Postverbal subjects in child Italian: Argument structure, discourse and the definiteness effect

2021 ◽  
pp. 014272372110542
Author(s):  
Alex Cairncross ◽  
Lena Dal Pozzo
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Argument Structure ◽  
Choice Task ◽  
New Information ◽  
Developmental Issue ◽  
Forced Choice Task ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Italian Children ◽  
Information Focus ◽  
Definiteness Effect

While previous work on postverbal subjects in Italian has shown that young children are sensitive to the effects of argument structure and definiteness, little is known about the acquisition of postverbal subjects at the VP-periphery. In response, the present study investigated such subjects under new-information focus by monolingual Italian children (6;1 – 7;4). For this, we employed an elicitation task and a forced-choice task. The results indicated that the children use postverbal subjects at the VP-periphery felicitously, although they do not perform at ceiling. Unexpectedly, the results also suggested possible remnant difficulty with the definiteness effect. However, after comparison with adult data we argue that this is not a developmental issue and instead may suggest that our children were aware that the definiteness effect is not about definiteness per se.

Children's epistemic inferences through modal verbs and prosody

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (6) ◽  
pp. 1132-1169
Author(s):  
Meghan ARMSTRONG
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Qualitative Analysis ◽  
Choice Task ◽  
Epistemic Modality ◽  
Metalinguistic Awareness ◽  
Modal Verbs ◽  
Epistemic Modal ◽  
Negative Valence ◽  
Forced Choice Task ◽  
Positive And Negative Valence

AbstractThis study explores how young children infer nuances in epistemic modality through prosody. A forced-choice task was used, testing children's (ages three to seven) comprehension of the might/will distinction (modal condition) as well their ability to modulate the strength of might through two prosodic tunes (prosody condition). Positive and negative valence conditions were included. Younger children were shown to start off performing above chance for the modal condition, and at around chance for the prosody condition, but after age four performance on the prosody condition quickly improved. For both modal verbs and prosody, children performed significantly better when valence was positive. By age seven, children performed at ceiling for all conditions. Qualitative analysis of children's justifications for prosody responses showed metalinguistic awareness of prosodic meaning as early as age four, with the ability to relate prosody to epistemic modal meaning becoming quite common by age seven.

Is One Ear Good Enough? Unilateral Hearing Loss and Preschoolers' Comprehension of the English Plural

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Benjamin Davies ◽  
Nan Xu Rattanasone ◽  
Aleisha Davis ◽  
Katherine Demuth
Keyword(s):  
Hearing Loss ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Normal Hearing ◽  
Forced Choice ◽  
Choice Task ◽  
Unilateral Hearing Loss ◽  
Grammatical Morphemes ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Forced Choice Task ◽  
Grammatical Number

Purpose The plural is one of the first grammatical morphemes acquired by English-speaking children with normal hearing (NH). Yet, those with hearing loss show delays in both plural comprehension and production. However, little is known about the effects of unilateral hearing loss (UHL) on children's acquisition of the plural, where children's ability to perceive fricatives (e.g., the /s/ in cat s ) can be compromised. This study therefore tested whether children with UHL were able to identify the grammatical number of newly heard words, both singular and plural. Method Eleven 3- to 5-year-olds with UHL participated in a novel word two-alternative forced choice task presented on an iPad. Their results were compared to those of 129 NH 3- to 5-year-olds. During the task, children had to choose whether an auditorily presented novel word was singular (e.g., tep, koss ) or plural (e.g., teps, kosses ) by touching the appropriate novel picture. Results Like their NH peers, children with UHL demonstrated comprehension of novel singulars. However, they were significantly less accurate at identifying novel plurals, with performance at chance. However, there were signs that their ability to identify novel plurals may improve with age. Conclusion While comparable to their NH peers at identifying novel singulars, these results suggest that young children with UHL do not yet have a robust representation of plural morphology, particularly on words they have not encountered before.

