22-NOV-1996 2;11.08 Tanja15 04-DEC-1996 2;11.20 The TANJA corpus has been transcribed by Eva Bar-Shalom, a native Russian-speaker. Transcription follows CHAT conventions. The resulting transcripts must be considered preliminary, however, because they have not yet been subjected to rigorous reliability checking. Additionally, the system of Romanization employed in the transcripts is not yet entirely consistent. We hope to improve on these shortcomings in a future version. As of June 1999, analyses of Tanja's syntax and morphology appear in two research reports: Bar-Shalom, Eva and Snyder, William (1997) "Optional infinitives in Russian and their implications for the pro-drop debate." In Martina Lindseth and Steven Franks (eds.) _Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics: The Indiana Meeting 1996_. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, pp.38-47. Bar-Shalom, Eva and Snyder, William (1998) "Root infinitives in Child Russian: A comparison with Italian and Polish." In Richard Shillcock, Antonella Sorace, and Caroline Heycock (eds.) _Language Acquisition: Knowledge Representation and Processing. Proceedings of GALA '97._ Edinburgh, UK: The University of Edinburgh. The TANJA corpus is being made available to the larger research community in its current form, with acknowledgement that errors and inconsistencies in typography, Romanization, and possibly transcription may still be present. Comments and questions on the TANJA corpus should be directed to: barshalo at uconnvm.uconn.edu OR wsnyder at sp.uconn.edu Prof. Eva Bar-Shalom, Ph.D. Prof. William Snyder, Ph.D. Dept. of Linguistics, U-1145 Dept. of Linguistics, U-1145 University of Connecticut University of Connecticut 341 Mansfield Road 341 Mansfield Road Storrs, CT 06269-1145 Storrs, CT 06269-1145 USA USA Papers making use of the corpus should cite (Bar-Shalom & Snyder 1997, 1998). From macw at cmu.edu Sun Jun 13 18:47:57 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Sun, 13 Jun 1999 14:47:57 -0400 Subject: TalkBank Project Announcement Message-ID: Project Announcement for "TalkBank: A Multimodal Database of Communicative Interaction" The goal of TalkBank is to create a distributed, web-based data archiving system for transcribed video and audio data on communicative interactions. TalkBank builds on our experience with CHILDES and LDC corpora, and is expected to be a major new tool for the social sciences. TalkBank data will be stored in an XML-based transcription framework incorporating richly structured, time-aligned annotations. For detailed information, please consult: CMU - http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/talkbank.html Penn - http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/annotation/talkbank.html We believe that TalkBank will benefit four types of research enterprises: Cross-corpora comparisons. For those interested in quantitative analyses of large corpora, TalkBank will provide direct access to enormous amounts of real-life data, subject to strict controls designed to protect confidentiality. Folios. Other researchers wish to focus on qualitative analyses involving the collection of a carefully sampled folio or casebook of evidence regarding specific fine-grained interactional patterns. TalkBank programs will facilitate the construction of these folios. Single corpus studies. For those interested in analyzing their own datasets rather than the larger database, TalkBank will provide a rich set of open-source tools for transcription, alignment, coding, and analysis of audio and video data. Collaborative commentary. For researchers interested in contrasting theoretical frameworks, TalkBank will provide support for entering competing systems of annotations and analytic profiles either locally or over the Internet. The creation of this distributed database with its related analysis tools will free researchers from many tedious aspects of data analysis and will stimulate fundamental improvements in the study of communicative interactions. The initiative unites ongoing efforts from the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) at Penn, the Penn Database Group, the Informedia Project at CMU, and the CHILDES Project at CMU. The initiative also establishes an ongoing interaction between computer scientists, linguists, psychologists, sociologists, political scientists, criminologists, educators, ethologists, cinematographers, psychiatrists, and anthropologists. A variety of funding possibilities are being sought for TalkBank, and we have recently received a commitment of support from NSF for initial planning meetings. We are also using the initiative to foster wide-ranging cooperation between ongoing research efforts. The TalkBank homepage [http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/annotation/talkbank.html] lists current participants and has a pointer to a document giving a detailed exposition of our vision for TalkBank. We invite anyone who is interested in participating actively in TalkBank or even in just providing suggestions and criticism to contact one or more of us: Brian MacWhinney (Psychology, CMU) Howard Wactlar (Computer Science, CMU) Peter Buneman (Computer Science, U Penn) Mark Liberman (Linguistic Data Consortium, U Penn) Steven Bird (Linguistic Data Consortium, U