Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
18265 papers
The grounded cognition framework proposes that sensorimotor brain areas, which are typically involved in perception and action, also play a role in linguistic processing. We assessed oscillatory modulation during visual presentation of single verbs and localized cortical motor regions by means of isometric contraction of hand and foot muscles. Analogously to oscillatory activation patterns accompanying voluntary movements, we expected a somatotopically distributed suppression of beta and alpha frequencies in the motor cortex during processing of body-related action verbs. Magnetoencephalographic data were collected during presentation of verbs that express actions performed using the hands (H) or feet (F). Verbs denoting no bodily movement (N) were used as a control. Between 150 and 500 msec after visual word onset, beta rhythms were suppressed in H and F in comparison with N in the left hemisphere. Similarly, alpha oscillations showed left-lateralized power suppression in the H-N con)
Established linguistic theoretical frameworks propose that alphabetic language speakers use phonemes as phonological encoding units during speech production whereas Mandarin Chinese speakers use syllables. This framework was challenged by recent neural evidence of facilitation induced by overlapping initial phonemes, raising the possibility that phonemes also contribute to the phonological encoding process in Chinese. However, there is no evidence of non-initial phoneme involvement in Chinese phonological encoding among representative Chinese speakers, rendering the functional role of phonemes in spoken Chinese controversial. Here, we addressed this issue by systematically investigating the word-initial and non-initial phoneme repetition effect on the electrophysiological signal using a picture-naming priming task in which native Chinese speakers produced disyllabic word pairs. We found that overlapping phonemes in both the initial and non-initial position evoked more positive ERPs in)
The present study was carried out in the Indo-European speaking tribal population groups of Southern Gujarat, India to investigate and reconstruct their paternal population structure and population histories. The role of language, ethnicity and geography in determining the observed pattern of Y haplogroup clustering in the study populations was also examined. A set of 48 bi-allelic markers on the non-recombining region of Y chromosome (NRY) were analysed in 284 males; representing nine Indo-European speaking tribal populations. The genetic structure of the populations revealed that none of these groups was overtly admixed or completely isolated. However, elevated haplogroup diversity and FST value point towards greater diversity and differentiation which suggests the possibility of early demographic expansion of the study groups. The phylogenetic analysis revealed 13 paternal lineages, of which six haplogroups: C5, H1a*, H2, J2, R1a1* and R2 accounted for a major portion of the Y chro)
Research on language comprehension using event-related potentials (ERPs) reported distinct ERP components reliably related to the processing of semantic (N400) and syntactic information (P600). Recent ERP studies have challenged this well-defined distinction by showing P600 effects for semantic and pragmatic anomalies. So far, it is still unresolved whether the P600 reflects specific or rather common processes. The present study addresses this question by investigating ERPs in response to a syntactic and pragmatic (irony) manipulation, as well as a combined syntactic and pragmatic manipulation. For the syntactic condition, a morphosyntactic violation was applied, whereas for the pragmatic condition, such as “That is rich”, either an ironic or literal interpretation was achieved, depending on the prior context. The ERPs at the critical word showed a LAN-P600 pattern for syntactically incorrect sentences relative to correct ones. For ironic compared to literal sentences, ERPs showed a P)
Nativists have postulated fundamental geometric knowledge that predates linguistic and symbolic thought. Central to these claims is the proposal for an isolated cognitive system dedicated to processing geometric information. Testing such hypotheses presents challenges due to difficulties in eliminating the combination of geometric and non-geometric information through language. We present evidence using a modified matching interference paradigm that an incongruent shape word interferes with identifying a two-dimensional geometric shape, but an incongruent two-dimensional geometric shape does not interfere with identifying a shape word. This asymmetry in interference effects between two-dimensional geometric shapes and their corresponding shape words suggests that shape words activate spatial representations of shapes but shapes do not activate linguistic representations of shape words. These results appear consistent with hypotheses concerning a cognitive system dedicated to processin)
Contradiction is a cornerstone of human rationality, essential for everyday life and communication. We investigated electroencephalographic (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in separate recording sessions during contradictory judgments, using a logical structure based on categorical propositions of the Aristotelian Square of Opposition (ASoO). The use of ASoO propositions, while controlling for potential linguistic or semantic confounds, enabled us to observe the spatial temporal unfolding of this contradictory reasoning. The processing started with the inversion of the logical operators corresponding to right middle frontal gyrus (rMFG-BA11) activation, followed by identification of contradictory statement associated with in the right inferior frontal gyrus (rIFG-BA47) activation. Right medial frontal gyrus (rMeFG, BA10) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC, BA32) contributed to the later stages of process. We observed a correlation between the delayed latency of r)
La dénomination orale: perspectives développementales chez l'enfant âgé de 5 à 11 ans Mots clés: modèle de dénomination, évaluation, développement Le manque du mot génère des difficultés souvent mises en évidence par une tâche de dénomination d'images. A l'heure actuelle, il n'existe aucun modèle du processus de dénomination spécifique à l'enfant, avec pour conséquence une compréhension limitée des difficultés rencontrées dans cette population. Partant de l'idée que la dénomination chez l'enfant implique les mêmes processus que chez l'adulte (Cycowicz et al., 1997), notre objectif est d'évaluer chacun de ces processus ainsi que les variables qui les influencent. Plusieurs sous-épreuves évaluant chaque niveau de traitement ont été créées, concernant: la reconnaissance visuelle, la mémoire sémantique, les traits sémantiques, l'accès lexical et les processus phonologiques. Chaque épreuve est informatisée, permettant un enregistrement en temps réel des performances. Notre échantillon se compose de 291 enfants, francophones, âgés de 5 à 11 ans. Les données sont actuellement en cours d'analyse. Les premiers résultats concernent notre épreuve d'accès lexical consistant en une épreuve de dénomination de 110 images d'objets actualisées et en couleur. Concernant le score brut à la tâche (/110), on observe une évolution linéaire des performances avec l'avancée en âge, et une stabilisation des performances entre 10 et 11 ans (U = 439.5; p =.722). Concernant le type d'erreur commise, les erreurs sémantiques diminuent significativement vers 8 ans (entre 8 et 9 ans: U = 457; p =.021) pour atteindre une stabilisation vers 10 ans (entre 10 et 11 ans: U = 454.5; p =.890). Concernant les erreurs phonologiques, on observe une diminution significative vers 7 ans (entre 7 et 8 ans: U = 944.5; p =.682) suivie d'une stabilisation. Ces premiers résultats confortent les résultats d'études antérieures (cfr. Cannard et al., 2005; Kavé et al., 2010). Ces résultats seront envisagés dans une perspective de modélisation présentée lors du colloque. CANNARD, C., BLAYE, A., SCHEUNER, N., & BONTHOUX, F. (2005). Picture naming in 3- to 8-year old French children: Methodological considerations for name agreement. Behavior Research Method, 37(3), 417-425 CYCOWICZ, Y. M., FRIEDMAN, D., ROTHSTEIN, M., & SNODGRASS, J. G. (1997). Picture naming by young children: norms for name agreement, familiarity, and visual complexity. Journal of experimental child psychology, 65(2), 171-237. KAVÉ, G., KNAFO, A., & GILBOA, A. (2010). The rise and fall of word retrieval across the lifespan. Psychology and aging, 25(3), 719-24.
