Suchergebnisse

AbstractPsycholinguistic research on children's early language environments has revealed many potential challenges for language acquisition. One is that in many cases, referents of linguistic expressions are hard to identify without prior knowledge of the language. Likewise, the speech signal itself varies substantially in clarity, with some productions being very clear, and others being phonetically reduced, even to the point of uninterpretability. In this study, we sought to better characterize the language‐learning environment of American English‐learning toddlers by testing how well phonetic clarity and referential clarity align in infant‐directed speech. Using an existing Human Simulation Paradigm (HSP) corpus with referential transparency measurements and adding new measures of phonetic clarity, we found that the phonetic clarity of words' first mentions significantly predicted referential clarity (how easy it was to guess the intended referent from visual information alone) at that moment. Thus, when parents' speech was especially clear, the referential semantics were also clearer. This suggests that young children could use the phonetics of speech to identify globally valuable instances that support better referential hypotheses, by homing in on clearer instances and filtering out less‐clear ones. Such multimodal "gems" offer special opportunities for early word learning.Research Highlights
In parent‐infant interaction, parents' referential intentions are sometimes clear and sometimes unclear; likewise, parents' pronunciation is sometimes clear and sometimes quite difficult to understand.
We find that clearer referential instances go along with clearer phonetic instances, more so than expected by chance.
Thus, there are globally valuable instances ("gems") from which children could learn about words' pronunciations and words' meanings at the same time.
Homing in on clear phonetic instances and filtering out less‐clear ones would help children identify these multimodal "gems" during word learning.

Whatever strategic ambiguity is, it's been around for an awfully long time.We were strolling through Trastevere in Rome of an evening last September when I spotted an English bookshop, something I can never resist in a foreign city. We went in and after a few minutes of idle browsing, my fingers fell on First Man in Rome, thefirst of Australian author Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome, a seven-volume series of historical novels of the last seventy years of the Republic. I had not heard of the series and had no great expectations; the cover looked a little Jackie Collins, but I applied my standard test. Flip to page 69 and if it holds the attention, buy it. I bought it. And have lived, utterly gripped, in ancient Rome, enthralled by McCullough's portraits of power, for eight months. The period is incredibly volatile; until reading McCullough, I had no idea how much so. Rome's aristocratic senatorial class is struggling to retain its grip on Rome in the face of a series of populist challenges to the power of the Senate that originate within the elite, as aristo demagogues exploit the grievances of the knightly merchant and plebeian classes in order to wrest power for themselves. It starts with the Gracchi brothers and proceeds through the likes of Saturninus and Catilina, whose conspiracy is famously blown by Cicero in the Senate. All meet violent deaths.

Despite longstanding efforts of leading scholars to standardize usage of the term "democracy" in scholarly practice on the basis of precise operational definitions, David Collier and Steven Levitsky found a proliferation of subtypes, a phenomenon they refer to as "democracy with adjectives." Efforts to define democracy in terms of a "procedural minimum" or those conditions necessary and sufficient for the existence of a democracy have not produced the intended uniformity of usage and high degrees of intercoder reliability, but rather led to the identification of hundreds of subtypes, of which "authoritarian democracy," "neopatrimonial democracy," "military-dominated democracy," and "protodemocracy," are a few. As they see it, scholars confront a dilemma. On the one hand, there is an impulse to maximize analytic differentiation in order to capture the wide variety of democracies that have emerged across the globe. On the other, there is a necessary concern for conceptual validity and to avoid what Giovanni Sartori referred to as "conceptual stretching."