Semantic Ambiguity Effects in L2 Word Recognition

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ishida, Tomomi

2018-01-01

The present study examined the ambiguity effects in second language (L2) word recognition. Previous studies on first language (L1) lexical processing have observed that ambiguous words are recognized faster and more accurately than unambiguous words on lexical decision tasks. In this research, L1 and L2 speakers of English were asked whether a…

Roles of frontal and temporal regions in reinterpreting semantically ambiguous sentences

PubMed Central

Vitello, Sylvia; Warren, Jane E.; Devlin, Joseph T.; Rodd, Jennifer M.

2014-01-01

Semantic ambiguity resolution is an essential and frequent part of speech comprehension because many words map onto multiple meanings (e.g., “bark,” “bank”). Neuroimaging research highlights the importance of the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) and the left posterior temporal cortex in this process but the roles they serve in ambiguity resolution are uncertain. One possibility is that both regions are engaged in the processes of semantic reinterpretation that follows incorrect interpretation of an ambiguous word. Here we used fMRI to investigate this hypothesis. 20 native British English monolinguals were scanned whilst listening to sentences that contained an ambiguous word. To induce semantic reinterpretation, the disambiguating information was presented after the ambiguous word and delayed until the end of the sentence (e.g., “the teacher explained that the BARK was going to be very damp”). These sentences were compared to well-matched unambiguous sentences. Supporting the reinterpretation hypothesis, these ambiguous sentences produced more activation in both the LIFG and the left posterior inferior temporal cortex. Importantly, all but one subject showed ambiguity-related peaks within both regions, demonstrating that the group-level results were driven by high inter-subject consistency. Further support came from the finding that activation in both regions was modulated by meaning dominance. Specifically, sentences containing biased ambiguous words, which have one more dominant meaning, produced greater activation than those with balanced ambiguous words, which have two equally frequent meanings. Because the context always supported the less frequent meaning, the biased words require reinterpretation more often than balanced words. This is the first evidence of dominance effects in the spoken modality and provides strong support that frontal and temporal regions support the updating of semantic representations during speech comprehension. PMID:25120445

Sublexical ambiguity effect in reading Chinese disyllabic compounds.

PubMed

Huang, Hsu-Wen; Lee, Chia-Ying; Tsai, Jie-Li; Tzeng, Ovid J-L

2011-05-01

For Chinese compounds, neighbors can share either both orthographic forms and meanings, or orthographic forms only. In this study, central presentation and visual half-field (VF) presentation methods were used in conjunction with ERP measures to investigate how readers solve the sublexical semantic ambiguity of the first constituent character in reading a disyllabic compound. The sublexical ambiguity of the first character was manipulated while the orthographic neighborhood sizes of the first and second character (NS1, NS2) were controlled. Subjective rating of number of meanings corresponding to a character was used as an index of sublexical ambiguity. Results showed that low sublexical ambiguity words elicited a more negative N400 than high sublexical ambiguity words when words were centrally presented. Similar patterns were found when words were presented to the left VF. Interestingly, different patterns were observed for pseudowords. With left VF presentation, high sublexical ambiguity psudowords showed a more negative N400 than low sublexical ambiguity pseudowords. In contrast, with right VF presentation, low sublexical ambiguity pseudowords showed a more negative N400 than high sublexical ambiguity pseudowords. These findings indicate that a level of morphological representation between form and meaning needs to be established and refined in Chinese. In addition, hemispheric asymmetries in the use of word information in ambiguity resolution should be taken into account, even at sublexical level. 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Phonological ambiguity modulates resolution of semantic ambiguity during reading: An fMRI study of Hebrew.

PubMed

Bitan, Tali; Kaftory, Asaf; Meiri-Leib, Adi; Eviatar, Zohar; Peleg, Orna

2017-10-01

The current fMRI study examined the role of phonology in the extraction of meaning from print in each hemisphere by comparing homophonic and heterophonic homographs (ambiguous words in which both meanings have the same or different sounds respectively, e.g., bank or tear). The analysis distinguished between the first phase, in which participants read ambiguous words without context, and the second phase in which the context resolves the ambiguity. Native Hebrew readers were scanned during semantic relatedness judgments on pairs of words in which the first word was either a homophone or a heterophone and the second word was related to its dominant or subordinate meaning. In Phase 1 there was greater activation for heterophones in left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), pars opercularis, and more activation for homophones in bilateral IFG pars orbitalis, suggesting that resolution of the conflict at the phonological level has abolished the semantic ambiguity for heterophones. Reduced activation for all ambiguous words in temporo-parietal regions suggests that although ambiguity enhances controlled lexical selection processes in frontal regions it reduces reliance on bottom-up mapping processes. After presentation of the context, a larger difference between the dominant and subordinate meaning was found for heterophones in all reading-related regions, suggesting a greater engagement for heterophones with the dominant meaning. Altogether these results are consistent with the prominent role of phonological processing in visual word recognition. Finally, despite differences in hemispheric asymmetry between homophones and heterophones, ambiguity resolution, even toward the subordinate meaning, is largely left lateralized. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).

As Far As Words Go: Activities for Understanding Ambiguous Language and Humor, Revised Edition

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Spector, Cecile Cyrul

2009-01-01

Understanding ambiguous words, phrases, and sentences is an important part of reading well, communicating skillfully, and enjoying humor based on word play. With this seven-unit activity book--filled with creative, ready-to-use activities based on jokes and puns--students will learn how to decipher the language ambiguities they encounter inside…

Exploiting Lexical Ambiguity to Help Students Understand the Meaning of "Random"

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kaplan, Jennifer J.; Rogness, Neal T.; Fisher, Diane G.

2014-01-01

Words that are part of colloquial English but used differently in a technical domain may possess lexical ambiguity. The use of such words by instructors may inhibit student learning if incorrect connections are made by students between the technical and colloquial meanings. One fundamental word in statistics that has lexical ambiguity for students…

Determinants of translation ambiguity

PubMed Central

Degani, Tamar; Prior, Anat; Eddington, Chelsea M.; Arêas da Luz Fontes, Ana B.; Tokowicz, Natasha

2016-01-01

Ambiguity in translation is highly prevalent, and has consequences for second-language learning and for bilingual lexical processing. To better understand this phenomenon, the current study compared the determinants of translation ambiguity across four sets of translation norms from English to Spanish, Dutch, German and Hebrew. The number of translations an English word received was correlated across these different languages, and was also correlated with the number of senses the word has in English, demonstrating that translation ambiguity is partially determined by within-language semantic ambiguity. For semantically-ambiguous English words, the probability of the different translations in Spanish and Hebrew was predicted by the meaning-dominance structure in English, beyond the influence of other lexical and semantic factors, for bilinguals translating from their L1, and translating from their L2. These findings are consistent with models postulating direct access to meaning from L2 words for moderately-proficient bilinguals. PMID:27882188

Context-dependent lexical ambiguity resolution: MEG evidence for the time-course of activity in left inferior frontal gyrus and posterior middle temporal gyrus.

PubMed

Mollo, Giovanna; Jefferies, Elizabeth; Cornelissen, Piers; Gennari, Silvia P

An MEG study investigated the role of context in semantic interpretation by examining the comprehension of ambiguous words in contexts leading to different interpretations. We compared high-ambiguity words in minimally different contexts (to bowl, the bowl) to low-ambiguity counterparts (the tray, to flog). Whole brain beamforming revealed the engagement of left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) and posterior middle temporal gyrus (LPMTG). Points of interest analyses showed that both these sites showed a stronger response to verb-contexts by 200 ms post-stimulus and displayed overlapping ambiguity effects that were sustained from 300 ms onwards. The effect of context was stronger for high-ambiguity words than for low-ambiguity words at several different time points, including within the first 100 ms post-stimulus. Unlike LIFG, LPMTG also showed stronger responses to verb than noun contexts in low-ambiguity trials. We argue that different functional roles previously attributed to LIFG and LPMTG are in fact played out at different periods during processing. Crown Copyright © 2018. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

How meaning similarity influences ambiguous word processing: the current state of the literature

PubMed Central

Tokowicz, Natasha

2016-01-01

The majority of words in the English language do not correspond to a single meaning, but rather correspond to two or more unrelated meanings (i.e., are homonyms) or multiple related senses (i.e., are polysemes). It has been proposed that the different types of “semantically-ambiguous words” (i.e., words with more than one meaning) are processed and represented differently in the human mind. Several review papers and books have been written on the subject of semantic ambiguity (e.g., Adriaens, Small, Cottrell, & Tanenhaus, 1988; Burgess & Simpson, 1988; Degani & Tokowicz, 2010; Gorfein, 1989, 2001; Simpson, 1984). However, several more recent studies (e.g., Klein & Murphy, 2001; Klepousniotou, 2002; Klepousniotou & Baum, 2007; Rodd, Gaskell, & Marslen-Wilson, 2002) have investigated the role of the semantic similarity between the multiple meanings of ambiguous words on processing and representation, whereas this was not the emphasis of previous reviews of the literature. In this review, we focus on the current state of the semantic ambiguity literature that examines how different types of ambiguous words influence processing and representation. We analyze the consistent and inconsistent findings reported in the literature and how factors such as semantic similarity, meaning/sense frequency, task, timing, and modality affect ambiguous word processing. We discuss the findings with respect to recent parallel distributed processing (PDP) models of ambiguity processing (Armstrong & Plaut, 2008, 2011; Rodd, Gaskell, & Marslen-Wilson, 2004). Finally, we discuss how experience/instance-based models (e.g., Hintzman, 1986; Reichle & Perfetti, 2003) can inform a comprehensive understanding of semantic ambiguity resolution. PMID:24889119

Word embeddings and recurrent neural networks based on Long-Short Term Memory nodes in supervised biomedical word sense disambiguation.

PubMed

Jimeno Yepes, Antonio

2017-09-01

Word sense disambiguation helps identifying the proper sense of ambiguous words in text. With large terminologies such as the UMLS Metathesaurus ambiguities appear and highly effective disambiguation methods are required. Supervised learning algorithm methods are used as one of the approaches to perform disambiguation. Features extracted from the context of an ambiguous word are used to identify the proper sense of such a word. The type of features have an impact on machine learning methods, thus affect disambiguation performance. In this work, we have evaluated several types of features derived from the context of the ambiguous word and we have explored as well more global features derived from MEDLINE using word embeddings. Results show that word embeddings improve the performance of more traditional features and allow as well using recurrent neural network classifiers based on Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) nodes. The combination of unigrams and word embeddings with an SVM sets a new state of the art performance with a macro accuracy of 95.97 in the MSH WSD data set. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

LIFG-based attentional control and the resolution of lexical ambiguities in sentence context

PubMed Central

Vuong, Loan C.; Martin, Randi C.

2010-01-01

The role of attentional control in lexical ambiguity resolution was examined in two patients with damage to the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) and one control patient with non-LIFG damage. Experiment 1 confirmed that the LIFG patients had attentional control deficits compared to normal controls while the non-LIFG patient was relatively unimpaired. Experiment 2 showed that all three patients did as well as normal controls in using biasing sentence context to resolve lexical ambiguities involving balanced ambiguous words, but only the LIFG patients took an abnormally long time on lexical ambiguities that resolved toward a subordinate meaning of biased ambiguous words. Taken together, the results suggest that attentional control plays an important role in the resolution of certain lexical ambiguities – those that induce strong interference from context-inappropriate meanings (i.e., dominant meanings of biased ambiguous words). PMID:20971500

Lexical ambiguity in sentence comprehension

PubMed Central

Mason, Robert A.; Just, Marcel Adam

2009-01-01

An event-related fMRI paradigm was used to investigate brain activity during the reading of sentences containing either a lexically ambiguous word or an unambiguous control word. Higher levels of activation occurred during the reading of sentences containing a lexical ambiguity. Furthermore, the activated cortical network differed, depending on: (1) whether the sentence contained a balanced (i.e., both meanings equally likely) or a biased (i.e., one meaning more likely than other meanings) ambiguous word; and, (2) the working memory capacity of the individual as assessed by reading span. The findings suggest that encountering a lexical ambiguity is dealt with by activating multiple meanings utilizing processes involving both hemispheres. When an early interpretation of a biased ambiguous word is later disambiguated to the subordinate meaning, the superior frontal cortex activates in response to the coherence break and the right inferior frontal gyrus and the insula activate, possibly to suppress the incorrect interpretation. Negative correlations between reading span scores and activation in the right hemisphere for both types of ambiguous words suggest that readers with lower spans are more likely to involve show right hemisphere involvement in the processing of the ambiguity. A positive correlation between reading span scores and insula activation appearing only for biased sentences disambiguated to the subordinate meaning indicates that individuals with higher spans were more likely to initially maintain both meanings and as a result had to suppress the unintended dominant meaning. PMID:17433891

A study of potential sources of linguistic ambiguity in written work instructions.

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

Matzen, Laura E.

This report describes the results of a small experimental study that investigated potential sources of ambiguity in written work instructions (WIs). The English language can be highly ambiguous because words with different meanings can share the same spelling. Previous studies in the nuclear weapons complex have shown that ambiguous WIs can lead to human error, which is a major cause for concern. To study possible sources of ambiguity in WIs, we determined which of the recommended action verbs in the DOE and BWXT writer's manuals have numerous meanings to their intended audience, making them potentially ambiguous. We used cognitive psychologymore » techniques to conduct a survey in which technicians who use WIs in their jobs indicated the first meaning that came to mind for each of the words. Although the findings of this study are limited by the small number of respondents, we identified words that had many different meanings even within this limited sample. WI writers should pay particular attention to these words and to their most frequent meanings so that they can avoid ambiguity in their writing.« less

Simply Imagining Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows Will Not Budge the Bias: The Role of Ambiguity in Interpretive Bias Modification.

PubMed

Clarke, Patrick J F; Nanthakumar, Shenooka; Notebaert, Lies; Holmes, Emily A; Blackwell, Simon E; Macleod, Colin

2014-01-01

Imagery-based interpretive bias modification (CBM-I) involves repeatedly imagining scenarios that are initially ambiguous before being resolved as either positive or negative in the last word/s. While the presence of such ambiguity is assumed to be important to achieve change in selective interpretation, it is also possible that the act of repeatedly imagining positive or negative events could produce such change in the absence of ambiguity. The present study sought to examine whether the ambiguity in imagery-based CBM-I is necessary to elicit change in interpretive bias, or, if the emotional content of the imagined scenarios is sufficient to produce such change. An imagery-based CBM-I task was delivered to participants in one of four conditions, where the valence of imagined scenarios were either positive or negative, and the ambiguity of the scenario was either present (until the last word/s) or the ambiguity was absent (emotional valence was evident from the start). Results indicate that only those who received scenarios in which the ambiguity was present acquired an interpretive bias consistent with the emotional valence of the scenarios, suggesting that the act of imagining positive or negative events will only influence patterns of interpretation when the emotional ambiguity is a consistent feature.

Not All Ambiguous Words Are Created Equal: An EEG Investigation of Homonymy and Polysemy

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Klepousniotou, Ekaterini; Pike, G. Bruce; Steinhauer, Karsten; Gracco, Vincent

2012-01-01

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to investigate the time-course of meaning activation of different types of ambiguous words. Unbalanced homonymous ("pen"), balanced homonymous ("panel"), metaphorically polysemous ("lip"), and metonymically polysemous words ("rabbit") were used in a visual single-word priming delayed lexical decision task.…

Harmony Search Algorithm for Word Sense Disambiguation.

PubMed

Abed, Saad Adnan; Tiun, Sabrina; Omar, Nazlia

2015-01-01

Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is the task of determining which sense of an ambiguous word (word with multiple meanings) is chosen in a particular use of that word, by considering its context. A sentence is considered ambiguous if it contains ambiguous word(s). Practically, any sentence that has been classified as ambiguous usually has multiple interpretations, but just one of them presents the correct interpretation. We propose an unsupervised method that exploits knowledge based approaches for word sense disambiguation using Harmony Search Algorithm (HSA) based on a Stanford dependencies generator (HSDG). The role of the dependency generator is to parse sentences to obtain their dependency relations. Whereas, the goal of using the HSA is to maximize the overall semantic similarity of the set of parsed words. HSA invokes a combination of semantic similarity and relatedness measurements, i.e., Jiang and Conrath (jcn) and an adapted Lesk algorithm, to perform the HSA fitness function. Our proposed method was experimented on benchmark datasets, which yielded results comparable to the state-of-the-art WSD methods. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the dependency generator, we perform the same methodology without the parser, but with a window of words. The empirical results demonstrate that the proposed method is able to produce effective solutions for most instances of the datasets used.

Harmony Search Algorithm for Word Sense Disambiguation

PubMed Central

Abed, Saad Adnan; Tiun, Sabrina; Omar, Nazlia

2015-01-01

Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is the task of determining which sense of an ambiguous word (word with multiple meanings) is chosen in a particular use of that word, by considering its context. A sentence is considered ambiguous if it contains ambiguous word(s). Practically, any sentence that has been classified as ambiguous usually has multiple interpretations, but just one of them presents the correct interpretation. We propose an unsupervised method that exploits knowledge based approaches for word sense disambiguation using Harmony Search Algorithm (HSA) based on a Stanford dependencies generator (HSDG). The role of the dependency generator is to parse sentences to obtain their dependency relations. Whereas, the goal of using the HSA is to maximize the overall semantic similarity of the set of parsed words. HSA invokes a combination of semantic similarity and relatedness measurements, i.e., Jiang and Conrath (jcn) and an adapted Lesk algorithm, to perform the HSA fitness function. Our proposed method was experimented on benchmark datasets, which yielded results comparable to the state-of-the-art WSD methods. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the dependency generator, we perform the same methodology without the parser, but with a window of words. The empirical results demonstrate that the proposed method is able to produce effective solutions for most instances of the datasets used. PMID:26422368

Exploiting Degrees of Inflectional Ambiguity: Stem Form and the Time Course of Morphological Processing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jarvikivi, Juhani; Pyykkonen, Pirita; Niemi, Jussi

2009-01-01

The authors compared sublexical and supralexical approaches to morphological processing with unambiguous and ambiguous inflected words and words with ambiguous stems in 3 masked and unmasked priming experiments in Finnish. Experiment 1 showed equal facilitation for all prime types with a short 60-ms stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) but significant…

Multiple Meanings Are Not Necessarily a Disadvantage in Semantic Processing: Evidence from Homophone Effects in Semantic Categorisation

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Siakaluk, Paul D.; Pexman, Penny M.; Sears, Christopher R.; Owen, William J.

2007-01-01

The ambiguity disadvantage (slower processing of ambiguous words relative to unambiguous words) has been taken as evidence for a distributed semantic representational system like that embodied in parallel distributed processing (PDP) models. In the present study, we investigated whether semantic ambiguity slows meaning activation, as PDP models…

Processing and Representation of Ambiguous Words in Chinese Reading: Evidence from Eye Movements.

PubMed

Shen, Wei; Li, Xingshan

2016-01-01

In the current study, we used eye tracking to investigate whether senses of polysemous words and meanings of homonymous words are represented and processed similarly or differently in Chinese reading. Readers read sentences containing target words which was either homonymous words or polysemous words. The contexts of text preceding the target words were manipulated to bias the participants toward reading the ambiguous words according to their dominant, subordinate, or neutral meanings. Similarly, disambiguating regions following the target words were also manipulated to favor either the dominant or subordinate meanings of ambiguous words. The results showed that there were similar eye movement patterns when Chinese participants read sentences containing homonymous and polysemous words. The study also found that participants took longer to read the target word and the disambiguating text following it when the prior context and disambiguating regions favored divergent meanings rather than the same meaning. These results suggested that homonymy and polysemy are represented similarly in the mental lexicon when a particular meaning (sense) is fully specified by disambiguating information. Furthermore, multiple meanings (senses) are represented as separate entries in the mental lexicon.

Polysemy Advantage with Abstract but Not Concrete Words

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jager, Bernadet; Cleland, Alexandra A.

2016-01-01

It is a robust finding that ambiguous words are recognized faster than unambiguous words. More recent studies (e.g., Rodd et al. in "J Mem Lang" 46:245-266, 2002) now indicate that this "ambiguity advantage" may in reality be a "polysemy advantage": caused by related senses (polysemy) rather than unrelated meanings…

Hemispheric Asymmetries in Semantic Processing: Evidence from False Memories for Ambiguous Words

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Faust, Miriam; Ben-Artzi, Elisheva; Harel, Itay

2008-01-01

Previous research suggests that the left hemisphere (LH) focuses on strongly related word meanings; the right hemisphere (RH) may contribute uniquely to the processing of lexical ambiguity by activating and maintaining a wide range of meanings, including subordinate meanings. The present study used the word-lists false memory paradigm [Roediger,…

Semantic Ambiguity and the Process of Generating Meaning From Print

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Pexman, Penny M.; Hino, Yasushi; Lupker, Stephen J.

2004-01-01

An ambiguity disadvantage (slower responses for ambiguous words, e.g., bank, than for unambiguous words) has been reported in semantic tasks (L. R. Gottlob, S. D. Goldinger, G. O. Stone, & G. C. Van Orden, 1999; Y. Hino, S. J. Lupker, & P. M. Pexman, 2002; C. D. Piercey & S. Joordens, 2000) and has been attributed to the meaning activation…

The role of reference in cross-situational word learning.

PubMed

Wang, Felix Hao; Mintz, Toben H

2018-01-01

Word learning involves massive ambiguity, since in a particular encounter with a novel word, there are an unlimited number of potential referents. One proposal for how learners surmount the problem of ambiguity is that learners use cross-situational statistics to constrain the ambiguity: When a word and its referent co-occur across multiple situations, learners will associate the word with the correct referent. Yu and Smith (2007) propose that these co-occurrence statistics are sufficient for word-to-referent mapping. Alternative accounts hold that co-occurrence statistics alone are insufficient to support learning, and that learners are further guided by knowledge that words are referential (e.g., Waxman & Gelman, 2009). However, no behavioral word learning studies we are aware of explicitly manipulate subjects' prior assumptions about the role of the words in the experiments in order to test the influence of these assumptions. In this study, we directly test whether, when faced with referential ambiguity, co-occurrence statistics are sufficient for word-to-referent mappings in adult word-learners. Across a series of cross-situational learning experiments, we varied the degree to which there was support for the notion that the words were referential. At the same time, the statistical information about the words' meanings was held constant. When we overrode support for the notion that words were referential, subjects failed to learn the word-to-referent mappings, but otherwise they succeeded. Thus, cross-situational statistics were useful only when learners had the goal of discovering mappings between words and referents. We discuss the implications of these results for theories of word learning in children's language acquisition. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Bidirectional Transfer: Consequences of Translation Ambiguity for Bilingual Word Meaning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Degani, Tamar

2011-01-01

Could a second language (L2) influence how bilinguals process their native language (L1)? The work described in this dissertation examined this issue focusing on the way bilinguals interpret the meanings of words. Capitalizing on the prevalence of words that can be translated in more than one way across languages (i.e., "translation ambiguity,"…

Processes in the Resolution of Ambiguous Words: Towards a Model of Selective Inhibition. Cognitive Science Program, Technical Report No. 86-6.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Yee, Penny L.

This study investigates the role of specific inhibitory processes in lexical ambiguity resolution. An attentional view of inhibition and a view based on specific automatic inhibition between nodes predict different results when a neutral item is processed between an ambiguous word and a related target. Subjects were 32 English speakers with normal…

How Does Context Play "a Part" in Splitting Words "Apart"? Production and Perception of Word Boundaries in Casual Speech

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kim, Dahee; Stephens, Joseph D. W.; Pitt, Mark A.

2012-01-01

Four experiments examined listeners' segmentation of ambiguous schwa-initial sequences (e.g., "a long" vs. "along") in casual speech, where acoustic cues can be unclear, possibly increasing reliance on contextual information to resolve the ambiguity. In Experiment 1, acoustic analyses of talkers' productions showed that the one-word and two-word…

Conceptual Representation Changes in Indonesian-English Bilinguals.

PubMed

Hartanto, Andree; Suárez, Lidia

2016-10-01

This study investigated conceptual representations changes in bilinguals. Participants were Indonesian-English bilinguals (dominant in Indonesian, with different levels of English proficiency) and a control group composed of English-dominant bilinguals. All completed a gender decision task, in which participants decided whether English words referred to a male or female person or animal. In order to explore conceptual representations, we divided the words into gender-specific and gender-ambiguous words. Gender-specific words were words in which conceptual representations contained gender as a defining feature, in both English and Indonesian (e.g., uncle). In contrast, gender-ambiguous words were words in which gender was a defining feature in English but not a necessary feature in Indonesian (e.g., nephew and niece are both subsumed under the same word, keponakan, in Indonesian). The experiment was conducted exclusively in English. Indonesian-English bilinguals responded faster to gender-specific words than gender-ambiguous words, but the difference was smaller for the most proficient bilinguals. As expected, English-dominant speakers' response latencies were similar across these two types of words. The results suggest that English concepts are dynamic and that proficiency leads to native-like conceptual representations.

Phase-ambiguity resolution for QPSK modulation systems. Part 2: A method to resolve offset QPSK

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Nguyen, Tien Manh

1989-01-01

Part 2 presents a new method to resolve the phase-ambiguity for Offset QPSK modulation systems. When an Offset Quaternary Phase-Shift-Keyed (OQPSK) communications link is utilized, the phase ambiguity of the reference carrier must be resolved. At the transmitter, two different unique words are separately modulated onto the quadrature carriers. At the receiver, the recovered carrier may have one of four possible phases, 0, 90, 180, or 270 degrees, referenced to the nominally correct phase. The IF portion of the channel may cause a phase-sense reversal, i.e., a reversal in the direction of phase rotation for a specified bit pattern. Hence, eight possible phase relationships (the so-called eight ambiguous phase conditions) between input and output of the demodulator must be resolved. Using the In-phase (I)/Quadrature (Q) channel reversal correcting property of an OQPSK Costas loop with integrated symbol synchronization, four ambiguous phase conditions are eliminated. Thus, only four possible ambiguous phase conditions remain. The errors caused by the remaining ambiguous phase conditions can be corrected by monitoring and detecting the polarity of the two unique words. The correction of the unique word polarities results in the complete phase-ambiguity resolution for the OQPSK system.

Semantic diversity: a measure of semantic ambiguity based on variability in the contextual usage of words.

PubMed

Hoffman, Paul; Lambon Ralph, Matthew A; Rogers, Timothy T

2013-09-01

Semantic ambiguity is typically measured by summing the number of senses or dictionary definitions that a word has. Such measures are somewhat subjective and may not adequately capture the full extent of variation in word meaning, particularly for polysemous words that can be used in many different ways, with subtle shifts in meaning. Here, we describe an alternative, computationally derived measure of ambiguity based on the proposal that the meanings of words vary continuously as a function of their contexts. On this view, words that appear in a wide range of contexts on diverse topics are more variable in meaning than those that appear in a restricted set of similar contexts. To quantify this variation, we performed latent semantic analysis on a large text corpus to estimate the semantic similarities of different linguistic contexts. From these estimates, we calculated the degree to which the different contexts associated with a given word vary in their meanings. We term this quantity a word's semantic diversity (SemD). We suggest that this approach provides an objective way of quantifying the subtle, context-dependent variations in word meaning that are often present in language. We demonstrate that SemD is correlated with other measures of ambiguity and contextual variability, as well as with frequency and imageability. We also show that SemD is a strong predictor of performance in semantic judgments in healthy individuals and in patients with semantic deficits, accounting for unique variance beyond that of other predictors. SemD values for over 30,000 English words are provided as supplementary materials.

Is there a genuine advantage to the upper part of words during lexical access? Evidence from the Stroop task.

PubMed

Tejero, Pilar; Perea, Manuel; Jiménez, María

2014-07-01

A number of recent visual-word recognition and reading experiments have concluded that the upper part of words is more important for lexical access than is the lower part, which conforms with Huey's (1908) observation. Here, we examined whether this phenomenon may simply be due to the fact that words in Indo-European languages tend to have a higher number of confusable letters in the lower than in the upper part. We manipulated the letter ambiguity of the upper and lower parts of words in two experiments in which we asked participants to report the presentation color of the upper and lower parts of color words and noncolor words, and in a baseline condition, of strings of &s (Stroop task). In Experiment 1, the lower part of noncolor words was more ambiguous than the upper part (upward-unbalanced words), whereas in Experiment 2, the ambiguities of the two parts of the noncolor words were similar (balanced words). For the upward-unbalanced noncolor words, the magnitude of lexical interference (relative to the baseline condition) was greater for the upper than for the lower part. Critically, the differences vanished when this factor was controlled (i.e., balanced words; Exp. 2). Thus, the apparent bias in favor of the upper part of words can be parsimoniously described as an idiosyncratic feature of the words' component letters.

Chinese translation norms for 1,429 English words.

PubMed

Wen, Yun; van Heuven, Walter J B

2017-06-01

We present Chinese translation norms for 1,429 English words. Chinese-English bilinguals (N = 28) were asked to provide the first Chinese translation that came to mind for 1,429 English words. The results revealed that 71 % of the English words received more than one correct translation indicating the large amount of translation ambiguity when translating from English to Chinese. The relationship between translation ambiguity and word frequency, concreteness and language proficiency was investigated. Although the significant correlations were not strong, results revealed that English word frequency was positively correlated with the number of alternative translations, whereas English word concreteness was negatively correlated with the number of translations. Importantly, regression analyses showed that the number of Chinese translations was predicted by word frequency and concreteness. Furthermore, an interaction between these predictors revealed that the number of translations was more affected by word frequency for more concrete words than for less concrete words. In addition, mixed-effects modelling showed that word frequency, concreteness and English language proficiency were all significant predictors of whether or not a dominant translation was provided. Finally, correlations between the word frequencies of English words and their Chinese dominant translations were higher for translation-unambiguous pairs than for translation-ambiguous pairs. The translation norms are made available in a database together with lexical information about the words, which will be a useful resource for researchers investigating Chinese-English bilingual language processing.

Enhancing lexical ambiguity resolution by brain polarization of the right posterior superior temporal sulcus.

PubMed

Peretz, Yael; Lavidor, Michal

2013-04-01

Previous studies have reported a hemispheric asymmetry in processing dominant (e.g., paper) and subordinate (e.g., farmer) associations of ambiguous words (pen). Here we applied sham and anodal Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) over Wernicke's area and its right homologue to test whether we can modulate the selective hemispheric expertise in processing lexical ambiguity. Ambiguous prime words were presented followed by target words that could be associated to the dominant or subordinate meaning of the prime in a semantic relatedness task. Anodal stimulation of the right Wernicke's area significantly decreased response time (RTs) to subordinate but not dominant associations compared to sham stimulation. There was also a complementary trend of faster responses to dominant associations following anodal stimulation of Wernicke's area. The results support brain asymmetry in processing lexical ambiguity and show that tDCS can enhance complex language processing even in a sample of highly literate individuals. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Cognitive Science Program: Processes in the Resolution of Ambiguous Words: Towards a Model of Selective Inhibition.

DTIC Science & Technology

1986-05-01

NUMBERS Department of Psychology NR 667-523 University of Oregon II. CONTROLLING OFFICE NAME AND ADDRESS 12. REPORT DATE May 1, 1986 13. NUMBER OF PAGES 21...14. MONITORING AGENCY NAME & ADDRSWI ’ dillsrat from Controlling Office) 15. SECURITY CLASS. (of this report) Unclassified IS. DECLASSIFICATION...trial n+It naming latencies were longer in trial n+1 thar in a control condition where there was no relation between successive trials. Neill proposed

Long-term priming of the meanings of ambiguous words

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rodd, Jennifer M.; Lopez Cutrin, Belen; Kirsch, Hannah; Millar, Allesandra; Davis, Matthew H.

2013-01-01

Comprehension of semantically ambiguous words (e.g., "bark") is strongly influenced by the relative frequencies of their meanings, such that listeners are biased towards retrieving the most frequent meaning. These biases are often assumed to reflect a highly stable property of an individual's long-term lexical-semantic representations. We present…

Lexical Access for Phonetic Ambiguities.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Spencer, N. J.; Wollman, Neil

1980-01-01

Reports on research that (1) suggests that phonetically ambiguous pairs (ice cream/I scream) have been used inaccurately to illustrate contextual effects in word segmentation, (2) supports unitary rather than exhaustive processing, and (3) supports the use of the concepts of word frequency and listener expectations instead of top-down, multiple…

Semantic Support and Parallel Parsing in Chinese

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hsieh, Yufen; Boland, Julie E.

2015-01-01

Two eye-tracking experiments were conducted using written Chinese sentences that contained a multi-word ambiguous region. The goal was to determine whether readers maintained multiple interpretations throughout the ambiguous region or selected a single interpretation at the point of ambiguity. Within the ambiguous region, we manipulated the…

Ambiguity's aftermath: how age differences in resolving lexical ambiguity affect subsequent comprehension.

PubMed

Lee, Chia-lin; Federmeier, Kara D

2012-04-01

When ambiguity resolution is difficult, younger adults recruit selection-related neural resources that older adults do not. To elucidate the nature of those resources and the consequences of their recruitment for subsequent comprehension, we embedded noun/verb homographs and matched unambiguous words in syntactically well-specified but semantically neutral sentences. Target words were followed by a prepositional phrase whose head noun was plausible for only one meaning of the homograph. Replicating past findings, younger but not older adults elicited sustained frontal negativity to homographs compared to unambiguous words. On the subsequent head nouns, younger adults showed plausibility effects in all conditions, attesting to successful meaning selection through suppression. In contrast, older adults showed smaller plausibility effects following ambiguous words and failed to show plausibility effects when the context picked out the homograph's non-dominant meaning (i.e., they did not suppress the contextually-irrelevant dominant meaning). Meaning suppression processes, reflected in the frontal negativity, thus become less available with age, with consequences for subsequent comprehension. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Inhibitory Control during Sentence Comprehension in Individuals with Dementia of the Alzheimer Type

PubMed Central

Faust, Mark E.; Balota, David A.; Duchek, Janet M.; Gernsbacher, Morton Ann; Smith, Stan

2015-01-01

In two experiments we investigated the extent to which individuals with dementia of the Alzheimer type (OAT) manage the activation of contextually appropriate and inappropriate meanings of ambiguous words during sentence comprehension. OAT individuals and healthy older individuals read sentences that ended in ambiguous words and then determined if a test word fit the overall meaning of the sentence. Analysis of response latencies indicated that OAT individuals were less efficient than healthy older individuals at suppressing inappropriate meanings of ambiguous words not implied by sentence context, but enhanced appropriate meanings to the same extent, if not more, than healthy older adults. DAT individuals were also more likely to allow inappropriate information to actually drive responses (i.e., increased intrusion errors). Overall, the results are consistent with a growing number of studies demonstrating impairments in inhibitory control, with relative preservation offacilitatory processes, in DAT. PMID:9126415

CarPrice versus CarpRice: Word Boundary Ambiguity Influences Saccade Target Selection during the Reading of Chinese Sentences

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Yan, Ming; Kliegl, Reinhold

2016-01-01

As a contribution to a theoretical debate about the degree of high-level influences on saccade targeting during sentence reading, we investigated eye movements during the reading of structurally ambiguous Chinese character strings and examined whether parafoveal word segmentation could influence saccade-target selection. As expected, ambiguous…

Common Expositional Problems in Students' Papers and Theses

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Colburn, Forrest D.; Uphoff, Norman

2012-01-01

Words should be chosen and used carefully so that they convey the meaning or meanings that you intend--and do not convey any unintended or double meanings. Writing should leave little ambiguity or uncertainty about what you are referring to--unless some purposeful ambiguity is desired. Sometimes words that are abstract or superficial may be chosen…

Ambiguity and Relatedness Effects in Semantic Tasks: Are They Due to Semantic Coding?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hino, Yasushi; Pexman, Penny M.; Lupker, Stephen J.

2006-01-01

According to parallel distributed processing (PDP) models of visual word recognition, the speed of semantic coding is modulated by the nature of the orthographic-to-semantic mappings. Consistent with this idea, an ambiguity disadvantage and a relatedness-of-meaning (ROM) advantage have been reported in some word recognition tasks in which semantic…

The comprehension of ambiguous idioms in aphasic patients.

PubMed

Cacciari, Cristina; Reati, Fabiola; Colombo, Maria Rosa; Padovani, Roberto; Rizzo, Silvia; Papagno, Costanza

2006-01-01

The ability to understand ambiguous idioms was assessed in 15 aphasic patients with preserved comprehension at a single word level. A string-to-word matching task was used. Patients were requested to choose one among four alternatives: a word associated with the figurative meaning of the idiom string; a word semantically associate with the last constituent of the idiom string; and two unrelated words. The results showed that patients' performance was impaired with respect to a group of matched controls, with patients showing a frontal and/or temporal lesion being the most impaired. A significant number of semantically associate errors were produced, suggesting an impairment of inhibition mechanisms and/or of recognition/activation of the idiomatic meaning.

Interpreting Chicken-Scratch: Lexical Access for Handwritten Words

PubMed Central

Barnhart, Anthony S.; Goldinger, Stephen D.

2014-01-01

Handwritten word recognition is a field of study that has largely been neglected in the psychological literature, despite its prevalence in society. Whereas studies of spoken word recognition almost exclusively employ natural, human voices as stimuli, studies of visual word recognition use synthetic typefaces, thus simplifying the process of word recognition. The current study examined the effects of handwriting on a series of lexical variables thought to influence bottom-up and top-down processing, including word frequency, regularity, bidirectional consistency, and imageability. The results suggest that the natural physical ambiguity of handwritten stimuli forces a greater reliance on top-down processes, because almost all effects were magnified, relative to conditions with computer print. These findings suggest that processes of word perception naturally adapt to handwriting, compensating for physical ambiguity by increasing top-down feedback. PMID:20695708

In favor of general probability distributions: lateral prefrontal and insular cortices respond to stimulus inherent, but irrelevant differences.

PubMed

Mestres-Missé, Anna; Trampel, Robert; Turner, Robert; Kotz, Sonja A

2016-04-01

A key aspect of optimal behavior is the ability to predict what will come next. To achieve this, we must have a fairly good idea of the probability of occurrence of possible outcomes. This is based both on prior knowledge about a particular or similar situation and on immediately relevant new information. One question that arises is: when considering converging prior probability and external evidence, is the most probable outcome selected or does the brain represent degrees of uncertainty, even highly improbable ones? Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, the current study explored these possibilities by contrasting words that differ in their probability of occurrence, namely, unbalanced ambiguous words and unambiguous words. Unbalanced ambiguous words have a strong frequency-based bias towards one meaning, while unambiguous words have only one meaning. The current results reveal larger activation in lateral prefrontal and insular cortices in response to dominant ambiguous compared to unambiguous words even when prior and contextual information biases one interpretation only. These results suggest a probability distribution, whereby all outcomes and their associated probabilities of occurrence--even if very low--are represented and maintained.

Fast max-margin clustering for unsupervised word sense disambiguation in biomedical texts

PubMed Central

Duan, Weisi; Song, Min; Yates, Alexander

2009-01-01

Background We aim to solve the problem of determining word senses for ambiguous biomedical terms with minimal human effort. Methods We build a fully automated system for Word Sense Disambiguation by designing a system that does not require manually-constructed external resources or manually-labeled training examples except for a single ambiguous word. The system uses a novel and efficient graph-based algorithm to cluster words into groups that have the same meaning. Our algorithm follows the principle of finding a maximum margin between clusters, determining a split of the data that maximizes the minimum distance between pairs of data points belonging to two different clusters. Results On a test set of 21 ambiguous keywords from PubMed abstracts, our system has an average accuracy of 78%, outperforming a state-of-the-art unsupervised system by 2% and a baseline technique by 23%. On a standard data set from the National Library of Medicine, our system outperforms the baseline by 6% and comes within 5% of the accuracy of a supervised system. Conclusion Our system is a novel, state-of-the-art technique for efficiently finding word sense clusters, and does not require training data or human effort for each new word to be disambiguated. PMID:19344480

Semantic Ambiguity and the Failure of Inhibition Hypothesis as an Explanation for Reading Errors in Deep Dyslexia

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Colangelo, A.; Buchanan, L.

2005-01-01

We report evidence for dissociation between explicit and implicit access to word representations in a deep dyslexic patient (JO). JO read aloud a series of ambiguous (e.g., bank) and unambiguous (e.g., food) words and performed a lexical decision task using these same items. When required to explicitly access the items (i.e., naming), JO showed…

Cross-situational statistical word learning in young children.

PubMed

Suanda, Sumarga H; Mugwanya, Nassali; Namy, Laura L

2014-10-01

Recent empirical work has highlighted the potential role of cross-situational statistical word learning in children's early vocabulary development. In the current study, we tested 5- to 7-year-old children's cross-situational learning by presenting children with a series of ambiguous naming events containing multiple words and multiple referents. Children rapidly learned word-to-object mappings by attending to the co-occurrence regularities across these ambiguous naming events. The current study begins to address the mechanisms underlying children's learning by demonstrating that the diversity of learning contexts affects performance. The implications of the current findings for the role of cross-situational word learning at different points in development are discussed along with the methodological implications of employing school-aged children to test hypotheses regarding the mechanisms supporting early word learning. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Phase ambiguity resolution for offset QPSK modulation systems

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Nguyen, Tien M. (Inventor)

1991-01-01

A demodulator for Offset Quaternary Phase Shift Keyed (OQPSK) signals modulated with two words resolves eight possible combinations of phase ambiguity which may produce data error by first processing received I(sub R) and Q(sub R) data in an integrated carrier loop/symbol synchronizer using a digital Costas loop with matched filters for correcting four of eight possible phase lock errors, and then the remaining four using a phase ambiguity resolver which detects the words to not only reverse the received I(sub R) and Q(sub R) data channels, but to also invert (complement) the I(sub R) and/or Q(sub R) data, or to at least complement the I(sub R) and Q(sub R) data for systems using nontransparent codes that do not have rotation direction ambiguity.

Valence and Origin of Emotional Words Influence on Subsequent Perception of Ambiguous Stimuli in Terms of Competence versus Warmth

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Imbir, Kamil K.

2017-01-01

The aim of this study was to examine whether the valence and origin of emotional words can alter perception of ambiguous objects in terms of warmth versus competence, fundamental dimensions of social cognition. 60 individuals were invited into the study focusing on the limits of intuition. They were asked to try to guess the meaning of Japanese…

Revisiting Neil Armstrongs Moon-Landing Quote: Implications for Speech Perception, Function Word Reduction, and Acoustic Ambiguity

PubMed Central

Baese-Berk, Melissa M.; Dilley, Laura C.; Schmidt, Stephanie; Morrill, Tuuli H.; Pitt, Mark A.

2016-01-01

Neil Armstrong insisted that his quote upon landing on the moon was misheard, and that he had said one small step for a man, instead of one small step for man. What he said is unclear in part because function words like a can be reduced and spectrally indistinguishable from the preceding context. Therefore, their presence can be ambiguous, and they may disappear perceptually depending on the rate of surrounding speech. Two experiments are presented examining production and perception of reduced tokens of for and for a in spontaneous speech. Experiment 1 investigates the distributions of several acoustic features of for and for a. The results suggest that the distributions of for and for a overlap substantially, both in terms of temporal and spectral characteristics. Experiment 2 examines perception of these same tokens when the context speaking rate differs. The perceptibility of the function word a varies as a function of this context speaking rate. These results demonstrate that substantial ambiguity exists in the original quote from Armstrong, and that this ambiguity may be understood through context speaking rate. PMID:27603209

Revisiting Neil Armstrongs Moon-Landing Quote: Implications for Speech Perception, Function Word Reduction, and Acoustic Ambiguity.

PubMed

Baese-Berk, Melissa M; Dilley, Laura C; Schmidt, Stephanie; Morrill, Tuuli H; Pitt, Mark A

2016-01-01

Neil Armstrong insisted that his quote upon landing on the moon was misheard, and that he had said one small step for a man, instead of one small step for man. What he said is unclear in part because function words like a can be reduced and spectrally indistinguishable from the preceding context. Therefore, their presence can be ambiguous, and they may disappear perceptually depending on the rate of surrounding speech. Two experiments are presented examining production and perception of reduced tokens of for and for a in spontaneous speech. Experiment 1 investigates the distributions of several acoustic features of for and for a. The results suggest that the distributions of for and for a overlap substantially, both in terms of temporal and spectral characteristics. Experiment 2 examines perception of these same tokens when the context speaking rate differs. The perceptibility of the function word a varies as a function of this context speaking rate. These results demonstrate that substantial ambiguity exists in the original quote from Armstrong, and that this ambiguity may be understood through context speaking rate.

Subsequent to suppression: Downstream comprehension consequences of noun/verb ambiguity in natural reading

PubMed Central

Stites, Mallory C.; Federmeier, Kara D.

2015-01-01

We used eye-tracking to investigate the downstream processing consequences of encountering noun/verb (NV) homographs (i.e., park) in semantically neutral but syntactically constraining contexts. Target words were followed by a prepositional phrase containing a noun that was plausible for only one meaning of the homograph. Replicating previous work, we found increased first fixation durations on NV homographs compared to unambiguous words, which persisted into the next sentence region. At the downstream noun, we found plausibility effects following ambiguous words that were correlated with the size of a reader's first fixation effect, suggesting that this effect reflects the recruitment of processing resources necessary to suppress the homograph's context-inappropriate meaning. Using these same stimuli, Lee and Federmeier (2012) found a sustained frontal negativity to the NV homographs, and, on the downstream noun, found a plausibility effect that was also positively correlated with the size of a reader's ambiguity effect. Together, these findings suggest that when only syntactic constraints are available, meaning selection recruits inhibitory mechanisms that can be measured in both first fixation slowdown and ERP ambiguity effects. PMID:25961358

Working memory constraints on the processing of syntactic ambiguity.

PubMed

MacDonald, M C; Just, M A; Carpenter, P A

1992-01-01

We propose a model that explains how the working-memory capacity of a comprehender can constrain syntactic parsing and thereby affect the processing of syntactic ambiguities. The model's predictions are examined in four experiments that measure the reading times for two constructions that contain a temporary syntactic ambiguity. An example of the syntactic ambiguity is The soldiers warned about the dangers . . . ; the verb warned may either be the main verb, in which case soldiers is the agent; or the verb warned may introduce a relative clause, in which case soldiers is the patient of warned rather than the agent, as in The soldiers warned about the dangers conducted the midnight raid. The model proposes that both alternative interpretations of warned are initially activated. However, the duration for which both interpretations are maintained depends, in part, on the reader's working-memory capacity, which can be assessed by the Reading Span task (Daneman & Carpenter, 1980). The word-by-word reading times indicate that all subjects do additional processing after encountering an ambiguity, suggesting that they generate both representations. Furthermore, readers with larger working-memory capacities maintain both representations for some period of time (several words), whereas readers with smaller working-memory capacities revert to maintaining only the more likely representation.

Children's Understanding of Ambiguous Idioms and Conversational Perspective-Taking

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Le Sourn-Bissaoui, Sandrine; Caillies, Stephanie; Bernard, Stephane; Deleau, Michel; Brule, Lauriane

2012-01-01

The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that conversational perspective-taking is a determinant of unfamiliar ambiguous idiom comprehension. We investigated two types of ambiguous idiom, decomposable and nondecomposable expressions, which differ in the degree to which the literal meanings of the individual words contribute to the overall…

In the Face of Uncertainty: A Twin Study of Ambiguous Information, Anxiety and Depression in Children

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Eley, Thalia C.; Gregory, Alice M.; Lau, Jennifer Y. F.; McGuffin, Peter; Napolitano, Maria; Rijsdijk, Fruhling V.; Clark, David M.

2008-01-01

Anxiety and depression share genetic influences, and have been associated with similar cognitive biases. Psychological theories of anxiety and depression highlight threat interpretations of ambiguity. Little is known about whether genes influence cognitive style, or its links to symptoms. We assessed ambiguous word and scenario interpretations,…

Semantic Ambiguity: Do Multiple Meanings Inhibit or Facilitate Word Recognition?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Haro, Juan; Ferré, Pilar

2018-01-01

It is not clear whether multiple unrelated meanings inhibit or facilitate word recognition. Some studies have found a disadvantage for words having multiple meanings with respect to unambiguous words in lexical decision tasks (LDT), whereas several others have shown a facilitation for such words. In the present study, we argue that these…

The Effects of Context, Meaning Frequency, and Associative Strength on Semantic Selection: Distinct Contributions from each Cerebral Hemisphere

PubMed Central

Meyer, Aaron M.; Federmeier, Kara D.

2008-01-01

The visual half-field procedure was used to examine hemispheric asymmetries in meaning selection. Event-related potentials were recorded as participants decided if a lateralized ambiguous or unambiguous prime was related in meaning to a centrally-presented target. Prime-target pairs were preceded by a related or unrelated centrally-presented context word. To separate the effects of meaning frequency and associative strength, unambiguous words were paired with concordant weakly-related context words and strongly-related targets (e.g., taste-sweet-candy) that were similar in associative strength to discordant subordinate-related context words and dominant-related targets (e.g., river-bank-deposit) in the ambiguous condition. Context words and targets were reversed in a second experiment. In an unrelated (neutral) context, N400 responses were more positive than baseline (facilitated) in all ambiguous conditions except when subordinate targets were presented on left visual field-right hemisphere (LVF-RH) trials. Thus, in the absence of biasing context information, the hemispheres seem to be differentially affected by meaning frequency, with the left maintaining multiple meanings and the right selecting the dominant meaning. In the presence of discordant context information, N400 facilitation was absent in both visual fields, indicating that the contextually-consistent meaning of the ambiguous word had been selected. In contrast, N400 facilitation occurred in all of the unambiguous conditions; however, the left hemisphere (LH) showed less facilitation for the weakly-related target when a strongly-related context was presented. These findings indicate that both hemispheres use context to guide meaning selection, but that the LH is more likely to focus activation on a single, contextually-relevant sense. PMID:17936727

Ambiguity Advantage Revisited: Two Meanings Are Better than One when Accessing Chinese Nouns

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lin, Chien-Jer Charles; Ahrens, Kathleen

2010-01-01

This paper revisits the effect of lexical ambiguity in word recognition, which has been controversial as previous research reported advantage, disadvantage, and null effects. We discuss factors that were not consistently treated in previous research (e.g., the level of lexical ambiguity investigated, parts of speech of the experimental stimuli,…

Sustained meaning activation for polysemous but not homonymous words: evidence from EEG.

PubMed

MacGregor, Lucy J; Bouwsema, Jennifer; Klepousniotou, Ekaterini

2015-02-01

Theoretical linguistic accounts of lexical ambiguity distinguish between homonymy, where words that share a lexical form have unrelated meanings, and polysemy, where the meanings are related. The present study explored the psychological reality of this theoretical assumption by asking whether there is evidence that homonyms and polysemes are represented and processed differently in the brain. We investigated the time-course of meaning activation of different types of ambiguous words using EEG. Homonyms and polysemes were each further subdivided into two: unbalanced homonyms (e.g., "coach") and balanced homonyms (e.g., "match"); metaphorical polysemes (e.g., "mouth") and metonymic polysemes (e.g., "rabbit"). These four types of ambiguous words were presented as primes in a visual single-word priming delayed lexical decision task employing a long ISI (750 ms). Targets were related to one of the meanings of the primes, or were unrelated. ERPs formed relative to the target onset indicated that the theoretical distinction between homonymy and polysemy was reflected in the N400 brain response. For targets following homonymous primes (both unbalanced and balanced), no effects survived at this long ISI indicating that both meanings of the prime had already decayed. On the other hand, for polysemous primes (both metaphorical and metonymic), activation was observed for both dominant and subordinate senses. The observed processing differences between homonymy and polysemy provide evidence in support of differential neuro-cognitive representations for the two types of ambiguity. We argue that the polysemous senses act collaboratively to strengthen the representation, facilitating maintenance, while the competitive nature of homonymous meanings leads to decay. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

An (un)clear conscience clause: the causes and consequences of statutory ambiguity in state contraceptive mandates.

