From macw at cmu.edu Mon Mar 1 18:21:49 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 1999 13:21:49 -0500 Subject: thanks for all the letters Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, I would like to thank the 375 researchers who mailed me letters describing their use of CHILDES for the NIH renewal. It's great to see the data and programs receiving such wide usage. The FedEx Internet tracking system tells me the proposal was delivered to NIH at 9:04 this morning. Just in time for the March 1 deadline. It may be possible to send in a group of "late" letters as an addendum later on. I plan to take time over the next months to go carefully through the letters taking a closer look at the 780 articles and presentations mentioned there that make use of CHILDES. I doubt that I will ever be able to read them all, but I will try to read a good sampling. Thanks again for all the letters. --Brian MacWhinney From pobanz at education.ucsb.edu Mon Mar 1 18:38:45 1999 From: pobanz at education.ucsb.edu (Michael Pobanz) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 1999 10:38:45 -0800 Subject: English morphology with L1 (Spanish) and L2 (Enlgish) Message-ID: Hi felow researchers and practitioners, I was wondering if anyone has any information on the acquisition of English morphology by native Spanish speaking children. -Does the order of acquisition mirror the order for native English speakers? -Are there certain errors specific to the English L2 group? - Are there any studies using the "Wug Test" for native Spanish speaking children? Any help will be greatly appreciated! please reply to: pobanz at education.ucsb.edu Thanks, Michael Pobanz Doctoral student in school psychology / school psychologist intern From lmb32 at columbia.edu Wed Mar 3 02:20:20 1999 From: lmb32 at columbia.edu (Lois Bloom) Date: Tue, 2 Mar 1999 21:20:20 -0500 Subject: Confidentiality Issues (fwd) Message-ID: I had shared the recent Childes exchange with Allison Bloom, one of the Childes children, and asked for her opinion. Here is her response. --Lois Bloom ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 2 Mar 1999 20:13:20 EST From: ABMEsq at aol.com To: lmb32 at columbia.edu Cc: ABMEsq at aol.com Subject: Confidentiality Issues TO: Info-Childes Subscribers FROM: Allison Joy Bloom Hi everyone: My mother, Lois Bloom, has asked me to add my $0.02 to the discussion of confidentiality issues relative to making audio and/or video tape data collections available via the Internet. I will speak to this issue on two different levels -- as a subject and as a lawyer. As a child, I was a subject of audio and video tape studies in my mother's research lab. The data she collected in those studies have become widely known in the academic world. I have previously given my permission for transcripts of those tapes to be made available for more widespread access than just to those students who were affiliated with my mother's lab. However, I have chosen to restrict access to the audio and video tapes. Originally, my restriction was based on what one might call "adolescent embarrassment." As a child whose name became famous in Linguistics circles, I felt that I was constantly being "studied" and evaluated by my mother's colleagues at various functions I attended (dinner parties, social gatherings, trips with my family to conventions where my mother was giving talks). Adolescents, in general, feel that they are under a microscope at all times; in my case, it was exacerbated by circumstances beyond my control when I was a small child. When I realized that my mother was showing video tapes of me in her classroom, I felt (for lack of a better word) violated. After all, it was my image that was being shown on screen, and yet no one had asked MY permission to do so... My mother honored my wishes and stopped showing the video tapes in her classroom and denied access to those who sought to use them for research. To the best of my knowledge, the tapes have not been viewed by anyone in recent years. I have come to understand and appreciate the impact that my language development has had on the field of Psycho-Linguistics. As an adult, I realize that learning how people learn language can have far reaching positive effects on society, from helping stroke and accident victims regain the use of speech and language to helping children with learning disabilities learn to read and write. However, I feel that the data collected 25 or 30 years ago are not necessarily going to have any more of a significant impact on language acquisition/reacquisition than data which have been collected more recently. I have been fortunate in that I have been able to maintain contact with the researcher who collected my data -- I see her just about every day. As a result, I have been able to have a say in what data have been released and in what form. Other subjects are not as fortunate. They have been given no control over their proprietary images. It is not enough to say that a parent or legal guardian signed a consent form at the time the tapes were made. Depending upon what the consent form said, the parent or guardian was more than likely giving permission for the tapes to be used solely by people "in house" for a particular research project and there was no intent on their part for more widespread dissemination of actual tapes. At most, permission may have been granted for "outside" researchers to come "on site" and view or listen to the tapes. I suspect that this would be increasingly true the older the tapes are. As Amy Sheldon pointed out in the Info-Childes discussions, the web was not even invented when a lot of the data out there were collected. Certainly the parents or legal guardians never envisioned worldwide access to their child's image and/or voice, let alone identifying information. Although the original permission was granted by the parents or legal guardians, the fact that a change in the method of access is now being contemplated, I feel, is a significant enough change to require new consent. Now that many of the subjects of these studies are adults, the decision to grant access to their image and/or voice should no longer be up to their parents or guardians; it should now be their decision alone to make. Which brings us to the legal part of the discussion... As an attorney, there are a number of issues which come to mind with regard to the availability of data via the Internet. Although I have not researched this particular question, it is safe to say that there may be privacy issues under the Constitution (specifically, within the Bill of Rights and the Equal Protection and Due Process clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment), as well as issues in the areas of Tort Law, Intellectual Property law, and Internet Technology law. All of these issues are going to center on the type of consent obtained, how far-reaching that consent is or was intended to be, the type of image being disseminated, and the safeguards and controls in place to prevent misappropriation of a person's image or likeness and an invasion of their privacy. Clearly, without permission, names, faces, voices and other identifying information have to be altered to protect the person's identity. Of final note is a somewhat analogous situation: Eight or nine states, including Minnesota, Maine, and California, have recently passed laws prohibiting the playing of audio 9-1-1 tapes in civil and/or criminal proceedings in order to protect the privacy of the caller. (By introducing the audio tapes into evidence during a court proceeding, those tapes become public records and are then available to the media for widespread distribution.) Although not directly on point, the question remains if states are limiting access to audio tapes within the judicial system, how they are going to view access via the Internet where permission is sketchy at best. In conclusion, while I am all for expanded research capabilities and access to data collections, I do not feel, either as a subject or as an attorney, that it is prudent to use previously collected data sources in this manner. It is my position that there are just too many consent and privacy issues to be concerned with when dealing with older data. One suggestion might be that only data collected from this point forward be available on audio or video via the Internet, providing that appropriate consent forms are obtained. Furthermore, the consent forms should also be drafted in a way which takes into account future technological advances. Also, the eight levels of consent which were proposed by Brian MacWhinney are not a bad idea, but would definitely need some revisions to make them more "user-friendly" for the parents to whom they are directed. Finally, as for the older data collections, you might be able to include a list of who has what data available for viewing/listening, what the contact information is, and whether or not the data can go off-site and/or be copied. But I would say that the current controls would need to be maintained in the absence of express consent from the subjects (or their parents or legal guardians) to allow widespread (i.e.: Internet) dissemination. I hope that my comments have been helpful. If anyone has any further questions, I can be reached on e-mail at "ABMEsq at aol.com". Sincerely, Allison Joy Bloom From jjm095f at mail.smsu.edu Wed Mar 3 14:40:23 1999 From: jjm095f at mail.smsu.edu (Masterson, Julie) Date: Wed, 3 Mar 1999 08:40:23 -0600 Subject: 1999 ASHA Convention Message-ID: CALL FOR PAPERS AMERICAN SPEECH-LANGUAGE-HEARING ASSOCIATION SAN FRANCISCO NOVEMBER 18-21, 1999 We'd like to encourage our colleagues to submit proposals for the 1999 ASHA Convention. We have made several changes in the format for submissions and evaluation criteria in order to encourage research presentations and highlight the role of science in the discipline of communication sciences and disorders. Proposals will be received at the ASHA office until March 15 or can be submitted on-line until March 29, 1999. For more information and on-line submission procedures, visit http://www.asha.org/convention/abstracts/. Julie Masterson & Rick Talbott Co-Chairs, 1999 ASHA Convention From garym at linguistics.ucl.ac.uk Wed Mar 3 16:58:00 1999 From: garym at linguistics.ucl.ac.uk (G.Morgan) Date: Wed, 3 Mar 1999 16:58:00 +0000 Subject: Confidentiality Issues and sign language Message-ID: Dear list members, I have been reading recent discussion of video data and confidentiality with interest as those of us working in sign language acquisition are always faced with issues regarding data on video. Sign language has to be recorded on video with children as clearly visible as possible (may mean running behind them or under a table - ouch!), and concealing faces is impossible, as often facial grammar is the object of study. In studies of adult-child interaction the adult must also be clearly seen, meaning the child can be identified, making pseudonyms irrelevant as the mother may be a known person to the audience. This becomes very problematic if you are talking about delayed or disordered language. At conferences and in teaching, it is always a problem whether to show the clip of the brilliant example of child language or sign it yourself (not so brilliant), in publications it is even more of a dilemma even with adult informants. Often a written gloss only reveals part of the information and looks like Egyptian hieroglyphics. When I collected data for my PhD thesis on BSL morpho-syntax, I designed an informed-consent form which parents or teachers had to sign. The form said that the data would be shown at different levels of exposure from -nobody but me-within research group-for teaching-conferences-publications. The legal guardian chose at what level they were happy for the data to be available. I also had to give the option that the video would be destroyed after the project. There are some good examples of how video can be used in child language in the sign language research community developed through 25 years of encountering problems of confidentiality. I can direct people to these practices in more detail if there is a need expressed. With the advent of digitised video in web archives I would like to know what other child language researchers are doing to protect informants anonymity. Yours Gary Morgan ------- Gary Morgan Dept of Linguistics, UCL, London tel: 0171 4193162 (voice/text) fax: 0171 3834108 From macw at cmu.edu Wed Mar 3 17:56:33 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Wed, 3 Mar 1999 12:56:33 -0500 Subject: formal analysis of annotation systems Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, Steven Bird and Mark Liberman have examined at least 12 transcription and annotation systems, including CHAT, and constructed a formal representation that captures relations in all 12 systems. Some of these systems go down to nitty-gritty levels of autosegmental representation. Others focus more on the word level. The result of their formal analysis is that all these systems can be represented as "annotation graphs" which have the shape of DAGs (directed acyclic graphs). Along the way, they make some important observations about linkage of codes to time and hierarchical relations between codes and words. Here is the information about the article and its address on the web. --Brian MacWhinney A Formal Framework for Linguistic Annotation Steven Bird & Mark Liberman Abstract `Linguistic annotation' covers any descriptive or analytic notations applied to raw language data. The basic data may be in the form of time functions - audio, video and/or physiological recordings - or it may be textual. The added notations may include transcriptions of all sorts (from phonetic features to discourse structures), part-of-speech and sense tagging, syntactic analysis, `named entity' identification, co-reference annotation, and so on. While there are several ongoing efforts to provide formats and tools for such annotations and to publish annotated linguistic databases, the lack of widely accepted standards is becoming a critical problem. Proposed standards, to the extent they exist, have focussed on file formats. This paper focuses instead on the logical structure of linguistic annotations. We survey a wide variety of existing annotation formats and demonstrate a common conceptual core, the annotation graph. This provides a formal framework for constructing, maintaining and searching linguistic annotations, while remaining consistent with many alternative data structures and file formats. 49pp, download from: [http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/cs.CL/9903003] Formats: PDF (336kb), Postscript (161kb), DVI (134kb), LaTeX (112kb) For an online survey and extensive links, visit the Linguistic Annotations Page: [http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/annotation] @TechReport{BirdLiberman99, author={Steven Bird and Mark Liberman}, title={A Formal Framework for Linguistic Annotation}, institution={Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania}, year=1999, number={MS-CIS-99-01}, note={[xxx.lanl.gov/abs/cs.CL/9903003]} } Please send comments to: sb at ldc.upenn.edu, myl at ldc.upenn.edu Regards, Steven Bird & Mark Liberman -- Steven.Bird at ldc.upenn.edu http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/sb Assoc Director, LDC; Adj Assoc Prof, CIS & Linguistics Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania 3615 Market St, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19104-2608 From au at psych.ucla.edu Wed Mar 3 18:11:42 1999 From: au at psych.ucla.edu (Terry Au) Date: Wed, 3 Mar 1999 10:11:42 -0800 Subject: Visiting Professorship at UCLA, 1999-2001 Message-ID: Dear Colleagues: The Developmental Area in Psychology at UCLA has been authorized to hire a visiting professor at the rank of Associate or Full Professor for 1999-2001. UCLA is on the quarter system, which means there are three terms (10 weeks of classes plus exam week). We hope that the visitor will offer two large undergraduate courses in a topic-oriented series of intro developmental courses (social development, cognitive development, applied developmental, language acquistion, education and psychology, culture and development) and perhaps either an undergrad elective or a graduate seminar. In addition, we hope the visitor will offer research opportunities and supervision to ourundergraduate and grad students. If you know of anyone (feel free to include yourself)who is interested, please send me a msg. and I will share the information. Thanks, Terry Au ******************************* 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 ketrezni at boun.edu.tr Thu Mar 4 07:35:04 1999 From: ketrezni at boun.edu.tr (Nihan Ketrez) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 10:35:04 +0300 Subject: ERRATA- PERSPECTIVES ON LANGUAGE ACQUISITION Message-ID: To the attention of colleagues who have received/purchased the volume PERSPECTIVES ON LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: SELECTED PAPERS FROM THE VIITH INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS FOR THE STUDY OF CHILD LANGUAGE Ayhan Aksu-Koc, Eser Erguvanli-Taylan, A. Sumru Ozsoy and Aylin Kuntay (Eds.), Istanbul: Bogazici University Press, 1998 ERRATA We apologize for an error of affiliation and address for Dr. Suzanne Quay in the list of contributors to the volume. The correct affiliation and address is as follows: Suzanne Quay Division of International Studies International Christian University 3-10-2 Osawa, Mitaka, Tokyo 181-8585 JAPAN From vclellen at mail.sdsu.edu Thu Mar 4 20:29:40 1999 From: vclellen at mail.sdsu.edu (Vera Gutierrez-Clellen) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 12:29:40 -0800 Subject: Bilingualism in SLI Message-ID: Does any one have any references of treatment studies with bilingual SLI children? I believe that Maggie Bruck has done some work in Canada but I don't have any references for her work. Thank you! Vera F. Gutierrez-Clellen, Ph.D. Department of Communicative Disorders, and SDSU/UCSD Joint Doctoral Program Language and Communicative Disorders San Diego State University 5500 Campanile Drive San Diego, CA 92182-1518 Office (619) 594-6645 FAX: (619) 594-7109 From asheldon at maroon.tc.umn.edu Fri Mar 5 04:16:48 1999 From: asheldon at maroon.tc.umn.edu (Amy L Sheldon) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 22:16:48 -0600 Subject: Confidentiality Issues, Back to the Future, & A. Bloom's brief Message-ID: Thanks to 20th C. technology, when Allison Bloom sent her message to this list, I experienced a major perspective shift. Technology enabled me to read a document from someone whose words heretofore were the object of investigation, who never spoke directly "to" us, and who I never heard string together such long utterances (what happened to the two word stage?). This forced me to rethink the timeless toddler person we "knew" as "Allison". Time moves on. Accessibility to people shifts. Now Allison speaks to us in long, eloquent, saavy paragraphs about our own research practices and is well-qualified to do so. Her post is a persuasive document which confirms the power and intimacy of the internet medium, and its capability of playing asynchronously with time, and with our expectations of how things "are" and who the people we study "are". Thinking through the subject's position is important in making policy about data in this technological environment. Amy Sheldon From eva.berglund at vua.uas.lul.se Fri Mar 5 09:34:51 1999 From: eva.berglund at vua.uas.lul.se (Eva Berglund) Date: Fri, 5 Mar 1999 04:34:51 -0500 Subject: DIGESTS Message-ID: DIGESTS From Kim.Plunkett at psy.ox.ac.uk Fri Mar 5 10:26:14 1999 From: Kim.Plunkett at psy.ox.ac.uk (Kim Plunkett) Date: Fri, 5 Mar 1999 10:26:14 GMT Subject: RA position Message-ID: University of Oxford Department of Experimental Psychology Research Assistant Academic-Related Research Staff Grade 1A: Salary stlg15,735-stlg23,651 pa An immediate vacancy exists for a research assistant to work on a project concerning first language acquisition. The research assistant will be working with the Oxford Babylab team and will be testing children between 6 and 36 months using the Preferential Looking Paradigm. The post involves contacting parents, scheduling, preparation of visual and auditory stimulus materials, testing of children and adults, and data analysis. Competence with Excel, SPSS and Word would be an advantage. Experience in working with young children, preferably of the above age group is essential. The position is funded for 12 months by a grant from the Leverhulme Trust and it is intended that the appointee will be in post on or before 1st May 1999. Informal enquiries about the research can be made to Professor Plunkett (Kim.Plunkett at psy.ox.ac.uk). Before submitting an application candidates should obtain further particulars from the Administrator, Department of Experimental Psychology, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3UD. (Email applications at psy.ox.ac.uk) or telephone 01865 271399 quoting Ref: RA/kpl/LEV. The closing date for applications is 19 March 1999. Interviews are planned for 29 March 1999. Further information on the department can be found on the web-site http://www.psych.ox.ac.uk From khirshpa at nimbus.ocis.temple.edu Sun Mar 7 21:15:56 1999 From: khirshpa at nimbus.ocis.temple.edu (Kathy Hirsh-Pasek) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1999 21:15:56 +0000 Subject: women in Afganistan Message-ID: The Taliban's War on Women: The government of Afghanistan is waging a war upon women. The situation is getting so bad that one person in an editorial of the Times compared the treatment of women there to the treatment of Jews in pre-Holocaust Poland. Since the Taliban took power in 1996, women have had to wear burqua and have been beaten and stoned in public for not having the proper attire, even if this means simply not having the mesh covering in front of their eyes. One woman was beaten to DEATH by an angry mob of fundamentalists for accidentally exposing her arm while she was driving. Another was stoned to death for trying to leave the country with a man that was not a relative. Women are not allowed to work or even go out in public without a male relative; professional women such as professors, translators, doctors, lawyers, artists and writers have been forced from their jobs and stuffed into their homes, so that depression is becoming so widespread that it has reached emergency levels. There is no way in such an extreme Islamic society to know the suicide rate with certainty, but relief workers are estimating that the suicide rate among women, who cannot find proper medication and treatment for severe depression and would rather take their lives than live in such conditions, has increased significantly. Homes where a woman is present must have their windows painted so that she can never be seen by outsiders. They must wear silent shoes so that they are never heard. Women live in fear of their lives for the slightest misbehaviour. Because they cannot work, those without male relatives or husbands are either starving to death or begging on the street, even if they hold Ph.D.'s. There are almost no medical facilities available for women, and relief workers, in protest, have mostly left the country, taking medicine and psychologists and other things necessary to treat the sky-rocketing level of depression among women. At one of the rare hospitals for women, a reporter found still, nearly lifeless bodies lying motionless on top of beds, wrapped in their burqua, unwilling to speak, eat, or do anything, but slowly wasting away. Others have gone mad and were seen crouched in corners, perpetually rocking or crying, most of them in fear. One doctor is considering, when what little medication that is left finally runs out, leaving these women in front of the president's residence as a form of peaceful protest. It is at the point where the term 'human rights violations' has become an understatement. Husbands have the power of life and death over their women relatives, especially their wives, but an angry mob has just as much right to stone or beat a woman, often to death, for exposing an inch of flesh or offending them in the slightest way. David Cornwell has said that those in the West should not judge the Afghan people for such treatment because it is a 'cultural thing', but this is not even true. Women enjoyed relative freedom, to work, dress generally as they wanted, and drive and appear in public alone until only 1996 -- the rapidity of this transition is the main reason, for the depression and suicide; women who were once educators or doctors or simply used to basic human freedoms are now severely restricted and treated as sub-human in the name of right-wing fundamentalist Islam. It is not their tradition or 'culture', but is alien to them, and it is extreme even for those cultures where fundamentalism is the rule. Besides, if we could excuse everything on cultural grounds, then we should not be appalled that the Carthaginians sacrificed their infant children, that little girls are circumcised in parts of Africa, that blacks in the deep south in the 1930's were lynched, prohibited from voting, and forced to submit to unjust Jim Crow laws. Everyone has a right to a tolerable human existence, even as women in a Muslim country in a part of the world that North Americans do not fully understand. If the U.S. can threaten military force in Kosovo in the name of human rights for the sake of ethnic Albanians, we can certainly express peaceful outrage at the oppression, murder and injustice committed against women by the Taliban. ************* STATEMENT: In signing this, we agree that the current treatment of women in Afghanistan is completely UNACCEPTABLE and deserves support and action by the people of the United Nations and that the current situation in Afghanistan will not be tolerated. Women's Rights is not a small issue anywhere and it is UNACCEPTABLE for women in 1999 to be treated as sub-human and so much as property. Equality and human decency is a RIGHT not a freedom, whether one lives in Afghanistan or anywhere else. ***** 1) Bruce J. Malina, Omaha, NE 2) Raymond Hobbs, Hamilton, ON, Canada 3) Elizabeth Demaray, Kanata, ON, Canada 4) Fred Demaray, Kanata, ON, Canada 5) Leslie Penrose, Tulsa, OK 6) Susan Ross, Perkins, OK 7) Jeannie Himes, Tulsa, OK 8) Lois Adams, Tulsa, OK 9) Mona M. Miller, Fort Collins, CO 10) Kara A. Sheldon, Colorado Springs, CO 11) Gay Victoria, Colorado Springs, CO 12) Catherine Euler, Leeds, UK 13) Margaret Talbot, Leeds, UK 14) Deena Scoretz, Berlin, GER 15) Claudia Brunath, Berlin, GER 16) Michaela Nickel, Berlin, GER 17) Christophe Mailliet, Berlin, GER 18) Gudrun Doll-Tepper, Berlin, GER 19) Bruce Kidd, Toronto, CANADA 20) Doug Richards, Toronto, CANADA 21) Caroline Sharp, Ottawa, CANADA 22) Michelle Van Vliet, Ottawa, CANADA 23) Darren Cates, Ottawa, CANADA 24) Daniel J. Moorcroft, Ottawa, CANADA 25) Mary K. Dickey, Ottawa CANADA 26) Jennifer MacLeod, Ottawa, CANADA 27) Rebecca Eaton, Toronto, CANADA 28) Jacques Mainguy, Ottawa, CANADA 29) Fred Holliss, Calgary, CANADA 30) Mike McDonald, Edmonton, CANADA 31) Kirby, Edmonton CANADA 32) Shauna de Cartier, Edmonton, CANADA 33) Chris Peters, Edmonton, CANADA 34) Genevieve Carolan, London, ENGLAND 35) Craig Tooley, London, UNITED KINGDOM 36) Joanna Topham, London, UNITED KINGDOM 37) Sarah Anderson-Edward, Guildford, UNITED KINGDOM 38) Sarah Phillis, North London, UNITED KINGDOM 39) Sally-Anne Wilson , Victoria, AUSTRALIA 40) Nicki Leech, New South Wales, AUSTRALIA 41) Kristi Edwards, Queensland, AUSTRALIA 42) Angelique Monk, Queensland,AUSTRALIA 43) Nicole Butler, Queensland, AUSTRALIA 44) Emily Mackenzie, Queensland, AUSTRALIA 45) Meg Kerwick, London, UNITED KINGDOM 46) Helen Campbell, London UNITED KINGDOM 47) Julie Peckham, San Diego, California UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 48) Carolyn Salerno, San Diego, California, United States of America 49)Bonnie Jones, Tustin, California, United States of America 50) Alison Clarke-Stewart, Laguna Beach, CA, USA 51) Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Ardmore, PA, USA **** Please sign to support, and include your town and country. Then copy and e-mail to as many people as possible. **** If you receive this list with more than 50 NAMES on it, please e-mail a copy of it to: mailto:sarabande at brandeis.edu Even if you decide not to sign, please be considerate and do not kill the petition, pass it on. Thank you. It is best to copy and paste the petition into a new email rather than forwarding the petition, to keep the number of >>>> forwarding symbols from getting out of control. Back to Inbox Copyright © 1997-99 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved. >> >> >> >> >> >> >>_________________________________________________________ >>DO YOU YAHOO!? >>Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com > From edwards at cogsci.Berkeley.EDU Mon Mar 8 03:15:40 1999 From: edwards at cogsci.Berkeley.EDU (Jane A. Edwards) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1999 19:15:40 -0800 Subject: HOAX: women in Afganistan Message-ID: The "women in Afganistan" posting circulated recently on the Berkeley Linguistics Department list and was exposed as a hoax by Eve Sweetser. She also suggested 2 more effective means of political action. I accidentally deleted her original message, but fortunately its contents were picked up by Jeremy Sirota and are indicated in the ">" part of the appended. As for "considerateness" -- >Even if you decide not to sign, please be considerate and do not kill >the petition, pass it on. Thank you. the Brandeis email address to which the petition was to be emailed has been closed. Whether it is "considerate" or not, it's pointless to propagate it farther. -Jane Edwards --------- Date: Wed, 17 Feb 1999 19:49:41 -0800 To: ling-dept at uclink4.berkeley.edu, matisoff at socrates.berkeley.edu From: jermy at uclink4.berkeley.edu Subject: Re: Afghan Women / Femmes afghanes I completely agree with what Eve says below. There is too much email waste these days which is contributing to the mental deterioration of our society. I believe we need to stand up for our God-given rights. That is why I am sitting at my computer right now sending out this email. We need to start an email petition to stop all this email garbage, and I will be the first one to sign it: 1. Jeremy Sirota, outraged student 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. >PLEASE, GUYS, think about these petitions which pile up e-mail >somewhere. The origin account for this petition about Afghanistan >is ALREADY dead, abolished by the Brandeis web-administrators. >And I'm not surprised, since I've received no less than eleven >copies of the petition in the last couple of weeks - imagine >the rajah's-chessboard effect at the home location. >THIS IS THE USUAL STORY with such e-petitions. > >THERE ARE SOME MORE RESPONSIBLE WAYS TO GARNER SUPPORT FOR A >GOOD CAUSE BY ELECTRONIC MEANS: > >(1) Send out e-mail urging people to write directly to, e.g., >President Clinton - whose e-mail IS set up to handle volume, I assure >you! - or to send faxes, paper mail, etc., to appropriate >recipients. > >(2) Set up a petition ON A WEB-SITE: > People can access the site and sign the petition >electronically, and there is no pileup of e-mail, only accumulation >of a list of names. > >Thanks, >Eve > > From eva.berglund at vua.uas.lul.se Mon Mar 8 13:06:43 1999 From: eva.berglund at vua.uas.lul.se (eva.berglund at vua.uas.lul.se) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 14:06:43 +0100 Subject: Internet addresses Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES subscribers, We are interested in obtaining the Internet addresses to homepages on child language and communication. Best regards, -Eva Berglund and Marten Eriksson From margo_malakoff at HMC.Edu Mon Mar 8 17:00:07 1999 From: margo_malakoff at HMC.Edu (Margo Malakoff) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 09:00:07 -0800 Subject: women in Afganistan Message-ID: This e-mail was begun as a well-intentioned petition that got out of control. The content of the petition is accurate -- however, signing and passing on the petition will not do anything. Because of the amount of e-mail that the petition generated, the e-mail address of the original sender (sarabande at brandeis.edu )was closed some months ago. Sending e-mail to that address will result in a reply message to that effect, along with some information about Human Rights groups you can contact. I just wanted to comment that the contents are not a hoax; however, the petition is currently just junk-e-mail with nowhere to go. -Margo Malakoff ********************************************************************* Margo Malakoff Office: (909) 607-3812 Asst. Professor of Psychology FAX: (909) 607-7600 Harvey Mudd College 301 E 12th St. URL:http://www4.hmc.edu:8001/humanities/malakoff/ Claremont, CA 91711 Demandez-vous: le mouton oui ou non a-t-il mange' la fleur? Et vous verrez comme tout change..... -St. Exupery (Le Petit Prince) From macw at cmu.edu Mon Mar 8 17:46:21 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 12:46:21 -0500 Subject: Internet resources and Eva Berglund's address Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, Eva Berglund's last letter raises a useful point. It would be great to have a better set of links to Internet resources on the issue of language learning. Right now, this page lists 7 other sites: http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/sites.html They include SALT, CompProf, JCHAT, IASCL, Neonatal Cry, UCSF (Merzenich), and the Wisconsin symposium page. Presumably there are dozens more. I tried sending reply mail to Eva asking her to collect answers to send to me, but the mailer in Sweden said her address was ambiguous and returned my message. So, if you can think of other sites to include, please send the info to both me and Eva or even just post it to info-childes. Many thanks. Along this line, I have found it really easy to search the info-childes archive at http://listserv.linguistlist.org/archives/info-childes.html and I would recommend that site to others too. --Brian MacWhinney From giyer at crl.ucsd.edu Tue Mar 9 05:12:24 1999 From: giyer at crl.ucsd.edu (Gowri Iyer) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 21:12:24 -0800 Subject: Req: Information on early Language devt. in Tamil Message-ID: Dear Info-childes subscribers, I am a doctoral student at UCSD/ SDSU. I was looking for research work done in early lexical development in Tamil-speaking children. I did a literature search but came up with very little information and none relevant to early language development in Tamil speaking children. I would really appreciate it if you could give me any information pertaining to this issue. Thanks in advance. If I do get many responses I will forward the information to info-childes (subscribers) for anyone else who might be interested. - Best Regards Gowri ============================================================================ Gowri K.Iyer Room E, 2330 Alvarado Ct. Center for Research in Language 0526 Language and Communicative Disorders University of Caifornia, San Diego Joint Doctoral Program SDSU/UCSD 9500 Gilman Drive San Diego, CA 92182-1518 La Jolla, CA 92093-0526 Ph# (619)594-8669-(O) Ph# (619)534-3926 e-mail: giyer at crl.ucsd.edu =========================================================================== = From T.Argus at crebit.ee Tue Mar 9 17:41:44 1999 From: T.Argus at crebit.ee (TONIS ARGUS) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 14:41:44 -300 Subject: Triplets Message-ID: Does anybody know of any work that has been done on the language development in groups of triplets? Some references would be appreciated. Thanks in advance. Reili Argus From T.Argus at crebit.ee Tue Mar 9 17:44:12 1999 From: T.Argus at crebit.ee (TONIS ARGUS) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 14:44:12 -300 Subject: Finno-Ugric languages Message-ID: Has anyone looked at questioning in the Finno-Ugric languages? Some references would be appreciated. Victoria Parmas Mail to: Victoria at epl.ee From edwards at cogsci.Berkeley.EDU Tue Mar 9 20:28:32 1999 From: edwards at cogsci.Berkeley.EDU (Jane A. Edwards) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 12:28:32 -0800 Subject: women in Afghanistan Message-ID: > This e-mail was begun as a well-intentioned petition that got out of > control. The content of the petition is accurate -- however, signing and > passing on the petition will not do anything. Because of the amount of > e-mail that the petition generated, the e-mail address of the original > sender (sarabande at brandeis.edu )was closed some months ago. Sending e-mail > to that address will result in a reply message to that effect, along with > some information about Human Rights groups you can contact. I just wanted > to comment that the contents are not a hoax; however, the petition is > currently just junk-e-mail with nowhere to go. Well, well-intentioned or not, the message deceives people into thinking they're signing a petition and then it doesn't deliver. To me, that's a hoax. I'm not questioning the seriousness of the plight of Afghan women (though it would be nice if they would give one specific reference we could look up), but there are at least 2 political strategies which would be more effective than e-petitions. Why not use those instead? Finally, e-petitions are extremely similar to chain letters: you add your name to the bottom and are urged under fear of being "inconsiderate" to not break the chain. It's significant that chain letters are prohibited in many places - due to their adverse effects on the net. -Jane Edwards From cbutt at nmu.edu Tue Mar 9 22:41:21 1999 From: cbutt at nmu.edu (Corinna Butt) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 17:41:21 -0500 Subject: MLU v.s. MLR...what do you think? Message-ID: Does anyone know of studies or literature which compare mean length utterance (in morphemes) to mean length of response (the average number of WORDS per utterance)? I am wondering how much of a difference there is between scores derived from each measure for a whole langauge sample (specifically, the langauge of a normal preschool age child with an MLU of 1.00 to 4.5 or so). If anyone can provide some references which address this topic, or if anyone has any thoughts on the matter, your input would be very much appreciated! Thank you . Corinna From kevin at psy.uwa.edu.au Wed Mar 10 09:59:09 1999 From: kevin at psy.uwa.edu.au (Kevin Durkin) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 17:59:09 +0800 Subject: The acquisition of tense-aspect morphology (Shirai, Slobin & Weist) Message-ID: First Language is pleased to announce the appearance of a Special Issue: The acquisition of tense-aspect morphology Edited by: Yasuhiro SHIRAI, Dan I. SLOBIN & Richard E. WEIST Contents: Introduction (Yasuhiro Shirai, Dan I. Slobin & Richard E. Weist) The role of input vs. universal predispositions in the emergence of tense-aspect morphology: evidence from Turkish (Ayhan Aksu-Koc) The emergence of tense-aspect morphology in Japanese: universal predisposition? (Yasuhiro Shirai) The acquisition of lexical and grammatical aspect in Chinese (Ping Li & Melissa Bowerman) The role of Aktionsart in the acquisition of Russian aspect (Sabine Stoll) The temporal interpretation of Dutch children's root infinitivals: the effect of eventivity (Frank Wijnen) Reflexive and middle markers in early child language acquisition: evidence from Mexican Spanish (Donna Jackson-Maldonado, Ricardo Maldonado & Donna J. Thal) http://www.alphaacademic.co.uk/fl.htm From Elma.Blom at LET.UU.NL Wed Mar 10 16:37:53 1999 From: Elma.Blom at LET.UU.NL (elma blom) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 17:37:53 +0100 Subject: modality/gerund Message-ID: Dear Info-Childes subscribers, Can anybody help me with one of the following questions (or perhaps both)? 1. How do English speaking children (in particular between 2-3 years old) express their wishes, needs, desires and intentions? Are there, for example, studies on the use of verb forms like "gonna" and "wanna"? 2. Do English speaking children (2-3 years old) use the gerund (V-ing)? I would also appreciate any references on this topic. Thanks in advance for any help, Elma Blom Elma Blom Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS Trans 10 NL-3512 JK Utrecht tel: 0031.(0)30.2536040 fax: 0031.(0)30.2536000 e-mail: elma.blom at let.uu.nl From lmb32 at columbia.edu Wed Mar 10 18:11:29 1999 From: lmb32 at columbia.edu (Lois Bloom) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 13:11:29 -0500 Subject: modality/gerund Message-ID: Well, for starters. . . On Wed, 10 Mar 1999, elma blom wrote: > Dear Info-Childes subscribers, > > > Can anybody help me with one of the following questions (or perhaps both)? > > 1. How do English speaking children (in particular between 2-3 years old) > express their wishes, needs, desires and intentions? Are there, for > example, studies on the use of verb forms like "gonna" and "wanna"? First, in general: Bloom, L., Lahey, M., Hood, L., Lifter, K., & Fiess, K. (1980). Complex sentences: Acquisition of syntactic connectives and the meaning relations they encode. Journal of Child Language, 7, 235-261. And 2nd, more specifically re: wanna, gonna, etc: Bloom, L., Tackeff, J., & Lahey, M. (1984). Learning to in complement constructions. Journal of Child Language, 11, 391-406. > 2. Do English speaking children (2-3 years old) use the gerund (V-ing)? I > would also appreciate any references on this topic. Bloom, L., Lifter, K., & Hafitz, J. (1980). The semantics of verbs and the development of verb inflections in child language. Language, 56, 386-412. > > Thanks in advance for any help, > > > Elma Blom > > > > > > > Elma Blom > Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS > Trans 10 > NL-3512 JK Utrecht > tel: 0031.(0)30.2536040 > fax: 0031.(0)30.2536000 > e-mail: elma.blom at let.uu.nl > > > > > > > From molsen at umiacs.umd.edu Wed Mar 10 20:21:45 1999 From: molsen at umiacs.umd.edu (Mari Broman Olsen) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 15:21:45 -0500 Subject: De Lemos on acquiring Brazilian Portugese Message-ID: I have a reference in my notes to a work by 'de Lemos', who studied (inter alia) acquisition of aspect/tense in Brazilian Portugese. I don't seem to have a paper, or a full reference: does anyone have a full reference to this work? Thanks much. Mari Broman Olsen, Research Associate University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies 3141 A.V. Williams Building University of Maryland College Park, MD 20742 EMAIL: molsen at umiacs.umd.edu PHONE: (301) 405-6754 FAX: (301) 314-9658 WEB: http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~molsen ********* From knelson at email.GC.cuny.edu Thu Mar 11 21:31:50 1999 From: knelson at email.GC.cuny.edu (KATHERINE NELSON) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 16:31:50 -0500 Subject: Narratives from the Crib Message-ID: I've been informed that there are about 30 copies left of the title Narratives from the Crib, and that it will not be reprinted. If anyone is interested in purchasing a copy you might want to do it now from Harvard University Press @ $39.95. Note that the original data on which the book was based is now available in the Childes data base. Katherine Nelson knelson at email.gc.cuny.edu Developmental Psychology CUNY GSUC 33 West 42nd St. New York, NY 10036 212-642-2554 From bochenek at absat.net.au Fri Mar 12 23:28:08 1999 From: bochenek at absat.net.au (Bochenek) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 07:28:08 +0800 Subject: oral to literate language transition Message-ID: I'm not sure HOW to include a URL. I've tried the help function. Could you assit please? -----Original Message----- From: Info-CHILDES To: Bochenek Date: Friday, 12 March 1999 3:04 Subject: Re: oral to literate language transition >Your post to Info-CHILDES was rejected because an enclosure was present. >Instead, please include a URL where subscribers can retrieve the file and >resend your message. > > >-------------------- Original Message Follows -------------------- >Hello All, >I'm a Ph.D student (at the University of Notre Dame Australia) trying to >document an integrated continuum of phonological/auditory/oral language >development, to identify critical indicators for the transition from oral to >literate language. > >I'd appreciate being directed to people/papers with a developmental view of >the "interface" of factors in oral-literate language development. > >Please reply to: >bochenek at absat.net.au >With thanks! >Carmel Bochenek. > > > > > >------------------ MIME Information follows ------------------ > >This is a multi-part message in MIME format. > >------=_NextPart_000_0028_01BE6D1F.B7CF9140 >Content-Type: text/plain; > charset="iso-8859-1" >Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable > > ><<<<<< See above "Message Body" >>>>>> > >------=_NextPart_000_0028_01BE6D1F.B7CF9140 >Content-Type: text/html; > charset="iso-8859-1" >Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable > > ><<<<<< See Enclosure named "text" >>>>>> > >------=_NextPart_000_0028_01BE6D1F.B7CF9140-- > > > From Roberta at UDel.Edu Fri Mar 12 17:53:50 1999 From: Roberta at UDel.Edu (Roberta Golinkoff) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 12:53:50 -0500 Subject: job for a colleague's lab Message-ID: JOB ANNOUNCEMENT Do you know any graduating students who want to go to graduate school but would like to take a year or two off first and work in the field? Starting this summer, I will need a full-time research assistant/project coordinator to work on my NICHD funded project on learning disabilities in children. In addition to having a background in psychology or child development, the individual must have good people skills, be a self starter, and have experience with (or interest in) working with children. Please have anyone who is interested call me at 302-831-4651 or write me via email at njordan at udel.edu. Many thanks for your help. Nancy C. Jordan -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Nancy C. Jordan Associate Professor, School of Education 303D Willard Hall University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716 Phone:(302)831-4651 Fax:(302)831-4445 e-mail:njordan at udel.edu -------------------------------------------------------------------------- From Ehrenfest at aol.com Fri Mar 12 18:57:41 1999 From: Ehrenfest at aol.com (Ehrenfest at aol.com) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 13:57:41 EST Subject: foreign adoptions Message-ID: I am looking for basic material about language development, and how to facilitate it, in children adopted at 12 mos. from China. Thank you. Liz Ehrenfest Steinglass From meg at scf.usc.edu Fri Mar 12 20:37:17 1999 From: meg at scf.usc.edu (Maria E. Gallardo) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 12:37:17 -0800 Subject: code-switching data search Message-ID: Does anyone have information on code-switching databases that would be available to examine, specifically in Spanish-English, but also I'm really hoping to find data involving English and other Romance languages other than Spanish. And also Spanish and other Romance languages, i.e. Spanish-Italian, Spanish-French code-switching. