Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
16504 papers
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)
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)
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)
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)
If the sentences or phrases like Fast Food-Konzept in Chile, Leonardo goes Gastronomie, Der Claim „Inspiration for modern living“, WM-Countdown läuft; Deutschland ist die fünftgrößte Incoming-Destination weltweit und … are considered, the first impression is that this is a typical mixture of both English and German. To all intents and purposes, they support the main part of a definition of pidgin language. Communication plays a central role in tourism. As emphasized by numerous authors, it is a personification of tourism; conversely tourism could be said to totally encompass a system of communication. As it is a crucial component of the industry, tourist discourse not only serves as a medium for buying/selling tourist products, it also assumes the role of the product itself within the complexity of various economic, technological and political processes in tourism. If analyzed within linguistic norms, discussion of Anglo-American influence on the German tourist discourse should focus on the problem of erosion of the national language, due to the impact of these Ango-Americanisms. The German tourist discourse aims at a customer-friendly approach in order to attract potential buyers or guests, all of which results in a slightly pidginized version of the German tourist discourse.
The majority of fear conditioning studies in humans have focused on fear acquisition rather than fear extinction. For this reason only a few functional imaging studies on fear extinction are available. A large number of animal studies indicate the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) as neuronal substrate of extinction. We therefore determined mPFC contribution during extinction learning after a discriminative fear conditioning in 34 healthy human subjects by using functional near-infrared spectroscopy. During the extinction training, a previously conditioned neutral face (conditioned stimulus, CS+) no longer predicted an aversive scream (unconditioned stimulus, UCS). Considering differential valence and arousal ratings as well as skin conductance responses during the acquisition phase, we found a CS+ related increase in oxygenated haemoglobin concentration changes within the mPFC over the time course of extinction. Late CS+ trials further revealed higher activation than CS– trials in a cluster of probe set channels covering the mPFC. These results are in line with previous findings on extinction and further emphasize the mPFC as significant for associative learning processes. During extinction, the diminished fear association between a former CS+ and a UCS is inversely correlated with mPFC activity – a process presumably dysfunctional in anxiety disorders.
Linguistic Thought of the Spanish Renaissance and HumanismThe present article examines the linguistic thoughts of the period of the Humanism and Renaissance in Spain comparing with the case of Italy.In Spain, in the end of the 15th century, the philologist Antonio de Nebrija introduced the humanisitic ideas born in Italy, and applied them not only to reform the education of the Latin or the studies of letters in general but also to create the grammar of a vernacular castillian language.In Italy, already in the 14th century, there were great works of literature written by the three most brilliant authors; Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarca.Then during the next two centuries the debates surround the language got intense, and the intellectuals discussed the question of how to establish linguistic norms and codify the language, that is to say which dialect or speech of Italy -like the Tuscan-should be standard of the whole Italian peninsula.This called questione della lingua"question of the language" no longer was a problem exclusively in Italy, rather than the problem of the whole Europe.In Spain, due to its proximity to Italy, that current of thought was introduced and developed pronto.But while then Italy was divided into a number of warring city-states that have distinctive dialects for each, in Spain, contrastively, there was a strong centralized government due to the union of Castille and Aragon in the latter half of the 15th century.This difference of political situations made different atmosphere in the debates about language in each of the two peninsulas.I will describe what was the "questions of the language" and how developed this both in Italy and in Spain.
This paper is stimulated by the ideas of Karel Hausenblas, the work of Olga Müllerová and the research on the syntax of Czech dialects (J. Balhar, J. Chloupek, M. Šipková and others). It presents a catalogue of phenomena and means of expression which mark the syntax of spoken Czech and devotes attention above all to: a) special syntactic constructions b) the varying formation of transitions between syntactic units in spoken expression (sharply structured transitions) and in written expression (softer, less apparent transitions, couched or “stuck” with numerous redundant means with non-definite semantics); that is, differences in the degree and type of cohesion, connection, or glutination between written and spoken expression c) differences between condensed, constricted written syntax and the relaxed structure of syntactic units in spoken Czech (with the prevalence of parataxis and juxtaposition). The paper views the syntactic differences between written and spoken expression as stylistic differences. It is based on data from various corpora of spoken Czech (including the Prague Dependency Treebank of Spoken Czech) and on the comparison of written and spoken narrative by the same speaker/author.
