Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
16504 papers
OBJECTIVE: Since previous work indicated smaller than normal temporal lobe structures in schizophrenic patients, the authors tested the hypothesis that this abnormality might be reflected in abnormally large sylvian fissures. METHOD: The subjects were 48 schizophrenic patients and 51 normal comparison subjects matched groupwise with regard to age and sex. CSF spaces (sylvian fissures, temporal lobe sulci, temporal horns, third ventricle, lateral ventricles, and superficial cerebral sulci) were visually assessed with the magnetic resonance imaging rating protocol of the Consortium to Establish a Registry for Alzheimer's Disease (CERAD). RESULTS: The sylvian fissures of the schizophrenic patients were found to be bilaterally wider than those of the comparison subjects. There were no other significant differences. CONCLUSIONS: Schizophrenic patients appear to have larger than normal sylvian fissures, which may reflect smaller superior temporal gyri.
Pillet Elisabeth - Social revolt and questioning linguistic norms: a rediscovery of the poet Gaston Couté. Gaston Couté (1880-1911) became famous ca. 1900 in Paris cabarets. Couté projected a revolutionary image of peasants, both in content (progressive ideas, a complex image of country life, opposing former stereotypes) and in form (regional French, popular genres, original style). This image contradicted the picture of peasants produced in mainstream literature. Couté, long forgotten, was rediscovered in the 70 's and 80 's, as part of the alternative cultural trends. Analysis of contemporary criticism shows that his admirers then particularly appreciated Couté 's use of a popular vernacular, and established a close link between rebellion against the social order and challenging linguistic norms.
Predictability and controllability of events influence attributions and affect in many research domains. In face-to-face social interaction, behavior is predictable from actor's own past behavior (internal determinants) and from partner's past behavior (social determinants). This study assessed how affect ratings are related to predictability of vocal activity from internal and social determinants. Time and frequency domain analysis of on-off vocal activity from 55 dyadic gettingacquainted conversations provided indexes of predictability from internal and social determinants. Greater predictability of vocal activity patterns from both internal and social determinants was associated with more positive affect. Future research should take internal as well as social determinants of behavior into account. The study of behavioral dialogues is emerging as an important research paradigm in social, developmental, and clinical psychology (Warner, 1991a). Investigators have examined time series data on the behavior, affect, or physiological states of social interaction partners to assess how social behavior is structured in time and how the behaviors of partners are interdependent.
This paper is concerned with the question of how to extract lexical knowledge from Machine-Readable Dictionaries (MRDs) within a lexical database which integrates a lexicon development environment. Our long term objective is the creation of a large lexical knowledge base using semiautomatic techniques to recover syntactic and semantic information from MRDs. In doing so, one finds that reliance on a single MRD source induces inadequacies which could be efficiently redressed through access to combined MRD sources. In the general case, the integration of information from distinct MRDs remains a problem hard, perhaps impossible, to solve without the aid of a complete, linguistically motivated database which provides a reference point for comparison. Nevertheless, advances can be made by attempting to correlate dictionaries which are not too dissimilar. In keeping with these observations, we describe a software package for correlating MRDs based on sense merging techniques and show how such a tool can be employed in augmenting a lexical knowledge base built from a conventional MRD with thesaurus information.
This paper describes a natural language generation system known as VINCI, which accepts as input a formal description of some subset of a natural language, and generates strings in the language. With the help of an attribute grammar formalism, the system can be used to simulate on a computer components of several current linguistic theories. The program, implemented in C, runs under a variety of operating systems, including UNIX, MS-DOS and VM/CMS. In this paper we consider not only the design of the system, but also some of its applications in linguistic modelling and second language acquisition research.
This study reports on computer-aided investigation of salient differences in the essay idiolects of the Mexican writers Octavio Paz and Rosario Castellanos and suggests that some of them may be linked to gender. It describes use of ready-made software and computational strategies requiring no tagging and minimal ocular scan. It suggests some parameters that can be searched and in most cases quantified to explore characteristics posited by linguistic and literary scholars, taking into consideration the particular language and culture of the authors.
The word senses in a published dictionary are a valuable resource for natural language processing and textual criticism alike. In order that they can be further exploited, their nature must be better understood. Lexicographers have always had to decide where to say a word has one sense, where two. The two studies described here look into their grounds for making distinctions. The first develops a classification scheme to describe the commonly occurring distinction types. The second examines the task of matching the usages of a word from a corpus with the senses a dictionary provides. Finally, a view of the ontological status of dictionary word senses is presented.