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Many thanks, Maria E. Gallardo meg at usc.edu From meg at scf.usc.edu Fri Mar 12 20:55:26 1999 From: meg at scf.usc.edu (Maria E. Gallardo) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 12:55:26 -0800 Subject: basque-Spanish code-switching Message-ID: Does anyone know about any studies on Basque-Spanish code-switching? I am hoping to find some published literature on the topic, so I would appreciate any help. Many thanks, Maria E. Gallardo meg at usc.edu From ann at hawaii.edu Fri Mar 12 22:20:34 1999 From: ann at hawaii.edu (Ann Peters) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 12:20:34 -1000 Subject: email for Frank Keil? Message-ID: Can anybody give me an email address for Frank Keil? thanks! Ann Peters From alekdep at pob.huji.ac.il Fri Mar 12 23:44:29 1999 From: alekdep at pob.huji.ac.il (ALEK & NINA) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 01:44:29 +0200 Subject: important - concernig a new computer virus Message-ID: Subject: VERY VERY IMPORTANT If you receive an email titled "It Takes Guts to Say 'Jesus'" DO NOT open it. It will erase everything on your hard drive. Forward this letter out to as many people as you can. This is a new, very malicious virus and not many people know about it. This information was announced yesterday morning from IBM; please share it with everyone that might access the internet From thoreson at cc.wwu.edu Sat Mar 13 14:33:01 1999 From: thoreson at cc.wwu.edu (Catherine Crain-Thoreson) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 06:33:01 -0800 Subject: important - concernig a new computer virus Message-ID: I am amazed that this hoax keeps going around and around, though it does change a little. Last year, it was Microsoft who supposedly endorsed it, now it's supposedly IBM. It is *impossible* for an email message to erase your hard drive. My department has warned us that there are some new viruses that you have to watch out for in attachments to email messages, though. What I've been told is not to open an email with an attachment unless you know the sender. Perhaps I'll find out that this is this an urban legend as well -- Always be wary of any message that says "very important -- forward to everyone you know," it is the recipe for SPAM. Catherine Crain-Thoreson At 01:44 AM 3/13/99 +0200, ALEK & NINA wrote: >Subject: VERY VERY IMPORTANT > >If you receive an email titled "It Takes Guts to Say >'Jesus'" DO NOT open it. It will erase everything on your hard drive. Forward >this letter out to as many people as you can. This is a new, very malicious >virus and not many people know about it. This information was announced yesterday morning >from IBM; please share it with everyone that might access the internet > > ************************************ Catherine Crain-Thoreson, Ph.D. Psychology Department Western Washington University Bellingham, WA 98225-9089 Tel: (360) 650-3168 Fax: (360) 650-7305 email: thoreson at cc.wwu.edu From cbutt at nmu.edu Mon Mar 15 00:19:01 1999 From: cbutt at nmu.edu (Corinna Butt) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 19:19:01 -0500 Subject: MLUm & MLUw: summary of responses Message-ID: Dear info-childes members, As requested, here is a summary of the responses to the question I posted about a week ago: "Is there a difference between MLU in words and MLU in morphemes?" Responses included references to both published studies, as well as some anecdotical responses. Thanks to all who responded! 1.) Studies of non-English speaking children showed high correlations between MLUw and MLUm. Hickey, T. (1991). Mean length of utterance and the acquisition of Irish. Journal of Child Language, 18, 553-569. Aguado, G. (1988). Appraisal of the morpho-syntactic competence in a 2.5 year old child. Infancia y Aprendizaje, 43, 75-95. Thordardottir, E., & Weismer, S. (1998). Mean length of utterance and other language sample measures in early Icelandic. First Language, 18 (52 pt. 1), 1-32. 2.) A study in press by M. Malakoff (to appear in Applied Developmental Psych) found high correlation (.97) between the two measures for 24 month old African American children with low SES. 3.) Responses from researchers who addressed this question either directly or indirectly in unpublished studies generally reported they recalled a high correlation between MLUm and MLUw. The one exception was a study of Hebrew children, which found a difference between the scores of the two measures. Others speculated that the difference in MLUm and MLUw was greater for langauge impaired childern than for normal children. This is all the info I have for now. If anyone has any more information, I'd still be interested. Thanks again! -Corinna Butt From bates at crl.ucsd.edu Mon Mar 15 01:18:50 1999 From: bates at crl.ucsd.edu (Elizabeth Bates) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 17:18:50 -0800 Subject: MLUm & MLUw: summary of responses Message-ID: Just a quick observation regarding the difference between MLU in words and MLU in morphemes: I agree with the various authors who have concluded that the two measures are highly correlated. In fact, MLU of either sort tends to be "co-linear" (correlate highly) not only with each other but with a whole lot of complexity measures, including various complicated measures of propositional complexity. Many years ago Lynn Snyder and Inge Bretherton and I took great pains to apply some of the candidate propositional complexity measures of the time (e.g. Kintsch's procedures; Antinucci & Parisi's proposals) to our Boulder data (the same data reported in "From first words to grammar", now housed at least in part in CHILDES). In the end we decided not to publish the results, despite all the efforts involved, because the various indices that we were comparing were so highly correlated, with each other and with MLU in morphemes, that they didn't tell us anything that we didn't already know from old-fashioned MLU. The matter is treated as a footnote somewhere in the book. However, there is another point worth making here, particularly in the context of cross-linguistic research. Correlations tell us about the individual differences between children, i.e. children who are high on A are also high on B, children who are low on A are also low on B, and so forth. That does *NOT* mean, though, that two highly correlated measures give us the same information or CONTENT. Weight and height are highly correlated across the normal population, for example, and yet we would agree that each one yields quite distinct information. To illustrate the point: back in Boulder we also did a study (also unpublished...) comparing MLU in three free-speech contexts involving the child and his/her mother: having a snack, playing on the floor with standard toys, reading a book together. The MLU measures for these three situations were highly correlated, in the sense that individual differences on one correlated with individual differences on the other. However, there were interesting mean differences between situations in the kind of speech that was elicited, in directions that all child language researchers will recognize (more pronominal forms in free play; more nouns and adjectives in book reading; more past and future reference in the snack -- after all, how much is there to say about the here and now in a snack, i.e. about the cracker and cheese?). This latter point has recently become important to us again, in the context of a cross-linguistic project that I am currently carrying out with Cristina Caselli, Antonella Devescovi, Judy Reilly, and several students in Italy and San Diego (with sage advice provided now and then by Elena Pizzuto). We are looking at grammatical development in English vs. Italian two-year-olds who are matched for vocabulary size (using the MacArthur CDI). The point of this exercise is to look at cross-linguistic differences in grammatical complexity and morphological marking when the children are matched for levels of lexical development. We have already shown WITHIN each of these languages that there is a very powerful relationship between vocabulary size and grammar (even when variation in age is regressed out -- recent paper by Caselli et al. in JCL). However, we also know (on informal grounds) that the AMOUNT of grammatical morphological that Italian children have to master at any given point in development is a lot more than English children have to master. Our question was: how can we show this cross-linguistic difference in quantitative terms? So we have developed a series of MLU measures ranging from MLU content words, total MLU in words (including functors), and several different indices of MLU in morphemes designed to pick of similarities and differences in the morphological options between these two languages. The project is still underway, and I can only cite preliminary results, but it looks like (1) there continue to be strong correlations between vocabulary size and any complexity metric, within either language, but (2) our ability to detect differences between the two languages is quite dependent on the MLU measure that we choose (e.g. differences in terms of MLU in words and differences in terms of MLU in morphemes give very different perspectives on cross-language variation). I hope this is helpful -- and we would very much appreciate hearing from anyone who has asked a similar cross-language question. Advice very welcome. -liz bates >Dear info-childes members, >As requested, here is a summary of the responses to the question I >posted about a week ago: "Is there a difference between MLU in words and >MLU in morphemes?" Responses included references to both published >studies, as well as some anecdotical responses. Thanks to all who >responded! > >1.) Studies of non-English speaking children showed high correlations >between MLUw and MLUm. > Hickey, T. (1991). Mean length of utterance and the acquisition >of Irish. Journal of Child Language, 18, 553-569. > > Aguado, G. (1988). Appraisal of the morpho-syntactic competence >in a 2.5 year old child. Infancia y Aprendizaje, 43, 75-95. > > Thordardottir, E., & Weismer, S. (1998). Mean length of >utterance and other language sample measures in early Icelandic. First >Language, 18 (52 pt. 1), 1-32. > >2.) A study in press by M. Malakoff (to appear in Applied Developmental >Psych) found high correlation (.97) between the two measures for 24 >month old African American children with low SES. > >3.) Responses from researchers who addressed this question either >directly or indirectly in unpublished studies generally reported they >recalled a high correlation between MLUm and MLUw. The one exception >was a study of Hebrew children, which found a difference between the >scores of the two measures. Others speculated that the difference in >MLUm and MLUw was greater for langauge impaired childern than for normal >children. > >This is all the info I have for now. If anyone has any more >information, I'd still be interested. >Thanks again! -Corinna Butt From jeff at elda.fr Mon Mar 15 08:34:36 1999 From: jeff at elda.fr (Jeff ALLEN) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 09:34:36 +0100 Subject: concerning a new computer virus Message-ID: At 06:33 13/03/99 -0800, Catherine Crain-Thoreson wrote: >I am amazed that this hoax keeps going around and around, though it does >change a little. Last year, it was Microsoft who supposedly endorsed it, >now it's supposedly IBM. It is *impossible* for an email message to erase >your hard drive. Exactly. All of the "Good times", "Trojan Horse", etc virus warnings are hoaxes, that means they are fake. All you need to do is spend 2 minutes going to AltaVista and search on "virus hoax" "urban legend" and check the first 5 sites to find lists of valid information on which viruses are real and which are false. >My department has warned us that there are some new >viruses that you have to watch out for in attachments to email messages, >though. What I've been told is not to open an email with an attachment >unless you know the sender. Perhaps I'll find out that this is this an >urban legend as well -- Actually, this is quite true and is a more recent phenomenon. The real Happy99.exe virus has been travelling over the Internet, including via discussion lists, since January 99. I received 2 copies of it last week, including one via a list. It is a real virus, and is fairly easy to remove. However, it crashes listservers quite well. >Always be wary of any message that says "very important -- forward to >everyone you know," it is the recipe for SPAM. Exactly. In all messages that I send on the topic of virus warnings and hoaxes, I clearly indicate that one should get informed about real viruses and virus hoaxes BEFORE ever sending out a message to the public. I have changed jobs recently (was in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University up until 1 December 98), so I do not have access to all of my standard reply messages on this topic. Like I said earlier in this message, just use a search engine to look up "virus hoax" and "urban legend". I believe one of the first five sites is the National Computer Security Association in the US. The information they provide is authoritative. Best, Jeff Allen ================================================= Jeff ALLEN - Directeur Technique European Language Resources Association (ELRA) & European Language Resources Distribution Agency (ELDA) (Agence Européenne de Distribution des Ressources Linguistiques) 55, rue Brillat-Savarin 75013 Paris FRANCE Tel: (+33) (0) 1.43.13.33.33 - Fax: (+33) (0) 1.43.13.33.30 mailto:jeff at elda.fr http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/home.html From s.velleman at bangor.ac.uk Mon Mar 15 11:23:03 1999 From: s.velleman at bangor.ac.uk (Shelley L. Velleman) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 11:23:03 +0000 Subject: sibling effects Message-ID: I'm looking for any studies with data (or possible implications) about the impact of an older sibling with disordered phonology (or language) on the phonological/language development of a younger sibling (who is presumably otherwise normally-developing, which is the catch, of course! -- How can we know for sure?) Twin studies where one is delayed/disordered would also be of interest. Thanks. Shelley Velleman (currently @ Univ. of Wales at Bangor) From macw at cmu.edu Mon Mar 15 15:11:58 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 10:11:58 -0500 Subject: sibling effects Message-ID: Dear Shelley, Gina Conti-Ramsden's data has this general shape. You should contact her about the specific questions you have in mind. --Brian MacWhinney --On Mon, Mar 15, 1999 11:23 AM +0000 "Shelley L. Velleman" wrote: > I'm looking for any studies with data (or possible implications) about > the impact of an older sibling with disordered phonology (or language) > on the phonological/language development of a younger sibling (who is > presumably otherwise normally-developing, which is the catch, of > course! -- How can we know for sure?) Twin studies where one is > delayed/disordered would also be of interest. > > Thanks. > > Shelley Velleman > (currently @ Univ. of Wales at Bangor) > From tomoko at Psych.Stanford.EDU Mon Mar 15 17:15:39 1999 From: tomoko at Psych.Stanford.EDU (Tomoko Wakabayashi) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 09:15:39 -0800 Subject: important - concerning a new computer virus Message-ID: Just for your information-- since this is a timely topic in our family right now. My father's computer recently got a virus through an attachment sent by somebody he KNOWS. It seems to be a famous one, called "Happy 1999." As soon as he opened the attachment, a firework came up on his screen. Once you get it, this virus automatically gets attached to every e-mail you send. Thus, you will be sending viruses to people without your knowing about it. I don't know the details concerning what "Happy 1999" does to your computer besides this, but it is worth a caution not to open any attachment by this name, or, according to my father, any which ends with .exe or .con. Tomoko Wakabayashi On Sat, 13 Mar 1999, Catherine Crain-Thoreson wrote: > I am amazed that this hoax keeps going around and around, though it does > change a little. Last year, it was Microsoft who supposedly endorsed it, > now it's supposedly IBM. It is *impossible* for an email message to erase > your hard drive. My department has warned us that there are some new > viruses that you have to watch out for in attachments to email messages, > though. What I've been told is not to open an email with an attachment > unless you know the sender. Perhaps I'll find out that this is this an > urban legend as well -- > > Always be wary of any message that says "very important -- forward to > everyone you know," it is the recipe for SPAM. > > Catherine Crain-Thoreson > > At 01:44 AM 3/13/99 +0200, ALEK & NINA wrote: > >Subject: VERY VERY IMPORTANT > > > >If you receive an email titled "It Takes Guts to Say > >'Jesus'" DO NOT open it. It will erase everything on your hard drive. Forward > >this letter out to as many people as you can. This is a new, very malicious > >virus and not many people know about it. This information was announced > yesterday morning > >from IBM; please share it with everyone that might access the internet > > > > > > > > ************************************ > Catherine Crain-Thoreson, Ph.D. > Psychology Department > Western Washington University > Bellingham, WA 98225-9089 > > Tel: (360) 650-3168 > Fax: (360) 650-7305 > email: thoreson at cc.wwu.edu > > From jeff at elda.fr Mon Mar 15 17:58:16 1999 From: jeff at elda.fr (Jeff ALLEN) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 18:58:16 +0100 Subject: The Happy99 virus Message-ID: >My father's computer recently got a virus through an attachment sent by >somebody he KNOWS. It seems to be a famous one, called "Happy 1999." As >soon as he opened the attachment, a firework came up on his screen. Once >you get it, this virus automatically gets attached to every e-mail you >send. Thus, you will be sending viruses to people without your knowing >about it. I don't know the details concerning what "Happy 1999" does to >your computer besides this, but it is worth a caution not to >open any attachment by this name, or, according to my father, any which >ends with .exe or .con. Yes, Happy99 is a real virus. It always comes as an attachment because it infects your Winsock file. It has been sweeping across the Internet since January 99 and has infiltrated many discussion lists, crashing the servers, and infecting computers of those who receive the message, click on the attachment and see the wonderful fireworks display. I am sending a separate message to Tomoko Wakabayashi on how to remove the virus from the computer. I've helped several people eradicate Happy99 this past week. I have been telling many people lately to Never, never open a .exe attached file. There are some exceptions, but you must really know where you are getting the file from and verify that they have regular anti-virus procedures set-up in-house at their institution, before you choose to open the file. Best, Jeff ================================================= Jeff ALLEN - Directeur Technique European Language Resources Association (ELRA) & European Language Resources Distribution Agency (ELDA) (Agence Européenne de Distribution des Ressources Linguistiques) 55, rue Brillat-Savarin 75013 Paris FRANCE Tel: (+33) (0) 1.43.13.33.33 - Fax: (+33) (0) 1.43.13.33.30 mailto:jeff at elda.fr http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/home.html From russgrd2 at psych1.psy.sunysb.edu Mon Mar 15 21:38:50 1999 From: russgrd2 at psych1.psy.sunysb.edu (russgrd2 at psych1.psy.sunysb.edu) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 16:38:50 -0500 Subject: How do you determine the difficulty of individual words? Message-ID: I need to write a story in which I manipulate the difficulty of individual words. I need a version with easy to read words and a version with hard to read words. I have not been able to locate an objective method for determining the difficulty of these words. Is anyone aware of a method that might help me in this task? --Brett Stoltz ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ | Brett Stoltz | Department of Psychology | SUNY at Stony Brook | Stony Brook, NY 11794-1200 | voice: (516) 632-7870 | fax: (516) 632-7871 | e-mail: russgrd2 at psych1.psy.sunysb.edu | Stony Brook Reading and Language Project | http://www.read+lang.sbs.sunysb.edu/ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ From snowcat at gse.harvard.edu Tue Mar 16 13:38:15 1999 From: snowcat at gse.harvard.edu (Catherine Snow) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 08:38:15 -0500 Subject: MLUm & MLUw: summary of responses Message-ID: > A quick postscript to Liz Bates' contribution concerning MLU: in a > paper that appeared in First Lanugage in 1996, Pam Rollins, John > Willett and I reported a similar analysis of MLU within English > speakers (Predictors of MLU: Lexical versus morphological > developments. First Language, 16, 243-259, 1996). Some children > produce an MLU of 2.0 using almost exclusively content words, whereas > others who look identical on the portmanteau measure have much more > morphology. Of course, the relative poverty of the English > morphological system limits the total possible contribution of > morphological complexity more than in Italian. > > So it seems that the value of MLU as a very general index of language > development may reflect, to some extent, its insensitivity to various > component processes. > > And a bibliographical postscript as well: > Arlman-Rupp, A., van Niekerk de Haan, D., and van de > Sandt-Koenderman, M. (1976). Brown's early stages: Some evidence > from Dutch. Journal of Child Language, 3, 267-274. Correlations > between MLU in morphemes, in words, and in syllables are reported for > four children Dutch-speaking children observed five times each. The > MLU-m to MLU-syllables correlations ranged from .91 to .99. The > MLU-m to MLU-word correlations ranged from .98 to .99. > > ---------------------------------------- > Catherine Snow > Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education > Harvard Graduate School of Education > Larsen 3 > Cambridge, MA 02138 > tel: 617 - 495 3563 > fax: 617 - 495 5771 > New email address: Snowcat at gse.harvard.edu > or: Catherine_Snow at harvard.edu > > > ---------------------------------------- Catherine Snow Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education Harvard Graduate School of Education Larsen 3 Cambridge, MA 02138 tel: 617 - 495 3563 fax: 617 - 495 5771 New email address: Snowcat at gse.harvard.edu or: Catherine_Snow at harvard.edu From ann at hawaii.edu Tue Mar 16 19:22:06 1999 From: ann at hawaii.edu (Ann Peters) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 09:22:06 -1000 Subject: MLUw and MLUm Message-ID: A follow-up to Liz and Catherine: I agree that, especially in early morphosyntactic production there are two things going on, and they probably need to be assessed differently. On the one hand there is [A] the stringing together of content words/ideas (MLUw?); on the other is [B] the increasing inclusion of grammatical markers (MLUm?). The trouble with English is that so many of the grammatical markers are free morphemes that one is tempted to think that counting *words* is the way to go. However, these capacities probably develop separately, showing up as individual differences in early combination. In fact, the kids who go the [B] route are probably the "frame and slot" kids who structure their early combinations around morphosyntactic frames. I think one sees these patterns even more clearly when one looks at languages (like Italian) with more bound morphology. I have found it useful to compute MLU in two ways: 1) just open-class lexical items (excluding free grammatical morphemes), and 2) all morphemes, whether bound or free. I believe these measures would equate better across languages than the traditional MLUw that grew out of working with English. I have tried to address some of these issues in my chapter in Slobin's vol.5: A.M. Peters, 1997. "Language typology, prosody and the acquisition of grammatical morphemes". In The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition, vol.5, D.I. Slobin, ed. Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 136-197. Ann Peters From thoreson at cc.wwu.edu Wed Mar 17 00:39:26 1999 From: thoreson at cc.wwu.edu (Catherine Crain-Thoreson) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 16:39:26 -0800 Subject: How do you determine the difficulty of individual words? Message-ID: Many people use printed word frequency for this purpose. The reference for word frequency that I'm aware of is Carroll, J., Davies, P., & Richman, B. (1971). Word frequency book. New York: American Heritage Publishing. There may be a newer edition. You might find Mark Seidenberg's work of interest. He and colleagues differentiate several different categories of words in reading tasks. The reference I have handy is Seidenberg, M., Bruck, M., Fornarolo, & Backman, J. (1985) Word recognition processes of poor and disabled readers: Do they necessarily differ? Applied Psycholinguistics, 6, 161-180. There's quite a large literature on what makes word recognition difficult or easy. Frequency and regularity of spelling pattern are two major factors. Is this what you're after? Catherine Crain-Thoreson At 04:38 PM 3/15/99 -0500, russgrd2 at psych1.psy.sunysb.edu wrote: >I need to write a story in which I manipulate the difficulty of individual >words. I need a version with easy to read words and a version with hard to >read words. I have not been able to locate an objective method for >determining the difficulty of these words. Is anyone aware of a method >that might help me in this task? > >--Brett Stoltz > >~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ >| Brett Stoltz >| Department of Psychology >| SUNY at Stony Brook >| Stony Brook, NY 11794-1200 >| voice: (516) 632-7870 >| fax: (516) 632-7871 >| e-mail: russgrd2 at psych1.psy.sunysb.edu >| Stony Brook Reading and Language Project >| http://www.read+lang.sbs.sunysb.edu/ >~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ > > ********************************* Catherine Crain-Thoreson, Ph.D. Psychology Department Western Washington University Bellingham, WA 98225-9089 Tel: (360) 650-3168 Fax: (360) 650-7305 e-mail: thoreson at cc.wwu.edu http://www.wwu.edu/~thoreson ********************************* From m.vihman at bangor.ac.uk Wed Mar 17 13:40:06 1999 From: m.vihman at bangor.ac.uk (Marilyn Vihman) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 14:40:06 +0100 Subject: MLUw and MLUm Message-ID: following up on Ann's comments, I can't resist adding in a reference to a 1982 paper of mine, in Applied Psycholinguistics, 3, which looks at my son's development along Ann's line [A], even though he was learning a highly inflected language, Estonian, as well as being exposed to english to a lesser extent. Courtney Cazden had noted these two approaches in the dev. of Eve vs. Sarah, among Brown's 3 subjects, in 1972. - marilyn vihman > I agree that, especially in early morphosyntactic production there are >two things going on, and they probably need to be assessed differently. >On the one hand there is [A] the stringing together of content words/ideas >(MLUw?); on the other is [B] the increasing inclusion of grammatical >markers (MLUm?). > The trouble with English is that so many of the grammatical markers >are free morphemes that one is tempted to think that counting *words* >is the way to go. However, these capacities probably develop separately, >showing up as individual differences in early combination. In fact, the >kids who go the [B] route are probably the "frame and slot" kids who >structure their early combinations around morphosyntactic frames. >I think one sees these patterns even more clearly when one looks at >languages (like Italian) with more bound morphology. > I have found it useful to compute MLU in two ways: >1) just open-class lexical items (excluding free grammatical morphemes), >and 2) all morphemes, whether bound or free. >I believe these measures would equate better across languages than the >traditional MLUw that grew out of working with English. >I have tried to address some of these issues in my chapter in Slobin's vol.5: >A.M. Peters, 1997. "Language typology, prosody and the acquisition of >grammatical morphemes". In The Crosslinguistic Study of Language >Acquisition, vol.5, D.I. Slobin, ed. Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum >Associates, 136-197. >Ann Peters ------------------------------------------------------- Marilyn M. Vihman Professor, Developmental Psychology | /\ School of Psychology | / \/\ University of Wales, Bangor, | /\/ \ \ Gwynedd LL57 2DG, U.K. | / ======\=\ tel. 44 (0)1248 383 775 FAX 382 599 | B A N G O R -------------------------------------------------------- From michael at giccs.georgetown.edu Wed Mar 17 19:17:51 1999 From: michael at giccs.georgetown.edu (Michael Ullman) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 14:17:51 -0500 Subject: ERP/fMRI postdoc positions Message-ID: TWO POSTDOC POSITIONS: ERP & FMRI STUDIES OF LANGUAGE & MEMORY We are seeking to hire two full-time Postdoctoral Fellows (or highly qualified non-PhDs) to carry out ERP and fMRI studies of language and memory. The positions are in the Brain and Language lab at the Georgetown Institute for Cognitive and Computational Sciences (GICCS) at Georgetown University Medical School. GICCS is a new institute dedicated to understanding the relation between brain and cognition. It is composed of a group of about fifteen researchers pursuing a variety of lines of research in cognition, computation, and neuroscience. At the Brain and Language lab we are interested in the neural, computational, psychological, and developmental bases of language and memory. Our work focuses on elucidating the underpinnings of lexicon (words) and grammar (rules), with a particular interest in the issues of modularity, neural localization, and domain-specificity/generality. We are carrying out several projects to test the hypothesis that the temporal-lobe "declarative memory" system, which has previously been implicated in the learning and use of fact and event knowledge, also subserves word knowledge; and that the frontal/basal-ganglia "procedural memory" system, which has previously been implicated in the learning and use of motor and cognitive "skills," such as riding a bicycle, also subserves grammatical knowledge. We are also examining sex differences in language. Our language projects focus primarily on English, Italian, and Japanese. The successful candidates will be primarily responsible for carrying out (1) ERP studies, using a high-end 96 channel system; or (2) fMRI studies, on a 1.5T Vision Siemens MR system. They will design and set up ERP/fMRI experiments, test subjects, analyze data, and prepare presentations and papers. There will also be opportunities to be involved in other projects, including (1) Magnetoencephalography (MEG) studies; (2) behavioral studies of people with adult-onset brain damage (aphasics and patients with Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, or Huntington's disease) or with developmental language disorders (Specific Language Impairment, Williams syndrome); (3) psycholinguistic studies of normal adults. The minimum requirement for the positions is research experience with *either* ERPs or fMRI. No previous experience with language or memory studies is required. The candidate should be available to work for a minimum of two years. The start date is flexible, but must be some time between late spring and early fall of 1999. Salary will be highly competitive. To apply, please send Michael Ullman a resume and arrange to have two letters of recommendation sent to him (preferably by email). Georgetown University is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity employer. Michael Ullman Assistant Professor Director, Brain and Language Laboratory Georgetown Institute for Cognitive and Computational Sciences (GICCS) Research Building 3970 Reservoir Rd, NW Georgetown University Washington DC 20007 Email: michael at giccs.georgetown.edu Tel: Office: 202-687-6064 Lab: 202-687-6896 Fax: 202-687-6914 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 3165 bytes Desc: not available URL: From ann at hawaii.edu Thu Mar 18 06:10:39 1999 From: ann at hawaii.edu (Ann Peters) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 20:10:39 -1000 Subject: SLI questions Message-ID: Dear info-childes, We at the University of Hawaii have three questions about work on Selective Language Impairment: 1. Can you direct us to a reasonably comprehensive list of recent research in SLI, particularly in languages other than English? 2. More specifically, has anybody done any work on production or perception of relative clauses by SLI children? 3. Finally, has anybody working on SLI in French found word order errors such as: On ne pas travaille. On toujours travaille fort. We will post a summary to the whole list. Thank you, Ann Peters From vhouwer at uia.ua.ac.be Thu Mar 18 12:13:30 1999 From: vhouwer at uia.ua.ac.be (Annick.DeHouwer) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 13:13:30 +0100 Subject: modality/gerund Message-ID: On Wed, 10 Mar 1999, elma blom wrote: > Can anybody help me with one of the following questions (or perhaps both)? > > 1. How do English speaking children (in particular between 2-3 years old) > express their wishes, needs, desires and intentions? Are there, for > example, studies on the use of verb forms like "gonna" and "wanna"? > > 2. Do English speaking children (2-3 years old) use the gerund (V-ing)? I > would also appreciate any references on this topic. > Chapter 7 part 7.4. of my book The acquisition of two languages from birth, 1990, Cambridge University Press, gives information on the use of WANNA/WANT TO, GONNA/GOING TO and the gerund by an English speaking child aged 2;7-3;4. --Annick De Houwer From talkasey at andrew.cmu.edu Thu Mar 18 14:57:35 1999 From: talkasey at andrew.cmu.edu (Tamara Al-Kasey) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 09:57:35 -0500 Subject: bibliographic requests Message-ID: --On Thu, Mar 18, 1999 1:13 PM +0100 "Annick.DeHouwer" wrote: >> Can anybody help me with one of the following questions (or perhaps >> both)? Dear readers, I enjoy reading the discussions of issues relevant to the field and rejoice when a discussion can lead researchers to a solution they are looking for or help them to find obscure and/or unpublished sources or a request from experts for "the best" of something. Unfortunately, various lists have become overwhelmingly requests for bibliographies. Many students seem to believe that such lists are a replacement for going to the library. If you have students that are beginning a research project and you don't have the subexpertise to give them a starter bibliography, please refer them to a relevant search site or print bibliography rather than helping them to take the easy way out and let others do the work for them. Tamara Al-Kasey Carnegie Mellon From lmb32 at columbia.edu Fri Mar 19 12:28:15 1999 From: lmb32 at columbia.edu (Lois Bloom) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 07:28:15 -0500 Subject: No subject Message-ID: The difference Ann made was also described in my book (Language Development: Form and Function in Emerging Grammars, MIT, 1970) in arguing against 'pivot grammar' --Kathryn and Gia (and, later, Allison) showed the first pattern, while Eric (and, later, Peter) showed the 2nd. Over the years, we also found that the two difference methods of counting utterance length mattered little, in following up on that original study. See, forexample, Bloom, Lightbown, & Hood, Structure and Variation in Child Language, SRCDMonograph, 1975). --Lois Bloom From lmb32 at columbia.edu Fri Mar 19 12:32:07 1999 From: lmb32 at columbia.edu (Lois Bloom) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 07:32:07 -0500 Subject: bibliographic requests Message-ID: Good advice! I'd also add that the replies to the list are not necessarily 'complete.' --Lois Bloom On Thu, 18 Mar 1999, Tamara Al-Kasey wrote: > > > --On Thu, Mar 18, 1999 1:13 PM +0100 "Annick.DeHouwer" > wrote: > > >> Can anybody help me with one of the following questions (or perhaps > >> both)? > > Dear readers, > > I enjoy reading the discussions of issues relevant to the field and rejoice > when a discussion can lead researchers to a solution they are looking for > or help them to find obscure and/or unpublished sources or a request from > experts for "the best" of something. Unfortunately, various lists have > become overwhelmingly requests for bibliographies. Many students seem to > believe that such lists are a replacement for going to the library. If you > have students that are beginning a research project and you don't have the > subexpertise to give them a starter bibliography, please refer them to a > relevant search site or print bibliography rather than helping them to take > the easy way out and let others do the work for them. > > Tamara Al-Kasey > Carnegie Mellon > > > > From vhouwer at uia.ua.ac.be Fri Mar 19 13:48:00 1999 From: vhouwer at uia.ua.ac.be (Annick.DeHouwer) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 14:48:00 +0100 Subject: bibliographic requests Message-ID: Dear colleagues, I agree wholeheartedly with the messages below. Nevertheless, I think there are mitigating circumstances for some of our younger colleagues, especially in countries outside the United States: they may not have advisors that can appropriately guide them to the relevant literature, especially if this literature is in a foreign language and about a foreign language. In addition, in many less well-off countries bibliographical queries through email might be the only way for researchers to get information, however basic and 'well-known' the information requested might seem to researchers who are fortunate enough to live and work in more affluent places. Also, potentially useful information about a particular topic might be 'hidden' - as my own response to Elma Blom's queries showed, there may be information about a topic that can only be accessed if you have the table of contents of a book in front of you. But there is no question that doing a first bibliographic search when a library is available or/and a search through internet sites should precede any query put out on email lists. Best regards, Annick De Houwer > > > Good advice! I'd also add that the replies to the list are not > necessarily 'complete.' --Lois Bloom > > > On Thu, 18 Mar 1999, Tamara Al-Kasey wrote: > > > > > > > --On Thu, Mar 18, 1999 1:13 PM +0100 "Annick.DeHouwer" > > wrote: > > > > >> Can anybody help me with one of the following questions (or perhaps > > >> both)? > > > > Dear readers, > > > > I enjoy reading the discussions of issues relevant to the field and rejoice > > when a discussion can lead researchers to a solution they are looking for > > or help them to find obscure and/or unpublished sources or a request from > > experts for "the best" of something. Unfortunately, various lists have > > become overwhelmingly requests for bibliographies. Many students seem to > > believe that such lists are a replacement for going to the library. If you > > have students that are beginning a research project and you don't have the > > subexpertise to give them a starter bibliography, please refer them to a > > relevant search site or print bibliography rather than helping them to take > > the easy way out and let others do the work for them. > > > > Tamara Al-Kasey > > Carnegie Mellon > > > > > > > > > > > From dpapadc at essex.ac.uk Fri Mar 19 13:47:34 1999 From: dpapadc at essex.ac.uk (D Papadopoulou) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 13:47:34 +0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: On Thu, 25 Feb 1999 13:51:46 -0500 (EST) Info-CHILDES wrote: > Your address has been added to the Info-CHILDES. The e-mail address for this > list is info-childes at childes.psy.cmu.edu. > > MAILING LIST HELP FILE > > Please read the list guidelines (see below) before engaging in discussion. > In addition, familiarize yourself with how the list operates, especially if > you've never participated in an Internet email discussion group before. > It's a good idea to save this message somewhere so you know how to > unsubscribe. > > When dealing with a listserver, there are two types of messages, namely, > COMMANDS and POSTS. Unlike traditional listservers which require the > use of numerous email addresses, we have simplified the process by > allowing for both both COMMANDS and POSTS to be sent to the same address. > > COMMANDS > > These e-mail messages are intended to cause some action to occur, such as > subscribing the FROM address to a mailing list. Commands are usually one or > two word phrases which should be entered in the SUBJECT field of the message. > Any other fields are ignored... it doesn't matter what you put in them. > > The following commands are accepted: > > subscribe > adds your e-mail address to the list of subscribers > you will then receive all posts > you are then allowed to post from that address > > unsubscribe > removes your e-mail address from the list of subscribers > you will no longer receive any posts > you are no longer allowed to post > > subscribe digest > switches you to digest mode > you will then receive one message per day which lists all posts > to switch back, send a "subscribe" command > > digests > returns a list of digests for the past 30 days along with > instructions for retreiving them via e-mail > > help > this message will be returned > > > POSTS > > Email messages which don't match any commands are distributed to everyone on > the list. > Every time you post a message, hundreds of other people on the list receive a > copy, just as if you sent it to them personally. As a member of the list, you > will receive a copy of every message anyone else sends. On this list, only > members of the list can post to it. > > > > To correspond directly with a person, write to kelley.sacco at cmu.edu > Despina Papadopoulou Department of Language and Linguistics University of Essex e-mail address: dpapadc at essex.ac.uk From Alison.Mayne at Colorado.EDU Fri Mar 19 15:45:00 1999 From: Alison.Mayne at Colorado.EDU (MAYNE ALISON MARIE) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 08:45:00 -0700 Subject: bibliographic requests Message-ID: Just curious...which search engines/ databases are people finding most helpful for doing literature searches? Thanks for your input. From molsen at umiacs.umd.edu Fri Mar 19 18:32:00 1999 From: molsen at umiacs.umd.edu (Mari Broman Olsen) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 13:32:00 -0500 Subject: bibliographic requests Message-ID: Altavista and amazon.com > > > Just curious...which search engines/ databases are people finding most > helpful for doing literature searches? > > Thanks for your input. ******** Mari Broman Olsen, Research Associate University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies 3141 A.V. Williams Building University of Maryland College Park, MD 20742 EMAIL: molsen at umiacs.umd.edu PHONE: (301) 405-6754 FAX: (301) 314-9658 WEB: http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~molsen ********* From edwards at cogsci.Berkeley.EDU Fri Mar 19 19:22:16 1999 From: edwards at cogsci.Berkeley.EDU (Jane A. Edwards) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 11:22:16 -0800 Subject: bibliographic requests Message-ID: I usually use keyword or author search on the electronic versions of: Current Contents, Psych Abstracts, Social Science Citations Abstracts, MLA, and UC library holdings. Once you "break into the loop", in terms of finding even a few references of interest to you, you can expand the loop by looking up the references mentioned in those sources. These resources help bridge the gap also between literatures in different languages because, for example, a university's library holdings include books in other languages, and so do Psych Abstracts. Current Contents includes articles in other languages but translates their titles into English. The library needs to invest money to have these things online. Where they are not available, the standard search engines on the Web should work. I have used the web to find references by particular author. It simply took a little longer. -Jane Edwards From ervin-tr at cogsci.Berkeley.EDU Sun Mar 21 21:18:42 1999 From: ervin-tr at cogsci.Berkeley.EDU (Susan Ervin-Tripp) Date: Sun, 21 Mar 1999 13:18:42 -0800 Subject: bibliographic requests Message-ID: Jane Edwards gives very good advice about expanding searches. In checking between different sources, it has been a surprise to discover how very limited any one of them is. For example, Psych Abstracts primarily lists items from the American Psychological Association journals, and books which publishers send to them. This means that publications in cross- disciplinary fields like child language are just left out, and you need to use other sources. Another question, which of the sources Edwards mentioned can be accessed from the web from other countries, and what are their URL's? Some kinds of bibliographic sources involve library passwords and may not be reachable from everywhere. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Susan M. Ervin-Tripp tel (510) 841-6803 Psychology Department FAX (510) 642-5293 University of California ervin-tr at cogsci.berkeley.edu Berkeley CA 94720 http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~ervintrp/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- From LloyAl at aol.com Mon Mar 22 01:07:57 1999 From: LloyAl at aol.com (LloyAl at aol.com) Date: Sun, 21 Mar 1999 20:07:57 EST Subject: Fast Mapping Message-ID: I've been trying to find the 1978 article by Carey and Bartlett "Acquiring a single new word". If any one knows where it can be located and acquired, I would appreciate the information. Thanks in advance, Lloyd Alford Howard University From jeff at elda.fr Mon Mar 22 09:39:55 1999 From: jeff at elda.fr (Jeff ALLEN) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 10:39:55 +0100 Subject: seeking a few bibliographic references Message-ID: I'm looking for bibliographic references on the following 2 points. 1. It has been shown in First Language Acquisition that prosodic patterns are learned and produced by children before lexical and syntactic structures, and that parents can understand the speech of children thanks to the intonation when the grammatical structure is sometimes undecipherable in isolation. 2. 