Thought Suppression in Patients With Bipolar Disorder

PubMed Central

Miklowitz, David J.; Alatiq, Yousra; Geddes, John R.; Goodwin, Guy M.; Williams, J. Mark G.

2010-01-01

Suppression of negative thoughts has been observed under experimental conditions among patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) but has never been examined among patients with bipolar disorder (BD). Patients with BD (n = 36), patients with MDD (n = 20), and healthy controls (n = 20) completed a task that required unscrambling 6-word strings into 5-word sentences, leaving out 1 word. The extra word allowed the sentences to be completed in a negative, neutral, or “hyperpositive” (manic/goal-oriented) way. Participants completed the sentences under conditions of cognitive load (rehearsing a 6-digit number), reward (a bell tone), load and reward, or neither load nor reward. We hypothesized that patients with BD would engage in more active suppression of negative and hyperpositive thoughts than would controls, as revealed by their unscrambling more word strings into negative or hyperpositive sentences. Under conditions of load or reward and in the absence of either load or reward, patients with BD unscrambled more negative sentences than did controls. Under conditions of reward, patients with BD unscrambled more negative sentences than did patients with MDD. Patients with BD also reported more use of negative thought suppression than did controls. These group differences in negative biases were no longer significant when current mood states were controlled. Finally, the groups did not differ in the proportion of hyperpositive sentence completions in any condition. Thought suppression may provide a critical locus for psychological interventions in BD. PMID:20455608

Interpretation biases in social anxiety: response generation, response selection, and self-appraisals.

PubMed

Huppert, Jonathan D; Pasupuleti, Radhika V; Foa, Edna B; Mathews, Andrew

2007-07-01

Cognitive theories propose that the resolution of ambiguity is related to the maintenance of social anxiety. A sentence completion task was used to examine how individuals high (n=26) and low (n=23) in social anxiety resolve ambiguous social sentences. Individuals were asked to generate as many responses as came to mind for each sentence, and then to endorse the response that best completes the sentence. Total responses, first responses, and endorsed responses were examined separately. Results indicated that high anxious individuals had more negative and anxious responses and fewer positive and neutral responses than low anxious individuals on all sentence completion measures. In contrast, a self-report measure of interpretation bias indicated that more of negative and anxious appraisals were related to social anxiety, while positive and neutral appraisals were not. Results are discussed in terms of a multi-stage processing model of interpretation biases.

A Multiple Choice Version of the Sentence Completion Method

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Shouval, Ron; And Others

1975-01-01

It was concluded that a multiple choice form corresponding to a sentence completion measure, test clearly defined personality areas (such as autonomy) could be a reasonable alternative for many purposes. (Author/DEP)

Sentence Combining: A Literature Review.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Phillips, Sylvia E.

Sentence combining--a technique of putting strings of sentence kernels together in a variety of ways so that completed sentences possess greater syntactic maturity--is a method offering much promise in the teaching of writing and composition. The purpose of this document is to provide a literature review of this procedure. After defining the term…

Expectancy, Integration, and Interactional Processes: Age Differences in the Nature of Words Affected by Sentence Context.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Schwantes, Frederick M.

1985-01-01

Two experiments investigated sentence context effects on the naming times of sentence completion words by third-grade children and college students. The semantic acceptability of the word in the sentence context had a much greater influence on children's word identification times than adults'. (Author/CB)

Teaching Semantic Radicals Facilitates Inferring New Character Meaning in Sentence Reading for Nonnative Chinese Speakers

PubMed Central

Nguyen, Thi Phuong; Zhang, Jie; Li, Hong; Wu, Xinchun; Cheng, Yahua

2017-01-01

This study investigates the effects of teaching semantic radicals in inferring the meanings of unfamiliar characters among nonnative Chinese speakers. A total of 54 undergraduates majoring in Chinese Language from a university in Hanoi, Vietnam, who had 1 year of learning experience in Chinese were assigned to two experimental groups that received instructional intervention, called “old-for-new” semantic radical teaching, through two counterbalanced sets of semantic radicals, with one control group. All of the students completed pre- and post-tests of a sentence cloze task where they were required to choose an appropriate character that fit the sentence context among four options. The four options shared the same phonetic radicals but had different semantic radicals. The results showed that the pre-test and post-test score increases were significant for the experimental groups, but not for the control group. Most importantly, the experimental groups successfully transferred the semantic radical strategy to figure out the meanings of unfamiliar characters containing semantic radicals that had not been taught. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of teaching semantic radicals for lexical inference in sentence reading for nonnative speakers, and highlight the ability of transfer learning to acquire semantic categories of sub-lexical units (semantic radicals) in Chinese characters among foreign language learners. PMID:29109694

Predictors of post-sentence mental health service use in a population cohort of first-time adult offenders in Western Australia.

PubMed

Sodhi-Berry, Nita; Knuiman, Matthew; Preen, David B; Alan, Janine; Morgan, Vera A

2015-12-01

Little is known about whether or how offenders use mental health services after sentence completion. This study aimed to determine the likelihood of such service use by adult (18-44 years) first-time offenders up to 5 years after sentence completion and possible predictor variables. Pre-sentence and post-sentence mental health service use was obtained from whole-population linked administrative data on 23,661 adult offenders. Cox proportional hazard models were used to determine which socio-demographic, offending and pre-sentence health service variables were associated with such post-sentence service use. The estimated 5-year probability of any post-sentence mental health service use was 12% for offenders who had not previously used such services, but still only 42% for those who had. For the latter, best predictors of post-sentence use were past psychiatric diagnosis and history of self-harm; history of self-harm also predicted post-sentence use among new mental health services users and so also did past physical illness. Indigenous offenders had a greater likelihood of service use for any mental disorder or for substance use disorders than non-Indigenous offenders, irrespective of pre-sentence use. Among those with pre-sentence service contact, imprisoned offenders were less likely to use mental health services after sentence than those under community penalties; in its absence, socio-economic disadvantage and geographic accessibility were associated with greater likelihood of post-sentence use. Our findings highlight the discontinuity of mental healthcare for most sentenced offenders, but especially prisoners, and suggest a need for better management strategies for these vulnerable groups with mental disorders. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Plasticity in speech production and perception: A study of accent change in young adults

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Evans, Bronwen G.; Iverson, Paul

2005-04-01

This study investigated plasticity in speech production and perception among university students, as individuals change their accent from regional to educated norms. Subjects were tested before beginning university, 3 months later and on completion of their first year of study. At each stage they were recorded reading a set of test words and a short passage. They also completed two perceptual tasks; they found best exemplar locations for vowels embedded in carrier sentences and identified words in noise. The results demonstrated that subjects changed their spoken accent after attending university. The changes were linked to sociolinguistic factors; subjects who were highly motivated to fit in with their university community changed their accent more. There was some evidence for a link between production and perception; between-subject differences in production and perception were correlated. However, this relationship was weaker for within-subject changes in accent over time. The results suggest that there were limitations in the ability of these subjects to acquire new phonological rules.

Depth of Processing and Interference Effects in the Learning and Remembering of Sentences. Technical Report No. 21.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kane, Janet Hidde; Anderson, Richard C.

In two experiments, college students who supplied the last words of sentences they read learned more than subjects who simply read whole sentences. This facilitation was observed even with a list of sentences which were almost always completed with the wrong words. However, proactive interference attributable to acquisition errors appeared on…

The Effects of Phonological Short-Term Memory and Speech Perception on Spoken Sentence Comprehension in Children: Simulating Deficits in an Experimental Design.

PubMed

Higgins, Meaghan C; Penney, Sarah B; Robertson, Erin K

2017-10-01

The roles of phonological short-term memory (pSTM) and speech perception in spoken sentence comprehension were examined in an experimental design. Deficits in pSTM and speech perception were simulated through task demands while typically-developing children (N [Formula: see text] 71) completed a sentence-picture matching task. Children performed the control, simulated pSTM deficit, simulated speech perception deficit, or simulated double deficit condition. On long sentences, the double deficit group had lower scores than the control and speech perception deficit groups, and the pSTM deficit group had lower scores than the control group and marginally lower scores than the speech perception deficit group. The pSTM and speech perception groups performed similarly to groups with real deficits in these areas, who completed the control condition. Overall, scores were lowest on noncanonical long sentences. Results show pSTM has a greater effect than speech perception on sentence comprehension, at least in the tasks employed here.

Children's understanding of yesterday and tomorrow.

PubMed

Zhang, Meng; Hudson, Judith A

2018-06-01

A picture-sentence matching task was used to investigate children's understanding of yesterday and tomorrow. In Experiment 1, 3- to 5-year-olds viewed two pictures of an object with a visible change of state (e.g., a carved pumpkin and an intact pumpkin) while listening to sentences referring to past or future actions ("I carved the pumpkin yesterday" or "I'm gonna carve the pumpkin tomorrow") and selected the matching picture. Children performed better with past tense sentences than with future tense sentences, and including tomorrow in future tense sentences increased accuracy. In the next two experiments, 4- and 5-year-olds (Experiment 2) and adults (Experiment 3) completed the same task but with sentences containing conflicting temporal information ("I carved the pumpkin tomorrow"). Children tended to select pictures depicting the outcome of actions regardless of tense or temporal adverb, whereas adults' judgments were based on temporal adverbs. In Experiment 4, 3- to 5-year-olds completed tasks requiring either forward or backward temporal reasoning about sentences referring to before, after, yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Across sentence types, forward temporal reasoning was easier for children than backward temporal reasoning. Altogether, results indicated that children understand yesterday better than tomorrow due to the increased cognitive demands involved in reasoning about future events. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Crosslinguistic Evidence for the Higher Sentence Analysis: A Review of the Literature. Working Papers on Language Universals, No. 8.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Farwell, Carol

Papers dealing with syntactic evidence in various languages for a higher performative sentence containing information about speaker, addressee and the speech act involved are reviewed and discussed. Arguments for this analysis have the form of showing that overt sentences behave in some way as if they were subordinate to a higher sentence…

Automated Sentence Completion Scoring.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Veldman, Donald J.

A 62-item form of the sentence-completion technique requiring one-word responses was administered to 1718 undergraduates in teacher education. The data were punched on cards and lists of different responses were compiled. Responses indicating evasion, hostility, anxiety and depression were identified for each stem to form a scoring "dictionary." A…

Attention, Working Memory, and Grammaticality Judgment in Typical Young Adults

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Smith, Pamela A.

2011-01-01

Purpose: To examine resource allocation and sentence processing, this study examined the effects of auditory distraction on grammaticality judgment (GJ) of sentences varied by semantics (reversibility) and short-term memory requirements. Method: Experiment 1: Typical young adult females (N = 60) completed a whole-sentence GJ task in distraction…

An Analysis of Errors in Written English Sentences: A Case Study of Thai EFL Students

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sermsook, Kanyakorn; Liamnimit, Jiraporn; Pochakorn, Rattaneekorn

2017-01-01

The purposes of the present study were to examine the language errors in a writing of English major students in a Thai university and to explore the sources of the errors. This study focused mainly on sentences because the researcher found that errors in Thai EFL students' sentence construction may lead to miscommunication. 104 pieces of writing…

Integration of Partial Information within and across Modalities: Contributions to Spoken and Written Sentence Recognition

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Smith, Kimberly G.; Fogerty, Daniel

2015-01-01

Purpose: This study evaluated the extent to which partial spoken or written information facilitates sentence recognition under degraded unimodal and multimodal conditions. Method: Twenty young adults with typical hearing completed sentence recognition tasks in unimodal and multimodal conditions across 3 proportions of preservation. In the unimodal…

Expressive and Receptive Language Effects of African American English on a Sentence Imitation Task

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Terry, J. Michael; Jackson, Sandra C.; Evangelou, Evangelos; Smith, Richard L.

2010-01-01

This study tests the extent to which giving credit for African American English (AAE) responses on a General American English sentence imitation test mitigates dialect effects. Forty-eight AAE-speaking second graders completed the Recalling Sentences subtest of the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals-Third Edition (1995). A Bayesian…

Premise and Inference Memory as a Function of Age and Context.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wagner, Michael; Rohwer, William D., Jr.

A sentence completion task was used to investigate age differences in childrens' ability or inclination to invoke premises and inferences during prose processing, tasks which (according to the constructive hypothesis) adults typically perform. A pilot study confirmed that the sentence completion task was preferable to the recognition paradigm,…

Investigating the Role of Verbal Working Memory in Young Children's Sentence Comprehension

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Boyle, Whitney; Lindell, Annukka K.; Kidd, Evan

2013-01-01

This study considers the role of verbal working memory in sentence comprehension in typically developing English-speaking children. Fifty-six (N = 56) children aged 4;0-6;6 completed a test of language comprehension that contained sentences which varied in complexity, standardized tests of vocabulary and nonverbal intelligence, and three tests of…

Use of Referential Discourse Contexts in L2 Offline and Online Sentence Processing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Yang, Pi-Lan

2016-01-01

The present study aimed to investigate (a) the extent to which Chinese-speaking learners of English in Taiwan use referential noun phrase (NP) information contained in discourse contexts to complete ambiguous noun/verb fragments in a sentence completion task, and (b) whether and when they use the contexts to disambiguate main verb versus reduced…

Chinese and Australians showed difference in mental time travel in emotion and content but not specificity

PubMed Central

Chen, Xing-Jie; Liu, Lu-Lu; Cui, Ji-Fang; Wang, Ya; Shum, David H. K.; Chan, Raymond C. K.

2015-01-01

Mental time travel refers to the ability to recall episodic past and imagine future events. The present study aimed to investigate cultural differences in mental time travel between Chinese and Australian university students. A total of 231 students (108 Chinese and 123 Australians) participated in the study. Their mental time travel abilities were measured by the Sentence Completion for Events from the Past Test (SCEPT) and the Sentence Completion for Events in the Future Test (SCEFT). Results showed that there were no cultural differences in the number of specific events generated for the past or future. Significant differences between the Chinese and Australian participants were found mainly in the emotional valence and content of the events generated. Both Chinese and Australian participants generated more specific positive events compared to negative events when thinking about the future and Chinese participants were more positive about their past than Australian participants when recalling specific events. For content, Chinese participants recalled more events about their interpersonal relationships, while Australian participants imagined more about personal future achievements. These findings shed some lights on cultural differences in episodic past and future thinking. PMID:26167154

A Closer Look at Phonology as a Predictor of Spoken Sentence Processing and Word Reading

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Myers, Suzanne; Robertson, Erin K.

2015-01-01

The goal of this study was to tease apart the roles of phonological awareness (pA) and phonological short-term memory (pSTM) in sentence comprehension, sentence production, and word reading. Children 6- to 10-years of age (N = 377) completed standardized tests of pA ("Elision") and pSTM ("Nonword Repetition") from the…

Automatic thermographic image defect detection of composites

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Luo, Bin; Liebenberg, Bjorn; Raymont, Jeff; Santospirito, SP

2011-05-01

Detecting defects, and especially reliably measuring defect sizes, are critical objectives in automatic NDT defect detection applications. In this work, the Sentence software is proposed for the analysis of pulsed thermography and near IR images of composite materials. Furthermore, the Sentence software delivers an end-to-end, user friendly platform for engineers to perform complete manual inspections, as well as tools that allow senior engineers to develop inspection templates and profiles, reducing the requisite thermographic skill level of the operating engineer. Finally, the Sentence software can also offer complete independence of operator decisions by the fully automated "Beep on Defect" detection functionality. The end-to-end automatic inspection system includes sub-systems for defining a panel profile, generating an inspection plan, controlling a robot-arm and capturing thermographic images to detect defects. A statistical model has been built to analyze the entire image, evaluate grey-scale ranges, import sentencing criteria and automatically detect impact damage defects. A full width half maximum algorithm has been used to quantify the flaw sizes. The identified defects are imported into the sentencing engine which then sentences (automatically compares analysis results against acceptance criteria) the inspection by comparing the most significant defect or group of defects against the inspection standards.

Language comprehenders retain implied shape and orientation of objects.

PubMed

Pecher, Diane; van Dantzig, Saskia; Zwaan, Rolf A; Zeelenberg, René

2009-06-01

According to theories of embodied cognition, language comprehenders simulate sensorimotor experiences to represent the meaning of what they read. Previous studies have shown that picture recognition is better if the object in the picture matches the orientation or shape implied by a preceding sentence. In order to test whether strategic imagery may explain previous findings, language comprehenders first read a list of sentences in which objects were mentioned. Only once the complete list had been read was recognition memory tested with pictures. Recognition performance was better if the orientation or shape of the object matched that implied by the sentence, both immediately after reading the complete list of sentences and after a 45-min delay. These results suggest that previously found match effects were not due to strategic imagery and show that details of sensorimotor simulations are retained over longer periods.

Single-Word Predictions of Upcoming Language During Comprehension: Evidence from the Cumulative Semantic Interference Task

PubMed Central

Kleinman, Daniel; Runnqvist, Elin; Ferreira, Victor S.

2015-01-01

Comprehenders predict upcoming speech and text on the basis of linguistic input. How many predictions do comprehenders make for an upcoming word? If a listener strongly expects to hear the word “sock”, is the word “shirt” partially expected as well, is it actively inhibited, or is it ignored? The present research addressed these questions by measuring the “downstream” effects of prediction on the processing of subsequently presented stimuli using the cumulative semantic interference paradigm. In three experiments, subjects named pictures (sock) that were presented either in isolation or after strongly constraining sentence frames (“After doing his laundry, Mark always seemed to be missing one…”). Naming sock slowed the subsequent naming of the picture shirt – the standard cumulative semantic interference effect. However, although picture naming was much faster after sentence frames, the interference effect was not modulated by the context (bare vs. sentence) in which either picture was presented. According to the only model of cumulative semantic interference that can account for such a pattern of data, this indicates that comprehenders pre-activated and maintained the pre-activation of best sentence completions (sock) but did not maintain the pre-activation of less likely completions (shirt). Thus, comprehenders predicted only the most probable completion for each sentence. PMID:25917550

The Effects of Phonological Short-Term Memory and Speech Perception on Spoken Sentence Comprehension in Children: Simulating Deficits in an Experimental Design

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Higgins, Meaghan C.; Penney, Sarah B.; Robertson, Erin K.

2017-01-01

The roles of phonological short-term memory (pSTM) and speech perception in spoken sentence comprehension were examined in an experimental design. Deficits in pSTM and speech perception were simulated through task demands while typically-developing children (N = 71) completed a sentence-picture matching task. Children performed the control,…

Empathy predicts false belief reasoning ability: evidence from the N400.

PubMed

Ferguson, Heather J; Cane, James E; Douchkov, Michelle; Wright, Daniel

2015-06-01

Interpreting others' actions relies on an understanding of their current mental state. Emerging research has begun to identify a number of factors that give rise to individual differences in this ability. We report an event-related brain potential study where participants (N = 28) read contexts that described a character having a true belief (TB) or false belief (FB) about an object's location. A second sentence described where that character would look for the object. Critically, this sentence included a sentence-final noun that was either consistent or inconsistent with the character's belief. Participants also completed the Empathy Quotient questionnaire. Analysis of the N400 revealed that when the character held a TB about the object's location, the N400 waveform was more negative-going for belief inconsistent vs belief consistent critical words. However, when the character held an FB about the object's location the opposite pattern was found. Intriguingly, correlations between the N400 inconsistency effect and individuals' empathy scores showed a significant correlation for FB but not TB. This suggests that people who are high in empathy can successfully interpret events according to the character's FB, while low empathizers bias their interpretation of events to their own egocentric view. © The Author (2014). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Complex Sentence Comprehension and Working Memory in Children With Specific Language Impairment

PubMed Central

Montgomery, James W.; Evans, Julia L.

2015-01-01

Purpose This study investigated the association of 2 mechanisms of working memory (phonological short-term memory [PSTM], attentional resource capacity/allocation) with the sentence comprehension of school-age children with specific language impairment (SLI) and 2 groups of control children. Method Twenty-four children with SLI, 18 age-matched (CA) children, and 16 language- and memory-matched (LMM) children completed a nonword repetition task (PSTM), the competing language processing task (CLPT; resource capacity/allocation), and a sentence comprehension task comprising complex and simple sentences. Results (1) The SLI group performed worse than the CA group on each memory task; (2) all 3 groups showed comparable simple sentence comprehension, but for complex sentences, the SLI and LMM groups performed worse than the CA group; (3) for the SLI group, (a) CLPT correlated with complex sentence comprehension, and (b) nonword repetition correlated with simple sentence comprehension; (4) for CA children, neither memory variable correlated with either sentence type; and (5) for LMM children, only CLPT correlated with complex sentences. Conclusions Comprehension of both complex and simple grammar by school-age children with SLI is a mentally demanding activity, requiring significant working memory resources. PMID:18723601

Sentence Paraphrasing from a Conceptual Base

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Goldman, Neil M.

1975-01-01

A model of natural language generation based on an underlying language-free representation of meaning is described. A computer implementation of this model, called BABEL, has been developed at Stanford University. It is able to produce sentence paraphrases which demonstrate understanding with respect to a given context. Available from Association…

Semantic and phonological contributions to short-term repetition and long-term cued sentence recall.

PubMed

Meltzer, Jed A; Rose, Nathan S; Deschamps, Tiffany; Leigh, Rosie C; Panamsky, Lilia; Silberberg, Alexandra; Madani, Noushin; Links, Kira A

2016-02-01

The function of verbal short-term memory is supported not only by the phonological loop, but also by semantic resources that may operate on both short and long time scales. Elucidation of the neural underpinnings of these mechanisms requires effective behavioral manipulations that can selectively engage them. We developed a novel cued sentence recall paradigm to assess the effects of two factors on sentence recall accuracy at short-term and long-term stages. Participants initially repeated auditory sentences immediately following a 14-s retention period. After this task was complete, long-term memory for each sentence was probed by a two-word recall cue. The sentences were either concrete (high imageability) or abstract (low imageability), and the initial 14-s retention period was filled with either an undemanding finger-tapping task or a more engaging articulatory suppression task (Exp. 1, counting backward by threes; Exp. 2, repeating a four-syllable nonword). Recall was always better for the concrete sentences. Articulatory suppression reduced accuracy in short-term recall, especially for abstract sentences, but the sentences initially recalled following articulatory suppression were retained better at the subsequent cued-recall test, suggesting that the engagement of semantic mechanisms for short-term retention promoted encoding of the sentence meaning into long-term memory. These results provide a basis for using sentence imageability and subsequent memory performance as probes of semantic engagement in short-term memory for sentences.

Effect of Immediate Feedback and Revision on Psychometric Properties of Open-Ended Sentence- Completion Items. ETS GRE Board Research Report No. 03-15. ETS RR-08-16

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Attali, Yigal; Powers, Don; Hawthorn, John

2008-01-01

Registered examinees for the GRE® General Test answered open-ended sentence-completion items. For half of the items, participants received immediate feedback on the correctness of their answers and up to two opportunities to revise their answers. A significant feedback-and-revision effect was found. Participants were able to correct many of their…

Reactions to mandatory sentences in relation to the ethnic identity and criminal history of the offender.

PubMed

Feather, N T; Souter, Jacqueline

2002-08-01

This study investigated the responses of 181 participants (87 men, 94 women), from Adelaide, South Australia, to scenarios describing mandatory sentences for perpetrators of a property offense committed in the Northern Territory, Australia. Four scenarios that were randomly distributed varied ethnic identity (White Australian, Aboriginal Australian) and criminal history (first-time offender, third-time offender). Participants completed attitude measures for both mandatory sentencing and capital punishment, a right-wing authoritarianism scale, and a scale concerned with sentencing goals (retribution, deterrence, protection of society, and rehabilitation). Results showed strong effects of attitude toward mandatory sentencing on scenario responses for variables such as perceived responsibility, deservingness, leniency, seriousness, anger and pleasure, and weaker effects of ethnic identity and criminal history. Participants were generally more sympathetic when the offender was an Aboriginal Australian. Results of a multiple regression analysis showed that attitude toward mandatory sentence was predicted by right-wing authoritarianism and by sentencing goals relating to deterrence and the protection of society.

Role of auditory non-verbal working memory in sentence repetition for bilingual children with primary language impairment.

PubMed

Ebert, Kerry Danahy

2014-01-01

Sentence repetition performance is attracting increasing interest as a valuable clinical marker for primary (or specific) language impairment (LI) in both monolingual and bilingual populations. Multiple aspects of memory appear to contribute to sentence repetition performance, but non-verbal memory has not yet been considered. To explore the relationship between a measure of non-verbal auditory working memory (NVWM) and sentence repetition performance in a sample of bilingual children with LI. Forty-seven school-aged Spanish-English bilingual children with LI completed sentence repetition and non-word repetition tasks in both Spanish and English as well as an NVWM task. Hierarchical multiple linear regression was used to predict sentence repetition in each language using age, non-word repetition and NVWM. NVWM predicted unique variance in sentence repetition performance in both languages after accounting for chronological age and language-specific phonological memory, as measured by non-word repetition. Domain-general memory resources play a unique role in sentence repetition performance in children with LI. Non-verbal working memory weaknesses may contribute to the poor performance of children with LI on sentence repetition tasks. © 2014 Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.

The Role of Auditory Nonverbal Working Memory in Sentence Repetition for Bilingual Children with Primary Language Impairment

PubMed Central

Ebert, Kerry Danahy

2015-01-01

Background Sentence repetition performance is attracting increasing interest as a valuable clinical marker for Primary (or Specific) Language Impairment (LI) in both monolingual and bilingual populations. Multiple aspects of memory appear to contribute to sentence repetition performance, but nonverbal memory has not yet been considered. Aims The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between a measure of nonverbal auditory working memory (NVWM) and sentence repetition performance in a sample of bilingual children with LI. Methods & Procedures Forty-seven school-aged Spanish-English bilingual children with LI completed sentence repetition and nonword repetition tasks in both Spanish and English as well as an NVWM task. Hierarchical multiple linear regression was used to predict sentence repetition in each language using age, nonword repetition, and NVWM. Outcomes & Results NVWM predicted unique variance in sentence repetition performance in both languages after accounting for chronological age and language-specific phonological memory, as measured by nonword repetition. Conclusions & Implications Domain-general memory resources play a unique role in sentence repetition performance in children with LI. Nonverbal working memory weaknesses may contribute to the poor performance of children with LI on sentence repetition tasks. PMID:24894308

Comprehending Sentences With the Body: Action Compatibility in British Sign Language?

PubMed

Vinson, David; Perniss, Pamela; Fox, Neil; Vigliocco, Gabriella

2017-05-01

Previous studies show that reading sentences about actions leads to specific motor activity associated with actually performing those actions. We investigate how sign language input may modulate motor activation, using British Sign Language (BSL) sentences, some of which explicitly encode direction of motion, versus written English, where motion is only implied. We find no evidence of action simulation in BSL comprehension (Experiments 1-3), but we find effects of action simulation in comprehension of written English sentences by deaf native BSL signers (Experiment 4). These results provide constraints on the nature of mental simulations involved in comprehending action sentences referring to transfer events, suggesting that the richer contextual information provided by BSL sentences versus written or spoken English may reduce the need for action simulation in comprehension, at least when the event described does not map completely onto the signer's own body. Copyright © 2016 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

Assessing understanding of relative clauses: a comparison of multiple-choice comprehension versus sentence repetition.

PubMed

Frizelle, Pauline; O'Neill, Clodagh; Bishop, Dorothy V M

2017-11-01

Although sentence repetition is considered a reliable measure of children's grammatical knowledge, few studies have directly compared children's sentence repetition performance with their understanding of grammatical structures. The current study aimed to compare children's performance on these two assessment measures, using a multiple-choice picture-matching sentence comprehension task and a sentence repetition task. Thirty-three typically developing children completed both assessments, which included relative clauses representing a range of syntactic roles. Results revealed a similar order of difficulty of constructions on both measures but little agreement between them when evaluating individual differences. Interestingly, repetition was the easier of the two measures, with children showing the ability to repeat sentences they did not understand. This discrepancy is primarily attributed to the additional processing load resulting from the design of multiple-choice comprehension tasks, and highlights the fact that these assessments are invoking skills beyond those of linguistic competence.

Polysemy in Sentence Comprehension: Effects of Meaning Dominance

PubMed Central

Foraker, Stephani; Murphy, Gregory L.

2012-01-01

Words like church are polysemous, having two related senses (a building and an organization). Three experiments investigated how polysemous senses are represented and processed during sentence comprehension. On one view, readers retrieve an underspecified, core meaning, which is later specified more fully with contextual information. On another view, readers retrieve one or more specific senses. In a reading task, context that was neutral or biased towards a particular sense preceded a polysemous word. Disambiguating material consistent with only one sense followed, in a second sentence (Experiment 1) or the same sentence (Experiments 2 & 3). Reading the disambiguating material was faster when it was consistent with that context, and dominant senses were committed to more strongly than subordinate senses. Critically, following neutral context, the continuation was read more quickly when it selected the dominant sense, and the degree of sense dominance partially explained the reading time advantage. Similarity of the senses also affected reading times. Across experiments, we found that sense selection may not be completed immediately following a polysemous word but is completed at a sentence boundary. Overall, the results suggest that readers select an individual sense when reading a polysemous word, rather than a core meaning. PMID:23185103

A sentence completion procedure as an alternative to the Autobiographical Memory Test for assessing overgeneral memory in non-clinical populations

PubMed Central

Raes, Filip; Hermans, Dirk; Williams, J. Mark G.; Eelen, Paul

2007-01-01

Overgeneral memory (OGM) has been proposed as a vulnerability factor for depression (Williams et al., 2007) or depressive reactivity to stressful life-events (e.g., Gibbs & Rude, 2004). Traditionally, a cue word procedure known as the Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT; Williams & Broadbent, 1986) is used to assess OGM. Although frequently and validly used in clinical populations, there is evidence suggesting that the AMT is insufficiently sensitive to measure OGM in non-clinical groups. Study 1 evaluated the usefulness of a sentence completion method to assess OGM in non-clinical groups, as an alternative to the AMT. Participants were 197 students who completed the AMT, the Sentence Completion for Events from the Past Test (SCEPT), a depression measure, and visual analogue scales assessing ruminative thinking. Results showed that the mean proportion of overgeneral responses was markedly higher for the SCEPT than for the standard AMT. Also, overgeneral responding on the SCEPT was positively associated to depression scores and depressive rumination scores, whereas overgeneral responding on the AMT was not. Results suggest that the SCEPT, relative to the AMT, is a more sensitive instrument to measure OGM, at least in non-clinical populations. Study 2 further showed that this enhanced sensitivity is most likely due to the omission of the instruction to be specific rather than to the SCEPT's sentence completion format (as opposed to free recall to cue words). PMID:17613793

A sentence completion procedure as an alternative to the Autobiographical Memory Test for assessing overgeneral memory in non-clinical populations.

PubMed

Raes, Filip; Hermans, Dirk; Williams, J Mark G; Eelen, Paul

2007-07-01

Overgeneral memory (OGM) has been proposed as a vulnerability factor for depression (Williams et al., 2007) or depressive reactivity to stressful life-events (e.g., Gibbs & Rude, 2004). Traditionally, a cue word procedure known as the Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT; Williams & Broadbent, 1986) is used to assess OGM. Although frequently and validly used in clinical populations, there is evidence suggesting that the AMT is insufficiently sensitive to measure OGM in non-clinical groups. Study 1 evaluated the usefulness of a sentence completion method to assess OGM in non-clinical groups, as an alternative to the AMT. Participants were 197 students who completed the AMT, the Sentence Completion for Events from the Past Test (SCEPT), a depression measure, and visual analogue scales assessing ruminative thinking. Results showed that the mean proportion of overgeneral responses was markedly higher for the SCEPT than for the standard AMT. Also, overgeneral responding on the SCEPT was positively associated to depression scores and depressive rumination scores, whereas overgeneral responding on the AMT was not. Results suggest that the SCEPT, relative to the AMT, is a more sensitive instrument to measure OGM, at least in non-clinical populations. Study 2 further showed that this enhanced sensitivity is most likely due to the omission of the instruction to be specific rather than to the SCEPT's sentence completion format (as opposed to free recall to cue words).

The Development of the Alpha-Omega Completed Sentence Form (AOCSF): An Instrument to Aid in the Measurement, Identification, and Assessment of an Individual's "Adaptational Approach(es)" to the Stressful Event of Death and Related Issues.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Klein, Ronald; And Others

The Alpha Omega Completed Sentence Form (AOCSF) was developed to identify and measure a person's adaptational approaches to information concerning their own death or the possible death of a significant other. In contrast to the Kubler-Ross stage theory, the adaptational approach recognizes a person's capacity to assimilate new information which…

Use of Matrix Sampling Procedures to Assess Achievement in Solving Open Addition and Subtraction Sentences.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Montague, Margariete A.

This study investigated the feasibility of concurrently and randomly sampling examinees and items in order to estimate group achievement. Seven 32-item tests reflecting a 640-item universe of simple open sentences were used such that item selection (random, systematic) and assignment (random, systematic) of items (four, eight, sixteen) to forms…

Electrophysiological signatures of phonological and semantic maintenance in sentence repetition.

PubMed

Meltzer, Jed A; Kielar, Aneta; Panamsky, Lilia; Links, Kira A; Deschamps, Tiffany; Leigh, Rosie C

2017-08-01

Verbal short-term memory comprises resources for phonological rehearsal, which have been characterized anatomically, and for maintenance of semantic information, which are less understood. Sentence repetition tasks tap both processes interactively. To distinguish brain activity involved in phonological vs. semantic maintenance, we recorded magnetoencephalography during a sentence repetition task, incorporating three manipulations emphasizing one mechanism over the other. Participants heard sentences or word lists and attempted to repeat them verbatim after a 5-second delay. After MEG, participants completed a cued recall task testing how much they remembered of each sentence. Greater semantic engagement relative to phonological rehearsal was hypothesized for 1) sentences vs. word lists, 2) concrete vs. abstract sentences, and 3) well recalled vs. poorly recalled sentences. During auditory perception and the memory delay period, we found highly left-lateralized activation in the form of 8-30 Hz event-related desynchronization. Compared to abstract sentences, concrete sentences recruited posterior temporal cortex bilaterally, demonstrating a neural signature for the engagement of visual imagery in sentence maintenance. Maintenance of arbitrary word lists recruited right hemisphere dorsal regions, reflecting increased demands on phonological rehearsal. Sentences that were ultimately poorly recalled in the post-test also elicited extra right hemisphere activation when they were held in short-term memory, suggesting increased demands on phonological resources. Frontal midline theta oscillations also reflected phonological rather than semantic demand, being increased for word lists and poorly recalled sentences. These findings highlight distinct neural resources for phonological and semantic maintenance, with phonological maintenance associated with stronger oscillatory modulations. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Role of Working Memory in Typically Developing Children's Complex Sentence Comprehension

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Montgomery, James W.; Magimairaj, Beula M.; O'Malley, Michelle H.

2008-01-01

The influence of three mechanisms of working memory (phonological short-term memory (PSTM capacity), attentional resource control/allocation, and processing speed) on children's complex (and simple) sentence comprehension was investigated. Fifty two children (6-12 years) completed a nonword repetition task (indexing PSTM), concurrent verbal…

In a Concurrent Memory and Auditory Perception Task, the Pupil Dilation Response Is More Sensitive to Memory Load Than to Auditory Stimulus Characteristics.

PubMed

Zekveld, Adriana A; Kramer, Sophia E; Rönnberg, Jerker; Rudner, Mary

2018-06-19

Speech understanding may be cognitively demanding, but it can be enhanced when semantically related text cues precede auditory sentences. The present study aimed to determine whether (a) providing text cues reduces pupil dilation, a measure of cognitive load, during listening to sentences, (b) repeating the sentences aloud affects recall accuracy and pupil dilation during recall of cue words, and (c) semantic relatedness between cues and sentences affects recall accuracy and pupil dilation during recall of cue words. Sentence repetition following text cues and recall of the text cues were tested. Twenty-six participants (mean age, 22 years) with normal hearing listened to masked sentences. On each trial, a set of four-word cues was presented visually as text preceding the auditory presentation of a sentence whose meaning was either related or unrelated to the cues. On each trial, participants first read the cue words, then listened to a sentence. Following this they spoke aloud either the cue words or the sentence, according to instruction, and finally on all trials orally recalled the cues. Peak pupil dilation was measured throughout listening and recall on each trial. Additionally, participants completed a test measuring the ability to perceive degraded verbal text information and three working memory tests (a reading span test, a size-comparison span test, and a test of memory updating). Cue words that were semantically related to the sentence facilitated sentence repetition but did not reduce pupil dilation. Recall was poorer and there were more intrusion errors when the cue words were related to the sentences. Recall was also poorer when sentences were repeated aloud. Both behavioral effects were associated with greater pupil dilation. Larger reading span capacity and smaller size-comparison span were associated with larger peak pupil dilation during listening. Furthermore, larger reading span and greater memory updating ability were both associated with better cue recall overall. Although sentence-related word cues facilitate sentence repetition, our results indicate that they do not reduce cognitive load during listening in noise with a concurrent memory load. As expected, higher working memory capacity was associated with better recall of the cues. Unexpectedly, however, semantic relatedness with the sentence reduced word cue recall accuracy and increased intrusion errors, suggesting an effect of semantic confusion. Further, speaking the sentence aloud also reduced word cue recall accuracy, probably due to articulatory suppression. Importantly, imposing a memory load during listening to sentences resulted in the absence of formerly established strong effects of speech intelligibility on the pupil dilation response. This nullified intelligibility effect demonstrates that the pupil dilation response to a cognitive (memory) task can completely overshadow the effect of perceptual factors on the pupil dilation response. This highlights the importance of taking cognitive task load into account during auditory testing.This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CCBY), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Beyond Sentences: Using the Expression, Reception, and Recall of Narratives Instrument to Assess Communication in School-Aged Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Volden, Joanne; Dodd, Erin; Engel, Kathleen; Smith, Isabel M.; Szatmari, Peter; Fombonne, Eric; Zwaigenbaum, Lonnie; Mirenda, Pat; Bryson, Susan; Roberts, Wendy; Vaillancourt, Tracy; Waddell, Charlotte; Elsabbagh, Mayada; Bennett, Teresa; Georgiades, Stelios; Duku, Eric

2017-01-01

Purpose: Impairments in the social use of language are universal in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but few standardized measures evaluate communication skills above the level of individual words or sentences. This study evaluated the Expression, Reception, and Recall of Narrative Instrument (ERRNI; Bishop, 2004) to determine its contribution to…

The perception of intonation questions and statements in Cantonese.

PubMed

Ma, Joan K-Y; Ciocca, Valter; Whitehill, Tara L

2011-02-01

In tone languages there are potential conflicts in the perception of lexical tone and intonation, as both depend mainly on the differences in fundamental frequency (F0) patterns. The present study investigated the acoustic cues associated with the perception of sentences as questions or statements in Cantonese, as a function of the lexical tone in sentence final position. Cantonese listeners performed intonation identification tasks involving complete sentences, isolated final syllables, and sentences without the final syllable (carriers). Sensitivity (d' scores) were similar for complete sentences and final syllables but were significantly lower for carriers. Sensitivity was also affected by tone identity. These findings show that the perception of questions and statements relies primarily on the F0 characteristics of the final syllables (local F0 cues). A measure of response bias (c) provided evidence for a general bias toward the perception of statements. Logistic regression analyses showed that utterances were accurately classified as questions or statements by using average F0 and F0 interval. Average F0 of carriers (global F0 cue) was also found to be a reliable secondary cue. These findings suggest that the use of F0 cues for the perception of intonation question in tonal languages is likely to be language-specific.

Future Expectations of Brasilian Street Youth

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Raffaelli, M.; Koller, S.H.

2005-01-01

Future expectations of youth surviving on the streets of Porto Alegre, Brasil, were examined. The sample consisted of 35 boys and 34 girls aged 10-18 (M age 14.4) who participated in a sentence completion task and semi-structured interviews. Responses to two incomplete sentences regarding the future revealed a mismatch between hoped-for and…

Sentence completion tests: a review of the literature and results of a survey of members of the Society for Personality Assessment.

PubMed

Holaday, M; Smith, D A; Sherry, A

2000-06-01

Test usage surveys consistently find that sentence completion tests (SCTs) are among the most popular personality assessment instruments used by practitioners. What is not noted is which SCTs practitioners are using, why these tests are so popular, and whether practitioners are using formal scoring. We surveyed a random selection of 100 members of the Society for Personality Assessment. With a 60% return rate on a single mailing, we found that most psychologists who use incomplete sentence tests use the Rotter (1951) Incomplete Sentences Blank with children (18%), adolescents (32%), and adults (47%). Most practitioners said they do not read stems aloud and record answers themselves, and even fewer said they use formal scoring. The most common reasons for using an SCT are (a) to use it as part of an assessment battery (41 endorsements), (b) to determine personality structure (18 endorsements), and (c) to elicit quotable quotes (17 endorsements). Implications for practitioners and training suggestions for academicians who prepare future psychologists are noted.

Dissociating linguistic and non-linguistic gesture processing: electrophysiological evidence from American Sign Language.

PubMed

Grosvald, Michael; Gutierrez, Eva; Hafer, Sarah; Corina, David

2012-04-01

A fundamental advance in our understanding of human language would come from a detailed account of how non-linguistic and linguistic manual actions are differentiated in real time by language users. To explore this issue, we targeted the N400, an ERP component known to be sensitive to semantic context. Deaf signers saw 120 American Sign Language sentences, each consisting of a "frame" (a sentence without the last word; e.g. BOY SLEEP IN HIS) followed by a "last item" belonging to one of four categories: a high-close-probability sign (a "semantically reasonable" completion to the sentence; e.g. BED), a low-close-probability sign (a real sign that is nonetheless a "semantically odd" completion to the sentence; e.g. LEMON), a pseudo-sign (phonologically legal but non-lexical form), or a non-linguistic grooming gesture (e.g. the performer scratching her face). We found significant N400-like responses in the incongruent and pseudo-sign contexts, while the gestures elicited a large positivity. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Dissociating linguistic and non-linguistic gesture processing: Electrophysiological evidence from American Sign Language

PubMed Central

Grosvald, Michael; Gutierrez, Eva; Hafer, Sarah; Corina, David

2012-01-01

A fundamental advance in our understanding of human language would come from a detailed account of how non-linguistic and linguistic manual actions are differentiated in real time by language users. To explore this issue, we targeted the N400, an ERP component known to be sensitive to semantic context. Deaf signers saw 120 American Sign Language sentences, each consisting of a “frame” (a sentence without the last word; e.g. BOY SLEEP IN HIS) followed by a “last item” belonging to one of four categories: a high-cloze-probability sign (a “semantically reasonable” completion to the sentence; e.g. BED), a low-cloze-probability sign (a real sign that is nonetheless a “semantically odd” completion to the sentence; e.g. LEMON), a pseudo-sign (phonologically legal but non-lexical form), or a non-linguistic grooming gesture (e.g. the performer scratching her face). We found significant N400-like responses in the incongruent and pseudo-sign contexts, while the gestures elicited a large positivity. PMID:22341555

Understanding environmental sounds in sentence context.

PubMed

Uddin, Sophia; Heald, Shannon L M; Van Hedger, Stephen C; Klos, Serena; Nusbaum, Howard C

2018-03-01

There is debate about how individuals use context to successfully predict and recognize words. One view argues that context supports neural predictions that make use of the speech motor system, whereas other views argue for a sensory or conceptual level of prediction. While environmental sounds can convey clear referential meaning, they are not linguistic signals, and are thus neither produced with the vocal tract nor typically encountered in sentence context. We compared the effect of spoken sentence context on recognition and comprehension of spoken words versus nonspeech, environmental sounds. In Experiment 1, sentence context decreased the amount of signal needed for recognition of spoken words and environmental sounds in similar fashion. In Experiment 2, listeners judged sentence meaning in both high and low contextually constraining sentence frames, when the final word was present or replaced with a matching environmental sound. Results showed that sentence constraint affected decision time similarly for speech and nonspeech, such that high constraint sentences (i.e., frame plus completion) were processed faster than low constraint sentences for speech and nonspeech. Linguistic context facilitates the recognition and understanding of nonspeech sounds in much the same way as for spoken words. This argues against a simple form of a speech-motor explanation of predictive coding in spoken language understanding, and suggests support for conceptual-level predictions. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Adaptation and Foreign Policy Theory

DTIC Science & Technology

1973-09-01

Chomsky , 1956:113, points out, "A properly formulated grammar should define unambiguously the set of grammatical sentences." The theorist of...Political Science The Ohio State University September 1973 A revised version of this paper Is forthcoming In Sage International Yearbook of Foreign...for through general laws. In the case of the linguist, these finite observations consist of sentences and the general laws are called the grammar . As

Psychological characteristics of eating disorders as evidenced by the combined administration of questionnaires and two projective methods: the Tree Drawing Test (Baum Test) and the Sentence Completion Test.

PubMed

Mizuta, Ichiro; Inoue, Yoichi; Fukunaga, Tomoko; Ishi, Ryohei; Ogawa, Asao; Takeda, Masatoshi

2002-02-01

The objective of this study is to examine psychological/psychopathological characteristics of eating disorders and their subtypes through a combined administration of questionnaires and projective tests. Three questionnaires (Eating Disorder Inventory - 2, Social Adaptation Scale, Southern California University Eating Disorder Inventory - Revised) and two projective tests (the Tree Drawing Test [TDT, Baum Test], and the Sentence Completion Test [SCT]) were administered to 126 female patients between the ages of 15 and 30 years, with eating disorders according to DSM-IV criteria at our outpatient clinic, and to 54 sex- and age-matched control subjects. The purging subtypes of eating disorders (anorexia nervosa - binge-eating/purging type [ANBP] and bulimia nervosa - purging type [BNP]) were clearly differentiated from the controls, both by the questionnaires and the projective tests. Compared with the controls, ANBP/BNP showed more problematic profiles across the three questionnaires, drew smaller and poorer trees in TDT to a more left location on the drawing paper, and gave fewer positive, and more negative responses in SCT. In contrast, few significant differences were found between anorexia nervosa- restricting type (ANR) and the controls, and between ANBP and BNP. As a trend, however, ANR was consistently located between the controls and ANBP/BNP across the whole questionnaires and projective tests.

Toward defining good writing: A rhetorical analysis of the words, sentences, and paragraphs in 16 industrial scripts

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Freisinger, R. R.; Petersen, B. T.

1981-01-01

The assumption that teachers of technical writing agree on a definition of good writing was found to be without basis. Resolution of disagreements arising from close reading and textual analysis is described. Writing samples from corporate sources including IBM, ALCOA, Exxon, Weyerhaeuser, Bell Labs, Underwriters Laboratories, Dow Chemical, and US Steel were requested. A mixture of informative and persuasive examples, and examples directed at lay and specialist audiences were received. Analyses of 16 writing samples are reported. Analysis of word level, sentence level, and paragraph level, was completed. Syllabism, verb selection, nominalizations, vocabulary choices, t-units, subordination, sentence and clause length, syntactic order, patterns, development, topic sentences, propositional order, and transitions were analyzed.

Writing Simple Sentences and Descriptive Paragraphs: Effects of an Intervention on Adolescents with Writing Difficulties

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Datchuk, Shawn M.

2016-01-01

The present study investigated the effects of a multicomponent intervention on the writing behavior of adolescents with writing difficulties. A single-case design consisting of a combination of multiple-probe design across participants and pre-post test was used. Four participants completed two intervention phases: (a) sentence instruction and…

When Novel Sentences Spoken or Heard for the First Time in the History of the Universe Are Not Enough: Toward a Dual-Process Model of Language

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Van Lancker Sidtis, Diana

2003-01-01

Although interest in the language sciences was previously focused on newly created sentences, more recently much attention has turned to the importance of formulaic expressions in normal and disordered communication. Also referred to as formulaic expressions and made up of speech formulas, idioms, expletives, serial and memorized speech, slang,…

Immediate source-monitoring, self-focused attention and the positive symptoms of schizophrenia.

PubMed

Startup, Mike; Startup, Sue; Sedgman, Adele

2008-10-01

Previous research suggests that tendencies to misattribute one's own thoughts to an external source, as assessed by an immediate source-monitoring test, are associated with auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs). However, recent research suggests that such tendencies are associated instead with symptoms of thought interference. The main aim of the present study was to examine whether such tendencies are differentially associated with different types of thought interference, with AVHs, or with both. It has also been suggested that external misattributions are especially likely to occur with emotionally salient material and if the individual's focus is on the self. These suggestions were also tested. The positive psychotic symptoms of 57 individuals with a diagnosis of schizophrenia were assessed and they then completed the Self-Focus Sentence Completion blank. Immediately after completing each sentence they were asked to indicate to what extent the sentence was their own. The number of sentences that were not rated as completely their own served as their externalization score. Externalization scores correlated significantly with the severity of three symptoms: voices commenting, delusions of being controlled, and thought insertion. In a logistic regression analysis, all three of these symptoms were significantly and independently related to externalization. Externalization was not associated with either a negative or a neutral self-focus. Thus tendencies to misattribute one's own thoughts to an external source are associated with AVHs and some, but not all, symptoms of thought interference. The importance for externalization of self-focused attention and of the emotional salience of the elicited thoughts was not supported.

Use of Referential Discourse Contexts in L2 Offline and Online Sentence Processing.

PubMed

Yang, Pi-Lan

2016-10-01

The present study aimed to investigate (a) the extent to which Chinese-speaking learners of English in Taiwan use referential noun phrase (NP) information contained in discourse contexts to complete ambiguous noun/verb fragments in a sentence completion task, and (b) whether and when they use the contexts to disambiguate main verb versus reduced relative clause (MV/RRC) ambiguities in real time. Results showed that unlike native English speakers, English learners did not create a marked increase in RRC completions in biasing two-NP-referent discourse contexts except for advanced learners. Nevertheless, like native speakers, the learners at elementary, intermediate, and advanced English proficiency levels all used the information in a later stage of resolving the MV/RRC ambiguities in real time. The delayed effect of referential context information observed suggests that L2 learners, like native speakers, are able to construct syntax-to-discourse mappings in real time. It also suggests that processing of syntactic information takes precedence over integration of syntactic information with discourse information during L1 and L2 online sentence processing.

"Hunting with a knife and ... fork": examining central coherence in autism, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and typical development with a linguistic task.

PubMed

Booth, Rhonda; Happé, Francesca

2010-12-01

A local processing bias, referred to as "weak central coherence," has been postulated to underlie key aspects of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Little research has examined whether individual differences in this cognitive style can be found in typical development, independent of intelligence, and how local processing relates to executive control. We present a brief and easy-to-administer test of coherence requiring global sentence completions. We report results from three studies assessing (a) 176 typically developing (TD) 8- to 25-year-olds, (b) individuals with ASD and matched controls, and (c) matched groups with ASD or attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The results suggest that the Sentence Completion Task can reveal individual differences in cognitive style unrelated to IQ in typical development, that most (but not all) people with ASD show weak coherence on this task, and that performance is not related to inhibitory control. The Sentence Completion Task was found to be a useful test instrument, capable of tapping local processing bias in a range of populations. (c) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Children's Comprehension of Object Relative Sentences: It's Extant Language Knowledge That Matters, Not Domain-General Working Memory.

