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18265 papers
We describe the first shared task for figurative language resolution, which was organised within SemEval-2007 and focused on metonymy. The paper motivates the linguistic principles of data sampling and annotation and shows the task’s feasibility via human agreement. The five participating systems mainly used supervised approaches exploiting a variety of features, of which grammatical relations proved to be the most useful. We compare the systems’ performance to automatic baselines as well as to a manually simulated approach based on selectional restriction violations, showing some limitations of this more traditional approach to metonymy recognition. The main problem supervised systems encountered is data sparseness, since metonymies in general tend to occur more rarely than literal uses. Also, within metonymies, the reading distribution is skewed towards a few frequent metonymy types. Future task developments should focus on addressing this issue.
Reviews1 43 Merriam-Webster'sAdvanced Learner's English Dictionary. 2008. Springfield: Merriam-Webster. Pp. 2016. JL b 1IiC world of dictionaries for advanced learners of English has long been dominated by two British publishers: Oxford University Press, which published the first modern learner's dictionary, die learner's Dictionary of Current F.nglkh (now the Oxford Advanced learner's Dictionary, or OAlJ)), in 1948; and Longman, which entered the market with die Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (IJ)OCF) in 1 978. Both publishers have followed dieir flagship products with dictionaries for intermediate and basic learners, with picture dictionaries, and with electronic products. In 1981, Longman published an American version of its intermediate-level dictionary as the Ixmgman Dictionary ofAmerican English, and for more than a decade this dictionary was about all diat was available to learners who preferred American English—die huge market of students living and working in die United States, as well as learners outside die US (particularly in Japan and many countries in die Americas). American dictionary publishers did not specialize in dictionaries for learners and were relative latecomers in spotting die market potential in ESL products. When diey did decide to enter die fray in die 1990s, diey badly miscalculated. Some, such as Merriam-Webster and Webster's New World, created "basic" dictionaries by adapting an existing data set; others, such as Heinle, Random House, and NTC, opted for single-audior works. These books showed little or no evidence diat dieir compilers were aware ofwhat by dien was more dian forty years' wordi of research and innovation in die production of learner's dictionaries—of die importance of using a controlled defining vocabulary, of showing pronunciations in the International Phonetic Alphabet, ofshowing grammatical patterns, of examining corpora oflearners' essays to aid in die writing ofusage notes, ofusing corpora to determine die relative frequency ofwords, patterns, and expressions so as to aid in making inclusion decisions. In die meantime, bodi Cambridge University Press and Longman produced new corpus-based editions of intermediate-level American dictionaries, and Longman published the lemgman Advanced American Dictionary, essentially an Americanized version of the Ixmgman Dictionary ofContemporary Englkh. With the exception of die Newbury House dictionaries published by Heinle, which have had some success, the home-grown American products have not presented a real challenge to the dominance of the American English learner's dictionary market by British publishers. A decade ago, die publishers at Merriam-Webster saw, quite righüy, that there was room for a strong American contender, and set out to produce one. The resulting dictionary, Merriam-Webster's Advanced learner's F.nglkh Dictionary (MWAlJJ)), largely avoids the clear weaknesses of its predecessors, and represents a solid, well-edited, and authoritative resource. In reviewing the text, I will make reference to its chiefcompetitors, the Dictionaries: journal ofthe Dictionary Society ofNorth America 30 (2009), 143-150 144Reviews Macmillan F'.nglkh Dictionaryfor Advanced Learners ofAmerican F.nglkh (MFD) and the Longman Advanced American Dictionary (IAAl)). Headwords and the Organization of Entries The number ofdiscrete lexical items—"100,000 words and phrases"—that are defined in MWAIFJ) is comparable to that of its competitors. Most learner's dictionaries list each part ofspeech as a separate homograph; MWAUDAso gives separate homographs for etymologically distinct words, e.g., calf the baby cow and the calf of your leg. It includes some British English terms and expressions, much as British dictionaries include some American ones. But sometimes the choice of inclusion is odd, and I suspect this may be because while the MerriamWebster citation resources are voluminous, a citation bank does not have the characteristics of a corpus that make it possible for a lexicographer tojudge centrality and frequency when considering whether to include a given term. Thus MWAIFJ) has an entry for cloud-cuckoo-land while the British edition of MFJ) does not include the American equivalent, la-la land; yet MWAIJD fails to provide an entry for earlier, even though this comparative form is frequent and its use should be illustrated for learners. MWIAFJ) gives the pronunciation of headwords in the International Phonetic Alphabet, which is now the undisputed norm for a learner's dictionary. Unfortunately, stress patterns are not shown...
The article offers information on a study which verifies that whether representation of past and future is also mapped onto spatial representations. It also aims at verifying that whether the cerebellum can be a neural substrate for linking space and time in the linguistic domain. It states that the responses to past tense were facilitated with the left space whereas responses to future tense were facilitated in the right space. It concludes that both cerebellar hemispheres can play an important role in establishing the grammatical rules for verb conjugation.
Across cultures, social relationships are often thought of, described, and acted out in terms of physical space (e.g. ''close friends'' ''high lord''). Does this cognitive mapping of social concepts arise from shared brain resources for processing social and physical relationships? Using fMRI, we found that the tasks of evaluating social compatibility and of evaluating physical distances engage a common brain substrate in the parietal cortex. The present study shows the possibility of an analytic brain mechanism to process and represent complex networks of social relationships. Given parietal cortex's known role in constructing egocentric maps of physical space, our present findings may help to explain the linguistic, psychological and behavioural links between social and physical space. [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 a listserv without the copyright )
This article describes a general framework for detecting sleepiness states on the basis of prosody, articulation, and speech-quality-related speech characteristics. The advantages of this automatic real-time approach are that obtaining speech data is nonobstrusive and is free from sensor application and calibration efforts. Different types of acoustic features derived from speech, speaker, and emotion recognition were employed (frame-level-based speech features). Combing these features with high-level contour descriptors, which capture the temporal information of frame-level descriptor contours, results in 45,088 features per speech sample. In general, the measurement proceß follows the speech-adapted steps of pattern recognition: (1) recording speech, (2) preproceßing, (3) feature computation (using perceptual and signal-proceßing-related features such as, e.g., fundamental frequency, intensity, pause patterns, formants, and cepstral coefficients), (4) dimensionality reduction, (5) claßification, and (6) evaluation. After a correlation-filter-based feature subset selection employed on the feature space in order to find most relevant features, different claßification models were trained. The best model—namely, the support-vector machine—achieved 86.1% claßification accuracy in predicting sleepineß in a sleep deprivation study (two-claß problem, N 5 12; 01.00-08.00 a.m.).
In this article, we describe a method for automatically detecting syllable nuclei in order to measure speech rate without the need for a transcription. A script written in the software program Praat (Boersma & Weenink, 2007) detects syllables in running speech. Peaks in intensity (dB) that are preceded and followed by dips in intensity are considered to be potential syllable nuclei. The script subsequently discards peaks that are not voiced. Testing the resulting syllable counts of this script on two corpora of spoken Dutch, we obtained high correlations between speech rate calculated from human syllable counts and speech rate calculated from automatically determined syllable counts. We conclude that a syllable count measured in this automatic fashion suffices to reliably assess and compare speech rates between participants and tasks.
Drawing on the g factor and information theory literatures, the relationship between the four subtests of the Culture-Fair Intelligence Test (CFIT) and the entropy of the Ruiz Absolute Scale of Complexity Management (R-ASCM) was investigated. In results based on data collected from 186 university students, the entropy of the R-ASCM mostly loads the first principal component extracted from the CFIT subtests and shows a corresponding strong relationship with the item difficulty of the R-ASCM. Because entropy is a ratio scale of complexity— with a true zero and units called bits—these findings suggest that entropy is the right vehicle for measuring the information contained in nonverbal intelligence tests.
Scales are collections of tones that divide octaves into specific intervals used to create music. Since humans can distinguish about 240 different pitches over an octave in the mid-range of hearing [1], in principle a very large number of tone combinations could have been used for this purpose. Nonetheless, compositions in Western classical, folk and popular music as well as in many other musical traditions are based on a relatively small number of scales that typically comprise only five to seven tones [2-6]. Why humans employ only a few of the enormous number of possible tone combinations to create music is not known. Here we show that the component intervals of the most widely used scales throughout history and across cultures are those with the greatest overall spectral similarity to a harmonic series. These findings suggest that humans prefer tone combinations that reflect the spectral characteristics of conspecific vocalizations. The analysis also highlights the spectral similar)
Computational models of lexical semantics, such as latent semantic analysis, can automatically generate semantic similarity measures between words from statistical redundancies in text. These measures are useful for experimental stimulus selection and for evaluating a model’s cognitive plausibility as a mechanism that people might use to organize meaning in memory. Although humans are exposed to enormous quantities of speech, practical constraints limit the amount of data that many current computational models can learn from. We follow up on previous work evaluating a simple metric of pointwise mutual information. Controlling for confounds in previous work, we demonstrate that this metric benefits from training on extremely large amounts of data and correlates more closely with human semantic similarity ratings than do publicly available implementations of several more complex models. We also present a simple tool for building simple and scalable models from large corpora quickly and efficiently.