Penn) *********************** This message is being posted on June 4, 1999 to the following mailing lists. Our apologies if you receive multiple copies. If you think this announcement should be posted to additional mailing lists, please send the addresses of those lists to Brian MacWhinney (macw at cmu.edu). It is particularly important to reach additional lists outside of the domains of linguistics and psycholinguistics. Many thanks. corpora at hd.uib.no elsnet-list at let.ruu.nl empiricists at unagi.cis.upenn.edu language-culture at cs.uchicago.edu linganth at cc.rochester.edu linguist at listserv.linguistlist.org ap-mate at mate.mip.ou.dk nl-kr at cs.rpi.edu info-childes at childes.psy.cmu.edu info-psyling at psy.gla.ac.uk funknet at rice.edu discours at linguist.ldc.upenn.edu comp.databases comp.databases.theory comp.speech.research comp.multimedia comp.theory.info-retrieval comp.ai.nat-lang From pispoli at club-internet.fr Tue Jun 15 08:47:03 1999 From: pispoli at club-internet.fr (David A. Cohen) Date: Tue, 15 Jun 1999 10:47:03 +0200 Subject: First Language at AAAL Message-ID: Dear All: I am the strand co-ordinator for first language acquisition papers to be presented at the AAAL conference in Vancouver , Canada, March 11th - 14th, 2000. When Pat Carrell asked be to serve, she said, 'Don't worry, Susan, we only had 6 submissions in L1 last year, so it won't be too much work.' Well, I got to thinking. That's terrible, only 6 submissions. I've been going to AAAL for years and giving papers in both L1 and L2, and it's a lovely conference. So, I've decided to issue this rallying call to all of you. Send in LOTS of abstracts on L1. We do Applied Linguistics. We should be properly represented! (N.B. AAAL is not TESOL, and it works hard to keep pure language teaching issues out of the conference.) The details of the conference, abstracts etc. can all be found at the AAAL website http://www.aaal.org The deadline for abstracts is August 16th 1999. Oh, and if anyone would like an offprint of a little review chapter I wrote on L1 and SLA research for the most recent Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, just let me know. I can be contacted at either pispoli at club-internet.fr or fosterco at ext.jussieu.fr All the best to all. Susan Foster-Cohen From kschaper at midwest.net Thu Jun 17 02:57:17 1999 From: kschaper at midwest.net (Kirsten Hodge) Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1999 21:57:17 -0500 Subject: post Message-ID: In the psych lab where I work (I'm a graduate student) we are using the Mercer Mayer frog stories to collect child speech. I have been discussing doing a joint thesis with another linguistics student on comparing 1st language acquistition of English and the Jamaicaian patois which is based on English. We wanted to collect samples of the patois in the same manner that we are collecting the English samples. However we had some concern whether or not those books would translate culturally. Does anyone know of any other books (ones without words) that might be usable for our study? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Kirsten Schaper Southern Illinois University at Carbondale From slobin at cogsci.Berkeley.EDU Thu Jun 17 03:54:27 1999 From: slobin at cogsci.Berkeley.EDU (Dan I. SLOBIN) Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1999 20:54:27 -0700 Subject: post Message-ID: The frog story has been used in a wide range of cultures, and appears to be useful in eliciting basic information about both linguistic and narrative structure. In Berman & Slobin (1994, Appendix III) we listed the following non-Western field sites where the frog story has been used: Morocco (Arabic), Australia (Arrernte, Guugu Yumithirr, Warlpiri), Botswana (Kgalagadi), US (Kickapoo, Lakhota), Papua New Guinea (Kilivila, Yupno), Solomon Islands (Longgu), Malaysia (Malay), China (Mandarin), Japan (Japanese), Belize (Mopan), Gabon (Myene), Uganda (several Western Nilotic languages), India (Tamil), Mexico (Totonac, Tzotzil, Tzeltal, Yucatec), Turkey (Turkish). It has also been used in several sign languages (American Sign Language, Sign Language of the Netherlands), as well as with various populations of language-impaired and developmentally-impaired speakers. (Berman, R. A., & Slobin, D. I. (1994). _Relating events in narrative: A crosslinguistic developmental study_. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.) For a useful discussion of cultural factors in use of the frog-story method, see: Wilkins, D. P. (1997). The verbalization of motion events in Arrernte (Central Australia). In E. V. Clark (Ed.), _The proceedings of the Twenty-eighth Annual Child Language Research Forum_ (pp. 295-308). Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information. -Dan Slobin Dept of Psychology University of California, Berkeley On Wed, 16 Jun 1999, Kirsten Hodge wrote: > In the psych lab where I work (I'm a graduate student) we are using the > Mercer Mayer frog stories to collect child speech. I have been discussing > doing a joint thesis with another linguistics student on comparing 1st > language acquistition of English and the Jamaicaian patois which is based > on English. We wanted to collect samples of the patois in the same manner > that we are collecting the English samples. However we had some concern > whether or not those books would translate culturally. Does anyone know of > any other books (ones without words) that might be usable for our study? > Any help would be greatly appreciated. > Kirsten Schaper > Southern Illinois University at Carbondale > > From n.hewlett at sls.qmced.ac.uk Mon Jun 21 09:32:24 1999 From: n.hewlett at sls.qmced.ac.uk (Nigel Hewlett) Date: Mon, 21 Jun 1999 10:32:24 +0100 Subject: Conference Announcement Message-ID: ICPLA 2000 CONFERENCE VIIIth meeting of the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association 16-19 August 2000 John MacIntyre Centre, Edinburgh, Scotland hosted by the Department of Speech & Language Sciences, Queen Margaret University College, Edinburgh The purpose of the VIIIth meeting of the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association (ICPLA), which will take place in Edinburgh in the year 2000, is to provide a forum for those who are interested in applying the techniques of phonetic and linguistic analysis to clinical data, with a view to exploring theories of disordered or normal language. We hope to make it an exciting and fruitful occasion for all those involved, or seeking to be involved, in this field. PLANNED SESSION THEMES Speech production, speech perception, linguistic theory and language disorder, psycholinguistics and aphasia, developmental psycholinguistics, neurology and language. Abstracts of papers or posters will be welcomed on any of these themes and on the application of any of the conventional areas of linguistics (phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics) to the analysis of disordered speech and language. KEYNOTE SPEAKERS Elizabeth Bates, Thierre Deonna, Fiona Gibbon, Heather van der Lely, John Locke, Susan Nittrouer, Lorraine Tyler IMPORTANT DATES First call for abstracts: 1 October 1999 Deadline for receipt of abstracts: 31 January 2000 Notification of acceptance of abstracts: 1 March 2000 Final date for discounted registration: 15 April 2000 Conference dates: 16-19 August 2000 VENUE John MacIntyre Centre, Edinburgh, Scotland WEBSITE http://sls.qmced.ac.uk/ICPLA2000/index.htm CONTACT ADDRESS (E-MAIL) icpla at sls.qmced.ac.uk ACCOMMODATION 140 rooms have been booked in the Pollock Halls accommodation adjacent to the conference centre in anticipation that most delegates will want to stay there. Alternative accommodation should be booked well in advance (at least six months). TRAVEL Edinburgh Airport is a 25 minute bus ride from the city centre. Most transatlantic flights operate from Glasgow, which is about 40 miles from Edinburgh. There are rail links to the rest of the UK from Edinburgh's Waverley Station. MAILING LIST If you wish to be put on our mailing list please e-mail us at: icpla at sls.qmced.ac.uk or write to us at: ICPLA 2000, Department of Speech and Language Sciences, Queen Margaret University College, Clerwood Terrace, Edinburgh, EH12 8TS, Scotland. Fax: +44 131 317 3689 CONFERENCE COMMITTEE Janet Beck, Bill Hardcastle, Nigel Hewlett, Fay Windsor, Sara Wood, Alan Wrench (Dept of Speech & Language Sciences, Queen Margaret University College), Wendy Cohen (Molecular Medicine Centre, Western General Hospital, Edinburgh), Louise Kelly (Dept of Psychology, University of Edinburgh), Anja Lowit (Dept of Speech and Language Therapy, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow), Anne O'Hare (Dept of Community Child Health, Royal Hospital for Sick Children, Edinburgh), Richard Shillcock (School of Cognitive Science, University of Edinburgh), Jocelynne Watson (Dept of Speech & Language Therapy, Royal Hospital for Sick Children, Edinburgh). Nigel Hewlett Lecturer and Laboratory Director Department of Speech and Language Sciences Queen Margaret University College Clerwood Terrace Edinburgh EH12 8TS e-mail: n.hewlett at sls.qmced.ac.uk phone: 0131 317 3690 From ddlsi at cunyvm.cuny.edu Wed Jun 23 18:10:01 1999 From: ddlsi at cunyvm.cuny.edu (David J. Lewkowicz, Ph.D.) Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 14:10:01 -0400 Subject: No subject Message-ID: RESEARCH SCIENTIST: Recent Ph.D. sought for NIH-funded project investigating intersensory perceptual development in human infants. Seeking person with an experimental background to fill the position as soon as possible.. Competitive salary and benefits. For inquiries please contact the project director, David J. Lewkowicz, Ph.D. by e-mail at ddlsi at cunyvm.cuny.edu or by phone at (718) 494-5302. To apply send CV and 3 letters of recommendation to Personnel #865, Institute for Basic Research, 1050 Forest Hill Rd., Staten Island, NY 10314. David J. Lewkowicz, Ph.D. Senior Research Scientist NYS Institute for Basic Research 1050 Forest Hill Rd. Staten Island, NY 10314, USA Phone: (718) 494-5302 Fax: (718) 494-5395 From gillis at uia.ua.ac.be Wed Jun 23 23:11:57 1999 From: gillis at uia.ua.ac.be (Steven Gillis) Date: Thu, 24 Jun 1999 01:11:57 +0200 Subject: IASCL Congress - San Sebastian Message-ID: The program of the IASCL congress in San Sebastian can be found on the congress web-site, which can be reached via the IASCL home page: http://atila-www.uia.ac.be/IASCL/Inhoud.html The local organizers in San Sebastian can be reached via email: fvcongre at vc.ehu.es See you in San Sebastian, Steven Gillis & Annick De Houwer ======================================================= Steven Gillis University of Antwerp - UIA Department of Linguistics - GER Center for Dutch Language and Speech - CNTS Universiteitsplein 1 B-2610 Wilrijk (Belgium) Tel.: +32 (0)3 8202766 Fax: +32(0)3 8202762 E-mail: gillis at uia.ua.ac.be http://ger-www.uia.ac.be/webger/ger/cnts/main.html http://atila-www.uia.ac.be/IASCL/Inhoud.html ======================================================= From mcgregor at casbah.acns.nwu.edu Thu Jun 24 14:54:07 1999 From: mcgregor at casbah.acns.nwu.edu (Karla McGregor) Date: Thu, 24 Jun 1999 15:54:07 +0100 Subject: Language Science position at Northwestern University Message-ID: Position Announcement Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders Northwestern University Position: Assistant Professor Appointment: Full-time, nine-month, tenure track Starting Date: September 1, 2000 Duties: Responsibilities include conducting research in areas of interest, teaching graduate and undergraduate courses, as well as directing student research and advising graduate and undergraduate students. Qualifications: Ph.D. in Psycholinguistics, Linguistics, Cognitive Science/Neuroscience/Psychology or related area required. Applicants must have demonstrated expertise in experimental approaches to semantic and/or syntactic processing. Individuals with interests in either child or adult language processing are encouraged to apply. Preference will be given to candidates with research interests that mesh with those of the current faculty, in particular those whose work has implications for language disorders. Salary: Competitive, depending on qualifications and experience. Application procedure: The application should include a cover letter, CV (indicating an e-mail address), statements of research and teaching interests, reprints, and three letters of reference sent directly to the search committee by the application deadline. Send all materials to: Karla K. McGregor, Ph.D. Search Committee Chair Speech and Language Pathology 2299 North Campus Drive Northwestern University Evanston, IL 60208-3570 E-mail: k-mcgregor at nwu.edu Closing date: Consideration of applications will begin December 3, 1999 and continue until the position is filled. Northwestern University is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer. Women and minorities are encouraged to apply. Hiring is contingent upon eligibility to work in the United States. -- Karla Mcgregor Northwestern University k-mcgregor at nwu.edu From Sabine.Prechter at anglistik.uni-giessen.de Mon Jun 28 10:24:46 1999 From: Sabine.Prechter at anglistik.uni-giessen.de (Sabine Prechter) Date: Mon, 28 Jun 1999 12:24:46 +0200 Subject: Privacy - Content of Consent of Subjects Message-ID: Dear fellow researchers, I remember a very lively discussion about the question of how to handle recorded and processed language data in the era of electronic data handling, processing and storing (also with the participation of both Alison and Lois Bloom) a couple of months ago, to which I would like to get back briefly. We are currently re-designing a joint project in co-operation with a US university on spoken language processing *in adults* and would like to hand our subjects a form of consent that covers their need for privacy as well as our need for useful data handling. Since German universities deal with the problem of privacy in experimental settings in a way which is very different from the US system of Ethics Boards etc, I would be more than grateful to receive your comments and maybe even pre-formulated Declarations of Consent that you or your colleagues have been using to ensure a proper legal basis for our experiments, which would cover the following areas: * open recording of conversations in explicity experimental settings * anonymized demographic information according to project content (self-classification according to first and additional languages, degree of familiarity with topic domain, age, sex) * transcription of recordings * storage of transcriptios and recordings on mechanical as well as electronic storage devices * analysis of data and integration of data into a larger corpus * partial analysis of data in several anonymized sub-projects in both universities participating * (possibly:) use of data by researchers involved also after they have left either of the participating institutions * anonymized use of data in class If you can think of any additional points of concern that might be linked to our experiments, please let me know! Thanks in advance, Sabine Prechter Nao basta abrir a janela Sabine Prechter, Ass. Professor Para ver os campos e o rio *sabine.prechter at anglistik.uni-giessen.de* Nao e bastante nao ser cego Otto-Behaghel-Str. 10 B IV Para ver as arvores e as flores D-35394 Giessen 20 de abril de 1919 Fone: +49 641 99-30065 Alberto Caeiro Fax: +49 641 99-30159 From a.karmiloff-Smith at ich.ucl.ac.uk Mon Jun 28 17:10:15 1999 From: a.karmiloff-Smith at ich.ucl.ac.uk (Annette Karmiloff-Smith) Date: Mon, 28 Jun 1999 17:10:15 +0000 Subject: Postdoc at NDU-ICH Message-ID: PLEASE BRING TO THE ATTENTION OF POTENTIAL CANDIDATES A position of POSTDOC is to become available on 1/11/99 until 30/9/2001 at the recently created Neurocognitive Development Unit (NDU), Institute of Child Health, London, funded