Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
16504 papers
We propose a new kind of event structure representation for computational linguistics, based on the theoretical framework of First-Phase Syntax We show that the approach not only gives a theoretically well-motivated set of subevents and related semantic roles, it also posits the levels of representation needed for analyzing a linguistic phenomenon that has repeatedly caused problems in computational systems, namely the treatment of complex predication. In particular, we look at V+V complex predicates in Urdu/Hindi and show that Ramchand's subevent decomposition implemented in a VerbNet-style resource allows for a consistent semantic analysis of these complex events. We also show how the proposed event representation can be added to existing resources in the language, in particular the Hindi-Urdu Treebank and Hindi PropBank.
This chapter proposes the hypothesis that online therapeutic work may be relatively less arousing than face-to-face work. It focuses on a study in which the impact of exchanges of online therapy text exchanges were compared to previously published results in face-to-face therapy using both aggregate benchmarking and mixed effects modeling. Therapists (N = 30) and clients (N = 30) engaged in online therapy were recruited from private practitioner sites, e-clinics, online counseling centers, and mental health related discussion boards. In a naturalistic design, they each visited an online site weekly and completed the Session Evaluation Questionnaire, a standard impact measure, for at least six weeks. Results indicated that the impact of text therapy was similar to or even more positive than that of faceto-face therapy. Of particular interest, online participants gave much lower SEQ Arousal ratings compared to their face-to-face counterparts, consistent with previous results. We call our hypothesis the online calming effect. This study's small size and naturalistic design impose limitations on its sensitivity and generalizability, but its suggestion of an online calming effect is intriguing.
This paper investigates the relation between the number of full valency frames (we do not distinguish between complements and optional adjuncts, both are taken into account) of a verb and the number of its synonyms. It is shown that for Czech verbs from the Prague Dependency Treebank it holds “the greater the full valency of a verb, the more synonyms the verb has”.
In this paper, we investigate the problem of domain-independent opinion target extraction. The only lexical resource used is domain-independent (general) sentiment dictionary. We begin from investigating syntactic descriptions (rules) using dependency parsing jointly with sentiment dictionary. We conclude that such a solution is not sufficient for opinion target extraction due to low precision. To overcome this difficulty, we propose a well-known supervised machine learning method as the second step, after applying syntactic rules. We find that supervised model without lexical features outperforms by large margin a comparable one with lexical features. The results appear promising and contribute to domain-independent opinion target extraction. All experiments were carried out on a publicly available Polish dependency treebank with manually verified opinion and sentiment annotations, as well as opinion target information.
This paper closely analysed and depicted the role of the hyponymy that is used in the lexical database called the Word Net to relate the words semantically with a relation "... Is a kind of...". The relation has very important role for disambiguating the senses of a polysemy word in any natural language and is, therefore, massively used in knowledge-based Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) approaches. However, the limitation of this relation is not so cared about. In many cases, the use of the hypernymy does not only mean nothing for disambiguation but also it increases only the computational effort for the system. The improper use of hypernymy is very costly. In some cases, which are described later, the use of this relation even decreases the accuracy of the WSD approaches.
In this contribution, we deal with graph parsing, i.e., mapping input strings to graph-structured output representations, using tree approximations. We experiment with the data from the SemEval 2014 Semantic Dependency Parsing (SDP) task. We define various tree approximation schemes for graphs, and make twofold use of them. First, we statically analyze the semantic dependency graphs, seeking to unscover which linguistic phenomena in particular require the additional annotation expressivity provided by moving from trees to graphs. We focus on undirected base cycles in the SDP graphs, and discover strong connections to grammatical control and coordination. Second, we make use of the approximations in a statistical parsing scenario. In it, we convert the training set graphs to dependency trees, and use the resulting treebanks to build standard dependency tree parsers. We perform lossy graph reconstructions on parser outputs, and evaluate our models as dependency graph parsers. Our system outperforms the baselines by a large margin, and evaluates as the best non-voting tree approximation–based parser on the SemEval 2014 data, scoring at just over 81% in labeled F1.
Margaret Thatcher was the first woman to become Prime Minister of the UK. It has been claimed, however, that she did little for the cause of women. Part of the problem is Thatcher made clear that while she was a woman she thought of herself as a politician first. In this chapter we consider the linguistic consequences of adopting such a position, and we argue that Thatcher used specific discourse structures conducive to the adversarial style of the British parliament. As this style has been equated with male discourse patterns some argue that Thatcher adopted male linguistic norms. However, adversarial styles are not inherently “male” and we consider whether Thatcher was speaking like a man or merely as a politician.
