Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
16504 papers
The issue of restoring the authenticity of the Ukrainian language is timely even during the war in Ukraine, because, as it turned out, language itself is a powerful identifier of national belonging. The first significant step towards was the project of the new Ukrainian spelling (orthography) of 2019, which launched the process of reviving Ukrainian language norms at the phonetic, lexical, and grammatical levels. In this context, the analysis of ancient works written by Ukrainian authors before the Ukrainophobic decrees aims to restore the lost, to determine the ways of returning the long-forgotten, the expediency of using it in the modern language, which is extremely relevant today. Unfortunately, for many decades, the spelling norms of the Ukrainian language were adapted to the language of the state, which established not linguistic, but political rules. That is why even the existing spellings of the Ukrainian language of the 20th century cannot be recognized as proper Ukrainian. Therefore, the linguistic analysis of authentic texts in the Ukrainian language, those publications that were not "censored" by the state machine and contained a living language inherent to its speakers, is gaining great importance. The burlesque-travesty poem “Eneida” by Ivan Kotliarevskii, written at the end of the 18th - beginning of the 19th century, is an example of the use of the colloquial Ukrainian language of that time, which is fully presented in the work. Of course, the development of a language at any stage has its own characteristics, so one cannot easily and thoughtlessly copy today what was inherent in the language in the XVIII-XIX centuries; it is important to find the authenticity of the language (at its various levels), which will be logically and correctly recorded in modern standards.
In his work How Children of the Preschool Age Observe Language, Gvozdev argued that a child of two-three years old could fix and correct errors in the speech of other people. At the same time, numerous priming-experiments built on the data of synonymous constructions of common language indicate that least frequency constructions willingly used by children in this age make the greatest influence on children’s speech. The aim of this article is to analyze speech behavior of a child who hears phrases with errors or receives a task to repeat wrongly constructed statements. Nobody has already studied constructions with speech errors in priming-experiments on Russian data. We analyzed the results of a pilot experiment on Russian data developed by non-native speakers of Russian from the Max Plank Institute for Evolutional Anthropology. There were 33 three-year-old children involved in the experiment. The texts included random deviations from both speech norms and frequency usage accepted in the Russian register of communication with children. Experiment results allow making some interim conclusions. The priming-effect on the perception of uncommon forms is low. Speech production mechanisms started to work when performing a task to repeat phrases heard by a child; that was followed with modifications of unusual forms, probably unconscious. Syntactic level (word order and choice of cases and prepositions) is least influenced by the prime. The previous speech experience also influences the ability to repeat what a child heard. The experience includes already formed grammatical representations of a certain child, the frequency of lexical units (including special contexts). While facing unusual constructions, the mechanism of evaluating the statement as “possible/impossible”, and “right/wrong” is launched which leads to its conscious or unconscious modification. Refs 18.
The article is devoted to the study of the process of borrowing and adaptation of English loan words in the Ukrainian language. It is established that in the lexical system of the Ukrainian language foreign words make up about 10%, 70 – 80% of which are English loan words. The presence of a significant share of English loan words in the Ukrainian language is due to a number of extra- and intralinguistic factors: the development of economic, cultural and political ties; quantitative and qualitative complication of various spheres of language communication; diversity of norms of speech behavior; expansion of regulatory limits; achievements of English-speaking countries in certain fields of activity; striving for linguistic economy; the need to replenish the composition of expressive language means; the need to clarify and detail the concepts available in the language; «Americanization»; imitation of fashion. The study systematizes English loan words in the Ukrainian language and distributes them by spheres of use (sociopolitical, financial and economic, culture and art, technical, mass communication, sports, science, and education). Three stages in the process of adaptation of English loan words into the Ukrainian language are distinguished: 1) the initial stage, which is characterized by a change in the morpheme structure of English loan words; 2) in-depth, related to the selection of the same components in groups of English loan words based on the similarity of final elements and the development of new suffixes of English origin in the Ukrainian language; 3) the stage of full adaptation, which is characterized by participation of English loan words in the process of word formation through the mediation of Ukrainian language suffixes, the formation of new complex words based on English loan words and Ukrainian or previously borrowed words, as well as the consolidation of the spelling form of complex words. It is established that the inclusion of English loan words in the lexical structure of the Ukrainian language and their active use in oral and written speech leads to the formation of synonymous pairs containing proper Ukrainian counterparts.
