Clause Chaining and Discourse Continuity in Turkish Children's Narratives.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Ogel-Balaban H
PROVIDER: S-EPMC7043320 | biostudies-literature | 2020
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Publications
Clause Chaining and Discourse Continuity in Turkish Children's Narratives.
Ögel-Balaban Hale H Aksu-Koç Ayhan A
Frontiers in psychology 20200219
The present study examines the development of complex sentences with non-finite clause combining with particular focus on clause chaining, in narratives of 40 Turkish-speaking 4- to 11-year-olds and six adults elicited by a wordless picture book. Results show a gradual increase by age in the variety of clauses combined, the length of the complex sentences and their frequency of use. Clause chains formed with converbal clauses are the earliest and most frequent type of clause combinations, alread ...[more]
Similar Datasets
Project description:Japanese is a clause chaining language, in which a sentence is formed by linking two or more clauses in a series (chain), using different forms of the verb in "non-final" clauses within the chain from the "final" clauses that end the chain. Since the verb comes at the end of a clause in Japanese, speakers must decide by the time they reach the verb at end of one clause whether or not to connect it to the following clause. This study analyzes the narratives of Japanese children and adults with the dual goal of discovering why narrators decide either to link the clause they are producing to the following clause or not to link, i.e., to end the clause chain. Stories were elicited from 60 3- to 7-year-old children and 10 adults, who performed two tasks: (1) telling the story depicted in a hand-drawn cartoon, and (2) viewing a 7-min video and then recounting the plot from memory. The data were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. The qualitative analysis examines story length and prompting, length of clause chains, variety of linking connectives, semantic relations-such as simultaneity, temporal sequence, and causality-between clauses in chains, shifts of subject from one story character to another (switch-reference), and contexts in stories where narrators end clause chains. For the quantitative analysis, a multifactorial, mixed-effects model was fit to determine which of several potential predictors have a significant effect on the probability that narrators will link clauses. The model is significant, though weak in discriminatory power. Among the significant effects, simultaneous relations between events increase the probability that narrators will link clauses, while changing the subject referent and reaching the end of a narrative unit, e.g., an episode, increase the probability that narrators will end their clause chain. There are no significant age effects: the children respond in the same way to the predictors as the adults. The qualitative and quantitative results of the study are interpreted with respect to the close relation between grammar (clause chains) and discourse (narrative structure) as well as the cognitive process of producing clause chains during narration.
| S-EPMC7019389 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Korean is a language with the verb at the end of a clause/sentence. In chaining several clauses [each consisting of a subject and a verb] in a sentence, a conjunction (e.g., -ko "and then," -ese "because, and so") is suffixed to the verb of a non-final clause. Korean has an extensive set of conjunctions that connect to the next clause, expressing temporal, causal, and contrastive relations among others. In this paper, I lay out a developmental trajectory of clause chaining construction in Korean based on longitudinal and cross-sectional data samples, focusing on conjunctive forms and functions as well as morphological and syntactic properties of connected clauses in a sentence. The database comes from longitudinal naturalistic speech data of five children collected regularly over different time periods between 2 and 5 years of age, and from elicited descriptions of short video events from children - aged 3, 4, 6, 8, and 10 years - and adults. The results show that, at least from 2 years of age, the Korean children in the sample start connecting clauses using appropriate conjunctions. Within 6 months, they acquire several major conjunctions that express temporal, causal, conditional, and contrastive relations between events. By 4 years of age, the children's clause chains are quite adult-like in terms of the repertoire of conjunctive forms and functions, and of the morphological and syntactic features of the clauses that connect to the main clause. In particular they learn to express temporal relations that have some disjuncture between events. However, 4-year-olds still lack the ability to appropriately refer to differential subjects of the chained clauses and also to connect multiple clauses in a sentence. The elicitation data reveal that further development in clause chaining occurs over several years - with a milestone at 10 years - and through adulthood, particularly in relation to appropriate referential marking, conjunction frequency, and segmentation of a macro event into sub-events for clause-chaining construction. These developmental processes are presented from a cognitive perspective, in particular with regard to concept of temporal relation, reference specification involving two or more entities, and perceptual saliency of event type.
