Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
16504 papers
Annotation corpus for discourse relations benefits NLP tasks such as machine translation and question answering. In this paper, we present SciDTB, a domain-specific discourse treebank annotated on scientific articles. Different from widely-used RST-DT and PDTB, SciDTB uses dependency trees to represent discourse structure, which is flexible and simplified to some extent but do not sacrifice structural integrity. We discuss the labeling framework, annotation workflow and some statistics about SciDTB. Furthermore, our treebank is made as a benchmark for evaluating discourse dependency parsers, on which we provide several baselines as fundamental work.
Web 2.0 has brought with it numerous user-produced data revealing one's thoughts, experiences, and knowledge, which are a great source for many tasks, such as information extraction, and knowledge base construction. However, the colloquial nature of the texts poses new challenges for current natural language processing techniques, which are more adapt to the formal form of the language. Ellipsis is a common linguistic phenomenon that some words are left out as they are understood from the context, especially in oral utterance, hindering the improvement of dependency parsing, which is of great importance for tasks relied on the meaning of the sentence. In order to promote research in this area, we are releasing a Chinese dependency treebank of 319 weibos, containing 572 sentences with omissions restored and contexts reserved.
The significance of tourism within the ASEAN region is recognised by multiple stakeholders. Presenting and promoting a distinctive image of tourism is a common agenda across the ten ASEAN nations. The aim of this study is to document and interpret the emotional connotations of ASEAN tourism slogans. Arguably, such messages provide an initial guide to the appeal and competitive advantages of each individual country. The study is underpinned by considering key ideas on destination positioning and the lexical analysis of emotions. By mining archival resources about word frequencies, synonyms and meanings, the positions of the slogans in an emotion space originally developed by Plutchik were compared and plotted. Joy, admiration and ecstasy were the dominant emotional connotations of most slogans. Thailand and Malaysia have the most distinctive tourism slogans, followed by Vietnam and Laos. Expressions used in the slogans for these four nations overlapped less with other countries across the families of emotion words.
We present a method for detecting annotation errors in manually and automatically annotated dependency parse trees, based on ensemble parsing in combination with Bayesian inference, guided by active learning.We evaluate our method in different scenarios: (i) for error detection in dependency treebanks and (ii) for improving parsing accuracy on in-and out-of-domain data.
Developed by the CLLD project with support from the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
Discourse parsing is a challenging task and plays a critical role in discourse analysis. This paper focus on the macro level discourse structure analysis, which has been less studied in the previous researches. We explore a macro discourse structure presentation schema to present the macro level discourse structure, and propose a corresponding corpus, named Macro Chinese Discourse Treebank. On these bases, we concentrate on two tasks of macro discourse structure analysis, including structure identification and nuclearity recognition. In order to reduce the error transmission between the associated tasks, we adopt a joint model of the two tasks, and an Integer Linear Programming approach is proposed to achieve global optimization with various kinds of constraints.
In the central nervous system the neuropeptide oxytocin mediates a range of behaviors related primarily to emotionality. One factor that influences oxytocinergic communication in the human brain and correlates with emotional behaviors is the single nucleotide polymorphism rs53576 on the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR). For example, variations in this OXTR genotype are related to parental, altruistic, and other prosocial behaviors. Electroencephalographic waveforms of visually evoked response potentials recorded at the midline parietal electrode site display a prominent component putatively involved with attention allocation called the late positive potential. The magnitude of the late positive potential was found to be significantly higher in homozygous G allele individuals compared with A allele carriers when viewing negative emotionally charged images. Inversely, A allele carriers rated these negative images as more arousing, when measured by the Self-Assessment Manikin rating scale. These data suggest that OXTR functioning contributes to visual processing and subjective experience of negative stimuli.
This paper addresses the scalability challenge of architecture search by formulating the task in a differentiable manner. Unlike conventional approaches of applying evolution or reinforcement learning over a discrete and non-differentiable search space, our method is based on the continuous relaxation of the architecture representation, allowing efficient search of the architecture using gradient descent. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, ImageNet, Penn Treebank and WikiText-2 show that our algorithm excels in discovering high-performance convolutional architectures for image classification and recurrent architectures for language modeling, while being orders of magnitude faster than state-of-the-art non-differentiable techniques. Our implementation has been made publicly available to facilitate further research on efficient architecture search algorithms.
This lexical cognate data was exported from the Indo-European Lexical Database (IELex) supporting the publication: Verkerk, Annemarie. (2018). Detecting non-tree-like signal using multiple tree topologies. Journal of Historical Linguistics. If you are looking to use the IELex data in your own research, we recommend you use the latest version, which is available along with documentation, phylogenetic tree samples and example BEAST control scripts.
Cilin is one of the most popular semantic knowledge bases in Chinese information processing. Due to its coding scheme and taxonomical arrangement, some semantic relations among words are not explicitly shown. Our work aims to characterize its semantic relations by adding tags and compound codes to optimize the taxonomy and hierarchy of Cilin. Experiment results show that using the tag-augmented Cilin as a knowledge base improves the performance in the task of semantic similarity measurement.
Many recent studies, academic and non-academic alike, have argued that the use of Urdu in Bollywood has started to decline. These studies, important as they are, however, suffer from some limitations. They are either impressionistic or based on non-representative data. Furthermore, they do not specify the object of the study or the site of the assumed decline of Urdu. Therefore, it remains vague which element of Urdu, for example sounds, words, syntax or script is under investigation. Similarly, it is not clear which component of film for example titles, dialogues or songs are experiencing the decline. Fulfilling this research gap this paper makes two contributions. Analyzing songs from 1959 to 2010’s, it empirically demonstrates the decline by documenting the shift in the pronunciation of the sounds /kh̲/, /gh̲/, and /q/ from the Urdu to Hindi phonetic norms. Singers from the 1990’s, unlike those from the previous generations, merge them with the sounds /kh/, /gh/, and /q/. The paper also makes a methodological contribution in that it shows how language in cinema can be studied empirically using a corpus.
We conducted a semantic similarity study of semantic concepts in the context of the Holy Book Quran. Semantic similarity examines the degree of likeness and shared common properties of two concepts. For example, the Quranic concept of Allah and God will result in a high score of semantic similarity, whereas hell and paradise will yield in a low score because of its extremely different attributes and semantic features. Apart from that, we also delivered the Quranic concept semantic similarity standard dataset which consists of some pairs of Quranic concept along with its similarity score, which was manually annotated by human raters. This dataset resulted in the score of inter-annotator agreement 0.63, not far from the the ones yielded by some well-known datasets such as WordSim and Simlex. Furthermore, to measure the semantic similarity score, we chose the knowledge-based approach by utilizing lexical database properties such as the length and depth of a synonym set (synset). We then applied it to Yuhua Li equation, which has been considered to be the baseline among researchers within the problem of semantic similarity. In terms of the result, our system gained Pearson's correlation 0.33 and Spearman's 0.19. By considering inter-annotator agreement 0.63 that our Quranic standard dataset has as the upper bound score, there are still quite large room for improvement to better mimicking Muslim's intuition to measure the degree of similarity of concepts within the domain of Quran.