In the article the content and specifics of students’ work with Ukrainian historical dictionaries in the context of the educational paradigm of future lecturers of the Ukrainian language are clarified. This topic is covered in the context of the analysis of educational and professional programs developed and implemented in the educational process by the lecturers of the Department of Ukrainian Philology of Khmelnytsky National University. The presentation of theoretical positions in diachronic linguistics should be based on illustrative material of historical dictionaries of the Ukrainian language, which should be presented with the help of computer technology available to all participants in the educational process. It is necessary to involve both vocabulary material of academic lexicography and the latest developments of linguists. To acquire lexicographic skills, students solve cognitive, training, creative research tasks on the origin of words, development of lexical meaning of language units, foreign language parallels for borrowed tokens, grammatical characteristics of nouns, phonetic, graphic, spelling variability of words, chronology of their functioning, norms of the modern Ukrainian language, etc. It is expedient to carry out a comparative analysis of lexicographical publications of historical and linguistic courses, paying attention to the peculiarities of the description of language material, selection of source base, construction of dictionary articles, etc. When performing lexical, etymological, grammatical, stylistic exercises, future lecturers are aware of the need to refer to the dictionary. Skills in managing the acquired lexicographic knowledge are necessary to prepare students for research activities. Students perform creative and exploratory tasks that allow them to recognize, systematize, analyze, compare various phenomena and facts reflected in lexicographic sources, comment and evaluate them according to the topic and purpose of the study. Important factors in improving the effectiveness of such activities may be the participation of students in scientific problem groups, circles, participation in scientific conferences, preparation and publication of scientific articles, etc. We consider the creation of electronic dictionaries of various directions to be a promising direction of modern and historical lexicography.
National audience
The educational potential of the Dictionary of Rare Words from the Literary Works Covered by the School Curriculum developed in Saint Petersburg, Russia, is provided not only by the features of the wordlist and the nature of word semantization in a dictionary entry, but also by readily-available methodological support, including a system of assignments for dictionary entries and teacher guidelines. The system is based on a word-centric approach to the organization of educational work. It involves, firstly, commenting on specially selected passages of literary works of the school curriculum in accordance with the lexicographic description, and secondly, comprehensive analysis of lexical material contained in the dictionary, covering semantic, derivational, grammatical, and stylistic aspects. Among the priority areas of the proposed educational work are a comparative analysis of linguistic phenomena, the formation of skills for referring to authoritative sources of information about the language, primarily to dictionaries of various types, the development of a philological culture that involves awareness of the interaction between the usage and the norm, historical variability as a fundamental characteristic of the language, and specificity of aesthetically significant usage. A special attention is also given to the possibilities that the Dictionary offers in terms of carrying out student research and project activities or the organization of a public discussion of theoretically significant or practically relevant language issues. The tasks we offer provide the teacher with the opportunity to independently regulate the amount of student workload and can contribute to personalized learning. The article provides examples of tasks of various types and methodological comments to them addressed to the teacher.
Dataset of 36 verbal images previously noted by critics and scholars. Each image is accompanied by contextual information and by a set of textual characteristics, from its size in words and characters to the semantic domains it is composed of, and the imageability ratings of its words.
The article is devoted to the evolutionary processes in the Italian language of the Internet, which are directly revealed at the lexical and word-formation levels. The article gives the general assessment of these processes from the point of view of a number of significant structural and sociolinguistic parameters in the context of the historical development of the Italian language. This research is based on the opposition of the language of the Internet to the structural norm of the Italian language; it is noted that the opposition is of slang nature. The key trend, as the author emphasizes, is the convergence of the oral and written forms of speech reflected in the used and normatively fixed forms of word-formation, in which traditional models as well as mixed polycodes (alphanumeric and/or alpha pictorial) are extensively used. Studying the media communication influence on the development of the Italian language, the author relies on the classification of the functional parameters of the opposition − convergence of written and oral forms of speech − by the Italian linguist G. Berruto. The main notions, which characterize such evolution, − diamesia, diastratia, diatopia, diafasia are studied. G. Berruto’s concept is developed by another Italian linguist G. Antonelli who singles out the language of the Internet communication as the culminating point of evolution. The article studies a large number of language examples revealing the picture of word-formation in the Italian language of the Internet. Word-formation is interpreted as the main factor in the normative evolution of the Italian language in the Internet communication. Particular attention is paid to contaminated word-formation methods, creolized forms of a language sign (contraction, pictogram), which are typical of the Internet language, as well as unregulated use of punctuation marks, and spelling violation. The article shows slang forms of lexical speech usage and word-formation in the Italian language of the Internet. The structural-linguistic and semiotic interpretation of the Italian Internet word-formation is given. The article carries out the rubrication of models and types of word-formation in the Italian language of the Internet. The article is suggested to specialists who are interested in semiotics of the Internet language, modern development trends of the Italian language, the peculiarities of Italian lexicology and word-formation.
