Composition of complex numbers: Delineating the computational role of the left anterior temporal lobe.

PubMed

Blanco-Elorrieta, Esti; Pylkkänen, Liina

2016-01-01

What is the neurobiological basis of our ability to create complex messages with language? Results from multiple methodologies have converged on a set of brain regions as relevant for this general process, but the computational details of these areas remain to be characterized. The left anterior temporal lobe (LATL) has been a consistent node within this network, with results suggesting that although it rather systematically shows increased activation for semantically complex structured stimuli, this effect does not extend to number phrases such as 'three books.' In the present work we used magnetoencephalography to investigate whether numbers in general are an invalid input to the combinatory operations housed in the LATL or whether the lack of LATL engagement for stimuli such as 'three books' is due to the quantificational nature of such phrases. As a relevant test case, we employed complex number terms such as 'twenty-three', where one number term is not a quantifier of the other but rather, the two terms form a type of complex concept. In a number naming paradigm, participants viewed rows of numbers and depending on task instruction, named them as complex number terms ('twenty-three'), numerical quantifications ('two threes'), adjectival modifications ('blue threes') or non-combinatory lists (e.g., 'two, three'). While quantificational phrases failed to engage the LATL as compared to non-combinatory controls, both complex number terms and adjectival modifications elicited a reliable activity increase in the LATL. Our results show that while the LATL does not participate in the enumeration of tokens within a set, exemplified by the quantificational phrases, it does support conceptual combination, including the composition of complex number concepts. Copyright © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Increases in Individualistic Words and Phrases in American Books, 1960–2008

PubMed Central

Twenge, Jean M.; Campbell, W. Keith; Gentile, Brittany

2012-01-01

Cultural products such as song lyrics, television shows, and books reveal cultural differences, including cultural change over time. Two studies examine changes in the use of individualistic words (Study 1) and phrases (Study 2) in the Google Books Ngram corpus of millions of books in American English. Current samples from the general population generated and rated lists of individualistic words and phrases (e.g., “unique,” “personalize,” “self,” “all about me,” “I am special,” “I’m the best”). Individualistic words and phrases increased in use between 1960 and 2008, even when controlling for changes in communal words and phrases. Language in American books has become increasingly focused on the self and uniqueness in the decades since 1960. PMID:22808113

Generics license 30-month-olds’ inferences about the atypical properties of novel kinds

PubMed Central

Graham, Susan A.; Gelman, Susan A.; Clarke, Jessica

2016-01-01

We examined whether the distinction between generic and nongeneric language provides toddlers with a rapid and efficient means to learn about kinds. In Experiment 1, we examined 30-month-olds’ willingness to extend atypical properties to members of an unfamiliar category when the properties were introduced in one of three ways: a) using a generic noun phrase (“Blicks drink ketchup”); b) using a nongeneric noun phrase (“These blicks drink ketchup”); and c) using an attentional phrase (“Look at this”). Hearing a generic noun phrase boosted toddlers’ extension of properties to both the model exemplars and to novel members of the same category, relative to when a property had been introduced with a nongeneric noun phrase or an attentional phrase. In Experiment 2, properties were introduced with a generic noun phrase and toddlers extended novel properties to members of the same-category, but not to an out-of-category object. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that generics highlight the stability of a feature and foster generalization of the property to novel within-category exemplars. PMID:27505699

Interpreting Conjoined Noun Phrases and Conjoined Clauses: Collective vs. Distributive Preferences

PubMed Central

Clifton, Charles; Frazier, Lyn

2012-01-01

Two experiments are reported that show that introducing event participants in a conjoined noun phrase (NP) favors a single event (collective) interpretation while introducing them in separate clauses favors a separate events (distributive) interpretation. In Experiment 1, acceptability judgments were speeded when the bias of a predicate toward separate events vs. a single event matched the presumed bias of how the subjects’ referents were introduced (as conjoined noun phrases or in conjoined clauses). In Experiment 2, reading of a phrase containing an anaphor following conjoined noun phrases was facilitated when the anaphor was they, relative to when it was neither/each of them; the opposite pattern was found when the anaphor followed conjoined clauses. We argue that comprehension was facilitated when the form of an anaphor was appropriate for how its antecedents were introduced. These results address the very general problem of how we individuate entities and events when presented with a complex situation, and show that different linguistic forms can guide how we construe a situation.. The results also indicate that there is no general penalty for introducing the entities or events separately – in distinct clauses as ‘split’ antecedents. PMID:22512324

Music Structure Analysis from Acoustic Signals

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Dannenberg, Roger B.; Goto, Masataka

Music is full of structure, including sections, sequences of distinct musical textures, and the repetition of phrases or entire sections. The analysis of music audio relies upon feature vectors that convey information about music texture or pitch content. Texture generally refers to the average spectral shape and statistical fluctuation, often reflecting the set of sounding instruments, e.g., strings, vocal, or drums. Pitch content reflects melody and harmony, which is often independent of texture. Structure is found in several ways. Segment boundaries can be detected by observing marked changes in locally averaged texture.

Phase structure rewrite systems in information retrieval

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Klingbiel, P. H.

1985-01-01

Operational level automatic indexing requires an efficient means of normalizing natural language phrases. Subject switching requires an efficient means of translating one set of authorized terms to another. A phrase structure rewrite system called a Lexical Dictionary is explained that performs these functions. Background, operational use, other applications and ongoing research are explained.

Improved Identification of Noun Phrases in Clinical Radiology Reports Using a High-Performance Statistical Natural Language Parser Augmented with the UMLS Specialist Lexicon

PubMed Central

Huang, Yang; Lowe, Henry J.; Klein, Dan; Cucina, Russell J.

2005-01-01

Objective: The aim of this study was to develop and evaluate a method of extracting noun phrases with full phrase structures from a set of clinical radiology reports using natural language processing (NLP) and to investigate the effects of using the UMLS® Specialist Lexicon to improve noun phrase identification within clinical radiology documents. Design: The noun phrase identification (NPI) module is composed of a sentence boundary detector, a statistical natural language parser trained on a nonmedical domain, and a noun phrase (NP) tagger. The NPI module processed a set of 100 XML-represented clinical radiology reports in Health Level 7 (HL7)® Clinical Document Architecture (CDA)–compatible format. Computed output was compared with manual markups made by four physicians and one author for maximal (longest) NP and those made by one author for base (simple) NP, respectively. An extended lexicon of biomedical terms was created from the UMLS Specialist Lexicon and used to improve NPI performance. Results: The test set was 50 randomly selected reports. The sentence boundary detector achieved 99.0% precision and 98.6% recall. The overall maximal NPI precision and recall were 78.9% and 81.5% before using the UMLS Specialist Lexicon and 82.1% and 84.6% after. The overall base NPI precision and recall were 88.2% and 86.8% before using the UMLS Specialist Lexicon and 93.1% and 92.6% after, reducing false-positives by 31.1% and false-negatives by 34.3%. Conclusion: The sentence boundary detector performs excellently. After the adaptation using the UMLS Specialist Lexicon, the statistical parser's NPI performance on radiology reports increased to levels comparable to the parser's native performance in its newswire training domain and to that reported by other researchers in the general nonmedical domain. PMID:15684131

Design and Diagnosis Problem Solving with Multifunctional Technical Knowledge Bases

DTIC Science & Technology

1992-09-29

STRUCTURE METHODOLOGY Design problem solving is a complex activity involving a number of subtasks. and a number of alternative methods potentially available...Conference on Artificial Intelligence. London: The British Computer Society, pp. 621-633. Friedland, P. (1979). Knowledge-based experimental design ...Computing Milieuxl: Management of Computing and Information Systems- -ty,*m man- agement General Terms: Design . Methodology Additional Key Words and Phrases

Managing ambiguity in reference generation: the role of surface structure.

PubMed

Khan, Imtiaz H; van Deemter, Kees; Ritchie, Graeme

2012-04-01

This article explores the role of surface ambiguities in referring expressions, and how the risk of such ambiguities should be taken into account by an algorithm that generates referring expressions, if these expressions are to be optimally effective for a hearer. We focus on the ambiguities that arise when adjectives occur in coordinated structures. The central idea is to use statistical information about lexical co-occurrence to estimate which interpretation of a phrase is most likely for human readers, and to avoid generating phrases where misunderstandings are likely. Various aspects of the problem were explored in three experiments in which responses by human participants provided evidence about which reading was most likely for certain phrases, which phrases were deemed most suitable for particular referents, and the speed at which various phrases were read. We found a preference for ''clear'' expressions to ''unclear'' ones, but if several of the expressions are ''clear,'' then brief expressions are preferred over non-brief ones even though the brief ones are syntactically ambiguous and the non-brief ones are not; the notion of clarity was made precise using Kilgarriff's Word Sketches. We outline an implemented algorithm that generates noun phrases conforming to our hypotheses. Copyright © 2011 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

Technical structure of the global nanoscience and nanotechnology literature

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kostoff, Ronald N.; Koytcheff, Raymond G.; Lau, Clifford G. Y.

2007-10-01

Text mining was used to extract technical intelligence from the open source global nanotechnology and nanoscience research literature. An extensive nanotechnology/nanoscience-focused query was applied to the Science Citation Index/Social Science Citation Index (SCI/SSCI) databases. The nanotechnology/nanoscience research literature technical structure (taxonomy) was obtained using computational linguistics/document clustering and factor analysis. The infrastructure (prolific authors, key journals/institutions/countries, most cited authors/journals/documents) for each of the clusters generated by the document clustering algorithm was obtained using bibliometrics. Another novel addition was the use of phrase auto-correlation maps to show technical thrust areas based on phrase co-occurrence in Abstracts, and the use of phrase-phrase cross-correlation maps to show technical thrust areas based on phrase relations due to the sharing of common co-occurring phrases. The ˜400 most cited nanotechnology papers since 1991 were grouped, and their characteristics generated. Whereas the main analysis provided technical thrusts of all nanotechnology papers retrieved, analysis of the most cited papers allowed their characteristics to be displayed. Finally, most cited papers from selected time periods were extracted, along with all publications from those time periods, and the institutions and countries were compared based on their representation in the most cited documents list relative to their representation in the most publications list.

78 FR 52832 - Catastrophic Risk Protection Endorsement

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2013-08-27

... comments are as follows: General Comment: A commenter stated there should be zero catastrophic risk which... ``price election'' to determine the loss. Response: The Special Provisions were not removed from the order... phrase ``price election'' creates uniformity since the phrase has already been replaced in the Common...

Korean Phrase Book.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Peace Corps, Washington, DC.

This is a brief guide to Korean pronunciation and phrases, prepared for U.S. Navy personnel. Expressions are grouped according to the following headings: (1) emergency expressions; (2) general expressions; (3) personal needs; (4) location and terrain; (5) roads and transportation; (6) communications; (7) letters, numbers, size, time, etc.; (8)…

Parallel functional category deficits in clauses and nominal phrases: The case of English agrammatism

PubMed Central

Wang, Honglei; Yoshida, Masaya; Thompson, Cynthia K.

2015-01-01

Individuals with agrammatic aphasia exhibit restricted patterns of impairment of functional morphemes, however, syntactic characterization of the impairment is controversial. Previous studies have focused on functional morphology in clauses only. This study extends the empirical domain by testing functional morphemes in English nominal phrases in aphasia and comparing patients’ impairment to their impairment of functional morphemes in English clauses. In the linguistics literature, it is assumed that clauses and nominal phrases are structurally parallel but exhibit inflectional differences. The results of the present study indicated that aphasic speakers evinced similar impairment patterns in clauses and nominal phrases. These findings are consistent with the Distributed Morphology Hypothesis (DMH), suggesting that the source of functional morphology deficits among agrammatics relates to difficulty implementing rules that convert inflectional features into morphemes. Our findings, however, are inconsistent with the Tree Pruning Hypothesis (TPH), which suggests that patients have difficulty building complex hierarchical structures. PMID:26379370

Mining Quality Phrases from Massive Text Corpora

PubMed Central

Liu, Jialu; Shang, Jingbo; Wang, Chi; Ren, Xiang; Han, Jiawei

2015-01-01

Text data are ubiquitous and play an essential role in big data applications. However, text data are mostly unstructured. Transforming unstructured text into structured units (e.g., semantically meaningful phrases) will substantially reduce semantic ambiguity and enhance the power and efficiency at manipulating such data using database technology. Thus mining quality phrases is a critical research problem in the field of databases. In this paper, we propose a new framework that extracts quality phrases from text corpora integrated with phrasal segmentation. The framework requires only limited training but the quality of phrases so generated is close to human judgment. Moreover, the method is scalable: both computation time and required space grow linearly as corpus size increases. Our experiments on large text corpora demonstrate the quality and efficiency of the new method. PMID:26705375

The Language of Energy: A Glossary of Words and Phrases Used in the Energy Industry.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

American Petroleum Inst., Washington, DC.

Provided is an alphabetical list or words and phrases commonly used in the energy industry. Entries range from such general terms as biomass, fossil fuels, and wetlands to such highly specific terms as Arab oil embargo of 1973-74 and Exxon Donor Solvent (EDS) Process. (JN)

Fullerene data mining using bibliometrics and database tomography

PubMed

Kostoff; Braun; Schubert; Toothman; Humenik

2000-01-01

Database tomography (DT) is a textual database analysis system consisting of two major components: (1) algorithms for extracting multiword phrase frequencies and phrase proximities (physical closeness of the multiword technical phrases) from any type of large textual database, to augment (2) interpretative capabilities of the expert human analyst. DT was used to derive technical intelligence from a fullerenes database derived from the Science Citation Index and the Engineering Compendex. Phrase frequency analysis by the technical domain experts provided the pervasive technical themes of the fullerenes database, and phrase proximity analysis provided the relationships among the pervasive technical themes. Bibliometric analysis of the fullerenes literature supplemented the DT results with author/journal/institution publication and citation data. Comparisons of fullerenes results with past analyses of similarly structured near-earth space, chemistry, hypersonic/supersonic flow, aircraft, and ship hydrodynamics databases are made. One important finding is that many of the normalized bibliometric distribution functions are extremely consistent across these diverse technical domains and could reasonably be expected to apply to broader chemical topics than fullerenes that span multiple structural classes. Finally, lessons learned about integrating the technical domain experts with the data mining tools are presented.

The Indris Have Got Rhythm! Timing and Pitch Variation of a Primate Song Examined between Sexes and Age Classes

PubMed Central

Gamba, Marco; Torti, Valeria; Estienne, Vittoria; Randrianarison, Rose M.; Valente, Daria; Rovara, Paolo; Bonadonna, Giovanna; Friard, Olivier; Giacoma, Cristina

2016-01-01

A crucial, common feature of speech and music is that they show non-random structures over time. It is an open question which of the other species share rhythmic abilities with humans, but in most cases the lack of knowledge about their behavioral displays prevents further studies. Indris are the only lemurs who sing. They produce loud howling cries that can be heard at several kilometers, in which all members of a group usually sing. We tested whether overlapping and turn-taking during the songs followed a precise pattern by analysing the temporal structure of the individuals' contribution to the song. We found that both dominants (males and females) and non-dominants influenced the onset timing one another. We have found that the dominant male and the dominant female in a group overlapped each other more frequently than they did with the non-dominants. We then focused on the temporal and frequency structure of particular phrases occurring during the song. Our results show that males and females have dimorphic inter-onset intervals during the phrases. Moreover, median frequencies of the unit emitted in the phrases also differ between the sexes, with males showing higher frequencies when compared to females. We have not found an effect of age on the temporal and spectral structure of the phrases. These results indicate that singing in indris has a high behavioral flexibility and varies according to social and individual factors. The flexible spectral structure of the phrases given during the song may underlie perceptual abilities that are relatively unknown in other non-human primates, such as the ability to recognize particular pitch patterns. PMID:27378834

A Phrase-Based Matching Function.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Galbiati, Giulia

1991-01-01

Describes the development of an information retrieval system designed for nonspecialist users that is based on the binary vector model. The syntactic structure of phrases used for indexing is examined, queries using an experimental collection of documents are described, and precision values are examined. (19 references) (LRW)

Parallel Architecture, Parallel Acquisition Cross-Linguistic Evidence from Nominal and Verbal Domains

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sutton, Brett R.

2017-01-01

This dissertation explores parallels between Complementizer Phrase (CP) and Determiner Phrase (DP) semantics, syntax, and morphology--including similarities in case-assignment, subject-verb and possessor-possessum agreement, subject and possessor semantics, and overall syntactic structure--in first language acquisition. Applying theoretical…

Developmental Relationships between Speech and Writing: Is Verb-Phrase Anaphora Production a Special Case?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Donaldson, Morag L.; Cooper, Lynn S. M.

2013-01-01

Background: Young children's speech is typically more linguistically sophisticated than their writing. However, there are grounds for asking whether production of cohesive devices, such as verb-phrase anaphora (VPA), might represent an exception to this developmental pattern, as cohesive devices are generally more important in writing than in…

Memory Operations and Structures in Sentence Comprehension: Evidence from Ellipsis

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Martin, Andrea Eyleen

2010-01-01

Natural language often contains dependencies that span words, phrases, or even sentences. Thus, language comprehension relies on recovering recently processed information from memory for subsequent interpretation. This dissertation investigates the memory operations that subserve dependency resolution through the lens of "verb-phrase ellipsis"…

Effects of Noun Phrase Type on Sentence Complexity

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gordon, Peter C.; Hendrick, Randall; Johnson, Marcus

2004-01-01

A series of self-paced reading time experiments was performed to assess how characteristics of noun phrases (NPs) contribute to the difference in processing difficulty between object- and subject-extracted relative clauses. Structural semantic characteristics of the NP in the embedded clause (definite vs. indefinite and definite vs. generic) did…

40 CFR 75.13 - Specific provisions for monitoring CO 2 emissions.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-07-01

... the general operating requirements in § 75.10 for a CO2 continuous emission monitoring system and flow... specified in §§ 75.11(a) through (e) or § 75.16, except that the phrase “CO2 continuous emission monitoring system” shall apply rather than “SO2 continuous emission monitoring system,” the phrase “CO2...

40 CFR 75.13 - Specific provisions for monitoring CO 2 emissions.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-07-01

... the general operating requirements in § 75.10 for a CO2 continuous emission monitoring system and flow... specified in §§ 75.11(a) through (e) or § 75.16, except that the phrase “CO2 continuous emission monitoring system” shall apply rather than “SO2 continuous emission monitoring system,” the phrase “CO2...

The Interface of Syntax with Pragmatics and Prosody in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders.

PubMed

Terzi, Arhonto; Marinis, Theodoros; Francis, Kostantinos

2016-08-01

In order to study problems of individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) with morphosyntax, we investigated twenty high-functioning Greek-speaking children (mean age: 6;11) and twenty age- and language-matched typically developing children on environments that allow or forbid object clitics or their corresponding noun phrase. Children with ASD fell behind typically developing children in comprehending and producing simple clitics and producing noun phrases in focus structures. The two groups performed similarly in comprehending and producing clitics in clitic left dislocation and in producing noun phrases in non-focus structures. We argue that children with ASD have difficulties at the interface of (morpho)syntax with pragmatics and prosody, namely, distinguishing a discourse prominent element, and considering intonation relevant for a particular interpretation that excludes clitics.

Structural Influences on Initial Accent Placement in French

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Astesano, Corine; Bard, Ellen Gurman; Turk, Alice

2007-01-01

In addition to the phrase-final accent (FA), the French phonological system includes a phonetically distinct Initial Accent (IA). The present study tested two proposals: that IA marks the onset of phonological phrases, and that it has an independent rhythmic function. Eight adult native speakers of French were instructed to read syntactically…

The Recipe for Success: Syntactic Features of "la chronique gastronomique."

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Engel, Dulcie M.

1997-01-01

Analyzes the syntactic structure of noun phrases and verb phrases in recipes and cookery articles in the French press and argues that the complexity of writing about cooking parallels the complexity of the cooking process itself, demonstrating how syntax can reflect function and meaning in a restricted text-type. (Author/MSE)

Are Subject Small Clauses Really Small Clauses?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kubo, Miori

1993-01-01

This paper discusses the ongoing debate over small clauses concerning the structure of the verb phrase in "I consider Bill smart." It is demonstrated that the subject constituent in question is not a small clause, but a Noun Phrase (NP), following Noun (N). It is shown that some peculiar phenomena under the small clause analysis are…

QR in Child Grammar: Evidence from Antecedent-Contained Deletion

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Syrett, Kristen; Lidz, Jeffrey

2009-01-01

We show that 4-year-olds assign the correct interpretation to antecedent-contained deletion (ACD) sentences because they have the correct representation of these structures. This representation involves Quantifier Raising (QR) of a Quantificational Noun Phrase (QNP) that must move out of the site of the verb phrase in which it is contained to…

WORDGRAPH: Keyword-in-Context Visualization for NETSPEAK's Wildcard Search.

PubMed

Riehmann, Patrick; Gruendl, Henning; Potthast, Martin; Trenkmann, Martin; Stein, Benno; Froehlich, Benno

2012-09-01

The WORDGRAPH helps writers in visually choosing phrases while writing a text. It checks for the commonness of phrases and allows for the retrieval of alternatives by means of wildcard queries. To support such queries, we implement a scalable retrieval engine, which returns high-quality results within milliseconds using a probabilistic retrieval strategy. The results are displayed as WORDGRAPH visualization or as a textual list. The graphical interface provides an effective means for interactive exploration of search results using filter techniques, query expansion, and navigation. Our observations indicate that, of three investigated retrieval tasks, the textual interface is sufficient for the phrase verification task, wherein both interfaces support context-sensitive word choice, and the WORDGRAPH best supports the exploration of a phrase's context or the underlying corpus. Our user study confirms these observations and shows that WORDGRAPH is generally the preferred interface over the textual result list for queries containing multiple wildcards.

Using Wikipedia and Conceptual Graph Structures to Generate Questions for Academic Writing Support

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Liu, Ming; Calvo, R. A.; Aditomo, A.; Pizzato, L. A.

2012-01-01

In this paper, we present a novel approach for semiautomatic question generation to support academic writing. Our system first extracts key phrases from students' literature review papers. Each key phrase is matched with a Wikipedia article and classified into one of five abstract concept categories: Research Field, Technology, System, Term, and…

Phrase Units as Determinants of Visual Processing in Music Reading

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sloboda, John A.

1977-01-01

Keyboard musicians sight-read passages of music in which the amount of information about the presence of phrase units was systematically varied. Results suggest a clear analogy between the cognition of music and language, in that knowledge of abstract structure is of importance in the organization of immediate visual processing of text. (Editor/RK)

The Processing and Interpretation of Verb Phrase Ellipsis Constructions by Children at Normal and Slowed Speech Rates

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Callahan, Sarah M.; Walenski, Matthew; Love, Tracy

2012-01-01

Purpose: To examine children's comprehension of verb phrase (VP) ellipsis constructions in light of their automatic, online structural processing abilities and conscious, metalinguistic reflective skill. Method: Forty-two children ages 5 through 12 years listened to VP ellipsis constructions involving the strict/sloppy ambiguity (e.g., "The…

Symmetric and Asymmetric Patterns of Attraction Errors in Producing Subject-Predicate Agreement in Hebrew: An Issue of Morphological Structure

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Deutsch, Avital; Dank, Maya

2011-01-01

A common characteristic of subject-predicate agreement errors (usually termed attraction errors) in complex noun phrases is an asymmetrical pattern of error distribution, depending on the inflectional state of the nouns comprising the complex noun phrase. That is, attraction is most likely to occur when the head noun is the morphologically…

Auditory Temporal Structure Processing in Dyslexia: Processing of Prosodic Phrase Boundaries Is Not Impaired in Children with Dyslexia

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Geiser, Eveline; Kjelgaard, Margaret; Christodoulou, Joanna A.; Cyr, Abigail; Gabrieli, John D. E.

2014-01-01

Reading disability in children with dyslexia has been proposed to reflect impairment in auditory timing perception. We investigated one aspect of timing perception--"temporal grouping"--as present in prosodic phrase boundaries of natural speech, in age-matched groups of children, ages 6-8 years, with and without dyslexia. Prosodic phrase…

The Pistol that Injured the Cowboy: Difficulty with Inanimate Subject-Verb Integration Is Reduced by Structural Separation

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lowder, Matthew W.; Gordon, Peter C.

2012-01-01

Previous work has suggested that the difficulty normally associated with processing an object-extracted relative clause (ORC) compared to a subject-extracted relative clause (SRC) is increased when the head noun phrase (NP1) is animate and the embedded noun phrase (NP2) is inanimate, compared to the reverse animacy configuration. Two eye-tracking…

The Republic of Turkey: Intercultural Education and the Colorado Air National Guard.

DTIC Science & Technology

1981-05-01

LESSON 9 1. Our goal in language 30 - 40 phrases 180 plus counting A - greetings, general phrases - eating habits & foods - directions - counting...Turkish coffee Alafranga kahve. Nescafe Tea (;ay (Breakfast continued) Bread, butter, jamn Ekmek, tereya§. reqel Egg Vumurta Fruit juice Meyve suyu Toast...Excuse me. Afferdersiniz Breakfast kahvalti Tea jay Coffee kahve Bread ekmek Fruit juice Meyve suyu Egg yumurta Milk sut Sugar 9eker Meat et Beef

Syntactic Complexity and Frequency in the Neurocognitive Language System.

PubMed

Yang, Yun-Hsuan; Marslen-Wilson, William D; Bozic, Mirjana

2017-09-01

Prominent neurobiological models of language follow the widely accepted assumption that language comprehension requires two principal mechanisms: a lexicon storing the sound-to-meaning mapping of words, primarily involving bilateral temporal regions, and a combinatorial processor for syntactically structured items, such as phrases and sentences, localized in a left-lateralized network linking left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) and posterior temporal areas. However, recent research showing that the processing of simple phrasal sequences may engage only bilateral temporal areas, together with the claims of distributional approaches to grammar, raise the question of whether frequent phrases are stored alongside individual words in temporal areas. In this fMRI study, we varied the frequency of words and of short and long phrases in English. If frequent phrases are indeed stored, then only less frequent items should generate selective left frontotemporal activation, because memory traces for such items would be weaker or not available in temporal cortex. Complementary univariate and multivariate analyses revealed that, overall, simple words (verbs) and long phrases engaged LIFG and temporal areas, whereas short phrases engaged bilateral temporal areas, suggesting that syntactic complexity is a key factor for LIFG activation. Although we found a robust frequency effect for words in temporal areas, no frequency effects were found for the two phrasal conditions. These findings support the conclusion that long and short phrases are analyzed, respectively, in the left frontal network and in a bilateral temporal network but are not retrieved from memory in the same way as simple words during spoken language comprehension.

The role of prominence in determining the scope of boundary-related lengthening in Greek.

PubMed

Katsika, Argyro

2016-03-01

This study aims at examining and accounting for the scope of the temporal effect of phrase boundaries. Previous research has indicated that there is an interaction between boundary-related lengthening and prominence such that the former extends towards the nearby prominent syllable. However, it is unclear whether this interaction is due to lexical stress and/or phrasal prominence (marked by pitch accent) and how far towards the prominent syllable the effect extends. Here, we use an electromagnetic articulography (EMA) study of Greek to examine the scope of boundary-related lengthening as a function of lexical stress and pitch accent separately. Boundaries are elicited by the means of a variety of syntactic constructions.. The results show an effect of lexical stress. Phrase-final lengthening affects the articulatory gestures of the phrase-final syllable that are immediately adjacent to the boundary in words with final stress, but is initiated earlier within phrase-final words with non-final stress. Similarly, the articulatory configurations during inter-phrasal pauses reach their point of achievement later in words with final stress than in words with non-final stress. These effects of stress hold regardless of whether the phrase-final word is accented or de-accented. Phrase-initial lengthening, on the other hand, is consistently detected on the phrase-initial constriction, independently of where the stress is within the preceding, phrase-final, word. These results indicate that the lexical aspect of prominence plays a role in determining the scope of boundary-related lengthening in Greek. Based on these results, a gestural account of prosodic boundaries in Greek is proposed in which lexical and phrasal prosody interact in a systematic and coordinated fashion. The cross-linguistic dimensions of this account and its implications for prosodic structure are discussed.

Lexical Noun Phrases in Texts Written by Deaf Children and Adults with Different Proficiency Levels in Sign Language

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

van Beijsterveldt, Liesbeth Maria; van Hell, Janet

2010-01-01

We report an analysis of lexical noun phrases (NPs) in narrative and expository texts written by Dutch deaf individuals from a bimodal bilingual perspective. Texts written by Dutch deaf children and adults who are either proficient in Sign Language of the Netherlands (SLN) or low-proficient in SLN were compared on structures that either overlap in…

Language and music phrase boundary processing in Autism Spectrum Disorder: An ERP study.

PubMed

DePriest, John; Glushko, Anastasia; Steinhauer, Karsten; Koelsch, Stefan

2017-10-31

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is frequently associated with communicative impairment, regardless of intelligence level or mental age. Impairment of prosodic processing in particular is a common feature of ASD. Despite extensive overlap in neural resources involved in prosody and music processing, music perception seems to be spared in this population. The present study is the first to investigate prosodic phrasing in ASD in both language and music, combining event-related brain potential (ERP) and behavioral methods. We tested phrase boundary processing in language and music in neuro-typical adults and high-functioning individuals with ASD. We targeted an ERP response associated with phrase boundary processing in both language and music - i.e., the Closure Positive Shift (CPS). While a language-CPS was observed in the neuro-typical group, for ASD participants a smaller response failed to reach statistical significance. In music, we found a boundary-onset music-CPS for both groups during pauses between musical phrases. Our results support the view of preserved processing of musical cues in ASD individuals, with a corresponding prosodic impairment. This suggests that, despite the existence of a domain-general processing mechanism (the CPS), key differences in the integration of features of language and music may lead to the prosodic impairment in ASD.

Acoustic foundations of the speech-to-song illusion.

PubMed

Tierney, Adam; Patel, Aniruddh D; Breen, Mara

2018-06-01

In the "speech-to-song illusion," certain spoken phrases are heard as highly song-like when isolated from context and repeated. This phenomenon occurs to a greater degree for some stimuli than for others, suggesting that particular cues prompt listeners to perceive a spoken phrase as song. Here we investigated the nature of these cues across four experiments. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to rate how song-like spoken phrases were after each of eight repetitions. Initial ratings were correlated with the consistency of an underlying beat and within-syllable pitch slope, while rating change was linked to beat consistency, within-syllable pitch slope, and melodic structure. In Experiment 2, the within-syllable pitch slope of the stimuli was manipulated, and this manipulation changed the extent to which participants heard certain stimuli as more musical than others. In Experiment 3, the extent to which the pitch sequences of a phrase fit a computational model of melodic structure was altered, but this manipulation did not have a significant effect on musicality ratings. In Experiment 4, the consistency of intersyllable timing was manipulated, but this manipulation did not have an effect on the change in perceived musicality after repetition. Our methods provide a new way of studying the causal role of specific acoustic features in the speech-to-song illusion via subtle acoustic manipulations of speech, and show that listeners can rapidly (and implicitly) assess the degree to which nonmusical stimuli contain musical structure. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Beauty and the Beast: The Mission of General Education.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Menke, Pamela Glenn

1979-01-01

"Back to Basics" has become a popular phrase to describe the current trend in higher education's general education requirements. What must be addressed beyond the evident need for basic skills is the nature of the "mission" of the general education curriculum component. (Author)

Prosodic structure shapes the temporal realization of intonation and manual gesture movements.

PubMed

Esteve-Gibert, Núria; Prieto, Pilar

2013-06-01

Previous work on the temporal coordination between gesture and speech found that the prominence in gesture coordinates with speech prominence. In this study, the authors investigated the anchoring regions in speech and pointing gesture that align with each other. The authors hypothesized that (a) in contrastive focus conditions, the gesture apex is anchored in the intonation peak and (b) the upcoming prosodic boundary influences the timing of gesture and intonation movements. Fifteen Catalan speakers pointed at a screen while pronouncing a target word with different metrical patterns in a contrastive focus condition and followed by a phrase boundary. A total of 702 co-speech deictic gestures were acoustically and gesturally analyzed. Intonation peaks and gesture apexes showed parallel behavior with respect to their position within the accented syllable: They occurred at the end of the accented syllable in non-phrase-final position, whereas they occurred well before the end of the accented syllable in phrase-final position. Crucially, the position of intonation peaks and gesture apexes was correlated and was bound by prosodic structure. The results refine the phonological synchronization rule (McNeill, 1992), showing that gesture apexes are anchored in intonation peaks and that gesture and prosodic movements are bound by prosodic phrasing.

How hierarchical is language use?

PubMed Central

Frank, Stefan L.; Bod, Rens; Christiansen, Morten H.

2012-01-01

It is generally assumed that hierarchical phrase structure plays a central role in human language. However, considerations of simplicity and evolutionary continuity suggest that hierarchical structure should not be invoked too hastily. Indeed, recent neurophysiological, behavioural and computational studies show that sequential sentence structure has considerable explanatory power and that hierarchical processing is often not involved. In this paper, we review evidence from the recent literature supporting the hypothesis that sequential structure may be fundamental to the comprehension, production and acquisition of human language. Moreover, we provide a preliminary sketch outlining a non-hierarchical model of language use and discuss its implications and testable predictions. If linguistic phenomena can be explained by sequential rather than hierarchical structure, this will have considerable impact in a wide range of fields, such as linguistics, ethology, cognitive neuroscience, psychology and computer science. PMID:22977157

The Two Sides of Sensory-Cognitive Interactions: Effects of Age, Hearing Acuity, and Working Memory Span on Sentence Comprehension.

PubMed

DeCaro, Renee; Peelle, Jonathan E; Grossman, Murray; Wingfield, Arthur

2016-01-01

Reduced hearing acuity is among the most prevalent of chronic medical conditions among older adults. An experiment is reported in which comprehension of spoken sentences was tested for older adults with good hearing acuity or with a mild-to-moderate hearing loss, and young adults with age-normal hearing. Comprehension was measured by participants' ability to determine the agent of an action in sentences that expressed this relation with a syntactically less complex subject-relative construction or a syntactically more complex object-relative construction. Agency determination was further challenged by inserting a prepositional phrase into sentences between the person performing an action and the action being performed. As a control, prepositional phrases of equivalent length were also inserted into sentences in a non-disruptive position. Effects on sentence comprehension of age, hearing acuity, prepositional phrase placement and sound level of stimulus presentations appeared only for comprehension of sentences with the more syntactically complex object-relative structures. Working memory as tested by reading span scores accounted for a significant amount of the variance in comprehension accuracy. Once working memory capacity and hearing acuity were taken into account, chronological age among the older adults contributed no further variance to comprehension accuracy. Results are discussed in terms of the positive and negative effects of sensory-cognitive interactions in comprehension of spoken sentences and lend support to a framework in which domain-general executive resources, notably verbal working memory, play a role in both linguistic and perceptual processing.

Searching the ASRS Database Using QUORUM Keyword Search, Phrase Search, Phrase Generation, and Phrase Discovery

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

McGreevy, Michael W.; Connors, Mary M. (Technical Monitor)

2001-01-01

To support Search Requests and Quick Responses at the Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS), four new QUORUM methods have been developed: keyword search, phrase search, phrase generation, and phrase discovery. These methods build upon the core QUORUM methods of text analysis, modeling, and relevance-ranking. QUORUM keyword search retrieves ASRS incident narratives that contain one or more user-specified keywords in typical or selected contexts, and ranks the narratives on their relevance to the keywords in context. QUORUM phrase search retrieves narratives that contain one or more user-specified phrases, and ranks the narratives on their relevance to the phrases. QUORUM phrase generation produces a list of phrases from the ASRS database that contain a user-specified word or phrase. QUORUM phrase discovery finds phrases that are related to topics of interest. Phrase generation and phrase discovery are particularly useful for finding query phrases for input to QUORUM phrase search. The presentation of the new QUORUM methods includes: a brief review of the underlying core QUORUM methods; an overview of the new methods; numerous, concrete examples of ASRS database searches using the new methods; discussion of related methods; and, in the appendices, detailed descriptions of the new methods.

The dependency structure of coordinate phrases: a corpus approach.

PubMed

Temperley, David

2005-11-01

Hudson (1990) proposes that each conjunct in a coordinate phrase forms dependency relations with heads or dependents outside the coordinate phrase (the "multi-head" view). This proposal is tested through corpus analysis of Wall Street Journal text. For right-branching constituents (such as direct-object NPs), a short-long preference for conjunct ordering is observed; this is predicted by the multi-head view, under the assumption that structures resulting in shorter dependencies are preferred. A short-long preference is also observed for left-branching constituents (such as subject NPs), which is less obviously accommodated by the multi-head view but not incompatible with it. The repetition of determiners was also examined (the dog and cat versus the dog and the cat), and a stronger preference was found for repetition with singular count nouns as opposed to mass or plural nouns; this accords well with the multi-head view, under the reasoning that single-determiner constructions require crossing dependencies with count nouns but not with plural or mass nouns.

Terminology model discovery using natural language processing and visualization techniques.

PubMed

Zhou, Li; Tao, Ying; Cimino, James J; Chen, Elizabeth S; Liu, Hongfang; Lussier, Yves A; Hripcsak, George; Friedman, Carol

2006-12-01

Medical terminologies are important for unambiguous encoding and exchange of clinical information. The traditional manual method of developing terminology models is time-consuming and limited in the number of phrases that a human developer can examine. In this paper, we present an automated method for developing medical terminology models based on natural language processing (NLP) and information visualization techniques. Surgical pathology reports were selected as the testing corpus for developing a pathology procedure terminology model. The use of a general NLP processor for the medical domain, MedLEE, provides an automated method for acquiring semantic structures from a free text corpus and sheds light on a new high-throughput method of medical terminology model development. The use of an information visualization technique supports the summarization and visualization of the large quantity of semantic structures generated from medical documents. We believe that a general method based on NLP and information visualization will facilitate the modeling of medical terminologies.

Punctuation, Prosody, and Discourse: Afterthought Vs. Right Dislocation

PubMed Central

Kalbertodt, Janina; Primus, Beatrice; Schumacher, Petra B.

2015-01-01

In a reading production experiment we investigate the impact of punctuation and discourse structure on the prosodic differentiation of right dislocation (RD) and afterthought (AT). Both discourse structure and punctuation are likely to affect the prosodic marking of these right-peripheral constructions, as certain prosodic markings are appropriate only in certain discourse structures, and punctuation is said to correlate with prosodic phrasing. With RD and AT clearly differing in discourse function (comment-topic structuring vs. disambiguation) and punctuation (comma vs. full stop), critical items in this study were manipulated with regard to the (mis-)match of these parameters. Since RD and AT are said to prosodically differ in pitch range, phrasing, and accentuation patterns, we measured the reduction of pitch range, boundary strength and prominence level. Results show an effect of both punctuation and discourse context (mediated by syntax) on phrasing and accentuation. Interestingly, for pitch range reduction no difference between RDs and ATs could be observed. Our results corroborate a language architecture model in which punctuation, prosody, syntax, and discourse-semantics are independent but interacting domains with correspondence constraints between them. Our findings suggest there are tight correspondence constraints between (i) punctuation (full stop and comma in particular) and syntax, (ii) prosody and syntax as well as (iii) prosody and discourse-semantics. PMID:26648883

29 CFR 541.201 - Directly related to management or general business operations.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-07-01

... management or general business operations. (a) To qualify for the administrative exemption, an employee's... operations of the employer or the employer's customers. The phrase “directly related to the management or... 29 Labor 3 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Directly related to management or general business...

The Two Sides of Sensory–Cognitive Interactions: Effects of Age, Hearing Acuity, and Working Memory Span on Sentence Comprehension

PubMed Central

DeCaro, Renee; Peelle, Jonathan E.; Grossman, Murray; Wingfield, Arthur

2016-01-01

Reduced hearing acuity is among the most prevalent of chronic medical conditions among older adults. An experiment is reported in which comprehension of spoken sentences was tested for older adults with good hearing acuity or with a mild-to-moderate hearing loss, and young adults with age-normal hearing. Comprehension was measured by participants’ ability to determine the agent of an action in sentences that expressed this relation with a syntactically less complex subject-relative construction or a syntactically more complex object-relative construction. Agency determination was further challenged by inserting a prepositional phrase into sentences between the person performing an action and the action being performed. As a control, prepositional phrases of equivalent length were also inserted into sentences in a non-disruptive position. Effects on sentence comprehension of age, hearing acuity, prepositional phrase placement and sound level of stimulus presentations appeared only for comprehension of sentences with the more syntactically complex object-relative structures. Working memory as tested by reading span scores accounted for a significant amount of the variance in comprehension accuracy. Once working memory capacity and hearing acuity were taken into account, chronological age among the older adults contributed no further variance to comprehension accuracy. Results are discussed in terms of the positive and negative effects of sensory–cognitive interactions in comprehension of spoken sentences and lend support to a framework in which domain-general executive resources, notably verbal working memory, play a role in both linguistic and perceptual processing. PMID:26973557

Indexing Anatomical Phrases in Neuro-Radiology Reports to the UMLS 2005AA

PubMed Central

Bashyam, Vijayaraghavan; Taira, Ricky K.

2005-01-01

This work describes a methodology to index anatomical phrases to the 2005AA release of the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). A phrase chunking tool based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) was developed to identify semantically coherent phrases within medical reports. Using this phrase chunker, a set of 2,551 unique anatomical phrases was extracted from brain radiology reports. These phrases were mapped to the 2005AA release of the UMLS using a vector space model. Precision for the task of indexing unique phrases was 0.87. PMID:16778995

Physics textbooks from the viewpoint of network structures

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Králiková, Petra; Teleki, Aba

2017-01-01

We can observe self-organized networks all around us. These networks are, in general, scale invariant networks described by the Bianconi-Barabasi model. The self-organized networks (networks formed naturally when feedback acts on the system) show certain universality. These networks, in simplified models, have scale invariant distribution (Pareto distribution type I) and parameter α has value between 2 and 5. The textbooks are extremely important in the learning process and from this reason we studied physics textbook at the level of sentences and physics terms (bipartite network). The nodes represent physics terms, sentences, and pictures, tables, connected by links (by physics terms and transitional words and transitional phrases). We suppose that learning process are more robust and goes faster and easier if the physics textbook has a structure similar to structures of self-organized networks.

Looking forwards and backwards: The real-time processing of Strong and Weak Crossover

PubMed Central

Lidz, Jeffrey; Phillips, Colin

2017-01-01

We investigated the processing of pronouns in Strong and Weak Crossover constructions as a means of probing the extent to which the incremental parser can use syntactic information to guide antecedent retrieval. In Experiment 1 we show that the parser accesses a displaced wh-phrase as an antecedent for a pronoun when no grammatical constraints prohibit binding, but the parser ignores the same wh-phrase when it stands in a Strong Crossover relation to the pronoun. These results are consistent with two possibilities. First, the parser could apply Principle C at antecedent retrieval to exclude the wh-phrase on the basis of the c-command relation between its gap and the pronoun. Alternatively, retrieval might ignore any phrases that do not occupy an Argument position. Experiment 2 distinguished between these two possibilities by testing antecedent retrieval under Weak Crossover. In Weak Crossover binding of the pronoun is ruled out by the argument condition, but not Principle C. The results of Experiment 2 indicate that antecedent retrieval accesses matching wh-phrases in Weak Crossover configurations. On the basis of these findings we conclude that the parser can make rapid use of Principle C and c-command information to constrain retrieval. We discuss how our results support a view of antecedent retrieval that integrates inferences made over unseen syntactic structure into constraints on backward-looking processes like memory retrieval. PMID:28936483

Implicit Prosody and Cue-based Retrieval: L1 and L2 Agreement and Comprehension during Reading

PubMed Central

Pratt, Elizabeth; Fernández, Eva M.

2016-01-01

This project focuses on structural and prosodic effects during reading, examining their influence on agreement processing and comprehension in native English (L1) and Spanish–English bilingual (L2) speakers. We consolidate research from several distinct areas of inquiry—cognitive processing, reading fluency, and L1/L2 processing—in order to support the integration of prosody with a cue-based retrieval mechanism for subject-verb agreement. To explore this proposal, the experimental design manipulated text presentation to influence implicit prosody, using sentences designed to induce subject-verb agreement attraction errors. Materials included simple and complex relative clauses with head nouns and verbs that were either matched or mismatched for number. Participants read items in one of three presentation formats (whole sentence, word-by-word, or phrase-by-phrase), rated each item for grammaticality, and responded to a comprehension probe. Results indicated that while overall, message comprehension was prioritized over subject-verb agreement computation, presentation format differentially affected both measures in the L1 and L2 groups. For the L1 participants, facilitating the projection of phrasal prosody onto text (phrase-by-phrase presentation) enhanced performance in agreement processing, while disrupting prosodic projection via word-by-word presentation decreased comprehension accuracy. For the L2 participants, however, phrase-by-phrase presentation was not significantly beneficial for agreement processing, and additionally resulted in lower comprehension accuracy. These differences point to a significant role of prosodic phrasing during agreement processing in both L1 and L2 speakers, additionally suggesting that it may contribute to a cue-based retrieval agreement model, either acting as a cue directly, or otherwise scaffolding the retrieval process. The discussion and results presented provide support both for a cue-based retrieval mechanism in agreement, and the function of prosody within such a mechanism, adding further insight into the interaction of retrieval processes, cognitive task load, and the role of implicit prosody. PMID:28018264

Implicit Prosody and Cue-based Retrieval: L1 and L2 Agreement and Comprehension during Reading.

PubMed

Pratt, Elizabeth; Fernández, Eva M

2016-01-01

This project focuses on structural and prosodic effects during reading, examining their influence on agreement processing and comprehension in native English (L1) and Spanish-English bilingual (L2) speakers. We consolidate research from several distinct areas of inquiry-cognitive processing, reading fluency, and L1/L2 processing-in order to support the integration of prosody with a cue-based retrieval mechanism for subject-verb agreement. To explore this proposal, the experimental design manipulated text presentation to influence implicit prosody, using sentences designed to induce subject-verb agreement attraction errors. Materials included simple and complex relative clauses with head nouns and verbs that were either matched or mismatched for number. Participants read items in one of three presentation formats (whole sentence, word-by-word, or phrase-by-phrase), rated each item for grammaticality, and responded to a comprehension probe. Results indicated that while overall, message comprehension was prioritized over subject-verb agreement computation, presentation format differentially affected both measures in the L1 and L2 groups. For the L1 participants, facilitating the projection of phrasal prosody onto text (phrase-by-phrase presentation) enhanced performance in agreement processing, while disrupting prosodic projection via word-by-word presentation decreased comprehension accuracy. For the L2 participants, however, phrase-by-phrase presentation was not significantly beneficial for agreement processing, and additionally resulted in lower comprehension accuracy. These differences point to a significant role of prosodic phrasing during agreement processing in both L1 and L2 speakers, additionally suggesting that it may contribute to a cue-based retrieval agreement model, either acting as a cue directly, or otherwise scaffolding the retrieval process. The discussion and results presented provide support both for a cue-based retrieval mechanism in agreement, and the function of prosody within such a mechanism, adding further insight into the interaction of retrieval processes, cognitive task load, and the role of implicit prosody.

The concomitant effects of phrase length and informational content in sentence comprehension.

PubMed

Thornton, R; MacDonald, M C; Arnold, J E

2000-03-01

Recent evidence suggests that phrase length plays a crucial role in modification ambiguities. Using a self-paced reading task, we extended these results by examining the additional pragmatic effects that length manipulations may exert. The results demonstrate that length not only modulates modification preferences directly, but that it also necessarily changes the informational content of a sentence, which itself affects modification preferences. Our findings suggest that the same length manipulation affects multiple sources of constraints, both structural and pragmatic, which can each exert differing effects on processing.