Recently, there has been a growing interest in regional variation within African American English. This study reviews a work done on local speech in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, discussing trends for both African American and White ethnic groups. Just as scholars have found in other geographic regions, in Pittsburgh, African Americans and Whites share a number of feature characteristics of the local dialect, but remain distinct in a number of other ways. Research in Pittsburgh, as elsewhere, highlights the complexity, rather than the homogeneity, of African American speech across the country, as speakers exhibit alignment to both regional and supraregional ethnic linguistic norms. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
This paper studies the nature of the BEI-construction in Cantonese, with Mandarin as the standard language of comparison. Although the BEI-construction has been much studied in Mandarin, the same in not true for Cantonese. Although this construction has traditionally been termed a "passive", I will show that it can have a different range of semantic interpretations in Cantonese. I argue that BEI is not confined to passive, but is used under certain circumstances to form a causative construction as well. The differences in behaviour between passive-BEI and causative-BEI can be seen in tests with anaphoric binding. I conclude that while the passive structure is mono-clausal, the causative structure must be bi-clausal. The Cantonese BEI-constructions have an obligatory agent-phrase which cannot be dropped. This differs from Mandarin and the challenge is to find an account for this phenomenon, especially if we are to claim that this construction is a passive. The optionality of the agent phrase is characteristic of passives and yet Cantonese deviates from this norm. I argue that passive in Cantonese is a syntactic process and predict that only transitive verbs may participate in this construction. I utilize the universal v-VP structure on transitive verbs, proposed by Chomsky (1995), to guarantee that the external theta role must be retained. I also examine the much debated status of BEI which is used in the BEI-construction. Although this construction can be used to derive both a passives and a causatives, it does not necessarily mean that two separate BEIs must be posited. I conclude that BEI can be treated as a category-neutral element which can interact in both causative and passive structures. To support this proposal I appeal to the functional versus lexical distinction of categories and projections.
The Romance languages derive, via Latin, from the Italic branch of Indo-European. Their modern distribution is the product of two major phases of conquest and colonisation. The first, between c. 240 BC and c. AD 100 brought the whole Mediterranean basin under Roman control; the second, beginning in the sixteenth century, annexed the greater part of the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa to Romance-speaking European powers. Today, some 665 million people speak, as their first or only language, one that is genetically related to Latin. Although for historical and cultural reasons preeminence is usually accorded to European Romance, it must not be forgotten that European speakers are now outnumbered by non-Europeans by a factor of nearly three to one. The principal modern varieties of European Romance are indicated on Map 8.1. Nouniformly acceptable nomenclature has been devised for Romance and the choice of term to designate a particular variety can often be politically charged. The Romance area is not exceptional in according or withholding the status of ‘language’ (in contradistinction to ‘dialect’ or ‘patois’) on sociopolitical rather than linguistic criteria, but additional relevant factors in Romance may be cultural allegiance and length of literary tradition. Five national standard languages are recognised: Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian and Rumanian (each treated in an individual chapter below). ‘Language’ status is usually also accorded on cultural/literary grounds to Catalan and Occitan, though most of their speakers are bilingual in Spanish and French respectively, and the ‘literary tradition’ of Occitan refers primarily to medieval Provençal, whose modern manifestation is properly considered a constituent dialect of Occitan. On linguistic grounds, Sardinian too is often described as a language, despite its internal heterogeneity. Purely linguistic criteria are difficult to apply systematically: Sicilian, which shares many features with southern Italian dialects, is not usually classed as an independent language, though its linguistic distance from standard Italian is no less than that separating Spanish from Portuguese. ‘Rhaeto-Romance’ is nowadays used as a cover term for a number of varieties spoken in southern Switzerland (principally Engadinish, Romansh and Surselvan) and in the Dolomites, but it is no longer taken to subsume Friulian. Romansh (local form romontsch) enjoys an official status for cantonal administration and so perhaps fulfils the requirements of a language. Another special case is Galician, located in Spainbut genetically and typologically very close to Portuguese; in the wake of political autonomy, galego/gallego now enjoys protected ‘language’ status in Spain, although elsewhere it continues to be thought of (erroneously) as a regional dialect of Spanish. Corsican, which clearly belongs to the Italo-Romance group, would be in a similar position if the separatist movement gained autonomy or independence from France. Outside Europe, Spanish, Portuguese and French, in descending order of native speakers,have achieved widest currency, though many other varieties are represented in localised immigrant communities, such as Sicilian in New York, Rumanian in Melbourne, Sephardic Spanish in Seattle and Buenos Aires. In addition, the colonial era gave rise to a number of creoles, of which those with lexical affinities to French are now the most vigorous, claiming some ten million speakers. In general, European variants are designated by their geographical location; ‘Latin’,as a term for the vernacular, has survived only for some subvarieties of Rhaeto-Romance (ladin) and for Biblical translations into Judaeo-Spanish (ladino). ‘Romance’ derives, through Spanish and French, from ROMĀNICĒ ‘in the Roman fashion’ but also ‘candidly, straightforwardly’, a sense well attested in early Spanish. The terminological distinction may reflect early awareness of register differentiation within the language, with ‘Latin’ reserved at first for formal styles and later for written language and Christian liturgy. The idea, once widely accepted, that Latin and Romance coexisted for centuries as natural, spoken languages, is now considered implausible. Among the chief concerns of Romance linguists have always been: the unity orotherwise of the proto-language, the causes and date of dialect differentiation and the classification of the modern variants. Plainly, Romance does not derive from the polished literary models of Classical Latin. Alternative attestations are quite plentiful, but difficultin may be stylistic artifice; inscriptional evidence is formulaic; the abundant Pompeian graffiti may be dialectal, and so on. Little is known of Roman linguistic policy or of the rate of assimilation of new conquests. We may however surmise that a vast territory, populated by widely different ethnic groups, annexed over a period exceeding three centuries, conquered by legionaries and first colonised by settlers who were probably not native speakers of Latin, and never enjoying easy or mass communications, could scarcely have possessed a single homogeneous language. The social conditions which must have accompanied latinisation – including slaveryand enforced population movements – have led some linguists to postulate a stage of creolisation, from which Latin slowly decreolised towards a spoken norm in the regions most exposed to metropolitan influences. Subsequent differentiation would then be due to the loss of administrative cohesion at the break-up of the Empire and the slow emergence of local centres of prestige whose innovations, whether internal or induced by adstrate languages, were largely resisted by neighbouring territories. Awareness of the extent of differentiation seems to have come very slowly, probably stimulated in the west by Carolingian reforms of the liturgical language, which sought to achieve a uniform pronunciation of Church Latin at the cost of rendering it incomprehensible to uneducated churchgoers. Sporadic attestations of Romance, mainly glosses and interlinear translations in religious and legal documents, begin in the eighth century. The earliest continuous texts which are indisputably Romance are dated: for French, ninth century; for Spanish and Italian, tenth; for Sardinian, eleventh; for Occitan (Provençal), Portuguese and Rhaeto-Romance, twelfth; for Catalan, thirteenth; for Dalmatian (now extinct), fourteenth; and for Rumanian, well into the sixteenth century. Most classifications of Romance give precedence, explicitly or implicitly, to histor-ical and areal factors. The traditional ‘first split’ is between East and West, located on a line running across northern Italy between La Spezia and Rimini. Varieties to the northwest are often portrayed as innovating, versus the conservative south-east. For instance, West Romance voices and weakens intervocalic plosives: SAPŌNE ‘soap’ > Ptg. sabão, Sp. jabón, Fr. savon, but It./Sard. sapone, Rum. sa˘pun; RŌTA ‘wheel’ > Ptg. roda, Sp. rueda, Cat. roda, Fr. roue, but It./Sard. rota, Rum. roata˘; URTĪCA ‘nettle’> Ptg./Sp./ Cat. ortiga, Fr. ortie, but Sard. urtica, It. ortica, Rum. urzica˘. The West also generalises /-s/ as a plural marker, while the East uses vocalic alternations: Ptg. as cabras ‘the goats’, Cat. les cabres, Romansh las chavras, contrast with It. le capre and Rum. caprele. In vocabulary, we could cite the verb ‘to weep’, where the older Latin word PLANGE˘RE survives in the East (Sard. pranghere, It. piangere, Rum. a plînge) but is completely replaced in the West by reflexes of PLORĀRE (Ptg. chorar, Sp. llorar, Cat. plorar, Oc. plourà, Fr. pleurer). In this classification, each major group splits into two subgroups: ‘East’ into Balkan-Romance and Italo-Romance, ‘West’ into Gallo-Romance and IberoRomance. The result is not entirely satisfactory. While, for example, Arumanian dialects and Istro-Rumanian group quite well with Balkan-Romance, our scant evidence of Dalmatian suggests it shared as many features with Italo-Romance as with the Balkan group. Catalan is a notorious difficulty, having been subject for centuries to alternating Occitan