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18265 papers
The effects of insulting political campaign rhetoric were examined in a laboratory setting. In Study 1, subjects categorized as for, against, or undecided about the issue of French language rights in English Canada read a political debate transcript focusing on this issue in which one candidate insulted or did not insult the other candidate. Backlash was evident on trait ratings: the insult source was rated more negatively in the insult condition than in the control condition, whereas ratings of the target were unaffected. Affective ratings of both candidates were lower in the insult condition than in the control condition. Subjects’ attitudes about French language rights also influenced their impressions of the candidates, but did not interact with the insult manipulation. In Study 2, subjects read debate transcripts embedded with insults that attacked either controllable target attributes, uncontrollable target attributes, or that contained no insults. The major findings of Study 1 were replicated, with the additional finding that insults directed at uncontrollable traits of the target produced effects in the same direction as but more extreme than those effects noted for controllable‐trait insults. These findings are discussed in terms of political campaign tactics and the application of attribution theory to political person perception.
Contains four files: kusa.txt, kusb.txt, kus1a.txt, and kus1b.txt. Together these appear to constitute a Kosraean lexical database (possibly more than one database) with English glosses. These files were taken from four 3.5-inch microdisks labeled to indicate that they have accompanying tapes numbered 4, 5, 6, 7, and 17. The tapes were not with the microdisks, and there is no indication of who created the lexical database or tapes.
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OBJECTIVE: To assess the feasibility and measurement characteristics of ratings completed by professional associates to evaluate the performance of practicing physicians. DESIGN: The clinical performance of physicians was evaluated using written questionnaires mailed to professional associates (physicians and nurses). Physician-associates were randomly selected from lists provided by both the subjects and medical supervisors, and detailed information was collected concerning the professional and social relationships between the associate and the subject. Responses were analyzed to determine factors that affect ratings and measurement characteristics of peer ratings. SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS: Physician-subjects were selected from among practicing internists in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania who received American Board of Internal Medicine certification 5 to 15 years previously. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE: Physician performance as assessed by peers. RESULTS: Peer ratings are not biased substantially by the method of selection of the peers or the relationship between the rater and the subject. Factor analyses suggest a two-dimensional conceptualization of clinical skills: one factor represents cognitive and clinical management skills and the other factor represents humanistic qualities and management of psychosocial aspects of illness. Ratings from 11 peer physicians are needed to provide a reliable assessment in these two areas. CONCLUSIONS: These findings suggest that it is feasible to obtain assessments from professional associates of practicing physicians in areas such as clinical skills, humanistic qualities, and communication skills. Using a shorter version of the questionnaire used in this study, peer ratings provide a practical method to assess clinical performance in areas such as humanistic qualities and communication skills that are difficult to assess with other measures.
For the analysis of continuous discourse in a wide range of corpora, it is essential both to model and to expand whole-language lexical resources (e.g.,Roget’s International Thesaurus), in order to make such whole-language lexical resources adaptable to differentiated-discourse domains by means of rapid extensibility. Thus, rapidly extensible lexicons are of interest as special-domain extensions to a whole-language lexicon. My presentation argues for the validity of this approach, with specific reference to a viable conceptual, whole-language, foundational lexicon,Roget’s International Thesaurus (1962).
Could a troupe of monkeys really produce Shakespeare if allowed to bang away at the word processor long enough? This age old question, commonly referred to as the Eddington problem, relates to fundamental issues of probability, and is examined in this article in a new light. Based on earlier research by the physicist William Bennett, Jr., the author describes a data structure which enables the computer to simulate the hypothetical monkeys. Exploiting principles of cryptology, the computer leads the simulated monkeys closer to their goal. Though the intent of the article is to encourage humanistic speculation, the final result proves to be quite practical and may come as a surprise to computer scientists and humanists alike.
College students were separated into 2 groups (high and low) on the basis of 3 measures: subjective familiarity ratings of words, self-reported language experiences, and a test of vocabulary knowledge. Three experiments were conducted to determine if the groups also differed in visual word naming, lexical decision, and semantic categorization. High Ss were consistently faster than low Ss in naming visually presented words. They were also faster and more accurate in making difficult lexical decisions and in rejecting homophone foils in semantic categorization. Taken together, the results demonstrate that Ss who differ in lexical familiarity also differ in processing efficiency. The relationship between processing efficiency and working memory accounts of individual differences in language processing is also discussed.
