<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div>I just learned of this paper via Penn's "Penn News Today" general-interest mail:</div><div><br></div><div><a href="http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~ycharles/ryc-cogsci2013.pdf">Modeling the Emergence of Lexicons in Homesign Systems</a> </div><div>Russell Richie (Univ. of Connecticut, Psych), Charles Yang (UPenn, Ling & CS), Marie Coppola (Univ. of Connecticut, Psych)</div><div><br></div><div>The news item itself was about a different study, more attention-grabbing but not so much on topic here:</div><div><div><a href="http://www.upenn.edu/pennnews/news/penn-research-shows-young-children-have-grammar-and-chimpanzees-don-t">Penn Research Shows That Young Children Have Grammar and Chimpanzees Don’t</a> .</div></div><div>The paper is <a href="http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~ycharles/PNAS-2013-final.pdf">here</a>.</div><div><br></div><div>The article is brief and not too careful: taken literally ("the same predictive models..."), it says that Yang analyzed Nim Chimpsky's utterances for frequency of constructions such as "a NP" vs. "the NP", which of course is a distinction specific to English and not found in ASL. Thankfully, that's just another instance of the journalistic tendencies we're all too familiar with, and the next paragraph is a more accurate summary: "Nim’s signs show significantly lower diversity than what is expected under a systematic grammar and were similar to the level expected with memorization." (Read "Nim's syntax" for "Nim's signs".)</div><div><br></div><div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-size: medium; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-size: medium; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">--<br>Mark A. Mandel<br>Linguistic Data Consortium<br>University of Pennsylvania<br><br><br></div></span></div></span></div></span></span>
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