Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
18265 papers
Musical stimuli are widely used in emotion research and intervention studies. However, reviews have repeatedly noted that a lack of pre-evaluated musical stimuli is stalling progress in our understanding of specific effects of varying music. Musical stimuli vary along a plethora of dimensions. Of particular interest are emotional valence and tempo. Thus, we aimed to evaluate the emotional valence of a set of slow and fast musical stimuli. N = 102 (mean age: 39.95, SD: 13.60, 61% female) participants rated the perceived emotional valence in 20 fast (>110 beats per minute [bmp]) and 20 slow (<90 bpm) stimuli. Moreover, we collected reports on subjective arousal for each stimulus to explore arousal's association with tempo and valence. Finally, participants completed questionnaires on demographics, mood (profile of mood states), personality (10-item personality index), musical sophistication (Gold-music sophistication index), and sound preferences and hearing habits (sound preference and hearing habits questionnaire). Using mixed-effect model estimates, we identified 19 stimuli that participants rated to have positive valence and 16 stimuli that they rated to have negative valence. Higher age predicted more positive valence ratings across stimuli. Higher tempo and more extreme valence ratings were each associated with higher arousal. Higher educational attainment was also associated with higher arousal reports. Pre-evaluated stimuli can be used in future musical research.
This paper investigates how different textile materials on the wrist bands may mediate the affective experience of two forms of tactile icons, namely stroking and squeezing. To this end, we designed Emoband, a wrist-worn textile-based tactile display that can stroke or squeeze on wearers’ wrists through the moving fabrics. We conducted two studies on the participants’ valence and arousal ratings towards the stroking and squeezing feedback from Emoband, respectively. Results showed that the valence ratings were significantly affected by the stroking or squeezing parameters and the wristband’s material, interactively. The movement-related parameters dominated the arousal rating. Meanwhile, the valence ratings demonstrated different tendencies between the two tactile feedback, with the valence increasing and decreasing along with the strength of stroking and squeezing, respectively. Besides, the valence ratings of the stroking stimuli demonstrated varied distributions across different materials, indicating the materials’ varying affective expressiveness in the wrist-worn haptic devices.
O artigo analisa variações no PetroGold, um treebank padrão ouro desenvolvido para o processamento de linguagem natural (PLN). Os resultados mostram que considerar a classe gramatical das expressões multipalavras na anotação de todas as palavras que as compõem, assim como simplificar o tagset sintático do treebank, produz modelos com melhor desempenho em algumas métricas, destacando a importância da modelagem linguística durante a anotação para resultados adequados no PLN. Os datasets utilizados no estudo estão disponíveis em um repositório dedicado, podendo ser ainda mais modificados para treinar melhores modelos de linguagem.
Emotional vocabulary development represents a growing field of interest.Studies show that children use emotional words starting from the age of two (Izard & Harris, 1995; Michalson & Lewis, 1985).Between 3 and 5 years, children develop their ability to name basic emotions (e.g., joy, sadness, surprise, disgust, anger, fear).Li and Yu (2015) observed that 2-13-years-old Chinese children comprehend positive emotion words earlier than negative and neutral ones.This result is probably link to the fact that valence is an early key dimension in emotion conceptual representation (Nook et al., 2017).If many studies investigated emotion words comprehension, only few studies investigated spontaneous vocabulary young children use to refer to emotions in reaction to emotional and non-emotional stimuli.The present experiment measured the use of emotional vocabulary during an emotional valence rating task of words, pictures, words-pictures combined.More precisely, 178 young French children aged 4-, 5-and 6-years-old were observed while rating stimuli.These ratings were made using a three points emotional valence rating scale (negative, neutral, and positive) based on AEJE scale (Largy, 2018).The 90 words, 90 pictures, 90 words-pictures combined were divided in sets of 15 stimuli.Each child rated all sets of stimuli in separate sessions in random order.Children's utterances containing emotion words were recorded.The content form of these emotional words produced was analyzed thanks to EMOVAL software (Leveau, Jhean-Larose & Denhire, 2011).EMOVAL is an automatic evaluation of emotional valence and arousal of texts, sentences using a 5656 root-words meta norm in French and in English.It also extracts emotional semantic topics from texts and sentences.First, analyses highlighted that young children use more positive emotion vocabulary compared to negative one.This result is congruent with the positive bias observed while young children rated emotional valence of stimuli (Syssau & Monnier, 2009).Like comprehension of emotional words, the use of positive emotion vocabulary occurs earlier in the development than negative one.Second, it was found that with increasing of age, the use of emotion vocabulary enhanced.If children aged 4 used topics that refer to primary emotions, children aged 5 and 6 used larger and more complex emotional topics.Discussion focused on the understanding of children's daily emotional language environments, and the implications of these for early educators and teachers.
Psycholinguistic properties such as concept familiarity and concreteness have been investigated in relation to technological innovations in teaching and learning. Due to ongoing advances in semantic representation and machine learning technologies, the automatic extrapolation of lexical psycholinguistic properties has received increased attention across a number of disciplines in recent years. However, little attention has been paid to the reliable and interpretable assessment of familiarity ratings for domain concepts. To address this gap, we present a regression model grounded in advanced natural language processing and interpretable machine learning techniques that can predict domain concepts’ familiarity ratings based on their lexical features. Each domain concept is represented at both the orthographic–phonological level and semantic level by means of pretrained word embedding models. Then, we compare the performance of six tree-based regression models (adaptive boosting, gradient boosting, extreme gradient boosting, a light gradient boosting machine, categorical boosting, and a random forest) on domain concepts’ familiarity rating prediction. Experimental results show that categorical boosting with the lowest MAPE (0.09) and the highest R2 value (0.02) is best suited to predicting domain concepts’ familiarity. Experimental results also revealed the prospect of integrating tree-based regression models and interpretable machine learning techniques to expand psycholinguistic resources. Specifically, findings showed that the semantic information of raw words and parts of speech in domain concepts are reliable indicators when predicting familiarity ratings. Our study underlines the importance of leveraging domain concepts’ familiarity ratings; future research should aim to improve familiarity extrapolation methods. Scholars should also investigate the correlation between students’ engagement in online discussions and their familiarity with domain concepts.
The Word Lexical Database is a vast collection of English words that categorizes nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs into sets of cognitive synonyms. This database may seem similar to a thesaurus, as it also groups words based on their meanings, but there are key differences. Unlike a thesaurus that only links word forms, the Word Lexical Database links specific senses of words, thereby disambiguating words found in close proximity. Additionally, the Word Lexical Database annotates the semantic relationships between words, whereas a thesaurus does not follow any explicit pattern besides meaning similarity in the grouping of words.