A Comparative Study on the Effectiveness of Two Song-Teaching Methods: Holistic vs. Phrase-by-Phrase

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Persellin, Diane; Bateman, Laura

2009-01-01

The purpose of our study was to compare the effectiveness of two song-teaching methods: holistic and phrase-by-phrase. Thirty-two first-grade children (n = 32) from two music classes in an urban elementary school were taught two folksongs. The first class (n = 16) was taught one song through the phrase-by-phrase method and another song through the…

ChemicalTagger: A tool for semantic text-mining in chemistry.

PubMed

Hawizy, Lezan; Jessop, David M; Adams, Nico; Murray-Rust, Peter

2011-05-16

The primary method for scientific communication is in the form of published scientific articles and theses which use natural language combined with domain-specific terminology. As such, they contain free owing unstructured text. Given the usefulness of data extraction from unstructured literature, we aim to show how this can be achieved for the discipline of chemistry. The highly formulaic style of writing most chemists adopt make their contributions well suited to high-throughput Natural Language Processing (NLP) approaches. We have developed the ChemicalTagger parser as a medium-depth, phrase-based semantic NLP tool for the language of chemical experiments. Tagging is based on a modular architecture and uses a combination of OSCAR, domain-specific regex and English taggers to identify parts-of-speech. The ANTLR grammar is used to structure this into tree-based phrases. Using a metric that allows for overlapping annotations, we achieved machine-annotator agreements of 88.9% for phrase recognition and 91.9% for phrase-type identification (Action names). It is possible parse to chemical experimental text using rule-based techniques in conjunction with a formal grammar parser. ChemicalTagger has been deployed for over 10,000 patents and has identified solvents from their linguistic context with >99.5% precision.

78 FR 13544 - Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement: Acquisition of Tents and Other Temporary...

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2013-02-28

... acquisition of domestic tents to include the structural components of tents, applicable to acquisitions that... rule. A. Tents and Structural Components of Tents Question: Does the term ``structural components... 225.7002-1(a)(3) and 252.225-7012(b)(3) ensures clarity that the phrase ``structural components'' only...

Structured Natural-Language Descriptions for Semantic Content Retrieval of Visual Materials.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tam, A. M.; Leung, C. H. C.

2001-01-01

Proposes a structure for natural language descriptions of the semantic content of visual materials that requires descriptions to be (modified) keywords, phrases, or simple sentences, with components that are grammatical relations common to many languages. This structure makes it easy to implement a collection's descriptions as a relational…

Category Label Effects on Chinese Children's Inductive Inferences: Modulation by Perceptual Detail and Category Specificity

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Long, Changquan; Lu, Xiaoying; Zhang, Li; Li, Hong; Deak, Gedeon O.

2012-01-01

Inductive generalization of novel properties to same-category or similar-looking objects was studied in Chinese preschool children. The effects of category labels on generalizations were investigated by comparing basic-level labels, superordinate-level labels, and a control phrase applied to three kinds of stimulus materials: colored photographs…

Bias in the exchange of arguments: the case of scientists' evaluation of lay viewpoints on GM food.

PubMed

Cuppen, Eefje; Hisschemøller, Matthijs; Midden, Cees

2009-09-01

Most perspectives on public participation share the notion that dialogues should be open, allowing participants to articulate and evaluate different views and knowledge claims. We hypothesize that participants' evaluation of claims may be biased because participants have a preference for a particular type or source of a claim. This would hamper an open dialogue. We tested the effect of three variables on scientists' evaluation of claims of the general public about GM food: the claim's favorability towards GM food, the phrasing, and the source of the claim. Results are based on a survey-experiment among 73 biotechnology-scientists. Biased processing occurred when scientists evaluated claims. Claims that were corresponding with the attitude of the scientists and that were phrased in a cognitive way were evaluated more positively than claims that were contrasting the attitude of the scientists and that were phrased in an affective way. Contrary to our expectation, scientists evaluated claims of the public more positively than claims of experts.

Analysis of humpback whale sounds in shallow waters of the Southeastern Arabian Sea: An indication of breeding habitat.

PubMed

Mahanty, Madan M; Latha, G; Thirunavukkarasu, A

2015-06-01

The primary objective of this work was to present the acoustical identification of humpback whales, detected by using an autonomous ambient noise measurement system, deployed in the shallow waters of the Southeastern Arabian Sea (SEAS) during the period January to May 2011. Seven types of sounds were detected. These were characteristically upsweeps and downsweeps along with harmonics. Sounds produced repeatedly in a specific pattern were referred to as phrases (PQRS and ABC). Repeated phrases in a particular pattern were referred to as themes, and from the spectrographic analysis, two themes (I and II) were identified. The variation in the acoustic characteristics such as fundamental frequency, range, duration of the sound unit, and the structure of the phrases and themes are discussed. Sound units were recorded from mid-January to mid-March, with a peak in February, when the mean SST is approx. 28 degree C, and no presence was recorded after mid-March. The temporal and thematic structures strongly determine the functions of the humpback whale song form. Given the use of song in the SEAS, this area is possibly used as an active breeding habitat by humpback whales during the winter season.

Identifying well-formed biomedical phrases in MEDLINE® text.

PubMed

Kim, Won; Yeganova, Lana; Comeau, Donald C; Wilbur, W John

2012-12-01

In the modern world people frequently interact with retrieval systems to satisfy their information needs. Humanly understandable well-formed phrases represent a crucial interface between humans and the web, and the ability to index and search with such phrases is beneficial for human-web interactions. In this paper we consider the problem of identifying humanly understandable, well formed, and high quality biomedical phrases in MEDLINE documents. The main approaches used previously for detecting such phrases are syntactic, statistical, and a hybrid approach combining these two. In this paper we propose a supervised learning approach for identifying high quality phrases. First we obtain a set of known well-formed useful phrases from an existing source and label these phrases as positive. We then extract from MEDLINE a large set of multiword strings that do not contain stop words or punctuation. We believe this unlabeled set contains many well-formed phrases. Our goal is to identify these additional high quality phrases. We examine various feature combinations and several machine learning strategies designed to solve this problem. A proper choice of machine learning methods and features identifies in the large collection strings that are likely to be high quality phrases. We evaluate our approach by making human judgments on multiword strings extracted from MEDLINE using our methods. We find that over 85% of such extracted phrase candidates are humanly judged to be of high quality. Published by Elsevier Inc.

A Cross-Linguistic Comparison of Generic Noun Phrases in English and Mandarin.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gelman, Susan A.; Tardif, Twila

1998-01-01

Three studies examined adults' generic noun phrases in English and Mandarin Chinese from child-directed speech of caregivers interacting with their toddlers. Found that generic noun phrases were reliably identified in both languages. Generic noun phrases most frequently referred to animals. Non-generic noun phrases were used most frequently for…

Song hybridization events during revolutionary song change provide insights into cultural transmission in humpback whales

PubMed Central

Garland, Ellen C.; Rendell, Luke; Lamoni, Luca; Poole, M. Michael; Noad, Michael J.

2017-01-01

Cultural processes occur in a wide variety of animal taxa, from insects to cetaceans. The songs of humpback whales are one of the most striking examples of the transmission of a cultural trait and social learning in any nonhuman animal. To understand how songs are learned, we investigate rare cases of song hybridization, where parts of an existing song are spliced with a new one, likely before an individual totally adopts the new song. Song unit sequences were extracted from over 9,300 phrases recorded during two song revolutions across the South Pacific Ocean, allowing fine-scale analysis of composition and sequencing. In hybrid songs the current and new songs were spliced together in two specific ways: (i) singers placed a single hybrid phrase, in which content from both songs were combined, between the two song types when transitioning from one to the other, and/or (ii) singers spliced complete themes from the revolutionary song into the current song. Sequence analysis indicated that both processes were governed by structural similarity rules. Hybrid phrases or theme substitutions occurred at points in the songs where both songs contained “similar sounds arranged in a similar pattern.” Songs appear to be learned as segments (themes/phrase types), akin to birdsong and human language acquisition, and these can be combined in predictable ways if the underlying structural pattern is similar. These snapshots of song change provide insights into the mechanisms underlying song learning in humpback whales, and comparative perspectives on the evolution of human language and culture. PMID:28739940

Song hybridization events during revolutionary song change provide insights into cultural transmission in humpback whales.

PubMed

Garland, Ellen C; Rendell, Luke; Lamoni, Luca; Poole, M Michael; Noad, Michael J

2017-07-24

Cultural processes occur in a wide variety of animal taxa, from insects to cetaceans. The songs of humpback whales are one of the most striking examples of the transmission of a cultural trait and social learning in any nonhuman animal. To understand how songs are learned, we investigate rare cases of song hybridization, where parts of an existing song are spliced with a new one, likely before an individual totally adopts the new song. Song unit sequences were extracted from over 9,300 phrases recorded during two song revolutions across the South Pacific Ocean, allowing fine-scale analysis of composition and sequencing. In hybrid songs the current and new songs were spliced together in two specific ways: ( i ) singers placed a single hybrid phrase, in which content from both songs were combined, between the two song types when transitioning from one to the other, and/or ( ii ) singers spliced complete themes from the revolutionary song into the current song. Sequence analysis indicated that both processes were governed by structural similarity rules. Hybrid phrases or theme substitutions occurred at points in the songs where both songs contained "similar sounds arranged in a similar pattern." Songs appear to be learned as segments (themes/phrase types), akin to birdsong and human language acquisition, and these can be combined in predictable ways if the underlying structural pattern is similar. These snapshots of song change provide insights into the mechanisms underlying song learning in humpback whales, and comparative perspectives on the evolution of human language and culture.

Neural Correlates of Phrase Rhythm: An EEG Study of Bipartite vs. Rondo Sonata Form.

PubMed

Martínez-Rodrigo, Arturo; Fernández-Sotos, Alicia; Latorre, José Miguel; Moncho-Bogani, José; Fernández-Caballero, Antonio

2017-01-01

This paper introduces the neural correlates of phrase rhythm. In short, phrase rhythm is the rhythmic aspect of phrase construction and the relationships between phrases. For the sake of establishing the neural correlates, a musical experiment has been designed to induce music-evoked stimuli related to phrase rhythm. Brain activity is monitored through electroencephalography (EEG) by using a brain-computer interface. The power spectral value of each EEG channel is estimated to obtain how power variance distributes as a function of frequency. Our experiment shows statistical differences in theta and alpha bands in the phrase rhythm variations of two classical sonatas, one in bipartite form and the other in rondo form.

Neural Correlates of Phrase Rhythm: An EEG Study of Bipartite vs. Rondo Sonata Form

PubMed Central

Martínez-Rodrigo, Arturo; Fernández-Sotos, Alicia; Latorre, José Miguel; Moncho-Bogani, José; Fernández-Caballero, Antonio

2017-01-01

This paper introduces the neural correlates of phrase rhythm. In short, phrase rhythm is the rhythmic aspect of phrase construction and the relationships between phrases. For the sake of establishing the neural correlates, a musical experiment has been designed to induce music-evoked stimuli related to phrase rhythm. Brain activity is monitored through electroencephalography (EEG) by using a brain–computer interface. The power spectral value of each EEG channel is estimated to obtain how power variance distributes as a function of frequency. Our experiment shows statistical differences in theta and alpha bands in the phrase rhythm variations of two classical sonatas, one in bipartite form and the other in rondo form. PMID:28496406

All Together Now: Concurrent Learning of Multiple Structures in an Artificial Language

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Romberg, Alexa R.; Saffran, Jenny R.

2013-01-01

Natural languages contain many layers of sequential structure, from the distribution of phonemes within words to the distribution of phrases within utterances. However, most research modeling language acquisition using artificial languages has focused on only one type of distributional structure at a time. In two experiments, we investigated adult…

Should Textbooks Be Politically Correct?...and Several Other Issues.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mader, Diane Castellano

By getting hold of the dominating verbal structures, political correctness has tried (according to Paul Berman) to "get everyone to abandon certain previously unanalyzed phrases that contain the entire structure of oppressive social domination." Unfortunately, "political correctness" has become a pejorative term used to…

ADJECTIVES AS NOUN PHRASES.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

ROSS, JOHN ROBERT

THIS ANALYSIS OF UNDERLYING SYNTACTIC STRUCTURE IS BASED ON THE ASSUMPTION THAT THE PARTS OF SPEECH CALLED "VERBS" AND "ADJECTIVES" ARE TWO SUBCATEGORIES OF ONE MAJOR LEXICAL CATEGORY, "PREDICATE." FROM THIS ASSUMPTION, THE HYPOTHESIS IS ADVANCED THAT, IN LANGUAGES EXHIBITING THE COPULA, THE DEEP STRUCTURE OF SENTENCES CONTAINING PREDICATE…

Effective Web and Desktop Retrieval with Enhanced Semantic Spaces

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Daoud, Amjad M.

We describe the design and implementation of the NETBOOK prototype system for collecting, structuring and efficiently creating semantic vectors for concepts, noun phrases, and documents from a corpus of free full text ebooks available on the World Wide Web. Automatic generation of concept maps from correlated index terms and extracted noun phrases are used to build a powerful conceptual index of individual pages. To ensure scalabilty of our system, dimension reduction is performed using Random Projection [13]. Furthermore, we present a complete evaluation of the relative effectiveness of the NETBOOK system versus the Google Desktop [8].

The Interaction of Morphological and Stereotypical Gender Information in Russian.

PubMed

Garnham, Alan; Yakovlev, Yuri

2015-01-01

Previous research, for example in English, French, German, and Spanish, has investigated the interplay between grammatical gender information and stereotype gender information (e.g., that secretaries are usually female, in many cultures), in the interpretation of both singular noun phrases (the secretary) and plural nouns phrases, particularly so-called generic masculines-nouns that have masculine grammatical gender but that should be able to refer to both groups of men and mixed groups of men and women. Since the studies have been conducted in cultures with broadly similar stereotypes, the effects generally reflect differences in the grammatical systems of the languages. Russian has a more complex grammatical gender system than the languages previously studied, and, unlike those languages frequently presents examples in which grammatical gender is marked on the predicate (in an inflection on the verb). In this study we collected stereotype norms for 160 role names in Russian, providing a useful resource for further work in this language. We also conducted a reading time study examining the interaction of grammatical and stereotype gender information in the interpretation of both Russian singular noun phrases, and plurals that were (potentially) generic masculines. Our results show that, although both types of gender information are used, when available, the effects of grammatical marking on the predicate are not as strong as those of such marking on subject noun phrases.

The Interaction of Morphological and Stereotypical Gender Information in Russian

PubMed Central

Garnham, Alan; Yakovlev, Yuri

2015-01-01

Previous research, for example in English, French, German, and Spanish, has investigated the interplay between grammatical gender information and stereotype gender information (e.g., that secretaries are usually female, in many cultures), in the interpretation of both singular noun phrases (the secretary) and plural nouns phrases, particularly so-called generic masculines—nouns that have masculine grammatical gender but that should be able to refer to both groups of men and mixed groups of men and women. Since the studies have been conducted in cultures with broadly similar stereotypes, the effects generally reflect differences in the grammatical systems of the languages. Russian has a more complex grammatical gender system than the languages previously studied, and, unlike those languages frequently presents examples in which grammatical gender is marked on the predicate (in an inflection on the verb). In this study we collected stereotype norms for 160 role names in Russian, providing a useful resource for further work in this language. We also conducted a reading time study examining the interaction of grammatical and stereotype gender information in the interpretation of both Russian singular noun phrases, and plurals that were (potentially) generic masculines. Our results show that, although both types of gender information are used, when available, the effects of grammatical marking on the predicate are not as strong as those of such marking on subject noun phrases. PMID:26635650

ChemicalTagger: A tool for semantic text-mining in chemistry

PubMed Central

2011-01-01

Background The primary method for scientific communication is in the form of published scientific articles and theses which use natural language combined with domain-specific terminology. As such, they contain free owing unstructured text. Given the usefulness of data extraction from unstructured literature, we aim to show how this can be achieved for the discipline of chemistry. The highly formulaic style of writing most chemists adopt make their contributions well suited to high-throughput Natural Language Processing (NLP) approaches. Results We have developed the ChemicalTagger parser as a medium-depth, phrase-based semantic NLP tool for the language of chemical experiments. Tagging is based on a modular architecture and uses a combination of OSCAR, domain-specific regex and English taggers to identify parts-of-speech. The ANTLR grammar is used to structure this into tree-based phrases. Using a metric that allows for overlapping annotations, we achieved machine-annotator agreements of 88.9% for phrase recognition and 91.9% for phrase-type identification (Action names). Conclusions It is possible parse to chemical experimental text using rule-based techniques in conjunction with a formal grammar parser. ChemicalTagger has been deployed for over 10,000 patents and has identified solvents from their linguistic context with >99.5% precision. PMID:21575201

ULTRA: Universal Grammar as a Universal Parser

PubMed Central

Medeiros, David P.

2018-01-01

A central concern of generative grammar is the relationship between hierarchy and word order, traditionally understood as two dimensions of a single syntactic representation. A related concern is directionality in the grammar. Traditional approaches posit process-neutral grammars, embodying knowledge of language, put to use with infinite facility both for production and comprehension. This has crystallized in the view of Merge as the central property of syntax, perhaps its only novel feature. A growing number of approaches explore grammars with different directionalities, often with more direct connections to performance mechanisms. This paper describes a novel model of universal grammar as a one-directional, universal parser. Mismatch between word order and interpretation order is pervasive in comprehension; in the present model, word order is language-particular and interpretation order (i.e., hierarchy) is universal. These orders are not two dimensions of a unified abstract object (e.g., precedence and dominance in a single tree); rather, both are temporal sequences, and UG is an invariant real-time procedure (based on Knuth's stack-sorting algorithm) transforming word order into hierarchical order. This shift in perspective has several desirable consequences. It collapses linearization, displacement, and composition into a single performance process. The architecture provides a novel source of brackets (labeled unambiguously and without search), which are understood not as part-whole constituency relations, but as storage and retrieval routines in parsing. It also explains why neutral word order within single syntactic cycles avoids 213-like permutations. The model identifies cycles as extended projections of lexical heads, grounding the notion of phase. This is achieved with a universal processor, dispensing with parameters. The empirical focus is word order in noun phrases. This domain provides some of the clearest evidence for 213-avoidance as a cross-linguistic word order generalization. Importantly, recursive phrase structure “bottoms out” in noun phrases, which are typically a single cycle (though further cycles may be embedded, e.g., relative clauses). By contrast, a simple transitive clause plausibly involves two cycles (vP and CP), embedding further nominal cycles. In the present theory, recursion is fundamentally distinct from structure-building within a single cycle, and different word order restrictions might emerge in larger domains like clauses. PMID:29497394

Limits on the role of retrieval cues in memory for actions: enactment effects in the absence of object cues in the environment.

PubMed

Steffens, Melanie C; Buchner, Axel; Wender, Karl F; Decker, Claudia

2007-12-01

Verb-object phrases (open the umbrella, knock on the table) are usually remembered better if they have been enacted during study (also called subject-performed tasks) than if they have merely been learned verbally (verbal tasks). This enactment effect is particularly pronounced for phrases for which the objects (table) are present as cues in the study and test contexts. In previous studies with retrieval cues for some phrases, the enactment effect in free recall for the other phrases has been surprisingly small or even nonexistent. The present study tested whether the often replicated enactment effect in free recall can be found if none of the phrases contains context cues. In Experiment 1, we tested, and corroborated, the suppression hypothesis: The enactment effect for a given type of phrase (marker phrases) is modified by the presence or absence of cues for the other phrases in the list (experimental phrases). Experiments 2 and 3 replicated the enactment effect for phrases without cues. Experiment 2 also showed that the presence of cues either at study or at test is sufficient for obtaining a suppression effect, and Experiment 3 showed that the enactment effect may disappear altogether if retrieval cues are very salient.

Effects on Text Simplification: Evaluation of Splitting up Noun Phrases

PubMed Central

Leroy, Gondy; Kauchak, David; Hogue, Alan

2016-01-01

To help increase health literacy, we are developing a text simplification tool that creates more accessible patient education materials. Tool development is guided by data-driven feature analysis comparing simple and difficult text. In the present study, we focus on the common advice to split long noun phrases. Our previous corpus analysis showed that easier texts contained shorter noun phrases. Subsequently, we conduct a user study to measure the difficulty of sentences containing noun phrases of different lengths (2-gram, 3-gram and 4-gram), conditions (split or not) and, to simulate unknown terms, use of pseudowords (present or not). We gathered 35 evaluations for 30 sentences in each condition (3×2×2 conditions) on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (N=12,600). We conducted a three-way ANOVA for perceived and actual difficulty. Splitting noun phrases had a positive effect on perceived difficulty but a negative effect on actual difficulty. The presence of pseudowords increased perceived and actual difficulty. Without pseudowords, longer noun phrase led to increased perceived and actual difficulty. A follow-up study using the phrases (N = 1,350) showed that measuring awkwardness may indicate when to split noun phrases. We conclude that splitting noun phrases benefits perceived difficulty, but hurts actual difficulty when the phrasing becomes less natural. PMID:27043754

Beyond Verb Meaning: Experimental Evidence for Incremental Processing of Semantic Roles and Event Structure.

PubMed

Philipp, Markus; Graf, Tim; Kretzschmar, Franziska; Primus, Beatrice

2017-01-01

We present an event-related potentials (ERP) study that addresses the question of how pieces of information pertaining to semantic roles and event structure interact with each other and with the verb's meaning. Specifically, our study investigates German verb-final clauses with verbs of motion such as fliegen 'fly' and schweben 'float, hover,' which are indeterminate with respect to agentivity and event structure. Agentivity was tested by manipulating the animacy of the subject noun phrase and event structure by selecting a goal adverbial, which makes the event telic, or a locative adverbial, which leads to an atelic reading. On the clause-initial subject, inanimates evoked an N400 effect vis-à-vis animates. On the adverbial phrase in the atelic (locative) condition, inanimates showed an N400 in comparison to animates. The telic (goal) condition exhibited a similar amplitude like the inanimate-atelic condition. Finally, at the verbal lexeme, the inanimate condition elicited an N400 effect against the animate condition in the telic (goal) contexts. In the atelic (locative) condition, items with animates evoked an N400 effect compared to inanimates. The combined set of findings suggest that clause-initial animacy is not sufficient for agent identification in German, which seems to be completed only at the verbal lexeme in our experiment. Here non-agents (inanimates) changing their location in a goal-directed way and agents (animates) lacking this property are dispreferred and this challenges the assumption that change of (locational) state is generally a defining characteristic of the patient role. Besides this main finding that sheds new light on role prototypicality, our data seem to indicate effects that, in our view, are related to complexity, i.e., minimality. Inanimate subjects or goal arguments increase processing costs since they have role or event structure restrictions that animate subjects or locative modifiers lack.

The Poetics of Argumentation: The Relevance of Conversational Repetition for Two Theories of Emergent Mathematical Reasoning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Staats, Susan

2017-01-01

Poetic structures emerge in spoken language when speakers repeat grammatical phrases that were spoken before. They create the potential to amend or comment on previous speech, and to convey meaning through the structure of discourse. This paper considers the ways in which poetic structure analysis contributes to two perspectives on emergent…

Capturing the complexity of uncertainty language to maximise its use.

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Juanchich, Marie; Sirota, Miroslav

2016-04-01

Uncertainty is often communicated verbally, using uncertainty phrases such as 'there is a small risk of earthquake', 'flooding is possible' or 'it is very likely the sea level will rise'. Prior research has only examined a limited number of properties of uncertainty phrases: mainly the probability conveyed (e.g., 'a small chance' convey a small probability whereas 'it is likely' convey a high probability). We propose a new analytical framework that captures more of the complexity of uncertainty phrases by studying their semantic, pragmatic and syntactic properties. Further, we argue that the complexity of uncertainty phrases is functional and can be leveraged to best describe uncertain outcomes and achieve the goals of speakers. We will present findings from a corpus study and an experiment where we assessed the following properties of uncertainty phrases: probability conveyed, subjectivity, valence, nature of the subject, grammatical category of the uncertainty quantifier and whether the quantifier elicits a positive or a negative framing. Natural language processing techniques applied to corpus data showed that people use a very large variety of uncertainty phrases representing different configurations of the properties of uncertainty phrases (e.g., phrases that convey different levels of subjectivity, phrases with different grammatical construction). In addition, the corpus analysis uncovered that uncertainty phrases commonly studied in psychology are not the most commonly used in real life. In the experiment we manipulated the amount of evidence indicating that a fact was true and whether the participant was required to prove the fact was true or that it was false. Participants produced a phrase to communicate the likelihood that the fact was true (e.g., 'it is not sure…', 'I am convinced that…'). The analyses of the uncertainty phrases produced showed that participants leveraged the properties of uncertainty phrases to reflect the strength of evidence but also to achieve their personal goals. For example, participants aiming to prove that the fact was true chose words that conveyed a more positive polarity and a higher probability than participants aiming to prove that the fact was false. We discuss the utility of the framework for harnessing the properties of uncertainty phrases in geosciences.

Prosody Production and Perception with Conversational Speech

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mo, Yoonsook

2010-01-01

Speech utterances are more than the linear concatenation of individual phonemes or words. They are organized by prosodic structures comprising phonological units of different sizes (e.g., syllable, foot, word, and phrase) and the prominence relations among them. As the linguistic structure of spoken languages, prosody serves an important function…

Nominal and Verbal Semantic Structure: Analogies and Interactions.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Filip, Hanna

2001-01-01

Examines parallels in semantic structure between noun phrases and verbal predicates in constructions in which they are mutually constraining and contribute to the expression of lexical aspect and grammatical aspect. Data are drawn mainly from English and Slavic languages, which are compared to German and Finnish. (Author/VWL)

The 'sense of alarm' ('gut feeling') in clinical practice. A survey among European general practitioners on recognition and expression.

PubMed

Stolper, Erik; van Royen, Paul; Dinant, Geert Jan

2010-06-01

Most general practitioners in the Netherlands and Flanders (Belgium) are familiar with that special feeling during certain consultations: 'There's something wrong here, though I have no specific indications yet'. This 'sense of alarm' alerts the doctor, activates the diagnostic process and induces him to initiate specific management to prevent serious health problems. We wanted to know whether this sense of alarm is a typical phenomenon among Dutch-speaking GPs or is also recognized by GPs elsewhere in Europe. A short questionnaire survey was held among 128 GPs in 28 countries included in the European General Practitioners Research Network (EGPRN). GPs were asked if they recognized our description of the 'sense of alarm' and if they used a typical phrase in their language to express this uneasy feeling. We received 30 replies from GPs in 16 European countries, plus Israel and South-Africa. They all recognized our description and 25 GPs reported typical expressions in their own language. The GPs' uneasy feeling was sometimes perceived as a bodily sensation. The 'sense of alarm' is a familiar phenomenon in general practices in Europe. We propose to use the English phrase 'gut feelings' in further research reports.

Resolving Conflicts Between Syntax and Plausibility in Sentence Comprehension

PubMed Central

Andrews, Glenda; Ogden, Jessica E.; Halford, Graeme S.

2017-01-01

Comprehension of plausible and implausible object- and subject-relative clause sentences with and without prepositional phrases was examined. Undergraduates read each sentence then evaluated a statement as consistent or inconsistent with the sentence. Higher acceptance of consistent than inconsistent statements indicated reliance on syntactic analysis. Higher acceptance of plausible than implausible statements reflected reliance on semantic plausibility. There was greater reliance on semantic plausibility and lesser reliance on syntactic analysis for more complex object-relatives and sentences with prepositional phrases than for less complex subject-relatives and sentences without prepositional phrases. Comprehension accuracy and confidence were lower when syntactic analysis and semantic plausibility yielded conflicting interpretations. The conflict effect on comprehension was significant for complex sentences but not for less complex sentences. Working memory capacity predicted resolution of the syntax-plausibility conflict in more and less complex items only when sentences and statements were presented sequentially. Fluid intelligence predicted resolution of the conflict in more and less complex items under sequential and simultaneous presentation. Domain-general processes appear to be involved in resolving syntax-plausibility conflicts in sentence comprehension. PMID:28458748

The role of parallelism in the real-time processing of anaphora.

PubMed

Poirier, Josée; Walenski, Matthew; Shapiro, Lewis P

2012-06-01

Parallelism effects refer to the facilitated processing of a target structure when it follows a similar, parallel structure. In coordination, a parallelism-related conjunction triggers the expectation that a second conjunct with the same structure as the first conjunct should occur. It has been proposed that parallelism effects reflect the use of the first structure as a template that guides the processing of the second. In this study, we examined the role of parallelism in real-time anaphora resolution by charting activation patterns in coordinated constructions containing anaphora, Verb-Phrase Ellipsis (VPE) and Noun-Phrase Traces (NP-traces). Specifically, we hypothesised that an expectation of parallelism would incite the parser to assume a structure similar to the first conjunct in the second, anaphora-containing conjunct. The speculation of a similar structure would result in early postulation of covert anaphora. Experiment 1 confirms that following a parallelism-related conjunction, first-conjunct material is activated in the second conjunct. Experiment 2 reveals that an NP-trace in the second conjunct is posited immediately where licensed, which is earlier than previously reported in the literature. In light of our findings, we propose an intricate relation between structural expectations and anaphor resolution.

The role of parallelism in the real-time processing of anaphora

PubMed Central

Poirier, Josée; Walenski, Matthew; Shapiro, Lewis P.

2012-01-01

Parallelism effects refer to the facilitated processing of a target structure when it follows a similar, parallel structure. In coordination, a parallelism-related conjunction triggers the expectation that a second conjunct with the same structure as the first conjunct should occur. It has been proposed that parallelism effects reflect the use of the first structure as a template that guides the processing of the second. In this study, we examined the role of parallelism in real-time anaphora resolution by charting activation patterns in coordinated constructions containing anaphora, Verb-Phrase Ellipsis (VPE) and Noun-Phrase Traces (NP-traces). Specifically, we hypothesised that an expectation of parallelism would incite the parser to assume a structure similar to the first conjunct in the second, anaphora-containing conjunct. The speculation of a similar structure would result in early postulation of covert anaphora. Experiment 1 confirms that following a parallelism-related conjunction, first-conjunct material is activated in the second conjunct. Experiment 2 reveals that an NP-trace in the second conjunct is posited immediately where licensed, which is earlier than previously reported in the literature. In light of our findings, we propose an intricate relation between structural expectations and anaphor resolution. PMID:23741080

Measures of gender role attitudes under revision: The example of the German General Social Survey.

PubMed

Walter, Jessica Gabriele

2018-05-01

Using the example of the German General Social Survey, this study describes how measures of gender role attitudes can be revised. To date measures have focused on the traditional male breadwinner model. However, social developments in female labor force participation, education, and family structure suggest that a revision and adjustment of existing measures are required. First, these measures need to be supplemented with items that represent more egalitarian models of division of labor and the role of the father in the family. Second, the phrasing of existing items needs to be revised. The results of this study indicate that especially regarding the amount of working hours and the age of children, a specification is needed. This study presents a revised measure, to facilitate analyses over time. This revised measure represents two factors: one referring to traditional and one to modern gender role attitudes. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Evaluating Treatment and Generalization Patterns of Two Theoretically Motivated Sentence Comprehension Therapies.

PubMed

Des Roches, Carrie A; Vallila-Rohter, Sofia; Villard, Sarah; Tripodis, Yorghos; Caplan, David; Kiran, Swathi

2016-12-01

The current study examined treatment outcomes and generalization patterns following 2 sentence comprehension therapies: object manipulation (OM) and sentence-to-picture matching (SPM). Findings were interpreted within the framework of specific deficit and resource reduction accounts, which were extended in order to examine the nature of generalization following treatment of sentence comprehension deficits in aphasia. Forty-eight individuals with aphasia were enrolled in 1 of 8 potential treatment assignments that varied by task (OM, SPM), complexity of trained sentences (complex, simple), and syntactic movement (noun phrase, wh-movement). Comprehension of trained and untrained sentences was probed before and after treatment using stimuli that differed from the treatment stimuli. Linear mixed-model analyses demonstrated that, although both OM and SPM treatments were effective, OM resulted in greater improvement than SPM. Analyses of covariance revealed main effects of complexity in generalization; generalization from complex to simple linguistically related sentences was observed both across task and across movement. Results are consistent with the complexity account of treatment efficacy, as generalization effects were consistently observed from complex to simpler structures. Furthermore, results provide support for resource reduction accounts that suggest that generalization can extend across linguistic boundaries, such as across movement type.

The difficult mountain: enriched composition in adjective–noun phrases

PubMed Central

Pickering, Martin J.; McElree, Brian

2012-01-01

When readers need to go beyond the straightforward compositional meaning of a sentence (i.e., when enriched composition is required), costly additional processing is the norm. However, this conclusion is based entirely on research that has looked at enriched composition between two phrases or within the verb phrase (e.g., the verb and its complement in … started the book …) where there is a discrepancy between the semantic expectations of the verb and the semantics of the noun. We carried out an eye-tracking experiment investigating enriched composition within a single noun phrase, as in the difficult mountain. As compared with adjective–noun phrases that allow a straightforward compositional interpretation (the difficult exercise), the coerced phrases were more difficult to process. These results indicate that coercion effects can be found in the absence of a typing violation and within a single noun phrase. PMID:21826403

Comparing Noun Phrasing Techniques for Use with Medical Digital Library Tools.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tolle, Kristin M.; Chen, Hsinchun

2000-01-01

Describes a study that investigated the use of a natural language processing technique called noun phrasing to determine whether it is a viable technique for medical information retrieval. Evaluates four noun phrase generation tools for their ability to isolate noun phrases from medical journal abstracts, focusing on precision and recall.…

PubMed Phrases, an open set of coherent phrases for searching biomedical literature

PubMed Central

Kim, Sun; Yeganova, Lana; Comeau, Donald C.; Wilbur, W. John; Lu, Zhiyong

2018-01-01

In biomedicine, key concepts are often expressed by multiple words (e.g., ‘zinc finger protein’). Previous work has shown treating a sequence of words as a meaningful unit, where applicable, is not only important for human understanding but also beneficial for automatic information seeking. Here we present a collection of PubMed® Phrases that are beneficial for information retrieval and human comprehension. We define these phrases as coherent chunks that are logically connected. To collect the phrase set, we apply the hypergeometric test to detect segments of consecutive terms that are likely to appear together in PubMed. These text segments are then filtered using the BM25 ranking function to ensure that they are beneficial from an information retrieval perspective. Thus, we obtain a set of 705,915 PubMed Phrases. We evaluate the quality of the set by investigating PubMed user click data and manually annotating a sample of 500 randomly selected noun phrases. We also analyze and discuss the usage of these PubMed Phrases in literature search. PMID:29893755

Young children pause on phrase boundaries in self-paced music listening: The role of harmonic cues.

PubMed

Kragness, Haley E; Trainor, Laurel J

2018-05-01

Proper segmentation of auditory streams is essential for understanding music. Many cues, including meter, melodic contour, and harmony, influence adults' perception of musical phrase boundaries. To date, no studies have examined young children's musical grouping in a production task. We used a musical self-pacing method to investigate (1) whether dwell times index young children's musical phrase grouping and, if so, (2) whether children dwell longer on phrase boundaries defined by harmonic cues specifically. In Experiment 1, we asked 3-year-old children to self-pace through chord progressions from Bach chorales (sequences in which metrical, harmonic, and melodic contour grouping cues aligned) by pressing a computer key to present each chord in the sequence. Participants dwelled longer on chords in the 8th position, which corresponded to phrase endings. In Experiment 2, we tested 3-, 4-, and 7-year-old children's sensitivity to harmonic cues to phrase grouping when metrical regularity cues and melodic contour cues were misaligned with the harmonic phrase boundaries. In this case, 7 and 4 year olds but not 3 year olds dwelled longer on harmonic phrase boundaries, suggesting that the influence of harmonic cues on phrase boundary perception develops substantially between 3 and 4 years of age in Western children. Overall, we show that the musical dwell time method is child-friendly and can be used to investigate various aspects of young children's musical understanding, including phrase grouping and harmonic knowledge. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

What Constitutes a Phrase in Sound-Based Music? A Mixed-Methods Investigation of Perception and Acoustics.

PubMed

Olsen, Kirk N; Dean, Roger T; Leung, Yvonne

2016-01-01

Phrasing facilitates the organization of auditory information and is central to speech and music. Not surprisingly, aspects of changing intensity, rhythm, and pitch are key determinants of musical phrases and their boundaries in instrumental note-based music. Different kinds of speech (such as tone- vs. stress-languages) share these features in different proportions and form an instructive comparison. However, little is known about whether or how musical phrasing is perceived in sound-based music, where the basic musical unit from which a piece is created is commonly non-instrumental continuous sounds, rather than instrumental discontinuous notes. This issue forms the target of the present paper. Twenty participants (17 untrained in music) were presented with six stimuli derived from sound-based music, note-based music, and environmental sound. Their task was to indicate each occurrence of a perceived phrase and qualitatively describe key characteristics of the stimulus associated with each phrase response. It was hypothesized that sound-based music does elicit phrase perception, and that this is primarily associated with temporal changes in intensity and timbre, rather than rhythm and pitch. Results supported this hypothesis. Qualitative analysis of participant descriptions showed that for sound-based music, the majority of perceived phrases were associated with intensity or timbral change. For the note-based piano piece, rhythm was the main theme associated with perceived musical phrasing. We modeled the occurrence in time of perceived musical phrases with recurrent event 'hazard' analyses using time-series data representing acoustic predictors associated with intensity, spectral flatness, and rhythmic density. Acoustic intensity and timbre (represented here by spectral flatness) were strong predictors of perceived musical phrasing in sound-based music, and rhythm was only predictive for the piano piece. A further analysis including five additional spectral measures linked to timbre strengthened the models. Overall, results show that even when little of the pitch and rhythm information important for phrasing in note-based music is available, phrasing is still perceived, primarily in response to changes of intensity and timbre. Implications for electroacoustic music composition and music recommender systems are discussed.

What Constitutes a Phrase in Sound-Based Music? A Mixed-Methods Investigation of Perception and Acoustics

PubMed Central

Olsen, Kirk N.; Dean, Roger T.; Leung, Yvonne

2016-01-01

Phrasing facilitates the organization of auditory information and is central to speech and music. Not surprisingly, aspects of changing intensity, rhythm, and pitch are key determinants of musical phrases and their boundaries in instrumental note-based music. Different kinds of speech (such as tone- vs. stress-languages) share these features in different proportions and form an instructive comparison. However, little is known about whether or how musical phrasing is perceived in sound-based music, where the basic musical unit from which a piece is created is commonly non-instrumental continuous sounds, rather than instrumental discontinuous notes. This issue forms the target of the present paper. Twenty participants (17 untrained in music) were presented with six stimuli derived from sound-based music, note-based music, and environmental sound. Their task was to indicate each occurrence of a perceived phrase and qualitatively describe key characteristics of the stimulus associated with each phrase response. It was hypothesized that sound-based music does elicit phrase perception, and that this is primarily associated with temporal changes in intensity and timbre, rather than rhythm and pitch. Results supported this hypothesis. Qualitative analysis of participant descriptions showed that for sound-based music, the majority of perceived phrases were associated with intensity or timbral change. For the note-based piano piece, rhythm was the main theme associated with perceived musical phrasing. We modeled the occurrence in time of perceived musical phrases with recurrent event ‘hazard’ analyses using time-series data representing acoustic predictors associated with intensity, spectral flatness, and rhythmic density. Acoustic intensity and timbre (represented here by spectral flatness) were strong predictors of perceived musical phrasing in sound-based music, and rhythm was only predictive for the piano piece. A further analysis including five additional spectral measures linked to timbre strengthened the models. Overall, results show that even when little of the pitch and rhythm information important for phrasing in note-based music is available, phrasing is still perceived, primarily in response to changes of intensity and timbre. Implications for electroacoustic music composition and music recommender systems are discussed. PMID:27997625

Body metaphors--reading the body in contemporary culture.

PubMed

Skara, Danica

2004-01-01

This paper addresses the linguistic reframing of the human body in contemporary culture. Our aim is to provide a linguistic description of the ways in which the body is represented in modern English language. First, we will try to focus on body metaphors in general. We have collected a sample of 300 words and phrases functioning as body metaphors in modern English language. Reading the symbolism of the body we are witnessing changes in the basic metaphorical structuring of the human body. The results show that new vocabulary binds different fields of knowledge associated with machines and human beings according to a shared textual frame: human as computer and computer as human metaphor. Humans are almost blended with computers and vice versa. This metaphorical use of the human body and its parts reveals not only currents of unconscious though but also the structures of modern society and culture.

A general natural-language text processor for clinical radiology.

PubMed Central

Friedman, C; Alderson, P O; Austin, J H; Cimino, J J; Johnson, S B

1994-01-01

OBJECTIVE: Development of a general natural-language processor that identifies clinical information in narrative reports and maps that information into a structured representation containing clinical terms. DESIGN: The natural-language processor provides three phases of processing, all of which are driven by different knowledge sources. The first phase performs the parsing. It identifies the structure of the text through use of a grammar that defines semantic patterns and a target form. The second phase, regularization, standardizes the terms in the initial target structure via a compositional mapping of multi-word phrases. The third phase, encoding, maps the terms to a controlled vocabulary. Radiology is the test domain for the processor and the target structure is a formal model for representing clinical information in that domain. MEASUREMENTS: The impression sections of 230 radiology reports were encoded by the processor. Results of an automated query of the resultant database for the occurrences of four diseases were compared with the analysis of a panel of three physicians to determine recall and precision. RESULTS: Without training specific to the four diseases, recall and precision of the system (combined effect of the processor and query generator) were 70% and 87%. Training of the query component increased recall to 85% without changing precision. PMID:7719797

The Application of Morpho-Syntactic Language Processing to Effective Phrase Matching.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sheridan, Paraic; Smeaton, Alan F.

1992-01-01

Describes a process of morpho-syntactic language analysis for information retrieval. Tree Structured Analytics (TSA) used for text representation is summarized; the matching process developed for such structures is outlined with an example appended; and experiments carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of TSA matching are discussed. (26…

Symbols, Relations, and Structural Complexity.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Reich, Peter A.

This paper discusses an alternate formalism for context-free phrase structure grammar. The author feels that if a grammar is stated completely explicitly it can be represented in the form of a relational network of the type proposed by Lamb. He discusses some formal properties of such networks and makes some revisions to Lamb's formulation which…

Estimation of TOA based MUSIC algorithm and cross correlation algorithm of appropriate interval

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lin, Wei; Liu, Jun; Zhou, Yineng; Huang, Jiyan

2017-03-01

Localization of mobile station (MS) has now gained considerable attention due to its wide applications in military, environmental, health and commercial systems. Phrase angle and encode data of MSK system model are two critical parameters in time-of-arrival (TOA) localization technique; nevertheless, precise value of phrase angle and encode data are not easy to achieved in general. In order to meet the actual situation, we should consider the condition that phase angle and encode data is unknown. In this paper, a novel TOA localization method, which combine MUSIC algorithm and cross correlation algorithm in an appropriate interval, is proposed. Simulations show that the proposed method has better performance than music algorithm and cross correlation algorithm of the whole interval.

Signs for Instructional Purposes.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kannapell, Barbara M.; And Others

Illustrations depict 465 new manual signs for use in high school and college instruction of deaf students. The signs represent words or phrases, usually made up of many letters, which are important to the following subject matters; sciences and mathematics (general terms), biology, chemistry, mathematics, physics, psychology, humanities (general…

Student Computer Dialogs Without Special Purpose Languages.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bork, Alfred

The phrase "student computer dialogs" refers to interactive sessions between the student and the computer. Rather than using programing languages specifically designed for computer assisted instruction (CAI), existing general purpose languages should be emphasized in the future development of student computer dialogs, as the power and…

The Sentence-Composition Effect: Processing of Complex Sentences Depends on the Configuration of Common Noun Phrases versus Unusual Noun Phrases

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Johnson, Marcus L.; Lowder, Matthew W.; Gordon, Peter C.

2011-01-01

In 2 experiments, the authors used an eye tracking while reading methodology to examine how different configurations of common noun phrases versus unusual noun phrases (NPs) influenced the difference in processing difficulty between sentences containing object- and subject-extracted relative clauses. Results showed that processing difficulty was…

Essie: A Concept-based Search Engine for Structured Biomedical Text

PubMed Central

Ide, Nicholas C.; Loane, Russell F.; Demner-Fushman, Dina

2007-01-01

This article describes the algorithms implemented in the Essie search engine that is currently serving several Web sites at the National Library of Medicine. Essie is a phrase-based search engine with term and concept query expansion and probabilistic relevancy ranking. Essie’s design is motivated by an observation that query terms are often conceptually related to terms in a document, without actually occurring in the document text. Essie’s performance was evaluated using data and standard evaluation methods from the 2003 and 2006 Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) Genomics track. Essie was the best-performing search engine in the 2003 TREC Genomics track and achieved results comparable to those of the highest-ranking systems on the 2006 TREC Genomics track task. Essie shows that a judicious combination of exploiting document structure, phrase searching, and concept based query expansion is a useful approach for information retrieval in the biomedical domain. PMID:17329729

Analysis of prosody in finger braille using electromyography.

PubMed

Miyagi, Manabi; Nishida, Masafumi; Horiuchi, Yasuo; Ichikawa, Akira

2006-01-01

Finger braille is one of the communication methods for the deaf blind. The interpreter types braille codes on the fingers of deaf blind. Finger braille seems to be the most suitable medium for real-time communication by its speed and accuracy of transmitting characters. We hypothesize that the prosody information exists in the time structure and strength of finger braille typing. Prosody is the paralinguistic information that has functions to transmit the sentence structure, prominence, emotions and other form of information in real time communication. In this study, we measured the surface electromyography (sEMG) of finger movement to analyze the typing strength of finger braille. We found that the typing strength increases at the beginning of a phrase and a prominent phrase. The result shows the possibility that the prosody in the typing strength of finger braille can be applied to create an interpreter system for the deafblind.

Neurophysiological Correlates of Musical and Prosodic Phrasing: Shared Processing Mechanisms and Effects of Musical Expertise

PubMed Central

Steinhauer, Karsten; DePriest, John; Koelsch, Stefan

2016-01-01

The processing of prosodic phrase boundaries in language is immediately reflected by a specific event-related potential component called the Closure Positive Shift (CPS). A component somewhat reminiscent of the CPS in language has also been reported for musical phrases (i.e., the so-called ‘music CPS’). However, in previous studies the quantification of the music-CPS as well as its morphology and timing differed substantially from the characteristics of the language-CPS. Therefore, the degree of correspondence between cognitive mechanisms of phrasing in music and in language has remained questionable. Here, we probed the shared nature of mechanisms underlying musical and prosodic phrasing by (1) investigating whether the music-CPS is present at phrase boundary positions where the language-CPS has been originally reported (i.e., at the onset of the pause between phrases), and (2) comparing the CPS in music and in language in non-musicians and professional musicians. For the first time, we report a positive shift at the onset of musical phrase boundaries that strongly resembles the language-CPS and argue that the post-boundary ‘music-CPS’ of previous studies may be an entirely distinct ERP component. Moreover, the language-CPS in musicians was found to be less prominent than in non-musicians, suggesting more efficient processing of prosodic phrases in language as a result of higher musical expertise. PMID:27192560

Neurophysiological Correlates of Musical and Prosodic Phrasing: Shared Processing Mechanisms and Effects of Musical Expertise.

PubMed

Glushko, Anastasia; Steinhauer, Karsten; DePriest, John; Koelsch, Stefan

2016-01-01

The processing of prosodic phrase boundaries in language is immediately reflected by a specific event-related potential component called the Closure Positive Shift (CPS). A component somewhat reminiscent of the CPS in language has also been reported for musical phrases (i.e., the so-called 'music CPS'). However, in previous studies the quantification of the music-CPS as well as its morphology and timing differed substantially from the characteristics of the language-CPS. Therefore, the degree of correspondence between cognitive mechanisms of phrasing in music and in language has remained questionable. Here, we probed the shared nature of mechanisms underlying musical and prosodic phrasing by (1) investigating whether the music-CPS is present at phrase boundary positions where the language-CPS has been originally reported (i.e., at the onset of the pause between phrases), and (2) comparing the CPS in music and in language in non-musicians and professional musicians. For the first time, we report a positive shift at the onset of musical phrase boundaries that strongly resembles the language-CPS and argue that the post-boundary 'music-CPS' of previous studies may be an entirely distinct ERP component. Moreover, the language-CPS in musicians was found to be less prominent than in non-musicians, suggesting more efficient processing of prosodic phrases in language as a result of higher musical expertise.

