Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
18265 papers
The ability to reproduce novel words is a sensitive marker of language impairment across a variety of developmental disorders. Nonword repetition tasks are thought to reflect phonological short-term memory skills. Yet, when children hear and then utter a word for the first time, they must transform a novel speech signal into a series of coordinated, precisely timed oral movements. Little is known about how children’s oromotor speed, planning and co-ordination abilities might influence their ability to repeat novel nonwords, beyond the influence of higher-level cognitive and linguistic skills. In the present study, we tested 35 typically developing children between the ages of 5−8 years on measures of nonword repetition, digit span, memory for non-verbal sequences, reading fluency, oromotor praxis, and oral diadochokinesis. We found that oromotor praxis uniquely predicted nonword repetition ability in school-age children, and that the variance it accounted for was additional to that of)
Parent report is commonly used to assess language and attention in children for research and clinical purposes. It is therefore important to understand the convergent validity of parent-report tools in comparison to direct assessments of language and attention. In particular, cultural and linguistic background may influence this convergence. In this study a group of six- to eight-year old children (N = 110) completed direct assessments of language and attention and their parents reported on the same areas. Convergence between assessment types was explored using correlations. Possible influences of ethnicity (Hispanic or non-Hispanic) and of parent report language (English or Spanish) were explored using hierarchical linear regression. Correlations between parent report and direct child assessments were significant for both language and attention, suggesting convergence between assessment types. Ethnicity and parent report language did not moderate the relationships between direct chil)
Experimental research has shown that pairs of stimuli which are congruent and assumed to ‘go together’ are recalled more effectively than an item presented in isolation. Will this multisensory memory benefit occur when stimuli are richer and longer, in an ecological setting? In the present study, we focused on an everyday situation of audio-visual learning and manipulated the relationship between audio guide tracks and viewed portraits in the galleries of the Tate Britain. By varying the gender and narrative style of the voice-over, we examined how the perceived congruency and assumed unity of the audio guide track with painted portraits affected subsequent recall. We show that tracks perceived as best matching the viewed portraits led to greater recall of both sensory and linguistic content. We provide the first evidence that manipulating crossmodal congruence and unity assumptions can effectively impact memory in a multisensory ecological setting, even in the absence of precise temp)
Languages employ different strategies to transmit structural and grammatical information. While, for example, grammatical dependency relationships in sentences are mainly conveyed by the ordering of the words for languages like Mandarin Chinese, or Vietnamese, the word ordering is much less restricted for languages such as Inupiatun or Quechua, as these languages (also) use the internal structure of words (e.g. inflectional morphology) to mark grammatical relationships in a sentence. Based on a quantitative analysis of more than 1,500 unique translations of different books of the Bible in almost 1,200 different languages that are spoken as a native language by approximately 6 billion people (more than 80% of the world population), we present large-scale evidence for a statistical trade-off between the amount of information conveyed by the ordering of words and the amount of information conveyed by internal word structure: languages that rely more strongly on word order information ten)
Acquiring language requires segmenting speech into individual words, and abstracting over those words to discover grammatical structure. However, these tasks can be conflicting—on the one hand requiring memorisation of precise sequences that occur in speech, and on the other requiring a flexible reconstruction of these sequences to determine the grammar. Here, we examine whether speech segmentation and generalisation of grammar can occur simultaneously—with the conflicting requirements for these tasks being over-come by sleep-related consolidation. After exposure to an artificial language comprising words containing non-adjacent dependencies, participants underwent periods of consolidation involving either sleep or wake. Participants who slept before testing demonstrated a sustained boost to word learning and a short-term improvement to grammatical generalisation of the non-adjacencies, with improvements after sleep outweighing gains seen after an equal period of wake. Thus, we propos)
