Does bilingual experience influence statistical language learning?

Bilingual experience may confer advantages in statistical language learning tasks. Given that SL tasks can measure different aspects of foreign language learning, which aspects benefit from bilingual experience is still largely unexplored. Here, we compared a Spanish monolingual and two (Spanish-Basque and Spanish-English) bilingual groups across three well-established SL tasks. Each task targeted a different aspect of foreign language learning as a proxy—i.e., word segmentation, morphological rule generalization, and word-referent learning. In Experiment 1, we manipulated sub-lexical phonotactic patterns to vary the difficulty of three SL tasks, and the results showed no differences between the groups in word segmentation. In Experiment 2, we included non-adjacent dependencies to target affixal morphology rule learning, and again there were no differences between the groups. Finally, Experiment 3 addressed word learning using a more challenging audio-visual SL task combining exclusive and multiple word-referent mappings. We observed a bilingual experience effect only for the exclusive mappings but not for the multiple mappings. These results suggest that bilingual experience might mainly exert influences on statistical language learning at the lexical level. We discuss these findings by contextualizing SL as a cognitive mechanism, an experimental task, and a proxy for foreign language learning, highlighting the strengths and limitations in detecting bilingual experience effects.

Age and prior working experience effect on entrepreneurial intention

The purpose of this paper is to identify the factors that determine entrepreneurial intention and examine the effects of age and prior working experience on the formation of entrepreneurial intention. A questionnaire-based survey was employed for the data collection. A total of 171 university students from a Business School in Greece participated in the survey. The findings of our research showed that perceived behavioral control and attitude are significantly influencing entrepreneurial intention. Additionally, our analysis indicates that age and prior working experience affect entrepreneurial intention. The contribution of this study concerns the illumination of the scarcely addressed in the literature relationship between age and work experience with entrepreneurial intention

Industry Experiences of Board, CEO, and Acquisition Performance

This study examines the collective impact of expert boards and CEOs on acquisition performance, providing new insight into the CEO–board relationship. Acquiring firms with expert boards earns an additional 1.16 percentage points (3.91 percentage points) when the CEOs are new to the target industry (also experts) compared to the firms with “nonexperienced” boards (expert boards alone). Robust to endogeneity checks, our evidence supports the “vigilant-advisor”, “resource-provisioning”, and “shared-experience” hypotheses that take three distinct views of the CEO–board relationship. Generalist CEOs and public targets intensify the shared-experience effect, whereas less powerful CEOs and private targets intensify the resource-provisioning effect. Experienced directors improve the quality of acquisitions by assisting acquirers to avoid large losses, identify targets with higher synergies, and negotiate better deals.

Experience Effect in the Impact of Free Trial Promotions

Although the use of free samples is extensive across industries, the effects of free samples across individuals with varying levels of usage have yet to be systematically examined. The models discussed in the literature consider targeting only the current nonusers of a product. In this research, we examine the question of targeting the current users both analytically and empirically for an experience good. Our analytical discussions highlight the reasons why some current users may be effective targets for free-sample promotions. We then conduct an empirical analysis using a data set on pre- and post-free-sample promotion mobile data usage provided by a telecom firm. The empirical findings are consistent with our analytical results. Specifically, we find the initial usage level to be a key determinant of both the redemption rate of a free-sample offer and the subsequent change in usage owing to free-sample redemption. In our context, the redemption rate increased from the low-percentile users to the high-percentile users. We also find that the change in usage was (weakly) monotonically increasing up to the [Formula: see text] percentile of usage distribution. Beyond the [Formula: see text] percentile, the effect was generally not significant. We discuss the managerial and policy implications of our findings. This paper was accepted by Juanjuan Zhang, marketing.