by Programme and Project Grants from the Medical Research Council, U.K., and studentships from the MRC, the Down's Syndrome Association, and the Williams Syndrome Foundation. We are a small, dynamic unit, focused on understanding atypical cognitive development in genetic disorders from infancy through adulthood. Our aims and interests are set out at the bottom of this ad. We are looking for a postdoc, with special interest and experience in infancy research and atypical development. The Institute of Child Health has excellent research facilities and is situated in the Bloomsbury area of central London, very close to a large community of researchers focused on cognitive neuroscience. Salary between 18,420 and 20,319 pounds sterling (including London weighting), depending on experience, qualifications, and age. Application closing date: 22nd July 1999. Please send your full CV, the names of two academic referees, and a description of your research experience and current research interests (no more than 1000 words please) to: Professor Annette Karmiloff-Smith Head, Neurocognitive Development Unit Institute of Child Health 30 Guilford Street London WC1N 1EH, U.K. tel: +44 171 905 2754 secretary: 242 9789 ext.0735 fax: +44 171 242 7717 The NDU has the following aims: - to map in detail the cognitive end state of a variety of developmental disorders - to trace these cognitive profiles to their origins in infancy - to explore the mechanisms underlying the developmental trajectories which connect the start state to the end state; - ultimately to devise remediation techniques useable in early infancy when the brain displays its maximum neocortical plasticity. Our current research focuses on infants, children and adults with Williams syndrome (WS) and Down's syndrome (DS). We plan subsequently to add a number of other syndromes, as a function of their different start and/or end states. In particular, we aim to explore the **cognitive** processes underlying **behavioural** outcomes, and we therefore focus on areas in which abnormal phenotypes show relative proficiency rather than solely on their areas of impairment. Indeed, even in areas where the output of the cognitive system looks normal (e.g., in the rather good language and face processing skills of people with WS), the processes underlying the behavioural output may be different. We are also particularly concerned with demonstrating that the initial state in infancy cannot be simply assumed from the end state in middle childhood and adulthood. This has an important theoretical bearing on the current use of atypical outcomes to make claims about innately specified, independently functioning modules in the starting state. Indeed, there has been a tendency to use the adult neuropsychological model of intact and impaired modules as an approach to the study of developmental disorders. When neuropsychologists find cognitive deficits in normal adults who have suffered brain damage, they try to isolate the 'components' of the cognitive system. The same approach is often taken with developmental disorders, particularly when these disorders are genetically based. So if a syndrome displays an uneven cognitive profile in the end state, it is frequently argued that this must be due to the child having started life with a pattern of preserved and impaired modules. We believe this assumption to be erroneous, in that it tends to neglect the role of development itself in ontogenetic outcomes (Karmiloff-Smith, 1998a). The relationship between genes and outcome is a very indirect one, with the environment playing an essential role in driving different developmental trajectories. A very subtle difference in the start state can gives rise to huge differences in the developmental outcome (Elman et al., 1996;Karmiloff-Smith, 1998a; Oliver, et al., in press; Thomas, in press; Thomas & Karmiloff-Smith, in press). This is why we are focusing a substantial part of our current research effort on infancy and why we are seeking a new Postdoc to join the team. We are also exploring via computational models a number of different hypotheses about the subtle impairment in the WS start state that may result in the pattern of deficits and behavioural proficiences seen in the WS end state. In general, we have found that the use of connectionist models helps clarify theoretical concepts and provides new empirical predictions for future research (Elman et al., 1996; Mareschal & Thomas, submitted). In general, we bring to bare a variety of different approaches, theoretical and empircal, on the questions we are addressing. Selected recent publications of the NDU team Brown, J., Paterson, S.J., Gs?dl, M.KJ., Johnson, M.H., & Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1999) The development of bodyt-centered representations: Spatial frames of reference in infants with Williams and Down syndromes. Poster Presentation at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Alburquerque, New Mexico. Elman, J., Bates, E., Johnson, M.H., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Parisi, D. and Plunkett, K. (1996) Rethinking Innateness: A connectionist perspective on development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Grant, J., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Berthoud, I., & Christophe, A. (1996) Is the language of people with Williams syndrome mere mimicry? Verbal short-term memory in a foreign language. Cahiers de Psychologie Cognitive, 15, 615-628. Grant, J., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Gathercole, S., Howlin, P., Davies, M., & Udwin, O. (1997) Verbal Short-term Memory and its relation to Language Acquisition in Williams Syndrome. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 2, 2, 81-99. Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1997) Crucial differences between developmental cognitive neuroscience and adult neuropsychology. Developmental Neuropsychology, 13, 4, 513-524. Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1998) Development itself is the key to understanding developmental disorders. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2, 10, 389-398. Karmiloff-Smith, A., Grant, J., Berthoud, I., Davies, M., Howlin, P. & Udwin, O. (1997) Language and Williams Syndrome: How Intact is "Intact"? Child Development, 68, 2, 246-262. Karmiloff-Smith, A., Tyler, L.K., Voice, K., Sims, K., Udwin, O., Davies, M., and Howlin, P. (1998) Linguistic Dissociations in Williams Syndrome: Evaluating Receptive Syntax in on-line and off-line tasks. Neuropsychologia, 36, 4, 342-351. Laing, E., Hulme, C. & Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1999) A preliminary study of reading abilities in people with Williams syndrome. York Conference on Reading. Mareschal, D. & Thomas, M.S.C. (in press) Self-organization in normal and abnormal cognitive development. To appear The Handbook of Brain and Behaviour in Human Development. Oliver, A., Johnson, M.H., Karmiloff-Smith, A. & Pennington, B. (in press) Deviations in the emergence of representations: A neuro-constructivist framework for analysing developmental disorders. Developmental Science. Paterson, S.J., Brown, J., Gs?dl, M.KJ., Johnson, M.H., & Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1999) A comparison of cognitive and language performance in 24, 30 and 36 month old infants with Down Syndrome and Williams Syndrome. Poster Presentation at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Alburquerque, New Mexico. Paterson, S., Brown, J., Gsodl, MK., Johnson, M.H., & Karmiloff-Smith, A. Brain modularity in genetic disorders: Infant profiles cannot be derived from phenotypic outcomes. (submitted). Rae. C., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Lee, M.A., Dixon, R.M., Blamire, A.M., Thompson, C.H., Grant, J., Styles, P. & Radda, G.K.. (1998) Brain Biochemistry in Williams Syndrome. Evidence for a role of the cerebellum in cognition? Neurology, 51, 33-40. Stevens, T. & Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1997) Word Learning in a Special Population: Do Individuals with Williams syndrome Obey Lexical Constraints? Journal of Child Language, 24, 737-765. Tassabehji, M., Metcalfe, K., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Carette, M.J., Grant, J., Dennis, N., Reardon, W., Splitt, M., Read, A.P., and Donnai, D. (1999) Williams Syndrome: Use of Chromosomal Microdeletions as a Tool to Dissect Cognitive and Physical Phenotypes. American Journal of Human Genetics, 64(1), 118-125. Thomas, M.S.C. (in press) Constructivism's promise: Commentary on O)liver, Johnson, Karmiloff-Smith, and Pennington. Developmental Science. T h o m a s , M . S . C . a n d K a r m i l o f f - S m i t h , A . ( i n p r e s s ) . Q u o v a d i s m o d u l a r i t y i n t h e 1 9 9 0 s ? I n : M . A n d e r s o n ( e d . ) S p e c i a l i s s u e o f L e a r n i n g a n d I n d i v i d u a l D i f f e r e n c e s . Thomas, M.S.C., & Mareschal, D. (1999) Metaphor as categorisation: A connectionist implementation. Proceedings of the AISB Symposium on Metaphor, Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive, pp: 1-10. Tyler, L.K., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Voice, K., Stevens, T., Grant, J., Udwin, O., Davies, M., Howlin, P. (1997) Do individuals with Williams syndrome have bizarre semantics? Evidence for lexical organization using an on-line task. Cortex, 33, 515-527. From a.karmiloff-Smith at ich.ucl.ac.uk Mon Jun 28 17:01:51 1999 From: a.karmiloff-Smith at ich.ucl.ac.uk (Annette Karmiloff-Smith) Date: Mon, 28 Jun 1999 17:01:51 +0000 Subject: Postdoc at NDU-ICH Message-ID: PLEASE BRING TO THE ATTENTION OF POTENTIAL CANDIDATES A position of POSTDOC is to become available on 1/11/99 until 30/9/2001 at the recently created Neurocognitive Development Unit (NDU), Institute of Child Health, London, funded by Programme and Project Grants from the Medical Research Council, U.K., and studentships from the MRC, the Down's Syndrome Association, and the Williams Syndrome Foundation. We are a small, dynamic unit, focused on understanding atypical cognitive development in genetic disorders from infancy through adulthood. Our aims and interests are set out at the bottom of this ad. We are looking for a postdoc, with special interest and experience in infancy research and atypical development. The Institute of Child Health has excellent research facilities and is situated in the Bloomsbury area of central London, very close to a large community of researchers focused on cognitive neuroscience. Salary between 18,420 and 20,319 pounds sterling (including London