From macwhinn at hku.hk Wed Aug 1 05:32:59 2001 From: macwhinn at hku.hk (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Wed, 1 Aug 2001 13:32:59 +0800 Subject: Archiving video data In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Dear Peter and Info-CHILDES, Good point. I've heard this about potential CD-R meltdown, but the time frame I have heard quoted for this is about 12 years. My guess is that people actually don't know, but want to make sure they err on the conservative side. I remember being told that reel-to-reel tapes would suffer from print through, but we have received many at CHILDES that are 30 to 40 years old and still in perfect condition. In fact, we have never received any that have the dreaded print-through we were told to worry about in the 1960s. Saving videotapes is fine, but lots of people are now recording directly to digital, so saving the original medium means saving the mini-DV tape, not the VHS cassette. I wonder what the shelf-life of the mini-DV tape is supposed to be. It is a film, like these other film-based media, so I am guessing it is pretty good. --Brian From ian.smythe at ukonline.co.uk Thu Aug 2 14:17:57 2001 From: ian.smythe at ukonline.co.uk (Ian Smythe) Date: Thu, 2 Aug 2001 14:17:57 +0000 Subject: Sound recording Message-ID: Dear Colleagues I am looking to record high quality digital sound on a handheld device (eg minidisc) which I can download to the computer. However, I cannot find a manufacturer who produces such a device. Sony make one for downloading MP3 files from the computer to the player, but apparently not the other way. Any suggestions? NB Digital 'dictaphones' are of insufficient quality. Thanks Ian Smythe From jbp007 at infi.net Wed Aug 1 22:04:41 2001 From: jbp007 at infi.net (Phelps) Date: Wed, 1 Aug 2001 17:04:41 -0500 Subject: remove this email address Message-ID: Please remove this email address from your list. Thank you. From macwhinn at hku.hk Sat Aug 4 02:17:50 2001 From: macwhinn at hku.hk (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Sat, 4 Aug 2001 10:17:50 +0800 Subject: Child Language Research Form 2002 Message-ID: The next STANFORD CHILD LANGUAGE RESEARCH FORUM will take place on: April 12-14, 2002 (Friday-Sunday) TOPIC: SPACE IN LANGUAGE - LOCATION, MOTION, PATH, AND MANNER How are these notions packaged? What is easy vs. hard to acquire? What is the major order of acquisition by language type? Are there differences between intransitive and caused motion? Differences in comprehension and production? Differences between oral and signed languages? What range of spatial terms can be extended to time? To other domains? What crosslinguistic comparisons are available? What interdisciplinary studies of language and spatial concepts? The Organizing Committee for the Stanford Child Language Research Forum has made several changes. The current plan is to meet every couple of years, instead of annually, and we decided to choose a specific topic for each meeting, and therefore solicit papers and posters on that topic only (but construed broadly). Space in Language is the topic for 2002. Abstracts are DUE on or before January 1, 2002; submitters will be informed of all decisions by February 15, 2002. Format for abstracts: please submit 2 copies x one page half- or double- spaced; do not include the author's name since abstracts are reviewed anonymously. Attach a separate 3x5 card with (a) author's name, (b) affiliation and address, (c) email, (d) abstract-title. Send abstracts to: CLRF-2002 Organizing Committee Department of Linguistics Margaret Jacks Hall Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305-2150, USA Check the CLRF website for information about registration, hotels, and any further announcements about the meeting, www-csli.stanford.edu/~clrf P.S. This URL is also bookmarked on the child language sites list on the CHILDES pages From macwhinn at hku.hk Sat Aug 4 10:04:25 2001 From: macwhinn at hku.hk (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Sat, 4 Aug 2001 18:04:25 +0800 Subject: Noji corpus Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, I am happy to announce the addition to CHILDES of a large corpus of Japanese child language data that was collected beginning in 1948 by Junya Noji from his son Sumihare. The current corpus was prepared and contributed by Norio Naka and Susanne Miyata with the permission of Noji. Thanks to all of them for this contribution. --Brian MacWhinney *************************** *** Noji Corpus v.1.1 ***** *************************** Susanne Miyata Faculty of Creativity and Culture Aichi Shukutoku University Sakuragaoka 23, Chikusa-ku Nagoya, Japan 464-8671 smiyata at asu.aasa.ac.jp ***History*** The Noji Corpus contains diary data collected by the Japanese linguist and dialectologist Junya Noji. He observed his first-born son Sumihare from birth (1948, March, 9th) until the age of 7, as he was growing up in Hiroshima. The data is based on handwritten records collected virtually daily (2243 days over 7 years), although the focus lies in the 3rd year. In the later years, less records were taken, resulting in a lower number of utterances available per month. Detailed description of the methodology can be found in the printed edition (Bunka Hyoron Shuppan). The data contains approximately 40,000 utterances by Sumihare, and about 22,000 utterances by other family members (his mother and father and his younger brother, Teruki) and other speakers such as the children from the neighborhood (Seejikun and Keekochan). A comment is provided for each utterance, establishing the context and interpreting the child's utterance. The electronic version of this data was entered, compared to the original, and adjusted to CHAT format by Norio Naka (Osaka Gakuin U.). The final brush up using CHECK was done by Susanne Miyata (Aichi Shukutoku U.). ***Format*** The print original uses katakana (phonetic syllable script) for the utterances, and regular hiragana (syllabic) and kanji (Chinese characters) for the comments, as well as a number of special symbols such as arrows to indicate the speaker and the addressee. The electronic version was done in Hebon (Hepburn transcription system) and separated into words (wakachi; spoken utterances only). The format follows the Japanese adaption of CHAT, JCHAT 1.0 (Oshima-Takane & MacWhinney, eds., 1998). When the data entry began in 1992, only ASCII was available within the CHILDES system. But now, even though there is no longer any restriction concerning the fonts, the use of Hebon (at least in the main line) has the advantage of compatibility with programs such as MOR, and renders the data accessible to a greater number of researchers by removing the barrier of Japanese script. ***Warnings*** 1) The wakachi (word separation) format is not yet adjusted to the JMOR- compatible WAKACHI99 format. 2) Words are transcribed as pronounced (e.g. 'futachu' for 'futatsu') 3) Proper names are not capitalized. when using this corpus please cite: Noji, Junya. (1973-77). Yooji no gengo seikatsu no jittai I -IV. Bunka Hyoron Shuppan. ***Table of Contents*** ######################################################### year month age # of # of utt. files (days) SUM others all utt. ######################################################## 1948 3 0;0 26 0 0 0 4 0;1 29 0 0 0 5 0;2 30 1 1 2 6 0;3 30 6 2 8 7 0;4 17 2 1 3 8 0;5 17 0 0 0 9 0;6 17 2 0 2 10 0;7 19 0 0 0 11 0;8 14 4 1 5 12 0;9 16 18 2 20 1949 1 0;10 19 17 11 28 2 0;11 27 52 27 79 ####################################################### 261 102 45 147 ####################################################### 3 1;0 24 65 28 93 4 1;1 20 67 31 98 5 1;2 27 61 26 87 6 1;3 29 110 43 153 7 1;4 30 81 26 107 8 1;5 31 342 97 439 9 1;6 30 453 149 602 10 1;7 31 436 178 614 11 1;8 30 425 144 569 12 1;9 31 414 125 539 1950 1 1;10 30 349 66 415 2 1;11 28 820 146 966 ####################################################### 341 3.623 1.059 4.682 ####################################################### 3 2;0 31 800 137 937 4 2;1 30 1.892 571 2463 5 2;2 31 3.201 1.050 4251 6 2;3 30 1.198 423 1621 7 2;4 30 1.280 557 1837 8 2;5 31 1.779 971 2750 9 2;6 30 939 419 1358 10 2;7 31 1.317 524 1841 11 2;8 30 1.368 641 2009 12 2;9 31 1.312 727 2039 1951 1 2;10 31 991 719 1710 2 2;11 28 771 518 1289 ######################################################### 364 16848 7257 24.105 ######################################################### 3 3;0 31 709 477 1186 4 3;1 30 847 542 1389 5 3;2 31 918 584 1502 6 3;3 30 1071 792 1863 7 3;4 31 1024 754 1778 8 3;5 31 689 517 1206 9 3;6 30 493 375 868 10 3;7 31 1321 870 2191 11 3;8 30 865 631 1496 12 3;9 31 620 519 1139 1952 1 3;10 30 537 337 874 2 3;11 29 497 375 872 ########################################################## 365 9.591 6.773 16.364 ########################################################## 3 4;0 31 576 435 1011 4 4;1 30 523 344 867 5 4;2 31 285 236 521 6 4;3 30 365 206 571 7 4;4 31 315 172 487 8 4;5 30 242 140 382 9 4;6 27 202 118 320 10 4;7 31 249 169 418 11 4;8 27 262 166 428 12 4;9 30 612 392 1004 1953 1 4;10 29 476 348 824 2 4;11 28 410 284 694 ########################################################## 355 4.517 3.010 7.527 ########################################################## 3 5;0 30 279 189 468 4 5;1 30 366 262 628 5 5;2 31 322 238 560 6 5;3 29 286 186 472 7 5;4 31 337 217 554 8 5;5 31 362 296 658 9 5;6 30 393 347 740 10 5;7 26 163 161 324 11 5;8 29 248 186 434 12 5;9 28 343 313 656 1954 1 5;10 24 172 150 322 2 5;11 25 167 162 329 ######################################################### 344 3.438 2.707 6.145 ########################################################## 3 6;0 16 97 64 161 4 6;1 18 85 65 150 5 6;2 18 105 77 182 6 6;3 26 251 224 475 7 6;4 29 359 297 656 8 6;5 29 346 233 579 9 6;6 25 111 115 226 10 6;7 14 44 50 94 11 6;8 8 23 29 52 12 6;9 11 50 43 93 1955 1 6;10 15 47 50 97 2 6;11 3 4 6 10 ######################################################### 212 1522 1.253 2.775 ######################################################### total sum 2.242 39.641 22.104 61.745 *****end From gut at spectrum.uni-bielefeld.de Mon Aug 6 07:20:43 2001 From: gut at spectrum.uni-bielefeld.de (gut) Date: Mon, 6 Aug 2001 09:20:43 +0200 Subject: Call for Papers Message-ID: Call for Papers: PHONOLOGICAL ACQUISITION IN A MULTILINGUAL CONTEXT Workshop at the 24th Annual Meeting of the DGfS (German Linguistics Association) February 27 - March 1, 2002 Mannheim, Germany Invited speakers (preliminary list): Janet Grijzenhout Barbara Höhle David Ingram Margaret Kehoe Zvi Penner Marilyn Vihman Irene Vogel Martha Young-Scholten The workshop aims to get researchers from different fields presenting recent work on phonological acquisition both in L2 and a multilingual L1 context. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: * Optimality accounts of phonological acquisition * prosodic acquisition * phonology/prosody in language contact * phonology/prosody in multilinguals * theoretical implications of research on phonological acquisition Abstracts should be sent electronically to lleo at uni-hamburg.de or on paper to Conxita Lleo Universität Hamburg Institut für Romanistik von Melle-Park 6 D- 20146 Hamburg E-mail submission, with plain-text abstracts in the body of the message, is strongly preferred. Presentations are limited to 20 min. (+ 10 min. discussion). Schedule: Abstract submissions (1 page) August 31, 2001 Notification of acceptance September 14, 2001 For general information on the Annual Meeting of the DGfS please take a look at: http://www.dgfs-home.de/DGfS-Mitteilungen/MIT53WWW/mit53www.html Organization: Conxita Lleo (University of Hamburg) Ulrike Gut (University of Bielefeld) Erika Kaltenbacher (University of Heidelberg) From sharon at lscp.ehess.fr Mon Aug 6 10:18:16 2001 From: sharon at lscp.ehess.fr (Sharon Peperkamp) Date: Mon, 6 Aug 2001 12:18:16 +0200 Subject: Workshop on Early Phonological Acquisition Message-ID: A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 3770 bytes Desc: not available URL: From pater at linguist.umass.edu Mon Aug 6 21:54:07 2001 From: pater at linguist.umass.edu (Joe Pater) Date: Mon, 6 Aug 2001 14:54:07 -0700 Subject: Sound recording Message-ID: Hi all- I recently spent a fair bit of time researching this question. For some reason portable Minidisc recorders are rarely, if ever, made with a digital output (presumably, either for cost-effectiveness, or to discourage digital copying). You can get a "Pro" minidisc recorder for over $1000, but at that price, you may as well buy a DAT recorder, which doesn't use any compression. There is one other alternative though. The Nomad Jukebox has high quality Analog-to-Digital converters for recording, and can record uncompressed .wav files at a 48k sampling rate. It records to a 6 gig hard drive, and you can upload to most current computers over the included USB connection. This has the advantage over a DAT recorder of not requiring a digital input on your computer. At $299, I think this is a great product (though I have yet to test it myself). The only thing you would need is an external amplifier for the mic - there is only a line in, and no preamp. Some mics have built-in preamps, and you can also get excellent small preamps. For more info, go to: http://www.nomadworld.com/welcome.asp Best, Joe Pater Ian Smythe wrote: > Dear Colleagues > > I am looking to record high quality digital sound on a handheld device (eg > minidisc) which I can download to the computer. However, I cannot find a > manufacturer who produces such a device. Sony make one for downloading MP3 > files from the computer to the player, but apparently not the other way. > Any suggestions? NB Digital 'dictaphones' are of insufficient quality. > > Thanks > > Ian Smythe From nakhtar at cats.UCSC.EDU Mon Aug 6 23:44:19 2001 From: nakhtar at cats.UCSC.EDU (Nameera Akhtar) Date: Mon, 6 Aug 2001 16:44:19 -0700 Subject: developmental position, UC Santa cruz Message-ID: Developmental Psychology, Position #586-02. The Psychology Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, invites applications for a tenure-track assistant professor position specializing in infancy or early childhood development in social or cultural context. Special consideration will be given to candidates researching either the development of emotion with links to mind and/or communication, or the development of language and communication. Candidates with interests in issues of diversity and/or methodological/statistical approaches to the study of development are especially encouraged to apply. We are looking for persons capable of teaching both graduate and undergraduate level courses who also are actively engaged in research and show promise of continued research productivity. We seek to hire an individual whose strengths best complement the distinctive character of our program and are especially interested in candidates who can contribute to the diversity and excellence of our academic community through their research, teaching and/or service. Beginning salary is $46,100 - $51,400, commensurate with qualifications and experience. A Ph.D. in Psychology or related field is preferred by June 30, 2002, must be conferred no later than June 30, 2003. The successful candidate must be able to demonstrate potential for excellence in research and teaching. The position will be available July 1, 2002. Applicants should submit a letter of application describing their research and teaching interests, a curriculum vitae, reprints and preprints, and have a minimum of three confidential letters of recommendation forwarded to: Faculty Search Committee, Psychology Department Faculty Services, 277 Social Sciences 2, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA 95064. In your reply, refer to Position #586-02. Applications must be postmarked by November 5, 2001. UCSC is an EEO/AA employer. From stadlema at uwec.edu Wed Aug 8 13:29:49 2001 From: stadlema at uwec.edu (Stadler, Marie A.) Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2001 08:29:49 -0500 Subject: remove address Message-ID: Please remove this email address from the list. Thanks. Marie Stadler From jeclar at essex.ac.uk Wed Aug 8 15:56:17 2001 From: jeclar at essex.ac.uk (Clarke, John E) Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2001 16:56:17 +0100 Subject: Bogoyvalenskiy, D Message-ID: Dear all, I would really appreciate it if someone knew the reference (journal title even) of Bogoyvalenskiy's 1950's wug test article(s)(?). I hear this person was working in Moscow roughly at the same time as Jean Berko. The Internet comes up with nothing and I have no idea which journal to start looking in. Sorry to bother you, but I hope you may be able to help. Thanking you all! Kind regards, John Clarke jeclar at essex.ac.uk MA Language Acquisition University of Essex, UK From nratner at hesp.umd.edu Wed Aug 8 17:26:42 2001 From: nratner at hesp.umd.edu (Nan Ratner) Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2001 13:26:42 -0400 Subject: Bogoyvalenskiy, D Message-ID: The reference is: (1973). The acquisition of Russian inflections. In Ferguson & Slobin (eds) Studies of child language development. pp 284-292, NY: Holt Rinehart & Winston. Nan From macwhinn at hku.hk Thu Aug 9 03:17:58 2001 From: macwhinn at hku.hk (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Thu, 9 Aug 2001 11:17:58 +0800 Subject: changing your info-childes subscription Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES People, This is the time of the year when people move to new jobs and get new email accounts. As a result, we tend to get a few "please remove my name" messages. Instead of sending these letters to the whole list of 1100 people, it is better to send them to either me (macw at cmu.edu) or Kelley Sacco (kelley.sacco at cmu.edu). We are happy to help. Or you can do this yourself by sending the message "unsubscribe info-childes" to requests at mail.talkbank.org Many thanks. --Brian MacWhinney From slobin at cogsci.berkeley.edu Thu Aug 9 08:03:35 2001 From: slobin at cogsci.berkeley.edu (Dan I. SLOBIN) Date: Thu, 9 Aug 2001 01:03:35 -0700 Subject: Bogoyvalenskiy, D In-Reply-To: <149DEAD6B76CD5119C9A009027D6396B363D33@sernt28.essex.ac.uk> Message-ID: Bogoyavlenskiy reported his study in a book: Bogoyavlenskiy, D. N. (1957). Psixologija usvoenija orfografii [Psychology of acquisition of orthography]. Moscow: Akademija Pedagogiceskix Nauk RSFSR. The study was part of a series of studies about children's metalinguistic awareness, in relation to literacy. The section that parallel's Berko's "wug" test was published in English translation as: Bogoyavlenskiy, D. N. (1973). The acquisition of Russian inflections. In C. A. Ferguson & D. I. Slobin (Eds.), Studies of child language development (pp. 284-292). New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Bogoyavlenskiy and Berko(-Gleason) were not aware of each other's work. -Dan Slobin On Wed, 8 Aug 2001, Clarke, John E wrote: > Dear all, > > I would really appreciate it if someone knew the reference (journal title > even) of Bogoyvalenskiy's 1950's wug test article(s)(?). I hear this person > was working in Moscow roughly at the same time as Jean Berko. The Internet > comes up with nothing and I have no idea which journal to start looking in. > Sorry to bother you, but I hope you may be able to help. > > Thanking you all! > Kind regards, > > John Clarke > jeclar at essex.ac.uk > > MA Language Acquisition > University of Essex, UK > From aluapairam at lycos.com Thu Aug 9 12:57:04 2001 From: aluapairam at lycos.com (Maria Paula) Date: Thu, 9 Aug 2001 09:57:04 -0300 Subject: Please remove my address. Message-ID: Could you please remove aluapairam at mailcity.com from the list? Thanks!! Get 250 color business cards for FREE! http://businesscards.lycos.com/vp/fastpath/ From gleason at bu.edu Thu Aug 9 15:21:06 2001 From: gleason at bu.edu (Jean Berko Gleason) Date: Thu, 9 Aug 2001 11:21:06 -0400 Subject: Bogoyvalenskiy, D Message-ID: "Dan I. SLOBIN" wrote: > > Bogoyavlenskiy and Berko(-Gleason) were not aware of each other's work. > > -Dan Slobin > Dan is right, of course. Also, Bogoyavlenskiy really did much more with derivational morphology, which is richer in Russian than in English, than we did. Prior to that, in addition to the work of scholars like Gvozdev, there was a lot of anecdotal evidence on morphological innovation in Russian, including a very charming book by Kornei Chukovskii, published around 1956. -- Jean Berko Gleason From Neil.Coffey at ox.compsoc.net Fri Aug 10 13:51:20 2001 From: Neil.Coffey at ox.compsoc.net (Neil Coffey) Date: Fri, 10 Aug 2001 14:51:20 +0100 Subject: Sound recording Message-ID: On Mon, 6 Aug 2001, Joe Pater wrote: > I recently spent a fair bit of time researching this question. For some > reason portable Minidisc recorders are rarely, if ever, made with a digital > output (presumably, either for cost-effectiveness, or to discourage digital > copying). As I understand things, there is a genuine technical reason for blocking digital-to-digital copying of Minidiscs. Because of the way the compression process works, if you repeatedly compress then decompress data via a minidisc, this actually leads to a degradation of the recording. (A bit like if you continually compress and decompress a JPEG image this gives a slight degradation of the image each time.) So the only real way to do a faithful digital copy would be for the machines to output the actual compressed data stored on the disc, and Sony presumably don't want to do this for reasons of propriety. But of course, the fact that it discourages copying is no doubt a handy bonus for the music industry... > You can get a "Pro" minidisc recorder for over $1000, but at that > price, you may as well buy a DAT recorder, which doesn't use any compression. There's a standard protocol for marking digital data as being 'non-copiable'. As I understand things, consumer goods with digital inputs check for the presence of this marking and act accordingly; "professional" equipment generally provides the facility to ignore the non-copiable status of the signal and let you copy it anyway. So presumably that's what your "Pro" minidisc recorder does. Some digital soundcards will also let you do intelligient things with the encoding of digital data -- e.g. strip the data of the 'non-copiable' marking. The card we have in our lab for example comes with a program which simply takes sound to the digital in, strips it of its non-copiable flag, and pipes it to the digital out. So I assume you could hook a minidisc machine up to each end and hey presto. If your main reason for not going for minidisc is the non-copiability, then this might be an alternative solution. Incidentally, has anyone actually studied the suitability of minidiscs for linguistic analysis in detail? The compression algorithm potentially does some fairly hefty munging about with the signal, and I'd have thought one would have to be at best pretty cautious about any acoustic analysis done on a minidisc recording. Neil From jeclar at essex.ac.uk Sat Aug 11 15:03:41 2001 From: jeclar at essex.ac.uk (Clarke, John E) Date: Sat, 11 Aug 2001 16:03:41 +0100 Subject: Bogoyvalenskiy, D Message-ID: Dear Dan, Thank you for your message. My present endeavour is to complete my MA dissertation which is looking at the acquisition of comparative adjectives in 5 and 7 year-old children, following up studies pursued by Prof. Clahsen & Prof. Temple here at Essex (to appear) who investigate the phenomena in relation to children with WS using the much admired elicited production experiment and one by Dr. Graziano-King at CUNY (1999) who looked at the developmental path of 'er' and 'more' using the much admired relative judgement task. My conclusion discusses briefly an issue that was raised recently on info-childes, that of trying to account for the large number of stems in (impaired) subjects in wug type tasks in relation to me trying to account for why my unimpaired seven-year olds were performing puzzlingly and produced so many stems. I felt they didn't refuse to perform the task, however, because they produced the superlative form often fine. I was looking back at Berko, Selby, the earliest elicited production studies in my area I knew, noting that eliciting adjectival comparatives was difficult. I wanted to know about Bogoyvalenskiy as well just in order to indicate the contribution to the 'wug' effort. I found that there was a difference in the usage of 'er' and 'more' in the two tasks. The elicited production experiment just didn't (despite all the mysterious stems) get the children producing 'more', they just always fell back on a stem, a substitution or 'er'. The judgement task, however, saw a higher preference in a greater number of adjective categories (as Graziano-King categorised them into monosyllables and unstressed endings in disyllables) for 'more'. The two tasks, then perhaps (at least for these thirty-eight children) tap different things. One twelve year old at a youth group who amazingly found all this interesting, asked to do the task. She came out with 'bad-badder', 'good-gooder' and just afterwards said to her younger friend 'I did better than you!' Isn't it strange? All the best and thank you to all those who gave me the reference, John MA Language Acquisition University of Essex, UK jeclar at essex.ac.uk unclejohnnies24 at yahoo.co.uk From tenbrink at informatik.uni-hamburg.de Mon Aug 13 10:46:11 2001 From: tenbrink at informatik.uni-hamburg.de (Thora Tenbrink) Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2001 12:46:11 +0200 Subject: Bogoyvalenskiy, D In-Reply-To: <149DEAD6B76CD5119C9A009027D6396B363D42@sernt28.essex.ac.uk > Message-ID: > One twelve year old at a youth group who amazingly found all this >interesting, asked to do the task. She came out with 'bad-badder', >'good-gooder' and just afterwards said to her younger friend 'I did better >than you!' Isn't it strange? John, I think there is a very simple explanation for this: "I did better than you" surely is a piece of prefabricated speech; I do not think that speakers really think of "better" as a comparative of "good" when using this sentence at all. Even more so because there is no such form as "I did good" - you would have to use the adverb. (Asked for the comparative of "well", what would the girl have said?) While I do not know about the tasks you mentioned, I suppose that the aim is to find out how much children know about comparatives and superlatives, which are abstract metalinguistic concepts. Such concepts do not have much to do with children's linguistic skills, because quite a lot of what we say in everyday life consists of strings of words that we have heard many times before, and which are therefore readily available. - Thora http://www.spatial-cognition.de --------------------------------------------- Thora Tenbrink Spatial Cognition Priority Program & WSV Universitaet Hamburg FB Informatik Vogt-Koelln-Str. 30 D-22527 Hamburg Tel.: +49/*40/42883-2382 Fax: +49/*40/42883-2385 e-mail: tenbrink at informatik.uni-hamburg.de http://www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/WSV/hp/tenbrink-english.htm From jeclar at essex.ac.uk Mon Aug 13 12:38:37 2001 From: jeclar at essex.ac.uk (Clarke, John E) Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2001 13:38:37 +0100 Subject: originating from Bogoyvalenskiy, D Message-ID: Dear Thora, Thank you for your kind message. Yes you are right, the sentence the girl used probably is a piece of fabricated speech and I really don't imagine this girl thought 'ah yes I'm using the comparative now'...language doesn't work that way, but it just means to me when a child uses 'gooder' in a task and then 'better' immediately after, regardless of the context, you can't then reliably say that that child hasn't acquired the irregular 'good-better' just because they say 'gooder' in an unnatural setting like a wug test. Who is to say that the child doesn't then use 'better' as a comparative to the same friend in the minibus on the way home? Comparatives and superlatives may be 'abstract metalinguistic concepts' but for most people out there who have no concern for linguistics, they are also pieces of language, and uses of more and -er, with comparative more coming later in development must then say something about the child's acquisition of the system. I don't believe to the child everything they have heard is readily available, if it was there would be no such thing as language acquisition and even if it was then who is to say that the child actually understands what they are saying? Thanks again and receive kind regards from John MA Language Acquisition University of Essex, UK From a.karmiloff-smith at ich.ucl.ac.uk Mon Aug 13 17:06:56 2001 From: a.karmiloff-smith at ich.ucl.ac.uk (Annette Karmiloff-Smith) Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2001 18:06:56 +0100 Subject: Bogoyvalenskiy, D In-Reply-To: <3.0.6.32.20010813124611.0079c860@rzdspc2.informatik.uni-hamburg.de> Message-ID: Don't Americans say "I did good" - I hear them say in response to "how are you" = "Good" and it is creeping into British english too, replacing "well". I've heard anecodatlly bestest, betterest amd gooder but never goodest.. Annette At 12:46 pm +0200 13/8/01, Thora Tenbrink wrote: > > One twelve year old at a youth group who amazingly found all this >>interesting, asked to do the task. She came out with 'bad-badder', >>'good-gooder' and just afterwards said to her younger friend 'I did better >>than you!' Isn't it strange? > >John, >I think there is a very simple explanation for this: "I did better than >you" surely is a piece of prefabricated speech; I do not think that >speakers really think of "better" as a comparative of "good" when using >this sentence at all. Even more so because there is no such form as "I did >good" - you would have to use the adverb. (Asked for the comparative of >"well", what would the girl have said?) While I do not know about the tasks >you mentioned, I suppose that the aim is to find out how much children know >about comparatives and superlatives, which are abstract metalinguistic >concepts. Such concepts do not have much to do with children's linguistic >skills, because quite a lot of what we say in everyday life consists of >strings of words that we have heard many times before, and which are >therefore readily available. >- Thora > > > >http://www.spatial-cognition.de > > >--------------------------------------------- > >Thora Tenbrink >Spatial Cognition Priority Program & WSV >Universitaet Hamburg >FB Informatik >Vogt-Koelln-Str. 30 >D-22527 Hamburg > >Tel.: +49/*40/42883-2382 >Fax: +49/*40/42883-2385 >e-mail: tenbrink at informatik.uni-hamburg.de >http://www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/WSV/hp/tenbrink-english.htm -- ________________________________________________________________ Professor A.Karmiloff-Smith, Head, Neurocognitive Development Unit, Institute of Child Health, 30 Guilford Street, London WC1N 1EH, U.K. tel: 0207 905 2754 fax: 0207 242 7717 http://www.ich.ucl.ac.uk/units/ncdu/NDU_homepage.htm ________________________________________________________________ From macwhinn at hku.hk Tue Aug 14 09:55:25 2001 From: macwhinn at hku.hk (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2001 17:55:25 +0800 Subject: French clinical data Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, I am happy to announce the addition to CHILDES of a new corpus of the early sentences of six French children contributed by Marie-Therese Le Normand. Two of the children had epilepsy and four were diagnosed with SLI. The corpus includes about 200 short sentences from each child in a single CHAT file linked to the audio productions in a .wav file. These are not conversational data, but are intended instead to represent the vocal characteristics of speech in these children. The data (audio and transcripts) can be downloaded from http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/audio Here is the documentation file for this fascinating new corpus: Contact Address: Dr. Marie-Thérèse Le Normand, Laboratoire de Neuropsychopathologie du langage et de la cognition INSERM 9609, Groupe Pitié-Salpétrière 47 Bld de l¹Hôpital 75651 Paris cedex 13 lenorman at chups.jussieu.fr lenorman at infobiogen.fr Le Normand audio corpora Children with SLI and EPIlepsy (EPI) involved in this corpora were part of a larger project supported by L¹Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM), Paris, investigating the language development of children with neurogenic disorder. This project may contribute to central issues in developmental psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics, particularly in the understanding of the cerebral involvement in the acquisition of language. Exclusion criteria for SLI and EPI children were premature birth, perinatal complications, evidence of obvious damage following a neurological examination, a diagnosed behavior problem or other psychopathology. Inclusion criteria were an Apgar score of 10 five minutes after birth, a nonverbal intellect score greater than 90 (MacCarthy, 1976; range: 95-126), intact hearing as assessed in an audiometric evaluation, native speaker of French and uninterrupted participation in the study. EEG evidenced for both EPI children a clear-cut left temporal focus. MRI evidenced for Sofian a left temporal lesion, most probably dysplastic without destruction of parenchyme. MRI evidenced no lesion for Benoît. PET scan revealed left temporal hypometabolism for Sofian. No PET scan was available for Benoît. Comprehension tasks The selection of language comprehension tasks included pointing (choosing which items in a set of pictures are named by the experimenter), and understanding of prepositions (positioning play