Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
18265 papers
A positive change in perceived self-efficacy expectation is considered an important goal of exposure-based treatments. In line with this, several studies have demonstrated a positive association between self-efficacy and therapy outcome. While those studies primarily focused on changes in self-efficacy expectation that are achieved through therapy, the present study sought to examine whether changes in self-efficacy prior to treatment have an influence on therapy outcome. To this end, 48 healthy subjects completed a differential fear conditioning task. After the fear acquisition phase, half of the subjects received a positive verbal feedback aimed at increasing self-efficacy (experimental group) whereas others received no feedback (control group). Our results not only show that self-efficacy beliefs can be enhanced through verbal feedback but also point to an enhanced extinction of conditioned fear in the experimental group relative to the control group, evident on the implicit (skin conductance responses) and explicit (valence rating) level. Our results may have clinical implications for exposure-based treatments in anxiety disorders.
BACKGROUND: Migraine is a disorder of periodic disabling headache. Facilitated cortical responsivity has been suggested as one predisposing factor. Although the underlying mechanisms of migraine attack onsets are not fully understood, facilitated cortical responsivity has been suggested as one predisposing factor. Here, we investigate if enhanced cortical responsivity is reflected in altered event-related potentials during processing of complex pictures. METHOD: Altogether, 16 migraine patients and 16 healthy volunteers participated in this study. Each patient had a diagnosed migraine and was headache- and medication-free for the study. Participants watched positive, negative and neutral pictures from the international affective picture system. An electroencephalogram was recorded during picture presentation. Afterwards, participants were asked to rate the pictures for valence and arousal. RESULTS: Migraine patients showed significantly more negative-going early event-related potential components from 100 ms to 180 ms to all picture categories over occipital regions as well as more positive-going late potentials over central regions. Patients and controls did not differ in valence and arousal ratings for the international-affective picture system. DISCUSSION: Patients with migraine seem to react cortically more intensely to all kinds of pictorial stimuli, regardless of emotional content. This facilitated processing may be related to the high cortical responsivity shown in various other event-related potential studies and might contribute to the recurring intense headache attacks.
Aquest article examina el paper del sistema educatiu en els processos d'implantació de la llengua catalana (especialment de la seva varietat normativa) i es focalitza en dues regions de parla catalana: la Catalunya i la Catalunya del Nord. S'estableixen els lligams teòrics entre les polítiques lingüístiques educatives i la implantació de varietats lingüístiques normatives, i es detallen tres esquemes sociolingüístics pertinents (adaptats de Cooper 1989, Schiffman 1996 i Baker 2011). Mitjançant aquests esquemes, es classificaran les dues situacions en qüestió per tal de comprendre-les millor. S'examinaran les dues regions per tanda: es farà una anàlisi a partir dels esquemes teòrics, tenint present dades experimentals existents pel que fa a la implantació de la normativa. L'estudi de la Catalunya del Nord és d'una importància especial, ja que el sistema educatiu d'aquesta regió no ha rebut gaire atenció per part dels investigadors. Veurem que les dues regions són molt diferents en gairebé tots els aspectes, incloent-hi el grau de la implantació i la presència de les classes de (o en) català. Tanmateix, abans de treure conclusions definitives, ens caldrà una investigació més extensa (sobretot de la situació a la Catalunya del Nord).<br/><br/>This article examines the role of the education system in processes of embedding of the Catalan language (particularly of its normative variety), and focuses on two Catalan-speaking regions: Catalonia and Northern Catalonia (in France). Theoretical links are established between language-in-education policy decisions and the embedding of linguistic norms, and three relevant sociolinguistic schema are outlined (based on Cooper 1989, Schiffman 1996 and Baker 2011). These are then used to classify and provide deeper insight into the situations under investigation. The two regions are addressed in turn: they are evaluated using the theoretical schema, and any data concerning the embedding of the norm is duly addressed and analysed. This is of particular relevance in the case of Northern Catalonia, whose education system has received relatively little academic attention. The two regions will be shown to differ on almost all fronts, from the degree of embedding to the presence of Catalan language (medium) education. However, much more research needs to be undertaken (particularly on Northern Catalonia) before any firm conclusions can be drawn.
Direct content analysis reveals important details about movies including those of gender representations and potential biases. We investigate the differences between male and female character depictions in movies, based on patterns of language used. Specifically, we use an automatically generated lexicon of linguistic norms characterizing gender ladenness. We use multivariate analysis to investigate gender depictions and correlate them with elements of movie production. The proposed metric differentiates between male and female utterances and exhibits some interesting interactions with movie genres and the screenplay writer gender.
Previous studies have shown that emotional facial expressions capture visual attention. However, it has been unclear whether attentional modulation is attributable to their emotional significance or to their visual features. We investigated this issue using a spatial cueing paradigm in which non-predictive cues were peripherally presented before the target was presented in either the same (valid trial) or the opposite (invalid trial) location. The target was an open dot and the cues were photographs of normal emotional facial expressions of anger and happiness, their anti-expressions and neutral expressions. Anti-expressions contained the amount of visual changes equivalent to normal emotional expressions compared with neutral expressions, but they were usually perceived as emotionally neutral. The participants were asked to localize the target as soon as possible. After the cueing task, they evaluated their subjective emotional experiences to the cue stimuli. Compared with anti-expressions, the normal emotional expressions decreased and increased the reaction times (RTs) in the valid and invalid trials, respectively. Shorter RTs in the valid trials and longer RTs in the invalid trials were related to higher subjective arousal ratings. These results suggest that emotional facial expressions accelerate attentional engagement and prolong attentional disengagement due to their emotional significance.