Abstract This paper explores the relation between familiarity of Chinese subjects and the syntactic distance. We propose two hypotheses: (1) contextually given Mandarin Chinese subjects are more likely to be used with long intervening adverbials than contextually new subjects; and (2) subjects with higher word frequency are more likely to be followed by long adverbials than those with lower word frequency. The data from two Mandarin Chinese treebanks provide supportive evidence for the first hypothesis, but not the second. Cognitively, this is probably due to the possibility that contextual givenness, which reflects familiarity, may lessen the effect of locality by increasing the activation level (the accessibility) of the subject and rendering these subjects less susceptible to the memory decay caused by the adverbials intervening between them and the predicate verbs. Subjects are usually the starting point of a sentence, which has a default given–new information structure. Therefore, when organizing a sentence, we are dominantly concerned with the information status (contextual givenness) relative to previous context when choosing the subjects, which may partly accounts for the observed irrelevance between word frequency and the use of adverbials. A sentence is structured based on the information status of the subjects, not their word frequency.
This article proposes a unified, character-based, generative model to incorporate additional resources for solving the out-of-vocabulary (OOV) problem of Chinese word segmentation, within which different types of additional information can be utilized independently in corresponding submodels. This article mainly addresses the following three types of OOV: unseen dictionary words, named entities, and suffix-derived words, none of which are handled well by current approaches. The results show that our approach can effectively improve the performance of the first two types with positive interaction in F-score. Additionally, we also analyze reason that suffix information is not helpful. After integrating the proposed generative model with the corresponding discriminative approach, our evaluation on various corpora---including SIGHAN-2005, CIPS-SIGHAN-2010, and the Chinese Treebank (CTB)---shows that our integrated approach achieves the best performance reported in the literature on all testing sets when additional information and resources are allowed.
This article examines how media scholars’ attributes affect ratings of Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly (JMCQ), based on the 2014 JMCQ readership survey. It compares the impacts of these attributes on five different types of subjective journal ratings. For instance, importance of journal impact factor in the respondent’s institution only affects the rating of the journal’s standing in the field. Attributes such as use and knowledge of the journal, research recognition received in the field, doctoral institution affiliation, and ethnicity consistently predict the rating of the journal’s standing in the field, overall ratings, and relevance to the respondents; but other attributes predict the ratings of the journal in serving the association members well and author-friendliness.
This study demonstrates the use of social media analytics in the context of network television (TV) programs. We first downloaded social media measures for 38 TV programs and their performance ratings over a period of five weeks resulting in a sample size of 165 weekly observations. Specifically we extracted the number of Twitter tweets, followers, followings, Facebook likes, and talk from the official Twitter and Facebook profiles of each TV program. Subsequently we applied OLS Regression techniques and determined that key social media measures positively affect ratings. In essence TV shows with a higher number of Twitter tweets, followers and Facebook talk are likely to associate with higher performance ratings. This study helps TV networks in realizing the pertinence of social media in garnering viewership. Consequently we also propose a social media analytics framework for businesses in identifying brands with higher social media buzz in the objective of improving future economic performance.
In this paper, the authors propose formalism for representing a knowledge base (KB) by network. The objective is to achieve a high coverage of this base. This type of network is similar to the semantic network with the difference that the arcs are quantified by a value indicating the semantic proximity between the concepts. This semantic proximity presents taxonomic relations, synonyms, and non-taxonomic relations (contextual relations). This latter are discovered based on the association rules model. This model is based on (i) indexing method (ii) the French lexical database EuroWordNet (EWNF) and (iii) the Apriori algorithm. The contextual relations are the latent relations buried in the KB, carried by the semantic context. Evaluating our representation formalism shows better result about 80% of coverage of the KB.