The Missing Link: The Use of Link Words and Phrases as a Link to Manuscript Quality

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Onwuegbuzie, Anthony J.

2016-01-01

In this article, I provide a typology of transition words/phrases. This typology comprises 12 dimensions of link words/phrases that capture 277 link words/phrases. Using QDA Miner, WordStat, and SPSS--a computer-assisted mixed methods data analysis software, content analysis software, and statistical software, respectively--I analyzed 74…

On search guide phrase compilation for recommending home medical products.

PubMed

Luo, Gang

2010-01-01

To help people find desired home medical products (HMPs), we developed an intelligent personal health record (iPHR) system that can automatically recommend HMPs based on users' health issues. Using nursing knowledge, we pre-compile a set of "search guide" phrases that provides semantic translation from words describing health issues to their underlying medical meanings. Then iPHR automatically generates queries from those phrases and uses them and a search engine to retrieve HMPs. To avoid missing relevant HMPs during retrieval, the compiled search guide phrases need to be comprehensive. Such compilation is a challenging task because nursing knowledge updates frequently and contains numerous details scattered in many sources. This paper presents a semi-automatic tool facilitating such compilation. Our idea is to formulate the phrase compilation task as a multi-label classification problem. For each newly obtained search guide phrase, we first use nursing knowledge and information retrieval techniques to identify a small set of potentially relevant classes with corresponding hints. Then a nurse makes the final decision on assigning this phrase to proper classes based on those hints. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our techniques by compiling search guide phrases from an occupational therapy textbook.

Complexity Matters: On Gender Agreement in Heritage Scandinavian

PubMed Central

Johannessen, Janne Bondi; Larsson, Ida

2015-01-01

This paper investigates aspects of the noun phrase from a Scandinavian heritage language perspective, with an emphasis on noun phrase-internal gender agreement and noun declension. Our results are somewhat surprising compared with earlier research: We find that noun phrase-internal agreement for the most part is rather stable. To the extent that we find attrition, it affects agreement in the noun phrase, but not the declension of the noun. We discuss whether this means that gender is lost and has been reduced to a pure declension class, or whether gender is retained. We argue that gender is actually retained in these heritage speakers. One argument for this is that the speakers who lack agreement in complex noun phrases, have agreement intact in simpler phrases. We have thus found that the complexity of the noun phrase is crucial for some speakers. However, among the heritage speakers we also find considerable inter-individual variation, and different speakers can have partly different systems. PMID:26733114

Philosophy + Advocacy = Success

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tutt, Kevin; Townley, Marc

2011-01-01

Knowledge about music advocacy strategies has long been promoted as important for music educators, not only for the benefit of their individual programs but also for the specific benefit of music students and the general public. This article suggests an approach to advocacy grounded in the teacher's professional beliefs, phrased in terms…

L2 Semantics from a Formal Linguistic Perspective

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Slabakova, Roumyana

2018-01-01

Ever since Aristotle and Plato ("The Categories"; "Cratylus"), linguists have considered language to be the pairing of form (sounds or gestures or written strings) and meaning. This is true for all meaningful linguistic units from morphemes, through words, phrases and sentences, to discourse. Generally speaking, semantics is…

Using Software Design Methods in CALL

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ward, Monica

2006-01-01

The phrase "software design" is not one that arouses the interest of many CALL practitioners, particularly those from a humanities background. However, software design essentials are simply logical ways of going about designing a system. The fundamentals include modularity, anticipation of change, generality and an incremental approach. While CALL…

Syntax-Prosody Interface: Evidence from wh-Movement in Jordanian Arabic and Egyptian Arabic

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Yasin, Ayman

2012-01-01

Richards (2006, 2010) suggests that wh-movement is prosodically driven. Based on the position of the Comp(lementizer) and the marking of prosodic phrase edges, he claims that if Comp is on one side and the language marks the opposite side of prosodic phrases, then the wh-phrase does not move since Comp and wh-phrase can create a prosodic wh-domain…

Verb Biases Are Shaped through Lifelong Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ryskin, Rachel A.; Qi, Zhenghan; Duff, Melissa C.; Brown-Schmidt, Sarah

2017-01-01

Verbs often participate in more than 1 syntactic structure, but individual verbs can be biased in terms of whether they are used more often with 1 structure or the other. For instance, in a sentence such as "Bop the bunny with the flower," the phrase "with the flower" is more likely to indicate an instrument with which to…

Do 11-month-old French infants process articles?

PubMed

Hallé, Pierre A; Durand, Catherine; de Boysson-Bardies, Bénédicte

2008-01-01

The first part of this study examined (Parisian) French-learning 11-month-old infants' recognition of the six definite and indefinite French articles: le, la, les, un, une, and des. The six articles were compared with pseudoarticles in the context of disyllabic or monosyllabic nouns, using the Head-turn Preference Procedure. The pseudo articles were similar to real articles in terms of phonetic composition and phonotactic probability, and real and pseudo noun phrases were alike in terms of overall prosodic contour. In three experiments, 11-month-old infants showed preference for real over pseudo articles, suggesting they have the articles' word-forms stored in long-term memory. The second part of the study evaluates several hypotheses about the role of articles in 11-month-olds infants' word recognition. Evidence from three experiments supports the view that articles help infants to recognize the following words. We propose that 11-month-olds have the capacity to parse noun phrases into their constituents, which is consistent with the more general view that function words define a syntactic skeleton that serves as a basis for parsing spoken utterances. This proposition is compared to a competing account, which argues that 11-month-olds recognize noun-phrases as whole-words.

5 CFR 2421.21 - Affected by issues raised.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-01-01

... 5 Administrative Personnel 3 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Affected by issues raised. 2421.21 Section 2421.21 Administrative Personnel FEDERAL LABOR RELATIONS AUTHORITY, GENERAL COUNSEL OF THE FEDERAL... § 2421.21 Affected by issues raised. The phrase affected by issues raised, as used in part 2422, should...

46 CFR 188.10-57 - Portable tank.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-10-01

... 46 Shipping 7 2013-10-01 2013-10-01 false Portable tank. 188.10-57 Section 188.10-57 Shipping COAST GUARD, DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY (CONTINUED) OCEANOGRAPHIC RESEARCH VESSELS GENERAL PROVISIONS Definition of Terms Used in This Subchapter § 188.10-57 Portable tank. This phrase means a...

46 CFR 188.10-57 - Portable tank.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-10-01

... 46 Shipping 7 2011-10-01 2011-10-01 false Portable tank. 188.10-57 Section 188.10-57 Shipping COAST GUARD, DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY (CONTINUED) OCEANOGRAPHIC RESEARCH VESSELS GENERAL PROVISIONS Definition of Terms Used in This Subchapter § 188.10-57 Portable tank. This phrase means a...

46 CFR 188.10-57 - Portable tank.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-10-01

... 46 Shipping 7 2012-10-01 2012-10-01 false Portable tank. 188.10-57 Section 188.10-57 Shipping COAST GUARD, DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY (CONTINUED) OCEANOGRAPHIC RESEARCH VESSELS GENERAL PROVISIONS Definition of Terms Used in This Subchapter § 188.10-57 Portable tank. This phrase means a...

46 CFR 188.10-57 - Portable tank.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-10-01

... 46 Shipping 7 2010-10-01 2010-10-01 false Portable tank. 188.10-57 Section 188.10-57 Shipping COAST GUARD, DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY (CONTINUED) OCEANOGRAPHIC RESEARCH VESSELS GENERAL PROVISIONS Definition of Terms Used in This Subchapter § 188.10-57 Portable tank. This phrase means a...

46 CFR 188.10-57 - Portable tank.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-10-01

... 46 Shipping 7 2014-10-01 2014-10-01 false Portable tank. 188.10-57 Section 188.10-57 Shipping COAST GUARD, DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY (CONTINUED) OCEANOGRAPHIC RESEARCH VESSELS GENERAL PROVISIONS Definition of Terms Used in This Subchapter § 188.10-57 Portable tank. This phrase means a...

49 CFR 520.5 - Guidelines for identifying major actions significantly affecting the environment.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-10-01

... significantly affecting the environment. 520.5 Section 520.5 Transportation Other Regulations Relating to... significantly affecting the environment. (a) General guidelines. The phrase, “major Federal actions significantly affecting the quality of the human environment,” as used in this part, shall be construed with a...

25 CFR 211.3 - Definitions.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-04-01

..., underground work, and in-situ leaching directed to severance and treatment of minerals; Provided, when sand... General § 211.3 Definitions. As used in this part, the following words and phrases have the specified... Affairs official in charge of an area office. Authorized officer means any employee of the Bureau of Land...

25 CFR 212.3 - Definitions.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-04-01

... not limited to: opencast work, underground work, and in-situ leaching directed to severance and... General § 212.3 Definitions. As used in this part, the following words and phrases have the specified... Affairs official in charge of an area office. Authorized officer means any employee of the Bureau of Land...

It's Not Just the "Heavy NP": Relative Phrase Length Modulates the Production of Heavy-NP Shift

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Stallings, Lynne M.; MacDonald, Maryellen C.

2011-01-01

Heavy-NP shift is the tendency for speakers to place long direct object phrases at the end of a clause rather than next to the verb. Though some analyses have focused on length of the direct object phrase alone, results from two experiments demonstrate that the length of the direct object relative to that of other phrases, and not the length of…

Building Fluency through the Phrased Text Lesson

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rasinski, Timothy; Yildirim, Kasim; Nageldinger, James

2012-01-01

This Teaching Tip article explores the importance of phrasing while reading. It also presents an instructional intervention strategy for helping students develop greater proficiency in reading with phrases that reflect the meaning of the text.

Processing Elided Verb Phrases with Flawed Antecedents: the Recycling Hypothesis

PubMed Central

Arregui, Ana; Clifton, Charles; Frazier, Lyn; Moulton, Keir

2006-01-01

Traditional syntactic accounts of verb phrase ellipsis (e.g. “Jason laughed. Sam did [ ] too.”) categorize as ungrammatical many sentences that language users find acceptable (they “undergenerate”); semantic accounts overgenerate. We propose that a processing theory, together with a syntactic account, does a better job of describing and explaining the data on verb phrase-ellipsis. Five acceptability judgment experiments supported a “VP recycling hypothesis,” which claims that when a syntactically-matching antecedent is not available, the listener/reader creates one using the materials at hand. Experiments 1 and 2 used verb phrase ellipsis sentences with antecedents ranging from perfect (a verb phrase in matrix verb phrase position) to impossible (a verb phrase containing only a deverbal word). Experiments 3 and 4 contrasted antecedents in verbal versus nominal gerund subjects. Experiment 5 explored the possibility that speakers are particularly likely to go beyond the grammar and produce elided constituents without perfect matching antecedents when the antecedent needed is less marked than the antecedent actually produced. This experiment contrasted active (unmarked) and passive antecedents to show that readers seem to honor such a tendency. PMID:17710192

TOWARD A MODERN THEORY OF CASE.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

FILLMORE, CHARLES J.

THE PAPER QUESTIONS THE ADEQUACY OF CHOMSKY'S PROPOSALS FOR FORMALLY RECONSTRUCTING THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN GRAMMATICAL CATEGORIES AND GRAMMATICAL FUNCTIONS. THE DEEP STRUCTURE VALIDITY OF THE NOTIONS "SUBJECT" AND "OBJECT" IS ALSO QUESTIONED. THE WRITER PROPOSES TO RECOGNIZE, INSTEAD, VARIOUS INTRODUCED NOUN PHRASES SUGGESTIVE…

Gender subordination in the vulnerability of women to domestic violence.

PubMed

Macedo Piosiadlo, Laura Christina; Godoy Serpa da Fonseca, Rosa Maria

2016-06-01

To create and validate an instrument that identifies women's vulnerability to domestic violence through gender subordination indicators in the family. An instrument consisting on 61 phrases was created, that indicates gender subordination in the family. After the assessment from ten judges, 34 phrases were validated. The approved version was administered to 321 health service users of São José dos Pinhais (Estado de Paraná, Brasil), along with the validated Portuguese version of the Abuse Assessment Screen (AAS) (for purposes of separating the sample group - the ''YES'' group was composed of women who have suffered violence and the ''NO'' group consisted of women who had not suffered violence). Data were transferred into the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) software, version 22, and quantitatively analyzed using exploratory and factor analysis, and tests for internal consistency. After analysis (Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) statistics, Monte Carlo Principal Components Analysis (PCA, and diagram segmentation), two factors were identified: F1 - consisting of phrases related to home maintenance and family structure; F2 - phrases intrinsic to the couple's relationship. For the statements that reinforce gender subordination, the mean of the factors were higher for the group that answered YES to one of the violence identifying issues. The created instrument was able to identify women who were vulnerable to domestic violence using gender subordination indicators. This could be an important tool for nurses and other professionals in multidisciplinary teams, in order to organize and plan actions to prevent violence against women.

Installing the ARL Phrase Book Android Application and Configuring its Dependencies

DTIC Science & Technology

2015-02-01

device and configuring several additional applications required by the Phrase Book. 15. SUBJECT TERMS Android, Phrase Book, Domain Translator, Festival ...CMU] Festival Light Dari Text-to-Speech [TTS] Engine, the Dari/Pashto soft keyboard2) were integrated into the Phrase Book for additional capability...apps (as APK files): • Dari and Pashto AnySoftKeyboards. Delivered as a 94-KB AnySoftKeyboardLanguagePackPashto.apk. • Festival Lite (Flite) TTS

Proverb and idiom comprehension in Alzheimer disease.

PubMed

Kempler, D; Van Lancker, D; Read, S

1988-01-01

Twenty-nine patients diagnosed with Probable Alzheimer Disease were administered tests of word, familiar phrases (idioms and proverbs), and novel phrase comprehension. From the early stage of the disease, patients performed worse at understanding familiar phrases than single words or novel phrases. The results uphold common observations that AD patients have difficulty interpreting abstract meanings. Cognitive variables responsible for poor idiom/proverb comprehension and the clinical implications of this new protocol are discussed.

Misinterpretations in agreement and agreement attraction.

PubMed

Patson, Nikole D; Husband, E Matthew

2016-01-01

It has been well established that subject-verb number agreement can be disrupted by local noun phrases that differ in number from the subject head noun phrase. In sentence production, mismatches in the grammatical number of the head and local noun phrases lead to agreement errors on the verb as in: the key to the cabinets are. Similarly, although ungrammaticality typically causes disruption in measures of sentence comprehension, the disruption is reduced when the local noun phrase has a plural feature. Using a forced-choice comprehension question method, we report two experiments that provide evidence that comprehenders were likely to misinterpret the number information on the head noun phrase when morphosyntactic number markings on the local noun phrase and verb did not match the head. These results are consistent with a growing body of research that suggests that comprehenders often arrive at a final interpretation of a sentence that is not faithful to the linguistic input.

Evaluating Treatment and Generalization Patterns of Two Theoretically Motivated Sentence Comprehension Therapies

PubMed Central

Des Roches, Carrie A.; Vallila-Rohter, Sofia; Villard, Sarah; Tripodis, Yorghos; Caplan, David

2016-01-01

Purpose The current study examined treatment outcomes and generalization patterns following 2 sentence comprehension therapies: object manipulation (OM) and sentence-to-picture matching (SPM). Findings were interpreted within the framework of specific deficit and resource reduction accounts, which were extended in order to examine the nature of generalization following treatment of sentence comprehension deficits in aphasia. Method Forty-eight individuals with aphasia were enrolled in 1 of 8 potential treatment assignments that varied by task (OM, SPM), complexity of trained sentences (complex, simple), and syntactic movement (noun phrase, wh-movement). Comprehension of trained and untrained sentences was probed before and after treatment using stimuli that differed from the treatment stimuli. Results Linear mixed-model analyses demonstrated that, although both OM and SPM treatments were effective, OM resulted in greater improvement than SPM. Analyses of covariance revealed main effects of complexity in generalization; generalization from complex to simple linguistically related sentences was observed both across task and across movement. Conclusions Results are consistent with the complexity account of treatment efficacy, as generalization effects were consistently observed from complex to simpler structures. Furthermore, results provide support for resource reduction accounts that suggest that generalization can extend across linguistic boundaries, such as across movement type. PMID:27997950

Novel figurative phrases and idioms: phrase characteristics over multiple presentations.

PubMed

Schweigert, Wendy A; Cintron, Jennifer; Sullivan, Karin; Ilic, Emily; Ellis, Shannon; Dobrowits, Carrie; Roberts, Crystal

2003-07-01

In a series of three studies, characteristics of novel figurative phrases were compared with those of established idioms. Studies 1 and 2 found that certain correlations were found to be strong and in one direction for familiar idioms and comparably strong but in the opposite direction for novel figurative phrases, with the correlations for less familiar idioms usually falling partway between these extremes. Study 2 also noted that written or auditory presentation had minimal effects on characteristic ratings. In Study 3 the correlations among characteristics stayed relatively constant for familiar idioms after one, three, or six presentations, but for the novel figurative phrases, after multiple presentations the correlations changed in the direction of the established idioms.

Comprehending idioms cross-linguistically.

PubMed

Bortfeld, Heather

2003-01-01

Speakers of three different languages (English, Latvian, and Mandarin) rated sets of idioms from their language for the analyzability of the relationship between each phrase's literal and figurative meaning. For each language, subsets of idioms were selected based on these ratings. Latvian and Mandarin idioms were literally translated into English. Across three experiments, people classified idioms from the three languages according to their figurative meanings. Response times and error rates indicate that participants were able to interpret unfamiliar (e.g., other languages') idioms depending largely on the degree to which they were analyzable, and that different forms of processing were used both within and between languages depending on this analyzability. Results support arguments for a continuum of analyzability (Bortfeld & McGlone, 2001), along which figurative speech ranges from reflecting general conceptual structures to specific cultural and historical references.

40 CFR 63.1434 - Equipment leak provisions.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-07-01

... applicable compliance date. (h) The phrase “the provisions of subparts F, I, or PPP of this part” shall apply.... In addition, the phrase “subparts F, I, and PPP” shall apply instead of the phrase “subparts F and I...

Assessing Emotional Suffering in Palliative Care: Use of a Structured Note Template to Improve Documentation.

PubMed

Lamba, Sangeeta; Berlin, Ana; Goett, Rebecca; Ponce, Christopher B; Holland, Bart; Walther, Susanne

2016-07-01

Documentation of the emotional or psychological needs of seriously ill patients receiving specialty palliative care is endorsed by the "Measuring What Matters" project as a quality performance metric and recommended for use by hospice and palliative care programs for program improvement. The aim of this study was to increase the proportion of inpatient palliative care team encounters in which emotional or psychological needs of patients and family members were documented and to qualitatively enrich the nature of this documentation. This is a mixed-methods retrospective study of 200 patient charts reviewed before and after implementation of a structured note template (SmartPhrase) for palliative care encounters. Patterns of documentation of emotional needs pre- and post-implementation were assessed quantitatively and qualitatively using thematic analysis. A total of 158 of 200 pre-intervention charts and 185 of 200 post-intervention charts included at least one note from the palliative care team. Documentation of emotional assessment increased after SmartPhrase implementation (63.9% [101 of 158] vs. 74.6% [138 of 185]; P < 0.03). Qualitative analysis revealed a post-intervention reduction in the use of generic phrases ("emotional support provided") and an increase in the breadth and depth of emotion-related documentation. A structured note template with a prompt for emotional assessment increases the overall quantity and richness of documentation related to patient and family emotions. However, this documentation remains mostly descriptive. Additional prompting for documentation of recommendations to address identified emotional needs, and the use of screening tools for depression and anxiety, when appropriate, may be necessary for clinically meaningful quality improvements in patient care. Copyright © 2016 American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The Role of White Matter Hyperintensities and Medial Temporal Lobe Atrophy in Age-Related Executive Dysfunctioning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Oosterman, Joukje M.; Vogels, Raymond L. C.; van Harten, Barbera; Gouw, Alida A.; Scheltens, Philip; Poggesi, Anna; Weinstein, Henry C.; Scherder, Erik J. A.

2008-01-01

Various studies support an association between white matter hyperintensities (WMH) and deficits in executive function in nondemented ageing. Studies examining executive functions and WMH have generally adopted executive function as a phrase including various functions such as flexibility, inhibition, and working memory. However, these functions…

31 CFR 561.322 - Entity owned or controlled by the Government of Iran.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-07-01

... Government of Iran. 561.322 Section 561.322 Money and Finance: Treasury Regulations Relating to Money and... SANCTIONS REGULATIONS General Definitions § 561.322 Entity owned or controlled by the Government of Iran. The phrase entity owned or controlled by the Government of Iran means any entity, including a...

31 CFR 561.322 - Entity owned or controlled by the Government of Iran.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-07-01

... Government of Iran. 561.322 Section 561.322 Money and Finance: Treasury Regulations Relating to Money and... SANCTIONS REGULATIONS General Definitions § 561.322 Entity owned or controlled by the Government of Iran. The phrase entity owned or controlled by the Government of Iran means any entity, including a...

31 CFR 561.322 - Entity owned or controlled by the Government of Iran.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-07-01

... Government of Iran. 561.322 Section 561.322 Money and Finance: Treasury Regulations Relating to Money and... SANCTIONS REGULATIONS General Definitions § 561.322 Entity owned or controlled by the Government of Iran. The phrase entity owned or controlled by the Government of Iran means any entity, including a...

Reduction in Force: Legal Issues and Recommended Policy. NOLPE Monograph Series.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Phay, Robert E.

More and more frequently schools are having to reduce their staffs, an act generally referred to by the depression-era phrase "reduction in force" (RIF). The reasons are several, including lower student enrollments, reduced turnover among teachers, a steady movement of students from public to private schools, greater unwillingness of weak teachers…

Generalizing Word Lattice Translation

DTIC Science & Technology

2008-02-01

demonstrate substantial gains for Chinese-English and Arabic -English translation. Keywords: word lattice translation, phrase-based and hierarchical...introduce in reordering models. Our experiments evaluating the approach demonstrate substantial gains for Chinese-English and Arabic -English translation. 15...gains for Chinese-English and Arabic -English translation. 1 Introduction When Brown and colleagues introduced statistical machine translation in the

Perceptual Veridicality in Esthetic Communication: A Model, General Procedure, and Illustration.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Holbrook, Morris B.; Bertges, Stephen A.

1981-01-01

Developed a model and tested the following hypotheses: (1) esthetic features--tempo, rhythm, dynamics, and phrasing in piano performance--are accurately perceived by audience members and (2) such perceptual veridicality does not depend upon one's degree of education/training and is therefore shared by critics and audience members. (PD)

75 FR 25770 - Approval and Promulgation of Air Quality Implementation Plans; Ohio; General Provisions

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2010-05-10

... and eliminate any ambiguity related to the term, EPA finds the requested revision to be approvable...)(7) is meant to clarify ambiguity in the rule concerning the phrase, ``certification under oath... aim to remove ambiguity from existing language in the SIP. The State's submittal meets the...

44 CFR 63.8 - Limitation on amount of benefits.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-10-01

..., DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY INSURANCE AND HAZARD MITIGATION National Flood Insurance Program IMPLEMENTATION OF SECTION 1306(c) OF THE NATIONAL FLOOD INSURANCE ACT OF 1968 General § 63.8 Limitation on amount of benefits. (a) In section 1306(c)(3)(C) of the Act, the phrase under the flood insurance contract...

44 CFR 63.8 - Limitation on amount of benefits.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-10-01

..., DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY INSURANCE AND HAZARD MITIGATION National Flood Insurance Program IMPLEMENTATION OF SECTION 1306(c) OF THE NATIONAL FLOOD INSURANCE ACT OF 1968 General § 63.8 Limitation on amount of benefits. (a) In section 1306(c)(3)(C) of the Act, the phrase under the flood insurance contract...

44 CFR 63.8 - Limitation on amount of benefits.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-10-01

..., DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY INSURANCE AND HAZARD MITIGATION National Flood Insurance Program IMPLEMENTATION OF SECTION 1306(c) OF THE NATIONAL FLOOD INSURANCE ACT OF 1968 General § 63.8 Limitation on amount of benefits. (a) In section 1306(c)(3)(C) of the Act, the phrase under the flood insurance contract...

44 CFR 63.8 - Limitation on amount of benefits.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-10-01

..., DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY INSURANCE AND HAZARD MITIGATION National Flood Insurance Program IMPLEMENTATION OF SECTION 1306(c) OF THE NATIONAL FLOOD INSURANCE ACT OF 1968 General § 63.8 Limitation on amount of benefits. (a) In section 1306(c)(3)(C) of the Act, the phrase under the flood insurance contract...

44 CFR 63.8 - Limitation on amount of benefits.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-10-01

..., DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY INSURANCE AND HAZARD MITIGATION National Flood Insurance Program IMPLEMENTATION OF SECTION 1306(c) OF THE NATIONAL FLOOD INSURANCE ACT OF 1968 General § 63.8 Limitation on amount of benefits. (a) In section 1306(c)(3)(C) of the Act, the phrase under the flood insurance contract...

Computer-Based Linguistic Analysis.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wright, James R.

Noam Chomsky's transformational-generative grammar model may effectively be translated into an equivalent computer model. Phrase-structure rules and transformations are tested as to their validity and ordering by the computer via the process of random lexical substitution. Errors appearing in the grammar are detected and rectified, and formal…

Sentential Negation in English

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mowarin, Macaulay

2009-01-01

This paper undertakes a detailed analysis of sentential negation in the English language with Chomsky's Government-Binding theory of Transformational Grammar as theoretical model. It distinguishes between constituent and sentential negation in English. The essay identifies the exact position of Negation phrase in an English clause structure. It…

Presentation of Repeated Phrases in a Computer-Assisted Abstracting Tool Kit.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Craven, Timothy C.

2001-01-01

Discusses automatic indexing methods and describes the development of a prototype computerized abstractor's assistant. Highlights include the text network management system, TEXNET; phrase selection that follows indexing; phrase display, including Boolean capabilities; results of preliminary testing; and availability of TEXNET software. (LRW)

Generating descriptive visual words and visual phrases for large-scale image applications.

PubMed

Zhang, Shiliang; Tian, Qi; Hua, Gang; Huang, Qingming; Gao, Wen

2011-09-01

Bag-of-visual Words (BoWs) representation has been applied for various problems in the fields of multimedia and computer vision. The basic idea is to represent images as visual documents composed of repeatable and distinctive visual elements, which are comparable to the text words. Notwithstanding its great success and wide adoption, visual vocabulary created from single-image local descriptors is often shown to be not as effective as desired. In this paper, descriptive visual words (DVWs) and descriptive visual phrases (DVPs) are proposed as the visual correspondences to text words and phrases, where visual phrases refer to the frequently co-occurring visual word pairs. Since images are the carriers of visual objects and scenes, a descriptive visual element set can be composed by the visual words and their combinations which are effective in representing certain visual objects or scenes. Based on this idea, a general framework is proposed for generating DVWs and DVPs for image applications. In a large-scale image database containing 1506 object and scene categories, the visual words and visual word pairs descriptive to certain objects or scenes are identified and collected as the DVWs and DVPs. Experiments show that the DVWs and DVPs are informative and descriptive and, thus, are more comparable with the text words than the classic visual words. We apply the identified DVWs and DVPs in several applications including large-scale near-duplicated image retrieval, image search re-ranking, and object recognition. The combination of DVW and DVP performs better than the state of the art in large-scale near-duplicated image retrieval in terms of accuracy, efficiency and memory consumption. The proposed image search re-ranking algorithm: DWPRank outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithm by 12.4% in mean average precision and about 11 times faster in efficiency.

Real and Imagined Body Movement Primes Metaphor Comprehension

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wilson, Nicole L.; Gibbs, Raymond W., Jr.

2007-01-01

We demonstrate in two experiments that real and imagined body movements appropriate to metaphorical phrases facilitate people's immediate comprehension of these phrases. Participants first learned to make different body movements given specific cues. In two reading time studies, people were faster to understand a metaphorical phrase, such as push…

Ethnic and Nationality Stereotypes in Everyday Language

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kite, Mary E.; Whitley, Bernard E., Jr.

2012-01-01

The authors describe a demonstration of stereotype use in everyday language that focuses on common phrases reflecting stereotypic beliefs about ethnic groups or nationalities. The exercise encourages students' discussion of stereotype use. Students read 13 common phrases from the English language and stated whether they had used each phrase and…

Identifying synonymy between relational phrases using word embeddings.

PubMed

Nguyen, Nhung T H; Miwa, Makoto; Tsuruoka, Yoshimasa; Tojo, Satoshi

2015-08-01

Many text mining applications in the biomedical domain benefit from automatic clustering of relational phrases into synonymous groups, since it alleviates the problem of spurious mismatches caused by the diversity of natural language expressions. Most of the previous work that has addressed this task of synonymy resolution uses similarity metrics between relational phrases based on textual strings or dependency paths, which, for the most part, ignore the context around the relations. To overcome this shortcoming, we employ a word embedding technique to encode relational phrases. We then apply the k-means algorithm on top of the distributional representations to cluster the phrases. Our experimental results show that this approach outperforms state-of-the-art statistical models including latent Dirichlet allocation and Markov logic networks. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Phonological Planning during Sentence Production: Beyond the Verb.

PubMed

Schnur, Tatiana T

2011-01-01

The current study addresses the extent of phonological planning during spontaneous sentence production. Previous work shows that at articulation, phonological encoding occurs for entire phrases, but encoding beyond the initial phrase may be due to the syntactic relevance of the verb in planning the utterance. I conducted three experiments to investigate whether phonological planning crosses multiple grammatical phrase boundaries (as defined by the number of lexical heads of phrase) within a single phonological phrase. Using the picture-word interference paradigm, I found in two separate experiments a significant phonological facilitation effect to both the verb and noun of sentences like "He opens the gate." I also altered the frequency of the direct object and found longer utterance initiation times for sentences ending with a low-frequency vs. high-frequency object offering further support that the direct object was phonologically encoded at the time of utterance initiation. That phonological information for post-verbal elements was activated suggests that the grammatical importance of the verb does not restrict the extent of phonological planning. These results suggest that the phonological phrase is unit of planning, where all elements within a phonological phrase are encoded before articulation. Thus, consistent with other action sequencing behavior, there is significant phonological planning ahead in sentence production.

Influencing feelings of cancer risk: direct and moderator effects of affectively laden phrases in risk communication.

PubMed

Janssen, Eva; van Osch, Liesbeth; Lechner, Lilian; de Vries, Hein

2015-01-01

Evidence is accumulating for the importance of feelings of risk in explaining cancer preventive behaviors, but best practices for influencing these feelings are limited. This study investigated the direct and moderational influence of affectively laden phrases in cancer risk messages. Two experimental studies were conducted in relation to different cancer-related behaviors--sunbed use (n = 112) and red meat consumption (n = 447)--among student and nonstudent samples. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: (a) a cognitive message using cognitively laden phrases or (b) an affective message using affectively laden phrases. The results revealed that affective phrases did not directly influence feelings of risk in both studies. Evidence for a moderational influence was found in Study 2, suggesting that affective information strengthened the relation between feelings of risk and intention (i.e., participants relied more on their feelings in the decision-making process after exposure to affective information). These findings suggest that solely using affective phrases in risk communication may not be sufficient to directly influence feelings of risk and other methods need to be explored in future research. Moreover, research is needed to replicate our preliminary indications for a moderational influence of affective phrases to advance theory and practice.

The Role of Sustained Attention in the Production of Conjoined Noun Phrases: An Individual Differences Study.

PubMed

Jongman, Suzanne R; Meyer, Antje S; Roelofs, Ardi

2015-01-01

It has previously been shown that language production, performed simultaneously with a nonlinguistic task, involves sustained attention. Sustained attention concerns the ability to maintain alertness over time. Here, we aimed to replicate the previous finding by showing that individuals call upon sustained attention when they plan single noun phrases (e.g., "the carrot") and perform a manual arrow categorization task. In addition, we investigated whether speakers also recruit sustained attention when they produce conjoined noun phrases (e.g., "the carrot and the bucket") describing two pictures, that is, when both the first and second task are linguistic. We found that sustained attention correlated with the proportion of abnormally slow phrase-production responses. Individuals with poor sustained attention displayed a greater number of very slow responses than individuals with better sustained attention. Importantly, this relationship was obtained both for the production of single phrases while performing a nonlinguistic manual task, and the production of noun phrase conjunctions in referring to two spatially separated objects. Inhibition and updating abilities were also measured. These scores did not correlate with our measure of sustained attention, suggesting that sustained attention and executive control are distinct. Overall, the results suggest that planning conjoined noun phrases involves sustained attention, and that language production happens less automatically than has often been assumed.

Brief intervention for agrammatism in Primary Progressive Nonfluent Aphasia: A case report

PubMed Central

Machado, Thais Helena; Campanha, Aline Carvalho; Caramelli, Paulo; Carthery-Goulart, Maria Teresa

2014-01-01

The non-fluent and agrammatic variant of Primary Progressive Aphasia (NFPPA) is characterized by reduced verbal production with deficits in building grammatically correct sentences, involving dysfunctions in syntactic and morphological levels of language. There are a growing number of studies about non-pharmacological alternatives focusing on the rehabilitation of functional aspects or specific cognitive impairments of each variant of PPA. This study reports a short-term treatment administered to a patient with NFPPA focusing on the production of sentences. The patient had significant reduction in verbal fluency, use of keywords, phrasal and grammatical simplifying as well as anomia. Using the method of errorless learning, six sessions were structured to stimulate the formation of sentences in the present and past with the cloze technique. The patient had improvement restricted to the strategy, with 100% accuracy on the trained phrases and generalization to untrained similar syntactic structure after training. These results persisted one month after the treatment. PMID:29213916

Science and Technology Text Mining: Origins of Database Tomography and Multi-Word Phrase Clustering

DTIC Science & Technology

2003-08-15

six decades to the pioneering work in: 1) lexicography of Hornby [1942] to account for co- occurrence knowledge, and 2) linguistics of De Saussure ...of Development in a Research Field," Scientometrics, Vol.19, No.1, 1990b. De Saussure , F., "Cours de Linguistique Generale," 4eme Edition, Librairie

What Do We Learn about Technical Communication in Hungary through My Students and My Hungarian Colleagues: An Initial Investigation

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ding, Daniel D.

2018-01-01

Very few articles exist that document technical communication in Hungary. My Fulbright research reveals two general points: First, technical communication pedagogy stresses correct use of professional terms and phrases in technical translations or technical articles for fictional audiences. Second, it does not emphasize the importance of…

Cultural Competence in the College Biology Classroom

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tanner, Kimberly; Allen, Deborah

2007-01-01

As a general phrase, "cultural competence" can often conjure for the unfamiliar reader a vision of a person who is fair, just, and open, a person who is nice, someone who is a good person at heart. Cultural competence, however, goes far beyond the everyday meanings that its component words invoke, and it is an active area of scholarship and…

USSR Report, International Affairs

DTIC Science & Technology

1986-11-21

Materials from foreign- language sources are translated; those from English- language sources are transcribed or reprinted, with the original phrasing...Message at the mediation of Spanish Foreign Minister F. Ordonez, while the new president of Guatemala, Vinicio Cerezo, came out with a proposal to...internacional. Caracteristicas generales y particulares de los procesos revolucionarios. Memorias. La Habana, 1982, p 49.) The Izquierda

Interactive Context Integration in Children? Evidence from an Action Memory Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mecklenbrauker, Silvia; Steffens, Melanie C.; Jelenec, Petra; Goergens, N. Kristine

2011-01-01

Action-object phrases (e.g., "lift the bottle") are remembered better if they have been enacted rather than learned verbally. This enactment effect is largest in free recall for phrases with objects (e.g., "bottle") present because these phrases can be interactively encoded with those context objects ("interactive context integration") that serve…

Planning in Sentence Production: Evidence for the Phrase as a Default Planning Scope

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Martin, Randi C.; Crowther, Jason E.; Knight, Meredith; Tamborello, Franklin P., II; Yang, Chin-Lung

2010-01-01

Controversy remains as to the scope of advanced planning in language production. Smith and Wheeldon (1999) found significantly longer onset latencies when subjects described moving-picture displays by producing sentences beginning with a complex noun phrase than for matched sentences beginning with a simple noun phrase. While these findings are…

Processing Coordinated Verb Phrases: The Relevance of Lexical-Semantic, Conceptual, and Contextual Information towards Establishing Verbal Parallelism

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tutunjian, Damon A.

2010-01-01

This dissertation examines the influence of lexical-semantic representations, conceptual similarity, and contextual fit on the processing of coordinated verb phrases. The study integrates information gleaned from current linguistic theory with current psycholinguistic approaches to examining the processing of coordinated verb phrases. It has…

Planning in sentence production: Evidence for the phrase as a default planning scope

PubMed Central

Martin, Randi C.; Crowther, Jason E.; Knight, Meredith; Tamborello, Franklin P.; Yang, Chin-Lung

2010-01-01

Controversy remains as to the scope of advanced planning in language production. Smith and Wheeldon (1999) found significantly longer onset latencies when subjects described moving picture displays by producing sentences beginning with a complex noun phrase than for matched sentences beginning with a simple noun phrase. While these findings are consistent with a phrasal scope of planning, they might also be explained on the basis of: 1) greater retrieval fluency for the second content word in the simple initial noun phrase sentences and 2) visual grouping factors. In Experiments 1 and 2, retrieval fluency for the second content word was equated for the complex and simple initial noun phrase conditions. Experiments 3 and 4 addressed the visual grouping hypothesis by using stationary displays and by comparing onset latencies for the same display for sentence and list productions. Longer onset latencies for the sentences beginning with a complex noun phrase were obtained in all experiments, supporting the phrasal scope of planning hypothesis. The results indicate that in speech, as in other motor production domains, planning occurs beyond the minimal production unit. PMID:20501338

Similarity of wh-Phrases and Acceptability Variation in wh-Islands

PubMed Central

Atkinson, Emily; Apple, Aaron; Rawlins, Kyle; Omaki, Akira

2016-01-01

In wh-questions that form a syntactic dependency between the fronted wh-phrase and its thematic position, acceptability is severely degraded when the dependency crosses another wh-phrase. It is well known that the acceptability degradation in wh-island violation ameliorates in certain contexts, but the source of this variation remains poorly understood. In the syntax literature, an influential theory – Featural Relativized Minimality – has argued that the wh-island effect is modulated exclusively by the distinctness of morpho-syntactic features in the two wh-phrases, but psycholinguistic theories of memory encoding and retrieval mechanisms predict that semantic properties of wh-phrases should also contribute to wh-island amelioration. We report four acceptability judgment experiments that systematically investigate the role of morpho-syntactic and semantic features in wh-island violations. The results indicate that the distribution of wh-island amelioration is best explained by an account that incorporates the distinctness of morpho-syntactic features as well as the semantic denotation of the wh-phrases. We argue that an integration of syntactic theories and perspectives from psycholinguistics can enrich our understanding of acceptability variation in wh-dependencies. PMID:26793156

Building Phrase Structure from Items and Contexts

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McKinney-Bock, Katherine S.

2013-01-01

This dissertation aims to revisit foundational issues in syntactic theory regarding cyclicity and displacement. I take narrow syntax to operate over domains ("phases") more local than in current Minimalism. To do this, I define a notion of "phase overlap" which involves the sharing of grammatical features across two independent…

Taxonomies, Folksonomies, and Semantics: Establishing Functional Meaning in Navigational Structures

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bacha, Jeffrey A.

2012-01-01

This article argues for the establishment of a usability process that incorporates the study of "words" and "word phrases." It demonstrates how semantically mapping a navigational taxonomy can help the developers of digital environments establish a more focused sense of functional meaning for the users of their digital designs.

Information Density and Syntactic Repetition

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Temperley, David; Gildea, Daniel

2015-01-01

In noun phrase (NP) coordinate constructions (e.g., NP and NP), there is a strong tendency for the syntactic structure of the second conjunct to match that of the first; the second conjunct in such constructions is therefore low in syntactic information. The theory of uniform information density predicts that low-information syntactic…

Deriving the Distribution of Conjunctions.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Zoerner, Ed

1994-01-01

This paper proposes an explanation for the limited possibilities of realized conjunctions in multitermed coordinations. It argues that conjunction "&" heads a fully articulated phrase (&P), which can iterate &P shells, similar to "V" in Larson's (1988) VP-shell hypothesis. This structure enables a single & to unify any number of conjuncts, and…

Language Switching in the Production of Phrases

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tarlowski, Andrzej; Wodniecka, Zofia; Marzecova, Anna

2013-01-01

The language switching task has provided a useful insight into how bilinguals produce language. So far, however, the studies using this method have been limited to lexical access. The present study provides empirical evidence on language switching in the production of simple grammar structures. In the reported experiment, Polish-English unbalanced…

More than Words: Frequency Effects for Multi-Word Phrases

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Arnon, Inbal; Snider, Neal

2010-01-01

There is mounting evidence that language users are sensitive to distributional information at many grain-sizes. Much of this research has focused on the distributional properties of words, the units they consist of (morphemes, phonemes), and the syntactic structures they appear in (verb-categorization frames, syntactic constructions). In a series…

Bootstrapping the Syntactic Bootstrapper: Probabilistic Labeling of Prosodic Phrases

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gutman, Ariel; Dautriche, Isabelle; Crabbé, Benoît; Christophe, Anne

2015-01-01

The "syntactic bootstrapping" hypothesis proposes that syntactic structure provides children with cues for learning the meaning of novel words. In this article, we address the question of how children might start acquiring some aspects of syntax before they possess a sizeable lexicon. The study presents two models of early syntax…

The Role of Sustained Attention in the Production of Conjoined Noun Phrases: An Individual Differences Study

PubMed Central

Jongman, Suzanne R.; Meyer, Antje S.; Roelofs, Ardi

2015-01-01

It has previously been shown that language production, performed simultaneously with a nonlinguistic task, involves sustained attention. Sustained attention concerns the ability to maintain alertness over time. Here, we aimed to replicate the previous finding by showing that individuals call upon sustained attention when they plan single noun phrases (e.g., "the carrot") and perform a manual arrow categorization task. In addition, we investigated whether speakers also recruit sustained attention when they produce conjoined noun phrases (e.g., "the carrot and the bucket") describing two pictures, that is, when both the first and second task are linguistic. We found that sustained attention correlated with the proportion of abnormally slow phrase-production responses. Individuals with poor sustained attention displayed a greater number of very slow responses than individuals with better sustained attention. Importantly, this relationship was obtained both for the production of single phrases while performing a nonlinguistic manual task, and the production of noun phrase conjunctions in referring to two spatially separated objects. Inhibition and updating abilities were also measured. These scores did not correlate with our measure of sustained attention, suggesting that sustained attention and executive control are distinct. Overall, the results suggest that planning conjoined noun phrases involves sustained attention, and that language production happens less automatically than has often been assumed. PMID:26335441

Syntax diagrams for body wave nomenclature, with generalizations for terrestrial planets

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Knapmeyer, M.

2003-04-01

The Apollo network on the Moon constitutes the beginning of planetary seismology. In the next few decades, we may see seismometers deployed on the Moon again, on Mars, and perhaps on other terrestrial planets or satellites. Any seismological software for computation of body wave travel times on other planets should be highly versatile and be prepared for a huge variety of velocity distributions and internal structures. A suite of trial models for a planet might, for example, contain models with and without solid inner cores. It would then be useful if the software could detect physically meaningless phase names automatically without actually carrying out any computation. It would also be useful if the program were prepared to deal with features like fully solid cores, internal oceans, and varying depths of mineralogical phase changes like the olivine-spinel transition. Syntax diagrams are a standard method to describe the syntax of programming languages. They represent a graphical way to define which letter or phrase is allowed to follow a given sequence of letters. Syntax diagrams may be stored in data structures that allow automatic evaluation of a given letter sequence. Such diagrams are presented here for a generalized body wave nomenclature. Generalizations are made to overcome earth-specific notations which incorporate discontinuity depths into phase names or to distinguish olivine transitions from ice-ice transitions (as expected on the Galilean Satellites).

Direct-access retrieval during sentence comprehension: Evidence from Sluicing

PubMed Central

Martin, Andrea E.; McElree, Brian

2011-01-01

Language comprehension requires recovering meaning from linguistic form, even when the mapping between the two is indirect. A canonical example is ellipsis, the omission of information that is subsequently understood without being overtly pronounced. Comprehension of ellipsis requires retrieval of an antecedent from memory, without prior prediction, a property which enables the study of retrieval in situ (Martin & McElree, 2008, 2009). Sluicing, or inflectional phrase ellipsis, in the presence of a conjunction, presents a test case where a competing antecedent position is syntactically licensed, in contrast with most cases of nonadjacent dependency, including verb phrase ellipsis. We present speed-accuracy tradeoff and eye-movement data inconsistent with the hypothesis that retrieval is accomplished via a syntactically guided search, a particular variant of search not examined in past research. The observed timecourse profiles are consistent with the hypothesis that antecedents are retrieved via a cue-dependent direct-access mechanism susceptible to general memory variables. PMID:21580797

Blue Car, Red Car: Developing Efficiency in Online Interpretation of Adjective-Noun Phrases

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fernald, Anne; Thorpe, Kirsten; Marchman, Virginia A.

2010-01-01

Two experiments investigated the development of fluency in interpreting adjective-noun phrases in 30- and 36-month-old English-learning children. Using online processing measures, children's gaze patterns were monitored as they heard the familiar adjective-noun phrases (e.g. "blue car") in visual contexts where the adjective was either informative…

Distinct ERP Signatures of Word Frequency, Phrase Frequency, and Prototypicality in Speech Production

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hendrix, Peter; Bolger, Patrick; Baayen, Harald

2017-01-01

Recent studies have documented frequency effects for word n-grams, independently of word unigram frequency. Further studies have revealed constructional prototype effects, both at the word level as well as for phrases. The present speech production study investigates the time course of these effects for the production of prepositional phrases in…

Phrase Length Matters: The Interplay between Implicit Prosody and Syntax in Korean "Garden Path" Sentences

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hwang, Hyekyung; Steinhauer, Karsten

2011-01-01

In spoken language comprehension, syntactic parsing decisions interact with prosodic phrasing, which is directly affected by phrase length. Here we used ERPs to examine whether a similar effect holds for the on-line processing of written sentences during silent reading, as suggested by theories of "implicit prosody." Ambiguous Korean sentence…

Facilitating Lecture Recall: The Effects of Embedded Imagery-Evoking Phrases.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Thrailkill, Nancy J.; Ormrod, Jeanne Ellis

Three experiments describe the effects of imagery on learning a large and integrated body of information from a college lecture. It was hypothesized that high-imagery phrases would be more easily recalled and would promote recall of abstract verbal phrases in close temporal proximity to them. In experiment 1, 22 undergraduates attended a lecture…

Doing the Best You Can: A Study of Values in a Group of Nun Educators

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hogard, Elaine

2004-01-01

A group of experienced and well-qualified nun educators were interviewed regarding their experiences and values. A recurrent phrase occurring in the interviews was "Doing the best you can". This phrase served to both justify and anticipate statements. A questionnaire was constructed to encourage elaboration of the phrase and to detect…

A Bidirectional Study on the Acquisition of Plural Noun Phrase Interpretation in English and Spanish

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ionin, Tania; Montrul, Silvina; Crivos, Monica

2013-01-01

This paper investigates how learners interpret definite plural noun phrases (e.g., "the tigers") and bare (article-less) plural noun phrases (e.g., "tigers") in their second language. Whereas Spanish allows definite plurals to have both generic and specific readings, English requires definite plurals to have specific, nongeneric readings. Generic…

An "Alms-Basket" of "Bric-a-Brac": "Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable".