figures; there were 18 requests to assess representation of space, quantity, partition and localization). Table 1. z- scores of language comprehension tasks Pointing Understanding of prepositions z-scores z-scores EPI Benoît 1 0 Sofian 0 0 SLI Beranger 1 -0.5 Hippolyte +1 +2 Paul -1 0.5 Samuel -1.7 -0.6 Sébastien 0 0 Production tasks The linguistic production tasks included repetition of mono-, bi- and polysyllabic words spoken by the experimenter; naming of pictures of objects; lexical and morphological categories diversity as measured by the number of type and tokens uttered in a 20 min controlled play session. A JPEG photo of the setup is included with the data files. This is a form of narrative where the subject is asked to verbalize all manipulations and actions with dolls and objects in and around a doll house. Normative data on the comprehension tasks are found in Chevrie-Muller, Simon and Decante (1981) for ages between 3 years, 9 months and 8 years, and normative data on the production tasks (lexical and morphological category diversity) are found in Le Normand (1997) for ages between 2years and 4 years. Video and audio recordings The video and audio recording sessions lasted approximately 20 minutes and were conducted in the lab with mother or father using the same play Fisher-Price toys materials. All sessions were transcribed in accordance with the guidelines produced by the Codes for Human Analysis of Transcripts (CHAT) which is part of the Child Language Data Exchange system (CHILDES) (MacWhinney, 1995). The computerized transcripts were then compared with the original videotaped data by an independent transcriber in order to verify their accuracy. This process resulted in 97.0% inter-transcriber reliability. Any disagreements concerning the transcription were resolved by re-examination until consensus was reached. From tenbrink at informatik.uni-hamburg.de Tue Aug 14 11:37:24 2001 From: tenbrink at informatik.uni-hamburg.de (Thora Tenbrink) Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2001 13:37:24 +0200 Subject: originating from Bogoyvalenskiy, D In-Reply-To: <149DEAD6B76CD5119C9A009027D6396B363D44@sernt28.essex.ac.uk > Message-ID: >work that way, but it just means to me when a child uses 'gooder' in a task >and then 'better' immediately after, regardless of the context, you can't >then reliably say that that child hasn't acquired the irregular >'good-better' just because they say 'gooder' in an unnatural setting like a >wug test. Who is to say that the child doesn't then use 'better' as a >comparative to the same friend in the minibus on the way home? You find this effect in many well-known concepts and contexts, e.g. regarding the acquisition of before and after: children may use them correctly in certain natural contexts as early as age 2, while psycholinguistic experiments prove that a thorough, more or less context-free knowledge of the (possible) meaning(s) of before and after is not acquired before an age of seven years or so. This is to say, natural language is acquired in many different ways and always in certain contexts, and nearly always involving pieces of readily available formats. Thus, to me it does not really make sense to ask when exactly the child has acquired the irregular 'good-better', it is more complicated than that. >of the system. I don't believe to the child everything they have heard is >readily available, if it was there would be no such thing as language >acquisition and even if it was then who is to say that the child actually >understands what they are saying? I did not mean to say that everything was readily available. What I mean is that some strings of words, or phonemes, or formats, are more available than others. Such as "thank you", which is certainly not broken down into verb and pronoun each time it is processed; it is acquired and used as a ready-made expression to be used in certain contexts. Similarly, while "I did better than you" must of course be understood before it can be used correctly, this does not necessarily involve an understanding of the irregular comparative. Rather, it may involve an understanding that this is the sentence to use when this particular meaning should be expressed. "doing better than" might then be a format that can be used involving varying participants. To me, this is even more plausible because the German equivalent is no exact translation of the English sentence. "Ich war besser als du" really means "I was better than you", but it would most certainly be used in contexts where English speaking people use "I did better than you". The literal translation "Ich tat (es) besser als du" is, to my knowledge, almost never used. It could be that the question to ask really is, when do children understand that "better" (which they may have used correctly in varying contexts for a long time) is systematically related to "good" -- in the same way as "worse" is to "bad", and "faster" is to "fast"? Then, a metalinguistic knowledge about comparatives can be said to have been acquired. -- Thora http://www.spatial-cognition.de --------------------------------------------- Thora Tenbrink Spatial Cognition Priority Program & WSV Universitaet Hamburg FB Informatik Vogt-Koelln-Str. 30 D-22527 Hamburg Tel.: +49/*40/42883-2382 Fax: +49/*40/42883-2385 e-mail: tenbrink at informatik.uni-hamburg.de http://www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/WSV/hp/tenbrink-english.htm From tenbrink at informatik.uni-hamburg.de Tue Aug 14 11:46:39 2001 From: tenbrink at informatik.uni-hamburg.de (Thora Tenbrink) Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2001 13:46:39 +0200 Subject: Bogoyvalenskiy, D In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 18:06 13.08.2001 +0100, you wrote: >Don't Americans say "I did good" - I hear them say in response to >"how are you" = "Good" and it is creeping into British english too, >replacing "well". I've heard anecodatlly bestest, betterest amd >gooder but never goodest.. >Annette > Thank you for this -- I never heard that. This might make it more plausible that those using "I did better" are somehow aware of the relationship to "I did good". Of course, understanding "well" really well involves understanding the relationship of the adverb to the adjective. Could it be that the increasing usage of the adjective rather than the adverb is due to a certain uneasiness with this irregularity? Maybe, for speakers, "well" is somehow too remote from "good" to be used with the same ease (in contexts where something "good" is to be expressed), so they increasingly prefer "good"?! (I'm not too familiar with the mechanisms of language change -- I'm just speculating!) - Thora http://www.spatial-cognition.de --------------------------------------------- Thora Tenbrink Spatial Cognition Priority Program & WSV Universitaet Hamburg FB Informatik Vogt-Koelln-Str. 30 D-22527 Hamburg Tel.: +49/*40/42883-2382 Fax: +49/*40/42883-2385 e-mail: tenbrink at informatik.uni-hamburg.de http://www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/WSV/hp/tenbrink-english.htm From jeclar at essex.ac.uk Tue Aug 14 14:52:21 2001 From: jeclar at essex.ac.uk (Clarke, John E) Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2001 15:52:21 +0100 Subject: originating from Bogoyvalenskiy, D Message-ID: Dear Thora Thank you for your message. I agree with you whole-heartedly. Saying a child has or has not acquired 'good-better' through a wug-test is an over-simplification and that was my point really. In that sense it is interesting to see when, as you suggest, comparatives are acquired metalinguistically (and subconsciously) as lexical subentries of an adjective, when 'better' relates to 'good'. The wug-test becomes something other then when you test an irregular like 'good-better' because you are testing other knowledge, not related to morphology, knowledge of more or morphological productivity. However, in that primary sense of more versus -er, comparatives then also relate to language development (outside of other cognitive development), a system which in English involves both syntax and a suffix. Thank you so much for your interest and receive kind regards from John MA Language Acquisition University of Essex, UK From flanigan at oak.cats.ohiou.edu Tue Aug 14 15:38:08 2001 From: flanigan at oak.cats.ohiou.edu (Beverly Flanigan) Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2001 11:38:08 -0400 Subject: Bogoyvalenskiy, D In-Reply-To: <3.0.6.32.20010814134639.007a5530@rzdspc2.informatik.uni-ha mburg.de> Message-ID: The adverbial use of "good" in the States may have begun as a dialect variant, but it is now simply idiomatic in certain phrases: "You did good," and after "How are you?" "I'm good, how are you?" But hasn't the same change occurred with German "gut"? Isn't "wohl" reserved mainly for idioms like "Leb wohl"? Such regularization is not unusual; adverbial -ly is also falling away in many dialects: "Go slow," "Do you say this different?" At 01:46 PM 8/14/01 +0200, you wrote: >At 18:06 13.08.2001 +0100, you wrote: > >Don't Americans say "I did good" - I hear them say in response to > >"how are you" = "Good" and it is creeping into British english too, > >replacing "well". I've heard anecodatlly bestest, betterest amd > >gooder but never goodest.. > >Annette > > > >Thank you for this -- I never heard that. This might make it more plausible >that those using "I did better" are somehow aware of the relationship to "I >did good". >Of course, understanding "well" really well involves understanding the >relationship of the adverb to the adjective. Could it be that the >increasing usage of the adjective rather than the adverb is due to a >certain uneasiness with this irregularity? Maybe, for speakers, "well" is >somehow too remote from "good" to be used with the same ease (in contexts >where something "good" is to be expressed), so they increasingly prefer >"good"?! (I'm not too familiar with the mechanisms of language change -- >I'm just speculating!) >- Thora > > > >http://www.spatial-cognition.de > > >--------------------------------------------- > >Thora Tenbrink >Spatial Cognition Priority Program & WSV >Universitaet Hamburg >FB Informatik >Vogt-Koelln-Str. 30 >D-22527 Hamburg > >Tel.: +49/*40/42883-2382 >Fax: +49/*40/42883-2385 >e-mail: tenbrink at informatik.uni-hamburg.de >http://www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/WSV/hp/tenbrink-english.htm _____________________________________________ Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm From jonmach at informix.com Tue Aug 14 16:18:25 2001 From: jonmach at informix.com (Jon Machtynger) Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2001 17:18:25 +0100 Subject: Bogoyvalenskiy, D In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.20010814113102.01cc08d0@oak.cats.ohiou.edu> Message-ID: > The adverbial use of "good" in the States may have begun as a dialect > variant, but it is now simply idiomatic in certain phrases: "You did > good," and after "How are you?" "I'm good, how are you?" But hasn't the > same change occurred with German "gut"? Isn't "wohl" reserved mainly for > idioms like "Leb wohl"? Such regularization is not unusual; adverbial -ly > is also falling away in many dialects: "Go slow," "Do you say this different?" I don't think that "you did good" uses good as an adverb, rather a noun, as in "let's do some good". The fact that people may consider this in an adverbial sense is probably a misunderstanding. Also from a German perspective, I think the context is understood to the native speaker. I'm no native speaker, but I believe that answering 'gut' would be implicitly considered "mir geht's gut" (i.e. goes well with me). Wohl would be different from gut (just as well is different from good) e.g. ich fuhle mich wohl. Jon > >At 18:06 13.08.2001 +0100, you wrote: > > >Don't Americans say "I did good" - I hear them say in response to > > >"how are you" = "Good" and it is creeping into British english too, > > >replacing "well". I've heard anecodatlly bestest, betterest amd > > >gooder but never goodest.. > > >Annette > > > > > > >Thank you for this -- I never heard that. This might make it more plausible > >that those using "I did better" are somehow aware of the relationship to "I > >did good". > >Of course, understanding "well" really well involves understanding the > >relationship of the adverb to the adjective. Could it be that the > >increasing usage of the adjective rather than the adverb is due to a > >certain uneasiness with this irregularity? Maybe, for speakers, "well" is > >somehow too remote from "good" to be used with the same ease (in contexts > >where something "good" is to be expressed), so they increasingly prefer > >"good"?! (I'm not too familiar with the mechanisms of language change -- > >I'm just speculating!) > >- Thora > > > > > > > >http://www.spatial-cognition.de > > > > > >--------------------------------------------- > > > >Thora Tenbrink > >Spatial Cognition Priority Program & WSV > >Universitaet Hamburg > >FB Informatik > >Vogt-Koelln-Str. 30 > >D-22527 Hamburg > > > >Tel.: +49/*40/42883-2382 > >Fax: +49/*40/42883-2385 > >e-mail: tenbrink at informatik.uni-hamburg.de > >http://www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/WSV/hp/tenbrink-english.htm > > > _____________________________________________ > Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics > Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 > Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 > http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm > From flanigan at oak.cats.ohiou.edu Tue Aug 14 17:07:41 2001 From: flanigan at oak.cats.ohiou.edu (Beverly Flanigan) Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2001 13:07:41 -0400 Subject: Bogoyvalenskiy, D In-Reply-To: <3B795D61.22646.19CCD58@localhost> Message-ID: We recently discussed this distinction on the American Dialect Society listserv, and we agreed that "You did good" could mean what you suggest (noun=a good thing/deed) but that it usually doesn't in its current idiomatic usage. It's a congratulatory comment, after, e.g., a good sports play or a good exam score, and even (!) professors use it, though in a somewhat jocular manner (in what Gumperz called a metaphoric switch to colloquial usage). There's clearly no misunderstanding the speaker's meaning. Similarly, I agree that there's no misunderstanding in the German usage, but my recollection is that "gut" is now the general adverb except in expression of emotion, as in your example. The performative adverb would be 'gut', I believe--but let's hear from a native speaker! At 05:18 PM 8/14/01 +0100, you wrote: > > The adverbial use of "good" in the States may have begun as a dialect > > variant, but it is now simply idiomatic in certain phrases: "You did > > good," and after "How are you?" "I'm good, how are you?" But hasn't the > > same change occurred with German "gut"? Isn't "wohl" reserved mainly for > > idioms like "Leb wohl"? Such regularization is not unusual; adverbial -ly > > is also falling away in many dialects: "Go slow," "Do you say this > different?" > >I don't think that "you did good" uses good as an adverb, rather a noun, as >in "let's do some good". The fact that people may consider this in an >adverbial sense is probably a misunderstanding. > >Also from a German perspective, I think the context is understood to the >native speaker. I'm no native speaker, but I believe that answering 'gut' >would be implicitly considered "mir geht's gut" (i.e. goes well with me). > >Wohl would be different from gut (just as well is different from good) >e.g. ich >fuhle mich wohl. > >Jon > > > >At 18:06 13.08.2001 +0100, you wrote: > > > >Don't Americans say "I did good" - I hear them say in response to > > > >"how are you" = "Good" and it is creeping into British english too, > > > >replacing "well". I've heard anecodatlly bestest, betterest amd > > > >gooder but never goodest.. > > > >Annette > > > > > > > > > >Thank you for this -- I never heard that. This might make it more > plausible > > >that those using "I did better" are somehow aware of the relationship > to "I > > >did good". > > >Of course, understanding "well" really well involves understanding the > > >relationship of the adverb to the adjective. Could it be that the > > >increasing usage of the adjective rather than the adverb is due to a > > >certain uneasiness with this irregularity? Maybe, for speakers, "well" is > > >somehow too remote from "good" to be used with the same ease (in contexts > > >where something "good" is to be expressed), so they increasingly prefer > > >"good"?! (I'm not too familiar with the mechanisms of language change -- > > >I'm just speculating!) > > >- Thora > > > > > > > > > > > >http://www.spatial-cognition.de > > > > > > > > >--------------------------------------------- > > > > > >Thora Tenbrink > > >Spatial Cognition Priority Program & WSV > > >Universitaet Hamburg > > >FB Informatik > > >Vogt-Koelln-Str. 30 > > >D-22527 Hamburg > > > > > >Tel.: +49/*40/42883-2382 > > >Fax: +49/*40/42883-2385 > > >e-mail: tenbrink at informatik.uni-hamburg.de > > >http://www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/WSV/hp/tenbrink-english.htm > > > > _____________________________________________ Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm From katewq at hawaii.edu Tue Aug 14 20:03:45 2001 From: katewq at hawaii.edu (Kate Wolfe-Quintero) Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2001 10:03:45 -1000 Subject: 'good' In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.20010814125522.01686f00@oak.cats.ohiou.edu> Message-ID: Don't you think that 'you did good' comes from 'you did something good' which is ultimately 'you did something that is good'? It's not an adverb in the sense of you did it well, but an adjective with ellipsis of 'something'. >We recently discussed this distinction on the American Dialect >Society listserv, and we agreed that "You did good" could mean what >you suggest (noun=a good thing/deed) but that it usually doesn't in >its current idiomatic usage. It's a congratulatory comment, after, >e.g., a good sports play or a good exam score, and even (!) >professors use it, though in a somewhat jocular manner (in what >Gumperz called a metaphoric switch to colloquial usage). There's >clearly no misunderstanding the speaker's meaning. > -- *************************************************************** Kate Wolfe-Quintero Associate Professor, PhD Program in SLA and MA Program in ESL Department of Second Language Studies University of Hawai`i at Manoa Director, Hawai'i English Language Program 1395 Lower Campus Rd. MC 13-1, Honolulu, HI 96822 email: katewq at hawaii.edu phone: (808) 956-9909 fax: (808) 956-2802 From lise.menn at colorado.edu Tue Aug 14 21:28:07 2001 From: lise.menn at colorado.edu (Lise Menn) Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2001 15:28:07 -0600 Subject: Bogoyvalenskiy, D In-Reply-To: <3B795D61.22646.19CCD58@localhost> Message-ID: Dear colleagues I suggest that the fact that we have no real way to test any of these claims points up serious limitations to the whole notion of 'part-of-speech'. Which is not exactly a new observation... Lise Menn At 5:18 PM +0100 8/14/01, Jon Machtynger wrote: >> The adverbial use of "good" in the States may have begun as a dialect >> variant, but it is now simply idiomatic in certain phrases: "You did >> good," and after "How are you?" "I'm good, how are you?" But hasn't the >> same change occurred with German "gut"? Isn't "wohl" reserved mainly for >> idioms like "Leb wohl"? Such regularization is not unusual; adverbial -ly >> is also falling away in many dialects: "Go slow," "Do you say this >>different?" > >I don't think that "you did good" uses good as an adverb, rather a noun, as >in "let's do some good". The fact that people may consider this in an >adverbial sense is probably a misunderstanding. > >Also from a German perspective, I think the context is understood to the >native speaker. I'm no native speaker, but I believe that answering 'gut' >would be implicitly considered "mir geht's gut" (i.e. goes well with me). > >Wohl would be different from gut (just as well is different from good) >e.g. ich >fuhle mich wohl. > >Jon > >> >At 18:06 13.08.2001 +0100, you wrote: >> > >Don't Americans say "I did good" - I hear them say in response to >> > >"how are you" = "Good" and it is creeping into British english too, >> > >replacing "well". I've heard anecodatlly bestest, betterest amd >> > >gooder but never goodest.. >> > >Annette >> > > >> > >> >Thank you for this -- I never heard that. This might make it more plausible >> >that those using "I did better" are somehow aware of the relationship to "I >> >did good". >> >Of course, understanding "well" really well involves understanding the >> >relationship of the adverb to the adjective. Could it be that the >> >increasing usage of the adjective rather than the adverb is due to a >> >certain uneasiness with this irregularity? Maybe, for speakers, "well" is >> >somehow too remote from "good" to be used with the same ease (in contexts >> >where something "good" is to be expressed), so they increasingly prefer >> >"good"?! (I'm not too familiar with the mechanisms of language change -- >> >I'm just speculating!) >> >- Thora >> > >> > >> > >> >http://www.spatial-cognition.de >> > >> > >> >--------------------------------------------- >> > >> >Thora Tenbrink >> >Spatial Cognition Priority Program & WSV >> >Universitaet Hamburg >> >FB Informatik >> >Vogt-Koelln-Str. 30 >> >D-22527 Hamburg >> > >> >Tel.: +49/*40/42883-2382 >> >Fax: +49/*40/42883-2385 >> >e-mail: tenbrink at informatik.uni-hamburg.de >> >http://www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/WSV/hp/tenbrink-english.htm >> >> >> _____________________________________________ >> Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics >> Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 >> Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 >> http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm >> Beware Procrustes bearing Occam's razor. Lise Menn office phone 303-492-1609 Professor home fax 303-413-0017 Department of Linguistics UCB 295 University of Colorado Boulder, CO 80309-0295 Lise Menn's home page http://www.colorado.edu/linguistics/faculty/lmenn/ "Shirley Says: Living with Aphasia" http://spot.colorado.edu/~menn/Shirley4.pdf From tenbrink at informatik.uni-hamburg.de Wed Aug 15 11:51:20 2001 From: tenbrink at informatik.uni-hamburg.de (Thora Tenbrink) Date: Wed, 15 Aug 2001 13:51:20 +0200 Subject: well, good, wohl, & gut In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.20010814125522.01686f00@oak.cats.ohiou.edu> Message-ID: >Similarly, I agree that there's no misunderstanding in the German usage, >but my recollection is that "gut" is now the general adverb except in >expression of emotion, as in your example. The performative adverb would >be 'gut', I believe--but let's hear from a native speaker! > Seems like a good intuition to start from, I have no objections. A query in an online dictionary (LEO) brought about some interesting results that inspire for a more thorough investigation of the semantic fields of "well", "good", "gut" and "wohl": done good -- gutgetan to do good -- wohltun good deed -- die Wohltat / die gute Tat (which are two very different concepts!) to feel good -- sich wohlfühlen (I did not find "sich gut fühlen" -- but I would certainly use it in certain contexts; however, it is certainly not equivalent to "sich wohlfühlen") to sell well -- sich gut verkaufen to bear oneself well -- sich gut betragen good -- das Wohl (e.g. common good - das gemeine Wohl/ Wohl der Gesellschaft) good -- das Gut (e.g. fragile good - zerbrechliches Gut) At first sight, and corresponding to intuitions, the semantic range of "wohl" seems to be quite remote from that of (adverbial) "gut". -- Thora From cslater at alma.edu Thu Aug 16 17:43:35 2001 From: cslater at alma.edu (Carol Slater) Date: Thu, 16 Aug 2001 13:43:35 -0400 Subject: Using CHILDES: Replies Message-ID: Dear Colleagues: Thanks to all of the list members who replied to my query about using CHILDES in an undergraduate course in language acquisition. It looks as though there are lots of ways to use it, varying widely in technical complexity and intensity. A number of people use CHILDES to create handouts for class discussion and analysis. Erika Hoff says, ” I have [only] used CHILDES to get the original Adam, Eve, and Sarah transcripts. I hand them out to the class and use them as examples of various phenomena and the students get to see the real words of famous subjects. I have also used those transcripts as the basis of take home exams with a question something like ‘what does Eve know and what about language does she not know at this point in her development?’ Students have thought that was interesting and valuable.” Lynn Santelmann makes more extensive use of CHILDES handouts. She says, ” I use the transcripts in two ways: First, I have created a packet of transcripts for the students to analyze, one set for child-directed speech, one for phonology, one for morphosyntax, and one for discourse/conversation. (I also have a set for narratives, but they did not come from CHILDES). Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get a good data set for word learning yet. I "clean up" these transcripts a bit to remove some of the analysis tiers, and I give them transcripts of different ages so they can see change over time. I give the students very specific questions or features to analyze, and then they work either in small groups or at home. We discuss the results in class. This gives them not only a chance to see some of the features that we've talked or read about first hand, but gives them a chance to see how hard it is to analyze things sometimes (e.g., is a morpheme missing because the child doesn't produce it or because the context does not provide an opportunity for the child to use it?).” People also involve students in analyzing CHILDES datasets with and without reliance on CLAN programs. Catherine Snow says, ”I have used CHILDES quite extensively in my course on child language to the extent of teaching the class while logged on to CHILDES so we could pursue particular issues (when does past tense first show up? what gets added when MLU goes from 1 to 2? what are the first words that kids say and to what extent are they the same across kids?) by downloading the relevant files preparatory to ... doing analysis right there and displaying the results. I also give analysis exercises as homework that students can do pretty efficiently using CLAN, or less efficiently without it (since some don’t want to really learn to use the system), and I provide CHAT formatted files as a basis for the longer analyses I assign for take-home essays. Again, the students can analyse the files using a word processor, or they can avail themselves of the CLAN options I also strongly encourage students to used archived data for their research projects, because they can then do something much bigger and more sophisticated. Santelmann prefers that students analyze their own data but “a few students can’t do this, or want to analyze a language other than English, so I let them use CHILDES data. They’re able to do some nice analyses because they have had some practice in class.” Michelle Barton systematically helps students develop skill using CLAN. Her experience has been that they like using the CHILDES system and “[In] several cases, having the skills has been a real plus for grad school applications and research assistant positions.” Some people also teach students about CHILDES transcription. Catherine Snow says, “I use the projection system to display transcripts linked to videos so that students get a sense of how one translates interaction into analyzable text.” Margaret Friend has had students carry out their own transcriptions. “My approach was to have students practice using the transcription system and ... complete two transcripts: one standard transcript which could be corrected for errors and on which they could obtain assistance from other students and one transcript that they had collected and recorded themselves. Students were assigned to groups of four and each group recorded narrative data from children of different ages. At the end of the semester they compared their transcriptions, did a count of open and closed-class words and presented an in-class developmental analysis based on the data . I was impressed with students’ insights at the end of the course .” In addition, there were pointers to relevant resources. Barton uses the CLAN exercises included in Brian MacWhinney, The CHILDES Project, 3rd ed. Volume I. (There is an introductory Tutorial at the beginning of Part 2: The Programs, and a set of Exercises at the end; Barton notes that longer versions of the latter appeared in Sokolov and Snow (1994) Handbook of Research on Language Development Using CHILDES.) Judith Becker Bryant mentions that her chapter in Jean Berko Gleason (ed.), The Development of Language, is followed by several suggestions for projects using CHILDES. Finally, people gave helpful counsel. Barton cautioned about glitches in CHILDES manual exercises: “[B]e sure to run them yourself and find the errors, before assigning them to the students. It’s frustrating for all if it doesn’t work right.” Santelmann says, “[I]t’s sometimes difficult to find a set of transcripts that illustrate a particular phenomenon, so students may need some direction in where to look. (That’s particularly true for phonology kinds of things.) [T]he less computer savvy of my students have had trouble down-loading [transcripts].” Snow suggested that “[I]t is slightly more efficient to have likely corpora pre-downloaded” if you plan to utilize them "on line" in class discussion and notes that encouraging sophisticated projects using archived data "only works, I find, if the class activities have demonstrated how to get into CHILDES, what data are available, and how to use CLAN." . Friend advises that the data transcription projects she assigned “turned out to be a considerable amount of work for the students so you will need to think carefully about grading.” I am indebted to Info-childes list members for their generous support and look forward to next steps made possible by their help.. Carol Slater Department of Psychology & Cognitive Science Group Alma College Alma MI 48801 From macwhinn at hku.hk Fri Aug 17 04:02:42 2001 From: macwhinn at hku.hk (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Fri, 17 Aug 2001 12:02:42 +0800 Subject: Using CHILDES: Replies In-Reply-To: <3B7C05BD.B79CB418@alma.edu> Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES and Carol, Many thanks for this excellent summary of people's experiences using CHILDES for teaching. I have placed these comments at http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/html/tips.html I have also reorganized the home page a bit so that teaching-related materials are within a similar heading which is now called "Teaching with CHILDES." If anyone would like to add additional material to the "Tips" page, please tell me. Right now there is a glitch in the left hand column of that page, but it is otherwise pretty legible. --Brian MacWhinney From negishi at psychology.rutgers.edu Mon Aug 20 18:39:06 2001 From: negishi at psychology.rutgers.edu (Michiro Negishi) Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2001 14:39:06 -0400 Subject: center embedded relatives in Japanese Message-ID: Dear all, I was running a Japanese language version of Elman's grammar learning task and realized that there can be no more than two levels of center embedded RELATIVE clauses (thus not including "he says/knows that..." etc.) in Japanese. I can even prove it... and I'm sure it's a know fact. I did some web search trying to find relevant papers with no success. Does anybody know references? Or are there counter examples?? Any info. would be appreciated. Michiro Negishi, Ph.D. Psychology Dept. Rutgers U. -------------------------------------------------- Michiro Negishi, Ph.D. Psychology Dept. Rutgers U. Work : (973) 353-5850 Home: (201) 339-4179 Web : http://psychology.rutgers.edu/users/negishi -------------------------------------------------- From snehab at utdallas.edu Thu Aug 23 20:59:55 2001 From: snehab at utdallas.edu (Sneha V Bharadwaj) Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2001 15:59:55 -0500 Subject: French vowels Message-ID: Hello All, I am currently analyzing French words produced by English-speaking children and adults. I am looking for developmental data concerning formant frequencies of French vowels. Are there any published or unpublished work (similar to Peterson & Barney, 1952)? Thanks, -Sneha Bharadwaj -------------------------------- Sneha Bharadwaj School of Human development GR41 University of Texas at Dallas Richardson, TX 75083 -------------------------------- From velleman at comdis.umass.edu Thu Aug 23 21:49:55 2001 From: velleman at comdis.umass.edu (Shelley L. Velleman) Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2001 17:49:55 -0400 Subject: French lang. devel. norms Message-ID: I'm looking for references for language (including phonology) development norms for French. Thanks! Shelley Velleman From Hilkee at lrz.uni-muenchen.de Fri Aug 31 15:35:44 2001 From: Hilkee at lrz.uni-muenchen.de (Hilke Elsen) Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2001 17:35:44 +0200 Subject: blind children Message-ID: Dear all, a colleague in Cairo is looking for information on BLIND-DEAF and BLIND-MOTOR children, especially assessment / evaluation programs and intervention programs. If anyone could help, please send information to manalmorsy