Work under this grant is intended to provide lexical resources for research on natural languages. The principal product is WordNet, a lexical database for English whose organization is inspired by current psycholinguistic theories of human lexical knowledge. Lexicalized concepts are organized by semantic relations for nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs.
Benoît de Cornulier's writings on French poetry concentrate on metrical boundaries, or caesura; however, the the criteria upon which he bases his analyses are useful in studying rhythm, or the relationship between syllables within the alexandrine's twohémistiches. This study focuses on three aspects of rhythm in French poetry: the definition of rhythm following Cornulier; the development of a method using the computer to detect rhythmic patterns in traditional isometrical alexandrines; the results of such a study when applied to three classical seventeenth-century plays which are composed of isometrical alexandrines (Corneille'sPolyeucte, Racine'sPhèdre, and Molière'sLe Tartuffe).
Contains four files: nuka.txt, nukb.txt, nukc.txt, and nukd.txt. Together these appear to constitute a Nukuoro lexical database with English glosses. These files were taken from four 3.5-inch microdisks labeled to indicate that they have accompanying tapes numbered 8, 20, 21, 22, and 23. The tapes were not with the microdisks, and there is no indication of who created the lexical database or tapes.
The Kay Elemetrics nasometer measures nasalance, a parameter of speech that reflects the proportion of total acoustic energy that is emitted nasally, making it possible to infer velopharyngeal (VP) function noninvasively. Nasometric evaluation is potentially widely applicable in the clinical assessment of suspected VF impairment. For clinical use, a patient’s mean nasalance on a passage of known phonetic composition must be compared to age-appropriate population norms. Most potential clinical subjects are young; many are preliterate. Passages for which norms have been established (Zoo, Rainbow, NasalSentences) are syntactically, semantically, and lexically complex, phonetically heterogeneous, phonologically mature, and long. Individual child subjects’ nasalance scores, if obtained at all, are therefore likely to be contaminated by artifacts created through hesitation noises, filled pauses, phonetic deviance from normed target, age differences, and measurement errors induced by coaching procedures. Differences in phonetic content between normed and actual utterances are almost inevitable; they lead to uninterpretable results. This study reports a technique for obtaining clinically useful nasalance scores from young, preliterate subjects, even those evidencing phonological deficits or noncompliant behavior. Large-n norms for preschool and primary children are presented.
I present an entropy measure for evaluating parser performance. The measure is fine-grained, and permits us to evaluate performance at the level of individual phrases. The parsing problem is characterized as statistically approximating the Penn Treebank annotations. I consider a series of models to "calibrate" the measure by determining what scores can be achieved using the most obvious kinds of information. I also relate the entropy measure to measures of recall/precision and grammar coverage.
Computer-aided literature studies have failed to have a significant impact on the field as a whole. This failure is traced to a concentration on how a text achieves its literary effect by the examination of subtle semantic or grammatical structures in single texts or the works of individual authors. Computer systems have proven to be very poorly suited to such refined analysis of complex language. Adopting such traditional objects of study has tended to discourage researchers from using the tool to ask questions to which it is better adapted, the examination of large amounts of simple linguistic features. Theoreticians such as Barthes, Foucault and Halliday show the importance of determining the linguistic and semantic characteristics of the language used by the author and her/his audience. Current technology, and databases like the TLG or ARTFL, facilitate such wide-spectrum analyses. Computer-aided methods are thus capable of opening up new areas of study, which can potentially transform the way in which literature is studied.
Commercial database programs such as dBase and Paradox, although developed originally for business applications, are versatile and powerful tools that can be used for an academic purpose such as evaluating student performance. They can be used to write and store test questions, assemble and print classroom or on-line laboratory tests, and calculate grades, test statistics, and so forth. Databases are flexible, unlike textbook “ancillary” test bank programs that are inextricably bound to the strictly linear format and brief shelf life of specific textbook editions. A prototypical relational database program is described, with which an instructor can produce tests based on generic terms adapted from Boneau’s (1990) study of psychological literacy, as well as on behavioral learning objectives adapted from Bloom’s (1956) taxonomy of educational objectives. As a relational database, the program integrates terms, objectives, questions, tests, and test scores, and avoids unnecessary data duplication and waste of computer storage space.
