A neural network model of semantic memory linking feature-based object representation and words.

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Cuppini, C; Magosso, E; Ursino, M

2009-06-01

Recent theories in cognitive neuroscience suggest that semantic memory is a distributed process, which involves many cortical areas and is based on a multimodal representation of objects. The aim of this work is to extend a previous model of object representation to realize a semantic memory, in which sensory-motor representations of objects are linked with words. The model assumes that each object is described as a collection of features, coded in different cortical areas via a topological organization. Features in different objects are segmented via gamma-band synchronization of neural oscillators. The feature areas are further connected with a lexical area, devoted to the representation of words. Synapses among the feature areas, and among the lexical area and the feature areas are trained via a time-dependent Hebbian rule, during a period in which individual objects are presented together with the corresponding words. Simulation results demonstrate that, during the retrieval phase, the network can deal with the simultaneous presence of objects (from sensory-motor inputs) and words (from acoustic inputs), can correctly associate objects with words and segment objects even in the presence of incomplete information. Moreover, the network can realize some semantic links among words representing objects with shared features. These results support the idea that semantic memory can be described as an integrated process, whose content is retrieved by the co-activation of different multimodal regions. In perspective, extended versions of this model may be used to test conceptual theories, and to provide a quantitative assessment of existing data (for instance concerning patients with neural deficits).

Extracting semantic representations from word co-occurrence statistics: stop-lists, stemming, and SVD.

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Bullinaria, John A; Levy, Joseph P

2012-09-01

In a previous article, we presented a systematic computational study of the extraction of semantic representations from the word-word co-occurrence statistics of large text corpora. The conclusion was that semantic vectors of pointwise mutual information values from very small co-occurrence windows, together with a cosine distance measure, consistently resulted in the best representations across a range of psychologically relevant semantic tasks. This article extends that study by investigating the use of three further factors--namely, the application of stop-lists, word stemming, and dimensionality reduction using singular value decomposition (SVD)--that have been used to provide improved performance elsewhere. It also introduces an additional semantic task and explores the advantages of using a much larger corpus. This leads to the discovery and analysis of improved SVD-based methods for generating semantic representations (that provide new state-of-the-art performance on a standard TOEFL task) and the identification and discussion of problems and misleading results that can arise without a full systematic study.

Behavioral and Neural Representations of Spatial Directions across Words, Schemas, and Images.

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Weisberg, Steven M; Marchette, Steven A; Chatterjee, Anjan

2018-05-23

Modern spatial navigation requires fluency with multiple representational formats, including visual scenes, signs, and words. These formats convey different information. Visual scenes are rich and specific but contain extraneous details. Arrows, as an example of signs, are schematic representations in which the extraneous details are eliminated, but analog spatial properties are preserved. Words eliminate all spatial information and convey spatial directions in a purely abstract form. How does the human brain compute spatial directions within and across these formats? To investigate this question, we conducted two experiments on men and women: a behavioral study that was preregistered and a neuroimaging study using multivoxel pattern analysis of fMRI data to uncover similarities and differences among representational formats. Participants in the behavioral study viewed spatial directions presented as images, schemas, or words (e.g., "left"), and responded to each trial, indicating whether the spatial direction was the same or different as the one viewed previously. They responded more quickly to schemas and words than images, despite the visual complexity of stimuli being matched. Participants in the fMRI study performed the same task but responded only to occasional catch trials. Spatial directions in images were decodable in the intraparietal sulcus bilaterally but were not in schemas and words. Spatial directions were also decodable between all three formats. These results suggest that intraparietal sulcus plays a role in calculating spatial directions in visual scenes, but this neural circuitry may be bypassed when the spatial directions are presented as schemas or words. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Human navigators encounter spatial directions in various formats: words ("turn left"), schematic signs (an arrow showing a left turn), and visual scenes (a road turning left). The brain must transform these spatial directions into a plan for action. Here, we investigate

How lingering representations of abandoned context words affect speech production.

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Tydgat, Ilse; Diependaele, Kevin; Hartsuiker, Robert J; Pickering, Martin J

2012-07-01

Four experiments tested whether and how initially planned but then abandoned speech can influence the production of a subsequent resumption. Participants named initial pictures, which were sometimes suddenly replaced by target pictures that were related in meaning or word form or were unrelated. They then had to stop and resume with the name of the target picture. Target picture naming latencies were measured separately for trials in which the initial speech was skipped, interrupted, or completed. Semantically related initial pictures helped the production of the target word, although the effect dissipated once the utterance of the initial picture name had been completed. In contrast, phonologically related initial pictures hindered the production of the target word, but only for trials in which the name of the initial picture had at least partly been uttered. This semantic facilitation and phonological interference did not depend on the time interval between the initial and target picture, which was either varied between 200 ms and 400 ms (Experiments 1-2) or was kept constant at 300 ms (Experiments 3-4). We discuss the implications of these results for models of speech self-monitoring and for models of problem-free word production. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Affective Norms for 362 Persian Words

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Mahdi Bagheri

2016-10-01

Full Text Available Background: During the past two decades, a great deal of research has been conducted on developing affective norms for words in various languages, showing that there is an urgent need to create such norms in Persian language, too. The present study intended to develop a set of 362 Persian words rated according to their emotional valence, arousal, imageability, and familiarity so as to prepare the ground for further research on emotional word processing. This was the first attempt to set affective norms for Persian words in the realm of emotion.  Methods: Prior to the study, a multitude of words were selected from Persian dictionary and academic books in Persian literature. Secondly, three independent proficient experts in the Persian literature were asked to extract the suitable words from the list and to choose the best (defined as grammatically correct and most often used. The database normalization process was based on the ratings by a total of 88 participants using a 9-point Likert scale. Each participant evaluated about 120 words on four different scales.  Results: There were significant relationships between affective dimensions and some psycholinguistic variables. Also, further analyses were carried out to investigate the possible relationship between different features of valences (positive, negative, and neutral and other variables included in the dataset.  Conclusion: These affective norms for Persian words create a useful and valid dataset which will provide researchers with applying standard verbal materials as well as materials applied in other languages, e.g. English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, etc.

HWNet v2: An Efficient Word Image Representation for Handwritten Documents

OpenAIRE

Krishnan, Praveen; Jawahar, C. V.

2018-01-01

We present a framework for learning efficient holistic representation for handwritten word images. The proposed method uses a deep convolutional neural network with traditional classification loss. The major strengths of our work lie in: (i) the efficient usage of synthetic data to pre-train a deep network, (ii) an adapted version of ResNet-34 architecture with region of interest pooling (referred as HWNet v2) which learns discriminative features with variable sized word images, and (iii) rea...

Similarities Between Deaf or Hard of Hearing and Hearing Students' Awareness of Affective Words' Valence in Written Language.

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Li, Degao; Zhang, Fan; Zeng, Xihong

2016-01-01

An affective priming task was used with two cohorts of college students, one deaf or hard of hearing (D/HH), the other hearing, in two experiments. The same set of affective-word targets, preceded by "※※" in Experiment 1 but by affective-word primes of the same valence as the targets in Experiment 2, were presented vertically above or below the screen center. Stimuli that preceded the targets were shown at the screen center. D/HH participants generally performed more poorly than hearing participants, but both groups performed similarly in that both did better on the positive targets than on the negative in both experiments, and on supporting metaphorical associations between valence and vertical positions (Meier & Robinson, 2004), as indicated by reaction times, in Experiment 2. The researchers concluded that D/HH and hearing college students perform similarly in developing cognition-grounded representations of affective words in written language.

Nencki Affective Word List (NAWL): the cultural adaptation of the Berlin Affective Word List-Reloaded (BAWL-R) for Polish.

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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.

Prosodic cues to word order: what level of representation?

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Carline eBernard

2012-10-01

Full Text Available Within language, systematic correlations exist between syntactic structure and prosody. Prosodic prominence, for instance, falls on the complement and not the head of syntactic phrases, and its realization depends on the phrasal position of the prominent element. Thus, in Japanese, a functor-final language, prominence is phrase-initial and realized as increased pitch (^Tōkyō ni ‘Tokyo to’, whereas in French, English or Italian, functor-initial languages, it manifests itself as phrase-final lengthening (to Rome. Prosody is readily available in the linguistic signal even to the youngest infants. It has, therefore, been proposed that young learners might be able to exploit its correlations with syntax to bootstrap language structure. In this study, we tested this hypothesis, investigating how 8-month-old monolingual French infants processed an artificial grammar manipulating the relative position of prosodic prominence and word frequency. In Condition 1, we created a speech stream in which the two cues, prosody and frequency, were aligned, frequent words being prosodically non-prominent and infrequent ones being prominent, as is the case in natural language (functors are prosodically minimal compared to content words. In Condition 2, the two cues were misaligned, with frequent words carrying prosodic prominence, unlike in natural language. After familiarization with the aligned or the misaligned stream in a headturn preference procedure, we tested infants’ preference for test items having a frequent word initial or a frequent word final word order. We found that infants’ familiarized with the aligned stream showed the expected preference for the frequent word initial test items, mimicking the functor-initial word order of French. Infants in the misaligned condition showed no preference. These results suggest that infants are able to use word frequency and prosody as early cues to word order and they integrate them into a coherent

Representation Learning of Logic Words by an RNN: From Word Sequences to Robot Actions

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Tatsuro Yamada

2017-12-01

Full Text Available An important characteristic of human language is compositionality. We can efficiently express a wide variety of real-world situations, events, and behaviors by compositionally constructing the meaning of a complex expression from a finite number of elements. Previous studies have analyzed how machine-learning models, particularly neural networks, can learn from experience to represent compositional relationships between language and robot actions with the aim of understanding the symbol grounding structure and achieving intelligent communicative agents. Such studies have mainly dealt with the words (nouns, adjectives, and verbs that directly refer to real-world matters. In addition to these words, the current study deals with logic words, such as “not,” “and,” and “or” simultaneously. These words are not directly referring to the real world, but are logical operators that contribute to the construction of meaning in sentences. In human–robot communication, these words may be used often. The current study builds a recurrent neural network model with long short-term memory units and trains it to learn to translate sentences including logic words into robot actions. We investigate what kind of compositional representations, which mediate sentences and robot actions, emerge as the network's internal states via the learning process. Analysis after learning shows that referential words are merged with visual information and the robot's own current state, and the logical words are represented by the model in accordance with their functions as logical operators. Words such as “true,” “false,” and “not” work as non-linear transformations to encode orthogonal phrases into the same area in a memory cell state space. The word “and,” which required a robot to lift up both its hands, worked as if it was a universal quantifier. The word “or,” which required action generation that looked apparently random, was represented as an

Body-specific representations of action word meanings in right and left handers

OpenAIRE

Daniel Casasanto

2007-01-01

If understanding action words involves mentally simulating our own actions, then the neurocognitive representation of word meanings must differ for people with different kinds of bodies, who perform actions in systematically different ways. In a test of the _Body-Specificity Hypothesis_, right- and left-handers were compared on two motor-meaning congruity tasks. Double dissociations in both action execution and recognition memory results showed that right and left handers form body-specific r...

The Emotions of Abstract Words: A Distributional Semantic Analysis.

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Lenci, Alessandro; Lebani, Gianluca E; Passaro, Lucia C

2018-04-06

Recent psycholinguistic and neuroscientific research has emphasized the crucial role of emotions for abstract words, which would be grounded by affective experience, instead of a sensorimotor one. The hypothesis of affective embodiment has been proposed as an alternative to the idea that abstract words are linguistically coded and that linguistic processing plays a key role in their acquisition and processing. In this paper, we use distributional semantic models to explore the complex interplay between linguistic and affective information in the representation of abstract words. Distributional analyses on Italian norming data show that abstract words have more affective content and tend to co-occur with contexts with higher emotive values, according to affective statistical indices estimated in terms of distributional similarity with a restricted number of seed words strongly associated with a set of basic emotions. Therefore, the strong affective content of abstract words might just be an indirect byproduct of co-occurrence statistics. This is consistent with a version of representational pluralism in which concepts that are fully embodied either at the sensorimotor or at the affective level live side-by-side with concepts only indirectly embodied via their linguistic associations with other embodied words. Copyright © 2018 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

The Word Composite Effect Depends on Abstract Lexical Representations But Not Surface Features Like Case and Font

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Paulo Ventura

2017-06-01

Full Text Available Prior studies have shown that words show a composite effect: When readers perform a same-different matching task on a target-part of a word, performance is affected by the irrelevant part, whose influence is severely reduced when the two parts are misaligned. However, the locus of this word composite effect is largely unknown. To enlighten it, in two experiments, Portuguese readers performed the composite task on letter strings: in Experiment 1, in written words varying in surface features (between-participants: courier, notera, alternating-cAsE, and in Experiment 2 in pseudowords. The word composite effect, signaled by a significant interaction between alignment of the two word parts and congruence between parts was found in the three conditions of Experiment 1, being unaffected by NoVeLtY of the configuration or by handwritten form. This effect seems to have a lexical locus, given that in Experiment 2 only the main effect of congruence between parts was significant and was not modulated by alignment. Indeed, the cross-experiment analysis showed that words presented stronger congruence effects than pseudowords only in the aligned condition, because when misaligned the whole lexical item configuration was disrupted. Therefore, the word composite effect strongly depends on abstract lexical representations, as it is unaffected by surface features and is specific to lexical items.

The Word Composite Effect Depends on Abstract Lexical Representations But Not Surface Features Like Case and Font.

Science.gov (United States)

Ventura, Paulo; Fernandes, Tânia; Leite, Isabel; Almeida, Vítor B; Casqueiro, Inês; Wong, Alan C-N

2017-01-01

Prior studies have shown that words show a composite effect: When readers perform a same-different matching task on a target-part of a word, performance is affected by the irrelevant part, whose influence is severely reduced when the two parts are misaligned. However, the locus of this word composite effect is largely unknown. To enlighten it, in two experiments, Portuguese readers performed the composite task on letter strings: in Experiment 1, in written words varying in surface features (between-participants: courier, notera, alternating-cAsE), and in Experiment 2 in pseudowords. The word composite effect, signaled by a significant interaction between alignment of the two word parts and congruence between parts was found in the three conditions of Experiment 1, being unaffected by NoVeLtY of the configuration or by handwritten form. This effect seems to have a lexical locus, given that in Experiment 2 only the main effect of congruence between parts was significant and was not modulated by alignment. Indeed, the cross-experiment analysis showed that words presented stronger congruence effects than pseudowords only in the aligned condition, because when misaligned the whole lexical item configuration was disrupted. Therefore, the word composite effect strongly depends on abstract lexical representations, as it is unaffected by surface features and is specific to lexical items.

Word position affects stimulus recognition: evidence for early ERP short-term plastic modulation.

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Spironelli, Chiara; Galfano, Giovanni; Umiltà, Carlo; Angrilli, Alessandro

2011-12-01

The present study was aimed at investigating the short-term plastic changes that follow word learning at a neurophysiological level. The main hypothesis was that word position (left or right visual field, LVF/RH or RVF/LH) in the initial learning phase would leave a trace that affected, in the subsequent recognition phase, the Recognition Potential (i.e., the first negative component distinguishing words from other stimuli) elicited 220-240 ms after centrally presented stimuli. Forty-eight students were administered, in the learning phase, 125 words for 4s, randomly presented half in the left and half in the right visual field. In the recognition phase, participants were split into two equal groups, one was assigned to the Word task, the other to the Picture task (in which half of the 125 pictures were new, and half matched prior studied words). During the Word task, old RVF/LH words elicited significantly greater negativity in left posterior sites with respect to old LVF/RH words, which in turn showed the same pattern of activation evoked by new words. Therefore, correspondence between stimulus spatial position and hemisphere specialized in automatic word recognition created a robust prime for subsequent recognition. During the Picture task, pictures matching old RVF/LH words showed no differences compared with new pictures, but evoked significantly greater negativity than pictures matching old LVF/RH words. Thus, the priming effect vanished when the task required a switch from visual analysis to stored linguistic information, whereas the lack of correspondence between stimulus position and network specialized in automatic word recognition (i.e., when words were presented to the LVF/RH) revealed the implicit costs for recognition. Results support the view that short-term plastic changes occurring in a linguistic learning task interact with both stimulus position and modality (written word vs. picture representation). Copyright © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights

Affective orientation influences memory for emotional and neutral words.

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Greenberg, Seth N; Tokarev, Julian; Estes, Zachary

2012-01-01

Memory is better for emotional words than for neutral words, but the conditions contributing to emotional memory improvement are not entirely understood. Elsewhere, it has been observed that retrieval of a word is easier when its attributes are congruent with a property assessed during an earlier judgment task. The present study examined whether affective assessment of a word matters to its remembrance. Two experiments were run, one in which only valence assessment was performed, and another in which valence assessment was combined with a running recognition for list words. In both experiments, some participants judged whether each word in a randomized list was negative (negative monitoring), and others judged whether each was positive (positive monitoring). We then tested their explicit memory for the words via both free recall and delayed recognition. Both experiments revealed an affective congruence effect, such that negative words were more likely to be recalled and recognized after negative monitoring, whereas positive words likewise benefited from positive monitoring. Memory for neutral words was better after negative monitoring than positive monitoring.Thus, memory for both emotional and neutral words is contingent on one's affective orientation during encoding.

Measuring, Predicting and Visualizing Short-Term Change in Word Representation and Usage in VKontakte Social Network

OpenAIRE

Stewart, Ian; Arendt, Dustin; Bell, Eric; Volkova, Svitlana

2017-01-01

Language in social media is extremely dynamic: new words emerge, trend and disappear, while the meaning of existing words can fluctuate over time. Such dynamics are especially notable during a period of crisis. This work addresses several important tasks of measuring, visualizing and predicting short term text representation shift, i.e. the change in a word's contextual semantics, and contrasting such shift with surface level word dynamics, or concept drift, observed in social media streams. ...

Measuring, Predicting and Visualizing Short-Term Change in Word Representation and Usage in VKontakte Social Network

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Stewart, Ian B.; Arendt, Dustin L.; Bell, Eric B.; Volkova, Svitlana

2017-05-17

Language in social media is extremely dynamic: new words emerge, trend and disappear, while the meaning of existing words can fluctuate over time. This work addresses several important tasks of visualizing and predicting short term text representation shift, i.e. the change in a word’s contextual semantics. We study the relationship between short-term concept drift and representation shift on a large social media corpus – VKontakte collected during the Russia-Ukraine crisis in 2014 – 2015. We visualize short-term representation shift for example keywords and build predictive models to forecast short-term shifts in meaning from previous meaning as well as from concept drift. We show that short-term representation shift can be accurately predicted up to several weeks in advance and that visualization provides insight into meaning change. Our approach can be used to explore and characterize specific aspects of the streaming corpus during crisis events and potentially improve other downstream classification tasks including real-time event forecasting in social media.

[The effect of goal framing on the activation of affective representations].

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Takehashi, Hiroki; Karasawa, Kaori

2007-10-01

Guided by regulatory focus theory, this study examined the effects of goal framing on the subjective experience of affect and the accessibility of affective representations. Study I examined lay persons' beliefs concerning the relationship between goal framing and certain kinds of affective experiences. The results indicated that a promotion focus was associated with happiness and disappointment, whereas a prevention focus was associated with relaxation and tension. Study 2 examined the effect of goal framing on the activation of affective representations, and found that a promotion focus activated both gain-related representations (happy and disappointment) and loss-related representations (relaxation and tension), whereas a prevention focus activated only loss-related representations. These results suggest that goal framing activates particular affective representations, and the activated affective representations may influence the interpretation of positive or negative experiences. The discussion considered the function of the activation of affective representations as a mediator between goal framing and its cognitive and behavioral consequences.

Image-Word Pairing-Congruity Effect on Affective Responses

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Sanabria Z., Jorge C.; Cho, Youngil; Sambai, Ami; Yamanaka, Toshimasa

The present study explores the effects of familiarity on affective responses (pleasure and arousal) to Japanese ad elements, based on the schema incongruity theory. Print ads showing natural scenes (landscapes) were used to create the stimuli (images and words). An empirical study was conducted to measure subjects' affective responses to image-word combinations that varied in terms of incongruity. The level of incongruity was based on familiarity levels, and was statistically determined by a variable called ‘pairing-congruity status’. The tested hypothesis proposed that even highly familiar image-word combinations, when combined incongruously, would elicit strong affective responses. Subjects assessed the stimuli using bipolar scales. The study was effective in tracing interactions between familiarity, pleasure and arousal, although the incongruous image-word combinations did not elicit the predicted strong effects on pleasure and arousal. The results suggest a need for further research incorporating kansei (i.e., creativity) into the process of stimuli selection.

The Effect of External Representations on Compare Word Problems: Supporting Mental Model Construction

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Munez, David; Orrantia, Josetxu; Rosales, Javier

2013-01-01

This study explored the effectiveness of external representations presented together with compare word problems, and whether such effectiveness was moderated by working memory. Participants were 49 secondary school students. Each participant solved 48 problems presented in 4 presentation types that included 2 difficulty treatments (number of steps…

Evidence for similar patterns of neural activity elicited by picture- and word-based representations of natural scenes.

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Kumar, Manoj; Federmeier, Kara D; Fei-Fei, Li; Beck, Diane M

2017-07-15

A long-standing core question in cognitive science is whether different modalities and representation types (pictures, words, sounds, etc.) access a common store of semantic information. Although different input types have been shown to activate a shared network of brain regions, this does not necessitate that there is a common representation, as the neurons in these regions could still differentially process the different modalities. However, multi-voxel pattern analysis can be used to assess whether, e.g., pictures and words evoke a similar pattern of activity, such that the patterns that separate categories in one modality transfer to the other. Prior work using this method has found support for a common code, but has two limitations: they have either only examined disparate categories (e.g. animals vs. tools) that are known to activate different brain regions, raising the possibility that the pattern separation and inferred similarity reflects only large scale differences between the categories or they have been limited to individual object representations. By using natural scene categories, we not only extend the current literature on cross-modal representations beyond objects, but also, because natural scene categories activate a common set of brain regions, we identify a more fine-grained (i.e. higher spatial resolution) common representation. Specifically, we studied picture- and word-based representations of natural scene stimuli from four different categories: beaches, cities, highways, and mountains. Participants passively viewed blocks of either phrases (e.g. "sandy beach") describing scenes or photographs from those same scene categories. To determine whether the phrases and pictures evoke a common code, we asked whether a classifier trained on one stimulus type (e.g. phrase stimuli) would transfer (i.e. cross-decode) to the other stimulus type (e.g. picture stimuli). The analysis revealed cross-decoding in the occipitotemporal, posterior parietal and

Working memory affects older adults' use of context in spoken-word recognition.

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Janse, Esther; Jesse, Alexandra

2014-01-01

Many older listeners report difficulties in understanding speech in noisy situations. Working memory and other cognitive skills may modulate older listeners' ability to use context information to alleviate the effects of noise on spoken-word recognition. In the present study, we investigated whether verbal working memory predicts older adults' ability to immediately use context information in the recognition of words embedded in sentences, presented in different listening conditions. In a phoneme-monitoring task, older adults were asked to detect as fast and as accurately as possible target phonemes in sentences spoken by a target speaker. Target speech was presented without noise, with fluctuating speech-shaped noise, or with competing speech from a single distractor speaker. The gradient measure of contextual probability (derived from a separate offline rating study) affected the speed of recognition. Contextual facilitation was modulated by older listeners' verbal working memory (measured with a backward digit span task) and age across listening conditions. Working memory and age, as well as hearing loss, were also the most consistent predictors of overall listening performance. Older listeners' immediate benefit from context in spoken-word recognition thus relates to their ability to keep and update a semantic representation of the sentence content in working memory.

Word selection affects perceptions of synthetic biology

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Tonidandel Scott

2011-07-01

Full Text Available Abstract Members of the synthetic biology community have discussed the significance of word selection when describing synthetic biology to the general public. In particular, many leaders proposed the word "create" was laden with negative connotations. We found that word choice and framing does affect public perception of synthetic biology. In a controlled experiment, participants perceived synthetic biology more negatively when "create" was used to describe the field compared to "construct" (p = 0.008. Contrary to popular opinion among synthetic biologists, however, low religiosity individuals were more influenced negatively by the framing manipulation than high religiosity people. Our results suggest that synthetic biologists directly influence public perception of their field through avoidance of the word "create".

Does "a picture is worth 1000 words" apply to iconic Chinese words? Relationship of Chinese words and pictures.

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Lo, Shih-Yu; Yeh, Su-Ling

2018-05-29

The meaning of a picture can be extracted rapidly, but the form-to-meaning relationship is less obvious for printed words. In contrast to English words that follow grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence rule, the iconic nature of Chinese words might predispose them to activate their semantic representations more directly from their orthographies. By using the paradigm of repetition blindness (RB) that taps into the early level of word processing, we examined whether Chinese words activate their semantic representations as directly as pictures do. RB refers to the failure to detect the second occurrence of an item when it is presented twice in temporal proximity. Previous studies showed RB for semantically related pictures, suggesting that pictures activate their semantic representations directly from their shapes and thus two semantically related pictures are represented as repeated. However, this does not apply to English words since no RB was found for English synonyms. In this study, we replicated the semantic RB effect for pictures, and further showed the absence of semantic RB for Chinese synonyms. Based on our findings, it is suggested that Chinese words are processed like English words, which do not activate their semantic representations as directly as pictures do.

Suppressing memories of words and familiar objects results in their affective devaluation: Evidence from Think/No-think tasks.

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De Vito, David; Fenske, Mark J

2017-05-01

Potentially distracting or otherwise-inappropriate stimuli, thoughts, or actions often must be inhibited to prevent interference with goal-directed behaviour. Growing evidence suggests that the impact of inhibition is not limited to reduced neurocognitive processing, but also includes negative affective consequences for any associated stimuli. The link between inhibition and aversive response has primarily been studied using tasks involving attentional- or response-related inhibition of external sensory stimuli. Here we show that affective devaluation also occurs when inhibition is applied to fully-encoded stimulus representations in memory. We first replicated prior findings of increased forgetting of words whose memories were suppressed in a Think/No-think procedure (Experiment 1). Incorporating a stimulus-evaluation task within this procedure revealed that suppressing memories of words (Experiment 2) and visual objects (Experiment 3) also results in their affective devaluation. Given the critical role of memory for guiding thoughts and actions, these results suggest that the affective consequences of inhibition may occur across a far broader range of situations than previously understood. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Word recognition in Alzheimer's disease: Effects of semantic degeneration.

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Cuetos, Fernando; Arce, Noemí; Martínez, Carmen; Ellis, Andrew W

2017-03-01

Impairments of word recognition in Alzheimer's disease (AD) have been less widely investigated than impairments affecting word retrieval and production. In particular, we know little about what makes individual words easier or harder for patients with AD to recognize. We used a lexical selection task in which participants were shown sets of four items, each set consisting of one word and three non-words. The task was simply to point to the word on each trial. Forty patients with mild-to-moderate AD were significantly impaired on this task relative to matched controls who made very few errors. The number of patients with AD able to recognize each word correctly was predicted by the frequency, age of acquisition, and imageability of the words, but not by their length or number of orthographic neighbours. Patient Mini-Mental State Examination and phonological fluency scores also predicted the number of words recognized. We propose that progressive degradation of central semantic representations in AD differentially affects the ability to recognize low-imageability, low-frequency, late-acquired words, with the same factors affecting word recognition as affecting word retrieval. © 2015 The British Psychological Society.

The effects of the concreteness of differently valenced words on affective priming.

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Yao, Zhao; Wang, Zhenhong

2013-07-01

This study aimed to determine whether affective priming is influenced by the concreteness of emotional words. To address this question, we conducted three experiments using lexical decision-priming task. In Experiment 1, positive-abstract (PA) and positive-concrete (PC) words were used as primes to examine the effect of the concreteness of positive words on affective priming, and in Experiment 2, negative-abstract (NA) and negative-concrete (NC) words were used as primes to examine the effect of the concreteness of negative words on affective priming. Results showed that participants responded faster to affectively congruent-abstract trails than incongruent-abstract trails in PA prime conditions, but for PC or negative word (NC and NA) prime conditions, there were no differences between the response times of congruent trails and incongruent trails. To examine the reliability of the priming effects observed in Experiments 1 and 2, we set up a neutral condition as a baseline in Experiment 3, through which we confirmed the difference in the affective priming effect between positive and negative primes in a concrete-abstract dimension. PA words were found to have the tendency to possess more emotional load and facilitate affective association between the prime and the target. The study finding suggests that aside from arousal and valence, the concreteness of positive words also has an impact on affective priming effect. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Review of Raffaele Simone and Francesca Masini: Word classes: Nature, typology and representations

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Shibuya, Yoshikata; Jensen, Kim Ebensgaard

2016-01-01

Review of Raffaele Simone and Francesca Masini (eds.). Word classes: Nature, typology and representations. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory [CILT] 332. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2014, 293 + vii pp., ISBN: 1978-90-272-4851-0. Hardback and E-book 99.00 EUR / 149...

Affective Meaning, Concreteness, and Subjective Frequency Norms for Indonesian Words

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Agnes Sianipar

2016-12-01

Full Text Available This study investigated the lexical-semantic space organized by the semantic and affective features of Indonesian words and their relationship with gender and cultural aspects. We recruited 1,402 participants who were native speakers of Indonesian to rate affective and lexico-semantic properties of 1,490 Indonesian words. Valence, Arousal, Dominance, Predictability, Subjective Frequency, and Concreteness ratings were collected for each word from at least 52 people. We explored cultural differences between American English ANEW, Spanish ANEW, and the new Indonesian inventory (called CEFI. We found functional relationships between the affective dimensions that were similar across languages, but also cultural differences dependent on gender.

Do reading and spelling share orthographic representations? Evidence from developmental dysgraphia.

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Hepner, Christopher; McCloskey, Michael; Rapp, Brenda

Both spelling and reading depend on knowledge of the spellings of words. Despite this commonality, observed dissociations between spelling and reading in cases of acquired and developmental deficits suggest some degree of independence between the cognitive mechanisms involved in these skills. In this paper, we examine the relationship between spelling and reading in two children with developmental dysgraphia. For both children, we identified significant deficits in spelling that affected the processing of orthographic long-term memory representations of words. We then examined their reading skills for similar difficulties. Even with extensive testing, we found no evidence of a reading deficit for one of the children. We propose that there may be an underlying difficulty that specifically affects the learning of orthographic word representations for spelling. These results lead us to conclude that at least some components of lexical orthographic representation and processing develop with considerable independence in spelling and reading.

Orthographic consistency affects spoken word recognition at different grain-sizes

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Dich, Nadya

2014-01-01

A number of previous studies found that the consistency of sound-to-spelling mappings (feedback consistency) affects spoken word recognition. In auditory lexical decision experiments, words that can only be spelled one way are recognized faster than words with multiple potential spellings. Previo...

Fuzzy Nonnative Phonolexical Representations Lead to Fuzzy Form-to-Meaning Mappings

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Svetlana V Cook

2016-09-01

Full Text Available The present paper explores nonnative (L2 phonological encoding of lexical entries and dissociates the difficulties associated with L2 phonological and phonolexical encoding by focusing on similarly sounding L2 words that are not differentiated by difficult phonological contrasts. We test two main claims of the fuzzy lexicon hypothesis: (1 L2 fuzzy phonolexical representations are not fully specified and lack details at both phonological and phonolexical levels of representation (Experiment 1; and (2 fuzzy phonolexical representations can lead to establishing incorrect form-to-meaning mappings (Experiment 2.The Russian-English Translation Priming task (Experiment 1, TJT explores how the degree of phonolexical similarity between a word and its lexical competitor affects lexical access of Russian words. Words with smaller phonolexical distance (e.g., parent - parrot show longer reaction times and lower accuracy compared to words with a larger phonolexical distance (e.g., parent – parchment in lower-proficiency nonnative speakers, and, to a lesser degree, higher-proficiency speakers. This points to a lack of detail in nonnative phonolexical representations necessary for efficient lexical access. The Russian Pseudo-Semantic Priming task (Experiment 2, PSP addresses the vulnerability of form-to-meaning mappings as a consequence of fuzzy phonolexical representations in L2. We primed the target with a word semantically related to its phonological competitor, or a potentially confusable word. The findings of Experiment 2 extend the results of Experiment 1 that, unlike native speakers, nonnative speakers do not properly encode phonolexical information. As a result, they are prone to access an incorrect lexical representation of a competitor word, as indicated by a slowdown in the judgments to confusable words.The study provides evidence that fuzzy phonolexical representations result in unfaithful form-to-meaning mappings, which lead to retrieval of

Knowledge inhibition and N400: a study with words that look like common words.

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Debruille, J B

1998-04-01

In addition to their own representations, low frequency words, such as BRIBE, can covertly activate the representations of higher frequency words they look like (e.g., BRIDE). Hence, look-alike words can activate knowledge that is incompatible with the knowledge corresponding to accurate representations. Comparatively, eccentric words, that is, low frequency words that do not look as much like higher frequency words, are less likely to activate incompatible knowledge. This study focuses on the hypothesis that the N400 component of the event-related potential reflects the inhibition of incompatible knowledge. This hypothesis predicts that look-alike words elicit N400s of greater amplitudes than eccentric words in conditions where incompatible knowledge is inhibited. Results from a single item lexical decision experiment are reported which support the inhibition hypothesis. Copyright 1998 Academic Press.

Orthographic Consistency Affects Spoken Word Recognition at Different Grain-Sizes

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Dich, Nadya

2014-01-01

A number of previous studies found that the consistency of sound-to-spelling mappings (feedback consistency) affects spoken word recognition. In auditory lexical decision experiments, words that can only be spelled one way are recognized faster than words with multiple potential spellings. Previous studies demonstrated this by manipulating…

Sliding into happiness: A new tool for measuring affective responses to words

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Warriner, Amy Beth; Shore, David I.; Schmidt, Louis A.; Imbault, Constance L.; Kuperman, Victor

2016-01-01

Reliable measurement of affective responses is critical for research into human emotion. Affective evaluation of words is most commonly gauged on multiple dimensions—including valence (positivity) and arousal—using a rating scale. Despite its popularity, this scale is open to criticism: it generates ordinal data that is often misinterpreted as interval, it does not provide the fine resolution that is essential by recent theoretical accounts of emotion, and its extremes may not be properly calibrated. In five experiments, we introduce a new slider tool for affective evaluation of words on a continuous, well-calibrated and high-resolution scale. In Experiment 1, participants were shown a word and asked to move a manikin representing themselves closer to or farther away from the word. The manikin’s distance from the word strongly correlated with the word’s valence. In Experiment 2, individual differences in shyness and sociability elicited reliable differences in distance from the words. Experiment 3 validated the results of Experiments 1 and 2 using a demographically more diverse population of responders. Finally, Experiment 4 (along with Experiment 2) suggested that task demand is not a potential cause for scale recalibration. In Experiment 5, men and women placed a manikin closer or farther from words that showed sex differences in valence, highlighting the sensitivity of this measure to group differences. These findings shed a new light on interactions among affect, language, and individual differences, and demonstrate the utility of a new tool for measuring word affect. PMID:28252996

Visual word form familiarity and attention in lateral difference during processing Japanese Kana words.

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Nakagawa, A; Sukigara, M

2000-09-01

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between familiarity and laterality in reading Japanese Kana words. In two divided-visual-field experiments, three- or four-character Hiragana or Katakana words were presented in both familiar and unfamiliar scripts, to which subjects performed lexical decisions. Experiment 1, using three stimulus durations (40, 100, 160 ms), suggested that only in the unfamiliar script condition was increased stimulus presentation time differently affected in each visual field. To examine this lateral difference during the processing of unfamiliar scripts as related to attentional laterality, a concurrent auditory shadowing task was added in Experiment 2. The results suggested that processing words in an unfamiliar script requires attention, which could be left-hemisphere lateralized, while orthographically familiar kana words can be processed automatically on the basis of their word-level orthographic representations or visual word form. Copyright 2000 Academic Press.

Comparing different kinds of words and word-word relations to test an habituation model of priming.

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Rieth, Cory A; Huber, David E

2017-06-01

Huber and O'Reilly (2003) proposed that neural habituation exists to solve a temporal parsing problem, minimizing blending between one word and the next when words are visually presented in rapid succession. They developed a neural dynamics habituation model, explaining the finding that short duration primes produce positive priming whereas long duration primes produce negative repetition priming. The model contains three layers of processing, including a visual input layer, an orthographic layer, and a lexical-semantic layer. The predicted effect of prime duration depends both on this assumed representational hierarchy and the assumption that synaptic depression underlies habituation. The current study tested these assumptions by comparing different kinds of words (e.g., words versus non-words) and different kinds of word-word relations (e.g., associative versus repetition). For each experiment, the predictions of the original model were compared to an alternative model with different representational assumptions. Experiment 1 confirmed the prediction that non-words and inverted words require longer prime durations to eliminate positive repetition priming (i.e., a slower transition from positive to negative priming). Experiment 2 confirmed the prediction that associative priming increases and then decreases with increasing prime duration, but remains positive even with long duration primes. Experiment 3 replicated the effects of repetition and associative priming using a within-subjects design and combined these effects by examining target words that were expected to repeat (e.g., viewing the target word 'BACK' after the prime phrase 'back to'). These results support the originally assumed representational hierarchy and more generally the role of habituation in temporal parsing and priming. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Emotion and language: Valence and arousal affect word recognition

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Brysbaert, Marc; Warriner, Amy Beth

2014-01-01

Emotion influences most aspects of cognition and behavior, but emotional factors are conspicuously absent from current models of word recognition. The influence of emotion on word recognition has mostly been reported in prior studies on the automatic vigilance for negative stimuli, but the precise nature of this relationship is unclear. Various models of automatic vigilance have claimed that the effect of valence on response times is categorical, an inverted-U, or interactive with arousal. The present study used a sample of 12,658 words, and included many lexical and semantic control factors, to determine the precise nature of the effects of arousal and valence on word recognition. Converging empirical patterns observed in word-level and trial-level data from lexical decision and naming indicate that valence and arousal exert independent monotonic effects: Negative words are recognized more slowly than positive words, and arousing words are recognized more slowly than calming words. Valence explained about 2% of the variance in word recognition latencies, whereas the effect of arousal was smaller. Valence and arousal do not interact, but both interact with word frequency, such that valence and arousal exert larger effects among low-frequency words than among high-frequency words. These results necessitate a new model of affective word processing whereby the degree of negativity monotonically and independently predicts the speed of responding. This research also demonstrates that incorporating emotional factors, especially valence, improves the performance of models of word recognition. PMID:24490848

Changing word usage predicts changing word durations in New Zealand English.

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Sóskuthy, Márton; Hay, Jennifer

2017-09-01

This paper investigates the emergence of lexicalized effects of word usage on word duration by looking at parallel changes in usage and duration over 130years in New Zealand English. Previous research has found that frequent words are shorter, informative words are longer, and words in utterance-final position are also longer. It has also been argued that some of these patterns are not simply online adjustments, but are incorporated into lexical representations. While these studies tend to focus on the synchronic aspects of such patterns, our corpus shows that word-usage patterns and word durations are not static over time. Many words change in duration and also change with respect to frequency, informativity and likelihood of occurring utterance-finally. Analysis of changing word durations over this time period shows substantial patterns of co-adaptation between word usage and word durations. Words that are increasing in frequency are becoming shorter. Words that are increasing/decreasing in informativity show a change in the same direction in duration (e.g. increasing informativity is associated with increasing duration). And words that are increasingly appearing utterance-finally are lengthening. These effects exist independently of the local effects of the predictors. For example, words that are increasing utterance-finally lengthen in all positions, including utterance-medially. We show that these results are compatible with a number of different views about lexical representations, but they cannot be explained without reference to a production-perception loop that allows speakers to update their representations dynamically on the basis of their experience. Copyright © 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The role of visual representations during the lexical access of spoken words.

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Lewis, Gwyneth; Poeppel, David

2014-07-01

Do visual representations contribute to spoken word recognition? We examine, using MEG, the effects of sublexical and lexical variables at superior temporal (ST) areas and the posterior middle temporal gyrus (pMTG) compared with that of word imageability at visual cortices. Embodied accounts predict early modulation of visual areas by imageability--concurrently with or prior to modulation of pMTG by lexical variables. Participants responded to speech stimuli varying continuously in imageability during lexical decision with simultaneous MEG recording. We employed the linguistic variables in a new type of correlational time course analysis to assess trial-by-trial activation in occipital, ST, and pMTG regions of interest (ROIs). The linguistic variables modulated the ROIs during different time windows. Critically, visual regions reflected an imageability effect prior to effects of lexicality on pMTG. This surprising effect supports a view on which sensory aspects of a lexical item are not a consequence of lexical activation. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

VStops: A Thinking Strategy and Visual Representation Approach in Mathematical Word Problem Solving toward Enhancing STEM Literacy

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Abdullah, Nasarudin; Halim, Lilia; Zakaria, Effandi

2014-01-01

This study aimed to determine the impact of strategic thinking and visual representation approaches (VStops) on the achievement, conceptual knowledge, metacognitive awareness, awareness of problem-solving strategies, and student attitudes toward mathematical word problem solving among primary school students. The experimental group (N = 96)…

Concreteness of positive word contributions to affective priming: an ERP study.

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Yao, Zhao; Wang, Zhenhong

2014-09-01

Recent behavioral data suggest that the concreteness of positive words modulates subsequent cognitive processing; however, the underlying physiological processes of this influence are not well understood. To explore this process, positive-abstract words or positive-concrete words were used as primes when participants performed a lexical decision task during the measurement of event-related potentials (ERPs). The behavioral data revealed a significant affective priming effect (i.e., incongruent>congruent) only for abstract word pairs. The N400 amplitude was larger for affectively incongruent pairs compared to affectively congruent pairs, independent of the prime concreteness. The amplitude of the late positive component (LPC) was modulated by prime concreteness. The processing of positive-abstract targets was facilitated by previous exposure to a congruent prime, as reflected by the reduced LPC, which has been thought to reflect attentional and memory processes. However, no differences in the LPC amplitude were found between congruent and incongruent-concrete pairs. These findings suggest that the influence of the concreteness of positive words mainly occurs during the decision-making processing and memory-related stages. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Electrophysiological differences in the processing of affective information in words and pictures.

