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18265 papers
The article addresses the issue of linguistic security (LS) as a relevant theoretical and practical phenomenon that requires in-depth scholarly examination and systematisation of the terminological framework. The author analyses a paradoxical situation: despite a considerable number of theoretical studies on LS since the early 2000s, the term has not yet received legal formalisation and is not закреплен (enshrined) in Russian strategic documents — including the Foundations of the State Language Policy of the Russian Federation, approved in July 2025. The paper traces the evolution of the concept of LS — from M.V. Gorbanevsky’s original interpretation (2002) as journalists’ responsibility for statements in the media to broader contemporary interpretations, which include protecting the language from displacement, countering culturallinguistic expansion, ensuring communicative norms, and so on. Particular attention is paid to distinguishing between the domains of linguistic security and linguoculture: while the former is associated with actual and potential threats to the language and linguistic relations in society, the latter covers issues of cultural-linguistic norms, speech culture, and verbal ethics. The author identifies two approaches to understanding LS: narrow approach — protecting the language from displacement by other languages, preserving the norms of the literary language, and countering linguistic expansion; broad approach — incorporating issues of language policy, communicative norms, speech offences, and language conflicts. The article critically analyses various classifications of LS (as part of information, semantic, cognitive, and national security) and argues that the most justified approach is to classify LS as part of civilisational security. Language, along with culture and the dominant belief system, is viewed as a fundamental foundation of civilisation, and its protection is seen as an element of the stability of Russian civilisational identity. Based on the analysis, the author concludes that there is a need for: methodological streamlining of the conceptual framework in the field of LS; clear delimitation of related concepts (linguo-social security, linguo-sociocultural security, etc.); development of strategic documents that would establish the status and mechanisms for ensuring linguistic security in Russia.
Contemporary scholarly discourse on gender-inclusive communication remains predominantly descriptive, often avoiding a systematic critical analysis of its internal contradictions and social consequences. However, the growing social tension around new linguistic norms, their ideologization, and direct impact on public institutions demand unbiased examination. The aim of this article is to identify and analyze the key paradoxes generated by gender-inclusive communication, which persist despite its proclaimed goals of equality and respect. The research material comprises English-language texts of various genres and styles, including scholarly articles, media publications, documents from university websites, healthcare institutions, governmental, non-governmental, and commercial organizations, as well as data from blogs and social networks from the period 2017 to 2025. This allowed us to examine gender-inclusive communication both in the sphere of academic reflection and within the context of public practice. The methodological framework is based on critical discourse analysis, which interprets linguistic changes as a struggle for power, and Lotman’s theory of the semiosphere, which views inclusive language as a phenomenon of cultural dynamics. The study establishes that inclusive communication generates a complex of systemic contradictions across different dimensions: linguistic (between the striving to erase and simultaneously multiply gender differences, leading to semantic tautology and a violation of linguistic conventionality); social (where inclusivity in practice becomes a tool for excluding dissenting voices and marginalizing the experiences of traditional groups); ethical (encompassing the conflict between the ideology of self-identification and biological realities, as well as the imposition of Anglo-centric models onto other linguacultures). Interpreting the results through the chosen methodological lens reveals that inclusive language functions not only as a discourse of power but also as a tool of auto-communication, aimed at redefining the core of the cultural semiosphere and consolidating a “progressive” identity. The findings open perspectives for comparative studies on the reception of inclusive practices in different linguacultures and for interdisciplinary research into the long-term social effects of linguistic reform.
Abstract Mood states strongly influence episodic memory processing, yet the neural mechanisms through which mood interacts with stimulus valence during encoding remain unclear. The present study examined how experimentally induced negative mood would modulate neural processing and behavioural outcomes during an associative memory task, and whether mindfulness intervention can alter these effects. Twenty healthy adults completed a memory-encoding (word-stimulus pairs) task in which mood induction (negative vs. neutral) prior to encoding was crossed with stimulus valence (neutral vs. negative), producing four conditions. Continuous EEG was recorded using a 64-channel system, and event-related potentials (ERPs) and oscillatory dynamics were analysed during stimulus-locked encoding epochs. After an initial retrieval session, participants were randomly assigned to either a brief mindfulness meditation intervention or an active podcast-listening control, followed by a second retrieval session. Our behavioral data indicated that, recognition accuracy, arousal, valence ratings, and confidence differed significantly across conditions. Participants formed stronger word–image associations for neutral than negative stimuli across conditions, with associative memory being most impaired when negative stimuli were encoded during a negative mood state. At the neural level, early perceptual–affective processing showed robust Mood × Valence interactions: central P200 and occipito‑parietal EPN amplitudes differentiated negative from neutral images during neutral mood, but this valence effect was markedly reduced under negative mood, indicating an early blunting of neural sensitivity to emotional content. Following the mindfulness intervention, the negative images encoded under negative mood showed the most pronounced reduction in arousal, along with heightened alpha activity during mediation. Together, these findings show that negative mood undermines associative binding and influences early stages of visual-affective processing, while mindfulness may primarily positively influence the associated affective responses.
Background: Auricular asymmetry affects facial aesthetics; yet, the degree of asymmetry discernible by a casual observer remains poorly defined. Objective: To measure the casual observer’s perception of auricular size, angulation, protrusion, and vertical position. Methods: Artificial intelligence-generated facial images were utilized and unilateral variations created in (1) size, (2) angulation, (3) protrusion, and (4) vertical position. A total of 200 responders reviewed 46 images, rating the ear appearance on a Likert scale of 0–10. Results: Causal observers rated a ≥10% change in size significantly different than baseline ( p < 0.001). Retrograde angulation ≥10° and anterograde angulation at 20° were rated significantly different than baseline ( p < 0.001). Positive asymmetrical protrusion was rated more severely than negative asymmetrical protrusion. The vertical position difference was rated least critically on average compared with baseline. Conclusion: Casual observers more critically perceived auricular size asymmetry and retrograde angulation when compared with protrusion and vertical position asymmetry.
Pronouns indicate significant importance in both pedagogical and communicative contexts, as they shape the way individuals are addressed and understood in social interactions and educational settings. Beyond the traditional pronouns “he” and “she,” the American Psychological Association endorses the scholarly use of the singular pronoun “they,” recognizing its relevance in promoting inclusive language practices. In addition, the popularity of neopronouns continues to rise, providing non-binary individuals with a broader range of linguistic options to express their identities. Despite this growing recognition, there remains a dearth of empirical research that systematically investigates the awareness, knowledge, and preferences regarding pronoun use among non-binary populations. Addressing this gap, the present quantitative inquiry examined the level of awareness, knowledge, and preference of pronouns among non-binary college students at a state university in the Philippines. The study involved 80 participants, including 20 lesbians, 20 gays, 20 bisexual males, and 20 bisexual females, selected through criterion sampling, who responded to a four-part researcher-developed survey questionnaire. The results indicate that, overall, non-binary college students are aware of the categories of pronouns (M=2.48, SD=0.39 for traditional pronouns; M=2.79, SD=0.25 for gender-neutral pronouns; and M=2.64, SD=0.32 for neopronouns) and knowledgeable about them (M=2.49, SD=0.31 for traditional pronouns; M=2.68, SD=0.23 for gender-neutral pronouns; and M=2.47, SD=0.32 for neopronouns). However, despite this awareness and knowledge, participants expressed a preference for using traditional pronouns (“he” and “she”) when being referred to. These findings underscore the persistence of traditional linguistic norms in educational settings and highlight the potential influence of formal language instruction on pronoun preference. Empirically, this study contributes to the limited body of research on non-binary pronoun use speficically in the Philippines, providing a foundational dataset that can inform inclusive language policies, pedagogical strategies, and future sociolinguistic investigations. Its significance lies not only in documenting patterns of pronoun awareness and preference but also in offering evidence-based insights for educators, policymakers, and advocates seeking to foster more inclusive and affirming learning environments.
Past research has shown that contextual renewal of conditional fear can be reduced if unconditional stimuli (USs) are presented unpaired with the conditional stimuli (CSs) during extinction training. The current study examined whether this reduction is a product of strengthened extinction learning from the unpaired presentation of the stimuli that had been paired during acquisition or from habituation to the US. Three groups of participants completed extinction training in a novel context with either: (1) CSs only (CS alone), (2) CSs and unpaired USs (unpaired), or (3) USs only (US alone) presentations. Based on past literature, contextual renewal of electrodermal responses was expected to occur in the CS alone group and renewal of US expectancy in the CS alone and US alone groups. Renewal was absent in electrodermal responses across all groups, limiting interpretation. US expectancy renewal emerged in the CS alone and US alone groups but not in the unpaired group, due to an unexpected increase in US expectancy during CS- in the unpaired extinction phase. This increase, along with parallel changes in affective ratings, suggests that the unpaired group perceived both CS+ and CS- as paired with the US. Taken together, the current findings provided limited support for the effectiveness of unpaired extinction in reducing the return of fear and highlight the role of participants' subjective interpretation of events. US alone extinction showed limited effectiveness, likely due to the high number of US presentations, with some evidence of US habituation.
