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There is a growing body of research in psychology that attempts to extrapolate human lexical judgments from computational models of semantics. This research can be used to help develop comprehensive norm sets for experimental research, it has applications to large-scale statistical modelling of lexical access and has broad value within natural language processing and sentiment analysis. However, the value of extrapolated human judgments has recently been questioned within psychological research. Of primary concern is the fact that extrapolated judgments may not share the same pattern of statistical relationship with lexical and semantic variables as do actual human judgments; often the error component in extrapolated judgments is not psychologically inert, making such judgments problematic to use for psychological research. We present a new methodology for extrapolating human judgments that partially addresses prior concerns of validity. We use this methodology to extrapolate human judgments of valence, arousal, dominance, and concreteness for 78,286 words. We also provide resources for users to extrapolate these human judgments for three million English words and short phrases. Applications for large sets of extrapolated human judgments are demonstrated and discussed.
Political misperceptions pose a serious threat to democracy, making it imperative to understand how to correct such false beliefs.Online ratings could play an important role in this process.Research on bandwagon effects suggests that favorable online ratings should help make corrections more persuasive by fostering trust in such messages.The assumption that online ratings are uniformly persuasive is, however, overly simplistic.I argue that online ratings will not always promote acceptance of corrections.In what I term the social affirmation heuristic, I hypothesize that people will only trust ratings of factual corrections that affirm what they already believe, and vice versa.I further predict that rating trust will influence subsequent trust in corrections.Taken together, this means that belief discrepant ratings can have boomerang effects.Instead of eliciting the bandwagon effects described above, favorable ratings promote distrust of belief discrepant corrections.It is, however, possible for belief uncertainty and de-biasing messages to limit these boomerang effects by reducing reliance on the social affirmation heuristic.I expect these predictions to hold for various kinds of ratings, including both star ratings, which indicate rater favorability toward content, and Likes, which indicate the number of raters who see value in the content.This dissertation uses two studies to test these ideas.The first study uses data from an online experiment conducted with convenience sample of 847 participants.The data for the second study come from a nationally representative sample of 500 participants.With the exception of the hypothesis that belief confidence affects rating iii trust, all hypotheses received robust support in the context of star ratings.Implications of these findings are discussed.iv Dedication This work is dedicated to all the academics out there who keep trying, failing, and getting back up again.May you triumph against the odds and prove your detractors wrong.vi My academic journey would not have come to fruition without the parasocial support from my favorite Disney animated features.These movies provided me with much comfort and solace whenever I faced academic struggles.Many thanks to Frozen, which taught me and still teaches me to 'test the limits and break through' and to 'let go of fear'.Special credit goes to Zootopia for being a very relatable movie that reflects my struggles and triumphs as a foreign student in America.Someday, I hope to be just like Judy Hopps, and prove my naysayers wrong.
We release Galactic Dependencies 1.0—a large set of synthetic languages not found on Earth, but annotated in Universal Dependencies format. This new resource aims to provide training and development data for NLP methods that aim to adapt to unfamiliar languages. Each synthetic treebank is produced from a real treebank by stochastically permuting the dependents of nouns and/or verbs to match the word order of other real languages. We discuss the usefulness, realism, parsability, perplexity, and diversity of the synthetic languages. As a simple demonstration of the use of Galactic Dependencies, we consider single-source transfer, which attempts to parse a real target language using a parser trained on a “nearby” source language. We find that including synthetic source languages somewhat increases the diversity of the source pool, which significantly improves results for most target languages.
Abstract: This technical note describes the US Army Research Laboratory (ARL) Arabic Dependency Treebank (AADT) for the purpose of documenting its release. The AADT was derived from existing Arabic treebanks distributed by the Linguistic Data Consortium using constituent-to-dependency conversion software written at ARL. Earlier versions of the AADT, as well as parsers trained from it, have been used in several published ARL research efforts, and, by releasing the data, we hope to facilitate additional Arabic language processing research by the greater community.
In this paper, we describe the compilation of the Slovene Lexical Database; main focus being on developing the methodology to improve the tools used for lexicographic analysis and to introduce automatic data extraction in the lexicographic process. The semi-automated approach, which was devised in the last stages of database compilation, involved extracting corpus data, i.e. grammatical relations, collocations, examples, and grammatical labels, and conducting lexicographic analysis in the dictionary-writing system rather than in the corpus tool. An evaluation that compared the manual approach with the semi-automatic approach showed that the semi-automatic approach is much quicker and presents the lexicographers with almost all the information they identified as relevant during the manual analysis, as well as additional potentially relevant information for the dictionary entry. The final section of the paper proposes a few avenues for improvement of the semi-automated approach, including the implementation of crowdsourcing and additional post-processing of automatically extracted data.
Various treebanks have been released for dependency parsing. Despite that treebanks may belong to different languages or have different annotation schemes, they contain common syntactic knowledge that is potential to benefit each other. This paper presents a universal framework for transfer parsing across multi-typed treebanks with deep multi-task learning. We consider two kinds of treebanks as source: the multilingual universal treebanks and the monolingual heterogeneous treebanks. Knowledge across the source and target treebanks are effectively transferred through multi-level parameter sharing. Experiments on several benchmark datasets in various languages demonstrate that our approach can make effective use of arbitrary source treebanks to improve target parsing models.
Various treebanks have been released for dependency parsing. Despite that treebanks may belong to different languages or have different annotation schemes, they contain syntactic knowledge that is potential to benefit each other. This paper presents an universal framework for exploiting these multi-typed treebanks to improve parsing with deep multi-task learning. We consider two kinds of treebanks as source: the multilingual universal treebanks and the monolingual heterogeneous treebanks. Multiple treebanks are trained jointly and interacted with multi-level parameter sharing. Experiments on several benchmark datasets in various languages demonstrate that our approach can make effective use of arbitrary source treebanks to improve target parsing models.
Treebanks are curial for natural language processing (NLP). In this paper, we present our work for annotating a Chinese treebank in scientific domain (SCTB), to address the problem of the lack of Chinese treebanks in this domain. Chinese analysis and machine translation experiments conducted using this treebank indicate that the annotated treebank can significantly improve the performance on both tasks. This treebank is released to promote Chinese NLP research in scientific domain.
In this paper the systems submitted by the joint team of Dublin City University and National Taiwan University to the IALP 2016 Shared Task: Dimensional Sentiment Analysis for Chinese Words are presented. The systems learn the vector representation using Word2Vec algorithm for each Chinese word for sentiment analysis. The corpus used for the calculation of vector representation is 5 years (2006 to 2010) of the LDC Chinese Gigaword Fifth Edition corpus. The systems calculated similarities between a test Chinese word and each word in training corpus of the shared task with human annotation and took the valence-arousal ratings of the most similar words as the ratings of the test word. The performance of the submitted systems are around the same level of the shared task's baseline system. We will be looking at the performance gap with top-ranked systems in several aspects including corpus used for training and methodology.
