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

Association and Phrase Structure in Sentence Recall.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rosenberg, Sheldon

The effect of within- and between-phrase normative controlled association and phrase structure upon word integration in sentence recall was studied in two experiments. The two experiments differed only with respect to the type of two-phrase sentence used. In both experiments, one group of subjects was given four study-test trials on a list of four…

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…

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

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…

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Increases in individualistic words and phrases in American books, 1960-2008.

PubMed

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.

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...

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)

Interface Problems: Structural Constraints on Interpretation?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Frazier, Lyn; Clifton, Charles; Rayner, Keith; Deevy, Patricia; Koh, Sungryong; Bader, Markus

2005-01-01

Five experiments investigated the interpretation of quantified noun phrases in relation to discourse structure. They demonstrated, using questionnaire and on-line reading techniques, that readers in English prefer to give a quantified noun phrase in (VP-external) subject position a presuppositional interpretation, in which the noun phrase limits…

CONSTRAINTS ON VARIABLES IN SYNTAX.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

ROSS, JOHN ROBERT

IN ATTEMPTING TO DEFINE "SYNTACTIC VARIABLE," THE AUTHOR BASES HIS DISCUSSION ON THE ASSUMPTION THAT SYNTACTIC FACTS ARE A COLLECTION OF TWO TYPES OF RULES--CONTEXT-FREE PHRASE STRUCTURE RULES (GENERATING UNDERLYING OR DEEP PHRASE MARKERS) AND GRAMMATICAL TRANSFORMATIONS, WHICH MAP UNDERLYING PHRASE MARKERS ONTO SUPERFICIAL (OR SURFACE) PHRASE…

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.

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

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

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.

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…

The Structure of Jarai Clauses and Noun Phrases

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jensen, Joshua Martin

2013-01-01

This dissertation provides a syntactic account for the Jarai noun phrase and for the three regions of the Jarai clause: the operator domain, the inflectional domain, and the theta domain. Within the noun phrase, I argue that demonstrative-final word order involves phrasal movement of the demonstrative's complement into Spec,D, where it…

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…

The Dependency Structure of Coordinate Phrases: A Corpus Approach

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Temperley, David

2005-01-01

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…

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

Proactive interference effects on sentence production

PubMed Central

FERREIRA, VICTOR S.; FIRATO, CARLA E.

2007-01-01

Proactive interference refers to recall difficulties caused by prior similar memory-related processing. Information-processing approaches to sentence production predict that retrievability affects sentence form: Speakers may word sentences so that material that is difficult to retrieve is spoken later. In this experiment, speakers produced sentence structures that could include an optional that, thereby delaying the mention of a subsequent noun phrase. This subsequent noun phrase was either (1) conceptually similar to three previous noun phrases in the same sentence, leading to greater proactive interference, or (2) conceptually dissimilar, leading to less proactive interference. Speakers produced more thats (and were more disfluencies) before conceptually similar noun phrases, suggesting that retrieval difficulties during sentence production affect the syntactic structures of sentences that speakers produce. PMID:12613685

[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.

[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.

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.

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.

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 ...

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Improved identification of noun phrases in clinical radiology reports using a high-performance statistical natural language parser augmented with the UMLS specialist lexicon.

PubMed

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

2005-01-01

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(R) Specialist Lexicon to improve noun phrase identification within clinical radiology documents. 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)(R) 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. 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%. 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.

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)

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

Processing Coordination Ambiguity

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Engelhardt, Paul E.; Ferreira, Fernanda

2010-01-01

We examined temporarily ambiguous coordination structures such as "put the butter in the bowl and the pan on the towel." Minimal Attachment predicts that the ambiguous noun phrase "the pan" will be interpreted as a noun-phrase coordination structure because it is syntactically simpler than clausal coordination. Constraint-based…

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…

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…

Slavic in Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Borsley, Robert D., Ed.; Przepiorkowski, Adam, Ed.

The collection of essays on the properties of Slavic languages in the context of the theory of head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG) includes: "Typological Similarities in HPSG" (Tania Avgustinova, Wojciech Skut, Hans Uszkoreit); "Auxiliaries, Verbs and Complementizers in Polish" (Robert D. Borsley); "An Architecture…

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

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"…

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...

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…

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)…

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...

On Directionality of Phrase Structure Building

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Chesi, Cristiano

2015-01-01

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…

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

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

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],'…

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…

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…

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

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…

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…

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.…

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.

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…

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…

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…

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)

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…

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…

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.

An ERP study of regular and irregular English past tense inflection.

PubMed

Newman, Aaron J; Ullman, Michael T; Pancheva, Roumyana; Waligura, Diane L; Neville, Helen J

2007-01-01

Compositionality is a critical and universal characteristic of human language. It is found at numerous levels, including the combination of morphemes into words and of words into phrases and sentences. These compositional patterns can generally be characterized by rules. For example, the past tense of most English verbs ("regulars") is formed by adding an -ed suffix. However, many complex linguistic forms have rather idiosyncratic mappings. For example, "irregular" English verbs have past tense forms that cannot be derived from their stems in a consistent manner. Whether regular and irregular forms depend on fundamentally distinct neurocognitive processes (rule-governed combination vs. lexical memorization), or whether a single processing system is sufficient to explain the phenomena, has engendered considerable investigation and debate. We recorded event-related potentials while participants read English sentences that were either correct or had violations of regular past tense inflection, irregular past tense inflection, syntactic phrase structure, or lexical semantics. Violations of regular past tense and phrase structure, but not of irregular past tense or lexical semantics, elicited left-lateralized anterior negativities (LANs). These seem to reflect neurocognitive substrates that underlie compositional processes across linguistic domains, including morphology and syntax. Regular, irregular, and phrase structure violations all elicited later positivities that were maximal over midline parietal sites (P600s), and seem to index aspects of controlled syntactic processing of both phrase structure and morphosyntax. The results suggest distinct neurocognitive substrates for processing regular and irregular past tense forms: regulars depending on compositional processing, and irregulars stored in lexical memory.

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

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…

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…

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)

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...

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…

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…

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…

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.

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.

AN ERP STUDY OF REGULAR AND IRREGULAR ENGLISH PAST TENSE INFLECTION

PubMed Central

Newman, Aaron J.; Ullman, Michael T.; Pancheva, Roumyana; Waligura, Diane L.; Neville, Helen J.

2006-01-01

Compositionality is a critical and universal characteristic of human language. It is found at numerous levels, including the combination of morphemes into words and of words into phrases and sentences. These compositional patterns can generally be characterized by rules. For example, the past tense of most English verbs (“regulars”) is formed by adding an -ed suffix. However, many complex linguistic forms have rather idiosyncratic mappings. For example, “irregular” English verbs have past tense forms that cannot be derived from their stems in a consistent manner. Whether regular and irregular forms depend on fundamentally distinct neurocognitive processes (rule-governed combination vs. lexical memorization), or whether a single processing system is sufficient to explain the phenomena, has engendered considerable investigation and debate. We recorded event-related potentials while participants read English sentences that were either correct or had violations of regular past tense inflection, irregular past tense inflection, syntactic phrase structure, or lexical semantics. Violations of regular past tense and phrase structure, but not of irregular past tense or lexical semantics, elicited left-lateralized anterior negativities (LANs). These seem to reflect neurocognitive substrates that underlie compositional processes across linguistic domains, including morphology and syntax. Regular, irregular, and phrase structure violations all elicited later positivities that were maximal over right parietal sites (P600s), and which seem to index aspects of controlled syntactic processing of both phrase structure and morphosyntax. The results suggest distinct neurocognitive substrates for processing regular and irregular past tense forms: regulars depending on compositional processing, and irregulars stored in lexical memory. PMID:17070703

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…

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...

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…

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…

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...

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…

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…

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…

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.

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.

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.

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…

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…

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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

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.

The Wives and Sisters of Sahagun: Word Order of Latin and Romance Synonyms in Possessive Noun Phrases in the Formulae of Medieval Iberian Notarial Documents--"Uxor vs. Mulier" and "Soror vs. Germana," a Preliminary Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lee, Jesse

2013-01-01

The goal of this study was to find and trace word order patterns in Possessive Noun Phrases ("PNP's") in formulaic language within notarial documents dating from the tenth through the thirteenth centuries, originating from the Monastery of Sahagun, Leon, Spain. The overall results show clear trends, which reveal a diachronic process that…

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.

Using phrases and document metadata to improve topic modeling of clinical reports.

PubMed

Speier, William; Ong, Michael K; Arnold, Corey W

2016-06-01

Probabilistic topic models provide an unsupervised method for analyzing unstructured text, which have the potential to be integrated into clinical automatic summarization systems. Clinical documents are accompanied by metadata in a patient's medical history and frequently contains multiword concepts that can be valuable for accurately interpreting the included text. While existing methods have attempted to address these problems individually, we present a unified model for free-text clinical documents that integrates contextual patient- and document-level data, and discovers multi-word concepts. In the proposed model, phrases are represented by chained n-grams and a Dirichlet hyper-parameter is weighted by both document-level and patient-level context. This method and three other Latent Dirichlet allocation models were fit to a large collection of clinical reports. Examples of resulting topics demonstrate the results of the new model and the quality of the representations are evaluated using empirical log likelihood. The proposed model was able to create informative prior probabilities based on patient and document information, and captured phrases that represented various clinical concepts. The representation using the proposed model had a significantly higher empirical log likelihood than the compared methods. Integrating document metadata and capturing phrases in clinical text greatly improves the topic representation of clinical documents. The resulting clinically informative topics may effectively serve as the basis for an automatic summarization system for clinical reports. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Commit* to change? A call to end the publication of the phrase ‘commit* suicide’

PubMed Central

Nielsen, Emma; Padmanathan, Prianka; Knipe, Duleeka

2016-01-01

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. PMID:28286872

Neural correlates of implicit and explicit combinatorial semantic processing

PubMed Central

Graves, William W.; Binder, Jeffrey R.; Desai, Rutvik H.; Conant, Lisa L.; Seidenberg, Mark S.

2010-01-01

Language consists of sequences of words, but comprehending phrases involves more than concatenating meanings: A boat house is a shelter for boats, whereas a summer house is a house used during summer, and a ghost house is typically uninhabited. Little is known about the brain bases of combinatorial semantic processes. We performed two fMRI experiments using familiar, highly meaningful phrases (LAKE HOUSE) and unfamiliar phrases with minimal meaning created by reversing the word order of the familiar items (HOUSE LAKE). The first experiment used a 1-back matching task to assess implicit semantic processing, and the second used a classification task to engage explicit semantic processing. These conditions required processing of the same words, but with more effective combinatorial processing in the meaningful condition. The contrast of meaningful versus reversed phrases revealed activation primarily during the classification task, to a greater extent in the right hemisphere, including right angular gyrus, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, and bilateral posterior cingulate/precuneus, areas previously implicated in semantic processing. Positive correlations of fMRI signal with lexical (word-level) frequency occurred exclusively with the 1-back task and to a greater spatial extent on the left, including left posterior middle temporal gyrus and bilateral parahippocampus. These results reveal strong effects of task demands on engagement of lexical versus combinatorial processing and suggest a hemispheric dissociation between these levels of semantic representation. PMID:20600969

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

The Mental Representation of Polysemy across Word Classes

PubMed Central

Lopukhina, Anastasiya; Laurinavichyute, Anna; Lopukhin, Konstantin; Dragoy, Olga

2018-01-01

Experimental studies on polysemy have come to contradictory conclusions on whether words with multiple senses are stored as separate or shared mental representations. The present study examined the semantic relatedness and semantic similarity of literal and non-literal (metonymic and metaphorical) senses of three word classes: nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Two methods were used: a psycholinguistic experiment and a distributional analysis of corpus data. In the experiment, participants were presented with 6–12 short phrases containing a polysemous word in literal, metonymic, or metaphorical senses and were asked to classify them so that phrases with the same perceived sense were grouped together. To investigate the impact of professional background on their decisions, participants were controlled for linguistic vs. non-linguistic education. For nouns and verbs, all participants preferred to group together phrases with literal and metonymic senses, but not any other pairs of senses. For adjectives, two pairs of senses were often grouped together: literal with metonymic, and metonymic with metaphorical. Participants with a linguistic background were more accurate than participants with non-linguistic backgrounds, although both groups shared principal patterns of sense classification. For the distributional analysis of corpus data, we used a semantic vector approach to quantify the similarity of phrases with literal, metonymic, and metaphorical senses in the corpora. We found that phrases with literal and metonymic senses had the highest degree of similarity for the three word classes, and that metonymic and metaphorical senses of adjectives had the highest degree of similarity among all word classes. These findings are in line with the experimental results. Overall, the results suggest that the mental representation of a polysemous word depends on its word class. In nouns and verbs, literal and metonymic senses are stored together, while metaphorical senses are stored separately; in adjectives, metonymic senses significantly overlap with both literal and metaphorical senses. PMID:29515502

The Mental Representation of Polysemy across Word Classes.

PubMed

Lopukhina, Anastasiya; Laurinavichyute, Anna; Lopukhin, Konstantin; Dragoy, Olga

2018-01-01

Experimental studies on polysemy have come to contradictory conclusions on whether words with multiple senses are stored as separate or shared mental representations. The present study examined the semantic relatedness and semantic similarity of literal and non-literal (metonymic and metaphorical) senses of three word classes: nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Two methods were used: a psycholinguistic experiment and a distributional analysis of corpus data. In the experiment, participants were presented with 6-12 short phrases containing a polysemous word in literal, metonymic, or metaphorical senses and were asked to classify them so that phrases with the same perceived sense were grouped together. To investigate the impact of professional background on their decisions, participants were controlled for linguistic vs. non-linguistic education. For nouns and verbs, all participants preferred to group together phrases with literal and metonymic senses, but not any other pairs of senses. For adjectives, two pairs of senses were often grouped together: literal with metonymic, and metonymic with metaphorical. Participants with a linguistic background were more accurate than participants with non-linguistic backgrounds, although both groups shared principal patterns of sense classification. For the distributional analysis of corpus data, we used a semantic vector approach to quantify the similarity of phrases with literal, metonymic, and metaphorical senses in the corpora. We found that phrases with literal and metonymic senses had the highest degree of similarity for the three word classes, and that metonymic and metaphorical senses of adjectives had the highest degree of similarity among all word classes. These findings are in line with the experimental results. Overall, the results suggest that the mental representation of a polysemous word depends on its word class. In nouns and verbs, literal and metonymic senses are stored together, while metaphorical senses are stored separately; in adjectives, metonymic senses significantly overlap with both literal and metaphorical senses.

Searching for the right word: Hybrid visual and memory search for words

PubMed Central

Boettcher, Sage E. P.; Wolfe, Jeremy M.

2016-01-01

In “Hybrid Search” (Wolfe 2012) observers search through visual space for any of multiple targets held in memory. With photorealistic objects as stimuli, response times (RTs) increase linearly with the visual set size and logarithmically with memory set size even when over 100 items are committed to memory. It is well established that pictures of objects are particularly easy to memorize (Brady, Konkle, Alvarez, & Olivia, 2008). Would hybrid search performance be similar if the targets were words or phrases where word order can be important and where the processes of memorization might be different? In Experiment One, observers memorized 2, 4, 8, or 16 words in 4 different blocks. After passing a memory test, confirming memorization of the list, observers searched for these words in visual displays containing 2 to 16 words. Replicating Wolfe (2012), RTs increased linearly with the visual set size and logarithmically with the length of the word list. The word lists of Experiment One were random. In Experiment Two, words were drawn from phrases that observers reported knowing by heart (E.G. “London Bridge is falling down”). Observers were asked to provide four phrases ranging in length from 2 words to a phrase of no less than 20 words (range 21–86). Words longer than 2 characters from the phrase constituted the target list. Distractor words were matched for length and frequency. Even with these strongly ordered lists, results again replicated the curvilinear function of memory set size seen in hybrid search. One might expect serial position effects; perhaps reducing RTs for the first (primacy) and/or last (recency) members of a list (Atkinson & Shiffrin 1968; Murdock, 1962). Surprisingly we showed no reliable effects of word order. Thus, in “London Bridge is falling down”, “London” and “down” are found no faster than “falling”. PMID:25788035

Data: Mining with a Mission- Data-Driven Decision Making Is the Buzz Phrase of Choice for the New Decade. but Once We've Got the Information, How Do We Use It to Yield Results?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Salpeter, Judy

2004-01-01

For some districts, the current obsession with data grows out of the need to comply with No Child Left Behind and additional accountability-related mandates. For others, it dates way back before the phrase "data-driven decision making" rolled so frequently off the tongues of educators. In either case, there is no denying that an integral…

Knowledge requirements for automated inference of medical textbook markup.

