Persistent structural priming from language comprehension to language production

To examine the relationship between syntactic processes in language comprehension and language production, we compared structural persistence from sentence primes that speakers heard to persistence from primes that speakers produced. [Bock, J. K., & Griffin, Z. M. (2000). The persistence of structural priming: transient activation or implicit learning? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 129, 177-192.] showed that the production of target priming structures increased the probability of spontaneously using the same structures to describe events in subsequent pictures that were semantically unrelated to the primes. These priming effects persisted across as many as ten intervening filler trials. The present studies replicated these results using auditorily presented primes to which participants only listened. The results indicated persistence of priming across all lags, with relative magnitudes of priming as large as those observed by Bock and Griffin. The implication is that structural priming is persistent regardless of the modality in which language structures are experienced, underscoring the power of priming as an implicit learning mechanism.     

The role of language in mathematical development: evidence from children with specific language impairments

A sample (n=48) of eight-year-olds with specific language impairments is compared with age-matched (n=55) and language matched controls (n=55) on a range of tasks designed to test the interdependence of language and mathematical development. Performance across tasks varies substantially in the SLI group, showing profound deficits in production of the count word sequence and basic calculation and significant deficits in understanding of the place-value principle in Hindu-Arabic notation. Only in understanding of arithmetic principles does SLI performance approximate that of age-matched-controls, indicating that principled understanding can develop even where number sequence production and other aspects of number processing are severely compromised.     

Parents' experiences in Child Protective Services: analysis of a dialogical group process

The authors qualitatively examine parent experiences in groups for persons seeking parental rights through Child Protective Services (CPS). The study focuses on 16 custody-seeking parent figures who participated in dialogical groups designed from a Collaborative Language Systems perspective. The grounded-theory analysis shows that parents initially described overwhelming emotions and conflictual relationships with CPS. It also identifies five therapeutic group processes that appeared to influence perceptions of hope and personal power and contribute to how parents position themselves relative to CPS: validation, sharing practical information and networking, highlighting strengths and resources, supportive confrontation, and sharing stories of change. The analysis provides insight into CPS parents' experiences, suggests that dialogical approaches may have potential to assist in reshaping experiences in CPS, and draws attention to the need for interventions at the structural and administrative levels.     

Improving postswitch performance in the dimensional change card-sorting task: the importance of the switch and of pretraining by redescribing the test cards

The dimensional change card-sorting task (DCCS) is used to assess the executive abilities of young children. Typically, 3-year-olds have difficulty in performing this task. However, the exact nature of this difficulty is still being debated. In the standard DCCS, children need to sort, for example, test cards with a blue flower or a red car into two boxes marked with the target cards. The 3-year-olds commonly have pronounced difficulty in switching from one sorting criterion (e.g., color) to another (e.g., shape). Here two experiments with 3-year-olds showed that making the transition between the sorting criteria more distinct improved performance significantly. This was achieved by taking away the target cards for a brief time period, asking a question irrelevant to the task, and pretraining the children by redescribing the test cards.     

Automatic activation of phonology in silent reading is parallel: evidence from beginning and skilled readers

The picture-word interference paradigm was used to shed new light on the debate concerning slow serial versus fast parallel activation of phonology in silent reading. Prereaders, beginning readers (Grades 1-4), and adults named pictures that had words printed on them. Words and pictures shared phonology either at the beginnings of words (e.g., DOLL-DOG) or at the ends of words (e.g., FOG-DOG). The results showed that phonological overlap between primes and targets facilitated picture naming. This facilitatory effect was present even in beginning readers. More important, from Grade 1 onward, end-related facilitation always was as strong as beginning-related facilitation. This result suggests that, from the beginning of reading, the implicit and automatic activation of phonological codes during silent reading is not serial but rather parallel.     

Oculomotor and manual indexes of incidental and intentional spatial sequence learning during middle childhood and adolescence

The goal of this study was to examine incidental and intentional spatial sequence learning during middle childhood and adolescence. We tested four age groups (8-10 years, 11-13 years, 14-17 years, and young adults [18+ years]) on a serial reaction time task and used manual and oculomotor measures to examine incidental sequence learning. Participants were also administered a trial block in which they were explicitly instructed to learn a sequence. Replicating our previous study with adults, oculomotor anticipations and response times showed learning effects similar to those in the manual modality. There were few age-related differences in the sequence learning indexes during incidental learning, but intentional learning yielded differences on all indexes. Results indicate that the search for regularities and the ability to learn a sequence rapidly under incidental conditions are mature by 8 to 10 years of age. In contrast, the ability to learn a sequence intentionally, which requires cognitive resources and strategies, continues to develop through adolescence.     