PubMed

VanSickle-Ward, Rachel; Hollis-Brusky, Amanda

2013-08-01

Since 1996, twenty-eight states have adopted legislation mandating insurance coverage of prescription contraceptives for women. Most of these policies include language that allows providers to opt out of the requirement because of religious or moral beliefs-conscience clause exemptions. There is striking variation in how these exemptions are defined. This article investigates the sources and consequences of ambiguous versus precise statutory language in conscience clauses. We find that some forms of political and institutional fragmentation (party polarization and gubernatorial appointment power) are correlated with the degree of policy specificity in state contraceptive mandates. This finding reinforces previous law and policy scholarship that has shown that greater fragmentation promotes ambiguous statutory language because broad wording acts as a vehicle for compromise when actors disagree. Interestingly, it is the more precisely worded statutes that have prompted court battles. We explain this with reference to the asymmetry of incentives and mobilizing costs between those disadvantaged by broad (primarily female employees) versus precisely worded statutes (primarily Catholic organizations). Our findings suggest that the impact of statutory ambiguity on court intervention is heavily contextualized by the resources and organization of affected stakeholders.

Support for context effects on segmentation and segments depends on the context.

PubMed

Heffner, Christopher C; Newman, Rochelle S; Idsardi, William J

2017-04-01

Listeners must adapt to differences in speech rate across talkers and situations. Speech rate adaptation effects are strong for adjacent syllables (i.e., proximal syllables). For studies that have assessed adaptation effects on speech rate information more than one syllable removed from a point of ambiguity in speech (i.e., distal syllables), the difference in strength between different types of ambiguity is stark. Studies of word segmentation have shown large shifts in perception as a result of distal rate manipulations, while studies of segmental perception have shown only weak, or even nonexistent, effects. However, no study has standardized methods and materials to study context effects for both types of ambiguity simultaneously. Here, a set of sentences was created that differed as minimally as possible except for whether the sentences were ambiguous to the voicing of a consonant or ambiguous to the location of a word boundary. The sentences were then rate-modified to slow down the distal context speech rate to various extents, dependent on three different definitions of distal context that were adapted from previous experiments, along with a manipulation of proximal context to assess whether proximal effects were comparable across ambiguity types. The results indicate that the definition of distal influenced the extent of distal rate effects strongly for both segments and segmentation. They also establish the presence of distal rate effects on word-final segments for the first time. These results were replicated, with some caveats regarding the perception of individual segments, in an Internet-based sample recruited from Mechanical Turk.

A Bootstrapping Model of Frequency and Context Effects in Word Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kachergis, George; Yu, Chen; Shiffrin, Richard M.

2017-01-01

Prior research has shown that people can learn many nouns (i.e., word--object mappings) from a short series of ambiguous situations containing multiple words and objects. For successful cross-situational learning, people must approximately track which words and referents co-occur most frequently. This study investigates the effects of allowing…

Overview of shorthand medical glossary (OMG) study.

PubMed

Politis, J; Lau, S; Yeoh, J; Brand, C; Russell, D; Liew, D

2015-04-01

Shorthand is commonplace in clinical notation. While many abbreviations are standard and widely accepted, an increasing number are non-standard and/or unrecognisable. We sought to describe the frequency of inappropriate and ambiguous shorthand in discharge summaries. Eighty electronic discharge summaries from the four General Medical Units at the Royal Melbourne Hospital were randomly extracted from the hospital's electronic records. Extraction was stratified by the four units and by the four quarters between July 2012 and June 2013. All abbreviations were assigned into one of four categories according to appropriateness: 1. 'Universally accepted and understood even without context'; 2. 'Understood when in context'; 3. 'Understood but inappropriate and/or ambiguous'; and 4. 'Unknown'. These categories were determined by the authors, which included junior and senior medical staff. The 80 discharge summaries contained 840 different abbreviations used on 6269 occasions. Of all words, 20.1% were abbreviations. Of the 6269 occasions of shorthand, 6.8% were categorised as 'Understood but inappropriate and/or ambiguous' or 'Unknown' (category 3 or 4), equating to 1.4% of all words, and an average of 5.4 words per discharge summary. Abbreviations are common in electronic discharge summaries, occurring at a frequency of one in five words. While the majority of shorthand used seems to be appropriate, the use of inappropriate, ambiguous or unknown shorthand is still frequent. This has implications for safe and effective patient care and highlights the need for better awareness and education regarding use of shorthand in clinical notation. © 2015 Royal Australasian College of Physicians.

Reading Comprehension and Tolerance against Comprehension Ambiguities: An Empirical Study of Iranian GFL-Learners in Communicative Education

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Haghani, Nader; Bahmannejad, Fereshteh

2018-01-01

The present study examines the influence of ambiguity tolerance on the performance of Iranian GFL-learners (Note 1) at level B1 in the processing of gap-filling-text tests. It is assumed that learners with more tolerance of ambiguity achieve better results in the reading comprehension or in the contextual guessing of the omitted words. 34 GFL…

The Role of the Left Inferior Frontal Gyrus in Implicit Semantic Competition and Selection: An Event-Related fMRI Study

PubMed Central

Grindrod, Christopher M.; Bilenko, Natalia Y.; Myers, Emily B.; Blumstein, Sheila E.

2008-01-01

Recent research suggests that the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) plays a role in selecting semantic information from among competing alternatives. A key question remains as to whether the LIFG is engaged by the selection of semantic information only or by increased semantic competition in and of itself, especially when such competition is implicit in nature. Ambiguous words presented in a lexical context provide a means of examining whether the LIFG is recruited under conditions when contextual cues constrain selection to only the meaning appropriate to the context (e.g., coin-mint-money) or under conditions of increased competition when contextual cues do not allow for the resolution to a particular meaning (e.g., candy-mint-money). In this event-related fMRI study, an implicit task was used in which subjects made lexical (i.e., word/nonword) decisions on the third stimulus of auditorily-presented triplets in conditions where the lexical context either promoted resolution toward a particular ambiguous word meaning or enhanced the competition among ambiguous word meanings. LIFG activation was observed when the context allowed for the resolution of competition and hence the selection of one meaning (e.g., coin-mint-money) but failed to emerge when competition between the meanings of an ambiguous word was unresolved by the context (e.g., candy-mint-money). In the latter case, there was a pattern of reduced activation in frontal, temporal and parietal areas. These findings demonstrate that selection or resolution of competition as opposed to increased semantic competition alone engages the LIFG. Moreover, they extend previous work in showing that the LIFG is recruited even in cases where the selection of meaning takes place implicitly. PMID:18656462

Word Learning Emerges from the Interaction of Online Referent Selection and Slow Associative Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McMurray, Bob; Horst, Jessica S.; Samuelson, Larissa K.

2012-01-01

Classic approaches to word learning emphasize referential ambiguity: In naming situations, a novel word could refer to many possible objects, properties, actions, and so forth. To solve this, researchers have posited constraints, and inference strategies, but assume that determining the referent of a novel word is isomorphic to learning. We…

Cross-Situational Word Learning in the Right Situations

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dautriche, Isabelle; Chemla, Emmanuel

2014-01-01

Upon hearing a novel word, language learners must identify its correct meaning from a diverse set of situationally relevant options. Such referential ambiguity could be reduced through "repetitive" exposure to the novel word across diverging learning situations, a learning mechanism referred to as "cross-situational learning."…

A Semantic Lexicon-Based Approach for Sense Disambiguation and Its WWW Application

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

di Lecce, Vincenzo; Calabrese, Marco; Soldo, Domenico

This work proposes a basic framework for resolving sense disambiguation through the use of Semantic Lexicon, a machine readable dictionary managing both word senses and lexico-semantic relations. More specifically, polysemous ambiguity characterizing Web documents is discussed. The adopted Semantic Lexicon is WordNet, a lexical knowledge-base of English words widely adopted in many research studies referring to knowledge discovery. The proposed approach extends recent works on knowledge discovery by focusing on the sense disambiguation aspect. By exploiting the structure of WordNet database, lexico-semantic features are used to resolve the inherent sense ambiguity of written text with particular reference to HTML resources. The obtained results may be extended to generic hypertextual repositories as well. Experiments show that polysemy reduction can be used to hint about the meaning of specific senses in given contexts.

Modulation of the N400 component in relation to hypomanic personality traits in a word meaning ambiguity resolution task.

PubMed

Raucher-Chéné, Delphine; Terrien, Sarah; Gobin, Pamela; Gierski, Fabien; Kaladjian, Arthur; Besche-Richard, Chrystel

2017-09-01

High levels of hypomanic personality traits have been associated with an increased risk of developing bipolar disorder (BD). Changes in semantic content, impaired verbal associations, abnormal prosody, and abnormal speed of language are core features of BD, and are thought to be related to semantic processing abnormalities. In the present study, we used event-related potentials to investigate the relation between semantic processing (N400 component) and hypomanic personality traits. We assessed 65 healthy young adults on the Hypomanic Personality Scale (HPS). Event-related potentials were recorded during a semantic ambiguity resolution task exploring semantic ambiguity (polysemous word ending a sentence) and congruency (target word semantically related to the sentence). As expected, semantic ambiguity and congruency both elicited an N400 effect across our sample. Correlation analyses showed a significant positive relationship between the Social Vitality subscore of the HPS and N400 modulation in the frontal region of interest in the incongruent unambiguous condition, and in the frontocentral region of interest in the incongruent ambiguous condition. We found differences in semantic processing (i.e., detection of incongruence and semantic inhibition) in individuals with higher Social Vitality subscores. In the light of the literature, we discuss the notion that a semantic processing impairment could be a potential marker of vulnerability to BD, and one that needs to be explored further in this clinical population. © 2017 The Authors. Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences © 2017 Japanese Society of Psychiatry and Neurology.

Varying acoustic-phonemic ambiguity reveals that talker normalization is obligatory in speech processing.

PubMed

Choi, Ja Young; Hu, Elly R; Perrachione, Tyler K

2018-04-01

The nondeterministic relationship between speech acoustics and abstract phonemic representations imposes a challenge for listeners to maintain perceptual constancy despite the highly variable acoustic realization of speech. Talker normalization facilitates speech processing by reducing the degrees of freedom for mapping between encountered speech and phonemic representations. While this process has been proposed to facilitate the perception of ambiguous speech sounds, it is currently unknown whether talker normalization is affected by the degree of potential ambiguity in acoustic-phonemic mapping. We explored the effects of talker normalization on speech processing in a series of speeded classification paradigms, parametrically manipulating the potential for inconsistent acoustic-phonemic relationships across talkers for both consonants and vowels. Listeners identified words with varying potential acoustic-phonemic ambiguity across talkers (e.g., beet/boat vs. boot/boat) spoken by single or mixed talkers. Auditory categorization of words was always slower when listening to mixed talkers compared to a single talker, even when there was no potential acoustic ambiguity between target sounds. Moreover, the processing cost imposed by mixed talkers was greatest when words had the most potential acoustic-phonemic overlap across talkers. Models of acoustic dissimilarity between target speech sounds did not account for the pattern of results. These results suggest (a) that talker normalization incurs the greatest processing cost when disambiguating highly confusable sounds and (b) that talker normalization appears to be an obligatory component of speech perception, taking place even when the acoustic-phonemic relationships across sounds are unambiguous.

Modeling Cross-Situational Word-Referent Learning: Prior Questions

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Yu, Chen; Smith, Linda B.

2012-01-01

Both adults and young children possess powerful statistical computation capabilities--they can infer the referent of a word from highly ambiguous contexts involving many words and many referents by aggregating cross-situational statistical information across contexts. This ability has been explained by models of hypothesis testing and by models of…

Who is respectful? Effects of social context and individual empathic ability on ambiguity resolution during utterance comprehension

PubMed Central

Jiang, Xiaoming; Zhou, Xiaolin

2015-01-01

Verbal communication is often ambiguous. By employing the event-related potential (ERP) technique, this study investigated how a comprehender resolves referential ambiguity by using information concerning the social status of communicators. Participants read a conversational scenario which included a minimal conversational context describing a speaker and two other persons of the same or different social status and a directly quoted utterance. A singular, second-person pronoun in the respectful form (nin/nin-de in Chinese) in the utterance could be ambiguous with respect to which of the two persons was the addressee (the “Ambiguous condition”). Alternatively, the pronoun was not ambiguous either because one of the two persons was of higher social status and hence should be the addressee according to social convention (the “Status condition”) or because a word referring to the status of a person was additionally inserted before the pronoun to help indicate the referent of the pronoun (the “Referent condition”). Results showed that the perceived ambiguity decreased over the Ambiguous, Status, and Referent conditions. Electrophysiologically, the pronoun elicited an increased N400 in the Referent than in the Status and the Ambiguous conditions, reflecting an increased integration demand due to the necessity of linking the pronoun to both its antecedent and the status word. Relative to the Referent condition, a late, sustained positivity was elicited for the Status condition starting from 600 ms, while a more delayed, anterior negativity was elicited for the Ambiguous condition. Moreover, the N400 effect was modulated by individuals' sensitivity to the social status information, while the late positivity effect was modulated by individuals' empathic ability. These findings highlight the neurocognitive flexibility of contextual bias in referential processing during utterance comprehension. PMID:26557102

Syntactic Computations in the Language Network: Characterizing Dynamic Network Properties Using Representational Similarity Analysis

PubMed Central

Tyler, Lorraine K.; Cheung, Teresa P. L.; Devereux, Barry J.; Clarke, Alex

2013-01-01

The core human capacity of syntactic analysis involves a left hemisphere network involving left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) and posterior middle temporal gyrus (LMTG) and the anatomical connections between them. Here we use magnetoencephalography (MEG) to determine the spatio-temporal properties of syntactic computations in this network. Listeners heard spoken sentences containing a local syntactic ambiguity (e.g., “… landing planes …”), at the offset of which they heard a disambiguating verb and decided whether it was an acceptable/unacceptable continuation of the sentence. We charted the time-course of processing and resolving syntactic ambiguity by measuring MEG responses from the onset of each word in the ambiguous phrase and the disambiguating word. We used representational similarity analysis (RSA) to characterize syntactic information represented in the LIFG and left posterior middle temporal gyrus (LpMTG) over time and to investigate their relationship to each other. Testing a variety of lexico-syntactic and ambiguity models against the MEG data, our results suggest early lexico-syntactic responses in the LpMTG and later effects of ambiguity in the LIFG, pointing to a clear differentiation in the functional roles of these two regions. Our results suggest the LpMTG represents and transmits lexical information to the LIFG, which responds to and resolves the ambiguity. PMID:23730293

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.

Understanding Metaphors: Is the Right Hemisphere Uniquely Involved?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kacinik, Natalie A.; Chiarello, Christine

2007-01-01

Two divided visual field priming experiments examined cerebral asymmetries for understanding metaphors varying in sentence constraint. Experiment 1 investigated ambiguous words (e.g., SWEET and BRIGHT) with literal and metaphoric meanings in ambiguous and unambiguous sentence contexts, while Experiment 2 involved standard metaphors (e.g., "The…

Prosodic disambiguation of noun/verb homophones in child-directed speech.

PubMed

Conwell, Erin

2017-05-01

One strategy that children might use to sort words into grammatical categories such as noun and verb is distributional bootstrapping, in which local co-occurrence information is used to distinguish between categories. Words that can be used in more than one grammatical category could be problematic for this approach. Using naturalistic corpus data, this study asks whether noun and verb uses of ambiguous words might differ prosodically as a function of their grammatical category in child-directed speech. The results show that noun and verb uses of ambiguous words in sentence-medial positions do differ from one another in terms of duration, vowel duration, pitch change, and vowel quality measures. However, sentence-final tokens are not different as a function of the category in which they were used. The availability of prosodic cues to category in natural child-directed speech could allow learners using a distributional bootstrapping approach to avoid conflating grammatical categories.

Syntactic Complexity and Ambiguity Resolution in a Free Word Order Language: Behavioral and Electrophysiological Evidences from Basque

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Erdocia, Kepa; Laka, Itziar; Mestres-Misse, Anna; Rodriguez-Fornells, Antoni

2009-01-01

In natural languages some syntactic structures are simpler than others. Syntactically complex structures require further computation that is not required by syntactically simple structures. In particular, canonical, basic word order represents the simplest sentence-structure. Natural languages have different canonical word orders, and they vary in…

Is Syntactic-Category Processing Obligatory in Visual Word Recognition? Evidence from Chinese

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wong, Andus Wing-Kuen; Chen, Hsuan-Chih

2012-01-01

Three experiments were conducted to investigate how syntactic-category and semantic information is processed in visual word recognition. The stimuli were two-character Chinese words in which semantic and syntactic-category ambiguities were factorially manipulated. A lexical decision task was employed in Experiment 1, whereas a semantic relatedness…

Visual word ambiguity.

PubMed

van Gemert, Jan C; Veenman, Cor J; Smeulders, Arnold W M; Geusebroek, Jan-Mark

2010-07-01

This paper studies automatic image classification by modeling soft assignment in the popular codebook model. The codebook model describes an image as a bag of discrete visual words selected from a vocabulary, where the frequency distributions of visual words in an image allow classification. One inherent component of the codebook model is the assignment of discrete visual words to continuous image features. Despite the clear mismatch of this hard assignment with the nature of continuous features, the approach has been successfully applied for some years. In this paper, we investigate four types of soft assignment of visual words to image features. We demonstrate that explicitly modeling visual word assignment ambiguity improves classification performance compared to the hard assignment of the traditional codebook model. The traditional codebook model is compared against our method for five well-known data sets: 15 natural scenes, Caltech-101, Caltech-256, and Pascal VOC 2007/2008. We demonstrate that large codebook vocabulary sizes completely deteriorate the performance of the traditional model, whereas the proposed model performs consistently. Moreover, we show that our method profits in high-dimensional feature spaces and reaps higher benefits when increasing the number of image categories.

Decoupling Semantic and Associative Information in False Memories: Explorations with Semantically Ambiguous and Unambiguous Critical Lures

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hutchison, K.A.; Balota, D.A.

2005-01-01

Veridical and false memory were examined in lists that contained 12 words that all converged onto the same meaning of a critical nonpresented word (e.g., snooze, wake, bedroom, slumber..., for SLEEP) or lists that contained 6 words that converged onto one meaning and 6 words that converged onto a different meaning of a homograph (e.g., stumble,…

Two- and Three-Year-Olds Track a Single Meaning during Word Learning: Evidence for Propose-but-Verify

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Woodard, Kristina; Gleitman, Lila R.; Trueswell, John C.

2016-01-01

A child word-learning experiment is reported that examines 2- and 3-year-olds' ability to learn the meanings of novel words across multiple, referentially ambiguous, word occurrences. Children were told they were going on an animal safari in which they would learn the names of unfamiliar animals. Critical trial sequences began with hearing a novel…

Frameworks for Comprehending Discourse: A Replication Study.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sjogren, Douglas; Timpson, William

1979-01-01

This study replicates findings of a study reported by Anderson et al. (EJ 184 138). Interpretation of ambiguously worded paragraphs was related to sex and college major. Titles on the paragraphs reduced ambiguity, although some students still gave an interpretation that was not consistent with the title. (Author/CP)

"That Bastard of a Learning Region..."

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Maybury, Terence

2009-01-01

The word "bastard" has a richly ambiguous resonance in the Australian meaning-making tradition. It is a term that is variously affectionate, neutral, deleterious and corrosive. This is an ambiguity whose clarification relies almost entirely on the communicational context where its utterance is implaced. Right across the globe the idea of…

Learning the Language of Evolution: Lexical Ambiguity and Word Meaning in Student Explanations

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rector, Meghan A.; Nehm, Ross H.; Pearl, Dennis

2013-01-01

Our study investigates the challenges introduced by students' use of lexically ambiguous language in evolutionary explanations. Specifically, we examined students' meaning of five key terms incorporated into their written evolutionary explanations: "pressure", "select", "adapt", "need", and "must". We utilized a new technological tool known as the…

Context-aware and locality-constrained coding for image categorization.

PubMed

Xiao, Wenhua; Wang, Bin; Liu, Yu; Bao, Weidong; Zhang, Maojun

2014-01-01

Improving the coding strategy for BOF (Bag-of-Features) based feature design has drawn increasing attention in recent image categorization works. However, the ambiguity in coding procedure still impedes its further development. In this paper, we introduce a context-aware and locality-constrained Coding (CALC) approach with context information for describing objects in a discriminative way. It is generally achieved by learning a word-to-word cooccurrence prior to imposing context information over locality-constrained coding. Firstly, the local context of each category is evaluated by learning a word-to-word cooccurrence matrix representing the spatial distribution of local features in neighbor region. Then, the learned cooccurrence matrix is used for measuring the context distance between local features and code words. Finally, a coding strategy simultaneously considers locality in feature space and context space, while introducing the weight of feature is proposed. This novel coding strategy not only semantically preserves the information in coding, but also has the ability to alleviate the noise distortion of each class. Extensive experiments on several available datasets (Scene-15, Caltech101, and Caltech256) are conducted to validate the superiority of our algorithm by comparing it with baselines and recent published methods. Experimental results show that our method significantly improves the performance of baselines and achieves comparable and even better performance with the state of the arts.

Lexical Ambiguity: Making a Case against Spread

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kaplan, Jennifer J.; Rogness, Neal T.; Fisher, Diane G.

2012-01-01

We argue for decreasing the use of the word "spread" when describing the statistical idea of dispersion or variability in introductory statistics courses. In addition, we argue for increasing the use of the word "variability" as a replacement for "spread."

An associative model of adaptive inference for learning word-referent mappings.

PubMed

Kachergis, George; Yu, Chen; Shiffrin, Richard M

2012-04-01

People can learn word-referent pairs over a short series of individually ambiguous situations containing multiple words and referents (Yu & Smith, 2007, Cognition 106: 1558-1568). Cross-situational statistical learning relies on the repeated co-occurrence of words with their intended referents, but simple co-occurrence counts cannot explain the findings. Mutual exclusivity (ME: an assumption of one-to-one mappings) can reduce ambiguity by leveraging prior experience to restrict the number of word-referent pairings considered but can also block learning of non-one-to-one mappings. The present study first trained learners on one-to-one mappings with varying numbers of repetitions. In late training, a new set of word-referent pairs were introduced alongside pretrained pairs; each pretrained pair consistently appeared with a new pair. Results indicate that (1) learners quickly infer new pairs in late training on the basis of their knowledge of pretrained pairs, exhibiting ME; and (2) learners also adaptively relax the ME bias and learn two-to-two mappings involving both pretrained and new words and objects. We present an associative model that accounts for both results using competing familiarity and uncertainty biases.

Tracking competition and cognitive control during language comprehension with multi-voxel pattern analysis

PubMed Central

Musz, Elizabeth; Thompson-Schill, Sharon L.

2017-01-01

To successfully comprehend a sentence that contains a homonym, readers must select the ambiguous word’s context-appropriate meaning. The outcome of this process is influenced both by top-down contextual support and bottom-up, word-specific characteristics. We examined how these factors jointly affect the neural signatures of lexical ambiguity resolution. We measured the similarity between multi-voxel patterns evoked by the same homonym in two distinct linguistic contexts: once after subjects read sentences that biased interpretation toward each homonym’s most frequent, dominant meaning, and again after interpretation was biased toward a weaker, subordinate meaning. We predicted that, following a subordinate-biasing context, the dominant yet inappropriate meaning would nevertheless compete for activation, manifesting in increased similarity between the neural patterns evoked by the two word meanings. In left anterior temporal lobe (ATL), degree of within-word pattern similarity was positively predicted by the association strength of each homonym’s dominant meaning. Further, within-word pattern similarity in left ATL was negatively predicted by item-specific responses in a region of left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) sensitive to semantic conflict. These findings have implications for psycholinguistic models of lexical ambiguity resolution, and for the role of left VLPFC function during this process. Moreover, these findings demonstrate the utility of item-level, similarity-based analyses of fMRI data for our understanding of competition between co-activated word meanings during language comprehension. PMID:27898341

Taking the High Road on Subcortical Transfer

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Miller, M.B.; Kingstone, A.

2005-01-01

Kingstone and Gazzaniga (1995) presented conceptually ambiguous word pairs, such as HOT-DOG, to a split-brain patient. Each hemisphere received only one of the words. With one hand, the patient drew the word pairs literally (e.g., a dog panting in the heat) but never drew the emergent object (e.g., a frankfurter in a bun). This finding suggested…

Morphological Decomposition in the Recognition of Prefixed and Suffixed Words: Evidence from Korean

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kim, Say Young; Wang, Min; Taft, Marcus

2015-01-01

Korean has visually salient syllable units that are often mapped onto either prefixes or suffixes in derived words. In addition, prefixed and suffixed words may be processed differently given a left-to-right parsing procedure and the need to resolve morphemic ambiguity in prefixes in Korean. To test this hypothesis, four experiments using the…

Development of Spelling Skills in a Shallow Orthography: The Case of Italian Language

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Notarnicola, Alessandra; Angelelli, Paola; Judica, Anna; Zoccolotti, Pierluigi

2012-01-01

This study analyzed the spelling skills of Italian children as a function of school experience. We examined the writing performances of 465 first- to eighth-grade normal readers on a spelling test that included regular words, context-sensitive regular words, words with ambiguous transcription, and regular pseudowords. Based on the dual-route model…

Cues for Better Writing: Empirical Assessment of a Word Counter and Cueing Application's Effectiveness

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Vijayasarathy, Leo R.; Gould, Susan Martin; Gould, Michael

2015-01-01

Written clarity and conciseness are desired by employers and emphasized in business communication courses. We developed and tested the efficacy of a cueing tool--Scribe Bene--to help students reduce their use of imprecise and ambiguous words and wordy phrases. Effectiveness was measured by comparing cue word usage between a treatment group given…

Sex differences in the use of delayed semantic context when listening to disrupted speech.

PubMed

Liederman, Jacqueline; Fisher, Janet McGraw; Coty, Alexis; Matthews, Geetha; Frye, Richard E; Lincoln, Alexis; Alexander, Rebecca

2013-02-01

Female as opposed to male listeners were better able to use a delayed informative cue at the end of a long sentence to report an earlier word which was disrupted by noise. Informative (semantically related) or uninformative (semantically unrelated) word cues were presented 2, 6, or 10 words after a target word whose initial phoneme had been replaced with noise. A total of 84 young adults (45 males) listened to each sentence and then repeated it after its offset. The semantic benefit effect (SBE) was the difference in the accuracy of report of the disrupted target word during informative vs. uninformative sentences. Women had significantly higher SBEs than men even though there were no significant sex differences in terms of number of non-target words reported, the effect of distance between the disrupted target word and the informative cue, or kinds of errors generated. We suggest that the superior ability of women to use delayed semantic information to decode an earlier ambiguous speech signal may be linked to women's tendency to engage the hemispheres more bilaterally than men during word processing. Since the maintenance of semantic context under ambiguous conditions demands more right than left hemispheric resources, this may give women an advantage.

Ambiguity effects of rhyme and meter.

PubMed

Wallot, Sebastian; Menninghaus, Winfried

2018-04-23

Previous research has shown that rhyme and meter-although enhancing prosodic processing ease and memorability-also tend to make semantic processing more demanding. Using a set of rhymed and metered proverbs, as well as nonrhymed and nonmetered versions of these proverbs, the present study reveals this hitherto unspecified difficulty of comprehension to be specifically driven by perceived ambiguity. Roman Jakobson was the 1st to propose this hypothesis, in 1960. He suggested that "ambiguity is an intrinsic, inalienable feature" of "parallelistic" diction of which the combination of rhyme and meter is a pronounced example. Our results show that ambiguity indeed explains a substantial portion of the rhyme- and meter-driven difficulty of comprehension. Longer word-reading times differentially reflected ratings for ambiguity and comprehension difficulty. However, the ambiguity effect is not "inalienable." Rather, many rhymed and metered sentences turned out to be low in ambiguity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Discourse Bootstrapping: Preschoolers Use Linguistic Discourse to Learn New Words

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sullivan, Jessica; Barner, David

2016-01-01

When children acquire language, they often learn words in the absence of direct instruction (e.g. "This is a ball!") or even social cues to reference (e.g. eye gaze, pointing). However, there are few accounts of how children do this, especially in cases where the referent of a new word is ambiguous. Across two experiments, we test…

A Review of Loss, Trauma, and Resilience: Therapeutic Work with Ambiguous Loss

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Thompson, Holly

2007-01-01

Thompson reviews the 2006 book by Pauline Boss. Loss is a word that is used frequently to describe numerous life events. In its most apparent state, loss is experienced through the physical death of someone who was once spiritually, psychologically, and physically near. However, ambiguous loss may also occur, when a central person remains present…

Accounting for Regressive Eye-Movements in Models of Sentence Processing: A Reappraisal of the Selective Reanalysis Hypothesis

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mitchell, Don C.; Shen, Xingjia; Green, Matthew J.; Hodgson, Timothy L.

2008-01-01

When people read temporarily ambiguous sentences, there is often an increased prevalence of regressive eye-movements launched from the word that resolves the ambiguity. Traditionally, such regressions have been interpreted at least in part as reflecting readers' efforts to re-read and reconfigure earlier material, as exemplified by the Selective…

Dissociating speech perception and comprehension at reduced levels of awareness

PubMed Central

Davis, Matthew H.; Coleman, Martin R.; Absalom, Anthony R.; Rodd, Jennifer M.; Johnsrude, Ingrid S.; Matta, Basil F.; Owen, Adrian M.; Menon, David K.

2007-01-01

We used functional MRI and the anesthetic agent propofol to assess the relationship among neural responses to speech, successful comprehension, and conscious awareness. Volunteers were scanned while listening to sentences containing ambiguous words, matched sentences without ambiguous words, and signal-correlated noise (SCN). During three scanning sessions, participants were nonsedated (awake), lightly sedated (a slowed response to conversation), and deeply sedated (no conversational response, rousable by loud command). Bilateral temporal-lobe responses for sentences compared with signal-correlated noise were observed at all three levels of sedation, although prefrontal and premotor responses to speech were absent at the deepest level of sedation. Additional inferior frontal and posterior temporal responses to ambiguous sentences provide a neural correlate of semantic processes critical for comprehending sentences containing ambiguous words. However, this additional response was absent during light sedation, suggesting a marked impairment of sentence comprehension. A significant decline in postscan recognition memory for sentences also suggests that sedation impaired encoding of sentences into memory, with left inferior frontal and temporal lobe responses during light sedation predicting subsequent recognition memory. These findings suggest a graded degradation of cognitive function in response to sedation such that “higher-level” semantic and mnemonic processes can be impaired at relatively low levels of sedation, whereas perceptual processing of speech remains resilient even during deep sedation. These results have important implications for understanding the relationship between speech comprehension and awareness in the healthy brain in patients receiving sedation and in patients with disorders of consciousness. PMID:17938125

Is a "Phoenician" reading style superior to a "Chinese" reading style? Evidence from fourth graders.

PubMed

Bowey, Judith A

2008-07-01

This study compared normally achieving fourth-grade "Phoenician" readers, who identify nonwords significantly more accurately than they do exception words, with "Chinese" readers, who show the reverse pattern. Phoenician readers scored lower than Chinese readers on word identification, exception word reading, orthographic choice, spelling, reading comprehension, and verbal ability. When compared with normally achieving children who read nonwords and exception words equally well, Chinese readers scored as well as these children on word identification, regular word reading, orthographic choice, spelling, reading comprehension, phonological sensitivity, and verbal ability and scored better on exception word reading. Chinese readers also used rhyme-based analogies to read nonwords derived from high-frequency exception words just as often as did these children. As predicted, Phoenician and Chinese readers adopted somewhat different strategies in reading ambiguous nonwords constructed by analogy to high-frequency exception words. Phoenician readers were more likely than Chinese readers to read ambiguous monosyllabic nonwords via context-free grapheme-phoneme correspondences and were less likely to read disyllabic nonwords by analogy to high-frequency analogues. Although the Chinese reading style was more common than the Phoenician style in normally achieving fourth graders, there were similar numbers of poor readers with phonological dyslexia (identifying nonwords significantly more accurately than exception words) and surface dyslexia (showing the reverse pattern), although surface dyslexia was more common in the severely disabled readers. However, few of the poor readers showed pure patterns of phonological or surface dyslexia.

Rapid Linguistic Ambiguity Resolution in Young Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Eye Tracking Evidence for the Limits of Weak Central Coherence.

PubMed

Hahn, Noemi; Snedeker, Jesse; Rabagliati, Hugh

2015-12-01

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have often been reported to have difficulty integrating information into its broader context, which has motivated the Weak Central Coherence theory of ASD. In the linguistic domain, evidence for this difficulty comes from reports of impaired use of linguistic context to resolve ambiguous words. However, recent work has suggested that impaired use of linguistic context may not be characteristic of ASD, and is instead better explained by co-occurring language impairments. Here, we provide a strong test of these claims, using the visual world eye tracking paradigm to examine the online mechanisms by which children with autism resolve linguistic ambiguity. To address concerns about both language impairments and compensatory strategies, we used a sample whose verbal skills were strong and whose average age (7; 6) was lower than previous work on lexical ambiguity resolution in ASD. Participants (40 with autism and 40 controls) heard sentences with ambiguous words in contexts that either strongly supported one reading or were consistent with both (John fed/saw the bat). We measured activation of the unintended meaning through implicit semantic priming of an associate (looks to a depicted baseball glove). Contrary to the predictions of weak central coherence, children with ASD, like controls, quickly used context to resolve ambiguity, selecting appropriate meanings within a second. We discuss how these results constrain the generality of weak central coherence. © 2015 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Accessing and Selecting Word Meaning in Autism Spectrum Disorder

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Henderson, L. M.; Clarke, P. J.; Snowling, M. J.

2011-01-01

Background: Comprehension difficulties are commonly reported in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) but the causes of these difficulties are poorly understood. This study investigates how children with ASD access and select meanings of ambiguous words to test four hypotheses regarding the nature of their comprehension difficulties: semantic deficit,…

It’s the Thought That Counts

PubMed Central

DeWall, C. Nathan; Twenge, Jean M.; Gitter, Seth A.; Baumeister, Roy F.

2008-01-01

Prior research has confirmed a casual path between social rejection and aggression, but there has been no clear explanation of why social rejection causes aggression. A series of experiments tested the hypothesis that social exclusion increases the inclination to perceive neutral information as hostile, which has implications for aggression. Compared to accepted and control participants, socially excluded participants were more likely to rate aggressive and ambiguous words as similar (Experiment 1a), to complete word fragments with aggressive words (Experiment 1b), and to rate the ambiguous actions of another person as hostile (Experiments 2-4). This hostile cognitive bias among excluded people was related to their aggressive treatment of others who were not involved in the exclusion experience (Experiments 2 and 3), and others with whom participants had no previous contact (Experiment 4). These findings provide a first step in resolving the mystery of why social exclusion produces aggression. PMID:19210063

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.

Lexical ambiguity resolution

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

Small, S.; Cottrell, G.; Tanenhaus, M.

1987-01-01

This book collects much of the best research currently available on the problem of lexical ambiguity resolution in the processing of human language. When taken out of context, sentences are usually ambiguous. When actually uttered in a dialogue or written in text, these same sentences often have unique interpretations. The inherent ambiguity of isolated sentences, becomes obvious in the attempt to write a computer program to understand them. Different views have emerged on the nature of context and the mechanisms by which it directs unambiguous understanding of words and sentences. These perspectives are represented and discussed. Eighteen original papers frommore » a valuable source book for cognitive scientists in AI, psycholinguistics, neuropsychology, or theoretical linguistics.« less

United States Airline Transport Pilot International Flight Language Experiences, Report 2: Word Meaning and Pronunciation

DTIC Science & Technology

2010-04-01

different countries are understood; (4) Poor radios and transmission quality contribute to the unintelligibility of some controller transmissions; (5...going into a foreign country; (7) Differences associated with U.S. and ICAO phraseology need to be resolved and procedural ambiguities eliminated...affect you most related to differences in the word(s) used to describe a clearance, instruction, advisory, or request? Please list some examples

Recommendations for reducing ambiguity in written procedures.

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

Matzen, Laura E.

Previous studies in the nuclear weapons complex have shown that ambiguous work instructions (WIs) and operating procedures (OPs) can lead to human error, which is a major cause for concern. This report outlines some of the sources of ambiguity in written English and describes three recommendations for reducing ambiguity in WIs and OPs. The recommendations are based on commonly used research techniques in the fields of linguistics and cognitive psychology. The first recommendation is to gather empirical data that can be used to improve the recommended word lists that are provided to technical writers. The second recommendation is to havemore » a review in which new WIs and OPs and checked for ambiguities and clarity. The third recommendation is to use self-paced reading time studies to identify any remaining ambiguities before the new WIs and OPs are put into use. If these three steps are followed for new WIs and OPs, the likelihood of human errors related to ambiguity could be greatly reduced.« less

Barking up the wrong tree? Lexical ambiguity resolution in children with language impairments and autistic spectrum disorders.

PubMed

Norbury, Courtenay Frazier

2005-02-01

Lexical ambiguity resolution was investigated in 9- to 17-year-olds with language impairment (LI, n=20), autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) plus language impairment (ALI, n=28), ASD and verbal abilities within the normal range (ASO, n=20), and typically developing children (TD, n=28). Experiment 1 investigated knowledge of dominant and subordinate meanings of ambiguous words. The LI and ALI groups knew fewer subordinate meanings than did the ASO and TD groups. Experiment 2 used a modified version of the paradigm to investigate contextual facilitation and suppression of irrelevant meanings. All groups demonstrated contextual facilitation, responding quickly and more accurately to words following a biased context. However, children with ALI and LI did not use context as efficiently as did their peers without language deficit. Furthermore, for the LI and ALI groups, errors in the suppression condition reflected poor contextual processing. These findings challenge the assumptions of weak central coherence theory and demonstrate the need for stringent language controls in the study of autistic cognition.

Novel word acquisition in aphasia: Facing the word-referent ambiguity of natural language learning contexts.

PubMed

Peñaloza, Claudia; Mirman, Daniel; Tuomiranta, Leena; Benetello, Annalisa; Heikius, Ida-Maria; Järvinen, Sonja; Majos, Maria C; Cardona, Pedro; Juncadella, Montserrat; Laine, Matti; Martin, Nadine; Rodríguez-Fornells, Antoni

2016-06-01

Recent research suggests that some people with aphasia preserve some ability to learn novel words and to retain them in the long-term. However, this novel word learning ability has been studied only in the context of single word-picture pairings. We examined the ability of people with chronic aphasia to learn novel words using a paradigm that presents new word forms together with a limited set of different possible visual referents and requires the identification of the correct word-object associations on the basis of online feedback. We also studied the relationship between word learning ability and aphasia severity, word processing abilities, and verbal short-term memory (STM). We further examined the influence of gross lesion location on new word learning. The word learning task was first validated with a group of forty-five young adults. Fourteen participants with chronic aphasia were administered the task and underwent tests of immediate and long-term recognition memory at 1 week. Their performance was compared to that of a group of fourteen matched controls using growth curve analysis. The learning curve and recognition performance of the aphasia group was significantly below the matched control group, although above-chance recognition performance and case-by-case analyses indicated that some participants with aphasia had learned the correct word-referent mappings. Verbal STM but not word processing abilities predicted word learning ability after controlling for aphasia severity. Importantly, participants with lesions in the left frontal cortex performed significantly worse than participants with lesions that spared the left frontal region both during word learning and on the recognition tests. Our findings indicate that some people with aphasia can preserve the ability to learn a small novel lexicon in an ambiguous word-referent context. This learning and recognition memory ability was associated with verbal STM capacity, aphasia severity and the integrity of the left inferior frontal region. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Novel word acquisition in aphasia: Facing the word-referent ambiguity of natural language learning contexts

PubMed Central

Peñaloza, Claudia; Mirman, Daniel; Tuomiranta, Leena; Benetello, Annalisa; Heikius, Ida-Maria; Järvinen, Sonja; Majos, Maria C.; Cardona, Pedro; Juncadella, Montserrat; Laine, Matti; Martin, Nadine; Rodríguez-Fornells, Antoni

2017-01-01

Recent research suggests that some people with aphasia preserve some ability to learn novel words and to retain them in the long-term. However, this novel word learning ability has been studied only in the context of single word-picture pairings. We examined the ability of people with chronic aphasia to learn novel words using a paradigm that presents new word forms together with a limited set of different possible visual referents and requires the identification of the correct word-object associations on the basis of online feedback. We also studied the relationship between word learning ability and aphasia severity, word processing abilities, and verbal short-term memory (STM). We further examined the influence of gross lesion location on new word learning. The word learning task was first validated with a group of forty-five young adults. Fourteen participants with chronic aphasia were administered the task and underwent tests of immediate and long-term recognition memory at 1 week. Their performance was compared to that of a group of fourteen matched controls using growth curve analysis. The learning curve and recognition performance of the aphasia group was significantly below the matched control group, although above-chance recognition performance and case-by-case analyses indicated that some participants with aphasia had learned the correct word-referent mappings. Verbal STM but not word processing abilities predicted word learning ability after controlling for aphasia severity. Importantly, participants with lesions in the left frontal cortex performed significantly worse than participants with lesions that spared the left frontal region both during word learning and on the recognition tests. Our findings indicate that some people with aphasia can preserve the ability to learn a small novel lexicon in an ambiguous word-referent context. This learning and recognition memory ability was associated with verbal STM capacity, aphasia severity and the integrity of the left inferior frontal region. PMID:27085892

A Cross-Sectional Study about Meaning Access Processes for Homographs

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Nievas, Francisco; Justicia, Fernando

2004-01-01

A cross-sectional study examined the effect of meaning frequency, referred to as ''dominance'' in the semantic priming paradigm, where ambiguous words (primes) were processed in isolation. Participants made lexical decisions to target words that were associates of the more frequent (dominant) or less frequent (subordinate) meaning of a homograph…

Disagreement over the Best Way to Use the Word "Validity" and Options for Reaching Consensus

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Newton, Paul E.; Shaw, Stuart D.

2016-01-01

The ability to convey shared meaning with minimal ambiguity is highly desirable for technical terms within disciplines and professions. Unfortunately, there is no widespread professional consensus over the meaning of the word "validity" as it pertains to educational and psychological testing. After illustrating the nature and extent of…

The word class effect in the picture–word interference paradigm

PubMed Central

Janssen, Niels; Melinger, Alissa; Mahon, Bradford Z.; Finkbeiner, Matthew; Caramazza, Alfonso

2010-01-01

The word class effect in the picture–word interference paradigm is a highly influential finding that has provided some of the most compelling support for word class constraints on lexical selection. However, methodological concerns called for a replication of the most convincing of those effects. Experiment 1 was a direct replication of Pechmann and Zerbst (2002; Experiment 4). Participants named pictures of objects in the context of noun and adverb distractors. Naming took place in bare noun and sentence frame contexts. A word class effect emerged in both bare noun and sentence frame naming conditions, suggesting a semantic origin of the effect. In Experiment 2, participants named objects in the context of noun and verb distractors whose word class relationship to the target and imageability were orthogonally manipulated. As before, naming took place in bare noun and sentence frame naming contexts. In both naming contexts, distractor imageability but not word class affected picture naming latencies. These findings confirm the sensitivity of the picture–word interference paradigm to distractor imageability and suggest the paradigm is not sensitive to distractor word class. The results undermine the use of the word class effect in the picture–word interference paradigm as supportive of word class constraints during lexical selection. PMID:19998070

Motorists Vestibular Disorientation Syndrome Revisited

DTIC Science & Technology

2003-02-01

inappropriate behaviour: a susceptibility to subliminal percepts. Once sensitised to the intrinsic ambiguities of a complex environment it becomes difficult to...for example being disturbed by a subliminal presentation of a word such as "cancer". Here-we propose that a similar phenomenon may exist for ambiguous...various stimuli. Agressologie. 1977;18:335-9. 32: Marme-Karelse AM, Bles W. Circular vection and human posture, 11. Does the auditory system play a

Resolving Phase Ambiguities In OQPSK

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Nguyen, Tien M.

1991-01-01

Improved design for modulator and demodulator in offset-quaternary-phase-key-shifting (OQPSK) communication system enables receiver to resolve ambiguity in estimated phase of received signal. Features include unique-code-word modulation and detection and digital implementation of Costas loop in carrier-recovery subsystem. Enchances performance of carrier-recovery subsystem, reduces complexity of receiver by removing redundant circuits from previous design, and eliminates dependence of timing in receiver upon parallel-to-serial-conversion clock.

The Effect of Instruction Method and Relearning on Dutch Spelling Performance of Third- through Fifth-Graders

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bouwmeester, Samantha; Verkoeijen, Peter P. J. L.

2011-01-01

In this study, we compared two instruction methods on spelling performance: a rewriting instruction in which children repeatedly rewrote words and an ambiguous property instruction in which children deliberately practiced on a difficult word aspect. Moreover, we examined whether the testing effect applies to spelling performance. One hundred…

2.5-Year-Olds Use Cross-Situational Consistency to Learn Verbs under Referential Uncertainty

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Scott, Rose M.; Fisher, Cynthia

2012-01-01

Recent evidence shows that children can use cross-situational statistics to learn new object labels under referential ambiguity (e.g., Smith & Yu, 2008). Such evidence has been interpreted as support for proposals that statistical information about word-referent co-occurrence plays a powerful role in word learning. But object labels represent only…

Examining the Roles of Work Autonomous and Controlled Motivations on Satisfaction and Anxiety as a Function of Role Ambiguity.

PubMed

Gillet, Nicolas; Fouquereau, Evelyne; Lafrenière, Marc-André K; Huyghebaert, Tiphaine

2016-07-03

Past research in the self-determination theory has shown that autonomous motivation is associated with positive outcomes (e.g., work satisfaction), whereas controlled motivation is related to negative outcomes (e.g., anxiety). The purpose of the present research was to examine the moderating function of role ambiguity on the relationships between work autonomous and controlled motivations on the one hand, and work satisfaction and anxiety on the other. Six hundred and ninety-eight workers (449 men and 249 women) participated in this study. Results revealed that autonomous motivation was most strongly related to satisfaction when ambiguity was low. In addition, controlled motivation was most strongly related to anxiety when ambiguity was high. In other words, the present findings suggest that the outcomes associated with each form of motivation may vary as a function of role ambiguity. The present study thus offers meaningful insights for organizations, managers, and employees.

Auditory word recognition: extrinsic and intrinsic effects of word frequency.

PubMed

Connine, C M; Titone, D; Wang, J

1993-01-01

Two experiments investigated the influence of word frequency in a phoneme identification task. Speech voicing continua were constructed so that one endpoint was a high-frequency word and the other endpoint was a low-frequency word (e.g., best-pest). Experiment 1 demonstrated that ambiguous tokens were labeled such that a high-frequency word was formed (intrinsic frequency effect). Experiment 2 manipulated the frequency composition of the list (extrinsic frequency effect). A high-frequency list bias produced an exaggerated influence of frequency; a low-frequency list bias showed a reverse frequency effect. Reaction time effects were discussed in terms of activation and postaccess decision models of frequency coding. The results support a late use of frequency in auditory word recognition.

Attentional requirements for the selection of words from different grammatical categories.

PubMed

Ayora, Pauline; Janssen, Niels; Dell'acqua, Roberto; Alario, F-Xavier

2009-09-01

Two grammatical classes are commonly distinguished in psycholinguistic research. The open-class includes content words such as nouns, whereas the closed-class includes function words such as determiners. A standing issue is to identify whether these words are retrieved through similar or distinct selection mechanisms. We report a comparative investigation of the allocation of attentional resources during the retrieval of words from these 2 classes. Previous studies used a psychological-refractory-period paradigm to establish that open-class word retrieval is supported by central attention mechanisms. We applied the same logic to closed-class word retrieval. French native speakers named pictures with determiner noun phrases while they concurrently identified the pitch of an auditory tone. The ease of noun and determiner retrieval was manipulated independently. Results showed that both manipulations affected picture naming and tone discrimination responses in similar ways. This suggests the involvement of central attentional resources in word production, irrespective of word class. These results argue against the commonly held hypothesis that closed-class retrieval is an automatic consequence of syntactic specific processes. (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved.

Effect of Multiple Translations and Cognate Status on Translation Recognition Performance of Balanced Bilinguals

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Boada, Roger; Sanchez-Casas, Rosa; Gavilan, Jose M.; Garcia-Albea, Jose E.; Tokowicz, Natasha

2013-01-01

When participants are asked to translate an ambiguous word, they are slower and less accurate than in the case of single-translation words (e.g., Laxen & Lavour, 2010; Tokowicz & Kroll, 2007). We report an experiment to further examine this multiple-translation effect by investigating the influence of variables shown to be relevant in bilingual…

Discovery of Predicate-Oriented Relations among Named Entities Extracted from Thai Texts

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Tongtep, Nattapong; Theeramunkong, Thanaruk

Extracting named entities (NEs) and their relations is more difficult in Thai than in other languages due to several Thai specific characteristics, including no explicit boundaries for words, phrases and sentences; few case markers and modifier clues; high ambiguity in compound words and serial verbs; and flexible word orders. Unlike most previous works which focused on NE relations of specific actions, such as work_for, live_in, located_in, and kill, this paper proposes more general types of NE relations, called predicate-oriented relation (PoR), where an extracted action part (verb) is used as a core component to associate related named entities extracted from Thai Texts. Lacking a practical parser for the Thai language, we present three types of surface features, i.e. punctuation marks (such as token spaces), entity types and the number of entities and then apply five alternative commonly used learning schemes to investigate their performance on predicate-oriented relation extraction. The experimental results show that our approach achieves the F-measure of 97.76%, 99.19%, 95.00% and 93.50% on four different types of predicate-oriented relation (action-location, location-action, action-person and person-action) in crime-related news documents using a data set of 1,736 entity pairs. The effects of NE extraction techniques, feature sets and class unbalance on the performance of relation extraction are explored.

Multiple priming of lexically ambiguous and unambiguous targets in the cerebral hemispheres: the coarse coding hypothesis revisited

PubMed Central

Kandhadai, Padmapriya; Federmeier, Kara D.

2009-01-01

The coarse coding hypothesis (Jung-Beeman 2005) postulates that the cerebral hemispheres differ in their breadth of semantic activation, with the left hemisphere (LH) activating a narrow, focused semantic field and the right (RH) weakly activating a broader semantic field. In support of coarse coding, studies (e.g., Faust and Lavidor 2003) investigating priming for multiple senses of a lexically ambiguous word have reported a RH benefit. However, studies of mediated priming (Livesay and Burgess 2003; Richards and Chiarello 1995) have failed to find a RH advantage for processing distantly-linked, unambiguous words. To address this debate, the present study made use of a multiple priming paradigm (Balota and Paul, 1996) in which two primes either converged onto the single meaning of an unambiguous, lexically-associated target (LION-STRIPES-TIGER) or diverged onto different meanings of an ambiguous target (KIDNEY-PIANO-ORGAN). In two experiments, participants either made lexical decisions to targets (Experiment 1) or made a semantic relatedness judgment between primes and targets (Experiment 2). In both tasks, for both ambiguous and unambiguous triplets we found equivalent priming strengths and patterns across the two visual fields, counter to the predictions of the coarse coding hypothesis. Priming patterns further suggested that both hemispheres made use of lexical level representations in the lexical decision task and semantic representations in the semantic judgment task. PMID:17459344

The company objects keep: Linking referents together during cross-situational word learning.

PubMed

Zettersten, Martin; Wojcik, Erica; Benitez, Viridiana L; Saffran, Jenny

2018-04-01

Learning the meanings of words involves not only linking individual words to referents but also building a network of connections among entities in the world, concepts, and words. Previous studies reveal that infants and adults track the statistical co-occurrence of labels and objects across multiple ambiguous training instances to learn words. However, it is less clear whether, given distributional or attentional cues, learners also encode associations amongst the novel objects. We investigated the consequences of two types of cues that highlighted object-object links in a cross-situational word learning task: distributional structure - how frequently the referents of novel words occurred together - and visual context - whether the referents were seen on matching backgrounds. Across three experiments, we found that in addition to learning novel words, adults formed connections between frequently co-occurring objects. These findings indicate that learners exploit statistical regularities to form multiple types of associations during word learning.

