Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
16504 papers
Traditionally, parsers are evaluated against gold standard test data. This can cause problems if there is a mismatch between the data structures and representations used by the parser and the gold standard. A particular case in point is German, for which two treebanks (TiGer and TüBa-D/Z) are available with highly different
Socio-economic decisions are commonly explained by rational cost versus benefit considerations, whereas person variables have not much been considered. The present study aimed at investigating the degree to which dispositional power motivation and affective states predict socio-economic decisions. The power motive was assessed both indirectly and directly using a TAT-like picture test and a power motive self-report, respectively. After 9 months, 62 students completed an affect rating and performed on a money allocation task (social values questionnaire). We hypothesized and confirmed that dispositional power should be associated with a tendency to maximize one’s profit but to care less about another party’s profit. Additionally, positive affect showed effects in the same direction. The results are discussed with respect to a motivational approach explaining socio-economic behaviour.
It is now generally accepted that phraseological units are an area of great difficulty in foreign language acquisition, even for advanced learners (Howarth, 1998; Schmitt & Carter, 2004; Nesselhauf, 2005; Forsberg, 2006). Accordingly, we analyzed 906 verb-noun combinations – including 703 phraseological units – with two high-frequency verbs, namely (ex.: prendre position) and (ex.: donner a Det occasion de N), taken from a corpus of academic texts produced by advanced learners of French as a foreign language (L2), and from a control corpus of academic texts produced by native speakers of French (L1). The aim of the study was mainly descriptive: we tried to reach a definition of the phraseological competence of the advanced variety of academic French as an L2, and to compare two different groups of advanced learners, i.e. English-speaking learners (185.000 words) and Dutch-speaking learners (90.000 words). First, to establish the phraseological or free status of these 906 verb-noun combinations, we made use of four lexical databases that were available for French as an L1: a lexical database studying predicates and arguments in the way they co-occur in journalistic texts (Fabre & Bourigault, 2006), a list of verbal phraseological units (M. Gross, 1975, 1988), a corpus of written press, and a corpus of spoken French (Francard et al., 2002). The method of analysis that we adopted in this study combines two complementary approaches in the field of phraseology: (i) the functional approach, which depends on linguistic criteria of fixedness (syntax, semantics, lexis); (ii) the statistical approach, which depends on measures of lexical attraction in corpus linguistics (e.a. the mutual information score). Secondly, this analysis allowed us to quantify several external (mother tongue, text type, spoken/written language), and internal factors (structure of the noun phrase, semantic categories) which are likely to influence the acquisition of (erroneous or error-free) phraseological units with high-frequency verbs. Overall results in academic texts showed a significant contrast in the frequency of verb-noun phraseological units with and donner: advanced learners of French as an L2 underuse phraseological units with 'prendre' (ex.: prendre Det exemple de N) but overuse phraseological units with (ex. donner Det instruction). In addition to this collocational analysis, an error analysis on phraseological units allowed us to categorize errors according to: (i) the error type, which can be defined as a formal (ex.: donner l’incentif), contextual (ex.: prendre instead of avoir lieu) or quantitative type of deviation (ex.: donner Det trait a X instead of preter Det trait a X); (ii) the grammatical category, which concerns the place of the deviation (verb + noun, verb, noun, determiner, and modifier); (iii) the degree of error gravity, which was defined here according to the error type, the grammatical category of error, the number of deviations per phraseological unit, the frequency and the collocability of the phraseological unit concerned in L1 French. Thirdly, we investigated 503 phraseological units taken from strictly argumentative essays produced by learners of French as an L2, from the angle of accuracy and complexity, in order to shed some light on the phraseological proficiency level of advanced English-speaking vs Dutch-speaking learners of French. This thesis is rounded off by a conclusion in which a few explanatory and didactic perspectives are suggested, in keeping with the findings of this essentially descriptive study.
Reply by the current authors to the review by Constant Leung (see record [rid]2008-09991-006[/rid]) on the original book, Language testing: The social dimension (2006). Leung has drawn attention to possibly the most obvious gap in our treatment: a properly elaborated discussion of the assessment of English as a lingua franca. While consideration of this issue has begun in the work of authors he cites in his review, and elsewhere, it is, as Leung points out, a multiply complex issue, in which the social dimension is the crux of the problem, ‘in terms of speaker subject positions, lexicogrammatical norms, transcultural pragmatic conventions and so on’. It is clear that language testing—particularly significant here as a site of authority about linguistic norms, not unlike a dictionary—has an important role to play in authorizing or de-authorizing English as a lingua franca communication as a proper target for language learning; a further demonstration, if one were needed, of the power of tests. But beyond this political and institutional dimension, the psychometric problems inherent in designing tests based on a construct that is local, situated, and fluid pose a difficult but productive challenge to testers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
Previous research found that the duration of segments decreases as children grow older. The development of suprasegmental duration, however, has not been explored. The present study investigated developmental changes in duration of the four Mandarin tones. 5-, 8-, and 12-year-old monolingual Mandarin-speaking children and young adults participated in the study. Tone durations were measured in participants’ production of monosyllabic target words elicited by picture identification tasks. The results were as follows (1) For each tone category, tone duration and variability decreased with age: 5- and 8-year-old children showed significantly longer durations than adults. Tone durations in 12-year-old children approximated adult values. (2) Despite longer durations, adultlike duration patterns across tone categories existed in all children: dipping tones were the longest, followed by rising and level tones, with falling tones being the shortest. (3) Duration differences between the rising and dipping tones became larger as children grew older. The results may be indicative of the general maturation of laryngeal control over age. Although 5- and 8-year-old children have already established lexical contrasts of tone, adultlike phonetic norms are still in the process of development. The developmental data also provide support for a hybrid account of speech production from a suprasegmental perspective.