Endangered Hausa dialects spoken in Jigawa State and selected communities in Kano, Katsina, and Yobe States represent an irreplaceable repository of cultural and linguistic heritage, yet these varieties are diminishing at an accelerating rate under the pressure of urbanisation, formal education in Standard Hausa, and mass media. This paper reports the principal findings of a linguistic documentation project that conducted the first systematic digital preservation of nine endangered Hausa dialect varieties across the four-state study region. Using a linguistic documentation research design, the project engaged 120 native speaker participants distributed across three age cohorts and nine dialect communities. Data were collected through 84 hours of audio and video recording, semi-structured interviews, participant observation, GPS-based dialect mapping, and systematic metadata documentation. Linguistic analysis produced annotated transcriptions of all recordings, a lexical database of 1,850 entries including 342 dialect-only lexical items, a phonological description of 24 unique tone contrasts and 18 distinct vowel patterns, 216 documented proverbs, and 68 dialect-specific kinship terms. A digital archive of 120 gigabytes was created following UNESCO and Endangered Language Documentation Programme standards. Language vitality assessment using the UNESCO framework revealed that six of the nine documented varieties score at or below the 3.0 endangered threshold, with Guri dialect critically endangered at 2.1. Mean young adult dialect use rates average 36 percent of elderly speaker rates, confirming severe intergenerational transmission failure. The study proposes a three-phase Digital Preservation Framework and offers evidence-based recommendations for language policy, curriculum design, and institutional capacity building in Nigerian Hausa dialect documentation.
Transformer models are not always deployed to low-resource devices due to the computational intensity of the model. Although some distilled models, such as DistilBERT, provide a minimum level of efficiency, additional compression is required to apply to any edge application. This paper offers a systematic evaluation of L1-norm unstructured pruning globally on a DistilBERT model that has been fine-tuned on binary sentiment analysis on the Stanford Sentiment Treebank (SST-2) dataset. The approach consists of pruning the model sequentially by 10 % to 60 % to check its performance using the accuracy of a stratified validation set and inference latency on a CPU. These findings indicate that model accuracy is very robust, and it still has more than 99% of the baseline performance until 40% sparsity. Only at this stage major degradation has taken place, and the accuracy retention was found to be 97.25 % and 94.22% at <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\mathbf{5 0 \%}$</tex> and <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\mathbf{6 0 \%}$</tex> sparsity, respectively. An important conclusion here is that this unstructured sparsity fails to bring inference speedups in conventional CPU hardware, highlighting a lack of a connection between theory and practical efficiency improvements. As a result, the paper has found the best operational point to be <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\mathbf{5 0 \%}$</tex> sparsity, which is an evidence-based guide to developers. The research also concludes that L1-norm unstructured pruning is a very effective method of maximizing model compression without significant accuracy impairment and thus can be used to achieve efficient deployment of NLP models in resource-constrained settings.
The Junction Grammar of English A Reproducible Corpus-Wide Analysis of Morpheme-Boundary Statistics and Consonant–Vowel Information Asymmetry Boicho Dimitrov Temelakiev Saxon Ventura Research Ltd 28th of May,2026 CC BY Abstract This paper reports a reproducible, corpus-wide statistical analysis of English word structure derived entirely from a single public word list of 455,246 entries, computed in a spreadsheet with no specialized tooling. The morpheme boundary—the junction between a stem and an affix—is treated as the primary object of measurement, and the distribution of the letters that may occupy each side of a junction is read across the corpus. Three results are established. First, the junction carries a stable structure: a consonant backbone (T, L, N, R, S, I) admitted by nearly all suffixes, an absolute floor (J, Q) admitted by none, and a sparsity that scales inversely with a suffix’s productivity. Second, the relationship between any two affixes is quantified by the correlation of their boundary distributions, which measures the degree to which they share a stem population; this correlation ranges from ~0.99 for etymological doublets to 0.57 for productivity-asymmetric near-twins. Third, the written word decomposes into a consonant skeleton carrying lexical identity (53.0% of the vocabulary is uniquely recoverable from consonants alone) and a vowel tissue carrying grammatical form (1.8% recoverable from vowels alone), a ~29-fold information asymmetry. Multiple independent measures—consonant recoverability, derivational classmarking, and free-stem fraction—partition the lexicon at a single boundary separating a transparent Germanic core from a bound Latinate superstructure. The method, its corrections, and its limits are reported in full, and a program of remaining work is stated. 1. Corpus and Method All results derive from one corpus analysed by one elementary procedure, and the reproducibility of that procedure is treated as part of the contribution. The corpus is the dwyl/english-words list (words_alpha.txt), comprising 455,246 alphabetic entries with a total of 4,254,354 letter occurrences and a mean word length of 9.345 letters. Each letter is assigned its ordinal value (A=1 through Z=26). Words bearing a given suffix are isolated by end-anchored matching and aligned on their final letter, so that each suffix position returns its exact ordinal value as a sanity check; the first stem letter preceding the suffix—the linker—is then read as a full A–Z frequency distribution rather than as a mean. The governing methodological constraint is that distributions are read in full and never collapsed to a mean prematurely, that no numerical coincidence is treated as a finding until tested across many cases, and that every claim is backed by a count. Page 1 Method: a derived column applies the ordinal map; end-anchored COUNTIF and MID/CODE formulas extract suffix positions and the linker; per-letter tallies at the linker yield the boundary distribution. Nesting among suffixes (for example ‑MENT within ‑ENT, or ‑ATION within ‑TION within ‑ION) is controlled by excluding longer relatives before counting. No statistical software, machine-learning library, or external lexical database is used at any stage of the core analysis. The constraint that the analysis remain computable by elementary means is not incidental; it ensures every figure in this paper can be independently reconstructed from the public corpus with a spreadsheet alone. 2. The Junction and Its Backbone The investigation began as a survey of unconditioned letter bigrams, which returned no morphological signal; structure appeared only when letter distributions were conditioned on a single morpheme boundary, and that conditioning is the method’s foundation. A preliminary tabulation of adjacent letter pairs across the corpus—which letters follow which, without regard to position within the word—yielded frequency patterns reducible to general orthographic regularities and carrying no isolable morphological content. The signal emerged only when a specific suffix was fixed and the letters preceding it were read as a population: conditioning on the junction, rather than measuring adjacency as such, is what renders the boundary structure visible. The set of letters that may legally occupy the stem side of a morpheme boundary then proves narrow, structured, and stable across suffixes. Reading the linker distribution across the mapped suffix inventory reveals a three-tier structure. A backbone of six letters—T, L, N, R, S, and I—is admitted at high frequency by nearly every suffix; T is the single most frequent linker across the inventory and recurs as the dominant boundary letter in suffix after suffix. An absolute floor of two letters—J and Q—is admitted by no suffix at measurable frequency, a prohibition confirmed corpus-wide and consistent with their status as the two rarest letters overall (J at 0.18%, Q at 0.19% of all letter occurrences). Between backbone and floor lies a selective middle whose composition varies by suffix and in which each suffix’s identity resides. Two descriptive terms are used throughout. Because each letter carries an ordinal value (A=1 through Z=26), a linker distribution may be summarized by where its mass falls on that scale: a distribution concentrated on early-alphabet letters (low ordinal values, A through roughly M) is termed cold, and one concentrated on late-alphabet letters (high ordinal values, roughly N through Z) is termed warm. The terms refer solely to ordinal position on the A–Z scale and carry no semantic content; the backbone letters, for instance, span both ends (cold I and L against warm N, R, S, T). The degree of selectivity is itself a measurement. The count of forbidden letters at a junction—its sparsity—scales inversely with the suffix’s productivity: derivational suffixes that attach choosily to a constrained stem class forbid many letters, whereas inflectional or highly productive suffixes forbid few. Sparsity is therefore not noise but signal: the pattern of exclusion characterizes the suffix as informatively as the pattern of admission. Page 2 Method: forbidden-letter counts are read directly from the linker distribution (frequency below 0.5% taken as floor); cross-checks against COUNTIF totals confirm the populations; J/Q absence is verified against the bare ‑S population of 84,208 words and against corpus-wide letter frequencies. The junction thus behaves as a filter whose admitted and forbidden letters together encode the morphological role of the boundary, with the consonant backbone bearing the structural load and the rare letters marking its limits.
