The Emotional Content of Children's Writing: A Data-Driven Approach.

Emotion is closely associated with language, but we know very little about how children express emotion in their own writing. We used a large-scale, cross-sectional, and data-driven approach to investigate emotional expression via writing in children of different ages, and whether it varies for boys and girls. We first used a lexicon-based bag-of-words approach to identify emotional content in a large corpus of stories (N>100,000) written by 7- to 13-year-old children. Generalized Additive Models were then used to model changes in sentiment across age and gender. Two other machine learning approaches (BERT and TextBlob) validated and extended these analyses, converging on the finding that positive sentiments in children's writing decrease with age. These findings echo reports from previous studies showing a decrease in mood and an increased use of negative emotion words with age. We also found that stories by girls contained more positive sentiments than stories by boys. Our study shows the utility of large-scale data-driven approaches to reveal the content and nature of children's writing. Future experimental work should build on these observations to understand the likely complex relationships between written language and emotion, and how these change over development.

Context Availability and Sentence Availability Ratings for 3,000 English Words and their Association with Lexical Processing.

Words that can be easily placed in contexts are more easily processed, yet norms for context availability are limited. Here, participants rated 3,000 words for context availability and sentence availability, a new metric predicted to capture information relating to textual variation. Both variables were investigated alongside other word-level characteristics to explore lexical-semantic space. Analyses demonstrated that context availability and sentence availability are distinct. Context availability covaries with concreteness and imageability, while sentence availability captures information relating to contextual variation, frequency and ambiguity. Analyses of megastudy data showed that both context availability and sentence availability uniquely facilitated lexical decision performance.

The nature and frequency of relative clauses in the language children hear and the language children read: A developmental cross-corpus analysis of English complex grammar.

As written language contains more complex syntax than spoken language, exposure to written language provides opportunities for children to experience language input different from everyday speech. We investigated the distribution and nature of relative clauses in three large developmental corpora: one of child-directed speech (targeted at pre-schoolers) and two of text written for children - namely, picture books targeted at pre-schoolers for shared reading and children's own reading books. Relative clauses were more common in both types of book language. Within text, relative clause usage increased with intended age, and was more frequent in nonfiction than fiction. The types of relative clause structures in text co-occurred with specific lexical properties, such as noun animacy and pronoun use. Book language provides unique access to grammar not easily encountered in speech. This has implications for the distributional lexical-syntactic features and associated discourse functions that children experience and, from this, consequences for language development.

Lexical connectivity effects in immediate serial recall of words.

In six experiments, we tested whether immediate serial recall is influenced by a word's degree centrality, an index of lexical connectivity. Words of high degree centrality are associated with more words in free association norms than those of low degree centrality. Experiment 1 analyzed secondary data to explore the effect of degree centrality in wordlists containing a mixture of high- and low-degree words. High-degree words were advantaged across all serial positions, independently of other variables including word frequency. Experiment 2 replicated this finding using an expanded stimulus set. Experiment 3 used pure lists with each list containing high- or low-degree words only (e.g., HHHHHH vs. LLLLLL). Once again, high-degree words were better recalled across all serial positions. In Experiment 4, each wordlist alternated between high and low-degree words (e.g., HLHLHL and LHLHLH). Recall of low-degree words was facilitated by the neighboring high-degree words, abolishing the overall high-degree advantage. Experiment 5 used a within-participant design and replicated the findings from Experiments 3 and 4 such that the high-degree advantage in pure lists disappeared in alternating lists. Experiment 6 compared high and low frequency words in pure lists while controlling for degree centrality between the item sets. A high-frequency advantage emerged, suggesting that the effects of frequency and degree centrality are separable. We conclude that degree centrality is a distinct psycholinguistic variable that affects serial recall as both (a) an item-level characteristic such that high (vs. low) degree words have greater accessibility in the lexicon and (b) an interitem property such that high-degree words facilitate the recall of neighboring words by enhancing the formation of associative links. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Boys Write About Boys: Androcentrism in Children's Reading Experience and Its Emergence in Children's Own Writing.

Gender bias exists in our language environment. We investigated personal name usage in two large corpora of language written for and by U.K. children aged 5-13. Study 1 found an overrepresentation of male names in children's books, largely attributable to male authors. In stories written by over 100,000 children, Study 2 found an overall male bias that interacted with age. Younger children wrote more about their own gender. With age, girls became more balanced yet boys continued to show a strong male bias. Our findings demonstrate a male-centered bias in both children's books and their own writing. We consider the power of written language to both shape and be shaped by cultural stereotypes via systematic biases in gender associations.

The influence of item-level contextual history on lexical and semantic judgments by children and adults.