Background: The variety of ways in which faces are categorized makes face recognition challenging for both synthetic and biological vision systems. Here we focus on two face processing tasks, detection and individuation, and explore whether differences in task demands lead to differences both in the features most effective for automatic recognition and in the featural codes recruited by neural processing. Methodology/Principal Findings: Our study appeals to a computational framework characterizing the features representing object categories as sets of overlapping image fragments. Within this framework, we assess the extent to which task-relevant information differs across image fragments. Based on objective differences we find among task-specific representations, we test the sensitivity of the human visual system to these different face descriptions independently of one another. Both behavior and functional magnetic resonance imaging reveal effects elicited by objective task-specific )
There is an increasing interest in multimodal communication as suggested by several national and international projects (ISLE, HUMAINE, SIMILAR, CHIL, AMI, CALO, VACE, CALLAS), the attention devoted to the topic by well-known institutions and organizations (the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Linguistic Data Consortium), and the success of conferences related to multimodal communication (ICMI, IVA, Gesture, Measuring Behavior, Nordic Symposium on Multimodal Communication, LREC Workshops on Multimodal Corpora).
Background: The alcohol dehydrogenases (ADH) are widely studied enzymes and the evolution of the mammalian gene cluster encoding these enzymes is also well studied. Previous studies have shown that the ADH1B*47His allele at one of the seven genes in humans is associated with a decrease in the risk of alcoholism and the core molecular region with this allele has been selected for in some East Asian populations. As the frequency of ADH1B*47His is highest in East Asia, and very low in most of the rest of the world, we have undertaken more detailed investigation in this geographic region. Methodology/Principal Findings: Here we report new data on 30 SNPs in the ADH7 and Class I ADH region in samples of 24 populations from China and Laos. These populations cover a wide geographic region and diverse ethnicities. Combined with our previously published East Asian data for these SNPs in 8 populations, we have typed populations from all of the 6 major linguistic phyla (Altaic including Korean-J)
Background: Understanding the time course of how listeners reconstruct a missing fundamental component in an auditory stimulus remains elusive. We report MEG evidence that the missing fundamental component of a complex auditory stimulus is recovered in auditory cortex within 100 ms post stimulus onset. Methodology: Two outside tones of four-tone complex stimuli were held constant (1200 Hz and 2400 Hz), while two inside tones were systematically modulated (between 1300 Hz and 2300 Hz), such that the restored fundamental (also knows as ''virtual pitch'') changed from 100 Hz to 600 Hz. Constructing the auditory stimuli in this manner controls for a number of spectral properties known to modulate the neuromagnetic signal. The tone complex stimuli only diverged on the value of the missing fundamental component. Principal Findings: We compared the M100 latencies of these tone complexes to the M100 latencies elicited by their respective pure tone (spectral pitch) counterparts. The M100 laten)
Recent neuroimaging studies have identified a set of brain regions that are metabolically active during wakeful rest and consistently deactivate in a variety the performance of demanding tasks. This ''default network'' has been functionally linked to the stream of thoughts occurring automatically in the absence of goal-directed activity and which constitutes an aspect of mental behavior specifically addressed by many meditative practices. Zen meditation, in particular, is traditionally associated with a mental state of full awareness but reduced conceptual content, to be attained via a disciplined regulation of attention and bodily posture. Using fMRI and a simplified meditative condition interspersed with a lexical decision task, we investigated the neural correlates of conceptual processing during meditation in regular Zen practitioners and matched control subjects. While behavioral performance did not differ between groups, Zen practitioners displayed a reduced duration of the neur)
Semantic intrusions are inappropriate responses frequently observed in patients with Alzheimer's disease. They belong to the same category as the words to be remembered, but their prototypic value remains largely unexplored. The prototype is the most representative word in a particular lexical category. The prototypic value is measured according to different criteria: written and oral lexical frequency, frequency of use, degree of typicality, degree of familiarity and rank of quotation. The objective of the study was to evaluate the prototypic value of intrusions produced by 17 Alzheimer's patients with mild to severe dementia, during the cued recall of the Grober & Buschke procedure (RL/RI 16 items). The prototypic value was compared to the categorial norms provided by 1) 17 control subjects and 2) the lexical database 'Lexique 3'. The results show that intrusions had a significantly higher prototypic value than targeted items. The prototypic value increased with the progression of the disease, and according to the evaluation criteria used. Thus with the criteria 'frequency of use', 'degree of typicality' and 'degree of familiarity,' the prototypic value increased exponentially with the severity of dementia. In contrast, in spite of the development of the pathology, the prototypic value decreased when assessed by the criteria of 'rank of quotation', and 'lexical frequency' (oral and written). In conclusion, the qualitative analysis of the prototypic value of intrusion errors in Alzheimers opens up new clinical and methodological considerations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