INTRODUCTION: Emotional behavioral disturbances are hallmarks of many dementias but their pathophysiology is poorly understood. Here we addressed this issue using the paradigm of emotionally salient sounds. METHODS: Pupil responses and affective valence ratings for nonverbal sounds of varying emotional salience were assessed in patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) (n = 14), semantic dementia (SD) (n = 10), progressive nonfluent aphasia (PNFA) (n = 12), and AD (n = 10) versus healthy age-matched individuals (n = 26). RESULTS: Referenced to healthy individuals, overall autonomic reactivity to sound was normal in Alzheimer's disease (AD) but reduced in other syndromes. Patients with bvFTD, SD, and AD showed altered coupling between pupillary and affective behavioral responses to emotionally salient sounds. DISCUSSION: Emotional sounds are a useful model system for analyzing how dementias affect the processing of salient environmental signals, with implications for defining pathophysiological mechanisms and novel biomarker development.
Both animal studies and studies using deep brain stimulation in humans have demonstrated the involvement of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) in motivational and emotional processes; however, participation of this nucleus in processing human emotion has not been investigated directly at the single-neuron level. We analyzed the relationship between the neuronal firing from intraoperative microrecordings from the STN during affective picture presentation in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) and the affective ratings of emotional valence and arousal performed subsequently. We observed that 17% of neurons responded to emotional valence and arousal of visual stimuli according to individual ratings. The activity of some neurons was related to emotional valence, whereas different neurons responded to arousal. In addition, 14% of neurons responded to visual stimuli. Our results suggest the existence of neurons involved in processing or transmission of visual and emotional information in the human STN, and provide evidence of separate processing of the affective dimensions of valence and arousal at the level of single neurons as well.
This release adds the <em>Peregrinatio Aetheriae</em> to the treebank, adds further material from the <em>Gallic War</em> and <em>Letters to Atticus</em> and includes numerous corrections across the treebank.
In conversation, speakers tend to echo the linguistic style of the person they are interacting with. This paper contributes to a body of work that addresses how this linguistic style coordination is affected by the social context in which the interaction occurs. In particular, we investigate the effect that an agent's social network centrality has on the coordination exhibited in replies to their utterances. We find that linguistic coordination is positively correlated with social network centrality and that this effect is greater than previous results showing a similar connection between statusbased power and linguistic coordination. We conjecture that the social value of coordination may reside in the wish to conform to the linguistic norms of a community.
This paper is interested in the assisted interrogation of lexical databases designed according to the LMF standard (Lexical Markup Framework) ISO-24613. The proposed solution is based on a requirement-based lexical web service generation approach that makes easier the task of engineers when developing NLP (Natural Language Processing) systems. Using this approach, the developer will not deal with the database content or its structure. Also, he will not use any language query. For each lexical requirement, we generate through a lexical web service for interrogating LMF databases. Also we generate with it its enhanced WSDL description file that we have enriched by semantic data describing data categories used in the requirement specification.
In a multi-lingual country like India where every language has its own phonological system, there is a need for language specific articulation test. Although in recent times there has been increasing awareness among parents for early intervention in children with articulation problems within the regional areas of the nation, the availability of articulation tests in the regional languages is very limited. The present study makes a preliminary attempt at developing an assessment tool to assess the articulatory skills of Tulu speaking children, who form a significant population in South India. Word list was developed based on familiarity rating and was administered on 50 children, aged 3-8 years. The target speech sounds were embedded in words which were presented in picture form to elicit responses from the participants. The responses were analysed qualitatively and in terms of production accuracy across age groups.
This release contains numerous corrections, in particular to the morphology. It also corrects a mistake in the previous release, which failed to alter the placement of PRO tokens in the <em>Peregrinatio Aetheriae</em> (see release 20150615).
In education literature, there is a call for the development of pedagogical activities about socio-scientific issues, both for their affordance with the epistemic values of a renewed vision of science teaching (e. g. Driver, Newton, Osborne, 2000, Sadler & Zeidler, 2005), and for concerns of citizenship education (e. g. Legardez & Simonneaux, 2006). To develop high quality reasoning on such topics, fundamental knowledge on key scientific concepts together with socio-ethical beliefs, values and interests structuring the controversy must be taken into account (Oulton, Dillon, Grace, 2004, Albe, 2009). Contrary to mainstream traditional educational routines, the students are not expected to give a right or wrong answer and are required to use and confront various information sources (daily experience, the media, school knowledge, moral principles, cultural common sense, etc). From a corpus of videotaped scientific cafe-type debates about drinking water management, collected in schools in Mexico, the US and France, I analyzed the typical argumentative resources used by the students in such setting (emotions, norms and knowledge). In this presentation, the focus is on the pieces of knowledge that are co-constructed all along the activity, led by 15-17 year-old student moderators for 12-14 year-old student attendees. The emergence and evolution of two different micro-units of knowledge content (1. the use of water for the production of other goods and 2. the distinction between the cost and the price) were followed during the distinct steps of the cafe (alternation of quiz on basic knowledge, group discussion, and group and class debates on socio-scientific issues). In order to have a global temporal picture of the genesis of these pieces of knowledge, and a better understanding of moderators’ role in the process, these micro-units of content were also tracked on the video of the moderators’ training, which took place prior to the cafe. With the help of video annotation tools (Transana and ELAN), each occurrence of each micro-unit of knowledge was precisely characterized on a multimodal perspective. The coding scheme includes key lexical and structural elements, main gesture features, and the use of material resources in the pedagogical environment. The analytical tools were developed on the basis of previous literature on gesture analysis (e. g. Colletta, Ramona, Kunene, Venouil, Kaufmann, Simon, 2009, Cosnier, 2004, Kendon, 2004, McNeill, 1992, 2000) and empirical observation of the data. It serves as a basis to compare the multimodal trajectory of each micro-unit of knowledge, in different communicative contexts (quiz elucidation or debate on socio-scientific issues, linguistic and cultural environment, moderating style, type of knowledge involved). This contrastive stance leads to a discussion on whether some features of the multimodal scenario of emergence of a piece of knowledge can be considered determinant to fosters its elaboration and later reinvestment at different social levels (individual, small group, whole classroom).