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bunge, Charles A.

1999-01-01

Describes the development and history of "Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable," a reference source first published in 1870 that includes the etymology of phrases, allusions and words. Discusses reviews that reflected and shaped its status as a standard reference book, describes the current edition, and considers its enduring value.…

The intonation of gapping and coordination in Japanese: evidence for intonational phrase and utterance.

PubMed

Kawahara, Shigeto; Shinya, Takahito

2008-01-01

In previous studies of Japanese intonational phonology, levels of prosodic constituents above the Major Phrase have not received much attention. This paper argues that at least two prosodic levels exist above the Major Phrase in Japanese. Through a detailed investigation of the intonation of gapping and coordination in Japanese, we argue that each syntactic clause projects its own Intonational Phrase, while an entire sentence constitutes one Utterance. We show that the Intonational Phrase is characterized by tonal lowering, creakiness and a pause in final position, as well as a distinctive large initial rise and pitch reset at its beginning. The Utterance defines a domain of declination, and it is signaled by an even larger initial rise, as well as a phrasal H tone at its right edge. Building on our empirical findings, we discuss several implications for the theory of intonational phonology. (c) 2007 S. Karger AG, Basel.

NASA automatic subject analysis technique for extracting retrievable multi-terms (NASA TERM) system

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Kirschbaum, J.; Williamson, R. E.

1978-01-01

Current methods for information processing and retrieval used at the NASA Scientific and Technical Information Facility are reviewed. A more cost effective computer aided indexing system is proposed which automatically generates print terms (phrases) from the natural text. Satisfactory print terms can be generated in a primarily automatic manner to produce a thesaurus (NASA TERMS) which extends all the mappings presently applied by indexers, specifies the worth of each posting term in the thesaurus, and indicates the areas of use of the thesaurus entry phrase. These print terms enable the computer to determine which of several terms in a hierarchy is desirable and to differentiate ambiguous terms. Steps in the NASA TERMS algorithm are discussed and the processing of surrogate entry phrases is demonstrated using four previously manually indexed STAR abstracts for comparison. The simulation shows phrase isolation, text phrase reduction, NASA terms selection, and RECON display.

Preschoolers' Use of Morphosyntactic Cues to Identify Generic Sentences: Indefinite Singular Noun Phrases, Tense, and Aspect

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cimpian, Andrei; Meltzer, Trent J.; Markman, Ellen M.

2011-01-01

Generic sentences (e.g., "Birds lay eggs") convey generalizations about entire categories and may thus be an important source of knowledge for children. However, these sentences cannot be identified by a simple rule, requiring instead the integration of multiple cues. The present studies focused on 3- to 5-year-olds' (N = 91) use of…

78 FR 4307 - Current Good Manufacturing Practice Requirements for Combination Products

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2013-01-22

.... Rationale for the Rulemaking B. The Proposed Rule C. The Final Rule II. Comments on the Proposed Rule A. General B. What is the scope of this subpart? (Sec. 4.1) C. How does FDA define key terms and phrases in... Act (the PHS Act) (42 U.S.C. 262). All biological products regulated under the PHS Act meet the...

Panda-Huggers and Dragon-Slayers: How to View Modern China Today

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gifford, Rob

2010-01-01

Panda-hugger and dragon-slayer are phrases used to describe two different kinds of China-watchers, and increasingly, two different types of people in the general public. A panda-hugger is someone who says that almost everything going on in China is good, that China's progress is a great thing for the world, and that any problems are peripheral. A…

Differences in Preschoolers' and Adults' Use of Generics about Novel Animals and Artifacts: A Window onto a Conceptual Divide

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Brandone, Amanda C.; Gelman, Susan A.

2009-01-01

Children and adults commonly produce more generic noun phrases (e.g., birds fly) about animals than artifacts. This may reflect differences in participants' generic knowledge about specific animals/artifacts (e.g., dogs/chairs), or it may reflect a more general distinction. To test this, the current experiments asked adults and preschoolers to…

The Role of Morphophonological Regularity in Young Spanish-Speaking Children's Production of Gendered Noun Phrases

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lindsey, Brittany A.; Gerken, LouAnn

2012-01-01

Adult Spanish speakers generally know which form a determiner preceding a noun should have even if the noun is not in their lexicon, because Spanish demonstrates high predictability between determiner form and noun form ("la" noun-"a" and "el" noun-"o"). We asked whether young children learning Spanish are similarly sensitive to the correlation of…

Case Markers in Mongolian: A Means for Encoding Null Constituents in Noun Phrase and Relative Clause

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Otgonsuren, Tseden

2017-01-01

This paper focuses on the capacity of the case markers in the Mongolian language, as a relative element, to generate any finite noun phrase or relative clause based on their syntactic function or relationship. In Mongolian, there are two different approaches to generate noun phrases: parataxis and hypotaxis. According to my early observation, if…

7 CFR 15f.4 - What do certain words and phrases in these regulations mean?

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-01-01

... 7 Agriculture 1 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false What do certain words and phrases in these regulations mean? 15f.4 Section 15f.4 Agriculture Office of the Secretary of Agriculture ADJUDICATIONS UNDER....4 What do certain words and phrases in these regulations mean? Agency means the USDA agency, office...

Metaphorical Salience in Artistic Text Processing: Evidence From Eye Movement.

PubMed

Novikova, Eleonora G; Janyan, Armina; Tsaregorodtseva, Oksana V

2015-01-01

The study aimed to explore processing difference between a literal phrase and a metaphoric one. Unlike artificially created stimuli in most experimental research, an artistic text with an ambiguous binary metaphoric phrase was used. Eye tracking methodology was applied. Results suggested difference between the two types of phrases in both early and late processing measures. © The Author(s) 2015.

Planning in sentence production: evidence for the phrase as a default planning scope.

PubMed

Martin, Randi C; Crowther, Jason E; Knight, Meredith; Tamborello, Franklin P; Yang, Chin-Lung

2010-08-01

Controversy remains as to the scope of advanced planning in language production. Smith and Wheeldon (1999) found significantly longer onset latencies when subjects described moving-picture displays by producing sentences beginning with a complex noun phrase than for matched sentences beginning with a simple noun phrase. While these findings are consistent with a phrasal scope of planning, they might also be explained on the basis of: (1) greater retrieval fluency for the second content word in the simple initial noun phrase sentences and (2) visual grouping factors. In Experiments 1 and 2, retrieval fluency for the second content word was equated for the complex and simple initial noun phrase conditions. Experiments 3 and 4 addressed the visual grouping hypothesis by using stationary displays and by comparing onset latencies for the same display for sentence and list productions. Longer onset latencies for the sentences beginning with a complex noun phrase were obtained in all experiments, supporting the phrasal scope of planning hypothesis. The results indicate that in speech, as in other motor production domains, planning occurs beyond the minimal production unit. Copyright (c) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Phrasing in the speech and reading of the hearing impaired.

PubMed

Gregory, J F

1986-08-01

The study reported here explored a partial explanation for the fourth-grade "bottleneck" in literacy advancement by hearing-impaired students. Speech samples from 21 deaf subjects were rated for degree of evident phrasal quality. Likewise, reading comprehension scores for each student were obtained under four reading conditions: reading in whole sentences, in phrases, in fragmented word groups, and in single words. Degree of rated speech phrasality was found to relate significantly and positively to correct recall answers to questions based upon silent reading of passages typed in meaningful word groups (but not when the passages were typed in whole sentences, fragmented word groups, or in single words). The results were taken to suggest that--whereas staccato-speaking deaf students may lack a sense of the phrase altogether--phrasal-speaking deaf youngsters fail to independently apply their phrase sense in the normal reading situation. Thus, both types of deaf youngsters have difficulty affecting the transition to phrase reading that is common for hearing students at or about the fourth-grade level. Finally, I argue that this phrase sense can be instilled in hearing-impaired students and that they can be trained to use it in reading.

Start-up rhetoric in eight speeches of Barack Obama.

PubMed

O'Connell, Daniel C; Kowal, Sabine; Sabin, Edward J; Lamia, John F; Dannevik, Margaret

2010-10-01

Our purpose in the following was to investigate the start-up rhetoric employed by U.S. President Barack Obama in his speeches. The initial 5 min from eight of his speeches from May to September of 2009 were selected for their variety of setting, audience, theme, and purpose. It was generally hypothesized that Barack Obama, widely recognized for the excellence of his rhetorical performance, would pursue both constant and variable strategies in his effort to establish contact with his audience. More specifically, it was hypothesized that the make-up of the audience--primarily native or non-native speakers of English--would be a prominent independent variable. A number of temporal and verbal measures were used as dependent variables. Variations were evident in mean length in syllables and duration in seconds of utterances (articulatory phrases), articulation rate in syllables per second of ontime, mean duration of silent pauses in seconds, and frequency of fillers, hesitations, colloquial words and phrases, introductory phrases, and 1st person singular pronominals. Results indicated that formality versus informality of the setting and presence or absence of a teleprompter were more prominent than native versus non-native audiences. Our analyses confirm Obama's skillfulness in challenging and variable settings and clearly detect orderliness and scientific generalizability in language use. The concept of orality/literacy provides a theoretical background and emphasizes dialogical interaction of audience and speaker.

Increased attention and memory for beloved-related information during infatuation: behavioral and electrophysiological data.

PubMed

Langeslag, Sandra J E; Olivier, Jamie R; Köhlen, Martine E; Nijs, Ilse M; Van Strien, Jan W

2015-01-01

Emotionally salient information is well attended and remembered. It has been shown that infatuated individuals have increased attention for their beloved. It is unknown whether this attention bias generalizes to information related to the beloved. Moreover, infatuated individuals report to remember trivial things about their beloved, but this has not yet been tested empirically. In two studies, we tested whether infatuated individuals have increased attention and memory for beloved-related information. In a passive viewing task (Study 1), the late positive potential, an event-related potential (ERP) component reflecting motivated attention, was enhanced for beloved-related vs friend-related words/phrases. In a recognition task (Study 2), memory performance and the frontal and parietal ERP old/new effects, reflecting familiarity and recollection, respectively, were not enhanced for beloved-related compared with friend-related words/phrases. In free recall tasks in both studies, memory was better for beloved-related than friend-related words/phrases. This research reveals that attention and memory are enhanced for beloved-related information. These attention and memory biases for beloved-related information were not due to valence, semantic relatedness, or experience, but to arousal. To conclude, romantic love has profound effects on cognition that play a clear role in daily life. © The Author (2014). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.

The Reed & Kellogg System of Sentence Diagramming and Its Implementation in Higher Education

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Coats, Judith Ruth

2012-01-01

The purpose of this study was to research whether or not the intervention of the Reed & Kellogg System of sentence diagramming would make a significant difference in the acquisition, retention, and comprehension of the basic grammatical skills, including parts of speech, complements, phrases, clauses, and sentence structures, on the higher…

Pedagogical Materials 2. The Yugoslav Serbo-Croatian-English Contrastive Project.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Filipovic, Rudolf, Ed.

The second volume in this series on Serbo-Croatian-English contrastive analysis contains seven articles. They are: "The Use of Contrastive and Error Analysis to Practicing Teachers," by Rudolf Filipovic; "Some Problems in Teaching English Noun Phrases as Subject to Serbo-Croatian Speakers,""Problems in Teaching the Structure of Some English Noun…

Similarities and Differences between Phrase Structure and Morphosyntactic Violations in Spanish: An Event-Related Potentials Study.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hinojosa, Jose A.; Martin-Loeches, Manuel; Casado, Pilar; Munoz, Francisco; Rubia, Francisco J.

2003-01-01

Event-related potentials (EPRs) were employed to compare word category and verb inflection violations in Spanish. A similar frontal negativity was found between 250-400 ms for both violation types, suggesting that they equally disrupt initial syntactic analyses. These and other findings are discussed in detail. (VWL)

Education, Post-Structuralism and the Politics of Difference

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Peters, Michael A.

2005-01-01

This article examines the "politics of difference," a phrase now almost synonymous with postmodernism and the critique of the Enlightenment. The article provides a post-structuralist take on this critique arguing that a critique of Enlightenment values can lead to a deepening of democracy and using Foucault's notion of governmentality to elucidate…

Without Specifiers: Phrase Structure and Events

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lohndal, Terje

2012-01-01

This dissertation attempts to unify two reductionist hypotheses: that there is no relational difference between specifiers and complements, and that verbs do not have thematic arguments. I argue that these two hypotheses actually bear on each other and that we get a better theory if we pursue both of them. The thesis is centered around the…

Can Individuals with Down Syndrome Improve Their Grammar?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sepulveda, Esther Moraleda; Lopez-Villasenor, Miguel Lazaro; Heinze, Elena Garayzabal

2013-01-01

Morphosyntax constitutes one of the most complex areas of language. It takes into account the structure of the word and that of the sentence, and its development allows one to establish adequately agreements both within the nominal phrase and in the rest of the sentence. Morphosyntax is particularly impaired in individuals with Down syndrome. To…

Nominal Modifiers in Mandarin Chinese.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hou, John Y.

In the surface structure of Chinese nominal modifiers (quantifiers, determiners, adjectives, measure phrase, relative clause, etc.) may occur either before or after a modified noun. In most of the transformational studies of Chinese syntax (e.g. Cheng 1966; Hashimoto 1966; Mei 1972; Tai 1973; Teng 1974), it has been assumed that such NP's have the…

Functional Sentence Perspective and Composition.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Vande Kopple, William J.

Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP) is a theory that predicts how units of information should be distributed in a sentence and how sentences should be related in a discourse. A binary topic-comment structure is assigned to each FSP sentence. For most English sentences, the topic is associated with the subject or the left-most noun phrase, and…

On the Early Left-Anterior Negativity (ELAN) in Syntax Studies

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Steinhauer, Karsten; Drury, John E.

2012-01-01

Within the framework of Friederici's (2002) neurocognitive model of sentence processing, the early left anterior negativity (ELAN) in event-related potentials (ERPs) has been claimed to be a brain marker of syntactic first-pass parsing. As ELAN components seem to be exclusively elicited by word category violations (phrase structure violations),…

Exploiting Acoustic and Syntactic Features for Automatic Prosody Labeling in a Maximum Entropy Framework

PubMed Central

Sridhar, Vivek Kumar Rangarajan; Bangalore, Srinivas; Narayanan, Shrikanth S.

2009-01-01

In this paper, we describe a maximum entropy-based automatic prosody labeling framework that exploits both language and speech information. We apply the proposed framework to both prominence and phrase structure detection within the Tones and Break Indices (ToBI) annotation scheme. Our framework utilizes novel syntactic features in the form of supertags and a quantized acoustic–prosodic feature representation that is similar to linear parameterizations of the prosodic contour. The proposed model is trained discriminatively and is robust in the selection of appropriate features for the task of prosody detection. The proposed maximum entropy acoustic–syntactic model achieves pitch accent and boundary tone detection accuracies of 86.0% and 93.1% on the Boston University Radio News corpus, and, 79.8% and 90.3% on the Boston Directions corpus. The phrase structure detection through prosodic break index labeling provides accuracies of 84% and 87% on the two corpora, respectively. The reported results are significantly better than previously reported results and demonstrate the strength of maximum entropy model in jointly modeling simple lexical, syntactic, and acoustic features for automatic prosody labeling. PMID:19603083

13 CFR 142.6 - What does the phrase “know or have reason to know” mean?

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-01-01

... 13 Business Credit and Assistance 1 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false What does the phrase âknow or have reason to knowâ mean? 142.6 Section 142.6 Business Credit and Assistance SMALL BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION PROGRAM FRAUD CIVIL REMEDIES ACT REGULATIONS Overview and Definitions § 142.6 What does the phrase “know...

Just Education: The Right to Education in Context and Conversation. Values and Ethics Series, Volume 3.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Stengel, Barbara Senkowski

This book takes an interpretative look at a common phrase in American educational equity lexicon, "the right to education." It addresses the educational disputes and issues of policy, procedure, and popular will that are associated with this phrase. Interpretation of the phrase is based on a focus on the everyday situations in which a right to…

Zipf's law holds for phrases, not words.

PubMed

Williams, Jake Ryland; Lessard, Paul R; Desu, Suma; Clark, Eric M; Bagrow, James P; Danforth, Christopher M; Dodds, Peter Sheridan

2015-08-11

With Zipf's law being originally and most famously observed for word frequency, it is surprisingly limited in its applicability to human language, holding over no more than three to four orders of magnitude before hitting a clear break in scaling. Here, building on the simple observation that phrases of one or more words comprise the most coherent units of meaning in language, we show empirically that Zipf's law for phrases extends over as many as nine orders of rank magnitude. In doing so, we develop a principled and scalable statistical mechanical method of random text partitioning, which opens up a rich frontier of rigorous text analysis via a rank ordering of mixed length phrases.

Disclosure Control of Natural Language Information to Enable Secure and Enjoyable Communication over the Internet

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kataoka, Haruno; Utsumi, Akira; Hirose, Yuki; Yoshiura, Hiroshi

Disclosure control of natural language information (DCNL), which we are trying to realize, is described. DCNL will be used for securing human communications over the internet, such as through blogs and social network services. Before sentences in the communications are disclosed, they are checked by DCNL and any phrases that could reveal sensitive information are transformed or omitted so that they are no longer revealing. DCNL checks not only phrases that directly represent sensitive information but also those that indirectly suggest it. Combinations of phrases are also checked. DCNL automatically learns the knowledge of sensitive phrases and the suggestive relations between phrases by using co-occurrence analysis and Web retrieval. The users' burden is therefore minimized, i.e., they do not need to define many disclosure control rules. DCNL complements the traditional access control in the fields where reliability needs to be balanced with enjoyment and objects classes for the access control cannot be predefined.

Code of Best Practice: Experimentation

DTIC Science & Technology

2002-07-01

verb phrases , and are connected via arrows, named as nouns or noun phrases , which define inputs (from the left), controls (from the top), outputs (to the...Mark Mandeles, Telyvin Murphy, Dan Oertel, Dr. Walter Perry, John Poirier , Dennis Popiela, Steve Shaker, Dr. David Signori, Dr. Ed Smith, Marcy Stahl...inevitably include the unhappy phrase , “it depends.” In other words, context matters. Hence, individual experiments, which can only look at a small

21 CFR 4.2 - How does FDA define key terms and phrases in this subpart?

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-04-01

... 21 Food and Drugs 1 2014-04-01 2014-04-01 false How does FDA define key terms and phrases in this subpart? 4.2 Section 4.2 Food and Drugs FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION, DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN... Combination Products § 4.2 How does FDA define key terms and phrases in this subpart? The terms listed in this...

21 CFR 4.2 - How does FDA define key terms and phrases in this subpart?

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-04-01

... 21 Food and Drugs 1 2013-04-01 2013-04-01 false How does FDA define key terms and phrases in this subpart? 4.2 Section 4.2 Food and Drugs FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION, DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN... Combination Products § 4.2 How does FDA define key terms and phrases in this subpart? The terms listed in this...

The use of phrase-level prosodic information in lexical segmentation: evidence from word-spotting experiments in Korean.

PubMed

Kim, Sahyang; Cho, Taehong

2009-05-01

This study investigated the role of phrase-level prosodic boundary information in word segmentation in Korean with two word-spotting experiments. In experiment 1, it was found that intonational cues alone helped listeners with lexical segmentation. Listeners paid more attention to local intonational cues (...H#L...) across the prosodic boundary than the intonational information within a prosodic phrase. The results imply that intonation patterns with high frequency are used, though not exclusively, in lexical segmentation. In experiment 2, final lengthening was added to see how multiple prosodic cues influence lexical segmentation. The results showed that listeners did not necessarily benefit from the presence of both intonational and final lengthening cues: Their performance was improved only when intonational information contained infrequent tonal patterns for boundary marking, showing only partially cumulative effects of prosodic cues. When the intonational information was optimal (frequent) for boundary marking, however, poorer performance was observed with final lengthening. This is arguably because the phrase-initial segmental allophonic cues for the accentual phrase were not matched with the prosodic cues for the intonational phrase. It is proposed that the asymmetrical use of multiple cues was due to interaction between prosodic and segmental information that are computed in parallel in lexical segmentation.

On the structures and mapping of auroral electrostatic potentials

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Chiu, Y. T.; Newman, A. L.; Cornwall, J. M.

1981-01-01

The mapping of magnetospheric and ionospheric electric fields in a kinetic model of magnetospheric-ionospheric electrodynamic coupling proposed for the aurora is examined. One feature is the generalization of the kinetic current-potential relationship to the return current region (identified as a region where the parallel drop from magnetosphere to ionosphere is positive); such a return current always exists unless the ionosphere is electrically charged to grossly unphysical values. A coherent phenomenological picture of both the low energy return current and the high energy precipitation of an inverted-V is given. The mapping between magnetospheric and ionospheric electric fields is phrased in terms of a Green's function which acts as a filter, emphasizing magnetospheric latitudinal spatial scales of order (when mapped to the ionosphere) 50 to 150 km. This same length, when multiplied by electric fields just above the ionosphere, sets the scale for potential drops between the ionosphere and equatorial magnetosphere.

Proceedings of the NASA/DOD Control/Structures Interaction Technology Conference (4th) Held in Orlando, Florida on 5-7 November 1990

DTIC Science & Technology

1991-01-15

Orlando, Florida, 5-7 November 1990. The conference was cosponsored by the Wright Laboratory and the NASA Langley Research Center. The Conference...Subiect Terms. Keywords or phrases responsible for writing the report, performing identifying major subjects in the repc.,t. the research , or...Laboratory and the NASA Langley Research Center have agreed to sponsor alternately a series of annual control/structures interaction technology

Keeping it simple: studying grammatical encoding with lexically reduced item sets

PubMed Central

Veenstra, Alma; Acheson, Daniel J.; Meyer, Antje S.

2014-01-01

Compared to the large body of work on lexical access, little research has been done on grammatical encoding in language production. An exception is the generation of subject-verb agreement. Here, two key findings have been reported: (1) speakers make more agreement errors when the head and local noun of a phrase mismatch in number than when they match [e.g., the key to the cabinet(s)]; and (2) this attraction effect is asymmetric, with stronger attraction for singular than for plural head nouns. Although these findings are robust, the cognitive processes leading to agreement errors and their significance for the generation of correct agreement are not fully understood. We propose that future studies of agreement, and grammatical encoding in general, may benefit from using paradigms that tightly control the variability of the lexical content of the material. We report two experiments illustrating this approach. In both of them, the experimental items featured combinations of four nouns, four color adjectives, and two prepositions. In Experiment 1, native speakers of Dutch described pictures in sentences such as the circle next to the stars is blue. In Experiment 2, they carried out a forced-choice task, where they read subject noun phrases (e.g., the circle next to the stars) and selected the correct verb-phrase (is blue or are blue) with a button press. Both experiments showed an attraction effect, with more errors after subject phrases with mismatching, compared to matching head and local nouns. This effect was stronger for singular than plural heads, replicating the attraction asymmetry. In contrast, the response times recorded in Experiment 2 showed similar attraction effects for singular and plural head nouns. These results demonstrate that critical agreement phenomena can be elicited reliably in lexically reduced contexts. We discuss the theoretical implications of the findings and the potential and limitations of studies using lexically simple materials. PMID:25101039

Keeping it simple: studying grammatical encoding with lexically reduced item sets.

PubMed

Veenstra, Alma; Acheson, Daniel J; Meyer, Antje S

2014-01-01

Compared to the large body of work on lexical access, little research has been done on grammatical encoding in language production. An exception is the generation of subject-verb agreement. Here, two key findings have been reported: (1) speakers make more agreement errors when the head and local noun of a phrase mismatch in number than when they match [e.g., the key to the cabinet(s)]; and (2) this attraction effect is asymmetric, with stronger attraction for singular than for plural head nouns. Although these findings are robust, the cognitive processes leading to agreement errors and their significance for the generation of correct agreement are not fully understood. We propose that future studies of agreement, and grammatical encoding in general, may benefit from using paradigms that tightly control the variability of the lexical content of the material. We report two experiments illustrating this approach. In both of them, the experimental items featured combinations of four nouns, four color adjectives, and two prepositions. In Experiment 1, native speakers of Dutch described pictures in sentences such as the circle next to the stars is blue. In Experiment 2, they carried out a forced-choice task, where they read subject noun phrases (e.g., the circle next to the stars) and selected the correct verb-phrase (is blue or are blue) with a button press. Both experiments showed an attraction effect, with more errors after subject phrases with mismatching, compared to matching head and local nouns. This effect was stronger for singular than plural heads, replicating the attraction asymmetry. In contrast, the response times recorded in Experiment 2 showed similar attraction effects for singular and plural head nouns. These results demonstrate that critical agreement phenomena can be elicited reliably in lexically reduced contexts. We discuss the theoretical implications of the findings and the potential and limitations of studies using lexically simple materials.

Predicting complex syntactic structure in real time: Processing of negative sentences in Russian.

PubMed

Kazanina, Nina

2017-11-01

In Russian negative sentences the verb's direct object may appear either in the accusative case, which is licensed by the verb (as is common cross-linguistically), or in the genitive case, which is licensed by the negation (Russian-specific "genitive-of-negation" phenomenon). Such sentences were used to investigate whether case marking is employed for anticipating syntactic structure, and whether lexical heads other than the verb can be predicted on the basis of a case-marked noun phrase. Experiment 1, a completion task, confirmed that genitive-of-negation is part of Russian speakers' active grammatical repertoire. In Experiments 2 and 3, the genitive/accusative case manipulation on the preverbal object led to shorter reading times at the negation and verb in the genitive versus accusative condition. Furthermore, Experiment 3 manipulated linear order of the direct object and the negated verb in order to distinguish whether the abovementioned facilitatory effect was predictive or integrative in nature, and concluded that the parser actively predicts a verb and (otherwise optional) negation on the basis of a preceding genitive-marked object. Similarly to a head-final language, case-marking information on preverbal noun phrases (NPs) is used by the parser to enable incremental structure building in a free-word-order language such as Russian.

Formal Semantics in the Neurology Clinic: Atypical Understanding of Aspectual Coercion in ALS Patients

PubMed Central

Baggio, Giosuè; Granello, Giulia; Verriello, Lorenzo; Eleopra, Roberto

2016-01-01

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a neurodegenerative disease of the motor system with subtle adverse effects on cognition. It is still unclear whether ALS also affects language and semantics, and if so, what aspects and processes exactly. We investigated how ALS patients understand verb phrases modified by temporal preposition phrases, e.g., “To watch TV for half an hour.” Interpretation here requires operations such as aspectual coercion that add or delete elements from event structures, depending on temporal modifiers, and constraints on coercion, which make combinations with certain modifiers not viable. Using a theoretically-motivated experimental design, we observed that acceptance rates for aspectual coercion were abnormally high in ALS patients. The effect was largest for the more complex cases of coercion: not those that involve enrichment of event structures (“To switch on the TV in half an hour,” where a number of failed attempts must be included in the interpretation) but those that, if applied, would result in deletion of event structure elements (“To repair the TV for half an hour”). Our experimental results are consistent with a deficit of constraints on coercion, and not with impaired semantic processes or representations, in line with recent studies suggesting that verb semantics is largely spared in ALS. PMID:27867369

Creation Myths of Generative Grammar and the Mathematics of Syntactic Structures

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Pullum, Geoffrey K.

Syntactic Structures (Chomsky [6]) is widely believed to have laid the foundations of a cognitive revolution in linguistic science, and to have presented (i) the first use in linguistics of powerful new ideas regarding grammars as generative systems, (ii) a proof that English was not a regular language, (iii) decisive syntactic arguments against context-free phrase structure grammar description, and (iv) a demonstration of how transformational rules could provide a formal solution to those problems. None of these things are true. This paper offers a retrospective analysis and evaluation.

Development and Validation of a Diagnostic Grammar Test for Japanese Learners of English

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Koizumi, Rie; Sakai, Hideki; Ido, Takahiro; Ota, Hiroshi; Hayama, Megumi; Sato, Masatoshi; Nemoto, Akiko

2011-01-01

This article reports on the development and validation of the English Diagnostic Test of Grammar (EDiT Grammar) for Japanese learners of English. From among the many aspects of grammar, this test focuses on the knowledge of basic English noun phrases (NPs), especially their internal structures, because previous research has indicated the…

The Acquisition of Prosodic Word Structures in Spanish by Monolingual and Spanish-German Bilingual Children

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lleo, Conxita

2006-01-01

This article examines the constraints on Prosodic Word production in Spanish by three monolingual and three Spanish-German bilingual children from the beginning of word production until 2;2. It also considers the relationship between Prosodic Words and Phonological Phrases, and in the case of monosyllabic words, it takes into consideration…

DAGUR MONGOLIAN GRAMMAR, TEXTS, AND LEXICON. URALIC AND ALTAIC SERIES, VOLUME 4.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

MARTIN, SAMUEL E.

THIS DESCRIPTION OF DAGUR, A MONGOLIAN LANGUAGE, IS BASED ON THE DIALECT OF A SPEAKER BORN IN INNER MONGOLIA IN NORTHWEST MANCHURIA. SECTION I OF THIS MANUAL DESCRIBES OTHER WORKS PUBLISHED IN MONGOLIAN LINGUISTICS WHICH HAVE USED THE SAME INFORMANT, AND PRESENTS THE AUTHOR'S APPROACH, IN TERMS OF A PHRASE-STRUCTURE GRAMMAR. SECTION II PRESENTS…

Effects of Weight and Syntactic Priming on the Production of Cantonese Verb-Doubling

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Francis, Elaine J.; Matthews, Stephen; Wong, Reace Wing Yan; Kwan, Stella Wing Man

2011-01-01

Verb-doubling, where a copy of the main verb occurs both before and after the direct object, is a structure commonly used in Chinese in sentences containing a frequency or duration phrase. In Cantonese, verb-doubling is highly optional and therefore problematic for existing syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic accounts of its distribution in…

Stimulus-Response Theory of Finite Automata, Technical Report No. 133.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Suppes, Patrick

The central aim of this paper and its projected successors is to prove in detail that stimulus-response theory, or at least a mathematically precise version, can give an account of the learning of many phrase-structure grammars. Section 2 is concerned with standard notions of finite and probabilistic automata. An automaton is defined as a device…

The Interaction of Eye-Voice Span with Syntactic Chunking and Predictability in Right- and Left-Embedded Sentences.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Balajthy, Ernest P., Jr.

Sixty tenth graders participated in this study of relationships between eye/voice span, phrase and clause boundaries, reading ability, and sentence structure. Results indicated that sentences apparently are "chunked" into surface constituents during processing. Better tenth grade readers had longer eye/voice spans than did poorer readers and…

"Blame" Concept in Phraseology: Cognitive-Semantic Aspect (Based on the French Language)

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Zalavina, Tatyana Y.; Kisel, Olesya V.

2016-01-01

Phraseology is one of the basic and most important objects of study in cognitive linguistics. The article deals with verbal fixed phrases in their correlation with the cognitive structure of knowledge--a concept. The used definitional analysis method to identify the basic notions of the conceptual content of the concept of blame and basic…

A Formal Criterion for Identifying Lexical Phrases: Implication from a Classroom Experiment

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Yu, Xia

2009-01-01

This study investigates whether two different means of learning the word sequence "despite the fact (that)" lead to differential outcomes of the acquisition of the grammatical structure imbedded in the word string which is, due to L1 transfer, especially problematic for Chinese learners of English. The participants of the study were randomly…

Acquisition of Structure and Interpretation: Cases from Mandarin Bare and Non-Bare Noun Phrases

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Chang, Hsiang-Hua

2011-01-01

Children's production of bare nominals is universal. When acquiring languages disallowing bare nominals, children will develop from the bare to the non-bare stage. However, Mandarin nominals may appear bare or non-bare in various positions with all kinds of interpretations. This dissertation conducts two acquisition studies to examine the…

Phrase-Meaning Relationship According to Situational and Incidental Texts

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Coskun, Mustafa Volkan; Ozkaya, Perihan Gulce; Uysal, Zeynep Ezgi

2017-01-01

The purpose of the current study is to conduct a comparative analysis of the situational story of Sait Faik Abasiyanik entitled as "Alemdag'da Var Bir Yilan" and the incidental story of Refik Halid Karay entitled as "Boz Esek" in terms of syntax on the basis of their deep structures. The current study employed case study, one…

Making a Minimalist Approach to Codeswitching Work: Adding the Matrix Language.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jake, Janice L.; Myers-Scotton, Carol; Gross, Steven

2002-01-01

Discusses the Matrix Language Frame model. Analysis of noun phrases in a Spanish-English corpus illustrates this compatibility and shows how recent minimalist proposals can explain the distribution of nouns and determiners in the data if they adopt the notion of matrix language as bilingual instantiation of structural uniformity in a CP.…

System, method and apparatus for generating phrases from a database

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

McGreevy, Michael W. (Inventor)

2004-01-01

A phrase generation is a method of generating sequences of terms, such as phrases, that may occur within a database of subsets containing sequences of terms, such as text. A database is provided and a relational model of the database is created. A query is then input. The query includes a term or a sequence of terms or multiple individual terms or multiple sequences of terms or combinations thereof. Next, several sequences of terms that are contextually related to the query are assembled from contextual relations in the model of the database. The sequences of terms are then sorted and output. Phrase generation can also be an iterative process used to produce sequences of terms from a relational model of a database.

[Effects of sustained and stopped hand actions on sensible/nonsensible judgments of verbal phrase of action: comparison between actual action and viewing a movie].

PubMed

Yamamoto, Yukiko; Hakoda, Yuji

2002-04-01

The present study investigated how an actual action or viewing a movie of an action influences the subsequent semantic processing of a verbal phrase concerning the action (e.g., holding a bag with a hand). Forty participants made sensible/nonsensible judgments about the target phrase which were preceded by one of the four prime conditions: sustained action, stopped action, sustained viewing movie, and stopped viewing movie. A facilitatory priming effect was observed in the sustained action condition. Whereas an inhibitory effect was observed in the stopped action condition. These results suggest that the kinetic information affects on the semantic processing of a verbal phrase of action.

Prototypicality in Sentence Production

PubMed Central

Onishi, Kristine H.; Murphy, Gregory L.; Bock, Kathryn

2008-01-01

Three cued-recall experiments examined the effect of category typicality on the ordering of words in sentence production. Past research has found that typical items tend to be mentioned before atypical items in a phrase—a pattern usually associated with lexical variables (like word frequency), and yet typicality is a conceptual variable. Experiment 1 revealed that an appropriate conceptual framework was necessary to yield the typicality effect. Experiment 2 tested ad-hoc categories that do not have prior representations in long-term memory and yielded no typicality effect. Experiment 3 used carefully matched sentences in which two category members appeared in the same or in different phrases. Typicality affected word order only when the two words appeared in the same phrase. These results are consistent with an account in which typicality has its origin in conceptual structure, which leads to differences in lexical accessibility in appropriate contexts. PMID:17631877

Is the fluency of language outputs related to individual differences in intelligence and executive function?

PubMed

Engelhardt, Paul E; Nigg, Joel T; Ferreira, Fernanda

2013-10-01

There has been little research on the fluency of language production and individual difference variables, such as intelligence and executive function. In this study, we report data from 106 participants who completed a battery of standardized cognitive tasks and a sentence production task. For the sentence production task, participants were presented with two objects and a verb and their task was to formulate a sentence. Four types of disfluency were examined: filled pauses (e.g. uh, um), unfilled pauses, repetitions, and repairs. Repetitions occur when the speaker suspends articulation and then repeats the previous word/phrase, and repairs occur when the speaker suspends articulation and then starts over with a different word/phrase. Hierarchical structural equation modeling revealed a significant relationship between repair disfluencies and inhibition. Conclusions focus on the role of individual differences in cognitive ability and their role in models and theories of language production. © 2013.

Is the fluency of language outputs related to individual differences in intelligence and executive function?

PubMed Central

Engelhardt, Paul E.; Nigg, Joel T.; Ferreira, Fernanda

2013-01-01

There has been little research on the fluency of language production and individual differences variables, such as intelligence and executive function. In this study, we report data from 106 participants who completed a battery of standardized cognitive tasks and a sentence production task. For the sentence production task, participants were presented with two objects and a verb and their task was to formulate a sentence. Four types of disfluency were examined: filled pauses (e.g. uh, um), unfilled pauses, repetitions, and repairs. Repetitions occur when the speaker suspends articulation and then repeats the previous word/phrase, and repairs occur when the speaker suspends articulation and then starts over with a different word/phrase. Hierarchical structural equation modeling revealed a significant relationship between repair disfluencies and inhibition. Conclusions focus on the role of individual differences in cognitive ability and their role in models and theories of language production. PMID:24018099

Infants can use distributional cues to form syntactic categories.

PubMed

Gerken, LouAnn; Wilson, Rachel; Lewis, William

2005-05-01

Nearly all theories of language development emphasize the importance of distributional cues for segregating words and phrases into syntactic categories like noun, feminine or verb phrase. However, questions concerning whether such cues can be used to the exclusion of referential cues have been debated. Using the headturn preference procedure, American children aged 1;5 were briefly familiarized with a partial Russian gender paradigm, with a subset of the paradigm members withheld. During test, infants listened on alternate trials to previously withheld grammatical items and ungrammatical items with incorrect gender markings on previously heard stems. Across three experiments, infants discriminated new grammatical from ungrammatical items, but like adults in previous studies, were only able to do so when a subset of familiarization items was double marked for gender category. The results suggest that learners can use distributional cues to category structure, to the exclusion of referential cues, from relatively early in the language learning process.

[Stimuli phrases of adductor spasmodic dysphonia phonatory break in mandarin Chinese].

PubMed

Ge, Pingjiang; Ren, Qingyi; Chen, Zhipeng; Cheng, Qiuhui; Sheng, Xiaoli; Wang, Ling; Chen, Shaohua; Zhang, Siyi

2015-12-01

To investigate the characteristics of adductor spasmodic dysphonia phonatory break in mandarin Chinese and select the stimuli phrases. Thirty-eight patients with adductor spasmodic dysphonia were involved in this study. Standard phrase " fù mŭ xīn" and a speech corpus in mandarin Chinese with 229 syllables covering all vowel and constant of mandarin Chinese were selected. Every patient read the phrases above twice in normal speed and comfortable voice. Two auditory perpetual speech pathologists marked phonatory break syllables respectively. The frequency of phonatory break syllables and their located phrases were calculated, rated and described. The phrases including the most phonatory break syllables were selected as stimuli phrases, the phonatory break frequency of which was also higher than that of standard phrase "fù mŭ xīn". Phonatory break happened in the reading of all patients. The average number of phonatory break syllables was 14 (3-33). Phonatroy break occurred when saying 177 (77.3%) syllables in the speech corpus. The syllables "guŏ, rén, zāng, diàn, chē, gè, guăn, a, bā, ne, de" broke in 23.1%-41.0% patients. These syllables belonged to the phrases "pĭng guŏ, huŏ chē, shì de, nĭ shì gè hăo rén, wŏ mén shì yŏu zŏng shì bă qĭn shì nong dé hĕn zāng, wŏ mén nà biān yŏu wăng qiú yùn dong chăng, cān gŭan, jiŭ bā hé yī gè miàn bāo dìan, tā shì duō me kāng kăi a,wŏ yīng gāi zài xìn lĭ xiĕ yī xiē shén mē ne?". Thirty-seven patients (97.3%) had phonatory break in above mentioned words. Ratios of these words phonatory break also were more than "fù mŭ xīn". Adductor spasmodic dysphonic patients exhibited different degrees of phonatory break in mandarine Chinese. The phrases" shì de, pĭng guŏ, huŏ chē, nĭ shì gè hăo rén, wŏ mén nà biān yŏu wăng qiú yùn dong chăng, cān gŭan, jiŭ bā hé yī gè miàn bāo dìan, tā shì duō me kāng kăi a" were recommended as stimuli phrases for adductor spasmodic dysphonia evaluation.

Compensating for Language Deficits in Amnesia I: H.M.'s Spared Retrieval Categories.

PubMed

MacKay, Donald G; Johnson, Laura W; Fazel, Vedad; James, Lori E

2013-03-14

Three studies examined amnesic H.M.'s use of words, phrases, and propositions on the Test of Language Competence (TLC). In Study 1, H.M. used 19 lexical categories (e.g., common nouns, verbs) and one syntactic category (noun phrases) with the same relative frequency as memory-normal controls, he used no lexical or syntactic category with less-than-normal frequency, and he used proper names (e.g., Melanie) and coordinative conjunctions (e.g., and) with reliably greater-than-normal frequency. In Study 2, H.M. overused proper names relative to controls when answering episodic memory questions about childhood experiences in speech and writing, replicating and extending Study 1 results for proper names. Based on detailed analyses of the use (and misuse) of coordinating conjunctions on the TLC, Study 3 developed a syntax-level "compensation hypothesis" for explaining why H.M. overused coordinating conjunctions relative to controls in Study 1. Present results suggested that (a) frontal mechanisms for retrieving word-, phrase-, and propositional-categories are intact in H.M., unlike in category-specific aphasia, (b) using his intact retrieval mechanisms, H.M. has developed a never-previously-observed proposition-level free association strategy to compensate for the hippocampal region damage that has impaired his mechanisms for encoding novel linguistic structures, and (c) H.M.'s overuse of proper names warrants further research.

Compensating for Language Deficits in Amnesia I: H.M.’s Spared Retrieval Categories

PubMed Central

MacKay, Donald G.; Johnson, Laura W.; Fazel, Vedad; James, Lori E.

2013-01-01

Three studies examined amnesic H.M.’s use of words, phrases, and propositions on the Test of Language Competence (TLC). In Study 1, H.M. used 19 lexical categories (e.g., common nouns, verbs) and one syntactic category (noun phrases) with the same relative frequency as memory-normal controls, he used no lexical or syntactic category with less-than-normal frequency, and he used proper names (e.g., Melanie) and coordinative conjunctions (e.g., and) with reliably greater-than-normal frequency. In Study 2, H.M. overused proper names relative to controls when answering episodic memory questions about childhood experiences in speech and writing, replicating and extending Study 1 results for proper names. Based on detailed analyses of the use (and misuse) of coordinating conjunctions on the TLC, Study 3 developed a syntax-level “compensation hypothesis” for explaining why H.M. overused coordinating conjunctions relative to controls in Study 1. Present results suggested that (a) frontal mechanisms for retrieving word-, phrase-, and propositional-categories are intact in H.M., unlike in category-specific aphasia, (b) using his intact retrieval mechanisms, H.M. has developed a never-previously-observed proposition-level free association strategy to compensate for the hippocampal region damage that has impaired his mechanisms for encoding novel linguistic structures, and (c) H.M.’s overuse of proper names warrants further research. PMID:24961315

Are individuals with Parkinson's disease capable of speech-motor learning? - A preliminary evaluation.

PubMed

Kaipa, Ramesh; Jones, Richard D; Robb, Michael P

2016-07-01

The benefits of different practice conditions in limb-based rehabilitation of motor disorders are well documented. Conversely, the role of practice structure in the treatment of motor-based speech disorders has only been minimally investigated. Considering this limitation, the current study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of selected practice conditions in spatial and temporal learning of novel speech utterances in individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD). Participants included 16 individuals with PD who were randomly and equally assigned to constant, variable, random, and blocked practice conditions. Participants in all four groups practiced a speech phrase for two consecutive days, and reproduced the speech phrase on the third day without further practice or feedback. There were no significant differences (p > 0.05) between participants across the four practice conditions with respect to either spatial or temporal learning of the speech phrase. Overall, PD participants demonstrated diminished spatial and temporal learning in comparison to healthy controls. Tests of strength of association between participants' demographic/clinical characteristics and speech-motor learning outcomes did not reveal any significant correlations. The findings from the current study suggest that repeated practice facilitates speech-motor learning in individuals with PD irrespective of the type of practice. Clinicians need to be cautious in applying practice conditions to treat speech deficits associated with PD based on the findings of non-speech-motor learning tasks. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Spicy Adjectives and Nominal Donkeys: Capturing Semantic Deviance Using Compositionality in Distributional Spaces.

PubMed

Vecchi, Eva M; Marelli, Marco; Zamparelli, Roberto; Baroni, Marco

2017-01-01

Sophisticated senator and legislative onion. Whether or not you have ever heard of these things, we all have some intuition that one of them makes much less sense than the other. In this paper, we introduce a large dataset of human judgments about novel adjective-noun phrases. We use these data to test an approach to semantic deviance based on phrase representations derived with compositional distributional semantic methods, that is, methods that derive word meanings from contextual information, and approximate phrase meanings by combining word meanings. We present several simple measures extracted from distributional representations of words and phrases, and we show that they have a significant impact on predicting the acceptability of novel adjective-noun phrases even when a number of alternative measures classically employed in studies of compound processing and bigram plausibility are taken into account. Our results show that the extent to which an attributive adjective alters the distributional representation of the noun is the most significant factor in modeling the distinction between acceptable and deviant phrases. Our study extends current applications of compositional distributional semantic methods to linguistically and cognitively interesting problems, and it offers a new, quantitatively precise approach to the challenge of predicting when humans will find novel linguistic expressions acceptable and when they will not. Copyright © 2016 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

On how Watson and Crick discovered what Watson and Crick had suggested: the "folk" concept of discovery rediscovered.

PubMed

Charpa, Ulrich

2008-01-01

This article opens with general and historical remarks on philosophy of science's problems with the concept of discovery. Then, drawing upon simple examples of Watson's and Crick's non-philosophical usage, I characterize phrases of the type "x discovers y" semantically. It will subsequently be shown how widespread philosophical discussion on discovery violates the semantic constraints of phrases of the type "x discovers y." Then I provide a philosophical reconstruction of "x discovers y" that is in keeping with the "folk" notion of discovery. The philosophical ingredients of this approach are taken from a certain aspect of action theory and from epistemological reliabilism. The approach draws upon the concept of superior action and connects this concept to progressive research. In contrast to normal actions, superior actions are primarily explained by competencies. This perspective includes reminders of what some nineteenth-century philosopher-scientists had advocated as a competence-oriented view on scientific research. Finally, this approach is applied to the case of Watson's and Crick's discovery.

Speed of mental processing in the middle of the night

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Monk, T. H.; Carrier, J.

1997-01-01

This study aimed to determine whether human mental processing actually slows down during the night hours, separately from the previously documented microsleeps, lapses in attention, and general slowing of motor responses. Eighteen healthy young adults were studied during 36 hours of constant wakeful bedrest. Every 2 hours, they performed a logical reasoning task. Items phrased in the negative voice took reliably longer to respond to than items phrased in the positive voice, indicating the need for more mental processing in those items. By subtracting "negative" from "positive" reaction times at each time of day, we were able to plot a circadian rhythm in the time taken for this extra mental processing to be done separately from microsleeps, psychomotor slowing, and inattention. The extra mental processing took longer at night and on the day following sleep loss than it did during the day before the sleep loss, suggesting that human mental processing slows down during the night under sleep deprivation.

Phonological and syntactic competition effects in spoken word recognition: evidence from corpus-based statistics.

PubMed

Zhuang, Jie; Devereux, Barry J

2017-02-07

As spoken language unfolds over time the speech input transiently activates multiple candidates at different levels of the system - phonological, lexical, and syntactic - which in turn leads to short-lived between-candidate competition. In an fMRI study, we investigated how different kinds of linguistic competition may be modulated by the presence or absence of a prior context (Tyler 1984; Tyler et al. 2008). We found significant effects of lexico-phonological competition for isolated words, but not for words in short phrases, with high competition yielding greater activation in left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) and posterior temporal regions. This suggests that phrasal contexts reduce lexico-phonological competition by eliminating form-class inconsistent cohort candidates. A corpus-derived measure of lexico-syntactic competition was associated with greater activation in LIFG for verbs in phrases, but not for isolated verbs, indicating that lexico-syntactic information is boosted by the phrasal context. Together, these findings indicate that LIFG plays a general role in resolving different kinds of linguistic competition.