Learning from a few examples remains a key challenge in machine learning. Despite recent advances in important domains such as vision and language, the standard supervised deep learning paradigm does not offer a satisfactory solution for learning new concepts rapidly from little data. In this work, we employ ideas from metric learning based on deep neural features and from recent advances that augment neural networks with external memories. Our framework learns a network that maps a small labelled support set and an unlabelled example to its label, obviating the need for fine-tuning to adapt to new class types. We then define one-shot learning problems on vision (using Omniglot, ImageNet) and language tasks. Our algorithm improves one-shot accuracy on ImageNet from 87.6% to 93.2% and from 88.0% to 93.8% on Omniglot compared to competing approaches. We also demonstrate the usefulness of the same model on language modeling by introducing a one-shot task on the Penn Treebank.
Automatic metaphor detection usually relies on various features, incorporating e.g. selectional preference violations or concreteness ratings to detect metaphors in text. These features rely on background corpora, hand-coded rules or additional, manually created resources, all specific to the language the system is being used on. We present a novel approach to metaphor detection using a neural network in combination with word embeddings, a method that has already proven to yield promising results for other natural language processing tasks. We show that foregoing manual feature engineering by solely relying on word embeddings trained on large corpora produces comparable results to other systems, while removing the need for additional resources.
The growing work in multi-lingual parsing faces the challenge of fair comparative evaluation and performance analysis across languages and their treebanks. The difficulty lies in teasing apart the properties of treebanks, such as their size or average sentence length, from those of the annotation scheme, and from the linguistic properties of languages. We propose a method to evaluate the effects of word order of a language on dependency parsing performance, while controlling for confounding treebank properties. The method uses artificially-generated treebanks that are minimal permutations of actual treebanks with respect to two word order properties: word order variation and dependency lengths. Based on these artificial data on twelve languages, we show that longer dependencies and higher word order variability degrade parsing performance. Our method also extends to minimal pairs of individual sentences, leading to a finer-grained understanding of parsing errors.
Many sequential processing tasks require complex nonlinear transition functions from one step to the next. However, recurrent neural networks with 'deep' transition functions remain difficult to train, even when using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks. We introduce a novel theoretical analysis of recurrent networks based on Gersgorin's circle theorem that illuminates several modeling and optimization issues and improves our understanding of the LSTM cell. Based on this analysis we propose Recurrent Highway Networks, which extend the LSTM architecture to allow step-to-step transition depths larger than one. Several language modeling experiments demonstrate that the proposed architecture results in powerful and efficient models. On the Penn Treebank corpus, solely increasing the transition depth from 1 to 10 improves word-level perplexity from 90.6 to 65.4 using the same number of parameters. On the larger Wikipedia datasets for character prediction (text8 and enwik8), RHNs outperform all previous results and achieve an entropy of 1.27 bits per character.
Gradients have been used to quantify feature importance in machine learning models. Unfortunately, in nonlinear deep networks, not only individual neurons but also the whole network can saturate, and as a result an important input feature can have a tiny gradient. We study various networks, and observe that this phenomena is indeed widespread, across many inputs. We propose to examine interior gradients, which are gradients of counterfactual inputs constructed by scaling down the original input. We apply our method to the GoogleNet architecture for object recognition in images, as well as a ligand-based virtual screening network with categorical features and an LSTM based language model for the Penn Treebank dataset. We visualize how interior gradients better capture feature importance. Furthermore, interior gradients are applicable to a wide variety of deep networks, and have the attribution property that the feature importance scores sum to the the prediction score. Best of all, interior gradients can be computed just as easily as gradients. In contrast, previous methods are complex to implement, which hinders practical adoption.
Abstract The automatic interpretation of 3D point clouds for building reconstruction is a challenging task. The interpretation process requires highly structured models representing semantics. Formal grammars can describe structures as well as the parameters of buildings and their parts. We propose a novel approach for the automatic learning of weighted attributed context‐free grammar rules for 3D building reconstruction, supporting the laborious manual design of rules. We separate structure from parameter learning. Specific Support Vector Machines (SVMs) are used to generate a weighted context‐free grammar and predict structured outputs such as parse trees. The grammar is extended by parameters and constraints, which are learned based on a statistical relational learning method using Markov Logic Networks (MLNs). MLNs enforce the topological and geometric constraints. MLNs address uncertainty explicitly and provide probabilistic inference. They are able to deal with partial observations caused by occlusions. Uncertain projective geometry is used to deal with the uncertainty of the observations. Learning is based on a large building database covering different building styles and façade structures. In particular, a treebank that has been derived from the database is employed for structure learning.
Sequential LSTM has been extended to model tree structures, giving competitive results for a number of tasks. Existing methods model constituent trees by bottom-up combinations of constituent nodes, making direct use of input word information only for leaf nodes. This is different from sequential LSTMs, which contain reference to input words for each node. In this paper, we propose a method for automatic head-lexicalization for tree-structure LSTMs, propagating head words from leaf nodes to every constituent node. In addition, enabled by head lexicalization, we build a tree LSTM in the top-down direction, which corresponds to bidirectional sequential LSTM structurally. Experiments show that both extensions give better representations of tree structures. Our final model gives the best results on the Standford Sentiment Treebank and highly competitive results on the TREC question type classification task.
Objectives: This study investigated the role of response style biases in the assessment of positive and negative affect in aging research; it addressed whether response styles (a) are associated with age-related changes in cognitive abilities, (b) lead to distorted conclusions about age differences in affect, and (c) reduce the convergent and predictive validity of affect measures in relation to health outcomes. Method: A multidimensional item response theory model was used to extract response styles from affect ratings provided by respondents to the psychosocial questionnaire (n = 6,295; aged 50-100 years) in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). Results: The likelihood of extreme response styles (disproportionate use of "not at all" and "very much" response categories) increased significantly with age, and this effect was mediated by age-related decreases in HRS cognitive test scores. Removing response styles from affect measures did not alter age patterns in positive and negative affect; however, it consistently enhanced the convergent validity (relationships with concurrent depression and mental health problems) and predictive validity (prospective relationships with hospital visits, physical illness onset) of the affect measures. Discussion: The results support the importance of detecting and controlling response styles when studying self-reported affect in aging research.