Interactive generative musical performance provides a suitable model for communication because, like natural linguistic discourse, it involves an exchange of ideas that is unpredictable, collaborative, and emergent. Here we show that interactive improvisation between two musicians is characterized by activation of perisylvian language areas linked to processing of syntactic elements in music, including inferior frontal gyrus and posterior superior temporal gyrus, and deactivation of angular gyrus and supramarginal gyrus, brain structures directly implicated in semantic processing of language. These findings support the hypothesis that musical discourse engages language areas of the brain specialized for processing of syntax but in a manner that is not contingent upon semantic processing. Therefore, we argue that neural regions for syntactic processing are not domain-specific for language but instead may be domain-general for communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR], Copyright of PLoS ONE)
A fundamental principle of brain organization is bilateral symmetry of structures and functions. For spatial sensory and motor information processing, this organization is generally plausible subserving orientation and coordination of a bilaterally symmetric body. However, breaking of the symmetry principle is often seen for functions that depend on convergent information processing and lateralized output control, e.g. left hemispheric dominance for the linguistic speech system. Conversely, a subtle splitting of functions into hemispheres may occur if peripheral information from symmetric sense organs is partly redundant, e.g. auditory pattern recognition, and therefore allows central conceptualizations of complex stimuli from different feature viewpoints, as demonstrated e.g. for hemispheric analysis of frequency modulations in auditory cortex (AC) of mammals including humans. Here we demonstrate that discrimination learning of rapidly but not of slowly amplitude modulated tones is n)
Few quantitative measures of genome architecture or organization exist to support assumptions of differences between microorganisms that are broadly defined as being free-living or pathogenic. General principles about complete proteomes exist for codon usage, amino acid biases and essential or core genes. Genome-wide shifts in amino acid usage between free-living and pathogenic microorganisms result in fundamental differences in the complexity of their respective proteomes that are size and gene content independent. These differences are evident across broad phylogenetic groups–a result of environmental factors and population genetic forces rather than phylogenetic distance. A novel comparative analysis of amino acid usage–utilizing linguistic analyses of word frequency in language and text–identified a global pattern of higher peptide word repetition in 376 free-living versus 421 pathogen genomes across broad ranges of genome size, G+C content and phylogenetic ancestry. This imprint )
To fully define the grammar of American Sign Language (ASL), a linguistic model of its nonmanuals needs to be constructed. While significant progress has been made to understand the features defining ASL manuals, after years of research, much still needs to be done to uncover the discriminant nonmanual components. The major barrier to achieving this goal is the difficulty in correlating facial features and linguistic features, especially since these correlations may be temporally defined. For example, a facial feature (e.g., head moves down) occurring at the end of the movement of another facial feature (e.g., brows moves up), may specify a Hypothetical conditional, but only if this time relationship is maintained. In other instances, the single occurrence of a movement (e.g., brows move up) can be indicative of the same grammatical construction. In the present paper, we introduce a linguistic–computational approach to efficiently carry out this analysis. First, a linguistic model of )
The present study investigated the relationship between Chinese reading skills and metalinguistic awareness skills such as phonological, morphological, and orthographic awareness for 101 Preschool, 94 Grade-1, 98 Grade-2, and 98 Grade-3 children from two primary schools in Mainland China. The aim of the study was to examine how each of these metalinguistic awareness skills would exert their influence on the success of reading in Chinese with age. The results showed that all three metalinguistic awareness skills significantly predicted reading success. It further revealed that orthographic awareness played a dominant role in the early stages of reading acquisition, and its influence decreased with age, while the opposite was true for the contribution of morphological awareness. The results were in stark contrast with studies in English, where phonological awareness is typically shown as the single most potent metalinguistic awareness factor in literacy acquisition. In order to account )
Behavioural evidence suggests that English regular past tense forms are automatically decomposed into their stem and affix (played = play+ed) based on an implicit linguistic rule, which does not apply to the idiosyncratically formed irregular forms (kept). Additionally, regular, but not irregular inflections, are thought to be processed through the procedural memory system (left inferior frontal gyrus, basal ganglia, cerebellum). It has been suggested that this distinction does not to apply to second language (L2) learners of English; however, this has not been tested at the brain level. This fMRI study used a masked-priming task with regular and irregular prime-target pairs (played-play/kept-keep) to investigate morphological processing in native and highly proficient late L2 English speakers. No between-groups differences were revealed. Compared to irregular pairs, regular pairs activated the pars opercularis, bilateral caudate nucleus and the right cerebellum, which are part of the)
Technology is today considered to be an enabler by most of us because of the ease with which we can do most of our work. But when it comes to academics and that too English language, it is technology which has caused the most serious damage as it has destabilising the established norms of the language. Keeping this as the focal point the paper has been broadly divided into three parts. The first one focuses on providing a brief background of the status of English before advancements in technology picked up pace. This is followed by a description of the technological changes that came up in the past couple of decades through the media, the internet, the mobile and computer gaming and influenced English, leading to a spurt in the number of users. This widespread use of language and language user has side lined the prescriptive grammar. English language users, especially in the second language and foreign language situation have become more careless, more carefree and more audacious. In a commercially governed world this has resulted into orthographical, syntactical and lexical innovations and code mixing to catch the attention of English readers, viewers, listeners and consumers. After citing the reasons for these distortions and innovations the paper concludes by suggesting the need to adapt according to the changing scenario and ensure sticking to standards along with being aware of the new standards created by technology. Suggestion has also been given about the future scope of study in this area.
