Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
16504 papers
Autori istražuju otvorena pitanja leksickoga normiranja u hrvatskoj maritimoloskoj leksikografiji. S jedne strane, hrvatska leksicka norma u 19. st. u velikoj mjeri određena je kriterijima hrvatskih vukovaca, koji su leksicku “cistocu” određivali po mjeri pripadnosti leksika ruralnim novostokavskim organskim idiomima, a s druge strane golem i izuzetno bogat maritimni leksik bio je prokazan kao tuđ, tj. kao talijanski. Na taj nacin nastala je praznina u hrvatskoj normativnoj maritimoloskoj leksikografiji koja nije ni do danas popunjena, unatoc tome sto je Anicev Rjecnik hrvatskoga jezika prvi put u znatnijoj mjeri uveo brojne hrvatske maritimizme i dao im leksicki normativni legitimitet.
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)
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.
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)
Background: Medical research increasingly utilizes patient-reported outcome measures administered and scored in different languages. In order to pool or compare outcomes from different language versions, instruments should be measurement equivalent across linguistic groups. The objective of this study was to examine the cross-language measurement equivalence of the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) between English- and French-speaking Canadian patients with systemic sclerosis (SSc). Methods: The sample consisted of 739 English- and 221 French-speaking SSc patients. Multiple-Indicator Multiple-Cause (MIMIC) modeling was used to identify items displaying possible differential item functioning (DIF). Results: A one-factor model for the PHQ-9 fit the data well in both English- and French-speaking samples. Statistically significant DIF was found for 3 of 9 items on the PHQ-9. However, the overall estimate in depression latent scores between English- and French-speaking respondents was)
This functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study investigates a crucial parameter in spatial description, namely variants in the frame of reference chosen. Two frames of reference are available in European languages for the description of small-scale assemblages, namely the intrinsic (or object-oriented) frame and the relative (or egocentric) frame. We showed participants a sentence such as "the ball is in front of the man", ambiguous between the two frames, and then a picture of a scene with a ball and a man - participants had to respond by indicating whether the picture did or did not match the sentence. There were two blocks, in which we induced each frame of reference by feedback. Thus for the crucial test items, participants saw exactly the same sentence and the same picture but now from one perspective, now the other. Using this method, we were able to precisely pinpoint the pattern of neural activation associated with each linguistic interpretation of the ambiguity, whil)
Proponents of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) claim that certain eye-movements are reliable indicators of lying. According to this notion, a person looking up to their right suggests a lie whereas looking up to their left is indicative of truth telling. Despite widespread belief in this claim, no previous research has examined its validity. In Study 1 the eye movements of participants who were lying or telling the truth were coded, but did not match the NLP patterning. In Study 2 one group of participants were told about the NLP eye-movement hypothesis whilst a second control group were not. Both groups then undertook a lie detection test. No significant differences emerged between the two groups. Study 3 involved coding the eye movements of both liars and truth tellers taking part in high profile press conferences. Once again, no significant differences were discovered. Taken together the results of the three studies fail to support the claims of NLP. The theoretical and practical)
Temporal predictability is thought to affect stimulus processing by facilitating the allocation of attentional resources. Recent studies have shown that periodicity of a tonal sequence results in a decreased peak latency and a larger amplitude of the P3b compared with temporally random, i.e., aperiodic sequences. We investigated whether this applies also to sequences of linguistic stimuli (syllables), although speech is usually aperiodic. We compared aperiodic syllable sequences with two temporally regular conditions. In one condition, the interval between syllable onset was fixed, whereas in a second condition the interval between the syllables' perceptual center (p-center) was kept constant. Event-related potentials were assessed in 30 adults who were instructed to detect irregularities in the stimulus sequences. We found larger P3b amplitudes for both temporally predictable conditions as compared to the aperiodic condition and a shorter P3b latency in the p-center condition than in)