Species-level tree identification is a fundamental task in forest monitoring, biodiversity assessment, and climate-smart ecosystem modeling. Close-range laser scanning technologies have become indispensable tools for forest mapping because they provide high-resolution, three-dimensional structural data at the individual-tree level. However, species-level identification remains a major challenge in global environmental monitoring and AI-driven ecological assessment owing to high species diversity, structural plasticity, and variability across sensing platforms. Here, we propose the cognition-inspired multimodal attention fusion network (CI-MAFusion), a dual-branch deep learning framework that integrates point cloud data with multi-view imagery. Guided by expert dendrological reasoning and cognitive neuroscience principles, CI-MAFusion incorporates a structural branch based on an improved graph attention-based point network for encoding 3D morphological patterns and a visual branch that processes standardized multi-view projections to extract textural features. A cross-gate attention mechanism adaptively fuses structural and visual features. Each branch uses an enhanced convolutional block attention module to highlight salient features, analogous to selective attention in the human visual system. We tested CI-MAFusion using Global LiDAR TreeBank, which contains 12,057 trees from 36 species across four continents and six Köppen climate zones. The model achieved 87.50% overall accuracy at the genus level and 86.12% at the species level, outperforming unimodal and existing fusion approaches by up to 8.1%. Additionally, it further achieved > 90% overall accuracy across regions and > 80% across climate zones, with attention visualizations highlighting biologically diagnostic features such as crown contours, bark textures, and branch junctions. This cognitively inspired architecture improves generalization and advances AI-based systems toward robust recognition of biological structures in complex environments.
Building on evidence for experience-specific grounding of word meaning and interindividual differences therein, this study investigated how specific aspects of empathy modulate the processing and representation of abstract emotional words. We investigated single-trial N400 amplitudes as a measure of semantic retrieval in 78 healthy adults during a delayed lexical decision task with emotion-label, emotion-laden, and neutral abstract words. We further measured the participants' levels of empathic concern, fantasy, personal distress, and perspective taking. Additionally, ratings on valence, arousal, and emotional experience quantified the words' emotional representational content. While direct comparison yielded no evidence for N400 differences between word types, N400 amplitudes in response to emotion-label words decreased with increasing fantasy scores, with this modulation being stronger than for emotion-laden and neutral words. Additionally, participants with higher fantasy scores rated emotional words higher in absolute valence. The observed N400 reductions thus seem to reflect fantasy-driven processing facilitation graded by the words' emotionality level. In contrast, we found no evidence for N400 modulations by empathic concern, personal distress, or perspective taking while affective ratings on all scales increased with increasing empathic concern scores. Our findings suggest that fantasy facilitates emotion-label word processing, and empathic concern enriches emotional word meaning representations, demonstrating interindividual differences in the experiential grounding of emotional abstract concepts.
Adequate recovery and habituation to acute stressors in daily life are essential for mental health. One potential moderator might be the use of different emotion regulation (ER) strategies contributing to interindividual differences in vulnerability to chronic stress. Rumination has been linked to impaired endocrine adaptation, whereas reappraisal tendencies have been associated with boosted habituation to psychosocial stress. Yet, no experimental study has directly compared the causal effects of these strategies on psychoneuroendocrine responses to repeated stress. To address this gap, 91 healthy participants (47 women) underwent a short Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) twice on two consecutive days and were randomly assigned to a rumination, reappraisal, or control intervention in between. Cognitive-affective ratings indexed psychological stress, while salivary cortisol, alpha-amylase (sAA), and heart rate (HR) served as biomarkers. Across the entire sample, reduced increases in negative affect and cortisol in response to the second TSST confirmed successful habituation. As expected, rumination immediately increased negative affect, reduced positive affect, and lowered perceived coping abilities indicating successful induction of ruminative thinking. Moreover, it prevented physiological habituation to repeated stress, evidenced by stable cortisol and HR responses. Unexpectedly, reappraisal also lowered perceived coping abilities in men, followed by prolonged sAA reactivity to the first stress exposure, hinting at a sex-specific impairing effect of reappraisal on noradrenergic recovery. However, reappraisal neither affected cortisol recovery nor habituation, which may result from generally poor reappraisal performance. Together, these findings provide initial evidence for differential effects of rumination and reappraisal on psychophysiological adaptations to repeated TSST exposure.
Our brain maps the space immediately surrounding the body, the peripersonal space (PPS), to sharpen sensory-motor coordination whenever an object enters it. Within PPS, past research demonstrated how several factors influence motor readiness: from stimulus characteristics, such as body-object distance and stimulus semantics, to personality traits like anxiety. However, most paradigms infer PPS boundaries using tactile and visual stimuli, with auditory cues often playing an ancillary role, rather than directly measuring response modulation to stimuli entering the PPS. Here, we measured anticipatory postural adjustments, as direct physiological indices of motor planning, to examine whether semantic content and individual suggestibility modulate responses to looming sounds stopping within PPS. Thirty-three adults heard affective semantic sounds (positive - applause, negative - dentist drill) or neutral non-semantic (pink noise) sounds halting at five within-PPS distances while we recorded muscle activation timing, distance estimates, affective ratings, and sensory suggestibility. Motor responses were faster as sounds stopped nearer the body but systematically delayed and less precise for semantic sounds compared to non-semantic sounds, with higher suggestibility predicting longer and more variable latencies, particularly for non-semantic sounds. These findings demonstrate that semantic evaluation imposes measurable processing costs that systematically delay motor preparation and increase perceived distance. Individual suggestibility produces freeze-like response patterns that amplify motor uncertainty, specifically when semantic context is absent, revealing distinct cognitive and trait-based mechanisms that jointly regulate defensive behaviour within PPS.
As deep learning models become increasingly integrated into critical decision-making systems, the need for explainable Artificial Intelligence (xAI) has grown paramount to ensure transparency, accountability, and trust. Post hoc explainability methods, which analyse trained models to interpret their predictions without modifying the underlying architecture, have become increasingly important, especially in fields such as healthcare and finance. Modern xAI techniques often produce feature importance rankings that fail to capture the true causal influence of features, particularly in transformer-based models. Recent quantitative metrics, such as Symmetric Relevance Gain (SRG), which measures the area between the feature corruption performance curves of the Most Important Feature (MIF) and the Least Important Feature (LIF), provide a more rigorous basis for evaluating explanation fidelity. In this study, we first show that existing xAI methods exhibit consistently poor performance under the SRG criterion when explaining transformer-based text classifiers. To address these limitations, we introduceEvoDropX, a novel framework that formulates explanation as an optimisation problem. EvoDropX leverages Grammatical Evolution (GE) to evolve sequences of feature corruption with the explicit objective of maximising SRG, thereby identifying features that most strongly influence model predictions. EvoDropX provides interventional, input–output (behavioural) explanations and does not attempt to infer or interpret internal model mechanisms. Through comprehensive experiments across multiple datasets (IMDb movie reviews (IMDB), Stanford Sentiment Treebank (SST-2), Amazon Polarity (AP)), multiple transformer models (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), RoBERTa, DistilBERT), and multiple metrics (SRG, MIF, LIF, Counterfactual Conciseness (CFC)), we demonstrate that EvoDropX significantly outperforms all state-of-the-art (SOTA) xAI baselines including Attention-Aware Layer- Wise Relevance Propagation for Transformers (AttnLRP), SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), and Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations (LIME), when evaluated using intervention-based faithfulness criteria. Notably, EvoDropX achieves 74.77% improvement in SRG than the best-performing baseline on the IMDB dataset with the BERT model, with consistent improvements observed across all dataset-model pairs. Finally, qualitative and linguistic analyses reveal that EvoDropX captures both sentiment-bearing terms and their structural relationships within sentences, yielding explanations that are both faithful and interpretable.
Background: Aromatherapy has been proposed as a non-pharmacological adjunctive intervention in critical care settings; however, evidence regarding its effects on objective outcome measures remains inconclusive. This systematic review aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of aromatherapy in modulating objective physiological and biochemical markers in adult intensive care unit (ICU) patients. We hypothesized that the controlled ICU environment would facilitate rigorous measurement of both physiological parameters and biochemical stress markers. Methods: A systematic search was conducted using a novel approach combining lexical database searching (PubMed) and AI-powered semantic search strategies (Elicit, Undermind). Randomized controlled trials examining aromatherapy effects on physiological parameters in critically ill and cardiac patients were included. Outcomes were categorized as cardiovascular, respiratory, and non-cardiovascular/non-respiratory parameters. Subgroup analyses were performed by essential oil type. Results: Eighteen studies comprising 1236 participants were included. Aromatherapy demonstrated moderate effects on cardiovascular parameters (systolic blood pressure: 50% success rate, 5-22 mmHg reductions; diastolic blood pressure: 50%, 3.7-14 mmHg; heart rate: 44%, up to 20 bpm) but limited effects on respiratory parameters (respiratory rate: 25%; peripheral oxygen saturation: 12.5%), with the exception of eucalyptus oil, which showed 75% success for respiratory outcomes in mechanically ventilated patients. Non-cardiovascular/non-respiratory outcomes demonstrated the highest efficacy: anxiety (86%), sleep quality (100%), pain (100%), and sedation outcomes (100%). Subgroup analysis revealed essential oil blends achieved superior cardiovascular and psychological outcomes (100%) compared to lavender alone (64% cardiovascular; 71% anxiety/sedation). Contrary to our hypothesis, no studies measured biochemical stress markers such as cortisol or catecholamines, representing a significant gap in the evidence base. A notable finding was the disparity between evidence certainty: high for anxiety reduction versus low/very low for physiological outcomes, highlighting inadequate control for ICU-specific confounders in existing trials. Conclusion: Aromatherapy may serve as a safe adjunctive intervention in critically ill patients, with potential cardiovascular benefits requiring cautious interpretation and strong effects on anxiety and sleep outcomes. The absence of biochemical outcome measurements and inadequate control for ICU-specific confounders limits mechanistic understanding and causal inference.