PubMed

Rusli, Yazmin Ahmad; Montgomery, James W

2017-10-17

The aim of this study was to determine whether extant language (lexical) knowledge or domain-general working memory is the better predictor of comprehension of object relative sentences for children with typical development. We hypothesized that extant language knowledge, not domain-general working memory, is the better predictor. Fifty-three children (ages 9-11 years) completed a word-level verbal working-memory task, indexing extant language (lexical) knowledge; an analog nonverbal working-memory task, representing domain-general working memory; and a hybrid sentence comprehension task incorporating elements of both agent selection and cross-modal picture-priming paradigms. Images of the agent and patient were displayed at the syntactic gap in the object relative sentences, and the children were asked to select the agent of the sentence. Results of general linear modeling revealed that extant language knowledge accounted for a unique 21.3% of variance in the children's object relative sentence comprehension over and above age (8.3%). Domain-general working memory accounted for a nonsignificant 1.6% of variance. We interpret the results to suggest that extant language knowledge and not domain-general working memory is a critically important contributor to children's object relative sentence comprehension. Results support a connectionist view of the association between working memory and object relative sentence comprehension. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.5404573.

Reduced sensitivity to context in language comprehension: A characteristic of Autism Spectrum Disorders or of poor structural language ability?

PubMed

Eberhardt, Melanie; Nadig, Aparna

2018-01-01

We present two experiments examining the universality and uniqueness of reduced context sensitivity in language processing in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), as proposed by the Weak Central Coherence account (Happé & Frith, 2006, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 36(1), 25). That is, do all children with ASD exhibit decreased context sensitivity, and is this characteristic specific to ASD versus other neurodevelopmental conditions? Experiment 1, conducted in English, was a comparison of children with ASD with normal language and their typically-developing peers on a picture selection task where interpretation of sentential context was required to identify homonyms. Contrary to the predictions of Weak Central Coherence, the ASD-normal language group exhibited no difficulty on this task. Experiment 2, conducted in German, compared children with ASD with variable language abilities, typically-developing children, and a second control group of children with Language Impairment (LI) on a sentence completion task where a context sentence had to be considered to produce the continuation of an ambiguous sentence fragment. Both ASD-variable language and LI groups exhibited reduced context sensitivity and did not differ from each other. Finally, to directly test which factors contribute to reduced context sensitivity, we conducted a regression analysis for each experiment, entering nonverbal IQ, structural language ability, and autism diagnosis as predictors. For both experiments structural language ability emerged as the only significant predictor. These convergent findings demonstrate that reduced sensitivity to context in language processing is linked to low structural language rather than ASD diagnosis. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Electrophysiological Correlates of Language Processing in Schizotypal Personality Disorder

PubMed Central

Niznikiewicz, Margaret A.; Voglmaier, Martina; Shenton, Martha E.; Seidman, Larry J.; Dickey, Chandlee C.; Rhoads, Richard; Teh, Enkeat; McCarley, Robert W.

2010-01-01

Objective This study examined whether the electrophysiological correlates of language processing found previously to be abnormal in schizophrenia are also abnormal in schizotypal individuals. The authors used the N400 component to evaluate language dysfunction in schizotypal individuals. Method Event-related potentials were recorded in 16 comparison subjects and 17 schizotypal individuals (who met full DSM-III-R criteria) to sentences presented both visually and aurally; half of the sentences ended with an expected word completion (congruent condition), and the other half ended with an unexpected word completion (incongruent condition). Results In the congruent condition, the N400 amplitude was more negative in individuals with schizotypal personality disorder than in comparison subjects in both the visual and auditory modalities. In addition, in the visual modality, the N400 latency was prolonged in the individuals with schizotypal personality disorder. Conclusions The N400 was found to be abnormal in the individuals with schizotypal personality disorder relative to comparison subjects. The abnormality was similar to the abnormality the authors’ laboratory reported earlier in schizophrenic subjects, in which the N400 amplitude was found to be more negative in both congruent and incongruent sentence completions. The N400 abnormality is consistent with the inefficient use of context. PMID:10401451

When does a strategy intervention overcome a failure of inhibition? Evidence from two left frontal brain tumour cases.

PubMed

Robinson, Gail A; Walker, David G; Biggs, Vivien; Shallice, Tim

2016-06-01

Initiation and inhibition of responses are crucial for appropriate behaviour across different settings. Initiation and inhibition difficulties are well documented following frontal damage, although task differences have limited our understanding. The Hayling Sentence Completion Test was designed to assess verbal initiation and inhibition within the same task. This study investigates the ability of two patients with left frontal tumours (KI: high grade glioma; PM: meningioma) to use a strategy to overcome profound suppression failures on the Hayling Test. KI and PM completed the Hayling Test and two experimental tasks. The Selection Investigation assessed verbal initiation on a sentence completion task that varied selection demands (high/low). The Suppression and Strategy Investigation assessed ability to implement four strategies aimed to override a suppression failure and facilitate production of an unconnected word. On the Hayling Test, KI and PM initiated responses to complete high constraint sentences, in contrast to impaired suppression. KI benefitted minimally from strategies to overcome suppression failure although one strategy (object naming) was partially successful. KI's errors revealed fast suppression errors, in contrast to slow no responses, and selection ability was also impaired for verbal initiation. PM, however, implemented each strategy 100% to overcome a suppression failure and had no difficulty completing sentences meaningfully, regardless of selection demands. This first investigation of strategy implementation to overcome profound suppression impairments provides insights into verbal initiation, inhibition, selection and strategy mechanisms, which has implications for neurorehabilitation. Specifically, both patients had profound inhibition deficits but KI also presented with a selection deficit and was unable to implement a strategy. By contrast, PM's selection ability was intact but she was unable to generate, rather than implement, a strategy. We suggest that KI has both fast, uncontrolled semantic output and response inhibition difficulty, whereas PM's difficulty is underpinned by motivational factors. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Implicit Detection of Poetic Harmony by the Naïve Brain.

PubMed

Vaughan-Evans, Awel; Trefor, Robat; Jones, Llion; Lynch, Peredur; Jones, Manon W; Thierry, Guillaume

2016-01-01

The power of poetry is universally acknowledged, but it is debatable whether its appreciation is reserved for experts. Here, we show that readers with no particular knowledge of a traditional form of Welsh poetry unconsciously distinguish phrases conforming to its complex poetic construction rules from those that violate them. We studied the brain response of native speakers of Welsh as they read meaningful sentences ending in a word that either complied with strict poetic construction rules, violated rules of consonantal repetition, violated stress pattern, or violated both these constraints. Upon reading the last word of each sentence, participants indicated sentence acceptability. As expected, our inexperienced participants did not explicitly distinguish between sentences that conformed to the poetic rules from those that violated them. However, in the case of orthodox sentences, the critical word elicited a distinctive brain response characteristic of target detection -the P3b- as compared to the other conditions, showing that speakers of Welsh with no expertise of this particular form of poetry implicitly detect poetic harmony. These results show for the first time that before we even consider literal meaning, the musical properties of poetry speak to the human mind in ways that escape consciousness.

Implicit Detection of Poetic Harmony by the Naïve Brain

PubMed Central

Vaughan-Evans, Awel; Trefor, Robat; Jones, Llion; Lynch, Peredur; Jones, Manon W.; Thierry, Guillaume

2016-01-01

The power of poetry is universally acknowledged, but it is debatable whether its appreciation is reserved for experts. Here, we show that readers with no particular knowledge of a traditional form of Welsh poetry unconsciously distinguish phrases conforming to its complex poetic construction rules from those that violate them. We studied the brain response of native speakers of Welsh as they read meaningful sentences ending in a word that either complied with strict poetic construction rules, violated rules of consonantal repetition, violated stress pattern, or violated both these constraints. Upon reading the last word of each sentence, participants indicated sentence acceptability. As expected, our inexperienced participants did not explicitly distinguish between sentences that conformed to the poetic rules from those that violated them. However, in the case of orthodox sentences, the critical word elicited a distinctive brain response characteristic of target detection –the P3b– as compared to the other conditions, showing that speakers of Welsh with no expertise of this particular form of poetry implicitly detect poetic harmony. These results show for the first time that before we even consider literal meaning, the musical properties of poetry speak to the human mind in ways that escape consciousness. PMID:27933025

BIOSSES: a semantic sentence similarity estimation system for the biomedical domain.

PubMed

Sogancioglu, Gizem; Öztürk, Hakime; Özgür, Arzucan

2017-07-15

The amount of information available in textual format is rapidly increasing in the biomedical domain. Therefore, natural language processing (NLP) applications are becoming increasingly important to facilitate the retrieval and analysis of these data. Computing the semantic similarity between sentences is an important component in many NLP tasks including text retrieval and summarization. A number of approaches have been proposed for semantic sentence similarity estimation for generic English. However, our experiments showed that such approaches do not effectively cover biomedical knowledge and produce poor results for biomedical text. We propose several approaches for sentence-level semantic similarity computation in the biomedical domain, including string similarity measures and measures based on the distributed vector representations of sentences learned in an unsupervised manner from a large biomedical corpus. In addition, ontology-based approaches are presented that utilize general and domain-specific ontologies. Finally, a supervised regression based model is developed that effectively combines the different similarity computation metrics. A benchmark data set consisting of 100 sentence pairs from the biomedical literature is manually annotated by five human experts and used for evaluating the proposed methods. The experiments showed that the supervised semantic sentence similarity computation approach obtained the best performance (0.836 correlation with gold standard human annotations) and improved over the state-of-the-art domain-independent systems up to 42.6% in terms of the Pearson correlation metric. A web-based system for biomedical semantic sentence similarity computation, the source code, and the annotated benchmark data set are available at: http://tabilab.cmpe.boun.edu.tr/BIOSSES/ . gizemsogancioglu@gmail.com or arzucan.ozgur@boun.edu.tr. © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com

Second-language instinct and instruction effects: nature and nurture in second-language acquisition.

PubMed

Yusa, Noriaki; Koizumi, Masatoshi; Kim, Jungho; Kimura, Naoki; Uchida, Shinya; Yokoyama, Satoru; Miura, Naoki; Kawashima, Ryuta; Hagiwara, Hiroko

2011-10-01

Adults seem to have greater difficulties than children in acquiring a second language (L2) because of the alleged "window of opportunity" around puberty. Postpuberty Japanese participants learned a new English rule with simplex sentences during one month of instruction, and then they were tested on "uninstructed complex sentences" as well as "instructed simplex sentences." The behavioral data show that they can acquire more knowledge than is instructed, suggesting the interweaving of nature (universal principles of grammar, UG) and nurture (instruction) in L2 acquisition. The comparison in the "uninstructed complex sentences" between post-instruction and pre-instruction using functional magnetic resonance imaging reveals a significant activation in Broca's area. Thus, this study provides new insight into Broca's area, where nature and nurture cooperate to produce L2 learners' rich linguistic knowledge. It also shows neural plasticity of adult L2 acquisition, arguing against a critical period hypothesis, at least in the domain of UG.

Amnesic H.M.'s performance on the language competence test: parallel deficits in memory and sentence production.

PubMed

MacKay, Donald G; James, Lori E; Hadley, Christopher B

2008-04-01

To test conflicting hypotheses regarding amnesic H.M.'s language abilities, this study examined H.M.'s sentence production on the Language Competence Test (Wiig & Secord, 1988). The task for H.M. and 8 education-, age-, and IQ-matched controls was to describe pictures using a single grammatical sentence containing prespecified target words. The results indicated selective deficits in H.M.'s picture descriptions: H.M. produced fewer single grammatical sentences, included fewer target words, and described the pictures less completely and accurately than did the controls. However, H.M.'s deficits diminished with repeated processing of unfamiliar stimuli and disappeared for familiar stimuli-effects that help explain why other researchers have concluded that H.M.'s language production is intact. Besides resolving the conflicting hypotheses, present results replicated other well-controlled sentence production results and indicated that H.M.'s language and memory exhibit parallel deficits and sparing. Present results comport in detail with binding theory but pose problems for current systems theories of H.M.'s condition.

University of Chicago School Mathematics Project (UCSMP) Algebra. WWC Intervention Report

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

What Works Clearinghouse, 2009

2009-01-01

University of Chicago School Mathematics Project (UCSMP) Algebra is a one-year course covering three primary topics: (1) linear and quadratic expressions, sentences, and functions; (2) exponential expressions and functions; and (3) linear systems. Topics from geometry, probability, and statistics are integrated with the appropriate algebra.…

Cerebellar tDCS Modulates Neural Circuits during Semantic Prediction: A Combined tDCS-fMRI Study.

PubMed

D'Mello, Anila M; Turkeltaub, Peter E; Stoodley, Catherine J

2017-02-08

It has been proposed that the cerebellum acquires internal models of mental processes that enable prediction, allowing for the optimization of behavior. In language, semantic prediction speeds speech production and comprehension. Right cerebellar lobules VI and VII (including Crus I/II) are engaged during a variety of language processes and are functionally connected with cerebral cortical language networks. Further, right posterolateral cerebellar neuromodulation modifies behavior during predictive language processing. These data are consistent with a role for the cerebellum in semantic processing and semantic prediction. We combined transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and fMRI to assess the behavioral and neural consequences of cerebellar tDCS during a sentence completion task. Task-based and resting-state fMRI data were acquired in healthy human adults ( n = 32; μ = 23.1 years) both before and after 20 min of 1.5 mA anodal ( n = 18) or sham ( n = 14) tDCS applied to the right posterolateral cerebellum. In the sentence completion task, the first four words of the sentence modulated the predictability of the final target word. In some sentences, the preceding context strongly predicted the target word, whereas other sentences were nonpredictive. Completion of predictive sentences increased activation in right Crus I/II of the cerebellum. Relative to sham tDCS, anodal tDCS increased activation in right Crus I/II during semantic prediction and enhanced resting-state functional connectivity between hubs of the reading/language networks. These results are consistent with a role for the right posterolateral cerebellum beyond motor aspects of language, and suggest that cerebellar internal models of linguistic stimuli support semantic prediction. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Cerebellar involvement in language tasks and language networks is now well established, yet the specific cerebellar contribution to language processing remains unclear. It is thought that the cerebellum acquires internal models of mental processes that enable prediction, allowing for the optimization of behavior. Here we combined neuroimaging and neuromodulation to provide evidence that the cerebellum is specifically involved in semantic prediction during sentence processing. We found that activation within right Crus I/II was enhanced when semantic predictions were made, and we show that modulation of this region with transcranial direct current stimulation alters both activation patterns and functional connectivity within whole-brain language networks. For the first time, these data show that cerebellar neuromodulation impacts activation patterns specifically during predictive language processing. Copyright © 2017 the authors 0270-6474/17/371604-10$15.00/0.

The effects of four variables on the intelligibility of synthesized sentences

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Conroy, Carol; Raphael, Lawrence J.; Bell-Berti, Fredericka

2003-10-01

The experiments reported here examined the effects of four variables on the intelligibilty of synthetic speech: (1) listener age, (2) listener experience, (3) speech rate, and (4) the presence versus absence of interword pauses. The stimuli, eighty IEEE-Harvard Sentences, were generated by a DynaVox augmentative/alternative communication device equipped with a DECtalk synthesizer. The sentences were presented to four groups of 12 listeners each (children (9-11 years), teens (14-16 years), young adults (20-25 years), and adults (38-45 years). In the first experiment the sentences were heard at four rates: 105, 135, 165, and 195 wpm; in the second experiment half of the sentences (presented at two rates: 135 and 165 wpm), contained 250 ms interword pauses. Conditions in both experiments were counterbalanced and no sentence was presented twice. Results indicated a consistent decrease in error rates with increased exposure to the synthesized speech for all age groups. Error rates also varied inversely with listener age. Effects of rate variation were inconsistent across listener groups and between experiments. The presences versus absences of pauses affected listener groups differently: The youngest listeners had higher error rates, and the older listeners lower error rates when interword pauses were included in the stimuli. [Work supported by St. John's University and New York City Board of Education, Technology Solutions, District 75.

Getting ahead of yourself: Parafoveal word expectancy modulates the N400 during sentence reading

DOE PAGES

Stites, Mallory C.; Payne, Brennan R.; Federmeier, Kara D.

2017-01-18

An important question in the reading literature regards the nature of the semantic information readers can extract from the parafovea (i.e., the next word in a sentence). Recent eye-tracking findings have found a semantic parafoveal preview benefit under many circumstances, and findings from event-related brain potentials (ERPs) also suggest that readers can at least detect semantic anomalies parafoveally. We use ERPs to ask whether fine-grained aspects of semantic expectancy can affect the N400 elicited by a word appearing in the parafovea. In an RSVP-with-flankers paradigm, sentences were presented word by word, flanked 2° bilaterally by the previous and upcoming words.more » Stimuli consisted of high constraint sentences that were identical up to the target word, which could be expected, unexpected but plausible, or anomalous, as well as low constraint sentences that were always completed with the most expected ending. Findings revealed an N400 effect to the target word when it appeared in the parafovea, which was graded with respect to the target’s expectancy and congruency within the sentence context. Moreover, when targets appeared at central fixation, this graded congruency effect was mitigated, suggesting that the semantic information gleaned from parafoveal vision functionally changes the semantic processing of those words when foveated.« less

Getting ahead of yourself: Parafoveal word expectancy modulates the N400 during sentence reading

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

Stites, Mallory C.; Payne, Brennan R.; Federmeier, Kara D.

An important question in the reading literature regards the nature of the semantic information readers can extract from the parafovea (i.e., the next word in a sentence). Recent eye-tracking findings have found a semantic parafoveal preview benefit under many circumstances, and findings from event-related brain potentials (ERPs) also suggest that readers can at least detect semantic anomalies parafoveally. We use ERPs to ask whether fine-grained aspects of semantic expectancy can affect the N400 elicited by a word appearing in the parafovea. In an RSVP-with-flankers paradigm, sentences were presented word by word, flanked 2° bilaterally by the previous and upcoming words.more » Stimuli consisted of high constraint sentences that were identical up to the target word, which could be expected, unexpected but plausible, or anomalous, as well as low constraint sentences that were always completed with the most expected ending. Findings revealed an N400 effect to the target word when it appeared in the parafovea, which was graded with respect to the target’s expectancy and congruency within the sentence context. Moreover, when targets appeared at central fixation, this graded congruency effect was mitigated, suggesting that the semantic information gleaned from parafoveal vision functionally changes the semantic processing of those words when foveated.« less

A Lag in Speech Motor Coordination During Sentence Production Is Associated With Stuttering Persistence in Young Children

PubMed Central

Smith, Anne; Weber, Christine

2017-01-01

Purpose The purpose of this study was to determine if indices of speech motor coordination during the production of sentences varying in sentence length and syntactic complexity were associated with stuttering persistence versus recovery in 5- to 7-year-old children. Methods We compared children with persistent stuttering (CWS-Per) with children who had recovered (CWS-Rec), and children who do not stutter (CWNS). A kinematic measure of articulatory coordination, lip aperture variability (LAVar), and overall movement duration were computed for perceptually fluent sentence productions varying in length and syntactic complexity. Results CWS-Per exhibited higher LAVar across sentence types compared to CWS-Rec and CWNS. For the participants who successfully completed the experimental paradigm, the demands of increasing sentence length and syntactic complexity did not appear to disproportionately affect the speech motor coordination of CWS-Per compared to their recovered and fluent peers. However, a subset of CWS-Per failed to produce the required number of accurate utterances. Conclusions These findings support our hypothesis that the speech motor coordination of school-age CWS-Per, on average, is less refined and less mature compared to CWS-Rec and CWNS. Childhood recovery from stuttering is characterized, in part, by overcoming an earlier occurring maturational lag in speech motor development. PMID:28056137

Do semantic sentence constraint and L2 proficiency influence language selectivity of lexical access in native language listening?

PubMed

Lagrou, Evelyne; Hartsuiker, Robert J; Duyck, Wouter

2015-12-01

We investigated whether language nonselective lexical access in bilingual auditory word recognition when listening in the native language (L1) is modulated by (a) the semantic constraint of the sentence and (b) the second language (L2) proficiency level. We report 2 experiments in which Dutch-English bilinguals with different proficiency levels completed an L1 auditory lexical-decision task on the last word of low- and high-constraining sentences. The critical stimuli were interlingual homophones (e.g., lief [sweet] - leaf /li:f/). Participants recognized homophones significantly slower than matched control words. Importantly, neither the semantic constraint of the sentence, nor the proficiency level of the bilinguals interacted with this interlingual homophone effect. However, when we compared the slow and fast reaction times (RTs), we observed a reduction in the homophone interference effect when listening to high-constraining sentences in L1 for the slow RTs, but not for the fast RTs. Taken together, this provides strong evidence for a language-nonselective account of lexical access when listening in L1, and suggests that even when low-proficient bilinguals are listening to high-constraint sentences in L1, both languages of a bilingual are still activated. (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).

The Sentence Completion and Three Wishes tasks: windows into the inner lives of people with intellectual disabilities.

PubMed

Dykens, E; Schwenk, K; Maxwell, M; Myatt, B

2007-08-01

Measuring the self-perceptions, thoughts, hopes and inner lives of persons with intellectual disabilities (ID) has long been a research challenge. Unlike objective or projective tests, semi-projective tasks may provide persons with ID with just enough structure or cues to convey their self-perceptions in a spontaneous and unbiased manner. Sentence Completion and Three Wishes tasks were individually administered to 128 persons with ID aged 5-50 years (mean = 18.75 years). Participants had Prader-Willi, Williams or Down syndromes. Content analyses resulted in 19 codes that were used to reliably score both tasks by independent raters who achieved excellent levels of inter-rater agreement. Participants also received IQ testing, and their parents or care providers completed the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL). Frequent themes across both tasks included activities, positive affect, desired objects, and relationships with family and pets. No gender or IQ effects were found, and just a few codes showed modest age effects. Several responses, including dating, friends, food, and positive or negative self-appraisals, were significantly related to either syndrome status or CBCL maladaptive behaviour. Although not widely used, the Sentence Completion and Three Wishes tasks are useful semi-projective techniques for garnering otherwise hard-to-access self-perceptions and associations of people with ID. Implications are discussed for practice and research.

Semantic and syntactic reading comprehension strategies used by deaf children with early and late cochlear implantation.

PubMed

Gallego, Carlos; Martín-Aragoneses, M Teresa; López-Higes, Ramón; Pisón, Guzmán

2016-01-01

Deaf students have traditionally exhibited reading comprehension difficulties. In recent years, these comprehension problems have been partially offset through cochlear implantation (CI), and the subsequent improvement in spoken language skills. However, the use of cochlear implants has not managed to fully bridge the gap in language and reading between normally hearing (NH) and deaf children, as its efficacy depends on variables such as the age at implant. This study compared the reading comprehension of sentences in 19 children who received a cochlear implant before 24 months of age (early-CI) and 19 who received it after 24 months (late-CI) with a control group of 19 NH children. The task involved completing sentences in which the last word had been omitted. To complete each sentence children had to choose a word from among several alternatives that included one syntactic and two semantic foils in addition to the target word. The results showed that deaf children with late-CI performed this task significantly worse than NH children, while those with early-CI exhibited no significant differences with NH children, except under more demanding processing conditions (long sentences with infrequent target words). Further, the error analysis revealed a preference of deaf students with early-CI for selecting the syntactic foil over a semantic one, which suggests that they draw upon syntactic cues during sentence processing in the same way as NH children do. In contrast, deaf children with late-CI do not appear to use a syntactic strategy, but neither a semantic strategy based on the use of key words, as the literature suggests. Rather, the numerous errors of both kinds that the late-CI group made seem to indicate an inconsistent and erratic response when faced with a lack of comprehension. These findings are discussed in relation to differences in receptive vocabulary and short-term memory and their implications for sentence reading comprehension. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Effectiveness in an Institution of Higher Education: A Multi-Dimensional Model and Its Empirical Examination.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Israeli, Rachel; Mannheim, Bilha

1991-01-01

A multidimensional definition was developed for the content universe of "organizational effectiveness" (OE) by using a mapping sentence. The definition's applicability was examined in an effectiveness study of an Israeli university, using data for 1,001 undergraduates. Relations among measures reflecting aspects of OE specific to…

Task difficulty differentially affects two measures of processing load: the pupil response during sentence processing and delayed cued recall of the sentences.

PubMed

Zekveld, Adriana A; Festen, Joost M; Kramer, Sophia E

2013-08-01

In this study, the authors assessed the influence of masking level (29% or 71% sentence perception) and test modality on the processing load during language perception as reflected by the pupil response. In addition, the authors administered a delayed cued stimulus recall test to examine whether processing load affected the encoding of the stimuli in memory. Participants performed speech and text reception threshold tests, during which the pupil response was measured. In the cued recall test, the first half of correctly perceived sentences was presented, and participants were asked to complete the sentences. Reading and listening span tests of working memory capacity were presented as well. Regardless of test modality, the pupil response indicated higher processing load in the 29% condition than in the 71% correct condition. Cued recall was better for the 29% condition. The consistent effect of masking level on the pupil response during listening and reading support the validity of the pupil response as a measure of processing load during language perception. The absent relation between pupil response and cued recall may suggest that cued recall is not directly related to processing load, as reflected by the pupil response.

Emotional working memory capacity in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)

PubMed Central

Schweizer, Susanne; Dalgleish, Tim

2011-01-01

Participants with a lifetime history of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and trauma-exposed controls with no PTSD history completed an emotional working memory capacity (eWMC) task. The task required them to remember lists of neutral words over short intervals while simultaneously processing sentences describing dysfunctional trauma-related thoughts (relative to neutral control sentences). The task was designed to operationalise an everyday cognitive challenge for those with mental health problems such as PTSD; namely, the ability to carry out simple, routine tasks with emotionally benign material, while at the same time tackling emotional laden intrusive thoughts and feelings. eWMC performance, indexed as the ability to remember the word lists in the context of trauma sentences, relative to neutral sentences, was poorer overall in the PTSD group compared with controls, suggestive of a particular difficulty employing working memory in emotion-related contexts in those with a history of PTSD. The possible implications for developing affective working memory training as an adjunctive treatment for PTSD are explored. PMID:21684525

Rational integration of noisy evidence and prior semantic expectations in sentence interpretation.

PubMed

Gibson, Edward; Bergen, Leon; Piantadosi, Steven T

2013-05-14

Sentence processing theories typically assume that the input to our language processing mechanisms is an error-free sequence of words. However, this assumption is an oversimplification because noise is present in typical language use (for instance, due to a noisy environment, producer errors, or perceiver errors). A complete theory of human sentence comprehension therefore needs to explain how humans understand language given imperfect input. Indeed, like many cognitive systems, language processing mechanisms may even be "well designed"--in this case for the task of recovering intended meaning from noisy utterances. In particular, comprehension mechanisms may be sensitive to the types of information that an idealized statistical comprehender would be sensitive to. Here, we evaluate four predictions about such a rational (Bayesian) noisy-channel language comprehender in a sentence comprehension task: (i) semantic cues should pull sentence interpretation towards plausible meanings, especially if the wording of the more plausible meaning is close to the observed utterance in terms of the number of edits; (ii) this process should asymmetrically treat insertions and deletions due to the Bayesian "size principle"; such nonliteral interpretation of sentences should (iii) increase with the perceived noise rate of the communicative situation and (iv) decrease if semantically anomalous meanings are more likely to be communicated. These predictions are borne out, strongly suggesting that human language relies on rational statistical inference over a noisy channel.

Rational integration of noisy evidence and prior semantic expectations in sentence interpretation

PubMed Central

Gibson, Edward; Bergen, Leon; Piantadosi, Steven T.

2013-01-01

Sentence processing theories typically assume that the input to our language processing mechanisms is an error-free sequence of words. However, this assumption is an oversimplification because noise is present in typical language use (for instance, due to a noisy environment, producer errors, or perceiver errors). A complete theory of human sentence comprehension therefore needs to explain how humans understand language given imperfect input. Indeed, like many cognitive systems, language processing mechanisms may even be “well designed”–in this case for the task of recovering intended meaning from noisy utterances. In particular, comprehension mechanisms may be sensitive to the types of information that an idealized statistical comprehender would be sensitive to. Here, we evaluate four predictions about such a rational (Bayesian) noisy-channel language comprehender in a sentence comprehension task: (i) semantic cues should pull sentence interpretation towards plausible meanings, especially if the wording of the more plausible meaning is close to the observed utterance in terms of the number of edits; (ii) this process should asymmetrically treat insertions and deletions due to the Bayesian “size principle”; such nonliteral interpretation of sentences should (iii) increase with the perceived noise rate of the communicative situation and (iv) decrease if semantically anomalous meanings are more likely to be communicated. These predictions are borne out, strongly suggesting that human language relies on rational statistical inference over a noisy channel. PMID:23637344

Normative data on audiovisual speech integration using sentence recognition and capacity measures.

PubMed

Altieri, Nicholas; Hudock, Daniel

2016-01-01

The ability to use visual speech cues and integrate them with auditory information is important, especially in noisy environments and for hearing-impaired (HI) listeners. Providing data on measures of integration skills that encompass accuracy and processing speed will benefit researchers and clinicians. The study consisted of two experiments: First, accuracy scores were obtained using City University of New York (CUNY) sentences, and capacity measures that assessed reaction-time distributions were obtained from a monosyllabic word recognition task. We report data on two measures of integration obtained from a sample comprised of 86 young and middle-age adult listeners: To summarize our results, capacity showed a positive correlation with accuracy measures of audiovisual benefit obtained from sentence recognition. More relevant, factor analysis indicated that a single-factor model captured audiovisual speech integration better than models containing more factors. Capacity exhibited strong loadings on the factor, while the accuracy-based measures from sentence recognition exhibited weaker loadings. Results suggest that a listener's integration skills may be assessed optimally using a measure that incorporates both processing speed and accuracy.

Relational Processing Following Stroke

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Andrews, Glenda; Halford, Graeme S.; Shum, David; Maujean, Annick; Chappell, Mark; Birney, Damian

2013-01-01

The research examined relational processing following stroke. Stroke patients (14 with frontal, 30 with non-frontal lesions) and 41 matched controls completed four relational processing tasks: sentence comprehension, Latin square matrix completion, modified Dimensional Change Card Sorting, and n-back. Each task included items at two or three…

Neurobiology of Self-Awareness in Schizophrenia: an fMRI Study

PubMed Central

Shad, Mujeeb U.; Keshavan, Matcheri S.; Steinberg, Joel L.; Mihalakos, Perry; Thomas, Binu P.; Motes, Michael A.; Soares, Jair C.; Tamminga, Carol A.

2012-01-01

Self-awareness (SA) is one of the core domains of higher cortical functions and is frequently compromised in schizophrenia. Deficits in SA have been associated with functional and psychosocial impairment in this patient population. However, despite its clinical significance, only a few studies have examined the neural substrates of self-referential processing in schizophrenia. The aim of this study was to assess self-awareness in schizophrenia using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) paradigm designed to elicit judgments of self-reference in a simulated social context. While scanned, volunteers looked at visually-displayed sentences that had the volunteer’s own first name (self-directed sentence-stimulus) or an unknown other person’s first name (other-directed sentence stimulus) as the grammatical subject of the sentence. The volunteers were asked to discern whether each sentence-stimulus was about the volunteer personally (during a self-referential cue epoch) or asked whether each statement was about someone else (during an other-referential cue epoch). We predicted that individuals with schizophrenia would demonstrate altered functional activation to self- and other-directed sentence-stimuli as compared to controls. Fifteen controls and seventeen schizophrenia volunteers completed clinical assessments and SA fMRI task on a 3T Philips 3.0 T Achieva system. The results showed significantly greater activation in schizophrenia compared to controls for cortical midline structures in response to self- vs. other-directed sentence-stimuli. These findings support results from earlier studies and demonstrate selective alteration in the activation of cortical midline structures associated with evaluations of self-reference in schizophrenia as compared to controls. PMID:22480958

Neurobiology of self-awareness in schizophrenia: an fMRI study.

PubMed

Shad, Mujeeb U; Keshavan, Matcheri S; Steinberg, Joel L; Mihalakos, Perry; Thomas, Binu P; Motes, Michael A; Soares, Jair C; Tamminga, Carol A

2012-07-01

Self-awareness (SA) is one of the core domains of higher cortical functions and is frequently compromised in schizophrenia. Deficits in SA have been associated with functional and psychosocial impairment in this patient population. However, despite its clinical significance, only a few studies have examined the neural substrates of self-referential processing in schizophrenia. The aim of this study was to assess self-awareness in schizophrenia using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) paradigm designed to elicit judgments of self-reference in a simulated social context. While scanned, volunteers looked at visually-displayed sentences that had the volunteer's own first name (self-directed sentence-stimulus) or an unknown other person's first name (other-directed sentence stimulus) as the grammatical subject of the sentence. The volunteers were asked to discern whether each sentence-stimulus was about the volunteer personally (during a self-referential cue epoch) or asked whether each statement was about someone else (during an other-referential cue epoch). We predicted that individuals with schizophrenia would demonstrate altered functional activation to self- and other-directed sentence-stimuli as compared to controls. Fifteen controls and seventeen schizophrenia volunteers completed clinical assessments and SA fMRI task on a 3T Philips 3.0 T Achieva system. The results showed significantly greater activation in schizophrenia compared to controls for cortical midline structures in response to self- vs. other-directed sentence-stimuli. These findings support results from earlier studies and demonstrate selective alteration in the activation of cortical midline structures associated with evaluations of self-reference in schizophrenia as compared to controls. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

New and updated tests of print exposure and reading abilities in college students

PubMed Central

Acheson, Daniel J.; Wells, Justine B.; MacDonald, Maryellen C.

2010-01-01

The relationship between print exposure and measures of reading skill was examined in college students (N = 99, 58 female; mean age = 20.3 years). Print exposure was measured with several new self-reports of reading and writing habits, as well as updated versions of the Author Recognition Test and the Magazine Recognition Test (Stanovich & West, 1989). Participants completed a sentence comprehension task with syntactically complex sentences, and reading times and comprehension accuracy were measured. An additional measure of reading skill was provided by participants’ scores on the verbal portions of the ACT, a standardized achievement test. Higher levels of print exposure were associated with higher sentence processing abilities and superior verbal ACT performance. The relative merits of different print exposure assessments are discussed. PMID:18411551

The Interrelationship of Ego, Moral, and Conceptual Development in a College Group.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lutwak, Nita

1984-01-01

Compared three personality theories (ego development, moral development, and conceptual systems theory) in 102 college students who completed the Sentence Completion Test, This I Believe Test, and Defining Issues Test. Results indicated a significant relationship between all three pairs of theories. (JAC)

A temporary deficiency in self-control: Can heightened motivation overcome this effect?

PubMed

Kelly, Claire L; Crawford, Trevor J; Gowen, Emma; Richardson, Kelly; Sünram-Lea, Sandra I

2017-05-01

Self-control is important for everyday life and involves behavioral regulation. Self-control requires effort, and when completing two successive self-control tasks, there is typically a temporary drop in performance in the second task. High self-reported motivation and being made self-aware somewhat counteract this effect-with the result that performance in the second task is enhanced. The current study explored the relationship between self-awareness and motivation on sequential self-control task performance. Before employing self-control in an antisaccade task, participants initially applied self-control in an incongruent Stroop task or completed a control task. After the Stroop task, participants unscrambled sentences that primed self-awareness (each started with the word "I") or unscrambled neutral sentences. Motivation was measured after the antisaccade task. Findings revealed that, after exerting self-control in the incongruent Stroop task, motivation predicted erroneous responses in the antisaccade task for those that unscrambled neutral sentences, and high motivation led to fewer errors. Those primed with self-awareness were somewhat more motivated overall, but motivation did not significantly predict antisaccade performance. Supporting the resource allocation account, if one was motivated-intrinsically or via the manipulation of self-awareness-resources were allocated to both tasks leading to the successful completion of two sequential self-control tasks. © 2017 The Authors. Psychophysiology published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of Society for Psychophysiological Research.

The Universality of Self-Generated Verbal Mediators as a Means of Enhancing Memory Processes. Research Report No. 58.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Buium, Nissan; Turnure, James E.

In a replication of a similar study with American children, 56 normal native Israeli children (5-years-old) were studied to determine the universality of self-generated verbal mediators as a means of enhancing memory processes. Eight Ss, randomly selected, were assigned in each of the following conditions: labeling, sentence generation, listening…

Basic Course in Uzbek. Indiana University Publications: Uralic and Altaic Series, Volume 59.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Raun, Alo

This work is a revised edition of the author's "Spoken Uzbek," originally written for class use at Indiana University in 1952-53. Comprised of 25 lesson units and five review units, the format follows the general outline of the earlier ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies) "Spoken Language" courses: basic sentences are presented in build-up…

Reusing Comprehensive Charts of Tense Forms to Teach EFL Students in a University of Science and Technology

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tsai, Min-Hsiu

2017-01-01

This study investigated 228 English as foreign language freshmen at a university of science and technology in southern Taiwan to explore the participants' knowledge of English tense forms by recognizing 12 tense forms and translating Chinese sentences into English with specific tense forms. The results showed that the participants who were taught…

The Universal Parser and Interlanguage: Domain-Specific Mental Organization in the Comprehension of "Combien" Interrogatives in English-French Interlanguage.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dekydtspotter, Laurent

2001-01-01

From the perspective of Fodor's (1983) theory of mental organization and Chomsky's (1995) Minimalist theory of grammar, considers constraints on the interpretation of French-type and English-type cardinality interrogatives in the task of sentence comprehension, as a function of a universal parsing algorithm and hypotheses embodied in a French-type…

76 FR 53489 - Agency Information Collection Agencies: New Collection; Comments Requested, Census of Problem...

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2011-08-26

... inclusionary and exclusionary factors, ii. Participant point of entry (e.g. pre-plea, post-plea/pre- sentence...) of the survey. Group A respondents will have the least access to data and complete only part one of... group A will take 40 minutes to complete the survey. Group (B) respondents will complete part one of the...

The Effect of Noise on Relationships Between Speech Intelligibility and Self-Reported Communication Measures in Tracheoesophageal Speakers.

PubMed

Eadie, Tanya L; Otero, Devon Sawin; Bolt, Susan; Kapsner-Smith, Mara; Sullivan, Jessica R

2016-08-01

The purpose of this study was to examine how sentence intelligibility relates to self-reported communication in tracheoesophageal speakers when speech intelligibility is measured in quiet and noise. Twenty-four tracheoesophageal speakers who were at least 1 year postlaryngectomy provided audio recordings of 5 sentences from the Sentence Intelligibility Test. Speakers also completed self-reported measures of communication-the Voice Handicap Index-10 and the Communicative Participation Item Bank short form. Speech recordings were presented to 2 groups of inexperienced listeners who heard sentences in quiet or noise. Listeners transcribed the sentences to yield speech intelligibility scores. Very weak relationships were found between intelligibility in quiet and measures of voice handicap and communicative participation. Slightly stronger, but still weak and nonsignificant, relationships were observed between measures of intelligibility in noise and both self-reported measures. However, 12 speakers who were more than 65% intelligible in noise showed strong and statistically significant relationships with both self-reported measures (R2 = .76-.79). Speech intelligibility in quiet is a weak predictor of self-reported communication measures in tracheoesophageal speakers. Speech intelligibility in noise may be a better metric of self-reported communicative function for speakers who demonstrate higher speech intelligibility in noise.

Relationships among measures of managerial personality traits.

PubMed

Miner, J B

1976-08-01

Comparisons were made to determine the degree of convergence among three measures associated with leadership success in large, hierarchic organizations in the business sector: the Miner Sentence Completion Scale; the Ghiselli Self-Description Inventory; and the F-Scale, Correlational analyses and comparisons between means were made using college students and business manager samples. The results indicated considerable convergence for the first two measures, but not for the F-Scale. The F-Scale was related to the Miner Sentence Completion Scale in the student group, but relationships were nonexistent among the managers. Analyses of the individual F-Scale items which produced the relationship among the students suggested that early family-related experiences and attitudes may contribute to the development of motivation to manage, but lose their relevance for it later, under the onslaught of actual managerial experience.

Representation of the verb's argument-structure in the human brain

PubMed Central

Assadollahi, Ramin; Rockstroh, Brigitte S

2008-01-01

Background A verb's argument structure defines the number and relationships of participants needed for a complete event. One-argument (intransitive) verbs require only a subject to make a complete sentence, while two- and three-argument verbs (transitives and ditransitives) normally take direct and indirect objects. Cortical responses to verbs embedded into sentences (correct or with syntactic violations) indicate the processing of the verb's argument structure in the human brain. The two experiments of the present study examined whether and how this processing is reflected in distinct spatio-temporal cortical response patterns to isolated verbs and/or verbs presented in minimal context. Results The magnetoencephalogram was recorded while 22 native German-speaking adults saw 130 German verbs, presented one at a time for 150 ms each in experiment 1. Verb-evoked electromagnetic responses at 250 – 300 ms after stimulus onset, analyzed in source space, were higher in the left middle temporal gyrus for verbs that take only one argument, relative to two- and three-argument verbs. In experiment 2, the same verbs (presented in different order) were preceded by a proper name specifying the subject of the verb. This produced additional activation between 350 and 450 ms in or near the left inferior frontal gyrus, activity being larger and peaking earlier for one-argument verbs that required no further arguments to form a complete sentence. Conclusion Localization of sources of activity suggests that the activation in temporal and frontal regions varies with the degree by which representations of an event as a part of the verbs' semantics are completed during parsing. PMID:18644141

Using the Feature Exchange Language in the Next Generation Controller

DTIC Science & Technology

1990-08-01

IFCTE DEC 28 The Robotics InstituteCarnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 LI 4 August 1990 Copyright 0 1990 Carnegie Mellon University The work...ORGANIZATION NAME(S) AND ADDRESS(ES) 8. PERFORMING ORGANIZATION REPORT NUMBER The Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University CMU-RI-TR-90-19 Pittsburgh, PA...Basic Syntax 3.1.1. The Grammar The design of FEL syntax is based on a few simple concepts: (1) sentences, (2) verbs, (3) attributes with associated

Idiographic measurement of depressive thinking: development and preliminary validation of the Sentence Completion Test for Chronic Pain (SCP).

PubMed

Rusu, Adina C; Hallner, Dirk

2018-06-06

Depression is a common feature of chronic pain, but there is only limited research into the content and frequency of depressed cognitions in pain patients. This study describes the development of the Sentence Completion Test for Chronic Pain (SCP), an idiographic measure for assessing depressive thinking in chronic pain patients. The sentence completion task requires participants to finish incomplete sentences using their own words to a set of predefined stems that include negative, positive and neutral valenced self-referenced words. In addition, the stems include past, future and world stems, which reflect the theoretical negative triad typical to depression. Complete responses are coded by valence (negative, positive and neutral), pain and health-related content. A total of 89 participants were included in this study. Forty seven adult out-patients formed the depressed pain group and were compared to a non-clinical control sample of 42 healthy control participants. This study comprised several phases: (1) theory-driven generation of coding rules; (2) the development of a coding manual by a panel of experts (3) comparing reliability of coding by expert raters without the use of the coding manual and with the use of the coding manual; (4) preliminary analyses of the construct validity of the SCP. The internal consistency of the SCP was tested using the Kuder-Richardson coefficient (KR-20). Inter-rater agreement was assessed by intra-class correlations (ICC). The content and construct validity of the SCP was investigated by correlation coefficients between SCP negative completions, the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) depression scores and the number of symptoms on the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV-TR (SCID). As predicted for content validity, the number of SCP negative statements was significantly greater in the depressed pain group and this group also produced significantly fewer positive statements, compared to the healthy control group. The number of negative pain completions and negative health completions was significantly greater in the depressed pain group. As expected, in the depressed pain group, the correlation between SCP negatives and the HADS Depression score was r=0.60 and the correlation between SCP negatives and the number of symptoms on the SCID was r=0.56. The SCP demonstrated good content validity, internal consistency and inter-rater reliability. Uses for this measure, such as complementing questionnaire measures by an idiographic assessment of depressive thinking and generating hypotheses about key problems within a cognitive-behavioural case-formulation, are suggested.

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

Sentence processing in the cerebral cortex.

PubMed

Sakai, K L; Hashimoto, R; Homae, F

2001-01-01

Human language is a unique faculty of the mind. It has been the ultimate mystery throughout the history of neuroscience. Despite many aphasia and functional imaging studies, the exact correlation between cortical language areas and subcomponents of the linguistic system has not been established. One notable drawback is that most functional imaging studies have tested language tasks at the word level, such as lexical decision and word generation tasks, thereby neglecting the syntactic aspects of the language faculty. As proposed by Chomsky, the critical knowledge of language involves universal grammar (UG), which governs the syntactic structure of sentences. In this article, we will review recent advances made by functional neuroimaging studies of language, focusing especially on sentence processing in the cerebral cortex. We also present the recent results of our functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study intended to identify cortical areas specifically involved in syntactic processing. A study of sentence processing that employs a newly developed technique, optical topography (OT), is also presented. Based on these findings, we propose a modular specialization of Broca's area, Wernicke's area, and the angular gyrus/supramarginal gyrus. The current direction of research in neuroscience is beginning to establish the existence of distinct modules responsible for our knowledge of language.

[Japanese learners' processing time for reading English relative clauses analyzed in relation to their English listening proficiency].

PubMed

Oyama, Yoshinori

2011-06-01

The present study examined Japanese university students' processing time for English subject and object relative clauses in relation to their English listening proficiency. In Analysis 1, the relation between English listening proficiency and reading span test scores was analyzed. The results showed that the high and low listening comprehension groups' reading span test scores do not differ. Analysis 2 investigated English listening proficiency and processing time for sentences with subject and object relative clauses. The results showed that reading the relative clause ending and the main verb section of a sentence with an object relative clause (such as "attacked" and "admitted" in the sentence "The reporter that the senator attacked admitted the error") takes less time for learners with high English listening scores than for learners with low English listening scores. In Analysis 3, English listening proficiency and comprehension accuracy for sentences with subject and object relative clauses were examined. The results showed no significant difference in comprehension accuracy between the high and low listening-comprehension groups. These results indicate that processing time for English relative clauses is related to the cognitive processes involved in listening comprehension, which requires immediate processing of syntactically complex audio information.

Universally Designed Text on the Web: Towards Readability Criteria Based on Anti-Patterns.

PubMed

Eika, Evelyn

2016-01-01

The readability of web texts affects accessibility. The Web Content Accessibility guidelines (WCAG) state that the recommended reading level should match that of someone who has completed basic schooling. However, WCAG does not give advice on what constitutes an appropriate reading level. Web authors need tools to help composing WCAG compliant texts, and specific criteria are needed. Classic readability metrics are generally based on lengths of words and sentences and have been criticized for being over-simplistic. Automatic measures and classifications of texts' reading levels employing more advanced constructs remain an unresolved problem. If such measures were feasible, what should these be? This work examines three language constructs not captured by current readability indices but believed to significantly affect actual readability, namely, relative clauses, garden path sentences, and left-branching structures. The goal is to see whether quantifications of these stylistic features reflect readability and how they correspond to common readability measures. Manual assessments of a set of authentic web texts for such uses were conducted. The results reveal that texts related to narratives such as children's stories, which are given the highest readability value, do not contain these constructs. The structures in question occur more frequently in expository texts that aim at educating or disseminating information such as strategy and journal articles. The results suggest that language anti-patterns hold potential for establishing a set of deeper readability criteria.

Question Generation via Overgenerating Transformations and Ranking

DTIC Science & Technology

2009-01-01

School of Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University 5000 Forbes Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15213 www.lti.cs.cmu.edu c©2009, Michael Heilman and Noah A...PERFORMING ORGANIZATION NAME(S) AND ADDRESS(ES) Carnegie Mellon University ,School of Computer Science,5000 Forbes Ave,Pittsburgh,PA,15213 8...1967), in particular those that view a question as a transformation of a canonical declarative sentence ( Chomsky , 1973). In computational linguistics

The Wernicke conundrum and the anatomy of language comprehension in primary progressive aphasia.

PubMed

Mesulam, M-Marsel; Thompson, Cynthia K; Weintraub, Sandra; Rogalski, Emily J

2015-08-01

Wernicke's aphasia is characterized by severe word and sentence comprehension impairments. The location of the underlying lesion site, known as Wernicke's area, remains controversial. Questions related to this controversy were addressed in 72 patients with primary progressive aphasia who collectively displayed a wide spectrum of cortical atrophy sites and language impairment patterns. Clinico-anatomical correlations were explored at the individual and group levels. These analyses showed that neuronal loss in temporoparietal areas, traditionally included within Wernicke's area, leave single word comprehension intact and cause inconsistent impairments of sentence comprehension. The most severe sentence comprehension impairments were associated with a heterogeneous set of cortical atrophy sites variably encompassing temporoparietal components of Wernicke's area, Broca's area, and dorsal premotor cortex. Severe comprehension impairments for single words, on the other hand, were invariably associated with peak atrophy sites in the left temporal pole and adjacent anterior temporal cortex, a pattern of atrophy that left sentence comprehension intact. These results show that the neural substrates of word and sentence comprehension are dissociable and that a circumscribed cortical area equally critical for word and sentence comprehension is unlikely to exist anywhere in the cerebral cortex. Reports of combined word and sentence comprehension impairments in Wernicke's aphasia come almost exclusively from patients with cerebrovascular accidents where brain damage extends into subcortical white matter. The syndrome of Wernicke's aphasia is thus likely to reflect damage not only to the cerebral cortex but also to underlying axonal pathways, leading to strategic cortico-cortical disconnections within the language network. The results of this investigation further reinforce the conclusion that the left anterior temporal lobe, a region ignored by classic aphasiology, needs to be inserted into the language network with a critical role in the multisynaptic hierarchy underlying word comprehension and object naming. © The Author (2015). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Idea units in notes and summaries for read texts by keyboard and pencil in middle childhood students with specific learning disabilities: Cognitive and brain findings

PubMed Central

Richards, Todd; Peverly, Stephen; Wolf, Amie; Abbott, Robert; Tanimoto, Steven; Thompson, Rob; Nagy, William; Berninger, Virginia

2016-01-01

Seven children with dyslexia and/or dysgraphia (2 girls, 5 boys, M=11 years) completed fMRI connectivity scans before and after twelve weekly computerized lessons in strategies for reading source material, taking notes, and writing summaries by touch typing or groovy pencils. During brain scanning they completed two reading comprehension tasks—one involving single sentences and one involving multiple sentences. From before to after intervention, fMRI connectivity magnitude changed significantly during sentence level reading comprehension (from right angular gyrus→right Broca’s) and during text level reading comprehension (from right angular gyrus→cingulate). Proportions of ideas units in children’s writing compared to idea units in source texts did not differ across combinations of reading-writing tasks and modes. Yet, for handwriting/notes, correlations insignificant before the lessons became significant after the strategy instruction between proportion of idea units and brain connectivity at all levels of language in reading comprehension (word-, sentence-, and text) during scanning; but for handwriting/summaries, touch typing/notes, and touch typing/summaries changes in those correlations from insignificant to significant after strategy instruction occurred only at text level reading comprehension during scanning. Thus, handwriting during note-taking may benefit all levels of language during reading comprehension, whereas all other combinations of modes and writing tasks in this exploratory study appear to benefit only the text level of reading comprehension. Neurological and educational significance of the interdisciplinary research findings for integrating reading and writing and future research directions are discussed. PMID:28133634

Idea units in notes and summaries for read texts by keyboard and pencil in middle childhood students with specific learning disabilities: Cognitive and brain findings.