The purpose of the article is to study the structural (syntactic) aspect of pleonastic formations, build a structural concept and thereby prove their semantic significance, as well as informative interpretation. The object of analysis is pleonastic expressions and their pragmatic functions based on the material of publicist and artistic discourses. The subject of analysis is the comparison of the transaction (transmission) of the author’s and the “communicative isolation” of the meaningful lexical unit – pleonasm. The result of the study is the recognition of the normality of the use of this phenomenon, but subject to certain conditions: only models with homogeneous components with the meaning of a person, phenomenon, quality, state, basically, complement, clarify the conceptual content of the expression. The semantics of the object or subject is redundant in models with predicative units. These constructions are usually found in colloquial and publicistic styles, which does not allow them to be attributed to the norm of the modern Russian literary language. Structural models with a subordinate relationship with the meaning of an object, attribute, action (agreement) are also considered superfluous.
In the linguistic picture of the world anthroponyms occupy a unique position, because man’s perception of himself as the center of the universe is manifested in the creation of many nominations, where the substantial nature of the human essence comes to the fore. The nomination of anthroponyms is an integral part of the nominative system of language, which follows all its laws and norms. The formation of new human names is carried out as a result of changes in the morpheme of the word, but most often through semantic changes in the word. The article is devoted to the analysis of nominative metonymic processes and lexical changes that took place in English nicknames at the end of the XX – beginning of the XXI century. Metonymic nicknames, formed on adjacency, are focused on the function of pointing up the characteristic feature of the object. Metonymy is a way of indirectly characterizing an object by highlighting one of its constant, variable or random features, which in this situation seems significant to the subject. The largest number of metonymic nicknames, according to our observations, is formed by metonymic transposition, where the whole is replaced by a part. The cognitive mechanism of metonymy creates a conceptual “shift”, and thus metonymy directly indicates the presence in the depths of human cognition on a larger-scale relative to the “parts” of conceptual units, knowledge of the world. Numerous nickname examples in the investigation testify to the fact that metonymy is one of the most productive ways of nickname formation and the meanings of new nominations give the exclusive material to the scientists for further linguistic, sociological, and psychological research.
The notion of acoustic distance figures into many aspects of phonetics, including phonological neighborhoods. A measurement of word-level acoustic distance useful for cognitive modeling must account for two listener characteristics: sensitivity to acoustic differences and sensitivity to duration discrepancies between words. The present work used dynamic time warping to measure how acoustic distance accumulates between words over time. The results of a distance rating task with synthesized vowels were used as a basis for selecting a mathematical function that best matched listener sensitivities. Additionally, the results of a reminder task with synthesized vowels were used to determine a just noticeable difference threshold for vowel duration. The results suggested that a distance function based on the 4.5-norm using a 30 ms radius for dynamic time warping best matched human behavior. A third analysis used these dynamic time warping configurations to model reaction times in an auditory lexical decision task and found that Euclidean distance and no temporal constraints on dynamic time warping best matched human behavior. These results are discussed in relation to spoken word recognition models, including how to assess the acoustic match between the speech signal and a word in the lexicon.
The article is devoted to the study of the formation and development of the literary Karachay-Balkar language history over the past hundred years. An overview of its study is given, current problems of functioning are outlined, and prospects for further improvement are determined. A multi-aspect analysis of the studied language is conducted, considering the main, crucial publica-tions for the period under review. The fundamental projects “Explanatory dictionary of the Kara-chay-Balkarian language” and “Modern Karachay-Balkarian language” stand out as special achievements of Karachay-Balkarian linguistics. A new periodization of the development of the literary Karachay-Balkar language and its evolution into the status of the state language is pro-posed. Attention is drawn to the tasks considered for philologists to determine, at the junction of humanitarian disciplines, the specific contribution of the classics of the Balkar and Karachay lit-eratures to strengthen the norms of the language being studied. Attention is paid to the develop-ment of issues related to writing, alphabet, spelling and terminology. For the further successful functioning of the native language, it is necessary to improve the very practice of creating com-plex studies, its method, and the unification of lexical norms. The expediency of developing scien-tific principles for the selection of linguistic phenomena is indicated, considering regional charac-teristics. The perspective possibilities of expansion of functions provided by the official status of “literary language” in two constituent entities of the Russian Federation are substantiated: the Ka-bardino-Balkarian and Karachay-Cherkess republics.
The article discusses the modus concept of “graduality”, the author gives her own definition of the concept. To describe the structure of the modus concept “graduality”, it is proposed to use cognitive matrix analysis developed by N.N. Boldyrev. The main provisions of this type of analysis are summarized. The author believes that the structure of the concept of “graduality” consists of a core (knowledge that the feature of an object, state or action can vary, that is, manifest itself to varying degrees) and the matrix itself, which includes such conceptual areas as “comparison”, “feature”, “the degree of feature manifestation”, “norm”, “quantity”, “quality”, “assessment”, “language representation”. It is argued that on the basis of the concept of “graduality”, a category of graduality is formed in the language, which, like other language categories, is developing. The paper for the first time expresses the opinion that the formation and development of the category of graduality in the English language have their own conceptual foundations. An attempt is made to identify the conceptual foundations of the development of the modus category of graduality, which comprise the modus concept “graduality” itself, the conceptual basis of the category and its modus character, as well as specific features of the conceptual structure of the semantics of lexical units-members of the language category under analysis.
