Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
16504 papers
Everyday speech is produced with an intricate timing pattern and rhythm. Speech units follow each other with short interleaving pauses, which can be either bridged by fillers (erm, ah) or empty. Through their syntactic positions, pauses connect to the thoughts expressed. We investigated whether disturbances of thought in schizophrenia are manifest in patterns at this level of linguistic organization, whether these are seen in first degree relatives (FDR) and how specific they are to formal thought disorder (FTD). Spontaneous speech from 15 participants without FTD (SZ-FTD), 15 with FTD (SZ+FTD), 15 FDRs and 15 neurotypical controls (NC) was obtained from a comic strip retelling task and rated for pauses subclassified by syntactic position and duration. SZ-FTD produced significantly more unfilled pauses than NC in utterance-initial positions and before embedded clauses. Unfilled pauses occurring within clausal units did not distinguish any groups. SZ-FTD also differed from SZ+FTD in pr)
Several self-report measures of conspiracist beliefs have been developed in Western populations, but examination of their psychometric properties outside Europe and North America is limited. This study aimed to examine the psychometric properties of three widely-used measures of conspiracist beliefs in Iran. We translated the Belief in Conspiracy Theory Inventory (BCTI), Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire (CMQ), and Generic Conspiracist Belief Scale (GCBS) into Persian. Factorial validity was examined using principal-axis factor analysis in a community sample from Tehran, Iran (N = 544). Further, the relationships between scores on these measures and hypothesized antecedents (i.e., education, schizotypal personality, information processing style, superstitious beliefs, religiosity, and political orientation) were examined. Overall, we failed to find support for the parent factor structures of two of the three scales (BCTI and GCBS) and evidence of construct validity for all three scal)
It is well known that people who read print or braille sometimes make eye or finger movements against the reading direction. The way these regressions are elicited has been studied in detail by manipulating linguistic aspects of the reading material. Actually, it has been shown that reducing the physical intensity or clarity of the visual input signal can also lead to increased regressions during reading. We asked whether the same might be true in the haptic realm while reading braille. We set the height of braille dots at three different levels (high, medium, and low) and asked adult blind, practiced braille readers to read standardized texts without any repetition of content. The results show that setting the braille dot height near the tactile threshold significantly increased the frequency of regressive finger movements. Additionally, at the lowest braille dot height, braille reading speed significantly diminished. These effects did not occur at braille dot heights that were close)
The Canary Islands' indigenous people have been the subject of substantial archaeological, anthropological, linguistic and genetic research pointing to a most probable North African Berber source. However, neither agreement about the exact point of origin nor a model for the indigenous colonization of the islands has been established. To shed light on these questions, we analyzed 48 ancient mitogenomes from 25 archaeological sites from the seven main islands. Most lineages observed in the ancient samples have a Mediterranean distribution, and belong to lineages associated with the Neolithic expansion in the Near East and Europe (T2c, J2a, X3a...). This phylogeographic analysis of Canarian ancient mitogenomes, the first of its kind, shows that some lineages are restricted to Central North Africa (H1cf, J2a2d and T2c1d3), while others have a wider distribution, including both West and Central North Africa, and, in some cases, Europe and the Near East (U6a1a1, U6a7a1, U6b, X3a, U6c1). In)
Background: Centile curves and standard scores are common in epidemiological research. However, standardised norms and centile growth curves for language disorder that reflect the entire UK local school population do not exist. Methods: Scores on six language indices assessing receptive and expressive functioning of children were obtained from the SCALES population survey. Monolingual English speaking participants were aged between five and nine years. Children who attended special schools at study intake, or who were learning English as an additional language were excluded. We constructed language norms using the LMS method of standardisation which allows for skewed measurements. We made use of probability weights that were produced from a two-step logistic model. Distributions of estimated standard scores from an intensively assessed sub-population and from the full population were contrasted to demonstrate the role of weights. Results: Non-overlapping centile curves and standard)
Lately, discourse structure has received considerable attention due to the benefits its application offers in several NLP tasks such as opinion mining, summarization, question answering, text simplification, among others. When automatically analyzing texts, discourse parsers typically perform two different tasks: i) identification of basic discourse units (text segmentation) ii) linking discourse units by means of discourse relations, building structures such as trees or graphs. The resulting discourse structures are, in general terms, accurate at intra-sentence discourse-level relations, however they fail to capture the correct inter-sentence relations. Detecting the main discourse unit (the Central Unit) is helpful for discourse analyzers (and also for manual annotation) in improving their results in rhetorical labeling. Bearing this in mind, we set out to build the first two steps of a discourse parser following a top-down strategy: i) to find discourse units, ii) to detect the Cen)
Human listeners can focus on one speech stream out of several concurrent ones. The present study aimed to assess the whole-brain functional networks underlying a) the process of focusing attention on a single speech stream vs. dividing attention between two streams and 2) speech processing on different time-scales and depth. Two spoken narratives were presented simultaneously while listeners were instructed to a) track and memorize the contents of a speech stream and b) detect the presence of numerals or syntactic violations in the same (“focused attended condition”) or in the parallel stream (“divided attended condition”). Speech content tracking was found to be associated with stronger connectivity in lower frequency bands (delta band- 0,5–4 Hz), whereas the detection tasks were linked with networks operating in the faster alpha (8–10 Hz) and beta (13–30 Hz) bands. These results suggest that the oscillation frequencies of the dominant brain networks during speech processing may be r)
Reading research uses different tasks to investigate different levels of the reading process, such as word recognition, syntactic parsing, or semantic integration. It seems to be tacitly assumed that the underlying cognitive process that constitute reading are stable across those tasks. However, nothing is known about what happens when readers switch from one reading task to another. The stability assumptions of the reading process suggest that the cognitive system resolves this switching between two tasks quickly. Here, we present an alternative language-game hypothesis (LGH) of reading that begins by treating reading as a softly-assembled process and that assumes, instead of stability, context-sensitive flexibility of the reading process. LGH predicts that switching between two reading tasks leads to longer lasting phase-transition like patterns in the reading process. Using the nonlinear-dynamical tool of recurrence quantification analysis, we test these predictions by examining se)
Boutwell, Nedelec, Winegard, Shackelford, Beaver, Vaughn, Barnes, & Wright (2017) published an article in this journal that interprets data from the Add Health dataset as showing that only one-quarter of individuals in the United States experience discrimination. In Study 1, we attempted to replicate Boutwell et al.’s findings using a more direct measure of discrimination. Using data from the Pew Research Center, we examined a large sample of American respondents (N = 3,716) and explored the prevalence of discrimination experiences among various racial groups. Our findings stand in contrast to Boutwell et al.’s estimates, revealing that between 50% and 75% of Black, Hispanic, and Asian respondents (depending on the group and analytic approach) reported discriminatory treatment. In Study 2, we explored whether question framing affected how participants responded to Boutwell’s question about experiencing less respect and courtesy. Regardless of question framing, non-White participants r)
Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP) patients present language disturbances in tasks like naming, repetition, reading, word comprehension and semantic association compared to Parkinson's disease (PD) and healthy controls (HC). In the present study we sought to validate a Screening for Aphasia in NeuroDegeneration (SAND) battery version specifically tailored on PSP patients and to describe language impairment in relation to PSP disease phenotype and cognitive status. Fifty-one PSP [23 with Richardson's syndrome (PSP-RS), 10 with predominant parkinsonism (PSP-P) and 18 with the other variant syndromes of PSP (vPSP)], 28 PD and 30 HC were enrolled in the present study. By excluding the tasks with poor acceptability (i.e., writing and picture description tasks) and increasing the items related to the remaining tasks, we showed that the PSP-tailored SAND Global Score is an acceptable, consistent and reliable tool to screen language disturbances in PSP. However, we failed to detect major di)
Children and adolescents with delayed or disordered language development are at increased risk of a number of negative outcomes, including social and emotional problems and mental health difficulties. Yet, in low- and middle- income countries, where risk factors for compromised language development are known to be prevalent, there is a lack of research on the association between child and adolescent language ability and mental health outcomes. This study evaluates data from a cross-sectional study in Khayelitsha, a semi-urban impoverished community near Cape Town, South Africa. To measure language ability, behaviour and mental health, adolescents aged 13 (n = 200) were assessed using the Riddles subtest of the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children Version 2, the parent report Child Behaviour Checklist, and the self-report Moods and Feelings Questionnaire and the Self-Esteem Questionnaire. We conducted univariate and multivariate analyses to determine associations between language sk)
The FMR1 premutation (PM) is relatively common in the general population. Evidence suggests that PM carriers may exhibit subtle differences in specific cognitive and language abilities. This study examined potential mechanisms underlying such differences through the study of gaze and language coordination during a language processing task (rapid automatized naming; RAN) among female carriers of the FMR1 PM. RAN taps a complex set of underlying neuropsychological mechanisms, with breakdowns implicating processing disruptions in fundamental skills that support higher order language and executive functions, making RAN (and analysis of gaze/language coordination during RAN) a potentially powerful paradigm for revealing the phenotypic expression of the FMR1 PM. Forty-eight PM carriers and 56 controls completed RAN on an eye tracker, where they serially named arrays of numbers, letters, colors, and objects. Findings revealed a pattern of inefficient language processing in the PM group, incl)
Background: Millions of people use a second language every day. Does this have an effect on their decision-making? Are decisions in a second language more deliberate? Two mechanisms have been proposed: reduced emotionality or increased deliberation. Most studies so far used problems where both mechanisms could contribute to a foreign language effect. Here, we aimed to identify whether deliberate reasoning increases for problems that are devoid of any emotional connotation when using a second language or having to switch between native and second language. Method: We measured deliberate reasoning with items from the cognitive reflection test, ratio bias, a probability matching task, and base rate neglect items. We recruited over 500 participants from Norway and the Netherlands that had English as their second language. Participants were randomly assigned to either the native, switching or second language condition. We measured: number of correctly answered items–deliberate reasoning )
Quantitative applied linguistics research often takes place in restricted settings of an intact language classroom, workplace, phonetics laboratory or longitudinal sample. In such settings the samples tend to be small, which raises several methodological problems. The main aim of the current paper is to give a detailed explanation of methodological and practical implications inherent in a robust statistical method called bootstrapped quantile regression (BQR) analysis. Importantly for applied linguistics research, the BQR method could help to deal with methodological difficulties inherent in small sample studies. The current study employed a moderately small sample (N = 27) of students learning the Japanese language in a Malaysian public university. It examined the relationships between the students’ language learning motivation (specifically, integrative orientation), the students’ images or stereotypes about Japan and their global attitudes toward the target language country and its)
Background: Spatial release of masking (SRM) is a measure of an individual’s ability to perform speech-noise segregation, which is usually quantified by the extent of improvement of the individual’s speech recognition performance when the noise is switched from a spatially co-located position (e.g., speech and noise both presented from the front) to a spatially separated position (e.g., speech presented from the front and noise presented from the right side) with reference to the target speech. SRM is a combined measure of head shadow and binaural unmasking benefits. SRM has only been investigated in young children at group level but not at individual participant level in the international literature due to the lack of reliable speech recognition test materials able to detect subtle statistically significant within-participant changes in speech-recognition-in-noise thresholds. Method: The performance to signal-to-noise ratio (P-SNR) functions of twenty-four disyllabic words were obt)
Approaching issues through the lens of nonnegotiable values increases the perceived intractability of debate (Baron & Spranca in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 70, 1–16, 1997), while focusing on the concrete consequences of policies instead results in the moderation of extreme opinions (Fernbach, Rogers, Fox, & Sloman in Psychological Science, 24, 939–946, 2013) and a greater likelihood of conflict resolution (Baron & Leshner in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 6, 183–194, 2000). Using comments on the popular social media platform Reddit from January 2006 until September 2017, we showed how changes in the framing of same-sex marriage in public discourse relate to changes in public opinion. We used a topic model to show that the contributions of certain protected-values-based topics to the debate (religious arguments and freedom of opinion) increased prior to the emergence of a public consensus in support of same-sex marriage (Gallup, 2017), and declined afterward. In contrast, the discussion of certain consequentialist topics (the impact of politicians’ stance and same-sex marriage as a matter of policy) showed the opposite pattern. Our results reinforce the meaningfulness of protected values and consequentialism as relevant dimensions for describing public discourse and highlight the usefulness of unsupervised machine-learning methods in tackling questions about social attitude change.
This project was supervised by Prof. Esther Dromi, Tel-Aviv University. The aim of this project was to generate Hebrew lexical development norms for toddlers aged 12-24 months. The norms presented here can be used by scientists and language clinicians as reference to the expected developmental curves for research and practice purposes. Data were collected from Hebrew-speaking parents of 881 healthy monolingual toddlers (12-24 months old). Parents completed a web version of the Hebrew adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories - Words and Gestures (MB-CDI-WG) as well as a background questionnaire. Parents reported on their child’s receptive and expressive lexicons, and action and gesture use. Hebrew-speaking clinicians please refer to the general guidelines.
