<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">I cc'ed Charles Yang, the Penn author of this paper. He wrote back:<br>
<div><div><br></div><blockquote type="cite"><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 1);"><b>From: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;">Charles Yang <<a href="mailto:charles.yang@babel.ling.upenn.edu">charles.yang@babel.ling.upenn.edu</a>><br></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 1);"><b>Date: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;">Apr 15, 2013 3:13 PM EDT<br></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 1);"><b>To: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;">"Mark A. Mandel" <<a href="mailto:mamandel@ldc.upenn.edu">mamandel@ldc.upenn.edu</a>><br></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium; color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 1);"><b>Subject: </b></span><span style="font-family:'Helvetica'; font-size:medium;"><b>Re: paper: Modeling the Emergence of Lexicons in Homesign Systems </b><br></span></div><br><div>Thanks for the clarification, Mark. As you can see for the paper, the analysis of Nim's data focused on what appeared to be combinations of signs (give|more with X), according to Terrace's original classification. It has nothing to do with "a|the noun" as is the case in English child syntax. Conclusion is no new, but the paper does put forward a novel and mathematically rigorous method for inferring about the underlying grammar given a corpus.<br><br>On the other note, the home sign emergence paper is to appear in this year's Cognitive Science society meeting in Berlin.<br><br>Charles<br></div></blockquote><br></div><div>He added a few minutes later:</div><div><br></div><div><blockquote type="cite">I would just add that the writer actually did a very fine job reporting on this piece. While the text does not go all out to stress Nim's data was not about determiners, it does not seem suggest it was, either.</blockquote></div><br><div>-- Mark</div></body></html>