At first glance, children’s word learning appears to be mostly a problem of learning words like dog and run. However, it is small words like and and or that enable the construction of complex combinatorial language. How do children learn the meaning of these function words? Using transcripts of parent- child interactions, we investigate the cues in child-directed speech that can inform the interpretation and acquisition of the connective or which has a particularly challenging semantics. Study 1 finds that, despite its low overall frequency, children can use or close to parents’ rate by age 4, in some speech acts. Study 2 uses annotations of a subset of parent-child interac- tions to show that disjunctions in child-directed speech are ac- companied by reliable cues to the correct interpretation (ex- clusive vs. inclusive). We present a decision-tree model that learns from a handful of annotated examples to correctly pre- dict the interpretation of a disjunction. These studies suggest that conceptual and prosodic cues in child-directed speech can provide information for the acquisition of functional categories like disjunction.

Several institutions have developed image feature extraction software to compute quantitative descriptors of medical images for radiomics analyses. With radiomics increasingly proposed for use in research and clinical contexts, new techniques are necessary for standardizing and replicating radiomics findings across software implementations. We have developed a software toolkit for the creation of 3D digital reference objects with customizable size, shape, intensity, texture, and margin sharpness values. Using user-supplied input parameters, these objects are defined mathematically as continuous functions, discretized, and then saved as DICOM objects. Here, we present the definition of these objects, parameterized derivations of a subset of their radiomics values, computer code for object generation, example use cases, and a user-downloadable sample collection used for the examples cited in this paper.