In this paper, we propose a hybrid approach for sentence paraphrase identification. The proposal addresses the problem of evaluating sentence-to-sentence semantic similarity when the sentences contain a set of named-entities. The essence of the proposal is to distinguish the computation of the semantic similarity of named-entity tokens from the rest of the sentence text. More specifically, this is based on the integration of word semantic similarity derived from WordNet taxonomic relations, and named-entity semantic relatedness inferred from Wikipedia entity co-occurrences and underpinned by Normalized Google Distance. In addition, the WordNet similarity measure is enriched with word part-of-speech (PoS) conversion aided with a Categorial Variation database (CatVar), which enhances the lexico-semantics of words. We validated our hybrid approach using two different datasets; Microsoft Research Paraphrase Corpus (MSRPC) and TREC-9 Question Variants. In our empirical evaluation, we showed that our system outperforms baselines and most of the related state-of-the-art systems for paraphrase detection. We also conducted a misidentification analysis to disclose the primary sources of our system errors.
With the rapid development of the internet, social media has become an essential tool for getting information, and attracted a large number of people join the social media platforms because of its low cost, accessibility and amazing content. It greatly enriches our life. However, its rapid development and widespread also have provided an excellent convenience for the range of fake news, people are constantly exposed to fake news and suffer from it all the time. Fake news usually uses hyperbole to catch people’s eyes with dishonest intention. More importantly, it often misleads the reader and causes people to have wrong perceptions of society. It has the potential for negative impacts on society and individuals. Therefore, it is significative research on detecting fake news. In the paper, we built a model named SMHA-CNN (Self Multi-Head Attention-based Convolutional Neural Networks) that can judge the authenticity of news with high accuracy based only on content by using convolutional )
We tested the hypothesis that phonosemantic iconicity––i.e., a motivated resonance of sound and meaning––might not only be found on the level of individual words or entire texts, but also in word combinations such that the meaning of a target word is iconically expressed, or highlighted, in the phonetic properties of its immediate verbal context. To this end, we extracted single lines from German poems that all include a word designating high or low dominance, such as large or small, strong or weak, etc. Based on insights from previous studies, we expected to find more vowels with a relatively short distance between the first two formants (low formant dispersion) in the immediate context of words expressing high physical or social dominance than in the context of words expressing low dominance. Our findings support this hypothesis, suggesting that neighboring words can form iconic dyads in which the meaning of one word is sound-iconically reflected in the phonetic properties of adjace)
Increasingly, liberal humanist ideals and the modern regime of human rights seem at best ineffective and at worst positioned to facilitate the proliferation of contemporary forms of domination. On the one side, “new” systems of violence afflict the marginalized humans this human rights regime is supposed to protect, as evidenced by increasing carcerality in liberal democracies. On the other, placing humanity at the center of ethical concern has enabled the destruction of ecosystems around the world, runaway climate change, and the most horrifying system of animal slaughter the world has ever seen. Both lines of domination closely connect to the afterlives of colonial and plantation societies that structured both a racial order and nonhuman lives and ecologies.1 In these times, then, the ethical and ontological value of the category of the human has come under scrutiny. What to do with this figure, one that conjoins so many systems of domination and simultaneously inspired so many liberation struggles? Hold fast to its emancipatory potential? Turn away and reject it entirely? Render it inoperative? Resignify and displace its meaning?Both Black studies and “posthumanism”—each of which traverses a variety of fields—have provided some of the most provocative responses to these questions, albeit through very different avenues.2 Black studies scholarship has shown how the modern category of the human and the attendant concept of liberal personhood emerged from transatlantic slavery and settler colonialism, which treated white men as the implicit model for proper humanity and enslaved black people as the paradigm of subhumanity.3 Similarly, posthumanist scholarship in animal studies has drawn attention to the European West’s consistent domination of and separation from nonhuman forms of life.4 If Black studies shows that blackness is the “inside-outside” of human civil society, to borrow Frank Wilderson’s description of the field,5 some forms of posthumanism also describe how non–Homo sapiens constitutes its inverse “outside-inside.” The trio of books under review—Bénédicte Boisseron’s Afro-Dog, Lindgren Johnson’s Race Matters, Animal Matters, and Cristin Ellis’s Antebellum Posthuman—explore these tensions in the specific context of the relationship between anthropocentrism and slavery in the antebellum United States. These authors join a growing list of writers interested in the relationship between antiblackness and the domination of animals, including Zakiyyah Jackson, Syl and Aph Ko, Claire Jean Kim, Breeze Harper, Christopher Sebastian McJetters, Che Gossett, and Lori Gruen.6 The publication of three monographs on this subject, all within a year of each other, may signal the consolidation of an alternative, multidimensional approach to the question of humanism: one that posits the co-constitutive roles of anthropocentrism, slavery, and colonialism, beginning from the intertwined presences of marginalized humans and nonhumans in specific historical contexts. As such, these texts resist confinement to any one discipline and are relevant to a wide variety of fields.Despite similar objects of critique, antiracist and antianthropocentric scholarship have not always traveled well together. A central tension revolves around the post- in posthumanism. Some critics—especially those inspired by Sylvia Wynter’s work, which charts the colonial emergence of the Western figure of “Man”— charge that the attempt to go beyond or after “the human” moves too quickly over the plight of those never considered properly human in the first place. To throw out human-centered concern risks prematurely pulling in a life preserver for marginalized humans just when they may need it most. It risks treating humanity as a monolithic agent of violence, overlooking the multiple ways of being human concealed by hegemonic conceptions of the human. Zakiyyah Jackson, in a review of texts also examining the intersection of race and posthumanism, argues that instead of taking “‘the human’s’ colonial imposition as synonymous with all appearances of ‘the human,’ there is a need to “reimagine ‘the human’ as an index of a multiplicity of historical and ongoing contestations.”7Part of the problem stems from the way posthumanism has come to describe many diverse schools of thought—from cyborgs, to transhumanism, to new materialism, to animal studies, to object-oriented ontologies, to plant theory—even though one major critique of anthropocentrism has been precisely that “the” nonhuman is not singular but an incredible multitude of beings. Another problem is lexical: humanism is already a vexing and polysemous term, and the prefix post- only compounds the trouble. Cary Wolfe, prominently associated with posthumanism, has noted that the term is not about being posthuman at all, in that it does not seek to transcend human embodiment, but is rather posthumanist, in that it “opposes fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy” inherited from humanism. Moreover, it is not straightforwardly after humanism but also before it, in that it names humanity’s embeddedness in a material and technical world before the emergence of a historically specific concept of Man.8 Nonetheless, it is difficult to escape the semantic residue implied in post-, and critics are correct to note that any account of the emergence of humanism that omits the role of slavery and colonialism misses a crucial, transformative element. Perhaps, following Jackson’s call to attend to the multiple contested histories of the human, the way to think together critiques of the human that come from the situations of both marginalized humans and nonhumans is to attend to their relationships in specific, critical historical contexts rather than try to settle the question of “the human” from afar.Joining the debate, Boisseron’s, Johnson’s, and Ellis’s texts all respond to an impasse that often occurs when questions about animals and slavery arise. As Claire Jean Kim puts it, mainstream animal rights scholarship often deploys slavery analogies comparatively rather than relationally, in ways “symptomatic of an antiblack order that depends upon denying the singularity of racial slavery and confining it in the distant past.”9 Boisseron’s Afro-Dog draws on Che Gossett’s work to describe this move as the “sequential” idea that the animal is the “new black” (ad, xxi). Johnson’s Race Matters, Animal Matters calls this move a politics of “extensionism” (rm, 4–5). On the other side of the analogical coin, the idea that slavery treats the enslaved “like animals” is one of the most common articulations of slavery’s essential violence. This description can be helpful if we consider the ways nonhumans too are “animalized,”10 but it raises further questions: What does it mean to be treated like “an animal”? Is that the same as how they should be treated, and does that make a difference? Is being treated like “a human” the opposite of being treated like “an animal”? At stake are fundamental questions about the precise character of humanism and liberal personhood’s violence and exclusions.Writing in the wake of a problematic history of comparison between animals and the enslaved, these authors do not treat slavery’s dehumanization of Homo sapiens as a mere symptom of anthropocentric violence. At the same time, they recognize and avoid the way that claims for liberation sometimes presume proximity to animals as an inherent state of ontological degradation. Boisseron and Johnson are wary of what Cristin Ellis’s Antebellum Posthuman terms “a politics of recognition” (ap, 4), which aims to secure acknowledgment of a being’s humanity or other proper moral status. For them, slavery presents an important site for redefining the structure of human/animal opposition altogether. Speaking to this relationality, Boisseron’s text uses the figure of the “Afro-Dog” to give an account of animality and blackness in the black Atlantic. The “Afro-Dog” suggests the variety of relationships between black people, dogs, and other animals, as well as the system of domination that often pits them against each other. Boisseron explicitly contrasts her approach with a comparative, analogical one, but maintains that these connections cannot be ignored, “if only because [they reveal] a long-standing trend in American and transatlantic consciousness to associate blackness with animality” (ad, xi). Thus, the question should not be whether the once chattel slave should claim his humanity.... The question is rather how the once chattel slave may be in the best position to challenge this so-called humanity and, in the process, redefine the meaning of existence beyond the human-animal divide. In other words, how can the black diasporic subject in the Americas abide by a different set of identifications, one that would not consist of refuting a putative inhumanity, since such regulation validates the accepted (racially invested) norm of humanity’s signification? (ad, 90–91)The question, for Boisseron, is not whether to draw these connections but how to do so. The book thus aims to be relentlessly reciprocal in its engagement, a “counterbalance” to the instrumentalization of race for animal issues while mindful of the need not to “overcorrect” by diminishing animal suffering (ad, xiv).Boisseron constructs an impressive and provocative archive of black-animal encounters in literature, philosophy, political theory, and theater. The breadth of Boisseron’s concerns and source material is remarkable—especially her translation and deployment of French-language material, which allows her to present sources relatively unknown to many English-speaking audiences. Afro-Dog presents its source material less through propositional argument than through montage or recombination, in that Boisseron’s argument tends to emerge through juxtapositions of thematic clusters of material. Readers desiring a more consistent argumentative thread or propositional style may be disappointed, but this approach allows Boisseron to build an important tool kit for the text’s complicated concerns.Each chapter is woven around a different theme and set of issues, addressing, respectively, ways that dogs and black people often “become-against” each other under antiblack humanism (ad, 48), the impasses of sentient property and antiblackness’s proscription of certain forms of human-nonhuman intimacy, and the politics of supposedly mute human and nonhuman beings suddenly returning the gaze or speaking back. A particularly illuminating chapter on creolization begins from the forgotten fact that creolization in the Caribbean involved both humans and nonhumans. Meditating on creolized animals, Boisseron posits an ethos of commensalism as “a human-to-animal and human-to-human relationship that carries an anticolonial, antihegemonic, and anti-anthropocentric resistance” (ad, 107). Commensalism (com, “sharing”; mensa, “table”) denotes a relationship where two entities mutually benefit without adversely affecting each other, even if the benefit is not reciprocal. Liminally wild animals like stray dogs, pigeons, and rodents, typically seen as freeloading nuisances in the contract-debt economy that undergirds both anthropocentrism and colonialism, can “share the table” even if they do not reciprocally return the gift.Afro-Dog focuses on moments of defiance and conjoined struggles, sometimes consonant and sometimes dissonant, for human and nonhuman dignity. It does so because Boisseron worries about a tendency to connect animality and blackness primarily through abjection and humiliation (xix). While I share Boisseron’s concern about framing liberation solely in terms of victimhood and pain, I also have reservations about centering the sorts of capacity that underlie a primary focus on resistance and defiance. Focusing on capacities for resistance may too easily lend itself to a new politics of recognition, and it risks forgetting the everyday animals and enslaved humans who may not have defied their oppressors (at least in ways that we recognize) but who nonetheless mattered. Perhaps a different grammar of suffering, one that lends itself less to victimhood, is necessary.11Lindgren Johnson’s Race Matters, Animal Matters extends the work done by Boisseron’s text, bringing little-known interspecies connections to light and building an archive of human-animal relations. Johnson examines vulnerabilities and intimacies between human and nonhuman animals in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African American literature and political texts. These intimacies, she argues, displace “extensionist” political maps. As noted earlier, one version of extensionism presumes that racial violence has been overcome and that ending violence against animals is the logical next step. Another iteration suggests, inversely, that only white people can access the privilege to jump over thorny and unfinished racial issues to address violence toward animals. In both cases, animal liberation relates to