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16504 papers
This paper explores interoperability for data represented using the Graph Annotation Framework (GrAF) (Ide and Suderman, 2007) and the data formats utilized by two general-purpose annotation systems: the General Architecture for Text Engineering (GATE) (Cunningham et al., 2002) and the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) (Ferrucci and Lally in Nat Lang Eng 10(3–4):327–348, 2004). GrAF is intended to serve as a “pivot” to enable interoperability among different formats, and both GATE and UIMA are at least implicitly designed with an eye toward interoperability with other formats and tools. We describe the steps required to perform a round-trip rendering from GrAF to GATE and GrAF to UIMA CAS and back again, and outline the commonalities as well as the differences and gaps that came to light in the process.
Annotating linguistic data has become a major field of interest, both for supplying the necessary data for machine learning approaches to NLP applications, and as a research issue in its own right. This comprises issues of technical formats, tools, and methodologies of annotation. We provide a brief overview of these notions and then introduce the papers assembled in this special issue.
The increasing number of experimental studies on second language (L2) processing, frequently with English as the L2, calls for a practical and valid measure of English vocabulary knowledge and proficiency. In a large-scale study with Dutch and Korean speakers of L2 English, we tested whether LexTALE, a 5-min vocabulary test, is a valid predictor of English vocabulary knowledge and, possibly, even of general English proficiency. Furthermore, the validity of LexTALE was compared with that of self-ratings of proficiency, a measure frequently used by L2 researchers. The results showed the following in both speaker groups: (1) LexTALE was a good predictor of English vocabulary knowledge; 2) it also correlated substantially with a measure of general English proficiency; and 3) LexTALE was generally superior to self-ratings in its predictions. LexTALE, but not self-ratings, also correlated highly with previous experimental data on two word recognition paradigms. The test can be carried out on or downloaded from www.lextale.com.
Student-constructed responses, such as essays, short-answer questions, and think-aloud protocols, provide a valuable opportunity to gauge student learning outcomes and comprehension strategies. However, given the challenges of grading student-constructed responses, instructors may be hesitant to use them. There have been major advances in the application of natural language processing of student-constructed responses. This literature review focuses on two dimensions that need to be considered when developing new systems. The first is type of response provided by the student—namely, meaning-making responses (e.g., think-aloud protocols, tutorial dialogue) and products of comprehension (e.g., essays, open-ended questions). The second corresponds to considerations of the type of natural language processing systems used and how they are applied to analyze the student responses. We argue that the appropriateness of the assessment protocols is, in part, constrained by the type of response and researchers should use hybrid systems that rely on multiple, convergent natural language algorithms.
A classic debate in the psychology of language concerns the question of the grain-size of the linguistic information that is stored in memory. One view is that only morphologically simple forms are stored (e.g., 'car', 'red'), and that more complex forms of language such as multi-word phrases (e.g., 'red car') are generated on-line from the simple forms. In two experiments we tested this view. In Experiment 1, participants produced noun+adjective and noun+noun phrases that were elicited by experimental displays consisting of colored line drawings and two superimposed line drawings. In Experiment 2, participants produced noun+adjective and determiner+noun+adjective utterances elicited by colored line drawings. In both experiments, naming latencies decreased with increasing frequency of the multi-word phrase, and were unaffected by the frequency of the object name in the utterance. These results suggest that the language system is sensitive to the distribution of linguistic information )
This special section of Language Resources and Evaluation contains a selection of presentations from ICGL that focus on interoperability for lexical and semantic databases and ontologies. These resources in effect constitute the “hub” of semantic interoperability by providing means to link language resources such as corpora to common categories and concepts. As such, interoperability within and among these databases is the necessary next step to enable semantic compatibility for language data.
The author analyzes the point of view of Vodjidali Mudjmali, the author of the well-known work “Matlat-ul-Ulum va Madjma-ul-Funun” dwelling on the ways of the right usage in regard to lexical units and grammatical constructions. In the tenth chapter of his hook Vodjidali Mudjmali registers numerous cases of violation of grammatical norms and proper combinability of words, he offers 11 factors which might promote smoothness and expressiveness of speech.
