Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
16504 papers
This study examines whether non-tone language listeners can acquire lexical tone categories distributionally and whether attention in the training phase modulates the effect of distributional learning. Native Australian English listeners were trained on a Thai lexical tone minimal pair and their performance was assessed using a discrimination task before and after training. During Training, participants either heard a Unimodal distribution that would induce a single central category, which should hinder their discrimination of that minimal pair, or a Bimodal distribution that would induce two separate categories that should facilitate their discrimination. The participants either heard the distribution passively (Experiments 1A and 1B) or performed a cover task during training designed to encourage auditory attention to the entire distribution (Experiment 2). In passive listening (Experiments 1A and 1B), results indicated no effect of distributional learning: the Bimodal group did not)
We studied the dynamics of lexical decisions by asking participants to categorize lexical and nonlexical stimuli and recording their mouse movements toward response buttons during the choice. In a previous report we revealed greater trajectory curvature and attraction to competitors for Low Frequency words and Pseudowords. This analysis did not clarify whether the trajectory curvature in the two conditions was due to a continuous dynamic competition between the response alternatives or if a discrete revision process (a "change of mind") took place during the choice from an initially selected response to the opposite one. To disentangle these two possibilities, here we analyse the velocity and acceleration profiles of mouse movements during the choice. Pseudowords' peak movement velocity occurred with 100ms delay with respect to words and Letters Strings. Acceleration profile for High and Low Frequency words and Letters Strings exhibited a butterfly plot with one acceleration peak at 4)
In different tasks involving action perception, performance has been found to be facilitated when the presented stimuli were produced by the participants themselves rather than by another participant. These results suggest that the same mental representations are accessed during both production and perception. However, with regard to spoken word perception, evidence also suggests that listeners’ representations for speech reflect the input from their surrounding linguistic community rather than their own idiosyncratic productions. Furthermore, speech perception is heavily influenced by indexical cues that may lead listeners to frame their interpretations of incoming speech signals with regard to speaker identity. In order to determine whether word recognition evinces similar self-advantages as found in action perception, it was necessary to eliminate indexical cues from the speech signal. We therefore asked participants to identify noise-vocoded versions of Dutch words that were based)
A handwritten signature is the final response to a complex cognitive and neuromuscular process which is the result of the learning process. Because of the many factors involved in signing, it is possible to study the signature from many points of view: graphologists, forensic experts, neurologists and computer vision experts have all examined them. Researchers study written signatures for psychiatric, penal, health and automatic verification purposes. As a potentially useful, multi-purpose study, this paper is focused on the lexical morphology of handwritten signatures. This we understand to mean the identification, analysis, and description of the signature structures of a given signer. In this work we analyze different public datasets involving 1533 signers from different Western geographical areas. Some relevant characteristics of signature lexical morphology have been selected, examined in terms of their probability distribution functions and modeled through a General Extreme Valu)
Temporal information in a signal can be partitioned into temporal envelope (E) and fine structure (FS). Fine structure is important for lexical tone perception for normal-hearing (NH) listeners, and listeners with sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) have an impaired ability to use FS in lexical tone perception due to the reduced frequency resolution. The present study was aimed to assess which of the acoustic aspects (E or FS) played a more important role in lexical tone perception in subjects with auditory neuropathy spectrum disorder (ANSD) and to determine whether it was the deficit in temporal resolution or frequency resolution that might lead to more detrimental effects on FS processing in pitch perception. Fifty-eight native Mandarin Chinese-speaking subjects (27 with ANSD, 16 with SNHL, and 15 with NH) were assessed for (1) their ability to recognize lexical tones using acoustic E or FS cues with the “auditory chimera” technique, (2) temporal resolution as measured with temporal )