black liberation only as an extension of the latter’s mission. The texts that Johnson analyzes overturn the “zero-sum” metanarrative that African Americans have sought their freedom only by distancing blackness from animality. The “fugitive humanism” of African American authors, the instances when they flip the script and embrace animality as a vector for liberation, offers resources beyond humanist violence.Race Matters, Animal Matters covers three moments in American history: slavery, via readings of Frederick Douglass’s and Moses Roper’s slave narratives; Reconstruction and its end, via Charles Chesnutt’s Conjure Woman and the Supreme Court’s of the in the and via the and of both and These the African American a putative liberation from the of under slavery the under the Johnson the moments when being and through this liberal personhood and the toward other with and through animality. Thus, she less for of humanism than for in texts that In with Johnson’s to embodiment, this approach of animal in of when authors as animal that an ethos against human (rm, Matters, Animal Matters is at its when historical between and anthropocentric chapter on of African for shows how an of and on the of the and the these of the of black people as the of animality to human Johnson the multiple animal and histories at The of for a in the white and the to do not when we a to if it before of it, but that it (rm, with their white the of the black Moreover, the of on the of which as a that the also the in ways that of white The comparison to then, suggests not mere animality but a of that with and to be The history of in the United to the of to this together a diverse of in of her focus on embodiment, including the of and It have been to Johnson’s objects of with a of and in like and of both of which many of “the in Black of can all the relevant literature, but like these are and address questions at the of Johnson’s relevant is between and as well as of the of personhood and under slavery, and her against the or deployment of black Boisseron and Johnson a wide breadth of new interspecies Cristin Ellis’s Antebellum Posthuman and political issues in the between and posthumanism via of three antebellum Frederick and and a model of and critique, Antebellum Posthuman antebellum not only of who to be in humanity but also of the meaning of “the human” as These she argues, have to about the contemporary relationship between contemporary and and of the human in the it just one by its It separation of the human from its and enabled a new that not always slavery and that not always how often a humanist to this as it to personhood for white men while the enslaved the of the in (ap, an in and not away from these new in of a of these writers them for their (ap, and also slavery in a which the of these authors as liberal humanist for these she does not the of but to the and questions they Douglass’s in the for about a that is the structure of that slavery, that it in that are not human at (ap, charts how this move questions of racial and Douglass’s concern for the value of human (ap, Similarly, on that as the of with the of material would this to the because their is to such a being’s value with its and with both human and rather than with a but as this it difficult to any being to be to what is human as to or or a (ap, tensions between racial and come to the more in antebellum argues that any to to race with these suggests that posthumanism is an that does not recognize itself as such (ap, and that what she calls for which Wynter’s work is her primary be considered posthumanism in that they seek to move beyond the present humanist order of (ap, these tensions in Ellis’s text because of in politics and from posthumanist ontologies, and to a between the idea of the human as Homo and as an a of the nonhuman and the non–Homo If posthumanism sometimes itself to nonhumans non–Homo its critics that it presumes a monolithic out this violence rather than to the ongoing violence against those Homo sapiens to an status. antiracist sometimes treat dehumanization as a category that the category is in that all Homo sapiens are human” (ap, both suggests that we the category of “the from Homo worries that her between the and of the human be too this very a and for through by the often While it may be to her implicit separation between the and too to at least that we not think about the of humanity as Homo sapiens at all but instead should address the category of the suggests that in Animal I argues that “the is in a but rather an way of is that while the human/animal concerns many beyond its is to in other words, the is by many and is not a Moreover, many other posthumanist with precisely that it is to the from the I this is consonant with Ellis’s may be to value to the Homo sapiens and to avoid it as an while taking not to treat it as or to the and of material It would be a of about of the human in different rather than the or the as the of Race Matters, Animal and Antebellum Posthuman the about the of antiblackness and anthropocentrism further and return to the question at the beginning of this What should we do with the human and with The texts but do not this question, which is than any text’s but they are helpful to think with and to of posthumanism, these three texts though Boisseron does not explicitly address the but she tends to the posthuman with a or Johnson and make of posthumanism. In with other Johnson argues that the idea of or the human the of marginalized people the human (rm, offers a different that the tendency of posthumanism, or at least a certain of it, to and lines of is not in itself an or a politics (ap, on the that posthumanism to by of all the that human It shows that of the world is a one, to the unknown in all... on the of (ap, and Ellis’s argument that politics cannot be from ontological I with the two implicit of politics or political these can be as they emerge out of and with politics and the It is to of a politics or that does not simultaneously make some ontological or and these for political The of animal studies this the question of how animals to be treated is to from about the of beings that they or whether the ontological grammar implied by of being is even in the first place. In the of of abjection such as and slave new ontological emerge not because they are but because the present is and a new be to borrow Wynter’s to with some critics instead call for and a “new” one that does not on offers an and account of human and is to the of the as has it is not always to what these once they a of human being not positioned over are What meaning the on that would it from the of human critique of posthumanism her to for a “fugitive as which to some the of new humanism is as it offers a of that for to humanist them It a humanism that is never one that is always on the Johnson’s focus on the of humanist between the between black and animal liberation is an essential but it also raises the question of what to do and how to these moments to the politics of the Moreover, the question To what is humanism a humanism at Johnson’s be that though these try to resist of they also seek its and (rm, the the writers she examines to on to of because there is not always but these moments rather than come to the humanism they emerge are to these questions, which more than rather than new Race Matters, Animal and Antebellum Posthuman can toward an of a human that simultaneously humanity because it is also interspecies and These three texts to these in such interspecies To to the human is to return to nonhumans without or or within to human being it at the same time, and to where it already would like to and the at for their in this
본 연구의 목적은 평가 유형(상대평가 대 절대평가)에 따라 수능 영어 독해 지문이 어휘 복잡성에서 차이가 있었는지 여부를 조사하는 것이다. 이를 위해 2016-2019 수능 영어 독해 지문으로 구성된 코퍼스를 구축했으며, 26개의 어휘 복잡성(어휘 밀도, 어휘 수준 정도, 어휘 변화도) 측정치로 자료를 분석했다. 연구 결과에 따르면 상대평가였던 2016-2017 수능 영어 독해 지문과 절대평가였던 2018-2019 수능 영어 독해 지문은 모든 측정치에 걸쳐 유의미한 차이가 발견되지 않았다. 이는 2016-2019 수능 영어 독해 지문의 어휘밀도, 어휘 수준 정도, 어휘 변화도에서 절대평가 도입으로 인한 차이가 발생하지 않았음을 의미한다. 교육적 함의와 후속 연구에 대한 제언이 제시되었다.