OBJECTIVES: Theoretical models of adult development suggest changes in emotion systems with age. This study determined how younger and older adults judged and classified 70 emotion terms that varied in valence and arousal, and that have been used in previous studies of adult aging and emotion. The terms were from the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule - Expanded (PANAS-X) and the (KS) affect scales. METHOD: Older (n = 32) and younger adults (n = 111) engaged in a card sort task which determined how the 70 emotion terms were classified (i.e. grouped) in relation to one another. Activation and valence ratings of emotion terms were collected. RESULTS: There were 17 age group differences in item ratings for activation and 19 for valence. Older adults tended to rate emotion terms and scales as more positive and activating than younger persons. Card sort data indicated similarity in conceptualizations of emotion terms across groups with exceptions for serene, sad, and lonely. CONCLUSIONS: Research that utilizes self-report emotion data from older and younger persons should consider how perceptions of emotion terms may vary systematically with age. The constructs of sadness, loneliness, and serene may be age-variant and necessitate age-based adjustments in assessment and intervention. Further, older adults may perceive some emotion terms to be more activating and positive than younger persons.
Two of the major problems in social media message classification are the data sparseness issue and the high degree of lexical variation. Paraphrases, or synonyms, are alternative ways of expressing the same meaning using different lexical variations. In this study, we try to use paraphrases to improve tweet topic classification performance. We explored two approaches to generating paraphrases, WordNet, which is a lexical database grouping English words into sets of synonyms, and word embeddings, which are learned from millions of tweets and billions of words. Our experiment shows that using paraphrases can improve the topic classification task, and the word embedding approach outperforms the WordNet method. To our knowledge, this is the first study exploiting paraphrases for tweet classification.
In NLP data drives research, as evidenced by the frequency with which seminal works of database engineering such as The Penn Treebank have been employed as a basis for experimentation. Traditionally large-scale expertly annotated corpora are expensive and time consuming to produce. This paradigm drove researchers to adopt automated methods for generating labelled data with available tools such as Freebase, DBpedia, and the "infoboxes" found on Wikipedia pages. These knowledge bases have been, or are in the process of being, subsumed by Wikidata, an initiative to concentrate such disparate data repositories in an organized machine readable format. This resource is an important research tool. In this paper, we review our experience using Wikidata in constructing a large annotated corpus under distant supervision, moreover we make the materials, the code used to generate our annotations, freely available to all interested parties.
The access of women in all fields of activity has provoked fierce linguistic polemics on feminisation of names of professions which has represented a wide range of linguistic investigations in France and in many French-speaking countries such as Canada, Belgium and Switzerland.This paper aims to examine the manifestation of the process of feminisation of names of professions in the French press, in other words, to observe how feminisation of names of professions in the French written media discourse is applied, knowing the fact that the press represents a favourable environment in which two areas conjugate, namely, society and linguistics. Therefore, this study is part of a sociolinguistic framework and will follow two approaches, one regulatory, related to linguistic habits and the other, innovative, revealed by the actual language-based practices that concern the visibility of women on the linguistic level.This micro research is justified by the assumption already advanced that the media has a very important role in the enrichment of languages, accompanying the evolution of the society by familiarizing the readers with new forms denoting new realities, thereby facilitating their further use.The objectives of this study are the study in the French press of the feminine forms used to designate women, comparing these forms to those indicated in the feminization guides and the Dictionary of the French Academy, which is the linguistic norm. The second part of the study is dedicated to analysing the procedures used to create the feminine form, in case of finding a lexical variation, but also explaining the factors favouring the option of using a form or another.Keywords: French, sociolinguistics, feminisation, names of profession.
While research on affective word processing in adults witnesses increasing interest, the present paper looks at another group of participants that have been neglected so far: pupils (age range: 6-12 years). Introducing a variant of the Berlin Affective Wordlist (BAWL) especially adapted for children of that age group, the "kidBAWL," we examined to what extent pupils process affective lexical semantics similarly to adults. In three experiments using rating and valence decision tasks in both the visual and auditory modality, it was established that children show the two ubiquitous phenomena observed in adults with emotional word material: the asymmetric U-shaped function relating valence to arousal ratings, and the inversely U-shaped function relating response times to valence decision latencies. The results for both modalities show large structural similarities between pupil and adult data (taken from previous studies) indicating that in the present age range, the affective lexicon and the dynamic interplay between language and emotion is already well-developed. Differential effects show that younger children tend to choose less extreme ratings than older children and that rating latencies decrease with age. Overall, our study should help to develop more realistic models of word recognition and reading that include affective processes and offer a methodology for exploring the roots of pleasant literary experiences and ludic reading.
The purpose of the study is to examine the effect of subliminal priming in terms of the perception of images influenced by words with positive, negative, and neutral emotional content, through electroencephalograms (EEGs). Participants were instructed to rate how much they like the stimuli images, on a 7-point Likert scale, after being subliminally exposed to masked lexical prime words that exhibit positive, negative, and neutral connotations with respect to the images. Simultaneously, the EEGs were recorded. Statistical tests such as repeated measures ANOVAs and two-tailed paired-samples t-tests were performed to measure significant differences in the likability ratings among the three prime affect types; the results showed a strong shift in the likeness judgment for the images in the positively primed condition compared to the other two. The acquired EEGs were examined to assess the difference in brain activity associated with the three different conditions. The consistent results o)
SOME PROBLEMS OF THE FORMATION PROCESS OF THE LATVIAN LITERARY LANGUAGE Summary 0. Literary language is the most complete variety of language, manifesting its functions in the best way possible and unifying the nation, as well as representing national mentality among other nations and their languages. 0.1. When speaking about the Latvian literary language and its formation, it seems useful to acknowledge that the literary language is (1) the language of the entire nation, (2) is being consciously cultivated and (3) has written form. 0.2. When dealing with the Latvian literary language formation processes, one should take into consideration (a) the specific external (sociopolitical) conditions, (b) the sources of the literary language, (c) aspects of language development and its research. 1. Development of the Latvian language has been affected by external sociopolitical factors and factors of migration of representatives of various cultural layers; these factors have both stimulated and hampered the overall formation of the language both in space and time. 2. Research of the Latvian literary language is complicated, because the most reliable proofs of this process are written texts, which in Latvian appeared only in the 16th century. Therefore both folk-lore and the spoken language can be used as sources. 2.1. From the 16th to the 19th century written texts were mainly produced by German clergymen who in the beginning (in the 16th century) had a poor knowledge of Latvian. Therefore these texts must be properly handled by differentiating the sociopolitical and philological activities of the Germans. Beginning with the 17th century a normative approach has been consciously applied to the language and thus a common variety of the language is being created by maximally keeping aloof of various patois forms. 2.2. The source of analysis of the literary language and the process of its formation is the abundant Latvian folk-lore and especially the folk-songs (dainas), but the folk-lore language changes gradually from generation to generation. 2.3. In studying the formation of the literary language, the spoken language found in written monuments and recorded in special questionnaires can be used. 3. In inquiring about the Latvian literary language and its formation, definite layers of cognition can be traced: 1) statement and description of phonetic, lexical and grammatical phenomena found in the Latvian language and in the Latvian texts written by the German clergymen, 2) historical survey of language phenomena and their comparison with related languages, 3) analysis of the old-Latvian (and later also new-Latvian) written language, 4) analysis of colloquial Latvian and folk-lore, 5) fundamental synchronic and diachronic research in phonetics, word stock and grammar within the framework of the language norm, style and language culture aspects. 3.1. None of these layers give an all-embracing picture of the stages of the development of the Latvian literary language, because in those days no such task was formulated. 3.2. In Latvian linguistics the Latvian literary language formation problem became topical in the 50ies of the 20th century with the emergence of historical research of literary Latvian as an independent branch of linguistics.