at hotmail.com. Thanks, Hilke From macwhinn at hku.hk Wed Aug 1 05:32:59 2001 From: macwhinn at hku.hk (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Wed, 1 Aug 2001 13:32:59 +0800 Subject: Archiving video data In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Dear Peter and Info-CHILDES, Good point. I've heard this about potential CD-R meltdown, but the time frame I have heard quoted for this is about 12 years. My guess is that people actually don't know, but want to make sure they err on the conservative side. I remember being told that reel-to-reel tapes would suffer from print through, but we have received many at CHILDES that are 30 to 40 years old and still in perfect condition. In fact, we have never received any that have the dreaded print-through we were told to worry about in the 1960s. Saving videotapes is fine, but lots of people are now recording directly to digital, so saving the original medium means saving the mini-DV tape, not the VHS cassette. I wonder what the shelf-life of the mini-DV tape is supposed to be. It is a film, like these other film-based media, so I am guessing it is pretty good. --Brian From ian.smythe at ukonline.co.uk Thu Aug 2 14:17:57 2001 From: ian.smythe at ukonline.co.uk (Ian Smythe) Date: Thu, 2 Aug 2001 14:17:57 +0000 Subject: Sound recording Message-ID: Dear Colleagues I am looking to record high quality digital sound on a handheld device (eg minidisc) which I can download to the computer. However, I cannot find a manufacturer who produces such a device. Sony make one for downloading MP3 files from the computer to the player, but apparently not the other way. Any suggestions? NB Digital 'dictaphones' are of insufficient quality. Thanks Ian Smythe From jbp007 at infi.net Wed Aug 1 22:04:41 2001 From: jbp007 at infi.net (Phelps) Date: Wed, 1 Aug 2001 17:04:41 -0500 Subject: remove this email address Message-ID: Please remove this email address from your list. Thank you. From macwhinn at hku.hk Sat Aug 4 02:17:50 2001 From: macwhinn at hku.hk (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Sat, 4 Aug 2001 10:17:50 +0800 Subject: Child Language Research Form 2002 Message-ID: The next STANFORD CHILD LANGUAGE RESEARCH FORUM will take place on: April 12-14, 2002 (Friday-Sunday) TOPIC: SPACE IN LANGUAGE - LOCATION, MOTION, PATH, AND MANNER How are these notions packaged? What is easy vs. hard to acquire? What is the major order of acquisition by language type? Are there differences between intransitive and caused motion? Differences in comprehension and production? Differences between oral and signed languages? What range of spatial terms can be extended to time? To other domains? What crosslinguistic comparisons are available? What interdisciplinary studies of language and spatial concepts? The Organizing Committee for the Stanford Child Language Research Forum has made several changes. The current plan is to meet every couple of years, instead of annually, and we decided to choose a specific topic for each meeting, and therefore solicit papers and posters on that topic only (but construed broadly). Space in Language is the topic for 2002. Abstracts are DUE on or before January 1, 2002; submitters will be informed of all decisions by February 15, 2002. Format for abstracts: please submit 2 copies x one page half- or double- spaced; do not include the author's name since abstracts are reviewed anonymously. Attach a separate 3x5 card with (a) author's name, (b) affiliation and address, (c) email, (d) abstract-title. Send abstracts to: CLRF-2002 Organizing Committee Department of Linguistics Margaret Jacks Hall Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305-2150, USA Check the CLRF website for information about registration, hotels, and any further announcements about the meeting, www-csli.stanford.edu/~clrf P.S. This URL is also bookmarked on the child language sites list on the CHILDES pages From macwhinn at hku.hk Sat Aug 4 10:04:25 2001 From: macwhinn at hku.hk (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Sat, 4 Aug 2001 18:04:25 +0800 Subject: Noji corpus Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, I am happy to announce the addition to CHILDES of a large corpus of Japanese child language data that was collected beginning in 1948 by Junya Noji from his son Sumihare. The current corpus was prepared and contributed by Norio Naka and Susanne Miyata with the permission of Noji. Thanks to all of them for this contribution. --Brian MacWhinney *************************** *** Noji Corpus v.1.1 ***** *************************** Susanne Miyata Faculty of Creativity and Culture Aichi Shukutoku University Sakuragaoka 23, Chikusa-ku Nagoya, Japan 464-8671 smiyata at asu.aasa.ac.jp ***History*** The Noji Corpus contains diary data collected by the Japanese linguist and dialectologist Junya Noji. He observed his first-born son Sumihare from birth (1948, March, 9th) until the age of 7, as he was growing up in Hiroshima. The data is based on handwritten records collected virtually daily (2243 days over 7 years), although the focus lies in the 3rd year. In the later years, less records were taken, resulting in a lower number of utterances available per month. Detailed description of the methodology can be found in the printed edition (Bunka Hyoron Shuppan). The data contains approximately 40,000 utterances by Sumihare, and about 22,000 utterances by other family members (his mother and father and his younger brother, Teruki) and other speakers such as the children from the neighborhood (Seejikun and Keekochan). A comment is provided for each utterance, establishing the context and interpreting the child's utterance. The electronic version of this data was entered, compared to the original, and adjusted to CHAT format by Norio Naka (Osaka Gakuin U.). The final brush up using CHECK was done by Susanne Miyata (Aichi Shukutoku U.). ***Format*** The print original uses katakana (phonetic syllable script) for the utterances, and regular hiragana (syllabic) and kanji (Chinese characters) for the comments, as well as a number of special symbols such as arrows to indicate the speaker and the addressee. The electronic version was done in Hebon (Hepburn transcription system) and separated into words (wakachi; spoken utterances only). The format follows the Japanese adaption of CHAT, JCHAT 1.0 (Oshima-Takane & MacWhinney, eds., 1998). When the data entry began in 1992, only ASCII was available within the CHILDES system. But now, even though there is no longer any restriction concerning the fonts, the use of Hebon (at least in the main line) has the advantage of compatibility with programs such as MOR, and renders the data accessible to a greater number of researchers by removing the barrier of Japanese script. ***Warnings*** 1) The wakachi (word separation) format is not yet adjusted to the JMOR- compatible WAKACHI99 format. 2) Words are transcribed as pronounced (e.g. 'futachu' for 'futatsu') 3) Proper names are not capitalized. when using this corpus please cite: Noji, Junya. (1973-77). Yooji no gengo seikatsu no jittai I -IV. Bunka Hyoron Shuppan. ***Table of Contents*** ######################################################### year month age # of # of utt. files (days) SUM others all utt. ######################################################## 1948 3 0;0 26 0 0 0 4 0;1 29 0 0 0 5 0;2 30 1 1 2 6 0;3 30 6 2 8 7 0;4 17 2 1 3 8 0;5 17 0 0 0 9 0;6 17 2 0 2 10 0;7 19 0 0 0 11 0;8 14 4 1 5 12 0;9 16 18 2 20 1949 1 0;10 19 17 11 28 2 0;11 27 52 27 79 ####################################################### 261 102 45 147 ####################################################### 3 1;0 24 65 28 93 4 1;1 20 67 31 98 5 1;2 27 61 26 87 6 1;3 29 110 43 153 7 1;4 30 81 26 107 8 1;5 31 342 97 439 9 1;6 30 453 149 602 10 1;7 31 436 178 614 11 1;8 30 425 144 569 12 1;9 31 414 125 539 1950 1 1;10 30 349 66 415 2 1;11 28 820 146 966 ####################################################### 341 3.623 1.059 4.682 ####################################################### 3 2;0 31 800 137 937 4 2;1 30 1.892 571 2463 5 2;2 31 3.201 1.050 4251 6 2;3 30 1.198 423 1621 7 2;4 30 1.280 557 1837 8 2;5 31 1.779 971 2750 9 2;6 30 939 419 1358 10 2;7 31 1.317 524 1841 11 2;8 30 1.368 641 2009 12 2;9 31 1.312 727 2039 1951 1 2;10 31 991 719 1710 2 2;11 28 771 518 1289 ######################################################### 364 16848 7257 24.105 ######################################################### 3 3;0 31 709 477 1186 4 3;1 30 847 542 1389 5 3;2 31 918 584 1502 6 3;3 30 1071 792 1863 7 3;4 31 1024 754 1778 8 3;5 31 689 517 1206 9 3;6 30 493 375 868 10 3;7 31 1321 870 2191 11 3;8 30 865 631 1496 12 3;9 31 620 519 1139 1952 1 3;10 30 537 337 874 2 3;11 29 497 375 872 ########################################################## 365 9.591 6.773 16.364 ########################################################## 3 4;0 31 576 435 1011 4 4;1 30 523 344 867 5 4;2 31 285 236 521 6 4;3 30 365 206 571 7 4;4 31 315 172 487 8 4;5 30 242 140 382 9 4;6 27 202 118 320 10 4;7 31 249 169 418 11 4;8 27 262 166 428 12 4;9 30 612 392 1004 1953 1 4;10 29 476 348 824 2 4;11 28 410 284 694 ########################################################## 355 4.517 3.010 7.527 ########################################################## 3 5;0 30 279 189 468 4 5;1 30 366 262 628 5 5;2 31 322 238 560 6 5;3 29 286 186 472 7 5;4 31 337 217 554 8 5;5 31 362 296 658 9 5;6 30 393 347 740 10 5;7 26 163 161 324 11 5;8 29 248 186 434 12 5;9 28 343 313 656 1954 1 5;10 24 172 150 322 2 5;11 25 167 162 329 ######################################################### 344 3.438 2.707 6.145 ########################################################## 3 6;0 16 97 64 161 4 6;1 18 85 65 150 5 6;2 18 105 77 182 6 6;3 26 251 224 475 7 6;4 29 359 297 656 8 6;5 29 346 233 579 9 6;6 25 111 115 226 10 6;7 14 44 50 94 11 6;8 8 23 29 52 12 6;9 11 50 43 93 1955 1 6;10 15 47 50 97 2 6;11 3 4 6 10 ######################################################### 212 1522 1.253 2.775 ######################################################### total sum 2.242 39.641 22.104 61.745 *****end From gut at spectrum.uni-bielefeld.de Mon Aug 6 07:20:43 2001 From: gut at spectrum.uni-bielefeld.de (gut) Date: Mon, 6 Aug 2001 09:20:43 +0200 Subject: Call for Papers Message-ID: Call for Papers: PHONOLOGICAL ACQUISITION IN A MULTILINGUAL CONTEXT Workshop at the 24th Annual Meeting of the DGfS (German Linguistics Association) February 27 - March 1, 2002 Mannheim, Germany Invited speakers (preliminary list): Janet Grijzenhout Barbara H?hle David Ingram Margaret Kehoe Zvi Penner Marilyn Vihman Irene Vogel Martha Young-Scholten The workshop aims to get researchers from different fields presenting recent work on phonological acquisition both in L2 and a multilingual L1 context. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: * Optimality accounts of phonological acquisition * prosodic acquisition * phonology/prosody in language contact * phonology/prosody in multilinguals * theoretical implications of research on phonological acquisition Abstracts should be sent electronically to lleo at uni-hamburg.de or on paper to Conxita Lleo Universit?t Hamburg Institut f?r Romanistik von Melle-Park 6 D- 20146 Hamburg E-mail submission, with plain-text abstracts in the body of the message, is strongly preferred. Presentations are limited to 20 min. (+ 10 min. discussion). Schedule: Abstract submissions (1 page) August 31, 2001 Notification of acceptance September 14, 2001 For general information on the Annual Meeting of the DGfS please take a look at: http://www.dgfs-home.de/DGfS-Mitteilungen/MIT53WWW/mit53www.html Organization: Conxita Lleo (University of Hamburg) Ulrike Gut (University of Bielefeld) Erika Kaltenbacher (University of Heidelberg) From sharon at lscp.ehess.fr Mon Aug 6 10:18:16 2001 From: sharon at lscp.ehess.fr (Sharon Peperkamp) Date: Mon, 6 Aug 2001 12:18:16 +0200 Subject: Workshop on Early Phonological Acquisition Message-ID: A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 3770 bytes Desc: not available URL: From pater at linguist.umass.edu Mon Aug 6 21:54:07 2001 From: pater at linguist.umass.edu (Joe Pater) Date: Mon, 6 Aug 2001 14:54:07 -0700 Subject: Sound recording Message-ID: Hi all- I recently spent a fair bit of time researching this question. For some reason portable Minidisc recorders are rarely, if ever, made with a digital output (presumably, either for cost-effectiveness, or to discourage digital copying). You can get a "Pro" minidisc recorder for over $1000, but at that price, you may as well buy a DAT recorder, which doesn't use any compression. There is one other alternative though. The Nomad Jukebox has high quality Analog-to-Digital converters for recording, and can record uncompressed .wav files at a 48k sampling rate. It records to a 6 gig hard drive, and you can upload to most current computers over the included USB connection. This has the advantage over a DAT recorder of not requiring a digital input on your computer. At $299, I think this is a great product (though I have yet to test it myself). The only thing you would need is an external amplifier for the mic - there is only a line in, and no preamp. Some mics have built-in preamps, and you can also get excellent small preamps. For more info, go to: http://www.nomadworld.com/welcome.asp Best, Joe Pater Ian Smythe wrote: > Dear Colleagues > > I am looking to record high quality digital sound on a handheld device (eg > minidisc) which I can download to the computer. However, I cannot find a > manufacturer who produces such a device. Sony make one for downloading MP3 > files from the computer to the player, but apparently not the other way. > Any suggestions? NB Digital 'dictaphones' are of insufficient quality. > > Thanks > > Ian Smythe From nakhtar at cats.UCSC.EDU Mon Aug 6 23:44:19 2001 From: nakhtar at cats.UCSC.EDU (Nameera Akhtar) Date: Mon, 6 Aug 2001 16:44:19 -0700 Subject: developmental position, UC Santa cruz Message-ID: Developmental Psychology, Position #586-02. The Psychology Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, invites applications for a tenure-track assistant professor position specializing in infancy or early childhood development in social or cultural context. Special consideration will be given to candidates researching either the development of emotion with links to mind and/or communication, or the development of language and communication. Candidates with interests in issues of diversity and/or methodological/statistical approaches to the study of development are especially encouraged to apply. We are looking for persons capable of teaching both graduate and undergraduate level courses who also are actively engaged in research and show promise of continued research productivity. We seek to hire an individual whose strengths best complement the distinctive character of our program and are especially interested in candidates who can contribute to the diversity and excellence of our academic community through their research, teaching and/or service. Beginning salary is $46,100 - $51,400, commensurate with qualifications and experience. A Ph.D. in Psychology or related field is preferred by June 30, 2002, must be conferred no later than June 30, 2003. The successful candidate must be able to demonstrate potential for excellence in research and teaching. The position will be available July 1, 2002. Applicants should submit a letter of application describing their research and teaching interests, a curriculum vitae, reprints and preprints, and have a minimum of three confidential letters of recommendation forwarded to: Faculty Search Committee, Psychology Department Faculty Services, 277 Social Sciences 2, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA 95064. In your reply, refer to Position #586-02. Applications must be postmarked by November 5, 2001. UCSC is an EEO/AA employer. From stadlema at uwec.edu Wed Aug 8 13:29:49 2001 From: stadlema at uwec.edu (Stadler, Marie A.) Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2001 08:29:49 -0500 Subject: remove address Message-ID: Please remove this email address from the list. Thanks. Marie Stadler From jeclar at essex.ac.uk Wed Aug 8 15:56:17 2001 From: jeclar at essex.ac.uk (Clarke, John E) Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2001 16:56:17 +0100 Subject: Bogoyvalenskiy, D Message-ID: Dear all, I would really appreciate it if someone knew the reference (journal title even) of Bogoyvalenskiy's 1950's wug test article(s)(?). I hear this person was working in Moscow roughly at the same time as Jean Berko. The Internet comes up with nothing and I have no idea which journal to start looking in. Sorry to bother you, but I hope you may be able to help. Thanking you all! Kind regards, John Clarke jeclar at essex.ac.uk MA Language Acquisition University of Essex, UK From nratner at hesp.umd.edu Wed Aug 8 17:26:42 2001 From: nratner at hesp.umd.edu (Nan Ratner) Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2001 13:26:42 -0400 Subject: Bogoyvalenskiy, D Message-ID: The reference is: (1973). The acquisition of Russian inflections. In Ferguson & Slobin (eds) Studies of child language development. pp 284-292, NY: Holt Rinehart & Winston. Nan From macwhinn at hku.hk Thu Aug 9 03:17:58 2001 From: macwhinn at hku.hk (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Thu, 9 Aug 2001 11:17:58 +0800 Subject: changing your info-childes subscription Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES People, This is the time of the year when people move to new jobs and get new email accounts. As a result, we tend to get a few "please remove my name" messages. Instead of sending these letters to the whole list of 1100 people, it is better to send them to either me (macw at cmu.edu) or Kelley Sacco (kelley.sacco at cmu.edu). We are happy to help. Or you can do this yourself by sending the message "unsubscribe info-childes" to requests at mail.talkbank.org Many thanks. --Brian MacWhinney From slobin at cogsci.berkeley.edu Thu Aug 9 08:03:35 2001 From: slobin at cogsci.berkeley.edu (Dan I. SLOBIN) Date: Thu, 9 Aug 2001 01:03:35 -0700 Subject: Bogoyvalenskiy, D In-Reply-To: <149DEAD6B76CD5119C9A009027D6396B363D33@sernt28.essex.ac.uk> Message-ID: Bogoyavlenskiy reported his study in a book: Bogoyavlenskiy, D. N. (1957). Psixologija usvoenija orfografii [Psychology of acquisition of orthography]. Moscow: Akademija Pedagogiceskix Nauk RSFSR. The study was part of a series of studies about children's metalinguistic awareness, in relation to literacy. The section that parallel's Berko's "wug" test was published in English translation as: Bogoyavlenskiy, D. N. (1973). The acquisition of Russian inflections. In C. A. Ferguson & D. I. Slobin (Eds.), Studies of child language development (pp. 284-292). New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Bogoyavlenskiy and Berko(-Gleason) were not aware of each other's work. -Dan Slobin On Wed, 8 Aug 2001, Clarke, John E wrote: > Dear all, > > I would really appreciate it if someone knew the reference (journal title > even) of Bogoyvalenskiy's 1950's wug test article(s)(?). I hear this person > was working in Moscow roughly at the same time as Jean Berko. The Internet > comes up with nothing and I have no idea which journal to start looking in. > Sorry to bother you, but I hope you may be able to help. > > Thanking you all! > Kind regards, > > John Clarke > jeclar at essex.ac.uk > > MA Language Acquisition > University of Essex, UK > From aluapairam at lycos.com Thu Aug 9 12:57:04 2001 From: aluapairam at lycos.com (Maria Paula) Date: Thu, 9 Aug 2001 09:57:04 -0300 Subject: Please remove my address. Message-ID: Could you please remove aluapairam at mailcity.com from the list? Thanks!! Get 250 color business cards for FREE! http://businesscards.lycos.com/vp/fastpath/ From gleason at bu.edu Thu Aug 9 15:21:06 2001 From: gleason at bu.edu (Jean Berko Gleason) Date: Thu, 9 Aug 2001 11:21:06 -0400 Subject: Bogoyvalenskiy, D Message-ID: "Dan I. SLOBIN" wrote: > > Bogoyavlenskiy and Berko(-Gleason) were not aware of each other's work. > > -Dan Slobin > Dan is right, of course. Also, Bogoyavlenskiy really did much more with derivational morphology, which is richer in Russian than in English, than we did. Prior to that, in addition to the work of scholars like Gvozdev, there was a lot of anecdotal evidence on morphological innovation in Russian, including a very charming book by Kornei Chukovskii, published around 1956. -- Jean Berko Gleason From Neil.Coffey at ox.compsoc.net Fri Aug 10 13:51:20 2001 From: Neil.Coffey at ox.compsoc.net (Neil Coffey) Date: Fri, 10 Aug 2001 14:51:20 +0100 Subject: Sound recording Message-ID: On Mon, 6 Aug 2001, Joe Pater wrote: > I recently spent a fair bit of time researching this question. For some > reason portable Minidisc recorders are rarely, if ever, made with a digital > output (presumably, either for cost-effectiveness, or to discourage digital > copying). As I understand things, there is a genuine technical reason for blocking digital-to-digital copying of Minidiscs. Because of the way the compression process works, if you repeatedly compress then decompress data via a minidisc, this actually leads to a degradation of the recording. (A bit like if you continually compress and decompress a JPEG image this gives a slight degradation of the image each time.) So the only real way to do a faithful digital copy would be for the machines to output the actual compressed data stored on the disc, and Sony presumably don't want to do this for reasons of propriety. But of course, the fact that it discourages copying is no doubt a handy bonus for the music industry... > You can get a "Pro" minidisc recorder for over $1000, but at that > price, you may as well buy a DAT recorder, which doesn't use any compression. There's a standard protocol for marking digital data as being 'non-copiable'. As I understand things, consumer goods with digital inputs check for the presence of this marking and act accordingly; "professional" equipment generally provides the facility to ignore the non-copiable status of the signal and let you copy it anyway. So presumably that's what your "Pro" minidisc recorder does. Some digital soundcards will also let you do intelligient things with the encoding of digital data -- e.g. strip the data of the 'non-copiable' marking. The card we have in our lab for example comes with a program which simply takes sound to the digital in, strips it of its non-copiable flag, and pipes it to the digital out. So I assume you could hook a minidisc machine up to each end and hey presto. If your main reason for not going for minidisc is the non-copiability, then this might be an alternative solution. Incidentally, has anyone actually studied the suitability of minidiscs for linguistic analysis in detail? The compression algorithm potentially does some fairly hefty munging about with the signal, and I'd have thought one would have to be at best pretty cautious about any acoustic analysis done on a minidisc recording. Neil From jeclar at essex.ac.uk Sat Aug 11 15:03:41 2001 From: jeclar at essex.ac.uk (Clarke, John E) Date: Sat, 11 Aug 2001 16:03:41 +0100 Subject: Bogoyvalenskiy, D Message-ID: Dear Dan, Thank you for your message. My present endeavour is to complete my MA dissertation which is looking at the acquisition of comparative adjectives in 5 and 7 year-old children, following up studies pursued by Prof. Clahsen & Prof. Temple here at Essex (to appear) who investigate the phenomena in relation to children with WS using the much admired elicited production experiment and one by Dr. Graziano-King at CUNY (1999) who looked at the developmental path of 'er' and 'more' using the much admired relative judgement task. My conclusion discusses briefly an issue that was raised recently on info-childes, that of trying to account for the large number of stems in (impaired) subjects in wug type tasks in relation to me trying to account for why my unimpaired seven-year olds were performing puzzlingly and produced so many stems. I felt they didn't refuse to perform the task, however, because they produced the superlative form often fine. I was looking back at Berko, Selby, the earliest elicited production studies in my area I knew, noting that eliciting adjectival comparatives was difficult. I wanted to know about Bogoyvalenskiy as well just in order to indicate the contribution to the 'wug' effort. I found that there was a difference in the usage of 'er' and 'more' in the two tasks. The elicited production experiment just didn't (despite all the mysterious stems) get the children producing 'more', they just always fell back on a stem, a substitution or 'er'. The judgement task, however, saw a higher preference in a greater number of adjective categories (as Graziano-King categorised them into monosyllables and unstressed endings in disyllables) for 'more'. The two tasks, then perhaps (at least for these thirty-eight children) tap different things. One twelve year old at a youth group who amazingly found all this interesting, asked to do the task. She came out with 'bad-badder', 'good-gooder' and just afterwards said to her younger friend 'I did better than you!' Isn't it strange? All the best and thank you to all those who gave me the reference, John MA Language Acquisition University of Essex, UK jeclar at essex.ac.uk unclejohnnies24 at yahoo.co.uk From tenbrink at informatik.uni-hamburg.de Mon Aug 13 10:46:11 2001 From: tenbrink at informatik.uni-hamburg.de (Thora Tenbrink) Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2001 12:46:11 +0200 Subject: Bogoyvalenskiy, D In-Reply-To: <149DEAD6B76CD5119C9A009027D6396B363D42@sernt28.essex.ac.uk > Message-ID: > One twelve year old at a youth group who amazingly found all this >interesting, asked to do the task. She came out with 'bad-badder', >'good-gooder' and just afterwards said to her younger friend 'I did better >than you!' Isn't it strange? John, I think there is a very simple explanation for this: "I did better than you" surely is a piece of prefabricated speech; I do not think that speakers really think of "better" as a comparative of "good" when using this sentence at all. Even more so because there is no such form as "I did good" - you would have to use the adverb. (Asked for the comparative of "well", what would the girl have said?) While I do not know about the tasks you mentioned, I suppose that the aim is to find out how much children know about comparatives and superlatives, which are abstract metalinguistic concepts. Such concepts do not have much to do with children's linguistic skills, because quite a lot of what we say in everyday life consists of strings of words that we have heard many times before, and which are therefore readily available. - Thora http://www.spatial-cognition.de --------------------------------------------- Thora Tenbrink Spatial Cognition Priority Program & WSV Universitaet Hamburg FB Informatik Vogt-Koelln-Str. 30 D-22527 Hamburg Tel.: +49/*40/42883-2382 Fax: +49/*40/42883-2385 e-mail: tenbrink at informatik.uni-hamburg.de http://www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/WSV/hp/tenbrink-english.htm From jeclar at essex.ac.uk Mon Aug 13 12:38:37 2001 From: jeclar at essex.ac.uk (Clarke, John E) Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2001 13:38:37 +0100 Subject: originating from Bogoyvalenskiy, D Message-ID: Dear Thora, Thank you for your kind message. Yes you are right, the sentence the girl used probably is a piece of fabricated speech and I really don't imagine this girl thought 'ah yes I'm using the comparative now'...language doesn't work that way, but it just means to me when a child uses 'gooder' in a task and then 'better' immediately after, regardless of the context, you can't then reliably say that that child hasn't acquired the irregular 'good-better' just because they say 'gooder' in an unnatural setting like a wug test. Who is to say that the child doesn't then use 'better' as a comparative to the same friend in the minibus on the way home? Comparatives and superlatives may be 'abstract metalinguistic concepts' but for most people out there who have no concern for linguistics, they are also pieces of language, and uses of more and -er, with comparative more coming later in development must then say something about the child's acquisition of the system. I don't believe to the child everything they have heard is readily available, if it was there would be no such thing as language acquisition and even if it was then who is to say that the child actually understands what they are saying? Thanks again and receive kind regards from John MA Language Acquisition University of Essex, UK From a.karmiloff-smith at ich.ucl.ac.uk Mon Aug 13 17:06:56 2001 From: a.karmiloff-smith at ich.ucl.ac.uk (Annette Karmiloff-Smith) Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2001 18:06:56 +0100 Subject: Bogoyvalenskiy, D In-Reply-To: <3.0.6.32.20010813124611.0079c860@rzdspc2.informatik.uni-hamburg.de> Message-ID: Don't Americans say "I did good" - I hear them say in response to "how are you" = "Good" and it is creeping into British english too, replacing "well". I've heard anecodatlly bestest, betterest amd gooder but never goodest.. Annette At 12:46 pm +0200 13/8/01, Thora Tenbrink wrote: > > One twelve year old at a youth group who amazingly found all this >>interesting, asked to do the task. She came out with 'bad-badder', >>'good-gooder' and just afterwards said to her younger friend 'I did better >>than you!' Isn't it strange? > >John, >I think there is a very simple explanation for this: "I did better than >you" surely is a piece of prefabricated speech; I do not think that >speakers really think of "better" as a comparative of "good" when using >this sentence at all. Even more so because there is no such form as "I did >good" - you would have to use the adverb. (Asked for the comparative of >"well", what would the girl have said?) While I do not know about the tasks >you mentioned, I suppose that the aim is to find out how much children know >about comparatives and superlatives, which are abstract metalinguistic >concepts. Such concepts do not have much to do with children's linguistic >skills, because quite a lot of what we say in everyday life consists of >strings of words that we have heard many times before, and which are >therefore readily available. >- Thora > > > >http://www.spatial-cognition.de > > >--------------------------------------------- > >Thora Tenbrink >Spatial Cognition Priority Program & WSV >Universitaet Hamburg >FB Informatik >Vogt-Koelln-Str. 30 >D-22527 Hamburg > >Tel.: +49/*40/42883-2382 >Fax: +49/*40/42883-2385 >e-mail: tenbrink at informatik.uni-hamburg.de >http://www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/WSV/hp/tenbrink-english.htm -- ________________________________________________________________ Professor A.Karmiloff-Smith, Head, Neurocognitive Development Unit, Institute of Child Health, 30 Guilford Street, London WC1N 1EH, U.K. tel: 0207 905 2754 fax: 0207 242 7717 http://www.ich.ucl.ac.uk/units/ncdu/NDU_homepage.htm ________________________________________________________________ From macwhinn at hku.hk Tue Aug 14 09:55:25 2001 From: macwhinn at hku.hk (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2001 17:55:25 +0800 Subject: French clinical data Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, I am happy to announce the addition to CHILDES of a new corpus of the early sentences of six French children contributed by Marie-Therese Le Normand. Two of the children had epilepsy and four were diagnosed with SLI. The corpus includes about 200 short sentences from each child in a single CHAT file linked to the audio productions in a .wav file. These are not conversational data, but are intended instead to represent the vocal characteristics of speech in these children. The data (audio and transcripts) can be downloaded from http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/audio Here is the documentation file for this fascinating new corpus: Contact Address: Dr. Marie-Th?r?se Le Normand, Laboratoire de Neuropsychopathologie du langage et de la cognition INSERM 9609, Groupe Piti?