Recent advances in the literature have focused on sketching phonosemantic mappings of imitative or iconic utterances by relying on vowels and consonants, leaving the suprasegmental information unexplored. To begin bridging this gap, this study looks at the interaction of lexical tone and iconicity by comparing sound symbolic (i.e., mimetic, expressive, ideophonic) strata and general (i.e., arbitrary, prosaic, non-iconic) strata from three Chinese languages (Mandarin, Taiwanese Southern Min, Hong Kong Cantonese) using corpus-based means. For all three languages the distribution of tones in the sound symbolic strata are skewed so that the majority of syllables are largely confined to two tonal categories per language, one of which is high level, while the general strata exhibit no such tonal bias. These results indicate that phonological systematicity at the prosodic level might play an important role in demarcating an iconic class of words. This cross-linguistic tendency towards high t)
Introduction: Exploiting information in health-related social media services is of great interest for patients, researchers and medical companies. The challenge is, however, to provide easy, quick and relevant access to the vast amount of information that is available. One step towards facilitating information access to online health data is opinion mining. Even though the classification of patient opinions into positive and negative has been previously tackled, most works make use of machine learning methods and bags of words. Our first contribution is an extensive evaluation of different features, including lexical, syntactic, semantic, network-based, sentiment-based and word embeddings features to represent patient-authored texts for polarity classification. The second contribution of this work is the study of polar facts (i.e. objective information with polar connotations). Traditionally, the presence of polar facts has been neglected and research in polarity classification has b)
Women are routinely exposed to images of extremely slim female bodies (the thin ideal) in advertisements, even if they do not necessarily pay much attention to these images. We hypothesized that paradoxically, it is precisely in such conditions of low attention that the impact of the social comparison with the thin ideal might be the most pronounced. To test this prediction, one hundred and seventy-three young female participants were exposed to images of the thin ideal or of women’s fashion accessories. They were allocated to either a condition of high (memorizing 10 digits) or low cognitive load (memorizing 4 digits). The main dependent measure was implicit: mean recognition latency of negative words, relative to neutral words, as assessed by a lexical decision task. The results showed that thin-ideal exposure did not affect negative word accessibility under low cognitive load but that it increased it under high cognitive load. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that )
Formal thought disorder (TD) is a neuropathology manifest in formal language dysfunction, but few behavioural linguistic studies exist. These have highlighted problems in the domain of semantics and more specifically of reference. Here we aimed for a more complete and systematic linguistic model of TD, focused on (i) a more in-depth analysis of anomalies of reference as depending on the grammatical construction type in which they occur, and (ii) measures of formal grammatical complexity and errors. Narrative speech obtained from 40 patients with schizophrenia, 20 with TD and 20 without, and from 14 healthy controls matched on pre-morbid IQ, was rated blindly. Results showed that of 10 linguistic variables annotated, 4 showed significant differences between groups, including the two patient groups. These all concerned mis-uses of noun phrases (NPs) for purposes of reference, but showed sensitivity to how NPs were classed: definite and pronominal forms of reference were more affected th)
For nearly 50 years, psychologists have studied prospective memory, or the ability to execute delayed intentions. Yet, there remains a gap in understanding as to whether initial encoding of the intention must be elaborative and strategic, or whether some components of successful encoding can occur in a perfunctory, transient manner. In eight studies (N = 680), we instructed participants to remember to press the Q key if they saw words representing fruits (cue) during an ongoing lexical decision task. They then typed what they were thinking and responded whether they encoded fruits as a general category, as specific exemplars, or hardly thought about it at all. Consistent with the perfunctory view, participants often reported mind wandering (42.9%) and hardly thinking about the prospective memory task (22.5%). Even though participants were given a general category cue, many participants generated specific category exemplars (34.5%). Bayesian analyses of encoding durations indicated tha)
The aim of this study was to examine eye movements and postural control performance among dyslexic children while reading a text and performing the Landolt reading task. Fifteen dyslexic and 15 non-dyslexic children were asked to stand upright while performing two experimental visual tasks: text reading and Landolt reading. In the text reading task, children were asked to silently read a text displayed on a monitor, while in the Landolt reading task, the letters in the text were replaced by closed circles and Landolt rings, and children were asked to scan each circle/ring in a reading-like fashion, from left to right, and to count the number of Landolt rings. Eye movements (Mobile T2®, SuriCog) and center of pressure excursions (Framiral®, Grasse, France) were recorded. Visual performance variables were total reading time, mean duration of fixation, number of pro- and retro-saccades, and amplitude of pro-saccades. Postural performance variable was the center of pressure area. The resu)
Experiencing a syntactic structure affects how we process subsequent instances of that structure. This phenomenon, called structural priming, is observed both in language production and in language comprehension. However, while abstract syntactic structures can be primed independent of lexical overlap in sentence production, evidence for structural priming in comprehension is more elusive. In addition, when structural priming in comprehension is found, it can often be accounted for in terms of participants’ explicit expectations. Participants may use the structural repetition over several sentences and build expectations, which create a priming effect. Here, we use a new experimental paradigm to investigate structural priming in sentence comprehension independent of lexical overlap and of participants’ expectations. We use an outcome dependent variable instead of commonly used online measures, which allows us to more directly compare these effects with those found in sentence producti)
In this study, we investigated the effects of context-related semantic anomalies on the fixation-related brain potentials of 12–13-year-old Finnish children in grade 6 during sentence reading. The detection of such anomalies is typically reflected in the N400 event-related potential. We also examined whether the representation invoked by the sentence context extends to the orthographic representation level by replacing the final words of the sentence with an anomalous word neighbour of a plausible word. The eye-movement results show that the anomalous word neighbours of plausible words cause similar first-fixation and gaze duration reactions, as do other anomalous words. Similarly, we observed frontal negativity in the fixation-related potential of the unrelated anomalous words and in the anomalous word neighbours. This frontal negativity was larger in both anomalous conditions than in the response elicited by the plausible condition. We thus show that the brain successfully uses cont)
Recent studies have suggested that proficient bilinguals show morphological decomposition in the L2, but the question remains as to whether this process is modulated by the cognateness of the morphemic constituents of L2 words and by L2 proficiency. To answer this question was the main goal of the present research. For that purpose, a masked priming lexical decision task was conducted manipulating for the first time the degree of orthographic overlap of the L2 word as a whole, as well as of their morphemic constituents (bases and suffixes). Thirty-four European Portuguese-English bilinguals (16 intermediate and 18 high-proficient) and 16 English native-speaking controls performed the task in English. Results revealed that both groups of bilinguals decomposed words as the native control group. Importantly, results also showed that morphological priming effects were sensitive not only to cross-language similarities of words as a whole, but also to their morphemic constituents (especiall)