50 or so percent of communication is transmitted through gestures, facial expression, etc. Thanks in advance for bibliographic references and possibly very brief summaries of what is found in the articles/paper/books that you mention. Regards, Jeff ================================================= Jeff ALLEN - Directeur Technique European Language Resources Association (ELRA) & European Language resources Distribution Agency (ELDA) (Agence Européenne de Distribution des Ressources Linguistiques) 55, rue Brillat-Savarin 75013 Paris FRANCE Tel: (+33) (0) 1.43.13.33.33 - Fax: (+33) (0) 1.43.13.33.30 mailto:jeff at elda.fr http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/home.html From macw at cmu.edu Mon Mar 22 20:16:56 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 15:16:56 -0500 Subject: bibliographic searches and Info-CHILDES Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, Tamara is right in noting the increasing use of discussion groups for basic bibliographic searches. Jane Edwards correctly points out how easy it is to use online bibliographies, if your university supports them. I have two additional comments on these issues. First, students may wish to use the CHILDES/BIB bibliography. Many libraries have hard copies. If you have the CHILDES CD-ROM, there is a copy there. However, the current version of the bibliography on the net is almost twice the size of the one on the CD. It now has 23,600 references. You and your students can download the whole bibliography from childes.psy.cmu.edu/chibib/index.html. However, they will also need to download a free copy of the EndNote program from the link given there. I am trying to find an easy on-line site for accessing the references directly over the web. One possibility might be the "Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies". Other suggestions are invited. If I could improve access to CHILDES/BIB, it would be a bit easier to suggest to people that they should look there first before posting queries to info-childes. For example, a search for "modal*" in CHILDES/BIB matched about 180 articles, many of which seemed quite relevant to the recent bibliographic query on modals. Similarly, a search for author "Carey" in CHILDES/BIB matches not only the paper that Lloyd Alford was looking for, but also other papers by Carey on the same subject that are easier to find in the library. Questions of the form "Is there work on language X?" are also easily resolved this way. However, other topics are a bit tougher. For example, reducing Jeff Allen's questions about prosodic structures and gestures to a series of key word queries is not easy. Jeff's question is not a mere bibliographic question. He is advancing a couple of specific claims (prosody learned before syntax, and 50 percent of language is gestural). So, his question is really about whether anyone has defended these specific claims. For example, Ann Peter and Lise Menn might conceivably (underscore "conceivably") say that they have evidence in support of the idea that parents can understand their children's intonation before they understand the content of their utterances. I will leave it up to others to decide if anyone would support the idea that 50% of communication is gestural. The ideal situation seems to be something like this. Before posting a query to the list, the researcher or student consults either PsychLit or CHILDES/BIB. If they don't find what they need there, they then post a note to the Web explaining that they found 100 matches to their key words search, but none or few that seemed to clearly address the more specific issue they have in mind. At that point, I think that the question becomes one that might interest us all. --Brian MacWhinney From zukow at ucla.edu Tue Mar 23 00:24:45 1999 From: zukow at ucla.edu (Patricia Zukow-Goldring) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 16:24:45 -0800 Subject: Jeff Allen request/gestures Message-ID: In response to Jeff Allen's request of 3/22. When Gestures Speak Louder Than Words. (No claims re 50% of communication, etc!) Infants often do not initially understand caregiver messages (Catch it!). Subsequent messages in which caregivers provide perceptual structure/information with gestures (demonstrating how to catch) overwhelmingly lead to achieving a practical understanding of ongoing events. When caregivers' subsequent messages are expressed only with more specific verbal utterances (Catch the ball!), a common understanding is rarely achieved. This longitudinal research was conducted during the prelinguistic period from 6 months through the one-word period (19-24 months). There were 5 Euro-American, English-speaking families and 6 Latino, Spanish-speaking families. The data were collected in suburbs of Los Angeles, CA, USA. Briefly, words cannot explain unless a person already knows what words mean. Learning what words mean is what the infant "means" to learn. These caregivers assembled messages by "saying and showing", so their infants could perceive what they said and did. Pat Zukow-Goldring Zukow-Goldring, P. (in press). Perceiving referring actions: Latino and Euro-American caregivers and infants comprehending speech. In K. L. Nelson, A. Aksu-Koc, & C. Johnson (Eds.), Children's Language, Vol. 11. Hillsdale NJ: Erlbaum. Zukow-Goldring, P. G. (1997). A social ecological realist approach to the emergence of the lexicon: Educating attention to amodal invariants in gesture and speech." In C. Dent-Read & P. Zukow-Goldring (Eds.), Evolving explanations of development: Ecological approaches to organism-environment systems (pp. 199-250). Washington, D. C.: American Psychological Association. Zukow-Goldring, P. (1996). Sensitive caregivers foster the comprehension of speech: When gestures speak louder than words. Early Development and Parenting, 5 (4), 195-211. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jeff at elda.fr Tue Mar 23 09:58:30 1999 From: jeff at elda.fr (Jeff ALLEN) Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 10:58:30 +0100 Subject: gestures and prosody Message-ID: Brian MacWhinney wrote: > However, other topics are a bit tougher. For example, reducing Jeff >Allen's questions about prosodic structures and gestures to a series of >key word queries is not easy. Jeff's question is not a mere >bibliographic question. He is advancing a couple of specific claims >(prosody learned before syntax, and 50 percent of language is >gestural). So, his question is really about whether anyone has >defended these specific claims. > For example, Ann Peter and Lise Menn >might conceivably (underscore "conceivably") say that they have >evidence in support of the idea that parents can understand their >children's intonation before they understand the content of their >utterances. Thank you Brian for your comments. I have heard that articles/papers have discussed the concept of prosody being acquired before syntax. What I am interested in specifically is that prosody is a very important factor in communication. In some instances of adult communication, the only way to distinguish between a declarative, and a question is from prosodic structure when the phonemic string is the same. In the case of children, especially children who I have not spent much time with, I sometimes cannot make out the individual lexical items, but the prosodic nature of the utterance is the glue that allows me to understand what they are trying to communicate. If there are articles in favor or against this concept, I would be more than willing to receive more info along these lines. >I will leave it up to others to decide if anyone would >support the idea that 50% of communication is gestural. The number 50 is completely arbitrary. It might be 10%, 20% 30% etc. I remember reading a paper on this topic several years ago and simply cannot remember the number that was attributed, nor the author of the paper. It is certain that gestures make up a part of general communication, but I would like to get some information on studies that try to quantify it, even in specific contexts. >The ideal situation seems to be something like this. Before posting >a query to the list, the researcher or student consults either PsychLit >or CHILDES/BIB. The problem is that my Internet access is very limited. I can easily send and receive e-mail. I am sorry if this request increases the bandwidth of the discussion list at the moment. Given my current internet situation, asking questions via lists is the best way for me to obtain information. Thanks in advance for the replies and comments. Jeff ================================================= Jeff ALLEN - Directeur Technique European Language Resources Association (ELRA) & European Language resources Distribution Agency (ELDA) (Agence Européenne de Distribution des Ressources Linguistiques) 55, rue Brillat-Savarin 75013 Paris FRANCE Tel: (+33) (0) 1.43.13.33.33 - Fax: (+33) (0) 1.43.13.33.30 mailto:jeff at elda.fr http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/home.html From Jordan.Zlatev at lucs.lu.se Tue Mar 23 11:13:19 1999 From: Jordan.Zlatev at lucs.lu.se (Jordan Zlatev) Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 12:13:19 +0100 Subject: sensorimotor experience and language Message-ID: Dear Info-childes readers, In reading Piattelli-Palmarini's (1979) book presenting the debate between Piaget and Chomsky I came upon an interesting issue that I would like to ask if anyone can say anything about. Namely, following Inhelder's presentation, Monod (p.140) brings up "an experiment that is theoretically very simple: if the development of language in the child is closely related to sensorimotor experience, one can suppose that a child born paraplegic ... would have very great difficulties in developing language." Inhelder (and everyone else) admit that they are not aware of any systematic evidence and Chomsky eventually states bluntly that "my own prediction is that it would turn out that there is no relations whatsoever, or at least the most marginal relation, between even extreme defects that would make it virtually impossible to develop and do all the things that Piaget was discussing, and his acquisition of language." (171) This was more than 20 years ago. Does anyone know about any systematic evidence now? If I get many replies I will summarize in a future posting. Greetings, Jordan Zlatev Cognitive Science Lund University Kungshuset, Lundagård 222 22 Lund, Sweden tel. : (+46) (0)46-222 0926 email: Jordan.Zlatev at lucs.lu.se http://www.lucs.lu.se/People/Jordan.Zlatev/ From jvwoude at calvin.edu Tue Mar 23 12:51:28 1999 From: jvwoude at calvin.edu (Judy Vander Woude) Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 07:51:28 -0500 Subject: gestures and prosody Message-ID: Jeff, You may wish to look at the Tarplee's chapter in the following book: Tarplee, C. (1996). Working on young children's utterances: prosodic aspects of repetition during picture labeling. In Couper-Kuhlen, E. & Selting, M. (Eds.) Prosody in conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clare doesn't address prosody before syntax, but she does wonderfully illustrate how important prosody is in parent-child conversation. The rest of the volume addresses the role of prosody in both adult and child conversations. Judy. > >Thank you Brian for your comments. I have heard that articles/papers >have discussed the concept of prosody being acquired before syntax. >What I am interested in specifically is that prosody is a very >important factor in communication. In some instances of adult >communication, the only way to distinguish between a declarative, >and a question is from prosodic structure when the phonemic string >is the same. In the case of children, especially children who I have >not spent much time with, I sometimes cannot make out the individual >lexical items, but the prosodic nature of the utterance is the glue that >allows me to understand what they are trying to communicate. If there >are articles in favor or against this concept, I would be more than >willing to receive more info along these lines. > >Jeff > > > >================================================= >Jeff ALLEN - Directeur Technique >European Language Resources Association (ELRA) & >European Language resources Distribution Agency (ELDA) >(Agence Européenne de Distribution des Ressources Linguistiques) >55, rue Brillat-Savarin >75013 Paris FRANCE >Tel: (+33) (0) 1.43.13.33.33 - Fax: (+33) (0) 1.43.13.33.30 >mailto:jeff at elda.fr >http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/home.html Judith Vander Woude, Ph.D. Department of Communication Arts and Sciences Calvin College 3201 Burton SE Grand Rapids, MI 49546 From jiverson at indiana.edu Tue Mar 23 18:00:40 1999 From: jiverson at indiana.edu (Jana M. Iverson) Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 10:00:40 -0800 Subject: gestures and prosody Message-ID: Hi Jeff, A group of Italian colleagues and I recently did a study in which we looked at the frequency of maternal gesture use as mothers interacted with their 16- and 20-month-old children in naturalistic, in-home play sessions. We found that only 10% of all maternal utterances were accompanied by gesture, that the vast majority of gestures were points at concrete objects, and that frequency of maternal gesture did not change across the children's 16 and 20 month sessions (i.e., maternal gesture production did not decline as children's vocal language skills improved). Interestingly, another unpublished study that looked at American mothers' use of gesture during interactions with their 18-month-olds also reported that 10% of maternal utterances occurred with gesture. Marilyn Shatz also did some work a few years ago looking at the relationship between speech and gesture in maternal speech to young children. Here are some references that might be helpful. Iverson, J.M., Capirci, O., Longobardi, E., & Caselli, M.C. (in press). Gesturing in mother-child interactions. Cognitive Development. Bekken, K. (1989). Is there motherese in gesture? Unpublished doctoral dissertation, The University of Chicago. Shatz, M. (1982). On mechanisms of language acquisition: Can features of the communicative environment account for development? In E. Wanner & L. Gleitman (Eds.), Language acquisition: The state of the art (pp. 102-127). New York: Cambridge University Press. Best, Jana Iverson ************************************************************************* Jana M. Iverson Phone: (812) 855-0817 Dept. of Psychology Fax: (812) 855-4691 1101 E. 10th St. Email: jiverson at indiana.edu Indiana University Bloomington, IN 47405 ************************************************************************* From macw at cmu.edu Tue Mar 23 16:32:57 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 11:32:57 -0500 Subject: sensorimotor experience and language Message-ID: Dear Jordan and Info-CHILDES, The 1979 discussion of language in a paraplegic may have been stimulated by the appearance in 1975 of an article by Fourcin in Eric Lenneberg's "Foundations of Language Development. Vol 2" (pp. 263-268). This article discusses the remarkable case of Richard Boydell, who was anarthric and also quadraplegic. His anarthria was extreme and he could not produce language. However, Boydell was quite bright and appears to have had good use of his feet. With his mother's help, he learned to read and was able to communicate in beautiful English using his feet and toes with a special typewriter. At that time, this case was used as evidence against the motor theory of speech perception. However, it could perhaps also be used as evidence against the sensorimotor account of language acquisition. Jordan is perhaps specifically interested in how cases of this sort might illuminate recent claims about embodied representations underpinning language that arise from functional linguistics and parts of psychology. The case of Richard Boydell does not address these issues. Boydell apparently had good use of his feet. I thought that quadraplegics were paralyzed in both arms and both legs. But this was evidently not the case for Boydell. In fact, the article discusses Boydell's "head and body movements" and their use in communication at age 4. Given this, it is clear that Boydell had extensive access to sensorimotor mappings of the type thought necessary to ground language. So, we would need to be looking for a more extreme case than that reported by Fourcin to understand the role of embodied representations. My own guess is that the mapping between sensorimotor imagery and language is important, but oblique in several ways. In this regard, it is useful to consider evidence for a double dissociation between visual perception and visual imagery in agnosia from Behrmann and others. --Brian MacWhinney From ann.dowker at psy.ox.ac.uk Wed Mar 24 00:40:13 1999 From: ann.dowker at psy.ox.ac.uk (Ann Dowker) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 00:40:13 +0000 Subject: sensorimotor experience and language Message-ID: There is the case of Christopher Nolan, born with cerebral palsy; almost completely paralyzed and seemingly mute, until the age of 11, when a new drug relaxed the muscles of his neck to allow him partial control of his head for short periods of time. He was then given a unicorn stick to fit on his forehead, and learned how to type by pressing the unicorn onto the keys of his typewriter. He then began writing impressive stories and poetry. "Dam-Burst of Dreams" (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981) is a collection of his works between the ages of 11 and 14. Ann Dowker From Alison.Mayne at Colorado.EDU Wed Mar 24 15:30:27 1999 From: Alison.Mayne at Colorado.EDU (MAYNE ALISON MARIE) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 08:30:27 -0700 Subject: bibliographic requests Message-ID: Thanks to everyone who responded to my query. Below is a summary of the recommendations thus far. Alison Mayne ------------------------- Jane Edwards: I usually use keyword or author search on the electronic versions of: Current Contents, Psych Abstracts, Social Science Citations Abstracts, MLA, and UC library holdings. Once you "break into the loop", in terms of finding even a few references of interest to you, you can expand the loop by looking up the references mentioned in those sources. These resources help bridge the gap also between literatures in different languages because, for example, a university's library holdings include books in other languages, and so do Psych Abstracts. Current Contents includes articles in other languages but translates their titles into English. The library needs to invest money to have these things online. Where they are not available, the standard search engines on the Web should work. I have used the web to find references by particular author. It simply took a little longer. --Brian MacWhinney: Along this line, I have found it really easy to search the info-childes archive at http://listserv.linguistlist.org/archives/info-childes.html and I would recommend that site to others too. ...the current version of the bibliography on the net is almost twice the size of the one on the CD. It now has 23,600 references. You and your students can download the whole bibliography from childes.psy.cmu.edu/chibib/index.html. However, they will also need to download a free copy of the EndNote program from the link given there. ... links to Internet resources on the issue of language learning. Right now, this page lists 7 other sites: http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/sites.html They include SALT, CompProf, JCHAT, IASCL, Neonatal Cry, UCSF (Merzenich), and the Wisconsin symposium page. Mari Broman Olsen Altavista and amazon.com From kanagy at darkwing.uoregon.edu Wed Mar 24 19:27:47 1999 From: kanagy at darkwing.uoregon.edu (Ruth Kanagy) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 11:27:47 -0800 Subject: literacy and acq of grammar Message-ID: Dear colleagues, I asked for references on the effects of literacy on the acquisition of grammar in L1/L2. Thanks to the following people for responding: Brett Reynolds, Patricia Carlin, Joyce Iliff, Eduardo Garcia, Dave Wolfe, David Gohre, Barbara Zurer Pearson, Stephen Krashen, Pearl Chiari, Carla Bazzanella, Carmel Bochenek, Birgit Harley. The following were some of the suggested references: Bazzanella, C. and Calleri, D. (1991). Tense coherence and grounding in children's narrative, in "Text" 11/2, 175-187. Handbook of reading research, vol. 2 / editor, P. David Pearson [and] section editors, Rebecca Barr, Michael L. Kamil, Peter Mosenthal. New York: Longman, c1984-1991. Harley, B. (1993). Instructional strategies and SLA in early French immersion. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 15, 245-259. Harley, B. (1998). The role of focus-on-form tasks in promoting child L2 acquisition. In C. Doughty and J. Williams (Eds.). Focus on formin classroom second language acquisition (pp. 156-173). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Lee, Y.O., Krashen, S., and Gribbons, B. (1995). The effect of reading on the acquisition of English relative clauses. I.T.L. 113-114, 263-273. Nelson, K. (1998). Toward a differentiated account of facilitators of literacy development and ASL in deaf children. Topics in Language Disorders (Aug)., 73-88. Sparks, R. and Ganschow, L. (1993b). Searching for the cognitive locus of foreign language learning difficulties: Linking first and second language learning. The Modern Language Journal, 77, 289-302. Stanovich, K. E. (1986). Matthew effects in reading: Some consequences of individual differences in the acquisition of literacy. Reading Research Quarterly, 21, 360-407. Stokes, J., Krashen, S., and Kartchner, J. (1998). Factors in the acquisition of the present subjunctive in Spanish: The role of reading and study. I.T.L. Review of Applied Linguistics 121-122, 19-25. Vellutino, F. R. and Denckla, M. B. (1996). Cognitive and neuropsychological foundations of word identification in poor and normally developing readers. In R. Barr et al. (Eds.) Handbook of Reading Research Volume II (pp. 571-608). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. RKanagy UOregon From Sergey.Avrutin at let.uu.nl Thu Mar 25 11:43:54 1999 From: Sergey.Avrutin at let.uu.nl (AVRUTIN) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 13:43:54 +0200 Subject: Language acquisition and language breakdown: program Message-ID: LANGUAGE ACQUISITION & LANGUAGE BREAKDOWN May 28-29, UiL OTS, Utrecht University PRELIMINARY PROGRAM: THURSDAY MAY 27 5-6 Reception & registration FRIDAY MAY 28 8.45 - 09.15 Registration 9.15 - 09.30 Opening and welcome by Eric Reuland (Director of UiL OTS, Utrecht University) 9.30-10.30 "The Vulnerable C-domain" Christer Platzack, Lund University 10.30-11.10 "The Italian determiner system in normal acquisition, specific language impairment, and childhood aphasia" Piero Bottari, Paola Cipriani, Anna Maria Chilosi & Lucia Pfanner University of Perugia, Scientific Institute Stella Maris & University of Pisa 11.10-11.30 coffee 11.30-12.10 "Functional categories and syntactic operations in (ab)normal language acquisition" Celia Jakubowicz & Lea Nash CNRS, Université Paris 5 & CNRS, Université Paris 8 12.10-12.50 "The acquisition of event structure in normally developing and language impaired children in German" Petra Schulz, Karin Wymann & Zvi Penner, Konstanz University 12.50-2.30 lunch 2.30-3.30 "Compounding and Inflection in Language Impairment" Harald Clahsen, University of Essex 3.30-4.10 "Controversies on CP: A comparison of language acquisition and language impairments in Broca's aphasia" Martina Penke, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf 4.10-4.30 tea 4.30-5.10 "Root infinitives and finite sentences: child language versus agrammatic speech" Esterella de Roo, HIL, Leiden University 5.10-6.10 "Grammatism: What language breakdown tells us about language development" Stephen Crain, University of Maryland Evening Conference dinner SATURDAY MAY 29 9.30-10.30 "The Unique Checking Constraint and Morphological Parameters as an Explanation of Variation over Time and Language of a Variety of Syntactic Constructions in Language Acquisition, both Impaired and Normal" Kenneth Wexler, MIT 10.30-11.10 "The acquisition of complex predicates in Japanese specifically language-impaired and normally-developing children" Shinji Fukuda & Suzy E. Fukuda, McGill University 11.10-11.30 coffee 11.30-12.10 "Comprehension of reversible relative clauses in specifically language impaired and normally developing children" Stavroula Stavraki, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki 12.10-12.50 "Morphosyntactic features in the verbal and nominal domains: a comparison between specifically language impaired and normally developing Greek children" Ianthi Maria Tsimpli, University of Cambridge 12.50-2.30 lunch 2.30-3.30 "The use of ellipsis in aphasic and child language" Herman Kolk, Nijmegen University 3.30-4.10 "Verb inflection and verb diversity in three populations: agrammatic speakers, normally developing children and children with specific language impairment" Roelien Bastiaanse & Gerard Bol, Groningen University 4.10-4.30 tea 4.30-5.10 "Language acquisition and breakdown in Zulu" Susan Suzman & Heile Jordaan, University of the Witwatersrand 5.10-6.10 "The neurology of syntax" Yosef Grodzinsky, Tel Aviv University Alternate papers: "Radical economy in deviant grammar: Deleted Formal Features [Agr and Relational prep]" Lamya Abdul-Karim, Eliane Ramos, Thomas Roeper & Harry Seymour University of Massachusetts "Verb movement in acquisition and aphasia: Same problem, different solutions. Evidence from Dutch" Shalom Zuckerman, Roelien Bastiaanse & Ron van Zonneveld, Groningen University From jbryant at luna.cas.usf.edu Thu Mar 25 14:11:27 1999 From: jbryant at luna.cas.usf.edu (Judith Becker Bryant) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 09:11:27 -0500 Subject: FW: 3/22 FOIA Comments (fwd) Message-ID: Colleagues in the United States will be interested in the following message. Judy Bryant Judith Becker Bryant, Ph.D. Associate Professor Department of Psychology, BEH 339 University of South Florida Tampa, FL 33620-8200 (813) 974-0475 fax (813) 974-4617 >From: Alan Kraut >To: "Mary Anne Cowden for COGDOP (E-mail)" , > "Roberta Klatzky (E-mail)" >Subject: 3/22 FOIA Comments >Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 14:03:54 -0500 > >March 22, 1999: FOIA Access to Research Data - Send a Letter > >Dear Colleague: > >I hope you've heard about the proposed changes to OMB Circular A-110 >that would allow Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) access to research >data. This change would be alarming for researchers, particularly for >those working with human subjects and confidential information. OMB >published draft regulations on the changes in the Federal Register (see >http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=1999_register& >docid=99-2220-filed) and is receiving comments until April 5. APS is >sending a letter opposing the changes, as is virtually every other >science group. But we're hearing it is important that OMB receive many >letters from individual researchers as well as organizations. > >There is a good summary of the issues, along with a link to the Register >regulations, on the NIH Web page >http://www.nih.gov/grants/policy/a110implications.htm Further, an April >APS Observer cover story on this soon will be available on our Web page >() as will the APS letter. I >encourage you to look at the information, and take a few minutes to send >comments in a letter or email to OMB. The address and other >instructions for submitting comments are posted on the Federal Register >link. And please get the word out to your colleagues. We need to make >sure researchers are heard loud and clear on this. > >Best, > >Alan > >> *** >> Alan G. Kraut, Executive Director 202-783-2077 V >> American Psychological Society 202-783-2083 F >> 1010 Vermont Ave., NW St 1100 akraut at aps.washington.dc.us >> Washington, DC 20005-4907 >> http://www.psychologicalscience.org >> From macw at cmu.edu Thu Mar 25 22:20:30 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 17:20:30 -0500 Subject: online child language bibliography Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, The CHILDES/BIB bibliography is now online. It has about 23,000 references which is about 10,000 more than the 1998 version of CHILDES/BIB on the CD-ROM. If you go to alaska.psy.cmu.edu, you will find it. A more precise address is: http://alaska.psy.cmu.edu/ris/risweb.isa The database is accessed using Reference Web Poster which allows all sorts of Boolean searches etc. I am hoping that this form of access will replace earlier hardcopy and EndNote-based versions of CHILDES/BIB. To test it out, try typing "modal" in the "Text to Search For:" field. You should get about 50 matches. You can view abstracts and details of records by clicking on the left icon with the stack of sheets of paper. You can download records to your own machine by marking them, clicking export, saving in RIS format, and then saving to your disk. You may also want to check to see if the entries for your own work are correct. If they need to be updated, please send the updated references with abstracts to kelley.sacco at andrew.cmu.edu The bibliography still has a lot of duplicates and some errors which Kelley will be fixing next week. Good luck. --Brian MacWhinney From b.woll at city.ac.uk Thu Mar 25 23:02:02 1999 From: b.woll at city.ac.uk (Bencie Woll) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 23:02:02 +0000 Subject: motor impairment and language Message-ID: We would like to respond to the recent correspondence from Jordan Zlatev and Brian MacWhinney relating to the relationship (if any) between language development and sensorimotor experience. In a paper presented at the Boston Child Language Seminar in 1997 and published in the proceedings* we report on a study of 10 severely motor-impaired children with Spinal Muscular Atrophy aged 18-35 months. These children are confined to wheelchairs, unable to stand independently or ambulate, but have normal cortical functions. Using the MacArthur CDI we found average levels of vocabulary (with slightly below-average levels in the youngest subjects due to deficits in items related to mobility) but significant advancement in morphological development, with 8/10 at or above the 75th percentile, and 6/10 above the 90th percentile in over-regularisations. These scores are up to 10 times those of normal children. On this evidence, neither the Piagetian perspective (as Monod phrases it): that a paraplegic child would have difficulties in developing language; nor Chomsky's prediction: that there is no or only a marginal relationship between language and motor development, is supported. Our findings suggest instead that the inability of children with SMA to explore objects and forms in the environment may advance the analysis of patterning in language, independently of vocabulary. These children examine language in place of a world they cannot reach, practising the way words are formed while able-bodied toddlers are engaged in motor and spatial learning. We propose two mutually compatible explanations: 1) different objects of learning in early childhood are in competition and language can advance if the child is less engaged in motor and spatial learning; 2) the mechanisms of procedural learning, identified as fundamental for motor and behavioural skills arising from direct actions and experiences, are also implicated in the development of the morphological rule system. Further studies are being undertaken to explore syntactic, pragmatic, and other aspects of these children's language development. *Sieratzki JS & Woll B (1998) Toddling into language: precocious language development in motor-impaired children with spinal muscular atrophy. In A Greenhill, M Hughes, H Littlefield & H Walsh (eds.) Proceedings of the 22nd annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Vol. 2. Somerville MA: Cascadilla Press. pp. 684-94 (a revised version will be submitted shortly for journal publication) As well as the paper in the Proceedings, an informal version may be read on the Jennifer Trust for Spinal Muscular Atrophy website Harry Sieratzki & Bencie Woll Professor Bencie Woll Chair of Sign Language and Deaf Studies C.C.S. City University Northampton Square London EC1V 0HB Tel: +44 171 477 8354 Minicom/TTY: +44 171 477 8314 Fax: +44 171 477 8577 e-mail: b.woll at city.ac.uk From sefukuda at nucba.ac.jp Fri Mar 26 08:51:47 1999 From: sefukuda at nucba.ac.jp (Suzy Fukuda) Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 17:51:47 +0900 Subject: Language acquisition and language breakdown: program Message-ID: LANGUAGE ACQUISITION & LANGUAGE BREAKDOWN May 28-29, UiL OTS, Utrecht University PRELIMINARY PROGRAM: THURSDAY MAY 27 5-6 Reception & registration FRIDAY MAY 28 8.45 - 09.15 Registration 9.15 - 09.30 Opening and welcome by Eric Reuland (Director of UiL OTS, Utrecht University) 9.30-10.30 "The Vulnerable C-domain" Christer Platzack, Lund University 10.30-11.10 "The Italian determiner system in normal acquisition, specific language impairment, and childhood aphasia" Piero Bottari, Paola Cipriani, Anna Maria Chilosi & Lucia Pfanner University of Perugia, Scientific Institute Stella Maris & University of Pisa 11.10-11.30 coffee 11.30-12.10 "Functional categories and syntactic operations in (ab)normal language acquisition" Celia Jakubowicz & Lea Nash CNRS, Université Paris 5 & CNRS, Université Paris 8 12.10-12.50 "The acquisition of event structure in normally developing and language impaired children in German" Petra Schulz, Karin Wymann & Zvi Penner, Konstanz University 12.50-2.30 lunch 2.30-3.30 "Compounding and Inflection in Language Impairment" Harald Clahsen, University of Essex 3.30-4.10 "Controversies on CP: A comparison of language acquisition and language impairments in Broca's aphasia" Martina Penke, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf 4.10-4.30 tea 4.30-5.10 "Root infinitives and finite sentences: child language versus agrammatic speech" Esterella de Roo, HIL, Leiden University 5.10-6.10 "Grammatism: What language breakdown tells us about language development" Stephen Crain, University of Maryland Evening Conference dinner SATURDAY MAY 29 9.30-10.30 "The Unique Checking Constraint and Morphological Parameters as an Explanation of Variation over Time and Language of a Variety of Syntactic Constructions in Language Acquisition, both Impaired and Normal" Kenneth Wexler, MIT 10.30-11.10 "The acquisition of complex predicates in Japanese specifically language-impaired and normally-developing children" Shinji Fukuda & Suzy E. Fukuda, McGill University 11.10-11.30 coffee 11.30-12.10 "Comprehension of reversible relative clauses in specifically language impaired and normally developing children" Stavroula Stavraki, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki 12.10-12.50 "Morphosyntactic features in the verbal and nominal domains: a comparison between specifically language impaired and normally developing Greek children" Ianthi Maria Tsimpli, University of Cambridge 12.50-2.30 lunch 2.30-3.30 "The use of ellipsis in aphasic and child language" Herman Kolk, Nijmegen University 3.30-4.10 "Verb inflection and verb diversity in three populations: agrammatic speakers, normally developing children and children with specific language impairment" Roelien Bastiaanse & Gerard Bol, Groningen University 4.10-4.30 tea 4.30-5.10 "Language acquisition and breakdown in Zulu" Susan Suzman & Heile Jordaan, University of the Witwatersrand 5.10-6.10 "The neurology of syntax" Yosef Grodzinsky, Tel Aviv University Alternate papers: "Radical economy in deviant grammar: Deleted Formal Features [Agr and Relational prep]" Lamya Abdul-Karim, Eliane Ramos, Thomas Roeper & Harry Seymour University of Massachusetts "Verb movement in acquisition and aphasia: Same problem, different solutions. Evidence from Dutch" Shalom Zuckerman, Roelien Bastiaanse & Ron van Zonneveld, Groningen University Suzy E. Fukuda Nagoya University of Commerce and Business Administration The Language Center 4-4 Sagamine Komenoki-cho Nisshin-shi, Aichi-ken Japan 470-01 Tel: 05617-4-1321 x26311 Fax: 05617-4-0341 E-Mail: sefukuda at nucba.ac.jp From bmj at aber.ac.uk Fri Mar 26 17:29:22 1999 From: bmj at aber.ac.uk (Bob Morris Jones) Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 17:29:22 +0000 Subject: Post advertisement Message-ID: An English version of this post advertisement follows this Welsh version. Swyddogion Ymchwil ar gyfer Prosiect ESRC ========================================= Gwahoddir ceisiadau ar gyfer dwy swydd ar brosiect ymchwil sy’n paratoi cronfa ddata electronig o sgyrsiau naturiol plant ifainc sy’n siarad Cymraeg. Noddir y prosiect gan y Cyngor Ymchwil Economaidd a Chymdeithasol (ESRC), a fe’i cyfarwyddir gan Mr Bob Morris Jones, Adran Addysg, Prifysgol Cymru Aberystwyth. Mi fydd y prosiect yn rhedeg o 1af Gorffennaf 1999 hyd at 30ain Mehefin 2000. Penodir ar bwynt 4 y raddfa gyflog RA1B, £15,735. Mi fydd yr ymgeiswyr llwyddiannus yn gyfrifol am drawsgrifio recordiadau sain o sgyrsiau naturiol plant ifainc gan ddefnyddio confensiynau safonol, ac am baratoi lecsicon ar sail yr holl ffurfiau a ymddengys yn y gronfa ddata. Fe fydd yn rhaid i’r ymgeiswyr fod yn rhugl yn naill ai Cymraeg llafar y gogledd neu Gymraeg llafar y de. Fe fyddai’n fantais bendant pe byddai ganddynt hyfforddiant mewn Ieithyddiaeth, ond mi fyddai cymwysterau yn y Gymraeg neu iaith fodern yn berthnasol. Mae’r gwaith yn gofyn am sgiliau cyfrifiadurol o ran defnyddio cyfrifiadur personol, trafod a golygu ffeiliau testun plaen, rhedeg pecynnau, a defnyddio e-bost a’r We. Fe fydd hyfforddiant cychwynnol sy’n cyflwyno’r system drawsgrifio a’r gwaith cyfrifiadurol. Am fanylion pellach, cysylltwch â’r Swyddfa Personel, Prifysgol Cymru, 9 Maes Lowri, Abersytwyth, Ceredigion, 01970 621832 (ffacs 622975), neu http://www.aber.ac.uk/~bmj/abercld/cyntaf.html. Anfonwch geisiadau gyda CV llawn a dau eirda i’r Swyddfa Personel, Prifysgol Cymru, 9 Maes Lowri, Abersytwyth, Ceredigion erbyn y dyddiad cau, 30ain Ebrill. Ceir fersiwn o'r hybyseb ganlynol yn y Gymraeg uchod. Research Officers for an ESRC project ===================================== Applications are invited for two posts on a research project which aims to create an electronic database of the spontaneous conversations of young children speaking Welsh. The project is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), and is directed by Mr Bob Morris Jones, Education Department, University of Wales Aberystwyth. The project will run from 1st July 1999 to 30th June 2000. The appointments will be made on point 4 of the salary scale RA1B, £15,735. The postholders will be responsible for transcribing audio recordings of the spontaneous conversations of young children using standard conventions, and for preparing a lexicon of all the word-forms which occur in the database. The applicants must be fluent in everyday colloquial Welsh either of a northern or southern dialect. Training in Linguistics would be a definite advantage, but qualifications in Welsh or a modern language would also be relevant. The work requires computer skills: using a PC, organizing and editing plain text files, running computer packages, and using e-mail and the Web. There will be preliminary training in the use of the transcription system and the computer work. For further details, contact the Personnel Office, University of Wales, 9 Laura Place, Abersytwyth, Ceredigion, 01970 621832 (fax 622975), or http://www.aber.ac.uk/~bmj/abercld/cyntaf.html. Send applications with a full CV and two references to the Personnel Office,University of Wales, 9 Laura Place, Abersytwyth, Ceredigion, Wales by the closing date, 30th April. Bob Morris Jones, Bob Morris Jones, Department of Education, Adran Addysg, University of Wales, Prifysgol Cymru, ABERYSTWYTH, Aberystwyth Ceredigion, Ceredigion Wales SY23 2AX. Cymru SY23 2AX Phone (01970) 622103 Ffôn (01970) 622103 Fax (01970) 622258 Ffax (01970) 622258 http://www.aber.ac.uk/~bmj/index.html http://www.aber.ac.uk/~bmj/index.html From Edy.Veneziano at pse.unige.ch Sun Mar 28 06:56:34 1999 From: Edy.Veneziano at pse.unige.ch (Edy.Veneziano) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 08:56:34 +0200 Subject: sensorimotor experience and language Message-ID: > At that time, this case was used as evidence against the motor theory > of speech perception. However, it could perhaps also be used as > evidence against the sensorimotor account of language acquisition. To take into consideration on this issue: As far as I can understand, sensorimotor intelligence does not necessarily need effective motor action to develop. 'Looking' is already considered an action that has transformational potentials; and, relatively early, objects can be assimilated to potential and internally-performed actions. Edy Veneziano From bates at crl.ucsd.edu Sun Mar 28 17:36:24 1999 From: bates at crl.ucsd.edu (Elizabeth Bates) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 09:36:24 -0800 Subject: sensorimotor experience and language Message-ID: I agree with Edy Veneziano that one should not take the "motor" part of the sensorimotor equation too literally. First, let's remember that the Piagetian insight was SENSORImotor, which is critical to the argument. Second, as Edy notes, let's remember that there is a very active, selective component to sensory activity as well -- and one that is linked in non-trivial ways to the planning of response, both phylogenetically and ontogenetically. We are talking here about the difference between hearing and listening, seeing and paying attention. Within the sensory systems of the brain, the connections going back down from (for example) visual cortex to the visual thalamus greatly outnumber the connections that bring information from the thalamus (which is where the eye reports....) to the cortex. In other words, perception itself is active, selective, enhancing some parts of the signal and suppressing others. But there is also a tight connection/overlap between active-sensory and covert-motor systems. For example, Italian neurophysiologist Rizzolatti has studied neurons in premotor cortex that fire preferentially when the monkey is planning an arm movement in one particular direction (a kind of covert motor analogue to the line-orientation preference cells in visual cortex). The most interesting finding here for our purposes is that these cells also fire when the monkey observes someone else making an analogous arm movement! These results are relevant to us in language acquisition on many grounds -- as one of the possible cortical bases to the mysteries of imitation, and as testimony to the active, action-based nature of perception and learning. In the particular cases of motor-impaired children that we are discussing here, we can certainly eliminate a literal actions-out-in-the-world interpretation of the sensorimotor theory of language, but as long as the child is capable of planning (including eye movements) and active testing of the world in some form, then the more interesting version of the sensorimotor hypothesis still stands, with plenty of neurophysiology to back it up. -liz bates From ervin-tr at cogsci.Berkeley.EDU Sun Mar 28 18:52:32 1999 From: ervin-tr at cogsci.Berkeley.EDU (Susan Ervin-Tripp) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 10:52:32 -0800 Subject: Virus on "Important Message From.." attachment Message-ID: Virus: Trash "List.doc" attached to "Subject: Important message from..." By MATT RICHTEL NY Times March 28, 1999 SAN FRANCISCO -- A rapidly spreading computer virus forced several large corporations to shut down their e-mail servers on Friday night as it rode the Internet on a global rampage, several leading network security companies reported Saturday. The security companies said early reports of the virus, which is carried by e-mail, led them to believe that tens of thousands of home and business computers had been infected on Friday alone. The virus reproduces itself exponentially, they said, trying to use each infected message to send 50 more infected messages. "This is the fastest-spreading virus we've seen," said Srivats Sampath, general manager for the McAfee Software division of Network Associates, a Santa Clara company that makes anti-virus software. Network security experts said that the virus appeared to do no harm to the machines it infected and that individuals could easily disable it. But they said its purpose is to interrupt networks by replicating itself so rapidly that it overwhelms networks and e-mail servers, the electronic post offices that direct message traffic. E-mail infected with the virus, which its creators call Melissa, has a topic line that begins, "Important Message From." Next is the sender's name, which is often the name of a friend, fellow worker or someone else known to the recipient. The message within the e-mail is short and innocuous: "Here is that document you asked for ... don't show anyone else ;-)" Attached to it is a 40,000-byte, or 40K, Microsoft Word document named list.doc. When the recipient opens list.doc, the Melissa virus automatically searches for an e-mail address book. It then sends a copy of itself -- the message and attachment -- from the recipient to the first 50 names it finds in the recipient's address book, which accounts for the rapid acceleration across the Internet. The virus is known to spread rapidly with two popular e-mail programs, Microsoft Outlook and a slimmed-down version of the same program, Microsoft Outlook Express, which is part of the Windows 98 operating system and is often installed with Windows 95. Network security administrators said they had seen no evidence that Melissa was able to open and use the address books in other e-mail programs, but they did not rule out the possibility that it could and would do so. Several anti-virus software makers posted software on their Web sites that their customers can download to detect the virus-encoded message and refuse it. A fix for the general public was available on www.sendmail.com, the Web site of Sendmail, the Emeryville company whose post-office software is often used to direct mail on the Internet. Eric Allman, a co-founder of Sendmail, said he was concerned that the problem would worsen on Monday morning when employees find these messages in their e-mail in-boxes. "This will get into a lot of mail boxes and lay dormant," he said. "When employees come in at 8 a.m. and read these messages, it will cause an explosive growth of the virus." Allman characterized the virus' virulence as "not the worst I'd seen, but it's pretty bad." He added, however, that it appeared to be the fastest-replicating virus he had seen. Individuals can avoid contracting or spreading the virus simply by not opening the attachment that accompanies the e-mail. Opening the message alone will not cause the virus to copy the address list and send itself out. Alternatively, users can disarm the virus by disabling the type of program that contains it -- "macros," which are small applications used to automate tasks in Microsoft Word documents. Disabling macros in Microsoft Word will render the virus ineffective. Officials from Microsoft said they were not certain of the magnitude of the virus and emphasized that it could be easily disarmed. Adam Sohn, a company spokesman, said, "If folks are careful about what runs on their machine, they'll always be fine." The virus overwhelmed employees on Friday at GCI Group, a public relations firm with offices throughout the United States. One contract employee, who exchanges mail with a number of company employees, said she received more than 500 messages during the day. "It hosed my entire day," said the employee, Leigh Anne Varney. "You can't print the words I used. I've never had this happen before." This hardly is the first virus to attack and spread automatically via e-mail, but it is the first to move from being a controlled, essentially experimental form "into the wild," said Dan Schrader, director of product marketing for Trend Micro, an anti-virus software maker in Cupertino. The rapid spread of the program was reminiscent of a 1988 program, known as a worm, written by Robert Tappan Morris, then a graduate student in computer science at Cornell University. Morris' program spread through the Internet with remarkable speed, ultimately disabling more than 6,000 computers. However, the Internet was tiny in 1988 compared with the size of today's network. As a result the potential for the spread of the program is truly vast. "We haven't seen anything impact this many people on the Internet in a long time," said Schrader. He said that three of his company's customers had temporarily shut down their e-mail servers to delete the infected mail. Whoever wrote the virus also left the message "W97M -- Melissa." The note said the virus was created by "Kwyjibo," which Trend Micro officials speculated is a reference to the television show "The Simpsons." In an episode of the Simpsons titled "Bart the Genius," Bart Simpson wins a Scrabble game by using the "word" Kwyjibo. The theory dovetails with a second impact of the virus: Once the virus has infected a computer, it will type a message on the screen when the time of day corresponds to the date (on March 26 it would be 3:26). The message reads: "Twenty-two points, plus triple-word-score, plus 50 points for using all my letters. Game's over. I'm outta here." From jeff at elda.fr Sat Mar 27 15:46:35 1999 From: jeff at elda.fr (Jeff ALLEN) Date: Sat, 27 Mar 1999 17:46:35 +0200 Subject: sum: prosody and gestures references Message-ID: Regarding my 2 separate questions on the topics of Prosody and Gestures last week on the Prosody and Info-Childes lists, this is the summary of responses. I wish to extend my thanks to Fred Cummins, Anton Batliner, Joost van de Weijer, Olle Engstrand , Joyce Tang Boyland , Paul Kienzle, Patricia Zukow-Goldring, Julie Vonwiller, Nick Bannan , Deborah Froelich, Jana Iverson, Laura D'Odorico, Gerard Bailly, Regina Cruz, Alex Monaghan CA , Carolyn Chaney and Judy Vander Woude for their replies. Given the overwhelming number of replies as well as requests in private for me to provide a summary, here it is. I am hope that this information will be beneficial to many of you as well. Best, Jeff ---- PROSODY My question was: 1. It has been shown in First Language Acquisition that prosodic patterns are learned and produced by children before lexical and syntactic structures, and that parents can understand the speech of children thanks to the intonation when the grammatical structure is sometimes undecipherable in isolation. and in my clarification message I stated: I have heard that articles/papers have discussed the concept of prosody being acquired before syntax. What I am interested in specifically is that prosody is a very important factor in communication. In some instances of adult communication, the only way to distinguish between a declarative, and a question is from prosodic structure when the phonemic string is the same. In the case of children, especially children who I have not spent much time with, I sometimes cannot make out the individual lexical items, but the prosodic nature of the utterance is the glue that allows me to understand what they are trying to communicate. If there are articles in favor or against this concept, I would be more than willing to receive more info along these lines. The replies were: @Article{condon:74, author = {William S. Condon and Louis W. Sander}, title = {Synchrony demonstrated between movements of the neonate and adult speech}, journal = {Child Development}, year = 1974, volume = 45, pages = {456--462} } @Article{bertoncini:95, author = {Josiane Bertoncini and Caroline Floccia and Thierry Nazzi and Jacques Mehler}, title = {Morae and syllables: rhythmical basis of speech representation in neonates}, journal = LS, year = 1995, volume = 38, number = 4, pages = {311--329}, annote = {French 3-day old infants discriminate stimuli based on syllable count, not moraic count (French infants, Japanese stimuli..)