The semantic annotation of texts with senses from a computational lexicon is a complex and often subjective task. As a matter of fact, the fine granularity of the WordNet sense inventory [Fellbaum, Christiane (ed.). 1998. WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database MIT Press], a de facto standard within the research community, is one of the main causes of a low inter-tagger agreement ranging between 70% and 80% and the disappointing performance of automated fine-grained disambiguation systems (around 65% state of the art in the Senseval-3 English all-words task). In order to improve the performance of both manual and automated sense taggers, either we change the sense inventory (e.g. adopting a new dictionary or clustering WordNet senses) or we aim at resolving the disagreements between annotators by dealing with the fineness of sense distinctions. The former approach is not viable in the short term, as wide-coverage resources are not publicly available and no large-scale reliable clustering of WordNet senses has been released to date. The latter approach requires the ability to distinguish between subtle or misleading sense distinctions. In this paper, we propose the use of structural semantic interconnections—a specific kind of lexical chains—for the adjudication of disagreed sense assignments to words in context. The approach relies on the exploitation of the lexicon structure as a support to smooth possible divergencies between sense annotators and foster coherent choices. We perform a twofold experimental evaluation of the approach applied to manual annotations from the SemCor corpus, and automatic annotations from the Senseval-3 English all-words competition. Both sets of experiments and results are entirely novel: structural adjudication allows to improve the state-of-the-art performance in all-words disambiguation by 3.3 points (achieving a 68.5% Fl-score) and attains figures around 80% precision and 60% recall in the adjudication of disagreements from human annotators. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
Background: Genome-wide data provide a powerful tool for inferring patterns of genetic variation and structure of human populations. Principal Findings: In this study, we analysed almost 250,000 SNPs from a total of 945 samples from Eastern and Western Finland, Sweden, Northern Germany and Great Britain complemented with HapMap data. Small but statistically significant differences were observed between the European populations (FST = 0.0040, p<10-4), also between Eastern and Western Finland (FST = 0.0032, p<10-3). The latter indicated the existence of a relatively strong autosomal substructure within the country, similar to that observed earlier with smaller numbers of markers. The Germans and British were less differentiated than the Swedes, Western Finns and especially the Eastern Finns who also showed other signs of genetic drift. This is likely caused by the later founding of the northern populations, together with subsequent founder and bottleneck effects, and a smaller populatio)
Reviewed by: Lexicalization and language change Jesús Fernández-Domínguez Laurel J. BrintonElizabeth Closs Traugott. 2005. Lexicalization and language change. In the series Research Surveys in Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp. xii + 207. US $34.99 (softcover). Lexicalization has been customarily defined as “a gradual historical process, involving graphemic, phonological and semantic changes and the loss of motivation” (Lipka 2005:40), and can affect a word in its phonology, morphology, semantics, or syntax. Because it can affect the makeup of virtually any item, it stands as a central phenomenon in language change, and as such it has gathered the attention of scholars for decades. The aim of [End Page 104] Brinton and Traugott’s work is to provide a wide coverage for what has been traditionally considered under lexicalization, as well as to discuss related concepts necessary for its understanding. Lexicalization and language change develops along six chapters and progressively introduces the various conceptualizations given to the processes of language modification. Chapter 1 (pp. 1–31) sets the theoretical context of the book and introduces some basic notions, and Chapter 2 (pp. 32–61) provides a background in terms of definitions and viewpoints for lexicalization. The authors discuss next the relationship between lexicalization and grammaticalization, first in a general fashion in Chapter 3 (pp. 62–88) and then in further detail in Chapter 4 (pp. 89–110). The most relevant contents of the work are exemplified in Chapter 5 (pp. 111–140), and some conclusions and research questions are offered in Chapter 6 (pp. 141–160). Among the concepts introduced in Chapter 1, the notion of lexicon bears a special significance, as there exist various senses to it which must be clarified before attempting a definition of lexicalization (see Aronoff 1989, not mentioned by the authors). To this end, Brinton and Traugott devote several pages to outline holistic vs. componential approaches to the lexicon, to the categories of the lexicon, and to the lexicon viewed as a continuum of productivity, thus laying the conceptual background required for a proper comprehension of the book. This overview is a suitable introduction to the subject also because it is contrasted with concepts like grammar, language change, or productivity, all of which have a bearing on lexicalization and are seen by the authors as a matter of gradation. Brinton and Traugott also offer a summary of the remainder of contents, and set a number of assumptions for a study of language change “from a historical, functionalist perspective” (p. 31). Chapter 2 immerses into lexicalization proper. After a brief introduction, a central section is “Ordinary processes of word formation” (pp. 33–45), a summary of the major devices of contemporary English: compounding, derivation, conversion, back-formation, initialism, etc. Here, Brinton and Traugott rightly note that lexicalization is to be distinguished from word-formation as far as only the latter has the capacity to produce new items in a regular and predictable manner, a discussion picked up later in Chapter 4. Their review proves valuable because it offers the reader the general features of present-day word-formation in a concise and satisfactory manner, even if one can hardly agree with the inclusion of loan translation, root creation, or coinage under word-formation (see Štekauer 2005:214). A subsequent logical step is the indispensable though brief explanation of institutionalization, that is, “the spread of a usage to a community and its establishment as the norm” (p. 45), usually taken as a stage following word-formation and preceding lexicalization (see Bauer 1983:45–48; Hohenhaus 2005). A number of opinions are explained and illustrated here before turning to the core of the chapter: lexicalization as fusion (pp. 47–57) and as increase in autonomy (pp. 57–60). The authors complain of the very little attention that lexicalization as fusion has received from a historical point of view, and define it as “the development of a form from a more complex to a simpler sequence” (p. 47). The present chapter truly represents a deep and up-to-date review of the typology of the phenomenon, given that it covers lexicalization as affecting phrasal and syntactic constructions (p. 48–50), word-formation (p. 50–52), phonological...
