Early Stutterings

1981 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 298-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver Bloodstein ◽  
Marcia Grossman

The speech of five stutterers ranging in age from 3 years, 10 months to 5 years, 7 months was analyzed to determine the types and loci of stutterings. Word repetition was the most frequent feature in three cases and one of the two predominant features in the remaining two cases. Almost without exception, word repetitions occurred at the beginning of syntactic units. A greater proportion of stutterings of all types appeared on the initial words of sentences or clauses than on the other words. In most cases proportionately more function words than content words were stuttered, as were more monosyllabic than polysyllabic words—just the reverse of the usual pattern in older children and adults. The tendency of older stutterers to have more difficulty on initial consonants than initial vowels appeared in only one case. The findings on the properties of stuttered words were interpreted to mean that word-bound factors as such have little influence on the loci of early stutterings. The results as a whole were related to the hypothesis that early stuttering represents mainly a type of difficulty in either the formulation or the execution of syntactic units.

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Madison Leigh Pesowski ◽  
Ori Friedman

From ancient objects in museums to souvenirs obtained on vacation, we often value objects for their distinctive histories. The present experiments investigate the developmental origins of people’s feelings that objects with distinctive histories are special. In each of four experiments, 4- to 7-year-olds (total N = 400) saw pairs of identical-looking objects in which one object was new and the other had a history that was either distinctive or mundane. In the first experiment, the histories did not involve people; in the remaining experiments, the histories were personal and related the objects to particular people. Distinctive histories affected children’s valuations of regular objects (all experiments), but not their valuations of stuffed animals. Both older and younger children viewed regular objects with distinctive histories as more special than those with mundane histories. Older children mostly viewed objects with distinctive histories as more special than new objects, and younger children showed similar judgments when judging which object a person cared about more. Together, the findings reveal a novel way that information about the past influences children’s judgments about the present and suggest that young children’s valuations of objects depend on objects’ histories.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Künzer ◽  
Robert Zinke ◽  
Gesine Hofinger

Abstract Guidance to emergency exits play an important role for safe evacuation. Dynamic route guidance by colored flashing lights and strobe lights at emergency exits has been tested [1–3], but the effects of dynamic lights to support route choices need to be determined in more detail. Also, the guidance effects of different colors need to be examined and the reaction of various groups of evacuees. The paper analyzes the effects of red and green running lights on route choice in subway stations comparing adults and older children (10 to 12 years old). Data was gathered in a laboratory experiment, focusing on the concept of affordance [4, 5]. Participants were asked to make a decision about the safest direction between two alternative directions. Their choice was either unsupported or supported by red or green running lights. In general, an interaction between color and direction of the running light was found. Green running lights influenced route choices of both participant groups and led participants clearly into the direction indicated by the lights. Red running lights influenced route choices of both participant groups, but red lights lead to ambiguous decisions. Architectural elements such as stairs influenced route choices of both participant groups (functional affordance). But green running light offered a stronger indication to a safe route (cognitive affordance) than a visible staircase (functional affordance). Green lights even led participants to modify their route preference. In contrast, red running lights had an aversive effect: older children chose against the lights and preferred the other direction than the red lights were directing to. Implications for design of dynamic route guidance are discussed. This includes colored running lights to lead evacuees to a safe exit and to implement the influence of running lights on route choice and movement in simulations.


2021 ◽  
pp. 66-85
Author(s):  
Matteo Greco

Function words are commonly considered to be a small and closed class of words in which each element is associated with a specific and fixed logical meaning. Unfortunately, this is not always true as witnessed by negation: on the one hand, negation does reverse the truth-value conditions of a proposition, and the other hand, it does not, realizing what is called Expletive Negation. This chapter aims to investigate whether a word that is established on the basis of its function can be ambiguous by discussing the role of the syntactic derivation in some instances of so-called Expletive Negation clauses, a case in which negation seems to lose its capacity to deny the proposition associated with its sentence. Both a theoretical and an experimental approach has been adopted.