The article deals with some stylistic features of English journalism based on the authentic texts of The Times and its official translations. The comparative analysis is carried out; attention is paid to the difficulties of English newspaper heads translation according to the norms of Russian journalism style; to peculiarities of idioms translation; frequency of use of lexical units; to the problems connected to the difference in the frequency of their use; to the stylistic divergence of vocabulary and peculiarities of the translation of stylistically colored words.
Sound symbolism is the systematic and non-arbitrary link between word and meaning. Although a number of behavioral studies demonstrate that both children and adults are universally sensitive to sound symbolism in mimetic words, the neural mechanisms underlying this phenomenon have not yet been extensively investigated. The present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate how Japanese mimetic words are processed in the brain. In Experiment 1, we compared processing for motion mimetic words with that for non-sound symbolic motion verbs and adverbs. Mimetic words uniquely activated the right posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS). In Experiment 2, we further examined the generalizability of the findings from Experiment 1 by testing another domain: shape mimetics. Our results show that the right posterior STS was active when subjects processed both motion and shape mimetic words, thus suggesting that this area may be the primary structure for processing sound symb)
Reviewed by: Fundamentos de fonología y fonética española para hablantes de inglés: Manual práctico de español como lengua extranjeraby Eva Núñez Méndez Nate Maddux Núñez Méndez, Eva. Fundamentos de fonología y fonética española para hablantes de inglés: Manual práctico de español como lengua extranjera. 2nded. Muenchen: LINCOM, 2012. Pp. 132. ISBN 978-3-8958-6958-7. In a market saturated with introductory Spanish phonetics and phonology texts that ignore the language background of the reader, Núñez Méndez’s book responds to a need for pedagogical resources designed with the native English speaker in mind. The nine-chapter volume has two stated goals: to assist advanced-level anglophone learners of Spanish in their pronunciation of the sounds that typify the language across its regional varieties, and to give readers a clear understanding of the articulatory characteristics of these sounds so that they may be faithfully reproduced. The first three chapters provide a general orientation to human language and the field of linguistics and its subdisciplines. The introductory chapter lays out the primary objectives of linguistics and offers an overview of the subdisciplines and methodological orientations within the field. Chapter 2 defines Language ( lenguaje) and gives a snapshot of the world’s language families. The third chapter begins with a chronological account of the emergence of historical, descriptive, and generative linguistics as fields of inquiry. Neurolinguistics, language processing and speech production are also given brief mention in the third chapter. The portion of the book dedicated to the sounds of Spanish commences with chapter 4, which surveys the orthography and phoneme-grapheme correspondences of the language before moving on to stress assignment, permissible syllable structures, treatment of vocalic sequences, resyllabification rules, and intonation patterns of various sentence types in Spanish. A definition of phonology and an explanation of the contrastive function and distributive properties of Spanish phonemes form the basis of the fifth chapter. Chapter 6 provides an overview of human articulatory anatomy, a classification of consonants by manner and place of articulation, the fundamental characteristics of Spanish vocoids, and a discussion of allophonic variation and nasal assimilation processes in Spanish. Students of language variation will likely find chapters 7 and 8 to be most valuable. The seventh chapter considers regional variation and its primary manifestations in Spanish, differentiating the stereotypically Castilian realizations of the palatal lateral and voiceless interdental fricative with their phonemic counterparts in Andalusian and American varieties of the language. Within this context of variation, Núñez Méndez describes a number of phonological processes, and it is here she introduces the conventions of phonetic transcription. Chapter 8 lays out the main principles of Spanish dialectology, social and contextual approaches to variation, regional linguistic norms, and language contact. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Spanish in the United States, focusing on lexical loans, calques, slang and code-switching. The ninth chapter is an applied section that takes an itemized approach to explaining how the Spanish phonemes most problematic for anglophones, such as the unaspirated voiceless plosives, the voiceless velar fricative, and the bipartite system of rhotics, differ in articulation from their approximate equivalents in English. The chapter also compares syllabic rhythm and intonation patterns between the languages, with the intention of facilitating the acquisition of these suprasegmental features by native English speakers. Accompanying the six-page glossary of key terms and three pages of bibliography offered at the conclusion of the manual is an appendix that will prove valuable to advanced-level students with an interest in broadening the scope of their study of Spanish phonetics and phonology beyond the text. The section offers a table of the allophonic variants of the Spanish vocalic inventory, a chart of the Spanish phonemic inventory organized by manner and place of articulation, and a detailed comparison of the phonetic symbols used to represent the sounds of Spanish according to both the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and Revista de Filología Española (RFE). What sets Núñez Méndez’s book apart as a unique and important resource for English-speaking students of Spanish phonetics and phonology, in addition to the...