The article analyzes the epistolary discourse of Ján Kollár using the categories and concepts of modern linguistic pragmatics. The subject of the study was 16 letters addressed to V. Ganka, V. Kopitar, K. Ya. Erben, S. Grobon, V. A. Maciejowski in the period from 1824 to 1851. The study of the material is based on the method of subjectobject interpretation of the addressee’s communication. The analysis of Ján Kollár’s texts showed that his epistolary discourse is a speechlanguage work that was created with regard to the chronologically determined national epistolary tradition. Contacts and the content of Ján Kollár’s communication concerned primarily the socio-political and cultural sphere related to his professional activities. The socio-cultural dimension, within which the communication took place, determined the addressee’s socio-pragmatic role, and their civil position, influenced the topics of the correspondence, its personal and subject components, and assumed dialogue. The components of the studied epistolary discourse are characterized by the following features: formality — informality, distance — non-distance of communication, the hierarchy of relations, and observance of etiquette norms with their mainly emotional verbal design. Markers of politeness in Ján Kollár’s letters are etiquette lexical means, as well as tropes metaphors, and phraseology, which are methods of expressing the author’s empathic moods. Individual features include numerous author innovations. Thus, the social and socio-psychological characteristics of the author affected the language, structure, and content of his epistolary discourse. Kollár’s epistolary legacy is also important in the extralingual aspect. It serves as an additional source for studying the role of the author in social, literary, and scientific circles of his time.
The article is an attempt to answer the question: is it justified to include in the academic dictionaries’ lexical units of substandard vocabulary — elements of colloquial speech, vernacular, jargon, slang, etc.? The article discusses whether it is justified to include in the academic dictionaries’ lexical units of substandard vocabulary — units of colloquial speech, vernacular, jargon, slang, etc. At different times, the authors of academic dictionaries were reproached (and are reproached today) for excessive democracy: according to critics, the normative dictionary should reflect strictly standard norm, the description of the substandard vocabulary in the normative dictionary is unacceptable. The problem mentioned above is studied on the material of two dictionaries — the Academic Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language and the Academic Russian Orthographic Dictionary. The first part of the article is devoted to the description of representation of units of non-codified subsystems of the Russian language in Academic Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language, the second part of the article deals with problems connected to the presentation of reduced words in the orthographic dictionary. The author refutes the thesis about the inadmissibility of including units of substandard lexis in the academic standard dictionary. The author comes to the conclusio that reflection of elements of non-codified subsystems in the normative dictionary does not lower the quality of the dictionary, but, on the contrary, it is necessary for the description of the standard language.
This chapter presents a series of experiments that elicit causal judgments using statements that do not include the verb "to cause". In particular, our interest is in exploring the extent to which previously observed effects of normative considerations on agreement with what we call "cause"-statements, i.e. those of the form "X caused..." extend as well to those of the form "X V-ed Y", where V is a lexical causative. Our principal finding is that in many cases the effects do not extend in this way, and moreover that the cases where we do find the same pattern are those where the causal verb used has a negative valence of its own. We draw two main conclusions from this finding. First, it reveals how the almost exclusive focus on "cause"-statements in the experimental study of causal judgment has led to findings that are unrepresentative of the full range of ordinary causal thinking, and provides a proof of concept as to how this thinking can be studied in its full variety. Second, the results of our experiments provide significant indirect support for the contention that the effect of moral considerations on agreement with "cause"-statements reflect the fact that these statements are most often used to assign responsibility for an event, and not just to describe the causal structure of what happened. It is not causal judgments in general that result from a process in which normative considerations play a role, but perhaps only those judgments that express a determination of moral responsibility.
The training process of future journalists is of great importance in higher education institutions. The aim of it is to form creative, competent, innovation-oriented professionals who are good with words, able to express their thoughts and quickly adapt to a multicultural environment, and use knowledge, skills and abilities to succeed. This is due to modern requirements for the journalistic profession, society's demand for professional skills, improving the communicative and linguistic level of future professionals. The article examines the issue of studying stylistics of mass media as an academic discipline in the training process of media officers. It also reveals the problem of improving the stylistic skills of journalism students in the process of mastering the course as an important factor in their training. The necessity of work on stylistic dexterity of speech in the context of improving the professional skills of a journalist is substantiated as well. It points out the importance of stylistics of mass media in the modern teaching process of future media officers as a means of forming a highly educated language personality that a modern journalist should be like. It is concluded that the stylistics of the media has great communicative potential, which contributes to the communicatively appropriate use of language in the future journalistic profession. Additionally, the study of this educational component will contribute to the assimilation of future journalists of the norms of modern Ukrainian literary language, and the formation of skills to create and edit media texts of different genres and styles. During the study of the educational component "Stylistics of mass media" higher education students master the skills of literate, expressive, clear speech, acquire skills in stylistic editing, use of oral and written forms of all functional styles, following spelling, orthoepic, lexical and grammatical, punctuation, thus improving their communication skills.
