L1 transfer in the acquisition of manner and path in Spanish by native speakers of English

In this article the authors argue that L1 transfer from English is not only important in the early stages of L2 acquisition of Spanish, but remains influential in later stages if there is not enough positive evidence for the learners to progress in their development (Lefebvre, White, & Jourdan, 2006). The findings are based on analyses of path and manner of movement in stories told by British students of Spanish (N = 68) of three different proficiency levels. Verbs that conflate motion and path, on the one hand, are mastered early, possibly because the existence of Latinate path verbs, such as enter and ascend in English, facilitate their early acquisition by British learners of Spanish. Contrary to the findings of Cadierno (2004) and Cadierno and Ruiz (2006), the encoding of manner, in particular in boundary crossing contexts, seems to pose enormous difficulties, even among students who had been abroad on a placement in a Spanish-speaking country prior to the data collection. An analysis of the frequency of manner verbs in Spanish corpora shows that one of the key reasons why students struggle with manner is that manner verbs are so infrequent in Spanish. The authors claim that scarce positive evidence in the language exposed to and little or no negative evidence are responsible for the long-lasting effect of transfer on the expression of manner.

The synthesis of dicobalt and dinickel complexes of trimethylsilylethynyl-1, 2-dihydrofullerene; characterisation by n.m.r. and structure of the first acyclic metal fullerene derivative: molecular structure of [η2-{2-H-1-(Me3SiC ≡ C)-C60}Ni2(η-C5H5)2]

The synthesis and characterisation of the complexes [η2-{2-H-1-(Me3SiC ≡ C)-C60}Co2(CO)6] (2)} and [η-2-{2-H-1-(Me3SiC ≡ C)-C60}Ni2η-C5H5)2] (3)} is reported, together with a single-crystal molecular structure for (3). This provides the first structural data for an acyclic metal derivative of [60]-fullerene.

Motivation in second language acquisition in Chinese research students in the UK

The present study sets out to examine motivation to learn English by Chinese research students in an informal setting. Data were collected, using semi-structured interviews, from four research students at two points in time during their first year in the UK. The main findings are: they believed that learning English was important; their main goal orientations were instrumental and extrinsic; they set learning goals and persisted to attain them; they valued their current learning environment in general and saw it as supportive of their goals; they held both positive and negative attitudes towards the British, which had differential effects on their motivation; their self-perceived support seemed to have a positive impact on their motivation and the development of self-confidence; they tended to attribute their success to stable causes such as the environment and failure to unstable but controllable causes such as effort. It is concluded that qualitative data of this kind may complement insights from quantitative research. Implications for target country institutions in the provision of support are discussed.

Production and processing asymmetries in the acquisition of tense morphology by sequential bilingual children

This study investigates the production and on-line processing of English tense morphemes by sequential bilingual (L2) Turkish-speaking children with more than three years of exposure to English. Thirty nine 6-9-year-old L2 children and 28 typically developing age-matched monolingual (L1) children were administered the production component for third person –s and past tense of the Test for Early Grammatical Impairment (Rice & Wexler, 1996) and participated in an on-line word-monitoring task involving grammatical and ungrammatical sentences with presence/omission of tense (third person –s, past tense -ed) and non-tense (progressive –ing, possessive ‘s) morphemes. The L2 children’s performance on the on-line task was compared to that of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in Montgomery & Leonard (1998, 2006) to ascertain similarities and differences between the two populations. Results showed that the L2 children were sensitive to the ungrammaticality induced by the omission of tense morphemes, despite variable production. This reinforces the claim about intact underlying syntactic representations in child L2 acquisition despite non target-like production (Haznedar & Schwartz, 1997).

Regularization of Descriptor Systems by Derivative and Proportional State Feedback

For linear multivariable time-invariant continuous or discrete-time singular systems it is customary to use a proportional feedback control in order to achieve a desired closed loop behaviour. Derivative feedback is rarely considered. This paper examines how derivative feedback in descriptor systems can be used to alter the structure of the system pencil under various controllability conditions. It is shown that derivative and proportional feedback controls can be constructed such that the closed loop system has a given form and is also regular and has index at most 1. This property ensures the solvability of the resulting system of dynamic-algebraic equations. The construction procedures used to establish the theory are based only on orthogonal matrix decompositions and can therefore be implemented in a numerically stable way. The problem of pole placement with derivative feedback alone and in combination with proportional state feedback is also investigated. A computational algorithm for improving the “conditioning” of the regularized closed loop system is derived.

Orthographic facilitation in oral vocabulary acquisition

An experiment investigated whether exposure to orthography facilitates oral vocabulary learning. A total of 58 typically developing children aged 8-9 years were taught 12 nonwords. Children were trained to associate novel phonological forms with pictures of novel objects. Pictures were used as referents to represent novel word meanings. For half of the nonwords children were additionally exposed to orthography, although they were not alerted to its presence, nor were they instructed to use it. After this training phase a nonword-picture matching posttest was used to assess learning of nonword meaning, and a spelling posttest was used to assess learning of nonword orthography. Children showed robust learning for novel spelling patterns after incidental exposure to orthography. Further, we observed stronger learning for nonword-referent pairings trained with orthography. The degree of orthographic facilitation observed in posttests was related to children's reading levels, with more advanced readers showing more benefit from the presence of orthography.

Deal size, acquisition premia and shareholder gains

This study examines the contradictory predictions regarding the association between the premium paid in acquisitions and deal size. We document a robust negative relation between offer premia and target size, indicating that acquirers tend to pay less for large firms, not more. We also find that the overpayment potential is lower in acquisitions of large targets. Yet, they still destroy more value for acquirers around deal announcements, implying that target size may proxy, among others, for the unobserved complexity inherent in large deals. We provide evidence in favor of this interpretation.

Knowledge acquisition in supply chain partnerships: the role of power

Knowledge is recognised as an important source of competitive advantage and hence there has been increasing academic and practitioner interest in understanding and isolating the factors that contribute to effective knowledge transfer between supply chain actors. The literature identifies power as a salient contributor to the effective operation of a supply chain partnership. However, there is a paucity of empirical research examining how power among actors influences knowledge acquisition and in turn the performance of supply chain partners. The aim of this research is to address this gap by examining the relationship between power, knowledge acquisition and supply chain performance among the supply chain partners of a focal Chinese steel manufacturer. A structured survey was used to collect the necessary data. Two conceptually independent variables – ‘availability of alternatives’ and ‘restraint in the use of power’ – were used to assess actual and realised power, respectively. Controlling for contingencies, we found that the flow of knowledge increased when supply chain actors had limited alternatives and when the more powerful actor exercised restraint in the use of power. Moreover, we found a positive relationship between knowledge acquisition and supply chain performance. This paper enriches the literature by empirically extending our understanding of how power affects knowledge acquisition and performance.