Speakers sometimes modify their gestures during the process of production into adaptors such as hair touching or eye scratching. Such disguised adaptors are evidence that the speaker can monitor their gestures. In this study, we investigated when and how disguised adaptors are first produced by children. Sixty elementary school children participated in this study. There were ten from each schoo...

Many public sector reforms in developing countries fail to make governments more functional. This is typically because reforms introduce new solutions that do not fit the contexts in which they are being placed. This situation reflects what has recently been called the ‘capability trap’ in development—which results in many interventions producing new forms that are not functional in states acro...

Approximately 60% of children with speech and language impairments do not receive the intervention they need because their impairment was missed by parents and professionals who lack specialized training. Diagnoses of these disorders require a time-intensive battery of assessments, and these are often only administered after parents, doctors, or teachers show concern. An automated test could en...

On the 4th of December 1967, Hans Kamp sent his UCLA seminar notes on the logic of ‘now’ to Arthur N. Prior. Kamp’s two-dimensional analysis stimulated Prior to an intense burst of creativity in which he sought to integrate Kamp’s work into tense logic using a one-dimensional approach. Prior’s search led him through the work of Castañeda, and back to his own work on hybrid logic: the first made...

Speakers of all ages spontaneously gesture as they talk. These gestures predict children's milestones in vocabulary and sentence structure. We ask whether gesture serves a similar role in the development of narrative skill. Children were asked to retell a story conveyed in a wordless cartoon at age five and then again at six, seven, and eight. Children's narrative structure in speech improved a...

This paper investigated the temporal cues of discourse boundaries in L1 and L2 Mandarin speech. Spontaneous speech in this study was elicited by asking subjects to retell a short non-verbal film, the Pear Story (Chafe 1980), after watching. The findings of the study are that 1) for L1 Mandarin speech, final syllable lengthening is a salient cue of prosodic boundaries and the pre-boundary syllab...

Speaking is a complex task, and it is to be expected that speech will be effected when a speaker is faced with cognitive difficulties. To explore how cognitive impairment is manifested in a persons’ speech, we compared the speech of elders diagnosed with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) to others who are cognitively intact, while the speakers attempt to retell a story they just heard. We found t...

This is a personal story regarding one woman's experience of serving as a case study protagonist and later having a psychologist uncover her identity and retell her life story in the name of scientific investigative journalism. As a participant in a psychological case report, I believed that my confidentiality would be protected. Unfortunately, this case study participant found herself in the m...

When prompted, preschoolers advocate punishment for moral transgressions against third parties, but little is known about whether and how they might act out such punishment. In this study, adult demonstrators enacted doll stories in which a perpetrator child doll made an unprovoked attack on a victim child doll, after which an adult doll punished either the perpetrator (consistent punishment) o...