Current archaeological evidence from Palau in western Micronesia indicates that the archipelago was settled around 3000- 3300 BP by normal sized populations; contrary to recent claims, they did not succumb to insular dwarfism. Background: Previous and ongoing archaeological research of both human burial and occupation sites throughout the Palauan archipelago during the last 50 years has produced a robust data set to test hypotheses regarding initial colonization and subsequent adaptations over the past three millennia. Principal Findings: Close examination of human burials at the early (ca. 3000 BP) and stratified site of Chelechol ra Orrak indicates that these were normal sized individuals. This is contrary to the recent claim of contemporaneous ''small-bodied'' individuals found at two cave sites by Berger et al. (2008). As we argue, their analyses are flawed on a number of different analytical levels. First, their sample size is too small and fragmentary to adequately address the v)
Spoken language resources (SLRs) are essential for both research and application development. In this article we clarify the concept of SLR validation. We define validation and how it differs from evaluation. Further, relevant principles of SLR validation are outlined. We argue that the best way to validate SLRs is to implement validation throughout SLR production and have it carried out by an external and experienced institute. We address which tasks should be carried out by the validation institute, and which not. Further, we list the basic issues that validation criteria for SLR should address. A standard validation protocol is shown, illustrating how validation can prove its value throughout the production phase in terms of pre-validation, full validation and pre-release validation.
Since norms for vocabulary acquisition in Maltese children do not yet exist, documentation of productive vocabulary acquisition may contribute to establishing a baseline of lexical development. Clinical implications may thus be derived. The current study is a small-scale investigation of the proportions of Maltese and English lexemes in the vocabularies of ten normally-developing Maltese children aged between 12 and 30 months. The participants were primarily exposed to Maltese within their immediate environments, while receiving indirect exposure to English. Outcomes of parental report and language sampling were analysed for evidence of a bilingual dimension in these children's productive vocabularies. Translation equivalents were reported on by parents, but negligible evidence of equivalents emerged in conversational language use. In contrast, lexical borrowings were both reported and sampled. A substantial proportion of English lexemes were reported by the parents in the absence of Maltese equivalents.
In this paper, I argue that standard, co-descriptional glue semantics provides no clear and satisfactory role for the traditional PREDfeatures of LFG, due to the fact that the linear logic of glue semantics does the work of the Completeness and Coherence Constraints. But then I show that a reduced but significant role for PRED-features can be found in an alternative ‘Description-by-Analysis’ (DBA) formulation, proposed in Andrews (2007a). The DBA formulation is argued to be superior in various respects, and some constraints are proposed to cause the DBA approach to approximate some of the empirically justifiable aspects of the behavior of the co-descriptional formulation. The standard way to combine LFG with glue-semantics has been with a ‘co-descriptional’ architecture in which lexical entries introduce the usual grammatical features in the usual way, together with ‘meaning-constructors’ that account for the meanings, both of the PRED-feature associated with the lexical item, and any semantically intepretable grammatical features that it might introduce, either inherently or due to the inflectional morphology. Typical examples would be the following entries for the verb form went and the noun-form feet: (1) a. went:V, (↑PRED)= ‘Gomotion ’, (↑TENSE)=PAST, λx.go(x): (↑ SUBJ)e −◦ ↑p, λP.Past(P ): ↑p −◦ ↑p b. feet:N, (↑PRED)= ‘Foot’, (↑NUM)=PL, λx.Foot(x): ↑p, λP.Past(P ): ↑p −◦ ↑p Co-description was introduced and motivated in Halvorsen and Kaplan (1988) as an alternative to the earlier (and overall more often used) ‘description-byanalysis’ (DBA) architecture, in which the f-structure is the primary input to the semantics. Although the norm in glue-semantics, co-description raises a puzzle with respect to the role of PRED-features, namely, why they are there at all. The problem is that, as pointed out in Kuhn (2001), the linear logic resource management employed in glue is in itself sufficient to account for the phenomena of Completeness, Coherence, and Predicate Uniqueness, which comprise the major special properties of PRED-features. This leaves us with no clear reason why these features couldn’t just be omitted from the lexical entries of (1). Even if absence of the PRED-features caused some And, independently developed for XLE (Crouch, p.c.), although no longer used. Using p ‘proposition’ for the type of propositions rather than the usual t, and a clearly oversimplified Priorian operator treatment for tense. See for example Halvorsen (1983), Wedekind and Kaplan (1993), Frank and Semecky (2004), Crouch and King (2006), Crouch (2006). subtle problems, putting them back in would still constitute an explanatory problem, since there isn’t any principle that requires LFG lexical entries to introduce PRED-values. If the benefits of co-description were sufficiently impressive, one could presumably deal with this issue, but I will first show that the original motivation for it is insufficient, and point out that it creates various problems, one of which was noted by Andrews (2007a). Then I will describe a DBA architecture for glue, and show it it provides a role for PRED-features. But this is not the same as in pre-glue LFG, since glue will be doing the work of Completeness and Coherence (but not Predicate Uniqueness). So the last step is to propose some constraints which will cause meaning-constructors in the DBA architecture to act in a way that is similar in certain empirically justifiable respects to standard PRED-features controlling Completeness and Coherence, but avoiding the problems with co-description. 