Comprehension of the copula: preschoolers (and sometimes adults) ignore subject–verb agreement during sentence processing

2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 695-708
Author(s):  
Benjamin DAVIES ◽  
Nan XU RATTANASONE ◽  
Katherine DEMUTH
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Choice Task ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
The Status ◽  
Forced Choice Task ◽  
Australian English

AbstractSubject–verb (SV) agreement helps listeners interpret the number condition of ambiguous nouns (The sheep is/are fat), yet it remains unclear whether young children use agreement to comprehend newly encountered nouns. Preschoolers and adults completed a forced choice task where sentences contained singular vs. plural copulas (Where is/are the [novel noun(s)]?). Novel nouns were either morphologically unambiguous (tup/tups) or ambiguous (/geks/ = singular: gex / plural: gecks). Preschoolers (and some adults) ignored the singular copula, interpreting /ks/-final words as plural, raising questions about the role of SV agreement in learners’ sentence comprehension and the status of is in Australian English.

Assessing the Link Between Perception and Production in Cantonese Tone Acquisition

2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (5) ◽  
pp. 1243-1257 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peggy Pik Ki Mok ◽  
Holly Sze Ho Fung ◽  
Vivian Guo Li
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
General Principle ◽  
Choice Task ◽  
Factors Affecting ◽  
Tone Pair ◽  
Tone Production ◽  
Monosyllabic Words ◽  
Early Production ◽  
Forced Choice Task ◽  
Production Accuracy

Purpose Previous studies showed early production precedes late perception in Cantonese tone acquisition, contrary to the general principle that perception precedes production in child language. How tone production and perception are linked in 1st language acquisition remains largely unknown. Our study revisited the acquisition of tone in Cantonese-speaking children, exploring the possible link between production and perception in 1st language acquisition. Method One hundred eleven Cantonese-speaking children aged between 2;0 and 6;0 (years;months) and 10 adolescent reference speakers participated in tone production and perception experiments. Production materials with 30 monosyllabic words were transcribed in filtered and unfiltered conditions by 2 native judges. Perception accuracy was based on a 2-alternative forced-choice task with pictures covering all possible tone pair contrasts. Results Children's accuracy of production and perception of all the 6 Cantonese tones was still not adultlike by age 6;0. Both production and perception accuracies matured with age. A weak positive link was found between the 2 accuracies. Mother's native language contributed to children's production accuracy. Conclusions Our findings show that production and perception abilities are associated in tone acquisition. Further study is needed to explore factors affecting production accuracy in children. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.7960826

Habit learning in a forced-choice task

2001 ◽  
Author(s):  
Markus Dressel ◽  
Teena D. Moody ◽  
Barbara J. Knowlton
Keyword(s):  
Forced Choice ◽  
Choice Task ◽  
Habit Learning ◽  
Forced Choice Task

The Effects of Contact with Handicapped Persons on Young Children's Attitudes

1986 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 224-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beverly G. Esposito ◽  
Thomas M. Reed
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Program Analysis ◽  
Integration Program ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Children's Attitudes

A survey designed to measure attitudes toward handicapped persons was administered to 92 young, nonhandicapped children. Nine of the subjects, who had previously reported more favorable attitudes as a result of participation in a structured integration program, continued to demonstrate these gains 2 years later. The remaining 83 subjects had never participated in a structured integration program. Analysis of the responses of the 92 children according to type of contact and the time at which contact occurred suggested that contact per se, regardless of type or timing, can produce more favorable attitudes among young children than an absence of contact.

scholarly journals Biological Bases of Beauty Revisited: The Effect of Symmetry, Averageness, and Sexual Dimorphism on Female Facial Attractiveness

Symmetry ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex L. Jones ◽  
Bastian Jaeger
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Dimorphism ◽  
Learning Algorithm ◽  
Facial Attractiveness ◽  
Choice Task ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Human Female ◽  
Literature Study ◽  
Skin Texture ◽  
Femininity And Masculinity ◽  
Forced Choice Task

