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There is a widely held belief that L2 vocabulary should be taught in an L2 context. However, studies in this field do not always support this idea because the effect of contextualized learning is rarely found in ordinary immediate-posttest scores. To explore the possibility of another way of assessing vocabulary cognition, Hasegawa (2010) used an imageability rating scale and found that context presentation enables learners to realize and imagine what the target word refers to. However, a follow-up study was imperative because the original study participants were only 22 university students and the factor of proficiency was not considered. According to past studies, the effect of contextualized learning might be found only among adult or advanced learners. Therefore, the present study carefully re-examined how context presentation affects learners' imageability ratings, as well as ordinary posttest scores, with an additional 118 high school students. In the experiment, the participants learned 21 unfamiliar adjectives in three types of translation-based learning that differed in context presentation: (a) no context, (b) collocational phrase context, and (c) sentential context. Study 1 analyzed the data from the new participants, and Study 2 compared the current data with Hasegawa's (2010) investigation. The results indicate that the context presentation does not enhance retention of vocabulary meanings and that the context effect on word imageability differed according to learner groups. Therefore, the previous conclusion should be modified as follows: When learners are provided with both translations and contexts, they tend to utilize translations as the immediate source of learning new words; however, university students are ready to enrich representations of lexical meaning in context.
This multiple case study sought to explore the process of acculturation on stress levels, coping strategies, and social identity choices of six international undergraduate students from Venezuela studying at a Midwestern U.S. university.This study analyzed the personal experiences of three CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION Each year, thousands of individuals migrate from a source or home country to a host country for a variety of different reasons such as political instability, high unemployment rates, family reunification, or, in the case of international students, the opportunity to study abroad at an institute of higher education.Globalization and a demand for an exceptional education have expanded the number of students pursuing higher education abroad (McLachlan & Justice, 2009) and the United States is the most sought-after host country for international students.For the past 50 years, more international students have studied in the U.S. than any other host country destination (Institute of International Education, 2012).A record high of approximately 723,277 international students enrolled in institutions of higher education in the U.S. during the 2010/11 academic year, which is a 32% increase since 2000/01 (IIE, 2012).The majority of the current literature and research surrounding international students within the U.S. context tends to focus on those who journey from countries of East and South Asia since this group makes up nearly one-half of the international student population within the U.S. (IIE, 2012).However, research reflective of this population tends to overlook an intriguing increase of international students from Central and South America.From 2010/11 to 2011/12, six South American countries (Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, and Venezuela) experienced a rise in student sojourners seeking an education within U.S. universities, with Venezuela being the country to have the most significant increase of 14.4% (IIE, 2012).Beyond the current rise of the Venezuelan international student population within the U.S., data strongly suggest that more Venezuelan students will be studying abroad in the U.S. in the near future; therefore, this international population is notable and warrants further research.For instance, Venezuela was one of only five countries out of the top 25 places of origin to have an over 10% increase in international students studying in the U.S. from 2009/10 to 2010/11 (IIE, 2012).This growing outrush of university students from Venezuela (Margolis, 2009) to the U.S. may be attributed to various Venezuelan sociopolitical reforms and policy changes; thus, these should be considered when studying the aforementioned expansion of international students from Venezuela in the U.S. In addition, a significant amount of literature claims that acculturation is a process that is inevitable for international students as they study abroad.As international students learn to adapt to life in the U.S., they experience the phenomenon of acculturation, or various social and cultural changes which result from continuous cross-cultural contact between two distinct cultural groups (Berry, Poortinga, Breugelmans, Chasiotis, & Sam, 2011).When international students sojourn to the U.S., they are faced with the difficulty of adjusting to a new sociocultural environment (customs, behaviors, language and values) and, therefore, may experience acculturative stress related to the process of adapting to the new environment (Berry, 2005).Thus, these rising numbers of Venezuelan international students may face challenges and stresses as they adjust to the cultural, social, and linguistic norms of mainstream U.S. society.It is also imperative to note that as international students experience acculturative stress, they also utilize various methods in order to deal with these challenges.The most prominent methods include learning the host language/cultural norms and forming social networks with either co-nationals or host nationals in order to feel a sense of belonging through these social connections (Li, Fox & Almarza, 2007;McLachlan & Justice, 2009).International students aspire to become part of at least one social group within the host country in order to establish secure bonds and a feeling of belonging within that group by utilizing certain social norms/behaviors in differing social contexts.It is this perceived sense of belonging to a social group that allows international students to experience decreased levels of acculturative stress.
bilabial stop (although any literate adult might believe that this word’s orthography perfectly reflects its pronunciation). The following chapter continues with the closely related topic of determining word boundaries in spoken language and teaching students to write correctly. This issue naturally raises questions of what constitutes a “word,” particularly in relation to compound nouns such as sac à dos, which students might attempt to spell as “sacados.” Pothier recommends helping students sort through their mental lexicons, trying to identify different phrases or expressions in which a word may appear (for example, sac-poubelle, sac de couchage). From these two initial chapters and their clear and concrete examples and implications, the book ventures into more abstract territory, discussing the arbitrary relationship between signifiant and signifié (to illustrate this point, Pothier presents the numerical systems of a handful of foreign languages); synonymy and polysemy; language functions (including communicative and cognitive, but also metalinguistic and poetic); and prescriptive linguistic norms. Pothier’s presentation of these concepts is clear and interesting, but their pedagogical implications seem a bit less clear. The final chapter presents a hodgepodge of well-established trucs concerning the teaching of French, including discussions of mute and aspirated h, invariable words, two-verb constructions (the second verb always appearing in its infinitival form, except for in compound tenses), and differences between the conditional and future forms. Although this book is primarily intended for teachers of French as a first language, the notion that language teachers who understand the inner workings of the language will be better equipped to anticipate and correct student errors certainly also holds for second language acquisition. Writing for her specific audience of French (language) school teachers, however, Pothier offers little in terms of practical advice for second language pedagogues. The issue of nonnative-speaking pupils is directly addressed in the discussion of phonetics/phonology and their relationship with orthography, but this issue is not pursued any further in subsequent chapters. With more advice specifically directed toward teachers of second language learners, Pothier could have greatly expanded her target audience. As it stands now, this book constitutes a fairly good introduction to some of the basic concepts of (French) linguistics but falls a bit short of making clear connections (beyond the most obvious ones) between the study of linguistics and language pedagogy. Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis A. Kate Miller SCHNEDECKER, CATHERINE, et CONSTANZE ARMBRECHT, éd. La quantification et ses domaines: actes du colloque de Strasbourg, 19–21 octobre 2006. Paris: Champion, 2012. ISBN 978-2-7453-2443-6. Pp. 657. 100 a. Conference proceedings, like journals, fall into two categories: refereed and non-refereed. Those that are non-refereed, and thus include all papers that were presented at the conference, occasionally display a wide range of quality, both in terms of the research conducted and the presentation of that research. La quantification is a pleasant surprise in this regard, however. Despite being non-refereed and apparently all-inclusive, this volume attests to the care that was given to the choice of conference presenters; there is not a single article that is extraneous to the topic of quantification, and many complement one another in ways that suggest Reviews 1237 that their authors routinely interact at conferences and through other scholarly exchanges. The forty-nine articles included here deal with the semantic issue of quantification from a wide variety of perspectives (too many to summarize in a review), examining a variety of source languages including French (primarily), Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Spanish, Korean and Romanian. Approximately 10% of the articles are written in English; the others are in French. The volume is subdivided into thematic units, including quantification, restriction, focalisation, totalisation; quantification via la prédication; quantification et négation. This organization allows the reader to find articles of interest among the many included. This is not a volume that one would read linearly, from cover to cover. There are, however, a plethora of articles, each different in its own way, which would interest a semanticist dealing with quantification. To the researcher working in this field, this volume offers a great deal. Because it contains conference proceedings, however, the articles are often short and at times somewhat undeveloped. Papers average...
The gaze cueing effect involves the rapid orientation of attention to follow the gaze direction of another person. Previous studies reported reciprocal influences between social variables and the gaze cueing effect, with modulation of gaze cueing by social features of face stimuli and modulation of the observer's social judgements from the validity of the gaze cues themselves. However, it remains unclear which social dimensions can affect-and be affected by-gaze cues. We used computer-averaged prototype face-like images with high and low levels of perceived trustworthiness and dominance to investigate the impact of these two fundamental social impression dimensions on the gaze cueing effect. Moreover, by varying the proportions of valid and invalid gaze cues across three experiments, we assessed whether gaze cueing influences observers' impressions of dominance and trustworthiness through incidental learning. Bayesian statistical analyses provided clear evidence that the gaze cueing effect was not modulated by facial social trait impressions (Experiments 1-3). However, there was uncertain evidence of incidental learning of social evaluations following the gaze cueing task. A decrease in perceived trustworthiness for non-cooperative low dominance faces (Experiment 2) and an increase in dominance ratings for faces whose gaze behaviour contradicted expectations (Experiment 3) appeared, but further research is needed to clarify these effects. Thus, this study confirms that attentional shifts triggered by gaze direction involve a robust and relatively automatic process, which could nonetheless influence social impressions depending on perceived traits and the gaze behaviour of faces providing the cues.
A new approach to lexicographic work, in which the lexicographer is seen more as a validator of the choices made by computer, was recently envisaged by Rundell and Kilgarriff (2011). In this paper, we describe an experiment using such an approach during the creation of Slovene Lexical Database (Gantar, Krek, 2011). The corpus data, i.e. grammatical relations, collocations, examples, and grammatical labels, were automatically extracted from 1,18-billion-word Gigafida corpus of Slovene. The evaluation of the extracted data consisted of making a comparison between the time spent writing a manual entry and a (semi)-automatic entry, and identifying potential improvements in the extraction algorithm and in the presentation of data. An important finding was that the automatic approach was far more effective than the manual approach, without any significant loss of information. Based on our experience, we would propose a slightly revised version of the approach envisaged by Rundell and Kilgarriff in which the validation of data is left to lower-level linguists or crowd-sourcing, whereas high-level tasks such as meaning description remain the domain of lexicographers. Such an approach indeed reduces the scope of lexicographer’s work, however it also results in the ability of bringing the content to the users more quickly.
We investigate acoustic modeling, feature extraction and feature selection for the problem of affective content recognition of generic, non-speech, non-music sounds. We annotate and analyze a database of generic sounds containing a subset of the BBC sound effects library. We use regression models, longterm features and wrapper-based feature selection to model affect in the continuous 3-D (arousal, valence, dominance) emotional space. The frame-level features for modeling are extracted from each audio clip and combined with functionals to estimate long term temporal patterns over the duration of the clip. Experimental results show that the regression models provide similar categorical performance as the more popular Gaussian Mixture Models. They are also capable of predicting accurate affective ratings on continuous scales, achieving 62-67% 3-class accuracy and 0.69-0.75 correlation with human ratings, higher than comparable numbers in literature.