1 Problems and Non-benefits of Co-Description The main proposed benefit of co-description was that it could make available for semantic interpretation information not present in f-structure (Halvorsen and Kaplan 1988:284, 1995 version). But this ignores the fact that, thanks to the inverse of the φ projection, anything accessible from c-structure is also accessible from f-structure. Andrews (2007b), for example, proposes constraints involving c-structure in a DBA glue framework. However, it might still be the case that co-description is the best approach, either for all, or only for some, kinds of linguistic phenomena. Here I will argue that it isn’t best for what would be traditionally regarded as the interpretation of features and lexical items (by contrast, co-description seems very well suited for the properties of information-structure, c.f. Mycock (2006)). Perhaps the most immediate problem, pointed out in Andrews (2007a), is that it becomes an accident that the occurrences of features and their traditionally ascribed meanings are quite closely correlated, with only limited exceptions, such as pluralia tantum, which I’ll discuss later. There would for example be nothing obviously wrong with a variant of (1b) in which the plural meaning-constructor was present but not the plural feature-equation. But this doesn’t happen, even with the exotic plurals that English is so fond of borrowing from other languages: (2) a. These seraphim are annoyed b. This seraph is annoyed c. *This seraphim is annoyed (plural meaning, singular syntax) “Every interpretation scheme based on description-by-analysis requires that all semantically relevant information be encoded in the functional structure.” But agreement, the main motivation for having features at all, leads to a further problem with the meaning-constructors. This is that one has to decide which of the various lexical entries introducing a given feature-value occurrence is the one that is introducing the constructor. Consider an Italian example such as: (3) (le the(FEM.PL) ragazze) girl(FEM.PL) vengono come(3.PL) The girls/they are coming If the subject is present, one would presumably want the noun to introduce the plural meaning-constructor, and the verb not to (since not all NPs are in positions where there is a verb to agree with them and provide their number constructors), but if the subject is omitted, then the verb would presumably be the provider of the constructor. It is certainly not impossible to come up with grammars that will work properly, but it involves delicate choices with considerable scope for stipulation, which it would be good to reduce to the greatest extent possible. Another problem resides in the overlapping powers and responsibilities of the PRED-features, with their argument-lists, and those of the meaningconstructors that refer to grammatical functions. This is that, although the PRED-features control what governable grammatical functions can and must appear, they no longer say anything about what their semantic contributions are, since this is done by the meaning-constructors. But, left unconstrained, meaning-constructors can do all sorts of peculiar things in the way of rearranging the semantics of the grammatical functions. Below, for example, (a) interchanges the semantic role of subject and object, while (b) creates an unspecified causee agent causative: (4) a. λPxy.P (y, x): ((↑OBJ)e −◦ (↑ SUBJ)e −◦ ↑p)−◦ (↑ SUBJ)−◦ (↑OBJ)−◦ ↑p b. λPx.(∃z)(Cause(x, P (z, y))): ((↑ SUBJ)e −◦ ↑p)−◦ (↑ SUBJ)e −◦ ↑p Without some further constraints, these meaning-constructors could be introduced by inflections or grammatical particles, thereby undoing the kinds of work people have been trying to accomplish with Lexical Mapping Theory and its competitors over the last several decades. The most obvious and direct solution to the overlap problem is to drop the PRED-features entirely, since, as noted above, the resource management provided by linear logic can do all of the syntactic work of the PRED-features, and of course the meaning constructors also take over their informal role of encoding the meaning. Therefore, the natural consequence of adopting codescription is to abandon PRED-features. This might of course be the right thing to do, but I will argue in the remainder of the paper that glue-byDBA would be a good thing to try first for certain aspects of semantic interpretation, especially, morphology and the lexicon. However, note that the use of meaning-constructors introduced by the PS rules, for example by Asudeh and Crouch (2002) and Sadler and Nordlinger (2008), is not implicated in any of the problems raised here, and is consistent with what I will be proposing.
Reviews the book, Le Francais en Amérique du Nord: État présent by Albert Valdman, Julie Auger, and Deborah Piston-Hatlen (eds.) (2005). Poirier, Boivin, Trepanier & Verreault 1994 gave us the first general overview of the French linguistic legacy in North America. Valdman and his team have updated that work, incorporating the findings of sociolinguistic research carried out over the past decade, notably in language obsolescence. The result is comprehensive treatment of all the main areas of North America where French is spoken. It is well organized, with an introductory chapter providing a succinct overview of the four sections to follow: The first describes where, how, and to what extent French is spoken in North America; the second examines language variation in each of these areas and the effects of language contact; the third looks at linguistic norms and language planning; and a fourth is devoted to more general comparative and historical issues. It is possible to point to improvements that could have been incorporated into the volume. There are occasional production blemishes. However, this volume offers an invaluable tool not only for students of French but also for sociolinguists concerned with the effects of language contact, language change, and language obsolescence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
The problem of significance of the knowledge of cultural norms and standards of national communication is discussed. Studying a foreign language implies not only the knowledge of its lexical units, grammar and word combinations but also the knowledge of behavior stereotypes, etiquette norms and rules in different situations of communication. This thesis is analyzed on the comparison of address forms both in Russian and American cultures.
Speech monitoring encompasses detection and self-repair of errors.This paper first reviews types of errors and self-repairs,then focuses on three theoretical accounts of how the monitoring mechanism works to detect and correct errors.Product-based theory assumes that there is a monitor which is equipped with phonological,lexical and syntactical rules and pragmatic norms and whose sole function is to monitor errors at varying levels when language is produced.Perception-based theory posits that a central monitor within the conceptualizer functions to accomplish the monitoring job.Node structure theory accounts for monitoring from the node activation hypothesis,i.e.,detection and correction of errors is tied to the activation strength or level of node committed or uncommitted.
Disordered gambling stigma was examined. University students (117 male, 132 female) rated vignettes describing males with five health conditions (schizophrenia, alcohol dependence, disordered gambling, cancer, and a no diagnosis control with subclinical problems) on a measure of attitudinal social distance. A mixed ANOVA revealed that, in keeping with hypotheses, disordered gambling was more stigmatized than the cancer and control conditions. Interactions suggested that stigma may be influenced by context (i.e., order of vignette appearance) and participant characteristics (i.e., sex and ethnicity), although follow–up analyses revealed this was not the case for disordered gambling. Perceived dangerousness attributions and familiarity (previous experience with a disordered gambler) were also examined. As predicted, perceived dangerousness was positively correlated with social distance scores. Familiarity ratings were unrelated to social distance.