Exploiting domain information for Word Sense Disambiguation of medical documents.

PubMed

Stevenson, Mark; Agirre, Eneko; Soroa, Aitor

2012-01-01

Current techniques for knowledge-based Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) of ambiguous biomedical terms rely on relations in the Unified Medical Language System Metathesaurus but do not take into account the domain of the target documents. The authors' goal is to improve these methods by using information about the topic of the document in which the ambiguous term appears. The authors proposed and implemented several methods to extract lists of key terms associated with Medical Subject Heading terms. These key terms are used to represent the document topic in a knowledge-based WSD system. They are applied both alone and in combination with local context. A standard measure of accuracy was calculated over the set of target words in the widely used National Library of Medicine WSD dataset. The authors report a significant improvement when combining those key terms with local context, showing that domain information improves the results of a WSD system based on the Unified Medical Language System Metathesaurus alone. The best results were obtained using key terms obtained by relevance feedback and weighted by inverse document frequency.

Exploiting domain information for Word Sense Disambiguation of medical documents

PubMed Central

Agirre, Eneko; Soroa, Aitor

2011-01-01

Objective Current techniques for knowledge-based Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) of ambiguous biomedical terms rely on relations in the Unified Medical Language System Metathesaurus but do not take into account the domain of the target documents. The authors' goal is to improve these methods by using information about the topic of the document in which the ambiguous term appears. Design The authors proposed and implemented several methods to extract lists of key terms associated with Medical Subject Heading terms. These key terms are used to represent the document topic in a knowledge-based WSD system. They are applied both alone and in combination with local context. Measurements A standard measure of accuracy was calculated over the set of target words in the widely used National Library of Medicine WSD dataset. Results and discussion The authors report a significant improvement when combining those key terms with local context, showing that domain information improves the results of a WSD system based on the Unified Medical Language System Metathesaurus alone. The best results were obtained using key terms obtained by relevance feedback and weighted by inverse document frequency. PMID:21900701

Inferring causes during speech perception.

PubMed

Liu, Linda; Jaeger, T Florian

2018-05-01

One of the central challenges in speech perception is the lack of invariance: talkers differ in how they map words onto the speech signal. Previous work has shown that one mechanism by which listeners overcome this variability is adaptation. However, talkers differ in how they pronounce words for a number of reasons, ranging from more permanent, characteristic factors such as having a foreign accent, to more temporary, incidental factors, such as speaking with a pen in the mouth. One challenge for listeners is that the true cause underlying atypical pronunciations is never directly known, and instead must be inferred from (often causally ambiguous) evidence. In three experiments, we investigate whether these inferences underlie speech perception, and how the speech perception system deals with uncertainty about competing causes for atypical pronunciations. We find that adaptation to atypical pronunciations is affected by whether the atypical pronunciations are seen as characteristic or incidental. Furthermore, we find that listeners are able to maintain information about previous causally ambiguous pronunciations that they experience, and use this previously experienced evidence to drive their adaptation after additional evidence has disambiguated the cause. Our findings revise previous proposals that causally ambiguous evidence is ignored during speech adaptation. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Guidelines for writing railroad operating rules

DOT National Transportation Integrated Search

1973-01-01

This report constitutes an aid to persons or groups who must create or revise railroad operating rules. It provides guidance for avoiding confusion, ambiguity and misconceptions in the wording of rules. Content, style and organization are discussed, ...

Learning linear transformations between counting-based and prediction-based word embeddings

PubMed Central

Hayashi, Kohei; Kawarabayashi, Ken-ichi

2017-01-01

Despite the growing interest in prediction-based word embedding learning methods, it remains unclear as to how the vector spaces learnt by the prediction-based methods differ from that of the counting-based methods, or whether one can be transformed into the other. To study the relationship between counting-based and prediction-based embeddings, we propose a method for learning a linear transformation between two given sets of word embeddings. Our proposal contributes to the word embedding learning research in three ways: (a) we propose an efficient method to learn a linear transformation between two sets of word embeddings, (b) using the transformation learnt in (a), we empirically show that it is possible to predict distributed word embeddings for novel unseen words, and (c) empirically it is possible to linearly transform counting-based embeddings to prediction-based embeddings, for frequent words, different POS categories, and varying degrees of ambiguities. PMID:28926629

Word learning emerges from the interaction of online referent selection and slow associative learning.

PubMed

McMurray, Bob; Horst, Jessica S; Samuelson, Larissa K

2012-10-01

Classic approaches to word learning emphasize referential ambiguity: In naming situations, a novel word could refer to many possible objects, properties, actions, and so forth. To solve this, researchers have posited constraints, and inference strategies, but assume that determining the referent of a novel word is isomorphic to learning. We present an alternative in which referent selection is an online process and independent of long-term learning. We illustrate this theoretical approach with a dynamic associative model in which referent selection emerges from real-time competition between referents and learning is associative (Hebbian). This model accounts for a range of findings including the differences in expressive and receptive vocabulary, cross-situational learning under high degrees of ambiguity, accelerating (vocabulary explosion) and decelerating (power law) learning, fast mapping by mutual exclusivity (and differences in bilinguals), improvements in familiar word recognition with development, and correlations between speed of processing and learning. Together it suggests that (a) association learning buttressed by dynamic competition can account for much of the literature; (b) familiar word recognition is subserved by the same processes that identify the referents of novel words (fast mapping); (c) online competition may allow the children to leverage information available in the task to augment performance despite slow learning; (d) in complex systems, associative learning is highly multifaceted; and (e) learning and referent selection, though logically distinct, can be subtly related. It suggests more sophisticated ways of describing the interaction between situation- and developmental-time processes and points to the need for considering such interactions as a primary determinant of development. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved.

Neural correlates of concreteness in semantic categorization.

PubMed

Pexman, Penny M; Hargreaves, Ian S; Edwards, Jodi D; Henry, Luke C; Goodyear, Bradley G

2007-08-01

In some contexts, concrete words (CARROT) are recognized and remembered more readily than abstract words (TRUTH). This concreteness effect has historically been explained by two theories of semantic representation: dual-coding [Paivio, A. Dual coding theory: Retrospect and current status. Canadian Journal of Psychology, 45, 255-287, 1991] and context-availability [Schwanenflugel, P. J. Why are abstract concepts hard to understand? In P. J. Schwanenflugel (Ed.), The psychology of word meanings (pp. 223-250). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1991]. Past efforts to adjudicate between these theories using functional magnetic resonance imaging have produced mixed results. Using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging, we reexamined this issue with a semantic categorization task that allowed for uniform semantic judgments of concrete and abstract words. The participants were 20 healthy adults. Functional analyses contrasted activation associated with concrete and abstract meanings of ambiguous and unambiguous words. Results showed that for both ambiguous and unambiguous words, abstract meanings were associated with more widespread cortical activation than concrete meanings in numerous regions associated with semantic processing, including temporal, parietal, and frontal cortices. These results are inconsistent with both dual-coding and context-availability theories, as these theories propose that the representations of abstract concepts are relatively impoverished. Our results suggest, instead, that semantic retrieval of abstract concepts involves a network of association areas. We argue that this finding is compatible with a theory of semantic representation such as Barsalou's [Barsalou, L. W. Perceptual symbol systems. Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 22, 577-660, 1999] perceptual symbol systems, whereby concrete and abstract concepts are represented by similar mechanisms but with differences in focal content.

Attentional Requirements for the Selection of Words from Different Grammatical Categories

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ayora, Pauline; Janssen, Niels; Dell'Acqua, Roberto; Alario, F.-Xavier

2009-01-01

Two grammatical classes are commonly distinguished in psycholinguistic research. The open-class includes content words such as nouns, whereas the closed-class includes function words such as determiners. A standing issue is to identify whether these words are retrieved through similar or distinct selection mechanisms. We report a comparative…

Cross-Linguistic Activation in Bilingual Sentence Processing: The Role of Word Class Meaning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Baten, Kristof; Hofman, Fabrice; Loeys, Tom

2011-01-01

This study investigates how categorial (word class) semantics influences cross-linguistic interactions when reading in L2. Previous homograph studies paid little attention to the possible influence of different word classes in the stimulus material on cross-linguistic activation. The present study examines the word recognition performance of…

Semantic Factors Predict the Rate of Lexical Replacement of Content Words

PubMed Central

Vejdemo, Susanne; Hörberg, Thomas

2016-01-01

The rate of lexical replacement estimates the diachronic stability of word forms on the basis of how frequently a proto-language word is replaced or retained in its daughter languages. Lexical replacement rate has been shown to be highly related to word class and word frequency. In this paper, we argue that content words and function words behave differently with respect to lexical replacement rate, and we show that semantic factors predict the lexical replacement rate of content words. For the 167 content items in the Swadesh list, data was gathered on the features of lexical replacement rate, word class, frequency, age of acquisition, synonyms, arousal, imageability and average mutual information, either from published databases or gathered from corpora and lexica. A linear regression model shows that, in addition to frequency, synonyms, senses and imageability are significantly related to the lexical replacement rate of content words–in particular the number of synonyms that a word has. The model shows no differences in lexical replacement rate between word classes, and outperforms a model with word class and word frequency predictors only. PMID:26820737

A Systematic Review of Experimental Paradigms for Exploring Biased Interpretation of Ambiguous Information with Emotional and Neutral Associations.

PubMed

Schoth, Daniel E; Liossi, Christina

2017-01-01

Interpretation biases have been extensively explored in a range of populations, including patients with anxiety and depressive disorders where they have been argued to influence the onset and maintenance of such conditions. Other populations in which interpretation biases have been explored include patients with chronic pain, anorexia nervosa, and alcohol dependency among others, although this literature is more limited. In this research, stimuli with threatening/emotional and neutral meanings are presented, with participant responses indicative of ambiguity resolution. A large number of paradigms have been designed and implemented in the exploration of interpretation biases, some varying in minor features only. This article provides a review of experimental paradigms available for exploring interpretation biases, with the aim to stimulate and inform the design of future research exploring cognitive biases across a range of populations. A systematic search of the experimental literature was conducted in Medline, PsychINFO, Web of Science, CINAHL, and Cochrane Library databases. Search terms were information, stimuli , and ambiguous intersected with the terms interpretation and bias * . Forty-five paradigms were found, categorized into those using ambiguous words, ambiguous images, and ambiguous scenarios. The key features, strengths and limitations of the paradigms identified are discussed.

Understanding Charts and Graphs.

DTIC Science & Technology

1987-07-28

34notational.* English, then, is obviously not a notational system because ambiguous words or sentences are possible, whereas musical notion is notational...how lines and regions are detected and organized; these principles grow out of discoveries about human visual information processing. A syntactic...themselves name other colors (e.g., the word "red" is printed in blue ink; this is known as the OStroop effecto ). Similarly, if "left" and "right" are

Analysis of space telescope data collection system

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Ingels, F. M.; Schoggen, W. O.

1982-01-01

An analysis of the expected performance for the Multiple Access (MA) system is provided. The analysis covers the expected bit error rate performance, the effects of synchronization loss, the problem of self-interference, and the problem of phase ambiguity. The problem of false acceptance of a command word due to data inversion is discussed. A mathematical determination of the probability of accepting an erroneous command word due to a data inversion is presented. The problem is examined for three cases: (1) a data inversion only, (2) a data inversion and a random error within the same command word, and a block (up to 256 48-bit words) containing both a data inversion and a random error.

Word identification in reading and the promise of subsymbolic psycholinguistics.

PubMed

Van Orden, G C; Pennington, B F; Stone, G O

1990-10-01

The vast literature concerning printed word identification either contradicts or provides ambiguous support for each of the central hypotheses of dual-process theory, the most widely accepted theory of printed word identification. In contrast, clear, positive support exists for an alternative subsymbolic approach that includes a central role for the process of phonologic coding. This subsymbolic account is developed around a covariant learning hypothesis, derived from a design principle common to current learning algorithms within the subsymbolic paradigm. Where this hypothesis applies, and it may apply broadly, it predicts a common empirical profile of development.

Opposing Effects of Semantic Diversity in Lexical and Semantic Relatedness Decisions

PubMed Central

2015-01-01

Semantic ambiguity has often been divided into 2 forms: homonymy, referring to words with 2 unrelated interpretations (e.g., bark), and polysemy, referring to words associated with a number of varying but semantically linked uses (e.g., twist). Typically, polysemous words are thought of as having a fixed number of discrete definitions, or “senses,” with each use of the word corresponding to one of its senses. In this study, we investigated an alternative conception of polysemy, based on the idea that polysemous variation in meaning is a continuous, graded phenomenon that occurs as a function of contextual variation in word usage. We quantified this contextual variation using semantic diversity (SemD), a corpus-based measure of the degree to which a particular word is used in a diverse set of linguistic contexts. In line with other approaches to polysemy, we found a reaction time (RT) advantage for high SemD words in lexical decision, which occurred for words of both high and low imageability. When participants made semantic relatedness decisions to word pairs, however, responses were slower to high SemD pairs, irrespective of whether these were related or unrelated. Again, this result emerged irrespective of the imageability of the word. The latter result diverges from previous findings using homonyms, in which ambiguity effects have only been found for related word pairs. We argue that participants were slower to respond to high SemD words because their high contextual variability resulted in noisy, underspecified semantic representations that were more difficult to compare with one another. We demonstrated this principle in a connectionist computational model that was trained to activate distributed semantic representations from orthographic inputs. Greater variability in the orthography-to-semantic mappings of high SemD words resulted in a lower degree of similarity for related pairs of this type. At the same time, the representations of high SemD unrelated pairs were less distinct from one another. In addition, the model demonstrated more rapid semantic activation for high SemD words, thought to underpin the processing advantage in lexical decision. These results support the view that polysemous variation in word meaning can be conceptualized in terms of graded variation in distributed semantic representations. PMID:25751041

Semantic context effects and priming in word association.

PubMed

Zeelenberg, René; Pecher, Diane; Shiffrin, Richard M; Raaijmakers, Jeroen G W

2003-09-01

Two experiments investigated priming in word association, an implicit memory task. In the study phase of Experiment 1, semantically ambiguous target words were presented in sentences that biased their interpretation. The appropriate interpretation of the target was either congruent or incongruent with the cue presented in a subsequent word association task. Priming (i.e., a higher proportion of target responses relative to a nonstudied baseline) was obtained for the congruent condition, but not for the incongruent condition. In Experiment 2, study sentences emphasized particular meaning aspects of nonambiguous targets. The word association task showed a higher proportion of target responses for targets studied in the more congruent sentence context than for targets studied in the less congruent sentence context. These results indicate that priming in word association depends largely on the storage of information relating the cue and target.

[Effects of punctuation on the processing of syntactically ambiguous Japanese sentences with a semantic bias].

PubMed

Niikuni, Keiyu; Muramoto, Toshiaki

2014-06-01

This study explored the effects of a comma on the processing of structurally ambiguous Japanese sentences with a semantic bias. A previous study has shown that a comma which is incompatible with an ambiguous sentence's semantic bias affects the processing of the sentence, but the effects of a comma that is compatible with the bias are unclear. In the present study, we examined the role of a comma compatible with the sentence's semantic bias using the self-paced reading method, which enabled us to determine the reading times for the region of the sentence where readers would be expected to solve the ambiguity using semantic information (the "target region"). The results show that a comma significantly increases the reading time of the punctuated word but decreases the reading time in the target region. We concluded that even if the semantic information provided might be sufficient for disambiguation, the insertion of a comma would affect the processing cost of the ambiguity, indicating that readers use both the comma and semantic information in parallel for sentence processing.

The interpretation of dream meaning: Resolving ambiguity using Latent Semantic Analysis in a small corpus of text.

PubMed

Altszyler, Edgar; Ribeiro, Sidarta; Sigman, Mariano; Fernández Slezak, Diego

2017-11-01

Computer-based dreams content analysis relies on word frequencies within predefined categories in order to identify different elements in text. As a complementary approach, we explored the capabilities and limitations of word-embedding techniques to identify word usage patterns among dream reports. These tools allow us to quantify words associations in text and to identify the meaning of target words. Word-embeddings have been extensively studied in large datasets, but only a few studies analyze semantic representations in small corpora. To fill this gap, we compared Skip-gram and Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) capabilities to extract semantic associations from dream reports. LSA showed better performance than Skip-gram in small size corpora in two tests. Furthermore, LSA captured relevant word associations in dream collection, even in cases with low-frequency words or small numbers of dreams. Word associations in dreams reports can thus be quantified by LSA, which opens new avenues for dream interpretation and decoding. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Civil Rightsspeak.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Williams, Walter E.

1986-01-01

Today's civil rights debate is clouded by ambiguities of language. The following frequently misused words are clarified in the text so the issues can be properly addressed: 1) segregation; 2) desegregation; 3) minority group; 4) civil rights; 5) compensatory; 6) statistical disparities; and 7) racist. (PS)

Cross-situational word learning in aphasia.

PubMed

Peñaloza, Claudia; Mirman, Daniel; Cardona, Pedro; Juncadella, Montserrat; Martin, Nadine; Laine, Matti; Rodríguez-Fornells, Antoni

2017-08-01

Human learners can resolve referential ambiguity and discover the relationships between words and meanings through a cross-situational learning (CSL) strategy. Some people with aphasia (PWA) can learn word-referent pairings under referential uncertainty supported by online feedback. However, it remains unknown whether PWA can learn new words cross-situationally and if such learning ability is supported by statistical learning (SL) mechanisms. The present study examined whether PWA can learn novel word-referent mappings in a CSL task without feedback. We also studied whether CSL is related to SL in PWA and neurologically healthy individuals. We further examined whether aphasia severity, phonological processing and verbal short-term memory (STM) predict CSL in aphasia, and also whether individual differences in verbal STM modulate CSL in healthy older adults. Sixteen people with chronic aphasia underwent a CSL task that involved exposure to a series of individually ambiguous learning trials and a SL task that taps speech segmentation. Their learning ability was compared to 18 older controls and 39 young adults recruited for task validation. CSL in the aphasia group was below the older controls and young adults and took place at a slower rate. Importantly, we found a strong association between SL and CSL performance in all three groups. CSL was modulated by aphasia severity in the aphasia group, and by verbal STM capacity in the older controls. Our findings indicate that some PWA can preserve the ability to learn new word-referent associations cross-situationally. We suggest that both PWA and neurologically intact individuals may rely on SL mechanisms to achieve CSL and that verbal STM also influences CSL. These findings contribute to the ongoing debate on the cognitive mechanisms underlying this learning ability. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Influence of Word Class Proportion on Cerebral Asymmetries for High- And Low-Imagery Words

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Chiarello, C.; Shears, C.; Liu, S.; Kacinik, N.A.

2005-01-01

It has been claimed that the typical RVF/LH advantage for word recognition is reduced or eliminated for imageable, as compared to nonimageable, nouns. To determine whether such word-class effects vary depending on the stimulus list context in which the words are presented, we varied the proportion of high- and low-image words presented in a…

Revisiting the operational RNA code for amino acids: Ensemble attributes and their implications.

PubMed

Shaul, Shaul; Berel, Dror; Benjamini, Yoav; Graur, Dan

2010-01-01

It has been suggested that tRNA acceptor stems specify an operational RNA code for amino acids. In the last 20 years several attributes of the putative code have been elucidated for a small number of model organisms. To gain insight about the ensemble attributes of the code, we analyzed 4925 tRNA sequences from 102 bacterial and 21 archaeal species. Here, we used a classification and regression tree (CART) methodology, and we found that the degrees of degeneracy or specificity of the RNA codes in both Archaea and Bacteria differ from those of the genetic code. We found instances of taxon-specific alternative codes, i.e., identical acceptor stem determinants encrypting different amino acids in different species, as well as instances of ambiguity, i.e., identical acceptor stem determinants encrypting two or more amino acids in the same species. When partitioning the data by class of synthetase, the degree of code ambiguity was significantly reduced. In cryptographic terms, a plausible interpretation of this result is that the class distinction in synthetases is an essential part of the decryption rules for resolving the subset of RNA code ambiguities enciphered by identical acceptor stem determinants of tRNAs acylated by enzymes belonging to the two classes. In evolutionary terms, our findings lend support to the notion that in the pre-DNA world, interactions between tRNA acceptor stems and synthetases formed the basis for the distinction between the two classes; hence, ambiguities in the ancient RNA code were pivotal for the fixation of these enzymes in the genomes of ancestral prokaryotes.

Revisiting the operational RNA code for amino acids: Ensemble attributes and their implications

PubMed Central

Shaul, Shaul; Berel, Dror; Benjamini, Yoav; Graur, Dan

2010-01-01

It has been suggested that tRNA acceptor stems specify an operational RNA code for amino acids. In the last 20 years several attributes of the putative code have been elucidated for a small number of model organisms. To gain insight about the ensemble attributes of the code, we analyzed 4925 tRNA sequences from 102 bacterial and 21 archaeal species. Here, we used a classification and regression tree (CART) methodology, and we found that the degrees of degeneracy or specificity of the RNA codes in both Archaea and Bacteria differ from those of the genetic code. We found instances of taxon-specific alternative codes, i.e., identical acceptor stem determinants encrypting different amino acids in different species, as well as instances of ambiguity, i.e., identical acceptor stem determinants encrypting two or more amino acids in the same species. When partitioning the data by class of synthetase, the degree of code ambiguity was significantly reduced. In cryptographic terms, a plausible interpretation of this result is that the class distinction in synthetases is an essential part of the decryption rules for resolving the subset of RNA code ambiguities enciphered by identical acceptor stem determinants of tRNAs acylated by enzymes belonging to the two classes. In evolutionary terms, our findings lend support to the notion that in the pre-DNA world, interactions between tRNA acceptor stems and synthetases formed the basis for the distinction between the two classes; hence, ambiguities in the ancient RNA code were pivotal for the fixation of these enzymes in the genomes of ancestral prokaryotes. PMID:19952117

Children value informativity over logic in word learning.

PubMed

Ramscar, Michael; Dye, Melody; Klein, Joseph

2013-06-01

The question of how children learn the meanings of words has long puzzled philosophers and psychologists. As Quine famously pointed out, simply hearing a word in context reveals next to nothing about its meaning. How then do children learn to understand and use words correctly? Here, we show how learning theory can offer an elegant solution to this seemingly intractable puzzle in language acquisition. From it, we derived formal predictions about word learning in situations of Quinean ambiguity, and subsequently tested our predictions on toddlers, undergraduates, and developmental psychologists. The toddlers' performance was consistent both with our predictions and with the workings of implicit mechanisms that can facilitate the learning of meaningful lexical systems. Adults adopted a markedly different and likely suboptimal strategy. These results suggest one explanation for why early word learning can appear baffling: Adult intuitions may be a poor source of insight into how children learn.

Letters in time and retinotopic space.

PubMed

Adelman, James S

2011-10-01

Various phenomena in tachistoscopic word identification and priming (WRODS and LTRS are confused with and prime WORDS and LETTERS) suggest that position-specific channels are not used in the processing of letters in words. Previous approaches to this issue have sought alternative matching rules because they have assumed that these phenomena reveal which stimuli are good but imperfect matches to a particular word-such imperfect matches being taken by the word recognition system as partial evidence for that word. The new Letters in Time and Retinotopic Space model (LTRS) makes the alternative assumption that these phenomena reveal the rates at which different features of the stimulus are extracted, because the stimulus is ambiguous when some features are missing from the percept. LTRS is successfully applied to tachistoscopic identification and form priming data with manipulations of duration and target-foil and prime-target relationships. © 2011 American Psychological Association

"What Happened?" Teaching Attribution Theory through Ambiguous Prompts

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McArthur, John

2011-01-01

The concept of attribution, "the act of explaining why something happens or why a person acts a particular way," is typically an abstract concept. This 35-50-minute activity invites students to make a series of attributions by asking them "What happened?" in ambiguous scenes presented in class. Then, students retrospectively identify what…

A Systematic Review of Experimental Paradigms for Exploring Biased Interpretation of Ambiguous Information with Emotional and Neutral Associations

PubMed Central

Schoth, Daniel E.; Liossi, Christina

2017-01-01

Interpretation biases have been extensively explored in a range of populations, including patients with anxiety and depressive disorders where they have been argued to influence the onset and maintenance of such conditions. Other populations in which interpretation biases have been explored include patients with chronic pain, anorexia nervosa, and alcohol dependency among others, although this literature is more limited. In this research, stimuli with threatening/emotional and neutral meanings are presented, with participant responses indicative of ambiguity resolution. A large number of paradigms have been designed and implemented in the exploration of interpretation biases, some varying in minor features only. This article provides a review of experimental paradigms available for exploring interpretation biases, with the aim to stimulate and inform the design of future research exploring cognitive biases across a range of populations. A systematic search of the experimental literature was conducted in Medline, PsychINFO, Web of Science, CINAHL, and Cochrane Library databases. Search terms were information, stimuli, and ambiguous intersected with the terms interpretation and bias*. Forty-five paradigms were found, categorized into those using ambiguous words, ambiguous images, and ambiguous scenarios. The key features, strengths and limitations of the paradigms identified are discussed. PMID:28232813

Exploiting MeSH indexing in MEDLINE to generate a data set for word sense disambiguation.

PubMed

Jimeno-Yepes, Antonio J; McInnes, Bridget T; Aronson, Alan R

2011-06-02

Evaluation of Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) methods in the biomedical domain is difficult because the available resources are either too small or too focused on specific types of entities (e.g. diseases or genes). We present a method that can be used to automatically develop a WSD test collection using the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Metathesaurus and the manual MeSH indexing of MEDLINE. We demonstrate the use of this method by developing such a data set, called MSH WSD. In our method, the Metathesaurus is first screened to identify ambiguous terms whose possible senses consist of two or more MeSH headings. We then use each ambiguous term and its corresponding MeSH heading to extract MEDLINE citations where the term and only one of the MeSH headings co-occur. The term found in the MEDLINE citation is automatically assigned the UMLS CUI linked to the MeSH heading. Each instance has been assigned a UMLS Concept Unique Identifier (CUI). We compare the characteristics of the MSH WSD data set to the previously existing NLM WSD data set. The resulting MSH WSD data set consists of 106 ambiguous abbreviations, 88 ambiguous terms and 9 which are a combination of both, for a total of 203 ambiguous entities. For each ambiguous term/abbreviation, the data set contains a maximum of 100 instances per sense obtained from MEDLINE.We evaluated the reliability of the MSH WSD data set using existing knowledge-based methods and compared their performance to that of the results previously obtained by these algorithms on the pre-existing data set, NLM WSD. We show that the knowledge-based methods achieve different results but keep their relative performance except for the Journal Descriptor Indexing (JDI) method, whose performance is below the other methods. The MSH WSD data set allows the evaluation of WSD algorithms in the biomedical domain. Compared to previously existing data sets, MSH WSD contains a larger number of biomedical terms/abbreviations and covers the largest set of UMLS Semantic Types. Furthermore, the MSH WSD data set has been generated automatically reusing already existing annotations and, therefore, can be regenerated from subsequent UMLS versions.

Performance impact of stop lists and morphological decomposition on word-word corpus-based semantic space models.

PubMed

Keith, Jeff; Westbury, Chris; Goldman, James

2015-09-01

Corpus-based semantic space models, which primarily rely on lexical co-occurrence statistics, have proven effective in modeling and predicting human behavior in a number of experimental paradigms that explore semantic memory representation. The most widely studied extant models, however, are strongly influenced by orthographic word frequency (e.g., Shaoul & Westbury, Behavior Research Methods, 38, 190-195, 2006). This has the implication that high-frequency closed-class words can potentially bias co-occurrence statistics. Because these closed-class words are purported to carry primarily syntactic, rather than semantic, information, the performance of corpus-based semantic space models may be improved by excluding closed-class words (using stop lists) from co-occurrence statistics, while retaining their syntactic information through other means (e.g., part-of-speech tagging and/or affixes from inflected word forms). Additionally, very little work has been done to explore the effect of employing morphological decomposition on the inflected forms of words in corpora prior to compiling co-occurrence statistics, despite (controversial) evidence that humans perform early morphological decomposition in semantic processing. In this study, we explored the impact of these factors on corpus-based semantic space models. From this study, morphological decomposition appears to significantly improve performance in word-word co-occurrence semantic space models, providing some support for the claim that sublexical information-specifically, word morphology-plays a role in lexical semantic processing. An overall decrease in performance was observed in models employing stop lists (e.g., excluding closed-class words). Furthermore, we found some evidence that weakens the claim that closed-class words supply primarily syntactic information in word-word co-occurrence semantic space models.

Translation Ambiguity in and out of Context

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Prior, Anat; Wintner, Shuly; MacWhinney, Brian; Lavie, Alon

2011-01-01

We compare translations of single words, made by bilingual speakers in a laboratory setting, with contextualized translation choices of the same items, made by professional translators and extracted from parallel language corpora. The translation choices in both cases show moderate convergence, demonstrating that decontextualized translation…

Overcoming the effect of letter confusability in letter-by-letter reading: a rehabilitation study.

PubMed

Harris, Lara; Olson, Andrew; Humphreys, Glyn

2013-01-01

Patients who read in a letter-by-letter manner can demonstrate effects of lexical variables when reading words comprised of low confusability letters, suggesting the capacity to process low-confusability words in parallel across the letters (Fiset, Arguin, & McCabe, 2006). Here a series of experiments is presented investigating letter confusability effects in MAH, a patient with expressive and receptive aphasia who shows reduced reading accuracy with longer words, and DM, a relatively "pure" alexic patient. Two rehabilitation studies were employed: (i) a word-level therapy and (ii) a letter-level therapy designed to improve discrimination of individual letters. The word-level treatment produced generalised improvement to low-confusability words only, but the serial processing treatment produced improvement on both high and low confusability words. The results add support to the hypothesis that letter confusability plays a key role in letter-by-letter reading, and suggest that a rehabilitation method aimed at reducing ambiguities in letter identification may be particularly effective for treating letter-by-letter reading.

The Function of Repeating: The Relation between Word Class and Repetition Type in Developmental Stuttering

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Buhr, Anthony P.; Jones, Robin M.; Conture, Edward G.; Kelly, Ellen M.

2016-01-01

Background: It is already known that preschool-age children who stutter (CWS) tend to stutter on function words at the beginning of sentences. It is also known that phonological errors potentially resulting in part-word repetitions tend to occur on content words. However, the precise relation between word class and repetition type in preschool-age…

[A study on English loan words in French plastic surgery].

PubMed

Hansson, E; Tegelberg, E

2014-10-01

The French language is less and less used as an international scientific language and many French researchers publish their work in English. Nowadays, Annales de Chirurgie Plastique Esthétique is the only international plastic surgical journal published completely in French. The use of English loan words in French plastic surgery has never been studied. The aim of this study was to describe the frequency and types of English loan words in French plastic surgery. A corpus consisting of all the articles in a number of Annales de Chirurgie Plastique Esthethique, chosen by default, was created. The frequency of English loan words was calculated and the types of words were analysed. The corpus contains 367 (0.8%) English loan words. Most of them are non-integrated loan words and calques. The majority of the plastic surgical loan words describe surgical techniques. The French plastic surgical language seems to be influenced by English. The usage of loan words does not always follow the recommendations and the usage is sometimes ambiguous. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.

Effects of context and word class on lexical retrieval in Chinese speakers with anomic aphasia.

PubMed

Law, Sam-Po; Kong, Anthony Pak-Hin; Lai, Loretta Wing-Shan; Lai, Christy

2015-01-01

Differences in processing nouns and verbs have been investigated intensely in psycholinguistics and neuropsychology in past decades. However, the majority of studies examining retrieval of these word classes have involved tasks of single word stimuli or responses. While the results have provided rich information for addressing issues about grammatical class distinctions, it is unclear whether they have adequate ecological validity for understanding lexical retrieval in connected speech which characterizes daily verbal communication. Previous investigations comparing retrieval of nouns and verbs in single word production and connected speech have reported either discrepant performance between the two contexts with presence of word class dissociation in picture naming but absence in connected speech, or null effects of word class. In addition, word finding difficulties have been found to be less severe in connected speech than picture naming. However, these studies have failed to match target stimuli of the two word classes and between tasks on psycholinguistic variables known to affect performance in response latency and/or accuracy. The present study compared lexical retrieval of nouns and verbs in picture naming and connected speech from picture description, procedural description, and story-telling among 19 Chinese speakers with anomic aphasia and their age, gender, and education matched healthy controls, to understand the influence of grammatical class on word production across speech contexts when target items were balanced for confounding variables between word classes and tasks. Elicitation of responses followed the protocol of the AphasiaBank consortium (http://talkbank.org/AphasiaBank/). Target words for confrontation naming were based on well-established naming tests, while those for narrative were drawn from a large database of normal speakers. Selected nouns and verbs in the two contexts were matched for age-of-acquisition (AoA) and familiarity. Influence of imageability was removed through statistical control. When AoA and familiarity were balanced, nouns were retrieved better than verbs, and performance was higher in picture naming than connected speech. When imageability was further controlled for, only the effect of task remained significant. The absence of word class effects when confounding variables are controlled for is similar to many previous reports; however, the pattern of better word retrieval in naming is rare but compatible with the account that processing demands are higher in narrative than naming. The overall findings have strongly suggested the importance of including connected speech tasks in any language assessment and evaluation of language rehabilitation of individuals with aphasia.

Effects of context and word class on lexical retrieval in Chinese speakers with anomic aphasia

PubMed Central

Law, Sam-Po; Kong, Anthony Pak-Hin; Lai, Loretta Wing-Shan; Lai, Christy

2014-01-01

Background Differences in processing nouns and verbs have been investigated intensely in psycholinguistics and neuropsychology in past decades. However, the majority of studies examining retrieval of these word classes have involved tasks of single word stimuli or responses. While the results have provided rich information for addressing issues about grammatical class distinctions, it is unclear whether they have adequate ecological validity for understanding lexical retrieval in connected speech which characterizes daily verbal communication. Previous investigations comparing retrieval of nouns and verbs in single word production and connected speech have reported either discrepant performance between the two contexts with presence of word class dissociation in picture naming but absence in connected speech, or null effects of word class. In addition, word finding difficulties have been found to be less severe in connected speech than picture naming. However, these studies have failed to match target stimuli of the two word classes and between tasks on psycholinguistic variables known to affect performance in response latency and/or accuracy. Aims The present study compared lexical retrieval of nouns and verbs in picture naming and connected speech from picture description, procedural description, and story-telling among 19 Chinese speakers with anomic aphasia and their age, gender, and education matched healthy controls, to understand the influence of grammatical class on word production across speech contexts when target items were balanced for confounding variables between word classes and tasks. Methods & Procedures Elicitation of responses followed the protocol of the AphasiaBank consortium (http://talkbank.org/AphasiaBank/). Target words for confrontation naming were based on well-established naming tests, while those for narrative were drawn from a large database of normal speakers. Selected nouns and verbs in the two contexts were matched for age-of-acquisition (AoA) and familiarity. Influence of imageability was removed through statistical control. Outcomes & Results When AoA and familiarity were balanced, nouns were retrieved better than verbs, and performance was higher in picture naming than connected speech. When imageability was further controlled for, only the effect of task remained significant. Conclusions The absence of word class effects when confounding variables are controlled for is similar to many previous reports; however, the pattern of better word retrieval in naming is rare but compatible with the account that processing demands are higher in narrative than naming. The overall findings have strongly suggested the importance of including connected speech tasks in any language assessment and evaluation of language rehabilitation of individuals with aphasia. PMID:25505810

Lexical statistics of competition in L2 versus L1 listening

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Cutler, Anne

2005-09-01

Spoken-word recognition involves multiple activation of alternative word candidates and competition between these alternatives. Phonemic confusions in L2 listening increase the number of potentially active words, thus slowing word recognition by adding competitors. This study used a 70,000-word English lexicon backed by frequency statistics from a 17,900,000-word corpus to assess the competition increase resulting from two representative phonemic confusions, one vocalic (ae/E) and one consonantal (r/l), in L2 versus L1 listening. The first analysis involved word embedding. Embedded words (cat in cattle, rib in ribbon) cause competition, which phonemic confusion can increase (cat in kettle, rib in liberty). The average increase in number of embedded words was 59.6 and 48.3 temporary ambiguity. Even when no embeddings are present, multiple alternatives are possible: para- can become parrot, paradise, etc., but also pallet, palace given /r/-/l/ confusion. Phoneme confusions (vowel or consonant) in first or second position in the word approximately doubled the number of activated candidates; confusions later in the word increased activation by on average 53 third, 42 confusions significantly increase competition for L2 compared with L1 listeners.

Word Class Distinctions in Second Language Acquisition: An Experimental Study of L2 Spanish

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Zyzik, Eve; Azevedo, Clara

2009-01-01

Although the problem of word class has been explored in numerous first language studies, relatively little is known about this process in SLA. The present study measures second language (L2) learners' knowledge of word class distinctions (e.g., noun vs. adjective) in a variety of syntactic contexts. English-speaking learners of Spanish from…

The Relationship of Class Size Effects and Teacher Salary

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Peevely, Gary; Hedges, Larry; Nye, Barbara A.

2005-01-01

The effects of class size on academic achievement have been studied for decades. Although the results of small-scale, randomized experiments and large-scale, econometric studies point to positive effects of small classes, some scholars see the evidence as ambiguous. Recent analyses from a 4-year, large-scale, randomized experiment on the effects…

Hemispheric processing of differently valenced and self-relevant attachment words in middle-aged married and separated individuals.

PubMed

Fussell, Nicola J; Rowe, Angela C; Mohr, Christine

2012-01-01

The reliance in experimental psychology on testing undergraduate populations with relatively little life experience, and/or ambiguously valenced stimuli with varying degrees of self-relevance, may have contributed to inconsistent findings in the literature on the valence hypothesis. To control for these potential limitations, the current study assessed lateralised lexical decisions for positive and negative attachment words in 40 middle-aged male and female participants. Self-relevance was manipulated in two ways: by testing currently married compared with previously married individuals and by assessing self-relevance ratings individually for each word. Results replicated a left hemisphere advantage for lexical decisions and a processing advantage of emotional over neutral words but did not support the valence hypothesis. Positive attachment words yielded a processing advantage over neutral words in the right hemisphere, while emotional words (irrespective of valence) yielded a processing advantage over neutral words in the left hemisphere. Both self-relevance manipulations were unrelated to lateralised performance. The role of participant sex and age in emotion processing are discussed as potential modulators of the present findings.

An image is worth a thousand words: why nouns tend to dominate verbs in early word learning.

PubMed

McDonough, Colleen; Song, Lulu; Hirsh-Pasek, Kathy; Golinkoff, Roberta Michnick; Lannon, Robert

2011-03-01

Nouns are generally easier to learn than verbs (e.g., Bornstein, 2005; Bornstein et al., 2004; Gentner, 1982; Maguire, Hirsh-Pasek, & Golinkoff, 2006). Yet, verbs appear in children's earliest vocabularies, creating a seeming paradox. This paper examines one hypothesis about the difference between noun and verb acquisition. Perhaps the advantage nouns have is not a function of grammatical form class but rather related to a word's imageability. Here, word imageability ratings and form class (nouns and verbs) were correlated with age of acquisition according to the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) (Fenson et al., 1994). CDI age of acquisition was negatively correlated with words' imageability ratings. Further, a word's imageability contributes to the variance of the word's age of acquisition above and beyond form class, suggesting that at the beginning of word learning, imageability might be a driving factor.

Activations of "Motor" and Other Non-Language Structures during Sentence Comprehension

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Stowe, Laurie A.; Paans, Anne M. J.; Wijers, Albertus A.; Zwarts, Frans

2004-01-01

In this paper we report the results of an experiment in which subjects read syntactically unambiguous and ambiguous sentences which were disambiguated after several words to the less likely possibility. Understanding such sentences involves building an initial structure, inhibiting the non-preferred structure, detecting that later input is…

Children with SLI Exhibit Delays Resolving Ambiguous Reference

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Estis, Julie M.; Beverly, Brenda L.

2015-01-01

Fast mapping weaknesses in children with specific language impairment (SLI) may be explained by differences in disambiguation, mapping an unknown word to an unnamed object. The impact of language ability and linguistic stimulus on disambiguation was investigated. Sixteen children with SLI (8 preschool, 8 school-age) and sixteen typically…

Effects of Sentence Context on Lexical Ambiguity Resolution in Patients with Schizophrenia

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Andreou, Christina; Tsapkini, Kyrana; Bozikas, Vasilis P.; Giannakou, Maria; Karavatos, Athanasios; Nimatoudis, Ioannis

2009-01-01

Previous research has suggested that a failure in processing contextual information may account for the heterogeneous clinical manifestations and cognitive impairments observed in schizophrenia. In the domain of language, context processing in schizophrenia has been investigated mostly with single-word semantic priming paradigms; however, natural…

Processing of Irregular Polysemes in Sentence Reading

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Brocher, Andreas; Foraker, Stephani; Koenig, Jean-Pierre

2016-01-01

The degree to which meanings are related in memory affects ambiguous word processing. We examined irregular polysemes, which have related senses based on similar or shared features rather than a relational rule, like regular polysemy. We tested to what degree the related meanings of irregular polysemes ("wire") are represented with…

Phonological Abstraction in the Mental Lexicon

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McQueen, James M.; Cutler, Anne; Norris, Dennis

2006-01-01

A perceptual learning experiment provides evidence that the mental lexicon cannot consist solely of detailed acoustic traces of recognition episodes. In a training lexical decision phase, listeners heard an ambiguous [f-s] fricative sound, replacing either [f] or [s] in words. In a test phase, listeners then made lexical decisions to visual…

Basic Composition and Enriched Integration in Idiom Processing: An EEG Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Canal, Paolo; Pesciarelli, Francesca; Vespignani, Francesco; Molinaro, Nicola; Cacciari, Cristina

2017-01-01

We investigated the extent to which the literal meanings of the words forming literally plausible idioms (e.g., "break the ice") are semantically composed and how the idiomatic meaning is integrated in the unfolding sentence representation. Participants read ambiguous idiom strings embedded in highly predictable, literal, and idiomatic…

Grammatical Category Ambiguity in Aphasia

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Goldberg, Elmera; Goldfarb, Robert

2005-01-01

This study asked whether aphasic adults show different noun/verb retrieval patterns based upon their clinical categorization as fluent or nonfluent. Participants selected either the noun or the verb meaning of target words, as presented in three contexts. The framework was that nouns (associated with temporal lobe function) are processed, stored,…

The Interpretative Lenses of Older Adults Are Not Rose-Colored – Just Less Dark: Aging and the Interpretation of Ambiguous Scenarios

PubMed Central

Mikels, Joseph A.; Shuster, Michael M.

2015-01-01

We are all faced with ambiguous situations daily that we must interpret to make sense of the world. In such situations, do you wear rose-colored glasses and fill in blanks with positives, or do you wear dark glasses and fill in blanks with negatives? In the current study, we presented 32 older and 32 younger adults with a series of ambiguous scenarios and had them continue the stories. Older adults continued the scenarios with less negativity than younger adults, as measured by negative and positive emotion word use and by the coded overall emotional valence of each interpretation. These results illuminate an interpretative approach by older adults that favors less negative endings and that supports broader age-related positivity. Additionally, older adults interpreted social scenarios with less emotionality than younger adults. These findings uncover a new manifestation of age-related positivity in spontaneous speech generated in response to ambiguity, indicating that older adults tend to create emotional meaning differently from the young. PMID:26322570

Lexical precision in skilled readers: Individual differences in masked neighbor priming.

PubMed

Andrews, Sally; Hersch, Jolyn

2010-05-01

Two experiments investigated the relationship between masked form priming and individual differences in reading and spelling proficiency among university students. Experiment 1 assessed neighbor priming for 4-letter word targets from high- and low-density neighborhoods in 97 university students. The overall results replicated previous evidence of facilitatory neighborhood priming only for low-neighborhood words. However, analyses including measures of reading and spelling proficiency as covariates revealed that better spellers showed inhibitory priming for high-neighborhood words, while poorer spellers showed facilitatory priming. Experiment 2, with 123 participants, replicated the finding of stronger inhibitory neighbor priming in better spellers using 5-letter words and distinguished facilitatory and inhibitory components of priming by comparing neighbor primes with ambiguous and unambiguous partial-word primes (e.g., crow#, cr#wd, crown CROWD). The results indicate that spelling ability is selectively associated with inhibitory effects of lexical competition. The implications for theories of visual word recognition and the lexical quality hypothesis of reading skill are discussed.

Word learning emerges from the interaction of online referent selection and slow associative learning

PubMed Central

McMurray, Bob; Horst, Jessica S.; Samuelson, Larissa K.

2013-01-01

Classic approaches to word learning emphasize the problem of referential ambiguity: in any naming situation the referent of a novel word must be selected from many possible objects, properties, actions, etc. To solve this problem, researchers have posited numerous constraints, and inference strategies, but assume that determining the referent of a novel word is isomorphic to learning. We present an alternative model in which referent selection is an online process that is independent of long-term learning. This two timescale approach creates significant power in the developing system. We illustrate this with a dynamic associative model in which referent selection is simulated as dynamic competition between competing referents, and learning is simulated using associative (Hebbian) learning. This model can account for a range of findings including the delay in expressive vocabulary relative to receptive vocabulary, learning under high degrees of referential ambiguity using cross-situational statistics, accelerating (vocabulary explosion) and decelerating (power-law) learning rates, fast-mapping by mutual exclusivity (and differences in bilinguals), improvements in familiar word recognition with development, and correlations between individual differences in speed of processing and learning. Five theoretical points are illustrated. 1) Word learning does not require specialized processes – general association learning buttressed by dynamic competition can account for much of the literature. 2) The processes of recognizing familiar words are not different than those that support novel words (e.g., fast-mapping). 3) Online competition may allow the network (or child) to leverage information available in the task to augment performance or behavior despite what might be relatively slow learning or poor representations. 4) Even associative learning is more complex than previously thought – a major contributor to performance is the pruning of incorrect associations between words and referents. 5) Finally, the model illustrates that learning and referent selection/word recognition, though logically distinct, can be deeply and subtly related as phenomena like speed of processing and mutual exclusivity may derive in part from the way learning shapes the system. As a whole, this suggests more sophisticated ways of describing the interaction between situation- and developmental-time processes and points to the need for considering such interactions as a primary determinant of development and processing in children. PMID:23088341

Deep learning meets ontologies: experiments to anchor the cardiovascular disease ontology in the biomedical literature.

PubMed

Arguello Casteleiro, Mercedes; Demetriou, George; Read, Warren; Fernandez Prieto, Maria Jesus; Maroto, Nava; Maseda Fernandez, Diego; Nenadic, Goran; Klein, Julie; Keane, John; Stevens, Robert

2018-04-12

Automatic identification of term variants or acceptable alternative free-text terms for gene and protein names from the millions of biomedical publications is a challenging task. Ontologies, such as the Cardiovascular Disease Ontology (CVDO), capture domain knowledge in a computational form and can provide context for gene/protein names as written in the literature. This study investigates: 1) if word embeddings from Deep Learning algorithms can provide a list of term variants for a given gene/protein of interest; and 2) if biological knowledge from the CVDO can improve such a list without modifying the word embeddings created. We have manually annotated 105 gene/protein names from 25 PubMed titles/abstracts and mapped them to 79 unique UniProtKB entries corresponding to gene and protein classes from the CVDO. Using more than 14 M PubMed articles (titles and available abstracts), word embeddings were generated with CBOW and Skip-gram. We setup two experiments for a synonym detection task, each with four raters, and 3672 pairs of terms (target term and candidate term) from the word embeddings created. For Experiment I, the target terms for 64 UniProtKB entries were those that appear in the titles/abstracts; Experiment II involves 63 UniProtKB entries and the target terms are a combination of terms from PubMed titles/abstracts with terms (i.e. increased context) from the CVDO protein class expressions and labels. In Experiment I, Skip-gram finds term variants (full and/or partial) for 89% of the 64 UniProtKB entries, while CBOW finds term variants for 67%. In Experiment II (with the aid of the CVDO), Skip-gram finds term variants for 95% of the 63 UniProtKB entries, while CBOW finds term variants for 78%. Combining the results of both experiments, Skip-gram finds term variants for 97% of the 79 UniProtKB entries, while CBOW finds term variants for 81%. This study shows performance improvements for both CBOW and Skip-gram on a gene/protein synonym detection task by adding knowledge formalised in the CVDO and without modifying the word embeddings created. Hence, the CVDO supplies context that is effective in inducing term variability for both CBOW and Skip-gram while reducing ambiguity. Skip-gram outperforms CBOW and finds more pertinent term variants for gene/protein names annotated from the scientific literature.

Crown Position and Light Exposure Classification-An Alternative to Field-Assigned Crown Class

Treesearch

William A. Bechtold

2003-01-01

Crown class, an ordinal tree-level mensuration attribute used extensively by foresters, is difficult to assign in the field because definitions of individual classes are confounded by ambiguous references to the position the tree in the canopy and amount of light received by its crown. When crown class is decomposed into its two elements-crown position and crown light...

Hemispheric resource limitations in comprehending ambiguous pictures.

PubMed

White, H; Minor, S W

1990-03-01

Ambiguous pictures (Roschach inkblots) were lateralized for 100 msec vs. 200 msec to the right and left hemispheres (RH and LH) of 32 normal right-handed males who determined which of two previously presented words (an accurate or inaccurate one) better described the inkblot. Over the first 32 trials, subjects receiving each stimulus exposure duration were less accurate when the hemisphere receiving the stimulus also controlled the hand used to register a keypress response (RH-left hand and LH-right hand trials) than when hemispheric resources were shared, i.e., when one hemisphere controlled stimulus processing and the other controlled response programming. These differences were eliminated when the 32 trials were repeated.

Modeling Cross-Situational Word–Referent Learning: Prior Questions

PubMed Central

Yu, Chen; Smith, Linda B.

2013-01-01

Both adults and young children possess powerful statistical computation capabilities—they can infer the referent of a word from highly ambiguous contexts involving many words and many referents by aggregating cross-situational statistical information across contexts. This ability has been explained by models of hypothesis testing and by models of associative learning. This article describes a series of simulation studies and analyses designed to understand the different learning mechanisms posited by the 2 classes of models and their relation to each other. Variants of a hypothesis-testing model and a simple or dumb associative mechanism were examined under different specifications of information selection, computation, and decision. Critically, these 3 components of the models interact in complex ways. The models illustrate a fundamental tradeoff between amount of data input and powerful computations: With the selection of more information, dumb associative models can mimic the powerful learning that is accomplished by hypothesis-testing models with fewer data. However, because of the interactions among the component parts of the models, the associative model can mimic various hypothesis-testing models, producing the same learning patterns but through different internal components. The simulations argue for the importance of a compositional approach to human statistical learning: the experimental decomposition of the processes that contribute to statistical learning in human learners and models with the internal components that can be evaluated independently and together. PMID:22229490

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

PubMed

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

2012-04-01

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

Methods of defining ontologies, word disambiguation methods, computer systems, and articles of manufacture

DOEpatents

Sanfilippo, Antonio P [Richland, WA; Tratz, Stephen C [Richland, WA; Gregory, Michelle L [Richland, WA; Chappell, Alan R [Seattle, WA; Whitney, Paul D [Richland, WA; Posse, Christian [Seattle, WA; Baddeley, Robert L [Richland, WA; Hohimer, Ryan E [West Richland, WA

2011-10-11

Methods of defining ontologies, word disambiguation methods, computer systems, and articles of manufacture are described according to some aspects. In one aspect, a word disambiguation method includes accessing textual content to be disambiguated, wherein the textual content comprises a plurality of words individually comprising a plurality of word senses, for an individual word of the textual content, identifying one of the word senses of the word as indicative of the meaning of the word in the textual content, for the individual word, selecting one of a plurality of event classes of a lexical database ontology using the identified word sense of the individual word, and for the individual word, associating the selected one of the event classes with the textual content to provide disambiguation of a meaning of the individual word in the textual content.

