Background: Spanish copulas ser and estar (translated as English “be”) have distinct distributional patterns [1,2,3,4,5]. Locative predicates typically appear with estar, while nominal predicates typically appear with ser. Adjectival predicates sometimes, but not always, may combine with either copula, and this gives rise to differing interpretations. Crucially for our purposes, individuallevel...

Children's reasoning about the stability of human psychological characteristics was investigated in relation to the obligatory distinction between the Spanish verb forms ser and estar (which convey different information about the stability of characteristics) and the corresponding English form to be. Participants (85 bilingual children, ages 6 to 10 years) were interviewed to determine (a) whet...

In Spanish locative constructions, a different form of the copula is selected in relation to the semantic properties of the grammatical subject: sentences that locate objects require estar while those that locate events require ser (both translated in English as 'to be'). In an ERP study, we examined whether second language (L2) speakers of Spanish are sensitive to the selectional restrictions ...

During the Southern Great Plains experiment, the synthetic aperture radiometer, ESTAR, mapped L-band brightness temperature over a swath about 50 km wide and about 300 km long extending west from Oklahoma City to El Reno and north from the Little Washita River watershed to the Kansas border. ESTAR flew on the NASA P-3B Orion aircraft at an altitude of 7.6 km and maps were made on 7 days between...

La Sociedad de Educación del IEEE (EdSoc – Education Society) se siente orgullosa de patrocinar la revista IEEERITA. Muchos de los lectores de IEEE-RITA son naturalmente miembros de la EdSoc. Como Presidente de la EdSoc, en este editorial, me gustaría presentar la Sociedad a aquellos que todavía no la conocen y animar a nuestros miembros a estar inmersos en nuestro proceso de planificación estr...

Spanish has two copulas, ser and estar, which are often translated as English ‘be’. Here, we study their differences by investigating their contrastive distributional patterns in combination with adjectival predicates. Specifically, we test the processing predictions of a presupposition-based analysis (Deo et al. 2016) that accounts for a wide range of distributional patterns of the copulas. Th...

Although there are a very large number of proposals in the literature to account for the complex distribution of the copulas ser and estar in Spanish and Portuguese (Bello 1951; Gili Gaya 1955; Querido 1976; Luján 1981; Lema 1995; Schmitt 1992, 2004; Maienborn 2000, 2003), very little is known about children’s acquisition of these two highly frequent copula verbs. The only acquisition study we ...

The electronically scanned thin array radiometer (ESTAR) was utilized for soil moisture mapping during the Southern Great Plains Experiment (SGP99). A retrieval algorithm was applied to obtain soil moisture from passive microwave measurements at 1.4 GHz. The algorithm was verified using ground data collected during SGP99. The results indicate a good correlation between observed and predicted so...