Respect plays a crucial role in successful interpersonal and intercultural communication. However, differences in linguistic norms and pragmatic conventions often lead to misunderstandings between speakers of different languages. This article examines pragmatic failures in expressing respect in English-Russian cross-cultural communication. The study aims to identify linguistic and cultural factors that cause misinterpretations of respect and to analyze how respect is pragmatically encoded in both languages. The findings suggest that pragmatic failures frequently arise from divergent politeness strategies, speech act realizations, and sociocultural expectations embedded in English and Russian communicative practices. The study emphasizes the importance of pragmatic awareness in developing intercultural communicative competence.
BACKGROUND: Digital public health services (DPHS) succeed when three elements align: dependable operations, clear public-value benefits, and credible institutional trust. How these elements jointly shape user satisfaction across cultures remains unclear. OBJECTIVE: Identify which user-voiced themes relate most to satisfaction, whether legitimacy and civic messages change how complaints affect ratings, and how these relationships vary across cultures. METHODS: We analyzed app-store reviews for two DPHS apps (Indian/UK) using structural topic modeling aligned with Public Value Theory dimensions, public-value outcomes (PVO), operational capacity (OC), and the authorizing environment (AE). Ordered logit models estimated main effects of theme salience on ratings; interaction models tested whether AE cues (institutional legitimacy, prosocial messaging) moderate OC and PVO complaints; a cross-country sensitivity analysis compared India and the UK. RESULTS: OC problems, access, verification, updates, stability, are the most consistent drivers of dissatisfaction. PVO features lift satisfaction only when they deliver end-to-end in real conditions (reliable booking, trustworthy exposure logic, seamless results integration); ambiguous signals or broken data flows quickly erode confidence. Legitimacy and civic cues matter, but not as substitutes for reliability: pairing "trust in government" or solidarity appeals with unresolved core faults typically worsens perceptions; the same cues help when problems are peripheral or visibly being fixed. Cultural differences reshape these effects. In more collectivist, higher power-distance settings, stewardship and shared-purpose framing contribute more to satisfaction once basics work. In more individualist, egalitarian settings, users weigh demonstrable privacy safeguards, transparent evidence, and precise remediation over patriotic messaging. CONCLUSIONS: Make reliability non-negotiable, verify public-value features in live conditions before promotion, and tailor legitimacy strategies to culture. Use civic appeals to amplify, not replace, operational excellence; lead with privacy, transparency, and proof where autonomy expectations are higher. This framework turns Public Value Theory into an actionable playbook for DPHS design, communication, and rollout.
Language, Reason, and the Costs of Abandoning StandardsI have been doing some reading in recent weeks of one of my favorite authors, Stephen Pinker, specifically a work, which has become something of a classic, published some time ago, The Language Instinct.1 In this fascinating work, Pinker includes a discussion of certain strands within contemporary language studies that advocate treating nonstandard dialects as pedagogically equivalent to standard academic language in analytic and institutional contexts. Increasingly, the trend to “deprioritize” the rules of the so-called “hegemonic” idiom has spread not only in the academic literature (especially in discourse within the “critical studies” community), but also into elementary and secondary educational contexts, where traditional instruction gives way to curricula which eschew formal semantics, structural rigor, analytical grammar and attention to conventions of standard speech. These are, in the view of many, tedious and “prescriptivist,” if not altogether oppressive, in effect. The implications of this trend bear attention.The desire for inclusivity, and a respect for the identity, and the legitimacy, of non-standard dialects has served an important corrective function. It has countered naïve assumptions about intelligence, worth, or expressive capacity based on the accent of speakers (particularly, within an educational context, members of traditionally “disadvantaged” or marginalized communities), or their native idiom, and they have rightly underscored that all natural languages, and dialects, as tools for the conveyance of meaning, are systematic, rule-governed, and capable of sustaining coherence within their speech communities. The aforementioned scholarship, among critical theorists, repetitively makes this case, and often advocates for the “disruption” of normative practice in prioritizing standard language in education. While many proponents of critical language awareness advocate additive models (combining standard instruction with critical reflection), there remains a growing pedagogical tendency—particularly in some applied contexts—to de-emphasize explicit instruction in standard forms. Alongside the salutary recognition of the potential of nonstandard idioms to convey meaning, the advocates of disruption and those who decentralize standard language – both in the study of the conventions of semantics, grammar, syntax and literature of the so-called hegemonic culture, and even (increasingly) in second language studies – are encouraged to develop in students “critical language awareness.” This means they must analyze how standard language ideologies function to maintain power, reproduce social inequality, and marginalize non-standard speakers. Standard language in this view should be depreciated, and “traditional” tenets of rigor and formality loosened, if not abandoned.2This, in my view, is a troubling tendency. A growing demand within the academic community that teachers should disparage the role of standard language as a distinct and indispensable instrument of analytic reasoning, education, and public discourse, and should ignore or relax altogether the requirements of standard language within those domains, comes at a genuine intellectual cost. This trend derives from a conflation of two claims that ought to be kept rigorously distinct: 1) that non-standard dialects are linguistically legitimate, and 2) that they are equally suited to the purposes of rigorous analysis, formal exposition, and institutional persuasion. The first claim is well supported; the second is not. Linguistic legitimacy concerns internal rule-governed structure. Analytic suitability concerns the external demands of institutional reasoning. These are different evaluative criteria.The function of standard language is not merely social or aesthetic. It is epistemic. Standard language, and its concomitant conventions, are a deliberately constrained linguistic instrument, refined over time to facilitate explicit reasoning among large, heterogeneous populations lacking shared background assumptions. Their norms - precision of reference, explicit premising, linear argumentation, controlled affect, and stable semantics—are not simply useless, arbitrary conventions imposed by cultural elites.They are, ultimately, technologies of clarity. Like any technology, they are historically contingent and socially distributed — but their function is instrumental rather than symbolic. Their value lies not in who first wielded them, but in what they enable: durable inferenceacross differences.This point becomes clearer when we consider the nature of analytic reasoning itself. Formal and informal logic alike require that premises be identifiable, that terms be defined and used consistently, that inferential steps be traceable, and that conclusions follow recognizably from what precedes them. These requirements impose significant cognitive demands, particularly on novice thinkers – such as students in elementary school and in secondary education. Language varieties or discourse registers that tolerate imprecision, ambiguity, shifting reference, lack of logical parallelism, ellipsis, emotional compression or implicit premises, and which rely heavily on coterie-defined metaphorical, metonymical and other figurative devices may function admirably in high-context, oral, or in-group settings. But when such registers are imported, unaltered, into analytic contexts, they tend to obscure inferential structure and permit, rather than resist, intellectual shortcuts.This observation should not be misunderstood as a claim about the intellectual capacities of speakers. The capacity to reason analytically is not distributed along linguistic lines. Rather, the issue is whether a linguistic system - or, more precisely, a set of linguistic norms - enforces the disciplines that analytic reasoning requires. Standard academic language, as institutionally codified, has evolved to externalize these disciplines; informal and high-context registers are typically not structured with those analytic demands in mind. What is permitted is frequently exploited, particularly by students still learning how to discipline their thought, to the detriment of cogency. The advantage of standard language is not structural superiority, but the institutionalization of constraints that externalize logical discipline.Consider, for example, features often cited in discussions of non-standard speech: double negatives, emotionally charged vocabulary, topic drift, or reliance on shared contextual assumptions. Within the speech communities in which these features are normative, they are not logically defective; they are, indeed, rule-governed and intelligible. But they are poorly aligned with analytic goals. Double negation, while unambiguous within a dialect, can complicate scope in formal reasoning. It takes the rigidity of formal logic, the agreement of the linguistic community as to application of meaning within the norms of “standard” language to resolve this. This is the case for example in Iberian languages, Langue d’oc, Langue d’oil and Italo Romance. In these contexts, the double negative construction and, for example, dative redundancy are standardized as to their interpretation within a closely framed set of linguistic applications. Emotional loading, meanwhile, collapses descriptive rigor into subjectivism. Topic drift, imprecise reference and highly figurative language often obfuscate reasoning and undermine argumentative coherence. Implicit premises and non sequitur render reasoning opaque for readers not already inclined to agree. Along with a failure to rigorously define conventions of semantics, grammar, syntax and punctuation, as well as spelling and pronunciation, these features may not make analytic reasoning entirely impossible. They do, however, make it more difficult, and far more subject to misunderstanding and misinterpretation. They detract from rigorous discourse, they do not assist it. And, in educational settings