Production of definite and indefinite articles in typically developing English-speaking children and children with SLI

The present paper examines the production of definite and indefinite articles in English-speaking typically developing (TD) children and children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Twenty four English-speaking children with SLI (mean age: 7;5), twenty nine TD age-matched (TD-AM) children (mean age: 7;5) and eleven younger (mean age: 5;5) TD vocabulary-matched (TD-VM) children participated in a production task involving short stories without picture props based on Schafer and de Villiers (2000). Article production was examined in two different semantic contexts for the definite article, namely in the anaphoric and the bridging context. In the anaphoric condition, definiteness is established via linguistic means, whereas in the bridging condition via shared world knowledge. Indefinite article production was examined in the referential specific, non-referential predicational, and non-referential instrumental contexts. The referential specific context involves [+speaker, −hearer] knowledge and the non-referential predicational and instrumental [−speaker, −hearer] knowledge. Results showed that in the definite article contexts, all three groups performed better on the bridging compared with the anaphoric condition; in the indefinite article contexts, they had better performance on the non-referential predicational vs. the referential specific and the non-referential instrumental conditions. In terms of errors, the TD-VM children and the children with SLI produced significantly more substitutions than the TD-AM children in the definite article contexts. In the indefinite article contexts, the three groups did not differ in terms of accuracy or error patterns. The present results point towards problems in the discourse integration of entities that are part of the speaker's and hearer's knowledge in children with SLI and TD-VM controls, especially in definite articles. These problems are accentuated in the children with SLI due to their grammatical impairment and suggest that children with SLI exhibit a delayed acquisition profile.

Environmental and ecological economics in the 21st century: an age adjusted citation analysis of the most influential articles, journals, authors and institutions

We investigate the influence of articles, authors, journals and institutions in the field of environmental and ecological economics. We depart from studies that investigated the literature until 2001 and include a time period that has witnessed an enormous increase of importance in the field. We adjust for the age effect given the huge impact of the year of an article's publication on its influence and we show that this adjustment does make a substantial difference — especially for disaggregated units of analysis with diverse age characteristics such as articles or authors. We analyse 6597 studies on environmental and ecological economics published between 2000 and 2009. We provide rankings of the influential articles, authors, journals and institutions and find that Ecological Economics, Energy Economics and the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management have the most influential articles, they publish very influential authors and their articles are cited most. The University of Maryland, Resources for the Future, the University of East Anglia and the World Bank appear to be the most influential institutions in the field of environmental and ecological economics.

THE EXTENT OF MULTIDISCIPLINARY AUTHORSHIP OF ARTICLES ON SCIENTOMETRICS AND BIBLIOMETRICS IN BRAZIL

The publications in scientometrics and bibliometrics with Brazilian authorship expanded exponentially in the 1990-2006 period, reaching 13 times in the Web of Science database and 19.5 times in the Google Scholar database. This increase is rather superior to that of the total Brazilian scientific production in the same time period (5.6 times in the Web of Science). Some characteristics to be noticed in this rise are: 1) The total number of articles during this period was 197; in that, 78% were published in 57 Brazilian journals and 22% in 13 international journals. 2) The national and international articles averaged 4.3 and 5.9 citations/article, respectively; two journals stood out among these, the national Ciencia da Informacao (44 articles averaging 6.7 citations/article) and the international Scientometrics (32 articles averaging 6.2 citations/article). 3) The articles encompass an impressive participation of authors from areas other than information science; only one-fourth of the authors are bound to the information science field, the remaining ones being distributed among the areas of humanities/business administration, biology/biomedicine, health and hard sciences. The occurrence of adventitious authors at this level of multidisciplinarity is uncommon in science. However, the possible benefits of such patterns are not clear in view of a fragmented intercommunication among the authors, as noticed through the citations. The advantages of changing this trend and of using other scientometric and bibliometric databases, such as SciELO, to avoid an almost exclusive use of the Web of Science database, are discussed.