This paper concurs with Mark Olsen's premise that computer-aided literature studies should take a different direction, one that is more suited to the computer's strength in analyzing large corpora of texts. However, the authors take issue with his conclusion that a reorientation of the notions of textual analysis is necessary in order to exploit the computer's capabilities. Contemporary medieval studies already provides us with models of textual analysis which are well suited to computer development. Though they stem from the particularities of medieval textual production, these models can perhaps be useful in the study of modern literatures.
The difficulties inherent in the evaluation of educational software are described in terms of the tradeoffs between internal, external, and ecological validity. Larger issues in evaluation research design and computer-based instruction are highlighted by primary and metaanalytic studies designed to reveal the effects of computer simulations in psychology classrooms and laboratories. The effectiveness of classroom and laboratory computer activities depends on how the inclusion of software, as well as the evaluation process itself, changes the entire instructional process.
Olsen is right to note what can be done with a good theory and the right machine. His particular theory, however, is not transferable to literary studies. If we need a new model, I would suggest that cognitive science can provide a few interesting ones. I have begun to do some work based on David Marr's VISION, in which he hypothesizes two levels of processing within the visual module. My speculation has been on the parallel existence of distinguishable levels of conceptual or language organization which would correspond to the viewer and object centered perspectives Marr describes for vision. I propose to explore the possibility that we may find here the model for the existence of stylistic individualism within overarching historical stylistic generalizations, and even more, that this may be what feminists are searching for when they try to resist being coopted by the masculine language of objectivity.
The primary objective of this project is to develop a robust, high-performance parser for English by automatically extracting a grammar from an annotated corpus of bracketed sentences, called the Treebank. The project is a collaboration between the IBM Continuous Speech Recognition Group and the University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer Sciences. Our initial focus is the domain of computer manuals with a vocabulary of 3000 words. We use a Treebank that was developed jointly by IBM and the University of Lancaster, England, during the past three years.
ABSTRACT As a case study in the formation of a new written language in a speech community moving from diglossia toward a “standard-with-dialects”, this article analyzes the development of M[odern] W[ritten] C[hinese] during the past 80 years. After a brief account of the historical background, the article discusses the sources and avenues of influence on the development of MWC, then examines the emergent grammatical and lexical norms, and investigates the variations displayed by the four main Chinese communities: mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The role of language planning is also explored. The similarities and differences between China and Western Europe, in their progress from diglossic to non-diglossic communities, are discussed. (Diglossia, Chinese linguistics, written language, language planning)
It has long been known that the pupil dilates as a consequence of attentional effort. But the function that relates attentional input to pupillary output has never been the subject of quantitative analysis. We present a system analysis of the pupillary response to attentional input. Attentional input is modeled as a string ofattentional pulses. We show that the system is linear; the effects of input pulses on the pupillary response are additive. The impulse response has essentially a gamma distribution with two free parameters. These parameters are estimated; they are fairly constant over tasks and subjects. The paper presents a method of estimating the string of attentional input pulses, given some average pupillary output. The method involves the technique of deconvolution; it can be implemented with a public-domain software package, Pupil.
Lack of a critical mass of scholars involved with the computer-assisted analysis of texts (CAAT), coupled with insufficient communication among various sectors of the literary and linguistic disciplines, has led to a skewed notion of computing humanists' work among their colleagues. This paper highlights the gap through examples of misunderstood humanist needs and achievements drawn from both recent media reports and humanities conferences. It suggests that networking and less modesty in manuscript submission can be at least partial solutions. The author cites some of his own published work and work-in-progress on Stendhal and Gobineau in refuting Mark Olsen's thesis that the dominance of single- or dual-author studies must be the cause of CAAT's “failure” to make significant inroads in mainstream literary journals. The author builds a case for the use of both diachronic and synchronic lexico-statistical data in carrying out such studies successfully. He recommends a new “Synthetic Criticism” where relevant quantitative methods would not be absent.