Effects reflecting serial within-word processing are frequently found in pseudo- and non-word recognition tasks not only among fluent, but especially among dyslexic readers. However, the time course and locus of these serial within-word processing effects in the cognitive hierarchy (i.e., orthographic, phonological, lexical) have remained elusive. We studied whether a subject's eye movements during a lexical decision task would provide information about the temporal dynamics of serial within-word processing. We assumed that if there is serial within-word processing proceeding from left to right, items with informative beginnings would attract the gaze position and (micro-)saccadic eye movements earlier in time relative to those with informative endings. In addition, we compared responses to word, non-word, and pseudo-word items to study whether serial within-word processing stems mainly from a lexical, orthographic, or phonological processing level, respectively. Gaze positions showed)
In recent years, numerous studies have provided converging evidence that word meaning is partially stored in modality-specific cortical networks. However, little is known about the mechanisms supporting the integration of this distributed semantic content into coherent conceptual representations. In the current study we aimed to address this issue by using EEG to look at the spatial and temporal dynamics of feature integration during word comprehension. Specifically, participants were presented with two modality-specific features (i.e., visual or auditory features such as silver and loud) and asked to verify whether these two features were compatible with a subsequently presented target word (e.g., WHISTLE). Each pair of features described properties from either the same modality (e.g., silver, tiny = visual features) or different modalities (e.g., silver, loud = visual, auditory). Behavioral and EEG data were collected. The results show that verifying features that are putatively)
The neurocognitive basis of memory retrieval is often examined by investigating brain potential old/new effects, which are differences in brain activity between successfully remembered repeated stimuli and correctly rejected new stimuli in a recognition test. In this study, we combined analyses of old/new effects for words with an item-method directed-forgetting manipulation in order to isolate differences between the retrieval processes elicited by words that participants were initially instructed to commit to memory and those that participants were initially instructed to forget. We compared old/new effects elicited by to-be-forgotten (TBF) words with those elicited by to-be-remembered (TBR) words in both an explicit-memory test (a recognition test) and an implicit-memory test (a lexical-decision test). Behavioral results showed clear directed forgetting effects in the recognition test, but not in the lexical decision test. Mirroring the behavioral findings, analyses of brain potent)
According to a prominent theory of language production, concepts activate multiple associated words in memory, which enter into competition for selection. However, only a few electrophysiological studies have identified brain responses reflecting competition. Here, we report a magnetoencephalography study in which the activation of competing words was manipulated by presenting pictures (e.g., dog) with distractor words. The distractor and picture name were semantically related (cat), unrelated (pin), or identical (dog). Related distractors are stronger competitors to the picture name because they receive additional activation from the picture relative to other distractors. Picture naming times were longer with related than unrelated and identical distractors. Phase-locked and non-phase-locked activity were distinct but temporally related. Phase-locked activity in left temporal cortex, peaking at 400 ms, was larger on unrelated than related and identical trials, suggesting differential)
A material basis for the conducted considerations are the texts of the selected legal acts. The aim is to diagnose the principle causes favouring the deviations from the binding language norms in such texts. Thus, the analyses try to demonstrate that such language flaws as ellipticalness of utterances, an excessive number of lexical repetitions or the formation of non-standard syntactical collocations need not be the token of linguistic imperfection of a legal text (its incorrectness), but the result of complex legislative procedures visible in the processes of terminologization, synonymy, message economy or message openness. Due to this, the opinions about linguistic correctness of legal texts are not always evident and determining the boundaries of error is not always explicit.
According to John Rawls, “A theory of justice depends upon a theory of society” (Rawls [1971, 62] 1999, 62, omitted). G. A. Cohen, on the other hand, argues that it is a mistake to think that a normative theory is necessarily linked to an explanatory theory or theories, and specifically rejects the idea that there is a necessary or privileged relationship between principles of justice and the basic structure of society (Cohen 2008, esp. 232). Cohen's critique of Rawls's focus on the basic structure of society to the exclusion of personal behavior has been widely discussed. So far, though, inadequate attention has been given to the relationship between normative principles and social ontology in their respective conceptions of justice. Focusing on the relationship between Rawls's principles of justice and his theory of society helps to shed new light on the debate about whether the basic structure ought to be seen as the primary subject of justice. Political philosophy may contribute to how a people think of their political and social institutions as a whole, and their basic aims and purposes as a society with a history—a nation—as opposed to their aims and purposes as individuals, or as members of families and associations. Moreover, the members of any civilized society need a conception that enables them to understand themselves as members having a certain political status—in a democracy, that of equal citizenship—and how this status affects their relation to their social world. (Rawls 2001, 2–3; see also Rawls 2007, 10) My argument is premised on the idea that Rawls's principles of justice for the basic structure of society should be seen as constitutive rules of social cooperation, akin to the rules of a game, and highlights areas of overlap between Rawls's normative constructivism and John Searle's social constructivism. I begin by questioning Cohen's description of the rules of the basic structure as regulative rules, contrasting this conception of rules with the idea of constitutive rules developed by Rawls and Searle. Then I proceed to situate Rawls's approach within a tradition of thought that adopts an ethical view of the role of social institutions, concerned with constituting relations of equal liberty between citizens. I argue that a corollary of Rawls's idea of the institutional imagination is that political philosophy involves a division of justificatory labor between a moral conception and a theory of society. This both responds to, and seeks to realize, an idea of freedom as collective self-government. On this basis, I examine the idea of the institutional imagination from the point of view of first the construction of fair rules for the basic structure (the rules of the game) and then from the point of view of citizens acting in accordance with these rules within the basic structure (the players of the game). Finally, I return to the issue of