PubMed

Richards, Todd; Peverly, Stephen; Wolf, Amie; Abbott, Robert; Tanimoto, Steven; Thompson, Rob; Nagy, William; Berninger, Virginia

2016-09-01

Seven children with dyslexia and/or dysgraphia (2 girls, 5 boys, M =11 years) completed fMRI connectivity scans before and after twelve weekly computerized lessons in strategies for reading source material, taking notes, and writing summaries by touch typing or groovy pencils. During brain scanning they completed two reading comprehension tasks-one involving single sentences and one involving multiple sentences. From before to after intervention, fMRI connectivity magnitude changed significantly during sentence level reading comprehension (from right angular gyrus→right Broca's) and during text level reading comprehension (from right angular gyrus→cingulate). Proportions of ideas units in children's writing compared to idea units in source texts did not differ across combinations of reading-writing tasks and modes. Yet, for handwriting/notes, correlations insignificant before the lessons became significant after the strategy instruction between proportion of idea units and brain connectivity at all levels of language in reading comprehension (word-, sentence-, and text) during scanning; but for handwriting/summaries, touch typing/notes, and touch typing/summaries changes in those correlations from insignificant to significant after strategy instruction occurred only at text level reading comprehension during scanning. Thus, handwriting during note-taking may benefit all levels of language during reading comprehension, whereas all other combinations of modes and writing tasks in this exploratory study appear to benefit only the text level of reading comprehension. Neurological and educational significance of the interdisciplinary research findings for integrating reading and writing and future research directions are discussed.

Direct speech quotations promote low relative-clause attachment in silent reading of English.

PubMed

Yao, Bo; Scheepers, Christoph

2018-07-01

The implicit prosody hypothesis (Fodor, 1998, 2002) proposes that silent reading coincides with a default, implicit form of prosody to facilitate sentence processing. Recent research demonstrated that a more vivid form of implicit prosody is mentally simulated during silent reading of direct speech quotations (e.g., Mary said, "This dress is beautiful"), with neural and behavioural consequences (e.g., Yao, Belin, & Scheepers, 2011; Yao & Scheepers, 2011). Here, we explored the relation between 'default' and 'simulated' implicit prosody in the context of relative-clause (RC) attachment in English. Apart from confirming a general low RC-attachment preference in both production (Experiment 1) and comprehension (Experiments 2 and 3), we found that during written sentence completion (Experiment 1) or when reading silently (Experiment 2), the low RC-attachment preference was reliably enhanced when the critical sentences were embedded in direct speech quotations as compared to indirect speech or narrative sentences. However, when reading aloud (Experiment 3), direct speech did not enhance the general low RC-attachment preference. The results from Experiments 1 and 2 suggest a quantitative boost to implicit prosody (via auditory perceptual simulation) during silent production/comprehension of direct speech. By contrast, when reading aloud (Experiment 3), prosody becomes equally salient across conditions due to its explicit nature; indirect speech and narrative sentences thus become as susceptible to prosody-induced syntactic biases as direct speech. The present findings suggest a shared cognitive basis between default implicit prosody and simulated implicit prosody, providing a new platform for studying the effects of implicit prosody on sentence processing. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The neural career of sensory-motor metaphors.

PubMed

Desai, Rutvik H; Binder, Jeffrey R; Conant, Lisa L; Mano, Quintino R; Seidenberg, Mark S

2011-09-01

The role of sensory-motor systems in conceptual understanding has been controversial. It has been proposed that many abstract concepts are understood metaphorically through concrete sensory-motor domains such as actions. Using fMRI, we compared neural responses with literal action (Lit; The daughter grasped the flowers), metaphoric action (Met; The public grasped the idea), and abstract (Abs; The public understood the idea) sentences of varying familiarity. Both Lit and Met sentences activated the left anterior inferior parietal lobule, an area involved in action planning, with Met sentences also activating a homologous area in the right hemisphere, relative to Abs sentences. Both Met and Abs sentences activated the left superior temporal regions associated with abstract language. Importantly, activation in primary motor and biological motion perception regions was inversely correlated with Lit and Met familiarity. These results support the view that the understanding of metaphoric action retains a link to sensory-motor systems involved in action performance. However, the involvement of sensory-motor systems in metaphor understanding changes through a gradual abstraction process whereby relatively detailed simulations are used for understanding unfamiliar metaphors, and these simulations become less detailed and involve only secondary motor regions as familiarity increases. Consistent with these data, we propose that anterior inferior parietal lobule serves as an interface between sensory-motor and conceptual systems and plays an important role in both domains. The similarity of abstract and metaphoric sentences in the activation of left superior temporal regions suggests that action metaphor understanding is not completely based on sensory-motor simulations but relies also on abstract lexical-semantic codes.

Supporting Worth Mapping with Sentence Completion

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Cockton, Gilbert; Kujala, Sari; Nurkka, Piia; Hölttä, Taneli

Expectations for design and evaluation approaches are set by the development practices within which they are used. Worth-Centred Development (WCD) seeks to both shape and fit such practices. We report a study that combined two WCD approaches. Sentence completion gathered credible quantitative data on user values, which were used to identify relevant values and aversions of two player groups for an on-line gambling site. These values provided human value elements for a complementary WCD approach of worth mapping. Initial worth maps were extended in three workshops, which focused on outcomes and user experiences that could be better addressed in the current product and associated marketing materials. We describe how worth maps were prepared for, and presented in, workshops, and how product owners and associated business roles evaluated the combination of WCD approaches. Based on our experiences, we offer practical advice on this combinination.

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.

Hierarchical Rhetorical Sentence Categorization for Scientific Papers

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Rachman, G. H.; Khodra, M. L.; Widyantoro, D. H.

2018-03-01

Important information in scientific papers can be composed of rhetorical sentences that is structured from certain categories. To get this information, text categorization should be conducted. Actually, some works in this task have been completed by employing word frequency, semantic similarity words, hierarchical classification, and the others. Therefore, this paper aims to present the rhetorical sentence categorization from scientific paper by employing TF-IDF and Word2Vec to capture word frequency and semantic similarity words and employing hierarchical classification. Every experiment is tested in two classifiers, namely Naïve Bayes and SVM Linear. This paper shows that hierarchical classifier is better than flat classifier employing either TF-IDF or Word2Vec, although it increases only almost 2% from 27.82% when using flat classifier until 29.61% when using hierarchical classifier. It shows also different learning model for child-category can be built by hierarchical classifier.

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

The recall of information from working memory. Insights from behavioural and chronometric perspectives.

PubMed

Towse, John N; Cowan, Nelson; Hitch, Graham J; Horton, Neil J

2008-01-01

We describe and evaluate a recall reconstruction hypothesis for working memory (WM), according to which items can be recovered from multiple memory representations. Across four experiments, participants recalled memoranda that were either integrated with or independent of the sentence content. We found consistently longer pauses accompanying the correct recall of integrated compared with independent words, supporting the argument that sentence memory could scaffold the access of target items. Integrated words were also more likely to be recalled correctly, dependent on the details of the task. Experiment 1 investigated the chronometry of spoken recall for word span and reading span, with participants completing an unfinished sentence in the latter case. Experiments 2 and 3 confirm recall time differences without using word generation requirements, while Experiment 4 used an item and order response choice paradigm with nonspoken responses. Data emphasise the value of recall timing in constraining theories of WM functioning.

28 CFR 505.7 - Procedures for final disposition.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-07-01

... ADMINISTRATION COST OF INCARCERATION FEE § 505.7 Procedures for final disposition. Before the inmate completes his or her sentence, Unit Team staff must review the status of the inmate's fee. Any unpaid amount...

Detecting causality from online psychiatric texts using inter-sentential language patterns

PubMed Central

2012-01-01

Background Online psychiatric texts are natural language texts expressing depressive problems, published by Internet users via community-based web services such as web forums, message boards and blogs. Understanding the cause-effect relations embedded in these psychiatric texts can provide insight into the authors’ problems, thus increasing the effectiveness of online psychiatric services. Methods Previous studies have proposed the use of word pairs extracted from a set of sentence pairs to identify cause-effect relations between sentences. A word pair is made up of two words, with one coming from the cause text span and the other from the effect text span. Analysis of the relationship between these words can be used to capture individual word associations between cause and effect sentences. For instance, (broke up, life) and (boyfriend, meaningless) are two word pairs extracted from the sentence pair: “I broke up with my boyfriend. Life is now meaningless to me”. The major limitation of word pairs is that individual words in sentences usually cannot reflect the exact meaning of the cause and effect events, and thus may produce semantically incomplete word pairs, as the previous examples show. Therefore, this study proposes the use of inter-sentential language patterns such as ≪broke up, boyfriend>,

Pronominalization: A Device for Unifying Sentences in Memory

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lesgold, Alan M.

1972-01-01

Based on the author's doctoral dissertation. Experiments supported by a National Science Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship and a National Institute of Mental Health grant; paper preparation supported by the Learning Research and Development Center, University of Pittsburgh, through the U.S. Office of Education. (VM)

Universal Screening for Writing Risk in Kindergarten

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Coker, David L., Jr.; Ritchey, Kristen D.

2014-01-01

Early identification of students at risk for writing disabilities is an important step in improving writing performance. Kindergarten students (n = 84) were administered a set of researcher-developed writing tasks (letter writing, sound spelling, word spelling, and sentence writing) and school-administered reading tasks ("Dynamic Indicators…

Semantic Processing of Mathematical Gestures

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lim, Vanessa K.; Wilson, Anna J.; Hamm, Jeff P.; Phillips, Nicola; Iwabuchi, Sarina J.; Corballis, Michael C.; Arzarello, Ferdinando; Thomas, Michael O. J.

2009-01-01

Objective: To examine whether or not university mathematics students semantically process gestures depicting mathematical functions (mathematical gestures) similarly to the way they process action gestures and sentences. Semantic processing was indexed by the N400 effect. Results: The N400 effect elicited by words primed with mathematical gestures…

Reading comprehension of ambiguous sentences by school-age children with autism spectrum disorder.

PubMed

Davidson, Meghan M; Ellis Weismer, Susan

2017-12-01

Weak central coherence (processing details over gist), poor oral language abilities, poor suppression, semantic interference, and poor comprehension monitoring have all been implicated to affect reading comprehension in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This study viewed the contributions of different supporting skills as a collective set of skills necessary for context integration-a multi-component view-to examine individual differences in reading comprehension in school-age children (8-14 years) with ASD (n = 23) and typically developing control peers (n = 23). Participants completed a written ambiguous sentence comprehension task in which participants had to integrate context to determine the correct homonym meaning via picture selection. Both comprehension products (i.e., offline representations after reading) and processes (i.e., online processing during reading) were evaluated. Results indicated that children with ASD, similar to their TD peers, integrated the context to access the correct homonym meanings while reading. However, after reading the sentences, when participants were asked to select the meanings, both groups experienced semantic interference between the two meanings. This semantic interference hindered the children with ASD's sentence representation to a greater degree than their peers. Individual differences in age/development, word recognition, vocabulary breadth (i.e., number of words in the lexicon), and vocabulary depth (i.e., knowledge of the homonym meanings) contributed to sentence comprehension in both children with ASD and their peers. Together, this evidence supports a multi-component view, and that helping children with ASD develop vocabulary depth may have cascading effects on their reading comprehension. Autism Res 2017, 10: 2002-2022. © 2017 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Like their peers, children with ASD were able to integrate context, or link words while reading sentences with ambiguous words (words with two meanings). After reading the sentences, both groups found it hard to pick the correct meaning of the ambiguous sentence and this decision was more difficult for the participants with ASD. Older children, children with better word reading abilities, and children with higher vocabularies were better at understanding ambiguous sentences. Helping children with ASD to develop richer vocabularies could be important for improving their reading comprehension. © 2017 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

"I am not a skinny toothpick and proud of it": Latina adolescents' ethnic identity and responses to mainstream media images.

PubMed

Schooler, Deborah; Daniels, Elizabeth A

2014-01-01

Using a quasi-experimental design, 118 Latina girls, ages 13-18, viewed five color photographs of White women. Girls viewed either images of sexualized women or images of non-sexualized women. After viewing the images, girls were asked to complete the sentence stem, "I am…" 20 times. Thirty percent of girls spontaneously described their ethnicity in one of their sentence completions. Spontaneous use of ethnicity was taken as an indicator of the salience of ethnic identity. Among girls who viewed sexualized, thin-ideal White media images, spontaneously using an ethnic descriptor was related to more positive descriptions of one's own body and appearance. Analyses supported the premise that ethnic identity may act as a protective factor, buffering Latina girls from the negative effects of viewing sexualized, thin-ideal White media images. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

76 FR 68789 - Agency Information Collection Agencies: New Collection; Comments Requested; Census of Problem...

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2011-11-07

.... Participant point of entry (e.g. pre-plea, post-plea/pre- sentence, etc.) e. Capacity and Enrollment: i. Total... survey. Group (B) respondents will complete part one of the survey and have access to only limited... 2,300 respondents will fall into the first group (A) of respondents, completing only part one of the...

Speech perception scores in cochlear implant recipients: An analysis of ceiling effects in the CUNY sentence test (Quiet) in post-lingually deafened cochlear implant recipients.

PubMed

Ebrahimi-Madiseh, Azadeh; Eikelboom, Robert H; Jayakody, Dona Mp; Atlas, Marcus D

2016-01-01

To evaluate the clinical utility of the City University of New York sentence test in a cohort of post-lingually deafened cochlear implants recipients over time. 117 post-lingually deafened, Australian English-speaking CI recipients aged between 23 and 98 years (M = 66 years; SD = 15.09) were recruited. CUNY sentence test scores in quiet were collated and analysed at two cut-offs, 95% and 100%, as ceiling scores. CUNY sentence scores ranged from 4% to 100% (M = 86.75; SD = 20.65), with 38.8% of participants scoring 95% and 16.5% of participants reaching the 100% scores. The percentage of participants reaching the 95% and 100% ceiling scores increased over time (6 and 12 months post-implantation). The distribution of all post-operative CUNY test scores skewed to the right with 82% of test scores reaching above 90%. This study demonstrates that the CUNY test cannot be used as a valid tool to measure the speech perception skills of post-lingually deafened CI recipients over time. This may be overcome by using adaptive test protocols or linguistically, cognitively or contextually demanding test materials. The high percentage of CI recipients achieving ceiling scores for the CUNY sentence test in quiet at 3 months post-implantation, questions the validity of using CUNY in CI assessment test battery and limits its application for use in longitudinal studies evaluating CI outcomes. Further studies are required to examine different methods to overcome this problem.

Collecting and Analyzing Patient Experiences of Health Care From Social Media.

PubMed

Rastegar-Mojarad, Majid; Ye, Zhan; Wall, Daniel; Murali, Narayana; Lin, Simon

2015-07-02

Social Media, such as Yelp, provides rich information of consumer experience. Previous studies suggest that Yelp can serve as a new source to study patient experience. However, the lack of a corpus of patient reviews causes a major bottleneck for applying computational techniques. The objective of this study is to create a corpus of patient experience (COPE) and report descriptive statistics to characterize COPE. Yelp reviews about health care-related businesses were extracted from the Yelp Academic Dataset. Natural language processing (NLP) tools were used to split reviews into sentences, extract noun phrases and adjectives from each sentence, and generate parse trees and dependency trees for each sentence. Sentiment analysis techniques and Hadoop were used to calculate a sentiment score of each sentence and for parallel processing, respectively. COPE contains 79,173 sentences from 6914 patient reviews of 985 health care facilities near 30 universities in the United States. We found that patients wrote longer reviews when they rated the facility poorly (1 or 2 stars). We demonstrated that the computed sentiment scores correlated well with consumer-generated ratings. A consumer vocabulary to describe their health care experience was constructed by a statistical analysis of word counts and co-occurrences in COPE. A corpus called COPE was built as an initial step to utilize social media to understand patient experiences at health care facilities. The corpus is available to download and COPE can be used in future studies to extract knowledge of patients' experiences from their perspectives. Such information can subsequently inform and provide opportunity to improve the quality of health care.

Ego development, psychopathology, and parenting problems in substance-abusing mothers.

PubMed

Suchman, Nancy; McMahon, Thomas; Decoste, Cindy; Castiglioni, Nicole; Luthar, Suniya

2008-01-01

The authors examined maternal ego development in relation to psychopathology and parenting problems in a sample of substance abusing mothers. Given predilections at higher levels of ego development for introspection and guilt, the authors expected mothers at higher levels to report more psychopathology. Given predilections at lower levels of ego development for dichotomous perceptions and limited conceptions of causation, the authors expected mothers at low levels to report more problematic parenting behaviors. Intelligence was expected to correlate but not overlap with ego development. Subjects were 182 mothers who expressed interest in a randomized clinical trial for a new parenting intervention. Measures included the Washington University Sentence Completion Task--Short Form, the Parental Acceptance-Rejection Questionnaire, the Brief Symptom Inventory and the Kaufman Brief Intelligence Test. Results of correlation and multivariate analyses of variance confirmed predictions. Implications for future development of interventions for substance abusing mothers are discussed. (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved

Ego Development, Psychopathology, and Parenting Problems in Substance-Abusing Mothers

PubMed Central

Suchman, Nancy; McMahon, Thomas; DeCoste, Cindy; Castiglioni, Nicole; Luthar, Suniya

2009-01-01

The authors examined maternal ego development in relation to psychopathology and parenting problems in a sample of substance abusing mothers. Given predilections at higher levels of ego development for introspection and guilt, the authors expected mothers at higher levels to report more psychopathology. Given predilections at lower levels of ego development for dichotomous perceptions and limited conceptions of causation, the authors expected mothers at low levels to report more problematic parenting behaviors. Intelligence was expected to correlate but not overlap with ego development. Subjects were 182 mothers who expressed interest in a randomized clinical trial for a new parenting intervention. Measures included the Washington University Sentence Completion Task—Short Form, the Parental Acceptance-Rejection Questionnaire, the Brief Symptom Inventory and the Kaufman Brief Intelligence Test. Results of correlation and multivariate analyses of variance confirmed predictions. Implications for future development of interventions for substance abusing mothers are discussed. PMID:18444723

Sorting Tasks and Vocabulary-in-Context Activities for Assessing Introductory Astronomy Understanding

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Slater, Timothy F.; Loranz, D.; Prather, E. E.

2006-12-01

One of the most ardent challenges for astronomy teachers is to deeply and meaningfully assess students’ conceptual and quantitative understanding of astronomy topics. In an effort to uncover students’ actual understanding, members and affiliates of the Conceptual Astronomy and Physics Education Research (CAPER) Team at the University of Arizona and Truckee Meadows Community College are creating and field-testing innovative approaches to assessment. Leveraging from the highly successful work from physics education research, we are creating a series of tasks where students categorize a list describing common astronomical events or phenomenon; or vocabulary terms into context rich categories or conceptually rich sentences. These intellectually challenging tasks are being created to span the entire domain of topics in introductory astronomy for non-science majoring undergraduates. When completed, these sorting tasks and vocabulary-in-context activities will be able to be delivered via a drag-and-drop computer interface.

The Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale: a cognitive-developmental measure of emotion.

PubMed

Lane, R D; Quinlan, D M; Schwartz, G E; Walker, P A; Zeitlin, S B

1990-01-01

The Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale (LEAS) is based on a new cognitive-developmental model of emotional experience. The scale poses evocative interpersonal situations and elicits descriptions of the emotional responses of self and others which are scored using specific structural criteria. Forty undergraduates (20 of each sex) were tested. Interrater reliability and intratest homogeneity of the LEAS were strong. The LEAS was significantly correlated with two measures of maturity: the Washington University Sentence Completion Test (SCT) of Ego Development, and the Parental Descriptions Scale-a cognitive-developmental measure of object representation. In addition, the LEAS correlated positively with openness to experience and emotional range but not with measures of specific emotions, repression or the number of words used in the LEAS responses. These findings suggest that it is the level of emotion, not the specific quality of emotion, that is tapped by the LEAS.

Role of semantic paradigms for optimization of language mapping in clinical FMRI studies.

PubMed

Zacà, D; Jarso, S; Pillai, J J

2013-10-01

The optimal paradigm choice for language mapping in clinical fMRI studies is challenging due to the variability in activation among different paradigms, the contribution to activation of cognitive processes other than language, and the difficulties in monitoring patient performance. In this study, we compared language localization and lateralization between 2 commonly used clinical language paradigms and 3 newly designed dual-choice semantic paradigms to define a streamlined and adequate language-mapping protocol. Twelve healthy volunteers performed 5 language paradigms: Silent Word Generation, Sentence Completion, Visual Antonym Pair, Auditory Antonym Pair, and Noun-Verb Association. Group analysis was performed to assess statistically significant differences in fMRI percentage signal change and lateralization index among these paradigms in 5 ROIs: inferior frontal gyrus, superior frontal gyrus, middle frontal gyrus for expressive language activation, middle temporal gyrus, and superior temporal gyrus for receptive language activation. In the expressive ROIs, Silent Word Generation was the most robust and best lateralizing paradigm (greater percentage signal change and lateralization index than semantic paradigms at P < .01 and P < .05 levels, respectively). In the receptive region of interest, Sentence Completion and Noun-Verb Association were the most robust activators (greater percentage signal change than other paradigms, P < .01). All except Auditory Antonym Pair were good lateralizing tasks (the lateralization index was significantly lower than other paradigms, P < .05). The combination of Silent Word Generation and ≥1 visual semantic paradigm, such as Sentence Completion and Noun-Verb Association, is adequate to determine language localization and lateralization; Noun-Verb Association has the additional advantage of objective monitoring of patient performance.

Basic Skills, Basic Writing, Basic Research.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Trimmer, Joseph F.

1987-01-01

Overviews basic writing instruction and research by briefly discussing the history of remediation, results of a survey of basic writing programs in U.S. colleges and universities, and interviews with developmental textbook editors at major publishing houses. Finds that basic writing instruction continues to focus on sentence grammar. (MM)

Mandarin Chinese Dictionary: English-Chinese.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wang, Fred Fangyu

This dictionary is a companion volume to the "Mandarin Chinese Dictionary (Chinese-English)" published in 1967 by Seton Hall University. The purpose of the dictionary is to help English-speaking students produce Chinese sentences in certain cultural situations by looking up the English expressions. Natural, spoken Chinese expressions within the…

Learning the Structure of Biomedical Relationships from Unstructured Text

PubMed Central

Percha, Bethany; Altman, Russ B.

2015-01-01

The published biomedical research literature encompasses most of our understanding of how drugs interact with gene products to produce physiological responses (phenotypes). Unfortunately, this information is distributed throughout the unstructured text of over 23 million articles. The creation of structured resources that catalog the relationships between drugs and genes would accelerate the translation of basic molecular knowledge into discoveries of genomic biomarkers for drug response and prediction of unexpected drug-drug interactions. Extracting these relationships from natural language sentences on such a large scale, however, requires text mining algorithms that can recognize when different-looking statements are expressing similar ideas. Here we describe a novel algorithm, Ensemble Biclustering for Classification (EBC), that learns the structure of biomedical relationships automatically from text, overcoming differences in word choice and sentence structure. We validate EBC's performance against manually-curated sets of (1) pharmacogenomic relationships from PharmGKB and (2) drug-target relationships from DrugBank, and use it to discover new drug-gene relationships for both knowledge bases. We then apply EBC to map the complete universe of drug-gene relationships based on their descriptions in Medline, revealing unexpected structure that challenges current notions about how these relationships are expressed in text. For instance, we learn that newer experimental findings are described in consistently different ways than established knowledge, and that seemingly pure classes of relationships can exhibit interesting chimeric structure. The EBC algorithm is flexible and adaptable to a wide range of problems in biomedical text mining. PMID:26219079

Are phonological influences on lexical (mis)selection the result of a monitoring bias?

PubMed Central

Ratinckx, Elie; Ferreira, Victor S.; Hartsuiker, Robert J.

2009-01-01

A monitoring bias account is often used to explain speech error patterns that seem to be the result of an interactive language production system, like phonological influences on lexical selection errors. A biased monitor is suggested to detect and covertly correct certain errors more often than others. For instance, this account predicts that errors which are phonologically similar to intended words are harder to detect than ones that are phonologically dissimilar. To test this, we tried to elicit phonological errors under the same conditions that show other kinds of lexical selection errors. In five experiments, we presented participants with high cloze probability sentence fragments followed by a picture that was either semantically related, a homophone of a semantically related word, or phonologically related to the (implicit) last word of the sentence. All experiments elicited semantic completions or homophones of semantic completions, but none elicited phonological completions. This finding is hard to reconcile with a monitoring bias account and is better explained with an interactive production system. Additionally, this finding constrains the amount of bottom-up information flow in interactive models. PMID:18942035

Analyticity and Features of Semantic Interaction.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Steinberg, Danny D.

The findings reported in this paper are the result of an experiment to determine the empirical validity of such semantic concepts as analytic, synthetic, and contradictory. Twenty-eight university students were presented with 156 sentences to assign to one of four semantic categories: (1) synthetic ("The dog is a poodle"), (2) analytic…

Visual Attention and Quantifier-Spreading in Heritage Russian Bilinguals

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sekerina, Irina A.; Sauermann, Antje

2015-01-01

It is well established in language acquisition research that monolingual children and adult second language learners misinterpret sentences with the universal quantifier "every" and make quantifier-spreading errors that are attributed to a preference for a match in number between two sets of objects. The present Visual World eye-tracking…

Re-Composing Space: Composition's Rhetorical Geography

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Binkley, Roberta; Smith, Marissa

2006-01-01

In the spaces where the teaching of first-year writing occurs in the North American university and community college, Composition Studies is still a relatively young discipline, and remains focused on process, thesis sentence, argument, and propositional, and linear logic as primary goals. The rhetorical practices that underlie the discipline of…

The Gatekeeping Impulse and Professor X: An Exploration

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sonnenmoser, Richard

2009-01-01

College and university instructors who assess student writing, including but not limited to teachers of first-year composition, sometimes keep the gate. Gatekeeping by writing instructors is an activity directly related to grading practices and, in many cases, to grading practices which emphasize formal, mechanical, usually sentence-level choices…

Learning a Novel Pattern through Balanced and Skewed Input

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McDonough, Kim; Trofimovich, Pavel

2013-01-01

This study compared the effectiveness of balanced and skewed input at facilitating the acquisition of the transitive construction in Esperanto, characterized by the accusative suffix "-n" and variable word order (SVO, OVS). Thai university students (N = 98) listened to 24 sentences under skewed (one noun with high token frequency) or…

Author Correction: A massive core for a cluster of galaxies at a redshift of 4.3.

PubMed

Miller, T B; Chapman, S C; Aravena, M; Ashby, M L N; Hayward, C C; Vieira, J D; Weiß, A; Babul, A; Béthermin, M; Bradford, C M; Brodwin, M; Carlstrom, J E; Chen, Chian-Chou; Cunningham, D J M; De Breuck, C; Gonzalez, A H; Greve, T R; Harnett, J; Hezaveh, Y; Lacaille, K; Litke, K C; Ma, J; Malkan, M; Marrone, D P; Morningstar, W; Murphy, E J; Narayanan, D; Pass, E; Perry, R; Phadke, K A; Rennehan, D; Rotermund, K M; Simpson, J; Spilker, J S; Sreevani, J; Stark, A A; Strandet, M L; Strom, A L

2018-06-21

Change history: In this Letter, the Acknowledgements section should have included the following sentence: "The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.". This omission has been corrected online.

The Wellbeing of the Self's Personality: A Structural Analysis

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Levy, Shlomit; Sabbagh, Clara

2008-01-01

Leaning on the formal faceted definition of wellbeing (Levy and Guttman (1975) "Social Indicators Research," 2, 361-388), a mapping sentence is provided for defining the universe of observations of the wellbeing of the self-expanding on personality aspects. The structure of the interrelationships among the variables of the expanded…

Multiple effects of sentential constraint on word processing

PubMed Central

Federmeier, Kara D.; Wlotko, Edward W.; De Ochoa-Dewald, Esmeralda; Kutas, Marta

2009-01-01

Behavioral and electrophysiological studies have uncovered different patterns of constraint effects on the processing of words in sentences. Whereas response time measures have indicated a reduced scope of facilitation from strongly constraining contexts, event-related brain potential (ERP) measures have instead revealed enhanced facilitation for semantically related endings in such sentences. Given this disparity, and the concomitant possibility of functionally separable stages of context effects, the current study jointly examined expectancy (cloze probability) and constraint effects on the ERP response to words. Expected and unexpected (but plausible) words completed strongly and weakly constraining sentences; unexpected items were matched for contextual fit across the two levels of constraint and were semantically unrelated to the most expected endings. N400 amplitudes were graded by expectancy but unaffected by constraint and seemed to index the benefit of contextual information. However, a later effect, in the form of increased frontal positivity from 500 to 900 ms post-stimulus-onset, indicated a possible cost associated with the processing of unexpected words in strongly constraining contexts. PMID:16901469

Effects of plausibility on structural priming.

PubMed

Christianson, Kiel; Luke, Steven G; Ferreira, Fernanda

2010-03-01

We report a replication and extension of Ferreira (2003), in which it was observed that native adult English speakers misinterpret passive sentences that relate implausible but not impossible semantic relationships (e.g., The angler was caught by the fish) significantly more often than they do plausible passives or plausible or implausible active sentences. In the experiment reported here, participants listened to the same plausible and implausible passive and active sentences as in Ferreira (2003), answered comprehension questions, and then orally described line drawings of simple transitive actions. The descriptions were analyzed as a measure of structural priming (Bock, 1986). Question accuracy data replicated Ferreira (2003). Production data yielded an interaction: Passive descriptions were produced more often after plausible passives and implausible actives. We interpret these results as indicative of a language processor that proceeds along differentiated morphosyntactic and semantic routes. The processor may end up adjudicating between conflicting outputs from these routes by settling on a "good enough" representation that is not completely faithful to the input.

Effects of individual differences in verbal skills on eye-movement patterns during sentence reading

PubMed Central

Kuperman, Victor; Van Dyke, Julie A.

2011-01-01

This study is a large-scale exploration of the influence that individual reading skills exert on eye-movement behavior in sentence reading. Seventy one non-college-bound 16–24 year-old speakers of English completed a battery of 18 verbal and cognitive skill assessments, and read a series of sentences as their eye movements were monitored. Statistical analyses were performed to establish what tests of reading abilities were predictive of eye-movement patterns across this population and how strong the effects were. We found that individual scores in rapid automatized naming and word identification tests (i) were the only participant variables with reliable predictivity throughout the time-course of reading; (ii) elicited effects that superceded in magnitude the effects of established predictors like word length or frequency; and (iii) strongly modulated the influence of word length and frequency on fixation times. We discuss implications of our findings for testing reading ability, as well as for research of eye-movements in reading. PMID:21709808

A Case Study of Giftedness and Specific Learning Disabilities: Bridging the Two Exceptionalities

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wormald, Catherine; Rogers, Karen B.; Vialle, Wilma

2015-01-01

Despite being unable to dress himself, sit still on a chair, or write a legible sentence, Scott was, from a very early age, able to build whole cities from construction blocks, able to complete complex puzzles, and verbally precocious. Even with his disabilities and their contrast with his academic talent, he completed K-12 school and went on to…

What Is Instrumented Learning? Part 1

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Blake, Robert; Mouton, Jane

1972-01-01

Although article is directed specifically towards improving sales techniques through self evaluation, it discusses various autoinstructional aids that could be applied to other fields. These include self-ranking against an objectives" grid, forced and multiple choice quizzes and the sentence-completion approach. (PD)

Characterising receptive language processing in schizophrenia using word and sentence tasks.

PubMed

Tan, Eric J; Yelland, Gregory W; Rossell, Susan L

2016-01-01

Language dysfunction is proposed to relate to the speech disturbances in schizophrenia, which are more commonly referred to as formal thought disorder (FTD). Presently, language production deficits in schizophrenia are better characterised than language comprehension difficulties. This study thus aimed to examine three aspects of language comprehension in schizophrenia: (1) the role of lexical processing, (2) meaning attribution for words and sentences, and (3) the relationship between comprehension and production. Fifty-seven schizophrenia/schizoaffective disorder patients and 48 healthy controls completed a clinical assessment and three language tasks assessing word recognition, synonym identification, and sentence comprehension. Poorer patient performance was expected on the latter two tasks. Recognition of word form was not impaired in schizophrenia, indicating intact lexical processing. Whereas single-word synonym identification was not significantly impaired, there was a tendency to attribute word meanings based on phonological similarity with increasing FTD severity. Importantly, there was a significant sentence comprehension deficit for processing deep structure, which correlated with FTD severity. These findings established a receptive language deficit in schizophrenia at the syntactic level. There was also evidence for a relationship between some aspects of language comprehension and speech production/FTD. Apart from indicating language as another mechanism in FTD aetiology, the data also suggest that remediating language comprehension problems may be an avenue to pursue in alleviating FTD symptomatology.

Language and culture modulate online semantic processing.

PubMed

Ellis, Ceri; Kuipers, Jan R; Thierry, Guillaume; Lovett, Victoria; Turnbull, Oliver; Jones, Manon W

2015-10-01

Language has been shown to influence non-linguistic cognitive operations such as colour perception, object categorization and motion event perception. Here, we show that language also modulates higher level processing, such as semantic knowledge. Using event-related brain potentials, we show that highly fluent Welsh-English bilinguals require significantly less processing effort when reading sentences in Welsh which contain factually correct information about Wales, than when reading sentences containing the same information presented in English. Crucially, culturally irrelevant information was processed similarly in both Welsh and English. Our findings show that even in highly proficient bilinguals, language interacts with factors associated with personal identity, such as culture, to modulate online semantic processing. © The Author (2015). Published by Oxford University Press.

ASD Is Not DLI: Individuals With Autism and Individuals With Syntactic DLI Show Similar Performance Level in Syntactic Tasks, but Different Error Patterns.

PubMed

Sukenik, Nufar; Friedmann, Naama

2018-01-01

Do individuals with autism have a developmental syntactic impairment, DLI (formerly known as SLI)? In this study we directly compared the performance of 18 individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) aged 9;0-18;0 years with that of 93 individuals with Syntactic-Developmental Language Impairment (SyDLI) aged 8;8-14;6 (and with 166 typically-developing children aged 5;2-18;1). We tested them using three syntactic tests assessing the comprehension and production of syntactic structures that are known to be sensitive to syntactic impairment: elicitation of subject and object relative clauses, reading and paraphrasing of object relatives, and repetition of complex syntactic structures including Wh questions, relative clauses, topicalized sentences, sentences with verb movement, sentences with A-movement, and embedded sentences. The results were consistent across the three tasks: the overall rate of correct performance on the syntactic tasks is similar for the children with ASD and those with SyDLI. However, once we look closer, they are very different. The types of errors of the ASD group differ from those of the SyDLI group-the children with ASD provide various types of pragmatically infelicitous responses that are not evinced in the SyDLI or in the age equivalent typically-developing groups. The two groups (ASD and SyDLI) also differ in the pattern of performance-the children with SyDLI show a syntactically-principled pattern of impairment, with selective difficulty in specific sentence types (such as sentences derived by movement of the object across the subject), and normal performance on other structures (such as simple sentences). In contrast, the ASD participants showed generalized low performance on the various sentence structures. Syntactic performance was far from consistent within the ASD group. Whereas all ASD participants had errors that can originate in pragmatic/discourse difficulties, seven of them had completely normal syntax in the structures we tested, and were able to produce, understand, and repeat relative clauses, Wh questions, and topicalized sentences. Only one ASD participant showed a syntactically-principled deficit similar to that of individuals with SyDLI. We conclude that not all individuals with ASD have syntactic difficulties, and that even when they fail in a syntactic task, this does not necessarily originate in a syntactic impairment. This shows that looking only at the total score in a syntactic test may be insufficient, and a fuller picture emerges once the performance on different structures and the types of erroneous responses are analyzed.

ASD Is Not DLI: Individuals With Autism and Individuals With Syntactic DLI Show Similar Performance Level in Syntactic Tasks, but Different Error Patterns

PubMed Central

Sukenik, Nufar; Friedmann, Naama

2018-01-01

Do individuals with autism have a developmental syntactic impairment, DLI (formerly known as SLI)? In this study we directly compared the performance of 18 individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) aged 9;0–18;0 years with that of 93 individuals with Syntactic-Developmental Language Impairment (SyDLI) aged 8;8–14;6 (and with 166 typically-developing children aged 5;2–18;1). We tested them using three syntactic tests assessing the comprehension and production of syntactic structures that are known to be sensitive to syntactic impairment: elicitation of subject and object relative clauses, reading and paraphrasing of object relatives, and repetition of complex syntactic structures including Wh questions, relative clauses, topicalized sentences, sentences with verb movement, sentences with A-movement, and embedded sentences. The results were consistent across the three tasks: the overall rate of correct performance on the syntactic tasks is similar for the children with ASD and those with SyDLI. However, once we look closer, they are very different. The types of errors of the ASD group differ from those of the SyDLI group—the children with ASD provide various types of pragmatically infelicitous responses that are not evinced in the SyDLI or in the age equivalent typically-developing groups. The two groups (ASD and SyDLI) also differ in the pattern of performance—the children with SyDLI show a syntactically-principled pattern of impairment, with selective difficulty in specific sentence types (such as sentences derived by movement of the object across the subject), and normal performance on other structures (such as simple sentences). In contrast, the ASD participants showed generalized low performance on the various sentence structures. Syntactic performance was far from consistent within the ASD group. Whereas all ASD participants had errors that can originate in pragmatic/discourse difficulties, seven of them had completely normal syntax in the structures we tested, and were able to produce, understand, and repeat relative clauses, Wh questions, and topicalized sentences. Only one ASD participant showed a syntactically-principled deficit similar to that of individuals with SyDLI. We conclude that not all individuals with ASD have syntactic difficulties, and that even when they fail in a syntactic task, this does not necessarily originate in a syntactic impairment. This shows that looking only at the total score in a syntactic test may be insufficient, and a fuller picture emerges once the performance on different structures and the types of erroneous responses are analyzed. PMID:29670550

Nasalance measures in Cantonese-speaking women.

PubMed

Whitehill, T L

2001-03-01

To establish and evaluate stimulus materials for nasalance measurement in Cantonese speakers, to provide normative data for Cantonese-speaking women, and to evaluate session-to-session reliability of nasalance measures. One hundred forty-one Cantonese-speaking women with normal resonance who were students in the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, University of Hong Kong. Participants read aloud four speech stimuli: oral sentences, nasal sentences, an oral paragraph (similar to the Zoo Passage), and an oral-nasal paragraph (similar to the Rainbow Passage). Data were collected and analyzed using the Kay Nasometer 6200. Data collection was repeated for a subgroup of speakers (n = 28) on a separate day. Nasalance materials were evaluated by using statistical tests of difference and correlation. Group mean (standard deviation) nasalance scores for oral sentences, nasal sentences, oral paragraph, and oral-nasal paragraph were 16.79 (5.99), 55.67 (7.38), 13.68 (7.16), and 35.46 (6.22), respectively. There was a significant difference in mean nasalance scores for oral versus nasal materials. Correlations between stimuli were as expected, ranging from 0.43 to 0.91. Session-to-session reliability was within 5 points for over 95% of speakers for the oral stimuli but for less than 76% of speakers for the nasal and oral-nasal stimuli. Standard nasalance materials have been developed for Cantonese, and normative data have been established for Cantonese women. Evaluation of materials indicated acceptable differentiation between oral and nasal materials. Two stimuli (nasal sentences and oral paragraph) are recommended for future use. Comparison with findings from other languages showed similarities in scores; possible language-specific differences are discussed. Session-to-session reliability was poorer for nasal than oral stimuli.

28 CFR 2.47 - Warrant placed as a detainer and dispositional review.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-07-01

... notified of his right to request counsel under the provisions of § 2.48(b) to assist him in completing this... original sentence is not interrupted by a new conviction (e.g., YCA; NARA; Mexican or Canadian treaty cases...

Matters of conscience and conscientiousness: the place of ego development in the Five-factor model.

PubMed

Kurtz, John E; Tiegreen, Sara B

2005-12-01

The Five-factor model (FFM; Digman, 1990; Goldberg, 1990) and Loevinger's (1994) theory of ego development are two active research traditions that are often construed as incompatible approaches to the study of personality. For example, each theory proposes a different view of the concept of conscientiousness. Loevinger argued that FFM conscientiousness, which emphasizes attributes such as order, self-discipline, and achievement striving, lacks a moral component and is more similar to the conformist stage in her theory. To investigate these claims, we administered the Revised NEO-Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R; Costa & McCrae, 1992) and the Washington University Sentence Completion Test (WUSCT; Hy & Loevinger, 1996) to 120 university students on 2 separate occasions. Together, the five traits of the FFM significantly predicted item sum scores from the WUSCT (multiple R = .54). Unique linear relationships of Openness to Experience and Agreeableness with ego level demonstrated that the two theories proposed similar constructs. We argue that these two FFM dimensions have conceptual relevance to the cognitive and interpersonal aspects of the ego development construct. We draw further connections between these FFM dimensions, ego development, and human values.

A Randomized Clinical Trial of Methadone Maintenance for Prisoners: Prediction of Treatment Entry and Completion in Prison

PubMed Central

GORDON, MICHAEL S.; KINLOCK, TIMOTHY W.; COUVILLION, KATHRYN A.; SCHWARTZ, ROBERT P.; O’GRADY, KEVIN

2014-01-01

The present report is an intent-to-treat analysis involving secondary data drawn from the first randomized clinical trial of prison-initiated methadone in the United States. This study examined predictors of treatment entry and completion in prison. A sample of 211 adult male prerelease inmates with preincarceration heroin dependence were randomly assigned to one of three treatment conditions: counseling only (counseling in prison; n= 70); counseling plus transfer (counseling in prison with transfer to methadone maintenance treatment upon release; n= 70); and counseling plus methadone (methadone maintenance in prison, continued in a community-based methadone maintenance program upon release; n= 71). Entered prison treatment (p <. 01), and completed prison treatment (p< .001) were significantly predicted by the set of 10 explanatory variables and favored the treatment conditions receiving methadone. The present results indicate that individuals who are older in age and have longer prison sentences may have better outcomes than younger individuals with shorter sentences, meaning they are more likely to enter and complete prison-based treatment. Furthermore, implications for the treatment of prisoners with prior heroin dependence and for conducting clinical trials may indicate the importance of examining individual characteristics and the possibility of the examination of patient preference. PMID:25392605

A Randomized Clinical Trial of Methadone Maintenance for Prisoners: Prediction of Treatment Entry and Completion in Prison.

PubMed

Gordon, Michael S; Kinlock, Timothy W; Couvillion, Kathryn A; Schwartz, Robert P; O'Grady, Kevin

2012-05-01

The present report is an intent-to-treat analysis involving secondary data drawn from the first randomized clinical trial of prison-initiated methadone in the United States. This study examined predictors of treatment entry and completion in prison. A sample of 211 adult male prerelease inmates with preincarceration heroin dependence were randomly assigned to one of three treatment conditions: counseling only (counseling in prison; n= 70); counseling plus transfer (counseling in prison with transfer to methadone maintenance treatment upon release; n= 70); and counseling plus methadone (methadone maintenance in prison, continued in a community-based methadone maintenance program upon release; n= 71). Entered prison treatment (p <. 01), and completed prison treatment (p< .001) were significantly predicted by the set of 10 explanatory variables and favored the treatment conditions receiving methadone. The present results indicate that individuals who are older in age and have longer prison sentences may have better outcomes than younger individuals with shorter sentences, meaning they are more likely to enter and complete prison-based treatment. Furthermore, implications for the treatment of prisoners with prior heroin dependence and for conducting clinical trials may indicate the importance of examining individual characteristics and the possibility of the examination of patient preference.

The self-concept of the elderly: a cross-cultural comparison.

PubMed

Katzko, M W; Steverink, N; Dittmann-Kohli, F; Herrera, R R

1998-01-01

This study examines the self-concept of the elderly in a cross-cultural perspective. An open-ended sentence completion methodology was employed. A sample of elderly Spanish and elderly Dutch were compared to gain an idea of the cross-cultural generality of the content of the self-concept. Analysis focuses on responses to sentences which probed the respondents' motivations and future plans and goals. Differences could be interpreted as reflecting an individualistic (Dutch) vs. collectivistic (Spanish) distinction between the two cultures. Furthermore, the findings had implications for how to interpret dimensions of meaningful aging. For example, a dimension such as "purpose in life" was more generalizable across the two samples than a dimension such as "autonomy."

Text-Message Abbreviations and Language Skills in High School and University Students

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

De Jonge, Sarah; Kemp, Nenagh

2012-01-01

This study investigated the use of text-message abbreviations (textisms) in Australian adolescents and young adults, and relations between textism use and literacy abilities. Fifty-two high school students aged 13-15 years, and 53 undergraduates aged 18-24 years, all users of predictive texting, translated conventional English sentences into…

Transferred L1 Strategies and L2 Syntactic Structure in L2 Sentence Comprehension.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Koda, Keiko

1993-01-01

The application of language processing skills between 2 languages with dissimilar morphosyntactic features was investigated with 72 American university students learning Japanese. Results suggest that learners' first- and second-language knowledge both play a significant role and that the linguistic knowledge and coding capability for text…

CHINESE GRAMMARS AND THE COMPUTER AT THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY. PRELIMINARY REPORT.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

MEYERS, L.F.; YANG, J.

SAMPLE OUTPUT SENTENCES OF VARIOUS COMIT AND SNOBOL PROGRAMS FOR TESTING A CHINESE GENERATIVE GRAMMAR ARE PRESENTED. THE GRAMMAR CHOSEN FOR EXPERIMENTATION IS A PRELIMINARY VERSION OF A TRANSFORMATIONAL GRAMMAR. ALL OF THE COMIT PROGRAMS AND ONE OF THE SNOBOL PROGRAMS USE A LINEARIZED REPRESENTATION OF TREE STRUCTURES, WITH ADDITIONAL NUMERICAL…

A Practical Methodology for the Systematic Development of Multiple Choice Tests.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Blumberg, Phyllis; Felner, Joel

Using Guttman's facet design analysis, four parallel forms of a multiple-choice test were developed. A mapping sentence, logically representing the universe of content of a basic cardiology course, specified the facets of the course and the semantic structural units linking them. The facets were: cognitive processes, disease priority, specific…

Speech to schoolchildren

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Angell, C. Austen

2013-02-01

Prof. C. A. Angell from Arizona State University read the following short and simple speech, saying the sentences in Italics in the best Japanese he could manage (after earnest coaching from a Japanese colleague). The rest was translated on the bus ride, and then spoken, as I spoke, by Ms. Yukako Endo- to whom the author is very grateful.

Effects of Forward and Backward Contextual Elaboration on Lexical Inferences: Evidence from a Semantic Relatedness Judgment Task

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hamada, Akira

2015-01-01

Three experiments examined whether the process of lexical inferences differs according to the direction of contextual elaboration using a semantic relatedness judgment task. In Experiment 1, Japanese university students read English sentences where target unknown words were semantically elaborated by prior contextual information (forward lexical…

Engaging with Theoretical Diffraction in Teacher Education

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lanas, Maija; Rautio, Pauliina; Koskela, Anne; Kinnunen, Susanna; Viljamaa, Elina; Juutinen, Jaana

2017-01-01

This article presents a study in which we began with a question "how to teach theoretical reflectivity in teacher education," and ended with a sentence "there is theoretical diffraction in teacher education." The research presented in this paper took place in the context of a university course in which we have been involved for…

IDEA: Stimulating Oral Production.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Easley, Jacob J.

1995-01-01

Presents daily activities that facilitate complete sentence response, promote oral production, and aid the learning of vocabulary in foreign-language classes. Because speech is the primary form of communication in the foreign-language classroom, it is important to stimulate students to converse as soon as possible. (Author/CK)

Balancing Punishment and Compassion for Seriously Ill Prisoners

PubMed Central

Williams, Brie A.; Sudore, Rebecca L.; Greifinger, Robert; Morrison, R. Sean

2011-01-01

Compassionate release is a mechanism to allow some eligible, seriously ill prisoners to die outside of prison before sentence completion. It became a matter of federal statute in 1984 and currently has been adopted by the majority of U.S. prison jurisdictions. Incarceration is justified on 4 principles: retribution, rehabilitation, deterrence, and incapacitation. Compassionate release derives from the theory that changes in health status may affect these principles and thus alter justification for incarceration and sentence completion. The medical profession is intricately involved in this process because eligibility for consideration for compassionate release is generally based on medical evidence. Due to an aging prison population, overcrowding, rising deaths in custody, and soaring criminal justice medical costs, many policy experts are calling for broader use of compassionate release. Yet, the medical eligibility criteria of many compassionate release guidelines – which often assume a definitive prognosis – are clinically flawed and procedural barriers may further limit their rational application. We propose changes to address these flaws. PMID:21628351

Do Individuals with High-Functioning Autism Who Speak a Tone Language Show Intonation Deficits?

PubMed

Chan, Kary K L; To, Carol K S

2016-05-01

This study investigated whether intonation deficits were observed in 19 Cantonese-speaking adults with high-functioning autism (HFA) when compared to 19 matched neurotypical (NT) controls. This study also investigated the use of sentence-final particles (SFPs) and their relationship with intonation in both groups. Standard deviations (SDs) of the fundamental frequency (F0), the total number and the type of SFPs were calculated based on narrative samples. The HFA group demonstrated significantly higher SD of F0 and a positive correlation between the type of SFPs and SD of F0. Both groups produced a similar total number and type of SFPs. The results supported the universality of atypical intonation in ASD. The relationship between intonation and SFPs could be further explored by focusing on sentences containing SFPs.

Selective Preservation of Syntax in Alzheimer's Dementia.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kempler, Daniel; Curtiss, Susan

A study investigating the independence of linguistic abilities from each other, specifically the separability of syntax and semantics and the autonomy of syntactic abilities, is described. In the study, 30 individuals with Alzheimer's disease produced spontaneous conversations, completed sentences eliciting 16 grammatical forms, and when possible,…

Tense and Agreement in German Agrammatism

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wenzlaff, Michaela; Clahsen, Harald

2004-01-01

This study presents results from sentence-completion and grammaticality-judgment tasks with 7 German-speaking agrammatic aphasics and 7 age-matched control subjects examining tense and subject-verb agreement marking. For both experimental tasks, we found that the aphasics achieved high correctness scores for agreement, while tense marking was…

Fluctuations in email size

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Matsubara, Yoshitsugu; Musashi, Yasuo

2017-12-01

The purpose of this study is to explain fluctuations in email size. We have previously investigated the long-term correlations between email send requests and data flow in the system log of the primary staff email server at a university campus, finding that email size frequency follows a power-law distribution with two inflection points, and that the power-law property weakens the correlation of the data flow. However, the mechanism underlying this fluctuation is not completely understood. We collected new log data from both staff and students over six academic years and analyzed the frequency distribution thereof, focusing on the type of content contained in the emails. Furthermore, we obtained permission to collect "Content-Type" log data from the email headers. We therefore collected the staff log data from May 1, 2015 to July 31, 2015, creating two subdistributions. In this paper, we propose a model to explain these subdistributions, which follow log-normal-like distributions. In the log-normal-like model, email senders -consciously or unconsciously- regulate the size of new email sentences according to a normal distribution. The fitting of the model is acceptable for these subdistributions, and the model demonstrates power-law properties for large email sizes. An analysis of the length of new email sentences would be required for further discussion of our model; however, to protect user privacy at the participating organization, we left this analysis for future work. This study provides new knowledge on the properties of email sizes, and our model is expected to contribute to the decision on whether to establish upper size limits in the design of email services.