This study compares lexical development in a sample of 25 simultaneous bilingual and 35 monolingual children for whom semilongitudinal data were collected between the ages of 8 and 30 months. A standardized parent report form, the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory (1989), was used to assess the children's receptive and productive vocabulary in English and/or Spanish. A methodology was devised to assess the degree of overlap between the bilingual children's lexical knowledge in one language and their knowledge in the other. Using the measures presented here, there was no statistical basis for concluding that the bilingual children were slower to develop early vocabulary than was the monolingual comparison group. The wide range of vocabulary sizes observed at these ages in normally developing children (Fenson et al., 1991) was observed in these bilingual children as well. The close correspondence of the pattern of the bilinguals' growth in two languages at once to monolinguals' growth in one suggests that norms for lexical development in bilinguals should be made with reference to the children's performance in two languages together.
Although many scholars in literature currently seem mainly interested in theory, the focus on literary texts is what defines literature studies. Computer technology and the statistical methods it fosters are applicable to both the theoretical and to the interpretative issues which scholars of literature habitually address. Genette's distinction between the homodiegetic and the autodiegetic perspective in first-person narrative can be confirmed statistically. Roquentin's loneliness inLa nausée can be shown to be a formal characteristic of the type of novel he narrates, thus validating his commentary on his society. The computer can be used to deal with standard literary questions in a principled fashion, and a new orientation of literature studies on a cultural history model, which Mark Olsen recommends, is not necessary.
Recent articles have noted that humanities computing techniques and methodologies remain marginal to mainstream literary scholarship. Mark Olsen's paper discusses this phenomenon and argues for large scale analyses of text databases that would incorporate a shift in theoretical orientation to include greater stress on intertextuality and sign theory. Part of Olsen's argument revolves on the need to move away from the syntactic and overt grammatical elements of textual language to more subtle semantics and meaning systems. While provocative and important, Olsen's stance remains rooted in literary theoretical constructs. Another level of language, the cognitive, offers equally interesting challenges for humanities computing, though the paradigms for this type of computer-based exploration are derived from disciplines traditionally removed from the humanities. The riddle, a nearly universal genre, offers a window onto some of the cognitive processes involved in deep level language function. By analyzing the riddling process, different methods of computational modelling can be inferred, suggesting new avenues for computing in the humanities.
Humanities computing (HC) has failed to integrate into its practices many of the key theoretical elements of contemporary text and discourse theory. This has in turn contributed to the marginalization of HC in research and teaching. Outdated theoretical models must be abandoned in order to develop a critical discourse based on the insights of HC. HC projects remain far too attached to micro-analyses and have not developed the theoretical and methodological tools necessary to undertake systemic macro-analyses on the level of discourse. Given that texts are a mixture of determinate and dynamic systems, recent developments in chaos theory may be of help in modelling the interrelationship of these elements at discourse level.
Attention is drawn to the need for controlling (during encoding) and checking (after encoding) the quality or accuracy of musical data. Some large databases of melodies are now becoming available, and methods of control and checking are presented which are specially suited to these. Two applications are discussed in detail: to Gregorian Chant and to German folksong. An effective method in tonal and modal music is found to be the investigation of melodic progressions which remain unusual even after amalgamation by transposition to a central register.
We should follow Mark Olsen's lead and think with maximum ambition of the role of the computer in supporting literary research of the highest order. Thus the computer enables us to answer one of the great questions of literary criticism: how does a given writer contribute to the changing language? We can now chart the influence of given writers by correlating their words and phrasing with computerized dictionaries so as to produce profiles and histories of the way words have entered the language.
This paper describes the use of correspondence analysis to create the “space” of a book, constructs that of Kierkegaard'sFear and Trembling as an illustration, and distinguishes three separate contexts of some of its most important words: thespatial context (where the search word lies in that named and ordered space); theoverall context (the x words closest to the search word in multi-dimensional space); and the “role/sense” context (the words associated with the search word in each of its most important roles, some of which may represent new senses.) It describes the identification of these contexts, discusses their importance and concludes by noting certain respects in which the procedure might perhaps be improved.
Optical Character Recognition is shown to be significantly more expensive than keyboarding, using off-shore contractors, for entry of large amounts of text where high accuracy is required. Using large test samples in French and English, the paper indicates that OCR applications which require significant post-scan editing are labor intensive projects that can be accomplished more efficiently by keyboarding. Most OCR systems are still not capable of entering large amounts of text accurately enough to avoid an expensive editing step.