and Spanish influences. The unity of ‘Rhaeto-Romance’ also fails to survive closer scrutiny: Ladin groups fairly well with Friulian as part of Italo-Romance, but southern Swiss varieties share many features with eastern French dialects. ‘Family-tree’ classifications, in which variants are each assigned to a single node,give only a crude indication of relationships in Romance and tend to obscure theLatin and patterns of contact. This is readily illustrated from the lexicon. The PLANGE˘RE/ PLORĀRE example, though supportive of the East-West split, is in fact rather atypical. More common are innovations spreading from central areas but failing to reach the periphery. ‘To boil’ is Ptg. ferver, Sp. hervir, Rum. a fierbe (< FERVĒRE/FERVE˘RE), but Cat. bullir, Oc. boulí, Fr. boullir, It. bollire (< BULLĪRE, originally ‘to bubble’); ‘to request’ is Ptg./Sp. rogar, Rum. a ruga (< ROGĀRE), but Cat. pregar, Oc. pregá, Fr. prier, It. pregare (< PRECĀRE, originally ‘to pray’); ‘to find’ is Ptg. achar, Sp. hallar, Rum. a afla, but Cat. trobar, Oc. trobà, Fr. trouver, It. trovare (both forms are metaphorical – classical INVENĪRE and REPERĪRE do not survive). Among nouns, we may cite ‘bird’: Ptg. pássaro, Sp. pájaro, Rum. pasa˘re (< *PASSARE), versus Oc. aucèu, Fr. oiseau, Romansh utschè, It. uccello (< AUCELLU); and ‘cheese’: Ptg. queijo, Sp. queso, Rum. cas¸ (< CĀSEU), versus Cat. formatge, Oc. froumage, Fr. fromage, It. formaggio (< [CASEU] FORMATICU ‘moulded [cheese]’). Almost the same distribution is found in a morphosyntactic innovation: the Latin synthetic comparative in -IŌRE nowhere survives as a productive form, but peripheral areas have MAGIS as the analytic replacement (‘higher’ is Ptg. mais alto, Rum. mai înalt) whereas the centre prefers PLŪS (Fr. plus haut, It. più alto). Despite this differential diffusion and the divergences created by localised borrowingfrom adstrate languages (notably from Arabic into Portuguese and Spanish, from Germanic into northern French, from Slavonic into Rumanian), the modern Romance languages have a high degree of lexical overlap. Cognacy is about 40 per cent for all major variants using the standard lexicostatistical 100-word list. For some language pairs it is much higher: 65 per cent for French-Spanish (slightly higher if suffixal derivation is disregarded), 90 per cent for Spanish-Portuguese. This is not, of course, a guarantee of mutual comprehensibility (untrained observers are unlikely to recognise the historical relationship of Sp. /oxa/ ‘leaf’ to Fr. /fœj/), but a high rate of cognacy does increase the chances of correct identification of phonological correspondences. Intercomprehensibility is also good in technical and formal registers, owing to extensive borrowing from Latin, whether of ready-made lexemes (abstract nouns are a favoured category) or of roots recombined in the naming of a new concept, like Fr. constitutionnel, émetteur, exportation, ventilateur, etc. Indirectly, coinings like these have fed the existing propensity of all Romance languages for enriching their word stock by suffixal derivation. Turning to morphosyntax, we find that all modern Romance is VO in its basic wordorder, though southern varieties generally admit some flexibility of subject position. A much reduced suffixal case system survives in Rumanian, but has been eliminated everywhere else, with internominal relations now expressed exclusively by prepositions. All variants have developed articles, the definite ones deriving overwhelmingly from the demonstrative ILLE/ILLA (though Sardinian and Balearic Catalan use IPSE/ IPSA), the indefinite from the numeral ŪNU/ŪNA. Articles, which precede their head noun everywhere except in Rumanian where they are enclitic, are often obligatory in subject position. Concord continues to operate throughout noun phrases and between subject and verb, though its range of exponents has diminished with the loss of nominal case. French is eccentric in virtually confining plural marking to the determiner, though substantives still show number in the written language. Parallel to the definite articles, most varieties have developed deictic object pronouns from demonstratives. These, like the personal pronouns, often occur in two sets, one free and capable of taking stress, the other cliticised to the verb. There is some evidence of the grammaticalisation of anclitic and in the marking of specific animate objects. This latter is widespread (using a in West Romance and pe in Rumanian) but not found in standard French or Italian. Suffixal inflection remains vigorous in the common verb paradigms everywhere butin French. Compound tense forms everywhere supplement the basic set, though the auxiliaries vary: for perfectives, HABĒRE is most common: ‘I have sung’ is Fr. j’ai chanté, It. ho cantato, Sp. he cantado but Ptg. tenho cantado (< TENĒRE originally ‘to hold’) and Cat. vaig cantar (< VĀDO CANTĀRE) – an eccentric outcome for a combination that would be interpreted elsewhere as a periphrastic future (‘I am going to sing’). Most Romance varieties have a basic imperfective/perfective aspectual opposition, supplemented by one or more of punctual, progressive and stative. The synthetic passive has given way to a historically reflexive medio-passive which coexists uneasily with a reconstituted analytic passive based on the copula and past participle. The replacement of the Latin future indicative by a periphrasis expressing volition or mild obligation (HABĒRE is again the most widespread auxiliary, but deppo ‘I ought’ is found in Sardinian and voi ‘I wish’ in Rumanian) provided the model for two new synthetic paradigms, the future itself and the conditional, which has taken over a number of functions from the subjunctive. The subjunctive has also been affected by changes in complementation patterns, but a few new uses have evolved during the documented period of Romance, and its morphological structure, though drastically reduced in spoken French, remains largely intact. In phonology, it is more difficult to make generalisations (see the individual languagesections below and, for the development from Latin to Proto-Romance, pages 146150). We can, however, detect some shared tendencies. The rhythmic structure is predominantly syllable-timed. Stress is dynamic rather than tonal and, on the whole, rather weak – certainly more so than in Germanic; some variants, notably Italian, do use higher tones as a concomitant of intensity, but none rely on melody alone. The loss of many intertonic and post-tonic syllables suggests that stress may previously have been stronger, witness IŪDI˘CE[’i˘u-di-ke] ‘judge’ > Ptg. juiz, Sp. juez, Cat. jutge, Fr. juge; CUBI˘TU [’ku-bi-tu] ‘elbow’ > Sp. codo, Fr. coude, Rum. cot. The elimination of phonemic length from the Latin vowel system has been maintained with only minor exceptions. A strong tendency in early Romance towards diphthongisation of stressed mid vowels has given very varied results, depending on whether both higher and lower mid vowels were affected, in both open and closed syllables, and on whether the diphthong was later levelled. Romance now exhibits a wide range of vowel systems, but those of the south-central group are noticeably simpler than those of the periphery: phonemic nasals are found only in French and Portuguese, high central vowels only in Rumanian, and phonemic front rounded vowels only in French, some Rhaeto-Romance and north Italian varieties and São Miguel Portuguese. Among consonantal developments, we have already mentioned lenition, which led to wholesale reduction and syllable loss in northern French dialects. Latin geminates generally survive only in Italo-Romance, and many other medial clusters are simplified (though new ones are created by various vocalic changes). Although Latin is in Indo-European terms a centum language (with k for PIE k), one of the earliest and most far-reaching Romance changes is the palatalisation, and later affrication, of velar and dental consonants before front vowels. Only the most conservative dialect of Sardinian fails to palatalise (witness kenapura ‘Holy supper = Friday’), and the process itself has elsewhere often proved cyclic.
Brazilian researchers have not been provided with instruments with which to investigate body image avoidance behaviors. The aim of this study was to translate and validate the Body Image Avoidance Questionnaire (BIAQ) for Brazil. The translation, synthesis, back-translation, Brazilian questionnaire formulation, and pretest were carried out in the first phase of the study. The study of the scale’s psychometric properties was conducted in the second phase of the study. Brazilian BIAQ has 13 items and good adjustment indexes. There was a greater adherence to the sampling data in the model in which the avoidance of body image is maintained by control strategies, by the refusal of body exposure, and by strategies that accommodate tension. This work is expected to enable the comparison of international data and the performance of multicultural studies on body avoidance behavior, expanding research possibilities in Brazil and worldwide.
This article introduces the topic of “Multilingual language resources and interoperability”. We start with a taxonomy and parameters for classifying language resources. Later we provide examples and issues of interoperatability, and resource architectures to solve such issues. Finally we discuss aspects of linguistic formalisms and interoperability.
An impressive amount of work was devoted over the past few decades to collocation extraction. The state of the art shows that there is a sustained interest in the morphosyntactic preprocessing of texts in order to better identify candidate expressions; however, the treatment performed is, in most cases, limited (lemmatization, POS-tagging, or shallow parsing). This article presents a collocation extraction system based on the full parsing of source corpora, which supports four languages: English, French, Spanish, and Italian. The performance of the system is compared against that of the standard mobile-window method. The evaluation experiment investigates several levels of the significance lists, uses a fine-grained annotation schema, and covers all the languages supported. Consistent results were obtained for these languages: parsing, even if imperfect, leads to a significant improvement in the quality of results, in terms of collocational precision (between 16.4 and 29.7%, depending on the language; 20.1% overall), MWE precision (between 19.9 and 35.8%; 26.1% overall), and grammatical precision (between 47.3 and 67.4%; 55.6% overall). This positive result bears a high importance, especially in the perspective of the subsequent integration of extraction results in other NLP applications.
