Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
18265 papers
Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is a statistical technique for representing word meaning that has been widely used for making semantic similarity judgments between words, sentences, and documents. In order to perform an LSA analysis, an LSA space is created in a two-stage procedure, involving the construction of a word frequency matrix and the dimensionality reduction of that matrix through singular value decomposition (SVD). This article presents LANSE, an SVD algorithm specifically designed for LSA, which allows extremely large matrices to be processed using off-the-shelf computer hardware.
Reviews the book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution by Dennis Baron (2009). This book addresses the impact of digital technologies on reading and writing practices by contextualizing these developments within the communication technologies that have preceded them. Though computers are often blamed for a perceived deterioration of culture and language, Baron notes that scorn and mistrust of communication technologies is not a new phenomenon; in fact, writing, the printing press, and the telegraph were all greeted at first with skepticism. And despite the pervasive anxiety that 'internet speech' is resulting in the destruction of grammar and spelling, Baron observes that online communities enforce their own linguistic norms. Rather than a linguistic free-for-all, Baron argues, 'spelling counts' in virtual spaces just as it does offline. In sum, Baron accounts for both the benefits and pitfalls of the digital revolution and analyzes it as merely another set of technological innovations, usefully situating them within a history of writing technologies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
We propose a method to improve the accuracy of parsing bilingual texts (bitexts) with the help of statistical machine translation (SMT) systems. Previous bitext parsing methods use human-annotated bilingual treebanks that are hard to obtain. Instead, our approach uses an auto-generated bilingual treebank to produce bilingual constraints. However, because the auto-generated bilingual treebank contains errors, the bilingual constraints are noisy. To overcome this problem, we use large-scale unannotated data to verify the constraints and design a set of effective bilingual features for parsing models based on the verified results. The experimental results show that our new parsers significantly outperform state-of-the-art baselines. Moreover, our approach is still able to provide improvement when we use a larger monolingual treebank that results in a much stronger baseline. Especially notable is that our approach can be used in a purely monolingual setting with the help of SMT.
This paper makes two contributions. First, we describe the Hindi Proposition Bank that contains annotations of predicate argument structures of verb predicates. Unlike PropBanks in most other languages, the Hind PropBank is annotated on top of dependency structure, the Hindi Dependency Treebank. We explore the similarities between dependency and predicate argument structures, so the PropBank annotation can be faster and more accurate. Second, we present a probabilistic rule-based system that maps syntactic dependents to semantic arguments. With simple rules, we classify about 47 % of the entire PropBank arguments with over 90 % confidence. These preliminary results are promising; they show how well these two frameworks are correlated. This can also be used to speed up our annotations. 1
Gastel, A., S. Schulze, Y. Versley & E. Hinrichs (2011). Annotation of implicit discourse relations in the TüBa-D/Z treebank. In T. Hedeland, T. Schmidt & K. Wörner (eds.), Multilingual Resources and Multilingual Applications, Proceedings of the German Society of Computational Linguistics and Language Technology (GSCL) 2011, 99–104. Hamburg.
Despite tremendous advances in artificial language synthesis, no machine has so far succeeded in deceiving a human. Most research focused on analyzing the behavior of "good" machine. We here choose an opposite strategy, by analyzing the behavior of "bad" humans, i.e., humans perceived as machine. The Loebner Prize in Artificial Intelligence features humans and artificial agents trying to convince judges on their humanness via computer-mediated communication. Using this setting as a model, we investigated here whether the linguistic behavior of human subjects perceived as non-human would enable us to identify some of the core parameters involved in the judgment of an agents' humanness. We analyzed descriptive and semantic aspects of dialogues in which subjects succeeded or failed to convince judges of their humanness. Using cognitive and emotional dimensions in a global behavioral characterization, we demonstrate important differences in the patterns of behavioral expressiveness of the)
Manually performed treebanking is an expensive effort compared with automatic annotation.In return, manual treebanking is generally believed to provide higherquality/value syntactic annotation than automatic methods.Unfortunately, there is little or no empirical evidence for or against this belief, though arguments have been voiced for the high degree of subjectivity in other levels of linguistic analysis (e.g.morphological annotation).We report a double-blind annotation experiment at the level of dependency syntax, using a small Finnish corpus as the analysis data.The results suggest that an interannotator agreement can be reached as a result of reviews and negotiations that is much higher than the corresponding labelled attachment scores (LAS) reported for stateof-the-art dependency parsers.