Rotation Reveals the Importance of Configural Cues in Handwritten Word Perception

PubMed Central

Barnhart, Anthony S.; Goldinger, Stephen D.

2013-01-01

A dramatic perceptual asymmetry occurs when handwritten words are rotated 90° in either direction. Those rotated in a direction consistent with their natural tilt (typically clockwise) become much more difficult to recognize, relative to those rotated in the opposite direction. In Experiment 1, we compared computer-printed and handwritten words, all equated for degrees of leftward and rightward tilt, and verified the phenomenon: The effect of rotation was far larger for cursive words, especially when rotated in a tilt-consistent direction. In Experiment 2, we replicated this pattern with all items presented in visual noise. In both experiments, word frequency effects were larger for computer-printed words and did not interact with rotation. The results suggest that handwritten word perception requires greater configural processing, relative to computer print, because handwritten letters are variable and ambiguous. When words are rotated, configural processing suffers, particularly when rotation exaggerates natural tilt. Our account is similar to theories of the “Thatcher Illusion,” wherein face inversion disrupts holistic processing. Together, the findings suggest that configural, word-level processing automatically increases when people read handwriting, as letter-level processing becomes less reliable. PMID:23589201

The processing of lexical ambiguity in healthy ageing and Parkinson׳s disease: role of cortico-subcortical networks.

PubMed

Ketteler, Simon; Ketteler, Daniel; Vohn, René; Kastrau, Frank; Schulz, Jörg B; Reetz, Kathrin; Huber, Walter

2014-09-18

Previous neuroimaging studies showed that correct resolution of lexical ambiguity relies on the integrity of prefrontal and inferior parietal cortices. Whereas prefrontal brain areas were associated with executive control over semantic selection, inferior parietal areas were linked with access to modality-independent representations of semantic memory. Yet insufficiently understood is the contribution of subcortical structures in ambiguity processing. Patients with disturbed basal ganglia function such as Parkinson׳s disease (PD) showed development of discourse comprehension deficits evoked by lexical ambiguity. To further investigate the engagement of cortico-subcortical networks functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) was monitored during ambiguity resolution in eight early PD patients without dementia and 14 age- and education-matched controls. Participants were required to relate meanings to a lexically ambiguous target (homonym). Each stimulus consisted of two words arranged on top of a screen, which had to be attributed to a homonym at the bottom. Brain activity was found in bilateral inferior parietal (BA 39), right middle temporal (BA 21/22), left middle frontal (BA 10) and bilateral inferior frontal areas (BA 45/46). Extent and amplitude of activity in the angular gyrus changed depending on semantic association strength that varied between conditions. Less activity in the left caudate was associated with semantic integration deficits in PD. The results of the present study suggest a relationship between subtle language deficits and early stages of basal ganglia dysfunction. Uncovering impairments in ambiguity resolution may be of future use in the neuropsychological assessment of non-motor deficits in PD. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Exploiting MeSH indexing in MEDLINE to generate a data set for word sense disambiguation

PubMed Central

2011-01-01

Background Evaluation of Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) methods in the biomedical domain is difficult because the available resources are either too small or too focused on specific types of entities (e.g. diseases or genes). We present a method that can be used to automatically develop a WSD test collection using the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Metathesaurus and the manual MeSH indexing of MEDLINE. We demonstrate the use of this method by developing such a data set, called MSH WSD. Methods In our method, the Metathesaurus is first screened to identify ambiguous terms whose possible senses consist of two or more MeSH headings. We then use each ambiguous term and its corresponding MeSH heading to extract MEDLINE citations where the term and only one of the MeSH headings co-occur. The term found in the MEDLINE citation is automatically assigned the UMLS CUI linked to the MeSH heading. Each instance has been assigned a UMLS Concept Unique Identifier (CUI). We compare the characteristics of the MSH WSD data set to the previously existing NLM WSD data set. Results The resulting MSH WSD data set consists of 106 ambiguous abbreviations, 88 ambiguous terms and 9 which are a combination of both, for a total of 203 ambiguous entities. For each ambiguous term/abbreviation, the data set contains a maximum of 100 instances per sense obtained from MEDLINE. We evaluated the reliability of the MSH WSD data set using existing knowledge-based methods and compared their performance to that of the results previously obtained by these algorithms on the pre-existing data set, NLM WSD. We show that the knowledge-based methods achieve different results but keep their relative performance except for the Journal Descriptor Indexing (JDI) method, whose performance is below the other methods. Conclusions The MSH WSD data set allows the evaluation of WSD algorithms in the biomedical domain. Compared to previously existing data sets, MSH WSD contains a larger number of biomedical terms/abbreviations and covers the largest set of UMLS Semantic Types. Furthermore, the MSH WSD data set has been generated automatically reusing already existing annotations and, therefore, can be regenerated from subsequent UMLS versions. PMID:21635749

The Automation System Censor Speech for the Indonesian Rude Swear Words Based on Support Vector Machine and Pitch Analysis

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Endah, S. N.; Nugraheni, D. M. K.; Adhy, S.; Sutikno

2017-04-01

According to Law No. 32 of 2002 and the Indonesian Broadcasting Commission Regulation No. 02/P/KPI/12/2009 & No. 03/P/KPI/12/2009, stated that broadcast programs should not scold with harsh words, not harass, insult or demean minorities and marginalized groups. However, there are no suitable tools to censor those words automatically. Therefore, researches to develop a system of intelligent software to censor the words automatically are needed. To conduct censor, the system must be able to recognize the words in question. This research proposes the classification of speech divide into two classes using Support Vector Machine (SVM), first class is set of rude words and the second class is set of properly words. The speech pitch values as an input in SVM, it used for the development of the system for the Indonesian rude swear word. The results of the experiment show that SVM is good for this system.

Context Effects in the Processing of Phonolexical Ambiguity in L2

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Chrabaszcz, Anna; Gor, Kira

2014-01-01

In order to comprehend speech, listeners have to combine low-level phonetic information about the incoming auditory signal with higher-order contextual information to make a lexical selection. This requires stable phonological categories and unambiguous representations of words in the mental lexicon. Unlike native speakers, second language (L2)…

Multiple Translations in Bilingual Memory: Processing Differences across Concrete, Abstract, and Emotion Words

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Basnight-Brown, Dana M.; Altarriba, Jeanette

2016-01-01

Historically, the manner in which translation ambiguity and emotional content are represented in bilingual memory have often been ignored in many theoretical and empirical investigations, resulting in these linguistic factors related to bilingualism being absent from even the most promising models of bilingual memory representation. However, in…

Troubling Neutrality: Toward a Philosophy of Teacher Ambiguity

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Heybach, Jessica A.

2014-01-01

Who is keeping watch to warn when policies and practices become essentially the same as those used in previous eras to justify the destruction of human beings? This question is asked by author Jessica Heybach, as she describes the etymological roots of the word "neutrality," the social function of teacher as neutral, and its relationship…

Contextual Modulation of N400 Amplitude to Lexically Ambiguous Words

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Titone, Debra A.; Salisbury, Dean F.

2004-01-01

Through much is known about the N400 component, an event-related EEG potential that is sensitive to semantic manipulations, it is unclear whether modulations of N400 amplitude reflect automatic processing, controlled processing, or both. We examined this issue using a semantic judgment task that manipulated local and global contextual cues. Word…

Can multilinguality improve Biomedical Word Sense Disambiguation?

PubMed

Duque, Andres; Martinez-Romo, Juan; Araujo, Lourdes

2016-12-01

Ambiguity in the biomedical domain represents a major issue when performing Natural Language Processing tasks over the huge amount of available information in the field. For this reason, Word Sense Disambiguation is critical for achieving accurate systems able to tackle complex tasks such as information extraction, summarization or document classification. In this work we explore whether multilinguality can help to solve the problem of ambiguity, and the conditions required for a system to improve the results obtained by monolingual approaches. Also, we analyze the best ways to generate those useful multilingual resources, and study different languages and sources of knowledge. The proposed system, based on co-occurrence graphs containing biomedical concepts and textual information, is evaluated on a test dataset frequently used in biomedicine. We can conclude that multilingual resources are able to provide a clear improvement of more than 7% compared to monolingual approaches, for graphs built from a small number of documents. Also, empirical results show that automatically translated resources are a useful source of information for this particular task. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Art Rounds: teaching interprofessional students visual thinking strategies at one school.

PubMed

Klugman, Craig M; Peel, Jennifer; Beckmann-Mendez, Diana

2011-10-01

The Art Rounds program uses visual thinking strategies (VTS) to teach visual observation skills to medical and nursing students at the University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio. This study's goal was to evaluate whether students' exposure to VTS would improve their physical observation skills, increase tolerance for ambiguity, and increase interest in learning communication skills. In January 2010, 32 students attended three, 90-minute sessions at which they observed and commented on three pieces of art in small groups led by museum educators. Pre and posttest evaluations included Geller and colleagues' version of Budner's Tolerance of Ambiguity Scale, the Communication Skills Attitudes Scale, and free responses to art and patient images. Statistical analyses compared pre and post time looking at images, number of words used to describe images, and number of observations made according to gender and discipline. Students significantly increased the amount of time they spent looking at art and patient images (P = .007), the number of words they used to describe art (P = .002) and patient images (P = .019), and the number of observations made of art (P = .000) and patient images (P = .001). Females increased the time spent observing significantly more than did males (P = .011). Students significantly increased their tolerance for ambiguity (P = .033) and positive views toward health care professional communication skills (P = .001). The authors speculate that these improved skills may help in patient care and interprofessional team interactions.

Gene and protein nomenclature in public databases

PubMed Central

Fundel, Katrin; Zimmer, Ralf

2006-01-01

Background Frequently, several alternative names are in use for biological objects such as genes and proteins. Applications like manual literature search, automated text-mining, named entity identification, gene/protein annotation, and linking of knowledge from different information sources require the knowledge of all used names referring to a given gene or protein. Various organism-specific or general public databases aim at organizing knowledge about genes and proteins. These databases can be used for deriving gene and protein name dictionaries. So far, little is known about the differences between databases in terms of size, ambiguities and overlap. Results We compiled five gene and protein name dictionaries for each of the five model organisms (yeast, fly, mouse, rat, and human) from different organism-specific and general public databases. We analyzed the degree of ambiguity of gene and protein names within and between dictionaries, to a lexicon of common English words and domain-related non-gene terms, and we compared different data sources in terms of size of extracted dictionaries and overlap of synonyms between those. The study shows that the number of genes/proteins and synonyms covered in individual databases varies significantly for a given organism, and that the degree of ambiguity of synonyms varies significantly between different organisms. Furthermore, it shows that, despite considerable efforts of co-curation, the overlap of synonyms in different data sources is rather moderate and that the degree of ambiguity of gene names with common English words and domain-related non-gene terms varies depending on the considered organism. Conclusion In conclusion, these results indicate that the combination of data contained in different databases allows the generation of gene and protein name dictionaries that contain significantly more used names than dictionaries obtained from individual data sources. Furthermore, curation of combined dictionaries considerably increases size and decreases ambiguity. The entries of the curated synonym dictionary are available for manual querying, editing, and PubMed- or Google-search via the ProThesaurus-wiki. For automated querying via custom software, we offer a web service and an exemplary client application. PMID:16899134

Graphic Somatography: Life Writing, Comics, and the Ethics of Care.

PubMed

DeFalco, Amelia

2016-09-01

This essay considers the ways in which graphic caregiving memoirs complicate the idealizing tendencies of ethics of care philosophy. The medium's "capacious" layering of words, images, temporalities, and perspectives produces "productive tensions. . . The words and images entwine, but never synthesize" (Chute 2010, 5). In graphic memoirs about care, this "capaciousness" allows for quick oscillation between the rewards and struggles of care work, representing ambiguous, even ambivalent attitudes toward care. Graphic memoirs effectively represent multiple perspectives without synthesis, part of a structural and thematic ambivalence that provides a provocative counterpart to the abstract idealism of ethics of care philosophy.

Neuroanatomically Separable Effects of Imageability and Grammatical Class during Single-Word Comprehension

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bedny, Marina; Thompson-Schill, Sharon L.

2006-01-01

The present study characterizes the neural correlates of noun and verb imageability and addresses the question of whether components of the neural network supporting word recognition can be separately modified by variations in grammatical class and imageability. We examined the effect of imageability on BOLD signal during single-word comprehension…

Dual routes for verbal repetition: articulation-based and acoustic-phonetic codes for pseudoword and word repetition, respectively.

PubMed

Yoo, Sejin; Chung, Jun-Young; Jeon, Hyeon-Ae; Lee, Kyoung-Min; Kim, Young-Bo; Cho, Zang-Hee

2012-07-01

Speech production is inextricably linked to speech perception, yet they are usually investigated in isolation. In this study, we employed a verbal-repetition task to identify the neural substrates of speech processing with two ends active simultaneously using functional MRI. Subjects verbally repeated auditory stimuli containing an ambiguous vowel sound that could be perceived as either a word or a pseudoword depending on the interpretation of the vowel. We found verbal repetition commonly activated the audition-articulation interface bilaterally at Sylvian fissures and superior temporal sulci. Contrasting word-versus-pseudoword trials revealed neural activities unique to word repetition in the left posterior middle temporal areas and activities unique to pseudoword repetition in the left inferior frontal gyrus. These findings imply that the tasks are carried out using different speech codes: an articulation-based code of pseudowords and an acoustic-phonetic code of words. It also supports the dual-stream model and imitative learning of vocabulary. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The Influence of Semantic Property and Grammatical Class on Semantic Selection

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Yang, Fan-pei Gloria; Khodaparast, Navid; Bradley, Kailyn; Fang, Min-Chieh; Bernstein, Ari; Krawczyk, Daniel C.

2013-01-01

Research to-date has not successfully demonstrated consistent neural distinctions for different types of ambiguity or explored the effect of grammatical class on semantic selection. We conducted a relatedness judgment task using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to further explore these topics. Participants judged…

Observational Word Learning: Beyond Propose-But-Verify and Associative Bean Counting.

PubMed

Roembke, Tanja; McMurray, Bob

2016-04-01

Learning new words is difficult. In any naming situation, there are multiple possible interpretations of a novel word. Recent approaches suggest that learners may solve this problem by tracking co-occurrence statistics between words and referents across multiple naming situations (e.g. Yu & Smith, 2007), overcoming the ambiguity in any one situation. Yet, there remains debate around the underlying mechanisms. We conducted two experiments in which learners acquired eight word-object mappings using cross-situational statistics while eye-movements were tracked. These addressed four unresolved questions regarding the learning mechanism. First, eye-movements during learning showed evidence that listeners maintain multiple hypotheses for a given word and bring them all to bear in the moment of naming. Second, trial-by-trial analyses of accuracy suggested that listeners accumulate continuous statistics about word/object mappings, over and above prior hypotheses they have about a word. Third, consistent, probabilistic context can impede learning, as false associations between words and highly co-occurring referents are formed. Finally, a number of factors not previously considered in prior analysis impact observational word learning: knowledge of the foils, spatial consistency of the target object, and the number of trials between presentations of the same word. This evidence suggests that observational word learning may derive from a combination of gradual statistical or associative learning mechanisms and more rapid real-time processes such as competition, mutual exclusivity and even inference or hypothesis testing.

Framing Effects are Robust to Linguistic Disambiguation: A Critical Test of Contemporary Theory

PubMed Central

Chick, Christina F.; Reyna, Valerie F.; Corbin, Jonathan C.

2015-01-01

Theoretical accounts of risky choice framing effects assume that decision makers interpret framing options as extensionally equivalent, such that if 600 lives are at stake, saving 200 implies that 400 die. However, many scholars have argued that framing effects are caused, instead, by filling in pragmatically implied information. This linguistic ambiguity hypothesis is grounded in neo-Gricean pragmatics, information leakage, and schema theory. In two experiments, we conducted a critical test of the linguistic ambiguity hypothesis and its relation to framing. We controlled for this crucial implied information by disambiguating it using instructions and detailed examples, followed by multiple quizzes. After disambiguating missing information, we presented standard framing problems plus truncated versions, varying types of missing information. Truncations were also critical tests of prospect theory and fuzzy trace theory. Participants were not only college students, but also middle-aged adults (who showed similar results). Contrary to the ambiguity hypothesis, participants who interpreted missing information as complementary to stated information none the less showed robust framing effects. Although adding words like “at least” can change interpretations of framing information, this form of linguistic ambiguity is not necessary to observe risky choice framing effects. PMID:26348200

Framing effects are robust to linguistic disambiguation: A critical test of contemporary theory.

PubMed

Chick, Christina F; Reyna, Valerie F; Corbin, Jonathan C

2016-02-01

Theoretical accounts of risky choice framing effects assume that decision makers interpret framing options as extensionally equivalent, such that if 600 lives are at stake, saving 200 implies that 400 die. However, many scholars have argued that framing effects are caused, instead, by filling in pragmatically implied information. This linguistic ambiguity hypothesis is grounded in neo-Gricean pragmatics, information leakage, and schema theory. In 2 experiments, we conducted critical tests of the linguistic ambiguity hypothesis and its relation to framing. We controlled for this crucial implied information by disambiguating it using instructions and detailed examples, followed by multiple quizzes. After disambiguating missing information, we presented standard framing problems plus truncated versions, varying types of missing information. Truncations were also critical tests of prospect theory and fuzzy trace theory. Participants were not only college students, but also middle-age adults (who showed similar results). Contrary to the ambiguity hypothesis, participants who interpreted missing information as complementary to stated information nonetheless showed robust framing effects. Although adding words like "at least" can change interpretations of framing information, this form of linguistic ambiguity is not necessary to observe risky choice framing effects. (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

Disambiguating ambiguous biomedical terms in biomedical narrative text: an unsupervised method.

PubMed

Liu, H; Lussier, Y A; Friedman, C

2001-08-01

With the growing use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques for information extraction and concept indexing in the biomedical domain, a method that quickly and efficiently assigns the correct sense of an ambiguous biomedical term in a given context is needed concurrently. The current status of word sense disambiguation (WSD) in the biomedical domain is that handcrafted rules are used based on contextual material. The disadvantages of this approach are (i) generating WSD rules manually is a time-consuming and tedious task, (ii) maintenance of rule sets becomes increasingly difficult over time, and (iii) handcrafted rules are often incomplete and perform poorly in new domains comprised of specialized vocabularies and different genres of text. This paper presents a two-phase unsupervised method to build a WSD classifier for an ambiguous biomedical term W. The first phase automatically creates a sense-tagged corpus for W, and the second phase derives a classifier for W using the derived sense-tagged corpus as a training set. A formative experiment was performed, which demonstrated that classifiers trained on the derived sense-tagged corpora achieved an overall accuracy of about 97%, with greater than 90% accuracy for each individual ambiguous term.

Coding hazardous tree failures for a data management system

Treesearch

Lee A. Paine

1978-01-01

Codes for automatic data processing (ADP) are provided for hazardous tree failure data submitted on Report of Tree Failure forms. Definitions of data items and suggestions for interpreting ambiguously worded reports are also included. The manual is intended to insure the production of accurate and consistent punched ADP cards which are used in transfer of the data to...

The Flexibility of 12-Month-Olds' Preferences for Phonologically Appropriate Object Labels

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

MacKenzie, Heather K.; Graham, Susan A.; Curtin, Suzanne; Archer, Stephanie L.

2014-01-01

We explored 12-month-olds' flexibility in accepting phonotactically illegal or ill-formed word forms in a modified associative-learning task. Sixty-four English-learning infants were presented with a training phase that either clarified the purpose of a sound--object association task or left the task ambiguous. Infants were then habituated to sets…

The Morphosyntax of Gender and Word Class in Spanish: Evidence from "-(c)ito/a" Diminutives

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Vadella, Katherine Lynn

2017-01-01

Since the inception of Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz, 1993), there have been two notable, but preliminary, analyses of Spanish gender and word class within this framework: Harris (1999) and Kramer (2015). This dissertation fills in the gaps left by these partial analyses for nominals in particular. It presents a novel word class…

An Evaluation Method of Words Tendency Depending on Time-Series Variation and Its Improvements.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Atlam, El-Sayed; Okada, Makoto; Shishibori, Masami; Aoe, Jun-ichi

2002-01-01

Discussion of word frequency and keywords in text focuses on a method to estimate automatically the stability classes that indicate a word's popularity with time-series variations based on the frequency change in past electronic text data. Compares the evaluation of decision tree stability class results with manual classification results.…

Reduction of Phase Ambiguity in an Offset-QPSK Receiver

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Berner, Jeff; Kinman, Peter

2004-01-01

Proposed modifications of an offset-quadri-phase-shift keying (offset-QPSK) transmitter and receiver would reduce the amount of signal processing that must be done in the receiver to resolve the QPSK fourfold phase ambiguity. Resolution of the phase ambiguity is necessary in order to synchronize, with the received carrier signal, the signal generated by a local oscillator in a carrier-tracking loop in the receiver. Without resolution of the fourfold phase ambiguity, the loop could lock to any of four possible phase points, only one of which has the proper phase relationship with the carrier. The proposal applies, more specifically, to an offset-QPSK receiver that contains a carrier-tracking loop like that shown in Figure 1. This carrier-tracking loop does not resolve or reduce the phase ambiguity. A carrier-tracking loop of a different design optimized for the reception of offset QPSK could reduce the phase ambiguity from fourfold to twofold, but would be more complex. Alternatively, one could resolve the fourfold phase ambiguity by use of differential coding in the transmitter, at a cost of reduced power efficiency. The proposed modifications would make it possible to reduce the fourfold phase ambiguity to twofold, with no loss in power efficiency and only relatively simple additional signal-processing steps in the transmitter and receiver. The twofold phase ambiguity would then be resolved by use of a unique synchronization word, as is commonly done in binary phase-shift keying (BPSK). Although the mathematical and signal-processing principles underlying the modifications are too complex to explain in detail here, the modifications themselves would be relatively simple and are best described with the help of simple block diagrams (see Figure 2). In the transmitter, one would add a unit that would periodically invert bits going into the QPSK modulator; in the receiver, one would add a unit that would effect different but corresponding inversions of bits coming out of the QPSK demodulator. The net effect of all the inversions would be that depending on which lock point the carrier-tracking loop had selected, all the output bits would be either inverted or non-inverted together; hence, the ambiguity would be reduced from fourfold to twofold, as desired.

Accent modulates access to word meaning: Evidence for a speaker-model account of spoken word recognition.

PubMed

Cai, Zhenguang G; Gilbert, Rebecca A; Davis, Matthew H; Gaskell, M Gareth; Farrar, Lauren; Adler, Sarah; Rodd, Jennifer M

2017-11-01

Speech carries accent information relevant to determining the speaker's linguistic and social background. A series of web-based experiments demonstrate that accent cues can modulate access to word meaning. In Experiments 1-3, British participants were more likely to retrieve the American dominant meaning (e.g., hat meaning of "bonnet") in a word association task if they heard the words in an American than a British accent. In addition, results from a speeded semantic decision task (Experiment 4) and sentence comprehension task (Experiment 5) confirm that accent modulates on-line meaning retrieval such that comprehension of ambiguous words is easier when the relevant word meaning is dominant in the speaker's dialect. Critically, neutral-accent speech items, created by morphing British- and American-accented recordings, were interpreted in a similar way to accented words when embedded in a context of accented words (Experiment 2). This finding indicates that listeners do not use accent to guide meaning retrieval on a word-by-word basis; instead they use accent information to determine the dialectic identity of a speaker and then use their experience of that dialect to guide meaning access for all words spoken by that person. These results motivate a speaker-model account of spoken word recognition in which comprehenders determine key characteristics of their interlocutor and use this knowledge to guide word meaning access. Copyright © 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Interpretive biases in chronic insomnia: an investigation using a priming paradigm.

PubMed

Ree, Melissa J; Harvey, Allison G

2006-09-01

Disorder-congruent interpretations of ambiguous stimuli characterize several psychological disorders and have been implicated in their maintenance. Models of insomnia have highlighted the importance of cognitive processes, but the possibility that biased interpretations are important has been minimally investigated. Hence, a priming methodology was employed to investigate the presence of an interpretive bias in insomnia. A sample of 78 participants, differing in the presence of a diagnosis of insomnia, severity of sleep disturbance, and sleepiness, was required to read ambiguous sentences and make a lexical decision about target words that followed. Sleepiness at the time of the experiment was associated with the likelihood with which participants made insomnia and threat consistent interpretations of ambiguous sentences. The results suggest that there is a general bias towards threatening interpretations when individuals are sleepy and suggests that cognitive accounts of insomnia require revision to include a role for interpretative bias when people are sleepy. Future research is required to investigate whether this interpretive bias plays a causal role in the maintenance of insomnia.

Children's understanding of ambiguous idioms and conversational perspective-taking.

PubMed

Le Sourn-Bissaoui, Sandrine; Caillies, Stéphanie; Bernard, Stéphane; Deleau, Michel; Brulé, Lauriane

2012-08-01

The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that conversational perspective-taking is a determinant of unfamiliar ambiguous idiom comprehension. We investigated two types of ambiguous idiom, decomposable and nondecomposable expressions, which differ in the degree to which the literal meanings of the individual words contribute to the overall idiomatic meaning. We designed an experiment to assess the relationship between the acquisition of figurative comprehension and conversational perspective-taking. Our sample of children aged 5-7 years performed three conversational perspective-taking tasks (language acts, shared/unshared information, and conversational maxims). They then listened to decomposable and nondecomposable idiomatic expressions presented in context before performing a multiple-choice task (figurative, literal, and contextual responses). Results indicated that decomposable idiom comprehension was predicted by conversational perspective-taking scores and language skills, whereas nondecomposable idiom comprehension was predicted solely by language skills. We discuss our findings with respect to verbal and pragmatic skills. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Rapid Learning of Syllable Classes from a Perceptually Continuous Speech Stream

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Endress, Ansgar D.; Bonatti, Luca L.

2007-01-01

To learn a language, speakers must learn its words and rules from fluent speech; in particular, they must learn dependencies among linguistic classes. We show that when familiarized with a short artificial, subliminally bracketed stream, participants can learn relations about the structure of its words, which specify the classes of syllables…

Acquiring Word Class Distinctions in American Sign Language: Evidence from Handshape

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Brentari, Diane; Coppola, Marie; Jung, Ashley; Goldin-Meadow, Susan

2013-01-01

Handshape works differently in nouns versus a class of verbs in American Sign Language (ASL) and thus can serve as a cue to distinguish between these two word classes. Handshapes representing characteristics of the object itself ("object" handshapes) and handshapes representing how the object is handled ("handling" handshapes)…

The role of meaning in grapheme-colour synaesthesia.

PubMed

Dixon, Mike J; Smilek, Daniel; Duffy, Patricia L; Zanna, Mark P; Merikle, Philip M

2006-02-01

When the synaesthete, J, is shown black graphemes, in addition to perceiving the black digits or letters she also experiences highly specific colours that overlay the graphemes (e.g., 5 is pink, S is green). We used ambiguous graphemes in a Stroop-type task to show that the exact same forms (e.g., 5) can elicit different synaesthetic colours depending on whether they are interpreted as digits or letters. J was shown strings of black digits (e.g., 3 4 5 6 7) or words (e.g., M U S I C for 1 sec. All but one of the graphemes then disappeared and the remaining grapheme changed to a colour that J had to name as quickly as possible. The key trials involved coloured graphemes that were ambiguous (e.g., the 5 in the strings above could be interpreted either as a digit or as a letter). On congruent trials, the colour of the ambiguous target grapheme was the same as J's photism for the digit or letter interpretations of the grapheme. On incongruent trials, the colours of the ambiguous target graphemes were different than the colours of J's photisms for the digit or letter interpretations of the graphemes. On digit-context incongruent trials, the ambiguous graphemes were presented in J's colour for the letter-interpretations of the graphemes, whereas on letter-context incongruent trials, the ambiguous graphemes were presented in J's colours for the digit-interpretations of the graphemes. Thus the same ambiguous grapheme (e.g., a pink 5) served as a congruent stimulus in one context and an incongruent stimulus in another context. J's response times showed that ambiguous graphemes elicited different photisms depending on whether they were interpreted as digits or letters. This finding suggests that it is not the form but the meaning of graphemes (whether they are interpreted as digits or letters) that determines the colours of synaesthetic photisms.

Experiments in automatic word class and word sense identification for information retrieval

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

Gauch, S.; Futrelle, R.P.

Automatic identification of related words and automatic detection of word senses are two long-standing goals of researchers in natural language processing. Word class information and word sense identification may enhance the performance of information retrieval system4ms. Large online corpora and increased computational capabilities make new techniques based on corpus linguisitics feasible. Corpus-based analysis is especially needed for corpora from specialized fields for which no electronic dictionaries or thesauri exist. The methods described here use a combination of mutual information and word context to establish word similarities. Then, unsupervised classification is done using clustering in the word space, identifying word classesmore » without pretagging. We also describe an extension of the method to handle the difficult problems of disambiguation and of determining part-of-speech and semantic information for low-frequency words. The method is powerful enough to produce high-quality results on a small corpus of 200,000 words from abstracts in a field of molecular biology.« less

Disambiguating the species of biomedical named entities using natural language parsers

PubMed Central

Wang, Xinglong; Tsujii, Jun'ichi; Ananiadou, Sophia

2010-01-01

Motivation: Text mining technologies have been shown to reduce the laborious work involved in organizing the vast amount of information hidden in the literature. One challenge in text mining is linking ambiguous word forms to unambiguous biological concepts. This article reports on a comprehensive study on resolving the ambiguity in mentions of biomedical named entities with respect to model organisms and presents an array of approaches, with focus on methods utilizing natural language parsers. Results: We build a corpus for organism disambiguation where every occurrence of protein/gene entity is manually tagged with a species ID, and evaluate a number of methods on it. Promising results are obtained by training a machine learning model on syntactic parse trees, which is then used to decide whether an entity belongs to the model organism denoted by a neighbouring species-indicating word (e.g. yeast). The parser-based approaches are also compared with a supervised classification method and results indicate that the former are a more favorable choice when domain portability is of concern. The best overall performance is obtained by combining the strengths of syntactic features and supervised classification. Availability: The corpus and demo are available at http://www.nactem.ac.uk/deca_details/start.cgi, and the software is freely available as U-Compare components (Kano et al., 2009): NaCTeM Species Word Detector and NaCTeM Species Disambiguator. U-Compare is available at http://-compare.org/ Contact: xinglong.wang@manchester.ac.uk PMID:20053840

Event-related potentials to event-related words: grammatical class and semantic attributes in the representation of knowledge.

PubMed

Barber, Horacio A; Kousta, Stavroula-Thaleia; Otten, Leun J; Vigliocco, Gabriella

2010-05-21

A number of recent studies have provided contradictory evidence on the question of whether grammatical class plays a role in the neural representation of lexical knowledge. Most of the previous studies comparing the processing of nouns and verbs, however, confounded word meaning and grammatical class by comparing verbs referring to actions with nouns referring to objects. Here, we recorded electrical brain activity from native Italian speakers reading single words all referring to events (e.g., corsa [the run]; correre [to run]), thus avoiding confounding nouns and verbs with objects and actions. We manipulated grammatical class (noun versus verb) as well as semantic attributes (motor versus sensory events). Activity between 300 and 450ms was more negative for nouns than verbs, and for sensory than motor words, over posterior scalp sites. These grammatical class and semantic effects were not dissociable in terms of latency, duration, or scalp distribution. In a later time window (450-110ms) and at frontal regions, grammatical class and semantic effects interacted; motor verbs were more positive than the other three word categories. We suggest that the lack of a temporal and topographical dissociation between grammatical class and semantic effects in the time range of the N400 component is compatible with an account in which both effects reflect the same underlying process related to meaning retrieval, and we link the later effect with working memory operations associated to the experimental task. Copyright 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The Ambiguities of Education Research or Can a Rabbit Catch the Fox?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Heaney, Thomas W.

Research methodologies are "word-specific," that is, they assume frames of reference which do not include all of reality. They are like the "sets" in mathematics in which axioms apply only within certain realities. (Parallel lines do converge, for example, on the horizon; the geometric postulate that says they do not holds only for the set of a…

Lexical Activation in Bilinguals' Speech Production Is Dynamic: How Language Ambiguous Words Can Affect Cross-Language Activation

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hermans, Daan; Ormel, E.; van Besselaar, Ria; van Hell, Janet

2011-01-01

Is the bilingual language production system a dynamic system that can operate in different language activation states? Three experiments investigated to what extent cross-language phonological co-activation effects in language production are sensitive to the composition of the stimulus list. L1 Dutch-L2 English bilinguals decided whether or not a…

What Makes a Word Easy to Acquire? The Effects of Word Class, Frequency, Imageability and Phonological Neighbourhood Density on Lexical Development

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hansen, Pernille

2017-01-01

This article analyses how a set of psycholinguistic factors may account for children's lexical development. Age of acquisition is compared to a measure of lexical development based on vocabulary size rather than age, and robust regression models are used to assess the individual and joint effects of word class, frequency, imageability and…

Spotlight on Spelling.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hardin County Board of Education, Elizabethtown, KY.

Word lists and class activities are suggested for improving the spelling of elementary school students. The word lists contain rhyming words, antonyms, synonyms, homonyms, 100 spelling demons, look-alike words that are easily confused, and content area words (for geography, mathematics, science, sports, music, social studies). The suggested…

The mechanism of suppression: a component of general comprehension skill.

PubMed

Gernsbacher, M A; Faust, M E

1991-03-01

We investigated whether the cognitive mechanism of suppression underlies differences in adult comprehension skill. Less skilled comprehenders reject less efficiently the inappropriate meanings of ambiguous words (e.g., the playing card vs. garden tool meaning of spade), the incorrect forms of homophones (e.g., patients vs. patience), the highly typical but absent members of scenes (e.g., a tractor in a farm scene), and words superimposed on pictures or pictures surrounding words. However, less skilled comprehenders are not less cognizant of what is contextually appropriate; in fact, they benefit from a biasing context just as much (and perhaps more) as more skilled comprehenders do. Thus, less skilled comprehenders do not have difficulty enhancing contextually appropriate information. Instead, we suggest that less skilled comprehenders suffer from a less efficient suppression mechanism, which we conclude is an important component of general comprehension skill.

Using Serial and Discrete Digit Naming to Unravel Word Reading Processes

PubMed Central

Altani, Angeliki; Protopapas, Athanassios; Georgiou, George K.

2018-01-01

During reading acquisition, word recognition is assumed to undergo a developmental shift from slow serial/sublexical processing of letter strings to fast parallel processing of whole word forms. This shift has been proposed to be detected by examining the size of the relationship between serial- and discrete-trial versions of word reading and rapid naming tasks. Specifically, a strong association between serial naming of symbols and single word reading suggests that words are processed serially, whereas a strong association between discrete naming of symbols and single word reading suggests that words are processed in parallel as wholes. In this study, 429 Grade 1, 3, and 5 English-speaking Canadian children were tested on serial and discrete digit naming and word reading. Across grades, single word reading was more strongly associated with discrete naming than with serial naming of digits, indicating that short high-frequency words are processed as whole units early in the development of reading ability in English. In contrast, serial naming was not a unique predictor of single word reading across grades, suggesting that within-word sequential processing was not required for the successful recognition for this set of words. Factor mixture analysis revealed that our participants could be clustered into two classes, namely beginning and more advanced readers. Serial naming uniquely predicted single word reading only among the first class of readers, indicating that novice readers rely on a serial strategy to decode words. Yet, a considerable proportion of Grade 1 students were assigned to the second class, evidently being able to process short high-frequency words as unitized symbols. We consider these findings together with those from previous studies to challenge the hypothesis of a binary distinction between serial/sublexical and parallel/lexical processing in word reading. We argue instead that sequential processing in word reading operates on a continuum, depending on the level of reading proficiency, the degree of orthographic transparency, and word-specific characteristics. PMID:29706918

Using Serial and Discrete Digit Naming to Unravel Word Reading Processes.

PubMed

Altani, Angeliki; Protopapas, Athanassios; Georgiou, George K

2018-01-01

During reading acquisition, word recognition is assumed to undergo a developmental shift from slow serial/sublexical processing of letter strings to fast parallel processing of whole word forms. This shift has been proposed to be detected by examining the size of the relationship between serial- and discrete-trial versions of word reading and rapid naming tasks. Specifically, a strong association between serial naming of symbols and single word reading suggests that words are processed serially, whereas a strong association between discrete naming of symbols and single word reading suggests that words are processed in parallel as wholes. In this study, 429 Grade 1, 3, and 5 English-speaking Canadian children were tested on serial and discrete digit naming and word reading. Across grades, single word reading was more strongly associated with discrete naming than with serial naming of digits, indicating that short high-frequency words are processed as whole units early in the development of reading ability in English. In contrast, serial naming was not a unique predictor of single word reading across grades, suggesting that within-word sequential processing was not required for the successful recognition for this set of words. Factor mixture analysis revealed that our participants could be clustered into two classes, namely beginning and more advanced readers. Serial naming uniquely predicted single word reading only among the first class of readers, indicating that novice readers rely on a serial strategy to decode words. Yet, a considerable proportion of Grade 1 students were assigned to the second class, evidently being able to process short high-frequency words as unitized symbols. We consider these findings together with those from previous studies to challenge the hypothesis of a binary distinction between serial/sublexical and parallel/lexical processing in word reading. We argue instead that sequential processing in word reading operates on a continuum, depending on the level of reading proficiency, the degree of orthographic transparency, and word-specific characteristics.

A Bootstrapping Model of Frequency and Context Effects in Word Learning.

PubMed

Kachergis, George; Yu, Chen; Shiffrin, Richard M

2017-04-01

Prior research has shown that people can learn many nouns (i.e., word-object mappings) from a short series of ambiguous situations containing multiple words and objects. For successful cross-situational learning, people must approximately track which words and referents co-occur most frequently. This study investigates the effects of allowing some word-referent pairs to appear more frequently than others, as is true in real-world learning environments. Surprisingly, high-frequency pairs are not always learned better, but can also boost learning of other pairs. Using a recent associative model (Kachergis, Yu, & Shiffrin, 2012), we explain how mixing pairs of different frequencies can bootstrap late learning of the low-frequency pairs based on early learning of higher frequency pairs. We also manipulate contextual diversity, the number of pairs a given pair appears with across training, since it is naturalistically confounded with frequency. The associative model has competing familiarity and uncertainty biases, and their interaction is able to capture the individual and combined effects of frequency and contextual diversity on human learning. Two other recent word-learning models do not account for the behavioral findings. Copyright © 2016 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

Orthographic and phonological neighborhood effects in handwritten word perception

PubMed Central

Goldinger, Stephen D.

2017-01-01

In printed-word perception, the orthographic neighborhood effect (i.e., faster recognition of words with more neighbors) has considerable theoretical importance, because it implicates great interactivity in lexical access. Mulatti, Reynolds, and Besner Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 32, 799–810 (2006) questioned the validity of orthographic neighborhood effects, suggesting that they reflect a confound with phonological neighborhood density. They reported that, when phonological density is controlled, orthographic neighborhood effects vanish. Conversely, phonological neighborhood effects were still evident even when controlling for orthographic neighborhood density. The present study was a replication and extension of Mulatti et al. (2006), with words presented in four different formats (computer-generated print and cursive, and handwritten print and cursive). The results from Mulatti et al. (2006) were replicated with computer-generated stimuli, but were reversed with natural stimuli. These results suggest that, when ambiguity is introduced at the level of individual letters, top-down influences from lexical neighbors are increased. PMID:26306881

Word classes in the brain: implications of linguistic typology for cognitive neuroscience.

PubMed

Kemmerer, David

2014-09-01

Although recent research on the neural substrates of word classes has generated some valuable findings, significant progress has been hindered by insufficient attention to theoretical issues involving the nature of the lexical phenomena under investigation. This paper shows how insights from linguistic typology can provide cognitive neuroscientists with well-motivated guidelines for interpreting the extant data and charting a future course. At the outset, a fundamental distinction is made between universal and language-particular aspects of word classes. Regarding universals, prototypical nouns involve reference to objects, and their meanings rely primarily on the ventral temporal lobes, which represent the shape features of entities; in contrast, prototypical verbs involve predication of actions, and their meanings rely primarily on posterior middle temporal regions and frontoparietal regions, which represent the visual motion features and somatomotor features of events. Some researchers maintain that focusing on object nouns and action verbs is inappropriate because it conflates the semantic and grammatical properties of each word class. However, this criticism not only ignores the importance of the universal prototypes, but also mistakenly assumes that there are straightforward morphological and/or syntactic criteria for identifying nouns and verbs in particular languages. In fact, at the level of individual languages, the classic method of distributional analysis leads to a proliferation of constructionally based entity-denoting and event-denoting word classes with mismatching memberships, and all of this variation must be taken seriously, not only by linguists, but also by cognitive neuroscientists. Many of these word classes involve remarkably close correspondences between grammar and meaning and hence are highly relevant to the neurobiology of conceptual knowledge, but so far hardly any of them have been investigated from a neurolinguistic perspective. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Is "Bow" for an Arrow or for Hair? A Classroom Demonstration on Gender Differences in Interpreting Ambiguous Information

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fa-Kaji, Naomi; Nguyen, Linda; Hebl, Mikki; Skorinko, Jeanine

2016-01-01

This article details a classroom demonstration of how gender differences in cognitive schemas can result in men and women differentially interpreting the same information. Students heard a series of six homonyms (e.g., bow and nail) spoken aloud and wrote down the first word with which they free-associated each homonym. When hearing the words…

Development of Lexical and Sentence Level Context Effects for Dominant and Subordinate Word Meanings of Homonyms

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Booth, James R.; Harasaki, Yasuaki; Burman, Douglas D.

2006-01-01

Nine-ten-and twelve-year-old children (N = 75) read aloud dominant, subordinate or ambiguous bias sentences (N = 120) that ended in a homonym (BALL). After the sentence (1,000 ms), children read aloud targets that were related to the dominant (BAT) or subordinate (DANCE) meaning of the homonym or control targets. Participants were also divided…

Two-Year-Olds but Not Younger Children Comprehend "It" in Ambiguous Contexts: Evidence from Preferential Looking

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Skarabela, Barbora; Ota, Mitsuhiko

2017-01-01

Children use pronouns in their speech from the earliest word combinations. Yet, it is not clear from these early utterances whether they understand that pronouns are used as substitutes for nouns and entities in the discourse. The aim of this study was to examine whether young children understand the anaphoric function of pronouns, focusing on the…

Resolving the orthographic ambiguity during visual word recognition in Arabic: an event-related potential investigation

PubMed Central

Taha, Haitham; Khateb, Asaid

2013-01-01

The Arabic alphabetical orthographic system has various unique features that include the existence of emphatic phonemic letters. These represent several pairs of letters that share a phonological similarity and use the same parts of the articulation system. The phonological and articulatory similarities between these letters lead to spelling errors where the subject tends to produce a pseudohomophone (PHw) instead of the correct word. Here, we investigated whether or not the unique orthographic features of the written Arabic words modulate early orthographic processes. For this purpose, we analyzed event-related potentials (ERPs) collected from adult skilled readers during an orthographic decision task on real words and their corresponding PHw. The subjects' reaction times (RTs) were faster in words than in PHw. ERPs analysis revealed significant response differences between words and the PHw starting during the N170 and extending to the P2 component, with no difference during processing steps devoted to phonological and lexico-semantic processing. Amplitude and latency differences were found also during the P6 component which peaked earlier for words and where source localization indicated the involvement of the classical left language areas. Our findings replicate some of the previous findings on PHw processing and extend them to involve early orthographical processes. PMID:24348367

The role of language in the experience and perception of emotion: a neuroimaging meta-analysis

PubMed Central

Brooks, Jeffrey A.; Shablack, Holly; Gendron, Maria; Satpute, Ajay B.; Parrish, Michael H.

2017-01-01

Abstract Recent behavioral and neuroimaging studies demonstrate that labeling one’s emotional experiences and perceptions alters those states. Here, we used a comprehensive meta-analysis of the neuroimaging literature to systematically explore whether the presence of emotion words in experimental tasks has an impact on the neural representation of emotional experiences and perceptions across studies. Using a database of 386 studies, we assessed brain activity when emotion words (e.g. ‘anger’, ‘disgust’) and more general affect words (e.g. ‘pleasant’, ‘unpleasant’) were present in experimental tasks vs not present. As predicted, when emotion words were present, we observed more frequent activations in regions related to semantic processing. When emotion words were not present, we observed more frequent activations in the amygdala and parahippocampal gyrus, bilaterally. The presence of affect words did not have the same effect on the neural representation of emotional experiences and perceptions, suggesting that our observed effects are specific to emotion words. These findings are consistent with the psychological constructionist prediction that in the absence of accessible emotion concepts, the meaning of affective experiences and perceptions are ambiguous. Findings are also consistent with the regulatory role of ‘affect labeling’. Implications of the role of language in emotion construction and regulation are discussed. PMID:27539864

Type-2 fuzzy set extension of DEMATEL method combined with perceptual computing for decision making

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Hosseini, Mitra Bokaei; Tarokh, Mohammad Jafar

2013-05-01

Most decision making methods used to evaluate a system or demonstrate the weak and strength points are based on fuzzy sets and evaluate the criteria with words that are modeled with fuzzy sets. The ambiguity and vagueness of the words and different perceptions of a word are not considered in these methods. For this reason, the decision making methods that consider the perceptions of decision makers are desirable. Perceptual computing is a subjective judgment method that considers that words mean different things to different people. This method models words with interval type-2 fuzzy sets that consider the uncertainty of the words. Also, there are interrelations and dependency between the decision making criteria in the real world; therefore, using decision making methods that cannot consider these relations is not feasible in some situations. The Decision-Making Trail and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) method considers the interrelations between decision making criteria. The current study used the combination of DEMATEL and perceptual computing in order to improve the decision making methods. For this reason, the fuzzy DEMATEL method was extended into type-2 fuzzy sets in order to obtain the weights of dependent criteria based on the words. The application of the proposed method is presented for knowledge management evaluation criteria.

Evaluation of a formula that categorizes female gray wolf breeding status by nipple size

USGS Publications Warehouse

Barber-Meyer, Shannon M.; Mech, L. David

2015-01-01

The proportion by age class of wild Canis lupus (Gray Wolf) females that reproduce in any given year remains unclear; thus, we evaluated the applicability to our long-term (1972–2013) data set of the Mech et al. (1993) formula that categorizes female Gray Wolf breeding status by nipple size and time of year. We used the formula to classify Gray Wolves from 68 capture events into 4 categories (yearling, adult non-breeder, former breeder, current breeder). To address issues with small sample size and variance, we created an ambiguity index to allow some Gray Wolves to be classed into 2 categories. We classified 20 nipple measurements ambiguously: 16 current or former breeder, 3 former or adult non-breeder, and 1 yearling or adult non-breeder. The formula unambiguously classified 48 (71%) of the nipple measurements; based on supplemental field evidence, at least 5 (10%) of these were incorrect. When used in conjunction with an ambiguity index we developed and with corrections made for classifications involving very large nipples, and supplemented with available field evidence, the Mech et al. (1993) formula provided reasonably reliable classification of breeding status in wild female Gray Wolves.

The problem of polysemy in the first thousand words of the General Service List: A corpus study of secondary chemistry texts

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Clemmons, Karina

Vocabulary in a second language is an indispensable building block of all comprehension (Folse, 2006; Nation, 2006). Teachers in content area classes such as science, math, and social studies frequently teach content specific vocabulary, but are not aware of the obstacles that can occur when students do not know the basic words. Word lists such as the General Service List (GSL) were created to assist students and teachers (West, 1953). The GSL does not adequately take into account the high level of polysemy of many common English words, nor has it been updated by genre to reflect specific content domains encountered by secondary science students in today's high stakes classes such as chemistry. This study examines how many words of the first 1000 words of the GSL occurred in the secondary chemistry textbooks sampled, how often the first 1000 words of the GSL were polysemous, and specifically which multiple meanings occurred. A discussion of results includes word tables that list multiple meanings present, example phrases that illustrate the context surrounding the target words, suggestions for a GSL that is genre specific to secondary chemistry textbooks and that is ranked by meaning as well as type, and implications for both vocabulary materials and classroom instruction for ELLs in secondary chemistry classes. Findings are essential to second language (L2) researchers, materials developers, publishers, and teachers.

Digital image processing of nanometer-size metal particles on amorphous substrates

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Soria, F.; Artal, P.; Bescos, J.; Heinemann, K.

1989-01-01

The task of differentiating very small metal aggregates supported on amorphous films from the phase contrast image features inherently stemming from the support is extremely difficult in the nanometer particle size range. Digital image processing was employed to overcome some of the ambiguities in evaluating such micrographs. It was demonstrated that such processing allowed positive particle detection and a limited degree of statistical size analysis even for micrographs where by bare eye examination the distribution between particles and erroneous substrate features would seem highly ambiguous. The smallest size class detected for Pd/C samples peaks at 0.8 nm. This size class was found in various samples prepared under different evaporation conditions and it is concluded that these particles consist of 'a magic number' of 13 atoms and have cubooctahedral or icosahedral crystal structure.

A comprehensive analysis of Italian web pages mentioning squalene-based influenza vaccine adjuvants reveals a high prevalence of misinformation.

PubMed

Panatto, Donatella; Amicizia, Daniela; Arata, Lucia; Lai, Piero Luigi; Gasparini, Roberto

2018-04-03

Squalene-based adjuvants have been included in influenza vaccines since 1997. Despite several advantages of adjuvanted seasonal and pandemic influenza vaccines, laypeople's perception of such formulations may be hesitant or even negative under certain circumstances. Moreover, in Italian, the term "squalene" has the same root as such common words as "shark" (squalo), "squalid" and "squalidness" that tend to have negative connotations. This study aimed to quantitatively and qualitatively analyze a representative sample of Italian web pages mentioning squalene-based adjuvants used in influenza vaccines. Every effort was made to limit the subjectivity of judgments. Eighty-four unique web pages were assessed. A high prevalence (47.6%) of pages with negative or ambiguous attitudes toward squalene-based adjuvants was established. Compared with web pages reporting balanced information on squalene-based adjuvants, those categorized as negative/ambiguous had significantly lower odds of belonging to a professional institution [adjusted odds ratio (aOR) = 0.12, p = .004], and significantly higher odds of containing pictures (aOR = 1.91, p = .034) and being more readable (aOR = 1.34, p = .006). Some differences in wording between positive/neutral and negative/ambiguous web pages were also observed. The most common scientifically unsound claims concerned safety issues and, in particular, claims linking squalene-based adjuvants to the Gulf War Syndrome and autoimmune disorders. Italian users searching the web for information on vaccine adjuvants have a high likelihood of finding unbalanced and misleading material. Information provided by institutional websites should be not only evidence-based but also carefully targeted towards laypeople. Conversely, authors writing for non-institutional websites should avoid sensationalism and provide their readers with more balanced information.

