The MacArthur-Bates CDI-III for Spanish-speaking Children

Parent report measures have been shown to be effective, valid and cost-effective means for obtaining information about early child language development. There are several measures available in multiple languages for children below the age of 3. There has been a need for such measures for older children. This study presents the development of a Spanish version of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory-III for children 2 ½ to 4 years of age. A total of 571 families of monolingual Spanish-speaking children from a diverse socio-economic group were asked to fill out the parent report measure in order to obtain a norming sample. Data are presented by age and socio-economic groups that show developmental growth curves for vocabulary production and sentence complexity. Norming tables that show variability by ages are presented. Additional information is given for a General Concepts section. This study presents a new parent report instrument that can be used both clinically and for research purposes.

Affect Control Theories: A Double Special Issue in Honor of David R. Heise

We introduce this two-part special issue that celebrates David Heise and his pathbreaking theories: affect control theory (ACT), affect control theory of the self (ACTS), and affect control theory of institutions (ACTI). These interlocking, multi-level, mathematically based theories explain a range of social processes, including impression formation, social interaction, trait and mood attributions, emotional experiences, emotion management, and identity adoption, and they do so in multiple languages and cultures. The 15 articles in this two-part issue test, apply, and develop the theories in new and innovative ways. After briefly summarizing each theory and Bayesian affect control theory (BayesACT), we highlight the key findings from each of the articles that follow.

Location-Based Internationalization and Localization With Mobile Computing

The Android system operates on many smartphones in many locales. Websites and web tools have their own requirements in day-to-day life. To reach the maximum users, the app and website should handle all the resources such as text strings, functions, layouts, graphics, and any other static data that the app/website needs. It requires internationalization and localization of the website and app to support multiple languages. The basic idea of this chapter is to present an approach for localizing the Android application according to the location data that the app received from the device, but many users do not allow the “access location” feature so this approach will be a dead end in this case. The authors have proposed some other techniques to achieve this feature of localization and internationalization by implementing the “choose language” service so that the app can itself optimize its content and translate it into the user's native language.

Family-Centered Intervention for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Multilingual Learners

This chapter explores principles of family-centered listening and spoken language (LSL) intervention, research, and best practices for children who are d/Deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) using multiple spoken languages and their families. Children with any degree/type of hearing loss who are in environments where multiple languages are spoken are referred to as deaf multilingual learners (DMLs). The language landscape for these children is varied. Some DMLs acquire a first language (L1) at home and are exposed to subsequent spoken languages in school or community settings; others are born into families where multiple languages are spoken from the beginning. While the chapter focuses on a framework of family-centered intervention applied to language development for DMLs whose families have selected LSL outcomes, the principles discussed broadly apply to DMLs using varied language(s) or modality(ies). Through analysis of best practices for interventionists and case studies, readers will understand bi/multilingual spoken language development for children who are DHH.

A Summary of Studies on Bon and Its Relationship with Buddhism

Bon Religion is the original religion of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. Today there are still Bon beliefs or cultural phenomena influenced by Bon Religion in areas where Tibetans live. This is an important content of Tibetology research today. Predecessors’ research on Bon Religion mainly focused on three major issues: the birth of Bon Religion, the historical staging of Bon Religion, and the relationship between Buddhism and Ben religion. Many results have been achieved. However, these are far from enough in terms of the research value of Bon Religion itself. The research on the time and place of the birth of Bon Religion has not yet been concluded. The main results are concentrated on the research of macroscopic issues, and the research on specific issues is insufficient. In response to these issues, researchers should pay attention to the re-discussion of existing results, use the method of combining literature and field investigations to pay more attention to specific regional issues, and at the same time strengthen the use of multiple languages.

Intelligence Eye for Blinds and Visually Impaired by Using Region-Based Convolutional Neural Network (R-CNN)

Intelligence Eye is an Android based mobile application developed to help blind and visually impaired users to detect light and objects. Intelligence Eye used Region-based Convolutional Neural Networks (R-CNN) to recognize objects in the object recognition module and a vibration feedback is provided according to the light value in the light detection module. A voice guidance is provided in the application to guide the users and announce the result of the object recognition. TensorFlow Lite is used to train the neural network model for object recognition in conjunction with extensible markup language (XML) and Java in Android Studio for the programming language. For future works, improvements can be made to enhance the functionality of the Intelligence Eye application by increasing the object detection capacity in the object recognition module, add menu settings for vibration intensity in light detection module and support multiple languages for the voice guidance.