and communication requiring rigor, assistance matters.Standard language functions as a kind of intellectual scaffolding. Its stylistic constraints externalize cognitive discipline. They force writers to slow down, to specify what they mean, to anticipate objections, and to make inferential commitments explicit. This is extremely important in academic contexts, in the public domain, and in business. In this sense, standard language “carries the water” for analytic thought not because it is inherently more logical, but because it institutionalizes habits of clarity. To abandon those habits in the name of linguistic equivalence is a major category error. It confuses respect of language evolutionary realities and cultural diversity with utility and rigor. Castilian was once the vulgar language of disenfranchised peasants within the complex of the pax romana. Over millennia, it evolved into a highly logical discursive language spectacularly suited for analytical rigor. Standard language, agreed upon by all, fulfills this highly utilitarian function as well as aesthetic objectives. It does so by default; non-standard and informal registers generally do not - much as Basil Bernstein’s distinction between restricted (high-context, assumption-laden) and elaborated (explicit, low-context) codes – which highlights the institutional mismatch when schools deprecate traditional standards or allow expression for heterogeneous consumption exclusively in high context idioms.3The consequences of this confusion in the educational domain and the acceptance, indeed the encouragement, of nonstandard language are increasingly visible. Students are often encouraged to view demands for standard language as matters of taste. Worse, the teaching of standard language is framed – especially within the so-called “critical” language studies community – through an academic perspective that interprets language primarily through the lens of power, domination, and resistance. In this view, standard language is disparaged as the language of the hegemon, the colonialist. It must cede its place to the patois, the languages and dialectical peculiarities of the so-called disenfranchised. Language study and language teaching must no longer prioritize the “standard” language of power elites. Rather, enlightened language theory must be, to use the term of consensus, “disruptive”.In reading such statements, I rarely understand, specifically, what harms are being remediated and what, other than the value of clarity, coherence and logical discourse, is being disrupted. This iconoclasm is seen somehow as a meritorious or virtuous redress of historical injustices which must be corrected. It seems that among such theoreticians, little thought is given to the fact that standard language – because it is the language of the hegemon – has evolved precisely to provide tools for rational thought – as such rational discourse, and its logic, provides the framework for advancement of the social, scientific and artistic achievements of the dominant culture. Institutional centers of power have historically codified linguistic norms that support the forms of reasoning valued within those institutions (reasoning construed as “effective” for achieving the utilitarian objectives of their societies and cultural norms upon which the reigning societal edifices are erected). Instead of disparaging the teaching of the language which fosters access to these norms – including not only the logic, the grammar, the syntax and agreed upon semantics of the hegemonic dialect, but also the indispensable linguistic niceties which constitute the phatic web within which all productive discourse takes place (is experienced as inviting, nonthreatening and conducive to dialogue) –, some pedagogical approaches, in seeking to resist linguistic hierarchy, actually end limiting students’ access to the linguistic tools most rewarded by institutions. In so doing, I suggest they are being cognitively dissonant – they are subverting their own implied desire to provide access to power to those whom they encourage to disparage standard forms. Research in educational sociology and writing studies suggests that explicit instruction in elaborated codes improves students’ ability to produce decontextualized, analytically structured arguments.4,5In today‘s public discourse, including political discourse, regrettably there is a trend increasingly to favor immediacy and affect over argument. This can be seen in both social and legacy media. Commentary frequently substitutes assertion for analysis, confident that expressive force will compensate for logical thinness. In such an environment, the erosion of linguistic standards is not merely a cultural shift; it is an epistemic one.To insist on standard language in analytic domains and in the public discourse, and to require students to learn and to wield it effectively, and with rigor, is not to denigrate non-standard dialects or to deny their expressive richness. It is simply to recognize that different communicative goals require different linguistic disciplines. It is a recognition that, in fact, not all registers are interchangeable. We do not accuse mathematics of elitism because it demands symbolic precision, nor chemistry because it requires a specialized vocabulary. We understand that certain forms of inquiry demand particular tools. Language is no different.This recognition carries clear implications for education, academia, and public life. Students should be taught—explicitly and unapologetically—that mastery of standard language is not a betrayal of identity but an acquisition of intellectual power and access to what Lisa Delpit calls “the language of power”.5 Academic institutions should resist the temptation to relax linguistic standards under the mistaken belief that rigor is exclusionary. Public figures, especially those who aspire to persuade across differences, should model the disciplined use of language appropriate to analytic, business and civic reasoning. It is important to emphasize that nothing in this argument entails that nonstandard dialects are cognitively deficient or aesthetically inferior. Nor does it deny that standard language carries some historical associations with exclusion. The question at issue is not dignity, but function. Educational institutions must decide which linguistic norms best serve the development of transferable analytic competence. While analytic reasoning is in principle independent of linguistic form, the absence of externalized constraints increases cognitive load, particularly for novice thinkers. None of this requires suppressing dialects, policing informal speech, or denying the legitimacy of linguistic variation in its proper contexts. It requires only the courage to say what was once taken for granted: that clarity is not oppressive, and precision is not prejudice. Recognizing the functional value of standard language does not require denying expressive richness or cultural legitimacy in other forms. I think we are better served with a stance not advocating replacement, but rather breadth of repertoire. This allows for expressive richness while recalling that a shared standard language remains one of the most powerful instruments we possess for thinking together in common. NOTES1. Stephen Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, 9th ed, Harper Perennial, 2007.2. Examples in the literature are myriad. A few: The new Journal from the U of Pennsylvania, Racial Justice in Multilingual Education(RJME), the first edition of which was published in August of 2025; The “Standard Language Ideology Statement”, published by the the Department of Linguistics at the University of Michigan, July 2021: https://lsa.umich.edu/linguistics/about-us/values-statement/standard-language-ideology-statement.In this latter, one reads the following: “Linguists do not support the widely held assumption that there is a standard language that should be adopted by all, and our department condemns penalties that come with not using such language. Standard language ideology is a construct that establishes a hierarchy between varieties. It misleads language users into believing that some varieties are better than others and can perpetuate harmful patterns of linguistic discrimination - discrimination that is often a proxy for ethnic, gender, class, and regional discrimination.”3. Basil Bernstein, Class, Codes and Control, Vol. 1 (Routledge, 1971); see also his 1962 article in American Anthropologist. Bernstein argues convincingly that elaborated codes are essential for formal reasoning and institutional success, and failing to teach them disadvantages students structurally, independent of any deficit in the restricted code itself.4. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson (Harvard University Press, 1991), esp. ”The Economics of Linguistic Exchanges” and ”Authorized Language.” Bourdieu argues that refusing to teach the dominant language in the name of equality deprives repressed groups of instruments for social mobility and institutional participation.5. Lisa Delpit, ”Skills and Other Dilemmas of a Progressive Black Educator,” Harvard Educational Review (1986); see also, Lisa Delpit, “The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People’s Children,” Harvard Educational Review 58:280–298 (1988). Delpit argues that explicit instruction in the ”language of power” (standard/edited English) is an ethical obligation, especially for marginalized students, and that withholding it is paternalistic rather than liberatory. This complements pedagogical work on writing as cognitive scaffolding, such as Flower and Hayes, “A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing.” College Composition and Communication, 1981.
This dataset contains anonymized quantitative data from the study “YOUBLUE: Exploring an Embodied Robotic Biofeedback System for Interoceptive Sensibility.” The dataset includes data from 91 participants assigned to either a respiration-driven or heartbeat-driven robotic biofeedback condition. The measures include the Brief State Interoceptive Sensibility Scale (BSIS), Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) valence and arousal ratings, and the six-item short form of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI-6), collected before and after the interaction.
Language is a living organism that evolves alongside technological and social advancements. This paper examines the phenomenon of neologisms—newly coined words or expressions—and their pervasive role in contemporary English mass media. The study categorizes recent neologisms based on their morphological formation processes, such as blending, compounding, and functional shift. Furthermore, it analyzes how mass media acts as a primary catalyst for the popularization of these terms. By investigating digital journals, social media platforms, and news broadcasts, the research highlights the pragmatic functions of neologisms in creating concise, engaging, and culturally relevant communication. The findings provide insights into the current trends of English lexicology and the impact of the digital age on linguistic norms.