This article describes an intelligent computer-assisted language instruction system that is designed to teach principles of syntactic style to students of English. Unlike conventional style checkers, the system performs a complete syntactic analysis of its input, and takes the student's stylistic intent into account when providing a diagnosis. Named STASEL for Stylistic Treatment At the Sentence Level, the system is specifically developed for the teaching of style, and makes use of artificial intelligence techniques in natural language processing to analyze free-form input sentences interactively.
This paper deals with the problem of discovering rules that govern social interactions and relations in preliteral societies. Two older computer programs are first described which can receive data, possibly incomplete and redundant, representing kinship relations among named individuals. The programs then establish a knowledge base in the form of a directed graph, which the user can query in a variety of ways. Another program, written on the “top” of these (rewritten in LISP), can form concepts of various properties, including kinship relations, of and between the individuals. The concepts are derived from the examples and non-examples of a certain social pattern, such as inheritance, succession, marriage, class (tribe, moiety, clan, etc.) membership, domination-subordination, incest and exogamy. The concepts become hypotheses about the rules, which are corroborated, modified or rejected by further examples and non-examples.
Using software (PAT and LECTOR) developed for the creation of the electronic Oxford English Dictionary, strategies applicable to other large data bases were developed to analyse systemic sex-role stereotyping. These are applied to the OED database as a whole and to sub-files of gender-related definition or quotation text. The corpus is also studied manually. Software-based strategies including text searches for collocations with gender-specific pronouns and possessive adjectives produce interesting results which are tested against information in previous research. Stereotypes are found most frequently in quotation text, to a lesser degree in definition text.
Three models for word frequency distributions, the lognormal law, the generalized inverse Gauss-Poisson law and the extended generalized Zipf's law are compared and evaluated with respect to goodness of fit and rationale. Application of these models to frequency distributions of a text, a corpus and morphological data reveals that no model can lay claim to exclusive validity, while inspection of the extrapolated theoretical vocabulary sizes raises doubts as to whether the urn scheme with independent trials is the correct underlying model for word frequency data. The role of morphology in shaping word frequency distributions is discussed, as well as parallelisms between vocabulary richness in literary studies and morphological productivity in linguistics.
Priming for semantically related concepts was investigated using a lexical decision task designed to reveal automatic semantic priming. Two experiments provided further evidence that priming in a single presentation lexical decision task (McNamara & Altarriba, 1988) derives from automatic processes. Mediated priming, but no inhibition or backward priming was found in this type of lexical decision task. Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrated that automatic priming was found only for associated word pairs, as determined by word association norms, and not for word pairs that are semantically related but not associated. It is argued that automatic priming in the lexical decision task occurs at a lexical level not at a semantic level.
The Renfrew Word Finding Scale (Renfrew, 1988) was administered to 30 Indian (Group A) and 30 White (Group B) Durban English speaking children aged between eight and nine years to determine its suitability for assessment of expressive vocabulary. Mean scores for both groups were statistically compared to the British norms in terms of mean raw scores and mean mental age. Mean scores for groups A and B were compared to each other. Item analyses were carried out to obtain further information regarding possible lexical characteristics for each group and common problems with certain items. Both groups performed significantly poorer than expected according to the British norms. Group A was significantly lower than Group B, thus indicating the test's unsuitability for use with these population groups in its present form.
Our work aims at the optimization of existing tools for computer-assisted description and analysis of textual data. More specifically, we have been involved in the thematic description of clauses and clause complexes of Quebec budget speeches from 1934 to 1960. Our main objective is to enhance the work already done in this direction by elaborating the analytic framework through a study of the thematic structure of these discourses. We first set out the general context of our work by briefly explaining the research project on political discourse under the Duplessis Regime in Quebec (1936–60) and giving a brief survey of the parsing strategy applied to the corpus. Second, we present the theoretical background of thematic analysis and the operational model that we are using here. Finally, we try to illustrate the relevance of such methodological work on research data.
The paper sets out twenty proposals for the development and evaluation of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) programs. These proposals emerge from special characteristics of language instruction and of the use of computers to assist in language instruction. We combine theoretically-based assumptions with empirical findings drawn from investigation of language courseware for Hebrew speakers in Israel. We first list four unique features of language instruction: (1) the object-language-meta-language distinction; (2) computer as written medium vs. language as primary spoken medium; (3) teaching of second language skills vs. linguistics; (4) the computer as an electronic tool vs. the computer as a cognitive entity simulating the speaker. We then show how these unique characteristics of language instruction (mother-tongue and foreign language) impose special proposals on language courseware. These proposals should be observed in the development of language courseware and in the evaluation of such programs. Clearly, these proposals integrate with general courseware proposals.