Official releases of the PROIEL treebank of ancient Indo-European languages
Il saggio si propone di analizzare la narrativa di Nelida Milani, scrittrice e linguista contemporanea istriana (Croazia), che nei suoi lavori alterna volutamente codici diversi: italiano standard, croato, dialetto istro- veneto, dando origine ad un vero e proprio miscuglio linguistico e mettendo in discussione la norma linguistica. Le frequenti commutazioni di codice, l'uso di registri e codici diversi nei suoi Racconti di guerra sono una prova importante e tangibile dell'identita plurilinguistica e pluriculturale della penisola Istriana. E proprio grazie alla lingua e allo sconvolgimeto della norma che la Milani riesce a trasmettere al meglio la tensione e la drammaticita dei sui racconti e a dipingere la realta del territorio e della storia che racconta. Oggetto della nostra analisi, di approccio pragmalinguistico, saranno proprio i momenti in cui la scrittrice alterna i diversi codici.
Abstract. The purpose of the experiment was to test the relationship between attributes of color, self-rated arousal, and autonomic reactions to color stimuli. Sixteen colored backgrounds of different hue, saturation, and brightness were each viewed by 64 subjects (females, M age = 22.48) while skin conductance responses (SCRs) were recorded. Subjective judgments relating to pleasantness (valence) and arousal were also measured. Results show that among color attributes only saturation had an effect on SCR magnitude, F(1, 63) = 6.31, p <.05, η G 2 =.01. There was also significant correlation, r(14) =.64, p <.01, between aggregated SCR magnitude and arousal ratings. It confirms that SCR could be used as a marker of phasic arousal even in response to the abstract, devoid of content stimuli. Saturation seems to be the main property connected with color’s ability to elicit orienting response. More saturated stimuli are better in capturing attention regardless of hue, thus suggesting that at the first stage of color perception, color intensity is more important than qualitative properties. Such results clarify some incoherent findings known from previous studies on psychophysiological responses to color stimuli.
Building Parallel Treebanks for Underresourced Languages: a Georgian-Ukrainian Treebank ProposalWe present outcomes of an undertaking on building a parallel Treebank for the Georgian and the Ukrainian languages, which is a “side product” of the GRUG multilingual Treebank project. The GRUG acronym stands for the German- Russian-Ukrainian-Georgian Treebank intended for contrastive studies and translation memory systems. The monolingual Ukrainian and Georgian parallel sentences were syntactically annotated manually using the Synpathy tool. Tagsets for both languages follow an adapted version of the German TIGER guidelines with necessary changes relevant for the Georgian and the Ukrainian grammar formal description. An output of the monolingual syntactic annotation is in the TIGER-XML format. Alignment of monolingual resources into a bilingual Georgian-Ukrainian Treebank was done by the Stockholm TreeAligner software.
Speakers respond more slowly when naming pictures presented with taboo (i.e., offensive/embarrassing) than with neutral distractor words in the picture-word interference paradigm. Over four experiments, we attempted to localize the processing stage at which this effect occurs during word production and determine whether it reflects the socially offensive/embarrassing nature of the stimuli. Experiment 1 demonstrated taboo interference at early stimulus onset asynchronies of -150 ms and 0 ms although not at 150 ms. In Experiment 2, taboo distractors sharing initial phonemes with target picture names eliminated the interference effect. Using additive factors logic, Experiment 3 demonstrated that taboo interference and phonological facilitation effects do not interact, indicating that the two effects originate at different processing levels within the speech production system. In Experiment 4, interference was observed for masked taboo distractors, including those sharing initial phonemes with the target picture names, indicating that the effect cannot be attributed to a processing level involving responses in an output buffer. In two of the four experiments, the magnitude of the interference effect correlated significantly with arousal ratings of the taboo words. However, no significant correlations were found for either offensiveness or valence ratings. These findings are consistent with a locus for the taboo interference effect prior to the processing stage responsible for word form encoding. We propose a pre-lexical account in which taboo distractors capture attention at the expense of target picture processing due to their high arousal levels.
Space-delimited words in Turkish and Hebrew text can be further segmented into meaningful units, but syntactic and semantic context is necessary to predict segmentation. At the same time, predicting correct syntactic structures relies on correct segmentation. We present a graph-based lattice dependency parser that operates on morphological lattices to represent different segmentations and morphological analyses for a given input sentence. The lattice parser predicts a dependency tree over a path in the lattice and thus solves the joint task of segmentation, morphological analysis, and syntactic parsing. We conduct experiments on the Turkish and the Hebrew treebank and show that the joint model outperforms three state-of-the-art pipeline systems on both data sets. Our work corroborates findings from constituency lattice parsing for Hebrew and presents the first results for full lattice parsing on Turkish.