Playing certain types of video games for a long time can improve a wide range of mental processes, from visual acuity to cognitive control. Frequent gamers have also displayed generalized improvements in perceptual learning. In the Texture Discrimination Task (TDT), a widely used perceptual learning paradigm, participants report the orientation of a target embedded in a field of lines and demonstrate robust over-night improvement. However, changing the orientation of the background lines midway through TDT training interferes with overnight improvements in overall performance on TDT. Interestingly, prior research has suggested that this effect will not occur if a one-hour break is allowed in between the changes. These results have suggested that after training is over, it may take some time for learning to become stabilized and resilient against interference. Here, we tested whether frequent gamers have faster stabilization of perceptual learning compared to non-gamers and examined th)
Objectives: The analysis of categorization of everyday sounds is a crucial aspect of the perception of our surrounding world. However, it constitutes a poorly explored domain in developmental studies. The aim of our study was to understand the nature and the logic of the construction of auditory cognitive categories for natural sounds during development. We have developed an original approach based on a free sorting task (FST). Indeed, categorization is fundamental for structuring the world and cognitive skills related to, without having any need of the use of language. Our project explored the ability of children to structure their acoustic world, and to investigate how such structuration matures during normal development. We hypothesized that age affects the listening strategy and the category decision, as well as the number and the content of individual categories. Design: Eighty-two French children (6–9 years), 20 teenagers (12–13 years), and 24 young adults participated in the )
Sound symbolism, or the nonarbitrary link between linguistic sound and meaning, has often been discussed in connection with language evolution, where the oral imitation of external events links phonetic forms with their referents (e.g., Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001). In this research, we explore whether sound symbolism may also facilitate synchronic language learning in human infants. Sound symbolism may be a useful cue particularly at the earliest developmental stages of word learning, because it potentially provides a way of bootstrapping word meaning from perceptual information. Using an associative word learning paradigm, we demonstrated that 14-month-old infants could detect Köhler-type (1947) shape-sound symbolism, and could use this sensitivity in their effort to establish a word-referent association. [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 w)
The contrast between regular and irregular inflectional morphology has been useful in investigating the functional and neural architecture of language. However, most studies have examined the regular/irregular distinction in non-agglutinative Indo-European languages (primarily English) with relatively simple morphology. Additionally, the majority of research has focused on verbal rather than nominal inflectional morphology. The present study attempts to address these gaps by introducing both plural and past tense production tasks in Hungarian, an agglutinative non-Indo-European language with complex morphology. Here we report results on these tasks from healthy Hungarian native-speaking adults, in whom we examine regular and irregular nominal and verbal inflection in a within-subjects design. Regular and irregular nouns and verbs were stem on frequency, word length, and phonological structure, and both accuracy and response times were acquired. The results revealed that the regular/ir)
Genetic diversity of present American populations results from very complex demographic events involving different types and degrees of admixture. Through the analysis of lineage markers such as mtDNA and Y chromosome it is possible to recover the original Native American haplotypes, which remained identical since the admixture events due to the absence of recombination. However, the decrease in the effective population sizes and the consequent genetic drift effects suffered by these populations during the European colonization resulted in the loss or under-representation of a substantial fraction of the Native American lineages. In this study, we aim to clarify how the diversity and distribution of uniparental lineages vary with the different demographic characteristics (size, degree of isolation) and the different levels of admixture of extant Native groups in Colombia. We present new data resulting from the analyses of mtDNA whole control region, Y chromosome SNP haplogroups and ST)
Aims: To assess the association of social determinants on the performance of health systems around the world. Methods: A transnational ecological study was conducted with an observation level focused on the country. In order to research on the strength of the association between the annual maternal and child mortality in 154 countries and social determinants: corruption, democratization, income inequality and cultural fragmentation, we used a mixed linear regression model for repeated measures with random intercepts and a conglomerate-based geographical analysis, between 2000 and 2010. Results: Health determinants with a significant association on child mortality(<1year): higher access to water (βa Quartile 4(Q4) vs Quartile 1(Q1) = -6,14; 95%CI: -11,63 to -0,73), sanitation systems, (Q4 vs Q1 = -25,58; 95%CI: -31,91 to -19,25), % measles vaccination coverage (Q4 vs Q1 = -7.35; 95%CI: -10,18 to -4,52), % of births attended by a healthcare professional (Q4 vs Q1 = -7,91; 95%CI: -11,)