Both facial expression and tone of voice represent key signals of emotional communication but their brain processing correlates remain unclear. Accordingly, we constructed a novel implicit emotion recognition task consisting of simultaneously presented human faces and voices with neutral, happy, and angry valence, within the context of recognizing monkey faces and voices task. To investigate the temporal unfolding of the processing of affective information from human face-voice pairings, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) to these audiovisual test stimuli in 18 normal healthy subjects; N100, P200, N250, P300 components were observed at electrodes in the frontal-central region, while P100, N170, P270 were observed at electrodes in the parietal-occipital region. Results indicated a significant audiovisual stimulus effect on the amplitudes and latencies of components in frontal-central (P200, P300, and N250) but not the parietal occipital region (P100, N170 and P270). Specifical)
Cet article constitue une version réduite de l'article "The French Social Media Bank: a Treebank of Noisy User Generated Content" (mêmes auteurs)
It is well known that damage to the peripheral auditory system causes deficits in tone detection as well as pitch and loudness perception across a wide range of frequencies. However, the extent to which to which the auditory cortex plays a critical role in these basic aspects of spectral processing, especially with regard to speech, music, and environmental sound perception, remains unclear. Recent experiments indicate that primary auditory cortex is necessary for the normally-high perceptual acuity exhibited by humans in pure-tone frequency discrimination. The present study assessed whether the auditory cortex plays a similar role in the intensity domain and contrasted its contribution to sensory versus discriminative aspects of intensity processing. We measured intensity thresholds for pure-tone detection and pure-tone loudness discrimination in a population of healthy adults and a middle-aged man with complete or near-complete lesions of the auditory cortex bilaterally. Detection t)
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)
The current work aims to validate, by means of a computational model, an empirical database of free word association norms of Mexican Spanish. Specifically, this work has two main goals: (1) to detect the associated weight of word word pairs, and (2) to provide an understanding of a lexical network formed beyond an input-output word pair, similar to the mediated priming effect reported experimentally. We used the Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency weighting (TFIDF) to obtain the associated weight between an input output word pair and to calculate the TFIDF-Matrix which is used as an input in the Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) Model. The LSA model is a semantic representation at the lexical level that allows us to understand semantic relationships beyond input-output word pairs. Our computational model replicates and further explains previous experimental work on lexical networks.
Background:Although the outbreak of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) in Guangdong has been documented for more than a decade, the molecular characteristics of such a regional HIV-1 epidemic remained unknown. Methodology/Principal Findings: By sequencing of HIV-1 pol/env genes and phylogenetic analysis, we performed a molecular epidemiologic study in a representative subset (n = 200) of the 508 HIV-1-seropositive individuals followed up at the center for HIV/AIDS care and treatment of Guangzhou Hospital of Infectious Diseases. Of 157 samples (54.1% heterosexual acquired adults, 20.4% needle-sharing drug users, 5.7% receivers of blood transfusion, 1.3% men who have sex with men, and 18.5% remained unknown) with successful sequencing for both pol and env genes, 105 (66.9%) HIV-1 subtype CRF01_AE and 24 (15.3%) CRF07_BC, 9 (5.7%) B', 5 (3.2%) CRF08_BC, 5 (3.2%) B, 1 (0.6%) C, 3 (1.9%) CRF02_AG, and 5 (3.2%) inter-region recombinants were identified within pol/env sequences. Thi)
Selectively attending to task-relevant sounds whilst ignoring background noise is one of the most amazing feats performed by the human brain. Here, we studied the underlying neural mechanisms by recording magnetoencephalographic (MEG) responses of 14 healthy human subjects while they performed a near-threshold auditory discrimination task vs. a visual control task of similar difficulty. The auditory stimuli consisted of notch-filtered continuous noise masker sounds, and of 1020-Hz target tones occasionally (p = 0.1) replacing 1000-Hz standard tones of 300-ms duration that were embedded at the center of the notches, the widths of which were parametrically varied. As a control for masker effects, tone-evoked responses were additionally recorded without masker sound. Selective attention to tones significantly increased the amplitude of the onset M100 response at ˜100 ms to the standard tones during presence of the masker sounds especially with notches narrower than the critical band. Fur)