PubMed Central

Berrios, D. C.; Kehler, A.; Fagan, L. M.

1999-01-01

Indexing medical text in journals or textbooks requires a tremendous amount of resources. We tested two algorithms for automatically indexing nouns, noun-modifiers, and noun phrases, and inferring selected binary relations between UMLS concepts in a textbook of infectious disease. Sixty-six percent of nouns and noun-modifiers and 81% of noun phrases were correctly matched to UMLS concepts. Semantic relations were identified with 100% specificity and 94% sensitivity. For some medical sub-domains, these algorithms could permit expeditious generation of more complex indexing. PMID:10566445

Prototype Equipment Student Guide for ACE (Air Intercept Controller Prototype Training System).

DTIC Science & Technology

1981-09-01

as your " home base", directing you to where you should be (at the Student Station CRT or the Console) and stating what you could (or should) do once...review the transmissions made in your last Practice with- out Freezes (see Subsection IV A) a take a break * re-start the instruction * answer a...the instructor select the phrase from the menu. The new collections will replace the previous collections made for the phrase. instructor Two keys on

Gay guys using gay language: friendship, shared values and the intent-context-effect matrix.

PubMed

McCormack, Mark; Wignall, Liam; Morris, Max

2016-12-01

This article draws on in-depth interviews with 35 openly gay male undergraduates from four universities in England to develop an understanding of the changing nature of language related to homosexuality. In addition to finding a diminution in the prevalence of homophobic language, we demonstrate that participants maintain complex and nuanced understandings of phrases that do not use homophobic pejoratives, such as 'that's so gay'. The majority of participants rejected the notion that these phrases are inherently homophobic, instead arguing that the intent with which they are said and the context in which they are used are vital in understanding their meaning and effect. We conceptualize an intent-context-effect matrix to understand the interdependency of these variables. Highlighting the situated nature of this matrix, we also demonstrate the importance of the existence of shared norms between those saying and hearing the phrase when interpreting such language. © London School of Economics and Political Science 2016.

The Effects of the Literal Meaning of Emotional Phrases on the Identification of Vocal Emotions.

PubMed

Shigeno, Sumi

2018-02-01

This study investigates the discrepancy between the literal emotional content of speech and emotional tone in the identification of speakers' vocal emotions in both the listeners' native language (Japanese), and in an unfamiliar language (random-spliced Japanese). Both experiments involve a "congruent condition," in which the emotion contained in the literal meaning of speech (words and phrases) was compatible with vocal emotion, and an "incongruent condition," in which these forms of emotional information were discordant. Results for Japanese indicated that performance in identifying emotions did not differ significantly between the congruent and incongruent conditions. However, the results for random-spliced Japanese indicated that vocal emotion was correctly identified more often in the congruent than in the incongruent condition. The different results for Japanese and random-spliced Japanese suggested that the literal meaning of emotional phrases influences the listener's perception of the speaker's emotion, and that Japanese participants could infer speakers' intended emotions in the incongruent condition.

Drivers of cultural success: The case of sensory metaphors.

PubMed

Akpinar, Ezgi; Berger, Jonah

2015-07-01

Why do some cultural items catch on and become more popular than others? Language is one of the basic foundations of culture. But what leads some phrases to become more culturally successful? There are multiple ways to convey the same thing and phrases with similar meanings often act as substitutes, competing for usage. A not so friendly person, for example, can be described as unfriendly or cold. We study how the senses shape cultural success, suggesting that compared with their semantic equivalents (e.g., unfriendly person), phrases which relate to senses in metaphoric ways (e.g., cold person) should be more culturally successful. Data from 5 million books over 200 years support this prediction: Sensory metaphors are used more frequently over time than are their semantic equivalents. Experimental evidence demonstrates that sensory metaphors are more memorable because they relate more to the senses and have more associative cues. These findings shed light on how senses shape language and the psychological foundations of culture more broadly. (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).

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.

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.

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).

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.

Understanding the role of culture in pain: Māori practitioner perspectives of pain descriptors.

PubMed

Magnusson, Jane E; Fennell, Joyce A

2011-01-21

There is growing interest in the role of cultural diversity within healthcare settings yet minority ethnic groups are underrepresented in the healthcare literature, including the literature on pain. To better assess and treat pain in different cultures the perspectives and experiences of that culture must be taken into consideration and therefore the present study was undertaken to better understand Māori perspectives of pain. Māori healthcare providers and kaumātua (tribal leaders/elders) completed questionnaires relating to the experience of pain and were asked to provide feedback regarding the suitability of words and phrases typically used to describe symptoms of pain and pain-related disability. Participants were also asked to provide words, or phrases (in te reo Māori or English) representing characteristics of pain which had not been provided but would be useful in the assessment of pain in a Māori population. All of the pain descriptors, and 92% of the phrases regarding the experience of pain, provided were endorsed by the majority of participants demonstrating that, as in many cultures, Māori perceive pain as a multidimensional experience impacting them on physiological, psychological, and social dimensions and that the terms and phrases of measures commonly used to assess pain appropriately capture their pain experiences. The implications of these findings are that established measures can be used when assessing pain in Māori. However, it is beneficial to confirm that the descriptors used in those measures accurately capture the experiences being measured.

Design, implementation, and evaluation of a computerized system to communicate with patients with limited native language proficiency in the perioperative period.

PubMed

Taicher, Brad M; Alam, Rammy I; Berman, Joshua; Epstein, Richard H

2011-01-01

Effective communication with patients having limited proficiency in the native language of anesthesia care providers during the perioperative period is often challenging. We describe how we developed, implemented, and evaluated a computerized system to convey frequently used prerecorded phrases related to perioperative anesthesia care in the languages we most often encounter in such patients. Phrases were chosen through a consensus process among anesthesia department members. These included routine sayings used to inform patients about what they should anticipate, what interventions we are performing, and how they can participate. Common questions requiring a "yes" or "no" answer were also identified. We recorded these phrases using native speakers who were both knowledgeable medically and familiar with the culture of the patients to provide accurate translations. We developed a software application that categorically grouped the phrases and allowed care providers to select a phrase and play the associated sound file to the patient and deployed the program on our touchscreen-enabled anesthesia information management system workstations. A convenience sample of obstetrical patients speaking a Chinese dialect with whom the language program was used were asked to complete an anonymous questionnaire, translated into Chinese, about their experience. Ninety-five percent lower confidence limits (LCLs) were calculated for response proportions. We approached 25 parturients with varying levels of English comprehension, and all agreed to use the language program. Each used it throughout her interaction with the anesthesia care providers during labor and delivery, and all patients completed the survey. Acceptance of the process was high, with all patients indicating that they would like to use it again were they to return for another procedure requiring anesthesia. Eighty-eight percent (LCL = 73%) indicated that having instructions in their native language made them feel more relaxed, whereas the experience was neutral in the remainder. Comprehension of the phrases presented was high, with 96% (LCL = 83%) indicating that they understood all instructions. Ninety-six percent (LCL = 83%) of patients indicated that they would be likely to refer friends and family to our institution based on the availability of this device. Although patient safety likely could be improved by use of a communication device such as the one we developed, our study was insufficiently powered to be able to measure this potential improvement. The process we describe should be useful wherever anesthesia care providers are not able to communicate in the same language as their patients.

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.

Inducing comprehension in the bilateral poor reader.

PubMed

Rattan, G; Dean, R S; Lowrie, R E

1987-09-01

The comprehension effects of changes in the spatial configuration of prose were examined with reading disabled children who differed in laterality preference. Specifically, 24 learning disabled boys were presented with prose materials in a standard, phrased, and backward (right to left) fashion. Measures of comprehension showed that text in the phrased and backward conditions differentially facilitated comprehension for the more bilateral subjects but had little effect on more right lateralized subjects. The results were discussed in terms of the instructional implications of alterations in the visual-spatial arrangement of prose materials for bilateral readers.

System, method and apparatus for conducting a phrase search

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

McGreevy, Michael W. (Inventor)

2004-01-01

A phrase search is a method of searching a database for subsets of the database that are relevant to an input query. First, a number of relational models of subsets of a database are provided. A query is then input. The query can include one or more sequences of terms. Next, a relational model of the query is created. The relational model of the query is then compared to each one of the relational models of subsets of the database. The identifiers of the relevant subsets are then output.

Polyphenotypic Psoriasis: A Report from the GRAPPA 2016 Annual Meeting.

PubMed

Kaskas, Nadine; Merola, Joseph F; Qureshi, Abrar A; Paek, So Yeon

2017-05-01

Recent groundbreaking therapies for psoriasis target specific pathways that drive this systemic inflammatory disease. However, patients with nonplaque psoriasis phenotypes often do not qualify for these therapies and are currently undertreated because of the criteria used during the development of novel agents. We propose use of the phrase "polyphenotypic psoriasis" to describe both plaque and nonplaque subtypes, as well as single and multiple phenotype involvement in individual patients. The goal of using the phrase "polyphenotypic psoriasis" is to remind clinicians about the heterogeneous manifestations of psoriasis in addition to chronic plaque psoriasis.

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.

Temporal coordination and adaptation to rate change in music performance.

PubMed

Loehr, Janeen D; Large, Edward W; Palmer, Caroline

2011-08-01

People often coordinate their actions with sequences that exhibit temporal variability and unfold at multiple periodicities. We compared oscillator- and timekeeper-based accounts of temporal coordination by examining musicians' coordination of rhythmic musical sequences with a metronome that gradually changed rate at the end of a musical phrase (Experiment 1) or at the beginning of a phrase (Experiment 2). The rhythms contained events that occurred at the same periodic rate as the metronome and at half the period. Rate change consisted of a linear increase or decrease in intervals between metronome onsets. Musicians coordinated their performances better with a metronome that decreased than increased in tempo (as predicted by an oscillator model), at both beginnings and ends of musical phrases. Model performance was tested with an oscillator period or timekeeper interval set to the same period as the metronome (1:1 coordination) or half the metronome period (2:1 coordination). Only the oscillator model was able to predict musicians' coordination at both periods. These findings suggest that coordination is based on internal neural oscillations that entrain to external sequences.

Laughter Among Deaf Signers

PubMed Central

Provine, Robert R.; Emmorey, Karen

2008-01-01

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 users of American Sign Language, however, laughter and language do not compete in the same way for a single output channel. This study investigated whether laughter occurs simultaneously with signing, or punctuates signing, as it does speech, in 11 signed conversations (with two to five participants) that had at least one instance of audible, vocal laughter. Laughter occurred 2.7 times more often during pauses and at phrase boundaries than simultaneously with a signed utterance. Thus, the production of laughter involves higher order cognitive or linguistic processes rather than the low-level regulation of motor processes competing for a single vocal channel. In an examination of other variables, the social dynamics of deaf and hearing people were similar, with “speakers” (those signing) laughing more than their audiences and females laughing more than males. PMID:16891353

Laughter among deaf signers.

PubMed

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 users of American Sign Language, however, laughter and language do not compete in the same way for a single output channel. This study investigated whether laughter occurs simultaneously with signing, or punctuates signing, as it does speech, in 11 signed conversations (with two to five participants) that had at least one instance of audible, vocal laughter. Laughter occurred 2.7 times more often during pauses and at phrase boundaries than simultaneously with a signed utterance. Thus, the production of laughter involves higher order cognitive or linguistic processes rather than the low-level regulation of motor processes competing for a single vocal channel. In an examination of other variables, the social dynamics of deaf and hearing people were similar, with "speakers" (those signing) laughing more than their audiences and females laughing more than males.

Pre- and post-head processing for single- and double-scrambled sentences of a head-final language as measured by the eye tracking method.

PubMed

Tamaoka, Katsuo; Asano, Michiko; Miyaoka, Yayoi; Yokosawa, Kazuhiko

2014-04-01

Using the eye-tracking method, the present study depicted pre- and post-head processing for simple scrambled sentences of head-final languages. Three versions of simple Japanese active sentences with ditransitive verbs were used: namely, (1) SO₁O₂V canonical, (2) SO₂O₁V single-scrambled, and (3) O₁O₂SV double-scrambled order. First pass reading times indicated that the third noun phrase just before the verb in both single- and double-scrambled sentences required longer reading times compared to canonical sentences. Re-reading times (the sum of all fixations minus the first pass reading) showed that all noun phrases including the crucial phrase before the verb in double-scrambled sentences required longer re-reading times than those required for single-scrambled sentences; single-scrambled sentences had no difference from canonical ones. Therefore, a single filler-gap dependency can be resolved in pre-head anticipatory processing whereas two filler-gap dependencies require much greater cognitive loading than a single case. These two dependencies can be resolved in post-head processing using verb agreement information.

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

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].

Key-phrase based classification of public health web pages.

PubMed

Dolamic, Ljiljana; Boyer, Célia

2013-01-01

This paper describes and evaluates the public health web pages classification model based on key phrase extraction and matching. Easily extendible both in terms of new classes as well as the new language this method proves to be a good solution for text classification faced with the total lack of training data. To evaluate the proposed solution we have used a small collection of public health related web pages created by a double blind manual classification. Our experiments have shown that by choosing the adequate threshold value the desired value for either precision or recall can be achieved.

Contract law--it's only as good as the people.

PubMed

George, James

2004-02-01

There is a frequently spoken phrase in law known as "Res Ipsa Loquitur." This Latin phrase translates in English to mean, "The thing speaks for itself." It is hoped the title of this article speaks for itself. The simple truth is that a contract is only as good as the people and institutions it binds. This does not mean that contracts should not exist or that important details of a contractual relationship should not be in writing. In essence, contracts are society's best attempt to memorialize the details of a business relationship between people and entities.

A Devil's dictionary for mental health

PubMed Central

Timms, Philip

2017-01-01

Clinical psychiatry, for all its emphasis on scientific rigour, is mediated mainly by words rather than by numbers. As with other professional areas, it has developed its own set of jargon words and phrases. Many of these are not the technical terms traditionally seen as jargon, but standard English words and phrases used in an idiosyncratic way. They therefore go unnoticed as jargon, while enfeebling our communications. I have used the template of Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary to highlight some examples, with the aim of helping us all to talk, write and, perhaps, think more clearly. PMID:29018547

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.

Influence of descriptive terminology on management of atypical thyroid fine-needle aspirates.

PubMed

Vivero, Marina; Renshaw, Andrew A; Krane, Jeffrey F

2014-03-01

The Bethesda System category of atypia of undetermined significance/follicular lesion of undetermined significance (AUS/FLUS) is used to classify a variety of mild abnormalities in thyroid FNAs. Modifying terminology is often added to FNA reports, but it is unknown whether specific phrases affect clinical management. To answer this question, the authors correlated treatment of patients who had initial AUS/FLUS diagnoses from Baptist Hospital (Miami, Fla) (BH) and Brigham and Women's Hospital (Boston, Mass) (BWH) with the language used in pathology reports. In total, 146 FNAs from BH, including 115 women and 31 men with a median age of 53 years (range, 21-79 years), and 300 FNAs from BWH, including 241 women and 59 men with a median age of 66 years (range, 10-85 years), were included. FNA reports were evaluated for predetermined descriptive phrases and were correlated with subsequent management. More patients with available follow-up underwent excision at BH than at BWH (86% vs 8%; P < .001), and fewer underwent a repeat biopsy (14% vs 92%; P < .001). Qualifiers associated with differing malignancy risk affected patient management (P < .05) at BH, but not at BWH. Reports indicating a scant or limited specimen increased rebiopsy rates at BH (100% vs 4.8%; P < .05), but not at BWH (93% vs 91%; P = .67), as did explicit recommendation for rebiopsy at BH (35% vs 14%; P = .03). No other phrases affected patient management (P > .05). In practice settings that follow The Bethesda System management guidelines, descriptive report terminology does not modify patient treatment. In less standardized settings, terminology associated with differing risk of malignancy on subsequent excision, pathologist recommendations, and phrases indicative of limited sampling significantly alter patient management. © 2013 American Cancer Society.