Broad-coverage parsing has come to a point where distinct approaches can offer (seemingly) comparable performance: statistical parsers acquired from the Penn Treebank (PTB); data-driven dependency parsers; deep parsers trained off enriched treebanks (in linguistic frameworks like CCG, HPSG, or LFG); and hybrid deep parsers, employing hand-built grammars in, for example, HPSG, LFG, or LTAG. Evaluation against trees in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) section of the PTB has helped advance parsing research over the course of the past decade. Despite some skepticism, the crisp and, over time, stable task of maximizing ParsEval metrics (i.e. constituent labeling precision and recall) over PTB trees has served as a dominating benchmark. However, modern treebank parsers still restrict themselves to only a subset of PTB annotation; there is reason to worry about the idiosyncrasies of this particular corpus; it remains unknown how much the ParsEval metric (or any intrinsic evaluation) can inform NLP application developers; and PTB-style analyses leave a lot to be desired in terms of linguistic information.
A positive family history of alcohol use disorders (FH) is a robust predictor of personal alcohol abuse and dependence. Exposure to problem-drinking models is one mechanism through which family history influences alcohol-related cognitions and drinking patterns. Similarly, exposure to alcohol advertisements is associated with alcohol involvement and the relationship between affective response to alcohol cues and drinking behavior has not been well established. In addition, the collective contribution that FH, exposure to different types of problem-drinking models (e.g. parents, peers) and personal alcohol use have on appraisal of alcohol-related stimuli has not been evaluated with a large sample. We investigated the independent effects of FH, exposure to problem-drinking models and personal alcohol use on valence ratings of alcohol pictures in a college sample. College students (n = 227) completed measures of personal drinking and substance use, exposure to problem-drinking models, FH and ratings on affective valence of 60 alcohol pictures. Greater exposure to non-familial problem-drinkers predicted greater drinking among college students (beta = 0.17, P < 0.01). However, personal drinking was the only predictor of valence ratings of alcohol pictures (beta = -0.53, P < 0.001). Personal drinking level predicted valence ratings of alcohol cues over and above FH, exposure to problem-drinking models and demographic characteristics. This suggests that positive affective responses to alcohol pictures are more a function of personal experience (i.e. repeated heavy alcohol use) than vicarious learning.
Unlike previous emotional studies using functional neuroimaging that have focused on either locating discrete emotions in the brain or linking emotional response to an external behavior, this study investigated brain regions in order to validate a three-dimensional construct--namely pleasure, arousal, and dominance (PAD) of emotion induced by marketing communication. Emotional responses to five television commercials were measured with Advertisement Self-Assessment Manikins (AdSAM) for PAD and with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify corresponding patterns of brain activation. We found significant differences in the AdSAM scores on the pleasure and arousal rating scales among the stimuli. Using the AdSAM response as a model for the fMRI image analysis, we showed bilateral activations in the inferior frontal gyri and middle temporal gyri associated with the difference on the pleasure dimension, and activations in the right superior temporal gyrus and right middle frontal gyrus associated with the difference on the arousal dimension. These findings suggest a dimensional approach of constructing emotional changes in the brain and provide a better understanding of human behavior in response to advertising stimuli.
The Evalita ’07 Parsing Task has been the first contest among parsing systems for Italian. It is the first attempt to compare the approaches and the results of the existing parsing systems specific for this language using a common treebank annotated using both a dependency and a constituency-based format. The development data set for this parsing competition was taken from the Turin University Treebank, which is annotated both in dependency and constituency format. The evaluation metrics were those standardly applied in CoNLL and PARSEVAL. The results of the parsing results are very promising and higher than the state-of-the-art for dependency parsing of Italian. An analysis of such results is provided, which takes into account other experiences in treebank-driven parsing for Italian and for other Romance languages (in particular, the CoNLL X &amp; 2007 shared tasks for dependency parsing). It focuses on the characteristics of data sets, i.e. type of annotation and size, parsing paradigms and approaches applied also to languages other than Italian.
This article examines the role of subjective familiarity in the implicit and explicit learning of artificial grammars. Experiment 1 found that objective measures of similarity (including fragment frequency and repetition structure) predicted ratings of familiarity, that familiarity ratings predicted grammaticality judgments, and that the extremity of familiarity ratings predicted confidence. Familiarity was further shown to predict judgments in the absence of confidence, hence contributing to above-chance guessing. Experiment 2 found that confidence developed as participants refined their knowledge of the distribution of familiarity and that differences in familiarity could be exploited prior to confidence developing. Experiment 3 found that familiarity was consciously exploited to make grammaticality judgments including those made without confidence and that familiarity could in some instances influence participants' grammaticality judgments apparently without their awareness. All 3 experiments found that knowledge distinct from familiarity was derived only under deliberate learning conditions. The results provide decisive evidence that familiarity is the essential source of knowledge in artificial grammar learning while also supporting a dual-process model of implicit and explicit learning.
In this paper we present a corpus representation format which unifies the representation of a wide range of dependency treebanks within a single model. This approach provides interoperability and reusability of annotated syntactic data which in turn extends its applicability within various research contexts. We demonstrate our approach by means of dependency treebanks of 11 languages. Further, we perform a comparative quantitative analysis of these treebanks in order to demonstrate the interoperability of our approach.