To control negative emotion entails avoiding the harmful influences of bad mood, which may influence attention, memory, subjective and physical well-being, etc. Developing effective methods of negative emotion regulation are critical in improving mental health. The study of cognitive appraisal has been the recent focus of this pursuit. Cognitive appraisal is defined as a type of cognitive regulation that may eliminate negative feelings. While much evidence of cognitive appraisal has been reported, the studies often used inappropriate instructions and hence caused a confounding effect due to uncontrollable cognitive activity. For example, some researchers explicitly asked participants to try to reduce their emotional intensity by using reappraisal. As a result, participants would use unnecessary cognitive activities to decrease emotion, leading to the artificial inflation of appraisal effect. In this study, an improved method was used to solve this problem and probe only the function of appraisal on negative emotion. Three pieces of films, the length of which were all about six minutes, were chosen to elicit emotion. According to the emotional valence ratings, one of them was neutral while the other two were negative. Thirty-seven participants for the main experiment were instructed to watch the films with two physiological indexes being recorded: GSR (Galvanic Skin Reflex) and ECG (Electrocardiography). Before and after each film, the participants were asked to rest for four minutes. A rating for their current mood was also made before and after the clips. Different from previous studies, two distinct appraisals were given to two participant groups before the second negative film started, both asked the participants to watch the films naturally. Nineteen of the participants were told the actors’ own stories and emphasized they just performed. The rest, as a control group, were told the content in the film. At the end of the experiment, all participants were asked if they thought the film was fabled when watching the last clip to assess whether the appraisal background influenced their cognition of the film. The results indicated that only GSR and self emotion rating reflected emotional activity differences between the two groups. Analysis of covariance with the GSR level of the first rest as covariant indicated that the GSR level in the actors-appraisal group was lower than that in the control group when watching the second negative film. However, during the first two films, there were no differences between these two groups. On the other hand, analysis of covariance with the self report before the first rest as covariant indicated that the negative experience of actors–appraisal group was lower than that of the control group when watching the second negative film. During the first two films, there were no such differences. The change of GSR and negative experience, as anticipated, indicated that appraisal decreased physiological reaction to negative emotion. To sum up, people with the knowledge that the emotional stimulus was fabled showed more peaceful physiological activity along with lower negative emotion rating. These results indicate the effect of appraisal on emotion.
A selective tour of annotation in historical corpora begins with extra-linguistic markup: how far can it alert the corpus user to usage which is atypical of the variety being sampled? Several syntactic fossils are discussed, and a playful use of foreign and pseudo-foreign words. Are they a kind of code-switching? In the former case the answer No is given, in the latter a partial Yes. As for grammatical mark-up, with few exceptions a given scheme must privilege one particular analysis for each word, sentence or other unit of analysis. Special tags are available in the CLAWS and Penn Treebank tagsets for cases which remain ambiguous but which are in principle decidable. Grammatical mark-up remains essentially a matter of synchronic analysis, and the guiding principle is to be as specific as possible; tagsets routinely deploy a much finer set of distinctions than traditional word classes. Historical corpora like the Penn family aim also for consistency of analysis. I argue that both principles can be problematic. Consider first the push towards a unique POS tag for every word. I propose that certain kinds of word are vague as to their word class not because of a failure of analysis but because they are genuinely underdetermined. Vagueness is not ambiguity, so ambiguity tags would be inappropriate - at least with their currently intended values. Secondly, the desideratum of consistency does not allow for patterns which arguably have dual analyses synchronically, nor for items which are in transition or which have changed over the time-span of a historical corpus. Among the data discussed are the POS-tagging and parsing of adjectives derived from passive participles (interested, amused), multi-word prepositions (on behalf of), phrasal and prepositional verbs (run over), proper-to-common-noun conversions and noun-to-adjective transitions (BandAid), countable-to-mass conversions (He looked at me across a vast expanse of table) and the converse (two coffees). A brief conclusion argues that while some of the problems considered are statistically unimportant, others demand greater flexibility of mark-up.