Delimiting and correctly annotating multiword expressions (MWEs) is an important task in constructing a gold standard treebank. In this paper, we applied three methods to the PetroGold corpus to identify MWE candidates. The methods include (1) leveraging expressions previously identified by the PALAVRAS annotator, (2) statistical analysis of collocations in Petroles, a larger non-annotated corpus, and (3) a curated list of co-occurring words from the POeTiSA project. Through extensive filtering and alignment with Universal Dependencies (UD) guidelines, we revised the annotations of 2,467 MWEs in the PetroGold corpus, we tested a new annotation for the part-of-speech (POS) of the words that are part of MWEs and we provide two computationally readable resources to assist other annotators.
Treebanks annotated with Universal Dependencies (UD) are currently available for over 100 languages and are widely utilized by the community. However, their inherent characteristics are hard to measure and are only partially reflected in parser evaluations via accuracy metrics like LAS. In this study, we analyze a large subset of the UD treebanks using three recently proposed accuracy-free dataset analysis methods: dataset cartography, 𝒱-information, and minimum description length. Each method provides insights about UD treebanks that would remain undetected if only LAS was considered. Specifically, we identify a number of treebanks that, despite yielding high LAS, contain very little information that is usable by a parser to surpass what can be achieved by simple heuristics. Furthermore, we make note of several treebanks that score consistently low across numerous metrics, indicating a high degree of noise or annotation inconsistency present therein.
Princeton University, including the various language programs it offers, has intentionally resisted distance learning for decades, primarily out of a desire to concentrate on the residential undergraduate educational experience. While the COVID-19 pandemic prompted sweeping changes to policies regarding remote instruction, they were temporary and are already, albeit irregularly, reverting to established, pre-pandemic norms. At the level of individual course or program curricula, however, potentially enduring adjustments have now taken root. In our second-year German courses, a convergence of factors, from video-based instructional modes and assignments to the poorly timed, as it felt then, roll-out of a new learning management system (LMS), have reshaped and helped redesign our approach to computer-assisted language learning (CALL) in the taught curriculum, classroom time, homework, and the modes of communication prioritized in assignments. Pandemic-related disruptions and institutional responses to them varied geographically and politically. In New Jersey, USA, state-level restrictions and institutional decisions resulted in the closure of campus instructional spaces from the halfway point of the 2020 spring semester through the end of the 2020–2021 academic year, with further precautions, mitigations, and flexible responses throughout the following academic year, including but not limited to frequent reversion to remote instruction during periods of high incidence, interior masking requirements, and social distancing when possible in classroom spaces. This situation prompted two sets of considerations, the first centered on adapting a remote instruction curricular and technological framework, the second on returning, however haltingly, to “normal” while adapting previous changes to unusual in-person environments. Our department was among the initial LMS implementation group in fall 2020. For the past six years, I have also redesigned, expanded, and aligned our second-year German program with the first year, which is based on a high-frequency core vocabulary and the development of contextual reading strategies, among other approaches (for a detailed description of approach, form, and function, see Oberlin, in press). In the spring semester of 2020 prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, I began testing the development of a new online curricular platform on the Canvas LMS (https://www.instructure.com/canvas), which has subsequently fully replaced Blackboard (https://www.blackboard.com/) at Princeton. The first semester of the Canvas implementation thus coincided with the first semester of fully remote instruction, while the remote half-semester prior remained on Blackboard; pre-pandemic, the LMS was used primarily as a repository for syllabi, electronic documents, and discussion boards. In the immediate context of the institutional shutdown effective March 14, 2020, which was announced just before the week of spring break, faculty had approximately 9 days to reenvision remote instruction to commence the week after. Of the many tools and approaches considered during this frantic and bewildering week, one stands out: the application of outside-of-class student-to-student communication via Zoom or other video-conferencing technologies with written follow-up to fulfill a number of desiderata: (1) that students speak more in an alternate assignment format given the realities of affective and technological hurdles while using video conferencing software; (2) that they are provided with an unsupervised opportunity to speak in an effort to reduce anxiety; (3) that self-scheduled partner work might offer flexibility necessary during home-based study and the various complications and distractions that entails, particularly during a period of ongoing disruptions; and (4) that a written response to this oral communication would generate classroom discussion, deepen engagement with materials, and present instructors with another avenue for teacher–student feedback and the assessment of sentence- or paragraph-level writing. While other types of oral communication were considered, for example, asynchronous recordings (see Ly, 2022), unrecorded and unobserved communication was selected for one type of assignment in order to foster confidence in speaking in an unusual environment of increased affective hurdles (Conroy & Lykens, 2022, pp. 119–120). This weekly assignment, a meaning-focused task (see Heift & Rimrott, 2012, on the efficacy of CALL task types in German) called a Partnergespräch in our curriculum, consists of a 20-min voice- or voice and video-based conversation between two or at most three students, based on a given prompt, usually a set of questions about curricular materials and the use of certain grammatical forms (e.g., the past subjunctive or the passive) and followed by a written exercise submitted on the LMS, either a summary of the partner's contributions or a reflection on the outcome of the conversation if a synthesis or agreement is requested. Any technology during remote instruction was allowed, provided that students did not simply text, email, or otherwise write to one another without speaking; students reported using Zoom, Facetime, Skype, Facebook Messenger, and telephone calls to complete the assignments. Now that we have returned to classroom teaching, some students choose to meet in person and others continue to meet virtually due to preference or ease of scheduling. Examples of current topics and materials across both second-year courses include analyzing specific themes or passages in novels and graphic novels (e.g., Heimat, Krug, 2018; Madgermanes, Weyhe, 2016; Im Westen nichts Neues, Remarque, 2014), films, and other materials tied to units on topics such as small text forms, rhetoric, phraseology, and media linguistics. Student responses from past semesters are shared anonymously after certain class discussions with current cohorts, particularly when opinions or perspectives diverge or shift over time. While instructors are unable to listen to the conversations (i.e., they are both unsupervised and unrecorded, a different approach than the dialogues discussed in Groepper, 2022), the conversations and the written responses have led to increased participation on assigned topics, materials, and questions in class, and course evaluations also suggest that they have been effective. For example, a student in an intensive intermediate course during the interrupted semester (spring 2020) mentioned that “I actually got more speaking practice than I would have due to the regularly scheduled discussions with the professor and my conversation partner. This sort of structure is great for online classes, and should be adopted more widely.” In the summer of 2020, a remote course took the place of our immersion program in Munich, during which a student in an intermediate class noted that “the structure of one-on-one partnered discussions” was “always helpful.” Another in an advanced course during the first fully remote semester (fall 2020) said “[m]y spoken German improved a lot in this course. The Partnergespräch was a big part of this.” After we returned to in-person instruction and the assignments were maintained as part of an increasingly utilized flipped-classroom approach, an advanced student in the tumultuous fall of 2021 provided feedback that has since proved beneficial: “Many of the assignments were great and wonderful [for] thinking and writing in German; however, I felt that the frequencies of the Partnergespräche were unhelpful and sometimes prioritized breadth over depth. I would prefer them to be longer and weekly rather than shorter and more frequent.” Both structures, twice and once weekly with shorter and longer prompts, are now in place in the third and fourth semesters, respectively. These assignments are broadly applicable to live, hybrid, and remote instructional modes. They can be scaled to a large extent in terms of the overall number, spacing, time span, prompts, and follow-up tasks and are technologically accessible to any student with a computer or smartphone or, in the case of live instruction, to all students without technological assistance and therefore bear no cost. The assignments support flipped curricula in providing a pre-lesson space for engaging with materials and one's peers before dealing with a topic in writing, all of which precede classroom discussions and activities. They can be minimally burdensome in terms of student time, that is, in our curriculum, they often replace other grammatical or lexical homework on days they are assigned rather than add to extant tasks. This is one small part of an overall Complex Adaptive Blended Language Learning System approach (Ortner, 2021; Wang et al., 2015) that seeks to center pedagogy over technology and adapt to changing circumstances, local conditions, student needs, and program goals. Furthermore, we hope that this and similar changes to the curriculum will continue to bridge the gap between theories of learner autonomy and the efficacy of task-based language learning (Schmenk, 2012). Adam Oberlin is a Senior Lecturer and the Academic Director of the Princeton in Vienna program in the Department of German at Princeton University, where he coordinates second-year courses and is developing new approaches to curricular development from corpus linguistic, lexicological, and historical linguistic perspectives.