This article performs a comparative analysis of diachronic translations of Agatha Christie’s novel Ten Little Niggers/Ten Little Indians/And Then There Were None (intralingual translations into American English and interlingual translations into French, German and Russian) in terms of adequacy of literary translation and following the norms of inclusive language. The paper found that the intralingual translation into American English is a culturally determined adaptation of the original text excluding culture-specific concepts perceived differently in the American culture. While classical interlingual translations of the novel into German, French and Russian follow the norms of adequacy and equivalence, modern interlingual translations reflect the desire of translators to make various lexical and lexico-grammatical transformations in order to avoid invective vocabulary, which often leads to the loss of text-forming dominants of the novel (the modern translation into French is such an example). Further, the importance of preserving the intertext, which reflects the author’s artistic intention, is demonstrated. The symbolic dominants of the novel are considered here in their historical and sociocultural context. It is concluded that these dominants are closely related to the collective ideas about racial differences in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Moreover, it is shown that following new language norms in translation should not violate the unity of a literary work; hence the importance of conveying the author’s intention and the historical and sociocultural context of the work. Finally, recommendations are given to translators as to finding a balance between the requirements of political correctness and adequacy of translation.
Translating legal texts is much more than transferring a message from one language to another. The language is a reflection of the legal system of a country, which reflects the history, culture, all laws, and legal norms of that country. The differences between legal systems and cultures affect the translation and the transfer of the legal force of all concepts, regulations, and the application of laws into the target language.The subject of analysis of this thesis is the translation of legal texts, specifically court judgments as legal text. The analysis includes lexical and morphosyntactic characteristics, the structure and composition of the texts, in order to find the significant features that influence the translation. Furthermore, there is analysis of the legal systems to which the texts belong and their characteristics, as well as what differences between the systems affect the interpretation of the legal text. The goal is to compare the translation of court judgments from two legal systems in terms of the structure and composition of the legal text, the lexical characteristics, the morphosyntactic characteristics, and the differences between the legal systems.The analysis is on samples of court judgments in criminal law taken from the judiciaries of Italy and the United Kingdom. At the end of the analysis, the possibilities for translation equivalence when translating a court judgment from a civil law system and the possibilities for translation equivalence when translating a court judgment from a Common law system are presented.
, 2020) has claimed there is no strong evidence that multi-letter graphemes are used in reading tasks with proficient adult readers, with most studies being statistically weak or having confounds in the stimuli used. Here, I used Monte Carlo simulation with data from reading mega-studies to examine the extent to which the number of multi-letter graphemes matters in words when letter length is held constant. This was done by simulating thousands of experiments using different sets of items for each of a small number of comparisons (e.g., words with only single-letter graphemes versus words with one multi-letter grapheme). The results showed that words with two multi-letter graphemes tended to cause slower reaction times than words with one or no multi-letter graphemes, with effects found in both naming and lexical decision tasks. Interestingly, when words with no multi-letter graphemes were compared with words with one multi-letter grapheme, the differences were much weaker. Simulations of naming results using two computer models, the connectionist dual-process (CDP) model and the dual-route cascaded (DRC) model, showed only CDP predicted this pattern. Since CDP learns simple associations between graphemes and phonemes whereas DRC uses a set of grapheme-phoneme rules, this suggests that the results may have been caused by simple associations between spelling and sound being relatively easy to learn with words with one compared with two multi-letter graphemes. More generally, the results suggest that graphemes are used when reading, but they often produce relatively weak effects and thus differences in some studies may not have been found due to a lack of power.
International audience
The Magyarization of Romanian toponymy in historical Transylvania was achieved in three different ways: 1) adapting the onomastic material to the Hungarian orthographic and phonetic system; 2) translating the toponymic items; 3) adopting the specific Hungarian morphosyntactic rules. The Magyarization of microtoponymy did not have repercussions on the morphosyntactic and lexical levels; the adoption of Hungarian orthography ensured only the formal assimilation of the toponyms. The Hungarian orthographic principles and norms, used inconsistently, reflect numerous oscillating contexts in which the sounds ă, î, u have as graphic correspondents both labial and non-labial vowels. The Magyarization of Romanian toponymy in historical Transylvania did not obscure specific dialectal features, which highlight important information on the age and strata of populations and the relationships among them
We present substructure distribution projection (SUBDP), a technique that projects a distribution over structures in one domain to another, by projecting substructure distributions separately. Models for the target domain can then be trained, using the projected distributions as soft silver labels. We evaluate SUBDP on zeroshot cross-lingual dependency parsing, taking dependency arcs as substructures: we project the predicted dependency arc distributions in the source language(s) to target language(s), and train a target language parser on the resulting distributions. Given an English treebank as the only source of human supervision, SUBDP achieves better unlabeled attachment score than all prior work on the Universal Dependencies v2.2 (Nivre et al., 2020) test set across eight diverse target languages, as well as the best labeled attachment score on six languages. In addition, SUBDP improves zeroshot cross-lingual dependency parsing with very few (e.g., 50) supervised bitext pairs, across a broader range of target languages.
