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Developmental Paths (developmental + paths)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	50%

Selected Abstracts

Parents' optimism is related to their ratings of their children's behaviour

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PERSONALITY, Issue 6 2006
Kati Heinonen
Abstract Associations between parents' dispositional optimism-pessimism (LOT-R) and their ratings of their children's behaviour were studied prospectively from infancy (M,=,6.3, SD,=,1.3 months) to middle childhood (M,=,5.5, SD,=,0.23 years) (n,=,212). One parent's higher optimism (overall LOT-R and component score) and/or lower pessimism (component score) at infancy predicted the same parent's own but not the other parent's ratings of the child's behaviour as less internalising and less externalising, and socially more competent and greater in self-mastery in middle childhood, even when controlling for child's positive and negative affectivity 5 years earlier. Ratings of lower negative affectivity in their infant predicted the same parent's increasing optimism and decreasing pessimism over 5 years. The associations between parental optimism and the child's social competence and self-mastery survived after adjustments for parental neuroticism and depressive symptoms. Neither parent nor child gender systematically moderated the associations. The current findings shed light on the developmental paths of children's positive behavioural outcomes. (n,=,144). Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

Temporal and selective association of multiple sigma factors with RNA polymerase during sporulation in Bacillus subtilis

GENES TO CELLS, Issue 2 2000
Masaya Fujita
Background During sporulation in Bacillus subtilis, an asymmetric division produces two cells, a forespore and mother cell, with which follow different developmental paths. The highly ordered programme of temporal and spatial gene activation during sporulation is governed by the principal RNA polymerase holoenzyme (E,A) and alternative holoenzyme forms containing the developmental sigma factors ,H, ,F, ,E, ,G and ,K, which appear successively during development. The control mechanism(s) of temporal and selective association of multiple sigma factors with core RNA polymerase is unclear. As a first step to addressing these issues, this report quantifies the amount of each subunit of RNA polymerase that is present in the sporangium during sporulation, and analyses in vitro the relative affinities of each sigma subunit for core RNA polymerase. Results Using quantitative immunoblot analysis, the amounts of E,A, E,H, E,E and E,K in relation to the total amount of RNA polymerase at appropriate time-points were found to be 15%, 1%, 6% and 2%, respectively. Therefore, the core RNA polymerase is predicted to be in excess. The level of core RNA polymerase and ,A remained constant during the transition from vegetative growth to sporulation, whereas the sporulation-specific sigma factors appeared successively, in the order ,H, ,E and ,K. Competition experiments between sigma factors in an in vitro transcription system revealed the dominance of ,A over ,H and ,E for open promoter complex formation. These results are inconsistent with the idea that late appearing sigma factors can displace earlier appearing sigmas from the core enzyme. Conclusions As the core RNA polymerase is in excess, the results suggest that successive sigma factors can bind to core RNA polymerase without having to displace earlier appearing sigma factors. Thus, the programme of gene expression during sporulation might not require mechanisms for the substitution of one sigma factor by another on the core RNA polymerase. [source]