Although treebanks annotated according to the guidelines of Universal Dependencies (UD) now exist for many languages, the goal of annotating the same phenomena in a crosslinguistically consistent fashion is not always met. In this paper, we investigate one phenomenon where we believe such consistency is lacking, namely expletive elements. Such elements occupy a position that is structurally associated with a core argument (or sometimes an oblique dependent), yet are non-referential and semantically void. Many UD treebanks identify at least some elements as expletive, but the range of phenomena differs between treebanks, even for closely related languages, and sometimes even for different treebanks for the same language. In this paper, we present criteria for identifying expletives that are applicable across languages and compatible with the goals of UD, give an overview of expletives as found in current UD treebanks, and present recommendations for the annotation of expletives so that more consistent annotation can be achieved in future releases.
The Hebrew treebank (HTB), consisting of 6221 morpho-syntactically annotated newspaper sentences, has been the only resource for training and validating statistical parsers and taggers for Hebrew, for almost two decades now. During these decades, the HTB has gone through a trajectory of automatic and semi-automatic conversions, until arriving at its UDv2 form. In this work we manually validate the UDv2 version of the HTB, and, according to our findings, we apply scheme changes that bring the UD HTB to the same theoretical grounds as the rest of UD. Our experimental parsing results with UDv2New confirm that improving the coherence and internal consistency of the UD HTB indeed leads to improved parsing performance. At the same time, our analysis demonstrates that there is more to be done at the point of intersection of UD with other linguistic processing layers, in particular, at the points where UD interfaces external morphological and lexical resources.
In this paper we discuss the project of digitization of the Dictionary of the Serbo-Croatian Standard and Vernacular \nLanguage. Scanning and character recognition were a particular challenge, since various non-standard \ncharacter set encoding was used in the course of the almost 60-year long production of the dictionary. The first \naim of the project was to formalize the micro-structure of the dictionary articles in order to parse the digitized \ntext of and transform it into structured data stored in relational lexical database. This approach is compatible \nwith several standard structured forms and ontologies (TEI, LMF, Ontolex, LexInfo). A lexical database model \nwas designed in compliance with these structured forms, following mostly the lemon model. Mapping of \nthe lexical entry markers to LexInfo and TEI enabled export of the lexical data to the mentioned formats. A \nsoftware solution for the dictionary text analysis, parsing and lexical database population was developed and \ntested on the first and the last published volumes of the dictionary (which contain 27,141 articles in total). An \nevaluation of the results shows that the developed model and software solution can be successfully used for \nthe other volumes as well.
This paper describes the development of the first syntactically-annotated corpus of Breton. The corpus is part of the Universal Dependencies project. In the paper we describe how the corpus was prepared, some Breton-specific constructions that required special treatment, and in addition we give results for parsing Breton using a number of off-the-shelf data-driven parsers.
This paper describes a method of creating synthetic treebanks for cross-lingual dependency parsing using a combination of machine translation (including pivot translation), annotation projection and the spanning tree algorithm. Sentences are first automatically translated from a lesser-resourced language to a number of related highly-resourced languages, parsed and then the annotations are projected back to the lesser-resourced language, leading to multiple trees for each sentence from the lesser-resourced language. The final treebank is created by merging the possible trees into a graph and running the spanning tree algorithm to vote for the best tree for each sentence. We present experiments aimed at parsing Faroese using a combination of Danish, Swedish and Norwegian. In a similar experimental setup to the CoNLL 2018 shared task on dependency parsing we report state-of-the-art results on dependency parsing for Faroese using an off-theshelf parser.
International audience
This paper describes the changes applied to the original process used to convert the Index Thomisticus Treebank, a corpus including texts in Medieval Latin by Thomas Aquinas, into the annotation style of Universal Dependencies. The changes are made both to harmonise the Universal Dependencies version of the Index Thomisticus Treebank with the two other available Latin treebanks and to fix errors and inconsistencies resulting from the original process. The paper details the treatment of different issues in PoS tagging, lemmatisation and assignment of dependency relations. Finally, it assesses the quality of the new conversion process by providing an evaluation against a gold standard.
In this study, we tested the linguistic relativity hypothesis by studying the effect of grammatical gender (feminine vs. masculine) on affective judgments of conceptual representation in Italian and German. In particular, we examined the within- and cross-language grammatical gender effect and its interaction with participants' demographic characteristics (such as, the raters' age and sex) on semantic differential scales (affective ratings of valence, arousal and dominance) in Italian and German speakers. We selected the stimuli and the relative affective measures from Italian and German adaptations of the ANEW (Affective Norms for English Words). Bayesian and frequentist analyses yielded evidence for the absence of within- and cross-languages effects of grammatical gender and sex- and age-dependent interactions. These results suggest that grammatical gender does not affect judgments of affective features of semantic representation in Italian and German speakers, since an overt coding of word grammar is not required. Although further research is recommended to refine the impact of the grammatical gender on properties of semantic representation, these results have implications for any strong view of the linguistic relativity hypothesis.
Developing experimental materials to study metaphor memory is a difficult process, especially in regard to finding a suitable type of control stimulus. The dead metaphors were technically metaphorical but have long since come into common usage; they were thus considered an intermediate type between metaphors and nonmetaphors. The fact that images were reported more often with metaphorical than non-metaphorical sentences suggests that imagery may be a more frequently used mnemonic with metaphors than with more literal language, even though it is not necessarily all that effective. The greater number of counting errors for metaphors may be attributed to differential saliency of the input sentences. The metaphors were novel, while the dead metaphors and nonmetaphors were commonplace. People’s intuitions about metaphors are often highly inaccurate, especially in the direction of thinking them to be more difficult, less informative, and less imageable than they truly are.