Existing approaches to describe social interactions consider emotional states or use ad-hoc descriptors for microanalysis of interactions. Such descriptors are different in each context thereby limiting comparisons, and can also mix facets of meaning such as emotional states, short term tactics and long-term goals. To develop a systematic set of concepts for second-by-second social interactions, we suggest a complementary approach based on practices employed in theater. Theater uses the concept of dramatic action, the effort that one makes to change the psychological state of another. Unlike states (e.g. emotions), dramatic actions aim to change states; unlike long-term goals or motivations, dramatic actions can last seconds. We defined a set of 22 basic dramatic action verbs using a lexical approach, such as ‘to threaten’–the effort to incite fear, and ‘to encourage’–the effort to inspire hope or confidence. We developed a set of visual cartoon stimuli for these basic dramatic action)
Background: Akinetic mutism is a key diagnostic feature of prion diseases, however, their rapidly progressive nature makes detailed investigation of the language disorder in a large cohort extremely challenging. This study aims to position prion diseases in the nosology of language disorders and improve early clinical recognition. Methods: A systematic, prospective investigation of language disorders in a large cohort of patients diagnosed with prion diseases. 568 patients were included as a sub-study of the National Prion Monitoring Cohort. All patients had at least one assessment with the MRC Scale, a milestone-based functional scale with language and non-language components. Forty patients, with early symptoms and able to travel to the study site, were also administered a comprehensive battery of language tests (spontaneous speech, semantics, syntax, repetition, naming, comprehension and lexical retrieval under different conditions). Results: 5/568 (0.9%) patients presented with)
Application of a phonological rule is often conditioned by prosodic structure, which may create a potential perceptual ambiguity, calling for phonological inferencing. Three eye-tracking experiments were conducted to examine how spoken word recognition may be modulated by the interaction between the prosodically-conditioned rule application and phonological inferencing. The rule examined was post-obstruent tensing (POT) in Korean, which changes a lax consonant into a tense after an obstruent only within a prosodic domain of Accentual Phrase (AP). Results of Experiments 1 and 2 revealed that, upon hearing a derived tense form, listeners indeed recovered its underlying (lax) form. The phonological inferencing effect, however, was observed only in the absence of its tense competitor which was acoustically matched with the auditory input. In Experiment 3, a prosodic cue to an AP boundary (which blocks POT) was created before the target using an F0 cue alone (i.e., without any temporal cue)
In the Speech-to-Song Illusion, repetition of a spoken phrase results in it being perceived as if it were sung. Although a number of previous studies have examined which characteristics of the stimulus will produce the illusion, there is, until now, no description of the cognitive mechanism that underlies the illusion. We suggest that the processes found in Node Structure Theory that are used to explain normal language processing as well as other auditory illusions might also account for the Speech-to-Song Illusion. In six experiments we tested whether the satiation of lexical nodes, but continued priming of syllable nodes may lead to the Speech-to-Song Illusion. The results of these experiments provide evidence for the role of priming, activation, and satiation as described in Node Structure Theory as an explanation of the Speech-to-Song Illusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR], Copyright of PLoS ONE is the property of Public Library of Science and its content may not be copied or emailed to)
The present study investigated the interplay between selective inhibition (the ability to suppress specific competing responses) and nonselective inhibition (the ability to suppress any inappropriate response) during single word production. To this end, we combined two well-established research paradigms: the picture-word interference task and the stop-signal task. Selective inhibition was assessed by instructing participants to name target pictures (e.g., dog) in the presence of semantically related (e.g., cat) or unrelated (e.g., window) distractor words. Nonselective inhibition was tested by occasionally presenting a visual stop-signal, indicating that participants should withhold their verbal response. The stop-signal was presented early (250 ms) aimed at interrupting the lexical selection stage, and late (325 ms) to influence the word-encoding stage of the speech production process. We found longer naming latencies for pictures with semantically related distractors than with unre)
A wealth of knowledge concerning relations between genes and its associated diseases is present in biomedical literature. Mining these biological associations from literature can provide immense support to research ranging from drug-targetable pathways to biomarker discovery. However, time and cost of manual curation heavily slows it down. In this current scenario one of the crucial technologies is biomedical text mining, and relation extraction shows the promising result to explore the research of genes associated with diseases. By developing automatic extraction of gene-disease associations from the literature using joint ensemble learning we addressed this problem from a text mining perspective. In the proposed work, we employ a supervised machine learning approach in which a rich feature set covering conceptual, syntax and semantic properties jointly learned with word embedding are trained using ensemble support vector machine for extracting gene-disease relations from four gold s)
The Semantic Link Network is a general semantic model for modeling the structure and the evolution of complex systems. Various semantic links play different roles in rendering the semantics of complex system. One of the basic semantic links represents cause-effect relation, which plays an important role in representation and understanding. This paper verifies the role of the Semantic Link Network in representing the core of text by investigating the contribution of cause-effect link to representing the core of scientific papers. Research carries out with the following steps: (1) Two propositions on the contribution of cause-effect link in rendering the core of paper are proposed and verified through a statistical survey, which shows that the sentences on cause-effect links cover about 65% of key words within each paper on average. (2) An algorithm based on syntactic patterns is designed for automatically extracting cause-effect link from scientific papers, which recalls about 70% of m)
In Experiment 1, the symbol interdependency hypothesis was tested with both concrete and abstract stimuli. Symbolic (i.e., semantic neighbourhood distance) and embodied (i.e., iconicity) factors were manipulated in two tasks—one that tapped symbolic relations (i.e., semantic relatedness judgment) and another that tapped embodied relations (i.e., iconicity judgment). Results supported the symbol interdependency hypothesis in that the symbolic factor was recruited for the semantic relatedness task and the embodied factor was recruited for the iconicity task. Across tasks, and especially in the iconicity task, abstract stimuli resulted in shorter RTs. This finding was in contrast to the concreteness effect where concrete words result in shorter RTs. Experiment 2 followed up on this finding by replicating the iconicity task from Experiment 1 in an ERP paradigm. Behavioural results continued to show a reverse concreteness effect with shorter RTs for abstract stimuli. However, ERP results p)