Linguistic research on the classroom behavior of school children has often shown that there is a tension between the development of an anti-authoritarian peer culture and the pressure to do well academically and behave in ways that meet adult approval. This tension is particularly strong for boys. In this context, violating the linguistic norms of the classroom is one way of rebelling and constructing a masculine identity which can gain peer approval. The rebellious and playful identities of the boys in this study are at times in conflict with their desire to be productive and high-achieving. In this study of an English Mother Tongue classroom in a German-American bilingual school in Berlin, Germany, five boys are faced with this dilemma. One tactic used by some of the boys to resolve the conflict is the use of Mock NSE. The use of Mock NSE by these boys is a salient socio-pragmatic device for indicating how they wish to be identified. These boys thus make use of the classroom norm of speaking Standard English by flouting it, creating new and multiple identities. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
Background: Studies of experts' problem-solving abilities have shown that experts can attend to the deep structure of a problem whereas novices attend to the surface structure. Although this effect has been replicated in many domains, there has been little investigation into such effects in medicine in general or patient management in particular. Methodology/Principal Findings: We designed a 10-item forced-choice triad task in which subjects chose which one of two hypothetical patients best matched a target patient. The target and its potential matches were related in terms of surface features (e.g., two patients of a similar age and gender) and deep features (e.g., two diabetic patients with similar management strategies: a patient with arthritis and a blind patient would both have difficulty with self-injected insulin). We hypothesized that experts would have greater knowledge of management categories and would be more likely to choose deep matches. We contacted 130 novices (medical)
This paper examines the ideologies and practices surrounding respect at a Korean American heritage language school in California. It illustrates the interaction between locally circulating metadiscourses about children’s dispositions, intentions, and identities and the enforcement of classroom norms of respect. In some cases, teachers accommodated to children’s linguistic norms though a metadiscourse that reframed the indexicality of potentially disrespectful behavior. In other cases, forms of bodily demeanor were naturalized as indexical of children’s deliberate communication of disrespect. Teachers’ classroom narratives presented theories of affective accommodation and affective display, where respect for a teacher’s feelings was supposed to be given priority over respect for a child’s feelings, but children did not always comply with these theories. By illustrating how teachers’ metapragmatic ideologies about children’s identities as Korean Americans, contexts of language acquisition, and linguistic needs mediate the interactional construction of (dis)respect, this paper demonstrates the hybrid/multidirectional nature of language socialization. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
Abstract This article examines three critical issues relating to the role of culture in teaching English as an international language (EIL): Firstly, the way in which top-down processes of globalisation, accompanied by the widespread desire for English in many former colonial countries, have in general fostered the negative effects of dominance, divisiveness and difference in world social relations, resulting in the suppression and devaluation of local forms of knowledge and practice. Secondly, the way in which shifts of ownership and authority to non-native speakers and their varieties of English in combination more recently with global cultural flows, have created the need for reconceiving English as a pluralised global language, informed by local norms, functions and practices, reflecting a fluid and multiple cultural base. Lastly, it explores the way in which an ecological approach to English language teaching, which is oriented to ‘globalisation from below’ (Appadurai, 2000; Canagarajah, 2005), and which opens up a dialogical relationship between the global and the local, might help speakers in ex-colonial settings to reclaim their local identity and voice and thus realise the potential of globalisation to construct more inclusive, democratic relationships. Cet article examine trois problèmes cruciaux relatifs au rôle de la culture dans l'apprentissage de l'anglais en tant que langue internationale. Premièrement, il examine comment le processus ‘top-down’ de mondialisation, accompagné du désir répandu pour l'anglais dans plusieurs anciennes colonies a, en general, encouragé les effets négatifs de dominance, de dissension et de différence dans les rapports sociaux dans le monde. Le résultat en est la suppression et la dévalorisation des formes et des pratiques locales. Deuxièmement, il examine comment les déplacements de propriété et d'autorité qui désormais incombent les interlocuteurs non-natifs et leurs variétés d'anglais, depuis peu en cumul avec le flux culturel mondial, ont crée le besoin de reconceptualiser l'anglais comme une langue mondiale plurale alimentée en des normes, fonctions et pratiques locales reflétant une base culturelle multiple et fluide. Dernièrement, il explore comment une approche écologique à l'apprentissage de la langue anglaise, orientée vers la mondialisation par en-dessous (Appadurai, 2000; Canagarajah, 2005), et qui ouvre un rapport dialogique entre le mondial et le local, pourrait aider les interlocuteurs qui se trouvent dans les situations ex-coloniaux, à récuperer leurs identité et voix locales et ainsi à réaliser le potentiel de mondialisation afin d’établlir des rapports plus inclusifs et démocratiques. Keywords: English as an international language (EIL)globalisationlocal forms of knowledge and practiceculturehybridity Acknowledgements The author thanks Nirupama Rastogi for her translation of the abstract. Notes 1. I am aware that Phillipson's (1992) proposition that the spread of English is the result of a deliberate imperialist policy has been challenged by scholars who disagree with this argument. In Brutt-Griffler's (Citation2002), p. ix) view, English ‘owes its existence as a world language in large part to the struggle against imperialism, and not to imperialism alone’. Fishman (Citation1996, p. 640) maintains that the current spread of English is more linked to countries’ engagement in the modern world economy ‘than to any efforts derived from their former colonial masters’. Bhatia and Ritchie (Citation2004, p. 513) even hypothesise that, ‘The economic forces of globalization together with the rise of global media have set the stage for a dramatic, exponential rise in global bilingualism’. While arguments, both for and against linguistic imperialism, have their measure of validity, my concern here is far more with the (negative) consequences of the spread of English than its causes, and the conditions for redressing them. 2. Standards of English have remained a continuing concern at the highest levels of decision making in Singapore with Lee Kwan Yew, the former Prime Minister, and currently Minister Mentor, taking a keen, personal interest in these matters. 3. While it is true that the banning of local languages and literatures was part of the imperialist dominance practice of subjugation, Macaulay's (1952) now infamous Minute of the passing of the English Education Act in 1835 in colonial India, with which the then official languages, Persian and Arabic, were replaced by English, was brazenly justified on the ground that ‘a single shelf of European library is worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’. Macaulay (Citation1952) declared that the native languages were neither moral nor scientific and thus were useless, much in the same way in which ‘foreign’ minority cultures and their ‘lack of civilisation’ were negatively constructed to justify colonisation. 4. Ngugi's (1986) recounting of one of the most humiliating experiences in a colonial school system where children caught speaking the local language were given the cane and forced to wear a placard round their necks with the inscription that read ‘I am a donkey’ or ‘I am stupid’ is painfully reminiscent of such elitism. 5. That is, although when used by ELF speakers English becomes a culture-free code (i.e. free of native-speaker culture), equally ELF is flexible enough to allow speakers to express their individual cultural identity – or ‘original voice’ (Kramsch, Citation1999) – by ‘exporting’ their L1 into the ELF and at the same time stimulate them to co-create a new inter-culture together with their co-participants. When Polzl notes that native-speaker English is ‘voice resistant’ he is referring to its intolerance of these dynamic aspects of the cultural, spatial and/or historical independence (no common ethnic origin) that characterise such interculture(s). 6. Scholars such as Kachru (Citation1992), Moag (Citation1992) and Schneider (Citation2003,Citation2007) agree in general terms that the new varieties of English pass through a series of evolutionary stages, starting with a reliance on exonormative varieties and a prejudice against the local variety through to the stage where the local variety receives local acceptance and becomes the classroom model. Schneider (Citation2003,Citation2007) identifies five phases: (1) the foundation phase when English first arrives; (2) the phase of exonormative stabilisation, characterised by the variety spoken by the settlers; (3) the nativisation phase when the variety of English takes on local lexical and cultural features; (4) the phase when the newly formed indigenous variety becomes accepted as the (endonormative) standard and (5) the final phase of differentiation signalling the emergence of different local varieties that mark ethnicity, identity and so on.
The Old Czech hapax legomenon bnedovánie is used in the adaptation of the medieval knight romance Duke Ernest (Herzog Ernst). There are two hypotheses based on the lexical system: 1) the corrupt word is an archaic part of the word family constituted by the adjectiv sbedný and its derivates and it means,a (brilliant and amusing) social behaviour corresponding with norms of court; (but we cannot satisfactorily explain word-formative processes leading from the sbedný to the bnedovánie); 2) the word is the corrupt form of Old Czech noun burdovánie (but its use is not convincing in the existing context).
Real networks, including biological networks, are known to have the small-world property, characterized by a small ''diameter'', which is defined as the average minimal path length between all pairs of nodes in a network. Because random networks also have short diameters, one may predict that the diameter of a real network should be even shorter than its random expectation, because having shorter diameters potentially increases the network efficiency such as minimizing transition times between metabolic states in the context of metabolic networks. Contrary to this expectation, we here report that the observed diameter is greater than the random expectation in every real network examined, including biological, social, technological, and linguistic networks. Simulations show that a modest enlargement of the diameter beyond its expectation allows a substantial increase of the network modularity, which is present in all real networks examined. Hence, short diameters appear to be sacrifice)
Background: Implicit racial bias denotes socio-cognitive attitudes towards other-race groups that are exempt from conscious awareness. In parallel, other-race faces are more difficult to differentiate relative to own-race faces - the ''Other- Race Effect.'' To examine the relationship between these two biases, we trained Caucasian subjects to better individuate other-race faces and measured implicit racial bias for those faces both before and after training. Methodology/Principal Findings: Two groups of Caucasian subjects were exposed equally to the same African American faces in a training protocol run over 5 sessions. In the individuation condition, subjects learned to discriminate between African American faces. In the categorization condition, subjects learned to categorize faces as African American or not. For both conditions, both pre- and post-training we measured the Other-Race Effect using old-new recognition and implicit racial biases using a novel implicit social measure - )
Computer-based diagnostic assessment systems hold potential to help teachers identify sources of poor performance and to connect teachers and students to learning activities designed to help advance students’ conceptual understandings. The present article presents findings from a study that examined how students’ performance in algebra and their overcoming of common algebraic misconceptions were affected by the use of a diagnostic assessment system that focused on important algebra concepts. This study used a four-group randomized cluster trial design in which teachers were assigned randomly to one of four groups: a “business as usual” control group, a partial intervention group that was provided with access to diagnostic tests results, a partial intervention group that was provided with access to the learning activities, and a full intervention group that was given access to the test results and learning activities. Data were collected from 905 students (6th–12th grade) nested within 44 teachers. We used hierarchical linear modeling techniques to compare the effects of full, partial, and no (control) intervention on students’ algebraic ability and misconceptions. The analyses indicate that full intervention had a net positive effect on ability and misconception measures.