Facial recognition is key to social interaction, however with unfamiliar faces only generic information, in the form of facial stereotypes such as gender and age is available. Therefore is generic information more prominent in unfamiliar versus familiar face processing? In order to address the question we tapped into two relatively disparate stages of face processing. At the early stages of encoding, we employed perceptual masking to reveal that only perception of unfamiliar face targets is affected by the gender of the facial masks. At the semantic end; using a priming paradigm, we found that while to-beignored unfamiliar faces prime lexical decisions to gender congruent stereotypic words, familiar faces do not. Our findings indicate that gender is a more salient dimension in unfamiliar relative to familiar face processing, both in early perceptual stages as well as later semantic stages of person construal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR], Copyright of PLoS ONE is the property of Public Libr)
Turning Turing's logic on its head, we used widespread letter-based Turing Tests found on the internet (CAPTCHAs) to shed light on human cognition. We examined the basis of the human ability to solve CAPTCHAs, where machines fail. We asked whether this is due to our use of slow-acting inferential processes that would not be available to machines, or whether fastacting automatic orthographic processing in humans has superior robustness to shape variations. A masked priming lexical decision experiment revealed efficient processing of CAPTCHA words in conditions that rule out the use of slow inferential processing. This shows that the human superiority in solving CAPTCHAs builds on a high degree of invariance to location and continuous transforms, which is achieved during the very early stages of visual word recognition in skilled readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR], Copyright of PLoS ONE is the property of Public Library of Science and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple si)
The objective of the present work is to show the most significant actions and results of the Cuban linguistic policy, which is directed towards increasing the standards of the culture and the linguistic knowledge of all the citizens by legitimating the high norms of the Cuban variant of the Spanish in its lexical, phonic and grammatical levels. It also aims to keep its union with the Spanish world respecting and acknowledging the diversity. Furthermore, it states the acknowledgement and respect to other languages which coexist with Spanish in the Cuban territory, through the assumption of linguistic strategies which favor everyone.
Previous fMRI studies in English-speaking samples suggested that specific interventions may alter brain function in language-relevant networks in children with reading and spelling difficulties, but this research strongly focused on reading impaired individuals. Only few studies so far investigated characteristics of brain activation associated with poor spelling ability and whether a specific spelling intervention may also be associated with distinct changes in brain activity patterns. We here investigated such effects of a morpheme-based spelling intervention on brain function in 20 children with comparatively poor spelling and reading abilities using repeated fMRI. Relative to 10 matched controls, children with comparatively poor spelling and reading abilities showed increased activation in frontal medial and right hemispheric regions and decreased activation in left occipito-temporal regions prior to the intervention, during processing of a lexical decision task. After five weeks )
The lexicons of human languages organize their units at two distinct levels. At a first combinatorial level, meaningless forms (typically referred to as phonemes) are combined into meaningful units (typically referred to as morphemes). Thanks to this, many morphemes can be obtained by relatively simple combinations of a small number of phonemes. At a second compositional level of the lexicon, morphemes are composed into larger lexical units, the meaning of which is related to the individual meanings of the composing morphemes. This duality of patterning is not a necessity for lexicons and the question remains wide open regarding how a population of individuals is able to bootstrap such a structure and the evolutionary advantages of its emergence. Here we address this question in the framework of a multi-agents model, where a population of individuals plays simple naming games in a conceptual environment modeled as a graph. We demonstrate that errors in communication as well as a blend)
In order to understand the style of the original author, the translation of the text should be the true reproduction of it. One aspect which helps translators to achieve the author style is accomplished by the translation of neologisms. Newmark (7) defined neologisms as newly coined lexical units or existing lexical units that acquire a new sense. The present study was an attempt to consider the most common translational norm and procedure ap- plied in the translation of computer neologisms from English into Persian in 2000s. To achieve the aims, a parallel corpus of computer texts was se- lected; the instances of neologisms were identified in them and compared with their Persian counterparts. The findings of the research suggested that transference and lexical synonymy were the major translational norms and transference was also the most frequent translation procedure in the transla- tion of neologisms in this specific period.