Training verb argument structure production in agrammatic aphasia: Behavioral and neural recovery patterns

PubMed Central

Thompson, Cynthia K.; Riley, Ellyn A.; den Ouden, Dirk-Bart; Meltzer-Asscher, Aya; Lukic, Sladjana

2013-01-01

Introduction Neuroimaging and lesion studies indicate a left hemisphere network for verb and verb argument structure processing, involving both frontal and temporoparietal brain regions. Although their verb comprehension is generally unimpaired, it is well known that individuals with agrammatic aphasia often present with verb production deficits, characterized by an argument structure complexity hierarchy, indicating faulty access to argument structure representations for production and integration into syntactic contexts. Recovery of verb processing in agrammatism, however, has received little attention and no studies have examined the neural mechanisms associated with improved verb and argument structure processing. In the present study we trained agrammatic individuals on verbs with complex argument structure in sentence contexts and examined generalization to verbs with less complex argument structure. The neural substrates of improved verb production were examined using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Methods Eight individuals with chronic agrammatic aphasia participated in the study (four experimental and four control participants). Production of three-argument verbs in active sentences was trained using a sentence generation task emphasizing the verb’s argument structure and the thematic roles of sentential noun phrases. Before and after training, production of trained and untrained verbs was tested in naming and sentence production and fMRI scans were obtained, using an action naming task. Results Significant pre- to post-training improvement in trained and untrained (one- and two-argument) verbs was found for treated, but not control, participants, with between-group differences found for verb naming, production of verbs in sentences, and production of argument structure. fMRI activation derived from post-treatment compared to pre-treatment scans revealed upregulation in cortical regions implicated for verb and argument structure processing in healthy controls. Conclusions Training verb deficits emphasizing argument structure and thematic role mapping is effective for improving verb and sentence production and results in recruitment of neural networks engaged for verb and argument structure processing in healthy individuals. PMID:23514929

A Layered Searchable Encryption Scheme with Functional Components Independent of Encryption Methods

PubMed Central

Luo, Guangchun; Qin, Ke

2014-01-01

Searchable encryption technique enables the users to securely store and search their documents over the remote semitrusted server, which is especially suitable for protecting sensitive data in the cloud. However, various settings (based on symmetric or asymmetric encryption) and functionalities (ranked keyword query, range query, phrase query, etc.) are often realized by different methods with different searchable structures that are generally not compatible with each other, which limits the scope of application and hinders the functional extensions. We prove that asymmetric searchable structure could be converted to symmetric structure, and functions could be modeled separately apart from the core searchable structure. Based on this observation, we propose a layered searchable encryption (LSE) scheme, which provides compatibility, flexibility, and security for various settings and functionalities. In this scheme, the outputs of the core searchable component based on either symmetric or asymmetric setting are converted to some uniform mappings, which are then transmitted to loosely coupled functional components to further filter the results. In such a way, all functional components could directly support both symmetric and asymmetric settings. Based on LSE, we propose two representative and novel constructions for ranked keyword query (previously only available in symmetric scheme) and range query (previously only available in asymmetric scheme). PMID:24719565

Constructing the Stereotype: Indexes and Performance of a Stigmatised Local Dialect in Egypt

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bassiouney, Reem

2018-01-01

'Sa?idi dialect' is a general phrase used by Egyptians to refer to a group of dialects spoken in an area that stretches from the south of Cairo to the border of the Sudan. Of all the dialects found throughout Egypt and the Arab world, Sa?idi Arabic is one of the most ridiculed, stigmatised and stereotyped in the media. Salient phonological and…

Between fall and fall-rise: substance-function relations in German phrase-final intonation contours.

PubMed

Ambrazaitis, Gilbert

2005-01-01

This study investigates an intonation contour of German whose status has not been established yet: a globally falling contour with a slight rise at the very end of the phrase (FSR). The contour may be said to lie on a phonetic continuum between falling (F) and falling-rising (FR) contours. It is hypothesized that F, FR and FSR differ with respect to their communicative functions: F is terminal, FR is non-terminal, and FSR is pseudo-terminal, respectively. The hypotheses were tested in two steps. First, measurements in a labelled corpus of spontaneous speech provided the necessary background information on the phonetics of the contours. In the second step, the general hypothesis was approached in a perceptual experiment using the paradigm of a semantic differential: 49 listeners judged 17 systematically generated stimuli on nine semantic scales, such as 'impolite/polite'. The hypotheses were generally confirmed. Both F and FSR were associated with a conclusive statement, while FR was more likely to be judged as marking a question. FSR differs from F in that it does not express features such as categoricalness, dominance or impoliteness. The results are interpreted as an instance of the frequency code: the addition of a slight rise means avoidance of extremely low F(0); the functional consequence is a reduction of communicated dominance.

Hyper-active gap filling

PubMed Central

Omaki, Akira; Lau, Ellen F.; Davidson White, Imogen; Dakan, Myles L.; Apple, Aaron; Phillips, Colin

2015-01-01

Much work has demonstrated that speakers of verb-final languages are able to construct rich syntactic representations in advance of verb information. This may reflect general architectural properties of the language processor, or it may only reflect a language-specific adaptation to the demands of verb-finality. The present study addresses this issue by examining whether speakers of a verb-medial language (English) wait to consult verb transitivity information before constructing filler-gap dependencies, where internal arguments are fronted and hence precede the verb. This configuration makes it possible to investigate whether the parser actively makes representational commitments on the gap position before verb transitivity information becomes available. A key prediction of the view that rich pre-verbal structure building is a general architectural property is that speakers of verb-medial languages should predictively construct dependencies in advance of verb transitivity information, and therefore that disruption should be observed when the verb has intransitive subcategorization frames that are incompatible with the predicted structure. In three reading experiments (self-paced and eye-tracking) that manipulated verb transitivity, we found evidence for reading disruption when the verb was intransitive, although no such reading difficulty was observed when the critical verb was embedded inside a syntactic island structure, which blocks filler-gap dependency completion. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that in English, as in verb-final languages, information from preverbal noun phrases is sufficient to trigger active dependency completion without having access to verb transitivity information. PMID:25914658

Hyper-active gap filling.

PubMed

Omaki, Akira; Lau, Ellen F; Davidson White, Imogen; Dakan, Myles L; Apple, Aaron; Phillips, Colin

2015-01-01

Much work has demonstrated that speakers of verb-final languages are able to construct rich syntactic representations in advance of verb information. This may reflect general architectural properties of the language processor, or it may only reflect a language-specific adaptation to the demands of verb-finality. The present study addresses this issue by examining whether speakers of a verb-medial language (English) wait to consult verb transitivity information before constructing filler-gap dependencies, where internal arguments are fronted and hence precede the verb. This configuration makes it possible to investigate whether the parser actively makes representational commitments on the gap position before verb transitivity information becomes available. A key prediction of the view that rich pre-verbal structure building is a general architectural property is that speakers of verb-medial languages should predictively construct dependencies in advance of verb transitivity information, and therefore that disruption should be observed when the verb has intransitive subcategorization frames that are incompatible with the predicted structure. In three reading experiments (self-paced and eye-tracking) that manipulated verb transitivity, we found evidence for reading disruption when the verb was intransitive, although no such reading difficulty was observed when the critical verb was embedded inside a syntactic island structure, which blocks filler-gap dependency completion. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that in English, as in verb-final languages, information from preverbal noun phrases is sufficient to trigger active dependency completion without having access to verb transitivity information.

Neural Correlates of Phrase Quadrature Perception in Harmonic Rhythm: An EEG Study Using a Brain-Computer Interface.

PubMed

Fernández-Soto, Alicia; Martínez-Rodrigo, Arturo; Moncho-Bogani, José; Latorre, José Miguel; Fernández-Caballero, Antonio

2018-06-01

For the sake of establishing the neural correlates of phrase quadrature perception in harmonic rhythm, a musical experiment has been designed to induce music-evoked stimuli related to one important aspect of harmonic rhythm, namely the phrase quadrature. Brain activity is translated to action through electroencephalography (EEG) by using a brain-computer interface. The power spectral value of each EEG channel is estimated to obtain how power variance distributes as a function of frequency. The results of processing the acquired signals are in line with previous studies that use different musical parameters to induce emotions. Indeed, our experiment shows statistical differences in theta and alpha bands between the fulfillment and break of phrase quadrature, an important cue of harmonic rhythm, in two classical sonatas.

The neural processing of hierarchical structure in music and speech at different timescales.

PubMed

Farbood, Morwaread M; Heeger, David J; Marcus, Gary; Hasson, Uri; Lerner, Yulia

2015-01-01

Music, like speech, is a complex auditory signal that contains structures at multiple timescales, and as such is a potentially powerful entry point into the question of how the brain integrates complex streams of information. Using an experimental design modeled after previous studies that used scrambled versions of a spoken story (Lerner et al., 2011) and a silent movie (Hasson et al., 2008), we investigate whether listeners perceive hierarchical structure in music beyond short (~6 s) time windows and whether there is cortical overlap between music and language processing at multiple timescales. Experienced pianists were presented with an extended musical excerpt scrambled at multiple timescales-by measure, phrase, and section-while measuring brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The reliability of evoked activity, as quantified by inter-subject correlation of the fMRI responses, was measured. We found that response reliability depended systematically on musical structure coherence, revealing a topographically organized hierarchy of processing timescales. Early auditory areas (at the bottom of the hierarchy) responded reliably in all conditions. For brain areas at the top of the hierarchy, the original (unscrambled) excerpt evoked more reliable responses than any of the scrambled excerpts, indicating that these brain areas process long-timescale musical structures, on the order of minutes. The topography of processing timescales was analogous with that reported previously for speech, but the timescale gradients for music and speech overlapped with one another only partially, suggesting that temporally analogous structures-words/measures, sentences/musical phrases, paragraph/sections-are processed separately.

Food Product Dating

MedlinePlus

... the product will be of best quality. For example, sausage formulated with certain ingredients used to preserve ... phrases used on labels to describe quality dates. Examples of commonly used phrases: A "Best if Used ...

Implicit Acquisition of Grammars with Crossed and Nested Non-Adjacent Dependencies: Investigating the Push-Down Stack Model

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Udden, Julia; Ingvar, Martin; Hagoort, Peter; Petersson, Karl M.

2012-01-01

A recent hypothesis in empirical brain research on language is that the fundamental difference between animal and human communication systems is captured by the distinction between finite-state and more complex phrase-structure grammars, such as context-free and context-sensitive grammars. However, the relevance of this distinction for the study…

The Morphosyntactic Structure of the Noun and Verb Phrases in Dholuo/Kiswahili Code Switching

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ojanga, Jael Anyango; Chai, Furaha; Mutiti, James

2015-01-01

Code switching, the use of any two or more languages or dialects interchangeably in a single communication context, is a common linguistic practice owing to the trend of multilingualism in the world today. In many situations of language in contact, constituents of one language can be found within the constituents of another language in a number of…

The Phonology of Capanahua and Its Grammatical Basis. Summer Institute of Linguistics Publications in Linguistics and Related Fields.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Loos, Eugene Emil

This generative-transformational model of Capanahua phonology aims (1) to make available to linguistic science data analyzed from the point of view of an explanatory, unified theory of language; and (2) to test some conclusions suggested by those data, with respect to language universals. Chapters treat phrase structure rules, transformational…

Generic Language Use Reveals Domain Differences in Young Children's Expectations about Animal and Artifact Categories

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Brandone, Amanda C.; Gelman, Susan A.

2013-01-01

The goal of the present study was to explore domain differences in young children's expectations about the structure of animal and artifact categories. We examined 5-year-olds' and adults' use of category-referring generic noun phrases (e.g., "Birds fly") about novel animals and artifacts. The same stimuli served as both animals and artifacts;…

The Use of Articles in Indian English: Errors and Pedagogical Implications.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Agnihotri, R. K.; And Others

1984-01-01

Studies patterns of frequent mistakes in the use of articles in English by speakers of Hindi/Punjabi. The control over the definite and indefinite article is examined in relation to their forms and functions. The use of articles is also considered in complex noun phrases and different syntactic structures, and an attempt is made to establish a…

Perception of hierarchical boundaries in music and its modulation by expertise.

PubMed

Zhang, Jingjing; Jiang, Cunmei; Zhou, Linshu; Yang, Yufang

2016-10-01

Hierarchical structure with units of different timescales is a key feature of music. For the perception of such structures, the detection of each boundary is crucial. Here, using electroencephalography (EEG), we explore the perception of hierarchical boundaries in music, and test whether musical expertise modifies such processing. Musicians and non-musicians were presented with musical excerpts containing boundaries at three hierarchical levels, including section, phrase and period boundaries. Non-boundary was chosen as a baseline condition. Recordings from musicians showed CPS (closure positive shift) was evoked at all the three boundaries, and their amplitude increased as the hierarchical level became higher, which suggest that musicians could represent music events at different timescales in a hierarchical way. For non-musicians, the CPS was only elicited at the period boundary and undistinguishable negativities were induced at all the three boundaries. The results indicate that a different and less clear way was used by non-musicians in boundary perception. Our findings reveal, for the first time, an ERP correlate of perceiving hierarchical boundaries in music, and show that the phrasing ability could be enhanced by musical expertise. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

MCORES: a system for noun phrase coreference resolution for clinical records.

PubMed

Bodnari, Andreea; Szolovits, Peter; Uzuner, Özlem

2012-01-01

Narratives of electronic medical records contain information that can be useful for clinical practice and multi-purpose research. This information needs to be put into a structured form before it can be used by automated systems. Coreference resolution is a step in the transformation of narratives into a structured form. This study presents a medical coreference resolution system (MCORES) for noun phrases in four frequently used clinical semantic categories: persons, problems, treatments, and tests. MCORES treats coreference resolution as a binary classification task. Given a pair of concepts from a semantic category, it determines coreferent pairs and clusters them into chains. MCORES uses an enhanced set of lexical, syntactic, and semantic features. Some MCORES features measure the distance between various representations of the concepts in a pair and can be asymmetric. MCORES was compared with an in-house baseline that uses only single-perspective 'token overlap' and 'number agreement' features. MCORES was shown to outperform the baseline; its enhanced features contribute significantly to performance. In addition to the baseline, MCORES was compared against two available third-party, open-domain systems, RECONCILE(ACL09) and the Beautiful Anaphora Resolution Toolkit (BART). MCORES was shown to outperform both of these systems on clinical records.

The NASTRAN user's manual

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

1983-01-01

All information directly associated with problem solving using the NASTRAN program is presented. This structural analysis program uses the finite element approach to structural modeling wherein the distributed finite properties of a structure are represented by a finite element of structural elements which are interconnected at a finite number of grid points, to which loads are applied and for which displacements are calculated. Procedures are described for defining and loading a structural model. Functional references for every card used for structural modeling, the NASTRAN data deck and control cards, problem solution sequences (rigid formats), using the plotting capability, writing a direct matrix abstraction program, and diagnostic messages are explained. A dictionary of mnemonics, acronyms, phrases, and other commonly used NASTRAN terms is included.

External morphology and calling song characteristics in Tibicen plebejus (Hemiptera: Cicadidae).

PubMed

Mehdipour, Maedeh; Sendi, Jalal Jalali; Zamanian, Hossein

2015-02-01

Tibicen plebejus is the largest cicada native to the ecosystem in northern Iran. The male cicada produces a loud calling song for attracting females from a long distance. It is presumed that the female selects a mate based on a combination of passive and active mechanisms, but it is not known if she selects for size, nor if the male's size correlates with any characteristic of the advertisement call. In this study, we report the relationship between calling song features and morphological characters in the male of T. plebejus. Research was conducted in northern Iran during the summer of 2010. Seventeen males were collected and their calling songs were recorded in a natural environment. Two morphological characters were measured: length and weight. Maximum, minimum and average of values of 10 key acoustic variables of the calling song were analyzed: phrase duration, phrase part 1, phrase part 2, number of phrases per minute, echeme duration, echeme period, interecheme interval, number of echeme per second, echeme/intereheme ratio, and dominant frequency. The data were tested for the level of association between morphology and acoustic variables using simple linear regression. In conclusion, in terms of song structure, three significant positive correlations existed between length and (1) mean echeme duration, (2) mean echeme/interecheme ratio, (3) maximum echeme/interecheme ratio. We found out also four significant negative correlations between both length and weight with (1) minimum interecheme intervals, (2) mean dominant frequency, (3) minimum dominant frequency, (4) maximum dominant frequency, and between weight and (1) minimum interecheme intervals, (2) mean dominant frequency, (3) minimum dominant frequency, (4) maximum dominant frequency. It can be found that larger males of T. plebejus produce songs of lower frequency and are less silent between echemes. Copyright © 2014 Académie des sciences. Published by Elsevier SAS. All rights reserved.

A Minimalist Analysis of English Topicalization: A Phase-Based Cartographic Complementizer Phrase (CP) Perspective.

PubMed

Tanaka, Hiroyoshi

Under the basic tenet that syntactic derivation offers an optimal solution to both phonological realization and semantic interpretation of linguistic expression, the recent minimalist framework of syntactic theory claims that the basic unit for the derivation is equivalent to a syntactic propositional element, which is called a phase. In this analysis, syntactic derivation is assumed to proceed at phasal projections that include Complementizer Phrases (CP). However, there have been pointed out some empirical problems with respect to the failure of multiple occurrences of discourse-related elements in the CP domain. This problem can be easily overcome if the alternative approach in the recent minimalist perspective, which is called Cartographic CP analysis, is adopted, but this may raise a theoretical issue about the tension between phasality and four kinds of functional projections assumed in this analysis (Force Phrase (ForceP), Finite Phrase (FinP), Topic Phrase (TopP) and Focus Phrase (FocP)). This paper argues that a hybrid analysis with these two influential approaches can be proposed by claiming a reasonable assumption that syntactically requisite projections (i.e., ForceP and FinP) are phases and independently constitute a phasehood with relevant heads in the derivation. This then enables us to capture various syntactic properties of the Topicalization construction in English. Our proposed analysis, coupled with some additional assumptions and observations in recent minimalist studies, can be extended to incorporate peculiar properties in temporal/conditional adverbials and imperatives.

Online discourse on fibromyalgia: text-mining to identify clinical distinction and patient concerns.

PubMed

Park, Jungsik; Ryu, Young Uk

2014-10-07

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the possibility of using text-mining to identify clinical distinctions and patient concerns in online memoires posted by patients with fibromyalgia (FM). A total of 399 memoirs were collected from an FM group website. The unstructured data of memoirs associated with FM were collected through a crawling process and converted into structured data with a concordance, parts of speech tagging, and word frequency. We also conducted a lexical analysis and phrase pattern identification. After examining the data, a set of FM-related keywords were obtained and phrase net relationships were set through a web-based visualization tool. The clinical distinction of FM was verified. Pain is the biggest issue to the FM patients. The pains were affecting body parts including 'muscles,' 'leg,' 'neck,' 'back,' 'joints,' and 'shoulders' with accompanying symptoms such as 'spasms,' 'stiffness,' and 'aching,' and were described as 'sever,' 'chronic,' and 'constant.' This study also demonstrated that it was possible to understand the interests and concerns of FM patients through text-mining. FM patients wanted to escape from the pain and symptoms, so they were interested in medical treatment and help. Also, they seemed to have interest in their work and occupation, and hope to continue to live life through the relationships with the people around them. This research shows the potential for extracting keywords to confirm the clinical distinction of a certain disease, and text-mining can help objectively understand the concerns of patients by generalizing their large number of subjective illness experiences. However, it is believed that there are limitations to the processes and methods for organizing and classifying large amounts of text, so these limits have to be considered when analyzing the results. The development of research methodology to overcome these limitations is greatly needed.

Temporal Codes for Memories: Issues and Problems.

DTIC Science & Technology

1977-04-01

for specific dates they were quite unable to reconstruct the dates. It has been reported (Gibson & Levin, 197S) that children afflicted with dyslexia ...used. Two answers predominated. First, a verbal label was used for the first item, and a "last" label was used by some subjects for the last item...this being assigned when the list terminated. Some subjects indicated that more general labels were used for several items, such phrases as the

Sleep-Based Memory Processing Facilitates Grammatical Generalization: Evidence from Targeted Memory Reactivation

PubMed Central

Batterink, Laura J.; Paller, Ken A.

2015-01-01

Generalization — the ability to abstract regularities from specific examples and apply them to novel instances — is an essential component of language acquisition. Generalization not only depends on exposure to input during wake, but may also improve offline during sleep. Here we examined whether targeted memory reactivation during sleep can influence grammatical generalization. Participants gradually acquired the grammatical rules of an artificial language through an interactive learning procedure. Then, phrases from the language (experimental group) or stimuli from an unrelated task (control group) were covertly presented during an afternoon nap. Compared to control participants, participants re-exposed to the language during sleep showed larger gains in grammatical generalization. Sleep cues produced a bias, not necessarily a pure gain, suggesting that the capacity for memory replay during sleep is limited. We conclude that grammatical generalization was biased by auditory cueing during sleep, and by extension, that sleep likely influences grammatical generalization in general. PMID:26443322

The motor origins of human and avian song structure

PubMed Central

Tierney, Adam T.; Russo, Frank A.; Patel, Aniruddh D.

2011-01-01

Human song exhibits great structural diversity, yet certain aspects of melodic shape (how pitch is patterned over time) are widespread. These include a predominance of arch-shaped and descending melodic contours in musical phrases, a tendency for phrase-final notes to be relatively long, and a bias toward small pitch movements between adjacent notes in a melody [Huron D (2006) Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA)]. What is the origin of these features? We hypothesize that they stem from motor constraints on song production (i.e., the energetic efficiency of their underlying motor actions) rather than being innately specified. One prediction of this hypothesis is that any animals subject to similar motor constraints on song will exhibit similar melodic shapes, no matter how distantly related those animals are to humans. Conversely, animals who do not share similar motor constraints on song will not exhibit convergent melodic shapes. Birds provide an ideal case for testing these predictions, because their peripheral mechanisms of song production have both notable similarities and differences from human vocal mechanisms [Riede T, Goller F (2010) Brain Lang 115:69–80]. We use these similarities and differences to make specific predictions about shared and distinct features of human and avian song structure and find that these predictions are confirmed by empirical analysis of diverse human and avian song samples. PMID:21876156

Hierarchical temporal structure in music, speech and animal vocalizations: jazz is like a conversation, humpbacks sing like hermit thrushes.

PubMed

Kello, Christopher T; Bella, Simone Dalla; Médé, Butovens; Balasubramaniam, Ramesh

2017-10-01

Humans talk, sing and play music. Some species of birds and whales sing long and complex songs. All these behaviours and sounds exhibit hierarchical structure-syllables and notes are positioned within words and musical phrases, words and motives in sentences and musical phrases, and so on. We developed a new method to measure and compare hierarchical temporal structures in speech, song and music. The method identifies temporal events as peaks in the sound amplitude envelope, and quantifies event clustering across a range of timescales using Allan factor (AF) variance. AF variances were analysed and compared for over 200 different recordings from more than 16 different categories of signals, including recordings of speech in different contexts and languages, musical compositions and performances from different genres. Non-human vocalizations from two bird species and two types of marine mammals were also analysed for comparison. The resulting patterns of AF variance across timescales were distinct to each of four natural categories of complex sound: speech, popular music, classical music and complex animal vocalizations. Comparisons within and across categories indicated that nested clustering in longer timescales was more prominent when prosodic variation was greater, and when sounds came from interactions among individuals, including interactions between speakers, musicians, and even killer whales. Nested clustering also was more prominent for music compared with speech, and reflected beat structure for popular music and self-similarity across timescales for classical music. In summary, hierarchical temporal structures reflect the behavioural and social processes underlying complex vocalizations and musical performances. © 2017 The Author(s).

The neural processing of hierarchical structure in music and speech at different timescales

PubMed Central

Farbood, Morwaread M.; Heeger, David J.; Marcus, Gary; Hasson, Uri; Lerner, Yulia

2015-01-01

Music, like speech, is a complex auditory signal that contains structures at multiple timescales, and as such is a potentially powerful entry point into the question of how the brain integrates complex streams of information. Using an experimental design modeled after previous studies that used scrambled versions of a spoken story (Lerner et al., 2011) and a silent movie (Hasson et al., 2008), we investigate whether listeners perceive hierarchical structure in music beyond short (~6 s) time windows and whether there is cortical overlap between music and language processing at multiple timescales. Experienced pianists were presented with an extended musical excerpt scrambled at multiple timescales—by measure, phrase, and section—while measuring brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The reliability of evoked activity, as quantified by inter-subject correlation of the fMRI responses, was measured. We found that response reliability depended systematically on musical structure coherence, revealing a topographically organized hierarchy of processing timescales. Early auditory areas (at the bottom of the hierarchy) responded reliably in all conditions. For brain areas at the top of the hierarchy, the original (unscrambled) excerpt evoked more reliable responses than any of the scrambled excerpts, indicating that these brain areas process long-timescale musical structures, on the order of minutes. The topography of processing timescales was analogous with that reported previously for speech, but the timescale gradients for music and speech overlapped with one another only partially, suggesting that temporally analogous structures—words/measures, sentences/musical phrases, paragraph/sections—are processed separately. PMID:26029037

PSEMA: An Algorithm for Pattern Stimulated Evolution of Music

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Mavrogianni, A. N.; Vlachos, D. S.; Harvalias, G.

2008-11-01

An algorithm for pattern stimulating evolution of music is presented in this work (PSEMA). The system combines a pattern with a genetic algorithm for automatic music composition in order to create a musical phrase uniquely characterizing the pattern. As an example a musical portrait is presented. The initialization of the musical phrases is done with a Markov Chain process. The evolution is dominated by an arbitrary correspondence between the pattern (feature extraction of the pattern may be used in this step) and the esthetic result of the musical phrase.

Ground Controlled Approach Controller Training System (GCA-CTS) System Documentation.

DTIC Science & Technology

1980-06-01

064010 OVER 72 Al NAVTRAEQUIPCEN 77-C-0162-3 TABLE 8. GCA-CTS PHRASES (CONT) Number Phrase of Identi- Number Repeats fier Phrase 90) 4 170040 THIS WILL...radians/second)( Becomes 0.0 degrees/second. 121 F-. 0 .,- NAVTRAEQUIPCE.: 77-C-nfi2-3 ?.1-t Ac7uires Vi5: al Contac- "’ith Runwav. If the current...variables: ITMP : temporary for source of speech output Files created/changed: None Files referenced: None Notes: None 388 I I4; r I’, Al ൐a7 190

Two-year-olds use the generic/non-generic distinction to guide their inferences about novel kinds

PubMed Central

Graham, Susan A.; Nayer, Samantha L.; Gelman, Susan A.

2011-01-01

These studies investigated 24- and 30-month-olds’ sensitivity to generic versus nongeneric language when acquiring knowledge about novel kinds. Toddlers were administered an inductive inference task, during which they heard a generic noun-phrase (e.g., “Blicks drink milk”) or a non-generic noun-phrase (e.g., “This blick drinks milk”) paired with an action (e.g., drinking) modeled on an object. They were then provided with the model and a non-model exemplar and asked to imitate the action. After hearing non-generic phrases, 30-month-olds, but not 24-month-olds, imitated more often with the model than with the non-model exemplar. In contrast, after hearing generic phrases, 30-month-olds imitated equally often with both exemplars. These results suggest that 30-month-olds use the generic/non-generic distinction to guide their inferences about novel kinds. PMID:21410928

A Battle of Words: "Dignity" and "Peace" in the Writings of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.

PubMed

Burnier, Daniel

2017-04-01

This article analyzes the writings of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross through the discursive lens of the phrase "dying with dignity." For her, the phrase meant allowing someone to die comfortably his/her own death. This phrase has to be understood in relationship with the final "stage of acceptance" of her model. Describing this key part of her well-known scientific output, she often used, in the early 1970s, the phrase "dying in peace and dignity." An evaluation of the evidence suggests that because the concept of dignity was co-opted by the pro-euthanasia movement during this decade, the language of dignity was little by little abandoned by her. In later years, only "peace" survived from her favorite expression. Although this concept of peace remains present to the end in all Kübler-Ross writings, the pro-euthanasia movement has also started to speak the language of peace.

Phrase frequency effects in language production.

PubMed

Janssen, Niels; Barber, Horacio A

2012-01-01

A classic debate in the psychology of language concerns the question of the grain-size of the linguistic information that is stored in memory. One view is that only morphologically simple forms are stored (e.g., 'car', 'red'), and that more complex forms of language such as multi-word phrases (e.g., 'red car') are generated on-line from the simple forms. In two experiments we tested this view. In Experiment 1, participants produced noun+adjective and noun+noun phrases that were elicited by experimental displays consisting of colored line drawings and two superimposed line drawings. In Experiment 2, participants produced noun+adjective and determiner+noun+adjective utterances elicited by colored line drawings. In both experiments, naming latencies decreased with increasing frequency of the multi-word phrase, and were unaffected by the frequency of the object name in the utterance. These results suggest that the language system is sensitive to the distribution of linguistic information at grain-sizes beyond individual words.

Information Extraction from Unstructured Text for the Biodefense Knowledge Center

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Samatova, N F; Park, B; Krishnamurthy, R

2005-04-29

The Bio-Encyclopedia at the Biodefense Knowledge Center (BKC) is being constructed to allow an early detection of emerging biological threats to homeland security. It requires highly structured information extracted from variety of data sources. However, the quantity of new and vital information available from every day sources cannot be assimilated by hand, and therefore reliable high-throughput information extraction techniques are much anticipated. In support of the BKC, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, together with the University of Utah, are developing an information extraction system built around the bioterrorism domain. This paper reports two important pieces ofmore » our effort integrated in the system: key phrase extraction and semantic tagging. Whereas two key phrase extraction technologies developed during the course of project help identify relevant texts, our state-of-the-art semantic tagging system can pinpoint phrases related to emerging biological threats. Also we are enhancing and tailoring the Bio-Encyclopedia by augmenting semantic dictionaries and extracting details of important events, such as suspected disease outbreaks. Some of these technologies have already been applied to large corpora of free text sources vital to the BKC mission, including ProMED-mail, PubMed abstracts, and the DHS's Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection (IAIP) news clippings. In order to address the challenges involved in incorporating such large amounts of unstructured text, the overall system is focused on precise extraction of the most relevant information for inclusion in the BKC.« less

The Processing and Interpretation of Verb Phrase Ellipsis Constructions by Children at Normal and Slowed Speech Rates

PubMed Central

Callahan, Sarah M.; Walenski, Matthew; Love, Tracy

2013-01-01

Purpose To examine children’s comprehension of verb phrase (VP) ellipsis constructions in light of their automatic, online structural processing abilities and conscious, metalinguistic reflective skill. Method Forty-two children ages 5 through 12 years listened to VP ellipsis constructions involving the strict/sloppy ambiguity (e.g., “The janitor untangled himself from the rope and the fireman in the elementary school did too after the accident.”) in which the ellipsis phrase (“did too”) had 2 interpretations: (a) strict (“untangled the janitor”) and (b) sloppy (“untangled the fireman”). We examined these sentences at a normal speech rate with an online cross-modal picture priming task (n = 14) and an offline sentence–picture matching task (n = 11). Both tasks were also given with slowed speech input (n = 17). Results Children showed priming for both the strict and sloppy interpretations at a normal speech rate but only for the strict interpretation with slowed input. Offline, children displayed an adultlike preference for the sloppy interpretation with normal-rate input but a divergent pattern with slowed speech. Conclusions Our results suggest that children and adults rely on a hybrid syntax-discourse model for the online comprehension and offline interpretation of VP ellipsis constructions. This model incorporates a temporally sensitive syntactic process of VP reconstruction (disrupted with slow input) and a temporally protracted discourse effect attributed to parallelism (preserved with slow input). PMID:22223886

Phrase boundary effects on the temporal kinematics of sequential tongue tip consonants1

PubMed Central

Byrd, Dani; Lee, Sungbok; Campos-Astorkiza, Rebeka

2008-01-01

This study evaluates the effects of phrase boundaries on the intra- and intergestural kinematic characteristics of blended gestures, i.e., overlapping gestures produced with a single articulator. The sequences examined are the juncture geminate [d(#)d], the sequence [d(#)z], and, for comparison, the singleton tongue tip gesture in [d(#)b]. This allows the investigation of the process of gestural aggregation [Munhall, K. G., and Löfqvist, A. (1992). “Gestural aggregation in speech: laryngeal gestures,” J. Phonetics 20, 93–110] and the manner in which it is affected by prosodic structure. Juncture geminates are predicted to be affected by prosodic boundaries in the same way as other gestures; that is, they should display prosodic lengthening and lesser overlap across a boundary. Articulatory prosodic lengthening is also investigated using a signal alignment method of the functional data analysis framework [Ramsay, J. O., and Silverman, B. W. (2005). Functional Data Analysis, 2nd ed. (Springer-Verlag, New York)]. This provides the ability to examine a time warping function that characterizes relative timing difference (i.e., lagging or advancing) of a test signal with respect to a given reference, thus offering a way of illuminating local nonlinear deformations at work in prosodic lengthening. These findings are discussed in light of the π-gesture framework of Byrd and Saltzman [(2003) “The elastic phrase: Modeling the dynamics of boundary-adjacent lengthening,” J. Phonetics 31, 149–180]. PMID:18537396

Margins of safety provided by COSHH Essentials and the ILO Chemical Control Toolkit.

PubMed

Jones, Rachael M; Nicas, Mark

2006-03-01

COSHH Essentials, developed by the UK Health and Safety Executive, and the Chemical Control Toolkit (Toolkit) proposed by the International Labor Organization, are 'control banding' approaches to workplace risk management intended for use by proprietors of small and medium-sized businesses. Both systems group chemical substances into hazard bands based on toxicological endpoint and potency. COSSH Essentials uses the European Union's Risk-phrases (R-phrases), whereas the Toolkit uses R-phrases and the Globally Harmonized System (GHS) of Classification and Labeling of Chemicals. Each hazard band is associated with a range of airborne concentrations, termed exposure bands, which are to be attained by the implementation of recommended control technologies. Here we analyze the margin of safety afforded by the systems and, for each hazard band, define the minimal margin as the ratio of the minimum airborne concentration that produced the toxicological endpoint of interest in experimental animals to the maximum concentration in workplace air permitted by the exposure band. We found that the minimal margins were always <100, with some ranging to <1, and inversely related to molecular weight. The Toolkit-GHS system generally produced margins equal to or larger than COSHH Essentials, suggesting that the Toolkit-GHS system is more protective of worker health. Although, these systems predict exposures comparable with current occupational exposure limits, we argue that the minimal margins are better indicators of health protection. Further, given the small margins observed, we feel it is important that revisions of these systems provide the exposure bands to users, so as to permit evaluation of control technology capture efficiency.

Improving Patients’ Understanding of Terms and Phrases Commonly Used in Self-Reported Measures of Sexual Function

PubMed Central

Alexander, Angel M.; Flynn, Kathryn E.; Hahn, Elizabeth A.; Jeffery, Diana D.; Keefe, Francis J.; Reeve, Bryce B.; Schultz, Wesley; Reese, Jennifer Barsky; Shelby, Rebecca A.; Weinfurt, Kevin P.

2014-01-01

Introduction There is a significant gap in research regarding the readability and comprehension of existing sexual function measures. Patient-reported outcome measures may use terms not well understood by respondents with low literacy. Aim To test comprehension of words and phrases typically used in sexual function measures to improve validity for all individuals, including those with low literacy. Methods We recruited 20 men and 28 women for cognitive interviews on version 2.0 of the PROMIS Sexual Function and Satisfaction measures. We assessed participants’ reading level using the word reading subtest of the Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT). Sixteen participants were classified as having low literacy. Main Outcome Measures In the first round of cognitive interviews, each survey item was reviewed by 5 or more people, at least 2 of whom had lower than a ninth-grade reading level (low literacy). Patient feedback was incorporated into a revised version of the items. In the second round of interviews, an additional 3 or more people (at least 1 with low literacy) reviewed each revised item. Results Participants with low literacy had difficulty comprehending terms such as aroused, orgasm, erection, ejaculation, incontinence, and vaginal penetration. Women across a range of literacy levels had difficulty with clinical terms like labia and clitoris. We modified unclear terms to include parenthetical descriptors or slang equivalents, which generally improved comprehension. Conclusions Common words and phrases used across measures of self-reported sexual function are not universally understood. Researchers should appreciate these misunderstandings as a potential source of error in studies using self-reported measures of sexual function. PMID:24902984

Preservation of memory-based automaticity in reading for older adults.

PubMed

Rawson, Katherine A; Touron, Dayna R

2015-12-01

Concerning age-related effects on cognitive skill acquisition, the modal finding is that older adults do not benefit from practice to the same extent as younger adults in tasks that afford a shift from slower algorithmic processing to faster memory-based processing. In contrast, Rawson and Touron (2009) demonstrated a relatively rapid shift to memory-based processing in the context of a reading task. The current research extended beyond this initial study to provide more definitive evidence for relative preservation of memory-based automaticity in reading tasks for older adults. Younger and older adults read short stories containing unfamiliar noun phrases (e.g., skunk mud) followed by disambiguating information indicating the combination's meaning (either the normatively dominant meaning or an alternative subordinate meaning). Stories were repeated across practice blocks, and then the noun phrases were presented in novel sentence frames in a transfer task. Both age groups shifted from computation to retrieval after relatively few practice trials (as evidenced by convergence of reading times for dominant and subordinate items). Most important, both age groups showed strong evidence for memory-based processing of the noun phrases in the transfer task. In contrast, older adults showed minimal shifting to retrieval in an alphabet arithmetic task, indicating that the preservation of memory-based automaticity in reading was task-specific. Discussion focuses on important implications for theories of memory-based automaticity in general and for specific theoretical accounts of age effects on memory-based automaticity, as well as fruitful directions for future research. (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).

Aphorisms and Short Phrases as Pieces of Knowledge in the Pedagogical Framework of the Andalusian School of Public Health

PubMed Central

González-García, Lorena; Chemello, Clarice; García-Sánchez, Filomena; Serpa-Anaya, Delia C.; Gómez-González, Carmen; Soriano-Carrascosa, Leticia; Muñoz-de Rueda, Paloma; Moya-Molina, Miguel; Sánchez-García, Fernando; Ortega-Calvo, Manuel

2012-01-01

Background: Bearing in mind the philosophical pedagogical significance of short phrases for the training of researchers in the health care ambit, we hence have studied the aphorisms and striking phrases expressed during the epidemiology course at the Andalusian School of Public Health. Methods: Belonging to the qualitative type and applied through the establishment of a multidisciplinary focus group made up of ten post-graduated students, where one of them acted as a moderator. The collection of information lasted four months. Information was classified in two ways: Firstly, aphorisms and short phrases with a pedagogical impact; and secondly, data with statistical, epidemiological, epistemological, pragmatic, or heuristic component, and for scientific diffusion. It was decided to perform a triangulation that included a descriptive presentation and a basic categorical analysis. The two teachers with a highest interpretative load have been identified . Results: A total of 127 elements, regarded as of interest by the focus group, were collected. Forty-four of them (34.6%) were aphorisms, and 83 were short phrases with a pedagogical load (65.3%). Most of all them were classified as statistical elements (35.4%) followed by epistemological (21.3%) and epidemiological (15.7%) elements. There was no tendency towards aphorisms or short phrases (P > 0.05) among the teachers with more informative representation. Conclusion: There has been a tilt in the contents towards the statistical area to the detriment of the epidemiological one. Concept maps have visualized classifications. This sort of qualitative analysis helps the researcher review contents acquired during his/her training process. PMID:22448313

On directionality of phrase structure building.

PubMed

Chesi, Cristiano

2015-02-01

Minimalism in grammatical theorizing (Chomsky in The minimalist program. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1995) led to simpler linguistic devices and a better focalization of the core properties of the structure building engine: a lexicon and a free (recursive) phrase formation operation, dubbed Merge, are the basic components that serve in building syntactic structures. Here I suggest that by looking at the elementary restrictions that apply to Merge (i.e., selection and licensing of functional features), we could conclude that a re-orientation of the syntactic derivation (from bottom-up/right-left to top-down/left-right) is necessary to make the theory simpler, especially for long-distance (filler-gap) dependencies, and is also empirically more adequate. If the structure building operations would assemble lexical items in the order they are pronounced (Phillips in Order and structure. PhD thesis, MIT, 1996; Chesi in Phases and cartography in linguistic computation: Toward a cognitively motivated computational model of linguistic competence. PhD thesis, Università di Siena, 2004; Chesi in Competence and computation: Toward a processing friendly minimalist grammar. Unipress, Padova, 2012), on-line performance data could better fit the grammatical model, without resorting to external "performance factors." The phase-based, top-down (and, as a consequence, left-right) Minimalist Grammar here discussed goes in this direction, ultimately showing how strong Islands (Huang in Logical relations in Chinese and the theory of grammar. PhD thesis, MIT, 1982) and intervention effects (Gordon et al. in J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn 27:1411-1423, 2001, Gordon et al. in J Mem Lang 51:97-114, 2004) could be better explained in structural terms assuming this unconventional derivational direction.

Identifying Key Words in 9-1-1 Calls for Stroke: A Mixed Methods Approach.

PubMed

Richards, Christopher T; Wang, Baiyang; Markul, Eddie; Albarran, Frank; Rottman, Doreen; Aggarwal, Neelum T; Lindeman, Patricia; Stein-Spencer, Leslee; Weber, Joseph M; Pearlman, Kenneth S; Tataris, Katie L; Holl, Jane L; Klabjan, Diego; Prabhakaran, Shyam

2017-01-01

Identifying stroke during a 9-1-1 call is critical to timely prehospital care. However, emergency medical dispatchers (EMDs) recognize stroke in less than half of 9-1-1 calls, potentially due to the words used by callers to communicate stroke signs and symptoms. We hypothesized that callers do not typically use words and phrases considered to be classical descriptors of stroke, such as focal neurologic deficits, but that a mixed-methods approach can identify words and phrases commonly used by 9-1-1 callers to describe acute stroke victims. We performed a mixed-method, retrospective study of 9-1-1 call audio recordings for adult patients with confirmed stroke who were transported by ambulance in a large urban city. Content analysis, a qualitative methodology, and computational linguistics, a quantitative methodology, were used to identify key words and phrases used by 9-1-1 callers to describe acute stroke victims. Because a caller's level of emotional distress contributes to the communication during a 9-1-1 call, the Emotional Content and Cooperation Score was scored by a multidisciplinary team. A total of 110 9-1-1 calls, received between June and September 2013, were analyzed. EMDs recognized stroke in 48% of calls, and the emotional state of most callers (95%) was calm. In 77% of calls in which EMDs recognized stroke, callers specifically used the word "stroke"; however, the word "stroke" was used in only 38% of calls. Vague, non-specific words and phrases were used to describe stroke victims' symptoms in 55% of calls, and 45% of callers used distractor words and phrases suggestive of non-stroke emergencies. Focal neurologic symptoms were described in 39% of calls. Computational linguistics identified 9 key words that were more commonly used in calls where the EMD identified stroke. These words were concordant with terms identified through qualitative content analysis. Most 9-1-1 callers used vague, non-specific, or distractor words and phrases and infrequently provide classic stroke descriptions during 9-1-1 calls for stroke. Both qualitative and quantitative methodologies identified similar key words and phrases associated with accurate EMD stroke recognition. This study suggests that tools incorporating commonly used words and phrases could potentially improve EMD stroke recognition.

Event-related brain potentials index cue-based retrieval interference during sentence comprehension.

PubMed

Martin, Andrea E; Nieuwland, Mante S; Carreiras, Manuel

2012-01-16

Successful language use requires access to products of past processing within an evolving discourse. A central issue for any neurocognitive theory of language then concerns the role of memory variables during language processing. Under a cue-based retrieval account of language comprehension, linguistic dependency resolution (e.g., retrieving antecedents) is subject to interference from other information in the sentence, especially information that occurs between the words that form the dependency (e.g., between the antecedent and the retrieval site). Retrieval interference may then shape processing complexity as a function of the match of the information at retrieval with the antecedent versus other recent or similar items in memory. To address these issues, we studied the online processing of ellipsis in Castilian Spanish, a language with morphological gender agreement. We recorded event-related brain potentials while participants read sentences containing noun-phrase ellipsis indicated by the determiner otro/a ('another'). These determiners had a grammatically correct or incorrect gender with respect to their antecedent nouns that occurred earlier in the sentence. Moreover, between each antecedent and determiner, another noun phrase occurred that was structurally unavailable as an antecedent and that matched or mismatched the gender of the antecedent (i.e., a local agreement attractor). In contrast to extant P600 results on agreement violation processing, and inconsistent with predictions from neurocognitive models of sentence processing, grammatically incorrect determiners evoked a sustained, broadly distributed negativity compared to correct ones between 400 and 1000ms after word onset, possibly related to sustained negativities as observed for referential processing difficulties. Crucially, this effect was modulated by the attractor: an increased negativity was observed for grammatically correct determiners that did not match the gender of the attractor, suggesting that structurally unavailable noun phrases were at least temporarily considered for grammatically correct ellipsis. These results constitute the first ERP evidence for cue-based retrieval interference during comprehension of grammatical sentences. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Divided listening in noise in a mock-up of a military command post.

PubMed

Abel, Sharon M; Nakashima, Ann; Smith, Ingrid

2012-04-01

This study investigated divided listening in noise in a mock-up of a vehicular command post. The effects of background noise from the vehicle, unattended speech of coworkers on speech understanding, and a visual cue that directed attention to the message source were examined. Sixteen normal-hearing males participated in sixteen listening conditions, defined by combinations of the absence/presence of vehicle and speech babble noises, availability of a vision cue, and number of channels (2 or 3, diotic or dichotic, and loudspeakers) over which concurrent series of call sign, color, and number phrases were presented. All wore a communications headset with integrated hearing protection. A computer keyboard was used to encode phrases beginning with an assigned call sign. Subjects achieved close to 100% correct phrase identification when presented over the headset (with or without vehicle noise) or over the loudspeakers, without vehicle noise. In contrast, the percentage correct phrase identification was significantly less by 30 to 35% when presented over loudspeakers with vehicle noise. Vehicle noise combined with babble noise decreased the accuracy by an additional 12% for dichotic listening. Vision cues increased phrase identification accuracy by 7% for diotic listening. Outcomes could be explained by the at-ear energy spectra of the speech and noise.

Language for Winning Hearts and Minds: Verb Aspect in U.S. Presidential Campaign Speeches for Engaging Emotion.

PubMed

Havas, David A; Chapp, Christopher B

2016-01-01

How does language influence the emotions and actions of large audiences? Functionally, emotions help address environmental uncertainty by constraining the body to support adaptive responses and social coordination. We propose emotions provide a similar function in language processing by constraining the mental simulation of language content to facilitate comprehension, and to foster alignment of mental states in message recipients. Consequently, we predicted that emotion-inducing language should be found in speeches specifically designed to create audience alignment - stump speeches of United States presidential candidates. We focused on phrases in the past imperfective verb aspect ("a bad economy was burdening us") that leave a mental simulation of the language content open-ended, and thus unconstrained, relative to past perfective sentences ("we were burdened by a bad economy"). As predicted, imperfective phrases appeared more frequently in stump versus comparison speeches, relative to perfective phrases. In a subsequent experiment, participants rated phrases from presidential speeches as more emotionally intense when written in the imperfective aspect compared to the same phrases written in the perfective aspect, particularly for sentences perceived as negative in valence. These findings are consistent with the notion that emotions have a role in constraining the comprehension of language, a role that may be used in communication with large audiences.

The early use of break-bone fever (Quebranta huesos, 1771) and dengue (1801) in Spanish.

PubMed

Rigau-Pérez, J G

1998-08-01

The appellation of break-bone fever for dengue is attributed to the popular name given to the disease in the first described epidemic of an illness that is clinically compatible with dengue in Philadelphia in 1780. The origin of the word dengue as the name of an illness is currently attributed to the Swahili phrase Ka dinga pepo, thought to have crossed from Africa to the Caribbean in 1827; in Cuba this phrase was popularly identified with the Spanish word dengue. This article presents documents from Spanish archives that indicate the use of quebranta huesos (break-bone) by a physician in Puerto Rico to describe a febrile illness in 1771, and the use of the term dengue by the Queen of Spain in 1801 to describe an acute febrile illness with bone and joint pains, hemorrhage, and jaundice. These texts are evidence of a more generalized use of the term break-bone than previously recognized, and conversely, the specifically Spanish origin of dengue as the name for an illness.