Purpose: This study investigated the relationship between 2-year-old children’s exposure to TV and language delay. Methods: The subjects of this study were 1,778 toddlers (906 males and 872 females) who participated in the Panel Study on Korean Children conducted in 2010. The linguistic ability of the toddlers was measured with the K-ASQ (Korean-Ages and Stages Questionnaire). The relationship between the amount of young children’s exposure to TV and language delay was analyzed with Poisson regression. Results: The average daily TV watching time of 2-year-old Korean toddlers in this study was 1.21 hours. After all confounding variables were adjusted, toddlers with over 2 hours and less than 3 hours of TV watching time had 2.7 times more risk (RR = 2.74, 95% CI: 1.13–6.65) of language delay than those with less than 1 hour of TV watching time. Those with more than 3 hours of TV watching time had approximately 3 times (RR = 3.03, 95% CI: 1.12–8.21) more risk (p<0.05). In addition, th)
Background: Visceral leishmaniasis (VL) is a multifactorial disease, where the host genetics play a significant role in determining the disease outcome. The immunological role of anti-inflammatory cytokine, Interleukin 10 (IL10), has been well-documented in parasite infections and considered as a key regulatory cytokine for VL. Although VL patients in India display high level of IL10 in blood serum, no genetic study has been conducted to assess the VL susceptibility / resistance. Therefore, the aim of this study is to investigate the role of IL10 variations in Indian VL; and to estimate the distribution of disease associated allele in diverse Indian populations. Methodology: All the exons and exon-intron boundaries of IL10 were sequenced in 184 VL patients along with 172 ethnically matched controls from VL endemic region of India. Result and Discussion: Our analysis revealed four variations; rs1518111 (2195 A>G, intron), rs1554286 (2607 C>T, intron), rs3024496 (4976 T>C, 3’ UTR) an)
A continental-scale model of Holocene Australian hunter-gatherer demography and mobility is generated using radiocarbon data and geospatial techniques. Results show a delayed expansion and settlement of much of Australia following the termination of the late Pleistocene until after 9,000 years ago (or 9ka). The onset of the Holocene climatic optimum (9-6ka) coincides with rapid expansion, growth and establishment of regional populations across ~75% of Australia, including much of the arid zone. This diffusion from isolated Pleistocene refugia provides a mechanism for the synchronous spread of pan-continental archaeological and linguistic attributes at this time (e.g. Pama-Nyungan language, Panaramitee art style, backed artefacts). We argue longer patch residence times were possible at the end of the optimum, resulting in a shift to more sedentary lifestyles and establishment of low-level food production in some parts of the continent. The onset of El Niño - Southern Oscillation (ENSO;)
The methods and procedures of task solving in the field of semantics are inevitably influenced by the paradigm change. In particular, using text corpora, it is possible to re-examine problems that are traditional for lexical semantics, such as polysemy, the unity of meaning as well as opportunities for interpretation of units provided by a context or an intertext. Moreover, on analyzing the uses of words registered in corpora, one can realize that together with the system of language social norms are additional coding systems that also play a decisive role in meaning determination. Thus, the Russian Language National Corpus reveals that the notion of «high moral character» which is defined as «dignity» in dictionaries may imply quite different properties depending on the distribution of roles that are customary for the given culture. For males it can imply intellect, fidelity to duty, poise or stalk; for an unmarried woman it can mean comeliness, good reputation and the art to dress with elegance; when applied to a wife, the notion can imply conjugal fidelity, debonnaire and homemaking; a maiden should be smooth-tempered and of rosy disposition; a subordinate is expected to be obedient and able to execute orders. The author comes to the conclusion that it is social norms that may have modulative influence on the word meaning in every case of its actualization in speech.
The genetic characterization of Native American groups provides insights into their history and demographic events. We sequenced the mitochondrial D-loop region (control region) of 520 samples from eight Mexican indigenous groups. In addition to an analysis of the genetic diversity, structure and genetic relationship between 28 Native American populations, we applied Bayesian skyline methodology for a deeper insight into the history of Mesoamerica. AMOVA tests applying cultural, linguistic and geographic criteria were performed. MDS plots showed a central cluster of Oaxaca and Maya populations, whereas those from the North and West were located on the periphery. Demographic reconstruction indicates higher values of the effective number of breeding females (Nef) in Central Mesoamerica during the Preclassic period, whereas this pattern moves toward the Classic period for groups in the North and West. Conversely, Nef minimum values are distributed either in the Lithic period (i.e. founde)