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Hinojosa, José A; Carretié, Luis; Valcárcel, María A; Méndez-Bértolo, Constantino; Pozo, Miguel A

2009-06-01

It is generally assumed that affective picture viewing is related to higher levels of physiological arousal than is the reading of emotional words. However, this assertion is based mainly on studies in which the processing of either words or pictures has been investigated under heterogenic conditions. Positive, negative, relaxing, neutral, and background (stimulus fragments) words and pictures were presented to subjects in two experiments under equivalent experimental conditions. In Experiment 1, neutral words elicited an enhanced late positive component (LPC) that was associated with an increased difficulty in discriminating neutral from background stimuli. In Experiment 2, high-arousing pictures elicited an enhanced early negativity and LPC that were related to a facilitated processing for these stimuli. Thus, it seems that under some circumstances, the processing of affective information captures attention only with more biologically relevant stimuli. Also, these data might be better interpreted on the basis of those models that postulate a different access to affective information for words and pictures.

Acquired word deafness, and the temporal grain of sound representation in the primary auditory cortex.

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Phillips, D P; Farmer, M E

1990-11-15

This paper explores the nature of the processing disorder which underlies the speech discrimination deficit in the syndrome of acquired word deafness following from pathology to the primary auditory cortex. A critical examination of the evidence on this disorder revealed the following. First, the most profound forms of the condition are expressed not only in an isolation of the cerebral linguistic processor from auditory input, but in a failure of even the perceptual elaboration of the relevant sounds. Second, in agreement with earlier studies, we conclude that the perceptual dimension disturbed in word deafness is a temporal one. We argue, however, that it is not a generalized disorder of auditory temporal processing, but one which is largely restricted to the processing of sounds with temporal content in the milliseconds to tens-of-milliseconds time frame. The perceptual elaboration of sounds with temporal content outside that range, in either direction, may survive the disorder. Third, we present neurophysiological evidence that the primary auditory cortex has a special role in the representation of auditory events in that time frame, but not in the representation of auditory events with temporal grains outside that range.

Concurrent word generation and motor performance: further evidence for language-motor interaction.

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Amy D Rodriguez

Full Text Available Embodied/modality-specific theories of semantic memory propose that sensorimotor representations play an important role in perception and action. A large body of evidence supports the notion that concepts involving human motor action (i.e., semantic-motor representations are processed in both language and motor regions of the brain. However, most studies have focused on perceptual tasks, leaving unanswered questions about language-motor interaction during production tasks. Thus, we investigated the effects of shared semantic-motor representations on concurrent language and motor production tasks in healthy young adults, manipulating the semantic task (motor-related vs. nonmotor-related words and the motor task (i.e., standing still and finger-tapping. In Experiment 1 (n = 20, we demonstrated that motor-related word generation was sufficient to affect postural control. In Experiment 2 (n = 40, we demonstrated that motor-related word generation was sufficient to facilitate word generation and finger tapping. We conclude that engaging semantic-motor representations can have a reciprocal influence on motor and language production. Our study provides additional support for functional language-motor interaction, as well as embodied/modality-specific theories.

Early access to lexical-level phonological representations of Mandarin word-forms : evidence from auditory N1 habituation

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Yue, Jinxing; Alter, Kai; Howard, David; Bastiaanse, Roelien

2017-01-01

An auditory habituation design was used to investigate whether lexical-level phonological representations in the brain can be rapidly accessed after the onset of a spoken word. We studied the N1 component of the auditory event-related electrical potential, and measured the amplitude decrements of N1

Perceptual, semantic and affective dimensions of experience of abstract and representational paintings

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Marković Slobodan

2011-01-01

Full Text Available In this study the difference between representational and abstract paintings in judgments on perceptual, semantic and affective dimensions was investigated. Two groups of participants judged the sets of representational and abstract paintings on three groups of dimensions: perceptual (Form, Color, Space and Complexity, semantic (Illusion-Construction of Reality, Expression, Ideology and Decoration, and affective (Hedonic Tone, Arousal, Relaxation and Regularity. The results have shown that representational paintings have higher judgments on the perceptual dimensions of Form and Complexity, the semantic dimension of the Illusion of Reality (the opposite pole of the Construction of Reality, and the affective dimension of Regularity. On the other hand, abstract paintings have higher judgments on the perceptual dimension of Color, the semantic dimensions of Construction of Reality (the opposite pole of the Illusion of Reality and Expression, and the affective dimension Arousal. A discriminant analysis indicated that all three sets of dimensions are relatively good predictors of the classification of representational and abstract paintings (61-100%. The results suggest that the subjective categorization of paintings is generally based on the recognizability of pictorial content (representational vs. abstract, but some formal or stylistic properties play a role in the categorization, as well: some expressionistic representational paintings were classified in an abstract category, and some geometrically abstract paintings were classified as representational.

Moved by words: Affective ratings for a set of 2,266 Spanish words in five discrete emotion categories.

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Ferré, Pilar; Guasch, Marc; Martínez-García, Natalia; Fraga, Isabel; Hinojosa, José Antonio

2017-06-01

The two main theoretical accounts of the human affective space are the dimensional perspective and the discrete-emotion approach. In recent years, several affective norms have been developed from a dimensional perspective, including ratings for valence and arousal. In contrast, the number of published datasets relying on the discrete-emotion approach is much lower. There is a need to fill this gap, considering that discrete emotions have an effect on word processing above and beyond those of valence and arousal. In the present study, we present ratings from 1,380 participants for a set of 2,266 Spanish words in five discrete emotion categories: happiness, anger, fear, disgust, and sadness. This will be the largest dataset published to date containing ratings for discrete emotions. We also present, for the first time, a fine-grained analysis of the distribution of words into the five emotion categories. This analysis reveals that happiness words are the most consistently related to a single, discrete emotion category. In contrast, there is a tendency for many negative words to belong to more than one discrete emotion. The only exception is disgust words, which overlap least with the other negative emotions. Normative valence and arousal data already exist for all of the words included in this corpus. Thus, the present database will allow researchers to design studies to contrast the predictions of the two most influential theoretical perspectives in this field. These studies will undoubtedly contribute to a deeper understanding of the effects of emotion on word processing.

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

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Haro, Juan; Ferré, Pilar

2018-06-01

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 inconsistent findings may be due to the approach employed to select ambiguous words across studies. To address this issue, we conducted three LDT experiments in which we varied the measure used to classify ambiguous and unambiguous words. The results suggest that multiple unrelated meanings facilitate word recognition. In addition, we observed that the approach employed to select ambiguous words may affect the pattern of experimental results. This evidence has relevant implications for theoretical accounts of ambiguous words processing and representation.

Word learning mechanisms.

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He, Angela Xiaoxue; Arunachalam, Sudha

2017-07-01

How do children acquire the meanings of words? Many word learning mechanisms have been proposed to guide learners through this challenging task. Despite the availability of rich information in the learner's linguistic and extralinguistic input, the word-learning task is insurmountable without such mechanisms for filtering through and utilizing that information. Different kinds of words, such as nouns denoting object concepts and verbs denoting event concepts, require to some extent different kinds of information and, therefore, access to different kinds of mechanisms. We review some of these mechanisms to examine the relationship between the input that is available to learners and learners' intake of that input-that is, the organized, interpreted, and stored representations they form. We discuss how learners segment individual words from the speech stream and identify their grammatical categories, how they identify the concepts denoted by these words, and how they refine their initial representations of word meanings. WIREs Cogn Sci 2017, 8:e1435. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1435 This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Language Acquisition Psychology > Language. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

On discriminating and not discriminating between affect and representation.

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Green, A

1999-04-01

The topic involves two issues. They can be related either to different clinical pictures or to divergent opinions about the same clinical facts. But the above mentioned opposition can be found in Freud's work. Listening in analysis differentiates between situations where the distinction of affect and representation is blurred within the general frame of communication and others where this distinction imposes itself because of the critical or chronic character of the predominance of affect. Problems about the discrimination between affect and representation in the unconscious are elucidated in the light of their structural differences. The notion of the psychical representative of the drive announces the reference to the further notion of instinctual impulse. Later on, in Freud's theory, the notion of instinctual impulse has encompassed the distinction between affects and representation. Contemporary authors have, in their vast majority, chosen to refer preferably to object relationships. Nevertheless, the problems raised by Freud remain unanswered. It is with the clinical picture of borderline personality disorders that the lack of discrimination between affect and representation becomes evident. A detailed description is presented of the forms of transference where the irrepresentable prevails, accompanied by feelings of being overwhelmed, repetition compulsion, acting out and somatic reactions. In the countertransference, the affects of helplessness, despair and even the impossibility of grasping the meaning of the patient's communication are frequently met in the analyst. In these clinical pictures, intermediary formations, i.e. psychic organisations where primary processes structures the unconscious, are impaired. One is struck by the limitation of the capacities of representation and by the importance of phenomena related to negative hallucinations specially focused on thought processes, The communication is frequently self-contradictory, the transference

The abstract representations in speech processing.

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Cutler, Anne

2008-11-01

Speech processing by human listeners derives meaning from acoustic input via intermediate steps involving abstract representations of what has been heard. Recent results from several lines of research are here brought together to shed light on the nature and role of these representations. In spoken-word recognition, representations of phonological form and of conceptual content are dissociable. This follows from the independence of patterns of priming for a word's form and its meaning. The nature of the phonological-form representations is determined not only by acoustic-phonetic input but also by other sources of information, including metalinguistic knowledge. This follows from evidence that listeners can store two forms as different without showing any evidence of being able to detect the difference in question when they listen to speech. The lexical representations are in turn separate from prelexical representations, which are also abstract in nature. This follows from evidence that perceptual learning about speaker-specific phoneme realization, induced on the basis of a few words, generalizes across the whole lexicon to inform the recognition of all words containing the same phoneme. The efficiency of human speech processing has its basis in the rapid execution of operations over abstract representations.

Eye Movement Evidence for Hierarchy Effects on Memory Representation of Discourses.

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Yingying Wu

Full Text Available In this study, we applied the text-change paradigm to investigate whether and how discourse hierarchy affected the memory representation of a discourse. Three kinds of three-sentence discourses were constructed. In the hierarchy-high condition and the hierarchy-low condition, the three sentences of the discourses were hierarchically organized and the last sentence of each discourse was located at the high level and the low level of the discourse hierarchy, respectively. In the linear condition, the three sentences of the discourses were linearly organized. Critical words were always located at the last sentence of the discourses. These discourses were successively presented twice and the critical words were changed to semantically related words in the second presentation. The results showed that during the early processing stage, the critical words were read for longer times when they were changed in the hierarchy-high and the linear conditions, but not in the hierarchy-low condition. During the late processing stage, the changed-critical words were again found to induce longer reading times only when they were in the hierarchy-high condition. These results suggest that words in a discourse have better memory representation when they are located at the higher rather than at the lower level of the discourse hierarchy. Global discourse hierarchy is established as an important factor in constructing the mental representation of a discourse.

Eye Movement Evidence for Hierarchy Effects on Memory Representation of Discourses.

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Wu, Yingying; Yang, Xiaohong; Yang, Yufang

2016-01-01

In this study, we applied the text-change paradigm to investigate whether and how discourse hierarchy affected the memory representation of a discourse. Three kinds of three-sentence discourses were constructed. In the hierarchy-high condition and the hierarchy-low condition, the three sentences of the discourses were hierarchically organized and the last sentence of each discourse was located at the high level and the low level of the discourse hierarchy, respectively. In the linear condition, the three sentences of the discourses were linearly organized. Critical words were always located at the last sentence of the discourses. These discourses were successively presented twice and the critical words were changed to semantically related words in the second presentation. The results showed that during the early processing stage, the critical words were read for longer times when they were changed in the hierarchy-high and the linear conditions, but not in the hierarchy-low condition. During the late processing stage, the changed-critical words were again found to induce longer reading times only when they were in the hierarchy-high condition. These results suggest that words in a discourse have better memory representation when they are located at the higher rather than at the lower level of the discourse hierarchy. Global discourse hierarchy is established as an important factor in constructing the mental representation of a discourse.

Learning during processing Word learning doesn’t wait for word recognition to finish

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Apfelbaum, Keith S.; McMurray, Bob

2017-01-01

Previous research on associative learning has uncovered detailed aspects of the process, including what types of things are learned, how they are learned, and where in the brain such learning occurs. However, perceptual processes, such as stimulus recognition and identification, take time to unfold. Previous studies of learning have not addressed when, during the course of these dynamic recognition processes, learned representations are formed and updated. If learned representations are formed and updated while recognition is ongoing, the result of learning may incorporate spurious, partial information. For example, during word recognition, words take time to be identified, and competing words are often active in parallel. If learning proceeds before this competition resolves, representations may be influenced by the preliminary activations present at the time of learning. In three experiments using word learning as a model domain, we provide evidence that learning reflects the ongoing dynamics of auditory and visual processing during a learning event. These results show that learning can occur before stimulus recognition processes are complete; learning does not wait for ongoing perceptual processing to complete. PMID:27471082

A Review of the Effects of Visual-Spatial Representations and Heuristics on Word Problem Solving in Middle School Mathematics

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Kribbs, Elizabeth E.; Rogowsky, Beth A.

2016-01-01

Mathematics word-problems continue to be an insurmountable challenge for many middle school students. Educators have used pictorial and schematic illustrations within the classroom to help students visualize these problems. However, the data shows that pictorial representations can be more harmful than helpful in that they only display objects or…

Acquiring concepts and features of novel words by two types of learning: direct mapping and inference.

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Chen, Shuang; Wang, Lin; Yang, Yufang

2014-04-01

This study examined the semantic representation of novel words learnt in two conditions: directly mapping a novel word to a concept (Direct mapping: DM) and inferring the concept from provided features (Inferred learning: IF). A condition where no definite concept could be inferred (No basic-level meaning: NM) served as a baseline. The semantic representation of the novel word was assessed via a semantic-relatedness judgment task. In this task, the learned novel word served as a prime, while the corresponding concept, an unlearned feature of the concept, and an unrelated word served as targets. ERP responses to the targets, primed by the novel words in the three learning conditions, were compared. For the corresponding concept, smaller N400s were elicited in the DM and IF conditions than in the NM condition, indicating that the concept could be obtained in both learning conditions. However, for the unlearned feature, the targets in the IF condition produced an N400 effect while in the DM condition elicited an LPC effect relative to the NM learning condition. No ERP difference was observed among the three learning conditions for the unrelated words. The results indicate that conditions of learning affect the semantic representation of novel word, and that the unlearned feature was only activated by the novel word in the IF learning condition. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Is Accessing of Words Affected by Affective Valence Only? A Discrete Emotion View on the Emotional Congruency Effect

OpenAIRE

Chen, Xuqian; Liu, Bo; Lin, Shouwen

2016-01-01

This paper advances the discussion on which emotion information affects word accessing. Emotion information, which is formed as a result of repeated experiences, is primary and necessary in learning and representing word meanings. Previous findings suggested that valence (i.e., positive or negative) denoted by words can be automatically activated and plays a role in many significant cognitive processes. However, there has been a lack of discussion about whether discrete emotion information (i...

Affective Congruence between Sound and Meaning of Words Facilitates Semantic Decision.

Science.gov (United States)

Aryani, Arash; Jacobs, Arthur M

2018-05-31

A similarity between the form and meaning of a word (i.e., iconicity) may help language users to more readily access its meaning through direct form-meaning mapping. Previous work has supported this view by providing empirical evidence for this facilitatory effect in sign language, as well as for onomatopoetic words (e.g., cuckoo) and ideophones (e.g., zigzag). Thus, it remains largely unknown whether the beneficial role of iconicity in making semantic decisions can be considered a general feature in spoken language applying also to "ordinary" words in the lexicon. By capitalizing on the affective domain, and in particular arousal, we organized words in two distinctive groups of iconic vs. non-iconic based on the congruence vs. incongruence of their lexical (meaning) and sublexical (sound) arousal. In a two-alternative forced choice task, we asked participants to evaluate the arousal of printed words that were lexically either high or low arousing. In line with our hypothesis, iconic words were evaluated more quickly and more accurately than their non-iconic counterparts. These results indicate a processing advantage for iconic words, suggesting that language users are sensitive to sound-meaning mappings even when words are presented visually and read silently.

The role of visual representations within working memory for paired-associate and serial order of spoken words.

Science.gov (United States)

Ueno, Taiji; Saito, Satoru

2013-09-01

Caplan and colleagues have recently explained paired-associate learning and serial-order learning with a single-mechanism computational model by assuming differential degrees of isolation. Specifically, two items in a pair can be grouped together and associated to positional codes that are somewhat isolated from the rest of the items. In contrast, the degree of isolation among the studied items is lower in serial-order learning. One of the key predictions drawn from this theory is that any variables that help chunking of two adjacent items into a group should be beneficial to paired-associate learning, more than serial-order learning. To test this idea, the role of visual representations in memory for spoken verbal materials (i.e., imagery) was compared between two types of learning directly. Experiment 1 showed stronger effects of word concreteness and of concurrent presentation of irrelevant visual stimuli (dynamic visual noise: DVN) in paired-associate memory than in serial-order memory, consistent with the prediction. Experiment 2 revealed that the irrelevant visual stimuli effect was boosted when the participants had to actively maintain the information within working memory, rather than feed it to long-term memory for subsequent recall, due to cue overloading. This indicates that the sensory input from irrelevant visual stimuli can reach and affect visual representations of verbal items within working memory, and that this disruption can be attenuated when the information within working memory can be efficiently supported by long-term memory for subsequent recall.

The structure of affective action representations: temporal binding of affective response codes.

Science.gov (United States)

Eder, Andreas B; Müsseler, Jochen; Hommel, Bernhard

2012-01-01

Two experiments examined the hypothesis that preparing an action with a specific affective connotation involves the binding of this action to an affective code reflecting this connotation. This integration into an action plan should lead to a temporary occupation of the affective code, which should impair the concurrent representation of affectively congruent events, such as the planning of another action with the same valence. This hypothesis was tested with a dual-task setup that required a speeded choice between approach- and avoidance-type lever movements after having planned and before having executed an evaluative button press. In line with the code-occupation hypothesis, slower lever movements were observed when the lever movement was affectively compatible with the prepared evaluative button press than when the two actions were affectively incompatible. Lever movements related to approach and avoidance and evaluative button presses thus seem to share a code that represents affective meaning. A model of affective action control that is based on the theory of event coding is discussed.

Is Accessing of Words Affected by Affective Valence Only? A Discrete Emotion View on the Emotional Congruency Effect.

Science.gov (United States)

Chen, Xuqian; Liu, Bo; Lin, Shouwen

2016-01-01

This paper advances the discussion on which emotion information affects word accessing. Emotion information, which is formed as a result of repeated experiences, is primary and necessary in learning and representing word meanings. Previous findings suggested that valence (i.e., positive or negative) denoted by words can be automatically activated and plays a role in many significant cognitive processes. However, there has been a lack of discussion about whether discrete emotion information (i.e., happiness, anger, sadness, and fear) is also involved in these processes. According to the hierarchy model, emotions are considered organized within an abstract-to-concrete hierarchy, in which emotion prototypes are organized following affective valence. By controlling different congruencies of emotion relations (i.e., matches or mismatches between valences and prototypes of emotion), the present study showed both an evaluative congruency effect (Experiment 1) and a discrete emotional congruency effect (Experiment 2). These findings indicate that not only affective valences but also discrete emotions can be activated under the present priming lexical decision task. However, the present findings also suggest that discrete emotions might be activated at the later priming stage as compared to valences. The present work provides evidence that information about discrete emotion could be involved in word processing. This might be a result of subjects' embodied experiences.

Usage of semantic representations in recognition memory.

Science.gov (United States)

Nishiyama, Ryoji; Hirano, Tetsuji; Ukita, Jun

2017-11-01

Meanings of words facilitate false acceptance as well as correct rejection of lures in recognition memory tests, depending on the experimental context. This suggests that semantic representations are both directly and indirectly (i.e., mediated by perceptual representations) used in remembering. Studies using memory conjunction errors (MCEs) paradigms, in which the lures consist of component parts of studied words, have reported semantic facilitation of rejection of the lures. However, attending to components of the lures could potentially cause this. Therefore, we investigated whether semantic overlap of lures facilitates MCEs using Japanese Kanji words in which a whole-word image is more concerned in reading. Experiments demonstrated semantic facilitation of MCEs in a delayed recognition test (Experiment 1), and in immediate recognition tests in which participants were prevented from using phonological or orthographic representations (Experiment 2), and the salient effect on individuals with high semantic memory capacities (Experiment 3). Additionally, analysis of the receiver operating characteristic suggested that this effect is attributed to familiarity-based memory judgement and phantom recollection. These findings indicate that semantic representations can be directly used in remembering, even when perceptual representations of studied words are available.

Using affective knowledge to generate and validate a set of emotion-related, action words.

Science.gov (United States)

Portch, Emma; Havelka, Jelena; Brown, Charity; Giner-Sorolla, Roger

2015-01-01

Emotion concepts are built through situated experience. Abstract word meaning is grounded in this affective knowledge, giving words the potential to evoke emotional feelings and reactions (e.g., Vigliocco et al., 2009). In the present work we explore whether words differ in the extent to which they evoke 'specific' emotional knowledge. Using a categorical approach, in which an affective 'context' is created, it is possible to assess whether words proportionally activate knowledge relevant to different emotional states (e.g., 'sadness', 'anger', Stevenson, Mikels & James, 2007a). We argue that this method may be particularly effective when assessing the emotional meaning of action words (e.g., Schacht & Sommer, 2009). In study 1 we use a constrained feature generation task to derive a set of action words that participants associated with six, basic emotional states (see full list in Appendix S1). Generation frequencies were taken to indicate the likelihood that the word would evoke emotional knowledge relevant to the state to which it had been paired. In study 2 a rating task was used to assess the strength of association between the six most frequently generated, or 'typical', action words and corresponding emotion labels. Participants were presented with a series of sentences, in which action words (typical and atypical) and labels were paired e.g., "If you are feeling 'sad' how likely would you be to act in the following way?" … 'cry.' Findings suggest that typical associations were robust. Participants always gave higher ratings to typical vs. atypical action word and label pairings, even when (a) rating direction was manipulated (the label or verb appeared first in the sentence), and (b) the typical behaviours were to be performed by the rater themselves, or others. Our findings suggest that emotion-related action words vary in the extent to which they evoke knowledge relevant for different emotional states. When measuring affective grounding, it may then be

On the impact of words: interpretation, empathy and affect regulation.

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Bisagni, Francesco

2013-11-01

This paper offers a contribution towards furthering our understanding of a theme more usually associated with the Freudian tradition, namely the role and function of words as action, particularly in relation to the representational process and its somatic roots. Some reference to neuroscience research will be offered in this respect. It also considers the value of differentiating Empathy from Empathism, as defined by the Italian psychoanalyst Stefano Bolognini who distinguishes informing complementary countertransference from states of over-concordance. Two analytic sessions taken from the intensive analysis of a deeply deprived late-latency child showing violent behaviour are provided with the aim of illustrating the application of these concepts. It is argued that, given the same elaboration of the countertransference and the adequate empathic position on the part of the analyst, the difference in the outcome of the interpretation was made by the specific use of words-in this case the use or not of the personal pronoun-in the two sessions. As the case material is taken from the clinical work of a supervisee, some elements regarding the supervisory situation are also discussed in the paper. © 2013, The Society of Analytical Psychology.

Influence of Suboptimally and Optimally Presented Affective Pictures and Words on Consumption-Related Behavior

Science.gov (United States)

Winkielman, Piotr; Gogolushko, Yekaterina

2018-01-01

Affective stimuli can influence immediate reactions as well as spontaneous behaviors. Much evidence for such influence comes from studies of facial expressions. However, it is unclear whether these effects hold for other affective stimuli, and how the amount of stimulus processing changes the nature of the influence. This paper addresses these issues by comparing the influence on consumption behaviors of emotional pictures and valence-matched words presented at suboptimal and supraliminal durations. In Experiment 1, both suboptimal and supraliminal emotional facial expressions influenced consumption in an affect-congruent, assimilative way. In Experiment 2, pictures of both high- and low-frequency emotional objects congruently influenced consumption. In comparison, words tended to produce incongruent effects. We discuss these findings in light of privileged access theories, which hold that pictures better convey affective meaning than words, and embodiment theories, which hold that pictures better elicit somatosensory and motor responses. PMID:29434556

Visual Word Recognition in Deaf Readers: Lexicality Is Modulated by Communication Mode

Science.gov (United States)

Barca, Laura; Pezzulo, Giovanni; Castrataro, Marianna; Rinaldi, Pasquale; Caselli, Maria Cristina

2013-01-01

Evidence indicates that adequate phonological abilities are necessary to develop proficient reading skills and that later in life phonology also has a role in the covert visual word recognition of expert readers. Impairments of acoustic perception, such as deafness, can lead to atypical phonological representations of written words and letters, which in turn can affect reading proficiency. Here, we report an experiment in which young adults with different levels of acoustic perception (i.e., hearing and deaf individuals) and different modes of communication (i.e., hearing individuals using spoken language, deaf individuals with a preference for sign language, and deaf individuals using the oral modality with less or no competence in sign language) performed a visual lexical decision task, which consisted of categorizing real words and consonant strings. The lexicality effect was restricted to deaf signers who responded faster to real words than consonant strings, showing over-reliance on whole word lexical processing of stimuli. No effect of stimulus type was found in deaf individuals using the oral modality or in hearing individuals. Thus, mode of communication modulates the lexicality effect. This suggests that learning a sign language during development shapes visuo-motor representations of words, which are tuned to the actions used to express them (phono-articulatory movements vs. hand movements) and to associated perceptions. As these visuo-motor representations are elicited during on-line linguistic processing and can overlap with the perceptual-motor processes required to execute the task, they can potentially produce interference or facilitation effects. PMID:23554976

Visual word recognition in deaf readers: lexicality is modulated by communication mode.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Laura Barca

Full Text Available Evidence indicates that adequate phonological abilities are necessary to develop proficient reading skills and that later in life phonology also has a role in the covert visual word recognition of expert readers. Impairments of acoustic perception, such as deafness, can lead to atypical phonological representations of written words and letters, which in turn can affect reading proficiency. Here, we report an experiment in which young adults with different levels of acoustic perception (i.e., hearing and deaf individuals and different modes of communication (i.e., hearing individuals using spoken language, deaf individuals with a preference for sign language, and deaf individuals using the oral modality with less or no competence in sign language performed a visual lexical decision task, which consisted of categorizing real words and consonant strings. The lexicality effect was restricted to deaf signers who responded faster to real words than consonant strings, showing over-reliance on whole word lexical processing of stimuli. No effect of stimulus type was found in deaf individuals using the oral modality or in hearing individuals. Thus, mode of communication modulates the lexicality effect. This suggests that learning a sign language during development shapes visuo-motor representations of words, which are tuned to the actions used to express them (phono-articulatory movements vs. hand movements and to associated perceptions. As these visuo-motor representations are elicited during on-line linguistic processing and can overlap with the perceptual-motor processes required to execute the task, they can potentially produce interference or facilitation effects.

Visual word recognition in deaf readers: lexicality is modulated by communication mode.

Science.gov (United States)

Barca, Laura; Pezzulo, Giovanni; Castrataro, Marianna; Rinaldi, Pasquale; Caselli, Maria Cristina

2013-01-01

Evidence indicates that adequate phonological abilities are necessary to develop proficient reading skills and that later in life phonology also has a role in the covert visual word recognition of expert readers. Impairments of acoustic perception, such as deafness, can lead to atypical phonological representations of written words and letters, which in turn can affect reading proficiency. Here, we report an experiment in which young adults with different levels of acoustic perception (i.e., hearing and deaf individuals) and different modes of communication (i.e., hearing individuals using spoken language, deaf individuals with a preference for sign language, and deaf individuals using the oral modality with less or no competence in sign language) performed a visual lexical decision task, which consisted of categorizing real words and consonant strings. The lexicality effect was restricted to deaf signers who responded faster to real words than consonant strings, showing over-reliance on whole word lexical processing of stimuli. No effect of stimulus type was found in deaf individuals using the oral modality or in hearing individuals. Thus, mode of communication modulates the lexicality effect. This suggests that learning a sign language during development shapes visuo-motor representations of words, which are tuned to the actions used to express them (phono-articulatory movements vs. hand movements) and to associated perceptions. As these visuo-motor representations are elicited during on-line linguistic processing and can overlap with the perceptual-motor processes required to execute the task, they can potentially produce interference or facilitation effects.

The semantic representation of prejudice and stereotypes.

Science.gov (United States)

Bhatia, Sudeep

2017-07-01

We use a theory of semantic representation to study prejudice and stereotyping. Particularly, we consider large datasets of newspaper articles published in the United States, and apply latent semantic analysis (LSA), a prominent model of human semantic memory, to these datasets to learn representations for common male and female, White, African American, and Latino names. LSA performs a singular value decomposition on word distribution statistics in order to recover word vector representations, and we find that our recovered representations display the types of biases observed in human participants using tasks such as the implicit association test. Importantly, these biases are strongest for vector representations with moderate dimensionality, and weaken or disappear for representations with very high or very low dimensionality. Moderate dimensional LSA models are also the best at learning race, ethnicity, and gender-based categories, suggesting that social category knowledge, acquired through dimensionality reduction on word distribution statistics, can facilitate prejudiced and stereotyped associations. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Affect influences feature binding in memory: Trading between richness and strength of memory representations.

Science.gov (United States)

Spachtholz, Philipp; Kuhbandner, Christof; Pekrun, Reinhard

2016-10-01

Research has shown that long-term memory representations of objects are formed as a natural product of perception even without any intentional memorization. It is not known, however, how rich these representations are in terms of the number of bound object features. In particular, because feature binding rests on resource-limited processes, there may be a context-dependent trade-off between the quantity of stored features and their memory strength. The authors examined whether affective state may bring about such a trade-off. Participants incidentally encoded pictures of real-world objects while experiencing positive or negative affect, and the authors later measured memory for 2 features. Results showed that participants traded between richness and strength of memory representations as a function of affect, with positive affect tuning memory formation toward richness and negative affect tuning memory formation toward strength. These findings demonstrate that memory binding is a flexible process that is modulated by affective state. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

Polynomial representations of GLn

CERN Document Server

Green, James A; Erdmann, Karin

2007-01-01

The first half of this book contains the text of the first edition of LNM volume 830, Polynomial Representations of GLn. This classic account of matrix representations, the Schur algebra, the modular representations of GLn, and connections with symmetric groups, has been the basis of much research in representation theory. The second half is an Appendix, and can be read independently of the first. It is an account of the Littelmann path model for the case gln. In this case, Littelmann's 'paths' become 'words', and so the Appendix works with the combinatorics on words. This leads to the repesentation theory of the 'Littelmann algebra', which is a close analogue of the Schur algebra. The treatment is self- contained; in particular complete proofs are given of classical theorems of Schensted and Knuth.

Polynomial representations of GLN

CERN Document Server

Green, James A

1980-01-01

The first half of this book contains the text of the first edition of LNM volume 830, Polynomial Representations of GLn. This classic account of matrix representations, the Schur algebra, the modular representations of GLn, and connections with symmetric groups, has been the basis of much research in representation theory. The second half is an Appendix, and can be read independently of the first. It is an account of the Littelmann path model for the case gln. In this case, Littelmann's 'paths' become 'words', and so the Appendix works with the combinatorics on words. This leads to the repesentation theory of the 'Littelmann algebra', which is a close analogue of the Schur algebra. The treatment is self- contained; in particular complete proofs are given of classical theorems of Schensted and Knuth.

No grammatical gender effect on affective ratings: evidence from Italian and German languages.

Science.gov (United States)

Montefinese, Maria; Ambrosini, Ettore; Roivainen, Eka

2018-06-06

In this study, we tested the linguistic relativity hypothesis by studying the effect of grammatical gender (feminine vs. masculine) on affective judgments of conceptual representation in Italian and German. In particular, we examined the within- and cross-language grammatical gender effect and its interaction with participants' demographic characteristics (such as, the raters' age and sex) on semantic differential scales (affective ratings of valence, arousal and dominance) in Italian and German speakers. We selected the stimuli and the relative affective measures from Italian and German adaptations of the ANEW (Affective Norms for English Words). Bayesian and frequentist analyses yielded evidence for the absence of within- and cross-languages effects of grammatical gender and sex- and age-dependent interactions. These results suggest that grammatical gender does not affect judgments of affective features of semantic representation in Italian and German speakers, since an overt coding of word grammar is not required. Although further research is recommended to refine the impact of the grammatical gender on properties of semantic representation, these results have implications for any strong view of the linguistic relativity hypothesis.

Using affective knowledge to generate and validate a set of emotion-related, action words

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Emma Portch

2015-07-01

Full Text Available Emotion concepts are built through situated experience. Abstract word meaning is grounded in this affective knowledge, giving words the potential to evoke emotional feelings and reactions (e.g., Vigliocco et al., 2009. In the present work we explore whether words differ in the extent to which they evoke ‘specific’ emotional knowledge. Using a categorical approach, in which an affective ‘context’ is created, it is possible to assess whether words proportionally activate knowledge relevant to different emotional states (e.g., ‘sadness’, ‘anger’, Stevenson, Mikels & James, 2007a. We argue that this method may be particularly effective when assessing the emotional meaning of action words (e.g., Schacht & Sommer, 2009. In study 1 we use a constrained feature generation task to derive a set of action words that participants associated with six, basic emotional states (see full list in Appendix S1. Generation frequencies were taken to indicate the likelihood that the word would evoke emotional knowledge relevant to the state to which it had been paired. In study 2 a rating task was used to assess the strength of association between the six most frequently generated, or ‘typical’, action words and corresponding emotion labels. Participants were presented with a series of sentences, in which action words (typical and atypical and labels were paired e.g., “If you are feeling ‘sad’ how likely would you be to act in the following way?” … ‘cry.’ Findings suggest that typical associations were robust. Participants always gave higher ratings to typical vs. atypical action word and label pairings, even when (a rating direction was manipulated (the label or verb appeared first in the sentence, and (b the typical behaviours were to be performed by the rater themselves, or others. Our findings suggest that emotion-related action words vary in the extent to which they evoke knowledge relevant for different emotional states. When

Deep generative learning of location-invariant visual word recognition.

Science.gov (United States)

Di Bono, Maria Grazia; Zorzi, Marco

2013-01-01

It is widely believed that orthographic processing implies an approximate, flexible coding of letter position, as shown by relative-position and transposition priming effects in visual word recognition. These findings have inspired alternative proposals about the representation of letter position, ranging from noisy coding across the ordinal positions to relative position coding based on open bigrams. This debate can be cast within the broader problem of learning location-invariant representations of written words, that is, a coding scheme abstracting the identity and position of letters (and combinations of letters) from their eye-centered (i.e., retinal) locations. We asked whether location-invariance would emerge from deep unsupervised learning on letter strings and what type of intermediate coding would emerge in the resulting hierarchical generative model. We trained a deep network with three hidden layers on an artificial dataset of letter strings presented at five possible retinal locations. Though word-level information (i.e., word identity) was never provided to the network during training, linear decoding from the activity of the deepest hidden layer yielded near-perfect accuracy in location-invariant word recognition. Conversely, decoding from lower layers yielded a large number of transposition errors. Analyses of emergent internal representations showed that word selectivity and location invariance increased as a function of layer depth. Word-tuning and location-invariance were found at the level of single neurons, but there was no evidence for bigram coding. Finally, the distributed internal representation of words at the deepest layer showed higher similarity to the representation elicited by the two exterior letters than by other combinations of two contiguous letters, in agreement with the hypothesis that word edges have special status. These results reveal that the efficient coding of written words-which was the model's learning objective

You can't drink a word: lexical and individual emotionality affect subjective familiarity judgments.

Science.gov (United States)

Westbury, Chris

2014-10-01

For almost 30 years, subjective familiarity has been used in psycholinguistics as an explanatory variable, allegedly able to explain many phenomena that have no other obvious explanation (Gernsbacher in J Exp Psychol General 113:256-281, 1984). In this paper, the hypothesis tested is that the subjective familiarity of words is reflecting personal familiarity with or importance of the referents of words. Using an empirically-grounded model of affective force derived from Wundt (Grundriss der Psychologie [Outlines of Psychology]. Engelmann, Leibzig, 1896) and based in a co-occurrence model of semantics (which involves no human judgment), it is shown that affective force can account for the same variance in a large set of human subjective familiarity judgments as other human subjective familiarity judgments, can predict whether people will rate new words of the same objective frequency as more or less familiar, can predict lexical access as well as human subjective familiarity judgments do, and has a predicted relationship to age of acquisition norms. Individuals who have highly affective reactivity [as measured by Carver and White's (J Pers Soc Psychol 67(2):319-333, 1994) Behavioral Inhibition Scale and Behavioral Activation Scales] rate words as significantly more familiar than individuals who have low affective reactivity.

A word expressing affective pain activates the anterior cingulate cortex in the human brain: an fMRI study.

Science.gov (United States)

Osaka, Naoyuki; Osaka, Mariko; Morishita, Masanao; Kondo, Hirohito; Fukuyama, Hidenao

2004-08-12

We present an fMRI study demonstrating that an onomatopoeia word highly suggestive of subjective pain, heard by the ear, significantly activates the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) while hearing non-sense words that did not imply affective pain under the same task does not activate this area in humans. We concluded that the ACC would be a pivotal locus for perceiving affective pain evoked by an onomatopoeia word that implied affective pain closely associated with the unpleasantness of pain. We suggest that the pain affect sustained by pain unpleasantness may depend on ACC-prefrontal cortical interactions that modify cognitive evaluation of emotions associated with word-induced pain.

Set of Frequent Word Item sets as Feature Representation for Text with Indonesian Slang

Science.gov (United States)

Sa'adillah Maylawati, Dian; Putri Saptawati, G. A.

2017-01-01

Indonesian slang are commonly used in social media. Due to their unstructured syntax, it is difficult to extract their features based on Indonesian grammar for text mining. To do so, we propose Set of Frequent Word Item sets (SFWI) as text representation which is considered match for Indonesian slang. Besides, SFWI is able to keep the meaning of Indonesian slang with regard to the order of appearance sentence. We use FP-Growth algorithm with adding separation sentence function into the algorithm to extract the feature of SFWI. The experiments is done with text data from social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and personal website. The result of experiments shows that Indonesian slang were more correctly interpreted based on SFWI.

Group Representations and Intergroup Bias: Positive Affect, Similarity, and Group Size.

Science.gov (United States)

Dovidio, John F.; And Others

1995-01-01

Examined how social appearance and affective factors can influence social categorization and intergroup bias. Positive affect increased the extent to which subjects formed inclusive group representations, anticipating that the members of two groups would feel like one. Subjects in dissimilarly dressed groups expected the members to feel less like…

Non-word repetition in children with specific language impairment: a deficit in phonological working memory or in long-term verbal knowledge?

Science.gov (United States)

Casalini, Claudia; Brizzolara, Daniela; Chilosi, Anna; Cipriani, Paola; Marcolini, Stefania; Pecini, Chiara; Roncoli, Silvia; Burani, Cristina

2007-08-01

In this study we investigated the effects of long-term memory (LTM) verbal knowledge on short-term memory (STM) verbal recall in a sample of Italian children affected by different subtypes of specific language impairment (SLI). The aim of the study was to evaluate if phonological working memory (PWM) abilities of SLI children can be supported by LTM linguistic representations and if PWM performances can be differently affected in the various subtypes of SLI. We tested a sample of 54 children affected by Mixed Receptive-Expressive (RE), Expressive (Ex) and Phonological (Ph) SLI (DSM-IV - American Psychiatric Association, 1994) by means of a repetition task of words (W) and non-words (NW) differing in morphemic structure [morphological non-words (MNW), consisting of combinations of roots and affixes - and simple non-words - with no morphological constituency]. We evaluated the effects of lexical and morpho-lexical LTM representations on STM recall by comparing the repetition accuracy across the three types of stimuli. Results indicated that although SLI children, as a group, showed lower repetition scores than controls, their performance was affected similarly to controls by the type of stimulus and the experimental manipulation of the non-words (better repetition of W than MNW and NW, and of MNW than NW), confirming the recourse to LTM verbal representations to support STM recall. The influence of LTM verbal knowledge on STM recall in SLI improved with age and did not differ among the three types of SLI. However, the three types of SLI differed in the accuracy of their repetition performances (PMW abilities), with the Phonological group showing the best scores. The implications for SLI theory and practice are discussed.

Functions of graphemic and phonemic codes in visual word-recognition.

Science.gov (United States)

Meyer, D E; Schvaneveldt, R W; Ruddy, M G

1974-03-01

Previous investigators have argued that printed words are recognized directly from visual representations and/or phonological representations obtained through phonemic recoding. The present research tested these hypotheses by manipulating graphemic and phonemic relations within various pairs of letter strings. Ss in two experiments classified the pairs as words or nonwords. Reaction times and error rates were relatively small for word pairs (e.g., BRIBE-TRIBE) that were both graphemically, and phonemically similar. Graphemic similarity alone inhibited performance on other word pairs (e.g., COUCH-TOUCH). These and other results suggest that phonological representations play a significant role in visual word recognition and that there is a dependence between successive phonemic-encoding operations. An encoding-bias model is proposed to explain the data.