This article examines the attitudes of a group of middle-class African Americans toward varieties that are available to them for helping to project the attitudes, stances, and affiliations that they perceive as effective in negotiating social and professional environments where vastly distinct linguistic norms may prevail. The research uses subjective reaction tests, interviews, and an online survey to ask questions about the significance of “sounding black” in judgments the participants make about standardness, social class, and appropriateness of speech styles for various environments. The research also examines linguistic features that contribute to the social judgments. Results show a correlation between the perception of African American identity and judgments that occur in other areas; the consultants value AAVE as their heritage language, but see standard African American English as the one variety that can meet the demands of all environments.
OBJECTIVE: We aimed to study the neural processing of emotion-denoting words based on a circumplex model of affect, which posits that all emotions can be described as a linear combination of two neurophysiological dimensions, valence and arousal. Based on the circumplex model, we predicted a linear relationship between neural activity and incremental changes in these two affective dimensions. METHODS: Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we assessed in 10 subjects the correlations of BOLD (blood oxygen level dependent) signal with ratings of valence and arousal during the presentation of emotion-denoting words. RESULTS: Valence ratings correlated positively with neural activity in the left insular cortex and inversely with neural activity in the right dorsolateral prefrontal and precuneus cortices. The absolute value of valence ratings (reflecting the positive and negative extremes of valence) correlated positively with neural activity in the left dorsolateral and medial prefrontal cortex (PFC), dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, and right dorsal PFC, and inversely with neural activity in the left medial temporal cortex and right amygdala. Arousal ratings and neural activity correlated positively in the left parahippocampus and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, and inversely in the left dorsolateral PFC and dorsal cerebellum. CONCLUSION: We found evidence for two neural networks subserving the affective dimensions of valence and arousal. These findings clarify inconsistencies from prior imaging studies of affect by suggesting that two underlying neurophysiological systems, valence and arousal, may subserve the processing of affective stimuli, consistent with the circumplex model of affect.
We present the first results on parsing the SynTagRus treebank of Russian with a data-driven dependency parser, achieving a labeled attachment score of over 82% and an unlabeled attachment score of 89%. A feature analysis shows that high parsing accuracy is crucially dependent on the use of both lexical and morphological features. We conjecture that the latter result can be generalized to richly inflected languages in general, provided that sufficient amounts of training data are available.
Over the past 15 years, there has been increasing use of linguistically annotated sentence collections, such as the Penn Treebank (PTB), for constructing statistically based parsers.While these parsers have generally been built for engineering purposes, more recently such approaches have been advanced as potentially cognitively relevant, e.g., for addressing the problem of human language acquisition.Here we examine this possibility critically: we assess how well these Treebank parsers actually approach human/child language competence.We find that such systems fail to replicate many, perhaps most, empirically attested grammaticality judgments; seem overly sensitive, rather than robust, to training data idiosyncrasies; and easily acquire "unnatural" syntactic constructions, those never attested in any human language.Overall, we conclude that existing statistically based treebank parsers fail to incorporate much "knowledge of language" in these three senses.
CONTEXT: Cognitive decline, mood, behavioral and sleep disturbances, and limitations of activities of daily living commonly burden elderly patients with dementia and their caregivers. Circadian rhythm disturbances have been associated with these symptoms. OBJECTIVE: To determine whether the progression of cognitive and noncognitive symptoms may be ameliorated by individual or combined long-term application of the 2 major synchronizers of the circadian timing system: bright light and melatonin. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS: A long-term, double-blind, placebo-controlled, 2 x 2 factorial randomized trial performed from 1999 to 2004 with 189 residents of 12 group care facilities in the Netherlands; mean (SD) age, 85.8 (5.5) years; 90% were female and 87% had dementia. INTERVENTIONS: Random assignment by facility to long-term daily treatment with whole-day bright (+/- 1000 lux) or dim (+/- 300 lux) light and by participant to evening melatonin (2.5 mg) or placebo for a mean (SD) of 15 (12) months (maximum period of 3.5 years). MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Standardized scales for cognitive and noncognitive symptoms, limitations of activities of daily living, and adverse effects assessed every 6 months. RESULTS: Light attenuated cognitive deterioration by a mean of 0.9 points (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.04-1.71) on the Mini-Mental State Examination or a relative 5%. Light also ameliorated depressive symptoms by 1.5 points (95% CI, 0.24-2.70) on the Cornell Scale for Depression in Dementia or a relative 19%, and attenuated the increase in functional limitations over time by 1.8 points per year (95% CI, 0.61-2.92) on the nurse-informant activities of daily living scale or a relative 53% difference. Melatonin shortened sleep onset latency by 8.2 minutes (95% CI, 1.08-15.38) or 19% and increased sleep duration by 27 minutes (95% CI, 9-46) or 6%. However, melatonin adversely affected scores on the Philadelphia Geriatric Centre Affect Rating Scale, both for positive affect (-0.5 points; 95% CI, -0.10 to -1.00) and negative affect (0.8 points; 95% CI, 0.20-1.44). Melatonin also increased withdrawn behavior by 1.02 points (95% CI, 0.18-1.86) on the Multi Observational Scale for Elderly Subjects scale, although this effect was not seen if given in combination with light. Combined treatment also attenuated aggressive behavior by 3.9 points (95% CI, 0.88-6.92) on the Cohen-Mansfield Agitation Index or 9%, increased sleep efficiency by 3.5% (95% CI, 0.8%-6.1%), and improved nocturnal restlessness by 1.00 minute per hour each year (95% CI, 0.26-1.78) or 9% (treatment x time effect). CONCLUSIONS: Light has a modest benefit in improving some cognitive and noncognitive symptoms of dementia. To counteract the adverse effect of melatonin on mood, it is recommended only in combination with light. TRIAL REGISTRATION: controlled-trials.com/isrctn Identifier: ISRCTN93133646.