The factors influencing human female facial attractiveness—symmetry, averageness, and sexual dimorphism—have been extensively studied. However, recent studies, using improved methodologies, have called into question their evolutionary utility and links with life history. The current studies use a range of approaches to quantify how important these factors actually are in perceiving attractiveness, through the use of novel statistical analyses and by addressing methodological weaknesses in the literature. Study One examines how manipulations of symmetry, averageness, femininity, and masculinity affect attractiveness using a two-alternative forced choice task, finding that increased masculinity and also femininity decrease attractiveness, compared to unmanipulated faces. Symmetry and averageness yielded a small and large effect, respectively. Study Two utilises a naturalistic ratings paradigm, finding similar effects of averageness and masculinity as Study One but no effects of symmetry and femininity on attractiveness. Study Three applies geometric face measurements of the factors and a random forest machine learning algorithm to predict perceived attractiveness, finding that shape averageness, dimorphism, and skin texture symmetry are useful features capable of relatively accurate predictions, while shape symmetry is uninformative. However, the factors do not explain as much variance in attractiveness as the literature suggests. The implications for future research on attractiveness are discussed.

scholarly journals RNNs develop history biases in an expectation-guided two-alternative forced choice task

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuel Molano-Mazon ◽  
Guangyu Robert Yang ◽  
Ainhoa Hermoso-Mendizabal ◽  
Jaime de la Rocha
Keyword(s):  
Forced Choice ◽  
Choice Task ◽  
Forced Choice Task

scholarly journals Attentional mechanisms drive systematic exploration in young children

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathaniel J. Blanco ◽  
Vladimir Sloutsky
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Information Gathering ◽  
Choice Task ◽  
Attention Allocation ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Distributed Attention ◽  
Systematic Exploration ◽  
The World ◽  
Attentional Mechanisms

Exploration is critical for discovering how the world works. Exploration should be particularlyvaluable for young children, who have little knowledge about the world. Theories of decision- making describe systematic exploration as being primarily driven by top-down cognitive control, which is immature in young children. Recent research suggests that a type of systematic exploration predominates in young children’s choices, despite immature control, suggesting that it may be driven by different mechanisms. We hypothesize that young children’s tendency to distribute attention widely promotes elevated exploration, and that interrupting distributed attention allocation through bottom-up attentional capture would also disrupt systematic exploration. We test this hypothesis by manipulating saliency of the options in a simple choice task. Saliency disrupted systematic exploration, thus indicating that attentional mechanisms may drive children’s systematic exploratory behavior. We suggest that both may be part of a larger tendency toward broad information gathering in young children.

scholarly journals When regularization gets it wrong: children over-simplify language input only in production

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (5) ◽  
pp. 1054-1072 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica F. SCHWAB ◽  
Casey LEW-WILLIAMS ◽  
Adele E. GOLDBERG
Keyword(s):  
Complex System ◽  
High Accuracy ◽  
Forced Choice ◽  
Choice Task ◽  
The Other ◽  
Natural Languages ◽  
Multiple Factors ◽  
Artificial Languages ◽  
Forced Choice Task ◽  
Unpredictable Variation

AbstractChildren tend to regularize their productions when exposed to artificial languages, an advantageous response to unpredictable variation. But generalizations in natural languages are typically conditioned by factors that children ultimately learn. In two experiments, adult and six-year-old learners witnessed two novel classifiers, probabilistically conditioned by semantics. Whereas adults displayed high accuracy in their productions – applying the semantic criteria to familiar and novel items – children were oblivious to the semantic conditioning. Instead, children regularized their productions, over-relying on only one classifier. However, in a two-alternative forced-choice task, children's performance revealed greater respect for the system's complexity: they selected both classifiers equally, without bias toward one or the other, and displayed better accuracy on familiar items. Given that natural languages are conditioned by multiple factors that children successfully learn, we suggest that their tendency to simplify in production stems from retrieval difficulty when a complex system has not yet been fully learned.

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