Study 3 Image Rating Support for Welfare
Selon la litterature, les aphasies thalamiques se caracterisent par un manque du mot compense principalement par des paraphasies semantiques. Crosson, chercheur americain, propose le modele de l'engagement selectif qui expliquerait le manque du mot dans l'aphasie thalamique par un defaut d'appariement entre concepts et representations lexicales au niveau de l'interface lexico-semantique. Cette interface, pilotee par le thalamus, dependrait de mecanismes attentionnels et executifs. Notre etude a consiste a tester ce modele. Nous avons evalue en phase aigue puis a trois mois post-AVC des patients presentant une lesion thalamique gauche et des patients presentant une lesion sous-corticale non-thalamique gauche. Les protocoles d'evaluation etaient constitues d'epreuves orthophoniques et neuropsychologiques standards, et d'une tâche de generation de mots destinee a mesurer specifiquement le fonctionnement de l'interface lexico-semantique. Cette tâche, ne disposant pas de normes, a ete etalonnee par nos soins aupres de sujets sains. Nos resultats ont mis en evidence la participation de la memoire de travail verbale au fonctionnement de l'interface lexico-semantique. Nous avons egalement objective, par les resultats a la tâche de generation, un dysfonctionnement des patients au niveau de l'interface, de facon plus marque chez les patients avec lesion sous-corticale non-thalamique. Ce dysfonctionnement n'etait pas systematiquement associe a un manque du mot en langage spontane. La poursuite de l'etude aupres d'un plus grand nombre de patients permettrait de preciser ces premiers resultats.
Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewsRatner, Steven R. The Thin Justice of International Law: A Moral Reckoning of the Law of Nations.New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. 496. $85.00 (cloth).David LefkowitzDavid LefkowitzUniversity of Richmond Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreTo write a book like this a person must be either brave or stupid. Steven R. Ratner is clearly not stupid; ergo, he must be brave. Why? Well first there is the general danger that accompanies any effort to not only write across but also speak to multiple disciplines. Carrying out such an enterprise is like standing on a plank between two ships at sea; at any moment, one or both ships may turn away to follow their own (disciplinary) pursuits, leaving one (and one’s work) to sink unnoticed beneath the waves. But second, Ratner does not limit his engagement with political philosophy to one topic or his philosophical interlocutors to one or two “big names.” Rather, he makes the courageous choice to dive into the deep end of contemporary political philosophy, to engage with arguments made by more than two dozen theorists on topics including war, self-determination and secession, state borders, sovereign equality, human rights, universal jurisdiction, global trade, and international investment. While philosophers who read this book will no doubt conclude at times that Ratner misrepresents a philosophical argument he deploys or contests, they should do so with full appreciation for the respect that Ratner has paid political philosophers by investing so much time and effort in engaging with our work.Ratner contends that philosophers who write on matters of global justice or ethics and international affairs too often ignore or disparage existing international law. As a result, they offer international actors impractical and frequently dangerous guidance, neglect important insights contained in social norms and practices that have evolved in response to the actual conduct of international affairs, and focus on an overly narrow set of options for promoting justice. At least for those concerned with advancing justice in the near term and not merely with elaborating an account of a perfectly just world, a better approach begins with a detailed understanding of the workings of our current global political order, one constituted by international law. On the basis of that understanding a critical assessment can then be made of the contributions that international law makes, or might soon make, to promoting at least a minimally, or thinly, just world.Thin justice consists of two pillars: peace and basic human rights. Ratner characterizes the former as the absence of armed conflict, while the latter consist of “those [rights] that guarantee a life free of external intrusion on the fundamental freedom of the individual vis-à-vis the state and other powerful actors that threaten him or her, coupled with [access to] the basic material goods and conditions necessary to a minimally flourishing life and thus addressing each individual’s most important vulnerabilities” (76–77). Ratner employs both the “logic of appropriateness” and the “logic of discovery” to defend his pillars of thin justice. For example, he defends his account of basic human rights by appeal to both Henry Shue’s analysis of such rights as “justified demands the denial of which no self-respecting person can reasonably be expected to accept” (75) and features of present-day international law such as jus cogens or peremptory norms (i.e., international laws from which no derogation is permitted) and a hierarchy of rights he maintains we can identify in treaties such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. When deployed to assess the justice of various core features of contemporary international law, the pillars operate as follows: first, a legal norm such as the prohibition on the use of force except in self-defense or when authorized by the UN Security Council is evaluated in terms of the contribution it makes to advancing peace. If it performs reasonably well at that task, the rule is then assessed in terms of whether it interferes with basic human rights. Ratner makes clear that he does not accord peace lexical priority over noninterference with basic human rights; for instance, he defends the superiority of a legal norm permitting humanitarian intervention without UN authorization in exceptional circumstances to a categorical legal prohibition on such conduct. Nevertheless, given his claim that a legal rule that satisfies the peace pillar of thin justice counts as presumptively just, while a legal rule that does not counts as presumptively unjust, it appears that in general Ratner thinks we ought to give greater weight to promoting and preserving peace than to mitigating international law’s interference with basic human rights.Since his interest is in the contribution that specifically legal international norms and institutions make to the advancement of justice, Ratner identifies two further considerations that must be taken into account when conducting a moral assessment of international law. The first he labels fairness or procedural justice, which he characterizes in terms of the eight criteria that Lon Fuller identified as constitutive of the internal morality of the law. Whether satisfying (to some degree) these eight criteria is a distinctive feature of a legal order is a matter of debate, of course, but not one Ratner explores. The second consideration Ratner refers to as the compliance corollary, and he seems to have in mind H. L. A. Hart’s claim that a necessary condition for the existence of a legal order is that those it purports to rule generally comply with its directives. Thus, Ratner maintains that we ought to reject proposals for international legal norms to which states, especially powerful states, are unlikely to conform not only because they will be ineffective at advancing peace and basic human rights but also because they will fail to exist as law at all. Applied to individual legal norms, as Ratner occasionally does, this argument is too strong (and not what Hart maintained). Yet it may get some traction against certain institutional cosmopolitans who advocate for radical, comprehensive reform to the global legal order without paying sufficient attention to how we are to affect the transition to their envisioned new world order.As the above description of Ratner’s method for conducting a moral reckoning of international law implies, the thin justice of specific international legal rules and institutions is a function of their outcomes or consequences. Indeed, Ratner repeatedly refers to his argument as a consequentialist one and groups himself with theorists such as Robert Goodin and Brad Hooker, while treating nonconsequentialist philosophers such as David Miller, Simon Caney, Andrew Altman, and Christopher Wellman as his opponents. This classification is misleading, however. Ratner maintains that international legal rules and institutions ought to be assessed in terms of their consequences or, perhaps better, in terms of the worlds they produce. Yet this is a claim that the aforementioned nonconsequentialist interlocutors would likely also endorse, at least for purposes of nonideal theorizing. Moreover, Ratner