-Salp?tri?re 47 Bld de l?H?pital 75651 Paris cedex 13 lenorman at chups.jussieu.fr lenorman at infobiogen.fr Le Normand audio corpora Children with SLI and EPIlepsy (EPI) involved in this corpora were part of a larger project supported by L?Institut National de la Sant? et de la Recherche M?dicale (INSERM), Paris, investigating the language development of children with neurogenic disorder. This project may contribute to central issues in developmental psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics, particularly in the understanding of the cerebral involvement in the acquisition of language. Exclusion criteria for SLI and EPI children were premature birth, perinatal complications, evidence of obvious damage following a neurological examination, a diagnosed behavior problem or other psychopathology. Inclusion criteria were an Apgar score of 10 five minutes after birth, a nonverbal intellect score greater than 90 (MacCarthy, 1976; range: 95-126), intact hearing as assessed in an audiometric evaluation, native speaker of French and uninterrupted participation in the study. EEG evidenced for both EPI children a clear-cut left temporal focus. MRI evidenced for Sofian a left temporal lesion, most probably dysplastic without destruction of parenchyme. MRI evidenced no lesion for Beno?t. PET scan revealed left temporal hypometabolism for Sofian. No PET scan was available for Beno?t. Comprehension tasks The selection of language comprehension tasks included pointing (choosing which items in a set of pictures are named by the experimenter), and understanding of prepositions (positioning play figures; there were 18 requests to assess representation of space, quantity, partition and localization). Table 1. z- scores of language comprehension tasks Pointing Understanding of prepositions z-scores z-scores EPI Beno?t 1 0 Sofian 0 0 SLI Beranger 1 -0.5 Hippolyte +1 +2 Paul -1 0.5 Samuel -1.7 -0.6 S?bastien 0 0 Production tasks The linguistic production tasks included repetition of mono-, bi- and polysyllabic words spoken by the experimenter; naming of pictures of objects; lexical and morphological categories diversity as measured by the number of type and tokens uttered in a 20 min controlled play session. A JPEG photo of the setup is included with the data files. This is a form of narrative where the subject is asked to verbalize all manipulations and actions with dolls and objects in and around a doll house. Normative data on the comprehension tasks are found in Chevrie-Muller, Simon and Decante (1981) for ages between 3 years, 9 months and 8 years, and normative data on the production tasks (lexical and morphological category diversity) are found in Le Normand (1997) for ages between 2years and 4 years. Video and audio recordings The video and audio recording sessions lasted approximately 20 minutes and were conducted in the lab with mother or father using the same play Fisher-Price toys materials. All sessions were transcribed in accordance with the guidelines produced by the Codes for Human Analysis of Transcripts (CHAT) which is part of the Child Language Data Exchange system (CHILDES) (MacWhinney, 1995). The computerized transcripts were then compared with the original videotaped data by an independent transcriber in order to verify their accuracy. This process resulted in 97.0% inter-transcriber reliability. Any disagreements concerning the transcription were resolved by re-examination until consensus was reached. From tenbrink at informatik.uni-hamburg.de Tue Aug 14 11:37:24 2001 From: tenbrink at informatik.uni-hamburg.de (Thora Tenbrink) Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2001 13:37:24 +0200 Subject: originating from Bogoyvalenskiy, D In-Reply-To: <149DEAD6B76CD5119C9A009027D6396B363D44@sernt28.essex.ac.uk > Message-ID: >work that way, but it just means to me when a child uses 'gooder' in a task >and then 'better' immediately after, regardless of the context, you can't >then reliably say that that child hasn't acquired the irregular >'good-better' just because they say 'gooder' in an unnatural setting like a >wug test. Who is to say that the child doesn't then use 'better' as a >comparative to the same friend in the minibus on the way home? You find this effect in many well-known concepts and contexts, e.g. regarding the acquisition of before and after: children may use them correctly in certain natural contexts as early as age 2, while psycholinguistic experiments prove that a thorough, more or less context-free knowledge of the (possible) meaning(s) of before and after is not acquired before an age of seven years or so. This is to say, natural language is acquired in many different ways and always in certain contexts, and nearly always involving pieces of readily available formats. Thus, to me it does not really make sense to ask when exactly the child has acquired the irregular 'good-better', it is more complicated than that. >of the system. I don't believe to the child everything they have heard is >readily available, if it was there would be no such thing as language >acquisition and even if it was then who is to say that the child actually >understands what they are saying? I did not mean to say that everything was readily available. What I mean is that some strings of words, or phonemes, or formats, are more available than others. Such as "thank you", which is certainly not broken down into verb and pronoun each time it is processed; it is acquired and used as a ready-made expression to be used in certain contexts. Similarly, while "I did better than you" must of course be understood before it can be used correctly, this does not necessarily involve an understanding of the irregular comparative. Rather, it may involve an understanding that this is the sentence to use when this particular meaning should be expressed. "doing better than" might then be a format that can be used involving varying participants. To me, this is even more plausible because the German equivalent is no exact translation of the English sentence. "Ich war besser als du" really means "I was better than you", but it would most certainly be used in contexts where English speaking people use "I did better than you". The literal translation "Ich tat (es) besser als du" is, to my knowledge, almost never used. It could be that the question to ask really is, when do children understand that "better" (which they may have used correctly in varying contexts for a long time) is systematically related to "good" -- in the same way as "worse" is to "bad", and "faster" is to "fast"? Then, a metalinguistic knowledge about comparatives can be said to have been acquired. -- Thora http://www.spatial-cognition.de --------------------------------------------- Thora Tenbrink Spatial Cognition Priority Program & WSV Universitaet Hamburg FB Informatik Vogt-Koelln-Str. 30 D-22527 Hamburg Tel.: +49/*40/42883-2382 Fax: +49/*40/42883-2385 e-mail: tenbrink at informatik.uni-hamburg.de http://www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/WSV/hp/tenbrink-english.htm From tenbrink at informatik.uni-hamburg.de Tue Aug 14 11:46:39 2001 From: tenbrink at informatik.uni-hamburg.de (Thora Tenbrink) Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2001 13:46:39 +0200 Subject: Bogoyvalenskiy, D In-Reply-To: Message-ID: At 18:06 13.08.2001 +0100, you wrote: >Don't Americans say "I did good" - I hear them say in response to >"how are you" = "Good" and it is creeping into British english too, >replacing "well". I've heard anecodatlly bestest, betterest amd >gooder but never goodest.. >Annette > Thank you for this -- I never heard that. This might make it more plausible that those using "I did better" are somehow aware of the relationship to "I did good". Of course, understanding "well" really well involves understanding the relationship of the adverb to the adjective. Could it be that the increasing usage of the adjective rather than the adverb is due to a certain uneasiness with this irregularity? Maybe, for speakers, "well" is somehow too remote from "good" to be used with the same ease (in contexts where something "good" is to be expressed), so they increasingly prefer "good"?! (I'm not too familiar with the mechanisms of language change -- I'm just speculating!) - Thora http://www.spatial-cognition.de --------------------------------------------- Thora Tenbrink Spatial Cognition Priority Program & WSV Universitaet Hamburg FB Informatik Vogt-Koelln-Str. 30 D-22527 Hamburg Tel.: +49/*40/42883-2382 Fax: +49/*40/42883-2385 e-mail: tenbrink at informatik.uni-hamburg.de http://www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/WSV/hp/tenbrink-english.htm From jeclar at essex.ac.uk Tue Aug 14 14:52:21 2001 From: jeclar at essex.ac.uk (Clarke, John E) Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2001 15:52:21 +0100 Subject: originating from Bogoyvalenskiy, D Message-ID: Dear Thora Thank you for your message. I agree with you whole-heartedly. Saying a child has or has not acquired 'good-better' through a wug-test is an over-simplification and that was my point really. In that sense it is interesting to see when, as you suggest, comparatives are acquired metalinguistically (and subconsciously) as lexical subentries of an adjective, when 'better' relates to 'good'. The wug-test becomes something other then when you test an irregular like 'good-better' because you are testing other knowledge, not related to morphology, knowledge of more or morphological productivity. However, in that primary sense of more versus -er, comparatives then also relate to language development (outside of other cognitive development), a system which in English involves both syntax and a suffix. Thank you so much for your interest and receive kind regards from John MA Language Acquisition University of Essex, UK From flanigan at oak.cats.ohiou.edu Tue Aug 14 15:38:08 2001 From: flanigan at oak.cats.ohiou.edu (Beverly Flanigan) Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2001 11:38:08 -0400 Subject: Bogoyvalenskiy, D In-Reply-To: <3.0.6.32.20010814134639.007a5530@rzdspc2.informatik.uni-ha mburg.de> Message-ID: The adverbial use of "good" in the States may have begun as a dialect variant, but it is now simply idiomatic in certain phrases: "You did good," and after "How are you?" "I'm good, how are you?" But hasn't the same change occurred with German "gut"? Isn't "wohl" reserved mainly for idioms like "Leb wohl"? Such regularization is not unusual; adverbial -ly is also falling away in many dialects: "Go slow," "Do you say this different?" At 01:46 PM 8/14/01 +0200, you wrote: >At 18:06 13.08.2001 +0100, you wrote: > >Don't Americans say "I did good" - I hear them say in response to > >"how are you" = "Good" and it is creeping into British english too, > >replacing "well". I've heard anecodatlly bestest, betterest amd > >gooder but never goodest.. > >Annette > > > >Thank you for this -- I never heard that. This might make it more plausible >that those using "I did better" are somehow aware of the relationship to "I >did good". >Of course, understanding "well" really well involves understanding the >relationship of the adverb to the adjective. Could it be that the >increasing usage of the adjective rather than the adverb is due to a >certain uneasiness with this irregularity? Maybe, for speakers, "well" is >somehow too remote from "good" to be used with the same ease (in contexts >where something "good" is to be expressed), so they increasingly prefer >"good"?! (I'm not too familiar with the mechanisms of language change -- >I'm just speculating!) >- Thora > > > >http://www.spatial-cognition.de > > >--------------------------------------------- > >Thora Tenbrink >Spatial Cognition Priority Program & WSV >Universitaet Hamburg >FB Informatik >Vogt-Koelln-Str. 30 >D-22527 Hamburg > >Tel.: +49/*40/42883-2382 >Fax: +49/*40/42883-2385 >e-mail: tenbrink at informatik.uni-hamburg.de >http://www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/WSV/hp/tenbrink-english.htm _____________________________________________ Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm From jonmach at informix.com Tue Aug 14 16:18:25 2001 From: jonmach at informix.com (Jon Machtynger) Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2001 17:18:25 +0100 Subject: Bogoyvalenskiy, D In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.20010814113102.01cc08d0@oak.cats.ohiou.edu> Message-ID: > The adverbial use of "good" in the States may have begun as a dialect > variant, but it is now simply idiomatic in certain phrases: "You did > good," and after "How are you?" "I'm good, how are you?" But hasn't the > same change occurred with German "gut"? Isn't "wohl" reserved mainly for > idioms like "Leb wohl"? Such regularization is not unusual; adverbial -ly > is also falling away in many dialects: "Go slow," "Do you say this different?" I don't think that "you did good" uses good as an adverb, rather a noun, as in "let's do some good". The fact that people may consider this in an adverbial sense is probably a misunderstanding. Also from a German perspective, I think the context is understood to the native speaker. I'm no native speaker, but I believe that answering 'gut' would be implicitly considered "mir geht's gut" (i.e. goes well with me). Wohl would be different from gut (just as well is different from good) e.g. ich fuhle mich wohl. Jon > >At 18:06 13.08.2001 +0100, you wrote: > > >Don't Americans say "I did good" - I hear them say in response to > > >"how are you" = "Good" and it is creeping into British english too, > > >replacing "well". I've heard anecodatlly bestest, betterest amd > > >gooder but never goodest.. > > >Annette > > > > > > >Thank you for this -- I never heard that. This might make it more plausible > >that those using "I did better" are somehow aware of the relationship to "I > >did good". > >Of course, understanding "well" really well involves understanding the > >relationship of the adverb to the adjective. Could it be that the > >increasing usage of the adjective rather than the adverb is due to a > >certain uneasiness with this irregularity? Maybe, for speakers, "well" is > >somehow too remote from "good" to be used with the same ease (in contexts > >where something "good" is to be expressed), so they increasingly prefer > >"good"?! (I'm not too familiar with the mechanisms of language change -- > >I'm just speculating!) > >- Thora > > > > > > > >http://www.spatial-cognition.de > > > > > >--------------------------------------------- > > > >Thora Tenbrink > >Spatial Cognition Priority Program & WSV > >Universitaet Hamburg > >FB Informatik > >Vogt-Koelln-Str. 30 > >D-22527 Hamburg > > > >Tel.: +49/*40/42883-2382 > >Fax: +49/*40/42883-2385 > >e-mail: tenbrink at informatik.uni-hamburg.de > >http://www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/WSV/hp/tenbrink-english.htm > > > _____________________________________________ > Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics > Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 > Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 > http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm > From flanigan at oak.cats.ohiou.edu Tue Aug 14 17:07:41 2001 From: flanigan at oak.cats.ohiou.edu (Beverly Flanigan) Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2001 13:07:41 -0400 Subject: Bogoyvalenskiy, D In-Reply-To: <3B795D61.22646.19CCD58@localhost> Message-ID: We recently discussed this distinction on the American Dialect Society listserv, and we agreed that "You did good" could mean what you suggest (noun=a good thing/deed) but that it usually doesn't in its current idiomatic usage. It's a congratulatory comment, after, e.g., a good sports play or a good exam score, and even (!) professors use it, though in a somewhat jocular manner (in what Gumperz called a metaphoric switch to colloquial usage). There's clearly no misunderstanding the speaker's meaning. Similarly, I agree that there's no misunderstanding in the German usage, but my recollection is that "gut" is now the general adverb except in expression of emotion, as in your example. The performative adverb would be 'gut', I believe--but let's hear from a native speaker! At 05:18 PM 8/14/01 +0100, you wrote: > > The adverbial use of "good" in the States may have begun as a dialect > > variant, but it is now simply idiomatic in certain phrases: "You did > > good," and after "How are you?" "I'm good, how are you?" But hasn't the > > same change occurred with German "gut"? Isn't "wohl" reserved mainly for > > idioms like "Leb wohl"? Such regularization is not unusual; adverbial -ly > > is also falling away in many dialects: "Go slow," "Do you say this > different?" > >I don't think that "you did good" uses good as an adverb, rather a noun, as >in "let's do some good". The fact that people may consider this in an >adverbial sense is probably a misunderstanding. > >Also from a German perspective, I think the context is understood to the >native speaker. I'm no native speaker, but I believe that answering 'gut' >would be implicitly considered "mir geht's gut" (i.e. goes well with me). > >Wohl would be different from gut (just as well is different from good) >e.g. ich >fuhle mich wohl. > >Jon > > > >At 18:06 13.08.2001 +0100, you wrote: > > > >Don't Americans say "I did good" - I hear them say in response to > > > >"how are you" = "Good" and it is creeping into British english too, > > > >replacing "well". I've heard anecodatlly bestest, betterest amd > > > >gooder but never goodest.. > > > >Annette > > > > > > > > > >Thank you for this -- I never heard that. This might make it more > plausible > > >that those using "I did better" are somehow aware of the relationship > to "I > > >did good". > > >Of course, understanding "well" really well involves understanding the > > >relationship of the adverb to the adjective. Could it be that the > > >increasing usage of the adjective rather than the adverb is due to a > > >certain uneasiness with this irregularity? Maybe, for speakers, "well" is > > >somehow too remote from "good" to be used with the same ease (in contexts > > >where something "good" is to be expressed), so they increasingly prefer > > >"good"?! (I'm not too familiar with the mechanisms of language change -- > > >I'm just speculating!) > > >- Thora > > > > > > > > > > > >http://www.spatial-cognition.de > > > > > > > > >--------------------------------------------- > > > > > >Thora Tenbrink > > >Spatial Cognition