“M. Marcel Proust has just published the third volume of his childhood memories,” wrote an exceptionally obtuse reviewer of Le Côté de Guermantes in 1920 (qtd. 130). That's one of the generic frames within which À la recherche du temps perdu has been read; other descriptions include “a psychological novel, a novel about time and memory, later a novel about art and aesthetic experience, a philosophical novel, a phenomenological one, and perhaps only later still a novel with a deeply anthropological and sociological bent, a novel interested in how culture happens, how language is a space in which culture happens, in which it is possible to watch culture happening over time, and to watch social change occur as culture happens” (125). The latter is of course the description closest to Michael Lucey's heart; his Proust is an ethnographer of the work done by language, and more generally a kind of wild sociologist who is deeply attentive to the playing out of social roles in conversation and in the idiosyncrasies of speech. The project of What Proust Heard is at once to analyze that narrative mode and to inculcate in the reader a novelistic form of attention to talk and to the social patterns that are revealed and enacted in talk.Two metadiscourses meet in this book. One is the series of reflections made by Proust's narrator on the conversations and the speech patterns of characters in the novel, including (by implication) those of the hero himself. The other is a set of theoretical languages elaborated by Mikhail Bakhtin, Erving Goffman, Pierre Bourdieu, and above all by the linguistic anthropologist Michael Silverstein.Let me start with the former. What the narrator notices and returns to again and again is a depth that underlies all talk (what Nathalie Sarraute calls the sous-conversation) (220). His interest is not in what is said but in how it is said and what that underlying subtext tells us about the speakers. Every act of speech carries with it the traces of a complex personal and interpersonal history, a linguistic habitus displaying the patterns of class, gender, and culture that are mobilized when characters speak. Everyday talk involves the attempt to decipher those traces and to ratify the social roles performed by speakers, as well as the social capital they claim and that is either granted or denied by their interlocutor; and much of the novel's comic force arises from its representation of the failed assumption of a shared habitus.Take, for example, a conversation centered on the Duc de Guermantes that Lucey analyzes at some length. The duke has expressed his regret that his nephew, Robert de Saint-Loup, has aligned himself with the supporters of Dreyfus: “With a name like ‘the Marquis de Saint-Loup,’” he remarks, “one isn't a Dreyfusard.” The narrator then appeals to one of two “laws of language” to explain the duke's use of the inappropriate phrase “with a name like” (“quand on s'appelle”). One of them “demands that we should express ourselves like others in our mental category and not of our caste”; the duke is speaking like a grocer. The other law is that from time to time there arise, as though by pure chance, “modes of expression that one hears in the same decade on the lips of people who have in no way concerted their efforts to use them” (qtd. 16). The first law, as Lucey paraphrases, “has to do with registers and how they are disseminated, and the second has to do, perhaps, with lexical innovation, borrowing, and diffusion” (17). The play of shifting registers continues in this conversation with interventions by an archivist and a historian: The former introduces a lexical novelty (the term “mentality” to describe a state of mind). The latter, “anxious to be part of the conversation,” points out that the word “mentality” occurs more frequently than the adjective “talentuous” (which the duke has just remarked on), citing as his authority the fact that “I'm on a committee at the Ministry of Education where I've heard it on several occasions, and also at my club, the Volney, and even at dinner at M. Émile Ollivier's.” To which the duke scathingly replies—“with false humility but with a vanity so deep-seated that his lips could not refrain from a smile”—that, since he doesn't have the honor of belonging to the Ministry of Education, nor of belonging to the Volney Club (“my only clubs are the Union and the Jockey—I don't believe you belong to the Jockey, monsieur?”), nor of having been invited to dine with M. Ollivier, he hasn't come across the word “mentality” (qtd. 20–21). Social caste is asserted, a social hierarchy reaffirmed.Although characters thus confirm their social roles by repeatedly performing them, their speech is not reducible to the expression of social position: the duke will, under certain circumstances, speak like a grocer. Much of the narrator's metadiscourse is directed to the slippery negotiations of position that take place in talk. Sexual codes are a particularly rich source of positional ambiguity: Charlus has to work out whether being called “one of us” by M. Verdurin means that his sexual proclivities (and thus, surprisingly, Verdurin's) have been revealed or that something more innocuous is intended, and the narrator is driven to anguish by Albertine's abruptly expressed desire to “me faire casser...,” which he reconstructs (“me faire casser le pot”) as referring to an obscene sexual act (158). Aesthetic codes similarly work both to shape a shared social space and to divide it through operations of distinction and exclusion: Elstir, Bergotte, and Vinteuil act as touchstones by which characters judge and are judged (Charlus signals reverence during a performance of the Vinteuil Septet, Mme. Verdurin performs absorption, and the narrator, anticipating Bourdieu, constructs and reconstructs the social field across which judgments of taste and the concomitant judgments of character are distributed).In a series of interludes between chapters Lucey extends Proust's narrator's fascination with the forms and uses of talk to other novelists who share that fascination: Honoré de Balzac, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Nathalie Sarraute, and Rachel Cusk. These interludes shift the focus from Proust to the description of a specific genre of the novel that culminates, paradoxically, in Cusk's tonally flat representations of talk which leave it entirely to the reader to make sense of motive and intention: her metadiscourse is present only as inference. We might wonder, though: Which novels would be excluded from this tradition? Which novelists are not particularly interested in the social dynamics of talk? And when Lucey speculates on how a reader would decipher motive and social patterning in a novel