The reporting of measures of effect size has become increasingly important in psychology. A Monte Carlo resampling permutation procedure is introduced to find near-optimum maximum values for Stuart’s τc measure for two-way ordinal contingency tables, also termed Kendall’s τc since Kendall introduced τa and τb . Comparisons between resampling and exact procedures demonstrate the accuracy and utility of resampling measures of effect size for two-way ordinal contingency tables. The resampling procedure is shown to be more precise than the traditional method of standardizing τc .
Calabrese, Relevant southern features here are NC > NN (monno vs mondo < MUNDUM ‘world’, piommo vs piombo < PLUMBUM ‘lead’); characteristic patterns of both tonic and atonic vowel development; use of postposed possessives (figliomo vs mio figlio ‘my son’); extensive use of the preterit; etc. A number of features mark off Tuscan from its neighbours: absence of metaphony (umlaut); -VriV-> -ViV-(IANUARIUM > gennaio, cf. Gennaro, patron saint of Naples); fricativisation of intervocalic voiceless stops – the socalled gorgia toscana ‘Tuscan throat’ – which yields pronunciations such as [la harta] la carta ‘the paper’, [kauo] capo ‘head’, [lo hiro] lo tiro ‘I pull it’; etc. Such divisions reflect both geographical and administrative boundaries. The La Spezia-Rimini line corresponds very closely both to the Apennine mountains and to the southern limit of the Archbishopric of Milan. The line between central and southern dialects approximates to the boundary between the Lombard Kingdom of Italy and the Norman Kingdom of Sicily, and to a point where the Apennines broaden out to form a kind of mountain barrier between the two parts of the peninsula. The earliest texts are similarly regional in nature. The first in which undisputed vernacular material occurs is the Placito Capuano of 960, a Latin document reporting the legal proceedings relating to the ownership of a piece of land, in the middle of which an oath sworn by the witnesses is recorded verbatim: sao ko kelle terre, per kelle fini que ki contene, trenta anni le possette parte Sancti Benedicti ‘I know that those lands, within those boundaries which are here stated, thirty years the party of Saint Benedict owned them.’ The textual evidence gradually increases, and by the thirteenth century it is clear that there are wellrooted literary traditions in a number of centres up and down the land. These are touched on briefly by the Florentine Dante (1265-1321) in a celebrated section of this treatise De Vulgari Eloquentia, but it is the poetic supremacy of his Divine Comedy, rapidly followed in the same city by the achievements of Petrarch (1304-74) and Boccaccio (1313-75), which ensured that literary, and thus linguistic, pre-eminence should go to Tuscan. There ensued a centuries-long debate about the language of literature – la questionedella lingua ‘the language question’, with Tuscan being kept in the forefront as a result of the theoretical writings of the influential Venetian (!) Pietro Bembo (1470-1547), especially his Prose della volgar lingua (1525). His ideas were adopted by the members of the Accademia della Crusca, founded in Florence in 1582-3, which produced its first dictionary in 1612 and which still survives as a centre for research into the Italian language. Meanwhile, although the affairs of day-to-day existence were largely conducted in dialect, the sociopolitical dimension of the question increased in importance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, assuming a particular urgency after unification in 1861. The new government appointed the author Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873) – himself born in Milan but yet another enthusiastic non-native advocate of Florentine usage – to head a commission, which in due course recommended Florentine as the linguistic standard to be adopted in the new national school system. This suggestion was not without its critics, notably the great Italian comparative philologist, Graziadio Ascoli (1829-1907), and a number of the specific recommendations were hopelessly impractical, but in any case the core of literary usage was so thoroughly Tuscan that the language taught in schools was bound to be similar. Education was, of course, crucial since the history of standardisation is essentially the history of increased literacy. On the most conservative estimate only 2.5 per cent of the population would have been literate in any meaningful sense of the word in 1861, although a more recent and moreper had 91.5 per cent by 1961, the centenary of unification and the thousandth anniversary of the first text. Even so, there is no guarantee that those who can use Italian do so as their normal daily means of communication, and it was only in 1982 that opinion polls recorded a figure of more than 50 per cent of those interviewed claiming that their first language was the standard rather than a dialect. Yet the opposition language/dialect greatly oversimplifies matters. For most speakers it is a question of ranging themselves at some point of a continuum from standard Italian through regional Italian and regional dialect to the local dialect, as circumstances and other participants seem to warrant. Note too that the term dialect means something rather different when used of the more or less homogeneous means of spoken communication in an isolated rural community and when used to refer to something such as Milanese or Venetian, both of which have fully fledged literary and administrative traditions of their own, and hence a good deal of internal social stratification. Another significant factor in promoting a national language was conscription, firstbecause it brought together people from different regions, and second because the army is statutorily required to provide education equivalent to three years of primary school to anyone who enters the service illiterate. Indeed, it is out of the analysis of letters written by soldiers in the First World War that some scholars have been led to recognise italiano popolare ‘popular Italian’ as a kind of national substandard, a language which is neither the literary norm nor yet a dialect tied to a particular town or region. Among the features which characterise it are: the extension of gli ‘to him’ to replace le ‘to her’ and loro ‘to them’, and, relatedly, of suo ‘his/her’ to include ‘their’; a reduction in the use of the subjunctive in complement clauses, where it is replaced by the indicative, and in conditional apodoses, where the imperfect subjunctive is replaced by the conditional, and the pluperfect subjunctive is replaced by either the conditional perfect or the imperfect indicative (thus standard se fosse venuto, mi avrebbe aiutato (‘if he had come he would have helped me’) becomes either se sarebbe venuto, mi avrebbe aiutato or se veniva, mi aiutava, the latter having an imperfect indicative in the protasis too; the use of che ‘that’ as a general marker of subordination; plural instead of singular verbs after nouns like la gente ‘people’. Some of these uses – e.g. gli for loro, the reduction in the use of the subjunctive and the use of the imperfect in irrealis conditionals – have also begun to penetrate upwards into educated colloquial usage, and it is likely that the media, another powerful force for linguistic unification, will spread other emergent patterns in due course. Industrialisation, too, has had its effect in redrawing the linguistic boundaries, both social and geographical. In addition to the standard language, the dialects and the claimed existence of ita-liano popolare, there are no less than eleven other languages spoken within the peninsula and having, according to one recent but probably rather high estimate, a total of nearly 2.75 million speakers. Of these, more than two million represent speakers of other Romance languages: Catalan, French, Friulian, Ladin, Occitan and Sardinian. The remaining languages are: Albanian, German, Greek, Serbo-Croat and Slovene. Amidst this heterogeneity, the Italian national and regional constitutions recognise the rights of four linguistic minorities: French speakers in the autonomous region of the Valle d’Aosta (approx. 75,000), German speakers in the province of Bolzano (approx. 225,000), Slovene speakers in the provinces of Trieste and Gorizia (approx. 100,000), Ladin speakers in the province of Bolzano (approx. 30,000). Yet French (and Occitan – approx. 200,000) and German speakers outside the stated areas are not protected in the same way. Norof closely related the two in turn being sub-branches of the Rhaeto-Romance group. The recognised linguistic minorities are, not surprisingly, in areas where the borders of the Italian state(s) have oscillated historically. In contrast, the southern part of the peninsula is peppered with individual villages which preserve linguistically the traces of that region’s turbulent past. It is here that we find Italy’s 100,000 Albanian, 20,000 Greek and 3,500 SerboCroat speakers, as well as a number of communities whose northern dialects reflect the presence of mediaeval settlers and mercenaries. Sardinia too contains a few Ligurian-speaking villages and 20,000 Catalan speakersin the port of Alghero as evidence of former colonisation. More importantly, the island has almost 1,000,000 speakers of Sardinian, a separate Romance language which has suffered undue neglect ever since Dante said of the inhabitants that they imitated Latin tanquam simie homines ‘as monkeys do men’. What he was referring to was the way in which Sardinian, both in structure and vocabulary, reveals itself to be the most conservative of the Romance vernaculars. Thus, we find a vowel system with no mergers apart from the loss of Latin phonemic vowel length; an absence of palatalisation of k and g; preservation of final s (with important morphological consequences); a definite article su, sa, etc. which derives from Latin IPSE rather than ILLE. Old Sardinian also maintained direct reflexes of the Latin pluperfect indicative and imperfect subjunctive. and the language is one of the few not to retain a future periphrasis from Latin infinitive + HABEO, using instead a reflex of Latin DEBERE ‘to have to’, e.g. des essere ‘you will be’. On the lexical side we have petere ‘to ask’, imbennere ‘to find’ (cf. Lat. INVENIRE), domo/domu ‘house’, albu ‘white’, etc. (contrast It. chiedere, trovare, casa, bianco). The presence of Italian outside the boundaries of the modern Italian state is due totwo rather different types of circumstance. First, it may be spoken in areas either geographically continuous with or at some time part of Italy, as in the independent Republic of San Marino (population 30,000), enclosed within the region of Emilia-Romagna, and in Canton Ticino (population approx. 325,000), the entirely italophone part of Switzerland. Both have local dialects, Romagnolo in San Marino and Lombard in Ticino, as well as the standard language of education and administration. Elsewhere, the historical continuity is reflected at the level of dialect, but with the superimposition of a different standard language. Thus, in Corsica (population approx. 280,000) the dialects are either Tuscan (following partial colonisation from Pisa in the eleventh century) or Sardinian in type, but the official language has since 1769 been French. The same situation obtains for those Italian dialects spoken in the areas of Istria and Dalmatia now part of Slovenia and Croatia. The second circumstance arises when Italian, or more often Italian dialects, has beencarried overseas, mainly to the New World. In the USA about one million Italian speakers constitute the second largest linguistic minority (after Hispano-Americans). They are concentrated for the most part either in New York, where they are mainly of southern origin and where a kind of southern Italian dialectal koine has emerged, and in the San Francisco Bay area, where northern and central Italians predominate, and where the peninsular standard has had more influence. Italian language media include a number of newspapers, radio stations and television programmes. The current signs of a reawakening of interest in their linguistic heritage amongst Italo-Americans are paralleled in Canada and Australia, each with about half a million Italian speakers according to official figures. There were also in excess of three million émigrés to South America, mostly to Argentina, and this has led, on the River Plate, to the developmentItalian in the Australia had its origins in the language of an underprivileged and often uneducated immigrant class, in Africa – specifically Ethiopia and Somalia and until recently Libya – Italian survives as a typical relic of a colonial situation. Ethiopia also has the only documented instance of an Italian-based pidgin, used not only between Europeans and local inhabitants but also between speakers of mutually unintelligible indigenous languages. The position of Italian in Malta is similarly due to penetration at a higher rather than a lower social level. Research is only now beginning into the linguistic consequences of the postwar migration of, again mainly southern, Italian labour as ‘Gastarbeiter’ in Switzerland and Germany. Finally, two curiosities are the discovery by a group of Italian ethnomusicologists in 1973 in the village of S˘tivor in northern Bosnia of a community of 470 speakers of a dialect from the northern Italian province of Trento, and the case of a group of émigrés from two coastal villages near Bari in Puglia, who settled in Kerch in the Crimea in the 1860s and whose dialectophone descendants died out only in the late twentieth century.