Text representation can map text into a vector space for subsequent use in numerical calculations and processing tasks. Word embedding is an important component of text representation. Most existing word embedding models focus on writing and utilize context, weight, dependency, morphology, etc., to optimize the training. However, from the linguistic point of view, spoken language is a more direct expression of semantics; writing has meaning only as a recording of spoken language. Therefore, this paper proposes the concept of a pronunciation-enhanced word embedding model (PWE) that integrates speech information into training to fully apply the roles of both speech and writing to meaning. This paper uses the Chinese language, English language and Spanish language as examples and presents several models that integrate word pronunciation characteristics into word embedding. Word similarity and text classification experiments show that the PWE outperforms the baseline model that does not i)
Research on sensemaking in organisations and on linguistic relativity suggests that speakers of the same language may use this language in different ways to construct social realities at work. We apply a semantic theory of survey response (STSR) to explore such differences in quantitative survey research. Using text analysis algorithms, we have studied how language from three media domains–the business press, PR Newswire and general newspapers–has differential explanatory value for analysing survey responses in leadership research. We projected well-known surveys measuring leadership, motivation and outcomes into large text samples from these three media domains significantly different impacts on survey responses. Business press language was best in explaining leadership-related items, PR language best at explaining organizational results and “ordinary” newspaper language seemed to explain the relationship among motivation items. These findings shed light on how different public arena)
Anatomical atlases have been developed to improve the targeting of basal ganglia in deep brain stimulation. However, the sole anatomy cannot predict the functional outcome of this surgery. Deep brain stimulation is often a compromise between several functional outcomes: motor, fluency and neuropsychological outcomes in particular. In this study, we have developed anatomo-clinical atlases for the targeting of subthalamic and medial globus pallidus deep brain stimulation. The activated electrode coordinates of 42 patients implanted in the subthalamic nucleus and 29 patients in the medial globus pallidus were studied. The atlas was built using the representation of the volume of tissue theoretically activated by the stimulation. The UPDRS score was used to represent the motor outcome. The Stroop test was represented as well as semantic and phonemic fluencies. For the subthalamic nucleus, best motor outcomes were obtained when the supero-lateral part of the nucleus was stimulated whereas )
Most language users agree that some words sound harsh (e.g. grotesque) whereas others sound soft and pleasing (e.g. lagoon). While this prominent feature of human language has always been creatively deployed in art and poetry, it is still largely unknown whether the sound of a word in itself makes any contribution to the word’s meaning as perceived and interpreted by the listener. In a large-scale lexicon analysis, we focused on the affective substrates of words’ meaning (i.e. affective meaning) and words’ sound (i.e. affective sound); both being measured on a two-dimensional space of valence (ranging from pleasant to unpleasant) and arousal (ranging from calm to excited). We tested the hypothesis that the sound of a word possesses affective iconic characteristics that can implicitly influence listeners when evaluating the affective meaning of that word. The results show that a significant portion of the variance in affective meaning ratings of printed words depends on a number of spe)
Methods for representing the meaning of words in vector spaces purely using the information distributed in text corpora have proved to be very valuable in various text mining and natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, these methods still disregard the valuable semantic relational structure between words in co-occurring contexts. These beneficial semantic relational structures are contained in manually-created knowledge bases (KBs) such as ontologies and semantic lexicons, where the meanings of words are represented by defining the various relationships that exist among those words. We combine the knowledge in both a corpus and a KB to learn better word embeddings. Specifically, we propose a joint word representation learning method that uses the knowledge in the KBs, and simultaneously predicts the co-occurrences of two words in a corpus context. In particular, we use the corpus to define our objective function subject to the relational constrains derived from the KB. We fu)
Aging has traditionally been related to impairments in name retrieval. These impairments have usually been explained by a phonological transmission deficit hypothesis or by an inhibitory deficit hypothesis. This decline can, however, be modulated by the educational level of the sample. This study analyzed the possible role of these approaches in explaining both object and face naming impairments during aging. Older adults with low and high educational level and young adults with high educational level were asked to repeatedly name objects or famous people using the semantic-blocking paradigm. We compared naming when exemplars were presented in a semantically homogeneous or in a semantically heterogeneous context. Results revealed significantly slower rates of both face and object naming in the homogeneous context (i.e., semantic interference), with a stronger effect for face naming. Interestingly, the group of older adults with a lower educational level showed an increased semantic in)
Rare changes in a stream of otherwise repeated task-irrelevant sounds break through selective attention and disrupt performance in an unrelated visual task by triggering shifts of attention to and from the deviant sound (deviance distraction). Evidence indicates that the involuntary orientation of attention to unexpected sounds is followed by their semantic processing. However, past demonstrations relied on tasks in which the meaning of the deviant sounds overlapped with features of the primary task. Here we examine whether such processing is observed when no such overlap is present but sounds carry some relevance to the participants’ biological need to eat when hungry. We report the results of an experiment in which hungry and satiated participants partook in a cross-modal oddball task in which they categorized visual digits (odd/even) while ignoring task-irrelevant sounds. On most trials the irrelevant sound was a sinewave tone (standard sound). On the remaining trials, deviant soun)
Deviance sensitivity is the specific response to a surprising stimulus, one that violates expectations set by the past stimulation stream. In audition, deviance sensitivity is often conflated with stimulus-specific adaptation (SSA), the decrease in responses to a common stimulus that only partially generalizes to other, rare stimuli. SSA is usually measured using oddball sequences, where a common (standard) tone and a rare (deviant) tone are randomly intermixed. However, the larger responses to a tone when deviant does not necessarily represent deviance sensitivity. Deviance sensitivity is commonly tested using a control sequence in which many different tones serve as the standard, eliminating the expectations set by the standard ('deviant among many standards'). When the response to a tone when deviant (against a single standard) is larger than the responses to the same tone in the control sequence, it is concluded that true deviance sensitivity occurs. In primary auditory cortex of )
Both musical training and native language have been shown to have experience-based plastic effects on auditory processing. However, the combined effects within individuals are unclear. Recent research suggests that musical training and tone language speaking are not clearly additive in their effects on processing of auditory features and that there may be a disconnect between perceptual and neural signatures of auditory feature processing. The literature has only recently begun to investigate the effects of musical expertise on basic auditory processing for different linguistic groups. This work provides a profile of primary auditory feature discrimination for Mandarin speaking musicians and nonmusicians. The musicians showed enhanced perceptual discrimination for both frequency and duration as well as enhanced duration discrimination in a multifeature discrimination task, compared to nonmusicians. However, there were no differences between the groups in duration processing of nonspee)