This article uses recent work on the computer-aided analysis of texts by the French writer Céline as a framework to discuss Olsen's paper on the current state of computer-aided literary analysis. Drawing on analysis of syntactic structures, lexical creativity and use of proper names, it makes two points: (1) given a rich theoretical framework and sufficiently precise models, even simple computer tools such as text editors and concordances can make a valuable contribution to literary scholarship; (2) it is important to view the computer not as a device for finding what we as readers have failed to notice, but rather as a means of focussing more closely on what we have already felt as readers, and of verifying hypotheses we have produced as researchers.
The study of signs is divided between those scholars who use the Saussurian binary sign (semiology) and those who prefer Charles Peirce's tripartite sign (semiotics). The common view of the opposition between the two types of signs does not take into consideration the methodological conditions of applicability of these two types of signs. This is particularly important in the field of literary studies and hence for the preparation of electronic programs for text analysis. The Peircian sign explicitly entails the discovery of a truth of meaning that claims to be universal and not reducible to a collection of opinions based on fragmented information; it also imposes the task of elucidating a transhistorical and universal significantion encoded in a text. Contrary to Peirce's view of the sign, our use of computer programs for text analysis, however, demonstrates that we implicitly treat every literary text as a set of linguistic data (letters, phonemes, syntagmatic segments, etc.) which are reducible to units that can be treated separately. A brief comparison of the results obtained from computer analyses of the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé's text, “Le Cygne,” with those obtained from two Peircian analyses (by Riffaterre and Champigny) of the same text demonstrates that our current methods of computer textual analysis are based on a Saussurian semiology, which is unidimensional and limited, and that these methods are still quite unable to produce a semiotic interpretation based on a totalizing hierarchy of the text's various discursive components.
The electronic generation of documents in modern offices will trasform the nature of archives, and also the techniques of historical research. Although considerable attention has been directed to developing research methodologies for social and economic history using computerized numeric data, almost no attention has been paid to the impact of machine readable textual records on historical writing. This article considers the advantages and disadvantages for the historian of the shift from paper records to electronic documents, and suggests a number of approaches to historical research made possible by the new technology.
Although the literature suggests that computers cannot completely replace traditional learning environments, a closer examination of factors that confound method with medium offers new research avenues for successful implementation of computer-based learning at the college level. Five suggestions for successful implementation of computers in the university setting are discussed.
Although Columbus'Diary of the first voyage to America as we know it is largely a transcription of the original diary carried out by Bartolomé de las Casas, commentators and readers often treat it as if it were Columbus' work alone. Editions published to date do not separate the explorer's narrative from that of his transcriber or editor. Since style can influence readers' perceptions of a writer's personality, it is important to determine characteristics of writing attributed to Columbus that may pertain instead to his trascriber. This study employs the computer to explore the style of Las Casas and that of Columbus. Differences in the writing of each “author” emerge with computer assistance by isolating Columbus' words from those of his transcriber and analyzing selected features of vocabulary, sentence length, and syntax.1
Genre and Intergenre in Medieval French Literature* Sara Sturm-Maddox & Donald Maddox T HE FACT THAT modern genre theory often pays scant attention to the literary production of the Middle Ages, or avoids it altogether, may be due in part to the special, particularly prob lematic case created by the vast universe of medieval textualities. On the one hand, the criterion of form common to many theoretical statements is singularly unhelpful with regard to the earliest phase of vernacular lit erature in Europe, in which verse, very often octosyllabic verse, was the almost exclusive literary medium, not only of the lyric but of works rang ing in their conventional classification from hagiography to epic to romance to historiography; on the other hand, various and shifting publics and performative contexts—oral/written, learned/popular— render descriptive categorization highly speculative. Early vernacular literary production, moreover, took place in the virtual absence of theo retical pronouncements concerning generic properties.1 One finds sporadic evidence of systems of classification founded on matières, as in Jehan Bodel’s distinction among the matières de France, de Rome, and de Bretagne.2While such divisions may be identified as components of certain genres, they are not in themselves determinants of genre; Wace’s Brut, introducing the Arthurian material into the vernacular, identifies his own work as both “geste” and “ romanz.” 