Transfert de la conscience morphologique de l’arabe langue première au français langue seconde au cours des trois premières années d’apprentissage

There is a great deal of evidence to support the role of morphological awareness in reading development. However, towards second language acquisition, transfer of morphological awareness from first to second language (L1 to L2) is still discussed. The underlying question concerns the extent to which morphological awareness is a specific or universal process, and its dependence of linguistic features. The aim of this study is to examine cross-linguistic transfer of morphological awareness from Arabic L1 to French L2 (morphological awareness and word reading) at different level of learning French L2 (F_L2). 106 Tunisian children, whose first language is Arabic, in 1st (n = 29; mean age; 8; 10 years), 2nd (n = 33; mean age; 9; 9 years) or 3rd year (n = 44; mean age; 10; 10 years) of learning F_L2 participated to this study. Their morphological awareness (inflectional or derivational oddity detection tasks) and their performance in word reading (one minute test) were assessed in standard Arabic and French, as well as their vocabulary knowledge in French. A series of fixed-order hierarchical regression analysis was performed on derivational awareness performances, inflectional awareness performances and word reading performances in F_L2, controlling for effects of other important variables (e.g. French vocabulary, French morphological awareness with word reading scores as outcome variable and French inflectional or derivational awareness with French inflectional or derivational awareness scores as outcome variable respectively, Arabic word reading, etc.). Results show significant contributions of L1 morpho-derivational awareness on F_L2 morpho-derivational awareness in 2nd year (12%), and of L1 morphological awareness on reading words F_L2 in 3^rd year (5%). These results confirm the cross-linguistic transfer of morphological awareness, particularly derivational, from L1 to L2 among alphabetic — but orthographically and morphologically distances — languages. They also suggest that such a transfer could be relatively limited. It could appear during learning process after achieving a threshold in F_L2 and before specific L2 skills take place. Thus, beyond the morphological opacity of Arabic (nonlinear morphology) and linguistic distance between Arabic and French, the morphological transfer could appear on rich and important morphological dimension in L1 and suggest dealing with the nature of cross-linguistic abilities in depth.     

Philosophy for Computers: Some Explorations in Philosophical Modeling

Philosophical modeling has a long and distinguished history, but the computer offers new and powerful prospects for the creation and manipulation of models. It seems inevitable that the computer will become a major tool in future philosophical research. Here I offer an overview of explorations in philosophical computer modeling that we in the Group for Logic and Formal Semantics at SUNY Stony Brook have undertaken: explorations regarding (1) the potential emergence of cooperation in a society of egoists, (2) self-reference and paradox in fuzzy logic, (3) a fractal approach to formal systems, and (4) on-going explorations with models for the emergence of communication. The attempt is not to give a detailed report on any of these but to give a bird s-eye view of them all, emphasizing the general form that the models take, the philosophical motivations behind them, and the kinds of philosophical results that they may have to offer.     

Creating “Maneuvering Room”: A Grounded Theory of Language and Influence in Marriage and Family Therapy

Influence in psychotherapy has been described as a characteristic of the therapist, a characteristic of the therapeutic relationship, and a negotiated process. This study combines grounded theory and task analysis to explore language patterns in facilitating change in family therapy. Thirty-one episodes of therapy were analyzed, resulting in the emergent concept of creating maneuvering room. Therapists introduce uncertainty into clients beliefs about problems then offer new ways of defining problems by speaking from three dimensions: therapist as expert or non-expert, therapist as participant or observer, or family members experiences as similar or different. The findings of this study support a possible common factor in family therapy.     

Temporal and spatial concepts in child language: conventional and configurational

The purpose of this research was to study the temporal and spatial systems of child language. Configurational time/space refers to the location of events/objects relative to referent events/objects (e.g., before/after or across/along) and conventional time/space refers to the specification of cycles/directions and the measurement of duration/distance (e.g., winter/fall or North/South). The research was designed to determine how configurational and conventional notions of time and space emerge in the child's language. The average age of the children in the cross-sectional design was: 3;9, 6;7, and 8;7. The children received a comprehension test that required them to match a sentence with a picture. In general, configurational contrasts were easier to comprehend than conventional contrasts, and, within the configurational problems, location requiring a single referent was easier than location requiring multiple referents. There was no overall difference between temporal and spatial dimensions. The role of conceptual development was discussed within the context of a comparison between first and second language acquisition.     

