Interactional conditions of syntax acquisition: A review

This paper reviews how and why children's acquistion of syntactic structures is influenced by verbal communication with adults. It argues that those interactions involve cooperative problem-solving and can be interpreted within interactionist theory. It surveys several ways in which adults model a child's syntactic structure to convey the child's intended meaning. These are: expansion; extension; modelling without prior child utterance; and modelling after metalinguistic interruption of the conversation.University of BielefeldState Institute for Early Education     

Pricing principles used by scholarly open access publishers

The article processing charge (APC) is currently the primary method of funding professionally published open access (OA) peer‐reviewed journals. The pricing principles of 77 OA publishers publishing over 1,000 journals using APCs were studied and classified. The most commonly used pricing method is a single fixed fee, which can either be the same for all of a publisher's journals or individually determined for each journal. Fees are usually only levied for publication of accepted papers, but there are some journals that also charge submission fees. Instead of fixed prices, many publishers charge by the page or have multi‐tiered fees depending on the length of articles. The country of origin of the author can also influence the pricing, in order to facilitate publishing for authors from developing countries.     

Dialectical Tensions Underpinning Family Farm Succession Planning

Though succession planning is vital if a farm is to survive, many farm families fail to take necessary succession planning actions. Semi-structured interviews conducted with 20 members of nine small-farm families in Pennsylvania revealed that dialectical tensions surrounding a farm transfer influence succession planning readiness and action. This report identifies five indigenous dialectical tensions that influence succession planning and describes five praxis patterns families use to manage them. Practical applications are outlined for agriculture estate planning professionals and others involved in family inheritance communication services to provide effective assistance to farm families in their succession planning efforts.     

Reported Argumentativeness and Verbal Aggressiveness Levels: The Influence of Type of Argument

Arguments in interpersonal relationships can be divided into two types: public issue arguments and personal issue arguments. This study examines the ability of type of argument, trait argumentativeness and verbal aggressiveness, and gender to predict reported argumentativeness and verbal aggressiveness levels related to a particular argument episode. Reported argumentativeness levels were higher in the public argument condition, and reported verbal aggressiveness levels were higher in the personal argument condition. Trait argumentativeness predicted reported argumentativeness levels better in the public argument condition than the personal argument condition, suggesting that type of argument may serve as a moderator for the relationship between trait argumentativeness levels and argument-specific argumentativeness levels. Implications for using these two scales to examine interpersonal argument are discussed.     

The Impact of Network Size and Financial Incentives on Adoption and Participation in New Online Communities

The success of online communities depends heavily on the providers' abilities to motivate potential users to adopt the service and to actively participate. Because research in this field of media economics is rare, especially with regard to newly established communities, this study analyzes what drives community adoption and how direct and indirect financial incentives influence user participation. Extending Ajzen's (1991) Theory of Planned Behavior, this article shows, in 2 empirical studies, that network size significantly affects adoption in newly established communities. The results of the first study indicate a strong effect of indirect financial incentives (saving money) on the intention to adopt. The second study indicates that direct financial incentives (earning money) may well help increase the network's size without altering user motivation through crowding-out effects. It is interesting to note that the presence of direct financial incentives attracts new users, but it does not increase usage.