The objective of our study is to introduce a fully automated, computational linguistic technique to quantify semantic relations between words generated on a standard semantic verbal fluency test and to determine its cognitive and clinical correlates. Cognitive differences between patients with Alzheimer’s disease and mild cognitive impairment are evident in their performance on the semantic verbal fluency test. In addition to the semantic verbal fluency test score, several other performance characteristics sensitive to disease status and predictive of future cognitive decline have been defined in terms of words generated from semantically related categories (clustering) and shifting between categories (switching). However, the traditional assessment of clustering and switching has been performed manually in a qualitative fashion resulting in subjective scoring with limited reproducibility and scalability. Our approach uses word definitions and hierarchical relations between the words in WordNet®, a large electronic lexical database, to quantify the degree of semantic similarity and relatedness between words. We investigated the novel semantic fluency indices of mean cumulative similarity and relatedness between all pairs of words regardless of their order, and mean sequential similarity and relatedness between pairs of adjacent words in a sample of patients with clinically diagnosed probable (n = 55) or possible (n = 27) Alzheimer’s disease or mild cognitive impairment (n = 31). The semantic fluency indices differed significantly between the diagnostic groups, and were strongly associated with neuropsychological tests of executive function, as well as the rate of global cognitive decline. Our results suggest that word meanings and relations between words shared across individuals and computationally modeled via WordNet and large text corpora provide the necessary context to account for the variability in language-based behavior and relate it to cognitive dysfunction observed in mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s disease. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved)
Background: Normal reading requires eye guidance and activation of lexical representations so that words in text can be identified accurately. However, little is known about how the visual content of text supports eye guidance and lexical activation, and thereby enables normal reading to take place. Methods and Findings: To investigate this issue, we investigated eye movement performance when reading sentences displayed as normal and when the spatial frequency content of text was filtered to contain just one of 5 types of visual content: very coarse, coarse, medium, fine, and very fine. The effect of each type of visual content specifically on lexical activation was assessed using a target word of either high or low lexical frequency embedded in each sentence Results: No type of visual content produced normal eye movement performance but eye movement performance was closest to normal for medium and fine visual content. However, effects of lexical frequency emerged early in)
Existing logic-based querying tools for dependency treebanks use first order logic or monadic second order logic. We introduce a very fast model checker based on hybrid logic with operators ↓, @ and A and show that it is much faster than an existing querying tool for dependency treebanks based on first order logic, and much faster than an existing general purpose hybrid logic model checker. The querying tool is made publicly available.
On average our eyes make 3-5 saccadic movements per second when we read, although their neural mechanism is still unclear. It is generally thought that saccades help redirect the retinal fovea to specific characters and words but that actual discrimination of information only occurs during periods of fixation. Indeed, it has been proposed that there is active and selective suppression of information processing during saccades to avoid experience of blurring due to the high-speed movement. Here, using a paradigm where a string of either lexical (Chinese) or non-lexical (alphabetic) characters are triggered by saccadic eye movements, we show that subjects can discriminate both while making saccadic eye movement. Moreover, discrimination accuracy is significantly better for characters scanned during the saccadic movement to a fixation point than those not scanned beyond it. Our results showed that character information can be processed during the saccade, therefore saccades during readin)
Visual lexical decision is a classical paradigm in psycholinguistics, and numerous studies have assessed the so-called ''lexicality effect'' (i.e., better performance with lexical than non-lexical stimuli). Far less is known about the dynamics of choice, because many studies measured overall reaction times, which are not informative about underlying processes. To unfold visual lexical decision in (over) time, we measured participants' hand movements toward one of two item alternatives by recording the streaming x,y coordinates of the computer mouse. Participants categorized four kinds of stimuli as ''lexical'' or ''non-lexical:'' high and low frequency words, pseudowords, and letter strings. Spatial attraction toward the opposite category was present for low frequency words and pseudowords. Increasing the ambiguity of the stimuli led to greater movement complexity and trajectory attraction to competitors, whereas no such effect was present for high frequency words and letter strings. )
Background: Extraction of linguistically relevant auditory features is critical for speech comprehension in complex auditory environments, in which the relationships between acoustic stimuli are often abstract and constant while the stimuli per se are varying. These relationships are referred to as the abstract auditory rule in speech and have been investigated for their underlying neural mechanisms at an attentive stage. However, the issue of whether or not there is a sensory intelligence that enables one to automatically encode abstract auditory rules in speech at a preattentive stage has not yet been thoroughly addressed. Methodology/Principal Findings: We chose Chinese lexical tones for the current study because they help to define word meaning and hence facilitate the fabrication of an abstract auditory rule in a speech sound stream. We continuously presented native Chinese speakers with Chinese vowels differing in formant, intensity, and level of pitch to construct a complex and)
