From DaleP at health.missouri.edu Thu Mar 2 03:24:13 2006 From: DaleP at health.missouri.edu (Dale, Philip S.) Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2006 21:24:13 -0600 Subject: Journal of Child Language Message-ID: Dear colleagues, Most of you are probably aware by now that we (Edith Bavin & Philip Dale) have taken over as editors of the Journal of Child Language. We are pleased and honored to follow a line of such distinguished and capable editors, including Elena Lieven who has completed nine years of yeoman service to the journal and the profession. We wanted you to know that we will be moving to electronic submission shortly; trials are now in progress. We will be using the ‘manuscript central’ service, which many of you will be familiar with from other journals. It is straightforward to use, reliable, and well-tested. We will be posting information about electronic submissions on our website in the next few months (http://journals.cambridge.org/jid_JCL). In the meantime we are using email as much as possible to speed up the turn around time between submission and editorial decision, something that is becoming increasingly important in this modern academic world. You will find on the website now some updated style guidelines; we ask that you look at them carefully in preparing manuscripts for submission. We thank you for supporting JCL in the past and look forward to your continued support. Please continue sending us your articles, and if you are interested in reviewing for our journal, please send your name and details of expertise to our administrative person, Miles Lambert (child_language at yahoo.co.uk). Kindest Regards, Edith & Philip From htagerf at bu.edu Fri Mar 3 14:16:40 2006 From: htagerf at bu.edu (htagerf at bu.edu) Date: Fri, 3 Mar 2006 09:16:40 -0500 Subject: RA Openings in Boston! Message-ID: I am resending this without the attachment. Please pass along to your best students and post in your department! RESEARCH ASSISTANT POSITION Boston University School of Medicine Laboratory of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Cognitive Neuroscience of Autism and Williams Syndrome STARTING SPRING/SUMMER 2006 Research positions available in NIH-funded research programs investigating the neurocognitive bases of autism and Williams syndrome. Job requirements include: background in Psychology or related field with Bachelors degree; research experience; strong organizational, interpersonal and computer skills (e.g., MS Office Word, Excel, Access; stimulus presentation software such E-Prime and Presentation) required. Most competitive applicants will have coursework and/or interest in cognitive science, neuroscience, developmental and/or clinical research. Familiarity with eye-tracking technology and/or psychophysiological measures as well as basic programming skills a big plus. Responsibilities include diagnostic, standardized IQ/language, and experimental testing of children and adults; implementing and troubleshooting new experiments and data management procedures; coding and analyzing data; maintaining electronic and paper files; and preparation of testing reports. We are seeking a mature, responsible, and highly motivated individual with a strong interest in autism, neurodevelopmental disorders, and/or social perception/cognition who would enjoy the experience of being involved in a large and active research lab (see our website: http://www.bu.edu/autism). The position requires a two-year commitment and provides excellent preparation for students who are interested in pursuing doctoral studies in clinical or developmental psychology or a related field. For more information, please send a cover letter, resume, and names of 3 references to: Robert M. Joseph, PhD or Daniela Plesa Skewer, PhD Department of Anatomy & Neurobiology Boston University School of Medicine 715 Albany Street L-814 Boston, MA 02118-2526 email: rmjoseph at bu.edu; dplesas at bu.edu From jill.hohenstein at kcl.ac.uk Fri Mar 3 17:03:22 2006 From: jill.hohenstein at kcl.ac.uk (Jill Hohenstein) Date: Fri, 3 Mar 2006 17:03:22 +0000 Subject: FW: URGENT: PhD Studentship in Language, Discourse & Communication In-Reply-To: <1dd.4ff17a92.31387de0@aol.com> Message-ID: The following details information about a studentship in the new Language, Discourse and Communication centre at King¹s College London. There ought to be an attachment to the email but the system will not accept attachments. The attachment contains the application for the studentship. If interested, please contact, Jill Hohenstein (jill.hohenstein at kcl.ac.uk) for a copy of the application form. Please note that applications for students interested in investigating language acquisition and cognitive development as related to language development are welcome. Dear colleague King¹s College London is offering a three year full-time doctoral studentship in language, discourse and communication (sociolinguistics, text linguistics, discourse analysis, literacy studies, educational linguistics, and cognitive/psycho-linguistics). This has now been advertised on the College website and the closing date is Friday 7 April 2006. The studentship involves a stipend of £14,300 in the first year (increasing in line with national levels subsequently) and a Home/EU fees waiver). The successful candidate will be affiliated to our new Centre, but based in the same department as their principal supervisor. Applicants will need to fill in the forms in consultation with a prospective supervisor - someone identified as having relevant research interests. If they don¹t already know us, we¹re asking applicants to consult the webpages at www.kcl.ac.uk/hums/ling to identify a potential supervisor, and to contact him/her as soon as possible with a first draft research proposal and an account of their qualifications and experience. Prospective students will need to apply for an ordinary MPhil/PhD place on the standard form in addition to filling out the special centre application This must be done by the 7 April 2006, though they don¹t have to have been offered a place by the deadline. Successful candidates will be affiliated with the centre but based in the department of their supervisor. If you¹d like further advice either on the process or on specific applications, please don¹t hesitate to contact me at ben.rampton at kcl.ac.uk (not the current benrampton1 at aol.com which I¹m not likely to reply to). * Please note ­ the attached application is NOT the same as the application form available on the College webpage where these studentships are advertised. For this LDC studentship, the College¹s generic form has been revised to bring it closer into line with Research Council requirements. To obtain the LDC studentship form, contact dave.flatman at kcl.ac.uk (entering ŒLDC Studentship¹ in the subject). Appendix: M-level courses in Language, Discourse & Communication o MA in World Englishes English Department ­ new course starting Sept 2006 http://www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/humanities/english/pg/masters/worldeng.html o MA in German Linguistics German Department http://www.kcl.ac.uk/pgp06/programme/396 o MA in Language, Ethnicity & Education Department of Education & Professional Studies http://www.kcl.ac.uk/education/modma/lang.html o MA in ELT & Applied Linguistics Department of Education & Professional Studies http://www.kcl.ac.uk/education/maelt.html o MRes in Language, Discourse & Communication School of Social Science & Public Policy & School of Humanities - new course designed to provide students with foundation research methods training prior to MPhil/PhD. Starting Sept 2006. For details, contact Roxy Harris (roxy.harris at kcl.ac.uk) ------ End of Forwarded Message ********************************************************** Jill Hohenstein, Ph.D. Lecturer, Psychology in Education Department of Education and Professional Studies Kings College London Franklin-Wilkins Building (Waterloo Bridge Wing) Waterloo Road London SE1 9NH Phone: 0207 848 3100 Fax: 0207 848 3182 ********************************************************** -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From gaby at UDel.Edu Sat Mar 4 19:52:10 2006 From: gaby at UDel.Edu (Gabriella Hermon) Date: Sat, 4 Mar 2006 14:52:10 -0500 Subject: Job announcement In-Reply-To: <21601.99505@mail.talkbank.org> Message-ID: Can you please post the following on your list: Department of Linguistics, University of Delaware Assistant Professor, 1 year Non Tenure Track position (renewable pending funding). Specialization in phonetics and phonology. PHD in Linguistics by June 2006 required. Teaching duties include undegraduate and graduate courses in phonetics and phonology. Competitive salary and benefits package. Please send all materials, including letters of recommendation, CV, application, samples of work, and teaching evaluations (if available) to: Gabriella Hermon Linguistics, 42. E. Delaware Av. University of Delaware, NEWARK DE 19716 For further information please contact: gaby at udel.edu (302-831 6806) -- ******************************** Gabriella Hermon, Professor and Interim Chair Linguistics, 42 E. Delaware Av. University of Delaware Newark, DE 19716 http://www.ling.udel.edu/gaby/ tel: (302) 831-1642 office fax: (302) 831-6896 fax on computer: 413-7932437 ********************************* From gaby at UDel.Edu Sat Mar 4 20:01:05 2006 From: gaby at UDel.Edu (Gabriella Hermon) Date: Sat, 4 Mar 2006 15:01:05 -0500 Subject: Fwd: Re: Job announcement Message-ID: > >Can you please post the following on your list: > >Department of Linguistics, University of Delaware >Assistant Professor, 1 year Non Tenure Track position (renewable >pending funding). Specialization in phonetics and phonology. PHD in >Linguistics by June 2006 required. > >Teaching duties include undergraduate and graduate courses in >phonetics and phonology. Competitive salary and benefits package. > >Please send all materials, including letters of recommendation, CV, >application, samples of work, and teaching evaluations (if >available) to: > >Gabriella Hermon >Linguistics, 42. E. Delaware Av. >University of Delaware, NEWARK DE 19716 > >For further information please contact: > gaby at udel.edu > (302-831 6806) >-- > >******************************** >Gabriella Hermon, Professor and Interim Chair > Linguistics, 42 E. Delaware Av. >University of Delaware >Newark, DE 19716 > >http://www.ling.udel.edu/gaby/ > >tel: (302) 831-1642 >office fax: (302) 831-6896 >fax on computer: 413-7932437 >********************************* -- ******************************** Gabriella Hermon, Professor and Interim Chair Linguistics, 42 E. Delaware Av. University of Delaware Newark, DE 19716 http://www.ling.udel.edu/gaby/ tel: (302) 831-1642 office fax: (302) 831-6896 fax on computer: 413-7932437 ********************************* -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karen.pollock at ualberta.ca Mon Mar 6 19:16:43 2006 From: karen.pollock at ualberta.ca (Pollock, Karen) Date: Mon, 6 Mar 2006 12:16:43 -0700 Subject: 2006 Child Phonology Conference - Call for Papers REMINDER Message-ID: Just a reminder that the Call for Papers deadline is March 15. Information is copied below, and also on the conference website. Please visit the conference website website (http://www.rehabmed.ualberta.ca/spa/phonology/2006 Child Phonology Conference.htm ) for information on registration, accommodations and travel, and links to sites of interest to visitors to Edmonton and Alberta. UPDATE: Registration information was added to the website recently. I am pleased to announce that the Faculty of Rehabilitation Medicine has made a generous financial contribution to the conference, which will allow us to keep the registration fees low. Please register early if at all possible - the pre-registration deadline is May 1. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions. Hope to see you in Edmonton in June! Karen Pollock Call for Papers Child Phonology Conference June 16-17 University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada The 2006 Child Phonology Conference organizing committee invites you to submit your recent research for presentation. Papers dealing with all aspects of children's phonological development and disorders will be considered. A maximum of two submissions per first author will be accepted. Typically, papers are presented in 20-minute time slots with 5-10 minutes for questions. However, if the number of papers submitted exceeds the total available time, some presentations will be converted to poster format. Submissions will be accepted until March 15, 2006. Submit the following: Title of Presentation Presenter Name(s) and Affiliation(s) Contact Information (preferred contact person, address, telephone & fax numbers, email address) 250 word summary/abstract Also indicate if you are willing to consider either platform or poster presentation format Email to: karen.pollock at ualberta.ca or Mail to: Karen E. Pollock, Ph.D. Dept. of Speech Pathology & Audiology 2-70 Corbett Hall University of Alberta Edmonton, AB T6G 2G4 Canada -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From at.perez.leroux at utoronto.ca Tue Mar 7 13:38:44 2006 From: at.perez.leroux at utoronto.ca (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Ana_P=E9rez-Leroux?=) Date: Tue, 7 Mar 2006 08:38:44 -0500 Subject: JUA Message-ID: I would like to respectfully invite fellow child language researchers to join (and invite your students to do so as well) Amnesty's Urgent Action on behalf of 4-year old Burmese (Myanmar) refugee Ei Po Po, who may be one of the youngest political prisoners in the world. Amnesty's letter writing campaigns can be very effective. Please find relevant information below. Ei Po Po's urgent action information http://www.amnesty.org.uk/images/ul/J/JUA_myanmarJ_jan06_2.pdf More on Myanmar http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGASA160012006?open&of=ENG-2S3 More on Amnesty Junior Urgent Action Network http://www.amnesty.org.uk/ua/jua/ Ana T. Pérez-Leroux Associate Professor of Spanish and Linguistics University of Toronto Victoria College 73 Queen's Park Crescent Toronto, ON M5S 1K7 Phone 416-585-4439 Fax 416-813-4084 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From macw at cmu.edu Wed Mar 8 04:17:22 2006 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Tue, 7 Mar 2006 23:17:22 -0500 Subject: early plural comprehension? Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, During class discussion on Monday, one of my students asked whether there were any experiments that have told us the age at which a child can comprehend the plural marker. We were discussing the findings of research in the picture preference task (perhaps with reinforcement) that have demonstrated comprehension at perhaps 12 months. If this paradigm can be used to see if children can distinguish "cat" from "dog" early on, has it also been used to see if children can distinguish "cat" from "cats?" We were particularly interested in information on the plural marker, simply because it is so early in production, so semantically transparent, and so easily demonstrated pictorially. However, evidence for the early learning of other grammatical markers would also be interesting. We are hoping that such information could shed further light on the comprehension-production lag during this period. Can anyone please point us to the relevant reference? Many thanks. --Brian MacWhinney, CMU From pgordon at exchange.tc.columbia.edu Wed Mar 8 16:38:01 2006 From: pgordon at exchange.tc.columbia.edu (Gordon, Peter) Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2006 11:38:01 -0500 Subject: early plural comprehension? Message-ID: Susan Carey's group at Harvard esp. Mathieu LeCorre has been looking at this a lot, and also David Barner. From what I remember, the notion of plural is first understood through verb-based constructions such as "there are ...." versus "there is ..." and only later becomes salient as the -s marker on the noun. Not sure if I have this right, but they would have a better story on this. Peter Gordon, Associate Professor Biobehavioral Sciences Department 1152 Thorndike Hall Teachers College, Columbia University 525 West 120th Street, Box 180 New York, NY 10027 http://www.tc.edu/faculty/pg328 Phone: (212) 678-8162 Lab: (212) 678-8169 FAX: (212) 678-8233 -----Original Message----- From: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org [mailto:info-childes at mail.talkbank.org] On Behalf Of Brian MacWhinney Sent: Tuesday, March 07, 2006 11:17 PM To: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org Subject: early plural comprehension? Dear Info-CHILDES, During class discussion on Monday, one of my students asked whether there were any experiments that have told us the age at which a child can comprehend the plural marker. We were discussing the findings of research in the picture preference task (perhaps with reinforcement) that have demonstrated comprehension at perhaps 12 months. If this paradigm can be used to see if children can distinguish "cat" from "dog" early on, has it also been used to see if children can distinguish "cat" from "cats?" We were particularly interested in information on the plural marker, simply because it is so early in production, so semantically transparent, and so easily demonstrated pictorially. However, evidence for the early learning of other grammatical markers would also be interesting. We are hoping that such information could shed further light on the comprehension-production lag during this period. Can anyone please point us to the relevant reference? Many thanks. --Brian MacWhinney, CMU From gelman at umich.edu Wed Mar 8 16:09:37 2006 From: gelman at umich.edu (Gelman, Susan) Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2006 11:09:37 -0500 Subject: early plural comprehension? Message-ID: Great topic! For more on generics & plurals in children, see: Gelman, S. A., & Raman, L. (2003). Preschool children use linguistic form class and pragmatic cues to interpret generics. Child Development, 24, 308-325. Chapter 8 in: Gelman, S. A. (2003). The essential child: Origins of essentialism in everyday thought. New York: Oxford University Press. --Susan Gelman -----Original Message----- From: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org [mailto:info-childes at mail.talkbank.org] On Behalf Of Tom Roeper Sent: Wednesday, March 08, 2006 9:40 AM To: Brian MacWhinney; info-childes Subject: Re: early plural comprehension? Dear Brian--- Plurals are one of the most interesting and inherently difficult things that a child must master. It is not clear when its properties are fully grasped at all. To consider what the child faces, parents easily say to a child, holding up a single banana, "do you like bananas?" with a generic reference in mind, but how does the child know that? An interesting paper on this is at the UMass website by Sauerland, Anderson, and Yatsushiro. Following work by Anne Vainnikka, they asked children questions like: Does a dog have tails? Try it! Six year olds regularly say "yes". Tom Roeper PS. In my forthcoming book "The Prism of Grammar" (MIT) I devote a long chapter to the topic. Brian MacWhinney wrote: > Dear Info-CHILDES, > During class discussion on Monday, one of my students asked > whether there were any experiments that have told us the age at which > a child can comprehend the plural marker. We were discussing the > findings of research in the picture preference task (perhaps with > reinforcement) that have demonstrated comprehension at perhaps 12 > months. If this paradigm can be used to see if children can > distinguish "cat" from "dog" early on, has it also been used to see > if children can distinguish "cat" from "cats?" > We were particularly interested in information on the plural > marker, simply because it is so early in production, so semantically > transparent, and so easily demonstrated pictorially. However, > evidence for the early learning of other grammatical markers would > also be interesting. We are hoping that such information could shed > further light on the comprehension-production lag during this > period. Can anyone please point us to the relevant reference? Many > thanks. > > --Brian MacWhinney, CMU > > From weist at fredonia.edu Wed Mar 8 15:43:53 2006 From: weist at fredonia.edu (Richard M. Weist) Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2006 10:43:53 -0500 Subject: early plural comprehension? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Dear Brian, As I understand your message, you are ultimately interested in the comprehension - production lag, and you are approaching the problem through the singular - plural distinction because of linguistic and methodological transparency. "We are hoping that such information could shed further light on the comprehension-production lag during this period." I might suggest that you can also approach this problem by investigating temporal and spatial reference with a similar methodological advantage. Here are three references with one on the comprehension side of the issue and two on the production side. I have added a forth reference that places this work in an integrated and larger context. Weist, R.M., Atanassova, M., Wysocka, H., & Pawlak, A. (1999). Spatial and temporal systems in child language and thought: A cross-linguistic study. First Language, 19, 267-312. Weist, R. M., Pawlak, A., & Carapella, J. (2004). Syntactic-semantic interface in the acquisition of verb morphology. Journal of Child Language, 31, 31 - 60. <>Internicola, R. & Weist, R. M. (2003). The acquisition of simple and complex spatial locatives in English: A longitudinal investigation. First Language, 23, 239 -248. Weist, R. M. (2002). Space and time in first and second language acquisition: A tribute to Henning Wode (pp. 79-108). In P. Burmeister, T. Piske, A. Rohde (Eds.) An integrated view of language development: Papers in honor of Henning Wode. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier (WVT). Regards, Dick Brian MacWhinney wrote: > Dear Info-CHILDES, > During class discussion on Monday, one of my students asked > whether there were any experiments that have told us the age at which > a child can comprehend the plural marker. We were discussing the > findings of research in the picture preference task (perhaps with > reinforcement) that have demonstrated comprehension at perhaps 12 > months. If this paradigm can be used to see if children can > distinguish "cat" from "dog" early on, has it also been used to see > if children can distinguish "cat" from "cats?" > We were particularly interested in information on the plural > marker, simply because it is so early in production, so semantically > transparent, and so easily demonstrated pictorially. However, > evidence for the early learning of other grammatical markers would > also be interesting. We are hoping that such information could shed > further light on the comprehension-production lag during this > period. Can anyone please point us to the relevant reference? Many > thanks. > > --Brian MacWhinney, CMU -- Richard M. Weist Distinguished Professor Department of Psychology SUNY College at Fredonia W337 Thompson Hall Fredonia, NY 14063 Phone: 716-673-3896 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kim.plunkett at psy.ox.ac.uk Wed Mar 8 15:24:59 2006 From: kim.plunkett at psy.ox.ac.uk (Kim Plunkett) Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2006 15:24:59 -0000 Subject: postdoc opening in Oxford Message-ID: University of Oxford Department of Experimental Psychology Research Assistant Academic-Related Research Staff Grade 1A: Salary £20,044-£30,002 A vacancy exists for a research assistant to work on a project concerned with early lexical development. The research assistant will be working with the Oxford BabyLab team and will be testing children between 15 and 24 months using the Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm. The post involves infant recruitment, contacting parents, scheduling, preparation of visual and auditory stimulus materials, testing of children and adults, and data analysis. Experience in working with young children , preferably of the above age group is essential. The successful candidate will hold a doctoral degree in a related topic and should have experience using eye-gaze fixation methods with infants and/or young children. Competence with Excel and SPSS would be an advantage. The post is funded by a grant from the Leverhulme Trust and is available from 1st April 2006. The appointment will be for 2 years in the first instance with a possibility of extension thereafter. Informal enquiries about the research can be made to Professor Kim Plunkett (kim.plunkett at psy.ox.ac.uk). Before submitting an application candidates should obtain further particulars from the Administrator, Department of Experimental Psychology, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3UD. (Email applications at psy.ox.ac.uk) or telephone 01865 271399 quoting reference: CQ/06/004. The closing date for applications is 31st March 2006. Interviews are planned for 21st April 2006. Further information on the department can be found on the web-site http://www.psy.ox.ac.uk -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From boehning at ling.uni-potsdam.de Wed Mar 8 14:58:35 2006 From: boehning at ling.uni-potsdam.de (=?iso-8859-1?Q?Marita_B=F6hning?=) Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2006 15:58:35 +0100 Subject: early plural comprehension? Message-ID: dear info-childes, dear tom roeper, dear brian macwhinney! please excuse the wrong forwarding/answering! was distracted by the interesting discussion and did not check recipients again. ;-) marita ********************************************* Marita Boehning Department of Linguistics (Erasmus/Sokrates co-ordinator) P.O. Box 601553 D - 14415 Potsdam Germany Phone: +49 331 977 2929 Fax: +49 331 977 2095 email: boehning at ling.uni-potsdam.de ********************************************* ----- Original Message ----- From: "Marita Böhning" To: "Tom Roeper" ; "Brian MacWhinney" ; "info-childes" Sent: Wednesday, March 08, 2006 3:54 PM Subject: Re: early plural comprehension? > Liebe Barbara, > wenn man die Diskussion zw. Tom Roeper, Tomasello und MacWhinney so liest, > scheint es eine wirklich gute Idee, unser Pluralexperiment bald zu > starten. Christina hat auch Daten zu Plural und würde sich konzeptionell > nach ihrem Urlaub beteiligen. > > LG > Marita > > > > ********************************************* > Marita Boehning > Department of Linguistics > (Erasmus/Sokrates co-ordinator) > P.O. Box 601553 > D - 14415 Potsdam > Germany > Phone: +49 331 977 2929 > Fax: +49 331 977 2095 > email: boehning at ling.uni-potsdam.de > ********************************************* > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Tom Roeper" > To: "Brian MacWhinney" ; "info-childes" > > Sent: Wednesday, March 08, 2006 3:40 PM > Subject: Re: early plural comprehension? > > >> Dear Brian--- >> >> Plurals are one of the most interesting and inherently difficult >> things that a child must master. It is not clear when its properties >> are fully grasped at all. To consider what the child faces, parents >> easily say to a child, holding up a single banana, >> "do you like bananas?" >> with a generic reference in mind, but how does the child know that? >> An interesting paper on this is at the UMass website by Sauerland, >> Anderson, and Yatsushiro. Following work by Anne Vainnikka, >> they asked children questions like: >> Does a dog have tails? >> Try it! Six year olds regularly say "yes". >> >> Tom Roeper >> >> PS. In my forthcoming book "The Prism of Grammar" (MIT) >> I devote a long chapter to the topic. >> Brian MacWhinney wrote: >> >>> Dear Info-CHILDES, >>> During class discussion on Monday, one of my students asked >>> whether there were any experiments that have told us the age at which >>> a child can comprehend the plural marker. We were discussing the >>> findings of research in the picture preference task (perhaps with >>> reinforcement) that have demonstrated comprehension at perhaps 12 >>> months. If this paradigm can be used to see if children can >>> distinguish "cat" from "dog" early on, has it also been used to see >>> if children can distinguish "cat" from "cats?" >>> We were particularly interested in information on the plural >>> marker, simply because it is so early in production, so semantically >>> transparent, and so easily demonstrated pictorially. However, >>> evidence for the early learning of other grammatical markers would >>> also be interesting. We are hoping that such information could shed >>> further light on the comprehension-production lag during this >>> period. Can anyone please point us to the relevant reference? Many >>> thanks. >>> >>> --Brian MacWhinney, CMU >>> >>> >> >> >> > From boehning at ling.uni-potsdam.de Wed Mar 8 14:54:29 2006 From: boehning at ling.uni-potsdam.de (=?iso-8859-1?Q?Marita_B=F6hning?=) Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2006 15:54:29 +0100 Subject: early plural comprehension? Message-ID: Liebe Barbara, wenn man die Diskussion zw. Tom Roeper, Tomasello und MacWhinney so liest, scheint es eine wirklich gute Idee, unser Pluralexperiment bald zu starten. Christina hat auch Daten zu Plural und würde sich konzeptionell nach ihrem Urlaub beteiligen. LG Marita ********************************************* Marita Boehning Department of Linguistics (Erasmus/Sokrates co-ordinator) P.O. Box 601553 D - 14415 Potsdam Germany Phone: +49 331 977 2929 Fax: +49 331 977 2095 email: boehning at ling.uni-potsdam.de ********************************************* ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tom Roeper" To: "Brian MacWhinney" ; "info-childes" Sent: Wednesday, March 08, 2006 3:40 PM Subject: Re: early plural comprehension? > Dear Brian--- > > Plurals are one of the most interesting and inherently difficult > things that a child must master. It is not clear when its properties > are fully grasped at all. To consider what the child faces, parents > easily say to a child, holding up a single banana, > "do you like bananas?" > with a generic reference in mind, but how does the child know that? > An interesting paper on this is at the UMass website by Sauerland, > Anderson, and Yatsushiro. Following work by Anne Vainnikka, > they asked children questions like: > Does a dog have tails? > Try it! Six year olds regularly say "yes". > > Tom Roeper > > PS. In my forthcoming book "The Prism of Grammar" (MIT) > I devote a long chapter to the topic. > Brian MacWhinney wrote: > >> Dear Info-CHILDES, >> During class discussion on Monday, one of my students asked >> whether there were any experiments that have told us the age at which >> a child can comprehend the plural marker. We were discussing the >> findings of research in the picture preference task (perhaps with >> reinforcement) that have demonstrated comprehension at perhaps 12 >> months. If this paradigm can be used to see if children can >> distinguish "cat" from "dog" early on, has it also been used to see >> if children can distinguish "cat" from "cats?" >> We were particularly interested in information on the plural >> marker, simply because it is so early in production, so semantically >> transparent, and so easily demonstrated pictorially. However, >> evidence for the early learning of other grammatical markers would >> also be interesting. We are hoping that such information could shed >> further light on the comprehension-production lag during this >> period. Can anyone please point us to the relevant reference? Many >> thanks. >> >> --Brian MacWhinney, CMU >> >> > > > From cnarayan at umich.edu Wed Mar 8 14:49:21 2006 From: cnarayan at umich.edu (cnarayan at umich.edu) Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2006 09:49:21 -0500 Subject: early plural comprehension? In-Reply-To: <440EE057.6060700@eva.mpg.de> Message-ID: If I'm not mistaken, Helene Deacon (now at Dalhousie) has been looking at infants' perception of plural markings on novel nouns at 18 months. -chandan Quoting Michael Tomasello : > Brian, > > The youngest children to add English plural -s in a production > experiment with novel verbs are, to my knowledge, 21-22 months (4 of > 10 children at least once). I know of no preferential looking > experiments examining this with novel verbs. Reference: > > Tomasello, M., Akhtar, N., & Dodson, K., Rekau, L. (1997). > Differential productivity in young children's use of nouns and verbs. > Journal of Child Language, 24, 373-87. > > Best, > > Mike > > > > ================================ chandan r. narayan dept. of linguistics university of michigan -------------------------------- cnarayan at umich.edu www-personal.umich.edu/~cnarayan ================================ From roeper at linguist.umass.edu Wed Mar 8 14:40:07 2006 From: roeper at linguist.umass.edu (Tom Roeper) Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2006 09:40:07 -0500 Subject: early plural comprehension? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Dear Brian--- Plurals are one of the most interesting and inherently difficult things that a child must master. It is not clear when its properties are fully grasped at all. To consider what the child faces, parents easily say to a child, holding up a single banana, "do you like bananas?" with a generic reference in mind, but how does the child know that? An interesting paper on this is at the UMass website by Sauerland, Anderson, and Yatsushiro. Following work by Anne Vainnikka, they asked children questions like: Does a dog have tails? Try it! Six year olds regularly say "yes". Tom Roeper PS. In my forthcoming book "The Prism of Grammar" (MIT) I devote a long chapter to the topic. Brian MacWhinney wrote: > Dear Info-CHILDES, > During class discussion on Monday, one of my students asked > whether there were any experiments that have told us the age at which > a child can comprehend the plural marker. We were discussing the > findings of research in the picture preference task (perhaps with > reinforcement) that have demonstrated comprehension at perhaps 12 > months. If this paradigm can be used to see if children can > distinguish "cat" from "dog" early on, has it also been used to see > if children can distinguish "cat" from "cats?" > We were particularly interested in information on the plural > marker, simply because it is so early in production, so semantically > transparent, and so easily demonstrated pictorially. However, > evidence for the early learning of other grammatical markers would > also be interesting. We are hoping that such information could shed > further light on the comprehension-production lag during this > period. Can anyone please point us to the relevant reference? Many > thanks. > > --Brian MacWhinney, CMU > > From tomasello at eva.mpg.de Wed Mar 8 13:47:03 2006 From: tomasello at eva.mpg.de (Michael Tomasello) Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2006 14:47:03 +0100 Subject: early plural comprehension? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Brian, The youngest children to add English plural -s in a production experiment with novel verbs are, to my knowledge, 21-22 months (4 of 10 children at least once). I know of no preferential looking experiments examining this with novel verbs. Reference: Tomasello, M., Akhtar, N., & Dodson, K., Rekau, L. (1997). Differential productivity in young children's use of nouns and verbs. Journal of Child Language, 24, 373-87. Best, Mike From barner at fas.harvard.edu Wed Mar 8 17:06:48 2006 From: barner at fas.harvard.edu (David Barner) Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2006 12:06:48 -0500 Subject: early plural comprehension?] Message-ID: Hi all, Susan Carey and colleagues have done several studies on the topic which support the idea that comprehension emerges at around 22-months (with production). The studies test s-p knowledge with: 1. preferential looking (Kouider, Halberda, Wood & Carey, in press Language Learning and Development) 2. manual search (Barner, Thalwitz, Wood, Yang & Carey, under review; Wood, Kouider, Halberda & Carey, under review) The first task finds successful use of singular-plural morpho-syntax in preferential looking at 24-months but not 20-months. The second (Barner et al) finds successful non-verbal discrimination of singular and plural sets at 22-months, which is driven by children whose parents report they use plural nouns (on the MCDI). It also finds lack of s-p comprehension and production at 20-months. The third study (Wood et al.) finds successful comprehension of s-p to guide reaching in manual search at 24- but not 20-months. Cheers, Dave Barner cnarayan at umich.edu wrote: > If I'm not mistaken, Helene Deacon (now at Dalhousie) has been looking > at infants' perception of plural markings on novel nouns at 18 months. > > -chandan > > Quoting Michael Tomasello : > >> Brian, >> >> The youngest children to add English plural -s in a production >> experiment with novel verbs are, to my knowledge, 21-22 months (4 of >> 10 children at least once). I know of no preferential looking >> experiments examining this with novel verbs. Reference: >> >> Tomasello, M., Akhtar, N., & Dodson, K., Rekau, L. (1997). >> Differential productivity in young children's use of nouns and verbs. >> Journal of Child Language, 24, 373-87. >> >> Best, >> >> Mike >> >> >> >> > > > > ================================ > chandan r. narayan > dept. of linguistics > university of michigan > -------------------------------- > cnarayan at umich.edu > www-personal.umich.edu/~cnarayan > ================================ > > From lise.menn at colorado.edu Wed Mar 8 17:33:51 2006 From: lise.menn at colorado.edu (Lise Menn) Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2006 10:33:51 -0700 Subject: early plural comprehension? In-Reply-To: <440EE057.6060700@eva.mpg.de> Message-ID: For a single-child data point, you can look at Peters, A., and Menn, L. (1993) False starts and filler syllables: Ways to learn grammatical morphemes. Language 69:4 (1993). pp. 742-777. Daniel was still demonstrably not comprehending the plural marker at 2;2.19, but started to produce it (and presumably to comprehend it??) about two weeks later. Lise Menn On Mar 8, 2006, at 6:47 AM, Michael Tomasello wrote: > Brian, > > The youngest children to add English plural -s in a production > experiment with novel verbs are, to my knowledge, 21-22 months (4 > of 10 children at least once). I know of no preferential looking > experiments examining this with novel verbs. Reference: > > Tomasello, M., Akhtar, N., & Dodson, K., Rekau, L. (1997). > Differential productivity in young children's use of nouns and > verbs. Journal of Child Language, 24, 373-87. > > Best, > > Mike Prof. Lise Menn, Hellems 293 Linguistics Department, University of Colorado 295 UCB phone 303-492-1609 Boulder, Colorado office fax 303-492-4416 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 Japanese version of "Shirley Says" http://www.bayget.com/inpaku/ kinen9.htm Academy of Aphasia http://www.academyofaphasia.org/doc -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From macw at cmu.edu Thu Mar 9 05:19:43 2006 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2006 00:19:43 -0500 Subject: summary on plural Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, I received 22 responses to my posting regarding evidence for early comprehension of the plural. I have compiled these responses into a set of pointers to the current and forthcoming literature which I am attaching here. I have only been able to read about three of the papers mentioned here so far, but I have already learned quite a bit. First, it is clear that the plural is not a uniform category, as Roeper, Pérez-Leroux and other argue. Second, although the initial application of preferential looking to this topic was unsuccessful, there appear to be some recent successes. In particular, studies that demonstrate productive control of the plural with novel nouns in comprehension provide us with an important landmark in terms of understanding the overall course of learning of morphology. Exactly where to place that landmark vis a vis production is perhaps not yet entirely clear. Third, it would be helpful to compare the learning of the English plural with more transparent plural markings such as Hungarian -ok or Turkish -ler. --Brian MacWhinney 1. Dave Barner, Harvard Several studies at Harvard have investigated this. Kouider, S., Halberda, J., Wood, J. & Carey, S. Acquisition of English number marking: The singular-plural distinction. Language Learning and Development, 2, 1-25. Using preferential looking, this study found that 24-month olds look reliably at the plurals of novel words if the noun and the verb are plural, but not if only the noun is plural. A second study, that I performed (Barner, Thalwitz, Wood, Yang & Carey, under review), shows that (1) children successfully search longer for 4 objects than for 1 at 22-months but not earlier (following up on Lisa Feigenson's finding that younger children can track only up to 3 objects); and (2) success at this 1 vs. 4 task is driven by children whose parents report they use plural nouns in the MCDI. Finally, a third study (Wood, Kouider, Halberda & Carey, under review) uses the same box reach task. The experimenter looks into the box and claims that either "there is a blicket" or "there are some blickets". Again, 20-month olds succeed and 24-month-olds fail. So, the sum of these results correspond with the MCDI production norms: children seem to be acquiring the link between s-p morphology and the underlying conceptual distinction sometime between 20- and 24- months, and in one case at 22-months exactly. MCDI norms indicate that 50% of children produce the plural at 22-months. Subsequent work has investigated whether the underlying conceptual distinction might be available to children prior to this (Barner, Kibbe, Wood & Carey, in prep). We've also looked to see whether a privileged distinction might exist between a "single individual" and "more than one" in rhesus monkeys (Barner, Wood, Hauser & Carey, in prep). The last two studies have played with spatio-temporal cues like common motion to elicit the representation of sets without invoking numerical representations. They may be totally unrelated to singular-plural in language - it remains to be seen what the link is. Another line has been to investigate French kids, to see if cross- linguistic differences affect age of acquisition (in progress by Kouider, Feigenson and Halberda) and to look at the conceptual distinction in Mandarin (in progress with Peggy Li, Shu-Ju Yang and Susan Carey) and Japanese children (in progress by me, Tamiko Ogura, Barbara Sarnecka, & Susan Carey). In a year or so we should know how all of these pieces fit together! 2. Kamil Ud Deen, University of Hawaii at Manoa While a grad student at UCLA in Nina Hyams' lab, we tried something like what you are suggesting, with no result. The reason was that the pictorial stimuli, while seemingly very transparent and amenable to the methodology, biased children towards plural responses. So for example, when presented with a banana on one side and a bunch of bananas on the other side, because many bananas are inherently more interesting, we got a skew towards plural responses. This was true for inanimate as well as animate pictures, despite various attempts to address the problem. I'm not trying to point out how dumb and unimaginative we were (and I'm sure someone smarter than us has managed to get around this), I just wanted to point out that is is not the case that this methodology lends itself so well to the testing of plurality. *** MacWhinney comment: Erik Thiessen (CMU) told me that Anne Fernald ran into similar methodological problems with this about 10 year back, supporting what Kamil says. Of course, this new report from Kouider et al. suggests that this can be overcome. 3. Lise Menn, Colorado For a single-child data point, you can look at: Peters, A., and Menn, L. (1993) False starts and filler syllables: Ways to learn grammatical morphemes. Language 69:4 (1993). pp. 742-777. Daniel was still demonstrably not comprehending the plural marker at 2;2.19, but started to produce it (and presumably to comprehend it??) about two weeks later. **** MacWhinney comment: I would say that this is the closest we have so far to an estimate of the comprehension-production lag for this morpheme. This estimate seems to fit with similar single-case anecdotal data from Brown. Obviously we would need to have this confirmed experimentally, but it may well be true that the gap is not as huge as one might expect. The discussion of the semantic problems with the plural from Roeper and Pérez-Leroux would further support the idea that the plural doesn’t just emerge full-fledged in either comprehension or production. Still, emerge it does. 4. Recent unpublished studies by Soderstrom, Newman, and Plunkett. Work currently under review. Kouider et al. mention two recent unpublished studies that examined this issue using preferential looking. These are from Melanie Soderstrom and Rochelle Newman, both of who also replied directly to me. Rochelle’s study was presented at SRCD Schnoor, B. C., & Newman, R. S. (2001). Infants' developing comprehension of plurals, 2001 biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development. Melanie’s study is her unpublished doctoral dissertation from Johns Hopkins in 2002. Melanie’s note to me suggests that there is “sensitivity to -s inflection (both plural and 3rd singular) in 16-month-olds.” Kim Plunkett (Oxford) found evidence for early sensitivity using novel words. Kim included a copy of his unpublished article on this, but I accidentally failed to pull out the attachment. My apologies to Kim. 5. Michael Tomasello, MPI Leipzig The youngest children to add English plural -s in a production experiment with novel verbs are, to my knowledge, 21-22 months (4 of 10 children at least once). Tomasello, M., Akhtar, N., & Dodson, K., Rekau, L. (1997). Differential productivity in young children's use of nouns and verbs. Journal of Child Language, 24, 373-87. I know of no preferential looking experiments examining this with novel verbs. 6. Dick Weist: Fredonia As I understand your message, you are ultimately interested in the comprehension - production lag, and you are approaching the problem through the singular - plural distinction because of linguistic and methodological transparency. I might suggest that you can also approach this problem by investigating temporal and spatial reference with a similar methodological advantage. Here are three references with one on the comprehension side of the issue and two on the production side. I have added a forth reference that places this work in an integrated and larger context. Weist, R.M., Atanassova, M., Wysocka, H., & Pawlak, A. (1999). Spatial and temporal systems in child language and thought: A cross- linguistic study. First Language, 19, 267-312. Weist, R. M., Pawlak, A., & Carapella, J. (2004). Syntactic-semantic interface in the acquisition of verb morphology. Journal of Child Language, 31, 31 – 60. Internicola, R. & Weist, R. M. (2003). The acquisition of simple and complex spatial locatives in English: A longitudinal investigation. First Language, 23, 239 -248. Weist, R. M. (2002). Space and time in first and second language acquisition: A tribute to Henning Wode (pp. 79–108). In P. Burmeister, T. Piske, A. Rohde (Eds.) An integrated view of language development: Papers in honor of Henning Wode. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier (WVT). 7. Javier Aguado-Orea: Nottingham Casla, M, Aguado-Orea, J & Pine, J. (2005). Eliciting frequent and infrequent verb forms in Spanish: An experimental study of the acquisition of inflectional morphology in Spanish. Paper presented at X International Congress for the Study of Child Language. Berlin, July 2005. The idea was to ask 3 year old children "qué hace" and "qué hacen" before a series of images displaying different characters performing a number of familiar actions. We wanted to know if the proportion of plural agreeing inflections (e.g. juegan) as RESPONSES to a plural agreeing question (i.e. hacen) was smaller than the proportion of singular agreeing inflections (e.g. juega) as responses to a singular agreeing question (e.g. hace). The effect was found, and it was significantly smaller than in adults (used as controls). This result seems to be consistent with previous results indicating higher error rates and lower productivity for the USE of plural agreeing verb inflections in Romance languages. Two biased examples follow: Aguado-Orea, J. (2004). The acquisition of morpho-syntax in Spanish: Implications for current theories of development. Unpublished PhD Thesis, The University of Nottingham, Nottingham. Rubino, R. & Pine, J. M. (1998). Subject-verb agreement in Brazilian Portuguese: what overall error-rates hide. Journal of Child Language, 25, 35-59. Note that I have capitalised 'RESPONSES' and 'USE'. I know that you wanted something about *comprehension*, but, the fact of the truth is that Spanish learning children use AT LEAST ONE plural agreeing inflection from very early, so there must be something going on there, since they have problems to be fully productive and accurate later on... 8. Tom Roeper Plurals are one of the most interesting and inherently difficult things that a child must master. It is not clear when its properties are fully grasped at all. To consider what the child faces, parents easily say to a child, holding up a single banana, "do you like bananas?" with a generic reference in mind, but how does the child know that? An interesting paper on this is at the UMass website by Sauerland, Anderson, and Yatsushiro. Following work by Anne Vainnikka, they asked children questions like: Does a dog have tails? Try it! Six year olds regularly say "yes". In my forthcoming book "The Prism of Grammar" (MIT) I devote a long chapter to the topic. MacWhinney comment: Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux makes very similar points in this article: Pérez-Leroux, Ana T. (2005) Number problems in children. Proceedings of the 2005 annual conference of the Canadian Linguistic Association. 9. Some additional notes and pointers: Gelman, S. A., & Raman, L. (2003). Preschool children use linguistic form class and pragmatic cues to interpret generics. Child Development, 24, 308-325. Chapter 8 in: Gelman, S. A. (2003). The essential child: Origins of essentialism in everyday thought. New York: Oxford University Press. Deacon, S. H., Lalji-Samji, N., Leung, D., & Werker, J. F. (2004, May 9). 'More or less': The specificity of 18- and 24-month old infants' knowledge of the plural. Paper presented at the XIV Biennial International Conference on Infant Studies, Chicago, Il. Twila Tardif (Michigan) provided this further comment on detection of the plural in the Werker frameword: Amber was in a Janet Werker study when she was about 18 months and had trouble with "keet" vs. "keets" but not with "keetsu" (Japanese version of plural). She knew no Japanese, but had a huge vocabulary for an 18-month-old in both English and Mandarin at that point so I was shocked that she didn't make the discrimination. This fits with Janet and her colleague's ideas, though, about the salience of the "s”. Helen Deacon at Dalhousie may be working on this. Alison Jolly at Oxford may be working on this. K. Miller & C. Schmitt in Language Acquisition Recent work by Jill Devilliers. Szagun, G. (2001). Learning different regularities: The acquisition of noun plurals by German-speaking children. First Language, 21(62, pt. 2), 109-141. From G.Morgan at city.ac.uk Thu Mar 9 14:09:40 2006 From: G.Morgan at city.ac.uk (Morgan, Gary) Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2006 14:09:40 -0000 Subject: research post Message-ID: RESEARCH ASSOCIATE Department of Language and Communication Science School of Allied Health Sciences City University, London £22.5K -£24.5K pa inc Fixed term for three years You will assist in an innovative intervention study exploring the differential effects of two interventions (narrative and vocabulary enrichment)with language impaired secondary school children.You will work closely with the project supervisor,therapists and teachers. You will work in the largest teaching,research and clinical department in the UK,liaising with a range of professionals in schools and working with secondary school children with speci .c language impairments.You will have the opportunity to plan intervention,be involved in both conducting the assessments and training teaching staff. You will have a .rst degree or postgraduate quali .cation in Speech and Language Therapy,Psychology,or Linguistics,and will have experience of working with school-aged children.With the ability to communicate effectively,you will be able to work independently,be well-organised and meticulous in collecting and entering data. In return,we offer a comprehensive package of in-house staff training and development,and bene .ts that include a .nal salary pension scheme. Further particulars and an application form can be downloaded from www.city.ac.uk/hr/jobs Alternatively contact the Recruitment Team,HR Department,City University,Northampton Square, London EC1V OHB,quoting reference number HM/10221. Closing date:13 April 2006 Actively working to promote equal opportunity and diversity . Informal enquiries to Dr Victoria Joffe V.Joffe at city.ac.uk Dr Victoria Joffe MRCSLT MHPC Programme Director, PGDip/MSc Speech and Language Therapy and MSc in Joint Professional Practice Senior Lecturer in Developmental Speech and Language Disability Department of Language and Communication Science City University Northampton Square London EC1V OHB Tel: 02070404629 Fax: 02070408577 www.city.ac.uk/lcs -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From nicol at cogsci.jhu.edu Thu Mar 9 21:43:44 2006 From: nicol at cogsci.jhu.edu (Tamara Nicol) Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2006 16:43:44 -0500 Subject: Postdoctoral Fellowship in Spatial Language and Spatial Representation Message-ID: Postdoctoral Fellowship in Spatial Language and Spatial Representation Johns Hopkins University Department of Cognitive Science Candidates are invited to apply for a post-doctoral fellowship to carry out research on the development of spatial representation, broadly construed, in normal children and people with Williams syndrome, who have selective visual-spatial impairments. We seek applicants who have broad interdisciplinary training in spatial representation, preferably with interest in spatial language, and a strong interest in development, learning and plasticity. Target areas of interest include spatial language, navigation, object representation, visual-manual action, spatial attention, and learning and plasticity within these. Funding is in place for two years, with the possibility for further renewal. Applicants should send a vita, research statement, and three letters of recommendation to Dr. Barbara Landau, Department of Cognitive Science, Johns Hopkins University, 241 Krieger Hall, Baltimore, MD 21218, or by email to landau at cogsci.jhu.edu. Applications will be reviewed immediately and the position will remain open until filled. From mfleck at cs.uiuc.edu Thu Mar 9 22:58:02 2006 From: mfleck at cs.uiuc.edu (Margaret Fleck) Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2006 16:58:02 -0600 Subject: early plural comprehension?] In-Reply-To: <440F0F28.6010508@fas.harvard.edu> Message-ID: When is "both" (e.g. "both hands") normally produced/understood, relative to production/ comprehension dates for plural forms? Just curious, Margaret From slornat at psi.ucm.es Fri Mar 10 11:25:49 2006 From: slornat at psi.ucm.es (=?iso-8859-1?Q?Susana_L=F3pez_Ornat?=) Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 12:25:49 +0100 Subject: early plural comprehension Message-ID: In more or less the same spirit of Margaret´s message: Spanish children, typically before 24 months, most frequently use a non-plural form which, interestingly, has "some" plural meaning: the "otro-otra" determiner ("another one", or "another"). They use it before the Noun, saying /oto/ or /ota/ + X, or use it free. They do one of those things when they want "more of the same X", or when they point out that "there are more of this same X around". They successfully use those otro-otra (masc.-fem) preceeding a Noun, or free -as pronouns-, from much earlier on than they use the "real" plural markers. This early marker is worked at, though for gender agreement reasons, with a succesfull Neural Net simulation, in: P.Smith, A.Nix, N.Davey, S.López-Ornat & D.Messer (2003): A connectionist account of Spanish determiner production. Journal Child Language, 30, 305-331. Its very early use is documented also in behavioural experiments about the early acquisition of the Spanish Nominal Phrase. See: S.Mariscal & S. López Ornat (2000) Oto* casa roja: The gradual acquisition of gender morphology in Spanish children under 2;06 years. At 9th International Morphology Meeting. Univ. of Viena, 25-27 february. S.Mariscal (2001) ¿Es "a pé" equivalente a DET+N?: sobre el conocimiento temprano de las categorías nominales. Cognitiva 13, 1, 35-69. Brian: I´d propose to track the comprehension of plural in steps like this. Thanks a lot for the summary you sent us all. Susana López Ornat www.ucm.es/info/equial Facultad de Psicología Universidad Complutense de Madrid 28223 From michael at georgetown.edu Tue Mar 14 16:55:29 2006 From: michael at georgetown.edu (Michael Ullman) Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 11:55:29 -0500 Subject: RA and Postdoctoral positions at the Brain and Language Lab Message-ID: The Brain and Language Lab at Georgetown University (brainlang.georgetown.edu) has two new positions, for one Research Assistant and one Postdoctoral Fellow. If you know of any excellent candidates for either of these positions (e.g., graduating seniors for the RA position, or individuals about to receive their PhD for the postdoctoral position), can you please forward them this email? I would also greatly appreciate it if you could forward/post the job description below to any appropriate email lists at your institution. Thank you very much, Michael Ullman THE BRAIN AND LANGUAGE LAB The Brain and Language Lab investigates the biological and computational bases of language, and the relations between language and other cognitive domains, including memory, music and motor function. The lab's research examines both native and later-learned language. The lab is particularly interested in within and between subject differences in the biocognition of language, based on factors such as genetic variation, endocrine fluctuations, and sex and handedness differences. The lab's members test their hypotheses using a set of complementary behavioral, neurological, neuroimaging (ERPs, fMRI) and other biological (genetic, endocrine, pharmacological) approaches. They are interested in the normal acquisition and processing of language and non-language functions, as well as in the breakdown, recovery and rehabilitation of these functions in a variety of disorders, including Specific Language Impairment, ADHD, dyslexia, autism, Williams syndrome, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, and aphasia. For a fuller description of the Brain and Language Lab, please go to brainlang.georgetown.edu. RESEARCH ASSISTANT POSITION We are seeking a full-time Research Assistant/Lab Manager. The successful candidate, who will work with the two RA/Lab Managers currently in the lab, will have the opportunity to be involved in a variety of projects, using a range of methodological approaches (see brainlang.georgetown.edu). S/he will have responsibility for various aspects of research and laboratory management and organization, including working with other lab members in preparing and managing grants and IRB protocols; helping manage and upgrade the lab’s computers; writing and upgrading lab-specific computer programs for data processing; creating experimental stimuli; setting up and running experiments; performing statistical analyses; carrying out background research; and helping to write papers for publication. Minimum requirements for the position include a B.A. or B.S., with a significant amount of course-work or research experience in language, cognition, neuroscience, computer science, statistics, or a related field. Familiarity with UNIX and Windows is highly desirable, as is programming experience and a strong aptitude and experience in math or statistics. A car is preferable because subject testing is conducted at multiple sites. The candidate must be extremely energetic, hard-working, organized, efficient and responsible, and be able to work with a diverse group of people. POSTDOCTORAL POSITION The postdoctoral fellow will have the opportunity to be involved in a number of different projects, using a variety of methodological approaches (see brainlang.georgetown.edu), and to carry out her/his own studies related to lab interests. Minimum requirements for the position include a PhD and background in cognitive neuroscience, cognitive psychology, theoretical linguistics or a related field; research experience investigating the neurocognition of language; and expertise in two or more of the following: ERPs, fMRI, MEG, adult-onset disorders, developmental disorders, psycholinguistic behavioral techniques, statistics, molecular techniques. We are particularly interested in candidates with a substantial background in, and an aptitude for, experimental design and statistics. Excellent writing skills, a strong publication record, and previous demonstration of funding will all be considered advantageous. Candidates must have completed all PhD degree requirements prior to starting the position. FOR BOTH POSITIONS To allow for sufficient time to learn new skills and to be productive, candidates for both positions should ideally be available to work for three years. A start date of spring/summer 2006 is preferable. Interested candidates should email Marco Piñeyro (map89 at georgetown.edu) their CV and up to 3 publications (or other writing samples, for RA applicants), and have 3 recommenders email him their recommendations directly. Consideration of applicants will begin immediately, and will end when the positions are filled. Salary will be commensurate with experience and qualifications. Both positions are NIH-funded. Georgetown University is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity employer. The positions include health benefits. From karen.pollock at ualberta.ca Wed Mar 15 17:40:12 2006 From: karen.pollock at ualberta.ca (Pollock, Karen) Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 10:40:12 -0700 Subject: 2006 Child Phonology Conference - Call for Papers REMINDER Message-ID: Today is the official deadline for the Call for Papers for the 2006 International Child Phonology Conference. Please get your submissions in as soon as possible. The Call for Papers is copied below, and also on the conference website. Please also visit the website (http://www.rehabmed.ualberta.ca/spa/phonology/2006 Child Phonology Conference.htm ) for information on registration, accommodations and travel, and links to sites of interest to visitors to Edmonton and Alberta. The pre-registration deadline is May 1. As always, feel free to contact me if you have any questions. Karen Call for Papers Child Phonology Conference June 16-17 University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada The 2006 Child Phonology Conference organizing committee invites you to submit your recent research for presentation. Papers dealing with all aspects of children's phonological development and disorders will be considered. A maximum of two submissions per first author will be accepted. Typically, papers are presented in 20-minute time slots with 5-10 minutes for questions. However, if the number of papers submitted exceeds the total available time, some presentations will be converted to poster format. Submissions will be accepted until March 15, 2006. Submit the following: - Title of Presentation - Presenter Name(s) and Affiliation(s) - Contact Information (preferred contact person, address, telephone & fax numbers, email address) - 250 word summary/abstract - Also indicate if you are willing to consider either platform or poster presentation format Email to: karen.pollock at ualberta.ca or Mail to: Karen E. Pollock, Ph.D. Dept. of Speech Pathology & Audiology 2-70 Corbett Hall University of Alberta Edmonton, AB T6G 2G4 Canada -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From macw at cmu.edu Wed Mar 15 22:42:23 2006 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 17:42:23 -0500 Subject: book announcement Message-ID: EARLY TRILINGUALISM A Focus on Questions Julia Barnes (University of Mondragon) All those of us interested in multilingualism have had to wait a long time for a thorough account of trilingual language acquisition similar to those studies in child bilingualism that have become classics. Julia Barnes’ book fills this gap admirably. It is meticulously researched, abounds with primary data and offers many new insights. It will be warmly welcomed by those concerned with the natural acquisition and development of more than one language in both monolingual and multilingual contexts. Charlotte Hoffmann, University of Salford, UK ‘Early trilingualism’ is a fascinating book which breaks new ground in the study of multilingualism. It is clearly organized, and presents an in-depth analysis of form and function in early questioning behaviour. It should be of great interest not only to researchers in language acquisition and multilingualism but also to all those interested in pragmatics, sociolinguistics and child development. Jasone Cenoz, University of the Basque Country The book describes how a trilingual child in the Basque Country, where Spanish and Basque are the languages of the community, is able to successfully acquire English at home through interaction with her mother. It focuses on her acquisition of the form and function of English questions. Contents Introduction Part 1: Theoretical Perspectives Chapter 1. Bilingual and trilingual acquisition; Chapter 2. The development of interrogative behaviour Part II: The Acquisition Of English Question Form And Function In A Trilingual Child Chapter 3. Research questions and design ; Chapter 4. Research findings; Chapter 5. Interpretation of the findings Second Language Acquisition No. 16 January 2006 Format: 210 x 148mm 256 pp Hbk ISBN 1-85359-854-2/ EAN 978-1-85359-854-8 £49.95/ US $89.95/ CAN$109.95 Ebook ISBN 1-85359-855-0 /EAN 978-1-85359-855-5 8 £49.95/ US $89.95/ CAN$109.95 (Adobe format) For further information and to order at 20% discount, click on the following link: http://www.multilingual-matters.com/multi/display.asp?isb=1853598542 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jacqueline.vankampen at let.uu.nl Thu Mar 16 16:48:04 2006 From: jacqueline.vankampen at let.uu.nl (kampen) Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 17:48:04 +0100 Subject: Last Call for papers Romance Turn Message-ID: Last Call for Papers for the Workshop The Romance Turn Date: 07-Sep-2006 - 09-Sep-2006 Location: Utrecht, Netherlands Contact Person: Jacqueline van Kampen Meeting Email: Romanceturn at let.uu.nl Web Site: http://www.let.uu.nl/romanceturn/ Linguistic Field(s): Language Acquisition Language Family(ies): Romance Call Deadline: 01-Apr-2006 Meeting Description: The Romance Turn II (Workshop on the Acquisition of Romance Languages) September 7-9 2006 at the UiL OTS, Utrecht University http://www.let.uu.nl./romanceturn/ The Romance Turn II will take place at Utrecht University (Netherlands). Like the first edition of The Romance Turn, which took place in 2004 at the UNED in Madrid, the present workshop intends to gather people working on the acquisition of the Romance languages. Workshop topics Papers are invited in the area of the acquisition of Romance languages. All topics in the fields of (typical and impaired) first and second language acquisition from a generative perspective will be considered. Presentations will be 30-minutes long, plus 15 minutes for discussion, and will be in English. Invited speakers Larisa Avram (University of Bucharest) Anne Christophe (CNRS Paris) Ludovica Serratrice (University of Manchester) Abstract submission Authors are invited to send one copy of an abstract (maximally two pages) in English for review. Abstracts should be submitted via e-mail to Romanceturn at let.uu.nl, as an attachment in PDF. In the body of the e-mail message include the title, language, name, academic affiliation, current address, phone and fax number, e-mail, and audiovisual requests. Authors may submit up to two abstracts, one individual and one joint. Deadline for receipt of abstracts: April 1 2006. Notification of acceptance: May 1 2006. Address for sending abstracts: Romanceturn at let.uu.nl Organizing committee Sergio Baauw Jacqueline van Kampen Joke de Lange Manuela Pinto http://www.let.uu.nl/~Jacqueline.vanKampen/personal/ Postal address: UiL OTS Trans 10 3512 JK Utrecht The Netherlands phone: +31 30-2536054 fax: +31 30-2536000 From ramoseli at fiu.edu Thu Mar 16 20:44:53 2006 From: ramoseli at fiu.edu (Eliane Ramos) Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 15:44:53 -0500 Subject: Position at Florida Int University Message-ID: Please distribute this position posting to any interested parties. Individuals with backgrounds in any area related to speech-language pathology and interested in bilingual acquisition/disorders are strongly encouraged to apply: Tenure track faculty position in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Florida International University located in the Miami metropolitan area. The department is located in the School of Health Sciences, College of Health and Urban Affairs and affords faculty and students a unique opportunity for collaboration with individuals in the departments of Physical Therapy, Occupational Therapy, and Health Information Management. Responsibilities will include teaching undergraduate and graduate level courses, student advisement, and research. Qualified applicants must have Ph.D. in Speech-Language Pathology or related area. Preference will be given to candidates who specialize in speech and language development/disorders, and bilingual acquisition. Individuals that are bilingual Spanish/English or Creole/English are strongly encouraged to apply. The Miami metropolitan area is an ideal location for researchers interested in bilingual issues. The department is committed to the outstanding academic and clinical preparation of multicultural populations. Salary is negotiable based on rank. This is a nine month position to begin Fall 2006. Opportunity for summer employment in future years is anticipated. For consideration interested applicants should submit a letter of interest, curriculum vita, and 3 letters of recommendation to: Eliane Ramos, Ph. D., Chair Search Committee Dept. of Communication Sciences and Disorders Florida International University University Park Campus, HLS 144 Miami, FL 33199 Telephone (305) 348-2710 Fax Number (305) 348-2740 ramoseli at fiu.edu Review of applicants to start April 10, 2006. Florida International University is an equal opportunity/Access Employer and Institution. From karen.pollock at ualberta.ca Fri Mar 17 04:29:36 2006 From: karen.pollock at ualberta.ca (Pollock, Karen) Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 21:29:36 -0700 Subject: 2006 International Child Phonology Conference - Final Call for Papers Message-ID: Yesterday (March 15) was the deadline for submission of presentation proposals for the 2006 International Child Phonology Conference to be held at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, June 16-17. However, I understand that there was a glitch in our network server mid-day yesterday, and that at least one person had difficulty getting an email submission through to me. I want to be sure that I didn't miss any other submissions, so am extending the deadline to Monday, March 20. If you sent a proposal but have not received an email confirmation from me, please let me know as soon as possible. The Call for Papers is copied below, and also on the conference website. Please also visit the website (http://www.rehabmed.ualberta.ca/spa/phonology/2006%20Child%20Phonology% 20Conference.htm) for information on registration, accommodations and travel, and links to sites of interest to visitors to Edmonton and Alberta. The pre-registration deadline is May 1. Karen Call for Papers Child Phonology Conference June 16-17 University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada The 2006 Child Phonology Conference organizing committee invites you to submit your recent research for presentation. Papers dealing with all aspects of children's phonological development and disorders will be considered. A maximum of two submissions per first author will be accepted. Typically, papers are presented in 20-minute time slots with 5-10 minutes for questions. However, if the number of papers submitted exceeds the total available time, some presentations will be converted to poster format. Submissions will be accepted until March 15, 2006. Submit the following: - Title of Presentation - Presenter Name(s) and Affiliation(s) - Contact Information (preferred contact person, address, telephone & fax numbers, email address) - 250 word summary/abstract - Also indicate if you are willing to consider either platform or poster presentation format Email to: karen.pollock at ualberta.ca or Mail to: Karen E. Pollock, Ph.D. Dept. of Speech Pathology & Audiology 2-70 Corbett Hall University of Alberta Edmonton, AB T6G 2G4 Canada -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Laura-Ann.Petitto at Dartmouth.EDU Fri Mar 17 19:02:37 2006 From: Laura-Ann.Petitto at Dartmouth.EDU (Laura-Ann Petitto) Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 14:02:37 EST Subject: Fascinating Post-Doc with NIRS/fMRI Message-ID: A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 1211 bytes Desc: not available URL: From macw at cmu.edu Sat Mar 18 22:11:52 2006 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 17:11:52 -0500 Subject: pitch shifts Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, Over the last four years, we have been attempting to provide continually better support in CHAT and CLAN for transcribers who are familiar with Conversation Analysis (CA) transcription format. At first, we simply provided a few CA symbols inside the CLAN editor without fully integrating CA and CHAT modes. Then, we began to provide methods for automatic alignment of overlaps and fuller support for all the special CA characters. Later, we eliminated any overt distinction between CA and CHAT by allowing full access to all CA characters from basic CHAT mode. The various CA characters and forms we support can be found at http://talkbank.org/ca/ Some of these changes have imposed unacceptable restrictions on CA coding in order to allow us to use CLAN programs like CHECK, FREQ, etc. However, we have also been developing a program called CHAT2CA that automatically removes all these ugly CHAT restrictions and allows CA users to redisplay their files in a purer CA format. The other side of this work involves a slow adaptation of CHAT conventions to look more like CA conventions wherever that makes good sense. The first major change in this direction is, as I have mentioned, the fact that all the codes given at http://talkbank.org/ ca/codes.html are currently legal in CHAT and should pass CHECK. These codes mark things like pitch shift, height, tempo change, creaky voice, breath, and loudness. These features were not marked in the current CHAT transcripts, so there was no need to reformat the transcripts to use these codes. However, they are now available for future work. In addition, I have now replaced the earlier system of CHAT markings for prosodic shift (shift to high, shift to low) with the corresponding CA forms. This means that -' was changed to the up arrow ↑ and -_ was changed to the down arrow ↓. As in CA, these markers appear next to the words they affect and are not surrounded by spaces. I have removed old section 7.4 from the manual where these markers were described and put the relevant material into section 6.4. I have removed the -, and similar symbols from the CHECK depfile and replaced all occurrences of the old symbols in the database with the new CA forms. I hope that people interested in marking these features will find the new methods of coding useful. Good luck, Brian MacWhinney From mearken at andrew.cmu.edu Mon Mar 20 14:35:23 2006 From: mearken at andrew.cmu.edu (Marnie Arkenberg) Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 09:35:23 -0500 Subject: reverse mutual exclusivity? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, A colleague mentioned that her bilingual 3 year old refuses to accept the notion that an object can have the same same in both English and Hebrew. Can anyone guide me towards literature that discusses this sort of thing? Cheers, Marnie Arkenberg Marnie E. Arkenberg, Ph.D. NIMH Postdoctoral Fellow 254F Baker Hall Department of Psychology Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 (412) 268-7986 From sdevitt at tcd.ie Mon Mar 20 16:42:45 2006 From: sdevitt at tcd.ie (Sean Devitt) Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 16:42:45 +0000 Subject: Issues with MLU and FREQ In-Reply-To: <91A0513E-5272-4ECA-8164-A2B3AF1A5292@mac.com> Message-ID: Dear Brian In the email from Dongping Zheng there is a comment about using “–t%mor” in the command line when calculating MLU. I cannot remember seeing reference to this in any other exchange on MLU or in the CLAN manual. There is a major difference between including “–t%mor” in the command line and omitting it. Could you explain just why this might be so? I would have expected that the number of utterances would be somewhat related (e.g. half the number when “-t%mor” is included) and the same for the morphemes, but there seems to be absolutely no relation. I give an example from Wells’ data below: When I used the command “mlu +t*CHI -t%mor +f jonath*.cha”, the result for the file: Jonath08.cha was as follows: Number of: utterances = 50, morphemes = 241 Ratio of morphemes over utterances = 4.820 Standard deviation = 3.882 When I used the command “mlu +t*CHI +f jonath*.cha (leaving out “-t%mor”)”, the result was: Number of: utterances = 252, morphemes = 691 Ratio of morphemes over utterances = 2.742 Standard deviation = 2.070 The same situation arose for all the files in this corpus – calculations of utterances and morphemes for the two commands that bore no relation to one another. My question is: which formula is to be taken as the appropriate one for calculating MLU? Obviously there is a huge difference in the calculation. A second related question: How reliable is MLU considered to be as an index of development nowadays? Obviously this is an important issue, for example in attempting to find at what point features like regular past tense appear. Finally, a question about FREQ and the number of utterances examined. The output of FREQ for any feature in the CHI tier contains a line - ### *CHI:, where ### is some number. I presumed this was the number of utterances of the child in that transcript. Obviously this cannot be the case. Below, for example, is the output of FREQ in the file Jonath08.cha referred to above for irregular pasts (command "freq +d2 +t*CHI +t%mor +s"*&PAST*" +f jonath*.cha"). It was necessary to include the MOR tier to find "*&PAST*". What DOES the figure 310 in this case refer to? It seems to bear no relation to the number of utterances calculated for MLU. @ID: en|wells|CHI|2;11.29||||Target_Child|| 310 *CHI: 1 v:aux|have&past 3 v|be&past&13s etc. @ST: 10 22 0.455 Best wishes Sean Devitt Quoting Brian MacWhinney : > Dear Dongping, > You can use GEM as the "frontend" for MLU and other programs by > using the "piping" feature. Section > 2.3.5 of the introductory tutorial desccribes this a bit and there > are further descriptions in section 7 Exercises. > Basically, GEM just does the work of narrowing down the material that > will go into FREQ with the +d2 option to produce a STATFREQ input. > > --Brian MacWhinney > > On Feb 13, 2006, at 9:01 PM, Dongping Zheng wrote: > > > Hi, > > > > I just wanted to thank Brian and Bracha for their help. Here is the > > trick and solution: > > > > Adding the -t%mor tag following the MLU command when analyzing MLU > > in words. > > > > > > > > My analysis is getting more involved. It is very > > exciting to come to this point since I learned so much about > > CHILDES and from this Listserv. I used STATFREQ and “mlu -t%mor - > > s"[+ bch]" +d +tBET *.cha” and was able to generate data and input > > in Excel. > > I wonder if there is a way to combine GEM and STATFREQ, > > GEM and “mlu -t%mor -s"[+ bch]" +d +tBET *.cha” so that I can > > generate data to input in Excel rather than hand keying them in. > > Thanks again for your help! > > Dongping > > > > > > <<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>> > > > > Dongping Zheng, ABD > > Department of Educational Psychology > > University of Connecticut > > > > 249 Glenbrook Rd. Unit 2064 > > > > Storrs, CT 06269 > > dongping.zheng at uconn.edu > > http://www.education2.uconn.edu/epsy240/dzheng/index.htm > > > > > > > > Webmaster @ Universal Design for Instruction > > http://www.facultyware.uconn.edu/home.htm > > > > From: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org [mailto:info- > > childes at mail.talkbank.org] On Behalf Of Bracha Nir-Sagiv > > Sent: Friday, February 10, 2006 2:57 AM > > To: Dongping Zheng > > Cc: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org > > Subject: Re: Gem and MLU > > > > > > > > Dear Dongping, > > Try adding the -t%mor tag following the MLU command - in the > > current version of CLAN, MLU works automatically on the %MOR tier > > and you need to tell the program to disregard it. > > Hope this helps, > > Bracha > > > > Dongping Zheng wrote: > > > > > > Hi, > > > > I was trying to run this command: gem +sgreet +t*LUL +t*SEA +t*BET > > +t*LIZ +d *.cha | MLU and I got this message in the output file: > > > > > > > > TIER "%MOR" HASN'T BEEN FOUND IN THE INPUT DATA! > > > > > > > > I don’t have %MOR tier in the input data, I have LUL, SEA BET and > > LIZ tiers. > > > > > > > > Would you help me to solve this problem? Oh, I use windows XP. > > > > > > > > Thank you so much! > > Dongping > > > > > > > > > > +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ > > This Mail Was Scanned By Mail-seCure System > > at the Tel-Aviv University CC. > > > > > > Dr. Seán Devitt, F.T.C.D. Senior Lecturer in Education, Education Department, Trinity College, University of Dublin Dublin, Ireland. Phone: (353 1) 608 1293. From macw at cmu.edu Mon Mar 20 18:22:08 2006 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 13:22:08 -0500 Subject: MLU and %mor Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, I try to avoid posting details regarding CLAN programs to this list, but I have received enough emails on this issue to suggest that it is time to remind people once more of a change made about 24 months ago in the operation of MLU. This is that MLU now operates by default on the %mor line, not the main line. In the database, there is now a %mor now for all of the English files and much of French, German, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish. If your corpus has a %mor line, then MLU will give you a true MLU. If it does not, and if you then run MLU on the main line by adding the -t%mor switch, what you are going to get is not "MLU in morphemes" but "MLU in words". Since the main line now includes no hyphenated words, MLU is going to count each word as one word and will do no morphemic analysis. If you want to have an MLU in morphemes, you have to have a %mor line. This shift to reliance on the %mor line was a part of a general plan of increased support for computational linguistic tools in the most recent proposal to NIH for continued funding for CHILDES. The basic rationale is that coherent and relplicable automatic morphosyntactic analysis has to be conducted on the basis of a systematically tagged database. Constructing a complete %mor line for all these files has been a huge job, as you can imagine. However, I am convinced that reliable progress in child language morphosyntactic analysis will proceed best through reliance on consistent computational tools. --Brian MacWhinney, CMU P.S. For those we haven't got the time to construct %mor lines for new data, it may be comforting to know that MLU in words is highly correlated with MLU in morphemes, at least for English. From caponeni at shu.edu Mon Mar 20 19:51:03 2006 From: caponeni at shu.edu (Nina Capone) Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 14:51:03 -0500 Subject: Faculty Position - Department of Speech-Language Pathology Message-ID: Faculty Position- Department of Speech-Language Pathology The School of Graduate Medical Education (SGME) of Seton Hall University announces a twelve-month faculty position in the Department of Speech-Language Pathology. The position is available starting summer 2006, but applications will continue to be accepted until the position is filled. Qualifications include an earned doctorate in speech-language pathology or communication sciences and disorders, and expertise in one or more of the following areas is preferred: language disorders in school-aged children and adolescents, phonological disorders, augmentative communication, and pediatric neuromotor disorders. CCC-SLP and eligibility for New Jersey state licensure preferred, but not required. Evidence of scholarly work and potential for programmatic research and extramural grant writing is desirable. Responsibilities include teaching graduate courses in applicant?s area(s) of expertise, serving on departmental, school and university committees, engaging in research and other scholarly activities, and mentoring and advising students. Teaching pre-requisite courses in SLP for non-major students may be required for this position. One of the objectives of the SGME is to have a significant national presence in health sciences education. In response to the changing health care needs of society, the school is assuming a leadership role in the development of high quality, innovative graduate programs. The SGME offers opportunities for intra- and inter-departmental collaborative research, curriculum development, teaching doctoral seminars, and grant development across a number of disciplines. Salary and benefits are extremely competitive and include tuition remission for spouses and eligible dependents. Please send a cover letter indicating the position you are applying for with a current curriculum vita that includes the names, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses of at least three (3) references to: Office of the Dean Attn: SLP Faculty Position School of Graduate Medical Education Seton Hall University, 400 South Orange Ave South Orange, NJ 07079 Applications will be accepted until the position is filled. The cover letter should address one's qualifications for the position and one's philosophy and specific goals regarding teaching and scholarship. After the initial screening, candidates may be subsequently asked to supply additional materials. Seton Hall University is committed to programs of equal opportunity and affirmative action (EEO/AA) to achieve our objectives of creating and supporting a diverse racial, ethnic, cultural community. Seton Hall University encourages applications from individuals who represent a broad spectrum of backgrounds and, in particular, welcomes applications from women and minority groups. For further information about this position, please contact: Venu Balasubramanian, Ph.D, at (973) 275-2912 or via e-mail at balasuve at shu.edu . For further information on Seton Hall University, see our web page at www.shu.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ellmcf at nus.edu.sg Tue Mar 21 01:16:01 2006 From: ellmcf at nus.edu.sg (Madalena Cruz-Ferreira) Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2006 09:16:01 +0800 Subject: reverse mutual exclusivity? Message-ID: Dear Marnie, I've noticed a similar phenomenon in my data. My children deliberately distorted similar-sounding words in their different languages in order to make them maximally different, starting at the one-word stage. They did this by manipulating segments and/or prosody. I discuss a few examples in a paper published in the Journal of Portuguese Linguistics that I can send electronically to you, if you want. More detail is in my book _Three is a Crowd?_ (Multilingual Matters, 2006), especially chapters 5, 6 and 10. I find this very, very interesting. If your colleague (or you!) should investigate this further, please let me know? Best Madalena ====================================== Madalena Cruz-Ferreira Dept. English Language and Literature National University of Singapore ellmcf at nus.edu.sg http://profile.nus.edu.sg/fass/ellmcf/ ====================================== -----Original Message----- From: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org [mailto:info-childes at mail.talkbank.org]On Behalf Of Marnie Arkenberg Sent: Monday, 20 March, 2006 10:35 PM To: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org Subject: reverse mutual exclusivity? Dear Info-CHILDES, A colleague mentioned that her bilingual 3 year old refuses to accept the notion that an object can have the same same in both English and Hebrew. Can anyone guide me towards literature that discusses this sort of thing? Cheers, Marnie Arkenberg Marnie E. Arkenberg, Ph.D. NIMH Postdoctoral Fellow 254F Baker Hall Department of Psychology Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 (412) 268-7986 From roberta at UDel.Edu Tue Mar 21 02:28:16 2006 From: roberta at UDel.Edu (Roberta Golinkoff) Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 21:28:16 -0500 Subject: reverse mutual exclusivity? In-Reply-To: <3211.128.2.65.130.1142865323.squirrel@128.2.65.130> Message-ID: here are a couple of relevant resources: Au, T. & Glusman, M. (1990). The principle of mutual exclusivity in word learning: to honor or not to honor? Child Development, 61, 1474-1490. Mervis, C. B., Golinkoff, R. M., & Bertrand, J. (1994). Two-year-olds readily learn multiple labels for the same basic level category. Child Development, 65, 971-991. Blewitt, P., Golinkoff, R. M., & Alioto, A. (2000). Do toddlers have label preferences? A possible explanation for word refusals. First Language, 20, 253-272. Hope these are helpful to you! Best, Roberta Golinkoff On Mar 20, 2006, at 9:35 AM, Marnie Arkenberg wrote: > Dear Info-CHILDES, > A colleague mentioned that her bilingual 3 year old refuses to > accept the notion that an object can have the same same in both > English and Hebrew. Can anyone guide me towards literature that > discusses this sort of thing? > Cheers, > Marnie Arkenberg > > Marnie E. Arkenberg, Ph.D. > NIMH Postdoctoral Fellow > 254F Baker Hall > Department of Psychology > Carnegie Mellon University > Pittsburgh, PA 15213 > (412) 268-7986 > > > _____________________________________________________ Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, Ph. D. H. Rodney Sharp Professor School of Education and Departments of Psychology and Linguistics University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716 Office: 302-831-1634; Fax: 302-831-4110 Web page: http://udel.edu/~roberta/ Please check out our doctoral program at http://www.udel.edu/educ/graduate/ -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 1661 bytes Desc: not available URL: From gleason at bu.edu Tue Mar 21 06:54:22 2006 From: gleason at bu.edu (Jean Berko Gleason) Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2006 01:54:22 -0500 Subject: Away from my mail Message-ID: I'll be away from March 21 to April 1, and may not be able to check my mail while traveling, but I'll try. I'll respond to your message as soon as I can. This is an automatic message. jbg From deak at cogsci.ucsd.edu Wed Mar 22 22:21:52 2006 From: deak at cogsci.ucsd.edu (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Gedeon_De=E1k?=) Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 14:21:52 -0800 Subject: reverse mutual exclusivity? In-Reply-To: <3211.128.2.65.130.1142865323.squirrel@128.2.65.130> Message-ID: Nice example, which might say more about knowledge of language use rather than so-called mutual exclusivity (M.E.). I can't address the bilingual metalinguistic/code-switching issue, but regarding more general issues of word learning and comprehension, here's an analysis of related issues: The literature on homonymy is most relevant. Check out the following (all w/ monolingual samples, I think). They do not paint a uniform (monochromatic?) picture but the general trend is that preschool children can interpret homonyms if reasonable contextual information supports the interpretation. However, even fairly old children can be "thrown" by low-frequency homonyms in sentential/story context (e.g., "The /har/ ran across the road" where"hair" is much more familiar & retrievable than "hare"). Here are some relevant references: Children's resistance to homonymy: An experimental study of pseudohomonyms Journal of child language [0305-0009] Casenhiser, Devin yr:2005 vol:32 iss:2 pg:319 -343 Children's difficulty in learning homonyms Journal of child language [0305-0009] Doherty, Martin yr:2004 vol:31 iss:1 pg:203 -214 Possible explanations for children's literal interpretations of homonyms Journal of child language [0305-0009] Mazzocco, Michèle yr:2003 vol:30 iss:4 pg:879 -904 A comparison of homonym and novel word learning: The role of phonotactic probability and word frequency Journal of child language [0305-0009] Storkel, Holly yr:2005 vol:32 iss:4 pg:827 -853 The issue of so-called M.E. (implied by "reverse ME") is also relevant, and people often use "ME" in ways that aren't theoretically or empirically supported. There is little evidence that children (of at least 2 years) generally assume that every class of referents has one label and each label refers to a unique (narrow) class of referents. The evidence for this position is too extensive to summarize here, but for a slightly out-of-date review see: Deák, G. O. (2000). Chasing the fox of word learning: Why “constraints” fail to capture it. Developmental Review, 20, 29-80. The references Roberta sent also are relevant; I won't rehash them. Children readily show what Bill Merriman called the "disambiguation effect": when they hear a novel word in an ostensive context, all else being equal they tend to map it onto an unnamed referent rather than a familiar referent with a known (common) label. However, that tendency has a number of possible explanations, many not requiring an underlying assumption that things only have one legitimate label (or description). And, just to be completely clear, there is little or no support for the idea that children have a kind of representational inflexibility, such that they cannot represent an entity as belonging to only on category. To the contrary, for example, 2- to 4-year-olds readily and robustly produce (or accept) multiple appropriate labels for objects, people, or story characters: Clark, E. V. & Svaib, T. A. (1997). Speaker perspective and reference in young children. First Language. Deák, G. O. & Maratsos, M. (1998). On having complex representations of things: Preschoolers use multiple words for objects and people. Developmental Psychology, 34, 224-240. Deák, G. O., Yen, L., & Pettit, J. (2001). By any other name: When will preschoolers produce multiple labels for a referent? Journal of Child Language, 28, 787-804. There are a few papers showing "true" ME effects (i.e., rejection of new word or replacement of old word (Merriman & Bowman, 1989; Deák et al 2001). Typically though the effects are small, but larger (it seems) when cognitive load is high (Liittschwager & Markman, 1994; Deák & Wagner, 2003). However, the Deak et al 2001 data show that rejection/replacement is an odd effect, and possibly an artifact: in short, right after learning a new word 3-/4-year-olds sometimes don't use or don't produce a familiar word for the same referent. However, there is nothing systematic about which word they don't produce--as if there is some maximum number of "legitimate" words they'll produce (in our studies, 2 to 3), and they choose from all the options...not at random, but not predictably either. The behavior looks like stochastic low-probability inhibition of lexical retrieval, possibly with specific items weighted by priming of that item. The implication is that this suppression doesn't say anything conceptually important about children's commitment to symbolic mappings (i.e., they're not committed to rejecting a word that they failed to produce on one occasion). I can't yet prove this account, but it's the best "fit" for the limited data available. In a recent series of studies (under review; available on request) we showed that there is a weak, transitory ME-like effect for words, facts, and pictorial symbols, w/ no difference in magnitude across the three kinds of items. Notably, the effect disappears after 2 exposures to the novel information, and, again, it is obtained under a relatively high cognitive load (we haven't experimentally manipulated this yet). Best account: when learning new info. with many-to-many associative mappings, there is a slight, temporary inhibitory effect for overlapping mappings. In other words, Anderson's old fan effect is content-general, and accounts for "true" ME effects. Two more brief notes (almost done!). First, there is converging data that children's pragmatic expectations influence the disambiguation effect: that is, children learn to expect grown-ups to use a restricted lexicon when talking to them (i.e., using shared words for a referent whenever possible (something like a Gricean principle of clarity). See, e.g., Diesendruck, Dev Psych 2005. Second, Perner, Sprung, Doherty et al have proposed that young children have trouble generating alternate perspectives (i.e., dissimilar representations with positive truth-values wrt a referent), and this could account for ME effects. It is a clever account with some intriguing supporting evidence: Perner, J., Strummer, S., Sprung, M., & Doherty, M. (2002). Theory of mind finds its Piagetian perspective: why alternative naming comes with understanding belief. Cognitive Development, 17, 1451–1472. but is disconfirmed (as I read it) by other evidence, particularly: Deák & Maratsos (1998) Deák, Yen, & Pettit (2001) Deák, G. O. & Enright, B. (in press). Choose and choose again: Appearance-reality errors and the logic of questioning. Developmental Science. Best conclusions for now: Disambiguation is at least in large part due to pragmatic expectations. Exposure to a multilingual environment, and situation-specific information about an interlocutor's lexical knowledge, seems to "set" children's expectations about the lexicon that interlocutor will use. (We do not yet know how robust or precise this process is.) "True" rejection/replacement effects, including of homonyms, are generally small, transitory, content-general (i.e., not specific to novel words) and probably modulated by factors such as lack of contextual supporting information and cognitive load. Implications for the example: Given the apparent pragmatic basis of disambiguation effects, there is no reason why a child couldn't induce the expectation that speakers of L1 use different lexemes (i.e., phonological forms) than speakers of L2 for the conventional (i.e., common) forms in each language that refer to a single referent category. So hearing someone known to be an L2 speaker using the L1 phonological form would violate this expectation. The child might respond in ways that reflect this expectancy violation. We know that children sometimes verbalize their doubt about a speaker's locution (whether or not they are committed to rejecting the locuation), and so a verbal statement of disbelief or rejection would not be unexpected. Anyone who knows of other findings that contradict these conclusions, please tell me. Thanks! On Mar 20, 2006, at 6:35 AM, Marnie Arkenberg wrote: > Dear Info-CHILDES, > A colleague mentioned that her bilingual 3 year old refuses to > accept the notion that an object can have the same same in both > English and Hebrew. Can anyone guide me towards literature that > discusses this sort of thing? > Cheers, > Marnie Arkenberg > > Marnie E. Arkenberg, Ph.D. > NIMH Postdoctoral Fellow > 254F Baker Hall > Department of Psychology > Carnegie Mellon University > Pittsburgh, PA 15213 > (412) 268-7986 > > > Gedeon O. Deák, Ph.D. Department of Cognitive Science 9500 Gilman Dr. (858) 822-3352 University of California, San Diego fax (858) 534-1128 La Jolla, CA 92093-0515 http://cogsci.ucsd.edu/~deak/ -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 9778 bytes Desc: not available URL: From msninio at pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il Thu Mar 23 06:01:44 2006 From: msninio at pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il (Anat Ninio) Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 08:01:44 +0200 Subject: language development and breastfeeding In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Dear Leah, If you're an Israeli, there is an article in today's Haaretz about the non-effects of breastfeeding on practically anything, starting with infant health and continuing with intelligence. The URL is below. http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=507898&contrassID=2&subContrassID=2&sbSubContrassID=0 I've never heard of the idea that breastfeeding has any connection to language development but on the face of it it sounds to me like a completely groundless New-Age-type invention. Like crystals and auras, you know. I think, on the other hand, that putting pressure on mothers to breastfeed more than they are willing is very harmful for the dyadic relationship and can cause emotional and developmental problems for the infants involved. I hope this answers your question, Prof. Anat Ninio Developmental Psycholinguist The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel From k.j.alcock at lancaster.ac.uk Thu Mar 23 09:33:54 2006 From: k.j.alcock at lancaster.ac.uk (Katie Alcock) Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 09:33:54 +0000 Subject: language development and breastfeeding In-Reply-To: <442239C8.1020006@pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il> Message-ID: Well-controlled studies that introduce long-chain fatty acids into infant formula e.g. Willatts, P., Forsyth, J. S., DiModugno, M. K., Varma, S., & Colvin, M. (1998). Effect of long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids in infant formula on problem solving at 10 months of age. Lancet, 352(9129), 688-691. control for any "bonding" or SES effects of breastfeeding - and an effect on some types of cognitive behaviour is shown in preverbal infants (e.g. problem solving in the above study). However other studies with similar designs e.g. Auestad, N., Scott, D. T., Janowsky, J. S., Jacobsen, C., Carroll, R. E., Montalto, M. B., et al. (2003). Visual, cognitive, and language assessments at 39 months: A follow-up study of children fed formulas containing long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids to 1 year of age. Pediatrics, 112(3), E177-E183. have shown no effect on language of supplemented formula. This study however failed to show an effect of breastfeeding itself, either, which has been fairly commonly found: it's just that there are so many confounds of breastfeeding itself. And others e.g. Birch, E. E., Garfield, S., Hoffman, D. R., Uauy, R., & Birch, D. G. (2000). A randomized controlled trial of early dietary supply of long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids and mental development in term infants. Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology, 42(3), 174-181. have shown improvements on e.g. the Bayley Scales - Cognitive, but this was only on the non-language sections, and there were no differences in the language sections. Katie Alcock Katie Alcock, DPhil Lecturer Department of Psychology University of Lancaster Fylde College Lancaster LA1 4YF Tel 01524 593833 Fax 01524 593744 Web http://www.psych.lancs.ac.uk/people/KatieAlcock.html From mmlahey at comcast.net Thu Mar 23 15:34:27 2006 From: mmlahey at comcast.net (Peg Lahey) Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 10:34:27 -0500 Subject: language development and breastfeeding In-Reply-To: Message-ID: For a review of some literature prior to 2004 that includes this topic see the Bamford-Lahey Children's Foundation website www.bamford-lahey.org. . The focus of the review is essential fatty acids but it includes some discussion of breastfeeding and development. It was completed in 2002 and updated in 2003. For direct access, click on first link below and then click section on infant development; for update click on 2nd link. There is some support re vocabulary and verbal IQ and some suggestion that there may be a nutritional component related to the higher amount of omega3 fatty acids found in breast milk vs. formula as it was constituted at the time [some changes recently]. Peg Lahey http://bamford-lahey.org/lipidsrev102.html#LIPIDS for original paper http://www.bamford-lahey.org/update.html for a short update in 2003. -----Original Message----- From: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org [mailto:info-childes at mail.talkbank.org]On Behalf Of leah gedalyovich Sent: Wednesday, March 22, 2006 5:05 PM To: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org Subject: language development and breastfeeding dear all, this question came up from a discussion with a friend who is a lactation consultant. there seems to be a given that breastfeeding is better than any other alternative for virtually every aspect of development. is there any published research on the relationship between breastfeeding and language development? if any relationship is found is it attributed to nutritional issues or to other issues (emotional, sensori-motor, etc) i will post a summary if there are replies. thanx! leah gedalyovich -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From j-tomblin at uiowa.edu Thu Mar 23 16:29:36 2006 From: j-tomblin at uiowa.edu (Tomblin, J B) Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 10:29:36 -0600 Subject: language development and breastfeeding Message-ID: Several years ago we published a study (Tomblin, Smith, & Zhang, 1997) on prenatal and infancy risk factors for SLI at 6 years of age that included retrospective information on breastfeeding. When mother's education was controlled breastfeeding was a significant protective factor for language outcome (odds ratio=0.5). We also found that there was a dose effect in that longer periods of breastfeeding had a stronger effect than shorter periods. More recently, Drane and Logemann (2000) published a systematic review of literature on breastfeeding and cognitive outcomes. Their findings were that the literature, although limited, supported an association between breastfeeding and better cognitive outcomes. These authors note that most research (including my study), has not differentiated between pure breastfeeding and combinations of breast and formula feeding which makes interpretation more difficult. I believe Denise Drane has recently completed a dissertation on language development and breastfeeding at Northwestern where this was controlled. Tomblin, J. B., Smith, E. & Zhang, X. (1997) Epidemiology of SLI: Prenatal and perinatal risk factors. Journal of Communication Disorders, 30, 325-344. Drane, D. & Logemann, J. (2000) A critical evaluation of the evidence on the association of infant feeding and cognitive development. Paediatric and Perinatal Epidemiology, 14, 349-356. ________________________________ From: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org [mailto:info-childes at mail.talkbank.org] On Behalf Of leah gedalyovich Sent: Wednesday, March 22, 2006 4:05 PM To: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org Subject: language development and breastfeeding dear all, this question came up from a discussion with a friend who is a lactation consultant. there seems to be a given that breastfeeding is better than any other alternative for virtually every aspect of development. is there any published research on the relationship between breastfeeding and language development? if any relationship is found is it attributed to nutritional issues or to other issues (emotional, sensori-motor, etc) i will post a summary if there are replies. thanx! leah gedalyovich -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lhewitt at bgnet.bgsu.edu Thu Mar 23 16:52:59 2006 From: lhewitt at bgnet.bgsu.edu (Lynne Hewitt) Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 11:52:59 -0500 Subject: language development and breastfeeding In-Reply-To: Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From alaakso at indiana.edu Thu Mar 23 18:23:35 2006 From: alaakso at indiana.edu (Aarre Laakso) Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 13:23:35 -0500 Subject: Japanese POST database? Message-ID: Hello, The CHILDES website (http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/morgrams/) states that there is a POST database available for Japanese. I have downloaded the MOR grammar, but I don't think it includes the POST database. Does anybody know where it is or have a copy they could send me? Thanks, Aarre -- Aarre Laakso http://mypage.iu.edu/~alaakso/ Cognitive Development Laboratory mailto:alaakso at indiana.edu Indiana University, Bloomington office: 812-856-0836 1101 East Tenth Street, Psych A104 lab: 812-855-8256 Bloomington, Indiana 47405-7007, USA fax: 309-276-8745 From James_Morgan at brown.edu Fri Mar 24 00:20:07 2006 From: James_Morgan at brown.edu (James Morgan) Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 19:20:07 -0500 Subject: language development and breastfeeding In-Reply-To: Message-ID: A substantial number of articles in the pediatric literature report that reduced incidence of otitis media is associated with breastfeeding. This is probably due to a combination of factors including antibodies passed to the child through breast milk and the increased mechanical load in breastfeeding relative to bottle feeding, which promotes drainage of the Eustachian tubes (infants' Eustacian tubes are narrower and more horizontal than adults'). There is at least a weak relation between incidence of OME in infancy and phonological and lexical measures of language development. -- Jim Morgan At 05:04 PM 3/22/2006, leah gedalyovich wrote: >dear all, >this question came up from a discussion with a friend who is a lactation >consultant. there seems to be a given that breastfeeding is better than >any other alternative for virtually every aspect of development. is there >any published research on the relationship between breastfeeding and >language development? if any relationship is found is it attributed to >nutritional issues or to other issues (emotional, sensori-motor, etc) >i will post a summary if there are replies. >thanx! >leah gedalyovich > > From macw at cmu.edu Fri Mar 24 04:16:30 2006 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 23:16:30 -0500 Subject: warning on formats and media Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, The rise of MP3 and DVD as popular consumer formats with readily available playback devices may lead researchers to think that these formats are also suitable for research on spoken language in natural contexts. In fact, both of these formats have problems when used for transcript-based analyses. Both are compressed in ways that make it difficult for software to find exact begin and end points of utterances, words, and gestures. The CHILDES CLAN program can play back MP3 because MP3 is a format supported directly by Quicktime. However, because of the nature of MP3 compression, QuickTime and CLAN cannot locate precise time points within an MP3 file. For this reason, I strongly advise researchers to use uncompressed audio formats like WAV and AIFF or OGG. Currently, all audio in the database is in WAV format. If you wish to generate MP3 files for special purposes such as student work, please always be sure to maintain uncompressed WAV files for archival purposes. It is also true that careful phonological analysis in programs like Praat or Phon will work much better with WAV files than with MP3 files. On the video side, there is an even more serious issue regarding the commercial DVD format. Currently, there are no methods at all for linking transcripts to material in DVD format. Instead, CLAN requires linkage to any of the compressed file formats supported by QuickTime, which include the various MPEG formats. Please note that using DVD media to store QuickTime or WAV files is not a problem at all. It is only the full DVD movie format that is a problem. For both video and audio, it is important to preserve your original uncompressed media as your archival source. For audio, this means the WAV files. For video, it typically means the mini-DV cassettes used by a digital recorder or the original VHS. If you are participating in a project that is having problem with the monetary resources needed for the archival storage of uncompressed media, please contact me and we will try to figure out some way of providing assistance or at least minimizing the negative consequences of destroying your original media. Many thanks, Brian MacWhinney From stemberg at interchange.ubc.ca Fri Mar 24 04:49:26 2006 From: stemberg at interchange.ubc.ca (Joe Stemberger) Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 20:49:26 -0800 Subject: warning on formats and media In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Brian, Thanks for the reminder about the MP3 and DVD formats. I have a follow-up question to this statement: > For both video and audio, it is important to preserve your original > uncompressed media as your archival source. For audio, this means > the WAV files. For video, it typically means the mini-DV cassettes > used by a digital recorder or the original VHS. > Storing WAV files is easy and cheap. And they're easy and cheap to copy. An hour of uncompressed sound is only 600MB, after all. But video is something else entirely, since each hour is 15GB. Although I COULD break up each 40-60-minute-long recording session into 3 or 4 parts and back them up as files on DVD disks (not in DVD format), I find that I don't. I do rely on the original mini-DV tapes for archiving. Can you tell us how long mini-DV cassettes last before they degrade? When do I need to think about backing them up to another storage medium? (I've heard that DVD disks are supposed to last for 100 years --- but since they havn't been around for anywhere near that long, I have my doubts about how much I can rely on that. Still, maybe 30 years?) Thanks! ---Joe Stemberger Linguistics University of British Columbia -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From peytontodd at mindspring.com Fri Mar 24 07:04:09 2006 From: peytontodd at mindspring.com (Peyton Todd) Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 02:04:09 -0500 Subject: warning on formats and media Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From peytontodd at mindspring.com Fri Mar 24 07:29:35 2006 From: peytontodd at mindspring.com (Peyton Todd) Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 02:29:35 -0500 Subject: warning on formats and media - Footnote Message-ID: A point I forgot to mention - if you follow my method of saving your video on a hard disk, do not use that hard disk for other purposes. As you know, hard disks are mechanical objects, like cars, and they wear out with use. Store the hard disk you use for backing up video in the closet and bring it out only when you're adding more video to it. Or leave it connected to your computer but don't turn it on except when backing up to it. Most of those they make nowadays have on-off switches. Also, many have BOTH Firewire AND USB connections, so they'll be sure to work on the new computer you buy some day. Check these features before you buy, of course. And if you're really, really worried, as I am, then do as I do: both an MPG backup to DVDs, and an AVI back up to a hard disk! Peyton From ellmcf at nus.edu.sg Fri Mar 24 11:21:47 2006 From: ellmcf at nus.edu.sg (Madalena Cruz-Ferreira) Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 19:21:47 +0800 Subject: warning on formats and media Message-ID: Dear Peyton and all, Just one short addition to what you wrote: >no one knows how long DVDs will keep. I'm really scared of them myself. If you live in a tropical climate, they will besides rot away wherever you store them -- unless you ziplock them, one by one. I learned this the hard way. So yes, external hard drives are my current choice too. But I also had to learn not to use them to full capacity. If I do, I can't access their contents on my laptop. The technician who recently helped me retrieve my files told me that these drives were created with portability in mind, not as permanent storage devices. Thanks for all this really, really useful information! Madalena ====================================== Madalena Cruz-Ferreira Dept. English Language and Literature National University of Singapore ellmcf at nus.edu.sg http://profile.nus.edu.sg/fass/ellmcf/ ====================================== -----Original Message----- From: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org [mailto:info-childes at mail.talkbank.org]On Behalf Of Peyton Todd Sent: Friday, 24 March, 2006 3:04 PM To: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org Subject: Re: warning on formats and media Dear Info-Childes: -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From k.j.alcock at lancaster.ac.uk Fri Mar 24 11:37:40 2006 From: k.j.alcock at lancaster.ac.uk (Katie Alcock) Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 11:37:40 +0000 Subject: warning on formats and media In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Traditional videotapes also go mouldy in a tropical climate ­ I understand it is due to the gelatine on the tape, I would imagine this could happen with DV tapes too, if they are made using any similar animal or vegetable material. Katie Alcock Katie Alcock, DPhil Lecturer Department of Psychology University of Lancaster Fylde College Lancaster LA1 4YF Tel 01524 593833 Fax 01524 593744 Web http://www.psych.lancs.ac.uk/people/KatieAlcock.html From: "Madalena Cruz-Ferreira" Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 19:21:47 +0800 To: "Peyton Todd" , Subject: RE: warning on formats and media Dear Peyton and all, Just one short addition to what you wrote: >no one knows how long DVDs will keep. I'm really scared of them myself. If you live in a tropical climate, they will besides rot away wherever you store them -- unless you ziplock them, one by one. I learned this the hard way. So yes, external hard drives are my current choice too. But I also had to learn not to use them to full capacity. If I do, I can't access their contents on my laptop. The technician who recently helped me retrieve my files told me that these drives were created with portability in mind, not as permanent storage devices. Thanks for all this really, really useful information! Madalena ====================================== Madalena Cruz-Ferreira Dept. English Language and Literature National University of Singapore ellmcf at nus.edu.sg http://profile.nus.edu.sg/fass/ellmcf/ ====================================== -----Original Message----- From: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org [mailto:info-childes at mail.talkbank.org]On Behalf Of Peyton Todd Sent: Friday, 24 March, 2006 3:04 PM To: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org Subject: Re: warning on formats and media Dear Info-Childes: -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From KNelson at gc.cuny.edu Fri Mar 24 15:05:30 2006 From: KNelson at gc.cuny.edu (Nelson, Katherine) Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 10:05:30 -0500 Subject: Narratives from the Crib Message-ID: I have learned that our book "Narratives from the Crib" is selling used through Amazon and Barnes and Noble for $100 or more. Before investing at this price anyone interested should know that after many years of urging Harvard University Press is planning to republish in paperback in Fall 06. I do not know what the price will be, but it will be less than $100! The new version will also include a commentary by Emily, now 25 years old. Those who may have tried to access the transcripts of Emily's nighttime talk through CLAN and found little or nothing there should know that the full transcripts have been re-copied and are now available. Katherine Nelson -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From KNelson at gc.cuny.edu Fri Mar 24 15:07:50 2006 From: KNelson at gc.cuny.edu (Nelson, Katherine) Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 10:07:50 -0500 Subject: narratives from the crib Message-ID: I have learned that our book "Narratives from the Crib" is selling used through Amazon and Barnes and Noble for $100 or more. Before investing at this price anyone interested should know that after many years of urging Harvard University Press is planning to republish in paperback in Fall 06. I do not know what the price will be, but it will be less than $100! The new version will also include a commentary by Emily, now 25 years old. Those who may have tried to access the transcripts of Emily's nighttime talk through CLAN and found little or nothing there should know that the full transcripts have been re-copied and are now available. Katherine Nelson -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cchaney at sfsu.edu Fri Mar 24 21:08:00 2006 From: cchaney at sfsu.edu (Carolyn Chaney) Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 13:08:00 -0800 Subject: warning on formats and media In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Another anxiety is the loss of access to old technology for use in teaching. I used to assume that all the non-native speakers in my pronunciation class had tape recorders with pause buttons and easy rewind/playback...now most have these digital gadgets that are very difficult to locate a specific thing to play back. And VCRs for recording and viewing themselves? Gone, gone, gone! Ain't progress wonderful? Carolyn Chaney cchaney at sfsu.edu "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" --Mary Oliver -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From macw at cmu.edu Sun Mar 26 00:06:50 2006 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2006 19:06:50 -0500 Subject: formats and archiving Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, A few further comments on the issue of audio/video formats and the importance of archiving. 1. Thanks to Devin Casenhiser for pointing out a possible method for extracting video from the DVD format. Of course, this method only applies to home-made DVDs. If someone could get it to work with commercial DVDs they would surely get rich (perhaps illegally?). Even within the framework of extracting video from homemade DVDs, however, I noted some limitations. For example, you purchase and install a recent QuickTimeMPEG2 decoder. However, even with this decoder installed, I found that I was only able to play back the first 11 second of a 20-minute video clip. If you can create content using some DVD format and then are able to pull out the content using QuickTime, then that is fine. However, personally, I would not rely on this process until I had shown it to work fully using some specific hardware/software platform. In any case, I would not rely on the MPEG-2 on the DVD as a replacement for mini-DV as the long- term archive. 2. I had not thought about the issues with mini-DV archiving and tape mould in tropical climates that Madalena Cruz-Ferreira mentioned. In this case, I would recommend shipping your mini-DV tapes to a colleague in a northern climate for storage. 3. For the current CHILDES and TalkBank collections, I have relied for awhile on DVD-ROMs for keeping copies of the compressed video and the original audio. The major problem I have noted with DVD-ROM storage is that it is very easy to scratch the media. Once this happens, the whole disk is unreadable. So, this is a sort of catastrophic failure. The rate of this type of failure is not large, but it is high enough that I have come to rely on both hard disk and DVD-ROM as storage for compressed video and WAV audio. 4. I double-checked with Peyton Todd to make sure I understood the thrust of his message. His central point was that it makes no sense to archive digital raw video (AVI format on Windows) because it is simply too big. I agree and that is why I emphasize archiving based on mini-DV. However Peyton was worried about the longevity of mini- DV, pointing to problems he had experienced with half-inch reel-to- reel tapes. I think Peyton is talking about the consumer level reel- to-reel video of the 1970s and early 1980s. It is true that this format has caused us some problems, but I am not convinced that the problem is with the tape medium, but rather with the flakiness of the slowly degenerating playback heads on the machines we have to use to read these old videos. By comparison, I have had zero problems playing back reel-to-reel audio tapes from up to 35 years ago that colleagues have sent us. Peyton's third point was that archiving of the original is not enough when you also do extensive editing with the compressed files. I totally agree with that too. Most of the material in CHILDES and TalkBank is not edited, except to throw out dead spaces at the beginning and end of tapes. 5. A further note on MPEG formats. MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 videos created on Windows (but not Mac) often have the sound track MUX-ed. When this is done, it becomes impossible to edit the material in QuickTime. Perhaps some future version of QuickTime will solve this problem. Moreover, many more recent versions of MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 compression on Windows no longer using MUX-ing, so this problem may also go away. However, if you use MPEG, it is a good idea to check your video inside QuickTime (Movie Properties) to make sure it is not using MUX. MUX is an abbreviation for multiplexing and it involves some sort of interlacing of the video and audio that makes subsequent analytic processing difficult or impossible. 6. Finally, let me pass on a comment regarding Carolyn Chaney's problems trying to get her techie undergrads to understand the usefulness of the playback functions in the old cassette recorders. I can only agree. It was so nice to be able to push a button and rehear a sentence. Of course, we have this type of function inside CLAN now in the SoundWalker mode, but all this requires you to be at your computer and it was so nice to have a little cassette player you could just put in your pocket and still be able to rewind. Maybe some genius will be able to figure out a method for simulating this on an iPod some day. Thanks for all your comments. And happy recording, compressing, and archiving. --Brian MacWhinney From edy.veneziano at paris5.sorbonne.fr Mon Mar 27 08:13:43 2006 From: edy.veneziano at paris5.sorbonne.fr (edy veneziano) Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 10:13:43 +0200 Subject: FIRST LANGUAGE Call for PAPERS REMINDER Message-ID: REMINDER - DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION 30 JUNE 2006 CALL FOR PAPERS: SPECIAL ISSUE of First Language Guest Editor: Edy Veneziano, Université Descartes Paris 5-CNRS Theme: Conversation in language development and use Conversation is almost unanimously recognized as the privileged site of language acquisition. In conversation, children are compelled to draw deeply on their communicative and language resources and both to use and to extend their formal and pragmatic competencies. This Special Issue addresses the nature, effects and development of exchanges unfolding among children and their co-conversationalists. Papers presenting empirical work on tangible effects of conversation on the acquisition and/or use of early as well as later language are of focal interest. Topics include (but are not restricted to): 4 The role of conversational exchanges in early language acquisition and/or use (lexical, syntactic, morphological and pragmatic knowledge) 4 The implications of conversational scaffolding for later developments (morphosyntactic, narrative and argumentative skills) 4 Acquiring and using conversational skills, including conversational repairs, explanations, justifications and argumentation 4 Learning to adjust one's speech to the interlocutor : style, topic, means 4 Individual differences 4 Conversational skills in children with language impairments and other disorders Deadline for submissions: 30 June 2006 Submissions and enquiries should be addressed to: Edy Veneziano Equipe Développement et Fonctionnement Cognitifs Université Descartes Paris 5 - CNRS 46, rue St Jacques, Paris 5ème, France. email: edy.veneziano at univ-paris5.fr -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 2792 bytes Desc: not available URL: From Chris.Letts at newcastle.ac.uk Mon Mar 27 11:26:45 2006 From: Chris.Letts at newcastle.ac.uk (Chris Letts) Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 12:26:45 +0100 Subject: formats and archiving Message-ID: And my few pence worth of contribution is that whatever format you use to archive material, you should review the archive at regular intervals. The BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) learned the hard way, by archiving the results of extensive information-gathering onto a new technology for the time, LaserDisc. Many years later they wanted to re-use the information, then found that although the discs were perfectly preserved, there existed nowhere a machine that could play them ! In the U.K. we're starting to find VHS format machines becoming more difficult to get, ditto decent cassette players at reasonable prices and one day these formats will dissappear for ever. Many old computer formats are also difficult to read including CD's burned by who-knows-what software before the formats became standardised. I'd certainly also advocate archiving valuable material in 2 different formats, stored in 2 different places. Our 'standard' system for video is to keep original material on DVC tape, with a copy in AVI format on a USB hard drive. Yes AVI files are huge, but they're easy to make and edit, and are guaranteed to replay on virtually any computer. Their size isn't really a problem these days - 250GB USB drives are getting common. Chris Letts, Technical Site Manager, School of Education, Communication & Language Sciences, King George VI Building University of Newcastle, Newcastle Upon Tyne NE1 7RU, U.K. From deak at cogsci.ucsd.edu Mon Mar 27 17:48:06 2006 From: deak at cogsci.ucsd.edu (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Gedeon_De=E1k?=) Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 09:48:06 -0800 Subject: formats and archiving In-Reply-To: <37E80E80B681A24B8F768D607373CA800329C1D5@largo.campus.ncl.ac.uk> Message-ID: That advice is worth more than a few pence for sure. Another suggestion: if you have access a VERY SECURE and STABLE supercomputer center with a policy for keeping/protecting sensitive data for years, it might be a back-up option. Also, re: DVDs for backing up, even though the compression causes some info loss, for many purposes it is still fine. The worst problem, imho, is a bit of horizontal blurring. Of course, burning DVDs even on fast machines is slow, so a down-side is the time to capture video in the first place, then burn the DVD. Maybe there's a way to do it simultaneously--probably, I'd guess, if you have a RAID system--but we couldn't figure out how using dual-processor Macs running 10.4 w/ 1 GB SDRAM. The capture/burn time issue is not major is you're just doing, say, a case study, but if you're doing a large project (w/ hours of video), it can get hairy. A possible solution for the capture/copy time problem is a new line of dv cams w/ built-in hard drives by JVC. Not trying to give them free ads; we just got a couple and are still testing them (if they stink I'll write back & retract the plug). They also market back-up HDs for the cameras; not sure if they are different from any other portable drives. The camera software has several diff compression methods. I haven't played w/ them yet; if anyone else has I'd be curious to know the practical difference between the best and 2nd-best compression. Anyway, if the cameras are any good they might be one way to capture/back-up video more quickly. Also, they're pretty small so if you want unobtrusive portable cameras, they might work. On Mar 27, 2006, at 3:26 AM, Chris Letts wrote: > > I'd certainly also advocate archiving valuable material in 2 different > formats, stored in 2 different places. Our 'standard' system for video > is to keep original material on DVC tape, with a copy in AVI format on > a > USB hard drive. Yes AVI files are huge, but they're easy to make and > edit, and are guaranteed to replay on virtually any computer. Their > size > isn't really a problem these days - 250GB USB drives are getting > common. > > Chris Letts, > Technical Site Manager, > School of Education, Communication & Language Sciences, > King George VI Building > University of Newcastle, > Newcastle Upon Tyne NE1 7RU, > > U.K. > > > Gedeon O. Deák, Ph.D. Department of Cognitive Science 9500 Gilman Dr. (858) 822-3352 University of California, San Diego fax (858) 534-1128 La Jolla, CA 92093-0515 http://cogsci.ucsd.edu/~deak/ From macw at cmu.edu Mon Mar 27 18:01:43 2006 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 13:01:43 -0500 Subject: formats and archiving In-Reply-To: <37E80E80B681A24B8F768D607373CA800329C1D5@largo.campus.ncl.ac.uk> Message-ID: Dear Chris, Yes, this a pivotal issue. Here at CMU, I have two approaches to this issue. The first is to maintain a menagerie of old devices. I have five type of reel-to-reel recorder, for example and an equal number of reel-to-reel video recorders. The other approach is to treat the database as an active database, not an archive. All CHILDES and TalkBank data, including the media, are always online and there are mirrors in Antwerp (Steven Gillis) and Chukyo (Hidetosi Sirai) that maintain full copies of everything. In addition, I maintain four copies on hard drives here, all stored at different locations. These approaches help us deal with antique formats and minimize catastrophic data loss. Yes, DVC tape is even better than mini-DV, if you recorded in that format. --Brian MacWhinney On Mar 27, 2006, at 6:26 AM, Chris Letts wrote: > And my few pence worth of contribution is that whatever format you use > to archive material, you should review the archive at regular > intervals. > The BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) learned the hard way, by > archiving the results of extensive information-gathering onto a new > technology for the time, LaserDisc. Many years later they wanted to > re-use the information, then found that although the discs were > perfectly preserved, there existed nowhere a machine that could play > them ! > In the U.K. we're starting to find VHS format machines becoming more > difficult to get, ditto decent cassette players at reasonable > prices and > one day these formats will dissappear for ever. Many old computer > formats are also difficult to read including CD's burned by > who-knows-what software before the formats became standardised. > > I'd certainly also advocate archiving valuable material in 2 different > formats, stored in 2 different places. Our 'standard' system for video > is to keep original material on DVC tape, with a copy in AVI format > on a > USB hard drive. Yes AVI files are huge, but they're easy to make and > edit, and are guaranteed to replay on virtually any computer. Their > size > isn't really a problem these days - 250GB USB drives are getting > common. > > Chris Letts, > Technical Site Manager, > School of Education, Communication & Language Sciences, > King George VI Building > University of Newcastle, > Newcastle Upon Tyne NE1 7RU, > > U.K. > > From mfleck at cs.uiuc.edu Mon Mar 27 18:09:10 2006 From: mfleck at cs.uiuc.edu (Margaret Fleck) Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 12:09:10 -0600 Subject: formats and archiving In-Reply-To: <37E80E80B681A24B8F768D607373CA800329C1D5@largo.campus.ncl.ac.uk> Message-ID: > I'd certainly also advocate archiving valuable material in 2 different > formats, stored in 2 different places. Our 'standard' system for video > is to keep original material on DVC tape, with a copy in AVI format on a > USB hard drive. Yes AVI files are huge, but they're easy to make and > edit, and are guaranteed to replay on virtually any computer. Their size > isn't really a problem these days - 250GB USB drives are getting common. ... and the two different places should be geographically separated. Off-hand, I can think of recent examples where universities sustained major damage (ranging from a whole building to multiple buildings) from fire, hurricane, flood, and PETA sabotage. I also know of an example where undergraduate research projects were sabotaged. That was especially hard to recover from, because the backup tapes were stored in the same room and were removed at the same time as the disks. I also know that even reputable academic departments and companies often keep backup tapes in the same or a nearby building, which is ok for minor machine meltdowns but not for disaster recovery. Send a second copy of your data to a colleague or relative far, far away. Margaret From cchaney at sfsu.edu Mon Mar 27 20:38:33 2006 From: cchaney at sfsu.edu (Carolyn Chaney) Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 12:38:33 -0800 Subject: phonological perception in Japanese speakers Message-ID: Hi friends, I have a student who wants to investigate how context helps Japanese speakers disambiguate among similar sounds (e.g., /r,l/). I thought I remembered a recent mention of a study in which Japanese speakers who produced /r,l/ distinctions persisted in having perceptual confusions. But I didn't make note of the study. Does anyone know of this study or any that show the help that context plays in making perceptual decisions? Thanks for any help. Carolyn Chaney From cnarayan at umich.edu Mon Mar 27 20:52:13 2006 From: cnarayan at umich.edu (cnarayan at umich.edu) Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 15:52:13 -0500 Subject: phonological perception in Japanese speakers In-Reply-To: Message-ID: If you're looking for literature on the effects of phonetic context on /r,l/ perception by Japanese adults, I would start with Logan, Lively, and Pisoni (1991); Lively, Pisoni and Logan (1993); Lively, et al. (1993, 1994). All of these have appeared in JASA. Also, check out the Pisoni chapter in "Speech Perception and Linguistic Experience" (Ed.W.Strange, 1995). This stuff is pretty old, but a good place to start! -chandan Quoting Carolyn Chaney : > Hi friends, > > I have a student who wants to investigate how context helps Japanese > speakers disambiguate among similar sounds (e.g., /r,l/). I thought > I remembered a recent mention of a study in which Japanese speakers > who produced /r,l/ distinctions persisted in having perceptual > confusions. But I didn't make note of the study. Does anyone know > of this study or any that show the help that context plays in making > perceptual decisions? > > Thanks for any help. > > Carolyn Chaney > > > > ================================ chandan r. narayan dept. of linguistics university of michigan -------------------------------- cnarayan at umich.edu www-personal.umich.edu/~cnarayan ================================ From s.disbray at pgrad.unimelb.edu.au Mon Mar 27 23:49:20 2006 From: s.disbray at pgrad.unimelb.edu.au (Samantha Disbray) Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 10:49:20 +1100 Subject: archiving & compression In-Reply-To: <44282A46.6010907@cs.uiuc.edu> Message-ID: > Hallo info childes thanks to everyone taking part in this discussion, very relevant to the project we are working on- Aboriginal Child language Acquisition Project (ACLA- Universities of Melbourne and Sydney, Australia). We are video recording 24 children in 3 field locations, at 6 mnthly intervals, over a 3 year project, looking at caregiver input. With the final field trip approaching we have some 300+ hours (6000GB) of video data, with different media stored in different locations. DV tapes currently with the researchers, to be deposited at an archive in the capital, Canberra. These seem to offer a backup in the short\medium term, which the new generation DV cameras with internal hard drives don't offer. Ofcourse the mini DV cameras will be quickly superceded and less available. We also invested in Lacie big disks (500GB). These have not been 100% reliable with the first 4 all requiring repair to the fire wire port socket as thhey continuously failed to mount. This appears rectified. One of the drives now has a mechanical fault and it is not certain that the data can be retrieved- perhaps reason not to upgrade to the new range of 1000GB drives- a lot of data to loose. We also have access to a data storage facility in Canberra, with a high speed connection between it and the universities. Still up and downloading is slow. As for formats, we have been keeping full quality QT files and also making QT compressed versions, small enough to store a number of a laptop, allowing field workers to work on transcripts with participants, without lugging external hard drives, requiring power etc. The settings we have used are (File - Export Movie to Quicktime movie- Options) under settings - frame rate 15, size 360 x 288. These reduce 18 GB (40 mins) to 1GB. The screen size is small, but quite clear enough, sound quality is unchanged. I am wondering if anyone can recommend some standard compression setting to store QT movies (of around 1 hour in length), which i DVD accepts, and which fit on a Dv disk. Samantha Disbray >> I'd certainly also advocate archiving valuable material in 2 different >> formats, stored in 2 different places. Our 'standard' system for video >> is to keep original material on DVC tape, with a copy in AVI format on a >> USB hard drive. Yes AVI files are huge, but they're easy to make and >> edit, and are guaranteed to replay on virtually any computer. Their size >> isn't really a problem these days - 250GB USB drives are getting common. > > ... and the two different places should be geographically separated. > > Off-hand, I can think of recent examples where universities sustained > major damage > (ranging from a whole building to multiple buildings) from fire, > hurricane, flood, > and PETA sabotage. I also know of an example where undergraduate > research > projects were sabotaged. That was especially hard to recover from, > because the > backup tapes were stored in the same room and were removed at the same > time as > the disks. > > I also know that even reputable academic departments and companies often > keep backup tapes in the same or a nearby building, which is ok for minor > machine meltdowns but not for disaster recovery. > > Send a second copy of your data to a colleague or relative far, far away. > > > Margaret > > > > From macw at cmu.edu Tue Mar 28 00:10:09 2006 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 19:10:09 -0500 Subject: archiving & compression In-Reply-To: <49489.128.250.86.215.1143503360.squirrel@webmail.student.unimelb.edu.au> Message-ID: Dear Samantha, Sounds like a great project that should keep people busy for years to come. Regarding hardware, I have 18 LaCie 500GB drives and none have ever failed. Sometimes an individual computer may fail to recognize the drive, but this can always be corrected by taking the drive to a fresh computer that somehow is more willing to talk with it. Also, I updated the software driver on each drive about 5 months back and performance was even better after that. Yes, mini-DV cameras will be superceded, so eventually there will be a need to copy these media to some new format. But it should be a digital copy and should not loss data. In the meantime, let's just all hang on to our DV cameras and tape decks. Regarding the idea of storing your QT movies through iDVD, I am not sure what you would gain through that. Just copying them to DVD- ROM should be good enough, I would think. --Brian MacWhinney From langconf at bu.edu Wed Mar 29 22:02:33 2006 From: langconf at bu.edu (BUCLD) Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 17:02:33 -0500 Subject: BUCLD 31 Call For Papers Message-ID: CALL FOR PAPERS THE 31st ANNUAL BOSTON UNIVERSITY CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT NOVEMBER 3-5, 2006 Keynote Speakers: Roberta Golinkoff, University of Delaware Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Temple University "Breaking the Language Barrier: The View from the Radical Middle" Plenary Speaker: J�rgen M. Meisel, University of Hamburg & University of Calgary �Multiple First Language Acquisition: A Case for Autonomous Syntactic Development in the Simultaneous Acquisition of More Than One Language� Lunch Symposium: �Future Directions in Search of Genes that Influence Language: Phenotypes, Molecules, Brains, and Growth� Mabel Rice, University of Kansas Helen Tager-Flusberg, Boston University Simon Fisher, University of Oxford Discussant: Gary Marcus, New York University� All topics in the fields of first and second language acquisition from all theoretical perspectives will be fully considered, including: * Bilingualism * Cognition & Language * Creoles & Pidgins * Dialects * Discourse * Exceptional Language * Gesture * Hearing Impairment and Deafness * Input & Interaction * Language Disorders * Linguistic Theory (Syntax, Semantics, Phonology, Morphology, Lexicon) * Literacy & Narrative * Neurolinguistics * Pragmatics * Pre-linguistic Development * Signed Languages * Sociolinguistics * Speech Perception & Production Presentations will be 20 minutes long followed by a 10 minute question period. Posters will be on display for a full day with two attended sessions during the day. ABSTRACT FORMAT AND CONTENT Abstracts submitted must represent original, unpublished research. Abstracts should be anonymous, clearly titled and no more than 450 words in length. They should also fit on one page, with an optional second page for references or figures if required. Abstracts longer than 450 words will be rejected without being evaluated. Please note the word count at the bottom of the abstract. Note that words counts need not include the abstract title or the list of references. A suggested format and style for abstracts is available at: http://www.bu.edu/linguistics/APPLIED/BUCLD/template.html An excellent example of how to formulate the content of the abstract can be found on the LSA website at: http://www.lsadc.org/info/dec02bulletin/model.html The criteria used by the reviewers to evaluate abstracts can be found at: http://www.bu.edu/linguistics/APPLIED/BUCLD/reviewprocess.html#rate All abstracts must be submitted as PDF documents. Specific instructions for how to create PDF documents are available at: http://www.bu.edu/linguistics/APPLIED/BUCLD/pdfinfo.html. If you encounter a problem creating a PDF file, please contact us for further assistance. Please use the first author's last name as the file name (eg. Smith.pdf). No author information should appear anywhere in the contents of the PDF file itself. SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS Electronic submission: To facilitate the abstract submission process, abstracts will be submitted using the form available at the conference website at http://www.bu.edu/linguistics/APPLIED/BUCLD/abstract.htm. Specific instructions for abstract submission are available on this website. Abstracts will be accepted between March 15 and May 15. Contact information for each author must be submitted via webform. No author information should appear anywhere in the abstract PDF. At the time of submission you will be asked whether you would like your abstract to be considered for a poster, a paper, or both. Although each author may submit as many abstracts as desired, we will accept for presentation by each author: (a) a maximum of 1 first authored paper/poster, and (b) a maximum of 2 papers/posters in any authorship status. Note that no changes in authorship (including deleting an author or changing author order) will be possible after the review process is completed or for publication in the conference proceedings. DEADLINE All submissions must be received by 8:00 PM EST, May 15, 2006. Late abstracts will not be considered, whatever the reason for the delay. We regret that we cannot accept abstract submissions by fax or email. Submissions via surface mail will only be accepted in special circumstances, on a case by case basis. Please contact us well in advance of the submission deadline (May 15, 2006) to make these arrangements. ABSTRACT SELECTION Each abstract is blind reviewed by 5 reviewers from a panel of approximately 100 international scholars. Further information about the review process is available at http://www.bu.edu/linguistics/APPLIED/BUCLD/reviewprocess.html. Acknowledgment of receipt of the abstract will be sent by email as soon as possible after receipt. Notice of acceptance or rejection will be sent to first authors only, in early August, by email. Pre-registration materials and preliminary schedule will be available in late August, 2006. If your abstract is accepted, you will need to submit a 150-word abstract including title, author(s) and affiliation(s) for inclusion in the conference handbook. Guidelines will be provided along with notification of acceptance. Abstracts accepted as papers will be invited for publication in the BUCLD Proceedings. Abstracts accepted as posters will be invited for publication online only, but not in the printed version. All conference papers will be selected on the basis of abstracts submitted. Although each abstract will be evaluated individually, we will attempt to honor requests to schedule accepted papers together in group sessions. No schedule changes will be possible once the schedule is set. Scheduling requests for religious reasons only must be made before the review process is complete (i.e. at the time of submission). A space is provided on the abstract submission webform to specify such requests. FURTHER INFORMATION Information regarding the conference may be accessed on the BUCLD website: http://www.bu.edu/linguistics/APPLIED/BUCLD/ Boston University Conference on Language Development 96 Cummington Street, Room 244 Boston, MA 02215 U.S.A. Telephone: (617) 353-3085 e-mail: langconf at bu.edu From dimkati at ecd.uoa.gr Fri Mar 31 08:24:04 2006 From: dimkati at ecd.uoa.gr (Demetra Katis) Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 11:24:04 +0300 Subject: saving data from old audio casette tapes Message-ID: I would very much appreciate any advice on whether I can save the recordings on casette tapes that I have had for a long time now. I recently discovered that they have been damaged, more specifically that the sound unfolds in slow motion. I was thinking of digitalizing them and trying to see whether I can speed up the sound to get it back to normal. Might anything like that work at all? Demetra Katis, University of Athens dimkati at ecd.uoa.gr -- From DaleP at health.missouri.edu Thu Mar 2 03:24:13 2006 From: DaleP at health.missouri.edu (Dale, Philip S.) Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2006 21:24:13 -0600 Subject: Journal of Child Language Message-ID: Dear colleagues, Most of you are probably aware by now that we (Edith Bavin & Philip Dale) have taken over as editors of the Journal of Child Language. We are pleased and honored to follow a line of such distinguished and capable editors, including Elena Lieven who has completed nine years of yeoman service to the journal and the profession. We wanted you to know that we will be moving to electronic submission shortly; trials are now in progress. We will be using the ?manuscript central? service, which many of you will be familiar with from other journals. It is straightforward to use, reliable, and well-tested. We will be posting information about electronic submissions on our website in the next few months (http://journals.cambridge.org/jid_JCL). In the meantime we are using email as much as possible to speed up the turn around time between submission and editorial decision, something that is becoming increasingly important in this modern academic world. You will find on the website now some updated style guidelines; we ask that you look at them carefully in preparing manuscripts for submission. We thank you for supporting JCL in the past and look forward to your continued support. Please continue sending us your articles, and if you are interested in reviewing for our journal, please send your name and details of expertise to our administrative person, Miles Lambert (child_language at yahoo.co.uk). Kindest Regards, Edith & Philip From htagerf at bu.edu Fri Mar 3 14:16:40 2006 From: htagerf at bu.edu (htagerf at bu.edu) Date: Fri, 3 Mar 2006 09:16:40 -0500 Subject: RA Openings in Boston! Message-ID: I am resending this without the attachment. Please pass along to your best students and post in your department! RESEARCH ASSISTANT POSITION Boston University School of Medicine Laboratory of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Cognitive Neuroscience of Autism and Williams Syndrome STARTING SPRING/SUMMER 2006 Research positions available in NIH-funded research programs investigating the neurocognitive bases of autism and Williams syndrome. Job requirements include: background in Psychology or related field with Bachelors degree; research experience; strong organizational, interpersonal and computer skills (e.g., MS Office Word, Excel, Access; stimulus presentation software such E-Prime and Presentation) required. Most competitive applicants will have coursework and/or interest in cognitive science, neuroscience, developmental and/or clinical research. Familiarity with eye-tracking technology and/or psychophysiological measures as well as basic programming skills a big plus. Responsibilities include diagnostic, standardized IQ/language, and experimental testing of children and adults; implementing and troubleshooting new experiments and data management procedures; coding and analyzing data; maintaining electronic and paper files; and preparation of testing reports. We are seeking a mature, responsible, and highly motivated individual with a strong interest in autism, neurodevelopmental disorders, and/or social perception/cognition who would enjoy the experience of being involved in a large and active research lab (see our website: http://www.bu.edu/autism). The position requires a two-year commitment and provides excellent preparation for students who are interested in pursuing doctoral studies in clinical or developmental psychology or a related field. For more information, please send a cover letter, resume, and names of 3 references to: Robert M. Joseph, PhD or Daniela Plesa Skewer, PhD Department of Anatomy & Neurobiology Boston University School of Medicine 715 Albany Street L-814 Boston, MA 02118-2526 email: rmjoseph at bu.edu; dplesas at bu.edu From jill.hohenstein at kcl.ac.uk Fri Mar 3 17:03:22 2006 From: jill.hohenstein at kcl.ac.uk (Jill Hohenstein) Date: Fri, 3 Mar 2006 17:03:22 +0000 Subject: FW: URGENT: PhD Studentship in Language, Discourse & Communication In-Reply-To: <1dd.4ff17a92.31387de0@aol.com> Message-ID: The following details information about a studentship in the new Language, Discourse and Communication centre at King?s College London. There ought to be an attachment to the email but the system will not accept attachments. The attachment contains the application for the studentship. If interested, please contact, Jill Hohenstein (jill.hohenstein at kcl.ac.uk) for a copy of the application form. Please note that applications for students interested in investigating language acquisition and cognitive development as related to language development are welcome. Dear colleague King?s College London is offering a three year full-time doctoral studentship in language, discourse and communication (sociolinguistics, text linguistics, discourse analysis, literacy studies, educational linguistics, and cognitive/psycho-linguistics). This has now been advertised on the College website and the closing date is Friday 7 April 2006. The studentship involves a stipend of ?14,300 in the first year (increasing in line with national levels subsequently) and a Home/EU fees waiver). The successful candidate will be affiliated to our new Centre, but based in the same department as their principal supervisor. Applicants will need to fill in the forms in consultation with a prospective supervisor - someone identified as having relevant research interests. If they don?t already know us, we?re asking applicants to consult the webpages at www.kcl.ac.uk/hums/ling to identify a potential supervisor, and to contact him/her as soon as possible with a first draft research proposal and an account of their qualifications and experience. Prospective students will need to apply for an ordinary MPhil/PhD place on the standard form in addition to filling out the special centre application This must be done by the 7 April 2006, though they don?t have to have been offered a place by the deadline. Successful candidates will be affiliated with the centre but based in the department of their supervisor. If you?d like further advice either on the process or on specific applications, please don?t hesitate to contact me at ben.rampton at kcl.ac.uk (not the current benrampton1 at aol.com which I?m not likely to reply to). * Please note ? the attached application is NOT the same as the application form available on the College webpage where these studentships are advertised. For this LDC studentship, the College?s generic form has been revised to bring it closer into line with Research Council requirements. To obtain the LDC studentship form, contact dave.flatman at kcl.ac.uk (entering ?LDC Studentship? in the subject). Appendix: M-level courses in Language, Discourse & Communication o MA in World Englishes English Department ? new course starting Sept 2006 http://www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/humanities/english/pg/masters/worldeng.html o MA in German Linguistics German Department http://www.kcl.ac.uk/pgp06/programme/396 o MA in Language, Ethnicity & Education Department of Education & Professional Studies http://www.kcl.ac.uk/education/modma/lang.html o MA in ELT & Applied Linguistics Department of Education & Professional Studies http://www.kcl.ac.uk/education/maelt.html o MRes in Language, Discourse & Communication School of Social Science & Public Policy & School of Humanities - new course designed to provide students with foundation research methods training prior to MPhil/PhD. Starting Sept 2006. For details, contact Roxy Harris (roxy.harris at kcl.ac.uk) ------ End of Forwarded Message ********************************************************** Jill Hohenstein, Ph.D. Lecturer, Psychology in Education Department of Education and Professional Studies Kings College London Franklin-Wilkins Building (Waterloo Bridge Wing) Waterloo Road London SE1 9NH Phone: 0207 848 3100 Fax: 0207 848 3182 ********************************************************** -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From gaby at UDel.Edu Sat Mar 4 19:52:10 2006 From: gaby at UDel.Edu (Gabriella Hermon) Date: Sat, 4 Mar 2006 14:52:10 -0500 Subject: Job announcement In-Reply-To: <21601.99505@mail.talkbank.org> Message-ID: Can you please post the following on your list: Department of Linguistics, University of Delaware Assistant Professor, 1 year Non Tenure Track position (renewable pending funding). Specialization in phonetics and phonology. PHD in Linguistics by June 2006 required. Teaching duties include undegraduate and graduate courses in phonetics and phonology. Competitive salary and benefits package. Please send all materials, including letters of recommendation, CV, application, samples of work, and teaching evaluations (if available) to: Gabriella Hermon Linguistics, 42. E. Delaware Av. University of Delaware, NEWARK DE 19716 For further information please contact: gaby at udel.edu (302-831 6806) -- ******************************** Gabriella Hermon, Professor and Interim Chair Linguistics, 42 E. Delaware Av. University of Delaware Newark, DE 19716 http://www.ling.udel.edu/gaby/ tel: (302) 831-1642 office fax: (302) 831-6896 fax on computer: 413-7932437 ********************************* From gaby at UDel.Edu Sat Mar 4 20:01:05 2006 From: gaby at UDel.Edu (Gabriella Hermon) Date: Sat, 4 Mar 2006 15:01:05 -0500 Subject: Fwd: Re: Job announcement Message-ID: > >Can you please post the following on your list: > >Department of Linguistics, University of Delaware >Assistant Professor, 1 year Non Tenure Track position (renewable >pending funding). Specialization in phonetics and phonology. PHD in >Linguistics by June 2006 required. > >Teaching duties include undergraduate and graduate courses in >phonetics and phonology. Competitive salary and benefits package. > >Please send all materials, including letters of recommendation, CV, >application, samples of work, and teaching evaluations (if >available) to: > >Gabriella Hermon >Linguistics, 42. E. Delaware Av. >University of Delaware, NEWARK DE 19716 > >For further information please contact: > gaby at udel.edu > (302-831 6806) >-- > >******************************** >Gabriella Hermon, Professor and Interim Chair > Linguistics, 42 E. Delaware Av. >University of Delaware >Newark, DE 19716 > >http://www.ling.udel.edu/gaby/ > >tel: (302) 831-1642 >office fax: (302) 831-6896 >fax on computer: 413-7932437 >********************************* -- ******************************** Gabriella Hermon, Professor and Interim Chair Linguistics, 42 E. Delaware Av. University of Delaware Newark, DE 19716 http://www.ling.udel.edu/gaby/ tel: (302) 831-1642 office fax: (302) 831-6896 fax on computer: 413-7932437 ********************************* -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karen.pollock at ualberta.ca Mon Mar 6 19:16:43 2006 From: karen.pollock at ualberta.ca (Pollock, Karen) Date: Mon, 6 Mar 2006 12:16:43 -0700 Subject: 2006 Child Phonology Conference - Call for Papers REMINDER Message-ID: Just a reminder that the Call for Papers deadline is March 15. Information is copied below, and also on the conference website. Please visit the conference website website (http://www.rehabmed.ualberta.ca/spa/phonology/2006 Child Phonology Conference.htm ) for information on registration, accommodations and travel, and links to sites of interest to visitors to Edmonton and Alberta. UPDATE: Registration information was added to the website recently. I am pleased to announce that the Faculty of Rehabilitation Medicine has made a generous financial contribution to the conference, which will allow us to keep the registration fees low. Please register early if at all possible - the pre-registration deadline is May 1. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions. Hope to see you in Edmonton in June! Karen Pollock Call for Papers Child Phonology Conference June 16-17 University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada The 2006 Child Phonology Conference organizing committee invites you to submit your recent research for presentation. Papers dealing with all aspects of children's phonological development and disorders will be considered. A maximum of two submissions per first author will be accepted. Typically, papers are presented in 20-minute time slots with 5-10 minutes for questions. However, if the number of papers submitted exceeds the total available time, some presentations will be converted to poster format. Submissions will be accepted until March 15, 2006. Submit the following: Title of Presentation Presenter Name(s) and Affiliation(s) Contact Information (preferred contact person, address, telephone & fax numbers, email address) 250 word summary/abstract Also indicate if you are willing to consider either platform or poster presentation format Email to: karen.pollock at ualberta.ca or Mail to: Karen E. Pollock, Ph.D. Dept. of Speech Pathology & Audiology 2-70 Corbett Hall University of Alberta Edmonton, AB T6G 2G4 Canada -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From at.perez.leroux at utoronto.ca Tue Mar 7 13:38:44 2006 From: at.perez.leroux at utoronto.ca (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Ana_P=E9rez-Leroux?=) Date: Tue, 7 Mar 2006 08:38:44 -0500 Subject: JUA Message-ID: I would like to respectfully invite fellow child language researchers to join (and invite your students to do so as well) Amnesty's Urgent Action on behalf of 4-year old Burmese (Myanmar) refugee Ei Po Po, who may be one of the youngest political prisoners in the world. Amnesty's letter writing campaigns can be very effective. Please find relevant information below. Ei Po Po's urgent action information http://www.amnesty.org.uk/images/ul/J/JUA_myanmarJ_jan06_2.pdf More on Myanmar http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGASA160012006?open&of=ENG-2S3 More on Amnesty Junior Urgent Action Network http://www.amnesty.org.uk/ua/jua/ Ana T. P?rez-Leroux Associate Professor of Spanish and Linguistics University of Toronto Victoria College 73 Queen's Park Crescent Toronto, ON M5S 1K7 Phone 416-585-4439 Fax 416-813-4084 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From macw at cmu.edu Wed Mar 8 04:17:22 2006 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Tue, 7 Mar 2006 23:17:22 -0500 Subject: early plural comprehension? Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, During class discussion on Monday, one of my students asked whether there were any experiments that have told us the age at which a child can comprehend the plural marker. We were discussing the findings of research in the picture preference task (perhaps with reinforcement) that have demonstrated comprehension at perhaps 12 months. If this paradigm can be used to see if children can distinguish "cat" from "dog" early on, has it also been used to see if children can distinguish "cat" from "cats?" We were particularly interested in information on the plural marker, simply because it is so early in production, so semantically transparent, and so easily demonstrated pictorially. However, evidence for the early learning of other grammatical markers would also be interesting. We are hoping that such information could shed further light on the comprehension-production lag during this period. Can anyone please point us to the relevant reference? Many thanks. --Brian MacWhinney, CMU From pgordon at exchange.tc.columbia.edu Wed Mar 8 16:38:01 2006 From: pgordon at exchange.tc.columbia.edu (Gordon, Peter) Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2006 11:38:01 -0500 Subject: early plural comprehension? Message-ID: Susan Carey's group at Harvard esp. Mathieu LeCorre has been looking at this a lot, and also David Barner. From what I remember, the notion of plural is first understood through verb-based constructions such as "there are ...." versus "there is ..." and only later becomes salient as the -s marker on the noun. Not sure if I have this right, but they would have a better story on this. Peter Gordon, Associate Professor Biobehavioral Sciences Department 1152 Thorndike Hall Teachers College, Columbia University 525 West 120th Street, Box 180 New York, NY 10027 http://www.tc.edu/faculty/pg328 Phone: (212) 678-8162 Lab: (212) 678-8169 FAX: (212) 678-8233 -----Original Message----- From: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org [mailto:info-childes at mail.talkbank.org] On Behalf Of Brian MacWhinney Sent: Tuesday, March 07, 2006 11:17 PM To: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org Subject: early plural comprehension? Dear Info-CHILDES, During class discussion on Monday, one of my students asked whether there were any experiments that have told us the age at which a child can comprehend the plural marker. We were discussing the findings of research in the picture preference task (perhaps with reinforcement) that have demonstrated comprehension at perhaps 12 months. If this paradigm can be used to see if children can distinguish "cat" from "dog" early on, has it also been used to see if children can distinguish "cat" from "cats?" We were particularly interested in information on the plural marker, simply because it is so early in production, so semantically transparent, and so easily demonstrated pictorially. However, evidence for the early learning of other grammatical markers would also be interesting. We are hoping that such information could shed further light on the comprehension-production lag during this period. Can anyone please point us to the relevant reference? Many thanks. --Brian MacWhinney, CMU From gelman at umich.edu Wed Mar 8 16:09:37 2006 From: gelman at umich.edu (Gelman, Susan) Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2006 11:09:37 -0500 Subject: early plural comprehension? Message-ID: Great topic! For more on generics & plurals in children, see: Gelman, S. A., & Raman, L. (2003). Preschool children use linguistic form class and pragmatic cues to interpret generics. Child Development, 24, 308-325. Chapter 8 in: Gelman, S. A. (2003). The essential child: Origins of essentialism in everyday thought. New York: Oxford University Press. --Susan Gelman -----Original Message----- From: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org [mailto:info-childes at mail.talkbank.org] On Behalf Of Tom Roeper Sent: Wednesday, March 08, 2006 9:40 AM To: Brian MacWhinney; info-childes Subject: Re: early plural comprehension? Dear Brian--- Plurals are one of the most interesting and inherently difficult things that a child must master. It is not clear when its properties are fully grasped at all. To consider what the child faces, parents easily say to a child, holding up a single banana, "do you like bananas?" with a generic reference in mind, but how does the child know that? An interesting paper on this is at the UMass website by Sauerland, Anderson, and Yatsushiro. Following work by Anne Vainnikka, they asked children questions like: Does a dog have tails? Try it! Six year olds regularly say "yes". Tom Roeper PS. In my forthcoming book "The Prism of Grammar" (MIT) I devote a long chapter to the topic. Brian MacWhinney wrote: > Dear Info-CHILDES, > During class discussion on Monday, one of my students asked > whether there were any experiments that have told us the age at which > a child can comprehend the plural marker. We were discussing the > findings of research in the picture preference task (perhaps with > reinforcement) that have demonstrated comprehension at perhaps 12 > months. If this paradigm can be used to see if children can > distinguish "cat" from "dog" early on, has it also been used to see > if children can distinguish "cat" from "cats?" > We were particularly interested in information on the plural > marker, simply because it is so early in production, so semantically > transparent, and so easily demonstrated pictorially. However, > evidence for the early learning of other grammatical markers would > also be interesting. We are hoping that such information could shed > further light on the comprehension-production lag during this > period. Can anyone please point us to the relevant reference? Many > thanks. > > --Brian MacWhinney, CMU > > From weist at fredonia.edu Wed Mar 8 15:43:53 2006 From: weist at fredonia.edu (Richard M. Weist) Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2006 10:43:53 -0500 Subject: early plural comprehension? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Dear Brian, As I understand your message, you are ultimately interested in the comprehension - production lag, and you are approaching the problem through the singular - plural distinction because of linguistic and methodological transparency. "We are hoping that such information could shed further light on the comprehension-production lag during this period." I might suggest that you can also approach this problem by investigating temporal and spatial reference with a similar methodological advantage. Here are three references with one on the comprehension side of the issue and two on the production side. I have added a forth reference that places this work in an integrated and larger context. Weist, R.M., Atanassova, M., Wysocka, H., & Pawlak, A. (1999). Spatial and temporal systems in child language and thought: A cross-linguistic study. First Language, 19, 267-312. Weist, R. M., Pawlak, A., & Carapella, J. (2004). Syntactic-semantic interface in the acquisition of verb morphology. Journal of Child Language, 31, 31 - 60. <>Internicola, R. & Weist, R. M. (2003). The acquisition of simple and complex spatial locatives in English: A longitudinal investigation. First Language, 23, 239 -248. Weist, R. M. (2002). Space and time in first and second language acquisition: A tribute to Henning Wode (pp. 79-108). In P. Burmeister, T. Piske, A. Rohde (Eds.) An integrated view of language development: Papers in honor of Henning Wode. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier (WVT). Regards, Dick Brian MacWhinney wrote: > Dear Info-CHILDES, > During class discussion on Monday, one of my students asked > whether there were any experiments that have told us the age at which > a child can comprehend the plural marker. We were discussing the > findings of research in the picture preference task (perhaps with > reinforcement) that have demonstrated comprehension at perhaps 12 > months. If this paradigm can be used to see if children can > distinguish "cat" from "dog" early on, has it also been used to see > if children can distinguish "cat" from "cats?" > We were particularly interested in information on the plural > marker, simply because it is so early in production, so semantically > transparent, and so easily demonstrated pictorially. However, > evidence for the early learning of other grammatical markers would > also be interesting. We are hoping that such information could shed > further light on the comprehension-production lag during this > period. Can anyone please point us to the relevant reference? Many > thanks. > > --Brian MacWhinney, CMU -- Richard M. Weist Distinguished Professor Department of Psychology SUNY College at Fredonia W337 Thompson Hall Fredonia, NY 14063 Phone: 716-673-3896 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kim.plunkett at psy.ox.ac.uk Wed Mar 8 15:24:59 2006 From: kim.plunkett at psy.ox.ac.uk (Kim Plunkett) Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2006 15:24:59 -0000 Subject: postdoc opening in Oxford Message-ID: University of Oxford Department of Experimental Psychology Research Assistant Academic-Related Research Staff Grade 1A: Salary ?20,044-?30,002 A vacancy exists for a research assistant to work on a project concerned with early lexical development. The research assistant will be working with the Oxford BabyLab team and will be testing children between 15 and 24 months using the Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm. The post involves infant recruitment, contacting parents, scheduling, preparation of visual and auditory stimulus materials, testing of children and adults, and data analysis. Experience in working with young children , preferably of the above age group is essential. The successful candidate will hold a doctoral degree in a related topic and should have experience using eye-gaze fixation methods with infants and/or young children. Competence with Excel and SPSS would be an advantage. The post is funded by a grant from the Leverhulme Trust and is available from 1st April 2006. The appointment will be for 2 years in the first instance with a possibility of extension thereafter. Informal enquiries about the research can be made to Professor Kim Plunkett (kim.plunkett at psy.ox.ac.uk). Before submitting an application candidates should obtain further particulars from the Administrator, Department of Experimental Psychology, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3UD. (Email applications at psy.ox.ac.uk) or telephone 01865 271399 quoting reference: CQ/06/004. The closing date for applications is 31st March 2006. Interviews are planned for 21st April 2006. Further information on the department can be found on the web-site http://www.psy.ox.ac.uk -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From boehning at ling.uni-potsdam.de Wed Mar 8 14:58:35 2006 From: boehning at ling.uni-potsdam.de (=?iso-8859-1?Q?Marita_B=F6hning?=) Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2006 15:58:35 +0100 Subject: early plural comprehension? Message-ID: dear info-childes, dear tom roeper, dear brian macwhinney! please excuse the wrong forwarding/answering! was distracted by the interesting discussion and did not check recipients again. ;-) marita ********************************************* Marita Boehning Department of Linguistics (Erasmus/Sokrates co-ordinator) P.O. Box 601553 D - 14415 Potsdam Germany Phone: +49 331 977 2929 Fax: +49 331 977 2095 email: boehning at ling.uni-potsdam.de ********************************************* ----- Original Message ----- From: "Marita B?hning" To: "Tom Roeper" ; "Brian MacWhinney" ; "info-childes" Sent: Wednesday, March 08, 2006 3:54 PM Subject: Re: early plural comprehension? > Liebe Barbara, > wenn man die Diskussion zw. Tom Roeper, Tomasello und MacWhinney so liest, > scheint es eine wirklich gute Idee, unser Pluralexperiment bald zu > starten. Christina hat auch Daten zu Plural und w?rde sich konzeptionell > nach ihrem Urlaub beteiligen. > > LG > Marita > > > > ********************************************* > Marita Boehning > Department of Linguistics > (Erasmus/Sokrates co-ordinator) > P.O. Box 601553 > D - 14415 Potsdam > Germany > Phone: +49 331 977 2929 > Fax: +49 331 977 2095 > email: boehning at ling.uni-potsdam.de > ********************************************* > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Tom Roeper" > To: "Brian MacWhinney" ; "info-childes" > > Sent: Wednesday, March 08, 2006 3:40 PM > Subject: Re: early plural comprehension? > > >> Dear Brian--- >> >> Plurals are one of the most interesting and inherently difficult >> things that a child must master. It is not clear when its properties >> are fully grasped at all. To consider what the child faces, parents >> easily say to a child, holding up a single banana, >> "do you like bananas?" >> with a generic reference in mind, but how does the child know that? >> An interesting paper on this is at the UMass website by Sauerland, >> Anderson, and Yatsushiro. Following work by Anne Vainnikka, >> they asked children questions like: >> Does a dog have tails? >> Try it! Six year olds regularly say "yes". >> >> Tom Roeper >> >> PS. In my forthcoming book "The Prism of Grammar" (MIT) >> I devote a long chapter to the topic. >> Brian MacWhinney wrote: >> >>> Dear Info-CHILDES, >>> During class discussion on Monday, one of my students asked >>> whether there were any experiments that have told us the age at which >>> a child can comprehend the plural marker. We were discussing the >>> findings of research in the picture preference task (perhaps with >>> reinforcement) that have demonstrated comprehension at perhaps 12 >>> months. If this paradigm can be used to see if children can >>> distinguish "cat" from "dog" early on, has it also been used to see >>> if children can distinguish "cat" from "cats?" >>> We were particularly interested in information on the plural >>> marker, simply because it is so early in production, so semantically >>> transparent, and so easily demonstrated pictorially. However, >>> evidence for the early learning of other grammatical markers would >>> also be interesting. We are hoping that such information could shed >>> further light on the comprehension-production lag during this >>> period. Can anyone please point us to the relevant reference? Many >>> thanks. >>> >>> --Brian MacWhinney, CMU >>> >>> >> >> >> > From boehning at ling.uni-potsdam.de Wed Mar 8 14:54:29 2006 From: boehning at ling.uni-potsdam.de (=?iso-8859-1?Q?Marita_B=F6hning?=) Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2006 15:54:29 +0100 Subject: early plural comprehension? Message-ID: Liebe Barbara, wenn man die Diskussion zw. Tom Roeper, Tomasello und MacWhinney so liest, scheint es eine wirklich gute Idee, unser Pluralexperiment bald zu starten. Christina hat auch Daten zu Plural und w?rde sich konzeptionell nach ihrem Urlaub beteiligen. LG Marita ********************************************* Marita Boehning Department of Linguistics (Erasmus/Sokrates co-ordinator) P.O. Box 601553 D - 14415 Potsdam Germany Phone: +49 331 977 2929 Fax: +49 331 977 2095 email: boehning at ling.uni-potsdam.de ********************************************* ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tom Roeper" To: "Brian MacWhinney" ; "info-childes" Sent: Wednesday, March 08, 2006 3:40 PM Subject: Re: early plural comprehension? > Dear Brian--- > > Plurals are one of the most interesting and inherently difficult > things that a child must master. It is not clear when its properties > are fully grasped at all. To consider what the child faces, parents > easily say to a child, holding up a single banana, > "do you like bananas?" > with a generic reference in mind, but how does the child know that? > An interesting paper on this is at the UMass website by Sauerland, > Anderson, and Yatsushiro. Following work by Anne Vainnikka, > they asked children questions like: > Does a dog have tails? > Try it! Six year olds regularly say "yes". > > Tom Roeper > > PS. In my forthcoming book "The Prism of Grammar" (MIT) > I devote a long chapter to the topic. > Brian MacWhinney wrote: > >> Dear Info-CHILDES, >> During class discussion on Monday, one of my students asked >> whether there were any experiments that have told us the age at which >> a child can comprehend the plural marker. We were discussing the >> findings of research in the picture preference task (perhaps with >> reinforcement) that have demonstrated comprehension at perhaps 12 >> months. If this paradigm can be used to see if children can >> distinguish "cat" from "dog" early on, has it also been used to see >> if children can distinguish "cat" from "cats?" >> We were particularly interested in information on the plural >> marker, simply because it is so early in production, so semantically >> transparent, and so easily demonstrated pictorially. However, >> evidence for the early learning of other grammatical markers would >> also be interesting. We are hoping that such information could shed >> further light on the comprehension-production lag during this >> period. Can anyone please point us to the relevant reference? Many >> thanks. >> >> --Brian MacWhinney, CMU >> >> > > > From cnarayan at umich.edu Wed Mar 8 14:49:21 2006 From: cnarayan at umich.edu (cnarayan at umich.edu) Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2006 09:49:21 -0500 Subject: early plural comprehension? In-Reply-To: <440EE057.6060700@eva.mpg.de> Message-ID: If I'm not mistaken, Helene Deacon (now at Dalhousie) has been looking at infants' perception of plural markings on novel nouns at 18 months. -chandan Quoting Michael Tomasello : > Brian, > > The youngest children to add English plural -s in a production > experiment with novel verbs are, to my knowledge, 21-22 months (4 of > 10 children at least once). I know of no preferential looking > experiments examining this with novel verbs. Reference: > > Tomasello, M., Akhtar, N., & Dodson, K., Rekau, L. (1997). > Differential productivity in young children's use of nouns and verbs. > Journal of Child Language, 24, 373-87. > > Best, > > Mike > > > > ================================ chandan r. narayan dept. of linguistics university of michigan -------------------------------- cnarayan at umich.edu www-personal.umich.edu/~cnarayan ================================ From roeper at linguist.umass.edu Wed Mar 8 14:40:07 2006 From: roeper at linguist.umass.edu (Tom Roeper) Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2006 09:40:07 -0500 Subject: early plural comprehension? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Dear Brian--- Plurals are one of the most interesting and inherently difficult things that a child must master. It is not clear when its properties are fully grasped at all. To consider what the child faces, parents easily say to a child, holding up a single banana, "do you like bananas?" with a generic reference in mind, but how does the child know that? An interesting paper on this is at the UMass website by Sauerland, Anderson, and Yatsushiro. Following work by Anne Vainnikka, they asked children questions like: Does a dog have tails? Try it! Six year olds regularly say "yes". Tom Roeper PS. In my forthcoming book "The Prism of Grammar" (MIT) I devote a long chapter to the topic. Brian MacWhinney wrote: > Dear Info-CHILDES, > During class discussion on Monday, one of my students asked > whether there were any experiments that have told us the age at which > a child can comprehend the plural marker. We were discussing the > findings of research in the picture preference task (perhaps with > reinforcement) that have demonstrated comprehension at perhaps 12 > months. If this paradigm can be used to see if children can > distinguish "cat" from "dog" early on, has it also been used to see > if children can distinguish "cat" from "cats?" > We were particularly interested in information on the plural > marker, simply because it is so early in production, so semantically > transparent, and so easily demonstrated pictorially. However, > evidence for the early learning of other grammatical markers would > also be interesting. We are hoping that such information could shed > further light on the comprehension-production lag during this > period. Can anyone please point us to the relevant reference? Many > thanks. > > --Brian MacWhinney, CMU > > From tomasello at eva.mpg.de Wed Mar 8 13:47:03 2006 From: tomasello at eva.mpg.de (Michael Tomasello) Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2006 14:47:03 +0100 Subject: early plural comprehension? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Brian, The youngest children to add English plural -s in a production experiment with novel verbs are, to my knowledge, 21-22 months (4 of 10 children at least once). I know of no preferential looking experiments examining this with novel verbs. Reference: Tomasello, M., Akhtar, N., & Dodson, K., Rekau, L. (1997). Differential productivity in young children's use of nouns and verbs. Journal of Child Language, 24, 373-87. Best, Mike From barner at fas.harvard.edu Wed Mar 8 17:06:48 2006 From: barner at fas.harvard.edu (David Barner) Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2006 12:06:48 -0500 Subject: early plural comprehension?] Message-ID: Hi all, Susan Carey and colleagues have done several studies on the topic which support the idea that comprehension emerges at around 22-months (with production). The studies test s-p knowledge with: 1. preferential looking (Kouider, Halberda, Wood & Carey, in press Language Learning and Development) 2. manual search (Barner, Thalwitz, Wood, Yang & Carey, under review; Wood, Kouider, Halberda & Carey, under review) The first task finds successful use of singular-plural morpho-syntax in preferential looking at 24-months but not 20-months. The second (Barner et al) finds successful non-verbal discrimination of singular and plural sets at 22-months, which is driven by children whose parents report they use plural nouns (on the MCDI). It also finds lack of s-p comprehension and production at 20-months. The third study (Wood et al.) finds successful comprehension of s-p to guide reaching in manual search at 24- but not 20-months. Cheers, Dave Barner cnarayan at umich.edu wrote: > If I'm not mistaken, Helene Deacon (now at Dalhousie) has been looking > at infants' perception of plural markings on novel nouns at 18 months. > > -chandan > > Quoting Michael Tomasello : > >> Brian, >> >> The youngest children to add English plural -s in a production >> experiment with novel verbs are, to my knowledge, 21-22 months (4 of >> 10 children at least once). I know of no preferential looking >> experiments examining this with novel verbs. Reference: >> >> Tomasello, M., Akhtar, N., & Dodson, K., Rekau, L. (1997). >> Differential productivity in young children's use of nouns and verbs. >> Journal of Child Language, 24, 373-87. >> >> Best, >> >> Mike >> >> >> >> > > > > ================================ > chandan r. narayan > dept. of linguistics > university of michigan > -------------------------------- > cnarayan at umich.edu > www-personal.umich.edu/~cnarayan > ================================ > > From lise.menn at colorado.edu Wed Mar 8 17:33:51 2006 From: lise.menn at colorado.edu (Lise Menn) Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2006 10:33:51 -0700 Subject: early plural comprehension? In-Reply-To: <440EE057.6060700@eva.mpg.de> Message-ID: For a single-child data point, you can look at Peters, A., and Menn, L. (1993) False starts and filler syllables: Ways to learn grammatical morphemes. Language 69:4 (1993). pp. 742-777. Daniel was still demonstrably not comprehending the plural marker at 2;2.19, but started to produce it (and presumably to comprehend it??) about two weeks later. Lise Menn On Mar 8, 2006, at 6:47 AM, Michael Tomasello wrote: > Brian, > > The youngest children to add English plural -s in a production > experiment with novel verbs are, to my knowledge, 21-22 months (4 > of 10 children at least once). I know of no preferential looking > experiments examining this with novel verbs. Reference: > > Tomasello, M., Akhtar, N., & Dodson, K., Rekau, L. (1997). > Differential productivity in young children's use of nouns and > verbs. Journal of Child Language, 24, 373-87. > > Best, > > Mike Prof. Lise Menn, Hellems 293 Linguistics Department, University of Colorado 295 UCB phone 303-492-1609 Boulder, Colorado office fax 303-492-4416 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 Japanese version of "Shirley Says" http://www.bayget.com/inpaku/ kinen9.htm Academy of Aphasia http://www.academyofaphasia.org/doc -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From macw at cmu.edu Thu Mar 9 05:19:43 2006 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2006 00:19:43 -0500 Subject: summary on plural Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, I received 22 responses to my posting regarding evidence for early comprehension of the plural. I have compiled these responses into a set of pointers to the current and forthcoming literature which I am attaching here. I have only been able to read about three of the papers mentioned here so far, but I have already learned quite a bit. First, it is clear that the plural is not a uniform category, as Roeper, P?rez-Leroux and other argue. Second, although the initial application of preferential looking to this topic was unsuccessful, there appear to be some recent successes. In particular, studies that demonstrate productive control of the plural with novel nouns in comprehension provide us with an important landmark in terms of understanding the overall course of learning of morphology. Exactly where to place that landmark vis a vis production is perhaps not yet entirely clear. Third, it would be helpful to compare the learning of the English plural with more transparent plural markings such as Hungarian -ok or Turkish -ler. --Brian MacWhinney 1. Dave Barner, Harvard Several studies at Harvard have investigated this. Kouider, S., Halberda, J., Wood, J. & Carey, S. Acquisition of English number marking: The singular-plural distinction. Language Learning and Development, 2, 1-25. Using preferential looking, this study found that 24-month olds look reliably at the plurals of novel words if the noun and the verb are plural, but not if only the noun is plural. A second study, that I performed (Barner, Thalwitz, Wood, Yang & Carey, under review), shows that (1) children successfully search longer for 4 objects than for 1 at 22-months but not earlier (following up on Lisa Feigenson's finding that younger children can track only up to 3 objects); and (2) success at this 1 vs. 4 task is driven by children whose parents report they use plural nouns in the MCDI. Finally, a third study (Wood, Kouider, Halberda & Carey, under review) uses the same box reach task. The experimenter looks into the box and claims that either "there is a blicket" or "there are some blickets". Again, 20-month olds succeed and 24-month-olds fail. So, the sum of these results correspond with the MCDI production norms: children seem to be acquiring the link between s-p morphology and the underlying conceptual distinction sometime between 20- and 24- months, and in one case at 22-months exactly. MCDI norms indicate that 50% of children produce the plural at 22-months. Subsequent work has investigated whether the underlying conceptual distinction might be available to children prior to this (Barner, Kibbe, Wood & Carey, in prep). We've also looked to see whether a privileged distinction might exist between a "single individual" and "more than one" in rhesus monkeys (Barner, Wood, Hauser & Carey, in prep). The last two studies have played with spatio-temporal cues like common motion to elicit the representation of sets without invoking numerical representations. They may be totally unrelated to singular-plural in language - it remains to be seen what the link is. Another line has been to investigate French kids, to see if cross- linguistic differences affect age of acquisition (in progress by Kouider, Feigenson and Halberda) and to look at the conceptual distinction in Mandarin (in progress with Peggy Li, Shu-Ju Yang and Susan Carey) and Japanese children (in progress by me, Tamiko Ogura, Barbara Sarnecka, & Susan Carey). In a year or so we should know how all of these pieces fit together! 2. Kamil Ud Deen, University of Hawaii at Manoa While a grad student at UCLA in Nina Hyams' lab, we tried something like what you are suggesting, with no result. The reason was that the pictorial stimuli, while seemingly very transparent and amenable to the methodology, biased children towards plural responses. So for example, when presented with a banana on one side and a bunch of bananas on the other side, because many bananas are inherently more interesting, we got a skew towards plural responses. This was true for inanimate as well as animate pictures, despite various attempts to address the problem. I'm not trying to point out how dumb and unimaginative we were (and I'm sure someone smarter than us has managed to get around this), I just wanted to point out that is is not the case that this methodology lends itself so well to the testing of plurality. *** MacWhinney comment: Erik Thiessen (CMU) told me that Anne Fernald ran into similar methodological problems with this about 10 year back, supporting what Kamil says. Of course, this new report from Kouider et al. suggests that this can be overcome. 3. Lise Menn, Colorado For a single-child data point, you can look at: Peters, A., and Menn, L. (1993) False starts and filler syllables: Ways to learn grammatical morphemes. Language 69:4 (1993). pp. 742-777. Daniel was still demonstrably not comprehending the plural marker at 2;2.19, but started to produce it (and presumably to comprehend it??) about two weeks later. **** MacWhinney comment: I would say that this is the closest we have so far to an estimate of the comprehension-production lag for this morpheme. This estimate seems to fit with similar single-case anecdotal data from Brown. Obviously we would need to have this confirmed experimentally, but it may well be true that the gap is not as huge as one might expect. The discussion of the semantic problems with the plural from Roeper and P?rez-Leroux would further support the idea that the plural doesn?t just emerge full-fledged in either comprehension or production. Still, emerge it does. 4. Recent unpublished studies by Soderstrom, Newman, and Plunkett. Work currently under review. Kouider et al. mention two recent unpublished studies that examined this issue using preferential looking. These are from Melanie Soderstrom and Rochelle Newman, both of who also replied directly to me. Rochelle?s study was presented at SRCD Schnoor, B. C., & Newman, R. S. (2001). Infants' developing comprehension of plurals, 2001 biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development. Melanie?s study is her unpublished doctoral dissertation from Johns Hopkins in 2002. Melanie?s note to me suggests that there is ?sensitivity to -s inflection (both plural and 3rd singular) in 16-month-olds.? Kim Plunkett (Oxford) found evidence for early sensitivity using novel words. Kim included a copy of his unpublished article on this, but I accidentally failed to pull out the attachment. My apologies to Kim. 5. Michael Tomasello, MPI Leipzig The youngest children to add English plural -s in a production experiment with novel verbs are, to my knowledge, 21-22 months (4 of 10 children at least once). Tomasello, M., Akhtar, N., & Dodson, K., Rekau, L. (1997). Differential productivity in young children's use of nouns and verbs. Journal of Child Language, 24, 373-87. I know of no preferential looking experiments examining this with novel verbs. 6. Dick Weist: Fredonia As I understand your message, you are ultimately interested in the comprehension - production lag, and you are approaching the problem through the singular - plural distinction because of linguistic and methodological transparency. I might suggest that you can also approach this problem by investigating temporal and spatial reference with a similar methodological advantage. Here are three references with one on the comprehension side of the issue and two on the production side. I have added a forth reference that places this work in an integrated and larger context. Weist, R.M., Atanassova, M., Wysocka, H., & Pawlak, A. (1999). Spatial and temporal systems in child language and thought: A cross- linguistic study. First Language, 19, 267-312. Weist, R. M., Pawlak, A., & Carapella, J. (2004). Syntactic-semantic interface in the acquisition of verb morphology. Journal of Child Language, 31, 31 ? 60. Internicola, R. & Weist, R. M. (2003). The acquisition of simple and complex spatial locatives in English: A longitudinal investigation. First Language, 23, 239 -248. Weist, R. M. (2002). Space and time in first and second language acquisition: A tribute to Henning Wode (pp. 79?108). In P. Burmeister, T. Piske, A. Rohde (Eds.) An integrated view of language development: Papers in honor of Henning Wode. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier (WVT). 7. Javier Aguado-Orea: Nottingham Casla, M, Aguado-Orea, J & Pine, J. (2005). Eliciting frequent and infrequent verb forms in Spanish: An experimental study of the acquisition of inflectional morphology in Spanish. Paper presented at X International Congress for the Study of Child Language. Berlin, July 2005. The idea was to ask 3 year old children "qu? hace" and "qu? hacen" before a series of images displaying different characters performing a number of familiar actions. We wanted to know if the proportion of plural agreeing inflections (e.g. juegan) as RESPONSES to a plural agreeing question (i.e. hacen) was smaller than the proportion of singular agreeing inflections (e.g. juega) as responses to a singular agreeing question (e.g. hace). The effect was found, and it was significantly smaller than in adults (used as controls). This result seems to be consistent with previous results indicating higher error rates and lower productivity for the USE of plural agreeing verb inflections in Romance languages. Two biased examples follow: Aguado-Orea, J. (2004). The acquisition of morpho-syntax in Spanish: Implications for current theories of development. Unpublished PhD Thesis, The University of Nottingham, Nottingham. Rubino, R. & Pine, J. M. (1998). Subject-verb agreement in Brazilian Portuguese: what overall error-rates hide. Journal of Child Language, 25, 35-59. Note that I have capitalised 'RESPONSES' and 'USE'. I know that you wanted something about *comprehension*, but, the fact of the truth is that Spanish learning children use AT LEAST ONE plural agreeing inflection from very early, so there must be something going on there, since they have problems to be fully productive and accurate later on... 8. Tom Roeper Plurals are one of the most interesting and inherently difficult things that a child must master. It is not clear when its properties are fully grasped at all. To consider what the child faces, parents easily say to a child, holding up a single banana, "do you like bananas?" with a generic reference in mind, but how does the child know that? An interesting paper on this is at the UMass website by Sauerland, Anderson, and Yatsushiro. Following work by Anne Vainnikka, they asked children questions like: Does a dog have tails? Try it! Six year olds regularly say "yes". In my forthcoming book "The Prism of Grammar" (MIT) I devote a long chapter to the topic. MacWhinney comment: Ana Teresa P?rez-Leroux makes very similar points in this article: P?rez-Leroux, Ana T. (2005) Number problems in children. Proceedings of the 2005 annual conference of the Canadian Linguistic Association. 9. Some additional notes and pointers: Gelman, S. A., & Raman, L. (2003). Preschool children use linguistic form class and pragmatic cues to interpret generics. Child Development, 24, 308-325. Chapter 8 in: Gelman, S. A. (2003). The essential child: Origins of essentialism in everyday thought. New York: Oxford University Press. Deacon, S. H., Lalji-Samji, N., Leung, D., & Werker, J. F. (2004, May 9). 'More or less': The specificity of 18- and 24-month old infants' knowledge of the plural. Paper presented at the XIV Biennial International Conference on Infant Studies, Chicago, Il. Twila Tardif (Michigan) provided this further comment on detection of the plural in the Werker frameword: Amber was in a Janet Werker study when she was about 18 months and had trouble with "keet" vs. "keets" but not with "keetsu" (Japanese version of plural). She knew no Japanese, but had a huge vocabulary for an 18-month-old in both English and Mandarin at that point so I was shocked that she didn't make the discrimination. This fits with Janet and her colleague's ideas, though, about the salience of the "s?. Helen Deacon at Dalhousie may be working on this. Alison Jolly at Oxford may be working on this. K. Miller & C. Schmitt in Language Acquisition Recent work by Jill Devilliers. Szagun, G. (2001). Learning different regularities: The acquisition of noun plurals by German-speaking children. First Language, 21(62, pt. 2), 109-141. From G.Morgan at city.ac.uk Thu Mar 9 14:09:40 2006 From: G.Morgan at city.ac.uk (Morgan, Gary) Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2006 14:09:40 -0000 Subject: research post Message-ID: RESEARCH ASSOCIATE Department of Language and Communication Science School of Allied Health Sciences City University, London ?22.5K -?24.5K pa inc Fixed term for three years You will assist in an innovative intervention study exploring the differential effects of two interventions (narrative and vocabulary enrichment)with language impaired secondary school children.You will work closely with the project supervisor,therapists and teachers. You will work in the largest teaching,research and clinical department in the UK,liaising with a range of professionals in schools and working with secondary school children with speci .c language impairments.You will have the opportunity to plan intervention,be involved in both conducting the assessments and training teaching staff. You will have a .rst degree or postgraduate quali .cation in Speech and Language Therapy,Psychology,or Linguistics,and will have experience of working with school-aged children.With the ability to communicate effectively,you will be able to work independently,be well-organised and meticulous in collecting and entering data. In return,we offer a comprehensive package of in-house staff training and development,and bene .ts that include a .nal salary pension scheme. Further particulars and an application form can be downloaded from www.city.ac.uk/hr/jobs Alternatively contact the Recruitment Team,HR Department,City University,Northampton Square, London EC1V OHB,quoting reference number HM/10221. Closing date:13 April 2006 Actively working to promote equal opportunity and diversity . Informal enquiries to Dr Victoria Joffe V.Joffe at city.ac.uk Dr Victoria Joffe MRCSLT MHPC Programme Director, PGDip/MSc Speech and Language Therapy and MSc in Joint Professional Practice Senior Lecturer in Developmental Speech and Language Disability Department of Language and Communication Science City University Northampton Square London EC1V OHB Tel: 02070404629 Fax: 02070408577 www.city.ac.uk/lcs -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From nicol at cogsci.jhu.edu Thu Mar 9 21:43:44 2006 From: nicol at cogsci.jhu.edu (Tamara Nicol) Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2006 16:43:44 -0500 Subject: Postdoctoral Fellowship in Spatial Language and Spatial Representation Message-ID: Postdoctoral Fellowship in Spatial Language and Spatial Representation Johns Hopkins University Department of Cognitive Science Candidates are invited to apply for a post-doctoral fellowship to carry out research on the development of spatial representation, broadly construed, in normal children and people with Williams syndrome, who have selective visual-spatial impairments. We seek applicants who have broad interdisciplinary training in spatial representation, preferably with interest in spatial language, and a strong interest in development, learning and plasticity. Target areas of interest include spatial language, navigation, object representation, visual-manual action, spatial attention, and learning and plasticity within these. Funding is in place for two years, with the possibility for further renewal. Applicants should send a vita, research statement, and three letters of recommendation to Dr. Barbara Landau, Department of Cognitive Science, Johns Hopkins University, 241 Krieger Hall, Baltimore, MD 21218, or by email to landau at cogsci.jhu.edu. Applications will be reviewed immediately and the position will remain open until filled. From mfleck at cs.uiuc.edu Thu Mar 9 22:58:02 2006 From: mfleck at cs.uiuc.edu (Margaret Fleck) Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2006 16:58:02 -0600 Subject: early plural comprehension?] In-Reply-To: <440F0F28.6010508@fas.harvard.edu> Message-ID: When is "both" (e.g. "both hands") normally produced/understood, relative to production/ comprehension dates for plural forms? Just curious, Margaret From slornat at psi.ucm.es Fri Mar 10 11:25:49 2006 From: slornat at psi.ucm.es (=?iso-8859-1?Q?Susana_L=F3pez_Ornat?=) Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 12:25:49 +0100 Subject: early plural comprehension Message-ID: In more or less the same spirit of Margaret?s message: Spanish children, typically before 24 months, most frequently use a non-plural form which, interestingly, has "some" plural meaning: the "otro-otra" determiner ("another one", or "another"). They use it before the Noun, saying /oto/ or /ota/ + X, or use it free. They do one of those things when they want "more of the same X", or when they point out that "there are more of this same X around". They successfully use those otro-otra (masc.-fem) preceeding a Noun, or free -as pronouns-, from much earlier on than they use the "real" plural markers. This early marker is worked at, though for gender agreement reasons, with a succesfull Neural Net simulation, in: P.Smith, A.Nix, N.Davey, S.L?pez-Ornat & D.Messer (2003): A connectionist account of Spanish determiner production. Journal Child Language, 30, 305-331. Its very early use is documented also in behavioural experiments about the early acquisition of the Spanish Nominal Phrase. See: S.Mariscal & S. L?pez Ornat (2000) Oto* casa roja: The gradual acquisition of gender morphology in Spanish children under 2;06 years. At 9th International Morphology Meeting. Univ. of Viena, 25-27 february. S.Mariscal (2001) ?Es "a p?" equivalente a DET+N?: sobre el conocimiento temprano de las categor?as nominales. Cognitiva 13, 1, 35-69. Brian: I?d propose to track the comprehension of plural in steps like this. Thanks a lot for the summary you sent us all. Susana L?pez Ornat www.ucm.es/info/equial Facultad de Psicolog?a Universidad Complutense de Madrid 28223 From michael at georgetown.edu Tue Mar 14 16:55:29 2006 From: michael at georgetown.edu (Michael Ullman) Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 11:55:29 -0500 Subject: RA and Postdoctoral positions at the Brain and Language Lab Message-ID: The Brain and Language Lab at Georgetown University (brainlang.georgetown.edu) has two new positions, for one Research Assistant and one Postdoctoral Fellow. If you know of any excellent candidates for either of these positions (e.g., graduating seniors for the RA position, or individuals about to receive their PhD for the postdoctoral position), can you please forward them this email? I would also greatly appreciate it if you could forward/post the job description below to any appropriate email lists at your institution. Thank you very much, Michael Ullman THE BRAIN AND LANGUAGE LAB The Brain and Language Lab investigates the biological and computational bases of language, and the relations between language and other cognitive domains, including memory, music and motor function. The lab's research examines both native and later-learned language. The lab is particularly interested in within and between subject differences in the biocognition of language, based on factors such as genetic variation, endocrine fluctuations, and sex and handedness differences. The lab's members test their hypotheses using a set of complementary behavioral, neurological, neuroimaging (ERPs, fMRI) and other biological (genetic, endocrine, pharmacological) approaches. They are interested in the normal acquisition and processing of language and non-language functions, as well as in the breakdown, recovery and rehabilitation of these functions in a variety of disorders, including Specific Language Impairment, ADHD, dyslexia, autism, Williams syndrome, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, and aphasia. For a fuller description of the Brain and Language Lab, please go to brainlang.georgetown.edu. RESEARCH ASSISTANT POSITION We are seeking a full-time Research Assistant/Lab Manager. The successful candidate, who will work with the two RA/Lab Managers currently in the lab, will have the opportunity to be involved in a variety of projects, using a range of methodological approaches (see brainlang.georgetown.edu). S/he will have responsibility for various aspects of research and laboratory management and organization, including working with other lab members in preparing and managing grants and IRB protocols; helping manage and upgrade the lab?s computers; writing and upgrading lab-specific computer programs for data processing; creating experimental stimuli; setting up and running experiments; performing statistical analyses; carrying out background research; and helping to write papers for publication. Minimum requirements for the position include a B.A. or B.S., with a significant amount of course-work or research experience in language, cognition, neuroscience, computer science, statistics, or a related field. Familiarity with UNIX and Windows is highly desirable, as is programming experience and a strong aptitude and experience in math or statistics. A car is preferable because subject testing is conducted at multiple sites. The candidate must be extremely energetic, hard-working, organized, efficient and responsible, and be able to work with a diverse group of people. POSTDOCTORAL POSITION The postdoctoral fellow will have the opportunity to be involved in a number of different projects, using a variety of methodological approaches (see brainlang.georgetown.edu), and to carry out her/his own studies related to lab interests. Minimum requirements for the position include a PhD and background in cognitive neuroscience, cognitive psychology, theoretical linguistics or a related field; research experience investigating the neurocognition of language; and expertise in two or more of the following: ERPs, fMRI, MEG, adult-onset disorders, developmental disorders, psycholinguistic behavioral techniques, statistics, molecular techniques. We are particularly interested in candidates with a substantial background in, and an aptitude for, experimental design and statistics. Excellent writing skills, a strong publication record, and previous demonstration of funding will all be considered advantageous. Candidates must have completed all PhD degree requirements prior to starting the position. FOR BOTH POSITIONS To allow for sufficient time to learn new skills and to be productive, candidates for both positions should ideally be available to work for three years. A start date of spring/summer 2006 is preferable. Interested candidates should email Marco Pi?eyro (map89 at georgetown.edu) their CV and up to 3 publications (or other writing samples, for RA applicants), and have 3 recommenders email him their recommendations directly. Consideration of applicants will begin immediately, and will end when the positions are filled. Salary will be commensurate with experience and qualifications. Both positions are NIH-funded. Georgetown University is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity employer. The positions include health benefits. From karen.pollock at ualberta.ca Wed Mar 15 17:40:12 2006 From: karen.pollock at ualberta.ca (Pollock, Karen) Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 10:40:12 -0700 Subject: 2006 Child Phonology Conference - Call for Papers REMINDER Message-ID: Today is the official deadline for the Call for Papers for the 2006 International Child Phonology Conference. Please get your submissions in as soon as possible. The Call for Papers is copied below, and also on the conference website. Please also visit the website (http://www.rehabmed.ualberta.ca/spa/phonology/2006 Child Phonology Conference.htm ) for information on registration, accommodations and travel, and links to sites of interest to visitors to Edmonton and Alberta. The pre-registration deadline is May 1. As always, feel free to contact me if you have any questions. Karen Call for Papers Child Phonology Conference June 16-17 University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada The 2006 Child Phonology Conference organizing committee invites you to submit your recent research for presentation. Papers dealing with all aspects of children's phonological development and disorders will be considered. A maximum of two submissions per first author will be accepted. Typically, papers are presented in 20-minute time slots with 5-10 minutes for questions. However, if the number of papers submitted exceeds the total available time, some presentations will be converted to poster format. Submissions will be accepted until March 15, 2006. Submit the following: - Title of Presentation - Presenter Name(s) and Affiliation(s) - Contact Information (preferred contact person, address, telephone & fax numbers, email address) - 250 word summary/abstract - Also indicate if you are willing to consider either platform or poster presentation format Email to: karen.pollock at ualberta.ca or Mail to: Karen E. Pollock, Ph.D. Dept. of Speech Pathology & Audiology 2-70 Corbett Hall University of Alberta Edmonton, AB T6G 2G4 Canada -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From macw at cmu.edu Wed Mar 15 22:42:23 2006 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 17:42:23 -0500 Subject: book announcement Message-ID: EARLY TRILINGUALISM A Focus on Questions Julia Barnes (University of Mondragon) All those of us interested in multilingualism have had to wait a long time for a thorough account of trilingual language acquisition similar to those studies in child bilingualism that have become classics. Julia Barnes? book fills this gap admirably. It is meticulously researched, abounds with primary data and offers many new insights. It will be warmly welcomed by those concerned with the natural acquisition and development of more than one language in both monolingual and multilingual contexts. Charlotte Hoffmann, University of Salford, UK ?Early trilingualism? is a fascinating book which breaks new ground in the study of multilingualism. It is clearly organized, and presents an in-depth analysis of form and function in early questioning behaviour. It should be of great interest not only to researchers in language acquisition and multilingualism but also to all those interested in pragmatics, sociolinguistics and child development. Jasone Cenoz, University of the Basque Country The book describes how a trilingual child in the Basque Country, where Spanish and Basque are the languages of the community, is able to successfully acquire English at home through interaction with her mother. It focuses on her acquisition of the form and function of English questions. Contents Introduction Part 1: Theoretical Perspectives Chapter 1. Bilingual and trilingual acquisition; Chapter 2. The development of interrogative behaviour Part II: The Acquisition Of English Question Form And Function In A Trilingual Child Chapter 3. Research questions and design ; Chapter 4. Research findings; Chapter 5. Interpretation of the findings Second Language Acquisition No. 16 January 2006 Format: 210 x 148mm 256 pp Hbk ISBN 1-85359-854-2/ EAN 978-1-85359-854-8 ?49.95/ US $89.95/ CAN$109.95 Ebook ISBN 1-85359-855-0 /EAN 978-1-85359-855-5 8 ?49.95/ US $89.95/ CAN$109.95 (Adobe format) For further information and to order at 20% discount, click on the following link: http://www.multilingual-matters.com/multi/display.asp?isb=1853598542 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jacqueline.vankampen at let.uu.nl Thu Mar 16 16:48:04 2006 From: jacqueline.vankampen at let.uu.nl (kampen) Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 17:48:04 +0100 Subject: Last Call for papers Romance Turn Message-ID: Last Call for Papers for the Workshop The Romance Turn Date: 07-Sep-2006 - 09-Sep-2006 Location: Utrecht, Netherlands Contact Person: Jacqueline van Kampen Meeting Email: Romanceturn at let.uu.nl Web Site: http://www.let.uu.nl/romanceturn/ Linguistic Field(s): Language Acquisition Language Family(ies): Romance Call Deadline: 01-Apr-2006 Meeting Description: The Romance Turn II (Workshop on the Acquisition of Romance Languages) September 7-9 2006 at the UiL OTS, Utrecht University http://www.let.uu.nl./romanceturn/ The Romance Turn II will take place at Utrecht University (Netherlands). Like the first edition of The Romance Turn, which took place in 2004 at the UNED in Madrid, the present workshop intends to gather people working on the acquisition of the Romance languages. Workshop topics Papers are invited in the area of the acquisition of Romance languages. All topics in the fields of (typical and impaired) first and second language acquisition from a generative perspective will be considered. Presentations will be 30-minutes long, plus 15 minutes for discussion, and will be in English. Invited speakers Larisa Avram (University of Bucharest) Anne Christophe (CNRS Paris) Ludovica Serratrice (University of Manchester) Abstract submission Authors are invited to send one copy of an abstract (maximally two pages) in English for review. Abstracts should be submitted via e-mail to Romanceturn at let.uu.nl, as an attachment in PDF. In the body of the e-mail message include the title, language, name, academic affiliation, current address, phone and fax number, e-mail, and audiovisual requests. Authors may submit up to two abstracts, one individual and one joint. Deadline for receipt of abstracts: April 1 2006. Notification of acceptance: May 1 2006. Address for sending abstracts: Romanceturn at let.uu.nl Organizing committee Sergio Baauw Jacqueline van Kampen Joke de Lange Manuela Pinto http://www.let.uu.nl/~Jacqueline.vanKampen/personal/ Postal address: UiL OTS Trans 10 3512 JK Utrecht The Netherlands phone: +31 30-2536054 fax: +31 30-2536000 From ramoseli at fiu.edu Thu Mar 16 20:44:53 2006 From: ramoseli at fiu.edu (Eliane Ramos) Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 15:44:53 -0500 Subject: Position at Florida Int University Message-ID: Please distribute this position posting to any interested parties. Individuals with backgrounds in any area related to speech-language pathology and interested in bilingual acquisition/disorders are strongly encouraged to apply: Tenure track faculty position in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Florida International University located in the Miami metropolitan area. The department is located in the School of Health Sciences, College of Health and Urban Affairs and affords faculty and students a unique opportunity for collaboration with individuals in the departments of Physical Therapy, Occupational Therapy, and Health Information Management. Responsibilities will include teaching undergraduate and graduate level courses, student advisement, and research. Qualified applicants must have Ph.D. in Speech-Language Pathology or related area. Preference will be given to candidates who specialize in speech and language development/disorders, and bilingual acquisition. Individuals that are bilingual Spanish/English or Creole/English are strongly encouraged to apply. The Miami metropolitan area is an ideal location for researchers interested in bilingual issues. The department is committed to the outstanding academic and clinical preparation of multicultural populations. Salary is negotiable based on rank. This is a nine month position to begin Fall 2006. Opportunity for summer employment in future years is anticipated. For consideration interested applicants should submit a letter of interest, curriculum vita, and 3 letters of recommendation to: Eliane Ramos, Ph. D., Chair Search Committee Dept. of Communication Sciences and Disorders Florida International University University Park Campus, HLS 144 Miami, FL 33199 Telephone (305) 348-2710 Fax Number (305) 348-2740 ramoseli at fiu.edu Review of applicants to start April 10, 2006. Florida International University is an equal opportunity/Access Employer and Institution. From karen.pollock at ualberta.ca Fri Mar 17 04:29:36 2006 From: karen.pollock at ualberta.ca (Pollock, Karen) Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 21:29:36 -0700 Subject: 2006 International Child Phonology Conference - Final Call for Papers Message-ID: Yesterday (March 15) was the deadline for submission of presentation proposals for the 2006 International Child Phonology Conference to be held at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, June 16-17. However, I understand that there was a glitch in our network server mid-day yesterday, and that at least one person had difficulty getting an email submission through to me. I want to be sure that I didn't miss any other submissions, so am extending the deadline to Monday, March 20. If you sent a proposal but have not received an email confirmation from me, please let me know as soon as possible. The Call for Papers is copied below, and also on the conference website. Please also visit the website (http://www.rehabmed.ualberta.ca/spa/phonology/2006%20Child%20Phonology% 20Conference.htm) for information on registration, accommodations and travel, and links to sites of interest to visitors to Edmonton and Alberta. The pre-registration deadline is May 1. Karen Call for Papers Child Phonology Conference June 16-17 University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada The 2006 Child Phonology Conference organizing committee invites you to submit your recent research for presentation. Papers dealing with all aspects of children's phonological development and disorders will be considered. A maximum of two submissions per first author will be accepted. Typically, papers are presented in 20-minute time slots with 5-10 minutes for questions. However, if the number of papers submitted exceeds the total available time, some presentations will be converted to poster format. Submissions will be accepted until March 15, 2006. Submit the following: - Title of Presentation - Presenter Name(s) and Affiliation(s) - Contact Information (preferred contact person, address, telephone & fax numbers, email address) - 250 word summary/abstract - Also indicate if you are willing to consider either platform or poster presentation format Email to: karen.pollock at ualberta.ca or Mail to: Karen E. Pollock, Ph.D. Dept. of Speech Pathology & Audiology 2-70 Corbett Hall University of Alberta Edmonton, AB T6G 2G4 Canada -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Laura-Ann.Petitto at Dartmouth.EDU Fri Mar 17 19:02:37 2006 From: Laura-Ann.Petitto at Dartmouth.EDU (Laura-Ann Petitto) Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2006 14:02:37 EST Subject: Fascinating Post-Doc with NIRS/fMRI Message-ID: A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 1211 bytes Desc: not available URL: From macw at cmu.edu Sat Mar 18 22:11:52 2006 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006 17:11:52 -0500 Subject: pitch shifts Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, Over the last four years, we have been attempting to provide continually better support in CHAT and CLAN for transcribers who are familiar with Conversation Analysis (CA) transcription format. At first, we simply provided a few CA symbols inside the CLAN editor without fully integrating CA and CHAT modes. Then, we began to provide methods for automatic alignment of overlaps and fuller support for all the special CA characters. Later, we eliminated any overt distinction between CA and CHAT by allowing full access to all CA characters from basic CHAT mode. The various CA characters and forms we support can be found at http://talkbank.org/ca/ Some of these changes have imposed unacceptable restrictions on CA coding in order to allow us to use CLAN programs like CHECK, FREQ, etc. However, we have also been developing a program called CHAT2CA that automatically removes all these ugly CHAT restrictions and allows CA users to redisplay their files in a purer CA format. The other side of this work involves a slow adaptation of CHAT conventions to look more like CA conventions wherever that makes good sense. The first major change in this direction is, as I have mentioned, the fact that all the codes given at http://talkbank.org/ ca/codes.html are currently legal in CHAT and should pass CHECK. These codes mark things like pitch shift, height, tempo change, creaky voice, breath, and loudness. These features were not marked in the current CHAT transcripts, so there was no need to reformat the transcripts to use these codes. However, they are now available for future work. In addition, I have now replaced the earlier system of CHAT markings for prosodic shift (shift to high, shift to low) with the corresponding CA forms. This means that -' was changed to the up arrow ? and -_ was changed to the down arrow ?. As in CA, these markers appear next to the words they affect and are not surrounded by spaces. I have removed old section 7.4 from the manual where these markers were described and put the relevant material into section 6.4. I have removed the -, and similar symbols from the CHECK depfile and replaced all occurrences of the old symbols in the database with the new CA forms. I hope that people interested in marking these features will find the new methods of coding useful. Good luck, Brian MacWhinney From mearken at andrew.cmu.edu Mon Mar 20 14:35:23 2006 From: mearken at andrew.cmu.edu (Marnie Arkenberg) Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 09:35:23 -0500 Subject: reverse mutual exclusivity? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, A colleague mentioned that her bilingual 3 year old refuses to accept the notion that an object can have the same same in both English and Hebrew. Can anyone guide me towards literature that discusses this sort of thing? Cheers, Marnie Arkenberg Marnie E. Arkenberg, Ph.D. NIMH Postdoctoral Fellow 254F Baker Hall Department of Psychology Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 (412) 268-7986 From sdevitt at tcd.ie Mon Mar 20 16:42:45 2006 From: sdevitt at tcd.ie (Sean Devitt) Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 16:42:45 +0000 Subject: Issues with MLU and FREQ In-Reply-To: <91A0513E-5272-4ECA-8164-A2B3AF1A5292@mac.com> Message-ID: Dear Brian In the email from Dongping Zheng there is a comment about using ??t%mor? in the command line when calculating MLU. I cannot remember seeing reference to this in any other exchange on MLU or in the CLAN manual. There is a major difference between including ??t%mor? in the command line and omitting it. Could you explain just why this might be so? I would have expected that the number of utterances would be somewhat related (e.g. half the number when ?-t%mor? is included) and the same for the morphemes, but there seems to be absolutely no relation. I give an example from Wells? data below: When I used the command ?mlu +t*CHI -t%mor +f jonath*.cha?, the result for the file: Jonath08.cha was as follows: Number of: utterances = 50, morphemes = 241 Ratio of morphemes over utterances = 4.820 Standard deviation = 3.882 When I used the command ?mlu +t*CHI +f jonath*.cha (leaving out ?-t%mor?)?, the result was: Number of: utterances = 252, morphemes = 691 Ratio of morphemes over utterances = 2.742 Standard deviation = 2.070 The same situation arose for all the files in this corpus ? calculations of utterances and morphemes for the two commands that bore no relation to one another. My question is: which formula is to be taken as the appropriate one for calculating MLU? Obviously there is a huge difference in the calculation. A second related question: How reliable is MLU considered to be as an index of development nowadays? Obviously this is an important issue, for example in attempting to find at what point features like regular past tense appear. Finally, a question about FREQ and the number of utterances examined. The output of FREQ for any feature in the CHI tier contains a line - ### *CHI:, where ### is some number. I presumed this was the number of utterances of the child in that transcript. Obviously this cannot be the case. Below, for example, is the output of FREQ in the file Jonath08.cha referred to above for irregular pasts (command "freq +d2 +t*CHI +t%mor +s"*&PAST*" +f jonath*.cha"). It was necessary to include the MOR tier to find "*&PAST*". What DOES the figure 310 in this case refer to? It seems to bear no relation to the number of utterances calculated for MLU. @ID: en|wells|CHI|2;11.29||||Target_Child|| 310 *CHI: 1 v:aux|have&past 3 v|be&past&13s etc. @ST: 10 22 0.455 Best wishes Sean Devitt Quoting Brian MacWhinney : > Dear Dongping, > You can use GEM as the "frontend" for MLU and other programs by > using the "piping" feature. Section > 2.3.5 of the introductory tutorial desccribes this a bit and there > are further descriptions in section 7 Exercises. > Basically, GEM just does the work of narrowing down the material that > will go into FREQ with the +d2 option to produce a STATFREQ input. > > --Brian MacWhinney > > On Feb 13, 2006, at 9:01 PM, Dongping Zheng wrote: > > > Hi, > > > > I just wanted to thank Brian and Bracha for their help. Here is the > > trick and solution: > > > > Adding the -t%mor tag following the MLU command when analyzing MLU > > in words. > > > > > > > > My analysis is getting more involved. It is very > > exciting to come to this point since I learned so much about > > CHILDES and from this Listserv. I used STATFREQ and ?mlu -t%mor - > > s"[+ bch]" +d +tBET *.cha? and was able to generate data and input > > in Excel. > > I wonder if there is a way to combine GEM and STATFREQ, > > GEM and ?mlu -t%mor -s"[+ bch]" +d +tBET *.cha? so that I can > > generate data to input in Excel rather than hand keying them in. > > Thanks again for your help! > > Dongping > > > > > > <<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>> > > > > Dongping Zheng, ABD > > Department of Educational Psychology > > University of Connecticut > > > > 249 Glenbrook Rd. Unit 2064 > > > > Storrs, CT 06269 > > dongping.zheng at uconn.edu > > http://www.education2.uconn.edu/epsy240/dzheng/index.htm > > > > > > > > Webmaster @ Universal Design for Instruction > > http://www.facultyware.uconn.edu/home.htm > > > > From: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org [mailto:info- > > childes at mail.talkbank.org] On Behalf Of Bracha Nir-Sagiv > > Sent: Friday, February 10, 2006 2:57 AM > > To: Dongping Zheng > > Cc: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org > > Subject: Re: Gem and MLU > > > > > > > > Dear Dongping, > > Try adding the -t%mor tag following the MLU command - in the > > current version of CLAN, MLU works automatically on the %MOR tier > > and you need to tell the program to disregard it. > > Hope this helps, > > Bracha > > > > Dongping Zheng wrote: > > > > > > Hi, > > > > I was trying to run this command: gem +sgreet +t*LUL +t*SEA +t*BET > > +t*LIZ +d *.cha | MLU and I got this message in the output file: > > > > > > > > TIER "%MOR" HASN'T BEEN FOUND IN THE INPUT DATA! > > > > > > > > I don?t have %MOR tier in the input data, I have LUL, SEA BET and > > LIZ tiers. > > > > > > > > Would you help me to solve this problem? Oh, I use windows XP. > > > > > > > > Thank you so much! > > Dongping > > > > > > > > > > +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ > > This Mail Was Scanned By Mail-seCure System > > at the Tel-Aviv University CC. > > > > > > Dr. Se?n Devitt, F.T.C.D. Senior Lecturer in Education, Education Department, Trinity College, University of Dublin Dublin, Ireland. Phone: (353 1) 608 1293. From macw at cmu.edu Mon Mar 20 18:22:08 2006 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 13:22:08 -0500 Subject: MLU and %mor Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, I try to avoid posting details regarding CLAN programs to this list, but I have received enough emails on this issue to suggest that it is time to remind people once more of a change made about 24 months ago in the operation of MLU. This is that MLU now operates by default on the %mor line, not the main line. In the database, there is now a %mor now for all of the English files and much of French, German, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish. If your corpus has a %mor line, then MLU will give you a true MLU. If it does not, and if you then run MLU on the main line by adding the -t%mor switch, what you are going to get is not "MLU in morphemes" but "MLU in words". Since the main line now includes no hyphenated words, MLU is going to count each word as one word and will do no morphemic analysis. If you want to have an MLU in morphemes, you have to have a %mor line. This shift to reliance on the %mor line was a part of a general plan of increased support for computational linguistic tools in the most recent proposal to NIH for continued funding for CHILDES. The basic rationale is that coherent and relplicable automatic morphosyntactic analysis has to be conducted on the basis of a systematically tagged database. Constructing a complete %mor line for all these files has been a huge job, as you can imagine. However, I am convinced that reliable progress in child language morphosyntactic analysis will proceed best through reliance on consistent computational tools. --Brian MacWhinney, CMU P.S. For those we haven't got the time to construct %mor lines for new data, it may be comforting to know that MLU in words is highly correlated with MLU in morphemes, at least for English. From caponeni at shu.edu Mon Mar 20 19:51:03 2006 From: caponeni at shu.edu (Nina Capone) Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 14:51:03 -0500 Subject: Faculty Position - Department of Speech-Language Pathology Message-ID: Faculty Position- Department of Speech-Language Pathology The School of Graduate Medical Education (SGME) of Seton Hall University announces a twelve-month faculty position in the Department of Speech-Language Pathology. The position is available starting summer 2006, but applications will continue to be accepted until the position is filled. Qualifications include an earned doctorate in speech-language pathology or communication sciences and disorders, and expertise in one or more of the following areas is preferred: language disorders in school-aged children and adolescents, phonological disorders, augmentative communication, and pediatric neuromotor disorders. CCC-SLP and eligibility for New Jersey state licensure preferred, but not required. Evidence of scholarly work and potential for programmatic research and extramural grant writing is desirable. Responsibilities include teaching graduate courses in applicant?s area(s) of expertise, serving on departmental, school and university committees, engaging in research and other scholarly activities, and mentoring and advising students. Teaching pre-requisite courses in SLP for non-major students may be required for this position. One of the objectives of the SGME is to have a significant national presence in health sciences education. In response to the changing health care needs of society, the school is assuming a leadership role in the development of high quality, innovative graduate programs. The SGME offers opportunities for intra- and inter-departmental collaborative research, curriculum development, teaching doctoral seminars, and grant development across a number of disciplines. Salary and benefits are extremely competitive and include tuition remission for spouses and eligible dependents. Please send a cover letter indicating the position you are applying for with a current curriculum vita that includes the names, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses of at least three (3) references to: Office of the Dean Attn: SLP Faculty Position School of Graduate Medical Education Seton Hall University, 400 South Orange Ave South Orange, NJ 07079 Applications will be accepted until the position is filled. The cover letter should address one's qualifications for the position and one's philosophy and specific goals regarding teaching and scholarship. After the initial screening, candidates may be subsequently asked to supply additional materials. Seton Hall University is committed to programs of equal opportunity and affirmative action (EEO/AA) to achieve our objectives of creating and supporting a diverse racial, ethnic, cultural community. Seton Hall University encourages applications from individuals who represent a broad spectrum of backgrounds and, in particular, welcomes applications from women and minority groups. For further information about this position, please contact: Venu Balasubramanian, Ph.D, at (973) 275-2912 or via e-mail at balasuve at shu.edu . For further information on Seton Hall University, see our web page at www.shu.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ellmcf at nus.edu.sg Tue Mar 21 01:16:01 2006 From: ellmcf at nus.edu.sg (Madalena Cruz-Ferreira) Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2006 09:16:01 +0800 Subject: reverse mutual exclusivity? Message-ID: Dear Marnie, I've noticed a similar phenomenon in my data. My children deliberately distorted similar-sounding words in their different languages in order to make them maximally different, starting at the one-word stage. They did this by manipulating segments and/or prosody. I discuss a few examples in a paper published in the Journal of Portuguese Linguistics that I can send electronically to you, if you want. More detail is in my book _Three is a Crowd?_ (Multilingual Matters, 2006), especially chapters 5, 6 and 10. I find this very, very interesting. If your colleague (or you!) should investigate this further, please let me know? Best Madalena ====================================== Madalena Cruz-Ferreira Dept. English Language and Literature National University of Singapore ellmcf at nus.edu.sg http://profile.nus.edu.sg/fass/ellmcf/ ====================================== -----Original Message----- From: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org [mailto:info-childes at mail.talkbank.org]On Behalf Of Marnie Arkenberg Sent: Monday, 20 March, 2006 10:35 PM To: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org Subject: reverse mutual exclusivity? Dear Info-CHILDES, A colleague mentioned that her bilingual 3 year old refuses to accept the notion that an object can have the same same in both English and Hebrew. Can anyone guide me towards literature that discusses this sort of thing? Cheers, Marnie Arkenberg Marnie E. Arkenberg, Ph.D. NIMH Postdoctoral Fellow 254F Baker Hall Department of Psychology Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 (412) 268-7986 From roberta at UDel.Edu Tue Mar 21 02:28:16 2006 From: roberta at UDel.Edu (Roberta Golinkoff) Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 21:28:16 -0500 Subject: reverse mutual exclusivity? In-Reply-To: <3211.128.2.65.130.1142865323.squirrel@128.2.65.130> Message-ID: here are a couple of relevant resources: Au, T. & Glusman, M. (1990). The principle of mutual exclusivity in word learning: to honor or not to honor? Child Development, 61, 1474-1490. Mervis, C. B., Golinkoff, R. M., & Bertrand, J. (1994). Two-year-olds readily learn multiple labels for the same basic level category. Child Development, 65, 971-991. Blewitt, P., Golinkoff, R. M., & Alioto, A. (2000). Do toddlers have label preferences? A possible explanation for word refusals. First Language, 20, 253-272. Hope these are helpful to you! Best, Roberta Golinkoff On Mar 20, 2006, at 9:35 AM, Marnie Arkenberg wrote: > Dear Info-CHILDES, > A colleague mentioned that her bilingual 3 year old refuses to > accept the notion that an object can have the same same in both > English and Hebrew. Can anyone guide me towards literature that > discusses this sort of thing? > Cheers, > Marnie Arkenberg > > Marnie E. Arkenberg, Ph.D. > NIMH Postdoctoral Fellow > 254F Baker Hall > Department of Psychology > Carnegie Mellon University > Pittsburgh, PA 15213 > (412) 268-7986 > > > _____________________________________________________ Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, Ph. D. H. Rodney Sharp Professor School of Education and Departments of Psychology and Linguistics University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716 Office: 302-831-1634; Fax: 302-831-4110 Web page: http://udel.edu/~roberta/ Please check out our doctoral program at http://www.udel.edu/educ/graduate/ -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 1661 bytes Desc: not available URL: From gleason at bu.edu Tue Mar 21 06:54:22 2006 From: gleason at bu.edu (Jean Berko Gleason) Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2006 01:54:22 -0500 Subject: Away from my mail Message-ID: I'll be away from March 21 to April 1, and may not be able to check my mail while traveling, but I'll try. I'll respond to your message as soon as I can. This is an automatic message. jbg From deak at cogsci.ucsd.edu Wed Mar 22 22:21:52 2006 From: deak at cogsci.ucsd.edu (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Gedeon_De=E1k?=) Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 14:21:52 -0800 Subject: reverse mutual exclusivity? In-Reply-To: <3211.128.2.65.130.1142865323.squirrel@128.2.65.130> Message-ID: Nice example, which might say more about knowledge of language use rather than so-called mutual exclusivity (M.E.). I can't address the bilingual metalinguistic/code-switching issue, but regarding more general issues of word learning and comprehension, here's an analysis of related issues: The literature on homonymy is most relevant. Check out the following (all w/ monolingual samples, I think). They do not paint a uniform (monochromatic?) picture but the general trend is that preschool children can interpret homonyms if reasonable contextual information supports the interpretation. However, even fairly old children can be "thrown" by low-frequency homonyms in sentential/story context (e.g., "The /har/ ran across the road" where"hair" is much more familiar & retrievable than "hare"). Here are some relevant references: Children's resistance to homonymy: An experimental study of pseudohomonyms Journal of child language [0305-0009] Casenhiser, Devin yr:2005 vol:32 iss:2 pg:319 -343 Children's difficulty in learning homonyms Journal of child language [0305-0009] Doherty, Martin yr:2004 vol:31 iss:1 pg:203 -214 Possible explanations for children's literal interpretations of homonyms Journal of child language [0305-0009] Mazzocco, Mich??le yr:2003 vol:30 iss:4 pg:879 -904 A comparison of homonym and novel word learning: The role of phonotactic probability and word frequency Journal of child language [0305-0009] Storkel, Holly yr:2005 vol:32 iss:4 pg:827 -853 The issue of so-called M.E. (implied by "reverse ME") is also relevant, and people often use "ME" in ways that aren't theoretically or empirically supported. There is little evidence that children (of at least 2 years) generally assume that every class of referents has one label and each label refers to a unique (narrow) class of referents. The evidence for this position is too extensive to summarize here, but for a slightly out-of-date review see: De?k, G. O. (2000). Chasing the fox of word learning: Why ?constraints? fail to capture it. Developmental Review, 20, 29-80. The references Roberta sent also are relevant; I won't rehash them. Children readily show what Bill Merriman called the "disambiguation effect": when they hear a novel word in an ostensive context, all else being equal they tend to map it onto an unnamed referent rather than a familiar referent with a known (common) label. However, that tendency has a number of possible explanations, many not requiring an underlying assumption that things only have one legitimate label (or description). And, just to be completely clear, there is little or no support for the idea that children have a kind of representational inflexibility, such that they cannot represent an entity as belonging to only on category. To the contrary, for example, 2- to 4-year-olds readily and robustly produce (or accept) multiple appropriate labels for objects, people, or story characters: Clark, E. V. & Svaib, T. A. (1997). Speaker perspective and reference in young children. First Language. De?k, G. O. & Maratsos, M. (1998). On having complex representations of things: Preschoolers use multiple words for objects and people. Developmental Psychology, 34, 224-240. De?k, G. O., Yen, L., & Pettit, J. (2001). By any other name: When will preschoolers produce multiple labels for a referent? Journal of Child Language, 28, 787-804. There are a few papers showing "true" ME effects (i.e., rejection of new word or replacement of old word (Merriman & Bowman, 1989; De?k et al 2001). Typically though the effects are small, but larger (it seems) when cognitive load is high (Liittschwager & Markman, 1994; De?k & Wagner, 2003). However, the Deak et al 2001 data show that rejection/replacement is an odd effect, and possibly an artifact: in short, right after learning a new word 3-/4-year-olds sometimes don't use or don't produce a familiar word for the same referent. However, there is nothing systematic about which word they don't produce--as if there is some maximum number of "legitimate" words they'll produce (in our studies, 2 to 3), and they choose from all the options...not at random, but not predictably either. The behavior looks like stochastic low-probability inhibition of lexical retrieval, possibly with specific items weighted by priming of that item. The implication is that this suppression doesn't say anything conceptually important about children's commitment to symbolic mappings (i.e., they're not committed to rejecting a word that they failed to produce on one occasion). I can't yet prove this account, but it's the best "fit" for the limited data available. In a recent series of studies (under review; available on request) we showed that there is a weak, transitory ME-like effect for words, facts, and pictorial symbols, w/ no difference in magnitude across the three kinds of items. Notably, the effect disappears after 2 exposures to the novel information, and, again, it is obtained under a relatively high cognitive load (we haven't experimentally manipulated this yet). Best account: when learning new info. with many-to-many associative mappings, there is a slight, temporary inhibitory effect for overlapping mappings. In other words, Anderson's old fan effect is content-general, and accounts for "true" ME effects. Two more brief notes (almost done!). First, there is converging data that children's pragmatic expectations influence the disambiguation effect: that is, children learn to expect grown-ups to use a restricted lexicon when talking to them (i.e., using shared words for a referent whenever possible (something like a Gricean principle of clarity). See, e.g., Diesendruck, Dev Psych 2005. Second, Perner, Sprung, Doherty et al have proposed that young children have trouble generating alternate perspectives (i.e., dissimilar representations with positive truth-values wrt a referent), and this could account for ME effects. It is a clever account with some intriguing supporting evidence: Perner, J., Strummer, S., Sprung, M., & Doherty, M. (2002). Theory of mind finds its Piagetian perspective: why alternative naming comes with understanding belief. Cognitive Development, 17, 1451?1472. but is disconfirmed (as I read it) by other evidence, particularly: De?k & Maratsos (1998) De?k, Yen, & Pettit (2001) De?k, G. O. & Enright, B. (in press). Choose and choose again: Appearance-reality errors and the logic of questioning. Developmental Science. Best conclusions for now: Disambiguation is at least in large part due to pragmatic expectations. Exposure to a multilingual environment, and situation-specific information about an interlocutor's lexical knowledge, seems to "set" children's expectations about the lexicon that interlocutor will use. (We do not yet know how robust or precise this process is.) "True" rejection/replacement effects, including of homonyms, are generally small, transitory, content-general (i.e., not specific to novel words) and probably modulated by factors such as lack of contextual supporting information and cognitive load. Implications for the example: Given the apparent pragmatic basis of disambiguation effects, there is no reason why a child couldn't induce the expectation that speakers of L1 use different lexemes (i.e., phonological forms) than speakers of L2 for the conventional (i.e., common) forms in each language that refer to a single referent category. So hearing someone known to be an L2 speaker using the L1 phonological form would violate this expectation. The child might respond in ways that reflect this expectancy violation. We know that children sometimes verbalize their doubt about a speaker's locution (whether or not they are committed to rejecting the locuation), and so a verbal statement of disbelief or rejection would not be unexpected. Anyone who knows of other findings that contradict these conclusions, please tell me. Thanks! On Mar 20, 2006, at 6:35 AM, Marnie Arkenberg wrote: > Dear Info-CHILDES, > A colleague mentioned that her bilingual 3 year old refuses to > accept the notion that an object can have the same same in both > English and Hebrew. Can anyone guide me towards literature that > discusses this sort of thing? > Cheers, > Marnie Arkenberg > > Marnie E. Arkenberg, Ph.D. > NIMH Postdoctoral Fellow > 254F Baker Hall > Department of Psychology > Carnegie Mellon University > Pittsburgh, PA 15213 > (412) 268-7986 > > > Gedeon O. De?k, Ph.D. Department of Cognitive Science 9500 Gilman Dr. (858) 822-3352 University of California, San Diego fax (858) 534-1128 La Jolla, CA 92093-0515 http://cogsci.ucsd.edu/~deak/ -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 9778 bytes Desc: not available URL: From msninio at pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il Thu Mar 23 06:01:44 2006 From: msninio at pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il (Anat Ninio) Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 08:01:44 +0200 Subject: language development and breastfeeding In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Dear Leah, If you're an Israeli, there is an article in today's Haaretz about the non-effects of breastfeeding on practically anything, starting with infant health and continuing with intelligence. The URL is below. http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=507898&contrassID=2&subContrassID=2&sbSubContrassID=0 I've never heard of the idea that breastfeeding has any connection to language development but on the face of it it sounds to me like a completely groundless New-Age-type invention. Like crystals and auras, you know. I think, on the other hand, that putting pressure on mothers to breastfeed more than they are willing is very harmful for the dyadic relationship and can cause emotional and developmental problems for the infants involved. I hope this answers your question, Prof. Anat Ninio Developmental Psycholinguist The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel From k.j.alcock at lancaster.ac.uk Thu Mar 23 09:33:54 2006 From: k.j.alcock at lancaster.ac.uk (Katie Alcock) Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 09:33:54 +0000 Subject: language development and breastfeeding In-Reply-To: <442239C8.1020006@pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il> Message-ID: Well-controlled studies that introduce long-chain fatty acids into infant formula e.g. Willatts, P., Forsyth, J. S., DiModugno, M. K., Varma, S., & Colvin, M. (1998). Effect of long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids in infant formula on problem solving at 10 months of age. Lancet, 352(9129), 688-691. control for any "bonding" or SES effects of breastfeeding - and an effect on some types of cognitive behaviour is shown in preverbal infants (e.g. problem solving in the above study). However other studies with similar designs e.g. Auestad, N., Scott, D. T., Janowsky, J. S., Jacobsen, C., Carroll, R. E., Montalto, M. B., et al. (2003). Visual, cognitive, and language assessments at 39 months: A follow-up study of children fed formulas containing long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids to 1 year of age. Pediatrics, 112(3), E177-E183. have shown no effect on language of supplemented formula. This study however failed to show an effect of breastfeeding itself, either, which has been fairly commonly found: it's just that there are so many confounds of breastfeeding itself. And others e.g. Birch, E. E., Garfield, S., Hoffman, D. R., Uauy, R., & Birch, D. G. (2000). A randomized controlled trial of early dietary supply of long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids and mental development in term infants. Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology, 42(3), 174-181. have shown improvements on e.g. the Bayley Scales - Cognitive, but this was only on the non-language sections, and there were no differences in the language sections. Katie Alcock Katie Alcock, DPhil Lecturer Department of Psychology University of Lancaster Fylde College Lancaster LA1 4YF Tel 01524 593833 Fax 01524 593744 Web http://www.psych.lancs.ac.uk/people/KatieAlcock.html From mmlahey at comcast.net Thu Mar 23 15:34:27 2006 From: mmlahey at comcast.net (Peg Lahey) Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 10:34:27 -0500 Subject: language development and breastfeeding In-Reply-To: Message-ID: For a review of some literature prior to 2004 that includes this topic see the Bamford-Lahey Children's Foundation website www.bamford-lahey.org. . The focus of the review is essential fatty acids but it includes some discussion of breastfeeding and development. It was completed in 2002 and updated in 2003. For direct access, click on first link below and then click section on infant development; for update click on 2nd link. There is some support re vocabulary and verbal IQ and some suggestion that there may be a nutritional component related to the higher amount of omega3 fatty acids found in breast milk vs. formula as it was constituted at the time [some changes recently]. Peg Lahey http://bamford-lahey.org/lipidsrev102.html#LIPIDS for original paper http://www.bamford-lahey.org/update.html for a short update in 2003. -----Original Message----- From: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org [mailto:info-childes at mail.talkbank.org]On Behalf Of leah gedalyovich Sent: Wednesday, March 22, 2006 5:05 PM To: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org Subject: language development and breastfeeding dear all, this question came up from a discussion with a friend who is a lactation consultant. there seems to be a given that breastfeeding is better than any other alternative for virtually every aspect of development. is there any published research on the relationship between breastfeeding and language development? if any relationship is found is it attributed to nutritional issues or to other issues (emotional, sensori-motor, etc) i will post a summary if there are replies. thanx! leah gedalyovich -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From j-tomblin at uiowa.edu Thu Mar 23 16:29:36 2006 From: j-tomblin at uiowa.edu (Tomblin, J B) Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 10:29:36 -0600 Subject: language development and breastfeeding Message-ID: Several years ago we published a study (Tomblin, Smith, & Zhang, 1997) on prenatal and infancy risk factors for SLI at 6 years of age that included retrospective information on breastfeeding. When mother's education was controlled breastfeeding was a significant protective factor for language outcome (odds ratio=0.5). We also found that there was a dose effect in that longer periods of breastfeeding had a stronger effect than shorter periods. More recently, Drane and Logemann (2000) published a systematic review of literature on breastfeeding and cognitive outcomes. Their findings were that the literature, although limited, supported an association between breastfeeding and better cognitive outcomes. These authors note that most research (including my study), has not differentiated between pure breastfeeding and combinations of breast and formula feeding which makes interpretation more difficult. I believe Denise Drane has recently completed a dissertation on language development and breastfeeding at Northwestern where this was controlled. Tomblin, J. B., Smith, E. & Zhang, X. (1997) Epidemiology of SLI: Prenatal and perinatal risk factors. Journal of Communication Disorders, 30, 325-344. Drane, D. & Logemann, J. (2000) A critical evaluation of the evidence on the association of infant feeding and cognitive development. Paediatric and Perinatal Epidemiology, 14, 349-356. ________________________________ From: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org [mailto:info-childes at mail.talkbank.org] On Behalf Of leah gedalyovich Sent: Wednesday, March 22, 2006 4:05 PM To: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org Subject: language development and breastfeeding dear all, this question came up from a discussion with a friend who is a lactation consultant. there seems to be a given that breastfeeding is better than any other alternative for virtually every aspect of development. is there any published research on the relationship between breastfeeding and language development? if any relationship is found is it attributed to nutritional issues or to other issues (emotional, sensori-motor, etc) i will post a summary if there are replies. thanx! leah gedalyovich -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lhewitt at bgnet.bgsu.edu Thu Mar 23 16:52:59 2006 From: lhewitt at bgnet.bgsu.edu (Lynne Hewitt) Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 11:52:59 -0500 Subject: language development and breastfeeding In-Reply-To: Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From alaakso at indiana.edu Thu Mar 23 18:23:35 2006 From: alaakso at indiana.edu (Aarre Laakso) Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 13:23:35 -0500 Subject: Japanese POST database? Message-ID: Hello, The CHILDES website (http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/morgrams/) states that there is a POST database available for Japanese. I have downloaded the MOR grammar, but I don't think it includes the POST database. Does anybody know where it is or have a copy they could send me? Thanks, Aarre -- Aarre Laakso http://mypage.iu.edu/~alaakso/ Cognitive Development Laboratory mailto:alaakso at indiana.edu Indiana University, Bloomington office: 812-856-0836 1101 East Tenth Street, Psych A104 lab: 812-855-8256 Bloomington, Indiana 47405-7007, USA fax: 309-276-8745 From James_Morgan at brown.edu Fri Mar 24 00:20:07 2006 From: James_Morgan at brown.edu (James Morgan) Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 19:20:07 -0500 Subject: language development and breastfeeding In-Reply-To: Message-ID: A substantial number of articles in the pediatric literature report that reduced incidence of otitis media is associated with breastfeeding. This is probably due to a combination of factors including antibodies passed to the child through breast milk and the increased mechanical load in breastfeeding relative to bottle feeding, which promotes drainage of the Eustachian tubes (infants' Eustacian tubes are narrower and more horizontal than adults'). There is at least a weak relation between incidence of OME in infancy and phonological and lexical measures of language development. -- Jim Morgan At 05:04 PM 3/22/2006, leah gedalyovich wrote: >dear all, >this question came up from a discussion with a friend who is a lactation >consultant. there seems to be a given that breastfeeding is better than >any other alternative for virtually every aspect of development. is there >any published research on the relationship between breastfeeding and >language development? if any relationship is found is it attributed to >nutritional issues or to other issues (emotional, sensori-motor, etc) >i will post a summary if there are replies. >thanx! >leah gedalyovich > > From macw at cmu.edu Fri Mar 24 04:16:30 2006 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 23:16:30 -0500 Subject: warning on formats and media Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, The rise of MP3 and DVD as popular consumer formats with readily available playback devices may lead researchers to think that these formats are also suitable for research on spoken language in natural contexts. In fact, both of these formats have problems when used for transcript-based analyses. Both are compressed in ways that make it difficult for software to find exact begin and end points of utterances, words, and gestures. The CHILDES CLAN program can play back MP3 because MP3 is a format supported directly by Quicktime. However, because of the nature of MP3 compression, QuickTime and CLAN cannot locate precise time points within an MP3 file. For this reason, I strongly advise researchers to use uncompressed audio formats like WAV and AIFF or OGG. Currently, all audio in the database is in WAV format. If you wish to generate MP3 files for special purposes such as student work, please always be sure to maintain uncompressed WAV files for archival purposes. It is also true that careful phonological analysis in programs like Praat or Phon will work much better with WAV files than with MP3 files. On the video side, there is an even more serious issue regarding the commercial DVD format. Currently, there are no methods at all for linking transcripts to material in DVD format. Instead, CLAN requires linkage to any of the compressed file formats supported by QuickTime, which include the various MPEG formats. Please note that using DVD media to store QuickTime or WAV files is not a problem at all. It is only the full DVD movie format that is a problem. For both video and audio, it is important to preserve your original uncompressed media as your archival source. For audio, this means the WAV files. For video, it typically means the mini-DV cassettes used by a digital recorder or the original VHS. If you are participating in a project that is having problem with the monetary resources needed for the archival storage of uncompressed media, please contact me and we will try to figure out some way of providing assistance or at least minimizing the negative consequences of destroying your original media. Many thanks, Brian MacWhinney From stemberg at interchange.ubc.ca Fri Mar 24 04:49:26 2006 From: stemberg at interchange.ubc.ca (Joe