A comprehensive analysis of Italian web pages mentioning squalene-based influenza vaccine adjuvants reveals a high prevalence of misinformation

PubMed Central

2018-01-01

ABSTRACT Squalene-based adjuvants have been included in influenza vaccines since 1997. Despite several advantages of adjuvanted seasonal and pandemic influenza vaccines, laypeople's perception of such formulations may be hesitant or even negative under certain circumstances. Moreover, in Italian, the term “squalene” has the same root as such common words as “shark” (squalo), “squalid” and “squalidness” that tend to have negative connotations. This study aimed to quantitatively and qualitatively analyze a representative sample of Italian web pages mentioning squalene-based adjuvants used in influenza vaccines. Every effort was made to limit the subjectivity of judgments. Eighty-four unique web pages were assessed. A high prevalence (47.6%) of pages with negative or ambiguous attitudes toward squalene-based adjuvants was established. Compared with web pages reporting balanced information on squalene-based adjuvants, those categorized as negative/ambiguous had significantly lower odds of belonging to a professional institution [adjusted odds ratio (aOR) = 0.12, p = .004], and significantly higher odds of containing pictures (aOR = 1.91, p = .034) and being more readable (aOR = 1.34, p = .006). Some differences in wording between positive/neutral and negative/ambiguous web pages were also observed. The most common scientifically unsound claims concerned safety issues and, in particular, claims linking squalene-based adjuvants to the Gulf War Syndrome and autoimmune disorders. Italian users searching the web for information on vaccine adjuvants have a high likelihood of finding unbalanced and misleading material. Information provided by institutional websites should be not only evidence-based but also carefully targeted towards laypeople. Conversely, authors writing for non-institutional websites should avoid sensationalism and provide their readers with more balanced information. PMID:29172967

Sexual Orientation Self-Concept Ambiguity and Alcohol Use Disorder Symptomology: The Roles of Motivated Psychological Distancing and Drinking to Cope.

PubMed

Hancock, David W; Talley, Amelia E; Bohanek, Jennifer; Iserman, Micah D; Ireland, Molly

2018-01-01

Women whose sexual identity is not exclusively heterosexual are at risk for alcohol use disorder (AUD) and problematic drinking. A textual analytic approach focusing on motivated psychological distancing in language style use was used to detect sexual minority women who are at greatest risk for an AUD. Young adult women (N = 254) were asked to complete a self-report measure of sexual orientation self-concept ambiguity as well as free-write about their sexuality. In addition, they completed a questionnaire assessing AUD symptoms according to criteria from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition. The Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) program assessed language markers within participant-written essays that reflected acute states of aversive self-focus (i.e., fewer first-person pronouns, fewer present-tense verbs). Drinking to cope with negative affectivity mediated the relationship between sexual orientation self-concept ambiguity and AUD symptomology. This indirect effect was conditional, moderated by higher use of language reflecting motivated psychological distancing, such that the indirect effect was significant only for women whose writing included fewer instances of first-person pronouns and present-tense verbs (-1 SD) compared with those with greater instances of first-person pronouns and present-tense verbs (+1 SD), reflecting motivated psychological distancing. Sexual minority women are at an increased risk for AUD. Further, this study suggests mechanisms that may exacerbate the relationship between sexual identity uncertainty and problematic drinking. The study presents a novel method of identifying individuals most at risk for alcohol misuse: detecting aversive self-focus in language style and word choice.

The Mental Representation of Polysemy across Word Classes

PubMed Central

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

2018-01-01

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

The Mental Representation of Polysemy across Word Classes.

PubMed

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

2018-01-01

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

Engaging Participation and Promoting Active Learning through Student Usage of the Internet to Create Notes for General Chemistry in Class

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Henry, Renee Monica

2017-01-01

Reported here is a study of an interactive component to General Chemistry I and General Chemistry II where a new pedagogy for taking notes in class was developed. These notes, called key word created class notes, prompted students to locate information using the Internet guided by a key word. Reference Web sites were added to a next generation of…

ERPs recorded during early second language exposure predict syntactic learning.

PubMed

Batterink, Laura; Neville, Helen J

2014-09-01

Millions of adults worldwide are faced with the task of learning a second language (L2). Understanding the neural mechanisms that support this learning process is an important area of scientific inquiry. However, most previous studies on the neural mechanisms underlying L2 acquisition have focused on characterizing the results of learning, relying upon end-state outcome measures in which learning is assessed after it has occurred, rather than on the learning process itself. In this study, we adopted a novel and more direct approach to investigate neural mechanisms engaged during L2 learning, in which we recorded ERPs from beginning adult learners as they were exposed to an unfamiliar L2 for the first time. Learners' proficiency in the L2 was then assessed behaviorally using a grammaticality judgment task, and ERP data acquired during initial L2 exposure were sorted as a function of performance on this task. High-proficiency learners showed a larger N100 effect to open-class content words compared with closed-class function words, whereas low-proficiency learners did not show a significant N100 difference between open- and closed-class words. In contrast, amplitude of the N400 word category effect correlated with learners' L2 comprehension, rather than predicting syntactic learning. Taken together, these results indicate that learners who spontaneously direct greater attention to open- rather than closed-class words when processing L2 input show better syntactic learning, suggesting a link between selective attention to open-class content words and acquisition of basic morphosyntactic rules. These findings highlight the importance of selective attention mechanisms for L2 acquisition.

Pictorial detail and recall in adults and children.

PubMed

Ritchey, G H

1982-03-01

Relatively little research has been done on the role of pictorial detail in memory, and the data that do exist are ambiguous. The issue is important because it touches on our understanding of basic issues such as encoding elaboration and trace distinctiveness. The present study attempts to extend our data base by testing recall of words, outlines, and detailed drawings in third graders, sixth graders, and adults. For a categorized set of items, specific comparisons showed that recall of both detailed drawings and outlines was superior to that of words but that these did not differ from one another. For an uncategorized set of items, specific comparisons showed that outlines were recalled significantly better than pictures and that both of these were recalled better than words. The finding of an advantage in recall for outlines over detailed drawings was quite surprising. A variety of explanations may be offered, but true understanding of this effect will depend on future research.

Do individuals with autism process words in context? Evidence from language-mediated eye-movements.

PubMed

Brock, Jon; Norbury, Courtenay; Einav, Shiri; Nation, Kate

2008-09-01

It is widely argued that people with autism have difficulty processing ambiguous linguistic information in context. To investigate this claim, we recorded the eye-movements of 24 adolescents with autism spectrum disorder and 24 language-matched peers as they monitored spoken sentences for words corresponding to objects on a computer display. Following a target word, participants looked more at a competitor object sharing the same onset than at phonologically unrelated objects. This effect was, however, mediated by the sentence context such that participants looked less at the phonological competitor if it was semantically incongruous with the preceding verb. Contrary to predictions, the two groups evidenced similar effects of context on eye-movements. Instead, across both groups, the effect of sentence context was reduced in individuals with relatively poor language skills. Implications for the weak central coherence account of autism are discussed.

Naming Action in Japanese: Effects of Semantic Similarity and Grammatical Class

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Iwasaki, Noriko; Vinson, David P.; Vigliocco, Gabriella; Watanabe, Masumi; Arciuli, Joanne

2008-01-01

This study investigated whether the semantic similarity and grammatical class of distracter words affects the naming of pictured actions (verbs) in Japanese. Three experiments used the picture-word interference paradigm with participants naming picturable actions while ignoring distracters. In all three experiments, we manipulated the semantic…

Words Spoken by Teachers to Primary-Level Classes of Deaf Children.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Stuckless, E. Ross; Miller, Linda D.

1987-01-01

The study generated a list of the 1000 most frequently used words by teachers of hearing impaired children in six primary grade classes. Results have implications for real time captioning systems of communication. An alphabetical list and a list ordered by frequency of use are appended. (DB)

Grammatical and Nongrammatical Contributions to Closed-Class Word Selection

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Alario, F.-Xavier; Ayora, Pauline; Costa, Albert; Melinger, Alissa

2008-01-01

Closed-class word selection was investigated by focusing on determiner production. Native speakers from three different languages named pictures of objects using determiner plus noun phrases (e.g., in French "la table" (the [subscript feminine] table), while ignoring distractor determiners printed on the pictures (e.g., "le"…

Linguistics in the English Class.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Small, Robert C., Jr.

Designed for secondary school English teachers who want to help their students develop enthusiasm for words, their histories, and the way language structures words to produce meaning, this paper offers suggestions for a program of study employing dictionary projects and personal experience. The paper describes making a class dictionary of teen…

Pedagogical Practice and Postmodernist Ideas.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hardy, Cynthia; Palmer, Ian

1999-01-01

Identifies four postmodern themes: complicated identities, the demise of the individual as expert, constraints on individual actions, and postmodern organizations as dream and nightmare. Outlines management-class exercises that illustrate ambiguities and paradoxes in the themes. (SK)

The Importance of Being Interpreted: Grounded Words and Children’s Relational Reasoning

PubMed Central

Son, Ji Y.; Smith, Linda B.; Goldstone, Robert L.; Leslie, Michelle

2012-01-01

Although young children typically have trouble reasoning relationally, they are aided by the presence of “relational” words (e.g., Gentner and Rattermann, 1991). They also reason well about commonly experienced event structures (e.g., Fivush, 1984). To explore what makes a word “relational” and therefore helpful in relational reasoning, we hypothesized that these words activate well-understood event structures. Furthermore, the activated schema must be open enough (without too much specificity) that it can be applied analogically to novel problems. Four experiments examine this hypothesis by exploring: how training with a label influence the schematic interpretation of a scene, what kinds of scenes are conducive to schematic interpretation, and whether children must figure out the interpretation themselves to benefit from the act of interpreting a scene as an event. Experiment 1 shows the superiority of schema-evoking words over words that do not connect to schematized experiences. Experiments 2 and 3 further reveal that these words must be applied to perceptual instances that require cognitive effort to connect to a label rather than unrelated or concretely related instances in order to draw attention to relational structure. Experiment 4 provides evidence that even when children do not work out an interpretation for themselves, just the act of interpreting an ambiguous scene is potent for relational generalization. The present results suggest that relational words (and in particular their meanings) are created from the act of interpreting a perceptual situation in the context of a word. PMID:22408628

A hierarchical word-merging algorithm with class separability measure.

PubMed

Wang, Lei; Zhou, Luping; Shen, Chunhua; Liu, Lingqiao; Liu, Huan

2014-03-01

In image recognition with the bag-of-features model, a small-sized visual codebook is usually preferred to obtain a low-dimensional histogram representation and high computational efficiency. Such a visual codebook has to be discriminative enough to achieve excellent recognition performance. To create a compact and discriminative codebook, in this paper we propose to merge the visual words in a large-sized initial codebook by maximally preserving class separability. We first show that this results in a difficult optimization problem. To deal with this situation, we devise a suboptimal but very efficient hierarchical word-merging algorithm, which optimally merges two words at each level of the hierarchy. By exploiting the characteristics of the class separability measure and designing a novel indexing structure, the proposed algorithm can hierarchically merge 10,000 visual words down to two words in merely 90 seconds. Also, to show the properties of the proposed algorithm and reveal its advantages, we conduct detailed theoretical analysis to compare it with another hierarchical word-merging algorithm that maximally preserves mutual information, obtaining interesting findings. Experimental studies are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm on multiple benchmark data sets. As shown, it can efficiently produce more compact and discriminative codebooks than the state-of-the-art hierarchical word-merging algorithms, especially when the size of the codebook is significantly reduced.

White Middle-Class Parents, Identities, Educational Choice and the Urban Comprehensive School: Dilemmas, Ambivalence and Moral Ambiguity

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Crozier, Gill; Reay, Diane; James, David; Jamieson, Fiona; Beedell, Phoebe; Hollingworth, Sumi; Williams, Katya

2008-01-01

At a time when the public sector and state education (in the United Kingdom) is under threat from the encroaching marketisation policy and private finance initiatives, our research reveals white middle-class parents who in spite of having the financial opportunity to turn their backs on the state system are choosing to assert their commitment to…

Similarity as an organising principle in short-term memory.

PubMed

LeCompte, D C; Watkins, M J

1993-03-01

The role of stimulus similarity as an organising principle in short-term memory was explored in a series of seven experiments. Each experiment involved the presentation of a short sequence of items that were drawn from two distinct physical classes and arranged such that item class changed after every second item. Following presentation, one item was re-presented as a probe for the 'target' item that had directly followed it in the sequence. Memory for the sequence was considered organised by class if probability of recall was higher when the probe and target were from the same class than when they were from different classes. Such organisation was found when one class was auditory and the other was visual (spoken vs. written words, and sounds vs. pictures). It was also found when both classes were auditory (words spoken in a male voice vs. words spoken in a female voice) and when both classes were visual (digits shown in one location vs. digits shown in another). It is concluded that short-term memory can be organised on the basis of sensory modality and on the basis of certain features within both the auditory and visual modalities.

Comparing productive vocabulary measures from the CDI and a systematic diary study.

PubMed

Robinson, B F; Mervis, C B

1999-02-01

Expressive vocabulary data gathered during a systematic diary study of one male child's early language development are compared to data that would have resulted from longitudinal administration of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories spoken vocabulary checklist (CDI). Comparisons are made for (1) the number of words at monthly intervals (9; 10.15 to 2; 0.15), (2) proportion of words by lexical class (i.e. noun, predicate, closed class, 'other'), (3) growth curves. The CDI underestimates the number of words in the diary study, with the underestimation increasing as vocabulary size increases. The proportion of diary study words appearing on the CDI differed as a function of lexical class. Finally, despite the differences in vocabulary size, logistic curves proved to be the best fitting model to characterize vocabulary development as measured by both the diary study and the CDI. Implications for the longitudinal use of the CDI are discussed.

Build an Interactive Word Wall

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jackson, Julie

2018-01-01

Word walls visually display important vocabulary covered during class. Although teachers have often been encouraged to post word walls in their classrooms, little information is available to guide them. This article describes steps science teachers can follow to transform traditional word walls into interactive teaching tools. It also describes a…

The interaction between specificity and linguistic contrast

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Nielsen, Kuniko

2005-09-01

Previous studies have shown listeners' ability to remember fine phonetic details [e.g., Mullennix et al., 1989], providing support for the episodic view of speech perception. The imitation paradigm [Goldinger, 1998, Shockley et al., 2004], in which subjects' speech is compared before and after they are exposed to target speech (= study phase) has shown that subjects shift their production in the direction of the target. Our earlier results [Nielsen, 2005] showed that the imitation effect for extended VOT was generalized to new stimuli as well as to a new segment, suggesting that the locus of the imitation effect can be smaller than individual words or segments. The current study aims to further investigate how experienced speech input interacts with linguistic representations, by testing whether the imitation effect is observed when the modeled stimuli have reduced VOT (which could introduce linguistic ambiguity). In other words, do speakers imitate and generalize shorter VOT even if the change might impair linguistic contrasts? To address this question, the study phase includes words with initial /p/ with reduced VOT, while the pre- and post-study production list includes (1) the modeled words, (2) the modeled segments /p/ in new words, and (3) the new segment /k/.

Using the Word Processor in Writing Groups.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Melia, Josie

Writing groups can use word processors or microcomputers in many different types of writing activities. Four hour-long sessions at a word processor with the help of a skilled word processing tutor have been found to be sufficient to provide a working knowledge of word processing. When two or three students enrolled in a writing class are assigned…

Students' Responses to CL-Based Teaching of English Prepositions

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hung, Bui Phu; Truong, Vien; Nguyen, Ngoc Vu

2018-01-01

Purpose: Most EFL textbooks suggest the use of vivid pictures and verbal explanations in teaching English prepositions. However, this word class appears in collocations, and rote-learning does not really help learners retain and use this word class successfully. Cognitive linguistics (CL) has implications for English language teaching as it rests…

An event-related potential study of memory for words spoken aloud or heard.

PubMed

Wilding, E L; Rugg, M D

1997-09-01

Subjects made old/new recognition judgements to visually presented words, half of which had been encountered in a prior study phase. For each word judged old, subjects made a subsequent source judgement, indicating whether they had pronounced the word aloud at study (spoken words), or whether they had heard the word spoken to them (heard words). Event-related potentials (ERPs) were compared for three classes of test item; words correctly judged to be new (correct rejections), and spoken and heard words that were correctly assigned to source (spoken hit/hit and heard hit/hit response categories). Consistent with previous findings (Wilding, E. L. and Rugg, M. D., Brain, 1996, 119, 889-905), two temporally and topographically dissociable components, with parietal and frontal maxima respectively, differentiated the ERPs to the hit/hit and correct rejection response categories. In addition, there was some evidence that the frontally distributed component could be decomposed into two distinct components, only one of which differentiated the two classes of hit/hit ERPs. The findings suggest that at least three functionally and neurologically dissociable processes can contribute to successful recovery of source information.

Meaning of counterfactual statements in quantum physics

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Stapp, Henry P.

1998-10-01

David Mermin suggests that my recent proof pertaining to quantum nonlocality is undermined by an essential ambiguity pertaining to the meaning of counterfactual statements in quantum physics. The ambiguity he cites arises from his imposition of a certain criterion for the meaningfulness of such counterfactual statements. That criterion conflates the meaning of a counterfactual statement with the details of a proof of its validity in such a way as to make the meaning of such a statement dependent upon the context in which it occurs. That dependence violates the normal demand in logic that the meaning of a statement be defined by the words in the statement itself, not by the context in which the statement occurs. My proof conforms to that normal requirement. I describe the context-independent meaning within my proof of the counterfactual statements in question.

Interactive Word Walls

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jackson, Julie; Narvaez, Rose

2013-01-01

It is common to see word walls displaying the vocabulary that students have learned in class. Word walls serve as visual scaffolds and are a classroom strategy used to reinforce reading and language arts instruction. Research shows a strong relationship between student word knowledge and academic achievement (Stahl and Fairbanks 1986). As a…

Integration of Pragmatic and Phonetic Cues in Spoken Word Recognition

PubMed Central

Rohde, Hannah; Ettlinger, Marc

2015-01-01

Although previous research has established that multiple top-down factors guide the identification of words during speech processing, the ultimate range of information sources that listeners integrate from different levels of linguistic structure is still unknown. In a set of experiments, we investigate whether comprehenders can integrate information from the two most disparate domains: pragmatic inference and phonetic perception. Using contexts that trigger pragmatic expectations regarding upcoming coreference (expectations for either he or she), we test listeners' identification of phonetic category boundaries (using acoustically ambiguous words on the/hi/∼/∫i/continuum). The results indicate that, in addition to phonetic cues, word recognition also reflects pragmatic inference. These findings are consistent with evidence for top-down contextual effects from lexical, syntactic, and semantic cues, but they extend this previous work by testing cues at the pragmatic level and by eliminating a statistical-frequency confound that might otherwise explain the previously reported results. We conclude by exploring the time-course of this interaction and discussing how different models of cue integration could be adapted to account for our results. PMID:22250908

Associating LIPS and SWOLLEN: delayed attentional disengagement following words in sex contexts.

PubMed

Oosterwijk, Suzanne; van der Leij, Andries R; Rotteveel, Mark

2017-09-01

With a series of three studies, using an adapted dot-probe paradigm, we investigated the elicitation of spontaneous affective meaning. Although it is well established that humans show delays in disengaging their attention from conventional affective stimuli, it is unknown whether contextually acquired affective meaning similarly impacts attention. We examined attentional disengagement following pairs of neutral or slightly ambiguous words that in combination could evoke sex, violence or neutral associations. Study 1 demonstrated slower disengagement following words that conveyed sex or violence associations compared to words that conveyed neutral associations. This pattern was only present for participants who were aware of sex or violence associations. Study 2 replicated these results in a large sample, but only for sex associations. Study 3 replicated the effect while instructing participants explicitly to expect sex and violence associations. Finally, two control studies countered reasonable alternative explanations for our findings. Together, these studies show that contextually driven affective associations can arise quickly with the potential to influence attentional processes. These findings are consistent with theoretical models of emotion and language that highlight the importance of context in the generation of affective meaning.

Painting with Words.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lieberman, Barry

1983-01-01

The part that words play in teaching art has been underestimated. In a good art class, there is an interplay of ideas about the ongoing work. By using the right words, the teacher can help students develop their creative faculties. (CS)

Actors' Interpretations and Organisational Change Processes: The Case of the University of Ghana's Strategic Vision of Becoming a "World Class University"

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Intsiful, Emmanuel; Maassen, Peter

2017-01-01

Despite its seemingly subjective and ambiguous nature, the notion of a World Class University (WCU) appears both established and widely discussed in higher education discourses over the last decade. At the same time, some scholars have argued that the notion does not fit or refer to universities in Africa. In the year 2010, the University of Ghana…

Formal Process Modeling to Improve Human Decision-Making in Test and Evaluation Acoustic Range Control

DTIC Science & Technology

2017-09-01

AVAILABILITY STATEMENT Approved for public release. Distribution is unlimited. 12b. DISTRIBUTION CODE 13. ABSTRACT (maximum 200 words) Test and...ambiguities and identify high -value decision points? This thesis explores how formalization of these experience-based decisions as a process model...representing a T&E event may reveal high -value decision nodes where certain decisions carry more weight or potential for impacts to a successful test. The

Automating "Word of Mouth" to Recommend Classes to Students: An Application of Social Information Filtering Algorithms

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Booker, Queen Esther

2009-01-01

An approach used to tackle the problem of helping online students find the classes they want and need is a filtering technique called "social information filtering," a general approach to personalized information filtering. Social information filtering essentially automates the process of "word-of-mouth" recommendations: items are recommended to a…

The Picture-Word Interference Paradigm: Grammatical Class Effects in Lexical Production

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

De Simone, Flavia; Collina, Simona

2016-01-01

Four picture-word interference experiments aimed to test the role of grammatical class in lexical production. In Experiment 1 target nouns and verbs were produced in presence of semantically unrelated distractors that could also be nouns and verbs. Participants were slower when the distractor was of the same grammatical category of the target. To…

Effects of Visual Information on Intelligibility of Open and Closed Class Words in Predictable Sentences Produced by Speakers with Dysarthria

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hustad, Katherine C.; Dardis, Caitlin M.; Mccourt, Kelly A.

2007-01-01

This study examined the independent and interactive effects of visual information and linguistic class of words on intelligibility of dysarthric speech. Seven speakers with dysarthria participated in the study, along with 224 listeners who transcribed speech samples in audiovisual (AV) or audio-only (AO) listening conditions. Orthographic…

The Language Environment and Syntactic Word-Class Acquisition.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Zavrel, Jakub; Veenstra, Jorn

A study analyzed the distribution of words in a three-million-word corpus of text from the "Wall Street Journal," in order to test a theory of the acquisition of word categories. The theory, an alternative to the semantic bootstrapping hypothesis, proposes that the child exploits multiple sources of cues (distributional, semantic, or…

Evidence for Early Morphological Decomposition in Visual Word Recognition

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Solomyak, Olla; Marantz, Alec

2010-01-01

We employ a single-trial correlational MEG analysis technique to investigate early processing in the visual recognition of morphologically complex words. Three classes of affixed words were presented in a lexical decision task: free stems (e.g., taxable), bound roots (e.g., tolerable), and unique root words (e.g., vulnerable, the root of which…

Word Sorts for General Music Classes

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cardany, Audrey Berger

2015-01-01

Word sorts are standard practice for aiding children in acquiring skills in English language arts. When included in the general music classroom, word sorts may aid students in acquiring a working knowledge of music vocabulary. The author shares a word sort activity drawn from vocabulary in John Lithgow's children's book "Never Play…

The association between tolerance for ambiguity and fear of negative evaluation: A study of engineering technology capstone courses

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Dubikovsky, Sergey I.

For many students in engineering and engineering technology programs in the US, senior capstone design courses require students to form a team, define a problem, and find a feasible technical solution to address this problem. Students must integrate the knowledge and skills acquired during their studies at the college or university level. These truly integrative design activities do not have a single "correct" solution. Instead, there is an array of solutions, many of which could be used to achieve the final result. This ambiguity can cause students to experience anxiety during the projects. This study examined the main topics: • To what extent is a social anxiety (measured as fear of negative evaluation) related to tolerance for ambiguity in senior engineering capstone courses? • How does exposure to ambiguity prior to and during capstone courses affect tolerance for ambiguity? The study looked at the standard educational practices to see if they have unintended consequences, such a social anxiety in dealing with ambiguity. Those consequences are highly undesirable because they reduce students' learning. It was hypothesized that the lecture-based approaches that are more common in the first three years of study would not prepare students for self-directed capstone courses because the students would rarely have experienced problem-based learning before. The study used a quantitative approach and examined students' perceptions of their tolerance for ambiguity, and social anxiety before and after their senior capstone design experience. A survey instrument was adapted to measure exposure to ambiguity, which was studied as a potential moderator of the relationship between social anxiety and tolerance for ambiguity. The study indicated that social anxiety, as measured by fear of negative evaluation, does not play a major role in capstone courses. The second finding is that a single course, even if it was administered as a problem-based senior class, failed to increase students' tolerance for ambiguity. Students with low tolerance have more problems with ambiguity, whereas students with high tolerance can more easily endure changes and find it easier to act in the absence of complete information. The third important finding was that exposure to ambiguity prior to capstone courses does affect tolerance for ambiguity while controlling for instructor and if exposure to ambiguity is included as a moderator. It was not in the scope of this study to explore the effect of instructor more deeply, but this provides a direction for future research, especially in this time of expanding implementation of project- and problem-based learning methods in technical curricula.

The use of music to enhance reading skills of second grade students and students with reading disabilities.

PubMed

Register, Dena; Darrow, Alice-Ann; Standley, Jayne; Swedberg, Olivia

2007-01-01

The purpose of the present study was to determine the efficacy of using music as a remedial strategy to enhance the reading skills of second-grade students and students who have been identified as having a specific learning disability (SLD) in reading. First, an intensive short-term music curriculum was designed to target reading comprehension and vocabulary skills at the second grade level. The curriculum was then implemented in classrooms at two public schools in the Southeast. Reading skills were evaluated pre and post curriculum intervention via the vocabulary and reading comprehension subtests of the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test for second grade. Analysis of pre/posttest data revealed that students with a specific disability in reading improved significantly from pre to post on all three subtests: word decoding (p = .04), word knowledge (p = .01), reading comprehension (p = .01), and test total (p = .01). Paired t-tests revealed that for 2nd grade students, both treatment and control classes improved significantly from pre to post on the subtests word decoding, word knowledge, and test total. While both classes made gains from pre to post on the subtest, reading comprehension, neither improved significantly. Analysis of Covariance revealed that the treatment class made greater gains pre to post than the control class on all 3 subtests (Including reading comprehension), and significantly greater gains on the subtest, word knowledge (p = .01).

Neighborhood Density and Syntactic Class Effects on Spoken Word Recognition: Specific Language Impairment and Typical Development

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hoover, Jill R.

2018-01-01

Purpose: The purpose of the current study was to determine the effect of neighborhood density and syntactic class on word recognition in children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typical development (TD). Method: Fifteen children with SLI ("M" age = 6;5 [years;months]) and 15 with TD ("M" age = 6;4) completed a…

Computer-Mediated Input, Output and Feedback in the Development of L2 Word Recognition from Speech

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Matthews, Joshua; Cheng, Junyu; O'Toole, John Mitchell

2015-01-01

This paper reports on the impact of computer-mediated input, output and feedback on the development of second language (L2) word recognition from speech (WRS). A quasi-experimental pre-test/treatment/post-test research design was used involving three intact tertiary level English as a Second Language (ESL) classes. Classes were either assigned to…

Meaning of counterfactual statements in quantum physics

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

Stapp, H.P.

1998-10-01

David Mermin suggests that my recent proof pertaining to quantum nonlocality is undermined by an essential ambiguity pertaining to the meaning of counterfactual statements in quantum physics. The ambiguity he cites arises from his imposition of a certain criterion for the meaningfulness of such counterfactual statements. That criterion conflates the meaning of a counterfactual statement with the details of a proof of its validity in such a way as to make the meaning of such a statement dependent upon the context in which it occurs. That dependence violates the normal demand in logic that the meaning of a statement bemore » defined by the words in the statement itself, not by the context in which the statement occurs. My proof conforms to that normal requirement. I describe the context-independent meaning within my proof of the counterfactual statements in question. {copyright} {ital 1998 American Association of Physics Teachers.}« less

Fifty psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid: a list of inaccurate, misleading, misused, ambiguous, and logically confused words and phrases.

PubMed

Lilienfeld, Scott O; Sauvigné, Katheryn C; Lynn, Steven Jay; Cautin, Robin L; Latzman, Robert D; Waldman, Irwin D

2015-01-01

The goal of this article is to promote clear thinking and clear writing among students and teachers of psychological science by curbing terminological misinformation and confusion. To this end, we present a provisional list of 50 commonly used terms in psychology, psychiatry, and allied fields that should be avoided, or at most used sparingly and with explicit caveats. We provide corrective information for students, instructors, and researchers regarding these terms, which we organize for expository purposes into five categories: inaccurate or misleading terms, frequently misused terms, ambiguous terms, oxymorons, and pleonasms. For each term, we (a) explain why it is problematic, (b) delineate one or more examples of its misuse, and (c) when pertinent, offer recommendations for preferable terms. By being more judicious in their use of terminology, psychologists and psychiatrists can foster clearer thinking in their students and the field at large regarding mental phenomena.

Emotion and Emotion-Laden Words in the Bilingual Lexicon

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Pavlenko, Aneta

2008-01-01

The purpose of this paper is to draw on recent studies of bilingualism and emotions to argue for three types of modifications to the current models of the bilingual lexicon. The first modification involves word categories: I will show that emotion words need to be considered as a separate class of words in the mental lexicon, represented and…

Emmert's Law and the moon illusion.

PubMed

Gregory, Richard L

2008-01-01

A cognitive account is offered of puzzling, though well known phenomena, including increased size of afterimages with greater distance (Emmert's Law) and increased size of the moon near the horizon (the Moon Illusion). Various classical distortion illusions are explained by Size Scaling when inappropriate to distance, 'flipping' depth ambiguity being used to separate botton-up and top-down visual scaling. Helmholtz's general Principle is discussed with simpler wording - that retinal images are attributed to objects - for object recognition and spatial vision.

Cross-Cultural Study of Information Processing Biases in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: Comparison of Dutch and UK Chronic Fatigue Patients.

PubMed

Hughes, Alicia M; Hirsch, Colette R; Nikolaus, Stephanie; Chalder, Trudie; Knoop, Hans; Moss-Morris, Rona

2018-02-01

This study aims to replicate a UK study, with a Dutch sample to explore whether attention and interpretation biases and general attentional control deficits in chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) are similar across populations and cultures. Thirty eight Dutch CFS participants were compared to 52 CFS and 51 healthy participants recruited from the UK. Participants completed self-report measures of symptoms, functioning, and mood, as well as three experimental tasks (i) visual-probe task measuring attentional bias to illness (somatic symptoms and disability) versus neutral words, (ii) interpretive bias task measuring positive versus somatic interpretations of ambiguous information, and (iii) the Attention Network Test measuring general attentional control. Compared to controls, Dutch and UK participants with CFS showed a significant attentional bias for illness-related words and were significantly more likely to interpret ambiguous information in a somatic way. These effects were not moderated by attentional control. There were no significant differences between the Dutch and UK CFS groups on attentional bias, interpretation bias, or attentional control scores. This study replicated the main findings of the UK study, with a Dutch CFS population, indicating that across these two cultures, people with CFS demonstrate biases in how somatic information is attended to and interpreted. These illness-specific biases appear to be unrelated to general attentional control deficits.

2.5-year-olds use cross-situational consistency to learn verbs under referential uncertainty.

PubMed

Scott, Rose M; Fisher, Cynthia

2012-02-01

Recent evidence shows that children can use cross-situational statistics to learn new object labels under referential ambiguity (e.g., Smith & Yu, 2008). Such evidence has been interpreted as support for proposals that statistical information about word-referent co-occurrence plays a powerful role in word learning. But object labels represent only a fraction of the vocabulary children acquire, and arguably represent the simplest case of word learning based on observations of world scenes. Here we extended the study of cross-situational word learning to a new segment of the vocabulary, action verbs, to permit a stronger test of the role of statistical information in word learning. In two experiments, on each trial 2.5-year-olds encountered two novel intransitive (e.g., "She's pimming!"; Experiment 1) or transitive verbs (e.g., "She's pimming her toy!"; Experiment 2) while viewing two action events. The consistency with which each verb accompanied each action provided the only source of information about the intended referent of each verb. The 2.5-year-olds used cross-situational consistency in verb learning, but also showed significant limits on their ability to do so as the sentences and scenes became slightly more complex. These findings help to define the role of cross-situational observation in word learning. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

2.5-year-olds use cross-situational consistency to learn verbs under referential uncertainty

PubMed Central

Scott, Rose M.; Fisher, Cynthia

2011-01-01

Recent evidence shows that children can use cross-situational statistics to learn new object labels under referential ambiguity (e.g., Smith & Yu, 2008). Such evidence has been interpreted as support for proposals that statistical information about word-referent co-occurrence plays a powerful role in word learning. But object labels represent only a fraction of the vocabulary children acquire, and arguably represent the simplest case of word learning based on observations of world scenes. Here we extended the study of cross-situational word learning to a new segment of the vocabulary, action verbs, to permit a stronger test of the role of statistical information in word learning. In two experiments, on each trial 2.5-year-olds encountered two novel intransitive (e.g., “She’s pimming!”; Experiment 1) or transitive verbs (e.g., “She’s pimming her toy!”; Experiment 2) while viewing two action events. The consistency with which each verb accompanied each action provided the only source of information about the intended referent of each verb. The 2.5-year-olds used cross-situational consistency in verb learning, but also showed significant limits on their ability to do so as the sentences and scenes became slightly more complex. These findings help to define the role of cross-situational observation in word learning. PMID:22104489

Propose but verify: Fast mapping meets cross-situational word learning

PubMed Central

Trueswell, John C.; Medina, Tamara Nicol; Hafri, Alon; Gleitman, Lila R.

2012-01-01

We report three eyetracking experiments that examine the learning procedure used by adults as they pair novel words and visually presented referents over a sequence of referentially ambiguous trials. Successful learning under such conditions has been argued to be the product of a learning procedure in which participants provisionally pair each novel word with several possible referents and use a statistical-associative learning mechanism to gradually converge on a single mapping across learning instances. We argue here that successful learning in this setting is instead the product of a one-trial procedure in which a single hypothesized word-referent pairing is retained across learning instances, abandoned only if the subsequent instance fails to confirm the pairing – more a ‘fast mapping’ procedure than a gradual statistical one. We provide experimental evidence for this Propose-but-Verify learning procedure via three experiments in which adult participants attempted to learn the meanings of nonce words cross-situationally under varying degrees of referential uncertainty. The findings, using both explicit (referent selection) and implicit (eye movement) measures, show that even in these artificial learning contexts, which are far simpler than those encountered by a language learner in a natural environment, participants do not retain multiple meaning hypotheses across learning instances. As we discuss, these findings challenge ‘gradualist’ accounts of word learning and are consistent with the known rapid course of vocabulary learning in a first language. PMID:23142693

Real-world visual statistics and infants' first-learned object names

PubMed Central

Clerkin, Elizabeth M.; Hart, Elizabeth; Rehg, James M.; Yu, Chen

2017-01-01

We offer a new solution to the unsolved problem of how infants break into word learning based on the visual statistics of everyday infant-perspective scenes. Images from head camera video captured by 8 1/2 to 10 1/2 month-old infants at 147 at-home mealtime events were analysed for the objects in view. The images were found to be highly cluttered with many different objects in view. However, the frequency distribution of object categories was extremely right skewed such that a very small set of objects was pervasively present—a fact that may substantially reduce the problem of referential ambiguity. The statistical structure of objects in these infant egocentric scenes differs markedly from that in the training sets used in computational models and in experiments on statistical word-referent learning. Therefore, the results also indicate a need to re-examine current explanations of how infants break into word learning. This article is part of the themed issue ‘New frontiers for statistical learning in the cognitive sciences’. PMID:27872373

When cancer is associated with illness but no longer with animal or zodiac sign: investigation of biased semantic networks in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

PubMed

Jelinek, Lena; Hottenrott, Birgit; Moritz, Steffen

2009-12-01

Building upon semantic network models, it is proposed that individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) process ambiguous words (e.g., homographs such as cancer) preferably in the context of the OC meaning (i.e., illness) and connect them to a lesser degree to other (neutral) cognitions (e.g., animal). To investigate this assumption, a new task was designed requiring participants to generate up to five associations for different cue words. Cue words were either emotionally neutral, negative or OC-relevant. Two thirds of the items were homographs, while the rest was unambiguous. Twenty-five OCD and 21 healthy participants were recruited via internet. Analyses reveal that OCD participants produced significantly more negative and OC-relevant associations than controls, supporting the assumption of biased associative networks in OCD. The findings support the use of psychological interventions such as Association Splitting that aim at restructuring associative networks in OCD by broadening the semantic scope of OC cognitions.

Bilingualism influences inhibitory control in auditory comprehension

PubMed Central

Blumenfeld, Henrike K.; Marian, Viorica

2013-01-01

Bilinguals have been shown to outperform monolinguals at suppressing task-irrelevant information. The present study aimed to identify how processing linguistic ambiguity during auditory comprehension may be associated with inhibitory control. Monolinguals and bilinguals listened to words in their native language (English) and identified them among four pictures while their eye-movements were tracked. Each target picture (e.g., hamper) appeared together with a similar-sounding within-language competitor picture (e.g., hammer) and two neutral pictures. Following each eye-tracking trial, priming probe trials indexed residual activation of target words, and residual inhibition of competitor words. Eye-tracking showed similar within-language competition across groups; priming showed stronger competitor inhibition in monolinguals than in bilinguals, suggesting differences in how inhibitory control was used to resolve within-language competition. Notably, correlation analyses revealed that inhibition performance on a nonlinguistic Stroop task was related to linguistic competition resolution in bilinguals but not in monolinguals. Together, monolingual-bilingual comparisons suggest that cognitive control mechanisms can be shaped by linguistic experience. PMID:21159332

Semantic processing in native and second language: evidence from hemispheric differences in fine and coarse semantic coding.

PubMed

Faust, Miriam; Ben-Artzi, Elisheva; Vardi, Nili

2012-12-01

Previous studies suggest that whereas the left hemisphere (LH) is involved in fine semantic processing, the right hemisphere (RH) is uniquely engaged in coarse semantic coding including the comprehension of distinct types of language such as figurative language, lexical ambiguity and verbal humor (e.g., Chiarello, 2003; Faust, 2012). The present study examined the patterns of hemispheric involvement in fine/coarse semantic processing in native and non-native languages using a split visual field priming paradigm. Thirty native Hebrew speaking students made lexical decision judgments of Hebrew and English target words preceded by strongly, weakly, or unrelated primes. Results indicated that whereas for Hebrew pairs, priming effect for the weakly-related word pairs was obtained only for RH presented target words, for English pairs, no priming effect for the weakly-related pairs emerged for either LH or RH presented targets, suggesting that coarse semantic coding is much weaker for a non-native than native language. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

A novel method of language modeling for automatic captioning in TC video teleconferencing.

PubMed

Zhang, Xiaojia; Zhao, Yunxin; Schopp, Laura

2007-05-01

We are developing an automatic captioning system for teleconsultation video teleconferencing (TC-VTC) in telemedicine, based on large vocabulary conversational speech recognition. In TC-VTC, doctors' speech contains a large number of infrequently used medical terms in spontaneous styles. Due to insufficiency of data, we adopted mixture language modeling, with models trained from several datasets of medical and nonmedical domains. This paper proposes novel modeling and estimation methods for the mixture language model (LM). Component LMs are trained from individual datasets, with class n-gram LMs trained from in-domain datasets and word n-gram LMs trained from out-of-domain datasets, and they are interpolated into a mixture LM. For class LMs, semantic categories are used for class definition on medical terms, names, and digits. The interpolation weights of a mixture LM are estimated by a greedy algorithm of forward weight adjustment (FWA). The proposed mixing of in-domain class LMs and out-of-domain word LMs, the semantic definitions of word classes, as well as the weight-estimation algorithm of FWA are effective on the TC-VTC task. As compared with using mixtures of word LMs with weights estimated by the conventional expectation-maximization algorithm, the proposed methods led to a 21% reduction of perplexity on test sets of five doctors, which translated into improvements of captioning accuracy.

The sound of enemies and friends in the neighborhood.

PubMed

Pecher, Diane; Boot, Inge; van Dantzig, Saskia; Madden, Carol J; Huber, David E; Zeelenberg, René

2011-01-01

Previous studies (e.g., Pecher, Zeelenberg, & Wagenmakers, 2005) found that semantic classification performance is better for target words with orthographic neighbors that are mostly from the same semantic class (e.g., living) compared to target words with orthographic neighbors that are mostly from the opposite semantic class (e.g., nonliving). In the present study we investigated the contribution of phonology to orthographic neighborhood effects by comparing effects of phonologically congruent orthographic neighbors (book-hook) to phonologically incongruent orthographic neighbors (sand-wand). The prior presentation of a semantically congruent word produced larger effects on subsequent animacy decisions when the previously presented word was a phonologically congruent neighbor than when it was a phonologically incongruent neighbor. In a second experiment, performance differences between target words with versus without semantically congruent orthographic neighbors were larger if the orthographic neighbors were also phonologically congruent. These results support models of visual word recognition that assume an important role for phonology in cascaded access to meaning.

On and Off Computer Writing of Eighth Grade Students Experienced in Word Processing. Technical Report 90-1.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Owston, Ronald D.; And Others

A study assessed the impact of word processing on the writing of junior high school students, experienced in working with computers, for a number of tasks, including writing. Subjects, 111 eighth grade students in four communications arts classes at a Canadian middle-class suburban school, who had been using computers for writing for a year and a…

Experimental Effects of Word Generation on Vocabulary, Academic Language, and Perspective Taking in High Poverty Middle Schools

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jones, Stephanie M.; Kim, James; LaRusso, Maria; Kim, Ha Yeon; Selman, Robert; Uccelli, Paola; Barnes, Sophie; Donovan, Suzanne; Snow, Catherine

2016-01-01

Word Generation (WG) is a research-based vocabulary program for middle school students designed to teach words through language arts, math, science, and social studies classes. The program consists of weekly units that introduce 5 high-utility target words through brief passages designed to spark active examination and discussion of contemporary…

Textual emotion recognition for enhancing enterprise computing

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Quan, Changqin; Ren, Fuji

2016-05-01

The growing interest in affective computing (AC) brings a lot of valuable research topics that can meet different application demands in enterprise systems. The present study explores a sub area of AC techniques - textual emotion recognition for enhancing enterprise computing. Multi-label emotion recognition in text is able to provide a more comprehensive understanding of emotions than single label emotion recognition. A representation of 'emotion state in text' is proposed to encompass the multidimensional emotions in text. It ensures the description in a formal way of the configurations of basic emotions as well as of the relations between them. Our method allows recognition of the emotions for the words bear indirect emotions, emotion ambiguity and multiple emotions. We further investigate the effect of word order for emotional expression by comparing the performances of bag-of-words model and sequence model for multi-label sentence emotion recognition. The experiments show that the classification results under sequence model are better than under bag-of-words model. And homogeneous Markov model showed promising results of multi-label sentence emotion recognition. This emotion recognition system is able to provide a convenient way to acquire valuable emotion information and to improve enterprise competitive ability in many aspects.

Word Sense Disambiguation in Bangla Language Using Supervised Methodology with Necessary Modifications

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Pal, Alok Ranjan; Saha, Diganta; Dash, Niladri Sekhar; Pal, Antara

2018-05-01

An attempt is made in this paper to report how a supervised methodology has been adopted for the task of word sense disambiguation in Bangla with necessary modifications. At the initial stage, the Naïve Bayes probabilistic model that has been adopted as a baseline method for sense classification, yields moderate result with 81% accuracy when applied on a database of 19 (nineteen) most frequently used Bangla ambiguous words. On experimental basis, the baseline method is modified with two extensions: (a) inclusion of lemmatization process into of the system, and (b) bootstrapping of the operational process. As a result, the level of accuracy of the method is slightly improved up to 84% accuracy, which is a positive signal for the whole process of disambiguation as it opens scope for further modification of the existing method for better result. The data sets that have been used for this experiment include the Bangla POS tagged corpus obtained from the Indian Languages Corpora Initiative, and the Bangla WordNet, an online sense inventory developed at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. The paper also reports about the challenges and pitfalls of the work that have been closely observed and addressed to achieve expected level of accuracy.

Speaking rate affects the perception of duration as a suprasegmental lexical-stress cue.

PubMed

Reinisch, Eva; Jesse, Alexandra; McQueen, James M

2011-06-01

Three categorization experiments investigated whether the speaking rate of a preceding sentence influences durational cues to the perception of suprasegmental lexical-stress patterns. Dutch two-syllable word fragments had to be judged as coming from one of two longer words that matched the fragment segmentally but differed in lexical stress placement. Word pairs contrasted primary stress on either the first versus the second syllable or the first versus the third syllable. Duration of the initial or the second syllable of the fragments and rate of the preceding context (fast vs. slow) were manipulated. Listeners used speaking rate to decide about the degree of stress on initial syllables whether the syllables' absolute durations were informative about stress (Experiment Ia) or not (Experiment Ib). Rate effects on the second syllable were visible only when the initial syllable was ambiguous in duration with respect to the preceding rate context (Experiment 2). Absolute second syllable durations contributed little to stress perception (Experiment 3). These results suggest that speaking rate is used to disambiguate words and that rate-modulated stress cues are more important on initial than noninitial syllables. Speaking rate affects perception of suprasegmental information.

Social class rank, threat vigilance, and hostile reactivity.

PubMed

Kraus, Michael W; Horberg, E J; Goetz, Jennifer L; Keltner, Dacher

2011-10-01

Lower-class individuals, because of their lower rank in society, are theorized to be more vigilant to social threats relative to their high-ranking upper-class counterparts. This class-related vigilance to threat, the authors predicted, would shape the emotional content of social interactions in systematic ways. In Study 1, participants engaged in a teasing interaction with a close friend. Lower-class participants--measured in terms of social class rank in society and within the friendship--more accurately tracked the hostile emotions of their friend. As a result, lower-class individuals experienced more hostile emotion contagion relative to upper-class participants. In Study 2, lower-class participants manipulated to experience lower subjective socioeconomic rank showed more hostile reactivity to ambiguous social scenarios relative to upper-class participants and to lower-class participants experiencing elevated socioeconomic rank. The results suggest that class affects expectations, perception, and experience of hostile emotion, particularly in situations in which lower-class individuals perceive their subordinate rank.

Revisiting the Incremental Effects of Context on Word Processing: Evidence from Single-Word Event-Related Brain Potentials

PubMed Central

Payne, Brennan R.; Lee, Chia-Lin; Federmeier, Kara D.

2015-01-01

The amplitude of the N400— an event-related potential (ERP) component linked to meaning processing and initial access to semantic memory— is inversely related to the incremental build-up of semantic context over the course of a sentence. We revisited the nature and scope of this incremental context effect, adopting a word-level linear mixed-effects modeling approach, with the goal of probing the continuous and incremental effects of semantic and syntactic context on multiple aspects of lexical processing during sentence comprehension (i.e., effects of word frequency and orthographic neighborhood). First, we replicated the classic word position effect at the single-word level: open-class words showed reductions in N400 amplitude with increasing word position in semantically congruent sentences only. Importantly, we found that accruing sentence context had separable influences on the effects of frequency and neighborhood on the N400. Word frequency effects were reduced with accumulating semantic context. However, orthographic neighborhood was unaffected by accumulating context, showing robust effects on the N400 across all words, even within congruent sentences. Additionally, we found that N400 amplitudes to closed-class words were reduced with incrementally constraining syntactic context in sentences that provided only syntactic constraints. Taken together, our findings indicate that modeling word-level variability in ERPs reveals mechanisms by which different sources of information simultaneously contribute to the unfolding neural dynamics of comprehension. PMID:26311477

Revisiting the incremental effects of context on word processing: Evidence from single-word event-related brain potentials.

PubMed

Payne, Brennan R; Lee, Chia-Lin; Federmeier, Kara D

2015-11-01

The amplitude of the N400-an event-related potential (ERP) component linked to meaning processing and initial access to semantic memory-is inversely related to the incremental buildup of semantic context over the course of a sentence. We revisited the nature and scope of this incremental context effect, adopting a word-level linear mixed-effects modeling approach, with the goal of probing the continuous and incremental effects of semantic and syntactic context on multiple aspects of lexical processing during sentence comprehension (i.e., effects of word frequency and orthographic neighborhood). First, we replicated the classic word-position effect at the single-word level: Open-class words showed reductions in N400 amplitude with increasing word position in semantically congruent sentences only. Importantly, we found that accruing sentence context had separable influences on the effects of frequency and neighborhood on the N400. Word frequency effects were reduced with accumulating semantic context. However, orthographic neighborhood was unaffected by accumulating context, showing robust effects on the N400 across all words, even within congruent sentences. Additionally, we found that N400 amplitudes to closed-class words were reduced with incrementally constraining syntactic context in sentences that provided only syntactic constraints. Taken together, our findings indicate that modeling word-level variability in ERPs reveals mechanisms by which different sources of information simultaneously contribute to the unfolding neural dynamics of comprehension. © 2015 Society for Psychophysiological Research.

Methods & Strategies: Put Your Walls to Work

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jackson, Julie; Durham, Annie

2016-01-01

This column provides ideas and techniques to enhance your science teaching. This month's issue discusses planning and using interactive word walls to support science and reading instruction. Many classrooms have word walls displaying vocabulary that students have learned in class. Word walls serve as visual scaffolds to support instruction. To…

Project Bank: Word Processing on Campus.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hlavin, Robert F.

Project Bank was initiated at Triton College (Illinois) to increase student awareness of the merits of word processing as it affects their class work and related assignments; to make faculty aware of advances in word processing programs; and to increase the utilization of the college's computer laboratory. All fall 1985 incoming freshmen were…

Immediate effects of form-class constraints on spoken word recognition

PubMed Central

Magnuson, James S.; Tanenhaus, Michael K.; Aslin, Richard N.

2008-01-01

In many domains of cognitive processing there is strong support for bottom-up priority and delayed top-down (contextual) integration. We ask whether this applies to supra-lexical context that could potentially constrain lexical access. Previous findings of early context integration in word recognition have typically used constraints that can be linked to pair-wise conceptual relations between words. Using an artificial lexicon, we found immediate integration of syntactic expectations based on pragmatic constraints linked to syntactic categories rather than words: phonologically similar “nouns” and “adjectives” did not compete when a combination of syntactic and visual information strongly predicted form class. These results suggest that predictive context is integrated continuously, and that previous findings supporting delayed context integration stem from weak contexts rather than delayed integration. PMID:18675408

Implementation of Improved Management Control of Aviation Depot Level Repairable Funds

DTIC Science & Technology

1986-12-01

for comparing and testing. Pf ter Drucker states that ". . . control is an ambiguous word. It means the abiliti to direct oneself and one’s work. It...Frequency 50 LIST OF REFERENCES 1. Drucker , Peter F., The Practice of Management , Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1954. 2. Terry, George R., Principles of...NAVAL POSTGRADUATE SCHOOLMonterey, California 0- 6~~VI E1B9 87THESIS I IMPLEMENTATION OF IMPROVED MANAGEMENT CONTROL OF AVIATION DEPOT LEVEL

Biomedical word sense disambiguation with ontologies and metadata: automation meets accuracy

PubMed Central

Alexopoulou, Dimitra; Andreopoulos, Bill; Dietze, Heiko; Doms, Andreas; Gandon, Fabien; Hakenberg, Jörg; Khelif, Khaled; Schroeder, Michael; Wächter, Thomas

2009-01-01

Background Ontology term labels can be ambiguous and have multiple senses. While this is no problem for human annotators, it is a challenge to automated methods, which identify ontology terms in text. Classical approaches to word sense disambiguation use co-occurring words or terms. However, most treat ontologies as simple terminologies, without making use of the ontology structure or the semantic similarity between terms. Another useful source of information for disambiguation are metadata. Here, we systematically compare three approaches to word sense disambiguation, which use ontologies and metadata, respectively. Results The 'Closest Sense' method assumes that the ontology defines multiple senses of the term. It computes the shortest path of co-occurring terms in the document to one of these senses. The 'Term Cooc' method defines a log-odds ratio for co-occurring terms including co-occurrences inferred from the ontology structure. The 'MetaData' approach trains a classifier on metadata. It does not require any ontology, but requires training data, which the other methods do not. To evaluate these approaches we defined a manually curated training corpus of 2600 documents for seven ambiguous terms from the Gene Ontology and MeSH. All approaches over all conditions achieve 80% success rate on average. The 'MetaData' approach performed best with 96%, when trained on high-quality data. Its performance deteriorates as quality of the training data decreases. The 'Term Cooc' approach performs better on Gene Ontology (92% success) than on MeSH (73% success) as MeSH is not a strict is-a/part-of, but rather a loose is-related-to hierarchy. The 'Closest Sense' approach achieves on average 80% success rate. Conclusion Metadata is valuable for disambiguation, but requires high quality training data. Closest Sense requires no training, but a large, consistently modelled ontology, which are two opposing conditions. Term Cooc achieves greater 90% success given a consistently modelled ontology. Overall, the results show that well structured ontologies can play a very important role to improve disambiguation. Availability The three benchmark datasets created for the purpose of disambiguation are available in Additional file 1. PMID:19159460

NERBio: using selected word conjunctions, term normalization, and global patterns to improve biomedical named entity recognition.