Priority Program & WSV > > >Universitaet Hamburg > > >FB Informatik > > >Vogt-Koelln-Str. 30 > > >D-22527 Hamburg > > > > > >Tel.: +49/*40/42883-2382 > > >Fax: +49/*40/42883-2385 > > >e-mail: tenbrink at informatik.uni-hamburg.de > > >http://www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/WSV/hp/tenbrink-english.htm > > > > _____________________________________________ Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm From katewq at hawaii.edu Tue Aug 14 20:03:45 2001 From: katewq at hawaii.edu (Kate Wolfe-Quintero) Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2001 10:03:45 -1000 Subject: 'good' In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.20010814125522.01686f00@oak.cats.ohiou.edu> Message-ID: Don't you think that 'you did good' comes from 'you did something good' which is ultimately 'you did something that is good'? It's not an adverb in the sense of you did it well, but an adjective with ellipsis of 'something'. >We recently discussed this distinction on the American Dialect >Society listserv, and we agreed that "You did good" could mean what >you suggest (noun=a good thing/deed) but that it usually doesn't in >its current idiomatic usage. It's a congratulatory comment, after, >e.g., a good sports play or a good exam score, and even (!) >professors use it, though in a somewhat jocular manner (in what >Gumperz called a metaphoric switch to colloquial usage). There's >clearly no misunderstanding the speaker's meaning. > -- *************************************************************** Kate Wolfe-Quintero Associate Professor, PhD Program in SLA and MA Program in ESL Department of Second Language Studies University of Hawai`i at Manoa Director, Hawai'i English Language Program 1395 Lower Campus Rd. MC 13-1, Honolulu, HI 96822 email: katewq at hawaii.edu phone: (808) 956-9909 fax: (808) 956-2802 From lise.menn at colorado.edu Tue Aug 14 21:28:07 2001 From: lise.menn at colorado.edu (Lise Menn) Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2001 15:28:07 -0600 Subject: Bogoyvalenskiy, D In-Reply-To: <3B795D61.22646.19CCD58@localhost> Message-ID: Dear colleagues I suggest that the fact that we have no real way to test any of these claims points up serious limitations to the whole notion of 'part-of-speech'. Which is not exactly a new observation... Lise Menn At 5:18 PM +0100 8/14/01, Jon Machtynger wrote: >> The adverbial use of "good" in the States may have begun as a dialect >> variant, but it is now simply idiomatic in certain phrases: "You did >> good," and after "How are you?" "I'm good, how are you?" But hasn't the >> same change occurred with German "gut"? Isn't "wohl" reserved mainly for >> idioms like "Leb wohl"? Such regularization is not unusual; adverbial -ly >> is also falling away in many dialects: "Go slow," "Do you say this >>different?" > >I don't think that "you did good" uses good as an adverb, rather a noun, as >in "let's do some good". The fact that people may consider this in an >adverbial sense is probably a misunderstanding. > >Also from a German perspective, I think the context is understood to the >native speaker. I'm no native speaker, but I believe that answering 'gut' >would be implicitly considered "mir geht's gut" (i.e. goes well with me). > >Wohl would be different from gut (just as well is different from good) >e.g. ich >fuhle mich wohl. > >Jon > >> >At 18:06 13.08.2001 +0100, you wrote: >> > >Don't Americans say "I did good" - I hear them say in response to >> > >"how are you" = "Good" and it is creeping into British english too, >> > >replacing "well". I've heard anecodatlly bestest, betterest amd >> > >gooder but never goodest.. >> > >Annette >> > > >> > >> >Thank you for this -- I never heard that. This might make it more plausible >> >that those using "I did better" are somehow aware of the relationship to "I >> >did good". >> >Of course, understanding "well" really well involves understanding the >> >relationship of the adverb to the adjective. Could it be that the >> >increasing usage of the adjective rather than the adverb is due to a >> >certain uneasiness with this irregularity? Maybe, for speakers, "well" is >> >somehow too remote from "good" to be used with the same ease (in contexts >> >where something "good" is to be expressed), so they increasingly prefer >> >"good"?! (I'm not too familiar with the mechanisms of language change -- >> >I'm just speculating!) >> >- Thora >> > >> > >> > >> >http://www.spatial-cognition.de >> > >> > >> >--------------------------------------------- >> > >> >Thora Tenbrink >> >Spatial Cognition Priority Program & WSV >> >Universitaet Hamburg >> >FB Informatik >> >Vogt-Koelln-Str. 30 >> >D-22527 Hamburg >> > >> >Tel.: +49/*40/42883-2382 >> >Fax: +49/*40/42883-2385 >> >e-mail: tenbrink at informatik.uni-hamburg.de >> >http://www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/WSV/hp/tenbrink-english.htm >> >> >> _____________________________________________ >> Beverly Olson Flanigan Department of Linguistics >> Ohio University Athens, OH 45701 >> Ph.: (740) 593-4568 Fax: (740) 593-2967 >> http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm >> Beware Procrustes bearing Occam's razor. Lise Menn office phone 303-492-1609 Professor home fax 303-413-0017 Department of Linguistics UCB 295 University of Colorado Boulder, CO 80309-0295 Lise Menn's home page http://www.colorado.edu/linguistics/faculty/lmenn/ "Shirley Says: Living with Aphasia" http://spot.colorado.edu/~menn/Shirley4.pdf From tenbrink at informatik.uni-hamburg.de Wed Aug 15 11:51:20 2001 From: tenbrink at informatik.uni-hamburg.de (Thora Tenbrink) Date: Wed, 15 Aug 2001 13:51:20 +0200 Subject: well, good, wohl, & gut In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.20010814125522.01686f00@oak.cats.ohiou.edu> Message-ID: >Similarly, I agree that there's no misunderstanding in the German usage, >but my recollection is that "gut" is now the general adverb except in >expression of emotion, as in your example. The performative adverb would >be 'gut', I believe--but let's hear from a native speaker! > Seems like a good intuition to start from, I have no objections. A query in an online dictionary (LEO) brought about some interesting results that inspire for a more thorough investigation of the semantic fields of "well", "good", "gut" and "wohl": done good -- gutgetan to do good -- wohltun good deed -- die Wohltat / die gute Tat (which are two very different concepts!) to feel good -- sich wohlf?hlen (I did not find "sich gut f?hlen" -- but I would certainly use it in certain contexts; however, it is certainly not equivalent to "sich wohlf?hlen") to sell well -- sich gut verkaufen to bear oneself well -- sich gut betragen good -- das Wohl (e.g. common good - das gemeine Wohl/ Wohl der Gesellschaft) good -- das Gut (e.g. fragile good - zerbrechliches Gut) At first sight, and corresponding to intuitions, the semantic range of "wohl" seems to be quite remote from that of (adverbial) "gut". -- Thora From cslater at alma.edu Thu Aug 16 17:43:35 2001 From: cslater at alma.edu (Carol Slater) Date: Thu, 16 Aug 2001 13:43:35 -0400 Subject: Using CHILDES: Replies Message-ID: Dear Colleagues: Thanks to all of the list members who replied to my query about using CHILDES in an undergraduate course in language acquisition. It looks as though there are lots of ways to use it, varying widely in technical complexity and intensity. A number of people use CHILDES to create handouts for class discussion and analysis. Erika Hoff says, ? I have [only] used CHILDES to get the original Adam, Eve, and Sarah transcripts. I hand them out to the class and use them as examples of various phenomena and the students get to see the real words of famous subjects. I have also used those transcripts as the basis of take home exams with a question something like ?what does Eve know and what about language does she not know at this point in her development?? Students have thought that was interesting and valuable.? Lynn Santelmann makes more extensive use of CHILDES handouts. She says, ? I use the transcripts in two ways: First, I have created a packet of transcripts for the students to analyze, one set for child-directed speech, one for phonology, one for morphosyntax, and one for discourse/conversation. (I also have a set for narratives, but they did not come from CHILDES). Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get a good data set for word learning yet. I "clean up" these transcripts a bit to remove some of the analysis tiers, and I give them transcripts of different ages so they can see change over time. I give the students very specific questions or features to analyze, and then they work either in small groups or at home. We discuss the results in class. This gives them not only a chance to see some of the features that we've talked or read about first hand, but gives them a chance to see how hard it is to analyze things sometimes (e.g., is a morpheme missing because the child doesn't produce it or because the context does not provide an opportunity for the child to use it?).? People also involve students in analyzing CHILDES datasets with and without reliance on CLAN programs. Catherine Snow says, ?I have used CHILDES quite extensively in my course on child language to the extent of teaching the class while logged on to CHILDES so we could pursue particular issues (when does past tense first show up? what gets added when MLU goes from 1 to 2? what are the first words that kids say and to what extent are they the same across kids?) by downloading the relevant files preparatory to ... doing analysis right there and displaying the results. I also give analysis exercises as homework that students can do pretty efficiently using CLAN, or less efficiently without it (since some don?t want to really learn to use the system), and I provide CHAT formatted files as a basis for the longer analyses I assign for take-home essays. Again, the students can analyse the files using a word processor, or they can avail themselves of the CLAN options I also strongly encourage students to used archived data for their research projects, because they can then do something much bigger and more sophisticated. Santelmann prefers that students analyze their own data but ?a few students can?t do this, or want to analyze a language other than English, so I let them use CHILDES data. They?re able to do some nice analyses because they have had some practice in class.? Michelle Barton systematically helps students develop skill using CLAN. Her experience has been that they like using the CHILDES system and ?[In] several cases, having the skills has been a real plus for grad school applications and research assistant positions.? Some people also teach students about CHILDES transcription. Catherine Snow says, ?I use the projection system to display transcripts linked to videos so that students get a sense of how one translates interaction into analyzable text.? Margaret Friend has had students carry out their own transcriptions. ?My approach was to have students practice using the transcription system and ... complete two transcripts: one standard transcript which could be corrected for errors and on which they could obtain assistance from other students and one transcript that they had collected and recorded themselves. Students were assigned to groups of four and each group recorded narrative data from children of different ages. At the end of the semester they compared their transcriptions, did a count of open and closed-class words and presented an in-class developmental analysis based on the data . I was impressed with students? insights at the end of the course .? In addition, there were pointers to relevant resources. Barton uses the CLAN exercises included in Brian MacWhinney, The CHILDES Project, 3rd ed. Volume I. (There is an introductory Tutorial at the beginning of Part 2: The Programs, and a set of Exercises at the end; Barton notes that longer versions of the latter appeared in Sokolov and Snow (1994) Handbook of Research on Language Development Using CHILDES.) Judith Becker Bryant mentions that her chapter in Jean Berko Gleason (ed.), The Development of Language, is followed by several suggestions for projects using CHILDES. Finally, people gave helpful counsel. Barton cautioned about glitches in CHILDES manual exercises: ?[B]e sure to run them yourself and find the errors, before assigning them to the students. It?s frustrating for all if it doesn?t work right.? Santelmann says, ?[I]t?s sometimes difficult to find a set of transcripts that illustrate a particular phenomenon, so students may need some direction in where to look. (That?s particularly true for phonology kinds of things.) [T]he less computer savvy of my students have had trouble down-loading [transcripts].? Snow suggested that ?[I]t is slightly more efficient to have likely corpora pre-downloaded? if you plan to utilize them "on line" in class discussion and notes that encouraging sophisticated projects using archived data "only works, I find, if the class activities have demonstrated how to get into CHILDES, what data are available, and how to use CLAN." . Friend advises that the data transcription projects she assigned ?turned out to be a considerable amount of work for the students so you will need to think carefully about grading.? I am indebted to Info-childes list members for their generous support and look forward to next steps made possible by their help.. Carol Slater Department of Psychology & Cognitive Science Group Alma College Alma MI 48801 From macwhinn at hku.hk Fri Aug 17 04:02:42 2001 From: macwhinn at hku.hk (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Fri, 17 Aug 2001 12:02:42 +0800 Subject: Using CHILDES: Replies In-Reply-To: <3B7C05BD.B79CB418@alma.edu> Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES and Carol, Many thanks for this excellent summary of people's experiences using CHILDES for teaching. I have placed these comments at http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/html/tips.html I have also reorganized the home page a bit so that teaching-related materials are within a similar heading which is now called "Teaching with CHILDES." If anyone would like to add additional material to the "Tips" page, please tell me. Right now there is a glitch in the left hand column of that page, but it is otherwise pretty legible. --Brian MacWhinney From negishi at psychology.rutgers.edu Mon Aug 20 18:39:06 2001 From: negishi at psychology.rutgers.edu (Michiro Negishi) Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2001 14:39:06 -0400 Subject: center embedded relatives in Japanese Message-ID: Dear all, I was running a Japanese language version of Elman's grammar learning task and realized that there can be no more than two levels of center embedded RELATIVE clauses (thus not including "he says/knows that..." etc.) in Japanese. I can even prove it... and I'm sure it's a know fact. I did some web search trying to find relevant papers with no success. Does anybody know references? Or are there counter examples?? Any info. would be appreciated. Michiro Negishi, Ph.D. Psychology Dept. Rutgers U. -------------------------------------------------- Michiro Negishi, Ph.D. Psychology Dept. Rutgers U. Work : (973) 353-5850 Home: (201) 339-4179 Web : http://psychology.rutgers.edu/users/negishi -------------------------------------------------- From snehab at utdallas.edu Thu Aug 23 20:59:55 2001 From: snehab at utdallas.edu (Sneha V Bharadwaj) Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2001 15:59:55 -0500 Subject: French vowels Message-ID: Hello All, I am currently analyzing French words produced by English-speaking children and adults. I am looking for developmental data concerning formant frequencies of French vowels. Are there any published or unpublished work (similar to Peterson & Barney, 1952)? Thanks, -Sneha Bharadwaj -------------------------------- Sneha Bharadwaj School of Human development GR41 University of Texas at Dallas Richardson, TX 75083 -------------------------------- From velleman at comdis.umass.edu Thu Aug 23 21:49:55 2001 From: velleman at comdis.umass.edu (Shelley L. Velleman) Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2001 17:49:55 -0400 Subject: French lang. devel. norms Message-ID: I'm looking for references for language (including phonology) development norms for French. Thanks! Shelley Velleman From Hilkee at lrz.uni-muenchen.de Fri Aug 31 15:35:44 2001 From: Hilkee at lrz.uni-muenchen.de (Hilke Elsen) Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2001 17:35:44 +0200 Subject: blind children Message-ID: Dear all, a colleague in Cairo is looking for information on BLIND-DEAF and BLIND-MOTOR children, especially assessment / evaluation programs and intervention programs. If anyone could help, please send information to manalmorsy at hotmail.com. Thanks, Hilke