explicitly rejects the use of consequentialist (or at least utilitarian) moral reasoning to rank the different states of affairs that would result from adopting alternative legal norms (81). The true differences between Ratner and his philosophical opponents largely either concern the kind of conclusions they defend, namely, prima facie or defeasible claims versus all-things-considered claims, or involve empirical disputes regarding the likely consequences of pursuing a particular reform to the existing international legal order.Ratner divides his assessment of the extent to which the core norms of international law satisfy thin justice into three sections. The first, composed of four chapters on the norms of statehood, includes illuminating discussions of both topics familiar to philosophers, such as secession, and ones to which philosophers have given relatively little attention. These include the permissibility of providing aid to rebel movements, the justifiability of extending the principle of uti possidetis (roughly, that the borders of new states be drawn according to preindependence administrative boundaries) beyond the context of decolonization, and the morally optimal design of the UN body charged with authorizing the use of force. The second section focuses largely on exceptions to international law’s territorially based approach to the protection of human rights and includes discussions of the applicability of human rights law to states when acting abroad, universal jurisdiction for certain violations of human rights, and armed humanitarian interventions not authorized by the United Nations. The thin justice of norms governing the global economy is the subject of the third section, which includes an assessment of various arguments challenging existing trade law on the grounds that it often interferes with individuals’ secure enjoyment of their basic human rights. While Ratner often comes down in defense of existing international legal rules, this is not always the case. For example, he calls for a reduction in the scope of sovereign immunity and for changes to the makeup of the states that enjoy permanent membership on the UN Security Council, as well as the rules governing the exercise of a veto by such states.Interestingly, Ratner maintains that thin justice does not provide a particularly useful tool for conducting a moral assessment of international humanitarian law (IHL), international criminal law (ICL), or international environmental law. With respect to IHL, for example, we lack the data we need to determine whether more or less permissive norms governing the killing of civilians in time of war would better serve to promote peace and basic human rights than does the current norm. Likewise, Ratner argues that the content of contemporary ICL is too haphazard, and its distinctive contribution to advancing peace and basic human rights too slight or speculative, to draw any meaningful conclusions regarding the impact it has on the realization of thin justice.In light of the approach Ratner takes to assessing international law and proposals for its reform, it is surprising how little space he devotes to an analysis of how international law contributes to the production of outcomes or worlds. Social scientific accounts of international law’s efficacy merit only a brief mention in the first chapter, and so for much of the book we are left with the “honestly held ‘seat-of-the-pants’ view [of] an international lawyer about the reactions of global actors to the rules or alternatives to them” (84). The judgment of an experienced international lawyer is a valuable source of knowledge. Nevertheless, in light of how often Ratner’s rebuttals to philosophers on specific issues of international law turn entirely on the effects of adopting one rule rather than another, we should ask for more. Indeed, there may be a general point here about how we should engage in the moral critique or construction of a legal order or regime. We should begin by asking why we need law and not just morality (or principles of justice). What is the work law does that morality does not; what is law’s distinctive contribution to realizing justice? To answer that question we must also consider how law performs the function or functions that we need it, or at least want it, to perform. A moral theory of a particular legal regime or system should be constructed on the basis of answers to these questions. In the case of international law, at least, these answers will likely include the facts of reasonable moral disagreement or pluralism, the inevitability and endogeneity of partial compliance, economic (or instrumental) and constructivist (or sociolegal) accounts of the ways in which law shapes actors’ deliberations, the importance of law’s de facto legitimacy, and much else besides.Any attempt to compare alternative legal norms on the basis of their consequences will also need to grapple with the paucity of data needed to draw a conclusion, or in cases when we have some data, our relatively low levels of confidence in its veracity or in our ability to generalize from it. Altman and Wellman, for example, repeatedly take these facts about the current state of our knowledge regarding international law’s impact on human conduct to block any inference from the existence of a moral right to a claim regarding the moral justifiability of an international legal norm that advances or interferes with the advancement of that moral right. While I think they often draw this conclusion too quickly, Ratner is likewise too quick to dismiss it. He does rightly press a related empirical objection against Altman and Wellman, however. Like many other political philosophers, they often call for an international legal institution to perform certain functions without any sensitivity to the larger context in which it operates or to its capacities. International law governs an anarchic society, a political order in which power and authority are largely distributed and exercised horizontally. Proposals that an international court exercise jurisdiction over groups’ claims to a plebiscitary right to secede, or determine in advance whether a state has a just cause for war, are not only impractical at present, but they presume that humanity has somehow transcended the environment that both structures and is structured by international law. They are not proposals for international law’s reform but its supersession.Ratner maintains that a legal norm that responds to institutional constraints, or better, to power and interest as well as to demands for moral treatment “is just, not a second-best alternative” (302). Many philosophers will demur; such a legal norm may be justifiable all things considered, but it is not just. One reason to adopt this second description is that conceding that a legal norm fails to accord some people the treatment they are due, but that this is necessary to prevent even more or worse immoral conduct, will generate greater acceptance and so make the norm more effective at advancing thin justice than will denying that the norm treats anyone unjustly at all. Some will also argue that an acknowledgment of wrongful treatment is called for even when that treatment is justified all things considered. An apology or expression of remorse is owed, if not compensation. Considering whether this is so or whether partial compliance is a fact that ought to figure in the very specification of our moral rights may be of little interest to international lawyers, but it strikes me as essential to a comprehensive moral reckoning of the law of nations.Ratner’s attempt to encourage political philosophers to engage in a deeper and more sustained dialogue with international law and international legal theorists will likely be only partially successful. Upon concluding the book, some philosophers will likely be convinced that its thick injustice, a product of the degree to which its content reflects power and interest, gives them little reason to engage with international law or those who practice it. Others, more practical in their orientation, more disposed to the development of truly interdisciplinary arguments, and perhaps more inclined to focus on mitigating the worst injustices than on elaborating a complete account of full or perfect justice, will likely find reading The Thin Justice of International Law very rewarding. If there are enough such philosophers, then Ratner’s book may mark an important step forward in the development of a semiautonomous subfield of philosophy of international law, one that may come to bear a relationship to the study of global justice analogous to the one that the philosophy of criminal law bears to the study of moral responsibility. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Ethics Volume 127, Number 1October 2016 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/687348 Views: 453Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.
