The effects of narrative context on French verbal inflections: A developmental perspective

This experiment examines how narrative context affects French subjects' selection of past imperfective (imparfait) vs. perfective inflections with different predicate types. Adults and 10-year-old children were asked to inflect verbs presented in their written infinitive form in two conditions: (a) in isolated sentences; (b) embedded in the beginning, middle, or end of narratives. Regardless of conditions, the adults rarely used theimparfait with punctual resultative predicates. In both conditions, the frequency ofimparfait was high with durative predicates, particularly with aresultative ones, but it varied with position in the narratives, being highest at the beginning and lowest at the end. Although the children also used the imparfait frequently with durative predicates, they overgeneralized it to punctual resultative ones, regardless of conditions and of positions. These results show that adult uses of the imperfective/perfective distinction are determined by both predicate properties and grounding in narrative context. The children are less sensitive to some predicate properties than the adults and they do not differentiate imperfective/perfective aspect consistently as a function of discourse context.     

Social significance of tasks,routines, and pragmatic schemas in distribution activities

Past research on social marking and pragmatic reasoning schemas suggests that cognitive processing modes are first elaborated by children when they are carrying out regulating social routines in the course of which they learn to produce the responses that satisfy the demand of their environment. The data of the two experimental studies reported here with 4–5 year old children, for object distribution tasks, show that the social routines evoked by the objects to be processed have a dual effect, influencing both the representation of the partition to be made, as well as the procedures used to make them. It can be hypothesised that the utilization of routine-evoking tasks, which children are capable at a very young age, of accomplishing by activating efficient social-goal oriented procedures, promote the attribution of an operative meaning to the linguistic expressions used to characterize the states to be attained, and the transformations to be applied in order to attain them.     

Grading the ‘cultural literacy’ project

The essay examines the argument advanced by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., for instituting ‘cultural literacy’ as a fundamental priority of schools. A number of confusions and equivocations in Hirsch's reasoning are identified, and the propensity of his project to indoctrinate is exposed. Among the features of Hirsch's argument shown to be troubling are his shifting construal of ‘language’, his inconsistency about the requirements of cultural literacy, and his uncritical relation to traditional images of the American past and present. The upshot is to raise the question why Hirsch's project has elicited wide support and praise.     

Rate variables and automatized naming in developmental dyslexia

The rate variable in rapid automatized naming (RAN) was investigated in 50 adolescent and 40 adult students with developmental dyslexia, in matched normal controls, and in learning-disabled students without reading difficulties. Visual stimuli depicting familiar colors and common objects were presented in isolation at three film speeds and three exposure times. Film speed and exposure time contributed as independent variables to error rate; and dyslexic subjects of both age groups made significantly more naming errors than controls. Dyslexic subjects also responded with longer naming latencies than controls when the same RAN stimuli were presented in a continuous sequential mode as a matrix of rows and columns. Naming latencies in the sequential presentation were highly correlated with naming errors in the film version. The implications of reduced naming rates for nongraphological stimuli in developmental dyslexia are discussed.     

Referenzsemantik in der Partnermodellierung

How can we explain that an assertion on something perceived can be understood in the same manner by somebody who cannot perceive that scene? This problem bases the interest in computational linguistics in how listener modeling could possibly be harmonized with reference semantics. Mental images substituting real perception appear as a way out. The architecture of the listener model has to be adapted to the creation and use of such pictorial data structures. Furthermore, the relation between the latter and a verbal (i. e., propositional) representation must be understood. The resulting architecture of a listener model with reference semantics can be employed to solve communicational problems from three general classes in a better way, as is demonstrated by an example implementation.     

Dissociation of implicit and explicit memory tests: Effect of age and divided attention on category exemplar generation and cued recall

In this article, we report an experiment that provides further evidence concerning the differences between explicit and implicit measures of memory. The effects of age and divided attention on the implicit conceptual test of category exemplar generation (CEG) were compared with their effects on the explicit test of cued recall, where the category names served as cues in both tasks. Four age groups (20–35, 40–55, 60–75, and 76–90) were compared. Half of the subjects were also required to carry out a secondary letter-detection task during the learning phase. Cued recall performance was significantly impaired by increased age and imposition of the secondary task. In contrast, the CEG task was unaffected by these two factors. These results suggest that implicit conceptual tasks and explicit memory tasks are mediated by different processes. This conclusion opposes those of previous studies that showed that experimental manipulations (level of processing, generation, organization) influenced these two kinds of memory tests in a similar way.