2016 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 492
Author(s):  
Carolina Falcón ◽  
Santos Orejudo ◽  
Teresa Fernández-Turrado ◽  
Francisco Javier Zarza

<p>When we study optimism in children, we note the temporary emergence of a bias that leads them to make optimistic predictions. In this study we intend to learn more about changes that can be observed in the optimistic bias of 6- to 12-year old schoolchildren when they predict future events, and in the way they justify those predictions. A total of 77 pupils participated in this study; we evaluated each one of them individually with a Piagetian interview, asking them to formulate predictions about a series of hypothetical situations. After analyzing whether a child’s prediction implied that the situation would maintain itself or would change for better or for worse, we classified the justifications they provided for their predictions. Results show that these subjects regarded positive change as more likely in the case of psychological or hybrid events than for purely biological ones, and that younger children tended to display a greater bias in favor of the likelihood of positive change. These younger children justified their predictions stating that nature or the passing of time could be responsible for the changes, without needing further intervention on the part of other agents. Older children, on the other hand, tended to provide similar kinds of explanations to justify their expectation of stasis. </p>


1994 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Bates ◽  
Virginia Marchman ◽  
Donna Thal ◽  
Larry Fenson ◽  
Philip Dale ◽  
...  

ABSTRACTResults are reported for stylistic and developmental aspects of vocabulary composition for 1, 803 children and families who participated in the tri-city norming of a new parental report instrument, the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories. We replicate previous studies with small samples showing extensive variation in use of common nouns between age o;8 and 1;4 (i.e. ‘referential style’), and in the proportion of vocabulary made up of closed-class words between 1;4 and 2;6 (i.e. ‘analytic’ vs. ‘holistic’ style). However, both style dimensions are confounded with developmental changes in the composition of the lexicon, including three ‘waves’ of reorganization: (1) an initial increase in percentage of common nouns from 0 to 100 words, followed by a proportional decrease; (2) a slow linear increase in verbs and other predicates, with the greatest gains taking place between 100 and 400 words; (3) no proportional development at all in the use of closed-class vocabulary between 0 and 400 words, followed by a sharp increase from 400 to 680 words. When developmental changes in noun use are controlled, referential-style measures do not show the association with developmental precocity reported in previous studies, although these scores are related to maternal education. By contrast, when developmental changes in grammatical function word use are controlled, high closed-class scores are associated with a slower rate of development. We suggest that younger children may have less perceptual acuity and/or shorter memory spans than older children with the same vocabulary size. As a result, the younger children may ignore unstressed function words until a later point in development while the older children tend to reproduce perceptual details that they do not yet understand. Longitudinal data show that early use of function words (under 400 words) is not related to grammatical levels after the 4OO-word point, confirming our ‘stylistic’ interpretation of early closed-class usage. We close with recommendations for the unconfounding of stylistic and developmental variance in research on individual differences in language development, and provide look-up tables that will permit other investigators to pull these aspects apart.


2019 ◽  
Vol X (4 (29)) ◽  
pp. 63-84
Author(s):  
Aneta Babiuk-Massalska

The article reviews the definitions of the tutoring concept in preschoolers relationships. Can we qualify the relationships of preschool children in learning situations as tutoring? Or maybe a different name would be more suitable for them? Preschoolers are used to learning in a different way than adults and older children. They prefer learning mimicking or playing. They obtain knowldge occasionally an unintentionally. In turn, definitions of tutoring quite precisely contain formulated fortifications that a little child is not able to meet yet. Immaturity of the nervous system limit the level and length of attention span of little child and relatively small, compared to school children and adults number of social experiences can seriously hamper the classification of situations in which children learn from each other as tutoring. While the generally understood master-student relationship, associated with tutoring, is quite often noticeable during childhood collaboration and play in which one child can do more than the other, the more detailed assumptions of tutoring are not as accessible to the observer. For example, it is difficult to talk about the regularity or planned nature of children's relationships. The definition of tutoring also sets specific expectations regarding the teacher's skills, among which are: high interpersonal competences, commitment to the relationship with the mentee, professionalism and responsibility. From a preschool child who would play the role of a teacher, it is difficult to demand fluent speech, not to mention professionalism and regularity. A preschool child, who just start to learn numbers, is often unable to orient himself in time, which makes it difficult or even impossible to plan and systematize his activities. Little child needs adult help in this area.