Synergetic Organization in Speech Rhythm

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Cummins, Fred

The Speech Cycling Task is a novel experimental paradigm developed together with Robert Port and Keiichi Tajima at Indiana University. In a task of this sort, subjects repeat a phrase containing multiple prominent, or stressed, syllables in time with an auditory metronome, which can be simple or complex. A phase-based collective variable is defined in the acoustic speech signal. This paper reports on two experiments using speech cycling which together reveal many of the hallmarks of hierarchically coupled oscillatory processes. The first experiment requires subjects to place the final stressed syllable of a small phrase at specified phases within the overall Phrase Repetition Cycle (PRC). It is clearly demonstrated that only three patterns, characterized by phases around 1/3, 1/2 or 2/3 are reliably produced, and these points are attractors for other target phases. The system is thus multistable, and the attractors correspond to stable couplings between the metrical foot and the PRC. A second experiment examines the behavior of these attractors at increased rates. Faster rates lead to mode jumps between attractors. Previous experiments have also illustrated hysteresis as the system moves from one mode to the next. The dynamical organization is particularly interesting from a modeling point of view, as there is no single part of the speech production system which cycles at the level of either the metrical foot or the phrase repetition cycle. That is, there is no continuous kinematic observable in the system. Nonetheless, there is strong evidence that the oscopic behavior of the entire production system is correctly described as hierarchically coupled oscillators. There are many parallels between this organization and the forms of inter-limb coupling observed in locomotion and rhythmic manual tasks.

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.

Experimental investigations of weak definite and weak indefinite noun phrases

PubMed Central

Klein, Natalie M.; Gegg-Harrison, Whitney M.; Carlson, Greg N.; Tanenhaus, Michael K.

2013-01-01

Definite noun phrases typically refer to entities that are uniquely identifiable in the speaker and addressee’s common ground. Some definite noun phrases (e.g. the hospital in Mary had to go the hospital and John did too) seem to violate this uniqueness constraint. We report six experiments that were motivated by the hypothesis that these “weak definite” interpretations arise in “incorporated” constructions. Experiments 1-3 compared nouns that seem to allow for a weak definite interpretation (e.g. hospital, bank, bus, radio) with those that do not (e.g. farm, concert, car, book). Experiments 1 and 2 used an instruction-following task and picture-judgment task, respectively, to demonstrate that a weak definite need not uniquely refer. In Experiment 3 participants imagined scenarios described by sentences such as The Federal Express driver had to go to the hospital/farm. The imagined scenarios following weak definite noun phrases were more likely to include conventional activities associated with the object, whereas following regular nouns, participants were more likely to imagine scenarios that included typical activities associated with the subject; similar effects were observed with weak indefinites. Experiment 4 found that object-related activities were reduced when the same subject and object were used with a verb that does not license weak definite interpretations. In Experiment 5, a science fiction story introduced an artificial lexicon for novel concepts. Novel nouns that shared conceptual properties with English weak definite nouns were more likely to allow weak reference in a judgment task. Experiment 6 demonstrated that familiarity for definite articles and anti- familiarity for indefinite articles applies to the activity associated with the noun, consistent with predictions made by the incorporation analysis. PMID:23685208

Effects of prosodic boundary on /aC/ sequences: articulatory results

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Tabain, Marija

2003-05-01

This study presents EMA (electromagnetic articulography) data on articulation of the vowel /a/ at different prosodic boundaries in French. Three speakers of metropolitan French produced utterances containing the vowel /a/, preceded by /tee/ and followed by one of six consonants /bee dee gee eff ess sh/ (three stops and three fricatives), with different prosodic boundaries intervening between the /a/ and the six different consonants. The prosodic boundaries investigated are the Utterance, the Intonational phrase, the Accentual phrase, and the Word. Data for the Tongue Tip, Tongue Body, and Jaw are presented. The articulatory data presented here were recorded at the same time as the acoustic data presented in Tabain [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 113, 516-531 (2003)]. Analyses show that there is a strong effect on peak displacement of the vowel according to the prosodic hierarchy, with the stronger prosodic boundaries inducing a much lower Tongue Body and Jaw position than the weaker prosodic boundaries. Durations of both the opening movement into and the closing movement out of the vowel are also affected. Peak velocity of the articulatory movements is also examined, and, contrary to results for phrase-final lengthening, it is found that peak velocity of the opening movement into the vowel tends to increase with the higher prosodic boundaries, together with the increased magnitude of the movement between the consonant and the vowel. Results for the closing movement out of the vowel and into the consonant are not so clear. Since one speaker shows evidence of utterance-level articulatory declension, it is suggested that the competing constraints of articulatory declension and prosodic effects might explain some previous results on phrase-final lengthening.

Sudden death: bereavement sequelae and interventions.

PubMed

Davidson, G P

1981-10-14

Just the phrase "sudden death' carries its sense of trepidation and even horror. So fear-inducing is its reality and prospect, that we have attempted to sanitise it by the colloquialisms such as a "sudden death play off' in sport, and even (recalling my days in military service) as the name of a particularly ferocious mix of alcoholic beverage. One of the reasons why the phrase is so evocative is the force of the unexpected bereavement that follows sudden death. This paper purports to examine, using a systems approach, the psychological sequelae of the emotionally involved survivors of sudden death, and to relate this to possible intervention strategies.

The online social self: an open vocabulary approach to personality.

PubMed

Kern, Margaret L; Eichstaedt, Johannes C; Schwartz, H Andrew; Dziurzynski, Lukasz; Ungar, Lyle H; Stillwell, David J; Kosinski, Michal; Ramones, Stephanie M; Seligman, Martin E P

2014-04-01

We present a new open language analysis approach that identifies and visually summarizes the dominant naturally occurring words and phrases that most distinguished each Big Five personality trait. Using millions of posts from 69,792 Facebook users, we examined the correlation of personality traits with online word usage. Our analysis method consists of feature extraction, correlational analysis, and visualization. The distinguishing words and phrases were face valid and provide insight into processes that underlie the Big Five traits. Open-ended data driven exploration of large datasets combined with established psychological theory and measures offers new tools to further understand the human psyche. © The Author(s) 2013.

Phrase-level speech simulation with an airway modulation model of speech production

PubMed Central

Story, Brad H.

2012-01-01

Artificial talkers and speech synthesis systems have long been used as a means of understanding both speech production and speech perception. The development of an airway modulation model is described that simulates the time-varying changes of the glottis and vocal tract, as well as acoustic wave propagation, during speech production. The result is a type of artificial talker that can be used to study various aspects of how sound is generated by humans and how that sound is perceived by a listener. The primary components of the model are introduced and simulation of words and phrases are demonstrated. PMID:23503742

A Genetic Algorithm for Learning Significant Phrase Patterns in Radiology Reports

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

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

2009-01-01

Radiologists disagree with each other over the characteristics and features of what constitutes a normal mammogram and the terminology to use in the associated radiology report. Recently, the focus has been on classifying abnormal or suspicious reports, but even this process needs further layers of clustering and gradation, so that individual lesions can be more effectively classified. Using a genetic algorithm, the approach described here successfully learns phrase patterns for two distinct classes of radiology reports (normal and abnormal). These patterns can then be used as a basis for automatically analyzing, categorizing, clustering, or retrieving relevant radiology reports for themore » user.« less

Identifying duplicate content using statistically improbable phrases

PubMed Central

Errami, Mounir; Sun, Zhaohui; George, Angela C.; Long, Tara C.; Skinner, Michael A.; Wren, Jonathan D.; Garner, Harold R.

2010-01-01

Motivation: Document similarity metrics such as PubMed's ‘Find related articles’ feature, which have been primarily used to identify studies with similar topics, can now also be used to detect duplicated or potentially plagiarized papers within literature reference databases. However, the CPU-intensive nature of document comparison has limited MEDLINE text similarity studies to the comparison of abstracts, which constitute only a small fraction of a publication's total text. Extending searches to include text archived by online search engines would drastically increase comparison ability. For large-scale studies, submitting short phrases encased in direct quotes to search engines for exact matches would be optimal for both individual queries and programmatic interfaces. We have derived a method of analyzing statistically improbable phrases (SIPs) for assistance in identifying duplicate content. Results: When applied to MEDLINE citations, this method substantially improves upon previous algorithms in the detection of duplication citations, yielding a precision and recall of 78.9% (versus 50.3% for eTBLAST) and 99.6% (versus 99.8% for eTBLAST), respectively. Availability: Similar citations identified by this work are freely accessible in the Déjà vu database, under the SIP discovery method category at http://dejavu.vbi.vt.edu/dejavu/ Contact: merrami@collin.edu PMID:20472545

Vertical array measurements of humpback whale songs

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Au, Whitlow W. L.; Lammers, Marc O.; Pack, Adam A.; Herman, Louis

2004-05-01

The songs of eight male humpback whales were recorded at ranges varying from 20 to 40 m with a vertical array of hydrophones that had a flat frequency response to 24 kHz. The songs consisted of bursts of sounds called units. Units were organized into phrases and phrases into themes. Most of the units had mean duration between 1 and 2 s and mean silent periods between units between 1 and 2 s. Many of the recorded songs contained units that had high-frequency harmonics that extended beyond 22 kHz. These harmonic results suggest that humpback whale songs have a broadband quality not previously reported and may provide some insights on the high-frequency limit of hearing in these whales. The source levels of the songs were also estimated by considering the root-mean-square sound-pressure level referenced to 1 m for the unit with the largest level for different phrase within a song. Source levels varied between 171 to 189 dB re: 1 μPa. Singing escorts have been regularly observed within two whale lengths of females and these observations and knowledge of source levels provide estimates of sound-pressure levels that male humpback whales expose female whales to.

Gender agreement and multiple referents.

PubMed

Finocchiaro, Chiara; Mahon, Bradford Z; Caramazza, Alfonso

2008-01-01

We report a new pattern of usage in current, spoken Italian that has implications for both psycholinguistic models of language production and linguistic theories of language change. In Italian, gender agreement is mandatory for both singular and plural nouns. However, when two or more nouns of different grammatical gender appear in a conjoined noun phrase (NP), masculine plural agreement is required. In this study, we combined on-line and off-line methodologies in order to assess the mechanisms involved in gender marking in the context of multiple referents. The results of two pronoun production tasks showed that plural feminine agreement was significantly more difficult than plural masculine agreement. In a separate study using offline judgements of acceptability, we found that agreement violations in Italian are tolerated more readily in the case of feminine conjoined noun phrases (e.g., la mela e la banana 'the:fem apple:fem and the: fem banana: fem') than masculine conjoined noun phrases (e.g., il fiore e il libro 'the:mas flower: mas and the:mas book:mas'). Implications of these results are discussed both at the level of functional architecture within the language production system and at the level of changes in language use.

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.

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.

The alarm call system of two species of black-and-white colobus monkeys (Colobus polykomos and Colobus guereza).

PubMed

Schel, Anne Marijke; Tranquilli, Sandra; Zuberbühler, Klaus

2009-05-01

Vervet monkey alarm calling has long been the paradigmatic example of how primates use vocalizations in response to predators. In vervets, there is a close and direct relationship between the production of distinct alarm vocalizations and the presence of distinct predator types. Recent fieldwork has however revealed the use of several additional alarm calling systems in primates. Here, the authors describe playback studies on the alarm call system of two colobine species, the King colobus (Colobus polykomos) of Taï Forest, Ivory Coast, and the Guereza colobus (C. guereza) of Budongo Forest, Uganda. Both species produce two basic alarm call types, snorts and acoustically variable roaring phrases, when confronted with leopards or crowned eagles. Neither call type is given exclusively to one predator, but the authors found strong regularities in call sequencing. Leopards typically elicited sequences consisting of a snort followed by few phrases, while eagles typically elicited sequences with no snorts and many phrases. The authors discuss how these call sequences have the potential to encode information at different levels, such as predator type, response-urgency, or the caller's imminent behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved).

The parser doesn't ignore intransitivity, after all

PubMed Central

Staub, Adrian

2015-01-01

Several previous studies (Adams, Clifton, & Mitchell, 1998; Mitchell, 1987; van Gompel & Pickering, 2001) have explored the question of whether the parser initially analyzes a noun phrase that follows an intransitive verb as the verb's direct object. Three eyetracking experiments examined this issue in more detail. Experiment 1 strongly replicated the finding (van Gompel & Pickering, 2001) that readers experience difficulty on this noun phrase in normal reading, and found that this difficulty occurs even with a class of intransitive verbs for which a direct object is categorically prohibited. Experiment 2, however, demonstrated that this effect is not due to syntactic misanalysis, but is instead due to disruption that occurs when a comma is absent at a subordinate clause/main clause boundary. Exploring a different construction, Experiment 3 replicated the finding (Pickering & Traxler, 2003; Traxler & Pickering, 1996) that when a noun phrase “filler” is an implausible direct object for an optionally transitive relative clause verb, processing difficulty results; however, there was no evidence for such difficulty when the relative clause verb was strictly intransitive. Taken together, the three experiments undermine the support for the claim that the parser initially ignores a verb's subcategorization restrictions. PMID:17470005

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

PubMed Central

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

2009-01-01

We investigated 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 (VP)), which receives its reference from the fully specified VP in the antecedent clause. VPE constructions are unlike other sentence types that require displacement of an argument NP; these latter constructions (e.g., object-relatives, wh-questions) yield either on-time or delayed antecedent reactivation. Our results demonstrate that Anomics, like unimpaired individuals, evince reactivation of the direct object NP (within the VP) at the elided position. Broca’s patients, on the other hand, do not show reactivation of the antecedent. We consider several interpretations for our data, including explanations focusing on the larger ‘grain size’ of the reconstructed material in the ellipsis clause, the properties of the auxiliary that carries tense and agreement features, and the possibility that the cost-free syntactic copy procedure claimed to underlie VPE may be modulated by the functional deficit in Broca’s aphasia. PMID:19350393

Metaphor Identification in Large Texts Corpora

PubMed Central

Neuman, Yair; Assaf, Dan; Cohen, Yohai; Last, Mark; Argamon, Shlomo; Howard, Newton; Frieder, Ophir

2013-01-01

Identifying metaphorical language-use (e.g., sweet child) is one of the challenges facing natural language processing. This paper describes three novel algorithms for automatic metaphor identification. The algorithms are variations of the same core algorithm. We evaluate the algorithms on two corpora of Reuters and the New York Times articles. The paper presents the most comprehensive study of metaphor identification in terms of scope of metaphorical phrases and annotated corpora size. Algorithms’ performance in identifying linguistic phrases as metaphorical or literal has been compared to human judgment. Overall, the algorithms outperform the state-of-the-art algorithm with 71% precision and 27% averaged improvement in prediction over the base-rate of metaphors in the corpus. PMID:23658625

Using semantic memory to boost 'episodic' recall in a case of developmental amnesia.

PubMed

Brandt, Karen R; Gardiner, John M; Vargha-Khadem, Faraneh; Baddeley, Alan D; Mishkin, Mortimer

2006-07-17

We report two experiments that investigated factors that might boost 'episodic' recall for Jon, a developmental amnesic whose episodic memory is gravely impaired but whose semantic memory seems relatively normal. Experiment 1 showed that Jon's recall improved following a semantic study task compared with a non-semantic study task, as well as following four repeated study trials compared with only one. Experiment 2 additionally revealed that Jon's recall improved after acting compared with reading action phrases at study, but only if the phrases were well integrated semantically. The results provide some support for the hypothesis that Jon's 'episodic' recall depends on the extent to which he is able to retrieve events using semantic memory.

The value of parsing as feature generation for gene mention recognition

PubMed Central

Smith, Larry H; Wilbur, W John

2009-01-01

We measured the extent to which information surrounding a base noun phrase reflects the presence of a gene name, and evaluated seven different parsers in their ability to provide information for that purpose. Using the GENETAG corpus as a gold standard, we performed machine learning to recognize from its context when a base noun phrase contained a gene name. Starting with the best lexical features, we assessed the gain of adding dependency or dependency-like relations from a full sentence parse. Features derived from parsers improved performance in this partial gene mention recognition task by a small but statistically significant amount. There were virtually no differences between parsers in these experiments. PMID:19345281

The extended curse: being a woman every day.