The global prevalence of English language is interpreted through two conflicting views: one being a Global English paradigm which, it is said, oppresses non-native English speakers (Phillipson, 1992); and the other, the World Englishes paradigm, in which speakers liberate themselves from binding linguistic norms by adhering to their own culture and mother language creating a version of heteroglossic, or pluralized English language (Kachru, 1992: 11). A boon in settling the arguments between former and the latter is a description of the context in which English language teaching and English language learning is carried out. The particular context of EFL from which I will describe my observations, takes place in secondary education. I am convinced that in the context of my work I have found some evidence showing that, although Japanese curriculum focuses on acrolectal forms, that is learning English for external communication using external standards of formal language (Yano, 2001: 123); in an instance of curriculum change, when the focus changes to basilectal forms, meaning less prestigious language, the indigenization of English takes place. Given this, I will show how formal (EFL) education can display characteristics of the two paradigms affecting one context simultaneously. The interplay between Global English and World Englishes paradigms results in a merger, creating a dual-existence view in the classroom. As an aid to this description, an English language relation with Japanese society, as well as current issues in EFL will be provided. A discussion about what can be done in this intricate context will follow. In addition, this paper intends to underpin the notion of the English language having the ability to carry and maintain a different culture (Mahboob, 2009: 183), thereby undermining the claims of the existence of linguistic imperialism in the expanding circle. Finally, a short description of the curriculum and a small sample of students' creative work will be provided to support my conclusions.
A new operationalization was used to model a schema-based approach to moral judgment, as well as compare it to predictions based on the Social Intuitionist Model. Judgments were made about the moral wrongness of killing different animals. At Time 1, only moral judgments were made. At Time 2 judgments were made again, with questions and scales relating to attributing morally relevant cognitive capacities also included; further, two randomized conditions varied the presentation order of the scales. Differences between Time 1 and 2 indicated a reversed perspective-taking effect, with animals of lower capacities rated less empathically at Time 2. Affective ratings and attributed capacities were compared as different predictors, showing attributed capacities being more powerful. A group comparison was also made between active animal rights proponents and non-proponents, showing differences on several factors. These and other findings are discussed with relation to the Social Intuitionist Model and a schema-based account of morality.
This file contains the guidelines, which were employed to administer the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) [1] and the productivity questionnaire to the participants of the experiment reported in [2]. The guidelines have been written by following the technical manual by Lang et al. [3]. This document will be updated while preparing the camera-ready version of the paper. The camera-ready version of the paper will be made available on Figshare as well (the publisher permits that) [1] Bradley, L.: Measuring emotion: the self-assessment semantic differential. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry. 25, 1, 49–59 (1994).<br>[2] Graziotin, D., Wang, X., & Abrahamsson, P.. Are Happy Developers more Productive? The Correlation of Affective States of Software Developers and their self-assessed Productivity. In Product-Focused Software Process Improvement,. Paphos, Cyprus. Springer Verlag. In Press (2013).<br>[3] Lang, P.J. et al.: International affective picture system (IAPS): Technical manual and affective ratings. Gainesville FL NIMH Center for the study of emotion and attention University of Florida. Technical Report A–6 (1999).
Introduction: The Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) is considered the gold standard of attachment assessment, but is expensive and time consuming. The Relationship Scale Questionaire (RSQ) is a self-report assessment of attachment, but measures different constructs. Objectives: We investigated how each measure correlates with brain activity in attachment-related tasks: conscious valence and salience appraisal of mother's face. Methods: 28 female subjects ages 18–30 were given the AAI and RSQ. Using fMRI subjects viewed pictures of their mother and were asked to rate how good the image made them feel (valence rating) and how related they felt (salience rating). Brain activity correlating with AAI and RSQ measures of attachment security and dismissingness was determined by linear regression. Results: Salience processing and valence processing were associated with increased thalamo-striatal, posterior cingulate and visual cortex activity. Salience processing was associated with bilateral decrease in PFC activity. In salience processing AAI secure subjects had attenuated visual cortex response and increased lingual gyrus activity while RSQ secure subjects had decreased right temporal lobe activity and AAI dismissing subjects had enhanced left PFC deactiviation while RSQ dismissing subjects had increased left temporal pole and visual cortex activity. In valence processing RSQ secure subjects demonstrated increased left insula activity and AAI dismissing subjects demonstrated bilateral increase in thalamic and posterior cingulate activation. Conclusions: AAI and RSQ measures of attachment measure different constructs with divergent patterns of associated brain activity. AAI measures of attachment tap midline structures (pre-reflective/unconscious attachment processing), while RSQ measures tap lateral structures (cognitive/conscious attachment processing).
It is generally accepted that a discourse connective expresses a semantic and/or pragmatic relation between its matrix sentence or clause and something in the previous discourse. Usually the sense of this relation is expressed as a label, often within a hierarchy of sense labels. But the meaning of these labels may vary from system to system, and the same connective may be assigned different labels in different systems. Given this, we might learn more and make better predictions if (i) sense labels were associated with (some of) their entailments and (ii) connectives were characterized in terms of both their formal properties and their use conditions. I’ll give examples of both. The above-mentioned predictions tie in with an interesting property of Penn Discourse TreeBank annotation. Annotators were allowed to assign multiple sense labels to a single connective, to imply that all the senses held simultaneously. For those cases where adjacent sentences lacked an intervening connective, annotators were instructed to try to insert one or more connectives that (together) expressed the relation(s) between the sentences. Here too, in many cases, annotators inserted a single connective to which they assigned multiple meanings, Other times they inserted multiple connectives to convey the relation(s) they took as being expressed. Some of this will be shown to make more sense in terms of the entailments and formal properties of the connectives than in terms of any sense labels. I’ll close by trying to distinguish discourse connectives that are associated with coordinating or subordinating relations between sentences or clauses, which is an feature of discourse structure, from those connectives that simply convey additional relevant semantic or pragmatic content.
Objective To explore the clinical effect of operation fixation in hip dislocation with acetabular posterior wall fracture and the influencing factors on prognosis.Methods 35 cases diagnosed as hip dislocation with acetabular posterior wall fracture were treated with reconstruction plate internal fixation through K-L approach.Results 35 cases were followed up for 2 years ～ 5 years and 4 months.Modified Merle d' Aubingne-Postel scoring system was used for clinical assessing: excellent in 16 cases,good in 12,fair in 4,and poor in 3.Matta imaging ratings: excellent in 13 cases,good in 16,fair in 5,and poor in 1.Clinical results and X-ray ratings was significantly positive correlation.The patients with age ≥55y or the reduction time ≥12h or complex type fracture showed a significant decrease in the clinical scoring.Conclusions Instantaneous diagnosis and reduction,restoration of acetabular continuity and stability are the keys of successful treatment.Patient age,reduction time and fracture type are important factors for the prognosis.
We describe two free, open-source applications developed as language-independent aids for linguists and language revitalization workers of all sorts. The first application, LingSync, is a linguistic database application which facilitates collaboration and encourages openness between linguists and the speakers they work with; the second, Learn [Language] is a language-teaching and language-learning aid geared towards learners of heritage minority languages who may still have speakers in their lives. \nRésumé \nNous décrivons deux applications gratuites et open source développées comme auxiliaires indépendants de la langue pour les linguistes et les travailleurs de revitalisation linguistique de toutes sortes. La première application, LingSync, est une application de banque de données linguistique qui facilite la collaboration et encourage l’ouverture entre linguistes et les locuteurs avec lesquels ils travaillent, la seconde, Learn [langue] est une aide à l’enseignement des langues et l’apprentissage des langues orientée vers les apprenants de langues minoritaires qui ont encore des locuteurs dans leur vie.
본 연구는 대구광역시를 대상으로 대표 이미지와 환경 이미지를 중심으로 도시이미지의 인지 변화를 파악하고자 설문조사를 실시하여, 대구시민과 타 지역 주민 집단 및 지난 10여 년간의 경시적 변화를 비교 고찰하였다. 주요 결과는 다음과 같이 요약된다. 첫째, 대구에 대한 대표 이미지로서 가장 먼저 떠오르는 것은 더위, 팔공산, 섬유 등이며, 가장 먼저 떠오르는 장소는 팔공산, 동성로, 이월드 등이었다. 10여 년 전과 비교했을 때, 대구의 대표 연상이미지로 사과와 섬유의 빈도가 현저히 줄어들고 있으며, 연상인물로는 과거에는 주로 정치인들이 많았지만, 요즘은 스포츠선수 연예인 등의 빈도가 높아져 세태 변화를 보여주었다. 둘째, 환경조건에 대한 이미지 평가 점수는 인간환경 부문에 대한 것이 가장 높았으며, 개별 변수로는 "대구로 접근하기 위한 교통조건", "여성의 이미지", "쇼핑 등 생활환경" 등이 높게 평가되었다. 지역 내외 집단 간에는 대구시민들의 평가보다는 타 지역 주민들의 평가가 대체로 높은 편이었으며, 2000년도 자료와 비교할 때 금회(2011년도) 평가치들이 전반적으로 높게 나타났다. 셋째, 대구시의 환경이미지에 영향을 주는 중요 요인 변수들로는 인간환경 요인 이 가장 큰 영향을 미치는 요인으로 나타났으며, 그 다음 "자연/기반환경 요인", "생활환경 요인" 및 "교통환경 요인" 등의 순으로 영향력이 큰 요인들로 나타났다. 이러한 연구결과는 대구시의 도시이미지의 변화특성을 파악함으로써 경관형성 계획의 정책적 제안 및 도시 브랜드이미지 제고를 위한 기초자료로 활용될 수 있을 것이다. This paper deals with a comparative analysis of changes in cognition of city image of Daegu City, focusing on image of representative and environmental conditions. Two-questionnaire surveys were conducted to compare the change of image cognition between the last decades. Major results are: Firstly, the most frequent representative images of Daegu City were hot weather, Palgong Mountain, textile industry, etc. and representative places were Palgong Mountain, Dongsung-ro Street, E world(Woobang Land), etc. Compared to the results of year 2000, the frequency of apple, and textile industry were remarkably decreased. Secondly, mean scores of image rating for environmental conditions were comparatively high in human environment such as women, and kindness. By individual variables, accessibility to Daegu City, women, living environment such as shopping, showed higher mean scores. Generally, mean scores of 2011 survey were higher than that of 2000. Thirdly, major factors affecting city image were human environment, living environment, natural environment, and transportation environment, respectively. These results can be used as a basic data for strategies to improve higher brand image of Daegu City.