The ASPM and MCPH1 genes have been implicated in the adaptive evolution of the human brain [Mekel-Bobrov N. et al., 2005. Ongoing adaptive evolution of ASPM, a brain size determinant in homo sapiens. Science 309; Evans P.D. et al., 2005. Microcephalin, a gene regulating brain size, continues to evolve adaptively in humans. Science 309]. Curiously, experimental attempts have failed to connect the implicated SNPs in these genes with higher-level brain functions. These results stand in contrast with a population-level study linking the population frequency of their alleles with the tendency to use lexical tones in a language [Dediu D., Ladd D.R., 2007. Linguistic tone is related to the population frequency of the adaptive haplogroups of two brain size genes, ASPM and microcephalin. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 104]. In the present study, we found a significant correlation between the load of the derived alleles of ASPM and tone perception in a group of European Americans who did not spe)
Both the ventral and dorsal visual streams in the human brain are known to be involved in reading. However, the interaction of these two pathways and their responses to different cognitive demands remains unclear. In this study, activation of neural pathways during Chinese character reading was acquired by using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technique. Visual-spatial analysis (mediated by the dorsal pathway) was disassociated from lexical recognition (mediated by the ventral pathway) via a spatial-based lexical decision task and effective connectivity analysis. Connectivity results revealed that, during spatial processing, the left superior parietal lobule (SPL) positively modulated the left fusiform gyrus (FG), while during lexical processing, the left SPL received positive modulatory input from the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and sent negative modulatory output to the left FG. These findings suggest that the dorsal stream is highly involved in lexical recognit)
Monolingual infants start learning the prosodic properties of their native language around 6 to 9 months of age, a fact marked by the development of preferences for predominant prosodic patterns and a decrease in sensitivity to non-native prosodic properties. The present study evaluates the effects of bilingual acquisition on speech perception by exploring how stress pattern perception may differ in French-learning 10-month-olds raised in bilingual as opposed to monolingual environments. Experiment 1 shows that monolinguals can discriminate stress patterns following a long familiarization to one of two patterns, but not after a short familiarization. In Experiment 2, two subgroups of bilingual infants growing up learning both French and another language (varying across infants) in which stress is used lexically were tested under the more difficult short familiarization condition: one with balanced input, and one receiving more input in the language other than French. Discrimination wa)
Orthographies vary in the degree of transparency of spelling-sound correspondence. These range from shallow orthographies with transparent grapheme-phoneme relations, to deep orthographies, in which these relations are opaque. Only a few studies have examined whether orthographic depth is reflected in brain activity. In these studies a betweenlanguage design was applied, making it difficult to isolate the aspect of orthographic depth. In the present work this question was examined using a within-subject-and-language investigation. The participants were speakers of Hebrew, as they are skilled in reading two forms of script transcribing the same oral language. One form is the shallow pointed script (with diacritics), and the other is the deep unpointed script (without diacritics). Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while skilled readers carried out a lexical decision task in the two forms of script. A visual non-orthographic task controlled for the visual difference between t)
Findings on song perception and song production have increasingly suggested that common but partially distinct neural networks exist for processing lyrics and melody. However, the neural substrates of song recognition remain to be investigated. The purpose of this study was to examine the neural substrates involved in the accessing "song lexicon" as corresponding to a representational system that might provide links between the musical and phonological lexicons using positron emission tomography (PET). We exposed participants to auditory stimuli consisting of familiar and unfamiliar songs presented in three ways: sung lyrics (song), sung lyrics on a single pitch (lyrics), and the sung syllable 'la' on original pitches (melody). The auditory stimuli were designed to have equivalent familiarity to participants, and they were recorded at exactly the same tempo. Eleven right-handed nonmusicians participated in four conditions: three familiarity decision tasks using song, lyrics, and melod)
Although deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the basal ganglia improves motor outcomes in Parkinson's disease (PD), its effects on cognition, including language, remain unclear. This study examined the impact of subthalamic nucleus (STN) DBS on two fundamental capacities of language, grammatical and lexical functions. These functions were tested with the production of regular and irregular past-tenses, which contrast aspects of grammatical (regulars) and lexical (irregulars) processing while controlling for multiple potentially confounding factors. Aspects of the motor system were tested by contrasting the naming of manipulated (motor) and non-manipulated (non-motor) objects. Performance was compared between healthy controls and early-stage PD patients treated with either DBS/medications or medications alone. Patients were assessed on and off treatment, with controls following a parallel testing schedule. STN- DBS improved naming of manipulated (motor) but not non-manipulated (non-motor) )