how a better understanding of Rawls's social ontology provides a basis for responding to Cohen's criticisms. In Rescuing Justice and Equality, Cohen repeats and extends his critique of Rawls's difference principle. According to this critique, the domain of legally unconstrained personal choice and not just the legally coercive structure of society is a site of considerations of distributive justice. Cohen criticizes the way in which, in justifying a role for material incentives that improve the position of the least well-off, the difference principle makes unwarranted concessions to acquisitive self-interest. On Cohen's interpretation of the idea that “the personal is political,” there is no principled basis for excluding personal behavior from judgment “at the bar of justice” (Cohen 2008, 116–18). The example of the family is taken to show that the attempt to shield personal behavior from assessment in accordance with principles of justice is untenable. If we recognize the family as a site of justice, in the sense that it involves a distribution of benefits and burdens—as we might think any theory of justice ought we the from coercive structure to the of the is we with no for not also personal behavior within the of justice. The for this is that the structure of the family is with the that people (Cohen 2008, and choice in the of the on Cohen's argues that it is not to between principles of justice that to the family and that to within This is it is the that people to to that the family and of justice be to the of the family also to within Moreover, to the that the for on the basic structure is on we as an that whether in the family or labor In a just as the society that Rawls an labor Cohen's in Rescuing Justice and makes it that not to a of about justice rejects Rawls's about justice, to there is a between principles of justice for the basic structure and principles for not on the basis of a to of the by Cohen 2008, Cohen that the example of as the that “the point of the rules an be that in (Cohen 2008, The point of the rules of is to and fair The players of a in their of to it is constitutive of that the players to This Cohen's to be an critique of is the that no attention to the way in Rawls's theory of justice as is on the idea of fair rules of a Cohen that his critique of Rawls not an between within an structure and players of a the rules to as as In this his argument for an to on the of that on the of a social that to in in the that institutions that the of their the difference principle (Cohen 2008, a in players the rules to as as is an for social in a just society. is to Rawls's of the is the idea that the players not to by the rules an to the that the rules to a and fair of the the though, that of a game, the of a and fair of the be it from the players their in the Cohen that the basic structure is a structure in his sense of the a of his argument to it is as that personal behavior is of and that personal behavior is an of the basic point is that personal not of the basic is to structure that on of it be within the of principles of distributive justice. 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Objective: This study aimed to develop a culturally acceptable and valid scale to assess depressive symptoms in older Indigenous Australians, to determine the prevalence of depressive disorders in the older Kimberley community, and to investigate the sociodemographic, lifestyle and clinical factors associated with depression in this population. Methods: Cross-sectional survey of adults aged 45 years or over from six remote Indigenous communities in the Kimberley and 30% of those living in Derby, Western Australia. The 11 linguistic and culturally sensitive items of the Kimberley Indigenous Cognitive Assessment of Depression (KICA-dep) scale were derived from the signs and symptoms required to establish the diagnosis of a depressive episode according to the DSM-IV-TR and ICD-10 criteria, and their frequency was rated on a 4-point scale ranging from ‘never’ to ‘all the time’ (range of scores: 0 to 33). The diagnosis of depressive disorder was established after a face-to-face assessment )
We present IceMorph, a semi-supervised morphosyntactic analyzer of Old Icelandic. In addition to machine-read corpora and dictionaries, it applies a small set of declension prototypes to map corpus words to dictionary entries. A web-based GUI allows expert users to modify and augment data through an online process. A machine learning module incorporates prototype data, edit-distance metrics, and expert feedback to continuously update part-of-speech and morphosyntactic classification. An advantage of the analyzer is its ability to achieve competitive classification accuracy with minimum training data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR], Copyright of PLoS ONE is the property of Public Library of Science and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the co)
The article is devoted to the study of the specificity of phatic speech on the radio. Phatics in this communication is conditioned by the process of democratization which is the main strategy of the media in general and, as a consequence, by the increased personal element in the sphere of oral public communication. There are two extralinguistic elements of identifying phatics: a) functional, where phatics is defined either as a simple exchange of words contributing to people uniting or as an implementation of the contact-making language function; b) semantic, where the specificity of phatics is determined in contrast to the informative content. 0riginally used in the sphere of everyday communication, phatic speech becomes an integral part of the mass media space today, as it enables to establish the contact with the audience and create an illusion of friendly communication between interlocutors. A radio listener enters the artificial world the presenters create by their specifically organized speech. The phatics in the speech makes public communication similar to the every day one, thus reducing the distance between the presenter and the audience. Approaching the level of their public speech to the language usage of prospective listeners and their language competence, radio presenters create a sense of home atmosphere suitable for informal communication. Colloquial speech is actively used. It adapts elements of different communicative spheres and facilitates their interaction. Colloquial elements express phatic communication on the radio. Infotainment as the principle of informing in the media leads to the activation of the game as a form of communication. The game is a deliberate breaking of the language norms with a pragmatic aim to establish and maintain the expressive phatic contact with the audience through the comic effect. Language game in a variety of techniques functions at different levels of radio broadcasts: program names, presenters' nicknames, presenters' speech. Pun is a common form of a language game; it is based on the use in one text of words with identical or similar sound forms (in precedent texts, idioms). The comic effect is created by a deliberate breach of lexical compatibility laws, constructing unusual lexical units and using circumlocutory nominations. Thus, phatic speech actively penetrating the area of public communication determines the tendency of the modern radio to ambivalence, which combines different phenomena a natural vivid dialogue with the listener and an informative message. Imitation of colloquial speech and language game on the radio bring an element of live human communication and make it more unpredictable and interesting for the audience.
