Acquisition of cumulative conditioning effects on words: Spanish-speaking children’s [subject pronoun + verb] usage

Child language acquisition research has provided ample evidence of lexical frequency effects. This corpus-based analysis introduces a novel frequency measure shown to significantly constrain adult language variation, but heretofore unexplored in child language acquisition research. Among adults, frequent occurrence of a form in a particular discourse context that conditions usage accumulates in memory over time and shapes the lexical representation of that form. This study contributes to the body of research on frequency effects in child language acquisition by testing whether such cumulative conditioning effects are also found among children, and, if so, at what age such effects appear. Specifically, the study investigates the influence of a distributional frequency measure (each verb form’s likelihood of use in a switch vs same-reference discourse context) on variable subject personal pronoun (SPP) expression ( N = 2227) in Spanish (e.g. yo voy ~ voy, both meaning ‘I go’) in the speech of 65 monolingual children in two age cohorts. Results reveal sensitivity to the contextual conditioning of discourse continuity (switch reference) among both the younger (6- and 7-year-olds) and older (8- and 9-year-olds) children in support of previous research. In addition, each verb’s likelihood of use in a switch-reference context significantly predicted the SPP use among the older children, but not the younger ones, suggesting that the cumulative effect of a probabilistic pattern takes time to emerge during childhood. The lexically specific accumulation in memory of contextual conditioning effects supports exemplar models of child language acquisition: each instance of use in discourse contributes to the lexical representation of that form and, over time, plays a role in the creation of morphosyntactic patterns during language development.

Systemic nicotine enhances opioid self-administration and modulates the formation of opioid-associated memories partly through actions within the insular cortex

Habitual use of nicotine containing products increases propensity to misuse prescription opioids and its prevalence is substantially increased in individuals currently involved in opioid-treatment programs. Nicotine enhances self-administration of many classes of drugs in rodents, though evidence for direct effects on opioids is lacking. We sought to measure the effects of nicotine pretreatment on the reinforcing efficacy of opioids in both self-administration and contextual conditioning paradigms. First, we measured the effect of systemic nicotine pretreatment on self-administration of two opioids. Additionally, we measured the degree to which systemic nicotine pretreatment impacts the formation of morphine-associated contextual memories in conditioned taste avoidance and place preference paradigms. Given the involvement of the insula in the maintenance of substance abuse, its importance in nicotine addiction, and findings that insular inactivation impairs contextual drug conditioning, we examined whether nicotine administered directly to the insula could recapitulate the effects of systemic nicotine. We demonstrate that systemic nicotine pretreatment significantly enhances opioid self-administration and alters contextual conditioning. Furthermore, intra-insula nicotine similarly altered morphine contextual conditioning by blocking the formation of taste avoidance at all three morphine doses tested (5.0, 10, and 20 mg/kg), while shifting the dose–response curve of morphine in the place preference paradigm rightward. In conclusion, these data demonstrate that nicotine facilitates opioid intake and is partly acting within the insular cortex to obfuscate aversive opiate memories while potentiating approach to morphine-associated stimuli at higher doses.

Translation Techniques in Environmentally Oriented Short Story Hinoki to Hinageshi (Pohon Hinoki dan Bunga Hinageshi) by Miyazawa Kenji into Indonesian

This study analyzed the translation techniques of Miyazawa Kenji's Hinoki to Hinageshi, which were translated to Indonesian as “Pohon Hinoki dan Bunga Hinageshi” by the UNPAD Press translation team. This short story tells about the life of a Hinoki tree with Hinageshi flowers that want to become a star, until one day a demon incarnates who wants to take advantage of Hinageshi flowers. In this short story, there are words that have a direct equivalent in Indonesian and those that do not have a direct word equivalent, so the aim of this study is to find the translation techniques used when translating this short story. The theory used is the theory of translation techniques by Hoed (2006), and data were collected using the literature review method. The collected data were analyzed with a distributional method. There are 7 types of translation techniques used by the translator: 1) Transposition, 2) Modulation, in the form of shifted meaning and a shift in the scope of meaning, 3) Descriptive Translation, 4) Contextual Conditioning, 5) Official/Standard Translation, and 6) Cultural Equivalent.

Nicotine and Opioid Polysubstance Abuse: Enhancement of opioid self-administration by systemic nicotine and modulation of opioid-associated memories by insular nicotine

Concurrent nicotine use is associated with increased liability for the development and exacerbation of opioid-use disorders. Habitual use of nicotine containing products increases propensity to misuse prescription opioids and its prevalence is substantially increased in individuals currently involved in opioid-treatment programs. Nicotine enhances self-administration of many classes of drugs in rodents, though evidence for direct effects on opioids is lacking. We sought to measure the effects of nicotine pretreatment on the reinforcing efficacy of opioids in both self-administration and contextual conditioning paradigms. First, we measured the effect of systemic nicotine pretreatment on self-administration of two opioids. Additionally, we measured the degree to which systemic nicotine pretreatment impacts the formation of morphine-associated contextual memories in conditioned taste avoidance and place preference paradigms. Given the involvement of the insula in the maintenance of substance abuse, its importance in nicotine addiction, and findings that insular inactivation impairs contextual drug conditioning, we examined whether nicotine administered directly to the insula could recapitulate the effects of systemic nicotine. We demonstrate that systemic nicotine pretreatment significantly enhances opioid self-administration and alters contextual conditioning. Furthermore, intra-insula nicotine similarly altered morphine contextual conditioning by blocking the formation of taste avoidance at all three morphine doses tested (5.0, 10, & 20 mg/kg), while shifting the dose-response curve of morphine in the place preference paradigm rightward. In conclusion, these data demonstrate that nicotine facilitates opioid intake and is partly acting within the insular cortex to obfuscate aversive opiate memories while potentiating approach to morphine-associated stimuli at higher doses.

Metrical conditioning of word-final devoicing in Polish

The present paper investigates a segmental phenomenon traditionally referred to as word-final obstruent devoicing in Polish. It is generally assumed that the context in which it applies is solely related to the absolute word-final position before silence. By inference, full voicing of a wordfinal obstruent is retained only when (i) it is followed by a voiced segment (a vowel or a consonant) in an utterance or when (ii) it is appended with a suffix which begins with a vowel. In this research a different group of factors which trigger the process is explored, namely the position of the obstruent within the metrical foot. If, as argued by Harris (2009), noninitial position within the foot is a typical lenition site (contrary to Iverson and Salmons 2007) and if devoicing is regarded as a special manifestation of lenition (through information loss, similarly to vowel reduction), a purely segmental (contextual) conditioning for voicing retention in obstruents word-finally cannot be maintained.