Deep generative learning of location-invariant visual word recognition

Science.gov (United States)

Di Bono, Maria Grazia; Zorzi, Marco

2013-01-01

It is widely believed that orthographic processing implies an approximate, flexible coding of letter position, as shown by relative-position and transposition priming effects in visual word recognition. These findings have inspired alternative proposals about the representation of letter position, ranging from noisy coding across the ordinal positions to relative position coding based on open bigrams. This debate can be cast within the broader problem of learning location-invariant representations of written words, that is, a coding scheme abstracting the identity and position of letters (and combinations of letters) from their eye-centered (i.e., retinal) locations. We asked whether location-invariance would emerge from deep unsupervised learning on letter strings and what type of intermediate coding would emerge in the resulting hierarchical generative model. We trained a deep network with three hidden layers on an artificial dataset of letter strings presented at five possible retinal locations. Though word-level information (i.e., word identity) was never provided to the network during training, linear decoding from the activity of the deepest hidden layer yielded near-perfect accuracy in location-invariant word recognition. Conversely, decoding from lower layers yielded a large number of transposition errors. Analyses of emergent internal representations showed that word selectivity and location invariance increased as a function of layer depth. Word-tuning and location-invariance were found at the level of single neurons, but there was no evidence for bigram coding. Finally, the distributed internal representation of words at the deepest layer showed higher similarity to the representation elicited by the two exterior letters than by other combinations of two contiguous letters, in agreement with the hypothesis that word edges have special status. These results reveal that the efficient coding of written words—which was the model's learning objective�

Deep generative learning of location-invariant visual word recognition

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Maria Grazia eDi Bono

2013-09-01

Full Text Available It is widely believed that orthographic processing implies an approximate, flexible coding of letter position, as shown by relative-position and transposition priming effects in visual word recognition. These findings have inspired alternative proposals about the representation of letter position, ranging from noisy coding across the ordinal positions to relative position coding based on open bigrams. This debate can be cast within the broader problem of learning location-invariant representations of written words, that is, a coding scheme abstracting the identity and position of letters (and combinations of letters from their eye-centred (i.e., retinal locations. We asked whether location-invariance would emerge from deep unsupervised learning on letter strings and what type of intermediate coding would emerge in the resulting hierarchical generative model. We trained a deep network with three hidden layers on an artificial dataset of letter strings presented at five possible retinal locations. Though word-level information (i.e., word identity was never provided to the network during training, linear decoding from the activity of the deepest hidden layer yielded near-perfect accuracy in location-invariant word recognition. Conversely, decoding from lower layers yielded a large number of transposition errors. Analyses of emergent internal representations showed that word selectivity and location invariance increased as a function of layer depth. Conversely, there was no evidence for bigram coding. Finally, the distributed internal representation of words at the deepest layer showed higher similarity to the representation elicited by the two exterior letters than by other combinations of two contiguous letters, in agreement with the hypothesis that word edges have special status. These results reveal that the efficient coding of written words – which was the model’s learning objective – is largely based on letter-level information.

Emotion Words Affect Eye Fixations during Reading

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Scott, Graham G.; O'Donnell, Patrick J.; Sereno, Sara C.

2012-01-01

Emotion words are generally characterized as possessing high arousal and extreme valence and have typically been investigated in paradigms in which they are presented and measured as single words. This study examined whether a word's emotional qualities influenced the time spent viewing that word in the context of normal reading. Eye movements…

Context affects L1 but not L2 during bilingual word recognition: an MEG study.

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Pellikka, Janne; Helenius, Päivi; Mäkelä, Jyrki P; Lehtonen, Minna

2015-03-01

How do bilinguals manage the activation levels of the two languages and prevent interference from the irrelevant language? Using magnetoencephalography, we studied the effect of context on the activation levels of languages by manipulating the composition of word lists (the probability of the languages) presented auditorily to late Finnish-English bilinguals. We first determined the upper limit time-window for semantic access, and then focused on the preceding responses during which the actual word recognition processes were assumedly ongoing. Between 300 and 500 ms in the temporal cortices (in the N400 m response) we found an asymmetric language switching effect: the responses to L1 Finnish words were affected by the presentation context unlike the responses to L2 English words. This finding suggests that the stronger language is suppressed in an L2 context, supporting models that allow auditory word recognition to be affected by contextual factors and the language system to be subject to inhibitory influence. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The Representation of Abstract Words: Why Emotion Matters

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Kousta, Stavroula-Thaleia; Vigliocco, Gabriella; Vinson, David P.; Andrews, Mark; Del Campo, Elena

2011-01-01

Although much is known about the representation and processing of concrete concepts, knowledge of what abstract semantics might be is severely limited. In this article we first address the adequacy of the 2 dominant accounts (dual coding theory and the context availability model) put forward in order to explain representation and processing…

Affective priming effects of musical sounds on the processing of word meaning.

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Steinbeis, Nikolaus; Koelsch, Stefan

2011-03-01

Recent studies have shown that music is capable of conveying semantically meaningful concepts. Several questions have subsequently arisen particularly with regard to the precise mechanisms underlying the communication of musical meaning as well as the role of specific musical features. The present article reports three studies investigating the role of affect expressed by various musical features in priming subsequent word processing at the semantic level. By means of an affective priming paradigm, it was shown that both musically trained and untrained participants evaluated emotional words congruous to the affect expressed by a preceding chord faster than words incongruous to the preceding chord. This behavioral effect was accompanied by an N400, an ERP typically linked with semantic processing, which was specifically modulated by the (mis)match between the prime and the target. This finding was shown for the musical parameter of consonance/dissonance (Experiment 1) and then extended to mode (major/minor) (Experiment 2) and timbre (Experiment 3). Seeing that the N400 is taken to reflect the processing of meaning, the present findings suggest that the emotional expression of single musical features is understood by listeners as such and is probably processed on a level akin to other affective communications (i.e., prosody or vocalizations) because it interferes with subsequent semantic processing. There were no group differences, suggesting that musical expertise does not have an influence on the processing of emotional expression in music and its semantic connotations.

Learning Document Semantic Representation with Hybrid Deep Belief Network

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Yan Yan

2015-01-01

it is also an effective way to remove noise from the different document representation type; the DBN can enhance extract abstract of the document in depth, making the model learn sufficient semantic representation. At the same time, we explore different input strategies for semantic distributed representation. Experimental results show that our model using the word embedding instead of single word has better performance.

A word in the hand: action, gesture and mental representation in humans and non-human primates

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Cartmill, Erica A.; Beilock, Sian; Goldin-Meadow, Susan

2012-01-01

The movements we make with our hands both reflect our mental processes and help to shape them. Our actions and gestures can affect our mental representations of actions and objects. In this paper, we explore the relationship between action, gesture and thought in both humans and non-human primates and discuss its role in the evolution of language. Human gesture (specifically representational gesture) may provide a unique link between action and mental representation. It is kinaesthetically close to action and is, at the same time, symbolic. Non-human primates use gesture frequently to communicate, and do so flexibly. However, their gestures mainly resemble incomplete actions and lack the representational elements that characterize much of human gesture. Differences in the mirror neuron system provide a potential explanation for non-human primates' lack of representational gestures; the monkey mirror system does not respond to representational gestures, while the human system does. In humans, gesture grounds mental representation in action, but there is no evidence for this link in other primates. We argue that gesture played an important role in the transition to symbolic thought and language in human evolution, following a cognitive leap that allowed gesture to incorporate representational elements. PMID:22106432

Words That Fascinate the Listener: Predicting Affective Ratings of On-Line Lectures

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Weninger, Felix; Staudt, Pascal; Schuller, Björn

2013-01-01

In a large scale study on 843 transcripts of Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) talks, the authors address the relation between word usage and categorical affective ratings of lectures by a large group of internet users. Users rated the lectures by assigning one or more predefined tags which relate to the affective state evoked in the…

Affective Norms for Italian Words in Older Adults: Age Differences in Ratings of Valence, Arousal and Dominance.

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Fairfield, Beth; Ambrosini, Ettore; Mammarella, Nicola; Montefinese, Maria

2017-01-01

In line with the dimensional theory of emotional space, we developed affective norms for words rated in terms of valence, arousal and dominance in a group of older adults to complete the adaptation of the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) for Italian and to aid research on aging. Here, as in the original Italian ANEW database, participants evaluated valence, arousal, and dominance by means of the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) in a paper-and-pencil procedure. We observed high split-half reliabilities within the older sample and high correlations with the affective ratings of previous research, especially for valence, suggesting that there is large agreement among older adults within and across-languages. More importantly, we found high correlations between younger and older adults, showing that our data are generalizable across different ages. However, despite this across-ages accord, we obtained age-related differences on three affective dimensions for a great number of words. In particular, older adults rated as more arousing and more unpleasant a number of words that younger adults rated as moderately unpleasant and arousing in our previous affective norms. Moreover, older participants rated negative stimuli as more arousing and positive stimuli as less arousing than younger participants, thus leading to a less-curved distribution of ratings in the valence by arousal space. We also found more extreme ratings for older adults for the relationship between dominance and arousal: older adults gave lower dominance and higher arousal ratings for words rated by younger adults with middle dominance and arousal values. Together, these results suggest that our affective norms are reliable and can be confidently used to select words matched for the affective dimensions of valence, arousal and dominance across younger and older participants for future research in aging.

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

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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.

Affective norms of 875 Spanish words for five discrete emotional categories and two emotional dimensions.

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Hinojosa, J A; Martínez-García, N; Villalba-García, C; Fernández-Folgueiras, U; Sánchez-Carmona, A; Pozo, M A; Montoro, P R

2016-03-01

In the present study, we introduce affective norms for a new set of Spanish words, the Madrid Affective Database for Spanish (MADS), that were scored on two emotional dimensions (valence and arousal) and on five discrete emotional categories (happiness, anger, sadness, fear, and disgust), as well as on concreteness, by 660 Spanish native speakers. Measures of several objective psycholinguistic variables--grammatical class, word frequency, number of letters, and number of syllables--for the words are also included. We observed high split-half reliabilities for every emotional variable and a strong quadratic relationship between valence and arousal. Additional analyses revealed several associations between the affective dimensions and discrete emotions, as well as with some psycholinguistic variables. This new corpus complements and extends prior databases in Spanish and allows for designing new experiments investigating the influence of affective content in language processing under both dimensional and discrete theoretical conceptions of emotion. These norms can be downloaded as supplemental materials for this article from www.dropbox.com/s/o6dpw3irk6utfhy/Hinojosa%20et%20al_Supplementary%20materials.xlsx?dl=0 .

Word segmentation in children’s literacy: a study about word awareness

OpenAIRE

Débora Mattos Marques; Aline Lorandi

2016-01-01

The present research aimed to investigate how linguistic awareness regarding the concept of “word” may influence some mistakes on segmenting words in children’s writing in the Elementary School. The observed data comprised those of hyper and hyposegmentation which were then related to word awareness. For the analysis of linguistic awareness data, the Representational Redescription, proposed by Karmillof-Smith (1986-1992), has been used. It postulates four levels where knowledge is redescri...

Picturing words? Sensorimotor cortex activation for printed words in child and adult readers

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Dekker, Tessa M.; Mareschal, Denis; Johnson, Mark H.; Sereno, Martin I.

2014-01-01

Learning to read involves associating abstract visual shapes with familiar meanings. Embodiment theories suggest that word meaning is at least partially represented in distributed sensorimotor networks in the brain (Barsalou, 2008; Pulvermueller, 2013). We explored how reading comprehension develops by tracking when and how printed words start activating these “semantic” sensorimotor representations as children learn to read. Adults and children aged 7–10 years showed clear category-specific cortical specialization for tool versus animal pictures during a one-back categorisation task. Thus, sensorimotor representations for these categories were in place at all ages. However, co-activation of these same brain regions by the visual objects’ written names was only present in adults, even though all children could read and comprehend all presented words, showed adult-like task performance, and older children were proficient readers. It thus takes years of training and expert reading skill before spontaneous processing of printed words’ sensorimotor meanings develops in childhood. PMID:25463817

Professional Music Training and Novel Word Learning: From Faster Semantic Encoding to Longer-lasting Word Representations.

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Dittinger, Eva; Barbaroux, Mylène; D'Imperio, Mariapaola; Jäncke, Lutz; Elmer, Stefan; Besson, Mireille

2016-10-01

On the basis of previous results showing that music training positively influences different aspects of speech perception and cognition, the aim of this series of experiments was to test the hypothesis that adult professional musicians would learn the meaning of novel words through picture-word associations more efficiently than controls without music training (i.e., fewer errors and faster RTs). We also expected musicians to show faster changes in brain electrical activity than controls, in particular regarding the N400 component that develops with word learning. In line with these hypotheses, musicians outperformed controls in the most difficult semantic task. Moreover, although a frontally distributed N400 component developed in both groups of participants after only a few minutes of novel word learning, in musicians this frontal distribution rapidly shifted to parietal scalp sites, as typically found for the N400 elicited by known words. Finally, musicians showed evidence for better long-term memory for novel words 5 months after the main experimental session. Results are discussed in terms of cascading effects from enhanced perception to memory as well as in terms of multifaceted improvements of cognitive processing due to music training. To our knowledge, this is the first report showing that music training influences semantic aspects of language processing in adults. These results open new perspectives for education in showing that early music training can facilitate later foreign language learning. Moreover, the design used in the present experiment can help to specify the stages of word learning that are impaired in children and adults with word learning difficulties.

A collective theory of happiness: words related to the word "happiness" in Swedish online newspapers.

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Garcia, Danilo; Sikström, Sverker

2013-06-01

It may be suggested that the representation of happiness in online media is collective in nature because it is a picture of happiness communicated by relatively few individuals to the masses. The present study is based on articles published in Swedish daily online newspapers in 2010; the data corpus comprises 1.5 million words. We investigated which words were most (un)common in articles containing the word "happiness" as compared with articles not containing this word. The results show that words related to people (by use of all relevant pronouns: you/me and us/them); important others (e.g., grandmother, mother); the Swedish royal wedding (e.g., Prince Daniel, Princess Victoria); and the FIFA World Cup (e.g., Zlatan, Argentina, Drogba) were highly recurrent in articles containing the word happiness. In contrast, words related to objects, such as money (e.g., millions, billions), bestselling gadgets (e.g., iPad, iPhone), and companies (e.g., Google, Windows), were predictive of contexts not recurrent with the word happiness. The results presented here are in accordance with findings in the happiness literature showing that relationships, not material things, are what make people happy. We suggest that our findings mirror a collective theory of happiness, that is, a shared picture or agreement, among members of a community, concerning what makes people happy. The fact that this representation is made public on such a large scale makes it collective in nature.

Individual language experience modulates rapid formation of cortical memory circuits for novel words

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Kimppa, Lilli; Kujala, Teija; Shtyrov, Yury

2016-01-01

Mastering multiple languages is an increasingly important ability in the modern world; furthermore, multilingualism may affect human learning abilities. Here, we test how the brain’s capacity to rapidly form new representations for spoken words is affected by prior individual experience in non-native language acquisition. Formation of new word memory traces is reflected in a neurophysiological response increase during a short exposure to novel lexicon. Therefore, we recorded changes in electrophysiological responses to phonologically native and non-native novel word-forms during a perceptual learning session, in which novel stimuli were repetitively presented to healthy adults in either ignore or attend conditions. We found that larger number of previously acquired languages and earlier average age of acquisition (AoA) predicted greater response increase to novel non-native word-forms. This suggests that early and extensive language experience is associated with greater neural flexibility for acquiring novel words with unfamiliar phonology. Conversely, later AoA was associated with a stronger response increase for phonologically native novel word-forms, indicating better tuning of neural linguistic circuits to native phonology. The results suggest that individual language experience has a strong effect on the neural mechanisms of word learning, and that it interacts with the phonological familiarity of the novel lexicon. PMID:27444206

The effects of using diagramming as a representational technique on high school students' achievement in solving math word problems

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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 (pvocabulary 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

Happiness is pleasant, or is it? Implicit representations of affect valence are associated with contrahedonic motivation and mixed affect in daily life.

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Riediger, Michaela; Wrzus, Cornelia; Wagner, Gert G

2014-10-01

People typically want to feel good. At times, however, they seek to maintain or enhance negative affect or to dampen positive affect. The prevalence of such contrahedonic motivation has been related to simultaneous experiences of positive and negative (i.e., mixed) affect. We investigated the role that implicit mental representations of affect valence may play in this regard in a study with N = 400 participants aged 11-88 years. Results demonstrated the age-fairness and reliability of the affect-valence Implicit Association Test, a newly developed implicit measure of interindividual differences in mental representations of affect valence. The older participants were, the more distinctively they implicitly associated happiness with pleasantness and/or unhappiness with unpleasantness. Participants furthermore carried mobile phones as assessment instruments with them for 3 weeks while pursuing their daily routines. The phones prompted participants on average 54 times to report their momentary affective experience and affect-regulation motivation. Contrahedonic motivation and mixed affect were most prevalent among adolescents and least prevalent among older adults, and thus showed a similar pattern of age differences as the affect-valence Implicit Association Test. Furthermore, the more distinctive participants' implicit associations of happiness with pleasantness, and/or unhappiness with unpleasantness, the less likely participants were to report contrahedonic motivation and mixed affect in their daily lives. These findings contribute to a refined understanding of the mixed-affect perspective on contrahedonic motivation by demonstrating the respective role of implicit affect-valence representations. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved.

Spoken word recognition without a TRACE

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Hannagan, Thomas; Magnuson, James S.; Grainger, Jonathan

2013-01-01

How do we map the rapid input of spoken language onto phonological and lexical representations over time? Attempts at psychologically-tractable computational models of spoken word recognition tend either to ignore time or to transform the temporal input into a spatial representation. TRACE, a connectionist model with broad and deep coverage of speech perception and spoken word recognition phenomena, takes the latter approach, using exclusively time-specific units at every level of representation. TRACE reduplicates featural, phonemic, and lexical inputs at every time step in a large memory trace, with rich interconnections (excitatory forward and backward connections between levels and inhibitory links within levels). As the length of the memory trace is increased, or as the phoneme and lexical inventory of the model is increased to a realistic size, this reduplication of time- (temporal position) specific units leads to a dramatic proliferation of units and connections, begging the question of whether a more efficient approach is possible. Our starting point is the observation that models of visual object recognition—including visual word recognition—have grappled with the problem of spatial invariance, and arrived at solutions other than a fully-reduplicative strategy like that of TRACE. This inspires a new model of spoken word recognition that combines time-specific phoneme representations similar to those in TRACE with higher-level representations based on string kernels: temporally independent (time invariant) diphone and lexical units. This reduces the number of necessary units and connections by several orders of magnitude relative to TRACE. Critically, we compare the new model to TRACE on a set of key phenomena, demonstrating that the new model inherits much of the behavior of TRACE and that the drastic computational savings do not come at the cost of explanatory power. PMID:24058349

Using Distributed Representations to Disambiguate Biomedical and Clinical Concepts

OpenAIRE

Tulkens, Stéphan; Šuster, Simon; Daelemans, Walter

2016-01-01

In this paper, we report a knowledge-based method for Word Sense Disambiguation in the domains of biomedical and clinical text. We combine word representations created on large corpora with a small number of definitions from the UMLS to create concept representations, which we then compare to representations of the context of ambiguous terms. Using no relational information, we obtain comparable performance to previous approaches on the MSH-WSD dataset, which is a well-known dataset in the bi...

The orbitofrontal cortex and beyond: from affect to decision-making.

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Rolls, Edmund T; Grabenhorst, Fabian

2008-11-01

The orbitofrontal cortex represents the reward or affective value of primary reinforcers including taste, touch, texture, and face expression. It learns to associate other stimuli with these to produce representations of the expected reward value for visual, auditory, and abstract stimuli including monetary reward value. The orbitofrontal cortex thus plays a key role in emotion, by representing the goals for action. The learning process is stimulus-reinforcer association learning. Negative reward prediction error neurons are related to this affective learning. Activations in the orbitofrontal cortex correlate with the subjective emotional experience of affective stimuli, and damage to the orbitofrontal cortex impairs emotion-related learning, emotional behaviour, and subjective affective state. With an origin from beyond the orbitofrontal cortex, top-down attention to affect modulates orbitofrontal cortex representations, and attention to intensity modulates representations in earlier cortical areas of the physical properties of stimuli. Top-down word-level cognitive inputs can bias affective representations in the orbitofrontal cortex, providing a mechanism for cognition to influence emotion. Whereas the orbitofrontal cortex provides a representation of reward or affective value on a continuous scale, areas beyond the orbitofrontal cortex such as the medial prefrontal cortex area 10 are involved in binary decision-making when a choice must be made. For this decision-making, the orbitofrontal cortex provides a representation of each specific reward in a common currency.

The Representation of Polysemy: MEG Evidence

OpenAIRE

Pylkkänen, Liina; Llinás, Rodolfo; Murphy, Gregory L.

2006-01-01

Most words in natural language are polysemous; i.e., they can be used in more than one way. For example, paper can be used to refer to a substance made out of wood pulp or to a daily publication printed on that substance. Even though virtually every sentence contains polysemy, there is little agreement as to how polysemy is represented in the mental lexicon. Do different uses of polysemous words involve access to a single representation or do our minds store distinct representations for each ...

How lexical is the lexicon? Evidence for integrated auditory memory representations.

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Pufahl, April; Samuel, Arthur G

2014-05-01

Previous research has shown that lexical representations must include not only linguistic information (what word was said), but also indexical information (how it was said, and by whom). The present work demonstrates that even this expansion is not sufficient. Seemingly irrelevant information, such as an unattended background sound, is retained in memory and can facilitate subsequent speech perception. We presented participants with spoken words paired with environmental sounds (e.g., a phone ringing), and had them make an "animate/inanimate" decision for each word. Later performance identifying filtered versions of the words was impaired to a similar degree if the voice changed or if the environmental sound changed. Moreover, when quite dissimilar words were used at exposure and test, we observed the same result when we reversed the roles of the words and the environmental sounds. The experiments also demonstrated limits to these effects, with no benefit from repetition. Theoretically, our results support two alternative possibilities: (1) Lexical representations are memory representations, and are not walled off from those for other sounds. Indexical effects reflect simply one type of co-occurrence that is incorporated into such representations. (2) The existing literature on indexical effects does not actually bear on lexical representations - voice changes, like environmental sounds heard with a word, produce implicit memory effects that are not tied to the lexicon. We discuss the evidence and implications of these two theoretical alternatives. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The role of emotionality in the acquisition of new concrete and abstract words.

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Ferré, Pilar; Ventura, David; Comesaña, Montserrat; Fraga, Isabel

2015-01-01

A processing advantage for emotional words relative to neutral words has been widely demonstrated in the monolingual domain (e.g., Kuperman et al., 2014). It is also well-known that, in bilingual speakers who have a certain degree of proficiency in their second language, the effects of the affective content of words on cognition are not restricted to the native language (e.g., Ferré et al., 2010). The aim of the present study was to test whether this facilitatory effect can also be obtained during the very early stages of word acquisition. In the context of a novel word learning paradigm, participants were trained on a set of Basque words by associating them to their Spanish translations. Words' concreteness and affective valence were orthogonally manipulated. Immediately after the learning phase and 1 week later, participants were tested in a Basque go-no go lexical decision task as well as in a translation task in which they had to provide the Spanish translation of the Basque words. A similar pattern of results was found across tasks and sessions, revealing main effects of concreteness and emotional content as well as an interaction between both factors. Thus, the emotional content facilitated the acquisition of abstract, but not concrete words, in the new language, with a more reliable effect for negative words than for positive ones. The results are discussed in light of the embodied theoretical view of semantic representation proposed by Kousta et al. (2011).

Typography manipulations can affect priming of word stem completion in older and younger adults.

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Gibson, J M; Brooks, J O; Friedman, L; Yesavage, J A

1993-12-01

The experiments reported here investigated whether changes of typography affected priming of word stem completion performance in older and younger adults. Across all experiments, the typeface in which a word appeared at presentation either did or did not match that of its 3-letter stem at test. In Experiment 1, no significant evidence of a typography effect was found when words were presented with a sentence judgment or letter judgment task. However, subsequent experiments revealed that, in both older and younger adults, only words presented with a syllable judgment task gave rise to the typography effect (Experiments 2-4). Specifically, performance was greater, when the presentation and test typeface matched than when they did not. Experiment 5, which used stem-cued recall, did not reveal a difference between syllable and letter judgment tasks. These findings highlight the complex nature of word stem completion performance.

The Inhibitory Mechanism in Learning Ambiguous Words in a Second Language.

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Lu, Yao; Wu, Junjie; Dunlap, Susan; Chen, Baoguo

2017-01-01

Ambiguous words are hard to learn, yet little is known about what causes this difficulty. The current study aimed to investigate the relationship between the representations of new and prior meanings of ambiguous words in second language (L2) learning, and to explore the function of inhibitory control on L2 ambiguous word learning at the initial stage of learning. During a 4-day learning phase, Chinese-English bilinguals learned 30 novel English words for 30 min per day using bilingual flashcards. Half of the words to be learned were unambiguous (had one meaning) and half were ambiguous (had two semantically unrelated meanings learned in sequence). Inhibitory control was introduced as a subject variable measured by a Stroop task. The semantic representations established for the studied items were probed using a cross-language semantic relatedness judgment task, in which the learned English words served as the prime, and the targets were either semantically related or unrelated to the prime. Results showed that response latencies for the second meaning of ambiguous words were slower than for the first meaning and for unambiguous words, and that performance on only the second meaning of ambiguous words was predicted by inhibitory control ability. These results suggest that, at the initial stage of L2 ambiguous word learning, the representation of the second meaning is weak, probably interfered with by the representation of the prior learned meaning. Moreover, inhibitory control may modulate learning of the new meanings, such that individuals with better inhibitory control may more effectively suppress interference from the first meaning, and thus learn the new meaning more quickly.

The Inhibitory Mechanism in Learning Ambiguous Words in a Second Language

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Baoguo Chen

2017-04-01

Full Text Available Ambiguous words are hard to learn, yet little is known about what causes this difficulty. The current study aimed to investigate the relationship between the representations of new and prior meanings of ambiguous words in second language (L2 learning, and to explore the function of inhibitory control on L2 ambiguous word learning at the initial stage of learning. During a 4-day learning phase, Chinese–English bilinguals learned 30 novel English words for 30 min per day using bilingual flashcards. Half of the words to be learned were unambiguous (had one meaning and half were ambiguous (had two semantically unrelated meanings learned in sequence. Inhibitory control was introduced as a subject variable measured by a Stroop task. The semantic representations established for the studied items were probed using a cross-language semantic relatedness judgment task, in which the learned English words served as the prime, and the targets were either semantically related or unrelated to the prime. Results showed that response latencies for the second meaning of ambiguous words were slower than for the first meaning and for unambiguous words, and that performance on only the second meaning of ambiguous words was predicted by inhibitory control ability. These results suggest that, at the initial stage of L2 ambiguous word learning, the representation of the second meaning is weak, probably interfered with by the representation of the prior learned meaning. Moreover, inhibitory control may modulate learning of the new meanings, such that individuals with better inhibitory control may more effectively suppress interference from the first meaning, and thus learn the new meaning more quickly.

Word Problem Solving in Contemporary Math Education: A Plea for Reading Comprehension Skills Training

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Boonen, Anton J. H.; de Koning, Björn B.; Jolles, Jelle; van der Schoot, Menno

2016-01-01

Successfully solving mathematical word problems requires both mental representation skills and reading comprehension skills. In Realistic Math Education (RME), however, students primarily learn to apply the first of these skills (i.e., representational skills) in the context of word problem solving. Given this, it seems legitimate to assume that students from a RME curriculum experience difficulties when asked to solve semantically complex word problems. We investigated this assumption under 80 sixth grade students who were classified as successful and less successful word problem solvers based on a standardized mathematics test. To this end, students completed word problems that ask for both mental representation skills and reading comprehension skills. The results showed that even successful word problem solvers had a low performance on semantically complex word problems, despite adequate performance on semantically less complex word problems. Based on this study, we concluded that reading comprehension skills should be given a (more) prominent role during word problem solving instruction in RME. PMID:26925012

Word problem solving in contemporary math education: A plea for reading comprehension skills training

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Anton eBoonen

2016-02-01

Full Text Available Successfully solving mathematical word problems requires both mental representation skills and reading comprehension skills. In Realistic Math Education (RME, however, students primarily learn to apply the first of these skills (i.e., representational skills in the context of word problem solving. Given this, it seems legitimate to assume that students from a RME curriculum experience difficulties when asked to solve semantically complex word problems. We investigated this assumption under 80 sixth grade students who were classified as successful and less successful word problem solvers based on a standardized mathematics test. To this end, students completed word problems that ask for both mental representation skills and reading comprehension skills. The results showed that even successful word problem solvers had a low performance on semantically complex word problems, despite adequate performance on semantically less complex word problems. Based on this study, we concluded that reading comprehension skills should be given a (more prominent role during word problem solving instruction in RME.

Word Problem Solving in Contemporary Math Education: A Plea for Reading Comprehension Skills Training.

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Boonen, Anton J H; de Koning, Björn B; Jolles, Jelle; van der Schoot, Menno

2016-01-01

Successfully solving mathematical word problems requires both mental representation skills and reading comprehension skills. In Realistic Math Education (RME), however, students primarily learn to apply the first of these skills (i.e., representational skills) in the context of word problem solving. Given this, it seems legitimate to assume that students from a RME curriculum experience difficulties when asked to solve semantically complex word problems. We investigated this assumption under 80 sixth grade students who were classified as successful and less successful word problem solvers based on a standardized mathematics test. To this end, students completed word problems that ask for both mental representation skills and reading comprehension skills. The results showed that even successful word problem solvers had a low performance on semantically complex word problems, despite adequate performance on semantically less complex word problems. Based on this study, we concluded that reading comprehension skills should be given a (more) prominent role during word problem solving instruction in RME.

Accessing orthographic representations from speech: the role of left ventral occipitotemporal cortex in spelling.

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Ludersdorfer, Philipp; Kronbichler, Martin; Wimmer, Heinz

2015-04-01

The present fMRI study used a spelling task to investigate the hypothesis that the left ventral occipitotemporal cortex (vOT) hosts neuronal representations of whole written words. Such an orthographic word lexicon is posited by cognitive dual-route theories of reading and spelling. In the scanner, participants performed a spelling task in which they had to indicate if a visually presented letter is present in the written form of an auditorily presented word. The main experimental manipulation distinguished between an orthographic word spelling condition in which correct spelling decisions had to be based on orthographic whole-word representations, a word spelling condition in which reliance on orthographic whole-word representations was optional and a phonological pseudoword spelling condition in which no reliance on such representations was possible. To evaluate spelling-specific activations the spelling conditions were contrasted with control conditions that also presented auditory words and pseudowords, but participants had to indicate if a visually presented letter corresponded to the gender of the speaker. We identified a left vOT cluster activated for the critical orthographic word spelling condition relative to both the control condition and the phonological pseudoword spelling condition. Our results suggest that activation of left vOT during spelling can be attributed to the retrieval of orthographic whole-word representations and, thus, support the position that the left vOT potentially represents the neuronal equivalent of the cognitive orthographic word lexicon. © 2014 The Authors Human Brain Mapping Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Words, shape, visual search and visual working memory in 3-year-old children.

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Vales, Catarina; Smith, Linda B

2015-01-01

Do words cue children's visual attention, and if so, what are the relevant mechanisms? Across four experiments, 3-year-old children (N = 163) were tested in visual search tasks in which targets were cued with only a visual preview versus a visual preview and a spoken name. The experiments were designed to determine whether labels facilitated search times and to examine one route through which labels could have their effect: By influencing the visual working memory representation of the target. The targets and distractors were pictures of instances of basic-level known categories and the labels were the common name for the target category. We predicted that the label would enhance the visual working memory representation of the target object, guiding attention to objects that better matched the target representation. Experiments 1 and 2 used conjunctive search tasks, and Experiment 3 varied shape discriminability between targets and distractors. Experiment 4 compared the effects of labels to repeated presentations of the visual target, which should also influence the working memory representation of the target. The overall pattern fits contemporary theories of how the contents of visual working memory interact with visual search and attention, and shows that even in very young children heard words affect the processing of visual information. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Gaming Horror’s horror: Representation, Regulation and Affect in Horror Videogames

OpenAIRE

Krzywinska, Tanya

2015-01-01

This position article outlines a personal perspective on the way that Horror games create affect in a complex play between representation and performance and that, in some cases, operate against the usual Vitruvian coordinates of games that are used in order to work with the types of affect associated with pleasure, agency and assuredness. The author argues that against the usual informative pleasures of self-affirmation and a clockwork universe, Horror games configured against normative game...

Classification of e-government documents based on cooperative expression of word vectors

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Fu, Qianqian; Liu, Hao; Wei, Zhiqiang

2017-03-01

The effective document classification is a powerful technique to deal with the huge amount of e-government documents automatically instead of accomplishing them manually. The word-to-vector (word2vec) model, which converts semantic word into low-dimensional vectors, could be successfully employed to classify the e-government documents. In this paper, we propose the cooperative expressions of word vector (Co-word-vector), whose multi-granularity of integration explores the possibility of modeling documents in the semantic space. Meanwhile, we also aim to improve the weighted continuous bag of words model based on word2vec model and distributed representation of topic-words based on LDA model. Furthermore, combining the two levels of word representation, performance result shows that our proposed method on the e-government document classification outperform than the traditional method.

Bio-SimVerb and Bio-SimLex: wide-coverage evaluation sets of word similarity in biomedicine.

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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

Identity-level representations affect unfamiliar face matching performance in sequential but not simultaneous tasks.

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Menon, Nadia; White, David; Kemp, Richard I

2015-01-01

According to cognitive and neurological models of the face-processing system, faces are represented at two levels of abstraction. First, image-based pictorial representations code a particular instance of a face and include information that is unrelated to identity-such as lighting, pose, and expression. Second, at a more abstract level, identity-specific representations combine information from various encounters with a single face. Here we tested whether identity-level representations mediate unfamiliar face matching performance. Across three experiments we manipulated identity attributions to pairs of target images and measured the effect on subsequent identification decisions. Participants were instructed that target images were either two photos of the same person (1ID condition) or photos of two different people (2ID condition). This manipulation consistently affected performance in sequential matching: 1ID instructions improved accuracy on "match" trials and caused participants to adopt a more liberal response bias than the 2ID condition. However, this manipulation did not affect performance in simultaneous matching. We conclude that identity-level representations, generated in working memory, influence the amount of variation tolerated between images, when making identity judgements in sequential face matching.

Syllable Transposition Effects in Korean Word Recognition

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Lee, Chang H.; Kwon, Youan; Kim, Kyungil; Rastle, Kathleen

2015-01-01

Research on the impact of letter transpositions in visual word recognition has yielded important clues about the nature of orthographic representations. This study investigated the impact of syllable transpositions on the recognition of Korean multisyllabic words. Results showed that rejection latencies in visual lexical decision for…

Technology Focus: Multi-Representational Approaches to Equation Solving

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Garofalo, Joe; Trinter, Christine

2009-01-01

Most mathematical functions can be represented in numerous ways. The main representations typically addressed in school, often referred to as "the big three," are graphical, algebraic, and numerical representations, but there are others as well (e.g., diagrams, words, simulations). These different types of representations "often illuminate…

Crossmodal Activation of Visual Object Regions for Auditorily Presented Concrete Words

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Jasper J F van den Bosch

2011-10-01

Full Text Available Dual-coding theory (Paivio, 1986 postulates that the human mind represents objects not just with an analogous, or semantic code, but with a perceptual representation as well. Previous studies (eg, Fiebach & Friederici, 2004 indicated that the modality of this representation is not necessarily the one that triggers the representation. The human visual cortex contains several regions, such as the Lateral Occipital Complex (LOC, that respond specifically to object stimuli. To investigate whether these principally visual representations regions are also recruited for auditory stimuli, we presented subjects with spoken words with specific, concrete meanings (‘car’ as well as words with abstract meanings (‘hope’. Their brain activity was measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging. Whole-brain contrasts showed overlap between regions differentially activated by words for concrete objects compared to words for abstract concepts with visual regions activated by a contrast of object versus non-object visual stimuli. We functionally localized LOC for individual subjects and a preliminary analysis showed a trend for a concreteness effect in this region-of-interest on the group level. Appropriate further analysis might include connectivity and classification measures. These results can shed light on the role of crossmodal representations in cognition.

It's Not a Math Lesson--We're Learning to Draw! Teachers' Use of Visual Representations in Instructing Word Problem Solving in Sixth Grade of Elementary School

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Boonen, Anton J. H.; Reed, Helen C.; Schoonenboom, Judith; Jolles, Jelle

2016-01-01

Non-routine word problem solving is an essential feature of the mathematical development of elementary school students worldwide. Many students experience difficulties in solving these problems due to erroneous problem comprehension. These difficulties could be alleviated by instructing students how to use visual representations that clarify the…

Modulation of motor-meaning congruity effects for valenced words

OpenAIRE

Brookshire, Geoffrey; Ivry, Richard; Casasanto, Daniel

2010-01-01

We investigated the extent to which emotionally valenced words automatically cue spatio-motor representations. Participants made speeded button presses, moving their hand upward or downward while viewing words with positive or negative valence. Only the color of the words was relevant to the response; on target trials, there was no requirement to read the words or process their meaning. In Experiment 1, upward responses were faster for positive words, and downward for negative words. This eff...

Words can slow down category learning.

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Brojde, Chandra L; Porter, Chelsea; Colunga, Eliana

2011-08-01

Words have been shown to influence many cognitive tasks, including category learning. Most demonstrations of these effects have focused on instances in which words facilitate performance. One possibility is that words augment representations, predicting an across the-board benefit of words during category learning. We propose that words shift attention to dimensions that have been historically predictive in similar contexts. Under this account, there should be cases in which words are detrimental to performance. The results from two experiments show that words impair learning of object categories under some conditions. Experiment 1 shows that words hurt performance when learning to categorize by texture. Experiment 2 shows that words also hurt when learning to categorize by brightness, leading to selectively attending to shape when both shape and hue could be used to correctly categorize stimuli. We suggest that both the positive and negative effects of words have developmental origins in the history of word usage while learning categories. [corrected

Automatic Identification of Nutritious Contexts for Learning Vocabulary Words

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Mostow, Jack; Gates, Donna; Ellison, Ross; Goutam, Rahul

2015-01-01

Vocabulary knowledge is crucial to literacy development and academic success. Previous research has shown learning the meaning of a word requires encountering it in diverse informative contexts. In this work, we try to identify "nutritious" contexts for a word--contexts that help students build a rich mental representation of the word's…

The role of emotionality in the acquisition of new concrete and abstract words

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Pilar eFerré

2015-07-01

Full Text Available A processing advantage for emotional words relative to neutral words has been widely demonstrated in the monolingual domain (e.g., Kuperman, Estes, Brysbaert, & Warriner, 2014. It is also well known that, in bilingual speakers who have a certain degree of proficiency in their second language, the effects of the affective content of words on cognition are not restricted to the native language (e.g., Ferré, García, Fraga, Sánchez-Casas, & Molero, 2010. The aim of the present study was to test whether this facilitative effect can also be obtained during the very early stages of word acquisition. In the context of a novel word learning paradigm, participants were trained on a set of Basque words by associating them to their Spanish translations. Words’ concreteness and affective valence were orthogonally manipulated. Immediately after the learning phase and one week later, participants were tested in a Basque go-no go lexical decision task as well as in a translation task in which they had to provide the Spanish translation of the Basque words. A similar pattern of results was found across tasks and sessions, revealing main effects of concreteness and emotional content as well as an interaction between both factors. Thus, the emotional content facilitated the acquisition of abstract, but not concrete words, in the new language, with a more reliable effect for negative words than for positive ones. The results are discussed in light of the embodied theoretical view of semantic representation proposed by Kousta,Vigliocco, Vinson, Andrews, and Del Campo (2011.

Development of Morphophonemic Segments in Children's Mental Representations of Words.

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Jones, Noel K.

This study explores children's development of dual-level phonological processing posited by generative theory for adult language users. Evidence suggesting 6-year-olds' utilization of morphophonemic segments was obtained by asking children to imitate complex words, omit specified portions, and discuss the meaning of the resulting word-parts. The…

The what, when, where, and how of visual word recognition.

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Carreiras, Manuel; Armstrong, Blair C; Perea, Manuel; Frost, Ram

2014-02-01

A long-standing debate in reading research is whether printed words are perceived in a feedforward manner on the basis of orthographic information, with other representations such as semantics and phonology activated subsequently, or whether the system is fully interactive and feedback from these representations shapes early visual word recognition. We review recent evidence from behavioral, functional magnetic resonance imaging, electroencephalography, magnetoencephalography, and biologically plausible connectionist modeling approaches, focusing on how each approach provides insight into the temporal flow of information in the lexical system. We conclude that, consistent with interactive accounts, higher-order linguistic representations modulate early orthographic processing. We also discuss how biologically plausible interactive frameworks and coordinated empirical and computational work can advance theories of visual word recognition and other domains (e.g., object recognition). Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Newly-acquired words are more phonologically robust in verbal short-term memory when they have associated semantic representations.

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Savill, Nicola; Ellis, Andrew W; Jefferies, Elizabeth

2017-04-01

Verbal short-term memory (STM) is a crucial cognitive function central to language learning, comprehension and reasoning, yet the processes that underlie this capacity are not fully understood. In particular, although STM primarily draws on a phonological code, interactions between long-term phonological and semantic representations might help to stabilise the phonological trace for words ("semantic binding hypothesis"). This idea was first proposed to explain the frequent phoneme recombination errors made by patients with semantic dementia when recalling words that are no longer fully understood. However, converging evidence in support of semantic binding is scant: it is unusual for studies of healthy participants to examine serial recall at the phoneme level and also it is difficult to separate the contribution of phonological-lexical knowledge from effects of word meaning. We used a new method to disentangle these influences in healthy individuals by training new 'words' with or without associated semantic information. We examined phonological coherence in immediate serial recall (ISR), both immediately and the day after training. Trained items were more likely to be recalled than novel nonwords, confirming the importance of phonological-lexical knowledge, and items with semantic associations were also produced more accurately than those with no meaning, at both time points. For semantically-trained items, there were fewer phoneme ordering and identity errors, and consequently more complete target items were produced in both correct and incorrect list positions. These data show that lexical-semantic knowledge improves the robustness of verbal STM at the sub-item level, even when the effect of phonological familiarity is taken into account. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Dissociating mere exposure and repetition priming as a function of word type.