Domestication has been consistently accompanied by a suite of traits called the domestication syndrome. These include increased docility, changes in coat coloration, prolonged juvenile behaviors, modified function of adrenal glands and reduced craniofacial dimensions. Wilkins et al recently proposed that the mechanistic factor underlying traits that encompass the domestication syndrome was altered neural crest cell (NCC) development. NCC form the precursors to a large number of tissue types including pigment cells, adrenal glands, teeth and the bones of the face. The hypothesis that deficits in NCC development can account for the domestication syndrome was partly based on the outcomes of Dmitri Belyaev’s domestication experiments initially conducted on silver foxes. After generations of selecting for tameness, the foxes displayed phenotypes observed in domesticated species. Belyaev also had a colony of rats selected over 64 generations for either tameness or defensive aggression towar)
Using new direct measures of numeracy and literacy skills among 85,875 adults in 17 Western countries, we find that foreign-born adults have lower mean skills than native-born adults of the same age (16 to 64) in all of the examined countries. The gaps are small, and vary substantially between countries. Multilevel models reveal that immigrant populations’ demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, employment, and language proficiency explain about half of the cross-national variance of numeracy and literacy skills gaps. Differences in origin countries’ average education level also account for variation in the size of the immigrant-native skills gap. The more protective labor markets in immigrant-receiving countries are, the less well immigrants are skilled in numeracy and literacy compared to natives. For those who migrate before their teens (the 1.5 generation), access to an education system that accommodates migrants’ special needs is crucial. The 1 and 1.5 generation have smal)
Regenerative medicine offers potentially ground-breaking treatments of blindness and low vision. However, as new methodologies are developed, a critical question will need to be addressed: how do we monitor in vivo for functional success? In the present study, we developed novel behavioral assays to examine vision in a vertebrate model system. In the assays, zebrafish larvae are imaged in multiwell or multilane plates while various red, green, blue, yellow or cyan objects are presented to the larvae on a computer screen. The assays were used to examine a loss of vision at 4 or 5 days post-fertilization and a gradual recovery of vision in subsequent days. The developed assays are the first to measure the loss and recovery of vertebrate vision in microplates and provide an efficient platform to evaluate novel treatments of visual impairment. [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 multiple)
We aimed to develop a word-reading test for Korean-speaking adults using irregularly pronounced words that would be useful for estimation of premorbid intelligence. A linguist who specialized in Korean phonology selected 94 words that have irregular relationship between orthography and phonology. Sixty cognitively normal elderly (CN) and 31 patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) were asked to read out loud the words and were administered the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, 4th edition, Korean version (K-WAIS-IV). Among the 94 words, 50 words that did not show a significant difference between the CN and the AD group were selected and constituted the KART. Using the 30 CN calculation group (CNc), a linear regression equation was obtained in which the observed full-scale IQ (FSIQ) was regressed on the reading errors of the KART, where education was included as an additional variable. When the regressed equation computed from the CNc was applied to 30 CN individuals of the validation g)
Reinforcement learning tasks are often used to assess participants’ tendency to learn more from the positive or more from the negative consequences of one’s action. However, this assessment often requires comparison in learning performance across different task conditions, which may differ in the relative salience or discriminability of the stimuli associated with more and less rewarding outcomes, respectively. To address this issue, in a first set of studies, participants were subjected to two versions of a common probabilistic learning task. The two versions differed with respect to the stimulus (Hiragana) characters associated with reward probability. The assignment of character to reward probability was fixed within version but reversed between versions. We found that performance was highly influenced by task version, which could be explained by the relative perceptual discriminability of characters assigned to high or low reward probabilities, as assessed by a separate discrimina)
