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We examined the concurrent relationship between narrative skills (the Renfrew Bus Story Test) and core language measures (vocabulary, grammar and verbal memory) at age 4 and the longitudinal relationship between core language and listening comprehension skills at age 7 in a sample of 215 children using latent variables and structural equation modelling. Our main purpose was to investigate to what extent narrative retell constitutes a unique influence on later language and listening comprehension skills. The results support a two-factor model of narrative retelling and core language representing different but related constructs at age 4. Narrative retell explained unique variance in later language skills but did not explain additional variance beyond the 58% explained by the age 4 language construct. Similarly, narrative retell predicted unique variance in later listening comprehension, but not beyond what was explained by core language skills at age 4. The strength of the relationship between narrative retelling at age 4 and the age 7 measures was not related to the level of narrative skills. The results indicate that age 4 traditional core language measures capture more of the skills that are important for later language and listening comprehension than narrative skills at the same age.

The article is dedicated to the implementation of utilizing of a wide range of teaching strategies, approaches and methods into the process of learning of foreign language of students, prove a set of effective pedagogical conditions for learning, as well as criteria for organizing extra curriculum in foreign language methodology. In addition, it illustrates how to outpace as an educator and the importance of prevalence of social net in the development of students speech.

With the increasing deployment of GPUs in many domains, it is important to enhance the dependability of GPU-based systems especially in mission critical environments. We believe that undefined behaviors present a major challenge for the CUDA platform, because its programming language and compiler are derived from traditional C/C++ languages. In this paper, we first present a suite of benchmarks for CUDA, which contains 77 categories of undefined behaviors corresponding to the core language in C11 standard. It is developed to evaluate how current CUDA compilers deal with undefined behaviors. Then, we present the design and implementation of a system that can detect and locate vulnerable code that may result in undefined behaviors in CUDA programs. Our system is composed of a program converter and a static analyzer; the former transforms CUDA programs into a portable and semantic-reserved C/C++ programs, and the latter performs analysis on the transformed programs to statically identify undefined behaviors. Using CUDA SDK and a set of real CUDA applications, we conduct extensive experiments to investigate the effectiveness of our system on finding undefined behaviors in CUDA C programs.

We present a type system for expressing size constraints on array types in an ML-style type system. The goal is to detect shape mismatches at compile-time, while being simpler than full dependent types. The main restrictions is that the only terms that can occur in types are array sizes, and syntactically they must be variables or constants. For those programs where this is not sufficient, we support a form of existential types, with the type system automatically managing the requisite book-keeping. We formalise a large subset of the type system in a small core language, which we prove sound. We also present an integration of the type system in the high-performance parallel functional language Futhark, and show on a collection of 44 representative programs that the restrictions in the type system are not too problematic in practice.

This work facilitates the usage of unsequenced execution policy as seen in C++20 standard library with the newly introduced OpenCL kernel language, C++ for OpenCL. By passing unseq, a global object of type unsequenced_policy, as an argument to selected C++ parallel algorithms, the function would then be vectorized with the help of clang and LLVM. This work complements the introduction of C++ for OpenCL, which brings the core language part of C++17 to OpenCL while leaving out the standard library part. In the best case, we see a whopping 6.9 time speedup.

Poor metaphor comprehension was considered a hallmark of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but recent research has questioned the extent and the sources of these difficulties. In this cross-sectional study, we compared metaphor comprehension in individuals with ASD (N = 29) and individuals with typical development (TD; N = 31), and investigated the relationship between core language and metaphor comprehension. Individuals with ASD showed more difficulty but also a more variable performance in both metaphor and literal items of the task used than individuals with TD did. This indicates that core language ability accounts for metaphor comprehension and should be considered in future research and interventions aiming to improve metaphor comprehension in individuals with ASD. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10803-021-04922-z.

Fodor’s “Language of Thought” (also called Mentalese) hypothesis—that we use a language-like, syntactic system in processing thoughts instead of natural languages—caused controversies in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics. While many researchers proposed their perspectives, both for and against, none of them addressed its evolutionary and sociocultural variabilities as far as I know. Accordingly, I provide a novel perspective on the hypothesis by discussing the interplay among our cognition, natural languages, evolution, and sociocultural factors. First, like one speaks personalized English as his/her idiolect, individuals have their own “Idiolects of Thought” as a derivative of Mentalese. Second, while Mentalese varies from individual to individual, “Core Language of Thought” is cognitively fundamental and largely shared across individuals.