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Butler, Laurie T; Berry, Dianne C; Helman, Shaun

2004-07-01

The mere exposure effect is defined as enhanced attitude toward a stimulus that has been repeatedly exposed. Repetition priming is defined as facilitated processing of a previously exposed stimulus. We conducted a direct comparison between the two phenomena to test the assumption that the mere exposure effect represents an example of repetition priming. In two experiments, having studied a set of words or nonwords, participants were given a repetition priming task (perceptual identification) or one of two mere exposure (affective liking or preference judgment) tasks. Repetition priming was obtained for both words and nonwords, but only nonwords produced a mere exposure effect. This demonstrates a key boundary for observing the mere exposure effect, one not readily accommodated by a perceptual representation systems (Tulving & Schacter, 1990) account, which assumes that both phenomena should show some sensitivity to nonwords and words.

Representations of handicaped in the portuguese press: hegemony and emancipation

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Patrícia Neca

2012-12-01

Full Text Available The purpose of this study is to describe and analyze what are the representations that three Portuguese general-interest newspapers - Diário de Notícias, Jornal de Notícias and Público - construct and convey about people with disabilities. The analysis was guided by the perspective of social representations, on the assumption that the views conveyed by the press are shared by society and affect the public opinion. A total of 220 articles about disabilities, published in November and December between 2004 and 2009 where analyzed. The results show that there is little questioning in the newspapers regarding issues related with disability and that there are different representations mediated by different newspapers. Diário de Notícias and Público convey hegemonic representations, in other words, don´t discuss the disability issues and show the group as homogeneous, incompetent and object of social policies, thus blocking the appearance of new representations. Jornal de Notícias convey emancipated representations, this is, opens space to the debate of the new ideas, showing disabled people as competent, mainly in articles about awareness raising and physical disability. This debate enhances the appearance of new representations. Regarding mental disability, it appears associated to the stereotype of incompetence, in all the newspapers analyzed.

Conditioned reinforcement can be mediated by either outcome-specific or general affective representations

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Kathryn A Burke

2007-11-01

Full Text Available Conditioned reinforcers are Pavlovian cues that support the acquisition and maintenance of new instrumental responses. Responding on the basis of conditioned rather than primary reinforcers is a pervasive part of modern life, yet we have a remarkably limited understanding of what underlying associative information is triggered by these cues to guide responding. Specifically, it is not certain whether conditioned reinforcers are effective because they evoke representations of specific outcomes or because they trigger general affective states that are independent of any specific outcome. This question has important implications for how different brain circuits might be involved in conditioned reinforcement. Here, we use specialized Pavlovian training procedures, reinforcer devaluation and transreinforcer blocking, to create cues that were biased to preferentially evoke either devaluation-insensitive, general affect representations or, devaluationsensitive, outcome-specific representations. Subsequently, these cues, along with normally conditioned control cues, were presented contingent on lever pressing.We found that intact rats learned to lever press for either the outcome or the affect cues to the same extent as for a normally conditioned cue. These results demonstrate that conditioned reinforcers can guide responding through either type of associative information. Interestingly, conditioned reinforcement was abolished in rats with basolateral amygdala lesions. Consistent with the extant literature, this result suggests a general role for basolateral amygdala in conditioned reinforcement. The implications of these data, combined with recent reports from our laboratory of a more specialized role of orbitofrontal cortex in conditioned reinforcement, will be discussed.

Spatial Representation of Ordinal Information

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Meng eZhang

2016-04-01

Full Text Available Right hand responds faster than left hand when shown larger numbers and vice-versa when shown smaller numbers (the SNARC effect. Accumulating evidence suggests that the SNARC effect may not be exclusive for numbers and can be extended to other ordinal sequences (e.g., months or letters in the alphabet as well. In this study, we tested the SNARC effect with a non-numerically ordered sequence: The Chinese notations for the color spectrum (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet. Chinese color word sequence reserves relatively weak ordinal information, because each element color in the sequence normally appears in non-sequential contexts, making it ideal to test the spatial organization of sequential information that was stored in the long-term memory. This study found a reliable SNARC-like effect for Chinese color words (deciding whether the presented color word was before or after the reference color word green, suggesting that, without access to any quantitative information or exposure to any previous training, ordinal representation can still activate a sense of space. The results support that weak ordinal information without quantitative magnitude encoded in the long-term memory can activate spatial representation in a comparison task.

Spatial Representation of Ordinal Information.

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Zhang, Meng; Gao, Xuefei; Li, Baichen; Yu, Shuyuan; Gong, Tianwei; Jiang, Ting; Hu, Qingfen; Chen, Yinghe

2016-01-01

Right hand responds faster than left hand when shown larger numbers and vice-versa when shown smaller numbers (the SNARC effect). Accumulating evidence suggests that the SNARC effect may not be exclusive for numbers and can be extended to other ordinal sequences (e.g., months or letters in the alphabet) as well. In this study, we tested the SNARC effect with a non-numerically ordered sequence: the Chinese notations for the color spectrum (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet). Chinese color word sequence reserves relatively weak ordinal information, because each element color in the sequence normally appears in non-sequential contexts, making it ideal to test the spatial organization of sequential information that was stored in the long-term memory. This study found a reliable SNARC-like effect for Chinese color words (deciding whether the presented color word was before or after the reference color word "green"), suggesting that, without access to any quantitative information or exposure to any previous training, ordinal representation can still activate a sense of space. The results support that weak ordinal information without quantitative magnitude encoded in the long-term memory can activate spatial representation in a comparison task.

Affective norms for 720 French words rated by children and adolescents (FANchild).

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Monnier, Catherine; Syssau, Arielle

2017-10-01

FANchild (French Affective Norms for Children) provides norms of valence and arousal for a large corpus of French words (N = 720) rated by 908 French children and adolescents (ages 7, 9, 11, and 13). The ratings were made using the Self-Assessment Manikin (Lang, 1980). Because it combines evaluations of arousal and valence and includes ratings provided by 7-, 9-, 11-, and 13-year-olds, this database complements and extends existing French-language databases. Good response reliability was observed in each of the four age groups. Despite a significant level of consensus, we found age differences in both the valence and arousal ratings: Seven- and 9-year-old children gave higher mean valence and arousal ratings than did the other age groups. Moreover, the tendency to judge words positively (i.e., positive bias) decreased with age. This age- and sex-related database will enable French-speaking researchers to study how the emotional character of words influences their cognitive processing, and how this influence evolves with age. FANchild is available at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Catherine_Monnier/contributions .

Emotion Words: Adding Face Value.

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Fugate, Jennifer M B; Gendron, Maria; Nakashima, Satoshi F; Barrett, Lisa Feldman

2017-06-12

Despite a growing number of studies suggesting that emotion words affect perceptual judgments of emotional stimuli, little is known about how emotion words affect perceptual memory for emotional faces. In Experiments 1 and 2 we tested how emotion words (compared with control words) affected participants' abilities to select a target emotional face from among distractor faces. Participants were generally more likely to false alarm to distractor emotional faces when primed with an emotion word congruent with the face (compared with a control word). Moreover, participants showed both decreased sensitivity (d') to discriminate between target and distractor faces, as well as altered response biases (c; more likely to answer "yes") when primed with an emotion word (compared with a control word). In Experiment 3 we showed that emotion words had more of an effect on perceptual memory judgments when the structural information in the target face was limited, as well as when participants were only able to categorize the face with a partially congruent emotion word. The overall results are consistent with the idea that emotion words affect the encoding of emotional faces in perceptual memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).

Word reading skill predicts anticipation of upcoming spoken language input: a study of children developing proficiency in reading.

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Mani, Nivedita; Huettig, Falk

2014-10-01

Despite the efficiency with which language users typically process spoken language, a growing body of research finds substantial individual differences in both the speed and accuracy of spoken language processing potentially attributable to participants' literacy skills. Against this background, the current study took a look at the role of word reading skill in listeners' anticipation of upcoming spoken language input in children at the cusp of learning to read; if reading skills affect predictive language processing, then children at this stage of literacy acquisition should be most susceptible to the effects of reading skills on spoken language processing. We tested 8-year-olds on their prediction of upcoming spoken language input in an eye-tracking task. Although children, like in previous studies to date, were successfully able to anticipate upcoming spoken language input, there was a strong positive correlation between children's word reading skills (but not their pseudo-word reading and meta-phonological awareness or their spoken word recognition skills) and their prediction skills. We suggest that these findings are most compatible with the notion that the process of learning orthographic representations during reading acquisition sharpens pre-existing lexical representations, which in turn also supports anticipation of upcoming spoken words. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

DOCUMENT REPRESENTATION FOR CLUSTERING OF SCIENTIFIC ABSTRACTS

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S. V. Popova

2014-01-01

Full Text Available The key issue of the present paper is clustering of narrow-domain short texts, such as scientific abstracts. The work is based on the observations made when improving the performance of key phrase extraction algorithm. An extended stop-words list was used that was built automatically for the purposes of key phrase extraction and gave the possibility for a considerable quality enhancement of the phrases extracted from scientific publications. A description of the stop- words list creation procedure is given. The main objective is to investigate the possibilities to increase the performance and/or speed of clustering by the above-mentioned list of stop-words as well as information about lexeme parts of speech. In the latter case a vocabulary is applied for the document representation, which contains not all the words that occurred in the collection, but only nouns and adjectives or their sequences encountered in the documents. Two base clustering algorithms are applied: k-means and hierarchical clustering (average agglomerative method. The results show that the use of an extended stop-words list and adjective-noun document representation makes it possible to improve the performance and speed of k-means clustering. In a similar case for average agglomerative method a decline in performance quality may be observed. It is shown that the use of adjective-noun sequences for document representation lowers the clustering quality for both algorithms and can be justified only when a considerable reduction of feature space dimensionality is necessary.

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

Science.gov (United States)

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.

Making fingers and words count in a cognitive robot

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Vivian Milagros De La Cruz

2014-02-01

Full Text Available Evidence from developmental as well as neuroscientific studies suggest that finger counting activity plays an important role in the acquisition of numerical skills in children. It has been claimed that this skill helps in building motor-based representations of number that continue to influence number processing well into adulthood, facilitating the emergence of number concepts from sensorimotor experience through a bottom-up process. The act of counting also involves the acquisition and use of a verbal number system of which number words are the basic building blocks. Using a Cognitive Developmental Robotics paradigm we present results of a modeling experiment on whether finger counting and the association of number words (or tags to fingers, could serve to bootstrap the representation of number in a cognitive robot, enabling it to perform basic numerical operations such as addition. The cognitive architecture of the robot is based on artificial neural networks, which enable the robot to learn both sensorimotor skills (finger counting and linguistic skills (using number words. The results obtained in our experiments show that learning the number words in sequence along with finger configurations helps the fast building of the initial representation of number in the robot. Number knowledge, is instead, not as efficiently developed when number words are learned out of sequence without finger counting. Furthermore, the internal representations of the finger configurations themselves, developed by the robot as a result of the experiments, sustain the execution of basic arithmetic operations, something consistent with evidence coming from developmental research with children. The model and experiments demonstrate the importance of sensorimotor skill learning in robots for the acquisition of abstract knowledge such as numbers.

Unsupervised Learning of Word-Sequence Representations from Scratch via Convolutional Tensor Decomposition

OpenAIRE

Huang, Furong; Anandkumar, Animashree

2016-01-01

Unsupervised text embeddings extraction is crucial for text understanding in machine learning. Word2Vec and its variants have received substantial success in mapping words with similar syntactic or semantic meaning to vectors close to each other. However, extracting context-aware word-sequence embedding remains a challenging task. Training over large corpus is difficult as labels are difficult to get. More importantly, it is challenging for pre-trained models to obtain word-...

Teacher-Student Interaction in Joint Word Problem Solving. The Role of Situational and Mathematical Knowledge in Mainstream Classrooms

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Rosales, Javier; Vicente, Santiago; Chamoso, Jose M.; Munez, David; Orrantia, Josetxu

2012-01-01

Word problem solving involves the construction of two different mental representations, namely, mathematical and situational. Although educational research in word problem solving has documented different kinds of instruction at these levels, less is known about how both representational levels are evoked during word problem solving in day-to-day…

Reassessing word frequency as a determinant of word recognition for skilled and unskilled readers.

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Kuperman, Victor; Van Dyke, Julie A

2013-06-01

The importance of vocabulary in reading comprehension emphasizes the need to accurately assess an individual's familiarity with words. The present article highlights problems with using occurrence counts in corpora as an index of word familiarity, especially when studying individuals varying in reading experience. We demonstrate via computational simulations and norming studies that corpus-based word frequencies systematically overestimate strengths of word representations, especially in the low-frequency range and in smaller-size vocabularies. Experience-driven differences in word familiarity prove to be faithfully captured by the subjective frequency ratings collected from responders at different experience levels. When matched on those levels, this lexical measure explains more variance than corpus-based frequencies in eye-movement and lexical decision latencies to English words, attested in populations with varied reading experience and skill. Furthermore, the use of subjective frequencies removes the widely reported (corpus) Frequency × Skill interaction, showing that more skilled readers are equally faster in processing any word than the less skilled readers, not disproportionally faster in processing lower frequency words. This finding challenges the view that the more skilled an individual is in generic mechanisms of word processing, the less reliant he or she will be on the actual lexical characteristics of that word. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved).

Reassessing word frequency as a determinant of word recognition for skilled and unskilled readers

Science.gov (United States)

Kuperman, Victor; Van Dyke, Julie A.

2013-01-01

The importance of vocabulary in reading comprehension emphasizes the need to accurately assess an individual’s familiarity with words. The present article highlights problems with using occurrence counts in corpora as an index of word familiarity, especially when studying individuals varying in reading experience. We demonstrate via computational simulations and norming studies that corpus-based word frequencies systematically overestimate strengths of word representations, especially in the low-frequency range and in smaller-size vocabularies. Experience-driven differences in word familiarity prove to be faithfully captured by the subjective frequency ratings collected from responders at different experience levels. When matched on those levels, this lexical measure explains more variance than corpus-based frequencies in eye-movement and lexical decision latencies to English words, attested in populations with varied reading experience and skill. Furthermore, the use of subjective frequencies removes the widely reported (corpus) frequency-by-skill interaction, showing that more skilled readers are equally faster in processing any word than the less skilled readers, not disproportionally faster in processing lower-frequency words. This finding challenges the view that the more skilled an individual is in generic mechanisms of word processing the less reliant he/she will be on the actual lexical characteristics of that word. PMID:23339352

The low-frequency encoding disadvantage: Word frequency affects processing demands.

Science.gov (United States)

Diana, Rachel A; Reder, Lynne M

2006-07-01

Low-frequency words produce more hits and fewer false alarms than high-frequency words in a recognition task. The low-frequency hit rate advantage has sometimes been attributed to processes that operate during the recognition test (e.g., L. M. Reder et al., 2000). When tasks other than recognition, such as recall, cued recall, or associative recognition, are used, the effects seem to contradict a low-frequency advantage in memory. Four experiments are presented to support the claim that in addition to the advantage of low-frequency words at retrieval, there is a low-frequency disadvantage during encoding. That is, low-frequency words require more processing resources to be encoded episodically than high-frequency words. Under encoding conditions in which processing resources are limited, low-frequency words show a larger decrement in recognition than high-frequency words. Also, studying items (pictures and words of varying frequencies) along with low-frequency words reduces performance for those stimuli. Copyright 2006 APA, all rights reserved.

Imaging When Acting: Picture but Not Word Cues Induce Action-Related Biases of Visual Attention

Science.gov (United States)

Wykowska, Agnieszka; Hommel, Bernhard; Schubö, Anna

2012-01-01

In line with the Theory of Event Coding (Hommel et al., 2001a), action planning has been shown to affect perceptual processing – an effect that has been attributed to a so-called intentional weighting mechanism (Wykowska et al., 2009; Memelink and Hommel, 2012), whose functional role is to provide information for open parameters of online action adjustment (Hommel, 2010). The aim of this study was to test whether different types of action representations induce intentional weighting to various degrees. To meet this aim, we introduced a paradigm in which participants performed a visual search task while preparing to grasp or to point. The to-be performed movement was signaled either by a picture of a required action or a word cue. We reasoned that picture cues might trigger a more concrete action representation that would be more likely to activate the intentional weighting of perceptual dimensions that provide information for online action control. In contrast, word cues were expected to trigger a more abstract action representation that would be less likely to induce intentional weighting. In two experiments, preparing for an action facilitated the processing of targets in an unrelated search task if they differed from distractors on a dimension that provided information for online action control. As predicted, however, this effect was observed only if action preparation was signaled by picture cues but not if it was signaled by word cues. We conclude that picture cues are more efficient than word cues in activating the intentional weighting of perceptual dimensions, presumably by specifying not only invariant characteristics of the planned action but also the dimensions of action-specific parameters. PMID:23087656

Imaging when acting: picture but not word cues induce action-related biases of visual attention.

Science.gov (United States)

Wykowska, Agnieszka; Hommel, Bernhard; Schubö, Anna

2012-01-01

In line with the Theory of Event Coding (Hommel et al., 2001a), action planning has been shown to affect perceptual processing - an effect that has been attributed to a so-called intentional weighting mechanism (Wykowska et al., 2009; Memelink and Hommel, 2012), whose functional role is to provide information for open parameters of online action adjustment (Hommel, 2010). The aim of this study was to test whether different types of action representations induce intentional weighting to various degrees. To meet this aim, we introduced a paradigm in which participants performed a visual search task while preparing to grasp or to point. The to-be performed movement was signaled either by a picture of a required action or a word cue. We reasoned that picture cues might trigger a more concrete action representation that would be more likely to activate the intentional weighting of perceptual dimensions that provide information for online action control. In contrast, word cues were expected to trigger a more abstract action representation that would be less likely to induce intentional weighting. In two experiments, preparing for an action facilitated the processing of targets in an unrelated search task if they differed from distractors on a dimension that provided information for online action control. As predicted, however, this effect was observed only if action preparation was signaled by picture cues but not if it was signaled by word cues. We conclude that picture cues are more efficient than word cues in activating the intentional weighting of perceptual dimensions, presumably by specifying not only invariant characteristics of the planned action but also the dimensions of action-specific parameters.

Basic Emotions in the Nencki Affective Word List (NAWL BE): New Method of Classifying Emotional Stimuli.

Science.gov (United States)

Wierzba, Małgorzata; Riegel, Monika; Wypych, Marek; Jednoróg, Katarzyna; Turnau, Paweł; Grabowska, Anna; Marchewka, Artur

2015-01-01

The Nencki Affective Word List (NAWL) has recently been introduced as a standardized database of Polish words suitable for studying various aspects of language and emotions. Though the NAWL was originally based on the most commonly used dimensional approach, it is not the only way of studying emotions. Another framework is based on discrete emotional categories. Since the two perspectives are recognized as complementary, the aim of the present study was to supplement the NAWL database by the addition of categories corresponding to basic emotions. Thus, 2902 Polish words from the NAWL were presented to 265 subjects, who were instructed to rate them according to the intensity of each of the five basic emotions: happiness, anger, sadness, fear and disgust. The general characteristics of the present word database, as well as the relationships between the studied variables are shown to be consistent with typical patterns found in previous studies using similar databases for different languages. Here we present the Basic Emotions in the Nencki Affective Word List (NAWL BE) as a database of verbal material suitable for highly controlled experimental research. To make the NAWL more convenient to use, we introduce a comprehensive method of classifying stimuli to basic emotion categories. We discuss the advantages of our method in comparison to other methods of classification. Additionally, we provide an interactive online tool (http://exp.lobi.nencki.gov.pl/nawl-analysis) to help researchers browse and interactively generate classes of stimuli to meet their specific requirements.

Macroscopic brain dynamics during verbal and pictorial processing of affective stimuli.

Science.gov (United States)

Keil, Andreas

2006-01-01

Emotions can be viewed as action dispositions, preparing an individual to act efficiently and successfully in situations of behavioral relevance. To initiate optimized behavior, it is essential to accurately process the perceptual elements indicative of emotional relevance. The present chapter discusses effects of affective content on neural and behavioral parameters of perception, across different information channels. Electrocortical data are presented from studies examining affective perception with pictures and words in different task contexts. As a main result, these data suggest that sensory facilitation has an important role in affective processing. Affective pictures appear to facilitate perception as a function of emotional arousal at multiple levels of visual analysis. If the discrimination between affectively arousing vs. nonarousing content relies on fine-grained differences, amplification of the cortical representation may occur as early as 60-90 ms after stimulus onset. Affectively arousing information as conveyed via visual verbal channels was not subject to such very early enhancement. However, electrocortical indices of lexical access and/or activation of semantic networks showed that affectively arousing content may enhance the formation of semantic representations during word encoding. It can be concluded that affective arousal is associated with activation of widespread networks, which act to optimize sensory processing. On the basis of prioritized sensory analysis for affectively relevant stimuli, subsequent steps such as working memory, motor preparation, and action may be adjusted to meet the adaptive requirements of the situation perceived.

Word segmentation in children’s literacy: a study about word awareness

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Débora Mattos Marques

2016-10-01

Full Text Available The present research aimed to investigate how linguistic awareness regarding the concept of “word” may influence some mistakes on segmenting words in children’s writing in the Elementary School. The observed data comprised those of hyper and hyposegmentation which were then related to word awareness. For the analysis of linguistic awareness data, the Representational Redescription, proposed by Karmillof-Smith (1986-1992, has been used. It postulates four levels where knowledge is redescribed in the human mind, becoming accessible for awareness and verbalization along with the time. The research methodology consisted of six tests, out of which four were applied in order to verify word awareness, and, the other two tests, to obtain samples of writing data. Thus, it was noticed that a great part of the segmentation mistakes identified in the collected writings are related to the informants' ability to distinguish between different words until the moment they were observed. As a result, the uncommon segmentation mistakes found in the analyzed data evidenced that not only are they motivated by prosodic or phonological matters, but they are also influenced by linguistic awareness issues involving the informants’ understanding of word.

The Representation of Abstract Words: What Matters? Reply to Paivio's (2013) Comment on Kousta et al. (2011)

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Vigliocco, Gabriella; Kousta, Stavroula; Vinson, David; Andrews, Mark; Del Campo, Elena

2013-01-01

In Kousta, Vigliocco, Vinson, Andrews, and Del Campo (2011), we presented an embodied theory of semantic representation, which crucially included abstract concepts as internally embodied via affective states. Paivio (2013) took issue with our treatment of dual coding theory, our reliance on data from lexical decision, and our theoretical proposal.…

Processing concrete words: fMRI evidence against a specific right-hemisphere involvement.

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Fiebach, Christian J; Friederici, Angela D

2004-01-01

Behavioral, patient, and electrophysiological studies have been taken as support for the assumption that processing of abstract words is confined to the left hemisphere, whereas concrete words are processed also by right-hemispheric brain areas. These are thought to provide additional information from an imaginal representational system, as postulated in the dual-coding theory of memory and cognition. Here we report new event-related fMRI data on the processing of concrete and abstract words in a lexical decision task. While abstract words activated a subregion of the left inferior frontal gyrus (BA 45) more strongly than concrete words, specific activity for concrete words was observed in the left basal temporal cortex. These data as well as data from other neuroimaging studies reviewed here are not compatible with the assumption of a specific right-hemispheric involvement for concrete words. The combined findings rather suggest a revised view of the neuroanatomical bases of the imaginal representational system assumed in the dual-coding theory, at least with respect to word recognition.

Right word making sense of the words that confuse

CERN Document Server

Morrison, Elizabeth

2012-01-01

'Affect' or 'effect'? 'Right', 'write' or 'rite'? English can certainly be a confusing language, whether you're a native speaker or learning it as a second language. 'The Right Word' is the essential reference to help people master its subtleties and avoid making mistakes. Divided into three sections, it first examines homophones - those tricky words that sound the same but are spelled differently - then looks at words that often confuse before providing a list of commonly misspelled words.

Emotion Recognition of Weblog Sentences Based on an Ensemble Algorithm of Multi-label Classification and Word Emotions

Science.gov (United States)

Li, Ji; Ren, Fuji

Weblogs have greatly changed the communication ways of mankind. Affective analysis of blog posts is found valuable for many applications such as text-to-speech synthesis or computer-assisted recommendation. Traditional emotion recognition in text based on single-label classification can not satisfy higher requirements of affective computing. In this paper, the automatic identification of sentence emotion in weblogs is modeled as a multi-label text categorization task. Experiments are carried out on 12273 blog sentences from the Chinese emotion corpus Ren_CECps with 8-dimension emotion annotation. An ensemble algorithm RAKEL is used to recognize dominant emotions from the writer's perspective. Our emotion feature using detailed intensity representation for word emotions outperforms the other main features such as the word frequency feature and the traditional lexicon-based feature. In order to deal with relatively complex sentences, we integrate grammatical characteristics of punctuations, disjunctive connectives, modification relations and negation into features. It achieves 13.51% and 12.49% increases for Micro-averaged F1 and Macro-averaged F1 respectively compared to the traditional lexicon-based feature. Result shows that multiple-dimension emotion representation with grammatical features can efficiently classify sentence emotion in a multi-label problem.

Translation Ambiguity but Not Word Class Predicts Translation Performance

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Prior, Anat; Kroll, Judith F.; Macwhinney, Brian

2013-01-01

We investigated the influence of word class and translation ambiguity on cross-linguistic representation and processing. Bilingual speakers of English and Spanish performed translation production and translation recognition tasks on nouns and verbs in both languages. Words either had a single translation or more than one translation. Translation…

Significant decimal digits for energy representation on short-word computers

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Sartori, E.

1989-01-01

The general belief that single precision floating point numbers have always at least seven significant decimal digits on short word computers such as IBM is erroneous. Seven significant digits are required however for representing the energy variable in nuclear cross-section data sets containing sharp p-wave resonances at 0 Kelvin. It is suggested that either the energy variable is stored in double precision or that cross-section resonances are reconstructed to room temperature or higher on short word computers

The Representation of Concrete and Abstract Concepts: Categorical versus Associative Relationships

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Geng, Jingyi; Schnur, Tatiana T.

2015-01-01

In 4 word-translation experiments, we examined the different representational frameworks theory (Crutch & Warrington, 2005; 2010) that concrete words are represented primarily by category, whereas abstract words are represented by association. In our experiments, Chinese-English bilingual speakers were presented with an auditory Chinese word…

Interaction between episodic and semantic memory networks in the acquisition and consolidation of novel spoken words

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Takashima, A.; Bakker, I.; Hell, J.G. van; Janzen, G.; McQueen, J.M.

2017-01-01

When a novel word is learned, its memory representation is thought to undergo a process of consolidation and integration. In this study, we tested whether the neural representations of novel words change as a function of consolidation by observing brain activation patterns just after learning and

Basic Emotions in the Nencki Affective Word List (NAWL BE: New Method of Classifying Emotional Stimuli.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Małgorzata Wierzba

Full Text Available The Nencki Affective Word List (NAWL has recently been introduced as a standardized database of Polish words suitable for studying various aspects of language and emotions. Though the NAWL was originally based on the most commonly used dimensional approach, it is not the only way of studying emotions. Another framework is based on discrete emotional categories. Since the two perspectives are recognized as complementary, the aim of the present study was to supplement the NAWL database by the addition of categories corresponding to basic emotions. Thus, 2902 Polish words from the NAWL were presented to 265 subjects, who were instructed to rate them according to the intensity of each of the five basic emotions: happiness, anger, sadness, fear and disgust. The general characteristics of the present word database, as well as the relationships between the studied variables are shown to be consistent with typical patterns found in previous studies using similar databases for different languages. Here we present the Basic Emotions in the Nencki Affective Word List (NAWL BE as a database of verbal material suitable for highly controlled experimental research. To make the NAWL more convenient to use, we introduce a comprehensive method of classifying stimuli to basic emotion categories. We discuss the advantages of our method in comparison to other methods of classification. Additionally, we provide an interactive online tool (http://exp.lobi.nencki.gov.pl/nawl-analysis to help researchers browse and interactively generate classes of stimuli to meet their specific requirements.

Uninformative contexts support word learning for high-skill spellers.

Science.gov (United States)

Eskenazi, Michael A; Swischuk, Natascha K; Folk, Jocelyn R; Abraham, Ashley N

2018-04-30

The current study investigated how high-skill spellers and low-skill spellers incidentally learn words during reading. The purpose of the study was to determine whether readers can use uninformative contexts to support word learning after forming a lexical representation for a novel word, consistent with instance-based resonance processes. Previous research has found that uninformative contexts damage word learning; however, there may have been insufficient exposure to informative contexts (only one) prior to exposure to uninformative contexts (Webb, 2007; Webb, 2008). In Experiment 1, participants read sentences with one novel word (i.e., blaph, clurge) embedded in them in three different conditions: Informative (six informative contexts to support word learning), Mixed (three informative contexts followed by three uninformative contexts), and Uninformative (six uninformative contexts). Experiment 2 added a new condition with only three informative contexts to further clarify the conclusions of Experiment 1. Results indicated that uninformative contexts can support word learning, but only for high-skill spellers. Further, when participants learned the spelling of the novel word, they were more likely to learn the meaning of that word. This effect was much larger for high-skill spellers than for low-skill spellers. Results are consistent with the Lexical Quality Hypothesis (LQH) in that high-skill spellers form stronger orthographic representations which support word learning (Perfetti, 2007). Results also support an instance-based resonance process of word learning in that prior informative contexts can be reactivated to support word learning in future contexts (Bolger, Balass, Landen, & Perfetti, 2008; Balass, Nelson, & Perfetti, 2010; Reichle & Perfetti, 2003). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Auditory phonological priming in children and adults during word repetition

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Cleary, Miranda; Schwartz, Richard G.

2004-05-01

Short-term auditory phonological priming effects involve changes in the speed with which words are processed by a listener as a function of recent exposure to other similar-sounding words. Activation of phonological/lexical representations appears to persist beyond the immediate offset of a word, influencing subsequent processing. Priming effects are commonly cited as demonstrating concurrent activation of word/phonological candidates during word identification. Phonological priming is controversial, the direction of effects (facilitating versus slowing) varying with the prime-target relationship. In adults, it has repeatedly been demonstrated, however, that hearing a prime word that rhymes with the following target word (ISI=50 ms) decreases the time necessary to initiate repetition of the target, relative to when the prime and target have no phonemic overlap. Activation of phonological representations in children has not typically been studied using this paradigm, auditory-word + picture-naming tasks being used instead. The present study employed an auditory phonological priming paradigm being developed for use with normal-hearing and hearing-impaired children. Initial results from normal-hearing adults replicate previous reports of faster naming times for targets following a rhyming prime word than for targets following a prime having no phonemes in common. Results from normal-hearing children will also be reported. [Work supported by NIH-NIDCD T32DC000039.

Taking Word Clouds Apart: An Empirical Investigation of the Design Space for Keyword Summaries.

Science.gov (United States)

Felix, Cristian; Franconeri, Steven; Bertini, Enrico

2018-01-01

In this paper we present a set of four user studies aimed at exploring the visual design space of what we call keyword summaries: lists of words with associated quantitative values used to help people derive an intuition of what information a given document collection (or part of it) may contain. We seek to systematically study how different visual representations may affect people's performance in extracting information out of keyword summaries. To this purpose, we first create a design space of possible visual representations and compare the possible solutions in this design space through a variety of representative tasks and performance metrics. Other researchers have, in the past, studied some aspects of effectiveness with word clouds, however, the existing literature is somewhat scattered and do not seem to address the problem in a sufficiently systematic and holistic manner. The results of our studies showed a strong dependency on the tasks users are performing. In this paper we present details of our methodology, the results, as well as, guidelines on how to design effective keyword summaries based in our discoveries.

Stimulus variability and the phonetic relevance hypothesis: effects of variability in speaking style, fundamental frequency, and speaking rate on spoken word identification.

Science.gov (United States)

Sommers, Mitchell S; Barcroft, Joe

2006-04-01

Three experiments were conducted to examine the effects of trial-to-trial variations in speaking style, fundamental frequency, and speaking rate on identification of spoken words. In addition, the experiments investigated whether any effects of stimulus variability would be modulated by phonetic confusability (i.e., lexical difficulty). In Experiment 1, trial-to-trial variations in speaking style reduced the overall identification performance compared with conditions containing no speaking-style variability. In addition, the effects of variability were greater for phonetically confusable words than for phonetically distinct words. In Experiment 2, variations in fundamental frequency were found to have no significant effects on spoken word identification and did not interact with lexical difficulty. In Experiment 3, two different methods for varying speaking rate were found to have equivalent negative effects on spoken word recognition and similar interactions with lexical difficulty. Overall, the findings are consistent with a phonetic-relevance hypothesis, in which accommodating sources of acoustic-phonetic variability that affect phonetically relevant properties of speech signals can impair spoken word identification. In contrast, variability in parameters of the speech signal that do not affect phonetically relevant properties are not expected to affect overall identification performance. Implications of these findings for the nature and development of lexical representations are discussed.

Predicting word sense annotation agreement

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Martinez Alonso, Hector; Johannsen, Anders Trærup; Lopez de Lacalle, Oier

2015-01-01

High agreement is a common objective when annotating data for word senses. However, a number of factors make perfect agreement impossible, e.g. the limitations of the sense inventories, the difficulty of the examples or the interpretation preferences of the annotations. Estimating potential...... agreement is thus a relevant task to supplement the evaluation of sense annotations. In this article we propose two methods to predict agreement on word-annotation instances. We experiment with a continuous representation and a three-way discretization of observed agreement. In spite of the difficulty...

Interfering with free recall of words: Detrimental effects of phonological competition.

Science.gov (United States)

Fernandes, Myra A; Wammes, Jeffrey D; Priselac, Sandra; Moscovitch, Morris

2016-09-01

We examined the effect of different distracting tasks, performed concurrently during memory retrieval, on recall of a list of words. By manipulating the type of material and processing (semantic, orthographic, and phonological) required in the distracting task, and comparing the magnitude of memory interference produced, we aimed to infer the kind of representation upon which retrieval of words depends. In Experiment 1, identifying odd digits concurrently during free recall disrupted memory, relative to a full attention condition, when the numbers were presented orthographically (e.g. nineteen), but not numerically (e.g. 19). In Experiment 2, a distracting task that required phonological-based decisions to either word or picture material produced large, but equivalent effects on recall of words. In Experiment 3, phonological-based decisions to pictures in a distracting task disrupted recall more than when the same pictures required semantically-based size estimations. In Experiment 4, a distracting task that required syllable decisions to line drawings interfered significantly with recall, while an equally difficult semantically-based color-decision task about the same line drawings, did not. Together, these experiments demonstrate that the degree of memory interference experienced during recall of words depends primarily on whether the distracting task competes for phonological representations or processes, and less on competition for semantic or orthographic or material-specific representations or processes. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Affective significance enhances covert attention: roles of anxiety and word familiarity.

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Calvo, Manuel G; Eysenck, Michael W

2008-11-01

To investigate the processing of emotional words by covert attention, threat-related, positive, and neutral word primes were presented parafoveally (2.2 degrees away from fixation) for 150 ms, under gaze-contingent foveal masking, to prevent eye fixations. The primes were followed by a probe word in a lexical-decision task. In Experiment 1, results showed a parafoveal threat-anxiety superiority: Parafoveal prime threat words facilitated responses to probe threat words for high-anxiety individuals, in comparison with neutral and positive words, and relative to low-anxiety individuals. This reveals an advantage in threat processing by covert attention, without differences in overt attention. However, anxiety was also associated with greater familiarity with threat words, and the parafoveal priming effects were significantly reduced when familiarity was covaried out. To further examine the role of word knowledge, in Experiment 2, vocabulary and word familiarity were equated for low- and high-anxiety groups. In these conditions, the parafoveal threat-anxiety advantage disappeared. This suggests that the enhanced covert-attention effect depends on familiarity with words.

Word maturity indices with latent semantic analysis: why, when, and where is Procrustes rotation applied?

Science.gov (United States)

Jorge-Botana, Guillermo; Olmos, Ricardo; Luzón, José M

2018-01-01

The aim of this paper is to describe and explain one useful computational methodology to model the semantic development of word representation: Word maturity. In particular, the methodology is based on the longitudinal word monitoring created by Kirylev and Landauer using latent semantic analysis for the representation of lexical units. The paper is divided into two parts. First, the steps required to model the development of the meaning of words are explained in detail. We describe the technical and theoretical aspects of each step. Second, we provide a simple example of application of this methodology with some simple tools that can be used by applied researchers. This paper can serve as a user-friendly guide for researchers interested in modeling changes in the semantic representations of words. Some current aspects of the technique and future directions are also discussed. WIREs Cogn Sci 2018, 9:e1457. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1457 This article is categorized under: Computer Science > Natural Language Processing Linguistics > Language Acquisition Psychology > Development and Aging. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Character Decomposition and Transposition Processes in Chinese Compound Words Modulates Attentional Blink.

Science.gov (United States)

Cao, Hongwen; Gao, Min; Yan, Hongmei

2016-01-01

The attentional blink (AB) is the phenomenon in which the identification of the second of two targets (T2) is attenuated if it is presented less than 500 ms after the first target (T1). Although the AB is eliminated in canonical word conditions, it remains unclear whether the character order in compound words affects the magnitude of the AB. Morpheme decomposition and transposition of Chinese two-character compound words can provide an effective means to examine AB priming and to assess combinations of the component representations inherent to visual word identification. In the present study, we examined the processing of consecutive targets in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm using Chinese two-character compound words in which the two characters were transposed to form meaningful words or meaningless combinations (reversible, transposed, or canonical words). We found that when two Chinese characters that form a compound word, regardless of their order, are presented in an RSVP sequence, the likelihood of an AB for the second character is greatly reduced or eliminated compared to when the two characters constitute separate words rather than a compound word. Moreover, the order of the report for the two characters is more likely to be reversed when the normal order of the two characters in a compound word is reversed, especially when the interval between the presentation of the two characters is extremely short. These findings are more consistent with the cognitive strategy hypothesis than the resource-limited hypothesis during character decomposition and transposition of Chinese two-character compound words. These results suggest that compound characters are perceived as a unit, rather than two separate words. The data further suggest that readers could easily understand the text with character transpositions in compound words during Chinese reading.

The socially-weighted encoding of spoken words: A dual-route approach to speech perception

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Meghan eSumner

2014-01-01

Full Text Available Spoken words are highly variable. A single word may never be uttered the same way twice. As listeners, we regularly encounter speakers of different ages, genders, and accents, increasing the amount of variation we face. How listeners understand spoken words as quickly and adeptly as they do despite this variation remains an issue central to linguistic theory. We propose that learned acoustic patterns are mapped simultaneously to linguistic representations and to social representations. In doing so, we illuminate a paradox that results in the literature from, we argue, the focus on representations and the peripheral treatment of word-level phonetic variation. We consider phonetic variation more fully and highlight a growing body of work that is problematic for current theory: Words with different pronunciation variants are recognized equally well in immediate processing tasks, while an atypical, infrequent, but socially-idealized form is remembered better in the long-term. We suggest that the perception of spoken words is socially-weighted, resulting in sparse, but high-resolution clusters of socially-idealized episodes that are robust in immediate processing and are more strongly encoded, predicting memory inequality. Our proposal includes a dual-route approach to speech perception in which listeners map acoustic patterns in speech to linguistic and social representations in tandem. This approach makes novel predictions about the extraction of information from the speech signal, and provides a framework with which we can ask new questions. We propose that language comprehension, broadly, results from the integration of both linguistic and social information.

The socially weighted encoding of spoken words: a dual-route approach to speech perception.

Science.gov (United States)

Sumner, Meghan; Kim, Seung Kyung; King, Ed; McGowan, Kevin B

2013-01-01

Spoken words are highly variable. A single word may never be uttered the same way twice. As listeners, we regularly encounter speakers of different ages, genders, and accents, increasing the amount of variation we face. How listeners understand spoken words as quickly and adeptly as they do despite this variation remains an issue central to linguistic theory. We propose that learned acoustic patterns are mapped simultaneously to linguistic representations and to social representations. In doing so, we illuminate a paradox that results in the literature from, we argue, the focus on representations and the peripheral treatment of word-level phonetic variation. We consider phonetic variation more fully and highlight a growing body of work that is problematic for current theory: words with different pronunciation variants are recognized equally well in immediate processing tasks, while an atypical, infrequent, but socially idealized form is remembered better in the long-term. We suggest that the perception of spoken words is socially weighted, resulting in sparse, but high-resolution clusters of socially idealized episodes that are robust in immediate processing and are more strongly encoded, predicting memory inequality. Our proposal includes a dual-route approach to speech perception in which listeners map acoustic patterns in speech to linguistic and social representations in tandem. This approach makes novel predictions about the extraction of information from the speech signal, and provides a framework with which we can ask new questions. We propose that language comprehension, broadly, results from the integration of both linguistic and social information.

Rapid interactions between lexical semantic and word form analysis during word recognition in context: evidence from ERPs.

Science.gov (United States)

Kim, Albert; Lai, Vicky

2012-05-01

We used ERPs to investigate the time course of interactions between lexical semantic and sublexical visual word form processing during word recognition. Participants read sentence-embedded pseudowords that orthographically resembled a contextually supported real word (e.g., "She measured the flour so she could bake a ceke…") or did not (e.g., "She measured the flour so she could bake a tont…") along with nonword consonant strings (e.g., "She measured the flour so she could bake a srdt…"). Pseudowords that resembled a contextually supported real word ("ceke") elicited an enhanced positivity at 130 msec (P130), relative to real words (e.g., "She measured the flour so she could bake a cake…"). Pseudowords that did not resemble a plausible real word ("tont") enhanced the N170 component, as did nonword consonant strings ("srdt"). The effect pattern shows that the visual word recognition system is, perhaps, counterintuitively, more rapidly sensitive to minor than to flagrant deviations from contextually predicted inputs. The findings are consistent with rapid interactions between lexical and sublexical representations during word recognition, in which rapid lexical access of a contextually supported word (CAKE) provides top-down excitation of form features ("cake"), highlighting the anomaly of an unexpected word "ceke."

