The process of selecting individual trees by humans for forest management purposes is the result of a plethora of factors and processes that are hard to disentangle. And yet in the past many textbooks and other publications have maintained that this selection leads to somewhat unanimous results. In this study, we analysed the data of 36 so-called marteloscope experiments from all over Britain, ...

This study examines the impact of Parkinson's disease (PD) on communicative efficiency conveyed through prosody. A new assessment method for evaluating productive prosodic skills in Dutch speaking dysarthric patients was devised and tested on 36 individuals (18 controls, 18 PD patients). Three professional listeners judged the intended meanings in four communicative functions of Dutch prosody: ...

The existence of null arguments in Athabascan languages, and other polysynthetic languages, is a debated topic. We argue that, if the agreement on the verb is the argument, the so-called Pronominal Argument Hypothesis, languages such as Navajo do not have null arguments in the traditional sense. We then outline the diachrony of Athabascan object marking on the verb (by looking at the various co...

The World Bank recently released a study, marking the tenth anniversary of the NAFTA agreement that focused on the agreement's impact on Mexico's development. This study included a widely cited section that tested the effect that NAFTA had on Mexico's per capita GDP growth. The test used in the study found that NAFTA increased Mexico's per capita GDP by an extra 4-5 percentage points by the end...

This article addresses various issues in the diachrony of gender marking, such as the origin and typology of gender systems, pathways of change and the question of directionality in relation to the Agreement Hierarchy, and the semantic basis of changes in gender systems in relation to the Individuation Hierarchy. It also offers an overview of recent multidisciplinary approaches to the evolution...

The other, termed ‘indirect possession’, involves agreement marking of one of a small closed set of forms that precede the possessum noun. Many Oceanic languages have exactly two indirect host forms in this closed set. In these languages the forms always function to distinguish items intended for consumption (as in (2)b.) from a residual category of general possessions (as in (2)a.), as is the ...

A common feature of early speech is that children use case marking incorrectly. Several researchers have proposed that the child's mistakes are limited to the misuse of nominative case, and are corrected once the child acquires verbal morphology. In this paper I will show that this characterization of the problem is incorrect: children misuse all case forms, not just nominative case. In additio...

Redundant marking of grammatical relations seems to be commonplace across languages, and has been shown benefit learning as well robust information transmission. At the same time, languages also exhibit trade-offs between strategies such case or word order, suggesting that redundancy may dis-preferred in line with a tendency towards communicative efficiency. In present paper, we assess redundan...

Abstract This aptitude–treatment interaction study investigated the extent to which explicit and implicit cognitive abilities are differentially related learning outcomes under two corrective feedback conditions. One hundred thirteen intermediate English learners of Spanish were randomly assigned an (recast), (explicit correction), or control group after completing tests from aptitude batteries...

Evaluating the success of prediction and retrieval systems depends upon a reliable reference standard, a ground truth. The ideal gold standard is expected to result from the marking, labeling, and rating of domain experts. However experts disagree and lack of agreement challenges the development and evaluation of image-based feature prediction. This paper addresses the success and limitations i...