This paper deals with a group of entries in the Pralex lexical database, namely with the one letter abbreviations and acronyms, which form a specific and very diverse group. Firstly, the author shortly describes the concept of chosen abbreviations and acronyms; secondly, she focuses on the methodology of processing of this group of entries in the lexical database.
This paper considers how implemented grammars can enhance descriptive ones. An implemented grammar encodes the analyses in machine readable form, facilitating automatic annotation of morphological, syntactic and semantic structures. A grammar augmented with a collection of such structures would enable, for example, a reader to search for items in which a PP argument fills the third most prominent semantic role.
The article deals with the issue of regional lexical units (LU) processed in the Pralex lexical database (LDB), specifically with the processing of regionally marked lexical units in the rising dictionaries while defining regionalisms of different type in the Czech tradition and in the Pralex LDB. It also emphasizes the problems occurring during the processing of this type of LU in the LDB. Furthermore, it examines the shifts in our evaluation of regional LU in comparison with the previous dictionaries (Dictionary of the Standard Czech Language, Dictionary of Standard Czech, Academy Dictionary of Loanwords in Czech).
Background: Diversity patterns of livestock species are informative to the history of agriculture and indicate uniqueness of breeds as relevant for conservation. So far, most studies on cattle have focused on mitochondrial and autosomal DNA variation. Previous studies of Y-chromosomal variation, with limited breed panels, identified two Bos taurus (taurine) haplogroups (Y1 and Y2; both composed of several haplotypes) and one Bos indicus (indicine/zebu) haplogroup (Y3), as well as a strong phylogeographic structuring of paternal lineages. Methodology and Principal Findings: Haplogroup data were collected for 2087 animals from 138 breeds. For 111 breeds, these were resolved further by genotyping microsatellites INRA189 (10 alleles) and BM861 (2 alleles). European cattle carry exclusively taurine haplotypes, with the zebu Y-chromosomes having appreciable frequencies in Southwest Asian populations. Y1 is predominant in northern and north-western Europe, but is also observed in several Ibe)
The article deals with the treatment of hypocorisms in the Pralex lexical database. The core of the article is the description of the work with exemplifications (sentential examples).
The paper deals with abbreviations, i.e. shortenings, acronyms and abbreviated expressions; it interprets and internally divides this special group of lexical units. The chosen typology was applied for a development of the database Praled. Following the particular types of units, the author monitors possible processing ways of various types of abbreviated forms, while building the Pralex lexical database.
The movement of people and their languages on an unprecedented scale has been exerting increasing pressure on the model of the nation state and the ideal of socially and linguistically homogeneous societies. Sociolinguists analyzing recent changes in language policies and citizenship legislation have focused on the global-local interface, as well as issues of territoriality and group membership, thus connecting with cultural geographers and anthropologists who study the relationship between language and senses of place. Although frequently regarded as the domain of linguistics, language policies and practices are inseparable from issues of power and identity. Scholarly investigations have demonstrated the need to view the dynamics of language contact in relation to “external” linguistic dimensions that are central to the field of sociology, including social class, gender, and ethnicity, together with acts of compliance with or resistance to social and linguistic norms.
The article proposes a reading of two novels by Evgenij Popov (b. 1946), Nakanune nakanune (1993) and Podlinnaja istorija «Zelenych muzykantov» (1999), as a response to “the language question” in post-perestroika Russian culture and society. The heterogeneous linguistic landscape of Nakanune – a remake of Turgenev's classic Nakanune – is compared to the “theoretical” reflections on language and style found in the numerous footnotes contained in Podlinnaja istorija. The comparative view opens up for a discussion of two principal types of metalanguage and the differences and interactions between them: explicit commentary on language and linguistic reflexivity through linguistic practice. For the latter, I propose the term “performative metalanguage”, and point to the numerous ways in which linguistic norms and styles may be negotiated, challenged and commented on through the linguistic practice, and in combination with straightforward commentary.