В статті аналізуються дискусійні проблеми сучасної світової архітектури, зокрема реформа МВФ, позиції долара в міжнародних валютно-кредитних відносинах, роль золота в резервах країн. Розглядається значення світових рей- тингових агенцій та їх вплив на економічний розвиток країн, нова політика промислово розвинутих країн щодо оф- шорних зон. Ключові слова: світова фінансова криза, сучасна світова архітектура, політика кількісних пом'якшень, криза суве- ренних боргів, транснаціональні банки. А. Рогач, д-р экон. наук, проф. КНУ имени Тараса Шевченко, Киев ПОИСК ПУТЕЙ РЕФОРМИРОВАНИЯ МИРОВОЙ ФИНАНСОВОЙ АРХИТЕКТУРЫ В статье анализируются дискуссионные проблемы современной мировой архитектуры, в частности реформа МВФ, позиции дол- лара в международных валютно-кредитных отношениях, роль золота в резервах стран. Рассматривается значение мировых рейтин- говых агентств и их влияние на экономическое развитие стран, новая политика промышленно развитых стран в отношении офф- шорных зон. Ключевые слова: мировой финансовый кризис, современная мировая архитектура, политика количественных смягчений, кризис суверенных долгов, транснациональные банки. O. Rogach, Doctor of Science (economics), Head Kyiv National Taras Shevchenko University, Kyiv SEARCHING FOR WAYS TO REFORM THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL ARCHITECTURE This article analyzes discussion problems of the world financial architecture with the focus on the IMF reform, the role of dollar in the international finance and gold as the reserve currency. Also this paper considers the impact of the leading word rating agencies on the economic development and finance, and new economic policy of the developed market economy countries for the offshore areas. Keywords: world financial crises, new global architecture, quantitative easening, sovereign debt crises, multinational banks.
This magister degree project is a quantitative, real-time study concerning Swedes’ pronunciation of English, their choice of English accent and the degree of mixing of accents by individual speakers. The informants of the study are Swedish television journalists who speak English on television, in various interview situations. In order to determine which accent/s the journalists adopt, the classical RP/GA differences have been observed. For the purpose of the study a corpus of television clips was created, using The Swedish Media Database (Svensk Mediedatabas). The time span of the gathered material stretches from 1970 until 2009, covering four full decades. The speech of TV journalists is particularly interesting from a sociolinguistic point of view, as it can be argued that it is a form of performed speech where the concern for linguistic norm or context appropriateness is higher than in normal speech. The accent that the journalists adopt could therefore be particularly indicative of which English accent is considered most prestigious or most appropriate, among Swedish speakers. British English was the exclusive educational norm in Sweden until 1994 when American English was accepted as an alternative. Students have since been encouraged to choose one of these accents and to avoid mixing of accents. At the same time Swedish speakers are increasingly exposed to American English through media. The hypothesis underlying this study was therefore that we should see a growing tendency in favour of American English in the journalists’ speech and that the tendency to mix accents would be less frequent in earlier years and more common today. Results of the study show a very modest increase of American accent, which peaks in the 1990s and seems to abate by 2000. The data indicates a surprisingly stable situation in favour of British English over the four decades, with a general 30-40 percent mix of American English features. All the informants mix accents, typically up to 30 percent, already in the 1970s. The data cannot fully confirm an increasing American English influence on Swedes’ choice of English accent. However, the study indicates that mixing of accents is, and has been, a common and probably inevitable phenomenon.
In this dissertation, the robustness of the relationship between the lexical frequency of phonotactic patterns and word-acceptability is examined for words of Amharic, an understudied Semitic language. The patterns under investigation span the whole verb root and include both under-represented and over-represented consonant distributions in the lexicon. A state-of-the-art probabilistic model, the Maximum Entropy phonotactic learner, is used to acquire a phonotactic grammar from the input (the lexicon) and the predictions of that grammar are compared with the results of two Amharic nonce-word rating tasks designed specifically to investigate a range of consonantal phonotactic patterns. The first task investigates consonant co-occurrence patterns (homorganic consonants, identical consonants, and fricatives). In the Amharic verb lexicon, identical consonants are under- represented in some locations and over-represented in others whereas homorganic consonants and fricatives (a previously unknown pattern independently acquired by the model) are under-represented. The phonotactic learner successfully learned the under-represented patterns and the comparison between the model predictions and the experimental results show evidence for a relationship between lexical frequency and word acceptability for under -representation. However, speaker judgements show no preference for over-representation. The second task examines the distribution of single consonants within the verb root with respect to under-representation, over- representation and positional restrictions. Evidence for a relationship between lexical frequency and phonotactic probability was observed for both under-represented and over-represented consonants, but tied to a particular location. The correlation between speaker judgments and model predictions is low for this task, due in part to the way the model deals with over-representation. This investigation demonstrates not only that word acceptability is influenced by phonotactic probability for both under-represented and over-represented patterns, but also that probabilistic models can be used to investigate the phonotactics of a language, even in the absence of speaker judgement data. These models can therefore be used to assess the phonotactics of languages where experimental data is difficult to obtain and broaden our knowledge of phonotactic typology
Dear readers, it seems now, that after the years of repeated attempts to amend the law on higher education, the effort gets clearer contours in the form of the extensive amendment to the law. It is true that before this amendment comes into force, it has to pass through the legislative process. Nevertheless, it is possible to ask the question yet, what can the proposed change bring to the university environment. At the outset, I must say that I am not really sure, whether we actually know, what the weaknesses of our universities are, and the most importantly, whether we do know how to deal with them. In my opinion, the basic problem is that we hear often about the need for fundamental reform of higher education, but the specific reasons are not usually discussed. It seems to me that the conclusion on the state of the whole higher school system is based on the obvious problems and the low level of one school. The analysis restricts to finding that schools are falling behind the world's prestigious universities and instructions slip into "you need to improve quality". These ideas are true, but they are too general for our search for the successful future of our higher education. If we want to increase the level of our colleges, we have to on the one hand very specifically describe, with knowledge of the conditions of our current higher education, what are the main problems of particular disciplines, and define the objectives we should achieve on the other hand. And then we should deduce the specific steps that will our colleges take to go in the right direction. If we look at the basic points of the amendment to the law, it cloud seem that it goes in this direction. It cannot be denied that the accent in the changes to law is on improving the quality of higher education, schools themselves should set up a body for internal quality assessment that evaluate the quality and to take measures for quality assurance. Enhancing the status of the National accrediting agency, as a guardian of the level and quality of our higher education, might be considered to be a significant change too. European Financial and Accounting Journal, 2013, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 4-6. 5 However, the important question still remains whether we are actually able to measure quality reliably and meaningfully. The measurement often slips to quantification of what can be quantified (and the meaningfulness of the quantification and implications it will bring stand aside), or it slips to the word rating, which in turn often results into reports which fail to find its attentive readers and does not provide usable information on the current state and ways to improve it in the first place. This is the main reason why I am quite sceptical whether the creation of an authority for the internal evaluation of quality will bring something new to the situation. The change in the status of the Accreditation Agency will not make itself the difference to its activities. In my opinion, there still remains the question whether the concept of agency of which members come from institutions that are the subject of accreditation, is able objectively to assess the quality of the schools and disciplines. Introduced institutional accreditation might free up capacity for the evaluation of applications for accreditation of schools that require "more attention", but does not solve the above problems. And so the question remains whether the amendment to the Act will have a real impact on quality of our universities. What is indisputable, however, is a relatively large administrative burden, which will be connected with the new accreditation of programmes, with the establishment of the authority for the internal quality assessment or with changing of many internal regulations of universities. It's not that the aims embodied in the amendment to the Act were flawed. I am afraid, however, that the changes will take place at the administrative level. The level of schools stems in reality from something else. It is primarily determined by the attitude and the responsibility of students and teachers, their interest and motivation to learn as much as possible, to discover something new and to take care of their school's reputation. And this all cannot be changed by any law. The change can be made only by competition between schools and by the pressure of employers for graduates' standards. It would be therefore better not to expect too much from the change of the law. We would rather not believe too much in the ability of some authority to inspect and review objectively the quality of schools. Let's learn that just as we select a car for its make, we need to choose a college for its name - whether we select a school where we want to study or from where we will employ graduates. We must not forget that as long as there is demand for titles PREFACE - DvoĹĂĄk, P.: About The Amendment to the Law on Higher Education. 6 without adequate knowledge, there are schools without the required quality. Fortunately, these schools are not determining the level of our higher education!
Factors Related to Undergraduate Psychology Majors Learning Statistics Tamarah Faye Smith Doctor of Philosophy: Educational Psychology Major Advisor: Dr. Frank Farley The American Psychological Association (APA) has outlined goals for psychology undergraduates. These goals are aimed at several objectives including the need to build skills for interpreting and conducting psychological research (APA, 2007). These skills allow psychologists to conduct research that is covered in the media (Farley et al. 2009) and influences policy and law (Fischer, Stein & Heikkinen, 2009; Steinberg, Cauffman, Woolard, Graham & Banich, 2009a; Steinberg, Cauffman, Woolard, Graham & Banich, 2009b). One of the fundamental courses required for building these skills is statistics, a course that begins at the undergraduate level. Research has suggested that performance after completing statistics courses is weak for many students (Garfield, 2003; Hirsch & O'Donnell, 2001; Konold et al. 1993; Mulhern & Wylie, 2005; Schau & Mattern, 1997). The current study examined factors that may be related to performance on a statistical test. A sample of 231 students enrolled in or having already completed a statistics course for psychology majors completed a statistical skill questionnaire, built by the author, to measure performance with four APA outlined goals. To measure student attitudes the Survey of Attitudes Toward Statistics (SATS-36; Schau, 2003) was completed with adapted questions to measure perceived attitudes of peers and faculty toward statistics. Finally, questions pertaining to classroom techniques and content areas covered were assessed. Building off of social cognitive theory (SCT; Bandura, 1986) and expectancy-value theory (Eccles & Wigfield, 2002), it was expected that lower attitudes, such as low value and low interest, among the students and those perceived to be held by faculty and peers would be related to lower performance on the statistical test. A series of linear regressions were conducted and revealed no significant relationship between perceived faculty attitudes and performance. Students' own liking and positive affect ratings were positive predictors of performance indicating a gain of 3-4% on the statistical test. However, an interesting negative relationship emerged with respect to students' value of statistics and peer interest scores where performance on the statistical test decreased as value and peer interest increased. This may be demonstrating issues pertaining to the SATS-36 validity when measuring students' value as well as issues with the items created to measure perceived peer interest. The results of a factor analysis on perceived attitude measures for peers and faculty suggest that the need for more items is necessary, particularly for faculty attitudes. Finally, this study provides a first look at the performance of a sample of psychology students with APA goals for quantitative reasoning. Results showed that students performed best at reading basic descriptive statistics (M=74.5%), and worst when choosing statistical tests for a given research hypothesis (M=30%). Performance on questions pertaining to confidence intervals (M=38%) and discriminating between statistical and practical significance (M=39%) was also low. Future research can address limitations of this study by expanding the sample to include a broader range of psychology undergraduates and including additional items for measuring perceived attitudes. Other methodological approaches, such as experimental design and directly measuring faculty attitudes, should also be considered. Finally, further research and replication are necessary to determine if scores on the statistical test will continue to be low with other samples and varying question formats. These results can then be used to generate conversation about why and how students are, or are not, learning the appropriate quantitative skills.