The article is about socio-and-political terminology and its peculiarities that are caused by linguistic factors which make it different from scientific and technical terminology. It doesn’t have such isolation as another term systems have. Socio-and-political Ukrainian terminology is relatively stable and fixed lexical-semantic system which is in a state of continuous movement and progressive improvement. Сhanges in the political lexicon are documented in written sources, particularly in dictionaries. There is the first lexicographic work which contains military, biological, medical and socio-political terms – Лексикон славено-латинський (Lexicon slavic-latin) by Epiphanii Slavynetskyi (1649). Ukrainian social-and-political terms of the late XIX – early XX cent. are fully revealed by I. Franko in his famous scientific works on the socio-political and socio-economic issues. Socio-political vocabulary simultaneously with other lexical and thematic groups was popular among linguists in the language analysis of individual documental sights by B. Khmelnytskyi, Lviv Stauropegion fraternities, historical-and-memoir prose of the first half of the 19th cent. Ideological differentiation of society in the early 90ies of XX cent. caused the reformation of political speech, that all appeared in the renewal conceptual and formal content. This includes: 1) large ammount of lexical innovations to describe new social and political reality; 2) the process of renaming, converting the key nominations of society, expansion of thematic areas because of previous taboo subject; 3) the emergence of new objects and political nominations; 4) the new rating system, the existence of double assessments of the same phenomenon; 5) changes inside pragmatic assessment structures, the negative vector moved from external to internal political areas; 6) formation of a new stylistic norm: the trend to simplification, democratization of broadcasting; 7) approaching to the spoken speech, rendering the stylistically reduced elements; 8) brief presentation, the desire to get rid of irrelevant information. All these are active language creative processes could not be unnoticed by researchers. The development of Ukrainian media language in the pre-October and later periods is shown; its role is defined in enriching and normalization of Ukrainian language: lexical, grammatical structure and spelling; creation of journalistic and scientific style.
The aim of this article is to investigate the growth of lexical norms with a focus on legal language during the end of the 17th century. The materials used are the first two legal handbooks in Swedish, the protocols from the King’s committee for the great revision of Swedish Law, known as the Law of 1734, and texts written by three Swedish lexicographers and linguistic authorities during the early 1800th century. The article is based on empirical studies of legal vocabulary and discussions of lexical norms, and the results give reason to believe that the official linguistic norm in modern Swedish, i.e. the functional norm, is based on the same fundamental mindset concerning the establishment of linguistic novelties as in the 17th century, although the political and democratic conditions have changed over the years.
Researchers have recently introduced various LexTALE-type word recognition tests in order to assess vocabulary size in a second language (L2) mastered by participants. These tests correlate well with other measures of language proficiency in unbalanced bilinguals whose second language ability is well below the level of their native language. In the present study, we investigated whether LexTALE-type tests also discriminate at the high end of the proficiency range. In several regions of Spain, people speak both the regional language (e.g., Catalan or Basque) and Spanish to very high degrees. Still, because of their living circumstances, some consider themselves as either Spanish-dominant or regional-language dominant. We showed that these two groups perform differently on the recently published Spanish Lextale-Esp: The Spanish-dominant group had significantly higher scores than the Catalan-dominant group. We also showed that the noncognate words of the test have the highest discrimination power. This indicates that the existing Lextale-Esp can be used to estimate proficiency differences in highly proficient bilinguals with Spanish as an L2, and that a more sensitive test could be built by replacing the cognates.
We define the notion of controlled hybrid language that allows information share and interaction between a controlled natural language (specified by a context-free grammar) and a controlled visual language (specified by a Symbol-Relation grammar). We present the controlled hybrid language INAUT, used to represent nautical charts of the French Naval and Hydrographic Service (SHOM) and their companion texts (Instructions nautiques).
One of the core challenges for building the semantic web is the creation of ontologies, a process known as ontology authoring. Controlled natural languages (CNLs) propose different frameworks for interfacing and creating ontologies in semantic web systems using restricted natural language. However, in order to engage non-expert users with no background in knowledge engineering, these language interfacing must be reliable, easy to understand and accepted by users. This paper includes the state-of-the-art for CNLs in terms of ontology authoring and the semantic web. In addition, it includes a detailed analysis of user evaluations with respect to each CNL and offers analytic conclusions with respect to the field.