In the process of constructing an academic edition for old and pre-modern texts, although they thoroughly record and comment the phonetic, morphological, syntactic, and lexical variants of a text, its omissions and interpolations, etc., the Romanian philologists tend to deal tacitly with the problem of punctuation, by adding rational, syntactic punctuation, according to the contemporary norm. This method has certain advantages for the general public, but, in fact, falsifies the text, because it puts the actions of a secondary agent—the editor—on the author. Moreover, the lack of perfect archæological relevations of the Romanian old and pre-modern texts—which would show, in this respect, the more or less consequent working habits of our early writers—leads, at least for the moment, to the impossibility of presenting the scientific community with a history of the Romanian punctuation. This is, nevertheless, an idea whose achievement depends on an objective re-evaluation of our contemporary editorial practice.
This study investigated the effect of individual differences (IDs) like language proficiency, gender and age on careful, unpressured online planning on the production of speech act of apology in institutional discourse. For this purpose, one hundred and eighty-seven Persian EFL university students at three academic levels (undergraduates, postgraduates and PhD students) participated and cross-sectional data were collected to compare and analyze the apologies produced by learners at different proficiency levels. A three way between subject analyses (ANOVA) showed quantitative differences among the three groups according to individual differences. Further, in-depth qualitative analyses of test items and retrospective verbal reports (RVRs) taken from the participants revealed developmental information about the series of processes, language states and patterns followed by learners when making an apology in a second language. Sociocultural, socio-psychological and socio-affective aspects of the discourse situations influenced not only students’ pragmalinguistic and sociolinguistic choices but also their negotiation of lexical and grammatical choices in planning the speech act of apology. Apparently, the degree of sociocultural accommodation to the L2 pragmatic norms may be a matter of choice as of ability. One major pedagogical implication of this study is that any account of the development of interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) should take into consideration the interaction of ID variables that are likely to intervene between the stages of noticing and target like production.<br /> <strong> </strong><br />
Previous studies on children’s acquisition of depicting verbs in signed languages have chiefly studied the use of classifiers in verbs of motion and location, particularly the order in which the different classes of handshape are acquired. The age of the children in these studies have ranged from age three to thirteen, and an important finding has been that classifier constructions are not fully acquired until early adolescence. Most of these studies have used an elicitation tool to investigate the production and comprehension of classifiers, but have not provided any adult target norms of the test items when scoring children’s achievement. The present dissertation provides a detailed description of both adults’ and children’s verb constructions in descriptions of cutting and breaking events in Swedish Sign Language (SSL), specifically focusing on the number of hands used in signing, handshape category and hand activity, which has not been previously described for any sign language. As part of this study, 14 deaf adults (ages 20–72) and 11 deaf children (2;1–6;6) of deaf parents, all native-users of SSL, performed a task that involved describing 53 video clips of cutting and breaking events. The clips show an event in which an actor separates material, either with the aid of a tool or without. Additionally, some clips show an entity separating by itself without an actor being involved. The adults described the events with depicting verb constructions that are produced with two hands. The analysis of the handshapes produced three categories: substitutor, manipulator and descriptor. The most frequent construction in the description of events without a tool was two acting manipulators (depicting a hand handling an object), whereas in descriptions of events with a tool the combinations were acting substitutor or manipulator with a non-acting manipulator. The acting hand referred to the tool and the non-acting manipulator to the affected entity. In descriptions of events without an actor, either two substitutors or two manipulators were used. In addition to depicting verb constructions, the descriptions also contained resultative complements, i.e. signs carrying information about the result of the activity being carried out. The complements were either lexical signs or some form of depicting verb construction. Similar observations have not been noted for any other signed language. In the manner of the adults, the children used depicting verb constructions in descriptions of cutting and breaking events (681 tokens), but they also used pointing and lexical signs (64 tokens). Nearly half of the verb constructions that were used by the children corresponded to the adult target forms. The majority of the constructions describing events without a tool corresponded to the adult target forms using two acting manipulators, even among the youngest informants. In events with a tool, only a third of the constructions corresponded to the adult target forms (emerging at 4;8 – 5;0); the remaining two-thirds were deviating constructions in terms of number of hands, handshape category and hand activity. Resultative complement are sparsely used by children (57 tokens), the most chosen type of complement being lexical signs. Pervasive features of children’s constructions were the addition of contact between the hands and a preference for substitutors, something not found in adults’ constructions. These features were elucidated within the framework of Real Space blending theory, with the study showing that children first use visible blended entities and that invisible blended entities do not emerge until 4;8–5;0.
This dissertation examines the heritage language (HL) ability of school-aged Mandarin HL children (age range = 6;5 – 10;10) living in Edmonton, a Canadian English majority city, and the factors contributing to their HL development and maintenance. Children’s language data were collected via various tasks, including comprehension, production, grammaticality judgment, psycholinguistic experiments, and narratives. A parental questionnaire was also included to collect Mandarin HL children’s information about the onset of English exposure, home language use, the richness of language environment, and the maternal education level. The results from three independent studies showed that Mandarin HL children were different from their monolingual peers regarding acquiring the lexically-driven classifier system and aspect morphemes. However, they were comparable to monolingual norms in comprehending and producing various syntactic structures (e.g. post-verbal clauses, relative clauses). These results indicate that the phenomenon of incomplete acquisition does not occur in every linguistic subdomain. Moreover, the longitudinal results revealed that Mandarin HL children’s L1 was convergent with the target grammar over time, suggesting that the reduced exposure to the HL does not necessarily lead to incomplete acquisition and attrition in the HL. Regarding various language environmental factors, the results demonstrated that older age of arrival, a rich and diverse HL environment, higher maternal education level and bilingual education contribute to stronger HL abilities, pointing to an important role for input in HL acquisition. Taken together, this dissertation offers insights relating to the debates between incomplete acquisition, attrition and the protracted acquisition in the acquisition of the HL during the early developmental stages. The research has practical contributions regarding the implications for policy and pedagogical decision-makings on HL education.