The thesis is devoted to the study of language planning in Soviet Ukraine in the interwar period. It presents and discusses some ideas, schools, debates and results of the normalization of the Ukrainian language in this period. The aim of the dissertation is to promote a better knowledge and understanding of an important phase in the history of the Ukrainian language, and identify the epistemological and cultural background which inspired some of the linguistic descriptions and prescriptions in the interwar period. \nThe thesis consists of index, introduction, four chapters, conclusions, bibliographical references, annexes and abstracts. \nThe first chapter summarizes the historical, linguistic and cultural background of the work on the norm of the Ukrainian language in the 1920s and 1930s, paying special attention to the importance of the relationship between language-people-nation in the Ukrainian culture, the influence of German Romanticism and Völkerpsychologie on Ukrainian normalizers, the concepts of language policy and planning and of linguistic norm and their application in Soviet Ukraine. It also provides the Western/Italian reader with some explanations of specific Ukrainian/Slavonic terms which need to be contextualized in order to be understood. \nThe second chapter focuses on the two schools of normalizers active during the so-called ‘Ukrainization’ (1925-1932): the ethnographic one (O. Kurylo in her early writings, Je. Tymčenko, A. Kryms’kyj, I. Ohijenko, S. Smerečyns’kyj, V. Simovyč in his early writings, M. Hladkyj) and the synthetic one (O. Synjavs’kyj, M. Sulyma, O. Kurylo in her later writings). We identify and define what each of the linguists presented considered to be the norm of the Ukrainian language. Our analysis confirms that the main difference between the ethnographic and synthetic school is that the former focused on folk vernacular, was extremely puristic and therefore tended to reject terms and syntactic structures patterned on or too close to Russian or Polish, whereas the latter was moderately puristic, less categorical in its prescriptions and more open to external influences. The chapter ends with a presentation of the main results of the activity of corpus planning. \nIn the third chapter some important aspects of Ukrainian morphosyntax are discussed. The diachronic perspective is taken into account in order to detect the level of linguistic purism of some prescriptions. The syntactic rules proposed by the ethnographic school of linguists reveal a close connection between syntactic constructions and structures of thought. In other words, syntax, according to the ethnographic school, seems to represent one of the main markers of national belonging, while the synthetic school shows a less radical approach. Generally speaking, the epistemological starting point used in their analysis is represented on the one hand by linguistic psychologism, and on the other by Völkerpsychologie. The chapter ends with an analysis of a polemical pamphlet written by Kost’ Nimčynov (1934) and some manuals, written after 1933: these sources testify that many of the ‘puristic’ opinions on morphosyntactic features of Ukrainian were rejected in the following period. \nThe fourth and last chapter deals with the orthographic question. Due to the symbolic and identity-making value of the written word, and the relationship between Orhodoxy and orthography, spelling rules were and remain one of the most debated fields of linguistic normalization in Ukraine. The process of orthographic normalization during the 1920s and the first half of the 1930s is reconstructed and discussed: the Main rules approved by the Academy of Sciences in 1921, the 1926 project, the debates on the periodical press between 1926-27, the orthographic conference convened in Charkiv in 1927, the elaboration of the 1928-29 spelling system and its main features, the 1933 spelling code and its sovietizing or russifying tendence are presented. \nThe analysis discusses plus and minuses of the two main spelling systems (1928-29 and 1933) and highlights the introduction of some rules of the 1933 spelling code in the political newspaper Visti before its official adoption in September 1933. All the facts presented and investigated prove the importance that was (and still is) attached to orthography in Ukraine. \n \n
Valency coercion phenomena arise when constructions and verbs are combined in novel and flexible ways. This flexibility is one of the main supporting of argument constructions as structural units of language, with abstract and independent semantics that dynamically interact with the semantics of the main verb (Goldberg, 1995; Michaelis, 2005; Pustejovsky et al., 2010; Lauwers and Willems, 2011; Perek, 2015). Despite the pivotal role of coercion in construction grammar, however, little research has been done outside the domain of English (Gonzalvez-Garcia, 2007; Boas and Gonzalvez-Garcıa, 2014; Booji and Audring, 2015), and – to our knowledge – no attempt has been previously made to analyse constructional flexibility in Italian.\t \nWe propose the results of an empirical study on Italian valency coercion, which aims to contribute both to a still lacking constructionist description of Italian and to a cross-linguistic debate on the cognitive reality of constructions. The first part of the research was carried out by means of an acceptability rating test based on Perek and Hilpert (2014): the experiment is structured around 9 argument structure constructions of Italian; a set of 21 sentences was created for each construction, divided in 3 experimental conditions: grammatical, coercion, impossible. Between conditions, sentences differ only in their verb, to insert as little variation as possible. \n1)\ta. Gianni ha detto che verrà domani (Gianni said that he will come tomorrow) \nb. Gianni ha fischiettato che verrà domani (Gianni whistled that he will come tomorrow) \nc. Gianni ha cucinato che verrà domani (Gianni cooked that he will come tomorrow) \n120 Italian native speakers from three age groups were tested: adolescents, young adults (18 - 35 years old), and adults (over 40). The data was analysed both with statistical tests and with linear mixed effect modelling. Results show coercion as an “intermediate” condition, significantly different from both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. Moreover, the recognition of coercion appears to vary with age, as older speakers tended to polarise their answers towards the extremities of the scale (1 or 7). \nThe data also showed inter-construction variability. Constructions appeared to have different degrees of flexibility, that we are addressing in the second part of the study. We are constructing a corpus-based distributional model to operationalize the notion of (partial) productivity of constructions (Barðdal, 2008; Zeschel, 2015). Our assumption is that coercion mechanisms are influenced both by the productivity of the construction and by the distance between source and target meaning of the verb embedded in the creative structure (Barak and Goldberg, 2017; Perek and Goldberg, 2017). We measure the latter by representing construction meaning with distributional vectors trained on a large Italian corpus, following the approach in Lebani and Lenci (2017). As data, we matched syntactic frames automatically extracted from the Universal Dependency Italian treebank (Rambelli et al., 2016) to our constructions and identified the more frequent verbs. The results of the second part of the study, which are still being processed, will provide distributional evidence to shed new light on Italian constructions’ flexibility.
The paper explores the American neologism of culturomics, coined on December 16, 2010 by the Harvardian research tandem of Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden for their article on a “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books.” In computer linguistics, it denotes an abbreviated, interdisciplinary amalgam of the words culture and genomics, and such a correct explanation of the notion was provided by the authors themselves, as well as by The Wall Street Journal linguistic columnist Ben Zimmer on December 23, 2010. However, the paper notes that the distinguished British linguist David Crystal associated it with economics and ergonomics, as did most of the readers, although the authentic American suffix is not -onomics but rather the bioscientific and neologistic -omics, whereas Michel and Aiden describe genomics as a study of organisms and their genomes, that is, their integral deoxyribonucleic sequences. Exemplified by a Google Books n-gram search pertaining to an American English usage frequency of the notion of “Croatia” from 1990 to 2008, the paper analyzes a scientific deployment of the new realizations and the development of software facilitating a machine retrieval of a spoken, written, or of a symbolic natural language, thus synthesizing a computerized theory and artificial intelligence with a cognitive psychology, linguistics, and logic to interactively correct or translate the texts and extract information. What is more, such an approach is also observable in a contemporary algorithmic speech synthesis, data mining, search engines, or in text compressors. Thus, an exploratory mining of the data stored in the permanently accessible digital archives of almost unlimited capacities represents a completely new behavioristic study, as well as a research in cultural phenomenology, in the so-called “narrative networks, ” reflected by a usage of certain words in a language. Additionally, the author notices a reality of almost 4% of all the printed editions being scanned by Google Books so far, in a pursuit for an apparently encrypted truth. As the statisticians, having mined that largest contemporary linguistic database of approximately 5.2 million digitized exemplars, computed that the holdings are comprised of the fascinating 500 billion words, emphasized is a fact that more than 360 billion of them are of English provenience, followed by the French, Spanish, German, Chinese, Russian and Hebrew ones. In such a multidisciplinary environment, the application of culturomic principles from the year 2000 on also enables the development of websites, for example, of Google Labs, which philologically function as special algorithmic, chronological search engines for the browsing of tokens, that is, of the developmental forms of a word or of the entire phrases in the history of humankind. Conclusively, the paper examines a necessity to acquire a systematic biological, encyclopedic, engineering or psychological knowledge to basically comprehend what the Program of Evolutionary Dynamics calls a “cultural genome.”