We describe InterFace, a software package for research in face recognition. The package supports image warping, reshaping, averaging of multiple face images, and morphing between faces. It also supports principal components analysis (PCA) of face images, along with tools for exploring the “face space” produced by PCA. The package uses a simple graphical user interface, allowing users to perform these sophisticated image manipulations without any need for programming knowledge. The program is available for download in the form of an app, which requires that users also have access to the (freely available) MATLAB Runtime environment.
Cheating threatens the validity of unproctored online achievement tests. To address this problem, we developed PageFocus, a JavaScript that detects when participants abandon test pages by switching to another window or browser tab. In a first study, we aimed at testing whether PageFocus could detect and prevent cheating. We asked 115 lab and 186 online participants to complete a knowledge test comprising items that were difficult to answer but easy to look up on the Internet. Half of the participants were invited to look up the solutions, which significantly increased their test scores. The PageFocus script detected test takers who abandoned the test page with very high sensitivity and specificity, and successfully reduced cheating by generating a popup message that asked participants not to cheat. In a second study, 510 online participants completed a knowledge test comprising items that could easily be looked up and a reasoning task involving matrices that were impossible to look up. In a first group, a performance-related monetary reward was promised to the top scorers; in a second group, participants took part in a lottery that provided performance-unrelated rewards; and in a third group, no incentive was offered. PageFocus revealed that participants cheated more when performance-related incentives were offered. As expected, however, this effect was limited to items that could easily be looked up. We recommend that PageFocus be routinely employed to detect and prevent cheating on online achievement tests.
Human action perception is so powerful that people can identify movement efficiently in the absence of pictorial information, such as in point-light displays. Interest is growing in this type of stimulus for research in neuroscience. This interest stems from the advantage of separating the component of pure human action kinematics from other pictorial information, such as facial expression and muscle contraction. Although several groups have previously developed datasets of human point-light actions, due to the lack of datasets composed of daily actions with short durations, we developed 20 biological and 40 control (scrambled) point-light movements by using the technique of recording people wearing reflector patches. The videos are about 1 s long. Subsequently, we performed a judgment task in which 100 participants (50 male and 50 female) evaluated each video according to three categories: human action resemblance, performed action, and gender of actor. We present the mean scores of each evaluation for each video, and further propose a selection of the most suitable videos to be used as human point-light action displays and scrambled point-light displays for control. Finally, we discuss our findings on the gender attributions of the point-light displays.
Local markets provide a rapid insight into the medicinal plants growing in a region as well as local traditional health concerns. Identification of market plant material can be challenging as plants are often sold in dried or processed forms. In this study, three approaches of DNA barcoding-based molecular identification of market samples are evaluated, two objective sequence matching approaches and an integrative approach that coalesces sequence matching with a priori and a posteriori data from other markers, morphology, ethnoclassification and species distribution. Plant samples from markets and herbal shops were identified using morphology, descriptions of local use, and vernacular names with relevant floras and pharmacopoeias. DNA barcoding was used for identification of samples that could not be identified to species level using morphology. Two methods based on BLAST similarity-based identification, were compared with an integrative identification approach. Integrative identifica)
The present affective stimulation systems have shortages in terms of inefficient emotion evocation and poor immersion. This paper presents the design, instructions and ratings of a novel Affective Virtual Reality System (AVRS), which includes a large set of emotionally-evocative VR scenes and their affective ratings. It can provide more objective and direct affective stimuli of basic emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, relaxation, disgust, and rage) by shielding the environmental interferences. In this study, affective VR scenes have been designed by using various standard affective picture, video and audio materials as references. To assess the three dimensional emotion indices of valence, arousal and dominance, each scene of the system is rated and standardized by Self-Assessment Mainikin. AVRS is the first released VR version affect stimuli materials, which sets a precedent for future interdisciplinary work bridging the gap between VR and cognitive psychology.