Abstract The Article aims to describe that social criticism not only can be yelled through protest, but also through the lyrics of the song. Social criticism lyrics of the song, in general, addressed to the government, state officials, and Indonesia politicians. The issues discussed in this paper is the social behavior of state officials and politicians in the Orde Baru and Era Reformasi, as well as the vocabulary used by the composer to encode the events that occurred at that time. The data of this paper were collected through listening methods using downloading technique and recording. The data were analyzed with the theory of dynamic model of meaning (Kecskes, 2007), which states that a person’s knowledge of the world may be encoded in the lexical item as a mixture of general knowledge associated with the provision concept, the wordspecific semantic properties (lexicalization knowledge of the world), and culture-specific conceptual properties. It is something new because during the analysis of social criticism lyrics of the song are dominated by semiotic theory and discourse theory. This paper found four types of behavior of state officials encoded in the lyrics of social criticism, namely (a) the behavior of enriching themselves by corruption the country money, (b) behavior of justifying a variety of ways to get the desired positions, (c) the behavior of being dared to violate religious norms to get the treasure, and (d) the behavior of being happy to commit fornication. Keywords: social critics, behavior, encode, song lyrics, state officials Abstrak Tulisan ini bertujuan untuk mendeskripsikan bahwa kritik sosial tidak hanya dapat dilakukan melalui demonstrasi, tetapi dapat juga dilakukan melalui lirik lagu. Lirik lagu kritik sosial, pada umumnya, ditujukan kepada pemerintah, pejabat negara, dan para politisi Indonesia. Masalah yang dibahas dalam tulisan ini adalah perilaku sosial para pejabat negara dan para politisi pada masa Orde Baru dan Era Reformasi, serta kosakata yang digunakan oleh pencipta lagu untuk menyandikan berbagai peristiwa yang terjadi pada masa itu. Data tulisan ini dikumpulkan melalui metode simak dengan teknik pengunduhan dan teknik pencatatan. Data dianalisis dengan Teori Model Makna Dinamis. Hal itu merupakan sesuatu yang baru karena selama ini analisis lirik lagu kritik sosial didominasi oleh teori semiotik dan teori wacana. Temuan tulisan yaitu empat jenis perilaku pejabat negara yang tersandi dalam lirik lagu kritik sosial, yakni (a) perilaku memperkaya diri dengan cara mengorupsi uang negara, (b) perilaku menghalalkan berbagai cara untuk mendapatkan jabatan yang dinginkan,(c) perilaku berani melanggar norma agama demi mendapatkan harta, dan (d) senang melakukan perbuatan zina. Kata kunci: kritik sosial, perilaku, tersandi, lirik lagu, pejabat negara
1explore the fi rst-person experience of auditory hallucinations (also known as voices) in a community sample using a qualitative survey approach. Auditory hallucinations are common in psychiatric disorders, especially schizophrenia. During the past 10 years, researchers have learned that auditory hallucinations also occur in a small but notable proportion of the general population without the need for clinical care. However, very little is known about these individuals, and even less is known about their experience of hallucinations. Woods and colleagues’ study 1 gives a unique insight into the raw phenomenology of auditory hallucinations, undistorted by the clinical symptoms (eg, delusional interpretations) and cognitive compromise (eg, language disorders) that often accompany schizophrenia. Importantly, the fi ndings of the study show new and surprising themes that direct attention beyond the immediate scope and remit of speech, and towards a more global and integrated experience. In the past 30 years, studies have been constructed with preconceived ideas about auditory hallucinations being composed of abnormal language processes or misattributed inner speech, such that language and speech have become common constitutive elements of any investigations. This language-centric approach has shaped interrogative questions about these experiences, and clinicians often ask questions such as “Do you hear voices in your head? What do they say?” Thus, verbal and lexical characteristics have become the norm in descriptions of the dimensional forms and features of auditory hallucinations (eg, verbalisation, speech content, replays of conversations, and complexity of utterances), and as targets in dialogue-based forms of clinical interventions. Language and speech are important in some hallucinations, especially those related to schizophrenia. However, the fact that non-verbal auditory hallucinations are also common is often forgotten; for example, they occur in roughly 40% of individuals with schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders 2 and a substantial
The term âpoetic grammarâ refers to the formal patterns that distinguish poetic registers from other modes of speech: for example, patterns in meter and rhyme schemes. For many poetic traditions, function is also a distinguishing feature: epic poetry is a vehicle for heroic lore, for instance, and liturgical hymns convey entreaties to gods. Thus, poetic genres are characterized in terms of patterns in sound or typical topics; connections between form and function are most often left unexplored. My dissertation examines relationships between traditional formal âstructuring devicesâ and the quite heterogeneous functions of a selection of hymns from the Rig Veda, the most ancient of Indic liturgical texts and one of considerable self-conscious poetic intricacy. Working in the traditions of interdisciplinary poetics pioneered by such figures as Roman Jakobson and Mikhail Bakhtin, and building on the insights of historical linguistics, I will explore how the phonological, grammatical and lexical patterns that comprise formal structuring devices are used to shape a discourse, and to further specific rhetorical goals of the Rigvedic poet Vasiá¹£á¹ha, among other speakers.Most Rigvedic hymns are embedded within ritual contexts; the poets are the primary speakers, and gods, patrons and ritual officiants the usual addressees. In addition, dialogue hymns present conversations between divine and human consorts and spouses. Structuring devices connect passages that affirm the norms of poetic grammar with variations that counter or distort them, creating a double-voiced discourse (i.e. âheteroglossiaâ) that helps certain speakers, whose lack of divinity, lower class, or disfavored gender puts them at a disadvantage with their interlocutor, gain control of ritual interactions. This dissertation will thus connect the formal conventions of Rigvedic poetics to poet-patron power dynamics, negotiations across the human-divine power differential, and changing gender roles in ritualâall relatively new lines of inquiry.
Psychologists have used experimental methods to study language for more than a century. However, only with the recent availability of large-scale linguistic databases has a more complete picture begun to emerge of how language is actually used, and what information is available as input to language acquisition. Analyses of such "big data" have resulted in reappraisals of key assumptions about the nature of language. As an example, we focus on corpus-based research that has shed new light on the arbitrariness of the sign: the longstanding assumption that the relationship between the sound of a word and its meaning is arbitrary. The results reveal a systematic relationship between the sound of a word and its meaning, which is stronger for early acquired words. Moreover, the analyses further uncover a systematic relationship between words and their lexical categories-nouns and verbs sound differently from each other-affecting how we learn new words and use them in sentences. Together, these results point to a division of labor between arbitrariness and systematicity in sound-meaning mappings. We conclude by arguing in favor of including "big data" analyses into the language scientist's methodological toolbox.
The increasing diversity of languages used on the web introduces a new level of complexity to Information Retrieval (IR) systems. We can no longer assume that textual content is written in one language or even the same language family. In this paper, we demonstrate how to build massive multilingual annotators with minimal human expertise and intervention. We describe a system that builds Named Entity Recognition (NER) annotators for 40 major languages using Wikipedia and Freebase. Our approach does not require NER human annotated datasets or language specific resources like treebanks, parallel corpora, and orthographic rules. The novelty of approach lies therein - using only language agnostic techniques, while achieving competitive performance. Our method learns distributed word representations (word embeddings) which encode semantic and syntactic features of words in each language. Then, we automatically generate datasets from Wikipedia link structure and Freebase attributes. Finally, we apply two preprocessing stages (oversampling and exact surface form matching) which do not require any linguistic expertise. Our evaluation is two fold: First, we demonstrate the system performance on human annotated datasets. Second, for languages where no gold-standard benchmarks are available, we propose a new method, distant evaluation, based on statistical machine translation.
Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) often have difficulty recognizing and interpreting facial expressions of emotion, which may impair their ability to navigate and communicate successfully in their social, interpersonal environments. Characterizing specific differences between individuals with ASD and their typically developing (TD) counterparts in the neural activity subserving their experience of emotional faces may provide distinct targets for ASD interventions. Thus we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and a parametric experimental design to identify brain regions in which neural activity correlated with ratings of arousal and valence for a broad range of emotional faces. Participants (51 ASD, 84 TD) were group-matched by age, sex, IQ, race, and socioeconomic status. Using task-related change in blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) fMRI signal as a measure, and covarying for age, sex, FSIQ, and ADOS scores, we detected significant differences across diagnostic groups in the neural activity subserving the dimension of arousal but not valence. BOLD-signal in TD participants correlated inversely with ratings of arousal in regions associated primarily with attentional functions, whereas BOLD-signal in ASD participants correlated positively with arousal ratings in regions commonly associated with impulse control and default-mode activity. Only minor differences were detected between groups in the BOLD signal correlates of valence ratings. Our findings provide unique insight into the emotional experiences of individuals with ASD. Although behavioral responses to face-stimuli were comparable across diagnostic groups, the corresponding neural activity for our ASD and TD groups differed dramatically. The near absence of group differences for valence correlates and the presence of strong group differences for arousal correlates suggest that individuals with ASD are not atypical in all aspects of emotion-processing. Studying these similarities and differences may help us to understand the origins of divergent interpersonal emotional experience in persons with ASD. Hum Brain Mapp 37:443-461, 2016. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
This poster is concerned with a new multi-layer representation of the German TüBa-D/Z Treebank, which allows users to conveniently query and visualize annotations for syntactic constituents, topological fields and coreference either separately or in conjunction.
Our knowledge of objects reflects the statistics of the visual environment. From our experiences in the world, we store information about categories of objects and the features that define them. One important statistical property of objects is the co-occurrence of their constituent features. For example, the round shape of an apple co-occurs frequently with the color red, but not the color blue. Here we examine the neural mechanisms that encode such feature co-occurrence statistics at the interface of perception and memory. In an fMRI experiment, subjects viewed images of colored objects while performing an unrelated scrambled-object detection task. The stimuli included exemplars from three different categories: apples, leaves, and roses. To create stimuli that sampled a range of co-occurrence statistics, each exemplar image had its color systematically manipulated to be red, pink, yellow, green, or blue (Fig.1A). We quantified co-occurrence frequencies of color-object combinations (e.g., “yellow apple”) in a large lexical corpus. A separate norming study demonstrated that this metric was strongly correlated with subjective ratings of color-object typicality. Importantly, the co-occurrence of object and color information is independent of the frequencies of each feature alone. We tested the hypothesis that feature co-occurrence information is encoded in semantic memory regions and automatically retrieved during object perception. Using representational similarity analysis, we identified regions where response patterns were similar for category exemplars with similar co-occurrence statistics (Fig.2B). We expected that the angular gyrus would encode combinatorial information given its proposed role in semantic integration. Indeed, we found that this region and the anterior fusiform cortex encode high-level feature co-occurrence statistics, while early visual cortex, lateral-occipital complex, and inferior-temporal cortex did not. These results suggest that regions at the interface of vision and semantic memory encode combinatorial information that underlies real-world knowledge of objects and is independent of coding for individual features. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015
Cross-lingual transfer has been shown to produce good results for dependency parsing of resource-poor languages. Although this avoids the need for a target language treebank, most approaches have still used large parallel corpora. However, parallel data is scarce for low-resource languages, and we report a new method that does not need parallel data. Our method learns syntactic word embeddings that generalise over the syntactic contexts of a bilingual vocabulary, and incorporates these into a neural network parser. We show empirical improvements over a baseline delexicalised parser on both the CoNLL and Universal Dependency Treebank datasets. We analyse the importance of the source languages, and show that combining multiple source-languages leads to a substantial improvement.
In this article we consider a multilevel first-order autoregressive [AR(1)] model with random intercepts, random autoregression, and random innovation variance (i.e., the level 1 residual variance). Including random innovation variance is an important extension of the multilevel AR(1) model for two reasons. First, between-person differences in innovation variance are important from a substantive point of view, in that they capture differences in sensitivity and/or exposure to unmeasured internal and external factors that influence the process. Second, using simulation methods we show that modeling the innovation variance as fixed across individuals, when it should be modeled as a random effect, leads to biased parameter estimates. Additionally, we use simulation methods to compare maximum likelihood estimation to Bayesian estimation of the multilevel AR(1) model and investigate the trade-off between the number of individuals and the number of time points. We provide an empirical illustration by applying the extended multilevel AR(1) model to daily positive affect ratings from 89 married women over the course of 42 consecutive days.
Psychologists have studied extensively the consequences of planning for motivation and task performance, but little work has examined whether plan-making serves another function, that of helping us feel better about the yet-to-be completed task. In the present research, we examined whether making plans for completing a future task positively impacts feelings related to that task. In three studies, we tested the possibility that planning decreases negative emotions about the task planned for, and whether some types of planning are more beneficial for this than others. In Studies 1 and 2, participants were asked to nominate an important task they had yet to complete and that they had felt concerned about completing lately, and then instructed to either make a plan to complete the task using one of the specified planning types, or were not asked to make a plan. Participants then rated their feelings about the task on twenty emotions adjectives (PANAS; Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988). In Study 3, participants were prompted to think about an upcoming exam, and then either (1) made a specific plan to prepare for it followed by giving affect ratings (experimental condition), or (2) rated their affect first and then made a specific plan (control condition). The results of Study 1 (N = 144) supported our hypothesis – following planning, mental simulation planners reported lower levels of negative affect than implementation intention planners and no plan controls. No differences were found for positive affect. These results were not replicated in Study 2 (N = 133) or Study 3 (N = 147), where feelings about the task did not differ depending on whether participants planned or not, or planning type. Overall, our findings did not yield consistent evidence that planning for an important future task has immediate affective benefits.