3 As the critical attention of recent decades has focused diversely on these questions, entrenched assumptions about how individual texts relate to the larger literary system have increasingly come to be perceived as inadequate for our understanding of medieval literary practice. From a diachronic perspective, for example, it is apparent that “ it is the literary masterpiece, not the learned treatise, that provides the rules of the genre.” 4 Seminal texts—the Hildesheim manuscript of the Vie de Saint Alexis, the Oxford manuscript of the Chanson de Roland, the Harley manuscript of the lais of Marie de France, etc.—become the measure for those that follow; a spate of “imitations,” “ rewritings,” and “ continuations” affirm that the earliest romans “ define” the genre, both for poets and for audiences. Yet there are early and significant Vol. XXXIII, No. 4 3 L ’E sprit C réateur movements away from the norms that might be inferred from this early corpus, and difficulties of classification soon arise as successive texts assert their individuality. As the list of texts subjected to critical scrutiny lengthens to include more and more “ non-canonical” works, it becomes apparent that the description and classification of medieval literary pro duction in the vernacular must be based, not on a set of liminal cate gories afforded by established poetic conventions, but on the works themselves. For these reasons, Hans Robert Jauss’s lament that surveys of litera ture still adhere to nineteenth-century generic classifications, themselves based on canons founded in Antiquity and revived in the modern “ classical” period, was nothing less than a challenge to reframe the ques tion of genre (art. cit.). Since then, the question has opened onto a broad cross-section of sometimes complementary, yet often competing theo retical perspectives. In the case of medieval works, the traditional generic designations have been augmented by sub-categories, e.g., “ historical romance” or “ religious romance,” 5 and new categories have been pro posed, e.g., in this issue, “ genealogy” and “ pseudo-autobiography.” 6 Attention has been called to the mobility of matière among genres, as in the case of “ romance” elements introduced into “ epic” texts.7Among other recent suggestions, Paul Zumthor distinguished between “ registre” and “genre littéraire”: while he characterizes a lyric genre as “ un groupement de thèmes, actualisés dans une certaine forme très générale,” a “registre” is a lexical, rhetorical, and stylistic level of coherence which may cut across, or “traverse,” several genres without becoming com pletely identified with any one of them.8 Eugene Vance, on the other hand, invokes “ la problématique du signe” with regard to the evolution of medieval literary genres and the creation of works that appear to be anomalous.9Jauss, arguing that a “ process of the continuous establish ing and altering of horizons... determines the relationship of the indi vidual text to...
Efficient exploratory data analysis (EDA) may be aided by succinct, but informative, graphical representations (e.g., Tukey plots) that convey information about central tendency, variability, and shape of distributions, and that permit detection of outliers. Using research strategies adapted from studies of cross-modal perceptual equivalence, we show how auditory analogies of such displays may offer an effective alternative to visual plots for EDA.
Contains two files: hawpn.txt and hawpn2.txt. Together these appear to constitute a Hawaiian lexical database with English glosses. These files were taken from one 3.5-inch microdisk labeled to indicate that it has accompanying tapes numbered 11, 12, and 13. The tapes were not with the microdisk, and there is no indication of who created the lexical database or tapes.
The MR Report Assistant is designed to perform the types of routine tasks that computers do well, while freeing the skilled psychologist to concentrate on tasks that are best done by knowledgeable humans. The Assistant is intended for reporting the results of psychological evaluation of known or suspected mental retardation patients using a standard battery consisting of the WAIS-R, the Vineland, and an interview. The program encourages the inclusion of additional information by writing to a disk file suitable for editing with a word processor, rather than directly to a printer. Research and training are encouraged by making the program available to qualified persons at no charge.
The elements of desirable research design for the evaluation of educational technology are discussed with reference to the context of existing research. Sources of internal invalidity, type of compared educational activity, and outcome measures are considered. Finally, recommendations regarding the direction of evaluation research are made. Research designs that take into account the characteristics of the learner, the software, and the teacher preferably within the framework of a model of the learning process should be adopted.
