Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
18265 papers
Evidence on the impact of nature images has been found in research with hospital patients (Ulrich, 2008, Nanda, Hathorn & Neumann, 2007). The use of art in healthcare environments has become increasingly common (Nanda, Eisen & Baladandayuthapani, 2008). Art is viewed as a positive distraction from stress of the hospital among patients and possibly staff (Ulrich et. al. 1991; Ulrich, Zimring, Quan, & Joseph, 2006). In a previous study art preference study (Nanda, Eisen & Baladandayuthapani, 2008) showed significant difference in the ratings of design students and patients. Findings showed that there was a significant difference in the ratings of the two groups. Furthermore, the emotional rating scale (how does the art picture make you feel) was highly correlated to the selection scale (would you put this art picture in your room) for hospital patients- while this was not the case with the design students. What is the role of culture in the above questions and in how does it impact healthcare design?A total of more than 600 design and non-design students from National University of Mexico, National University of Singapore and University of Texas San Antonio rated images of visual art included abstract, representational and nature images from Mexico, Singapore and Texas representative of the unique cultural contexts, in addition to images that strictly adhere to the evidence-based guidelines for healthcare art laid down by Ulrich & Gilpin (2003) and examples of classic high art.At the end of the survey students re-rated the images again as if they were hospitalized and lying in a patient room. An analysis of preferences across cultures, design disciplines and emotion and selection was undertaken.Results show a surprising amount of agreement across cultures on image rating for hospital rooms. Level of agreement for art selection for personal rooms is significantly lower. This is true in both design and non-design students. Landscapes with a high depth of field, bright colors and verdant foliage were rated consistently high across all cultures, regardless of indigenous elements, with few exceptions, that suggests that there is a certain universal appeal for restorative images of nature that go beyond cultural and educational boundaries. The study showed that empathy (how this art would make you feel) is a stronger determinant of selection than culture, or education, when it comes to art selection for hospitals.
Cet article décrit les étapes qui composent notre analyse du discours, en partant du texte brut, et pour en produire une représentation sémantique dans le cadre de la Discourse Representation Theory, désormais DRT (Kamp and Reyle, 1993). Une chaîne complète de traitement est proposée et testée sur le corpus Itipy, "Itinéraires Pyrénéens", lequel a été proposé par la médiathèque de Pau. Le premier but applicatif consiste à attacher un lieu aux portions de texte narrant une action dans ce lieu. Nous exploitons alors ce corpus de récits de voyage du XIXème siècle dans l'objectif d'extraire automatiquement les itinéraires décrits et afin d'indexer les portions de texte prenant effectivement pour décors les lieux géographiques en question. Notre outil, Grail est un parser pour grammaire logique de types avec un ensemble restreint de règles fixes et utilisant un lexique riche. Tout d'abord, la première phase a consisté en l'acquisition de la grammaire sur un corpus annoté (Paris 7 Treebank). Ce corpus nous a permis d'obtenir les informations grammaticales propres aux unités du lexique de la langue française présentes dans le corpus, le lexique produit ne contient donc pas la totalité des mots du français et contient plusieurs catégories pour les entrées les plus fréquentes. Dans la chaine de traitement, la méthode d'attribution de la catégorie intègre une approche statistique: lors- qu'un mot est absent du lexique, l'analyse propose une catégorie ou lorsqu'il présente plusieurs catégories possibles, elle sélectionne la plus appropriée. Chaque mot du texte est taggé, puis supertaggé en fonction des autres unités se trouvant dans son contexte proche (la phrase). Le supertagger propose plusieurs formules qui correspondent à une analyse syntaxique partielle pour chaque phrase du texte dans le cadre des grammaires catégorielles, et plus précisément du calcul de Lambek. S'ensuit une étape de combinaison de toutes les analyses partielles pour donner l'analyse globale. La structure obtenant la meilleure probabilité étant sélectionnée, on garde cette structure comme organisation du calcul de la représentation sémantique en fonction des unités qui la composent. On associe alors à chaque mot son λ-terme à partir du lexique sémantique cette fois et dont la formule correspond à celle présente dans le lexique grammatical pour cette même entrée (Moot, 2010). Le λ -terme pour chaque unité sémantique est saisi à la main dans le style de la λ -DRT. La représentation sémantique étant produite automatiquement à partir de l'analyse syntaxique, nous obtenons une représentation logique sémantique bien formée. La dimension pragmatique quant à elle ne peut être reléguée à un plan inférieur dans l'interprétation du discours. En effet, une analyse du discours impose de fait une interaction entre la sémantique des unités de langue