made up entirely of dialogue (Ivy Compton-Burnett comes to mind), he doesn't push this to think about how such deciphering might work in the limit case of drama and dramatic irony.The second metadiscourse elaborated in What Proust Heard is drawn from Bakhtin's account of speech genres (but not, unfortunately, except in passing, the early work of Bakhtin/Vološinov and Bakhtin/Medvedev); Goffman's account of the splitting of the author function between animator, author, and principal; Bourdieu's account of habitus, field, and the logic of practice; and Michael Silverstein's linguistic anthropology (but not, unfortunately, the social semiotics of Michael Halliday, which covers much of the same ground as Silverstein but more lucidly and with somewhat more linguistic complexity in its theorization of the interlocking determinations of speech registers). Here the key construct is the “social indexicality” of language, a concept that invites us to attend not to the denotational force of speech but to the social markers it carries and the social work it performs. Lucey's reading of Silverstein is grounded in a compelling critique of the limitations of speech act theory and of H. Paul Grice's “cooperative principle.” The tradition that stretches from J. L. Austin through Grice and John Searle understands language-in-use in ways that are instrumentalist and acontextual, oriented to the speaker's intention and to the truth-values carried by speech. As Goffman puts it, however, talk is less about giving information than about “giving shows” (98). For Silverstein, language has an indexical rather than an illocutionary force: it carries embedded information about role relationships and it projects “consequential social action”; its “indexical entailments” are “more various than normal construals of performativity allow for” (223–24). Whereas Grice's account of conversational implicatures expresses a kind of philosopher's fantasy about the use of talk for the rational and cooperative construction of a shared project, where participants are expected to speak transparently, economically, truthfully, and to the point, “neither Proust nor linguistic anthropology proceeds from the assumption of reciprocity, and so neither finds it normal that an easily or widely shared reference to a common repository of illocutionary possibilities or metapragmatic functions necessarily produces a uniform recognition of what transpires in this or that instance of language use” (32–33). To the contrary: what Proust takes from Dostoevsky is a thematics of mutual incomprehension, such that any conversation between, say, the narrator and Albertine is largely opaque to their respective “intentions,” and speakers are never fully the subjects or authors of their speech. Many of the most interesting and most subtle readings in the book are explorations of the tormented dynamic that holds the narrator and Albertine together and apart.The two metadiscourses elaborated in this book—that of the narrator, and a social-scientific discourse—are interrelated; but the form of their relationship is something of a problem. At times Proust (or the narrator) figures as a kind of precursor of social theory; at others that theory acts as a supplement, translating the narrator's analyses of talk into explicitly sociological terms. I'm not entirely convinced that that act of translation adds significant value, however, and I have a particular concern about Silverstein's concept of the social “indexicality” of language. The Peircean indexical sign operates by means of a direct existential or physical connection between the sign and its object: the connection may be causal, or it may be spatiotemporal, as in the case of deictic indices. The concept of social indexicality thus seems to indicate that role relationships can be read off from spoken text, with immediate legibility, and it points to actual relations of power and solidarity conveyed in talk rather than to relations that are projected but not necessarily accomplished: to discursive positions that don't simply or immediately reflect actual social positions (the duke speaking like a grocer). To put this differently, the logic of the concept of indexicality cuts short an analysis of the negotiation through talk of rhetorical positions, and the interpretive ploys that all such negotiation involves.One of the consequences of this logic is played out in Lucey's response to a reflection by Cusk on the instability of character in her novels. She tells her interviewer that “we're very used to a novel being carried by a self that we believe in, and we believe in it as a simulation, or a representation of us. We think that's what our experiences are like, and this is the form which that experience of being in a self is like, and I don't believe that. I don't think that's true. I think... that experience is much more lateral and oceanic” (258). To which Lucey replies that “of course, it is probably statistically more likely that certain kinds of people will share certain experiences than others, will be informed by certain kinds of experience than others, will talk in one way rather than another.... Cusk's novels constantly hover on the brink of this kind of self-reflexivity. Proust's narrator hovers on this same brink” (259).I don't want to make too much of this: Lucey's reading of Proust is fully attentive to the indeterminacies and instabilities of character and to the “distributive authorship” of speech (276). But one of the ways in which Proust is not doing the kind of norm-governed classificatory work that a sociologist like Bourdieu does has to do with his fascination with the dispersal of “character”: the atavism that finds us speaking the language of our parents and acquiring the racial features of our ancestors; the slippage of one character into another through the myriad transformations of desire and identity in this most fluid of novels. Proust may indeed have an ethnographic sensibility, but his commitment as a novelist is not only to the descriptive but also to the transformative and the Cratylic powers of language.
This dataset is an extraction of the data contained in <em>LinkEast</em>, a lexical database of Eastern Polynesian languages. <em>LinkEast </em>is housed at the Université de la Polynésie française, within <em>Anareo</em>, a digital infrastructure dedicated to research on and documentation of the languages of French Polynesia. This data (v1.0) is based primarily on the Linguistic Atlas of French Polynesia (Charpentier & François, 2015). References:<br> Charpentier, Jean-Michel, & François, Alexandre, 2015, <em>Atlas linguistique de la Polynésie française</em>, Berlin et Papeete, Mouton de Gruyter et Université de la Polynésie française.