The article deals with the features of spoken language in the written discourse of live text commentary, a modern genre of online journalism. After locating the new genre at the intersection of spoken live commentary, computer-mediated communication and everyday conversation, it identifies some of the features conveying spokenness on the phonological/graphological, lexical, syntactic and pragmatic levels. Based on data from recent sports reports, the article argues that orality represents an unstated norm in the interactive subtype of LTC found, for instance, in the online British newspaper the Guardian. Spoken features and the pseudo-conversational structure of the reports are devices whereby the authors of the texts create a sense of immediacy in their reports, on the one hand, and construct and enhance the illusion of an interpersonal speech event, on the other. The linguistic characteristics of LTC, which reflect the hybrid nature of the genre, can be seen as serving the purpose of social bonding within the virtual group of readers.
This paper presents a high-performance broad-coverage supervised word sense disambiguation (WSD) system for English verbs that uses linguistically motivated features and a smoothed maximum entropy machine learning model. We describe three specific enhancements to our system’s treatment of linguistically motivated features which resulted in the best published results on SENSEVAL-2 verbs. We then present the results of training our system on OntoNotes data, both the SemEval-2007 task and additional data. OntoNotes data is designed to provide clear sense distinctions, based on using explicit syntactic and semantic criteria to group WordNet senses, with sufficient examples to constitute high quality, broad coverage training data. Using similar syntactic and semantic features for WSD, we achieve performance comparable to that of human taggers, and competitive with the top results for the SemEval-2007 task. Empirical analysis of our results suggests that clarifying sense boundaries and/or increasing the number of training instances for certain verbs could further improve system performance.
The article discusses a study which investigated whether subtitles, which provide lexical information, support perceptual learning about foreign speech. As explained, subtitles indicate which words are being spoken, which could improve lexically-guided learning about foreign speech sounds. As part of the study, Dutch participants were asked to watch videos containing unfamiliar regionally-accented English, with or without subtitles. Both English and Dutch subtitles were used which made it possible to compare the effects of subtitles in the language spoken in the videos with the effects of subtitles in the observers' native language.
We introduce a new type of lexical structure called lexical system, an interoperable model that can feed both monolingual and multilingual language resources. We begin with a formal characterization of lexical systems as simple directed graphs, solely made up of nodes corresponding to lexical entities and links. To illustrate our approach, we present data borrowed from a lexical system that has been generated from the French DiCo database. We later explain how the compilation of the original dictionary-like database into a net-like one has been made possible. Finally, we discuss the potential of the proposed lexical structure for designing multilingual lexical resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR], Copyright of Language Resources & Evaluation is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual )
In this paper we present a tool that uses comparable corpora to find appropriate translation equivalents for expressions that are considered by translators as difficult. For a phrase in the source language the tool identifies a range of possible expressions used in similar contexts in target language corpora and presents them to the translator as a list of suggestions. In the paper we discuss the method and present results of human evaluation of the performance of the tool, which highlight its usefulness when dictionary solutions are lacking.
Background: One of the most debated issues in the cognitive neuroscience of language is whether distinct semantic domains are differentially represented in the brain. Clinical studies described several anomic dissociations with no clear neuroanatomical correlate. Neuroimaging studies have shown that memory retrieval is more demanding for proper than common nouns in that the former are purely arbitrary referential expressions. In this study a semantic relatedness paradigm was devised to investigate neural processing of proper and common nouns. Methodology/Principal Findings: 780 words (arranged in pairs of Italian nouns/adjectives and the first/last names of well known persons) were presented. Half pairs were semantically related (''Woody Allen'' or ''social security''), while the others were not (''Sigmund Parodi'' or ''judicial cream''). All items were balanced for length, frequency, familiarity and semantic relatedness. Participants were to decide about the semantic relatedness of t)
There has been much debate on the issue of priority between redistributive and recognitive justice.1 On one hand, recognition theorists assert that injustice results from the dominant relations of cultural, political, gendered, and racialized misrecognition of society's vulnerable and marginalized members. On the other hand redistributive justice theorists argue that such cultural forms of misrecognition as sexism, racism, ableism, and ageism cannot be fully understood apart from a class analysis of the maldistribution of income, social transfers, old age and disabiUty pensions as well as the exclusion of vulnerable members of society from public institutions of health, education and employment. In this essay, I want to explore Ricoeur's Aristotelian interpretation of the redistribution - recognition debate, and in particular, how he approaches the issue of priority between redistributive and recognitive justice in his reflections on the serial or the lexical ordering of Rawls's principles of justice.2 Recently, Gary Foster has argued that whereas Ricoeur emphasizes the conceptual priority of the good over the right, Rawls's conception of justice as fairness prioritizes the right over the good.3 Foster claims that neither the good nor the right may be shown to have a strict priority over the other. Rather, we may speak of the provisional priority of the right over the good, whereby the idea of justice is continually interpreted through historical and cultural conceptions of the good life. We must go beyond Ricoeur's articulation of the ethical aim, which prioritizes the good, to get at a dialectical relationship between the right and the good. But, as I read Ricoeur's theory of justice, it is both recognitive and redistributive. In developing what he refers to as the lexical ordering of the Rawlsian principles of justice, Ricoeur is not concerned with prioritizing the good over the just, but with developing a citizenship narrative. Rawls's lexical ordering of the principles of justice articulates a principle of civic inclusion, which states that no one is to be excluded from the public institutions of citizenship. This principle of civic inclusion funds the citizenship narrative. It is this civic narrative that gets lost when we become preoccupied by the issue of prioritization between the right (or the principles of justice), and the good (or the ethical intention). Rather than take Foster's issue of priority as a starting point, I begin with Ricoeur's conception of the norm of reciprocity, or the Golden Rule. It is the dialectic of the norm of reciprocity that mediates between the imperative of recognition owed to persons as ends in themselves (reflected in the solicitous care of persons in their singularity) and the imperative of redistributive justice (which extends the ethics of equality articulated by the solicitous care for the otherness of the other to all members of the political community).4 I shall underscore the specifically political character of Ricoeur's norm of reciprocity by following its development through Rawls's principles of justice, reaching in fine the principle of civic inclusion I have here introduced. From the Problem of Priority to the Norm of Reciprocity In his concluding remarks on his conception of a mediation between the just and the good, Foster argues that rather than concern ourselves with prioritizing either the right or the good, we are better off thinking of the two notions as co-dependent.5 My own argument departs from Foster's conclusion. In citing Rawls's central claim that justice constitutes the founding virtue of social institutions, Foster goes on to consider the possibility that justice is not the only 'first virtue of social institutions'6 but that we would do well to harmonize justice with other important social virtues, such as care, emphasized by feminist philosophers. But what a priori meaning could the virtue of justice be held to have, if it did not already encompass the social virtue of care? …
Se référant à divers ouvrages et auteurs de tous temps, styles ou nationalités, cette étude sur la représentation du substrat dialectal et étranger dans la littérature française et anglo-américaine, et sur sa traduction, cherche principalement à comprendre la démarche des auteurs recourant à la retranscription phonétique, pour ensuite mieux appréhender celle des traducteurs. Analysant en premier lieu les diverses motivations qui poussent ces écrivains à bouleverser les normes grammaticales et orthographiques pour transfigurer dans l’écrit, l’oral et la parole, puis s’interrogeant quant à la validité d’une méthode à appliquer à ces créations linguistiques, cet exposé tente de répondre, notamment par un examen énumératif des procédés matérialisant l’accent dialectal ou étranger, aux questions d’ordre lexical, grammatical ou morphosyntaxique qu’infère cette intrusion de la langue parlée dans le texte. Elucidant enfant les outils traductologiques mis en place dans ces littératures, ce travail propose un traducteur futur de pleinement s’en inspirer, et ainsi faire de l’achoppement, un argument à la créativité.