dont on doit interpréter le sens en discours et la prise en compte de la dimension pragmatique de ce qui est dit. Notre approche s'inspire de l'approche de Busquets et al. (2001), "une théorie de l'interprétation des discours doit être aussi en fait une théorie de la sémantique, de la pragmatique, et de leur interaction, c'est-à-dire une théorie de l'interface pragmatique-sémantique". Certains phénomènes sémantiques restent cependant difficiles à traiter, certains cas de glissement de sens montrent qu'une flexibilité dans le typage doit être permise, alors que dans les cas les plus courants le typage doit être rigide pour éviter une repré- sentation inappropriée. Nous donnerons quelques exemples à propos et proposons donc afin d'améliorer les résultats de notre chaîne traitement de traiter ces phénomènes par l'affinement des λ -termes du lexique dans le cadre du système F, λ -calcul d'ordre supérieur. Nous détaillerons ici notre corpus et nos objectifs applicatifs quant à celui-ci, nous présenterons les étapes de traitement du discours, commençant par l'acquisition de la grammaire du français sur corpus annoté, puis l'analyse syntaxique dans le cadre des grammaires catégorielles. Nous expliquerons plus amplement l'interface syntaxe-sémantique dans la théorie des types logiques permettant la construction de nos repré- sentations sémantiques en λ-DRT. Nous présenterons le système F et notre traitement des phénomènes discursifs mettant en jeu l'interaction sémantique-pragmatique puis nous présenterons les perspectives de ce travail.
We describe and analyze a Neandertal postcranial skeleton and dentition, which together show unambiguous signs of right-handedness. Asymmetries between the left and right upper arm in Regourdou 1 were identified nearly 20 years ago, then confirmed by more detailed analyses of the inner bone structure for the clavicle, humerus, radius and ulna. The total pattern of all bones in the shoulder and arm reveals that Regourdou 1 was a right-hander. Confirmatory evidence comes from the mandibular incisors, which display a distinct pattern of right oblique scratches, typical of right-handed manipulations performed at the front of the mouth. Regourdou's right handedness is consistent with the strong pattern of manual lateralization in Neandertals and further confirms a modern pattern of left brain dominance, presumably signally linguistic competence. These observations along with cultural, genetic and morphological evidence indicate language competence in Neandertals and their Europ)
Background: According to archaeological records and historical documentation, Italy has been a melting point for populations of different geographical and ethnic matrices. Although Italy has been a favorite subject for numerous population genetic studies, genetic patterns have never been analyzed comprehensively, including uniparental and autosomal markers throughout the country. Methods/Principal Findings: A total of 583 individuals were sampled from across the Italian Peninsula, from ten distant (if homogeneous by language) ethnic communities - and from two linguistic isolates (Ladins, Grecani Salentini). All samples were first typed for the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) control region and selected coding region SNPs (mtSNPs). This data was pooled for analysis with 3,778 mtDNA control-region profiles collected from the literature. Secondly, a set of Ychromosome SNPs and STRs were also analyzed in 479 individuals together with a panel of autosomal ancestry informative markers (AIMs) from)
Linguistic and genetic studies on Roma populations inhabited in Europe have unequivocally traced these populations to the Indian subcontinent. However, the exact parental population group and time of the out-of-India dispersal have remained disputed. In the absence of archaeological records and with only scanty historical documentation of the Roma, comparative linguistic studies were the first to identify their Indian origin. Recently, molecular studies on the basis of disease-causing mutations and haploid DNA markers (i.e. mtDNA and Y-chromosome) supported the linguistic view. The presence of Indianspecific Y-chromosome haplogroup H1a1a-M82 and mtDNA haplogroups M5a1, M18 and M35b among Roma has corroborated that their South Asian origins and later admixture with Near Eastern and European populations. However, previous studies have left unanswered questions about the exact parental population groups in South Asia. Here we present a detailed phylogeographical study of Y-chromosomal ha)
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])
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)
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)
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)
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)
Given the contemporary trend to modular NLP architectures and multiple annotation frameworks, the existence of concurrent tokenizations of the same text represents a pervasive problem in everyday’s NLP practice and poses a non-trivial theoretical problem to the integration of linguistic annotations and their interpretability in general. This paper describes a solution for integrating different tokenizations using a standoff XML format, and discusses the consequences from a corpus-linguistic perspective.