In a functional MRI (fMRI) study, we have investigated the grammatical categories of object noun, event noun and verb in order to assess the cortical regions of activation supporting their processing. Twelve Italian healthy participants performed a lexical decision task. They had to decide whether a string was an Italian word or not. Words could be objects like medaglia (medal), or events like the noun pianto (cry); or the verb dormire (to sleep). Noun and verb comparison shows differences in regions of activation in the left Inferior Frontal cortex and in the extent of the same areas. We have found specific areas of activation for object noun, and similarities in the pattern of activation for event noun and verb. The activations induced by pseudowords highly resembled the areas activated by the corresponding word category. The implications of the results are discussed in light of the recent debate on the role of grammatical category in the brain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR], Copyright of )
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)
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. )
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: 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)
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)
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)
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) )
I am deeply grateful—certainly far more grateful than a brief response such as this can signal—to Zachary Braiterman, Marc Ellis, and Richard L. Rubenstein for having taken the time to respond to my essay. I have learned a great deal from all of them in the past, and I continue to learn from them when reading their responses. I especially thank Professor Rubenstein for correcting some of the finer points in my interpretation of his relationship with Thomas Altizer; I remain in awe of his personal closeness to someone who sees the Holocaust as a cosmic event.All of the respondents envision a radical theology that is different from what I have offered in this essay, a model that strikes them (albeit in different ways) as too ensconced in a certain contemporary understanding of tradition. Marc Ellis argues that radical Jewish theology must move “outside the rabbinic framework” that has too much pull today in determining which Jewish positions count as normatively Jewish, and move toward the prophetic. Zachary Braiterman agrees with Ellis and argues that a radical Jewish theology must not only move beyond nomos, but also goes further than Ellis in the claim that radical Jewish theology must also move beyond kindness and other forms of ethics. Indeed, for Braiterman radical Jewish theology must embody the monstrousness that lies at the core of all radicality; it is essentially an apocalyptics that can unleash all of the violent energies that have been associated with apocalyptic movements in history. Richard Rubenstein agrees with Braiterman on what radical theology must entail, yet while Braiterman finally must leave radicality behind, Rubenstein embraces it, and in so doing steps beyond Jewish theological tradition and especially the Jewish philosophical-theological tradition to which Braiterman is committed. Jewish radicalism, for Rubenstein, is no longer necessarily Jewish radical theology, since the social sciences and political theory are better tools by which to build Jewish power and avoid the horror of a second Holocaust. While Rubenstein's comments are brief, I find it worthy of note that in his self-description as an “accidental theologian” there seems to be a turn away from the call for a religious transformation of humans to “an inclusive vision appropriate to a global civilization in which Moses and Mohammed, Christ, Buddha, and Confucius all play a role” with which Rubenstein ended The Age of Triage (1983, 240).I find all of these options tempting, yet unsatisfying, although I am also well aware that my dissatisfaction is something that threatens to torpedo the sentiment behind the essay. Let me explain.Like Rubenstein, Braiterman, and Ellis, I find much lacking in the texts of modern Jewish philosophical theology that were handed down to us, texts for us to comment on (and thereby gain tenure) and then pass on to our students. What is lacking is, in a word, historicity. This too is a theme of a subcanon in twentieth-century Jewish thought, including that of Rubenstein, Fackenheim, and Arendt. But in the work of Herberg, Heschel, Rosenzweig, and even parts of Cohen and Levinas, God is described only in terms of transcendence. The task for humans (so says Jewish philosophical theology) is to assent to various divinely ordained practices that are beyond knowledge, and wait for redemption and/or death. This is the purpose of ethical action in Cohen and Levinas, of ritual action in Rosenzweig, and of a generally Sinai-centered view of the world in Herberg and Heschel. Yet how could these figures have known to assent? Perhaps there was a chain of revelation from Sinai to them; this is how Moses Mendelssohn defended the need to maintain halakhic observance in his 1783 Jerusalem. Yet if so, why would these figures’ arguments have had any effect on their audience? If a chain of revelation were authoritative, wouldn't a people have already returned to, or never left, the mitzvot? Yet if these figures were giving nonrevealed arguments for their conclusions, how could they be making arguments about a transcendent God? For these reasons, I—along with Ellis and Braiterman, and perhaps to a degree with Rubenstein—read the Jewish tradition for its currents of immanence, for the ways in which human action is understood to be expressing divine power.This is all that radicality requires: a