Purpose: To identify whether exposing medical students to a multimodal curriculum of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) practices improves their understanding of CAM clinical applications. Background: A significant portion of the U.S. population uses CAM: 34% of adults and 12% of children. Integrative medicine combines the best of conventional and CAM practices. Despite the increased clinical acceptance of CAM, medical education has been lagging, leaving gaps in learners' knowledge. It is important for medical education to keep pace with these developments by educating students and expanding the view of interprofessional care. Methods: A total of 101 first-year medical students at the University of Connecticut participated in a multimodal CAM curriculum. This included (1) an hour lecture, (2) an online research assignment for a continuity patient, and (3) 2 of 4 modules: acupuncture, hypnotherapy, Reiki, or pet therapy. Pre- and post-tests were administered 1 week apart to assess familiarity with CAM practices and the perceived safety and efficacy of each modality. The familiarity was rated on a scale of 0 (not familiar) to 10 (very familiar). Paired Student's t-tests assessed changes from pre- to post-tests at significant levels (p < 0.01). Results: Overall, the mean percentage of students who were able to identify 1 of the top 8 CAM modalities increased from 38% to 49%. The average familiarity rating of CAM significantly increased from 4.7 pretest to 6.6 post-test (p < 0.01). The top 8 CAM modalities, as selected by students, included acupuncture, meditation, yoga, massage, Reiki, chiropractic, hypnosis, and pet therapy. Overall, the familiarity ratings increased for both safety and effectiveness with intermodule variability from pre- and post-test (p < 0.01). Larger increases in effectiveness familiarity were found than of safety familiarity (p < 0.01). Conclusions: This multimodal curriculum significantly improved medical students' familiarity with CAM modalities and the perceived safety and effectiveness of the modalities.
Automatically inferring drivers’ emotions during driver-pedestrian interactions to improve road safety remains a challenge for designing in-vehicle, empathic interfaces. To that end, we carried out a lab-based study using a combination of camera and physiological sensors. We collected participants’ (N=21) real-time, affective (emotion self-reports, heart rate, pupil diameter, skin conductance, and facial temperatures) responses towards non-verbal, pedestrian crossing videos from the Joint Attention for Autonomous Driving (JAAD) dataset. Our findings reveal that positive, non-verbal, pedestrian crossing actions in the videos elicit higher valence ratings from participants, while non-positive actions elicit higher arousal. Different pedestrian crossing actions in the videos also have a significant influence on participants’ physiological signals (heart rate, pupil diameter, skin conductance) and facial temperatures. Our findings provide a first step toward enabling in-car empathic interfaces that draw on behavioural and physiological sensing to in situ infer driver emotions during non-verbal pedestrian interactions.
OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to examine implicit affect toward suicide (i.e., how good/bad suicide is perceived). Some people might be more likely to think about/choose suicide because they perceive it as a good option (to gain relief) relative to available alternatives. METHOD: Implicit affect toward suicide among adults (N = 72) and adolescents (N = 174) with and without suicidal thoughts was examined using first-person (FP) perspective suicide pictures in the affect misattribution procedure (AMP). RESULTS: Suicidal adults' implicit positive affect toward suicide was associated with STB variables, such as explicit valence (r = 0.34) and arousal (r = 0.44) ratings of suicide pictures, and implicit affect differentiated groups above and beyond explicit valence ratings. Contrary to our hypothesis, suicidal participants did not display higher implicit positive affect toward suicide than nonsuicidal participants. However, suicidal participants displayed consistent implicit affect toward different suicide pictures, whereas nonsuicidal participants evaluated some pictures as more pleasant than others (ORs = 1.92-2.27). CONCLUSIONS: Implicit affect toward suicide may relate to STB, but stimuli characteristics (e.g., color) likely influence the accuracy of assessment with the AMP and should be a focus of future research involving this and other implicit measures.