Prior semantic processing can enhance subsequent picture naming performance, yet the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying this effect and its longevity are unknown. This functional magnetic resonance imaging study examined whether different neurological mechanisms underlie short-term (within minutes) and long-term (within days) facilitation effects from a semantic task in healthy older adults. Both short- and long-term facilitated items were named significantly faster than unfacilitated items, with short-term items significantly faster than long-term items. Region of interest results identified decreased activity for long-term facilitated items compared to unfacilitated and short-term facilitated items in the midportion of the middle temporal gyrus, indicating lexical-semantic priming. Additionally, in the whole brain results, increased activity for short-term facilitated items was identified in regions previously linked to episodic memory and object recognition, including the right l)
Patients with classic galactosemia, an inborn error of metabolism, have speech and language production impairments. Past research primarily focused on speech (motor) problems, but these cannot solely explain the language impairments. Which specific deficits contribute to the impairments in language production is not yet known. Deficits in semantic and syntactic planning are plausible and require further investigation. In the present study, we examined syntactic encoding while patients and matched controls overtly described scenes of moving objects using either separate words (minimal syntactic planning) or sentences (sentence-level syntactic planning). The design of the paradigm also allowed tapping into local noun phrase- and more global sentence-level syntactic planning. Simultaneously, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs). The patients needed more time to prepare and finish the utterances and made more errors. The patient ERPs had a very similar morphology to that of healthy)
Background: Studies demonstrating the involvement of motor brain structures in language processing typically focus on time windows beyond the latencies of lexical-semantic access. Consequently, such studies remain inconclusive regarding whether motor brain structures are recruited directly in language processing or through post-linguistic conceptual imagery. In the present study, we introduce a grip-force sensor that allows online measurements of language-induced motor activity during sentence listening. We use this tool to investigate whether language-induced motor activity remains constant or is modulated in negative, as opposed to affirmative, linguistic contexts. Methodology/Principal Findings: Participants listened to spoken action target words in either affirmative or negative sentences while holding a sensor in a precision grip. The participants were asked to count the sentences containing the name of a country to ensure attention. The grip force signal was recorded continuousl)
In human verbal communication, not only lexical information, but also paralinguistic information plays an important role in transmitting the speakers' mental state. Paralinguistic information is conveyed mainly through acoustic features like pitch, rhythm, tempo and so on. These acoustic features are generally known as prosody. It is known that some species of birds can discriminate certain aspects of human speech. However, there have not been any studies on the discrimination of prosody in human language which convey different paralinguistic meanings by birds. In the present study, we have shown that the Java sparrow (Padda oryzivora) can discriminate different prosodic patterns of Japanese sentences. These birds could generalize prosodic discrimination to novel sentences, but could not generalize sentence discrimination to those with novel prosody. Moreover, unlike Japanese speakers, Java sparrows used the first part of the utterance as the discrimination cue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR])
Background: The question of how the brain encodes letter position in written words has attracted increasing attention in recent years. A number of models have recently been proposed to accommodate the fact that transposed-letter stimuli like jugde or caniso are perceptually very close to their base words. Methodology: Here we examined how letter position coding is attained in the tactile modality via Braille reading. The idea is that Braille word recognition may provide more serial processing than the visual modality, and this may produce differences in the input coding schemes employed to encode letters in written words. To that end, we conducted a lexical decision experiment with adult Braille readers in which the pseudowords were created by transposing/replacing two letters. Principal Findings: We found a word-frequency effect for words. In addition, unlike parallel experiments in the visual modality, we failed to find any clear signs of transposed-letter confusability effects. Thi)
In contrast with animal communication systems, diversity is characteristic of almost every aspect of human language. Languages variously employ tones, clicks, or manual signs to signal differences in meaning; some languages lack the noun-verb distinction (e.g., Straits Salish), whereas others have a proliferation of fine-grained syntactic categories (e.g., Tzeltal); and some languages do without morphology (e.g., Mandarin), while others pack a whole sentence into a single word (e.g., Cayuga). A challenge for evolutionary biology is to reconcile the diversity of languages with the high degree of biological uniformity of their speakers. Here, we model processes of language change and geographical dispersion and find a consistent pressure for flexible learning, irrespective of the language being spoken. This pressure arises because flexible learners can best cope with the observed high rates of linguistic change associated with divergent cultural evolution following human migration. Thus)