In the present article, functions written in the freeware R are presented that calculate several measures from traditional signal detection theory for each individual in a sample, along with summary statistics for the sample. Bias-corrected and accelerated bootstrap confidence intervals are also produced. Arguments are made for using an alternative approach—multilevel generalized linear models—and a function is presented for it. These functions are part of the R package sdtalt, which is available on the Comprehensive R Archive Network. Recent data from memory recognition studies are used to illustrate these functions.
Based on a structural approach and semi-directive interviews, this study analyzes athletic rules and legal consciousness of adolescents in relation to their contexts of athletic practice (institutionalized versus self-organized context). The lexical analysis (with alceste software) demonstrates that the institutionalized context leads mainly to a civilized consciousness where legal norms transcend individuals; on the other hand, the self-regulated context is the basis for a responsible and moral consciousness. These results contradict common beliefs associated with these two sport practices.
Measurements of people’s causal and explanatory models are frequently key dependent variables in investigations of concepts and categories, lay theories, and health behaviors. A variety of challenges are inherent in the pen-and-paper and narrative methods commonly used to measure such causal models. We have attempted to alleviate these difficulties by developing a software tool, ConceptBuilder, for automating the process and ensuring accurate coding and quantification of the data. In this article, we present ConceptBuilder, a multiple-use tool for data gathering, data entry, and diagram display. We describe the program’s controls, report the results of a usability test of the program, and discuss some technical aspects of the program. We also describe ConceptAnalysis, a companion program for generating data matrices and analyses, and ConceptViewer, a program for viewing the data exactly as drawn.
This article presents the current state of a work in progress, whose objective is to better understand the effects of factors that significantly influence the performance of latent semantic analysis (LSA). A difficult task, which consisted of answering (French) biology multiple choice questions, was used to test the semantic properties of the truncated singular space and to study the relative influence of the main parameters. A dedicated software was designed to fine-tune the LSA semantic space for the multiple choice questions task. With optimal parameters, the performances of our simple model were quite surprisingly equal or superior to those of seventh- and eighthgrade students. This indicates that semantic spaces were quite good despite their low dimensions and the small sizes of the training data sets. In addition, we present an original entropy global weighting of the answers’ terms for each of the multiple choice questions, which was necessary to achieve the model’s success.
Thesauri and controlled vocabularies facilitate access to digital collections by explicitly representing the underlying principles of organization. Translation of such resources into multiple languages is an important component for providing multilingual access. However, the specificity of vocabulary terms in most thesauri precludes fully-automatic translation using general-domain lexical resources. In this paper, we present an efficient process for leveraging human translations to construct domain-specific lexical resources. This process is illustrated on a thesaurus of 56,000 concepts used to catalog a large archive of oral histories. We elicited human translations on a small subset of concepts, induced a probabilistic phrase dictionary from these translations, and used the resulting resource to automatically translate the rest of the thesaurus. Two separate evaluations demonstrate the acceptability of the automatic translations and the cost-effectiveness of our approach.
Considering the differential successes and failures in adult second language acquisition (SLA), many researchers have urged that studies on L2 ultimate attainment should identify the domains in which adult L2 learners are (or are not) able to attain native-like proficiency levels, hence providing a descriptive basis for the learning potential in adult SLA. In particular, both Birdsong (2005) and Sorace (2005) contend that at the L2 end-state, the fundamental difference between native speakers and highly proficient late L2 learners often reside in the processing system, thereby leading to minor quantitative and/or qualitative departures from monolingual norms. To test the above claim, this study explored whether a nativelike lexical processing system can be attained by advanced L2 learners who start acquiring Mandarin Chinese as a foreign language long after the onset of puberty. To this end, the study employed the advanced-learner approach, recruiting 23 adult L2 Chinese learners, whose L2 reading skills were comparable to native Chinese speakers, and 23 native speakers of Chinese as controls. Two online reading tasks that aimed to tap into sentence-level Chinese character recognition were administered to the participants. Data revealed that, while the two groups were comparable in terms of their overall Chinese reading ability, both similarities and differences co-existed between them with regard to the underlying lexical processing procedure and the nature of the activated lexical information; nevertheless, these L2 learners were still able to achieve functional equivalence with natives at the performance level. Based upon these findings, implications for L2 end-state lexical processing system will be discussed.
Résumé Dans cette étude, qui se base sur un petit corpus de textes français et suédois originaux et traduits, l’usage des formes lexicales et pronominales en fonction anaphorique est examiné. Comme prévu, les formes pronominales s’avèrent plus fréquentes dans les textes français que dans les textes suédois, où la répétition du SN lexical thématique prédomine. Cette différence est en général liée aux normes rhétoriques ou stylistiques des cultures respectives, telles que la plus haute fréquence de marqueurs explicites de cohérence textuelle et le besoin plus fort de variation lexicale dans les langues romanes comparées aux langues germaniques, mais l’absence systématique de pronoms anaphoriques dans les textes suédois demande une autre explication. Elle semble due à une répugnance générale des pronoms personnels suédois inanimés ( den, det ) d’assumer une fonction anaphorique.
The hands and mouth do not always slip together in British Sign Language: Dissociating articulatory channels in the lexicon David P. Vinson (d.vinson@ucl.ac.uk) Robin L. Thompson (robin.thompson@ucl.ac.uk) Robert Skinner (robert.skinner@ucl.ac.uk) Neil Fox (neil.fox@ucl.ac.uk) Gabriella Vigliocco (g.vigliocco@ucl.ac.uk) Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre, Department of Cognitive, Perceptual and Brain Sciences University College London, 26 Bedford Way, London, WC1H 0AP, UK LUNCH 1 are distinguished only by English-derived mouthings), but they are also commonplace in nonambiguous signs, occurring very frequently in spontaneous conversation, and are often considered to be part of the signs themselves (see Boyes Braem & Sutton- Spence, 2001, for further discussion) 2. However, there is little evidence concerning the precise nature of the link between mouthings and manual elements of lexical signs in language production, and the nature of the systems underlying their retrieval and production. It is certainly the case that the two must diverge at some point, because they rely upon different articulatory systems (hands vs. mouth). Our primary question concerns the extent to which these representations are linked before this divergence takes place. On one hand, mouthings might reflect the activation of representations based on a spoken language, which are accessed relatively independently from the sign language representations driving the manual component of signs. As such they would be incidental to the retrieval of the manual form, rather than being integrated before phonological and especially phonetic encoding.. On the other hand, although mouthings historically originated as a borrowed form from the surrounding spoken language, they may have become fully embedded within the sign language production system and thus completely integrated with the manual component of signs. In order to test these two alternatives, we employed a lexical retrieval task targeting the semantic level of representation: cyclic semantic blocking (Kroll & Stewart, 1994). In this task, participants repeatedly name objects presented in contexts of other objects that are either semantically related or unrelated to each other. In spoken languages, speakers are slower to name pictures when they are presented in the context of semantically related items, an Abstract We investigate the extent of integration between the hands and mouthing for lexical signs in British Sign Language, using picture naming and translation tasks that are sensitive to semantic similarity effects in lexical retrieval. Semantic errors in sign forms due to semantically related contexts were more common in translation from English than in picture naming, while semantic errors in mouth patterns were sensitive to semantic context only in picture naming, and not in translation from English. These results are consistent with an account whereby mouthing is accessed through a largely separable channel from manual components of the sign lexicon, rather than being bundled with manual components and incorporated into the sign language lexicon despite its original relationship to English. Effects did not differ between Deaf and hearing native signers, suggesting that stronger links between orthography and phonology in the hearing group do not play a role. Keywords: lexical retrieval, production, sign language, mouthing, semantic competition Introduction Signed language production involves the simultaneous use of multiple articulators; not only the two hands themselves, but also other articulators such as the body, face, and the mouth have both lexical and grammatical functions (e.g., to convey adjectival or adverbial information, or to mark negation, yes-no questions or relative clauses). In addition to mouth patterns that can be used to express adjectival or adverbial information, many lexical signs are associated with specific mouth patterns which are integral to a specific sign and are time-locked to production of the sign's manual component (i.e., the movement of the hands, Boyes Braem & Sutton-Spence, 2001). These mouth patterns are of two types: those originating within the sign language system, and those derived from a spoken language. The former, sometimes termed mouth gestures, use abstract vocal properties (e.g., inhalation/exhalation, mouth shape, or articulation) to reflect properties of the manual signs themselves (Woll & Sieratzki, 1998). The latter, instead (often termed mouthings ), are derived from the pronunciation of words in a spoken language. Sometimes mouthings are used to distinguish between ambiguous sign forms (for example, the British Sign Language (BSL) signs BREAKFAST and Signs in BSL are customarily represented as English glosses in capital letters. For example, in a set of 300 lexical signs produced by Deaf BSL signers for use in a lexical norming study (Vinson, et al. 2009), more than 90% included mouthing, although the sign models were given only general instructions to produce the signs as naturally as possible, and no mention was made of mouthing. This is likely an overestimate of the rate at which mouthing occurs in discourse (these signs were produced in isolation) but gives an impression of the importance of mouthing.