Humans reached present-day Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) in one of the first major human migrations out of Africa. Population movements in the millennia following this initial settlement are thought to have greatly influenced the genetic makeup of current inhabitants, yet the extent attributed to different events is not clear. Recent studies suggest that south-to-north gene flow largely influenced present-day patterns of genetic variation in Southeast Asian populations and that late Pleistocene and early Holocene migrations from Southeast Asia are responsible for a substantial proportion of ISEA ancestry. Archaeological and linguistic evidence suggests that the ancestors of present-day inhabitants came mainly from north-to-south migrations from Taiwan and throughout ISEA approximately 4,000 years ago. We report a large-scale genetic analysis of human variation in the Iban population from the Malaysian state of Sarawak in northwestern Borneo, located in the center of ISEA. Genome-wide s)
I "the meadow/' proceedingin "the air" and "thesea," beforereturning to "thecity,"and endingat "home" wheretheexplorer needs tolingerto reflect upon the knowledge gained throughout herjourney. The poems lead the reader to question the ignorance,knowledge, cruelty,and spirituality of human beings throughthe explorer'sjourney.EceTemelkuran's exquisite sense ofnatureand humanity is rendered through Deniz Perin'sprecisetranslation, whichskillfully conveysthetone oftheoriginal Turkish and makesthe book a meaningful giftto readersof theEnglish-speaking world. FatmaTarlaci University ofTexas,Austin C. K. Williams.Wait. New York.Farrar, Straus& Giroux.2010. 125 pages. $25. ISBN 978-0-374-28591-3 Wait, C. K. Williams'snewestcollection of poetry,delivers trademark poems - namely,poems thatarecast in the signaturestyle of Williams. Those who are already fans will not be disappointed and will find severalnew poems thatare as good as anyWilliamshas written to date, especiallythefinalpoem ofthevolume, "Jewon Bridge,"whichrefers to Paul Celan, and whichby virtue ofitscontent is inherently moving. The poem "Marina," which focuses onMarinaTsvetaeva, ispossiblytheother poeminthisvolumethat willclaima placeinanyfinalselected poems of Williams.The poem proceedsbyquotingbrief passages from Tsvetaeva'sArt in theLightofConscience while observingthefateof a winged insectdraggingitselfacross a tableand recalling eventsin Tsvetaeva 's life.Withpoems like these, Waitshowsno signsofdeclineinthe author'sabilities. Book of the Edge poems bvEce Temelkuran Translated with an Introduction byDeniz Perin Still, there are a few misgivings about some of thepoems' featuresthatadmittedly could be made about otherpoetryby Williams as well. First, the poet persistently uses imagerythatseems consciously gauged to deflate the "poetic" with the "antipoetic," but which frequently feelsgratuitousand ultimately theatrical.For example, in one stretch ofthebook in almostas manypoems as images,we encounterColeridge begging a ship's captainforan enema,a dead child,rottingplums comparedto "dog shit," a dog lickinghis "balls,"a blackbird hitbya car,a frog'sorgansliquefied by an insectbitethensucked out,a fishhead lyingon a sidewalk,flower "fucking," and "shitin a hat." 741WorldLiterature Today WÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊË Second,Williamsis an obviouslyintelligent andwell-read poet, and his learning findsits proper placeinhispoems,sometimes centrally asinthe poem"Marina," mentioned above.Thatsaid,attimes the musty smelloftheacademy canbe detected and be a little off-putting. Whenone poemencounters cows, thespeakermust(ofcourse)think ofIo;whenanother poemdescribes an encounter betweena man and womanon themetro, thespeaker must(ofcourse)recall Gombrowicz foran idea as simpleas physical assertion. Thereare multiple other examples oftimes whenthisreader wishestheauthor wouldputaside hisprofessor's cap. Third, there are too many stretches, even whole poems, in whichthepoet managesto barely includeconcreteimagery.For example, consider theselinesfrom "AllButAlways": "andifyouwere unable to give / an unqualified response to thesequestions, / but were forcedto admitthatyou / couldn't saywithcertainty whether / theactivities of thethingwere yourdoing/ ortheresult ofsome other agency." Suchlongstrings of abstractions seem less like poetry and moreliketherushedhurtle of abstract cogitation bysomeone consuming toomuchespresso. FredDings University ofSouthCarolina Miscellaneous Beyond Words:Translatingthe World. Susan Ouriou, ed. Banff, Alberta. BanffCentre Press. 2010. 175 pages. Can$21.95. isbn 978-1-894773-38-6 BeyondWords:Translating theWorld is a collection oftwenty-one short, mostlyinformal essays,thoughts on translation bya kaleidoscope of translators who have participated at varioustimesin theBanff literary Translation Centre's Summer ResidenceProgram. It is stimulating to confront in a shortspace how twenty-one translators with different approachesand attitudes facetwenty-one different problems oftranslation in as manydifferent ways.How does translating make us think aboutlanguage? Whatcan translators do, caughtin thegaps between twolanguages? How does each individualtextdetermine its translation? Whatabouttranslating from a major language into anindigenouslanguage?Whatis involved intranslating from a minor national language into a major one?What ifa translator isalsoa writer? Howdoes one carryacrossstylistic and linguistic norms from onelanguageto another - eveninthecaseofclosely related languages? How canpoetry be translated? Is translation political?Shoulditbe subjective? Is the translator translating him-or herself?Whataboutliterary imports? ■Hli^^H^H^^HHIII^^^MH^^HHH^^MI^^HHIJ^H...