The editorial discusses articles in this issue of Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics. The papers included in this issue cover the main areas of the speech and language sciences: phonetics, phonology, lexis, syntax and semantics. The work reported here underlines the importance of considering head stabilization in ultrasound studies. Lili Yeh, Bill Wells, Joy Stackhouse and Marcin Szczerbinski investigated phonological awareness in children acquiring Mandarin, especially of constituent parts of the syllable. However, as well as looking at the development of awareness, the authors were able to use their data to compare the merits of different models of the syllable in Mandarin. Marianne Lind and colleagues Hanna Simonsen, Pernille Hansen, Elisabeth Holm, and Bjørn- Helge Mevik provide a lexical database for clinicians and clinical linguists working with Norwegian. Jodi Tommerdahl and Cynthia Kilpatrick describe a study of child directed speech. Their particular area of interest is test–retest reliability, and they looked at frequency of morphosyntactic productions in 17 mothers talking to their children. Yalda Kazemi, Thomas Klee and Helen Stringer examined language sample measures for Persian-speaking children and their diagnostic accuracy in distinguishing language impaired from normally developing speakers. The final paper in this issue is by Seung-yun Yan and Diane Sidtis and explores hemispheric specialization for common and proper nouns. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
A lexicostatistical classification is proposed for 20 languages and dialects of the Lezgian group of the North Caucasian family, based on meticulously compiled 110-item wordlists, published as part of the Global Lexicostatistical Database project. The lexical data have been subsequently analyzed with the aid of the principal phylogenetic methods, both distance-based and character-based: Starling neighbor joining (StarlingNJ), Neighbor joining (NJ), Unweighted pair group method with arithmetic mean (UPGMA), Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), Unweighted maximum parsimony (UMP). Cognation indexes within the input matrix were marked by two different algorithms: traditional etymological approach and phonetic similarity, i.e., the automatic method of consonant classes (Levenshtein distances). Due to certain reasons (first of all, high lexicographic quality of the wordlists and a consensus about the Lezgian phylogeny among Caucasologists), the Lezgian database is a perfect testing are)
Spatial terms such as “above”, “in front of”, and “on the left of” are all essential for describing the location of one object relative to another object in everyday communication. Apprehending such spatial relations involves relating linguistic to object representations by means of attention. This requires at least one attentional shift, and models such as the Attentional Vector Sum (AVS) predict the direction of that attention shift, from the sausage to the box for spatial utterances such as “The box is above the sausage”. To the extent that this prediction generalizes to overt gaze shifts, a listener’s visual attention should shift from the sausage to the box. However, listeners tend to rapidly look at referents in their order of mention and even anticipate them based on linguistic cues, a behavior that predicts a converse attentional shift from the box to the sausage. Four eye-tracking experiments assessed the role of overt attention in spatial language comprehension by examining )
In taking an integrated ethnopedological approach, this study aims to investigate the meaning of the distribution of the toponyms used in traditional and recent cartography of Sardinia (southern Italy). It is particularly, but not only, focused on those related to soil resources. Sardinia is particularly interesting in this respect, as its unique history, geography, and linguistic position makes it one of the Italian and Mediterranean regions with the greatest number of toponyms. This research investigated the toponyms belonging to an important sub-region of Sardinia, called Ogliastra (central-eastern Sardinia). The research was conducted through the following integrated approach: i) toponymy research and collection from different sources; ii) database creation and translation of toponyms from the Sardinian language (SL); iii) categorization of toponyms; and iv) graphical, statistical, and cartographic data processing. Distribution and diversity of toponyms were assessed using the com)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
Indirect forms of speech, such as sarcasm, jocularity (joking), and ‘white lies’ told to spare another’s feelings, occur frequently in daily life and are a problem for many clinical populations. During social interactions, information about the literal or nonliteral meaning of a speaker unfolds simultaneously in several communication channels (e.g., linguistic, facial, vocal, and body cues); however, to date many studies have employed uni-modal stimuli, for example focusing only on the visual modality, limiting the generalizability of these results to everyday communication. Much of this research also neglects key factors for interpreting speaker intentions, such as verbal context and the relationship of social partners. Relational Inference in Social Communication (RISC) is a newly developed (English-language) database composed of short video vignettes depicting sincere, jocular, sarcastic, and white lie social exchanges between two people. Stimuli carefully manipulated the social re)
