Acquisition Of Morphology Research Articles

Low-temperature resin embedding of the whole brain for various precise structures dissection

Resin embedding combined with ultra-thin sectioning has been widely used in microscopic and electron imaging to acquire precise structural information of biological tissues. However, the existing embedding method was detrimental to quenchable fluorescent signals of precise structures and pH-insensitive fluorescent dyes. Here, we developed a low-temperature chemical polymerization method named HM20-T to maintain weak signals of various precise structures and to decrease background fluorescence. The fluorescence preservation ratio of green fluorescent protein (GFP) tagged presynaptic elements and tdTomato labeled axons doubled. The HM20-T method was suitable for a variety of fluorescent dyes, such as DyLight 488 conjugated Lycopersicon esculentum lectin. Moreover, the brains also retained immunoreactivity after embedding. In summary, the HM20-T method was suitable for the characterization of multi-color labeled precise structures, which would contribute to the acquisition of complete morphology of various biological tissues and to the investigation of composition and circuit connection in the whole brain.

Addressing the Joint Impact of Temperature and pH on Vibrio harveyi Adaptation in the Time of Climate Change.

Global warming and acidification of the global ocean are two important manifestations of the ongoing climate change. To characterize their joint impact on Vibrio adaptation and fitness, we analyzed the temperature-dependent adaptation of Vibrio harveyi at different pHs (7.0, 7.5, 8.0, 8.3 and 8.5) that mimic the pH of the world ocean in the past, present and future. Comparison of V. harveyi growth at 20, 25 and 30 °C show that higher temperature per se facilitates the logarithmic growth of V. harveyi in nutrient-rich environments in a pH-dependent manner. Further survival tests carried out in artificial seawater for 35 days revealed that cell culturability declined significantly upon incubation at 25 °C and 30 °C but not at 20 °C. Moreover, although acidification displayed a negative impact on cell culturability at 25 °C, it appeared to play a minor role at 30 °C, suggesting that elevated temperature, rather than pH, was the key player in the observed reduction of cell culturability. In addition, analyses of the stressed cell morphology and size distribution by epifluorescent microscopy indicates that V. harveyi likely exploits different adaptation strategies (e.g., acquisition of coccoid-like morphology) whose roles might differ depending on the temperature-pH combination.

How frequent are these verbs?

In monolingual (L1) acquisition, children produce target-like subject-verb agreement early in development in both Spanish (Grinstead 1998) and English (Guasti 2002). However, in heritage simultaneous bilinguals (2L1) and child second language acquirers (L2), agreement morphology shows variability (Goldin 2020; Herschensohn & Stevenson 2005) due to age of acquisition (AoA) effects. Lexical frequency is another factor that has been shown to play a role in modulating L1 (i.e. Ambridge et al. 2015) and heritage acquisition (i.e. Giancaspro 2017, 2020), but little is known about its effect in child L2. This study explores the extent to which verb lexical frequency plays a role in the acquisition of verb morphology for bilingual children with differing AoA, comparing 42 2L1 heritage children with 46 L2 Spanish learners with AoA of 5;0. They participated in a Spanish fill-in-the-blanks production task. The results of an analysis focused on singular correr and comer (chosen because they differ in only one phoneme) indicated that responses to comer, the more frequent verb, were more target-like for both groups, and that frequency showed a stronger effect for heritage 2L1 children than for L2 children, while also modulating non-target-like responses. We discuss these findings with implications for bilingual development and education.

Book Review: William Forshaw, The Acquisition of Complex Morphology: Insights from Murrinhpatha (Trends in Language Acquisition Research, Volume 30)

Book Review: William Forshaw, <i>The Acquisition of Complex Morphology: Insights from Murrinhpatha</i> (<i>Trends in Language Acquisition Research</i>, Volume 30)

Ana dil Türkçe konuşanların ikinci dil Rusçada görünüş bilgisini edinimi

This study examines the acquisition of functional morphology which overtly marks lexical aspect in Russian by adult second language (L2) learners of Turkish. Russian and Turkish are different in the ways they mark both grammatical and lexical aspects. In Russian, both grammatical and lexical (telic) aspects are marked by overt verbal morphology. In Turkish, however, while the grammatical aspect of verbs is marked by inflectional morphemes, which also express tense and/or mood (Kornfilt, 1997), lexical aspect (telicity) is marked by quantized nominal arguments combined with dynamic verbs. We tested 16 L1 Turkish/L2 Russian learners and 16 L1 Russian speakers on a Semantic Entailment (SE) task with telicity and boundedness semantic features and a Truth-Value Judgment (TVJ) task involving sentences with perfective and imperfective forms including quantity and non-quantity internal argument themes. The results of the SE task indicated that L2 Russian speakers were not as successful as L1 Russian speakers in choosing the most logical entailment to perfective sentences rather than imperceptive sentences. The differences between the two groups were statistically significant. The results of the TVJ task also indicated that L2 Russian speakers were less successful than L1 Russian speakers in matching perfective and imperfective sentences with correct pictures. These findings support the claim that adult L2 speakers have difficulty with the acquisition of functional morphology, in particular aspectual morphology and its telicity feature.