| S-EPMC7078364 | biostudies-literature
Project description:ObjectiveThis paper presents a coreference resolution system for clinical narratives. Coreference resolution aims at clustering all mentions in a single document to coherent entities.Materials and methodsA knowledge-intensive approach for coreference resolution is employed. The domain knowledge used includes several domain-specific lists, a knowledge intensive mention parsing, and task informed discourse model. Mention parsing allows us to abstract over the surface form of the mention and represent each mention using a higher-level representation, which we call the mention's semantic representation (SR). SR reduces the mention to a standard form and hence provides better support for comparing and matching. Existing coreference resolution systems tend to ignore discourse aspects and rely heavily on lexical and structural cues in the text. The authors break from this tradition and present a discourse model for "person" type mentions in clinical narratives, which greatly simplifies the coreference resolution.ResultsThis system was evaluated on four different datasets which were made available in the 2011 i2b2/VA coreference challenge. The unweighted average of F1 scores (over B-cubed, MUC and CEAF) varied from 84.2% to 88.1%. These experiments show that domain knowledge is effective for different mention types for all the datasets.DiscussionError analysis shows that most of the recall errors made by the system can be handled by further addition of domain knowledge. The precision errors, on the other hand, are more subtle and indicate the need to understand the relations in which mentions participate for building a robust coreference system.ConclusionThis paper presents an approach that makes an extensive use of domain knowledge to significantly improve coreference resolution. The authors state that their system and the knowledge sources developed will be made publicly available.
| S-EPMC3638172 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Children's poor performance on object relative clauses has been explained in terms of intervention locality. This approach predicts that object relatives with a full DP head and an embedded pronominal subject are easier than object relatives in which both the head noun and the embedded subject are full DPs. This prediction is shared by other accounts formulated to explain processing mechanisms. We conducted a visual-world study designed to test the off-line comprehension and on-line processing of object relatives in German-speaking 5-year-olds. Children were tested on three types of object relatives, all having a full DP head noun and differing with respect to the type of nominal phrase that appeared in the embedded subject position: another full DP, a 1st- or a 3rd-person pronoun. Grammatical skills and memory capacity were also assessed in order to see whether and how they affect children's performance. Most accurately processed were object relatives with 1st-person pronoun, independently of children's language and memory skills. Performance on object relatives with two full DPs was overall more accurate than on object relatives with 3rd-person pronoun. In the former condition, children with stronger grammatical skills accurately processed the structure and their memory abilities determined how fast they were; in the latter condition, children only processed accurately the structure if they were strong both in their grammatical skills and in their memory capacity. The results are discussed in the light of accounts that predict different pronoun effects like the ones we find, which depend on the referential properties of the pronouns. We then discuss which role language and memory abilities might have in processing object relatives with various embedded nominal phrases.
| S-EPMC4477058 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Pantomime has long been considered distinct from co-speech gesture. It has therefore been argued that pantomime cannot be part of gesture-speech integration. We examine pantomime as distinct from silent gesture, focusing on non-co-speech gestures that occur in the midst of children's spoken narratives. We propose that gestures with features of pantomime are an infrequent but meaningful component of a multimodal communicative strategy. We examined spontaneous non-co-speech representational gesture production in the narratives of 30 monolingual English-speaking children between the ages of 8- and 11-years. We compared the use of co-speech and non-co-speech gestures in both autobiographical and fictional narratives and examined viewpoint and the use of non-manual articulators, as well as the length of responses and narrative quality. The use of non-co-speech gestures was associated with longer narratives of equal or higher quality than those using only co-speech gestures. Non-co-speech gestures were most likely to adopt character-viewpoint and use non-manual articulators. The present study supports a deeper understanding of the term pantomime and its multimodal use by children in the integration of speech and gesture.
| S-EPMC7734346 | biostudies-literature
Project description:ObjectiveThe aim of the present study was to validate the Turkish version of the Children's Power of Food Scale (C-PFS-T) after translation of the original version.DesignThe data were collected via face-to-face interviews using the C-PFS-T and a socio-demographic information form. BMI was calculated by dividing body weight by the square of the height. After the adaptation of the scale to Turkish language, validity and reliability analysis were conducted for the C-PFS-T.SettingGülhane Training and Research Hospital Department of Child Health and Diseases Nutrition and Diet Unit in Ankara.ParticipantsThis research was conducted with volunteer children and adolescents between the ages of 9 and 16 years (n 268).ResultsIt was concluded that the 15-item C-PFS-T was collected under three factors as in the original version of the child version. Cronbach's α coefficient was found to be 0·878 for the scale. The confirmatory factor analysis results showed the acceptability and applicability of adapting the version of the C-PFS-T in terms of χ2/df (= 3·816), adjusted goodness-of-fit index (AGFI = 0·931), root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA = 0·082) and goodness-of-fit index (GFI = 0·852) fit indices. C-PFS-T total score's median value of obese group wasn't substantially different from normal weight group.Conclusions:It was concluded that the Turkish version of the C-PFS, which provides an assessment of the hedonic hunger status of children and adolescents with fifteen items and threesubdimensions, has sufficient reliability and validity to be applied to these subjects.