Language universals have long been attributed to an innate Universal Grammar. An alternative explanation states that linguistic universals emerged independently in every language in response to shared cognitive or perceptual biases. A computational model has recently shown how this could be the case, focusing on the paradigmatic example of the universal properties of colour naming patterns, and producing results in quantitative agreement with the experimental data. Here we investigate the role of an individual perceptual bias in the framework of the model. We study how, and to what extent, the structure of the bias influences the corresponding linguistic universal patterns. We show that the cultural history of a group of speakers introduces population-specific constraints that act against the pressure for uniformity arising from the individual bias, and we clarify the interplay between these two forces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR], Copyright of PLoS ONE is the property of Public Library of)
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 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 )
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)
ABSTRACT. The present article has as its purpose to present way in which vocabulary of Romanian language from last two decades has known very important modifications, as result of changes present in political, economic, social, cultural plan as well as at level of mentalities. These modifications should be focus of attention for those concerned with communication issues, but especially for those who work or are in process of training to work in specialized translations departments or in mass-media.Keywords: connection between language and society; predominance of technical-scientific language; metaphorization of specialized terms; demarcation literary-non-literary; Romanian language of nowadays: mixture of Anglo-Romanian jargon, pretentious expressions, slang and familiar termsWe all agree that there is very tight connection between language and society, periods of major changes in life of society (as period our society has been going through since 1990) leading to important modifications of verbal means that we use to communicate. At level of Romanian vocabulary, some words and some meanings associated to words fall into disuse or acquire new connotations, whereas other words or meanings of words emerge - many of which are not yet to be found as dictionary entries. Moreover, stylistic modifications regarding relation between language variants are also obvious. Under these circumstances, in order to consolidate and disseminate cultivated variant of Romanian language, in 2005, Romanian Academy, more precisely Iorgu Iordan - Al. Rosetti Institute of Linguistics succeeded in publishing two fundamental works: Dicfionarul ortografie, ortoepic §i morfologic al limbii române (The Orthographic, Orthoepie and Morphological Dictionary of Romanian, second edition, also called DOOM2) and Gramatica limbii române (Romanian Grammar). On occasion of second edition of DOOM, president of Romanian Academy at that time, Eugen Simion, defined it as follows: a necessary work, that large public has been waiting for, work of national interest, which will from now on be used as unique source in correctly applying academic norms in domain of Romanian orthography. Our DOOM appears at time it is highly needed. Needless to say that this is work that translators cannot do without.Hosting television show at România de Mâine (Romania Tomorrow) television, linguistic culture show - Speak, write Romanian - I asked academician Eugen Simion to briefly characterize way in which Romanian language is used. His answer was that the Romanian language has become ugly in sense that way most of us speak is characterized by relaxing exigencies, allowing unliterary linguistic elements such as: regionalisms, popular expressions and even slang expressions to penetrate neat language. The explanation is simple: Romanian society has been confronting with an acute crisis of values in these last two decades, which has led to horizontal positioning, to accepting both value and non-value, to socially imposing model of an individual who, as concerns norms of Romanian language, adopts principle of character mam-mare (big mama) from famous Romanian sketch Mr. Goe, by Caragiale: may speak as you know, I speak as I speak. And when half-leamedness shakes hands with preciosity and snobbery, one may commit mistakes that are harder and harder to eliminate (Theodor Hristea). According to specialists' estimations, most sensible 'seismograph' that register changes that appear in political, economic, social, cultural plan as well as at level of mentalities is publicistic language, always in permanent search for expressive innovation and lexical pictoresqueness.Although language, seen from historical perspective, appears as an element of stability in people's life, it is nevertheless subject to variation and change. …
We tested the hypothesis that lexical-semantic access of inflected words is governed by the word stem. Object drawings overlaid with a dot/arrow marking position/movement were matched with corresponding linguistic expressions like “from the house”. To test whether the stem dominates lexical-semantic access irrespective of its position, we used Swedish prepositional phrases (locative information via preposition immediately preceding the stem) or Finnish case-inflected words (locative information via suffix immediately following the stem). Both in monolingual Swedish and in bilingual Finnish-Swedish speakers, correct stems with incorrect prepositions/case-endings were hardest to reject. This finding supports the view that the stem is indeed the dominant unit in meaning access of inflected words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR], Copyright of PLoS ONE is the property of Public Library of Science and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copy)