Political strategists decide daily how to market their candidates. Growing recognition of the importance of implicit processes (processes occurring outside of awareness) suggests limitations to focus groups and polling, which rely on conscious self‐report. Two experiments, inspired by national political campaigns, employed Internet‐presented subliminal primes to study evaluations of politicians. In Experiment 1, the subliminal word “RATS” increased negative ratings of an unknown politician. In Experiment 2, conducted during former California Governor Gray Davis's recall referendum, a subliminal photo of Clinton affected ratings of Davis, primarily among Independents. Results showed that subliminal stimuli can affect ratings of well‐known as well as unknown politicians. Further, subliminal studies can be conducted in a mass media outlet (the Internet) in real time and supplement voter self‐report, supporting the potential utility of implicit measures for campaign decision making.
We show that jointly parsing a bitext can substantially improve parse quality on both sides. In a maximum entropy bitext parsing model, we define a distribution over source trees, target trees, and node-to-node alignments between them. Features include monolingual parse scores and various measures of syntactic divergence. Using the translated portion of the Chinese treebank, our model is trained iteratively to maximize the marginal likelihood of training tree pairs, with alignments treated as latent variables. The resulting bitext parser outperforms state-of-the-art monolingual parser baselines by 2.5 F1 at predicting English side trees and 1.8 F1 at predicting Chinese side trees (the highest published numbers on these corpora). Moreover, these improved trees yield a 2.4 BLEU increase when used in a downstream MT evaluation.
Parser self-training is the technique of taking an existing parser, parsing extra data and then creating a second parser by treating the extra data as further training data. Here we apply this technique to parser adaptation. In particular, we self-train the standard Charniak/Johnson Penn-Treebank parser using unlabeled biomedical abstracts. This achieves an f-score of 84.3% on a standard test set of biomedical abstracts from the Genia corpus. This is a 20% error reduction over the best previous result on biomedical data (80.2% on the same test set).
Two Languages - One Annotation Scenario? Experience from the Prague Dependency Treebank This paper compares the two FGD-based annotation scenarios for Czech and for English, with the Czech as the basis. We discuss the secondary predication expressed by infinitive and its functions in Czech and English, respectively. We give a few examples of English constructions that do not have direct counterparts in Czech (e.g., tough movement and causative constructions with make, get, and have ), as well as some phenomena central in English but much less employed in Czech (object raising or control in adjectives as nominal predicates), and, last, structures more or less parallel both in their function and distribution, whose respective annotation differs due to significant differences in the respective linguistic traditions (verbs of perception).
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Although current theories suggest that affective empathy (perceivers' experience of social targets' emotions) should contribute to empathic accuracy (perceivers' ability to accurately assess targets' emotions), extant research has failed to consistently demonstrate a correspondence between them. We reasoned that prior null findings may be attributable to a failure to account for the fundamentally interpersonal nature of empathy, and tested the prediction that empathic accuracy may depend on both targets' tendency to express emotion and perceivers' tendency to empathically share that emotion. Using a continuous affect-rating paradigm, we found that perceivers' trait affective empathy was unrelated to empathic accuracy unless targets' trait expressivity was taken into account: Perceivers' trait affective empathy predicted accuracy only for expressive targets. These data suggest that perceivers' self-reported affective empathy can indeed predict their empathic accuracy, but only when targets' expressivity allows their thoughts and feelings to be read.
Probabilistic modeling of lexicalized grammars is difficult because these grammars exploit complicated data structures, such as typed feature structures. This prevents us from applying common methods of probabilistic modeling in which a complete structure is divided into sub-structures under the assumption of statistical independence among sub-structures. For example, part-of-speech tagging of a sentence is decomposed into tagging of each word, and CFG parsing is split into applications of CFG rules. These methods have relied on the structure of the target problem, namely lattices or trees, and cannot be applied to graph structures including typed feature structures. This article proposes the feature forest model as a solution to the problem of probabilistic modeling of complex data structures including typed feature structures. The feature forest model provides a method for probabilistic modeling without the independence assumption when probabilistic events are represented with feature forests. Feature forests are generic data structures that represent ambiguous trees in a packed forest structure. Feature forest models are maximum entropy models defined over feature forests. A dynamic programming algorithm is proposed for maximum entropy estimation without unpacking feature forests. Thus probabilistic modeling of any data structures is possible when they are represented by feature forests. This article also describes methods for representing HPSG syntactic structures and predicate-argument structures with feature forests. Hence, we describe a complete strategy for developing probabilistic models for HPSG parsing. The effectiveness of the proposed methods is empirically evaluated through parsing experiments on the Penn Treebank, and the promise of applicability to parsing of real-world sentences is discussed.
Searching in a linguistically annotated treebank is a principal task that requires a sophisticated tool. Netgraph has been designed to perform the searching with maximum comfort and minimum requirements
We describe experiments on learning latent variable grammars for various German tree-banks, using a language-agnostic statistical approach. In our method, a minimal initial grammar is hierarchically refined using an adaptive split-and-merge EM procedure, giving compact, accurate grammars. The learning procedure directly maximizes the likelihood of the training treebank, without the use of any language specific or linguistically constrained features. Nonetheless, the resulting grammars encode many linguistically interpretable patterns and give the best published parsing accuracies on three German treebanks.