PubMed

Tsai, Richard Tzong-Han; Sung, Cheng-Lung; Dai, Hong-Jie; Hung, Hsieh-Chuan; Sung, Ting-Yi; Hsu, Wen-Lian

2006-12-18

Biomedical named entity recognition (Bio-NER) is a challenging problem because, in general, biomedical named entities of the same category (e.g., proteins and genes) do not follow one standard nomenclature. They have many irregularities and sometimes appear in ambiguous contexts. In recent years, machine-learning (ML) approaches have become increasingly common and now represent the cutting edge of Bio-NER technology. This paper addresses three problems faced by ML-based Bio-NER systems. First, most ML approaches usually employ singleton features that comprise one linguistic property (e.g., the current word is capitalized) and at least one class tag (e.g., B-protein, the beginning of a protein name). However, such features may be insufficient in cases where multiple properties must be considered. Adding conjunction features that contain multiple properties can be beneficial, but it would be infeasible to include all conjunction features in an NER model since memory resources are limited and some features are ineffective. To resolve the problem, we use a sequential forward search algorithm to select an effective set of features. Second, variations in the numerical parts of biomedical terms (e.g., "2" in the biomedical term IL2) cause data sparseness and generate many redundant features. In this case, we apply numerical normalization, which solves the problem by replacing all numerals in a term with one representative numeral to help classify named entities. Third, the assignment of NE tags does not depend solely on the target word's closest neighbors, but may depend on words outside the context window (e.g., a context window of five consists of the current word plus two preceding and two subsequent words). We use global patterns generated by the Smith-Waterman local alignment algorithm to identify such structures and modify the results of our ML-based tagger. This is called pattern-based post-processing. To develop our ML-based Bio-NER system, we employ conditional random fields, which have performed effectively in several well-known tasks, as our underlying ML model. Adding selected conjunction features, applying numerical normalization, and employing pattern-based post-processing improve the F-scores by 1.67%, 1.04%, and 0.57%, respectively. The combined increase of 3.28% yields a total score of 72.98%, which is better than the baseline system that only uses singleton features. We demonstrate the benefits of using the sequential forward search algorithm to select effective conjunction feature groups. In addition, we show that numerical normalization can effectively reduce the number of redundant and unseen features. Furthermore, the Smith-Waterman local alignment algorithm can help ML-based Bio-NER deal with difficult cases that need longer context windows.

Signs of developmental stuttering up to age eight and at 12 plus.

PubMed

Howell, Peter

2007-04-01

Clinicians who are familiar with the general DSM-IV-TR scheme may want to know how to identify whether a child does, or (equally importantly) does not, stutter and what differences there are in the presenting signs for children of different ages. This article reviews and discusses topics in the research literature that have a bearing on these questions. The review compared language, social-environmental and host factors of children who stutter across two age groups (up to age eight and 12 plus). Dysfluency types mainly involved repetition of one or more whole function words up to age eight whereas at age 12 plus, dysfluency on parts of content words often occurred. Twin studies showed that environmental and host factors were split roughly 30/70 for both ages. Though the disorder is genetically transmitted, the mode of transmission is not known at present. At the earlier age, there were few clearcut socio-environmental influences. There were, however, some suggestions of sensory (high incidence of otitis media with effusion) and motor differences (high proportion of left-handed individuals in the stuttering group relative to norms) compared to control speakers. At age 12 plus, socio-environmental influences (like state anxiety) occurred in the children who persist, but were not evident in the children who recover from the disorder. Brain scans at the older age show some replicable abnormality in the areas connecting motor and sensory areas in speakers who stutter. The topics considered in the discussion return to the question of how to identify whether a child does or does not stutter. The review identifies extra details that might be considered to improve the classification of stuttering (e.g. sensory and motor assessments). Also, some age-dependent factors and processes are identified (such as change in dysfluency type with age). Knowing the distinguishing features of the disorder allows it to be contrasted with other disorders which show superficially similar features. Two or more disorders can co-occur for two reasons: comorbidity, where the child has two identifiable disorders (e.g. a child with Down Syndrome whose speech has been properly assessed and classed as stuttering). Ambiguous classifications, where an individual suffering from one disorder meets the criteria for one or more other disorders. One way DSM-IV-TR deals with the latter is by giving certain classification axes priority over others. The grounds for such superordinacy seem circular as the main role for allowing this appears to be to avoid such ambiguities.

Signs of developmental stuttering up to age eight and at 12 plus

PubMed Central

Howell, Peter

2007-01-01

Clinicians who are familiar with the general DSM-IV-TR scheme may want to know how to identify whether a child does, or (equally importantly) does not, stutter and what differences there are in the presenting signs for children of different ages. This article reviews and discusses topics in the research literature that have a bearing on these questions. The review compared language, social–environmental and host factors of children who stutter across two age groups (up to age eight and 12 plus). Dysfluency types mainly involved repetition of one or more whole function words up to age eight whereas at age 12 plus, dysfluency on parts of content words often occurred. Twin studies showed that environmental and host factors were split roughly 30/70 for both ages. Though the disorder is genetically transmitted, the mode of transmission is not known at present. At the earlier age, there were few clearcut socio-environmental influences. There were, however, some suggestions of sensory (high incidence of otitis media with effusion) and motor differences (high proportion of left-handed individuals in the stuttering group relative to norms) compared to control speakers. At age 12 plus, socio-environmental influences (like state anxiety) occurred in the children who persist, but were not evident in the children who recover from the disorder. Brain scans at the older age show some replicable abnormality in the areas connecting motor and sensory areas in speakers who stutter. The topics considered in the discussion return to the question of how to identify whether a child does or does not stutter. The review identifies extra details that might be considered to improve the classification of stuttering (e.g. sensory and motor assessments). Also, some age-dependent factors and processes are identified (such as change in dysfluency type with age). Knowing the distinguishing features of the disorder allows it to be contrasted with other disorders which show superficially similar features. Two or more disorders can co-occur for two reasons: comorbidity, where the child has two identifiable disorders (e.g. a child with Down Syndrome whose speech has been properly assessed and classed as stuttering). Ambiguous classifications, where an individual suffering from one disorder meets the criteria for one or more other disorders. One way DSM-IV-TR deals with the latter is by giving certain classification axes priority over others. The grounds for such superordinacy seem circular as the main role for allowing this appears to be to avoid such ambiguities. PMID:17156904

49 CFR 172.203 - Additional description requirements.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-10-01

..., there must be entered for— (1) Anhydrous ammonia. (i) The words “0.2 PERCENT WATER” to indicate the... transportation as “limited quantity,” as authorized by this subchapter, must include the words “Limited Quantity... labels. (6) For a package containing fissile Class 7 (radioactive) material: (i) The words “Fissile...

Sustainability and the Recycling of Words

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Miller, Donna L.; Nilsen, Alleen Pace

2011-01-01

With the mention of "sustainability" and "recycling," most people think about reusing paper, plastic, metal, and glass, but what the authors discovered when they embarked on a word-study unit is that the sustainability movement has also brought about the recycling of words. The authors were team-teaching a language awareness class taken by…

Improving Learners' Vocabulary through Strategy Training and Recycling the Target Words

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Akin, Ayse; Seferoglu, Golge

2004-01-01

The purpose of this study was to determine whether an approach combining creating strategy awareness and recycling words will result in better vocabulary learning (delayed recall) of selected words than teaching vocabulary following the course book alone, for intermediate level English language learners. Two English language classes, a total of 51…

Electrophysiological Correlates of Stimulus Equivalence Processes

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Haimson, Barry; Wilkinson, Krista M.; Rosenquist, Celia; Ouimet, Carolyn; McIlvane, William J.

2009-01-01

Research reported here concerns neural processes relating to stimulus equivalence class formation. In Experiment 1, two types of word pairs were presented successively to normally capable adults. In one type, the words had related usage in English (e.g., uncle, aunt). In the other, the two words were not typically related in their usage (e.g.,…

Secret Society 123: Understanding the Language of Self-Harm on Instagram.

PubMed

Moreno, Megan A; Ton, Adrienne; Selkie, Ellen; Evans, Yolanda

2016-01-01

Nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) content is present on social media and may influence adolescents. Instagram is a popular site among adolescents in which NSSI-related terms are user-generated as hashtags (words preceded by a #). These hashtags may be ambiguous and thus challenging for those outside the NSSI community to understand. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the meaning, popularity, and content advisory warnings related to ambiguous NSSI hashtags on Instagram. This study used the search term "#selfharmmm" to identify public Instagram posts. Hashtag terms co-listed with #selfharmmm on each post were evaluated for inclusion criteria; selected hashtags were then assessed using a structured evaluation for meaning and consistency. We also investigated the total number of Instagram search hits for each hashtag at two time points and determined whether the hashtag prompted a Content Advisory warning. Our sample of 201 Instagram posts led to identification of 10 ambiguous NSSI hashtags. NSSI terms included #blithe, #cat, and #selfinjuryy. We discovered a popular image that described the broader community of NSSI and mental illness, called "#MySecretFamily." The term #MySecretFamily had approximately 900,000 search results at Time 1 and >1.5 million at Time 2. Only one-third of the relevant hashtags generated Content Advisory warnings. NSSI content is popular on Instagram and often veiled by ambiguous hashtags. Content Advisory warnings were not reliable; thus, parents and providers remain the cornerstone of prompting discussions about NSSI content on social media and providing resources for teens. Copyright © 2016 Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Secret Society 123: Understanding the Language of Self-Harm on Instagram

PubMed Central

Moreno, Megan A.; Ton, Adrienne; Selkie, Ellen; Evans, Yolanda

2017-01-01

Purpose Nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) content is present on social media and may influence adolescents. Instagram is a popular site among adolescents in which NSSI-related terms are user-generated as hashtags (words preceded by a #). These hashtags may be ambiguous and thus challenging for those outside the NSSI community to understand. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the meaning, popularity, and content advisory warnings related to ambiguous NSSI hashtags on Instagram. Methods This study used the search term “#selfharmmm” to identify public Instagram posts. Hashtag terms co-listed with #selfharmmm on each post were evaluated for inclusion criteria; selected hashtags were then assessed using a structured evaluation for meaning and consistency. We also investigated the total number of Instagram search hits for each hashtag at two time points and determined whether the hashtag prompted a Content Advisory warning. Results Our sample of 201 Instagram posts led to identification of 10 ambiguous NSSI hashtags. NSSI terms included #blithe, #cat, and #selfinjuryy. We discovered a popular image that described the broader community of NSSI and mental illness, called “#MySecretFamily.” The term #MySe-cretFamily had approximately 900,000 search results at Time 1 and >1.5 million at Time 2. Only one-third of the relevant hashtags generated Content Advisory warnings. Conclusions NSSI content is popular on Instagram and often veiled by ambiguous hashtags. Content Advisory warnings were not reliable; thus, parents and providers remain the cornerstone of prompting discussions about NSSI content on social media and providing resources for teens. PMID:26707231

Foundations for the Development of a Simple Natural Language Interface for Task Knowledge Elicitation and Representation.

DTIC Science & Technology

1982-01-01

the best known being ELIZA - a simulated Rogerian psychotherapist (Weizenbaum 1966), and PARRY - a simulated paranoid patient (Colby 1968). These...derived from the syntactic aspects of the input, that is, the word classes (noun, verb etc) rather than the word meanings. The concept of parsing is...captures the "full" meaning of a word or concept , consequently few researchers actually seek "absolute" definitions of words. The definition of a word, as

Library Students Are "Breaking Good" with Saul Goodman's Advice

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Turkewitz, Deborah

2014-01-01

Graduate students are taking big steps and stretching themselves, whether returning to school midpoint in their lives, taking classes on unfamiliar topics, or starting internships and trying to put theory into practice. Who better to offer advice to these graduate students than America's favorite hilarious, morally ambiguous, ambulance-chasing,…

A Geometric Model to Teach Nature of Science, Science Practices, and Metacognition

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Nyman, Matthew; St. Clair, Tyler

2016-01-01

Using the science practice model in science classes for preservice teachers addresses three important aspects of science teacher preparation: teaching the nonlinear nature of scientific process, using scientific practices rather than the ambiguous term "inquiry-based," and emphasizing the process of metacognition as an important tool in…

Contextual Information and Verifying Inferences from Conversations.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dubitsky, Tony

Research was conducted to investigate the effects of contextual information on the speed and accuracy with which two general classes of inferences were verified by readers. These types of inferences were based on information in conversations that were or were not topically ambiguous, depending upon the amount of available contextual information.…

Attentional biases in body dysmorphic disorder (BDD): Eye-tracking using the emotional Stroop task.

PubMed

Toh, Wei Lin; Castle, David J; Rossell, Susan L

2017-04-01

Body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) is characterised by repetitive behaviours and/or mental acts occurring in response to preoccupations with perceived defects or flaws in physical appearance. This study aimed to examine attentional biases in BDD via the emotional Stroop task with two modifications: i) incorporating an eye-tracking paradigm, and ii) employing an obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) control group. Twenty-one BDD, 19 OCD and 21 HC participants, who were age-, sex-, and IQ-matched, were included. A card version of the emotional Stroop task was employed based on seven 10-word lists: (i) BDD-positive, (ii) BDD-negative, (iii) OCD-checking, (iv) OCD-washing, (v) general positive, (vi) general threat, and (vii) neutral (as baseline). Participants were asked to read aloud words and word colours consecutively, thereby yielding accuracy and latency scores. Eye-tracking parameters were also measured. Participants with BDD exhibited significant Stroop interference for BDD-negative words relative to HC participants, as shown by extended colour-naming latencies. In contrast, the OCD group did not exhibit Stroop interference for OCD-related nor general threat words. Only mild eye-tracking anomalies were uncovered in clinical groups. Inspection of individual scanning styles and fixation heat maps however revealed that viewing strategies adopted by clinical groups were generally disorganised, with avoidance of certain disorder-relevant words and considerable visual attention devoted to non-salient card regions. The operation of attentional biases to negative disorder-specific words was corroborated in BDD. Future replication studies using other paradigms are vital, given potential ambiguities inherent in emotional Stroop task interpretation. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Forerunner of the Science of Psychoanalysis? An Essay on the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition.

PubMed

Simms, Norman

2015-01-01

The inquisitions in Spain and Portugual were state organs, rather than church-run enterprises; their purpose to modernize disparate jurisdictions during the final stages of Reconquista (return of Moorish areas to Christian administration) to ensure security and loyalty. So many Jews converted (under duress or willingly for strategic reasons) and inter-married with middle-class and aristocratic families, that their sincerity and loyalty was suspected, This meant going beyond traditional monitoring of ritual acts and social behaviour; there was a need to look below the surface, to interpret ambiguity, and to break codes of duplicity. Inquisitors developed techniques of a form of psychoanalysis before the discoveries of Freud: methods of questioning to bring out repressed beliefs and motivations, unriddling equivocational performance and speech-acts, and integrating fragments of information from family members, business associates and neighbours collected over many years. Torture, more threatened than actual, and lengthy incarceration punctuated by periods of exile and re-arrest after years quiet, provoked desperate confessions and specious denunciations, all of which had to be subject to intense scrutiny and analysis. The assumption was modern: a person's self was no longer equivalent to their words and actions; instead, a deep dark and traumatized inner self to be revealed.

Examining the direct and indirect effects of visual-verbal paired associate learning on Chinese word reading.

PubMed

Georgiou, George; Liu, Cuina; Xu, Shiyang

2017-08-01

Associative learning, traditionally measured with paired associate learning (PAL) tasks, has been found to predict reading ability in several languages. However, it remains unclear whether it also predicts word reading in Chinese, which is known for its ambiguous print-sound correspondences, and whether its effects are direct or indirect through the effects of other reading-related skills such as phonological awareness and rapid naming. Thus, the purpose of this study was to examine the direct and indirect effects of visual-verbal PAL on word reading in an unselected sample of Chinese children followed from the second to the third kindergarten year. A sample of 141 second-year kindergarten children (71 girls and 70 boys; mean age=58.99months, SD=3.17) were followed for a year and were assessed at both times on measures of visual-verbal PAL, rapid naming, and phonological awareness. In the third kindergarten year, they were also assessed on word reading. The results of path analysis showed that visual-verbal PAL exerted a significant direct effect on word reading that was independent of the effects of phonological awareness and rapid naming. However, it also exerted significant indirect effects through phonological awareness. Taken together, these findings suggest that variations in cross-modal associative learning (as measured by visual-verbal PAL) place constraints on the development of word recognition skills irrespective of the characteristics of the orthography children are learning to read. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Metalexical awareness: development, methodology or written language? A cross-linguistic comparison.

PubMed

Kurvers, Jeanne; Uri, Helene

2006-07-01

This study explores the ability to access word boundaries of pre-school children, using an on-line methodology (Karmiloff-Smith, Grant, Sims, Jones, & Cockle (1996). Cognition, 58, 197-219.), which has hardly been used outside English-speaking countries. In a cross-linguistic study in the Netherlands and Norway, four and five-year-old children were asked to repeat the last word every time a narrator stopped reading a story. In total 32 target-words were used, both closed and open class words, and both monosyllabic and disyllabic words. The outcomes in both countries were different from those of the original English study (Karmiloff-Smith et al., 1996): four- and five-year-olds were successful in only about 26% of the cases, whereas the success rate in the former English experiment was 75% for the younger and 96% for the older children. No differences were found between age groups and between open and closed class words. This methodology does reveal the ability to access word boundaries, but probably not because of the ease of the on-line methodology in itself, but rather because literacy introduces new representations of language, even in on-line processing. The outcomes implicate that the ability to mark word boundaries does not seem to be a valid indication of who is ready for reading.

LESS SKILLED READERS HAVE LESS EFFICIENT SUPPRESSION MECHANISMS.

PubMed

Gernsbacher, Morton Ann

1993-09-01

One approach to understanding the component processes and mechanisms underlying adult reading skill is to compare the performance of more skilled and less skilled readers on laboratory experiments. The results of some recent experiments employing this approach demonstrate that less skilled adult readers suppress less efficiently the inappropriate meanings of ambiguous words (e.g., the playing card vs. garden tool meanings of spade ), the incorrect forms of homophones (e.g., patients vs. patience ), the typical-but-absent members of scenes (e.g., a tractor in a farm scene), and words superimposed on pictures. Less skilled readers are not less efficient in activating contextually appropriate information; in fact, they activate contextually appropriate information more strongly than more skilled readers do. Therefore, one conclusion that can be drawn from these experiments is that less skilled adult readers suffer from less efficient suppression mechanisms.

Electrophysiological signatures of event words: Dissociating syntactic and semantic category effects in lexical processing.

PubMed

Lapinskaya, Natalia; Uzomah, Uchechukwu; Bedny, Marina; Lau, Ellen

2016-12-01

Numerous theories have been proposed regarding the brain's organization and retrieval of lexical information. Neurophysiological dissociations in processing different word classes, particularly nouns and verbs, have been extensively documented, supporting the contribution of grammatical class to lexical organization. However, the contribution of semantic properties to these processing differences is still unresolved. We aim to isolate this contribution by comparing ERPs to verbs (e.g. wade), object nouns (e.g. cookie), and event nouns (e.g. concert) in a paired similarity judgment task, as event nouns share grammatical category with object nouns but some semantic properties with verbs. We find that event nouns pattern with verbs in eliciting a more positive response than object nouns across left anterior electrodes 300-500ms after word presentation. This time-window has been strongly linked to lexical-semantic access by prior electrophysiological work. Thus, the similarity of the response to words referring to concepts with more complex participant structure and temporal continuity extends across grammatical class (event nouns and verbs), and contrasts with the words that refer to objects (object nouns). This contrast supports a semantic, as well as syntactic, contribution to the differential neural organization and processing of lexical items. We also observed a late (500-800ms post-stimulus) posterior positivity for object nouns relative to event nouns and verbs at the second word of each pair, which may reflect the impact of semantic properties on the similarity judgment task. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

It's All About You: An ERP Study of Emotion and Self-Relevance in Discourse

PubMed Central

Fields, Eric C.; Kuperberg, Gina R.

2013-01-01

Accurately communicating self-relevant and emotional information is a vital function of language, but we have little idea about how these factors impact normal discourse comprehension. In an event-related potential (ERP) study, we fully crossed self-relevance and emotion in a discourse context. Two-sentence social vignettes were presented either in the third or the second person (previous work has shown that this influences the perspective from which mental models are built). ERPs were time-locked to a critical word toward the end of the second sentence which was pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant (e.g., A man knocks on Sandra's/your hotel room door. She/You see(s) that he has a gift/tray/gun in his hand.). We saw modulation of early components (P1, N1, and P2) by self-relevance, suggesting that a self-relevant context can lead to top-down attentional effects during early stages of visual processing. Unpleasant words evoked a larger late positivity than pleasant words, which evoked a larger positivity than neutral words, indicating that, regardless of self-relevance, emotional words are assessed as motivationally significant, triggering additional or deeper processing at post-lexical stages. Finally, self-relevance and emotion interacted on the late positivity: a larger late positivity was evoked by neutral words in self-relevant, but not in non-self-relevant, contexts. This may reflect prolonged attempts to disambiguate the emotional valence of ambiguous stimuli that are relevant to the self. More broadly, our findings suggest that the assessment of emotion and self-relevance are not independent, but rather that they interactively influence one another during word-by-word language comprehension. PMID:22584232

Language and Memory Improvements following tDCS of Left Lateral Prefrontal Cortex.

PubMed

Hussey, Erika K; Ward, Nathan; Christianson, Kiel; Kramer, Arthur F

2015-01-01

Recent research demonstrates that performance on executive-control measures can be enhanced through brain stimulation of lateral prefrontal regions. Separate psycholinguistic work emphasizes the importance of left lateral prefrontal cortex executive-control resources during sentence processing, especially when readers must override early, incorrect interpretations when faced with temporary ambiguity. Using transcranial direct current stimulation, we tested whether stimulation of left lateral prefrontal cortex had discriminate effects on language and memory conditions that rely on executive-control (versus cases with minimal executive-control demands, even in the face of task difficulty). Participants were randomly assigned to receive Anodal, Cathodal, or Sham stimulation of left lateral prefrontal cortex while they (1) processed ambiguous and unambiguous sentences in a word-by-word self-paced reading task and (2) performed an n-back memory task that, on some trials, contained interference lure items reputed to require executive-control. Across both tasks, we parametrically manipulated executive-control demands and task difficulty. Our results revealed that the Anodal group outperformed the remaining groups on (1) the sentence processing conditions requiring executive-control, and (2) only the most complex n-back conditions, regardless of executive-control demands. Together, these findings add to the mounting evidence for the selective causal role of left lateral prefrontal cortex for executive-control tasks in the language domain. Moreover, we provide the first evidence suggesting that brain stimulation is a promising method to mitigate processing demands encountered during online sentence processing.

Language and Memory Improvements following tDCS of Left Lateral Prefrontal Cortex

PubMed Central

Hussey, Erika K.; Ward, Nathan; Christianson, Kiel; Kramer, Arthur F.

2015-01-01

Recent research demonstrates that performance on executive-control measures can be enhanced through brain stimulation of lateral prefrontal regions. Separate psycholinguistic work emphasizes the importance of left lateral prefrontal cortex executive-control resources during sentence processing, especially when readers must override early, incorrect interpretations when faced with temporary ambiguity. Using transcranial direct current stimulation, we tested whether stimulation of left lateral prefrontal cortex had discriminate effects on language and memory conditions that rely on executive-control (versus cases with minimal executive-control demands, even in the face of task difficulty). Participants were randomly assigned to receive Anodal, Cathodal, or Sham stimulation of left lateral prefrontal cortex while they (1) processed ambiguous and unambiguous sentences in a word-by-word self-paced reading task and (2) performed an n-back memory task that, on some trials, contained interference lure items reputed to require executive-control. Across both tasks, we parametrically manipulated executive-control demands and task difficulty. Our results revealed that the Anodal group outperformed the remaining groups on (1) the sentence processing conditions requiring executive-control, and (2) only the most complex n-back conditions, regardless of executive-control demands. Together, these findings add to the mounting evidence for the selective causal role of left lateral prefrontal cortex for executive-control tasks in the language domain. Moreover, we provide the first evidence suggesting that brain stimulation is a promising method to mitigate processing demands encountered during online sentence processing. PMID:26528814

Applying active learning to supervised word sense disambiguation in MEDLINE.

PubMed

Chen, Yukun; Cao, Hongxin; Mei, Qiaozhu; Zheng, Kai; Xu, Hua

2013-01-01

This study was to assess whether active learning strategies can be integrated with supervised word sense disambiguation (WSD) methods, thus reducing the number of annotated samples, while keeping or improving the quality of disambiguation models. We developed support vector machine (SVM) classifiers to disambiguate 197 ambiguous terms and abbreviations in the MSH WSD collection. Three different uncertainty sampling-based active learning algorithms were implemented with the SVM classifiers and were compared with a passive learner (PL) based on random sampling. For each ambiguous term and each learning algorithm, a learning curve that plots the accuracy computed from the test set as a function of the number of annotated samples used in the model was generated. The area under the learning curve (ALC) was used as the primary metric for evaluation. Our experiments demonstrated that active learners (ALs) significantly outperformed the PL, showing better performance for 177 out of 197 (89.8%) WSD tasks. Further analysis showed that to achieve an average accuracy of 90%, the PL needed 38 annotated samples, while the ALs needed only 24, a 37% reduction in annotation effort. Moreover, we analyzed cases where active learning algorithms did not achieve superior performance and identified three causes: (1) poor models in the early learning stage; (2) easy WSD cases; and (3) difficult WSD cases, which provide useful insight for future improvements. This study demonstrated that integrating active learning strategies with supervised WSD methods could effectively reduce annotation cost and improve the disambiguation models.

Applying active learning to supervised word sense disambiguation in MEDLINE

PubMed Central

Chen, Yukun; Cao, Hongxin; Mei, Qiaozhu; Zheng, Kai; Xu, Hua

2013-01-01

Objectives This study was to assess whether active learning strategies can be integrated with supervised word sense disambiguation (WSD) methods, thus reducing the number of annotated samples, while keeping or improving the quality of disambiguation models. Methods We developed support vector machine (SVM) classifiers to disambiguate 197 ambiguous terms and abbreviations in the MSH WSD collection. Three different uncertainty sampling-based active learning algorithms were implemented with the SVM classifiers and were compared with a passive learner (PL) based on random sampling. For each ambiguous term and each learning algorithm, a learning curve that plots the accuracy computed from the test set as a function of the number of annotated samples used in the model was generated. The area under the learning curve (ALC) was used as the primary metric for evaluation. Results Our experiments demonstrated that active learners (ALs) significantly outperformed the PL, showing better performance for 177 out of 197 (89.8%) WSD tasks. Further analysis showed that to achieve an average accuracy of 90%, the PL needed 38 annotated samples, while the ALs needed only 24, a 37% reduction in annotation effort. Moreover, we analyzed cases where active learning algorithms did not achieve superior performance and identified three causes: (1) poor models in the early learning stage; (2) easy WSD cases; and (3) difficult WSD cases, which provide useful insight for future improvements. Conclusions This study demonstrated that integrating active learning strategies with supervised WSD methods could effectively reduce annotation cost and improve the disambiguation models. PMID:23364851

Techniques Class: September 12, 2001.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

More, William; Corsetti, Patricia L.; Endleman, Orna; Julian, Sarah; Lindemann, Evie; Spinelli, Laura

2002-01-01

On September 12, 2001, the Techniques in Art Therapy class in the art therapy program at Albertus Magnus College met at its normal Wednesday evening time. This article describes the class session through the words and images of several class members who found the class useful in their own process of beginning to deal with the attacks and their…

Producing Spatial Words Is Not Enough: Understanding the Relation between Language and Spatial Cognition

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Miller, Hilary E.; Vlach, Haley A.; Simmering, Vanessa R.

2017-01-01

Prior research has investigated the relation between children's language and spatial cognition by assessing the quantity of children's spatial word production, with limited attention to the context in which children use such words. This study tested whether 4-year-olds children's (N = 41, primarily white middle class) adaptive use of task-relevant…

The Absence of a Shape Bias in Children's Word Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cimpian, Andrei; Markman, Ellen M.

2005-01-01

There is debate about whether preschool-age children interpret words as referring to kinds or to classes defined by shape similarity. The authors argue that the shape bias reported in previous studies is a task-induced artifact rather than a genuine word-learning strategy. In particular, children were forced to extend an object's novel label to…

Are Effects of Emotion in Single Words Non-Lexical? Evidence from Event-Related Brain Potentials

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Palazova, Marina; Mantwill, Katharina; Sommer, Werner; Schacht, Annekathrin

2011-01-01

Emotional meaning impacts word processing. However, it is unclear, at which functional locus this influence occurs and whether and how it depends on word class. These questions were addressed by recording event-related potentials (ERPs) in a lexical decision task with written adjectives, verbs, and nouns of positive, negative, and neutral…

The Influence of Morphological Structure Information on the Memorization of Chinese Compound Words

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Liu, Duo

2017-01-01

The present study investigated the influence of morphological structure information on the memorization of Chinese subordinate and coordinative compound words using the memory conjunction error paradigm. During the Study Phase, Hong Kong Chinese college students were asked to either judge the word class (Exp. 1, N = 25) or the orthographic…

Does Lexical Stress Influence 17-Month-Olds' Mapping of Verbs and Nouns?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Campbell, Jennifer; Mihalicz, Patrick; Thiessen, Erik; Curtin, Suzanne

2018-01-01

English-learning infants attend to lexical stress when learning new words. Attention to lexical stress might be beneficial for word learning by providing an indication of the grammatical class of that word. English disyllabic nouns commonly have trochaic (strong-weak) stress, whereas English disyllabic verbs commonly have iambic (weak-strong)…

Qualitative differences between the joint effects of stimulus quality and word frequency in reading aloud and lexical decision: extensions to Yap and Balota (2007).

PubMed

O'Malley, Shannon; Reynolds, Michael G; Besner, Derek

2007-03-01

There have been multiple reports over the last 3 decades that stimulus quality and word frequency have additive effects on the time to make a lexical decision. However, it is surprising that there is only 1 published report to date that has investigated the joint effects of these two factors in the context of reading aloud, and the outcome of that study is ambiguous. The present study shows that these factors interact in the context of reading aloud and at the same time replicate the standard pattern reported for lexical decision. The main implication of these results is that lexical activation, at least as indexed by the effect of word frequency, does not unfold in a uniform way in the contexts reported here. The observed dissociation also implies, contrary to J. A. Fodor's (1983) view, that the mental lexicon is penetrable rather than encapsulated. The distinction between cascaded and thresholded processing offers one way to understand these and related results. A direction for further research is briefly noted.

Real-world visual statistics and infants' first-learned object names.

PubMed

Clerkin, Elizabeth M; Hart, Elizabeth; Rehg, James M; Yu, Chen; Smith, Linda B

2017-01-05

We offer a new solution to the unsolved problem of how infants break into word learning based on the visual statistics of everyday infant-perspective scenes. Images from head camera video captured by 8 1/2 to 10 1/2 month-old infants at 147 at-home mealtime events were analysed for the objects in view. The images were found to be highly cluttered with many different objects in view. However, the frequency distribution of object categories was extremely right skewed such that a very small set of objects was pervasively present-a fact that may substantially reduce the problem of referential ambiguity. The statistical structure of objects in these infant egocentric scenes differs markedly from that in the training sets used in computational models and in experiments on statistical word-referent learning. Therefore, the results also indicate a need to re-examine current explanations of how infants break into word learning.This article is part of the themed issue 'New frontiers for statistical learning in the cognitive sciences'. © 2016 The Author(s).

Grammatical Role Parallelism Influences Ambiguous Pronoun Resolution in German

PubMed Central

Sauermann, Antje; Gagarina, Natalia

2017-01-01

Previous research on pronoun resolution in German revealed that personal pronouns in German tend to refer to the subject or topic antecedents, however, these results are based on studies involving subject personal pronouns. We report a visual world eye-tracking study that investigated the impact of the word order and grammatical role parallelism on the online comprehension of pronouns in German-speaking adults. Word order of the antecedents and parallelism by the grammatical role of the anaphor was modified in the study. The results show that parallelism of the grammatical role had an early and strong effect on the processing of the pronoun, with subject anaphors being resolved to subject antecedents and object anaphors to object antecedents, regardless of the word order (information status) of the antecedents. Our results demonstrate that personal pronouns may not in general be associated with the subject or topic of a sentence but that their resolution is modulated by additional factors such as the grammatical role. Further studies are required to investigate whether parallelism also affects offline antecedent choices. PMID:28790940

Graph-based word sense disambiguation of biomedical documents.

PubMed

Agirre, Eneko; Soroa, Aitor; Stevenson, Mark

2010-11-15

Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD), automatically identifying the meaning of ambiguous words in context, is an important stage of text processing. This article presents a graph-based approach to WSD in the biomedical domain. The method is unsupervised and does not require any labeled training data. It makes use of knowledge from the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Metathesaurus which is represented as a graph. A state-of-the-art algorithm, Personalized PageRank, is used to perform WSD. When evaluated on the NLM-WSD dataset, the algorithm outperforms other methods that rely on the UMLS Metathesaurus alone. The WSD system is open source licensed and available from http://ixa2.si.ehu.es/ukb/. The UMLS, MetaMap program and NLM-WSD corpus are available from the National Library of Medicine https://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/, http://mmtx.nlm.nih.gov and http://wsd.nlm.nih.gov. Software to convert the NLM-WSD corpus into a format that can be used by our WSD system is available from http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/∼marks/biomedical_wsd under open source license.

Modeling loosely annotated images using both given and imagined annotations

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Tang, Hong; Boujemaa, Nozha; Chen, Yunhao; Deng, Lei

2011-12-01

In this paper, we present an approach to learn latent semantic analysis models from loosely annotated images for automatic image annotation and indexing. The given annotation in training images is loose due to: 1. ambiguous correspondences between visual features and annotated keywords; 2. incomplete lists of annotated keywords. The second reason motivates us to enrich the incomplete annotation in a simple way before learning a topic model. In particular, some ``imagined'' keywords are poured into the incomplete annotation through measuring similarity between keywords in terms of their co-occurrence. Then, both given and imagined annotations are employed to learn probabilistic topic models for automatically annotating new images. We conduct experiments on two image databases (i.e., Corel and ESP) coupled with their loose annotations, and compare the proposed method with state-of-the-art discrete annotation methods. The proposed method improves word-driven probability latent semantic analysis (PLSA-words) up to a comparable performance with the best discrete annotation method, while a merit of PLSA-words is still kept, i.e., a wider semantic range.

Adapting Web content for low-literacy readers by using lexical elaboration and named entities labeling

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Watanabe, W. M.; Candido, A.; Amâncio, M. A.; De Oliveira, M.; Pardo, T. A. S.; Fortes, R. P. M.; Aluísio, S. M.

2010-12-01

This paper presents an approach for assisting low-literacy readers in accessing Web online information. The "Educational FACILITA" tool is a Web content adaptation tool that provides innovative features and follows more intuitive interaction models regarding accessibility concerns. Especially, we propose an interaction model and a Web application that explore the natural language processing tasks of lexical elaboration and named entity labeling for improving Web accessibility. We report on the results obtained from a pilot study on usability analysis carried out with low-literacy users. The preliminary results show that "Educational FACILITA" improves the comprehension of text elements, although the assistance mechanisms might also confuse users when word sense ambiguity is introduced, by gathering, for a complex word, a list of synonyms with multiple meanings. This fact evokes a future solution in which the correct sense for a complex word in a sentence is identified, solving this pervasive characteristic of natural languages. The pilot study also identified that experienced computer users find the tool to be more useful than novice computer users do.

Bilingualism influences inhibitory control in auditory comprehension.

PubMed

Blumenfeld, Henrike K; Marian, Viorica

2011-02-01

Bilinguals have been shown to outperform monolinguals at suppressing task-irrelevant information. The present study aimed to identify how processing linguistic ambiguity during auditory comprehension may be associated with inhibitory control. Monolinguals and bilinguals listened to words in their native language (English) and identified them among four pictures while their eye-movements were tracked. Each target picture (e.g., hamper) appeared together with a similar-sounding within-language competitor picture (e.g., hammer) and two neutral pictures. Following each eye-tracking trial, priming probe trials indexed residual activation of target words, and residual inhibition of competitor words. Eye-tracking showed similar within-language competition across groups; priming showed stronger competitor inhibition in monolinguals than in bilinguals, suggesting differences in how inhibitory control was used to resolve within-language competition. Notably, correlation analyses revealed that inhibition performance on a nonlinguistic Stroop task was related to linguistic competition resolution in bilinguals but not in monolinguals. Together, monolingual-bilingual comparisons suggest that cognitive control mechanisms can be shaped by linguistic experience. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Evidence for bilateral involvement in idiom comprehension: An fMRI study.

PubMed

Zempleni, Monika-Zita; Haverkort, Marco; Renken, Remco; A Stowe, Laurie

2007-02-01

The goal of the current study was to identify the neural substrate of idiom comprehension using fMRI. Idioms are familiar, fixed expressions whose meaning is not dependent on the literal interpretation of the component words. We presented literally plausible idioms in a sentence forcing a figurative or a literal interpretation and contrasted them with sentences containing idioms for which no literal interpretation was available and with unambiguously literal sentences. The major finding of the current study is that figurative comprehension in the case of both ambiguous and unambiguous idioms is supported by bilateral inferior frontal gyri and left middle temporal gyrus. The right middle temporal gyrus is also involved, but seems to exclusively process the ambiguous idioms. Therefore, our data suggest a bilateral neural network underlying figurative comprehension, as opposed to the exclusive participation of the right hemisphere. The data also provide evidence against proposed models of idiom comprehension in which literal processing is by-passed, since figurative processing demanded more resources than literal processing in the language network.

Fifty psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid: a list of inaccurate, misleading, misused, ambiguous, and logically confused words and phrases

PubMed Central

Lilienfeld, Scott O.; Sauvigné, Katheryn C.; Lynn, Steven Jay; Cautin, Robin L.; Latzman, Robert D.; Waldman, Irwin D.

2015-01-01

The goal of this article is to promote clear thinking and clear writing among students and teachers of psychological science by curbing terminological misinformation and confusion. To this end, we present a provisional list of 50 commonly used terms in psychology, psychiatry, and allied fields that should be avoided, or at most used sparingly and with explicit caveats. We provide corrective information for students, instructors, and researchers regarding these terms, which we organize for expository purposes into five categories: inaccurate or misleading terms, frequently misused terms, ambiguous terms, oxymorons, and pleonasms. For each term, we (a) explain why it is problematic, (b) delineate one or more examples of its misuse, and (c) when pertinent, offer recommendations for preferable terms. By being more judicious in their use of terminology, psychologists and psychiatrists can foster clearer thinking in their students and the field at large regarding mental phenomena. PMID:26284019

Rapid fast-mapping abilities in 2-year-olds.

PubMed

Spiegel, Chad; Halberda, Justin

2011-05-01

Learning a new word consists of two primary tasks that have often been conflated into a single process: referent selection, in which a child must determine the correct referent of a novel label, and referent retention, which is the ability to store this newly formed label-object mapping in memory for later use. In addition, children must be capable of performing these tasks rapidly and repeatedly as they are frequently exposed to novel words during the course of natural conversation. Here we used a preferential pointing task to investigate 2-year-olds' (N=72) ability to infer the referent of a novel noun from a single ambiguous exposure and their ability to retain this mapping over time. Children were asked to identify the referent of a novel label on six critical trials distributed throughout the course of a 10-min study involving many familiar and novel objects. On these critical trials, images of a known object and a novel object (e.g., a ball and a nameless artifact constructed in the laboratory) appeared on two computer screens and a voice asked children to "point at the _____ [e.g., glark]." Following label onset, children were allowed only 3s during which to infer the correct referent, point at it, and potentially store this new word-object mapping. In a final posttest trial, all previously labeled novel objects appeared and children were asked to point to one of them (e.g., "Can you find the glark?"). To succeed, children needed to have initially mapped the novel labels correctly and retained these mappings over the course of the study. Despite the difficult demands of the current task, children successfully identified the target object on the retention trial. We conclude that 2-year-olds are able to fast map novel nouns during a brief single exposure under ambiguous labeling conditions. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The influence of rTMS over prefrontal and motor areas in a morphological task: grammatical vs. semantic effects.

PubMed

Gerfo, Emanuele Lo; Oliveri, Massimiliano; Torriero, Sara; Salerno, Silvia; Koch, Giacomo; Caltagirone, Carlo

2008-01-31

We investigated the differential role of two frontal regions in the processing of grammatical and semantic knowledge. Given the documented specificity of the prefrontal cortex for the grammatical class of verbs, and of the primary motor cortex for the semantic class of action words, we sought to investigate whether the prefrontal cortex is also sensitive to semantic effects, and whether the motor cortex is also sensitive to grammatical class effects. We used repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to suppress the excitability of a portion of left prefontal cortex (first experiment) and of the motor area (second experiment). In the first experiment we found that rTMS applied to the left prefrontal cortex delays the processing of action verbs' retrieval, but is not critical for retrieval of state verbs and state nouns. In the second experiment we found that rTMS applied to the left motor cortex delays the processing of action words, both name and verbs, while it is not critical for the processing of state words. These results support the notion that left prefrontal and motor cortex are involved in the process of action word retrieval. Left prefrontal cortex subserves processing of both grammatical and semantic information, whereas motor cortex contributes to the processing of semantic representation of action words without any involvement in the representation of grammatical categories.

Rational-emotive behavior therapy and the formation of stimulus equivalence classes.

PubMed

Plaud, J J; Gaither, G A; Weller, L A; Bigwood, S J; Barth, J; von Duvillard, S P

1998-08-01

Stimulus equivalence is a behavioral approach to analyzing the "meaning" of stimulus sets and has an implication for clinical psychology. The formation of three-member (A --> B --> C) stimulus equivalence classes was used to investigate the effects of three different sets of sample and comparison stimuli on emergent behavior. The three stimulus sets were composed of Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT)-related words, non-REBT emotionally charged words, and a third category of neutral words composed of flower labels. Sixty-two women and men participated in a modified matching-to-sample experiment. Using a mixed cross-over design, and controlling for serial order effects, participants received conditional training and emergent relationship training in the three stimulus set conditions. Results revealed a significant interaction between the formation of stimulus equivalence classes and stimulus meaning, indicating consistently biased responding in favor of reaching criterion responding more slowly for REBT-related and non-REBT emotionally charged words. Results were examined in the context of an analysis of the importance of stimulus meaning on behavior and the relation of stimulus meaning to behavioral and cognitive theories, with special appraisal given to the influence of fear-related discriminative stimuli on behavior.

A Selective Deficit in Phonetic Recalibration by Text in Developmental Dyslexia.

PubMed

Keetels, Mirjam; Bonte, Milene; Vroomen, Jean

2018-01-01

Upon hearing an ambiguous speech sound, listeners may adjust their perceptual interpretation of the speech input in accordance with contextual information, like accompanying text or lipread speech (i.e., phonetic recalibration; Bertelson et al., 2003). As developmental dyslexia (DD) has been associated with reduced integration of text and speech sounds, we investigated whether this deficit becomes manifest when text is used to induce this type of audiovisual learning. Adults with DD and normal readers were exposed to ambiguous consonants halfway between /aba/ and /ada/ together with text or lipread speech. After this audiovisual exposure phase, they categorized auditory-only ambiguous test sounds. Results showed that individuals with DD, unlike normal readers, did not use text to recalibrate their phoneme categories, whereas their recalibration by lipread speech was spared. Individuals with DD demonstrated similar deficits when ambiguous vowels (halfway between /wIt/ and /wet/) were recalibrated by text. These findings indicate that DD is related to a specific letter-speech sound association deficit that extends over phoneme classes (vowels and consonants), but - as lipreading was spared - does not extend to a more general audio-visual integration deficit. In particular, these results highlight diminished reading-related audiovisual learning in addition to the commonly reported phonological problems in developmental dyslexia.

Link-topic model for biomedical abbreviation disambiguation.

PubMed

Kim, Seonho; Yoon, Juntae

2015-02-01

The ambiguity of biomedical abbreviations is one of the challenges in biomedical text mining systems. In particular, the handling of term variants and abbreviations without nearby definitions is a critical issue. In this study, we adopt the concepts of topic of document and word link to disambiguate biomedical abbreviations. We newly suggest the link topic model inspired by the latent Dirichlet allocation model, in which each document is perceived as a random mixture of topics, where each topic is characterized by a distribution over words. Thus, the most probable expansions with respect to abbreviations of a given abstract are determined by word-topic, document-topic, and word-link distributions estimated from a document collection through the link topic model. The model allows two distinct modes of word generation to incorporate semantic dependencies among words, particularly long form words of abbreviations and their sentential co-occurring words; a word can be generated either dependently on the long form of the abbreviation or independently. The semantic dependency between two words is defined as a link and a new random parameter for the link is assigned to each word as well as a topic parameter. Because the link status indicates whether the word constitutes a link with a given specific long form, it has the effect of determining whether a word forms a unigram or a skipping/consecutive bigram with respect to the long form. Furthermore, we place a constraint on the model so that a word has the same topic as a specific long form if it is generated in reference to the long form. Consequently, documents are generated from the two hidden parameters, i.e. topic and link, and the most probable expansion of a specific abbreviation is estimated from the parameters. Our model relaxes the bag-of-words assumption of the standard topic model in which the word order is neglected, and it captures a richer structure of text than does the standard topic model by considering unigrams and semantically associated bigrams simultaneously. The addition of semantic links improves the disambiguation accuracy without removing irrelevant contextual words and reduces the parameter space of massive skipping or consecutive bigrams. The link topic model achieves 98.42% disambiguation accuracy on 73,505 MEDLINE abstracts with respect to 21 three letter abbreviations and their 139 distinct long forms. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Talk this way: the effect of prosodically conveyed semantic information on memory for novel words.

PubMed

Shintel, Hadas; Anderson, Nathan L; Fenn, Kimberly M

2014-08-01

Speakers modulate their prosody to express not only emotional information but also semantic information (e.g., raising pitch for upward motion). Moreover, this information can help listeners infer meaning. Work investigating the communicative role of prosodically conveyed meaning has focused on reference resolution, and potential mnemonic benefits remain unexplored. We investigated the effect of prosody on memory for the meaning of novel words, even when it conveys superfluous information. Participants heard novel words, produced with congruent or incongruent prosody, and viewed image pairs representing the intended meaning and its antonym (e.g., a small and a large dog). Importantly, an arrow indicated the image representing the intended meaning, resolving the ambiguity. Participants then completed 2 memory tests, either immediately after learning or after a 24-hr delay, on which they chose an image (out of a new image pair) and a definition that best represented the word. On the image test, memory was similar on the immediate test, but incongruent prosody led to greater loss over time. On the definition test, memory was better for congruent prosody at both times. Results suggest that listeners extract semantic information from prosody even when it is redundant and that prosody can enhance memory, beyond its role in comprehension. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved.

Heterogeneous Concurrent Modeling and Design in Java (Volume 2: Ptolemy II Software Architecture)

DTIC Science & Technology

2008-04-01

file (EPS) suitable for inclusion in word processors. The image in figure 7.3 is such an EPS file imported into FrameMaker . At this time, the EPS...can be imported into word processors. This figure was imported into FrameMaker . 152 Ptolemy II Plot Package 7.2.4 Modifying the format You can control...FixToken class 57 FrameMaker 149 full name 4 function closures 59 function dependency 48 FunctionDependency class 48 FunctionToken 122 FunctionToken

On the reality of the conjunction fallacy.

PubMed

Sides, Ashley; Osherson, Daniel; Bonini, Nicolao; Viale, Riccardo

2002-03-01

Attributing higher "probability" to a sentence of form p-and-q, relative to p, is a reasoning fallacy only if (1) the word probability carries its modern, technical meaning and (2) the sentence p is interpreted as a conjunct of the conjunction p-and-q. Legitimate doubts arise about both conditions in classic demonstrations of the conjunction fallacy. We used betting paradigms and unambiguously conjunctive statements to reduce these sources of ambiguity about conjunctive reasoning. Despite the precautions, conjunction fallacies were as frequent under betting instructions as under standard probability instructions.

Word Learning and Attention Allocation Based on Word Class and Category Knowledge

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hupp, Julie M.

2015-01-01

Attention allocation in word learning may vary developmentally based on the novelty of the object. It has been suggested that children differentially learn verbs based on the novelty of the agent, but adults do not because they automatically infer the object's category and thus treat it like a familiar object. The current research examined…

The Impact of Topic Interest, L2 Proficiency, and Gender on EFL Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition through Reading

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lee, Sunjung; Pulido, Diana

2017-01-01

This study investigated the impact of topic interest, alongside L2 proficiency and gender, on L2 vocabulary acquisition through reading. A repeated-measures design was used with 135 Korean EFL students. Control variables included topic familiarity, prior target-word knowledge, and target-word difficulty (word length, class, and concreteness).…

Evaluating a Bilingual Text-Mining System with a Taxonomy of Key Words and Hierarchical Visualization for Understanding Learner-Generated Text

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kong, Siu Cheung; Li, Ping; Song, Yanjie

2018-01-01

This study evaluated a bilingual text-mining system, which incorporated a bilingual taxonomy of key words and provided hierarchical visualization, for understanding learner-generated text in the learning management systems through automatic identification and counting of matching key words. A class of 27 in-service teachers studied a course…

The Word Writing CAFE: Assessing Student Writing for Complexity, Accuracy, and Fluency

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Leal, Dorothy J.

2005-01-01

The Word Writing CAFE is a new assessment tool designed for teachers to evaluate objectively students' word-writing ability for fluency, accuracy, and complexity. It is designed to be given to the whole class at one time. This article describes the development of the CAFE and provides directions for administering and scoring it. The author also…

Resolving the observer reference class problem in cosmology

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Friederich, Simon

2017-06-01

The assumption that we are typical observers plays a core role in attempts to make multiverse theories empirically testable. A widely shared worry about this assumption is that it suffers from systematic ambiguity concerning the reference class of observers with respect to which typicality is assumed. As a way out, Srednicki and Hartle recommend that we empirically test typicality with respect to different candidate reference classes in analogy to how we test physical theories. Unfortunately, as this paper argues, this idea fails because typicality is not the kind of assumption that can be subjected to empirical tests. As an alternative, a background information constraint on observer reference class choice is suggested according to which the observer reference class should be chosen such that it includes precisely those observers who one could possibly be, given one's assumed background information.

Bootstrapping language acquisition.