The Slavic branch of the Balto-Slavic sub-family of Indo-European languages underwent rapid divergence as a result of the spatial expansion of its speakers from Central-East Europe, in early medieval times. This expansion–mainly to East Europe and the northern Balkans–resulted in the incorporation of genetic components from numerous autochthonous populations into the Slavic gene pools. Here, we characterize genetic variation in all extant ethnic groups speaking Balto-Slavic languages by analyzing mitochondrial DNA (n = 6,876), Y-chromosomes (n = 6,079) and genome-wide SNP profiles (n = 296), within the context of other European populations. We also reassess the phylogeny of Slavic languages within the Balto-Slavic branch of Indo-European. We find that genetic distances among Balto-Slavic populations, based on autosomal and Y-chromosomal loci, show a high correlation (0.9) both with each other and with geography, but a slightly lower correlation (0.7) with mitochondrial DNA and linguis)
Common walnut (Juglans regia L) is an economically important species cultivated worldwide for its wood and nuts. It is generally accepted that J. regia survived and grew spontaneously in almost completely isolated stands in its Asian native range after the Last Glacial Maximum. Despite its natural geographic isolation, J. regia evolved over many centuries under the influence of human management and exploitation. We evaluated the hypothesis that the current distribution of natural genetic resources of common walnut in Asia is, at least in part, the product of ancient anthropogenic dispersal, human cultural interactions, and afforestation. Genetic analysis combined with ethno-linguistic and historical data indicated that ancient trade routes such as the Persian Royal Road and Silk Road enabled long-distance dispersal of J. regia from Iran and Trans-Caucasus to Central Asia, and from Western to Eastern China. Ancient commerce also disrupted the local spatial genetic structure of autochth)
Units of the Russian word family with the root -gordoriginate in the Proto-Slavic etymological word family * gbrdb, which has reflexes gord/ gardin East Slavic languages, grd-, grd-, hrdin South Slavic and hrd-, hord-, hard-, gardin West Slavic. These units express the concept pride almost in all Slavic languages (with the exception of Slovenian). In Russian, Ukrainian, Czech, Sorbian, Bulgarian and Macedonian units of etymological word family * gbrdb are the main expression means of the concept pride. In the Slovak and Belarusian languages there are also units with other roots (Belarusian gonar-, Slovakianpych-) in the nucleus of the lexical semantic field pride. In the western group of South Slavic languages (Serbian, Slovenian) and Polish the basic units expressing the concept pride are lexemes of a word family with root ponos-. The semantic field of Proto-Slavic etymological word family * gbrdb includes four semantic centers: 1) pride and related concepts (obstinacy, insolence, scorn, impudence, abuse); 2) social status, which includes words with meanings 'grandeur', 'majestic', 'nobility', 'loftiness', 'hero', 'glory', 'fame', 'importance', the Russian dialect ritual wedding lexis and Old-Russian units with meanings 'austerity', which contain negative connotations. The units of the following two semantic centers are registered in all Slavic language groups: 3) common and aesthetic evaluation: a) common negative and negative aesthetic evaluation: units expressing common and aesthetic negative evaluation with meanings 'ugly', 'hideous', 'bad' are registered in South Slavic, Old Slovak, Old Russian and Upper Sorbian languages; b) positive aesthetic evaluation; such units are recorded in West Slavic and East Slavic languages; 4) exceeding norms in size and strength; the units of the etymological word family * gbrdb expressing meanings 'big', 'heavy' exist in Serbian and Upper Sorbian languages and Russian dialects. So, first and second semantic centers are common for all Slavic languages, while third and fourth are local. The units of the third center are registered in South and West Slavic languages. The fourth center is characteristic for South Slavic languages mostly. A.A. Kretov and L. Kralik suggested two well-founded etymology versions of Russian gord-. Both explain its semantics 'pride/proud/to be proud' as an extension of the meaning 'having high social status'. The main divergence of the two versions applies to the primary meaning of Proto-Slavic *gbrdb. A.A.Kretov supposes that Proto-Slavic *gbrdb primary meaning is 'dimensional height', while L. Kralik considers Proto Slavic *gbrdb as derived from Indo-European *gwher 'hot' and believes that its primary meaning is 'furious'. Detailed Slavic lexis analysis and the structure of the etymological word family semantic field corroborates Kretov's version and shows that the meaning 'pride/proud/to be proud' of Proto-Slavic *gbrdb is related genetically to meanings 'high social level' and 'dimensional height'.