Does Japanese/German L1 Metrical and Tonal Structure Constrain the Acquisition of French L2 Morphology?

In different studies dedicated to the acquisition of verbal morphology by bilingual children or by L2 learners, it has been noted that differences in the acquisition process cannot be accounted for by only considering the distance between L1 and L2 morphology. Some forms, such as auxiliaries, may occur in L2 productions without being motivated by L1 morphology. To account for this, the prosodic transfer hypothesis—according to which the acquisition of morphology in the non-dominant language is influenced by the prosody of the dominant language—has been formulated. That prosodic features may influence the acquisition of morphology is interesting as it shows that the acquisition process must be apprehended by considering interfaces and interrelations between the various levels of linguistic description. The aim of this contribution is thus twofold: (i) clarifying to which aspects of prosody prosodic transfer hypothesis refers (specifically, among tonal and metrical prosodic elements, which one comes into play to account for morphological development); and (ii) explaining the importance of considering grammatical interfaces in study on L2 development. To do so, an exploratory study, which relies on the analysis of L2 French narratives produced by two learners with L1 Japanese and two with L1 German, was achieved. This preliminary analysis of the data suggests that metrical structure—more precisely, the nature of the basic metrical unit—may constrain the occurrence of auxiliary and vowel-final forms in the productions of Japanese learners.

Rejecting Competence – Essentialist Constructs Reproduce Ableism and White Supremacy in Linguistic Theory: A Commentary on “Undoing Competence: Coloniality, Homogeneity, and the Overrepresentation of Whiteness in Applied Linguistics”

Rejecting Competence – Essentialist Constructs Reproduce Ableism and White Supremacy in Linguistic Theory: A Commentary on “Undoing Competence: Coloniality, Homogeneity, and the Overrepresentation of Whiteness in Applied Linguistics”

Testing the Competing Systems Hypothesis: Further evidence from aspect in tutored L1-English–L2-Spanish

This study tests the Competing Systems Hypothesis (CSH) as applied to adult second language acquisition of aspect in Spanish. The CSH purports that differences among tutored and untutored learners result from competition between one system of underlying grammatical knowledge and another of learned metalinguistic knowledge in tutored learners (TLs). Twenty-nine first language (L1) English and second language (L2) Spanish (L1-English–L2-Spanish) TLs and 29 native Spanish speakers completed three tasks examining knowledge of Spanish aspect. A Cloze Task targeted typical use of preterit and imperfect morphology, while a Semantic Entailments Task assessed acquired knowledge of entailments falling out from convergence on the aspectual system. Finally, a Binary-Choice Task targeted three pedagogical simplifications common to L1-English–L2-Spanish textbooks: adverbials that ‘go with’ the preterit or imperfect, ‘meaning-changing’ verbs in preterit, and the lower frequency of stative verbs in preterit. Results align with the CSH in that TLs performed above 80% accuracy on preterit and imperfect items in the Cloze Task, indicating acquisition of Spanish aspectual morphology. The Semantic Entailments Task further shows TLs converge on underlying knowledge of grammatical aspect by making a significant distinction between logical and illogical entailments. Finally, competition between the underlying grammatical system and learned metalinguistic knowledge is evidenced in the Binary-Choice Task where TLs are less accurate with preterit; specifically, TLs demonstrate effects from pedagogical simplifications regarding adverbials and ‘meaning-changing’ verbs.

Book Review: Veronica Mattes, Sabine Sommer-Lolei, Katharina Korecky-Kröll and Wolfgang U. Dressler (Eds.), The acquisition of derivational morphology: A cross-linguistic perspective

Book Review: Veronica Mattes, Sabine Sommer-Lolei, Katharina Korecky-Kröll and Wolfgang U. Dressler (Eds.), <i>The acquisition of derivational morphology: A cross-linguistic perspective</i>

Taking molecular pathology to the next level: Whole slide multicolor confocal imaging with the Pannoramic Confocal digital pathology scanner.