Evaluating and reducing the effect of data corruption when applying bag of words approaches to medical records.

Science.gov (United States)

Ruch, P; Baud, R; Geissbühler, A

2002-12-04

Unlike journal corpora, which are supposed to be carefully reviewed before being published, the quality of documents in a patient record are often corrupted by mispelled words and conventional graphies or abbreviations. After a survey of the domain, the paper focuses on evaluating the effect of such corruption on an information retrieval (IR) engine. The IR system uses a classical bag of words approach, with stems as representation items and term frequency-inverse document frequency (tf-idf) as weighting schema; we pay special attention to the normalization factor. First results shows that even low corruption levels (3%) do affect retrieval effectiveness (4-7%), whereas higher corruption levels can affect retrieval effectiveness by 25%. Then, we show that the use of an improved automatic spelling correction system, applied on the corrupted collection, can almost restore the retrieval effectiveness of the engine.

Memory for emotional words: The role of semantic relatedness, encoding task and affective valence.

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Ferré, Pilar; Fraga, Isabel; Comesaña, Montserrat; Sánchez-Casas, Rosa

2015-01-01

Emotional stimuli have been repeatedly demonstrated to be better remembered than neutral ones. The aim of the present study was to test whether this advantage in memory is mainly produced by the affective content of the stimuli or it can be rather accounted for by factors such as semantic relatedness or type of encoding task. The valence of the stimuli (positive, negative and neutral words that could be either semantically related or unrelated) as well as the type of encoding task (focused on either familiarity or emotionality) was manipulated. The results revealed an advantage in memory for emotional words (either positive or negative) regardless of semantic relatedness. Importantly, this advantage was modulated by the encoding task, as it was reliable only in the task which focused on emotionality. These findings suggest that congruity with the dimension attended at encoding might contribute to the superiority in memory for emotional words, thus offering us a more complex picture of the underlying mechanisms behind the advantage for emotional information in memory.

How Justice Can Affect Jury Training Abstract Words Promotes Generalization to Concrete Words in Patients with Aphasia

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Sandberg, Chaleece; Kiran, Swathi

2014-01-01

Developing language treatments that not only improve trained items but also promote generalization to untrained items is a major focus in aphasia research. This study is a replication and extension of previous work that found that training abstract words in a particular context-category promotes generalization to concrete words but not vice versa (Kiran, Sandberg, & Abbott, 2009). Twelve persons with aphasia (5 female) with varying types and degrees of severity participated in a generative naming treatment based on the complexity account of treatment efficacy (CATE; Thompson, Shapiro, Kiran, & Sobecks, 2003). All participants were trained to generate abstract words in a particular context-category by analyzing the semantic features of the target words. Two other context-categories were used as controls. Ten of the twelve participants improved on the trained abstract words in the trained context-category. Eight of the ten participants who responded to treatment also generalized to concrete words in the same context-category. These results suggest that this treatment is both efficacious and efficient. We discuss possible mechanisms of training and generalization effects. PMID:24805853

Social representations of reading: central and peripheral elements of these representations among teachers

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Elsa Maria M. Pessoa Pullin

2011-12-01

Full Text Available This paper aims to characterize the structure of the social representations of reading held by fi rst and middle-school teachers from city public schools in a city in the interior of Paraná, Brazil. A free word association test was used for data collection. Of the 322 different words recorded, which were processed by the EVOC software, the elements “know”, “inform” and “essential” seem to be central. For this group of teachers, reading is essential and necessary for knowledge acquisition. Implications of these meanings of reading and suggestions are presented throughout the paper.

Supersymmetric vector multiplets in nonadjoint representations of SO(N)

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Nishino, Hitoshi; Rajpoot, Subhash

2007-01-01

In the conventional formulation of N=1 supersymmetry, a vector multiplet is supposed to be in the adjoint representation of a given gauge group. We present a new formulation with a vector multiplet in the nonadjoint representation of SO(N) gauge group. Our basic algebra is [T I ,T J ]=f IJK T K , [T I ,U i ]=-(T I ) ij U j , [U i ,U j ]=-(T I ) ij T I , where T I are the generators of SO(N), while U i are the new ''generators'' in certain nonadjoint real representation R of SO(N). We use here the word generator in the broader sense of the word. Such a representation can be any real representation of SO(N) with the positive definite metric, satisfying (T I ) ij =-(T I ) ji and (T I ) [ij| (T I ) |k]l ≡0. The first nontrivial examples are the spinorial 8 S and conjugate spinorial 8 C representations of SO(8) consistent with supersymmetry. We further couple the system to chiral multiplets and show that a Higgs mechanism can give positive definite (mass) 2 to the new gauge fields for U i . We show an analogous system working with N=1 supersymmetry in 10D, and thereby N=4 system in 4D interacting with extra multiplets in the representation R. We also perform superspace reformulation as an independent confirmation

Word-embeddings Italian semantic spaces: A semantic model for psycholinguistic research

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Marelli Marco

2017-01-01

Full Text Available Distributional semantics has been for long a source of successful models in psycholinguistics, permitting to obtain semantic estimates for a large number of words in an automatic and fast way. However, resources in this respect remain scarce or limitedly accessible for languages different from English. The present paper describes WEISS (Word-Embeddings Italian Semantic Space, a distributional semantic model based on Italian. WEISS includes models of semantic representations that are trained adopting state-of-the-art word-embeddings methods, applying neural networks to induce distributed representations for lexical meanings. The resource is evaluated against two test sets, demonstrating that WEISS obtains a better performance with respect to a baseline encoding word associations. Moreover, an extensive qualitative analysis of the WEISS output provides examples of the model potentialities in capturing several semantic phenomena. Two variants of WEISS are released and made easily accessible via web through the SNAUT graphic interface.

Affective Norms for 4900 Polish Words Reload (ANPW_R): Assessments for Valence, Arousal, Dominance, Origin, Significance, Concreteness, Imageability and, Age of Acquisition

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Imbir, Kamil K.

2016-01-01

In studies that combine understanding of emotions and language, there is growing demand for good-quality experimental materials. To meet this expectation, a large number of 4905 Polish words was assessed by 400 participants in order to provide a well-established research method for everyone interested in emotional word processing. The Affective Norms for Polish Words Reloaded (ANPW_R) is designed as an extension to the previously introduced the ANPW dataset and provides assessments for eight different affective and psycholinguistic measures of Valence, Arousal, Dominance, Origin, Significance, Concreteness, Imageability, and subjective Age of Acquisition. The ANPW_R is now the largest available dataset of affective words for Polish, including affective scores that have not been measured in any other dataset (concreteness and age of acquisition scales). Additionally, the ANPW_R allows for testing hypotheses concerning dual-mind models of emotion and activation (origin and subjective significance scales). Participants in the current study assessed all 4905 words in the list within 1 week, at their own pace in home sessions, using eight different Self-assessment Manikin (SAM) scales. Each measured dimension was evaluated by 25 women and 25 men. The ANPW_R norms appeared to be reliable in split-half estimation and congruent with previous normative studies in Polish. The quadratic relation between valence and arousal was found to be in line with previous findings. In addition, nine other relations appeared to be better described by quadratic instead of linear function. The ANPW_R provides well-established research materials for use in psycholinguistic and affective studies in Polish-speaking samples. PMID:27486423

Affective Norms for 4900 Polish Words Reload (ANPW_R:Assessments for Valence, Arousal, Dominance, Origin, Significance, Concreteness, Imageability and Age of Acquisition.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Kamil Konrad Imbir

2016-07-01

Full Text Available In studies that combine understanding of emotions and language, there is growing demand for good-quality experimental materials. To meet this expectation, a large number of 4905 Polish words was assessed by 400 participants in order to provide a well-established research methodfor everyone interested in emotional word processing. The Affective Norms for Polish Words Reloaded (ANPW_R is designed as an extension to the previously introduced the ANPW dataset and provides assessments for eight different affective and psycholinguistic measures of Valence, Arousal, Dominance, Origin, Significance, Concreteness, Imageability and subjective Age of Acquisition. The ANPW_R is now the largest available dataset of affective words for Polish, including affective scores that have not been measured in any other dataset (concreteness and age of acquisition scales. Additionally, the ANPW_R allows for testing hypotheses concerning dual-mind models of emotion and activation (origin and subjective significance scales. Participants in the current study assessed all 4,905 words in the list within one week, at their own pace in home sessions, using eight different Self-assessment Manikin (SAM scales. Each measured dimension was evaluated by 25 women and 25 men. The ANPW_R norms appeared to be reliable in split-half estimation and congruent with previous normative studies in Polish. The quadratic relation between valence and arousal was found to be in line with previous findings. In addition, nine other relations appeared to be better described by quadratic instead of linear function. The ANPW_R provides well-established research materials for use in psycholinguistic and affective studies in Polish-speaking samples.

The meaning of 'life' and other abstract words: Insights from neuropsychology.

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Hoffman, Paul

2016-09-01

There are a number of long-standing theories on how the cognitive processing of abstract words, like 'life', differs from that of concrete words, like 'knife'. This review considers current perspectives on this debate, focusing particularly on insights obtained from patients with language disorders and integrating these with evidence from functional neuroimaging studies. The evidence supports three distinct and mutually compatible hypotheses. (1) Concrete and abstract words differ in their representational substrates, with concrete words depending particularly on sensory experiences and abstract words on linguistic, emotional, and magnitude-based information. Differential dependence on visual versus verbal experience is supported by the evidence for graded specialization in the anterior temporal lobes for concrete versus abstract words. In addition, concrete words have richer representations, in line with better processing of these words in most aphasic patients and, in particular, patients with semantic dementia. (2) Abstract words place greater demands on executive regulation processes because they have variable meanings that change with context. This theory explains abstract word impairments in patients with semantic-executive deficits and is supported by neuroimaging studies showing greater response to abstract words in inferior prefrontal cortex. (3) The relationships between concrete words are governed primarily by conceptual similarity, while those of abstract words depend on association to a greater degree. This theory, based primarily on interference and priming effects in aphasic patients, is the most recent to emerge and the least well understood. I present analyses indicating that patterns of lexical co-occurrence may be important in understanding these effects. © 2015 The Authors. Journal of Neuropsychology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of the British Psychological Society.

Sensorimotor simulations underlie conceptual representations: modality-specific effects of prior activation.

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Pecher, Diane; Zeelenberg, René; Barsalou, Lawrence W

2004-02-01

According to the perceptual symbols theory (Barsalou, 1999), sensorimotor simulations underlie the representation of concepts. Simulations are componential in the sense that they vary with the context in which the concept is presented. In the present study, we investigated whether representations are affected by recent experiences with a concept. Concept names (e.g., APPLE) were presented twice in a property verification task with a different property on each occasion. The two properties were either from the same perceptual modality (e.g., green, shiny) or from different modalities (e.g., tart, shiny). All stimuli were words. There was a lag of several intervening trials between the first and second presentation. Verification times and error rates for the second presentation of the concept were higher if the properties were from different modalities than if they were from the same modality.

It matters how much you talk: on the automaticity of affective connotations of first and second language words

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Degner, J.; Doycheva, C.; Wentura, D.

2012-01-01

We report the results of an affective priming study conducted with proficient sequential German and French bilinguals to assess automatic affective word processing in L1 and L2. Additionally, a semantic priming task was conducted in both languages. Whereas semantic priming effects occurred in L1 and

Working Memory Load Affects Processing Time in Spoken Word Recognition: Evidence from Eye-Movements

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Hadar, Britt; Skrzypek, Joshua E.; Wingfield, Arthur; Ben-David, Boaz M.

2016-01-01

In daily life, speech perception is usually accompanied by other tasks that tap into working memory capacity. However, the role of working memory on speech processing is not clear. The goal of this study was to examine how working memory load affects the timeline for spoken word recognition in ideal listening conditions. We used the “visual world” eye-tracking paradigm. The task consisted of spoken instructions referring to one of four objects depicted on a computer monitor (e.g., “point at the candle”). Half of the trials presented a phonological competitor to the target word that either overlapped in the initial syllable (onset) or at the last syllable (offset). Eye movements captured listeners' ability to differentiate the target noun from its depicted phonological competitor (e.g., candy or sandal). We manipulated working memory load by using a digit pre-load task, where participants had to retain either one (low-load) or four (high-load) spoken digits for the duration of a spoken word recognition trial. The data show that the high-load condition delayed real-time target discrimination. Specifically, a four-digit load was sufficient to delay the point of discrimination between the spoken target word and its phonological competitor. Our results emphasize the important role working memory plays in speech perception, even when performed by young adults in ideal listening conditions. PMID:27242424

Distance-dependent processing of pictures and words.

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Amit, Elinor; Algom, Daniel; Trope, Yaacov

2009-08-01

A series of 8 experiments investigated the association between pictorial and verbal representations and the psychological distance of the referent objects from the observer. The results showed that people better process pictures that represent proximal objects and words that represent distal objects than pictures that represent distal objects and words that represent proximal objects. These results were obtained with various psychological distance dimensions (spatial, temporal, and social), different tasks (classification and categorization), and different measures (speed of processing and selective attention). The authors argue that differences in the processing of pictures and words emanate from the physical similarity of pictures, but not words, to the referents. Consequently, perceptual analysis is commonly applied to pictures but not to words. Pictures thus impart a sense of closeness to the referent objects and are preferably used to represent such objects, whereas words do not convey proximity and are preferably used to represent distal objects in space, time, and social perspective.

Processing negative valence of word pairs that include a positive word.

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Itkes, Oksana; Mashal, Nira

2016-09-01

Previous research has suggested that cognitive performance is interrupted by negative relative to neutral or positive stimuli. We examined whether negative valence affects performance at the word or phrase level. Participants performed a semantic decision task on word pairs that included either a negative or a positive target word. In Experiment 1, the valence of the target word was congruent with the overall valence conveyed by the word pair (e.g., fat kid). As expected, response times were slower in the negative condition relative to the positive condition. Experiment 2 included target words that were incongruent with the overall valence of the word pair (e.g., fat salary). Response times were longer for word pairs whose overall valence was negative relative to positive, even though these word pairs included a positive word. Our findings support the Cognitive Primacy Hypothesis, according to which emotional valence is extracted after conceptual processing is complete.

Dissociating the Influence of Affective Word Content and Cognitive Processing Demands on the Late Positive Potential.

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Nowparast Rostami, Hadiseh; Ouyang, Guang; Bayer, Mareike; Schacht, Annekathrin; Zhou, Changsong; Sommer, Werner

2016-01-01

The late positive potential (LPP) elicited by affective stimuli in the event-related brain potential (ERP) is often assumed to be a member of the P3 family. The present study addresses the relationship of the LPP to the classic P3b in a published data set, using a non-parametric permutation test for topographical comparisons, and residue iteration decomposition to assess the temporal features of the LPP and the P3b by decomposing the ERP into several component clusters according to their latency variability. The experiment orthogonally manipulated arousal and valence of words, which were either read or judged for lexicality. High-arousing and positive valenced words induced a larger LPP than low-arousing and negative valenced words, respectively, and the LDT elicited a larger P3b than reading. The experimental manipulation of arousal, valence, and task yielded main effects without any interactions on ERP amplitude in the LPP/P3b time range. The arousal and valence effects partially differed from the task effect in scalp topography; in addition, whereas the late positive component elicited by affective stimuli, defined as LPP, was stimulus-locked, the late positive component elicited by task demand, defined as P3b, was mainly latency-variable. Therefore LPP and P3b manifest different subcomponents.

Allophones, not phonemes in spoken-word recognition

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Mitterer, H.A.; Reinisch, E.; McQueen, J.M.

2018-01-01

What are the phonological representations that listeners use to map information about the segmental content of speech onto the mental lexicon during spoken-word recognition? Recent evidence from perceptual-learning paradigms seems to support (context-dependent) allophones as the basic

Changes in Theta and Beta Oscillations as Signatures of Novel Word Consolidation

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Bakker, I.; Takashima, A.; Hell, J.G. van; Janzen, G.; McQueen, J.M.

2015-01-01

The complementary learning systems account of word learning states that novel words, like other types of memories, undergo an offline consolidation process during which they are gradually integrated into the neocortical memory network. A fundamental change in the neural representation of a novel

Color perception involves color representations firstly at a semantic level and then at a lexical level.

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Heurley, Loïc P; Brouillet, Thibaut; Chesnoy, Gabrielle; Brouillet, Denis

2013-03-01

Studies and models have suggested that color perception first involves access to semantic representations of color. This result leads to two questions: (1) is knowledge able to influence the perception of color when associated with a color? and (2) can the perception of color really involve only semantic representations? We developed an experiment where participants have to discriminate the color of a patch (yellow vs. green). The target patch is preceded either by a black-and-white line drawing or by a word representing a natural object associated with the same or a different color (banana vs. frog). We expected a priming effect for pictures because, with a 350-ms SOA, they only involve access to semantic representations of color, whereas words seem only elicit an access to lexical representations. As expected, we found a priming effect for pictures, but also for words. Moreover, we found a general slowdown of response times in the word-prime-condition suggesting the need of an additional processing step to produce priming. In a second experiment, we manipulated the SOA in order to preclude a semantic access in the word-prime-condition that could explain the additional step of processing. We also found a priming effect, suggesting that interaction with perception occurs at a lexical level and the additional step occurs at a color perception level. In the discussion, we develop a new model of color perception assuming that color perception involves access to semantic representations and then access to lexical representations.

Ontological Annotation with WordNet

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Sanfilippo, Antonio P.; Tratz, Stephen C.; Gregory, Michelle L.; Chappell, Alan R.; Whitney, Paul D.; Posse, Christian; Paulson, Patrick R.; Baddeley, Bob; Hohimer, Ryan E.; White, Amanda M.

2006-06-06

Semantic Web applications require robust and accurate annotation tools that are capable of automating the assignment of ontological classes to words in naturally occurring text (ontological annotation). Most current ontologies do not include rich lexical databases and are therefore not easily integrated with word sense disambiguation algorithms that are needed to automate ontological annotation. WordNet provides a potentially ideal solution to this problem as it offers a highly structured lexical conceptual representation that has been extensively used to develop word sense disambiguation algorithms. However, WordNet has not been designed as an ontology, and while it can be easily turned into one, the result of doing this would present users with serious practical limitations due to the great number of concepts (synonym sets) it contains. Moreover, mapping WordNet to an existing ontology may be difficult and requires substantial labor. We propose to overcome these limitations by developing an analytical platform that (1) provides a WordNet-based ontology offering a manageable and yet comprehensive set of concept classes, (2) leverages the lexical richness of WordNet to give an extensive characterization of concept class in terms of lexical instances, and (3) integrates a class recognition algorithm that automates the assignment of concept classes to words in naturally occurring text. The ensuing framework makes available an ontological annotation platform that can be effectively integrated with intelligence analysis systems to facilitate evidence marshaling and sustain the creation and validation of inference models.

Information properties of morphologically complex words modulate brain activity during word reading.

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Hakala, Tero; Hultén, Annika; Lehtonen, Minna; Lagus, Krista; Salmelin, Riitta

2018-06-01

Neuroimaging studies of the reading process point to functionally distinct stages in word recognition. Yet, current understanding of the operations linked to those various stages is mainly descriptive in nature. Approaches developed in the field of computational linguistics may offer a more quantitative approach for understanding brain dynamics. Our aim was to evaluate whether a statistical model of morphology, with well-defined computational principles, can capture the neural dynamics of reading, using the concept of surprisal from information theory as the common measure. The Morfessor model, created for unsupervised discovery of morphemes, is based on the minimum description length principle and attempts to find optimal units of representation for complex words. In a word recognition task, we correlated brain responses to word surprisal values derived from Morfessor and from other psycholinguistic variables that have been linked with various levels of linguistic abstraction. The magnetoencephalography data analysis focused on spatially, temporally and functionally distinct components of cortical activation observed in reading tasks. The early occipital and occipito-temporal responses were correlated with parameters relating to visual complexity and orthographic properties, whereas the later bilateral superior temporal activation was correlated with whole-word based and morphological models. The results show that the word processing costs estimated by the statistical Morfessor model are relevant for brain dynamics of reading during late processing stages. © 2018 The Authors Human Brain Mapping Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Understanding of Words and Symbols by Chemistry University Students in Croatia

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Vladušic, Roko; Bucat, Robert; Ožic, Mia

2016-01-01

This article reports on a study conducted in Croatia on students' understanding of scientific words and representations, as well as everyday words used in chemistry teaching. A total of 82 undergraduate chemistry students and 36 pre-service chemistry teachers from the Faculty of Science, University of Split, were involved. Students' understanding…

Novel-word learning deficits in Mandarin-speaking preschool children with specific language impairments.

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Chen, Yuchun; Liu, Huei-Mei

2014-01-01

Children with SLI exhibit overall deficits in novel word learning compared to their age-matched peers. However, the manifestation of the word learning difficulty in SLI was not consistent across tasks and the factors affecting the learning performance were not yet determined. Our aim is to examine the extent of word learning difficulties in Mandarin-speaking preschool children with SLI, and to explore the potent influence of existing lexical knowledge on to the word learning process. Preschool children with SLI (n=37) and typical language development (n=33) were exposed to novel words for unfamiliar objects embedded in stories. Word learning tasks including the initial mapping and short-term repetitive learning were designed. Results revealed that Mandarin-speaking preschool children with SLI performed as well as their age-peers in the initial form-meaning mapping task. Their word learning difficulty was only evidently shown in the short-term repetitive learning task under a production demand, and their learning speed was slower than the control group. Children with SLI learned the novel words with a semantic head better in both the initial mapping and repetitive learning tasks. Moderate correlations between stand word learning performances and scores on standardized vocabulary were found after controlling for children's age and nonverbal IQ. The results suggested that the word learning difficulty in children with SLI occurred in the process of establishing a robust phonological representation at the beginning stage of word learning. Also, implicit compound knowledge is applied to aid word learning process for children with and without SLI. We also provide the empirical data to validate the relationship between preschool children's word learning performance and their existing receptive vocabulary ability. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Words leaking from objects: thinking with absent photographs

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Ana Luisa Cruz

2012-01-01

Full Text Available The possibilities within notions of the object constitute a special area of interest in my research. As I have come to see it, the object is bounded by – and yet comes to alter- views of representation/re-presentation; it contributes towards academic thinking through its capacity for democratizing and bridging itself towards others – yet it has a history of failing in the exchange of everyday gestures with places seemingly remote from the academia. Although accused of resolution and impermeability, I admittedly cannot part with the word ‘object’. And this creates a tension in my work with photography, where I attempt to articulate a personal view of the photograph as something ultimately unfixed. In this view, writing and photography extend continuously and reciprocally into the virtual and the physical from gestures before the photograph and before the word. This text reflects on these tensions, drawing on notions of affect, potentiality and on ethics to discover traces of the other suggested in the physical, but also the imaginary surface of an object. Following Sherry Turkle’s notion of ‘object’ as evocative, in this text ‘the things I think with’ form narratives that reflect the absence of other(s, and the escaping capacity of absent objects in and out of words.

Interaction between episodic and semantic memory networks in the acquisition and consolidation of novel spoken words.

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Takashima, Atsuko; Bakker, Iske; van Hell, Janet G; Janzen, Gabriele; McQueen, James M

2017-04-01

When a novel word is learned, its memory representation is thought to undergo a process of consolidation and integration. In this study, we tested whether the neural representations of novel words change as a function of consolidation by observing brain activation patterns just after learning and again after a delay of one week. Words learned with meanings were remembered better than those learned without meanings. Both episodic (hippocampus-dependent) and semantic (dependent on distributed neocortical areas) memory systems were utilised during recognition of the novel words. The extent to which the two systems were involved changed as a function of time and the amount of associated information, with more involvement of both systems for the meaningful words than for the form-only words after the one-week delay. These results suggest that the reason the meaningful words were remembered better is that their retrieval can benefit more from these two complementary memory systems. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Instructional Benefits of Spoken Words: A Review of Cognitive Load Factors

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Kalyuga, Slava

2012-01-01

Spoken words have always been an important component of traditional instruction. With the development of modern educational technology tools, spoken text more often replaces or supplements written or on-screen textual representations. However, there could be a cognitive load cost involved in this trend, as spoken words can have both benefits and…

Korean deaf adolescents' recognition of written words for taxonomic categories of different levels.

Science.gov (United States)

Li, Degao; Yi, Kwangoh; Kim, Jung Yeon

2011-04-01

Deaf college students seem to have relatively stronger associations from words for taxonomic categories of basic (e.g., snake) to those of super-ordinate (e.g., reptiles) level than vice versa compared with hearing students in word association (Marschark, Convertino, McEvoy & Masteller, 2004). In deciding whether two sequentially presented words for taxonomic categories of different levels are conceptually related, deaf adolescents might therefore have a poorer performance when they see a category name before than when they see it after one of the corresponding exemplar words. Deaf Korean adolescents were found to recognize words for taxonomic categories of super-ordinate level with lower efficiencies than those of basic level. Their accuracy seemed to reflect a reversed typicality effect when they decided that first-presented words for taxonomic categories of basic level were conceptually related to second-presented words for those of super-ordinate level. It was argued that deaf Korean adolescents went through a temporary stage of having iconic representations of several exemplars of the category aroused in working memory before the abstract semantic representation was fully activated when they saw the word for a taxonomic category of super-ordinate level. © 2010 The Authors. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology © 2010 The Scandinavian Psychological Associations.

Affective Primacy vs. Cognitive Primacy: Dissolving the Debate.

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Lai, Vicky Tzuyin; Hagoort, Peter; Casasanto, Daniel

2012-01-01

When people see a snake, they are likely to activate both affective information (e.g., dangerous) and non-affective information about its ontological category (e.g., animal). According to the Affective Primacy Hypothesis, the affective information has priority, and its activation can precede identification of the ontological category of a stimulus. Alternatively, according to the Cognitive Primacy Hypothesis, perceivers must know what they are looking at before they can make an affective judgment about it. We propose that neither hypothesis holds at all times. Here we show that the relative speed with which affective and non-affective information gets activated by pictures and words depends upon the contexts in which stimuli are processed. Results illustrate that the question of whether affective information has processing priority over ontological information (or vice versa) is ill-posed. Rather than seeking to resolve the debate over Cognitive vs. Affective Primacy in favor of one hypothesis or the other, a more productive goal may be to determine the factors that cause affective information to have processing priority in some circumstances and ontological information in others. Our findings support a view of the mind according to which words and pictures activate different neurocognitive representations every time they are processed, the specifics of which are co-determined by the stimuli themselves and the contexts in which they occur.

Affective Primacy vs. Cognitive Primacy: Dissolving the debate

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Vicky T. Lai

2012-07-01

Full Text Available When people see a snake, they are likely to activate both affective information (e.g., dangerous and non-affective information about its ontological category (e.g., animal. According to the Affective Primacy Hypothesis, the affective information has priority, and its activation can precede identification of the ontological category of a stimulus. Alternatively, according to the Cognitive Primacy Hypothesis, perceivers must know what they are looking at before they can make an affective judgment about it. We propose that neither hypothesis holds at all times. Here we show that the relative speed with which affective and non-affective information gets activated by pictures and words depends upon the contexts in which stimuli are processed. Results illustrate that the question of whether affective information has processing priority over ontological information (or vice versa is ill posed. Rather than seeking to resolve the debate over Cognitive vs. Affective Primacy in favor of one hypothesis or the other, a more productive goal may be to determine the factors that cause affective information to have processing priority in some circumstances and ontological information in others. Our findings support a view of the mind according to which words and pictures activate different neurocognitive representations every time they are processed, the specifics of which are co-determined by the stimuli themselves and the contexts in which they occur.

Affective responses to emotional words are boosted in communicative situations.

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Rohr, Lana; Abdel Rahman, Rasha

2015-04-01

Emotional verbal messages are typically encountered in meaningful contexts, for instance, during face-to-face communication in social situations. Yet, they are often investigated by confronting single participants with isolated words on a computer screen, thus potentially lacking ecological validity. In the present study we recorded event-related brain potentials (ERPs) during emotional word processing in communicative situations provided by videos of a speaker, assuming that emotion effects should be augmented by the presence of a speaker addressing the listener. Indeed, compared to non-communicative situations or isolated word processing, emotion effects were more pronounced, started earlier and lasted longer in communicative situations. Furthermore, while the brain responded most strongly to negative words when presented in isolation, a positivity bias with more pronounced emotion effects for positive words was observed in communicative situations. These findings demonstrate that communicative situations--in which verbal emotions are typically encountered--strongly enhance emotion effects, underlining the importance of social and meaningful contexts in processing emotional and verbal messages. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Event-related potentials reflecting the frequency of unattended spoken words

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Shtyrov, Yury; Kimppa, Lilli; Pulvermüller, Friedemann

2011-01-01

, in passive non-attend conditions, with acoustically matched high- and low-frequency words along with pseudo-words. Using factorial and correlation analyses, we found that already at ~120 ms after the spoken stimulus information was available, amplitude of brain responses was modulated by the words' lexical...... for the most frequent word stimuli, later-on (~270 ms), a more global lexicality effect with bilateral perisylvian sources was found for all stimuli, suggesting faster access to more frequent lexical entries. Our results support the account of word memory traces as interconnected neuronal circuits, and suggest......How are words represented in the human brain and can these representations be qualitatively assessed with respect to their structure and properties? Recent research demonstrates that neurophysiological signatures of individual words can be measured when subjects do not focus their attention...

Hierarchical levels of representation in language prediction: The influence of first language acquisition in highly proficient bilinguals.

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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.

Research-Based Worksheets on Using Multiple Representations in Science Classrooms

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Hill, Matthew; Sharma, Manjula

2015-01-01

The ability to represent the world like a scientist is difficult to teach; it is more than simply knowing the representations (e.g., graphs, words, equations and diagrams). For meaningful science learning to take place, consideration needs to be given to explicitly integrating representations into instructional methods, linked to the content, and…

Working memory operates over the same representations as attention.

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Chen, Ke; Ye, Yanyan; Xie, Jiushu; Xia, Tiansheng; Mo, Lei

2017-01-01

A recent study observed a working memory (WM) Stroop effect with a magnitude equivalent to that of the classic Stroop effect, indicating that WM operates over the same representations as attention. However, more research is needed to examine this proposal. One unanswered question is whether the WM Stroop effect occurs when the WM item and the perceptual task do not have an overlapping response set. We addressed this question in Experiment 1 by conducting an attentional word-color task and a WM word-color task. The results showed that a WM Stroop effect also occurred in that condition, as a word that only indirectly evoked a color representation could interfere with the color judgement in both the attentional task and WM task. In Experiment 2, we used a classic Simon task and a WM Simon task to examine whether holding visuo-spatial information rather than verbal information in WM could interfere with perceptual judgment as well. We observed a WM Simon effect of equivalent magnitude to that of the classic Simon effect. The well-known stimulus-response compatibility effect also existed in the WM domain. The two experiments together demonstrated that WM operates over the same representations as attention, which sheds new light on the hypothesis that working memory is internally directed attention.

[Effect of concreteness of target words on verbal working memory: an evaluation using Japanese version of reading span test].

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Kondo, H; Osaka, N

2000-04-01

Effects of concreteness and representation mode (kanji/hiragana) of target words on working memory during reading was tested using Japanese version of reading span test (RST), developed by Osaka and Osaka (1994). Concreteness and familiarity of target words and difficulty of sentences were carefully controlled. The words with high concreteness resulted in significantly higher RST scores, which suggests the high efficiency of working memory in processing these words. The results suggest that high concrete noun-words associated with visual clues consume less working memory capacity during reading. The effect of representation mode is different between subjects with high-RST and low-RST scores. Characteristic of the high concrete words that may be responsible for the effectiveness of processing are discussed.

Does Top-Down Feedback Modulate the Encoding of Orthographic Representations During Visual-Word Recognition?

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Perea, Manuel; Marcet, Ana; Vergara-Martínez, Marta

2016-09-01

In masked priming lexical decision experiments, there is a matched-case identity advantage for nonwords, but not for words (e.g., ERTAR-ERTAR words when top-down feedback is minimized. We employed a task that taps prelexical orthographic processes: the masked prime same-different task. For "same" trials, results showed faster response times for targets when preceded by a briefly presented matched-case identity prime than when preceded by a mismatched-case identity prime. Importantly, this advantage was similar in magnitude for nonwords and words. This finding constrains the interplay of bottom-up versus top-down mechanisms in models of visual-word identification.

An event-related potential investigation of the relationship between semantic and perceptual levels of representation

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Van Schie, H.T.; Wijers, A.A.; Kellenbach, M.L; Stowe, L.A.

The present study was conducted to investigate relationships between semantic and perceptual levels of representation. A picture - word repetition paradigm was used in which we manipulated the semantic relationship between pictures and words. Experiment I involved two types of trials, one with words

Does Grammatical Structure Accelerate Number Word Learning? Evidence from Learners of Dual and Non-Dual Dialects of Slovenian.

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Franc Marušič

Full Text Available How does linguistic structure affect children's acquisition of early number word meanings? Previous studies have tested this question by comparing how children learning languages with different grammatical representations of number learn the meanings of labels for small numbers, like 1, 2, and 3. For example, children who acquire a language with singular-plural marking, like English, are faster to learn the word for 1 than children learning a language that lacks the singular-plural distinction, perhaps because the word for 1 is always used in singular contexts, highlighting its meaning. These studies are problematic, however, because reported differences in number word learning may be due to unmeasured cross-cultural differences rather than specific linguistic differences. To address this problem, we investigated number word learning in four groups of children from a single culture who spoke different dialects of the same language that differed chiefly with respect to how they grammatically mark number. We found that learning a dialect which features "dual" morphology (marking of pairs accelerated children's acquisition of the number word two relative to learning a "non-dual" dialect of the same language.

Does Grammatical Structure Accelerate Number Word Learning? Evidence from Learners of Dual and Non-Dual Dialects of Slovenian

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Plesničar, Vesna; Razboršek, Tina; Sullivan, Jessica; Barner, David

2016-01-01

How does linguistic structure affect children’s acquisition of early number word meanings? Previous studies have tested this question by comparing how children learning languages with different grammatical representations of number learn the meanings of labels for small numbers, like 1, 2, and 3. For example, children who acquire a language with singular-plural marking, like English, are faster to learn the word for 1 than children learning a language that lacks the singular-plural distinction, perhaps because the word for 1 is always used in singular contexts, highlighting its meaning. These studies are problematic, however, because reported differences in number word learning may be due to unmeasured cross-cultural differences rather than specific linguistic differences. To address this problem, we investigated number word learning in four groups of children from a single culture who spoke different dialects of the same language that differed chiefly with respect to how they grammatically mark number. We found that learning a dialect which features “dual” morphology (marking of pairs) accelerated children’s acquisition of the number word two relative to learning a “non-dual” dialect of the same language. PMID:27486802

Are baboons learning "orthographic" representations? Probably not.

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Maja Linke

Full Text Available The ability of Baboons (papio papio to distinguish between English words and nonwords has been modeled using a deep learning convolutional network model that simulates a ventral pathway in which lexical representations of different granularity develop. However, given that pigeons (columba livia, whose brain morphology is drastically different, can also be trained to distinguish between English words and nonwords, it appears that a less species-specific learning algorithm may be required to explain this behavior. Accordingly, we examined whether the learning model of Rescorla and Wagner, which has proved to be amazingly fruitful in understanding animal and human learning could account for these data. We show that a discrimination learning network using gradient orientation features as input units and word and nonword units as outputs succeeds in predicting baboon lexical decision behavior-including key lexical similarity effects and the ups and downs in accuracy as learning unfolds-with surprising precision. The models performance, in which words are not explicitly represented, is remarkable because it is usually assumed that lexicality decisions, including the decisions made by baboons and pigeons, are mediated by explicit lexical representations. By contrast, our results suggest that in learning to perform lexical decision tasks, baboons and pigeons do not construct a hierarchy of lexical units. Rather, they make optimal use of low-level information obtained through the massively parallel processing of gradient orientation features. Accordingly, we suggest that reading in humans first involves initially learning a high-level system building on letter representations acquired from explicit instruction in literacy, which is then integrated into a conventionalized oral communication system, and that like the latter, fluent reading involves the massively parallel processing of the low-level features encoding semantic contrasts.

76 FR 37291 - Representation Case Procedures

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2011-06-27

... communications must include the following words on the Subject Line--``Request to Attend Public Meeting Regarding... NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS BOARD 29 CFR Parts 101, 102, 103 RIN 3142-AAO8 Representation Case Procedures AGENCY: National Labor Relations Board. ACTION: Proposed rule; notice of meeting. SUMMARY: The...

Top-down attention affects sequential regularity representation in the human visual system.

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Kimura, Motohiro; Widmann, Andreas; Schröger, Erich

2010-08-01

Recent neuroscience studies using visual mismatch negativity (visual MMN), an event-related brain potential (ERP) index of memory-mismatch processes in the visual sensory system, have shown that although sequential regularities embedded in successive visual stimuli can be automatically represented in the visual sensory system, an existence of sequential regularity itself does not guarantee that the sequential regularity will be automatically represented. In the present study, we investigated the effects of top-down attention on sequential regularity representation in the visual sensory system. Our results showed that a sequential regularity (SSSSD) embedded in a modified oddball sequence where infrequent deviant (D) and frequent standard stimuli (S) differing in luminance were regularly presented (SSSSDSSSSDSSSSD...) was represented in the visual sensory system only when participants attended the sequential regularity in luminance, but not when participants ignored the stimuli or simply attended the dimension of luminance per se. This suggests that top-down attention affects sequential regularity representation in the visual sensory system and that top-down attention is a prerequisite for particular sequential regularities to be represented. Copyright 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Early attentional bias for negative words when competition is induced.

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Ho, Ming-Chou; Li, Shuo-Heng; Yeh, Su-Ling

2016-05-01

Previous research (Zeelenberg, Wagenmakers, & Rotteveel, 2006) revealed that emotionally meaningful words were identified significantly better than neutral words, with no difference between positive and negative words. Since in that study only a single target word was displayed at a time, we hypothesized that the equivalent performances for positive and negative words were due to a lack of competition. To test this, in our Experiment 1, we replicated Zeelenberg and colleagues' finding, using emotion-laden Chinese words and the identical data-limited method, which measured the accuracy of a briefly shown target. We then introduced competition in Experiment 2 by simultaneously presenting two words during the target frame, and found evidence for an early attentional bias to negative words. In Experiment 3, we confirmed that the bias in Experiment 2 was not due to the inevitable repetition of stimuli. Taken together, these results support our hypothesis that, in the presence of competition, negative words receive attentional priority and consequently have enhanced perceptual representations.

Distance-Dependent Processing of Pictures and Words

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Amit, Elinor; Algom, Daniel; Trope, Yaacov

2009-01-01

A series of 8 experiments investigated the association between pictorial and verbal representations and the psychological distance of the referent objects from the observer. The results showed that people better process pictures that represent proximal objects and words that represent distal objects than pictures that represent distal objects and…

Face and Word Recognition Can Be Selectively Affected by Brain Injury or Developmental Disorders.

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Robotham, Ro J; Starrfelt, Randi

2017-01-01

Face and word recognition have traditionally been thought to rely on highly specialised and relatively independent cognitive processes. Some of the strongest evidence for this has come from patients with seemingly category-specific visual perceptual deficits such as pure prosopagnosia, a selective face recognition deficit, and pure alexia, a selective word recognition deficit. Together, the patterns of impaired reading with preserved face recognition and impaired face recognition with preserved reading constitute a double dissociation. The existence of these selective deficits has been questioned over the past decade. It has been suggested that studies describing patients with these pure deficits have failed to measure the supposedly preserved functions using sensitive enough measures, and that if tested using sensitive measurements, all patients with deficits in one visual category would also have deficits in the other. The implications of this would be immense, with most textbooks in cognitive neuropsychology requiring drastic revisions. In order to evaluate the evidence for dissociations, we review studies that specifically investigate whether face or word recognition can be selectively affected by acquired brain injury or developmental disorders. We only include studies published since 2004, as comprehensive reviews of earlier studies are available. Most of the studies assess the supposedly preserved functions using sensitive measurements. We found convincing evidence that reading can be preserved in acquired and developmental prosopagnosia and also evidence (though weaker) that face recognition can be preserved in acquired or developmental dyslexia, suggesting that face and word recognition are at least in part supported by independent processes.

Automating Ontological Annotation with WordNet

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Sanfilippo, Antonio P.; Tratz, Stephen C.; Gregory, Michelle L.; Chappell, Alan R.; Whitney, Paul D.; Posse, Christian; Paulson, Patrick R.; Baddeley, Bob L.; Hohimer, Ryan E.; White, Amanda M.

2006-01-22

Semantic Web applications require robust and accurate annotation tools that are capable of automating the assignment of ontological classes to words in naturally occurring text (ontological annotation). Most current ontologies do not include rich lexical databases and are therefore not easily integrated with word sense disambiguation algorithms that are needed to automate ontological annotation. WordNet provides a potentially ideal solution to this problem as it offers a highly structured lexical conceptual representation that has been extensively used to develop word sense disambiguation algorithms. However, WordNet has not been designed as an ontology, and while it can be easily turned into one, the result of doing this would present users with serious practical limitations due to the great number of concepts (synonym sets) it contains. Moreover, mapping WordNet to an existing ontology may be difficult and requires substantial labor. We propose to overcome these limitations by developing an analytical platform that (1) provides a WordNet-based ontology offering a manageable and yet comprehensive set of concept classes, (2) leverages the lexical richness of WordNet to give an extensive characterization of concept class in terms of lexical instances, and (3) integrates a class recognition algorithm that automates the assignment of concept classes to words in naturally occurring text. The ensuing framework makes available an ontological annotation platform that can be effectively integrated with intelligence analysis systems to facilitate evidence marshaling and sustain the creation and validation of inference models.