coincidentia oppositorum between heaven and earth. It need not be politically radical. Neither need it be politically liberal, if by that word one means a code of thought determining how a polity organizes itself. But if human action—if all human action—expresses divine power, then radical theology is democratic, along the lines that Jeffrey Stout has articulated in his 2004 Democracy and Tradition and, more concretely, in his 2010 Blessed Are the Organized. It is this openness to pragmatism—and perhaps to a conversation that might never actually get around to doing anything—that I understand dismays my respondents. For a certain kind of pragmatism that takes norms as always potentially revisable, there is neither the righteousness that leads to successful protest, nor the monstrousness of upending convention, nor a secure knowledge that current immigration patterns in Europe must be stopped.And yet, I wonder how Ellis and Rubenstein are to convince their audiences. Is it obvious that the prophetic is the “originating core of Jewishness,” as Ellis suggests? Certainly, this is a problematic historical claim. Moreover, this antithesis between prophecy and mitzvot seems to me to go against the nature of the prophetic texts in general, which called the people back to the mitzvot so that God would remain with them. (If Heschel was a prophetic thinker, then his writing shows the breadth of the prophets’ goals. Take for example, his parting shot to his readers in Man's Quest for God, playing off of B. Shabbat 88a: “The mountain of history is over our heads again. Shall we renew the covenant with God?” [1954, 151].)1 If Ellis's invocation of prophecy as something opposed to the covenantal, or the legal, or the rabbinic, is to take hold of his readers—which I hope it does—then why not stress those aspects of the tradition that his opponents hold dear? The category of the “stranger” is a matter of law, after all, not of prophecy. And the first Hebrew word of Exodus 22:21, kol ‘almanah ve-yatom lo’ te‘annun (“you shall not ill-treat any widow or orphan”), lexically transgresses the ethnic boundaries that bedevil so much of Biblical law. If radical theology shows that the boundary between heaven and earth is fluid, it can also show that the boundary between the texts cited by “empire Jews” and “prophetic Jews” is just as fluid, in order to have confidence that the relationship between those Jews will not forever be antithetical. In this way and other ways, it can give reasons for why its views should be taken by the reader as authoritative. The benefit of this approach—to cite tradition whether one might happen to believe in its divine origin or not—is that it moves beyond the strictly private realm of the affect of horror, on which Rubenstein places so much emphasis in his response. This is not to say that I do not share at least the broad contours of Rubenstein's reaction to learning about the Holocaust in 1944. Yet it is the case that what strikes Rubenstein as horrifying and what strikes Ellis as horrifying are different. Why is Ellis sensitive to the expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from their homes in 1948, and to various unjust actions of the Israeli army since that time, while Rubenstein seems less so? Why does Rubenstein seem immune to something like Ellis's deeply moving story of his friendship with the murdered Palestinian health worker Naela Ayad (Ellis 2007, 70–72)? My point is not to convert either to the other's position, but to say only that reasons must be given, and in that conversation between the two of them—in which they would make their normative commitments explicit and show which other normative commitments must therefore be included or excluded—the realm of affect would be left behind. Power would cohere with wisdom, as it did for the rabbis.For Braiterman, this simply is not enough. I am talking about kindness, in his eyes. And in a mark of the kindness that is typical of his friendship, he tells me that as much as he approves of my position, it is by no means radical. Perhaps this is true, but I would deeply hope that it is not. Recently, Braiterman's colleague Vincent Lloyd was deeply involved in activists’ attempts to get the city of Syracuse to rebudget so that it could find $120,000 per annum to keep the Ida Benderson Senior Center open for service, to between sixty and ninety people per day. These attempts failed; the center closed, and about half of the seniors once served by the center will now be served by Salvation Army programs.2 Would the activists have been successful had they been more apocalyptic, and tried to upend the order of things? Such counterfactual questions cannot be answered. Yet when the mayor of Syracuse, Stephanie Miner, refused a check that would keep the center open for two more months, it became clear that what the activists were protesting was not simply the mayor's actions, but more broadly, a notion of power that is content to refuse to give justifying reasons for its actions. This has been what “radicals” have always protested. They can only gain power when they see their interpretations of what makes a good polity as being just as well-grounded as (and actually better grounded than) the interpretations of those in power. This ethos, which I take to be the sine qua non of classical Jewish discourse about the nature of right authority, is about something more than mere kindness. Radicalism ain't what it used to be, but from that premise there is no reason to infer that it ain't radical anymore. I hope that other self-styled radical theologians might agree. Although I cannot prove this point here, I think that only on such an account of radical theology can radical theologians be effective in the public sphere.