Blueberries have been reported to possess several anti-inflammatory properties. Previous studies examining the anti-inflammatory effect of blueberries on acute inflammation caused by exercise-induced muscle damage are largely inconclusive. This may be due to the dose used in these studies not accounting for an individual’s lean mass (LM), the compartment directly involved during exercise, when determining appropriate blueberry dosage. PURPOSE: To examine the effect of blueberry supplementation (BB) at a dose relative to LM on delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) and recovery. METHODS: Fourteen recreationally active women (age: 21±1yr; body fat: 24.8±4.5%) participated in this double blind, matched-pairs study. Participants were matched by LM and randomly assigned to either a BB or a placebo (PLA) group. Leg strength was assessed via one-repetition maximum (1RM) on a leg press. Participants consumed a daily dose of freeze-dried BB powder (1.6g BB/kgLM) or a PLA (1.6g PLA/kgLM) for 7 days prior to induction of DOMS. Participants completed 6 sets of 10 repetitions at 70% 1RM on the leg press to induce DOMS. Perceived soreness (questionnaire), pressure-pain threshold (dolorimeter), and average power (AP; Biodex™) of the right thigh muscles were assessed immediately before (PRE) and after (POST), 24, 48, and 72h post induction of DOMS. Repeated measures ANOVAs were used for analyses. Significance was set at p<0.05. RESULTS: There were no group x time interactions for perceived soreness, pressure-pain threshold, and AP, however, significant time effects were observed for these variables. When comparing pre to post 24hr (p<0.001), 48hr (p=0.001), and 72hr (p=0.011) perceived soreness of the thigh muscles significantly increased. Pressure-pain threshold of the thigh muscles decreased significantly from pre to post 24hr (p=0.023), 48hr (p=0.001), and 72hr (p=0.024. Isokinetic leg extension AP decreased from pre to post 24hr (BB: 83±17 to 76±22Nm; PLA: 85±21 to 79±26Nm; p=0.02). CONCLUSION: Consumption of BB for 7 days prior to DOMS induction on a leg press does not affect rating of perceived soreness, pain threshold, nor attenuate decreases in performance compared to a PLA in recreationally active women.
Socioemotional Selectivity Theory posits that as person progresses through the life cycle, he or she makes concerted steps to maximize social and emotional wellbeing through selective patterns of emotional processing (Carstensen, 1995). The temporal positioning of an individual’s goals, motivations, and social orientations, or future time perspective (FTP), drives this change in emotional processing. The association between FTP and age is a naturally-occurring phenomenon as FTP becomes more limited as a person ages; however, it is believed that the construct of future time perspective is sufficiently malleable to be experimentally manipulated (Carstensen, 2003). The current study assessed the effects of a future time perspective manipulation on the emotional processing of positively and negatively valenced IAPS images in a college sample. Emotional processing was indexed by heart rate variability (HRV), skin conductance, memory recall, and eye-tracking. Young adult volunteers (N=22) were randomly assigned to one of two experimental conditions, wherein their future time perspective was manipulated to become either more limited or more expansive. Participants viewed a series of positive and negative cues followed by corresponding valenced images before and after the future time perspective manipulation. Preliminary results of the current study suggest the imagery task had no significant effect on FTP. Due to limitations from the small sample size, a larger sample size will be needed to conduct valid group comparisons to sufficiently test the effectiveness of the manipulation. Results of this study show participants with a more limited FTP had lower LF and greater HF HRV, indicating greater emotional regulation of arousal during the task. Interestingly, our results also indicate that positive affect ratings on the PANAS were related to avoiding negative emotional content (lower fixation percentage for negative images and cues), remembering more positive information (greater positive memory recall), \ndetecting a greater saliency for positive information (longer skin conductance rec t/2), lower sympathetic activity (lower posttest LF and SCL) and greater parasympathetic activity (greater posttest HF and RMSSD). These data suggest that reports of affect might provide more sensitive indication of emotional processing than future time perspective.
High quality communication between health care providers (HCPs) and adolescents and young adults (AYAs) with type 1 diabetes (T1D) may contribute to better diabetes self-care and health outcomes. Health communication reflects both informational content and how information is conveyed, including affect and tone. The aim of this study was to assess HCP affective communication and the relationship between HCP affective communication and glycemic control in AYAs with T1D. As part of a larger study of AYA-HCP health communication, routine clinic visits for 69 AYAs with T1D (M age 17.81 years; 56.5% female) and 8 HCPs (88% female) were audiorecorded. Clinic visits were coded using the Roter Interaction Analysis System (RIAS), a validated coding structure assessing verbal and non-verbal exchanges in a medical encounter. HCP global affective ratings were used to create two composite variables—positive HCP affect (e.g., attentiveness; respectfulness; Cronbach’s a = 0.82) and negative HCP affect (e.g., anger; dominance; Cronbach’s a = 0.75). Hemoglobin A1c (A1c) was taken from the medical chart. The mean A1c was 8.97% (±2.30). Descriptive analyses of positive and negative HCP affect indicated that HCPs expressed a high level of positive affect (M = 4.21) and a relatively low level of negative affect (M = 2.80). Negative affect was positively associated with HbA1c. After controlling for salient covariates (e.g., HCP, race, regimen), A1c accounted for a significant portion of the variance in negative affect during the clinic visit (Adj R2 =.36, ß = 0.57, p &lt; 0.001). This sample of HCPs predominantly exhibited positive affect during routine T1D visits. Glycemic control was not associated with positive affect, but higher A1c was associated with more negative affect. This finding suggests elevated A1c levels may elicit more negative affect in routine diabetes care. Future research should examine these associations over time, including how AYA-HCP health communication quality predicts long-term glycemic control. Disclosure K. Homma: None. F.R. Cogen: None. R. Streisand: None. M. Monaghan: Research Support; Self; American Diabetes Association, National Institutes of Health.