This paper explores the semantics of proper names and specifically focuses on the so-called “given names”. It draws on recent theoretical work in the field (Van Langendonck, 2007; Vaxelaire, 2007; Hebert, 2004; Caprini, 2001, among others), my own lexicological and socio-anthroponymic corpora studies of birth certificates, and a sociolinguistic survey. A discussion of the issues leads to the following conclusions: a) proper names are a part of the lexicon of a language and, as such, have meaning; b) the concept of norm is central in the determination of semantic content and functioning of proper names, and c) there is no absolute distinction between the lexical categories of common nouns and proper names, but rather a “name threshold” (Fabre, 1980) that, if crossed over —initially in use, afterwards in the language— enables us to move from one category to the other along a continuum.
Higher N170 amplitudes to words and to faces were recently reported for faster readers of German. Since the shallow German orthography allows phonological recoding of single letters, the reported speed advantages might have their origin in especially well-developed visual processing skills of faster readers. In contrast to German, adult readers of Hebrew are forced to process letter chunks up to whole words. This dependence on more complex visual processing might have created ceiling effects for this skill. Therefore, the current study examined whether also in the deep Hebrew orthography visual processing skills as reflected by N170 amplitudes explain reading speed differences. Forty university students, native speakers of Hebrew without reading impairments, accomplished a lexical decision task (i.e., deciding whether a visually presented stimulus represents a real or a pseudo word) and a face decision task (i.e., deciding whether a face was presented complete or with missing facial f)
Previous research has shown that neural responses to words during sentence comprehension are sensitive to both lexical repetition and a word’s predictability in context. While previous research has often contrasted the effects of these variables (e.g. by looking at cases in which word repetition violates sentence-level constraints), little is known about how they work in tandem. In the current study we examine how recent exposure to a word and its predictability in context combine to impact lexical semantic processing. We devise a novel paradigm that combines reading comprehension with a recognition memory task, allowing for an orthogonal manipulation of a word’s predictability and its repetition status. Using event-related brain potentials (ERPs), we show that word repetition and predictability have qualitatively similar and additive effects on the N400 amplitude. We propose that prior exposure to a word and predictability impact lexical semantic processing in an additive and indepen)
This special issue of Language Resources and Evaluation is devoted to Resources and Tools for Language Learners.
The valency lexicon PDT-Vallex has been built in close connection with the annotation of the Prague Dependency Treebank project (PDT) and its successors (mainly the Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank project, PCEDT). It contains over 11000 valency frames for more than 7000 verbs which occurred in the PDT or PCEDT. It is available in electronically processable format (XML) together with the aforementioned treebanks (to be viewed and edited by TrEd, the PDT/PCEDT main annotation tool), and also in more human readable form including corpus examples (see the WEBSITE link below). The main feature of the lexicon is its linking to the annotated corpora - each occurrence of each verb is linked to the appropriate valency frame with additional (generalized) information about its usage and surface morphosyntactic form alternatives.
Data sparsity issues are extremely severe for parser due to the flexibility of tree structures. Many tags and productions appears a little, nevertheless, they are crucial for the parse disambiguation where it occurs. Besides, when a common tag somewhat regularly occurs in a non-canonical position, its distribution is usually distinct. In this paper, we propose a metric that measures the scarcity of any phrase with arbitrary span size. To make a better compromise between training trees with high confidence and scarcity, we try to catch some constraints in response to rare but articulating categories when training latent variable grammar. We exploits the limited data more sufficiently by capturing the depicting power of rate tree structure configuration in Expectation & Maximization procedure and Split & Merge framework. The resulting grammars are interpretable as our intension. Based on this approach, we further propose a method that exploits the limited training date from multiple perspectives, and accumulates their advantages in a product model. Despite its limited training data, out model improves parsing performance on Penn Chinese Treebank Fifth Edition, even higher than some systems with extra unlabeled data and external resources. Furthermore, this method is easy to generalized to cope with data sparsity in other natural language processing tasks.
One way of teaching grammar, namely morphology and syntax, is to visualize sentences as diagrams capturing relationships between words. Similarly, such relationships are captured in a more complex way in treebanks serving as key building stones in modern natural language processing. However, building them is very time consuming, thus we have been seeking for an alternative cheaper and faster way, like crowdsourcing. The purpose of our work is to explore possibility to get sentence diagrams produced by students and teachers. In our pilot study, the object language is Czech, where sentence diagrams are part of elementary school curriculum.
Automatic text categorisation systems is a type of software that every day it is receiving more interest, due not only to its use in documentaries environments but also to its possible application to tag properly documents on the Web. Many options have been proposed to face this subject using statistical approaches, natural language processing tools, ontologies and lexical databases. Nevertheless, there have been no too many empirical evaluations comparing the influence of the different tools used to solve these problems, particularly in a multilingual environment. In this paper we propose a multi-language rule-based pipeline system for automatic document categorisation and we compare empirically the results of applying techniques that rely on statistics and supervised learning with the results of applying the same techniques but with the support of smarter tools based on language semantics and ontologies, using for this purpose several corpora of documents. GENIE is being applied to real environments, which shows the potential of the proposal.
We investigate whether parsers can be used for self-monitoring in surface realization in order to avoid egregious errors involving "vicious" ambiguities, namely those where the intended interpretation fails to be considerably more likely than alternative ones. Using parse accuracy in a simple reranking strategy for selfmonitoring, we find that with a stateof-the-art averaged perceptron realization ranking model, BLEU scores cannot be improved with any of the well-known Treebank parsers we tested, since these parsers too often make errors that human readers would be unlikely to make. However, by using an SVM ranker to combine the realizer's model score together with features from multiple parsers, including ones designed to make the ranker more robust to parsing mistakes, we show that significant increases in BLEU scores can be achieved. Moreover, via a targeted manual analysis, we demonstrate that the SVM reranker frequently manages to avoid vicious ambiguities, while its ranking errors tend to affect fluency much more often than adequacy.