There would be little adaptive value in a complex communication system like human language if there were no ways to detect and correct problems. A systematic comparison of conversation in a broad sample of the world’s languages reveals a universal system for the real-time resolution of frequent breakdowns in communication. In a sample of 12 languages of 8 language families of varied typological profiles we find a system of ‘other-initiated repair’, where the recipient of an unclear message can signal trouble and the sender can repair the original message. We find that this system is frequently used (on average about once per 1.4 minutes in any language), and that it has detailed common properties, contrary to assumptions of radical cultural variation. Unrelated languages share the same three functionally distinct types of repair initiator for signalling problems and use them in the same kinds of contexts. People prefer to choose the type that is the most specific possible, a principle)
The ability to integrate contextual information is important for the comprehension of emotional and social situations. While some studies have shown that emotional processes and social cognition are impaired in people with hypomanic personality trait, no results have been reported concerning the neurophysiological processes mediating the processing of emotional information during the integration of contextual social information in this population. We therefore chose to conduct an ERP study dealing with the integration of emotional information in a population with hypomanic personality trait. Healthy participants were evaluated using the Hypomanic Personality Scale (HPS), and ERPs were recorded during a linguistic task in which participants silently read sentence pairs describing short social situations. The first sentence implicitly conveyed the positive or negative emotional state of a character. The second sentence was emotionally congruent or incongruent with the first sentence. We)
All editions of the Slovene Normative Guide incorporate in some way the rules of standard pronunciation. Initially, it was only common to provide the pronunciation of some of the more problematic (morphological) categories. The last three editions of the orthographic dictionary, however, which through incorporation of large amount of lexical and other supplementary data come close to a general monolingual dictionary, can in their capacity to offer a comprehensive account of the pronunciation norm be rightly viewed as the authoritative guides on contemporary standard pronunciation. On the other hand, the currently still growing online database Slovar pravopisnih težav (Engl. Dictionary of Orthographic Difficulties) at www.fran. si again involuntarily distances itself from assuming the role of the authoritative body on standard pronunciation seeing that the level of its informativeness is qualitatively different due to its being first and foremost an advisory body on the level of written (and not necessarily also spoken) language. In the process of re-editing of the Slovene standardization manual sev eral problem areas in pronunciation standardization have become apparent. These are mainly due to the fact that no comprehensive theoretical analysis of the contemporary data is in fact available, which will probably have a general impact on the compilation of future (be it general or specialized) dictionaries as well. The central part of the article therefore reconsiders the concept of pronunciation standardization and offers a number of valuable suggestions for a reliable representation of the contemporary pronunciation norm which would be further useful for the compilers of a variety of language manuals, notably 1) a preliminary analysis of written and spoken communications which typically involve the use of standard pronunciation; 2) construction of a reliable and balanced specialized speech corpus; 3) compilation of problem areas and language users' dilemmas with a set of already proposed solutions; 4) survey research of standard pronunciation; and 5) the formalization of a consultative body of researchers, experts and practitioners.
Odours are highly complex, relying on hundreds of receptors, and people are known to disagree in their linguistic descriptions of smells. It is partly due to these facts that, it is very hard to map the domain of odour molecules or their structure to that of perceptual representations, a problem that has been referred to as the Structure-Odour-Relationship. We collected a number of diverse open domain databases of odour molecules having unorganised perceptual descriptors, and developed a graphical method to find the similarity between perceptual descriptors; which is intuitive and can be used to identify perceptual classes. We then separately projected the physico-chemical and perceptual features of these molecules in a non-linear dimension and clustered the similar molecules. We found a significant overlap between the spatial positioning of the clustered molecules in the physico-chemical and perceptual spaces. We also developed a statistical method of predicting the perceptual qualit)
Background: The repeated presentation of stimuli typically attenuates neural responses (repetition suppression) or, less commonly, increases them (repetition enhancement) when stimuli are highly complex, degraded or presented under noisy conditions. In adult functional neuroimaging research, these repetition effects are considered as neural correlates of habituation. The development and respective functional significance of these effects in infancy remain largely unknown. Objective: This study investigates repetition effects in newborns using functional near-infrared spectroscopy, and specifically the role of stimulus complexity in evoking a repetition enhancement vs. a repetition suppression response, following up on Gervain et al. (2008). In that study, abstract rule-learning was found at birth in cortical areas specific to speech processing, as evidenced by a left-lateralized repetition enhancement of the hemodynamic response to highly variable speech sequences conforming to a re)
Instrumental music and language are both syntactic systems, employing complex, hierarchically-structured sequences built using implicit structural norms. This organization allows listeners to understand the role of individual words or tones in the context of an unfolding sentence or melody. Previous studies suggest that the brain mechanisms of syntactic processing may be partly shared between music and language. However, functional neuroimaging evidence for anatomical overlap of brain activity involved in linguistic and musical syntactic processing has been lacking. In the present study we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in conjunction with an interference paradigm based on sung sentences. We show that the processing demands of musical syntax (harmony) and language syntax interact in Broca’s area in the left inferior frontal gyrus (without leading to music and language main effects). A language main effect in Broca’s area only emerged in the complex music harmony con)
