Search

Purpose: Language production, a dynamic process involving real-time language processing, is crucial for children's language and communication development. To explore the early development of children's real-time language production, this study investigated Chinese preschool children's pausing strategies in narratives and their associations with verbal working memory and vocabulary abilities. Method: A picture-elicited narrative task was employed. Sixty Mandarin-speaking children aged 4-5 years were asked to tell a story according to the book "Frog, Where Are You?" The pausing types and positions in narratives were coded and analyzed. Additionally, children's verbal working memory and vocabulary were measured. Results: The results showed that 4- to 5-year-old children prefer to use silent pauses and tend to produce pauses within clauses. The total frequency of pausing decreases with age and shows a significant gender difference. Girls prefer to use within-clause pauses, whereas boys prefer to use between-clause pauses. More importantly, children's pausing frequency is closely associated with their verbal working memory and vocabulary, in which working memory plays a more important role. Conclusions: This study is a first-step exploration of pausing strategies in 4- to 5-year-old Chinese children's narratives. The developmental characteristics of pausing strategies shown in typically developing children serve as a crucial reference for interventions for children with language deficits.

In this article, we consider the design of a tracking controller for a class of uncertain nonlinear systems with external disturbances and actuator failures and achieve predesignated performance results on the tracking error. First, since the existing prescribed performance strategies are unable to specify performance bounds in an arbitrary way, we propose a new tool to address the prescribed performance issue by constructing chained first‐order filters and an input switching method. With the aid of the new and flexible prescribed performance tool, any predesignated continuous bounds can be formed by setting the reference coordinate values, sufficiently small coordinate value intervals and the gain parameters of the filters. Second, a full state feedback controller design scheme based on the prescribed performance bounds, which describe the convergence rate and maximum overshoot of the tracking error, is proposed. It is proven that the tracking error always satisfies the prescribed performance bounds. Finally, simulation studies are used to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed tool and the correctness of the established theoretical results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This article considers the distributed finite‐time output consensus tracking problem for a class of high‐order nonlinear multiagent systems with the powers of positive odd rational numbers and output constraints. First, since the finite‐time tracking design method for a single system with the powers of positive odd rational numbers cannot be extended to the finite‐time consensus tracking for multiagent systems, an especial configuration method of the powers is constructed. Second, a new exponential brake function (EBF) that purely depends on the outputs is proposed to address the asymmetric output constraints directly. By adjusting a related parameter, the large converted value can be avoided when the output approaches the constrained boundaries, which may reduce the control input over a large output scale. Third, given some reasonable assumptions, a distributed finite‐time output consensus tracking controller is proposed to guarantee that the tracking error converges to an adjustable small region around the origin in a finite time and that the output constraints of all subsystems are not violated. The result with output constraints can also be extended to the case without output constraints. Finally, simulation verifications also confirm the benefits and effectiveness of the proposed control methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The adverse impact of childhood sexual abuse experience on a person's physical and mental health is long‐lasting. The disadvantageous influence can be reflected in the language expression even if they grow up, especially when the language is not monitored intentionally by the speaker. However, few researchers have focused on the language expression characteristics of this group. This study aims to analyze the message of social media to explore the difference of language expression between adult females with childhood sexual abuse experience (CSA group) and adult women without such experience (control group) by Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). We collected 46 victims (all females) and 46 nonvictims (gender‐matched with CSA group) on Sina Weibo, and we applied LIWC to encode and count all the text messages posted on the social platforms. The results of this research suggested that the CSA group differed from the control group in multiple indicators, especially in psychological process words. The victims were less likely to refer to psychological process words, such as body words, sex words, etc. than the nonvictims, however, they preferred to mention human words. Moreover, compared to the control group, the CSA group had published fewer contents and used fewer words that represent the present tense in the social media platforms. The present study provides the research basis for identifying the CSA group in social media platforms in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]