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In this study, the influence of parental input on the acquisition of discourse connectives was investigated. Three factors were hypothesized to play a role in contributing to the course of language acquisition: first, an increase in age, and hence, an increase in conceptual abilities; second, short-term frequency effects (effects of parental input in the space of one recording); and third, long-term frequency effects (effects of the cumulative parental input over a longer period of time). The authors developed a growth curve analysis and used this to analyze data from a dense longitudinal corpus of a German boy aged 1;11.12—2;11.27. Results show that each factor has a significant effect on the acquisition of the German connectives aber `but,' damit `so that,' und `and,' weil `because,' and wenn `when' and should always be taken into account when studying connective acquisition. Furthermore, growth curve analysis promises to be an innovative tool to study factors influencing the course of language acquisition.

Respondents are more likely to disagree with negative survey questions (This text is boring. Yes/No) than to agree with positive ones (This text is interesting. Yes/No). The size of this effect, however, varies largely between word pairs. A semantic classification of adjectives in closed scale/absolute and open scale/relative types was predicted to explain this variation. To classify survey adjectives, a judgment experiment was conducted. Language users (N = 173) rated sentences in which an adjective was modified by the maximizer completely or the approximator almost: it should be possible to combine closed scale/absolute adjectives with these modifiers, in contrast to open scale/relative adjectives for which this is not the case. Results show that language users agree on which adjective and degree modifier combinations are acceptable and which combinations are unacceptable. Moreover, the two methods, almost and fully, show convergent validity. However, the rating of the same combination of a specific adjective and a specific degree modifier varies across contexts. This suggests that neither of the two methods allows for an unambiguous classification of adjectives. Hence, the distinction between closed scale/absolute and open scale/relative adjectives cannot explain variation in survey response effects. For semantics and pragmatics results indicate that context plays a crucial role in the linguistic behavior of adjectives and degree modifiers.

In many countries with multiparty systems, a decline in class voting has increased volatility and the need for comprehensive information about the political landscape among voters. Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) are online tools that match users to political parties and, as such, they hold a promise of reinforcing informational transparency and democratic representation. The current research investigated whether VAAs live up to this expectation by investigating to what extent VAAs affected users' political knowledge and vote choice in the Dutch national elections of 2012. Results show that VAA users feel that the VAA improved their political knowledge. In addition, those groups of VAA users who experienced a large knowledge increase, also relatively often indicated that their vote choice had been affected. This suggests that VAAs contribute to informational transparency by increasing knowledge among a potentially wide audience, and also that VAAs might increase democratic representation to the extent that VAAs persuade people to vote for the candidate that best represents their opinions. On the other hand, we found discrepancies between behavioural and perceptual measurements of the effect of VAAs on vote choice. This raises doubts about whether VAAs shape actual voting behaviours and knowledge, or rather perceptions of that.

In this study, we investigate whispered speech (and normal speech) as input for cochlear implants. We use normal-hearing participants presented with vocoder speech. Three tasks are involved: stress perception, gender perception, sentence melody perception and segmental intelligibility.

Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) show difficulties with grammatical morphology. Based on the data from 12 Dutch children with SLI, an information-theoretical model is proposed in which the noun-article set dependency is modeled as a channel. We propose that reduced capacity of this channel is responsible for article omission. The Kullback-Leibler divergence between input and output distribution of article production provides an index of the channel capacity, which is shown to correlate with the percentage of article omission and to lag behind in SLI development as compared to typically developing children.