Infants' Acquisition of Grammatical Gender Dependencies

To successfully understand spoken language, listeners need to determine how words within sentences relate to one another. Although the ability to compute relationships between word categories is known to develop early in life, little research has been conducted on infants' early sensitivity to subcategorical dependencies, such as those evoked by grammatical gender (where the article form is dictated by the noun's gender). This study therefore examines whether French‐learning 18‐month‐olds track such relationships. Using the Visual Fixation Procedure, infants were presented with article–noun sequences in which the gender‐marked article either matched (e.g., la_FEM poussette_FEM “the stroller”) or mismatched (e.g., le_MASC poussette_FEM) the gender of the noun. A clear preference for correct over incorrect co‐occurrences was observed, suggesting that by 18 months of age, children's storage and access of words is sufficiently sophisticated to include the means to track subcategorical dependencies. This early sensitivity to gender information may be greatly beneficial for constraining lexical access during online language processing.     

Impact Factors and Risk Analysis of Tropical Cyclones on a Highway Network

Coastal areas typically have high social and economic development and are likely to suffer huge losses due to tropical cyclones. These cyclones have a great impact on the transportation network, but there have been a limited number of studies about tropical‐cyclone‐induced transportation network functional damages, especially in Asia. This study develops an innovative measurement and analytical tool for highway network functional damage and risk in the context of a tropical cyclone, with which we explored the critical spatial characteristics of tropical cyclones with regard to functional damage to a highway network by developing linear regression models to quantify their relationship. Furthermore, we assessed the network's functional risk and calculated the return periods under different damage levels. In our analyses, we consider the real‐world highway network of Hainan province, China. Our results illustrate that the most important spatial characteristics were location (in particular, the midlands), travel distance, landfalling status, and origin coordinates. However, the trajectory direction did not obviously affect the results. Our analyses indicate that the highway network of Hainan province may suffer from a 90% functional damage scenario every 4.28 years. These results have critical policy implications for the transport sector in reference to emergency planning and disaster reduction.     

Logistic discrimination using robust estimators: An influence function approach

Logistic regression is frequently used for classifying observations into two groups. Unfortunately there are often outlying observations in a data set and these might affect the estimated model and the associated classification error rate. In this paper, the authors study the effect of observations in the training sample on the error rate by deriving influence functions. They obtain a general expression for the influence function of the error rate, and they compute it for the maximum likelihood estimator as well as for several robust logistic discrimination procedures. Besides being of interest in their own right, the influence functions are also used to derive asymptotic classification efficiencies of different logistic discrimination rules. The authors also show how influential points can be detected by means of a diagnostic plot based on the values of the influence function     

A robust test of exogeneity based on quantile regressions

In this paper, we propose a robust test of exogeneity. The test statistics is constructed from quantile regression estimators, which are robust to heavy tails of errors. We derive the asymptotic distribution of the test statistic under the null hypothesis of exogeneity at a given quantile. The finite sample properties of the test are investigated through Monte Carlo simulations that exhibit not only good size and power properties, but also good robustness to outliers.     

Theoretical L-moments and TL-moments using combinatorial identities and finite operators

Moments have been traditionally used to characterize a probability distribution. Recently, linear moments (L-moments) and trimmed L-moments (TL-moments) are appealing alternatives to the conventional moments. This paper focuses on the computation of theoretical L-moments and TL-moments and emphasizes the use of combinatorial identities. We are able to derive new closed-form formulas of L-moments and TL-moments for continuous probability distributions. Finally, closed-form formulas for the L-moments for the exponential distribution and the uniform distribution are also obtained.     

On temperance and risk spreading

Theory and Decision - On page 599 in the original publication of the article.     

14‐month‐olds exploit verbs’ syntactic contexts to build expectations about novel words

During their second year of life, infants develop a rudimentary understanding of grammatical categories based on their knowledge and use of frequent function words. The current study inquired whether, at only 14 months of age, infants can track co‐occurrence patterns between function words and content words (e.g., determiners can precede nouns, and pronouns can precede verbs), and use these previously encountered syntactic contexts to build expectations about which function words can co‐occur with novel words. Using a habituation paradigm, French‐learning 14‐month‐olds were presented with utterances containing two novel words preceded by function words (either two determiners in the Novel Nouns condition or two pronouns in the Novel Verbs conditions). We found that at test, infants looked longer during trials in which the novel words occurred in an unexpected syntactic context (following a pronoun for infants in the Novel Nouns condition and following a determiner for infants in the pooled analysis of the three Novel Verbs conditions). Hence, our results confirm previous findings on infants’ sensitivity to noun contexts and most importantly demonstrate that their sensitivity to the co‐occurrence of verbs with pronouns begins much earlier than previously understood.     

The Probabilistic Final Standing Calculator: a fair stochastic tool to handle abruptly stopped football seasons

AStA Advances in Statistical Analysis - The COVID-19 pandemic has left its marks in the sports world, forcing the full stop of all sports-related activities in the first half of 2020. Football...     

Charting and theorising the territorialisation of agricultural policy

Against a background of contestation of European agricultural policy, the territorial dimension is one of the prominent factors in proposals for shaping new rules of public action. This situation has been brought about by shifts in the nature of the challenges facing farming and in society's expectations of it, but also by a change in the forms that public policy may take, which is challenging the hegemony of the nation states in matters of economic and social organisation. We attempt to characterise this territorialisation of public policy in agriculture from a regulationist standpoint and on the basis of research conducted in France. This involves three points: the renewal of decision-making procedures, the adaptation of public action to local specificities and the offsetting of market effects. Empirical findings show that these three factors are only marginal aspects of the changes that have come about in public action in farming: the territorial dimension is not at present the vector of any far-reaching change to the underlying principles and ground rules in this domain. However, these three emerging rationales do give a preview of new forms of regulation in the farming sector.