This experimental study investigates the impact of affective attitudes on risk and return estimates of stocks. Participants rate well-known blue-chip firms on an affective scale and forecast risk and return of the firms' stock. We find that positive affective attitudes lead to a prediction of high return and low risk, while negative attitudes lead to a prediction of low return and high risk. This bias increases with participants' confidence in their ratings and decreases with financial literacy. Firm characteristics such as a firm's marketing expenditures and the strength of its brand have a positive impact on its affective rating.
Does international law's effectiveness require a clear distinction between law and non-law? This essay, which reviews Jean d'Aspremont's Formalism and the Sources of International Law, argues the answer is no. Ambiguity about the legal nature of international instruments has important benefits. Clarity in the law may encourage states to do the minimum necessary to comply, while some uncertainty about what the law requires may induce states to take extra efforts to ensure they are in compliance. Ambiguity in the law also promotes dynamic change, an important feature in rapidly developing areas of the law such as international environmental law and human rights. Most importantly, though, soft law — international instruments that have legal consequences but are not unambiguously 'law' — expands the range of instruments available to states when cooperating. Institutionalist theories of international law suggest that a larger menu of international instruments is valuable because it allows states to calibrate the level of their commitments more precisely, thereby expanding their ability to cooperate. Institutional theories, however, have heretofore not explained exactly how states communicate to each other the level of their commitment; that is, they have not explained how states mark an instrument as soft law and whether and how states distinguish between types of soft law commitments. A theory of law-identification based on linguistic norms, such as d'Aspremont proposes, offers a descriptive account of how states might signal levels of legal commitment beyond the dichotomy of 'binding' and 'non-binding' law. A communicative theory of international law — one based on the use of language in international instruments to signal relatively fine-grained variation in the level of commitment — thus would enrich our understanding of what soft law is, and when and how states use it.
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the distribution of the pronunciations (mainly /ju, u,?/) of orthographic 〈u〉 in British English. /ju, u,?/ have incurred many complicated problems regarding the status of /j/, the underling form of these vowels, etc. Chomsky and Halle (1968) argue that the pronunciations of 〈u〉 are derived from Middle English lax /?/; it becomes /ju/ when it occurs in an open syllable; it remains /?/ when it is preceded by one of the nonnasal labials /p, b, f, v/ and followed by /l,?,?/; elsewhere, that is, in a closed syllable, it becomes /?/. It is expected that the pronunciations of 〈u〉 and their contexts are reflected in the present-day pronunciations of 〈u〉. To check this I analyzed the monomorphemic words in the CELEX lexical database; [?] appears mostly in a closed syllable as expected, but it is hard to say that [ju] and [u] occur mostly in the expected contexts. It is also found that /j?/ occurs only in a word-medial unstressed open syllable and that the favorite onset of a /u/-syllable is /l, r/, the reason of which is to be studied in the future.
Based on Kachru’s Three Circle Model on the spread of English in different parts of the world, I question how foreign university students migrating from Expanding Circle countries to Singapore deal with the “clash” of linguistic norms set by different circles. This research hence explores English speaking behavioural intentions of these foreign tertiary students in Singapore and how they account for their language behavioural plans. The collected data reveal that most students held a notion on the native English-Singlish dichotomy, seeing native English as standard and superior while regarding Singlish as improper and non-standard. Considering language behavioural intentions, most respondents claimed to adopt three main strategies: speech maintenance, adapting to the formality level of the communicative situation, and speech convergence. Looking into respondents’ accounts for these intended strategies, I argue that speakers orient their language use not only towards language perceptions but also the communicative situations they are in. However, the relative influences of these two factors on language use vary among different cases.
The chapter presents a meta-search tool developed in order to deliver search results structured according to the specific interests of users. Meta-search means that for a specific query, several search mechanisms could be simultaneously applied. Using the clustering process, thematically homogenous groups are built up from the initial list provided by the standard search mechanisms. The results are more user oriented, as a result of the ontological approach of the clustering process. After the initial search made on multiple search engines, the results are pre-processed and transformed into vectors of words. These vectors are mapped into vectors of concepts, by calling an educational ontology and using the WordNet lexical database. The vectors of concepts are refined through concept space graphs and projection mechanisms, before applying the clustering procedure. Implementation details and early experimentation results are also provided.