PubMed

Berg, D H; Coutts, L B

1994-01-01

Inductive analysis of the portrayal of menstruating women in contemporary menstrual product advertisements revealed a profound shift in the meaning of feminine hygiene over the last few decades. The phrase sanitary protection has been replaced by a more euphemistic phrase, feminine hygiene, to refer to menstrual management products. What first appeared to be mere euphemistic substitution, on further analysis, was revealed to involve considerably more than semantics. In the case of panty liners, it was found that the marketing of these specialized products involves the invocation of negative definitions of femaleness and a concomitant subscription to altered definitions of femininity. These altered meanings, conveyed in recent menstrual product advertisements, have serious implications for contemporary women's self-images.

Production of graphic symbol sentences by individuals with aphasia: efficacy of a computer-based augmentative and alternative communication intervention.

PubMed

Koul, Rajinder; Corwin, Melinda; Hayes, Summer

2005-01-01

The study employed a single-subject multiple baseline design to examine the ability of 9 individuals with severe Broca's aphasia or global aphasia to produce graphic symbol sentences of varying syntactical complexity using a software program that turns a computer into a speech output communication device. The sentences ranged in complexity from simple two-word phrases to those with morphological inflections, transformations, and relative clauses. Overall, results indicated that individuals with aphasia are able to access, manipulate, and combine graphic symbols to produce phrases and sentences of varying degrees of syntactical complexity. The findings are discussed in terms of the clinical and public policy implications.

Effects of testing on subsequent re-encoding and long-term forgetting of action-relevant materials: On the influence of recall type.

PubMed

Kubik, Veit; Nilsson, Lars-Göran; Olofsson, Jonas K; Jönsson, Fredrik U

2015-10-01

Testing one's memory of previously studied information reduces the rate of forgetting, compared to restudy. However, little is known about how this direct testing effect applies to action phrases (e.g., "wash the car") - a learning material relevant to everyday memory. As action phrases consist of two different components, a verb (e.g., "wash") and a noun (e.g., "car"), testing can either be implemented as noun-cued recall of verbs or verb-cued recall of nouns, which may differently affect later memory performance. In the present study, we investigated the effect of testing for these two recall types, using verbally encoded action phrases as learning materials. Results showed that repeated study-test practice, compared to repeated study-restudy practice, decreased the forgetting rate across 1 week to a similar degree for both noun-cued and verb-cued recall types. However, noun-cued recall of verbs initiated more new subsequent learning during the first restudy, compared to verb-cued recall of nouns. The study provides evidence that testing has benefits on both subsequent restudy and long-term retention of action-relevant materials, but that these benefits are differently expressed with testing via noun-cued versus verb-cued recall. © 2015 Scandinavian Psychological Associations and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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

Strategies to combat auditory overload during vehicular command and control.

PubMed

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

2014-09-01

Strategies to combat auditory overload were studied. Normal-hearing males were tested in a sound isolated room in a mock-up of a military land vehicle. Two tasks were presented concurrently, in quiet and vehicle noise. For Task 1 dichotic phrases were delivered over a communications headset. Participants encoded only those beginning with a preassigned call sign (Baron or Charlie). For Task 2, they agreed or disagreed with simple equations presented either over loudspeakers, as text on the laptop monitor, in both the audio and the visual modalities, or not at all. Accuracy was significantly better by 20% on Task 2 when the equations were presented visually or audiovisually. Scores were at least 78% correct for dichotic phrases presented over the headset, with a right ear advantage of 7%, given the 5 dB speech-to-noise ratio. The left ear disadvantage was particularly apparent in noise, where the interaural difference was 12%. Relatively lower scores in the left ear, in noise, were observed for phrases beginning with Charlie. These findings underscore the benefit of delivering higher priority communications to the dominant ear, the importance of selecting speech sounds that are resilient to noise masking, and the advantage of using text in cases of degraded audio. Reprint & Copyright © 2014 Association of Military Surgeons of the U.S.

Birth order effects on autism symptom domains.

PubMed

Reichenberg, Abraham; Smith, Christopher; Schmeidler, James; Silverman, Jeremy M

2007-03-30

Autism is predominantly genetically determined. Evidence supports familiality of the main sets of behavioral characteristics that define the syndrome of autism; however, possible non-genetic effects have also been suggested. The present study compared levels of autism symptom domains, as measured by the Autism Diagnostic Interview, and useful phrase speech scores between 106 pairs of first- and second-born siblings from multiply affected families. In addition, the intercorrelations between the measures were compared between siblings. The overall mean repetitive behavior total score was significantly higher (worse) in first-born than in second-born siblings. In contrast, first-born siblings had significantly lower (better) useful phrase speech than their younger siblings. Autism social and non-verbal communication scores were significantly correlated in first- and in second-born siblings. However, there was a significant difference in the coefficients between first- and second-born siblings. Performance on the non-verbal communication domain was also significantly and positively correlated with useful phrase speech score in both first- and second-born siblings. It is unclear at this time whether these results are of biologic origin. Nevertheless, the findings suggest that genetic studies in autism using specific levels of familial autism traits as phenotypes should take into account their intercorrelations and birth order effects embedded in the instrument.

Semantics is crucial for the right-hemisphere involvement in metaphor processing: evidence from mouth asymmetry during speaking.

PubMed

Argyriou, Paraskevi; Byfield, Sarah; Kita, Sotaro

2015-01-01

Research on the neural basis of metaphor provides contradicting evidence about the role of right and left hemispheres. We used the mouth-opening asymmetry technique to investigate the relative involvement of the two hemispheres whilst right-handed healthy male participants explained the meaning of English phrases. This technique is based on the contralateral cortical control of the facial musculature and reflects the relative hemispheric involvement during different cognitive tasks. In particular, right-handers show a right-sided mouth asymmetry (right side of the mouth opens wider than the left) during linguistic tasks, thus reflecting the left-hemisphere specialization for language. In the current study, we compared the right-sided mouth asymmetry during metaphor explanation (e.g., explain the meaning of the phrase "to spin a yarn") and concrete explanation (e.g., explain the meaning of the phrase "to spin a golf ball") and during the production of content and function words. The expected right-sided mouth asymmetry reduced during metaphorical compared to concrete explanations suggesting the relative right-hemispheric involvement for metaphor processing. Crucially, this right-sided mouth asymmetry reduction was particularly pronounced for the production of content words. Thus, we concluded that semantics is crucial to the right-hemispheric involvement for metaphorical speech production.

Abstinence-related word associations and definitions of abstinence and virginity among missouri high school freshmen.

PubMed

Wilson, Kelly L; Smith, Matthew Lee; Menn, Mindy

2013-11-01

The ways in which adolescents define and view sex, abstinence, and virginity impact the efforts of sexuality educators and sexual health professionals. This study examined terminology used by nonsexually active high school students to define abstinence and virginity and identified words students associate with these terms. Purposes included (1) describing words/phrases associated with abstinence; (2) describing phrases for "being abstinent until marriage" and "being a virgin;" (3) assessing concordance between word dyads associated with abstinence; and (4) assessing concordance between phrases defining "abstinent until marriage" and "a virgin." In this study, 216 freshmen provided information about beliefs, behaviors, and perceptions. Pearson chi-square tests and Wilcoxon sign-rank tests assessed sex-based differences, definitions, and levels of concordance were conducted. Girls' friends took an abstinence pledge (p = .004) and their parents (p = .025) and best friends (p < .001) think they should abstain. Male counterparts reported being dissatisfied with current sex status (p = .002) and high acceptance of sex before marriage (p = .011). Boys were more likely to endorse "negative" words than girls. Professionals need to use relevant materials incorporating terminology that resonates with adolescents and programs that engage coherent participant discussions. © 2013, American School Health Association.

Improving perceptions of empathy in patients undergoing low-yield computerized tomographic imaging in the emergency department.

PubMed

Lin, Michelle P; Probst, Marc A; Puskarich, Michael A; Dehon, Erin; Kuehl, Damon R; Wang, Ralph C; Hess, Erik P; Butler, Katie; Runyon, Michael S; Wang, Hao; Courtney, D Mark; Muckley, Brandon; Hobgood, Cherri D; Hall, Cassandra L; Kline, Jeffrey A

2018-04-01

We assessed emergency department (ED) patient perceptions of how physicians can improve their language to determine patient preferences for 11 phrases to enhance physician empathy toward the goal of reducing low-value advanced imaging. Multi-center survey study of low-risk ED patients undergoing computerized tomography (CT) scanning. We enroled 305 participants across nine sites. The statement "I have carefully considered what you told me about what brought you here today" was most frequently rated as important (88%). The statement "I have thought about the cost of your medical care to you today" was least frequently rated as important (59%). Participants preferred statements indicating physicians had considered their "vital signs and physical examination" (86%), "past medical history" (84%), and "what prior research tells me about your condition" (79%). Participants also valued statements conveying risks of testing, including potential kidney injury (78%) and radiation (77%). The majority of phrases were identified as important. Participants preferred statements conveying cognitive reassurance, medical knowledge and risks of testing. Our findings suggest specific phrases have the potential to enhance ED patient perceptions of physician empathy. Further research is needed to determine whether statements to convey empathy affect diagnostic testing rates. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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.

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.

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.

The Gender of "Energy": Language, Social Theory, and Cultural Change in Women's Lands in the United States.

PubMed

Luis, Keridwen N

2015-01-01

Within women's intentional communities, women use the phrase women's energy to describe certain social interactions, a sense of community, and ideas about how gender is done or performed. For example, energy can express both difference in communication style between men and women and male dominance in social situations. During my fieldwork in these communities, I explored how this phrase suggests a reference to a precultural female body, but it is also sometimes used to explicitly reject biological reasons for gender difference. The term is easily understandable to a wide range of women from varying class backgrounds and encompasses both the unconscious side of social interactions and a possibility for future change.

22 CFR 217.3 - Definitions.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-04-01

..., muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, mental retardation, emotional... this section the phrase: (i) Physical or mental impairment includes but is not limited to such diseases...

22 CFR 217.3 - Definitions.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-04-01

..., muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, mental retardation, emotional... this section the phrase: (i) Physical or mental impairment includes but is not limited to such diseases...

22 CFR 217.3 - Definitions.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-04-01

..., muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, mental retardation, emotional... this section the phrase: (i) Physical or mental impairment includes but is not limited to such diseases...

Stuttering

MedlinePlus

Stuttering may start with repeating consonants (k, g, t). If stuttering becomes worse, words and phrases are repeated. Later, vocal spasms develop. There is a forced, almost explosive sound to speech. The ...

16 CFR 23.2 - Misleading illustrations.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-01-01

... representation, picture, televised or computer image, illustration, diagram, or other depiction which, either alone or in conjunction with any accompanying words or phrases, misrepresents the type, kind, grade...

16 CFR 23.2 - Misleading illustrations.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-01-01

... representation, picture, televised or computer image, illustration, diagram, or other depiction which, either alone or in conjunction with any accompanying words or phrases, misrepresents the type, kind, grade...

16 CFR 23.2 - Misleading illustrations.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-01-01

... representation, picture, televised or computer image, illustration, diagram, or other depiction which, either alone or in conjunction with any accompanying words or phrases, misrepresents the type, kind, grade...

16 CFR 23.2 - Misleading illustrations.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-01-01

... representation, picture, televised or computer image, illustration, diagram, or other depiction which, either alone or in conjunction with any accompanying words or phrases, misrepresents the type, kind, grade...

29 CFR 541.701 - Customarily and regularly.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-07-01

... DELIMITING THE EXEMPTIONS FOR EXECUTIVE, ADMINISTRATIVE, PROFESSIONAL, COMPUTER AND OUTSIDE SALES EMPLOYEES Definitions and Miscellaneous Provisions § 541.701 Customarily and regularly. The phrase “customarily and...

29 CFR 541.701 - Customarily and regularly.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-07-01

... DELIMITING THE EXEMPTIONS FOR EXECUTIVE, ADMINISTRATIVE, PROFESSIONAL, COMPUTER AND OUTSIDE SALES EMPLOYEES Definitions and Miscellaneous Provisions § 541.701 Customarily and regularly. The phrase “customarily and...

29 CFR 541.701 - Customarily and regularly.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-07-01

... DELIMITING THE EXEMPTIONS FOR EXECUTIVE, ADMINISTRATIVE, PROFESSIONAL, COMPUTER AND OUTSIDE SALES EMPLOYEES Definitions and Miscellaneous Provisions § 541.701 Customarily and regularly. The phrase “customarily and...

29 CFR 541.701 - Customarily and regularly.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-07-01

... DELIMITING THE EXEMPTIONS FOR EXECUTIVE, ADMINISTRATIVE, PROFESSIONAL, COMPUTER AND OUTSIDE SALES EMPLOYEES Definitions and Miscellaneous Provisions § 541.701 Customarily and regularly. The phrase “customarily and...

Glossary of Water Resource Terms.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Titelbaum, Olga Adler

Twelve reference sources were used in the compilation of this glossary of water pollution control terminology. Definitions for 364 words, acronyms, and phrases are included with cross references. (KP)

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.

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.

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

Electrocorticographic language mapping with a listening task consisting of alternating speech and music phrases.

PubMed

Mooij, Anne H; Huiskamp, Geertjan J M; Gosselaar, Peter H; Ferrier, Cyrille H

2016-02-01

Electrocorticographic (ECoG) mapping of high gamma activity induced by language tasks has been proposed as a more patient friendly alternative for electrocortical stimulation mapping (ESM), the gold standard in pre-surgical language mapping of epilepsy patients. However, ECoG mapping often reveals more language areas than considered critical with ESM. We investigated if critical language areas can be identified with a listening task consisting of speech and music phrases. Nine patients with implanted subdural grid electrodes listened to an audio fragment in which music and speech alternated. We analysed ECoG power in the 65-95 Hz band and obtained task-related activity patterns in electrodes over language areas. We compared the spatial distribution of sites that discriminated between listening to speech and music to ESM results using sensitivity and specificity calculations. Our listening task of alternating speech and music phrases had a low sensitivity (0.32) but a high specificity (0.95). The high specificity indicates that this test does indeed point to areas that are critical to language processing. Our test cannot replace ESM, but this short and simple task can give a reliable indication where to find critical language areas, better than ECoG mapping using language tasks alone. Copyright © 2015 International Federation of Clinical Neurophysiology. Published by Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Screening of hearing in elderly people: assessment of accuracy and reproducibility of the whispered voice test.

PubMed

Labanca, Ludimila; Guimarães, Fernando Sales; Costa-Guarisco, Letícia Pimenta; Couto, Erica de Araújo Brandão; Gonçalves, Denise Utsch

2017-11-01

Given the high prevalence of presbycusis and its detrimental effect on quality of life, screening tests can be useful tools for detecting hearing loss in primary care settings. This study therefore aimed to determine the accuracy and reproducibility of the whispered voice test as a screening method for detecting hearing impairment in older people. This cross-sectional study was carried out with 210 older adults aged between 60 and 97 years who underwent the whispered voice test employing ten different phrases and using audiometry as a reference test. Sensitivity, specificity and positive and negative predictive values were calculated and accuracy was measured by calculating the area under the ROC curve. The test was repeated on 20% of the ears by a second examiner to assess inter-examiner reproducibility (IER). The words and phrases that showed the highest area under the curve (AUC) and IER values were: "shoe" (AUC = 0.918; IER = 0.877), "window" (AUC = 0.917; IER = 0.869), "it looks like it's going to rain" (AUC = 0.911; IER = 0.810), and "the bus is late" (AUC = 0.900; IER = 0.810), demonstrating that the whispered voice test is a useful screening tool for detecting hearing loss among older people. It is proposed that these words and phrases should be incorporated into the whispered voice test protocol.

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.

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.

Perceptual recovery from consonant-cluster simplification in Korean using language-specific phonological knowledge.

