Audiovisual Correlates of Interrogativity: A Comparative Analysis of Catalan and Dutch

Languages employ different strategies to mark an utterance as a polar (yes–no) question, including syntax, intonation and gestures. This study analyzes the production and perception of information-seeking questions and broad focus statements in Dutch and Catalan. These languages use intonation for marking questionhood, but Dutch also exploits syntactic variation for this purpose. A production task revealed the expected language-specific auditory differences, but also showed that gaze and eyebrow-raising are used in this distinction. A follow-up perception experiment revealed that perceivers relied greatly on auditory information in determining whether an utterance is a question or a statement, but accuracy was further enhanced when visual information was added. Finally, the study demonstrates that the concentration of several response-mobilizing cues in a sentence is positively correlated with the perceivers’ ratings of these utterances as interrogatives.     

Estimation with right‐censored observations under a semi‐Markov model

The semi‐Markov process often provides a better framework than the classical Markov process for the analysis of events with multiple states. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, we show that in the presence of right censoring, when the right end‐point of the support of the censoring time is strictly less than the right end‐point of the support of the semi‐Markov kernel, the transition probability of the semi‐Markov process is nonidentifiable, and the estimators proposed in the literature are inconsistent in general. We derive the set of all attainable values for the transition probability based on the censored data, and we propose a nonparametric inference procedure for the transition probability using this set. Second, the conventional approach to constructing confidence bands is not applicable for the semi‐Markov kernel and the sojourn time distribution. We propose new perturbation resampling methods to construct these confidence bands. Different weights and transformations are explored in the construction. We use simulation to examine our proposals and illustrate them with hospitalization data from a recent cancer survivor study. The Canadian Journal of Statistics 41: 237–256; 2013 © 2013 Statistical Society of Canada     

New Goodness-of-Fit Tests Based on Sample Quantiles

In this article power divergences statistics based on sample quantiles are transformed in order to introduce new goodness-of-fit tests. Quantiles of the distribution of proposed statistics are calculated under uniformity, normality, and exponentiality. Several power comparisons are performed to show that the new tests are generally more powerful than the original ones.     

Assessing student learning in the context of evaluating a chance course

This paper describes the use of different assessment methods to evaluate Chance courses in the NSF-funded Chance project. Multiple methods were used to measure changes in students' attitudes and beliefs about statistics, reasoning about probability and statistics, and ability to critique a newspaper article that reports statistical results. Samples of assessment materials and scoring rubrics used in the evaluation are included.     

THE EFFECTIVENESS OF FAMILY INTERVENTIONS IN THE TREATMENT OF PHYSICAL ILLNESS

Although a large body of research demonstrates that the family has a powerful influence on physical health, the evidence for the effectiveness of family interventions in physical illness is less conclusive. Family therapy and other family interventions appear to be most effective in chronic childhood illnesses such as asthma and diabetes. Family interventions have also been shown to be effective in the management of some cardiovascular and neurologic disorders and for the treatment of obesity. Family therapy appears to be more effective than individual therapy for some groups of patients with anorexia nervosa. This research supports the increasingly important role of medical family therapy in the new health care system. Recommendations for future research are discussed.     

The Effect of Firm and Host Country Characteristics on the Choice of Entry Mode: Empirical Evidence from Spanish Firms

When investing abroad firms must choose betweengoing alone or with a partner – the so-calledownership structure decision. Additionally,firms can enter a new country by acquisitionsor by greenfield investments – the foreignestablishment mode decision. These twodecisions have traditionally been analyzedseparately in the literature on entry mode.What is more, this literature has much lessanalyzed hybrid entry modes, like partialacquisitions. The aim of this paper is toanalyze how the different factors analyzed inprior research influence the choice of entrymode when jointly taking into account fouralternative entry modes: greenfield whollyowned subsidiaries, greenfield joint ventures,full acquisitions and partial acquisitions. Theempirical analysis was carried out byestimating a multinomial logit model over asample of FDIs made by Spanish firms. Ourresults also contribute to the knowledge ofspecific patterns in the choice of entry modeby firms from late investor countries, likeSpain.     

Planning for technological innovation: Part II—investment in technological change in three major industries

In an article in the December 1977 issue the author described an analytical method to determine the reaction of British industry to the oil crisis. The purpose of this paper is to carry forward the discussion by examining and comparing circumstances in three British industries between 1963 and 1975.The paper aims first, to show how and why the cost structures of these three industries differ; second, to examine changes forced upon companies by inflation of earnings, statutory control of prices and the oil crisis; and finally to assess how far these congruent economic forces have impinged on tangible and intangible investment.The data used for this study were drawn from British and Canadian official statistics but, as described in Part 1, a new analytical technique was devised to give due weight to the full range of investment expenditure.