Emily Dickinson is exemplary exactly in her extremity. Her lyric stands for lyric as such. In her, compression is extent, omissions demand elaborations. Her very privacy is a public intervention. She attests and tests the limits of lyric, as well as its limitlessness.The potential reach of Dickinson's condensed texts is reflected in this collection of essays engaging Dickinson across the world. Such a project immediately entails its own set of questions: what marks the borders for discussing “reception”? How are the categories of nation, language, or culture to be demarcated and defined, and what might govern their interrelationship? What aspects of reception are cogent? Scholarly, popular, elite, performative? What is the role and what are the possibilities of translation, with its fraught theoretical and practical problems? What interpretive frameworks does Dickinson's work call for or conform to?The essays collected in The International Reception of Emily Dickinson address these questions to different degrees and with different emphases, enacting them in ways that vary according to each cultural forum. Most essays are grouped around a national rubric: Dickinson in the Low Countries (by Marian de Vooght), in Norway (by Domhnall Mitchell), in Sweden (by Lennart Nyberg), in Portugal (by Ana Luisa Amaral and Marinela Freitas), in Brazil (by Carlos Daghlian), in Japan (by Masako Takeda), in England and Ireland (by Maria Stuart), in Australia (by Joan Kirkby). Some adopt essentially linguistic borders: Dickinson in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (by Sabine Sielke); in francophone Europe and North America (by David Palmieri); in Hebrew (by Lilach Lachman); in Slavic traditions (by Anna Chenokova). Within each bounded frame, others emerge, reflecting the interests and traditions these national/linguistic orders themselves deploy. The result is Dickinson reading different cultures as much as different cultures reading Dickinson.The opening essay by Sabine Sielke on Dickinson in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, for example, in effect offers a history of theoretical engagements with Dickinson. The author thus proceeds to confirm Robert Spiller's remarks on German scholarship as tending “to look at human experience in terms of absolutes and to clear your theoretical positions before proceeding to empirical practices” (8). She fulfills her own description of Germanic literary study as theoretically inclined, emerging out of the idealist-phenomenological philosophical traditions of German thought. This essay accordingly traces Dickinson studies through its categories of formalism, modernism, transcendentalism, gender, and New Historicism.The second essay by David Palmieri on francophone Dickinson studies, however, turns from theory to translation of Dickinson poems, not only into the French language but into French literary culture, as deployed through psychoanalysis and symbolism. “Puritanisme” becomes a French category. Dickinson comes to share French views of America. Over time and somewhat slowly, Dickinson thus comes to join Whitman but mainly Poe—who the French, in Baudelaire's translations, read as French—as an American classic.It is impossible here to review each approach offered through the course of the essays in this collection. All the essays offer a cogent account of the main figures, scholarship, translations, editions, chronologies, and genres–including music, drama, cinema and art—associated with Dickinson's appearance and emergence within each national-linguistic world. Formalism, modernism, and gender are recurring topics, often tracing a literary and cultural history—Domnhall Mitchell emphasizes, as do others, the institutional strata of Dickinson's reception via libraries, curricula, university settings, and the development of American studies—in each language/territory. As Lilach Lachman reflects, changing approaches to Dickinson “reveal differing preferences and practices of poetry, but also a change in zeitgeist that is historical and cultural (156).” The portraits of Dickinson that emerge are equally portraits of each cultural world, often, as Maria Stuart traces, through misreadings, not least across such overlapping cultural boundaries as American, Irish, Australian and British English. Dickinson, despite her being so emphatically circumscribed both geographically and culturally, finds astonishing recognition across great distances—as seen in Masako Takeda's discussion of Dickinson in terms of haiku.On the whole Dickinson's own historical specificity is less emphasized in the essays. Her religious and political contexts tend to be viewed in terms of the religion and politics of the receivers—as is especially evident and impelling in Anna Chesnokova's account of Dickinson in the Slavic world reaching from Russia through the Ukraine and across the Cold War and the revolutionary changes that came with the fall of the Soviet Union. It is rather the texts, in all their mysterious resistances, that travel best. Indeed, what emerges is a striking number of individual encounters, where a poet or scholar or translator, transformed by Dickinson's own reclusive biography and poetics, begins groundbreaking work that inaugurates new literary histories. This collection, to me, attests to the enduring strength of immediate confrontation with Dickinson, even as this confrontation arises out of and then contributes to shaping wider cultural events and courses.What aesthetic norms might be inferred from these wide-ranging and variegated discussions of Dickinson, across national and linguistic and, not least, interpretive borders? Dickinson writes of “[s]preading wide my narrow hands to gather Paradise.” Her texts indeed gather into their intense condensation a great range of interests: philosophical, psychological, religious, ethical, historical, political, gendered. Far from constructing an exclusionary realm of language reflecting on language—a reading Dickinson tempts in her verbal intensities and fracturing of linguistic norms—Dickinson's poetry ultimately insists on the intersection of different fields and territories of experience in mutual interrogation and investigation. This, I would argue, is the aesthetic that emerges—surprisingly and yet also inexorably—out of the cross-cultural experiences of Dickinson assembled in this collection: the lyric as a site of encounter among multiple and variant fields of experience.
Self-regulatory trainings can be an effective complementary treatment for mental health disorders. We investigated the effects of a six-week-focused meditation training on emotion and attention regulation in undergraduates randomly allocated to a meditation, a relaxation, or a wait-list control group. Assessment comprised a discrimination task that investigates the relationship between attentional load and emotional processing and self-report measures. For emotion regulation, results showed greater reduction in emotional interference in the low attentional load condition in meditators, particularly compared to relaxation. Only meditators presented a significant association between amount of weekly practice and the reduction in emotion interference in the task and significantly reduced image ratings of negative valence and arousal, perceived anxiety and difficulty during the task, and state and trait-anxiety. For attention regulation, response bias during the task was analyzed through signal detection theory. After training, meditation and relaxation significantly reduced bias in the high attentional load condition. Importantly, there was a doseresponse effect on general bias: the lowest in meditation, increasing linearly across relaxation and wait-list. Only meditators reduced omissions in a concentrated attention test. Focused meditation seems to be an effective training for emotion and attention regulation and an alternative for treatments in the mental health context.
Despite a common desire for physically attractive partners, people tend to end up with mates of a similar level of physical attractiveness to themselves. This study proposed an adaptive mate effort calibration system, whereby greater length of time without mating success (sexual/romantic drought) decreases the level of physical attractiveness deemed minimally acceptable in a mate, and increases attraction towards potential partners who display interest. Such a system would allow for an individual’s mate effort to be balanced between pursuing the most desirable attractive potential mates, and pursuing the potential mates with whom there is the greatest chance of mating success. Four hundred (200 female) participants took part in an online study. To manipulate display of interest, smiling and non-smiling photos of participant’s preferred sex were presented and rated for physical attractiveness and willingness-to-date. Sexual/romantic drought was measured via self-report of recent sexual and romantic activity. Two predictions were made: 1) Length of sexual/romantic drought will not affect ratings of physical attractiveness, but it will affect choosiness as measured by ‘willingness to date’, such that a longer drought is associated with willingness to date less attractive individuals. 2) Length of sexual/romantic drought will increase attraction to smiling (i.e. potentially interested) individuals, such that participants in a longer drought will show a greater differential between smiling and non-smiling photos in terms of attractiveness and willingness-to-date ratings. Both predictions were unsupported. However, a marginally significant interaction was consistent with the general theory of mate effort calibration; participants perceiving less sexual interest from the opposite-sex in day-to-day life were more willing-to-date individuals they found less physically attractive. Limitations of the present study and directions for future research are discussed.
This chapter proposes a generalized paradigm function (GPF), comprising four separate functions defined over each of the four attributes of the lexical entry, FORM, SYN, SEM, LI, and mapping a pairing of 〈LI, {feature set}〉 to some representation. In the case of vanilla inflectional morphology the GPF applies trivially to the SYN, SEM, LI attributes and introduces no change. It therefore reduces to the paradigm function of classical PFM. However, for regular and productive derivational morphology the generalized paradigm function introduces non-trivial changes to all four attributes, including the lexemic index, LI, thus defining a new lexeme in the lexical database. The GPF is also deployed to define the notion ‘lexical entry’ itself: the FORM, SYN, and SEM components are defined over a pairing of the LI and the empty or unspecified feature set, u, so for the two homophonous verb lexemes DRAW1 and DRAW2, the FORM is defined as FORM(DRAW1, u) = FORM(DRAW2, u) = /draw/, while the SEM functions deliver distinct semantic representations for the two lexemes. The model includes a default principle specific to lexeme(LI)-changing morphology, the Derived Lexical Entry Principle: where a generalized paradigm function defines a new LI, either the properties are specified directly by the appropriate component of the generalized paradigm function, or they are replaced by underspecified values. For instance, if DRIVER has a SEM value ‘person who drives (something)’, the SYN attribute and the inflectional properties of the derived lexeme are replaced by the empty property set u. By the ‘Default Cascade’ the derived word will default to a noun syntactically (since DRIVER is ontologically a Thing) and hence morphologically to a noun. Inflecting words are given a morpholexical signature, which defines their morphological category and the features they inflect for. By default, this signature is derived from the SYN representation, but that default can be overridden to account for mismatches (e.g. nouns that inflect like adjectives). The GPF can now be used to define all the intermediate types of lexical relatedness. For instance, a transposition introduces non-trivial changes to the FORM and SYN attributes without changing the SEM and LI attributes, while meaning-bearing (inherent) inflection changes the FORM and SEM attributes without changing the SYN and LI attributes.