Background: Recent advances in automated assessment of basic vocabulary lists allow the construction of linguistic phylogenies useful for tracing dynamics of human population expansions, reconstructing ancestral cultures, and modeling transition rates of cultural traits over time. Methods: Here we investigate the Tupi expansion, a widely-dispersed language family in lowland South America, with a distance-based phylogeny based on 40-word vocabulary lists from 48 languages. We coded 11 cultural traits across the diverse Tupi family including traditional warfare patterns, post-marital residence, corporate structure, community size, paternity beliefs, sibling terminology, presence of canoes, tattooing, shamanism, men's houses, and lip plugs. Results/Discussion: The linguistic phylogeny supports a Tupi homeland in west-central Brazil with subsequent major expansions across much of lowland South America. Consistently, ancestral reconstructions of cultural traits over the linguistic phylogen)
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)
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)
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 present study explores the role of Pakistani English newspapers in promoting lexical innovations that deviate from the standard British norms. For this exploration, a descriptive causal comparative research was conducted in which a sample of 473 participants was selected through stratified sampling method. The participants were given an open book test based on the lexical innovations made by the newspapers. The analysis of the data shows that the readers reflected a number of lexical deviations. Thus the impact of language of newspapers was found in the form of a new variety that is Pakistani English.
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)
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)
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)
Background: Continuity of care is widely acknowledged as a core value in family medicine. In this systematic review, we aimed to identify the instruments measuring continuity of care and to assess the quality of their measurement properties. Methods: We did a systematic review using the PubMed, Embase and PsycINFO databases, with an extensive search strategy including 'continuity of care', 'coordination of care', 'integration of care', 'patient centered care', 'case management' and its linguistic variations. We searched from 1995 to October 2011 and included articles describing the development and/ or evaluation of the measurement properties of instruments measuring one or more dimensions of continuity of care (1) care from the same provider who knows and follows the patient (personal continuity), (2) communication and cooperation between care providers in one care setting (team continuity), and (3) communication and cooperation between care providers in different care settings (cross)
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)
LOLspeak is a complex and systematic reimagining of the English language. It is most often associated with the popular, productive and long-lasting Internet meme ‘LOLcats’. This style of English is characterised by the simultaneous playful manipulation of multiple levels of language. Using community-generated web content as a corpus, we analyse some of the common language play strategies (Sherzer 2002) used in LOLspeak, which include morphological reanalysis, atypical sentence structure and lexical playfulness. The linguistic variety that emerges from these manipulations displays collaboratively constructed norms and tendencies providing a standard which may be meaningfully adhered to or subverted by users. We conclude with a discussion of why people may choose to participate in such language play, and suggest that the language play strategies used by participants allow for the construction of complex identity.
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)
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 )
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))
How does language comprehension interact with motor activity? We investigated the conditions under which comprehending an action sentence affects people's balance. We performed two experiments to assess whether sentences describing forward or backward movement modulate the lateral movements made by subjects who made sensibility judgments about the sentences. In one experiment subjects were standing on a balance board and in the other they were seated on a balance board that was mounted on a chair. This allowed us to investigate whether the action compatibility effect (ACE) is robust and persists in the face of salient incompatibilities between sentence content and subject movement. Growth-curve analysis of the movement trajectories produced by the subjects in response to the sentences suggests that the ACE is indeed robust. Sentence content influenced movement trajectory despite salient inconsistencies between implied and actual movement. These results are interpreted in the context o)
Rapid vocabulary learning in children has been attributed to "fast mapping", with new words often claimed to be learned through a single presentation. As reported in 2004 in Science a border collie (Rico) not only learned to identify more than 200 words, but fast mapped the new words, remembering meanings after just one presentation. Our research tests the fast mapping interpretation of the Science paper based on Rico's results, while extending the demonstration of large vocabulary recognition to a lap dog. We tested a Yorkshire terrier (Bailey) with the same procedures as Rico, illustrating that Bailey accurately retrieved randomly selected toys from a set of 117 on voice command of the owner. Second we tested her retrieval based on two additional voices, one male, one female, with different accents that had never been involved in her training, again showing she was capable of recognition by voice command. Third, we did both exclusion-based training of new items (toys she had never s)
The processes underlying object recognition are fundamental for the understanding of visual perception. Humans can recognize many objects rapidly even in complex scenes, a task that still presents major challenges for computer vision systems. A common experimental demonstration of this ability is the rapid animal detection protocol, where human participants earliest responses to report the presence/absence of animals in natural scenes are observed at 250-270 ms latencies. One of the hypotheses to account for such speed is that people would not actually recognize an animal per se, but rather base their decision on global scene statistics. These global statistics (also referred to as spatial envelope or gist) have been shown to be computationally easy to process and could thus be used as a proxy for coarse object recognition. Here, using a saccadic choice task, which allows us to investigate a previously inaccessible temporal window of visual processing, we showed that animal - but not )