Sentence comprehension involves timely computing different types of relations between its verbs and noun arguments, such as morphosyntactic, semantic, and thematic relations. Here, we used EEG technique to investigate the potential differences in thematic role computing and lexical-semantic relatedness processing during on-line sentence comprehension, and the interaction between these two types of processes. Mandarin Chinese sentences were used as materials. The basic structure of those sentences is “Noun+Verb+‘le’+a two-character word”, with the Noun being the initial argument. The verb disambiguates the initial argument as an agent or a patient. Meanwhile, the initial argument and the verb are highly or lowly semantically related. The ERPs at the verbs revealed that: relative to the agent condition, the patient condition evoked a larger N400 only when the argument and verb were lowly semantically related; however, relative to the high-relatedness condition, the low-relatedness condi)
There is evidence of a preference for visual symmetry. This is true from mate selection in the animal world to the aesthetic appreciation of works of art. It has been proposed that this preference is due to processing fluency, which engenders positive affect. But is visual symmetry pleasant? Evidence is mixed as explicit preferences show that this is the case. In contrast, implicit measures show that visual symmetry does not spontaneously engender positive affect but it depends on participants intentionally assessing visual regularities. In four experiments using variants of the affective priming paradigm, we investigated when visual symmetry engenders positive affect. Findings showed that, when no Stroop-like effects or post-lexical mechanisms enter into play, visual symmetry spontaneously elicits positive affect and results in affective congruence effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR], Copyright of PLoS ONE is the property of Public Library of Science and its content may not be copied or )
Recent event-related potential research has reported a N200 response or a negative deflection peaking around 200 ms following the visual presentation of two-character Chinese words. This N200 shows amplitude enhancement upon immediate repetition and there has been preliminary evidence that it reflects orthographic processing but not semantic processing. The present study tested whether this N200 is indeed unrelated to semantic processing with more sensitive measures, including the use of two tasks engaging semantic processing either implicitly or explicitly and the adoption of a within-trial priming paradigm. In Exp. 1, participants viewed repeated, semantically related and unrelated prime-target word pairs as they performed a lexical decision task judging whether or not each target was a real word. In Exp. 2, participants viewed high-related, low-related and unrelated word pairs as they performed a semantic task judging whether each word pair was related in meaning. In both tasks, se)
This book offers an exciting new perspective on the origins of language. Language is conceptualized as a collective invention, on the model of writing or the wheel, and the book places social and cultural dynamics at the centre of its evolution: language emerged and further developed in human communities already suffused with meaning and communication, mimesis, ritual, song and dance, coparenting, new divisions of labour, and revolutionary changes in social relations. The book thus challenges assumptions about the causal relations between genes, capacities, social communication, and innovation: the biological capacities are taken to evolve incrementally on the basis of cognitive plasticity, in a process that recruits previous adaptations and fine-tunes them to serve novel communicative ends. Topics include the ability brought about by language to tell lies, which must have confronted our ancestors with new problems of public trust; the dynamics of social-cognitive co-evolution; the role of gesture and mimesis in linguistic communication; studies of how monkeys and apes express their feelings or thoughts; play, laughter, dance, song, ritual, and other social displays among extant hunter-gatherers; the social nature of language acquisition and innovation; normativity and the emergence of linguistic norms; the interaction of language and emotions; and novel perspectives on the timeframe for language evolution. The contributors are leading international scholars from linguistics, anthropology, paleontology, primatology, psychology, evolutionary biology, artificial intelligence, archaeology, and cognitive science. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
