The acquisition literature has documented several different types of misinterpretations of telic sentences by children, yet a comprehensive analysis of these child interpretations has not been attempted and a crosslinguistic perspective is lacking. This task is not easy, for, on the surface, children’s non-adultlike interpretations appear to be scattered and even contradictory across languages. Several cognitive biases have been proposed to explain given patterns (children initially adhere to a Manner bias, or alternatively a Result bias). Reviewing a wide range of studies on the acquisition of telic sentences in relation to tense-aspect markers, we show that children’s non-adultlike interpretations fall into three different patterns. We conclude that the diversity of non-adultlike interpretations that is found across child languages is incompatible with accounts that rely on these cognitive, language-independent principles, but instead is triggered by language-specific properties. Analyzing these patterns in detail, it appears that child learners across languages have problems with tense-aspect forms with variable meanings, in contrast to forms with a one-to-one form/meaning mappings which are acquired earlier. While adults use a context-sensitive interpretation of forms with multiple meanings, various semantic-pragmatic sources can explain children’s difficulties with interpreting such forms. All explanations that we identify across child languages rely on children’s immature command of pragmatic reasoning, albeit in very different ways for the three different patterns. Thus, by taking a crosslinguistic semantic approach and integrating detailed insights from the tense-aspect semantics of specific languages with universal pragmatic effects, we explain the non-adultlike interpretation of telic sentences in a variety of child languages in a comprehensive way.

Cryptococcosis is a worldwide and potentially fatal mycosis documented in wild and captive koalas ( Phascolarctos cinereus ) caused by Cryptococcus neoformans . Though mainly a subclinical disease, when the nasal cavity is affected, epistaxis, mucopurulent nasal discharge, dyspnea, and facial distortion may occur. This report describes a case of cryptococcosis in a koala where unilateral exophthalmos was the only evident clinical sign and magnetic resonance imaging and computed tomography findings are described. Both advanced imaging techniques should be considered as standard and complementary techniques for nasal cavity evaluation in koalas.

In this paper, we present some features of the European Spanish adaptation of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN), most of them related to specificities of the Spanish grammar as compared to English, the source language of the original MAIN (Gagarina et al., 2012). These two languages differ in e.g. 1) the use of 3rd grammatical person to address the hearer; 2) the ways of maintaining nominal cohesion: English (non-pro drop) vs. Spanish (pro-drop); 3) the verbal paradigm with regard to morphological tense and aspect morphology. Finally, preliminary results for micro- and macrostructure measures in the narratives of children with Spanish as L1 and L2 confirm their consistency across MAIN stories and procedures.

No abstract

No abstract