Brown Laboratory for Linguistic Information Processing (BLLIP) North American News Text, Complete, LDC2008T13, isbn 1-58563-482-4. Contains a Penn Treebank-style parsing of approximately 24 million sentences from the North American News Text Corpus (LDC95T21). The North American News Text Corpus consists of English news text from the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post (1994-1997), the New York Times (1994-1996), Reuters News Service (1994-1996) and the Wall Street Journal (1994-1996).
International audience
Many cognitive accounts of emotional processing assume that emotions have representational content that can be influenced by beliefs and desires. It is generally thought that emotions also have non-cognitive, affective components, including valence and arousal. To clarify the impact of cognition on these affective components we asked participants to rate sentences along cognitive and affective dimensions. For the former case, participants rated the believability of the material. For the latter case, they provided valence and arousal ratings. Across two experiments, we show that valence and arousal are differently influenced by beliefs, suggesting that these two largely independent affective components of emotion differ in their cognitive penetrability. While both components depended upon overall comprehension of sentence meaning, only valence was influenced by the consistency of the sentences with participants' beliefs (i.e., whether it was believable or unbelievable). We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding cognition-emotion relationships.
SUC-CORE is a subset of Stockholm Umea Corpus 2.0 and Swedish Treebank, annotated with noun phrase coreference. While most coreference annotated corpora consist of texts of similar types within rel...
The lack of annotated corpora brings limitations in research of discourse classification for many languages. In this paper, we present the first effort towards recognizing ambiguities of discourse connectives, which is fundamental to discourse classification for resource-poor language such as Chinese. A language independent framework is proposed utilizing bilingual dictionaries, Penn Discourse Treebank and parallel data between English and Chinese. We start from translating the English connectives to Chinese using a bi-lingual dictionary. Then, the ambiguities in terms of senses a connective may signal are estimated based on the ambiguities of English connectives and word alignment information. Finally, the ambiguity between discourse usage and non-discourse usage were disambiguated using the co-training algorithm. Experimental results showed the proposed method not only built a high quality connective lexicon for Chinese but also achieved a high performance in recognizing the ambiguities. We also present a discourse corpus for Chinese which will soon become the first Chinese discourse corpus publicly available.
The program part of the lexical database was developed as the Mozilla Firefox application (2005-2006); the processing software is designed as a modern lexicographic workstation. Since 2007, we have gradually complemented the database with the lexicographicallly relevant data (research project Creation of a Lexical Database of the Czech Language of the Beginning of the 21st Century, 2005-2011). We have focused predominantly on detailed treatment of the example part, which demonstrates the breadth of the collocability of the lemmas.