Ces dernières années ont vu un regain d’intérêt dans l’utilisation de données semi-structurées, grâce à la standardisation de formats d’échange de données sur le Web tels que XML et RDF. On notera en particulier le Linking Open Data Project qui comptait plus de 31 milliard de triplets RDF à la fin de l’année 2011. XML reste, pour sa part, l’un des formats de données privilégié de nombreuses bases de données de grandes tailles dont Uniprot, Open Government Initiative et Penn Treebank. Cet accroissement du volume de données semi-structurées a suscité un intérêt croissant pour le développement de bases de données adaptées. Parmi les différentes approches proposées, on peut distinguer les approches relationnelles et les approches graphes, comme détaillé au Chapitre 3. Les premières visent à exploiter les moteurs de bases de données relationnelles existants, en y intégrant des techniques spécialisées. Les secondes voient les données semistructurées comme des graphes, c’est-à-dire un ensemble de noeuds liés entre eux par des arêtes étiquetées, dont elles exploitent la structure. L’une des techniques de ce domaine, connue sous le nom d’indexation structurelle, vise à résumer les graphes de données, de sorte à pouvoir identifier rapidement les données utiles au traitement d’une requête. Les index structurels classiques sont construits sur base des notions de simulation et de bisimulation sur des graphes. Ces notions, qui sont d’usage dans de nombreux domaines tels que la vérification, la sécurité, et le stockage de données, sont des relations sur les noeuds des graphes. Fondamentalement, ces notions caractérisent le fait que deux noeuds partagent certaines caractéristiques telles qu’un même voisinage. Bien que les approches graphes soient efficaces en pratique, elles présentent des limitations dans le cadre de RDF et son langage de requêtes SPARQL. Les étiquettes sont, dans cette optique, distinctes des noeuds du graphe.Dans le modèle décrit par RDF et supporté par SPARQL, les étiquettes et noeuds font néanmoins partie du même ensemble. C’est pourquoi, les approches graphes ne supportent qu’un sous-ensemble des requêtes SPARQL. Au contraire, les approches relationnelles sont fidèles au modèle RDF, et peuvent répondre au différentes requêtes SPARQL. La question à laquelle nous souhaitons répondre dans cette thèse est de savoir si les approches relationnelles et graphes sont incompatible, ou s’il est possible de les combiner de manière avantageuse. En particulier, il serait souhaitable de pouvoir conserver la performance des approches graphe, et la généralité des approches relationnelles. Dans ce cadre, nous réalisons un index structurel adapté aux données relationnelles. Nous nous basons sur une méthodologie décrite par Fletcher et ses coauteurs pour la conception d’index structurels. Cette méthodologie repose sur trois composants principaux. Un premier composant est une caractérisation dite structurelle du langage de requêtes à supporter. Il s’agit ici de pouvoir identifier les données qui sont retournées en même temps par n’importe quelle requête du langage aussi précisément que possible. Un second composant est un algorithme qui doit permettre de grouper efficacement les données qui sont retournées en même temps, d’après la caractérisation structurelle. Le troisième composant est l’index en tant que tel. Il s’agit d’une structure de données qui doit permettre d’identifier les groupes de données, générés par l’algorithme précédent pour répondre aux requêtes. Dans un premier temps, il faut remarquer que le langage SPARQL pris dans sa totalité ne se prête pas à la réalisation d’index structurels efficaces. En effet, le fondement des requêtes SPARQL se situe dans l’expression de requêtes conjonctives. La caractérisation structurelle des requêtes conjonctives est connue, mais ne se prête pas à la construction d’algorithmes efficaces pour le groupement. Néanmoins, l’étude empirique des requêtes SPARQL posées en pratique que nous réalisons au Chapitre 5 montre que celles-ci sont principalement des requêtes conjonctives acycliques. Les requêtes conjonctives acycliques sont connues dans la littérature pour admettre des algorithmes d’évaluation efficaces. Le premier composant de notre index structurel, introduit au Chapitre 6, est une caractérisation des requêtes conjonctives acycliques. Cette caractérisation est faite en termes de guarded simulation. Pour les graphes la notion de simulation est une version restreinte de la notion de bisimulation. Similairement, nous introduisons la notion de guarded simulation comme une restriction de la notion de guarded bisimulation, une extension connue de la notion de bisimulation aux données relationelles. Le Chapitre 7 offre un second composant de notre index structurel. Ce composant est une structure de données appelée guarded structural index qui supporte le traitement de requêtes conjonctives quelconques. Nous montrons que, couplé à la caractérisation structurelle précédente, cet index permet d’identifier de manière optimale les données utiles au traitement de requêtes conjonctives acycliques. Le Chapitre 8 constitue le troisième composant de notre index structurel et propose des méthodes efficaces pour calculer la notion de guarded simulation. Notre algorithme consiste essentiellement en une transformation d’une base de données en un graphe particulier, sur lequel les notions de simulation et guarded simulation correspondent. Il devient alors possible de réutiliser les algorithmes existants pour calculer des relations de simulation. Si les chapitres précédents définissent une base nécessaire pour un index structurel visant les données relationnelles, ils n’intègrent pas encore cet index dans le contexte d’un moteur de bases de données relationnelles. C’est ce que propose le Chapitre 9, en développant des méthodes qui permettent de prendre en compte l’index durant le traitement d’une requête SPARQL. Des résultats expérimentaux probants complètent cette étude. Ce travail apporte donc une première réponse positive à la question de savoir s’il est possible de combiner de manière avantageuse les approches relationnelles et graphes de stockage de données RDF.
Modern linguistics aims its research at solving applied problems. Promising in this aspect is database technologies. The purpose of this work is to undertake a review of research in the field of linguistic databases, and to provide an option of structuring the lexical-semantic field of sounding and the parameterization of the semantics of lexical units that form this area. At present, the computer representation of information in the form of databases is used in various fields of linguistics and applied linguistics, including lexicography when creating traditional and electronic dictionaries. This paper presents a database project that allows to structurally present the conceptual sphere sounding. When analyzing words with the semantics of sound it is necessary, first, to establish the limits of the lexical-semantic field, and, second, to investigate its structure in terms of the possibility of its submitting to the database. To get the most complete picture of the material it is necessary to include the projected resource of a wide range of units, but in view of their non-equivalent positions. The core of the database, as well as the core of the lexical-semantic field, is verbs. The next step in creating a database is to parameterize the semantics of separate language units to present them as tables. The description of the semantic information needs additional structuring. Fixing the transferred lexico-semantic variants is possible due to the introduction of key identifiers in the numerical form, which will allow representing the variants as separate entries in the table, but the same form of words, as well as an indication of the type of the meaning, will establish their identity. Multimedia technology allows to supplement linguistic data with information of other kinds to include the units nominating different types of sounding, audio or video records that capture the type of sounding, the subject and the action. The creation of such resources will allow to effectively and quickly obtain information about the composition of lexical units forming a certain semantic sphere, the structure of the meaning, metaphoric and metonymic models operating in the sphere. Such a database could be used in the educational process as a lexicographical source in teaching courses of Lexicography, Lexicology, Linguistic Culturology, Language Picture of the World, Russian as a Foreign Language, etc.
of a dissertation at the University of Miami. Dissertation supervised by Professor Alexandra L. Quittner No. of pages in text. (70) Objective: CF is a progressive, life-shortening disease treated primarily with palliative medications. Among the consequences of the disease’s progression and daily treatments are discomfort and pain. Previous studies have suggested that pain is common in patients with CF; however, little is known about the factors associated with this pain or its impact on clinical outcomes. The relationships between pain and health outcomes over time, such as adherence and health-related quality of life (HRQOL), are largely unknown in this population. The purpose of this study was to systematically assess pain in adolescents with CF and evaluate its associations with adherence, social support, and HRQOL over a six-month period. Methods: The current study is part of a multi-center NIH SBIR Phase II randomized, controlled trial. The sample consisted of 95 participants, with a mean age of 15.69. Participants completed a battery of measures during three consecutive clinic visits, approximately 3 months apart. Participants also completed an online pain diary for the 6 days following each clinic visit. Diaries assessed pain intensity, location, duration, affective rating, and coping responses. Results: Overall, 73% of participants completed one or more of the online pain diaries across these time points, with 44% of the sample completing all six diaries. Pain was reported by 74.5% of participants. Of those who experienced pain, intensity was generally mild. Daily pain ratings, as assessed by online diaries, were highly variable within participants. Path analyses indicated that worse treatment adherence and poor social functioning were directly related higher pain and ultimately related to worse HRQOL. Conclusions: These results indicated that pain is common in adolescents with CF and that it interferes significantly with HRQOL. Treatment adherence appears to be particularly predictive of pain in this population. Regular assessment of pain and HRQOL is recommended.
INTRODUCTION Investigation of the neural responses of chronic pain have traditionally involved establishing the BOLD fMRI response to acute pain in a nodal network that has been referred to as the ‘pain matrix’ or the ‘pain neuromatrix’ (1). However, Melzack originally used the term ‘matrix’ because the system to which he referred was multimodal in function and lacked specificity. This might explain why, over 20 years after the term was coined, there has been little translational benefit to patients in terms of improved management of chronic pain states despite numerous studies examining the ‘pain matrix response’. The basal ganglia form part of this matrix and are worthy of further investigation. Destruction of nigrostriatal neurones in the ventral basal ganglia are associated with reduced pain thresholds, the inverse effect occurring with nigrostriatal stimulation(2). However, inactivation of the accumbens core in the ventral basal ganglia with local anaesthetic has demonstrated a hyperalgesic response (3). Molecular imaging has been used to examine the differential roles of dorsal and ventral basal ganglia in pain perception (4). These authors found that whilst nigrostriatal D2-dopamine activity correlates with sensory and affective ratings, in accumbens the dopamine response is positively associated with negative affect and fear ratings during pain, aspects of the pain experience that are thought to better explain interindividual variations in chronic pain (5) and response to analgesia. In establishing a region of interest approach to the investigation of chronic pain through the application of acutely painful stimuli, the ventral striatum may therefore be an important target. The role of the ventral striatum in response to aversive stimuli is receiving increasing attention, in counterpart to studies of its responsivity to rewarding stimuli. Recent work (6) suggests that the differential striatal responses to acute pain may provide a meaningful insight into the neural substrates of chronic pain perception, including idiopathic pain disorders and the functional somatic syndromes, where activation of the ‘pain matrix’ as a whole has proved unable to. We have investigated the brain response to somatosensory pain, specifically examining the response of the ventral striatum in contrast to other components of the ‘pain matrix’.