Abstract CzeDLex is a new electronic lexicon of Czech discourse connectives, planned for publication by the end of this year. Its data format and structure are based on a study of similar existing resources, and adjusted to comply with the Czech syntactic tradition and specifics and with the Prague approach to the annotation of semantic discourse relations in text. In the article, we first put the lexicon in context of related resources and discuss theoretical aspects of building the lexicon – we present arguments for our choice of the data structure and for selecting features of the lexicon entries, while special attention is paid to a consistent and (as far as possible) uniform encoding of both primary (such as in English because, therefore ) and secondary connectives (e.g. for this reason, this is the reason why ). The main principle adopted for nesting entries in the lexicon is – apart from the lexical form of the connective – a discoursesemantic type (sense) expressed by the given connective, which enables us to deal with a broad formal variability of connectives and is convenient for interlinking CzeDLex with lexicons in other languages. Second, we introduce the chosen technical solution based on the Prague Markup Language, which allows for an efficient incorporation of the lexicon into the family of Prague treebanks – it can be directly opened and edited in the tree editor TrEd, processed from the command line in btred, interlinked with its source corpus and queried in the PML Tree Query engine. Third, we describe the process of getting data for the lexicon by exploiting a large corpus manually annotated with discourse relations – the Prague Discourse Treebank 2.0: we elaborate on the automatic extraction part, post-extraction checks and manual addition of supplementary linguistic information.
Participants explored a representative set of 47 solid, fluid and granular materials and rated them according to a list of 32 perceptual and 20 affective attributes. In a principal component analysis (PCA) of the perceptual ratings, we extracted six dimensions: Fluidity, Roughness, Deformability, Fibrousness, Heaviness, and Granularity explained 88% variance. A PCA on affective ratings revealed the dimensions: Valence, Arousal, and Dominance, explaining 92% variance. Greater Valence was significantly associated with reduced Roughness, greater Arousal with more Fluidity and greater Dominance with decreasing Deformability and decreasing Heaviness. Overall, the present study demonstrates that the range of affective responses to touched material is broader than previously assumed, and that these affective responses are systematically associated with certain perceptual dimensions.
STYX 1.0 is a corpus of Czech sentences selected from the Prague Dependency treebank. The criterion for including sentences into STYX was their suitability for practicing Czech morphology and syntax in elementary schools. The sentences contain both the PDT annotations and the school sentence analyses. The school sentence analyses were created by transforming the PDT annotations using handcrafted rules. Altogether the STYX 1.0 corpus contains 11 655 sentences. Originally, the STYX 1.0 corpus was an inseparable part of the Styx system (http://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-097C-0000-0001-48FB-F)
In line with the dimensional theory of emotional space, we developed affective norms for words rated in terms of valence, arousal and dominance in a group of older adults to complete the adaptation of the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) for Italian and to aid research on aging. Here, as in the original Italian ANEW database, participants evaluated valence, arousal, and dominance by means of the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) in a paper-and-pencil procedure. We observed high split-half reliabilities within the older sample and high correlations with the affective ratings of previous research, especially for valence, suggesting that there is large agreement among older adults within and across-languages. More importantly, we found high correlations between younger and older adults, showing that our data are generalizable across different ages. However, despite this across-ages accord, we obtained age-related differences on three affective dimensions for a great number of words. In particular, older adults rated as more arousing and more unpleasant a number of words that younger adults rated as moderately unpleasant and arousing in our previous affective norms. Moreover, older participants rated negative stimuli as more arousing and positive stimuli as less arousing than younger participants, thus leading to a less-curved distribution of ratings in the valence by arousal space. We also found more extreme ratings for older adults for the relationship between dominance and arousal: older adults gave lower dominance and higher arousal ratings for words rated by younger adults with middle dominance and arousal values. Together, these results suggest that our affective norms are reliable and can be confidently used to select words matched for the affective dimensions of valence, arousal and dominance across younger and older participants for future research in aging.