In this paper we describe a mechanism for parallel treebank generation between an intense studied language (i.e. English) and a less studied language, like Romanian. The Romanian constituents of the treebank are induced from the corresponding constituents of the English part taking into account the words alignments of the corpus. The proposed mechanism reuses and adjusts existing tools and algorithms for automatic Part-Of-Speech annotation and syntactic trees alignment.
State of the art Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) systems require large sense-tagged corpora along with lexical databases to reach satisfactory results. The number of English language resources for developed WSD increased in the past years, while most other languages are still under-resourced. The situation is no different for Dutch. In order to overcome this data bottleneck, the DutchSemCor project will deliver a Dutch corpus that is sense-tagged with senses from the Cornetto lexical database. Part of this \ncorpus (circa 300K examples) is manually tagged. The remainder is automatically tagged using different WSD systems and validated by human annotators. The project uses existing corpora compiled in other projects; these are extended with Internet \nexamples for word senses that are less frequent and do not (sufficiently) appear in the corpora. We report on the status of the project and the evaluations of the WSD systems with the current training data.
The Internet has rarely been used in auditory perception studies due to concerns about standardisation and calibration across different systems and settings. However, not all auditory research is based on the investigation of fine-grained differences in auditory thresholds. Where meaningful ‘real-world’ listening, for instance the perception of speech, is concerned, the Internet may be a more appropriate and ecologically valid setting to collect data. This study compared affective ratings of low-pass-filtered infant-, foreigner- and British adult-directed speech obtained with traditional methods in the laboratory, with those obtained from an Internet sample. Dropout rates and demographic distribution of participants in the Internet condition were also assessed. The results show that affective ratings were similar for both the Internet and laboratory samples. These findings indicate the viability of Internet-based research into affective speech perception and suggest that precise acoustic environmental control may not always be necessary.
It has been shown that the human genome contains extensive copy number variations (CNVs). Investigating the medical and evolutionary impacts of CNVs requires the knowledge of locations, sizes and frequency distribution of them within and between populations. However, CNV study of Chinese minorities, which harbor the majority of genetic diversity of Chinese populations, has been underrepresented considering the same efforts in other populations. Here we constructed, to our knowledge, a first CNV map in seven Chinese populations representing the major linguistic groups in China with 1,440 CNV regions identified using Affymetrix SNP 6.0 Array. Considerable differences in distributions of CNV regions between populations and substantial population structures were observed. We showed that ∼35% of CNV regions identified in minority ethnic groups are not shared by Han Chinese population, indicating that the contribution of the minorities to genetic architecture of Chinese population could not)
Understanding the role that social cues have on interpersonal choice, and their susceptibility to contextual effects, is of core importance to models of social decision-making. Language, on the other hand, is one of the main means of communication during social interactions in our culture. The present experiments tested whether positive and negative linguistic descriptions of alleged partners in a modified Ultimatum Game biased decisions made to the same set of offers, and whether the contextual uncertainty of the game modulated this biasing effect. The results showed that in an uncertain context, the same offers were accepted with higher probability when they were preceded by positive rather than by negative valenced trait-words. Participants also accepted fair offers with higher probability than unfair offers, but this effect did not interact with the valence of the social descriptive words. In addition, the speed of the decision was affected by valence: acceptance choices were fast)
Therapist self-disclosure has been theorized and found to have both positive and negative effects. These effects depend, in part, on the nature of the disclosure. This study sought to examine the differential effects of therapist disclosures of more and less resolved countertransference issues on perceptions of therapists and therapy sessions. Using an analogue method, undergraduate participants (N = 116) were randomly assigned to watch one of two videos in which a therapist disclosed personal issues that were relatively resolved or relatively unresolved. As hypothesized, therapist disclosure of issues that were more resolved caused the therapist to be rated as more attractive and trustworthy and instilled greater hope than therapist disclosure of less resolved issues. The type of therapist disclosure, however, did not affect ratings of the expertness of the therapist, the depth or smoothness of the session, or the perceived universality between client and therapist. Implications of the results for the judicious use of self-disclosure are discussed.