PubMed

Abend, Omri; Kwiatkowski, Tom; Smith, Nathaniel J; Goldwater, Sharon; Steedman, Mark

2017-07-01

The semantic bootstrapping hypothesis proposes that children acquire their native language through exposure to sentences of the language paired with structured representations of their meaning, whose component substructures can be associated with words and syntactic structures used to express these concepts. The child's task is then to learn a language-specific grammar and lexicon based on (probably contextually ambiguous, possibly somewhat noisy) pairs of sentences and their meaning representations (logical forms). Starting from these assumptions, we develop a Bayesian probabilistic account of semantically bootstrapped first-language acquisition in the child, based on techniques from computational parsing and interpretation of unrestricted text. Our learner jointly models (a) word learning: the mapping between components of the given sentential meaning and lexical words (or phrases) of the language, and (b) syntax learning: the projection of lexical elements onto sentences by universal construction-free syntactic rules. Using an incremental learning algorithm, we apply the model to a dataset of real syntactically complex child-directed utterances and (pseudo) logical forms, the latter including contextually plausible but irrelevant distractors. Taking the Eve section of the CHILDES corpus as input, the model simulates several well-documented phenomena from the developmental literature. In particular, the model exhibits syntactic bootstrapping effects (in which previously learned constructions facilitate the learning of novel words), sudden jumps in learning without explicit parameter setting, acceleration of word-learning (the "vocabulary spurt"), an initial bias favoring the learning of nouns over verbs, and one-shot learning of words and their meanings. The learner thus demonstrates how statistical learning over structured representations can provide a unified account for these seemingly disparate phenomena. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Phonological similarity influences word learning in adults learning Spanish as a foreign language

PubMed Central

Stamer, Melissa K.; Vitevitch, Michael S.

2013-01-01

Neighborhood density—the number of words that sound similar to a given word (Luce & Pisoni, 1998)—influences word-learning in native English speaking children and adults (Storkel, 2004; Storkel, Armbruster, & Hogan, 2006): novel words with many similar sounding English words (i.e., dense neighborhood) are learned more quickly than novel words with few similar sounding English words (i.e., sparse neighborhood). The present study examined how neighborhood density influences word-learning in native English speaking adults learning Spanish as a foreign language. Students in their third-semester of Spanish language classes learned advanced Spanish words that sounded similar to many known Spanish words (i.e., dense neighborhood) or sounded similar to few known Spanish words (i.e., sparse neighborhood). In three word-learning tasks, performance was better for Spanish words with dense rather than sparse neighborhoods. These results suggest that a similar mechanism may be used to learn new words in a native and a foreign language. PMID:23950692

Mood volatility with rumination but neither attentional nor interpretation biases in chronic fatigue syndrome.

PubMed

Martin, Maryanne; Alexeeva, Iana

2010-11-01

This study tested whether (1) chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) individuals have a bias in the initial orientation of attention to illness-related information, which is enhanced by rumination. (2) CFS individuals have an illness interpretation bias (IB) in their early automatic processing of ambiguous information. (3) CFS individuals experience a greater degree of mood fluctuation following rumination and distraction inductions. Thirty-three CFS participants who had received a medical practitioner's diagnosis of CFS were compared to 33 healthy matched controls on an exogenous cueing task and a lexical decision task. All participants underwent either a rumination or distraction induction. They then completed an exogenous cueing task to assess bias to illness and social threat compared with neutral stimuli, as well as a lexical decision task to assess their interpretation of ambiguous words having illness, social threat, or neutral interpretations. Reaction time data revealed that CFS individuals did not have an attentional bias (AB) in the initial orientation of attention to illness-related material. Nor was there an IB towards illness in CFS individual's automatic response to ambiguous information. However, as hypothesized, CFS individuals showed a greater degree of mood fluctuation following the rumination/distraction induction. Rumination and distraction lead to greater mood volatility in CFS individuals than in controls, but not to attentional nor interpretation biases in the early automatic stages of information processing in CFS individuals.

Literacy Profiles of At-Risk Young Adults Enrolled in Career and Technical Education

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mellard, Daryl F.; Woods, Kari L.; Lee, Jae Hoon

2016-01-01

A latent profile analysis of 323 economically and academically at-risk adolescent and young adult learners yielded two classes: an average literacy class (92%) and a low literacy class (8%). The class profiles significantly differed in their word reading and math skills, and in their processing speeds and self-reported learning disabilities. The…

The Relationship between Student Motivation and Class Engagement Levels

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Nayir, Funda

2017-01-01

Purpose: Student engagement and interest in class are important conditions for active learning. For this they must be highly motivated. In other words, students who have high motivation make an effort to be engaged in class. Thus, knowing students' motivation level is important for active engagement in class. The aim of the present study is to…

The quantization of the chiral Schwinger model based on the BFT - BFV formalism

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kim, Won T.; Kim, Yong-Wan; Park, Mu-In; Park, Young-Jai; Yoon, Sean J.

1997-03-01

We apply the newly improved Batalin - Fradkin - Tyutin (BFT) Hamiltonian method to the chiral Schwinger model in the case of the regularization ambiguity a>1. We show that one can systematically construct the first class constraints by the BFT Hamiltonian method, and also show that the well-known Dirac brackets of the original phase space variables are exactly the Poisson brackets of the corresponding modified fields in the extended phase space. Furthermore, we show that the first class Hamiltonian is simply obtained by replacing the original fields in the canonical Hamiltonian by these modified fields. Performing the momentum integrations, we obtain the corresponding first class Lagrangian in the configuration space.

Large-scale weakly supervised object localization via latent category learning.

PubMed

Chong Wang; Kaiqi Huang; Weiqiang Ren; Junge Zhang; Maybank, Steve

2015-04-01

Localizing objects in cluttered backgrounds is challenging under large-scale weakly supervised conditions. Due to the cluttered image condition, objects usually have large ambiguity with backgrounds. Besides, there is also a lack of effective algorithm for large-scale weakly supervised localization in cluttered backgrounds. However, backgrounds contain useful latent information, e.g., the sky in the aeroplane class. If this latent information can be learned, object-background ambiguity can be largely reduced and background can be suppressed effectively. In this paper, we propose the latent category learning (LCL) in large-scale cluttered conditions. LCL is an unsupervised learning method which requires only image-level class labels. First, we use the latent semantic analysis with semantic object representation to learn the latent categories, which represent objects, object parts or backgrounds. Second, to determine which category contains the target object, we propose a category selection strategy by evaluating each category's discrimination. Finally, we propose the online LCL for use in large-scale conditions. Evaluation on the challenging PASCAL Visual Object Class (VOC) 2007 and the large-scale imagenet large-scale visual recognition challenge 2013 detection data sets shows that the method can improve the annotation precision by 10% over previous methods. More importantly, we achieve the detection precision which outperforms previous results by a large margin and can be competitive to the supervised deformable part model 5.0 baseline on both data sets.

Word comprehension facilitates object individuation in 10- and 11-month-old infants.

PubMed

Rivera, Susan M; Zawaydeh, Aseen Nancie

2007-05-18

The present study investigated the role that comprehending words for objects plays in 10- and 11-month-old infants' ability to individuate those objects in a spatiotemporally ambiguous event. To do this, we employed an object individuation task in which infants were familiarized to two objects coming in and out from behind a screen in alternation, and then the screen was removed to reveal either both or only one of the objects. Results show that only when 10- and 11-month-olds comprehend words for both objects seen do they exhibit looking behavior that is consistent with object individuation (i.e., looking longer when one of the objects is surreptitiously removed). Neither level of object permanence reasoning nor overall receptive vocabulary had an effect on performance in the object individuation task, indicating that the effect was specific to the immediate parameters of the situation, and not a function of overall precocity on the part of the succeeding infants. These results suggest that comprehending the words for occluded/disoccluded objects provides a kind of "glue" which allows infants to bind the mental index of an object with its perceptual features (thus precipitating the formation of two mental indexes, rather than one). They further suggest that a shift from object indexing driven by the where (dorsal) system to one which is driven by integration of the ventral and dorsal neural systems, usually not observed until 12 months of age, can be facilitated by word comprehension in 10- and 11-month-old infants.

Critical Disability Studies and Socially Just Change in Higher Education

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Liasidou, Anastasia

2014-01-01

Social justice is an ambiguous and contested term that is evoked in order to address issues of enhancing participation and eliminating discrimination across various markers of difference linked to race, social class, and so on. Historically, disability has been excluded from these analyses because it has been cast in the sphere of abnormality and…

School Bullying and Fitting into the Peer Landscape: A Grounded Theory Field Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Thornberg, Robert

2018-01-01

Research on school bullying has its roots in the field of developmental and educational psychology, and appeals to the need for a theoretical and methodological widening in order to grasp its ambiguity and complexity. The article draws on ethnographic fieldwork in which 144 pupils and seven teachers participated from seven school classes in three…

A Hunt for Tennyson: Teaching Poetry through Painting.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lask-Spinac, Sabina

Tennyson's poem "The Lady of Shalott" and Holman Hunt's painting of the same subject are excellent examples of the value of exploring poetry through painting. One of the biggest questions raised in relation to the poem's theme is the problem of its ambiguity. By looking at the painting in class, one can sense the lack of definite…

When emotions are expressed figuratively: Psycholinguistic and Affective Norms of 619 Idioms for German (PANIG).

PubMed

Citron, Francesca M M; Cacciari, Cristina; Kucharski, Michael; Beck, Luna; Conrad, Markus; Jacobs, Arthur M

2016-03-01

Despite flourishing research on the relationship between emotion and literal language, and despite the pervasiveness of figurative expressions in communication, the role of figurative language in conveying affect has been underinvestigated. This study provides affective and psycholinguistic norms for 619 German idiomatic expressions and explores the relationships between affective and psycholinguistic idiom properties. German native speakers rated each idiom for emotional valence, arousal, familiarity, semantic transparency, figurativeness, and concreteness. They also described the figurative meaning of each idiom and rated how confident they were about the attributed meaning. The results showed that idioms rated high in valence were also rated high in arousal. Negative idioms were rated as more arousing than positive ones, in line with results from single words. Furthermore, arousal correlated positively with figurativeness (supporting the idea that figurative expressions are more emotionally engaging than literal expressions) and with concreteness and semantic transparency. This suggests that idioms may convey a more direct reference to sensory representations, mediated by the meanings of their constituting words. Arousal correlated positively with familiarity. In addition, positive idioms were rated as more familiar than negative idioms. Finally, idioms without a literal counterpart were rated as more emotionally valenced and arousing than idioms with a literal counterpart. Although the meanings of ambiguous idioms were less correctly defined than those of unambiguous idioms, ambiguous idioms were rated as more concrete than unambiguous ones. We also discuss the relationships between the various psycholinguistic variables characterizing idioms, with reference to the literature on idiom structure and processing.

Aging and Individual Differences in Binding During Sentence Understanding: Evidence from Temporary and Global Syntactic Attachment Ambiguities

PubMed Central

Payne, Brennan R.; Grison, Sarah; Gao, Xuefei; Christianson, Kiel; Morrow, Daniel G.; Stine-Morrow, Elizabeth A. L.

2013-01-01

We report an investigation of aging and individual differences in binding information during sentence understanding. An age-continuous sample of adults (N = 91), ranging from 18 to 81 years of age, read sentences in which a relative clause could be attached high to a head noun NP1, attached low to its modifying prepositional phrase NP2 (e.g., The son of the princess who scratched himself / herself in public was humiliated), or in which the attachment site of the relative clause was ultimately indeterminate (e.g., The maid of the princess who scratched herself in public was humiliated). Word-by-word reading times and comprehension (e.g., who scratched?) were measured. A series of mixed-effects models were fit to the data, revealing: (1) that, on average, NP1-attached sentences were harder to process and comprehend than NP2-attached sentences; (2) that these average effects were independently moderated by verbal working memory capacity and reading experience, with effects that were most pronounced in the oldest participants and; (3) that readers on average did not allocate extra time to resolve global ambiguities, though older adults with higher working memory span did. Findings are discussed in relation to current models of lifespan cognitive development, working memory, language experience, and the role of prosodic segmentation strategies in reading. Collectively, these data suggest that aging brings differences in sentence understanding, and these differences may depend on independent influences of verbal working memory capacity and reading experience. PMID:24291806

Aging and individual differences in binding during sentence understanding: evidence from temporary and global syntactic attachment ambiguities.

PubMed

Payne, Brennan R; Grison, Sarah; Gao, Xuefei; Christianson, Kiel; Morrow, Daniel G; Stine-Morrow, Elizabeth A L

2014-02-01

We report an investigation of aging and individual differences in binding information during sentence understanding. An age-continuous sample of adults (N=91), ranging from 18 to 81 years of age, read sentences in which a relative clause could be attached high to a head noun NP1, attached low to its modifying prepositional phrase NP2 (e.g., The son of the princess who scratched himself/herself in public was humiliated), or in which the attachment site of the relative clause was ultimately indeterminate (e.g., The maid of the princess who scratched herself in public was humiliated). Word-by-word reading times and comprehension (e.g., who scratched?) were measured. A series of mixed-effects models were fit to the data, revealing: (1) that, on average, NP1-attached sentences were harder to process and comprehend than NP2-attached sentences; (2) that these average effects were independently moderated by verbal working memory capacity and reading experience, with effects that were most pronounced in the oldest participants and; (3) that readers on average did not allocate extra time to resolve global ambiguities, though older adults with higher working memory span did. Findings are discussed in relation to current models of lifespan cognitive development, working memory, language experience, and the role of prosodic segmentation strategies in reading. Collectively, these data suggest that aging brings differences in sentence understanding, and these differences may depend on independent influences of verbal working memory capacity and reading experience. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

An ERP study on hostile attribution bias in aggressive and nonaggressive individuals.

PubMed

Gagnon, Jean; Aubin, Mercédès; Emond, Fannie Carrier; Derguy, Sophie; Brochu, Alex Fernet; Bessette, Monique; Jolicoeur, Pierre

2017-05-01

Hostile attribution bias (e.g., tendency to interpret the intention of others as hostile in ambiguous social contexts) has been associated with impulsive aggression in adults, but the results are mixed and the complete sequence of hostile inferential processes leading to aggression has not been investigated yet. The goal of this event-related brain potentials (ERPs) study was to track the neural activity associated with the violation of expectations about hostile versus nonhostile intentions in aggressive and nonaggressive individuals and examine how this neural activity relates to self-reported hostile attributional bias and impulsive aggression in real life. To this end, scenarios with a hostile versus nonhostile social context followed by a character's ambiguous aversive behavior were presented to readers, and ERPs to critical words that specified the hostile versus nonhostile intent behind the behavior were analysed. Thirty-seven aggressive and fifty nonaggressive individuals participated in the study. The presentation of a critical word that violated hostile expectation caused an N400 response that was significantly larger in aggressive than nonaggressive individuals. Results also showed an enhanced late positive potential-like component in aggressive individuals when hostile intention scenarios took place in a nonhostile context, which is associated with impulsive aggression in real life even after having controlled for the effect of self-reported hostile attributional bias. The Hostile Expectancy Violation paradigm evaluated in this study represents a promising tool to investigate the relationship between the online processing of hostile intent in others and impulsive aggression. Aggr. Behav. 43:217-229, 2017. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Modulation of the electrophysiological correlates of retrieval cue processing by the specificity of task demands.

PubMed

Johnson, Jeffrey D; Rugg, Michael D

2006-02-03

Retrieval orientation refers to the differential processing of retrieval cues according to the type of information sought from memory (e.g., words vs. pictures). In the present study, event-related potentials (ERPs) were employed to investigate whether the neural correlates of differential retrieval orientations are sensitive to the specificity of the retrieval demands of the test task. In separate study-test phases, subjects encoded lists of intermixed words and pictures, and then undertook one of two retrieval tests, in both of which the retrieval cues were exclusively words. In the recognition test, subjects performed 'old/new' discriminations on the test items, and old items corresponded to only one class of studied material (words or pictures). In the exclusion test, old items corresponded to both classes of study material, and subjects were required to respond 'old' only to test items corresponding to a designated class of material. Thus, demands for retrieval specificity were greater in the exclusion test than during recognition. ERPs elicited by correctly classified new items in the two types of test were contrasted according to whether words or pictures were the sought-for material. Material-dependent ERP effects were evident in both tests, but the effects onset earlier and offset later in the exclusion test. The findings suggest that differential processing of retrieval cues, and hence the adoption of differential retrieval orientations, varies according to the specificity of the retrieval goal.

Making Class Size Work in the Middle Grades

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tienken, C. H.; Achilles, C. M.

2006-01-01

Most research on the positive effects of class-size reduction (CSR) has occurred in the elementary level (Word, Johnston, Bain, Fulton, Zaharias, Lintz, Achilles, Folger, & Breda, 1990; Molnar, Smith, Zahorik, Palmer, Halbach, & Ehrle, 1999). Is CSR an important variable in improving education in the middle grades? Can small classes be…

The neural network approximation method for solving multidimensional nonlinear inverse problems of geophysics

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Shimelevich, M. I.; Obornev, E. A.; Obornev, I. E.; Rodionov, E. A.

2017-07-01

The iterative approximation neural network method for solving conditionally well-posed nonlinear inverse problems of geophysics is presented. The method is based on the neural network approximation of the inverse operator. The inverse problem is solved in the class of grid (block) models of the medium on a regularized parameterization grid. The construction principle of this grid relies on using the calculated values of the continuity modulus of the inverse operator and its modifications determining the degree of ambiguity of the solutions. The method provides approximate solutions of inverse problems with the maximal degree of detail given the specified degree of ambiguity with the total number of the sought parameters n × 103 of the medium. The a priori and a posteriori estimates of the degree of ambiguity of the approximated solutions are calculated. The work of the method is illustrated by the example of the three-dimensional (3D) inversion of the synthesized 2D areal geoelectrical (audio magnetotelluric sounding, AMTS) data corresponding to the schematic model of a kimberlite pipe.

Influence of Reading Material Characteristics on Study Time for Pre-Class Quizzes in a Flipped Classroom

PubMed Central

Hogg, Abigail

2017-01-01

Objective. To examine how instructor-developed reading material relates to pre-class time spent preparing for the readiness assurance process (RAP) in a team-based learning (TBL) course. Methods. Students within pharmacokinetics and physiology were asked to self-report the amount of time spent studying for the RAP. Correlation analysis and multilevel linear regression techniques were used to identify factors within the pre-class reading material that contribute to self-reported study time. Results. On average students spent 3.2 hours preparing for a section of material in the TBL format. The ratio of predicted reading time, based on reading speed and word count, and self-reported study time was greater than 1:3. Self-reported study time was positively correlated with word count, number of tables and figures, and overall page length. For predictors of self-reported study time, topic difficulty and number of figures were negative predictors whereas word count and number of self-assessments were positive predictors. Conclusion. Factors related to reading material are moderate predictors of self-reported student study time for an accountability assessment. A more significant finding is student self-reported study time is much greater than the time predicted by simple word count. PMID:28970604

Influence of Reading Material Characteristics on Study Time for Pre-Class Quizzes in a Flipped Classroom.

PubMed

Persky, Adam M; Hogg, Abigail

2017-08-01

Objective. To examine how instructor-developed reading material relates to pre-class time spent preparing for the readiness assurance process (RAP) in a team-based learning (TBL) course. Methods. Students within pharmacokinetics and physiology were asked to self-report the amount of time spent studying for the RAP. Correlation analysis and multilevel linear regression techniques were used to identify factors within the pre-class reading material that contribute to self-reported study time. Results. On average students spent 3.2 hours preparing for a section of material in the TBL format. The ratio of predicted reading time, based on reading speed and word count, and self-reported study time was greater than 1:3. Self-reported study time was positively correlated with word count, number of tables and figures, and overall page length. For predictors of self-reported study time, topic difficulty and number of figures were negative predictors whereas word count and number of self-assessments were positive predictors. Conclusion. Factors related to reading material are moderate predictors of self-reported student study time for an accountability assessment. A more significant finding is student self-reported study time is much greater than the time predicted by simple word count.

Cheap Words: A Paperback Dictionary Roundup.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kister, Ken

1979-01-01

Surveys currently available paperback editions in three classes of dictionaries: collegiate, abridged, and pocket. A general discussion distinguishes among the classes and offers seven consumer tips, followed by an annotated listing of dictionaries now available. (SW)

Pathway Evidence of How Musical Perception Predicts Word-Level Reading Ability in Children with Reading Difficulties

PubMed Central

Cogo-Moreira, Hugo; Brandão de Ávila, Clara Regina; Ploubidis, George B.; de Jesus Mari, Jair

2013-01-01

Objective To investigate whether specific domains of musical perception (temporal and melodic domains) predict the word-level reading skills of eight- to ten-year-old children (n = 235) with reading difficulties, normal quotient of intelligence, and no previous exposure to music education classes. Method A general-specific solution of the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA), which underlies a musical perception construct and is constituted by three latent factors (the general, temporal, and the melodic domain), was regressed on word-level reading skills (rate of correct isolated words/non-words read per minute). Results General and melodic latent domains predicted word-level reading skills. PMID:24358358

OCR Scanners Facilitate WP Training in Business Schools and Colleges.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

School Business Affairs, 1983

1983-01-01

Optical Character Recognition Scanners (OCR) scan typed text and feed it directly into word processing systems, saving input time. OCRs are valuable in word processing training programs because they allow more students access to classes and more time for skill training. (MD)

Do You Talk to Your Teacher with that Mouth? "F*ck: A Documentary" and Profanity as a Teaching Tool in the Communication Classroom

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sobre-Denton, Miriam; Simonis, Jana

2012-01-01

The infamous word "fuck" has become one of the most powerful words in the English language. The current research project explores the relationship between language and cultural norms in the university classroom through an analysis of the use of a documentary film on the word "fuck" as a teaching tool in intercultural communication classes. For the…

Nouns, verbs, objects, actions, and abstractions: Local fMRI activity indexes semantics, not lexical categories

PubMed Central

Moseley, Rachel L.; Pulvermüller, Friedemann

2014-01-01

Noun/verb dissociations in the literature defy interpretation due to the confound between lexical category and semantic meaning; nouns and verbs typically describe concrete objects and actions. Abstract words, pertaining to neither, are a critical test case: dissociations along lexical-grammatical lines would support models purporting lexical category as the principle governing brain organisation, whilst semantic models predict dissociation between concrete words but not abstract items. During fMRI scanning, participants read orthogonalised word categories of nouns and verbs, with or without concrete, sensorimotor meaning. Analysis of inferior frontal/insula, precentral and central areas revealed an interaction between lexical class and semantic factors with clear category differences between concrete nouns and verbs but not abstract ones. Though the brain stores the combinatorial and lexical-grammatical properties of words, our data show that topographical differences in brain activation, especially in the motor system and inferior frontal cortex, are driven by semantics and not by lexical class. PMID:24727103

Nouns, verbs, objects, actions, and abstractions: local fMRI activity indexes semantics, not lexical categories.

PubMed

Moseley, Rachel L; Pulvermüller, Friedemann

2014-05-01

Noun/verb dissociations in the literature defy interpretation due to the confound between lexical category and semantic meaning; nouns and verbs typically describe concrete objects and actions. Abstract words, pertaining to neither, are a critical test case: dissociations along lexical-grammatical lines would support models purporting lexical category as the principle governing brain organisation, whilst semantic models predict dissociation between concrete words but not abstract items. During fMRI scanning, participants read orthogonalised word categories of nouns and verbs, with or without concrete, sensorimotor meaning. Analysis of inferior frontal/insula, precentral and central areas revealed an interaction between lexical class and semantic factors with clear category differences between concrete nouns and verbs but not abstract ones. Though the brain stores the combinatorial and lexical-grammatical properties of words, our data show that topographical differences in brain activation, especially in the motor system and inferior frontal cortex, are driven by semantics and not by lexical class. Copyright © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Unfolding Visual Lexical Decision in Time

PubMed Central

Barca, Laura; Pezzulo, Giovanni

2012-01-01

Visual lexical decision is a classical paradigm in psycholinguistics, and numerous studies have assessed the so-called “lexicality effect" (i.e., better performance with lexical than non-lexical stimuli). Far less is known about the dynamics of choice, because many studies measured overall reaction times, which are not informative about underlying processes. To unfold visual lexical decision in (over) time, we measured participants' hand movements toward one of two item alternatives by recording the streaming x,y coordinates of the computer mouse. Participants categorized four kinds of stimuli as “lexical" or “non-lexical:" high and low frequency words, pseudowords, and letter strings. Spatial attraction toward the opposite category was present for low frequency words and pseudowords. Increasing the ambiguity of the stimuli led to greater movement complexity and trajectory attraction to competitors, whereas no such effect was present for high frequency words and letter strings. Results fit well with dynamic models of perceptual decision-making, which describe the process as a competition between alternatives guided by the continuous accumulation of evidence. More broadly, our results point to a key role of statistical decision theory in studying linguistic processing in terms of dynamic and non-modular mechanisms. PMID:22563419

Neuroticism as Distancing: Perceptual Sources of Evidence

PubMed Central

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

2013-01-01

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

2060 Chiron - Colorimetry and cometary behavior

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Hartmann, William K.; Tholen, David J.; Meech, Karen J.; Cruikshank, Dale P.

1990-01-01

Ambiguities concerning the fit of the 2060 Chiron's visible spectrum to its IR spectrum have been resolved by resort to VRIJHK colorimetry obtained in 1988, which also confirms the neutrality of Chiron's taxonomic class C spectrum and indicates that Chiron has anomalously brightened since 1980-1983. This brightening, and one reported in 1978, are consistent with the hypothesis that Chiron sporadically undergoes weak cometary outbursts similar to those of comet P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 1; Chiron is further speculated to be an ice-rich object darkened by C-class carbonaceous soil, and may have been scattered from the Oort cloud in recent solar system history.

Strange Imports: Working-Class Appalachian Women in the Composition Classroom

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fedukovich, Casie

2009-01-01

Valerie Miner muses in "Writing and Teaching with Class:" "I've always carried that Miner suspicion that laboring with words is not real work . . . Should I be doing something useful?" (1993, 74). If working-class academics face uneasy negotiations between their disciplines and their home cultures, which may include deployment…

Benefits of off-campus education for students in the health sciences: a text-mining analysis.

PubMed

Nakagawa, Kazumasa; Asakawa, Yasuyoshi; Yamada, Keiko; Ushikubo, Mitsuko; Yoshida, Tohru; Yamaguchi, Haruyasu

2012-08-28

In Japan, few community-based approaches have been adopted in health-care professional education, and the appropriate content for such approaches has not been clarified. In establishing community-based education for health-care professionals, clarification of its learning effects is required. A community-based educational program was started in 2009 in the health sciences course at Gunma University, and one of the main elements in this program is conducting classes outside school. The purpose of this study was to investigate using text-analysis methods how the off-campus program affects students. In all, 116 self-assessment worksheets submitted by students after participating in the off-campus classes were decomposed into words. The extracted words were carefully selected from the perspective of contained meaning or content. With the selected terms, the relations to each word were analyzed by means of cluster analysis. Cluster analysis was used to select and divide 32 extracted words into four clusters: cluster 1-"actually/direct," "learn/watch/hear," "how," "experience/participation," "local residents," "atmosphere in community-based clinical care settings," "favorable," "communication/conversation," and "study"; cluster 2-"work of staff member" and "role"; cluster 3-"interaction/communication," "understanding," "feel," "significant/important/necessity," and "think"; and cluster 4-"community," "confusing," "enjoyable," "proactive," "knowledge," "academic knowledge," and "class." The students who participated in the program achieved different types of learning through the off-campus classes. They also had a positive impression of the community-based experience and interaction with the local residents, which is considered a favorable outcome. Off-campus programs could be a useful educational approach for students in health sciences.

Verbal Complementizers in Arabic

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ahmed, Hossam Eldin Ibrahim

2015-01-01

A class of Modern Standard Arabic complementizers known as "'?inna' and its sisters" demonstrate unique case and word order restrictions. While CPs in Arabic allow both Subject-Verb (SV) and Verb-Subject (VS) word order and their subjects show nominative morphology, CPs introduced by "?inna" ban a verb from directly following…

Performance Theories for Sentence Coding: Some Quantitative Models

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Aaronson, Doris; And Others

1977-01-01

This study deals with the patterns of word-by-word reading times over a sentence when the subject must code the linguistic information sufficiently for immediate verbatim recall. A class of quantitative models is considered that would account for reading times at phrase breaks. (Author/RM)

Influence of low-molecular-weight glutenin subunit haplotypes on dough rheology in elite common wheat varieties

USDA-ARS?s Scientific Manuscript database

The low molecular weight glutenin subunits (LMW-GSs) are a class of wheat seed storage proteins. They are encoded by a multigene family located at the Glu-3 loci, and their allelic variation strongly influences wheat end-use quality. Due to ambiguities in the LMW-GS allele nomenclature and to the co...

Age effects on acquisition of word stress in Spanish-English bilinguals

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Guion, Susan G.; Clark, J. J.; Harada, Tetsuo

2003-10-01

Based on studies of syntactic and semantic learning, it has been proposed that certain aspects of second language learning may be more adversely affected by delays in language learning than others. Here, this proposal is extended to the phonological domain in which the acquisition of English word stress patterns by early (AOA <6 years) and late (AOA >14 years) Spanish-English bilinguals is investigated. The knowledge of English word stress was investigated by three behavioral tasks. In a production task, participants produced two syllable nonwords in both noun and verb sentence frames. In a perception task, participants indicated a preference for first or last syllable stress on the nonwords. Real words that were phonologically similar to the test items were also collected from each participant. Regression analyses and ANOVAs were conducted to determine the effect of syllable structure, lexical class, and stress pattern of phonologically similar words on the data from the production and perception tasks. Early bilinguals patterned similarly to the native English participants. Late bilinguals showed little evidence of learning prosodically based stress patterns but did show evidence of application of distributional patterns based on lexical class and analogy in stress assignment. [Research supported by NIH.

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

Morris, Karla

Although the high-performance computing (HPC) community increasingly embraces object-oriented programming (OOP), most HPC OOP projects employ the C++ programming language. Until recently, Fortran programmers interested in mining the benefits of OOP had to emulate OOP in Fortran 90/95. The advent of widespread compiler support for Fortran 2003 now facilitates explicitly constructing object-oriented class hierarchies via inheritance and leveraging related class behaviors such as dynamic polymorphism. Although C++ allows a class to inherit from multiple parent classes, Fortran and several other OOP languages restrict or prohibit explicit multiple inheritance relationships in order to circumvent several pitfalls associated with them. Nonetheless, whatmore » appears as an intrinsic feature in one language can be modeled as a user-constructed design pattern in another language. The present paper demonstrates how to apply the facade structural design pattern to support a multiple inheritance class relationship in Fortran 2003. As a result, the design unleashes the power of the associated class relationships for modeling complicated data structures yet avoids the ambiguities that plague some multiple inheritance scenarios.« less

Dorsomedial striatum involvement in regulating conflict between current and presumed outcomes.

PubMed

Mestres-Missé, Anna; Bazin, Pierre-Louis; Trampel, Robert; Turner, Robert; Kotz, Sonja A

2014-09-01

The balance between automatic and controlled processing is essential to human flexible but optimal behavior. On the one hand, the automation of habitual behavior and processing is indispensable, and, on the other hand, strategic processing is needed in light of unexpected, conflicting, or new situations. Using ultra-high-field high-resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging (7T-fMRI), the present study examined the role of subcortical structures in mediating this balance. Participants were asked to judge the congruency of sentences containing a semantically ambiguous or unambiguous word. Ambiguous sentences had three possible resolutions: dominant meaning, subordinate meaning, and incongruent. The dominant interpretation represents the most habitual response, whereas both the subordinate and incongruent options clash with this automatic response, and, hence, require cognitive control. Moreover, the subordinate resolution entails a less expected but correct outcome, while the incongruent condition is simply wrong. The current results reveal the involvement of the anterior dorsomedial striatum in modulating and resolving conflict between actual and expected outcomes, and highlight the importance of cortical and subcortical cooperation in this process. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Using Twitter to Measure Public Discussion of Diseases: A Case Study

PubMed Central

Schwartz, H Andrew; Hill, Shawndra; Merchant, Raina M; Arango, Catalina; Ungar, Lyle

2015-01-01

Background Twitter is increasingly used to estimate disease prevalence, but such measurements can be biased, due to both biased sampling and inherent ambiguity of natural language. Objective We characterized the extent of these biases and how they vary with disease. Methods We correlated self-reported prevalence rates for 22 diseases from Experian’s Simmons National Consumer Study (n=12,305) with the number of times these diseases were mentioned on Twitter during the same period (2012). We also identified and corrected for two types of bias present in Twitter data: (1) demographic variance between US Twitter users and the general US population; and (2) natural language ambiguity, which creates the possibility that mention of a disease name may not actually refer to the disease (eg, “heart attack” on Twitter often does not refer to myocardial infarction). We measured the correlation between disease prevalence and Twitter disease mentions both with and without bias correction. This allowed us to quantify each disease’s overrepresentation or underrepresentation on Twitter, relative to its prevalence. Results Our sample included 80,680,449 tweets. Adjusting disease prevalence to correct for Twitter demographics more than doubles the correlation between Twitter disease mentions and disease prevalence in the general population (from .113 to .258, P <.001). In addition, diseases varied widely in how often mentions of their names on Twitter actually referred to the diseases, from 14.89% (3827/25,704) of instances (for stroke) to 99.92% (5044/5048) of instances (for arthritis). Applying ambiguity correction to our Twitter corpus achieves a correlation between disease mentions and prevalence of .208 ( P <.001). Simultaneously applying correction for both demographics and ambiguity more than triples the baseline correlation to .366 ( P <.001). Compared with prevalence rates, cancer appeared most overrepresented in Twitter, whereas high cholesterol appeared most underrepresented. Conclusions Twitter is a potentially useful tool to measure public interest in and concerns about different diseases, but when comparing diseases, improvements can be made by adjusting for population demographics and word ambiguity. PMID:26925459

Slot Machine Preferences of Pathological and Recreational Gamblers Are Verbally Constructed

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dixon, Mark R.; Bihler, Holly L.; Nastally, Becky L.

2011-01-01

The current study attempted to alter preferences for concurrently available slot machines of equal payout through the development of equivalence classes and subsequent transfers of functions. Participants rated stimuli consisting of words thought to be associated with having a gambling problem (e.g., "desperation" and "debt"), words associated…

More than a Word Cloud

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Filatova, Olga

2016-01-01

Word cloud generating applications were originally designed to add visual attractiveness to posters, websites, slide show presentations, and the like. They can also be an effective tool in reading and writing classes in English as a second language (ESL) for all levels of English proficiency. They can reduce reading time and help to improve…

Reading Coaching for Math Word Problems

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Edwards, Sharon A.; Maloy, Robert W.; Anderson, Gordon

2009-01-01

"Math is language, too," Phyllis and David Whitin (2000) remind everyone in their informative book about reading and writing in the mathematics classroom. This means that students in elementary school math classes are learning two distinct, yet related languages--one of numbers, the other of words. These languages of numbers and words…

Writing in Maths

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Australian Primary Mathematics Classroom, 2009

2009-01-01

Students write definitions or explanations of mathematical words or symbols in their own words. These can be collated and added to as the year progresses to form a class dictionary that all students can access as required, or students could create their own personal dictionaries. This article presents a collection of ideas for incorporating…

From shared contexts to syntactic categories: The role of distributional information in learning linguistic form-classes

PubMed Central

Reeder, Patricia A.; Newport, Elissa L.; Aslin, Richard N.

2012-01-01

A fundamental component of language acquisition involves organizing words into grammatical categories. Previous literature has suggested a number of ways in which this categorization task might be accomplished. Here we ask whether the patterning of the words in a corpus of linguistic input (distributional information) is sufficient, along with a small set of learning biases, to extract these underlying structural categories. In a series of experiments, we show that learners can acquire linguistic form-classes, generalizing from instances of the distributional contexts of individual words in the exposure set to the full range of contexts for all the words in the set. Crucially, we explore how several specific distributional variables enable learners to form a category of lexical items and generalize to novel words, yet also allow for exceptions that maintain lexical specificity. We suggest that learners are sensitive to the contexts of individual words, the overlaps among contexts across words, the non-overlap of contexts (or systematic gaps in information), and the size of the exposure set. We also ask how learners determine the category membership of a new word for which there is very sparse contextual information. We find that, when there are strong category cues and robust category learning of other words, adults readily generalize the distributional properties of the learned category to a new word that shares just one context with the other category members. However, as the distributional cues regarding the category become sparser and contain more consistent gaps, learners show more conservatism in generalizing distributional properties to the novel word. Taken together, these results show that learners are highly systematic in their use of the distributional properties of the input corpus, using them in a principled way to determine when to generalize and when to preserve lexical specificity. PMID:23089290

From shared contexts to syntactic categories: the role of distributional information in learning linguistic form-classes.

PubMed

Reeder, Patricia A; Newport, Elissa L; Aslin, Richard N

2013-02-01

A fundamental component of language acquisition involves organizing words into grammatical categories. Previous literature has suggested a number of ways in which this categorization task might be accomplished. Here we ask whether the patterning of the words in a corpus of linguistic input (distributional information) is sufficient, along with a small set of learning biases, to extract these underlying structural categories. In a series of experiments, we show that learners can acquire linguistic form-classes, generalizing from instances of the distributional contexts of individual words in the exposure set to the full range of contexts for all the words in the set. Crucially, we explore how several specific distributional variables enable learners to form a category of lexical items and generalize to novel words, yet also allow for exceptions that maintain lexical specificity. We suggest that learners are sensitive to the contexts of individual words, the overlaps among contexts across words, the non-overlap of contexts (or systematic gaps in information), and the size of the exposure set. We also ask how learners determine the category membership of a new word for which there is very sparse contextual information. We find that, when there are strong category cues and robust category learning of other words, adults readily generalize the distributional properties of the learned category to a new word that shares just one context with the other category members. However, as the distributional cues regarding the category become sparser and contain more consistent gaps, learners show more conservatism in generalizing distributional properties to the novel word. Taken together, these results show that learners are highly systematic in their use of the distributional properties of the input corpus, using them in a principled way to determine when to generalize and when to preserve lexical specificity. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Freshmen and Five Hundred Words: Investigating Flash Fiction as a Genre for High School Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Batchelor, Katherine E.; King, April

2014-01-01

This article shares two National Writing Project Teacher Consultants' interest in examining student engagement in writing flash fiction using mentor texts. Our two-week unit centered on two high school freshmen classes (one class identified as "at-risk" and another class identified as "college prep"), and we found the use…

Identifying and Predicting Classes of Response to Explicit Phonological Spelling Instruction during Independent Composing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Amtmann, Dagmar; Abbott, Robert D.; Berninger, Virginia W.

2008-01-01

After explicit spelling instruction, low achieving second grade spellers increased the number of correctly spelled words during composing but differed in response trajectories. Class 1 (low initial and slow growth) had the lowest initial performance and improved at a relatively slow rate. Class 2 (high initial and fast growth) started higher than…

Word sense disambiguation in the clinical domain: a comparison of knowledge-rich and knowledge-poor unsupervised methods

PubMed Central

Chasin, Rachel; Rumshisky, Anna; Uzuner, Ozlem; Szolovits, Peter

2014-01-01

Objective To evaluate state-of-the-art unsupervised methods on the word sense disambiguation (WSD) task in the clinical domain. In particular, to compare graph-based approaches relying on a clinical knowledge base with bottom-up topic-modeling-based approaches. We investigate several enhancements to the topic-modeling techniques that use domain-specific knowledge sources. Materials and methods The graph-based methods use variations of PageRank and distance-based similarity metrics, operating over the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). Topic-modeling methods use unlabeled data from the Multiparameter Intelligent Monitoring in Intensive Care (MIMIC II) database to derive models for each ambiguous word. We investigate the impact of using different linguistic features for topic models, including UMLS-based and syntactic features. We use a sense-tagged clinical dataset from the Mayo Clinic for evaluation. Results The topic-modeling methods achieve 66.9% accuracy on a subset of the Mayo Clinic's data, while the graph-based methods only reach the 40–50% range, with a most-frequent-sense baseline of 56.5%. Features derived from the UMLS semantic type and concept hierarchies do not produce a gain over bag-of-words features in the topic models, but identifying phrases from UMLS and using syntax does help. Discussion Although topic models outperform graph-based methods, semantic features derived from the UMLS prove too noisy to improve performance beyond bag-of-words. Conclusions Topic modeling for WSD provides superior results in the clinical domain; however, integration of knowledge remains to be effectively exploited. PMID:24441986

Hierarchical levels of representation in language prediction: The influence of first language acquisition in highly proficient bilinguals.

PubMed

Molinaro, Nicola; Giannelli, Francesco; Caffarra, Sendy; Martin, Clara

2017-07-01

Language comprehension is largely supported by predictive mechanisms that account for the ease and speed with which communication unfolds. Both native and proficient non-native speakers can efficiently handle contextual cues to generate reliable linguistic expectations. However, the link between the variability of the linguistic background of the speaker and the hierarchical format of the representations predicted is still not clear. We here investigate whether native language exposure to typologically highly diverse languages (Spanish and Basque) affects the way early balanced bilingual speakers carry out language predictions. During Spanish sentence comprehension, participants developed predictions of words the form of which (noun ending) could be either diagnostic of grammatical gender values (transparent) or totally ambiguous (opaque). We measured electrophysiological prediction effects time-locked both to the target word and to its determiner, with the former being expected or unexpected. Event-related (N200-N400) and oscillatory activity in the low beta-band (15-17Hz) frequency channel showed that both Spanish and Basque natives optimally carry out lexical predictions independently of word transparency. Crucially, in contrast to Spanish natives, Basque natives displayed visual word form predictions for transparent words, in consistency with the relevance that noun endings (post-nominal suffixes) play in their native language. We conclude that early language exposure largely shapes prediction mechanisms, so that bilinguals reading in their second language rely on the distributional regularities that are highly relevant in their first language. More importantly, we show that individual linguistic experience hierarchically modulates the format of the predicted representation. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Decision-Making Under Risk, but Not Under Ambiguity, Predicts Pathological Gambling in Discrete Types of Abstinent Substance Users.

PubMed

Wilson, Michael J; Vassileva, Jasmin

2018-01-01

This study explored how different forms of reward-based decision-making are associated with pathological gambling (PG) among abstinent individuals with prior dependence on different classes of drugs. Participants had lifetime histories of either "pure" heroin dependence ( n = 64), "pure" amphetamine dependence ( n = 51), or polysubstance dependence ( n = 89), or had no history of substance dependence ( n = 133). Decision-making was assessed via two neurocognitive tasks: (1) the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), a measure of decision-making under ambiguity (i.e., uncertain risk contingencies); and (2) the Cambridge Gambling task (CGT), a measure of decision-making under risk (i.e., explicit risk contingencies). The main effects of neurocognitive performance and drug class on PG (defined as ≥3 DSM-IV PG symptoms) as well as their interactional effects were assessed via multiple linear regression. Two CGT indices of decision-making under risk demonstrated positive main effects on PG. Interaction effects indicated that the effects of decision-making under risk on PG were largely consistent across participant groups. Notably, a linear relationship between greater CGT Risk-Taking and PG symptoms was not observed among amphetamine users, whereas IGT performance was selectively and positively associated with PG in polysubstance users. Overall, results indicate that reward-based decision-making under risk may represent a risk factor for PG across substance users, with some variations in these relationships influenced by specific class of substance of abuse.

Computer Assisted Language Testing: On the Efficacy of Web-Based Approach in the Instruction of Elementary Learners of English

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Soleimani, Maryam; Gahhari, Shima

2012-01-01

In this study the effectiveness and efficacy of e-learning was evaluated through a web based approach. Two classes of elementary learners of English were selected for this study, one class received a six month instruction through the typical twice a week classes and the other one was instructed through internet, in other words, the first class did…

Electrophysiological indices of brain activity to content and function words in discourse.

PubMed

Neumann, Yael; Epstein, Baila; Shafer, Valerie L

2016-09-01

An increase in positivity of event-related potentials (ERPs) at the lateral anterior sites has been hypothesized to be an index of semantic and discourse processing, with the right lateral anterior positivity (LAP) showing particular sensitivity to discourse factors. However, the research investigating the LAP is limited; it is unclear whether the effect is driven by word class (function word versus content word) or by a more general process of structure building triggered by elements of a determiner phrase (DP). To examine the neurophysiological indices of semantic/discourse integration using two different word categories (function versus content word) in the discourse contexts and to contrast processing of these word categories in meaningful versus nonsense contexts. Planned comparisons of ERPs time locked to a function word stimulus 'the' and a content word stimulus 'cats' in sentence-initial position were conducted in both discourse and nonsense contexts to examine the time course of processing following these word forms. A repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) for the Discourse context revealed a significant interaction of condition and site due to greater positivity for 'the' relative to 'cats' at anterior and superior sites. In the Nonsense context, there was a significant interaction of condition, time and site due to greater positivity for 'the' relative to 'cats' at anterior sites from 150 to 350 ms post-stimulus offset and at superior sites from 150 to 200 ms post-stimulus offset. Overall, greater positivity for both 'the' and 'cats' was observed in the discourse relative to the nonsense context beginning approximately 150 ms post-stimulus offset. Additionally, topographical analyses were highly correlated for the two word categories when processing meaningful discourse. This topographical pattern could be characterized as a prominent right LAP. The LAP was attenuated when the target stimulus word initiated a nonsense context. The results of this study support the view that the right LAP is an index of general discourse processing rather than an index of word class. These findings demonstrate that the LAP can be used to study discourse processing in populations with compromised metalinguistic skills, such as adults with aphasia or traumatic brain injury. © 2016 Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.

Making Good Instructors Great: USMC Cognitive Readiness and Instructor Professionalization Initiatives

DTIC Science & Technology

2012-01-01

enhance their classes; these approaches are recom- mended in addition to (not in lieu of) other well-known military scenario-based training methods...Interservice/Industry Training , Simulation, and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) 2012 2012 Paper No. 12185 Making Good Instructors Great: USMC...and ambiguous environments. Each of the US Armed Services is addressing cognitive readiness training differently. The Marine Corps, for in- stance

How the Context Matters. Literal and Figurative Meaning in the Embodied Language Paradigm

PubMed Central

Cuccio, Valentina; Ambrosecchia, Marianna; Ferri, Francesca; Carapezza, Marco; Lo Piparo, Franco; Fogassi, Leonardo; Gallese, Vittorio

2014-01-01

The involvement of the sensorimotor system in language understanding has been widely demonstrated. However, the role of context in these studies has only recently started to be addressed. Though words are bearers of a semantic potential, meaning is the product of a pragmatic process. It needs to be situated in a context to be disambiguated. The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that embodied simulation occurring during linguistic processing is contextually modulated to the extent that the same sentence, depending on the context of utterance, leads to the activation of different effector-specific brain motor areas. In order to test this hypothesis, we asked subjects to give a motor response with the hand or the foot to the presentation of ambiguous idioms containing action-related words when these are preceded by context sentences. The results directly support our hypothesis only in relation to the comprehension of hand-related action sentences. PMID:25531530

Seven Individualized Reading and Study Strategies for Mainstreamed Students in Content Area Classes.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Maring, Gerald H.; Furman, Gail

The paper describes ways in which mainstreamed special education students can engage in individual assignments to master course content. The activities include developing a word parts dictionary which addresses prefixes, roots, and suffixes of the subject area; highlighting the textbook to sort out main ideas, vocabulary words, and supporting…

The Effect of Testing Condition on Word Guessing in Elementary School Children

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mannamaa, Mairi; Kikas, Eve; Raidvee, Aire

2008-01-01

Elementary school children's word guessing is studied, and the results from individual and collective testing conditions are compared. The participants are 764 students from the second, third, and fourth grades (ages 8-11, 541 students from mainstream regular classes and 223 students with learning disabilities). About half of these students are…

Good Talking Words: A Social Communications Skills Program for Preschool and Kindergarten Classes.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Paulson, Lucy Hart; van den Pol, Rick

The "Good Talking Words" program aims to help children develop and demonstrate the social communication skills that are vital to school and life success. It uses an active, direct instructional approach for preschool and kindergarten students that uses language experiences to teach specific, prosocial behaviors that will help children…

Math in Plain English: Literacy Strategies for the Mathematics Classroom

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Benjamin, Amy

2011-01-01

Do word problems and math vocabulary confuse students in your mathematics classes? Do simple keywords like "value" and "portion" seem to mislead them? Many words that students already know can have a different meaning in mathematics. To grasp that difference, students need to connect English literacy skills to math. Successful students speak,…

Improving Elementary Students' Spelling Achievement Using High-Frequency Words.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Durnil, Christina; And Others

An action research study detailed a program for improving spelling achievement across the curriculum. The targeted population is composed of second and third grade students from a growing, middle class community located in a suburb of Chicago, Illinois. The problem of misspelled words in the students' writing was documented through students'…

Increasing Word Recognition Skills in High School Remedial Readers through Systematic Intersensory Transfer.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Silverston, Randall A.; Deichmann, John W.

The purpose of this study was to design and test a remedial reading instructional strategy for word recognition skills utilizing specific intersensory transfer components. The subjects were 56 high school sophomores and juniors enrolled in special education classes. Eight subjects were randomly selected from each of seven special education…

Magical Words

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Strauch-Nelson, Wendy

2007-01-01

Prompted by a parent's comment that indicated a desire for her elementary-age children to learn the elements and principles of design in their art class, the author set out to enrich her own understanding and appreciation of the language used in the art room. Looking at word origins helps students appreciate the significance of art and craft in…

The Reading Process--The Relationship Between Word Recognition and Comprehension.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hays, Warren S.

The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between word recognition and comprehension achieved by second and fifth grade students when reading material at various levels of readability. A random sample of twenty-five second and twenty-five fifth graders, taken from three middle class schools, was administered a…

Spelling: Easing the Student's Anxiety and Improving His/Her Skill.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rabianski, Nancyanne

Because spelling errors affect the writer's word choice and the writer's audience, college students who are otherwise good writers are often placed in remedial English classes. Despite its relationship to audience concerns, word choice, and the physical act of writing, spelling has not been of much concern to composition teachers. Research in the…

A Development of a System Enables Character Input and PC Operation via Voice for a Physically Disabled Person with a Speech Impediment

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Tanioka, Toshimasa; Egashira, Hiroyuki; Takata, Mayumi; Okazaki, Yasuhisa; Watanabe, Kenzi; Kondo, Hiroki

We have designed and implemented a PC operation support system for a physically disabled person with a speech impediment via voice. Voice operation is an effective method for a physically disabled person with involuntary movement of the limbs and the head. We have applied a commercial speech recognition engine to develop our system for practical purposes. Adoption of a commercial engine reduces development cost and will contribute to make our system useful to another speech impediment people. We have customized commercial speech recognition engine so that it can recognize the utterance of a person with a speech impediment. We have restricted the words that the recognition engine recognizes and separated a target words from similar words in pronunciation to avoid misrecognition. Huge number of words registered in commercial speech recognition engines cause frequent misrecognition for speech impediments' utterance, because their utterance is not clear and unstable. We have solved this problem by narrowing the choice of input down in a small number and also by registering their ambiguous pronunciations in addition to the original ones. To realize all character inputs and all PC operation with a small number of words, we have designed multiple input modes with categorized dictionaries and have introduced two-step input in each mode except numeral input to enable correct operation with small number of words. The system we have developed is in practical level. The first author of this paper is physically disabled with a speech impediment. He has been able not only character input into PC but also to operate Windows system smoothly by using this system. He uses this system in his daily life. This paper is written by him with this system. At present, the speech recognition is customized to him. It is, however, possible to customize for other users by changing words and registering new pronunciation according to each user's utterance.