This paper outlines a proposal for maritime English language teaching in public and private Nautical Schools and other maritime educational institutions and establishments in Italy, using a content and language integrated learning (CLIL) approach. The courses are addressed in particular to those students who would like to take up a marine career as officers, engineers or other crew members of the Merchant Navy, and thus require an adequate knowledge of seafaring terminology, but can also be interesting for those wishing to explore the origins and development of maritime language. In order to provide a more challenging environment and better opportunity for the learning of seafaring terms and expressions in English, students are supported by Mariterm, a lexical database, organized in semantic relations, available at the Institute for Computational Linguistics (ILC) of the National Research Council (CNR) in Pisa. A
Domain adaptation is an important task in order for NLP systems to work well in real applications. There has been extensive research on this topic. In this paper, we address two issues that are related to domain adaptation. The first question is how much genre variation will affect NLP systems ’ performance. We investigate the effect of genre variation on the performance of three NLP tools, namely, word segmenter, POS tagger, and parser. We choose the Chinese Penn Treebank (CTB) as our corpus. The second question is how one can estimate NLP systems ’ performance when gold standard on the test data does not exist. To answer the question, we extend the parsing prediction model in (Ravi et al., 2008) to provide prediction for word segmentation and POS tagging as well. Our experiments show that the predicted scores are close to the real scores when tested on the CTB data.
The automatic recognition of the maximal-length noun phrase (MNP) helps to the shallow parsing. In this paper, automatic labeling of Chinese MNP is regarded as a sequential labeling task and Support Vector Machine model (SVM) is employed in the model. We propose a method which takes 2-phase hybrid approach which first identifies base chunk and then identifies MNP. Furthermore, the base chunk features can be exploited to improve performance of MNP recognition. In addition, both left-right and right-left sequential labeling were employed to identify Chinese MNP by bidirectional sequence labeling merging. The data set in the experiments is selected from Penn Chinese Treebank 5.0 Corpus, and split into train set, development set and test set according to the proportion of 4:4:1. Experimental result shows a high quality performance of 90.13% in F1-measure.
This thesis introduces an experimental and quantitative approach to language through the study of the concept of soft constraints and its application to two phenomena of order in French: the position of the attributive adjective and the ordering of verbal complements occurring in postverbal position. Soft constraints are defined as affecting the acceptability rather than the grammaticality of the sentences. Our main hypothesis is that these constraints are properties of the language and thus must studied in syntax. These constraints raise a methodological issue: since they do not affect the grammaticality of the sentences, they cannot be investigated using the traditional tools of syntax (introspection and grammaticality judgment). It is therefore necessary to define tools for their description and analysis. The proposed methods are statistical analysis of corpus date, inspired by the work of Bresnan et al. (2007) and Bresnan & Ford (2010) and, to a lesser extent, psycholinguistic experiment. Regarding the position of the adjective, we test most of the constraints encountered in the literature and we propose a statistical analysis of the data extracted from the French Treebank corpus. We show the importance of the adjectival item and the nominal item with which it combines. Other constraints linked to the internal syntax of the adjectival phrase and the noun phrase also play a significant role in the choice of position. The work on the relative order of the verbal complements is conducted on a sample of sentences extracted from two newspapers corpora (French Treebank and Est-Républicain) and two corpora of spoken French (ESTER and C-ORAL-ROM). We show the significant influence of the constituent weight over the ordering: short before long order which is a feature of SVO languages like French, is observed in over 86% of cases. We also identify the important role of the verbal lemma associated with its semantic class (annotated with the dictionary of Dubois & Dubois-Charlier, 1997). Finally, building on the analysis of corpus data as well a two questionnaires eliciting acceptability judgments, it seems that nor animacy neither information structure (given/new, Prince, 1981) have a significant effect on the postverbal complement ordering.
With english speaking population expanding rapidly due to increasing international communication, english is no longer spoken by native speakers alone. English is spoken in different regions around the world, developing into different variants reflecting local language and culture. When speakers in an international conference speak in non-native english, interpreters, unfamiliar to such varieties, may be challenged as unfamiliarity to specific variants is more likely to present difficulties in intelligibility and comprehensibility. Previous studies indicate that conference interpreters found unfamiliar accents challenging and difficult to interpret. This paper discusses stress factors for English-Korean interpreters presented by non-native english speakers, following the concept of ‘World Englishes,’ which refers to different varieties developed around the world reflecting cultural and linguistic norms of the region or society of speakers. This paper aims to identify previous researches that point to the challenges of interpreting performance in general, and world englishes, in particular, to develop a theoretical framework for analyzing specific difficulties experienced by English-Korean conference interpreters at the level of phonology, syntax, and processing effort
The rat visual system is structured such that the large (>90 %) majority of retinal ganglion axons reach the contralateral lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) and visual cortex (V1). This anatomical design allows for the relatively selective activation of one cerebral hemisphere under monocular viewing conditions. Here, we describe the design of a harness and face mask allowing simple and noninvasive monocular occlusion in rats. The harness is constructed from synthetic fiber (shoelace-type material) and fits around the girth region and neck, allowing for easy adjustments to fit rats of various weights. The face mask consists of soft rubber material that is attached to the harness by Velcro strips. Eyeholes in the mask can be covered by additional Velcro patches to occlude either one or both eyes. Rats readily adapt to wearing the device, allowing behavioral testing under different types of viewing conditions. We show that rats successfully acquire a water-maze-based visual discrimination task under monocular viewing conditions. Following task acquisition, interocular transfer was assessed. Performance with the previously occluded, “untrained” eye was impaired, suggesting that training effects were partially confined to one cerebral hemisphere. The method described herein provides a simple and noninvasive means to restrict visual input for studies of visual processing and learning in various rodent species.