* Introduction This is the Khmer ALT of the Asian Language Treebank (ALT) Corpus. Please refer to<br> http://www2.nict.go.jp/astrec-att/member/mutiyama/ALT/index.html<br> for an introduction of the ALT project. The process of building the Khmer ALT began with sampling about 20,000 sentences from English Wikinews, and then these sentences were translated into Khmer language.<br> <br> The English Wikinews<br> https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page<br> is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.<br> https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/ * License Khmer ALT has been developed by NICT and CADT (a.k.a. NIPTICT). The license of Khmer ALT is Academic Research Non-Commercial Limited CC-BY-NC-SA Reference-Type License Agreement Terms and Conditions The use of this material (copyrighted material, data, etc.) is permitted under the conditions similar to the Creative Commons "Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike" License. However, the purpose of use shall not only be "NonCommercial" but must be “for Academic Research and Non-Commercial”.<br> The detailed legal provisions are listed at the end of the document, but the outline is as follows. You are free to:<br> Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format<br> Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material<br> The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms. Under the following terms:<br> Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.<br> Academic Research&Non-Commercial — You may use the material only for academic research purposes and may not use it for commercial purposes.<br> ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original. In this Terms and Conditions, academic research purposes are not associated with the interpretation of the Creative Commons License, and shall refer to "the purpose of intellectual creative activities conducted by persons belonging to institutions of higher education and research institutes, etc. in order to develop a better and affluent society through exploration of the truth about nature, humans, society, etc., discovery of new principles and laws, and application of these in a wide range of fields from natural sciences to human and social sciences." Non-commercial means: not for the purpose of any contribution to a for-profit or commercial business. The outcome of research and development activities initially undertaken without the purpose of contributing in any way to a for-profit or commercial business shall not be permitted to be used later to contribute to one. The legal provisions of this license are: the terms of Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode) plus the following rider clauses. On that note, the Terms and Conditions of this license are not equal to that of the Creative Commons license—they were inspired by them and share most of the terms and conditions with them, but shall be considered as a different license. Rider Clauses<br> 1. "Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License" in the title and preamble shall read "Academic Research Non-Commercial Limited CC-BY-NC-SA Compliant License Agreeement Terms and Conditions".<br> 2. Article 1 c and g shall be deleted.<br> 3. Article 1 k shall be amended as follows:<br> k. "Academic Research Purposes" shall refer to the purpose of intellectual creative activities conducted by persons belonging to institutions of higher education and research institutes, etc. in order to develop a better and affluent society through exploration of the truth about nature, humans, society, etc., discovery of new principles and laws, and application of these in a wide range of fields from natural sciences to human and social sciences, and does not consider contribution to for-profit or commercial businesses as its main or secondary purpose. Activities initially undertaken without the purpose of contributing to a for-profit or commercial business, shall no longer be considered as "academic research purposes" as soon as they decide to contribute to one.<br> 4. Article 3 b.1. shall be replaced by the following:<br> 1. The Adapter's License that You apply must be this License.<br> 5. In all provisions, "NonCommercial" shall read "Academic Research Purposes" and "this Public License" shall read "this License". Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License<br> <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode> * Usage 1. Compile the source codes.<br> 2. Run with no option to see the instruction.<br> 3. Follow the instruction to generate the treebank.
This dataset offers a multilingual corpus for studying Persian translations of Plato’s Crito in comparison with the Ancient Greek source text. It is designed for scholars and students working in fields such as translation studies, computational linguistics, and philology. This repository includes: The Ancient Greek text of Crito (Burnet edition) Five Persian student translations, word-level and sentence-level alignments Three finalized Persian translations, word-level andsentence-level alignments, including UD treebank annotations Two English translations (Jowett and Fowler), sentence-level aligned One German translation (Schleiermacher), sentence-level aligned A Greek–Persian lexical wordlist for Crito Source Texts & References Greek text: Plato. Platonis Opera, ed. John Burnet. Oxford University Press. 1903.Source: Perseus Digital Library – https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0169%3Atext%3DCrito%3Asection%3D43a Student Persian translations: Produced during a Greek translation course by elementary students after a 30-hour introductory course to Ancient Greek. Each translation was made using Ancient Greek commentaries, lexicons, and parallel English and German translations available in this dataset. Alignments were created by the translators using Ugarit.These translations are available as word-level and sentence-level alignments. The word alignments are extracted from Ugarit, but they are still visualized on Ugarit. Translators’ Ugarit profiles: - Shouresh Assimi: https://ugarit.ialigner.com/userProfile.php?userid=50956- Aylar Mahmoudzadeh Sarabi: https://ugarit.ialigner.com/userProfile.php?userid=63464&tgid=9576- Nima Mohammadi: https://ugarit.ialigner.com/userProfile.php?userid=52434&tgid=9362- Kimia Nikpour: https://ugarit.ialigner.com/userProfile.php?userid=52378- Farshid Rahimi: https://ugarit.ialigner.com/userProfile.php?userid=50932&tgid=9727 Finalized Persian translations: Three finalized Persian translations, revised under the supervision of Farnoosh Shamsian.These translations are available as word-level and sentence-level alignments, accompanied by UD treebank annotation English translations: Fowler’s translation:Plato, H. N. Fowler, W. Lamb, Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 1, translated by Harold North Fowler; Introduction by W.R.M. Lamb, volume 1, Harvard University Press and Wiliam Heinemann Ltd., Cambridge, MA and London, 1966.Fowler's translation on Perseus Digital Library:https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=plat.+crito+43aAlignment: Sentence-level Jowett's translation:Plato, B. Jowett, Crito, The Internet Classics Archive, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/crito.html.Alignment: Sentence-level German translation: Plato, F. Schleiermacher, Platons Werke, In der Realschulbuchhandlung, 1809Link to the text on Project Gutenberg:https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/platon/platowr1/kriton.html Alignment: Sentence-level Dataset Contents To ensure proper rendering of Persian RTL text, files are available in both CSV and XML formats when necessary. Student translations aligned at sentence-level:Sentence-level alignments of the Ancient Greek text of Plato’s Crito with all five student Persian translations, two English translations (Jowett and Fowler), and one German translation (Schleiermacher).The sentence number is the treebank sentence ID followed by the Stephanus paginations.Files and Formats available:crito_sentence_alignments_student_translations.csvcrito_sentence_alignments_student_translations.xlsxNotes: All eight translations aligned to the same sentence boundaries as the Greek text. Student alignment data extracted from Ugarit:Word-level alignments of the student translations, which were done throughout the course by each student on Ugarit. The zip file includes five folders, each containing the Ugarit user ID of the student who did the translation and the alignment, followed by their last name in parentheses. Each folder includes the alignments of Crito done by the student, exported from Ugarit as a JSON file. The name of each JSON file is the identifier of the alignment on Ugarit.Formats available:student_alignments_ugarit.zip, containing JSON files Three finalized Persian translations aligned at sentence-level:Sentence-level alignments of the Ancient Greek text of Crito with the three finalized Persian translations under the supervision of Farnoosh Shamsian. The sentence number is the treebank sentence ID followed by the Stephanus paginations. Formats available:crito_finalized_translations_sentence_alignment.csvcrito_finalized_translations_sentence_alignment.xlsx Three finalized Persian translations aligned at word-level to the UD treebanks:Word-level alignments of the three finalized Persian translations to the Ancient Greek text, accompanied by UD Treebank annotations. These alignments are done by a single annotator according to alignment guidelines previously published on Zenodo here:Shamsian, F. (2023). Alignment Guidelines for Greek-Persian. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.8039931Formats available:crito_finalized_translations_treebank_word_alignment.csvcrito_finalized_translations_treebank_word_alignment.xlsxNotes: The translations are aligned to the treebanks provided by the Pedalion project, which were automatically generated and manually corrected. See more here: https://perseids-publications.github.io/pedalion-trees/ A Greek-Persian wordlist:A bilingual wordlist containing Greek–Persian lexical correspondences for every Greek word attested in Plato’s Crito.Formats available:crito_greek_persian_wordlist.csvcrito_greek_persian_wordlist.xlsx Notes This is the actively maintained and most complete release. An earlier version (only the three finalized translations) is now outdated, but still archived on Zenodo for reference here: Shamsian, F., Assimi, S., Mahmoudzadeh Sarabi, A., Mohammadi, N., Nikpour, K., & Rahimi, F. (2023). Persian Translations of Crito, Three Versions with Word-level Alignment. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8333681 Refrences to the consulted print sources and other Persian translations: Adam, J. (1888). Platonis Crito. Cambridge University Press. Emlyn-Jones, C. (1999). Crito. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Fowler, H. N., Lamb, W. R. M., & Shorey, P. (1966). Plato in Twelve Volumes: With an English Translation. Harvard University Press. Jowett, B. (1909). The Apology, Phaedo, and Crito of Plato, with introduction, notes and illustrations. New York P.F. Collier & son. http://archive.org/details/apologyphaedocri0000plat Plato (1938) Hekmate Soghrāt va Aflātun (M. A. Foroughi, Trans.) Tehran: Majles Publishing house. Plato (1979) Dore-ye Āsāre Aflātun (H. Lotfi, Trans.) Tehran: Kharazmi. Plato (1989) Vāpasin Ruzhāye Soghrāt (J. Jahanshahi, Trans.) Tehran: Porsesh. Plato (2013) Mohākeme-ye Soghrāt (L. Golestan, Trans.) Tehran: Markaz. Plato (2023) Kriton (I. Shafi’-Beyk, Trans.) Tehran: Ney. Schleiermacher, F. (1910). Platons Apologie und Kriton. Verlag Philipp Reclam.
Perceived density was examined as two architectural design features were varied: wider wall location in trapezoid-shaped apartments and window size. Subjects rated perceived density and positive affect following presentation of apartment units with these features changed but with the same amount of space. Two electroencephalogram (EEG) measures were examined: event-related desynchronization modulation (Mu-Rhythm) and Theta power – both associated with movement planning. There was an interaction of design features – the wide wall was at the entrance (appears narrowing) with a narrow window, was rated higher for perceived density compared to all other conditions. There was also an interaction for Mu Rhythm – greater modulation for incongruence: widening apartments with narrow windows or narrowing apartments with wide windows. Theta power results indicated a window size main effect – increased Theta power in wider window conditions. These findings support the idea that density perception is linked with movement planning and could lead to guidelines for architectural design in limited spaces to enhance wellbeing.
International audience
status: Published online
In task-based second language (L2) writing research, genre effects on linguistic features are usually explained by either task complexity hypothesis or differences in communicative demands. The basic distinction between the two explanations is determined by whether cognitive factors are at work. To date, the actual causes for L2 learners' different linguistic features in different genres are still unclear. Aiming at providing empirical evidence for explaining the mechanism of genre effects, this investigation uses dependency-grammar-based measures to examine the role of cognitive factors in L2 argumentative, narrative, and descriptive writings. A total of 540 compositions from three different proficiency groups of English as a foreign language learners were collected, and their mean dependency distances and their distributions of dependency distance were calculated. It was found that in all proficiency groups of compositions, dependency distance distributions of five types showed significant differences between genres. Since dependency distance reflects cognitive load, those five dependency types were able to show that cognitive factors are at play in the writing process. Among the five types, the phrasal dependency relation types could reveal genre effects regardless of learners' language proficiency, and clausal dependency relation types might pinpoint learners' threshold of perceiving task complexity. The findings suggest that genre effects on linguistic features in L2 writings may result from different cognitive demand imposed by writing tasks with different genres, and genre effect may exhibit variation among different proficiency groups.
CONTEXT: Congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) is a genetic disorder that results in hormonal imbalances and decreased brain volumes in regions important for emotional processing. OBJECTIVE: To examine whether emotion perception differs between youth with CAH and control youth, and if these differences relate to brain volumes. METHODS: In this cross-sectional study of 27 youths with CAH (mean age = 12.63 years, 16 female) and 35 age- and sex-matched controls (mean age = 13.03 years, 20 female), each participant rated picture stimuli and completed a 3T structural brain scan. Valence and arousal ratings and reaction times of 61 affective images were assessed. Gray matter volumes were measured by MRI. RESULTS: Youth with CAH had lower valence ratings for negative (P =.007) and neutral (P =.019) images. Controls showed differences in reaction times and arousal ratings across stimuli conditions, but youth with CAH did not. Brain volumes of the right amygdala (P =.025) and left hippocampus (P =.002) were associated with valence ratings. Left rostral middle frontal (P <.001) and right medial orbitofrontal cortex (P =.002) volumes were negatively related to valence scores only in youth with CAH, whereas left medial orbitofrontal cortex (P <.001) volumes were associated with valence scores positively in youth with CAH and negatively in controls. CONCLUSION: Findings suggest that youth with CAH perceive emotive stimuli as more unpleasant. Decreased brain volumes in the amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex are associated with these measures of altered emotion perception in youth with CAH.
სტატიაში წარმოდგენილია აფხაზური სინტაქსური ბანკის შექმნის მცდელობა უნივერსალური დამოკიდებულებების (UD) ჩარჩოს ფარგლებში.
National audience
Using Stanford parser as a tool, taking 1840 articles on two topics by 920 English learners of four levels after random selection as the research corpus, this study attempts to explore the development trend of syntactic complexity of learners of different levels and what influence divergent topic can have on it. Results show that multi-level learners generally prefer adverbial clauses (advcl) and complement clauses (ccomp) to relative clauses (acl: recl); adjective modifiers (amod) are the best in distinguishing the level of English learners, which can be used as an important basis for judging the level of L2; in addition, different topics of the same task type have no significant effect on L2 learners’ syntactic complexity. It can be concluded that most syntactic complexity measures at the clause and phrase level show a non-linear development trend. Based upon the findings, implications are provided for English textbook development and English pedagogical practices.
