The Marine Education Programme and ESD Schools in Costa Rica

The purpose of this article is to share information about the Costa Rican Marine Education Programme in relation to the quality criteria for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) Schools. We found that the application of these criteria is feasible, not only to the organisation and management of schools that are looking to become ESD Schools, but also for the analysis of different projects seeking to educate students from the perspective of sustainable development. The way in which the criteria were adapted in this case to the area of teaching and learning proved both easy and effective, following the conceptual document produced by Breiting, Mayer and Mogensen in 2005. We therefore recommend that proposals of this kind be disseminated more widely and more attention be paid to their potential to contribute to education systems. As to the Marine Education Programme, the analysis performed highlighted its pertinence and conceptual orientation, and provided an insight into the methodology applied during its constituent workshops; however, in this case, the approach adopted was not tailored in accordance with quality criteria for ESD.     

Child-Directed Speech Is Infrequent in a Forager-Farmer Population: A Time Allocation Study

This article provides an estimation of how frequently, and from whom, children aged 0–11 years (Ns between 9 and 24) receive one-on-one verbal input among Tsimane forager-horticulturalists of lowland Bolivia. Analyses of systematic daytime behavioral observations reveal < 1 min per daylight hour is spent talking to children younger than 4 years of age, which is 4 times less than estimates for others present at the same time and place. Adults provide a majority of the input at 0–3 years of age but not afterward. When integrated with previous work, these results reveal large cross-cultural variation in the linguistic experiences provided to young children. Consideration of more diverse human populations is necessary to build generalizable theories of language acquisition.     

Absorbing the shocks: The case of food security,extension and the agricultural knowledge and information system in Havana,Cuba

Since 1959, Cuba has undergone a series of political changes, and since 1989, Cuba has had to invent, evolve, and implement a new system of food production that provides lessons from which others can learn. Many of the changes since 1989 caused shocks to the food-security system. As a result many institutions and individuals had to absorb the realities of a food production and distribution system faced with major disruption. These shocks led to adjustments and adaptations necessary to ensure a secure food supply for the 11 million inhabitants of Cuba. This article focuses on adjustments and adaptations made in the extension domain within Cuba's unique agricultural knowledge and information system.     

Toddlers Default to Canonical Surface‐to‐Meaning Mapping When Learning Verbs

Previous work has shown that toddlers readily encode each noun in the sentence as a distinct argument of the verb. However, languages allow multiple mappings between form and meaning that do not fit this canonical format. Two experiments examined French 28‐month‐olds' interpretation of right‐dislocated sentences (noun_i‐verb, noun_i) where the presence of clear, language‐specific cues should block such a canonical mapping. Toddlers (N = 96) interpreted novel verbs embedded in these sentences as transitive, disregarding prosodic cues to dislocation (Experiment 1) but correctly interpreted right‐dislocated sentences containing well‐known verbs (Experiment 2). These results suggest that toddlers can integrate multiple cues in ideal conditions, but default to canonical surface‐to‐meaning mapping when extracting structural information about novel verbs in semantically impoverished conditions.     

Predicting Individual Variation in Language From Infant Speech Perception Measures

There are increasing reports that individual variation in behavioral and neurophysiological measures of infant speech processing predicts later language outcomes, and specifically concurrent or subsequent vocabulary size. If such findings are held up under scrutiny, they could both illuminate theoretical models of language development and contribute to the prediction of communicative disorders. A qualitative, systematic review of this emergent literature illustrated the variety of approaches that have been used and highlighted some conceptual problems regarding the measurements. A quantitative analysis of the same data established that the bivariate relation was significant, with correlations of similar strength to those found for well‐established nonlinguistic predictors of language. Further exploration of infant speech perception predictors, particularly from a methodological perspective, is recommended.