Semantic diversity quantifies the similarity in the content of contexts a word has been experienced in. Four experiments investigated its effect on lexical and semantic judgments in 9- to 10-year-olds and adults. In Experiment 1, a cross-modal semantic judgment task, participants decided whether a visually presented word matched an audio definition. Both groups were slower to respond to words high in semantic diversity, and this effect was modulated by task demands. Experiment 2 used the same items but in a lexical-decision task. Children were faster to respond to words high in diversity but there was no effect in adults, failing to replicate previous work. Experiment 3 examined possible reasons for this, and Experiment 4 tested the effect of semantic diversity on lexical decision via secondary analysis of 2 large megastudies. Overall, the facilitative effect of semantic diversity on lexical decision was robust. Our findings show that contextual experience influences subsequent lexical processing, consistent with context inducing semantic representations that reflect continuities and gradations in meaning. These gradations are captured by semantic diversity, and in turn, this interacts with task demands to influence behavioral performance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Agent-patient similarity affects sentence structure in language production: evidence from subject omissions in Mandarin.

Interference effects from semantically similar items are well-known in studies of single word production, where the presence of semantically similar distractor words slows picture naming. This article examines the consequences of this interference in sentence production and tests the hypothesis that in situations of high similarity-based interference, producers are more likely to omit one of the interfering elements than when there is low semantic similarity and thus low interference. This work investigated language production in Mandarin, which allows subject noun phrases to be omitted in discourse contexts in which the subject entity has been previously mentioned in the discourse. We hypothesize that Mandarin speakers omit the subject more often when the subject and the object entities are conceptually similar. A corpus analysis of simple transitive sentences found higher rates of subject omission when both the subject and object were animate (potentially yielding similarity-based interference) than when the subject was animate and object was inanimate. A second study manipulated subject-object animacy in a picture description task and replicated this result: participants omitted the animate subject more often when the object was also animate than when it was inanimate. These results suggest that similarity-based interference affects sentence forms, particularly when the agent of the action is mentioned in the sentence. Alternatives and mechanisms for this effect are discussed.

Experience and generalization in a connectionist model of Mandarin Chinese relative clause processing.

Sentences containing relative clauses are well known to be difficult to comprehend, and they have long been an arena in which to investigate the role of working memory in language comprehension. However, recent work has suggested that relative clause processing is better described by ambiguity resolution processes than by limits on extrinsic working memory. We investigated these alternative views with a Simple Recurrent Network (SRN) model of relative clause processing in Mandarin Chinese, which has a unique pattern of word order across main and relative clauses and which has yielded mixed results in human comprehension studies. To assess the model's ability to generalize from similar sentence structures, and to observe effects of ambiguity through the sentence, we trained the model on several different sentence types, based on a detailed corpus analysis of Mandarin relative clauses and simple sentences, coded to include patterns of noun animacy in the various structures. The model was evaluated on 16 different relative clause subtypes. Its performance corresponded well to human reading times, including effects previously attributed to working memory overflow. The model's performance across a wide variety of sentence types suggested that the seemingly inconsistent results in some prior empirical studies stemmed from failures to consider the full range of sentence types in empirical studies. Crucially, sentence difficulty for the model was not simply a reflection of sentence frequency in the training set; the model generalized from similar sentences and showed high error rates at points of ambiguity. The results suggest that SRNs are a powerful tool to examine the complicated constraint-satisfaction process of sentence comprehension, and that understanding comprehension of specific structures must include consideration of experiences with other similar structures in the language.

Learning that classifiers count: Mandarin-speaking children's acquisition of sortal and mensural classifiers.

Two experiments explored two-to five-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's acquisition of classifiers, mandatory morphemes for expressing quantities in many Asian languages. Classifiers are similar to measure words in English (e.g., a piece of apple; a cup of apples), with the main difference being that classifiers are also required when counting sortals (e.g., yi ge pinguo or "one unit apple" in Mandarin means "one apple"). The current study extended prior studies (e.g., Chien et al., J East Asian Linguist 12:91-120, 2003) to examine Mandarin-speaking children's understanding of classifiers as indicating units of quantification. Children were also tested on their knowledge of numerals to assess the relationship between children's acquisition of numerals and classifiers. The findings suggest that children first notice that sortal classifiers specify properties such as shape. Only after learning some numerals do they begin to work out how classifiers indicate units of quantification. By age four, children scored above chance on most classifiers tested.

Demonstration of a glycoprotein derived from the Ceacam10 gene in mouse seminal vesicle secretions.

CEACAM10 was purified from mouse seminal vesicle secretions by a series of purification steps that included ion exchange chromatography on a DEAE-Sephacel column and ion exchange high-performance liquid chromatography on a sulfopropyl column. It was shown to be a 36-kDa glycoprotein with an N-linked carbohydrate moiety. The circular dichromoism spectrum of CEACAM10 in 50 mM phosphate buffer at pH 7.4 appeared as one negative band arising from the beta form at 217 nm. CEACAM10 was expressed predominantly in seminal vesicles of adult mice. Both CEACAM10 and its mRNA were demonstrated on the luminal epithelium of the mucosal folds in the seminal vesicle. The amount of Ceacam10 mRNA in the seminal vesicle was correlated with the stage of animal maturation. Castration of adult mice resulted in cessation of Ceacam10 expression, while treatment of castrated mice with testosterone propionate in corn oil restored Ceacam10 expression in the seminal vesicle. During the entire course of pregnancy, Ceacam10 might be silent in the embryo. A cytochemical study illustrated the presence of the CEACAM10 binding region on the entire surface of mouse sperm. CEACAM10-sperm binding greatly enhanced sperm motility in vitro.