It has long been recognized that there is a natural dependence between theories of knowledge representation and theories of knowledge acquisition, with the idea that the right knowledge representation enables acquisition to happen as reliably as it does. Given this, a reasonable criterion for a theory of knowledge representation is that it be useful for acquisition, particularly in non-trivial ...

Knowledge gradually becomes a driving force for the economic development. The progress of information and communication technology facilitates sharing of technologically and economically valuable knowledge and further integration of productive forces of humanity in emerging knowledge-based economy. This process has already revealed dominant structural formations and major approaches to the orga...

The ability of children to generalize over the linguistic input they receive is key to acquiring productive knowledge of verbs. Such generalizations help children extend their learned knowledge of constructions to a novel verb, and use it appropriately in syntactic patterns previously unobserved for that verb—a key factor in language productivity. Computational models can help shed light on the...

The present study investigated the developmental interrelationships between play, gesture use and spoken language development in children aged 18–31 months. The children completed two tasks: (i) a structured measure of pretend (or ‘symbolic’) play and (ii) a measure of vocabulary knowledge in which children have been shown to gesture. Additionally, their productive spoken language knowledge was...

Collaborative work groups that span multiple locations and time zones, or “follow the sun,” create a growing demand for creating new technologies and methodologies that enable traditional spatial and temporal separations to be surmounted in an effective and productive manner. The hurdles faced by members of such virtual teams are in three key areas: differences in concepts and terminologies use...

Collocations are of great importance for second language learners, and a learner’s knowledge of them plays a key role in producing language fluently (Nation, 2001: 323). In this article we describe and evaluate an innovative system that uses a Web-derived corpus and digital library software to produce a vast concordance and present it in a way that helps students use collocations more effective...

Are there individual differences in children's prediction of upcoming linguistic input and what do these differences reflect? Using a variant of the preferential looking paradigm (Golinkoff, Hirsh-Pasek, Cauley, & Gordon, 1987), we found that, upon hearing a sentence like, "The boy eats a big cake," 2-year-olds fixate edible objects in a visual scene (a cake) soon after they hear the semantical...

Previous studies have documented that children are slow to acquire adjectives into their productive vocabulary. Yet in laboratory studies, even very young children can extend novel adjectives to new instances. Two studies examined the relation between children’s acquisition of adjectives and children’s emerging knowledge about nouns. In Study 1, the input parents provide to children when talkin...

A 69 year old non-smoking male attended the surgery giving a one week history of a cough productive of green sputum. He was diagnosed with community acquired pneumonia, issued an antibiotic, and advised to return if he was not improving in four weeks. Four weeks later, he had ongoing sputum production. A full blood picture revealed the following: 1. What is the most significant abnormality? 2. ...

This paper describes phonological development in children with Down syndrome paying particular attention to underlying deficits and intervention strategies. The first section provides an overview of factors believed to influence phonological development in this population. The second section describes four aspects of Down syndrome phonology: (1) the prelinguistic stage; (2) the transition to sp...