Aspectual asymmetries in the mental representation of events: Role of lexical and grammatical aspect.

PubMed

Yap, Foong Ha; Chu, Patrick Chun Kau; Yiu, Emily Sze Man; Wong, Stella Fay; Kwan, Stella Wing Man; Matthews, Stephen; Tan, Li Hai; Li, Ping; Shirai, Yasuhiro

2009-07-01

Temporal information is important in the construction of situation models, and many languages make use of perfective and imperfective aspect markers to distinguish between completed situations (e.g., He made a cake) and ongoing situations (e.g., He is making a cake). Previous studies in which the effect of grammatical aspect has been examined have shown that perfective sentences are often processed more quickly than imperfective ones (e.g., Chan, Yap, Shirai, & Matthews, 2004; Madden & Zwaan, 2003; Yap et al., 2004; Yap et al., 2006). However, these studies used only accomplishment verbs (i.e., verbs with an inherent endpoint, such as bake a cake). The present study on the processing of Cantonese includes activity verbs (i.e., durative verbs with no inherent endpoint, such as play the piano), and the results indicate a strong interaction between lexical aspect (i.e., verb type) and grammatical aspect. That is, perfective sentences were processed more quickly with accomplishment verbs, consistent with previous findings, but imperfective sentences were processed more quickly with activity verbs. We suggest that these different aspectual asymmetries emerge as a result of the inherent associations between accomplishment verbs and the bounded features of perfective aspect and between activity verbs and the unbounded features of imperfective aspect. The sentence stimuli from this study may be downloaded from mc.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.

Production of Verb Tense in Agrammatic Aphasia: A Meta-Analysis and Further Data

PubMed Central

Faroqi-Shah, Yasmeen; Friedman, Laura

2015-01-01

In a majority of languages, the time of an event is expressed by marking tense on the verb. There is substantial evidence that the production of verb tense in sentences is more severely impaired than other functional categories in persons with agrammatic aphasia. The underlying source of this verb tense impairment is less clear, particularly in terms of the relative contribution of conceptual-semantic and processing demands. This study aimed to provide a more precise characterization of verb tense impairment by examining if there is dissociation within tenses (due to conceptual-semantic differences) and an effect of experimental task (mediated by processing limitations). Two sources of data were used: a meta-analysis of published research (which yielded 143 datasets) and new data from 16 persons with agrammatic aphasia. Tensed verbs were significantly more impaired than neutral (nonfinite) verbs, but there were no consistent differences between past, present, and future tenses. Overall, tense accuracy was mediated by task, such that picture description task was the most challenging, relative to sentence completion, sentence production priming, and grammaticality judgment. An interaction between task and tense revealed a past tense disadvantage for a sentence production priming task. These findings indicate that verb tense impairment is exacerbated by processing demands of the elicitation task and the conceptual-semantic differences between tenses are too subtle to show differential performance in agrammatism. PMID:26457004

Memory Effects in Syntactic ERP Tasks

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sabourin, Laura; Stowe, Laurie

2004-01-01

The study presented here investigated the role of memory in normal sentence processing by looking at ERP effects to normal sentences and sentences containing grammatical violations. Sentences where the critical word was in the middle of the sentence were compared to sentences where the critical word always occurred in sentence-final position.…

[Short-term sentence memory in children with auditory processing disorders].

PubMed

Kiese-Himmel, C

2010-05-01

To compare sentence repetition performance of different groups of children with Auditory Processing Disorders (APD) and to examine the relationship between age or respectively nonverbal intelligence and sentence recall. Nonverbal intelligence was measured with the COLOURED MATRICES, in addition the children completed a standardized test of SENTENCE REPETITION (SR) which requires to repeat spoken sentences (subtest of the HEIDELBERGER SPRACHENTWICKLUNGSTEST). Three clinical groups (n=49 with monosymptomatic APD; n=29 with APD+developmental language impairment; n=14 with APD+developmental dyslexia); two control groups (n=13 typically developing peers without any clinical developmental disorder; n=10 children with slight reduced nonverbal intelligence). The analysis showed a significant group effect (p=0.0007). The best performance was achieved by the normal controls (T-score 52.9; SD 6.4; Min 42; Max 59) followed by children with monosymptomatic APD (43.2; SD 9.2), children with the co-morbid-conditions APD+developmental dyslexia (43.1; SD 10.3), and APD+developmental language impairment (39.4; SD 9.4). The clinical control group presented the lowest performance, on average (38.6; SD 9.6). Accordingly, language-impaired children and children with slight reductions in intelligence could poorly use their grammatical knowledge for SR. A statistically significant improvement in SR was verified with the increase of age with the exception of children belonging to the small group with lowered intelligence. This group comprised the oldest children. Nonverbal intelligence correlated positively with SR only in children with below average-range intelligence (0.62; p=0.054). The absence of APD, SLI as well as the presence of normal intelligence facilitated the use of phonological information for SR.

Accurate Reading with Sequential Presentation of Single Letters

PubMed Central

Price, Nicholas S. C.; Edwards, Gemma L.

2012-01-01

Rapid, accurate reading is possible when isolated, single words from a sentence are sequentially presented at a fixed spatial location. We investigated if reading of words and sentences is possible when single letters are rapidly presented at the fovea under user-controlled or automatically controlled rates. When tested with complete sentences, trained participants achieved reading rates of over 60 wpm and accuracies of over 90% with the single letter reading (SLR) method and naive participants achieved average reading rates over 30 wpm with greater than 90% accuracy. Accuracy declined as individual letters were presented for shorter periods of time, even when the overall reading rate was maintained by increasing the duration of spaces between words. Words in the lexicon that occur more frequently were identified with higher accuracy and more quickly, demonstrating that trained participants have lexical access. In combination, our data strongly suggest that comprehension is possible and that SLR is a practicable form of reading under conditions in which normal scanning of text is not possible, or for scenarios with limited spatial and temporal resolution such as patients with low vision or prostheses. PMID:23115548

Eye Movement Patterns in Natural Reading: A Comparison of Monolingual and Bilingual Reading of a Novel

PubMed Central

Cop, Uschi; Drieghe, Denis; Duyck, Wouter

2015-01-01

Introduction and Method This paper presents a corpus of sentence level eye movement parameters for unbalanced bilingual first language (L1) and second-language (L2) reading and monolingual reading of a complete novel (56 000 words). We present important sentence-level basic eye movement parameters of both bilingual and monolingual natural reading extracted from this large data corpus. Results and Conclusion Bilingual L2 reading patterns show longer sentence reading times (20%), more fixations (21%), shorter saccades (12%) and less word skipping (4.6%), than L1 reading patterns. Regression rates are the same for L1 and L2 reading. These results could indicate, analogous to a previous simulation with the E-Z reader model in the literature, that it is primarily the speeding up of lexical access that drives both L1 and L2 reading development. Bilingual L1 reading does not differ in any major way from monolingual reading. This contrasts with predictions made by the weaker links account, which predicts a bilingual disadvantage in language processing caused by divided exposure between languages. PMID:26287379

Development and preliminary evaluation of a new test of ongoing speech comprehension.

PubMed

Best, Virginia; Keidser, Gitte; Buchholz, Jӧrg M; Freeston, Katrina

2016-01-01

The overall goal of this work is to create new speech perception tests that more closely resemble real world communication and offer an alternative or complement to the commonly used sentence recall test. We describe the development of a new ongoing speech comprehension test based on short everyday passages and on-the-go questions. We also describe the results of an experiment conducted to compare the psychometric properties of this test to those of a sentence test. Both tests were completed by a group of listeners that included normal hearers as well as hearing-impaired listeners who participated with and without their hearing aids. Overall, the psychometric properties of the two tests were similar, and thresholds were significantly correlated. However, there was some evidence of age/cognitive effects in the comprehension test that were not revealed by the sentence test. This new comprehension test promises to be useful for the larger goal of creating laboratory tests that combine realistic acoustic environments with realistic communication tasks. Further efforts will be required to assess whether the test can ultimately improve predictions of real-world outcomes.

Business Schools' Programs Turn Felons into Entrepreneurs

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mangan, Katherine

2013-01-01

Mike Potts was halfway through a five-year prison sentence outside Houston when he heard about a program that would help him start a business when even buddies with clean records were struggling to find work. The Prison Entrepreneurship Program, run by a nonprofit group of the same name, works with Baylor University's Hankamer School of Business…

Cross Space: The Exploration of SNS-Based Writing Activities in a Multimodal Learning Environment

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lee, Kwang-Soon; Kim, Bong-Gyu

2016-01-01

This study explores the positive learning effect of formulating English sentences via Social Network Service (SNS; "Kakao-Talk") on less proficient L2 university students' (LPSs') writing, when the application is utilized as a tool to link in and out-of class activities in a multimodal-learning environment. Its objective is also to…

"Wishes" the Teacher Candidates Expressed in Communication with Themselves

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Çaliskan, Nihat

2014-01-01

The purpose of this study is to identify "the wish sentences" that teacher candidates create in the communication with themselves. The case study which is one of the type of qualitative research is utilized in this study. The study group is formed by 320 students studying in a university in central Anatolia. Data were collected by the…

The Universality of Syntactic Constraints on Spanish-English Codeswitching in the USA

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Moro, Mónica

2015-01-01

This study focuses on the syntactic properties of codeswitching within sentences uttered by bilingual speakers of Spanish and English in the USA or the so-called "Spanglish," by analysing data based on examples cited in the existing literature. To that end, I will examine the definitions of this cultural and linguistic phenomenon, make a…

The Relationship between Written Coherence and Thinking.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Goldstein, Elizabeth Odoroff

It was hypothesized that writers of sentence pairs with clear relationships would have better recall of second sentences than would writers of sentence pairs with unclear relationships. Clear connections between sentences in sentence pairs were defined as those sentences in which the language of the first sentence was explicitly picked up in the…

Parafoveal preview during reading: Effects of sentence position

PubMed Central

White, Sarah J.; Warren, Tessa; Reichle, Erik D.

2011-01-01

Two experiments examined parafoveal preview for words located in the middle of sentences and at sentence boundaries. Parafoveal processing was shown to occur for words at sentence-initial, mid-sentence, and sentence-final positions. Both Experiments 1 and 2 showed reduced effects of preview on regressions out for sentence-initial words. In addition, Experiment 2 showed reduced preview effects on first-pass reading times for sentence-initial words. These effects of sentence position on preview could result from reduced parafoveal processing for sentence-initial words, or other processes specific to word reading at sentence boundaries. In addition to the effects of preview, the experiments also demonstrate variability in the effects of sentence wrap-up on different reading measures, indicating that the presence and time course of wrap-up effects may be modulated by text-specific factors. We also report simulations of Experiment 2 using version 10 of E-Z Reader (Reichle, Warren, & McConnell, 2009), designed to explore the possible mechanisms underlying parafoveal preview at sentence boundaries. PMID:21500948

Exploring new possibilities of astronomy education and outreach

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Fukushima, Kodai

2015-08-01

I investigate the influences of astronomy education and outreach activities on people in order to explore their potential benefits and contribution to society. This research is based on the astronomy education lessons I gave to 287 senior high school and junior high school students in Cambodia in November 2013. Before and after my lesson, I asked them to answer my questionnaires in Khmer, where they could also write free descriptions. Sentences in their free descriptions translated into Japanese are analyzed by means of a text mining method. By converting text data to various numbers using a text mining method, it is possible for us to do statistical analysis. I counted the number of question sentences and computed their rate with respect to the total number of sentences. The rate of question sentences in 9th and 12th grade students are 39% and 9%, respectively. This shows 9th grade students wonder why and how more frequently and appear to be more stimulated in their curiosity than 12th grade students. I counted the frequency of words in the free descriptions and examined high frequency words, to take a broad view of the characteristics of free description. The word ''world'' is the fourth highest frequency word among 369 words following the three words, ''the universe'', ''the earth'', and ''a star'', which frequently appear in the lesson in astronomy. The most sentences including the word “world” described amazement at the existence of so vast unknown world outside of what they had known until then. The frequency of sentences including the word ''world'' of 12th grade students is much higher (45%) than that (18%) of 9th grade students. A significant fraction of 12th grade students appears to have had a strong impact and changed their views of the world. It is found that my lesson and related activities inspired intellectual curiosity in many students, especially in 9th grade students. It is also found that a significant fraction of 12th grade students appear to have had a strong impact and changed their views of the world. I conclude that astronomy education and outreach activities have a potential to contribute to Cambodian development.

29 CFR 1903.19 - Abatement verification.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-07-01

... identify the violation and the steps to be taken to achieve abatement, including a schedule for completing..., the progress report must identify, in a single sentence if possible, the action taken to achieve abatement and the date the action was taken. Note to paragraph (f): Appendix B contains a Sample Progress...

The Role of Island Constraints in Second Language Sentence Processing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kim, Eunah; Baek, Soondo; Tremblay, Annie

2015-01-01

This study investigates whether adult second language learners' online processing of "wh"-dependencies is constrained by island constraints on movement. Proficiency-matched Spanish and Korean learners of English completed a grammaticality judgment task and a stop-making-sense task designed to examine their knowledge of the relative…

Sentences. MicroSIFT Courseware Evaluation.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Northwest Regional Educational Lab., Portland, OR.

THE FOLLOWING IS THE FULL TEXT OF THIS DOCUMENT (Except for the Evaluation Summary Table): VERSION: Apple II. PRODUCER: Micro Power & Light Company, 12820 Hillcrest Rd., Suite 224, Dallas, Texas 75230. EVALUATION COMPLETED: June 1982 by the staff and constituents of the Portland Public Schools, Multnomah ESD, Portland, Oregon. COST: $24.95.…

Artificial Intelligence in a German Adventure Game: Spion in PROLOG.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Molla, Steven R.; And Others

1988-01-01

Spion, an adventure game for intermediate and advanced college German students, requires players to communicate with a fictitious agent in complete, correct German sentences. The spy game was written in PROLOG, runs on an IBM-PC, and is available at no cost for noncommercial purposes. (Author/CB)

Spanish Language Workbook (In Development).

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Peace Corps, Santiago (Chile).

This guide is designed for the Spanish language training of Peace Corps workers in Chile and reflects daily communication needs in that context. The workbook contains a series of sentence completion exercises at the intermediate to advanced level, notes and exercises on metric system conversion, verb/substantive lists, specialized vocabulary lists…

Phonics Pathways. 7th Edition.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hiskes, Dolores G.

This book uses phonics to teach reading in a complete manual for beginning and remedial readers of all ages. The book builds sounds and spelling patterns slowly and systematically into syllables, phrases, and sentences of gradually increasing complexity, presenting only one sound per lesson--each new sound builds upon previously learned skills for…

Referent Predictability Is Affected by Syntactic Structure: Evidence from Chinese

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cheng, Wei; Almor, Amit

2017-01-01

This paper examines the effect of syntactic structures on referent predictability. Focusing on stimulus-experiencer (SE) verbs, we conducted two sentence-completion experiments in Chinese by contrasting SE verbs in three structures (active canonical, active "ba," and passive). The results showed that although verb semantics and discourse…

Discourse Classification into Rhetorical Functions for AWE Feedback

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cotos, Elena; Pendar, Nick

2016-01-01

This paper reports on the development of an analysis engine for the Research Writing Tutor (RWT), an AWE program designed to provide genre and discipline-specific feedback on the functional units of research article discourse. Unlike traditional NLP-based applications that categorize complete documents, the analyzer categorizes every sentence in…

A Defense of Semantic Minimalism

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kim, Su

2012-01-01

Semantic Minimalism is a position about the semantic content of declarative sentences, i.e., the content that is determined entirely by syntax. It is defined by the following two points: "Point 1": The semantic content is a complete/truth-conditional proposition. "Point 2": The semantic content is useful to a theory of…

Relationship of sports experience and ego development of adolescent Japanese athletes.

PubMed

Takenouchi, Takashi; Taguchi, Tae; Okuda, Aiko

2004-08-01

This study examined the relationship of sports experience with ego development. A questionnaire was used to assess experience of Crisis, Exploration, and Commitment in the issues of Athletic Performance and of Being a Teammate in 782 adolescent Japanese athletes (423 boys, M age = 15.2 yr.; 359 girls, M age = 15.0 yr.). Their Ego Levels were assessed using the Washington University Sentence Completion Test. Correlations indicated that scores on Crisis, Exploration, and Commitment in the issues of Athletic Performance and Being a Teammate were generally associated with Ego Development. Multiple regression analyses indicated that, for boys, the issue of Athletic Performance was closely associated with Ego Development, while for girls, the issue of Being a Teammate was closely associated with Ego Development. Sports experience with crisis, exploration, and commitment may be related to accommodation, which is, in turn, related to ego development. The sex differences on issues related to ego development may be associated with differences in sex-role development for boys and girls.

A case for the sentence in reading comprehension.

PubMed

Scott, Cheryl M

2009-04-01

This article addresses sentence comprehension as a requirement of reading comprehension within the framework of the narrow view of reading that was advocated in the prologue to this forum. The focus is on the comprehension requirements of complex sentences, which are characteristic of school texts. Topics included in this discussion are (a) evidence linking sentence comprehension and syntax with reading, (b) syntactic properties of sentences that make them difficult to understand, (c) clinical applications for the assessment of sentence comprehension as it relates to reading, and (d) evidence and methods for addressing sentence complexity in treatment. Sentence complexity can create comprehension problems for struggling readers. The contribution of sentence comprehension to successful reading has been overlooked in models that emphasize domain-general comprehension strategies at the text level. The author calls for the evaluation of sentence comprehension within the context of content domains where complex sentences are found.

Physics textbooks from the viewpoint of network structures

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Králiková, Petra; Teleki, Aba

2017-01-01

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

Reading as a Thinking Process; Proceedings of the Annual Reading Conference (5th, Indiana State University, Terre Haute, June 12-13, 1975).

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Waterman, David C.; Gibbs, Vanita M.

Thinking skills in children, effectively developed through reading, were emphasized at this reading conference. Three types of thinking skills linked to reading are: decoding symbols from the printed page, seeking factual meaning through recall; reading interpretively, understanding cause and effect reasoning or seeking the main idea of sentences;…

Comparative Studies on the Roles of Linguistic Knowledge and Sentence Processing Speed in L2 Listening and Reading Comprehension in an EFL Tertiary Setting

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Oh, Eunjou

2016-01-01

The present study investigated the relative contributions of vocabulary knowledge, grammar knowledge, and processing speed to second language listening and reading comprehension. Seventy-five Korean university students participated in the study. Results showed the three tested components had a significant portion of shared variance in explaining…

A robust data-driven approach for gene ontology annotation.

PubMed

Li, Yanpeng; Yu, Hong

2014-01-01

Gene ontology (GO) and GO annotation are important resources for biological information management and knowledge discovery, but the speed of manual annotation became a major bottleneck of database curation. BioCreative IV GO annotation task aims to evaluate the performance of system that automatically assigns GO terms to genes based on the narrative sentences in biomedical literature. This article presents our work in this task as well as the experimental results after the competition. For the evidence sentence extraction subtask, we built a binary classifier to identify evidence sentences using reference distance estimator (RDE), a recently proposed semi-supervised learning method that learns new features from around 10 million unlabeled sentences, achieving an F1 of 19.3% in exact match and 32.5% in relaxed match. In the post-submission experiment, we obtained 22.1% and 35.7% F1 performance by incorporating bigram features in RDE learning. In both development and test sets, RDE-based method achieved over 20% relative improvement on F1 and AUC performance against classical supervised learning methods, e.g. support vector machine and logistic regression. For the GO term prediction subtask, we developed an information retrieval-based method to retrieve the GO term most relevant to each evidence sentence using a ranking function that combined cosine similarity and the frequency of GO terms in documents, and a filtering method based on high-level GO classes. The best performance of our submitted runs was 7.8% F1 and 22.2% hierarchy F1. We found that the incorporation of frequency information and hierarchy filtering substantially improved the performance. In the post-submission evaluation, we obtained a 10.6% F1 using a simpler setting. Overall, the experimental analysis showed our approaches were robust in both the two tasks. © The Author(s) 2014. Published by Oxford University Press.

Neural correlates of pragmatic language comprehension in autism spectrum disorders.

PubMed

Tesink, C M J Y; Buitelaar, J K; Petersson, K M; van der Gaag, R J; Kan, C C; Tendolkar, I; Hagoort, P

2009-07-01

Difficulties with pragmatic aspects of communication are universal across individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Here we focused on an aspect of pragmatic language comprehension that is relevant to social interaction in daily life: the integration of speaker characteristics inferred from the voice with the content of a message. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we examined the neural correlates of the integration of voice-based inferences about the speaker's age, gender or social background, and sentence content in adults with ASD and matched control participants. Relative to the control group, the ASD group showed increased activation in right inferior frontal gyrus (RIFG; Brodmann area 47) for speaker-incongruent sentences compared to speaker-congruent sentences. Given that both groups performed behaviourally at a similar level on a debriefing interview outside the scanner, the increased activation in RIFG for the ASD group was interpreted as being compensatory in nature. It presumably reflects spill-over processing from the language dominant left hemisphere due to higher task demands faced by the participants with ASD when integrating speaker characteristics and the content of a spoken sentence. Furthermore, only the control group showed decreased activation for speaker-incongruent relative to speaker-congruent sentences in right ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vMPFC; Brodmann area 10), including right anterior cingulate cortex (ACC; Brodmann area 24/32). Since vMPFC is involved in self-referential processing related to judgments and inferences about self and others, the absence of such a modulation in vMPFC activation in the ASD group possibly points to atypical default self-referential mental activity in ASD. Our results show that in ASD compensatory mechanisms are necessary in implicit, low-level inferential processes in spoken language understanding. This indicates that pragmatic language problems in ASD are not restricted to high-level inferential processes, but encompass the most basic aspects of pragmatic language processing.

Extrinsic Cognitive Load Impairs Spoken Word Recognition in High- and Low-Predictability Sentences.

PubMed

Hunter, Cynthia R; Pisoni, David B

Listening effort (LE) induced by speech degradation reduces performance on concurrent cognitive tasks. However, a converse effect of extrinsic cognitive load on recognition of spoken words in sentences has not been shown. The aims of the present study were to (a) examine the impact of extrinsic cognitive load on spoken word recognition in a sentence recognition task and (b) determine whether cognitive load and/or LE needed to understand spectrally degraded speech would differentially affect word recognition in high- and low-predictability sentences. Downstream effects of speech degradation and sentence predictability on the cognitive load task were also examined. One hundred twenty young adults identified sentence-final spoken words in high- and low-predictability Speech Perception in Noise sentences. Cognitive load consisted of a preload of short (low-load) or long (high-load) sequences of digits, presented visually before each spoken sentence and reported either before or after identification of the sentence-final word. LE was varied by spectrally degrading sentences with four-, six-, or eight-channel noise vocoding. Level of spectral degradation and order of report (digits first or words first) were between-participants variables. Effects of cognitive load, sentence predictability, and speech degradation on accuracy of sentence-final word identification as well as recall of preload digit sequences were examined. In addition to anticipated main effects of sentence predictability and spectral degradation on word recognition, we found an effect of cognitive load, such that words were identified more accurately under low load than high load. However, load differentially affected word identification in high- and low-predictability sentences depending on the level of sentence degradation. Under severe spectral degradation (four-channel vocoding), the effect of cognitive load on word identification was present for high-predictability sentences but not for low-predictability sentences. Under mild spectral degradation (eight-channel vocoding), the effect of load was present for low-predictability sentences but not for high-predictability sentences. There were also reliable downstream effects of speech degradation and sentence predictability on recall of the preload digit sequences. Long digit sequences were more easily recalled following spoken sentences that were less spectrally degraded. When digits were reported after identification of sentence-final words, short digit sequences were recalled more accurately when the spoken sentences were predictable. Extrinsic cognitive load can impair recognition of spectrally degraded spoken words in a sentence recognition task. Cognitive load affected word identification in both high- and low-predictability sentences, suggesting that load may impact both context use and lower-level perceptual processes. Consistent with prior work, LE also had downstream effects on memory for visual digit sequences. Results support the proposal that extrinsic cognitive load and LE induced by signal degradation both draw on a central, limited pool of cognitive resources that is used to recognize spoken words in sentences under adverse listening conditions.

Sentence Combining: Everything for Everybody or Something for Somebody.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ney, James W.

Sentence combining exercises present material to the students to be mastered by processes similar to memorization. By taking ideas in short sentences and compacting them into larger sentences, students become familiar with the relationships between the ideas in the short sentences. At its best, sentence combining is a process that requires the…

Parallel Mechanisms of Sentence Processing: Assigning Roles to Constituents of Sentences.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McClelland, James L.; Kawamoto, Alan H.

This paper describes and illustrates a simulation model for the processing of grammatical elements in a sentence, focusing on one aspect of sentence comprehension: the assignment of the constituent elements of a sentence to the correct thematic case roles. The model addresses questions about sentence processing from a perspective very different…

Incremental Sentence Processing in Japanese: A Maze Investigation into Scrambled and Control Sentences

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Witzel, Jeffrey; Witzel, Naoko

2016-01-01

This study investigates preverbal structural and semantic processing in Japanese, a head-final language, using the maze task. Two sentence types were tested--simple scrambled sentences (Experiment 1) and control sentences (Experiment 2). Experiment 1 showed that even for simple, mono-clausal Japanese sentences, (1) there are online processing…

Memory for the Pragmatic Implications of Sentences. Technical Report No. 65.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Brewer, William F.

A sentence "pragmatically implies" another sentence when information in the first sentence leads the hearer to expect something that is neither explicitly stated nor necessarily implied by the original sentence. Thus, the sentence "The safe-cracker put the match to the fuse" pragmatically implies that "the safe-cracker lit…

Functional Sentence Perspective and Composition.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Vande Kopple, William J.

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

Taiwan's experience in ocean education at the level of junior high school: a textbook-editing project of MEEP

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Liu, C.-M.; Chen, I.-C.

2012-04-01

MEEP (Marine Education Enhancement Project) is a four-year pioneering project (Aug. 2008 to Jul. 2011) supported by Ministry of Education of Taiwan for the sake of spreading and deepening the ocean-related knowledge to the public as well as students at all universities and schools. MEEP covers several sub-projects which include the academic courses for college students either with or without marine background, the career training for students interested in ocean-related industries and shipbuilding, and the textbook editing for students from 6 to 18 years old. Among these sub-projects, the last one may be the most important because in Taiwan professional books containing ocean knowledge for younger students are quite few in the past. To this end, last year the authors completed a textbook entitled as "Ocean science, technology and history" suitable for students at junior high schools. Different from textbook used in universities and colleges, it requires more delicate means and vivid descriptions which are obviously beyond a professor's academic ability. Experiences the authors acquired in editing this textbook are represented herein. They include how the structure of chapters was chosen, how the figures for easy comprehension were painted, and how the difficult and hard sentences were translated to simple expressions.

The history of Vienna University Observatory - illustrated by its historical instruments and by a typoscript by Johann Steinmayr. (Original Title: Die Geschichte der Universitätssternwarte Wien - Dargestellt anhand ihrer historischen Instrumente und eines Typoskripts von Johann Steinmayr)

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Hamel, Jürgen; Müller, Isolde; Posch, Thomas

The present Institute for Astronomy of Vienna University comprises an important collection of historical instruments. They originate, among others, from the holdings of historical observatories, starting from the Jesuit observatory of the first half of the 18th century. The present volume offers a presentation of all instruments in photos and descriptions. Among those are telescopes from two centuries, angle measuring devices, clocks, globes, as well as various auxiliary instruments for positional astronomy and for astrophysical researches. Also instruments from Vienniese workshops, which document the high level of local instrument construction, are included in the collection. The second part of the book contains the first publication of the history of the Viennese observatories by Johann Steinmayr, written in 1932-1935, and preceded by a biographical essay by Nora Pärr. His text is based on an extensive study of sources and is until now the most complete of its kind, Steinmayr, who was a member of the Society of Jesus, was sentenced to death in 1944 by the national socialist People's Court because of his involvement in the Austrian resistance movement.

Brain connectivity associated with cascading levels of language.

PubMed

Richards, Todd; Nagy, William; Abbott, Robert; Berninger, Virginia

2016-01-01

Typical oral and written language learners (controls) (5 girls, 4 boys) completed fMRI reading judgment tasks (sub-word grapheme-phoneme, word spelling, sentences with and without spelling foils, affixed words, sentences with and without affix foils, and multi-sentence). Analyses identified connectivity within and across adjacent levels (units) of language in reading: from subword to word to syntax in Set I and from word to syntax to multi-sentence in Set II). Typicals were compared to (a) students with dyslexia (6 girls, 10 boys) on the subword and word tasks in Set I related to levels of language impaired in dyslexia, and (b) students with oral and written language learning disability (OWL LD) (3 girls, 2 boys) on the morphology and syntax tasks in Set II, related to levels of language impaired in OWL LD. Results for typical language learners showed that adjacent levels of language in the reading brain share common and unique connectivity. The dyslexia group showed over-connectivity to a greater degree on the imaging tasks related to their levels of language impairments than the OWL LD group who showed under-connectivity to a greater degree than did the dyslexia group on the imaging tasks related to their levels of language impairment. Results for these students in grades 4 to 9 (ages 9 to 14) are discussed in reference to the contribution of patterns of connectivity across levels of language to understanding the nature of persisting dyslexia and dysgraphia despite early intervention.

Episodic future thinking: the role of working memory and inhibition on age-related differences.

PubMed

Zavagnin, Michela; De Beni, Rossana; Borella, Erika; Carretti, Barbara

2016-02-01

The ability to remember past events and imagine future events (episodic future thinking-EFT) has been shown to decline with aging. However, only few studies have analyzed the cognitive mechanisms involved in EFT in both young and older adults. The present study examined the role of working memory and inhibition on age-related differences between young and older adults in EFT, in response to short sentences reflecting common events, some of which were repeated in both conditions (past and future). Thirty-seven young and 36 older adults completed an adapted version of the autobiographical interview, in which sentences were presented. Results showed that processing resources explained a significant part of the variance in the amount of details; in particular, inhibition explained the amount of external details produced in the future condition. In addition, using sentences, the older group did not differ from the young adults in terms of the proportion of internal details recalled in the past condition, whereas they produced a lower proportion of internal details in the future condition. The effect of using structured material was reinforced by repeating some sentences in the past. Further, only older adults rated the remembered episodes as more emotionally salient and relevant than the imagined ones. Age-related differences between young and older adults in EFT appear to depend on the type of material used, on basic mechanisms of cognition, and are characterized by both quantitative and qualitative differences.

Identification of Clinical Markers of Specific Language Impairment in Adults

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Poll, Gerard H.; Betz, Stacy K.; Miller, Carol A.

2010-01-01

Purpose: To investigate the usefulness of 3 tasks known to be effective diagnostic clinical markers of specific language impairment (SLI) in children: (a) nonword repetition, (b) sentence repetition, and (c) grammaticality judgments of finiteness marking. Method: Two groups of young adults, 13 with SLI and 18 with typical language, completed 3…

Figuring the Acceleration of the Simple Pendulum

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lieberherr, Martin

2011-01-01

The centripetal acceleration has been known since Huygens' (1659) and Newton's (1684) time. The physics to calculate the acceleration of a simple pendulum has been around for more than 300 years, and a fairly complete treatise has been given by C. Schwarz in this journal. But sentences like "the acceleration is always directed towards the…

Writing Readiness: Perspectives on Learning to Write.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Stallard, Charles K.

Writing readiness is defined in this paper as the skills and understandings necessary for minimum success in completing a writing task. The skills discussed are divided into three areas of need: to give students a clear, operational concept of the function and structure of composition that includes the concepts of paragraphs, sentences,…

The Argumentative Connective "Meme" in French: An Experimental Study in Eight- to Ten-Year-Old Children.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bassano, Dominique; Champaud, Christian

1989-01-01

Examines how children understand the argumentative function of the French connective meme (even). Two completion tasks, related to the argumentative properties of the morpheme, were used: 1) to infer the conclusion of an "even" sentence, and 2) to infer the argument position. (34 references) (Author/CB)

Comparison of Measures of Morphosyntactic Complexity in French-Speaking School-Aged Children

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mimeau, Catherine; Plourde, Vickie; Ouellet, Andrée-Anne; Dionne, Ginette

2015-01-01

This study examined the validity and reliability of different measures of morphosyntactic complexity, including the Morphosyntactic Complexity Scale (MSCS), a novel adaptation of the Developmental Sentence Scoring, in French-speaking school-aged children. Seventy-three Quebec children from kindergarten to Grade 3 completed a definition task and a…

[Does action semantic knowledge influence mental simulation in sentence comprehension?].

PubMed

Mochizuki, Masaya; Naito, Katsuo

2012-04-01

This research investigated whether action semantic knowledge influences mental simulation during sentence comprehension. In Experiment 1, we confirmed that the words of face-related objects include the perceptual knowledge about the actions that bring the object to the face. In Experiment 2, we used an acceptability judgment task and a word-picture verification task to compare the perceptual information that is activated by the comprehension of sentences describing an action using face-related objects near the face (near-sentence) or far from the face (far-sentence). Results showed that participants took a longer time to judge the acceptability of the far-sentence than the near-sentence. Verification times were significantly faster when the actions in the pictures matched the action described in the sentences than when they were mismatched. These findings suggest that action semantic knowledge influences sentence processing, and that perceptual information corresponding to the content of the sentence is activated regardless of the action semantic knowledge at the end of the sentence processing.

Multimodal Counseling Interventions: Effect on Human Papilloma Virus Vaccination Acceptance.

PubMed

Nwanodi, Oroma; Salisbury, Helen; Bay, Curtis

2017-11-06

Human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine was developed to reduce HPV-attributable cancers, external genital warts (EGW), and recurrent respiratory papillomatosis. Adolescent HPV vaccination series completion rates are less than 40% in the United States of America, but up to 80% in Australia and the United Kingdom. Population-based herd immunity requires 80% or greater vaccination series completion rates. Pro-vaccination counseling facilitates increased vaccination rates. Multimodal counseling interventions may increase HPV vaccination series non-completers' HPV-attributable disease knowledge and HPV-attributable disease prophylaxis (vaccination) acceptance over a brief 14-sentence counseling intervention. An online, 4-group, randomized controlled trial, with 260 or more participants per group, found that parents were more likely to accept HPV vaccination offers for their children than were childless young adults for themselves (68.2% and 52.9%). A combined audiovisual and patient health education handout (PHEH) intervention raised knowledge of HPV vaccination purpose, p = 0.02, and HPV vaccination acceptance for seven items, p < 0.001 to p = 0.023. The audiovisual intervention increased HPV vaccination acceptance for five items, p < 0.001 to p = 0.006. That HPV causes EGW, and that HPV vaccination prevents HPV-attributable diseases were better conveyed by the combined audiovisual and PHEH than the control 14-sentence counseling intervention alone.

Are habitual overgeneral recollection and prospection maladaptive?

PubMed

Robinaugh, Donald J; Lubin, Rebecca E; Babic, Luka; McNally, Richard J

2013-06-01

Individuals with depression exhibit difficulty retrieving specific memories and imagining specific future events when instructed to do so relative to non-clinical comparison groups. Instead of specific events, depressed individuals frequently retrieve or imagine "overgeneral" memories that span a long period of time or that denote a category of similar events. Recently, Raes, Hermans, Williams, and Eelen (2007) developed a sentence completion procedure (SCEPT) to assess the tendency to recall overgeneral autobiographical memories. They found that specificity on this measure was associated with depression and rumination. We aimed to replicate these findings and to examine the tendency to imagine overgeneral future events. We had 170 subjects complete past (SCEPT) and future-oriented (SCEFT) sentence completion tasks and measures of depression severity, PTSD severity, hopelessness, and repetitive negative thought. Although specificities of past and future events were correlated, neither SCEPT nor SCEFT specificity was negatively associated with depression severity, posttraumatic stress symptoms, repetitive negative thought (RNT), or hopelessness. Our data are cross-sectional, preventing any determination of causality and limiting our assessment of whether specificity is associated with psychological distress following a stressful life event. In addition, we observed poor internal consistency for both the SCEPT and SCEFT. These findings fail to support the hypothesis that overgeneral memory and prospection on these tasks are associated with psychological distress. Copyright © 2012. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Elephants in Pyjamas: Testing the Weak Central Coherence Account of Autism Spectrum Disorders Using a Syntactic Disambiguation Task.

PubMed

Riches, N G; Loucas, T; Baird, G; Charman, T; Simonoff, E

2016-01-01

According to the weak central coherence (CC) account individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) exhibit enhanced local processing and weak part-whole integration. CC was investigated in the verbal domain. Adolescents, recruited using a 2 (ASD status) by 2 (language impairment status) design, completed an aural forced choice comprehension task involving syntactically ambiguous sentences. Half the picture targets depicted the least plausible interpretation, resulting in longer RTs across groups. These were assumed to reflect local processing. There was no ASD by plausibility interaction and consequently little evidence for weak CC in the verbal domain when conceptualised as enhanced local processing. Furthermore, there was little evidence that the processing of syntactically ambiguous sentences differed as a function of ASD or language-impairment status.

The relationship between form and function level receptive prosodic abilities in autism.

PubMed

Järvinen-Pasley, Anna; Peppé, Susan; King-Smith, Gavin; Heaton, Pamela

2008-08-01

Prosody can be conceived as having form (auditory-perceptual characteristics) and function (pragmatic/linguistic meaning). No known studies have examined the relationship between form- and function-level prosodic skills in relation to the effects of stimulus length and/or complexity upon such abilities in autism. Research in this area is both insubstantial and inconclusive. Children with autism and controls completed the receptive tasks of the Profiling Elements of Prosodic Systems in Children (PEPS-C) test, which examines both form- and function-level skills, and a sentence-level task assessing the understanding of intonation. While children with autism were unimpaired in both form and function tasks at the single-word level, they showed significantly poorer performance in the corresponding sentence-level tasks than controls. Implications for future research are discussed.

Using sentence combining in technical writing classes

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Rosner, M.; Paul, T.

1981-01-01

Sentence combining exercises are advanced as a way to teach technical writing style without reliance upon abstractions, from which students do not learn. Such exercises: (1) give students regular writing practice; (2) teach the logic of sentence structure, sentence editing, and punctuation; (3) paragraph development and organization; and (4) rhetorical stance. Typical sentence, paragraph, and discourse level sentence combining exercises are described.

Oscillatory EEG dynamics underlying automatic chunking during sentence processing.

PubMed

Bonhage, Corinna E; Meyer, Lars; Gruber, Thomas; Friederici, Angela D; Mueller, Jutta L

2017-05-15

Sentences are easier to remember than random word sequences, likely because linguistic regularities facilitate chunking of words into meaningful groups. The present electroencephalography study investigated the neural oscillations modulated by this so-called sentence superiority effect during the encoding and maintenance of sentence fragments versus word lists. We hypothesized a chunking-related modulation of neural processing during the encoding and retention of sentences (i.e., sentence fragments) as compared to word lists. Time-frequency analysis revealed a two-fold oscillatory pattern for the memorization of sentences: Sentence encoding was accompanied by higher delta amplitude (4Hz), originating both from regions processing syntax as well as semantics (bilateral superior/middle temporal regions and fusiform gyrus). Subsequent sentence retention was reflected in decreased theta (6Hz) and beta/gamma (27-32Hz) amplitude instead. Notably, whether participants simply read or properly memorized the sentences did not impact chunking-related activity during encoding. Therefore, we argue that the sentence superiority effect is grounded in highly automatized language processing mechanisms, which generate meaningful memory chunks irrespective of task demands. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Early Sentence Productions of 3- and 4-Year-Old Children Who Use Augmentative and Alternative Communication

PubMed Central

Kent-Walsh, Jennifer; King, Marika; Mansfield, Lindsay

2017-01-01

Purpose This study investigated the early rule-based sentence productions of 3- and 4-year-old children with severe speech disorders who used single-meaning graphic symbols to communicate. Method Ten 3- and 4-year-olds requiring the use of augmentative and alternative communication, who had largely intact receptive language skills, received instruction in producing up to four different semantic–syntactic targets using an Apple iPad with a communication app. A single-case, multiple-probe, across-targets design was used to assess the progress of each participant and target. Generalization to new vocabulary was assessed, and a subgroup also was taught to produce sentences using grammatical markers. Results Some targets (primarily possessor-entity) were mastered in the baseline phase, and the majority of the remaining targets were mastered during intervention. All four children who completed intervention for grammatical markers quickly learned to use the markers accurately. Conclusions Expressive language potential for preschoolers using graphic symbol–based augmentative and alternative communication systems should not be underestimated. With appropriate presentation and intervention techniques, some preschoolers with profound speech disorders can readily learn to produce rule-based messages via graphic symbols. PMID:28614575

Development and preliminary evaluation of a new test of ongoing speech comprehension

PubMed Central

Best, Virginia; Keidser, Gitte; Buchholz, Jörg M.; Freeston, Katrina

2016-01-01

Objective The overall goal of this work is to create new speech perception tests that more closely resemble real world communication and offer an alternative or complement to the commonly used sentence recall test. Design We describe the development of a new ongoing speech comprehension test based on short everyday passages and on-the-go questions. We also describe the results of an experiment conducted to compare the psychometric properties of this test to those of a sentence test. Study Sample Both tests were completed by a group of listeners that included normal hearers as well as hearing-impaired listeners who participated with and without their hearing aids. Results Overall, the psychometric properties of the two tests were similar, and thresholds were significantly correlated. However, there was some evidence of age/cognitive effects in the comprehension test that were not revealed by the sentence test. Conclusions This new comprehension test promises to be useful for the larger goal of creating laboratory tests that combine realistic acoustic environments with realistic communication tasks. Further efforts will be required to assess whether the test can ultimately improve predictions of real-world outcomes. PMID:26158403

Early Sentence Productions of 3- and 4-Year-Old Children Who Use Augmentative and Alternative Communication.

PubMed

Binger, Cathy; Kent-Walsh, Jennifer; King, Marika; Mansfield, Lindsay

2017-07-12

This study investigated the early rule-based sentence productions of 3- and 4-year-old children with severe speech disorders who used single-meaning graphic symbols to communicate. Ten 3- and 4-year-olds requiring the use of augmentative and alternative communication, who had largely intact receptive language skills, received instruction in producing up to four different semantic-syntactic targets using an Apple iPad with a communication app. A single-case, multiple-probe, across-targets design was used to assess the progress of each participant and target. Generalization to new vocabulary was assessed, and a subgroup also was taught to produce sentences using grammatical markers. Some targets (primarily possessor-entity) were mastered in the baseline phase, and the majority of the remaining targets were mastered during intervention. All four children who completed intervention for grammatical markers quickly learned to use the markers accurately. Expressive language potential for preschoolers using graphic symbol-based augmentative and alternative communication systems should not be underestimated. With appropriate presentation and intervention techniques, some preschoolers with profound speech disorders can readily learn to produce rule-based messages via graphic symbols.

Does ego development increase during midlife? The effects of openness and accommodative processing of difficult events.

PubMed

Lilgendahl, Jennifer Pals; Helson, Ravenna; John, Oliver P

2013-08-01

Although Loevinger's model of ego development is a theory of personality growth, there are few studies that have examined age-related change in ego level over developmentally significant periods of adulthood. To address this gap in the literature, we examined mean-level change and individual differences in change in ego level over 18 years of midlife. In this longitudinal study, participants were 79 predominantly White, college-educated women who completed the Washington University Sentence Completion Test in early (age 43) and late (age 61) midlife as well as measures of the trait of Openness (ages 21, 43, 52, and 61) and accommodative processing (assessed from narratives of difficult life events at age 52). As hypothesized, the sample overall showed a mean-level increase in ego level from age 43 to age 61. Additionally, a regression analysis showed that both the trait of Openness at age 21 and accommodative processing of difficult events that occurred during (as opposed to prior to) midlife were each predictive of increasing ego level from age 43 to age 61. These findings counter prior claims that ego level remains stable during adulthood and contribute to our understanding of the underlying processes involved in personality growth in midlife. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

75 FR 54698 - Sentencing Guidelines for United States Courts

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2010-09-08

... UNITED STATES SENTENCING COMMISSION Sentencing Guidelines for United States Courts AGENCY: United... amendments to Federal sentencing guidelines effective November 1, 2010. SUMMARY: On April 29, 2010, the Commission submitted to the Congress amendments to the sentencing guidelines and official commentary, which...

77 FR 31069 - Sentencing Guidelines for United States Courts

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2012-05-24

... SENTENCING COMMISSION Sentencing Guidelines for United States Courts AGENCY: United States... federal sentencing guidelines, and in accordance with Rule 5.2 of its Rules of Practice and Procedure, the... the judicial branch of the United States Government. The Commission promulgates sentencing guidelines...

77 FR 51110 - Sentencing Guidelines for United States Courts

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2012-08-23

... UNITED STATES SENTENCING COMMISSION Sentencing Guidelines for United States Courts AGENCY: United... amendments to federal sentencing guidelines effective November 1, 2012. SUMMARY: On April 30, 2012, the Commission submitted to the Congress amendments to the sentencing guidelines and official commentary, which...

76 FR 58563 - Sentencing Guidelines for United States Courts

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2011-09-21

... UNITED STATES SENTENCING COMMISSION Sentencing Guidelines for United States Courts AGENCY: United... amendments to Federal sentencing guidelines effective November 1, 2011. SUMMARY: On April 28, 2011, the Commission submitted to the Congress amendments to the sentencing guidelines and official commentary, which...

Sentence-Combining Practice

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Akin, Judy O'Neal

1978-01-01

Sample sentence-combining lessons developed to accompany the first-year A-LM German textbook are presented. The exercises are designed for language manipulation practice; they involve breaking down more complex sentences into simpler sentences and the subsequent recombination into complex sentences. All language skills, and particularly writing,…

Comparing the production of complex sentences in Persian patients with post-stroke aphasia and non-damaged people with normal speaking.

PubMed

Mehri, Azar; Ghorbani, Askar; Darzi, Ali; Jalaie, Shohreh; Ashayeri, Hassan

2016-01-05

Cerebrovascular disease leading to stroke is the most common cause of aphasia. Speakers with agrammatic non-fluent aphasia have difficulties in production of movement-derived sentences such as passive sentences, topicalized constituents, and Wh-questions. To assess the production of complex sentences, some passive, topicalized and focused sentences were designed for patients with non-fluent Persian aphasic. Afterwards, patients' performance in sentence production was tested and compared with healthy non-damaged subjects. In this cross sectional study, a task was designed to assess the different types of sentences (active, passive, topicalized and focused) adapted to Persian structures. Seven Persian patients with post-stroke non-fluent agrammatic aphasia (5 men and 2 women) and seven healthy non-damaged subjects participated in this study. The computed tomography (CT) scan or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) showed that all the patients had a single left hemisphere lesion involved middle cerebral artery (MCA), Broca`s area and in its white matter. In addition, based on Bedside version of Persian Western Aphasia Battery (P-WAB-1), all of them were diagnosed with moderate Broca aphasia. Then, the production task of Persian complex sentences was administered. There was a significant difference between four types of sentences in patients with aphasia [Degree of freedom (df) = 3, P < 0.001]. All the patients showed worse performance than the healthy participants in all the four types of sentence production (P < 0.050). In general, it is concluded that topicalized and focused sentences as non-canonical complex sentences in Persian are very difficult to produce for patients with agrammatic non-fluent aphasia. It seems that sentences with A-movement are simpler for the patients than sentences involving A`-movement; since they include shorter movements in compare to topicalized and focused sentences.

Transfer of auditory perceptual learning with spectrally reduced speech to speech and nonspeech tasks: implications for cochlear implants.

PubMed

Loebach, Jeremy L; Pisoni, David B; Svirsky, Mario A

2009-12-01

The objective of this study was to assess whether training on speech processed with an eight-channel noise vocoder to simulate the output of a cochlear implant would produce transfer of auditory perceptual learning to the recognition of nonspeech environmental sounds, the identification of speaker gender, and the discrimination of talkers by voice. Twenty-four normal-hearing subjects were trained to transcribe meaningful English sentences processed with a noise vocoder simulation of a cochlear implant. An additional 24 subjects served as an untrained control group and transcribed the same sentences in their unprocessed form. All subjects completed pre- and post-test sessions in which they transcribed vocoded sentences to provide an assessment of training efficacy. Transfer of perceptual learning was assessed using a series of closed set, nonlinguistic tasks: subjects identified talker gender, discriminated the identity of pairs of talkers, and identified ecologically significant environmental sounds from a closed set of alternatives. Although both groups of subjects showed significant pre- to post-test improvements, subjects who transcribed vocoded sentences during training performed significantly better at post-test than those in the control group. Both groups performed equally well on gender identification and talker discrimination. Subjects who received explicit training on the vocoded sentences, however, performed significantly better on environmental sound identification than the untrained subjects. Moreover, across both groups, pre-test speech performance and, to a higher degree, post-test speech performance, were significantly correlated with environmental sound identification. For both groups, environmental sounds that were characterized as having more salient temporal information were identified more often than environmental sounds that were characterized as having more salient spectral information. Listeners trained to identify noise-vocoded sentences showed evidence of transfer of perceptual learning to the identification of environmental sounds. In addition, the correlation between environmental sound identification and sentence transcription indicates that subjects who were better able to use the degraded acoustic information to identify the environmental sounds were also better able to transcribe the linguistic content of novel sentences. Both trained and untrained groups performed equally well ( approximately 75% correct) on the gender-identification task, indicating that training did not have an effect on the ability to identify the gender of talkers. Although better than chance, performance on the talker discrimination task was poor overall ( approximately 55%), suggesting that either explicit training is required to discriminate talkers' voices reliably or that additional information (perhaps spectral in nature) not present in the vocoded speech is required to excel in such tasks. Taken together, the results suggest that although transfer of auditory perceptual learning with spectrally degraded speech does occur, explicit task-specific training may be necessary for tasks that cannot rely on temporal information alone.

Transfer of Auditory Perceptual Learning with Spectrally Reduced Speech to Speech and Nonspeech Tasks: Implications for Cochlear Implants

PubMed Central

Loebach, Jeremy L.; Pisoni, David B.; Svirsky, Mario A.

