Bite force performance from wild derived mice has undetectable heritability despite having heritable morphological components

Fitness-related traits tend to have low heritabilities. Conversely, morphology tends to be highly heritable. Yet, many fitness-related performance traits such as running speed or bite force depend critically on morphology. Craniofacial morphology correlates with bite performance in several groups including rodents. However, within species, this relationship is less clear, and the genetics of performance, morphology and function are rarely analyzed in combination. Here, we use a half-sib design in outbred wild-derived Mus musculus to study the morphology-bite force relationship and determine whether there is additive genetic (co-)variance for these traits. Results suggest that bite force has undetectable additive genetic variance and heritability in this sample, while morphological traits related mechanically to bite force exhibit varying levels of heritability. The most heritable traits include the length of the mandible which relates to bite force. Despite its correlation with morphology, realized bite force was not heritable, which suggests it is less responsive to selection in comparison to its morphological determinants. We explain this paradox with a non-additive, many-to-one mapping hypothesis of heritable change in complex traits. We furthermore propose that performance traits could evolve if pleiotropic relationships among the determining traits are modified.

Canonicity Effect on Sentence Processing of Persian-Speaking Broca’s Patients

This research with the aim of scrutinizing fundamental notions of mapping hypothesis tries to investigate the comprehension of diverse complex syntactic structures in four age, education and gender matched Persian-speaking Broca’s patients and eight matched healthy controls via conducting two tasks of syntactic comprehension and grammaticality judgment in which subjects’ comprehension of diverse complex structures were put into scrutiny. The structures being tested included subject –agentive, agentive passive, object experience, subject experience, subject cleft and object cleft constructions. Our results, while corroborating the predictions of mapping hypothesis, showed that in structures in which linguistic elements were substituted and dislocated out of their canonical syntactic positions, namely, agentive passive, subject- experiencer, object -experiencer and object- cleft constructions, Broca’s problems escalated. In contrast, in those structures whose constituent concatenations were aligned with canonical syntactic structures, namely subject agentive and cleft structures, patients had above chance performance. Ultimately, theoretical and clinical implications of the study were discussed

A Corpus-Based Comparison of the Pragmatic Use of Qian and Hou to Examine the Applicability of Space–Time Metaphor Hypothesis in Early Child Mandarin

The Universal Space–Time Mapping Hypothesis suggests that temporal expression is based on spatial metaphor for all human beings. This study examines its applicability in the Chinese language using the data elicited from the Early Childhood Mandarin Corpus (ECMC) (Li and Tse, 2011), which collected the utterances produced by 168 Mandarin-speaking preschoolers in a semistructured play context. The unique pair of Chinese words, qian (前/before/front) and hou (后/after/back), which can be used to express either time (before/after) or space (front/back) in daily communication, was the unit of analysis. The results indicated that: (1) there was a significant age effect in the production of “qian/hou,” indicating that the period before the age of 4.5 may be critical for the development of temporal and spatial expression; (2) the pair was produced to express time (before/after) much earlier than space (front/back), indicating that the expression of time might not necessarily be based on the spatial metaphor; and (3) the pair was used more frequently to express time (before/after) than space (front/back) by the preschoolers, thus challenging the hypothesis.

A Classifier Language with D

Chapter 4 analyzes argument formation in Nuosu Yi, a language that is typologically unusual in having classifiers as well as a definite determiner. Also unusual is the fact that its demonstratives do not combine directly with nouns but require the mediation of classifiers. Properties such as these are shown to challenge accounts of argument formation developed in Chapters 2 and 3. In particular, the discovery of a classifier language with an overt determiner may seem to tilt the balance in favor of the Universal DP Hypothesis and also disprove Chierchia’s (1998b) Nominal Mapping Hypothesis adopted in Chapters 2 and 3. However, this chapter argues that the opposite is the case. It proposes a modification of Chierchia’s (1998b) framework, which accounts for why classifier languages with overt Ds are possible but rare and also allows us to make further predictions about classifier languages.

The hunt for the Age of Acquisition effect: It’s in the links!

The Age of Acquisition (AoA) effect is such that words acquired early in life are processed more quickly than later-acquired words. One explanation for the AoA effects is the arbitrary mapping hypothesis (Ellis & Lambon-Ralph, 2000), stating that the AoA effects are more likely to occur in items that have an arbitrary, rather than a systematic, nature between input and output. Previous behavioural findings have shown that the AoA effects are larger in pictorial than word items. However, no behavioural studies have attempted to directly assess the AoA effects in relation to the connections between representations. In the first two experiments, 48 participants completed a word-picture verification task (Experiments 1A and 2A), together with a spoken (Experiment 1B) or written (Experiment 2B) picture naming task. In the third and fourth experiments, 48 participants complete a picture-word verification task (Experiments 3A and 4A), together with a spoken (Experiment 3B) or written (Experiment 4B) word naming task. For each pair of experiments the subtraction of the naming latencies from the verification tasks for each item per participant was calculated (Experiments 1-4C; e.g. Santiago, Mackay, Palma & Rho, 2000). Results showed that early-acquired items were responded to more quickly than late-acquired ones for all experiments, except for Experiment 3B (spoken word naming) where the AoA effect was shown for only low-frequency words. In addition, the subtraction results for pictorial stimuli demonstrated strong AoA effects. This strengthens the case for the AM hypothesis, also suggesting the AoA effect resides in the connections between representations.

Bare numeral phrases in Mandarin and the Minimalist Mapping Hypothesis

We pursue an agreement-based analysis of the bare numeral phrases in Chinese. Bare numeral phrases in Chinese often occur with the you marker in the preverbal position. With the marker, a bare numeral phrase obtains an individual-denoting reading, which has an existential meaning. In contrast, several syntactic environments do not need the you marker, and the bare numeral phrase obtains the quantity-denoting reading. In addition to the existential you marker, we observe that the distributions of the two readings are correlated to the lower (root) modals (Mod) and the middle aspects (Asp). We argue that the correlation can be analyzed through syntactic feature agreement. That is, the bare numeral phrase carries an unvalued quantificational feature in the null D, and its unvalued feature is valued by the corresponding existential you marker, Asp, and/or Mod heads through (multiple) agreement. We argue that the proposed feature agreement mechanism can improve upon the (Extended) Mapping Hypothesis (Diesing 1992; Tsai 1999, 2001) under the Minimalist Program.

The adicities of thematic separation

This paper discusses whether or not verbs have thematic arguments or whether they just have an event variable. The paper discusses some evidence in favor of the Neo-Davidsonian position that verbs only have an event variable. Based on this evidence, the paper develops a transparent mapping hypothesis from syntax to logical form where each Spell-Out domain corresponds to a conjunct at logical form. The paper closes by discussing the nature of compositionality for a Conjunctivist semantics.