Rapid modulation of spoken word recognition by visual primes.

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Okano, Kana; Grainger, Jonathan; Holcomb, Phillip J

2016-02-01

In a masked cross-modal priming experiment with ERP recordings, spoken Japanese words were primed with words written in one of the two syllabary scripts of Japanese. An early priming effect, peaking at around 200ms after onset of the spoken word target, was seen in left lateral electrode sites for Katakana primes, and later effects were seen for both Hiragana and Katakana primes on the N400 ERP component. The early effect is thought to reflect the efficiency with which words in Katakana script make contact with sublexical phonological representations involved in spoken language comprehension, due to the particular way this script is used by Japanese readers. This demonstrates fast-acting influences of visual primes on the processing of auditory target words, and suggests that briefly presented visual primes can influence sublexical processing of auditory target words. The later N400 priming effects, on the other hand, most likely reflect cross-modal influences on activity at the level of whole-word phonology and semantics.

Accuracy Feedback Improves Word Learning from Context: Evidence from a Meaning-Generation Task

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Frishkoff, Gwen A.; Collins-Thompson, Kevyn; Hodges, Leslie; Crossley, Scott

2016-01-01

The present study asked whether accuracy feedback on a meaning generation task would lead to improved contextual word learning (CWL). Active generation can facilitate learning by increasing task engagement and memory retrieval, which strengthens new word representations. However, forced generation results in increased errors, which can be…

Neurophysiological correlates of word processing deficits in isolated reading and isolated spelling disorders.

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Bakos, Sarolta; Landerl, Karin; Bartling, Jürgen; Schulte-Körne, Gerd; Moll, Kristina

2018-03-01

In consistent orthographies, isolated reading disorders (iRD) and isolated spelling disorders (iSD) are nearly as common as combined reading-spelling disorders (cRSD). However, the exact nature of the underlying word processing deficits in isolated versus combined literacy deficits are not well understood yet. We applied a phonological lexical decision task (including words, pseudohomophones, legal and illegal pseudowords) during ERP recording to investigate the neurophysiological correlates of lexical and sublexical word-processing in children with iRD, iSD and cRSD compared to typically developing (TD) 9-year-olds. TD children showed enhanced early sensitivity (N170) for word material and for the violation of orthographic rules compared to the other groups. Lexical orthographic effects (higher LPC amplitude for words than for pseudohomophones) were the same in the TD and iRD groups, although processing took longer in children with iRD. In the iSD and cRSD groups, lexical orthographic effects were evident and stable over time only for correctly spelled words. Orthographic representations were intact in iRD children, but word processing took longer compared to TD. Children with spelling disorders had partly missing orthographic representations. Our study is the first to specify the underlying neurophysiology of word processing deficits associated with isolated literacy deficits. Copyright © 2017 International Federation of Clinical Neurophysiology. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Impaired color naming of food and body shape words: weight phobia or distinct affective state?

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Green, M W; Elliman, N A; Rogers, P J; Welch, D A

1997-01-01

The current study investigated whether a concern with body shape and weight represents a distinct affective state, or whether it is better conceptualized as a highly specific form of anxiety. The color-naming performance of women with a high Drive for Thinness score was examined under three experimental conditions: when a photograph of chocolate was present, when actual chocolate was present, and a control condition. High Drive for Thinness subjects demonstrated relatively impaired color naming of body shape words in the picture condition, but not in the food or control conditions. Although there was a significant impairment in the color naming of food words, this was unaffected by condition or degree of Drive for Thinness. The results are interpreted as supporting an analogy between weight/body shape concerns and subclinical phobic anxiety.

Different Loci of Semantic Interference in Picture Naming vs. Word-Picture Matching Tasks.

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Harvey, Denise Y; Schnur, Tatiana T

2016-01-01

Naming pictures and matching words to pictures belonging to the same semantic category impairs performance relative to when stimuli come from different semantic categories (i.e., semantic interference). Despite similar semantic interference phenomena in both picture naming and word-picture matching tasks, the locus of interference has been attributed to different levels of the language system - lexical in naming and semantic in word-picture matching. Although both tasks involve access to shared semantic representations, the extent to which interference originates and/or has its locus at a shared level remains unclear, as these effects are often investigated in isolation. We manipulated semantic context in cyclical picture naming and word-picture matching tasks, and tested whether factors tapping semantic-level (generalization of interference to novel category items) and lexical-level processes (interactions with lexical frequency) affected the magnitude of interference, while also assessing whether interference occurs at a shared processing level(s) (transfer of interference across tasks). We found that semantic interference in naming was sensitive to both semantic- and lexical-level processes (i.e., larger interference for novel vs. old and low- vs. high-frequency stimuli), consistent with a semantically mediated lexical locus. Interference in word-picture matching exhibited stable interference for old and novel stimuli and did not interact with lexical frequency. Further, interference transferred from word-picture matching to naming. Together, these experiments provide evidence to suggest that semantic interference in both tasks originates at a shared processing stage (presumably at the semantic level), but that it exerts its effect at different loci when naming pictures vs. matching words to pictures.

Effects of Sleep on Word Pair Memory in Children – Separating Item and Source Memory Aspects

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Jing-Yi Wang

2017-09-01

Full Text Available Word paired-associate learning is a well-established task to demonstrate sleep-dependent memory consolidation in adults as well as children. Sleep has also been proposed to benefit episodic features of memory, i.e., a memory for an event (item bound into the spatiotemporal context it has been experienced in (source. We aimed to explore if sleep enhances word pair memory in children by strengthening the episodic features of the memory, in particular. Sixty-one children (8–12 years studied two lists of word pairs with 1 h in between. Retrieval testing comprised cued recall of the target word of each word pair (item memory and recalling in which list the word pair had appeared in (source memory. Retrieval was tested either after 1 h (short retention interval or after 11 h, with this long retention interval covering either nocturnal sleep or daytime wakefulness. Compared with the wake interval, sleep enhanced separate recall of both word pairs and the lists per se, while recall of the combination of the word pair and the list it had appeared in remained unaffected by sleep. An additional comparison with adult controls (n = 37 suggested that item-source bound memory (combined recall of word pair and list is generally diminished in children. Our results argue against the view that the sleep-induced enhancement in paired-associate learning in children is a consequence of sleep specifically enhancing the episodic features of the memory representation. On the contrary, sleep in children might strengthen item and source representations in isolation, while leaving the episodic memory representations (item-source binding unaffected.

Grounding word learning in space.

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Larissa K Samuelson

Full Text Available Humans and objects, and thus social interactions about objects, exist within space. Words direct listeners' attention to specific regions of space. Thus, a strong correspondence exists between where one looks, one's bodily orientation, and what one sees. This leads to further correspondence with what one remembers. Here, we present data suggesting that children use associations between space and objects and space and words to link words and objects--space binds labels to their referents. We tested this claim in four experiments, showing that the spatial consistency of where objects are presented affects children's word learning. Next, we demonstrate that a process model that grounds word learning in the known neural dynamics of spatial attention, spatial memory, and associative learning can capture the suite of results reported here. This model also predicts that space is special, a prediction supported in a fifth experiment that shows children do not use color as a cue to bind words and objects. In a final experiment, we ask whether spatial consistency affects word learning in naturalistic word learning contexts. Children of parents who spontaneously keep objects in a consistent spatial location during naming interactions learn words more effectively. Together, the model and data show that space is a powerful tool that can effectively ground word learning in social contexts.

Enrichment Effects of Gestures and Pictures on Abstract Words in a Second Language

OpenAIRE

Claudia Repetto; Elisa Pedroli; Manuela Macedonia; Manuela Macedonia

2017-01-01

Laboratory research has demonstrated that multisensory enrichment promotes verbal learning in a foreign language (L2). Enrichment can be done in various ways, e.g., by adding a picture that illustrates the L2 word’s meaning or by the learner performing a gesture to the word (enactment). Most studies have tested enrichment on concrete but not on abstract words. Unlike concrete words, the representation of abstract words is deprived of sensory-motor features. This has been addressed as one of t...

ERP profiles for face and word recognition are based on their status in semantic memory not their stimulus category.

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Nie, Aiqing; Griffin, Michael; Keinath, Alexander; Walsh, Matthew; Dittmann, Andrea; Reder, Lynne

2014-04-04

Previous research has suggested that faces and words are processed and remembered differently as reflected by different ERP patterns for the two types of stimuli. Specifically, face stimuli produced greater late positive deflections for old items in anterior compared to posterior regions, while word stimuli produced greater late positive deflections in posterior compared to anterior regions. Given that words have existing representations in subjects׳ long-term memories (LTM) and that face stimuli used in prior experiments were of unknown individuals, we conducted an ERP study that crossed face and letter stimuli with the presence or absence of a prior (stable or existing) memory representation. During encoding, subjects judged whether stimuli were known (famous face or real word) or not known (unknown person or pseudo-word). A surprise recognition memory test required subjects to distinguish between stimuli that appeared during the encoding phase and stimuli that did not. ERP results were consistent with previous research when comparing unknown faces and words; however, the late ERP pattern for famous faces was more similar to that for words than for unknown faces. This suggests that the critical ERP difference is mediated by whether there is a prior representation in LTM, and not whether the stimulus involves letters or faces. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Defining a Conceptual Topography of Word Concreteness: Clustering Properties of Emotion, Sensation, and Magnitude among 750 English Words

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Joshua Troche

2017-10-01

Full Text Available Cognitive science has a longstanding interest in the ways that people acquire and use abstract vs. concrete words (e.g., truth vs. piano. One dominant theory holds that abstract and concrete words are subserved by two parallel semantic systems. We recently proposed an alternative account of abstract-concrete word representation premised upon a unitary, high dimensional semantic space wherein word meaning is nested. We hypothesize that a range of cognitive and perceptual dimensions (e.g., emotion, time, space, color, size, visual form bound this space, forming a conceptual topography. Here we report a normative study where we examined the clustering properties of a sample of English words (N = 750 spanning a spectrum of concreteness in a continuous manner from highly abstract to highly concrete. Participants (N = 328 rated each target word on a range of 14 cognitive dimensions (e.g., color, emotion, valence, polarity, motion, space. The dimensions reduced to three factors: Endogenous factor, Exogenous factor, and Magnitude factor. Concepts were plotted in a unified, multimodal space with concrete and abstract concepts along a continuous continuum. We discuss theoretical implications and practical applications of this dataset. These word norms are freely available for download and use at http://www.reilly-coglab.com/data/.

Defining a Conceptual Topography of Word Concreteness: Clustering Properties of Emotion, Sensation, and Magnitude among 750 English Words.

Science.gov (United States)

Troche, Joshua; Crutch, Sebastian J; Reilly, Jamie

2017-01-01

Cognitive science has a longstanding interest in the ways that people acquire and use abstract vs. concrete words (e.g., truth vs. piano). One dominant theory holds that abstract and concrete words are subserved by two parallel semantic systems. We recently proposed an alternative account of abstract-concrete word representation premised upon a unitary, high dimensional semantic space wherein word meaning is nested. We hypothesize that a range of cognitive and perceptual dimensions (e.g., emotion, time, space, color, size, visual form) bound this space, forming a conceptual topography. Here we report a normative study where we examined the clustering properties of a sample of English words ( N = 750) spanning a spectrum of concreteness in a continuous manner from highly abstract to highly concrete. Participants ( N = 328) rated each target word on a range of 14 cognitive dimensions (e.g., color, emotion, valence, polarity, motion, space). The dimensions reduced to three factors: Endogenous factor, Exogenous factor, and Magnitude factor. Concepts were plotted in a unified, multimodal space with concrete and abstract concepts along a continuous continuum. We discuss theoretical implications and practical applications of this dataset. These word norms are freely available for download and use at http://www.reilly-coglab.com/data/.

The effect of incremental changes in phonotactic probability and neighborhood density on word learning by preschool children

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Storkel, Holly L.; Bontempo, Daniel E.; Aschenbrenner, Andrew J.; Maekawa, Junko; Lee, Su-Yeon

2013-01-01

Purpose Phonotactic probability or neighborhood density have predominately been defined using gross distinctions (i.e., low vs. high). The current studies examined the influence of finer changes in probability (Experiment 1) and density (Experiment 2) on word learning. Method The full range of probability or density was examined by sampling five nonwords from each of four quartiles. Three- and 5-year-old children received training on nonword-nonobject pairs. Learning was measured in a picture-naming task immediately following training and 1-week after training. Results were analyzed using multi-level modeling. Results A linear spline model best captured nonlinearities in phonotactic probability. Specifically word learning improved as probability increased in the lowest quartile, worsened as probability increased in the midlow quartile, and then remained stable and poor in the two highest quartiles. An ordinary linear model sufficiently described neighborhood density. Here, word learning improved as density increased across all quartiles. Conclusion Given these different patterns, phonotactic probability and neighborhood density appear to influence different word learning processes. Specifically, phonotactic probability may affect recognition that a sound sequence is an acceptable word in the language and is a novel word for the child, whereas neighborhood density may influence creation of a new representation in long-term memory. PMID:23882005

Effects of word width and word length on optimal character size for reading of horizontally scrolling Japanese words

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Wataru eTeramoto

2016-02-01

Full Text Available The present study investigated whether word width and length affect the optimal character size for reading of horizontally scrolling Japanese words, using reading speed as a measure. In Experiment 1, three Japanese words, each consisting of 4 Hiragana characters, sequentially scrolled on a display screen from right to left. Participants, all Japanese native speakers, were instructed to read the words aloud as accurately as possible, irrespective of their order within the sequence. To quantitatively measure their reading performance, we used rapid serial visual presentation paradigm, where the scrolling rate was increased until the participants began to make mistakes. Thus, the highest scrolling rate at which the participants’ performance exceeded 88.9% correct rate was calculated for each character size (0.3, 0.6, 1.0, and 3.0° and scroll window size (5 or 10 character spaces. Results showed that the reading performance was highest in the range of 0.6° to 1.0°, irrespective of the scroll window size. Experiment 2 investigated whether the optimal character size observed in Experiment 1 was applicable for any word width and word length (i.e., the number of characters in a word. Results showed that reading speeds were slower for longer than shorter words and the word width of 3.6° was optimal among the word lengths tested (3, 4, and 6 character words. Considering that character size varied depending on word width and word length in the present study, this means that the optimal character size can be changed by word width and word length.

Spatial representations elicit dual-coding effects in mental imagery.

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Verges, Michelle; Duffy, Sean

2009-08-01

Spatial aspects of words are associated with their canonical locations in the real world. Yet little research has tested whether spatial associations denoted in language comprehension generalize to their corresponding images. We directly tested the spatial aspects of mental imagery in picture and word processing (Experiment 1). We also tested whether spatial representations of motion words produce similar perceptual-interference effects as demonstrated by object words (Experiment 2). Findings revealed that words denoting an upward spatial location produced slower responses to targets appearing at the top of the display, whereas words denoting a downward spatial location produced slower responses to targets appearing at the bottom of the display. Perceptual-interference effects did not obtain for pictures or for words lacking a spatial relation. These findings provide greater empirical support for the perceptual-symbols system theory (Barsalou, 1999, 2008). Copyright © 2009 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

Effects of Word Width and Word Length on Optimal Character Size for Reading of Horizontally Scrolling Japanese Words.

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Teramoto, Wataru; Nakazaki, Takuyuki; Sekiyama, Kaoru; Mori, Shuji

2016-01-01

The present study investigated, whether word width and length affect the optimal character size for reading of horizontally scrolling Japanese words, using reading speed as a measure. In Experiment 1, three Japanese words, each consisting of four Hiragana characters, sequentially scrolled on a display screen from right to left. Participants, all Japanese native speakers, were instructed to read the words aloud as accurately as possible, irrespective of their order within the sequence. To quantitatively measure their reading performance, we used rapid serial visual presentation paradigm, where the scrolling rate was increased until the participants began to make mistakes. Thus, the highest scrolling rate at which the participants' performance exceeded 88.9% correct rate was calculated for each character size (0.3°, 0.6°, 1.0°, and 3.0°) and scroll window size (5 or 10 character spaces). Results showed that the reading performance was highest in the range of 0.6° to 1.0°, irrespective of the scroll window size. Experiment 2 investigated whether the optimal character size observed in Experiment 1 was applicable for any word width and word length (i.e., the number of characters in a word). Results showed that reading speeds were slower for longer than shorter words and the word width of 3.6° was optimal among the word lengths tested (three, four, and six character words). Considering that character size varied depending on word width and word length in the present study, this means that the optimal character size can be changed by word width and word length in scrolling Japanese words.

Word type effects in false recall: concrete, abstract, and emotion word critical lures.

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Bauer, Lisa M; Olheiser, Erik L; Altarriba, Jeanette; Landi, Nicole

2009-01-01

Previous research has demonstrated that definable qualities of verbal stimuli have implications for memory. For example, the distinction between concrete and abstract words has led to the finding that concrete words have an advantage in memory tasks (i.e., the concreteness effect). However, other word types, such as words that label specific human emotions, may also affect memory processes. This study examined the effects of word type on the production of false memories by using a list-learning false memory paradigm. Participants heard lists of words that were highly associated to nonpresented concrete, abstract, or emotion words (i.e., the critical lures) and then engaged in list recall. Emotion word critical lures were falsely recalled at a significantly higher rate (with the effect carried by the positively valenced critical lures) than concrete and abstract critical lures. These findings suggest that the word type variable has implications for our understanding of the mechanisms that underlie recall and false recall.

Serial recall, word frequency, and mixed lists: the influence of item arrangement.

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Miller, Leonie M; Roodenrys, Steven

2012-11-01

Studies of the effect of word frequency in the serial recall task show that lists of high-frequency words are better recalled than lists of low-frequency words; however, when high- and low-frequency words are alternated within a list, there is no difference in the level of recall for the two types of words, and recall is intermediate between lists of pure frequency. This pattern has been argued to arise from the development of a network of activated long-term representations of list items that support the redintegration of all list items in a nondirectional and nonspecific way. More recently, it has been proposed that the frequency effect might be a product of the coarticulation of items at word boundaries and their influence on rehearsal rather than a consequence of memory representations. The current work examines recall performance in mixed lists of an equal number of high- and low-frequency items arranged in contiguous segments (i.e., HHHLLL and LLLHHH), under quiet and articulatory suppression conditions, to test whether the effect is (a) nondirectional and (b) dependent on articulatory processes. These experiments demonstrate that neither explanation is satisfactory, although the results suggest that the effect is mnemonic. A language-based approach to short-term memory is favored with emphasis on the role of speech production processes at output.

Neurophysiological evidence for the interplay of speech segmentation and word-referent mapping during novel word learning.

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François, Clément; Cunillera, Toni; Garcia, Enara; Laine, Matti; Rodriguez-Fornells, Antoni

2017-04-01

Learning a new language requires the identification of word units from continuous speech (the speech segmentation problem) and mapping them onto conceptual representation (the word to world mapping problem). Recent behavioral studies have revealed that the statistical properties found within and across modalities can serve as cues for both processes. However, segmentation and mapping have been largely studied separately, and thus it remains unclear whether both processes can be accomplished at the same time and if they share common neurophysiological features. To address this question, we recorded EEG of 20 adult participants during both an audio alone speech segmentation task and an audiovisual word-to-picture association task. The participants were tested for both the implicit detection of online mismatches (structural auditory and visual semantic violations) as well as for the explicit recognition of words and word-to-picture associations. The ERP results from the learning phase revealed a delayed learning-related fronto-central negativity (FN400) in the audiovisual condition compared to the audio alone condition. Interestingly, while online structural auditory violations elicited clear MMN/N200 components in the audio alone condition, visual-semantic violations induced meaning-related N400 modulations in the audiovisual condition. The present results support the idea that speech segmentation and meaning mapping can take place in parallel and act in synergy to enhance novel word learning. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Competition between multiple words for a referent in cross-situational word learning

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Benitez, Viridiana L.; Yurovsky, Daniel; Smith, Linda B.

2016-01-01

Three experiments investigated competition between word-object pairings in a cross-situational word-learning paradigm. Adults were presented with One-Word pairings, where a single word labeled a single object, and Two-Word pairings, where two words labeled a single object. In addition to measuring learning of these two pairing types, we measured competition between words that refer to the same object. When the word-object co-occurrences were presented intermixed in training (Experiment 1), we found evidence for direct competition between words that label the same referent. Separating the two words for an object in time eliminated any evidence for this competition (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 demonstrated that adding a linguistic cue to the second label for a referent led to different competition effects between adults who self-reported different language learning histories, suggesting both distinctiveness and language learning history affect competition. Finally, in all experiments, competition effects were unrelated to participants’ explicit judgments of learning, suggesting that competition reflects the operating characteristics of implicit learning processes. Together, these results demonstrate that the role of competition between overlapping associations in statistical word-referent learning depends on time, the distinctiveness of word-object pairings, and language learning history. PMID:27087742

Neural dichotomy of word concreteness: a view from functional neuroimaging.

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Kumar, Uttam

2016-02-01

Our perception about the representation and processing of concrete and abstract concepts is based on the fact that concrete words are highly imagined and remembered faster than abstract words. In order to explain the processing differences between abstract and concrete concepts, various theories have been proposed, yet there is no unanimous consensus about its neural implication. The present study investigated the processing of concrete and abstract words during an orthography judgment task (implicit semantic processing) using functional magnetic resonance imaging to validate the involvement of the neural regions. Relative to non-words, both abstract and concrete words show activation in the regions of bilateral hemisphere previously associated with semantic processing. The common areas (conjunction analyses) observed for abstract and concrete words are bilateral inferior frontal gyrus (BA 44/45), left superior parietal (BA 7), left fusiform gyrus and bilateral middle occipital. The additional areas for abstract words were noticed in bilateral superior temporal and bilateral middle temporal region, whereas no distinct region was noticed for concrete words. This suggests that words with abstract concepts recruit additional language regions in the brain.

Cultural constraints on brain development: evidence from a developmental study of visual word processing in mandarin chinese.

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Cao, Fan; Lee, Rebecca; Shu, Hua; Yang, Yanhui; Xu, Guoqing; Li, Kuncheng; Booth, James R

2010-05-01

Developmental differences in phonological and orthographic processing in Chinese were examined in 9 year olds, 11 year olds, and adults using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Rhyming and spelling judgments were made to 2-character words presented sequentially in the visual modality. The spelling task showed greater activation than the rhyming task in right superior parietal lobule and right inferior temporal gyrus, and there were developmental increases across tasks bilaterally in these regions in addition to bilateral occipital cortex, suggesting increased involvement over age on visuo-orthographic analysis. The rhyming task showed greater activation than the spelling task in left superior temporal gyrus and there were developmental decreases across tasks in this region, suggesting reduced involvement over age on phonological representations. The rhyming and spelling tasks included words with conflicting orthographic and phonological information (i.e., rhyming words spelled differently or nonrhyming words spelled similarly) or nonconflicting information. There was a developmental increase in the difference between conflicting and nonconflicting words in left inferior parietal lobule, suggesting greater engagement of systems for mapping between orthographic and phonological representations. Finally, there were developmental increases across tasks in an anterior (Broadman area [BA] 45, 46) and posterior (BA 9) left inferior frontal gyrus, suggesting greater reliance on controlled retrieval and selection of posterior lexical representations.

He Said, She Said: Effects of Bilingualism on Cross-Talker Word Recognition in Infancy

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Singh, Leher

2018-01-01

The purpose of the current study was to examine effects of bilingual language input on infant word segmentation and on talker generalization. In the present study, monolingually and bilingually exposed infants were compared on their abilities to recognize familiarized words in speech and to maintain generalizable representations of familiarized…

The time course of morphological processing during spoken word recognition in Chinese.

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Shen, Wei; Qu, Qingqing; Ni, Aiping; Zhou, Junyi; Li, Xingshan

2017-12-01

We investigated the time course of morphological processing during spoken word recognition using the printed-word paradigm. Chinese participants were asked to listen to a spoken disyllabic compound word while simultaneously viewing a printed-word display. Each visual display consisted of three printed words: a semantic associate of the first constituent of the compound word (morphemic competitor), a semantic associate of the whole compound word (whole-word competitor), and an unrelated word (distractor). Participants were directed to detect whether the spoken target word was on the visual display. Results indicated that both the morphemic and whole-word competitors attracted more fixations than the distractor. More importantly, the morphemic competitor began to diverge from the distractor immediately at the acoustic offset of the first constituent, which was earlier than the whole-word competitor. These results suggest that lexical access to the auditory word is incremental and morphological processing (i.e., semantic access to the first constituent) that occurs at an early processing stage before access to the representation of the whole word in Chinese.

A neural signature of phonological access: distinguishing the effects of word frequency from familiarity and length in overt picture naming.

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Graves, William W; Grabowski, Thomas J; Mehta, Sonya; Gordon, Jean K

2007-04-01

Cognitive models of word production correlate the word frequency effect (i.e., the fact that words which appear with less frequency take longer to produce) with an increased processing cost to activate the whole-word (lexical) phonological representation. We performed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while subjects produced overt naming responses to photographs of animals and manipulable objects that had high name agreement but were of varying frequency, with the purpose of identifying neural structures participating specifically in activating whole-word phonological representations, as opposed to activating lexical semantic representations or articulatory-motor routines. Blood oxygen level-dependent responses were analyzed using a parametric approach based on the frequency with which each word produced appears in the language. Parallel analyses were performed for concept familiarity and word length, which provided indices of semantic and articulatory loads. These analyses permitted us to identify regions related to word frequency alone, and therefore, likely to be related specifically to activation of phonological word forms. We hypothesized that the increased processing cost of producing lower-frequency words would correlate with activation of the left posterior inferotemporal (IT) cortex, the left posterior superior temporal gyrus (pSTG), and the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). Scan-time response latencies demonstrated the expected word frequency effect. Analysis of the fMRI data revealed that activity in the pSTG was modulated by frequency but not word length or concept familiarity. In contrast, parts of IT and IFG demonstrated conjoint frequency and familiarity effects, and parts of both primary motor regions demonstrated conjoint effects of frequency and word length. The results are consistent with a model of word production in which lexical-semantic and lexical-phonological information are accessed by overlapping neural systems within

Activation of words with phonological overlap

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Claudia K. Friedrich

2013-08-01

Full Text Available Multiple lexical representations overlapping with the input (cohort neighbors are temporarily activated in the listener’s mental lexicon when speech unfolds in time. Activation for cohort neighbors appears to rapidly decline as soon as there is mismatch with the input. However, it is a matter of debate whether or not they are completely excluded from further processing. We recorded behavioral data and event-related brain potentials (ERPs in auditory-visual word onset priming during a lexical decision task. As primes we used the first two syllables of spoken German words. In a carrier word condition, the primes were extracted from spoken versions of the target words (ano-ANORAK 'anorak'. In a cohort neighbor condition, the primes were taken from words that overlap with the target word up to the second nucleus (ana- taken from ANANAS 'pineapple'. Relative to a control condition, where primes and targets were unrelated, lexical decision responses for cohort neighbors were delayed. This reveals that cohort neighbors are disfavored by the decision processes at the behavioral front end. In contrast, left-anterior ERPs reflected long-lasting facilitated processing of cohort neighbors. We interpret these results as evidence for extended parallel processing of cohort neighbors. That is, in parallel to the preparation and elicitation of delayed lexical decision responses to cohort neighbors, aspects of the processing system appear to keep track of those less efficient candidates.

Aging affects both perceptual and lexical/semantic components of word stem priming: An event-related fMRI study

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Daselaar, S.M.; Veltman, D.J.; Rombouts, S.A.R.B.; Raaijmakers, J.G.; Jonker, C.

2005-01-01

In this event-related fMRI study, brain activity patterns were compared in extensive groups of young (N = 25) and older (N = 38) adults, while they were performing a word stem completion priming task. Based on behavioral findings, we tested the hypothesis that aging affects only the

HMM-based lexicon-driven and lexicon-free word recognition for online handwritten Indic scripts.

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Bharath, A; Madhvanath, Sriganesh

2012-04-01

Research for recognizing online handwritten words in Indic scripts is at its early stages when compared to Latin and Oriental scripts. In this paper, we address this problem specifically for two major Indic scripts--Devanagari and Tamil. In contrast to previous approaches, the techniques we propose are largely data driven and script independent. We propose two different techniques for word recognition based on Hidden Markov Models (HMM): lexicon driven and lexicon free. The lexicon-driven technique models each word in the lexicon as a sequence of symbol HMMs according to a standard symbol writing order derived from the phonetic representation. The lexicon-free technique uses a novel Bag-of-Symbols representation of the handwritten word that is independent of symbol order and allows rapid pruning of the lexicon. On handwritten Devanagari word samples featuring both standard and nonstandard symbol writing orders, a combination of lexicon-driven and lexicon-free recognizers significantly outperforms either of them used in isolation. In contrast, most Tamil word samples feature the standard symbol order, and the lexicon-driven recognizer outperforms the lexicon free one as well as their combination. The best recognition accuracies obtained for 20,000 word lexicons are 87.13 percent for Devanagari when the two recognizers are combined, and 91.8 percent for Tamil using the lexicon-driven technique.

Does main clause word order affect attention to change in subordinate clauses?

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Christensen, Marie Herget; Christensen, Tanya Karoli; Jensen, Torben Juel

2018-01-01

,and in the article we argue that this ‘Main Clause Phenomena’ (cf. Aelbrechtet al. 2012) functions as a foregroundingdevice, signaling that the more important information of the clause complex isto be found in the subordinate clause instead of in its matrix clause. Aprediction from the foregrounding hypothesis...... is that a subordinate clause withVerb>Adverb word order will attract more attention than a clause withAdverb>Verb word order. To test this, we conducted an experiment under the textchange paradigm. 59 students each read 24 constructions twice, each containinga subordinate clause with either Verb>Adverb or Adverb......>Verb word order.Half of the subordinate clauses were governed by a semifactive predicate (opento both word orders) and the other half by a semantically secondary sentence(in itself strongly favoring Verb>Adverb word order). Attention to thesubordinate clause was tested by measuring how disinclined...

Posture affects how robots and infants map words to objects.

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Anthony F Morse

Full Text Available For infants, the first problem in learning a word is to map the word to its referent; a second problem is to remember that mapping when the word and/or referent are again encountered. Recent infant studies suggest that spatial location plays a key role in how infants solve both problems. Here we provide a new theoretical model and new empirical evidence on how the body - and its momentary posture - may be central to these processes. The present study uses a name-object mapping task in which names are either encountered in the absence of their target (experiments 1-3, 6 & 7, or when their target is present but in a location previously associated with a foil (experiments 4, 5, 8 & 9. A humanoid robot model (experiments 1-5 is used to instantiate and test the hypothesis that body-centric spatial location, and thus the bodies' momentary posture, is used to centrally bind the multimodal features of heard names and visual objects. The robot model is shown to replicate existing infant data and then to generate novel predictions, which are tested in new infant studies (experiments 6-9. Despite spatial location being task-irrelevant in this second set of experiments, infants use body-centric spatial contingency over temporal contingency to map the name to object. Both infants and the robot remember the name-object mapping even in new spatial locations. However, the robot model shows how this memory can emerge -not from separating bodily information from the word-object mapping as proposed in previous models of the role of space in word-object mapping - but through the body's momentary disposition in space.

Word-Decoding Skill Interacts with Working Memory Capacity to Influence Inference Generation during Reading

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Hamilton, Stephen; Freed, Erin; Long, Debra L.

2016-01-01

The aim of this study was to examine predictions derived from a proposal about the relation between word-decoding skill and working memory capacity, called verbal efficiency theory. The theory states that poor word representations and slow decoding processes consume resources in working memory that would otherwise be used to execute high-level…

Is a picture worth a thousand words? The interaction of visual display and attribute representation in attenuating framing bias}

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Eyal Gamliel

2013-07-01

Full Text Available The attribute framing bias is a well-established phenomenon, in which an object or an event is evaluated more favorably when presented in a positive frame such as ``the half full glass'' than when presented in the complementary negative framing. Given that previous research showed that visual aids can attenuate this bias, the current research explores the factors underlying the attenuating effect of visual aids. In a series of three experiments, we examined how attribute framing bias is affected by two factors: (a The display mode---verbal versus visual; and (b the representation of the critical attribute---whether one outcome, either the positive or the negative, is represented or both outcomes are represented. In Experiment 1 a marginal attenuation of attribute framing bias was obtained when verbal description of either positive or negative information was accompanied by corresponding visual representation. In Experiment 2 similar marginal attenuation was obtained when both positive and negative outcomes were verbally represented. In Experiment 3, where the verbal description represented both positive and negative outcomes, significant attenuation was obtained when it was accompanied by a visual display that represented a single outcome, and complete attenuation, totally eliminating the framing bias, was obtained when it was accompanied by a visual display that represented both outcomes. Thus, our findings showed that interaction between the display mode and the representation of the critical attribute attenuated the framing bias. Theoretical and practical implications of the interaction between verbal description, visual aids and representation of the critical attribute are discussed, and future research is suggested.

Digital models for architectonical representation

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Stefano Brusaporci

2011-12-01

Full Text Available Digital instruments and technologies enrich architectonical representation and communication opportunities. Computer graphics is organized according the two phases of visualization and construction, that is modeling and rendering, structuring dichotomy of software technologies. Visualization modalities give different kinds of representations of the same 3D model and instruments produce a separation between drawing and image’s creation. Reverse modeling can be related to a synthesis process, ‘direct modeling’ follows an analytic procedure. The difference between interactive and not interactive applications is connected to the possibilities offered by informatics instruments, and relates to modeling and rendering. At the same time the word ‘model’ describes different phenomenon (i.e. files: mathematical model of the building and of the scene; raster representation and post-processing model. All these correlated different models constitute the architectonical interpretative model, that is a simulation of reality made by the model for improving the knowledge.

Where and how morphologically complex words interplay with naming pictures.

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Zwitserlood, Pienie; Bölte, Jens; Dohmes, Petra

2002-01-01

Two picture-word experiments are reported in which a delay of 7 to 10 was introduced between distractor and picture. Distractor words were either derived words (Experiment 1) or compounds (Experiment 2), morphologically related to the picture name. In both experiments, the position of morphological overlap between distractor (e.g., rosebud vs tea-rose) and picture name (rose) was manipulated. Clear facilitation of picture naming latencies was obtained when pictures were paired with morphological distractors, and effects were independent of distractor type and position of overlap. The results are evaluated against "full listing" and "decomposition" approaches of morphological representation. Copyright 2002 Elsevier Science (USA).

Word and Nonword Processing without Meaning Support in Korean-Speaking Children with and without Hyperlexia

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Lee, Sung Hee; Hwang, Mina

2015-01-01

Hyperlexia is a syndrome of reading without meaning in individuals who otherwise have pronounced cognitive and language deficits. The present study investigated the quality of word representation and the effects of deficient semantic processing on word and nonword reading of Korean children with hyperlexia; their performances were compared to…

Long-term temporal tracking of speech rate affects spoken-word recognition.

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Baese-Berk, Melissa M; Heffner, Christopher C; Dilley, Laura C; Pitt, Mark A; Morrill, Tuuli H; McAuley, J Devin

2014-08-01

Humans unconsciously track a wide array of distributional characteristics in their sensory environment. Recent research in spoken-language processing has demonstrated that the speech rate surrounding a target region within an utterance influences which words, and how many words, listeners hear later in that utterance. On the basis of hypotheses that listeners track timing information in speech over long timescales, we investigated the possibility that the perception of words is sensitive to speech rate over such a timescale (e.g., an extended conversation). Results demonstrated that listeners tracked variation in the overall pace of speech over an extended duration (analogous to that of a conversation that listeners might have outside the lab) and that this global speech rate influenced which words listeners reported hearing. The effects of speech rate became stronger over time. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that neural entrainment by speech occurs on multiple timescales, some lasting more than an hour. © The Author(s) 2014.

Semantic Neighborhood Effects for Abstract versus Concrete Words.

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Danguecan, Ashley N; Buchanan, Lori

2016-01-01

Studies show that semantic effects may be task-specific, and thus, that semantic representations are flexible and dynamic. Such findings are critical to the development of a comprehensive theory of semantic processing in visual word recognition, which should arguably account for how semantic effects may vary by task. It has been suggested that semantic effects are more directly examined using tasks that explicitly require meaning processing relative to those for which meaning processing is not necessary (e.g., lexical decision task). The purpose of the present study was to chart the processing of concrete versus abstract words in the context of a global co-occurrence variable, semantic neighborhood density (SND), by comparing word recognition response times (RTs) across four tasks varying in explicit semantic demands: standard lexical decision task (with non-pronounceable non-words), go/no-go lexical decision task (with pronounceable non-words), progressive demasking task, and sentence relatedness task. The same experimental stimulus set was used across experiments and consisted of 44 concrete and 44 abstract words, with half of these being low SND, and half being high SND. In this way, concreteness and SND were manipulated in a factorial design using a number of visual word recognition tasks. A consistent RT pattern emerged across tasks, in which SND effects were found for abstract (but not necessarily concrete) words. Ultimately, these findings highlight the importance of studying interactive effects in word recognition, and suggest that linguistic associative information is particularly important for abstract words.

Word class and context affect alpha-band oscillatory dynamics in an older population

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Monika eMellem

2012-04-01

Full Text Available Differences in the oscillatory EEG dynamics of reading open class and closed class words have previously been found (Bastiaansen et al., 2005 and are thought to reflect differences in lexical-semantic content between these word classes. In particular, the theta band (4–7 Hz seems to play a prominent role in lexical-semantic retrieval. We tested whether this theta effect is robust in an older population of subjects. Additionally, we examined how the context of a word can modulate the oscillatory dynamics underlying retrieval for the two different classes of words. Older participants (mean age 55 read words presented in either syntactically-correct sentences or in a scrambled order (scrambled sentence while their EEG was recorded. We performed time-frequency analysis to examine how power varied based on the context or class of the word. We observed larger power decreases in the alpha (8–12Hz band between 200–700 ms for the open class compared to closed class words, but this was true only for the scrambled sentence context. We did not observe differences in theta power between these conditions. Context exerted an effect on the alpha and low beta (13–18 Hz bands between 0–700 ms. These results suggest that the previously observed word class effects on theta power changes in a younger participant sample do not seem to be a robust effect in this older population. Though this is an indirect comparison between studies, it may suggest the existence of aging effects on word retrieval dynamics for different populations. Additionally, the interaction between word class and context suggests that word retrieval mechanisms interact with sentence-level comprehension mechanisms in the alpha band.

Development of Embodied Word Meanings: Sensorimotor Effects in Children's Lexical Processing.

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Inkster, Michelle; Wellsby, Michele; Lloyd, Ellen; Pexman, Penny M

2016-01-01

Previous research showed an effect of words' rated body-object interaction (BOI) in children's visual word naming performance, but only in children 8 years of age or older (Wellsby and Pexman, 2014a). In that study, however, BOI was established using adult ratings. Here we collected ratings from a group of parents for children's BOI experience (child-BOI). We examined effects of words' child-BOI and also words' imageability on children's responses in an auditory word naming task, which is suited to the lexical processing skills of younger children. We tested a group of 54 children aged 6-7 years and a comparison group of 25 adults. Results showed significant effects of both imageability and child-BOI on children's auditory naming latencies. These results provide evidence that children younger than 8 years of age have richer semantic representations for high imageability and high child-BOI words, consistent with an embodied account of word meaning.

Selective processing of threatening information: effects of attachment representation and anxiety disorder on attention and memory.

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Zeijlmans van Emmichoven, Ingeborg A; van IJzendoorn, Marinus H; de Ruiter, Corine; Brosschot, Jos F

2003-01-01

To investigate the effect of the mental representation of attachment on information processing, 28 anxiety disorder outpatients, as diagnosed by the Anxiety Disorders Interview Schedule-Revised, were administered the Adult Attachment Interview and the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory. They also completed an emotional Stroop task with subliminal and supraliminal exposure conditions, a free recall memory task, and a recognition test. All tasks contained threatening, neutral, and positively valenced stimuli. A nonclinical comparison group of 56 participants completed the same measures. Results on the Stroop task showed color-naming interference for threatening words in the supraliminal condition only. Nonclinical participants with insecure attachment representations showed a global response inhibition to the Stroop task. Clinical participants with secure attachment representations showed the largest Stroop interference of the threatening words compared to the other groups. Results on the free recall task showed superior recall of all types of stimuli by participants with secure attachment representations. In the outpatient group, participants with secure attachment representations showed superior recall of threatening words on the free recall task, compared to insecure participants. Results on the recognition task showed no differences between attachment groups. We conclude that secure attachment representations are characterized by open communication about and processing of threatening information, leading to less defensive exclusion of negative material during the attentional stage of information processing and to better recall of threatening information in a later stage. Attachment insecurity, but not the type of insecurity, seems a decisive factor in attention and memory processes.

Feature generation and representations for protein-protein interaction classification.

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Lan, Man; Tan, Chew Lim; Su, Jian

2009-10-01

Automatic detecting protein-protein interaction (PPI) relevant articles is a crucial step for large-scale biological database curation. The previous work adopted POS tagging, shallow parsing and sentence splitting techniques, but they achieved worse performance than the simple bag-of-words representation. In this paper, we generated and investigated multiple types of feature representations in order to further improve the performance of PPI text classification task. Besides the traditional domain-independent bag-of-words approach and the term weighting methods, we also explored other domain-dependent features, i.e. protein-protein interaction trigger keywords, protein named entities and the advanced ways of incorporating Natural Language Processing (NLP) output. The integration of these multiple features has been evaluated on the BioCreAtIvE II corpus. The experimental results showed that both the advanced way of using NLP output and the integration of bag-of-words and NLP output improved the performance of text classification. Specifically, in comparison with the best performance achieved in the BioCreAtIvE II IAS, the feature-level and classifier-level integration of multiple features improved the performance of classification 2.71% and 3.95%, respectively.