The article focuses on the EuroComGerm research project, which is based on the principles of the multilingualism didactics. The article argues the approach of enhancing the language knowledge by applying the targeted foreign language onto the knowledge of previously acquired languages. The EuroComGerm is a concept that is based on parallel learning of related languages. H. G. Klein, one of the authors, believes that the future of language learning is in the receptive knowledge of language and in the development of listening and reading comprehension. In 1999 the project received an award as “European language label for the best innovative language projects” in Vienna.The EuroComGerm project was published in 2007 as a handbook, created by B. Huffayzen and N. Marx. The researchers identified “The Seven Sieves” as the linguistic indicators which served to analyze related languages in identifying their common and distinctive features. The article deals separately with each of the “Sieves”, and attempts to apply the technique on the example of a passage in a foreign, previously not acquired language using the knowledge of the German language.The present study confirmed the findings that the technique is effective and allows to understand the content of the text in an unknown language based on a sufficient level of language proficiency of a different language of the same language family (in our case, German language). This technique provides opportunities for learning more than three related languages: Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic, and Dutch., Стаття присвячена аналізу теоретичних основ проєкту EuroCom, який базується на засадах дидактики багатомовності та дослідженню можливості використання елементів запропонованої авторами проєкту методики у практиці навчання другої іноземної мови. Зазначено, що концепція ґрунтується на ідеї використання наявних мовних знань у процесі вивчення другої та подальших іноземних мов. Проаналізовано основні елементи методики EuroCom та перевірено дієвість дослідження на запропонованих авторами прикладах. Вказано, що методика була успішно апробована в Європейських школах.

Supporting language skills in the early years is important because children who begin school with stronger language skills continue to perform well later in their language as well as academic and socioemotional growth. This three-wave longitudinal study of 50 mother-infant dyads reveals that maternal sensitivity and maternal language at 5 months each uniquely predicts child language at 49 months, controlling for age, education, and maternal verbal IQ as well as maternal supportive presence at 49 months. These findings reinforce the importance of maternal sensitivity and maternal language in infancy for child language development and specify that early maternal sensitivity and language, apart from maternal age, education, and IQ as well as later sensitivity, contribute to child language development. Accepted version This research was supported by the Intramural Research Program of the NIH/NICHD, USA, and an International Research Fellowship at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), London, UK, funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 695300-HKADeC-ERC-2015-AdG).

Syntactic sugar refers to a certain syntactic structure added to the programming language. This syntactic structure has no effect on the function of the language, but is more convenient for programmers to use. Since syntactic sugar will be translated to the basic syntactic structure of the core language at the compilation stage, the relationship between the source program written with syntactic sugar and the execution of the core program is masked, and the compiled program is unfamiliar to programmers. It is not convenient for programmers to learn and debug source programs written with syntactic sugar. To solve that problem, this paper adopts the idea of resugaring for automatically transforming the evaluation sequence of the core language into the evaluation sequence of the surface language, and gives a cheap implementation using the existing bidirectional transformation tool BIRDS. The resugaring algorithms for both non-recursive and recursive desugaring transformations are implemented using Datalog, and the solutions to maintain two important properties of emulation and abstraction in the process of resugaring are studied.

Recent studies have integrated noninvasive brain-imaging methods and advanced analysis techniques to study associations between the location of brain damage and cognitive deficits. By applying data-driven analysis methods to large sets of data on language deficits after stroke (aphasia), these studies have identified the cognitive systems that support language processing—phonology, semantics, fluency, and executive functioning—and their neural basis. Phonological processing is supported by dual pathways around the Sylvian fissure, a ventral speech-recognition component and a dorsal speech-production component; fluent sentence-level speech production relies on a more anterior frontal component, and the semantic system relies on a hub in the anterior temporal lobe and frontotemporal white-matter tracts. The executive function system was less consistently localized, possibly because of the kinds of brain damage tested in these studies. This review synthesizes the results of these studies, showing how they converge with contemporary models of primary systems that support perception, action, and conceptual knowledge across domains, and highlights some divergent findings and directions for future research.

Blocked and event-related fMRI designs are both commonly used to localize language networks and determine hemispheric dominance in research and clinical settings. We compared activation profiles on a semantic monitoring task using one of the two designs in a total of 43 healthy individual to determine whether task design or subject-specific factors (i.e., age, sex, or language performance) influence activation patterns. We found high concordance between the two designs within core language regions, including the inferior frontal, posterior temporal, and basal temporal region. However, differences emerged within inferior parietal cortex. Subject-specific factors did not influence activation patterns, nor did they interact with task design. These results suggest that despite high concordance within perisylvian regions that are robust to subject-specific factors, methodological differences between blocked and event-related designs may contribute to parietal activations. These findings provide important information for researchers incorporating fMRI results into meta-analytic studies, as well as for clinicians using fMRI to guide pre-surgical planning.