The tempo of modern living picks up day by day and the representatives of various professions should learn new information coming in various languages, including rare languages, from different parts of the world. Translators find themselves in the conditions of the necessity of more quick and qualitative translation what is not always possible when translating the rare language pair. The paper covers special aspects of appropriate translation using the intermediate language, which is required to increase the speed and the quality of translation from rare languages. Usually, the official international language (English) acts as the intermediate language, but other variants are possible as well. The paper describes as an example the experience of translation from Chinese to Russian using English as the intermediate language. The authors distinguished some special aspects of such translation. The experience of translation of Chinese novels from English (intermediate language) into Russian allowed the authors to find out that when working with the intermediate language, it is necessary to follow not only the general norms and rules of translation but some identified special aspects as well. The authors noted that while working with the intermediate language, a translator should take into account three cultural patterns (including various historical allusions) performed in three languages involved in the translation; select an appropriate translation strategy for appropriate translation of units of measure; take into account the specifics of proper names, which have not got any analogues in the intermediate and translating languages; give special attention to the use of both lexical and grammatical transformations.
A sentence is the natural unit of language. Patterns embedded in series of sentences can be used to model the formation and evolution of languages, and to solve practical problems such as evaluating linguistic ability. In this paper, we apply de-trended fluctuation analysis to detect long-range correlations embedded in sentence series from A Story of the Stone, one of the greatest masterpieces of Chinese literature. We identified a weak long-range correlation, with a Hurst exponent of 0.575±0.002 up to a scale of 104. We used the structural stability to confirm the behavior of the long-range correlation, and found that different parts of the series had almost identical Hurst exponents. We found that noisy records can lead to false results and conclusions, even if the noise covers a limited proportion of the total records (e.g., less than 1%). Thus, the structural stability test is an essential procedure for confirming the existence of long-range correlations, which has been widely neg)
The article demonstrate the expressive function of borrowed interjections in colloquial Russian and Macedonian languages. The given research covers English interjections and their consistency based on a discourse analysis of the context. Work attempts have been made to point the importance of the cross-language influence on a lexical norm. The research include comparative analysis as a method to identify the reasons of using English interjections in contemporary Russian and Macedonian languages.
EnglishThe aim of this paper is to examine uncommon first names in the Romance language speech community of Montpellier, France, during the period 1960-1985, from the perspective of socioanthroponymy, lexicology and sociolinguistics. The classic onomastic studies, especially French onomastics, as well as pragmasemantics and socioanthroponymy, provide the theoretical bases on which the analysis is grounded. Our underlying presuppositions are: a) a proper name, and consequently a first name, is a complete linguistic sign in its own right, and b) it is also a symbolic, cultural, compulsory and free entity, the choice of which embodies the parental project of those who name the child. In this study, which is a part of a more extensive comparative project, first names in the corpus appearing only once were analyzed in terms of three factors: 1) the modern language in which they were registered, 2) the grammatical gender (masculine or feminine) to which they belong, and 3) the nominal category to which they are assigned, based on the norms of language use of the times (first name, surname, hypocoristic, place name or ‘common noun’). We conclude that, in terms of terminology, we need to define exactly what we understand by ‘rare’, ‘little used’ and ‘non-conventional’ first names francaisL’objectif de cette communication est d’aborder les prenoms peu usites dans une communaute linguistique de langue romane, Montpellier, France, pendant la periode 1960-1985, depuis la socioanthroponymie, la lexicologie et la sociolinguistique. Les bases theoriques sur lesquelles se fondent les analyses sont les etudes de l'onomastique classique, specialement francaise, de la pragmasemantique et de la socionomastique. Voici les presupposes sous-jacents: a) le nom propre —et par consequent le prenom— est un signe linguistique a part entiere, et b) c’est aussi un bien symbolique, culturel, obligatoire et gratuit dont le choix synthetise le projet parental de ceux qui prenomment l'enfant. Dans cette etude qui fait partie d’un projet comparatif plus etendu, les unites lexicales attribuees une seule fois dans le corpus ont ete analysees selon trois facteurs: 1) la langue moderne dans laquelle elles ont ete inscrites; 2) le genre grammatical auquel elles appartiennent, et 3) la categorie nominale qui leur correspond selon la norme d’usage de l’epoque (prenom, nom de famille, hypocoristique, toponyme ou « nom commun »). Nous concluons qu’une precision terminologique s’avere necessaire: il faut definir ce qu’on entend par prenom « rare », prenom « peu usite » et prenom « non conventionnel ».
Abstract We are investigating methods by which data from dependency syntax treebanks of ancient Greek can be applied to questions of authorship in ancient Greek historiography. From the Ancient Greek Dependency Treebank were constructed syntax words (sWords) by tracing the shortest path from each leaf node to the root for each sentence tree. This paper presents the results of a preliminary test of the usefulness of the sWord as a stylometric discriminator. The sWord data was subjected to clustering analysis. The resultant groupings were in accord with traditional classifications. The use of sWords also allows a more fine-grained heuristic exploration of difficult questions of text reuse. A comparison of relative frequencies of sWords in the directly transmitted Polybius book 1 and the excerpted books 9–10 indicate that the measurements of the two texts are generally very close, but when frequencies do vary, the differences are surprisingly large. These differences reveal that a certain syntactic simplification is a salient characteristic of Polybius’ excerptor, who leaves conspicuous syntactic indicators of his modifications.
In this paper and the associated system demo, we present an advanced search system that allows to perform a joint search over a (bilingual) valency lexicon and a correspondingly annotated linked parallel corpus. This search tool has been developed on the basis of the Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank, but its ideas are applicable in principle to any bilingual parallel corpus that is annotated for dependencies and valency (i.e., predicate-argument structure), and where verbs are linked to appropriate entries in an associated valency lexicon. Our online search tool consolidates more search interfaces into one, providing expanded structured search capability and a more efficient advanced way to search, allowing users to search for verb pairs, verbal argument pairs, their surface realization as recorded in the lexicon, or for their surface form actually appearing in the linked parallel corpus. The search system is currently under development, and is replacing our current search tool available at http://lindat.mff.cuni.cz/services/CzEngVallex, which could search the lexicon but the queries cannot take advantage of the underlying corpus nor use the additional surface form information from the lexicon(s). The system is available as open source.