} } @Article{nazzi:98, author = {Nazzi, T. and Bertoncini, J. and Mehler, J.}, title = {Language discrimination by newborns: towards an understanding of the role of rhythm}, journal = JEP-HPP, year = 1998, volume = 24, pages = {756--766}, annote = {Newborns (< 5 days, native French) can discriminate LPF speech (400 Hz) when presented with Engliah and Japanese, now when presented with English and Dutch, and only the rhythmic coherent set of English/Dutch vs Spanish/Italian, not English/Italian vs Dutch/Spanish. Uses the concept of 'rhythmic distance'.} } @Article{bosch:97, author = {Bosch, Laura and Sebasti\'{a}n-{G}all\'{e}s}, title = {Native-language recognition abilities in 4-month-old infants from monolingual and bilingual environments}, journal = {Cognition}, year = 1997, volume = 65, pages = {33-69}, annote = {4 mo infants (Catalan) can discriminate Catalan/English (1). Monolingual Spanish or Catalan infants can discriminate between the langauge of their envirinment and the other (2). Ditto with LPF utterances (400 Hz) (3). Spanish/Catalan bilingual infants react faster to English than their maternal language (opposite of expected result) (4a). Bilingual infants showed no preference for one of their 2 languages (4b). Result 4a was replicated with Spanish/Catalan vs Italian (5).} } @Article{fowler:86, author = {Fowler, Carol A. and Smith, Mary R. and Tassinary, Louis G.}, title = {Perception of syllable timing by prebabbling infants}, journal = JASA, year = 1986, volume = 79, number = 3, pages = {814-825} } --- early responsiveness to intonation preceeds lexical comprehension and production: (Achtung: bei `Papousek' ist "uber dem s ein umgekehrtes Dach!) Papousek, M. \& Papousek, H.:=20 Musical elements in the infant's vocalization:=20 Their significance for communication, cognition and creativity. In: L.P. Lipsitt (Ed.): Advances in Infancy Research, Vol. 1 (pp. 163-224). Norwood, NJ: Ablex. ... awareness of prosodic contrast in adult utterances directed to the child ... known to be present in children from around 2 to 3 months ... : David Crystal: Prosodic development. In: Paul Fletcher and Michael Garman: Language Acquisition. Studies in first language development. Cambridge University Press, Cambridg= e et al., 1979. p. 33-48. ---- A. Fernald (1989). Intonation and communicative intent in mothers' speech to infants: is the melody the message. Child Development, 60, 1897-1510. --- http://www.ling.su.se/staff/olle/Native_babbling.htm ---- Lynch, MP; Kimbrough Oller, D; Steffens, ML; Buder, EH (1995). Phrasing in prelinguistic vocalizations. Developmental Psychology 28(1):3-25 Abstract: "... Adult judges identified a hirarchical arrangement of syllables embedded within utterances and utterances embedded within prelinguistic phrases in the vocalizations of infants. ..." Hallé, PA; de Boysson-Bardies, B; Vihman, MM; Beginnings of prosodic organization: Intonation and duration patterns of disyllables produced by Japanese and French infants Abstract: "... by four French and four Japanese children of about 18 months of age are examind. F- contour and vowel durations in disyyllables are found to be clearly language-specific. ..." ---- Vonwiller Julie P "The development of Intonation in Infants" 1988 PhD thesis, SHLRC Centre, Macquarie University, Australia ---- You may wish to look at the Tarplee's chapter in the following book: Tarplee, Clare. (1996). Working on young children's utterances: prosodic aspects of repetition during picture labeling. In Couper-Kuhlen, E. & Selting, M. (Eds.) Prosody in conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clare doesn't address prosody before syntax, but she does wonderfully illustrate how important prosody is in parent-child conversation. The rest of the volume addresses the role of prosody in both adult and child conversations. ---- The link with your own work might be to look at the research of Klaus Scherer, who has made fascinating comparisons between the sonic communication of various animal species; Paul Ekman, where the link between emotionally-motivated facial expression and sonic results ties in with this; and Terrence Deacon, where the neurological story of how we communicate is told in a way which leaves room for the kind of assumptions ---- About the discussion of the concept of prosody acquired before syntax, I'm sending you the references of two articles which show how infants use different prosodic patterns to differentiate cry and non cry vocalization produced in different communicative contexts. I hope they will be useful to you. D'ODORICO L., Non-segmental features in prelinguistic communication: an analysis of some types of infant cry and non-cry vocalizations, Journal of Child Language, 1984, 11,pp.17-27. D'ODORICO L. e FRANCO F., Selective production of vocalization types in different communication contexts. Journal of Child Language, 18, 3, pp.475-500, 1991. ---- GESTURES: My question was: 2. 50 or so percent of communication is transmitted through gestures, facial expression, etc. and in my clarification message I stated: The number 50 is completely arbitrary. It might be 10%, 20% 30% etc. I remember reading a paper on this topic several years ago and simply cannot remember the number that was attributed, nor the author of the paper. It is certain that gestures make up a part of general communication, but I would like to get some information on studies that try to quantify it, even in specific contexts. The replies were: When Gestures Speak Louder Than Words. (No claims re 50% of communication, etc!) Infants often do not initially understand caregiver messages (Catch it!). Subsequent messages in which caregivers provide perceptual structure/information with gestures (demonstrating how to catch) overwhelmingly lead to achieving a practical understanding of ongoing events. When caregivers' subsequent messages are expressed only with more specific verbal utterances (Catch the ball!), a common understanding is rarely achieved. This longitudinal research was conducted during the prelinguistic period from 6 months through the one-word period (19-24 months). There were 5 Euro-American, English-speaking families and 6 Latino, Spanish-speaking families. The data were collected in suburbs of Los Angeles, CA, USA. Briefly, words cannot explain unless a person already knows what words mean. Learning what words mean is what the infant "means" to learn. These caregivers assembled messages by "saying and showing", so their infants could perceive what they said and did. Pat Zukow-Goldring Zukow-Goldring, P. (in press). Perceiving referring actions: Latino and Euro-American caregivers and infants comprehending speech. In K. L. Nelson, A. Aksu-Koc, & C. Johnson (Eds.), Children's Language, Vol. 11. Hillsdale NJ: Erlbaum. Zukow-Goldring, P. G. (1997). A social ecological realist approach to the emergence of the lexicon: Educating attention to amodal invariants in gesture and speech." In C. Dent-Read & P. Zukow-Goldring (Eds.), Evolving explanations of development: Ecological approaches to organism-environment systems (pp. 199-250). Washington, D. C.: American Psychological Association. Zukow-Goldring, P. (1996). Sensitive caregivers foster the comprehension of speech: When gestures speak louder than words. Early Development and Parenting, 5 (4), 195-211. ----- I think I know the study you have in mind regarding % of communication: Mehrabian, A (1972) Nonverbal Communication Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall Mehrabian (after careful film and audio analysis of conversations) gave the proportions as 55% gestural and 45% verbal. Leon Thurman, author of 'Bodymind and Voice', uses this study extensively in his illustration of the musical features of infant prosody which remain in place throughout life as the singing voice where the convergent development of semantic speech (and writing, schooling, etc.) do not inhibit them. ----- There is an interesting book by McNeill called Hand and Mind (1992) about gestures. I would be interested in whatever you hear from others as well. ----- A group of Italian colleagues and I recently did a study in which we looked at the frequency of maternal gesture use as mothers interacted with their 16- and 20-month-old children in naturalistic, in-home play sessions. We found that only 10% of all maternal utterances were accompanied by gesture, that the vast majority of gestures were points at concrete objects, and that frequency of maternal gesture did not change across the children's 16 and 20 month sessions (i.e., maternal gesture production did not decline as children's vocal language skills improved). Interestingly, another unpublished study that looked at American mothers' use of gesture during interactions with their 18-month-olds also reported that 10% of maternal utterances occurred with gesture. Marilyn Shatz also did some work a few years ago looking at the relationship between speech and gesture in maternal speech to young children. Here are some references that might be helpful. Iverson, J.M., Capirci, O., Longobardi, E., & Caselli, M.C. (in press). Gesturing in mother-child interactions. Cognitive Development. Bekken, K. (1989). Is there motherese in gesture? Unpublished doctoral dissertation, The University of Chicago. Shatz, M. (1982). On mechanisms of language acquisition: Can features of the communicative environment account for development? In E. Wanner & L. Gleitman (Eds.), Language acquisition: The state of the art (pp. 102-127). New York: Cambridge University Press. ---- There is an older paper by Menyuk & Bernholtz in which a holophrastic child's babbled utterances were played to listeners, who reliably identified the uttances as declaratives, questions or emphatics. I can find the full citation for you if you want it (I'm sure it's cited in Menyuk's book on language acquisition). ----- PROSODY AND GESTURES: Some replies received indicated the combination of my 2 questions although I have not been working on the hybridization of the 2 areas. The replies were: http://www.lpl.univ-aix.fr Dans cette même homepage, tu peux trouver les details dans congrès qui a eu lieu à Besançon au mois de décembre derniers dont la plus part de thèmes était au tours de ce sujet "prosodie et gestes". Les actes sont disponibles dans les librairies aussi. De toute façon, je t'envoies son mail pour que tu puisses avoir toutes les informations souhaitées: ---- actually, for those who are interested, the proceedings of the conference "speech and gesture" were published as a book: Santi, Guaïtella, Cavé & Konopczynski (eds) 1998: "Oralité et Gestualité", Paris: L'Harmattan. The Aix-en-Provence group is well established and has produced several theses in this area, including Santi's and Guaïtella's. They are probably the only group in Europe to combine significant expertise in gesture, suprasegmental phonetics and prosodic phonology. ----- NOT SURE Since I posted 2 questions in the same message, I received a couple of replies that seem to refer to Prosody, but might refer to Gestures since the title "Signal to Syntax" could be applied to either area. The replies were: Look in the PsycInfo (or is it PsycLit?) database under Anne Fernald and you should get a bunch of abstracts. Also look in the book Signal to Syntax edited by James L. Morgan and Katherine Demuth for a whole collection of relevant papers and the names of the people who do this research. This was one of my qualifying exam topics about 7 years ago. You can get chapter titles and often chapter abstracts out of the same database. ---- @book{morgan-demuth:signal-to-syntax, author = {James L. Morgan and Katherine Demuth}, title = {Signal to syntax: an overview}, year = {1996}, publisher = {Lawrence Erlbaum Associates}, address = {Mahwah, NJ - USA} } ---- end -------- ================================================= Jeff ALLEN - Directeur Technique European Language Resources Association (ELRA) & European Language resources Distribution Agency (ELDA) (Agence Européenne de Distribution des Ressources Linguistiques) 55, rue Brillat-Savarin 75013 Paris FRANCE Tel: (+33) 1.43.13.33.33 - Fax: (+33) 1.43.13.33.30 mailto:jeff at elda.fr http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/home.html From Y.W.Lam-Kwok at newcastle.ac.uk Mon Mar 29 10:51:52 1999 From: Y.W.Lam-Kwok at newcastle.ac.uk (LAM-KWOK) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 10:51:52 GMT0BST Subject: Bilingualism Symposium at Newcastle Message-ID: Someone requested information about the Newcastle Conference. Unfortunately I deleted the file by mistake. Instead of giving you a personal reply, I'm now sending the information to the mailing lists instead . Hope you'll find it useful. Thanks again for your email. Yuet Wah Lam-Kwok University of Newcastle > 2nd International Symposium on Bilingualism > > 14-17 April, 1999 > University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK > > KEYNOTE SPEAKERS > Michael Clyne (Monash) > Francois Grosjean (Neuchatel) > Monica Heller (OISE, Toronto) > Carol Myers Scotton (South Carolina) > > COLLOQUIA > 1. Cross-linguistic studies of language acquisition (Marilyn M. > Vihman:m.vihman at bangor.ac.uk and Ginny Mueller Gathercole: > v.c.gathercole at bangor.ac.uk) >2. Bilingual cognitive processing (David Green: ucjtdg at ucl.ac.uk) >3.Input in bilingual acquisition (Annick de Houwer: vhouwer at uia.ua.ac.be > and Elizabeth Lanza: Elizabeth.Lanza at ilf.uio.no) > 4. Early syntax of developing bilinguals > (Margaret Deuchar: m.deuchar at bangor.ac.uk) > 5. Neurolinguistics and acquired communication disorders in bilinguals > (Franco Fabbro and Nick Miller:nicholas.miller at ncl.ac.uk) > >6. Sign bilingualsim (Clare Gallaway: gallaway at fs1.ed.man.ac.uk) >7. Grammar and Codeswitching (Jeanine Treffers-Daller: > j-treffersdaller at wpg.uwe.ac.uk and Ad Backus: > backus at ling.ucsd.edu and jacomine Nortier: jacomine.nortier at let.ruu.nl) >8. Sociolinguistics of bilingual interaction > (Ben Rampton: ben.rampton at tvu.ac.u, Mukul Saxena: > m.saxena at ucrysj.ac.uk and Li Wei: li.wei at ncl.ac.uk) >9.Trilingualism and trilinguals (Charlotte Hoffman: > c.hoffman at mod.lang.salford.ac.uk) > > Round-Table > Bilingualism and communication disorders; implications for speech >and language therapy (Chair: Deirdre Martin: > martinm at edusrv1.bham.ac.uk) > For more information, please contact: Mrs Gillian Cavagan, ISB Organizing Commitee, Department of Speech, University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Tel: 44-191-222 7385 Fax: 44-191-2226518 From Edy.Veneziano at pse.unige.ch Mon Mar 29 10:50:51 1999 From: Edy.Veneziano at pse.unige.ch (Edy.Veneziano) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 12:50:51 +0200 Subject: sensorimotor experience and language Message-ID: Elizabeth Bates wrote: >.... >For example, Italian neurophysiologist Rizzolatti has studied > neurons in premotor cortex that fire preferentially when the monkey is > planning an arm movement in one particular direction (a kind of covert > motor analogue to the line-orientation preference cells in visual cortex). > The most interesting finding here for our purposes is that these cells > also fire when the monkey observes someone else making an analogous > arm movement! IT is fascinating! Thank you Elizabeth for sharing this with us. At your leisure, could you send out some references? Edy From eubank at unt.edu Mon Mar 29 15:07:57 1999 From: eubank at unt.edu (Lynn Eubank) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 09:07:57 -0600 Subject: sensorimotor experience and language Message-ID: > Elizabeth Bates wrote: > >.... > >For example, Italian neurophysiologist Rizzolatti has studied > > neurons in premotor cortex that fire preferentially when the monkey is > > planning an arm movement in one particular direction (a kind of covert > > motor analogue to the line-orientation preference cells in visual cortex). > > The most interesting finding here for our purposes is that these cells > > also fire when the monkey observes someone else making an analogous > > arm movement! It is, of course, hard to sort through all of this. How did Rizzolatti know, for example, that their monkey was "planning" an arm movement? Actually, I suppose that Rizzolatti did have an experimental paradigm that isolates planning activity (though it'd still be interesting to know how it was done). But then comes the next question: When the monkey observes an analogous movement, is this a movement that the monkey is in some sense already familiar with? In other words, with monkey-see/ monkey-do, are we talking about a see-do pairing that the monkey would have to -learn- to do? The question becomes relevant, I think, for concerns one might have about -acquisition- in humans. later, Lynn Eubank eubank at unt.edu From gleason at bu.edu Mon Mar 29 16:13:52 1999 From: gleason at bu.edu (Jean Berko Gleason) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 11:13:52 -0500 Subject: sensorimotor experience and language Message-ID: As a slight historical note, I once raised the question at a meeting, either BU or Stanford, to Mimi Sinclair, of how children with e.g. major motor impairment resulting from Thalidomide could develop so well intellectually without the motor component, and she replied (referring to sensorimotor development), basically, "They do it with their eyes." At the time there were a number of reports in the press and a film about a bright young man named, I believe, Terry Wiles, who was born without limbs. He had ultimately been fitted with prostheses, and was leading an active life, with plans for college. jbg From macw at cmu.edu Mon Mar 29 18:24:45 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 13:24:45 -0500 Subject: seeing, mapping, and mirror neurons Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, The discussion of sensorimotor input from Lynn, Edy, Liz, and others has correctly interwoven several issues. If you go back to Piaget's analyses in "Origins of Intelligence", you see a child who is much involved in forming primary and secondary circular reactions between sensory and motor schemes. It would be easy to take this characterization of Laurent or Jacqueline as somehow the only road that the child could traverse. But I doubt that Piaget saw things that way. Rather, his emphasis was on the flexibility of mental structures. But can the child rely on only sensation to construct the world? I doubt that Piaget would have considered that adequate for the construction of the physical universe. Even if we cannot act on objects ourselves directly, we can easily observe the actions of others on objects. Rizzolatti's work shows that support for this level of intersubjective mapping is fundamental to cognition. Of course, there is work from Meltzoff, Kuhl, Anisfeld, and others pointing to the presence of mechanisms to support imitation. I have been thinking that these various pieces of evidence point to rich neuronal support for the mapping of our body image onto the body images of others. My initial ideas on this are at: http://psyling.psy.cmu.edu/brian/papers/bod.htm How might all this impact language learning? First, I guess most of us can agree that the learning of verb argument structures is a core component of the larger task of language learning. Second, there are many theories that would further argue that argument structure is a partial reflex of verb semantics. But then, how does the child learn the semantics of verbs? One possibility is that this occurs through the formation of embodied representations for verbs. The NTL group at the ICSI at Berkeley (Feldman, Lakoff, Chang, Bailey, Narayanan) has been developing this approach for modeling the learning of the semantics of verbs like "push" and "shove". But if a child is born without limbs or without the control of limbs, how could they learn such verbs? The perspective-taking account would hold that the child would match and map their own body image to that of other actors. By observing the pushing and shoving done by others, they would then remap to their own potentialities. Blind children would experience the pushing and shoving directly and would have a more difficult time mapping to others, but would be able to do so through imagine projection of their body image. Lynn correctly notes that the Rizzolatti et al. mirror neurons do not prove that there is a mechanism for projection of our internal body schematic. However, Rizzolatti's results do show that monkeys (and presumably humans too) customarily process the actions of others through the same neural hardware that process self action. Rizzolatti further shows that some of these neurons respond specifically to basic actions with some firing for grasping and others for pinching, for example. It is fine to then call these "grasp" or "pinch" neurons, but the point is that these neurons fire equally for self and other. So there is a neuronal juncture where the two maps coarticulate. There are many detailed issues in child language acquisition that could potentially be illuminated by this approach. Consider the child's representation of the verb "pick up", as in "pick me up". Rather than mapping this verb's meaning initially to the perspective of the person who lifts up, the child may view the action from the "ergative" perspective of the child being lifted. Eventually, both perspectives are merged, thereby supporting a fuller set of syntactic options. I'm curious whether others have considered the implications of perspective-mapping for language acquisition. It would seem that Nancy Budwig's work on the replacement of subject pronoun "I" by "my" for actions in which the child is directly involved might be a further case of this sort, for example. --Brian MacWhinney From macw at cmu.edu Mon Mar 29 18:33:55 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 13:33:55 -0500 Subject: Rizzolatti reference Message-ID: The Rizzolatti reference is: Rizzolatti, G., Fadiga, L., Gallese, V., & Fogassi, L. (1996). Premotor cortex and the recognition of motor actions. Cognitive Brain Research, 3, 131-141. That article includes related references to about six other papers on related studies. --Brian MacWhinney From bates at crl.ucsd.edu Mon Mar 29 18:51:50 1999 From: bates at crl.ucsd.edu (Elizabeth Bates) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 10:51:50 -0800 Subject: sensorimotor experience and language Message-ID: I'm not an expert in research on awake-behaving monkeys, let me stress, but I understand that experiments like Rizzolati's involve a long training period in which the animal is rewarded for (1) moving in the direction he needs to move to get the reward, and then (2) waiting to make that movement until a "go" signal is given. After they are trained up, the single cell recording is done. So, the operational definition of "the animal is planning an arm movement" would be performance on a trial in which a movement in Direction A will be produced, but the animal is still waiting for the "go" signal. By the way, there is also human fMRI work on covert motor activity, in which people are instructed to (1) covertly copy a set of finger movements, (2) plan those movements but wait for a "go" signal before they are 'covertly executed', and (3) plan those movements but then inhibit them when a 'stop' signal is given. Believe it or not, distinct though related patterns of frontal/prefrontal activation are seen in each of these three conditions, quite systematic! Even more exciting (or disturbing, depending on your point of view), the various areas involved in covert planning/execution/inhibition of hand movements overlap markedly with the areas that show up in covert speech.... With regard to the question about whether these are movements that the monkey is familiar with, the answer is definitely "yes": these are relatively simple directed movements that the animal uses in everday life, and hence do not represent animal homologues to imitation in the strong sense of imitation of novel acts that the animal has never seen before. It is an empirical question whether imitation of known vs. imitation of novel movements elicit similar patterns of activation in humans (monkeys do so little of any interest in the latter domain that the experiment really couldn't be done.....see research on this topic by Elisabetta Visalberghi -- the term "monkey see/monkey do" is really misleading, because humans are the only primates who perform reliably in this domain!). -liz bates >> Elizabeth Bates wrote: >> >.... >> >For example, Italian neurophysiologist Rizzolatti has studied >> > neurons in premotor cortex that fire preferentially when the monkey is >> > planning an arm movement in one particular direction (a kind of covert >> > motor analogue to the line-orientation preference cells in visual cortex). >> > The most interesting finding here for our purposes is that these cells >> > also fire when the monkey observes someone else making an analogous >> > arm movement! > >It is, of course, hard to sort through all of this. How did Rizzolatti >know, for example, that their monkey was "planning" an arm movement? >Actually, I suppose that Rizzolatti did have an experimental paradigm >that isolates planning activity (though it'd still be interesting to >know how it was done). But then comes the next question: When the monkey >observes an analogous movement, is this a movement that the monkey is in >some sense already familiar with? In other words, with monkey-see/ >monkey-do, are we talking about a see-do pairing that the monkey would >have to -learn- to do? The question becomes relevant, I think, for >concerns one might have about -acquisition- in humans. > >later, >Lynn Eubank >eubank at unt.edu From Jordan.Zlatev at lucs.lu.se Mon Mar 29 19:27:37 1999 From: Jordan.Zlatev at lucs.lu.se (Jordan Zlatev) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 21:27:37 +0200 Subject: Summary: sensorimotor experience and language Message-ID: Dear Info-childes readers, I wish to thank everyone who replied to my querie and am quite happy that the discussion seems to have caught on: the issues brought up are exactly what prompted my question in the first place. Since most people have replied directly to the net I will only summarise those references sent directly to me. Melissa Bowerman: Jordan, N. (1972). Is there an Achilles' heel in Piaget's theorizing? Human Development, 15:325-384. Joyce Tang Boyland: Alison Gopnik has done some very nice work on the relation between Piagetian tasks and language dvelopment. Annette Karmiloff-Smith: there is some unpublished work suggesting that children with SMA develop language faster than those who can crawl around and explore the world. The authors suggest that this is due to the child spending more time exploring language because of no competition from other stimuli. If I recall, the data concerned morphological markers. Robin N Campbell: My old employer and mentor Margaret Donaldson was interested in this question in the late 1960s, and she sought to investigate it with 'thalidomide' children, whose limbs were often rudimentary. I'm not sure whether anything got published, but the outcome was perfectly clear. There was no evidence of lag in sensorimotor achievement, apart from those achievements directly affected by the disability. However, I wouldn't at all go along with Monod (and even less with Chomsky) on this hypothesis. Piaget's ideas about the origins of sensorimotor structures are simply not precise enough to be susceptible to this sort of global empirical test. Piaget's own evidence is all particularized: he traces the origin of particular structures (throwing a ball, say) in previous experiences with arm movements, grasp, balls, etc. Wendy Hough-Eyamie: One population that has been study in reference to your question about the importance of sensori-motor experience on the acquisition of language is children born with cerebral palsy. A colleague of mine conducted her doctoral research on the topic. I am not sure whether she was looking from a Piagetian perspective at motor experience but I'm sure her research is relevant to your interest. Her name is Dr. Ann Sutton... Claire Kopp: Some years ago, we published a brief report about a child born without any limbs (Kopp & Shaperman, 1973). We were interested in the development of sensorimotor skills, because of Piaget's emphasis on motor activity in early cognitive development. I tested the child, starting when he was about 2 yrs. The testing took quite a while because of the child's limitations; his sensorimotor development was okay. His language development was also 'normal'. I followed the child until he was 7, and his functional use of language was on a par with other children his age. I heard he later went to college, etc. Miguel Perez Pereira (on acquisition by blind children) B. Landau & L Gleitman (1985). Language and experience. Evidence from the blind. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Peters, A. M. (1994). The interdependence of social, cognitive, and linguistic development: Evidence from a visually impaired child. In H. Tager-Flusberg (Ed.), Constraints on language acquisition: Studies of atypical children. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Pérez-Pereira, M. & Castro, J. (1997). Language acquisition and the compensation of visual deficit: New comparative data on a controversial topic. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 15, 439-459. Pérez-Pereira, M. & Conti-Ramsden, G. (in press). Language development and social interaction in blind children. London: Psychology Press. Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini: Monod and Chomsky were right. In all these years there has been not an example of a motor impediment that causes a speech deficit, except in the most trivial instances (the muscles of the mouth in production, motor handicaps in signing, again only at the production level). I think that theirs was a brilliant insight. Thank you again, and following Brain's discussion of the (potential) role of cross-modal mappings and his question: > I'm curious whether others have considered the implications of > perspective-mapping for language acquisition. - let me mentioned one source of evidence which has so far not surfaced: modeling language acquisition through robotics (which is what I am currently involved in). Hideki Kozima has considered the role of perspective-mapping in this context: http://www-karc.crl.go.jp/kss/xkozima/work/overview-E.html And I will be doing likewise in my project, eventually. A question which puzzles me in this context is: to what extent is it justified to assume that the innate mapping mechanism innate? Cheers, Jordan Zlatev Cognitive Science Lund University Kungshuset, Lundagård 222 22 Lund, Sweden fax. : (+46) (0)46-222 9758 tel. : (+46) (0)46-222 0926 email: Jordan.Zlatev at lucs.lu.se http://www.lucs.lu.se/People/Jordan.Zlatev/ From Angeliek.vanHout at let.uu.nl Mon Mar 29 21:44:47 1999 From: Angeliek.vanHout at let.uu.nl (Angeliek van Hout) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 23:44:47 +0200 Subject: Conference program: Language acquisition & breakdown Message-ID: Below follows the program of our conference again, now with further conference information on (pre-)registration and a web site address which has a link with hotel information. LANGUAGE ACQUISITION & LANGUAGE BREAKDOWN May 28-29 UiL OTS, Utrecht University PRELIMINARY PROGRAM: THURSDAY MAY 27, UiL OTS, Trans 10, room 0.07 5-7 Reception & registration FRIDAY MAY 28, room to be announced 8.45 - 09.15 Registration 9.15 - 09.30 Opening and welcome by Eric Reuland (Direcetor of UiL OTS, Utrecht University) 9.30-10.30 "The Vulnerable C-domain" Christer Platzack, Lund University 10.30-11.10 "The Italian determiner system in normal acquisition, specific language impairment, and childhood aphasia" Piero Bottari, Paola Cipriani, Anna Maria Chilosi & Lucia Pfanner, University of Perugia, Scientific Institute Stella Maris & University of Pisa 11.10-11.30 coffee 11.30-12.10 "Functional categories and syntactic operations in (ab)normal language acquisition" Celia Jakubowicz & Lea Nash CNRS, Université Paris 5 & CNRS, Université Paris 8 12.10-12.50 "The acquisition of event structure in normally developing and language impaired children in German" Petra Schulz, Karin Wymann & Zvi Penner, Konstanz University 12.50-2.30 lunch 2.30-3.30 "Compounding and Inflection in Language Impairment" Harald Clahsen, University of Essex 3.30-4.10 "Controversies on CP: A comparison of language acquisition and language impairments in Broca's aphasia" Martina Penke, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf 4.10-4.30 tea 4.30-5.10 "Root infinitives and finite sentences: child language versus agrammatic speech" Esterella de Roo, HIL, Leiden University 5.10-6.10 "Grammatism: What language breakdown tells us about language development" Stephen Crain, University of Maryland Evening Conference dinner SATURDAY MAY 29 9.30-10.30 "The Unique Checking Constraint and Morphological Parameters as an Explanation of Variation over Time and Language of a Variety of Syntactic Constructions in Language Acquisition, both Impaired and Normal" Kenneth Wexler, MIT 10.30-11.10 "The acquisition of complex predicates in Japanese specifically language-impaired and normally-developing children" Shinji Fukuda & Suzy E. Fukuda, McGill University 11.10-11.30 coffee 11.30-12.10 "Comprehension of reversible relative clauses in specifically language impaired and normally developing children" Stavroula Stavraki, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki 12.10-12.50 "Morphosyntactic features in the verbal and nominal domains: a comparison between specifically language impaired and normally developing Greek children" Ianthi Maria Tsimpli, University of Cambridge 12.50-2.30 lunch 2.30-3.30 "The use of ellipsis in aphasic and child language" Herman Kolk, Nijmegen University 3.30-4.10 "Verb inflection and verb diversity in three populations: agrammatic speakers, normally developing children and children with specific language impairment" Roelien Bastiaanse & Gerard Bol, Groningen University 4.10-4.30 tea 4.30-5.10 "Language acquisition and breakdown in Zulu" Susan Suzman & Heile Jordaan, University of the Witwatersrand 5.10-6.10 "The neurology of syntax" Yosef Grodzinsky, Tel Aviv University Alternate papers: "Radical economy in deviant grammar: Deleted Formal Features [Agr and Relational prep]" Lamya Abdul-Karim, Eliane Ramos, Thomas Roeper & Harry Seymour University of Massachusetts "Verb movement in acquisition and aphasia: Same problem, different solutions. Evidence from Dutch" Shalom Zuckerman, Roelien Bastiaanse & Ron van Zonneveld, Groningen University Registration Pre-registration fee till May 15th 1999: participant fl 60 (approx. 27.50 euro) student fl 20 (approx. 9 euro) Registration fee at conference venue: participant fl 85 (approx. 39 euro) student fl 30 (approx. 14 euro) Pre-registration can be done on-line on our web site, or by requesting a registration form by sending an email to: uil-ots at let.uu.nl Conference venue UiL OTS is located in downtown Utrecht. Exact location to be announced. Accommodation Information on hotel accommodation in Utrecht can be found on our web site. Conference web site http://www-uilots.let.uu.nl/Conferences/LanguageBreakdown/index.htm Organizers Sergey Avrutin (Yale University), Marco Haverkort (Groningen University & Boston University), Angeliek van Hout (Utrecht University), Maaike Verrips (Utrecht University) For further information UiL OTS, Utrecht University Trans 10 NL-3512 JK Utrecht Netherlands Language.Acquisition at let.uu.nl From a.karmiloff-Smith at ich.ucl.ac.uk Tue Mar 30 12:28:57 1999 From: a.karmiloff-Smith at ich.ucl.ac.uk (Annette Karmiloff-Smith) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 12:28:57 +0000 Subject: SHORT INFANT TEST Message-ID: A PhD student of mine is looking for a *short* general cognitive infant test. She will have Bayley-II data on a total population, but in case some subsequent experimental tasks are a little too removed from the date of the initial Bayley testing, she wanted to run a *short* test to make sure that there have been no major changes in test age in the less able vs more able groups of infants. Can anyone suggest anything other than running the Bayley again on the whole population? Many thanks Annette ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 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: +44 171 831 7717 mobile: 0961 10 59 63 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ From mshatz at umich.edu Tue Mar 30 13:32:26 1999 From: mshatz at umich.edu (Marilyn Shatz) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 08:32:26 -0500 Subject: gestures and prosody Message-ID: Here are a couple of more references you may find useful for my work on gesturing to children that followed the one Jana provided: Schnur, E. & Shatz, M. (1984). The role of maternal gesturing in conversations with one-year-olds. JCL, 11, 29-41. Shatz, M. (1984). Contributions of mother and mind to the acquisition of communicative competence. In M. Perlmutter (Ed). Parent-child interactions and parent-child relations in child development. Minnesota Symposium on Child Psychology, v.17 (33-59), U of Minn. Press. From edwards.212 at osu.edu Tue Mar 30 15:47:34 1999 From: edwards.212 at osu.edu (Jan Edwards) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 10:47:34 -0500 Subject: NIH Traning Grant postdoc positions available Message-ID: * Please Post * POSTDOCTORAL TRAINEESHIPS AVAILABLE Multidisciplinary Program in Speech and Hearing Science Department of Speech and Hearing Science, The Ohio State University We anticipate two Postdoctoral Research Training Fellowships (National Institutional Research Service Award Fellowship) for PhDs or MDs to be available in 1999 (one should be available 1 July 1999; the second in Autumn 1999). These postdoctoral traineeships provide an opportunity to pursue focused research (either basic research or clinical research) in one of five areas of concentration within the discipline of speech and hearing science including speech production, speech processing, psychoacoustics, speech perception, and speech-language development. Emphasis of this training program is on cross-disciplinary research. The training faculty come from many different departments including the Departments of Speech and Hearing Science (Robert Fox, Lawrence Feth, Jan Weisenberger, Osamu Fujimura, Marios Fourakis, Jan Edwards, Stephanie Davidson, Lisa Stover, Michael Trudeau), Linguistics (Mary Beckman, Keith Johnson,), Psychology (Mari Jones, Neal Johnson, Caroline Palmer, Mark Pitt), Otolaryngology (Kamran Barin, Tom DeMaria), Electrical Engineering (Ashok Krishnamurthy, Stan Ahalt, Randy Moses), Zoology (William Masters), Mechanical Engineering (Mardi Hastings), and Wright-Patternson AFB (Tim Anderson). Potential trainees should have a doctorate and be a U.S. citizen or have permanent residence status. Traineeships will be awarded for a minimum of two years. Support will include a stipend, moving expenses, medical insurance, travel, and other training-related expenses. Interested individuals should submit inquiries and vitae along with a list of references to: Dr. Robert Allen Fox, Chair Department of Speech and Hearing Science 110 Pressey Hall, 1070 Carmack Rd. Columbus OH 43210-1002 Office phone: 614-292-1628 FAX: 614-292-7504 e-mail address: fox.2 at osu.edu From g.laws at surrey.ac.uk Tue Mar 30 15:58:49 1999 From: g.laws at surrey.ac.uk (Glynis Laws) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 10:58:49 -0500 Subject: No subject Message-ID: recipients info-childes From aad784 at agora.ulaval.ca Tue Mar 30 23:05:16 1999 From: aad784 at agora.ulaval.ca (Antonella Conte) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 18:05:16 -0500 Subject: No subject Message-ID: digest From smc4u at virginia.edu Wed Mar 31 11:36:30 1999 From: smc4u at virginia.edu (Stephanie M. Curenton) Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 10:36:30 -0100 Subject: Question about age norms of MLU Message-ID: I am currently working a project in which preschoolers told stories using the book "Frog, Where Are you?" I have calculated their MLU using CLAN. Could anyone suggest papers which talk about the age norms for MLU. For example, I have 5-year-olds with MLU of about 5.5. Do most 5-year-olds have MLU around this range? I would also be interested in any papers about low-income and African-American children's MLU. Thanks for your help! --steph From Roberta at UDel.Edu Wed Mar 31 15:35:13 1999 From: Roberta at UDel.Edu (Roberta Golinkoff) Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 10:35:13 -0500 Subject: online child language bibliography Message-ID: Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and I have some news that we hope will be helpful to you all. We have written a popular press book on language acquisition that can be useful for teaching undergraduates as well as for recommending to parents who want to know more about language development. It's called "How babies talk: The magic and mystery of language in the first three years of life" (Dutton Press) and will come out in June, 1999. It describes the wonders of language acquisition in a highly readable, jargon-free style. Written with numerous vignettes to illustrate its points, it reviews the most recent research in the field of language development in a way that conveys the significance of the newest findings. It begins with how fetuses process language in the womb and concludes with the paradoxically competent 3 year-old who is talking a blue streak but can't yet tie her shoes. The book covers much more than just the work coming out of our labs; findings from laboratories around the world are described as a testimony to infants' and toddlers' amazing linguistic competencies and to the activity of this research area. The book also contains two important tools for teaching. First, a bibliography for each chapter provides the references discussed. Second, sections called "Try This" invite parents to turn their homes into a laboratory by experimenting and observing their own children. These can be used by students as they follow a baby's progress in home visits over the course of the semester. The book will cost $26.00 American dollars. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, Ph.D. H. Rodney Sharp Professor School of Education and Departments of Psychology and Linguistics University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716 Phone: (302) 831-1634 Fax: (302) 831-4445 E-mail: Roberta at udel.edu ------------------------------------------------------------------------- From a.karmiloff-Smith at ich.ucl.ac.uk Wed Mar 31 17:35:04 1999 From: a.karmiloff-Smith at ich.ucl.ac.uk (Annette Karmiloff-Smith) Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 17:35:04 +0000 Subject: online child language bibliography Message-ID: Hi Roberta, oh dear, we might be in competition and not just in collaboration! My daughter and I are just finishing a book on LA for the Developing Child Series of Harvard Uni Press....though ours will go beyond 3 years. It's called "Language Acquisition from foetus to adolescent". Previously we did a *really* popular-level book together on infancy called "Everything your baby would ask if only he or she could talk..." published in the US by Golden Books. It's a bit gimmicky (the publisher insisted) but does bring a lot of scientific results to the public. I had always wanted my "Baby It's You" (Ebury Press, Random House) which accompanied an Emmy-winning TV series on the first three years of life to be turned into a first year text book, but I couldn't be bothered and no-one else took up the challenge. I do think it's important for academics to bring science to the general public in a pallatable form, so am really looking forward to seeing your book. Our LA book isn't targeted at the general public, more for young psych students, nurses and the like, as the whole series is aimed. Can I order a copy from you? It'll take forever before the British have it available for sale. I'll be at Albuquerque, will you? best thoughts and thanks again for all your hospitality to my student. She just loved her stay with Renee and you lot. Annette At 10:35 -0500 31/3/99, Roberta Golinkoff wrote: >Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and I have some news that we hope will be helpful to you >all. We have written a popular press book on language acquisition that can >be useful for teaching undergraduates as well as for recommending to >parents who want to know more about language development. It's called "How >babies talk: The magic and mystery of language in the first three years of >life" (Dutton Press) and will come out in June, 1999. It describes the >wonders of language acquisition in a highly readable, jargon-free style. >Written with numerous vignettes to illustrate its points, it reviews the >most recent research in the field of language development in a way that >conveys the significance of the newest findings. It begins with how >fetuses process language in the womb and concludes with the paradoxically >competent 3 year-old who is talking a blue streak but can't yet tie her >shoes. > >The book covers much more than just the work coming out of our labs; >findings from laboratories around the world are described as a testimony to >infants' and toddlers' amazing linguistic competencies and to the activity >of this research area. > >The book also contains two important tools for teaching. First, a >bibliography for each chapter provides the references discussed. Second, >sections called "Try This" invite parents to turn their homes into a >laboratory by experimenting and observing their own children. These can be >used by students as they follow a baby's progress in home visits over the >course of the semester. The book will cost $26.00 American dollars. > >------------------------------------------------------------------------- >Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, Ph.D. >H. Rodney Sharp Professor >School of Education and Departments of Psychology and Linguistics >University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716 >Phone: (302) 831-1634 Fax: (302) 831-4445 E-mail: Roberta at udel.edu >------------------------------------------------------------------------- From macw at cmu.edu Wed Mar 31 19:23:33 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 14:23:33 -0500 Subject: Question about age norms of MLU Message-ID: Stephanie, If you search CHILDES/BIB for "mean length of utterance" as the keyword, you will find 10 papers that discuss MLU norms. If you search using "Black" as a keyword you will find 68 papers, many of which seem relevant to the topic of MLU in African-American children. It's at alaska.psy.cmu.edu. --Brian MacWhinney From macw at cmu.edu Mon Mar 1 18:21:49 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 1999 13:21:49 -0500 Subject: thanks for all the letters Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, I would like to thank the 375 researchers who mailed me letters describing their use of CHILDES for the NIH renewal. It's great to see the data and programs receiving such wide usage. The FedEx Internet tracking system tells me the proposal was delivered to NIH at 9:04 this morning. Just in time for the March 1 deadline. It may be possible to send in a group of "late" letters as an addendum later on. I plan to take time over the next months to go carefully through the letters taking a closer look at the 780 articles and presentations mentioned there that make use of CHILDES. I doubt that I will ever be able to read them all, but I will try to read a good sampling. Thanks again for all the letters. --Brian MacWhinney From pobanz at education.ucsb.edu Mon Mar 1 18:38:45 1999 From: pobanz at education.ucsb.edu (Michael Pobanz) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 1999 10:38:45 -0800 Subject: English morphology with L1 (Spanish) and L2 (Enlgish) Message-ID: Hi felow researchers and practitioners, I was wondering if anyone has any information on the acquisition of English morphology by native Spanish speaking children. -Does the order of acquisition mirror the order for native English speakers? -Are there certain errors specific to the English L2 group? - Are there any studies using the "Wug Test" for native Spanish speaking children? Any help will be greatly appreciated! please reply to: pobanz at education.ucsb.edu Thanks, Michael Pobanz Doctoral student in school psychology / school psychologist intern From lmb32 at columbia.edu Wed Mar 3 02:20:20 1999 From: lmb32 at columbia.edu (Lois Bloom) Date: Tue, 2 Mar 1999 21:20:20 -0500 Subject: Confidentiality Issues (fwd) Message-ID: I had shared the recent Childes exchange with Allison Bloom, one of the Childes children, and asked for her opinion. Here is her response. --Lois Bloom ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 2 Mar 1999 20:13:20 EST From: ABMEsq at aol.com To: lmb32 at columbia.edu Cc: ABMEsq at aol.com Subject: Confidentiality Issues TO: Info-Childes Subscribers FROM: Allison Joy Bloom Hi everyone: My mother, Lois Bloom, has asked me to add my $0.02 to the discussion of confidentiality issues relative to making audio and/or video tape data collections available via the Internet. I will speak to this issue on two different levels -- as a subject and as a lawyer. As a child, I was a subject of audio and video tape studies in my mother's research lab. The data she collected in those studies have become widely known in the academic world. I have previously given my permission for transcripts of those tapes to be made available for more widespread access than just to those students who were affiliated with my mother's lab. However, I have chosen to restrict access to the audio and video tapes. Originally, my restriction was based on what one might call "adolescent embarrassment." As a child whose name became famous in Linguistics circles, I felt that I was constantly being "studied" and evaluated by my mother's colleagues at various functions I attended (dinner parties, social gatherings, trips with my family to conventions where my mother was giving talks). Adolescents, in general, feel that they are under a microscope at all times; in my case, it was exacerbated by circumstances beyond my control when I was a small child. When I realized that my mother was showing video tapes of me in her classroom, I felt (for lack of a better word) violated. After all, it was my image that was being shown on screen, and yet no one had asked MY permission to do so... My mother honored my wishes and stopped showing the video tapes in her classroom and denied access to those who sought to use them for research. To the best of my knowledge, the tapes have not been viewed by anyone in recent years. I have come to understand and appreciate the impact that my language development has had on the field of Psycho-Linguistics. As an adult, I realize that learning how people learn language can have far reaching positive effects on society, from helping stroke and accident victims regain the use of speech and language to helping children with learning disabilities learn to read and write. However, I feel that the data collected 25 or 30 years ago are not necessarily going to have any more of a significant impact on language acquisition/reacquisition than data which have been collected more recently. I have been fortunate in that I have been able to maintain contact with the researcher who collected my data -- I see her just about every day. As a result, I have been able to have a say in what data have been released and in what form. Other subjects are not as fortunate. They have been given no control over their proprietary images. It is not enough to say that a parent or legal guardian signed a consent form at the time the tapes were made. Depending upon what the consent form said, the parent or guardian was more than likely giving permission for the tapes to be used solely by people "in house" for a particular research project and there was no intent on their part for more widespread dissemination of actual tapes. At most, permission may have been granted for "outside" researchers to come "on site" and view or listen to the tapes. I suspect that this would be increasingly true the older the tapes are. As Amy Sheldon pointed out in the Info-Childes discussions, the web was not even invented when a lot of the data out there were collected. Certainly the parents or legal guardians never envisioned worldwide access to their child's image and/or voice, let alone identifying information. Although the original permission was granted by the parents or legal guardians, the fact that a change in the method of access is now being contemplated, I feel, is a significant enough change to require new consent. Now that many of the subjects of these studies are adults, the decision to grant access to their image and/or voice should no longer be up to their parents or guardians; it should now be their decision alone to make. Which brings us to the legal part of the discussion... As an attorney, there are a number of issues which come to mind with regard to the availability of data via the Internet. Although I have not researched this particular question, it is safe to say that there may be privacy issues under the Constitution (specifically, within the Bill of Rights and the Equal Protection and Due Process clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment), as well as issues in the areas of Tort Law, Intellectual Property law, and Internet Technology law. All of these issues are going to center on the type of consent obtained, how far-reaching that consent is or was intended to be, the type of image being disseminated, and the safeguards and controls in place to prevent misappropriation of a person's image or likeness and an invasion of their privacy. Clearly, without permission, names, faces, voices and other identifying information have to be altered to protect the person's identity. Of final note is a somewhat analogous situation: Eight or nine states, including Minnesota, Maine, and California, have recently passed laws prohibiting the playing of audio 9-1-1 tapes in civil and/or criminal proceedings in order to protect the privacy of the caller. (By introducing the audio tapes into evidence during a court proceeding, those tapes become public records and are then available to the media for widespread distribution.) Although not directly on point, the question remains if states are limiting access to audio tapes within the judicial system, how they are going to view access via the Internet where permission is sketchy at best. In conclusion, while I am all for expanded research capabilities and access to data collections, I do not feel, either as a subject or as an attorney, that it is prudent to use previously collected data sources in this manner. It is my position that there are just too many consent and privacy issues to be concerned with when dealing with older data. One suggestion might be that only data collected from this point forward be available on audio or video via the Internet, providing that appropriate consent forms are obtained. Furthermore, the consent forms should also be drafted in a way which takes into account future technological advances. Also, the eight levels of consent which were proposed by Brian MacWhinney are not a bad idea, but would definitely need some revisions to make them more "user-friendly" for the parents to whom they are directed. Finally, as for the older data collections, you might be able to include a list of who has what data available for viewing/listening, what the contact information is, and whether or not the data can go off-site and/or be copied. But I would say that the current controls would need to be maintained in the absence of express consent from the subjects (or their parents or legal guardians) to allow widespread (i.e.: Internet) dissemination. I hope that my comments have been helpful. If anyone has any further questions, I can be reached on e-mail at "ABMEsq at aol.com". Sincerely, Allison Joy Bloom From jjm095f at mail.smsu.edu Wed Mar 3 14:40:23 1999 From: jjm095f at mail.smsu.edu (Masterson, Julie) Date: Wed, 3 Mar 1999 08:40:23 -0600 Subject: 1999 ASHA Convention Message-ID: CALL FOR PAPERS AMERICAN SPEECH-LANGUAGE-HEARING ASSOCIATION SAN FRANCISCO NOVEMBER 18-21, 1999 We'd like to encourage our colleagues to submit proposals for the 1999 ASHA Convention. We have made several changes in the format for submissions and evaluation criteria in order to encourage research presentations and highlight the role of science in the discipline of communication sciences and disorders. Proposals will be received at the ASHA office until March 15 or can be submitted on-line until March 29, 1999. For more information and on-line submission procedures, visit http://www.asha.org/convention/abstracts/. Julie Masterson & Rick Talbott Co-Chairs, 1999 ASHA Convention From garym at linguistics.ucl.ac.uk Wed Mar 3 16:58:00 1999 From: garym at linguistics.ucl.ac.uk (G.Morgan) Date: Wed, 3 Mar 1999 16:58:00 +0000 Subject: Confidentiality Issues and sign language Message-ID: Dear list members, I have been reading recent discussion of video data and confidentiality with interest as those of us working in sign language acquisition are always faced with issues regarding data on video. Sign language has to be recorded on video with children as clearly visible as possible (may mean running behind them or under a table - ouch!), and concealing faces is impossible, as often facial grammar is the object of study. In studies of adult-child interaction the adult must also be clearly seen, meaning the child can be identified, making pseudonyms irrelevant as the mother may be a known person to the audience. This becomes very problematic if you are talking about delayed or disordered language. At conferences and in teaching, it is always a problem whether to show the clip of the brilliant example of child language or sign it yourself (not so brilliant), in publications it is even more of a dilemma even with adult informants. Often a written gloss only reveals part of the information and looks like Egyptian hieroglyphics. When I collected data for my PhD thesis on BSL morpho-syntax, I designed an informed-consent form which parents or teachers had to sign. The form said that the data would be shown at different levels of exposure from -nobody but me-within research group-for teaching-conferences-publications. The legal guardian chose at what level they were happy for the data to be available. I also had to give the option that the video would be destroyed after the project. There are some good examples of how video can be used in child language in the sign language research community developed through 25 years of encountering problems of confidentiality. I can direct people to these practices in more detail if there is a need expressed. With the advent of digitised video in web archives I would like to know what other child language researchers are doing to protect informants anonymity. Yours Gary Morgan ------- Gary Morgan Dept of Linguistics, UCL, London tel: 0171 4193162 (voice/text) fax: 0171 3834108 From macw at cmu.edu Wed Mar 3 17:56:33 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Wed, 3 Mar 1999 12:56:33 -0500 Subject: formal analysis of annotation systems Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, Steven Bird and Mark Liberman have examined at least 12 transcription and annotation systems, including CHAT, and constructed a formal representation that captures relations in all 12 systems. Some of these systems go down to nitty-gritty levels of autosegmental representation. Others focus more on the word level. The result of their formal analysis is that all these systems can be represented as "annotation graphs" which have the shape of DAGs (directed acyclic graphs). Along the way, they make some important observations about linkage of codes to time and hierarchical relations between codes and words. Here is the information about the article and its address on the web. --Brian MacWhinney A Formal Framework for Linguistic Annotation Steven Bird & Mark Liberman Abstract `Linguistic annotation' covers any descriptive or analytic notations applied to raw language data. The basic data may be in the form of time functions - audio, video and/or physiological recordings - or it may be textual. The added notations may include transcriptions of all sorts (from phonetic features to discourse structures), part-of-speech and sense tagging, syntactic analysis, `named entity' identification, co-reference annotation, and so on. While there are several ongoing efforts to provide formats and tools for such annotations and to publish annotated linguistic databases, the lack of widely accepted standards is becoming a critical problem. Proposed standards, to the extent they exist, have focussed on file formats. This paper focuses instead on the logical structure of linguistic annotations. We survey a wide variety of existing annotation formats and demonstrate a common conceptual core, the annotation graph. This provides a formal framework for constructing, maintaining and searching linguistic annotations, while remaining consistent with many alternative data structures and file formats. 49pp, download from: [http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/cs.CL/9903003] Formats: PDF (336kb), Postscript (161kb), DVI (134kb), LaTeX (112kb) For an online survey and extensive links, visit the Linguistic Annotations Page: [http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/annotation] @TechReport{BirdLiberman99, author={Steven Bird and Mark Liberman}, title={A Formal Framework for Linguistic Annotation}, institution={Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania}, year=1999, number={MS-CIS-99-01}, note={[xxx.lanl.gov/abs/cs.CL/9903003]} } Please send comments to: sb at ldc.upenn.edu, myl at ldc.upenn.edu Regards, Steven Bird & Mark Liberman -- Steven.Bird at ldc.upenn.edu http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/sb Assoc Director, LDC; Adj Assoc Prof, CIS & Linguistics Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania 3615 Market St, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19104-2608 From au at psych.ucla.edu Wed Mar 3 18:11:42 1999 From: au at psych.ucla.edu (Terry Au) Date: Wed, 3 Mar 1999 10:11:42 -0800 Subject: Visiting Professorship at UCLA, 1999-2001 Message-ID: Dear Colleagues: The Developmental Area in Psychology at UCLA has been authorized to hire a visiting professor at the rank of Associate or Full Professor for 1999-2001. UCLA is on the quarter system, which means there are three terms (10 weeks of classes plus exam week). We hope that the visitor will offer two large undergraduate courses in a topic-oriented series of intro developmental courses (social development, cognitive development, applied developmental, language acquistion, education and psychology, culture and development) and perhaps either an undergrad elective or a graduate seminar. In addition, we hope the visitor will offer research opportunities and supervision to ourundergraduate and grad students. If you know of anyone (feel free to include yourself)who is interested, please send me a msg. and I will share the information. Thanks, Terry Au ******************************* 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 ketrezni at boun.edu.tr Thu Mar 4 07:35:04 1999 From: ketrezni at boun.edu.tr (Nihan Ketrez) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 10:35:04 +0300 Subject: ERRATA- PERSPECTIVES ON LANGUAGE ACQUISITION Message-ID: To the attention of colleagues who have received/purchased the volume PERSPECTIVES ON LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: SELECTED PAPERS FROM THE VIITH INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS FOR THE STUDY OF CHILD LANGUAGE Ayhan Aksu-Koc, Eser Erguvanli-Taylan, A. Sumru Ozsoy and Aylin Kuntay (Eds.), Istanbul: Bogazici University Press, 1998 ERRATA We apologize for an error of affiliation and address for Dr. Suzanne Quay in the list of contributors to the volume. The correct affiliation and address is as follows: Suzanne Quay Division of International Studies International Christian University 3-10-2 Osawa, Mitaka, Tokyo 181-8585 JAPAN From vclellen at mail.sdsu.edu Thu Mar 4 20:29:40 1999 From: vclellen at mail.sdsu.edu (Vera Gutierrez-Clellen) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 12:29:40 -0800 Subject: Bilingualism in SLI Message-ID: Does any one have any references of treatment studies with bilingual SLI children? I believe that Maggie Bruck has done some work in Canada but I don't have any references for her work. Thank you! Vera F. Gutierrez-Clellen, Ph.D. Department of Communicative Disorders, and SDSU/UCSD Joint Doctoral Program Language and Communicative Disorders San Diego State University 5500 Campanile Drive San Diego, CA 92182-1518 Office (619) 594-6645 FAX: (619) 594-7109 From asheldon at maroon.tc.umn.edu Fri Mar 5 04:16:48 1999 From: asheldon at maroon.tc.umn.edu (Amy L Sheldon) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 22:16:48 -0600 Subject: Confidentiality Issues, Back to the Future, & A. Bloom's brief Message-ID: Thanks to 20th C. technology, when Allison Bloom sent her message to this list, I experienced a major perspective shift. Technology enabled me to read a document from someone whose words heretofore were the object of investigation, who never spoke directly "to" us, and who I never heard string together such long utterances (what happened to the two word stage?). This forced me to rethink the timeless toddler person we "knew" as "Allison". Time moves on. Accessibility to people shifts. Now Allison speaks to us in long, eloquent, saavy paragraphs about our own research practices and is well-qualified to do so. Her post is a persuasive document which confirms the power and intimacy of the internet medium, and its capability of playing asynchronously with time, and with our expectations of how things "are" and who the people we study "are". Thinking through the subject's position is important in making policy about data in this technological environment. Amy Sheldon From eva.berglund at vua.uas.lul.se Fri Mar 5 09:34:51 1999 From: eva.berglund at vua.uas.lul.se (Eva Berglund) Date: Fri, 5 Mar 1999 04:34:51 -0500 Subject: DIGESTS Message-ID: DIGESTS From Kim.Plunkett at psy.ox.ac.uk Fri Mar 5 10:26:14 1999 From: Kim.Plunkett at psy.ox.ac.uk (Kim Plunkett) Date: Fri, 5 Mar 1999 10:26:14 GMT Subject: RA position Message-ID: University of Oxford Department of Experimental Psychology Research Assistant Academic-Related Research Staff Grade 1A: Salary stlg15,735-stlg23,651 pa An immediate vacancy exists for a research assistant to work on a project concerning first language acquisition. The research assistant will be working with the Oxford Babylab team and will be testing children between 6 and 36 months using the Preferential Looking Paradigm. The post involves contacting parents, scheduling, preparation of visual and auditory stimulus materials, testing of children and adults, and data analysis. Competence with Excel, SPSS and Word would be an advantage. Experience in working with young children, preferably of the above age group is essential. The position is funded for 12 months by a grant from the Leverhulme Trust and it is intended that the appointee will be in post on or before 1st May 1999. Informal enquiries about the research can be made to Professor Plunkett (Kim.Plunkett at psy.ox.ac.uk). Before submitting an application candidates should obtain further particulars from the Administrator, Department of Experimental Psychology, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3UD. (Email applications at psy.ox.ac.uk) or telephone 01865 271399 quoting Ref: RA/kpl/LEV. The closing date for applications is 19 March 1999. Interviews are planned for 29 March 1999. Further information on the department can be found on the web-site http://www.psych.ox.ac.uk From khirshpa at nimbus.ocis.temple.edu Sun Mar 7 21:15:56 1999 From: khirshpa at nimbus.ocis.temple.edu (Kathy Hirsh-Pasek) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1999 21:15:56 +0000 Subject: women in Afganistan Message-ID: The Taliban's War on Women: The government of Afghanistan is waging a war upon women. The situation is getting so bad that one person in an editorial of the Times compared the treatment of women there to the treatment of Jews in pre-Holocaust Poland. Since the Taliban took power in 1996, women have had to wear burqua and have been beaten and stoned in public for not having the proper attire, even if this means simply not having the mesh covering in front of their eyes. One woman was beaten to DEATH by an angry mob of fundamentalists for accidentally exposing her arm while she was driving. Another was stoned to death for trying to leave the country with a man that was not a relative. Women are not allowed to work or even go out in public without a male relative; professional women such as professors, translators, doctors, lawyers, artists and writers have been forced from their jobs and stuffed into their homes, so that depression is becoming so widespread that it has reached emergency levels. There is no way in such an extreme Islamic society to know the suicide rate with certainty, but relief workers are estimating that the suicide rate among women, who cannot find proper medication and treatment for severe depression and would rather take their lives than live in such conditions, has increased significantly. Homes where a woman is present must have their windows painted so that she can never be seen by outsiders. They must wear silent shoes so that they are never heard. Women live in fear of their lives for the slightest misbehaviour. Because they cannot work, those without male relatives or husbands are either starving to death or begging on the street, even if they hold Ph.D.'s. There are almost no medical facilities available for women, and relief workers, in protest, have mostly left the country, taking medicine and psychologists and other things necessary to treat the sky-rocketing level of depression among women. At one of the rare hospitals for women, a reporter found still, nearly lifeless bodies lying motionless on top of beds, wrapped in their burqua, unwilling to speak, eat, or do anything, but slowly wasting away. Others have gone mad and were seen crouched in corners, perpetually rocking or crying, most of them in fear. One doctor is considering, when what little medication that is left finally runs out, leaving these women in front of the president's residence as a form of peaceful protest. It is at the point where the term 'human rights violations' has become an understatement. Husbands have the power of life and death over their women relatives, especially their wives, but an angry mob has just as much right to stone or beat a woman, often to death, for exposing an inch of flesh or offending them in the slightest way. David Cornwell has said that those in the West should not judge the Afghan people for such treatment because it is a 'cultural thing', but this is not even true. Women enjoyed relative freedom, to work, dress generally as they wanted, and drive and appear in public alone until only 1996 -- the rapidity of this transition is the main reason, for the depression and suicide; women who were once educators or doctors or simply used to basic human freedoms are now severely restricted and treated as sub-human in the name of right-wing fundamentalist Islam. It is not their tradition or 'culture', but is alien to them, and it is extreme even for those cultures where fundamentalism is the rule. Besides, if we could excuse everything on cultural grounds, then we should not be appalled that the Carthaginians sacrificed their infant children, that little girls are circumcised in parts of Africa, that blacks in the deep south in the 1930's were lynched, prohibited from voting, and forced to submit to unjust Jim Crow laws. Everyone has a right to a tolerable human existence, even as women in a Muslim country in a part of the world that North Americans do not fully understand. If the U.S. can threaten military force in Kosovo in the name of human rights for the sake of ethnic Albanians, we can certainly express peaceful outrage at the oppression, murder and injustice committed against women by the Taliban. ************* STATEMENT: In signing this, we agree that the current treatment of women in Afghanistan is completely UNACCEPTABLE and deserves support and action by the people of the United Nations and that the current situation in Afghanistan will not be tolerated. Women's Rights is not a small issue anywhere and it is UNACCEPTABLE for women in 1999 to be treated as sub-human and so much as property. Equality and human decency is a RIGHT not a freedom, whether one lives in Afghanistan or anywhere else. ***** 1) Bruce J. Malina, Omaha, NE 2) Raymond Hobbs, Hamilton, ON, Canada 3) Elizabeth Demaray, Kanata, ON, Canada 4) Fred Demaray, Kanata, ON, Canada 5) Leslie Penrose, Tulsa, OK 6) Susan Ross, Perkins, OK 7) Jeannie Himes, Tulsa, OK 8) Lois Adams, Tulsa, OK 9) Mona M. Miller, Fort Collins, CO 10) Kara A. Sheldon, Colorado Springs, CO 11) Gay Victoria, Colorado Springs, CO 12) Catherine Euler, Leeds, UK 13) Margaret Talbot, Leeds, UK 14) Deena Scoretz, Berlin, GER 15) Claudia Brunath, Berlin, GER 16) Michaela Nickel, Berlin, GER 17) Christophe Mailliet, Berlin, GER 18) Gudrun Doll-Tepper, Berlin, GER 19) Bruce Kidd, Toronto, CANADA 20) Doug Richards, Toronto, CANADA 21) Caroline Sharp, Ottawa, CANADA 22) Michelle Van Vliet, Ottawa, CANADA 23) Darren Cates, Ottawa, CANADA 24) Daniel J. Moorcroft, Ottawa, CANADA 25) Mary K. Dickey, Ottawa CANADA 26) Jennifer MacLeod, Ottawa, CANADA 27) Rebecca Eaton, Toronto, CANADA 28) Jacques Mainguy, Ottawa, CANADA 29) Fred Holliss, Calgary, CANADA 30) Mike McDonald, Edmonton, CANADA 31) Kirby, Edmonton CANADA 32) Shauna de Cartier, Edmonton, CANADA 33) Chris Peters, Edmonton, CANADA 34) Genevieve Carolan, London, ENGLAND 35) Craig Tooley, London, UNITED KINGDOM 36) Joanna Topham, London, UNITED KINGDOM 37) Sarah Anderson-Edward, Guildford, UNITED KINGDOM 38) Sarah Phillis, North London, UNITED KINGDOM 39) Sally-Anne Wilson , Victoria, AUSTRALIA 40) Nicki Leech, New South Wales, AUSTRALIA 41) Kristi Edwards, Queensland, AUSTRALIA 42) Angelique Monk, Queensland,AUSTRALIA 43) Nicole Butler, Queensland, AUSTRALIA 44) Emily Mackenzie, Queensland, AUSTRALIA 45) Meg Kerwick, London, UNITED KINGDOM 46) Helen Campbell, London UNITED KINGDOM 47) Julie Peckham, San Diego, California UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 48) Carolyn Salerno, San Diego, California, United States of America 49)Bonnie Jones, Tustin, California, United States of America 50) Alison Clarke-Stewart, Laguna Beach, CA, USA 51) Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Ardmore, PA, USA **** Please sign to support, and include your town and country. Then copy and e-mail to as many people as possible. **** If you receive this list with more than 50 NAMES on it, please e-mail a copy of it to: mailto:sarabande at brandeis.edu Even if you decide not to sign, please be considerate and do not kill the petition, pass it on. Thank you. It is best to copy and paste the petition into a new email rather than forwarding the petition, to keep the number of >>>> forwarding symbols from getting out of control. Back to Inbox Copyright ? 1997-99 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved. >> >> >> >> >> >> >>_________________________________________________________ >>DO YOU YAHOO!? >>Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com > From edwards at cogsci.Berkeley.EDU Mon Mar 8 03:15:40 1999 From: edwards at cogsci.Berkeley.EDU (Jane A. Edwards) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1999 19:15:40 -0800 Subject: HOAX: women in Afganistan Message-ID: The "women in Afganistan" posting circulated recently on the Berkeley Linguistics Department list and was exposed as a hoax by Eve Sweetser. She also suggested 2 more effective means of political action. I accidentally deleted her original message, but fortunately its contents were picked up by Jeremy Sirota and are indicated in the ">" part of the appended. As for "considerateness" -- >Even if you decide not to sign, please be considerate and do not kill >the petition, pass it on. Thank you. the Brandeis email address to which the petition was to be emailed has been closed. Whether it is "considerate" or not, it's pointless to propagate it farther. -Jane Edwards --------- Date: Wed, 17 Feb 1999 19:49:41 -0800 To: ling-dept at uclink4.berkeley.edu, matisoff at socrates.berkeley.edu From: jermy at uclink4.berkeley.edu Subject: Re: Afghan Women / Femmes afghanes I completely agree with what Eve says below. There is too much email waste these days which is contributing to the mental deterioration of our society. I believe we need to stand up for our God-given rights. That is why I am sitting at my computer right now sending out this email. We need to start an email petition to stop all this email garbage, and I will be the first one to sign it: 1. Jeremy Sirota, outraged student 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. >PLEASE, GUYS, think about these petitions which pile up e-mail >somewhere. The origin account for this petition about Afghanistan >is ALREADY dead, abolished by the Brandeis web-administrators. >And I'm not surprised, since I've received no less than eleven >copies of the petition in the last couple of weeks - imagine >the rajah's-chessboard effect at the home location. >THIS IS THE USUAL STORY with such e-petitions. > >THERE ARE SOME MORE RESPONSIBLE WAYS TO GARNER SUPPORT FOR A >GOOD CAUSE BY ELECTRONIC MEANS: > >(1) Send out e-mail urging people to write directly to, e.g., >President Clinton - whose e-mail IS set up to handle volume, I assure >you! - or to send faxes, paper mail, etc., to appropriate >recipients. > >(2) Set up a petition ON A WEB-SITE: > People can access the site and sign the petition >electronically, and there is no pileup of e-mail, only accumulation >of a list of names. > >Thanks, >Eve > > From eva.berglund at vua.uas.lul.se Mon Mar 8 13:06:43 1999 From: eva.berglund at vua.uas.lul.se (eva.berglund at vua.uas.lul.se) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 14:06:43 +0100 Subject: Internet addresses Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES subscribers, We are interested in obtaining the Internet addresses to homepages on child language and communication. Best regards, -Eva Berglund and Marten Eriksson From margo_malakoff at HMC.Edu Mon Mar 8 17:00:07 1999 From: margo_malakoff at HMC.Edu (Margo Malakoff) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 09:00:07 -0800 Subject: women in Afganistan Message-ID: This e-mail was begun as a well-intentioned petition that got out of control. The content of the petition is accurate -- however, signing and passing on the petition will not do anything. Because of the amount of e-mail that the petition generated, the e-mail address of the original sender (sarabande at brandeis.edu )was closed some months ago. Sending e-mail to that address will result in a reply message to that effect, along with some information about Human Rights groups you can contact. I just wanted to comment that the contents are not a hoax; however, the petition is currently just junk-e-mail with nowhere to go. -Margo Malakoff ********************************************************************* Margo Malakoff Office: (909) 607-3812 Asst. Professor of Psychology FAX: (909) 607-7600 Harvey Mudd College 301 E 12th St. URL:http://www4.hmc.edu:8001/humanities/malakoff/ Claremont, CA 91711 Demandez-vous: le mouton oui ou non a-t-il mange' la fleur? Et vous verrez comme tout change..... -St. Exupery (Le Petit Prince) From macw at cmu.edu Mon Mar 8 17:46:21 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 12:46:21 -0500 Subject: Internet resources and Eva Berglund's address Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, Eva Berglund's last letter raises a useful point. It would be great to have a better set of links to Internet resources on the issue of language learning. Right now, this page lists 7 other sites: http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/sites.html They include SALT, CompProf, JCHAT, IASCL, Neonatal Cry, UCSF (Merzenich), and the Wisconsin symposium page. Presumably there are dozens more. I tried sending reply mail to Eva asking her to collect answers to send to me, but the mailer in Sweden said her address was ambiguous and returned my message. So, if you can think of other sites to include, please send the info to both me and Eva or even just post it to info-childes. Many thanks. Along this line, I have found it really easy to search the info-childes archive at http://listserv.linguistlist.org/archives/info-childes.html and I would recommend that site to others too. --Brian MacWhinney From giyer at crl.ucsd.edu Tue Mar 9 05:12:24 1999 From: giyer at crl.ucsd.edu (Gowri Iyer) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 21:12:24 -0800 Subject: Req: Information on early Language devt. in Tamil Message-ID: Dear Info-childes subscribers, I am a doctoral student at UCSD/ SDSU. I was looking for research work done in early lexical development in Tamil-speaking children. I did a literature search but came up with very little information and none relevant to early language development in Tamil speaking children. I would really appreciate it if you could give me any information pertaining to this issue. Thanks in advance. If I do get many responses I will forward the information to info-childes (subscribers) for anyone else who might be interested. - Best Regards Gowri ============================================================================ Gowri K.Iyer Room E, 2330 Alvarado Ct. Center for Research in Language 0526 Language and Communicative Disorders University of Caifornia, San Diego Joint Doctoral Program SDSU/UCSD 9500 Gilman Drive San Diego, CA 92182-1518 La Jolla, CA 92093-0526 Ph# (619)594-8669-(O) Ph# (619)534-3926 e-mail: giyer at crl.ucsd.edu =========================================================================== = From T.Argus at crebit.ee Tue Mar 9 17:41:44 1999 From: T.Argus at crebit.ee (TONIS ARGUS) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 14:41:44 -300 Subject: Triplets Message-ID: Does anybody know of any work that has been done on the language development in groups of triplets? Some references would be appreciated. Thanks in advance. Reili Argus From T.Argus at crebit.ee Tue Mar 9 17:44:12 1999 From: T.Argus at crebit.ee (TONIS ARGUS) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 14:44:12 -300 Subject: Finno-Ugric languages Message-ID: Has anyone looked at questioning in the Finno-Ugric languages? Some references would be appreciated. Victoria Parmas Mail to: Victoria at epl.ee From edwards at cogsci.Berkeley.EDU Tue Mar 9 20:28:32 1999 From: edwards at cogsci.Berkeley.EDU (Jane A. Edwards) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 12:28:32 -0800 Subject: women in Afghanistan Message-ID: > This e-mail was begun as a well-intentioned petition that got out of > control. The content of the petition is accurate -- however, signing and > passing on the petition will not do anything. Because of the amount of > e-mail that the petition generated, the e-mail address of the original > sender (sarabande at brandeis.edu )was closed some months ago. Sending e-mail > to that address will result in a reply message to that effect, along with > some information about Human Rights groups you can contact. I just wanted > to comment that the contents are not a hoax; however, the petition is > currently just junk-e-mail with nowhere to go. Well, well-intentioned or not, the message deceives people into thinking they're signing a petition and then it doesn't deliver. To me, that's a hoax. I'm not questioning the seriousness of the plight of Afghan women (though it would be nice if they would give one specific reference we could look up), but there are at least 2 political strategies which would be more effective than e-petitions. Why not use those instead? Finally, e-petitions are extremely similar to chain letters: you add your name to the bottom and are urged under fear of being "inconsiderate" to not break the chain. It's significant that chain letters are prohibited in many places - due to their adverse effects on the net. -Jane Edwards From cbutt at nmu.edu Tue Mar 9 22:41:21 1999 From: cbutt at nmu.edu (Corinna Butt) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 17:41:21 -0500 Subject: MLU v.s. MLR...what do you think? Message-ID: Does anyone know of studies or literature which compare mean length utterance (in morphemes) to mean length of response (the average number of WORDS per utterance)? I am wondering how much of a difference there is between scores derived from each measure for a whole langauge sample (specifically, the langauge of a normal preschool age child with an MLU of 1.00 to 4.5 or so). If anyone can provide some references which address this topic, or if anyone has any thoughts on the matter, your input would be very much appreciated! Thank you . Corinna From kevin at psy.uwa.edu.au Wed Mar 10 09:59:09 1999 From: kevin at psy.uwa.edu.au (Kevin Durkin) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 17:59:09 +0800 Subject: The acquisition of tense-aspect morphology (Shirai, Slobin & Weist) Message-ID: First Language is pleased to announce the appearance of a Special Issue: The acquisition of tense-aspect morphology Edited by: Yasuhiro SHIRAI, Dan I. SLOBIN & Richard E. WEIST Contents: Introduction (Yasuhiro Shirai, Dan I. Slobin & Richard E. Weist) The role of input vs. universal predispositions in the emergence of tense-aspect morphology: evidence from Turkish (Ayhan Aksu-Koc) The emergence of tense-aspect morphology in Japanese: universal predisposition? (Yasuhiro Shirai) The acquisition of lexical and grammatical aspect in Chinese (Ping Li & Melissa Bowerman) The role of Aktionsart in the acquisition of Russian aspect (Sabine Stoll) The temporal interpretation of Dutch children's root infinitivals: the effect of eventivity (Frank Wijnen) Reflexive and middle markers in early child language acquisition: evidence from Mexican Spanish (Donna Jackson-Maldonado, Ricardo Maldonado & Donna J. Thal) http://www.alphaacademic.co.uk/fl.htm From Elma.Blom at LET.UU.NL Wed Mar 10 16:37:53 1999 From: Elma.Blom at LET.UU.NL (elma blom) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 17:37:53 +0100 Subject: modality/gerund Message-ID: Dear Info-Childes subscribers, Can anybody help me with one of the following questions (or perhaps both)? 1. How do English speaking children (in particular between 2-3 years old) express their wishes, needs, desires and intentions? Are there, for example, studies on the use of verb forms like "gonna" and "wanna"? 2. Do English speaking children (2-3 years old) use the gerund (V-ing)? I would also appreciate any references on this topic. Thanks in advance for any help, Elma Blom Elma Blom Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS Trans 10 NL-3512 JK Utrecht tel: 0031.(0)30.2536040 fax: 0031.(0)30.2536000 e-mail: elma.blom at let.uu.nl From lmb32 at columbia.edu Wed Mar 10 18:11:29 1999 From: lmb32 at columbia.edu (Lois Bloom) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 13:11:29 -0500 Subject: modality/gerund Message-ID: Well, for starters. . . On Wed, 10 Mar 1999, elma blom wrote: > Dear Info-Childes subscribers, > > > Can anybody help me with one of the following questions (or perhaps both)? > > 1. How do English speaking children (in particular between 2-3 years old) > express their wishes, needs, desires and intentions? Are there, for > example, studies on the use of verb forms like "gonna" and "wanna"? First, in general: Bloom, L., Lahey, M., Hood, L., Lifter, K., & Fiess, K. (1980). Complex sentences: Acquisition of syntactic connectives and the meaning relations they encode. Journal of Child Language, 7, 235-261. And 2nd, more specifically re: wanna, gonna, etc: Bloom, L., Tackeff, J., & Lahey, M. (1984). Learning to in complement constructions. Journal of Child Language, 11, 391-406. > 2. Do English speaking children (2-3 years old) use the gerund (V-ing)? I > would also appreciate any references on this topic. Bloom, L., Lifter, K., & Hafitz, J. (1980). The semantics of verbs and the development of verb inflections in child language. Language, 56, 386-412. > > Thanks in advance for any help, > > > Elma Blom > > > > > > > Elma Blom > Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS > Trans 10 > NL-3512 JK Utrecht > tel: 0031.(0)30.2536040 > fax: 0031.(0)30.2536000 > e-mail: elma.blom at let.uu.nl > > > > > > > From molsen at umiacs.umd.edu Wed Mar 10 20:21:45 1999 From: molsen at umiacs.umd.edu (Mari Broman Olsen) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 15:21:45 -0500 Subject: De Lemos on acquiring Brazilian Portugese Message-ID: I have a reference in my notes to a work by 'de Lemos', who studied (inter alia) acquisition of aspect/tense in Brazilian Portugese. I don't seem to have a paper, or a full reference: does anyone have a full reference to this work? Thanks much. Mari Broman Olsen, Research Associate University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies 3141 A.V. Williams Building University of Maryland College Park, MD 20742 EMAIL: molsen at umiacs.umd.edu PHONE: (301) 405-6754 FAX: (301) 314-9658 WEB: http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~molsen ********* From knelson at email.GC.cuny.edu Thu Mar 11 21:31:50 1999 From: knelson at email.GC.cuny.edu (KATHERINE NELSON) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 16:31:50 -0500 Subject: Narratives from the Crib Message-ID: I've been informed that there are about 30 copies left of the title Narratives from the Crib, and that it will not be reprinted. If anyone is interested in purchasing a copy you might want to do it now from Harvard University Press @ $39.95. Note that the original data on which the book was based is now available in the Childes data base. Katherine Nelson knelson at email.gc.cuny.edu Developmental Psychology CUNY GSUC 33 West 42nd St. New York, NY 10036 212-642-2554 From bochenek at absat.net.au Fri Mar 12 23:28:08 1999 From: bochenek at absat.net.au (Bochenek) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 07:28:08 +0800 Subject: oral to literate language transition Message-ID: I'm not sure HOW to include a URL. I've tried the help function. Could you assit please? -----Original Message----- From: Info-CHILDES To: Bochenek Date: Friday, 12 March 1999 3:04 Subject: Re: oral to literate language transition >Your post to Info-CHILDES was rejected because an enclosure was present. >Instead, please include a URL where subscribers can retrieve the file and >resend your message. > > >-------------------- Original Message Follows -------------------- >Hello All, >I'm a Ph.D student (at the University of Notre Dame Australia) trying to >document an integrated continuum of phonological/auditory/oral language >development, to identify critical indicators for the transition from oral to >literate language. > >I'd appreciate being directed to people/papers with a developmental view of >the "interface" of factors in oral-literate language development. > >Please reply to: >bochenek at absat.net.au >With thanks! >Carmel Bochenek. > > > > > >------------------ MIME Information follows ------------------ > >This is a multi-part message in MIME format. > >------=_NextPart_000_0028_01BE6D1F.B7CF9140 >Content-Type: text/plain; > charset="iso-8859-1" >Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable > > ><<<<<< See above "Message Body" >>>>>> > >------=_NextPart_000_0028_01BE6D1F.B7CF9140 >Content-Type: text/html; > charset="iso-8859-1" >Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable > > ><<<<<< See Enclosure named "text" >>>>>> > >------=_NextPart_000_0028_01BE6D1F.B7CF9140-- > > > From Roberta at UDel.Edu Fri Mar 12 17:53:50 1999 From: Roberta at UDel.Edu (Roberta Golinkoff) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 12:53:50 -0500 Subject: job for a colleague's lab Message-ID: JOB ANNOUNCEMENT Do you know any graduating students who want to go to graduate school but would like to take a year or two off first and work in the field? Starting this summer, I will need a full-time research assistant/project coordinator to work on my NICHD funded project on learning disabilities in children. In addition to having a background in psychology or child development, the individual must have good people skills, be a self starter, and have experience with (or interest in) working with children. Please have anyone who is interested call me at 302-831-4651 or write me via email at njordan at udel.edu. Many thanks for your help. Nancy C. Jordan -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Nancy C. Jordan Associate Professor, School of Education 303D Willard Hall University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716 Phone:(302)831-4651 Fax:(302)831-4445 e-mail:njordan at udel.edu -------------------------------------------------------------------------- From Ehrenfest at aol.com Fri Mar 12 18:57:41 1999 From: Ehrenfest at aol.com (Ehrenfest at aol.com) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 13:57:41 EST Subject: foreign adoptions Message-ID: I am looking for basic material about language development, and how to facilitate it, in children adopted at 12 mos. from China. Thank you. Liz Ehrenfest Steinglass From meg at scf.usc.edu Fri Mar 12 20:37:17 1999 From: meg at scf.usc.edu (Maria E. Gallardo) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 12:37:17 -0800 Subject: code-switching data search Message-ID: Does anyone have information on code-switching databases that would be available to examine, specifically in Spanish-English, but also I'm really hoping to find data involving English and other Romance languages other than Spanish. And also Spanish and other Romance languages, i.e. Spanish-Italian, Spanish-French code-switching. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Many thanks, Maria E. Gallardo meg at usc.edu From meg at scf.usc.edu Fri Mar 12 20:55:26 1999 From: meg at scf.usc.edu (Maria E. Gallardo) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 12:55:26 -0800 Subject: basque-Spanish code-switching Message-ID: Does anyone know about any studies on Basque-Spanish code-switching? I am hoping to find some published literature on the topic, so I would appreciate any help. Many thanks, Maria E. Gallardo meg at usc.edu From ann at hawaii.edu Fri Mar 12 22:20:34 1999 From: ann at hawaii.edu (Ann Peters) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 12:20:34 -1000 Subject: email for Frank Keil? Message-ID: Can anybody give me an email address for Frank Keil? thanks! Ann Peters From alekdep at pob.huji.ac.il Fri Mar 12 23:44:29 1999 From: alekdep at pob.huji.ac.il (ALEK & NINA) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 01:44:29 +0200 Subject: important - concernig a new computer virus Message-ID: Subject: VERY VERY IMPORTANT If you receive an email titled "It Takes Guts to Say 'Jesus'" DO NOT open it. It will erase everything on your hard drive. Forward this letter out to as many people as you can. This is a new, very malicious virus and not many people know about it. This information was announced yesterday morning from IBM; please share it with everyone that might access the internet From thoreson at cc.wwu.edu Sat Mar 13 14:33:01 1999 From: thoreson at cc.wwu.edu (Catherine Crain-Thoreson) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1999 06:33:01 -0800 Subject: important - concernig a new computer virus Message-ID: I am amazed that this hoax keeps going around and around, though it does change a little. Last year, it was Microsoft who supposedly endorsed it, now it's supposedly IBM. It is *impossible* for an email message to erase your hard drive. My department has warned us that there are some new viruses that you have to watch out for in attachments to email messages, though. What I've been told is not to open an email with an attachment unless you know the sender. Perhaps I'll find out that this is this an urban legend as well -- Always be wary of any message that says "very important -- forward to everyone you know," it is the recipe for SPAM. Catherine Crain-Thoreson At 01:44 AM 3/13/99 +0200, ALEK & NINA wrote: >Subject: VERY VERY IMPORTANT > >If you receive an email titled "It Takes Guts to Say >'Jesus'" DO NOT open it. It will erase everything on your hard drive. Forward >this letter out to as many people as you can. This is a new, very malicious >virus and not many people know about it. This information was announced yesterday morning >from IBM; please share it with everyone that might access the internet > > ************************************ Catherine Crain-Thoreson, Ph.D. Psychology Department Western Washington University Bellingham, WA 98225-9089 Tel: (360) 650-3168 Fax: (360) 650-7305 email: thoreson at cc.wwu.edu From cbutt at nmu.edu Mon Mar 15 00:19:01 1999 From: cbutt at nmu.edu (Corinna Butt) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 19:19:01 -0500 Subject: MLUm & MLUw: summary of responses Message-ID: Dear info-childes members, As requested, here is a summary of the responses to the question I posted about a week ago: "Is there a difference between MLU in words and MLU in morphemes?" Responses included references to both published studies, as well as some anecdotical responses. Thanks to all who responded! 1.) Studies of non-English speaking children showed high correlations between MLUw and MLUm. Hickey, T. (1991). Mean length of utterance and the acquisition of Irish. Journal of Child Language, 18, 553-569. Aguado, G. (1988). Appraisal of the morpho-syntactic competence in a 2.5 year old child. Infancia y Aprendizaje, 43, 75-95. Thordardottir, E., & Weismer, S. (1998). Mean length of utterance and other language sample measures in early Icelandic. First Language, 18 (52 pt. 1), 1-32. 2.) A study in press by M. Malakoff (to appear in Applied Developmental Psych) found high correlation (.97) between the two measures for 24 month old African American children with low SES. 3.) Responses from researchers who addressed this question either directly or indirectly in unpublished studies generally reported they recalled a high correlation between MLUm and MLUw. The one exception was a study of Hebrew children, which found a difference between the scores of the two measures. Others speculated that the difference in MLUm and MLUw was greater for langauge impaired childern than for normal children. This is all the info I have for now. If anyone has any more information, I'd still be interested. Thanks again! -Corinna Butt From bates at crl.ucsd.edu Mon Mar 15 01:18:50 1999 From: bates at crl.ucsd.edu (Elizabeth Bates) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 17:18:50 -0800 Subject: MLUm & MLUw: summary of responses Message-ID: Just a quick observation regarding the difference between MLU in words and MLU in morphemes: I agree with the various authors who have concluded that the two measures are highly correlated. In fact, MLU of either sort tends to be "co-linear" (correlate highly) not only with each other but with a whole lot of complexity measures, including various complicated measures of propositional complexity. Many years ago Lynn Snyder and Inge Bretherton and I took great pains to apply some of the candidate propositional complexity measures of the time (e.g. Kintsch's procedures; Antinucci & Parisi's proposals) to our Boulder data (the same data reported in "From first words to grammar", now housed at least in part in CHILDES). In the end we decided not to publish the results, despite all the efforts involved, because the various indices that we were comparing were so highly correlated, with each other and with MLU in morphemes, that they didn't tell us anything that we didn't already know from old-fashioned MLU. The matter is treated as a footnote somewhere in the book. However, there is another point worth making here, particularly in the context of cross-linguistic research. Correlations tell us about the individual differences between children, i.e. children who are high on A are also high on B, children who are low on A are also low on B, and so forth. That does *NOT* mean, though, that two highly correlated measures give us the same information or CONTENT. Weight and height are highly correlated across the normal population, for example, and yet we would agree that each one yields quite distinct information. To illustrate the point: back in Boulder we also did a study (also unpublished...) comparing MLU in three free-speech contexts involving the child and his/her mother: having a snack, playing on the floor with standard toys, reading a book together. The MLU measures for these three situations were highly correlated, in the sense that individual differences on one correlated with individual differences on the other. However, there were interesting mean differences between situations in the kind of speech that was elicited, in directions that all child language researchers will recognize (more pronominal forms in free play; more nouns and adjectives in book reading; more past and future reference in the snack -- after all, how much is there to say about the here and now in a snack, i.e. about the cracker and cheese?). This latter point has recently become important to us again, in the context of a cross-linguistic project that I am currently carrying out with Cristina Caselli, Antonella Devescovi, Judy Reilly, and several students in Italy and San Diego (with sage advice provided now and then by Elena Pizzuto). We are looking at grammatical development in English vs. Italian two-year-olds who are matched for vocabulary size (using the MacArthur CDI). The point of this exercise is to look at cross-linguistic differences in grammatical complexity and morphological marking when the children are matched for levels of lexical development. We have already shown WITHIN each of these languages that there is a very powerful relationship between vocabulary size and grammar (even when variation in age is regressed out -- recent paper by Caselli et al. in JCL). However, we also know (on informal grounds) that the AMOUNT of grammatical morphological that Italian children have to master at any given point in development is a lot more than English children have to master. Our question was: how can we show this cross-linguistic difference in quantitative terms? So we have developed a series of MLU measures ranging from MLU content words, total MLU in words (including functors), and several different indices of MLU in morphemes designed to pick of similarities and differences in the morphological options between these two languages. The project is still underway, and I can only cite preliminary results, but it looks like (1) there continue to be strong correlations between vocabulary size and any complexity metric, within either language, but (2) our ability to detect differences between the two languages is quite dependent on the MLU measure that we choose (e.g. differences in terms of MLU in words and differences in terms of MLU in morphemes give very different perspectives on cross-language variation). I hope this is helpful -- and we would very much appreciate hearing from anyone who has asked a similar cross-language question. Advice very welcome. -liz bates >Dear info-childes members, >As requested, here is a summary of the responses to the question I >posted about a week ago: "Is there a difference between MLU in words and >MLU in morphemes?" Responses included references to both published >studies, as well as some anecdotical responses. Thanks to all who >responded! > >1.) Studies of non-English speaking children showed high correlations >between MLUw and MLUm. > Hickey, T. (1991). Mean length of utterance and the acquisition >of Irish. Journal of Child Language, 18, 553-569. > > Aguado, G. (1988). Appraisal of the morpho-syntactic competence >in a 2.5 year old child. Infancia y Aprendizaje, 43, 75-95. > > Thordardottir, E., & Weismer, S. (1998). Mean length of >utterance and other language sample measures in early Icelandic. First >Language, 18 (52 pt. 1), 1-32. > >2.) A study in press by M. Malakoff (to appear in Applied Developmental >Psych) found high correlation (.97) between the two measures for 24 >month old African American children with low SES. > >3.) Responses from researchers who addressed this question either >directly or indirectly in unpublished studies generally reported they >recalled a high correlation between MLUm and MLUw. The one exception >was a study of Hebrew children, which found a difference between the >scores of the two measures. Others speculated that the difference in >MLUm and MLUw was greater for langauge impaired childern than for normal >children. > >This is all the info I have for now. If anyone has any more >information, I'd still be interested. >Thanks again! -Corinna Butt From jeff at elda.fr Mon Mar 15 08:34:36 1999 From: jeff at elda.fr (Jeff ALLEN) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 09:34:36 +0100 Subject: concerning a new computer virus Message-ID: At 06:33 13/03/99 -0800, Catherine Crain-Thoreson wrote: >I am amazed that this hoax keeps going around and around, though it does >change a little. Last year, it was Microsoft who supposedly endorsed it, >now it's supposedly IBM. It is *impossible* for an email message to erase >your hard drive. Exactly. All of the "Good times", "Trojan Horse", etc virus warnings are hoaxes, that means they are fake. All you need to do is spend 2 minutes going to AltaVista and search on "virus hoax" "urban legend" and check the first 5 sites to find lists of valid information on which viruses are real and which are false. >My department has warned us that there are some new >viruses that you have to watch out for in attachments to email messages, >though. What I've been told is not to open an email with an attachment >unless you know the sender. Perhaps I'll find out that this is this an >urban legend as well -- Actually, this is quite true and is a more recent phenomenon. The real Happy99.exe virus has been travelling over the Internet, including via discussion lists, since January 99. I received 2 copies of it last week, including one via a list. It is a real virus, and is fairly easy to remove. However, it crashes listservers quite well. >Always be wary of any message that says "very important -- forward to >everyone you know," it is the recipe for SPAM. Exactly. In all messages that I send on the topic of virus warnings and hoaxes, I clearly indicate that one should get informed about real viruses and virus hoaxes BEFORE ever sending out a message to the public. I have changed jobs recently (was in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University up until 1 December 98), so I do not have access to all of my standard reply messages on this topic. Like I said earlier in this message, just use a search engine to look up "virus hoax" and "urban legend". I believe one of the first five sites is the National Computer Security Association in the US. The information they provide is authoritative. Best, Jeff Allen ================================================= Jeff ALLEN - Directeur Technique European Language Resources Association (ELRA) & European Language Resources Distribution Agency (ELDA) (Agence Europ?enne de Distribution des Ressources Linguistiques) 55, rue Brillat-Savarin 75013 Paris FRANCE Tel: (+33) (0) 1.43.13.33.33 - Fax: (+33) (0) 1.43.13.33.30 mailto:jeff at elda.fr http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/home.html From s.velleman at bangor.ac.uk Mon Mar 15 11:23:03 1999 From: s.velleman at bangor.ac.uk (Shelley L. Velleman) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 11:23:03 +0000 Subject: sibling effects Message-ID: I'm looking for any studies with data (or possible implications) about the impact of an older sibling with disordered phonology (or language) on the phonological/language development of a younger sibling (who is presumably otherwise normally-developing, which is the catch, of course! -- How can we know for sure?) Twin studies where one is delayed/disordered would also be of interest. Thanks. Shelley Velleman (currently @ Univ. of Wales at Bangor) From macw at cmu.edu Mon Mar 15 15:11:58 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 10:11:58 -0500 Subject: sibling effects Message-ID: Dear Shelley, Gina Conti-Ramsden's data has this general shape. You should contact her about the specific questions you have in mind. --Brian MacWhinney --On Mon, Mar 15, 1999 11:23 AM +0000 "Shelley L. Velleman" wrote: > I'm looking for any studies with data (or possible implications) about > the impact of an older sibling with disordered phonology (or language) > on the phonological/language development of a younger sibling (who is > presumably otherwise normally-developing, which is the catch, of > course! -- How can we know for sure?) Twin studies where one is > delayed/disordered would also be of interest. > > Thanks. > > Shelley Velleman > (currently @ Univ. of Wales at Bangor) > From tomoko at Psych.Stanford.EDU Mon Mar 15 17:15:39 1999 From: tomoko at Psych.Stanford.EDU (Tomoko Wakabayashi) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 09:15:39 -0800 Subject: important - concerning a new computer virus Message-ID: Just for your information-- since this is a timely topic in our family right now. My father's computer recently got a virus through an attachment sent by somebody he KNOWS. It seems to be a famous one, called "Happy 1999." As soon as he opened the attachment, a firework came up on his screen. Once you get it, this virus automatically gets attached to every e-mail you send. Thus, you will be sending viruses to people without your knowing about it. I don't know the details concerning what "Happy 1999" does to your computer besides this, but it is worth a caution not to open any attachment by this name, or, according to my father, any which ends with .exe or .con. Tomoko Wakabayashi On Sat, 13 Mar 1999, Catherine Crain-Thoreson wrote: > I am amazed that this hoax keeps going around and around, though it does > change a little. Last year, it was Microsoft who supposedly endorsed it, > now it's supposedly IBM. It is *impossible* for an email message to erase > your hard drive. My department has warned us that there are some new > viruses that you have to watch out for in attachments to email messages, > though. What I've been told is not to open an email with an attachment > unless you know the sender. Perhaps I'll find out that this is this an > urban legend as well -- > > Always be wary of any message that says "very important -- forward to > everyone you know," it is the recipe for SPAM. > > Catherine Crain-Thoreson > > At 01:44 AM 3/13/99 +0200, ALEK & NINA wrote: > >Subject: VERY VERY IMPORTANT > > > >If you receive an email titled "It Takes Guts to Say > >'Jesus'" DO NOT open it. It will erase everything on your hard drive. Forward > >this letter out to as many people as you can. This is a new, very malicious > >virus and not many people know about it. This information was announced > yesterday morning > >from IBM; please share it with everyone that might access the internet > > > > > > > > ************************************ > Catherine Crain-Thoreson, Ph.D. > Psychology Department > Western Washington University > Bellingham, WA 98225-9089 > > Tel: (360) 650-3168 > Fax: (360) 650-7305 > email: thoreson at cc.wwu.edu > > From jeff at elda.fr Mon Mar 15 17:58:16 1999 From: jeff at elda.fr (Jeff ALLEN) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 18:58:16 +0100 Subject: The Happy99 virus Message-ID: >My father's computer recently got a virus through an attachment sent by >somebody he KNOWS. It seems to be a famous one, called "Happy 1999." As >soon as he opened the attachment, a firework came up on his screen. Once >you get it, this virus automatically gets attached to every e-mail you >send. Thus, you will be sending viruses to people without your knowing >about it. I don't know the details concerning what "Happy 1999" does to >your computer besides this, but it is worth a caution not to >open any attachment by this name, or, according to my father, any which >ends with .exe or .con. Yes, Happy99 is a real virus. It always comes as an attachment because it infects your Winsock file. It has been sweeping across the Internet since January 99 and has infiltrated many discussion lists, crashing the servers, and infecting computers of those who receive the message, click on the attachment and see the wonderful fireworks display. I am sending a separate message to Tomoko Wakabayashi on how to remove the virus from the computer. I've helped several people eradicate Happy99 this past week. I have been telling many people lately to Never, never open a .exe attached file. There are some exceptions, but you must really know where you are getting the file from and verify that they have regular anti-virus procedures set-up in-house at their institution, before you choose to open the file. Best, Jeff ================================================= Jeff ALLEN - Directeur Technique European Language Resources Association (ELRA) & European Language Resources Distribution Agency (ELDA) (Agence Europ?enne de Distribution des Ressources Linguistiques) 55, rue Brillat-Savarin 75013 Paris FRANCE Tel: (+33) (0) 1.43.13.33.33 - Fax: (+33) (0) 1.43.13.33.30 mailto:jeff at elda.fr http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/home.html From russgrd2 at psych1.psy.sunysb.edu Mon Mar 15 21:38:50 1999 From: russgrd2 at psych1.psy.sunysb.edu (russgrd2 at psych1.psy.sunysb.edu) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 16:38:50 -0500 Subject: How do you determine the difficulty of individual words? Message-ID: I need to write a story in which I manipulate the difficulty of individual words. I need a version with easy to read words and a version with hard to read words. I have not been able to locate an objective method for determining the difficulty of these words. Is anyone aware of a method that might help me in this task? --Brett Stoltz ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ | Brett Stoltz | Department of Psychology | SUNY at Stony Brook | Stony Brook, NY 11794-1200 | voice: (516) 632-7870 | fax: (516) 632-7871 | e-mail: russgrd2 at psych1.psy.sunysb.edu | Stony Brook Reading and Language Project | http://www.read+lang.sbs.sunysb.edu/ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ From snowcat at gse.harvard.edu Tue Mar 16 13:38:15 1999 From: snowcat at gse.harvard.edu (Catherine Snow) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 08:38:15 -0500 Subject: MLUm & MLUw: summary of responses Message-ID: > A quick postscript to Liz Bates' contribution concerning MLU: in a > paper that appeared in First Lanugage in 1996, Pam Rollins, John > Willett and I reported a similar analysis of MLU within English > speakers (Predictors of MLU: Lexical versus morphological > developments. First Language, 16, 243-259, 1996). Some children > produce an MLU of 2.0 using almost exclusively content words, whereas > others who look identical on the portmanteau measure have much more > morphology. Of course, the relative poverty of the English > morphological system limits the total possible contribution of > morphological complexity more than in Italian. > > So it seems that the value of MLU as a very general index of language > development may reflect, to some extent, its insensitivity to various > component processes. > > And a bibliographical postscript as well: > Arlman-Rupp, A., van Niekerk de Haan, D., and van de > Sandt-Koenderman, M. (1976). Brown's early stages: Some evidence > from Dutch. Journal of Child Language, 3, 267-274. Correlations > between MLU in morphemes, in words, and in syllables are reported for > four children Dutch-speaking children observed five times each. The > MLU-m to MLU-syllables correlations ranged from .91 to .99. The > MLU-m to MLU-word correlations ranged from .98 to .99. > > ---------------------------------------- > Catherine Snow > Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education > Harvard Graduate School of Education > Larsen 3 > Cambridge, MA 02138 > tel: 617 - 495 3563 > fax: 617 - 495 5771 > New email address: Snowcat at gse.harvard.edu > or: Catherine_Snow at harvard.edu > > > ---------------------------------------- Catherine Snow Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education Harvard Graduate School of Education Larsen 3 Cambridge, MA 02138 tel: 617 - 495 3563 fax: 617 - 495 5771 New email address: Snowcat at gse.harvard.edu or: Catherine_Snow at harvard.edu From ann at hawaii.edu Tue Mar 16 19:22:06 1999 From: ann at hawaii.edu (Ann Peters) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 09:22:06 -1000 Subject: MLUw and MLUm Message-ID: A follow-up to Liz and Catherine: I agree that, especially in early morphosyntactic production there are two things going on, and they probably need to be assessed differently. On the one hand there is [A] the stringing together of content words/ideas (MLUw?); on the other is [B] the increasing inclusion of grammatical markers (MLUm?). The trouble with English is that so many of the grammatical markers are free morphemes that one is tempted to think that counting *words* is the way to go. However, these capacities probably develop separately, showing up as individual differences in early combination. In fact, the kids who go the [B] route are probably the "frame and slot" kids who structure their early combinations around morphosyntactic frames. I think one sees these patterns even more clearly when one looks at languages (like Italian) with more bound morphology. I have found it useful to compute MLU in two ways: 1) just open-class lexical items (excluding free grammatical morphemes), and 2) all morphemes, whether bound or free. I believe these measures would equate better across languages than the traditional MLUw that grew out of working with English. I have tried to address some of these issues in my chapter in Slobin's vol.5: A.M. Peters, 1997. "Language typology, prosody and the acquisition of grammatical morphemes". In The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition, vol.5, D.I. Slobin, ed. Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 136-197. Ann Peters From thoreson at cc.wwu.edu Wed Mar 17 00:39:26 1999 From: thoreson at cc.wwu.edu (Catherine Crain-Thoreson) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 16:39:26 -0800 Subject: How do you determine the difficulty of individual words? Message-ID: Many people use printed word frequency for this purpose. The reference for word frequency that I'm aware of is Carroll, J., Davies, P., & Richman, B. (1971). Word frequency book. New York: American Heritage Publishing. There may be a newer edition. You might find Mark Seidenberg's work of interest. He and colleagues differentiate several different categories of words in reading tasks. The reference I have handy is Seidenberg, M., Bruck, M., Fornarolo, & Backman, J. (1985) Word recognition processes of poor and disabled readers: Do they necessarily differ? Applied Psycholinguistics, 6, 161-180. There's quite a large literature on what makes word recognition difficult or easy. Frequency and regularity of spelling pattern are two major factors. Is this what you're after? Catherine Crain-Thoreson At 04:38 PM 3/15/99 -0500, russgrd2 at psych1.psy.sunysb.edu wrote: >I need to write a story in which I manipulate the difficulty of individual >words. I need a version with easy to read words and a version with hard to >read words. I have not been able to locate an objective method for >determining the difficulty of these words. Is anyone aware of a method >that might help me in this task? > >--Brett Stoltz > >~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ >| Brett Stoltz >| Department of Psychology >| SUNY at Stony Brook >| Stony Brook, NY 11794-1200 >| voice: (516) 632-7870 >| fax: (516) 632-7871 >| e-mail: russgrd2 at psych1.psy.sunysb.edu >| Stony Brook Reading and Language Project >| http://www.read+lang.sbs.sunysb.edu/ >~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ > > ********************************* Catherine Crain-Thoreson, Ph.D. Psychology Department Western Washington University Bellingham, WA 98225-9089 Tel: (360) 650-3168 Fax: (360) 650-7305 e-mail: thoreson at cc.wwu.edu http://www.wwu.edu/~thoreson ********************************* From m.vihman at bangor.ac.uk Wed Mar 17 13:40:06 1999 From: m.vihman at bangor.ac.uk (Marilyn Vihman) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 14:40:06 +0100 Subject: MLUw and MLUm Message-ID: following up on Ann's comments, I can't resist adding in a reference to a 1982 paper of mine, in Applied Psycholinguistics, 3, which looks at my son's development along Ann's line [A], even though he was learning a highly inflected language, Estonian, as well as being exposed to english to a lesser extent. Courtney Cazden had noted these two approaches in the dev. of Eve vs. Sarah, among Brown's 3 subjects, in 1972. - marilyn vihman > I agree that, especially in early morphosyntactic production there are >two things going on, and they probably need to be assessed differently. >On the one hand there is [A] the stringing together of content words/ideas >(MLUw?); on the other is [B] the increasing inclusion of grammatical >markers (MLUm?). > The trouble with English is that so many of the grammatical markers >are free morphemes that one is tempted to think that counting *words* >is the way to go. However, these capacities probably develop separately, >showing up as individual differences in early combination. In fact, the >kids who go the [B] route are probably the "frame and slot" kids who >structure their early combinations around morphosyntactic frames. >I think one sees these patterns even more clearly when one looks at >languages (like Italian) with more bound morphology. > I have found it useful to compute MLU in two ways: >1) just open-class lexical items (excluding free grammatical morphemes), >and 2) all morphemes, whether bound or free. >I believe these measures would equate better across languages than the >traditional MLUw that grew out of working with English. >I have tried to address some of these issues in my chapter in Slobin's vol.5: >A.M. Peters, 1997. "Language typology, prosody and the acquisition of >grammatical morphemes". In The Crosslinguistic Study of Language >Acquisition, vol.5, D.I. Slobin, ed. Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum >Associates, 136-197. >Ann Peters ------------------------------------------------------- Marilyn M. Vihman Professor, Developmental Psychology | /\ School of Psychology | / \/\ University of Wales, Bangor, | /\/ \ \ Gwynedd LL57 2DG, U.K. | / ======\=\ tel. 44 (0)1248 383 775 FAX 382 599 | B A N G O R -------------------------------------------------------- From michael at giccs.georgetown.edu Wed Mar 17 19:17:51 1999 From: michael at giccs.georgetown.edu (Michael Ullman) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 14:17:51 -0500 Subject: ERP/fMRI postdoc positions Message-ID: TWO POSTDOC POSITIONS: ERP & FMRI STUDIES OF LANGUAGE & MEMORY We are seeking to hire two full-time Postdoctoral Fellows (or highly qualified non-PhDs) to carry out ERP and fMRI studies of language and memory. The positions are in the Brain and Language lab at the Georgetown Institute for Cognitive and Computational Sciences (GICCS) at Georgetown University Medical School. GICCS is a new institute dedicated to understanding the relation between brain and cognition. It is composed of a group of about fifteen researchers pursuing a variety of lines of research in cognition, computation, and neuroscience. At the Brain and Language lab we are interested in the neural, computational, psychological, and developmental bases of language and memory. Our work focuses on elucidating the underpinnings of lexicon (words) and grammar (rules), with a particular interest in the issues of modularity, neural localization, and domain-specificity/generality. We are carrying out several projects to test the hypothesis that the temporal-lobe "declarative memory" system, which has previously been implicated in the learning and use of fact and event knowledge, also subserves word knowledge; and that the frontal/basal-ganglia "procedural memory" system, which has previously been implicated in the learning and use of motor and cognitive "skills," such as riding a bicycle, also subserves grammatical knowledge. We are also examining sex differences in language. Our language projects focus primarily on English, Italian, and Japanese. The successful candidates will be primarily responsible for carrying out (1) ERP studies, using a high-end 96 channel system; or (2) fMRI studies, on a 1.5T Vision Siemens MR system. They will design and set up ERP/fMRI experiments, test subjects, analyze data, and prepare presentations and papers. There will also be opportunities to be involved in other projects, including (1) Magnetoencephalography (MEG) studies; (2) behavioral studies of people with adult-onset brain damage (aphasics and patients with Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, or Huntington's disease) or with developmental language disorders (Specific Language Impairment, Williams syndrome); (3) psycholinguistic studies of normal adults. The minimum requirement for the positions is research experience with *either* ERPs or fMRI. No previous experience with language or memory studies is required. The candidate should be available to work for a minimum of two years. The start date is flexible, but must be some time between late spring and early fall of 1999. Salary will be highly competitive. To apply, please send Michael Ullman a resume and arrange to have two letters of recommendation sent to him (preferably by email). Georgetown University is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity employer. Michael Ullman Assistant Professor Director, Brain and Language Laboratory Georgetown Institute for Cognitive and Computational Sciences (GICCS) Research Building 3970 Reservoir Rd, NW Georgetown University Washington DC 20007 Email: michael at giccs.georgetown.edu Tel: Office: 202-687-6064 Lab: 202-687-6896 Fax: 202-687-6914 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 3165 bytes Desc: not available URL: From ann at hawaii.edu Thu Mar 18 06:10:39 1999 From: ann at hawaii.edu (Ann Peters) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 20:10:39 -1000 Subject: SLI questions Message-ID: Dear info-childes, We at the University of Hawaii have three questions about work on Selective Language Impairment: 1. Can you direct us to a reasonably comprehensive list of recent research in SLI, particularly in languages other than English? 2. More specifically, has anybody done any work on production or perception of relative clauses by SLI children? 3. Finally, has anybody working on SLI in French found word order errors such as: On ne pas travaille. On toujours travaille fort. We will post a summary to the whole list. Thank you, Ann Peters From vhouwer at uia.ua.ac.be Thu Mar 18 12:13:30 1999 From: vhouwer at uia.ua.ac.be (Annick.DeHouwer) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 13:13:30 +0100 Subject: modality/gerund Message-ID: On Wed, 10 Mar 1999, elma blom wrote: > Can anybody help me with one of the following questions (or perhaps both)? > > 1. How do English speaking children (in particular between 2-3 years old) > express their wishes, needs, desires and intentions? Are there, for > example, studies on the use of verb forms like "gonna" and "wanna"? > > 2. Do English speaking children (2-3 years old) use the gerund (V-ing)? I > would also appreciate any references on this topic. > Chapter 7 part 7.4. of my book The acquisition of two languages from birth, 1990, Cambridge University Press, gives information on the use of WANNA/WANT TO, GONNA/GOING TO and the gerund by an English speaking child aged 2;7-3;4. --Annick De Houwer From talkasey at andrew.cmu.edu Thu Mar 18 14:57:35 1999 From: talkasey at andrew.cmu.edu (Tamara Al-Kasey) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 09:57:35 -0500 Subject: bibliographic requests Message-ID: --On Thu, Mar 18, 1999 1:13 PM +0100 "Annick.DeHouwer" wrote: >> Can anybody help me with one of the following questions (or perhaps >> both)? Dear readers, I enjoy reading the discussions of issues relevant to the field and rejoice when a discussion can lead researchers to a solution they are looking for or help them to find obscure and/or unpublished sources or a request from experts for "the best" of something. Unfortunately, various lists have become overwhelmingly requests for bibliographies. Many students seem to believe that such lists are a replacement for going to the library. If you have students that are beginning a research project and you don't have the subexpertise to give them a starter bibliography, please refer them to a relevant search site or print bibliography rather than helping them to take the easy way out and let others do the work for them. Tamara Al-Kasey Carnegie Mellon From lmb32 at columbia.edu Fri Mar 19 12:28:15 1999 From: lmb32 at columbia.edu (Lois Bloom) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 07:28:15 -0500 Subject: No subject Message-ID: The difference Ann made was also described in my book (Language Development: Form and Function in Emerging Grammars, MIT, 1970) in arguing against 'pivot grammar' --Kathryn and Gia (and, later, Allison) showed the first pattern, while Eric (and, later, Peter) showed the 2nd. Over the years, we also found that the two difference methods of counting utterance length mattered little, in following up on that original study. See, forexample, Bloom, Lightbown, & Hood, Structure and Variation in Child Language, SRCDMonograph, 1975). --Lois Bloom From lmb32 at columbia.edu Fri Mar 19 12:32:07 1999 From: lmb32 at columbia.edu (Lois Bloom) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 07:32:07 -0500 Subject: bibliographic requests Message-ID: Good advice! I'd also add that the replies to the list are not necessarily 'complete.' --Lois Bloom On Thu, 18 Mar 1999, Tamara Al-Kasey wrote: > > > --On Thu, Mar 18, 1999 1:13 PM +0100 "Annick.DeHouwer" > wrote: > > >> Can anybody help me with one of the following questions (or perhaps > >> both)? > > Dear readers, > > I enjoy reading the discussions of issues relevant to the field and rejoice > when a discussion can lead researchers to a solution they are looking for > or help them to find obscure and/or unpublished sources or a request from > experts for "the best" of something. Unfortunately, various lists have > become overwhelmingly requests for bibliographies. Many students seem to > believe that such lists are a replacement for going to the library. If you > have students that are beginning a research project and you don't have the > subexpertise to give them a starter bibliography, please refer them to a > relevant search site or print bibliography rather than helping them to take > the easy way out and let others do the work for them. > > Tamara Al-Kasey > Carnegie Mellon > > > > From vhouwer at uia.ua.ac.be Fri Mar 19 13:48:00 1999 From: vhouwer at uia.ua.ac.be (Annick.DeHouwer) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 14:48:00 +0100 Subject: bibliographic requests Message-ID: Dear colleagues, I agree wholeheartedly with the messages below. Nevertheless, I think there are mitigating circumstances for some of our younger colleagues, especially in countries outside the United States: they may not have advisors that can appropriately guide them to the relevant literature, especially if this literature is in a foreign language and about a foreign language. In addition, in many less well-off countries bibliographical queries through email might be the only way for researchers to get information, however basic and 'well-known' the information requested might seem to researchers who are fortunate enough to live and work in more affluent places. Also, potentially useful information about a particular topic might be 'hidden' - as my own response to Elma Blom's queries showed, there may be information about a topic that can only be accessed if you have the table of contents of a book in front of you. But there is no question that doing a first bibliographic search when a library is available or/and a search through internet sites should precede any query put out on email lists. Best regards, Annick De Houwer > > > Good advice! I'd also add that the replies to the list are not > necessarily 'complete.' --Lois Bloom > > > On Thu, 18 Mar 1999, Tamara Al-Kasey wrote: > > > > > > > --On Thu, Mar 18, 1999 1:13 PM +0100 "Annick.DeHouwer" > > wrote: > > > > >> Can anybody help me with one of the following questions (or perhaps > > >> both)? > > > > Dear readers, > > > > I enjoy reading the discussions of issues relevant to the field and rejoice > > when a discussion can lead researchers to a solution they are looking for > > or help them to find obscure and/or unpublished sources or a request from > > experts for "the best" of something. Unfortunately, various lists have > > become overwhelmingly requests for bibliographies. Many students seem to > > believe that such lists are a replacement for going to the library. If you > > have students that are beginning a research project and you don't have the > > subexpertise to give them a starter bibliography, please refer them to a > > relevant search site or print bibliography rather than helping them to take > > the easy way out and let others do the work for them. > > > > Tamara Al-Kasey > > Carnegie Mellon > > > > > > > > > > > From dpapadc at essex.ac.uk Fri Mar 19 13:47:34 1999 From: dpapadc at essex.ac.uk (D Papadopoulou) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 13:47:34 +0000 Subject: No subject Message-ID: On Thu, 25 Feb 1999 13:51:46 -0500 (EST) Info-CHILDES wrote: > Your address has been added to the Info-CHILDES. The e-mail address for this > list is info-childes at childes.psy.cmu.edu. > > MAILING LIST HELP FILE > > Please read the list guidelines (see below) before engaging in discussion. > In addition, familiarize yourself with how the list operates, especially if > you've never participated in an Internet email discussion group before. > It's a good idea to save this message somewhere so you know how to > unsubscribe. > > When dealing with a listserver, there are two types of messages, namely, > COMMANDS and POSTS. Unlike traditional listservers which require the > use of numerous email addresses, we have simplified the process by > allowing for both both COMMANDS and POSTS to be sent to the same address. > > COMMANDS > > These e-mail messages are intended to cause some action to occur, such as > subscribing the FROM address to a mailing list. Commands are usually one or > two word phrases which should be entered in the SUBJECT field of the message. > Any other fields are ignored... it doesn't matter what you put in them. > > The following commands are accepted: > > subscribe > adds your e-mail address to the list of subscribers > you will then receive all posts > you are then allowed to post from that address > > unsubscribe > removes your e-mail address from the list of subscribers > you will no longer receive any posts > you are no longer allowed to post > > subscribe digest > switches you to digest mode > you will then receive one message per day which lists all posts > to switch back, send a "subscribe" command > > digests > returns a list of digests for the past 30 days along with > instructions for retreiving them via e-mail > > help > this message will be returned > > > POSTS > > Email messages which don't match any commands are distributed to everyone on > the list. > Every time you post a message, hundreds of other people on the list receive a > copy, just as if you sent it to them personally. As a member of the list, you > will receive a copy of every message anyone else sends. On this list, only > members of the list can post to it. > > > > To correspond directly with a person, write to kelley.sacco at cmu.edu > Despina Papadopoulou Department of Language and Linguistics University of Essex e-mail address: dpapadc at essex.ac.uk From Alison.Mayne at Colorado.EDU Fri Mar 19 15:45:00 1999 From: Alison.Mayne at Colorado.EDU (MAYNE ALISON MARIE) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 08:45:00 -0700 Subject: bibliographic requests Message-ID: Just curious...which search engines/ databases are people finding most helpful for doing literature searches? Thanks for your input. From molsen at umiacs.umd.edu Fri Mar 19 18:32:00 1999 From: molsen at umiacs.umd.edu (Mari Broman Olsen) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 13:32:00 -0500 Subject: bibliographic requests Message-ID: Altavista and amazon.com > > > Just curious...which search engines/ databases are people finding most > helpful for doing literature searches? > > Thanks for your input. ******** Mari Broman Olsen, Research Associate University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies 3141 A.V. Williams Building University of Maryland College Park, MD 20742 EMAIL: molsen at umiacs.umd.edu PHONE: (301) 405-6754 FAX: (301) 314-9658 WEB: http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~molsen ********* From edwards at cogsci.Berkeley.EDU Fri Mar 19 19:22:16 1999 From: edwards at cogsci.Berkeley.EDU (Jane A. Edwards) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 11:22:16 -0800 Subject: bibliographic requests Message-ID: I usually use keyword or author search on the electronic versions of: Current Contents, Psych Abstracts, Social Science Citations Abstracts, MLA, and UC library holdings. Once you "break into the loop", in terms of finding even a few references of interest to you, you can expand the loop by looking up the references mentioned in those sources. These resources help bridge the gap also between literatures in different languages because, for example, a university's library holdings include books in other languages, and so do Psych Abstracts. Current Contents includes articles in other languages but translates their titles into English. The library needs to invest money to have these things online. Where they are not available, the standard search engines on the Web should work. I have used the web to find references by particular author. It simply took a little longer. -Jane Edwards From ervin-tr at cogsci.Berkeley.EDU Sun Mar 21 21:18:42 1999 From: ervin-tr at cogsci.Berkeley.EDU (Susan Ervin-Tripp) Date: Sun, 21 Mar 1999 13:18:42 -0800 Subject: bibliographic requests Message-ID: Jane Edwards gives very good advice about expanding searches. In checking between different sources, it has been a surprise to discover how very limited any one of them is. For example, Psych Abstracts primarily lists items from the American Psychological Association journals, and books which publishers send to them. This means that publications in cross- disciplinary fields like child language are just left out, and you need to use other sources. Another question, which of the sources Edwards mentioned can be accessed from the web from other countries, and what are their URL's? Some kinds of bibliographic sources involve library passwords and may not be reachable from everywhere. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Susan M. Ervin-Tripp tel (510) 841-6803 Psychology Department FAX (510) 642-5293 University of California ervin-tr at cogsci.berkeley.edu Berkeley CA 94720 http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~ervintrp/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- From LloyAl at aol.com Mon Mar 22 01:07:57 1999 From: LloyAl at aol.com (LloyAl at aol.com) Date: Sun, 21 Mar 1999 20:07:57 EST Subject: Fast Mapping Message-ID: I've been trying to find the 1978 article by Carey and Bartlett "Acquiring a single new word". If any one knows where it can be located and acquired, I would appreciate the information. Thanks in advance, Lloyd Alford Howard University From jeff at elda.fr Mon Mar 22 09:39:55 1999 From: jeff at elda.fr (Jeff ALLEN) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 10:39:55 +0100 Subject: seeking a few bibliographic references Message-ID: I'm looking for bibliographic references on the following 2 points. 1. It has been shown in First Language Acquisition that prosodic patterns are learned and produced by children before lexical and syntactic structures, and that parents can understand the speech of children thanks to the intonation when the grammatical structure is sometimes undecipherable in isolation. 2. 