Our study examines the extent to which French immersion students use lax /ɪ/ in the same linguistic context as native speakers of Canadian French. Our results show that the lax variant is vanishingly rare in the speech of immersion students and is used by only a small minority of individuals. This is interpreted as a limitation of French immersion students’ sociolinguistic competence. Within the group of students who do use both variants, we document a positive correlation between female and middle-class students and use of the lax variant and suggest these speakers are generally more sensitive to sociolinguistic variation. A reverse correlation between English cognates and laxing was found. This is taken as evidence that the learning of laxing is lexically mediated.
The development of a normalized morpho-syntactic Arabic lexicon is not an easy task. In fact, many norms allow the structuration and representation of lexical data. The adoption of a stable standard will guarantee the interoperability and interchangeability of lexical resources. Still, research work that deals with normalization for Arabic lexical resources is not well developed yet, especially for some standards such as the TEI (Text Encoding Initiative). In this context, we aim at creating an Arabic lexicon editor with a constraint checker based on both the ISO standard LMF (Lexical Markup Framework) and the TEI guidelines. To develop this editor, we use a linguistic approach composed of several steps. The editor's prototype named ALIF can guarantee the construction of two types of output lexicon files: one in LMF and the other in TEI. The evaluation of this system is based upon a lexical database that contains all the derived and inflected forms generated from a lexicon of 10 000 canonical verbs. The results obtained were encouraging despite some flaws related to exceptional cases of difficult words.
The past half-century has witnessed remarkable growth in the study of language variation, and it has now become a highly productive subfield of research in sociolinguistics. Variability is everywhere in language, from the unique details in each production of a sound or sign to the auditory or visual processing of the linguistic signal. All languages that we can observe today show variation; what is more, they vary in identical ways, namely geographically and socially. It's no secret that languages like English are full of variation. So, the aim of the article is to detect the reasons of variation and to uncover rates of usage of different free variations for a given set of lexical items. The research work is carried out by using the descriptive, comparative methods by subjecting to analysis the specific language materials. The discovery of law of variation became a starting point for the evolution of linguistics. The problem of search of variation facts and its role in the functioning of language system concerns many specialists from the outset. The scope of the investigation was to set up a system out of chaos of phenomena. Currently, the fact of conditionality of variation by system relations existing in the language is considered to be established.
The present event-related potential (ERP) study investigated for the first time whether children with early-onset social anxiety disorder (SAD) process affective facial expressions of varying intensities differently than non-anxious controls. Participants were 15 SAD patients and 15 non-anxious controls (mean age of 9 years). They were presented with schematic faces displaying anger and happiness at four intensity levels (25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%), as well as with neutral faces. ERPs in early and later time windows (P100, N170, late positivity [LP]), as well as affective ratings (valence and arousal) for the faces, were recorded. SAD patients rated the faces as generally more arousing, regardless of the type of emotion and intensity. Moreover, they displayed enhanced right-parietal LP (350-650 ms). Both arousal ratings and LP reflect stimulus intensity. Therefore, this study provides first evidence of an intensity amplification bias in pediatric SAD during facial affect processing.
Mondzish (Mangish) lexical database, including transcriptions of my audio recordings collected in China in from 2012-2015.
One particular problem in large vocabulary continuous speech recognition for low-resourced languages is finding relevant training data for the statistical language models. Large amount of data is required, because models should estimate the probability for all possible word sequences. For Finnish, Estonian and the other fenno-ugric languages a special problem with the data is the huge amount of different word forms that are common in normal speech. The same problem exists also in other language technology applications such as machine translation, information retrieval, and in some extent also in other morphologically rich languages. In this paper we present methods and evaluations in four recent language modeling topics: selecting conversational data from the Internet, adapting models for foreign words, multi-domain and adapted neural network language modeling, and decoding with subword units. Our evaluations show that the same methods work in more than one language and that they scale down to smaller data resources.