Order of the major constituents in sign languages: implications for all language

PubMed Central

Napoli, Donna Jo; Sutton-Spence, Rachel

2014-01-01

A survey of reports of sign order from 42 sign languages leads to a handful of generalizations. Two accounts emerge, one amodal and the other modal. We argue that universal pressures are at work with respect to some generalizations, but that pressure from the visual modality is at work with respect to others. Together, these pressures conspire to make all sign languages order their major constituents SOV or SVO. This study leads us to the conclusion that the order of S with regard to verb phrase (VP) may be driven by sensorimotor system concerns that feed universal grammar. PMID:24860523

Information content in Medline record fields.

PubMed

Kostoff, Ronald N; Block, Joel A; Stump, Jesse A; Pfeil, Kirstin M

2004-06-30

The authors have been conducting text mining analyses (extraction of useful information from text) of Medline records, using Abstracts as the main data source. For literature-based discovery, and other text mining applications as well, all records in a discipline need to be evaluated for determining prior art. Many Medline records do not contain Abstracts, but typically contain Titles and Mesh terms. Substitution of these fields for Abstracts in the non-Abstract records would restore the missing literature to some degree. Determine how well the information content of Title and Mesh fields approximates that of Abstracts in Medline records. Select historical Medline records related to Raynaud's Phenomenon that contain Abstracts. Determine the information content in the Abstract fields through text mining. Then, determine the information content in the Title fields, the Mesh fields, and the combined Title-Mesh fields, and compare with the information content in the Abstracts. Four metrics were used to compare the information content related to Raynaud's Phenomenon in the different fields: total number of phrases; number of unique phrases; content of factors from factor analyses; content of clusters from multi-link clustering. The Abstract field contains almost an order of magnitude more phrases than the other fields, and slightly more than an order of magnitude more unique phrases than the other fields. Each field used a factor matrix with 14 factors, and the combination of all 56 factors for the four fields represented 27 separate, but not unique, themes. These themes could be placed in two major categories, with two sub-categories per major category: Auto-immunity (antibodies, inflammation) and circulation (peripheral vessel circulation, coronary vessel circulation). All four sub-categories included representation from each field. Thus, while the focus of the representation of each field in each sub-category was moderately different, the four sub-category structure could be identified by analyzing the total factors in each field. In the cluster comparison phase of the study, the phrases used to create the clusters were the most important phrases identified for each factor. Thus, the factor matrix served as a filter for words used for clustering. While clusters were generated for all four fields, the Title hierarchy tended to be fragmented due to sparsity of the co-occurrence matrix that underlies the clusters. Therefore, the Title clusters were examined at only the lower levels of aggregation. The Abstract, Mesh, and Mesh + Title fields had the same first level taxonomy categories, auto-immunity and circulation. At the second level, the Abstract, Mesh, and Mesh + Title fields had the autoimmune diseases and antibodies sub-category in common. The Abstract and Mesh fields shared fascia inflammation as the other auto-immunity sub-category, while the other Mesh + Title sub-category focuses on vinyl chloride poisoning from industrial contact, and consequences of antineoplastic agents. However, in both cases, even though the words may be different, inflammation may be the common theme. For taxonomy generation, especially at the higher levels, each of the four fields has a similar thematic structure. At very detailed levels, the Mesh and Title fields run out of phrases relative to the Abstract field. Therefore, selection of field (s) to be employed for taxonomy generation depends on the objectives of the study, particularly the level of categorization required for the taxonomy. For information retrieval, or literature-based discovery, selection of the appropriate field again depends on the study objectives. If large queries, or large numbers of concepts or themes are desired, then the field with the largest number of technical phrases would be desirable. If queries or concepts represented by the more accepted popular terminology is adequate, then the smaller fields may be sufficient. Because of its established and controlled vocabulary, the Mesh field lags the Title or Abss the Title or Abstract fields in currency. Thus, the Title or Abstract fields would retrieve records with the most explicitly stated current concepts, but the Mesh field would capture a larger swath of fields that contained a concept of interest but perhaps had a wider range of specific terminology in the Abstract or Title text. In addition, this study provides the first validated estimate of the disparity in information retrieved through text mining limited to Titles and Mesh terms relative to entire Abstracts. As much of the older biomedical literature was entered into electronic databases without associated Abstracts, literature-based discovery exercises that search the older medical literature may miss a substantial proportion of relevant information. On the basis of this study, it may be estimated that up to a log order more information may be retrieved when complete Abstracts are searched.

Individual differences in adult foreign language learning: the mediating effect of metalinguistic awareness.

PubMed

Brooks, Patricia J; Kempe, Vera

2013-02-01

In this study, we sought to identify cognitive predictors of individual differences in adult foreign-language learning and to test whether metalinguistic awareness mediated the observed relationships. Using a miniature language-learning paradigm, adults (N = 77) learned Russian vocabulary and grammar (gender agreement and case marking) over six 1-h sessions, completing tasks that encouraged attention to phrases without explicitly teaching grammatical rules. The participants' ability to describe the Russian gender and case-marking patterns mediated the effects of nonverbal intelligence and auditory sequence learning on grammar learning and generalization. Hence, even under implicit-learning conditions, individual differences stemmed from explicit metalinguistic awareness of the underlying grammar, which, in turn, was linked to nonverbal intelligence and auditory sequence learning. Prior knowledge of languages with grammatical gender (predominantly Spanish) predicted learning of gender agreement. Transfer of knowledge of gender from other languages to Russian was not mediated by awareness, which suggests that transfer operates through an implicit process akin to structural priming.

40 CFR 63.1434 - Equipment leak provisions.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-07-01

... provisions of subparts F, I, or PPP of this part” shall apply instead of the phrase “the provisions of..., and PPP” shall apply instead of the phrase “subparts F and I” in § 63.174(c)(2)(iii), for the purposes...

40 CFR 63.1434 - Equipment leak provisions.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-07-01

... subparts F, I, or PPP of this part” shall apply instead of the phrase “the provisions of subparts F or I of....163 and 63.168, for the purposes of this subpart. In addition, the phrase “subparts F, I, and PPP...

40 CFR 63.1434 - Equipment leak provisions.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-07-01

... subparts F, I, or PPP of this part” shall apply instead of the phrase “the provisions of subparts F or I of....163 and 63.168, for the purposes of this subpart. In addition, the phrase “subparts F, I, and PPP...

40 CFR 63.1434 - Equipment leak provisions.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-07-01

... subparts F, I, or PPP of this part” shall apply instead of the phrase “the provisions of subparts F or I of....163 and 63.168, for the purposes of this subpart. In addition, the phrase “subparts F, I, and PPP...

On the Application of Syntactic Methodologies in Automatic Text Analysis.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Salton, Gerard; And Others

1990-01-01

Summarizes various linguistic approaches proposed for document analysis in information retrieval environments. Topics discussed include syntactic analysis; use of machine-readable dictionary information; knowledge base construction; the PLNLP English Grammar (PEG) system; phrase normalization; and statistical and syntactic phrase evaluation used…

morphogen: Translation into Morphologically Rich Languages with Synthetic Phrases

DTIC Science & Technology

2013-10-01

specific trans - lation phrases. These “synthetic phrases” augment the standard translation grammars and decoding proceeds normally with a standard...Genitive case grandparent(poss) Hebrew Suffix ים ( masculine plural) parent=NNS after=NNS Prefix א (first person sing. + future) child(nsubj)=I child(aux

A W-Grammar Description for ADA.

DTIC Science & Technology

1986-12-01

7 2. A Type 2 Grammar for Ada Identifiers . . . . . . .... 8 3. The Chomsky erarchy......... ...... 10 4. Some Hypernotions Used in...Ada Language Reference Manual. The Chomsky Hierarchy (4:9-20, 7:217-232). In the 1950s, Noam Chomsky defined five classes of phrase structure grammars ...describing valid language tokens. For example a Type 3 grammar for Ada identifiers is shown in Figure 1. Type 2 Chomsky Languages are the Context-free

Determiners, Entities, and Contexts

DTIC Science & Technology

1986-10-01

understanding of this noun phrase must capture this relationship. The new noun phrase is imp] ielt [¥ associated with the local/oeus as described in...New York, August 1986. ~rince1981] Ellen F. Prince, Toward a Taxonomy of Given-New Information. In Radical Pragmat- ies, Peter Cole (ed.), Academic

Chinese-English Sourcebook of Classified Educational Phrases

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Chinese Education, 1976

1976-01-01

Official translation from Chinese to English of words and phrases commonly used in education and library work. Classifications include sayings of Chairman Mao, revolutionary mass criticism, revolution in education, "May 7" cadre schools, teaching methods and materials, disciplines and curricula, school names and terms, and library…

Working memory and planning during sentence production.

PubMed

Martin, Randi C; Yan, Hao; Schnur, Tatiana T

2014-10-01

Speakers retrieve conceptual, syntactic and lexical information in advance of articulation during sentence production. What type of working memory (WM) store is used to hold the planned information before speaking? To address this question, we measured onset latencies when subjects produced sentences that began with either a complex or a simple initial noun phrase, while holding semantic, phonological or spatial information in WM. Although we found that subjects had longer onset latencies for sentences beginning with a complex noun phrase, showing a phrasal scope of planning, the magnitude of this complexity effect was not affected by any type of WM load. However, subjects made more syntactic errors (but not lexical errors) for sentences beginning with a complex noun phrase, suggesting that advance planning for these phrases occurs at a syntactic rather than lexical-semantic level, which may account for the lack of effect with various types of WM load in the current study. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Automatic Identification & Classification of Surgical Margin Status from Pathology Reports Following Prostate Cancer Surgery

PubMed Central

D’Avolio, Leonard W.; Litwin, Mark S.; Rogers, Selwyn O.; Bui, Alex A. T.

2007-01-01

Prostate cancer removal surgeries that result in tumor found at the surgical margin, otherwise known as a positive surgical margin, have a significantly higher chance of biochemical recurrence and clinical progression. To support clinical outcomes assessment a system was designed to automatically identify, extract, and classify key phrases from pathology reports describing this outcome. Heuristics and boundary detection were used to extract phrases. Phrases were then classified using support vector machines into one of three classes: ‘positive (involved) margins,’ ‘negative (uninvolved) margins,’ and ‘not-applicable or definitive.’ A total of 851 key phrases were extracted from a sample of 782 reports produced between 1996 and 2006 from two major hospitals. Despite differences in reporting style, at least 1 sentence containing a diagnosis was extracted from 780 of the 782 reports (99.74%). Of the 851 sentences extracted, 97.3% contained diagnoses. Overall accuracy of automated classification of extracted sentences into the three categories was 97.18%. PMID:18693818

Phrase Frequency Effects in Language Production

PubMed Central

Janssen, Niels; Barber, Horacio A.

2012-01-01

A classic debate in the psychology of language concerns the question of the grain-size of the linguistic information that is stored in memory. One view is that only morphologically simple forms are stored (e.g., ‘car’, ‘red’), and that more complex forms of language such as multi-word phrases (e.g., ‘red car’) are generated on-line from the simple forms. In two experiments we tested this view. In Experiment 1, participants produced noun+adjective and noun+noun phrases that were elicited by experimental displays consisting of colored line drawings and two superimposed line drawings. In Experiment 2, participants produced noun+adjective and determiner+noun+adjective utterances elicited by colored line drawings. In both experiments, naming latencies decreased with increasing frequency of the multi-word phrase, and were unaffected by the frequency of the object name in the utterance. These results suggest that the language system is sensitive to the distribution of linguistic information at grain-sizes beyond individual words. PMID:22479370

Mining Tasks from the Web Anchor Text Graph: MSR Notebook Paper for the TREC 2015 Tasks Track

DTIC Science & Technology

2015-11-20

Mining Tasks from the Web Anchor Text Graph: MSR Notebook Paper for the TREC 2015 Tasks Track Paul N. Bennett Microsoft Research Redmond, USA pauben...anchor text graph has proven useful in the general realm of query reformulation [2], we sought to quantify the value of extracting key phrases from...anchor text in the broader setting of the task understanding track. Given a query, our approach considers a simple method for identifying a relevant

75 FR 80678 - Conversions of Insured Credit Unions

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2010-12-23

... Conversions of Insured Credit Unions AGENCY: National Credit Union Administration (NCUA). ACTION: Interim... of the phrase ``Regional Director'' in NCUA's rule on credit union to mutual savings bank conversions and to add the same revised definition of that phrase to NCUA's rule on conversions to nonfederal...

Echolalic and Spontaneous Phrase Speech in Autistic Children.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Howlin, Patricia

1982-01-01

Investigates the syntactical level of spontaneous and echolalic utterances of 26 autistic boys at different stages of phrase speech development. Speech samples were collected over a 90-minute period in unstructured settings in participants' homes. Imitations were not deliberately elicited, and only unprompted, noncommunicative echoes were…

Ilokano Language Packet.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Peace Corps, Manila (Philippines).

The workbook for Ilokano was designed for language training of Peace Corps volunteers in the Philippines. It consists of: a list of commonly-used phrases for greetings, leavetaking, shopping, asking for directions, managing a conversation, and introducing oneself; a more extensive vocabulary/phrase book of words and expressions used in everyday…

20 CFR 300.1 - Words and phrases.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-04-01

... 20 Employees' Benefits 1 2010-04-01 2010-04-01 false Words and phrases. 300.1 Section 300.1 Employees' Benefits RAILROAD RETIREMENT BOARD REGULATIONS UNDER THE RAILROAD UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE ACT... language or context indicates otherwise: (a) The term “act” means the Railroad Unemployment Insurance act...

20 CFR 300.1 - Words and phrases.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-04-01

... 20 Employees' Benefits 1 2011-04-01 2011-04-01 false Words and phrases. 300.1 Section 300.1 Employees' Benefits RAILROAD RETIREMENT BOARD REGULATIONS UNDER THE RAILROAD UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE ACT... language or context indicates otherwise: (a) The term “act” means the Railroad Unemployment Insurance act...

20 CFR 300.1 - Words and phrases.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-04-01

... 20 Employees' Benefits 1 2013-04-01 2012-04-01 true Words and phrases. 300.1 Section 300.1 Employees' Benefits RAILROAD RETIREMENT BOARD REGULATIONS UNDER THE RAILROAD UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE ACT... language or context indicates otherwise: (a) The term “act” means the Railroad Unemployment Insurance act...

20 CFR 300.1 - Words and phrases.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-04-01

... 20 Employees' Benefits 1 2012-04-01 2012-04-01 false Words and phrases. 300.1 Section 300.1 Employees' Benefits RAILROAD RETIREMENT BOARD REGULATIONS UNDER THE RAILROAD UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE ACT... language or context indicates otherwise: (a) The term “act” means the Railroad Unemployment Insurance act...

20 CFR 300.1 - Words and phrases.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-04-01

... 20 Employees' Benefits 1 2014-04-01 2012-04-01 true Words and phrases. 300.1 Section 300.1 Employees' Benefits RAILROAD RETIREMENT BOARD REGULATIONS UNDER THE RAILROAD UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE ACT... language or context indicates otherwise: (a) The term “act” means the Railroad Unemployment Insurance act...

Phrase versus Phase: Family Engagement

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ferrara, Margaret M.

2011-01-01

Parents and their roles in schools, public or private, often become the bed of heated discussions. "Parent involvement" is yesterday's buzz word; today, it is "family involvement." The phrase "parent involvement" connotes an image of parents being involved in their children's education. Family involvement is a more encompassing concept, embracing…

Flexibility of Expressive Timing in Repeated Musical Performances

PubMed Central

Demos, Alexander P.; Lisboa, Tânia; Chaffin, Roger

2016-01-01

Performances by soloists in the Western classical tradition are normally highly prepared, yet must sound fresh and spontaneous. How do musicians manage this? We tested the hypothesis that they achieve the necessary spontaneity by varying the musical gestures that express their interpretation of a piece. We examined the tempo arches produced by final slowing at the ends of phrases in performances of J. S. Bach’s No. 6 (Prelude) for solo cello (12 performances) and the Italian Concerto (Presto) for solo piano (eight performances). The performances were given by two experienced concert soloists during a short time period (3½ months for the Prelude, 2 weeks for the Presto) after completing their preparations for public performance. We measured the tempo of each bar or half-bar, and the stability of tempo across performances (difference of the tempo of each bar/half bar from each of the other performances). There were phrase arches for both tempo and stability with slower, less stable tempi at beginnings and ends of phrases and faster, more stable tempi mid-phrase. The effects of practice were complex. Tempo decreased overall with practice, while stability increased in some bars and decreased in others. One effect of practice may be to imbue well-learned, automatic motor sequences with freshness and spontaneity through cognitive control at phrase boundaries where slower tempi and decreased stability provide opportunities for slower cognitive processes to modulate rapid automatic motor sequences. PMID:27757089

Improving patients' understanding of terms and phrases commonly used in self-reported measures of sexual function.

PubMed

Alexander, Angel M; Flynn, Kathryn E; Hahn, Elizabeth A; Jeffery, Diana D; Keefe, Francis J; Reeve, Bryce B; Schultz, Wesley; Reese, Jennifer Barsky; Shelby, Rebecca A; Weinfurt, Kevin P

2014-08-01

There is a significant gap in research regarding the readability and comprehension of existing sexual function measures. Patient-reported outcome measures may use terms not well understood by respondents with low literacy. This study aims to test comprehension of words and phrases typically used in sexual function measures to improve validity for all individuals, including those with low literacy. We recruited 20 men and 28 women for cognitive interviews on version 2.0 of the Patient-Reported Outcome Measurement Information System(®) (PROMIS(®) ) Sexual Function and Satisfaction measures. We assessed participants' reading level using the word reading subtest of the Wide Range Achievement Test. Sixteen participants were classified as having low literacy. In the first round of cognitive interviews, each survey item was reviewed by five or more people, at least two of whom had lower than a ninth-grade reading level (low literacy). Patient feedback was incorporated into a revised version of the items. In the second round of interviews, an additional three or more people (at least one with low literacy) reviewed each revised item. Participants with low literacy had difficulty comprehending terms such as aroused, orgasm, erection, ejaculation, incontinence, and vaginal penetration. Women across a range of literacy levels had difficulty with clinical terms like labia and clitoris. We modified unclear terms to include parenthetical descriptors or slang equivalents, which generally improved comprehension. Common words and phrases used across measures of self-reported sexual function are not universally understood. Researchers should appreciate these misunderstandings as a potential source of error in studies using self-reported measures of sexual function. This study also provides evidence for the importance of including individuals with low literacy in cognitive pretesting during the measure development. © 2014 International Society for Sexual Medicine.

Characterizing the Google Books Corpus: Strong Limits to Inferences of Socio-Cultural and Linguistic Evolution

PubMed Central

Pechenick, Eitan Adam; Danforth, Christopher M.; Dodds, Peter Sheridan

2015-01-01

It is tempting to treat frequency trends from the Google Books data sets as indicators of the “true” popularity of various words and phrases. Doing so allows us to draw quantitatively strong conclusions about the evolution of cultural perception of a given topic, such as time or gender. However, the Google Books corpus suffers from a number of limitations which make it an obscure mask of cultural popularity. A primary issue is that the corpus is in effect a library, containing one of each book. A single, prolific author is thereby able to noticeably insert new phrases into the Google Books lexicon, whether the author is widely read or not. With this understood, the Google Books corpus remains an important data set to be considered more lexicon-like than text-like. Here, we show that a distinct problematic feature arises from the inclusion of scientific texts, which have become an increasingly substantive portion of the corpus throughout the 1900s. The result is a surge of phrases typical to academic articles but less common in general, such as references to time in the form of citations. We use information theoretic methods to highlight these dynamics by examining and comparing major contributions via a divergence measure of English data sets between decades in the period 1800–2000. We find that only the English Fiction data set from the second version of the corpus is not heavily affected by professional texts. Overall, our findings call into question the vast majority of existing claims drawn from the Google Books corpus, and point to the need to fully characterize the dynamics of the corpus before using these data sets to draw broad conclusions about cultural and linguistic evolution. PMID:26445406

When and how do GPs record vital signs in children with acute infections? A cross-sectional study

PubMed Central

Blacklock, Claire; Haj-Hassan, Tanya Ali; Thompson, Matthew J

2012-01-01

Background NICE recommendations and evidence from ambulatory settings promotes the use of vital signs in identifying serious infections in children. This appears to differ from usual clinical practice where GPs report measuring vital signs infrequently. Aim To identify frequency of vital sign documentation by GPs, in the assessment of children with acute infections in primary care. Design and setting Observational study in 15 general practice surgeries in Oxfordshire and Somerset, UK. Method A standardised proforma was used to extract consultation details including documentation of numerical vital signs, and words or phrases used by the GP in assessing vital signs, for 850 children aged 1 month to 16 years presenting with acute infection. Results Of the children presenting with acute infections 31.6% had one or more numerical vital signs recorded (269, 31.6%), however GP recording rate improved if free text proxies were also considered: at least one vital sign was then recorded in over half (54.1%) of children. In those with recorded numerical values for vital signs, the most frequent was temperature (210, 24.7%), followed by heart rate (62, 7.3%), respiratory rate (58, 6.8%), and capillary refill time (36, 4.2%). Words or phrases for vital signs were documented infrequently (temperature 17.6%, respiratory rate 14.6%, capillary refill time 12.5%, and heart rate 0.5%), Text relating to global assessment was documented in 313/850 (36.8%) of consultations. Conclusion GPs record vital signs using words and phrases as well as numerical methods, although overall documentation of vital signs is infrequent in children presenting with acute infections. PMID:23265227

Characterizing the Google Books Corpus: Strong Limits to Inferences of Socio-Cultural and Linguistic Evolution.

PubMed

Pechenick, Eitan Adam; Danforth, Christopher M; Dodds, Peter Sheridan

2015-01-01

It is tempting to treat frequency trends from the Google Books data sets as indicators of the "true" popularity of various words and phrases. Doing so allows us to draw quantitatively strong conclusions about the evolution of cultural perception of a given topic, such as time or gender. However, the Google Books corpus suffers from a number of limitations which make it an obscure mask of cultural popularity. A primary issue is that the corpus is in effect a library, containing one of each book. A single, prolific author is thereby able to noticeably insert new phrases into the Google Books lexicon, whether the author is widely read or not. With this understood, the Google Books corpus remains an important data set to be considered more lexicon-like than text-like. Here, we show that a distinct problematic feature arises from the inclusion of scientific texts, which have become an increasingly substantive portion of the corpus throughout the 1900 s. The result is a surge of phrases typical to academic articles but less common in general, such as references to time in the form of citations. We use information theoretic methods to highlight these dynamics by examining and comparing major contributions via a divergence measure of English data sets between decades in the period 1800-2000. We find that only the English Fiction data set from the second version of the corpus is not heavily affected by professional texts. Overall, our findings call into question the vast majority of existing claims drawn from the Google Books corpus, and point to the need to fully characterize the dynamics of the corpus before using these data sets to draw broad conclusions about cultural and linguistic evolution.

77 FR 6138 - Draft Policy on Interpretation of the Phrase “Significant Portion of Its Range” in the Endangered...

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2012-02-07

... Portion of Its Range'' in the Endangered Species Act's Definitions of ``Endangered Species'' and... interpreting the phrase ``significant portion of its range'' in the Endangered Species Act's (Act's...'' in the Act's definitions of ``endangered species'' and ``threatened species'' will consider...

An Individualized Problem-Solving Approach for Teaching Choral Phrase Shaping: An Experimental Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Broomhead, Paul

2009-01-01

This experiment tested a treatment designed to improve choral students' expressiveness regarding keyword emphasis and phrase shaping. The treatment was founded upon the constructivist belief that students actively construct conceptual knowledge through problem solving. Participants were 46 university students randomly selected from a nonauditioned…

15 CFR 995.12 - Certification designation.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-01-01

... REQUIREMENTS FOR NOAA HYDROGRAPHIC PRODUCTS AND SERVICES CERTIFICATION REQUIREMENTS FOR DISTRIBUTORS OF NOAA... been certified by NOAA as a CED may use the phrase “Certified NOAA ENC Distributor” on products and marketing materials. An Applicant that has been certified by NOAA as a CEVAD may use the phrase “Certified...

15 CFR 995.12 - Certification designation.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-01-01

... REQUIREMENTS FOR NOAA HYDROGRAPHIC PRODUCTS AND SERVICES CERTIFICATION REQUIREMENTS FOR DISTRIBUTORS OF NOAA... been certified by NOAA as a CED may use the phrase “Certified NOAA ENC Distributor” on products and marketing materials. An Applicant that has been certified by NOAA as a CEVAD may use the phrase “Certified...

15 CFR 995.12 - Certification designation.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-01-01

... REQUIREMENTS FOR NOAA HYDROGRAPHIC PRODUCTS AND SERVICES CERTIFICATION REQUIREMENTS FOR DISTRIBUTORS OF NOAA... been certified by NOAA as a CED may use the phrase “Certified NOAA ENC Distributor” on products and marketing materials. An Applicant that has been certified by NOAA as a CEVAD may use the phrase “Certified...

15 CFR 995.12 - Certification designation.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-01-01

... REQUIREMENTS FOR NOAA HYDROGRAPHIC PRODUCTS AND SERVICES CERTIFICATION REQUIREMENTS FOR DISTRIBUTORS OF NOAA... been certified by NOAA as a CED may use the phrase “Certified NOAA ENC Distributor” on products and marketing materials. An Applicant that has been certified by NOAA as a CEVAD may use the phrase “Certified...

76 FR 57940 - Revision of Department of Justice Freedom of Information Act Regulations

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2011-09-19

... posted online, you must include the phrase ``CONFIDENTIAL BUSINESS INFORMATION'' in the first paragraph... comments received are considered part of the public record and made available for public inspection online... posted online, you must include the phrase ``PERSONAL IDENTIFYING INFORMATION'' in the first paragraph of...

Investigating the Usefulness of Lexical Phrases in Contemporary Coursebooks

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Koprowski, Mark

2005-01-01

Over the past decade, lexical theory, corpus statistics, and psycholinguistic research have pointed to the pedagogical value of lexical phrases. In response, commercial publishers have been quick to import these insights into their materials in a bid to accommodate consumers and to profit from the "lexical chunk" phenomenon. Contemporary British…

20 CFR 201.1 - Words and phrases.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-04-01

... 20 Employees' Benefits 1 2010-04-01 2010-04-01 false Words and phrases. 201.1 Section 201.1 Employees' Benefits RAILROAD RETIREMENT BOARD REGULATIONS UNDER THE RAILROAD RETIREMENT ACT DEFINITIONS... as defined in the act and part 220 of this chapter. (e) Compensation. The term “compensation” means...

Computational Support for Early Elicitation and Classification of Tone

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bird, Steven; Lee, Haejoong

2014-01-01

Investigating a tone language involves careful transcription of tone on words and phrases. This is challenging when the phonological categories--the tones or melodies--have not been identified. Effects such as coarticulation, sandhi, and phrase-level prosody appear as obstacles to early elicitation and classification of tone. This article presents…

Laughter among Deaf Signers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Provine, Robert R.; Emmorey, Karen

2006-01-01

The placement of laughter in the speech of hearing individuals is not random but "punctuates" speech, occurring during pauses and at phrase boundaries where punctuation would be placed in a transcript of a conversation. For speakers, language is dominant in the competition for the vocal tract since laughter seldom interrupts spoken phrases. For…

Phonological Phrase Boundaries Constrain the Online Syntactic Analysis of Spoken Sentences

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Millotte, Severine; Rene, Alice; Wales, Roger; Christophe, Anne

2008-01-01

Two experiments tested whether phonological phrase boundaries constrain online syntactic analysis in French. Pairs of homophones belonging to different syntactic categories (verb and adjective) were used to create sentences with a local syntactic ambiguity (e.g., [le petit chien "mort"], in English, the "dead" little dog, vs.…

A Self-Organizing Approach to Subject-Verb Number Agreement

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Smith, Garrett; Franck, Julie; Tabor, Whitney

2018-01-01

We present a self-organizing approach to sentence processing that sheds new light on notional plurality effects in agreement attraction, using pseudopartitive subject noun phrases (e.g., "a bottle of pills"). We first show that notional plurality ratings (numerosity judgments for subject noun phrases) predict verb agreement choices in…

Memory Operations that Support Language Comprehension: Evidence from Verb-Phrase Ellipsis

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Martin, Andrea E.; McElree, Brian

2009-01-01

Comprehension of verb-phrase ellipsis (VPE) requires reevaluation of recently processed constituents, which often necessitates retrieval of information about the elided constituent from memory. A. E. Martin and B. McElree (2008) argued that representations formed during comprehension are content addressable and that VPE antecedents are retrieved…

Stories from Hopescapes

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Harris, Violet J.

2011-01-01

Author Virginia Hamilton had the gift of creating lyrical phrases that captured the complexities of life. Among her most notable phrase is the idea of the "hopescape," the metaphoric description of the pains and joys, triumphs and defeats, longing, and dreams that make us human. The publication of an edited volume that compiles a sampling of…

Phonological Phrase Boundaries Constrain Lexical Access I. Adult Data

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Christophe, A.; Peperkamp, S.; Pallier, C.; Block, E.; Mehler, J.

2004-01-01

We tested the effect of local lexical ambiguities while manipulating the type of prosodic boundary at which the ambiguity occurred, using French sentences and participants. We observed delayed lexical access when a local lexical ambiguity occurred within a phonological phrase (consistent with previous research; e.g., '[un chat grincheux],'…

English Code Switching in Indonesian Language

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Setiawan, Dedy

2016-01-01

There is a growing phenomenon, worldwide, of inserting English words, phrases or expressions, into the local language: this is part of the acceptance of English as current world language. Indonesia is experiencing the use of this mixture of language when using either their own Indonesian or local language; English words, phrases and expressions…

Lexical Entrainment and Lexical Differentiation in Reference Phrase Choice

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Van Der Wege, Mija M.

2009-01-01

Speakers reuse prior references to objects when choosing reference phrases, a phenomenon known as lexical entrainment. One explanation is that speakers want to maintain a set of previously established referential precedents. Speakers may also contrast any new referents against this previously established set, thereby avoiding applying the same…

15 CFR 995.12 - Certification designation.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-01-01

... REQUIREMENTS FOR NOAA HYDROGRAPHIC PRODUCTS AND SERVICES CERTIFICATION REQUIREMENTS FOR DISTRIBUTORS OF NOAA... been certified by NOAA as a CED may use the phrase “Certified NOAA ENC Distributor” on products and marketing materials. An Applicant that has been certified by NOAA as a CEVAD may use the phrase “Certified...

Survival Words and Phrases for Professionals Who Work with Students Who Are Bilingual and Severely/Multiply Handicapped, and with Their Families.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Silberman, Rosanne K.; Correa, Vivian I.

1989-01-01

The paper offers a rationale for bilingual special education, provides suggestions for developing bilingual lessons for severely/multiply handicapped students, and includes a list of Spanish words and phrases used most frequently by students and their parents. (JDD)

Bilingual Medical Phrase Book (In English and Laotian).

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Thuy, Vuong G.

This phrase book offers Laotian refugees and immigrants with limited English proficiency a short-cut, word-for-word bilingual reference tool for dealing with medical problems and situations in English-language environments. Seven chapters deal with different issues of the medical encounter and five appendixes present specialized terms and…

Learn Locally, Act Globally: Learning Language from Variation Set Cues

PubMed Central

Onnis, Luca; Waterfall, Heidi R.; Edelman, Shimon

2011-01-01

Variation set structure — partial overlap of successive utterances in child-directed speech — has been shown to correlate with progress in children’s acquisition of syntax. We demonstrate the benefits of variation set structure directly: in miniature artificial languages, arranging a certain proportion of utterances in a training corpus in variation sets facilitated word and phrase constituent learning in adults. Our findings have implications for understanding the mechanisms of L1 acquisition by children, and for the development of more efficient algorithms for automatic language acquisition, as well as better methods for L2 instruction. PMID:19019350

Learning Cue Phrase Patterns from Radiology Reports Using a Genetic Algorithm

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Patton, Robert M; Beckerman, Barbara G; Potok, Thomas E

2009-01-01

Various computer-assisted technologies have been developed to assist radiologists in detecting cancer; however, the algorithms still lack high degrees of sensitivity and specificity, and must undergo machine learning against a training set with known pathologies in order to further refine the algorithms with higher validity of truth. This work describes an approach to learning cue phrase patterns in radiology reports that utilizes a genetic algorithm (GA) as the learning method. The approach described here successfully learned cue phrase patterns for two distinct classes of radiology reports. These patterns can then be used as a basis for automatically categorizing, clustering, ormore » retrieving relevant data for the user.« less

An Event Related Field Study of Rapid Grammatical Plasticity in Adult Second-Language Learners

PubMed Central

Bastarrika, Ainhoa; Davidson, Douglas J.

2017-01-01

The present study used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to investigate how Spanish adult learners of Basque respond to morphosyntactic violations after a short period of training on a small fragment of Basque grammar. Participants (n = 17) were exposed to violation and control phrases in three phases (pretest, training, generalization-test). In each phase participants listened to short Basque phrases and they judged whether they were correct or incorrect. During the pre-test and generalization-test, participants did not receive any feedback. During the training blocks feedback was provided after each response. We also ran two Spanish control blocks before and after training. We analyzed the event-related magnetic- field (ERF) recorded in response to a critical word during all three phases. In the pretest, classification was below chance and we found no electrophysiological differences between violation and control stimuli. Then participants were explicitly taught a Basque grammar rule. From the first training block participants were able to correctly classify control and violation stimuli and an evoked violation response was present. Although the timing of the electrophysiological responses matched participants' L1 effect, the effect size was smaller for L2 and the topographical distribution differed from the L1. While the L1 effect was bilaterally distributed on the auditory sensors, the L2 effect was present at right frontal sensors. During training blocks two and three, the violation-control effect size increased and the topography evolved to a more L1-like pattern. Moreover, this pattern was maintained in the generalization test. We conclude that rapid changes in neuronal responses can be observed in adult learners of a simple morphosyntactic rule, and that native-like responses can be achieved at least in small fragments of second language. PMID:28174530

ERP Evidence for the Activation of Syntactic Structure During Comprehension of Lexical Idiom.

PubMed

Zhang, Meichao; Lu, Aitao; Song, Pingfang

2017-10-01

The present study used event-related potentials to investigate whether the syntactic structure was activated in the comprehension of lexical idioms, and if so, whether it varied as a function of familiarity and semantic transparency. Participants were asked to passively read the "1+2" structural Chinese lexical idioms with each being presented following 3-5 contextual "1+2" (congruent-structure condition) or "2+1" structural Chinese phrases (incongruent-structure condition). The N400 ERP responses showed more positivity in congruent-structure condition relative to incongruent-structure condition in idioms with high familiarity and high semantic transparency, but less positivity in congruent-structure condition in idioms with high familiarity but low semantic transparency, idioms with low familiarity but high semantic transparency, and idioms with low familiarity and low semantic transparency. Our results suggest that syntactic structure, as the unnecessarity of lexical idiomatic words, was nevertheless activated, independent of familiarity and semantic transparency.

A developmental analysis of generic nouns in Southern Peruvian Quechua.

PubMed

Mannheim, Bruce; Gelman, Susan A; Escalante, Carmen; Huayhua, Margarita; Puma, Rosalía

2010-01-01

Generic noun phrases (e.g., "Cats like to drink milk") are a primary means by which adults express generalizations to children, yet they pose a challenging induction puzzle for learners. Although prior research has established that English speakers understand and produce generic noun phrases by preschool age, little is known regarding the cross-cultural generality of generic acquisition. Southern Peruvian Quechua provides a valuable comparison because, unlike English, it is a highly inflected language in which generics are marked by the absence rather than the presence of any linguistic markers. Moreover, Quechua is spoken in a cultural context that differs markedly from the highly educated, middle-class contexts within which earlier research on generics was conducted. We presented participants from 5 age groups (3-6, 7-9, 10-12, 14-35, and 36-90 years of age) with two tasks that examined the ability to distinguish generic from non-generic utterances. In Study 1, even the youngest children understood generics as applying broadly to a category (like "all") and distinct from indefinite reference ("some"). However, there was a developmental lag before children understood that generics, unlike "all", can include exceptions. Study 2 revealed that generic interpretations are more frequent for utterances that (a) lack specifying markers and (b) are animate. Altogether, generic interpretations are found among the youngest participants, and may be a default mode of quantification. These data demonstrate the cross-cultural importance of generic information in linguistic expression.

A developmental analysis of generic nouns in Southern Peruvian Quechua

PubMed Central

Mannheim, Bruce; Gelman, Susan A.; Escalante, Carmen; Huayhua, Margarita; Puma, Rosalía

2010-01-01

Generic noun phrases (e.g., “Cats like to drink milk”) are a primary means by which adults express generalizations to children, yet they pose a challenging induction puzzle for learners. Although prior research has established that English speakers understand and produce generic noun phrases by preschool age, little is known regarding the cross-cultural generality of generic acquisition. Southern Peruvian Quechua provides a valuable comparison because, unlike English, it is a highly inflected language in which generics are marked by the absence rather than the presence of any linguistic markers. Moreover, Quechua is spoken in a cultural context that differs markedly from the highly educated, middle-class contexts within which earlier research on generics was conducted. We presented participants from 5 age groups (3-6, 7-9, 10-12, 14-35, and 36-90 years of age) with two tasks that examined the ability to distinguish generic from non-generic utterances. In Study 1, even the youngest children understood generics as applying broadly to a category (like “all”) and distinct from indefinite reference (“some”). However, there was a developmental lag before children understood that generics, unlike “all”, can include exceptions. Study 2 revealed that generic interpretations are more frequent for utterances that (a) lack specifying markers and (b) are animate. Altogether, generic interpretations are found among the youngest participants, and may be a default mode of quantification. These data demonstrate the cross-cultural importance of generic information in linguistic expression. PMID:21779154

Using English Language Arts to Teach a Song

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cardany, Audrey Berger

2017-01-01

Music and reading domains require similar auditory processing skills. Students employ these skills when learning a new song through an oral/aural or rote-teaching approach. In this article, I review literature on the effectiveness of immersion and phrase-by-phrase approaches for teaching a song with or without words. Then, using an amusing…

Phonological Phrase Boundaries Constrain Lexical Access II. Infant Data

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gout, A.; Christophe, A.; Morgan, J. L.

2004-01-01

The location of phonological phrase boundaries was shown to affect lexical access by English-learning infants of 10 and 13 months of age. Experiments 1 and 2 used the head-turn preference procedure: infants were familiarized with two bisyllabic words, then presented with sentences that either contained the familiarized words or contained both…

Driving: English-Spanish. Enlarged and Revised Edition.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Grosse, Philip

The bilingual glossary, in English-to-Spanish, defines words and phrases related to driving and traffic safety. It is intended for individuals driving in Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries. A second section lists the vocabulary used in common road signs, and the third section lists useful phrases for communicating about car repair needs.…

Intonation Miscues and Apprehension of Text.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Flippo, Rona F.

Working on the theory that intonation miscues caused by confusion over punctuation and other phrase boundaries will make the apprehension of text more difficult than necessary for young developing readers, a study reviewed the research and literature relevant to the effects of location of punctuation, phrasing, and line breaks in text and on the…

Processing of Written Irony: An Eye Movement Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kaakinen, Johanna K.; Olkoniemi, Henri; Kinnari, Taina; Hyönä, Jukka

2014-01-01

We examined processing of written irony by recording readers' eye movements while they read target phrases embedded either in ironic or non-ironic story context. After reading each story, participants responded to a text memory question and an inference question tapping into the understanding of the meaning of the target phrase. The results of…

The Development and Validation of a Behaviorally Defined Interest Instrument for Science.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Butzow, John W., Jr.

A semantic differential (SD) instrument, modified by replacing words or noun phrases with phrases describing a behavior, was administered to male freshmen students. Six items discriminated between two groups, 97 science majors and 161 non-science majors, on three axes, labelled as evaluation, potency, and activity. To test whether the instrument…

A Different Vision in eLearning: Metaphors

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tuncay, Nazime; Stanescu, Ioana Andreea; Tuncay, Mustafa

2011-01-01

Metaphors are figures of speech in which a word or phrase that denotes a certain object or idea is applied to another word or phrase to imply some similarity between them. Due to their ability to make speaking and writing more lively and interesting, metaphors have always been popular among students. While metaphors provide significant enhancement…

Lexical Access during the Production of Idiomatic Phrases

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sprenger, Simone A.; Levelt, Willem J. M.; Kempen, Gerard

2006-01-01

In three experiments we test the assumption that idioms have their own lexical entry, which is linked to its constituent lemmas (Cutting & Bock, 1997). Speakers produced idioms or literal phrases (Experiment 1), completed idioms (Experiment 2), or switched between idiom completion and naming (Experiment 3). The results of Experiment 1 show that…

Response to Biber, Gray, and Poonpon (2011)

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Yang, WeiWei

2013-01-01

The recent "TESOL Quarterly" article by Biber, Gray, and Poonpon (2011) raises important considerations with respect to the use of syntactic complexity (SC) measures in second language (L2) studies. The article draws the field's attention to one particular measure--complexity of noun phrases (NP) (i.e., noun phrases with modifiers, such as…

Testing for a Signal with Unknown Location and Scale in a Stationary Gaussian Random Field

DTIC Science & Technology

1994-01-07

Secondary 60D05, 52A22. Key words and phrases. Euler characteristic, integral geometry, image analysis , Gaussian fields, volume of tubes. SUMMARY We...words and phrases. Euler characteristic, integral geometry. image analysis . Gaussian fields. volume of tubes. 20. AMST RACT (Coith..o an revmreo ef* It

Russian-English Glossary of International Maritime Law Terms (and Selected Terms in Related Disciplines.)

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Naval Intelligence Support Center, Washington, DC.

This glossary contains over 750 terms encountered in international maritime law texts. It includes terms of the art, fairly common abbreviations, geographic names, and prepositional phrases routinely encountered in international treaties, conventions, and agreements. The prepositional phrases are recorded exactly as they appear in formal texts.…

Absolute Interrogative Intonation Patterns in Buenos Aires Spanish

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lee, Su Ar

2010-01-01

In Spanish, each uttered phrase, depending on its use, has one of a variety of intonation patterns. For example, a phrase such as "Maria viene manana" "Mary is coming tomorrow" can be used as a declarative or as an absolute interrogative (a yes/no question) depending on the intonation pattern that a speaker produces. …

Constituent Length Affects Prosody and Processing for a Dative NP Ambiguity in Korean

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hwang, Hyekyung; Schafer, Amy J.

2009-01-01

Two sentence processing experiments on a dative NP ambiguity in Korean demonstrate effects of phrase length on overt and implicit prosody. Both experiments controlled non-prosodic length factors by using long versus short proper names that occurred before the syntactically critical material. Experiment 1 found that long phrases induce different…

Understanding Old Words with New Meanings.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Clark, Herbert H.; Gerrig, Richard J.

1983-01-01

Assumptions about comprehension of utterances are challenged in two experiments using as an example the verb phrase "to do a Richard Nixon on a tape" (i.e., erase it). It is argued that creating meanings, as with this phrase, works differently from selecting senses for utterances and that many require a mixture of the two. (MSE)

You Say "Probable" and I Say "Likely": Improving Interpersonal Communication With Verbal Probability Phrases

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Karelitz, Tzur M.; Budescu, David V.

2004-01-01

When forecasters and decision makers describe uncertain events using verbal probability terms, there is a risk of miscommunication because people use different probability phrases and interpret them in different ways. In an effort to facilitate the communication process, the authors investigated various ways of converting the forecasters' verbal…

Corpus Study of Tense, Aspect, and Modality in Diglossic Speech in Cairene Arabic

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Moshref, Ola Ahmed

2012-01-01

Morpho-syntactic features of Modern Standard Arabic mix intricately with those of Egyptian Colloquial Arabic in ordinary speech. I study the lexical, phonological and syntactic features of verb phrase morphemes and constituents in different tenses, aspects, moods. A corpus of over 3000 phrases was collected from religious, political/economic and…

On "Yes, We Can": Linguistics Power and Possibility

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bista, Krishna K.

2009-01-01

In this article I address a hitherto used buzz phrase in English, "Yes, we can." This phrase represents various forms of meanings--challenge, possibility, ability, permission and opportunity in social, political and linguistics domains. I consider the syntactic and the semantic properties of "Yes, we can." I also compare its conventional usages…

Between Anaphora and Deixis ... The Resolution of the Demonstrative Noun Phrase "That N"

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fossard, Marion; Garnham, Alan; Cowles, H. Wind

2012-01-01

Three experiments examined the hypothesis that the demonstrative noun phrase (NP) that N, as an anadeictic expression, preferentially refers to the less salient referent in a discourse representation when used anaphorically, whereas the anaphoric pronoun he or she preferentially refers to the highly-focused referent. The findings, from a sentence…

Hyphens for Disambiguating Phrases: Effectiveness for Young and Older Adults

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Anema, Inge; Obler, Loraine K.

2012-01-01

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether hyphens that disambiguate phrasing in ambiguous sentences influence reading rate and reading comprehension for younger and older adults. Moreover, as working memory (WM) has been implicated in age-related changes in sentence comprehension for both auditory and written materials, we asked if it…

Early Acquisition of Gender Agreement in the Spanish Noun Phrase: Starting Small

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mariscal, Sonia

2009-01-01

Nativist and constructivist accounts differ in their characterization of children's knowledge of grammatical categories. In this paper we present research on the process of acquisition of a particular grammatical system, gender agreement in the Spanish noun phrase, in children under three years of age. The design of the longitudinal study employed…

Verbs and Noun Phrases--Two Tendencies in Philosophical Essays.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Koskela, Merja

Noun phrases are often used in academic writing to express the abstract character of the topics discussed. Nouns, especially nominalizations, make it possible to express complicated ideas in a condensed and compact manner, whereas the corresponding verbs make texts easier to understand and more dynamic. In this paper, a case study is presented…

GhostWriter-2.0: Product Reviews with Case-Based Support

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bridge, Derek; Healy, Paul

A lot of user-generated content on the Web takes the form of records of personal experiences. Case-Based Reasoning offers a way of helping one user to reuse another's experiences from the Web. In this paper, we present GhostWriter-2.0, a Case-Based Reasoning system that supports a user who is writing a product review. GhostWriter-2.0 makes suggestions to the user, in the form of short phrases that are mined from other reviews. The purpose of the suggestions is to prompt the user to write a more comprehensive and helpful review than she might otherwise have done. We explain how GhostWriter-2.0's case base is populated with relevant and helpful reviews from Amazon. We show how it extracts and scores phrases in these reviews to decide which to suggest to the user.We report a trial with real users, in which users made greater use of GhostWriter-2.0's suggested phrases than they did of phrases suggested by a system that used a more random form of selection.

Semantic analyzability in children's understanding of idioms.

PubMed

Gibbs, R W

1991-06-01

This study investigated the role of semantic analyzability in children's understanding of idioms. Kindergartners and first, third, and fourth graders listened to idiomatic expressions either alone or at the end of short story contexts. Their task was to explain verbally the intended meanings of these phrases and then to choose their correct idiomatic interpretations. The idioms presented to the children differed in their degree of analyzability. Some idioms were highly analyzable or decomposable, with the meanings of their parts contributing independently to their overall figurative meanings. Other idioms were nondecomposable because it was difficult to see any relation between a phrase's individual components and the idiom's figurative meaning. The results showed that younger children (kindergartners and first graders) understood decomposable idioms better than they did nondecomposable phrases. Older children (third and fourth graders) understood both kinds of idioms equally well in supporting contexts, but were better at interpreting decomposable idioms than they were at understanding nondecomposable idioms without contextual information. These findings demonstrate that young children better understand idiomatic phrases whose individual parts independently contribute to their overall figurative meanings.