2002 ◽  
Vol 94 (3) ◽  
pp. 707-719 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonja H. Ofte ◽  
Kenneth Hugdahl

Two paper-and-pen tests, consisting of line drawings of human figures, viewed from the back, the front, or randomly alternating between back and front drawings, were used to study right-left discrimination in younger and older children. One test, called the Abstract test, had just a circle to indicate heads of the figures. The other test, called the Concrete test, showed facial characteristics and hair in the head circle. The sample consisted of 280 younger and older children, ages 7–8 and 12–13 years, respectively. The main findings were that participants who responded to the Concrete test solved more items correctly compared to those using the old figures in the Abstract test. The error scores did not differ between the tests. The older children solved more items correctly than the younger children. The older children also showed a significant decrease in correct scores on the subtest with the alternating views subtest compared with the other subtests. Their error scores did not differ across the subtests. The younger children solved a similar number of correct items on all subtests; however, they made significantly more errors on the subtest using the front view than on the other two subtests. The results are discussed in relation to theories of hemispheric lateralization, brain development, and cognitive development.


2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 477-501 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antje Endesfelder Quick ◽  
Elena Lieven ◽  
Malinda Carpenter ◽  
Michael Tomasello

Abstract Intra-sentential code-mixing presents a number of puzzles for theories of bilingualism. In this paper, we examine the code-mixed English-German utterances of a young English-German-Spanish trilingual child between 1;10 – 3;1, using both an extensive diary kept by the mother and audio recordings. We address the interplay between lexical and syntactic aspects of language use outlined in the usage-based approach (e.g. Tomasello, 2003). The data suggest that partially schematic constructions play an important role in the code-mixing of this child. In addition, we find, first, that the code-mixing was not mainly the result of lexical gaps. Second, there was more mixing of German function words than content words. Third, code-mixed utterances often consisted of the use of a partially schematic construction with the open slot filled by material from the other language. These results raise a number of important issues for all theoretical approaches to code mixing, which we discuss.


2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-214
Author(s):  
Najamuddin Najamuddin

A knowledge of words, phrases, clauses is essential to good writting andspeaking, but it doesn’t mean neglect the other part of grammar. The correction ofwriting and speaking is to concentrate on what we are saying rather than on how weare saying it. The problems might raise once speakers find similar words in meaningbut cotextually different in use. The study aims to investigate the forms of words thathave more than one correct meaning but different in use. The data were collected bysorting some potential words that have the same meanings in the dictionary as acontent analysis.The words were investigated in the dictionary and provided theirmeanings in forms of tables.The words were analysed qualitatively by looking at themeaning prescribed in dictionary and compared how they are used in a sentence. Itis found that words serve different purposes in language. Some words seem to havefunction words that cue a reader or speaker to the structure of the sentence suchas are, that, a, to, or, the, of, and so forth. Function words make spoken languagemeaningful and written language coherent and readable. Other words might refer ascontent words that communicate meaning in text. Clearly, students must know bothkinds of words to understand what they read.


1991 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 341-364 ◽  

William Valentine Mayneord was born 14 February 1902, the last child of Walter and Elizabeth Mayneord, in Redditch, Worcestershire. Walter Mayneord, who worked first in a fishing-tackle factory in Redditch and later as agent for the Pearl Assurance Company, was clearly a man of many parts. As a youth he was an enthusiastic amateur runner, a very able chess player, playing for Worcestershire, and a well-known figure riding his bicycle aged over 80 and singing in the choir at 90, the year of his death. He was a devoted Gladstonian Liberal and a founder of the Liberal Club in Redditch. Walter and Elizabeth had two older children, Ewart and Gilbert. Ewart the eldest, though largely self-educated, had a great facility for languages and served as an interpreter on the Western Front in World War I. After the war he taught himself Russian and became foreign correspondent for a firm trading with Russia, which he visited on business. Unfortunately Ewart died from a brain tumour at about the age of 34. The other brother, Gilbert, was to some degree mentally deficient and worked as a labourer. But clearly, despite the meagre educational opportunities of the time, the Mayneord family had talent and ability: still earlier, grandfather William Mayneord had been a well-known local preacher. The family books also showed that they were surprisingly well read.


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