This paper examines the sociolinguistic situation of a multilingual secondary school in the Barcelona metropolitan area and examines the language practices of both students and educators. Following a critical sociolinguistic ethnography perspective, it understands practices as constructing the socio-institutional order of the school, and language as constitutive of social processes. The analysis of the data shows that the students, the majority of which are of migrant background, systematically fail to employ Catalan, the language of schooling, and that the teachers refuse to enforce official linguistic norms. Rather than considering it exclusively a language issue, we claim that language is an index of a process of constructing the school as 'different' and the school body as non-academic. In the analysis of discourses and practices, social class emerges as one of the grounding motivations for such 'difference', which leads to low academic demands, a life skills educational perspective, and lack of competence in Catalan, with serious consequences for students’ social access. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
Given that explicitly realist perspectives are currently quite unfashionable in applied linguistics, we very much welcome your thorough and careful discussion of the various forms they might take. We find the various categories you identify quite persuasive, and we find much to agree with in your characterisation of several of the positions you outline, particularly in the earlier part of the paper. However, we do take issue with aspects of your characterisation of both 'social' and 'linguistic systems' realism, and with some of the arguments you adduce particularly against the latter and in favour of your seventh way ('linguistic norm circles realism'). Our response, then, concentrates particularly on the challenges arising from these parts of your paper, and addresses: (1) the ways in which we may define language itself, for the purposes of this debate; (2) the distinction between social and linguistic norms; (3) the properties of language; (4) the role of empirical evidence; and (5) the methodological problems we find with the norm circle approach. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
This study examined the contribution of visual salience to bottom-up attention orienting to faces in cluttered natural scenes across development. We eye tracked participants 4 months to 24 years of age as they freely viewed 16 natural scenes, all of which had faces in them. In half, the face was also the winner-take-all salient area in the display as determined by the MATLAB SaliencyToolbox. In the other half, a random location was the winner-take-all salient area in the display and the face was visually non-salient. We found that proportion of attended faces, in the first second of scene viewing, improved after the first year. Visually salient faces attracted bottom-up attention orienting more than non-salient faces reliably and robustly only after infancy. Preliminary data indicate that this shift to use of visual salience to guide bottom-up attention orienting after infancy may be a function of stabilization of visual skills. Moreover, sociodemographic factors including number of s)
Purpose: Osteoporosis poses a great threat to the aging society. Hypochlorhydric or achlorhydric conditions are risk factors for osteoporosis. Atrophic gastritis also decreases gastric acid production; however, the role of atrophic gastritis as a related factor for osteoporosis is unclear. We investigated the relationship between atrophic gastritis and osteoporosis in postmenopausal women over 60 years of age. Subjects and Methods: A total of 401 postmenopausal women were included in this cross-sectional study, which was conducted during their medical check-ups. Bone mineral densitometry was measured using a dual energy X-ray absorptiometry. Atrophic gastritis was defined endoscopically if gastric mucosa in the antrum and the body were found to be atrophied and thinned and submucosal vessels could be well visualized. Results: The proportion of people with atrophic gastritis was higher in the osteoporotic group than in the group without osteoporosis. A linear relationship was observed )
In this paper we analyse the word frequency profiles of a set of works from the Shakespearean era to uncover patterns of relationship between them, highlighting the connections within authorial canons. We used a text corpus comprising 256 plays and poems from the 16th and 17th centuries, with 17 works of uncertain authorship. Our clustering approach is based on the Jensen-Shannon divergence and a graph partitioning algorithm, and our results show that authors' characteristic styles are very powerful factors in explaining the variation of word use, frequently transcending cross-cutting factors like the differences between tragedy and comedy, early and late works, and plays and poems. Our method also provides an empirical guide to the authorship of plays and poems where this is unknown or disputed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR], Copyright of PLoS ONE is the property of Public Library of Science and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the c)