50 or so percent of communication is transmitted through gestures, facial expression, etc. Thanks in advance for bibliographic references and possibly very brief summaries of what is found in the articles/paper/books that you mention. Regards, Jeff ================================================= Jeff ALLEN - Directeur Technique European Language Resources Association (ELRA) & European Language resources Distribution Agency (ELDA) (Agence Europ?enne de Distribution des Ressources Linguistiques) 55, rue Brillat-Savarin 75013 Paris FRANCE Tel: (+33) (0) 1.43.13.33.33 - Fax: (+33) (0) 1.43.13.33.30 mailto:jeff at elda.fr http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/home.html From macw at cmu.edu Mon Mar 22 20:16:56 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 15:16:56 -0500 Subject: bibliographic searches and Info-CHILDES Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, Tamara is right in noting the increasing use of discussion groups for basic bibliographic searches. Jane Edwards correctly points out how easy it is to use online bibliographies, if your university supports them. I have two additional comments on these issues. First, students may wish to use the CHILDES/BIB bibliography. Many libraries have hard copies. If you have the CHILDES CD-ROM, there is a copy there. However, the current version of the bibliography on the net is almost twice the size of the one on the CD. It now has 23,600 references. You and your students can download the whole bibliography from childes.psy.cmu.edu/chibib/index.html. However, they will also need to download a free copy of the EndNote program from the link given there. I am trying to find an easy on-line site for accessing the references directly over the web. One possibility might be the "Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies". Other suggestions are invited. If I could improve access to CHILDES/BIB, it would be a bit easier to suggest to people that they should look there first before posting queries to info-childes. For example, a search for "modal*" in CHILDES/BIB matched about 180 articles, many of which seemed quite relevant to the recent bibliographic query on modals. Similarly, a search for author "Carey" in CHILDES/BIB matches not only the paper that Lloyd Alford was looking for, but also other papers by Carey on the same subject that are easier to find in the library. Questions of the form "Is there work on language X?" are also easily resolved this way. However, other topics are a bit tougher. For example, reducing Jeff Allen's questions about prosodic structures and gestures to a series of key word queries is not easy. Jeff's question is not a mere bibliographic question. He is advancing a couple of specific claims (prosody learned before syntax, and 50 percent of language is gestural). So, his question is really about whether anyone has defended these specific claims. For example, Ann Peter and Lise Menn might conceivably (underscore "conceivably") say that they have evidence in support of the idea that parents can understand their children's intonation before they understand the content of their utterances. I will leave it up to others to decide if anyone would support the idea that 50% of communication is gestural. The ideal situation seems to be something like this. Before posting a query to the list, the researcher or student consults either PsychLit or CHILDES/BIB. If they don't find what they need there, they then post a note to the Web explaining that they found 100 matches to their key words search, but none or few that seemed to clearly address the more specific issue they have in mind. At that point, I think that the question becomes one that might interest us all. --Brian MacWhinney From zukow at ucla.edu Tue Mar 23 00:24:45 1999 From: zukow at ucla.edu (Patricia Zukow-Goldring) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 16:24:45 -0800 Subject: Jeff Allen request/gestures Message-ID: In response to Jeff Allen's request of 3/22. When Gestures Speak Louder Than Words. (No claims re 50% of communication, etc!) Infants often do not initially understand caregiver messages (Catch it!). Subsequent messages in which caregivers provide perceptual structure/information with gestures (demonstrating how to catch) overwhelmingly lead to achieving a practical understanding of ongoing events. When caregivers' subsequent messages are expressed only with more specific verbal utterances (Catch the ball!), a common understanding is rarely achieved. This longitudinal research was conducted during the prelinguistic period from 6 months through the one-word period (19-24 months). There were 5 Euro-American, English-speaking families and 6 Latino, Spanish-speaking families. The data were collected in suburbs of Los Angeles, CA, USA. Briefly, words cannot explain unless a person already knows what words mean. Learning what words mean is what the infant "means" to learn. These caregivers assembled messages by "saying and showing", so their infants could perceive what they said and did. Pat Zukow-Goldring Zukow-Goldring, P. (in press). Perceiving referring actions: Latino and Euro-American caregivers and infants comprehending speech. In K. L. Nelson, A. Aksu-Koc, & C. Johnson (Eds.), Children's Language, Vol. 11. Hillsdale NJ: Erlbaum. Zukow-Goldring, P. G. (1997). A social ecological realist approach to the emergence of the lexicon: Educating attention to amodal invariants in gesture and speech." In C. Dent-Read & P. Zukow-Goldring (Eds.), Evolving explanations of development: Ecological approaches to organism-environment systems (pp. 199-250). Washington, D. C.: American Psychological Association. Zukow-Goldring, P. (1996). Sensitive caregivers foster the comprehension of speech: When gestures speak louder than words. Early Development and Parenting, 5 (4), 195-211. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jeff at elda.fr Tue Mar 23 09:58:30 1999 From: jeff at elda.fr (Jeff ALLEN) Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 10:58:30 +0100 Subject: gestures and prosody Message-ID: Brian MacWhinney wrote: > However, other topics are a bit tougher. For example, reducing Jeff >Allen's questions about prosodic structures and gestures to a series of >key word queries is not easy. Jeff's question is not a mere >bibliographic question. He is advancing a couple of specific claims >(prosody learned before syntax, and 50 percent of language is >gestural). So, his question is really about whether anyone has >defended these specific claims. > For example, Ann Peter and Lise Menn >might conceivably (underscore "conceivably") say that they have >evidence in support of the idea that parents can understand their >children's intonation before they understand the content of their >utterances. Thank you Brian for your comments. I have heard that articles/papers have discussed the concept of prosody being acquired before syntax. What I am interested in specifically is that prosody is a very important factor in communication. In some instances of adult communication, the only way to distinguish between a declarative, and a question is from prosodic structure when the phonemic string is the same. In the case of children, especially children who I have not spent much time with, I sometimes cannot make out the individual lexical items, but the prosodic nature of the utterance is the glue that allows me to understand what they are trying to communicate. If there are articles in favor or against this concept, I would be more than willing to receive more info along these lines. >I will leave it up to others to decide if anyone would >support the idea that 50% of communication is gestural. The number 50 is completely arbitrary. It might be 10%, 20% 30% etc. I remember reading a paper on this topic several years ago and simply cannot remember the number that was attributed, nor the author of the paper. It is certain that gestures make up a part of general communication, but I would like to get some information on studies that try to quantify it, even in specific contexts. >The ideal situation seems to be something like this. Before posting >a query to the list, the researcher or student consults either PsychLit >or CHILDES/BIB. The problem is that my Internet access is very limited. I can easily send and receive e-mail. I am sorry if this request increases the bandwidth of the discussion list at the moment. Given my current internet situation, asking questions via lists is the best way for me to obtain information. Thanks in advance for the replies and comments. Jeff ================================================= Jeff ALLEN - Directeur Technique European Language Resources Association (ELRA) & European Language resources Distribution Agency (ELDA) (Agence Europ?enne de Distribution des Ressources Linguistiques) 55, rue Brillat-Savarin 75013 Paris FRANCE Tel: (+33) (0) 1.43.13.33.33 - Fax: (+33) (0) 1.43.13.33.30 mailto:jeff at elda.fr http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/home.html From Jordan.Zlatev at lucs.lu.se Tue Mar 23 11:13:19 1999 From: Jordan.Zlatev at lucs.lu.se (Jordan Zlatev) Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 12:13:19 +0100 Subject: sensorimotor experience and language Message-ID: Dear Info-childes readers, In reading Piattelli-Palmarini's (1979) book presenting the debate between Piaget and Chomsky I came upon an interesting issue that I would like to ask if anyone can say anything about. Namely, following Inhelder's presentation, Monod (p.140) brings up "an experiment that is theoretically very simple: if the development of language in the child is closely related to sensorimotor experience, one can suppose that a child born paraplegic ... would have very great difficulties in developing language." Inhelder (and everyone else) admit that they are not aware of any systematic evidence and Chomsky eventually states bluntly that "my own prediction is that it would turn out that there is no relations whatsoever, or at least the most marginal relation, between even extreme defects that would make it virtually impossible to develop and do all the things that Piaget was discussing, and his acquisition of language." (171) This was more than 20 years ago. Does anyone know about any systematic evidence now? If I get many replies I will summarize in a future posting. Greetings, Jordan Zlatev Cognitive Science Lund University Kungshuset, Lundag?rd 222 22 Lund, Sweden tel. : (+46) (0)46-222 0926 email: Jordan.Zlatev at lucs.lu.se http://www.lucs.lu.se/People/Jordan.Zlatev/ From jvwoude at calvin.edu Tue Mar 23 12:51:28 1999 From: jvwoude at calvin.edu (Judy Vander Woude) Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 07:51:28 -0500 Subject: gestures and prosody Message-ID: Jeff, You may wish to look at the Tarplee's chapter in the following book: Tarplee, C. (1996). Working on young children's utterances: prosodic aspects of repetition during picture labeling. In Couper-Kuhlen, E. & Selting, M. (Eds.) Prosody in conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clare doesn't address prosody before syntax, but she does wonderfully illustrate how important prosody is in parent-child conversation. The rest of the volume addresses the role of prosody in both adult and child conversations. Judy. > >Thank you Brian for your comments. I have heard that articles/papers >have discussed the concept of prosody being acquired before syntax. >What I am interested in specifically is that prosody is a very >important factor in communication. In some instances of adult >communication, the only way to distinguish between a declarative, >and a question is from prosodic structure when the phonemic string >is the same. In the case of children, especially children who I have >not spent much time with, I sometimes cannot make out the individual >lexical items, but the prosodic nature of the utterance is the glue that >allows me to understand what they are trying to communicate. If there >are articles in favor or against this concept, I would be more than >willing to receive more info along these lines. > >Jeff > > > >================================================= >Jeff ALLEN - Directeur Technique >European Language Resources Association (ELRA) & >European Language resources Distribution Agency (ELDA) >(Agence Europ?enne de Distribution des Ressources Linguistiques) >55, rue Brillat-Savarin >75013 Paris FRANCE >Tel: (+33) (0) 1.43.13.33.33 - Fax: (+33) (0) 1.43.13.33.30 >mailto:jeff at elda.fr >http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/home.html Judith Vander Woude, Ph.D. Department of Communication Arts and Sciences Calvin College 3201 Burton SE Grand Rapids, MI 49546 From jiverson at indiana.edu Tue Mar 23 18:00:40 1999 From: jiverson at indiana.edu (Jana M. Iverson) Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 10:00:40 -0800 Subject: gestures and prosody Message-ID: Hi Jeff, A group of Italian colleagues and I recently did a study in which we looked at the frequency of maternal gesture use as mothers interacted with their 16- and 20-month-old children in naturalistic, in-home play sessions. We found that only 10% of all maternal utterances were accompanied by gesture, that the vast majority of gestures were points at concrete objects, and that frequency of maternal gesture did not change across the children's 16 and 20 month sessions (i.e., maternal gesture production did not decline as children's vocal language skills improved). Interestingly, another unpublished study that looked at American mothers' use of gesture during interactions with their 18-month-olds also reported that 10% of maternal utterances occurred with gesture. Marilyn Shatz also did some work a few years ago looking at the relationship between speech and gesture in maternal speech to young children. Here are some references that might be helpful. Iverson, J.M., Capirci, O., Longobardi, E., & Caselli, M.C. (in press). Gesturing in mother-child interactions. Cognitive Development. Bekken, K. (1989). Is there motherese in gesture? Unpublished doctoral dissertation, The University of Chicago. Shatz, M. (1982). On mechanisms of language acquisition: Can features of the communicative environment account for development? In E. Wanner & L. Gleitman (Eds.), Language acquisition: The state of the art (pp. 102-127). New York: Cambridge University Press. Best, Jana Iverson ************************************************************************* Jana M. Iverson Phone: (812) 855-0817 Dept. of Psychology Fax: (812) 855-4691 1101 E. 10th St. Email: jiverson at indiana.edu Indiana University Bloomington, IN 47405 ************************************************************************* From macw at cmu.edu Tue Mar 23 16:32:57 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 11:32:57 -0500 Subject: sensorimotor experience and language Message-ID: Dear Jordan and Info-CHILDES, The 1979 discussion of language in a paraplegic may have been stimulated by the appearance in 1975 of an article by Fourcin in Eric Lenneberg's "Foundations of Language Development. Vol 2" (pp. 263-268). This article discusses the remarkable case of Richard Boydell, who was anarthric and also quadraplegic. His anarthria was extreme and he could not produce language. However, Boydell was quite bright and appears to have had good use of his feet. With his mother's help, he learned to read and was able to communicate in beautiful English using his feet and toes with a special typewriter. At that time, this case was used as evidence against the motor theory of speech perception. However, it could perhaps also be used as evidence against the sensorimotor account of language acquisition. Jordan is perhaps specifically interested in how cases of this sort might illuminate recent claims about embodied representations underpinning language that arise from functional linguistics and parts of psychology. The case of Richard Boydell does not address these issues. Boydell apparently had good use of his feet. I thought that quadraplegics were paralyzed in both arms and both legs. But this was evidently not the case for Boydell. In fact, the article discusses Boydell's "head and body movements" and their use in communication at age 4. Given this, it is clear that Boydell had extensive access to sensorimotor mappings of the type thought necessary to ground language. So, we would need to be looking for a more extreme case than that reported by Fourcin to understand the role of embodied representations. My own guess is that the mapping between sensorimotor imagery and language is important, but oblique in several ways. In this regard, it is useful to consider evidence for a double dissociation between visual perception and visual imagery in agnosia from Behrmann and others. --Brian MacWhinney From ann.dowker at psy.ox.ac.uk Wed Mar 24 00:40:13 1999 From: ann.dowker at psy.ox.ac.uk (Ann Dowker) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 00:40:13 +0000 Subject: sensorimotor experience and language Message-ID: There is the case of Christopher Nolan, born with cerebral palsy; almost completely paralyzed and seemingly mute, until the age of 11, when a new drug relaxed the muscles of his neck to allow him partial control of his head for short periods of time. He was then given a unicorn stick to fit on his forehead, and learned how to type by pressing the unicorn onto the keys of his typewriter. He then began writing impressive stories and poetry. "Dam-Burst of Dreams" (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981) is a collection of his works between the ages of 11 and 14. Ann Dowker From Alison.Mayne at Colorado.EDU Wed Mar 24 15:30:27 1999 From: Alison.Mayne at Colorado.EDU (MAYNE ALISON MARIE) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 08:30:27 -0700 Subject: bibliographic requests Message-ID: Thanks to everyone who responded to my query. Below is a summary of the recommendations thus far. Alison Mayne ------------------------- Jane Edwards: I usually use keyword or author search on the electronic versions of: Current Contents, Psych Abstracts, Social Science Citations Abstracts, MLA, and UC library holdings. Once you "break into the loop", in terms of finding even a few references of interest to you, you can expand the loop by looking up the references mentioned in those sources. These resources help bridge the gap also between literatures in different languages because, for example, a university's library holdings include books in other languages, and so do Psych Abstracts. Current Contents includes articles in other languages but translates their titles into English. The library needs to invest money to have these things online. Where they are not available, the standard search engines on the Web should work. I have used the web to find references by particular author. It simply took a little longer. --Brian MacWhinney: Along this line, I have found it really easy to search the info-childes archive at http://listserv.linguistlist.org/archives/info-childes.html and I would recommend that site to others too. ...the current version of the bibliography on the net is almost twice the size of the one on the CD. It now has 23,600 references. You and your students can download the whole bibliography from childes.psy.cmu.edu/chibib/index.html. However, they will also need to download a free copy of the EndNote program from the link given there. ... links to Internet resources on the issue of language learning. Right now, this page lists 7 other sites: http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/sites.html They include SALT, CompProf, JCHAT, IASCL, Neonatal Cry, UCSF (Merzenich), and the Wisconsin symposium page. Mari Broman Olsen Altavista and amazon.com From kanagy at darkwing.uoregon.edu Wed Mar 24 19:27:47 1999 From: kanagy at darkwing.uoregon.edu (Ruth Kanagy) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 11:27:47 -0800 Subject: literacy and acq of grammar Message-ID: Dear colleagues, I asked for references on the effects of literacy on the acquisition of grammar in L1/L2. Thanks to the following people for responding: Brett Reynolds, Patricia Carlin, Joyce Iliff, Eduardo Garcia, Dave Wolfe, David Gohre, Barbara Zurer Pearson, Stephen Krashen, Pearl Chiari, Carla Bazzanella, Carmel Bochenek, Birgit Harley. The following were some of the suggested references: Bazzanella, C. and Calleri, D. (1991). Tense coherence and grounding in children's narrative, in "Text" 11/2, 175-187. Handbook of reading research, vol. 2 / editor, P. David Pearson [and] section editors, Rebecca Barr, Michael L. Kamil, Peter Mosenthal. New York: Longman, c1984-1991. Harley, B. (1993). Instructional strategies and SLA in early French immersion. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 15, 245-259. Harley, B. (1998). The role of focus-on-form tasks in promoting child L2 acquisition. In C. Doughty and J. Williams (Eds.). Focus on formin classroom second language acquisition (pp. 156-173). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Lee, Y.O., Krashen, S., and Gribbons, B. (1995). The effect of reading on the acquisition of English relative clauses. I.T.L. 113-114, 263-273. Nelson, K. (1998). Toward a differentiated account of facilitators of literacy development and ASL in deaf children. Topics in Language Disorders (Aug)., 73-88. Sparks, R. and Ganschow, L. (1993b). Searching for the cognitive locus of foreign language learning difficulties: Linking first and second language learning. The Modern Language Journal, 77, 289-302. Stanovich, K. E. (1986). Matthew effects in reading: Some consequences of individual differences in the acquisition of literacy. Reading Research Quarterly, 21, 360-407. Stokes, J., Krashen, S., and Kartchner, J. (1998). Factors in the acquisition of the present subjunctive in Spanish: The role of reading and study. I.T.L. Review of Applied Linguistics 121-122, 19-25. Vellutino, F. R. and Denckla, M. B. (1996). Cognitive and neuropsychological foundations of word identification in poor and normally developing readers. In R. Barr et al. (Eds.) Handbook of Reading Research Volume II (pp. 571-608). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. RKanagy UOregon From Sergey.Avrutin at let.uu.nl Thu Mar 25 11:43:54 1999 From: Sergey.Avrutin at let.uu.nl (AVRUTIN) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 13:43:54 +0200 Subject: Language acquisition and language breakdown: program Message-ID: LANGUAGE ACQUISITION & LANGUAGE BREAKDOWN May 28-29, UiL OTS, Utrecht University PRELIMINARY PROGRAM: THURSDAY MAY 27 5-6 Reception & registration FRIDAY MAY 28 8.45 - 09.15 Registration 9.15 - 09.30 Opening and welcome by Eric Reuland (Director of UiL OTS, Utrecht University) 9.30-10.30 "The Vulnerable C-domain" Christer Platzack, Lund University 10.30-11.10 "The Italian determiner system in normal acquisition, specific language impairment, and childhood aphasia" Piero Bottari, Paola Cipriani, Anna Maria Chilosi & Lucia Pfanner University of Perugia, Scientific Institute Stella Maris & University of Pisa 11.10-11.30 coffee 11.30-12.10 "Functional categories and syntactic operations in (ab)normal language acquisition" Celia Jakubowicz & Lea Nash CNRS, Universit? Paris 5 & CNRS, Universit? Paris 8 12.10-12.50 "The acquisition of event structure in normally developing and language impaired children in German" Petra Schulz, Karin Wymann & Zvi Penner, Konstanz University 12.50-2.30 lunch 2.30-3.30 "Compounding and Inflection in Language Impairment" Harald Clahsen, University of Essex 3.30-4.10 "Controversies on CP: A comparison of language acquisition and language impairments in Broca's aphasia" Martina Penke, Heinrich-Heine-Universit?t D?sseldorf 4.10-4.30 tea 4.30-5.10 "Root infinitives and finite sentences: child language versus agrammatic speech" Esterella de Roo, HIL, Leiden University 5.10-6.10 "Grammatism: What language breakdown tells us about language development" Stephen Crain, University of Maryland Evening Conference dinner SATURDAY MAY 29 9.30-10.30 "The Unique Checking Constraint and Morphological Parameters as an Explanation of Variation over Time and Language of a Variety of Syntactic Constructions in Language Acquisition, both Impaired and Normal" Kenneth Wexler, MIT 10.30-11.10 "The acquisition of complex predicates in Japanese specifically language-impaired and normally-developing children" Shinji Fukuda & Suzy E. Fukuda, McGill University 11.10-11.30 coffee 11.30-12.10 "Comprehension of reversible relative clauses in specifically language impaired and normally developing children" Stavroula Stavraki, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki 12.10-12.50 "Morphosyntactic features in the verbal and nominal domains: a comparison between specifically language impaired and normally developing Greek children" Ianthi Maria Tsimpli, University of Cambridge 12.50-2.30 lunch 2.30-3.30 "The use of ellipsis in aphasic and child language" Herman Kolk, Nijmegen University 3.30-4.10 "Verb inflection and verb diversity in three populations: agrammatic speakers, normally developing children and children with specific language impairment" Roelien Bastiaanse & Gerard Bol, Groningen University 4.10-4.30 tea 4.30-5.10 "Language acquisition and breakdown in Zulu" Susan Suzman & Heile Jordaan, University of the Witwatersrand 5.10-6.10 "The neurology of syntax" Yosef Grodzinsky, Tel Aviv University Alternate papers: "Radical economy in deviant grammar: Deleted Formal Features [Agr and Relational prep]" Lamya Abdul-Karim, Eliane Ramos, Thomas Roeper & Harry Seymour University of Massachusetts "Verb movement in acquisition and aphasia: Same problem, different solutions. Evidence from Dutch" Shalom Zuckerman, Roelien Bastiaanse & Ron van Zonneveld, Groningen University From jbryant at luna.cas.usf.edu Thu Mar 25 14:11:27 1999 From: jbryant at luna.cas.usf.edu (Judith Becker Bryant) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 09:11:27 -0500 Subject: FW: 3/22 FOIA Comments (fwd) Message-ID: Colleagues in the United States will be interested in the following message. Judy Bryant Judith Becker Bryant, Ph.D. Associate Professor Department of Psychology, BEH 339 University of South Florida Tampa, FL 33620-8200 (813) 974-0475 fax (813) 974-4617 >From: Alan Kraut >To: "Mary Anne Cowden for COGDOP (E-mail)" , > "Roberta Klatzky (E-mail)" >Subject: 3/22 FOIA Comments >Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1999 14:03:54 -0500 > >March 22, 1999: FOIA Access to Research Data - Send a Letter > >Dear Colleague: > >I hope you've heard about the proposed changes to OMB Circular A-110 >that would allow Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) access to research >data. This change would be alarming for researchers, particularly for >those working with human subjects and confidential information. OMB >published draft regulations on the changes in the Federal Register (see >http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=1999_register& >docid=99-2220-filed) and is receiving comments until April 5. APS is >sending a letter opposing the changes, as is virtually every other >science group. But we're hearing it is important that OMB receive many >letters from individual researchers as well as organizations. > >There is a good summary of the issues, along with a link to the Register >regulations, on the NIH Web page >http://www.nih.gov/grants/policy/a110implications.htm Further, an April >APS Observer cover story on this soon will be available on our Web page >() as will the APS letter. I >encourage you to look at the information, and take a few minutes to send >comments in a letter or email to OMB. The address and other >instructions for submitting comments are posted on the Federal Register >link. And please get the word out to your colleagues. We need to make >sure researchers are heard loud and clear on this. > >Best, > >Alan > >> *** >> Alan G. Kraut, Executive Director 202-783-2077 V >> American Psychological Society 202-783-2083 F >> 1010 Vermont Ave., NW St 1100 akraut at aps.washington.dc.us >> Washington, DC 20005-4907 >> http://www.psychologicalscience.org >> From macw at cmu.edu Thu Mar 25 22:20:30 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 17:20:30 -0500 Subject: online child language bibliography Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, The CHILDES/BIB bibliography is now online. It has about 23,000 references which is about 10,000 more than the 1998 version of CHILDES/BIB on the CD-ROM. If you go to alaska.psy.cmu.edu, you will find it. A more precise address is: http://alaska.psy.cmu.edu/ris/risweb.isa The database is accessed using Reference Web Poster which allows all sorts of Boolean searches etc. I am hoping that this form of access will replace earlier hardcopy and EndNote-based versions of CHILDES/BIB. To test it out, try typing "modal" in the "Text to Search For:" field. You should get about 50 matches. You can view abstracts and details of records by clicking on the left icon with the stack of sheets of paper. You can download records to your own machine by marking them, clicking export, saving in RIS format, and then saving to your disk. You may also want to check to see if the entries for your own work are correct. If they need to be updated, please send the updated references with abstracts to kelley.sacco at andrew.cmu.edu The bibliography still has a lot of duplicates and some errors which Kelley will be fixing next week. Good luck. --Brian MacWhinney From b.woll at city.ac.uk Thu Mar 25 23:02:02 1999 From: b.woll at city.ac.uk (Bencie Woll) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 23:02:02 +0000 Subject: motor impairment and language Message-ID: We would like to respond to the recent correspondence from Jordan Zlatev and Brian MacWhinney relating to the relationship (if any) between language development and sensorimotor experience. In a paper presented at the Boston Child Language Seminar in 1997 and published in the proceedings* we report on a study of 10 severely motor-impaired children with Spinal Muscular Atrophy aged 18-35 months. These children are confined to wheelchairs, unable to stand independently or ambulate, but have normal cortical functions. Using the MacArthur CDI we found average levels of vocabulary (with slightly below-average levels in the youngest subjects due to deficits in items related to mobility) but significant advancement in morphological development, with 8/10 at or above the 75th percentile, and 6/10 above the 90th percentile in over-regularisations. These scores are up to 10 times those of normal children. On this evidence, neither the Piagetian perspective (as Monod phrases it): that a paraplegic child would have difficulties in developing language; nor Chomsky's prediction: that there is no or only a marginal relationship between language and motor development, is supported. Our findings suggest instead that the inability of children with SMA to explore objects and forms in the environment may advance the analysis of patterning in language, independently of vocabulary. These children examine language in place of a world they cannot reach, practising the way words are formed while able-bodied toddlers are engaged in motor and spatial learning. We propose two mutually compatible explanations: 1) different objects of learning in early childhood are in competition and language can advance if the child is less engaged in motor and spatial learning; 2) the mechanisms of procedural learning, identified as fundamental for motor and behavioural skills arising from direct actions and experiences, are also implicated in the development of the morphological rule system. Further studies are being undertaken to explore syntactic, pragmatic, and other aspects of these children's language development. *Sieratzki JS & Woll B (1998) Toddling into language: precocious language development in motor-impaired children with spinal muscular atrophy. In A Greenhill, M Hughes, H Littlefield & H Walsh (eds.) Proceedings of the 22nd annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Vol. 2. Somerville MA: Cascadilla Press. pp. 684-94 (a revised version will be submitted shortly for journal publication) As well as the paper in the Proceedings, an informal version may be read on the Jennifer Trust for Spinal Muscular Atrophy website Harry Sieratzki & Bencie Woll Professor Bencie Woll Chair of Sign Language and Deaf Studies C.C.S. City University Northampton Square London EC1V 0HB Tel: +44 171 477 8354 Minicom/TTY: +44 171 477 8314 Fax: +44 171 477 8577 e-mail: b.woll at city.ac.uk From sefukuda at nucba.ac.jp Fri Mar 26 08:51:47 1999 From: sefukuda at nucba.ac.jp (Suzy Fukuda) Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 17:51:47 +0900 Subject: Language acquisition and language breakdown: program Message-ID: LANGUAGE ACQUISITION & LANGUAGE BREAKDOWN May 28-29, UiL OTS, Utrecht University PRELIMINARY PROGRAM: THURSDAY MAY 27 5-6 Reception & registration FRIDAY MAY 28 8.45 - 09.15 Registration 9.15 - 09.30 Opening and welcome by Eric Reuland (Director of UiL OTS, Utrecht University) 9.30-10.30 "The Vulnerable C-domain" Christer Platzack, Lund University 10.30-11.10 "The Italian determiner system in normal acquisition, specific language impairment, and childhood aphasia" Piero Bottari, Paola Cipriani, Anna Maria Chilosi & Lucia Pfanner University of Perugia, Scientific Institute Stella Maris & University of Pisa 11.10-11.30 coffee 11.30-12.10 "Functional categories and syntactic operations in (ab)normal language acquisition" Celia Jakubowicz & Lea Nash CNRS, Universit? Paris 5 & CNRS, Universit? Paris 8 12.10-12.50 "The acquisition of event structure in normally developing and language impaired children in German" Petra Schulz, Karin Wymann & Zvi Penner, Konstanz University 12.50-2.30 lunch 2.30-3.30 "Compounding and Inflection in Language Impairment" Harald Clahsen, University of Essex 3.30-4.10 "Controversies on CP: A comparison of language acquisition and language impairments in Broca's aphasia" Martina Penke, Heinrich-Heine-Universit?t D?sseldorf 4.10-4.30 tea 4.30-5.10 "Root infinitives and finite sentences: child language versus agrammatic speech" Esterella de Roo, HIL, Leiden University 5.10-6.10 "Grammatism: What language breakdown tells us about language development" Stephen Crain, University of Maryland Evening Conference dinner SATURDAY MAY 29 9.30-10.30 "The Unique Checking Constraint and Morphological Parameters as an Explanation of Variation over Time and Language of a Variety of Syntactic Constructions in Language Acquisition, both Impaired and Normal" Kenneth Wexler, MIT 10.30-11.10 "The acquisition of complex predicates in Japanese specifically language-impaired and normally-developing children" Shinji Fukuda & Suzy E. Fukuda, McGill University 11.10-11.30 coffee 11.30-12.10 "Comprehension of reversible relative clauses in specifically language impaired and normally developing children" Stavroula Stavraki, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki 12.10-12.50 "Morphosyntactic features in the verbal and nominal domains: a comparison between specifically language impaired and normally developing Greek children" Ianthi Maria Tsimpli, University of Cambridge 12.50-2.30 lunch 2.30-3.30 "The use of ellipsis in aphasic and child language" Herman Kolk, Nijmegen University 3.30-4.10 "Verb inflection and verb diversity in three populations: agrammatic speakers, normally developing children and children with specific language impairment" Roelien Bastiaanse & Gerard Bol, Groningen University 4.10-4.30 tea 4.30-5.10 "Language acquisition and breakdown in Zulu" Susan Suzman & Heile Jordaan, University of the Witwatersrand 5.10-6.10 "The neurology of syntax" Yosef Grodzinsky, Tel Aviv University Alternate papers: "Radical economy in deviant grammar: Deleted Formal Features [Agr and Relational prep]" Lamya Abdul-Karim, Eliane Ramos, Thomas Roeper & Harry Seymour University of Massachusetts "Verb movement in acquisition and aphasia: Same problem, different solutions. Evidence from Dutch" Shalom Zuckerman, Roelien Bastiaanse & Ron van Zonneveld, Groningen University Suzy E. Fukuda Nagoya University of Commerce and Business Administration The Language Center 4-4 Sagamine Komenoki-cho Nisshin-shi, Aichi-ken Japan 470-01 Tel: 05617-4-1321 x26311 Fax: 05617-4-0341 E-Mail: sefukuda at nucba.ac.jp From bmj at aber.ac.uk Fri Mar 26 17:29:22 1999 From: bmj at aber.ac.uk (Bob Morris Jones) Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 17:29:22 +0000 Subject: Post advertisement Message-ID: An English version of this post advertisement follows this Welsh version. Swyddogion Ymchwil ar gyfer Prosiect ESRC ========================================= Gwahoddir ceisiadau ar gyfer dwy swydd ar brosiect ymchwil sy?n paratoi cronfa ddata electronig o sgyrsiau naturiol plant ifainc sy?n siarad Cymraeg. Noddir y prosiect gan y Cyngor Ymchwil Economaidd a Chymdeithasol (ESRC), a fe?i cyfarwyddir gan Mr Bob Morris Jones, Adran Addysg, Prifysgol Cymru Aberystwyth. Mi fydd y prosiect yn rhedeg o 1af Gorffennaf 1999 hyd at 30ain Mehefin 2000. Penodir ar bwynt 4 y raddfa gyflog RA1B, ?15,735. Mi fydd yr ymgeiswyr llwyddiannus yn gyfrifol am drawsgrifio recordiadau sain o sgyrsiau naturiol plant ifainc gan ddefnyddio confensiynau safonol, ac am baratoi lecsicon ar sail yr holl ffurfiau a ymddengys yn y gronfa ddata. Fe fydd yn rhaid i?r ymgeiswyr fod yn rhugl yn naill ai Cymraeg llafar y gogledd neu Gymraeg llafar y de. Fe fyddai?n fantais bendant pe byddai ganddynt hyfforddiant mewn Ieithyddiaeth, ond mi fyddai cymwysterau yn y Gymraeg neu iaith fodern yn berthnasol. Mae?r gwaith yn gofyn am sgiliau cyfrifiadurol o ran defnyddio cyfrifiadur personol, trafod a golygu ffeiliau testun plaen, rhedeg pecynnau, a defnyddio e-bost a?r We. Fe fydd hyfforddiant cychwynnol sy?n cyflwyno?r system drawsgrifio a?r gwaith cyfrifiadurol. Am fanylion pellach, cysylltwch ??r Swyddfa Personel, Prifysgol Cymru, 9 Maes Lowri, Abersytwyth, Ceredigion, 01970 621832 (ffacs 622975), neu http://www.aber.ac.uk/~bmj/abercld/cyntaf.html. Anfonwch geisiadau gyda CV llawn a dau eirda i?r Swyddfa Personel, Prifysgol Cymru, 9 Maes Lowri, Abersytwyth, Ceredigion erbyn y dyddiad cau, 30ain Ebrill. Ceir fersiwn o'r hybyseb ganlynol yn y Gymraeg uchod. Research Officers for an ESRC project ===================================== Applications are invited for two posts on a research project which aims to create an electronic database of the spontaneous conversations of young children speaking Welsh. The project is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), and is directed by Mr Bob Morris Jones, Education Department, University of Wales Aberystwyth. The project will run from 1st July 1999 to 30th June 2000. The appointments will be made on point 4 of the salary scale RA1B, ?15,735. The postholders will be responsible for transcribing audio recordings of the spontaneous conversations of young children using standard conventions, and for preparing a lexicon of all the word-forms which occur in the database. The applicants must be fluent in everyday colloquial Welsh either of a northern or southern dialect. Training in Linguistics would be a definite advantage, but qualifications in Welsh or a modern language would also be relevant. The work requires computer skills: using a PC, organizing and editing plain text files, running computer packages, and using e-mail and the Web. There will be preliminary training in the use of the transcription system and the computer work. For further details, contact the Personnel Office, University of Wales, 9 Laura Place, Abersytwyth, Ceredigion, 01970 621832 (fax 622975), or http://www.aber.ac.uk/~bmj/abercld/cyntaf.html. Send applications with a full CV and two references to the Personnel Office,University of Wales, 9 Laura Place, Abersytwyth, Ceredigion, Wales by the closing date, 30th April. Bob Morris Jones, Bob Morris Jones, Department of Education, Adran Addysg, University of Wales, Prifysgol Cymru, ABERYSTWYTH, Aberystwyth Ceredigion, Ceredigion Wales SY23 2AX. Cymru SY23 2AX Phone (01970) 622103 Ff?n (01970) 622103 Fax (01970) 622258 Ffax (01970) 622258 http://www.aber.ac.uk/~bmj/index.html http://www.aber.ac.uk/~bmj/index.html From Edy.Veneziano at pse.unige.ch Sun Mar 28 06:56:34 1999 From: Edy.Veneziano at pse.unige.ch (Edy.Veneziano) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 08:56:34 +0200 Subject: sensorimotor experience and language Message-ID: > At that time, this case was used as evidence against the motor theory > of speech perception. However, it could perhaps also be used as > evidence against the sensorimotor account of language acquisition. To take into consideration on this issue: As far as I can understand, sensorimotor intelligence does not necessarily need effective motor action to develop. 'Looking' is already considered an action that has transformational potentials; and, relatively early, objects can be assimilated to potential and internally-performed actions. Edy Veneziano From bates at crl.ucsd.edu Sun Mar 28 17:36:24 1999 From: bates at crl.ucsd.edu (Elizabeth Bates) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 09:36:24 -0800 Subject: sensorimotor experience and language Message-ID: I agree with Edy Veneziano that one should not take the "motor" part of the sensorimotor equation too literally. First, let's remember that the Piagetian insight was SENSORImotor, which is critical to the argument. Second, as Edy notes, let's remember that there is a very active, selective component to sensory activity as well -- and one that is linked in non-trivial ways to the planning of response, both phylogenetically and ontogenetically. We are talking here about the difference between hearing and listening, seeing and paying attention. Within the sensory systems of the brain, the connections going back down from (for example) visual cortex to the visual thalamus greatly outnumber the connections that bring information from the thalamus (which is where the eye reports....) to the cortex. In other words, perception itself is active, selective, enhancing some parts of the signal and suppressing others. But there is also a tight connection/overlap between active-sensory and covert-motor systems. For example, Italian neurophysiologist Rizzolatti has studied neurons in premotor cortex that fire preferentially when the monkey is planning an arm movement in one particular direction (a kind of covert motor analogue to the line-orientation preference cells in visual cortex). The most interesting finding here for our purposes is that these cells also fire when the monkey observes someone else making an analogous arm movement! These results are relevant to us in language acquisition on many grounds -- as one of the possible cortical bases to the mysteries of imitation, and as testimony to the active, action-based nature of perception and learning. In the particular cases of motor-impaired children that we are discussing here, we can certainly eliminate a literal actions-out-in-the-world interpretation of the sensorimotor theory of language, but as long as the child is capable of planning (including eye movements) and active testing of the world in some form, then the more interesting version of the sensorimotor hypothesis still stands, with plenty of neurophysiology to back it up. -liz bates From ervin-tr at cogsci.Berkeley.EDU Sun Mar 28 18:52:32 1999 From: ervin-tr at cogsci.Berkeley.EDU (Susan Ervin-Tripp) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 10:52:32 -0800 Subject: Virus on "Important Message From.." attachment Message-ID: Virus: Trash "List.doc" attached to "Subject: Important message from..." By MATT RICHTEL NY Times March 28, 1999 SAN FRANCISCO -- A rapidly spreading computer virus forced several large corporations to shut down their e-mail servers on Friday night as it rode the Internet on a global rampage, several leading network security companies reported Saturday. The security companies said early reports of the virus, which is carried by e-mail, led them to believe that tens of thousands of home and business computers had been infected on Friday alone. The virus reproduces itself exponentially, they said, trying to use each infected message to send 50 more infected messages. "This is the fastest-spreading virus we've seen," said Srivats Sampath, general manager for the McAfee Software division of Network Associates, a Santa Clara company that makes anti-virus software. Network security experts said that the virus appeared to do no harm to the machines it infected and that individuals could easily disable it. But they said its purpose is to interrupt networks by replicating itself so rapidly that it overwhelms networks and e-mail servers, the electronic post offices that direct message traffic. E-mail infected with the virus, which its creators call Melissa, has a topic line that begins, "Important Message From." Next is the sender's name, which is often the name of a friend, fellow worker or someone else known to the recipient. The message within the e-mail is short and innocuous: "Here is that document you asked for ... don't show anyone else ;-)" Attached to it is a 40,000-byte, or 40K, Microsoft Word document named list.doc. When the recipient opens list.doc, the Melissa virus automatically searches for an e-mail address book. It then sends a copy of itself -- the message and attachment -- from the recipient to the first 50 names it finds in the recipient's address book, which accounts for the rapid acceleration across the Internet. The virus is known to spread rapidly with two popular e-mail programs, Microsoft Outlook and a slimmed-down version of the same program, Microsoft Outlook Express, which is part of the Windows 98 operating system and is often installed with Windows 95. Network security administrators said they had seen no evidence that Melissa was able to open and use the address books in other e-mail programs, but they did not rule out the possibility that it could and would do so. Several anti-virus software makers posted software on their Web sites that their customers can download to detect the virus-encoded message and refuse it. A fix for the general public was available on www.sendmail.com, the Web site of Sendmail, the Emeryville company whose post-office software is often used to direct mail on the Internet. Eric Allman, a co-founder of Sendmail, said he was concerned that the problem would worsen on Monday morning when employees find these messages in their e-mail in-boxes. "This will get into a lot of mail boxes and lay dormant," he said. "When employees come in at 8 a.m. and read these messages, it will cause an explosive growth of the virus." Allman characterized the virus' virulence as "not the worst I'd seen, but it's pretty bad." He added, however, that it appeared to be the fastest-replicating virus he had seen. Individuals can avoid contracting or spreading the virus simply by not opening the attachment that accompanies the e-mail. Opening the message alone will not cause the virus to copy the address list and send itself out. Alternatively, users can disarm the virus by disabling the type of program that contains it -- "macros," which are small applications used to automate tasks in Microsoft Word documents. Disabling macros in Microsoft Word will render the virus ineffective. Officials from Microsoft said they were not certain of the magnitude of the virus and emphasized that it could be easily disarmed. Adam Sohn, a company spokesman, said, "If folks are careful about what runs on their machine, they'll always be fine." The virus overwhelmed employees on Friday at GCI Group, a public relations firm with offices throughout the United States. One contract employee, who exchanges mail with a number of company employees, said she received more than 500 messages during the day. "It hosed my entire day," said the employee, Leigh Anne Varney. "You can't print the words I used. I've never had this happen before." This hardly is the first virus to attack and spread automatically via e-mail, but it is the first to move from being a controlled, essentially experimental form "into the wild," said Dan Schrader, director of product marketing for Trend Micro, an anti-virus software maker in Cupertino. The rapid spread of the program was reminiscent of a 1988 program, known as a worm, written by Robert Tappan Morris, then a graduate student in computer science at Cornell University. Morris' program spread through the Internet with remarkable speed, ultimately disabling more than 6,000 computers. However, the Internet was tiny in 1988 compared with the size of today's network. As a result the potential for the spread of the program is truly vast. "We haven't seen anything impact this many people on the Internet in a long time," said Schrader. He said that three of his company's customers had temporarily shut down their e-mail servers to delete the infected mail. Whoever wrote the virus also left the message "W97M -- Melissa." The note said the virus was created by "Kwyjibo," which Trend Micro officials speculated is a reference to the television show "The Simpsons." In an episode of the Simpsons titled "Bart the Genius," Bart Simpson wins a Scrabble game by using the "word" Kwyjibo. The theory dovetails with a second impact of the virus: Once the virus has infected a computer, it will type a message on the screen when the time of day corresponds to the date (on March 26 it would be 3:26). The message reads: "Twenty-two points, plus triple-word-score, plus 50 points for using all my letters. Game's over. I'm outta here." From jeff at elda.fr Sat Mar 27 15:46:35 1999 From: jeff at elda.fr (Jeff ALLEN) Date: Sat, 27 Mar 1999 17:46:35 +0200 Subject: sum: prosody and gestures references Message-ID: Regarding my 2 separate questions on the topics of Prosody and Gestures last week on the Prosody and Info-Childes lists, this is the summary of responses. I wish to extend my thanks to Fred Cummins, Anton Batliner, Joost van de Weijer, Olle Engstrand , Joyce Tang Boyland , Paul Kienzle, Patricia Zukow-Goldring, Julie Vonwiller, Nick Bannan , Deborah Froelich, Jana Iverson, Laura D'Odorico, Gerard Bailly, Regina Cruz, Alex Monaghan CA , Carolyn Chaney and Judy Vander Woude for their replies. Given the overwhelming number of replies as well as requests in private for me to provide a summary, here it is. I am hope that this information will be beneficial to many of you as well. Best, Jeff ---- PROSODY My question was: 1. It has been shown in First Language Acquisition that prosodic patterns are learned and produced by children before lexical and syntactic structures, and that parents can understand the speech of children thanks to the intonation when the grammatical structure is sometimes undecipherable in isolation. and in my clarification message I stated: I have heard that articles/papers have discussed the concept of prosody being acquired before syntax. What I am interested in specifically is that prosody is a very important factor in communication. In some instances of adult communication, the only way to distinguish between a declarative, and a question is from prosodic structure when the phonemic string is the same. In the case of children, especially children who I have not spent much time with, I sometimes cannot make out the individual lexical items, but the prosodic nature of the utterance is the glue that allows me to understand what they are trying to communicate. If there are articles in favor or against this concept, I would be more than willing to receive more info along these lines. The replies were: @Article{condon:74, author = {William S. Condon and Louis W. Sander}, title = {Synchrony demonstrated between movements of the neonate and adult speech}, journal = {Child Development}, year = 1974, volume = 45, pages = {456--462} } @Article{bertoncini:95, author = {Josiane Bertoncini and Caroline Floccia and Thierry Nazzi and Jacques Mehler}, title = {Morae and syllables: rhythmical basis of speech representation in neonates}, journal = LS, year = 1995, volume = 38, number = 4, pages = {311--329}, annote = {French 3-day old infants discriminate stimuli based on syllable count, not moraic count (French infants, Japanese stimuli..)