This paper presents an overview of studies on automated hand gesture analysis, which is mainly concerned with recognition and segmentation issues related to functional types and gesture phases. The issues selected for discussion have been arranged in a way that takes account of problems within the Theory of Gestures that each study seeks to address. Their principal computational factors that were involved in conducting the analysis of automated hand gesture have been examined, and an analysis of open research issues has been carried out for each application dealt with in the studies.
A controlled natural language (CNL) is based on a natural language but includes restrictions on vocabulary, grammar, and/or semantics, in order to reduce or eliminate ambiguity and complexity.
Cognitive mechanisms for sign language lexical access are fairly unknown. This study investigated whether phonological similarity facilitates lexical retrieval in sign languages using measures from a new lexical database for American Sign Language. Additionally, it aimed to determine which similarity metric best fits the present data in order to inform theories of how phonological similarity is constructed within the lexicon and to aid in the operationalization of phonological similarity in sign language. Sign repetition latencies and accuracy were obtained when native signers were asked to reproduce a sign displayed on a computer screen. Results indicated that, as predicted, phonological similarity facilitated repetition latencies and accuracy as long as there were no strict constraints on the type of sublexical features that overlapped. The data converged to suggest that one similarity measure, MaxD, defined as the overlap of any 4 sublexical features, likely best represents mechanisms of phonological similarity in the mental lexicon. Together, these data suggest that lexical access in sign language is facilitated by phonologically similar lexical representations in memory and the optimal operationalization is defined as liberal constraints on overlap of 4 out of 5 sublexical features—similar to the majority of extant definitions in the literature. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved)
Grammatical words represent the part of grammar that can be most directly contrasted with the lexicon. Aphasiological studies, linguistic theories and psycholinguistic studies suggest that their processing is operated at different stages in speech production. Models of sentence production propose that at the formulation stage, lexical words are processed at the functional level while grammatical words are processed at a later positional level. In this study we consider proposals made by linguistic theories and psycholinguistic models to derive two predictions for the processing of grammatical words compared to lexical words. First, based on the assumption that grammatical words are less crucial for communication and therefore paid less attention to, it is predicted that they show shorter articulation times and/or higher error rates than lexical words. Second, based on the assumption that grammatical words differ from lexical words in being dependent on a lexical host, it is hypothesiz)
Using a wireless single channel EEG device, we investigated the feasibility of using short-term frontal EEG as a means to evaluate the dynamic changes of mental workload. Frontal EEG signals were recorded from twenty healthy subjects performing four cognitive and motor tasks, including arithmetic operation, finger tapping, mental rotation and lexical decision task. Our findings revealed that theta activity is the common EEG feature that increases with difficulty across four tasks. Meanwhile, with a short-time analysis window, the level of mental workload could be classified from EEG features with 65%–75% accuracy across subjects using a SVM model. These findings suggest that frontal EEG could be used for evaluating the dynamic changes of mental workload. [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 multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permissio)
The experiments reported here used “Reversed-Interior” (RI) primes (e.g., cetupmor-COMPUTER) in three different masked priming paradigms in order to test between different models of orthographic coding/visual word recognition. The results of Experiment 1, using a standard masked priming methodology, showed no evidence of priming from RI primes, in contrast to the predictions of the Bayesian Reader and LTRS models. By contrast, Experiment 2, using a sandwich priming methodology, showed significant priming from RI primes, in contrast to the predictions of open bigram models, which predict that there should be no orthographic similarity between these primes and their targets. Similar results were obtained in Experiment 3, using a masked prime same-different task. The results of all three experiments are most consistent with the predictions derived from simulations of the Spatial-coding model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR], Copyright of PLoS ONE is the property of Public Library of Science and i)