The Effective Set-Size model has been used to describe uncertainty in various signal detection experiments. The model regards images as if they were an effective number (M*) of searchable locations, where the observer treats each location as a location-known-exactly detection task with signals having average detectability d'. The model assumes a rational observer behaves as if he searches an effective number of independent locations and follows signal detection theory at each location. Thus the location-known-exactly detectability (d') and the effective number of independent locations M* fully characterize search performance. In this model the image rating in a single-response task is assumed to be the maximum response that the observer would assign to these many locations. The model has been used by a number of other researchers, and is well corroborated. We examine this model as a way of differentiating imaging tasks that radiologists perform. Tasks involving more searching or location uncertainty may have higher estimated M* values. In this work we applied the Effective Set-Size model to a number of medical imaging data sets. The data sets include radiologists reading screening and diagnostic mammography with and without computer-aided diagnosis (CAD), and breast tomosynthesis. We developed an algorithm to fit the model parameters using two-sample maximum-likelihood ordinal regression, similar to the classic bi-normal model. The resulting model ROC curves are rational and fit the observed data well. We find that the distributions of M* and d' differ significantly among these data sets, and differ between pairs of imaging systems within studies. For example, on average tomosynthesis increased readers’ d' values, while CAD reduced the M* parameters. We demonstrate that the model parameters M* and d' are correlated. We conclude that the Effective Set-Size model may be a useful way of differentiating location uncertainty from the diagnostic uncertainty in medical imaging tasks.
Introduction. The article explores the impact of various types of verbal representation of ethnic stereotypes in the framework of a polyethnical academic community, i.e. educational environment in modern international university. Although the educational process with subjects of different cultural backgrounds plays a crucial role in conveying world views of representatives of different cultures, the research on the linguistic representation of stereotyped views on representatives of other nationalities has not been conducted yet. This aspect determines the relevance of the study. The aim of the research is to compare the impact levels of purely linguistic and speech ways of verbalising heterostereotypes by ways of employing relevant linguistic data for academic purposes during foreign language classes. Materials and Methods. The first stage of the experiment resulted in preparation of the linguistic corpus for the research: by means of comprehensive vocabulary research the lexical database with ethnonyms or ethnonym-based adjectives was compiled. To reveal the potential of their usage in the education processes, the participants were offered the preliminary and final surveys held as free associatio n experiment. Results. The influential potential for purely linguistic and speech ways of representing national stereotypes was compared to find out if they relate to the descriptors and scripts revealed through analysis of phraseological units and national anecdote respectively, while the latter was marked as a more efficient way of delivering ethnic stereotypes. The conclusions based on the analysis of the data obtained were drawn on how to use relevant linguistic material for academic purposes in order to appropriately develop attitudes to other ethnic groups. Discussion and Conclusions. The conducted research revealed more significant impact degree for ethnic anecdotes against investigation of lexical-phraseological units containing ethnonyms or ethnonym-based adjectives. It was illustrated by collection and further analysis of verbal reactions provided by students of non-linguistic departments of the modern University who took part in the preliminary and final stages which were in line with the beginning and end of the academic term accordingly. The portraits of typical national representatives made by the students at the completion of the course which included sessions on studying dictionary extracts and national anecdotes, to a greater extent conformed with the stereotypes delivered by ethnic anecdotes than the linguistic corpus of lexical-phraseological units. The research results may be considered during the development of the curriculum for foreign language courses in international universities with polyethnical academic environment.
Activities can increase quality of life for residents with dementia, however determining which activities are high in quality is often subjective. In this study, trained researchers observed 22 residents in common areas of a memory care unit (10 males, 12 female, all consented for research). Assessments occurred in 15-minute sessions across multiple days (totaling 7000 minutes). Each minute involved co-observation of staff interactions (Quality Interaction Scale, Dean, et al., 1993) and residents’ positive affect (Philadelphia Geriatric Center Affect Rating Scale, Lawton, et al., 1996). Observers noted types of activities underway. Z-scores indicated proportionally higher positive affect in residents during preplanned activities, compared to non-facilitated/unplanned activities (z = -3.09, p <.001). Compared to residents’ positive affect during “no activity”, positive affect was proportionally highest (p <.001) during music therapy (z = -23.43) and motor activity (z = -13.67), and lowest (p = n.s.) during dance performances (z = -1.07) and art/crafts (z = 1.83). Compared to positive staff interactions during “no activity”, positive staff interactions was proportionally highest (p <.001) during motor activities (z = -12.74) and music therapy (z = -11.86), and lowest (p = n.s.) during cognitive activities (z = -0.30) and music presentations (z = -0.17). Commonalities in quality activities included residents being able to see, engage, and move about if they wanted, staff considering residents’ autonomy and staff using active efforts to converse with residents. Staff can observe affect in residents to evaluate engagement during activities, and adjust delivery and interaction frequency where needed.
Det är lättare att minnas emotionellt laddad information. Även om minnet ofta försämras vid normalt åldrande, kvarstår den emotionella förstärkningseffekten. Studier antyder att unga vuxna minns bättre negativt än positivt material, men att minnespreferensen för negativt material minskar eller t.o.m. ersätts av en preferens för positivt material med åldern. I avhandlingen undersöktes hur unga och äldre friska vuxna personer minns ord med olika emotionellt värde (positiv/negativ) och emotionell intensitet. Även underliggande mekanismer i hjärnan hos äldre vuxna utforskades. Avhandlingen visade att det inte fanns skillnader mellan hur unga (21-35 år) och äldre (50-79 år) vuxna minns emotionella ord. Här sågs alltså ingen skillnad i minnespreferens för negativa eller positiva ord eller för ord med olika stark emotionell intensitet mellan åldersgrupperna. I avhandlingen identifierades samband mellan minne för positiva ord och gråsubstansvolym i hjärnans bakre delar hos friska äldre vuxna. Bättre minne för positiva ord hade samband med lägre integritet hos vitsubstansbanor i hjärnan, vilket antyder att en kompensationsmekanism kunde spela en roll. Avhandlingen visade även att språkliga och kulturella faktorer har större betydelse än ålder och kön för bedömningen av emotionella egenskaper hos ord. ------------------------------------- On helpompi muistaa tunnesisältöistä materiaalia. Vaikka muisti usein heikkenee normaalissa ikääntymisessä, tunnesisällön muistia vahvistava vaikutus pysyy. Tutkimukset osoittavat, että nuoret aikuiset muistavat kielteistä materiaalia myönteistä paremmin, mutta että kielteisen materiaalin suosiminen vähenee tai jopa vaihtuu myönteisen materiaalin suosimiseksi ikääntyessä. Väitöskirjassa tutkittiin miten nuoret ja ikääntyvät terveet aikuiset muistavat erityyppisiä tunnesisältöisiä sanoja. Selvitettiin myös tunnemuistin aivostollista perustaa ikääntyvillä aikuisilla. Väitöskirja osoitti, ettei nuorten (21-35 v.) ja ikääntyvien (50-79 v.) aikuisten välillä ollut eroja tunnesisältöisten sanojen muistamisessa. Tässä ei siis havaittu ikään liittyvää eroa kielteisten tai myönteisten sanojen tai eri tunneintensiteetillä varustettujen sanojen suosimisessa. Väitöskirjassa havaittiin yhteys myönteisten sanojen muistamisen ja aivojen takaosien harmaan aineen volyymin välillä terveillä ikääntyvillä aikuisilla. Mitä paremmin myönteisiä sanoja muistettiin, sen matalampi valkean aineen radastojen integriteetti oli normaalisti ikääntyvillä, mikä voi viitata korvaavan mekanismin vaikutukseen. Väitöskirja osoitti myös, että kielellisillä ja kulttuurillisilla tekijöillä on suurempi merkitys kuin iällä tai sukupuolella sanojen tunnesisällön arvioinnissa.