Author’s Introduction African languages have played an important role in the development of linguistic theory but their role in the fields of historical linguistics and linguistic typology has been less prominent. Africa’s linguistic diversity has been long underestimated given the dominance of the four‐family model proposed by Joseph Greenberg. Criticism of this model has long held among specialists in some of Africa’s smaller and lesser‐known language families, but has only recently become more widely acknowledged among linguists. Archaeologists, geneticists, and others continue to model African prehistory based on African linguistic classifications, which are outdated and which have failed to withstand scrutiny. This teaching and learning guide suggests a program to train scholars in recognizing and evaluating the standards by which various African language classifications have been made. Africa’s linguistic diversity will be shown to be far greater than what is suggested by the four‐family model. Author Recommends 1. Childs, G. Tucker. 2003. The classification of African languages. An Introduction to African Languages, 19–53. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. A highly readable introduction to the subject, ‘The classification of African languages’ provides an overview of the four‐phylum model, along with the discussion of some of the major critiques that have been made of it. 2. Dimmendaal, Gerrit J. and F.K. Erhard Voeltz. 2007. Africa. Encyclopedia of the World’s Endangered Languages, 579–634. ed. by Christopher Moseley. London: Routledge. ‘Africa’ provides an overview of the major changes to the picture of African language classification that have been accepted by leading historical linguists and specialists. This reading also includes a list of endangered African languages, and an up‐to‐date discussion of Africa’s linguistic areas. 3. Campbell, Lyle and William J. Poser. 2008. Africa. Language Classification: History and Method, 203–245. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. The ‘Africa’ section of Campbell and Poser’s book surveys the history of African language classification. Examples are given showing problems with the types of evidence used to uphold Greenberg and pre‐Greenberg classifications. 4. Dimmendaal, Gerrit J. 2008. Language ecology and linguistic diversity on the African continent. Language and Linguistics Compass 2(5).840–858. DOI: DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-818X.2008.00085.x The article ‘Language ecology and linguistic diversity on the African continent’ discusses recent revisions to African linguistic classification and pays special attention to the development of spread zones and accretion zones on the continent. It also details several cases of contact‐induced linguistic changes. 5. Batibo, Herman M. 2005. The endangered languages of Africa. Language Decline and Death in Africa: Causes, Consequences and Challenges, 62–86. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. The book ‘Language Decline and Death in Africa’ is an important survey of the factors that have been leading to a loss of linguistic diversity on the African continent. Chapter 5 ‘The endangered languages of Africa’ provides a concise summary of these factors, as well as a country‐by‐country outline of endangered languages. 6. Mous, Maarten. 2003. Loss of linguistic diversity in Africa. Language Death and Language Maintenance: Theoretical, Practical and Descriptive Approaches, 157–170. ed. by Mark Janse and Sijmen Tol. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. The article ‘Loss of linguistic diversity in Africa’ surveys the linguistic genetic diversity of the continent’s languages and provides an overview of the factors that have led to a language shift in Africa. Online Materials 1. The World Atlas of Language Structures Online (WALS) http://wals.info/index The World Atlas of Language Structures Online (WALS) is a database of over 58,000 datapoints of phonological, grammatical, and lexical features of a subset of the world’s languages. The database allows scholars see maps of the distribution of these features, and to read the 142 chapters examining these structural features across the typological database. The Online database is a project of Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the Max Planck Digital Library, edited by Martin Haspelmath, Matthew S. Dryer, David Gil and Bernard Comrie (Munich: Max Planck Digital Library, 2008). WALS was also published as a book (with CD‐ROM) by Oxford University Press in 2005. 2. SIL Electronic Survey Reports http://www.sil.org/silesr/indexes/languages.asp The SIL Electronic Survey Reports website provides links to a large number of language surveys (in a downloadable pdf format) produced by Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) researchers. These reports include a great deal of linguistic information about a large number of African languages. Of particular interest to the comparative linguist is the large number of word lists included in the reports. 3. Jouni Maho’s Web Resources for African Languages http://www.africanlanguages.org/ Jouni Maho’s ‘Web Resources for African Languages’ pages provide a continuously updated list of online databases and downloadable documents on African languages. Links to both published and unpublished sources are included. The pages also provide a select print bibliography for each language family or isolate. 4. Comparative Bantu Online Dictionary (CBOLD) http://www.linguistics.berkeley.edu/CBOLD/ The Comparative Bantu Online Dictionary (CBOLD) at the University of California Berkeley as started in 1994 by Larry Hyman and John Lowe but includes contributions from scholars from many other institutions. It includes over 20 searchable Bantu language dictionaries, the Tervuren database of Bantu Lexical Reconstructions (BLR2) (with 9800 entries), and the Tanzanian Language Survey lexical database. 5. Ethnologue: Languages of the World http://www.ethnologue.com/ Ethnologue is an ‘encyclopedic reference work cataloging all of the world’s 6,912 known living languages’ produced by the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL). This website provides a quick and handy means of getting information about such topics as: the languages spoken in each
TempEval is a framework for evaluating systems that automatically annotate texts with temporal relations. It was created in the context of the SemEval 2007 workshop and uses the TimeML annotation language. The evaluation consists of three subtasks of temporal annotation: anchoring an event to a time expression in the same sentence, anchoring an event to the document creation time, and ordering main events in consecutive sentences. In this paper we describe the TempEval task and the systems that participated in the evaluation. In addition, we describe how further task decomposition can bring even more structure to the evaluation of temporal relations.
Since the inception of the Senseval series there has been a great deal of debate in the word sense disambiguation (WSD) community on what the right sense distinctions are for evaluation, with the consensus of opinion being that the distinctions should be relevant to the intended application. A solution to the above issue is lexical substitution, i.e. the replacement of a target word in context with a suitable alternative substitute. In this paper, we describe the English lexical substitution task and report an exhaustive evaluation of the systems participating in the task organized at SemEval-2007. The aim of this task is to provide an evaluation where the sense inventory is not predefined and where performance on the task would bode well for applications. The task not only reflects WSD capabilities, but also can be used to compare lexical resources, whether man-made or automatically created, and has the potential to benefit several natural-language applications.
The NLP community has shown a renewed interest in deeper semantic analyses, among them automatic recognition of semantic relations in text. We present the development and evaluation of a semantic analysis task: automatic recognition of relations between pairs of nominals in a sentence. The task was part of SemEval-2007, the fourth edition of the semantic evaluation event previously known as SensEval. Apart from the observations we have made, the long-lasting effect of this task may be a framework for comparing approaches to the task. We introduce the problem of recognizing relations between nominals, and in particular the process of drafting and refining the definitions of the semantic relations. We show how we created the training and test data, list and briefly describe the 15 participating systems, discuss the results, and conclude with the lessons learned in the course of this exercise.
Virtual reality technology is argued to be suitable to the simulation study of mass evacuation behavior, because of the practical and ethical constraints in researching this field. This article describes three studies in which a new virtual reality paradigm was used, in which participants had to escape from a burning underground rail station. Study 1 was carried out in an immersion laboratory and demonstrated that collective identification in the crowd was enhanced by the (shared) threat embodied in emergency itself. In Study 2, high-identification participants were more helpful and pushed less than did low-identification participants. In Study 3, identification and group size were experimentally manipulated, and similar results were obtained. These results support a hypothesis according to which (emergent) collective identity motivates solidarity with strangers. It is concluded that the virtual reality technology developed here represents a promising start, although more can be done to embed it in a traditional psychology laboratory setting.
Recently, Kuppens, Van Mechelen, and Rijmen (2008) developed a method that allows researchers to examine and disentangle the contributions of the different possible sources of variability in sequential processes that underlie psychological outcomes or behaviors. Although this method may prove valuable for many research domains in the social sciences, its use may be limited by its statistical complexity and the effort and programming skills required. We present an R package, called Desequens, intended to make this method easily accessible to social science researchers. The tool does not require any knowledge of R, so that R laymen can easily apply the method to their data as well. We demonstrate the use of Desequens by means of a didactic example.
The magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine itself has an impact on the likelihood of obtaining successful measurements of brain size in certain groups of subjects. The differential selection and attrition in both cross-sectional and longitudinal designs, therefore, indicate that the MRI coincidentally serves as a screen for the anatomical structure of the brains that are successfully scanned. This screening effect introduces confounds in experiments whose very hypotheses are focused on comparing anatomical differences in subjects who differ, for example, in their reactions to anxiety-inducing situations. Here, behavioral interventions and possible statistical models are presented in order to reduce attrition and other effects of the confounds introduced by the MRI measurement process in research. Child and adolescent research—particularly in the attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder research area—is used as an example to clarify and delineate the general research principles presented in the present article.
Visual inspection of X-ray images of luggage is a time-pressured task that typically shows large initial training effects, but there exists a paucity of models capable of evaluating performance and speed concurrently. In the present study, visual inspection ability during learning was modeled using Drury’s two-component inspection model (TCM; Drury, 1975) in a laboratory experiment involving 12 younger (mean age = 20.8 years) and 12 older (mean age = 60.0 years) naive participants undertaking a simplified luggage search task. Model fits and assumptions were found to be reliable and accurately reflected improvement with training for decision time, although neither search nor decision components of the model individually showed a significant effect of age. The decision component of the model showed larger improvement with training than did the search component, and stopping-time policy accurately reflected the improvements found between ages and within training levels. The TCM is a useful supplement to detection theory when speed of performance is a factor.