In this talk, I will outline some of the myriad of challenges and opportunities that social media offer for natural language processing. I will present analysis of how pre-processing can be used to make social media data more amenable to natural language processing, and review a selection of tasks which attempt to harness the considerable potential of different social media services. There is no question that social media are fantastically popular and varied in form — ranging from user forums, to microblogs such as Twitter, to social networking sites such as Facebook — and that much of the content they host is in the form of natural language. This would suggest a myriad of opportunities for natural language processing (NLP), and yet much of the applied research on social media which uses language data is based on superficial analysis, often in the form of simple keyword search. This begs the question: Are NLP methods not suited to social media analysis? Conversely, is social media data too challenging for modern-day NLP? Alternatively, are simple term search-based methods sufficient for social media analysis, i.e. is NLP overkill for social media? In exploring these questions, I attempt to answer the overarching question of whether social media data is the friend or foe of NLP. I approach the question first from the perspective of what challenges social media language poses for NLP. The most immediate answer is the infamously free-form nature of language in social media, encompassing spelling inconsistencies, the free-form adoption of new terms, and regular violations of English grammar norms. Unsurprisingly, when NLP tools are applied directly to social media data, the results tend to be miserable when compared to data sets such as the Wall Street Journal component of the Penn Treebank. However, there have been recent successes in adapting parsers and POS taggers to social media data (Foster et al., 2011; Gimpel et al., 2011). Additionally, lexical normalisation and other preprocessing strategies have been shown to enhance the performance of NLP tools over social media data (Lui and Baldwin, 2012; Han et al., to appear). Furthermore, social media posts tend to be short and the content highly varied, meaning it is difficult to adapt a tool to the domain, or harness textual context to disambiguate the content. There is also the engineering challenge of real-time processing of the text stream, as much of NLP research is carried out offline with only secondary concern for throughput. As such, we might conclude that social media data is a foe of NLP, in that it challenges traditional assumptions made in NLP research on the nature of the target text and the requirements for real-time responsiveness. However, if we look beyond the immediate text content of social media, we quickly realise that there are various non-textual data sources that can be used to enhance the robustness and accuracy of NLP models, in a way which is not possible with static text corpora. For example, simple information on the author of a post can be used to develop authoradapted models based on the previous posts of the same individual (at least for users who post sufficiently large volumes of data). Links in the post can be used to disambiguate the textual content of the post, whether in the form of URLs and the content contained in the target document(s), hashtags and the content of other similarly-tagged posts, thread-
One of the fundamental elements in the economy of any novel the writer's handling of language. Before any other feature of the finished work, language the medium by means of which the writer operates his fictional in-put.There a close interconnection between form and meaning in the case of poetic language, which can be also extended to poetic prose. possible because, in both cases, meaning can be analyzed and explained only in relation to other elements of poetic organization. requirement that the components of a structure be analyzed with relation to each other, that the problems of form be constantly correlated to problems of meaning indispensable in the study of language1, and, we consider, this indispensable in the analysis of poetic prose, too.The study of expressive language deals with the description of the elements of the linguistic code that are endowed with an emotive function, that is, elements that serve to express the writer's attitude towards his reader or to the thing spoken about. The expressive elements cannot be studied outside their relation to the distinctive elements of language. In other words, this means speaking about the problem of the linguistic code in poetic language, which by extension means referring to peculiarities of the linguistic code in poetic prose. As in the case of poetry, that operates with some linguistic features which do not occur in casual language (phonemic, lexical or grammatical), poetic prose also operates with various differences on the lexical or syntactic level. Deviations from the accepted norms frequently occur in poetry, in particular, and they must be viewed as the result of manipulations of available linguistic material and of the skilful use of the multiple possibilities existent in the standard language. When speaking about a recognized standard language, any departure from the norm may be restricted to one of its levels or to some of its elements. Quite common the use of lexical items that pertain to different systems or to different strata of one system. This achieved by the introduction of dialects, archaic words, of foreignisms or of specialized, technical terms.2 Few of these are applicable in the case of Lawrence's novelistic prose; his use of non standard language and his peculiar style (in his later novels in particular) are obviously due to an original handling of the lexical strata.Our analysis here will be focused on one particular lexical device - lexical repetition - otherwise