In situations of real threat, showing a fear reaction makes sense, thus, increasing the chance to survive. The question is, how could anybody differentiate between a real and an apparent threat? Here, the slogan counts “better safe than sorry”, meaning that it is better to shy away once too often from nothing than once too little from a real threat. Furthermore, in a complex environment it is adaptive to generalize from one threatening situation or stimulus to another similar situation/stimulus. But, the danger hereby is to generalize in a maladaptive manner involving as it is to strong and/or fear too often “harmless” (safety) situations/stimuli, as it is known to be a criterion of anxiety disorders (AD). Fear conditioning and fear generalization paradigms are well suited to investigate fear learning processes. It is remarkable that despite increasing interest in this topic there is only little research on fear generalization. Especially, most research on human fear conditioning and its generalization has focused on adults, whereas only little is known about these processes in children, even though AD is typically developing during childhood. To address this knowledge gap, four experiments were conducted, in which a discriminative fear conditioning and generalization paradigm was used. In the first two experiments, developmental aspects of fear learning and generalization were of special interest. Therefore, in the first experiment 267 children and 285 adults were compared in the differential fear conditioning paradigm and generalization test. Skin conductance responses (SCRs) and ratings of valence and arousal were obtained to indicate fear learning. Both groups displayed robust and similar differential conditioning on subjective and physiological levels. However, children showed heightened fear generalization compared to adults as indexed by higher arousal ratings and SCRs to the generalization stimuli. Results indicate overgeneralization of conditioned fear as a developmental correlate of fear learning. The developmental change from a shallow to a steeper generalization gradient is likely related to the maturation of brain structures that modulate efficient discrimination between threatening and (ambiguous) safety cues. The question hereby is, at which developmental stage fear generalization gradients of children adapt to the gradients of adults. Following up on this question, in a second experiment, developmental changes in fear conditioning and fear generalization between children and adolescents were investigated. According to experiment 1 and previous studies in children, which showed changes in fear learning with increasing age, it was assumed that older children were better at discriminating threat and safety stimuli. Therefore, 396 healthy participants (aged 8 to 12 years) were examined with the fear conditioning and generalization paradigm. Again, ratings of valence, arousal, and SCRs were obtained. SCRs indicated differences in fear generalization with best fear discrimination in 12-year-old children suggesting that the age of 12 years seems to play an important role, since generalization gradients were similar to that of adults. These age differences were seen in boys and girls, but best discrimination was found in 12-year-old boys, indicating different development of generalization gradients according to sex. This result fits nicely with the fact that the prevalence of AD is higher in women than in men. In a third study, it was supposed that the developmental trajectory from increased trait anxiety in childhood to manifest AD could be mediated by abnormal fear conditioning and generalization processes. To this end, 394 children aged 8 to 12 years with different scores in trait anxiety were compared with each other. Results provided evidence that children with high trait anxiety showed stronger responses to threat cues and impaired safety signal learning contingent on awareness as indicated by arousal at acquisition. Furthermore, analyses revealed that children with high trait anxiety showed overall higher arousal ratings at generalization. Contrary to what was expected, high trait anxious children did not show significantly more fear generalization than children with low trait anxiety. However, high-trait-anxious (HA) participants showed a trend for a more linear gradient, whereas moderate-trait-anxious (MA) and low-trait-anxious (LA) participants showed more quadratic gradients according to arousal. Additionally, after controlling for age, sex and negative life experience, SCR to the safety stimulus predicted the trait anxiety level of children suggesting that impaired safety signal learning may be a risk factor for the development of AD. Results provide hints that frontal maturation could develop differently according to trait anxiety resulting in different stimuli discrimination. Thus, in a fourth experiment, 40 typically developing volunteers aged 10 to 18 years were screened for trait anxiety and investigated with the differential fear conditioning and generalization paradigm in the scanner. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) were used to identify the neural mechanisms of fear learning and fear generalization investigating differences in this neural mechanism according to trait anxiety, developmental aspects and sex. At acquisition, HA participants showed reduced activation in frontal brain regions, but at generalization, HA participants showed an increase in these frontal regions with stronger linear increase in activation with similarity to CS+ in HA when compared to LA participants. This indicates that there is a hyper-regulation in adolescents to compensate the higher difficulties at generalization in form of a compensatory mechanism, which decompensates with adulthood and/or may be collapsed in manifest AD. Additionally, significant developmental effects were found: the older the subjects the stronger the hippocampus and frontal activation with resemblance to CS+, which could explain the overgeneralization of younger children. Furthermore, there were differences according to sex: males showed stronger activation with resemblance to CS+ in the hippocampus and frontal regions when compared to females fitting again nicely with the observation that prevalence rates for AD are higher for females than males. In sum, the studies suggest that investigating developmental aspects of (maladaptive) overgeneralization may lead to better understanding of the mechanisms of manifest anxiety disorders, which could result in development and provision of prevention strategies. Although, there is need for further investigations, the present work gives some first hints for such approaches.
espanolLa interpretacion de espanol y castellano ha tenido casi siempre una tendencia sinonimica total a lo largo de su historia. Sin embargo, existen razones historicas y linguisticas para no considerarlo asi. Por un lado, la expansion del Imperio espanol parece ser la causa fundamental para el uso del primero de los terminos mientras que Norma linguistica sevillana serviria como prueba irrefutable de la validez del segundo, de una manera sistemica, y a pesar de que los propios sevillanistas normalmente se habrian manifestado en contra. Se presentan entonces una serie de argumentos contrapuestos que hacen especial hincapie en el marco normativo e historico del idioma y su descripcion geolectal en la actualidad. Con ello se pretende esclarecer diferencias entre los dos conceptos y, de paso, justificar tambien su significado como denominacion compuesta, espanol castellano. NB: Este articulo se basa en el texto “Del castellano al espanol y viceversa”, incluido en mi tesis doctoral (2017) y se redacta de acuerdo con “Opciones linguisticas avanzadas en clase ELE” (2016). EnglishThe interpretation of Spanish and Castilian has been almost meant to be synonymic in absolute terms in history. However, there exist linguistic and historic reasons in order not to state this. On the one hand, the expansion of the Spanish Empire seems to be the paramount cause for the use of the first term whereas Sevillian Linguistic Norm would prove successful in validating the second of them, in a systemic sense, and in spite of the fact that the selfsame sevillianists would have regularly claimed the opposite. Contrasted arguments are presented then, which put special emphasis on the historic and normative framework about this language and its geolectal description at present day. With this, it is intended to clarify some differences between the two concepts and, via that, to also justify their meaning as a compound definition, Castilian Spanish. NB: this article is based on the text “Del castellano al espanol y viceversa”, included in my doctoral thesis (2017) and it has been composed according to “Opciones linguisticas avanzadas en clase ELE” (2016).
Fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS), a common chronic pain condition, is often incompletely treated by conventional medical therapies. It can cause disability, psychological distress, work-related absenteeism, increased use of healthcare resources, and result in the inability to carry out the tasks of daily living. The purpose of this quantitative, correlational study was to investigate the potential influence of laughter on affect and pain in individuals with FMS. Laughter produces beneficial effects on acute pain and on chronic pain in general and has been found to improve temporary affective states, but there have been no studies testing the effects of laughter on the pain and affect of fibromyalgia patients. Informing this study were the gate control and neuromatrix theories of pain, as well as the dynamic model of affect theory. The research questions addressed whether laughter frequency is associated with affect and or with perceived chronic pain levels in these individuals. Forty-one adult fibromyalgia patients documented all laughter episodes daily and assessed their pain and affective states 3 times per day for 14 days. Hierarchical regressions revealed that increased overall laughter frequency was significantly associated with decreases in overall pain and increases in overall positive affect but was not associated with measures of negative affect. Also, morning laughter frequency was predictive of increased afternoon and evening positive affect ratings, as well as with decreased afternoon pain ratings, but was not significantly associated with evening pain ratings. The knowledge gained from these results may have positive social change implications at the individual level, within those individuals' larger social networks, and within the research and medical communities.
This study aimed to address the following questions regarding the emotional experience of Dialectical Behavior Therapy clients with Borderline Personality Disorder: 1) How do positive and negative emotions change in therapy? 2) Does the severity of clients’ symptoms relate to affect? 3) Is affect related to clients’ perceptions of therapeutic alliance? 4) How are clients’ and therapists’ affect related? To test these questions, positive and negative affect ratings were collected from clients (N=77) and therapists (N=25) at the start and end of session. These ratings were tested in relation to alliance and severity ratings using Hierarchical Linear Modeling. Results indicated that clients’ positive affect increased while negative affect decreased from the start to the end of session. This pattern was mirrored over the course of treatment, but only the increase in positive affect was statistically significant over that time period. Severity was significantly related to affect, but in an unexpected direction (higher ratings of emotion dysregulation were associated with slight decreases in negative emotion and emotion lability). Additionally, clients’ positive emotion significantly predicted therapeutic alliance ratings, and therapist positive affect was significantly, positively related to clients’ positive emotion. These results indicate that client affect appears to change in treatment and may be related to severity, alliance, and therapist affect. Further exploration is needed to clarify these complex relationships given the differences between positive and negative affect and the surprising direction of the association between negative affect and emotion dysregulation.
Demand-withdraw is an ineffective communication pattern frequently experienced by distressed couples. Therapists often attempt to address this pattern by helping partners understand and regulate the emotions that underlie these behaviors. To date, there is a lack of research focusing on the emotional experiences underlying the demand-withdraw pattern of interaction in couples. Related lines of research focus on emotional arousal and the expression of hard and soft emotions, but this research does not specifically investigate demand-withdraw interactions. The purpose of this study is to identify what emotions underlie demanding behavior in both men and women during marital demand-withdraw conflict interactions. Six couples were chosen from a five-year longitudinal randomized clinical trial that compared Integrative Behavioral Couple Therapy (IBCT) and Traditional Behavioral Couple Therapy (TBCT). Researchers viewed 10-minute pre-treatment problem-solving interactions to observe the demand-withdraw pattern in vivo among couples seeking therapy. The Behavioral Affective Rating Scale (BARS) was used to code the emotions observed during the interactions. The results indicated that the types of emotions varied not only depending on who initiated the problem-solving interaction (e.g., wife topic-husband topic) but also between the different couples, and when comparing gender. Anxiety (#2) and aggression (#4) were in the top four most commonly observed emotions for husbands, while they were two of the least observed emotions for wives. Moreover, frustration and hurt were the two most observed emotions for wives, while they were the least observed emotions for husbands.
Abstract Contrary to what non-practitioners might expect, the systems of phonetic notation used by linguists are highly idiosyncratic. Not only do various linguistic subfields disagree on the specific symbols they use to denote the speech sounds of languages, but also in large databases of sound inventories considerable variation can be found. Inspired by recent efforts to link cross-linguistic data with help of reference catalogues (Glottolog, Concepticon) across different resources, we present initial efforts to link different phonetic notation systems to a catalogue of speech sounds. This is achieved with the help of a database accompanied by a software framework that uses a limited but easily extendable set of non-binary feature values to allow for quick and convenient registration of different transcription systems, while at the same time linking to additional datasets with restricted inventories. Linking different transcription systems enables us to conveniently translate between different phonetic transcription systems, while linking sounds to databases allows users quick access to various kinds of metadata, including feature values, statistics on phoneme inventories, and information on prosody and sound classes. In order to prove the feasibility of this enterprise, we supplement an initial version of our cross-linguistic database of phonetic transcription systems (CLTS), which currently registers five transcription systems and links to fifteen datasets, as well as a web application, which permits users to conveniently test the power of the automatic translation across transcription systems.
Customers’ opinions on social network platforms are known to influence peer behaviour (Bai, 2011; Eirinaki, Pisal, &amp; Singh, 2012). Customers are also known to be more engaged in sharing their experiences by writing online reviews and recommendations that may be useful to others (Cantallops &amp; Salvi, 2014; Tang &amp; Guo, 2015; Xu &amp; Li, 2016). Actually, user-generated content (UGC) on social network platforms has emerged as an important source for understanding and managing consumers’ expectations, particularly using automated and semi-automated knowledge extraction techniques from text such as text mining and sentiment analysis (Zhang, Zeng, Li, Wang, &amp; Zuo, 2009). This research analyses dimensions of online customer engagement and associated concepts in customers’ reviews through (i) a global sentiment analysis using positive, neutral and negative sentiments and (ii) a topic-sentiment analysis to capture latent topics in online reviews. Furthermore, it examines what influences customers to contribute their online reviews, beyond the features of each focal company or brand. The research methodology is based on a text mining approach, using the MeaningCloud tool. The study focuses on Yelp.com reviews and includes a random sample of 15,000 unique reviews of restaurants, hotels and nightlife entertainment in eleven cities in the USA. An innovative customer engagement dictionary is created, based on previously validated scales using known dimensions of engagement, experience, emotions and brand advocacy, and extended using WordNet 2.1 lexical database. The research findings reveal a high impact of the engagement cognitive processing dimension and hedonic experience on customers’ review endeavour. The study results further indicate that customers seem to be more engaged in positively advocating a company/brand than the contrary. The findings will help social network managers to reinforce their platforms.