We investigate the structure of spatial knowledge that spontaneously develops during free exploration of a novel environment. We present evidence that this structure is similar to a labeled graph: a network of topological connections between places, labeled with local metric information. In contrast to route knowledge, we find that the most frequent routes and detours to target locations had not been traveled during learning. Contrary to purely topological knowledge, participants typically traveled the shortest metric distance to a target, rather than topologically equivalent but longer paths. The results are consistent with the proposal that people learn a labeled graph of their environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR], Copyright of PLoS ONE is the property of Public Library of Science and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for in)
We investigated the robust correlation between American Sign Language (ASL) and English reading ability in 51 young deaf signers ages 7;3 to 19;0. Signers were divided into ‘skilled’ and ‘less-skilled’ signer groups based on their performance on three measures of ASL. We next assessed reading comprehension of four English sentence structures (actives, passives, pronouns, reflexive pronouns) using a sentence-to-picture-matching task. Of interest was the extent to which ASL proficiency provided a foundation for lexical and syntactic processes of English. Skilled signers outperformed less-skilled signers overall. Error analyses further indicated greater single-word recognition difficulties in less-skilled signers marked by a higher rate of errors reflecting an inability to identify the actors and actions described in the sentence. Our findings provide evidence that increased ASL ability supports English sentence comprehension both at the levels of individual words and syntax. This is con)
The present investigation examines the development of children's diagnostic reasoning abilities when such inferences involve belief revision about uncertain potential causes. Four- to 7-year-olds observed an event occur that was due to one of four potential causes. Some of those potential causes were revealed to be efficacious; others were revealed to be inefficacious, but there was always one potential cause presented with unknown efficacy. While all children could make appropriate predictive inferences about this situation, 4- and 5-year-olds were less capable of making correct diagnostic inferences about the cause of the event under these circumstances than older children. We discuss possible mechanisms for this development, as well as speculate on the relation between these findings and literature in children's scientific reasoning. [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 si)
Recent research with skilled adult readers has consistently revealed an advantage of consonants over vowels in visual-word recognition (i.e., the so-called “consonant bias”). Nevertheless, little is known about how early in development the consonant bias emerges. This work aims to address this issue by studying the relative contribution of consonants and vowels at the early stages of visual-word recognition in developing readers (2nd and 4th Grade children) and skilled adult readers (college students) using a masked priming lexical decision task. Target words starting either with a consonant or a vowel were preceded by a briefly presented masked prime (50 ms) that could be the same as the target (e.g., pirata-PIRATA [pirate-PIRATE]), a consonant-preserving prime (e.g., pureto-PIRATA), a vowel-preserving prime (e.g., gicala-PIRATA), or an unrelated prime (e.g., bocelo -PIRATA). Results revealed significant priming effects for the identity and consonant-preserving conditions in adult re)
Purpose: Acoustic and perceptual studies show a number of differences between the voices of radio performers and controls. Despite this, the vocal fold kinematics underlying these differences are largely unknown. Using high-speed videoendoscopy, this study sought to determine whether the vocal vibration features of radio performers differed from those of non-performing controls. Method: Using high-speed videoendoscopy, recordings of a mid-phonatory/i/ in 16 male radio performers (aged 25–52 years) and 16 age-matched controls (aged 25–52 years) were collected. Videos were extracted and analysed semi-automatically using High-Speed Video Program, obtaining measures of fundamental frequency (f0), open quotient and speed quotient. Post-hoc analyses of sound pressure level (SPL) were also performed (n = 19). Pearson's correlations were calculated between SPL and both speed and open quotients. Results: Male radio performers had a significantly higher speed quotient than their matched control)
In this article, we offer a critical view of Thibodeau and Boroditsky who report an effect of metaphorical framing on readers' preference for political measures after exposure to a short text on the increase of crime in a fictitious town: when crime was metaphorically presented as a beast, readers became more enforcement-oriented than when crime was metaphorically framed as a virus. We argue that the design of the study has left room for alternative explanations. We report four experiments comprising a follow-up study, remedying several shortcomings in the original design while collecting more encompassing sets of data. Our experiments include three additions to the original studies: (1) a non-metaphorical control condition, which is contrasted to the two metaphorical framing conditions used by Thibodeau and Boroditsky, (2) text versions that do not have the other, potentially supporting metaphors of the original stimulus texts, (3) a pre-exposure measure of political preference (Expe)
