2½‐Year‐Old Children Use Animacy and Syntax to Learn a New Noun

We examine how attention to animacy information may contribute to children's developing knowledge of language. This research extends beyond prior research in that children were shown dynamic events with novel entities, and were asked not only to comprehend sentences but to use sentence structure to infer the meaning of a new word. In a 4 × 3 design, animacy status (e.g., animate agent, inanimate patient) and labeling syntax (agent, patient, nonlabel control) were varied. Across most events, 2 1/2‐year‐old participants responded as if they expected animate entities to be named. However, in a prototypical (animate agent‐inanimate patient) event condition, children responded differentially across different syntactic structures. Thus, the clearest evidence for attention to syntactic cues was found in the prototypical event condition. These results suggest that young children attend to the animacy status of unfamiliar entities, that they have expectations about animacy relations in events, and that these expectations support emerging syntactic knowledge.     

Banks winners in tournaments are difficult to recognize

Given a tournament T, a Banks winner of T is the top vertex of any maximal (with respect to inclusion) transitive subtournament of T. In this technical note, we show that the problem of deciding whether some fixed vertex v is a Banks winner for T is NP-complete. Received: 22 February 2002/Accepted: 20 June 2002 Supported by the START program Y43-MAT of the Austrian Ministry of Science. I would like to thank two thank the referees for a careful reading of the paper, for helpful remarks, and for many suggestions how to improve the presentation.     

Family Cap and Nonmarital Fertility: The Racial Conditioning of Policy Effects

Using an experimental design, this research examines the effect of the nation's first family cap on the births, abortions, and contraception use of over 8,000 women receiving public assistance in New Jersey. The family cap denies additional cash benefits to children conceived while the mother is receiving public assistance. Our research shows that a targeted welfare benefit manipulation does influence fertility behavior; however, the effect is conditioned by race. We find that Black women in the experimental group have a 21% lower birth rate and a 32% higher abortion rate than Black women in the control group. We do not find a birth effect for Hispanic or White women. We discuss the policy implications of the effects of a segmented family cap.     

Transnational Migration: Bringing Gender In

This article aims to bring gender into an even tighter transnational migration focus by broadening and deepening our original framework of “gendered geographies of power,” linking it more directly to existing and emerging scholarship. We examine and highlight previously neglected areas such as the role of the state and the social imaginary in gendering transnational processes and experiences. We identify topics that remain under‐appreciated, under‐researched, and/or under‐theorized. Finally, we initiate a discussion of how a gendered analysis of transnational migration can help bridge this particular research to other gendered transnational processes under study that do not privilege migration.     

Testing symmetry under a skew Laplace model

We develop tests of hypothesis about symmetry based on samples from possibly asymmetric Laplace distributions and present exact and limiting distribution of the test statistics. We postulate that the test statistic derived under the Laplace model is a rational choice as a measure of skewness and can be used in testing symmetry for other, quite general classes of skew distributions. Our results are applied to foreign exchange rates for 15 currencies.     

Estimation of Metabolic Rate Constants in PBPK‐Models from Liver Slice Experiments: What Are the Experimental Needs?

A mechanistic model is presented describing the clearance of a compound in a precision-cut liver slice that is incubated in a culture medium. The problem of estimating metabolic rate constants in PBPK models from liver slice experiments is discussed using identifiability analysis. From the identifiability problem analysis, it appears that in addition to the clearance, the compound's free fraction in the slice and the diffusion rate of the exchange of the compound between culture medium and liver slice should be identified. In addition, knowledge of the culture medium volume, the slice volume, the compound's free fraction, and octanol-water-based partition between medium and slice is presupposed. The formal solution for identification is discussed from the perspective of experimental practice. A formally necessary condition for identification is the sampling of parent compound in liver slice or culture medium. However, due to experimental limitations and errors, sampling the parent compound in the slice together with additional sampling of metabolite pooled from the medium and the slice is required for identification in practice. Moreover, it appears that identification results are unreliable when the value of the intrinsic clearance exceeds the value of the diffusion coefficient, a condition to be verified a posteriori.     

Foster parenting: A developmental model

This paper proposes a developmental framework for foster parents and outlines four distinct growth stages. Such a framework can be of value to program administrators who are required to assess foster parent development during the crucial matching process. To draw a distinction between each developmental stage, specific instrumental tasks and indicators are outlined.     

An Existential Approach to Risk Perception

Existential, or existential-phenomenological philosophical approaches to the social psychology of risk perception provide a novel framework for understanding issues that are common to all humanity, such as fear of death, freedom and responsibility, isolation and meaninglessness, as these anxieties are a function of existing, or being-in-the-world. These fundamental anxieties can be related theoretically to the ways people perceive risks within social and cultural milieus, and can also be used practically within case studies, as demonstrated in the three examples presented, which examine perceptions of climate change, food-related risks, and environmental awareness via a mixture of quantitative and qualitative techniques. The discussion focuses on the possible insights that can be gained from taking an existential perspective on risk perception, and relates notions of contemporary technologically-oriented societies to the existential challenges faced by individuals and societies in the contemporary world.