Tears in Heaven: Tracing the Contours of a Pan-European Transconfessional Genre

This article explores the genesis, proliferation, and readership of an understudied genre of religious poetry in early modern Europe. The weeping poem—a devotional literary genre combining elements of epic narrative and Petrarchan lyric that focused specifically on the religious grief of biblical figures—swept across Europe in the forty years around the turn of the seventeenth century. Although this genre was instigated by the Italian Luigi Tansillo’s 1560 Le Lagrime di San Pietro and has often been read as exhibiting a distinctively Counter-Reformation spirituality, our survey of weeping poems uncovers the surprising reach of this genre across multiple languages and even into Protestant England. The range and popularity of this specific kind of weeping poetry across early modern national, linguistic, and confessional lines shows how this constellation of texts transmitted a new form of devotional affect founded on imaginative identification with weeping biblical narrators. In other words, these poems demonstrate how interiority, rather than factional political or theological difference, could be the basis for new emotional communities of worship. Moreover, the relative obscurity of this genre to scholars prompts new questions around the viability of continuing to explore early modern European literary traditions from the perspective of nationalist/linguistic/confessional frameworks.

Event and Entity Coreference Across Five Languages: Effects of Context and Referring Expression

Current work on coreference focuses primarily on entities, often leaving unanalysed the use of anaphors to corefer with antecedents such as events and textual segments. Moreover, the anaphoric forms that speakers use for entity and non-entity coreference are not mutually exclusive. This ambiguity has been the subject of recent work in English, with evidence of a split between comprehenders' preferential interpretation of personal versus demonstrative pronouns. In addition, comprehenders are shown to be sensitive to antecedent complexity and aspectual status, two verb-driven cues that signal how an event is being portrayed. Here we extend this work via a comparison across five languages (English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish). With a story-continuation experiment, we test how different referring expressions corefer with entity and event antecedents and whether verbal features such as argument structure and aspect influence this choice. Our results show widely consistent, not categorical biases across languages: entity coreference is favoured for personal pronouns and event coreference for demonstratives. Antecedent complexity increases the rate at which anaphors are taken to corefer with an event antecedent, but portraying an event as completed does not reach statistical significance (though showing quite uniform patterns). Lastly, we report a comparison of the same referring expressions to refer to entity and event antecedents in a trilingual parallel corpus annotated with coreference.Together, the results provide a first crosslingual picture of coreference preferences beyond the restricted entity-only patterns targeted by most existing work on coreference. The five languages are all shown to allow gradable use of pronouns for entity and event coreference, with biases that align with existing generalizations about the link between prominence and the use of reduced referring expressions. The studies also show the feasibility of manipulating targeted verb-driven cues across multiple languages to support crosslingual comparisons.

Family language policy among Québec-based parents raising multilingual infants and toddlers: A study of resources as a form of language management

This is the first large-scale study of resources as a form of language management – that is, a way of influencing children’s language practices. We introduce the distinction between child-directed resources (i.e., those providing parents with opportunities to engage with their children in the languages they are transmitting) and parent-directed resources (i.e., those providing parents with information about multilingual child-rearing). This pre-registered study focused on the awareness and use of, as well as the desire for, such resources among Québec-based parents (n=824) raising infants/toddlers (0-4 years) with multiple languages in the home. Data were collected with a questionnaire. Quantitative data were analyzed statistically, and qualitative data were analyzed using a computer assisted discourse study. We compared parents transmitting at least one heritage language – usually in addition to English and/or French (HL parents), and parents transmitting only English and French (non-HL parents). Overall, the findings show that non-HL parents were comparatively satisfied with existing child- and parent-directed resources in English and French. By contrast, HL parents had a stronger desire for additional resources in their HLs. All parents desired multilingual resources. The paper discusses the theoretical and practical contributions of this study as well as directions for further research.