This study explored the relationship of mindfulness trait with the early and late stages of affective processing, by examining the two corresponding ERP components, P2 and LPP, collected from twenty-two male Chinese participants with a wide range of meditation experiences. Multiple regression analyses was performed on the mindfulness scores, as measured by CAMS-R, with the subjective affective ratings and ERP data collected during an emotion processing task. The results showed that increased mindfulness scores predicted increased valence ratings of negative stimuli (less negative), as well as increased P2 amplitudes at the frontocentral location for positive compared to negative stimuli. Based on these findings, a plausible mechanism of mindfulness in reducing negativity bias was discussed. Moreover, our results replicated previous findings on the age-related increase of P2 amplitudes at the frontal sites for positive compared to neutral stimuli. Since the locations at which P2 amplitudes were found as associated with age and mindfulness differed, as did the emotional contents of the stimuli being compared, indicating that the effect of age did not confound our findings on mindfulness and the two factors might operate on early affective processing from distinct sources and mechanisms.
Regular participation in physical activity is associated with a variety of health benefits and a reduction in diverse chronic diseases. However, empirical studies have shown that about 50% of the participants in exercise programs drop out during the first six months. One strategy to increase regular physical activity would be to promote positive feelings during exercise. The purposes of this experimental study were a) to investigate whether the affective states can be influenced by specific interventions and b) to link these changes in affective states to exercise adherence. The trainers of the experimental group were instructed to promote positive emotions (e.g. pleasure and fun) during exercise according to specific principles. The trainers of the control group were instructed to comply with the recommendations of the American College of Sports Medicine. 24 participants in the experimental group and 17 participants in the control group were recruited for this study. The results of the repeated measures analyses of variance provide a significant time by group interaction suggesting that participants of the intervention group increased their affective ratings significantly compared to the control group. The results of the hierarchical regression analyses support the hypothesis that the changes in affective ratings related to exercise mediated the effects of intervention on physical activity adherence. This study provides evidence that affective states during exercise can be systematically influenced to increase physical activity adherence. Principles on how to increase positive affective judgments related to exercising can be drawn from this study and eventually be used in order to promote regular physical activity among a large part of the population.
Subjective and psychophysiological emotional responses to music from two different cultures were compared within these two cultures. Two identical experiments were conducted: the first in the Congolese rainforest with an isolated population of Mebenzélé Pygmies without any exposure to Western music and culture, the second with a group of Western music listeners, with no experience with Congolese music. Forty Pygmies and 40 Canadians listened in pairs to 19 music excerpts of 29-99 s in duration in random order (eight from the Pygmy population and 11 Western instrumental excerpts). For both groups, emotion components were continuously measured: subjective feeling (using a two- dimensional valence and arousal rating interface), peripheral physiological activation, and facial expression. While Pygmy music was rated as positive and arousing by Pygmies, ratings of Western music by Westerners covered the range from arousing to calming and from positive to negative. Comparing psychophysiological responses to emotional qualities of Pygmy music across participant groups showed no similarities. However, Western stimuli, rated as high and low arousing by Canadians, created similar responses in both participant groups (with high arousal associated with increases in subjective and physiological activation). Several low-level acoustical features of the music presented (tempo, pitch, and timbre) were shown to affect subjective and physiological arousal similarly in both cultures. Results suggest that while the subjective dimension of emotional valence might be mediated by cultural learning, changes in arousal might involve a more basic, universal response to low-level acoustical characteristics of music.
Most mental functions are associated with dynamic interactions within functional brain networks. Thus, training individuals to alter functional brain networks might provide novel and powerful means to improve cognitive performance and emotions. Using a novel connectivity-neurofeedback approach based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we show for the first time that participants can learn to change functional brain networks. Specifically, we taught participants control over a key component of the emotion regulation network, in that they learned to increase top-down connectivity from the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, which is involved in cognitive control, onto the amygdala, which is involved in emotion processing. After training, participants successfully self-regulated the top-down connectivity between these brain areas even without neurofeedback, and this was associated with concomitant increases in subjective valence ratings of emotional stimuli of the participants. Connectivity-based neurofeedback goes beyond previous neurofeedback approaches, which were limited to training localized activity within a brain region. It allows to noninvasively and nonpharmacologically change interconnected functional brain networks directly, thereby resulting in specific behavioral changes. Our results demonstrate that connectivity-based neurofeedback training of emotion regulation networks enhances emotion regulation capabilities. This approach can potentially lead to powerful therapeutic emotion regulation protocols for neuropsychiatric disorders.
One key criterion when creating a representation of the lexicon of any language within a dictionary or lexical database is that it must be decided which groups of idiosyncratic and systematically modified variants together form a lexeme. Few researchers have, however, attempted to outline such principles as they might apply to sign languages. As a consequence, some sign language dictionaries and lexical databases appear to be mixed collections of phonetic, phonological, morphological, and lexical variants of lexical signs (e.g. Brien 1992) which have not addressed what may be termed as the lemma dilemma. In this paper, we outline the lemmatisation practices used in the creation of BSL SignBank (Fenlon, Cormier et al. 2014), a lexical database and dictionary of British Sign Language based on signs identified within the British Sign Language Corpus ( http://www.bslcorpusproject.org ). We argue that the principles outlined here should be considered in the creation of any sign language lexical database and ultimately any sign language dictionary and reference grammar.
