Information structure in Makhuwa: Electrophysiological evidence for a universal processing account.

There is evidence from both behavior and brain activity that the way information is structured, through the use of focus, can up-regulate processing of focused constituents, likely to give prominence to the relevant aspects of the input. This is hypothesized to be universal, regardless of the different ways in which languages encode focus. In order to test this universalist hypothesis, we need to go beyond the more familiar linguistic strategies for marking focus, such as by means of intonation or specific syntactic structures (e.

Overrated gaps: Inter-speaker gaps provide limited information about the timing of turns in conversation.

Corpus analyses have shown that turn-taking in conversation is much faster than laboratory studies of speech planning would predict. To explain fast turn-taking, Levinson and Torreira (2015) proposed that speakers are highly proactive: They begin to plan a response to their interlocutor's turn as soon as they have understood its gist, and launch this planned response when the turn-end is imminent. Thus, fast turn-taking is possible because speakers use the time while their partner is talking to plan their own utterance.

Forgotten Little Words: How Backchannels and Particles May Facilitate Speech Planning in Conversation?

In everyday conversation, turns often follow each other immediately or overlap in time. It has been proposed that speakers achieve this tight temporal coordination between their turns by engaging in linguistic dual-tasking, i.e.

Working Together: Contributions of Corpus Analyses and Experimental Psycholinguistics to Understanding Conversation.

As conversation is the most important way of using language, linguists and psychologists should combine forces to investigate how interlocutors deal with the cognitive demands arising during conversation. Linguistic analyses of corpora of conversation are needed to understand the structure of conversations, and experimental work is indispensable for understanding the underlying cognitive processes. We argue that joint consideration of corpus and experimental data is most informative when the utterances elicited in a lab experiment match those extracted from a corpus in relevant ways.

Benefit of physiotherapeutic treatment in children with torticollis.

Introduction: The incidence of torticollis, which is often accompanied by some degree of plagiocephaly in infants, has remained increased since the introduction of the supine sleeping position to prevent sudden infant death. Recently, instruments allowing quantitative measurement of torticollis and related pathology have been developed and validated. The aim of the present study was to monitor a cohort of children with torticollis using a standardised protocol including valid and reliable measurements.

Development of spatial preferences for counting and picture naming.

The direction of object enumeration reflects children's enculturation but previous work on the development of such spatial preferences has been inconsistent. Therefore, we documented directional preferences in finger counting, object counting, and picture naming for children (4 groups from 3 to 6 years, N = 104) and adults (N = 56). We found a right-side preference for finger counting in 3- to 6-year-olds and a left-side preference for counting objects and naming pictures by 6 years of age.

18-Month-Olds Predict Specific Action Mistakes Through Attribution of False Belief, Not Ignorance, and Intervene Accordingly.

This study employed a new "anticipatory intervening" paradigm to tease apart false belief and ignorance-based interpretations of 18-month-olds' helpful informing. We investigated in three experiments whether 18-month-old infants inform an adult selectively about one of the two locations depending on the adult's belief about which of the two locations held her toy. In experiments 1 and 2, the adult falsely believed that one of the locations held her toy.

The end-state comfort effect in 3- to 8-year-old children in two object manipulation tasks.

The aim of the study was to compare 3- to 8-year-old children's propensity to anticipate a comfortable hand posture at the end of a grasping movement (end-state comfort effect) between two different object manipulation tasks, the bar-transport task, and the overturned-glass task. In the bar-transport task, participants were asked to insert a vertically positioned bar into a small opening of a box. In the overturned-glass task, participants were asked to put an overturned-glass right-side-up on a coaster.

Eighteen- and 24-month-old infants correct others in anticipation of action mistakes.

Much of human communication and collaboration is predicated on making predictions about others' actions. Humans frequently use predictions about others' action mistakes to correct others and spare them mistakes. Such anticipatory correcting reveals a social motivation for unsolicited helping.

[Positional plagiocephaly in infants can be prevented].

The prevalence of positional plagiocephaly is increasing. A systematic database search (Cochrane, MEDLINE, Embase, Cinahl and PEDro), critical appraisal and systematic evaluation of the quality of 14 selected studies show that the following are certain risk factors for the development of positional plagiocephaly: supine sleeping position, positional preference, one-sided handling of the child, male sex, delayed motor development, reduced neck mobility, too little "tummy time", firstborn, multiple births and premature children. Recommendations for prevention are provided.