We examined the influence of female fertility on the likelihood of male participants aligning their choice of syntactic construction with those of female confederates. Men interacted with women throughout their menstrual cycle. On critical trials during the interaction, the confederate described a picture to the participant using particular syntactic constructions. Immediately thereafter, the participant described to the confederate a picture that could be described using either the same construction that was used by the confederate or an alternative form of the construction. Our data show that the likelihood of men choosing the same syntactic structure as the women was inversely related to the women's level of fertility: higher levels of fertility were associated with lower levels of linguistic matching. A follow-up study revealed that female participants do not show this same change in linguistic behavior as a function of changes in their conversation partner's fertility. We interpr)
The amino acid sequences of proteins determine their three-dimensional structures and functions. However, how sequence information is related to structures and functions is still enigmatic. In this study, we show that at least a part of the sequence information can be extracted by treating amino acid sequences of proteins as a collection of English words, based on a working hypothesis that amino acid sequences of proteins are composed of short constituent amino acid sequences (SCSs) or "words". We first confirmed that the English language highly likely follows Zipf's law, a special case of power law. We found that the rank-frequency plot of SCSs in proteins exhibits a similar distribution when low-rank tails are excluded. In comparison with natural English and "compressed" English without spaces between words, amino acid sequences of proteins show larger linear ranges and smaller exponents with heavier low-rank tails, demonstrating that the SCS distribution in proteins is largely scal)
Language change takes place primarily via diffusion of linguistic variants in a population of individuals. Identifying selective pressures on this process is important not only to construe and predict changes, but also to inform theories of evolutionary dynamics of socio-cultural factors. In this paper, we advocate the Price equation from evolutionary biology and the Pó lyaurn dynamics from contagion studies as efficient ways to discover selective pressures. Using the Price equation to process the simulation results of a computer model that follows the Pó lya-urn dynamics, we analyze theoretically a variety of factors that could affect language change, including variant prestige, transmission error, individual influence and preference, and social structure. Among these factors, variant prestige is identified as the sole selective pressure, whereas others help modulate the degree of diffusion only if variant prestige is involved. This multidisciplinary study discerns the primary and co)
Background: Electronic health records are invaluable for medical research, but much of the information is recorded as unstructured free text which is time-consuming to review manually. Aim: To develop an algorithm to identify relevant free texts automatically based on labelled examples. Methods: We developed a novel machine learning algorithm, the 'Semi-supervised Set Covering Machine' (S3CM), and tested its ability to detect the presence of coronary angiogram results and ovarian cancer diagnoses in free text in the General Practice Research Database. For training the algorithm, we used texts classified as positive and negative according to their associated Read diagnostic codes, rather than by manual annotation. We evaluated the precision (positive predictive value) and recall (sensitivity) of S3CM in classifying unlabelled texts against the gold standard of manual review. We compared the performance of S3CM with the Transductive Vector Support Machine (TVSM), the original fully-supe)
The advent of humanoid robots has enabled a new approach to investigating the acquisition of language, and we report on the development of robots able to acquire rudimentary linguistic skills. Our work focuses on early stages analogous to some characteristics of a human child of about 6 to 14 months, the transition from babbling to first word forms. We investigate one mechanism among many that may contribute to this process, a key factor being the sensitivity of learners to the statistical distribution of linguistic elements. As well as being necessary for learning word meanings, the acquisition of anchor word forms facilitates the segmentation of an acoustic stream through other mechanisms. In our experiments some salient one-syllable word forms are learnt by a humanoid robot in real-time interactions with naive participants. Words emerge from random syllabic babble through a learning process based on a dialogue between the robot and the human participant, whose speech is perceived b)
The small alpine district of East Tyrol (Austria) has an exceptional demographic history. It was contemporaneously inhabited by members of the Romance, the Slavic and the Germanic language groups for centuries. Since the Late Middle Ages, however, the population of the principally agrarian-oriented area is solely Germanic speaking. Historic facts about East Tyrol's colonization are rare, but spatial density-distribution analysis based on the etymology of place-names has facilitated accurate spatial mapping of the various language groups' former settlement regions. To test for present-day Y chromosome population substructure, molecular genetic data were compared to the information attained by the linguistic analysis of pasture names. The linguistic data were used for subdividing East Tyrol into two regions of former Romance (A) and Slavic (B) settlement. Samples from 270 East Tyrolean men were genotyped for 17 Y-chromosomal microsatellites (Y-STRs) and 27 single nucleotide polymorphism)
We examined whether language affects the strength of a visual representation in memory. Participants studied a picture, read a story about the depicted object, and then selected out of two pictures the one whose transparency level most resembled that of the previously presented picture. The stories contained two linguistic manipulations that have been demonstrated to affect concept availability in memory, i.e., object presence and goal-relevance. The results show that described absence of an object caused people to select the most transparent picture more often than described presence of the object. This effect was not moderated by goal-relevance, suggesting that our paradigm tapped into the perceptual quality of representations rather than, for example, their linguistic availability. We discuss the implications of these findings within a framework of grounded cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR], Copyright of PLoS ONE is the property of Public Library of Science and its content may not )