Compared to other mammals, humans are extremely vocal. Using language highly eases the expression of inner states, but there is an evolutionarily more conservative set of vocalizations, the non-verbal vocal bursts (or calls) that play an important role in human emotion expressions. We can draw homologies between some of these calls with mammalian vocalizations: e.g. based on its acoustics, the evolution of human laughter can be derived from pleasure vocalizations of the apes. Humans are also good at recognizing the emotional states of conspecifics based solely on these vocal bursts. Moreover, they can perform surprisingly well in assessing inner states of other species. Several studies showed, for example, that human listeners can attribute probable inner states to dog barks. Dogs are a good source of emotion expressing calls, due to their rich and variable repertoire and the fact that they live with humans for more than thousand years. It is not known, however, whether human listeners use the same acoustic cues to assess emotional content in conspecific and non-conspecific vocalizations. Here we aimed to compare how human listeners rated the emotional content of dog and human non-verbal vocalizations, and also to explore what acoustical parameters affected their responses. \nTo test this, we compiled a pool of 100-100 various types of dog and human non-verbal vocalizations from diverse social contexts, and designed an online survey, in which every sound sample could be rated parallel along two dimensions: emotional valence (ranging from negative to positive) and emotional intensity (ranging from not aroused to maximally aroused). The sound samples were presented in random order for each subject (N=39). We calculated the mean of the valence and intensity scores for each sound sample. We also measured the average length of bursts within each sample (call length), the fundamental frequency (f0) and the harmonics-to-noise ratio (HNR). Comparisons of these acoustic measures showed that on average, dog vocalizations had shorter call lengths and were noisier, but their overall f0 did not differ from the human vocalizations. Valence ratings did not differ across species, but human vocalizations were rated less intense. Importantly, linear regressions revealed similar relationships for human and dog vocalizations between acoustic features and emotional ratings. Call length had a significant effect on valence: both dog and human sounds with shorter call lengths were rated as more positive. F0, in contrast, influenced the intensity scores mainly: both higher pitched human and dog sounds were rated more intense. We also found some species-specific relationships between acoustics and perceptual scores: dog vocalizations with a shorter call length or with a higher harmonics-to-noise ratio were rated less intense. \nIn sum, acoustical parameters affected humans’ emotional ratings independently from the source species of these vocal expressions, despite the acoustical and emotional differences between human and dog vocalizations. These findings suggest that humans utilize the same mental mechanisms for recognizing conspecific and heterospecific vocal emotions. \n
Language, Media, and Social Awareness My first introduction to sociolinguistics came not in a college classroom but in my home as a child, where I was constantly reprimanded by my mother for not pronouncing my “r”s. I remember being confused by her scolding; why did everyone else in my suburban Boston neighborhood – including my father, an English teacher! – seem to drop this sound left and right? “People will think you’re stupid if you talk like that,” my mother would explain to me. One day, I asked my father why he dropped his “r”s. “I’m a product of my environment, not my education!” was his retort. He would later invoke this response in reaction to so many of my smart-aleck comments about his vernacular grammar over the years. (“You says to her, Dad? Do you teach your students that?” or “ ‘I should have gone,’ not ‘I should of went.’ I’m glad you’re not the one taking the SATs next week!”) Years after these formative conversations in my family, I read William Labov’s (1972a) seminal studies on the sociolinguistics of Martha’s Vineyard and New York City department stores. Aside from being astounded by the ingenuity of these studies that empirically presented what I had intuited over the years, these foundational works also made me realize that although my parents’ views on language had always seemed to be diametrically opposed to each other, they were actually in a sense both “right.” One might say that, in a dialogical manner, my parents taught me what I now believe to be the two most important principles of sociolinguistics: (1) We are judged by others on the basis of the way we talk, and (2) We are linguistic products of our environments. When I left my hometown as a young adult and began to experience new linguistic norms and the social consequences of speaking differently from those in my new geographic and social environments, a third and equally important principle presented itself to me: (3) Through the language we use, we have the power to enact social change. My research has been driven by these three principles, which have directed me toward the study of language use in a variety of media contexts, from newspaper discourse and televised talk shows to news-sharing websites and online discussion forums. Because of the immediacy, ubiquity, and ever-increasing number of channels through which we interact with the media on a daily basis, these outlets are a powerful source not only for directly informing us about whatis happening in the world (or at least for providing a particular interpretation of it), but also for indirectly informing us about the appropriate discourses through which we articulate “facts” and come to understand the “natural order” of things. The media also play a significant role in influencing the ways in which we conceptualize our relationships with other individuals and social groups. In sum, the ideological potential of the media to reinforce or reconstrue the sociolinguistic lessons we learn at home, along with their capacity for enacting social change, has led me to focus my interest in language variation on this particular context of use.
Hoarding Disorder (HD) is characterized by a difficulty discarding possessions and leads to the accumulation of clutter, causing marked distress and impairment (Mataix-Cols, et al., 2010). HD has been an increasing area of research and public interest, though little is known about how it develops or factors that influence its expression (Mataiz-Cols, Fernandes de la Cruz, Nakoa, and Pertusa, 2011; Frost, Steketee, and Tolin, 2011). High frequency of trauma among people with hoarding behavior has been reported (Saxena et al. 2011; Cromer, Schmidt, and Murphy, 2007; Hartl, Duffany, Allen, Steketee, and Frost, 2005), but none have examined it in detail. The current study included 211 HD diagnosed participants from Frost et al.'s (2011) study of comorbidity, 105 of whom had experienced a traumatic life event and 106 who had not. Severity of acquisition and clutter (SI-R) were elevated among those who had experienced a traumatic life event, while difficulty discarding was not. Interference in the activities of daily living due to hoarding (ADL-H) was greater in participants with a trauma history, as were Clutter Image Ratings. Saving Cognitions Inventory subscales of Emotional Attachment, Responsibility, and Control were higher for participants with versus without trauma. Age of hoarding onset was earlier for participants who had experienced trauma, and participants with trauma histories more often reported lower levels of family warmth and security as well as higher levels of uncertainty. Trauma in hoarding was associated with greater attention deficit disorder symptoms, more anxiety, greater anxiety sensitivity, and more symptoms of obsessivecompulsive disorder. However, trauma was not associated with depression, social anxiety or perfectionism. Participants with histories of trauma had more current Axis I diagnoses, but not over the course of a lifetime. MDD was more frequent in HD participants with trauma, as was GAD. Social Phobia and OCD comorbidity did not significantly differ between participants with and without traumatic life experiences.
Objective To study the scanning techniques of low-dose CT urography (CTU) and post-processing in children with hydronephrosis. Methods From September 2011 to May 2012, a total of 43 children with hydronephrosis, aged from 4-month-old to 13-year-old received CTU in our hospital. First, the abdominal plain CT scan was implement, then 43 cases were divided into three degrees according to degrees of hydronephrosis, mild, moderate and sever. Then CTU delay scan program was conducted according to different groups, renal excretion period of mild group delayed (5~10) min, moderate group delayed (30~90) min, severe group delayed (3~5) h. After scanning, the multiplanar reformation (MPR) and volume rendering (VR) for each case were carried out, with the original data of renal excretion period images on the post-processing workstation. Post-processing image rating score were measured by two physicians. The study protocol was approved by the Ethical Review Board of Investigation in Human Being of West China Second University Hospital. Informed consent was obtained from all participates. Results The degrees of hydronephrosis were below, 20 cases for mild group (46.51%), 11 cases for moderate group (25.58%), 12 cases for severe group (27.91%). The highest average score of post-processing CTU image was mild group, with the highest satisfaction of diagnosis (80.00%); and severe group with the minimum of images average and the lowest percentage of the appraised image (29.2%); the difference between mild group and severe group was statistically significant(χ2=17.599, P<0.001). Consistency test which was measured by two physicians was excellent (κ value was 0.811). Conclusions Low-dose CTU can provide accurate diagnostic basis for pediatric patients with hydronephrosis and surgical treatment. Key words: spiral CT; urography; child; hydronephrosis
Introduction \nPrevious research reveals that two factors influence the perception of tiredness in a face: the height of the upper eyelid (pretarsal show, both increased and decreased), and increased eyebrow elevation. We aimed to design, develop and validate a set of stimuli to differentiate the characteristics that increase perception of a tired face. \n \nMethods \nA hand-drawn picture of a neutral face was modified using imaging software to create a series of ten images, varying in degrees of pretarsal show, upper/lower lid depression and elevation, and eyebrow shape and position. Participants (n=63) from the general population were presented with the images and asked to quantify on a scale of 0-10 the presence of eight emotions or states – “surprise”, “anger”, “tiredness”, “sadness”, “disgust”, “alertness”, “fear” and “happiness” with 0 being the lowest and 10 being the highest rating. \n \nResults \nOne way repeated measures ANOVAs were conducted to determine, for each image, which emotions were rated significantly differently from each other. For the images with increased pretarsal show and upper lid depression, tiredness was rated significantly higher than other emotions (F[4.04,173.6]=33.67,p<.001; and F[3.84,165.3]=67.63, p<.001, respectively). Furthermore, paired samples t-tests compared ratings of tiredness and alertness in each modified face to that of the neutral face to further confirm the presence of tiredness/alertness compared to the neutral image. Ratings of tiredness were greater for images containing an increased pretarsal show t(43)=6.06,p<.001, and upper lid depression t(43)=10.46, p<.001. \n \nConclusion \nThe present study found perception of tiredness was greatest for images in which pretarsal show and upper lid depression were increased. These findings inform us as to the elements that constitute a tired face, and highlight the elements of pictorial facial stimuli to be manipulated to create a ‘tired’ facial expression, for the utilization in future research.
BACKGROUND: Modern endoscopy requires video display. Recent miniaturized, ultraportable projectors are affordable, durable, and offer quality image display. OBJECTIVE: Explore feasibility of using ultraportable projectors in endoscopy. METHODS: Prospective bench-top comparison; clinical feasibility study. Masked comparison study of images displayed via 2 Samsung ultraportable light-emitting diode projectors (pocket-sized SP-HO3; pico projector SP-P410M) and 1 Microvision Showwx-II Laser pico projector. BENCH-TOP FEASIBILITY STUDY: Prerecorded endoscopic video was streamed via computer. CLINICAL COMPARISON STUDY: Live high-definition endoscopy video was simultaneously displayed through each processor onto a standard liquid crystal display monitor and projected onto a portable, pull-down projection screen. Endoscopists, endoscopy nurses, and technicians rated video images; ratings were analyzed by linear mixed-effects regression models with random intercepts. RESULTS: All projectors were easy to set up, adjust, focus, and operate, with no real-time lapse for any. Bench-top study outcomes: Samsung pico preferred to Laser pico, overall rating 1.5 units higher (95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.7-2.4), P <.001; Samsung pocket preferred to Laser pico, 3.3 units higher (95% CI = 2.4-4.1), P <.001; Samsung pocket preferred to Samsung pico, 1.7 units higher (95% CI = 0.9-2.5), P <.001. The clinical comparison study confirmed the Samsung pocket projector as best, with a higher overall rating of 2.3 units (95% CI = 1.6-3.0), P <.001, than Samsung pico. CONCLUSIONS: Low brightness currently limits pico projector use in clinical endoscopy. The pocket projector, with higher brightness levels (170 lumens), is clinically useful. Continued improvements to ultraportable projectors will supply a needed niche in endoscopy through portability, reduced cost, and equal or better image quality.