Input and SLA: Adults' Sensitivity to Different Sorts of Cues to French Gender

LANGUAGE LEARNING, Issue S1 2005
Susanne E. Carroll
All second language (L2) learning theories presuppose that learners learn the target language from the speech signal (or written material, when learners are reading), so an understanding of learners' ability to detect and represent novel patterns in linguistic stimuli will constitute a major building block in an adequate theory of second language acquisition (SLA) input. Pattern detection, a mainstay of current connectionist modeling of language learning, presupposes a sensitivity to particular properties of the signal. Learning abstract grammatical knowledge from the signal presupposes, as well, the capacity to map phonetic properties of the signal onto properties of another type (segments and syllables, morpheme categories, and so on). Thus, even seemingly "simple" grammatical phenomena may embody complex structural knowledge and be instantiated by a plethora of diverse cues. Moreover, cues have no a priori status; a phenomenon of a given sort takes on a value as a cue when acquisition of the grammatical system reveals it to be useful. My study deals with initial sensitivity to cues to gender attribution in French. Andersen (1984) asked: "What's gender good for anyway?" One answer comes from a number of studies, done mostly in the last 20 years, of gender processing by both monolingual and bilingual speakers (among many others, Bates, Devescovi, Hernandez, & Pizzamiglio, 1996; Bates & Liu, 1997; Friederici & Jacobsen, 1990; Grosjean, Dommergues, Cornu, Guillemon, & Besson, 1994; Guillemon & Grosjean, 2001; Taft & Meunier, 1998). These studies provide evidence that in monolinguals and early (but not late) L2 learners, prenominal morphosyntactic exponents of gender prime noun activation and speed up noun recognition. Over the same period, a growing number of studies detailing the course of L2 gender acquisition for a variety of different target languages and learner types (e.g., Bartning, 2000; Chini, 1995; Dewaele & Véronique, 2000; Granfeldt, 2003; Hawkins & Franceschina, 2004) have provided support for the hypothesis that developmental paths differ for early and later learners of gender. Yet despite its obvious importance to SLA theorizing, few studies have dealt directly with adult learners' ability to detect and analyze potential cues to gender at the initial stage of exposure to the L2 (and this despite considerable discussion in recent years of the nature of the "initial state" of L2 learning). The study reported on in this article, which was actually conducted in the late 1980s, was an attempt to shed some light on what the beginning learner can do with the gender attribution problem. This study was, at that time, and is even now, an anomaly; most research dealing with "input" provided descriptions of what people say to learners, not what learners can perceive and represent. Indeed, most studies that shed light on the initial analytical capacities of absolute beginners were concerned with "perceptual" learning, that is, with the acquisition of phonetic or phonological distinctions (e.g., Broselow, Hurtig, & Ringen's [1987] study of tone learning or various studies on the perception of the /r/ vs. /l/ phonemes in American English by Japanese speakers). In this update, it is therefore worth mentioning Rast's (2003) dissertation and Rast and Dommergues (2003), which is based on it, which examined the results of the first 8 hr of instructed learning of Polish by francophone adults. My study asked if anglophone adults, with little or no prior exposure to French, given auditory stimuli, were equally sensitive to phonological, morphosyntactic, or semantic cues to French gender classes. The issue of what learners can detect in the signal and encode is an empirical one. I presented 88 adult English speakers with highly patterned data in list form, namely, auditory sequences of [Det + N]French + translation equivalentEnglish forms. The patterns, all true generalizations, were drawn from linguistic descriptions of French. These cues are believed by grammarians of the language to be "psychologically real" to native speakers. I then measured in 3 different ways what my participants had acquired. Given the extreme limitations on the input (no visual supports to identify referents of names), the participants performed pretty well. Moreover, they proved to be highly sensitive to "natural" semantic and morphological patterns and could generalize accurately from learned instances to novel exemplars. These patterns, however, are not directly instantiated in the speech signal; they are abstractions imposed on the stimuli by human linguistic cognition. Moreover, although it would be inaccurate to describe the learning patterns as "transfer"(because English nouns have no gender feature), prior knowledge seemed to be implicated in the results. Above all, these Anglophones appear to perceive the gender learning problem as a semantic one and to make use of "top-down" information in solving it. It follows that the pattern detection that they can do when listening to speech is clearly biased by what they already know. These results, therefore, provide support for hypotheses that the initial state is to be defined in terms of the transfer of first language (L1) grammatical knowledge and/or the transfer of L1-based processing procedures. [source]

A tale of networks and policies: prolegomena to an analysis of irregular migration careers and their developmental paths

POPULATION, SPACE AND PLACE (PREVIOUSLY:-INT JOURNAL OF POPULATION GEOGRAPHY), Issue 3 2010
Martina Cvajner
Abstract In recent decades, large-scale irregular migration flows and systems have developed across Europe. Although such systems involve most European countries and are often treated as being similar, their structures and dynamics are quite different. Some irregular migration systems have developed through clandestine entries, while other systems are almost entirely the result of overstaying. Some systems have been structured around a sequence of self-contained spells of irregular work, while others have involved long-term irregular residence. Some have coupled specific flows with specific niches in the occupational structures, while others have shown no significant connections with specific sectors of employment. This paper is based on what has been learned from an immigrant life-history project carried out in Italy in recent years, and describes three different types of irregular migratory systems that are themselves rooted in three different kinds of migration careers: atomistic, volume-based and structured. The paper argues that the distinction between different irregular migration systems is crucial both for structural and developmental analysis. Differences in the structure of irregular migration systems should also be taken into account in the analyses of the impact of different migration control policies. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]