PubMed

Cho, Taehong; McQueen, James M

2011-08-01

Two experiments examined whether perceptual recovery from Korean consonant-cluster simplification is based on language-specific phonological knowledge. In tri-consonantal C1C2C3 sequences such as /lkt/ and /lpt/ in Seoul Korean, either C1 or C2 can be completely deleted. Seoul Koreans monitored for C2 targets (/p/ or / k/, deleted or preserved) in the second word of a two-word phrase with an underlying /l/-C2-/t/ sequence. In Experiment 1 the target-bearing words had contextual lexical-semantic support. Listeners recovered deleted targets as fast and as accurately as preserved targets with both Word and Intonational Phrase (IP) boundaries between the two words. In Experiment 2, contexts were low-pass filtered. Listeners were still able to recover deleted targets as well as preserved targets in IP-boundary contexts, but better with physically-present targets than with deleted targets in Word-boundary contexts. This suggests that the benefit of having target acoustic-phonetic information emerges only when higher-order (contextual and phrase-boundary) information is not available. The strikingly efficient recovery of deleted phonemes with neither acoustic-phonetic cues nor contextual support demonstrates that language-specific phonological knowledge, rather than language-universal perceptual processes which rely on fine-grained phonetic details, is employed when the listener perceives the results of a continuous-speech process in which reduction is phonetically complete.

Arabic word recognizer for mobile applications

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Khanna, Nitin; Abdollahian, Golnaz; Brame, Ben; Boutin, Mireille; Delp, Edward J.

2011-03-01

When traveling in a region where the local language is not written using a "Roman alphabet," translating written text (e.g., documents, road signs, or placards) is a particularly difficult problem since the text cannot be easily entered into a translation device or searched using a dictionary. To address this problem, we are developing the "Rosetta Phone," a handheld device (e.g., PDA or mobile telephone) capable of acquiring an image of the text, locating the region (word) of interest within the image, and producing both an audio and a visual English interpretation of the text. This paper presents a system targeted for interpreting words written in Arabic script. The goal of this work is to develop an autonomous, segmentation-free Arabic phrase recognizer, with computational complexity low enough to deploy on a mobile device. A prototype of the proposed system has been deployed on an iPhone with a suitable user interface. The system was tested on a number of noisy images, in addition to the images acquired from the iPhone's camera. It identifies Arabic words or phrases by extracting appropriate features and assigning "codewords" to each word or phrase. On a dictionary of 5,000 words, the system uniquely mapped (word-image to codeword) 99.9% of the words. The system has a 82% recognition accuracy on images of words captured using the iPhone's built-in camera.

On being understood: clarity and jargon in radiation protection.

PubMed

Strom, Daniel J; Watson, Charles R

2002-03-01

While much of the language used to express the concepts of radiation protection works effectively, there are many ill-chosen names and phrases and much jargon that permeate our professional speech and writing. From the oxymoron "internal exposure" to the "snarl word" "decay," there is much room for improvement. This essay identifies many of the problems and suggests solutions. We examine the kinds of confusions that can result from using familiar words with unfamiliar meanings and the need for neology. We offer insights into specific and unambiguous naming of physical quantities and explore the seemingly unlimited kinds of "dose." We disaggregate exposure from irradiation following intakes, and unmask units like "gram rad per microcurie hour." We call for a definition of radiation weighting factor that doesn't result in a violation of the law of conservation of energy. We examine the subtleties of distinguishing between radiation and radioactive materials. Some words, such as "exposure," have multiple meanings, while at other times there are different words or phrases with the same meaning, such as "critical level" and "decision level" or "detection level" and "minimum detectable amount." Sometimes phrases are used whose meaning is unclear or not agreed upon, such as "lower limit of detection." Sometimes there are words that are simply not apt, such as "disintegration" applied to the emission of a subatomic particle from a nucleus.

Word order denotes relevance differences: The case of conjoined phrases with lexical gender.

PubMed

Kesebir, Selin

2017-08-01

This work explores the order of linguistic references to the two genders (e.g., men and women vs. women and men). It argues that a gender is more likely to be mentioned first when it is perceived to have higher relevance in a context rather than lower relevance, and audiences assign stronger relevance to a party when the party is mentioned first rather than second. Studies 1-3 document the current prevalence of male-first conjoined phrases in the public (but not family) domain and link the pattern to historical changes in women's public presence over the 20th century. Study 4 shows that contextual relevance cues affect the odds of first mention, such that people are more likely to refer to a woman before a man, when the two are in a primary school classroom rather than a corporate office. At the same time, Studies 4 and 5 find that people often choose to reproduce collectively preferred word order patterns (e.g., men and women). Studies 6 and 7 show that these choices matter because people assign more relevance to a party when it comes first rather than second in a conjoined phrase. Overall, this work offers theoretical grounding and empirical evidence for word order as a means of expressing and perpetuating gender stereotypes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).

Meditation

MedlinePlus

... a tranquil mind. During meditation, you focus your attention and eliminate the stream of jumbled thoughts that ... word, thought or phrase to prevent distracting thoughts. Mindfulness meditation. This type of meditation is based on ...

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.

Pelvic Exam

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... exact term or phrase, no variations. Use multiple keywords separated by spaces (e.g. kidney renal ) for ... higher those with all or most of the keywords. Plurals and other variations are automatically included. To ...

Pap Test

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Pharynx Anatomy

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Larynx Anatomy

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Paraganglioma Anatomy

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Vulva Anatomy

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Phrase-Final Words in Greek Storytelling Speech: A Study on the Effect of a Culturally-Specific Prosodic Feature on Short-Term Memory.

PubMed

Loutrari, Ariadne; Tselekidou, Freideriki; Proios, Hariklia

2018-02-27

Prosodic patterns of speech appear to make a critical contribution to memory-related processing. We considered the case of a previously unexplored prosodic feature of Greek storytelling and its effect on free recall in thirty typically developing children between the ages of 10 and 12 years, using short ecologically valid auditory stimuli. The combination of a falling pitch contour and, more notably, extensive final-syllable vowel lengthening, which gives rise to the prosodic feature in question, led to statistically significantly higher performance in comparison to neutral phrase-final prosody. Number of syllables in target words did not reveal substantial difference in performance. The current study presents a previously undocumented culturally-specific prosodic pattern and its effect on short-term memory.

Thymus Gland Anatomy

MedlinePlus

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42 CFR 495.102 - Incentive payments to EPs.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-10-01

... (CONTINUED) STANDARDS AND CERTIFICATION STANDARDS FOR THE ELECTRONIC HEALTH RECORD TECHNOLOGY INCENTIVE... in its place the phrase “Business address, business email address, and” in (a)(3), effective Nov. 5...

Pancreatic Cancer Stage 4

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Ovarian Cancer Stage IV

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Cervical Cancer Stage IB

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Cervical Cancer Stage IIIA

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Ovarian Cancer Stage IIIC

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Ovarian Cancer Stage II

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Pancreatic Cancer Stage 3

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Cervical Cancer Stage IVA

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Searching for the right word: Hybrid visual and memory search for words.

PubMed

Boettcher, Sage E P; Wolfe, Jeremy M

2015-05-01

In "hybrid search" (Wolfe Psychological Science, 23(7), 698-703, 2012), observers search through visual space for any of multiple targets held in memory. With photorealistic objects as the stimuli, response times (RTs) increase linearly with the visual set size and logarithmically with the memory set size, even when over 100 items are committed to memory. It is well-established that pictures of objects are particularly easy to memorize (Brady, Konkle, Alvarez, & Oliva Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105, 14325-14329, 2008). Would hybrid-search performance be similar if the targets were words or phrases, in which word order can be important, so that the processes of memorization might be different? In Experiment 1, observers memorized 2, 4, 8, or 16 words in four different blocks. After passing a memory test, confirming their memorization of the list, the observers searched for these words in visual displays containing two to 16 words. Replicating Wolfe (Psychological Science, 23(7), 698-703, 2012), the RTs increased linearly with the visual set size and logarithmically with the length of the word list. The word lists of Experiment 1 were random. In Experiment 2, words were drawn from phrases that observers reported knowing by heart (e.g., "London Bridge is falling down"). Observers were asked to provide four phrases, ranging in length from two words to no less than 20 words (range 21-86). All words longer than two characters from the phrase, constituted the target list. Distractor words were matched for length and frequency. Even with these strongly ordered lists, the results again replicated the curvilinear function of memory set size seen in hybrid search. One might expect to find serial position effects, perhaps reducing the RTs for the first (primacy) and/or the last (recency) members of a list (Atkinson & Shiffrin, 1968; Murdock Journal of Experimental Psychology, 64, 482-488, 1962). Surprisingly, we showed no reliable effects of word order. Thus, in "London Bridge is falling down," "London" and "down" were found no faster than "falling."

Experiential and Doctrinal Religious Knowledge Categorization in Parkinson's Disease: Behavioral and Brain Correlates

PubMed Central

Modestino, Edward J.; O'Toole, Partrick; Reinhofer, AnnaMarie

2016-01-01

Recent studies suggest changes in religious cognition in a subgroup of patients with Parkinson's disease (PD e.g., Butler et al., 2011). It is unclear whether this deficit extends to both doctrinal and experiential categorization forms of religious cognition. Kapogiannis et al. (2009b) dissociated experiential and doctrinal religious knowledge to different neural networks using fMRI. We examined Kapogiannis' dissociation against the background of PD side of onset (LOPD, ROPD), assessing performance both On- and Off-medication. In the behavioral portion of the study, we used a statement classification task in combination with scholar derived test sets for experiential and doctrinal religious knowledge categorization in conjunction with neuropsychological measures. In the neuroimaging portion of the study, we expanded on Kapogiannis' study by examining the same networks in PD. The behavioral data revealed that all groups rated (categorized) the scholar derived tests of experiential and doctrinal significantly differently than the scholars. All groups, including the scholars, classified more phrases as doctrinal than experiential. Religious cognition differed in the PD groups: those with PD Off-medication and LOPD Off-medication comprehended scholar defined experiential phrases with more difficulty, making them more likely to be classified as mixed or doctrinal. This was in contrast to the subjective frequency of classification of phrases as experiential paired with a cognitive decline in PD Off-medication; whereas PD On-medication showed a positive correlation with cognitive state and subjective doctrinal classification. For ROPD, cognitive state was associated with subjective experiential and doctrinal frequency of classification. With more intact intellect, there was a greater likelihood of classifying phrases subjectively as mixed, and the converse for experiential. Furthermore, religiosity negatively predicted subjective doctrinal frequency in LOPD, with the converse in ROPD. In fcMRI in PD, we found resting state functional intrinsic connectivity of reward networks associated with classification of statements using seeds in bilateral nucleus accumbens in PD. For experiential regressors, there was a negative correlation in bilateral frontal lobes paired with a positive correlation in left occipital visual areas (BAs 17, 18). For doctrinal regressors, there was a positive correlation in right BA 20. PMID:27047360

Society of Reproductive Surgeons

MedlinePlus

... true credit should go to the many capable original reviewers, particularly Meike Uhler, Dan Williams, Paul Lin, ... a decade. I’ve tried to acknowledge these original authors through phrasing such as “Literature reviewed originally ...

EVALUATION GUIDELINES FOR ECOLOGICAL INDICATORS

EPA Science Inventory

This document presents fifteen technical guidelines to evaluate the suitability of an ecological indicator for a particular monitoring program. The guidelines are organized within four evaluation phrases: conceptual relevance, feasibility of implementation, response variability...

37 CFR 205.1 - Definitions.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-07-01

... with a claim for registration of a copyrighted work. Employee means any current or former officer or.... This phrase includes all phases of discovery as well as responses to formal or informal requests by...

Apraxia

MedlinePlus

... important for people with aprexia. To help with communication, family and friends should: Avoid giving complex directions. Use simple phrases to avoid misunderstandings. Speak in a normal tone of ... communication aids, if possible, depending on the person and ...

Pancreatic Cancer Stage 2A

MedlinePlus

... exact term or phrase, no variations. Use multiple keywords separated by spaces (e.g. kidney renal ) for ... higher those with all or most of the keywords. Plurals and other variations are automatically included. To ...

Pancreatic Cancer Stage 2B

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... exact term or phrase, no variations. Use multiple keywords separated by spaces (e.g. kidney renal ) for ... higher those with all or most of the keywords. Plurals and other variations are automatically included. To ...

76 FR 49313 - Approval and Promulgation of Implementation Plans North Carolina: Prevention of Significant...

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2011-08-10

... exception of the phrase ``except ethanol production facilities producing ethanol by natural fermentation... ethanol by natural fermentation under the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) codes...

It's a Fine Season for Masks.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kennedy, Patricia

1999-01-01

Describes an art lesson, inspired by Giuseppe Arcimboldo's "Seasons" series, in which students construct masks representing one of the four seasons. Discusses the process and lists words and phrases associated with each season. (CMK)

49 CFR 37.3 - Definitions.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-10-01

..., and work. (3) The phrase has a record of such an impairment means has a history of, or has been... guideway, or other advanced technology vehicles, designed to travel at speeds in excess of those possible...

Developmental stress, social rank and song complexity in the European starling (Sturnus vulgaris).

PubMed Central

Spencer, K A; Buchanan, K L; Goldsmith, A R; Catchpole, C K

2004-01-01

Bird song is a sexually selected trait and females have been shown to prefer males that sing more complex songs. However, for repertoire size to be an honest signal of male quality it must be associated with some form of cost. This experiment investigates the effects of food restriction and social status during development on song complexity in the European starling (Sturnus vulgaris). Birds that experienced an unpredictable food supply early in life produced a significantly smaller repertoire of song phrases than those with a constant food supply. Social status during development was also significantly correlated with repertoire size, with dominant birds producing more phrase types. This study therefore provides novel evidence that social as well as nutritional history may be important in shaping the song signal in this species. PMID:15101438

Verb Aspect and the Activation of Event Knowledge

PubMed Central

Ferretti, Todd R.; Kutas, Marta; McRae, Ken

2011-01-01

The authors show that verb aspect influences the activation of event knowledge with 4 novel results. First, common locations of events (e.g., arena) are primed following verbs with imperfective aspect (e.g., was skating) but not verbs with perfect aspect (e.g., had skated). Second, people generate more locative prepositional phrases as completions to sentence fragments with imperfective than those with perfect aspect. Third, the amplitude of the N400 component to location nouns varies as a function of aspect and typicality, being smallest for imperfective sentences with highly expected locations and largest for imperfective sentences with less expected locations. Fourth, the amplitude of a sustained frontal negativity spanning prepositional phrases is larger following perfect than following imperfective aspect. Taken together, these findings suggest a dynamic interplay between event knowledge and the linguistic stream. PMID:17201561

An Improved Forensic Science Information Search.

PubMed

Teitelbaum, J

2015-01-01

Although thousands of search engines and databases are available online, finding answers to specific forensic science questions can be a challenge even to experienced Internet users. Because there is no central repository for forensic science information, and because of the sheer number of disciplines under the forensic science umbrella, forensic scientists are often unable to locate material that is relevant to their needs. The author contends that using six publicly accessible search engines and databases can produce high-quality search results. The six resources are Google, PubMed, Google Scholar, Google Books, WorldCat, and the National Criminal Justice Reference Service. Carefully selected keywords and keyword combinations, designating a keyword phrase so that the search engine will search on the phrase and not individual keywords, and prompting search engines to retrieve PDF files are among the techniques discussed. Copyright © 2015 Central Police University.

From slogans to strategy: a workable approach to customer satisfaction and retention.

PubMed

Timm, P R

1997-01-01

Too many organizations confuse slogans, good intentions, or mechanical phrases with customer service. Most recognize that the most powerful way to prosper in today's economy is to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty. But customer service has little to do with mottos, slogans, or mechanical phrases. The real management challenge lies in translating the slogans into employee actions that create customer satisfaction and loyalty--in creating a strategy for ensuring good service intentions and exceptional service results. This article shows a logical, theoretically sound approach to building and implementing what I call an E-Plus Customer Satisfaction strategy. Incidentally, I use the term "customer" throughout this article, but I recognize that we have different terms in various organizations. So feel free to substitute "patient", "guest", "client", or any other synonym. The principles are the same.