The strong association between music and speech has been supported by recent research focusing on musicians' superior abilities in second language learning and neural encoding of foreign speech sounds. However, evidence for a double association-the influence of linguistic background on music pitch processing and disorders-remains elusive. Because languages differ in their usage of elements (e.g., pitch) that are also essential for music, a unique opportunity for examining such language-to-music associations comes from a cross-cultural (linguistic) comparison of congenital amusia, a neurogenetic disorder affecting the music (pitch and rhythm) processing of about 5% of the Western population. In the present study, two populations (Hong Kong and Canada) were compared. One spoke a tone language in which differences in voice pitch correspond to differences in word meaning (in Hong Kong Cantonese, /si/ means 'teacher' and 'to try' when spoken in a high and mid pitch pattern, respectively). )
Linguistic and genetic studies on Roma populations inhabited in Europe have unequivocally traced these populations to the Indian subcontinent. However, the exact parental population group and time of the out-of-India dispersal have remained disputed. In the absence of archaeological records and with only scanty historical documentation of the Roma, comparative linguistic studies were the first to identify their Indian origin. Recently, molecular studies on the basis of disease-causing mutations and haploid DNA markers (i.e. mtDNA and Y-chromosome) supported the linguistic view. The presence of Indianspecific Y-chromosome haplogroup H1a1a-M82 and mtDNA haplogroups M5a1, M18 and M35b among Roma has corroborated that their South Asian origins and later admixture with Near Eastern and European populations. However, previous studies have left unanswered questions about the exact parental population groups in South Asia. Here we present a detailed phylogeographical study of Y-chromosomal ha)
The institutionalization of separate standard varieties for Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian in the 1990s was hailed by many Bosnians as the long-denied recognition of the Bosnian idiom as distinct from the Serbian and Croatian varieties it had so often been subordinated under. Yet the accompanying codification of Bosnian standard language forms has been highly controversial in Bosnia, and debates continue today about how to define the Bosnian language My dissertation explores the paradox that while many Bosnians support the Bosnian language as a name, they often do not support it as a norm . To explore this paradox, I undertook 12 months of fieldwork in four different middle schools in Bosnia. Education is a domain in which linguistic norms are highlighted. In Bosnia, it is also an area in which language variation is deemed to be particularly problematic by observers, participants, and commentators both locally and abroad. The decentralized nature of education in Bosnia means that classrooms are often ethnically segregated and curricula in use across the country are not harmonized. Language standardization has often been analyzed as a state-sponsored process that works through official institutions to reduce heterogeneity and promote uniform understandings of linguistic forms and their semiotic meanings. This dissertation explores ongoing language standardization campaigns in Bosnia and Herzegovina and argues that traditional ways of understanding the role of institutions in language standardization don't explain why standardization has been so unsuccessful in the post-war Bosnian state. My research challenges the idea that institutions must be engaged in drawing rigid us/them boundaries to be thought of as representative or legitimate, instead pointing to the possibility that ambiguity can be a marker of legitimacy rather than a threat to it. This dissertation explores how ideologies of heterogeneity and free choice in language work against the imposition of a standard norm at the same time as European aspirations and ideas about post-socialist normalcy push many Bosnians to believe their country should have such a standard. The resulting tension is the space in which choice between standard variants takes on social meaning and contributes to emerging definitions of what it means to be Bosnian. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
This paper investigates the ways languages are used in Philadelphia Chinatown through qualitative content analysis of 330 photos. Examining the linguistic landscape of public spaces exposes issues of linguistic tensions, language vitality, and language shift in multilingual settings. While Chinese in the form of Mandarin is highly publicized, thereby placing disproportionate emphasis upon one language over others, Philadelphia Chinatown shows diversity, coexistence, and creative uses of multiple Chinese languages alongside English. The signage suggests linguistic rescaling connecting real and imagined audiences, conforming to broader 'Chinese' linguistic norms while localized to connect to a range of Chineses. We show how linguistic and cultural pluralism of 'Chinese' have always existed—and continue to exist—and the importance of developing socially sensitive literacy pedagogy, especially when there is a mismatch between the informal, community-level signage and what is formally taught in 'Chinese' language classrooms in the U.S. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