Abstract We introduce an extensive dataset for multilingual probing of morphological information in language models (247 tasks across 42 languages from 10 families), each consisting of a sentence with a target word and a morphological tag as the desired label, derived from the Universal Dependencies treebanks. We find that pre-trained Transformer models (mBERT and XLM-RoBERTa) learn features that attain strong performance across these tasks. We then apply two methods to locate, for each probing task, where the disambiguating information resides in the input. The first is a new perturbation method that “masks” various parts of context; the second is the classical method of Shapley values. The most intriguing finding that emerges is a strong tendency for the preceding context to hold more information relevant to the prediction than the following context.
Tupí-Guaraní is one of the largest branches of the Tupían language family, but despite its relevance there is no consensus about its origins in terms of age, homeland, and expansion. Linguistic classifications vary significantly, with archaeological studies suggesting incompatible date ranges while ethnographic literature confirms the close similarities as a result of continuous inter-family contact. To investigate this issue, we use a linguistic database of cognate data, employing Bayesian phylogenetic methods to infer a dated tree and to build a phylogeographic expansion model. Results suggest that the branch originated around 2500 BP in the area of the upper course of the Tapajós-Xingu basins, with a split between Southern and Northern varieties beginning around 1750 BP. We analyse the difficulties in reconciling archaeological and linguistic data for this group, stressing the importance of developing an interdisciplinary unified model that incorporates evidence from both disciplines.
Chloé Braud, Yang Janet Liu, Eleni Metheniti, Philippe Muller, Laura Rivière, Attapol Rutherford, Amir Zeldes. Proceedings of the 3rd Shared Task on Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking (DISRPT 2023). 2023.
Abstract This study represents the first stage of evaluating whether cognitive training interventions may be facilitated by the presence of a socially assistive robot (SAR) and gamification. Our experimental setup involves using a SAR providing feedback to a gamified visuospatial working memory task, administered according to a differential outcomes training (DOT) protocol. The study’s main objective was to investigate whether performance and attitude towards the task would be affected by different robotic setups (none, simulated or physical) and in relation to different challenge levels. We measured performance accuracy on the gamified visuospatial memory task and self-reported affective ratings, which are relevant for assessing attitude towards the task and providing indicators to the potential for using a SAR for a longer-term cognitive intervention. Additionally, we conducted exploratory analyses of eye movement strategies for memory encoding during the task. The results demonstrated a significant differential outcomes effect (DOE) on memory performance accuracy, regardless of Robot type and Challenge level, providing evidence that a DOE can still be obtained when a SAR interacts with participants. Moreover, the results from the affective ratings revealed that participants accompanied by the physical robot reported lower levels of stress and increased levels of control. Our results demonstrate, for the first time, a DOE using a SAR in a gamified context. This result, coupled with positive subjective reporting of the human–robot interactive experience of participants, demonstrates the potential for using a SAR to: (i) promote positive attitudes for a DOT-based cognitive intervention, without (ii) negatively affecting task performance.
Individuals differ in the tendency to derive pleasure out of motive-specific incentives, such as being socially included or attaining power. Multiple theoretical approaches have proposed that such motive-specific positive affective contingencies (PACs) are central building blocks of motive dispositions and personality more broadly. In the current research, we put this claim to test and investigated individual differences with regard to motive-specific PACs in the affiliation and power domains. We measured PACs via spontaneous emotional reactions to motive-specific cues, as assessed by affect ratings and electromyographic (EMG) recordings of smile responses. Both of these PAC operationalizations were highly internally consistent and moderately to highly stable across time. Furthermore, motive-specific PACs were linked in a manner consistent with theory to measures of motive dispositions and to personality traits with motivational underpinnings (i.e., extraversion, agreeableness, and narcissism). Finally, in the affiliation domain, motive-specific PACs were linked to objectively assessed, key motivational outcomes (i.e., attentional orientation, behavior in daily life, and in the laboratory). Taken together, the findings underscore the relevance of affective contingencies for the understanding of personality and motivated behavior.
Purpose: Emerging bilingual children represent a diverse population with regard to their language learning histories and individual factors. When assessing a bilingual child, it is important to accurately differentiate typical second-language learning characteristics from differences that indicate a disorder. The Iranian scholarly and clinical communities have established essential linguistic norms and identified linguistic and nonlinguistic indicators of speech and language disorder in Farsi-speaking children. The community has also developed assessment tools that are useful when evaluating the language skills of bilingual Farsi-English–speaking children. Method: We present some relevant characteristics of the Farsi-speaking community and summarize the literature related to linguistic norms and the characteristics of the Farsi language, particularly related to the phonological and morphosyntactic structure of Farsi. To illustrate the diversity in bilingual children's profiles and the need for individualized assessment, we present two case studies of sequential emerging Farsi–English bilingual children. Results: We present the children's assessment results and report clinical indicators of a language disorder. The case examples are used to highlight several recommendations for conducting individualized and culturally sensitive assessments. Conclusions: This tutorial highlights the need for a comprehensive and individualized assessment of a bilingual child. Specific assessment tools and procedures are outlined to support clinicians in completing accurate and sensitive evaluations of Farsi–English bilingual children.
Abstract Ellipsis refers to a linguistic mismatch between sound and meaning. In order to fill the research gap in exploring the cause of ellipsis concerning research methods, the study herein attempts to further this issue with an empirical approach. A complex network approach is used to describe the structural patterns of ellipsis language from a macroscopic perspective and different scales of microscopic granularity. According to previous theoretical foundations on ellipsis, two syntactic network models are established, one is derived from the treebank of spoken conversation in modern Chinese; the other is obtained from the same treebank, but with all its elliptical structures added. Twelve kinds of network measures are used to approach the structural similarities and differences between the two networks. Research results suggested that elliptical structures did not change the network topology extracted from the communication system, nor the relevant importance of the linguistic element for transmitting the information. More specifically, the linguistic elements functioned as good ‘spreaders’, transitivity, connectedness, efficiency, and stability in information transmission of the communication system are not affected by elliptical structures.
Abstract We extend a pair of continuous combinator-based constituency parsers (one binary and one multi-branching) into a discontinuous pair. Our parsers iteratively compose constituent vectors from word embeddings without any grammar constraints. Their empirical complexities are subquadratic. Our extension includes 1) a swap action for the orientation-based binary model and 2) biaffine attention for the chunker-based multi-branching model. In tests conducted with the Discontinuous Penn Treebank and TIGER Treebank, we achieved state-of-the-art discontinuous accuracy with a significant speed advantage.
Emotional arousal is known to enhance episodic memory in young adults. However, compared to valence, little is known about how healthy aging impacts arousal-enhanced memory effects. Furthermore, while emotion regulation is believed to improve with age, it is unclear how individual differences in emotion regulation influence arousal-enhanced memory. In this large-scale online study, we investigated the impact of age and individual differences in emotion regulation on arousal-enhanced memory. During encoding, participants made arousal ratings about negative, neutral, and positive images, and we compared their subsequent memory of high and low-arousal images. We found the impact of emotional arousal on memory was reduced with age, especially for older adults who habitually suppress their emotions. Our findings show that arousal-related memory benefits are reduced with advancing age, and that individual differences in habitual usage of emotion regulation impact these age-related alterations.