} } @Article{nazzi:98, author = {Nazzi, T. and Bertoncini, J. and Mehler, J.}, title = {Language discrimination by newborns: towards an understanding of the role of rhythm}, journal = JEP-HPP, year = 1998, volume = 24, pages = {756--766}, annote = {Newborns (< 5 days, native French) can discriminate LPF speech (400 Hz) when presented with Engliah and Japanese, now when presented with English and Dutch, and only the rhythmic coherent set of English/Dutch vs Spanish/Italian, not English/Italian vs Dutch/Spanish. Uses the concept of 'rhythmic distance'.} } @Article{bosch:97, author = {Bosch, Laura and Sebasti\'{a}n-{G}all\'{e}s}, title = {Native-language recognition abilities in 4-month-old infants from monolingual and bilingual environments}, journal = {Cognition}, year = 1997, volume = 65, pages = {33-69}, annote = {4 mo infants (Catalan) can discriminate Catalan/English (1). Monolingual Spanish or Catalan infants can discriminate between the langauge of their envirinment and the other (2). Ditto with LPF utterances (400 Hz) (3). Spanish/Catalan bilingual infants react faster to English than their maternal language (opposite of expected result) (4a). Bilingual infants showed no preference for one of their 2 languages (4b). Result 4a was replicated with Spanish/Catalan vs Italian (5).} } @Article{fowler:86, author = {Fowler, Carol A. and Smith, Mary R. and Tassinary, Louis G.}, title = {Perception of syllable timing by prebabbling infants}, journal = JASA, year = 1986, volume = 79, number = 3, pages = {814-825} } --- early responsiveness to intonation preceeds lexical comprehension and production: (Achtung: bei `Papousek' ist "uber dem s ein umgekehrtes Dach!) Papousek, M. \& Papousek, H.:=20 Musical elements in the infant's vocalization:=20 Their significance for communication, cognition and creativity. In: L.P. Lipsitt (Ed.): Advances in Infancy Research, Vol. 1 (pp. 163-224). Norwood, NJ: Ablex. ... awareness of prosodic contrast in adult utterances directed to the child ... known to be present in children from around 2 to 3 months ... : David Crystal: Prosodic development. In: Paul Fletcher and Michael Garman: Language Acquisition. Studies in first language development. Cambridge University Press, Cambridg= e et al., 1979. p. 33-48. ---- A. Fernald (1989). Intonation and communicative intent in mothers' speech to infants: is the melody the message. Child Development, 60, 1897-1510. --- http://www.ling.su.se/staff/olle/Native_babbling.htm ---- Lynch, MP; Kimbrough Oller, D; Steffens, ML; Buder, EH (1995). Phrasing in prelinguistic vocalizations. Developmental Psychology 28(1):3-25 Abstract: "... Adult judges identified a hirarchical arrangement of syllables embedded within utterances and utterances embedded within prelinguistic phrases in the vocalizations of infants. ..." Hall?, PA; de Boysson-Bardies, B; Vihman, MM; Beginnings of prosodic organization: Intonation and duration patterns of disyllables produced by Japanese and French infants Abstract: "... by four French and four Japanese children of about 18 months of age are examind. F- contour and vowel durations in disyyllables are found to be clearly language-specific. ..." ---- Vonwiller Julie P "The development of Intonation in Infants" 1988 PhD thesis, SHLRC Centre, Macquarie University, Australia ---- You may wish to look at the Tarplee's chapter in the following book: Tarplee, Clare. (1996). Working on young children's utterances: prosodic aspects of repetition during picture labeling. In Couper-Kuhlen, E. & Selting, M. (Eds.) Prosody in conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clare doesn't address prosody before syntax, but she does wonderfully illustrate how important prosody is in parent-child conversation. The rest of the volume addresses the role of prosody in both adult and child conversations. ---- The link with your own work might be to look at the research of Klaus Scherer, who has made fascinating comparisons between the sonic communication of various animal species; Paul Ekman, where the link between emotionally-motivated facial expression and sonic results ties in with this; and Terrence Deacon, where the neurological story of how we communicate is told in a way which leaves room for the kind of assumptions ---- About the discussion of the concept of prosody acquired before syntax, I'm sending you the references of two articles which show how infants use different prosodic patterns to differentiate cry and non cry vocalization produced in different communicative contexts. I hope they will be useful to you. D'ODORICO L., Non-segmental features in prelinguistic communication: an analysis of some types of infant cry and non-cry vocalizations, Journal of Child Language, 1984, 11,pp.17-27. D'ODORICO L. e FRANCO F., Selective production of vocalization types in different communication contexts. Journal of Child Language, 18, 3, pp.475-500, 1991. ---- GESTURES: My question was: 2. 50 or so percent of communication is transmitted through gestures, facial expression, etc. and in my clarification message I stated: The number 50 is completely arbitrary. It might be 10%, 20% 30% etc. I remember reading a paper on this topic several years ago and simply cannot remember the number that was attributed, nor the author of the paper. It is certain that gestures make up a part of general communication, but I would like to get some information on studies that try to quantify it, even in specific contexts. The replies were: When Gestures Speak Louder Than Words. (No claims re 50% of communication, etc!) Infants often do not initially understand caregiver messages (Catch it!). Subsequent messages in which caregivers provide perceptual structure/information with gestures (demonstrating how to catch) overwhelmingly lead to achieving a practical understanding of ongoing events. When caregivers' subsequent messages are expressed only with more specific verbal utterances (Catch the ball!), a common understanding is rarely achieved. This longitudinal research was conducted during the prelinguistic period from 6 months through the one-word period (19-24 months). There were 5 Euro-American, English-speaking families and 6 Latino, Spanish-speaking families. The data were collected in suburbs of Los Angeles, CA, USA. Briefly, words cannot explain unless a person already knows what words mean. Learning what words mean is what the infant "means" to learn. These caregivers assembled messages by "saying and showing", so their infants could perceive what they said and did. Pat Zukow-Goldring Zukow-Goldring, P. (in press). Perceiving referring actions: Latino and Euro-American caregivers and infants comprehending speech. In K. L. Nelson, A. Aksu-Koc, & C. Johnson (Eds.), Children's Language, Vol. 11. Hillsdale NJ: Erlbaum. Zukow-Goldring, P. G. (1997). A social ecological realist approach to the emergence of the lexicon: Educating attention to amodal invariants in gesture and speech." In C. Dent-Read & P. Zukow-Goldring (Eds.), Evolving explanations of development: Ecological approaches to organism-environment systems (pp. 199-250). Washington, D. C.: American Psychological Association. Zukow-Goldring, P. (1996). Sensitive caregivers foster the comprehension of speech: When gestures speak louder than words. Early Development and Parenting, 5 (4), 195-211. ----- I think I know the study you have in mind regarding % of communication: Mehrabian, A (1972) Nonverbal Communication Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall Mehrabian (after careful film and audio analysis of conversations) gave the proportions as 55% gestural and 45% verbal. Leon Thurman, author of 'Bodymind and Voice', uses this study extensively in his illustration of the musical features of infant prosody which remain in place throughout life as the singing voice where the convergent development of semantic speech (and writing, schooling, etc.) do not inhibit them. ----- There is an interesting book by McNeill called Hand and Mind (1992) about gestures. I would be interested in whatever you hear from others as well. ----- A group of Italian colleagues and I recently did a study in which we looked at the frequency of maternal gesture use as mothers interacted with their 16- and 20-month-old children in naturalistic, in-home play sessions. We found that only 10% of all maternal utterances were accompanied by gesture, that the vast majority of gestures were points at concrete objects, and that frequency of maternal gesture did not change across the children's 16 and 20 month sessions (i.e., maternal gesture production did not decline as children's vocal language skills improved). Interestingly, another unpublished study that looked at American mothers' use of gesture during interactions with their 18-month-olds also reported that 10% of maternal utterances occurred with gesture. Marilyn Shatz also did some work a few years ago looking at the relationship between speech and gesture in maternal speech to young children. Here are some references that might be helpful. Iverson, J.M., Capirci, O., Longobardi, E., & Caselli, M.C. (in press). Gesturing in mother-child interactions. Cognitive Development. Bekken, K. (1989). Is there motherese in gesture? Unpublished doctoral dissertation, The University of Chicago. Shatz, M. (1982). On mechanisms of language acquisition: Can features of the communicative environment account for development? In E. Wanner & L. Gleitman (Eds.), Language acquisition: The state of the art (pp. 102-127). New York: Cambridge University Press. ---- There is an older paper by Menyuk & Bernholtz in which a holophrastic child's babbled utterances were played to listeners, who reliably identified the uttances as declaratives, questions or emphatics. I can find the full citation for you if you want it (I'm sure it's cited in Menyuk's book on language acquisition). ----- PROSODY AND GESTURES: Some replies received indicated the combination of my 2 questions although I have not been working on the hybridization of the 2 areas. The replies were: http://www.lpl.univ-aix.fr Dans cette m?me homepage, tu peux trouver les details dans congr?s qui a eu lieu ? Besan?on au mois de d?cembre derniers dont la plus part de th?mes ?tait au tours de ce sujet "prosodie et gestes". Les actes sont disponibles dans les librairies aussi. De toute fa?on, je t'envoies son mail pour que tu puisses avoir toutes les informations souhait?es: ---- actually, for those who are interested, the proceedings of the conference "speech and gesture" were published as a book: Santi, Gua?tella, Cav? & Konopczynski (eds) 1998: "Oralit? et Gestualit?", Paris: L'Harmattan. The Aix-en-Provence group is well established and has produced several theses in this area, including Santi's and Gua?tella's. They are probably the only group in Europe to combine significant expertise in gesture, suprasegmental phonetics and prosodic phonology. ----- NOT SURE Since I posted 2 questions in the same message, I received a couple of replies that seem to refer to Prosody, but might refer to Gestures since the title "Signal to Syntax" could be applied to either area. The replies were: Look in the PsycInfo (or is it PsycLit?) database under Anne Fernald and you should get a bunch of abstracts. Also look in the book Signal to Syntax edited by James L. Morgan and Katherine Demuth for a whole collection of relevant papers and the names of the people who do this research. This was one of my qualifying exam topics about 7 years ago. You can get chapter titles and often chapter abstracts out of the same database. ---- @book{morgan-demuth:signal-to-syntax, author = {James L. Morgan and Katherine Demuth}, title = {Signal to syntax: an overview}, year = {1996}, publisher = {Lawrence Erlbaum Associates}, address = {Mahwah, NJ - USA} } ---- end -------- ================================================= Jeff ALLEN - Directeur Technique European Language Resources Association (ELRA) & European Language resources Distribution Agency (ELDA) (Agence Europ?enne de Distribution des Ressources Linguistiques) 55, rue Brillat-Savarin 75013 Paris FRANCE Tel: (+33) 1.43.13.33.33 - Fax: (+33) 1.43.13.33.30 mailto:jeff at elda.fr http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/home.html From Y.W.Lam-Kwok at newcastle.ac.uk Mon Mar 29 10:51:52 1999 From: Y.W.Lam-Kwok at newcastle.ac.uk (LAM-KWOK) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 10:51:52 GMT0BST Subject: Bilingualism Symposium at Newcastle Message-ID: Someone requested information about the Newcastle Conference. Unfortunately I deleted the file by mistake. Instead of giving you a personal reply, I'm now sending the information to the mailing lists instead . Hope you'll find it useful. Thanks again for your email. Yuet Wah Lam-Kwok University of Newcastle > 2nd International Symposium on Bilingualism > > 14-17 April, 1999 > University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK > > KEYNOTE SPEAKERS > Michael Clyne (Monash) > Francois Grosjean (Neuchatel) > Monica Heller (OISE, Toronto) > Carol Myers Scotton (South Carolina) > > COLLOQUIA > 1. Cross-linguistic studies of language acquisition (Marilyn M. > Vihman:m.vihman at bangor.ac.uk and Ginny Mueller Gathercole: > v.c.gathercole at bangor.ac.uk) >2. Bilingual cognitive processing (David Green: ucjtdg at ucl.ac.uk) >3.Input in bilingual acquisition (Annick de Houwer: vhouwer at uia.ua.ac.be > and Elizabeth Lanza: Elizabeth.Lanza at ilf.uio.no) > 4. Early syntax of developing bilinguals > (Margaret Deuchar: m.deuchar at bangor.ac.uk) > 5. Neurolinguistics and acquired communication disorders in bilinguals > (Franco Fabbro and Nick Miller:nicholas.miller at ncl.ac.uk) > >6. Sign bilingualsim (Clare Gallaway: gallaway at fs1.ed.man.ac.uk) >7. Grammar and Codeswitching (Jeanine Treffers-Daller: > j-treffersdaller at wpg.uwe.ac.uk and Ad Backus: > backus at ling.ucsd.edu and jacomine Nortier: jacomine.nortier at let.ruu.nl) >8. Sociolinguistics of bilingual interaction > (Ben Rampton: ben.rampton at tvu.ac.u, Mukul Saxena: > m.saxena at ucrysj.ac.uk and Li Wei: li.wei at ncl.ac.uk) >9.Trilingualism and trilinguals (Charlotte Hoffman: > c.hoffman at mod.lang.salford.ac.uk) > > Round-Table > Bilingualism and communication disorders; implications for speech >and language therapy (Chair: Deirdre Martin: > martinm at edusrv1.bham.ac.uk) > For more information, please contact: Mrs Gillian Cavagan, ISB Organizing Commitee, Department of Speech, University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Tel: 44-191-222 7385 Fax: 44-191-2226518 From Edy.Veneziano at pse.unige.ch Mon Mar 29 10:50:51 1999 From: Edy.Veneziano at pse.unige.ch (Edy.Veneziano) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 12:50:51 +0200 Subject: sensorimotor experience and language Message-ID: Elizabeth Bates wrote: >.... >For example, Italian neurophysiologist Rizzolatti has studied > neurons in premotor cortex that fire preferentially when the monkey is > planning an arm movement in one particular direction (a kind of covert > motor analogue to the line-orientation preference cells in visual cortex). > The most interesting finding here for our purposes is that these cells > also fire when the monkey observes someone else making an analogous > arm movement! IT is fascinating! Thank you Elizabeth for sharing this with us. At your leisure, could you send out some references? Edy From eubank at unt.edu Mon Mar 29 15:07:57 1999 From: eubank at unt.edu (Lynn Eubank) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 09:07:57 -0600 Subject: sensorimotor experience and language Message-ID: > Elizabeth Bates wrote: > >.... > >For example, Italian neurophysiologist Rizzolatti has studied > > neurons in premotor cortex that fire preferentially when the monkey is > > planning an arm movement in one particular direction (a kind of covert > > motor analogue to the line-orientation preference cells in visual cortex). > > The most interesting finding here for our purposes is that these cells > > also fire when the monkey observes someone else making an analogous > > arm movement! It is, of course, hard to sort through all of this. How did Rizzolatti know, for example, that their monkey was "planning" an arm movement? Actually, I suppose that Rizzolatti did have an experimental paradigm that isolates planning activity (though it'd still be interesting to know how it was done). But then comes the next question: When the monkey observes an analogous movement, is this a movement that the monkey is in some sense already familiar with? In other words, with monkey-see/ monkey-do, are we talking about a see-do pairing that the monkey would have to -learn- to do? The question becomes relevant, I think, for concerns one might have about -acquisition- in humans. later, Lynn Eubank eubank at unt.edu From gleason at bu.edu Mon Mar 29 16:13:52 1999 From: gleason at bu.edu (Jean Berko Gleason) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 11:13:52 -0500 Subject: sensorimotor experience and language Message-ID: As a slight historical note, I once raised the question at a meeting, either BU or Stanford, to Mimi Sinclair, of how children with e.g. major motor impairment resulting from Thalidomide could develop so well intellectually without the motor component, and she replied (referring to sensorimotor development), basically, "They do it with their eyes." At the time there were a number of reports in the press and a film about a bright young man named, I believe, Terry Wiles, who was born without limbs. He had ultimately been fitted with prostheses, and was leading an active life, with plans for college. jbg From macw at cmu.edu Mon Mar 29 18:24:45 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 13:24:45 -0500 Subject: seeing, mapping, and mirror neurons Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, The discussion of sensorimotor input from Lynn, Edy, Liz, and others has correctly interwoven several issues. If you go back to Piaget's analyses in "Origins of Intelligence", you see a child who is much involved in forming primary and secondary circular reactions between sensory and motor schemes. It would be easy to take this characterization of Laurent or Jacqueline as somehow the only road that the child could traverse. But I doubt that Piaget saw things that way. Rather, his emphasis was on the flexibility of mental structures. But can the child rely on only sensation to construct the world? I doubt that Piaget would have considered that adequate for the construction of the physical universe. Even if we cannot act on objects ourselves directly, we can easily observe the actions of others on objects. Rizzolatti's work shows that support for this level of intersubjective mapping is fundamental to cognition. Of course, there is work from Meltzoff, Kuhl, Anisfeld, and others pointing to the presence of mechanisms to support imitation. I have been thinking that these various pieces of evidence point to rich neuronal support for the mapping of our body image onto the body images of others. My initial ideas on this are at: http://psyling.psy.cmu.edu/brian/papers/bod.htm How might all this impact language learning? First, I guess most of us can agree that the learning of verb argument structures is a core component of the larger task of language learning. Second, there are many theories that would further argue that argument structure is a partial reflex of verb semantics. But then, how does the child learn the semantics of verbs? One possibility is that this occurs through the formation of embodied representations for verbs. The NTL group at the ICSI at Berkeley (Feldman, Lakoff, Chang, Bailey, Narayanan) has been developing this approach for modeling the learning of the semantics of verbs like "push" and "shove". But if a child is born without limbs or without the control of limbs, how could they learn such verbs? The perspective-taking account would hold that the child would match and map their own body image to that of other actors. By observing the pushing and shoving done by others, they would then remap to their own potentialities. Blind children would experience the pushing and shoving directly and would have a more difficult time mapping to others, but would be able to do so through imagine projection of their body image. Lynn correctly notes that the Rizzolatti et al. mirror neurons do not prove that there is a mechanism for projection of our internal body schematic. However, Rizzolatti's results do show that monkeys (and presumably humans too) customarily process the actions of others through the same neural hardware that process self action. Rizzolatti further shows that some of these neurons respond specifically to basic actions with some firing for grasping and others for pinching, for example. It is fine to then call these "grasp" or "pinch" neurons, but the point is that these neurons fire equally for self and other. So there is a neuronal juncture where the two maps coarticulate. There are many detailed issues in child language acquisition that could potentially be illuminated by this approach. Consider the child's representation of the verb "pick up", as in "pick me up". Rather than mapping this verb's meaning initially to the perspective of the person who lifts up, the child may view the action from the "ergative" perspective of the child being lifted. Eventually, both perspectives are merged, thereby supporting a fuller set of syntactic options. I'm curious whether others have considered the implications of perspective-mapping for language acquisition. It would seem that Nancy Budwig's work on the replacement of subject pronoun "I" by "my" for actions in which the child is directly involved might be a further case of this sort, for example. --Brian MacWhinney From macw at cmu.edu Mon Mar 29 18:33:55 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 13:33:55 -0500 Subject: Rizzolatti reference Message-ID: The Rizzolatti reference is: Rizzolatti, G., Fadiga, L., Gallese, V., & Fogassi, L. (1996). Premotor cortex and the recognition of motor actions. Cognitive Brain Research, 3, 131-141. That article includes related references to about six other papers on related studies. --Brian MacWhinney From bates at crl.ucsd.edu Mon Mar 29 18:51:50 1999 From: bates at crl.ucsd.edu (Elizabeth Bates) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 10:51:50 -0800 Subject: sensorimotor experience and language Message-ID: I'm not an expert in research on awake-behaving monkeys, let me stress, but I understand that experiments like Rizzolati's involve a long training period in which the animal is rewarded for (1) moving in the direction he needs to move to get the reward, and then (2) waiting to make that movement until a "go" signal is given. After they are trained up, the single cell recording is done. So, the operational definition of "the animal is planning an arm movement" would be performance on a trial in which a movement in Direction A will be produced, but the animal is still waiting for the "go" signal. By the way, there is also human fMRI work on covert motor activity, in which people are instructed to (1) covertly copy a set of finger movements, (2) plan those movements but wait for a "go" signal before they are 'covertly executed', and (3) plan those movements but then inhibit them when a 'stop' signal is given. Believe it or not, distinct though related patterns of frontal/prefrontal activation are seen in each of these three conditions, quite systematic! Even more exciting (or disturbing, depending on your point of view), the various areas involved in covert planning/execution/inhibition of hand movements overlap markedly with the areas that show up in covert speech.... With regard to the question about whether these are movements that the monkey is familiar with, the answer is definitely "yes": these are relatively simple directed movements that the animal uses in everday life, and hence do not represent animal homologues to imitation in the strong sense of imitation of novel acts that the animal has never seen before. It is an empirical question whether imitation of known vs. imitation of novel movements elicit similar patterns of activation in humans (monkeys do so little of any interest in the latter domain that the experiment really couldn't be done.....see research on this topic by Elisabetta Visalberghi -- the term "monkey see/monkey do" is really misleading, because humans are the only primates who perform reliably in this domain!). -liz bates >> Elizabeth Bates wrote: >> >.... >> >For example, Italian neurophysiologist Rizzolatti has studied >> > neurons in premotor cortex that fire preferentially when the monkey is >> > planning an arm movement in one particular direction (a kind of covert >> > motor analogue to the line-orientation preference cells in visual cortex). >> > The most interesting finding here for our purposes is that these cells >> > also fire when the monkey observes someone else making an analogous >> > arm movement! > >It is, of course, hard to sort through all of this. How did Rizzolatti >know, for example, that their monkey was "planning" an arm movement? >Actually, I suppose that Rizzolatti did have an experimental paradigm >that isolates planning activity (though it'd still be interesting to >know how it was done). But then comes the next question: When the monkey >observes an analogous movement, is this a movement that the monkey is in >some sense already familiar with? In other words, with monkey-see/ >monkey-do, are we talking about a see-do pairing that the monkey would >have to -learn- to do? The question becomes relevant, I think, for >concerns one might have about -acquisition- in humans. > >later, >Lynn Eubank >eubank at unt.edu From Jordan.Zlatev at lucs.lu.se Mon Mar 29 19:27:37 1999 From: Jordan.Zlatev at lucs.lu.se (Jordan Zlatev) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 21:27:37 +0200 Subject: Summary: sensorimotor experience and language Message-ID: Dear Info-childes readers, I wish to thank everyone who replied to my querie and am quite happy that the discussion seems to have caught on: the issues brought up are exactly what prompted my question in the first place. Since most people have replied directly to the net I will only summarise those references sent directly to me. Melissa Bowerman: Jordan, N. (1972). Is there an Achilles' heel in Piaget's theorizing? Human Development, 15:325-384. Joyce Tang Boyland: Alison Gopnik has done some very nice work on the relation between Piagetian tasks and language dvelopment. Annette Karmiloff-Smith: there is some unpublished work suggesting that children with SMA develop language faster than those who can crawl around and explore the world. The authors suggest that this is due to the child spending more time exploring language because of no competition from other stimuli. If I recall, the data concerned morphological markers. Robin N Campbell: My old employer and mentor Margaret Donaldson was interested in this question in the late 1960s, and she sought to investigate it with 'thalidomide' children, whose limbs were often rudimentary. I'm not sure whether anything got published, but the outcome was perfectly clear. There was no evidence of lag in sensorimotor achievement, apart from those achievements directly affected by the disability. However, I wouldn't at all go along with Monod (and even less with Chomsky) on this hypothesis. Piaget's ideas about the origins of sensorimotor structures are simply not precise enough to be susceptible to this sort of global empirical test. Piaget's own evidence is all particularized: he traces the origin of particular structures (throwing a ball, say) in previous experiences with arm movements, grasp, balls, etc. Wendy Hough-Eyamie: One population that has been study in reference to your question about the importance of sensori-motor experience on the acquisition of language is children born with cerebral palsy. A colleague of mine conducted her doctoral research on the topic. I am not sure whether she was looking from a Piagetian perspective at motor experience but I'm sure her research is relevant to your interest. Her name is Dr. Ann Sutton... Claire Kopp: Some years ago, we published a brief report about a child born without any limbs (Kopp & Shaperman, 1973). We were interested in the development of sensorimotor skills, because of Piaget's emphasis on motor activity in early cognitive development. I tested the child, starting when he was about 2 yrs. The testing took quite a while because of the child's limitations; his sensorimotor development was okay. His language development was also 'normal'. I followed the child until he was 7, and his functional use of language was on a par with other children his age. I heard he later went to college, etc. Miguel Perez Pereira (on acquisition by blind children) B. Landau & L Gleitman (1985). Language and experience. Evidence from the blind. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Peters, A. M. (1994). The interdependence of social, cognitive, and linguistic development: Evidence from a visually impaired child. In H. Tager-Flusberg (Ed.), Constraints on language acquisition: Studies of atypical children. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. P?rez-Pereira, M. & Castro, J. (1997). Language acquisition and the compensation of visual deficit: New comparative data on a controversial topic. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 15, 439-459. P?rez-Pereira, M. & Conti-Ramsden, G. (in press). Language development and social interaction in blind children. London: Psychology Press. Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini: Monod and Chomsky were right. In all these years there has been not an example of a motor impediment that causes a speech deficit, except in the most trivial instances (the muscles of the mouth in production, motor handicaps in signing, again only at the production level). I think that theirs was a brilliant insight. Thank you again, and following Brain's discussion of the (potential) role of cross-modal mappings and his question: > I'm curious whether others have considered the implications of > perspective-mapping for language acquisition. - let me mentioned one source of evidence which has so far not surfaced: modeling language acquisition through robotics (which is what I am currently involved in). Hideki Kozima has considered the role of perspective-mapping in this context: http://www-karc.crl.go.jp/kss/xkozima/work/overview-E.html And I will be doing likewise in my project, eventually. A question which puzzles me in this context is: to what extent is it justified to assume that the innate mapping mechanism innate? Cheers, Jordan Zlatev Cognitive Science Lund University Kungshuset, Lundag?rd 222 22 Lund, Sweden fax. : (+46) (0)46-222 9758 tel. : (+46) (0)46-222 0926 email: Jordan.Zlatev at lucs.lu.se http://www.lucs.lu.se/People/Jordan.Zlatev/ From Angeliek.vanHout at let.uu.nl Mon Mar 29 21:44:47 1999 From: Angeliek.vanHout at let.uu.nl (Angeliek van Hout) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 23:44:47 +0200 Subject: Conference program: Language acquisition & breakdown Message-ID: Below follows the program of our conference again, now with further conference information on (pre-)registration and a web site address which has a link with hotel information. LANGUAGE ACQUISITION & LANGUAGE BREAKDOWN May 28-29 UiL OTS, Utrecht University PRELIMINARY PROGRAM: THURSDAY MAY 27, UiL OTS, Trans 10, room 0.07 5-7 Reception & registration FRIDAY MAY 28, room to be announced 8.45 - 09.15 Registration 9.15 - 09.30 Opening and welcome by Eric Reuland (Direcetor of UiL OTS, Utrecht University) 9.30-10.30 "The Vulnerable C-domain" Christer Platzack, Lund University 10.30-11.10 "The Italian determiner system in normal acquisition, specific language impairment, and childhood aphasia" Piero Bottari, Paola Cipriani, Anna Maria Chilosi & Lucia Pfanner, University of Perugia, Scientific Institute Stella Maris & University of Pisa 11.10-11.30 coffee 11.30-12.10 "Functional categories and syntactic operations in (ab)normal language acquisition" Celia Jakubowicz & Lea Nash CNRS, Universit? Paris 5 & CNRS, Universit? Paris 8 12.10-12.50 "The acquisition of event structure in normally developing and language impaired children in German" Petra Schulz, Karin Wymann & Zvi Penner, Konstanz University 12.50-2.30 lunch 2.30-3.30 "Compounding and Inflection in Language Impairment" Harald Clahsen, University of Essex 3.30-4.10 "Controversies on CP: A comparison of language acquisition and language impairments in Broca's aphasia" Martina Penke, Heinrich-Heine-Universit?t D?sseldorf 4.10-4.30 tea 4.30-5.10 "Root infinitives and finite sentences: child language versus agrammatic speech" Esterella de Roo, HIL, Leiden University 5.10-6.10 "Grammatism: What language breakdown tells us about language development" Stephen Crain, University of Maryland Evening Conference dinner SATURDAY MAY 29 9.30-10.30 "The Unique Checking Constraint and Morphological Parameters as an Explanation of Variation over Time and Language of a Variety of Syntactic Constructions in Language Acquisition, both Impaired and Normal" Kenneth Wexler, MIT 10.30-11.10 "The acquisition of complex predicates in Japanese specifically language-impaired and normally-developing children" Shinji Fukuda & Suzy E. Fukuda, McGill University 11.10-11.30 coffee 11.30-12.10 "Comprehension of reversible relative clauses in specifically language impaired and normally developing children" Stavroula Stavraki, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki 12.10-12.50 "Morphosyntactic features in the verbal and nominal domains: a comparison between specifically language impaired and normally developing Greek children" Ianthi Maria Tsimpli, University of Cambridge 12.50-2.30 lunch 2.30-3.30 "The use of ellipsis in aphasic and child language" Herman Kolk, Nijmegen University 3.30-4.10 "Verb inflection and verb diversity in three populations: agrammatic speakers, normally developing children and children with specific language impairment" Roelien Bastiaanse & Gerard Bol, Groningen University 4.10-4.30 tea 4.30-5.10 "Language acquisition and breakdown in Zulu" Susan Suzman & Heile Jordaan, University of the Witwatersrand 5.10-6.10 "The neurology of syntax" Yosef Grodzinsky, Tel Aviv University Alternate papers: "Radical economy in deviant grammar: Deleted Formal Features [Agr and Relational prep]" Lamya Abdul-Karim, Eliane Ramos, Thomas Roeper & Harry Seymour University of Massachusetts "Verb movement in acquisition and aphasia: Same problem, different solutions. Evidence from Dutch" Shalom Zuckerman, Roelien Bastiaanse & Ron van Zonneveld, Groningen University Registration Pre-registration fee till May 15th 1999: participant fl 60 (approx. 27.50 euro) student fl 20 (approx. 9 euro) Registration fee at conference venue: participant fl 85 (approx. 39 euro) student fl 30 (approx. 14 euro) Pre-registration can be done on-line on our web site, or by requesting a registration form by sending an email to: uil-ots at let.uu.nl Conference venue UiL OTS is located in downtown Utrecht. Exact location to be announced. Accommodation Information on hotel accommodation in Utrecht can be found on our web site. Conference web site http://www-uilots.let.uu.nl/Conferences/LanguageBreakdown/index.htm Organizers Sergey Avrutin (Yale University), Marco Haverkort (Groningen University & Boston University), Angeliek van Hout (Utrecht University), Maaike Verrips (Utrecht University) For further information UiL OTS, Utrecht University Trans 10 NL-3512 JK Utrecht Netherlands Language.Acquisition at let.uu.nl From a.karmiloff-Smith at ich.ucl.ac.uk Tue Mar 30 12:28:57 1999 From: a.karmiloff-Smith at ich.ucl.ac.uk (Annette Karmiloff-Smith) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 12:28:57 +0000 Subject: SHORT INFANT TEST Message-ID: A PhD student of mine is looking for a *short* general cognitive infant test. She will have Bayley-II data on a total population, but in case some subsequent experimental tasks are a little too removed from the date of the initial Bayley testing, she wanted to run a *short* test to make sure that there have been no major changes in test age in the less able vs more able groups of infants. Can anyone suggest anything other than running the Bayley again on the whole population? Many thanks Annette ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 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: +44 171 831 7717 mobile: 0961 10 59 63 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ From mshatz at umich.edu Tue Mar 30 13:32:26 1999 From: mshatz at umich.edu (Marilyn Shatz) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 08:32:26 -0500 Subject: gestures and prosody Message-ID: Here are a couple of more references you may find useful for my work on gesturing to children that followed the one Jana provided: Schnur, E. & Shatz, M. (1984). The role of maternal gesturing in conversations with one-year-olds. JCL, 11, 29-41. Shatz, M. (1984). Contributions of mother and mind to the acquisition of communicative competence. In M. Perlmutter (Ed). Parent-child interactions and parent-child relations in child development. Minnesota Symposium on Child Psychology, v.17 (33-59), U of Minn. Press. From edwards.212 at osu.edu Tue Mar 30 15:47:34 1999 From: edwards.212 at osu.edu (Jan Edwards) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 10:47:34 -0500 Subject: NIH Traning Grant postdoc positions available Message-ID: * Please Post * POSTDOCTORAL TRAINEESHIPS AVAILABLE Multidisciplinary Program in Speech and Hearing Science Department of Speech and Hearing Science, The Ohio State University We anticipate two Postdoctoral Research Training Fellowships (National Institutional Research Service Award Fellowship) for PhDs or MDs to be available in 1999 (one should be available 1 July 1999; the second in Autumn 1999). These postdoctoral traineeships provide an opportunity to pursue focused research (either basic research or clinical research) in one of five areas of concentration within the discipline of speech and hearing science including speech production, speech processing, psychoacoustics, speech perception, and speech-language development. Emphasis of this training program is on cross-disciplinary research. The training faculty come from many different departments including the Departments of Speech and Hearing Science (Robert Fox, Lawrence Feth, Jan Weisenberger, Osamu Fujimura, Marios Fourakis, Jan Edwards, Stephanie Davidson, Lisa Stover, Michael Trudeau), Linguistics (Mary Beckman, Keith Johnson,), Psychology (Mari Jones, Neal Johnson, Caroline Palmer, Mark Pitt), Otolaryngology (Kamran Barin, Tom DeMaria), Electrical Engineering (Ashok Krishnamurthy, Stan Ahalt, Randy Moses), Zoology (William Masters), Mechanical Engineering (Mardi Hastings), and Wright-Patternson AFB (Tim Anderson). Potential trainees should have a doctorate and be a U.S. citizen or have permanent residence status. Traineeships will be awarded for a minimum of two years. Support will include a stipend, moving expenses, medical insurance, travel, and other training-related expenses. Interested individuals should submit inquiries and vitae along with a list of references to: Dr. Robert Allen Fox, Chair Department of Speech and Hearing Science 110 Pressey Hall, 1070 Carmack Rd. Columbus OH 43210-1002 Office phone: 614-292-1628 FAX: 614-292-7504 e-mail address: fox.2 at osu.edu From g.laws at surrey.ac.uk Tue Mar 30 15:58:49 1999 From: g.laws at surrey.ac.uk (Glynis Laws) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 10:58:49 -0500 Subject: No subject Message-ID: recipients info-childes From aad784 at agora.ulaval.ca Tue Mar 30 23:05:16 1999 From: aad784 at agora.ulaval.ca (Antonella Conte) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 18:05:16 -0500 Subject: No subject Message-ID: digest From smc4u at virginia.edu Wed Mar 31 11:36:30 1999 From: smc4u at virginia.edu (Stephanie M. Curenton) Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 10:36:30 -0100 Subject: Question about age norms of MLU Message-ID: I am currently working a project in which preschoolers told stories using the book "Frog, Where Are you?" I have calculated their MLU using CLAN. Could anyone suggest papers which talk about the age norms for MLU. For example, I have 5-year-olds with MLU of about 5.5. Do most 5-year-olds have MLU around this range? I would also be interested in any papers about low-income and African-American children's MLU. Thanks for your help! --steph From Roberta at UDel.Edu Wed Mar 31 15:35:13 1999 From: Roberta at UDel.Edu (Roberta Golinkoff) Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 10:35:13 -0500 Subject: online child language bibliography Message-ID: Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and I have some news that we hope will be helpful to you all. We have written a popular press book on language acquisition that can be useful for teaching undergraduates as well as for recommending to parents who want to know more about language development. It's called "How babies talk: The magic and mystery of language in the first three years of life" (Dutton Press) and will come out in June, 1999. It describes the wonders of language acquisition in a highly readable, jargon-free style. Written with numerous vignettes to illustrate its points, it reviews the most recent research in the field of language development in a way that conveys the significance of the newest findings. It begins with how fetuses process language in the womb and concludes with the paradoxically competent 3 year-old who is talking a blue streak but can't yet tie her shoes. The book covers much more than just the work coming out of our labs; findings from laboratories around the world are described as a testimony to infants' and toddlers' amazing linguistic competencies and to the activity of this research area. The book also contains two important tools for teaching. First, a bibliography for each chapter provides the references discussed. Second, sections called "Try This" invite parents to turn their homes into a laboratory by experimenting and observing their own children. These can be used by students as they follow a baby's progress in home visits over the course of the semester. The book will cost $26.00 American dollars. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, Ph.D. H. Rodney Sharp Professor School of Education and Departments of Psychology and Linguistics University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716 Phone: (302) 831-1634 Fax: (302) 831-4445 E-mail: Roberta at udel.edu ------------------------------------------------------------------------- From a.karmiloff-Smith at ich.ucl.ac.uk Wed Mar 31 17:35:04 1999 From: a.karmiloff-Smith at ich.ucl.ac.uk (Annette Karmiloff-Smith) Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 17:35:04 +0000 Subject: online child language bibliography Message-ID: Hi Roberta, oh dear, we might be in competition and not just in collaboration! My daughter and I are just finishing a book on LA for the Developing Child Series of Harvard Uni Press....though ours will go beyond 3 years. It's called "Language Acquisition from foetus to adolescent". Previously we did a *really* popular-level book together on infancy called "Everything your baby would ask if only he or she could talk..." published in the US by Golden Books. It's a bit gimmicky (the publisher insisted) but does bring a lot of scientific results to the public. I had always wanted my "Baby It's You" (Ebury Press, Random House) which accompanied an Emmy-winning TV series on the first three years of life to be turned into a first year text book, but I couldn't be bothered and no-one else took up the challenge. I do think it's important for academics to bring science to the general public in a pallatable form, so am really looking forward to seeing your book. Our LA book isn't targeted at the general public, more for young psych students, nurses and the like, as the whole series is aimed. Can I order a copy from you? It'll take forever before the British have it available for sale. I'll be at Albuquerque, will you? best thoughts and thanks again for all your hospitality to my student. She just loved her stay with Renee and you lot. Annette At 10:35 -0500 31/3/99, Roberta Golinkoff wrote: >Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and I have some news that we hope will be helpful to you >all. We have written a popular press book on language acquisition that can >be useful for teaching undergraduates as well as for recommending to >parents who want to know more about language development. It's called "How >babies talk: The magic and mystery of language in the first three years of >life" (Dutton Press) and will come out in June, 1999. It describes the >wonders of language acquisition in a highly readable, jargon-free style. >Written with numerous vignettes to illustrate its points, it reviews the >most recent research in the field of language development in a way that >conveys the significance of the newest findings. It begins with how >fetuses process language in the womb and concludes with the paradoxically >competent 3 year-old who is talking a blue streak but can't yet tie her >shoes. > >The book covers much more than just the work coming out of our labs; >findings from laboratories around the world are described as a testimony to >infants' and toddlers' amazing linguistic competencies and to the activity >of this research area. > >The book also contains two important tools for teaching. First, a >bibliography for each chapter provides the references discussed. Second, >sections called "Try This" invite parents to turn their homes into a >laboratory by experimenting and observing their own children. These can be >used by students as they follow a baby's progress in home visits over the >course of the semester. The book will cost $26.00 American dollars. > >------------------------------------------------------------------------- >Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, Ph.D. >H. Rodney Sharp Professor >School of Education and Departments of Psychology and Linguistics >University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716 >Phone: (302) 831-1634 Fax: (302) 831-4445 E-mail: Roberta at udel.edu >------------------------------------------------------------------------- From macw at cmu.edu Wed Mar 31 19:23:33 1999 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1999 14:23:33 -0500 Subject: Question about age norms of MLU Message-ID: Stephanie, If you search CHILDES/BIB for "mean length of utterance" as the keyword, you will find 10 papers that discuss MLU norms. If you search using "Black" as a keyword you will find 68 papers, many of which seem relevant to the topic of MLU in African-American children. It's at alaska.psy.cmu.edu. --Brian MacWhinney