The article deals with the program as well as content part of the theoretical conception of capturing Czech lexis in the form of a lexical database. It briefly outlines the development of the Praled software and describes the overall structure of the Pralex LDB in terms of its macrostructure as well as microstructure and the main principles of the treatment of database items (the data obligatorily provided with every entry). The ending is devoted to the potential of the application of this lexical database not only for a future monolingual dictionary and specialised dictionaries but also for various linguistic research projects.
We describe the background for and building of IcePaHC, a one million word parsed historical corpus of Icelandic which has just been finished. This corpus which is completely free and open contains fragments of 60 texts ranging from the late 12 th century to the present. We describe the text selection and text collecting process and discuss the quality of the texts and their conversion to modern Icelandic spelling. We explain why we choose to use a phrase structure Penn style annotation scheme and briefly describe the syntactic annotation process. Furthermore, we advocate the importance of an open source policy as regards language resources.
Personal naming practices exist in all human groups and are far from random. Rather, they continue to reflect social norms and ethno-cultural customs that have developed over generations. As a consequence, contemporary name frequency distributions retain distinct geographic, social and ethno-cultural patterning that can be exploited to understand population structure in human biology, public health and social science. Previous attempts to detect and delineate such structure in large populations have entailed extensive empirical analysis of naming conventions in different parts of the world without seeking any general or automated methods of population classification by ethno-cultural origin. Here we show how 'naming networks', constructed from forename-surname pairs of a large sample of the contemporary human population in 17 countries, provide a valuable representation of cultural, ethnic and linguistic population structure around the world. This innovative approach enriches and adds)
Background: The well-established left hemisphere specialisation for language processing has long been claimed to be based on a low-level auditory specialization for specific acoustic features in speech, particularly regarding 'rapid temporal processing'. Methodology: A novel analysis/synthesis technique was used to construct a variety of sounds based on simple sentences which could be manipulated in spectro-temporal complexity, and whether they were intelligible or not. All sounds consisted of two noise-excited spectral prominences (based on the lower two formants in the original speech) which could be static or varying in frequency and/or amplitude independently. Dynamically varying both acoustic features based on the same sentence led to intelligible speech but when either or both acoustic features were static, the stimuli were not intelligible. Using the frequency dynamics from one sentence with the amplitude dynamics of another led to unintelligible sounds of comparable spectro-te)
Background: During sentence processing we decode the sequential combination of words, phrases or sentences according to previously learned rules. The computational mechanisms and neural correlates of these rules are still much debated. Other key issue is whether sentence processing solely relies on language-specific mechanisms or is it also governed by domain-general principles. Methodology/Principal Findings: In the present study, we investigated the relationship between sentence processing and implicit sequence learning in a dual-task paradigm in which the primary task was a non-linguistic task (Alternating Serial Reaction Time Task for measuring probabilistic implicit sequence learning), while the secondary task were a sentence comprehension task relying on syntactic processing. We used two control conditions: a non-linguistic one (math condition) and a linguistic task (word processing task). Here we show that the sentence processing interfered with the probabilistic implicit seque)
Human languages evolve continuously, and a puzzling problem is how to reconcile the apparent robustness of most of the deep linguistic structures we use with the evidence that they undergo possibly slow, yet ceaseless, changes. Is the state in which we observe languages today closer to what would be a dynamical attractor with statistically stationary properties or rather closer to a non-steady state slowly evolving in time? Here we address this question in the framework of the emergence of shared linguistic categories in a population of individuals interacting through language games. The observed emerging asymptotic categorization, which has been previously tested - with success - against experimental data from human languages, corresponds to a metastable state where global shifts are always possible but progressively more unlikely and the response properties depend on the age of the system. This aging mechanism exhibits striking quantitative analogies to what is observed in the stati)