OBJECTIVES: Gender has been suggested to play a critical role in how facial expressions of pain are perceived by others. With the present study we aim to further investigate how gender might impact the decoding of facial expressions of pain, (i) by varying both the gender of the observer as well as the gender of the expressor and (ii) by considering two different aspects of the decoding process, namely intensity decoding and pain recognition. METHODS: In two online-studies, videos of facial expressions of pain as well as of anger and disgust displayed by male and female avatars were presented to male and female participants. In the first study, valence and arousal ratings were assessed (intensity decoding) and in the second study, participants provided intensity ratings for different affective states, that allowed for assessing intensity decoding as well as pain recognition. RESULTS: The gender of the avatar significantly affected the intensity decoding of facial expressions of pain, with higher ratings (arousal, valence, pain intensity) for female compared to male avatars. In contrast, the gender of the observer had no significant impact on intensity decoding. With regard to pain recognition (differentiating pain from anger and disgust), neither the gender of the avatar, nor the gender of the observer had any affect. CONCLUSIONS: Only the gender of the expressor seems to have a substantial impact on the decoding of facial expressions of pain, whereas the gender of the observer seems of less relevance. Reasons for the tendency to see more pain in female faces might be due to psychosocial factors (e.g., gender stereotypes) and require further research.
How does social support bolster resilience? Here, we present a new dyadic paradigm to study causal mechanisms of acute and ecologically valid social support in the laboratory. The Dyadic Stress and Support Task (DSST) consists of a psychosocial stress phase and a recovery phase. During DSST stress, a pair of participants take turns to perform public speaking and mental arithmetic in front of a panel. Unable to see or touch each other, they witness each other's performance and feedback. During DSST recovery, the pair either interact freely with each other for 5 min (social support condition) or interact separately with an experimenter (non-support condition). To establish the validity of the DSST, we tested 21 pairs of long-term close friends in a pilot study. Primary outcome measures were ratings of affective state and bodily arousal (VAS scales 0-100). Secondary outcome measures were heart rate and salivary cortisol. DSST stress successfully induced subjective Stress Activation, increased Negative Affect and decreased Positive Affect. We also observed increased heart rate and salivary cortisol. After DSST recovery, Stress Activation and Negative Affect ratings were reduced in both groups. Positive Affect was completely restored to pre-stress baseline levels in the Social support group, while remaining significantly lower in the Non-support group. The DSST successfully induced stress and negative affect and captured stress recovery in both groups. Free-form interaction with the friend enhanced recovery of affective state, supporting the validity of spontaneous interaction between friends as a model of social support.
Spoken language contains overlapping patterns across different levels, from syllables to words to phrases. The discovery of these structures may be partially supported by statistical learning (SL), the unguided, automatic extraction of regularities from the environment through passive exposure. SL supports word learning in artificial language experiments, but few studies have examined whether it scales up to support natural language learning in adult second language learners. Here, adult English speakers (n = 70) listened to daily podcasts in either Italian or English for 2 weeks while going about their normal routines. To measure word knowledge, participants provided familiarity ratings of Italian words and nonwords both before and after the listening period. Critically, compared with English controls, Italian listeners significantly improved in their ability to discriminate Italian words and nonwords. These results suggest that unguided exposure to natural, foreign language speech supports the extraction of relevant word features and the development of nascent word forms. At a theoretical level, these findings indicate that SL may effectively scale up to support real-world language acquisition. These results also have important practical implications, suggesting that adult learners may be able to acquire relevant speech patterns and initial word forms simply by listening to the language. This form of learning can occur without explicit effort, formal instruction or focused study.
Aggression-related sexual fantasies (ASF) have been related to various forms of harmful sexual behavior in both sex offender and community samples. However, more research is needed to fully understand this relation, particularly whether ASF is associated with harmful sexual behavior beyond hostile sexism against women and a sexual preference for violence and sexual violence. In the present study, N = 428 participants (61.9% women) between 18 and 83 years of age (M = 28.17, SD = 9.7) reported their ASF and hostile sexism. They rated their sexual arousal by erotic, violent, and sexually violent pictures as a direct measure of sexual preference. Response latencies between stimulus presentation and arousal ratings were used as an indirect measure of sexual preference. ASF and the directly and indirectly assessed sexual preference for violent and sexually violent stimuli were positively correlated. They were unrelated to hostile sexism against women. ASF showed the strongest associations with self-reported sexually sadistic behavior and presumably non-consensual sexual sadism beyond these preferences and hostile sexism in the total group and separately among men and women. The findings indicate that ASF and sexual preference are not equivalent constructs and further underscore the potential relevance of ASF for harmful sexual behavior.
ABSTRACT there is empirical evidence in different languages on how the computation of gender morphology during psycholinguistic processing affects the conformation of sex-generic representations. However, there is no empirical evidence on the processing of non-binary morphological variants in Spanish (-x or -e) in contrast to the generic masculine variant (-o). To analyze this phenomenon, we conducted two experiments: an acceptability judgment task and a sentence comprehension task. The results show differences depending on the task. This means that the underlying processes put into play in each one generate different effects. In acceptability judgments, which involve strategic processes mediated by beliefs and the linguistic norm, the generic masculine is more acceptable to refer to mixed groups. In the sentence comprehension task, which inquires about automatic processes and implicit representations, the non-binary forms consistently elicited a reference to mixed groups. Furthermore, the response times indicated that these morphological variants do not entail a higher processing cost than the generic masculine.