Stemberger) Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 20:49:26 -0800 Subject: warning on formats and media In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Brian, Thanks for the reminder about the MP3 and DVD formats. I have a follow-up question to this statement: > For both video and audio, it is important to preserve your original > uncompressed media as your archival source. For audio, this means > the WAV files. For video, it typically means the mini-DV cassettes > used by a digital recorder or the original VHS. > Storing WAV files is easy and cheap. And they're easy and cheap to copy. An hour of uncompressed sound is only 600MB, after all. But video is something else entirely, since each hour is 15GB. Although I COULD break up each 40-60-minute-long recording session into 3 or 4 parts and back them up as files on DVD disks (not in DVD format), I find that I don't. I do rely on the original mini-DV tapes for archiving. Can you tell us how long mini-DV cassettes last before they degrade? When do I need to think about backing them up to another storage medium? (I've heard that DVD disks are supposed to last for 100 years --- but since they havn't been around for anywhere near that long, I have my doubts about how much I can rely on that. Still, maybe 30 years?) Thanks! ---Joe Stemberger Linguistics University of British Columbia -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From peytontodd at mindspring.com Fri Mar 24 07:04:09 2006 From: peytontodd at mindspring.com (Peyton Todd) Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 02:04:09 -0500 Subject: warning on formats and media Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From peytontodd at mindspring.com Fri Mar 24 07:29:35 2006 From: peytontodd at mindspring.com (Peyton Todd) Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 02:29:35 -0500 Subject: warning on formats and media - Footnote Message-ID: A point I forgot to mention - if you follow my method of saving your video on a hard disk, do not use that hard disk for other purposes. As you know, hard disks are mechanical objects, like cars, and they wear out with use. Store the hard disk you use for backing up video in the closet and bring it out only when you're adding more video to it. Or leave it connected to your computer but don't turn it on except when backing up to it. Most of those they make nowadays have on-off switches. Also, many have BOTH Firewire AND USB connections, so they'll be sure to work on the new computer you buy some day. Check these features before you buy, of course. And if you're really, really worried, as I am, then do as I do: both an MPG backup to DVDs, and an AVI back up to a hard disk! Peyton From ellmcf at nus.edu.sg Fri Mar 24 11:21:47 2006 From: ellmcf at nus.edu.sg (Madalena Cruz-Ferreira) Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 19:21:47 +0800 Subject: warning on formats and media Message-ID: Dear Peyton and all, Just one short addition to what you wrote: >no one knows how long DVDs will keep. I'm really scared of them myself. If you live in a tropical climate, they will besides rot away wherever you store them -- unless you ziplock them, one by one. I learned this the hard way. So yes, external hard drives are my current choice too. But I also had to learn not to use them to full capacity. If I do, I can't access their contents on my laptop. The technician who recently helped me retrieve my files told me that these drives were created with portability in mind, not as permanent storage devices. Thanks for all this really, really useful information! Madalena ====================================== Madalena Cruz-Ferreira Dept. English Language and Literature National University of Singapore ellmcf at nus.edu.sg http://profile.nus.edu.sg/fass/ellmcf/ ====================================== -----Original Message----- From: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org [mailto:info-childes at mail.talkbank.org]On Behalf Of Peyton Todd Sent: Friday, 24 March, 2006 3:04 PM To: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org Subject: Re: warning on formats and media Dear Info-Childes: -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From k.j.alcock at lancaster.ac.uk Fri Mar 24 11:37:40 2006 From: k.j.alcock at lancaster.ac.uk (Katie Alcock) Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 11:37:40 +0000 Subject: warning on formats and media In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Traditional videotapes also go mouldy in a tropical climate ? I understand it is due to the gelatine on the tape, I would imagine this could happen with DV tapes too, if they are made using any similar animal or vegetable material. Katie Alcock Katie Alcock, DPhil Lecturer Department of Psychology University of Lancaster Fylde College Lancaster LA1 4YF Tel 01524 593833 Fax 01524 593744 Web http://www.psych.lancs.ac.uk/people/KatieAlcock.html From: "Madalena Cruz-Ferreira" Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 19:21:47 +0800 To: "Peyton Todd" , Subject: RE: warning on formats and media Dear Peyton and all, Just one short addition to what you wrote: >no one knows how long DVDs will keep. I'm really scared of them myself. If you live in a tropical climate, they will besides rot away wherever you store them -- unless you ziplock them, one by one. I learned this the hard way. So yes, external hard drives are my current choice too. But I also had to learn not to use them to full capacity. If I do, I can't access their contents on my laptop. The technician who recently helped me retrieve my files told me that these drives were created with portability in mind, not as permanent storage devices. Thanks for all this really, really useful information! Madalena ====================================== Madalena Cruz-Ferreira Dept. English Language and Literature National University of Singapore ellmcf at nus.edu.sg http://profile.nus.edu.sg/fass/ellmcf/ ====================================== -----Original Message----- From: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org [mailto:info-childes at mail.talkbank.org]On Behalf Of Peyton Todd Sent: Friday, 24 March, 2006 3:04 PM To: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org Subject: Re: warning on formats and media Dear Info-Childes: -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From KNelson at gc.cuny.edu Fri Mar 24 15:05:30 2006 From: KNelson at gc.cuny.edu (Nelson, Katherine) Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 10:05:30 -0500 Subject: Narratives from the Crib Message-ID: I have learned that our book "Narratives from the Crib" is selling used through Amazon and Barnes and Noble for $100 or more. Before investing at this price anyone interested should know that after many years of urging Harvard University Press is planning to republish in paperback in Fall 06. I do not know what the price will be, but it will be less than $100! The new version will also include a commentary by Emily, now 25 years old. Those who may have tried to access the transcripts of Emily's nighttime talk through CLAN and found little or nothing there should know that the full transcripts have been re-copied and are now available. Katherine Nelson -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From KNelson at gc.cuny.edu Fri Mar 24 15:07:50 2006 From: KNelson at gc.cuny.edu (Nelson, Katherine) Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 10:07:50 -0500 Subject: narratives from the crib Message-ID: I have learned that our book "Narratives from the Crib" is selling used through Amazon and Barnes and Noble for $100 or more. Before investing at this price anyone interested should know that after many years of urging Harvard University Press is planning to republish in paperback in Fall 06. I do not know what the price will be, but it will be less than $100! The new version will also include a commentary by Emily, now 25 years old. Those who may have tried to access the transcripts of Emily's nighttime talk through CLAN and found little or nothing there should know that the full transcripts have been re-copied and are now available. Katherine Nelson -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cchaney at sfsu.edu Fri Mar 24 21:08:00 2006 From: cchaney at sfsu.edu (Carolyn Chaney) Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 13:08:00 -0800 Subject: warning on formats and media In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Another anxiety is the loss of access to old technology for use in teaching. I used to assume that all the non-native speakers in my pronunciation class had tape recorders with pause buttons and easy rewind/playback...now most have these digital gadgets that are very difficult to locate a specific thing to play back. And VCRs for recording and viewing themselves? Gone, gone, gone! Ain't progress wonderful? Carolyn Chaney cchaney at sfsu.edu "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" --Mary Oliver -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From macw at cmu.edu Sun Mar 26 00:06:50 2006 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2006 19:06:50 -0500 Subject: formats and archiving Message-ID: Dear Info-CHILDES, A few further comments on the issue of audio/video formats and the importance of archiving. 1. Thanks to Devin Casenhiser for pointing out a possible method for extracting video from the DVD format. Of course, this method only applies to home-made DVDs. If someone could get it to work with commercial DVDs they would surely get rich (perhaps illegally?). Even within the framework of extracting video from homemade DVDs, however, I noted some limitations. For example, you purchase and install a recent QuickTimeMPEG2 decoder. However, even with this decoder installed, I found that I was only able to play back the first 11 second of a 20-minute video clip. If you can create content using some DVD format and then are able to pull out the content using QuickTime, then that is fine. However, personally, I would not rely on this process until I had shown it to work fully using some specific hardware/software platform. In any case, I would not rely on the MPEG-2 on the DVD as a replacement for mini-DV as the long- term archive. 2. I had not thought about the issues with mini-DV archiving and tape mould in tropical climates that Madalena Cruz-Ferreira mentioned. In this case, I would recommend shipping your mini-DV tapes to a colleague in a northern climate for storage. 3. For the current CHILDES and TalkBank collections, I have relied for awhile on DVD-ROMs for keeping copies of the compressed video and the original audio. The major problem I have noted with DVD-ROM storage is that it is very easy to scratch the media. Once this happens, the whole disk is unreadable. So, this is a sort of catastrophic failure. The rate of this type of failure is not large, but it is high enough that I have come to rely on both hard disk and DVD-ROM as storage for compressed video and WAV audio. 4. I double-checked with Peyton Todd to make sure I understood the thrust of his message. His central point was that it makes no sense to archive digital raw video (AVI format on Windows) because it is simply too big. I agree and that is why I emphasize archiving based on mini-DV. However Peyton was worried about the longevity of mini- DV, pointing to problems he had experienced with half-inch reel-to- reel tapes. I think Peyton is talking about the consumer level reel- to-reel video of the 1970s and early 1980s. It is true that this format has caused us some problems, but I am not convinced that the problem is with the tape medium, but rather with the flakiness of the slowly degenerating playback heads on the machines we have to use to read these old videos. By comparison, I have had zero problems playing back reel-to-reel audio tapes from up to 35 years ago that colleagues have sent us. Peyton's third point was that archiving of the original is not enough when you also do extensive editing with the compressed files. I totally agree with that too. Most of the material in CHILDES and TalkBank is not edited, except to throw out dead spaces at the beginning and end of tapes. 5. A further note on MPEG formats. MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 videos created on Windows (but not Mac) often have the sound track MUX-ed. When this is done, it becomes impossible to edit the material in QuickTime. Perhaps some future version of QuickTime will solve this problem. Moreover, many more recent versions of MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 compression on Windows no longer using MUX-ing, so this problem may also go away. However, if you use MPEG, it is a good idea to check your video inside QuickTime (Movie Properties) to make sure it is not using MUX. MUX is an abbreviation for multiplexing and it involves some sort of interlacing of the video and audio that makes subsequent analytic processing difficult or impossible. 6. Finally, let me pass on a comment regarding Carolyn Chaney's problems trying to get her techie undergrads to understand the usefulness of the playback functions in the old cassette recorders. I can only agree. It was so nice to be able to push a button and rehear a sentence. Of course, we have this type of function inside CLAN now in the SoundWalker mode, but all this requires you to be at your computer and it was so nice to have a little cassette player you could just put in your pocket and still be able to rewind. Maybe some genius will be able to figure out a method for simulating this on an iPod some day. Thanks for all your comments. And happy recording, compressing, and archiving. --Brian MacWhinney From edy.veneziano at paris5.sorbonne.fr Mon Mar 27 08:13:43 2006 From: edy.veneziano at paris5.sorbonne.fr (edy veneziano) Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 10:13:43 +0200 Subject: FIRST LANGUAGE Call for PAPERS REMINDER Message-ID: REMINDER - DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION 30 JUNE 2006 CALL FOR PAPERS: SPECIAL ISSUE of First Language Guest Editor: Edy Veneziano, Universit? Descartes Paris 5-CNRS Theme: Conversation in language development and use Conversation is almost unanimously recognized as the privileged site of language acquisition. In conversation, children are compelled to draw deeply on their communicative and language resources and both to use and to extend their formal and pragmatic competencies. This Special Issue addresses the nature, effects and development of exchanges unfolding among children and their co-conversationalists. Papers presenting empirical work on tangible effects of conversation on the acquisition and/or use of early as well as later language are of focal interest. Topics include (but are not restricted to): 4 The role of conversational exchanges in early language acquisition and/or use (lexical, syntactic, morphological and pragmatic knowledge) 4 The implications of conversational scaffolding for later developments (morphosyntactic, narrative and argumentative skills) 4 Acquiring and using conversational skills, including conversational repairs, explanations, justifications and argumentation 4 Learning to adjust one's speech to the interlocutor : style, topic, means 4 Individual differences 4 Conversational skills in children with language impairments and other disorders Deadline for submissions: 30 June 2006 Submissions and enquiries should be addressed to: Edy Veneziano Equipe D?veloppement et Fonctionnement Cognitifs Universit? Descartes Paris 5 - CNRS 46, rue St Jacques, Paris 5?me, France. email: edy.veneziano at univ-paris5.fr -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 2792 bytes Desc: not available URL: From Chris.Letts at newcastle.ac.uk Mon Mar 27 11:26:45 2006 From: Chris.Letts at newcastle.ac.uk (Chris Letts) Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 12:26:45 +0100 Subject: formats and archiving Message-ID: And my few pence worth of contribution is that whatever format you use to archive material, you should review the archive at regular intervals. The BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) learned the hard way, by archiving the results of extensive information-gathering onto a new technology for the time, LaserDisc. Many years later they wanted to re-use the information, then found that although the discs were perfectly preserved, there existed nowhere a machine that could play them ! In the U.K. we're starting to find VHS format machines becoming more difficult to get, ditto decent cassette players at reasonable prices and one day these formats will dissappear for ever. Many old computer formats are also difficult to read including CD's burned by who-knows-what software before the formats became standardised. I'd certainly also advocate archiving valuable material in 2 different formats, stored in 2 different places. Our 'standard' system for video is to keep original material on DVC tape, with a copy in AVI format on a USB hard drive. Yes AVI files are huge, but they're easy to make and edit, and are guaranteed to replay on virtually any computer. Their size isn't really a problem these days - 250GB USB drives are getting common. Chris Letts, Technical Site Manager, School of Education, Communication & Language Sciences, King George VI Building University of Newcastle, Newcastle Upon Tyne NE1 7RU, U.K. From deak at cogsci.ucsd.edu Mon Mar 27 17:48:06 2006 From: deak at cogsci.ucsd.edu (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Gedeon_De=E1k?=) Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 09:48:06 -0800 Subject: formats and archiving In-Reply-To: <37E80E80B681A24B8F768D607373CA800329C1D5@largo.campus.ncl.ac.uk> Message-ID: That advice is worth more than a few pence for sure. Another suggestion: if you have access a VERY SECURE and STABLE supercomputer center with a policy for keeping/protecting sensitive data for years, it might be a back-up option. Also, re: DVDs for backing up, even though the compression causes some info loss, for many purposes it is still fine. The worst problem, imho, is a bit of horizontal blurring. Of course, burning DVDs even on fast machines is slow, so a down-side is the time to capture video in the first place, then burn the DVD. Maybe there's a way to do it simultaneously--probably, I'd guess, if you have a RAID system--but we couldn't figure out how using dual-processor Macs running 10.4 w/ 1 GB SDRAM. The capture/burn time issue is not major is you're just doing, say, a case study, but if you're doing a large project (w/ hours of video), it can get hairy. A possible solution for the capture/copy time problem is a new line of dv cams w/ built-in hard drives by JVC. Not trying to give them free ads; we just got a couple and are still testing them (if they stink I'll write back & retract the plug). They also market back-up HDs for the cameras; not sure if they are different from any other portable drives. The camera software has several diff compression methods. I haven't played w/ them yet; if anyone else has I'd be curious to know the practical difference between the best and 2nd-best compression. Anyway, if the cameras are any good they might be one way to capture/back-up video more quickly. Also, they're pretty small so if you want unobtrusive portable cameras, they might work. On Mar 27, 2006, at 3:26 AM, Chris Letts wrote: > > I'd certainly also advocate archiving valuable material in 2 different > formats, stored in 2 different places. Our 'standard' system for video > is to keep original material on DVC tape, with a copy in AVI format on > a > USB hard drive. Yes AVI files are huge, but they're easy to make and > edit, and are guaranteed to replay on virtually any computer. Their > size > isn't really a problem these days - 250GB USB drives are getting > common. > > Chris Letts, > Technical Site Manager, > School of Education, Communication & Language Sciences, > King George VI Building > University of Newcastle, > Newcastle Upon Tyne NE1 7RU, > > U.K. > > > Gedeon O. De?k, Ph.D. Department of Cognitive Science 9500 Gilman Dr. (858) 822-3352 University of California, San Diego fax (858) 534-1128 La Jolla, CA 92093-0515 http://cogsci.ucsd.edu/~deak/ From macw at cmu.edu Mon Mar 27 18:01:43 2006 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 13:01:43 -0500 Subject: formats and archiving In-Reply-To: <37E80E80B681A24B8F768D607373CA800329C1D5@largo.campus.ncl.ac.uk> Message-ID: Dear Chris, Yes, this a pivotal issue. Here at CMU, I have two approaches to this issue. The first is to maintain a menagerie of old devices. I have five type of reel-to-reel recorder, for example and an equal number of reel-to-reel video recorders. The other approach is to treat the database as an active database, not an archive. All CHILDES and TalkBank data, including the media, are always online and there are mirrors in Antwerp (Steven Gillis) and Chukyo (Hidetosi Sirai) that maintain full copies of everything. In addition, I maintain four copies on hard drives here, all stored at different locations. These approaches help us deal with antique formats and minimize catastrophic data loss. Yes, DVC tape is even better than mini-DV, if you recorded in that format. --Brian MacWhinney On Mar 27, 2006, at 6:26 AM, Chris Letts wrote: > And my few pence worth of contribution is that whatever format you use > to archive material, you should review the archive at regular > intervals. > The BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) learned the hard way, by > archiving the results of extensive information-gathering onto a new > technology for the time, LaserDisc. Many years later they wanted to > re-use the information, then found that although the discs were > perfectly preserved, there existed nowhere a machine that could play > them ! > In the U.K. we're starting to find VHS format machines becoming more > difficult to get, ditto decent cassette players at reasonable > prices and > one day these formats will dissappear for ever. Many old computer > formats are also difficult to read including CD's burned by > who-knows-what software before the formats became standardised. > > I'd certainly also advocate archiving valuable material in 2 different > formats, stored in 2 different places. Our 'standard' system for video > is to keep original material on DVC tape, with a copy in AVI format > on a > USB hard drive. Yes AVI files are huge, but they're easy to make and > edit, and are guaranteed to replay on virtually any computer. Their > size > isn't really a problem these days - 250GB USB drives are getting > common. > > Chris Letts, > Technical Site Manager, > School of Education, Communication & Language Sciences, > King George VI Building > University of Newcastle, > Newcastle Upon Tyne NE1 7RU, > > U.K. > > From mfleck at cs.uiuc.edu Mon Mar 27 18:09:10 2006 From: mfleck at cs.uiuc.edu (Margaret Fleck) Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 12:09:10 -0600 Subject: formats and archiving In-Reply-To: <37E80E80B681A24B8F768D607373CA800329C1D5@largo.campus.ncl.ac.uk> Message-ID: > I'd certainly also advocate archiving valuable material in 2 different > formats, stored in 2 different places. Our 'standard' system for video > is to keep original material on DVC tape, with a copy in AVI format on a > USB hard drive. Yes AVI files are huge, but they're easy to make and > edit, and are guaranteed to replay on virtually any computer. Their size > isn't really a problem these days - 250GB USB drives are getting common. ... and the two different places should be geographically separated. Off-hand, I can think of recent examples where universities sustained major damage (ranging from a whole building to multiple buildings) from fire, hurricane, flood, and PETA sabotage. I also know of an example where undergraduate research projects were sabotaged. That was especially hard to recover from, because the backup tapes were stored in the same room and were removed at the same time as the disks. I also know that even reputable academic departments and companies often keep backup tapes in the same or a nearby building, which is ok for minor machine meltdowns but not for disaster recovery. Send a second copy of your data to a colleague or relative far, far away. Margaret From cchaney at sfsu.edu Mon Mar 27 20:38:33 2006 From: cchaney at sfsu.edu (Carolyn Chaney) Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 12:38:33 -0800 Subject: phonological perception in Japanese speakers Message-ID: Hi friends, I have a student who wants to investigate how context helps Japanese speakers disambiguate among similar sounds (e.g., /r,l/). I thought I remembered a recent mention of a study in which Japanese speakers who produced /r,l/ distinctions persisted in having perceptual confusions. But I didn't make note of the study. Does anyone know of this study or any that show the help that context plays in making perceptual decisions? Thanks for any help. Carolyn Chaney From cnarayan at umich.edu Mon Mar 27 20:52:13 2006 From: cnarayan at umich.edu (cnarayan at umich.edu) Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 15:52:13 -0500 Subject: phonological perception in Japanese speakers In-Reply-To: Message-ID: If you're looking for literature on the effects of phonetic context on /r,l/ perception by Japanese adults, I would start with Logan, Lively, and Pisoni (1991); Lively, Pisoni and Logan (1993); Lively, et al. (1993, 1994). All of these have appeared in JASA. Also, check out the Pisoni chapter in "Speech Perception and Linguistic Experience" (Ed.W.Strange, 1995). This stuff is pretty old, but a good place to start! -chandan Quoting Carolyn Chaney : > Hi friends, > > I have a student who wants to investigate how context helps Japanese > speakers disambiguate among similar sounds (e.g., /r,l/). I thought > I remembered a recent mention of a study in which Japanese speakers > who produced /r,l/ distinctions persisted in having perceptual > confusions. But I didn't make note of the study. Does anyone know > of this study or any that show the help that context plays in making > perceptual decisions? > > Thanks for any help. > > Carolyn Chaney > > > > ================================ chandan r. narayan dept. of linguistics university of michigan -------------------------------- cnarayan at umich.edu www-personal.umich.edu/~cnarayan ================================ From s.disbray at pgrad.unimelb.edu.au Mon Mar 27 23:49:20 2006 From: s.disbray at pgrad.unimelb.edu.au (Samantha Disbray) Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 10:49:20 +1100 Subject: archiving & compression In-Reply-To: <44282A46.6010907@cs.uiuc.edu> Message-ID: > Hallo info childes thanks to everyone taking part in this discussion, very relevant to the project we are working on- Aboriginal Child language Acquisition Project (ACLA- Universities of Melbourne and Sydney, Australia). We are video recording 24 children in 3 field locations, at 6 mnthly intervals, over a 3 year project, looking at caregiver input. With the final field trip approaching we have some 300+ hours (6000GB) of video data, with different media stored in different locations. DV tapes currently with the researchers, to be deposited at an archive in the capital, Canberra. These seem to offer a backup in the short\medium term, which the new generation DV cameras with internal hard drives don't offer. Ofcourse the mini DV cameras will be quickly superceded and less available. We also invested in Lacie big disks (500GB). These have not been 100% reliable with the first 4 all requiring repair to the fire wire port socket as thhey continuously failed to mount. This appears rectified. One of the drives now has a mechanical fault and it is not certain that the data can be retrieved- perhaps reason not to upgrade to the new range of 1000GB drives- a lot of data to loose. We also have access to a data storage facility in Canberra, with a high speed connection between it and the universities. Still up and downloading is slow. As for formats, we have been keeping full quality QT files and also making QT compressed versions, small enough to store a number of a laptop, allowing field workers to work on transcripts with participants, without lugging external hard drives, requiring power etc. The settings we have used are (File - Export Movie to Quicktime movie- Options) under settings - frame rate 15, size 360 x 288. These reduce 18 GB (40 mins) to 1GB. The screen size is small, but quite clear enough, sound quality is unchanged. I am wondering if anyone can recommend some standard compression setting to store QT movies (of around 1 hour in length), which i DVD accepts, and which fit on a Dv disk. Samantha Disbray >> I'd certainly also advocate archiving valuable material in 2 different >> formats, stored in 2 different places. Our 'standard' system for video >> is to keep original material on DVC tape, with a copy in AVI format on a >> USB hard drive. Yes AVI files are huge, but they're easy to make and >> edit, and are guaranteed to replay on virtually any computer. Their size >> isn't really a problem these days - 250GB USB drives are getting common. > > ... and the two different places should be geographically separated. > > Off-hand, I can think of recent examples where universities sustained > major damage > (ranging from a whole building to multiple buildings) from fire, > hurricane, flood, > and PETA sabotage. I also know of an example where undergraduate > research > projects were sabotaged. That was especially hard to recover from, > because the > backup tapes were stored in the same room and were removed at the same > time as > the disks. > > I also know that even reputable academic departments and companies often > keep backup tapes in the same or a nearby building, which is ok for minor > machine meltdowns but not for disaster recovery. > > Send a second copy of your data to a colleague or relative far, far away. > > > Margaret > > > > From macw at cmu.edu Tue Mar 28 00:10:09 2006 From: macw at cmu.edu (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 19:10:09 -0500 Subject: archiving & compression In-Reply-To: <49489.128.250.86.215.1143503360.squirrel@webmail.student.unimelb.edu.au> Message-ID: Dear Samantha, Sounds like a great project that should keep people busy for years to come. Regarding hardware, I have 18 LaCie 500GB drives and none have ever failed. Sometimes an individual computer may fail to recognize the drive, but this can always be corrected by taking the drive to a fresh computer that somehow is more willing to talk with it. Also, I updated the software driver on each drive about 5 months back and performance was even better after that. Yes, mini-DV cameras will be superceded, so eventually there will be a need to copy these media to some new format. But it should be a digital copy and should not loss data. In the meantime, let's just all hang on to our DV cameras and tape decks. Regarding the idea of storing your QT movies through iDVD, I am not sure what you would gain through that. Just copying them to DVD- ROM should be good enough, I would think. --Brian MacWhinney From langconf at bu.edu Wed Mar 29 22:02:33 2006 From: langconf at bu.edu (BUCLD) Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 17:02:33 -0500 Subject: BUCLD 31 Call For Papers Message-ID: CALL FOR PAPERS THE 31st ANNUAL BOSTON UNIVERSITY CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT NOVEMBER 3-5, 2006 Keynote Speakers: Roberta Golinkoff, University of Delaware Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Temple University "Breaking the Language Barrier: The View from the Radical Middle" Plenary Speaker: J?rgen M. Meisel, University of Hamburg & University of Calgary ?Multiple First Language Acquisition: A Case for Autonomous Syntactic Development in the Simultaneous Acquisition of More Than One Language? Lunch Symposium: ?Future Directions in Search of Genes that Influence Language: Phenotypes, Molecules, Brains, and Growth? Mabel Rice, University of Kansas Helen Tager-Flusberg, Boston University Simon Fisher, University of Oxford Discussant: Gary Marcus, New York University? All topics in the fields of first and second language acquisition from all theoretical perspectives will be fully considered, including: * Bilingualism * Cognition & Language * Creoles & Pidgins * Dialects * Discourse * Exceptional Language * Gesture * Hearing Impairment and Deafness * Input & Interaction * Language Disorders * Linguistic Theory (Syntax, Semantics, Phonology, Morphology, Lexicon) * Literacy & Narrative * Neurolinguistics * Pragmatics * Pre-linguistic Development * Signed Languages * Sociolinguistics * Speech Perception & Production Presentations will be 20 minutes long followed by a 10 minute question period. Posters will be on display for a full day with two attended sessions during the day. ABSTRACT FORMAT AND CONTENT Abstracts submitted must represent original, unpublished research. Abstracts should be anonymous, clearly titled and no more than 450 words in length. They should also fit on one page, with an optional second page for references or figures if required. Abstracts longer than 450 words will be rejected without being evaluated. Please note the word count at the bottom of the abstract. Note that words counts need not include the abstract title or the list of references. A suggested format and style for abstracts is available at: http://www.bu.edu/linguistics/APPLIED/BUCLD/template.html An excellent example of how to formulate the content of the abstract can be found on the LSA website at: http://www.lsadc.org/info/dec02bulletin/model.html The criteria used by the reviewers to evaluate abstracts can be found at: http://www.bu.edu/linguistics/APPLIED/BUCLD/reviewprocess.html#rate All abstracts must be submitted as PDF documents. Specific instructions for how to create PDF documents are available at: http://www.bu.edu/linguistics/APPLIED/BUCLD/pdfinfo.html. If you encounter a problem creating a PDF file, please contact us for further assistance. Please use the first author's last name as the file name (eg. Smith.pdf). No author information should appear anywhere in the contents of the PDF file itself. SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS Electronic submission: To facilitate the abstract submission process, abstracts will be submitted using the form available at the conference website at http://www.bu.edu/linguistics/APPLIED/BUCLD/abstract.htm. Specific instructions for abstract submission are available on this website. Abstracts will be accepted between March 15 and May 15. Contact information for each author must be submitted via webform. No author information should appear anywhere in the abstract PDF. At the time of submission you will be asked whether you would like your abstract to be considered for a poster, a paper, or both. Although each author may submit as many abstracts as desired, we will accept for presentation by each author: (a) a maximum of 1 first authored paper/poster, and (b) a maximum of 2 papers/posters in any authorship status. Note that no changes in authorship (including deleting an author or changing author order) will be possible after the review process is completed or for publication in the conference proceedings. DEADLINE All submissions must be received by 8:00 PM EST, May 15, 2006. Late abstracts will not be considered, whatever the reason for the delay. We regret that we cannot accept abstract submissions by fax or email. Submissions via surface mail will only be accepted in special circumstances, on a case by case basis. Please contact us well in advance of the submission deadline (May 15, 2006) to make these arrangements. ABSTRACT SELECTION Each abstract is blind reviewed by 5 reviewers from a panel of approximately 100 international scholars. Further information about the review process is available at http://www.bu.edu/linguistics/APPLIED/BUCLD/reviewprocess.html. Acknowledgment of receipt of the abstract will be sent by email as soon as possible after receipt. Notice of acceptance or rejection will be sent to first authors only, in early August, by email. Pre-registration materials and preliminary schedule will be available in late August, 2006. If your abstract is accepted, you will need to submit a 150-word abstract including title, author(s) and affiliation(s) for inclusion in the conference handbook. Guidelines will be provided along with notification of acceptance. Abstracts accepted as papers will be invited for publication in the BUCLD Proceedings. Abstracts accepted as posters will be invited for publication online only, but not in the printed version. All conference papers will be selected on the basis of abstracts submitted. Although each abstract will be evaluated individually, we will attempt to honor requests to schedule accepted papers together in group sessions. No schedule changes will be possible once the schedule is set. Scheduling requests for religious reasons only must be made before the review process is complete (i.e. at the time of submission). A space is provided on the abstract submission webform to specify such requests. FURTHER INFORMATION Information regarding the conference may be accessed on the BUCLD website: http://www.bu.edu/linguistics/APPLIED/BUCLD/ Boston University Conference on Language Development 96 Cummington Street, Room 244 Boston, MA 02215 U.S.A. Telephone: (617) 353-3085 e-mail: langconf at bu.edu From dimkati at ecd.uoa.gr Fri Mar 31 08:24:04 2006 From: dimkati at ecd.uoa.gr (Demetra Katis) Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 11:24:04 +0300 Subject: saving data from old audio casette tapes Message-ID: I would very much appreciate any advice on whether I can save the recordings on casette tapes that I have had for a long time now. I recently discovered that they have been damaged, more specifically that the sound unfolds in slow motion. I was thinking of digitalizing them and trying to see whether I can speed up the sound to get it back to normal. Might anything like that work at all? Demetra Katis, University of Athens dimkati at ecd.uoa.gr --