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)
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)
Computer use draws on linguistic abilities. Using this medium thus presents challenges for young people with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and raises questions of whether computer-based tasks are appropriate for them. We consider theoretical arguments predicting impaired performance and negative outcomes relative to peers without SLI versus the possibility of positive gains. We examine the relationship between frequency of computer use (for leisure and educational purposes) and educational achievement; in particular examination performance at the end of compulsory education and level of educational progress two years later. Participants were 49 young people with SLI and 56 typically developing (TD) young people. At around age 17, the two groups did not differ in frequency of educational computer use or leisure computer use. There were no associations between computer use and educational outcomes in the TD group. In the SLI group, after PIQ was controlled for, educational computer)
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)
We examined whether language affects the strength of a visual representation in memory. Participants studied a picture, read a story about the depicted object, and then selected out of two pictures the one whose transparency level most resembled that of the previously presented picture. The stories contained two linguistic manipulations that have been demonstrated to affect concept availability in memory, i.e., object presence and goal-relevance. The results show that described absence of an object caused people to select the most transparent picture more often than described presence of the object. This effect was not moderated by goal-relevance, suggesting that our paradigm tapped into the perceptual quality of representations rather than, for example, their linguistic availability. We discuss the implications of these findings within a framework of grounded cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR], Copyright of PLoS ONE is the property of Public Library of Science and its content may not )
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)
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 warp ikat method of making decorated textiles is one of the most geographically widespread in southeast Asia, being used by Austronesian peoples in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines, and Daic peoples on the Asian mainland. In this study a dataset consisting of the decorative characters of 36 of these warp ikat weaving traditions is investigated using Bayesian and Neighbornet techniques, and the results are used to construct a phylogenetic tree and taxonomy for warp ikat weaving in southeast Asia. The results and analysis show that these diverse traditions have a common ancestor amongst neolithic cultures the Asian mainland, and parallels exist between the patterns of textile weaving descent and linguistic phylogeny for the Austronesian group. Ancestral state analysis is used to reconstruct some of the features of the ancestral weaving tradition. The widely held theory that weaving motifs originated in the late Bronze Age Dong-Son culture is shown to be inconsistent with the )
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)
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)
Many patterns displayed by the distribution of human linguistic groups are similar to the ecological organization described for biological species. It remains a challenge to identify simple and meaningful processes that describe these patterns. The population size distribution of human linguistic groups, for example, is well fitted by a log-normal distribution that may arise from stochastic demographic processes. As we show in this contribution, the distribution of the area size of home ranges of those groups also agrees with a log-normal function. Further, size and area are significantly correlated: the number of speakers p and the area a spanned by linguistic groups follow the allometric relation a ... pz, with an exponent z varying accross different world regions. The empirical evidence presented leads to the hypothesis that the distributions of p and a, and their mutual dependence, rely on demographic dynamics and on the result of conflicts over territory due to group growth. To s)
In this article, we first present the overall structure of the Pralex lexical database, the work with the data entry form and Praled’s functions. We then focus on the general principles of the elementary processing of database entries, which are subsequently specified according to the individual word classes and entry types. The article ends with a specific example of the processing of an entry in the Pralex lexical database.
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)
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)
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. )
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)
Background: Normal reading requires eye guidance and activation of lexical representations so that words in text can be identified accurately. However, little is known about how the visual content of text supports eye guidance and lexical activation, and thereby enables normal reading to take place. Methods and Findings: To investigate this issue, we investigated eye movement performance when reading sentences displayed as normal and when the spatial frequency content of text was filtered to contain just one of 5 types of visual content: very coarse, coarse, medium, fine, and very fine. The effect of each type of visual content specifically on lexical activation was assessed using a target word of either high or low lexical frequency embedded in each sentence Results: No type of visual content produced normal eye movement performance but eye movement performance was closest to normal for medium and fine visual content. However, effects of lexical frequency emerged early in)
Existing logic-based querying tools for dependency treebanks use first order logic or monadic second order logic. We introduce a very fast model checker based on hybrid logic with operators ↓, @ and A and show that it is much faster than an existing querying tool for dependency treebanks based on first order logic, and much faster than an existing general purpose hybrid logic model checker. The querying tool is made publicly available.