Conceptual plural information is used to guide early parsing decisions: Evidence from garden-path sentences with reciprocal verbs.

PubMed

Patson, Nikole D; Ferreira, Fernanda

2009-05-01

In three eyetracking studies, we investigated the role of conceptual plurality in initial parsing decisions in temporarily ambiguous sentences with reciprocal verbs (e.g., While the lovers kissed the baby played alone). We varied the subject of the first clause using three types of plural noun phrases: conjoined noun phrases (the bride and the groom), plural definite descriptions (the lovers), and numerically quantified noun phrases (the two lovers). We found no evidence for garden-path effects when the subject was conjoined (Ferreira & McClure, 1997), but traditional garden-path effects were found with the other plural noun phrases. In addition, we tested plural anaphors that had a plural antecedent present in the discourse. We found that when the antecedent was conjoined, garden-path effects were absent compared to cases in which the antecedent was a plural definite description. Our results indicate that the parser is sensitive to the conceptual representation of a plural constituent. In particular, it appears that a Complex Reference Object (Moxey et al., 2004) automatically activates a reciprocal reading of a reciprocal verb.

Tracking the time course of multi-word noun phrase production with ERPs or on when (and why) cat is faster than the big cat.

PubMed

Bürki, Audrey; Laganaro, Marina

2014-01-01

Words are rarely produced in isolation. Yet, our understanding of multi-word production, and especially its time course, is still rather poor. In this research, we use event-related potentials to examine the production of multi-word noun phrases in the context of overt picture naming. We track the processing costs associated with the production of these noun phrases as compared with the production of bare nouns, from picture onset to articulation. Behavioral results revealed longer naming latencies for French noun phrases with determiners and pre-nominal adjectives (D-A-N, the big cat) than for noun phrases with a determiner (D-N, the cat), or bare nouns (N, cat). The spatio-temporal analysis of the ERPs revealed differences in the duration of stable global electrophysiological patterns as a function of utterance format in two time windows, from ~190 to 300 ms after picture onset, and from ~530 ms after picture onset to 100 ms before articulation. These findings can be accommodated in the following model. During grammatical encoding (here from ~190 to 300 ms), the noun and adjective lemmas are accessed in parallel, followed by the selection of the gender-agreeing determiner. Phonological encoding (after ~530 ms) operates sequentially. As a consequence, the phonological encoding process is longer for longer utterances. In addition, when determiners are repeated across trials, their phonological encoding can be anticipated or primed, resulting in a shortened encoding process.

Dynamic interactions between musical, cardiovascular, and cerebral rhythms in humans.

PubMed

Bernardi, Luciano; Porta, Cesare; Casucci, Gaia; Balsamo, Rossella; Bernardi, Nicolò F; Fogari, Roberto; Sleight, Peter

2009-06-30

Reactions to music are considered subjective, but previous studies suggested that cardiorespiratory variables increase with faster tempo independent of individual preference. We tested whether compositions characterized by variable emphasis could produce parallel instantaneous cardiovascular/respiratory responses and whether these changes mirrored music profiles. Twenty-four young healthy subjects, 12 musicians (choristers) and 12 nonmusician control subjects, listened (in random order) to music with vocal (Puccini's "Turandot") or orchestral (Beethoven's 9th Symphony adagio) progressive crescendos, more uniform emphasis (Bach cantata), 10-second period (ie, similar to Mayer waves) rhythmic phrases (Giuseppe Verdi's arias "Va pensiero" and "Libiam nei lieti calici"), or silence while heart rate, respiration, blood pressures, middle cerebral artery flow velocity, and skin vasomotion were recorded.Common responses were recognized by averaging instantaneous cardiorespiratory responses regressed against changes in music profiles and by coherence analysis during rhythmic phrases. Vocal and orchestral crescendos produced significant (P=0.05 or better) correlations between cardiovascular or respiratory signals and music profile, particularly skin vasoconstriction and blood pressures, proportional to crescendo, in contrast to uniform emphasis, which induced skin vasodilation and reduction in blood pressures. Correlations were significant both in individual and group-averaged signals. Phrases at 10-second periods by Verdi entrained the cardiovascular autonomic variables. No qualitative differences in recorded measurements were seen between musicians and nonmusicians. Music emphasis and rhythmic phrases are tracked consistently by physiological variables. Autonomic responses are synchronized with music, which might therefore convey emotions through autonomic arousal during crescendos or rhythmic phrases.

Computational principles of syntax in the regions specialized for language: integrating theoretical linguistics and functional neuroimaging

PubMed Central

Ohta, Shinri; Fukui, Naoki; Sakai, Kuniyoshi L.

2013-01-01

The nature of computational principles of syntax remains to be elucidated. One promising approach to this problem would be to construct formal and abstract linguistic models that parametrically predict the activation modulations in the regions specialized for linguistic processes. In this article, we review recent advances in theoretical linguistics and functional neuroimaging in the following respects. First, we introduce the two fundamental linguistic operations: Merge (which combines two words or phrases to form a larger structure) and Search (which searches and establishes a syntactic relation of two words or phrases). We also illustrate certain universal properties of human language, and present hypotheses regarding how sentence structures are processed in the brain. Hypothesis I is that the Degree of Merger (DoM), i.e., the maximum depth of merged subtrees within a given domain, is a key computational concept to properly measure the complexity of tree structures. Hypothesis II is that the basic frame of the syntactic structure of a given linguistic expression is determined essentially by functional elements, which trigger Merge and Search. We then present our recent functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment, demonstrating that the DoM is indeed a key syntactic factor that accounts for syntax-selective activations in the left inferior frontal gyrus and supramarginal gyrus. Hypothesis III is that the DoM domain changes dynamically in accordance with iterative Merge applications, the Search distances, and/or task requirements. We confirm that the DoM accounts for activations in various sentence types. Hypothesis III successfully explains activation differences between object- and subject-relative clauses, as well as activations during explicit syntactic judgment tasks. A future research on the computational principles of syntax will further deepen our understanding of uniquely human mental faculties. PMID:24385957

Computational principles of syntax in the regions specialized for language: integrating theoretical linguistics and functional neuroimaging.

PubMed

Ohta, Shinri; Fukui, Naoki; Sakai, Kuniyoshi L

2013-01-01

The nature of computational principles of syntax remains to be elucidated. One promising approach to this problem would be to construct formal and abstract linguistic models that parametrically predict the activation modulations in the regions specialized for linguistic processes. In this article, we review recent advances in theoretical linguistics and functional neuroimaging in the following respects. First, we introduce the two fundamental linguistic operations: Merge (which combines two words or phrases to form a larger structure) and Search (which searches and establishes a syntactic relation of two words or phrases). We also illustrate certain universal properties of human language, and present hypotheses regarding how sentence structures are processed in the brain. Hypothesis I is that the Degree of Merger (DoM), i.e., the maximum depth of merged subtrees within a given domain, is a key computational concept to properly measure the complexity of tree structures. Hypothesis II is that the basic frame of the syntactic structure of a given linguistic expression is determined essentially by functional elements, which trigger Merge and Search. We then present our recent functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment, demonstrating that the DoM is indeed a key syntactic factor that accounts for syntax-selective activations in the left inferior frontal gyrus and supramarginal gyrus. Hypothesis III is that the DoM domain changes dynamically in accordance with iterative Merge applications, the Search distances, and/or task requirements. We confirm that the DoM accounts for activations in various sentence types. Hypothesis III successfully explains activation differences between object- and subject-relative clauses, as well as activations during explicit syntactic judgment tasks. A future research on the computational principles of syntax will further deepen our understanding of uniquely human mental faculties.

Phrase Lengths and the Perceived Informativeness of Prosodic Cues in Turkish.

PubMed

Dinçtopal Deniz, Nazik; Fodor, Janet Dean

2017-12-01

It is known from previous studies that in many cases (though not all) the prosodic properties of a spoken utterance reflect aspects of its syntactic structure, and also that in many cases (though not all) listeners can benefit from these prosodic cues. A novel contribution to this literature is the Rational Speaker Hypothesis (RSH), proposed by Clifton, Carlson and Frazier. The RSH maintains that listeners are sensitive to possible reasons for why a speaker might introduce a prosodic break: "listeners treat a prosodic boundary as more informative about the syntax when it flanks short constituents than when it flanks longer constituents," because in the latter case the speaker might have been motivated solely by consideration of optimal phrase lengths. This would effectively reduce the cue value of an appropriately placed prosodic boundary. We present additional evidence for the RSH from Turkish, a language typologically different from English. In addition, our study shows for the first time that the RSH also applies to a prosodic break which conflicts with the syntactic structure, reducing its perceived cue strength if it might have been motivated by length considerations. In this case, the RSH effect is beneficial. Finally, the Turkish data show that prosody-based explanations for parsing preferences such as the RSH do not take the place of traditional syntax-sensitive parsing strategies such as Late Closure. The two sources of guidance co-exist; both are used when available.

Neuroticism as Distancing: Perceptual Sources of Evidence

PubMed Central

Liu, Tianwei; Ode, Scott; Moeller, Sara K.; Robinson, Michael D.

2013-01-01

Several theories and self-reported sources of data link individual differences in negative affectivity to avoidance motivation. Chronic avoidance motivation, through repeated practice, may result in a relatively cognitive distance-enhancing dynamic whereby events and stimuli are perceived as further away from the self, even when they are not threatening. Such predictions are novel, but follow from cybernetic theories of self-regulation. In five studies (total N = 463), relations of this type were investigated. Study 1 presented participants with phrases that were ambiguous and found that trait negative affect predicted phrase interpretation in a distance-enhancing temporal direction. Study 2 replicated this effect across a systematic manipulation of event valence. Study 3 asked individuals to estimate the size of words and found that individuals higher in neuroticism generally perceived words to be smaller than did individuals lower in neuroticism. In Study 4, people high (but not low) in neuroticism perceived words to be shrinking faster than they were growing. In Study 5, greater perceptual distancing, in a font size estimation task, predicted more adverse reactions to negative events in daily life. Although normative effects varied across studies, consistent support for a chronic distancing perspective of individual differences in negative affectivity was found. PMID:23527850

THE PEAKS AND GEOMETRY OF FITNESS LANDSCAPES

PubMed Central

CRONA, KRISTINA; GREENE, DEVIN; BARLOW, MIRIAM

2012-01-01

Fitness landscapes are central in the theory of adaptation. Recent work compares global and local properties of fitness landscapes. It has been shown that multi-peaked fitness landscapes have a local property called reciprocal sign epistasis interactions. The converse is not true. We show that no condition phrased in terms of reciprocal sign epistasis interactions only, implies multiple peaks. We give a sufficient condition for multiple peaks phrased in terms of two-way interactions. This result is surprising since it has been claimed that no sufficient local condition for multiple peaks exist. We show that our result cannot be generalized to sufficient conditions for three or more peaks. Our proof depends on fitness graphs, where nodes represent genotypes and where arrows point toward more fit genotypes. We also use fitness graphs in order to give a new brief proof of the equivalent characterizations of fitness landscapes lacking genetic constraints on accessible mutational trajectories. We compare a recent geometric classification of fitness landscape based on triangulations of polytopes with qualitative aspects of gene interactions. One observation is that fitness graphs provide information not contained in the geometric classification. We argue that a qualitative perspective may help relating theory of fitness landscapes and empirical observations. PMID:23036916

Seeing a Phrase "Time and Again" Matters: The Role of Phrasal Frequency in the Processing of Multiword Sequences

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Siyanova-Chanturia, Anna; Conklin, Kathy; van Heuven, Walter J. B.

2011-01-01

Are speakers sensitive to the frequency with which phrases occur in language? The authors report an eye-tracking study that investigates this by examining the processing of multiword sequences that differ in phrasal frequency by native and proficient nonnative English speakers. Participants read sentences containing 3-word binomial phrases…

Think outside the Box: A Logic-Defying "Impossible" Solution

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Raje, Sonali

2012-01-01

"Think outside the box" is a very common phrase, routinely used to convey the idea of finding creative and unconventional solutions to problems. Although widely used as a cliche in the business world, this phrase is significantly applicable to people who do science for a living, because scientists are constantly developing and testing new ideas.…

Dictogloss or Dicto-Phrase: Which Works Better for Listening Comprehension?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Marashi, Hamid; Khaksar, Mojgan

2013-01-01

This research compared the effect of using dictogloss and dicto-phrase tasks on EFL learners' listening comprehension. To fulfill the purpose of the study, a piloted sample Key English Test (KET) was administered to a total number of 90 Iranian female teenage EFL learners at Kish Language School, Tehran, and then 60 were selected based on their…

"Forty Acres and a Mule" as a Pedagogical Motif

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Burch, Kerry

2008-01-01

This essay revisits an iconic yet now languishing phrase in United States political culture--"Forty Acres and a Mule"--to clarify the meaning of freedom and to assess the contemporary meaning of its betrayal by the U.S. government immediately after the Civil War. Among the few citizens for whom the phrase still retains a semblance of…

On the Screen, in the Mind: An ERP Investigation into the Interaction between Visuo-Spatial Information and Spatial Language during On-Line Processing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Zane, Emily

2016-01-01

This project used Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) to explore neurophysiological brain responses to prepositional phrases involving concrete and abstract reference nouns (e.g., "plate" and "moment," respectively) after the presentation of objects with varying spatial features. Prepositional phrases were headed by "in"…

Russian: A Guide to the Spoken Language.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Department of Defense, Washington, DC.

This Russian language guide is of assistance in carrying on simple conversations in Russian and is used in conjunction with records. Russian ranks after Chinese and English as the third most widespread language in the world. All the words and phrases are written in a simplified spelling which is read like English. Useful words and phrases include…

48 CFR 970.2904-1 - Management and operating contracts.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-10-01

... contracts. (a) Pursuant to 48 CFR 29.401-4(b), the clause at 48 CFR 52.229-10, State of New Mexico Gross... conditions stated. The contracting officer shall modify paragraph (b) of the clause to replace the phrase “Allowable Cost and Payment” with the phrase “Payments and Advances.” (b) Contracting officers shall include...

76 FR 40237 - Approval and Disapproval and Promulgation of Air Quality Implementation Plans; Montana; Revisions...

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2011-07-08

... before permit issuance. The rule only allows installing concrete foundations work, below ground plumbing...)), submitted on May 28, 2003; 17.8.743 (except the phrases ``asphalt concrete plants, mineral crushers'' in 17... following provisions in Subchapter 7: ARM 17.8.743(1)(c) and ARM 17.8.770, the phrase ``asphalt concrete...

20 CFR 345.302 - Definition of terms and phrases used in experience-rating.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-04-01

... for the current calendar year. This ratio is computed to four decimal places. (k) Pooled credit ratio... employer for the calendar year involved in the computation. This ratio is computed to four decimal places... 20 Employees' Benefits 1 2010-04-01 2010-04-01 false Definition of terms and phrases used in...

"Picture Bride" as a Definition of "Third World" Poetry.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fujita, Gayle K.

This conference paper describes how the phrase "picture bride" is used as a metaphor in ethnic poetry. It is used in poems which concern female creativity in the areas of art and housekeeping. The phrase represents the fusion of concepts and ideas which are usually thought of in juxtaposition with each other. These concepts and ideas are…

Acquisition of Generic Noun Phrases in Chinese: Learning about Lions without an '-S'

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tardif, Twila; Gelman, Susan A.; Fu, Xiaolan; Zhu, Liqi

2012-01-01

English-speaking children understand and produce generic expressions in the preschool years, but there are cross-linguistic differences in how generics are expressed. Three studies examined interpretation of generic noun phrases in three- to seven-year-old child (N=192) and adult speakers (N=163) of Mandarin Chinese. Contrary to suggestions by…

Idiom Comprehension Deficits in Relation to Corpus Callosum Agenesis and Hypoplasia in Children with Spina Bifida Meningomyelocele

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Huber-Okrainec, J.; Blaser, S.E.; Dennis, M.

2005-01-01

Idioms are phrases with figurative meanings that are not directly derived from the literal meanings of the words in the phrase. Idiom comprehension varies with: literality, whether the idiom is literally plausible; compositionality, whether individual words contribute to a figurative meaning; and contextual bias. We studied idiom comprehension in…

Moral and Ethical Dimensions of Socioscientific Decision-Making as Integral Components of Scientific Literacy

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sadler, Troy D.

2004-01-01

Science educators have appropriated many meanings for the phrase "scientific literacy" (Champagne & Lovitts, 1989). This paper advances an argument that in order to maintain the usefulness of such a malleable phrase, its users must explicitly address the context of its use. Based on the vision of science education articulated in standards…

To What Extent Do Native and Non-Native Writers Make Use of Collocations?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Durrant, Philip; Schmitt, Norbert

2009-01-01

Usage-based models claim that first language learning is based on the frequency-based analysis of memorised phrases. It is not clear though, whether adult second language learning works in the same way. It has been claimed that non-native language lacks idiomatic formulas, suggesting that learners neglect phrases, focusing instead on orthographic…

What Business Students Should Know about Attorney-Client Privilege

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Draba, Robert; Marshall, Brent

2012-01-01

The case law on attorney-client privilege is extensive and can be somewhat complex. Over seven hundred articles in Westlaw, for example, have the phrase "attorney-client privilege" in the title; in the last three years alone, there have been over 3700 federal cases in which the phrase "attorney-client privilege" appears at least once. However,…

The On-Line Processing of Verb-Phrase Ellipsis in Aphasia

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Poirier, Josee; Shapiro, Lewis P.; Love, Tracy; Grodzinsky, Yosef

2009-01-01

We investigate the on-line processing of verb-phrase ellipsis (VPE) constructions in two brain injured populations: Broca's and Anomic aphasics. VPE constructions are built from two simple clauses; the first is the antecedent clause and the second is the ellipsis clause. The ellipsis clause is missing its verb and object (i.e., its verb phrase…

Phrase Length and Prosody in On-Line Ambiguity Resolution

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Webman-Shafran, Ronit; Fodor, Janet Dean

2016-01-01

We investigated the processing of ambiguous double-PP constructions in Hebrew. Selection restrictions forced the first prepositional phrase (PP1) to attach low, but PP2 could attach maximally high to VP or maximally low to the NP inside PP1. A length contrast in PP2 was also examined. This construction affords more potential locations for prosodic…

Phrase Frequency, Proficiency and Grammaticality Interact in Non-Native Processing: Implications for Theories of SLA

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Shantz, Kailen

2017-01-01

This study reports on a self-paced reading experiment in which native and non-native speakers of English read sentences designed to evaluate the predictions of usage-based and rule-based approaches to second language acquisition (SLA). Critical stimuli were four-word sequences embedded into sentences in which phrase frequency and grammaticality…

Sub-Audible Speech Recognition Based upon Electromyographic Signals

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Jorgensen, Charles C. (Inventor); Agabon, Shane T. (Inventor); Lee, Diana D. (Inventor)

2012-01-01

Method and system for processing and identifying a sub-audible signal formed by a source of sub-audible sounds. Sequences of samples of sub-audible sound patterns ("SASPs") for known words/phrases in a selected database are received for overlapping time intervals, and Signal Processing Transforms ("SPTs") are formed for each sample, as part of a matrix of entry values. The matrix is decomposed into contiguous, non-overlapping two-dimensional cells of entries, and neural net analysis is applied to estimate reference sets of weight coefficients that provide sums with optimal matches to reference sets of values. The reference sets of weight coefficients are used to determine a correspondence between a new (unknown) word/phrase and a word/phrase in the database.

Female Autism Phenotypes Investigated at Different Levels of Language and Developmental Abilities.

PubMed

Howe, Yamini J; O'Rourke, Julia A; Yatchmink, Yvette; Viscidi, Emma W; Jones, Richard N; Morrow, Eric M

2015-11-01

This study investigated the differences in clinical symptoms between females and males with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) across three verbal ability groups (nonverbal, phrase and fluent speech), based on which Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule module was administered to 5723 individuals in four research datasets. In the Simons Simplex Collection and Autism Treatment Network, females with ASD and phrase or fluent speech had lower cognitive, adaptive, and social abilities than males. In the Autism Genetics Resource Exchange and the Autism Consortium, females with phrase or fluent speech had similar or better adaptive and social abilities than males. Females who were nonverbal had similar cognitive, adaptive, and social abilities as males. Population-based longitudinal studies of verbally fluent females with ASD are needed.

Effects of parallel planning on agreement production.

PubMed

Veenstra, Alma; Meyer, Antje S; Acheson, Daniel J

2015-11-01

An important issue in current psycholinguistics is how the time course of utterance planning affects the generation of grammatical structures. The current study investigated the influence of parallel activation of the components of complex noun phrases on the generation of subject-verb agreement. Specifically, the lexical interference account (Gillespie & Pearlmutter, 2011b; Solomon & Pearlmutter, 2004) predicts more agreement errors (i.e., attraction) for subject phrases in which the head and local noun mismatch in number (e.g., the apple next to the pears) when nouns are planned in parallel than when they are planned in sequence. We used a speeded picture description task that yielded sentences such as the apple next to the pears is red. The objects mentioned in the noun phrase were either semantically related or unrelated. To induce agreement errors, pictures sometimes mismatched in number. In order to manipulate the likelihood of parallel processing of the objects and to test the hypothesized relationship between parallel processing and the rate of agreement errors, the pictures were either placed close together or far apart. Analyses of the participants' eye movements and speech onset latencies indicated slower processing of the first object and stronger interference from the related (compared to the unrelated) second object in the close than in the far condition. Analyses of the agreement errors yielded an attraction effect, with more errors in mismatching than in matching conditions. However, the magnitude of the attraction effect did not differ across the close and far conditions. Thus, spatial proximity encouraged parallel processing of the pictures, which led to interference of the associated conceptual and/or lexical representation, but, contrary to the prediction, it did not lead to more attraction errors. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The neurophysiology of language processing shapes the evolution of grammar: evidence from case marking.

PubMed

Bickel, Balthasar; Witzlack-Makarevich, Alena; Choudhary, Kamal K; Schlesewsky, Matthias; Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, Ina

2015-01-01

Do principles of language processing in the brain affect the way grammar evolves over time or is language change just a matter of socio-historical contingency? While the balance of evidence has been ambiguous and controversial, we identify here a neurophysiological constraint on the processing of language that has a systematic effect on the evolution of how noun phrases are marked by case (i.e. by such contrasts as between the English base form she and the object form her). In neurophysiological experiments across diverse languages we found that during processing, participants initially interpret the first base-form noun phrase they hear (e.g. she…) as an agent (which would fit a continuation like … greeted him), even when the sentence later requires the interpretation of a patient role (as in … was greeted). We show that this processing principle is also operative in Hindi, a language where initial base-form noun phrases most commonly denote patients because many agents receive a special case marker ("ergative") and are often left out in discourse. This finding suggests that the principle is species-wide and independent of the structural affordances of specific languages. As such, the principle favors the development and maintenance of case-marking systems that equate base-form cases with agents rather than with patients. We confirm this evolutionary bias by statistical analyses of phylogenetic signals in over 600 languages worldwide, controlling for confounding effects from language contact. Our findings suggest that at least one core property of grammar systematically adapts in its evolution to the neurophysiological conditions of the brain, independently of socio-historical factors. This opens up new avenues for understanding how specific properties of grammar have developed in tight interaction with the biological evolution of our species.

A General Theory of Target Identification: An Analytical Approach to Cognition, Perception, and Knowledge

DTIC Science & Technology

1985-05-01

K. B. Zuber: Quantum Field Theory, McGraw Hill, 1980. 13. Kant , Immanuel : Critique of Pure Reason, Anchor Books, Garden City, NY, (1781). 14. Malcolm...Mystics, Hegel, Kant , Kierkegaard, Marcel (The Mystery of Beina, Vols I and II), Husserl, Heidegger and a host of others. The trouble with all this activity...apperception", to use a Kantian phrase. The rest of the world is as if it were blocked off and what is under consideration is a small part, a micro-world

Automating concept identification in the electronic medical record: an experiment in extracting dosage information.

PubMed Central

Evans, D. A.; Brownlow, N. D.; Hersh, W. R.; Campbell, E. M.

1996-01-01

We discuss the development and evaluation of an automated procedure for extracting drug-dosage information from clinical narratives. The process was developed rapidly using existing technology and resources, including categories of terms from UMLS96. Evaluations over a large training and smaller test set of medical records demonstrate an approximately 80% rate of exact and partial matches' on target phrases, with few false positives and a modest rate of false negatives. The results suggest a strategy for automating general concept identification in electronic medical records. PMID:8947694

Kinematic parameters of signed verbs.

PubMed

Malaia, Evie; Wilbur, Ronnie B; Milkovic, Marina

2013-10-01

Sign language users recruit physical properties of visual motion to convey linguistic information. Research on American Sign Language (ASL) indicates that signers systematically use kinematic features (e.g., velocity, deceleration) of dominant hand motion for distinguishing specific semantic properties of verb classes in production ( Malaia & Wilbur, 2012a) and process these distinctions as part of the phonological structure of these verb classes in comprehension ( Malaia, Ranaweera, Wilbur, & Talavage, 2012). These studies are driven by the event visibility hypothesis by Wilbur (2003), who proposed that such use of kinematic features should be universal to sign language (SL) by the grammaticalization of physics and geometry for linguistic purposes. In a prior motion capture study, Malaia and Wilbur (2012a) lent support for the event visibility hypothesis in ASL, but there has not been quantitative data from other SLs to test the generalization to other languages. The authors investigated the kinematic parameters of predicates in Croatian Sign Language ( Hrvatskom Znakovnom Jeziku [HZJ]). Kinematic features of verb signs were affected both by event structure of the predicate (semantics) and phrase position within the sentence (prosody). The data demonstrate that kinematic features of motion in HZJ verb signs are recruited to convey morphological and prosodic information. This is the first crosslinguistic motion capture confirmation that specific kinematic properties of articulator motion are grammaticalized in other SLs to express linguistic features.

Buzzwords and newspeak

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Swartz, Clifford E.

2000-03-01

You have to read beneath the lines in this business. Every week I get manuscripts filled with words and phrases fraught with cabalistic meaning. Would you believe, for instance, that in using the modeling method of teaching that the carefully structured development and concept flow would lead through Socratic dialogue to a rich classroom discourse? Perhaps it would help if I reminded you that a model is a primary unit of coherently structured knowledge. Of course, I am speaking only of the essence of models that are at the heart of modeling theory. These depend on student-centered teaching that is research-informed, leading to interactive engagement methods and cooperative learning.

Implicit memory in music and language.

PubMed

Ettlinger, Marc; Margulis, Elizabeth H; Wong, Patrick C M

2011-01-01

Research on music and language in recent decades has focused on their overlapping neurophysiological, perceptual, and cognitive underpinnings, ranging from the mechanism for encoding basic auditory cues to the mechanism for detecting violations in phrase structure. These overlaps have most often been identified in musicians with musical knowledge that was acquired explicitly, through formal training. In this paper, we review independent bodies of work in music and language that suggest an important role for implicitly acquired knowledge, implicit memory, and their associated neural structures in the acquisition of linguistic or musical grammar. These findings motivate potential new work that examines music and language comparatively in the context of the implicit memory system.

Resolving Conflicts in Natural and Grammatical Gender Agreement: Evidence from Eye Movements.

PubMed

Dank, Maya; Deutsch, Avital; Bock, Kathryn

2015-08-01

The present research investigated the attraction phenomenon, which commonly occurs in the domain of production but is also apparent in comprehension. It particularly focused on its accessibility to conceptual influence, in analogy to previous findings in production in Hebrew (Deutsch and Dank, J Mem Lang, 60:112-143, 2009). The experiments made use of the contrast between grammatical and natural gender in Hebrew, using complex subject noun phrases containing head nouns and prepositional phrases with local nouns. Noun phrases were manipulated to produce (a) matches and mismatches in grammatical gender between heads and local nouns; and (b) inanimate nouns and animate nouns with natural gender that served either as head or as local nouns. These noun phrases were the subjects of sentences that ended with predicates agreeing in gender with the head noun, with the local noun, or both. The ungrammatical sentences were those in which the gender of the predicate and the head noun did not match. To assess the impact of conflicts in grammatical and natural gender on the time course of reading, participants' eye movements were monitored. The results revealed clear disruptions in reading the predicate due to grammatical-gender mismatches with head and local nouns, in analogy to attraction in production. When the head nouns conveyed natural gender these effects were amplified, but variations in the natural gender of local nouns had negligible consequences. The results imply that comprehension and production are similarly sensitive to the control of grammatical agreement by grammatical and natural gender in subject noun phrases.

Gender and Heritage Spanish Bilingual Grammars: A Study of Code-Mixed Determiner Phrases and Copula Constructions

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Valenzuela, Elena; Faure, Ana; Ramirez-Trujillo, Alma P.; Barski, Ewelina; Pangtay, Yolanda; Diez, Adriana

2012-01-01

The study examined heritage speaker grammars and to what extent they diverge with respect to grammatical gender from adult L2 learners. Results from a preference task involving code-mixed Determiner Phrases (DPs) and code-mixed copula constructions show a difference between these two types of operations. Heritage speakers patterned with the…

Does the Advanced Proficiency Evaluated in Oral-Like Written Text Support Syntactic Parsing in a Written Academic Text among L2 Japanese Learners?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kitajima, Ryu

2016-01-01

Corpus linguistics identifies the qualitative difference in the characteristics of spoken discourse vs. written academic discourse. Whereas spoken discourse makes greater use of finite dependent clauses functioning as constituents in other clauses, written academic discourse incorporates noun phrase constituents and complex phrases. This claim can…

Intentional Control and Operational Constraints in Prosodic Phrasing: A Study of Picture-Elicited Narrations by French Children

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Vion, Monique; Colas, Annie

2009-01-01

This study deals with the determinants of prosodic phrasing in French schoolchildren's narratives. Children (aged 7 to 11) told picture stories to a silent same-age peer. The establishment of temporal and/or causal relations between the events was more or less guided by the drawings (ordered vs. arbitrary sequences). The comprehension of the…

40 CFR Appendix A to Part 272 - State Requirements

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-07-01

...)(ii) through (iii)); 370.2(a); 370.2(b)(1) through (b)(15) “battery”; 370.2(b)(15) “bedrock” (January... last sentence and the phrase, “ recycling” in the first sentence), 2-7-111(C)(2)(a) (except the phrase “Except as provided in subparagraph b of this paragraph” and the word “recycling” in the first sentence...

Two-Year-Olds Use the Generic/Nongeneric Distinction to Guide Their Inferences about Novel Kinds

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Graham, Susan A.; Nayer, Samantha L.; Gelman, Susan A.

2011-01-01

These studies investigated two hundred and forty-four 24- and 30-month-olds' sensitivity to generic versus nongeneric language when acquiring knowledge about novel kinds. Toddlers were administered an inductive inference task, during which they heard a generic noun phrase (e.g., "Blicks drink milk") or a nongeneric noun phrase (e.g., "This blick…

Sentential Context and the Interpretation of Familiar Open-Compounds and Novel Modifier-Noun Phrases

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gagne, Christina L.; Spalding, Thomas L.; Gorrie, Melissa C.

2005-01-01

Two experiments investigated the influence of sentential context on the relative ease of deriving a particular meaning for novel and familiar compounds. Experiment 1 determined which of two possible meanings was preferred for a set of novel phrases. Experiment 2 used both novel (e.g., "brain sponge") and familiar compounds (e.g., "bug spray"). The…

A Reference Grammar of Spoken Kannada.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Schiffman, Harold

This reference grammar is a description of the speech of educated people of the Bangalore/Mysore area of Karnataka State in South India. This particular dialect is used in films and, to some extent, on the radio. The four sections of the book deal with: (1) phonology, (2) the noun phrase, (3) the verb phrase, and (4) syntax. Each item that is…

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders Who Do Not Develop Phrase Speech in the Preschool Years

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Norrelgen, Fritjof; Fernell, Elisabeth; Eriksson, Mats; Hedvall, Asa; Persson, Clara; Sjölin, Maria; Gillberg, Christopher; Kjellmer, Liselotte

2015-01-01

There is uncertainty about the proportion of children with autism spectrum disorders who do not develop phrase speech during the preschool years. The main purpose of this study was to examine this ratio in a population-based community sample of children. The cohort consisted of 165 children (141 boys, 24 girls) with autism spectrum disorders aged…

Identifying missing dictionary entries with frequency-conserving context models.

PubMed

Williams, Jake Ryland; Clark, Eric M; Bagrow, James P; Danforth, Christopher M; Dodds, Peter Sheridan

2015-10-01

In an effort to better understand meaning from natural language texts, we explore methods aimed at organizing lexical objects into contexts. A number of these methods for organization fall into a family defined by word ordering. Unlike demographic or spatial partitions of data, these collocation models are of special importance for their universal applicability. While we are interested here in text and have framed our treatment appropriately, our work is potentially applicable to other areas of research (e.g., speech, genomics, and mobility patterns) where one has ordered categorical data (e.g., sounds, genes, and locations). Our approach focuses on the phrase (whether word or larger) as the primary meaning-bearing lexical unit and object of study. To do so, we employ our previously developed framework for generating word-conserving phrase-frequency data. Upon training our model with the Wiktionary, an extensive, online, collaborative, and open-source dictionary that contains over 100000 phrasal definitions, we develop highly effective filters for the identification of meaningful, missing phrase entries. With our predictions we then engage the editorial community of the Wiktionary and propose short lists of potential missing entries for definition, developing a breakthrough, lexical extraction technique and expanding our knowledge of the defined English lexicon of phrases.

Machine aided indexing from natural language text

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Silvester, June P.; Genuardi, Michael T.; Klingbiel, Paul H.

1993-01-01

The NASA Lexical Dictionary (NLD) Machine Aided Indexing (MAI) system was designed to (1) reuse the indexing of the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC); (2) reuse the indexing of the Department of Energy (DOE); and (3) reduce the time required for original indexing. This was done by automatically generating appropriate NASA thesaurus terms from either the other agency's index terms, or, for original indexing, from document titles and abstracts. The NASA STI Program staff devised two different ways to generate thesaurus terms from text. The first group of programs identified noun phrases by a parsing method that allowed for conjunctions and certain prepositions, on the assumption that indexable concepts are found in such phrases. Results were not always satisfactory, and it was noted that indexable concepts often occurred outside of noun phrases. The first method also proved to be too slow for the ultimate goal of interactive (online) MAI. The second group of programs used the knowledge base (KB), word proximity, and frequency of word and phrase occurrence to identify indexable concepts. Both methods are described and illustrated. Online MAI has been achieved, as well as several spinoff benefits, which are also described.

Humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) song unit and phrase repertoire progression on a subarctic feeding ground.

PubMed

Magnúsdóttir, Edda E; Miller, Patrick J O; Lim, Rangyn; Rasmussen, Marianne H; Lammers, Marc O; Svavarsson, Jörundur

2015-11-01

The songs of the male humpback whales have traditionally been associated with breeding activities at low latitude breeding grounds during winter. This study provides the first detailed analysis of humpback whale songs recorded in the subarctic waters of Iceland using passive acoustic recorders. Recordings were collected during three winter seasons: 2008-2009, 2009-2010, and 2011 during which singing was detected in all seasons. Peak song occurrence was during January-February in all years; this coincides with the timing of the peak breeding season of humpback whales in the Northern hemisphere. A total of 2810 song units from all years were measured and statistically divided into 14 groups, which constructed 25 phrases. The song unit repertoires included stable song unit types that occurred frequently in songs during all years while the occurrence of other song unit types varied more between years. Around 60% of the phrases were conserved between the first two study seasons, while the majority of phrases found during the last study season had not been observed before. This study indicates the importance of a subarctic feeding ground for song progression and song exchange and possibly as an opportunistic mating ground for migrating or overwintering humpback whales.

A Frequency and Error Analysis of the Use of Determiners, the Relationships between Noun Phrases, and the Structure of Discourse in English Essays by Native English Writers and Native Chinese, Taiwanese, and Korean Learners of English as a Second Language

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gressang, Jane E.

2010-01-01

Second language (L2) learners notoriously have trouble using articles in their target languages (e.g., "a", "an", "the" in English). However, researchers disagree about the patterns and causes of these errors. Past studies have found that L2 English learners: (1) Predominantly omit articles (White 2003, Robertson 2000), (2) Overuse "the" (Huebner…

Keep it local (and final): Remnant preferences in "let alone" ellipsis.

PubMed

Harris, Jesse A; Carlson, Katy

2016-01-01

The let alone construction (John can't run a mile, let alone a marathon) differs from standard coordination structures (with and or but) by requiring ellipsis of the second conjunct--for example, a marathon is the remnant of an elided clause [[see text] a marathon]. In support of an ellipsis account, a corpus study of British and American English finds that let alone exhibits a Locality bias, as the second conjunct preferentially contrasts with the nearest lexical item of the same syntactic type. Two self-paced reading studies show that the Locality bias is active during online processing, but must be reconciled with indicators of semantic contrast and discourse information. Further, a sentence-rating study shows that the Locality bias interacts with a Finality bias that favours placing the let alone phrase at the end of a clause, which sometimes necessitates a nonlocal contrast. Together, the results show how a general bias in ellipsis for local contrasts is affected by discourse demands, such as the need for scalar contrast imposed by let alone, thereby offering a window into how possibly divergent syntactic and discourse constraints impact sentence processing.

Incorporating Speech Recognition into a Natural User Interface

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Chapa, Nicholas

2017-01-01

The Augmented/ Virtual Reality (AVR) Lab has been working to study the applicability of recent virtual and augmented reality hardware and software to KSC operations. This includes the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Microsoft HoloLens, and Unity game engine. My project in this lab is to integrate voice recognition and voice commands into an easy to modify system that can be added to an existing portion of a Natural User Interface (NUI). A NUI is an intuitive and simple to use interface incorporating visual, touch, and speech recognition. The inclusion of speech recognition capability will allow users to perform actions or make inquiries using only their voice. The simplicity of needing only to speak to control an on-screen object or enact some digital action means that any user can quickly become accustomed to using this system. Multiple programs were tested for use in a speech command and recognition system. Sphinx4 translates speech to text using a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) based Language Model, an Acoustic Model, and a word Dictionary running on Java. PocketSphinx had similar functionality to Sphinx4 but instead ran on C. However, neither of these programs were ideal as building a Java or C wrapper slowed performance. The most ideal speech recognition system tested was the Unity Engine Grammar Recognizer. A Context Free Grammar (CFG) structure is written in an XML file to specify the structure of phrases and words that will be recognized by Unity Grammar Recognizer. Using Speech Recognition Grammar Specification (SRGS) 1.0 makes modifying the recognized combinations of words and phrases very simple and quick to do. With SRGS 1.0, semantic information can also be added to the XML file, which allows for even more control over how spoken words and phrases are interpreted by Unity. Additionally, using a CFG with SRGS 1.0 produces a Finite State Machine (FSM) functionality limiting the potential for incorrectly heard words or phrases. The purpose of my project was to investigate options for a Speech Recognition System. To that end I attempted to integrate Sphinx4 into a user interface. Sphinx4 had great accuracy and is the only free program able to perform offline speech dictation. However it had a limited dictionary of words that could be recognized, single syllable words were almost impossible for it to hear, and since it ran on Java it could not be integrated into the Unity based NUI. PocketSphinx ran much faster than Sphinx4 which would've made it ideal as a plugin to the Unity NUI, unfortunately creating a C# wrapper for the C code made the program unusable with Unity due to the wrapper slowing code execution and class files becoming unreachable. Unity Grammar Recognizer is the ideal speech recognition interface, it is flexible in recognizing multiple variations of the same command. It is also the most accurate program in recognizing speech due to using an XML grammar to specify speech structure instead of relying solely on a Dictionary and Language model. The Unity Grammar Recognizer will be used with the NUI for these reasons as well as being written in C# which further simplifies the incorporation.

Structured prediction models for RNN based sequence labeling in clinical text.

PubMed

Jagannatha, Abhyuday N; Yu, Hong

2016-11-01

Sequence labeling is a widely used method for named entity recognition and information extraction from unstructured natural language data. In clinical domain one major application of sequence labeling involves extraction of medical entities such as medication, indication, and side-effects from Electronic Health Record narratives. Sequence labeling in this domain, presents its own set of challenges and objectives. In this work we experimented with various CRF based structured learning models with Recurrent Neural Networks. We extend the previously studied LSTM-CRF models with explicit modeling of pairwise potentials. We also propose an approximate version of skip-chain CRF inference with RNN potentials. We use these methodologies for structured prediction in order to improve the exact phrase detection of various medical entities.

Structured prediction models for RNN based sequence labeling in clinical text

PubMed Central

Jagannatha, Abhyuday N; Yu, Hong

2016-01-01

Sequence labeling is a widely used method for named entity recognition and information extraction from unstructured natural language data. In clinical domain one major application of sequence labeling involves extraction of medical entities such as medication, indication, and side-effects from Electronic Health Record narratives. Sequence labeling in this domain, presents its own set of challenges and objectives. In this work we experimented with various CRF based structured learning models with Recurrent Neural Networks. We extend the previously studied LSTM-CRF models with explicit modeling of pairwise potentials. We also propose an approximate version of skip-chain CRF inference with RNN potentials. We use these methodologies1 for structured prediction in order to improve the exact phrase detection of various medical entities. PMID:28004040

Portmanteau Constructions, Phrase Structure, and Linearization.

PubMed

Chan, Brian Hok-Shing

2015-01-01

In bilingual code-switching which involves language-pairs with contrasting head-complement orders (i.e., head-initial vs. head-final), a head may be lexicalized from both languages with its complement sandwiched in the middle. These so-called "portmanteau" sentences (Nishimura, 1985, 1986; Sankoff et al., 1990, etc.) have been attested for decades, but they had never received a systematic, formal analysis in terms of current syntactic theory before a few recent attempts (Hicks, 2010, 2012). Notwithstanding this lack of attention, these structures are in fact highly relevant to theories of linearization and phrase structure. More specifically, they challenge binary-branching (Kayne, 1994, 2004, 2005) as well as the Antisymmetry hypothesis (ibid.). Not explained by current grammatical models of code-switching, including the Equivalence Constraint (Poplack, 1980), the Matrix Language Frame Model (Myers-Scotton, 1993, 2002, etc.), and the Bilingual Speech Model (Muysken, 2000, 2013), the portmanteau construction indeed looks uncommon or abnormal, defying any systematic account. However, the recurrence of these structures in various datasets and constraints on them do call for an explanation. This paper suggests an account which lies with syntax and also with the psycholinguistics of bilingualism. Assuming that linearization is a process at the Sensori-Motor (SM) interface (Chomsky, 2005, 2013), this paper sees that word order is not fixed in a syntactic tree but it is set in the production process, and much information of word order rests in the processor, for instance, outputting a head before its complement (i.e., head-initial word order) or the reverse (i.e., head-final word order). As for the portmanteau construction, it is the output of bilingual speakers co-activating two sets of head-complement orders which summon the phonetic forms of the same word in both languages. Under this proposal, the underlying structure of a portmanteau construction is as simple as an XP in which a head X merges with its complement YP and projects an XP (i.e., X YP → [XP X YP]).

Portmanteau Constructions, Phrase Structure, and Linearization

PubMed Central

Chan, Brian Hok-Shing

2015-01-01

In bilingual code-switching which involves language-pairs with contrasting head-complement orders (i.e., head-initial vs. head-final), a head may be lexicalized from both languages with its complement sandwiched in the middle. These so-called “portmanteau” sentences (Nishimura, 1985, 1986; Sankoff et al., 1990, etc.) have been attested for decades, but they had never received a systematic, formal analysis in terms of current syntactic theory before a few recent attempts (Hicks, 2010, 2012). Notwithstanding this lack of attention, these structures are in fact highly relevant to theories of linearization and phrase structure. More specifically, they challenge binary-branching (Kayne, 1994, 2004, 2005) as well as the Antisymmetry hypothesis (ibid.). Not explained by current grammatical models of code-switching, including the Equivalence Constraint (Poplack, 1980), the Matrix Language Frame Model (Myers-Scotton, 1993, 2002, etc.), and the Bilingual Speech Model (Muysken, 2000, 2013), the portmanteau construction indeed looks uncommon or abnormal, defying any systematic account. However, the recurrence of these structures in various datasets and constraints on them do call for an explanation. This paper suggests an account which lies with syntax and also with the psycholinguistics of bilingualism. Assuming that linearization is a process at the Sensori-Motor (SM) interface (Chomsky, 2005, 2013), this paper sees that word order is not fixed in a syntactic tree but it is set in the production process, and much information of word order rests in the processor, for instance, outputting a head before its complement (i.e., head-initial word order) or the reverse (i.e., head-final word order). As for the portmanteau construction, it is the output of bilingual speakers co-activating two sets of head-complement orders which summon the phonetic forms of the same word in both languages. Under this proposal, the underlying structure of a portmanteau construction is as simple as an XP in which a head X merges with its complement YP and projects an XP (i.e., X YP → [XP X YP]). PMID:26733894

Does the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy Predict the Difficulty Order in the Acquisition of Japanese Relative Clauses?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ozeki, Hiromi; Shirai, Yasuhiro

2007-01-01

Although Keenan and Comrie's (1977) noun phrase accessibility hierarchy (NPAH) has been shown to predict the difficulty order of relative clauses (RCs) in SLA, most studies of the NPAH have been on European languages. This paper tests the prediction for Japanese. Study 1 analyzes RCs in an oral interview corpus from 90 learners of Japanese at four…

Implications of Time Adjustments at Micro, Macro and Meso Levels in Undergraduate and Graduate Piano Students' Performance

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

dos Santos, Regina Antunes Teixeira; Gerling, Cristina Capparelli; de Bortoli, Álvaro Luiz

2017-01-01

A short piano piece was prepared by undergraduate and graduate piano students (N = 15) without guidance from their piano teachers. Temporal parameters were analyzed in several time frames, from a phrase-to-phrase level to an interonset interval. At a macro level, local tempo was shown to be a crucial parameter that divided the students into two…

Do "We" Really Live in Rapidly Changing Times? Questions Concerning Time, Childhood, Technology and Education

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gibbons, Andrew

2016-01-01

The arrival of digital media in early education appears to have been both the cause and effect of an idea of a universal experience of rapidly changing time. In this article, the role and purpose of the phrase "we live in rapidly changing times" is of critical concern. The phrase is questioned in order to avoid taking its meaning for…

Conceptual Plural Information Is Used to Guide Early Parsing Decisions: Evidence from Garden-Path Sentences with Reciprocal Verbs

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Patson, Nikole D.; Ferreira, Fernanda

2009-01-01

In three eyetracking studies, we investigated the role of conceptual plurality in initial parsing decisions in temporarily ambiguous sentences with reciprocal verbs (e.g., "While the lovers kissed the baby played alone"). We varied the subject of the first clause using three types of plural noun phrases: conjoined noun phrases ("the bride and the…

Teaching the Order of Adjectives in the English Noun Phrase.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ney, James W.

A number of studies on the order of adjectives in the English noun phrase are reviewed. Analysis of the studies and examples used in them indicates that almost any order of adjective seems to be possible depending on the intended meaning of the speaker or the situation in which the speaker frames an utterance. To see if in fact the ordering of…

Syntactic and Prosodic Computations in the Resolution of Relative Clause Attachment Ambiguity by English-French Learners

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dekydtspotter, Laurent; Donaldson, Bryan; Edmonds, Amanda C.; Fultz, Audrey Liljestrand; Petrush, Rebecca A.

2008-01-01

This study investigates the manner in which syntax, prosody, and context interact when second- and fourth-semester college-level English-French learners process relative clause (RC) attachment to either the first noun phrase (NP1) or the second noun phrase (NP2) in complex nominal expressions such as "le secretaire du psychologue qui se promene"…

Fraz ak Mo Ki Itil Angle-Kreyol Ayisyen = English-Haitian Creole Phrasebook with Useful Wordlist (for Kreyol Speakers).

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Department of State, Washington, DC. Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration.