frequently exploited and peculiarly employed by Lawrence, as it one which he paradoxically makes responsible for varied poetic effects in his novels.Among the most recurrent poetic effects in his late novels, in particular, that of rhythmic pattern. According to Stankiewicz, verse is the highest form of poetic organization, differing from prose in its rhythmic pattern.3 We may say Lawrence's prose contains certain distinctive elements that are responsible for rhythmic patterns which provide a poetic quality to his prose.The purpose of our linguistic investigation twofold: on the one hand, we intend to highlight on Lawrence's peculiar use and variation of lexical elements and, on the other hand, to prove to what extent these changes or deviations from the norm constitute daring innovations.We start from the premise that any great poet the man (and Lawrence can rightly be considered one of the greatest stylists in English prose) who possesses an intuitive mastery of the rules that are obligatory within his own poetic tradition and language, but who also can manipulate these rules4, thus going far beyond the traditional linguistic norms.D.H. Lawrence had strong opinions and clear ideas about the proper use of literary language. He quite explicitly saw himself as inventing language, both in terms of the functions he expected language to perform from novel to novel, and in the ways he adapted, refined and reinvented language and linguistic forms over the years. …
The Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB) is a data set that promotes the advancement of dis- course analysis tools. Improving discourse analysis is useful for other areas of Natural Language Processing, but it still proves to be a challenging task. This research focuses on improving sense relation classification in the PDTB for implicit relations at all three levels. The features selected for classification are motivated by prior research and statistical testing in this research. The goal is not only to provide features that improve classification in PDTB, but also to select features which are broad enough to be effective beyond the scope of the PDTB. Moreover, these features are derived from a variety of categories such as Semantics, Syntax and Entity in order to ensure stronger results. Using these features, of which many are new for PDTB sense classification, and Naive Bayes, Maximum Entropy and SVM, this research shows improvement in a number of senses that prior research has had difficulty improving, mainly Comparison and Contingency.
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)
A fundamental issue in cognitive neuroscience is the existence of two major, sub-lexical and lexical, reading processes and their possible segregation in the left posterior perisylvian cortex. Using cortical electrostimulation mapping, we identified the cortical areas involved on reading either orthographically irregular words (lexical, "direct" process) or pronounceable pseudowords (sublexical, "indirect" process) in 14 right-handed neurosurgical patients while video-recording behavioral effects. Intraoperative neuronavigation system and Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) stereotactic coordinates were used to identify the localization of stimulation sites. Fifty-one reading interference areas were found that affected either words (14 areas), or pseudo-words (11 areas), or both (26 areas). Forty-one (80%) corresponded to the impairment of the phonological level of reading processes. Reading processes involved discrete, highly localized perisylvian cortical areas with individual var)
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 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 )
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)
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 )
Bilingualism provides a unique opportunity for understanding the relative roles of proficiency and order of acquisition in determining how the brain represents language. In a previous study, we combined magnetoencephalography (MEG) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to examine the spatiotemporal dynamics of word processing in a group of Spanish- English bilinguals who were more proficient in their native language. We found that from the earliest stages of lexical processing, words in the second language evoke greater activity in bilateral posterior visual regions, while activity to the native language is largely confined to classical left hemisphere fronto-temporal areas. In the present study, we sought to examine whether these effects relate to language proficiency or order of language acquisition by testing Spanish-English bilingual subjects who had become dominant in their second language. Additionally, we wanted to determine whether activity in bilateral visual regions was relat)
Music listeners have difficulty correctly understanding and remembering song lyrics. However, results from the present study support the hypothesis that young adults can learn African-American English (AAE) vocabulary from listening to hiphop music. Non-African-American participants first gave free-response definitions to AAE vocabulary items, after which they answered demographic questions as well as questions addressing their social networks, their musical preferences, and their knowledge of popular culture. Results from the survey show a positive association between the number of hip-hop artists listened to and AAE comprehension vocabulary scores. Additionally, participants were more likely to know an AAE vocabulary item if the hip-hop artists they listen to use the word in their song lyrics. Together, these results suggest that young adults can acquire vocabulary through exposure to hip-hop music, a finding relevant for research on vocabulary acquisition, the construction of adole)