Word Meaning Frequencies Affect Negative Compatibility Effects In Masked Priming.

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Brocher, Andreas; Koenig, Jean-Pierre

2016-01-01

Negative compatibility effects (NCEs)-that is, slower responses to targets in related than unrelated prime-target pairs, have been observed in studies using stimulus-response (S-R) priming with stimuli like arrows and plus signs. Although there is no consensus on the underlying mechanism, explanations tend to locate NCEs within the motor-response system. A characteristic property of perceptuo-motor NCEs is a biphasic pattern of activation: A brief period in which very briefly presented (typically) masked primes facilitate processing of related targets is followed by a phase of target processing impairment. In this paper, we present data that suggest that NCEs are not restricted to S-R priming with low-level visual stimuli: The brief (50 ms), backward masked (250 ms) presentation of ambiguous words (bank) leads to slower responses than baseline to words related to the more frequent (rob) but not less frequent meaning (swim). Importantly, we found that slowed responses are preceded by a short phase of response facilitation, replicating the biphasic pattern reported for arrows and plus signs. The biphasic pattern of priming and the fact that the NCEs were found only for target words that are related to their prime word's more frequent meaning has strong implications for any theory of NCEs that locate these effects exclusively within the motor-response system.

Words Get in the Way: Linguistic Effects on Talker Discrimination.

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Narayan, Chandan R; Mak, Lorinda; Bialystok, Ellen

2017-07-01

A speech perception experiment provides evidence that the linguistic relationship between words affects the discrimination of their talkers. Listeners discriminated two talkers' voices with various linguistic relationships between their spoken words. Listeners were asked whether two words were spoken by the same person or not. Word pairs varied with respect to the linguistic relationship between the component words, forming either: phonological rhymes, lexical compounds, reversed compounds, or unrelated pairs. The degree of linguistic relationship between the words affected talker discrimination in a graded fashion, revealing biases listeners have regarding the nature of words and the talkers that speak them. These results indicate that listeners expect a talker's words to be linguistically related, and more generally, indexical processing is affected by linguistic information in a top-down fashion even when listeners are not told to attend to it. Copyright © 2016 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

Detailed vocalic information in Danish 20-month-olds' novel words

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Højen, Anders; Nazzi, Thierry

2010-01-01

results were found at 16 months with a simplified word-learning task (Havy & Nazzi, 2009). This indicated that vocalic information is given less weight than consonantal information when learning novel words. On the other hand, English 14- or 18-month-olds were sensitive to vowel mispronunciations of three......  Infants are endowed with an amazing capacity to perceive speech sounds. However, when learning new words, infants appear to not always use their perceptual capacities to their fullest. Recent research has provided conflicting evidence regarding the extent to which infants form new lexical...... representations with fully specified vowels. In a recent study, French 20-month-olds were able to learn two new words that differed by a single consonant but not words that differed by a single vowel, even when changing two or more phonetic features, in a name-based categorization task (Nazzi, 2005); similar...

Effects of auditory and visual modalities in recall of words.

Science.gov (United States)

Gadzella, B M; Whitehead, D A

1975-02-01

Ten experimental conditions were used to study the effects of auditory and visual (printed words, uncolored and colored pictures) modalities and their various combinations with college students. A recall paradigm was employed in which subjects responded in a written test. Analysis of data showed the auditory modality was superior to visual (pictures) ones but was not significantly different from visual (printed words) modality. In visual modalities, printed words were superior to colored pictures. Generally, conditions with multiple modes of representation of stimuli were significantly higher than for conditions with single modes. Multiple modalities, consisting of two or three modes, did not differ significantly from each other. It was concluded that any two modalities of the stimuli presented simultaneously were just as effective as three in recall of stimulus words.

Spatial encoding of visual words for image classification

Science.gov (United States)

Liu, Dong; Wang, Shengsheng; Porikli, Fatih

2016-05-01

Appearance-based bag-of-visual words (BoVW) models are employed to represent the frequency of a vocabulary of local features in an image. Due to their versatility, they are widely popular, although they ignore the underlying spatial context and relationships among the features. Here, we present a unified representation that enhances BoVWs with explicit local and global structure models. Three aspects of our method should be noted in comparison to the previous approaches. First, we use a local structure feature that encodes the spatial attributes between a pair of points in a discriminative fashion using class-label information. We introduce a bag-of-structural words (BoSW) model for the given image set and describe each image with this model on its coarsely sampled relevant keypoints. We then combine the codebook histograms of BoVW and BoSW to train a classifier. Rigorous experimental evaluations on four benchmark data sets demonstrate that the unified representation outperforms the conventional models and compares favorably to more sophisticated scene classification techniques.

Visual recognition of permuted words

Science.gov (United States)

Rashid, Sheikh Faisal; Shafait, Faisal; Breuel, Thomas M.

2010-02-01

In current study we examine how letter permutation affects in visual recognition of words for two orthographically dissimilar languages, Urdu and German. We present the hypothesis that recognition or reading of permuted and non-permuted words are two distinct mental level processes, and that people use different strategies in handling permuted words as compared to normal words. A comparison between reading behavior of people in these languages is also presented. We present our study in context of dual route theories of reading and it is observed that the dual-route theory is consistent with explanation of our hypothesis of distinction in underlying cognitive behavior for reading permuted and non-permuted words. We conducted three experiments in lexical decision tasks to analyze how reading is degraded or affected by letter permutation. We performed analysis of variance (ANOVA), distribution free rank test, and t-test to determine the significance differences in response time latencies for two classes of data. Results showed that the recognition accuracy for permuted words is decreased 31% in case of Urdu and 11% in case of German language. We also found a considerable difference in reading behavior for cursive and alphabetic languages and it is observed that reading of Urdu is comparatively slower than reading of German due to characteristics of cursive script.

The Low-Frequency Encoding Disadvantage: Word Frequency Affects Processing Demands

OpenAIRE

Diana, Rachel A.; Reder, Lynne M.

2006-01-01

Low-frequency words produce more hits and fewer false alarms than high-frequency words in a recognition task. The low-frequency hit rate advantage has sometimes been attributed to processes that operate during the recognition test (e.g., L. M. Reder et al., 2000). When tasks other than recognition, such as recall, cued recall, or associative recognition, are used, the effects seem to contradict a low-frequency advantage in memory. Four experiments are presented to support the claim that in ad...

The embodiment of emotional words in a second language: An eye-movement study.

Science.gov (United States)

Sheikh, Naveed A; Titone, Debra

2016-01-01

The hypothesis that word representations are emotionally impoverished in a second language (L2) has variable support. However, this hypothesis has only been tested using tasks that present words in isolation or that require laboratory-specific decisions. Here, we recorded eye movements for 34 bilinguals who read sentences in their L2 with no goal other than comprehension, and compared them to 43 first language readers taken from our prior study. Positive words were read more quickly than neutral words in the L2 across first-pass reading time measures. However, this emotional advantage was absent for negative words for the earliest measures. Moreover, negative words but not positive words were influenced by concreteness, frequency and L2 proficiency in a manner similar to neutral words. Taken together, the findings suggest that only negative words are at risk of emotional disembodiment during L2 reading, perhaps because a positivity bias in L2 experiences ensures that positive words are emotionally grounded.

Oscillatory brain dynamics associated with the automatic processing of emotion in words.

Science.gov (United States)

Wang, Lin; Bastiaansen, Marcel

2014-10-01

This study examines the automaticity of processing the emotional aspects of words, and characterizes the oscillatory brain dynamics that accompany this automatic processing. Participants read emotionally negative, neutral and positive nouns while performing a color detection task in which only perceptual-level analysis was required. Event-related potentials and time frequency representations were computed from the concurrently measured EEG. Negative words elicited a larger P2 and a larger late positivity than positive and neutral words, indicating deeper semantic/evaluative processing of negative words. In addition, sustained alpha power suppressions were found for the emotional compared to neutral words, in the time range from 500 to 1000ms post-stimulus. These results suggest that sustained attention was allocated to the emotional words, whereas the attention allocated to the neutral words was released after an initial analysis. This seems to hold even when the emotional content of the words is task-irrelevant. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Computer simulation as representation of knowledge in education

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Krekic, Valerija Pinter; Namestovski, Zolt

2009-01-01

According to Aebli's operative method (1963) and Bruner's (1974) theory of representation the development of the process of thinking in teaching has the following phases - levels of abstraction: manipulation with specific things (specific phase), iconic representation (figural phase), symbolic representation (symbolic phase). Modern information technology has contributed to the enrichment of teaching and learning processes, especially in the fields of natural sciences and mathematics and those of production and technology. Simulation appears as a new possibility in the representation of knowledge. According to Guetzkow (1972) simulation is an operative representation of reality from a relevant aspect. It is about a model of an objective system, which is dynamic in itself. If that model is material it is a simple simulation, if it is abstract it is a reflective experiment, that is a computer simulation. This present work deals with the systematization and classification of simulation methods in the teaching of natural sciences and mathematics and of production and technology with special retrospective view on computer simulations and exemplar representation of the place and the role of this modern method of cognition. Key words: Representation of knowledge, modeling, simulation, education

Classification of forensic autopsy reports through conceptual graph-based document representation model.

Science.gov (United States)

Mujtaba, Ghulam; Shuib, Liyana; Raj, Ram Gopal; Rajandram, Retnagowri; Shaikh, Khairunisa; Al-Garadi, Mohammed Ali

2018-06-01

Text categorization has been used extensively in recent years to classify plain-text clinical reports. This study employs text categorization techniques for the classification of open narrative forensic autopsy reports. One of the key steps in text classification is document representation. In document representation, a clinical report is transformed into a format that is suitable for classification. The traditional document representation technique for text categorization is the bag-of-words (BoW) technique. In this study, the traditional BoW technique is ineffective in classifying forensic autopsy reports because it merely extracts frequent but discriminative features from clinical reports. Moreover, this technique fails to capture word inversion, as well as word-level synonymy and polysemy, when classifying autopsy reports. Hence, the BoW technique suffers from low accuracy and low robustness unless it is improved with contextual and application-specific information. To overcome the aforementioned limitations of the BoW technique, this research aims to develop an effective conceptual graph-based document representation (CGDR) technique to classify 1500 forensic autopsy reports from four (4) manners of death (MoD) and sixteen (16) causes of death (CoD). Term-based and Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine-Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT) based conceptual features were extracted and represented through graphs. These features were then used to train a two-level text classifier. The first level classifier was responsible for predicting MoD. In addition, the second level classifier was responsible for predicting CoD using the proposed conceptual graph-based document representation technique. To demonstrate the significance of the proposed technique, its results were compared with those of six (6) state-of-the-art document representation techniques. Lastly, this study compared the effects of one-level classification and two-level classification on the experimental results

Electric Symbols: Internet Words And Culture

OpenAIRE

Fraim, John

2002-01-01

The famous Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis posits a linguistic determinism arguing language plays a central role in creation of a worldview. In the sense that language is a product of words, one can say that a culture's worldview is affected and influenced by the words of its particular language. Words both create and communicate worldviews. The greatest potential in history for the observation and analysis of words exists on the Internet. Indeed, the Internet can be considered history's greatest obse...

Ghosts in the nursery: a case study of the maternal representations of a woman who killed her baby

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A Gous

2005-11-01

Full Text Available The maternal representations as described by Stern (1995:171-190 are used in an extreme case to illustrate the link between depression and pathogenic maternal representations. Opsomming Die moedervoorstellings soos dit deur Stern (1995:171-190 beskryf word, word in ‘n ekstreme geval gebruik om die verband tussen depressie en patogene moedervoorstellings aan te toon. *Please note: This is a reduced version of the abstract. Please refer to PDF for full text.

Small wins big: analytic pinyin skills promote Chinese word reading.

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Lin, Dan; McBride-Chang, Catherine; Shu, Hua; Zhang, Yuping; Li, Hong; Zhang, Juan; Aram, Dorit; Levin, Iris

2010-08-01

The present study examined invented spelling of pinyin (a phonological coding system for teaching and learning Chinese words) in relation to subsequent Chinese reading development. Among 296 Chinese kindergartners in Beijing, independent invented pinyin spelling was found to be uniquely predictive of Chinese word reading 12 months later, even with Time 1 syllable deletion, phoneme deletion, and letter knowledge, in addition to the autoregressive effects of Time 1 Chinese word reading, statistically controlled. These results underscore the importance of children's early pinyin representations for Chinese reading acquisition, both theoretically and practically. The findings further support the idea of a universal phonological principle and indicate that pinyin is potentially an ideal measure of phonological awareness in Chinese.

An ordinal approach to computing with words and the preference-aversion model

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Franco de los Rios, Camilo Andres; Rodríguez, J. Tinguaro; Montero, Javier

2014-01-01

Computing with words (CWW) explores the brain’s ability to handle and evaluate perceptions through language, i.e., by means of the linguistic representation of information and knowledge. On the other hand, standard preference structures examine decision problems through the decomposition of the p......Computing with words (CWW) explores the brain’s ability to handle and evaluate perceptions through language, i.e., by means of the linguistic representation of information and knowledge. On the other hand, standard preference structures examine decision problems through the decomposition...... of the preference predicate into the simpler situations of strict preference, indifference and incomparability. Hence, following the distinctive cognitive/neurological features for perceiving positive and negative stimuli in separate regions of the brain, we consider two separate and opposite poles of preference...... and aversion, and obtain an extended preference structure named the Preference–aversion (P–A) structure. In this way, examining the meaning of words under an ordinal scale and using CWW’s methodology, we are able to formulate the P–A model under a simple and purely linguistic approach to decision making...

Modulation of the semantic system by word imageability.

Science.gov (United States)

Sabsevitz, D S; Medler, D A; Seidenberg, M; Binder, J R

2005-08-01

A prevailing neurobiological theory of semantic memory proposes that part of our knowledge about concrete, highly imageable concepts is stored in the form of sensory-motor representations. While this theory predicts differential activation of the semantic system by concrete and abstract words, previous functional imaging studies employing this contrast have provided relatively little supporting evidence. We acquired event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data while participants performed a semantic similarity judgment task on a large number of concrete and abstract noun triads. Task difficulty was manipulated by varying the degree to which the words in the triad were similar in meaning. Concrete nouns, relative to abstract nouns, produced greater activation in a bilateral network of multimodal and heteromodal association areas, including ventral and medial temporal, posterior-inferior parietal, dorsal prefrontal, and posterior cingulate cortex. In contrast, abstract nouns produced greater activation almost exclusively in the left hemisphere in superior temporal and inferior frontal cortex. Increasing task difficulty modulated activation mainly in attention, working memory, and response monitoring systems, with almost no effect on areas that were modulated by imageability. These data provide critical support for the hypothesis that concrete, imageable concepts activate perceptually based representations not available to abstract concepts. In contrast, processing abstract concepts makes greater demands on left perisylvian phonological and lexical retrieval systems. The findings are compatible with dual coding theory and less consistent with single-code models of conceptual representation. The lack of overlap between imageability and task difficulty effects suggests that once the neural representation of a concept is activated, further maintenance and manipulation of that information in working memory does not further increase neural activation in

Effects of Long-Term Representations on Free Recall of Unrelated Words

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Katkov, Mikhail; Romani, Sandro; Tsodyks, Misha

2015-01-01

Human memory stores vast amounts of information. Yet recalling this information is often challenging when specific cues are lacking. Here we consider an associative model of retrieval where each recalled item triggers the recall of the next item based on the similarity between their long-term neuronal representations. The model predicts that…

Number word structure in first and second language influences arithmetic skills

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Anat ePrior

2015-03-01

Full Text Available Languages differ in how they represent numerical information, and specifically whether the verbal notation of numbers follows the same order as the symbolic notation (in non-inverted languages, e.g. Hebrew, 25, twenty-five or whether the two notations diverge (in inverted languages, e.g. Arabic, 25, five-and-twenty. We examined how the structure of number-words affects how arithmetic operations are processed by bilingual speakers of an inverted and a non-inverted language. We examined Arabic-Hebrew bilinguals' performance in the first language, L1 (inverted and in the second language, L2 (non-inverted. Their performance was compared to that of Hebrew L1 speakers, who do not speak an inverted language. Participants judged the accuracy of addition problems presented aurally in L1, aurally in L2 or in visual symbolic notation. Problems were presented such that they matched or did not match the structure of number words in the language. Arabic-Hebrew bilinguals demonstrated both flexibility in processing and adaptation to the language of aural-verbal presentation – they were more accurate for the inverted order of presentation in Arabic, but more accurate for non-inverted order of presentation in Hebrew, thus exhibiting the same pattern found for native Hebrew speakers. In addition, whereas native Hebrew speakers preferred the non-inverted order in visual symbolic presentation as well, the Arabic-Hebrew bilinguals showed enhanced flexibility, without a significant preference for one order over the other, in either speed or accuracy. These findings suggest that arithmetic processing is sensitive to the linguistic representations of number words. Moreover, bilinguals exposed to inverted and non-inverted languages showed influence of both systems, and enhanced flexibility in processing. Thus, the L1 does not seem to have exclusive power in shaping numerical mental representations, but rather the system remains open to influences from a later learned

The effects of mental representation on performance in a navigation task

Science.gov (United States)

Barshi, Immanuel

Most aviation accidents and incidents are attributed to human error. Among the various kinds of human errors found in aviation, problems in communication constitute a large majority. The purpose of this study is to understand some of the cognitive factors influencing these misunderstandings so they can be prevented. Five experiments tested individuals' ability to follow verbal instructions pertaining to navigating in space. The experiments simulated the kinds of instructions pilots receive from air traffic controllers. All five experiments show the importance of the mental representation of the task over and above the short-term memory demands. The results of Experiment 1 show that the number of instructional units is a critical factor, rather than the number of words per unit. The results of Experiment 2 show that when moving in a three dimensional space, it does not matter whether movement is required along all three dimensions or along only two of the three dimensions. The results of Experiment 3 show that individuals perform much better when they have to maintain a two-dimensional mental representation than when they have to maintain a three-dimensional mental representation. What is more, it shows that even immediate verbatim recall is affected by the representation of the situation to which the language input applies. The results of Experiments 4 and 5 show that the two-dimensional advantage found in Experiment 3 is indeed an aspect of the mental representation, rather than a result of translating a visual display into a mental representation. These results also suggest that three units is the capacity limit of short-term memory. Thus, to minimize misunderstandings due to message length, air traffic controllers are advised to limit their messages to no more than three instructions at a time. In addition to ATC procedures, this research has practical implications for computer/visual displays, and for training environments.

Feature Statistics Modulate the Activation of Meaning during Spoken Word Processing

Science.gov (United States)

Devereux, Barry J.; Taylor, Kirsten I.; Randall, Billi; Geertzen, Jeroen; Tyler, Lorraine K.

2016-01-01

Understanding spoken words involves a rapid mapping from speech to conceptual representations. One distributed feature-based conceptual account assumes that the statistical characteristics of concepts' features--the number of concepts they occur in ("distinctiveness/sharedness") and likelihood of co-occurrence ("correlational…

Social representations of adolescents on quality of life: structurally-based study

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Ramon Missias Moreira

2015-01-01

Full Text Available This study sought to conduct a comparatively analysis and describe the contents of the structure of the social representations of adolescents on quality of life. It involves descriptive, quantitative research, with the benchmark of a structural approach to social representations. The informants included 316 adolescents from three public schools in Jequié in the State of Bahia. The Spontaneous Word-Choice Eliciting Technique using the key expression "Quality of Life" was used for data collection. The responses were processed using Evoc 2003 software, which generated the Four-House Chart. The results reveal the core nucleus of the terms: healthy eating; physical activity; money; and sex. In the 1st outer circle, the words absence of disease, condoms, liberty, marijuana, housing, work and living well are featured. In the 2nd outer circle, there appeared the words difficulty, family, peace and power, and the contrasting elements of well-being and soccer. The overall consensus is that adolescents associate quality of life with sports and other healthy behavior activities, and are influenced by the desires and curiosities of adolescence.

Words, Words, Words: English, Vocabulary.

Science.gov (United States)

Lamb, Barbara

The Quinmester course on words gives the student the opportunity to increase his proficiency by investigating word origins, word histories, morphology, and phonology. The course includes the following: dictionary skills and familiarity with the "Oxford,""Webster's Third," and "American Heritage" dictionaries; word…

A word-count approach to analyze linguistic patterns in the reflective writings of medical students

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Chi-Wei Lin

2016-02-01

Full Text Available Background: Teaching reflection and administering reflective writing assignments to students are widely practiced and discussed in medical education and health professional education. However, little is known about how medical students use language to construct their narratives. Exploring students’ linguistic patterns in their reflective writings can facilitate understanding the scope and facets of their reflections and their representational or communication approaches to share their experiences. Moreover, research findings regarding gender differences in language use are inconsistent. Therefore, we attempted to examine how females and males differ in their use of words in reflective writing within our research circumstance to detect the unique and gender-specific approaches to learning and their applications. Methods: We analyzed the linguistic profiles of psychological process categories in the reflective writings of medical students and examined the difference in word usage between male and female medical students. During the first year of a clinical rotation, 60 fifth-year medical students wrote reflective narratives regarding pediatric patients and the psychosocial challenges faced by the patients and their family members. The narratives were analyzed using the Chinese version of Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (CLIWC, a text analysis software program. Multivariate procedures were applied for statistical analysis. Results: Cognitive words were most pervasive, averaging 22.16%, whereas perceptual words (2.86% were least pervasive. Female students used more words related to positive emotions and sadness than did male students. The male students exceeded the female students only in the space category. The major limitation of this study is that CLIWC cannot directly acquire contextual text meanings; therefore, depending on the research topic, further qualitative study of the given texts might be necessary. Conclusions: To enhance students�

Hierarchical Control and Skilled Typing: Evidence for Word-Level Control over the Execution of Individual Keystrokes

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Crump, Matthew J. C.; Logan, Gordon D.

2010-01-01

Routine actions are commonly assumed to be controlled by hierarchically organized processes and representations. In the domain of typing theories, word-level information is assumed to activate the constituent keystrokes required to type each letter in a word. We tested this assumption directly using a novel single-letter probe technique. Subjects…

Social representation of the kinesiotherapist profession

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Beatrice ABALAŞE

2017-03-01

Full Text Available The scientific approach is focused on identifying the social representation of the profession of physical therapist referring to mental images of social reality to a group consensus meeting. The goal of research identifies social representation of the profession of physical therapist, on the premise that students of the Faculty of Physical Education and Sport have made a social representation of the profession of physical therapist in accordance with the description of the occupation of COR. Working method was based on the questionnaire. Interpretation of results, the first two items of the questionnaire was done through word association technique, developed by P. Verges (1 and an alternative method for determining the structure and organization of elements representation proposed by. C. Havârneanu (2. Qualitative analysis reveals that students’ specialization Physical Therapy and Special Motricity believes that a therapist uses therapy as a strategy to work, and it must be applied professionally. Respondents considered, as shown in the data collected, that this profession is subject to skills, education, cognitive baggage, all sending to knowledge, experience and passion. The core refers to the complex representation obtained thanks cognitive process by which individuals or groups in familiar transforms abstract and it integrates knowledge of their system.

Processing advantage for emotional words in bilingual speakers.

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Ponari, Marta; Rodríguez-Cuadrado, Sara; Vinson, David; Fox, Neil; Costa, Albert; Vigliocco, Gabriella

2015-10-01

Effects of emotion on word processing are well established in monolingual speakers. However, studies that have assessed whether affective features of words undergo the same processing in a native and nonnative language have provided mixed results: Studies that have found differences between native language (L1) and second language (L2) processing attributed the difference to the fact that L2 learned late in life would not be processed affectively, because affective associations are established during childhood. Other studies suggest that adult learners show similar effects of emotional features in L1 and L2. Differences in affective processing of L2 words can be linked to age and context of learning, proficiency, language dominance, and degree of similarity between L2 and L1. Here, in a lexical decision task on tightly matched negative, positive, and neutral words, highly proficient English speakers from typologically different L1s showed the same facilitation in processing emotionally valenced words as native English speakers, regardless of their L1, the age of English acquisition, or the frequency and context of English use. (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).

Spelling pronunciation and visual preview both facilitate learning to spell irregular word

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Hilte, M.; Reitsma, P.

2006-01-01

Spelling pronunciations are hypothesized to be helpful in building up relatively stable phonologically underpinned orthographic representations, particularly for learning words with irregular phoneme-grapheme correspondences. In a four-week computer-based training, the efficacy of spelling

Hand gestures support word learning in patients with hippocampal amnesia.

Science.gov (United States)

Hilverman, Caitlin; Cook, Susan Wagner; Duff, Melissa C

2018-06-01

Co-speech hand gesture facilitates learning and memory, yet the cognitive and neural mechanisms supporting this remain unclear. One possibility is that motor information in gesture may engage procedural memory representations. Alternatively, iconic information from gesture may contribute to declarative memory representations mediated by the hippocampus. To investigate these alternatives, we examined gesture's effects on word learning in patients with hippocampal damage and declarative memory impairment, with intact procedural memory, and in healthy and in brain-damaged comparison groups. Participants learned novel label-object pairings while producing gesture, observing gesture, or observing without gesture. After a delay, recall and object identification were assessed. Unsurprisingly, amnesic patients were unable to recall the labels at test. However, they correctly identified objects at above chance levels, but only if they produced a gesture at encoding. Comparison groups performed well above chance at both recall and object identification regardless of gesture. These findings suggest that gesture production may support word learning by engaging nondeclarative (procedural) memory. © 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Tracking the time course of word-frequency effects in auditory word recognition with event-related potentials.

Science.gov (United States)

Dufour, Sophie; Brunellière, Angèle; Frauenfelder, Ulrich H

2013-04-01

Although the word-frequency effect is one of the most established findings in spoken-word recognition, the precise processing locus of this effect is still a topic of debate. In this study, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to track the time course of the word-frequency effect. In addition, the neighborhood density effect, which is known to reflect mechanisms involved in word identification, was also examined. The ERP data showed a clear frequency effect as early as 350 ms from word onset on the P350, followed by a later effect at word offset on the late N400. A neighborhood density effect was also found at an early stage of spoken-word processing on the PMN, and at word offset on the late N400. Overall, our ERP differences for word frequency suggest that frequency affects the core processes of word identification starting from the initial phase of lexical activation and including target word selection. They thus rule out any interpretation of the word frequency effect that is limited to a purely decisional locus after word identification has been completed. Copyright © 2012 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

Conceptual Understanding and Representation Quality through Multi-representation Learning on Newton Law Content

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Suci Furwati

2017-08-01

Full Text Available Abstract: Students who have good conceptual acquisition will be able to represent the concept by using multi representation. This study aims to determine the improvement of students' understanding of the concept of Newton's Law material, and the quality of representation used in solving problems on Newton's Law material. The results showed that the concept acquisition of students increased from the average of 35.32 to 78.97 with an effect size of 2.66 (strong and N-gain of 0.68 (medium. The quality of each type of student representation also increased from level 1 and level 2 up to level 3. Key Words: concept aquisition, represetation quality, multi representation learning, Newton’s Law Abstrak: Siswa yang memiliki penguasaan konsep yang baik akan mampu merepresentasikan konsep dengan menggunakan multi representasi. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui peningkatan pemahaman konsep siswa SMP pada materi Hukum Newton, dan kualitas representasi yang digunakan dalam menyelesaikan masalah pada materi Hukum Newton. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa penguasaan konsep siswa meningkat dari rata-rata 35,32 menjadi 78,97 dengan effect size sebesar 2,66 (kuat dan N-gain sebesar 0,68 (sedang. Kualitas tiap jenis representasi siswa juga mengalami peningkatan dari level 1 dan level 2 naik menjadi level 3. Kata kunci: hukum Newton, kualitas representasi, pemahaman konsep, pembelajaran multi representasi

Representational Thickness

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Mullins, Michael

Contemporary communicational and informational processes contribute to the shaping of our physical environment by having a powerful influence on the process of design. Applications of virtual reality (VR) are transforming the way architecture is conceived and produced by introducing dynamic...... elements into the process of design. Through its immersive properties, virtual reality allows access to a spatial experience of a computer model very different to both screen based simulations as well as traditional forms of architectural representation. The dissertation focuses on processes of the current...... representation? How is virtual reality used in public participation and how do virtual environments affect participatory decision making? How does VR thus affect the physical world of built environment? Given the practical collaborative possibilities of immersive technology, how can they best be implemented...

The development of the abilities to acquire novel detailed orthographic representations and maintain them in long-term memory.

Science.gov (United States)

Binamé, Florence; Poncelet, Martine

2016-03-01

Previous studies have clearly demonstrated that the development of orthographic representations relies on phonological recoding. However, substantial questions persist about the remaining unexplained variance in the acquisition of word-specific orthographic knowledge that is still underspecified. The main aim of this study was to explore whether two cognitive factors-sensitivity to orthographic regularities and short-term memory (STM) for serial order-make independent contributions to the acquisition of novel orthographic representations beyond that of the phonological core component and the level of preexisting word-specific orthographic knowledge. To this end, we had children from second to sixth grades learn novel written word forms using a repeated spelling practice paradigm. The speed at which children learned the word forms and their long-term retention (1week and 1month later) were assessed. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that phonological recoding, preexisting word-specific orthographic knowledge, and order STM explained a portion of the variance in orthographic learning speed, whereas phonological recoding, preexisting word-specific orthographic knowledge, and orthographic sensitivity each explained a portion of variance in the long-term retention of the newly created orthographic representations. A secondary aim of the study was to determine the developmental trajectory of the abilities to acquire novel orthographic word forms over the course of primary schooling. As expected, results showed an effect of age on both learning speed and long-term retention. The specific roles of orthographic sensitivity and order STM as independent factors involved in different steps of orthographic learning are discussed. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Item Effects in Recognition Memory for Words

Science.gov (United States)

Freeman, Emily; Heathcote, Andrew; Chalmers, Kerry; Hockley, William

2010-01-01

We investigate the effects of word characteristics on episodic recognition memory using analyses that avoid Clark's (1973) "language-as-a-fixed-effect" fallacy. Our results demonstrate the importance of modeling word variability and show that episodic memory for words is strongly affected by item noise (Criss & Shiffrin, 2004), as measured by the…

Source memory enhancement for emotional words.

Science.gov (United States)

Doerksen, S; Shimamura, A P

2001-03-01

The influence of emotional stimuli on source memory was investigated by using emotionally valenced words. The words were colored blue or yellow (Experiment 1) or surrounded by a blue or yellow frame (Experiment 2). Participants were asked to associate the words with the colors. In both experiments, emotionally valenced words elicited enhanced free recall compared with nonvalenced words; however, recognition memory was not affected. Source memory for the associated color was also enhanced for emotional words, suggesting that even memory for contextual information is benefited by emotional stimuli. This effect was not due to the ease of semantic clustering of emotional words because semantically related words were not associated with enhanced source memory, despite enhanced recall (Experiment 3). It is suggested that enhancement resulted from facilitated arousal or attention, which may act to increase organization processes important for source memory.

Lexical Characteristics of Spanish and English Words and the Development of Phonological Awareness Skills in Spanish-Speaking Language-Minority Children

Science.gov (United States)

Goodrich, J. Marc; Lonigan, Christopher J.

2016-01-01

The lexical restructuring model (LRM) is a theory that attempts to explain the developmental origins of phonological awareness (PA). According to the LRM, various characteristics of words should be related to the extent to which words are segmentally represented in the lexicon. Segmental representations of words allow children to access the parts…

Words and melody are intertwined in perception of sung words: EEG and behavioral evidence.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Reyna L Gordon

Full Text Available Language and music, two of the most unique human cognitive abilities, are combined in song, rendering it an ecological model for comparing speech and music cognition. The present study was designed to determine whether words and melodies in song are processed interactively or independently, and to examine the influence of attention on the processing of words and melodies in song. Event-Related brain Potentials (ERPs and behavioral data were recorded while non-musicians listened to pairs of sung words (prime and target presented in four experimental conditions: same word, same melody; same word, different melody; different word, same melody; different word, different melody. Participants were asked to attend to either the words or the melody, and to perform a same/different task. In both attentional tasks, different word targets elicited an N400 component, as predicted based on previous results. Most interestingly, different melodies (sung with the same word elicited an N400 component followed by a late positive component. Finally, ERP and behavioral data converged in showing interactions between the linguistic and melodic dimensions of sung words. The finding that the N400 effect, a well-established marker of semantic processing, was modulated by musical melody in song suggests that variations in musical features affect word processing in sung language. Implications of the interactions between words and melody are discussed in light of evidence for shared neural processing resources between the phonological/semantic aspects of language and the melodic/harmonic aspects of music.

A word by any other intonation: fMRI evidence for implicit memory traces for pitch contours of spoken words in adult brains.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Michael Inspector

Full Text Available OBJECTIVES: Intonation may serve as a cue for facilitated recognition and processing of spoken words and it has been suggested that the pitch contour of spoken words is implicitly remembered. Thus, using the repetition suppression (RS effect of BOLD-fMRI signals, we tested whether the same spoken words are differentially processed in language and auditory brain areas depending on whether or not they retain an arbitrary intonation pattern. EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN: Words were presented repeatedly in three blocks for passive and active listening tasks. There were three prosodic conditions in each of which a different set of words was used and specific task-irrelevant intonation changes were applied: (i All words presented in a set flat monotonous pitch contour (ii Each word had an arbitrary pitch contour that was set throughout the three repetitions. (iii Each word had a different arbitrary pitch contour in each of its repetition. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: The repeated presentations of words with a set pitch contour, resulted in robust behavioral priming effects as well as in significant RS of the BOLD signals in primary auditory cortex (BA 41, temporal areas (BA 21 22 bilaterally and in Broca's area. However, changing the intonation of the same words on each successive repetition resulted in reduced behavioral priming and the abolition of RS effects. CONCLUSIONS: Intonation patterns are retained in memory even when the intonation is task-irrelevant. Implicit memory traces for the pitch contour of spoken words were reflected in facilitated neuronal processing in auditory and language associated areas. Thus, the results lend support for the notion that prosody and specifically pitch contour is strongly associated with the memory representation of spoken words.

Frame as representation of knowledge in the cognitive aspect

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ирина Николаевна Ивашкевич

2011-06-01

Full Text Available The article is devoted to the problem of representation of different types of knowledge in cognitive linguistics. The author makes a special emphasis on the presentation of frame which is considered to be one of the cognitive structures of knowledge within the meaning of words.

Factors affecting use of word-of-mouth by dental patients.

Science.gov (United States)

Jung, Yun-Sook; Yang, Hae-Young; Choi, Youn-Hee; Kim, Eun-Kyong; Jeong, Seong-Hwa; Cho, Min-Jeong; Nam, Soon-Hyeun; Song, Keun-Bae

2018-03-23

Word-of-mouth (WOM) refers to communication among consumers, which greatly influences the marketing strategies of dental clinics. This study aimed to explore factors that affect use of WOM by dental patients and to analyse their pathways. The participants were 520 outpatients from four private dental clinics. Data were obtained from a survey using self-reported questionnaires, which included questions regarding seven latent variables: five exogenous variables, including medical service quality (physical environment, customer service, patient relationship quality) and individual characteristic variables (opinion leader tendency, social hub tendency); and two endogenous variables (intention to recommend, WOM experience). Statistical analysis was performed using structural equation modelling. Significant associations were found in the pathways between relationship quality and intention to recommend, intention to recommend and WOM, and opinion leader tendency and WOM (P < 0.001). Higher patient relationship quality and higher intention to recommend were related to positive WOM, as was higher opinion leader tendency. Improving patient relationship quality can promote positive WOM for dental clinics. Strategies are needed to promote a positive perception of dental clinics by effectively responding to the views of patients with strong opinion leader tendencies. © 2018 FDI World Dental Federation.

Infant word recognition: Insights from TRACE simulations.

Science.gov (United States)

Mayor, Julien; Plunkett, Kim

2014-02-01

The TRACE model of speech perception (McClelland & Elman, 1986) is used to simulate results from the infant word recognition literature, to provide a unified, theoretical framework for interpreting these findings. In a first set of simulations, we demonstrate how TRACE can reconcile apparently conflicting findings suggesting, on the one hand, that consonants play a pre-eminent role in lexical acquisition (Nespor, Peña & Mehler, 2003; Nazzi, 2005), and on the other, that there is a symmetry in infant sensitivity to vowel and consonant mispronunciations of familiar words (Mani & Plunkett, 2007). In a second series of simulations, we use TRACE to simulate infants' graded sensitivity to mispronunciations of familiar words as reported by White and Morgan (2008). An unexpected outcome is that TRACE fails to demonstrate graded sensitivity for White and Morgan's stimuli unless the inhibitory parameters in TRACE are substantially reduced. We explore the ramifications of this finding for theories of lexical development. Finally, TRACE mimics the impact of phonological neighbourhoods on early word learning reported by Swingley and Aslin (2007). TRACE offers an alternative explanation of these findings in terms of mispronunciations of lexical items rather than imputing word learning to infants. Together these simulations provide an evaluation of Developmental (Jusczyk, 1993) and Familiarity (Metsala, 1999) accounts of word recognition by infants and young children. The findings point to a role for both theoretical approaches whereby vocabulary structure and content constrain infant word recognition in an experience-dependent fashion, and highlight the continuity in the processes and representations involved in lexical development during the second year of life.

Acquired Affective Associations Induce Emotion Effects in Word Recognition: An ERP Study

Science.gov (United States)

Fritsch, Nathalie; Kuchinke, Lars

2013-01-01

The present study examined how contextual learning and in particular emotionality conditioning impacts the neural processing of words, as possible key factors for the acquisition of words' emotional connotation. 21 participants learned on five consecutive days associations between meaningless pseudowords and unpleasant or neutral pictures using an…

Development of brain networks involved in spoken word processing of Mandarin Chinese.

Science.gov (United States)

Cao, Fan; Khalid, Kainat; Lee, Rebecca; Brennan, Christine; Yang, Yanhui; Li, Kuncheng; Bolger, Donald J; Booth, James R

2011-08-01

Developmental differences in phonological and orthographic processing of Chinese spoken words were examined in 9-year-olds, 11-year-olds and adults using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Rhyming and spelling judgments were made to two-character words presented sequentially in the auditory modality. Developmental comparisons between adults and both groups of children combined showed that age-related changes in activation in visuo-orthographic regions depended on a task. There were developmental increases in the left inferior temporal gyrus and the right inferior occipital gyrus in the spelling task, suggesting more extensive visuo-orthographic processing in a task that required access to these representations. Conversely, there were developmental decreases in activation in the left fusiform gyrus and left middle occipital gyrus in the rhyming task, suggesting that the development of reading is marked by reduced involvement of orthography in a spoken language task that does not require access to these orthographic representations. Developmental decreases may arise from the existence of extensive homophony (auditory words that have multiple spellings) in Chinese. In addition, we found that 11-year-olds and adults showed similar activation in the left superior temporal gyrus across tasks, with both groups showing greater activation than 9-year-olds. This pattern suggests early development of perceptual representations of phonology. In contrast, 11-year-olds and 9-year-olds showed similar activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus across tasks, with both groups showing weaker activation than adults. This pattern suggests late development of controlled retrieval and selection of lexical representations. Altogether, this study suggests differential effects of character acquisition on development of components of the language network in Chinese as compared to previous reports on alphabetic languages. Published by Elsevier Inc.

Value Representations

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Rasmussen, Majken Kirkegaard; Petersen, Marianne Graves

2011-01-01

Stereotypic presumptions about gender affect the design process, both in relation to how users are understood and how products are designed. As a way to decrease the influence of stereotypic presumptions in design process, we propose not to disregard the aspect of gender in the design process......, as the perspective brings valuable insights on different approaches to technology, but instead to view gender through a value lens. Contributing to this perspective, we have developed Value Representations as a design-oriented instrument for staging a reflective dialogue with users. Value Representations...

Language and modeling word problems in mathematics among bilinguals.

Science.gov (United States)

Bernardo, Allan B I

2005-09-01

The study was conducted to determine whether the language of math word problems would affect how Filipino-English bilingual problem solvers would model the structure of these word problems. Modeling the problem structure was studied using the problem-completion paradigm, which involves presenting problems without the question. The paradigm assumes that problem solvers can infer the appropriate question of a word problem if they correctly grasp its problem structure. Arithmetic word problems in Filipino and English were given to bilingual students, some of whom had Filipino as a first language and others who had English as a first language. The problem-completion data and solution data showed similar results. The language of the problem had no effect on problem-structure modeling. The results were discussed in relation to a more circumscribed view about the role of language in word problem solving among bilinguals. In particular, the results of the present study showed that linguistic factors do not affect the more mathematically abstract components of word problem solving, although they may affect the other components such as those related to reading comprehension and understanding.

Automatization and Orthographic Development in Second Language Visual Word Recognition

Science.gov (United States)

Kida, Shusaku

2016-01-01

The present study investigated second language (L2) learners' acquisition of automatic word recognition and the development of L2 orthographic representation in the mental lexicon. Participants in the study were Japanese university students enrolled in a compulsory course involving a weekly 30-minute sustained silent reading (SSR) activity with…

Transposed-letter priming of prelexical orthographic representations.

Science.gov (United States)

Kinoshita, Sachiko; Norris, Dennis

2009-01-01

A prime generated by transposing two internal letters (e.g., jugde) produces strong priming of the original word (judge). In lexical decision, this transposed-letter (TL) priming effect is generally weak or absent for nonword targets; thus, it is unclear whether the origin of this effect is lexical or prelexical. The authors describe the Bayesian Reader theory of masked priming (D. Norris & S. Kinoshita, 2008), which explains why nonwords do not show priming in lexical decision but why they do in the cross-case same-different task. This analysis is followed by 3 experiments that show that priming in this task is not based on low-level perceptual similarity between the prime and target, or on phonology, to make the case that priming is based on prelexical orthographic representation. The authors then use this task to demonstrate equivalent TL priming effects for nonwords and words. The results are interpreted as the first reliable evidence based on the masked priming procedure that letter position is not coded absolutely within the prelexical, orthographic representation. The implications of the results for current letter position coding schemes are discussed.