Erratum: A Comparison of Closures for Stochastic Advection-Diffusion Equations

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

Jarman, Kenneth D.; Tartakovsky, Alexandre M.

2015-01-01

This note corrects an error in the authors' article [SIAM/ASA J. Uncertain. Quantif., 1 (2013), pp. 319 347] in which the cited work [Neuman, Water Resour. Res., 29(3) (1993), pp. 633 645] was incorrectly represented and attributed. Concentration covariance equations presented in our article as new were in fact previously derived in the latter work. In the original abstract, the phrase " . . .we propose a closed-form approximation to two-point covariance as a measure of uncertainty. . ." should be replaced by the phrase " . . .we study a closed-form approximation to two-point covariance, previously derived in [Neumanmore » 1993], as a measure of uncertainty." The primary results in our article--the analytical and numerical comparison of existing closure methods for specific example problems are not changed by this correction.« less

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

Cross-linguistic differences in the use of durational cues for the segmentation of a novel language.

PubMed

Ordin, Mikhail; Polyanskaya, Leona; Laka, Itziar; Nespor, Marina

2017-07-01

It is widely accepted that duration can be exploited as phonological phrase final lengthening in the segmentation of a novel language, i.e., in extracting discrete constituents from continuous speech. The use of final lengthening for segmentation and its facilitatory effect has been claimed to be universal. However, lengthening in the world languages can also mark lexically stressed syllables. Stress-induced lengthening can potentially be in conflict with right edge phonological phrase boundary lengthening. Thus the processing of durational cues in segmentation can be dependent on the listener's linguistic background, e.g., on the specific correlates and unmarked location of lexical stress in the native language of the listener. We tested this prediction and found that segmentation by both German and Basque speakers is facilitated when lengthening is aligned with the word final syllable and is not affected by lengthening on either the penultimate or the antepenultimate syllables. Lengthening of the word final syllable, however, does not help Italian and Spanish speakers to segment continuous speech, and lengthening of the antepenultimate syllable impedes their performance. We have also found a facilitatory effect of penultimate lengthening on segmentation by Italians. These results confirm our hypothesis that processing of lengthening cues is not universal, and interpretation of lengthening as a phonological phrase final boundary marker in a novel language of exposure can be overridden by the phonology of lexical stress in the native language of the listener.

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

Content analysis of resident evaluations of faculty anesthesiologists: supervision encompasses some attributes of the professionalism core competency.

PubMed

Dexter, Franklin; Szeluga, Debra; Hindman, Bradley J

2017-05-01

Anesthesiology departments need an instrument with which to assess practicing anesthesiologists' professionalism. The purpose of this retrospective analysis of the content of a cohort of resident evaluations of faculty anesthesiologists was to investigate the relationship between a clinical supervision scale and the multiple attributes of professionalism. From July 1, 2013 to the present, our department has utilized the de Oliveira Filho unidimensional nine-item supervision scale to assess the quality of clinical supervision of residents provided by our anesthesiologists. The "cohort" we examined included all 13,664 resident evaluations of all faculty anesthesiologists from July 1, 2013 through December 31, 2015, including 1,387 accompanying comments. Words and phrases associated with the core competency of professionalism were obtained from previous studies, and the supervision scale was analyzed for the presence of these words and phrases. The supervision scale assesses some attributes of anesthesiologists' professionalism as well as patient care and procedural skills and interpersonal and communication skills. The comments that residents provided with the below-average supervision scores included attributes of professionalism, although numerous words and phrases related to professionalism were not present in any of the residents' comments. The de Oliveira Filho clinical supervision scale includes some attributes of anesthesiologists' professionalism. The core competency of professionalism, however, is multidimensional, and the supervision scale and/or residents' comments did not address many of the other established attributes of professionalism.

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.

26 CFR 1.552-3 - Stock ownership requirement.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-04-01

... the ownership thereof, since a corporation comes within the classification if the statutory conditions... taxable year, the phrase in value shall, in the light of all the circumstances, be deemed the value of the...

26 CFR 1.552-3 - Stock ownership requirement.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-04-01

... the ownership thereof, since a corporation comes within the classification if the statutory conditions... taxable year, the phrase in value shall, in the light of all the circumstances, be deemed the value of the...

"Actions for Slander"-Defamation in English Law, Language, and History

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jones, W. R.

1971-01-01

A survey of the various meanings and interpretations of defamation in medieval and early modern English law-ecclesiastical, royal, Roman, municipal and manorial-which includes many of the defamatory words and phrases. (AF)

20 CFR 201.1 - Words and phrases.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-04-01

..., sleeping-car company, or carrier by railroad, subject to part I of the Interstate Commerce Act (24 Stat... authorized to and does represent that organization on all of a particular railroad or on a substantial...

20 CFR 201.1 - Words and phrases.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-04-01

..., sleeping-car company, or carrier by railroad, subject to part I of the Interstate Commerce Act (24 Stat... authorized to and does represent that organization on all of a particular railroad or on a substantial...

20 CFR 201.1 - Words and phrases.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-04-01

..., sleeping-car company, or carrier by railroad, subject to part I of the Interstate Commerce Act (24 Stat... authorized to and does represent that organization on all of a particular railroad or on a substantial...

20 CFR 201.1 - Words and phrases.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-04-01

..., sleeping-car company, or carrier by railroad, subject to part I of the Interstate Commerce Act (24 Stat... authorized to and does represent that organization on all of a particular railroad or on a substantial...

77 FR 4329 - Agency Information Collection Activities; Proposed Collection; Comment Request; Experimental...

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2012-01-27

..., challenging FDA's 2009 petition response under the First Amendment. On cross-motions for summary judgment, the... examine consumer reactions to health claims using those phrases, with and without various disclaimers...

26 CFR 1.269-1 - Meaning and use of terms.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-04-01

... deduction, a credit, an adjustment, an exemption, or an exclusion. (b) Evasion or avoidance. The phrase evasion or avoidance is not limited to cases involving criminal penalties, or civil penalties for fraud...

Ein Ungluck Kommt Selten Allein (When It Rains, It Pours): Six Amusing Illustrations to Stimulate Classroom Conversation.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lepke, Helen; And Others

Six captioned illustrations present humorous situations for classroom discussion. A list of appropriate German vocabulary words and phrases (and English translations) accompanies each illustration. (MSE)

26 CFR 1.127-2 - Qualified educational assistance program.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-04-01

... transportation, or (iii) Education involving sports, games, or hobbies, unless such education involves the business of the employer or is required as part of a degree program. The phrase “sports, games, or hobbies...

76 FR 36875 - Approval and Promulgation of Implementation Plans; South Carolina: Prevention of Significant...

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2011-06-23

... ethanol through a natural fermentation process (hereafter referred to as the ``Ethanol Rule'') from the... exception of the phrase ``except ethanol production facilities producing ethanol by natural fermentation...

Fermions and Bosons

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

Lincoln, Don

In particle physics, there are many different types of particles, mostly ending with the phrase “-on.” In this video, Fermilab’s Dr. Don Lincoln talks about fermions and bosons and what is the key difference between these two particles.

29 CFR 784.124 - Going to and returning from work.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-07-01

... meaning of this language. However, the phrase does not apply to employees who are not employed in the activities involved in the acquisition of aquatic animal or vegetable life, such as those going to or...

12 CFR 1011.25 - Misleading sales practices.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-01-01

... actually fronts on a body of water. Representations which refer to “canal” or “canals” must state the.... Use of the word “guarantee” or phrase “guaranteed refund” or similar language implying a money-back...

24 CFR 1715.25 - Misleading sales practices.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-04-01

... actually fronts on a body of water. Representations which refer to “canal” or “canals” must state the.... Use of the word “guarantee” or phrase “guaranteed refund” or similar language implying a money-back...

29 CFR 784.124 - Going to and returning from work.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-07-01

... meaning of this language. However, the phrase does not apply to employees who are not employed in the activities involved in the acquisition of aquatic animal or vegetable life, such as those going to or...

29 CFR 784.124 - Going to and returning from work.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-07-01

... meaning of this language. However, the phrase does not apply to employees who are not employed in the activities involved in the acquisition of aquatic animal or vegetable life, such as those going to or...

29 CFR 784.124 - Going to and returning from work.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-07-01

... meaning of this language. However, the phrase does not apply to employees who are not employed in the activities involved in the acquisition of aquatic animal or vegetable life, such as those going to or...

28 CFR 35.104 - Definitions.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-07-01

... illness, and specific learning disabilities. (ii) The phrase physical or mental impairment includes, but..., heart disease, diabetes, mental retardation, emotional illness, specific learning disabilities, HIV... Judicial Administration DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE NONDISCRIMINATION ON THE BASIS OF DISABILITY IN STATE AND...

Hemispheric processing of vocal emblem sounds.

PubMed

Neumann-Werth, Yael; Levy, Erika S; Obler, Loraine K

2013-01-01

Vocal emblems, such as shh and brr, are speech sounds that have linguistic and nonlinguistic features; thus, it is unclear how they are processed in the brain. Five adult dextral individuals with left-brain damage and moderate-severe Wernicke's aphasia, five adult dextral individuals with right-brain damage, and five Controls participated in two tasks: (1) matching vocal emblems to photographs ('picture task') and (2) matching vocal emblems to verbal translations ('phrase task'). Cross-group statistical analyses on items on which the Controls performed at ceiling revealed lower accuracy by the group with left-brain damage (than by Controls) on both tasks, and lower accuracy by the group with right-brain damage (than by Controls) on the picture task. Additionally, the group with left-brain damage performed significantly less accurately than the group with right-brain damage on the phrase task only. Findings suggest that comprehension of vocal emblems recruits more left- than right-hemisphere processing.

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

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

An experimental version of the MZT (speech-from-text) system with external F(sub 0) control

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Nowak, Ignacy

1994-12-01

The version of a Polish speech from text system described in this article was developed using the speech-from-text system. The new system has additional functions which make it possible to enter commands in edited orthographic text to control the phrase component and accentuation parameters. This makes it possible to generate a series of modified intonation contours in the texts spoken by the system. The effects obtained are made easier to control by a graphic illustration of the base frequency pattern in phrases that were last 'spoken' by the system. This version of the system was designed as a test prototype which will help us expand and refine our set of rules for automatic generation of intonation contours, which in turn will enable the fully automated speech-from-text system to generate speech with a more varied and precisely formed fundamental frequency pattern.

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.

Noun-phrase anaphors and focus: the informational load hypothesis.

PubMed

Almor, A

1999-10-01

The processing of noun-phrase (NP) anaphors in discourse is argued to reflect constraints on the activation and processing of semantic information in working memory. The proposed theory views NP anaphor processing as an optimization process that is based on the principle that processing cost, defined in terms of activating semantic information, should serve some discourse function--identifying the antecedent, adding new information, or both. In a series of 5 self-paced reading experiments, anaphors' functionality was manipulated by changing the discourse focus, and their cost was manipulated by changing the semantic relation between the anaphors and their antecedents. The results show that reading times of NP anaphors reflect their functional justification: Anaphors were read faster when their cost had a better functional justification. These results are incompatible with any theory that treats NP anaphors as one homogeneous class regardless of discourse function and processing cost.

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

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

Intonation and expressivity: a single case study of classical western singing.

PubMed

Sundberg, Johan; Lã, Filipa M B; Himonides, Evangelos

2013-05-01

Previous studies have shown that singers tend to sharpen phrase-peak tones as compared with equally tempered tuning (ETT). Here we test the hypothesis that this can serve the purpose of musical expressivity. Data were drawn from earlier recordings, where a professional baritone sang excerpts as void of musical expression as he could (Neutral) and as expressive as in a concert (Concert). Fundamental frequency averaged over tones was examined and compared with ETT. Phrase-peak tones were sharper in excited examples, particularly in the Concert versions. These tones were flattened to ETT using the Melodyne software. The manipulated and original versions were presented pairwise to a musician panel that was asked to choose the more expressive version. By and large, the original versions were perceived as more expressive, thus supporting the common claim that intonation is a means for adding expressivity to a performance. Copyright © 2013 The Voice Foundation. All rights reserved.

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.

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.

Early acquisition of gender agreement in the Spanish noun phrase: starting small.

PubMed

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 presents some variations in relation to classical studies. The aim was to obtain a large corpus of NP data which would allow different types of analysis of the children's productions to be carried out. Intra-individual variability in early NP types was analyzed and measured, and an elicitation task for adjectives was used. Results show that the acquisition of NP and gender agreement is a complex process which advances as the children gradually integrate different pieces of evidence: phonological, distributional and functional. The reduction of variability as the grammatical process advances is a key feature for its explanation.

Utilization of Prosodic Information in Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution

PubMed Central

2010-01-01

Two self paced listening experiments examined the role of prosodic phrasing in syntactic ambiguity resolution. In Experiment 1, the stimuli consisted of early closure sentences (e.g., “While the parents watched, the child sang a song.”) containing transitive-biased subordinate verbs paired with plausible direct objects or intransitive-biased subordinate verbs paired with implausible direct objects. Experiment 2 also contained early closure sentences with transitively and intransitive-biased subordinate verbs, but the subordinate verbs were always followed by plausible direct objects. In both experiments, there were two prosodic conditions. In the subject-biased prosodic condition, an intonational phrase boundary marked the clausal boundary following the subordinate verb. In the object-biased prosodic condition, the clause boundary was unmarked. The results indicate that lexical and prosodic cues interact at the subordinate verb and plausibility further affects processing at the ambiguous noun. Results are discussed with respect to models of the role of prosody in sentence comprehension. PMID:20033849

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.

Children and youth perceive smoking messages in an unbranded advertisement from a NIKE marketing campaign: a cluster randomised controlled trial

PubMed Central

2011-01-01

Background How youth perceive marketing messages in sports is poorly understood. We evaluated whether youth perceive that the imagery of a specific sports marketing advertisement contained smoking-related messages. Methods Twenty grade 7 to 11 classes (397 students) from two high schools in Montréal, Canada were recruited to participate in a cluster randomised single-blind controlled trial. Classes were randomly allocated to either a NIKE advertisement containing the phrase 'LIGHT IT UP' (n = 205) or to a neutral advertisement with smoking imagery reduced and the phrase replaced by 'GO FOR IT' (n = 192). The NIKE logo was removed from both advertisements. Students responded in class to a questionnaire asking open-ended questions about their perception of the messages in the ad. Reports relating to the appearance and text of the ad, and the product being promoted were evaluated. Results Relative to the neutral ad, more students reported that the phrase 'LIGHT IT UP' was smoking-related (37.6% vs. 0.5%) and that other parts of the ad resembled smoking-related products (50.7% vs. 10.4%). The relative risk of students reporting that the NIKE ad promoted cigarettes was 4.41 (95% confidence interval: 2.64-7.36; P < 0.001). Conclusions The unbranded imagery of an advertisement in a specific campaign aimed at promoting NIKE hockey products appears to have contained smoking-related messages. This particular marketing campaign may have promoted smoking. This suggests that the regulation of marketing to youth may need to be more tightly controlled. PMID:21477307

Menopause and big data: Word Adjacency Graph modeling of menopause-related ChaCha data.

PubMed

Carpenter, Janet S; Groves, Doyle; Chen, Chen X; Otte, Julie L; Miller, Wendy R

2017-07-01

To detect and visualize salient queries about menopause using Big Data from ChaCha. We used Word Adjacency Graph (WAG) modeling to detect clusters and visualize the range of menopause-related topics and their mutual proximity. The subset of relevant queries was fully modeled. We split each query into token words (ie, meaningful words and phrases) and removed stopwords (ie, not meaningful functional words). The remaining words were considered in sequence to build summary tables of words and two and three-word phrases. Phrases occurring at least 10 times were used to build a network graph model that was iteratively refined by observing and removing clusters of unrelated content. We identified two menopause-related subsets of queries by searching for questions containing menopause and menopause-related terms (eg, climacteric, hot flashes, night sweats, hormone replacement). The first contained 263,363 queries from individuals aged 13 and older and the second contained 5,892 queries from women aged 40 to 62 years. In the first set, we identified 12 topic clusters: 6 relevant to menopause and 6 less relevant. In the second set, we identified 15 topic clusters: 11 relevant to menopause and 4 less relevant. Queries about hormones were pervasive within both WAG models. Many of the queries reflected low literacy levels and/or feelings of embarrassment. We modeled menopause-related queries posed by ChaCha users between 2009 and 2012. ChaCha data may be used on its own or in combination with other Big Data sources to identify patient-driven educational needs and create patient-centered interventions.