This dataset contains respondent-level records from on-site soundscape surveys of urban public space in two Chinese cities, collected under the ISO/TS 12913-2:2018 Method A protocol between 2018 and 2025. It covers 2,821 questionnaires from 13 public spaces — parks, green spaces and civic squares — 12 in Shenyang, Liaoning Province and one in Changshu, Jiangsu Province. Each record holds soundscape perception (eight perceived affective qualities with ISO pleasantness-eventfulness coordinates, overall evaluation, appropriateness, perceived loudness and four sound-source dominance ratings), four perceived-restorativeness items, visit behaviour and social context, demographics and the WHO-5 Well-Being Index. While each respondent answered, one minute of binaural audio was recorded beside them; per-channel acoustic and psychoacoustic indicators (LAeq and percentile levels, Zwicker loudness, sharpness, roughness, fluctuation strength and tonality) are included, together with 150 photo semantic-segmentation area shares describing the visual context of most records. The workbook carries two data sheets — the corrected 2,373-record analysis table used by the associated articles on well-being and age differences, and the full settled 2018-2025 table — plus an SSID protocol codebook, an English variable dictionary and per-site coverage notes. Version 2 corrects 45 site labels, sound-source ratings on 105 records and one WHO-5 record against the original questionnaires, and adds the restorativeness, acoustic-indicator and visual-context variables.
Arabic WordNet 4.0 is a comprehensive lexical database for Modern Standard Arabic, derived from the Open English WordNet using the expand approach. **Features:**- 109,823 synsets (100% OEWN coverage)- 124,653 lexical entries- 166,643 senses- 265,676 synset relations- 97.2% ILI coverage for cross-linguistic linking- Full WN-LMF 1.4 XML format compliance **Methodology:**Translations were generated using AI-assisted translation (Google Gemini 3 Pro Preview) following the expand approach for WordNet construction. **Attribution:**This resource is derived from Open English WordNet (CC BY 4.0), which is based on Princeton WordNet 3.0.
Recognising emotions as they naturally emerge in everyday contexts remains a key challenge in affective computing due to the inherent complexity, subtlety and variability of human emotional expression. While recent advances in multimodal deep learning have shown promising results, their effectiveness in real-world applications is often limited by the datasets used for training. Most existing emotion datasets are collected in controlled, acted scenarios, which tend to exaggerate expressions and fail to capture the subtle, low-intensity signals that reflect how emotions naturally unfold. To address this gap, we introduce EmU, a novel dataset grounded in spontaneous emotional expressions through autobiographical narratives. Expert consensus provides two levels of annotation, comprising seven discrete emotion categories alongside discretised valence ratings. We benchmark the dataset under both unimodal and multimodal settings using an attentive feature fusion framework, offering baseline performances to guide and facilitate future research.
The Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) is one of the most widely used tools for measuring affect along the dimensions of valence and arousal, yet its abstract humanoid icons have been criticized for ambiguity, especially in representing arousal, and for lacking full gender neutrality. Despite newer alternatives, challenges remain in achieving clarity, inclusivity, and dimensional precision. To address this, we developed the Weather-Based Emotion Reporting (WER), a visual digital scale that represents affective states using familiar weather scenes. Grounded in normative affective data, WER was constructed to systematically map weather imagery onto the valence-arousal circumplex. In a within-subjects online experiment (N = 100), participants rated affective words using either WER or the SAM, allowing comparison of convergent validity, reaction times, and subjective usability.WER demonstrated a strong convergence with SAM, particularly for valence, while arousal showed moderate and more variable agreement, replicating well-documented asymmetry between affective dimensions. Reaction time analyses showed that WER responses were slightly faster than SAM responses, although the effect size was small. Participants consistently preferred WER, reporting greater clarity, comfort, and ease of use. Visual complexity analyses confirmed that WER and SAM differ qualitatively in their visual structure. Complementary image-complexity analyses highlighted the role of visual richness as a contextual factor in affective reporting. Together, these findings support WER as a valid and intuitive alternative to traditional schematic affective rating tools, particularly for communicating valence while maintaining comparable performance for arousal, and suggest that ecologically grounded visual metaphors may address some limitations of existing instruments.
The Darbest dataset is a Universal Dependencies (UD) treebank dataset for Standard Sorani Kurdish written in the Perso-Arabic script. It contains 69,000 annotated sentences and 1,205,855 tokens collected from nine textual domains. The corpus was collected from seven Kurdish online news websites and supplemented with texts from published books. Before preprocessing, the collected corpus contained 1,250,275 words from 5,627 web pages together with book-based texts and was preprocessed using a Python-based pipeline involving text cleaning, Unicode and punctuation normalization, sentence segmentation, and tokenization. The dataset was developed to provide a large-scale syntactically and morphologically annotated resource for Standard Sorani Kurdish. A separate 100-sentence gold-standard set was manually annotated according to the Universal Dependencies v2 guidelines. Sorani Kurdish linguistic experts supported the selection of sentences representing diverse and linguistically complex structures and reviewed LLM-generated annotations for errors. The gold-standard set was used to construct few-shot prompts for annotating the remaining corpus. The resulting annotations were represented in the standard CoNLL-U format and validated using the official Universal Dependencies validation tool, followed by manual correction and quality review. The released treebank is divided into training, development, and test sets and includes lemmas, Universal Part-of-Speech (UPOS) tags, morphological features, syntactic heads, and dependency relations. The dataset can be used to train, evaluate, and benchmark NLP models for part-of-speech tagging, lemmatization, morphological analysis, dependency parsing, and related computational linguistics tasks. The accompanying repository also contains the separate 100-sentence gold-standard set, plain-text corpus splits, README documentation, and a dataset statistics spreadsheet.
The Darbest dataset is a Universal Dependencies (UD) treebank dataset for Standard Sorani Kurdish written in the Perso-Arabic script. It contains 69,000 annotated sentences and 1,205,855 tokens collected from nine textual domains. The corpus was collected from seven Kurdish online news websites and supplemented with texts from published books. Before preprocessing, the collected corpus contained 1,250,275 words from 5,627 web pages together with book-based texts and was preprocessed using a Python-based pipeline involving text cleaning, Unicode and punctuation normalization, sentence segmentation, and tokenization. The dataset was developed to provide a large-scale syntactically and morphologically annotated resource for Standard Sorani Kurdish. A separate 100-sentence gold-standard set was manually annotated according to the Universal Dependencies v2 guidelines. Sorani Kurdish linguistic experts supported the selection of sentences representing diverse and linguistically complex structures and reviewed LLM-generated annotations for errors. The gold-standard set was used to construct few-shot prompts for annotating the remaining corpus. The resulting annotations were represented in the standard CoNLL-U format and validated using the official Universal Dependencies validation tool, followed by manual correction and quality review. The released treebank is divided into training, development, and test sets and includes lemmas, Universal Part-of-Speech (UPOS) tags, morphological features, syntactic heads, and dependency relations. The dataset can be used to train, evaluate, and benchmark NLP models for part-of-speech tagging, lemmatization, morphological analysis, dependency parsing, and related computational linguistics tasks. The accompanying repository also contains the separate 100-sentence gold-standard set, plain-text corpus splits, README documentation, and a dataset statistics spreadsheet.
PURPOSE: This study aimed to provide normative affective ratings for middle-aged to older adults with normal hearing using the Marcell database. The database includes 120 diverse environmental sounds representing various real-world acoustic events, such as those produced by animals, humans, musical instruments, tools, signals, and liquids. Secondary aims were to examine the relationship between valence and arousal, and whether factors such as age, gender, hearing-related lifestyle, hearing demands, and self-reported hearing difficulties influence these affective evaluations. STUDY SAMPLE: Ninety participants (mean age: 54 ± 9 years) with self-reported normal hearing. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS: The study was conducted online. Participants rated each sound token in the Marcell database in terms of valence (pleasantness) and arousal (intensity). They also completed a hearing-related lifestyle questionnaire assessing the frequency, importance, and difficulty of hearing in everyday situations. Normative data for valence and arousal were calculated as means and standard deviations across participants for each individual sound token. To explore the relationship between valence and arousal, correlation analyses were performed. Furthermore, mixed-effects linear regression was used to examine whether any of the measured variables could predict participants' affective responses to the sounds. RESULTS: Normative data for each individual sound token were obtained and reported. A moderately strong negative correlation was found between valence and arousal ratings, indicating that pleasant sounds were generally perceived as calming, while unpleasant sounds were seen as more arousing. Regression analyses revealed that age, gender, hearing-related lifestyle, hearing demands, and self-reported hearing difficulties did not significantly predict valence or arousal ratings in the current dataset of middle-aged to older adults. CONCLUSIONS: The normative data presented in this study offer a benchmark for the hearing research community when examining emotional responses across middle-aged to older adult populations.