Research in natural language processing (NLP) is aimed at making machines automatically understand natural language. Incorporating world knowledge semantics is becoming an increasingly crucial requirement for resolving deep, complex decisions in most NLP tasks today, e.g., question answering, syntactic parsing, coreference resolution, and relation extraction. Structured NLP corpora such as treebanks are too small to encode much of this knowledge, so instead, we turn to the vast Web, and access its information via a diverse collection of Web n-gram counts (of size 4 billion, and ~500x larger than Wikipedia). Shallow cues from this large n-gram dataset, when harnessed in a structured learning setting, help reveal deep semantics. In this thesis, we address various important facets of the semantics problem - from indirect semantics for sentence-level syntactic ambiguities, and semantics as specific knowledge for discourse-level coreference ambiguities, to structured acquisition of semantic taxonomies from text, and fine-grained semantics such as intensity order. These facets represent structured NLP tasks which have a combinatorially large decision space. Hence, in general, we adopt a structured learning approach, incorporating surface Web-based semantic cues as intuitive features on the full space of decisions. The feature weights are then learned automatically based on a discriminative training approach. Empirically, for each facet, we see significant improvements over the corresponding state-of-the-art.In the first part of this thesis, we show how Web-based features can be powerful cues to resolving complex syntactic ambiguities. We develop surface n-gram features over the full range of syntactic attachments, encoding both lexical affinities as well as paraphrase-based cues to syntactic structure. These features, when encoded into full-scale, discriminative dependency and constituent parsers, correct a range of error types.In the next part, we address semantic ambiguities in discourse-level coreference resolution, again using Web n-gram features that capture a range of world knowledge cues to hypernymy, semantic compatibility, and semantic context, as well as general lexical co-occurrence. When added to a state-of-the-art coreference baseline, these Web features provide significant improvements on multiple datasets and metrics.In the third part, we acquire the semantics itself via structured learning of hypernymy taxonomies. We adopt a probabilistic graphical model formulation which incorporates heterogeneous relational evidence about both hypernymy and siblinghood, captured by surface features based on patterns and statistics from Web n-grams and Wikipedia abstracts. Inference is based on loopy belief propagation and spanning tree algorithms. The system is discriminatively trained on WordNet sub-structures using adaptive subgradient stochastic optimization. On the task of reproducing subhierarchies of WordNet, this approach achieves substantial error reductions over previous work.Finally, we discuss a fine-grained semantic facet - intensity order, where the relative ranks of near-synonyms such as good, great, and excellent are predicted using Web statistics of phrases like good but not excellent. We employ linear programming to jointly infer the positions on a single scale, such that individual decisions benefit from global information. When ranking English near-synonymous adjectives, this global approach gets substantial improvements over previous work on both pairwise and rank correlation metrics.
Reviewed by: Cultural Capital, Language and National Identity in Imperial Spain by Lucia Binotti Ryan Prendergast Binotti, Lucia. Cultural Capital, Language and National Identity in Imperial Spain. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Tamesis, 2012. 207 pp. Lucia Binotti’s study approaches the question of national identity by way of language, and, more specifically, how language and theories about language shaped the cultural underpinnings of sixteenth-century Spain and became the principal mechanism for constructing cultural identity in the Spanish Renaissance. Beginning with the understanding that there was a competition with the main tenets of the Italian Renaissance, Cultural Capital, Language and National Identity in Imperial Spain offers readers the opportunity to better understand how Spain’s intellectuals and elite both imitated and departed from the linguistic and cultural models [End Page 572] that were the basis for the Italian Renaissance. Finally, the book examines how authors used texts to construct and project the image of Spain as an imperial power. Within these parameters, Binotti reflects on the inextricably linked issues of courtly society, book production, patronage, literacy, translation, and canon formation, and she clearly articulates the complex coordinates that framed and amplified the field of cultural inquiry in the Renaissances of both Spain and Italy. Cultural Capital is divided into two parts and has five chapters. Part one, “Patronage, Audiences and Cultural Markets,” encompasses the first three chapters. In chapter one, Binotti focuses on how the Italian tradition appropriated Spanish sentimental fiction, in particular Diego de San Pedro’s Cárcel de amor and La historia de Grisel and Mirabella by Juan de Flores. The editorial choices for the Italian translations of these two texts speak to the changing balance of power between “courtly society and the new reality brought about by the Spanish domination of Italy” (18). This, in turn, constructed new social meaning for the texts and the genre. Binotti convincingly demonstrates how there are echoes of Carcel de amor in Baldassare Castiglione’s Il cortegiano and how Spanish sentimental fiction influenced Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso. She goes on to argue that these appropriations by Italians serve as an example of how “the commercialization of the book became a powerful factor in the drastic changes in the habits of consumption … that occurred in Europe at the middle of the [sixteenth] century” made the book “an agent of class distinction” and redefined what constituted cultural capital (50). The second chapter takes up the issue of literature and canon formation, using as a point of departure the idea that by the mid-sixteenth century the printing press had turned into a much more full-fledged enterprise that expanded the reading public. As a result, printed texts had the immense power to influence and define the ideology of the era. Binotti carefully studies the editorial project of Alfonso de Ulloa, who translated to Italian from Spanish and vice versa. She asserts quite convincingly that Ulloa, like most sellers of literature at the time, was involved in the process of defining and creating a “national literary profile” by “shaping cultural authority and cultural capital” (53). To illustrate these ideas, Binotti examines Ulloa’s 1553 translation of Orlando furioso into Spanish, noting how it was packaged as a classic. She suggests that it was meant for Italians who wanted to enjoy the poem while learning Spanish, but it also acted as a conduit for “idealized social and linguistic norms” to Spain (59). Chapter three examines Luis de Góngora’s Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea, in which Binotti analyzes erotic and vulgar imagery within an ekphrastic framework. She points out how the poem casts the reader in the role of a viewer by “transposing complicated tropes into visual images” that ultimately elicit both aesthetic and erotic responses (101). Through some adroit and suggestive close reading, Binotti also elucidates how Góngora, taking his cue from the conventions of painting, is able to weave together poetry and painting to achieve his erotic end, though often veiled in innuendos, puns, and double entendres. She maintains that the Polifemo is an aesthetic manifesto while also being sophisticated pornography, asserting that the “titillation of desire” is linked to the text’s “masked linguistic titillation” (101). By [End Page...
Recently, sentence comprehension in languages other than European languages has been investigated from a cross-linguistic perspective. In this paper, we examine whether and how animacy-related semantic information is used for real-time sentence comprehension in a SOV word order language (i.e., Japanese). Twenty-three Japanese native speakers participated in this study. They read semantically reversible and non-reversible sentences with canonical word order, and those with scrambled word order. In our results, the second argument position in reversible sentences took longer to read than that in non-reversible sentences, indicating that animacy information is used in second argument processing. In contrast, for the predicate position, there was no difference in reading times, suggesting that animacy information is NOT used in the predicate position. These results are discussed using the sentence comprehension models of an SOV word order language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR], Copyright of PLo)
Wordnets are built of synsets, not of words. A synset consists of words. Synonymy is a relation between words. Words go into a synset because they are synonyms. Later, a wordnet treats words as synonymous because they belong in the same synset\(\ldots\) Such circularity, a well-known problem, poses a practical difficulty in wordnet construction, notably when it comes to maintaining consistency. We propose to make a wordnet a net of words or, to be more precise, lexical units. We discuss our assumptions and present their implementation in a steadily growing Polish wordnet. A small set of constitutive relations allows us to construct synsets automatically out of groups of lexical units with the same connectivity. Our analysis includes a thorough comparative overview of systems of relations in several influential wordnets. The additional synset-forming mechanisms include stylistic registers and verb aspect.
‘Lexical bundles’ as a category of word combinations are words which follow each other more frequently than expected by chance. This corpus-based study attempts to compare the frequencies of three- and four-word lexical bundles in research articles of three disciplines: physics, computer engineering, and applied linguistics. Moreover, it aims to scrutinize them between native and nonnative research articles of applied linguistics to see whether Iranian authors who publish articles in English, use lexical bundles in the same way as native authors. To this end, three native corpora and a non-native corpus of research articles were collected, each including approximately one million words. All the analyses were conducted through Wordsmith Tools (Scott, 2010) and Hyland’s (2008) taxonomy of most frequent academic lexical bundles. The results show that there are relatively significant differences between the frequencies of the lexical bundles employed across the disciplines. In addition, they differ significantly between the native and nonnative articles of applied linguistics. It is also revealed that lexical bundles are realized differently across different disciplines and that non-natives do not follow the norms of natives appropriately. Findings can be used to improve writing in different disciplines and create more cohesive and coherent texts.
Artiklis tulevad vaatluse alla 17. sajandi kiriklike teoste tõlkija ja keelenormi kujundaja Heinrich Stahli tekstides kasutatud kaheksa haruldast tüvisõna ja seitse tuletist, mis (1) esinevad tema teostes vaid ühe korra (nn hapax legomenon’id), (2) esinevad põhjaeesti kirjakeeles esimest korda just Stahli teostes, (3) ei ole tänapäeva kirjakeeles sellises vormis ja/või tähenduses kasutusel, (4) ei ole otselaenud (alam)- saksa keelest. Käsitluse eesmärgiks on välja tuua Stahli haruldast sõnavara, mis pole tänapäeva eesti keeles enam kas tüve, moodustusviisi või tähenduse poolest läbipaistev. Niisugused lekseemid võimaldavad täpsemat pilguheitu Stahli teoste eripärasele sõnavarale ja selle kasutamise motiividele. Artiklis käsitletud tüvisõnad peegeldavad arhailist sõnavarakihti, mis on enamjaolt rahvakeelne ja võib osaliselt pärineda varasematest, Stahli-eelsetest allikatest. Tuletised avavad lisaks ka mehhanisme, kuidas Stahl on kasutanud teksti vajadustest lähtudes produktiivseid tuletusvõimalusi või toetunud analoogiamallidele. Selline täpseid esinemissagedusi arvestav uurimus on võimalikuks saanud pärast Stahli tekstide korpuse lemmatiseeritud kuju valmimist 2013. aastal.Rare words from the works of Heinrich Stahl. The article takes a look at 8 stem words and 7 derivations used in the works of Heinrich Stahl, the 17th century translator of religious texts and shaper of language norms. The stem words and derivations discussed in the article (1) only occur once in his texts, (2) first appear in Literary North-Estonian in Stahl’s texts, (3) are not used in Modern Estonian in the same form and/or meaning, (4) are not direct loans from (Low) German. These lexemes reveal the peculiarity of the lexicon of Stahl’s works. Because of their rarity, the lemmatising of such units while coding the corpus of Stahl’s texts has been problematic. These archaic words are not transparent in stem, form or meaning in Modern Estonian. The lexical stems discussed in the article reflect an archaic layer of the lexicon which is mostly vernacular and may partly originate in earlier, pre-Stahl sources. Derivations, in addition to revealing archaic lexicon, also reveal the mechanisms of how Stahl used productive derivation or analogy patterns depending on the demands of the text.
