scholarly journals Late generalization of morphological causatives: Evidence from Turkish

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ebru Ger ◽  
Guanghao You ◽  
Aylin C. Küntay ◽  
Tilbe Göksun ◽  
Sabine Stoll ◽  
...  

Children’s spontaneous speech may not reflect true productivity with grammar rules. We investigated Turkish-learning children’s rule-based understanding of causative morphology by combining experimental and corpus work. We asked (1) when the generalization of causative morphology emerges and (2) what role input plays in this development. To answer the first question, Study 1 experimentally tested 106 children aged 2;6–6;1 on a language judgment task using pseudo-verbs. Children preferred the causative marker -DIr over an incongruent suffix for causativized events earliest at age 4;10. Further, Study 2 tested 38 children aged 3;6–4;6 and revealed no preference of -DIr over no suffix. Study 3 examined a corpus for child-directed input and showed that the variation of verb stems to which -DIr was attached remained lower than variation of verbs eligible to take -DIr, up to age 3. The findings suggest that rule-based understanding of morphological causatives emerges much later than previously proposed productivity at age 2, which might be accounted for by the insufficient variation of morphological causatives in the early input.

2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
RICKY K. W. CHAN ◽  
JANNY H. C. LEUNG

ABSTRACTDespite the growing interest in the phenomenon of learning without intention, the incidental learning of phonological features, especially prosodic features, has received relatively little attention. This paper reports an experiment on incidental learning of lexical stress rules, and investigates whether the resultant knowledge can be unconscious, abstract, and rule based. Participants were incidentally exposed to a lexical stress system where stress location of a word is mainly determined by the final phoneme, syllable type, and syllable weight. Learning was assessed by a pronunciation judgment task. Results indicate that participants were able to transfer their knowledge of stress patterns to novel words whose final phoneme was not previously encountered, suggesting that participants had acquired abstract and potentially rule-based knowledge. The combined use of subjective and objective measures of awareness in the present study provides a strong piece of evidence of the acquisition of implicit knowledge.


2002 ◽  
Vol 23 (7) ◽  
pp. 819-831 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bor-shen Lin ◽  
Berlin Chen ◽  
Hsin-min Wang ◽  
Lin-shan Lee

Machine Translation is best alternative to traditional manual translation. The corpus of Sanskrit literature includes a rich tradition of philosophical and religious texts as well as poetry, music, drama, scientific, technical and other texts. Due to the modernization of tradition and languages, Sanskrit is not on everyone's lips. Translation makes it convenient for users to understand the unknown text. This paper presents a language Machine Translation System from Hindi to Sanskrit and Sanskrit to Hindi using a rule-based technique. We developed a machine translation tool 'anuvaad' which translates Sanskrit prose text into Hindi & vice versa. We also developed bi-lingual corpora to deal with Sanskrit and Hindi grammar rules and text applied rule based method to perform the translation. The experimental results on different 110 examples show that the proposed anuvaad tool achieves overall 93% accuracy for both types of translations. The objective of our work is to ensure confidentiality and multilingual support, which can be tedious and time consuming in case of manual translation.


2012 ◽  
Vol 34 (6) ◽  
pp. 1163-1193 ◽  
Author(s):  
PAUL D. TOTH ◽  
PEDRO GUIJARRO-FUENTES

ABSTRACTThis paper compares explicit instruction in second-language Spanish with a control treatment on a written picture description task and a timed auditory grammaticality judgment task. Participants came from two intact, third-year US high school classes, with one experiencing a week of communicative lessons on the Spanish clitic se (n = 15) and the other exposed to se only incidentally (n = 20). Explicit instruction consisted of grammar rules with sentence-level examples, followed by communicative tasks. Three test versions were administered within a split-bloc design as a pretest, immediate posttest, and delayed posttest 6 weeks after instruction. The instructed group increased targetlike uses of se on both tasks and sustained gains through the delayed posttest, although first-language transfer errors persisted. Meanwhile, overgeneralization errors centered on semantic and syntactic contexts similar to the instructional object, aligning with the unergative–unaccusative distinction among intransitive verbs. It is argued that the data provide evidence for the permeability of second-language implicit knowledge to explicit instruction and against total encapsulation as a model of the mind.