Negative biases in emotional processing are central to cognitive models of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), yet it remains unclear whether negatively biased valence attribution covaries with depressive symptoms or represents a more stable vulnerability. In this longitudinal study, we examined emotional valence ratings during a subliminal affective priming task in n = 232 MDD patients and n = 496 healthy controls (HC's) across multiple follow-up assessments, yielding 1395 observations. Multilevel models tested effects of depressive symptom severity, diagnostic group (MDD vs. HC), affective prime (happy, sad, neutral), and their interactions. To separate within-person fluctuations from between-person differences, depressive symptom severity was decomposed (Mundlak within-between specification). Exploratory analyses examined whether long-term symptom trajectory clusters were associated with emotional bias. Greater depressive symptom severity was associated with more negative valence ratings. Within-between analyses indicated that this association was primarily driven by within-person symptom fluctuations, indicating more negative ratings when symptom severity exceeded individual average. In contrast, diagnostic group, prime condition, and symptom severity × prime interactions did not significantly predict valence ratings, and no group differences emerged between HC's and remitted MDD patients. Exploratory trajectory analyses suggested that patients with recurrent symptom patterns may show more negative valence ratings, although cluster stability was limited and findings should be interpreted cautiously. Overall, the results suggest that negative valence attribution in MDD is more closely linked to current depressive symptom severity than to diagnostic status alone. Longitudinal approaches separating within- and between-person processes may help clarify when negative biases emerge and persist during depression progression.
We spend about 90% of our time in indoor environments. These environments strongly influence our health, behavior, and psychological well-being, yet we know surprisingly little about how indoor characteristics shape our affective and approach-avoidance responses. This gap exists partly because previous studies relied on small, self-curated image sets created based on differing criteria, limiting generalizability and reproducibility. To address this, we introduce the Image Database for Everyday Affective Spaces (IDEAS), an open-access dataset of 1,800 high-quality, real-world photographs from the six most frequented indoor environments: offices, living rooms, dining rooms, kitchens, bedrooms, and restaurants. These images were rated by 900 participants on valence, tense arousal, energetic arousal, and approach-avoidance in two online studies. We examined the relationship between valence, tense arousal, and energetic arousal in our dataset using seven theoretical models. Our analyses revealed a strong negative correlation between valence and tense arousal ratings of indoor scenes, whereas valence and energetic arousal, as well as energetic arousal and tense arousal, were largely independent, providing support for the three-dimensional core affect model. Demographic variables had minimal influence on affective ratings, while participants showed high inter-rater reliability. IDEAS offers a valuable resource for advancing environmental preference and broader environmental psychology research, enabling more nuanced investigation of how specific indoor environments and their characteristics shape emotional experience. Beyond normative affective scores, the dataset includes a comprehensive set of low-, mid-, and high-level visual features, individual ratings, demographic data, and copyright information. The IDEAS dataset is available on the OSF (https://osf.io/g9ze5) and GitHub (https://github.com/FatihcDeniz/Image-Database-for-Everyday-Affective-Spaces).
This study has made new contributions to Pauline epistolography by applying the results of sociolinguistic and semantic analyses of the remembrance motif and litotic disclosure formula in epistolary papyri to Paul’s forms of the formulae using an interpretive lens of lexical norms and exploitations. The analyses presented in the study reveal hitherto unnoticed elements in Paul’s communicative strategy and demonstrate how a sociolinguistic approach to documentary papyri opens up new avenues for NT research. Chapter 12 summarises this tripartite study, discusses its significance for Pauline epistolography, and suggests potential avenues of further research.
Abstract This chapter analyzes the deliberate modification of English language accents as a tactic in professional career development. This chapter examines how individuals modify their speech patterns to conform to established linguistic norms in professional environments. This chapter further explains these by utilizing linguistic theories and professional communication principles. This chapter incorporates language profiling, cultural impacts, and geographical impacts of accent modification on career development. This chapter highlights the dual influence of accent modification on individual identity and career prospects.
This record provides disclosure-controlled derived analytical data, analysis code, archived model outputs, and figures supporting the study “Beyond street imagery: A multi-source, multilevel study of spatial conditions and in situ emotional valence in public spaces.” The package reproduces the reported analyses from 378 valid in-situ valence ratings collected across 40 route sections within 10 purposively selected sites. Direct identifiers, exact site linkage, the raw workbook, source route photographs, and manual annotation materials are not included because of privacy, consent, and image/location-rights considerations.
Static concreteness ratings are widely used in NLP, yet a word's concreteness can shift with context, especially in figurative language such as metaphor, where common concrete nouns can take abstract interpretations. While such shifts are evident from context, it remains unclear how LLMs understand concreteness internally. We conduct a layer-wise and geometric analysis of LLM hidden representations across four model families, examining how models distinguish literal vs figurative uses of the same noun and how concreteness is organized in representation space. We find that LLMs separate literal and figurative usage in early layers, and that mid-to-late layers compress concreteness into a one-dimensional direction that is consistent across models. Finally, we show that this geometric structure is practically useful: a single concreteness direction supports efficient figurative-language classification and enables training-free steering of generation toward more literal or more figurative rewrites.
A single-session fMRI study in which participants breathed with a visual pacer whose rate increased, decreased, or held constant on each trial (with abrupt vs gradual change salience), interleaved with free-breathing periods, and reported the perceived direction of change with confidence and arousal ratings. Respiration was recorded with a chest belt and expired CO2 with a capnograph. This registration covers the functional imaging analysis only: all behavioural and physiological processing is complete and disclosed; no functional image statistic has been computed. Hypotheses include direct replications of Farb, Zuo & Price (2023, eNeuro): insula/opercular deactivation under exogenous respiratory pacing, and MAIA-moderated sparing of anterior cingulate activity.
This research aims to study the stylistic choice of words and trace their semantic and argumentative movement by shedding light on the precision of the stylistic choice of Quranic words, which carry argumentative potential and persuasive semantic dimensions through their context. The recipient has no choice but to submit and acquiesce. The study examines these words in terms of their lexical and semantic content, not as a departure from the linguistic norm. The study examines examples from the Holy Quran, where the word is evaluative, lively, and charged with semantic dimensions and persuasive argumentative potential. These words compel the recipient to submit and acquiesce to what is presented to them. They possess semantic features that connect them to the context in which they appear, directing them in an influential argumentative direction.
This is the Adult–Child Touching Hands Dataset (AC-THD): a dataset of 59 image stimuli depicting hand-to-hand touch between an adult and a child, systematically categorized into three emotional valence classes: negative (n = 15), neutral (n = 29), and positive (n = 15). The tool emphasizes the central role of the hands in conveying emotional information within an adult–childinterpersonal context.The images and the hand-to-hand positions were developed by four trained psychologists, and were first assigned into three emotional valence categories: negative (e.g., one person tightly pinching or forcefully gripping the other person’s hand); neutral (e.g., the two individuals’ fingers lightly overlapping or their wrists touching), and positive (e.g., one person gently stroking the back of the other person’s hand or the two individuals interlocking their hands). Images were initially assigned provisional alphabetical labels, which were subsequently refined through a percentile-based procedure in accordance with validation data. The AC-THD acquisition phase involved a mother (Caucasian, aged 48, right-handed) and her child (Caucasian male, aged 10, right-handed). Images were acquired by a professional photographer using a Canon EOS 1100D digital SLR camera with a 12.2 megapixel APS-C CMOS sensor and a resolution of 4272 × 2848 pixels, equipped with an EF-S 18–55 mm f/3.5–5.6 lens. The built-in flash (Guide Number 9.2 at ISO 100) was manually triggered for each shot to standardize illumination and minimize shadows. The camera was positioned on a tripod to maintain a fixed 90° angle. All images were captured in color in sRGB mode, with framing restricted to the hands and forearms. In the validation study, images were rated by 321 participants on valence, using a numeric rating scale ranging from 0 to 10, where 0 indicates a strongly negative image, 5 a neutral image, and 10 a strongly positive image, with anchors at 0 (“strongly negative”) and 10 (“strongly positive”). Mean emotional valence ratings were calculated for each image, along with standard deviations (SDs), mode, minimum and maximum values, and percentiles. Stimuli were finally classified as negative, neutral, or positive based on the 25th and 75th percentiles of the distribution of mean valence ratings. Accordingly, images with mean valence scores ≤ 4.25 were classified as negative, those with mean valence scores > 4.25 and < 7.23 as neutral, and those with mean valence scores ≥ 7.23 as positive. Therefore, the final dataset is comprised of: N = 15 images in the negative category; N = 29 images in the neutral category; N = 15 images in the positive category. Study validation of the dataset also examined potential differences in emotional valence ratings as a function of participants’ socioeconomic status (SES) and gender, which are reported as Supplementary Materials. These images can be used across a range of research fields, including emotion elicitation, neuroscience, and psychophysiological studies, as well as for assessing affective responses in individuals with histories of supportive or adverse tactile caregiving, given their potential to evoke autobiographical memories.