Après un bref rĂŠsumĂŠ de la thĂŠorie de Topic-Focus Articulation (TFA), la prĂŠsente ĂŠtude dĂŠmontre, à l'aide de plusieurs exemples illustrant l'annotation de principaux traits de TFA sur un large corpus (the Prague Dependency Treebank), que l'annotation du corpus apporte une valeur ajoutĂŠe au corpus, si deux conditions sont rĂŠunies: (i) le schĂŠma de l'annotation est basĂŠ sur une thĂŠorie linguistique solide, (ii) le procĂŠdĂŠ d'annotation est ĂŠtabli avec soin (c'est-à-dire de façon systĂŠmatique et cohĂŠrente). Une telle annotation est importante non seulement pour la structure de surface de la phrase mais encore davantage pour la structure phrastique sous-jacente, car elle est susceptible de mettre en ĂŠvidence les phĂŠnomènes cachĂŠs au niveau de la structure de surface, mais incontournables lors de la reprĂŠsentation du sens et du fonctionnement de la phrase.
The goal of the presented parallel phrase extraction algorithm is to provide rich and robust set of translation syntactic patterns. To make this approach feasible, we consider the phrase-to-phrase alignments of a bilingual treebank annotated with syntactic constituents. For the intended purpose, the extracted phrasal nodes are encoded by the syntactical information of their components, highlighting some special constructs such as the functional words.
The article addresses the core problems at building the communication competencies of foreign student and justifies the language culture course as mean to build the reuired skills, the paper also proposes methodology of teaching those skills in the lexical norms study
The paper offers an overview of the key issues raised during the 8 years’ activity of the Multilingual Question Answering Track at the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF). The general aim of the track has been to test both monolingual and cross-language Question Answering (QA) systems that process queries and documents in several European languages, also drawing attention to a number of challenging issues for research in multilingual QA. The paper gives a brief description of how the task has evolved over the years and of the way in which the data sets have been created, presenting also a short summary of the different types of questions developed. The document collections adopted in the competitions are outlined as well, and data about participation is provided. Moreover, the main measures used to evaluate system performances are explained and an overall analysis of the results achieved is presented.
Corpora with high-quality linguistic annotations are an essential component in many NLP applications and a valuable resource for linguistic research. For obtaining these annotations, a large amount of manual effort is needed, making the creation of these resources time-consuming and costly. One attempt to speed up the annotation process is to use supervised machine-learning systems to automatically assign (possibly erroneous) labels to the data and ask human annotators to correct them where necessary. However, it is not clear to what extent these automatic pre-annotations are successful in reducing human annotation effort, and what impact they have on the quality of the resulting resource. In this article, we present the results of an experiment in which we assess the usefulness of partial semi-automatic annotation for frame labeling. We investigate the impact of automatic pre-annotation of differing quality on annotation time, consistency and accuracy. While we found no conclusive evidence that it can speed up human annotation, we found that automatic pre-annotation does increase its overall quality.
Increasingly sophisticated discourse on heritage and the increasing specialisation of the field of knowledge it explores are transforming the symbolic mechanism of heritage: in parallel with a changing lexical field, a form of heritage materialism is also emerging, which, under the dictates of regulatory norms and local governance, seems to be compromising the idea of handed-down “relics” in favour of new ideas on what heritage and its uses might be. This interpretation offers insights into rarely discussed issues of contemporary heritage building—provided of course that heritage is understood as a form of representation.
In this paper we present and justify methodological principles and syntactic criteria to design an annotation scheme for a Persian Treebank. The advantages of the proposed scheme for annotation of the Persian Treebank will be discussed. At the same time, we present the way that different types of linguistic knowledge (morphological, syntactic and semantic) are encoded in the structures of the schema. We will show how this scheme can account for many of the syntactic constructions that appear to be unique to the Persian language.