Conceptual mapping of user's queries to medical subject headings.

PubMed Central

Zieman, Y. L.; Bleich, H. L.

1997-01-01

This paper describes a way to map users' queries to relevant Medical Subject Headings (MeSH terms) used by the National Library of Medicine to index the biomedical literature. The method, called SENSE (SEarch with New SEmantics), transforms words and phrases in the users' queries into primary conceptual components and compares these components with those of the MeSH vocabulary. Similar to the way in which most numbers can be split into numerical factors and expressed as their product--for example, 42 can be expressed as 2*21, 6*7, 3*14, 2*3*7,--so most medical concepts can be split into "semantic factors" and expressed as their juxtaposition. Note that if we split 42 into its primary factors, the breakdown is unique: 2*3*7. Similarly, when we split medical concepts into their "primary semantic factors" the breakdown is also unique. For example, the MeSH term 'renovascular hypertension' can be split morphologically into reno, vascular, hyper, and tension--morphemes that can then be translated into their primary semantic factors--kidney, blood vessel, high, and pressure. By "factoring" each MeSH term in this way, and by similarly factoring the user's query, we can match query to MeSH term by searching for combinations of common factors. Unlike UMLS and other methods that match at the level of words or phrases, SENSE matches at the level of concepts; in this way, a wide variety of words and phrases that have the same meaning produce the same match. Now used in PaperChase, the method is surprisingly powerful in matching users' queries to Medical Subject Headings. PMID:9357680

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

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

Toward a tactile language for human-robot interaction: two studies of tacton learning and performance.

PubMed

Barber, Daniel J; Reinerman-Jones, Lauren E; Matthews, Gerald

2015-05-01

Two experiments were performed to investigate the feasibility for robot-to-human communication of a tactile language using a lexicon of standardized tactons (tactile icons) within a sentence. Improvements in autonomous systems technology and a growing demand within military operations are spurring interest in communication via vibrotactile displays. Tactile communication may become an important element of human-robot interaction (HRI), but it requires the development of messaging capabilities approaching the communication power of the speech and visual signals used in the military. In Experiment 1 (N = 38), we trained participants to identify sets of directional, dynamic, and static tactons and tested performance and workload following training. In Experiment 2 (N = 76), we introduced an extended training procedure and tested participants' ability to correctly identify two-tacton phrases. We also investigated the impact of multitasking on performance and workload. Individual difference factors were assessed. Experiment 1 showed that participants found dynamic and static tactons difficult to learn, but the enhanced training procedure in Experiment 2 produced competency in performance for all tacton categories. Participants in the latter study also performed well on two-tacton phrases and when multitasking. However, some deficits in performance and elevation of workload were observed. Spatial ability predicted some aspects of performance in both studies. Participants may be trained to identify both single tactons and tacton phrases, demonstrating the feasibility of developing a tactile language for HRI. Tactile communication may be incorporated into multi-modal communication systems for HRI. It also has potential for human-human communication in challenging environments. © 2014, Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.

Sleep facilitates learning a new linguistic rule

PubMed Central

Batterink, Laura J.; Oudiette, Delphine; Reber, Paul J.; Paller, Ken A.

2014-01-01

Natural languages contain countless regularities. Extraction of these patterns is an essential component of language acquisition. Here we examined the hypothesis that memory processing during sleep contributes to this learning. We exposed participants to a hidden linguistic rule by presenting a large number of two-word phrases, each including a noun preceded by one of four novel words that functioned as an article (e.g., gi rhino). These novel words (ul, gi, ro and ne) were presented as obeying an explicit rule: two words signified that the noun referent was relatively near, and two that it was relatively far. Undisclosed to participants was the fact that the novel articles also predicted noun animacy, with two of the articles preceding animate referents and the other two preceding inanimate referents. Rule acquisition was tested implicitly using a task in which participants responded to each phrase according to whether the noun was animate or inanimate. Learning of the hidden rule was evident in slower responses to phrases that violated the rule. Responses were delayed regardless of whether rule-knowledge was consciously accessible. Brain potentials provided additional confirmation of implicit and explicit rule-knowledge. An afternoon nap was interposed between two 20-min learning sessions. Participants who obtained greater amounts of both slow-wave and rapid-eye-movement sleep showed increased sensitivity to the hidden linguistic rule in the second session. We conclude that during sleep, reactivation of linguistic information linked with the rule was instrumental for stabilizing learning. The combination of slow-wave and rapid-eye-movement sleep may synergistically facilitate the abstraction of complex patterns in linguistic input. PMID:25447376

Differing Interpretations of Report Terminology Between Primary Care Physicians and Radiologists.

PubMed

Gunn, Andrew J; Tuttle, Mitch C; Flores, Efren J; Mangano, Mark D; Bennett, Susan E; Sahani, Dushyant V; Choy, Garry; Boland, Giles W

2016-12-01

The lexicons of the radiologist and the referring physician may not be synonymous, which could cause confusion with radiology reporting. To further explore this possibility, we surveyed radiologists and primary care physicians (PCPs) regarding their respective interpretations of report terminology. A survey was distributed to radiologists and PCPs through an internal listserv. Respondents were asked to provide an interpretation of the statistical likelihood of the presence of metastatic disease based upon the terminology used within a hypothetical radiology report. Ten common modifying terms were evaluated. Potential responses for the statistical likelihoods included 0%-25%, 26%-50%, 51%-75%, 76%-99%, and 100%. Differences between the groups were evaluated using either a χ 2 test or Fisher exact test, as appropriate. The phrases "diagnostic for metastatic disease" and "represents metastatic disease" were selected by a high percentage of both groups as conferring a 100% likelihood of "true metastatic disease." The phrases "cannot exclude metastatic disease" and "may represent metastatic disease" were selected by a high proportion of both groups as conferring a 0% likelihood of "true metastatic disease." Radiologists assigned a higher statistical likelihood to the terms "diagnostic for metastatic disease" (P = .016), "represents metastatic disease" (P = .004), "suspicious for metastatic disease" (P = .04), "consistent with metastatic disease" (P < .0001), and "compatible with metastatic disease" (P = .003). A qualitative agreement among radiologists and PCPs exists concerning the significance of the evaluated terminology, although radiologists assigned a higher statistical likelihood than PCPs for several phrases. Copyright © 2016 American College of Radiology. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Automatic Generation of English-Japanese Translation Pattern Utilizing Genetic Programming Technique

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Matsumura, Koki; Tamekuni, Yuji; Kimura, Shuhei

There are a lot of constructional differences in an English-Japanese phrase template, and that often makes the act of translation difficult. Moreover, there exist various and tremendous phrase templates and sentence to be refered to. It is not easy to prepare the corpus that covers the all. Therefore, it is very significant to generate the translation pattern of the sentence pattern automatically from a viewpoint of the translation success rate and the capacity of the pattern dictionary. Then, for the purpose of realizing the automatic generation of the translation pattern, this paper proposed the new method for the generation of the translation pattern by using the genetic programming technique (GP). The technique tries to generate the translation pattern of various sentences which are not registered in the phrase template dictionary automatically by giving the genetic operation to the parsing tree of a basic pattern. The tree consists of the pair of the English-Japanese sentence generated as the first stage population. The analysis tree data base with 50,100,150,200 pairs was prepared as the first stage population. And this system was applied and executed for an English input of 1,555 sentences. As a result, the analysis tree increases from 200 to 517, and the accuracy rate of the translation pattern has improved from 42.57% to 70.10%. And, 86.71% of the generated translations was successfully done, whose meanings are enough acceptable and understandable. It seemed that this proposal technique became a clue to raise the translation success rate, and to find the possibility of the reduction of the analysis tree data base.

Children and youth perceive smoking messages in an unbranded advertisement from a NIKE marketing campaign: a cluster randomised controlled trial.

PubMed

Auger, Nathalie; Daniel, Mark; Knäuper, Bärbel; Raynault, Marie-France; Pless, Barry

2011-04-08

How youth perceive marketing messages in sports is poorly understood. We evaluated whether youth perceive that the imagery of a specific sports marketing advertisement contained smoking-related messages. Twenty grade 7 to 11 classes (397 students) from two high schools in Montréal, Canada were recruited to participate in a cluster randomised single-blind controlled trial. Classes were randomly allocated to either a NIKE advertisement containing the phrase 'LIGHT IT UP' (n = 205) or to a neutral advertisement with smoking imagery reduced and the phrase replaced by 'GO FOR IT' (n = 192). The NIKE logo was removed from both advertisements. Students responded in class to a questionnaire asking open-ended questions about their perception of the messages in the ad. Reports relating to the appearance and text of the ad, and the product being promoted were evaluated. Relative to the neutral ad, more students reported that the phrase 'LIGHT IT UP' was smoking-related (37.6% vs. 0.5%) and that other parts of the ad resembled smoking-related products (50.7% vs. 10.4%). The relative risk of students reporting that the NIKE ad promoted cigarettes was 4.41 (95% confidence interval: 2.64-7.36; P < 0.001). The unbranded imagery of an advertisement in a specific campaign aimed at promoting NIKE hockey products appears to have contained smoking-related messages. This particular marketing campaign may have promoted smoking. This suggests that the regulation of marketing to youth may need to be more tightly controlled.

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).

Las uniones conjuntivas en espanol (Conjunctive Correspondences in Spanish)

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Perez Botero, Luis

1977-01-01

This study of the medieval Spanish concept of order examines uses made of the word "y" ("and") in Spanish medieval writing to join words and phrases connoting social, natural and human order. (Text is in Spanish.) (CHK)

Homeland Security and Information.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Relyea, Harold C.

2002-01-01

Reviews the development of two similar policy concepts, national security and internal security, before exploring the new phrase homeland security that has become popular since the September 11 terrorist attacks. Discusses the significance of each for information policy and practice. (Author/LRW)

20 CFR 323.1 - Introduction.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-04-01

...' Benefits RAILROAD RETIREMENT BOARD REGULATIONS UNDER THE RAILROAD UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE ACT NONGOVERNMENTAL PLANS FOR UNEMPLOYMENT OR SICKNESS INSURANCE § 323.1 Introduction. (a) This part defines the phrase nongovernmental plan for unemployment or sickness insurance and sets forth the procedure by which...

20 CFR 323.1 - Introduction.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-04-01

...' Benefits RAILROAD RETIREMENT BOARD REGULATIONS UNDER THE RAILROAD UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE ACT NONGOVERNMENTAL PLANS FOR UNEMPLOYMENT OR SICKNESS INSURANCE § 323.1 Introduction. (a) This part defines the phrase nongovernmental plan for unemployment or sickness insurance and sets forth the procedure by which...

20 CFR 323.1 - Introduction.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-04-01

...' Benefits RAILROAD RETIREMENT BOARD REGULATIONS UNDER THE RAILROAD UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE ACT NONGOVERNMENTAL PLANS FOR UNEMPLOYMENT OR SICKNESS INSURANCE § 323.1 Introduction. (a) This part defines the phrase nongovernmental plan for unemployment or sickness insurance and sets forth the procedure by which...

20 CFR 323.1 - Introduction.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-04-01

...' Benefits RAILROAD RETIREMENT BOARD REGULATIONS UNDER THE RAILROAD UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE ACT NONGOVERNMENTAL PLANS FOR UNEMPLOYMENT OR SICKNESS INSURANCE § 323.1 Introduction. (a) This part defines the phrase nongovernmental plan for unemployment or sickness insurance and sets forth the procedure by which...

20 CFR 323.1 - Introduction.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-04-01

...' Benefits RAILROAD RETIREMENT BOARD REGULATIONS UNDER THE RAILROAD UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE ACT NONGOVERNMENTAL PLANS FOR UNEMPLOYMENT OR SICKNESS INSURANCE § 323.1 Introduction. (a) This part defines the phrase nongovernmental plan for unemployment or sickness insurance and sets forth the procedure by which...

Collection and Retention Procedures for Electronically Stored Information (ESI) Collected Using E-Discovery Tools

EPA Pesticide Factsheets

This procedure is designed to support the collection of potentially responsive information using automated E-Discovery tools that rely on keywords, key phrases, index queries, or other technological assistance to retrieve Electronically Stored Information

Investigating Interdimensional Relationships

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Valentine, Keri Duncan

2017-01-01

The phrase "interdimensional relationships" may conjure images of UFOs, alien beings, wormholes, and even mystical powers. These notions of interdimensionality were not out of bounds in the middle school learners' experiences described in this article. However, these notions do not entirely capture the mathematical relationships…

47 CFR 0.409 - Commission policy on private printing of FCC forms.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-10-01

... in quality to the original document, without change to the page size, image size, configuration of... document.” (4) Do not add to the form any other symbol, word or phrase that might be construed as...

47 CFR 0.409 - Commission policy on private printing of FCC forms.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-10-01

... in quality to the original document, without change to the page size, image size, configuration of... document.” (4) Do not add to the form any other symbol, word or phrase that might be construed as...

47 CFR 0.409 - Commission policy on private printing of FCC forms.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-10-01

... in quality to the original document, without change to the page size, image size, configuration of... document.” (4) Do not add to the form any other symbol, word or phrase that might be construed as...

47 CFR 0.409 - Commission policy on private printing of FCC forms.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-10-01

... in quality to the original document, without change to the page size, image size, configuration of... document.” (4) Do not add to the form any other symbol, word or phrase that might be construed as...

Civic Literacy

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bauerlein, Mark

2012-01-01

There are so many generous and high-sounding phrases and ambitions in "A Crucible Moment: College Learning & Democracy's Future," the report by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), that to criticize them almost seems bilious and misanthropic. "A Crucible Moment," too, grounds its…

Profits R Us: Notes on the Commercialization of America's Schools.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kaplan, George R.

1996-01-01

The phrase "school/business relationship" is misleading, since such "partnerships" encompass everything from genuine altruism to cynical exploitation of the "youth market." Corporate infiltration could signal privatization of public education, despite conspicuous failures like Education Alternatives, Inc. Instead of…

48 CFR 252.225-7000 - Buy American-Balance of Payments Program Certificate.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-10-01

... 225.1101(1)(ii), add the terms “South Caucasus/Central and South Asian (SC/CASA) state” and “South Caucasus/Central and South Asian (SC/CASA) state end product” in paragraph (a) and replace the phrase...

Sea Language Our Heritage.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Heitzmann, Wm. Ray

1982-01-01

Reviews several references focusing on words and phrases in the American language which have nautical origins (sailing, whaling, navigation, ship-building and others) and have since lost their nautical connections. Also includes examples from the references such as "slush fund", "posh", and "windfall." (JN)

Dine Tah, "Among the People Scenic Road" : Corridor Management Plan.

DOT National Transportation Integrated Search

2008-08-15

Walk in beauty is a phrase often quoted as representing the essence of Navajo philosophy. Beauty is a central : idea in Navajo thinking, but it means far more than outward appearance: it means order, harmony, blessedness, : pleasantness, everyt...

Developing and Mentoring Foreign Language Instructors: Best Practices Study Results

DTIC Science & Technology

2013-11-01

directing, and controlling organizational resources” ( Daft , 2008, p. 14) • Instructional supervision is focused on the improvement of...business, management, educational leadership /administration fields Cultural Expertise • Cultural do’s and don’ts, greetings, common phrases, etc. 11

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…

Studies of next generation air traffic control specialists : why be an air traffic controller?

DOT National Transportation Integrated Search

2011-08-01

With phrases such as Managing Millennials (Gimbel, 2007), descriptions of generational differences are a staple in the : human resources (HR) trade press and corporate training. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) offers a course in : man...

Abbreviations and acronyms guide

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

1971-01-01

A selected list of abbreviations and acronyms in use throughout the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is presented. The compilation includes NASA and JPL facilities and organizations, federal government agencies, international organizations, engineering and scientific associations and societies, commercial organizations, and words and phrases with technical and financial applications.