Narrative length and speech rate of traumatic recollections have been previously associated with different emotions and adjustment trajectories after trauma. However, the evidence is limited and the results are mixed. The present study aimed to evaluate length (i.e., word count) and speech rate (i.e., words per minute) in narratives of events with different valence (i.e., neutral, positive, and negative/traumatic) by 50 battered women (trauma group) and 50 non-traumatized women (controls). The results showed that traumatic narratives by the trauma group were longer than those by the control group. Moreover, they were inversely related to time since the event and anxiety during disclosure, whereas the speech rate was also inversely associated with anxiety, as well as with peritraumatic dissociation and avoidance. The shorter narratives for positive events and a decelerated speech pattern for traumatic experiences predicted psychological symptoms. Additionally, the individual’s emotiona)
In this work we apply techniques and modus operandi typical of Statistical Mechanics to a large dataset about key social quantifiers and compare the resulting behaviors of five European nations, namely France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Switzerland. The social quantifiers considered are i. the evolution of the number of autochthonous marriages (i.e., between two natives) within a given territorial district and ii. the evolution of the number of mixed marriages (i.e., between a native and an immigrant) within a given territorial district. Our investigations are twofold. From a theoretical perspective, we develop novel techniques, complementary to classical methods (e.g., historical series and logistic regression), in order to detect possible collective features underlying the empirical behaviors; from an experimental perspective, we evidence a clear outline for the evolution of the social quantifiers considered. The comparison between experimental results and theoretical predictions is )
Using a variant of the visual world eye tracking paradigm, we examined if language non- selective activation of translation equivalents leads to attention capture and distraction in a visual task in bilinguals. High and low proficient Hindi-English speaking bilinguals were instructed to programme a saccade towards a line drawing which changed colour among other distractor objects. A spoken word, irrelevant to the main task, was presented before the colour change. On critical trials, one of the line drawings was a phonologically related word of the translation equivalent of the spoken word. Results showed that saccade latency was significantly higher towards the target in the presence of this cross-linguistic translation competitor compared to when the display contained completely unrelated objects. Participants were also slower when the display contained the referent of the spoken word among the distractors. However, the bilingual groups did not differ with regard to the interference )
In cognitive science there is a seeming paradox: On the one hand, studies of human judgment and decision making have repeatedly shown that people systematically violate optimal behavior when integrating information from multiple sources. On the other hand, optimal models, often Bayesian, have been successful at accounting for information integration in fields such as categorization, memory, and perception. This apparent conflict could be due, in part, to different materials and designs that lead to differences in the nature of processing. Stimuli that require controlled integration of information, such as the quantitative or linguistic information (commonly found in judgment studies), may lead to suboptimal performance. In contrast, perceptual stimuli may lend themselves to automatic processing, resulting in integration that is closer to optimal. We tested this hypothesis with an experiment in which participants categorized faces based on resemblance to a family patriarch. The amount )
Background: Confusion between look-alike and sound-alike (LASA) medication names (such as mercaptamine and mercaptopurine) accounts for up to one in four medication errors, threatening patient safety. Error reduction strategies include computerized physician order entry interventions, and ‘Tall Man’ lettering. The purpose of this study is to explore the medication name designation process, to elucidate properties that may prime the risk of confusion. Methods and Findings: We analysed the formal and semantic properties of 7,987 International Non-proprietary Names (INNs), in relation to naming guidelines of the World Health Organization (WHO) INN programme, and have identified potential for errors. We explored: their linguistic properties, the underlying taxonomy of stems to indicate pharmacological interrelationships, and similarities between INNs. We used Microsoft Excel for analysis, including calculation of Levenshtein edit distance (LED). Compliance with WHO naming guidelines was)
Electronic health records and scientific articles possess differing linguistic characteristics that may impact the performance of natural language processing tools developed for one or the other. In this paper, we investigate the performance of four extant concept recognition tools: the clinical Text Analysis and Knowledge Extraction System (cTAKES), the National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO) Annotator, the Biomedical Concept Annotation System (BeCAS) and MetaMap. Each of the four concept recognition systems is applied to four different corpora: the i2b2 corpus of clinical documents, a PubMed corpus of Medline abstracts, a clinical trails corpus and the ShARe/CLEF corpus. In addition, we assess the individual system performances with respect to one gold standard annotation set, available for the ShARe/CLEF corpus. Furthermore, we built a silver standard annotation set from the individual systems’ output and assess the quality as well as the contribution of individual systems t)