‘Ideal learning’ of natural language: Positive results about learning from positive evidence

Gold's [1967. Language identification in the limit. Information and Control, 16, 447-474] celebrated work on learning in the limit has been taken, by many cognitive scientists, to have powerful negative implications for the learnability of language from positive data (i.e., from mere exposure to linguistic input). This provides one, of several, lines of argument that language acquisition must draw on other sources of information, including innate constraints on learning. We consider an ‘ideal learner’ that applies a Simplicity Principle to the problem of language acquisition. The Simplicity Principle chooses the hypothesis that provides the briefest representation of the available data—here, the data are the linguistic input to the child. The Simplicity Principle allows learning from positive evidence alone, given quite weak assumptions, in apparent contrast to results on language learnability in the limit (e.g., Gold, 1967). These results provide a framework for reconsidering the learnability of various aspects of natural language from positive evidence, which has been at the center of theoretical debate in research on language acquisition and linguistics.     

Recursion, language, and starlings

It has been claimed that recursion is one of the properties that distinguishes human language from any other form of animal communication. Contrary to this claim, a recent study purports to demonstrate center-embedded recursion in starlings. I show that the performance of the birds in this study can be explained by a counting strategy, without any appreciation of center-embedding. To demonstrate that birds understand center-embedding of sequences of the form A(n) B(n) (such as A(1) A(2) B(2) B(1) , or A(3) A(4) A(5) B(5) B(4) B(3) ) would require not only that they discriminate such patterns from other patterns, but that they appreciate that elements must be bound from the outside in (thus, in the above examples, A(1) B(1) , A(2) B(2) , A(3) B(3) , A(4) B(4) , A(5) B(5) are bound pairs). This has not been shown in nonhuman species, and sentences with this structure are difficult even for humans to parse. There appears to be no evidence to date that nonhuman species understand recursion.     

Situated language understanding as filtering perceived affordances

We introduce a computational theory of situated language understanding in which the meaning of words and utterances depends on the physical environment and the goals and plans of communication partners. According to the theory, concepts that ground linguistic meaning are neither internal nor external to language users, but instead span the objective-subjective boundary. To model the possible interactions between subject and object, the theory relies on the notion of perceived affordances: structured units of interaction that can be used for prediction at multiple levels of abstraction. Language understanding is treated as a process of filtering perceived affordances. The theory accounts for many aspects of the situated nature of human language use and provides a unified solution to a number of demands on any theory of language understanding including conceptual combination, prototypicality effects, and the generative nature of lexical items. To support the theory, we describe an implemented system that understands verbal commands situated in a virtual gaming environment. The implementation uses probabilistic hierarchical plan recognition to generate perceived affordances. The system has been evaluated on its ability to correctly interpret free-form spontaneous verbal commands recorded from unrehearsed game play between human players. The system is able to "step into the shoes" of human players and correctly respond to a broad range of verbal commands in which linguistic meaning depends on social and physical context. We quantitatively compare the system's predictions in response to direct player commands with the actions taken by human players and show generalization to unseen data across a range of situations and verbal constructions.     

Language-relative construal of individuation constrained by universal ontology: revisiting language universals and linguistic relativity

Objects and substances bear fundamentally different ontologies. In this article, we examine the relations between language, the ontological distinction with respect to individuation, and the world. Specifically, in cross‐linguistic developmental studies that follow Imai and Gentner (1997) , we examine the question of whether language influences our thought in different forms, like (1) whether the language‐specific construal of entities found in a word extension context ( Imai & Gentner, 1997 ) is also found in a nonlinguistic classification context; (2) whether the presence of labels per se, independent of the count‐mass syntax, fosters ontology‐based classification; (3) in what way, if at all, the count‐mass syntax that accompanies a label changes English speakers' default construal of a given entity? On the basis of the results, we argue that the ontological distinction concerning individuation is universally shared and functions as a constraint on early learning of words. At the same time, language influences one's construal of entities cross‐lingistically and developmentally, and causes a temporary change of construal within a single language. We provide a detailed discussion of how each of these three ways language may affect the construal of entities, and discuss how our universally possessed knowledge interacts with language both within a single language and in cross‐linguistic context.