2009-01-01

Objective The objective of this study was to assess whether training on speech processed with an 8-channel noise vocoder to simulate the output of a cochlear implant would produce transfer of auditory perceptual learning to the recognition of non-speech environmental sounds, the identification of speaker gender, and the discrimination of talkers by voice. Design Twenty-four normal hearing subjects were trained to transcribe meaningful English sentences processed with a noise vocoder simulation of a cochlear implant. An additional twenty-four subjects served as an untrained control group and transcribed the same sentences in their unprocessed form. All subjects completed pre- and posttest sessions in which they transcribed vocoded sentences to provide an assessment of training efficacy. Transfer of perceptual learning was assessed using a series of closed-set, nonlinguistic tasks: subjects identified talker gender, discriminated the identity of pairs of talkers, and identified ecologically significant environmental sounds from a closed set of alternatives. Results Although both groups of subjects showed significant pre- to posttest improvements, subjects who transcribed vocoded sentences during training performed significantly better at posttest than subjects in the control group. Both groups performed equally well on gender identification and talker discrimination. Subjects who received explicit training on the vocoded sentences, however, performed significantly better on environmental sound identification than the untrained subjects. Moreover, across both groups, pretest speech performance, and to a higher degree posttest speech performance, were significantly correlated with environmental sound identification. For both groups, environmental sounds that were characterized as having more salient temporal information were identified more often than environmental sounds that were characterized as having more salient spectral information. Conclusions Listeners trained to identify noise-vocoded sentences showed evidence of transfer of perceptual learning to the identification of environmental sounds. In addition, the correlation between environmental sound identification and sentence transcription indicates that subjects who were better able to utilize the degraded acoustic information to identify the environmental sounds were also better able to transcribe the linguistic content of novel sentences. Both trained and untrained groups performed equally well (~75% correct) on the gender identification task, indicating that training did not have an effect on the ability to identify the gender of talkers. Although better than chance, performance on the talker discrimination task was poor overall (~55%), suggesting that either explicit training is required to reliably discriminate talkers’ voices, or that additional information (perhaps spectral in nature) not present in the vocoded speech is required to excel in such tasks. Taken together, the results suggest that while transfer of auditory perceptual learning with spectrally degraded speech does occur, explicit task-specific training may be necessary for tasks that cannot rely on temporal information alone. PMID:19773659

Brain Imaging and rTMS Studies of Individual Differences in Cognitive Processing

DTIC Science & Technology

2013-08-09

Institution: Address: Phone: Fax: Email : Web Page: Contract: Project Title: Program Officer: Dr. Marcel Adam Just Carnegie Mellon University...and multitasking ) are included in the progress report using well established sets of materials. In the sentence and discourse tasks, participants...compensatory partnerships and the re-emergence of the primary regions. 3. Cortical reorganization induced by rTMS during multitasking (listening to

Latin America Report.

DTIC Science & Technology

1985-08-23

34 Apostolic Movement, before becoming a student leader together with Javier Bedoya, replacing Carlos Bianca, who was graduating from the PUC. He was...Trinidad BWIA Talks Aim To Avert Trade Spat (Clevon Raphael; TRINIDAD GUARDIAN, 18 Jul 85) 1 Barbados Economist Calls on Trinidad To Settle Debt ...85) 50 Student Leader’s Goal: ’Ungovernable’ University (Yerko Ljubetic Godoy Interview; HOY, 8 Jul 85)... 54 Three People Sentenced for

Psycholinguistics: a cross-language perspective.

PubMed

Bates, E; Devescovi, A; Wulfeck, B

2001-01-01

Cross-linguistic studies are essential to the identification of universal processes in language development, language use, and language breakdown. Comparative studies in all three areas are reviewed, demonstrating powerful differences across languages in the order in which specific structures are acquired by children, the sparing and impairment of those structures in aphasic patients, and the structures that normal adults rely upon most heavily in real-time word and sentence processing. It is proposed that these differences reflect a cost-benefit trade-off among universal mechanisms for learning and processing (perception, attention, motor planning, memory) that are critical for language, but are not unique to language.

DEEPEN: A negation detection system for clinical text incorporating dependency relation into NegEx

PubMed Central

Mehrabi, Saeed; Krishnan, Anand; Sohn, Sunghwan; Roch, Alexandra M; Schmidt, Heidi; Kesterson, Joe; Beesley, Chris; Dexter, Paul; Schmidt, C. Max; Liu, Hongfang; Palakal, Mathew

2018-01-01

In Electronic Health Records (EHRs), much of valuable information regarding patients’ conditions is embedded in free text format. Natural language processing (NLP) techniques have been developed to extract clinical information from free text. One challenge faced in clinical NLP is that the meaning of clinical entities is heavily affected by modifiers such as negation. A negation detection algorithm, NegEx, applies a simplistic approach that has been shown to be powerful in clinical NLP. However, due to the failure to consider the contextual relationship between words within a sentence, NegEx fails to correctly capture the negation status of concepts in complex sentences. Incorrect negation assignment could cause inaccurate diagnosis of patients’ condition or contaminated study cohorts. We developed a negation algorithm called DEEPEN to decrease NegEx’s false positives by taking into account the dependency relationship between negation words and concepts within a sentence using Stanford dependency parser. The system was developed and tested using EHR data from Indiana University (IU) and it was further evaluated on Mayo Clinic dataset to assess its generalizability. The evaluation results demonstrate DEEPEN, which incorporates dependency parsing into NegEx, can reduce the number of incorrect negation assignment for patients with positive findings, and therefore improve the identification of patients with the target clinical findings in EHRs. PMID:25791500

Exploring Methods to Investigate Sentencing Decisions

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Merrall, Elizabeth L. C.; Dhami, Mandeep K.; Bird, Sheila M.

2010-01-01

The determinants of sentencing are of much interest in criminal justice and legal research. Understanding the determinants of sentencing decisions is important for ensuring transparent, consistent, and justifiable sentencing practice that adheres to the goals of sentencing, such as the punishment, rehabilitation, deterrence, and incapacitation of…

75 FR 41927 - Sentencing Guidelines for United States Courts

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2010-07-19

... UNITED STATES SENTENCING COMMISSION Sentencing Guidelines for United States Courts AGENCY: United... operation of the Federal sentencing guidelines, and in accordance with Rule 5.2 of its Rules of Practice and... branch of the United States Government. The Commission promulgates sentencing guidelines and policy...

76 FR 45007 - Sentencing Guidelines for United States Courts

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2011-07-27

... UNITED STATES SENTENCING COMMISSION Sentencing Guidelines for United States Courts AGENCY: United... operation of the Federal sentencing guidelines, and in accordance with Rule 5.2 of its Rules of Practice and... branch of the United States Government. The Commission promulgates sentencing guidelines and policy...

Tracking sentence planning and production.

PubMed

Kemper, Susan; Bontempo, Daniel; McKedy, Whitney; Schmalzried, RaLynn; Tagliaferri, Bruno; Kieweg, Doug

2011-03-01

To assess age differences in the costs of language planning and production. A controlled sentence production task was combined with digital pursuit rotor tracking. Participants were asked to track a moving target while formulating a sentence using specified nouns and verbs and to continue to track the moving target while producing their response. The length of the critical noun phrase (NP) as well as the type of verb provided were manipulated. The analysis indicated that sentence planning was more costly than sentence production, and sentence planning costs increased when participants had to incorporate a long NP into their sentence. The long NPs also tended to be shifted to the end of the sentence, whereas short NPs tended to be positioned after the verb. Planning or producing responses with long NPs was especially difficult for older adults, although verb type and NP shift had similar costs for young and older adults. Pursuit rotor tracking during controlled sentence production reveals the effects of aging on sentence planning and production.

Thai Language Sentence Similarity Computation Based on Syntactic Structure and Semantic Vector

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wang, Hongbin; Feng, Yinhan; Cheng, Liang

2018-03-01

Sentence similarity computation plays an increasingly important role in text mining, Web page retrieval, machine translation, speech recognition and question answering systems. Thai language as a kind of resources scarce language, it is not like Chinese language with HowNet and CiLin resources. So the Thai sentence similarity research faces some challenges. In order to solve this problem of the Thai language sentence similarity computation. This paper proposes a novel method to compute the similarity of Thai language sentence based on syntactic structure and semantic vector. This method firstly uses the Part-of-Speech (POS) dependency to calculate two sentences syntactic structure similarity, and then through the word vector to calculate two sentences semantic similarity. Finally, we combine the two methods to calculate two Thai language sentences similarity. The proposed method not only considers semantic, but also considers the sentence syntactic structure. The experiment result shows that this method in Thai language sentence similarity computation is feasible.

The Effects of Sentence Imitation and Picture Verification on the Recall of Subsequent Digits. Lektos: Interdisciplinary Working Papers in Language Sciences, Vol. 3, No. 1.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Scholes, Robert J.; And Others

The effects of sentence imitation and picture verification on the recall of subsequent digits were studied. Stimuli consisted of 20 sentences, each sentence followed by a string of five digit names, and five structural types of sentences were presented. Subjects were instructed to listen to the sentence and digit string and then either immediately…

Natural language processing pipelines to annotate BioC collections with an application to the NCBI disease corpus.

PubMed

Comeau, Donald C; Liu, Haibin; Islamaj Doğan, Rezarta; Wilbur, W John

2014-01-01

BioC is a new format and associated code libraries for sharing text and annotations. We have implemented BioC natural language preprocessing pipelines in two popular programming languages: C++ and Java. The current implementations interface with the well-known MedPost and Stanford natural language processing tool sets. The pipeline functionality includes sentence segmentation, tokenization, part-of-speech tagging, lemmatization and sentence parsing. These pipelines can be easily integrated along with other BioC programs into any BioC compliant text mining systems. As an application, we converted the NCBI disease corpus to BioC format, and the pipelines have successfully run on this corpus to demonstrate their functionality. Code and data can be downloaded from http://bioc.sourceforge.net. Database URL: http://bioc.sourceforge.net. © The Author(s) 2014. Published by Oxford University Press.

Chemical-induced disease relation extraction via convolutional neural network.

PubMed

Gu, Jinghang; Sun, Fuqing; Qian, Longhua; Zhou, Guodong

2017-01-01

This article describes our work on the BioCreative-V chemical-disease relation (CDR) extraction task, which employed a maximum entropy (ME) model and a convolutional neural network model for relation extraction at inter- and intra-sentence level, respectively. In our work, relation extraction between entity concepts in documents was simplified to relation extraction between entity mentions. We first constructed pairs of chemical and disease mentions as relation instances for training and testing stages, then we trained and applied the ME model and the convolutional neural network model for inter- and intra-sentence level, respectively. Finally, we merged the classification results from mention level to document level to acquire the final relations between chemical and disease concepts. The evaluation on the BioCreative-V CDR corpus shows the effectiveness of our proposed approach. http://www.biocreative.org/resources/corpora/biocreative-v-cdr-corpus/. © The Author(s) 2017. Published by Oxford University Press.

The network of concepts in written texts

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Caldeira, S. M. G.; Petit Lobão, T. C.; Andrade, R. F. S.; Neme, A.; Miranda, J. G. V.

2006-02-01

Complex network theory is used to investigate the structure of meaningful concepts in written texts of individual authors. Networks have been constructed after a two phase filtering, where words with less meaning contents are eliminated and all remaining words are set to their canonical form, without any number, gender or time flexion. Each sentence in the text is added to the network as a clique. A large number of written texts have been scrutinised, and it is found that texts have small-world as well as scale-free structures. The growth process of these networks has also been investigated, and a universal evolution of network quantifiers have been found among the set of texts written by distinct authors. Further analyses, based on shuffling procedures taken either on the texts or on the constructed networks, provide hints on the role played by the word frequency and sentence length distributions to the network structure.

Sentence processing selectivity in Broca's area: evident for structure but not syntactic movement.

PubMed

Rogalsky, Corianne; Almeida, Diogo; Sprouse, Jon; Hickok, Gregory

The role of Broca's area in sentence processing is hotly debated. Prominent hypotheses include that Broca's area supports sentence comprehension via syntax-specific processes ("syntactic movement" in particular), hierarchical structure building or working memory. In the present fMRI study we adopt a within subject, across task approach using targeted sentence-level contrasts and non-sentential comparison tasks to address these hypotheses regarding the role of Broca's area in sentence processing. For clarity, we have presented findings as three experiments: (i) Experiment 1 examines selectivity for a particular type of sentence construction, namely those containing syntactic movement. Standard syntactic movement distance effects in Broca's area were replicated but no difference was found between movement and non-movement sentences in Broca's area at the group level or consistently in individual subjects. (ii) Experiment 2 examines selectivity for sentences versus non-sentences, to assess claims regarding the role of Broca's area in hierarchical structure building. Group and individual results differ, but both identify subregions of Broca's area that are selective for sentence structure. (iii) Experiment 3 assesses whether activations in Broca's area are selective for sentences when contrasted with simple subvocal articulation. Group results suggest shared resources for sentence processing and articulation in Broca's area, but individual subject analyses contradict this finding. We conclude that Broca's area is not selectively involved in processing syntactic movement, but that subregions are selectively responsive to sentence structure. Our findings also reinforce Fedorenko & Kanwishser's call for the use of more individual subject analyses in functional imaging studies of sentence processing in Broca's area, as group findings can obscure selective response patterns.

The Relationship between the Perception and the Production of Intonation by Hearing-Impaired Children.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Most, Tova; Frank, Yael

1991-01-01

Twenty-two hearing-impaired children (ages 9 to 13) with a hearing loss of 80 dB or greater completed 3 tasks of intonation perception and production. Acoustic analysis suggested a relationship between imitation and discrimination of intonation contours and a relationship between imitation and production of orally read sentences when a rising…

What Iconic Gesture Fragments Reveal about Gesture-Speech Integration: When Synchrony Is Lost, Memory Can Help

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Obermeier, Christian; Holle, Henning; Gunter, Thomas C.

2011-01-01

The present series of experiments explores several issues related to gesture-speech integration and synchrony during sentence processing. To be able to more precisely manipulate gesture-speech synchrony, we used gesture fragments instead of complete gestures, thereby avoiding the usual long temporal overlap of gestures with their coexpressive…

AN ACTIVE INTRODUCTION TO NEWSPAPER SWAHILI.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Foreign Service (Dept. of State), Washington, DC. Foreign Service Inst.

EACH OF THE 25 SHORT LESSONS IN THIS BOOKLET IS BUILT AROUND A STORY FROM AN EAST AFRICAN NEWSPAPER. THE STUDENT IS EXPECTED TO LISTEN TO AND REPEAT BASIC SENTENCES, LISTEN TO AND READ THE TEXT, AND COMPLETE THE ACCOMPANYING EXERCISES. THUS, HE NOT ONLY LEARNS TO READ NEWSPAPER ARTICLES BUT ALSO ACTIVELY DEMONSTRATES HOW MUCH HE HAS COMPREHENDED…

Parsing the Passive: Comparing Children with Specific Language Impairment to Sequential Bilingual Children

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Marinis, Theodoros; Saddy, Douglas

2013-01-01

Twenty-five monolingual (L1) children with specific language impairment (SLI), 32 sequential bilingual (L2) children, and 29 L1 controls completed the Test of Active & Passive Sentences-Revised (van der Lely 1996) and the Self-Paced Listening Task with Picture Verification for actives and passives (Marinis 2007). These revealed important…

Code Switching among Bilingual and Limited English Proficient Students: Possible Indicators of Giftedness

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hughes, Claire E.; Shaunessy, Elizabeth S.; Brice, Alejandro R.; Ratliff, Mary Anne; McHatton, Patricia Alvarez

2006-01-01

Code switching includes the use of complete sentences, phrases, and borrowed words from another language (Brice & Brice, 2000). It is a common linguistic phenomenon noted among bilingual populations. In order to code switch effectively, students must possess a high level of understanding of the 2 cultures, as well as a deep understanding of the…

Acquisition of /S/-Clusters in Hebrew-Speaking Children with Phonological Disorders

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ben-David, Avivit; Ezrati, Ruth; Stulman, Navah

2010-01-01

This study examines the production and reduction patterns of initial /s/ clusters by Hebrew-speaking children with phonological disorders. Data were collected from 30 children with phonological disorders between the ages of 3;5-5;2. The data were elicited by means of a picture-naming task combined with a sentence completion task. Target words…

Aspects of the Acquisition of Object Control and ECM-Type Verbs in European Portuguese

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Santos, Ana Lúcia; Gonçalves, Anabela; Hyams, Nina

2016-01-01

We investigate the acquisition of sentential complementation under causative, perception, and object control verbs in European Portuguese, a language rich in complement types, including the typologically marked inflected infinitives. We tested 58 children between 3 and 5 years of age and 24 adults on a sentence completion task. The results support…

A Study of Students' Assessment in Writing Skills of the English Language

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Javed, Muhammad; Juan, Wu Xiao; Nazli, Saima

2013-01-01

This paper addresses to evaluate and assess the students' competency in writing skills at Secondary school level in the English Language focusing five major content areas: word completion, sentence making/syntax, comprehension, tenses/ grammar and handwriting. The target population was the male and female students of grade 10 of urban and rural…

A Study of Students' Assessment in Writing Skills of the English Language

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Javed, Muhammad; Juan, Wu Xiao; Nazli, Saima

2013-01-01

This paper addresses to evaluate and assess the students' competency in writing skills at Secondary school level in the English Language focusing five major content areas: word completion, sentence making/syntax, comprehension, tenses/grammar and handwriting. The target population was the male and female students of grade 10 of urban and rural…

The Effects of Word Order on Subject-Verb and Object-Verb Agreement: Evidence from Basque

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Santesteban, Mikel; Pickering, Martin J.; Branigan, Holly P.

2013-01-01

We report two experiments investigating subject-verb and object-verb agreement in Basque. Participants repeated and completed preambles containing singular or plural subjects and objects in sentences with canonical subject-object-verb (SOV) or non-canonical object-subject-verb (OSV) order; in Experiment 2, they did so while remembering two…

Asking the Right Questions: Teaching about Islam and Globalization

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jafar, Afshan

2017-01-01

This article describes an exercise designed to introduce the topic of Islam and Muslims in a Sociology of Globalization course. The activity asks students to complete a sentence regarding Muslim women. Rather than provide any definitive answers regarding Islam or Muslims, the purpose of the exercise is for students to see the reductive nature of…

Children's Production of Subject-Verb Agreement in Hebrew When Gender and Context Are Ambiguous

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Karniol, Rachel; Artzi, Sigal; Ludmer, Maya

2016-01-01

Third and 5th grade Hebrew-speaking children performed two sentence completion tasks, one requiring the assignment of male, female, or gender-ambiguous names and the inflection of verbs for male-stereotyped, female-stereotyped, and gender-neutral activities, and the other task, of inflecting verbs for male- and female-stereotyped activities…

Supports for Vocabulary Instruction in Early Language and Literacy Methods Textbooks

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wright, Tanya S.; Peltier, Marliese R.

2016-01-01

The goal of this study was to examine the extent to which the content and recommendations in recently published early language and literacy methods textbooks may support early childhood teachers in learning to provide vocabulary instruction for young children. We completed a content analysis of 9 textbooks with coding at the sentence level.…

The Interface between Neighborhood Density and Optional Infinitives: Normal Development and Specific Language Impairment

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hoover, Jill R.; Storkel, Holly L.; Rice, Mabel L.

2012-01-01

The effect of neighborhood density on optional infinitives was evaluated for typically developing (TD) children and children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Forty children, twenty in each group, completed two production tasks that assessed third person singular production. Half of the sentences in each task presented a dense verb, and…

Does Fatherhood Training in Prison Improve Fathering Skills and Reduce Family Challenges?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hansen, Gunnar Vold

2018-01-01

The Norwegian Correctional Service offers a program called "Fathers in Prison", aimed at helping incarcerated fathers to have better contact with their children during their sentence and after release. On the basis of 38 semi-structured interviews with prisoners who have completed the program, we would argue that there is reason to…

Intimacy Status and Self-Disclosure to Significant Others and Strangers.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Prager, Karen J.

The objective of this study was to explore the relationship between self-disclosure and intimacy status. Sixty-four women and 32 men (mean age = 27.44) were asked to complete the Greene Self-Disclosure Sentence Blank in response to one of two conditions, each of which specified a hypothetical target person for the self-revealing communication: a…

Gifted Students' Metaphor Images about Mathematics

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Arikan, Elif Esra; Unal, Hasan

2015-01-01

The aim of this study is to investigate the metaphors images of gifted students about mathematics. The sample of the study consists of 82 gifted students, which are 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 graders, from Istanbul. Data were collected by asking students to complete the sentence: "Mathematics is as …, because…". In the study content analysis was…

Linguistic Proficiency Assessment in Second Language Acquisition Research: The Elicited Imitation Task

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gaillard, Stéphanie; Tremblay, Annie

2016-01-01

This study investigated the elicited imitation task (EIT) as a tool for measuring linguistic proficiency in a second/foreign (L2) language, focusing on French. Nonnative French speakers (n = 94) and native French speakers (n = 6) completed an EIT that included 50 sentences varying in length and complexity. Three raters evaluated productions on…

Appropriateness of ICNP in Korean home care nursing.

PubMed

Kang, Min-Jeoung; Kim, Soon-Lae; Lee, Jong-Eun; Jung, Chai Young; Kim, Sukil

2015-09-01

There are several hospitals in Korea that introduced the ICNP (International Classification for Nursing Practice) as the standard terminology for clinical and home care nursing. This research attempted to determine the appropriateness of ICNP in Korean, hospital based, home care nursing. The data was collected from a home care nursing center from January 1, 2009 to September 21, 2012. The center is operated by a Korean teaching hospital equipped with an ICNP based electronic nursing record (ENR) system. Via a refining process, 40,082 simplified sentences of nursing intervention were acquired from 41,158 nursing records. Among them, 545 preferred nursing statements were extracted, then mapped, to ICNP 2011 at both axis and sentence levels. The mapping results were classified into three categories based on the axis of concept origin and the level of hierarchy. These categories were titled: complete, incomplete and no mapping. Out of 45 unique concepts in the action axis, 42 (93.33%) concepts were completely mapped. However, only 38 (15.08%), out of 252 unique concepts, were completely mapped in the focus axis. At the statement level, only 19.63% of statements were completely mapped. The ICNP is not useful as a tool for home care nursing in its present form. The granularity of ICNP has to be improved and more concepts, specific to home care nursing, need to be added in the focus and action axes. Also, a new measure needs to be introduced to prevent information loss during mapping. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

32 CFR 16.3 - Available sentences.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-07-01

... 32 National Defense 1 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Available sentences. 16.3 Section 16.3 National Defense Department of Defense OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE MILITARY COMMISSIONS SENTENCING § 16.3 Available sentences. (a) General. 32 CFR part 9 permits a military commission wide latitude in sentencing...

32 CFR 16.3 - Available sentences.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-07-01

... 32 National Defense 1 2011-07-01 2011-07-01 false Available sentences. 16.3 Section 16.3 National Defense Department of Defense OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE MILITARY COMMISSIONS SENTENCING § 16.3 Available sentences. (a) General. 32 CFR part 9 permits a military commission wide latitude in sentencing...

32 CFR 16.3 - Available sentences.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-07-01

... 32 National Defense 1 2013-07-01 2013-07-01 false Available sentences. 16.3 Section 16.3 National Defense Department of Defense OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE MILITARY COMMISSIONS SENTENCING § 16.3 Available sentences. (a) General. 32 CFR part 9 permits a military commission wide latitude in sentencing...

32 CFR 16.3 - Available sentences.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-07-01

... 32 National Defense 1 2012-07-01 2012-07-01 false Available sentences. 16.3 Section 16.3 National Defense Department of Defense OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE MILITARY COMMISSIONS SENTENCING § 16.3 Available sentences. (a) General. 32 CFR part 9 permits a military commission wide latitude in sentencing...

28 CFR 2.10 - Date service of sentence commences.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-07-01

... imposed. (b) The imposition of a sentence of imprisonment for civil contempt shall interrupt the running of any sentence of imprisonment being served at the time the sentence of civil contempt is imposed... civil contempt is lifted. (c) Service of the sentence of a committed youth offender or person committed...

28 CFR 523.30 - What is educational good time sentence credit?

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-07-01

... ADMISSION, CLASSIFICATION, AND TRANSFER COMPUTATION OF SENTENCE District of Columbia Educational Good Time Credit § 523.30 What is educational good time sentence credit? Educational good time sentence credit is... 28 Judicial Administration 2 2013-07-01 2013-07-01 false What is educational good time sentence...

28 CFR 523.30 - What is educational good time sentence credit?

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-07-01

... ADMISSION, CLASSIFICATION, AND TRANSFER COMPUTATION OF SENTENCE District of Columbia Educational Good Time Credit § 523.30 What is educational good time sentence credit? Educational good time sentence credit is... 28 Judicial Administration 2 2014-07-01 2014-07-01 false What is educational good time sentence...

28 CFR 523.30 - What is educational good time sentence credit?

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-07-01

... ADMISSION, CLASSIFICATION, AND TRANSFER COMPUTATION OF SENTENCE District of Columbia Educational Good Time Credit § 523.30 What is educational good time sentence credit? Educational good time sentence credit is... 28 Judicial Administration 2 2012-07-01 2012-07-01 false What is educational good time sentence...

The role of visual imagery in the retention of information from sentences.

PubMed

Drose, G S; Allen, G L

1994-01-01

We conducted two experiments to evaluate a multiple-code model for sentence memory that posits both propositional and visual representational systems. Both sentences involved recognition memory. The results of Experiment 1 indicated that subjects' recognition memory for concrete sentences was superior to their recognition memory for abstract sentences. Instructions to use visual imagery to enhance recognition performance yielded no effects. Experiment 2 tested the prediction that interference by a visual task would differentially affect recognition memory for concrete sentences. Results showed the interference task to have had a detrimental effect on recognition memory for both concrete and abstract sentences. Overall, the evidence provided partial support for both a multiple-code model and a semantic integration model of sentence memory.

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

The action-sentence compatibility effect in Japanese sentences.

PubMed

Awazu, Shunji

2011-10-01

The action-sentence compatibility effect (ACE) is a phenomenon in which a reader's response to a sentence is made faster when there is congruity between the action described in the sentence and the action that makes up the response. Previous studies showed the ACE occurs in action-related sentences in several languages. However, all these were SVO (verb-object) languages, in which verbs are placed before object nouns; this order is reversed in SOV languages. Moreover, those studies investigated hand responses. This study assessed the existence of the ACE in Japanese, an SOV language, and in foot responses. 24 female participants judged the sensibility of Japanese sentences that described actions and responded with either their foot or hand as an effector. Reaction times were significantly faster when there was congruity between the effector described in the sentences and the effector actually used for the response. However, sentence dependency was also found in the foot responses.

Why do children pay more attention to grammatical morphemes at the ends of sentences?

PubMed

Sundara, Megha

2018-05-01

Children pay more attention to the beginnings and ends of sentences rather than the middle. In natural speech, ends of sentences are prosodically and segmentally enhanced; they are also privileged by sensory and recall advantages. We contrasted whether acoustic enhancement or sensory and recall-related advantages are necessary and sufficient for the salience of grammatical morphemes at the ends of sentences. We measured 22-month-olds' listening times to grammatical and ungrammatical sentences with third person singular -s. Crucially, by cross-splicing the speech stimuli, acoustic enhancement and sensory and recall advantages were fully crossed. Only children presented with the verb in sentence-final position, a position with sensory and recall advantages, distinguished between the grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. Thus, sensory and recall advantages alone were necessary and sufficient to make grammatical morphemes at ends of sentences salient. These general processing constraints privilege ends of sentences over middles, regardless of the acoustic enhancement.

An interference account of the missing-VP effect

PubMed Central

Häussler, Jana; Bader, Markus

2015-01-01

Sentences with doubly center-embedded relative clauses in which a verb phrase (VP) is missing are sometimes perceived as grammatical, thus giving rise to an illusion of grammaticality. In this paper, we provide a new account of why missing-VP sentences, which are both complex and ungrammatical, lead to an illusion of grammaticality, the so-called missing-VP effect. We propose that the missing-VP effect in particular, and processing difficulties with multiply center-embedded clauses more generally, are best understood as resulting from interference during cue-based retrieval. When processing a sentence with double center-embedding, a retrieval error due to interference can cause the verb of an embedded clause to be erroneously attached into a higher clause. This can lead to an illusion of grammaticality in the case of missing-VP sentences and to processing complexity in the case of complete sentences with double center-embedding. Evidence for an interference account of the missing-VP effect comes from experiments that have investigated the missing-VP effect in German using a speeded grammaticality judgments procedure. We review this evidence and then present two new experiments that show that the missing-VP effect can be found in German also with less restricting procedures. One experiment was a questionnaire study which required grammaticality judgments from participants without imposing any time constraints. The second experiment used a self-paced reading procedure and did not require any judgments. Both experiments confirm the prior findings of missing-VP effects in German and also show that the missing-VP effect is subject to a primacy effect as known from the memory literature. Based on this evidence, we argue that an account of missing-VP effects in terms of interference during cue-based retrieval is superior to accounts in terms of limited memory resources or in terms of experience with embedded structures. PMID:26136698

Effective Instruction for Persisting Dyslexia in Upper Grades: Adding Hope Stories and Computer Coding to Explicit Literacy Instruction.

PubMed

Thompson, Robert; Tanimoto, Steve; Lyman, Ruby Dawn; Geselowitz, Kira; Begay, Kristin Kawena; Nielsen, Kathleen; Nagy, William; Abbott, Robert; Raskind, Marshall; Berninger, Virginia

2018-05-01

Children in grades 4 to 6 ( N =14) who despite early intervention had persisting dyslexia (impaired word reading and spelling) were assessed before and after computerized reading and writing instruction aimed at subword, word, and syntax skills shown in four prior studies to be effective for treating dyslexia. During the 12 two-hour sessions once a week after school they first completed HAWK Letters in Motion© for manuscript and cursive handwriting, HAWK Words in Motion© for phonological, orthographic, and morphological coding for word reading and spelling, and HAWK Minds in Motion© for sentence reading comprehension and written sentence composing. A reading comprehension activity in which sentences were presented one word at a time or one added word at a time was introduced. Next, to instill hope they could overcome their struggles with reading and spelling, they read and discussed stories about struggles of Buckminister Fuller who overcame early disabilities to make important contributions to society. Finally, they engaged in the new Kokopelli's World (KW)©, blocks-based online lessons, to learn computer coding in introductory programming by creating stories in sentence blocks (Tanimoto and Thompson 2016). Participants improved significantly in hallmark word decoding and spelling deficits of dyslexia, three syntax skills (oral construction, listening comprehension, and written composing), reading comprehension (with decoding as covariate), handwriting, orthographic and morphological coding, orthographic loop, and inhibition (focused attention). They answered more reading comprehension questions correctly when they had read sentences presented one word at a time (eliminating both regressions out and regressions in during saccades) than when presented one added word at a time (eliminating only regressions out during saccades). Indicators of improved self-efficacy that they could learn to read and write were observed. Reminders to pay attention and stay on task needed before adding computer coding were not needed after computer coding was added.

The Impact of Age, Background Noise, Semantic Ambiguity, and Hearing Loss on Recognition Memory for Spoken Sentences.

PubMed

Koeritzer, Margaret A; Rogers, Chad S; Van Engen, Kristin J; Peelle, Jonathan E

2018-03-15

The goal of this study was to determine how background noise, linguistic properties of spoken sentences, and listener abilities (hearing sensitivity and verbal working memory) affect cognitive demand during auditory sentence comprehension. We tested 30 young adults and 30 older adults. Participants heard lists of sentences in quiet and in 8-talker babble at signal-to-noise ratios of +15 dB and +5 dB, which increased acoustic challenge but left the speech largely intelligible. Half of the sentences contained semantically ambiguous words to additionally manipulate cognitive challenge. Following each list, participants performed a visual recognition memory task in which they viewed written sentences and indicated whether they remembered hearing the sentence previously. Recognition memory (indexed by d') was poorer for acoustically challenging sentences, poorer for sentences containing ambiguous words, and differentially poorer for noisy high-ambiguity sentences. Similar patterns were observed for Z-transformed response time data. There were no main effects of age, but age interacted with both acoustic clarity and semantic ambiguity such that older adults' recognition memory was poorer for acoustically degraded high-ambiguity sentences than the young adults'. Within the older adult group, exploratory correlation analyses suggested that poorer hearing ability was associated with poorer recognition memory for sentences in noise, and better verbal working memory was associated with better recognition memory for sentences in noise. Our results demonstrate listeners' reliance on domain-general cognitive processes when listening to acoustically challenging speech, even when speech is highly intelligible. Acoustic challenge and semantic ambiguity both reduce the accuracy of listeners' recognition memory for spoken sentences. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.5848059.

Influence of consonant voicing characteristics on sentence production in abductor versus adductor spasmodic dysphonia.

PubMed

Cannito, Michael P; Chorna, Lesya B; Kahane, Joel C; Dworkin, James P

2014-05-01

This study evaluated the hypotheses that sentence production by speakers with adductor (AD) and abductor (AB) spasmodic dysphonia (SD) may be differentially influenced by consonant voicing and manner features, in comparison with healthy, matched, nondysphonic controls. This was a prospective, single blind study, using a between-groups, repeated measures design for the independent variables of perceived voice quality and sentence duration. Sixteen subjects with ADSD and 10 subjects with ABSD, as well as 26 matched healthy controls produced four short, simple sentences that were systematically loaded with voiced or voiceless consonants of either obstruant or continuant manner categories. Experienced voice clinicians, who were "blind" as to speakers' group affixations, used visual analog scaling to judge the overall voice quality of each sentence. Acoustic sentence durations were also measured. Speakers with ABSD or ADSD demonstrated significantly poorer than normal voice quality on all sentences. Speakers with ABSD exhibited longer than normal duration for voiceless consonant sentences. Speakers with ADSD had poorer voice quality for voiced than for voiceless consonant sentences. Speakers with ABSD had longer durations for voiceless than for voiced consonant sentences. The two subtypes of SD exhibit differential performance on the basis of consonant voicing in short, simple sentences; however, each subgroup manifested voicing-related differences on a different variable (voice quality vs sentence duration). Findings suggest different underlying pathophysiological mechanisms for ABSD and ADSD. Findings also support inclusion of short, simple sentences containing voiced or voiceless consonants as part of the diagnostic protocol for SD, with measurement of sentence duration in addition to judments of voice quality severity. Copyright © 2014 The Voice Foundation. Published by Mosby, Inc. All rights reserved.

Syntactic Priming during Sentence Comprehension: Evidence for the Lexical Boost

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Traxler, Matthew J.; Tooley, Kristen M.; Pickering, Martin J.

2014-01-01

Syntactic priming occurs when structural information from one sentence influences processing of a subsequently encountered sentence (Bock, 1986; Ledoux et al., 2007). This article reports 2 eye-tracking experiments investigating the effects of a prime sentence on the processing of a target sentence that shared aspects of syntactic form. The…

A Bilingual Advantage in Controlling Language Interference during Sentence Comprehension

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Filippi, Roberto; Leech, Robert; Thomas, Michael S. C.; Green, David W.; Dick, Frederic

2012-01-01

This study compared the comprehension of syntactically simple with more complex sentences in Italian-English adult bilinguals and monolingual controls in the presence or absence of sentence-level interference. The task was to identify the agent of the sentence and we primarily examined the accuracy of response. The target sentence was signalled by…

Effects of word frequency and modality on sentence comprehension impairments in people with aphasia.

PubMed

DeDe, Gayle

2012-05-01

It is well known that people with aphasia have sentence comprehension impairments. The present study investigated whether lexical factors contribute to sentence comprehension impairments in both the auditory and written modalities using online measures of sentence processing. People with aphasia and non brain-damaged controls participated in the experiment (n = 8 per group). Twenty-one sentence pairs containing high- and low-frequency words were presented in self-paced listening and reading tasks. The sentences were syntactically simple and differed only in the critical words. The dependent variables were response times for critical segments of the sentence and accuracy on the comprehension questions. The results showed that word frequency influences performance on measures of sentence comprehension in people with aphasia. The accuracy data on the comprehension questions suggested that people with aphasia have more difficulty understanding sentences containing low-frequency words in the written compared to auditory modality. Both group and single-case analyses of the response time data also indicated that people with aphasia experience more difficulty with reading than listening. Sentence comprehension in people with aphasia is influenced by word frequency and presentation modality.

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

[Analysis of judicial sentences issued against traumatologists between 1995 and 2011 as regards medical negligence].

PubMed

Cardoso-Cita, Z; Perea-Pérez, B; Albarrán-Juan, M E; Labajo-González, M E; López-Durán, L; Marco-Martínez, F; Santiago-Saéz, A

2016-01-01

Traumatology and Orthopaedic Surgery is one of the specialities with most complaints due to its scope and complexity. The aim of this study is to determine the characteristics of the complaints made against medical specialists in Traumatology, taking into account those variables that might have an influence both on the presenting of the complaint as well as on the resolving of the process. An analysis was performed on 303 legal judgments (1995-2011) collected in the health legal judgements archive of the Madrid School of Medicine, which is linked to the Westlaw Aranzadi data base. Civil jurisdiction was the most used. The specific processes with most complaints were bone-joint disorders followed by vascular-nerve problems and infections. The injury claimed against most was in the lower limb, particularly the knee. The most frequent general cause of complaint was surgical treatment error, followed by diagnostic error. There was lack of information in 14.9%. There was sentencing in 49.8% of the cases, with compensation mainly being less than 50,000 euros. Traumatology and Orthopaedic Surgery is a speciality prone to complaints due to malpractice. The number of sentences against traumatologists is high, but compensations are usually less than 50,000 euros. The main reason for sentencing is surgical treatment error; thus being the basic surgical procedure and where precautions should be maximised. The judgements due to lack of information are high, with adequate doctor-patient communication being essential as well as the correct completion of the informed consent. Copyright © 2014 SECOT. Published by Elsevier Espana. All rights reserved.

[The speech audiometry using the matrix sentence test].

PubMed

Boboshko, M Yu; Zhilinskaia, E V; Warzybok, A; Maltseva, N V; Zokoll, M; Kollmeier, B

The matrix sentence test in which the five-word semantically unpredictable sentences presented under the background noise conditions are used as the speech material was designed and validated for many languages. The objective of the present study was to evaluate the Russian version of the matrix sentence test (RuMatrix test) in the listeners of different ages with normal hearing. At the first stage of the study, 35 listeners at the age from 18 to 33 year were examined. The results of the estimation of the training effect dictated the necessity of conducting two training tracks before carrying out the RuMatrix test proper. The signal-to-noise ratio at which 50% speech recognition (SRT50) was obtained was found to be -8.8±0.8 dB SNR. A significant effect of exposure to the background noise was demonstrated: the noise level of 80 and 75 Db SPL led to a considerably lower intelligibility than the noise levels in the range from 45 to 70 dB SPL; in the subsequent studies, the noise level of 65 dB SPL was used. The high test-retest reliability of the RuMatrix test was proved. At the second stage of the study, 20 young (20-40 year old) listeners and 20 aged (62-74 year old) ones were examined. The mean SRT50 in the aged patients was found to be -6.9±1.1 dB SNR which was much worse than the mean STR50 in the young subjects (-8.7±0.9 dB SNR). It is concluded that, bearing in mind the excellent comparability of the results of the RUMat rix test across different languages, it can be used as a universal tool in international research projects.

Probability of criminal acts of violence: a test of jury predictive accuracy.

PubMed

Reidy, Thomas J; Sorensen, Jon R; Cunningham, Mark D

2013-01-01

The ability of capital juries to accurately predict future prison violence at the sentencing phase of aggravated murder trials was examined through retrospective review of the disciplinary records of 115 male inmates sentenced to either life (n = 65) or death (n = 50) in Oregon from 1985 through 2008, with a mean post-conviction time at risk of 15.3 years. Violent prison behavior was completely unrelated to predictions made by capital jurors, with bidirectional accuracy simply reflecting the base rate of assaultive misconduct in the group. Rejection of the special issue predicting future violence enjoyed 90% accuracy. Conversely, predictions that future violence was probable had 90% error rates. More than 90% of the assaultive rule violations committed by these offenders resulted in no harm or only minor injuries. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A rational inference approach to group and individual-level sentence comprehension performance in aphasia.

PubMed

Warren, Tessa; Dickey, Michael Walsh; Liburd, Teljer L

2017-07-01

The rational inference, or noisy channel, account of language comprehension predicts that comprehenders are sensitive to the probabilities of different interpretations for a given sentence and adapt as these probabilities change (Gibson, Bergen & Piantadosi, 2013). This account provides an important new perspective on aphasic sentence comprehension: aphasia may increase the likelihood of sentence distortion, leading people with aphasia (PWA) to rely more on the prior probability of an interpretation and less on the form or structure of the sentence (Gibson, Sandberg, Fedorenko, Bergen & Kiran, 2015). We report the results of a sentence-picture matching experiment that tested the predictions of the rational inference account and other current models of aphasic sentence comprehension across a variety of sentence structures. Consistent with the rational inference account, PWA showed similar sensitivity to the probability of particular kinds of form distortions as age-matched controls, yet overall their interpretations relied more on prior probability and less on sentence form. As predicted by rational inference, but not by other models of sentence comprehension in aphasia, PWA's interpretations were more faithful to the form for active and passive sentences than for direct object and prepositional object sentences. However contra rational inference, there was no evidence that individual PWA's severity of syntactic or semantic impairment predicted their sensitivity to form versus the prior probability of a sentence, as cued by semantics. These findings confirm and extend previous findings that suggest the rational inference account holds promise for explaining aphasic and neurotypical comprehension, but they also raise new challenges for the account. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Professional Writers Teaching Professional Writing: Transcending the Borders between Professional Writers and Academic Scholars, Harmonizing Throught and Reality: A Text Arguing for Teaching Sentences First, Last, and Foremost.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Beene, LynnDianne

Good writing is good sentences. It is a simple truth that many in the business of teaching writing have strayed from. Good writing is a first sentence that makes a reader want to read the second sentence, a second sentence that makes a reader want to read the third, and so on. Erika Lindemann suggests that certain types of sentence instruction can…

Conceptual Influences on Word Order and Voice in Sentence Production: Evidence from Japanese

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tanaka, Mikihiro N.; Branigan, Holly P.; McLean, Janet F.; Pickering, Martin J.

2011-01-01

Two experiments using a sentence recall task tested the effect of animacy on syntactic processing in Japanese sentence production. Experiment 1 and 2 showed that when Japanese native speakers recalled transitive sentences, they were more likely to assign animate entities earlier positions in the sentence than inanimate entities. In addition,…

A No-Grammar Approach to Sentence Power: John C. Mellon's Sentence-Combining Games.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cooper, Charles R.

1971-01-01

This study is concerned with increasing the rate at which children progress toward more highly differentiated sentence structure. The study recommends sentence-combining practices that will accelerate this progress. The two main purposes of grammar study have been to prevent errors in writing and to present the full range of sentence structures…

Predicted Errors In Children's Early Sentence Comprehension

PubMed Central

Gertner, Yael; Fisher, Cynthia

2012-01-01

Children use syntax to interpret sentences and learn verbs; this is syntactic bootstrapping. The structure-mapping account of early syntactic bootstrapping proposes that a partial representation of sentence structure, the set of nouns occurring with the verb, guides initial interpretation and provides an abstract format for new learning. This account predicts early successes, but also telltale errors: Toddlers should be unable to tell transitive sentences from other sentences containing two nouns. In testing this prediction, we capitalized on evidence that 21-month-olds use what they have learned about noun order in English sentences to understand new transitive verbs. In two experiments, 21-month-olds applied this noun-order knowledge to two-noun intransitive sentences, mistakenly assigning different interpretations to “The boy and the girl are gorping!” and “The girl and the boy are gorping!”. This suggests that toddlers exploit partial representations of sentence structure to guide sentence interpretation; these sparse representations are useful, but error-prone. PMID:22525312

Automatic processing of pragmatic information in the human brain: a mismatch negativity study.

PubMed

Zhao, Ming; Liu, Tao; Chen, Feiyan

2018-05-23

Language comprehension involves pragmatic information processing, which allows world knowledge to influence the interpretation of a sentence. This study explored whether pragmatic information can be automatically processed during spoken sentence comprehension. The experiment adopted the mismatch negativity (MMN) paradigm to capture the neurophysiological indicators of automatic processing of spoken sentences. Pragmatically incorrect ('Foxes have wings') and correct ('Butterflies have wings') sentences were used as the experimental stimuli. In condition 1, the pragmatically correct sentence was the deviant and the pragmatically incorrect sentence was the standard stimulus, whereas the opposite case was presented in condition 2. The experimental results showed that, compared with the condition that the pragmatically correct sentence is the deviant stimulus, when the condition that the pragmatically incorrect sentence is the deviant stimulus MMN effects were induced within 60-120 and 220-260 ms. The results indicated that the human brain can monitor for incorrect pragmatic information in the inattentive state and can automatically process pragmatic information at the beginning of spoken sentence comprehension.

Sentence Comprehension: A Parallel Distributed Processing Approach

DTIC Science & Technology

1989-07-14

NAME OF PERFORMING ORGANIZATION 6b OFFICE SYMBOL 7a NAME OF MONITORING ORGANIZATION (If aodkawe) Computer Sciences DivisionCarnegie-Mellon University...Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213. Arlington, Virginia 22217-5000 $a. NAME OF FUNOINGISPONSORING Sb OFFICE SYMBOL 9 PROCUREMENT INSTRUMENT IOENTIFICATION...3 OTIC USERS 22a NAME OF RESPONSIBLE INOIVI0UAL 22b TELEPHONE (include Area COd) 22c. OFFICE SYMBOL Dr. Alan L. Meyrowitz (202) 696-4302 N00014 D0

Impact of Video Clips on the Development of the Listening Skills in English Classes: A Case Study of Turkish Students

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tekin, Inan; Parmaksiz, Ramazan Sükrü

2016-01-01

The purpose of this research is to examine whether using feature films in video lessons has an effect on the development of listening skills of students or not. The research has been conducted at one of the state universities in Black Sea region of Turkey with 126 students. The students watched and listened to only the sentences taken from…

Spanish Language Processing at University of Maryland: Building Infrastructure for Multilingual Applications

DTIC Science & Technology

2001-09-01

translation of the Spanish original sentence. Acquiring bilingual dictionary entries In addition to building and applying the more sophisticated LCS...porting LCS lexicons to new languages, as described above, and are also useful by themselves in improving dictionary -based cross language information...hold much of the time. Moreover, lexical dependencies have proven to be instrumental in advances in monolingual syntactic analysis (e.g. I-erg MY

University students' perceptions of pre-school and kindergarten children who stutter.

PubMed

Betz, Ilana Roth; Blood, Gordon W; Blood, Ingrid M

2008-01-01

To determine how early "the stuttering stereotype" is assigned, 160 university students rated a hypothetical vignette depicting either a 3-, 4-, 5-, or 6-year-old with or without the statement "He stutters". A factor analysis of the semantic differential scale showed a three-factor solution comprised of 17 of the 25 bi-polar adjective pairs. The factor labeled personality showed significantly more negative ratings for 2-, 4-, 5-, or 6-year-old children based on the inclusion of the "He stutters" sentence. There were no differences between male and female raters. A significant difference was found between raters who were knew someone who stuttered and raters who did not know someone who stuttered on the personality factor. Raters who were knew someone who stuttered were significantly more likely to assign more positive ratings to the children. Readers should be able to learn and understand: (1) the research describing the negative stereotypes associated with stuttering; (2) the vignette method used to evaluate stereotypes in children and youth; (3) the negative perceptions of the sentence "He stutters" on raters' perception of personality, sociability and speech for children as young as 3-, 4-, 5-, or 6-year-olds; and (4) the familiarity with a person who stutters and raters' perceptions of children who stutter.

A Discriminative Sentence Compression Method as Combinatorial Optimization Problem

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Hirao, Tsutomu; Suzuki, Jun; Isozaki, Hideki

In the study of automatic summarization, the main research topic was `important sentence extraction' but nowadays `sentence compression' is a hot research topic. Conventional sentence compression methods usually transform a given sentence into a parse tree or a dependency tree, and modify them to get a shorter sentence. However, this method is sometimes too rigid. In this paper, we regard sentence compression as an combinatorial optimization problem that extracts an optimal subsequence of words. Hori et al. also proposed a similar method, but they used only a small number of features and their weights were tuned by hand. We introduce a large number of features such as part-of-speech bigrams and word position in the sentence. Furthermore, we train the system by discriminative learning. According to our experiments, our method obtained better score than other methods with statistical significance.

Do Not Resonate with Actions: Sentence Polarity Modulates Cortico-Spinal Excitability during Action-Related Sentence Reading

PubMed Central

Liuzza, Marco Tullio; Candidi, Matteo; Aglioti, Salvatore Maria

2011-01-01

Background Theories of embodied language suggest that the motor system is differentially called into action when processing motor-related versus abstract content words or sentences. It has been recently shown that processing negative polarity action-related sentences modulates neural activity of premotor and motor cortices. Methods and Findings We sought to determine whether reading negative polarity sentences brought about differential modulation of cortico-spinal motor excitability depending on processing hand-action related or abstract sentences. Facilitatory paired-pulses Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (pp-TMS) was applied to the primary motor representation of the right-hand and the recorded amplitude of induced motor-evoked potentials (MEP) was used to index M1 activity during passive reading of either hand-action related or abstract content sentences presented in both negative and affirmative polarity. Results showed that the cortico-spinal excitability was affected by sentence polarity only in the hand-action related condition. Indeed, in keeping with previous TMS studies, reading positive polarity, hand action-related sentences suppressed cortico-spinal reactivity. This effect was absent when reading hand action-related negative polarity sentences. Moreover, no modulation of cortico-spinal reactivity was associated with either negative or positive polarity abstract sentences. Conclusions Our results indicate that grammatical cues prompting motor negation reduce the cortico-spinal suppression associated with affirmative action sentences reading and thus suggest that motor simulative processes underlying the embodiment may involve even syntactic features of language. PMID:21347305

Word Order and Linguistic Factors in the Second Language Processing of Spanish Passive Sentences

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lee, James F.

2017-01-01

The present study examines how second language learners (L2) assign the thematic roles of agent/patient in Spanish passive sentences with "ser" (often referred to as the true passive) when it is their initial exposure to this structure. The target sentences were preceded by a contextual sentence. After hearing the two sentences,…

The Identification of Word Meaning from Sentence Contexts: An Effect of Presentation Order.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ammon, Paul R.; Graves, Jack A.

Sixty fourth- and fifth-grade children listened to six series of six sentences each, with each sentence in a series containing the same artificial word. The task was to assign to the artificial word a meaning which would fit all sentence contexts in the series. Preliminary data provided an estimate of the probability that a particular sentence,…

Effects of Word Frequency and Modality on Sentence Comprehension Impairments in People with Aphasia

PubMed Central

DeDe, Gayle

2014-01-01

Purpose It is well known that people with aphasia have sentence comprehension impairments. The present study investigated whether lexical factors contribute to sentence comprehension impairments in both the auditory and written modalities using on-line measures of sentence processing. Methods People with aphasia and non-brain-damaged controls participated in the experiment (n=8 per group). Twenty-one sentence pairs containing high and low frequency words were presented in self-paced listening and reading tasks. The sentences were syntactically simple and differed only in the critical words. The dependent variables were response times for critical segments of the sentence and accuracy on the comprehension questions. Results The results showed that word frequency influences performance on measures of sentence comprehension in people with aphasia. The accuracy data on the comprehension questions suggested that people with aphasia have more difficulty understanding sentences containing low frequency words in the written compared to auditory modality. Both group and single case analyses of the response time data also pointed to more difficulty with reading than listening. Conclusions The results show that sentence comprehension in people with aphasia is influenced by word frequency and presentation modality. PMID:22294411

Sentence Position and Syntactic Complexity of Stuttering in Early Childhood: A Longitudinal Study

PubMed Central

Buhr, Anthony P.; Zebrowski, Patricia M.