This study examines the phenomenon of stylistic deviation (déviation stylistique) in the celebrated Dāliyya poem of the Moroccan scholar and Sufi mystic Abū ʿAlī al-Yūsī (d. 1102 AH/1691 CE). Drawing on Jean Cohen’s theory of poetic language, it explores how al-Yūsī departs from conventional linguistic norms to generate multiple layers of aesthetic, semantic, and spiritual meaning. The study adopts an analytical approach encompassing the phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic levels of the text. It demonstrates that stylistic deviation in al-Yūsī’s poetry is not merely a formal rhetorical device but also a cognitive and mystical act that embodies the Sufi vision of transcendence, unity, and spiritual transformation. The findings reveal that al-Yūsī’s Dāliyya represents a distinctive model of Moroccan Sufi poetry, in which language transcends its representational function to become a medium of revelation, illumination, and spiritual insight. Consequently, stylistic deviation emerges as a dual process of linguistic innovation and spiritual liberation, reflecting the profound interconnection between poetic expression and mystical experience.
This article examines how a historically marginalized Chinese Indonesian community negotiates belonging in post-Suharto Indonesia, drawing on ethnography with the Indonesian Jinjiang Hometown Association. It argues that the association functions as an agentive institutional site rather than a passive vessel of cultural preservation, simultaneously curating collective memory and regulating members’ identity performances. As ‘memory curator’, it manages historical trauma through heroization, securitization and legitimization; as ‘identity regulator’, it orchestrates national, ethnic and class performances through mechanisms including donation-based status hierarchies and linguistic norms. These are not two separate functions but interlocking stages of a single institutional cycle, here named ‘Connection-Translation-Empowerment’, in which memory work authorizes status claims and the resulting capacity sustains further rounds of memory work. Fieldwork evidence complicates any celebratory account of this cycle: the empowerment it generates is unevenly distributed across gender, generation and ethno-cultural lines, revealing the limits of the belonging the association claims to produce.
Since sound is a wave, it has all the properties pertaining to any wave, including frequency, amplitude, waveform, and duration, which, translated into musical terms, describe pitch, dynamics, tone, and duration. These four structural elements of sound each alter the listener’s experience and, by extension, the arousal, valence, and, in particular, emotions elicited by them. The significance of emotions and music within both modern society and ancient cultures suggests that any correlation or causation between the two must be inherently important, and the near universal ubiquity and experience of both music and emotion is further evidence of this. However, in order to determine if there was a relationship between the two factors, meta-analysis of both qualitative and quantitative data was conducted, revealing that the alteration of any single or combination of structural elements resulted in variation of the onset predictability, creating psychological engagement and reward. This positive correlation between sound and the degree of response on emotional, arousal, and valence levels within both the qualitative and quantitative data suggests that, depending on the pitch, dynamics, timbre, and tempo of the auditory stimuli, the affective state experienced by the listener varies. Additionally, the higher valency and arousal ratings expressed upon listening to expressive auditory stimuli, which involves the augmentation of tempo as well as an increase in pitch and dynamics and a decrease in duration, ultimately result in surprise, fear, or, most typically, happiness.
There is a consensus among researchers and educators that teachers’ language register (LR) influences learners’ cognitive development. While previous studies have examined how teachers’ professionalism in relation to LR is evaluated by educational experts and researchers, this study was motivated by the need to understand the perceptions of parents, teachers, and teacher-trainees regarding the contribution of LR to teachers’ professionalism in intercultural environments. In this mixed-methods study, 308 participants were asked to rate teacher professionalism based on one of three written reflections, identical in content but differing in LR level. The study was conducted in Israel, a multilingual society in which Hebrew is the official language of instruction but is a second language for many teachers and learners. This context, shaped by ongoing immigration, adds an important cultural lens to the investigation. Unlike previous studies, the findings in this research showed that very few participants considered LR an important component of teacher professionalism. Instead, they emphasised proficiency in other areas, particularly teacher knowledge, cultural awareness, and responsiveness to learners’ needs. This study offers global implications for teacher education in increasingly multicultural and multilingual societies, suggesting that perceptions of professionalism prioritise cultural competence and pedagogical adaptability over formal linguistic norms.
Abstract This study investigates the multifunctionality of the Turkish discourse connective ve ‘and’ in simultaneous interpreting from Turkish into Turkish Sign Language (TİD) in broadcast news. Using a corpus of interpreted news texts, it examines how this polyfunctional connective is transferred across modalities. Drawing on Halliday and Hasan’s cohesion model and the Penn Discourse Treebank typology, the study identifies discourse relations expressed by ve — such as elaboration, temporality, causality, and comparison — and analyzes how they are conveyed in TİD through explicit signs, implicit marking, or omission. Most relations are preserved, though often implicitly, reflecting the economy principle in signed languages. Manual signs used to express ve, including ve -1 and palm-up, vary systematically with relation type. This points to a cross-modal tendency for explicit realization under increased processing demands. As the data derive from hearing interpreters rather than native Deaf signers, the findings reflect interpreter-mediated strategies rather than monolingual Deaf discourse norms.
Anatomical education has historically relied on binary terminology, reinforcing the conflation of sex, gender, and gender identity through long-standing social and linguistic norms. To better include gender and sex diverse students and to respect the delineations between gender and sex, educators are incorporating diversity into their courses through educational primers; however, there is a lack of literature on the subject. Thus, this study explores learners' perceptions and attitudes about adding sex and gender diversity into anatomical education programs at a Canadian university. A total of 73 participants responded to a survey informed by grounded theory, and descriptive statistics are used for analysis. Nearly half of learners felt their overall educational experience was enhanced by the inclusion of sex and gender diversity content in their anatomy course and around half of learners felt more knowledgeable about inclusive language. Some learners were inspired to begin using inclusive language following their anatomy course. Overall, these findings suggest that integration of gender and sex diversity could be well-received and valued by anatomy students for humanistic skill development. Emerging themes requiring qualitative insights, including learners' definitions of "inclusive language" and the viability of peer-based learning, will be explored in future work.
Abstract Recognizing others’ emotions is central to social interaction. Traditional biological psychology infers emotional responding via laboratory measures, whereas contemporary computer vision algorithms claim to identify emotions unobtrusively from facial video. However, the validity of such algorithms for classifying spontaneous emotional responses occurring without explicit communicative intent remains debated. We compared established psychophysiological measures (EEG, facial EMG, EDA activity) with the open-source facial behavior toolkit OpenFace for classifying participants’ spontaneous responses during free viewing of happiness-inducing, disgust-inducing, and neutral pictures. Participants provided valence and arousal ratings and later selected the basic emotion that best matched their reaction which served as the classification criterion. Using within-participants single-trial support vector machine (SVM) classification, EEG achieved the highest accuracy (40%), followed by facial EMG (37%); OpenFace reached 36%. All methods except EDA exceeded chance performance (33.3%) and were lower compared to human raters (48%). Predictions declined slightly for across-participants SVMs, being at chance for OpenFace and EDA. The results indicate that in principle both, psychophysiological measures and video-derived facial action units, can capture diagnostically relevant aspects of emotional responding during picture viewing, but that their performance is limited when expressions are spontaneous and not produced for communicative purposes. Inter-individual variability in expressivity and physiological responding likely contributes to these limitations and should be considered when deploying automatic emotion recognition in research or applied settings.
Abstract This paper examines the social contexts in Thomas Mann’s novel Buddenbrooks where the North German dialect Plattdeutsch is spoken. Beyond the technical challenges of translating these passages, the analysis focuses on the literary representation of code-switching that functions primarily as socially and symbolically charged act. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological theory, the study interprets deviations from linguistic norms and dialect use as instances of double negation – a strategy that appears to challenge social conventions but, in reality, affirms the most valuable social capital in classical bourgeois society: the certainty that one’s high status remains unthreatened. The difficulty of translating such passages stems from the specific cultural parameters embedded in the novel. Ultimately, the paper argues that culture is not an immediate given but requires analytical frameworks from the social sciences for proper understanding and interpretation.
= 702), we examined whether the expectancy of an action effect shapes the affective evaluation of corresponding action-effect episodes. In each study, participants responded to stimuli by clicking on buttons that produced effects with either high (stimulus-congruent) or low (stimulus-incongruent) expectancy. Induced affect was assessed using both implicit (affective priming) and explicit (valence ratings) measures. Overall, high-expectancy episodes elicited relatively more positive affect than low-expectancy episodes. For our implicit measure, this effect persisted unless correspondence among all task events (stimulus, response, and effect) was simultaneously reduced (Experiments 2 + 3). Furthermore, this outcome could not be attributed to mere visual mismatch between stimulus and effect (Experiment 4) and was observed even when stimulus-congruent effects were less likely to occur than stimulus-incongruent ones (Experiments 5 + 6). These findings suggest that expected action outcomes elicit positive affect, thus offering a parsimonious explanation for performance advantages previously attributed to more complex mechanisms like ideomotor accounts or response monitoring. More broadly, we propose that affective evaluation of action-effect episodes represents a fundamental mechanism governing behavior across multiple psychological domains, from basic action control to complex behavior in various settings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).