Dependency parsing has gained more and more interest in natural language processing in recent years due to its simplicity and general applicability for diverse languages. The international conference of computational natural language learning (CoNLL) has organized shared tasks on multilingual dependency parsing successively from 2006 to 2009, which leads to extensive progress on dependency parsing in both theoretical and practical perspectives. Meanwhile, dependency parsing has been successfully applied to machine translation, question answering, text mining, etc. To date, research on dependency parsing mainly focuses on data-driven supervised approaches and results show that the supervised models can achieve reasonable performance on in-domain texts for a variety of languages when manually labeled data is provided. However, relatively less effort is devoted to parsing out-domain texts and resource-poor languages, and few successful techniques are bought up for such scenario. This tutorial will cover all these research topics of dependency parsing and is composed of four major parts. Especially, we will survey the present progress of semi-supervised dependency parsing, web data parsing, and multilingual text parsing, and show some directions for future work. In the first part, we will introduce the fundamentals and supervised approaches for dependency parsing. The fundamentals include examples of dependency trees, annotated treebanks, evaluation metrics, and comparisons with other syntactic formulations like constituent parsing. Then we will introduce a few mainstream supervised approaches, i.e., transition-based, graph-based, easy-first, constituent-based dependency parsing. These approaches study dependency parsing from different perspectives, and achieve comparable and state-of-the-art performance for a wide range of languages. Then we will move to the hybrid models that combine the advantages of the above approaches. We will also introduce recent work on efficient parsing techniques, joint lexical analysis and dependency parsing, multiple treebank exploitation, etc. In the second part, we will survey the work on semi-supervised dependency parsing techniques. Such work aims to explore unlabeled data so that the parser can achieve higher performance. This tutorial will present several successful techniques that utilize information from different levels: whole tree level, partial tree level, and lexical level. We will discuss the advantages and limitations of these existing techniques. In the third part, we will survey the work on dependency parsing techniques for domain adaptation and web data. To advance research on out-domain parsing, researchers have organized two shared tasks, i.e., the CoNLL 2007 shared task and the shared task of syntactic analysis of non-canonical languages (SANCL 2012). Both two shared tasks attracted many participants. These participants tried different techniques to adapt the parser trained on WSJ texts to out-domain texts with the help of large-scale unlabeled data. Especially, we will present a brief survey on text normalization, which is proven to be very useful for parsing web data. In the fourth part, we will introduce the recent work on exploiting multilingual texts for dependency parsing, which falls into two lines of research. The first line is to improve supervised dependency parser with multilingual texts. The intuition behind is that ambiguities in the target language may be unambiguous in the source language. The other line is multilingual transfer learning which aims to project the syntactic knowledge from the source language to the target language.
Constituent Context Model (CCM) is an effective generative model for grammar induction, the aim of which is to induce hierarchical syntactic structure from natural text. The CCM simply defines the Multinomial distribution over constituents, which leads to a severe data sparse problem because long constituents are unlikely to appear in unseen data sets. This paper proposes a Bayesian method for constituent smoothing by defining two kinds of prior distributions over constituents: the Dirichlet prior and the Pitman-Yor Process prior. The Dirichlet prior functions as an additive smoothing method, and the PYP prior functions as a back-off smoothing method. Furthermore, a modified CCM is proposed to differentiate left constituents and right constituents in binary branching trees. Experiments show that both the proposed Bayesian smoothing method and the modified CCM are effective, and combining them attains or significantly improves the state-of-the-art performance of grammar induction evaluated on standard treebanks of various languages.
We describe a new dependency parser for English tweets, TWEEBOPARSER. The parser builds on several contributions: new syntactic annotations for a corpus of tweets (TWEEBANK), with conventions informed by the domain; adaptations to a statistical parsing algorithm; and a new approach to exploiting out-of-domain Penn Treebank data. Our experiments show that the parser achieves over 80% unlabeled attachment accuracy on our new, high-quality test set and measure the benefit of our contributions. Our dataset and parser can be found at http://www.ark.cs.cmu.edu/TweetNLP.
Methylphenidate mainly enhances dopamine neurotransmission whereas 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA, "ecstasy") mainly enhances serotonin neurotransmission. However, both drugs also induce a weaker increase of cerebral noradrenaline exerting sympathomimetic properties. Dopaminergic psychostimulants are reported to increase sexual drive, while serotonergic drugs typically impair sexual arousal and functions. Additionally, serotonin has also been shown to modulate cognitive perception of romantic relationships. Whether methylphenidate or MDMA alter sexual arousal or cognitive appraisal of intimate relationships is not known. Thus, we evaluated effects of methylphenidate (40 mg) and MDMA (75 mg) on subjective sexual arousal by viewing erotic pictures and on perception of romantic relationships of unknown couples in a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled, crossover study in 30 healthy adults. Methylphenidate, but not MDMA, increased ratings of sexual arousal for explicit sexual stimuli. The participants also sought to increase the presentation time of implicit sexual stimuli by button press after methylphenidate treatment compared with placebo. Plasma levels of testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone were not associated with sexual arousal ratings. Neither MDMA nor methylphenidate altered appraisal of romantic relationships of others. The findings indicate that pharmacological stimulation of dopaminergic but not of serotonergic neurotransmission enhances sexual drive. Whether sexual perception is altered in subjects misusing methylphenidate e.g., for cognitive enhancement or as treatment for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is of high interest and warrants further investigation.