The article discusses the methodology and the preliminary results of the research project entitled “Latvian language in Monolingual and Bilingual Acquisition: tools, theories and applications” (LAMBA). The project involves 25 researchers – linguists, educators, psychologists – from five institutions in Latvia and Norway, and focuses on phonological, lexical and morphosyntactic acquisition of Latvian as a native language in monolingual and bilingual settings. One of the main goals of the project is to develop a set of norm-referenced language assessment tools that would allow for accurate and time-efficient evaluation of language development in pre-school children.The article will focus specifically on the Latvian adaptation of MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories – a parental report tool that assesses the development of receptive and productive vocabulary, and certain aspects of grammar. Two CDI forms were adapted in the project: CDI Words and Gestures designed for use with children between 8 and 16 months of age, and CDI Words and Sentences designed for 16- to 36-month old children. Each CDI form contains extensive and language-specific checklists of lexical items, communicative gestures and grammatical constructions.
We present a study on two key characteristics of human syntactic annotations: anchoring and agreement. Anchoring is a well known cognitive bias in human decision making, where judgments are drawn towards pre-existing values. We study the influence of anchoring on a standard approach to creation of syntactic resources where syntactic annotations are obtained via human editing of tagger and parser output. Our experiments demonstrate a clear anchoring effect and reveal unwanted consequences, including overestimation of parsing performance and lower quality of annotations in comparison with human-based annotations. Using sentences from the Penn Treebank WSJ, we also report the first systematically obtained inter-annotator agreement estimates for English syntactic parsing. Our agreement results control for anchoring bias, and are consequential in that they are \emph{on par} with state of the art parsing performance for English. We discuss the impact of our findings on strategies for future annotation efforts and parser evaluations.
Images: EEG montage used, beside international type; experiment overview; waveforms; difference topographies. For a more detailed view of the waveforms per group and electrode, visit: <b>https://pablobernabeu.shinyapps.io/export_files/</b><b>Abstract. </b>The engagement of sensory systems during word comprehension has been extensively documented; yet, the precise relevance of those remains unclear. We probed into this with an event-related potential (ERP) experiment which implemented the conceptual modality switch. This paradigm works as follows. In each trial, participants judge whether a property word can describe a concept word. However, the critical manipulation is the conceptual modality of the trials—e.g., haptic or visual—, as enabled by modality-normed stimuli. Switching across trials in different modalities, compared to maintaining a modality, incurs a switching cost. So far, experiments have measured this either on-line, from ERPs time-locked to the second word of the target trials, or off-line, from response times at the end of those trials. Problematically, both measurements fail to control a possible switch at the first word, as well as the semantic relation between the first and second words. In tackling the actual time frame of lexical and semantic access, we time-locked ERPs to the first word of target trials. Then, the experiment included different types of switch—from auditory to visual, and from haptic to visual—, which were compared to the non-switch—visual to visual. Further, we had a quick response group (<i>n</i> = 21), and a self-paced group (<i>n</i> = 21), alongside a few participants with no speed instructions (<i>n</i> = 5). The results, analyzed with mixed effects models, reveal ERP effects of modality-switching in four typical time windows between 160 and 750 ms after word onset. The effects are generally characterized by a more negative amplitude for modality-switching than not switching, and they arise with both types of switch, in both groups, and in anterior as well as posterior brain regions. In sum, the early start and broad scope of this effect suggest that perceptual simulation contributes fundamentally to word comprehension.
A considerable body of sensory research has addressed the rules governing simultaneity judgments (SJs) and temporal order judgments (TOJs). In principle, neural events that register stimulus-arrival-time differences at an early sensory stage could set the limit on SJs and TOJs alike. Alternatively, distinct limits on SJs and TOJs could arise from task-specific neural events occurring after the stimulus-driven stage. To distinguish between these possibilities, we developed a novel reaction-time (RT) measure and tested it in a perceptual-learning procedure. The stimuli comprised dual-stream Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) displays. Participants judged either the simultaneity or temporal order of red-letter and black-number targets presented in opposite lateral hemifield streams of black-letter distractors. Despite identical visual stimulation across-tasks, the SJ and TOJ tasks generated distinct RT patterns. SJs exhibited significantly faster RTs to synchronized targets than to )
Children’s interpretations of sentences containing focus particles do not seem adult-like until school age. This study investigates how German 4-year-old children comprehend sentences with the focus particle ‘nur’ (only) by using different tasks and controlling for the impact of general cognitive abilities on performance measures. Two sentence types with ‘only’ in either pre-subject or pre-object position were presented. Eye gaze data and verbal responses were collected via the visual world paradigm combined with a sentence-picture verification task. While the eye tracking data revealed an adult-like pattern of focus particle processing, the sentence-picture verification replicated previous findings of poor comprehension, especially for ‘only’ in pre-subject position. A second study focused on the impact of general cognitive abilities on the outcomes of the verification task. Working memory was related to children’s performance in both sentence types whereas inhibitory control was sel)
The extent of research on children’s speech in general and on disordered speech specifically is very limited. In this article, we describe the process of creating databases of children’s speech and the possibilities for using such databases, which have been created by the LANNA research group in the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at Czech Technical University in Prague. These databases have been principally compiled for medical research but also for use in other areas, such as linguistics. Two databases were recorded: one for healthy children’s speech (recorded in kindergarten and in the first level of elementary school) and the other for pathological speech of children with a Specific Language Impairment (recorded at a surgery of speech and language therapists and at the hospital). Both databases were sub-divided according to specific demands of medical research. Their utilization can be exoteric, specifically for linguistic research and pedagogical use as well as for studies of s)
Images play an important role in the representation and acquisition of specialized knowledge. Not surprisingly, terminological knowledge bases (TKBs) often include images as a way to enhance the information in concept entries. However, the selection of these images should not be random, but rather based on specific guidelines that take into account the type and nature of the concept being described. This paper presents a proposal on how to combine the features of images with the conceptual propositions in EcoLexicon, a multilingual TKB on the environment. This proposal is based on the following: (1) the combinatory possibilities of concept types; (2) image types, such as photographs, drawings and flow charts; (3) morphological features or visual knowledge patterns (VKPs), such as labels, colours, arrows, and their effect on the functional nature of each image type. Currently, images are stored in association with concept entries according to the semantic content of their definitions, but they are not described or annotated according to the parameters that guided their selection, which would undoubtedly contribute to the systematization and automatization of the process. First, the images included in EcoLexicon were analyzed in terms of their adequateness, the semantic relations expressed, the concept types and their VKPs. Then, with these data, guidelines for image selection and annotation were created. The final aim is twofold: (1) to systematize the selection of images and (2) to start annotating old and new images so that the system can automatically allocate them in different concept entries based on shared conceptual propositions.