Globalization of business and competitiveness in manufacturing has forced companies to improve their manufacturing facilities to respond to market requirements. Machine tool evaluation involves an essential decision using imprecise and vague information, and plays a major role to improve the productivity and flexibility in manufacturing. The aim of this study is to present an integrated approach for decision-making in machine tool selection. This paper is focused on the integration of a consistent fuzzy AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) and a fuzzy COmplex PRoportional ASsessment (COPRAS) for multi-attribute decision-making in selecting the most suitable machine tool. In this method, the fuzzy linguistic reference relation is integrated into AHP to handle the imprecise and vague information, and to simplify the data collection for the pair-wise comparison matrix of the AHP which determines the weights of attributes. The output of the fuzzy AHP is imported into the fuzzy COPRAS method f)
Does it matter if you speak with a regional accent? Speaking immediately reveals something of one’s own social and cultural identity, be it consciously or unconsciously. Perceiving accents involves not only reconstructing such imprints but also augmenting them with particular attitudes and stereotypes. Even though we know much about attitudes and stereotypes that are transmitted by, e.g. skin color, names or physical attractiveness, we do not yet have satisfactory answers how accent perception affects human behavior. How do people act in economically relevant contexts when they are confronted with regional accents? This paper reports a laboratory experiment where we address this question. Participants in our experiment conduct cognitive tests where they can choose to either cooperate or compete with a randomly matched male opponent identified only via his rendering of a standardized text in either a regional accent or standard accent. We find a strong connection between the linguistic)
У статті розглянуто випадки порушень лексичних норм у мові сучасної української преси. Подано види порушень лексичних норм та способи їх усунення, проаналізовано причини їх виникнення та запропоновано шляхи подолання цієї проблеми. (Ukrainian language has had the status of the state language for more than 20 years but its equal functioning in all spheres of our people’s life is not ensured yet. In particular, this is true for the Ukrainian press. Percentage of Ukrainian-language newspapers is extremely small and those ones that are still published in Ukrainian can, unfortunately, serve only as material for collections of linguistic errors. As early as in 1928 there appeared a monograph by the Ukrainian linguist M. Hladkyi «Our Newspaper Language». The author wanted to help the Ukrainian newspapers employees get rid of imitation of Russianlanguage samples, develop their own style, and learn how to use the wealth of the popular Ukrainian language. M. Hladkyi puts an emphasize on the return to popular Ukrainian-language models at the lexical, morphological, syntactic, and phraseological levels, since the content of newspaper articles should be clear to any reader. Today there is also a need for such works. In spite of considerable number of Ukrainian language culture handbooks, articles, and even theses (O. Ponomariv «Problem of Ukrainian Language Standardization in Mass Media») that are devoted to the modern Ukrainian-press language standardization, the materials of our mass media are littered with a great number of arbitrary foreign words and awkward morphological and syntactic structures. Why is mass media broadcasting standardization so important? Because readers take it as a model. Very often when people are remarked to be saying something in a wrong way, the one who remarked may hear in response: «But it was written so in the newspaper (on the Internet)». «They said so in the news on the radio (on TV)». Let us notice that first of all these are lexical errors that become evident in any newspaper texts. The authors of articles should follow the correct word usage because an infelicitous word can distort, obscure the content of the communicated information, and prevent the press from carrying out its main functions: to shape public opinion and communicate information. The suggested article deals with violations of lexical norms in modern Ukrainian-language press. The types of violation of lexical norms and ways for their elimination are provided, their causes are analyzed, and the ways to overcome this problem are developed.)
Abstract The predicative word bylo in contemporary Russian. The norm of expression and the boundaries of the norm The norm constitutes a real indication of the language system and of the place and function of a unit in the structure of the language, which manifests itself in each unit in its immanent essence as fundamental feature of the sign. To a typological series of signs the question where and how the differences between a norm and its absence manifest themselves remains open. The boundaries of the norm are defined as the scope limit of a language unit and a sign. Attention has been paid at the aspects of the norm. Predicates with the complicating word bylo demand special consideration as an important object in respect of the expansion of thought and development of coherent speech. Lexical, morphological and syntactic features specific of predicative expressions are analyzed in their different connections. The linguistic changes of bylo and their systemic-structural foundations are accounted for. The norm of the language system, innovations and the boundaries of norm are defined. Key words System of language, language use, language norm, speech structure, word 'bylo'. Резюме Норма есть действительный показатель системы языка и место и роль единицы в языковой организации, воплощающейся каждой единицей в ее имманентной сущности и данности как фундаментальных качеств знака. Для типологического ряда знаков актуален вопрос о том, где и в чем именно отличие нормы языкового явления от неормы. Границы нормы определяются как сфера действия языковой единицы и пределы знака. Отмечаются аспекты нормы. В языковой структуре предикаты с осложняющим словом «было» и парадигматически соотнесенные средства выражения выдвигаются как объект специального рассмотрения, важный в плане pазвертывания мысли и развития связной речи. Анализируется лексическая, морфологическая и синтаксическая специфика предикативного выражения в их взаимосвязи. Фиксируются речевые изменения и их системно-структурные основания. Определяется норма языковой системы, новообразования и границы нормы. Ключевые слова Языковая система, употребление языка, языковая норма, языковая структура, предикативное слово 'было'.