Calculating the semantic similarity between sentences is a long dealt problem in the area of natural language processing. The semantic analysis field has a crucial role to play in the research related to the text analytics. The semantic similarity differs as the domain of operation differs. In this paper, we present a methodology which deals with this issue by incorporating semantic similarity and corpus statistics. To calculate the semantic similarity between words and sentences, the proposed method follows an edge-based approach using a lexical database. The methodology can be applied in a variety of domains. The methodology has been tested on both benchmark standards and mean human similarity dataset. When tested on these two datasets, it gives highest correlation value for both word and sentence similarity outperforming other similar models. For word similarity, we obtained Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.8753 and for sentence similarity, the correlation obtained is 0.8794.
Freedom-of-movement in thought (the degree to which thought is constrained in its variety as opposed to being free to change) can be empirically dissociated from other well-studied dimensions of thought such as its task-unrelatedness in everyday life setting, but has yet to be studied in a controlled experimental environment. While there are several proposed mechanisms by which thought can become constrained (and therefore less freely moving), none have bene explored empirically. The present study set out to uncover which constructs associated with thought’s task-relatedness were also related to its freedom-of-movement and to test potential mechanisms of constraint. Motivation was within-subjects through a variable-value time-sensitive task and administered experience sampling probes asking participants to self-report the level of freely-moving thought, task-unrelated thought, deliberate control, arousal, and valence they were experiencing. Electrodermal activity and pupillometry were used as an index of physiological arousal in addition to self-reports. When participants were more highly motivated they reported having more constrained and more task-related thoughts, and having greater control over their thoughts. Control fully mediated motivation’s impact on freedom-of-movement of thought, but only partially mediated motivation’s impact on task-unrelated thought. Neither self-report or physiological measures of arousal were impacted by the manipulation, but high levels of both task-unrelated and freely-moving thought were associated with high ratings or self-reported arousal, higher pupillary responses to stimuli and smaller average pupil size, with freely-moving thought being uniquely associated with reduced skin conductance. Additionally, high freely-moving thought ratings were uniquely associated with slower responses, while high task-unrelated thought ratings were uniquely associated with low valence ratings. Overall, these findings support and further extend the previously identified dissociation between task-unrelatedness and freedom-of-movement as two separable dimensions of thought. They indicate that a person’s degree of control over their own thoughts is a crucial determinant of the content and especially the dynamics of that thought, but further work needs to be done to explore what nonconscious factors constrain thought movement.
A number of firms in Northern Europe and especially in Denmark are owned by private foundations similarly to what would have been the case if the Ford Foundation had owned a majority of the shares in Ford Motor Company. Foundation-owned companies appear to perform surprisingly well in terms of profitability and growth despite lacking governance mechanisms like profit incentives or takeover threats. Given their non-profit ownership, they might be expected to behave more responsibly towards stakeholders such as employees or customers (Hansmann 1980), but so far there has been little empirical evidence to support this hypothesis. This paper presents new research on the reputation and responsibility of foundation-owned companies. In a panel of large Danish companies 2001-2011 we find that foundation-owned firms have better reputations and are regarded as more socially responsible in corporate image ratings. Secondary evidence on labour market behaviour is consistent with these findings. Using matched employer-employee data we show that foundation-owned companies are more stable employers, pay their employees better and keep them for longer. Altogether, the evidence indicates that foundation-ownership is associated with more responsible business behaviour towards employees.
Abstract In the context of the current heated debate surrounding the pervasive influence of the English language and Anglo-American culture on other languages, as well as the widespread purist attitude towards some contact-induced language change phenomena, both abroad and in Romania, our article discusses the situation of English lexical borrowings in present-day Romanian, focusing on the perception and processing of the so-called luxury Anglicisms ( Sections 2 and 3 ) by young Romanian native speakers, in an attempt to see whether such an analysis can help clarify their acceptability and diffusion across our target population. We propose an alternative cognitive, psycholinguistic approach to the study of contact-induced lexical borrowings, aiming to show that there is no difference in the young Romanian native speakers’ processing of sentences containing luxury Anglicisms and their established Romanian counterparts. Such findings may support our claim that the acceptability and diffusion of such Anglicisms are pervasive across our target population, even if the official position generally condemns such uses, considering them gratuitous and a burden in communication, even making it unintelligible sometimes. Our analysis starts from the observation that most (but not all) Romanian academics, whether linguists or not, tend to embrace a purist attitude, while on the other hand young Romanians accept such Anglicisms and tend to use them extensively. In fact, such uses are not limited to young people, who have been the subjects of our research, but are the ‘norm’ in daily conversations and elsewhere across the general population ( Stoichițoiu Ichim 2006 ). Thus, there seems to be a gap between the actual acceptability and diffusion of luxury Anglicisms among Romanians and the ‘official’ recommendations. Based on the results of a sensicality task, meant to show how 188 Romanians, aged 18–22, process and perceive sentences with or without luxury Anglicisms (see Section 6 ), we will try to show that luxury Anglicisms are accepted and, by recurrent use, diffused among the Romanian community. For a more accurate picture of their diffusion, the findings will be further correlated with data from CoRoLa, the only official corpus of present-day Romanian (beginning 1989) made available under the auspices of the Romanian Academy, as well as a corpus currently in the making, and the Internet (see Section 7 ). Besides showing that luxury Anglicisms cannot really be blamed for burdening or impairing processing, and thus communication, and explaining why such uses should not be censured or disapproved, we hope that our study of acceptability and diffusion will demonstrate that we are dealing with a complex, multi-layered phenomenon that can be better understood by going beyond a diachronic and synchronic analysis of particular words and a frequency count, and should incorporate more experimental data. Last but not least, we suggest that, on the practical side, such experimental studies as the one described here could be used as an additional criterion for the lexicographic inclusion of lexical borrowings.
Background: Idea density (ID), a natural language processing–based index, was developed to aid in the detection of dementia through the analysis of English narratives. However, it has not been applied to non-English languages due to the difficulties in translating grammatical concepts. In this study, we defined rules to count ideas in Japanese narratives based on a previous study and proposed a novel method to estimate ID in Japanese text using machine translation. Materials: The study participants comprised 42 Japanese patients with dementia aged 69–98 years (mean: 84.95 years). We collected free narratives from the participants to build a speech corpus. The narratives of the patients were translated into English using three machine translation systems: Google Translate, Bing Translator, and Excite Translator. The ID in the translated text was then calculated using the Dependency-based Propositional ID (DEPID), an English ID scoring tool. Results: The maximum correlation coefficie)