Memory traces for words are frequently conceptualized neurobiologically as networks of neurons interconnected via reciprocal links developed through associative learning in the process of language acquisition. Neurophysiological reflection of activation of such memory traces has been reported using the mismatch negativity brain potential (MMN), which demonstrates an enhanced response to meaningful words over meaningless items. This enhancement is believed to be generated by the activation of strongly intraconnected long-term memory circuits for words that can be automatically triggered by spoken linguistic input and that are absent for unfamiliar phonological stimuli. This conceptual framework critically predicts different amounts of activation depending on the strength of the word's lexical representation in the brain. The frequent use of words should lead to more strongly connected representations, whereas less frequent items would be associated with more weakly linked circuits. A w)
Network analysis has demonstrated that systems ranging from social networks to electric power grids often involve a small world structure-with local clustering but global ac cess. Critically, small world structure has also been shown to characterize adult human semantic networks. Moreover, the connectivity pattern of these mature networks is consistent with lexical growth processes in which children add new words to their vocabulary based on the structure of the language-learning environment. However, thus far, there is no direct evidence that a child's individual semantic network structure is associated with their early language learning. Here we show that, while typically developing children's early networks show small world structure as early as 15 months and with as few as 55 words, children with language delay (late talkers) have this structure to a smaller degree. This implicates a maladaptive bias in word acquisition for late talkers, potentially indicating a preference for ''o)
Historical linguistics aims at inferring the most likely language phylogenetic tree starting from information concerning the evolutionary relatedness of languages. The available information are typically lists of homologous (lexical, phonological, syntactic) features or characters for many different languages: a set of parallel corpora whose compilation represents a paramount achievement in linguistics. From this perspective the reconstruction of language trees is an example of inverse problems: starting from present, incomplete and often noisy, information, one aims at inferring the most likely past evolutionary history. A fundamental issue in inverse problems is the evaluation of the inference made. A standard way of dealing with this question is to generate data with artificial models in order to have full access to the evolutionary process one is going to infer. This procedure presents an intrinsic limitation: when dealing with real data sets, one typically does not know which mod)
Alzheimer's Disease irremediably alters the proficiency of word search and retrieval processes even at its early stages. Such disruption can sometimes be paradoxical in specific language tasks, for example semantic priming. Here we focus in the striking side-effect of hyperpriming in Alzheimer's Disease patients, which has been well-established in the literature for a long time. Previous studies have evidenced that modern network theory can become a powerful complementary tool to gain insight in cognitive phenomena. Here, we first show that network modeling is an appropriate approach to account for semantic priming in normal subjects. Then we turn to priming in degraded cognition: hyperpriming can be readily understood in the scope of a progressive degradation of the semantic network structure. We compare our simulation results with previous empirical observations in diseased patients finding a qualitative agreement. The network approach presented here can be used to accommodate curre)
In speech perception, a functional hierarchy has been proposed by recent functional neuroimaging studies: Core auditory areas on the dorsal plane of superior temporal gyrus (STG) are sensitive to basic acoustic characteristics, whereas downstream regions, specifically the left superior temporal sulcus (STS) and middle temporal gyrus (MTG) ventral to Heschl's gyrus (HG) are responsive to abstract phonological features. What is unclear so far is the relationship between the dorsal and ventral processes, especially with regard to whether low-level acoustic processing is modulated by high-level phonological processing. To address the issue, we assessed sensitivity of core auditory and downstream regions to acoustic and phonological variations by using within- and across-category lexical tonal continua with equal physical intervals. We found that relative to within-category variation, across-category variation elicited stronger activation in the left middle MTG (mMTG), apparently reflectin)
Numerous studies have reported subliminal repetition and semantic priming in the visual modality. We transferred this paradigm to the auditory modality. Prime awareness was manipulated by a reduction of sound intensity level. Uncategorized prime words (according to a post-test) were followed by semantically related, unrelated, or repeated target words (presented without intensity reduction) and participants performed a lexical decision task (LDT). Participants with slower reaction times in the LDT showed semantic priming (faster reaction times for semantically related compared to unrelated targets) and negative repetition priming (slower reaction times for repeated compared to semantically related targets). This is the first report of semantic priming in the auditory modality without conscious categorization of the prime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR], Copyright of PLoS ONE is the property of Public Library of Science and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted t)