This phrasebook with wordlist is designed for speakers of Haitian Creole who are immigrants to the United States. The English phrases presented are grouped by subject and selected for their directness, brevity, and relevance to the needs of newly-arrived residents. Most are presented in the form of brief, two-line dialogues. Phrases and…

JPRS Report, Soviet Union, Political Affairs, Republic Language Legislation.

DTIC Science & Technology

1989-12-05

reference materials ( dictionaries , termi- nology glossaries, phrase books, self-taught books, and so on), and qualified specialists in the field of...textbooks; d) to publish self-taught manuals, phrase books, and explanatory and bilingual dictionaries for the aid of persons desiring to study...Armenian. To create the nec- essary printing facility base to publish high-quality illus- trated dictionaries ; to provide uninterrupted delivery of

Guidance and Control Software,

DTIC Science & Technology

1980-05-01

commitments of function, cost, and schedule . The phrase "software engineering" was intended to contrast with the phrase "computer science" the latter aims...the software problems of cost, delivery schedule , and quality were gradually being recognized at the highest management levels. Thus, in a project... schedule dates. Although the analysis of software problems indicated that the entire software development process (figure 1) needed new methods, only

Terminology extraction from medical texts in Polish

PubMed Central

2014-01-01

Background Hospital documents contain free text describing the most important facts relating to patients and their illnesses. These documents are written in specific language containing medical terminology related to hospital treatment. Their automatic processing can help in verifying the consistency of hospital documentation and obtaining statistical data. To perform this task we need information on the phrases we are looking for. At the moment, clinical Polish resources are sparse. The existing terminologies, such as Polish Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), do not provide sufficient coverage for clinical tasks. It would be helpful therefore if it were possible to automatically prepare, on the basis of a data sample, an initial set of terms which, after manual verification, could be used for the purpose of information extraction. Results Using a combination of linguistic and statistical methods for processing over 1200 children hospital discharge records, we obtained a list of single and multiword terms used in hospital discharge documents written in Polish. The phrases are ordered according to their presumed importance in domain texts measured by the frequency of use of a phrase and the variety of its contexts. The evaluation showed that the automatically identified phrases cover about 84% of terms in domain texts. At the top of the ranked list, only 4% out of 400 terms were incorrect while out of the final 200, 20% of expressions were either not domain related or syntactically incorrect. We also observed that 70% of the obtained terms are not included in the Polish MeSH. Conclusions Automatic terminology extraction can give results which are of a quality high enough to be taken as a starting point for building domain related terminological dictionaries or ontologies. This approach can be useful for preparing terminological resources for very specific subdomains for which no relevant terminologies already exist. The evaluation performed showed that none of the tested ranking procedures were able to filter out all improperly constructed noun phrases from the top of the list. Careful choice of noun phrases is crucial to the usefulness of the created terminological resource in applications such as lexicon construction or acquisition of semantic relations from texts. PMID:24976943

Terminology extraction from medical texts in Polish.

PubMed

Marciniak, Małgorzata; Mykowiecka, Agnieszka

2014-01-01

Hospital documents contain free text describing the most important facts relating to patients and their illnesses. These documents are written in specific language containing medical terminology related to hospital treatment. Their automatic processing can help in verifying the consistency of hospital documentation and obtaining statistical data. To perform this task we need information on the phrases we are looking for. At the moment, clinical Polish resources are sparse. The existing terminologies, such as Polish Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), do not provide sufficient coverage for clinical tasks. It would be helpful therefore if it were possible to automatically prepare, on the basis of a data sample, an initial set of terms which, after manual verification, could be used for the purpose of information extraction. Using a combination of linguistic and statistical methods for processing over 1200 children hospital discharge records, we obtained a list of single and multiword terms used in hospital discharge documents written in Polish. The phrases are ordered according to their presumed importance in domain texts measured by the frequency of use of a phrase and the variety of its contexts. The evaluation showed that the automatically identified phrases cover about 84% of terms in domain texts. At the top of the ranked list, only 4% out of 400 terms were incorrect while out of the final 200, 20% of expressions were either not domain related or syntactically incorrect. We also observed that 70% of the obtained terms are not included in the Polish MeSH. Automatic terminology extraction can give results which are of a quality high enough to be taken as a starting point for building domain related terminological dictionaries or ontologies. This approach can be useful for preparing terminological resources for very specific subdomains for which no relevant terminologies already exist. The evaluation performed showed that none of the tested ranking procedures were able to filter out all improperly constructed noun phrases from the top of the list. Careful choice of noun phrases is crucial to the usefulness of the created terminological resource in applications such as lexicon construction or acquisition of semantic relations from texts.

Mixed metaphors: Electrophysiological brain responses to (un)expected concrete and abstract prepositional phrases.

PubMed

Zane, Emily; Shafer, Valerie

2018-02-01

Languages around the world use spatial terminology, like prepositions, to describe non-spatial, abstract concepts, including time (e.g., in the moment). The Metaphoric Mapping Theory explains this pattern by positing that a universal human cognitive process underlies it, whereby abstract concepts are conceptualized via the application of concrete, three-dimensional space onto abstract domains. The alternative view is that the use of spatial propositions in abstract phrases is idiomatic, and thus does not trigger metaphoric mapping. In the current study, event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to examine the time-course of neural processing of concrete and abstract phrases consisting of the prepositions in or on followed by congruent and incongruent nouns (e.g., in the bowl/plate and in the moment/mend). ERPs were recorded from the onset of reference nouns in 28 adult participants using a 128-channel electrode net. Results show that congruency has differential effects on neural measures, depending on whether the noun is concrete or abstract. Incongruent reference nouns in concrete phrases (e.g., on the bowl) elicited a significant central negativity (an N400 effect), while incongruent reference nouns in abstract phrases (e.g., on the moment) did not. These results suggest that spatially incongruent concrete nouns are semantically unexpected (N400 effect). A P600 effect, which might indicate rechecking, reanalysis and/or reconstruction, was predicted for incongruent abstract nouns, but was not observed, possibly due to the variability in abstract stimuli. Findings cast doubt on accounts claiming that abstract uses of prepositions are cognitively and metaphorically linked to their spatial sense during natural, on-line processing. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Implementation of the common phrase index method on the phrase query for information retrieval

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Fatmawati, Triyah; Zaman, Badrus; Werdiningsih, Indah

2017-08-01

As the development of technology, the process of finding information on the news text is easy, because the text of the news is not only distributed in print media, such as newspapers, but also in electronic media that can be accessed using the search engine. In the process of finding relevant documents on the search engine, a phrase often used as a query. The number of words that make up the phrase query and their position obviously affect the relevance of the document produced. As a result, the accuracy of the information obtained will be affected. Based on the outlined problem, the purpose of this research was to analyze the implementation of the common phrase index method on information retrieval. This research will be conducted in English news text and implemented on a prototype to determine the relevance level of the documents produced. The system is built with the stages of pre-processing, indexing, term weighting calculation, and cosine similarity calculation. Then the system will display the document search results in a sequence, based on the cosine similarity. Furthermore, system testing will be conducted using 100 documents and 20 queries. That result is then used for the evaluation stage. First, determine the relevant documents using kappa statistic calculation. Second, determine the system success rate using precision, recall, and F-measure calculation. In this research, the result of kappa statistic calculation was 0.71, so that the relevant documents are eligible for the system evaluation. Then the calculation of precision, recall, and F-measure produces precision of 0.37, recall of 0.50, and F-measure of 0.43. From this result can be said that the success rate of the system to produce relevant documents is low.

Abstract numeric relations and the visual structure of algebra.

PubMed

Landy, David; Brookes, David; Smout, Ryan

2014-09-01

Formal algebras are among the most powerful and general mechanisms for expressing quantitative relational statements; yet, even university engineering students, who are relatively proficient with algebraic manipulation, struggle with and often fail to correctly deploy basic aspects of algebraic notation (Clement, 1982). In the cognitive tradition, it has often been assumed that skilled users of these formalisms treat situations in terms of semantic properties encoded in an abstract syntax that governs the use of notation without particular regard to the details of the physical structure of the equation itself (Anderson, 2005; Hegarty, Mayer, & Monk, 1995). We explore how the notational structure of verbal descriptions or algebraic equations (e.g., the spatial proximity of certain words or the visual alignment of numbers and symbols in an equation) plays a role in the process of interpreting or constructing symbolic equations. We propose in particular that construction processes involve an alignment of notational structures across representation systems, biasing reasoners toward the selection of formal notations that maintain the visuospatial structure of source representations. For example, in the statement "There are 5 elephants for every 3 rhinoceroses," the spatial proximity of 5 and elephants and 3 and rhinoceroses will bias reasoners to write the incorrect expression 5E = 3R, because that expression maintains the spatial relationships encoded in the source representation. In 3 experiments, participants constructed equations with given structure, based on story problems with a variety of phrasings. We demonstrate how the notational alignment approach accounts naturally for a variety of previously reported phenomena in equation construction and successfully predicts error patterns that are not accounted for by prior explanations, such as the left to right transcription heuristic.

Two-Dimensional Grammars And Their Applications To Artificial Intelligence

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lee, Edward T.

1987-05-01

During the past several years, the concepts and techniques of two-dimensional grammars1,2 have attracted growing attention as promising avenues of approach to problems in picture generation as well as in picture description3 representation, recognition, transformation and manipulation. Two-dimensional grammar techniques serve the purpose of exploiting the structure or underlying relationships in a picture. This approach attempts to describe a complex picture in terms of their components and their relative positions. This resembles the way a sentence is described in terms of its words and phrases, and the terms structural picture recognition, linguistic picture recognition, or syntactic picture recognition are often used. By using this approach, the problem of picture recognition becomes similar to that of phrase recognition in a language. However, describing pictures using a string grammar (one-dimensional grammar), the only relation between sub-pictures and/or primitives is the concatenation; that is each picture or primitive can be connected only at the left or right. This one-dimensional relation has not been very effective in describing two-dimensional pictures. A natural generaliza-tion is to use two-dimensional grammars. In this paper, two-dimensional grammars and their applications to artificial intelligence are presented. Picture grammars and two-dimensional grammars are introduced and illustrated by examples. In particular, two-dimensional grammars for generating all possible squares and all possible rhombuses are presented. The applications of two-dimensional grammars to solving region filling problems are discussed. An algorithm for region filling using two-dimensional grammars is presented together with illustrative examples. The advantages of using this algorithm in terms of computation time are also stated. A high-level description of a two-level picture generation system is proposed. The first level is the picture primitive generation using two-dimensional grammars. The second level is picture generation using either string description or entity-relationship (ER) diagram description. Illustrative examples are also given. The advantages of ER diagram description together with its comparison to string description are also presented. The results obtained in this paper may have useful applications in artificial intelligence, robotics, expert systems, picture processing, pattern recognition, knowledge engineering and pictorial database design. Furthermore, examples related to satellite surveillance and identifications are also included.

Method for automatic measurement of second language speaking proficiency

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bernstein, Jared; Balogh, Jennifer

2005-04-01

Spoken language proficiency is intuitively related to effective and efficient communication in spoken interactions. However, it is difficult to derive a reliable estimate of spoken language proficiency by situated elicitation and evaluation of a person's communicative behavior. This paper describes the task structure and scoring logic of a group of fully automatic spoken language proficiency tests (for English, Spanish and Dutch) that are delivered via telephone or Internet. Test items are presented in spoken form and require a spoken response. Each test is automatically-scored and primarily based on short, decontextualized tasks that elicit integrated listening and speaking performances. The tests present several types of tasks to candidates, including sentence repetition, question answering, sentence construction, and story retelling. The spoken responses are scored according to the lexical content of the response and a set of acoustic base measures on segments, words and phrases, which are scaled with IRT methods or parametrically combined to optimize fit to human listener judgments. Most responses are isolated spoken phrases and sentences that are scored according to their linguistic content, their latency, and their fluency and pronunciation. The item development procedures and item norming are described.

Linguistic complexity and information structure in Korean: Evidence from eye-tracking during reading

PubMed Central

Lee, Yoonhyoung; Lee, Hanjung; Gordon, Peter C.

2006-01-01

The nature of the memory processes that support language comprehension and the manner in which information packaging influences online sentence processing were investigated in three experiments that used eye-tracking during reading to measure the ease of understanding complex sentences in Korean. All three experiments examined reading of embedded complement sentences; the third experiment additionally examined reading of sentences with object-modifying, object-extracted relative clauses. In Korean, both of these structures place two NPs with nominative case marking early in the sentence, with the embedded and matrix verbs following later. The type (pronoun, name or description) of these two critical NPs was varied in the experiments. When the initial NPs were of the same type, comprehension was slowed after participants had read the sentence-final verbs, a finding that supports the view that working memory in language comprehension is constrained by similarity-based interference during the retrieval of information necessary to determine the syntactic or semantic relations between noun phrases and verb phrases. Ease of comprehension was also influenced by the association between type of NP and syntactic position, with the best performance being observed when more definite NPs (pronouns and names) were in a prominent syntactic position (e.g., matrix subject) and less definite NPs (descriptions) were in a non-prominent syntactic position (embedded subject). This pattern provides evidence that the interpretation of sentences is facilitated by consistent packaging of information in different linguistic elements. PMID:16970936

Neural correlates of prosodic boundary perception in German preschoolers: If pause is present, pitch can go.

PubMed

Männel, Claudia; Friederici, Angela D

2016-02-01

Children׳s perception of prosodic phrasing provides a head start into the discovery of speech structure. Based on the close prosody-syntax correspondence, children can infer the underlying syntactic structure from the acoustic modulations of prosodic boundaries, typically consisting of co-occurring pitch changes, preboundary lengthening, and pausing. Previous electrophysiological studies revealed that listeners are to some degree flexible in the detection of major prosodic boundaries that are not marked with all three of the suprasegmental cues. Adults and 6-year-olds still showed the brain response for prosodic boundary perception, the Closure Positive Shift (CPS), when pauses marking boundaries were deleted. In contrast, younger children at 3 years did not show this ability yet, but required pausing to complement the other boundary cues. Following the hypothesis that German weights duration cues more heavily than pitch cues, we here examined 3-year-olds׳ brain responses to prosodic phrasing, testing the role of boundary-related pitch changes. Results revealed that children at this age even showed the CPS in response to pitch-neutralized boundaries with only pausing and preboundary lengthening being present. These results indicate differential roles of acoustic cues in boundary perception, with a preferential reliance on duration cues over pitch changes in 3-year-olds. This preference likely results from the characteristics of the German intonation system and furthers the discussion of cross-linguistic differences in the weighting of prosodic boundary cues. Copyright © 2015. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Experiments in concept modeling for radiographic image reports.

PubMed Central

Bell, D S; Pattison-Gordon, E; Greenes, R A

1994-01-01

OBJECTIVE: Development of methods for building concept models to support structured data entry and image retrieval in chest radiography. DESIGN: An organizing model for chest-radiographic reporting was built by analyzing manually a set of natural-language chest-radiograph reports. During model building, clinician-informaticians judged alternative conceptual structures according to four criteria: content of clinically relevant detail, provision for semantic constraints, provision for canonical forms, and simplicity. The organizing model was applied in representing three sample reports in their entirety. To explore the potential for automatic model discovery, the representation of one sample report was compared with the noun phrases derived from the same report by the CLARIT natural-language processing system. RESULTS: The organizing model for chest-radiographic reporting consists of 62 concept types and 17 relations, arranged in an inheritance network. The broadest types in the model include finding, anatomic locus, procedure, attribute, and status. Diagnoses are modeled as a subtype of finding. Representing three sample reports in their entirety added 79 narrower concept types. Some CLARIT noun phrases suggested valid associations among subtypes of finding, status, and anatomic locus. CONCLUSIONS: A manual modeling process utilizing explicitly stated criteria for making modeling decisions produced an organizing model that showed consistency in early testing. A combination of top-down and bottom-up modeling was required. Natural-language processing may inform model building, but algorithms that would replace manual modeling were not discovered. Further progress in modeling will require methods for objective model evaluation and tools for formalizing the model-building process. PMID:7719807

Comparative study on the song behavior and song control nuclei in male and female Mongolian larks (Melanocorypha mongolica).

PubMed

Zhang, Xuebo; Zeng, Shaoju; Zhang, Xinwen; Zuo, Mingxue

2011-09-12

Songbirds can produce a remarkable diversity of songs, which is well-characterized learned behavior that reflects the basic processes of language learning in humans. As song control nuclei governing song behavior has been identified, bird song provides an excellent model to address the relationship between brain areas and their controlling behavior. The Mongolian lark (Melanocorypha mongolica), a species of the Alaudidae family, is well known for its elaborate singing and ability to learn new songs, even in adulthood. Here, we studied the singing behavior and underlying neural structures of the Mongolian lark in both sexes. We found that the sizes of song bouts and song phrases (song repertoires) in male Mongolian larks are extremely large, and that each song repertoire or phrase has a complex structure, comprising several different syllables that seldom appear in other types of song bouts. In accordance with these complex songs, Mongolian lark song control nuclei are well developed and can be easily detected by Nissl staining. In contrast to male Mongolian larks, females were not observed to sing. However, they possess significant song control nuclei with abundant neural connectivity within them despite their small sizes compared with males. These data provide new evidence that help further clarify the mechanisms by which songbirds sing. Our results also have implications for the evolution of complex birdsongs and song control nuclei in oscine birds. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Articulatory mediation of speech perception: a causal analysis of multi-modal imaging data.

PubMed

Gow, David W; Segawa, Jennifer A

2009-02-01

The inherent confound between the organization of articulation and the acoustic-phonetic structure of the speech signal makes it exceptionally difficult to evaluate the competing claims of motor and acoustic-phonetic accounts of how listeners recognize coarticulated speech. Here we use Granger causation analyzes of high spatiotemporal resolution neural activation data derived from the integration of magnetic resonance imaging, magnetoencephalography and electroencephalography, to examine the role of lexical and articulatory mediation in listeners' ability to use phonetic context to compensate for place assimilation. Listeners heard two-word phrases such as pen pad and then saw two pictures, from which they had to select the one that depicted the phrase. Assimilation, lexical competitor environment and the phonological validity of assimilation context were all manipulated. Behavioral data showed an effect of context on the interpretation of assimilated segments. Analysis of 40 Hz gamma phase locking patterns identified a large distributed neural network including 16 distinct regions of interest (ROIs) spanning portions of both hemispheres in the first 200 ms of post-assimilation context. Granger analyzes of individual conditions showed differing patterns of causal interaction between ROIs during this interval, with hypothesized lexical and articulatory structures and pathways driving phonetic activation in the posterior superior temporal gyrus in assimilation conditions, but not in phonetically unambiguous conditions. These results lend strong support for the motor theory of speech perception, and clarify the role of lexical mediation in the phonetic processing of assimilated speech.

Singing can facilitate foreign language learning.

PubMed

Ludke, Karen M; Ferreira, Fernanda; Overy, Katie

2014-01-01

This study presents the first experimental evidence that singing can facilitate short-term paired-associate phrase learning in an unfamiliar language (Hungarian). Sixty adult participants were randomly assigned to one of three "listen-and-repeat" learning conditions: speaking, rhythmic speaking, or singing. Participants in the singing condition showed superior overall performance on a collection of Hungarian language tests after a 15-min learning period, as compared with participants in the speaking and rhythmic speaking conditions. This superior performance was statistically significant (p < .05) for the two tests that required participants to recall and produce spoken Hungarian phrases. The differences in performance were not explained by potentially influencing factors such as age, gender, mood, phonological working memory ability, or musical ability and training. These results suggest that a "listen-and-sing" learning method can facilitate verbatim memory for spoken foreign language phrases.

Contextual effects of noise on vocalization encoding in primary auditory cortex

PubMed Central

Ni, Ruiye; Bender, David A.; Shanechi, Amirali M.; Gamble, Jeffrey R.

2016-01-01

Robust auditory perception plays a pivotal function for processing behaviorally relevant sounds, particularly with distractions from the environment. The neuronal coding enabling this ability, however, is still not well understood. In this study, we recorded single-unit activity from the primary auditory cortex (A1) of awake marmoset monkeys (Callithrix jacchus) while delivering conspecific vocalizations degraded by two different background noises: broadband white noise and vocalization babble. Noise effects on neural representation of target vocalizations were quantified by measuring the responses' similarity to those elicited by natural vocalizations as a function of signal-to-noise ratio. A clustering approach was used to describe the range of response profiles by reducing the population responses to a summary of four response classes (robust, balanced, insensitive, and brittle) under both noise conditions. This clustering approach revealed that, on average, approximately two-thirds of the neurons change their response class when encountering different noises. Therefore, the distortion induced by one particular masking background in single-unit responses is not necessarily predictable from that induced by another, suggesting the low likelihood of a unique group of noise-invariant neurons across different background conditions in A1. Regarding noise influence on neural activities, the brittle response group showed addition of spiking activity both within and between phrases of vocalizations relative to clean vocalizations, whereas the other groups generally showed spiking activity suppression within phrases, and the alteration between phrases was noise dependent. Overall, the variable single-unit responses, yet consistent response types, imply that primate A1 performs scene analysis through the collective activity of multiple neurons. NEW & NOTEWORTHY The understanding of where and how auditory scene analysis is accomplished is of broad interest to neuroscientists. In this paper, we systematically investigated neuronal coding of multiple vocalizations degraded by two distinct noises at various signal-to-noise ratios in nonhuman primates. In the process, we uncovered heterogeneity of single-unit representations for different auditory scenes yet homogeneity of responses across the population. PMID:27881720

Contextual effects of noise on vocalization encoding in primary auditory cortex.

PubMed

Ni, Ruiye; Bender, David A; Shanechi, Amirali M; Gamble, Jeffrey R; Barbour, Dennis L

2017-02-01

Robust auditory perception plays a pivotal function for processing behaviorally relevant sounds, particularly with distractions from the environment. The neuronal coding enabling this ability, however, is still not well understood. In this study, we recorded single-unit activity from the primary auditory cortex (A1) of awake marmoset monkeys (Callithrix jacchus) while delivering conspecific vocalizations degraded by two different background noises: broadband white noise and vocalization babble. Noise effects on neural representation of target vocalizations were quantified by measuring the responses' similarity to those elicited by natural vocalizations as a function of signal-to-noise ratio. A clustering approach was used to describe the range of response profiles by reducing the population responses to a summary of four response classes (robust, balanced, insensitive, and brittle) under both noise conditions. This clustering approach revealed that, on average, approximately two-thirds of the neurons change their response class when encountering different noises. Therefore, the distortion induced by one particular masking background in single-unit responses is not necessarily predictable from that induced by another, suggesting the low likelihood of a unique group of noise-invariant neurons across different background conditions in A1. Regarding noise influence on neural activities, the brittle response group showed addition of spiking activity both within and between phrases of vocalizations relative to clean vocalizations, whereas the other groups generally showed spiking activity suppression within phrases, and the alteration between phrases was noise dependent. Overall, the variable single-unit responses, yet consistent response types, imply that primate A1 performs scene analysis through the collective activity of multiple neurons. The understanding of where and how auditory scene analysis is accomplished is of broad interest to neuroscientists. In this paper, we systematically investigated neuronal coding of multiple vocalizations degraded by two distinct noises at various signal-to-noise ratios in nonhuman primates. In the process, we uncovered heterogeneity of single-unit representations for different auditory scenes yet homogeneity of responses across the population. Copyright © 2017 the American Physiological Society.

Improved de-identification of physician notes through integrative modeling of both public and private medical text

PubMed Central

2013-01-01

Background Physician notes routinely recorded during patient care represent a vast and underutilized resource for human disease studies on a population scale. Their use in research is primarily limited by the need to separate confidential patient information from clinical annotations, a process that is resource-intensive when performed manually. This study seeks to create an automated method for de-identifying physician notes that does not require large amounts of private information: in addition to training a model to recognize Protected Health Information (PHI) within private physician notes, we reverse the problem and train a model to recognize non-PHI words and phrases that appear in public medical texts. Methods Public and private medical text sources were analyzed to distinguish common medical words and phrases from Protected Health Information. Patient identifiers are generally nouns and numbers that appear infrequently in medical literature. To quantify this relationship, term frequencies and part of speech tags were compared between journal publications and physician notes. Standard medical concepts and phrases were then examined across ten medical dictionaries. Lists and rules were included from the US census database and previously published studies. In total, 28 features were used to train decision tree classifiers. Results The model successfully recalled 98% of PHI tokens from 220 discharge summaries. Cost sensitive classification was used to weight recall over precision (98% F10 score, 76% F1 score). More than half of the false negatives were the word “of” appearing in a hospital name. All patient names, phone numbers, and home addresses were at least partially redacted. Medical concepts such as “elevated white blood cell count” were informative for de-identification. The results exceed the previously approved criteria established by four Institutional Review Boards. Conclusions The results indicate that distributional differences between private and public medical text can be used to accurately classify PHI. The data and algorithms reported here are made freely available for evaluation and improvement. PMID:24083569

Improved de-identification of physician notes through integrative modeling of both public and private medical text.

PubMed

McMurry, Andrew J; Fitch, Britt; Savova, Guergana; Kohane, Isaac S; Reis, Ben Y

2013-10-02

Physician notes routinely recorded during patient care represent a vast and underutilized resource for human disease studies on a population scale. Their use in research is primarily limited by the need to separate confidential patient information from clinical annotations, a process that is resource-intensive when performed manually. This study seeks to create an automated method for de-identifying physician notes that does not require large amounts of private information: in addition to training a model to recognize Protected Health Information (PHI) within private physician notes, we reverse the problem and train a model to recognize non-PHI words and phrases that appear in public medical texts. Public and private medical text sources were analyzed to distinguish common medical words and phrases from Protected Health Information. Patient identifiers are generally nouns and numbers that appear infrequently in medical literature. To quantify this relationship, term frequencies and part of speech tags were compared between journal publications and physician notes. Standard medical concepts and phrases were then examined across ten medical dictionaries. Lists and rules were included from the US census database and previously published studies. In total, 28 features were used to train decision tree classifiers. The model successfully recalled 98% of PHI tokens from 220 discharge summaries. Cost sensitive classification was used to weight recall over precision (98% F10 score, 76% F1 score). More than half of the false negatives were the word "of" appearing in a hospital name. All patient names, phone numbers, and home addresses were at least partially redacted. Medical concepts such as "elevated white blood cell count" were informative for de-identification. The results exceed the previously approved criteria established by four Institutional Review Boards. The results indicate that distributional differences between private and public medical text can be used to accurately classify PHI. The data and algorithms reported here are made freely available for evaluation and improvement.

A Case of Generalized Auditory Agnosia with Unilateral Subcortical Brain Lesion

PubMed Central

Suh, Hyee; Kim, Soo Yeon; Kim, Sook Hee; Chang, Jae Hyeok; Shin, Yong Beom; Ko, Hyun-Yoon

2012-01-01

The mechanisms and functional anatomy underlying the early stages of speech perception are still not well understood. Auditory agnosia is a deficit of auditory object processing defined as a disability to recognize spoken languages and/or nonverbal environmental sounds and music despite adequate hearing while spontaneous speech, reading and writing are preserved. Usually, either the bilateral or unilateral temporal lobe, especially the transverse gyral lesions, are responsible for auditory agnosia. Subcortical lesions without cortical damage rarely causes auditory agnosia. We present a 73-year-old right-handed male with generalized auditory agnosia caused by a unilateral subcortical lesion. He was not able to repeat or dictate but to perform fluent and comprehensible speech. He could understand and read written words and phrases. His auditory brainstem evoked potential and audiometry were intact. This case suggested that the subcortical lesion involving unilateral acoustic radiation could cause generalized auditory agnosia. PMID:23342322

Representing Medical Knowledge in the Form of Structured Text: The Development of Current Disease Descriptions*

PubMed Central

Nelson, Stuart J.; Sherertz, David D.; Erlbaum, Mark S.; Tuttle, Mark S.

1989-01-01

As part of the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) initiative, some 900 diseases have been described using “structured text.” Structured text is words and short phrases entered under labelled contexts. Vocabulary is not controlled. The contexts comprise a template for the disease description. The structured text is both manipulable by machine and readable by humans. Use of the template was natural, and only a few problems arose in using the template. Instructions to disease description composers must be explicit in definitions of the contexts. Diseases to be described are chosen, after clustering related diseases, according to the distinctions that physicians practicing in the area under question believe are important. Limiting disease descriptions to primitive observations and to entities otherwise described within the corpus appears to be both feasible and desirable.

Comprehension of Elided Phrases in Korean and English: VP-Ellipsis, Null Object Constructions, and One-Substitution

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kim, Jinsook

2012-01-01

The purpose of this study is to experimentally investigate the comprehension of elided phrases in Korean and English, focusing on the patterns exemplified below. (1) Korean a. VP-ellipsis: Sungki-ka phalan kabang-ul sa-ss-e-yo. Sunhuy-to-yey-yo Sungki-NOM blue bag-ACC buy-PST-DECL-POL Sunhuy-also-be-POL "Sungki bought a blue bag. Sunhuy did…

Extending Phrase-Based Decoding with a Dependency-Based Reordering Model

DTIC Science & Technology

2009-11-01

strictly within the confines of phrase-based translation. The hope was to introduce an approach that could take advantage of monolingual syntactic...tuple represents one element of the XML markup, where element is the name of this element, attributes is a dictionary (mapping strings to strings...representing the range of possible compressions, in the form of a dictionary mapping the latter to the former. To represent multiple dependency

Communicating diagnostic uncertainty in surgical pathology reports: disparities between sender and receiver.

PubMed

Lindley, Sarah W; Gillies, Elizabeth M; Hassell, Lewis A

2014-10-01

Surgical pathologists use a variety of phrases to communicate varying degrees of diagnostic certainty which have the potential to be interpreted differently than intended. This study sought to: (1) assess the setting, varieties and frequency of use of phrases of diagnostic uncertainty in the diagnostic line of surgical pathology reports, (2) evaluate use of uncertainty expressions by experience and gender, (3) determine how these phrases are interpreted by clinicians and pathologists, and (4) assess solutions to this communication problem. We evaluated 1500 surgical pathology reports to determine frequency of use of uncertainty terms, identified those most commonly used, and looked for variations in usage rates on the basis of case type, experience and gender. We surveyed 76 physicians at tumor boards who were asked to assign a percentage of certainty to diagnoses containing expressions of uncertainty. We found expressions of uncertainty in 35% of diagnostic reports, with no statistically significant difference in usage based on age or gender. We found wide variation in the percentage of certainty clinicians assigned to the phrases studied. We conclude that non-standardized language used in the communication of diagnostic uncertainty is a significant source of miscommunication, both amongst pathologists and between pathologists and clinicians. Copyright © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier GmbH.. All rights reserved.

Clinical validation of a non-heteronormative version of the Social Interaction Anxiety Scale (SIAS).

PubMed

Lindner, Philip; Martell, Christopher; Bergström, Jan; Andersson, Gerhard; Carlbring, Per

2013-12-19

Despite welcomed changes in societal attitudes and practices towards sexual minorities, instances of heteronormativity can still be found within healthcare and research. The Social Interaction Anxiety Scale (SIAS) is a valid and reliable self-rating scale of social anxiety, which includes one item (number 14) with an explicit heteronormative assumption about the respondent's sexual orientation. This heteronormative phrasing may confuse, insult or alienate sexual minority respondents. A clinically validated version of the SIAS featuring a non-heteronormative phrasing of item 14 is thus needed. 129 participants with diagnosed social anxiety disorder, enrolled in an Internet-based intervention trial, were randomly assigned to responding to the SIAS featuring either the original or a novel non-heteronormative phrasing of item 14, and then answered the other item version. Within-subject, correlation between item versions was calculated and the two scores were statistically compared. The two items' correlations with the other SIAS items and other psychiatric rating scales were also statistically compared. Item versions were highly correlated and scores did not differ statistically. The two items' correlations with other measures did not differ statistically either. The SIAS can be revised with a non-heteronormative formulation of item 14 with psychometric equivalence on item and scale level. Implications for other psychiatric instruments with heteronormative phrasings are discussed.

Commit* to change? A call to end the publication of the phrase 'commit* suicide'.

PubMed

Nielsen, Emma; Padmanathan, Prianka; Knipe, Duleeka

2016-12-06

Background. Countering stigma is a fundamental facet of suicide prevention efforts.  Integral to this is the promotion of accurate and sensitive language.  The phrase 'commit* suicide' has prompted marked opposition primarily due to the connotations of immorality and illegality.  Methods. The study investigated the frequency of the use of the wordstem 'commit', in relation to self-harm and suicidal behaviours, in the three leading suicide-specific academic journals between 2000 and 2015.  Results. One third (34%) of articles published since the year 2000 used the word 'commit*' when describing an act of self-harm or suicide. Over half of these articles (57%) used the phrase on more than one occasion, with 6% using it more than 10 times in the same manuscript. The percentage of papers utilising the word 'commit*' has fluctuated over time, but there is a promising downward trend in the use of this phrase from 33% in 2000 to 13% in 2015 ( p < 0.001).  Discussion. We advocate for the implementation of publication requirements regarding the language used when discussing suicide. Whilst we call for collective responsibility amongst academics and clinicians, editors hold a unique position in ensuring that outdated, inaccurate and stigma-laden terms are expunged from the scientific literature.

Identifying missing dictionary entries with frequency-conserving context models

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Williams, Jake Ryland; Clark, Eric M.; Bagrow, James P.; Danforth, Christopher M.; Dodds, Peter Sheridan

2015-10-01

In an effort to better understand meaning from natural language texts, we explore methods aimed at organizing lexical objects into contexts. A number of these methods for organization fall into a family defined by word ordering. Unlike demographic or spatial partitions of data, these collocation models are of special importance for their universal applicability. While we are interested here in text and have framed our treatment appropriately, our work is potentially applicable to other areas of research (e.g., speech, genomics, and mobility patterns) where one has ordered categorical data (e.g., sounds, genes, and locations). Our approach focuses on the phrase (whether word or larger) as the primary meaning-bearing lexical unit and object of study. To do so, we employ our previously developed framework for generating word-conserving phrase-frequency data. Upon training our model with the Wiktionary, an extensive, online, collaborative, and open-source dictionary that contains over 100 000 phrasal definitions, we develop highly effective filters for the identification of meaningful, missing phrase entries. With our predictions we then engage the editorial community of the Wiktionary and propose short lists of potential missing entries for definition, developing a breakthrough, lexical extraction technique and expanding our knowledge of the defined English lexicon of phrases.

Syntactic Prediction in Language Comprehension: Evidence From Either…or

PubMed Central

Staub, Adrian; Clifton, Charles

2006-01-01

Readers’ eye movements were monitored as they read sentences in which two noun phrases or two independent clauses were connected by the word or (NP-coordination and S-coordination, respectively). The word either could be present or absent earlier in the sentence. When either was present, the material immediately following or was read more quickly, across both sentence types. In addition, there was evidence that readers misanalyzed the S-coordination structure as an NP-coordination structure only when either was absent. The authors interpret the results as indicating that the word either enabled readers to predict the arrival of a coordination structure; this predictive activation facilitated processing of this structure when it ultimately arrived, and in the case of S-coordination sentences, enabled readers to avoid the incorrect NP-coordination analysis. The authors argue that these results support parsing theories according to which the parser can build predictable syntactic structure before encountering the corresponding lexical input. PMID:16569157

Neuroticism as distancing: perceptual sources of evidence.

PubMed

Liu, Tianwei; Ode, Scott; Moeller, Sara K; Robinson, Michael D

2013-05-01

Several theories and self-reported sources of data link individual differences in negative affectivity to avoidance motivation. Chronic avoidance motivation, through repeated practice, may result in a relatively cognitive distance-enhancing dynamic whereby events and stimuli are perceived as further away from the self, even when they are not threatening. Such predictions are novel but follow from cybernetic theories of self-regulation. In 5 studies (total N = 463), relations of this type were investigated. Study 1 presented participants with phrases that were ambiguous and found that trait negative affect predicted phrase interpretation in a distance-enhancing temporal direction. Study 2 replicated this effect across a systematic manipulation of event valence. Study 3 asked individuals to estimate the size of words and found that individuals higher in neuroticism generally perceived words to be smaller than did individuals lower in neuroticism. In Study 4, people high (but not low) in neuroticism perceived words to be shrinking faster than they were growing. In Study 5, greater perceptual distancing, in a font size estimation task, predicted more adverse reactions to negative events in daily life. Although normative effects varied across studies, consistent support for a chronic distancing perspective of individual differences in negative affectivity was found. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved

Implicit Memory in Music and Language

PubMed Central

Ettlinger, Marc; Margulis, Elizabeth H.; Wong, Patrick C. M.

2011-01-01

Research on music and language in recent decades has focused on their overlapping neurophysiological, perceptual, and cognitive underpinnings, ranging from the mechanism for encoding basic auditory cues to the mechanism for detecting violations in phrase structure. These overlaps have most often been identified in musicians with musical knowledge that was acquired explicitly, through formal training. In this paper, we review independent bodies of work in music and language that suggest an important role for implicitly acquired knowledge, implicit memory, and their associated neural structures in the acquisition of linguistic or musical grammar. These findings motivate potential new work that examines music and language comparatively in the context of the implicit memory system. PMID:21927608

Amplitude (vu and rms) and Temporal (msec) Measures of Two Northwestern University Auditory Test No. 6 Recordings.

PubMed

Wilson, Richard H

2015-04-01

In 1940, a cooperative effort by the radio networks and Bell Telephone produced the volume unit (vu) meter that has been the mainstay instrument for monitoring the level of speech signals in commercial broadcasting and research laboratories. With the use of computers, today the amplitude of signals can be quantified easily using the root mean square (rms) algorithm. Researchers had previously reported that amplitude estimates of sentences and running speech were 4.8 dB higher when measured with a vu meter than when calculated with rms. This study addresses the vu-rms relation as applied to the carrier phrase and target word paradigm used to assess word-recognition abilities, the premise being that by definition the word-recognition paradigm is a special and different case from that described previously. The purpose was to evaluate the vu and rms amplitude relations for the carrier phrases and target words commonly used to assess word-recognition abilities. In addition, the relations with the target words between rms level and recognition performance were examined. Descriptive and correlational. Two recoded versions of the Northwestern University Auditory Test No. 6 were evaluated, the Auditec of St. Louis (Auditec) male speaker and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) female speaker. Using both visual and auditory cues from a waveform editor, the temporal onsets and offsets were defined for each carrier phrase and each target word. The rms amplitudes for those segments then were computed and expressed in decibels with reference to the maximum digitization range. The data were maintained for each of the four Northwestern University Auditory Test No. 6 word lists. Descriptive analyses were used with linear regressions used to evaluate the reliability of the measurement technique and the relation between the rms levels of the target words and recognition performances. Although there was a 1.3 dB difference between the calibration tones, the mean levels of the carrier phrases for the two recordings were -14.8 dB (Auditec) and -14.1 dB (VA) with standard deviations <1 dB. For the target words, the mean amplitudes were -19.9 dB (Auditec) and -18.3 dB (VA) with standard deviations ranging from 1.3 to 2.4 dB. The mean durations for the carrier phrases of both recordings were 593-594 msec, with the mean durations of the target words a little different, 509 msec (Auditec) and 528 msec (VA). Random relations were observed between the recognition performances and rms levels of the target words. Amplitude and temporal data for the individual words are provided. The rms levels of the carrier phrases closely approximated (±1 dB) the rms levels of the calibration tones, both of which were set to 0 vu (dB). The rms levels of the target words were 5-6 dB below the levels of the carrier phrases and were substantially more variable than the levels of the carrier phrases. The relation between the rms levels of the target words and recognition performances on the words was random. American Academy of Audiology.

The historical origins of the vegetative state: Received wisdom and the utility of the text.

PubMed

Adams, Zoe M; Fins, Joseph J

2017-01-01

The persistent vegetative state (PVS) is one of the most iconic and misunderstood phrases in clinical neuroscience. Coined as a diagnostic category by Scottish neurosurgeon Bryan Jennett and American neurologist Fred Plum in 1972, the phrase "vegetative" first appeared in Aristotle's treatise On the Soul (circa mid-fourth century BCE). Aristotle influenced neuroscientists of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Xavier Bichat and Walter Timme, and informed their conceptions of the vegetative nervous system. Plum credits Bichat and Timme in his use of the phrase, thus putting the ancient and modern in dialogue. In addition to exploring Aristotle's definition of the "vegetative" in the original Greek, we put Aristotle in conversation with his contemporaries-Plato and the Hippocratics-to better apprehend theories of mind and consciousness in antiquity. Utilizing the discipline of reception studies in classics scholarship, we demonstrate the importance of etymology and historical origin when considering modern medical nosology.

Developing cultural competence and social responsibility in preclinical dental students.

PubMed

Rubin, Richard W

2004-04-01

Dental student development of cultural competence and social responsibility is recognized by educators as an important element in the overall shaping of minds and attitudes of modem dental practitioners. Yet training modalities to achieve these competencies are not clearly defined, and outcome measurements are elusive. This article shows an effective method to meet these desired outcomes. Sixty-one freshmen (class of 2005) participated in forty hours of nondental community service, and reflective journals were completed by the end of second year. Competency outcomes were measured by selecting key words and phrases found in the individual journals. Key phrases were related to compassion, righteousness, propriety, and wisdom. Also, phrases had to be accompanied by written indications of direct program causation. The combination of active-learning (based upon service learning models) in public health settings outside of the dental realm, accompanied by reflective journaling, enhanced cultural understanding and community spirit in the majority of students.

Language disorders as a window on universal grammar: an abstract theory of agreement for IP, DP, and V-PP.

PubMed

Roeper, T; Ramos, E; Seymour, H; Abdul-Karim, L

2001-06-01

A new concept of Agreement (AGR) has been represented as a Formal Feature that can appear in a wide range of different configurations (Chomsky, 1998). A case study from language disorders supports and extends this abstract concept. The child shows no agreement in Inflectional Phrase me can and Determiner Phrase them eyes. We then extend the notion of AGR to include verb-Prepositional Phrase relations, where the child also systematically avoids certain prepositions (go beach). The analysis is supported by intuitional data from compounds (sweep with broom --> broom-swept). We also define a systematic notion of Possible deficit as a premature fixation of functional items which normally require additional Phi-features. The notion of Maximization of Formal Features then emerges as a significant feature of learnability from both a normal and disordered perspective. Copyright 2001 Academic Press.

Evolution of the most common English words and phrases over the centuries.

PubMed

Perc, Matjaz

2012-12-07

By determining the most common English words and phrases since the beginning of the sixteenth century, we obtain a unique large-scale view of the evolution of written text. We find that the most common words and phrases in any given year had a much shorter popularity lifespan in the sixteenth century than they had in the twentieth century. By measuring how their usage propagated across the years, we show that for the past two centuries, the process has been governed by linear preferential attachment. Along with the steady growth of the English lexicon, this provides an empirical explanation for the ubiquity of Zipf's law in language statistics and confirms that writing, although undoubtedly an expression of art and skill, is not immune to the same influences of self-organization that are known to regulate processes as diverse as the making of new friends and World Wide Web growth.

Index of Ship Structure Committee Publications.

DTIC Science & Technology

1977-12-01

rtr ra $e , SEE BOX 15 , ent.r manufactur er s full nanre and if iv ision h f any 1 in Bois ~r If nor. than one manufacturci .ntei phrase , SEE BOX 15...Do rot use abbreviation s oi words that are pott of the subject category l iste d rrr Boy 2 Key word pirrases are li rrr ited to 60 total characters...state it part icipant act iv i t y or corporation and division submitting the document and GIDEP two .c ltoracter code (e .g , Xl ) . DO PORN 2000 i t

A highly optimized vectorized code for Monte Carlo simulations of SU(3) lattice gauge theories

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Barkai, D.; Moriarty, K. J. M.; Rebbi, C.

1984-01-01

New methods are introduced for improving the performance of the vectorized Monte Carlo SU(3) lattice gauge theory algorithm using the CDC CYBER 205. Structure, algorithm and programming considerations are discussed. The performance achieved for a 16(4) lattice on a 2-pipe system may be phrased in terms of the link update time or overall MFLOPS rates. For 32-bit arithmetic, it is 36.3 microsecond/link for 8 hits per iteration (40.9 microsecond for 10 hits) or 101.5 MFLOPS.

Ultrasonic Songs of Male Mice

PubMed Central

Guo, Zhongsheng

2005-01-01

Previously it was shown that male mice, when they encounter female mice or their pheromones, emit ultrasonic vocalizations with frequencies ranging over 30–110 kHz. Here, we show that these vocalizations have the characteristics of song, consisting of several different syllable types, whose temporal sequencing includes the utterance of repeated phrases. Individual males produce songs with characteristic syllabic and temporal structure. This study provides a quantitative initial description of male mouse songs, and opens the possibility of studying song production and perception in an established genetic model organism. PMID:16248680

Information Structure Influences Depth of Syntactic Processing: Event-Related Potential Evidence for the Chomsky Illusion

PubMed Central

Wang, Lin; Bastiaansen, Marcel; Yang, Yufang; Hagoort, Peter

2012-01-01

Information structure facilitates communication between interlocutors by highlighting relevant information. It has previously been shown that information structure modulates the depth of semantic processing. Here we used event-related potentials to investigate whether information structure can modulate the depth of syntactic processing. In question-answer pairs, subtle (number agreement) or salient (phrase structure) syntactic violations were placed either in focus or out of focus through information structure marking. P600 effects to these violations reflect the depth of syntactic processing. For subtle violations, a P600 effect was observed in the focus condition, but not in the non-focus condition. For salient violations, comparable P600 effects were found in both conditions. These results indicate that information structure can modulate the depth of syntactic processing, but that this effect depends on the salience of the information. When subtle violations are not in focus, they are processed less elaborately. We label this phenomenon the Chomsky illusion. PMID:23110131

Information structure influences depth of syntactic processing: event-related potential evidence for the Chomsky illusion.

PubMed

Wang, Lin; Bastiaansen, Marcel; Yang, Yufang; Hagoort, Peter

2012-01-01

Information structure facilitates communication between interlocutors by highlighting relevant information. It has previously been shown that information structure modulates the depth of semantic processing. Here we used event-related potentials to investigate whether information structure can modulate the depth of syntactic processing. In question-answer pairs, subtle (number agreement) or salient (phrase structure) syntactic violations were placed either in focus or out of focus through information structure marking. P600 effects to these violations reflect the depth of syntactic processing. For subtle violations, a P600 effect was observed in the focus condition, but not in the non-focus condition. For salient violations, comparable P600 effects were found in both conditions. These results indicate that information structure can modulate the depth of syntactic processing, but that this effect depends on the salience of the information. When subtle violations are not in focus, they are processed less elaborately. We label this phenomenon the Chomsky illusion.

Generalized Quantum Theory and Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Field Theory

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Maroun, Michael Anthony

This dissertation is divided into two main topics. The first is the generalization of quantum dynamics when the Schrodinger partial differential equation is not defined even in the weak mathematical sense because the potential function itself is a distribution in the spatial variable, the same variable that is used to define the kinetic energy operator, i.e. the Laplace operator. The procedure is an extension and broadening of the distributional calculus and offers spectral results as an alternative to the only other two known methods to date, namely a) the functional calculi; and b) non-standard analysis. Furthermore, the generalizations of quantum dynamics presented within give a resolution to the time asymmetry paradox created by multi-particle quantum mechanics due to the time evolution still being unitary. A consequence is the randomization of phases needed for the fundamental justification Pauli master equation. The second topic is foundations of the quantum theory of fields. The title is phrased as ``foundations'' to emphasize that there is no claim of uniqueness but rather a proposal is put forth, which is markedly different than that of constructive or axiomatic field theory. In particular, the space of fields is defined as a space of generalized functions with involutive symmetry maps (the CPT invariance) that affect the topology of the field space. The space of quantum fields is then endowed the Frechet property and interactions change the topology in such a way as to cause some field spaces to be incompatible with others. This is seen in the consequences of the Haag theorem. Various examples and discussions are given that elucidate a new view of the quantum theory of fields and its (lack of) mathematical structure.