2009-01-01

The purpose of the present investigation was to assess longitudinal word- and sentence-level measures of stuttering in young children. Participants included 12 stuttering and non-stuttering children between 36 and 71 months of age at an initial who exhibited a range of stuttering rates. Parent-child spontaneous speech samples were obtained over a period of two years at six-month intervals. Each speech sample was transcribed, and both stuttering-like disfluencies (SLDs) and other disfluencies (ODs) were coded. Word and sentence-level measures of SLDs were used to assess linguistic characteristics of stuttering. Results of the word-level analysis indicated that stuttering was most likely to occur at the sentence-initial position, but that a tendency to stutter on function words was present only at the sentence-initial position. Results of the sentence-level analyses indicated that sentences containing ODs and those containing SLDs were both significantly longer and more complex than fluent sentences, but did not differ from each other. Word- and sentence-level measures also did not change across visits. Results were taken to suggest that both SLDs and ODs originate during the same stage of sentence planning. PMID:19948270

A Developmental Perspective on the Imperfective Paradox

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kazanina, Nina; Phillips, Colin

2007-01-01

Imperfective or progressive verb morphology makes it possible to use the name of a whole event to refer to an activity that is clearly not a complete instance of that event, leading to what is known as the Imperfective Paradox. For example, a sentence like "John was building a house" does not entail that a house ever got built. The Imperfective…

The Writing Skills Workbook--In Preparation for the GED Test. Test I: The Writing Skills Test. Revised Edition.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Carter, Marilyn; And Others

Intended for students preparing for the General Educational Development (GED) test, this workbook enables them to complete lessons in writing and spelling skills and to take the simulated writing skills tests. The first section contains worksheets on basic writing skills, such as sentence structure, capitalization, and punctuation and the use of…

28 CFR 2.47 - Warrant placed as a detainer and dispositional review.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-07-01

... opportunity for counsel as provided in § 2.48(b). [52 FR 17400, May 8, 1987, as amended at 61 FR 33657, June... notified of his right to request counsel under the provisions of § 2.48(b) to assist him in completing this written application. (b) If the prisoner is serving a new federal sentence, the Regional Commissioner...

28 CFR 2.47 - Warrant placed as a detainer and dispositional review.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-07-01

... opportunity for counsel as provided in § 2.48(b). [52 FR 17400, May 8, 1987, as amended at 61 FR 33657, June... notified of his right to request counsel under the provisions of § 2.48(b) to assist him in completing this written application. (b) If the prisoner is serving a new federal sentence, the Regional Commissioner...

28 CFR 2.47 - Warrant placed as a detainer and dispositional review.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-07-01

... opportunity for counsel as provided in § 2.48(b). [52 FR 17400, May 8, 1987, as amended at 61 FR 33657, June... notified of his right to request counsel under the provisions of § 2.48(b) to assist him in completing this written application. (b) If the prisoner is serving a new federal sentence, the Regional Commissioner...

28 CFR 2.47 - Warrant placed as a detainer and dispositional review.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-07-01

... opportunity for counsel as provided in § 2.48(b). [52 FR 17400, May 8, 1987, as amended at 61 FR 33657, June... notified of his right to request counsel under the provisions of § 2.48(b) to assist him in completing this written application. (b) If the prisoner is serving a new federal sentence, the Regional Commissioner...

How L2-Learners' Brains React to Code-Switches: An ERP Study with Russian Learners of German

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ruigendijk, Esther; Hentschel, Gerd; Zeller, Jan Patrick

2016-01-01

This Event Related Potentials (ERP) study investigates auditory processing of sentences with so-called code-switches in Russian learners of German. It has often been argued that switching between two languages results in extra processing cost, although it is not completely clear yet what exactly causes these costs. ERP presents a good method to…

"The Teacher Who Helps Children Learn Best": Affect and Authority in the Traditional Primary Classroom

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hargreaves, Eleanore; Elhawary, Dalia; Mahgoub, Mohamed

2018-01-01

This paper draws on the views of nearly 400 Year 5 pupils across nine classes in three government primary schools in Alexandria, Egypt. It explores how they perceived the role of affect in their classroom; and their teachers' authority. By presenting pupils with sentences to complete, our research explored how the prevailing traditional approach…

Parents' Reports of Lexical and Grammatical Aspects of Toddlers' Language in European Portuguese: Developmental Trends, Age and Gender Differences

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Silva, Carla; Cadime, Irene; Ribeiro, Iolanda; Santos, Sandra; Santos, Ana Lúcia; Viana, Fernanda Leopoldina

2017-01-01

The results from a large-scale study on toddlers' language acquisition in European Portuguese are presented. Toddlers' lexical and grammatical competencies were assessed using the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory: Words and Sentences. The results, based on 3012 reports completed by parents, indicate an increase in the lexical…

Aprendamos juntos: Cuaderno de trabajo. Segunda parte (Let's Learn Together: Workbook. Part Two).

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Instituto Nacional para la Educacion de los Adultos, Mexico City (Mexico).

This workbook is part of a Mexican series of instructional materials designed for Spanish speaking adults who are in the process of becoming literate or have recently become literate in their native language. This workbook provides an introduction to grammar. It is designed to help students learn to write words, complete sentences, and paragraphs.…

Processing Subject-Verb Agreement in a Second Language Depends on Proficiency

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hoshino, Noriko; Dussias, Paola E.; Kroll, Judith F.

2010-01-01

Subject-verb agreement is a computation that is often difficult to execute perfectly in the first language (L1) and even more difficult to produce skillfully in a second language (L2). In this study, we examine the way in which bilingual speakers complete sentence fragments in a manner that reflects access to both grammatical and conceptual…

Parental Language Mixing: Its Measurement and the Relation of Mixed Input to Young Bilingual Children's Vocabulary Size

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Byers-Heinlein, Krista

2013-01-01

Is parental language mixing related to vocabulary acquisition in bilingual infants and children? Bilingual parents (who spoke English and another language; n = 181) completed the Language Mixing Scale questionnaire, a new self-report measure that assesses how frequently parents use words from two different languages in the same sentence, such as…

The Sentence Completion and Three Wishes Tasks: Windows into the Inner Lives of People with Intellectual Disabilities

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dykens, E.; Schwenk, K.; Maxwell, M.; Myatt, B.

2007-01-01

Background: Measuring the self-perceptions, thoughts, hopes and inner lives of persons with intellectual disabilities (ID) has long been a research challenge. Unlike objective or projective tests, semi-projective tasks may provide persons with ID with just enough structure or cues to convey their self-perceptions in a spontaneous and unbiased…

Syntax in a Native Language Still Continues to Develop in Adults: Honorification Judgment in Japanese

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Momo, Kanako; Sakai, Hiromu; Sakai, Kuniyoshi L.

2008-01-01

Native languages (L1s) are tacitly assumed to be complete and stable in adults. Here we report an unexpected individual variation in judgment of L1 regarding Japanese sentences including honorification, and further clarify its neural basis with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). By contrasting an honorification judgment task with a…

Individual differences in susceptibility to false memories: The effect of memory specificity.

PubMed

Dewhurst, Stephen A; Anderson, Rachel J; Berry, Donna M; Garner, Sarah R

2017-06-25

Previous research has highlighted the wide individual variability in susceptibility to the false memories produced by the Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) procedure [Deese, J. (1959). On the prediction of occurrence of particular verbal intrusions in immediate recall. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 58, 17-22; Roediger, H. L., III, & McDermott, K. B. (1995). Creating false memories: Remembering words not presented in lists. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 21, 803-814]. The current study investigated whether susceptibility to false memories is influenced by individual differences in the specificity of autobiographical memory retrieval. Memory specificity was measured using the Sentence Completion for Events from the Past Test (SCEPT) [Raes, F., Hermans, D., Williams, J. M. G., & Eelen, P. (2007). A sentence completion procedure as an alternative to the Autobiographical Memory Test for assessing overgeneral memory in non-clinical populations. Memory, 15, 495-507]. Memory specificity did not correlate with correct recognition, but a specific retrieval style was positively correlated with levels of false recognition. It is proposed that the contextual details that frequently accompany false memories of nonstudied lures are more accessible in individuals with specific retrieval styles.

Effects of children's working memory capacity and processing speed on their sentence imitation performance.

PubMed

Poll, Gerard H; Miller, Carol A; Mainela-Arnold, Elina; Adams, Katharine Donnelly; Misra, Maya; Park, Ji Sook

2013-01-01

More limited working memory capacity and slower processing for language and cognitive tasks are characteristics of many children with language difficulties. Individual differences in processing speed have not consistently been found to predict language ability or severity of language impairment. There are conflicting views on whether working memory and processing speed are integrated or separable abilities. To evaluate four models for the relations of individual differences in children's processing speed and working memory capacity in sentence imitation. The models considered whether working memory and processing speed are integrated or separable, as well as the effect of the number of operations required per sentence. The role of working memory as a mediator of the effect of processing speed on sentence imitation was also evaluated. Forty-six children with varied language and reading abilities imitated sentences. Working memory was measured with the Competing Language Processing Task (CLPT), and processing speed was measured with a composite of truth-value judgment and rapid automatized naming tasks. Mixed-effects ordinal regression models evaluated the CLPT and processing speed as predictors of sentence imitation item scores. A single mediator model evaluated working memory as a mediator of the effect of processing speed on sentence imitation total scores. Working memory was a reliable predictor of sentence imitation accuracy, but processing speed predicted sentence imitation only as a component of a processing speed by number of operations interaction. Processing speed predicted working memory capacity, and there was evidence that working memory acted as a mediator of the effect of processing speed on sentence imitation accuracy. The findings support a refined view of working memory and processing speed as separable factors in children's sentence imitation performance. Processing speed does not independently explain sentence imitation accuracy for all sentence types, but contributes when the task requires more mental operations. Processing speed also has an indirect effect on sentence imitation by contributing to working memory capacity. © 2013 Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.

Processing Mechanisms in Hearing-Impaired Listeners: Evidence from Reaction Times and Sentence Interpretation.

PubMed

Carroll, Rebecca; Uslar, Verena; Brand, Thomas; Ruigendijk, Esther

The authors aimed to determine whether hearing impairment affects sentence comprehension beyond phoneme or word recognition (i.e., on the sentence level), and to distinguish grammatically induced processing difficulties in structurally complex sentences from perceptual difficulties associated with listening to degraded speech. Effects of hearing impairment or speech in noise were expected to reflect hearer-specific speech recognition difficulties. Any additional processing time caused by the sustained perceptual challenges across the sentence may either be independent of or interact with top-down processing mechanisms associated with grammatical sentence structure. Forty-nine participants listened to canonical subject-initial or noncanonical object-initial sentences that were presented either in quiet or in noise. Twenty-four participants had mild-to-moderate hearing impairment and received hearing-loss-specific amplification. Twenty-five participants were age-matched peers with normal hearing status. Reaction times were measured on-line at syntactically critical processing points as well as two control points to capture differences in processing mechanisms. An off-line comprehension task served as an additional indicator of sentence (mis)interpretation, and enforced syntactic processing. The authors found general effects of hearing impairment and speech in noise that negatively affected perceptual processing, and an effect of word order, where complex grammar locally caused processing difficulties for the noncanonical sentence structure. Listeners with hearing impairment were hardly affected by noise at the beginning of the sentence, but were affected markedly toward the end of the sentence, indicating a sustained perceptual effect of speech recognition. Comprehension of sentences with noncanonical word order was negatively affected by degraded signals even after sentence presentation. Hearing impairment adds perceptual processing load during sentence processing, but affects grammatical processing beyond the word level to the same degree as in normal hearing, with minor differences in processing mechanisms. The data contribute to our understanding of individual differences in speech perception and language understanding. The authors interpret their results within the ease of language understanding model.

A Deficit in Movement-Derived Sentences in German-Speaking Hearing-Impaired Children

PubMed Central

Ruigendijk, Esther; Friedmann, Naama

2017-01-01

Children with hearing impairment (HI) show disorders in syntax and morphology. The question is whether and how these disorders are connected to problems in the auditory domain. The aim of this paper is to examine whether moderate to severe hearing loss at a young age affects the ability of German-speaking orally trained children to understand and produce sentences. We focused on sentence structures that are derived by syntactic movement, which have been identified as a sensitive marker for syntactic impairment in other languages and in other populations with syntactic impairment. Therefore, our study tested subject and object relatives, subject and object Wh-questions, passive sentences, and topicalized sentences, as well as sentences with verb movement to second sentential position. We tested 19 HI children aged 9;5–13;6 and compared their performance with hearing children using comprehension tasks of sentence-picture matching and sentence repetition tasks. For the comprehension tasks, we included HI children who passed an auditory discrimination task; for the sentence repetition tasks, we selected children who passed a screening task of simple sentence repetition without lip-reading; this made sure that they could perceive the words in the tests, so that we could test their grammatical abilities. The results clearly showed that most of the participants with HI had considerable difficulties in the comprehension and repetition of sentences with syntactic movement: they had significant difficulties understanding object relatives, Wh-questions, and topicalized sentences, and in the repetition of object who and which questions and subject relatives, as well as in sentences with verb movement to second sentential position. Repetition of passives was only problematic for some children. Object relatives were still difficult at this age for both HI and hearing children. An additional important outcome of the study is that not all sentence structures are impaired—passive structures were not problematic for most of the HI children PMID:28659836

Drug offence sentencing practices in the United States of America.

PubMed

Weissman, J C

1984-01-01

The United States criminal justice system, in response to a variety of risks, makes available a range of options to help control drug offenders. Pre-arrest diversion, pre-trial diversion, pre-trial release, probation, split sentencing, warn release, incarceration and parole release are alternative dispositions involving a graduated scale of punishment, incarceration, specific deterrence and rehabilitation. New drug offence sentencing policies are emerging within the criminal justice system. Traditional values of rehabilitation are currently less favoured and contemporary doctrines advocate sentencing based on principles of uniformity and retribution. Drug law sentencing practices are a principal concern of this article and the major policy themes are systematically reviewed. Diversion, criminal responsibility, selective incapacitation, trafficking, and cocaine abuse are examined. Guidelines for policy development are recommended and the analysis covers the related concepts of sentencing ideology, decriminalization, and determinate sentencing models. Specific recommendations are offered for revision of drug offence sentencing policies to incorporate the emerging penal values.

Words That Move Us. The Effects of Sentences on Body Sway

PubMed Central

Stins, John F.; Marmolejo-Ramos, Fernando; Hulzinga, Femke; Wenker, Eric; Cañal-Bruland, Rouwen

2017-01-01

According to the embodied cognition perspective, cognitive systems and perceptuo-motor systems are deeply intertwined and exert a causal effect on each other. A prediction following from this idea is that cognitive activity can result in subtle changes in observable movement. In one experiment, we tested whether reading various sentences resulted in changes in postural sway. Sentences symbolized various human activities involving high, low, or no physical effort. Dutch participants stood upright on a force plate, measuring the body center of pressure, while reading a succession of sentences. High physical effort sentences resulted in more postural sway (greater SD) than low physical effort sentences. This effect only showed up in medio-lateral sway but not anterio-posterior sway. This suggests that sentence comprehension was accompanied by subtle motoric activity, likely mirroring the various activities symbolized in the sentences. We conclude that semantic processing reaches the motor periphery, leading to increased postural activity. PMID:28713451

Role of Two Types of Syntactic Embedding in Belief Attribution in Adults with or without Asperger Syndrome

PubMed Central

Burnel, Morgane Clémentine; Perrone-Bertolotti, Marcela; Durrleman, Stephanie; Reboul, Anne C.; Baciu, Monica

2017-01-01

The role of syntax in belief attribution (BA) is not completely understood in healthy adults and understudied in adults with autism spectrum disorder. Embedded syntax could be useful either for the development of Theory of Mind (ToM) (Emergence account) or more generally over the lifespan (Reasoning account). Two hypotheses have been explored, one suggesting that embedding itself (Relatives and Complement sentences and Metarepresentation account) is important for ToM and another one considering that the embedding of a false proposition into a true one (Complement sentences and Misrepresentation account) is important. The goals of this study were to evaluate (1) the role of syntax in ToM (Emergence vs. Reasoning account), (2) the type of syntax implied in ToM (Metarepresentation vs. Misrepresentation account), and (3) the verbally mediated strategies which compensate for ToM deficits in adults with Asperger Syndrome (AS). Fifty NeuroTypical (NT) adults and 22 adults with AS were involved in a forced-choice task including ±ToM tasks (BA and a control task, physical causation, PC) under four Interference conditions (silence, syllable repetition, relative sentences repetition, and complement sentences repetition). The non-significant ±ToM × Interference interaction effect in the NT group did not support the Reasoning account and thus suggests that syntax is useful only for ToM development (i.e., Emergence account). Results also indicated that repeating complement clauses put NT participants in a dual task whereas repeating relative clauses did not, suggesting that repeating relatives is easier for NT than repeating complements. This could be an argument in favor of the Misrepresentation account. However, this result should be interpreted with caution because our results did not support the Reasoning account. Moreover, AS participants (but not NT participants) were more disrupted by ±ToM tasks when asked to repeat complement sentences compared to relative clause sentences. This result is in favor of the Misrepresentation account and indirectly suggests verbally mediated strategies for ToM in AS. To summarize, our results are in favor of the Emergence account in NT and of Reasoning and Misrepresentation accounts in adults with AS. Overall, this suggests that adults with AS use complement syntax to compensate for ToM deficits. PMID:28553246

Role of Two Types of Syntactic Embedding in Belief Attribution in Adults with or without Asperger Syndrome.

PubMed

Burnel, Morgane Clémentine; Perrone-Bertolotti, Marcela; Durrleman, Stephanie; Reboul, Anne C; Baciu, Monica

2017-01-01

The role of syntax in belief attribution (BA) is not completely understood in healthy adults and understudied in adults with autism spectrum disorder. Embedded syntax could be useful either for the development of Theory of Mind (ToM) ( Emergence account) or more generally over the lifespan ( Reasoning account). Two hypotheses have been explored, one suggesting that embedding itself (Relatives and Complement sentences and Metarepresentation account) is important for ToM and another one considering that the embedding of a false proposition into a true one (Complement sentences and Misrepresentation account) is important. The goals of this study were to evaluate (1) the role of syntax in ToM ( Emergence vs. Reasoning account), (2) the type of syntax implied in ToM ( Metarepresentation vs. Misrepresentation account), and (3) the verbally mediated strategies which compensate for ToM deficits in adults with Asperger Syndrome (AS). Fifty NeuroTypical (NT) adults and 22 adults with AS were involved in a forced-choice task including ±ToM tasks (BA and a control task, physical causation, PC) under four Interference conditions (silence, syllable repetition, relative sentences repetition, and complement sentences repetition). The non-significant ±ToM × Interference interaction effect in the NT group did not support the Reasoning account and thus suggests that syntax is useful only for ToM development (i.e., Emergence account). Results also indicated that repeating complement clauses put NT participants in a dual task whereas repeating relative clauses did not, suggesting that repeating relatives is easier for NT than repeating complements. This could be an argument in favor of the Misrepresentation account. However, this result should be interpreted with caution because our results did not support the Reasoning account. Moreover, AS participants (but not NT participants) were more disrupted by ±ToM tasks when asked to repeat complement sentences compared to relative clause sentences. This result is in favor of the Misrepresentation account and indirectly suggests verbally mediated strategies for ToM in AS. To summarize, our results are in favor of the Emergence account in NT and of Reasoning and Misrepresentation accounts in adults with AS. Overall, this suggests that adults with AS use complement syntax to compensate for ToM deficits.

A Sentence Repetition Task for Catalan-Speaking Typically-Developing Children and Children with Specific Language Impairment

PubMed Central

Gavarró, Anna

2017-01-01

It is common to find that so-called minority languages enjoy fewer (if any) diagnostic tools than the so-called majority languages. This has repercussions for the detection and proper assessment of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) brought up in these languages. With a view to remedy this situation for Catalan, I developed a sentence repetition task to assess grammatical maturity in school-age children; in current practice, Catalan-speaking children are assessed with tests translated from Spanish, with disregard of the fact that the markers of SLI may differ substantially from one language to another, even between closely related languages. The test proposed here is inspired by SASIT [School-Age Sentence Imitation Test – English], designed for English by Marinis et al. (2011); some of the constructions targeted are challenging in a subset of languages, but not others, and are included because they are indeed affected in Catalan SLI; other constructions appear to be disrupted universally. The test involves canonical SVO sentences, sentences with third person accusative clitics (known to be problematic in Catalan SLI, but not in Spanish), passives, wh- interrogatives, subordinate clauses, subject and object relatives and conditionals. The test was administered to thirty typically developing 6- and 7-year-olds (as reported in Gavarró et al., 2012b), and five children diagnosed with SLI (mean age 10;7). The results of the task were scored under two systems: (i) identical vs. non-identical repetition and (ii) identical, grammatical and ungrammatical repetition, with detail regarding the error type. The results for typically developing and SLI children showed differences between the groups: identical repetition was found in 88.9% of cases for typically developing children but only 48% for SLI children. Ungrammatical productions were higher for the SLI group, and so were grammatical but different repetitions, a trend which was found in every child individually. The results are compared to those available in the literature for similar languages and I discuss the impact of grammatical variation in language performance, in both typical and impaired development. PMID:29163261

A Study of the Speed of Understanding Sentences as a Function of Sentence Structure. Final Report.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Halamandaris, Pandelis G.

On the basis of the grammatical theory developed by Noam Chomsky, it is reasonable to presume that the different parts of a sentence may not all be understood with equal facility and speed. One purpose of this study was to determine whether some of the grammatical relations within a sentence were understood more readily than others. Sentences of…

Verb and sentence production and comprehension in aphasia: Northwestern Assessment of Verbs and Sentences (NAVS)

PubMed Central

Cho-Reyes, Soojin; Thompson, Cynthia K.

2015-01-01

Background Verbs and sentences are often impaired in individuals with aphasia, and differential impairment patterns are associated with different types of aphasia. With currently available test batteries, however, it is challenging to provide a comprehensive profile of aphasic language impairments because they do not examine syntactically important properties of verbs and sentences. Aims This study presents data derived from the Northwestern Assessment of Verbs and Sentences (NAVS; Thompson, 2011), a new test battery designed to examine syntactic deficits in aphasia. The NAVS includes tests for verb naming and comprehension, and production of verb argument structure in simple active sentences, with each examining the effects of the number and optionality of arguments. The NAVS also tests production and comprehension of canonical and non-canonical sentences. Methods & Procedures A total of 59 aphasic participants (35 agrammatic and 24 anomic) were tested using a set of action pictures. Participants produced verbs or sentences for the production subtests and identified pictures corresponding to auditorily provided verbs or sentences for the comprehension subtests. Outcomes & Results The agrammatic group, compared to the anomic group, performed significantly more poorly on all subtests except verb comprehension, and for both groups comprehension was less impaired than production. On verb naming and argument structure production tests both groups exhibited difficulty with three-argument verbs, affected by the number and optionality of arguments. However, production of sentences using three-argument verbs was more impaired in the agrammatic, compared to the anomic, group. On sentence production and comprehension tests, the agrammatic group showed impairments in all types of non-canonical sentences, whereas the anomic group exhibited difficulty primarily with the most difficult, object relative, structures. Conclusions Results show that verb and sentence deficits seen in individuals with agrammatic aphasia are largely influenced by syntactic complexity; however, individuals with anomic aphasia appear to exhibit these impairments only for the most complex forms of verbs and sentences. The present data indicate that the NAVS is useful for characterising verb and sentence deficits in people with aphasia. PMID:26379358

The Neuronal Correlates of Indeterminate Sentence Comprehension: An fMRI Study

PubMed Central

de Almeida, Roberto G.; Riven, Levi; Manouilidou, Christina; Lungu, Ovidiu; Dwivedi, Veena D.; Jarema, Gonia; Gillon, Brendan

2016-01-01

Sentences such as The author started the book are indeterminate because they do not make explicit what the subject (the author) started doing with the object (the book). In principle, indeterminate sentences allow for an infinite number of interpretations. One theory, however, assumes that these sentences are resolved by semantic coercion, a linguistic process that forces the noun book to be interpreted as an activity (e.g., writing the book) or by a process that interpolates this activity information in the resulting enriched semantic composition. An alternative theory, pragmatic, assumes classical semantic composition, whereby meaning arises from the denotation of words and how they are combined syntactically, with enrichment obtained via pragmatic inferences beyond linguistic-semantic processes. Cognitive neuroscience studies investigating the neuroanatomical and functional correlates of indeterminate sentences have shown activations either at the ventromedial pre-frontal cortex (vmPFC) or at the left inferior frontal gyrus (L-IFG). These studies have supported the semantic coercion theory assuming that one of these regions is where enriched semantic composition takes place. Employing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we found that indeterminate sentences activate bilaterally the superior temporal gyrus (STG), the right inferior frontal gyrus (R-IFG), and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), more so than control sentences (The author wrote the book). Activation of indeterminate sentences exceeded that of anomalous sentences (…drank the book) and engaged more left- and right-hemisphere areas than other sentence types. We suggest that the widespread activations for indeterminate sentences represent the deployment of pragmatic-inferential processes, which seek to enrich sentence content without necessarily resorting to semantic coercion. PMID:28066204

A Shared Neural Substrate for Mentalizing and the Affective Component of Sentence Comprehension

PubMed Central

Hervé, Pierre-Yves; Razafimandimby, Annick; Jobard, Gaël; Tzourio-Mazoyer, Nathalie

2013-01-01

Using event-related fMRI in a sample of 42 healthy participants, we compared the cerebral activity maps obtained when classifying spoken sentences based on the mental content of the main character (belief, deception or empathy) or on the emotional tonality of the sentence (happiness, anger or sadness). To control for the effects of different syntactic constructions (such as embedded clauses in belief sentences), we subtracted from each map the BOLD activations obtained during plausibility judgments on structurally matching sentences, devoid of emotions or ToM. The obtained theory of mind (ToM) and emotional speech comprehension networks overlapped in the bilateral temporo-parietal junction, posterior cingulate cortex, right anterior temporal lobe, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and in the left inferior frontal sulcus. These regions form a ToM network, which contributes to the emotional component of spoken sentence comprehension. Compared with the ToM task, in which the sentences were enounced on a neutral tone, the emotional sentence classification task, in which the sentences were play-acted, was associated with a greater activity in the bilateral superior temporal sulcus, in line with the presence of emotional prosody. Besides, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex was more active during emotional than ToM sentence processing. This region may link mental state representations with verbal and prosodic emotional cues. Compared with emotional sentence classification, ToM was associated with greater activity in the caudate nucleus, paracingulate cortex, and superior frontal and parietal regions, in line with behavioral data showing that ToM sentence comprehension was a more demanding task. PMID:23342148

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

PubMed

Kazanina, Nina

2017-11-01

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

Lexical and affective prosody in children with high-functioning autism.

PubMed

Grossman, Ruth B; Bemis, Rhyannon H; Plesa Skwerer, Daniela; Tager-Flusberg, Helen

2010-06-01

To investigate the perception and production of lexical stress and processing of affective prosody in adolescents with high-functioning autism (HFA). We hypothesized preserved processing of lexical and affective prosody but atypical lexical prosody production. Sixteen children with HFA and 15 typically developing (TD) peers participated in 3 experiments that examined the following: (a) perception of affective prosody (Experiment 1), (b) lexical stress perception (Experiment 2), and (c) lexical stress production (Experiment 3). In Experiment 1, participants labeled sad, happy, and neutral spoken sentences that were low-pass filtered, to eliminate verbal content. In Experiment 2, participants disambiguated word meanings based on lexical stress (HOTdog vs. hot DOG). In Experiment 3, participants produced these words in a sentence completion task. Productions were analyzed with acoustic measures. Accuracy levels showed no group differences. Participants with HFA could determine affect from filtered sentences and disambiguate words on the basis of lexical stress. They produced appropriately differentiated lexical stress patterns but demonstrated atypically long productions, indicating reduced ability in natural prosody production. Children with HFA were as capable as their TD peers in receptive tasks of lexical stress and affective prosody. Prosody productions were atypically long, despite accurate differentiation of lexical stress patterns. Future research should use larger samples and spontaneous versus elicited productions.

[Cognitive aging mechanism of signaling effects on the memory for procedural sentences].

PubMed

Yamamoto, Hiroki; Shimada, Hideaki

2006-08-01

The aim of this study was to clarify the cognitive aging mechanism of signaling effects on the memory for procedural sentences. Participants were 60 younger adults (college students) and 60 older adults. Both age groups were assigned into two groups; half of each group was presented with procedural sentences with signals that highlighted their top-level structure and the other half with procedural sentences without them. Both groups were requested to perform the sentence arrangement task and the reconstruction task. Each task was composed of procedural sentences with or without signals. Results indicated that signaling supported changes in strategy utilization during the successive organizational processes and that changes in strategy utilization resulting from signaling improved the memory for procedural sentences. Moreover, age-related factors interfered with these signaling effects. This study clarified the cognitive aging mechanism of signaling effects in which signaling supports changes in the strategy utilization during organizational processes at encoding and this mediation promotes memory for procedural sentences, though disuse of the strategy utilization due to aging restrains their memory for procedural sentences.

Sentence Verification, Sentence Recognition, and the Semantic-Episodic Distinction

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Shoben, Edward J.; And Others

1978-01-01

In an attempt to assess the validity of the distinction between episodic and semantic memory, this research examined the influence of two variables on sentence verification (presumably a semantic memory task) and sentence recognition (presumably an episodic memory task). ( Editor)

78 FR 36641 - Sentencing Guidelines for United States Courts

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2013-06-18

... UNITED STATES SENTENCING COMMISSION Sentencing Guidelines for United States Courts AGENCY: United States Sentencing Commission. ACTION: Notice of period during which individuals may apply to be appointed to certain voting memberships of the Practitioners Advisory Group; request for applications. SUMMARY...

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2011-06-30

... UNITED STATES SENTENCING COMMISSION Sentencing Guidelines for United States Courts AGENCY: United States Sentencing Commission. ACTION: Notice of period during which individuals may apply to be appointed to certain voting memberships of the Practitioners Advisory Group; request for applications. SUMMARY...

Neural correlate of the construction of sentence meaning

PubMed Central

Fedorenko, Evelina; Brunner, Peter; Pritchett, Brianna; Kanwisher, Nancy

2016-01-01

The neural processes that underlie your ability to read and understand this sentence are unknown. Sentence comprehension occurs very rapidly, and can only be understood at a mechanistic level by discovering the precise sequence of underlying computational and neural events. However, we have no continuous and online neural measure of sentence processing with high spatial and temporal resolution. Here we report just such a measure: intracranial recordings from the surface of the human brain show that neural activity, indexed by γ-power, increases monotonically over the course of a sentence as people read it. This steady increase in activity is absent when people read and remember nonword-lists, despite the higher cognitive demand entailed, ruling out accounts in terms of generic attention, working memory, and cognitive load. Response increases are lower for sentence structure without meaning (“Jabberwocky” sentences) and word meaning without sentence structure (word-lists), showing that this effect is not explained by responses to syntax or word meaning alone. Instead, the full effect is found only for sentences, implicating compositional processes of sentence understanding, a striking and unique feature of human language not shared with animal communication systems. This work opens up new avenues for investigating the sequence of neural events that underlie the construction of linguistic meaning. PMID:27671642

Sentence-position effects on children's perception and production of English third person singular -s.

PubMed

Sundara, Megha; Demuth, Katherine; Kuhl, Patricia K

2011-02-01

Two-year-olds produce third person singular -s more accurately on verbs in sentence-final position as compared with verbs in sentence-medial position. This study was designed to determine whether these sentence-position effects can be explained by perceptual factors. For this purpose, the authors compared 22- and 27-month-olds' perception and elicited production of third person singular -s in sentence-medial versus-final position. The authors assessed perception by measuring looking/listening times to a 1-screen display of a cartoon paired with a grammatical versus an ungrammatical sentence (e.g., She eats now vs. She eat now). Children at both ages demonstrated sensitivity to the presence/absence of this inflectional morpheme in sentence-final, but not sentence-medial, position. Children were also more accurate at producing third person singular -s sentence finally, and production accuracy was predicted by vocabulary measures as well as by performance on the perception task. These results indicate that children's more accurate production of third person singular -s in sentence-final position cannot be explained by articulatory factors alone but that perceptual factors play an important role in accounting for early patterns of production. The findings also indicate that perception and production of inflectional morphemes may be more closely related than previously thought.

Predicate Argument Structure Frames for Modeling Information in Operative Notes

PubMed Central

Wang, Yan; Pakhomov, Serguei; Melton, Genevieve B.

2015-01-01

The rich information about surgical procedures contained in operative notes is a valuable data source for improving the clinical evidence base and clinical research. In this study, we propose a set of Predicate Argument Structure (PAS) frames for surgical action verbs to assist in the creation of an information extraction (IE) system to automatically extract details about the techniques, equipment, and operative steps from operative notes. We created PropBank style PAS frames for the 30 top surgical action verbs based on examination of randomly selected sample sentences from 3,000 Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy notes. To assess completeness of the PAS frames to represent usage of same action verbs, we evaluated the PAS frames created on sample sentences from operative notes of 6 other gastrointestinal surgical procedures. Our results showed that the PAS frames created with one type of surgery can successfully denote the usage of the same verbs in operative notes of broader surgical categories. PMID:23920664

Long-lasting perceptual priming and semantic learning in amnesia: a case experiment.

PubMed

Tulving, E; Hayman, C A; Macdonald, C A

1991-07-01

An investigation of perceptual priming and semantic learning in the severely amnesic subject K.C. is reported. He was taught 64 three-word sentences and tested for his ability to produce the final word of each sentence. Despite a total lack of episodic memory, he exhibited (a) strong perceptual priming effects in word-fragment completion, which were retained essentially in full strength for 12 months, and (b) independent of perceptual priming, learning of new semantic facts, many of which were also retained for 12 months. K.C.'s semantic learning may be at least partly attributable to repeated study trials and minimal interference during learning. The findings suggest that perceptual priming and semantic learning are subserved by two memory systems different from episodic memory and that both systems (perceptual representation and semantic memory) are at least partially preserved in some amnesic subjects.

Overgeneral past and future thinking in dysphoria: the role of emotional cues and cueing methodology.

PubMed

Anderson, Rachel J; Boland, Jennifer; Garner, Sarah R

2016-01-01

Overgeneral memory, where individuals exhibit difficulties in retrieving specific episodes from autobiographical memory, has been consistently linked with emotional disorders. However, the majority of this literature has relied upon a single methodology, in which participants respond to emotional cue words with explicit instructions to retrieve/simulate specific events. Through the use of sentence completion tasks the current studies explored whether overgenerality represents a habitual pattern of thinking that extends to how individuals naturally consider their personal past and future life story. In both studies, when compared with controls, dysphoric individuals evidenced overgeneral thinking style with respect to their personal past. However, overgeneral future thinking was only evident when the sentence stems included emotional words. These findings highlight the importance of investigating the overgenerality phenomenon using a variety of cueing techniques and results are discussed with reference to the previous literature exploring overgenerality and cognitive models of depression.

The effect of implied orientation derived from verbal context on picture recognition.

PubMed

Stanfield, R A; Zwaan, R A

2001-03-01

Perceptual symbol systems assume an analogue relationship between a symbol and its referent, whereas amodal symbol systems assume an arbitrary relationship between a symbol and its referent. According to perceptual symbol theories, the complete representation of an object, called a simulation, should reflect physical characteristics of the object. Amodal theories, in contrast, do not make this prediction. We tested the hypothesis, derived from perceptual symbol theories, that people mentally represent the orientation of an object implied by a verbal description. Orientation (vertical-horizontal) was manipulated by having participants read a sentence that implicitly suggested a particular orientation for an object. Then recognition latencies to pictures of the object in each of the two orientations were measured. Pictures matching the orientation of the object implied by the sentence were responded to faster than pictures that did not match the orientation. This finding is interpreted as offering support for theories positing perceptual symbol systems.

75 FR 41279 - Sentencing Guidelines for United States Courts

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2010-07-15

... UNITED STATES SENTENCING COMMISSION Sentencing Guidelines for United States Courts AGENCY: United... Commission submitted to the Congress amendments to the sentencing guidelines and official commentary, which... calculation of the criminal history score, has the effect of lowering guideline ranges. The Commission...

77 FR 71681 - Sentencing Guidelines for United States Courts

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2012-12-03

... UNITED STATES SENTENCING COMMISSION Sentencing Guidelines for United States Courts AGENCY: United States Sentencing Commission. ACTION: Notice of period during which individuals may apply to be appointed to a certain voting membership of the Practitioners Advisory Group; request for applications. SUMMARY...

77 FR 31071 - Sentencing Guidelines for United States Courts

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2012-05-24

... UNITED STATES SENTENCING COMMISSION Sentencing Guidelines for United States Courts AGENCY: United States Sentencing Commission. ACTION: Notice of period during which individuals may apply to be appointed to voting memberships of the Victims Advisory Group; request for applications. SUMMARY: In view of...

The Classical Theory of Composition; From Its Origins to the Present: A Historical Survey (University of North Carolina Studies in Comparative Literature, No. 53.)

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Scaglione, Aldo

The major purpose of this study is the descriptive analysis of a large body of literature, mainly technical, which attempts to explain the structure of sentences and ordering of their elements, on the linguistic and artistic levels. It is hoped that this study helps to document the relevance of technical material for the proper understanding of…

Sentence Level Information Patterns for Novelty Detection

DTIC Science & Technology

2006-07-01

had new discourse entities that were not found in the growing history list of discourse entities. Eichmann et al [38] considered the number of new...TREC2002: Question Answering and Novelty Tracks”, TREC 2002. [10] D. Eichmann and P. Srinivasan. “Novel Results and Some Answers, The University...D. Eichmann , P. Srinivasan, M. Light, H. Wang, X. Y. Qiu, R. J. Arens, and A. Sehgal, “Experiments in Novelty, Genes and Questions at the

Translations on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, Number 308

DTIC Science & Technology

1977-07-01

17 June (AFP)—A Swedish girl, Annica Carrson, 21, was today sentenced to 2 and a half months jail for possession of heroin. Four Malaysians (words...visiting Malaysia by two Malaysians in Sweden and fell into bad company here. CSO: 5300 SINGAPORE BRIEFS DRUG TRAFFICKER SENTENCED—In the...Vincennes University in the cinema and music depart- ments. The arrest was made on two separate occasions. On 25 May, Commissioner Andre Soleres

University of Glasgow at TREC 2008: Experiments in Blog, Enterprise, and Relevance Feedback Tracks with Terrier

DTIC Science & Technology

2008-11-01

improves our TREC 2007 dictionary -based approach by automatically building an internal opinion dictionary from the collection itself. We measure the opin...detecting opinionated documents. The first approach improves our TREC 2007 dictionary -based approach by automat- ically building an internal opinion... dictionary from the collection itself. The second approach is based on the OpinionFinder tool, which identifies subjective sentences in text. In particular

The sentence wrap-up dogma.

PubMed

Stowe, Laurie A; Kaan, Edith; Sabourin, Laura; Taylor, Ryan C

2018-03-30

Current sentence processing research has focused on early effects of the on-line incremental processes that are performed at each word or constituent during processing. However, less attention has been devoted to what happens at the end of the clause or sentence. More specifically, over the last decade and a half, a lot of effort has been put into avoiding measuring event-related brain potentials (ERPs) at the final word of a sentence, because of the possible effects of sentence wrap-up. This article reviews the evidence on how and when sentence wrap-up impacts behavioral and ERP results. Even though the end of the sentence is associated with a positive-going ERP wave, thus far this effect has not been associated with any factors hypothesized to affect wrap-up. In addition, ERP responses to violations have not been affected by this positivity. "Sentence-final" negativities reported in the literature are not unique to sentence final positions, nor do they obscure or distort ERP effects associated with linguistic manipulations. Finally, the empirical evidence used to argue that sentence-final ERPs are different from those recorded at sentence-medial positions is weak at most. Measuring ERPs at sentence-final positions is therefore certainly not to be avoided at all costs, especially not in cases where the structure of the language under investigation requires it. More importantly, researchers should follow rigorous method in their experimental design, avoid decision tasks which may induce ERP confounds, and ensure all other possible explanations for results are considered. Although this article is directed at a particular dogma from a particular literature, this review shows that it is important to reassess what is regarded as "general knowledge" from time to time. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Working Memory Training and Speech in Noise Comprehension in Older Adults.

PubMed

Wayne, Rachel V; Hamilton, Cheryl; Jones Huyck, Julia; Johnsrude, Ingrid S

2016-01-01

Understanding speech in the presence of background sound can be challenging for older adults. Speech comprehension in noise appears to depend on working memory and executive-control processes (e.g., Heald and Nusbaum, 2014), and their augmentation through training may have rehabilitative potential for age-related hearing loss. We examined the efficacy of adaptive working-memory training (Cogmed; Klingberg et al., 2002) in 24 older adults, assessing generalization to other working-memory tasks (near-transfer) and to other cognitive domains (far-transfer) using a cognitive test battery, including the Reading Span test, sensitive to working memory (e.g., Daneman and Carpenter, 1980). We also assessed far transfer to speech-in-noise performance, including a closed-set sentence task (Kidd et al., 2008). To examine the effect of cognitive training on benefit obtained from semantic context, we also assessed transfer to open-set sentences; half were semantically coherent (high-context) and half were semantically anomalous (low-context). Subjects completed 25 sessions (0.5-1 h each; 5 sessions/week) of both adaptive working memory training and placebo training over 10 weeks in a crossover design. Subjects' scores on the adaptive working-memory training tasks improved as a result of training. However, training did not transfer to other working memory tasks, nor to tasks recruiting other cognitive domains. We did not observe any training-related improvement in speech-in-noise performance. Measures of working memory correlated with the intelligibility of low-context, but not high-context, sentences, suggesting that sentence context may reduce the load on working memory. The Reading Span test significantly correlated only with a test of visual episodic memory, suggesting that the Reading Span test is not a pure-test of working memory, as is commonly assumed.

Working Memory Training and Speech in Noise Comprehension in Older Adults

PubMed Central

Wayne, Rachel V.; Hamilton, Cheryl; Jones Huyck, Julia; Johnsrude, Ingrid S.

2016-01-01

Understanding speech in the presence of background sound can be challenging for older adults. Speech comprehension in noise appears to depend on working memory and executive-control processes (e.g., Heald and Nusbaum, 2014), and their augmentation through training may have rehabilitative potential for age-related hearing loss. We examined the efficacy of adaptive working-memory training (Cogmed; Klingberg et al., 2002) in 24 older adults, assessing generalization to other working-memory tasks (near-transfer) and to other cognitive domains (far-transfer) using a cognitive test battery, including the Reading Span test, sensitive to working memory (e.g., Daneman and Carpenter, 1980). We also assessed far transfer to speech-in-noise performance, including a closed-set sentence task (Kidd et al., 2008). To examine the effect of cognitive training on benefit obtained from semantic context, we also assessed transfer to open-set sentences; half were semantically coherent (high-context) and half were semantically anomalous (low-context). Subjects completed 25 sessions (0.5–1 h each; 5 sessions/week) of both adaptive working memory training and placebo training over 10 weeks in a crossover design. Subjects' scores on the adaptive working-memory training tasks improved as a result of training. However, training did not transfer to other working memory tasks, nor to tasks recruiting other cognitive domains. We did not observe any training-related improvement in speech-in-noise performance. Measures of working memory correlated with the intelligibility of low-context, but not high-context, sentences, suggesting that sentence context may reduce the load on working memory. The Reading Span test significantly correlated only with a test of visual episodic memory, suggesting that the Reading Span test is not a pure-test of working memory, as is commonly assumed. PMID:27047370

Individual differences in executive control relate to metaphor processing: an eye movement study of sentence reading

PubMed Central

Columbus, Georgie; Sheikh, Naveed A.; Côté-Lecaldare, Marilena; Häuser, Katja; Baum, Shari R.; Titone, Debra

2015-01-01

Metaphors are common elements of language that allow us to creatively stretch the limits of word meaning. However, metaphors vary in their degree of novelty, which determines whether people must create new meanings on-line or retrieve previously known metaphorical meanings from memory. Such variations affect the degree to which general cognitive capacities such as executive control are required for successful comprehension. We investigated whether individual differences in executive control relate to metaphor processing using eye movement measures of reading. Thirty-nine participants read sentences including metaphors or idioms, another form of figurative language that is more likely to rely on meaning retrieval. They also completed the AX-CPT, a domain-general executive control task. In Experiment 1, we examined sentences containing metaphorical or literal uses of verbs, presented with or without prior context. In Experiment 2, we examined sentences containing idioms or literal phrases for the same participants to determine whether the link to executive control was qualitatively similar or different to Experiment 1. When metaphors were low familiar, all people read verbs used as metaphors more slowly than verbs used literally (this difference was smaller for high familiar metaphors). Executive control capacity modulated this pattern in that high executive control readers spent more time reading verbs when a prior context forced a particular interpretation (metaphorical or literal), and they had faster total metaphor reading times when there was a prior context. Interestingly, executive control did not relate to idiom processing for the same readers. Here, all readers had faster total reading times for high familiar idioms than literal phrases. Thus, executive control relates to metaphor but not idiom processing for these readers, and for the particular metaphor and idiom reading manipulations presented. PMID:25628557

Individual differences in executive control relate to metaphor processing: an eye movement study of sentence reading.

PubMed

Columbus, Georgie; Sheikh, Naveed A; Côté-Lecaldare, Marilena; Häuser, Katja; Baum, Shari R; Titone, Debra

2014-01-01

Metaphors are common elements of language that allow us to creatively stretch the limits of word meaning. However, metaphors vary in their degree of novelty, which determines whether people must create new meanings on-line or retrieve previously known metaphorical meanings from memory. Such variations affect the degree to which general cognitive capacities such as executive control are required for successful comprehension. We investigated whether individual differences in executive control relate to metaphor processing using eye movement measures of reading. Thirty-nine participants read sentences including metaphors or idioms, another form of figurative language that is more likely to rely on meaning retrieval. They also completed the AX-CPT, a domain-general executive control task. In Experiment 1, we examined sentences containing metaphorical or literal uses of verbs, presented with or without prior context. In Experiment 2, we examined sentences containing idioms or literal phrases for the same participants to determine whether the link to executive control was qualitatively similar or different to Experiment 1. When metaphors were low familiar, all people read verbs used as metaphors more slowly than verbs used literally (this difference was smaller for high familiar metaphors). Executive control capacity modulated this pattern in that high executive control readers spent more time reading verbs when a prior context forced a particular interpretation (metaphorical or literal), and they had faster total metaphor reading times when there was a prior context. Interestingly, executive control did not relate to idiom processing for the same readers. Here, all readers had faster total reading times for high familiar idioms than literal phrases. Thus, executive control relates to metaphor but not idiom processing for these readers, and for the particular metaphor and idiom reading manipulations presented.

Learning Minature Linguistic Systems: Effects of English Language Habits and Concomitant Meaning Conditioning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Miller, Adam

1973-01-01

Forty participants who learned ten sentences and who were tested for recall and ability to generate new sentences demonstrated that the closer the sentence order was to natural language order, the better the recall and new sentence generation. (Author/KM)

Context and the Spelling-to-Sound Regularity Effect in Pronunciation.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Parkin, Alan J.; Ilett, Alison

1986-01-01

Examines how spelling-to-sound irregularity affects pronunciation latencies when words are presented in a sentence, and concludes that pronunciation latencies are strongly affected by the type of preceding sentence, with the specific sentences producing shorter latencies than the general sentences. (HOD)

75 FR 13680 - Commutation of Sentence: Technical Change

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2010-03-23

... Sentence: Technical Change AGENCY: Bureau of Prisons, Justice. ACTION: Interim rule. SUMMARY: This document makes a minor technical change to the Bureau of Prisons (Bureau) regulations on sentence commutation to.... Commutation of Sentence: Technical Change This document makes a minor technical change to the Bureau...

Context Strengthens Initial Misinterpretations of Text

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Christianson, Kiel; Luke, Steven G.

2011-01-01

Three self-paced reading experiments examined the effect of context on interpreting subsequent sentences and in the difficulty of revising initial misinterpretations of subsequent temporarily ambiguous sentences. Target sentences containing noun phrase/sentence (NP/S) coordination ambiguities were preceded by contexts that either did or did not…

Effects of syntactic structure in the memory of concrete and abstract Chinese sentences.

PubMed

Ho, C S; Chen, H C

1993-09-01

Smith (1981) found that concrete English sentences were better recognized than abstract sentences and that this concreteness effect was potent only when the concrete sentence was also affirmative but the effect switched to an opposite end when the concrete sentence was negative. These results were partially replicated in Experiment 1 by using materials from a very different language (i.e., Chinese): concrete-affirmative sentences were better remembered than concrete-negative and abstract sentences, but no reliable difference was found between the latter two types. In Experiment 2, the task was modified by using a visual presentation instead of an oral one as in Experiment 1. Both concrete-affirmative and concrete-negative sentences were better memorized then abstract ones in Experiment 2. The findings in the two experiments are explained by a combination of the dual-coding model and Marschark's (1985) item-specific and relational processing. The differential effects of experience with different language systems on processing verbal materials in memory are also discussed.

What's in a sentence? The crucial role of lexical content in sentence production in nonfluent aphasia.

PubMed

Speer, Paula; Wilshire, Carolyn E

2013-01-01

This study investigated the effect of lexical content on sentence production in nonfluent aphasia. Five participants with nonfluent aphasia, four with fluent aphasia, and eight controls were asked to describe pictured events in subject-verb-object sentences. Experiment 1 manipulated speed of lexical retrieval by varying the frequency of sentence nouns. Nonfluent participants' accuracy was consistently higher for sentences commencing with a high- than with a low-frequency subject noun, even when errors on those nouns were themselves excluded. This was not the case for the fluent participants. Experiment 2 manipulated the semantic relationship between subject and object nouns. The nonfluent participants produced sentences less accurately when they contained related than when they contained unrelated lexical items. The fluent participants exhibited the opposite trend. We propose that individuals with nonfluent aphasia are disproportionately reliant on activated conceptual-lexical representations to drive the sentence generation process, an idea we call the content drives structure (COST) hypothesis.

Grasping Ideas with the Motor System: Semantic Somatotopy in Idiom Comprehension

PubMed Central

Hauk, Olaf; Pulvermüller, Friedemann

2009-01-01

Single words and sentences referring to bodily actions activate the motor cortex. However, this semantic grounding of concrete language does not address the critical question whether the sensory–motor system contributes to the processing of abstract meaning and thought. We examined functional magnetic resonance imaging activation to idioms and literal sentences including arm- and leg-related action words. A common left fronto-temporal network was engaged in sentence reading, with idioms yielding relatively stronger activity in (pre)frontal and middle temporal cortex. Crucially, somatotopic activation along the motor strip, in central and precentral cortex, was elicited by idiomatic and literal sentences, reflecting the body part reference of the words embedded in the sentences. Semantic somatotopy was most pronounced after sentence ending, thus reflecting sentence-level processing rather than that of single words. These results indicate that semantic representations grounded in the sensory–motor system play a role in the composition of sentence-level meaning, even in the case of idioms. PMID:19068489

A Knowledge-Based Arrangement of Prototypical Neural Representation Prior to Experience Contributes to Selectivity in Upcoming Knowledge Acquisition.