Instructional Note: Microthemes--A Utility Assignment for Any Class

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ferrario, Larry

2005-01-01

This note offers suggestions for using microthemes in diverse classes across the curriculum. Microthemes are short essays (100 to 250 words) that can be used in any class to address any issue. They are so versatile that Ray Smith has called them the "Swiss Army knife of writing assignments" (1) because they have so many applications: they can be…

Notes on the origins of the Educational Terms Class and Curriculum. Discussion Paper.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hamilton, David; And Others

This paper examines the origins of the two educational terms--class and curriculum. The authors believe that an understanding of the origins of key words in education may contribute not only to the history of education but also to the wider development of educational theory. The paper argues that the emergence of classes (in the modern sense)…

Electrophysiology of prosodic and lexical-semantic processing during sentence comprehension in aphasia.

PubMed

Sheppard, Shannon M; Love, Tracy; Midgley, Katherine J; Holcomb, Phillip J; Shapiro, Lewis P

2017-12-01

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to examine how individuals with aphasia and a group of age-matched controls use prosody and themattic fit information in sentences containing temporary syntactic ambiguities. Two groups of individuals with aphasia were investigated; those demonstrating relatively good sentence comprehension whose primary language difficulty is anomia (Individuals with Anomic Aphasia (IWAA)), and those who demonstrate impaired sentence comprehension whose primary diagnosis is Broca's aphasia (Individuals with Broca's Aphasia (IWBA)). The stimuli had early closure syntactic structure and contained a temporary early closure (correct)/late closure (incorrect) syntactic ambiguity. The prosody was manipulated to either be congruent or incongruent, and the temporarily ambiguous NP was also manipulated to either be a plausible or an implausible continuation for the subordinate verb (e.g., "While the band played the song/the beer pleased all the customers."). It was hypothesized that an implausible NP in sentences with incongruent prosody may provide the parser with a plausibility cue that could be used to predict syntactic structure. The results revealed that incongruent prosody paired with a plausibility cue resulted in an N400-P600 complex at the implausible NP (the beer) in both the controls and the IWAAs, yet incongruent prosody without a plausibility cue resulted in an N400-P600 at the critical verb (pleased) only in healthy controls. IWBAs did not show evidence of N400 or P600 effects at the ambiguous NP or critical verb, although they did show evidence of a delayed N400 effect at the sentence-final word in sentences with incongruent prosody. These results suggest that IWAAs have difficulty integrating prosodic cues with underlying syntactic structure when lexical-semantic information is not available to aid their parse. IWBAs have difficulty integrating both prosodic and lexical-semantic cues with syntactic structure, likely due to a processing delay. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Aging and the Statistical Learning of Grammatical Form Classes

PubMed Central

Schwab, Jessica F.; Schuler, Kathryn D.; Stillman, Chelsea M.; Newport, Elissa L.; Howard, James H.; Howard, Darlene V.

2016-01-01

Language learners must place unfamiliar words into categories, often with few explicit indicators about when and how that word can be used grammatically. Reeder, Newport, and Aslin (2013) showed that college students can learn grammatical form classes from an artificial language by relying solely on distributional information (i.e., contextual cues in the input). Here, two experiments revealed that healthy older adults also show such statistical learning, though they are poorer than young at distinguishing grammatical from ungrammatical strings. This finding expands knowledge of which aspects of learning vary with aging, with potential implications for second language learning in late adulthood. PMID:27294711

The modality-specific organization of grammatical categories: evidence from impaired spoken and written sentence production.

PubMed

Rapp, B; Caramazza, A

1997-02-01

We describe the case of a brain-damaged individual whose speech is characterized by difficulty with practically all words except for elements of the closed class vocabulary. In contrast, his written sentence production exhibits a complementary impairment involving the omission of closed class vocabulary items and the relative sparing of nouns. On the basis of these differences we argue: (1) that grammatical categories constitute an organizing parameter of representation and/or processing for each of the independent, modality-specific lexicons, and (2) that these observations contribute to the growing evidence that access to the orthographic and phonological forms of words can occur independently.

Disrupting the brain to validate hypotheses on the neurobiology of language

PubMed Central

Papeo, Liuba; Pascual-Leone, Alvaro; Caramazza, Alfonso

2013-01-01

Comprehension of words is an important part of the language faculty, involving the joint activity of frontal and temporo-parietal brain regions. Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) enables the controlled perturbation of brain activity, and thus offers a unique tool to test specific predictions about the causal relationship between brain regions and language understanding. This potential has been exploited to better define the role of regions that are classically accepted as part of the language-semantic network. For instance, TMS has contributed to establish the semantic relevance of the left anterior temporal lobe, or to solve the ambiguity between the semantic vs. phonological function assigned to the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG). We consider, more closely, the results from studies where the same technique, similar paradigms (lexical-semantic tasks) and materials (words) have been used to assess the relevance of regions outside the classically-defined language-semantic network—i.e., precentral motor regions—for the semantic analysis of words. This research shows that different aspects of the left precentral gyrus (primary motor and premotor sites) are sensitive to the action-non action distinction of words' meanings. However, the behavioral changes due to TMS over these sites are incongruent with what is expected after perturbation of a task-relevant brain region. Thus, the relationship between motor activity and language-semantic behavior remains far from clear. A better understanding of this issue could be guaranteed by investigating functional interactions between motor sites and semantically-relevant regions. PMID:23630480

[Two-and-a-half year follow-up study of strategy factors in successful learning to predict academic achievements in medical education].

PubMed

Lee, Soon Ok; Lee, Sang Yeoup; Baek, Sunyong; Woo, Jae Seok; Im, Sun Ju; Yune, So Jung; Lee, Sun Hee; Kam, Beesung

2015-06-01

We performed a two-and-a-half year follow-up study of strategy factors in successful learning to predict academic achievements in medical education. Strategy factors in successful learning were identified using a content analysis of open-ended responses from 30 medical students who were ranked in the top 10 of their class. Core words were selected among their responses in each category and the frequency of the words were counted. Then, a factors survey was conducted among year 2 students, before the second semester. Finally, we performed an analysis to assess the association between the factors score and academic achievement for the same students 2.5 years later. The core words were "planning and execution," "daily reviews" in the study schedule category; "focusing in class" and "taking notes" among class-related category; and "lecture notes," "previous exams or papers," and "textbooks" in the primary self-learning resources category. There were associations between the factors scores for study planning and execution, focusing in class, and taking notes and academic achievement, representing the second year second semester credit score, third year written exam scores and fourth year written and skill exam scores. Study planning was only one independent variable to predict fourth year summative written exam scores. In a two-and-a-half year follow-up study, associations were founded between academic achievement and the factors scores for study planning and execution, focusing in class, and taking notes. Study planning as only one independent variable is useful for predicting fourth year summative written exam score.

Role of Text and Student Characteristics in Real-Time Reading Processes across the Primary Grades

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

de Leeuw, Linda; Segers, Eliane; Verhoeven, Ludo

2016-01-01

Although much is known about beginning readers using behavioural measures, real-time processes are still less clear. The present study examined eye movements (skipping rate, gaze, look back and second-pass duration) as a function of text-related (difficulty and word class) and student-related characteristics (word decoding, reading comprehension,…

Strategies Used by Saudi EFL Students to Determine the Meaning of English Words

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Baniabdelrahman, Abdallah Ahmad; Al-shumaimeri, Yousif

2014-01-01

This study investigated the strategies which first-year Saudi university EFL students used to derive the meaning of unfamiliar words while reading English texts. Using cluster sampling method, participants chosen to be included in the study consisted of six male and six female classes (120 male and 120 female students) of the preparatory year…

STUDIES IN THE USE OF COLOR.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

HINDS, LILLIAN R.

STUDIES RELATED TO WORDS IN COLOR, THE MORPHOLOGICO-ALGEBRAIC APPROACH TO TEACHING READING, ARE DISCUSSED. ADULT CLASSES IN MILWAUKEE TAUGHT TO READ BY THIS METHOD ACHIEVED A MEAN GAIN OF .93 OF A YEAR IN 30 HOURS OF INSTRUCTION. IN EUCLID, OHIO, KINDERGARTENERS WHOSE PROGRESS WAS FOLLOWED THROUGH THE SECOND GRADE WERE TAUGHT BY WORDS IN COLOR AND…

Using Word Clouds for Fast, Formative Assessment of Students' Short Written Responses

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Brooks, Bill J.; Gilbuena, Debra M.; Krause, Stephen J.; Koretsky, Milo D.

2014-01-01

Active learning in class helps students develop deeper understanding of chemical engineering principles. While the use of multiple-choice ConcepTests is clearly effective, we advocate for including student writing in learning activities as well. In this article, we demonstrate that word clouds can provide a quick analytical technique to assess…

Phonological Competition within the Word: Evidence from the Phoneme Similarity Effect in Spoken Production

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cohen-Goldberg, Ariel M.

2012-01-01

Theories of spoken production have not specifically addressed whether the phonemes of a word compete with each other for selection during phonological encoding (e.g., whether /t/ competes with /k/ in cat). Spoken production theories were evaluated and found to fall into three classes, theories positing (1) no competition, (2) competition among…

The Dyslexic Student and the Public Speaking Notecard.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hayward, Pamela A.

To facilitate the extemporaneous speaking style, the preferred method of speech delivery in public speaking classes, students are advised to take a notecard with key words and phrases on it with them as they deliver the speech. In other words, the speech is to be well rehearsed but not given completely from memory or from a detailed manuscript.…

From Shared Contexts to Syntactic Categories: The Role of Distributional Information in Learning Linguistic Form-Classes

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Reeder, Patricia A.; Newport, Elissa L.; Aslin, Richard N.

2013-01-01

A fundamental component of language acquisition involves organizing words into grammatical categories. Previous literature has suggested a number of ways in which this categorization task might be accomplished. Here we ask whether the patterning of the words in a corpus of linguistic input ("distributional information") is sufficient, along with a…

Bringing a Class to Its Senses.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Eichenberg, Mary Ann

1965-01-01

Students can be taught to create vivid, colorful descriptions. To train their senses and sharpen their word choices and images, they can be asked to (1) list specific adjectives to describe such an image-producing word as "ocean," (2) substitute sharply-etched verbs for general ones in a given sentence, (3) record day-to-day observations in a…

Phonological neighborhood and word frequency effects in the stuttered disfluencies of children who stutter.

PubMed

Anderson, Julie D

2007-02-01

The purpose of this study was to examine (a) the role of neighborhood density (number of words that are phonologically similar to a target word) and frequency variables on the stuttering-like disfluencies of preschool children who stutter, and (b) whether these variables have an effect on the type of stuttering-like disfluency produced. A 500+ word speech sample was obtained from each participant (N = 15). Each stuttered word was randomly paired with the firstly produced word that closely matched it in grammatical class, familiarity, and number of syllables/phonemes. Frequency, neighborhood density, and neighborhood frequency values were obtained for the stuttered and fluent words from an online database. Findings revealed that stuttered words were lower in frequency and neighborhood frequency than fluent words. Words containing part-word repetitions and sound prolongations were also lower in frequency and/or neighborhood frequency than fluent words, but these frequency variables did not have an effect on single-syllable word repetitions. Neighborhood density failed to influence the susceptibility of words to stuttering, as well as the type of stuttering-like disfluency produced. In general, findings suggest that neighborhood and frequency variables not only influence the fluency with which words are produced in speech, but also have an impact on the type of stuttering-like disfluency produced.

Benchmark eye movement effects during natural reading in autism spectrum disorder.

PubMed

Howard, Philippa L; Liversedge, Simon P; Benson, Valerie

2017-01-01

In 2 experiments, eye tracking methodology was used to assess on-line lexical, syntactic and semantic processing in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In Experiment 1, lexical identification was examined by manipulating the frequency of target words. Both typically developed (TD) and ASD readers showed normal frequency effects, suggesting that the processes TD and ASD readers engage in to identify words are comparable. In Experiment 2, syntactic parsing and semantic interpretation requiring the on-line use of world knowledge were examined, by having participants read garden path sentences containing an ambiguous prepositional phrase. Both groups showed normal garden path effects when reading low-attached sentences and the time course of reading disruption was comparable between groups. This suggests that not only do ASD readers hold similar syntactic preferences to TD readers, but also that they use world knowledge on-line during reading. Together, these experiments demonstrate that the initial construction of sentence interpretation appears to be intact in ASD. However, the finding that ASD readers skip target words less often in Experiment 2, and take longer to read sentences during second pass for both experiments, suggests that they adopt a more cautious reading strategy and take longer to evaluate their sentence interpretation prior to making a manual response. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).

Neuroticism as distancing: perceptual sources of evidence.

PubMed

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

2013-05-01

Several theories and self-reported sources of data link individual differences in negative affectivity to avoidance motivation. Chronic avoidance motivation, through repeated practice, may result in a relatively cognitive distance-enhancing dynamic whereby events and stimuli are perceived as further away from the self, even when they are not threatening. Such predictions are novel but follow from cybernetic theories of self-regulation. In 5 studies (total N = 463), relations of this type were investigated. Study 1 presented participants with phrases that were ambiguous and found that trait negative affect predicted phrase interpretation in a distance-enhancing temporal direction. Study 2 replicated this effect across a systematic manipulation of event valence. Study 3 asked individuals to estimate the size of words and found that individuals higher in neuroticism generally perceived words to be smaller than did individuals lower in neuroticism. In Study 4, people high (but not low) in neuroticism perceived words to be shrinking faster than they were growing. In Study 5, greater perceptual distancing, in a font size estimation task, predicted more adverse reactions to negative events in daily life. Although normative effects varied across studies, consistent support for a chronic distancing perspective of individual differences in negative affectivity was found. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved

Multi-Sensor Information Integration and Automatic Understanding

DTIC Science & Technology

2008-05-27

distributions for target tracks and class which are utilized by an active learning cueing management framework to optimally task the appropriate sensor...modality to cued regions of interest. Moreover, this active learning approach also facilitates analyst cueing to help resolve track ambiguities in complex...scenes. We intend to leverage SIG’s active learning with analyst cueing under future efforts with ONR and other DoD agencies. Obtaining long- term

Multi-Sensor Information Integration and Automatic Understanding

DTIC Science & Technology

2008-08-27

distributions for target tracks and class which are utilized by an active learning cueing management framework to optimally task the appropriate sensor modality...to cued regions of interest. Moreover, this active learning approach also facilitates analyst cueing to help resolve track ambiguities in complex...scenes. We intend to leverage SIG’s active learning with analyst cueing under future efforts with ONR and other DoD agencies. Obtaining long- term

Are implicit motives revealed in mere words? Testing the marker-word hypothesis with computer-based text analysis

PubMed Central

Schultheiss, Oliver C.

2013-01-01

Traditionally, implicit motives (i.e., non-conscious preferences for specific classes of incentives) are assessed through semantic coding of imaginative stories. The present research tested the marker-word hypothesis, which states that implicit motives are reflected in the frequencies of specific words. Using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC; Pennebaker et al., 2001), Study 1 identified word categories that converged with a content-coding measure of the implicit motives for power, achievement, and affiliation in picture stories collected in German and US student samples, showed discriminant validity with self-reported motives, and predicted well-validated criteria of implicit motives (gender difference for the affiliation motive; in interaction with personal-goal progress: emotional well-being). Study 2 demonstrated LIWC-based motive scores' causal validity by documenting their sensitivity to motive arousal. PMID:24137149

Emulating multiple inheritance in Fortran 2003/2008

DOE PAGES

Morris, Karla

2015-01-24

Although the high-performance computing (HPC) community increasingly embraces object-oriented programming (OOP), most HPC OOP projects employ the C++ programming language. Until recently, Fortran programmers interested in mining the benefits of OOP had to emulate OOP in Fortran 90/95. The advent of widespread compiler support for Fortran 2003 now facilitates explicitly constructing object-oriented class hierarchies via inheritance and leveraging related class behaviors such as dynamic polymorphism. Although C++ allows a class to inherit from multiple parent classes, Fortran and several other OOP languages restrict or prohibit explicit multiple inheritance relationships in order to circumvent several pitfalls associated with them. Nonetheless, whatmore » appears as an intrinsic feature in one language can be modeled as a user-constructed design pattern in another language. The present paper demonstrates how to apply the facade structural design pattern to support a multiple inheritance class relationship in Fortran 2003. As a result, the design unleashes the power of the associated class relationships for modeling complicated data structures yet avoids the ambiguities that plague some multiple inheritance scenarios.« less

Manipulability impairs association-memory: revisiting effects of incidental motor processing on verbal paired-associates.

PubMed

Madan, Christopher R

2014-06-01

Imageability is known to enhance association-memory for verbal paired-associates. High-imageability words can be further subdivided by manipulability, the ease by which the named object can be functionally interacted with. Prior studies suggest that motor processing enhances item-memory, but impairs association-memory. However, these studies used action verbs and concrete nouns as the high- and low-manipulability words, respectively, confounding manipulability with word class. Recent findings demonstrated that nouns can serve as both high- and low-manipulability words (e.g., CAMERA and TABLE, respectively), allowing us to avoid this confound. Here participants studied pairs of words that consisted of all possible pairings of high- and low-manipulability words and were tested with immediate cued recall. Recall was worse for pairs that contained high-manipulability words. In free recall, participants recalled more high- than low-manipulability words. Our results provide further evidence that manipulability influences memory, likely occurring through automatic motor imagery. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Frames of reference in spatial language acquisition.

PubMed

Shusterman, Anna; Li, Peggy

2016-08-01

Languages differ in how they encode spatial frames of reference. It is unknown how children acquire the particular frame-of-reference terms in their language (e.g., left/right, north/south). The present paper uses a word-learning paradigm to investigate 4-year-old English-speaking children's acquisition of such terms. In Part I, with five experiments, we contrasted children's acquisition of novel word pairs meaning left-right and north-south to examine their initial hypotheses and the relative ease of learning the meanings of these terms. Children interpreted ambiguous spatial terms as having environment-based meanings akin to north and south, and they readily learned and generalized north-south meanings. These studies provide the first direct evidence that children invoke geocentric representations in spatial language acquisition. However, the studies leave unanswered how children ultimately acquire "left" and "right." In Part II, with three more experiments, we investigated why children struggle to master body-based frame-of-reference words. Children successfully learned "left" and "right" when the novel words were systematically introduced on their own bodies and extended these words to novel (intrinsic and relative) uses; however, they had difficulty learning to talk about the left and right sides of a doll. This difficulty was paralleled in identifying the left and right sides of the doll in a non-linguistic memory task. In contrast, children had no difficulties learning to label the front and back sides of a doll. These studies begin to paint a detailed account of the acquisition of spatial terms in English, and provide insights into the origins of diverse spatial reference frames in the world's languages. Copyright © 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Bio-SimVerb and Bio-SimLex: wide-coverage evaluation sets of word similarity in biomedicine.

PubMed

Chiu, Billy; Pyysalo, Sampo; Vulić, Ivan; Korhonen, Anna

2018-02-05

Word representations support a variety of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. The quality of these representations is typically assessed by comparing the distances in the induced vector spaces against human similarity judgements. Whereas comprehensive evaluation resources have recently been developed for the general domain, similar resources for biomedicine currently suffer from the lack of coverage, both in terms of word types included and with respect to the semantic distinctions. Notably, verbs have been excluded, although they are essential for the interpretation of biomedical language. Further, current resources do not discern between semantic similarity and semantic relatedness, although this has been proven as an important predictor of the usefulness of word representations and their performance in downstream applications. We present two novel comprehensive resources targeting the evaluation of word representations in biomedicine. These resources, Bio-SimVerb and Bio-SimLex, address the previously mentioned problems, and can be used for evaluations of verb and noun representations respectively. In our experiments, we have computed the Pearson's correlation between performances on intrinsic and extrinsic tasks using twelve popular state-of-the-art representation models (e.g. word2vec models). The intrinsic-extrinsic correlations using our datasets are notably higher than with previous intrinsic evaluation benchmarks such as UMNSRS and MayoSRS. In addition, when evaluating representation models for their abilities to capture verb and noun semantics individually, we show a considerable variation between performances across all models. Bio-SimVerb and Bio-SimLex enable intrinsic evaluation of word representations. This evaluation can serve as a predictor of performance on various downstream tasks in the biomedical domain. The results on Bio-SimVerb and Bio-SimLex using standard word representation models highlight the importance of developing dedicated evaluation resources for NLP in biomedicine for particular word classes (e.g. verbs). These are needed to identify the most accurate methods for learning class-specific representations. Bio-SimVerb and Bio-SimLex are publicly available.

The Landscape of long non-coding RNA classification

PubMed Central

St Laurent, Georges; Wahlestedt, Claes; Kapranov, Philipp

2015-01-01

Advances in the depth and quality of transcriptome sequencing have revealed many new classes of long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs). lncRNA classification has mushroomed to accommodate these new findings, even though the real dimensions and complexity of the non-coding transcriptome remain unknown. Although evidence of functionality of specific lncRNAs continues to accumulate, conflicting, confusing, and overlapping terminology has fostered ambiguity and lack of clarity in the field in general. The lack of fundamental conceptual un-ambiguous classification framework results in a number of challenges in the annotation and interpretation of non-coding transcriptome data. It also might undermine integration of the new genomic methods and datasets in an effort to unravel function of lncRNA. Here, we review existing lncRNA classifications, nomenclature, and terminology. Then we describe the conceptual guidelines that have emerged for their classification and functional annotation based on expanding and more comprehensive use of large systems biology-based datasets. PMID:25869999

HIGH-PRECISION BIOLOGICAL EVENT EXTRACTION: EFFECTS OF SYSTEM AND OF DATA

PubMed Central

Cohen, K. Bretonnel; Verspoor, Karin; Johnson, Helen L.; Roeder, Chris; Ogren, Philip V.; Baumgartner, William A.; White, Elizabeth; Tipney, Hannah; Hunter, Lawrence

2013-01-01

We approached the problems of event detection, argument identification, and negation and speculation detection in the BioNLP’09 information extraction challenge through concept recognition and analysis. Our methodology involved using the OpenDMAP semantic parser with manually written rules. The original OpenDMAP system was updated for this challenge with a broad ontology defined for the events of interest, new linguistic patterns for those events, and specialized coordination handling. We achieved state-of-the-art precision for two of the three tasks, scoring the highest of 24 teams at precision of 71.81 on Task 1 and the highest of 6 teams at precision of 70.97 on Task 2. We provide a detailed analysis of the training data and show that a number of trigger words were ambiguous as to event type, even when their arguments are constrained by semantic class. The data is also shown to have a number of missing annotations. Analysis of a sampling of the comparatively small number of false positives returned by our system shows that major causes of this type of error were failing to recognize second themes in two-theme events, failing to recognize events when they were the arguments to other events, failure to recognize nontheme arguments, and sentence segmentation errors. We show that specifically handling coordination had a small but important impact on the overall performance of the system. The OpenDMAP system and the rule set are available at http://bionlp.sourceforge.net. PMID:25937701

Brainstorming for Ideas

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mogahed, Mogahed M.

2011-01-01

Learners occasionally complain that they lack ideas when sitting down to write a composition. Teachers complain that they do not want to spend half the class time telling students what to write. There is an answer. Teachers brainstorm words connected with the topic in class before setting the composition for homework. The question remains: how to…

Lexical Acquisition in Elementary Science Classes

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Best, Rachel M.; Dockrell, Julie E.; Braisby, Nick

2006-01-01

The purpose of this study was to further researchers' understanding of lexical acquisition in the beginning primary schoolchild by investigating word learning in small-group elementary science classes. Two experiments were conducted to examine the role of semantic scaffolding (e.g., use of synonymous terms) and physical scaffolding (e.g., pointing…

The Role of Grammatical Class on Word Recognition

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Vigliocco, Gabriella; Vinson, David P.; Arciuli, Joanne; Barber, Horacio

2008-01-01

The double dissociation between noun and verb processing, well documented in the neuropsychological literature, has not been supported in imaging studies. Recent imaging studies, in fact, suggest that once confounding with semantics is eliminated, grammatical class effects only emerge as a consequence of building frames. Here we assess this…

Computers and Classroom Culture.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Schofield, Janet Ward

This book explores the meaning of computer technology in schools. The book is based on data gathered from a two-year observation of more than 30 different classrooms in an urban high school: geometry classes in which students used artificially intelligent tutors; business classes in which students learned word processing; and computer science…

75 FR 76921 - Tobacco Transition Payment Program; Tobacco Transition Assessments

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2010-12-10

... rule; technical amendment. SUMMARY: The Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) is modifying the regulations... domestic volume of each class. This means that CCC will continue to determine tobacco class allocations... technical amendment does not change how the TTPP is implemented by CCC, but rather clarifies the wording of...

Fundamental differences between optimization code test problems in engineering applications

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Eason, E. D.

1984-01-01

The purpose here is to suggest that there is at least one fundamental difference between the problems used for testing optimization codes and the problems that engineers often need to solve; in particular, the level of precision that can be practically achieved in the numerical evaluation of the objective function, derivatives, and constraints. This difference affects the performance of optimization codes, as illustrated by two examples. Two classes of optimization problem were defined. Class One functions and constraints can be evaluated to a high precision that depends primarily on the word length of the computer. Class Two functions and/or constraints can only be evaluated to a moderate or a low level of precision for economic or modeling reasons, regardless of the computer word length. Optimization codes have not been adequately tested on Class Two problems. There are very few Class Two test problems in the literature, while there are literally hundreds of Class One test problems. The relative performance of two codes may be markedly different for Class One and Class Two problems. Less sophisticated direct search type codes may be less likely to be confused or to waste many function evaluations on Class Two problems. The analysis accuracy and minimization performance are related in a complex way that probably varies from code to code. On a problem where the analysis precision was varied over a range, the simple Hooke and Jeeves code was more efficient at low precision while the Powell code was more efficient at high precision.

Extracting numeric measurements and temporal coordinates from Japanese radiological reports

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Imai, Takeshi; Onogi, Yuzo

2004-04-01

Medical records are written mainly, in natural language. The focus of this study is narrative radiological reports written in natural Japanese. These reports cannot be used for advanced retrieval, data mining, and so on, unless they are stored, using a structured format such as DICOM-SR. The goal is to structure narrative reports progressively, using natural language processing (NLP). Structure has many different levels, for example, DICOM-SR has three established levels -- basic text, enhanced and comprehensive. At the enhanced level, it is necessary to use numerical measurements and spatial & temporal coordinates. In this study, the wording used in the reports was first standardized, dictionaries were organized, and morphological analysis performed. Next, numerical measurements and temporal coordinates were extracted, and the objects to which they referred, analyzed. 10,000 CT and MR reports were separated into 82,122 sentences, and 34,269 of the 36,444 numerical descriptions were tagged. Periods, slashes, hyphens, and parentheses are ambiguously used in the description of enumerated lists, dates, image numbers, and anatomical names, as well as at the end of sentences; to resolve this ambiguity, descriptions were processed, according to the order -- date, size, unit, enumerated list, and abbreviation -- then, the tagged reports were separated into sentences.

Phonotactic Probability Effects in Children Who Stutter

PubMed Central

Anderson, Julie D.; Byrd, Courtney T.

2008-01-01

Purpose The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of phonotactic probability, the frequency of different sound segments and segment sequences, on the overall fluency with which words are produced by preschool children who stutter (CWS), as well as to determine whether it has an effect on the type of stuttered disfluency produced. Method A 500+ word language sample was obtained from 19 CWS. Each stuttered word was randomly paired with a fluently produced word that closely matched it in grammatical class, word length, familiarity, word and neighborhood frequency, and neighborhood density. Phonotactic probability values were obtained for the stuttered and fluent words from an online database. Results Phonotactic probability did not have a significant influence on the overall susceptibility of words to stuttering, but it did impact the type of stuttered disfluency produced. In specific, single-syllable word repetitions were significantly lower in phonotactic probability than fluently produced words, as well as part-word repetitions and sound prolongations. Conclusions In general, the differential impact of phonotactic probability on the type of stuttering-like disfluency produced by young CWS provides some support for the notion that different disfluency types may originate in the disruption of different levels of processing. PMID:18658056

The Prosodic Licensing of Coda Consonants in Early Speech: Interactions with Vowel Length

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Miles, Kelly; Yuen, Ivan; Cox, Felicity; Demuth, Katherine

2016-01-01

English has a word-minimality requirement that all open-class lexical items must contain at least two moras of structure, forming a bimoraic foot (Hayes, 1995).Thus, a word with either a long vowel, or a short vowel and a coda consonant, satisfies this requirement. This raises the question of when and how young children might learn this…

Fostering Analogical Transfer: The Multiple Components Approach to Algebra Word Problem Solving in a Chemistry Context

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ngu, Bing Hiong; Yeung, Alexander Seeshing

2012-01-01

Holyoak and Koh (1987) and Holyoak (1984) propose four critical tasks for analogical transfer to occur in problem solving. A study was conducted to test this hypothesis by comparing a multiple components (MC) approach against worked examples (WE) in helping students to solve algebra word problems in chemistry classes. The MC approach incorporated…

Freeing the Language Learner: The How and Why of a More Powerful Vocabulary.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hughey, Jane B.; Wormuth, Deanna R.

College and university students in English as a second language classes need to acquire an active and fairly extensive vocabulary rather quickly. Methods of learning such as analysis and memorization of word lists, word building, and dictionary use can be combined with methods of gaining vocabulary by becoming familiar with it and using it in…

The Separability of Morphological Processes from Semantic Meaning and Syntactic Class in Production of Single Words: Evidence from the Hebrew Root Morpheme

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Deutsch, Avital

2016-01-01

In the present study we investigated to what extent the morphological facilitation effect induced by the derivational root morpheme in Hebrew is independent of semantic meaning and grammatical information of the part of speech involved. Using the picture-word interference paradigm with auditorily presented distractors, Experiment 1 compared the…

Songs vs. Stories: Impact of Input Sources on ESL Vocabulary Acquisition by Preliterate Children

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lesniewska, Justyna; Pichette, François

2016-01-01

Research in second language acquisition has paid little attention to preliterate children learning a language which is absent from their environment outside the language class. This study examines the acquisition of English words by 24 French-speaking children aged 35-59 months, who were introduced to 57 words, embedded in stories and songs. Four…

Aging and the statistical learning of grammatical form classes.

PubMed

Schwab, Jessica F; Schuler, Kathryn D; Stillman, Chelsea M; Newport, Elissa L; Howard, James H; Howard, Darlene V

2016-08-01

Language learners must place unfamiliar words into categories, often with few explicit indicators about when and how that word can be used grammatically. Reeder, Newport, and Aslin (2013) showed that college students can learn grammatical form classes from an artificial language by relying solely on distributional information (i.e., contextual cues in the input). Here, 2 experiments revealed that healthy older adults also show such statistical learning, though they are poorer than young at distinguishing grammatical from ungrammatical strings. This finding expands knowledge of which aspects of learning vary with aging, with potential implications for second language learning in late adulthood. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

Interpreting ambiguous 'trace' results in Schistosoma mansoni CCA Tests: Estimating sensitivity and specificity of ambiguous results with no gold standard.

PubMed

Clements, Michelle N; Donnelly, Christl A; Fenwick, Alan; Kabatereine, Narcis B; Knowles, Sarah C L; Meité, Aboulaye; N'Goran, Eliézer K; Nalule, Yolisa; Nogaro, Sarah; Phillips, Anna E; Tukahebwa, Edridah Muheki; Fleming, Fiona M

2017-12-01

The development of new diagnostics is an important tool in the fight against disease. Latent Class Analysis (LCA) is used to estimate the sensitivity and specificity of tests in the absence of a gold standard. The main field diagnostic for Schistosoma mansoni infection, Kato-Katz (KK), is not very sensitive at low infection intensities. A point-of-care circulating cathodic antigen (CCA) test has been shown to be more sensitive than KK. However, CCA can return an ambiguous 'trace' result between 'positive' and 'negative', and much debate has focused on interpretation of traces results. We show how LCA can be extended to include ambiguous trace results and analyse S. mansoni studies from both Côte d'Ivoire (CdI) and Uganda. We compare the diagnostic performance of KK and CCA and the observed results by each test to the estimated infection prevalence in the population. Prevalence by KK was higher in CdI (13.4%) than in Uganda (6.1%), but prevalence by CCA was similar between countries, both when trace was assumed to be negative (CCAtn: 11.7% in CdI and 9.7% in Uganda) and positive (CCAtp: 20.1% in CdI and 22.5% in Uganda). The estimated sensitivity of CCA was more consistent between countries than the estimated sensitivity of KK, and estimated infection prevalence did not significantly differ between CdI (20.5%) and Uganda (19.1%). The prevalence by CCA with trace as positive did not differ significantly from estimates of infection prevalence in either country, whereas both KK and CCA with trace as negative significantly underestimated infection prevalence in both countries. Incorporation of ambiguous results into an LCA enables the effect of different treatment thresholds to be directly assessed and is applicable in many fields. Our results showed that CCA with trace as positive most accurately estimated infection prevalence.

Interpreting ambiguous ‘trace’ results in Schistosoma mansoni CCA Tests: Estimating sensitivity and specificity of ambiguous results with no gold standard

PubMed Central

Donnelly, Christl A.; Fenwick, Alan; Kabatereine, Narcis B.; Knowles, Sarah C. L.; Meité, Aboulaye; N'Goran, Eliézer K.; Nalule, Yolisa; Nogaro, Sarah; Phillips, Anna E.; Tukahebwa, Edridah Muheki; Fleming, Fiona M.

2017-01-01

Background The development of new diagnostics is an important tool in the fight against disease. Latent Class Analysis (LCA) is used to estimate the sensitivity and specificity of tests in the absence of a gold standard. The main field diagnostic for Schistosoma mansoni infection, Kato-Katz (KK), is not very sensitive at low infection intensities. A point-of-care circulating cathodic antigen (CCA) test has been shown to be more sensitive than KK. However, CCA can return an ambiguous ‘trace’ result between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’, and much debate has focused on interpretation of traces results. Methodology/Principle findings We show how LCA can be extended to include ambiguous trace results and analyse S. mansoni studies from both Côte d’Ivoire (CdI) and Uganda. We compare the diagnostic performance of KK and CCA and the observed results by each test to the estimated infection prevalence in the population. Prevalence by KK was higher in CdI (13.4%) than in Uganda (6.1%), but prevalence by CCA was similar between countries, both when trace was assumed to be negative (CCAtn: 11.7% in CdI and 9.7% in Uganda) and positive (CCAtp: 20.1% in CdI and 22.5% in Uganda). The estimated sensitivity of CCA was more consistent between countries than the estimated sensitivity of KK, and estimated infection prevalence did not significantly differ between CdI (20.5%) and Uganda (19.1%). The prevalence by CCA with trace as positive did not differ significantly from estimates of infection prevalence in either country, whereas both KK and CCA with trace as negative significantly underestimated infection prevalence in both countries. Conclusions Incorporation of ambiguous results into an LCA enables the effect of different treatment thresholds to be directly assessed and is applicable in many fields. Our results showed that CCA with trace as positive most accurately estimated infection prevalence. PMID:29220354

Perceiving referential intent: Dynamics of reference in natural parent-child interactions

PubMed Central

Trueswell, John C.; Lin, Yi; Armstrong, Benjamin; Cartmill, Erica A.; Goldin-Meadow, Susan; Gleitman, Lila R.

2016-01-01

Two studies are presented which examined the temporal dynamics of the social-attentive behaviors that co-occur with referent identification during natural parent-child interactions in the home. Study 1 focused on 6.2 hours of videos of 56 parents interacting during everyday activities with their 14–18 month-olds, during which parents uttered common nouns as parts of spontaneously occurring utterances. Trained coders recorded, on a second-by-second basis, parent and child attentional behaviors relevant to reference in the period (40 sec.) immediately surrounding parental naming. The referential transparency of each interaction was independently assessed by having naïve adult participants guess what word the parent had uttered in these video segments, but with the audio turned off, forcing them to use only non-linguistic evidence available in the ongoing stream of events. We found a great deal of ambiguity in the input along with a few potent moments of word-referent transparency; these transparent moments have a particular temporal signature with respect to parent and child attentive behavior: it was the object’s appearance and/or the fact that it captured parent/child attention at the moment the word was uttered, not the presence of the object throughout the video, that predicted observers’ accuracy. Study 2 experimentally investigated the precision of the timing relation, and whether it has an effect on observer accuracy, by disrupting the timing between when the word was uttered and the behaviors present in the videos as they were originally recorded. Disrupting timing by only +/− 1 to 2 sec. reduced participant confidence and significantly decreased their accuracy in word identification. The results enhance an expanding literature on how dyadic attentional factors can influence early vocabulary growth. By hypothesis, this kind of time-sensitive data-selection process operates as a filter on input, removing many extraneous and ill-supported word-meaning hypotheses from consideration during children’s early vocabulary learning. PMID:26775159

Phonological Neighborhood and Word Frequency Effects in the Stuttered Disfluencies of Children Who Stutter

PubMed Central

Anderson, Julie D.

2008-01-01

Purpose The purpose of this study was to examine (a) the role of neighborhood density (number of words that are phonologically similar to a target word) and frequency variables on the stuttering-like disfluencies of preschool children who stutter, and (b) whether these variables have an effect on the type of stuttering-like disfluency produced. Method A 500+ word speech sample was obtained from each participant (N = 15). Each stuttered word was randomly paired with the firstly produced word that closely matched it in grammatical class, familiarity, and number of syllables/phonemes. Frequency, neighborhood density, and neighborhood frequency values were obtained for the stuttered and fluent words from an online database. Results Findings revealed that stuttered words were lower in frequency and neighborhood frequency than fluent words. Words containing part-word repetitions and sound prolongations were also lower in frequency and/or neighborhood frequency than fluent words, but these frequency variables did not have an effect on single-syllable word repetitions. Neighborhood density failed to influence the susceptibility of words to stuttering, as well as the type of stuttering-like disfluency produced. Conclusions In general, findings suggest that neighborhood and frequency variables not only influence the fluency with which words are produced in speech, but also have an impact on the type of stuttering-like disfluency produced. PMID:17344561

Blind Linguistic Steganalysis against Translation Based Steganography

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Chen, Zhili; Huang, Liusheng; Meng, Peng; Yang, Wei; Miao, Haibo

Translation based steganography (TBS) is a kind of relatively new and secure linguistic steganography. It takes advantage of the "noise" created by automatic translation of natural language text to encode the secret information. Up to date, there is little research on the steganalysis against this kind of linguistic steganography. In this paper, a blind steganalytic method, which is named natural frequency zoned word distribution analysis (NFZ-WDA), is presented. This method has improved on a previously proposed linguistic steganalysis method based on word distribution which is targeted for the detection of linguistic steganography like nicetext and texto. The new method aims to detect the application of TBS and uses none of the related information about TBS, its only used resource is a word frequency dictionary obtained from a large corpus, or a so called natural frequency dictionary, so it is totally blind. To verify the effectiveness of NFZ-WDA, two experiments with two-class and multi-class SVM classifiers respectively are carried out. The experimental results show that the steganalytic method is pretty promising.

Nencki Affective Word List (NAWL): the cultural adaptation of the Berlin Affective Word List-Reloaded (BAWL-R) for Polish.

PubMed

Riegel, Monika; Wierzba, Małgorzata; Wypych, Marek; Żurawski, Łukasz; Jednoróg, Katarzyna; Grabowska, Anna; Marchewka, Artur

2015-12-01

In the present article, we introduce the Nencki Affective Word List (NAWL), created in order to provide researchers with a database of 2,902 Polish words, including nouns, verbs, and adjectives, with ratings of emotional valence, arousal, and imageability. Measures of several objective psycholinguistic features of the words (frequency, grammatical class, and number of letters) are also controlled. The database is a Polish adaptation of the Berlin Affective Word List-Reloaded (BAWL-R; Võ et al., Behavior Research Methods 41:534-538, 2009), commonly used to investigate the affective properties of German words. Affective normative ratings were collected from 266 Polish participants (136 women and 130 men). The emotional ratings and psycholinguistic indexes provided by NAWL can be used by researchers to better control the verbal materials they apply and to adjust them to specific experimental questions or issues of interest. The NAWL is freely accessible to the scientific community for noncommercial use as supplementary material to this article.

The effects of using diagramming as a representational technique on high school students' achievement in solving math word problems

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Banerjee, Banmali

Methods and procedures for successfully solving math word problems have been, and continue to be a mystery to many U.S. high school students. Previous studies suggest that the contextual and mathematical understanding of a word problem, along with the development of schemas and their related external representations, positively contribute to students' accomplishments when solving word problems. Some studies have examined the effects of diagramming on students' abilities to solve word problems that only involved basic arithmetic operations. Other studies have investigated how instructional models that used technology influenced students' problem solving achievements. Still other studies have used schema-based instruction involving students with learning disabilities. No study has evaluated regular high school students' achievements in solving standard math word problems using a diagramming technique without technological aid. This study evaluated students' achievement in solving math word problems using a diagramming technique. Using a quasi-experimental experimental pretest-posttest research design, quantitative data were collected from 172 grade 11 Hispanic English language learners (ELLS) and African American learners whose first language is English (EFLLs) in 18 classes at an inner city high school in Northern New Jersey. There were 88 control and 84 experimental students. The pretest and posttest of each participating student and samples of the experimental students' class assignments provided the qualitative data for the study. The data from this study exhibited that the diagramming method of solving math word problems significantly improved student achievement in the experimental group (p<.01) compared to the control group. The study demonstrated that urban, high school, ELLs benefited from instruction that placed emphasis on the mathematical vocabulary and symbols used in word problems and that both ELLs and EFLLs improved their problem solving success through careful attention to the creation and labeling of diagrams to represent the mathematics involved in standard word problems. Although Learnertype (ELL, EFLL), Classtype (Bilingual and Mixed), and Gender (Female, Male) were not significant indicators of student achievement, there was significant interaction between Treatment and Classtype at the level of the Bilingual students ( p<.01) and between Treatment and Learnertype at the level of the ELLs (p<.01).

Teaching Techniques: Physical Vocabulary in the Beginner-Level Classroom

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Maiullo, Jonathan

2016-01-01

After having success with this warm-up activity in his theater classes, the author adapted it for his beginner-level English classes, knowing his students would appreciate the opportunity to move around. The activity allows students to create their own physical interpretation of a vocabulary word, which increases their ability to remember it…

Google Docs in an Out-of-Class Collaborative Writing Activity

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Zhou, Wenyi; Simpson, Elizabeth; Domizi, Denise Pinette

2012-01-01

Google Docs, an online word processing application, is a promising tool for collaborative learning. However, many college instructors and students lack knowledge to effectively use Google Docs to enhance teaching and learning. Goals of this study include (1) assessing the effectiveness of using Google Docs in an out-of-class collaborative writing…

Information Processing Concepts: A Cure for "Technofright." Information Processing in the Electronic Office. Part 1: Concepts.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Popyk, Marilyn K.

1986-01-01

Discusses the new automated office and its six major technologies (data processing, word processing, graphics, image, voice, and networking), the information processing cycle (input, processing, output, distribution/communication, and storage and retrieval), ergonomics, and ways to expand office education classes (versus class instruction). (CT)

Incivility among Group Mates in English Classes at a Japanese Women's University

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jacobs, George M.; Kimura, Harumi; Greliche, Nicolas

2016-01-01

Incivilities are words and actions that may be perceived as impolite. This article reports a study of perceptions of and experiences with incivilities during group activities in English class. Participants were 119 students at a women's university in Japan. They completed the Pair/Groupwork Incivility Scale, a Japanese-language instrument, which…

Homographs: Classification and Identification.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Pacak, M.; Henisz, Bozena

1968-01-01

Homographs are defined in this study as sets of word forms which are spelled alike but which have entirely or partially different meanings and which may have different syntactic functions (that is, they belong to more than one form class or to more than one subclass of a form class). This report deals with the classification and identification of…

Acquiring Taxonomic Relations in Lexical Memory: The Role of Superordinate Category Labels.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Blewitt, Pamela; Krackow, Elisa

1992-01-01

On picture matching and word recall tasks, children performed better on slot-fillers, or items classed in a superordinate category (such as food) and in the same event context (such as eating breakfast), than on coordinates, or items classed in a superordinate category but in different event contexts. (BC)

Speaking, Writing, and Performance: An Integrated Approach to the Word.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Stracke, J. Richard; Snow, Sara

To provide students with a rhetorical stance and motivation, a college freshman composition class adopted the ideas of the "radical" literacy educator, Paulo Freire, who believes that literacy should allow students and teachers to become truly conscious of the world. Class projects were initiated in which the students had as much…

Effects of Textbook and Teacher Definitions on Student Definitions of Psychology.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Romer, Gail H.; Henley, Tracy B.

Two teachers gathered psychology definitions from 1,000 college students enrolled in introductory psychology classes on the first and last days of class during two successive fall terms at the University of Tennessee. A word analysis of first-day definitions suggested three major themes: behavior, mind/brain, and environment. These terms showed…

A novel Multi-Agent Ada-Boost algorithm for predicting protein structural class with the information of protein secondary structure.

PubMed

Fan, Ming; Zheng, Bin; Li, Lihua

2015-10-01

Knowledge of the structural class of a given protein is important for understanding its folding patterns. Although a lot of efforts have been made, it still remains a challenging problem for prediction of protein structural class solely from protein sequences. The feature extraction and classification of proteins are the main problems in prediction. In this research, we extended our earlier work regarding these two aspects. In protein feature extraction, we proposed a scheme by calculating the word frequency and word position from sequences of amino acid, reduced amino acid, and secondary structure. For an accurate classification of the structural class of protein, we developed a novel Multi-Agent Ada-Boost (MA-Ada) method by integrating the features of Multi-Agent system into Ada-Boost algorithm. Extensive experiments were taken to test and compare the proposed method using four benchmark datasets in low homology. The results showed classification accuracies of 88.5%, 96.0%, 88.4%, and 85.5%, respectively, which are much better compared with the existing methods. The source code and dataset are available on request.

A Principled Relation between Reading and Naming in Acquired and Developmental Anomia: Surface Dyslexia Following Impairment in the Phonological Output Lexicon

PubMed Central

Gvion, Aviah; Friedmann, Naama

2016-01-01

Lexical retrieval and reading aloud are often viewed as two separate processes. However, they are not completely separate—they share components. This study assessed the effect of an impairment in a shared component, the phonological output lexicon, on lexical retrieval and on reading aloud. Because the phonological output lexicon is part of the lexical route for reading, individuals with an impairment in this lexicon may be forced to read aloud via the sublexical route and therefore show a reading pattern that is typical of surface dyslexia. To examine the effect of phonological output lexicon deficit on reading, we tested the reading of 16 Hebrew-speaking individuals with phonological output lexicon anomia, eight with acquired anomia following brain damage and eight with developmental anomia. We established that they had a phonological output lexicon deficit according to the types of errors and the effects on their naming in a picture naming task, and excluded other deficit loci in the lexical retrieval process according to a line of tests assessing their picture and word comprehension, word and non-word repetition, and phonological working memory. After we have established that the participants have a phonological output lexicon deficit, we tested their reading. To assess their reading and type of reading impairment, we tested their reading aloud, lexical decision, and written word comprehension. We found that all of the participants with phonological output lexicon impairment showed, in addition to anomia, also the typical surface dyslexia errors in reading aloud of irregular words, words with ambiguous conversion to phonemes, and potentiophones (words like “now” that, when read via the sublexical route, can be sounded out as another word, “know”). Importantly, the participants performed normally on pseudohomophone lexical decision and on homophone/potentiophone reading comprehension, indicating spared orthographic input lexicon and spared access to it and from it to lexical semantics. This pattern was shown both by the adults with acquired anomia and by the participants with developmental anomia. These results thus suggest a principled relation between anomia and dyslexia, and point to a distinct type of surface dyslexia. They further show the possibility of good comprehension of written words when the phonological output stages are impaired. PMID:27065897

Relation Education Index Norms for 500 Picture Pairs and 10 Relations: High School Sample. Technical Report No. 6.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Haynes, James L.; And Others

Mode of presentation (word vs. picture) is said to be a factor in social class differences in performance on analogy tests. To investigate this contention, data were needed on equivalent word and picture analogy test performance. This report presents data on relation education index (REI) norms for 500 picture pairs collected in the process of…

Classification Skills and Cueing Conditions in Free Recall of Familiar and New Words among 3rd and 4th Grade Children.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Grippin, Pauline C.

Ninety children in third and fourth grade were assessed on a hierarchical class inclusion task. Scores were trichotomized, and children from each level were randomly assigned to one of three cueing conditions (no cues, two superordinate cues, six subordinate cues). Subjects were administered a recall task of categorized words and "new" words…

Tahitian Words for Race and Class. Working Papers of the Language Behavior Research Laboratory, No. 40.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kay, Paul

This volume is based on field work conducted in 1960 in Papeete and in a rural district of Tahiti, under the guidance of Douglas Oliver. Section two, which is based on a Ph.D. thesis (Kay 1963), develops the hypothesis that Tahitian words for social classification and the common French translations are semantically equivalent for most native…

An Analysis of Sixth Grade Pupil's Ability to Use Context Clues in Science and Social Studies.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Olson, Arthur V.

The ability of sixth-grade students to use context clues for identifying unknown words in science and social studies reading materials and the types of context clues most frequently used are examined. The 30 subjects from three white, middle-class urban schools missed 50 percent or more of the words on a prevocabulary test. The subjects read two…

How Linearity and Structural Complexity Interact and Affect the Recognition of Italian Derived Words.

PubMed

Bridgers, Franca Ferrari; Kacinik, Natalie

2017-02-01

The majority of words in most languages consist of derived poly-morphemic words but a cross-linguistic review of the literature (Amenta and Crepaldi in Front Psychol 3:232-243, 2012) shows a contradictory picture with respect to how such words are represented and processed. The current study examined the effects of linearity and structural complexity on the processing of Italian derived words. Participants performed a lexical decision task on three types of prefixed and suffixed words and nonwords differing in the complexity of their internal structure. The processing of these words was indeed found to vary according to the nature of the affixes, the order in which they appear, and the type of information the affix encodes. The results thus indicate that derived words are not a uniform class and the best account of these findings appears to be a constraint-based or probabilistic multi-route processing model (e.g., Kuperman et al. in Lang Cogn Process 23:1089-1132, 2008; J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform 35:876-895, 2009; J Mem Lang 62:83-97, 2010).

Neural associative memories for the integration of language, vision and action in an autonomous agent.

PubMed

Markert, H; Kaufmann, U; Kara Kayikci, Z; Palm, G

2009-03-01

Language understanding is a long-standing problem in computer science. However, the human brain is capable of processing complex languages with seemingly no difficulties. This paper shows a model for language understanding using biologically plausible neural networks composed of associative memories. The model is able to deal with ambiguities on the single word and grammatical level. The language system is embedded into a robot in order to demonstrate the correct semantical understanding of the input sentences by letting the robot perform corresponding actions. For that purpose, a simple neural action planning system has been combined with neural networks for visual object recognition and visual attention control mechanisms.

The Affective Norms for Polish Short Texts (ANPST) Database Properties and Impact of Participants’ Population and Sex on Affective Ratings

PubMed Central

Imbir, Kamil K.

2017-01-01

The Affective Norms for Polish Short Texts (ANPST) dataset (Imbir, 2016d) is a list of 718 affective sentence stimuli with known affective properties with respect to subjectively perceived valence, arousal, dominance, origin, subjective significance, and source. This article examines the reliability of the ANPST and the impact of population type and sex on affective ratings. The ANPST dataset was introduced to provide a recognized method of eliciting affective states with linguistic stimuli more complex than single words and that included contextual information and thus are less ambiguous in interpretation than single word. Analysis of the properties of the ANPST dataset showed that norms collected are reliable in terms of split-half estimation and that the distributions of ratings are similar to those obtained in other affective norms studies. The pattern of correlations was the same as that found in analysis of an affective norms dataset for words based on the same six variables. Female psychology students’ valence ratings were also more polarized than those of their female student peers studying other subjects, but arousal ratings were only higher for negative words. Differences also appeared for all other measured dimensions. Women’s valence ratings were found to be more polarized and arousal ratings were higher than those made by men, and differences were also present for dominance, origin, and subjective significance. The ANPST is the first Polish language list of sentence stimuli and could easily be adapted for other languages and cultures. PMID:28611707