weighting), depending on experience, qualifications, and age. Application closing date: 22nd July 1999. Please send your full CV, the names of two academic referees, and a description of your research experience and current research interests (no more than 1000 words please) to: Professor Annette Karmiloff-Smith Head, Neurocognitive Development Unit Institute of Child Health 30 Guilford Street London WC1N 1EH, U.K. fax: +44 171 242 7717 The NDU has the following aims: - to map in detail the cognitive end state of a variety of developmental disorders - to trace these cognitive profiles to their origins in infancy - to explore the mechanisms underlying the developmental trajectories which connect the start state to the end state; - ultimately to devise remediation techniques useable in early infancy when the brain displays its maximum neocortical plasticity. Our current research focuses on infants, children and adults with Williams syndrome (WS) and Down's syndrome (DS). We plan subsequently to add a number of other syndromes, as a function of their different start and/or end states. In particular, we aim to explore the **cognitive** processes underlying **behavioural** outcomes, and we therefore focus on areas in which abnormal phenotypes show relative proficiency rather than solely on their areas of impairment. Indeed, even in areas where the output of the cognitive system looks normal (e.g., in the rather good language and face processing skills of people with WS), the processes underlying the behavioural output may be different. We are also particularly concerned with demonstrating that the initial state in infancy cannot be simply assumed from the end state in middle childhood and adulthood. This has an important theoretical bearing on the current use of atypical outcomes to make claims about innately specified, independently functioning modules in the starting state. Indeed, there has been a tendency to use the adult neuropsychological model of intact and impaired modules as an approach to the study of developmental disorders. When neuropsychologists find cognitive deficits in normal adults who have suffered brain damage, they try to isolate the 'components' of the cognitive system. The same approach is often taken with developmental disorders, particularly when these disorders are genetically based. So if a syndrome displays an uneven cognitive profile in the end state, it is frequently argued that this must be due to the child having started life with a pattern of preserved and impaired modules. We believe this assumption to be erroneous, in that it tends to neglect the role of development itself in ontogenetic outcomes (Karmiloff-Smith, 1998a). The relationship between genes and outcome is a very indirect one, with the environment playing an essential role in driving different developmental trajectories. A very subtle difference in the start state can gives rise to huge differences in the developmental outcome (Elman et al., 1996;Karmiloff-Smith, 1998a; Oliver, et al., in press; Thomas, in press; Thomas & Karmiloff-Smith, in press). This is why we are focusing a substantial part of our current research effort on infancy and why we are seeking a new Postdoc to join the team. We are also exploring via computational models a number of different hypotheses about the subtle impairment in the WS start state that may result in the pattern of deficits and behavioural proficiences seen in the WS end state. In general, we have found that the use of connectionist models helps clarify theoretical concepts and provides new empirical predictions for future research (Elman et al., 1996; Mareschal & Thomas, submitted). In general, we bring to bare a variety of different approaches, theoretical and empircal, on the questions we are addressing. Selected recent publications of the NDU team Brown, J., Paterson, S.J., Gs?dl, M.KJ., Johnson, M.H., & Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1999) The development of bodyt-centered representations: Spatial frames of reference in infants with Williams and Down syndromes. Poster Presentation at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Alburquerque, New Mexico. Elman, J., Bates, E., Johnson, M.H., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Parisi, D. and Plunkett, K. (1996) Rethinking Innateness: A connectionist perspective on development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Grant, J., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Berthoud, I., & Christophe, A. (1996) Is the language of people with Williams syndrome mere mimicry? Verbal short-term memory in a foreign language. Cahiers de Psychologie Cognitive, 15, 615-628. Grant, J., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Gathercole, S., Howlin, P., Davies, M., & Udwin, O. (1997) Verbal Short-term Memory and its relation to Language Acquisition in Williams Syndrome. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 2, 2, 81-99. Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1997) Crucial differences between developmental cognitive neuroscience and adult neuropsychology. Developmental Neuropsychology, 13, 4, 513-524. Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1998) Development itself is the key to understanding developmental disorders. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2, 10, 389-398. Karmiloff-Smith, A., Grant, J., Berthoud, I., Davies, M., Howlin, P. & Udwin, O. (1997) Language and Williams Syndrome: How Intact is "Intact"? Child Development, 68, 2, 246-262. Karmiloff-Smith, A., Tyler, L.K., Voice, K., Sims, K., Udwin, O., Davies, M., and Howlin, P. (1998) Linguistic Dissociations in Williams Syndrome: Evaluating Receptive Syntax in on-line and off-line tasks. Neuropsychologia, 36, 4, 342-351. Laing, E., Hulme, C. & Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1999) A preliminary study of reading abilities in people with Williams syndrome. York Conference on Reading. Mareschal, D. & Thomas, M.S.C. (in press) Self-organization in normal and abnormal cognitive development. To appear The Handbook of Brain and Behaviour in Human Development. Oliver, A., Johnson, M.H., Karmiloff-Smith, A. & Pennington, B. (in press) Deviations in the emergence of representations: A neuro-constructivist framework for analysing developmental disorders. Developmental Science. Paterson, S.J., Brown, J., Gs?dl, M.KJ., Johnson, M.H., & Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1999) A comparison of cognitive and language performance in 24, 30 and 36 month old infants with Down Syndrome and Williams Syndrome. Poster Presentation at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Alburquerque, New Mexico. Paterson, S., Brown, J., Gsodl, MK., Johnson, M.H., & Karmiloff-Smith, A. Brain modularity in genetic disorders: Infant profiles cannot be derived from phenotypic outcomes. (submitted). Rae. C., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Lee, M.A., Dixon, R.M., Blamire, A.M., Thompson, C.H., Grant, J., Styles, P. & Radda, G.K.. (1998) Brain Biochemistry in Williams Syndrome. Evidence for a role of the cerebellum in cognition? Neurology, 51, 33-40. Stevens, T. & Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1997) Word Learning in a Special Population: Do Individuals with Williams syndrome Obey Lexical Constraints? Journal of Child Language, 24, 737-765. Tassabehji, M., Metcalfe, K., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Carette, M.J., Grant, J., Dennis, N., Reardon, W., Splitt, M., Read, A.P., and Donnai, D. (1999) Williams Syndrome: Use of Chromosomal Microdeletions as a Tool to Dissect Cognitive and Physical Phenotypes. American Journal of Human Genetics, 64(1), 118-125. Thomas, M.S.C. (in press) Constructivism's promise: Commentary on O)liver, Johnson, Karmiloff-Smith, and Pennington. Developmental Science. T h o m a s , M . S . C . a n d K a r m i l o f f - S m i t h , A . ( i n p r e s s ) . Q u o v a d i s m o d u l a r i t y i n t h e 1 9 9 0 s ? I n : M . A n d e r s o n ( e d . ) S p e c i a l i s s u e o f L e a r n i n g a n d I n d i v i d u a l D i f f e r e n c e s . Thomas, M.S.C., & Mareschal, D. (1999) Metaphor as categorisation: A connectionist implementation. Proceedings of the AISB Symposium on Metaphor, Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive, pp: 1-10. Tyler, L.K., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Voice, K., Stevens, T., Grant, J., Udwin, O., Davies, M., Howlin, P. (1997) Do individuals with Williams syndrome have bizarre semantics? Evidence for lexical organization using an on-line task. Cortex, 33, 515-527. From bates at crl.ucsd.edu Tue Jun 29 01:07:45 1999 From: bates at crl.ucsd.edu (Elizabeth Bates) Date: Mon, 28 Jun 1999 18:07:45 -0700 Subject: child language readings Message-ID: Mike Tomasello and Elizabeth Bates have agreed to put together a book of essential readings in language acquisition, as part of a series for Blackwell. We have a preliminary list of our own ideas, but are anxious to hear from other researchers in the field about your teaching needs. If you are willing to help out, please send us any suggestions you might have for articles that you use in your own courses (in addition to or instead of textbooks), or any primary sources that (in your view) any undergraduate or graduate student in language development ought to read. You could, if you like, also send us the bibliographies that you give to your own classes as email attachments. We don't want to clog up info-childes with such attachments, so please address your thoughts to either of us at the following addresses: bates at crl.ucsd.edu tomas at eva.mpg.de Once we have collected your suggestions, we will be happy to post a list of the top twenty or so choices proposed by info-childes readers (although they may not all work out for the Blackwell reader). Thanks in advance. -Liz Bates & Mike Tomasello From macw at cmu.edu Tue Jun 29 16:29:43 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 12:29:43 -0400 Subject: books of readings Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, It turns out that I am also working on a set of readings in child language acquisition. In my case, it is for Psychology Press. So, if you have ideas on essential readings or course syllabi that you pass on to Mike and Liz, I would love to receive a copy too. Somewhere along the line, Michael, Liz, and I should be able to figure out how not to publish two books of readers that have the same content. There are so many good readings to be sampled that it should be pretty easy to avoid serious overlap. --Brian MacWhinney (macw at cmu.edu)