Perspective-taking and comprehension of passive sentences by Japanese-speaking children

This study demonstrates that children's difficulties in the interpretation of passives are attributed to their perspective-taking ability. Thirty-six Japanese preschool children participated in act-out sentence comprehension tasks. They were asked to manipulate two toy animals to demonstrate the meaning of two types of stimulus sentences: Type I had the child's toy, whose reference involved the child's actual name (e.g., Jun-kun no neko Jun's cat) encoded as grammatical subject, while Type II had the child's toy encoded as non-subject. Since passive structures take the perspective of the patient-denoting subject NP, it is assumed that only Type I passives have the perspective that matches that of the child.The results show that children's performance on passives was significantly better in Type I than in Type II sentences. But this difference was not observed for active sentences. For those who showed (nearly) perfect performance on active sentences, only Type I passives were equally well understood. These results strongly suggest that perspective-taking difficulties mask children's true competence on passives and that even 6-year-olds may not yet have attained the full perspective-taking ability required for comprehension of passive sentences.     

Teaching children with autism to ask questions about hidden objects

We taught 2 4‐year‐old children with autism to ask questions of an adult who held a closed box with a toy inside. The treatment package (modeling, prompting, and reinforcement) was evaluated with a multiple baseline design across the three question forms during training, generalization, and follow‐up evaluations. The first question form (“What's that?”) produced the name of the hidden item. The second form (“Can I see it?”) produced sight of it, and the third form (“Can I have it?”) produced the item itself. Both children learned to ask questions about hidden objects.     

Communicative development in Swedish children 16-28 months old: the Swedish early communicative development inventory--words and sentences

To describe the development of words and sentences in Swedish children 16-28 months old, 900 parental reports on 336 children were analyzed. Subjects were randomly selected from the national birth register, and there was a response rate of 88%. The assessments were made using the Swedish Early Communicative Development Inventory--words and sentences (SECDI--w&s). Age-based norms for productive vocabulary, pragmatic skills, grammar skills, and maximum length of utterance (MaxLU) were determined. We describe the development of feedback morphemes, semantic categories, and single words and tasks. Correlation across measures was significant, and especially strong between vocabulary size and grammar skills. Optimized positive predictive values were high for 25 to 28 month predictions (71%-88%), and vocabulary scores were found to be of particular predictive importance. No significant gender differences were detected. The clinical relevance of the instrument is discussed.     

Individual differences in children's emotion understanding: effects of age and language

Over the last two decades, it has been established that children's emotion understanding changes as they develop. Recent studies have also begun to address individual differences in children's emotion understanding. The first goal of this study was to examine the development of these individual differences across a wide age range with a test assessing nine different components of emotion understanding. The second goal was to examine the relation between language ability and individual differences in emotion understanding. Eighty children ranging in age from 4 to 11 years were tested. Children displayed a clear improvement with age in both their emotion understanding and language ability. In each age group, there were clear individual differences in emotion understanding and language ability. Age and language ability together explained 72% of emotion understanding variance; 20% of this variance was explained by age alone and 27% by language ability alone. The results are discussed in terms of their theoretical and practical implications.     

自闭症幼儿的情感认知特点的实验研究

本实验采用3(组别)×4(基本情绪)×3(实验材料)×2(实验条件)的混合设计的方法对平均心理年龄24个月的6名自闭症幼儿和心理年龄与之相近的6名正常儿童和6名弱智儿童的情感认知特点进行了比较性的研究。实验结果表明:在“语言提示”条件下,自闭症幼儿的正答率远远低于正常儿童和弱智儿童,但在“表情提示”条件下,自闭症幼儿与弱智幼儿几乎没差距,在对“愤怒”和“惊恐”等情绪的认知中,正答率高于弱智幼儿。这意味着自闭症幼儿可能运用了其他的替代策略进行情感认知。     

Studying the grammatical aspects of word recognition: lexical priming,parsing, and syntactic ambiguity resolution

Two experiments are reported examining the relationship between lexical and syntactic processing during language comprehension, combining techniques common to the on-line study of syntactic ambiguity resolution with priming techniques common to the study of lexical processing. By manipulating grammatical properties of lexical primes, we explore how lexically based knowledge is activated and guides combinatory sentence processing. Particularly, we find that nouns (like verbs, see Trueswell & Kim, 1998) can activate detailed lexically specific syntactic information and that these representations guide the resolution of relevant syntactic ambiguities pertaining to verb argument structure. These findings suggest that certain principles of knowledge representation common to theories of lexical knowledge—such as overlapping and distributed representations—also characterize grammatical knowledge. Additionally, observations from an auditory comprehension study suggest similar conclusions about the lexical nature of parsing in spoken language comprehension. They also suggest that thematic role and syntactic preferences are activated during word recognition and that both influence combinatory processing.