The primary sensory cortices are characterized by a topographical mapping of basic sensory features which is considered to deteriorate in higher-order areas in favor of complex sensory features. Recently, however, retinotopic maps were also discovered in the higher-order visual, parietal and prefrontal cortices. The discovery of these maps enabled the distinction between visual regions, clarified their function and hierarchical processing. Could such extension of topographical mapping to high-order processing regions apply to the auditory modality as well? This question has been studied previously in animal models but only sporadically in humans, whose anatomical and functional organization may differ from that of animals (e.g. unique verbal functions and Heschl's gyrus curvature). Here we applied fMRI spectral analysis to investigate the cochleotopic organization of the human cerebral cortex. We found multiple mirror-symmetric novel cochleotopic maps covering most of the core and hig)
Participants read aloud swear words, euphemisms of the swear words, and neutral stimuli while their autonomic activity was measured by electrodermal activity. The key finding was that autonomic responses to swear words were larger than to euphemisms and neutral stimuli. It is argued that the heightened response to swear words reflects a form of verbal conditioning in which the phonological form of the word is directly associated with an affective response. Euphemisms are effective because they replace the trigger (the offending word form) by another word form that expresses a similar idea. That is, word forms exert some control on affect and cognition in turn. We relate these findings to the linguistic relativity hypothesis, and suggest a simple mechanistic account of how language may influence thinking in this context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR], Copyright of PLoS ONE is the property of Public Library of Science and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to )
Background: The language faculty is probably the most distinctive feature of our species, and endows us with a unique ability to exchange highly structured information. In written language, information is encoded by the concatenation of basic symbols under grammatical and semantic constraints. As is also the case in other natural information carriers, the resulting symbolic sequences show a delicate balance between order and disorder. That balance is determined by the interplay between the diversity of symbols and by their specific ordering in the sequences. Here we used entropy to quantify the contribution of different organizational levels to the overall statistical structure of language. Methodology/Principal Findings: We computed a relative entropy measure to quantify the degree of ordering in word sequences from languages belonging to several linguistic families. While a direct estimation of the overall entropy of language yielded values that varied for the different families con)
This paper deals with the ways in which minority students in the Danish public school system bring mono-lingually based norms into their poly-lingual peer group interaction. In sequential micro-analyses of interaction we show how the students use the voice of an authority in their reproduction and negotiation of linguistic norms. We base our analyses on the Bakhtinian concept of double-voicing, the Goffmanian concept of keying and Tholander's concept of subteaching. We discuss in detail the relation between the local practices of the students and the linguistic norms expressed in broader society, for instance in newspaper editorials and government papers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
Domestic dogs are skillful at using the human pointing gesture. In this study we investigated whether dogs take contextual information into account when following pointing gestures, specifically, whether they follow human pointing gestures more readily in the context in which food has been found previously. Also varied was the human's tone of voice as either imperative or informative. Dogs were more sustained in their searching behavior in the 'context' condition as opposed to the 'no context' condition, suggesting that they do not simply follow a pointing gesture blindly but use previously acquired contextual information to inform their interpretation of that pointing gesture. Dogs also showed more sustained searching behavior when there was pointing than when there was not, suggesting that they expect to find a referent when they see a human point. Finally, dogs searched more in high-pitched informative trials as opposed to the low-pitched imperative trials, whereas in the latter do)
Background: Previous studies have claimed that a precise split at the vertical midline of each fovea causes all words to the left and right of fixation to project to the opposite, contralateral hemisphere, and this division in hemispheric processing has considerable consequences for foveal word recognition. However, research in this area is dominated by the use of stimuli from Latinate languages, which may induce specific effects on performance. Consequently, we report two experiments using stimuli from a fundamentally different, non-Latinate language (Arabic) that offers an alternative way of revealing effects of split-foveal processing, if they exist. Methods and Findings: Words (and pseudowords) were presented to the left or right of fixation, either close to fixation and entirely within foveal vision, or further from fixation and entirely within extrafoveal vision. Fixation location and stimulus presentations were carefully controlled using an eye-tracker linked to a fixation-cont)
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)
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)
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)