<h3>Introduction</h3><br> English News Text Treebank: Penn Treebank Revised was developed by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) with funding through a gift from Google Inc. It consists of a combination of automated and manual revisions of the <a href="../../../LDC99T42">Penn Treebank</a> annotation of Wall Street Journal (WSJ) stories. The data is comprised of 1,203,648 word-level tokens in 49,191 sentence-level tokens -- in all 2,312 of the original Penn Treebank WSJ files. <br> <h3>Data</h3><br> This release includes revised tokenization, part-of-speech, and syntactic treebank annotation intended to bring the full WSJ treebank section into compliance with the agreed-upon policies and updates implemented for current English treebank annotation specifications at LDC. Examples include English Web Treebank (<a href="../../../LDC2012T13">LDC2012T13</a>), OntoNotes (<a href="../../../LDC2013T19">LDC2013T19</a>), and English translation treebanks such as English Translation Treebank: An-Nahar Newswire (<a href="../../../LDC2012T02">LDC2012T02</a>). English Treebank Supplemental Guidelines are included in this release. <br> <h3>Samples</h3><br> Please view this <a href="desc/addenda/LDC2015T13.tree.txt">treebank</a> and <a href="desc/addenda/LDC2015T13.txt">tokenized</a> samples. <br> <h3>Updates</h3><br> None at this time. </br> Portions © 1987-1989 Dow Jones & Company, Inc., © 1999, 2015 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania
The theory of core affect posits that the neural system processes affective aspects of stimuli encountered by the organism quickly and automatically, resulting in a unified affective state described along the dimensions of valence and arousal. Core affect theory posits two functional subsystems that guide affective processing: a sensory integration and a visceramotor network. The proposed study investigates how the representation of affective dimensions depends on sensory modality, features of the task, and brain regions. A series of behavioral studies was run to develop an experimental stimulus set of silent videos and musical clips that met requirements of equating valence across stimulus types while holding arousal constant across valence categories. Valence manipulation was successful, with valence categories were equated on arousal ratings. The stimulus sets in the current study matched many of low level features between valence categories so that any difference between experimental conditions can most likely be attributed to the valence of the stimuli and not to the arousal levels or low level features of the stimuli. The fMRI study applied multiple multivariate analysis tools to analyze the fMRI data. General valence was successfully decoded from patterns of whole brain activation within participants. The successful cross-modal classification demonstrated that there is modality-general processing of valence at the whole brain level. The multidimensional scaling (MDS) results supported these conclusions by showing that a common valence dimension for visual and auditory trials as well as visual- and auditory-specific valence dimensions. The same analyses were applied to the predefined anatomical ROIs (mPFC, OFC, and STS) and revealed modality-general valence processing, evidenced by cross-modal classification and the MDS solution. Successful within-participant cross-modal classifications and unsuccessful cross-participant cross-modal classifications implies that modality-general representation of valence could be individual-specific, whereas, successful within-participant within-modal classifications and successful cross-participant within-modal classifications implies that modality-specific representations of valence might be individual-general. A first searchlight analysis was performed to localize the brain regions that were involved in modality-general valence and it identified three significant clusters: right transverse temporal gyrus, left superior temporal gyrus, and right middle temporal gyrus. These searchlight results were validated with cross-modal classification and MDS. The modality-specific regions found by a second searchlight analysis were in the occipital region for visual stimuli and the temporal region for auditory stimuli, as expected. Within-modality classification confirmed that those modality-congruent areas are involved in valence processing of the corresponding modality. Interestingly, each modality’s valence was also decoded from the modality-incongruent regions. These results imply modality-specific valence valuation for both modalities in each region, because cross-modal classification was not successful in these regions and MDS did not reveal a general valence dimension in either region. In sum, the neural representation of both modality-general and modality-specific valence were found at a whole brain level as well as frontal and temporal regions, consistent with the two system approach to core affect posited by Barrett and Bliss-Moreau (2009). This conclusion was bolstered by converging methodologies.
Cet article présente le repérage des connecteurs de discours dans le corpus « French Treebank » (FTB) déjà annoté pour la morpho-syntaxe. C’est la première étape dans l’annotation discursive complète de ce corpus. Il s’agit de projeter sur le corpus les éléments répertoriés dans LexConn, lexique des connecteurs du français, et de filtrer les occurrences de ces éléments qui n’ont pas un emploi discursif mais par exemple un emploi d’adverbe de manière ou de préposition introduisant un complément sous-catégorisé. Plus de 10 000 connecteurs ont été identifiés.
In this methodological article I discuss the advantages of using parsed corpora (treebanks) for historical linguistics research. I argue that even apparently simple, descriptive questions such as how often different word orders occur cannot be adequately answered without the use of treebanks, which make the underlying theoretical assumptions explicit. I demonstrate this concretely with a case study from word order in participle clauses in the New Testament.