PubMed

Kurashige, Hiroki; Yamashita, Yuichi; Hanakawa, Takashi; Honda, Manabu

2018-01-01

Knowledge acquisition is a process in which one actively selects a piece of information from the environment and assimilates it with prior knowledge. However, little is known about the neural mechanism underlying selectivity in knowledge acquisition. Here we executed a 2-day human experiment to investigate the involvement of characteristic spontaneous activity resembling a so-called "preplay" in selectivity in sentence comprehension, an instance of knowledge acquisition. On day 1, we presented 10 sentences (prior sentences) that were difficult to understand on their own. On the following day, we first measured the resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Then, we administered a sentence comprehension task using 20 new sentences (posterior sentences). The posterior sentences were also difficult to understand on their own, but some could be associated with prior sentences to facilitate their understanding. Next, we measured the posterior sentence-induced fMRI to identify the neural representation. From the resting-state fMRI, we extracted the appearances of activity patterns similar to the neural representations for posterior sentences. Importantly, the resting-state fMRI was measured before giving the posterior sentences, and thus such appearances could be considered as preplay-like or prototypical neural representations. We compared the intensities of such appearances with the understanding of posterior sentences. This gave a positive correlation between these two variables, but only if posterior sentences were associated with prior sentences. Additional analysis showed the contribution of the entorhinal cortex, rather than the hippocampus, to the correlation. The present study suggests that prior knowledge-based arrangement of neural activity before an experience contributes to the active selection of information to be learned. Such arrangement prior to an experience resembles preplay activity observed in the rodent brain. In terms of knowledge acquisition, the present study leads to a new view of the brain (or more precisely of the brain's knowledge) as an autopoietic system in which the brain (or knowledge) selects what it should learn by itself, arranges preplay-like activity as a position for the new information in advance, and actively reorganizes itself.

A Knowledge-Based Arrangement of Prototypical Neural Representation Prior to Experience Contributes to Selectivity in Upcoming Knowledge Acquisition

PubMed Central

Kurashige, Hiroki; Yamashita, Yuichi; Hanakawa, Takashi; Honda, Manabu

2018-01-01

Knowledge acquisition is a process in which one actively selects a piece of information from the environment and assimilates it with prior knowledge. However, little is known about the neural mechanism underlying selectivity in knowledge acquisition. Here we executed a 2-day human experiment to investigate the involvement of characteristic spontaneous activity resembling a so-called “preplay” in selectivity in sentence comprehension, an instance of knowledge acquisition. On day 1, we presented 10 sentences (prior sentences) that were difficult to understand on their own. On the following day, we first measured the resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Then, we administered a sentence comprehension task using 20 new sentences (posterior sentences). The posterior sentences were also difficult to understand on their own, but some could be associated with prior sentences to facilitate their understanding. Next, we measured the posterior sentence-induced fMRI to identify the neural representation. From the resting-state fMRI, we extracted the appearances of activity patterns similar to the neural representations for posterior sentences. Importantly, the resting-state fMRI was measured before giving the posterior sentences, and thus such appearances could be considered as preplay-like or prototypical neural representations. We compared the intensities of such appearances with the understanding of posterior sentences. This gave a positive correlation between these two variables, but only if posterior sentences were associated with prior sentences. Additional analysis showed the contribution of the entorhinal cortex, rather than the hippocampus, to the correlation. The present study suggests that prior knowledge-based arrangement of neural activity before an experience contributes to the active selection of information to be learned. Such arrangement prior to an experience resembles preplay activity observed in the rodent brain. In terms of knowledge acquisition, the present study leads to a new view of the brain (or more precisely of the brain’s knowledge) as an autopoietic system in which the brain (or knowledge) selects what it should learn by itself, arranges preplay-like activity as a position for the new information in advance, and actively reorganizes itself. PMID:29662446

Uneven Reassembly of Tense, Telicity and Discourse Features in L2 Acquisition of the Chinese "shì…de" Cleft Construction by Adult English Speakers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mai, Ziyin; Yuan, Boping

2016-01-01

This article reports an empirical study investigating L2 acquisition of the Mandarin Chinese "shì…de" cleft construction by adult English-speaking learners within the framework of the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere, 2009). A Sentence Completion task, an interpretation task, two Acceptability Judgement tasks, and a felicity…

Development of a Sex Education Syllabus for Health Science at American River College. Emergence of Higher Education in America.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rasler, Michael L.

This practicum paper discusses the development, evaluation, and revision of a student sex education syllabus at American River College (California). The syllabus is intended to provide an alternative learning format to the traditional lecture format. After a review of the literature, it was decided to use a fill-in or sentence completion format…

Hombres y Lugares. Que Bonito Es Leer, II. Libro IV. Cuaderno de Ejercicios (Men and Places. How Nice Reading Is, II. Book IV. Workbook).

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dissemination and Assessment Center for Bilingual Education, Austin, TX.

The exercises in the Spanish language workbook are intended to teach comprehension, interpretation, vocabulary, pronunciation, and study skills. The workbook provides one to five pages of reinforcement and follow-up work for each of the stories in the reader of the same title. Exercises stress sentence completion and construction, phonology,…

Psychometric Features of the General Aptitude Test-Verbal Part (GAT-V): A Large-Scale Assessment of High School Graduates in Saudi Arabia

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dimitrov, Dimiter M.; Shamrani, Abdul Rahman

2015-01-01

This study examines the psychometric features of a General Aptitude Test-Verbal Part, which is used with assessments of high school graduates in Saudi Arabia. The data supported a bifactor model, with one general factor and three content domains (Analogy, Sentence Completion, and Reading Comprehension) as latent aspects of verbal aptitude.

Beyond Baby Talk: From Sounds to Sentences--A Parent's Complete Guide to Language Development.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Apel, Kenn; Masterson, Julie J.

Noting that the early years of a child's life are the most critical for speech and language development and that parents are the child's primary language role model, this book is designed to help parents become knowledgeable on the topic of child language development during their first six years. Chapter 1 covers the infant's first year and the…

Online Sentence Reading in People With Aphasia: Evidence From Eye Tracking

PubMed Central

Knilans, Jessica

2015-01-01

Purpose There is a lot of evidence that people with aphasia have more difficulty understanding structurally complex sentences (e.g., object clefts) than simpler sentences (subject clefts). However, subject clefts also occur more frequently in English than object clefts. Thus, it is possible that both structural complexity and frequency affect how people with aphasia understand these structures. Method Nine people with aphasia and 8 age-matched controls participated in the study. The stimuli consisted of 24 object cleft and 24 subject cleft sentences. The task was eye tracking during reading, which permits a more fine-grained analysis of reading performance than measures such as self-paced reading. Results As expected, controls had longer reading times for critical regions in object cleft sentences compared with subject cleft sentences. People with aphasia showed the predicted effects of structural frequency. Effects of structural complexity in people with aphasia did not emerge on their first pass through the sentence but were observed when they were rereading critical regions of complex sentences. Conclusions People with aphasia are sensitive to both structural complexity and structural frequency when reading. However, people with aphasia may use different reading strategies than controls when confronted with relatively infrequent and complex sentence structures. PMID:26383779

Online Sentence Reading in People With Aphasia: Evidence From Eye Tracking.

PubMed

Knilans, Jessica; DeDe, Gayle

2015-11-01

There is a lot of evidence that people with aphasia have more difficulty understanding structurally complex sentences (e.g., object clefts) than simpler sentences (subject clefts). However, subject clefts also occur more frequently in English than object clefts. Thus, it is possible that both structural complexity and frequency affect how people with aphasia understand these structures. Nine people with aphasia and 8 age-matched controls participated in the study. The stimuli consisted of 24 object cleft and 24 subject cleft sentences. The task was eye tracking during reading, which permits a more fine-grained analysis of reading performance than measures such as self-paced reading. As expected, controls had longer reading times for critical regions in object cleft sentences compared with subject cleft sentences. People with aphasia showed the predicted effects of structural frequency. Effects of structural complexity in people with aphasia did not emerge on their first pass through the sentence but were observed when they were rereading critical regions of complex sentences. People with aphasia are sensitive to both structural complexity and structural frequency when reading. However, people with aphasia may use different reading strategies than controls when confronted with relatively infrequent and complex sentence structures.

Automatically Generating Reading Comprehension Look-Back Strategy: Questions from Expository Texts

DTIC Science & Technology

2008-05-14

34t"> <sentence string="Copyright 1997, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation" id=Ŕ" indent="c"> <sentence string="The six hundred mostly Inuit residents...Sentence: The Inuit children were killed by a storm on April 10. Question: When were the Inuit children killed by a storm? Additionally...questions formed from complex sentences are simplified during transformation. For example, in the following sentence, the Inuit children killed in the

Time course of action representations evoked during sentence comprehension.

PubMed

Heard, Alison W; Masson, Michael E J; Bub, Daniel N

2015-03-01

The nature of hand-action representations evoked during language comprehension was investigated using a variant of the visual-world paradigm in which eye fixations were monitored while subjects viewed a screen displaying four hand postures and listened to sentences describing an actor using or lifting a manipulable object. Displayed postures were related to either a functional (using) or volumetric (lifting) interaction with an object that matched or did not match the object mentioned in the sentence. Subjects were instructed to select the hand posture that matched the action described in the sentence. Even before the manipulable object was mentioned in the sentence, some sentence contexts allowed subjects to infer the object's identity and the type of action performed with it and eye fixations immediately favored the corresponding hand posture. This effect was assumed to be the result of ongoing motor or perceptual imagery in which the action described in the sentence was mentally simulated. In addition, the hand posture related to the manipulable object mentioned in a sentence, but not related to the described action (e.g., a writing posture in the context of a sentence that describes lifting, but not using, a pencil), was favored over other hand postures not related to the object. This effect was attributed to motor resonance arising from conceptual processing of the manipulable object, without regard to the remainder of the sentence context. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The Impact of Social-Cognitive Stress on Speech Variability, Determinism, and Stability in Adults Who Do and Do Not Stutter.

PubMed

Jackson, Eric S; Tiede, Mark; Beal, Deryk; Whalen, D H

2016-12-01

This study examined the impact of social-cognitive stress on sentence-level speech variability, determinism, and stability in adults who stutter (AWS) and adults who do not stutter (AWNS). We demonstrated that complementing the spatiotemporal index (STI) with recurrence quantification analysis (RQA) provides a novel approach to both assessing and interpreting speech variability in stuttering. Twenty AWS and 21 AWNS repeated sentences in audience and nonaudience conditions while their lip movements were tracked. Across-sentence variability was assessed via the STI; within-sentence determinism and stability were assessed via RQA. Compared with the AWNS, the AWS produced speech that was more variable across sentences and more deterministic and stable within sentences. Audience presence contributed to greater within-sentence determinism and stability in the AWS. A subset of AWS who were more susceptible to experiencing anxiety exhibited reduced across-sentence variability in the audience condition compared with the nonaudience condition. This study extends the assessment of speech variability in AWS and AWNS into the social-cognitive domain and demonstrates that the characterization of speech within sentences using RQA is complementary to the across-sentence STI measure. AWS seem to adopt a more restrictive, less flexible speaking approach in response to social-cognitive stress, which is presumably a strategy for maintaining observably fluent speech.

The Impact of Social–Cognitive Stress on Speech Variability, Determinism, and Stability in Adults Who Do and Do Not Stutter

PubMed Central

Tiede, Mark; Beal, Deryk; Whalen, D. H.

2016-01-01

Purpose This study examined the impact of social–cognitive stress on sentence-level speech variability, determinism, and stability in adults who stutter (AWS) and adults who do not stutter (AWNS). We demonstrated that complementing the spatiotemporal index (STI) with recurrence quantification analysis (RQA) provides a novel approach to both assessing and interpreting speech variability in stuttering. Method Twenty AWS and 21 AWNS repeated sentences in audience and nonaudience conditions while their lip movements were tracked. Across-sentence variability was assessed via the STI; within-sentence determinism and stability were assessed via RQA. Results Compared with the AWNS, the AWS produced speech that was more variable across sentences and more deterministic and stable within sentences. Audience presence contributed to greater within-sentence determinism and stability in the AWS. A subset of AWS who were more susceptible to experiencing anxiety exhibited reduced across-sentence variability in the audience condition compared with the nonaudience condition. Conclusions This study extends the assessment of speech variability in AWS and AWNS into the social–cognitive domain and demonstrates that the characterization of speech within sentences using RQA is complementary to the across-sentence STI measure. AWS seem to adopt a more restrictive, less flexible speaking approach in response to social–cognitive stress, which is presumably a strategy for maintaining observably fluent speech. PMID:27936276

Toward developing a standardized Arabic continuous text reading chart.

PubMed

Alabdulkader, Balsam; Leat, Susan Jennifer

Near visual acuity is an essential measurement during an oculo-visual assessment. Short duration continuous text reading charts measure reading acuity and other aspects of reading performance. There is no standardized version of such chart in Arabic. The aim of this study is to create sentences of equal readability to use in the development of a standardized Arabic continuous text reading chart. Initially, 109 Arabic pairs of sentences were created for use in constructing a chart with similar layout to the Colenbrander chart. They were created to have the same grade level of difficulty and physical length. Fifty-three adults and sixteen children were recruited to validate the sentences. Reading speed in correct words per minute (CWPM) and standard length words per minute (SLWPM) was measured and errors were counted. Criteria based on reading speed and errors made in each sentence pair were used to exclude sentence pairs with more outlying characteristics, and to select the final group of sentence pairs. Forty-five sentence pairs were selected according to the elimination criteria. For adults, the average reading speed for the final sentences was 166 CWPM and 187 SLWPM and the average number of errors per sentence pair was 0.21. Childrens' average reading speed for the final group of sentences was 61 CWPM and 72 SLWPM. Their average error rate was 1.71. The reliability analysis showed that the final 45 sentence pairs are highly comparable. They will be used in constructing an Arabic short duration continuous text reading chart. Copyright © 2016 Spanish General Council of Optometry. Published by Elsevier España, S.L.U. All rights reserved.

32 CFR 16.4 - Sentencing procedures.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-07-01

... 32 National Defense 1 2011-07-01 2011-07-01 false Sentencing procedures. 16.4 Section 16.4 National Defense Department of Defense OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE MILITARY COMMISSIONS SENTENCING... relevant to sentencing. 32 CFR 9.6(e)(10) permits the Prosecution and Defense to present information to aid...

32 CFR 16.4 - Sentencing procedures.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-07-01

... 32 National Defense 1 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Sentencing procedures. 16.4 Section 16.4 National Defense Department of Defense OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE MILITARY COMMISSIONS SENTENCING... relevant to sentencing. 32 CFR 9.6(e)(10) permits the Prosecution and Defense to present information to aid...

32 CFR 16.4 - Sentencing procedures.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-07-01

... 32 National Defense 1 2013-07-01 2013-07-01 false Sentencing procedures. 16.4 Section 16.4 National Defense Department of Defense OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE MILITARY COMMISSIONS SENTENCING... relevant to sentencing. 32 CFR 9.6(e)(10) permits the Prosecution and Defense to present information to aid...

32 CFR 16.4 - Sentencing procedures.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-07-01

... 32 National Defense 1 2012-07-01 2012-07-01 false Sentencing procedures. 16.4 Section 16.4 National Defense Department of Defense OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE MILITARY COMMISSIONS SENTENCING... relevant to sentencing. 32 CFR 9.6(e)(10) permits the Prosecution and Defense to present information to aid...

Sentence Comprehension in Slovak-Speaking Patients with Alzheimer's Disease

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Marková, Jana; Horváthová, Lubica; Králová, Mária; Cséfalvay, Zsolt

2017-01-01

Background: According to some studies, sentence comprehension is diminished in Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients, but they differ on what underlies the sentence comprehension impairment. Sentence comprehension in AD patients has been studied mainly in the English language. It is less clear how patients with AD speaking a morphologically rich…

Sentence Initial Devices. Summer Institute in Linguistics Publications in Linguistics. Publication Number 75.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Grimes, Joseph E., Ed.

A collection of papers on sentence constituents occurring in the sentence-initial position in a variety of Central and South American languages includes: "Consitutent Order, Cohesion, and Staging in Gaviao" (Horst Stute); "Focus and Topic in Xavante" (Eunice Burgess); "Sentence-Initial Elements in Brazilian Guarani"…

The Role of Semantics in Sentence-Processing.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dell, Gary S.

In order to explore the effect of semantic organization on the comprehension of sentences, this research, based on the hypothesis that fully grammatical sentences would be processed more easily than anomalous sentences, depended on data provided by 20 paid college students serving in individual sessions. Each student listened to 30 tape-recorded…

Sentence Comprehension in Swahili-English Bilingual Agrammatic Speakers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Abuom, Tom O.; Shah, Emmah; Bastiaanse, Roelien

2013-01-01

For this study, sentence comprehension was tested in Swahili-English bilingual agrammatic speakers. The sentences were controlled for four factors: (1) order of the arguments (base vs. derived); (2) embedding (declarative vs. relative sentences); (3) overt use of the relative pronoun "who"; (4) language (English and Swahili). Two…

Perception of affective and linguistic prosody: an ALE meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies.

PubMed

Belyk, Michel; Brown, Steven

2014-09-01

Prosody refers to the melodic and rhythmic aspects of speech. Two forms of prosody are typically distinguished: 'affective prosody' refers to the expression of emotion in speech, whereas 'linguistic prosody' relates to the intonation of sentences, including the specification of focus within sentences and stress within polysyllabic words. While these two processes are united by their use of vocal pitch modulation, they are functionally distinct. In order to examine the localization and lateralization of speech prosody in the brain, we performed two voxel-based meta-analyses of neuroimaging studies of the perception of affective and linguistic prosody. There was substantial sharing of brain activations between analyses, particularly in right-hemisphere auditory areas. However, a major point of divergence was observed in the inferior frontal gyrus: affective prosody was more likely to activate Brodmann area 47, while linguistic prosody was more likely to activate the ventral part of area 44. © The Author (2013). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.

The double-edged sword of genetic accounts of criminality: causal attributions from genetic ascriptions affect legal decision making.

PubMed

Cheung, Benjamin Y; Heine, Steven J

2015-12-01

Much debate exists surrounding the applicability of genetic information in the courtroom, making the psychological processes underlying how people consider this information important to explore. This article addresses how people think about different kinds of causal explanations in legal decision-making contexts. Three studies involving a total of 600 Mechanical Turk and university participants found that genetic, versus environmental, explanations of criminal behavior lead people to view the applicability of various defense claims differently, perceive the perpetrator's mental state differently, and draw different causal attributions. Moreover, mediation and path analyses highlight the double-edged nature of genetic attributions-they simultaneously reduce people's perception of the perpetrator's sense of control while increasing people's tendencies to attribute the cause to internal factors and to expect the perpetrator to reoffend. These countervailing relations, in turn, predict sentencing in opposite directions, although no overall differences in sentencing or ultimate verdicts were found. © 2015 by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.

Some factors underlying individual differences in speech recognition on PRESTO: a first report.

PubMed

Tamati, Terrin N; Gilbert, Jaimie L; Pisoni, David B

2013-01-01

Previous studies investigating speech recognition in adverse listening conditions have found extensive variability among individual listeners. However, little is currently known about the core underlying factors that influence speech recognition abilities. To investigate sensory, perceptual, and neurocognitive differences between good and poor listeners on the Perceptually Robust English Sentence Test Open-set (PRESTO), a new high-variability sentence recognition test under adverse listening conditions. Participants who fell in the upper quartile (HiPRESTO listeners) or lower quartile (LoPRESTO listeners) on key word recognition on sentences from PRESTO in multitalker babble completed a battery of behavioral tasks and self-report questionnaires designed to investigate real-world hearing difficulties, indexical processing skills, and neurocognitive abilities. Young, normal-hearing adults (N = 40) from the Indiana University community participated in the current study. Participants' assessment of their own real-world hearing difficulties was measured with a self-report questionnaire on situational hearing and hearing health history. Indexical processing skills were assessed using a talker discrimination task, a gender discrimination task, and a forced-choice regional dialect categorization task. Neurocognitive abilities were measured with the Auditory Digit Span Forward (verbal short-term memory) and Digit Span Backward (verbal working memory) tests, the Stroop Color and Word Test (attention/inhibition), the WordFam word familiarity test (vocabulary size), the Behavioral Rating Inventory of Executive Function-Adult Version (BRIEF-A) self-report questionnaire on executive function, and two performance subtests of the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence (WASI) Performance Intelligence Quotient (IQ; nonverbal intelligence). Scores on self-report questionnaires and behavioral tasks were tallied and analyzed by listener group (HiPRESTO and LoPRESTO). The extreme groups did not differ overall on self-reported hearing difficulties in real-world listening environments. However, an item-by-item analysis of questions revealed that LoPRESTO listeners reported significantly greater difficulty understanding speakers in a public place. HiPRESTO listeners were significantly more accurate than LoPRESTO listeners at gender discrimination and regional dialect categorization, but they did not differ on talker discrimination accuracy or response time, or gender discrimination response time. HiPRESTO listeners also had longer forward and backward digit spans, higher word familiarity ratings on the WordFam test, and lower (better) scores for three individual items on the BRIEF-A questionnaire related to cognitive load. The two groups did not differ on the Stroop Color and Word Test or either of the WASI performance IQ subtests. HiPRESTO listeners and LoPRESTO listeners differed in indexical processing abilities, short-term and working memory capacity, vocabulary size, and some domains of executive functioning. These findings suggest that individual differences in the ability to encode and maintain highly detailed episodic information in speech may underlie the variability observed in speech recognition performance in adverse listening conditions using high-variability PRESTO sentences in multitalker babble. American Academy of Audiology.

The neural basis of reversible sentence comprehension: Evidence from voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping in aphasia

PubMed Central

Thothathiri, Malathi; Kimberg, Daniel Y.; Schwartz, Myrna F.

2012-01-01

We explored the neural basis of reversible sentence comprehension in a large group of aphasic patients (N=79). Voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping revealed a significant association between damage in temporoparietal cortex and impaired sentence comprehension. This association remained after we controlled for phonological working memory. We hypothesize that this region plays an important role in the thematic or what-where processing of sentences. In contrast, we detected weak or no association between reversible sentence comprehension and the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, which includes Broca’s area, even for syntactically complex sentences. This casts doubt on theories that presuppose a critical role for this region in syntactic computations. PMID:21861679

Chinese Text Summarization Algorithm Based on Word2vec

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Chengzhang, Xu; Dan, Liu

2018-02-01

In order to extract some sentences that can cover the topic of a Chinese article, a Chinese text summarization algorithm based on Word2vec is used in this paper. Words in an article are represented as vectors trained by Word2vec, the weight of each word, the sentence vector and the weight of each sentence are calculated by combining word-sentence relationship with graph-based ranking model. Finally the summary is generated on the basis of the final sentence vector and the final weight of the sentence. The experimental results on real datasets show that the proposed algorithm has a better summarization quality compared with TF-IDF and TextRank.

Tracking voice change after thyroidectomy: application of spectral/cepstral analyses.

PubMed

Awan, Shaheen N; Helou, Leah B; Stojadinovic, Alexander; Solomon, Nancy Pearl

2011-04-01

This study evaluates the utility of perioperative spectral and cepstral acoustic analyses to monitor voice change after thyroidectomy. Perceptual and acoustic analyses were conducted on speech samples (sustained vowel /α/ and CAPE-V sentences) provided by 70 participants (36 women and 34 men) at four study time points: prior to thyroid surgery and 2 weeks, 3 months and 6 months after thyroidectomy. Repeated measures analyses of variance focused on the relative amplitude of the dominant harmonic in the voice signal (cepstral peak prominence, CPP), the ratio of low-to-high spectral energy, and their respective standard deviations (SD). Data were also examined for relationships between acoustic measures and perceptual ratings of overall severity of voice quality. Results showed that perceived overall severity and the acoustic measures of the CPP and its SD (CPPsd) computed from sentence productions were significantly reduced at 2-week post-thyroidectomy for 20 patients (29% of the sample) who had self-reported post-operative voice change. For this same group of patients, the CPP and CPPsd computed from sentence productions improved significantly from 2-weeks post-thyroidectomy to 6-months post-surgery. CPP and CPPsd also correlated well with perceived overall severity (r = -0.68 and -0.79, respectively). Measures of CPP from sustained vowel productions were not as effective as those from sentence productions in reflecting voice deterioration in the post-thyroidectomy patients at the 2-week post-surgery time period, were weaker correlates with perceived overall severity, and were not as effective in discriminating negative voice outcome (NegVO) from normal voice outcome (NormVO) patients as compared to the results from the sentence-level stimuli. Results indicate that spectral/cepstral analysis methods can be used with continuous speech samples to provide important objective data to document the effects of dysphonia in a post-thyroidectomy patient sample. When used in conjunction with patient's self-report and other general measures of vocal dysfunction, the acoustic measures employed in this study contribute to a complete profile of the patient's vocal condition.

Elaboration over a Discourse Facilitates Retrieval in Sentence Processing.

PubMed

Troyer, Melissa; Hofmeister, Philip; Kutas, Marta

2016-01-01

Language comprehension requires access to stored knowledge and the ability to combine knowledge in new, meaningful ways. Previous work has shown that processing linguistically more complex expressions ('Texas cattle rancher' vs. 'rancher') leads to slow-downs in reading during initial processing, possibly reflecting effort in combining information. Conversely, when this information must subsequently be retrieved (as in filler-gap constructions), processing is facilitated for more complex expressions, possibly because more semantic cues are available during retrieval. To follow up on this hypothesis, we tested whether information distributed across a short discourse can similarly provide effective cues for retrieval. Participants read texts introducing two referents (e.g., two senators), one of whom was described in greater detail than the other (e.g., 'The Democrat had voted for one of the senators, and the Republican had voted for the other, a man from Ohio who was running for president'). The final sentence (e.g., 'The senator who the {Republican/Democrat}had voted for…') contained a relative clause picking out either the Many-Cue referent (with 'Republican') or the One-Cue referent (with 'Democrat'). We predicted facilitated retrieval (faster reading times) for the Many-Cue condition at the verb region ('had voted for'), where readers could understand that 'The senator' is the object of the verb. As predicted, this pattern was observed at the retrieval region and continued throughout the rest of the sentence. Participants also completed the Author/Magazine Recognition Tests (ART/MRT; Stanovich and West, 1989), providing a proxy for world knowledge. Since higher ART/MRT scores may index (a) greater experience accessing relevant knowledge and/or (b) richer/more highly structured representations in semantic memory, we predicted it would be positively associated with effects of elaboration on retrieval. We did not observe the predicted interaction between ART/MRT scores and Cue condition at the retrieval region, though ART/MRT interacted with Cue condition in other locations in the sentence. In sum, we found that providing more elaborative information over the course of a text can facilitate retrieval for referents, consistent with a framework in which referential elaboration over a discourse and not just local linguistic information directly impacts information retrieval during sentence processing.

Syntactic priming during sentence comprehension: evidence for the lexical boost.

PubMed

Traxler, Matthew J; Tooley, Kristen M; Pickering, Martin J

2014-07-01

Syntactic priming occurs when structural information from one sentence influences processing of a subsequently encountered sentence (Bock, 1986; Ledoux et al., 2007). This article reports 2 eye-tracking experiments investigating the effects of a prime sentence on the processing of a target sentence that shared aspects of syntactic form. The experiments were designed to determine the degree to which lexical overlap between prime and target sentences produced larger effects, comparable to the widely observed "lexical boost" in production experiments (Pickering & Branigan, 1998; Pickering & Ferreira, 2008). The current experiments showed that priming effects during online comprehension were in fact larger when a verb was repeated across the prime and target sentences (see also Tooley et al., 2009). The finding of larger priming effects with lexical repetition supports accounts under which syntactic form representations are connected to individual lexical items (e.g., Tomasello, 2003; Vosse & Kempen, 2000, 2009). PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved.

Risk Assessment in Criminal Sentencing.

PubMed

Monahan, John; Skeem, Jennifer L

2016-01-01

The past several years have seen a surge of interest in using risk assessment in criminal sentencing, both to reduce recidivism by incapacitating or treating high-risk offenders and to reduce prison populations by diverting low-risk offenders from prison. We begin by sketching jurisprudential theories of sentencing, distinguishing those that rely on risk assessment from those that preclude it. We then characterize and illustrate the varying roles that risk assessment may play in the sentencing process. We clarify questions regarding the various meanings of "risk" in sentencing and the appropriate time to assess the risk of convicted offenders. We conclude by addressing four principal problems confronting risk assessment in sentencing: conflating risk and blame, barring individual inferences based on group data, failing adequately to distinguish risk assessment from risk reduction, and ignoring whether, and if so, how, the use of risk assessment in sentencing affects racial and economic disparities in imprisonment.

Proficiency and sentence constraint effects on second language word learning.

PubMed

Ma, Tengfei; Chen, Baoguo; Lu, Chunming; Dunlap, Susan

2015-07-01

This paper presents an experiment that investigated the effects of L2 proficiency and sentence constraint on semantic processing of unknown L2 words (pseudowords). All participants were Chinese native speakers who learned English as a second language. In the experiment, we used a whole sentence presentation paradigm with a delayed semantic relatedness judgment task. Both higher and lower-proficiency L2 learners could make use of the high-constraint sentence context to judge the meaning of novel pseudowords, and higher-proficiency L2 learners outperformed lower-proficiency L2 learners in all conditions. These results demonstrate that both L2 proficiency and sentence constraint affect subsequent word learning among second language learners. We extended L2 word learning into a sentence context, replicated the sentence constraint effects previously found among native speakers, and found proficiency effects in L2 word learning. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Pupillary dynamics reveal computational cost in sentence planning.

PubMed

Sevilla, Yamila; Maldonado, Mora; Shalóm, Diego E

2014-01-01

This study investigated the computational cost associated with grammatical planning in sentence production. We measured people's pupillary responses as they produced spoken descriptions of depicted events. We manipulated the syntactic structure of the target by training subjects to use different types of sentences following a colour cue. The results showed higher increase in pupil size for the production of passive and object dislocated sentences than for active canonical subject-verb-object sentences, indicating that more cognitive effort is associated with more complex noncanonical thematic order. We also manipulated the time at which the cue that triggered structure-building processes was presented. Differential increase in pupil diameter for more complex sentences was shown to rise earlier as the colour cue was presented earlier, suggesting that the observed pupillary changes are due to differential demands in relatively independent structure-building processes during grammatical planning. Task-evoked pupillary responses provide a reliable measure to study the cognitive processes involved in sentence production.

Automatic Summarization as a Combinatorial Optimization Problem

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Hirao, Tsutomu; Suzuki, Jun; Isozaki, Hideki

We derived the oracle summary with the highest ROUGE score that can be achieved by integrating sentence extraction with sentence compression from the reference abstract. The analysis results of the oracle revealed that summarization systems have to assign an appropriate compression rate for each sentence in the document. In accordance with this observation, this paper proposes a summarization method as a combinatorial optimization: selecting the set of sentences that maximize the sum of the sentence scores from the pool which consists of the sentences with various compression rates, subject to length constrains. The score of the sentence is defined by its compression rate, content words and positional information. The parameters for the compression rates and positional information are optimized by minimizing the loss between score of oracles and that of candidates. The results obtained from TSC-2 corpus showed that our method outperformed the previous systems with statistical significance.

Socio-Economic Status Affects Sentence Repetition, but Not Non-Word Repetition, in Chilean Preschoolers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Balladares, Jaime; Marshall, Chloë; Griffiths, Yvonne

2016-01-01

Sentence repetition and non-word repetition tests are widely used measures of language processing which are sensitive to language ability. Surprisingly little previous work has investigated whether children's socio-economic status (SES) affects their sentence and non-word repetition accuracy. This study investigates sentence and non-word…

Unscrambling Jumbled Sentences: An Authentic Task for English Language Assessment?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lanteigne, Betty

2017-01-01

Jumbled sentence items in language assessment have been criticized by some authors as inauthentic. However, unscrambling jumbled sentences is a common occurrence in real-world communication in English as a lingua franca. Naturalistic inquiry identified 54 instances of jumbled sentence use in daily life in Dubai/Sharjah, where English is widely…

Brain Activity Varies with Modulation of Dynamic Pitch Variance in Sentence Melody

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Meyer, Martin; Steinhauer, Karsten; Alter, Kai; Friederici, Angela D.; von Cramon, D. Yves

2004-01-01

Fourteen native speakers of German heard normal sentences, sentences which were either lacking dynamic pitch variation (flattened speech), or comprised of intonation contour exclusively (degraded speech). Participants were to listen carefully to the sentences and to perform a rehearsal task. Passive listening to flattened speech compared to normal…

Time Course of Lexicalization during Sentence Production in Parkinson's Disease: Eye-Tracking While Speaking

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lee, Jiyeon

2017-01-01

Purpose: Growing evidence suggests that sentence formulation is affected in Parkinson's disease (PD); however, how speakers with PD coordinate sentence planning and speaking remains unclear. Within 2 competing models of sentence production, this study examined whether speakers with PD show advanced buffering of words to minimize disfluencies and…

75 FR 29585 - Agency Information Collection Activities: Proposed collection; Comments Requested

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2010-05-26

... Under Sentence of Death. The Department of Justice (DOJ), Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice.../Collection: Capital Punishment Report of Inmates Under Sentence of Death. (3) Agency form number, if any, and... Report of Inmates Under Sentence of Death; NPS-8A Update Report of Inmates Under Sentence of Death; NPS...

Sentence Repetition Accuracy in Adults with Developmental Language Impairment: Interactions of Participant Capacities and Sentence Structures

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Poll, Gerard H.; Miller, Carol A.; van Hell, Janet G.

2016-01-01

Purpose: We asked whether sentence repetition accuracy could be explained by interactions of participant processing limitations with the structures of the sentences. We also tested a prediction of the procedural deficit hypothesis (Ullman & Pierpont, 2005) that adjuncts are more difficult than arguments for individuals with developmental…

28 CFR 2.9 - Study prior to sentencing.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-07-01

... 28 Judicial Administration 1 2011-07-01 2011-07-01 false Study prior to sentencing. 2.9 Section 2... PRISONERS, YOUTH OFFENDERS, AND JUVENILE DELINQUENTS United States Code Prisoners and Parolees § 2.9 Study... sentencing court for observation and study prior to sentencing, under the provisions of 18 U.S.C. 4205(c...

28 CFR 2.9 - Study prior to sentencing.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-07-01

... 28 Judicial Administration 1 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Study prior to sentencing. 2.9 Section 2... PRISONERS, YOUTH OFFENDERS, AND JUVENILE DELINQUENTS United States Code Prisoners and Parolees § 2.9 Study... sentencing court for observation and study prior to sentencing, under the provisions of 18 U.S.C. 4205(c...

Effects of Word Frequency and Modality on Sentence Comprehension Impairments in People with Aphasia

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

DeDe, Gayle

2012-01-01

Purpose: It is well known that people with aphasia have sentence comprehension impairments. The present study investigated whether lexical factors contribute to sentence comprehension impairments in both the auditory and written modalities using online measures of sentence processing. Method: People with aphasia and non brain-damaged controls…

Nonnative Speakers Do Not Take Competing Alternative Expressions into Account the Way Native Speakers Do

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Robenalt, Clarice; Goldberg, Adele E.

2016-01-01

When native speakers judge the acceptability of novel sentences, they appear to implicitly take competing formulations into account, judging novel sentences with a readily available alternative formulation to be less acceptable than novel sentences with no competing alternative. Moreover, novel sentences with a competing alternative are more…

The Role of Constraints in Creative Sentence Production

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Haught, Catrinel

2015-01-01

Two experiments explored how people create novel sentences referring to given entities presented either in line drawings or in nouns. The line drawings yielded more creative sentences than the words, both as rated by judges and objectively by a measure of the amount of information that the sentences conveyed. A hypothesis about the cognitive…

Sentencing Criminal Defendants by College Students: An Experiment in Disparity of Treatment

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Perlstein, Jolanta J.

1978-01-01

Discusses a study in a political science course to determine disparity in sentencing patterns among students involved in sentencing criminals. Concludes that a great deal of disparity in sentencing exists among judges in the real world and among college students who assume the role of judges. (Author/DB)

The Relationship between Prisoners' Educational Motives and Previous Incarceration, Sentence Length, and Sentence Served

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Roth, Beate Buanes; Manger, Terje

2014-01-01

The aim of this study was to examine Norwegian prisoners' educational motives, and how previous incarceration, sentence length, and sentence served influence such motives. Three motive categories emerged: future planning (Factor 1), social reasons and escapism (Factor 2), and competence building (Factor 3). Among prisoners who participated in…

A Frequency-List of Sentence Structures: Distribution of Kernel Sentences

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Geens, Dirk

1974-01-01

A corpus of 10,000 sentences extracted from British theatrical texts was used to construct a frequency list of kernel sentence structures. Thirty-one charts illustrate the analyzed results. The procedures used and an interpretation of the frequencies are given. Such lists might aid foreign language teachers in course organization. Available from…

Writing with Basals: A Sentence Combining Approach to Comprehension.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Reutzel, D. Ray; Merrill, Jimmie D.

Sentence combining techniques can be used with basal readers to help students develop writing skills. The first technique is addition, characterized by using the connecting word "and" to join two or more base sentences together. The second technique is called "embedding," and is characterized by putting parts of two or more base sentences together…

The Cognitive Basis for Sentence Planning Difficulties in Discourse after Traumatic Brain Injury

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Peach, Richard K.

2013-01-01

Purpose: Analyses of language production of individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI) place increasing emphasis on microlinguistic (i.e., within-sentence) patterns. It is unknown whether the observed problems involve implementation of well-formed sentence frames or represent a fundamental linguistic disturbance in computing sentence structure.…

Cross-Language Priming of Word Meaning during Second Language Sentence Comprehension

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Yuan, Yanli; Woltz, Dan; Zheng, Robert

2010-01-01

The experiment investigated the benefit to second language (L2) sentence comprehension of priming word meanings with brief visual exposure to first language (L1) translation equivalents. Native English speakers learning Mandarin evaluated the validity of aurally presented Mandarin sentences. For selected words in half of the sentences there was…

Contrastive Analysis of Place of Adjuncts in English and Persian Sentences

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mirzahoseini, Zeynab; Gowhary, Habib; Azizifar, Akbar; Mirzahoseini, Ehsan

2015-01-01

This study investigates the position of adjuncts in sentences in English and Persian languages. The numbers of 136 sentences are collected from English story books and their Persian translations. The frequencies of each position (initial, middle, final) of adjuncts are determined by SPSS software and frequencies in English sentences are matched…

Ideology, Social Threat, and the Death Sentence: Capital Sentences across Time and Space

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jacobs, David; Carmichael, Jason T.

2004-01-01

Capital punishment is the most severe criminal penalty, yet we know little about the factors that produce jurisdictional differences in the use of the death sentence. Political explanations emphasize conservative values and the strength of more conservative political parties. Threat accounts suggest that this sentence will be more likely in…

Deaf Readers’ Response to Syntactic Complexity: Evidence from Self-Paced Reading

PubMed Central

Traxler, Matthew J.; Corina, David P.; Morford, Jill P.; Hafer, Sarah; Hoversten, Liv J.

2013-01-01

This study was designed to determine the feasibility of using self-paced reading methods to study deaf readers and to assess how deaf readers respond to two syntactic manipulations. Three groups of participants read the test sentences: deaf readers, hearing monolingual English readers, and hearing bilingual readers whose second language was English. In Experiment 1, participants read sentences containing subject relative or object relative clauses. The test sentences contained semantic information that influences on-line processing outcomes (Traxler et al., 2002; 2005). All of the participant groups had greater difficulty processing sentences containing object relative clauses. This difficulty was reduced when helpful semantic cues were present. In Experiment 2, participants read active voice and passive voice sentences. The sentences were processed similarly by all three groups. Comprehension accuracy was higher in hearing readers than in deaf readers. Within deaf readers, native signers read the sentences faster and comprehended them to a higher degree than did non-native signers. These results indicate that self-paced reading is a useful method for studying sentence interpretation among deaf readers. PMID:23868696

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.

Attention blinks for selection, not perception or memory: reading sentences and reporting targets.

PubMed

Potter, Mary C; Wyble, Brad; Olejarczyk, Jennifer

2011-12-01

In whole report, a sentence presented sequentially at the rate of about 10 words/s can be recalled accurately, whereas if the task is to report only two target words (e.g., red words), the second target suffers an attentional blink if it appears shortly after the first target. If these two tasks are carried out simultaneously, is there an attentional blink, and does it affect both tasks? Here, sentence report was combined with report of two target words (Experiments 1 and 2) or two inserted target digits, Arabic numerals or word digits (Experiments 3 and 4). When participants reported only the targets an attentional blink was always observed. When they reported both the sentence and targets, sentence report was quite accurate but there was an attentional blink in picking out the targets when they were part of the sentence. When targets were extra digits inserted in the sentence there was no blink when viewers also reported the sentence. These results challenge some theories of the attentional blink: Blinks result from online selection, not perception or memory.

From a concept to a word in a syntactically complete sentence: an fMRI study on spontaneous language production in an overt picture description task.

PubMed

Grande, Marion; Meffert, Elisabeth; Schoenberger, Eva; Jung, Stefanie; Frauenrath, Tobias; Huber, Walter; Hussmann, Katja; Moormann, Mareike; Heim, Stefan

2012-07-02

Spontaneous language has rarely been subjected to neuroimaging studies. This study therefore introduces a newly developed method for the analysis of linguistic phenomena observed in continuous language production during fMRI. Most neuroimaging studies investigating language have so far focussed on single word or - to a smaller extent - sentence processing, mostly due to methodological considerations. Natural language production, however, is far more than the mere combination of words to larger units. Therefore, the present study aimed at relating brain activation to linguistic phenomena like word-finding difficulties or syntactic completeness in a continuous language fMRI paradigm. A picture description task with special constraints was used to provoke hesitation phenomena and speech errors. The transcribed speech sample was segmented into events of one second and each event was assigned to one category of a complex schema especially developed for this purpose. The main results were: conceptual planning engages bilateral activation of the precuneus. Successful lexical retrieval is accompanied - particularly in comparison to unsolved word-finding difficulties - by the left middle and superior temporal gyrus. Syntactic completeness is reflected in activation of the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) (area 44). In sum, the method has proven to be useful for investigating the neural correlates of lexical and syntactic phenomena in an overt picture description task. This opens up new prospects for the analysis of spontaneous language production during fMRI. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Exploring Use of the Coordinate Response Measure in a Multitalker Babble Paradigm

PubMed Central

Kidd, Gary R.; Fogerty, Daniel

2017-01-01

Purpose Three experiments examined the use of competing coordinate response measure (CRM) sentences as a multitalker babble. Method In Experiment I, young adults with normal hearing listened to a CRM target sentence in the presence of 2, 4, or 6 competing CRM sentences with synchronous or asynchronous onsets. In Experiment II, the condition with 6 competing sentences was explored further. Three stimulus conditions (6 talkers saying same sentence, 1 talker producing 6 different sentences, and 6 talkers each saying a different sentence) were evaluated with different methods of presentation. Experiment III examined the performance of older adults with hearing impairment in a subset of conditions from Experiment II. Results In Experiment I, performance declined with increasing numbers of talkers and improved with asynchronous sentence onsets. Experiment II identified conditions under which an increase in the number of talkers led to better performance. In Experiment III, the relative effects of the number of talkers, messages, and onset asynchrony were the same for young and older listeners. Conclusions Multitalker babble composed of CRM sentences has masking properties similar to other types of multitalker babble. However, when the number of different talkers and messages are varied independently, performance is best with more talkers and fewer messages. PMID:28249093

Importance of envelope modulations during consonants and vowels in segmentally interrupted sentencesa)

PubMed Central

Fogerty, Daniel

2014-01-01

The present study investigated the importance of overall segment amplitude and intrinsic segment amplitude modulation of consonants and vowels to sentence intelligibility. Sentences were processed according to three conditions that replaced consonant or vowel segments with noise matched to the long-term average speech spectrum. Segments were replaced with (1) low-level noise that distorted the overall sentence envelope, (2) segment-level noise that restored the overall syllabic amplitude modulation of the sentence, and (3) segment-modulated noise that further restored faster temporal envelope modulations during the vowel. Results from the first experiment demonstrated an incremental benefit with increasing resolution of the vowel temporal envelope. However, amplitude modulations of replaced consonant segments had a comparatively minimal effect on overall sentence intelligibility scores. A second experiment selectively noise-masked preserved vowel segments in order to equate overall performance of consonant-replaced sentences to that of the vowel-replaced sentences. Results demonstrated no significant effect of restoring consonant modulations during the interrupting noise when existing vowel cues were degraded. A third experiment demonstrated greater perceived sentence continuity with the preservation or addition of vowel envelope modulations. Overall, results support previous investigations demonstrating the importance of vowel envelope modulations to the intelligibility of interrupted sentences. PMID:24606291

Selective Attention to Semantic and Syntactic Features Modulates Sentence Processing Networks in Anterior Temporal Cortex

PubMed Central

Rogalsky, Corianne

2009-01-01

Numerous studies have identified an anterior temporal lobe (ATL) region that responds preferentially to sentence-level stimuli. It is unclear, however, whether this activity reflects a response to syntactic computations or some form of semantic integration. This distinction is difficult to investigate with the stimulus manipulations and anomaly detection paradigms traditionally implemented. The present functional magnetic resonance imaging study addresses this question via a selective attention paradigm. Subjects monitored for occasional semantic anomalies or occasional syntactic errors, thus directing their attention to semantic integration, or syntactic properties of the sentences. The hemodynamic response in the sentence-selective ATL region (defined with a localizer scan) was examined during anomaly/error-free sentences only, to avoid confounds due to error detection. The majority of the sentence-specific region of interest was equally modulated by attention to syntactic or compositional semantic features, whereas a smaller subregion was only modulated by the semantic task. We suggest that the sentence-specific ATL region is sensitive to both syntactic and integrative semantic functions during sentence processing, with a smaller portion of this area preferentially involved in the later. This study also suggests that selective attention paradigms may be effective tools to investigate the functional diversity of networks involved in sentence processing. PMID:18669589

Treatment of sentence comprehension and production in aphasia: is there cross-modal generalisation?

PubMed

Adelt, Anne; Hanne, Sandra; Stadie, Nicole

2016-09-09

Exploring generalisation following treatment of language deficits in aphasia can provide insights into the functional relation of the cognitive processing systems involved. In the present study, we first review treatment outcomes of interventions targeting sentence processing deficits and, second report a treatment study examining the occurrence of practice effects and generalisation in sentence comprehension and production. In order to explore the potential linkage between processing systems involved in comprehending and producing sentences, we investigated whether improvements generalise within (i.e., uni-modal generalisation in comprehension or in production) and/or across modalities (i.e., cross-modal generalisation from comprehension to production or vice versa). Two individuals with aphasia displaying co-occurring deficits in sentence comprehension and production were trained on complex, non-canonical sentences in both modalities. Two evidence-based treatment protocols were applied in a crossover intervention study with sequence of treatment phases being randomly allocated. Both participants benefited significantly from treatment, leading to uni-modal generalisation in both comprehension and production. However, cross-modal generalisation did not occur. The magnitude of uni-modal generalisation in sentence production was related to participants' sentence comprehension performance prior to treatment. These findings support the assumption of modality-specific sub-systems for sentence comprehension and production, being linked uni-directionally from comprehension to production.

Effects of sentence-structure complexity on speech initiation time and disfluency.

PubMed

Tsiamtsiouris, Jim; Cairns, Helen Smith

2013-03-01

There is general agreement that stuttering is caused by a variety of factors, and language formulation and speech motor control are two important factors that have been implicated in previous research, yet the exact nature of their effects is still not well understood. Our goal was to test the hypothesis that sentences of high structural complexity would incur greater processing costs than sentences of low structural complexity and these costs would be higher for adults who stutter than for adults who do not stutter. Fluent adults and adults who stutter participated in an experiment that required memorization of a sentence classified as low or high structural complexity followed by production of that sentence upon a visual cue. Both groups of speakers initiated most sentences significantly faster in the low structural complexity condition than in the high structural complexity condition. Adults who stutter were over-all slower in speech initiation than were fluent speakers, but there were no significant interactions between complexity and group. However, adults who stutter produced significantly more disfluencies in sentences of high structural complexity than in those of low complexity. After reading this article, the learner will be able to: (a) identify integral parts of all well-known models of adult sentence production; (b) summarize the way that sentence structure might negatively influence the speech production processes; (c) discuss whether sentence structure influences speech initiation time and disfluencies. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Spatial distance effects on incremental semantic interpretation of abstract sentences: evidence from eye tracking.

PubMed

Guerra, Ernesto; Knoeferle, Pia

2014-12-01

A large body of evidence has shown that visual context information can rapidly modulate language comprehension for concrete sentences and when it is mediated by a referential or a lexical-semantic link. What has not yet been examined is whether visual context can also modulate comprehension of abstract sentences incrementally when it is neither referenced by, nor lexically associated with, the sentence. Three eye-tracking reading experiments examined the effects of spatial distance between words (Experiment 1) and objects (Experiment 2 and 3) on participants' reading times for sentences that convey similarity or difference between two abstract nouns (e.g., 'Peace and war are certainly different...'). Before reading the sentence, participants inspected a visual context with two playing cards that moved either far apart or close together. In Experiment 1, the cards turned and showed the first two nouns of the sentence (e.g., 'peace', 'war'). In Experiments 2 and 3, they turned but remained blank. Participants' reading times at the adjective (Experiment 1: first-pass reading time; Experiment 2: total times) and at the second noun phrase (Experiment 3: first-pass times) were faster for sentences that expressed similarity when the preceding words/objects were close together (vs. far apart) and for sentences that expressed dissimilarity when the preceding words/objects were far apart (vs. close together). Thus, spatial distance between words or entirely unrelated objects can rapidly and incrementally modulate the semantic interpretation of abstract sentences. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Minho Affective Sentences (MAS): Probing the roles of sex, mood, and empathy in affective ratings of verbal stimuli.

PubMed

Pinheiro, Ana P; Dias, Marcelo; Pedrosa, João; Soares, Ana P

2017-04-01

During social communication, words and sentences play a critical role in the expression of emotional meaning. The Minho Affective Sentences (MAS) were developed to respond to the lack of a standardized sentence battery with normative affective ratings: 192 neutral, positive, and negative declarative sentences were strictly controlled for psycholinguistic variables such as numbers of words and letters and per-million word frequency. The sentences were designed to represent examples of each of the five basic emotions (anger, sadness, disgust, fear, and happiness) and of neutral situations. These sentences were presented to 536 participants who rated the stimuli using both dimensional and categorical measures of emotions. Sex differences were also explored. Additionally, we probed how personality, empathy, and mood from a subset of 40 participants modulated the affective ratings. Our results confirmed that the MAS affective norms are valid measures to guide the selection of stimuli for experimental studies of emotion. The combination of dimensional and categorical ratings provided a more fine-grained characterization of the affective properties of the sentences. Moreover, the affective ratings of positive and negative sentences were not only modulated by participants' sex, but also by individual differences in empathy and mood state. Together, our results indicate that, in their quest to reveal the neurofunctional underpinnings of verbal emotional processing, researchers should consider not only the role of sex, but also of interindividual differences in empathy and mood states, in responses to the emotional meaning of sentences.