Previous studies showed that socially anxious individuals tend to have problems with facial expression processing, especially negative expressions. The present study aimed to investigate whether/how acute aerobic exercise intervention affects the emotional evaluation of socially anxious individuals. Participants needed to rate the emotional valence of facial expressions (happy, neutral, angry) on a 7-point Likert scale (from entirely negative to entirely positive) after 30 min of moderate-intensity aerobic exercise and rest interventions on separate days. Results showed a significant decrease in the valence rating of happy faces (i.e., less positively) and a significant increase in the valence rating of angry faces (i.e., less negatively) after acute aerobic exercise as compared with after rest for the social anxiety group. In contrast, there was no significant difference between the two intervention conditions for the control group. These results showed that acute aerobic exercise effectively moderates the emotional valence rating of facial expressions in socially anxious individuals, decreasing the emotion evaluation of facial expressions.
Abstract This paper provides an overview of all the meaningful sub-sign form units (form-meaning units; FMUs) in lexical signs in Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT). We investigated the potential meaning of all form features that were previously established in analyses of NGT form by analyzing their distribution in lexical signs. The data set consisted of 500 NGT signs in the lexical database Global Signbank, and a set of 163 elicited newly-formed lexical signs. All features in these data sets appear to bear meaning (at least once). No completely arbitrary features were found, and some features appeared to be always associated to a specific meaning. This toolkit and the set of FMUs in NGT provides a possible basis for cross-linguistic study and for a more fine-grained approach in various research disciplines, for instance psycholinguistics and acquisition, and it may thus advance the theoretical and applied study of sign languages.
Attractiveness is a proposed universal cue to overall biological quality. Nonetheless, local raters and raters of the same ethnicity may be more accurate in assessing the cues for attractiveness than distant and unfamiliar raters. Shared ethnicity and shared environment may both affect rating accuracy: our aim was to compare their relative influence. Therefore, we photographed young Vietnamese participants (N = 93, 33 women) from Hanoi, Vietnam. The photographs were rated by Czechs, Asian Vietnamese, and Czech Vietnamese (raters of Vietnamese origin who lived in Czechia for all or most of their life). Using geometric morphometrics, we measured facial shape cues to biological quality: averageness, asymmetry, and sexual dimorphism. We expected that Vietnamese raters residing in Czechia and Vietnam would agree on perceived attractiveness and use shape-related facial cues to biological quality better than Czech European raters, who are less familiar with East Asians. Surprisingly, mixed-effect models and post hoc comparisons identified no major cross-group differences in attributed attractiveness and path analyses revealed that the three groups based their rating on shape-related characteristics in a similar way. However, despite the considerable cross-cultural agreement regarding perceived attractiveness, Czech European raters associated attractiveness with facial shape averageness significantly more than Vietnamese raters.
We introduce EASIER Notation, a gloss-based scripting language to describe sign language content to be signed by an avatar and describe the functionality a lexical database for a sign language needs to provide in order to fully support the notation approach. In addition, we present the prototype of a text editor supporting EASIER Notation for human post-editing of machine translation output as well as pre-scribing signed utterances from scratch.
According to the Facial Feedback Hypothesis (FFH), feedback from facial muscles can initiate and modulate a person’s emotional state. However, this assumption is debated, and existing research has arguably suffered from a lack of control over which facial muscles are activated, when, to what degree, and for how long. To overcome these limitations, we carried out a pre-registered experiment recruiting 58 participants in 2023 in which we applied facial neuromuscular electrical stimulation (fNMES) to the Zygomaticus Major (ZM) and Depressor Anguli Oris (DAO) muscles for 5 seconds at 100% and 50% of the participants individual motor threshold (MT). After each trial, participants reported their emotions’ valence and arousal. Heart rate and electrodermal activity were recorded throughout. Results showed that muscle activation through fNMES, even when controlling for fNMES-induced discomfort, modulated participants’ emotional state as expected, with more positive emotions reported after stronger stimulation of the ZM than the DAO muscle. The addition of expression-congruent emotional images increased the effect. Moreover, fNMES intensity predicted arousal ratings and skin conductance responses. The finding that changes in felt emotion can be induced through brief, controlled activation of specific facial muscles is in line with the FFH and offers exciting opportunities for translational intervention.
Extinction training has proved effective to diminish the expectancy of the aversive unconditioned stimulus (US). However, the negative valence of the conditioned stimulus (CS) may still stay intact. In fact, several studies have suggested that the CS negative valence may be a factor that promotes the return of fear. Our study focuses on the role of changes in the CS valence as a potential mechanism to reduce the spontaneous recovery of threat expectancies. To do that, we evaluated counterconditioning (CC), a technique aimed to reduce the CS negative valence by paring it with a positive stimulus and compared its efficacy to that of a novelty-facilitated extinction (NFE) and a standard extinction interventions. Using a 2-day protocol, participants first learned the relationship between a figure and an aversive sound, using a differential conditioning paradigm, and were then randomly assigned to one of three different groups. For the CC group, CS+ or cue A was paired with a positive US. The standard extinction group was exposed to cue A alone. For a third NFE group, cue A was followed by a neutral US. Finally, on the second day, spontaneous recovery was tested. Our findings did not provide evidence to suggest that CC could be more effective to prevent or reduce the return of threat expectancies or influence valence ratings when compared with NFE and standard extinction.
Two distinct literatures have evolved to study within-person changes in affect over time. One literature has examined affect dynamics with millisecond-level resolution under controlled laboratory conditions, and the second literature has captured affective dynamics across much longer timescales (e.g., hours or days) within the relatively uncontrolled but more ecologically valid conditions of daily life. Despite the importance of linking these literatures, very little research has been done so far. In the laboratory, peak affect intensities and reaction durations were quantified using a paradigm that captures second-to-second changes in subjective affect elicited by provocative images. In two studies, analyses attempted to link these micro-dynamic indexes to fluctuations in daily affect ratings collected via daily protocols up to 4 weeks later. Although peak intensity and reaction duration scores from the laboratory did not consistently relate to daily scores pertaining to affect variability or instability, the total magnitude of changes in affect following images did display relationships of this type. In addition, higher peaks in the laboratory predicted larger intensity reactions to salient daily events. Together, the studies provide insights into the mechanisms through which correspondences and noncorrespondences between laboratory reactivity indices and daily affect dynamic measures can be expected.