The emergence and fast advance of digital pathology allows the acquisition, digital storage, interactive recall and analysis of morphology at the tissue level. When applying immunohistochemistry, it also affords the correlation of morphology with the expression of one or two specific molecule of interest. The rise of fluorescence pathology scanners expands the number of detected molecules based on multiplex labeling. The Pannoramic Confocal (created by 3DHistech, Hungary) is a first-of-the-kind digital pathology scanner that affords not only multiplexed fluorescent detection on top of conventional transmission imaging, but also confocality. We have benchmarked this scanner in terms of stability, precision, light efficiency, linearity and sensitivity. X-Y stability and relocalisation precision were well below resolution limit (≤50 nm). Light throughput in confocal mode was 4-5 times higher than that of a point scanning confocal microscope, yielding similar calculated confocal intensities but with the potential for improving signal to noise ratio or scan speed. Response was linear with R2 ≥ 0.9996. Calibrated measurements showed that using indirect labeling ≥2000 molecules per cell could be well detected and imaged on the cell surface. Both standard-based and statistical post-acquisition flatfield corrections are implemented. We have also measured the point spread function (PSF) of the instrument. The dimensions of the PSF are somewhat larger and less symmetric than of the theoretical PSF of a conventional CLSM, however, the spatial homogeneity of these parameters allows for obtaining a specific system PSF for each optical path and using it for optional on-the-fly deconvolution. In conclusion, the Pannoramic Confocal provides sensitive, quantitative widefield and confocal detection of multiplexed fluorescence signals, with optical sectioning and 3D reconstruction, in addition to brightfield transmission imaging. High speed scanning of large samples, analysis of tissue heterogeneity, and detection of rare events open up new ways for quantitatively analyzing tissue sections, organoid cultures or large numbers of adherent cells.

ACQUISITION OF INDONESIAN IN A CHILD AGED 1 YEAR AND THE FACTORS THAT INFLUENCE IT

This study is aimed to find, study, analyze, and explain about the first language acquisition of a one year old child and the factors that affect it. The data source in this study is a one year old child. The data of this study is collected from the daily utterances of the one year old child. The child was observed in seven months. The observation took place in Banjar Adat Angantiga, Desa Petang, Badung, Bali. The method and technique of collecting data used in this study is the qualitative method with participated observation and unstructured interview. The note taking method is used in the observation and interview. The method and technique of analyzing data used in this study is qualitative descriptive method. The theory of early child language development by Otto (2015) is applied to analyze the acquisition of phonology, morphology, and syntactic in Bahasa Indonesia; factors that affect the language acquisition from KEMENRISTEKDIKTI RI (2018) is applied to analyze the internal and external factors that can affect the first language acquisition. The result of this study showed that in phonological aspect the one year old child can produce vocals /a/ /i/ /u/ /e/ /o/ /?/ /O/ perfectly. Most of the consonants are produced well whether it is in the beginning, in the middle, or in the final position. In the morphological aspect, it is found that the one year old child sometimes produce some meaningless words such as nyah nyah, mbew, yuh, etc. which are undefined and with no reference. In the syntactical aspect, the one year old child can produce one word and two words utterance, simple imperative sentences, negative utterance, and pronominal. The child language acquisition is affected by the internal and external factors. The internal factors are age, nature, genetic, and cognitive. The external factors that can affect the language acquisition are environment and technology.

Abstract No. 369 Facilitating lower dose quantitative DSA: a technique for simultaneous acquisition of blood velocity and vessel morphology during angiographic imaging

An interleaved x-ray imaging technique was developed to capture diagnostic quality angiographic images and contrast media kinetics in a single scan, while reducing patient radiation and contrast dose. This study assessed the accuracy of arterial velocity calculations using quantitative DSA (qDSA) and the interleaved technique.

Investigation of Acquisition of Oromo Inflectional Morphology in Typically Developing Children

This research is aimed at investigating patterns of acquisition of Oromo inflectional morphology in typically developing children. The study specifically tries to look into he acquisition of some verbal inflections (tense and aspect) and nominal inflections (number and case). Although linguistic descriptions on various aspects of the Oromo language have extensively been done, there were no research available on the child language acquisition in Oromo in general and inflectional morphology acquisition in particular. The study employed a descriptive cross-sectional research design. Data were collected from thirty children age range 3;0-7;11 years. The study employed primarily elicited production through picture naming method. The speech samples were transcribed first Oromo script and then phonetically transcribed using the IPA symbols. The results showed that some morphological processes attested in children’s productions. In this process, the children employed substitution, and overextension strategy in naming the pictures. In addition, majority of the children omitted noun inflectional morphemes, even at the age 6 through 7. Furthermore, the omission of some inflectional morphemes on the locative case and progressive aspect morpheme were observed, but the lexical morphemes are retained for the latter two items. As to the two past and future tenses, almost all participants performed well. This implies the children acquired these tenses even before the age of 3;3. Evaluating the children’s performance based on sex at the same age, the study revealed an insignificant difference among both sexes.

Genesis of Grammatical Structure of a Preschool Child Language

The problem of formation of grammatical structure of language in pre-schoolers is fundamental for understanding development of children’s speech. A brief description of the process of speech formation in preschool children suggests that a turning point in the development of speech is isolation of morphological elements of words from the merged speech material and their synthesis in their own utterances. However, differences in the actual data of researchers prevent discovery of a conditional standard by which grammatical structure of language is formed in ontogenesis. We considered the stages of speech development of a preschool child from birth to seven years old. We have singled out some important scientific facts for our study concerning the child’s acquisition of morphology and word formation. Thus, acquisition of grammatical knowledge is based on visual representation. This is quite a difficult way for a child, in which one can identify several stages: focusing on the sound form of a word, establishing a common sound form that is similar in different words, combining this form with a certain element, a phenomenon of the reality, establishing a “hard” connection of the sound complex with a specific phenomenon, and, as a consequence, projection of this sound complex to all words to denote the phenomenon in general (“model - type”).

U-shaped trajectories in an L2 context: Evidence from the acquisition of verb morphology

This study explores U-shaped behaviour in the acquisition of irregular verb morphology across three groups of Norwegian L2 learners of English. This phenomenon is especially interesting due to its significance for the organization and division between the mental lexicon and grammar. We hypothesized that if U-shaped behaviour was observable, then we would find significant differences in participants’ performance accuracy levels in conjunction with overregularization errors. We report results on the acquisition of irregular verb morphology, in addition to mean reaction times on different types of responses (accurate responses and overregularized ones). The final analysis includes data from participants from the 8 th grade (N=17), 9 th grade (N=19), and 10 th grade (N=15). We report results of the acquisition of irregular verbs, in addition to reaction latencies. Participants responded to an elicitation task to test performance on 40 items. The results are consistent with the later stages of U-shaped learning. We found an increase in overall accuracy co-occurring with a decrease in overregularization errors. We propose that the existence of U-shaped behaviour in the L2 is indicative of a general underlying input-driven learning pattern, and that this process is an integral part of acquiring knowledge upon exposure to irregularities in a productive paradigm.

Acquisition of Russian nominal derivation in monolingualism and bilingualism

The case study focuses on the acquisition of Russian derivational morphology in terms of nouns by monolingual (Russian) and simultaneous bilingual (Russian German) children of early age. The results are based on analysis of representative natural longitudinal recordings transcribed and stored in CHAT format using the CHILDES system. The first patterns and methods of nominal word-formation along with the morphemes used by children are revealed. The properties of word-formation that indicate the productive use of the nominal derivatives, such as the presence of simplex–derivative pairs, chains and word families, as well as occasionalisms are noted. The similarities and differences in the acquisition of nominal derivatives, including their semantic domains, in mono- and bilingual situations are discussed. Keywords: nouns, word-formation, derivatives, simplexes, compounding, Russian, German

Camel Urine Promotes Sensitization to Doxorubicin by Inhibiting Epithelial-Mesenchymal Transition and Modulating NF-κB-Snail Signaling Pathway in Breast Cancer Cells.

Background:Camel urine (CU) has been used as traditional treatment in the Arabian Peninsula for centuries. Although, researchers have reported CU anti-cancer effects, the exact mechanism(s) of action involved has not been fully elucidated. The epithelial–mesenchymal transition EMT is a phenotypic switch that promotes the acquisition of a fibroblastoid-like morphology by epithelial tumor cells, resulting in enhanced tumor cell motility and invasiveness. EMT has been shown to contribute to metastasis and chemoresistance of carcinomas. For that, in the present study, we have assessed the potential mechanism (s) by which CU exert its anti-cancer effects and its possible synergistic therapeutic effect with Doxorubicin (DOX) in breast cancer cells. Methods:Determination of anti-proliferative and apoptosis validation of CU was performed by 3-(4,5-Dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2,5,-diphenyltetrazolium bromide (MTT), annexin-V-fluorescein isothiocyanate assays, and Western blot. EMT protein markers, migration and invasion of cells were determined by Western blot or immunofluorescent staining, Scratch assay, Transwell invasion assay, respectively. Results:CU applied a significant anti-cancer effect on breast cancer cells via induction of DNA damage and apoptosis in a concentration- and time-dependent manner. Also, CU remarkably reversed the EMT by downregulating N-cadherin and Vimentin expression and upregulating E-cadherin expression. As a result, the stemness, migration and invasion of breast cancer cells were also inhibited, which was likely mediated by NF-κB-Snail signalling pathway and its downstream inflammatory effectors. CU successfully enhanced DOX cytotoxicity by reversing EMT which possibly through inhibition of NF-κB-Snail signalling and subsequently inflammation. Thus, our study provides new mechanistic bases for the therapeutic application of CU that may improve the outcomes of anti-cancer chemotherapy.

Child Heritage Language Development: An Interplay Between Cross-Linguistic Influence and Language-External Factors.

The current study investigated the mechanisms of heritage language (HL) development with a focus on case morphology. First, the effects of cross-linguistic influence (i.e., the influence of the properties of the societal language (SL) on the acquisition of the HL) was assessed by performing bilingual vs. monolingual, and between-bilingual group comparisons (Russian–Dutch vs. Russian–Hebrew bilinguals). Russian, Hebrew, and Dutch show differences in the marking of the accusative (ACC) and genitive (GEN) cases, and these differences were used as a basis for the evaluation of cross-linguistic influences. Second, the study evaluated the contribution of language-external factors such as chronological age, age of onset of bilingualism (AoO), languages spoken by the parent to the child (only HL, only SL, both HL and SL), and family language type (both parents are HL speakers, mixed families). Finally, we assessed how language-external factors might potentially mitigate the effects of cross-linguistic influences in bilinguals. Russian-Dutch bilinguals from the Netherlands (n = 39, MAGE = 5.1, SD = 0.8), Russian-Hebrew bilinguals from Israel (n = 36, MAGE = 4.9, SD = 0.9) and monolingual Russian-speaking children (n = 41, MAGE = 4.8, SD = 0.8), along with adult controls residing in the Russian Federation, participated in the study. The case production of ACC and GEN cases was evaluated using elicitation tasks. For the bilinguals, the background data on individual language-external factors were elicited from the participants. The results show that case morphology is challenging under HL acquisition—case acquisition in the HL is impeded under the influence of the properties of the SL. This is evident in the lower performance of both bilingual groups, compared with the monolingual controls who showed ceiling performance in the production of target inflection in the ACC and GEN contexts. More specifically, the acquisition of morphology is hindered when there are differences in the mapping of functional features (such as with Russian-Hebrew bilinguals) and/or the absence of this feature marking (such as with Russian-Dutch bilinguals). But the findings also point to the involvement of language-external factors as important mitigators of potential negative effects of cross-linguistic influence. In summary, HL development is an intricate interplay between cross-linguistic influence and language-external factors.

Early Acquisition of Plural Morphology in a Classifier Language: Data from Korean 2-4 Year Olds

ABSTRACT Korean is a classifier language in which bare nouns are not obligatorily number-marked. Children learning other classifier languages like Japanese and Mandarin are late in learning the plural morpheme. In this paper, we present two datasets that suggest that Korean plural marker -tul is acquired much earlier, in contrast to what has been previously claimed. In a comprehension study, we find that Korean children begin acquiring this morpheme by age 3, showing adult-like performance by age 4. We suggest that the higher frequency of plural marking on both types and tokens of nouns and the consistent marking of plural in the domain of definite nouns may facilitate Korean plural acquisition.

Acquisition of morphology by L2 children in naturalistic environments: a case of Japanese case markers

Abstract This study investigated the second language (L2) acquisition of Japanese case markers among children in naturalistic environments. L2 Japanese children with Chinese backgrounds (n = 187) and monolingual Japanese children (n = 280) were tested on their productive knowledge of four case markers: ga, o, ni, and de. Test scores correlated more strongly with length of residence (LOR) than age of acquisition in the current L2 group (LOR mean = 4.98 years). Most L2 children reached age-matched monolingual norms after an LOR of 2–5 years, although some did not reach the norms within this time frame. The nominative and accusative case markers, ga and o, were generally easier than the other two case markers, even though there are no equivalent morphological markers in Chinese. This indicates that the absence of these markers in the first language is not always a determining factor for the difficulty in naturalistic child L2 acquisition.