Nowadays, advertising is becoming an integral part of our daily life and is playing an increasingly significant role in modern society. It appears we are living in an advertising world. Many studies have been carried out in this field, and among them the study of advertising language has attracted particular attention from social linguists. As a way to promote the sales of products, advertisements must conform to the AIM principle—to grab readers’ attention, arouse their interest, and construct their memory to achieve the ultimate goal of triggering their action. Thus, the advertisers seek for attention-attracting strategies. The application of language deviation technique is an efficient way. Deviation refers to the special or unusual expression that deviates from normal norms and it appears in various forms such as deviation of phonology, lexicon and grammar. This paper attempts to give a description of language deviations in English advertising including phonological, graphological, lexical, and grammatical deviation.
In this paper we investigate the differences in risk-averse behavior in translated versus non-translated texts by comparing lexical normalization in various registers of translated and non-translated Dutch. We want to verify: (i) to what extent normalization is register dependent; (ii) whether normalizing behavior is similar in translated and non-translated texts of the same register, and (iii) to what extent normalization is source-language dependent. We relied on the Dutch Parallel Corpus to investigate the dispersion of 10 profiles, i.e. sets of synonymous lexical alternatives consisting of a Standard Dutch and a Belgian Standard Dutch alternative. Using an exploratory, multivariate technique we visualized and measured the degrees to which a number of registers of translated and non-translated Dutch conform to linguistic norms.
Gamedesire (GD), as a meeting place for multilingual communities, is an inexhaustible resource for linguistic research on Computer-Mediated Discourse (CMD). GD remains linguistically under-researched though it gives rise to a plethora of linguistic issues relating in particular to written English. This paper is a seminal work that takes as its keynote the linguistic analysis of one key issue — namely 'euphemism of nicknaming'. The present study seeks to examine the various language tools users employ in their creation of their own nicknames on the URL http://www.gamedesire.com. A corpus of 200 nicknames has randomly been collected in 2008 and tested against an existing model of euphemism by Warren (1992) [7]. The study shows that a large number of connotatively dysphemistic nicknames are denotatively euphemized by deviating from language norms and employing a wide range of linguistic and paralinguistic devices, including word-formation, orthographic modification, borrowing and semantic innovation. Some of these nicknames were not subsumable under the original model and, therefore, necessitated developing a new rendition. The new rendition of the model created other mechanisms not developed by the original model. The study concludes that language users employ different styles of nicknaming marked by grammatical (change of word grammar), lexical (creation of new words), phonological (irregularity of pronunciation), orthographic (irregularity of spelling), and semantic deviations (transference of meaning).
Gaze-contingent displays provide a valuable method in visual research for controlling visual input and investigating its visual and cognitive processing. Although the body of research using gaze-contingent retinal stabilization techniques has grown considerably during the last decade, only few studies have been concerned with the reliability of the specific real-time simulations applied. Using a Landolt ring discrimination task, we present a behavioral validation of gaze-contingent central scotoma simulation in healthy observers. Importantly, behavioral testing is necessary to show whether the simulation impairs foveal processing of visual information. This test becomes even more crucial when researchers are faced with null results in a task performed with the scotoma, as compared with a control condition. It must be ruled out that the lack of behavioral effects results from a type II error caused by improper implementation before conclusions about foveal contributions to the given task may be drawn. In our experiment, the scotoma effectively prevented foveal processing of the visual stimuli, leading to significantly reduced response accuracies, as compared with unimpaired vision. Moreover, the final fixation at the time of the participants’ responses was placed close to the target position in the unimpaired condition, whereas the distance to the target was enhanced with the scotoma, indicating that the observers were not able to discriminate visual target stimuli from distractors, due to the scotoma. The present work presents a validated behavioral testing method for the efficiency of gaze-contingent scotoma simulations, including code for implementation. In addition, solutions for common methodological problems are discussed.
This paper explores the feasibility of modelling concept concreteness perceived by humans and representing it in computational semantic lexicons, addressing an issue at the crossroads of computational linguistics, lexicography, and psycholinguistics. The inherent distinction between concrete words and abstract words in psychology has relied mostly on subjective human ratings. This practice is hardly scalable and does not consider the effect of polysemy. In view of this, we attempt to obtain a measure of concreteness from dictionary definitions comparable to human judgement, capitalising on conventional lexicographic assumptions and the regularities exhibited in the surface structures of sense definitions. The structural pattern of a definition is analysed and scored on a 7-point scale of concreteness ratings. The definition scores turned out to be quite effective for a dichotomous distinction between concrete and abstract concepts and more consistent with human ratings for the former. Beyond the two-way distinction, however, the results were more variable. The study has thus revealed the potentials and limitations of our approach, suggesting that different defining styles probably reflect the describability of concepts, and describability alone may not be sufficient for differentiating the degree of concreteness. The range of definition patterns has to be reconsidered, in combination with other inseparable factors constituting our perception of concreteness, for better modelling on a finer scale of concreteness distinction to enrich semantic lexicons for natural language processing.
The efficient processing of sentences in native speakers is the result of great automaticity and speed both in lexical retrieval and in structural computations. In lexical retrieval, all interpretations of a word are accessed, and non-convergent interpretations are quickly pruned. Garden paths also suggest the autonomy of syntactic computations from contextual knowledge, although there is semantic feedback on proposed syntactic attachments at every stage of processing. Early effects of both lexical and contextual semantic knowledge also point to immediate discourse-semantics processing. Sentence processing, therefore, involves computations in various sub-modules, in the limits of their interfaces (Crocker, 1996; inter alia). Sentence processing includes structural computations that are blind to other sources of knowledge. This blindness is a presumed source of efficiency. However, this efficiency comes at the price of a certain dumbness as the processor seems to be unable to learn from its mistakes, taking the same routes over and over even if they are dead-ends leading to garden paths (Fodor, 1983, 2000). Grammatical research argues that a generative computational system specialized for human language (CHL) plays a significant role in giving language its expressive power. CHL crucially mediates between lexical information and the conceptual intentional system (CI-system) that interfaces with CHL at the level of Logical Form (LF). Thus, constraints on movements and on binding appear to be specific to natural-language grammars. Indeed, formal logical systems do not have such constraints. Grammatical research in the generative paradigm has attempted to understand the role of CHL, with all its idiosyncrasies, in language design in terms of mental constitution. Hence, research on the grammar of anaphora (Reuland, 2001; Reinhart & Reuland, 1993) and research on the processing of movement dependencies (Gibson, 1998, 2000; Gibson & Warren, 2004) both conclude that the computation of referential dependencies in syntax plays a central role in the management of the global processing load. Binding reduces the number of assignments of values to variables (Reuland, 2001; Reinhart & Reuland, 1993) and movement traces refresh the activation of referents in discourse-semantics (Gibson, 1998, 2000; Gibson & Warren, 2004). Quirky grammatical dependencies are pervasive in human languages and their target-like acquisition is not trivial for the second language (L2) learner. Formal grammatical rules constitute a non-negligible portion of what needs to be acquired, in addition to vocabulary items. Beyond either the perceived or real needs of L2 learners to approximate the target-language norms or their personal desire to do so, one may wonder whether there are any benefits to formal grammatical rules in L2 acquisition. CHL computations of grammatical rules clearly involve costs, but the dependencies that these computations establish might also eke out efficiencies in the CI-system in return. Benefits to discourse-semantics processing, if they can be found, could offer insights into the role of UGconstrained grammatical states in L2 cognition. Given that a range of cognitive abilities are available
In describing motion events verbs of manner provide information about the speed of agents or objects in those events. We used eye tracking to investigate how inferences about this verb-associated speed of motion would influence the time course of attention to a visual scene that matched an event described in language. Eye movements were recorded as participants heard spoken sentences with verbs that implied a fast (“dash”) or slow (“dawdle”) movement of an agent towards a goal. These sentences were heard whilst participants concurrently looked at scenes depicting the agent and a path which led to the goal object. Our results indicate a mapping of events onto the visual scene consistent with participants mentally simulating the movement of the agent along the path towards the goal: when the verb implies a slow manner of motion, participants look more often and longer along the path to the goal; when the verb implies a fast manner of motion, participants tend to look earlier at the goal)
OBJECTIVE: A growing number of studies on deaf children with cochlear implant (CI) document a significant improvement in receptive and expressive language skills after implantation, even if they show language delay when compared with normal-hearing peers. Data on language acquisition in CI Italian children are still scarce and limited to only certain aspects of language. The purpose of this study is to prospectively describe the trajectories of language development in early CI Italian children, with particular attention to the transition from first words to combinatorial speech and to acquisition of complex grammar in a language with rich morphology, such as Italian. DESIGN: Six children, with profound prelingual deafness, provided with CI, between 16 and 24 months of age were prospectively assessed and followed over a mean period of up to 34.8 months postimplant. During follow-up, each child received between four to five individual language evaluations through a combination of indirect procedures (parent reports of early lexical and grammar development) and direct ones (administration of standardized receptive and expressive language tests with Italian norms and collection of spontaneous language samples). RESULTS: In relation to chronological age, the acquisition of expressive vocabulary was delayed. However, considering the duration of hearing experience, most CI participants showed an earlier start and faster growth of expressive rather than receptive vocabulary in comparison with typically developing children. This quite atypical result persisted right up until the end of the follow-up. The acquisition of expressive grammar was delayed relative to chronological age, though all but one CI participant achieved the expected grammar level after approximately 3 years of CI use. In addition, the rate of grammar acquisition was not homogeneous during development, showing two different paces: one comparable with normal hearing in the transition from holophrastic to primitive combinatorial speech and a much slower one to attain more advanced levels of morphosyntactic control. CONCLUSION: From a rehabilitative viewpoint, our results suggest the importance of implementing rehabilitation in lexical comprehension, even when expressive vocabulary appears to be within normal range. Moreover, assessment of language acquisition in CI Italian children should focus on those grammar aspects that are more vulnerable to early acoustic deprivation (such as free and bound morphology) to ensure enhanced language therapy planning.