The Stuttgart-Tbingen Tagset (STTS) is a widely used POS annotation scheme for German which provides 54 different tags for the analysis on the part of speech level.The tagset, however, does not distinguish between adverbs and different types of particles used for expressing modality, intensity, graduation, or to mark the focus of the sentence.In the paper, we present an extension to the STTS which provides tags for a more fine-grained analysis of modification, based on a syntactic perspective on parts of speech.We argue that the new classification not only enables us to do corpus-based linguistic studies on modification, but also improves statistical parsing.We give proof of concept by training a data-driven dependency parser on data from the TiGer treebank, providing the parser a) with the original STTS tags and b) with the new tags.Results show an improved labelled accuracy for the new, syntactically motivated classification.
The present study compared the impact of symbolic equivalence and opposition relations on fear generalisation. In a procedure using nonsense words, some stimuli became symbolically equivalent to an aversively conditioned stimulus while others were symbolically opposite. The generalisation of fear to symbolically related stimuli was then measured using behavioural avoidance, retrospective unconditioned stimulus expectancy and stimulus valence ratings. Equivalence relations facilitated fear generalisation while opposition relations constrained generalisation. The potential clinical implications of symbolic generalisation are discussed.
Emotion effects in event-related brain potentials (ERPs) have previously been reported for a range of visual stimuli, including emotional words, pictures, and facial expressions. Still, little is known about the actual comparability of emotion effects across these stimulus classes. The present study aimed to fill this gap by investigating emotion effects in response to words, pictures, and facial expressions using a blocked within-subject design. Furthermore, ratings of stimulus arousal and valence were collected from an independent sample of participants. Modulations of early posterior negativity (EPN) and late positive complex (LPC) were visible for all stimulus domains, but showed clear differences, particularly in valence processing. While emotion effects were limited to positive stimuli for words, they were predominant for negative stimuli in pictures and facial expressions. These findings corroborate the notion of a positivity offset for words and a negativity bias for pictures and facial expressions, which was assumed to be caused by generally lower arousal levels of written language. Interestingly, however, these assumed differences were not confirmed by arousal ratings. Instead, words were rated as overall more positive than pictures and facial expressions. Taken together, the present results point toward systematic differences in the processing of written words and pictorial stimuli of emotional content, not only in terms of a valence bias evident in ERPs, but also concerning their emotional evaluation captured by ratings of stimulus valence and arousal.
The present paper aims to categorize different types of synonymous words and also to highlight their synonymic pattern as well as grammatical categories found in Wordnet of Assamese language. Synonymy is an important component of vocabulary of the language. It establishes lexical relation between words. In fact, the term ‘synonymy’ is applied to the two or more words which share the same semantic features. WorldNet is a lexical database consisting of synsets. A synset is constructed by assembling a set of synonyms that together define a unique sense and synset is the basic foundation of Wordnet. Assamese language is rich in synonyms. In Assamese WorldNet, more than 20,000 synsets are entered under the categories of Noun, Verb, Adverb and Adjective. These synsets can of different types according to their semantic similarity, connotation, denotation, stylistic variations etc.
Recent years have seen an increased interest in and availability of parallel corpora. Large corpora from international organizations (e.g. European Union, United Nations, European Patent Office), or from multilingual Internet sites (e.g. OpenSubtitles) are now easily available and are used for statistical machine translation but also for online search by different user groups. This paper gives an overview of different usages and different types of search systems. In the past, parallel corpus search systems were based on sentence-aligned corpora. We argue that automatic word alignment allows for major innovations in searching parallel corpora. Some online query systems already employ word alignment for sorting translation variants, but none supports the full query functionality that has been developed for parallel treebanks. We propose to develop such a system for efficiently searching large parallel corpora with a powerful query language.
This is the first attempt at characterizing reading difficulty in Hindi using naturally occurring sentences. We created the Potsdam-Allahabad Hindi Eyetracking Corpus by recording eye-movement data from 30 participants at the University of Allahabad, India. The target stimuli were 153 sentences selected from the beta version of the Hindi-Urdu treebank. We find that word- or low-level predictors (syllable length, unigram and bigram frequency) affect first-pass reading times, regression path duration, total reading time, and outgoing saccade length. An increase in syllable length results in longer fixations, and an increase in word unigram and bigram frequency leads to shorter fixations. Longer syllable length and higher frequency lead to longer outgoing saccades. We also find that two predictors of sentence comprehension difficulty, integration and storage cost, have an effect on reading difficulty. Integration cost (Gibson, 2000) was approximated by calculating the distance (in words) between a dependent and head; and storage cost (Gibson, 2000), which measures difficulty of maintaining predictions, was estimated by counting the number of predicted heads at each point in the sentence. We find that integration cost mainly affects outgoing saccade length, and storage cost affects total reading times and outgoing saccade length. Thus, word-level predictors have an effect in both early and late measures of reading time, while predictors of sentence comprehension difficulty tend to affect later measures. This is, to our knowledge, the first demonstration using eye-tracking that both integration and storage cost influence reading difficulty.
Ever since Aristotle discussed the issue in Book II of his Rhetoric, humans have attempted to identify a set of "basic emotion labels". In this paper we propose an algorithmic method for evaluating sets of basic emotion labels that relies upon computed co-occurrence distances between words in a 12.7-billion-word corpus of unselected text from USENET discussion groups. Our method uses the relationship between human arousal and valence ratings collected for a large list of words, and the co-occurrence similarity between each word and emotion labels. We assess how well the words in each of 12 emotion label sets-proposed by various researchers over the past 118 years-predict the arousal and valence ratings on a test and validation dataset, each consisting of over 5970 items. We also assess how well these emotion labels predict lexical decision residuals (LDRTs), after co-varying out the effects attributable to basic lexical predictors. We then demonstrate a generalization of our method to determine the most predictive "basic" emotion labels from among all of the putative models of basic emotion that we considered. As well as contributing empirical data towards the development of a more rigorous definition of basic emotions, our method makes it possible to derive principled computational estimates of emotionality-specifically, of arousal and valence-for all words in the language.