We present IceMorph, a semi-supervised morphosyntactic analyzer of Old Icelandic. In addition to machine-read corpora and dictionaries, it applies a small set of declension prototypes to map corpus words to dictionary entries. A web-based GUI allows expert users to modify and augment data through an online process. A machine learning module incorporates prototype data, edit-distance metrics, and expert feedback to continuously update part-of-speech and morphosyntactic classification. An advantage of the analyzer is its ability to achieve competitive classification accuracy with minimum training data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR], Copyright of PLoS ONE is the property of Public Library of Science and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the co)
Human languages are rule governed, but almost invariably these rules have exceptions in the form of irregularities. Since rules in language are efficient and productive, the persistence of irregularity is an anomaly. How does irregularity linger in the face of internal (endogenous) and external (exogenous) pressures to conform to a rule? Here we address this problem by taking a detailed look at simple past tense verbs in the Corpus of Historical American English. The data show that the language is open, with many new verbs entering. At the same time, existing verbs might tend to regularize or irregularize as a consequence of internal dynamics, but overall, the amount of irregularity sustained by the language stays roughly constant over time. Despite continuous vocabulary growth, and presumably, an attendant increase in expressive power, there is no corresponding growth in irregularity. We analyze the set of irregulars, showing they may adhere to a set of minority rules, allowing for i)
How do children learn to restrict their productivity and avoid ungrammatical utterances? The present study addresses this question by examining why some verbs are used with un- prefixation (e.g., unwrap) and others are not (e.g., *unsqueeze). Experiment 1 used a priming methodology to examine children's (3–4; 5–6) grammatical restrictions on verbal un- prefixation. To elicit production of un-prefixed verbs, test trials were preceded by a prime sentence, which described reversal actions with grammatical un- prefixed verbs (e.g., Marge folded her arms and then she unfolded them). Children then completed target sentences by describing cartoon reversal actions corresponding to (potentially) un- prefixed verbs. The younger age-group's production probability of verbs in un- form was negatively related to the frequency of the target verb in bare form (e.g., squeez/e/ed/es/ing), while the production probability of verbs in un- form for both age groups was negatively predicted by the frequency)
One of the most well studied ecological patterns is Rapoport's rule, which posits that the geographical extent of species ranges increases at higher latitudes. However, studies to date have been limited in their geographic scope and results have been equivocal. In turn, much debate exists over potential links between Rapoport's rule and latitudinal patterns in species richness. Humans collectively speak nearly 7000 different languages, which are spread unevenly across the globe, with loci in the tropics. Causes of this skewed distribution have received only limited study. We analyze the extent of Rapoport's rule in human languages at a global scale and within each region of the globe separately. We test the relationship between Rapoport's rule and the richness of languages spoken in different regions. We also explore the frequency distribution of language-range sizes. The language-range area distribution is strongly right-skewed, with 87% of languages having range areas less than 10,0)
Words are built from smaller meaning bearing parts, called morphemes. As one word can contain multiple morphemes, one morpheme can be present in different words. The number of distinct words a morpheme can be found in is its family size. Here we used Birth-Death-Innovation Models (BDIMs) to analyze the distribution of morpheme family sizes in English and German vocabulary over the last 200 years. Rather than just fitting to a probability distribution, these mechanistic models allow for the direct interpretation of identified parameters. Despite the complexity of language change, we indeed found that a specific variant of this pure stochastic model, the second order linear balanced BDIM, significantly fitted the observed distributions. In this model, birth and death rates are increased for smaller morpheme families. This finding indicates an influence of morpheme family sizes on vocabulary changes. This could be an effect of word formation, perception or both. On a more general level, )
In this paper, we conduct a study about differences between female and male discursive strategies when posting in the microblogging service Twitter, with a particular focus on the hashtag designation process during political debate. The fact that men and women use language in distinct ways, reverberating practices linked to their expected roles in the social groups, is a linguistic phenomenon known to happen in several cultures and that can now be studied on the Web and on online social networks in a large scale enabled by computing power. Here, for instance, after analyzing tweets with political content posted during Brazilian presidential campaign,we found out that male Twitter users, when expressing their attitude toward a given candidate, are more prone to use imperative verbal forms in hashtags, while female users tend to employ declarative forms. This difference can be interpreted as a sign of distinct approaches in relation to other network members: for example, if political ha)
