Qian Peng

An essential feature of human communication is robustness to errors: even when speakers and writers make mistakes, listeners and readers can usually determine the intended meaning. A leading hypothesis is that comprehenders achieve robust error correction by internally deploying a “noisy‐channel” model of the language production process. Crucially, to best achieve error robustness, a comprehender's noisy‐channel model should be finely calibrated to the environmental statistics of language production, incorporating not only prior expectations about communicative intents but also structure‐sensitive likelihoods of different types of speaker error. This environmentally calibrated noisy‐channel hypothesis has been difficult to test, because the rates of most types of language production errors are hard to estimate. Here, we test this hypothesis by experimentally investigating comprehenders' interpretations of subject–verb agreement errors, for which context‐contingent language production error rates are feasible to estimate. In a novel free‐form error correction task, participants edited sentences with subject–verb agreement mismatches to indicate what they think was intended. Bayesian analysis of the resulting data shows that comprehenders' interpretations reflect both item‐specific prior expectations and structure‐sensitive error likelihoods that closely correspond to error rates in language production. These results provide quantitative evidence that humans closely track prior statistics over linguistic forms and deploy a noisy‐channel model finely calibrated to statistics of the linguistic environment to achieve robust language understanding.

Based on work-family border theory and work-home resource theory, this paper examines the impact of border keeper’s support on work-family enrichment and whether or how work-family boundary flexibility mediates the relationship between border keeper’s support and work-family enrichment. A sample of 504 preschool teachers in Guangdong province, China completed questionnaires. The research results show a two-way process of work-family enrichment for preschool teachers in China. Organizational support was directly and significantly correlated with work-to-family enrichment, and family support was significantly and directly correlated with family-to-work enrichment. Organizational support had no significant positive predictive effect on work boundary flexibility which has a significant positive predictive effect on WFE. Family support had a significant positive predictive effect on family boundary flexibility which had a significant positive predictive effect on the FWE. In addition, the study found that family boundary flexibility mediates the relationships between family support and FWE whereas work boundary flexibility did not mediate the relationships between organizational support and WFE. The above research results are partly consistent with the existing research, and partly inconsistent, which is related to the profound influence of traditional culture in Chinese society and the current situation of preschool teachers in China. Such findings have important implications for improving the work-family enrichment of preschool teachers.

Longitudinal diagnostic classification models (DCMs) with hierarchical attributes can characterize learning trajectories in terms of the transition between attribute profiles for formative assessment. A longitudinal DCM for hierarchical attributes was proposed by imposing model constraints on the transition DCM. To facilitate the applications of longitudinal DCMs, this paper explored the critical topic of the Q-matrix design with a simulation study. The results suggest that including the transpose of the R-matrix in the Q-matrix improved the classification accuracy; ten-item tests measuring three linear attributes across three time points provided satisfactory classification accuracy for low-stakes assessment. Educational implications and future directions were discussed.