| S-EPMC8609363 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Relative clauses are considered strong islands for extraction across languages. Swedish comprises a well-known exception, allegedly allowing extraction from relative clauses (RCE), raising the possibility that island constraints may be subject to "deep variation" between languages. One alternative is that such exceptions are only illusory and represent "surface variation" attributable to independently motivated syntactic properties. Yet, to date, no surface account has proven tenable for Swedish RCEs. The present study uses eyetracking while reading to test whether the apparent acceptability of Swedish RCEs has any processing correlates at the point of filler integration compared to uncontroversial strong island violations. Experiment 1 tests RCE against licit that-clause extraction (TCE), illicit extraction from a non-restrictive relative clause (NRCE), and an intransitive control. For this, RCE was found to pattern similarly to TCE at the point of integration in early measures, but between TCE and NRCE in total durations. Experiment 2 uses RCE and extraction from a subject NP island (SRCE) to test the hypothesis that only non-islands will show effects of implausible filler-verb dependencies. RCE showed sensitivity to the plausibility manipulation across measures at the first potential point of filler integration, whereas such effects were limited to late measures for SRCE. In addition, structural facilitation was seen across measures for RCE relative to SRCE. We propose that our results are compatible with RCEs being licit weak island extractions in Swedish, and that the overall picture speaks in favor of a surface rather than a deep variation approach to the lack of island effects in Swedish RCEs.
| S-EPMC5726081 | biostudies-literature
Project description:PurposeThe overall aim was to evaluate the key worker role across principal treatment centres for children with cancer in England, Wales and Scotland.MethodsMixed-methods case study gathering data from multiple perspectives using questionnaires, interviews, focus groups and reports/performance documents over a two-year period. Framework approach was adopted to analyse transcripts and documentary data.ResultsParticipants included: 22 nurse specialist key workers, 103 parents, 85 professionals and 10 children/young people. Qualitative and quantitative data were woven together, to best illuminate key worker services. Four main models of care were described as well as the context of care and process of care. Key working effectiveness centred around three pillars: care coordination; expert knowledge, experience and expertise; relationship. These were essential to improved family experience, emotional wellbeing, and delivery of individualized care closer to home.ConclusionsThe role is complex and diverse, responding to local needs. Certain conditions, (e.g., high caseload) placed limits on enacting the three pillars, diminishing the positive experience of families. When they worked well, key workers reduced the fragmented nature of services and families placed great value on keeping the same key worker from diagnosis into long-term care. Retaining these roles, where already in place, or including, if not, we would recommend, factoring into budgets to sustain and expand such roles.
| S-EPMC9246033 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The nucleotide second messengers pppGpp and ppGpp [(p)ppGpp] are responsible for the global downregulation of transcription, translation, DNA replication, and growth rate that occurs during the stringent response. More recent studies suggest that (p)ppGpp is also an important effector in many nonstringent processes, including virulence, persister cell formation, and biofilm production. In Bacillus subtilis, (p)ppGpp production is primarily determined by the net activity of RelA, a bifunctional (p)ppGpp synthetase/hydrolase, and two monofunctional (p)ppGpp synthetases, YwaC and YjbM. We observe that in B. subtilis, a relA mutant grows exclusively as unchained, motile cells, phenotypes regulated by the alternative sigma factor SigD. Our data indicate that the relA mutant is trapped in a SigD "on" state during exponential growth, implicating RelA and (p)ppGpp levels in the regulation of cell chaining and motility in B. subtilis. Our results also suggest that minor variations in basal (p)ppGpp levels can significantly skew developmental decision-making outcomes.
| S-EPMC4288673 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Growing tissue and bacterial colonies are active matter systems where cell divisions and cellular motion generate active stress. Although they operate in the non-equilibrium regime, these biological systems can form large-scale ordered structures. How mechanical instabilities drive the dynamics of active matter systems and form ordered structures are not well understood. Here, we use chaining Bacillus subtilis, also known as a biofilm, to study the relation between mechanical instabilities and nematic ordering. We find that bacterial biofilms have intrinsic length scales above which a series of mechanical instabilities occur. Localized stress and friction drive buckling and edge instabilities which further create nematically aligned structures and topological defects. We also observe that topological defects control stress distribution and initiate the formation of sporulation sites by creating three-dimensional structures. In this study we propose an alternative active matter platform to study the essential roles of mechanics in growing biological tissue.
| S-EPMC6533293 | biostudies-literature