ANFIS BASED MODELS FOR ACCESSING QUALITY OF WIKIPEDIA ARTICLES

Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Due to the free nature of Wikipedia and allowing open access to everyone to edit articles the quality of articles may be affected. As all people don’t have equal level of knowledge and also different people have different opinions about a topic so there may be difference between the contributions made by different authors. To overcome this situation it is very important to classify the articles so that the articles of good quality can be separated from the poor quality articles and should be removed from the database. The aim of this study is to classify the articles of Wikipedia into two classes class 0 (poor quality) and class 1(good quality) using the Adaptive Neuro Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) and data mining techniques. Two ANFIS are built using the Fuzzy Logic Toolbox [1] available in Matlab. The first ANFIS is based on the rules obtained from J48 classifier in WEKA while the other one was built by using the expert’s knowledge. The data used for this research work contains 226 article’s records taken from the German version of Wikipedia. The dataset consists of 19 inputs and one output. The data was preprocessed to remove any similar attributes. The input variables are related to the editors, contributors, length of articles and the lifecycle of articles. In the end analysis of different methods implemented in this research is made to analyze the performance of each classification method used.

Manipulation in Newspaper Articles : A Political Discourse Analysis of Lexical Choice and Manipulation in Japanese Newspaper Crisis Reporting in the case of North Korea

This paper analyzes some forms of linguistic manipulation in Japanese in newspapers when reporting on North Korea and its nuclear tests. The focus lies on lexical ambiguity in headlines and journalist’s voices in the body of the articles, that results in manipulation of the minds of the readers. The study is based on a corpus of nine articles from two of Japan’s largest newspapers Yomiuri Online and Asahi Shimbun Digital. The linguistic phenomenon that contribute to create manipulation are divided into Short Term Memory impact or Long Term Memory impact and examples will be discussed under each of the categories.The main results of the study are that headlines in Japanese newspapers do not make use of an ambiguous, double grounded structure. However, the articles are filled with explicit and implied attitudes as well as attributed material from people of a high social status, which suggests that manipulation of the long term memory is a tool used in Japanese media.

New directions for research on SME-eBusiness :insights from an analysis of journal articles from 2003-2006

Previous research which consolidates the growing body of academic literature on small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and electronic business (eBusiness) has taken the form of meta-analyses which focus on analysing adoption factors, pre-2000 articles and a small number of journals. This paper makes a valuable contribution to the analysis of SME-eBusiness research by addressing the limitations of past literature analyses because it presents an extensive literature review of 120 SME-eBusiness journal articles published between 2003 and 2006 in 53 journals. This paper is unique, when compared to meta-analyses of adoption factors, because it analyses the SME-eBusiness literature broadly on the basis of the data collection approaches used, countries and eBusiness technologies studied, and the primary research objective of each article. This approach to the analysis revealed a number of limitations in the existing research such as the tendency: to treat SMEs and eBusiness applications homogeneously rather than as highly diverse, complex entities; to repeat adoption factor studies which have now reached saturation point; and to focus on SMEs themselves without considering the complexity of relationships which many SMEs have with family, friends, other businesses and eBusiness solution providers. These limitations highlight the need for new research directions which move beyond identifying and evaluating adoption factors. The paper concludes by outlining a number of broad research directions which might help overcome the limitations with the existing body of SME-eBusiness research.

Polster and Ross " Maths Masters" articles

Burkard Polster and Marty Ross's 'Maths Masters' articles (previously reviewed in Vinculum) now linked with the 'Education Supplement' in The Age online are recommended to readers. Polster and Ross will be sending out e-mail alerts with a short summary of the latest article plus a link to where it is sitting on The Age online. E-mail alerts can be requested via Polster and Ross's website mathsmasters@qedcat.com

Learning to read journal articles : an exploratory study of an Australian marketing class

Reading and comprehension form an integral part of educational practice. This study explores students’ learning experience in reading journal articles for a Marketing class. Two broad aims are considered: 1) to reflect on students’ reading capacity of journal articles, and 2) to investigate students’ reflection on their use of a learning framework developed to assist them in reading. Data were collected as part of an explorative pilot study from 31 students in Marketing tutorial classes at a university in Australia during a summer semester. The participants were asked about their learning experience in reading a Marketing journal article and their experience of using the learning framework as they read the given article. Findings indicate that students were positive about the value of the learning framework in assisting them to read, to understand the Marketing journal articles and to extract relevant learning themes from them.