A fundamental principle of brain organization is bilateral symmetry of structures and functions. For spatial sensory and motor information processing, this organization is generally plausible subserving orientation and coordination of a bilaterally symmetric body. However, breaking of the symmetry principle is often seen for functions that depend on convergent information processing and lateralized output control, e.g. left hemispheric dominance for the linguistic speech system. Conversely, a subtle splitting of functions into hemispheres may occur if peripheral information from symmetric sense organs is partly redundant, e.g. auditory pattern recognition, and therefore allows central conceptualizations of complex stimuli from different feature viewpoints, as demonstrated e.g. for hemispheric analysis of frequency modulations in auditory cortex (AC) of mammals including humans. Here we demonstrate that discrimination learning of rapidly but not of slowly amplitude modulated tones is n)
Objective: To investigate factors associated with engagement of U.S. Federal Health Agencies via Twitter. Our specific goals are to study factors related to a) numbers of retweets, b) time between the agency tweet and first retweet and c) time between the agency tweet and last retweet. Methods: We collect 164,104 tweets from 25 Federal Health Agencies and their 130 accounts. We use negative binomial hurdle regression models and Cox proportional hazards models to explore the influence of 26 factors on agency engagement. Account features include network centrality, tweet count, numbers of friends, followers, and favorites. Tweet features include age, the use of hashtags, user-mentions, URLs, sentiment measured using Sentistrength, and tweet content represented by fifteen semantic groups. Results: A third of the tweets (53,556) had zero retweets. Less than 1% (613) had more than 100 retweets (mean = 284). The hurdle analysis shows that hashtags, URLs and user-mentions are positively )
The grounded cognition framework proposes that sensorimotor brain areas, which are typically involved in perception and action, also play a role in linguistic processing. We assessed oscillatory modulation during visual presentation of single verbs and localized cortical motor regions by means of isometric contraction of hand and foot muscles. Analogously to oscillatory activation patterns accompanying voluntary movements, we expected a somatotopically distributed suppression of beta and alpha frequencies in the motor cortex during processing of body-related action verbs. Magnetoencephalographic data were collected during presentation of verbs that express actions performed using the hands (H) or feet (F). Verbs denoting no bodily movement (N) were used as a control. Between 150 and 500 msec after visual word onset, beta rhythms were suppressed in H and F in comparison with N in the left hemisphere. Similarly, alpha oscillations showed left-lateralized power suppression in the H-N con)
The present study was carried out in the Indo-European speaking tribal population groups of Southern Gujarat, India to investigate and reconstruct their paternal population structure and population histories. The role of language, ethnicity and geography in determining the observed pattern of Y haplogroup clustering in the study populations was also examined. A set of 48 bi-allelic markers on the non-recombining region of Y chromosome (NRY) were analysed in 284 males; representing nine Indo-European speaking tribal populations. The genetic structure of the populations revealed that none of these groups was overtly admixed or completely isolated. However, elevated haplogroup diversity and FST value point towards greater diversity and differentiation which suggests the possibility of early demographic expansion of the study groups. The phylogenetic analysis revealed 13 paternal lineages, of which six haplogroups: C5, H1a*, H2, J2, R1a1* and R2 accounted for a major portion of the Y chro)
Objective: This study aimed to develop a culturally acceptable and valid scale to assess depressive symptoms in older Indigenous Australians, to determine the prevalence of depressive disorders in the older Kimberley community, and to investigate the sociodemographic, lifestyle and clinical factors associated with depression in this population. Methods: Cross-sectional survey of adults aged 45 years or over from six remote Indigenous communities in the Kimberley and 30% of those living in Derby, Western Australia. The 11 linguistic and culturally sensitive items of the Kimberley Indigenous Cognitive Assessment of Depression (KICA-dep) scale were derived from the signs and symptoms required to establish the diagnosis of a depressive episode according to the DSM-IV-TR and ICD-10 criteria, and their frequency was rated on a 4-point scale ranging from ‘never’ to ‘all the time’ (range of scores: 0 to 33). The diagnosis of depressive disorder was established after a face-to-face assessment )