This paper describes the use of Authorware Professional, an icon-based, object-oriented authoring system, to develop courseware and on-line experiments. Notable features include direct editability, facility with many response types, and built-in variables. Shortcomings include the difficulty of learning how to use the program, inability to present stimuli rapidly, the program’s linear development style, weak drawing tools, a lack of scroll bars for text, and some problems in the use of Authorware with other applications. Overall, the package is recommended for users with adequate resources.
Various objections are raised against current practice in co-occurrence analysis. The use of Yule's coefficient Y is then advocated.
For those studying languages with rich word structures, a morphological parser is a valuable tool. PC-KIMMO is a parser for small computers that is based on Koskenniemi's two-level model of morphology. Of the many practical uses for a morphological parser such as PC-KIMMO, this article describes one: producing automatically glossed interlinear text.
The purpose of the present study was to identify the physiological characteristics corresponding to three affects (fear, anger, and joy), which were elicited through real situations in a laboratory. The subjects were asked to rate their psychological responses using the Affect Rating Scales for each affective situation. Physiological indices (diastolic and systolic blood pressures, heart rate, respiration rate, and frequency of galvanic skin response) were measured. The subjects' affects can be characterized by two functions obtained through discriminant analysis. One discriminant function separated positive from negative affects; the other set apart anger from the remaining affects.
Spreadsheets can be used to focus academic research and teaching on theoretical models. Examples of models from learning, social psychology, and perception are presented to illustrate how spreadsheet techniques work. Two strengths of this approach are emphasized: (1) Spreadsheets provide a relatively user-friendly alternative to some kinds of instructional and research programming; and (2) the linked tables and graphs of modern spreadsheets provide a powerful display medium and a fast way to examine the behavior of models as parameters change. I suggest some models for which spreadsheets may be appropriate.
Although the model of English pronunciation in Dutch schools is, and always has been, British English (commonly known as Received Pronunciation, RP), not only teachers, but also informed laymen notice that the pronunciation of learners seems to be more and more influenced by American English. An investigation into the nature and spread of this influence therefore seems in order. This paper discusses some of the preliminary results of a research project which aims to give an inventory and description of the influence of American English (General American, GA) on the pronunciation of 10 phonological variables, among which are /æ/ in words like classroom and wineglass, and flapped /t/ in words like pretty and meeting. A second aim of the project is to find out to which the degree the American and British varieties are attractive to our population. Therefore a number of listening tests were administered: - a preference test, in which subjects had to indicate which pronunciation of a lexical item they thought (a) best (i.e. confirm to the school norm) and (b) they would prefer to use themselves. - an identification test, in which subjects had to indicate whether an item was pronounced in RP or in GA. - a matched guise test consisting of 12 versions of the same story, read by 8 speakers, 4 of them in both varieties. A preliminary inventory shows that in roughly 25% of all the pronunciations of single lexical items (word list style) we can speak of an 'American-like' pronunciaton. The variables that are pronounced most frequently GA-like are flapped /t/ in little, /æ/ in classroom, /a/ in hockey and postvocalic /r/ in morning. It also appears that RP is still the preferred variety on both the preference tests, although this preference decreases slightly when asked which pronunciation they would prefer to use themselves. Roughly 65% of the items was correctly identified as being RP or GA. Finally, the matched guise test showed a significantly high rating of GA female voices on all factors except for the factor 'school-norm'. RP males and females scored relatively high on this factor as well as on 'social status', but dropped considerably on the 'activity' factor and remained below the GA voices on 'personal affect'.
In the speech genre of beta = Io7il 'joking speech' Tojolab'al women use the ambiguity of indirect speech to negotiate their relationship to social norms and cultural values in the midst of everyday conversation. Indirection and ambiguity involve the intersection of form, function, and meaning in lexical, grammatical, and conversational structure. Ambiguity permits criticism and conflict in the context of cooperation and social solidarity.