1992 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela G. Garn-Nunn ◽  
Vicki Martin

This study explored whether or not standard administration and scoring of conventional articulation tests accurately identified children as phonologically disordered and whether or not information from these tests established severity level and programming needs. Results of standard scoring procedures from the Assessment of Phonological Processes-Revised, the Goldman-Fristoe Test of Articulation, the Photo Articulation Test, and the Weiss Comprehensive Articulation Test were compared for 20 phonologically impaired children. All tests identified the children as phonologically delayed/disordered, but the conventional tests failed to clearly and consistently differentiate varying severity levels. Conventional test results also showed limitations in error sensitivity, ease of computation for scoring procedures, and implications for remediation programming. The use of some type of rule-based analysis for phonologically impaired children is highly recommended.


2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (11) ◽  
pp. 4001-4014
Author(s):  
Melanie Weirich ◽  
Adrian Simpson

Purpose The study sets out to investigate inter- and intraspeaker variation in German infant-directed speech (IDS) and considers the potential impact that the factors gender, parental involvement, and speech material (read vs. spontaneous speech) may have. In addition, we analyze data from 3 time points prior to and after the birth of the child to examine potential changes in the features of IDS and, particularly also, of adult-directed speech (ADS). Here, the gender identity of a speaker is considered as an additional factor. Method IDS and ADS data from 34 participants (15 mothers, 19 fathers) is gathered by means of a reading and a picture description task. For IDS, 2 recordings were made when the baby was approximately 6 and 9 months old, respectively. For ADS, an additional recording was made before the baby was born. Phonetic analyses comprise mean fundamental frequency (f0), variation in f0, the 1st 2 formants measured in /i: ɛ a u:/, and the vowel space size. Moreover, social and behavioral data were gathered regarding parental involvement and gender identity. Results German IDS is characterized by an increase in mean f0, a larger variation in f0, vowel- and formant-specific differences, and a larger acoustic vowel space. No effect of gender or parental involvement was found. Also, the phonetic features of IDS were found in both spontaneous and read speech. Regarding ADS, changes in vowel space size in some of the fathers and in mean f0 in mothers were found. Conclusion Phonetic features of German IDS are robust with respect to the factors gender, parental involvement, speech material (read vs. spontaneous speech), and time. Some phonetic features of ADS changed within the child's first year depending on gender and parental involvement/gender identity. Thus, further research on IDS needs to address also potential changes in ADS.


2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (7) ◽  
pp. 2054-2069
Author(s):  
Brandon Merritt ◽  
Tessa Bent

Purpose The purpose of this study was to investigate how speech naturalness relates to masculinity–femininity and gender identification (accuracy and reaction time) for cisgender male and female speakers as well as transmasculine and transfeminine speakers. Method Stimuli included spontaneous speech samples from 20 speakers who are transgender (10 transmasculine and 10 transfeminine) and 20 speakers who are cisgender (10 male and 10 female). Fifty-two listeners completed three tasks: a two-alternative forced-choice gender identification task, a speech naturalness rating task, and a masculinity/femininity rating task. Results Transfeminine and transmasculine speakers were rated as significantly less natural sounding than cisgender speakers. Speakers rated as less natural took longer to identify and were identified less accurately in the gender identification task; furthermore, they were rated as less prototypically masculine/feminine. Conclusions Perceptual speech naturalness for both transfeminine and transmasculine speakers is strongly associated with gender cues in spontaneous speech. Training to align a speaker's voice with their gender identity may concurrently improve perceptual speech naturalness. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.12543158


2007 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 17-20
Author(s):  
Jean E. Fox Tree
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Bettina von Helversen ◽  
Stefan M. Herzog ◽  
Jörg Rieskamp

Judging other people is a common and important task. Every day professionals make decisions that affect the lives of other people when they diagnose medical conditions, grant parole, or hire new employees. To prevent discrimination, professional standards require that decision makers render accurate and unbiased judgments solely based on relevant information. Facial similarity to previously encountered persons can be a potential source of bias. Psychological research suggests that people only rely on similarity-based judgment strategies if the provided information does not allow them to make accurate rule-based judgments. Our study shows, however, that facial similarity to previously encountered persons influences judgment even in situations in which relevant information is available for making accurate rule-based judgments and where similarity is irrelevant for the task and relying on similarity is detrimental. In two experiments in an employment context we show that applicants who looked similar to high-performing former employees were judged as more suitable than applicants who looked similar to low-performing former employees. This similarity effect was found despite the fact that the participants used the relevant résumé information about the applicants by following a rule-based judgment strategy. These findings suggest that similarity-based and rule-based processes simultaneously underlie human judgment.


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