29 CFR 2582.8478-3 - Permanent bonding requirements.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-07-01

.... For example, the phrase “every administrator, officer and employee of any employee welfare benefit....8478-3 Labor Regulations Relating to Labor (Continued) EMPLOYEE BENEFITS SECURITY ADMINISTRATION, DEPARTMENT OF LABOR FIDUCIARY RESPONSIBILITY UNDER THE FEDERAL EMPLOYEES' RETIREMENT SYSTEM ACT OF 1986 RULES...

English: Basic Mechanics Modules 4 and 5.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Pipeline, 1983

1983-01-01

"English: Basic Mechanics" is a series of computer-based lessons for the Apple II that allow students to practice applying the fundamentals of English grammar and punctuation. The two newest modules covering use of subordinate clauses and use of subordinate phrases are described. (JN)

Understanding Learning Disabilities

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Walcot-Gayda, Elizabeth

2004-01-01

Knowledgeable persons within the field frequently criticize definitions of "learning disabilities" for the choice of vocabulary, phrasing and implied ideas. Although there may never be a universally accepted definition, a definition that reflects current research is used in this article to make evident some of the cognitive and…

Automatic NEPHIS Coding of Descriptive Titles for Permuted Index Generation.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Craven, Timothy C.

1982-01-01

Describes a system for the automatic coding of most descriptive titles which generates Nested Phrase Indexing System (NEPHIS) input strings of sufficient quality for permuted index production. A series of examples and an 11-item reference list accompany the text. (JL)

21 CFR 133.155 - Mozzarella cheese and scamorza cheese.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-04-01

... warmed to approximately 88 °F (31.1 °C) and subjected to the action of a lactic acid-producing bacterial... buffalo milk, the name of the food is accompanied by the phrase “made with water buffalo milk”. (d) Label...

21 CFR 133.155 - Mozzarella cheese and scamorza cheese.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-04-01

... warmed to approximately 88 °F (31.1 °C) and subjected to the action of a lactic acid-producing bacterial... buffalo milk, the name of the food is accompanied by the phrase “made with water buffalo milk”. (d) Label...

21 CFR 133.155 - Mozzarella cheese and scamorza cheese.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-04-01

... warmed to approximately 88 °F (31.1 °C) and subjected to the action of a lactic acid-producing bacterial... buffalo milk, the name of the food is accompanied by the phrase “made with water buffalo milk”. (d) Label...

29 CFR 34.2 - Definitions.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-07-01

... JTPA services who have filed a completed application and for whom a formal eligibility determination...) The phrase major life activities means functions such as caring for one's self, performing manual... be deemed to commence on the first day, following determination of eligibility, on which the...

To Boolean or Not To Boolean.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hildreth, Charles R.

1983-01-01

This editorial addresses the issue of whether or not to provide free-text, keyword/boolean search capabilities in the information retrieval mechanisms of online public access catalogs and discusses online catalogs developed prior to 1980--keyword searching, phrase searching, and precoordination and postcoordination. (EJS)

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

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-04-01

... pooled charge ratio thus picks up the cost of benefits paid to employees of employers whose rate of... raised in order to bring that rate to the minimum rate of zero is multiplied by the employer's 1-year...

Digital Equipment Corporation's CRDOM Software and Database Publications.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Adams, Michael Q.

1986-01-01

Acquaints information professionals with Digital Equipment Corporation's compact optical disk read-only-memory (CDROM) search and retrieval software and growing library of CDROM database publications (COMPENDEX, Chemical Abstracts Services). Highlights include MicroBASIS, boolean operators, range operators, word and phrase searching, proximity…

Strategic Approach for Developing World-Class Universities in Egypt

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ahmed, Hanaa Ouda Khadri

2015-01-01

In the past decade, the term "world-class university" "WCU"--also called "globally competitive universities", "world-class", "elite", or "flagship" universities--has become a catch phrase, not simply for improving the quality of learning and research in higher education but also, more…

Teaching English Phrases through SMS

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cig, Enes Kurtay; Guvercin, Selim; Bayimbetov, Berdak; Dos, Bulent

2015-01-01

Achieving the maximum efficiency in teaching a second language (L2) has always been an important issue for educators. Current globalization processes, development of international business relations, political integrations among the various countries throughout the world, and the abilities of latest information and communications technologies…

Using macroinvertebrate response to inform sediment criteria development in mountain streams

EPA Science Inventory

The phrase biologically-based sediment criterion indicates that biological data is used to develop regional sediment criteria that will protect and maintain self-sustaining populations of native sediment-sensitive biota. To develop biologically-based sediment criteria we must qua...

Comparing deep learning and concept extraction based methods for patient phenotyping from clinical narratives.

PubMed

Gehrmann, Sebastian; Dernoncourt, Franck; Li, Yeran; Carlson, Eric T; Wu, Joy T; Welt, Jonathan; Foote, John; Moseley, Edward T; Grant, David W; Tyler, Patrick D; Celi, Leo A

2018-01-01

In secondary analysis of electronic health records, a crucial task consists in correctly identifying the patient cohort under investigation. In many cases, the most valuable and relevant information for an accurate classification of medical conditions exist only in clinical narratives. Therefore, it is necessary to use natural language processing (NLP) techniques to extract and evaluate these narratives. The most commonly used approach to this problem relies on extracting a number of clinician-defined medical concepts from text and using machine learning techniques to identify whether a particular patient has a certain condition. However, recent advances in deep learning and NLP enable models to learn a rich representation of (medical) language. Convolutional neural networks (CNN) for text classification can augment the existing techniques by leveraging the representation of language to learn which phrases in a text are relevant for a given medical condition. In this work, we compare concept extraction based methods with CNNs and other commonly used models in NLP in ten phenotyping tasks using 1,610 discharge summaries from the MIMIC-III database. We show that CNNs outperform concept extraction based methods in almost all of the tasks, with an improvement in F1-score of up to 26 and up to 7 percentage points in area under the ROC curve (AUC). We additionally assess the interpretability of both approaches by presenting and evaluating methods that calculate and extract the most salient phrases for a prediction. The results indicate that CNNs are a valid alternative to existing approaches in patient phenotyping and cohort identification, and should be further investigated. Moreover, the deep learning approach presented in this paper can be used to assist clinicians during chart review or support the extraction of billing codes from text by identifying and highlighting relevant phrases for various medical conditions.

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.

Lexical Planning in Sentence Production Is Highly Incremental: Evidence from ERPs.

PubMed

Zhao, Li-Ming; Yang, Yu-Fang

2016-01-01

The scope of lexical planning, which means how far ahead speakers plan lexically before they start producing an utterance, is an important issue for research into speech production, but remains highly controversial. The present research investigated this issue using the semantic blocking effect, which refers to the widely observed effects that participants take longer to say aloud the names of items in pictures when the pictures in a block of trials in an experiment depict items that belong to the same semantic category than different categories. As this effect is often interpreted as a reflection of difficulty in lexical selection, the current study took the semantic blocking effect and its associated pattern of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) as a proxy to test whether lexical planning during sentence production extends beyond the first noun when a subject noun-phrase includes two nouns, such as "The chair and the boat are both red" and "The chair above the boat is red". The results showed a semantic blocking effect both in onset latencies and in ERPs during the utterance of the first noun of these complex noun-phrases but not for the second noun. The indication, therefore, is that the lexical planning scope does not encompass this second noun-phrase. Indeed, the present findings are in line with accounts that propose radically incremental lexical planning, in which speakers plan ahead only one word at a time. This study also provides a highly novel example of using ERPs to examine the production of long utterances, and it is hoped the present demonstration of the effectiveness of this approach inspires further application of ERP techniques in this area of research.

Consumer perception of risk associated with eating genetically engineered soybeans is less in the presence of a perceived consumer benefit.

PubMed

Brown, J Lynne; Ping, Yanchao

2003-02-01

To determine whether perceived benefit alters personal risk perception associated with eating genetically engineered soybeans, consumer desire for labeling, preferred phrase on a label symbol, and desired information in an educational brochure. Comparison of responses of two consumer groups who completed one of two survey versions. One hundred fifty supermarket shoppers, age 21 years and older, for each survey or n=300 total. Focus groups and a pilot test were used to develop the final survey in which consumers read a description of a genetically engineered soybean with either no obvious consumer benefit or an obvious consumer benefit and then completed a set of attitude questions and evaluated a voluntary label design and educational brochure content. Main outcome measures were mean opinion scores of personal risk and desire for labeling and ranking of desired label phrase and brochure topics. Chi;(2) and t Tests were used. Consumers reading about the soybean with obvious consumer benefit were significantly more comfortable eating these than those reading about the soybean with no obvious consumer benefit (2.9+/-1.1 vs 3.4+/-1.0, respectively; P

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.

Cultural diversity: blind spot in medical curriculum documents, a document analysis.

PubMed

Paternotte, Emma; Fokkema, Joanne P I; van Loon, Karsten A; van Dulmen, Sandra; Scheele, Fedde

2014-08-22

Cultural diversity among patients presents specific challenges to physicians. Therefore, cultural diversity training is needed in medical education. In cases where strategic curriculum documents form the basis of medical training it is expected that the topic of cultural diversity is included in these documents, especially if these have been recently updated. The aim of this study was to assess the current formal status of cultural diversity training in the Netherlands, which is a multi-ethnic country with recently updated medical curriculum documents. In February and March 2013, a document analysis was performed of strategic curriculum documents for undergraduate and postgraduate medical education in the Netherlands. All text phrases that referred to cultural diversity were extracted from these documents. Subsequently, these phrases were sorted into objectives, training methods or evaluation tools to assess how they contributed to adequate curriculum design. Of a total of 52 documents, 33 documents contained phrases with information about cultural diversity training. Cultural diversity aspects were more prominently described in the curriculum documents for undergraduate education than in those for postgraduate education. The most specific information about cultural diversity was found in the blueprint for undergraduate medical education. In the postgraduate curriculum documents, attention to cultural diversity differed among specialties and was mainly superficial. Cultural diversity is an underrepresented topic in the Dutch documents that form the basis for actual medical training, although the documents have been updated recently. Attention to the topic is thus unwarranted. This situation does not fit the demand of a multi-ethnic society for doctors with cultural diversity competences. Multi-ethnic countries should be critical on the content of the bases for their medical educational curricula.

Revisiting speech rate and utterance length manipulations in stuttering speakers.

PubMed

Blomgren, Michael; Goberman, Alexander M

2008-01-01

The goal of this study was to evaluate stuttering frequency across a multidimensional (2x2) hierarchy of speech performance tasks. Specifically, this study examined the interaction between changes in length of utterance and levels of speech rate stability. Forty-four adult male speakers participated in the study (22 stuttering speakers and 22 non-stuttering speakers). Participants were audio and video recorded while producing a spontaneous speech task and four different experimental speaking tasks. The four experimental speaking tasks involved reading a list of 45 words and a list 45 phrases two times each. One reading of each list involved speaking at a steady habitual rate (habitual rate tasks) and another reading involved producing each list at a variable speaking rate (variable rate tasks). For the variable rate tasks, participants were directed to produce words or phrases at randomly ordered slow, habitual, and fast rates. The stuttering speakers exhibited significantly more stuttering on the variable rate tasks than on the habitual rate tasks. In addition, the stuttering speakers exhibited significantly more stuttering on the first word of the phrase length tasks compared to the single word tasks. Overall, the results indicated that varying levels of both utterance length and temporal complexity function to modulate stuttering frequency in adult stuttering speakers. Discussion focuses on issues of speech performance according to stuttering severity and possible clinical implications. The reader will learn about and be able to: (1) describe the mediating effects of length of utterance and speech rate on the frequency of stuttering in stuttering speakers; (2) understand the rationale behind multidimensional skill performance matrices; and (3) describe possible applications of motor skill performance matrices to stuttering therapy.

Idioms and mental imagery: the metaphorical motivation for idiomatic meaning.

PubMed

Gibbs, R W; O'Brien, J E

1990-07-01

We conducted three experiments to investigate the mental images associated with idiomatic phrases in English. Our hypothesis was that people should have strong conventional images for many idioms and that the regularity in people's knowledge of their images for idioms is due to the conceptual metaphors motivating the figurative meanings of idioms. In the first study, subjects were asked to form and describe their mental images for different idiomatic expressions. Subjects were then asked a series of detailed questions about their images regarding the causes and effects of different events within their images. We found high consistency in subjects' images of idioms with similar figurative meanings despite differences in their surface forms (e.g., spill the beans and let the cat out of the bag). Subjects' responses to detailed questions about their images also showed a high degree of similarity in their answers. Further examination of subjects' imagery protocols supports the idea that the conventional images and knowledge associated with idioms are constrained by the conceptual metaphors (e.g., the MIND IS A CONTAINER and IDEAS ARE ENTITIES) which motivate the figurative meanings of idioms. The results of two control studies showed that the conventional images associated with idioms are not solely based on their figurative meanings (Experiment 2) and that the images associated with literal phrases (e.g., spill the peas) were quite varied and unlikely to be constrained by conceptual metaphor (Experiment 3). These findings support the view that idioms are not "dead" metaphors with their meanings being arbitrarily determined. Rather, the meanings of many idioms are motivated by speakers' tacit knowledge of the conceptual metaphors underlying the meanings of these figurative phrases.

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.

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.

Cultural diversity: blind spot in medical curriculum documents, a document analysis

PubMed Central

2014-01-01

Background Cultural diversity among patients presents specific challenges to physicians. Therefore, cultural diversity training is needed in medical education. In cases where strategic curriculum documents form the basis of medical training it is expected that the topic of cultural diversity is included in these documents, especially if these have been recently updated. The aim of this study was to assess the current formal status of cultural diversity training in the Netherlands, which is a multi-ethnic country with recently updated medical curriculum documents. Methods In February and March 2013, a document analysis was performed of strategic curriculum documents for undergraduate and postgraduate medical education in the Netherlands. All text phrases that referred to cultural diversity were extracted from these documents. Subsequently, these phrases were sorted into objectives, training methods or evaluation tools to assess how they contributed to adequate curriculum design. Results Of a total of 52 documents, 33 documents contained phrases with information about cultural diversity training. Cultural diversity aspects were more prominently described in the curriculum documents for undergraduate education than in those for postgraduate education. The most specific information about cultural diversity was found in the blueprint for undergraduate medical education. In the postgraduate curriculum documents, attention to cultural diversity differed among specialties and was mainly superficial. Conclusions Cultural diversity is an underrepresented topic in the Dutch documents that form the basis for actual medical training, although the documents have been updated recently. Attention to the topic is thus unwarranted. This situation does not fit the demand of a multi-ethnic society for doctors with cultural diversity competences. Multi-ethnic countries should be critical on the content of the bases for their medical educational curricula. PMID:25150546

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

Sleep facilitates learning a new linguistic rule.

PubMed

Batterink, Laura J; Oudiette, Delphine; Reber, Paul J; Paller, Ken A

2014-12-01

Natural languages contain countless regularities. Extraction of these patterns is an essential component of language acquisition. Here we examined the hypothesis that memory processing during sleep contributes to this learning. We exposed participants to a hidden linguistic rule by presenting a large number of two-word phrases, each including a noun preceded by one of four novel words that functioned as an article (e.g., gi rhino). These novel words (ul, gi, ro and ne) were presented as obeying an explicit rule: two words signified that the noun referent was relatively near, and two that it was relatively far. Undisclosed to participants was the fact that the novel articles also predicted noun animacy, with two of the articles preceding animate referents and the other two preceding inanimate referents. Rule acquisition was tested implicitly using a task in which participants responded to each phrase according to whether the noun was animate or inanimate. Learning of the hidden rule was evident in slower responses to phrases that violated the rule. Responses were delayed regardless of whether rule-knowledge was consciously accessible. Brain potentials provided additional confirmation of implicit and explicit rule-knowledge. An afternoon nap was interposed between two 20-min learning sessions. Participants who obtained greater amounts of both slow-wave and rapid-eye-movement sleep showed increased sensitivity to the hidden linguistic rule in the second session. We conclude that during sleep, reactivation of linguistic information linked with the rule was instrumental for stabilizing learning. The combination of slow-wave and rapid-eye-movement sleep may synergistically facilitate the abstraction of complex patterns in linguistic input. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.