The importance of “reasoning” in law is pointed out. Law and jurisprudence belong to the “reasoning-conscious” disciplines. Accordingly, there is a long tradition of logic in law. The specific methods of professional work in law are to be seen in close connection with legal reasoning. The advent of computers at first did not touch upon legal reasoning (or the professional work in law). At first computers could be used only for general auxiliary functions (e.g., numerical calculations in tax law). Gradually, the use of computers for auxiliary functions in law has become more specific and more sophisticated (e.g., legal information retrieval), touching more closely upon professional legal work. Moreover, renewed interest in AI has also fostered interest in AI in law, especially for legal expert systems. AI techniques can be used in support of legal reasoning. Yet until now legal expert systems have remained in the research and development stage and have hardly succeeded in becoming a profitable tool for the profession. Therefore it is hoped that the two lines of computer support, for auxiliary functions in law and for immediate support of legal reasoning, may unite in the future.
This paper attempts to provide an overview of the development of humanities computing during the past twenty-five years. Mention is made of the major applications of the computer to humanities disciplines, and of the most important and representative projects across the world.
This paper deals with discourse analysis, with specific reference to the Linguistic and Logic Based Legal Expert System, LEX. In the LEX project we concentrated on a few arbitrarily selected court decisions, extracted the case descriptions, and then added the necessary background knowledge to our prototype expert system to analyze the case descriptions and to deduce the answers to some juridical questions. In this paper we present and comment on a typical discourse representation structure for an accident description in the corpus we studied.
Since April 1989, the Center for Text and Technology at Georgetown University has gathered information on the structure of projects that produce electronic text in the humanities. This report — based on the April, 1991 version of the Georgetown Catalogue and emphasizing its full-text projects in humanities disciplines other than linguistics —surveys the countries in which projects are found, the languages encoded, the disciplines served, and the auspices represented. Then the report explores three trends toward the improvement of electronic texts: increased scope of the new projects, improved quality of the editions used, and greater sophistication in the text-analysis tools added. Included among the notes is a list of titles and contacts for 42 projects cited in the report.
We assess the validity of the Thisted-Efron author-ship tests in two stages. First, we construct simulated texts in accordance with the assumptions implicit in the underlying model and use these to validate the basic computations, to determine their range of applicability, and to evaluate their sensitivity to basic lexical parameters. Second, we experiment with actual texts from the Shakespearean canon and the plays of Christopher Marlowe. The results of the tests are mixed, showing good consistency for the Shakespeare plays (with some discrimination among early, middle and late works) but poor consistency between Shakespeare's poems and plays, or among Marlowe's plays.
We introduce an authorship identification test, called modal analysis, based on a new statistic derived from the Karhunen-Loeve transform. Application to the poems of the Shakespearean canon and to other contemporary poetry strongly supports the case for disqualification of most major claimants. Results also cast doubt that the recently discovered poems, Shall I Die and Elegy, were written by William Shakespeare, but do suggest that eight unascribed poems of The Passionate Pilgrim may have been his work.
One of the essential aspects is described of an expert system (called LEXICOGRAPHER), designed to supply the user with diverse information about Russian words, including bibliographic information concerning individual lexical entries. The lexical database of the system contains semantic information that cannot be elicited from the existing dictionaries. The priority is given to semantic features influencing lexical or grammatical co-occurrence restrictions. Possibilities are discussed of predicting selectional restrictions on the basis of semantic features of a word in the lexicon.
A variety of written material was evaluated with five writing-assistance software packages. Three of the packages were found to be of limited value; they operated at a superficial level and cost much money. Of the remaining two, one was judged potentially valuable, although it was embedded in a larger system designed to teach writing to college students. The other one was judged a best buy on the basis of helpfulness to writers and minimal cost. Software is still no substitute for a good human editor.
While there are many parallels between computing activities in musicology and those in other humanities disciplines, the particular nature of musical material and the ways in which this must be accommodated set many activities apart from those in text-based disciplines. As in other disciplines, early applications were beset by hardware constraints, which placed a premium on expertise and promoted design-intensive projects. Massive musical encoding and bibliographical projects were initiated. Diversification of hardware platforms and languages in the Seventies led to task-specific undertakings, including preliminary work on many of today's programs for music printing and analysis. The rise of personal computers and associated general-purpose software in the Eighties has enabled many scholars to pursue projects individually, particularly with the assistance of database, word processing, and notation software. Current issues facing the field include the need for standards for data interchange, the creation of banks of reusable data, the establishment of qualitative standards for encoded data, and the encouragement of realistic appraisals of what computers can do.
A late 1990 survey found that most historical editors in the United States continue to use the computer primarily as a word processing tool to prepare texts and editorial apparatus. Among older projects, a migration from mainframe or mini-computers to PCs has been the norm. New developments in the field include the “Founding Fathers” CD-ROM project, the impending release of Version 2.0 of NLCindex, and a strong interest in the Text Encoding Initiative.