University of Delaware at TREC 2014

DTIC Science & Technology

2014-11-01

order, i.e. the keyword with the highest weight first, will make sure that places from categories that a user prefers more will occur at higher ranks...create sentences in two different ways. Here are two examples of actual descriptions that were generated and included in our runs: Sweet Beginnings...randomly selected. 2.2 Submitted runs Our main idea is to maintain diversity among all the genres that suit the user’s taste . We have submitted two runs

Design of short Italian sentences to assess near vision performance.

PubMed

Calossi, Antonio; Boccardo, Laura; Fossetti, Alessandro; Radner, Wolfgang

2014-01-01

To develop and validate 28 short Italian sentences for the construction of the Italian version of the Radner Reading Chart to simultaneously measure near visual acuity and reading speed. 41 sentences were constructed in Italian language, following the procedure defined by Radner, to obtain "sentence optotypes" with comparable structure and with the same lexical and grammatical difficulty. Sentences were statistically selected and used in 211 normal, non-presbyopic, native Italian-speaking persons. The most equally matched sentences in terms of reading speed and number of reading errors were selected. To assess the validity of the reading speed results obtained with the 28 selected short sentences, we compared the reading speed and reading errors with the average obtained by reading two long 4th-grade paragraphs (97 and 90 words) under the same conditions. The overall mean reading speed of the tested persons was 189±26wpm. The 28 sentences more similar in terms of reading times were selected, achieving a coefficient of variation (the relative SD) of 2.2%. The reliability analyses yielded an overall Cronbach's alpha coefficient of 0.98. The correlation between the short sentences and the long paragraph was high (r=0.85, P<0.0001). The 28 short single Italian sentences optotypes were highly comparable in syntactical structure, number, position, and length of words, lexical difficulty, and reading length. The resulting Italian Radner Reading Chart is precise (high consistency) and practical (short sentences) and therefore useful for research and clinical practice to simultaneously measure near reading acuity and reading speed. Copyright © 2013 Spanish General Council of Optometry. Published by Elsevier Espana. All rights reserved.

Dependency-based Siamese long short-term memory network for learning sentence representations

PubMed Central

Zhu, Wenhao; Ni, Jianyue; Wei, Baogang; Lu, Zhiguo

2018-01-01

Textual representations play an important role in the field of natural language processing (NLP). The efficiency of NLP tasks, such as text comprehension and information extraction, can be significantly improved with proper textual representations. As neural networks are gradually applied to learn the representation of words and phrases, fairly efficient models of learning short text representations have been developed, such as the continuous bag of words (CBOW) and skip-gram models, and they have been extensively employed in a variety of NLP tasks. Because of the complex structure generated by the longer text lengths, such as sentences, algorithms appropriate for learning short textual representations are not applicable for learning long textual representations. One method of learning long textual representations is the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network, which is suitable for processing sequences. However, the standard LSTM does not adequately address the primary sentence structure (subject, predicate and object), which is an important factor for producing appropriate sentence representations. To resolve this issue, this paper proposes the dependency-based LSTM model (D-LSTM). The D-LSTM divides a sentence representation into two parts: a basic component and a supporting component. The D-LSTM uses a pre-trained dependency parser to obtain the primary sentence information and generate supporting components, and it also uses a standard LSTM model to generate the basic sentence components. A weight factor that can adjust the ratio of the basic and supporting components in a sentence is introduced to generate the sentence representation. Compared with the representation learned by the standard LSTM, the sentence representation learned by the D-LSTM contains a greater amount of useful information. The experimental results show that the D-LSTM is superior to the standard LSTM for sentences involving compositional knowledge (SICK) data. PMID:29513748

Real-time parallel processing of grammatical structure in the fronto-striatal system: a recurrent network simulation study using reservoir computing.

PubMed

Hinaut, Xavier; Dominey, Peter Ford

2013-01-01

Sentence processing takes place in real-time. Previous words in the sentence can influence the processing of the current word in the timescale of hundreds of milliseconds. Recent neurophysiological studies in humans suggest that the fronto-striatal system (frontal cortex, and striatum--the major input locus of the basal ganglia) plays a crucial role in this process. The current research provides a possible explanation of how certain aspects of this real-time processing can occur, based on the dynamics of recurrent cortical networks, and plasticity in the cortico-striatal system. We simulate prefrontal area BA47 as a recurrent network that receives on-line input about word categories during sentence processing, with plastic connections between cortex and striatum. We exploit the homology between the cortico-striatal system and reservoir computing, where recurrent frontal cortical networks are the reservoir, and plastic cortico-striatal synapses are the readout. The system is trained on sentence-meaning pairs, where meaning is coded as activation in the striatum corresponding to the roles that different nouns and verbs play in the sentences. The model learns an extended set of grammatical constructions, and demonstrates the ability to generalize to novel constructions. It demonstrates how early in the sentence, a parallel set of predictions are made concerning the meaning, which are then confirmed or updated as the processing of the input sentence proceeds. It demonstrates how on-line responses to words are influenced by previous words in the sentence, and by previous sentences in the discourse, providing new insight into the neurophysiology of the P600 ERP scalp response to grammatical complexity. This demonstrates that a recurrent neural network can decode grammatical structure from sentences in real-time in order to generate a predictive representation of the meaning of the sentences. This can provide insight into the underlying mechanisms of human cortico-striatal function in sentence processing.

Real-Time Parallel Processing of Grammatical Structure in the Fronto-Striatal System: A Recurrent Network Simulation Study Using Reservoir Computing

PubMed Central

Hinaut, Xavier; Dominey, Peter Ford

2013-01-01

Sentence processing takes place in real-time. Previous words in the sentence can influence the processing of the current word in the timescale of hundreds of milliseconds. Recent neurophysiological studies in humans suggest that the fronto-striatal system (frontal cortex, and striatum – the major input locus of the basal ganglia) plays a crucial role in this process. The current research provides a possible explanation of how certain aspects of this real-time processing can occur, based on the dynamics of recurrent cortical networks, and plasticity in the cortico-striatal system. We simulate prefrontal area BA47 as a recurrent network that receives on-line input about word categories during sentence processing, with plastic connections between cortex and striatum. We exploit the homology between the cortico-striatal system and reservoir computing, where recurrent frontal cortical networks are the reservoir, and plastic cortico-striatal synapses are the readout. The system is trained on sentence-meaning pairs, where meaning is coded as activation in the striatum corresponding to the roles that different nouns and verbs play in the sentences. The model learns an extended set of grammatical constructions, and demonstrates the ability to generalize to novel constructions. It demonstrates how early in the sentence, a parallel set of predictions are made concerning the meaning, which are then confirmed or updated as the processing of the input sentence proceeds. It demonstrates how on-line responses to words are influenced by previous words in the sentence, and by previous sentences in the discourse, providing new insight into the neurophysiology of the P600 ERP scalp response to grammatical complexity. This demonstrates that a recurrent neural network can decode grammatical structure from sentences in real-time in order to generate a predictive representation of the meaning of the sentences. This can provide insight into the underlying mechanisms of human cortico-striatal function in sentence processing. PMID:23383296

The Impact of Age, Background Noise, Semantic Ambiguity, and Hearing Loss on Recognition Memory for Spoken Sentences

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Koeritzer, Margaret A.; Rogers, Chad S.; Van Engen, Kristin J.; Peelle, Jonathan E.

2018-01-01

Purpose: The goal of this study was to determine how background noise, linguistic properties of spoken sentences, and listener abilities (hearing sensitivity and verbal working memory) affect cognitive demand during auditory sentence comprehension. Method: We tested 30 young adults and 30 older adults. Participants heard lists of sentences in…

Development of a Theoretically Based Treatment for Sentence Comprehension Deficits in Individuals with Aphasia

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kiran, Swathi; Caplan, David; Sandberg, Chaleece; Levy, Joshua; Berardino, Alex; Ascenso, Elsa; Villard, Sarah; Tripodis, Yorghos

2012-01-01

Purpose: Two new treatments, 1 based on sentence to picture matching (SPM) and the other on object manipulation (OM), that train participants on the thematic roles of sentences using pictures or by manipulating objects were piloted. Method: Using a single-subject multiple-baseline design, sentence comprehension was trained on the affected sentence…

What is Sentence Combining and Why Does It Work?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Morenberg, Max

When the literature and the research results on sentence combining are analyzed, they seem to provide an expanded meaning of sentence combining and reasons for its effects on the writing of some students. Gains in syntactic maturity alone do not explain why sentence combining affects positively the writing of some students, nor does the fact that…

75 FR 45156 - Agency Information Collection Activities: Proposed Collection; Comments Requested

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2010-08-02

... under sentence of death. The Department of Justice (DOJ), Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice.../Collection: Capital Punishment Report of Inmates under Sentence of Death. (3) Agency form number, if any, and..., Report of Inmates under Sentence of Death; NPS-8A Update Report of Inmate under Sentence of Death; NPS-8B...

Validating Self-Paced Sentence-by-Sentence Reading: Story Comprehension, Recall, and Narrative Transportation

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Chung-Fat-Yim, Ashley; Peterson, Jordan B.; Mar, Raymond A.

2017-01-01

Previous studies on discourse have employed a self-paced sentence-by-sentence paradigm to present text and record reading times. However, presenting discourse this way does not mirror real-world reading conditions; for example, this paradigm prevents regressions to earlier portions of the text. The purpose of the present study is to investigate…

The Thematic Structure of the Sentence in English and Polish.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Szwedek, Aleksander

An important feature of the sentence in any language is its thematic structure, new/given information organization. It has been found that in English, where word order is grammatically determined, the thematic structure is signalled by the place of the sentence stress. If an indefinite noun (new information) is present in the sentence, it bears…

Extra-Linguistic Influences on Sentence Comprehension in Italian-Speaking Children with and without Specific Language Impairment

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Pettenati, P.; Benassi, E.; Deevy, P.; Leonard, L. B.; Caselli, M. C.

2015-01-01

Background: Many children with specific language impairment (SLI) in sentence comprehension. These deficits are usually attributed to limitations in the children's understanding of syntax or the lexical items contained in the sentences. This study examines the role that extra-linguistic factors can play in these children's sentence comprehension.…

Sentence Learning in Children and Adults: The Production of Forms and Transforms.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ehri, Linnea C.

This investigation was intended to study the effects of some linguistic variables on child and adult memories for sentences when recall was prompted by nouns embedded in the sentences. Its purpose was to examine for developmental differences in sentence processing systems expected by psycholinguistic theory and research. A group of 64 subjects,…

Sentence Production after Listener and Echoic Training by Prelingual Deaf Children with Cochlear Implants

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Golfeto, Raquel M.; de Souza, Deisy G.

2015-01-01

Three children with neurosensory deafness who used cochlear implants were taught to match video clips to dictated sentences. We used matrix training with overlapping components and tested for recombinative generalization. Two 3?×?3 matrices generated 18 sentences. For each matrix, we taught 6 sentences and evaluated generalization with the…

Retrieval of Sentence Relations: Semantic vs. Syntactic Deep Structure.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Perfetti, Charles A.

Two experiments on unaided and cued recall of sentences presented in context to college students are reported in this study. Key nouns in the sentences were arranged to have uniform surface functions, but to vary independently in deep syntactic category and semantic function. Cued recall for sentences in which the semantic function of actor and…

A retrospective analysis of the sentence writing component of the Mini Mental State Examination: cognitive and affective aspects.

PubMed

Press, Yan; Velikiy, Natalia; Berzak, Alex; Tandeter, Howard; Peleg, Roni; Freud, Tamar; Punchik, Boris; Dwolatzky, Tzvi

2012-01-01

One of the components of the Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) is the request to write a sentence. We investigated the relationship between the characteristics of the written sentence of the MMSE and the cognitive and affective status of elderly patients. The characteristics of the sentence were compared to the total MMSE score, sociodemographic characteristics, tests evaluating cognition and affective status, and diagnoses. The number of words was significantly associated with the degree of cognitive impairment, whereas the emotional polarity of sentences and concerns about health were associated with depression. Characteristics of the MMSE sentence may provide important additional information regarding both cognition and affect when assessing older people. Copyright © 2012 S. Karger AG, Basel.

Beyond Capacity Limitations II: Effects of Lexical Processes on Word Recall in Verbal Working Memory Tasks in Children with and without Specific Language Impairment

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mainela-Arnold, Elina; Evans, Julia L.; Coady, Jeffry

2010-01-01

Purpose: This study investigated the impact of lexical processes on target word recall in sentence span tasks in children with and without specific language impairment (SLI). Method: Participants were 42 children (ages 8;2-12;3 [years;months]): 21 with SLI and 21 typically developing peers matched on age and nonverbal IQ. Children completed a…

Expansion of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Criminal Alien Program in the War on Terror

DTIC Science & Technology

2008-12-01

public version), January 2007, 6. 42 Ibid., i. 43 Ibid., 7. 44 Ibid., 9. 45 Jennifer M. Chacon , “Unsecured Borders: Immigration Restrictions...completion of their sentence. 47 Jennifer M. Chacon , “Unsecured Borders: Immigration Restrictions, Crime...Teaming with Drug Cartels.” Washington Times, August 8, 2007. Chacon , Jennifer M. “Unsecured Borders: Immigration Restrictions, Crime Control and

Computer-based auditory phoneme discrimination training improves speech recognition in noise in experienced adult cochlear implant listeners.

PubMed

Schumann, Annette; Serman, Maja; Gefeller, Olaf; Hoppe, Ulrich

2015-03-01

Specific computer-based auditory training may be a useful completion in the rehabilitation process for cochlear implant (CI) listeners to achieve sufficient speech intelligibility. This study evaluated the effectiveness of a computerized, phoneme-discrimination training programme. The study employed a pretest-post-test design; participants were randomly assigned to the training or control group. Over a period of three weeks, the training group was instructed to train in phoneme discrimination via computer, twice a week. Sentence recognition in different noise conditions (moderate to difficult) was tested pre- and post-training, and six months after the training was completed. The control group was tested and retested within one month. Twenty-seven adult CI listeners who had been using cochlear implants for more than two years participated in the programme; 15 adults in the training group, 12 adults in the control group. Besides significant improvements for the trained phoneme-identification task, a generalized training effect was noted via significantly improved sentence recognition in moderate noise. No significant changes were noted in the difficult noise conditions. Improved performance was maintained over an extended period. Phoneme-discrimination training improves experienced CI listeners' speech perception in noise. Additional research is needed to optimize auditory training for individual benefit.

Minnesota multiphasic personality inventory-2-restructured form (MMPI-2-RF) predictors of violating probation after felonious crimes.

PubMed

Tarescavage, Anthony M; Luna-Jones, Lynn; Ben-Porath, Yossef S

2014-12-01

We compared Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2-Restructured Form (MMPI-2-RF) scores of 25 individuals convicted of felonies who violated probation within 1 year of sentencing with those of 45 similarly sentenced defendants who completed probation successfully. The sample (51 males, 19 females) ranged in age from 18 to 81 years (M = 35.2, SD = 13.8) and had 8 to 16 years of education (M = 11.7, SD = 2.1). The majority were Caucasian (85.7%), but African Americans were also represented (14.3%). Individuals in the sample were primarily convicted of mid-level felonies (F-1: 2.9%; F-2: 14.3%; F-3: 22.9%; F-4: 31.4%; F-5: 12.9%). As hypothesized, moderate to large statistically significant differences between probation completers and violators were found on several MMPI-2-RF scales, including Behavioral/Externalizing Dysfunction, Antisocial Behavior, Juvenile Conduct Problems, Substance Abuse, Aggression, Activation, and Disconstraint. Relative risk ratio analyses indicated that probationers who produced elevated scores on these scales were up to 3 times more likely to violate probation than were those with non-elevated scores. Implications of these results and limitations of our findings are discussed. (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved.

Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders Show Reduced Specificity and Less Positive Events in Mental Time Travel

PubMed Central

Chen, Xing-jie; Liu, Lu-lu; Cui, Ji-fang; Wang, Ya; Chen, An-tao; Li, Feng-hua; Wang, Wei-hong; Zheng, Han-feng; Gan, Ming-yuan; Li, Chun-qiu; Shum, David H. K.; Chan, Raymond C. K.

2016-01-01

Mental time travel refers to the ability to recall past events and to imagine possible future events. Schizophrenia (SCZ) patients have problems in remembering specific personal experiences in the past and imagining what will happen in the future. This study aimed to examine episodic past and future thinking in SCZ spectrum disorders including SCZ patients and individuals with schizotypal personality disorder (SPD) proneness who are at risk for developing SCZ. Thirty-two SCZ patients, 30 SPD proneness individuals, and 33 healthy controls participated in the study. The Sentence Completion for Events from the Past Test (SCEPT) and the Sentence Completion for Events in the Future Test were used to measure past and future thinking abilities. Results showed that SCZ patients showed significantly reduced specificity in recalling past and imagining future events, they generated less proportion of specific and extended events compared to healthy controls. SPD proneness individuals only generated less extended events compared to healthy controls. The reduced specificity was mainly manifested in imagining future events. Both SCZ patients and SPD proneness individuals generated less positive events than controls. These results suggest that mental time travel impairments in SCZ spectrum disorders and have implications for understanding their cognitive and emotional deficits. PMID:27507958

Ideational apraxia in Parkinson disease.

PubMed

Qureshi, Mohammad; Williamson, John B; Heilman, Kenneth M

2011-09-01

: The objective of the study was to determine whether ideational apraxia (IA), a loss of ability to plan the sequence of actions needed to achieve a goal, is associated with Parkinson disease (PD). : The frontal lobes play an important role in planning and sequencing, and many patients with PD have frontal lobe dysfunction. : Ten right-handed patients with PD and 10 right-handed neurologically and psychiatrically healthy people participated. To assess for IA, participants were given sets of pictures that showed the steps in completing a task, but the steps were shown out of order. The participants were required to point to the pictures in the correct sequence to complete each task. The participants also performed a control task of sequencing randomly arranged printed single words to create a sentence that described an accompanying picture. : The patients with PD performed more poorly than the controls on the action-sequencing tasks (P<0.05). Errors were predominantly in sequencing rather than repetition or omission, indicating that the poor performance was not caused by perseveration. There were no group differences in the task of sequencing words to make a sentence. : These results indicate that patients with PD do have IA, an action-sequence planning deficit. Further research is needed to better understand mechanisms, ecological implications, and potential treatments.

Multimodal Counseling Interventions: Effect on Human Papilloma Virus Vaccination Acceptance

PubMed Central

Salisbury, Helen; Bay, Curtis

2017-01-01

Human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine was developed to reduce HPV-attributable cancers, external genital warts (EGW), and recurrent respiratory papillomatosis. Adolescent HPV vaccination series completion rates are less than 40% in the United States of America, but up to 80% in Australia and the United Kingdom. Population-based herd immunity requires 80% or greater vaccination series completion rates. Pro-vaccination counseling facilitates increased vaccination rates. Multimodal counseling interventions may increase HPV vaccination series non-completers’ HPV-attributable disease knowledge and HPV-attributable disease prophylaxis (vaccination) acceptance over a brief 14-sentence counseling intervention. An online, 4-group, randomized controlled trial, with 260 or more participants per group, found that parents were more likely to accept HPV vaccination offers for their children than were childless young adults for themselves (68.2% and 52.9%). A combined audiovisual and patient health education handout (PHEH) intervention raised knowledge of HPV vaccination purpose, p = 0.02, and HPV vaccination acceptance for seven items, p < 0.001 to p = 0.023. The audiovisual intervention increased HPV vaccination acceptance for five items, p < 0.001 to p = 0.006. That HPV causes EGW, and that HPV vaccination prevents HPV-attributable diseases were better conveyed by the combined audiovisual and PHEH than the control 14-sentence counseling intervention alone. PMID:29113137

Estradiol Therapy After Menopause Mitigates Effects of Stress on Cortisol and Working Memory.

PubMed

Herrera, Alexandra Ycaza; Hodis, Howard N; Mack, Wendy J; Mather, Mara

2017-12-01

Postmenopausal estradiol therapy (ET) can reduce the stress response. However, it remains unclear whether such reductions can mitigate effects of stress on cognition. Investigate effects of ET on cortisol response to a physical stressor, cold pressor test (CPT), and whether ET attenuates stress effects on working memory. Women completed the CPT or control condition across two sessions and subsequently completed a sentence span task. General community: Participants were recruited from the Early vs Late Intervention Trial with Estradiol (ELITE). ELITE participants (mean age = 66, standard deviation age = 6.8) in this study did not suffer from any major chronic illness or use medications known to affect the stress response or cognition. Participants had received a median of randomized 4.7 years of estradiol (n = 21) or placebo (n = 21) treatment at time of participation in this study. Salivary cortisol and sentence span task performance. Women assigned to estradiol exhibited blunted cortisol responses to CPT compared with placebo (P = 0.017) and lesser negative effects of stress on working memory (P = 0.048). We present evidence suggesting ET may protect certain types of cognition in the presence of stress. Such estrogenic protection against stress hormone exposure may prove beneficial to both cognition and the neural circuitry that maintains and propagates cognitive faculties. Copyright © 2017 Endocrine Society

A sentence sliding window approach to extract protein annotations from biomedical articles

PubMed Central

Krallinger, Martin; Padron, Maria; Valencia, Alfonso

2005-01-01

Background Within the emerging field of text mining and statistical natural language processing (NLP) applied to biomedical articles, a broad variety of techniques have been developed during the past years. Nevertheless, there is still a great ned of comparative assessment of the performance of the proposed methods and the development of common evaluation criteria. This issue was addressed by the Critical Assessment of Text Mining Methods in Molecular Biology (BioCreative) contest. The aim of this contest was to assess the performance of text mining systems applied to biomedical texts including tools which recognize named entities such as genes and proteins, and tools which automatically extract protein annotations. Results The "sentence sliding window" approach proposed here was found to efficiently extract text fragments from full text articles containing annotations on proteins, providing the highest number of correctly predicted annotations. Moreover, the number of correct extractions of individual entities (i.e. proteins and GO terms) involved in the relationships used for the annotations was significantly higher than the correct extractions of the complete annotations (protein-function relations). Conclusion We explored the use of averaging sentence sliding windows for information extraction, especially in a context where conventional training data is unavailable. The combination of our approach with more refined statistical estimators and machine learning techniques might be a way to improve annotation extraction for future biomedical text mining applications. PMID:15960831

The Processing of Extraposed Structures in English

PubMed Central

Levy, Roger; Fedorenko, Evelina; Breen, Mara; Gibson, Ted

2012-01-01

In most languages, most of the syntactic dependency relations found in any given sentence are PROJECTIVE: the word-word dependencies in the sentence do not cross each other. Some syntactic dependency relations, however, are NON-PROJECTIVE: some of their word-word dependencies cross each other. Non-projective dependencies are both rarer and more computationally complex than projective dependencies; hence, it is of natural interest to investigate whether there are any processing costs specific to non-projective dependencies, and whether factors known to influence processing of projective dependencies also affect non-projective dependency processing. We report three self-paced reading studies, together with corpus and sentence completion studies, investigating the comprehension difficulty associated with the non-projective dependencies created by the extraposition of relative clauses in English. We find that extraposition over either verbs or prepositional phrases creates comprehension difficulty, and that this difficulty is consistent with probabilistic syntactic expectations estimated from corpora. Furthermore, we find that manipulating the expectation that a given noun will have a postmodifying relative clause can modulate and even neutralize the difficulty associated with extraposition. Our experiments rule out accounts based purely on derivational complexity and/or dependency locality in terms of linear positioning. Our results demonstrate that comprehenders maintain probabilistic syntactic expectations that persist beyond projective-dependency structures, and suggest that it may be possible to explain observed patterns of comprehension difficulty associated with extraposition entirely through probabilistic expectations. PMID:22035959

Electrophysiological time course and brain areas of spontaneous and intentional trait inferences

PubMed Central

Van Duynslaeger, Marijke; Verstraeten, Edwin

2007-01-01

This study measured event-related potentials during spontaneous and intentional trait inferences. Participants read sentences describing the behavior of a target person from which a strong moral trait could be inferred. The last word of each sentence determined the consistency with the trait induced during an introductory paragraph. In comparison with behaviors that were consistent with the implied trait, a P300 waveform was obtained when the behaviors were evaluative inconsistent with that trait. This dependency on behavioral consistency indicates that trait inferences were made previously while reading the preceding behaviors, irrespective of the participants’ spontaneous or intentional goals. Overall, the P300 shows considerable parallels between spontaneous and intentional inferences, indicating that the type and timing of the inconsistency process is very similar. In contrast, source localization (LORETA) of the event-related potentials suggest that spontaneous inferences show greater activation in the temporo-parietal junction compared to intentional inferences following an inconsistency. Memory measures taken after the presentation of the stimulus material involved sentence completion and trait-cued recall, and supported the occurrence of trait inferences associated with the actor. They also showed significant correlations with the neural components (i.e. P300 and its current density at the temporo-parietal junction) predominantly following spontaneous instructions, indicating that these components are valid neural indices of spontaneous inferences. PMID:18985139

Do two and three year old children use an incremental first-NP-as-agent bias to process active transitive and passive sentences?: A permutation analysis

PubMed Central

Chang, Franklin; Rowland, Caroline; Ferguson, Heather; Pine, Julian

2017-01-01

We used eye-tracking to investigate if and when children show an incremental bias to assume that the first noun phrase in a sentence is the agent (first-NP-as-agent bias) while processing the meaning of English active and passive transitive sentences. We also investigated whether children can override this bias to successfully distinguish active from passive sentences, after processing the remainder of the sentence frame. For this second question we used eye-tracking (Study 1) and forced-choice pointing (Study 2). For both studies, we used a paradigm in which participants simultaneously saw two novel actions with reversed agent-patient relations while listening to active and passive sentences. We compared English-speaking 25-month-olds and 41-month-olds in between-subjects sentence structure conditions (Active Transitive Condition vs. Passive Condition). A permutation analysis found that both age groups showed a bias to incrementally map the first noun in a sentence onto an agent role. Regarding the second question, 25-month-olds showed some evidence of distinguishing the two structures in the eye-tracking study. However, the 25-month-olds did not distinguish active from passive sentences in the forced choice pointing task. In contrast, the 41-month-old children did reanalyse their initial first-NP-as-agent bias to the extent that they clearly distinguished between active and passive sentences both in the eye-tracking data and in the pointing task. The results are discussed in relation to the development of syntactic (re)parsing. PMID:29049390

Quantification, Prediction, and the Online Impact of Sentence Truth-Value: Evidence From Event-Related Potentials

PubMed Central

2015-01-01

Do negative quantifiers like “few” reduce people’s ability to rapidly evaluate incoming language with respect to world knowledge? Previous research has addressed this question by examining whether online measures of quantifier comprehension match the “final” interpretation reflected in verification judgments. However, these studies confounded quantifier valence with its impact on the unfolding expectations for upcoming words, yielding mixed results. In the current event-related potentials study, participants read negative and positive quantifier sentences matched on cloze probability and on truth-value (e.g., “Most/Few gardeners plant their flowers during the spring/winter for best results”). Regardless of whether participants explicitly verified the sentences or not, true-positive quantifier sentences elicited reduced N400s compared with false-positive quantifier sentences, reflecting the facilitated semantic retrieval of words that render a sentence true. No such facilitation was seen in negative quantifier sentences. However, mixed-effects model analyses (with cloze value and truth-value as continuous predictors) revealed that decreasing cloze values were associated with an interaction pattern between truth-value and quantifier, whereas increasing cloze values were associated with more similar truth-value effects regardless of quantifier. Quantifier sentences are thus understood neither always in 2 sequential stages, nor always in a partial-incremental fashion, nor always in a maximally incremental fashion. Instead, and in accordance with prediction-based views of sentence comprehension, quantifier sentence comprehension depends on incorporation of quantifier meaning into an online, knowledge-based prediction for upcoming words. Fully incremental quantifier interpretation occurs when quantifiers are incorporated into sufficiently strong online predictions for upcoming words. PMID:26375784

Representing sentence information

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Perkins, Walton A., III

1991-03-01

This paper describes a computer-oriented representation for sentence information. Whereas many Artificial Intelligence (AI) natural language systems start with a syntactic parse of a sentence into the linguist's components: noun, verb, adjective, preposition, etc., we argue that it is better to parse the input sentence into 'meaning' components: attribute, attribute value, object class, object instance, and relation. AI systems need a representation that will allow rapid storage and retrieval of information and convenient reasoning with that information. The attribute-of-object representation has proven useful for handling information in relational databases (which are well known for their efficiency in storage and retrieval) and for reasoning in knowledge- based systems. On the other hand, the linguist's syntactic representation of the works in sentences has not been shown to be useful for information handling and reasoning. We think it is an unnecessary and misleading intermediate form. Our sentence representation is semantic based in terms of attribute, attribute value, object class, object instance, and relation. Every sentence is segmented into one or more components with the form: 'attribute' of 'object' 'relation' 'attribute value'. Using only one format for all information gives the system simplicity and good performance as a RISC architecture does for hardware. The attribute-of-object representation is not new; it is used extensively in relational databases and knowledge-based systems. However, we will show that it can be used as a meaning representation for natural language sentences with minor extensions. In this paper we describe how a computer system can parse English sentences into this representation and generate English sentences from this representation. Much of this has been tested with computer implementation.

Is human sentence parsing serial or parallel? Evidence from event-related brain potentials.

PubMed

Hopf, Jens-Max; Bader, Markus; Meng, Michael; Bayer, Josef

2003-01-01

In this ERP study we investigate the processes that occur in syntactically ambiguous German sentences at the point of disambiguation. Whereas most psycholinguistic theories agree on the view that processing difficulties arise when parsing preferences are disconfirmed (so-called garden-path effects), important differences exist with respect to theoretical assumptions about the parser's recovery from a misparse. A key distinction can be made between parsers that compute all alternative syntactic structures in parallel (parallel parsers) and parsers that compute only a single preferred analysis (serial parsers). To distinguish empirically between parallel and serial parsing models, we compare ERP responses to garden-path sentences with ERP responses to truly ungrammatical sentences. Garden-path sentences contain a temporary and ultimately curable ungrammaticality, whereas truly ungrammatical sentences remain so permanently--a difference which gives rise to different predictions in the two classes of parsing architectures. At the disambiguating word, ERPs in both sentence types show negative shifts of similar onset latency, amplitude, and scalp distribution in an initial time window between 300 and 500 ms. In a following time window (500-700 ms), the negative shift to garden-path sentences disappears at right central parietal sites, while it continues in permanently ungrammatical sentences. These data are taken as evidence for a strictly serial parser. The absence of a difference in the early time window indicates that temporary and permanent ungrammaticalities trigger the same kind of parsing responses. Later differences can be related to successful reanalysis in garden-path but not in ungrammatical sentences. Copyright 2003 Elsevier Science B.V.

A new method for eliciting three speaking styles in the laboratory

PubMed Central

Harnsberger, James D.; Wright, Richard; Pisoni, David B.

2009-01-01

In this study, a method was developed to elicit three different speaking styles, reduced, citation, and hyperarticulated, using controlled sentence materials in a laboratory setting. In the first set of experiments, the reduced style was elicited by having twelve talkers read a sentence while carrying out a distractor task that involved recalling from short-term memory an individually-calibrated number of digits. The citation style corresponded to read speech in the laboratory. The hyperarticulated style was elicited by prompting talkers (twice) to reread the sentences more carefully. The results of perceptual tests with naïve listeners and an acoustic analysis showed that six of the twelve talkers produced a reduced style of speech for the test sentences in the distractor task relative to the same sentences in the citation style condition. In addition, all talkers consistently produced sentences in the citation and hyperarticulated styles. In the second set of experiments, the reduced style was elicited by increasing the number of digits in the distractor task by one (a heavier cognitive load). The procedures for eliciting citation and hyperarticulated sentences remained unchanged. Ten talkers were recorded in the second experiment. The results showed that six out of ten talkers differentiated all three styles as predicted (70% of all sentences recorded). In addition, all talkers consistently produced sentences in the citation and hyperarticulated styles. Overall, the results demonstrate that it is possible to elicit controlled sentence stimulus materials varying in speaking style in a laboratory setting, although the method requires further refinement to elicit these styles more consistently from individual participants. PMID:19562041

A new method for eliciting three speaking styles in the laboratory.

PubMed

Harnsberger, James D; Wright, Richard; Pisoni, David B

2008-04-01

In this study, a method was developed to elicit three different speaking styles, reduced, citation, and hyperarticulated, using controlled sentence materials in a laboratory setting. In the first set of experiments, the reduced style was elicited by having twelve talkers read a sentence while carrying out a distractor task that involved recalling from short-term memory an individually-calibrated number of digits. The citation style corresponded to read speech in the laboratory. The hyperarticulated style was elicited by prompting talkers (twice) to reread the sentences more carefully. The results of perceptual tests with naïve listeners and an acoustic analysis showed that six of the twelve talkers produced a reduced style of speech for the test sentences in the distractor task relative to the same sentences in the citation style condition. In addition, all talkers consistently produced sentences in the citation and hyperarticulated styles. In the second set of experiments, the reduced style was elicited by increasing the number of digits in the distractor task by one (a heavier cognitive load). The procedures for eliciting citation and hyperarticulated sentences remained unchanged. Ten talkers were recorded in the second experiment. The results showed that six out of ten talkers differentiated all three styles as predicted (70% of all sentences recorded). In addition, all talkers consistently produced sentences in the citation and hyperarticulated styles. Overall, the results demonstrate that it is possible to elicit controlled sentence stimulus materials varying in speaking style in a laboratory setting, although the method requires further refinement to elicit these styles more consistently from individual participants.

Ambiguous function words do not prevent 18-month-olds from building accurate syntactic category expectations: An ERP study.

PubMed

Brusini, Perrine; Dehaene-Lambertz, Ghislaine; van Heugten, Marieke; de Carvalho, Alex; Goffinet, François; Fiévet, Anne-Caroline; Christophe, Anne

2017-04-01

To comprehend language, listeners need to encode the relationship between words within sentences. This entails categorizing words into their appropriate word classes. Function words, consistently preceding words from specific categories (e.g., the ball NOUN , I speak VERB ), provide invaluable information for this task, and children's sensitivity to such adjacent relationships develops early on in life. However, neighboring words are not the sole source of information regarding an item's word class. Here we examine whether young children also take into account preceding sentence context online during syntactic categorization. To address this question, we use the ambiguous French function word la which, depending on sentence context, can either be used as determiner (the, preceding nouns) or as object clitic (it, preceding verbs). French-learning 18-month-olds' evoked potentials (ERPs) were recorded while they listened to sentences featuring this ambiguous function word followed by either a noun or a verb (thus yielding a locally felicitous co-occurrence of la + noun or la + verb). Crucially, preceding sentence context rendered the sentence either grammatical or ungrammatical. Ungrammatical sentences elicited a late positivity (resembling a P600) that was not observed for grammatical sentences. Toddlers' analysis of the unfolding sentence was thus not limited to local co-occurrences, but rather took into account non-adjacent sentence context. These findings suggest that by 18 months of age, online word categorization is already surprisingly robust. This could be greatly beneficial for the acquisition of novel words. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

How Hearing Impairment Affects Sentence Comprehension: Using Eye Fixations to Investigate the Duration of Speech Processing

PubMed Central

Kollmeier, Birger; Brand, Thomas

2015-01-01

The main objective of this study was to investigate the extent to which hearing impairment influences the duration of sentence processing. An eye-tracking paradigm is introduced that provides an online measure of how hearing impairment prolongs processing of linguistically complex sentences; this measure uses eye fixations recorded while the participant listens to a sentence. Eye fixations toward a target picture (which matches the aurally presented sentence) were measured in the presence of a competitor picture. Based on the recorded eye fixations, the single target detection amplitude, which reflects the tendency of the participant to fixate the target picture, was used as a metric to estimate the duration of sentence processing. The single target detection amplitude was calculated for sentence structures with different levels of linguistic complexity and for different listening conditions: in quiet and in two different noise conditions. Participants with hearing impairment spent more time processing sentences, even at high levels of speech intelligibility. In addition, the relationship between the proposed online measure and listener-specific factors, such as hearing aid use and cognitive abilities, was investigated. Longer processing durations were measured for participants with hearing impairment who were not accustomed to using a hearing aid. Moreover, significant correlations were found between sentence processing duration and individual cognitive abilities (such as working memory capacity or susceptibility to interference). These findings are discussed with respect to audiological applications. PMID:25910503

Grammatical Planning Units During Real-Time Sentence Production in Speakers With Agrammatic Aphasia and Healthy Speakers.

PubMed

Lee, Jiyeon; Yoshida, Masaya; Thompson, Cynthia K

2015-08-01

Grammatical encoding (GE) is impaired in agrammatic aphasia; however, the nature of such deficits remains unclear. We examined grammatical planning units during real-time sentence production in speakers with agrammatic aphasia and control speakers, testing two competing models of GE. We queried whether speakers with agrammatic aphasia produce sentences word by word without advanced planning or whether hierarchical syntactic structure (i.e., verb argument structure; VAS) is encoded as part of the advanced planning unit. Experiment 1 examined production of sentences with a predefined structure (i.e., "The A and the B are above the C") using eye tracking. Experiment 2 tested production of transitive and unaccusative sentences without a predefined sentence structure in a verb-priming study. In Experiment 1, both speakers with agrammatic aphasia and young and age-matched control speakers used word-by-word strategies, selecting the first lemma (noun A) only prior to speech onset. However, in Experiment 2, unlike controls, speakers with agrammatic aphasia preplanned transitive and unaccusative sentences, encoding VAS before speech onset. Speakers with agrammatic aphasia show incremental, word-by-word production for structurally simple sentences, requiring retrieval of multiple noun lemmas. However, when sentences involve functional (thematic to grammatical) structure building, advanced planning strategies (i.e., VAS encoding) are used. This early use of hierarchical syntactic information may provide a scaffold for impaired GE in agrammatism.

Metaphors are Embodied, and so are Their Literal Counterparts

PubMed Central

Santana, Eduardo; de Vega, Manuel

2011-01-01

This study investigates whether understanding up/down metaphors as well as semantically homologous literal sentences activates embodied representations online. Participants read orientational literal sentences (e.g., she climbed up the hill), metaphors (e.g., she climbed up in the company), and abstract sentences with similar meaning to the metaphors (e.g., she succeeded in the company). In Experiments 1 and 2, participants were asked to perform a speeded upward or downward hand motion while they were reading the sentence verb. The hand motion either matched or mismatched the direction connoted by the sentence. The results showed a meaning-action effect for metaphors and literals, that is, faster hand motion responses in the matching conditions. Notably, the matching advantage was also found for homologous abstract sentences, indicating that some abstract ideas are conceptually organized in the vertical dimension, even when they are expressed by means of literal sentences. In Experiment 3, participants responded to an upward or downward visual motion associated with the sentence verb by pressing a single key. In this case, the facilitation effect for matching visual motion-sentence meaning faded, indicating that the visual motion component is less important than the action component in conceptual metaphors. Most up and down metaphors convey emotionally positive and negative information, respectively. We suggest that metaphorical meaning elicits upward/downward movements because they are grounded on the bodily expression of the corresponding emotions. PMID:21687459

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Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2013-09-23

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Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2013-07-17

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On the Optimization of Sentence Imitation in Primary School English Teaching from the Perspective of Strong Memes

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lin, Wang

2017-01-01

A sentence is an important unit in English language, and plays a crucial role in language teaching and learning as well. For many years, sentence teaching is always worth discussion in English teaching, because sentence imitation is very important for students' construction of logical discourse. This paper, based on memetics, proposes some certain…

Sentence-Position Effects on Children's Perception and Production of English Third Person Singular "-s"

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sundara, Megha; Demuth, Katherine; Kuhl, Patricia K.

2011-01-01

Purpose: Two-year-olds produce third person singular "-s" more accurately on verbs in sentence-final position as compared with verbs in sentence-medial position. This study was designed to determine whether these sentence-position effects can be explained by perceptual factors. Method: For this purpose, the authors compared 22- and 27-month-olds'…

Literal, Fictive and Metaphorical Motion Sentences Preserve the Motion Component of the Verb: A TMS Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cacciari, C.; Bolognini, N.; Senna, I.; Pellicciari, M. C.; Miniussi, C.; Papagno, C.

2011-01-01

We used Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) to assess whether reading literal, non-literal (i.e., metaphorical, idiomatic) and fictive motion sentences modulates the activity of the motor system. Sentences were divided into three segments visually presented one at a time: the noun phrase, the verb and the final part of the sentence. Single…

Can Intonational Phrase Structure be Primed (like Syntactic Structure)?

PubMed Central

Tooley, Kristen M.; Konopka, Agnieszka E.; Watson, Duane G.

2013-01-01

In three experiments, we investigated whether intonational phrase structure can be primed. In all experiments, participants listened to sentences in which the presence and location of intonational phrase boundaries was manipulated such that the recording either included no intonational phrase boundaries, a boundary in a structurally dispreferred location, in a preferred location, or in both locations. In Experiment 1, participants repeated the sentences to test whether they would reproduce the prosodic structure they had just heard. Experiments 2 and 3 used a prime-target paradigm to evaluate whether the intonational phrase structure heard in the prime sentence might influence that of a novel target sentence. Experiment 1 showed that participants did repeat back sentences that they just heard with the original intonational phrase structure, yet Experiments 2 and 3 found that exposure to intonational phrase boundaries on prime trials did not influence how a novel target sentence was prosodically phrased. These results suggest that speakers may retain the intonational phrasing of a sentence, but this effect is not long-lived and does not generalize across unrelated sentences. Furthermore, these findings provide no evidence that intonational phrase structure is formulated during a planning stage that is separate from other sources of linguistic information. PMID:24188467

TMS-induced modulation of action sentence priming in the ventral premotor cortex.

PubMed

Tremblay, Pascale; Sato, Marc; Small, Steven L

2012-01-01

Despite accumulating evidence that cortical motor areas, particularly the lateral premotor cortex, are activated during language comprehension, the question of whether motor processes help mediate the semantic encoding of language remains controversial. To address this issue, we examined whether low frequency (1 Hz) repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) of the left ventral premotor cortex (PMv) can interfere with the comprehension of sentences describing manual actions, visual properties of manipulable and non-manipulable objects, and actions of the lips and mouth. Using a primed semantic decision task, sixteen participants were asked to determine for a given sentence whether or not an auditorily presented target word was congruent with the sentence. We hypothesized that if the left PMv is contributing semantic information that is used to comprehend action and object related sentences, then TMS applied over PMv should result in a disruption of semantic priming. Our results show that TMS reduces semantic priming, induces a shift in response bias, and increases response sensitivity, but does so only during the processing of manual action sentences. This suggests a preferential contribution of PMv to the processing of sentences describing manual actions compared to other types of sentences. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Syntactic Versus Memory Accounts of the Sentence Comprehension Deficits of Specific Language Impairment: Looking Back, Looking Ahead.

PubMed

Montgomery, James W; Gillam, Ronald B; Evans, Julia L

2016-12-01

Compared with same-age typically developing peers, school-age children with specific language impairment (SLI) exhibit significant deficits in spoken sentence comprehension. They also demonstrate a range of memory limitations. Whether these 2 deficit areas are related is unclear. The present review article aims to (a) review 2 main theoretical accounts of SLI sentence comprehension and various studies supporting each and (b) offer a new, broader, more integrated memory-based framework to guide future SLI research, as we believe the available evidence favors a memory-based perspective of SLI comprehension limitations. We reviewed the literature on the sentence comprehension abilities of English-speaking children with SLI from 2 theoretical perspectives. The sentence comprehension limitations of children with SLI appear to be more fully captured by a memory-based perspective than by a syntax-specific deficit perspective. Although a memory-based view appears to be the better account of SLI sentence comprehension deficits, this view requires refinement and expansion. Current memory-based perspectives of adult sentence comprehension, with proper modification, offer SLI investigators new, more integrated memory frameworks within which to study and better understand the sentence comprehension abilities of children with SLI.

Syntactic Versus Memory Accounts of the Sentence Comprehension Deficits of Specific Language Impairment: Looking Back, Looking Ahead

PubMed Central

Gillam, Ronald B.; Evans, Julia L.

2016-01-01

Purpose Compared with same-age typically developing peers, school-age children with specific language impairment (SLI) exhibit significant deficits in spoken sentence comprehension. They also demonstrate a range of memory limitations. Whether these 2 deficit areas are related is unclear. The present review article aims to (a) review 2 main theoretical accounts of SLI sentence comprehension and various studies supporting each and (b) offer a new, broader, more integrated memory-based framework to guide future SLI research, as we believe the available evidence favors a memory-based perspective of SLI comprehension limitations. Method We reviewed the literature on the sentence comprehension abilities of English-speaking children with SLI from 2 theoretical perspectives. Results The sentence comprehension limitations of children with SLI appear to be more fully captured by a memory-based perspective than by a syntax-specific deficit perspective. Conclusions Although a memory-based view appears to be the better account of SLI sentence comprehension deficits, this view requires refinement and expansion. Current memory-based perspectives of adult sentence comprehension, with proper modification, offer SLI investigators new, more integrated memory frameworks within which to study and better understand the sentence comprehension abilities of children with SLI. PMID:27973643

Adaptation to nonlinear frequency compression in normal-hearing adults: a comparison of training approaches.

PubMed

Dickinson, Ann-Marie; Baker, Richard; Siciliano, Catherine; Munro, Kevin J

2014-10-01

To identify which training approach, if any, is most effective for improving perception of frequency-compressed speech. A between-subject design using repeated measures. Forty young adults with normal hearing were randomly allocated to one of four groups: a training group (sentence or consonant) or a control group (passive exposure or test-only). Test and training material differed in terms of material and speaker. On average, sentence training and passive exposure led to significantly improved sentence recognition (11.0% and 11.7%, respectively) compared with the consonant training group (2.5%) and test-only group (0.4%), whilst, consonant training led to significantly improved consonant recognition (8.8%) compared with the sentence training group (1.9%), passive exposure group (2.8%), and test-only group (0.8%). Sentence training led to improved sentence recognition, whilst consonant training led to improved consonant recognition. This suggests learning transferred between speakers and material but not stimuli. Passive exposure to sentence material led to an improvement in sentence recognition that was equivalent to gains from active training. This suggests that it may be possible to adapt passively to frequency-compressed speech.

Sentence comprehension in agrammatic aphasia: history and variability to clinical implications.

PubMed

Johnson, Danielle; Cannizzaro, Michael S

2009-01-01

Individuals with Broca's aphasia often present with deficits in their ability to comprehend non-canonical sentences. This has been contrastingly characterized as a systematic loss of specific grammatical abilities or as individual variability in the dynamics between processing load and resource availability. The present study investigated sentence level comprehension in participants with Broca's aphasia in an attempt to integrate these contrasting views into a clinically useful process. Two participants diagnosed with Broca's aphasia were assessed using a sentence-to-picture matching paradigm and a truth-value judgement task, across sentence constructions thought to be problematic for this population. The data demonstrate markedly different patterns of performance between participants, as well as variability within participants (e.g. by sentence type). These findings support the notion of individual performance variability in persons with aphasia. Syntactic theory was instructive for assessing sentence level comprehension, leading to a clinically relevant process of identifying treatment targets considering both performance variability and syntactic complexity for this population.

Chinese Sentence Classification Based on Convolutional Neural Network

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Gu, Chengwei; Wu, Ming; Zhang, Chuang

2017-10-01

Sentence classification is one of the significant issues in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Feature extraction is often regarded as the key point for natural language processing. Traditional ways based on machine learning can not take high level features into consideration, such as Naive Bayesian Model. The neural network for sentence classification can make use of contextual information to achieve greater results in sentence classification tasks. In this paper, we focus on classifying Chinese sentences. And the most important is that we post a novel architecture of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to apply on Chinese sentence classification. In particular, most of the previous methods often use softmax classifier for prediction, we embed a linear support vector machine to substitute softmax in the deep neural network model, minimizing a margin-based loss to get a better result. And we use tanh as an activation function, instead of ReLU. The CNN model improve the result of Chinese sentence classification tasks. Experimental results on the Chinese news title database validate the effectiveness of our model.

Incremental comprehension of spoken quantifier sentences: Evidence from brain potentials.

PubMed

Freunberger, Dominik; Nieuwland, Mante S

2016-09-01

Do people incrementally incorporate the meaning of quantifier expressions to understand an unfolding sentence? Most previous studies concluded that quantifiers do not immediately influence how a sentence is understood based on the observation that online N400-effects differed from offline plausibility judgments. Those studies, however, used serial visual presentation (SVP), which involves unnatural reading. In the current ERP-experiment, we presented spoken positive and negative quantifier sentences ("Practically all/practically no postmen prefer delivering mail, when the weather is good/bad during the day"). Different from results obtained in a previously reported SVP-study (Nieuwland, 2016) sentence truth-value N400 effects occurred in positive and negative quantifier sentences alike, reflecting fully incremental quantifier comprehension. This suggests that the prosodic information available during spoken language comprehension supports the generation of online predictions for upcoming words and that, at least for quantifier sentences, comprehension of spoken language may proceed more incrementally than comprehension during SVP reading. Copyright © 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Effects of age, working memory, and word order on passive-sentence comprehension: evidence from a verb-final language.

PubMed

Sung, Jee Eun; Yoo, Jae Keun; Lee, Soo Eun; Eom, Bora

2017-06-01

The purpose of the current study was to investigate the effects of working-memory (WM) capacity on age-related changes in abilities to comprehend passive sentences when the word order was systematically manipulated. A total of 134 individuals participated in the study. The sentence-comprehension task consisted of the canonical and non-canonical word-order conditions. A composite measure of WM scores was used as an index of WM capacity. Participants exhibited worse performance on sentences with non-canonical word order than canonical word order. The two-way interaction between age and WM was significant, suggesting that WM effects were greater than age effects on the task. WM capacity effects on passive-sentence comprehension increased dramatically as people aged, suggesting that those who have larger WM capacity are less vulnerable to age-related changes in sentence-comprehension abilities. WM capacity may serve as a cognitive reserve associated with sentence-comprehension abilities for elderly adults.

The Effect of Number and Presentation Order of High-Constraint Sentences on Second Language Word Learning.

PubMed

Ma, Tengfei; Chen, Ran; Dunlap, Susan; Chen, Baoguo

2016-01-01

This paper presents the results of an experiment that investigated the effects of number and presentation order of high-constraint sentences on semantic processing of unknown second language (L2) words (pseudowords) through reading. All participants were Chinese native speakers who learned English as a foreign language. In the experiment, sentence constraint and order of different constraint sentences were manipulated in English sentences, as well as L2 proficiency level of participants. We found that the number of high-constraint sentences was supportive for L2 word learning except in the condition in which high-constraint exposure was presented first. Moreover, when the number of high-constraint sentences was the same, learning was significantly better when the first exposure was a high-constraint exposure. And no proficiency level effects were found. Our results provided direct evidence that L2 word learning benefited from high quality language input and first presentations of high quality language input.