Since the late 1800s, the Uruguayan Government has attempted to enforce cultural and linguistic norms along the border with Brazil through the prohibition of Portuguese, especially in schools, despite the fact that this is the heritage language of most border residents. This research focuses on the differential use of Spanish and Portuguese in Rivera, the largest city on the border. Using self-reported data and metalinguistic commentaries extracted from interviews with 63 Spanish–Portuguese bilinguals, the use of both languages in various domains (home, school, work spaces) and with diverse interlocutors (family, friends, co-workers, superiors) is analyzed. Quantitative and qualitative analysis reveals that Portuguese, which has been marginalized for decades, is more frequently used in the home with relatives and close friends. The use of Portuguese in more formal domains, including schools, is much less frequent. The results from this study corroborate a perception within the community that Portuguese lacks the prestige of Spanish and provide further evidence of its status as a primarily home language. The current research does not show a progressive shift toward Spanish in Rivera nor does it support claims by other researchers that this community is diglossic. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
The inhibition of unwanted behaviors is considered an effortful and controlled ability. However, inhibition also requires the detection of contexts indicating that old behaviors may be inappropriate - in other words, inhibition requires the ability to monitor context in the service of goals, which we refer to as context-monitoring. Using behavioral, neuroimaging, electrophysiological and computational approaches, we tested whether motoric stopping per se is the cognitivelycontrolled process supporting response inhibition, or whether context-monitoring may fill this role. Our results demonstrate that inhibition does not require control mechanisms beyond those involved in context-monitoring, and that such control mechanisms are the same regardless of stopping demands. These results challenge dominant accounts of inhibitory control, which posit that motoric stopping is the cognitively-controlled process of response inhibition, and clarify emerging debates on the frontal substrates of res)
Humans make systematic errors in the 3D interpretation of the optic flow in both passive and active vision. These systematic distortions can be predicted by a biologically-inspired model which disregards self-motion information resulting from head movements (Caudek, Fantoni, & Domini 2011). Here, we tested two predictions of this model: (1) A plane that is stationary in an earth-fixed reference frame will be perceived as changing its slant if the movement of the observer's head causes a variation of the optic flow; (2) a surface that rotates in an earth-fixed reference frame will be perceived to be stationary, if the surface rotation is appropriately yoked to the head movement so as to generate a variation of the surface slant but not of the optic flow. Both predictions were corroborated by two experiments in which observers judged the perceived slant of a random-dot planar surface during egomotion. We found qualitatively similar biases for monocular and binocular viewing of the simul)
Background: The Hospital Acquired Condition Strategy (HACS) denies payment for venous thromboembolism (VTE) after total knee arthroplasty (TKA). The intention is to reduce complications and associated costs, while improving the quality of care by mandating VTE prophylaxis. We applied a system dynamics model to estimate the impact of HACS on VTE rates, and potential unintended consequences such as increased rates of bleeding and infection and decreased access for patients who might benefit from TKA. Methods and Findings: The system dynamics model uses a series of patient stocks including the number needing TKA, deemed ineligible, receiving TKA, and harmed due to surgical complication. The flow of patients between stocks is determined by a series of causal elements such as rates of exclusion, surgery and complications. The number of patients harmed due to VTE, bleeding or exclusion were modeled by year by comparing patient stocks that results in scenarios with and without HACS. The perc)
Visual perceptual learning (VPL) is defined as visual performance improvement after visual experiences. VPL is often highly specific for a visual feature presented during training. Such specificity is observed in behavioral tuning function changes with the highest improvement centered on the trained feature and was originally thought to be evidence for changes in the early visual system associated with VPL. However, results of neurophysiological studies have been highly controversial concerning whether the plasticity underlying VPL occurs within the visual cortex. The controversy may be partially due to the lack of observation of neural tuning function changes in multiple visual areas in association with VPL. Here using human subjects we systematically compared behavioral tuning function changes after global motion detection training with decoded tuning function changes for 8 visual areas using pattern classification analysis on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI))
Language is the best example of a cultural evolutionary system, able to retain a phylogenetic signal over many thousands of years. The temporal stability (conservatism) of basic vocabulary is relatively well understood, but the stability of the structural properties of language (phonology, morphology, syntax) is still unclear. Here we report an extensive Bayesian phylogenetic investigation of the structural stability of numerous features across many language families and we introduce a novel method for analyzing the relationships between the "stability profiles" of language families. We found that there is a strong universal component across language families, suggesting the existence of universal linguistic, cognitive and genetic constraints. Against this background, however, each language family has a distinct stability profile, and these profiles cluster by geographic area and likely deep genealogical relationships. These stability profiles seem to show, for example, the ancient hi)
Context-free grammars are fundamental for the description of linguistic syntax. However, most artificial grammar learning experiments have explored learning of simpler finite-state grammars, while studies exploring context-free grammars have not assessed awareness and implicitness. This paper explores the implicit learning of context-free grammars employing features of hierarchical organization, recursive embedding and long-distance dependencies. The grammars also featured the distinction between left- and right-branching structures, as well as between centre- and tail-embedding, both distinctions found in natural languages. People acquired unconscious knowledge of relations between grammatical classes even for dependencies over long distances, in ways that went beyond learning simpler relations (e.g. n-grams) between individual words. The structural distinctions drawn from linguistics also proved important as performance was greater for tail-embedding than centre-embedding structures)
While humans are capable of mentally transcending the here and now, this faculty for mental time travel (MTT) is dependent upon an underlying cognitive representation of time. To this end, linguistic, cognitive and behavioral evidence has revealed that people understand temporal constructs by mapping them to concrete spatial domains (e.g. past = backward, future = forward). However, very little research has investigated factors that may determine the topographical characteristics of these spatiotemporal maps. Guided by the imperative role of episodic content for retrospective and prospective thought (i.e., MTT), here we explored the possibility that the spatialization of time is influenced by the amount of episodic detail a temporal unit contains. In two experiments, participants mapped temporal events along mediolateral (Experiment 1) and anterioposterior (Experiment 2) spatial planes. Importantly, the temporal units varied in self-relevance as they pertained to temporally proximal o)
This study aims at investigating the HLA molecular variation across Switzerland in order to determine possible regional differences, which would be highly relevant to several purposes: optimizing donor recruitment strategies in hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT), providing reliable reference data in HLA and disease association studies, and understanding the population genetic background(s) of this culturally heterogeneous country. HLA molecular data of more than 20,000 HSCT donors from 9-13 recruitment centers of the whole country were analyzed. Allele and haplotype frequencies were estimated by using new computer tools adapted to the heterogeneity and ambiguity of the data. Nonparametric and resampling statistical tests were performed to assess Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, selective neutrality and linkage disequilibrium among different loci, both in each recruitment center and in the whole national registry. Genetic variation was explored through genetic distance and hiera)
The human populations of the Iberian Peninsula are the varied result of a complex mixture of cultures throughout history, and are separated by clear social, cultural, linguistic or geographic barriers. The stronger genetic differences between closely related populations occur in the northern third of Spain, a phenomenon commonly known as "micro-differentiation". It has been argued and discussed how this form of genetic structuring can be related to both the rugged landscape and the ancient societies of Northern Iberia, but this is difficult to test in most regions due to the intense human mobility of previous centuries. Nevertheless, the Spanish autonomous community of Asturias shows a complex history which hints of a certain isolation of its population. This, joined together with a difficult terrain full of deep valleys and steep mountains, makes it suitable for performing a study of genetic structure, based on mitochondrial DNA and Y-Chromosome markers. Our analyses do not only show)
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The article contains analysis of the norm concept in the base of the semantic category of the same name. The research is carried out on the material of Russian lexical units and derivatives. In the article the norm concept and the norm semantic category are considered in the aspects of quantity and quality. Some category characteristics and certain varieties of norms are described. The article consists of four parts. In the beginning of the article the norm category semantics is described and conditions for its formation are indicated. The universal category characteristics of the norm are described and the main principles of the norm semantic category are given. The universal category characteristics are systems organization, distribution, formal definition, stability, reproducibility, optimality and bilaterality. The main principles of the norm semantic category organization are employment of antonyms and evaluation. Accounting for these principles, it is possible to select four groups, indicating the norm and anomalies of lexical units. Each group is discussed in the article. In the first part of the paper the semantics of the word норма (norm, standard) and its derivates is analysed. It is established that the norm concept has quantitative and qualitative aspects. The word норма and its derivates acquire evaluation semantics when naming anomalies or when parts of phraseological units. The second part of the article is devoted to the analysis of the semantics of the word порядок (order) and its derivates. In this part of the paper, synonyms of this word are studied. These lexical units are actively used for naming anomalies. It is conditioned by this words meaning. In the third part of the paper a comparative analysis of synonyms правильный (correct) and верный (right) and its derivates is carried out with the purpose of revealing reasons of their evaluative meanings formation. The word правильный and its derivates indicate mainly technical norms; the word верный is more connected with logical truths. The fourth part of the article contains a description of the semantics of the word лад (harmony, concord) and its derivates. The derivates generally have evaluative semantics of positive connotation and an ability to indicate a large number of various situations. In the article some types of norms are named and the role of the analysed words for these norms indications is described. In the final part of the paper specific features of the norm category characteristics in word meanings are described.