This research examined how training and experience, family roles, and gender of observed family leadership affect ratings of family and individual parent functioning. Observer perceptions of video-taped family interviews were compared to determine the relative influence of male and female leadership. The influence of training was determined by comparing the perceptions of trained and naive observers. One hundred forty (70 naive, 70 experienced) adults from a large university and midwestern city participated in the experiment. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two family interview conditions: (a) matriarchical, and (b) patriarchical. After viewing the video-taped family interviews, participants completed forms assessing the parents and families. The assessments included ratings of family communication, family conflict negotiation, family support and nurturance, parent helpfulness to family functioning, and parent individual adjustment. For the three family measures, a multivariate analysis of variance was conducted. Results indicate experienced observers are vulnerable to bias against female family leadership whereas naive observers show no comparable tendency. For the two measures of parent functioning, a mixed model multivariate analysis of variance was conducted. Results indicate that although experienced observers offer more critical ratings than their naive counterparts, vulnerability to bias against women as family leaders is not significantly influenced by training and experience. Evaluations of parent and family functioning appear the result of the combined influence of several factors. As a consequence, vulnerability to bias in family evaluations likely occurs in a complicated and potentially discrete fashion. This complexity promotes serious concern with respect to the ability of training to reduce the propensity for gender discriminating practice.
Describes a synthesis-by-analogy system which is a model of novel-word pronunciation by humans. It uses analogy in both orthographic and phonological domains and is applied to the pronunciation of novel words in British English and German. A major part of this cross-language study concerned the impact of implementational choices on performance, where this was defined as the ability of the system to produce pronunciations in line with those given by humans. The size and content of the lexical database on which any analogy system must be based were also considered. The better performing implementations produced useful results for both British English and German. However, best results for each of the 2 languages were obtained from different implementations. The system described is also a psychological model of reading aloud. (German & French abstracts) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved)
Contains three files: kapa.txt, kapb.txt, and kapc.txt. Together these appear to constitute a Kapingamarangi lexical database with English glossing. These files were taken from three 3.5-inch microdisks labeled to indicate that they have accompanying tapes numbered 14, 15, and 16. The tapes were not with the microdisks, and there is no indication of who created the lexical database or tapes.
This paper describes a procedure for obtaining conditional accuracy functions(CAFs) from naive observers and a restricted number of trials. The method permits the experimenter to counter the subjects’ tendency to favor accuracy in tasks in which stimulus discrimination is easy. Each time a block of 12 trials contains less than three errors, observers are instructed, by means of a speed-up signal, to respond faster. The subject is continuously informed about her/his effective reaction time. The data show that the desired speed-accuracy tradeoff was obtained within each of the 7 observers. The mean percent error was around 25%.
The Learning Systems Department at Siemens Corporate Research is investigating the use of concept spaces to increase retrieval effectiveness. Similar to a semantic net, a concept space is a construct that defines the semantic relationships among ideas. The current focus of our research is to exploit the information in such a structure to ameliorate known shortcomings of statistical retrieval methods while maintaining the statistical methods' robustness. Our initial concept space is extracted from WordNet, a manually-constructed lexical database developed at Princeton University.
This article addresses the methodological problem of the non-linear representation of philosophical systems in a computerized knowledge base. It is a problem of knowledge representation as defined in the field of artificial intelligence. Instead of a purely theoretical discussion of the issue, we present selected results of a practical experiment which has in itself some theoretical significance. We show how one can represent different philosophies using CODE, a knowledge engineering system developed by artificial intelligence researchers. The hypothesis is that such a computer based representation of philosophical systems can give insight into their conceptual structure. We argue that computer aided text analysis can apply knowledge representation tools and techniques developed in artificial intelligence and we estimate how philosophers as well as knowledge engineers could gain from this cross-fertilization. This paper should be considered as an experiment report on the use of knowledge representation techniques in computer aided text analysis. It is part of a much broader project on the representation of conceptual structures in an expert system. However, we intentionally avoided technical issues related to either Computer Science or History of Philosophy to focus on the benefit to enhance traditional humanistic studies with tools and methods developed in AI on the one hand and the need to develop more appropriate tools on the other.
ABSTRACT: Despite the current extensive research on many variables associated with English language testing, little attention has been focused on the inherent variability in the linguistic ‘norms’ for Standard English that are generally tested. This paper examines data from domains of Standard English in several native‐speaker (e.g. British) and non‐native (e.g. Malaysian) varieties of English, focusing on linguistic and attitudinal factors leading to changes in these norms. It then discusses implications of these changes for test construction aimed at assessing proficiency in English as a global language, particularly through such standardized instruments as the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC).