Showing papers by "School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences published in 1989"

Limits on bilingualism

Abstract: SPEECH, in any language, is continuous; speakers provide few reliable cues to the boundaries of words, phrases, or other meaningful units. To understand speech, listeners must divide the continuous speech stream into portions that correspond to such units. This segmentation process is so basic to human language comprehension that psycholinguists long assumed that all speakers would do it in the same way. In previous research1,2, however, we reported that segmentation routines can be language-specific: speakers of French process spoken words syllable by syllable, but speakers of English do not. French has relatively clear syllable boundaries and syllable-based timing patterns, whereas English has relatively unclear syllable boundaries and stress-based timing; thus syllabic segmentation would work more efficiently in the comprehension of French than in the comprehension of English. Our present study suggests that at this level of language processing, there are limits to bilingualism: a bilingual speaker has one and only one basic language.

Adjustment and income distribution

Abstract: This paper presents a structural macro simulation model to quantify the effects of alternative stabilization packages on the distribution of income and wealth. The model combines the explicit microeconomic optimizing behavior characteristic of computable general equilibrium models with asset portfolio behavior of macroeconomic models in Tobin's tradition. In this model there are four main mechanisms by which policy changes affect the distribution of income and wealth. First, changes in factor rewards affect directly household income distribution. Second, household real incomes are affected by changes in their respective cost of living indexes. Third, household real incomes are affected by changes in real returns on financial assets since household incomes include income from financial holdings. Fourth, household wealth distribution is affected by capital gains and losses. Illustrative simulations with the model are carried out for a representative economy subject to the interest rate and terms-of-trade shocks of the early 1980s. The simulations suggest a large adverse impact on the distribution of income of a sharp contractionary package.

Technological Innovations in Contemporary Music

Abstract: by composers, but rather how innovations such as electroacoustic and computer music were able to 'succeed'. I employ the word 'success' in the organizational sense: it is the lasting formation of new segments of musical creation and the mobilization of composers, of partners from the scientific world, and of the technical and financial resources for establishing these new segments. If the two types of musical production I shall consider - electroacoustic music and computer music - can be strongly distinguished, it is because they neither appeared nor developed in the same contexts, nor did they require the same technical or human resources. And the respective roles played by creation, properly speaking, and the research work of scientific invention are very different. I believe that one might also differentiate them geographically: electroacoustic creation was dominant in Europe up until the late 1970s; the research in the field of computer music developed very early on in the United States. Of course, one might cite examples that contradict this pattern but the main tendency corresponds, I believe, to the presentation that I propose. What in fact interest me are the factors that shape each of these separate activities, i.e. the socio-economic, technical and organizational factors. I shall therefore examine these two sorts of activity successively, and then I shall show how one has sought to reconcile the merits of each, using the example of the French centre for musical research IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique).

Problems of context and knowledge

Abstract: In spite of alleged differences in purpose, descriptive and computational linguistics share many problems, due to the fact that any precise study on language needs some form of knowledge representation. This constraint is mostly apparent when interpretation of sentences takes into account elements of the so-called “context”. The parametrization of context, i.e. the explicit listing of features relevant to some intepretation task, is difficult because it requires flexible formal structures for understanding or simulating inferential behaviour, as well as a large amount of information about conventional structures in the given language. This paper aims at illustrating major difficulties in these two fields, in relation with the necessity of a contextual approach. It offers a (clearly partial) enumeration of open problems inthe reperesentation of commonsense knowledge and languages-dependent structures, with some attempt to delineate future solutions.

Income Distribution, Development and Foreign Trade: A Cross-Sectional Analysis

Abstract: This paper analyses cross-sectional evidence on income inequality in developing countries within a consistent theoretical framework where the major explanatory variables are factor endowments, their ownership structure and foreign trade distortions. The resulting explanation of cross-country differences in income distribution is considerably better than what is found in the existing literature. Endowments in mineral resources, land concentration in agricultural exports, trade protection and secondary schooling are shown to be major determinants of differences in income inequality across developing countries.