Ignoring a visual stimulus causes it to subsequently receive more negative affective ratings than novel items or prior targets of attention. This has been taken as evidence that attentional inhibition alters the coding of stimulus-associated value to ensure that previously distracting stimuli can be effectively avoided in future encounters. Previous results have suggested that this ‘inhibitory devaluation’ effect may operate through affective associations with specific perceptual features that allow distractors to be differentiated from targets. Prior inhibition can thereby impact the affective value both of specific items that have appeared as distractors and of novel items that share a previously ignored feature. But what happens when a distractor shares the same perceptual features as a target being held in visual working memory? Recent electrophysiological evidence suggests that while the similarity may initially cause selective attention to be biased toward such task-irrelevant items, active inhibition may then be triggered to prevent them from interfering with the ongoing task. If inhibition causes affective devaluation, then such findings predict greater devaluation of task-irrelevant stimuli that share the same perceptual features as a target being held in visual working memory than those that do not. To test this, we utilized delayed-match-to-sample trials that required participants to maintain a uniquely-coloured stimulus in working memory while task-irrelevant probe arrays were presented. The probe arrays contained abstract shapes whose colour either matched or did not match that of the stimulus being held in memory. Subsequent affective-evaluation trials revealed that prior memory-matching distractors received more negative ratings than non-matching distractors or a set of previously-unseen shapes. These results converge with prior electrophysiological evidence to suggest that distractors matching the contents of visual working memory are subjected to greater levels of attentional inhibition than other task-irrelevant stimuli, and that the consequences of this inhibition include alterations in affective value. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015
La nueva base de datos del Proyecto Nerthus, llamada The Grid, fue presentada por Martin Arista en una conferencia dictada en la Universidad de Sheffield en 2013. The Grid consiste en cinco tablas relacionadas: la base de datos lexica Nerthus, una concordancia por fragmentos, una concordancia por palabras, un indice y un indice inverso de The Dictionary of Old English Corpus. The Grid no esta basado en formas de diccionario, sino en atestiguaciones textuales. De todas las lineas de investigacion posibles que esta nueva organizacion de la base de datos ofrece, este trabajo se hace cargo de la lematizacion de las formas textuales. La razon es que un corpus morfologicamente anotado de ingles antiguo es una asignatura pendiente de esta disciplina. La informacion morfologica solo esta disponible para las letras A-G, las cuales ya han sido publicadas por el The Dictionary of Old English, pero no existe, o no es tan facil de encontrar en los diccionarios actuales para las letras H-Y. El proposito de la investigacion es proporcionar un inventario de lemas de verbos fuertes basados en la evidencia textual que viene proporcionada por el Dictionary of Old English Corpus. Respecto al Proyecto Nerthus, esta tesis intenta desarrollar un sistema de busquedas basado en sucesivas busquedas, de manera que las formas mas transparentes sean etiquetadas antes que otras formas mas opacas. La restriccion del ambito de analisis a los verbos fuertes se basa en dos razones. La primera es que el sistema de verbos fuertes en ingles antiguo desempena un papel central en la derivacion y el desarrollo del lexico. Por otra parte, los verbos fuertes, caracterizados por la apofonia, o ablaut, pueden ser buscados no solo por la terminacion flexiva, pero tambien por la vocal radical, lo que contribuye a refinar el sistema de busquedas. El punto de partida de esta investigacion es que la labor de lematizacion se puede hacer en parte automaticamente y en parte manualmente. La informacion contenida en la base de datos, junto con las funcionalidades de Filemaker, pueden maximizar la parte automatica del analisis y minimizar la revision manual. La metodologia incluye tres pasos principales: la recopilacion de un corpus de verbos fuertes que se adapte al analisis, la identificacion de las formas flexivas, y la definicion de codigos de busqueda automatica. La lista de verbos fuertes se ha tomado de la lista de referencia de verbos fuertes del Proyecto Nerthus, que se basa en las siete clases de Campbell (1987) y Hogg and Fulk (2011), y en las subclases de Krygier (1994). Para la identificacion de las formas flexivas relevantes, los verbos fuertes que no han sido derivados, han sido derivados en el infinitivo, presente de indicativo, preterito de indicativo, presente de subjuntivo, preterito de subjuntivo, e imperativo, todos ellos en singular y plural. Para las busquedas en la base de datos lexica, esta tesis propone un sistema de cuatro codigos de busqueda sucesivos que estan disenados especificamente para buscar determinadas formas verbales. Aparte del inventario de verbos fuertes, en las conclusiones se presentan resultados en dos areas. Primero, esta tesis puede responder de manera motivada la cuestion de los limites en la automatizacion en el analisis morfologico. En segundo lugar, que tesis arroja luz sobre la cuestion de la regularizacion de la ortografia caracteristica del trabajo lexicografico o normalizacion.
International audience
Researchers have demonstrated the importance of phonology in literacy acquisition and in visual word recognition. For example, the spelling-to-sound consistency effect has been observed in visual word recognition tasks, in which the naming responses are faster and more accurate for words with the same letters that also have the same pronunciation (e.g. -ean is always pronounced /in/, as in lean, dean, and bean). In addition, some studies have reported a much less intuitive feedback consistency effect when a rime can be spelled in different ways (e.g. /ip/ in heap and deep) in lexical decision tasks. Such findings suggest that, with activation flowing back and forth between orthographic and phonological units during word processing, any inconsistency in the mappings between orthography and phonology should weaken the stability of the feedback loop, and, thus, should delay recognition. However, several studies have failed to show reliable feedback consistency in printed word recognition. One possible reason for this is that the feedback consistency is naturally confounded with many other variables, such as orthographic neighborhood or bigram frequency, as these variables are difficult to tease apart. Furthermore, there are challenges in designing factorial experiments that perfectly balance lexical stimuli on all factors besides feedback consistency. This study aims to examine the feedback consistency effect in reading Chinese characters by using a normative data of 3,423 Chinese phonograms. We collected the lexical decision time from 180 college students. A linear mixed model analysis was used to examine the feedback consistency effect by taking into account additional properties that may be confounded with feedback consistency, including character frequency, number of strokes, phonetic combinability, semantic combinability, semantic ambiguity, phonetic consistency, noun-to-verb ratios, and morphological boundedness. Some typical effects were observed, such as the more frequent and familiar a character, the faster one can decide it is a real character. More importantly, the linear mixed model analysis revealed a significant feedback consistency effect while controlling for other factors, which indicated that the pronunciation of phonograms might accommodate the organization of Chinese orthographic representation. Our study disentangled the feedback consistency from the many other factors, and supports the view that phonological activation would reverberate to orthographic representation in visual word recognition.
Multiword expressions (MWEs) present particular and distinctive semantic properties, hence their automatic extraction receives special attention from the natural language processing (NLP) and corpus linguistics community, and is still an active research area. Unfortunately, the creation of necessary resources for this task is quite rigorous and many languages suffer from the lack of these; as in the case for Turkish.
We present a dependency parser for Persian, called ParsPer, developed using the graph-based parser in the Mate Tools. The parser is trained on the entire Uppsala Persian Dependency Treebank with a specific configuration that was selected by MaltParser as the best performing parsing representation. The treebank’s syntactic annotation scheme is based on Stanford Typed Dependencies with extensions for Persian. The results of the ParsPer evaluation revealed a best labeled accuracy over 82% with an unlabeled accuracy close to 87%. The parser is freely available and released as an open source tool for parsing Persian.