Stress is omnipresent in our everyday lives. It is therefore critical to identify potential stress-buffering behaviors that can help to prevent the negative effects of acute stress in daily life. Massages, a form of social touch, are an effective buffer against both the endocrinological and sympathetic stress response in women. However, for other forms of social touch, potential stress-buffering effects have not been investigated in detail. Furthermore, the possible stress-buffering effects of social touch on men have not been researched so far. The present study focused on embracing, one of the most common forms of social touch across many cultures. We used a short-term embrace between romantic partners as a social touch intervention prior to the induction of acute stress via the Socially Evaluated Cold Pressor Test. Women who embraced their partner prior to being stressed showed a reduced cortisol response compared to a control group in which no embrace occurred. No stress-buffering effect could be observed in men. No differences between the embrace and control group were observed regarding sympathetic nervous system activation measured via blood pressure or subjective affect ratings. These findings suggest that in women, short-term embraces prior to stressful social situations such as examinations or stressful interviews can reduce the cortisol response in that situation.
In this work, we explore character-level neural syntactic parsing for Chinese with two typical syntactic formalisms: the constituent formalism and a dependency formalism based on a newly released character-level dependency treebank. Prior works in Chinese parsing have struggled with whether to de ne words when modeling character interactions. We choose to integrate full character-level syntactic dependency relationships using neural representations from character embeddings and richer linguistic syntactic information from human-annotated character-level Parts-Of-Speech and dependency labels. This has the potential to better understand the deeper structure of Chinese sentences and provides a better structural formalism for avoiding unnecessary structural ambiguities. Specifically, we first compare two different character-level syntax annotation styles: constituency and dependency. Then, we discuss two key problems for character-level parsing: (1) how to combine constituent and dependency syntactic structure in full character-level trees and (2) how to convert from character-level to word-level for both constituent and dependency trees. In addition, we also explore several other key parsing aspects, including di erent character-level dependency annotations and joint learning of Parts-Of-Speech and syntactic parsing. Finally, we evaluate our models on the Chinese Penn Treebank (CTB) and our published Shanghai Jiao Tong University Chinese Character Dependency Treebank (SCDT). The results show the e effectiveness of our model on both constituent and dependency parsing. We further provide empirical analysis and suggest several directions for future study.
Early life stress (ELS) and major depressive disorder (MDD) share neural network abnormalities. However, it is unclear how ELS and MDD may separately and/or jointly relate to brain networks, and whether neural differences exist between depressed individuals with vs without ELS. Moreover, prior work evaluated static versus dynamic network properties, a critical gap considering brain networks show changes in coordinated activity over time. Seventy-one unmedicated females with and without childhood sexual abuse (CSA) histories and/or MDD completed a resting state scan and a stress task in which cortisol and affective ratings were collected. Recurring functional network co-activation patterns (CAPs) were examined and time in CAP (number of times each CAP is expressed) and transition frequencies (transitioning between different CAPs) were computed. The effects of MDD and CSA on CAP metrics were examined and CAP metrics were correlated with depression and stress-related variables. Results showed that MDD, but not CSA, related to CAP metrics. Specifically, individuals with MDD (N = 35) relative to HCs (N = 36), spent more time in a posterior default mode (DMN)-frontoparietal network (FPN) CAP and transitioned more frequently between posterior DMN-FPN and prototypical DMN CAPs. Across groups, more time spent in a posterior DMN-FPN CAP and greater DMN-FPN and prototypical DMN CAP transition frequencies were linked to higher rumination. Imbalances between the DMN and the FPN appear central to MDD and might contribute to MDD-related cognitive dysfunction, including rumination. Unexpectedly, CSA did not modulate such dysfunctions, a finding that needs to be replicated by future studies with larger sample sizes.
The aim of this article is to take the first steps toward the compilation of a treebank of Old English compatible with the framework of Universal Dependencies (UD). Such a treebank will comprise morphological and syntactic annotation of Old English texts adequate for cross-linguistic comparison, diachronic analysis and natural language processing. The article, therefore, engages in four tasks: (i) identifying the Old English exponents of UD lexical categories; (ii) selecting the Old English exponents of UD morphological features; (iii) finding the areas of Old English morphology that require token indexing in the UD format; and (iv) checking on the relevance of the universal set of dependency relations. The data have been extracted from ParCorOEv2, an open access annotated parallel corpus Old English-English. The main conclusions are that the annotation format calls for two additional fields (gloss and morphological relatedness) and that enhanced dependencies are required in order to account for some syntactic phenomena.