Two experiments examine how grammatical verb aspect constrains our understanding of events. According to linguistic theory, an event described in the perfect aspect (John had opened the bottle) should evoke a mental representation of a finished event with focus on the resulting object, whereas an event described in the imperfective aspect (John was opening the bottle) should evoke a representation of the event as ongoing, including all stages of the event, and focusing all entities relevant to the ongoing action (instruments, objects, agents, locations, etc.). To test this idea, participants saw rebus sentences in the perfect and imperfective aspect, presented one word at a time, self-paced. In each sentence, the instrument and the recipient of the action were replaced by pictures (John was using/had used a ** to open the ** at the restaurant). Time to process the two images as well as speed and accuracy on sensibility judgments were measured. Although experimental sentences always ma)
In this article we report a computational semantic analysis of the presidential candidates’ speeches in the two major political parties in the USA. In Study One, we modeled the political semantic spaces as a function of party, candidate, and time of election, and findings revealed patterns of differences in the semantic representation of key political concepts and the changing landscapes in which the presidential candidates align or misalign with their parties in terms of the representation and organization of politically central concepts. Our models further showed that the 2016 US presidential nominees had distinct conceptual representations from those of previous election years, and these patterns did not necessarily align with their respective political parties’ average representation of the key political concepts. In Study Two, structural equation modeling demonstrated that reported political engagement among voters differentially predicted reported likelihoods of voting for Clinton versus Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Study Three indicated that Republicans and Democrats showed distinct, systematic word association patterns for the same concepts/terms, which could be reliably distinguished using machine learning methods. These studies suggest that given an individual’s political beliefs, we can make reliable predictions about how they understand words, and given how an individual understands those same words, we can also predict an individual’s political beliefs. Our study provides a bridge between semantic space models and abstract representations of political concepts on the one hand, and the representations of political concepts and citizens’ voting behavior on the other.
CzeDLex 0.5 is a pilot version of a lexicon of Czech discourse connectives. The lexicon contains connectives partially automatically extracted from the Prague Discourse Treebank 2.0 (PDiT 2.0), a large corpus annotated manually with discourse relations. The most frequent entries in the lexicon (covering more than 2/3 of the discourse relations annotated in the PDiT 2.0) have been manually checked, translated to English and supplemented with additional linguistic information.
Full text discourse parsing relies on texts comprehensively annotated with discourse relations. To this end, we address a significant gap in the inter-sentential discourse relations annotated in the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB), namely the class of cross-paragraph implicit relations, which account for 30% of inter-sentential relations in the corpus. We present our annotation study to explore the incidence rate of adjacent vs. non-adjacent implicit relations in cross-paragraph contexts, and the relative degree of difficulty in annotating them. Our experiments show a high incidence of non-adjacent relations that are difficult to annotate reliably, suggesting the practicality of backing off from their annotation to reduce noise for corpusbased studies. Our resulting guidelines follow the PDTB adjacency constraint for implicits while employing an underspecified representation of non-adjacent implicits, and yield 62% inter-annotator agreement on this task.
We describe the Marmara Turkish Coreference Corpus, which is an annotation of the whole METU-Sabanci Turkish Treebank with mentions and coreference chains. Collecting eight or more independent annotations for each document allowed for fully automatic adjudication. We provide a baseline system for Turkish mention detection and coreference resolution and evaluate it on the corpus.
PDTSC 1.0 is a multi-purpose corpus of spoken language. 768,888 tokens, 73,374 sentences and 7,324 minutes of spontaneous dialog speech have been recorded, transcribed and edited in several interlinked layers: audio recordings, automatic and manual transcription and manually reconstructed text. PDTSC 1.0 is a delayed release of data annotated in 2012. It is an update of Prague Dependency Treebank of Spoken Language (PDTSL) 0.5 (published in 2009). In 2017, Prague Dependency Treebank of Spoken Czech (PDTSC) 2.0 was published as an update of PDTSC 1.0.