Differences in Scope Assignments for Child and Adult Speakers of Mandarin

The present study used a Truth Value Judgment Task to investigate whether changes in sentence structure lead to corresponding changes in the assignment of scope relations by Mandarin-speaking children and adults. In one condition, participants were presented with ordinary negative sentences containing disjunction; this condition was designed to verify the existing claim that disjunction is a positive polarity item for adult speakers of Mandarin, but not for child speakers. In a second condition, participants were presented with negative sentences where the disjunction phrase was preposed from object position; this condition was designed to examine the extent to which changes in sentence structure can result in changes in scope assignments to negated disjunctions. The results indicate that the preposed disjunction phrase undergoes reconstruction for children, whereas reconstruction is blocked for adults. This finding also suggests that Mandarin-speaking children and adults exhibit different scope preferences for negated disjunctions, regardless of where the disjunction phrase appears in the surface syntax.     

How Possessive Relations are Mapped onto Child Language: A View from Mandarin Chinese

The present studies sought to investigate the mapping relations between language and cognition by focusing on how Mandarin-speaking children acquire the mapping between their conceptual knowledge of possession and their linguistic expressions of possession. Two experiments were conducted. Experiment 1 used a comprehension task to explore whether young children are able to map their knowledge of possessive constructions onto their interpretation of possessive relations. Experiment 2 employed a production task to examine whether they are able to map their knowledge of possessive relations onto their linguistic expressions of possession. The findings were that 4-year-olds exhibited correct comprehension and production of possessive DE constructions, indicating that by age 4, Mandarin-speaking children have already established the mapping between their conceptual knowledge of possession and their linguistic expressions of possession. By contrast, 3-year-olds exhibited response patterns that suggest a developmental stage where they use noun–noun compounds to represent possessive relations before they map possessive relations onto possessive constructions.     

Direct Gaze Blurs Self-Other Boundaries

Self-other merging can arise not only between acquainted people but also between strangers. To date, the factors determining self-other merging between strangers remain to be elucidated. We investigate whether strangers’ facial appearance (i.e. gaze direction) modulates such initial processes of self-other merging. In the two experiments, participants viewed strangers’ faces whose gaze either directed to or averted from them. The extent of self-other merging was measured in terms of perception of face resemblance, Inclusion of the Other in the Self (IOS) scale, and correlations of personality judgments. We found that direct gaze blurred the self-other boundaries at both facial and conceptual levels. Participants felt a stranger who directly gazed at them to be closer and more similar to themselves about face and personality.     

Atomic imaging of the interface between M23C6-type carbide and matrix in a long-term ageing polycrystalline Ni-based superalloy

Besides the well-known cube-on-cube orientation relationship (OR) between M₂₃C₆ carbide and matrix, we have determined a new OR named as the twin-related OR in a long-term ageing Ni-based superalloy on the basis of the extensive and detailed electron diffraction analyses. Furthermore, by means of atomic-resolution high angle annular dark-field imaging technique which is implemented in the aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscope, we elucidated the interfacial characteristics between M₂₃C₆ and matrix for above two types of ORs. Taking into account of the interfacial characteristics, we propose that the twin-related OR possesses a higher total interfacial energy. Thus, its frequency of occurrence is lower than that of the cube-on-cube OR though both ORs are usually seen in the long-term ageing samples.