Pre-learning stress differentially affects long-term memory for emotional words, depending on temporal proximity to the learning experience.

Science.gov (United States)

Zoladz, Phillip R; Clark, Brianne; Warnecke, Ashlee; Smith, Lindsay; Tabar, Jennifer; Talbot, Jeffery N

2011-07-06

Stress exerts a profound, yet complex, influence on learning and memory and can enhance, impair or have no effect on these processes. Here, we have examined how the administration of stress at different times before learning affects long-term (24-hr) memory for neutral and emotional information. Participants submerged their dominant hand into a bath of ice cold water (Stress) or into a bath of warm water (No stress) for 3 min. Either immediately (Exp. 1) or 30 min (Exp. 2) after the water bath manipulation, participants were presented with a list of 30 words varying in emotional valence. The next day, participants' memory for the word list was assessed via free recall and recognition tests. In both experiments, stressed participants exhibited greater blood pressure, salivary cortisol levels, and subjective pain and stress ratings than non-stressed participants in response to the water bath manipulation. Stress applied immediately prior to learning (Exp. 1) enhanced the recognition of positive words, while stress applied 30 min prior to learning (Exp. 2) impaired free recall of negative words. Participants' recognition of positive words in Experiment 1 was positively associated with their heart rate responses to the water bath manipulation, while participants' free recall of negative words in Experiment 2 was negatively associated with their blood pressure and cortisol responses to the water bath manipulation. These findings indicate that the differential effects of pre-learning stress on long-term memory may depend on the temporal proximity of the stressor to the learning experience and the emotional nature of the to-be-learned information. Copyright © 2011. Published by Elsevier Inc.

Executive Functions are not Affected by 24 Hours of Sleep Deprivation: A Color-Word Stroop Task Study

OpenAIRE

Dixit, Abhinav; Mittal, Tushar

2015-01-01

Background: Sleep is an important factor affecting cognitive performance. Sleep deprivation results in fatigue, lack of concentration, confusion and sleepiness along with anxiety, depression and irritability. Sleep deprivation can have serious consequences in professions like armed forces and medicine where quick decisions and actions need to be taken. Color-Word Stroop task is one of the reliable tests to assess attention and it analyzes the processing of information in two dimensions i.e., ...

Fracture Mechanics Method for Word Embedding Generation of Neural Probabilistic Linguistic Model.

Science.gov (United States)

Bi, Size; Liang, Xiao; Huang, Ting-Lei

2016-01-01

Word embedding, a lexical vector representation generated via the neural linguistic model (NLM), is empirically demonstrated to be appropriate for improvement of the performance of traditional language model. However, the supreme dimensionality that is inherent in NLM contributes to the problems of hyperparameters and long-time training in modeling. Here, we propose a force-directed method to improve such problems for simplifying the generation of word embedding. In this framework, each word is assumed as a point in the real world; thus it can approximately simulate the physical movement following certain mechanics. To simulate the variation of meaning in phrases, we use the fracture mechanics to do the formation and breakdown of meaning combined by a 2-gram word group. With the experiments on the natural linguistic tasks of part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition and semantic role labeling, the result demonstrated that the 2-dimensional word embedding can rival the word embeddings generated by classic NLMs, in terms of accuracy, recall, and text visualization.

Effects of semantic context on access to words of low imageability in deep-phonological dysphasia: a treatment case study.

Science.gov (United States)

McCarthy, Laura Mary; Kalinyak-Fliszar, Michelene; Kohen, Francine; Martin, Nadine

2017-01-01

Deep dysphasia is a relatively rare subcategory of aphasia, characterised by word repetition impairment and a profound auditory-verbal short-term memory (STM) limitation. Repetition of words is better than nonwords (lexicality effect) and better for high-image than low-image words (imageability effect). Another related language impairment profile is phonological dysphasia, which includes all of the characteristics of deep dysphasia except for the occurrence of semantic errors in single word repetition. The overlap in symptoms of deep and phonological dysphasia has led to the hypothesis that they share the same root cause, impaired maintenance of activated representation of words, but that they differ in severity of that impairment, with deep dysphasia being more severe. We report a single-subject multiple baseline, multiple probe treatment study of a person who presented with a pattern of repetition that was consistent with the continuum of deep-phonological dysphasia: imageability and lexicality effects in repetition of single and multiple words and semantic errors in repetition of multiple-word utterances. The aim of this treatment study was to improve access to and repetition of low-imageability words by embedding them in modifier-noun phrases that enhanced their imageability. The treatment involved repetition of abstract noun pairs. We created modifier-abstract noun phrases that increased the semantic and syntactic cohesiveness of the words in the pair. For example, the phrases "long distance" and "social exclusion" were developed to improve repetition of the abstract pair "distance-exclusion". The goal of this manipulation was to increase the probability of accessing lexical and semantic representations of abstract words in repetition by enriching their semantic -syntactic context. We predicted that this increase in accessibility would be maintained when the words were repeated as pairs, but without the contextual phrase. Treatment outcomes indicated that

A Description Logic Based Knowledge Representation Model for Concept Understanding

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Badie, Farshad

2017-01-01

This research employs Description Logics in order to focus on logical description and analysis of the phenomenon of ‘concept understanding’. The article will deal with a formal-semantic model for figuring out the underlying logical assumptions of ‘concept understanding’ in knowledge representation...... systems. In other words, it attempts to describe a theoretical model for concept understanding and to reflect the phenomenon of ‘concept understanding’ in terminological knowledge representation systems. Finally, it will design an ontology that schemes the structure of concept understanding based...

Effects of semantic neighborhood density in abstract and concrete words.

Science.gov (United States)

Reilly, Megan; Desai, Rutvik H

2017-12-01

Concrete and abstract words are thought to differ along several psycholinguistic variables, such as frequency and emotional content. Here, we consider another variable, semantic neighborhood density, which has received much less attention, likely because semantic neighborhoods of abstract words are difficult to measure. Using a corpus-based method that creates representations of words that emphasize featural information, the current investigation explores the relationship between neighborhood density and concreteness in a large set of English nouns. Two important observations emerge. First, semantic neighborhood density is higher for concrete than for abstract words, even when other variables are accounted for, especially for smaller neighborhood sizes. Second, the effects of semantic neighborhood density on behavior are different for concrete and abstract words. Lexical decision reaction times are fastest for words with sparse neighborhoods; however, this effect is stronger for concrete words than for abstract words. These results suggest that semantic neighborhood density plays a role in the cognitive and psycholinguistic differences between concrete and abstract words, and should be taken into account in studies involving lexical semantics. Furthermore, the pattern of results with the current feature-based neighborhood measure is very different from that with associatively defined neighborhoods, suggesting that these two methods should be treated as separate measures rather than two interchangeable measures of semantic neighborhoods. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Amodal Semantic Representations Depend on both Anterior Temporal Lobes: Evidence from Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation

Science.gov (United States)

Pobric, Gorana; Jefferies, Elizabeth; Ralph, Matthew A. Lambon

2010-01-01

The key question of how the brain codes the meaning of words and pictures is the focus of vigorous debate. Is there a "semantic hub" in the temporal poles where these different inputs converge to form amodal conceptual representations? Alternatively, are there distinct neural circuits that underpin our comprehension of pictures and words?…

Rapid formation and flexible expression of memories of subliminal word pairs.

Science.gov (United States)

Reber, Thomas P; Henke, Katharina

2011-01-01

Our daily experiences are incidentally and rapidly encoded as episodic memories. Episodic memories consist of numerous associations (e.g., who gave what to whom where and when) that can be expressed flexibly in new situations. Key features of episodic memory are speed of encoding, its associative nature, and its representational flexibility. Another defining feature of human episodic memory has been consciousness of encoding/retrieval. Here, we show that humans can rapidly form associations between subliminal words and minutes later retrieve these associations even if retrieval words were conceptually related to, but different from encoding words. Because encoding words were presented subliminally, associative encoding, and retrieval were unconscious. Unconscious association formation and retrieval were dependent on a preceding understanding of task principles. We conclude that key computations underlying episodic memory - rapid encoding and flexible expression of associations - can operate outside consciousness.

Dynamic versus Static Dictionary with and without Printed Focal Words in e-Book Reading as Facilitator for Word Learning

Science.gov (United States)

Korat, Ofra; Levin, Iris; Ben-Shabt, Anat; Shneor, Dafna; Bokovza, Limor

2014-01-01

We investigated the extent to which a dictionary embedded in an e-book with static or dynamic visuals with and without printed focal words affects word learning. A pretest-posttest design was used to measure gains of expressive words' meaning and their spelling. The participants included 250 Hebrew-speaking second graders from…

Word form Encoding in Chinese Word Naming and Word Typing

Science.gov (United States)

Chen, Jenn-Yeu; Li, Cheng-Yi

2011-01-01

The process of word form encoding was investigated in primed word naming and word typing with Chinese monosyllabic words. The target words shared or did not share the onset consonants with the prime words. The stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was 100 ms or 300 ms. Typing required the participants to enter the phonetic letters of the target word,…

A new ANEW: Evaluation of a word list for sentiment analysis in microblogs

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Nielsen, Finn Årup

2011-01-01

Sentiment analysis of microblogs such as Twitter has recently gained a fair amount of attention. One of the simplest sentiment analysis approaches compares the words of a posting against a labeled word list, where each word has been scored for valence, — a “sentiment lexicon” or “affective word...... lists”. There exist several affective word lists, e.g., ANEW (Affective Norms for English Words) developed before the advent of microblogging and sentiment analysis. I wanted to examine how well ANEW and other word lists performs for the detection of sentiment strength in microblog posts in comparison...... with a new word list specifically constructed for microblogs. I used manually labeled postings from Twitter scored for sentiment. Using a simple word matching I show that the new word list may perform better than ANEW, though not as good as the more elaborate approach found in SentiStrength....

Thoughts on representation in therapy of Holocaust survivors.

Science.gov (United States)

Moore, Yael

2009-12-01

This paper presents the problems of representation and lack of representation in treating Holocaust survivors, through clinical vignettes and various theoreticians. The years of Nazi persecution and murder brought about a destruction of symbolization and turning inner and external reality into the Thing itself, the concrete, or, in Lacan's words, 'The Thing'. The paper presents two ideas related to praxis as well as theory in treating Holocaust survivors: the first is related to the therapist's treatment of the Holocaust nightmare expressing the traumatic events just as they happened 63 years previously; the second deals with the attempt at subjectification, in contrast to the objectification forced by the Nazis on their victims.

Multiple Regions of a Cortical Network Commonly Encode the Meaning of Words in Multiple Grammatical Positions of Read Sentences.

Science.gov (United States)

Anderson, Andrew James; Lalor, Edmund C; Lin, Feng; Binder, Jeffrey R; Fernandino, Leonardo; Humphries, Colin J; Conant, Lisa L; Raizada, Rajeev D S; Grimm, Scott; Wang, Xixi

2018-05-16

Deciphering how sentence meaning is represented in the brain remains a major challenge to science. Semantically related neural activity has recently been shown to arise concurrently in distributed brain regions as successive words in a sentence are read. However, what semantic content is represented by different regions, what is common across them, and how this relates to words in different grammatical positions of sentences is weakly understood. To address these questions, we apply a semantic model of word meaning to interpret brain activation patterns elicited in sentence reading. The model is based on human ratings of 65 sensory/motor/emotional and cognitive features of experience with words (and their referents). Through a process of mapping functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging activation back into model space we test: which brain regions semantically encode content words in different grammatical positions (e.g., subject/verb/object); and what semantic features are encoded by different regions. In left temporal, inferior parietal, and inferior/superior frontal regions we detect the semantic encoding of words in all grammatical positions tested and reveal multiple common components of semantic representation. This suggests that sentence comprehension involves a common core representation of multiple words' meaning being encoded in a network of regions distributed across the brain.

Infant word recognition: Insights from TRACE simulations☆

Science.gov (United States)

Mayor, Julien; Plunkett, Kim

2014-01-01

The TRACE model of speech perception (McClelland & Elman, 1986) is used to simulate results from the infant word recognition literature, to provide a unified, theoretical framework for interpreting these findings. In a first set of simulations, we demonstrate how TRACE can reconcile apparently conflicting findings suggesting, on the one hand, that consonants play a pre-eminent role in lexical acquisition (Nespor, Peña & Mehler, 2003; Nazzi, 2005), and on the other, that there is a symmetry in infant sensitivity to vowel and consonant mispronunciations of familiar words (Mani & Plunkett, 2007). In a second series of simulations, we use TRACE to simulate infants’ graded sensitivity to mispronunciations of familiar words as reported by White and Morgan (2008). An unexpected outcome is that TRACE fails to demonstrate graded sensitivity for White and Morgan’s stimuli unless the inhibitory parameters in TRACE are substantially reduced. We explore the ramifications of this finding for theories of lexical development. Finally, TRACE mimics the impact of phonological neighbourhoods on early word learning reported by Swingley and Aslin (2007). TRACE offers an alternative explanation of these findings in terms of mispronunciations of lexical items rather than imputing word learning to infants. Together these simulations provide an evaluation of Developmental (Jusczyk, 1993) and Familiarity (Metsala, 1999) accounts of word recognition by infants and young children. The findings point to a role for both theoretical approaches whereby vocabulary structure and content constrain infant word recognition in an experience-dependent fashion, and highlight the continuity in the processes and representations involved in lexical development during the second year of life. PMID:24493907

Predicting Neural Activity Patterns Associated with Sentences Using a Neurobiologically Motivated Model of Semantic Representation.

Science.gov (United States)

Anderson, Andrew James; Binder, Jeffrey R; Fernandino, Leonardo; Humphries, Colin J; Conant, Lisa L; Aguilar, Mario; Wang, Xixi; Doko, Donias; Raizada, Rajeev D S

2017-09-01

We introduce an approach that predicts neural representations of word meanings contained in sentences then superposes these to predict neural representations of new sentences. A neurobiological semantic model based on sensory, motor, social, emotional, and cognitive attributes was used as a foundation to define semantic content. Previous studies have predominantly predicted neural patterns for isolated words, using models that lack neurobiological interpretation. Fourteen participants read 240 sentences describing everyday situations while undergoing fMRI. To connect sentence-level fMRI activation patterns to the word-level semantic model, we devised methods to decompose the fMRI data into individual words. Activation patterns associated with each attribute in the model were then estimated using multiple-regression. This enabled synthesis of activation patterns for trained and new words, which were subsequently averaged to predict new sentences. Region-of-interest analyses revealed that prediction accuracy was highest using voxels in the left temporal and inferior parietal cortex, although a broad range of regions returned statistically significant results, showing that semantic information is widely distributed across the brain. The results show how a neurobiologically motivated semantic model can decompose sentence-level fMRI data into activation features for component words, which can be recombined to predict activation patterns for new sentences. © The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Written threat: Electrophysiological evidence for an attention bias to affective words in social anxiety disorder.

Science.gov (United States)

Wabnitz, Pascal; Martens, Ulla; Neuner, Frank

2016-01-01

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is associated with heightened sensitivity to threat cues, typically represented by emotional facial expressions. To examine if this bias can be transferred to a general hypersensitivity or whether it is specific to disorder relevant cues, we investigated electrophysiological correlates of emotional word processing (alpha activity and event-related potentials) in 20 healthy participants and 20 participants with SAD. The experimental task was a silent reading of neutral, positive, physically threatening and socially threatening words (the latter were abusive swear words) while responding to a randomly presented dot. Subsequently, all participants were asked to recall as many words as possible during an unexpected recall test. Participants with SAD showed blunted sensory processing followed by a rapid processing of emotional words during early stages (early posterior negativity - EPN). At later stages, all participants showed enhanced processing of negative (physically and socially threatening) compared to neutral and positive words (N400). Moreover, at later processing stages alpha activity was increased specifically for negative words in participants with SAD but not in healthy controls. Recall of emotional words for all subjects was best for socially threatening words, followed by negative and positive words irrespective of social anxiety. The present findings indicate that SAD is associated with abnormalities in emotional word processing characterised by early hypervigilance to emotional cues followed by cognitive avoidance at later processing stages. Most importantly, the specificity of these attentional biases seems to change as a function of time with a general emotional bias at early and a more specific bias at later processing stages.

Social representations about religion and spirituality.

Science.gov (United States)

Borges, Moema da Silva; Santos, Marília Borges Couto; Pinheiro, Tiago Gomes

2015-01-01

to identify the social representations about the concepts of spirituality and religion of of health teachers. exploratory and descriptive study, based on a qualitative approach. 25 subjects participated in it. The following instruments were used to collect data: questionnaire to identify the profile; questionnaire of free association, whose inducing words were religion and spirituality, and an interview based on the scale FICA (Puchalski, 2006). the representations about religion and spirituality, for professors, are forged around the faith in God and it gives them meaning and purpose to deal with the challenges of personal and professional living. there are still barriers that need to be overcome with a view to a comprehensive care. For this, it is essential to incorporate spirituality in the process in the curricula of health courses.

Chunking or not chunking? How do we find words in artificial language learning?

Science.gov (United States)

Franco, Ana; Destrebecqz, Arnaud

2012-01-01

What is the nature of the representations acquired in implicit statistical learning? Recent results in the field of language learning have shown that adults and infants are able to find the words of an artificial language when exposed to a continuous auditory sequence consisting in a random ordering of these words. Such performance can only be based on processing the transitional probabilities between sequence elements. Two different kinds of mechanisms may account for these data: Participants may either parse the sequence into smaller chunks corresponding to the words of the artificial language, or they may become progressively sensitive to the actual values of the transitional probabilities between syllables. The two accounts are difficult to differentiate because they make similar predictions in comparable experimental settings. In this study, we present two experiments that aimed at contrasting these two theories. In these experiments, participants had to learn 2 sets of pseudo-linguistic regularities: Language 1 (L1) and Language 2 (L2) presented in the context of a serial reaction time task. L1 and L2 were either unrelated (none of the syllabic transitions of L1 were present in L2), or partly related (some of the intra-words transitions of L1 were used as inter-words transitions of L2). The two accounts make opposite predictions in these two settings. Our results indicate that the nature of the representations depends on the learning condition. When cues were presented to facilitate parsing of the sequence, participants learned the words of the artificial language. However, when no cues were provided, performance was strongly influenced by the employed transitional probabilities.

Body schematics: on the role of the body schema in embodied lexical-semantic representations.

Science.gov (United States)

Rueschemeyer, Shirley-Ann; Pfeiffer, Christian; Bekkering, Harold

2010-02-01

Words denoting manipulable objects activate sensorimotor brain areas, likely reflecting action experience with the denoted objects. In particular, these sensorimotor lexical representations have been found to reflect the way in which an object is used. In the current paper we present data from two experiments (one behavioral and one neuroimaging) in which we investigate whether body schema information, putatively necessary for interacting with functional objects, is also recruited during lexical processing. To this end, we presented participants with words denoting objects that are typically brought towards or away from the body (e.g., cup or key, respectively). We hypothesized that objects typically brought to a location on the body (e.g., cup) are relatively more reliant on body schema representations, since the final goal location of the cup (i.e., the mouth) is represented primarily through posture and body co-ordinates. In contrast, objects typically brought to a location away from the body (e.g., key) are relatively more dependent on visuo-spatial representations, since the final goal location of the key (i.e., a keyhole) is perceived visually. The behavioral study showed that prior planning of a movement along an axis towards and away from the body facilitates processing of words with a congruent action semantic feature (i.e., preparation of movement towards the body facilitates processing of cup.). In an fMRI study we showed that words denoting objects brought towards the body engage the resources of brain areas involved in the processing information about human bodies (i.e., the extra-striate body area, middle occipital gyrus and inferior parietal lobe) relatively more than words denoting objects typically brought away from the body. The results provide converging evidence that body schema are implicitly activated in processing lexical information. 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

“Without love you can not develop a good work”: analysis of social representation of teachers inclusion on school

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ednéia Rodrigues Albuquerque

2009-04-01

Full Text Available The educational legislation, and the National Policy on Education in Brazil highlight the Special Education as a means of education, offered, preferably in the regular school network, whose guiding principle is the inclusion. This article presents the results of a study of social representations to include school teachers between the public network developed in the Graduate Program in Education at the Federal University of Pernambuco - UFPE. Participants in the survey are 43 teachers of students with disabilities in the municipal network of Jaboatao of Exmouth-EP. Data were collected through the free association of words and the results indicate that the inclusion in school social representation of teachers is an act of love. The character of the emotional evocations excels is in the social representations of students with disabilities affecting the meaning of inclusion as a right of a student with disabilities. Thus, the Special Education, despite its merits and achievements, such as social right constitutionally guaranteed to persons with disabilities continues to be denied.

The Role of Auditory and Visual Speech in Word Learning at 18 Months and in Adulthood

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Havy, Mélanie; Foroud, Afra; Fais, Laurel; Werker, Janet F.

2017-01-01

Visual information influences speech perception in both infants and adults. It is still unknown whether lexical representations are multisensory. To address this question, we exposed 18-month-old infants (n = 32) and adults (n = 32) to new word-object pairings: Participants either heard the acoustic form of the words or saw the talking face in…

Representations of abstract grammatical feature agreement in young children.

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Melançon, Andréane; Shi, Rushen

2015-11-01

A fundamental question in language acquisition research is whether young children have abstract grammatical representations. We tested this question experimentally. French-learning 30-month-olds were first taught novel word-object pairs in the context of a gender-marked determiner (e.g., un MASC ravole 'a ravole'). Test trials presented the objects side-by-side while one of them was named in new phrases containing other determiners and an adjective (e.g., le MASC joli ravole MASC 'the pretty ravole'). The gender agreement between the new determiner and the non-adjacent noun was manipulated in different test trials (e.g., le MASC __ravole MASC; *la FEM __ravole MASC). We found that online comprehension of the named target was facilitated in gender-matched trials but impeded in gender-mismatched trials. That is, children assigned the determiner genders to the novel nouns during word learning. They then processed the non-adjacent gender agreement between the two categories (Det, Noun) during test. The results demonstrate abstract featural representation and grammatical productivity in young children.

The Influence of Sex Information on Gender Word Processing.

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Casado, Alba; Palma, Alfonso; Paolieri, Daniela

2018-06-01

Three different tasks (word repetition, lexical decision, and gender decision) were designed to explore the impact of the sex clues (sex of the speaker, sex of the addressee) and the type of gender (semantic, arbitrary) on the processing of isolated Spanish gendered words. The findings showed that the grammatical gender feature was accessed when no mandatory attentional focus was required. In addition, the results indicated that the participants organize information according to their own sex role, which provides more salience to the words that match in grammatical gender with their own sex role representation, even when the gender assignment is arbitrary. Finally, the sex of the speaker biased the lexical access and the grammatical gender selection, serving as a semantic prime when the two dimensions have a congruent relationship. Furthermore, the masculine form serves as the generic gender representing both male and female figures.

Spelling pronunciation and visual preview both facilitate learning to spell irregular words.

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Hilte, Maartje; Reitsma, Pieter

2006-12-01

Spelling pronunciations are hypothesized to be helpful in building up relatively stable phonologically underpinned orthographic representations, particularly for learning words with irregular phoneme-grapheme correspondences. In a four-week computer-based training, the efficacy of spelling pronunciations and previewing the spelling patterns on learning to spell loan words in Dutch, originating from French and English, was examined in skilled and less skilled spellers with varying ages. Reading skills were taken into account. Overall, compared to normal pronunciation, spelling pronunciation facilitated the learning of the correct spelling of irregular words, but it appeared to be no more effective than previewing. Differences between training conditions appeared to fade with older spellers. Less skilled young spellers seemed to profit more from visual examination of the word as compared to practice with spelling pronunciations. The findings appear to indicate that spelling pronunciation and allowing a preview can both be effective ways to learn correct spellings of orthographically unpredictable words, irrespective of age or spelling ability.

The affective (re)production of refugee representations through educational policies and practices: Reconceptualising the role of emotion for peace education in a divided country

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Zembylas, Michalinos

2012-08-01

Drawing into a discussion of the politicisation of emotion, this paper develops a framework to analyse some of the processes and strategies by which educational policies and pedagogical practices "emotionalise" the representation of refugees in conflict-ridden societies such as Cyprus and explores the implications for peace education. In particular, this paper aims to refine our understanding of how emotions affect the ways in which educational policies and practices reproduce self-other dichotomies through certain representations of the refugee experience. It is argued that these dichotomies are relevant to the emotional reactions against peace education initiatives. Second, this paper examines alternative possibilities of promoting peaceful coexistence, while taking into consideration the affective (re)production of refugee representations yet without undermining the refugee experience. Better understanding of how emotion is involved will help educational policymakers and teachers in divided societies to take into account the hitherto poorly developed aspects of the ways in which emotions, the refugee experience and peace education are inextricably intertwined.

Does Hearing Several Speakers Reduce Foreign Word Learning?

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Ludington, Jason Darryl

2016-01-01

Learning spoken word forms is a vital part of second language learning, and CALL lends itself well to this training. Not enough is known, however, about how auditory variation across speech tokens may affect receptive word learning. To find out, 144 Thai university students with no knowledge of the Patani Malay language learned 24 foreign words in…

Is a Picture Worth a Thousand Words? Using Images to Create a Concreteness Effect for Abstract Words: Evidence from Beginning L2 Learners of Spanish

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Farley, Andrew; Pahom, Olga; Ramonda, Kris

2014-01-01

This study examines the lexical representation and recall of abstract words by beginning L2 learners of Spanish in the light of the predictions of the dual coding theory (Paivio 1971; Paivio and Desrochers 1980). Ninety-seven learners (forty-four males and fifty-three females) were randomly placed in the picture or non-picture group and taught…

A Lesk-inspired Unsupervised Algorithm for Lexical Choice from WordNet Synsets

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Basile, Valerio; Basili, Roberto; Lenci, Allesandro; Magnini, Bernardo

2014-01-01

The generation of text from abstract meaning representations involves, among other tasks, the production of lexical items for the concepts to realize. Using WordNet as a foundational ontology, we exploit its internal network structure to predict the best lemmas for a given synset without the need

Fracture Mechanics Method for Word Embedding Generation of Neural Probabilistic Linguistic Model

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Size Bi

2016-01-01

Full Text Available Word embedding, a lexical vector representation generated via the neural linguistic model (NLM, is empirically demonstrated to be appropriate for improvement of the performance of traditional language model. However, the supreme dimensionality that is inherent in NLM contributes to the problems of hyperparameters and long-time training in modeling. Here, we propose a force-directed method to improve such problems for simplifying the generation of word embedding. In this framework, each word is assumed as a point in the real world; thus it can approximately simulate the physical movement following certain mechanics. To simulate the variation of meaning in phrases, we use the fracture mechanics to do the formation and breakdown of meaning combined by a 2-gram word group. With the experiments on the natural linguistic tasks of part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition and semantic role labeling, the result demonstrated that the 2-dimensional word embedding can rival the word embeddings generated by classic NLMs, in terms of accuracy, recall, and text visualization.

How to make a good animation: A grounded cognition model of how visual representation design affects the construction of abstract physics knowledge

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Zhongzhou Chen

2014-04-01

Full Text Available Visual representations play a critical role in teaching physics. However, since we do not have a satisfactory understanding of how visual perception impacts the construction of abstract knowledge, most visual representations used in instructions are either created based on existing conventions or designed according to the instructor’s intuition, which leads to a significant variance in their effectiveness. In this paper we propose a cognitive mechanism based on grounded cognition, suggesting that visual perception affects understanding by activating “perceptual symbols”: the basic cognitive unit used by the brain to construct a concept. A good visual representation activates perceptual symbols that are essential for the construction of the represented concept, whereas a bad representation does the opposite. As a proof of concept, we conducted a clinical experiment in which participants received three different versions of a multimedia tutorial teaching the integral expression of electric potential. The three versions were only different by the details of the visual representation design, only one of which contained perceptual features that activate perceptual symbols essential for constructing the idea of “accumulation.” On a following post-test, participants receiving this version of tutorial significantly outperformed those who received the other two versions of tutorials designed to mimic conventional visual representations used in classrooms.

Reevaluating split-fovea processing in word recognition: hemispheric dominance, retinal location, and the word-nonword effect.

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Jordan, Timothy R; Paterson, Kevin B; Kurtev, Stoyan

2009-03-01

Many studies have claimed that hemispheric projections are split precisely at the foveal midline and so hemispheric asymmetry affects word recognition right up to the point of fixation. To investigate this claim, four-letter words and nonwords were presented to the left or right of fixation, either close to fixation in foveal vision or farther from fixation in extrafoveal vision. Presentation accuracy was controlled using an eyetracker linked to a fixation-contingent display. Words presented foveally produced identical performance on each side of fixation, but words presented extrafoveally showed a clear left-hemisphere (LH) advantage. Nonwords produced no evidence of hemispheric asymmetry in any location. Foveal stimuli also produced an identical word-nonword effect on each side of fixation, whereas extrafoveal stimuli produced a word-nonword effect only for LH (not right-hemisphere) displays. These findings indicate that functional unilateral projections to contralateral hemispheres exist in extrafoveal locations but provide no evidence of a functional division in hemispheric processing at fixation.

Semantic priming increases word frequency judgments: Evidence for the role of memory strength in frequency estimation.

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Woltz, Dan J; Gardner, Michael K

2015-09-01

Previous research has demonstrated a systematic, nonlinear relationship between word frequency judgments and values from word frequency norms. This relationship could reflect a perceptual process similar to that found in the psychophysics literature for a variety of sensory phenomena. Alternatively, it could reflect memory strength differences that are expected for words of varying levels of prior exposure. Two experiments tested the memory strength explanation by semantically priming words prior to frequency judgments. Exposure to related word meanings produced a small but measurable increase in target word frequency ratings. Repetition but not semantic priming had a greater impact on low compared to high frequency words. These findings are consistent with a memory strength view of frequency judgments that assumes a distributed network with lexical and semantic levels of representation. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The lateralization of motor cortex activation to action words

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Olaf eHauk

2011-11-01

Full Text Available What determines the laterality of activation in motor cortex for words whose meaning is related to bodily actions? It has been suggested that the neuronal representation of the meaning of action-words is shaped by individual experience. However, core language functions are left-lateralized in the majority of both right- and left-handers. It is still an open question to what degree connections between left-hemispheric core language areas and right-hemispheric motor areas can play a role in semantics. We investigated laterality of brain activation using fMRI in right- and left-handed participants in response to visually presented hand-related action-words, namely uni- and bi-manual actions (such as "throw" and "clap". These stimulus groups were matched with respect to general (hand-action-relatedness, but differed with respect to whether they are usually performed with the dominant hand or both hands. We may expect generally more left-hemispheric motor-cortex activation for hand-related words in both handedness groups, with possibly more bilateral activation for bimanual words as well as left-handers. In our study, both participant groups activated motor cortex bilaterally for bi-manual words. Interestingly, both groups also showed a left-lateralized activation pattern to uni-manual words. We argue that this reflects the effect of left-hemispheric language dominance on the formation of semantic brain circuits on the basis of Hebbian correlation learning.

WORD-ATTACK SKILLS FOR INDONESIAN LEARNERS

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Joko Pranowo

2006-01-01

Full Text Available The typical drawbacks that affect most Indonesian learners studying English as the target language concern the strategies in dealing with new dictions. The rule of thumb is that the learners are usually tempted to directly look up the meaning in a dictionary when other ways such as guessing the meaning from the context or by dissecting the words into smaller units so that they are able to get a hint from the base word cannot be engineered. As a result of this activity then, they miss crucial points in the realm of word enrichment. This article will shed some light on how to deal with new words and claim that it is not the meaning of a new word that should be the first priority.

The impact of music on learning and consolidation of novel words.

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Tamminen, Jakke; Rastle, Kathleen; Darby, Jess; Lucas, Rebecca; Williamson, Victoria J

2017-01-01

Music can be a powerful mnemonic device, as shown by a body of literature demonstrating that listening to text sung to a familiar melody results in better memory for the words compared to conditions where they are spoken. Furthermore, patients with a range of memory impairments appear to be able to form new declarative memories when they are encoded in the form of lyrics in a song, while unable to remember similar materials after hearing them in the spoken modality. Whether music facilitates the acquisition of completely new information, such as new vocabulary, remains unknown. Here we report three experiments in which adult participants learned novel words in the spoken or sung modality. While we found no benefit of musical presentation on free recall or recognition memory of novel words, novel words learned in the sung modality were more strongly integrated in the mental lexicon compared to words learned in the spoken modality. This advantage for the sung words was only present when the training melody was familiar. The impact of musical presentation on learning therefore appears to extend beyond episodic memory and can be reflected in the emergence and properties of new lexical representations.

Interaction and representational integration: Evidence from speech errors

OpenAIRE

Goldrick, Matthew; Baker, H. Ross; Murphy, Amanda; Baese-Berk, Melissa

2011-01-01

We examine the mechanisms that support interaction between lexical, phonological and phonetic processes during language production. Studies of the phonetics of speech errors have provided evidence that partially activated lexical and phonological representations influence phonetic processing. We examine how these interactive effects are modulated by lexical frequency. Previous research has demonstrated that during lexical access, the processing of high frequency words is facilitated; in contr...

Word meaning in the ventral visual path: a perceptual to conceptual gradient of semantic coding.

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Borghesani, Valentina; Pedregosa, Fabian; Buiatti, Marco; Amadon, Alexis; Eger, Evelyn; Piazza, Manuela

2016-12-01

The meaning of words referring to concrete items is thought of as a multidimensional representation that includes both perceptual (e.g., average size, prototypical color) and conceptual (e.g., taxonomic class) dimensions. Are these different dimensions coded in different brain regions? In healthy human subjects, we tested the presence of a mapping between the implied real object size (a perceptual dimension) and the taxonomic categories at different levels of specificity (conceptual dimensions) of a series of words, and the patterns of brain activity recorded with functional magnetic resonance imaging in six areas along the ventral occipito-temporal cortical path. Combining multivariate pattern classification and representational similarity analysis, we found that the real object size implied by a word appears to be primarily encoded in early visual regions, while the taxonomic category and sub-categorical cluster in more anterior temporal regions. This anteroposterior gradient of information content indicates that different areas along the ventral stream encode complementary dimensions of the semantic space. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Risk for eating disorders modulates startle-responses to body words.

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Herbert, Cornelia; Kübler, Andrea; Vögele, Claus

2013-01-01

Body image disturbances are core symptoms of eating disorders (EDs). Recent evidence suggests that changes in body image may occur prior to ED onset and are not restricted to in-vivo exposure (e.g. mirror image), but also evident during presentation of abstract cues such as body shape and weight-related words. In the present study startle modulation, heart rate and subjective evaluations were examined during reading of body words and neutral words in 41 student female volunteers screened for risk of EDs. The aim was to determine if responses to body words are attributable to a general negativity bias regardless of ED risk or if activated, ED relevant negative body schemas facilitate priming of defensive responses. Heart rate and word ratings differed between body words and neutral words in the whole female sample, supporting a general processing bias for body weight and shape-related concepts in young women regardless of ED risk. Startle modulation was specifically related to eating disorder symptoms, as was indicated by significant positive correlations with self-reported body dissatisfaction. These results emphasize the relevance of examining body schema representations as a function of ED risk across different levels of responding. Peripheral-physiological measures such as the startle reflex could possibly be used as predictors of females' risk for developing EDs in the future.

Risk for eating disorders modulates startle-responses to body words.

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Cornelia Herbert

Full Text Available Body image disturbances are core symptoms of eating disorders (EDs. Recent evidence suggests that changes in body image may occur prior to ED onset and are not restricted to in-vivo exposure (e.g. mirror image, but also evident during presentation of abstract cues such as body shape and weight-related words. In the present study startle modulation, heart rate and subjective evaluations were examined during reading of body words and neutral words in 41 student female volunteers screened for risk of EDs. The aim was to determine if responses to body words are attributable to a general negativity bias regardless of ED risk or if activated, ED relevant negative body schemas facilitate priming of defensive responses. Heart rate and word ratings differed between body words and neutral words in the whole female sample, supporting a general processing bias for body weight and shape-related concepts in young women regardless of ED risk. Startle modulation was specifically related to eating disorder symptoms, as was indicated by significant positive correlations with self-reported body dissatisfaction. These results emphasize the relevance of examining body schema representations as a function of ED risk across different levels of responding. Peripheral-physiological measures such as the startle reflex could possibly be used as predictors of females' risk for developing EDs in the future.

Representation of grammatical categories of words in the brain.

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Hillis, A E; Caramazza, A

1995-01-01

We report the performance of a patient who, as a consequence of left frontal and temporoparietal strokes, makes far more errors on nouns than on verbs in spoken output tasks, but makes far more errors on verbs than on nouns in written input tasks. This double dissociation within a single patient with respect to grammatical category provides evidence for the hypothesis that phonological and orthographic representations of nouns and verbs are processed by independent neural mechanisms. Furthermore, the opposite dissociation in the verbal output modality, an advantage for nouns over verbs in spoken tasks, by a different patient using the same stimuli has also been reported (Caramazza & Hillis, 1991). This double dissociation across patients on the same task indicates that results cannot be ascribed to "greater difficulty" with one type of stimulus, and provides further evidence for the view that grammatical category information is an important organizational principle of lexical knowledge in the brain.

Teaching Problem Solving to Students Receiving Tiered Interventions Using the Concrete-Representational-Abstract Sequence and Schema-Based Instruction

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Flores, Margaret M.; Hinton, Vanessa M.; Burton, Megan E.

2016-01-01

Mathematical word problems are the most common form of mathematics problem solving implemented in K-12 schools. Identifying key words is a frequent strategy taught in classrooms in which students struggle with problem solving and show low success rates in mathematics. Researchers show that using the concrete-representational-abstract (CRA)…

Structured Semantic Knowledge Can Emerge Automatically from Predicting Word Sequences in Child-Directed Speech

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Huebner, Philip A.; Willits, Jon A.

2018-01-01

Previous research has suggested that distributional learning mechanisms may contribute to the acquisition of semantic knowledge. However, distributional learning mechanisms, statistical learning, and contemporary “deep learning” approaches have been criticized for being incapable of learning the kind of abstract and structured knowledge that many think is required for acquisition of semantic knowledge. In this paper, we show that recurrent neural networks, trained on noisy naturalistic speech to children, do in fact learn what appears to be abstract and structured knowledge. We trained two types of recurrent neural networks (Simple Recurrent Network, and Long Short-Term Memory) to predict word sequences in a 5-million-word corpus of speech directed to children ages 0–3 years old, and assessed what semantic knowledge they acquired. We found that learned internal representations are encoding various abstract grammatical and semantic features that are useful for predicting word sequences. Assessing the organization of semantic knowledge in terms of the similarity structure, we found evidence of emergent categorical and hierarchical structure in both models. We found that the Long Short-term Memory (LSTM) and SRN are both learning very similar kinds of representations, but the LSTM achieved higher levels of performance on a quantitative evaluation. We also trained a non-recurrent neural network, Skip-gram, on the same input to compare our results to the state-of-the-art in machine learning. We found that Skip-gram achieves relatively similar performance to the LSTM, but is representing words more in terms of thematic compared to taxonomic relations, and we provide reasons why this might be the case. Our findings show that a learning system that derives abstract, distributed representations for the purpose of predicting sequential dependencies in naturalistic language may provide insight into emergence of many properties of the developing semantic system. PMID

Structured Semantic Knowledge Can Emerge Automatically from Predicting Word Sequences in Child-Directed Speech

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Philip A. Huebner

2018-02-01

Full Text Available Previous research has suggested that distributional learning mechanisms may contribute to the acquisition of semantic knowledge. However, distributional learning mechanisms, statistical learning, and contemporary “deep learning” approaches have been criticized for being incapable of learning the kind of abstract and structured knowledge that many think is required for acquisition of semantic knowledge. In this paper, we show that recurrent neural networks, trained on noisy naturalistic speech to children, do in fact learn what appears to be abstract and structured knowledge. We trained two types of recurrent neural networks (Simple Recurrent Network, and Long Short-Term Memory to predict word sequences in a 5-million-word corpus of speech directed to children ages 0–3 years old, and assessed what semantic knowledge they acquired. We found that learned internal representations are encoding various abstract grammatical and semantic features that are useful for predicting word sequences. Assessing the organization of semantic knowledge in terms of the similarity structure, we found evidence of emergent categorical and hierarchical structure in both models. We found that the Long Short-term Memory (LSTM and SRN are both learning very similar kinds of representations, but the LSTM achieved higher levels of performance on a quantitative evaluation. We also trained a non-recurrent neural network, Skip-gram, on the same input to compare our results to the state-of-the-art in machine learning. We found that Skip-gram achieves relatively similar performance to the LSTM, but is representing words more in terms of thematic compared to taxonomic relations, and we provide reasons why this might be the case. Our findings show that a learning system that derives abstract, distributed representations for the purpose of predicting sequential dependencies in naturalistic language may provide insight into emergence of many properties of the developing

Social Representations Of Violence Against Rural Women: Unveiling Senses In Multiple Views

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Marta Cocco Costa

Full Text Available We analyze the social representations of violence against women from the perspective of city managers, professionals and health workers in rural settings of the southern half of Rio Grande do Sul. The study has a qualitative approach and adds a theoretical/methodological perspective of social representations. The data were generated by means of the associative method, question-stimulus of words and expressions emergence. The analysis of word association was performed with EVOC software, considering frequency and order of association with inducing terms. Participants recognize violence against women as gender destination that induces consent, resignation, guilt and fear, and results in naturalization and trivialization of this social phenomenon. We highlight the need to produce ruptures in established and traditional forms of health care, in the conservative and stereotypical views of violence, favoring access to friendly service and avoiding the reproduction of gender inequalities.

Social Representations Of Violence Against Rural Women: Unveiling Senses In Multiple Views

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Marta Cocco Costa

2014-04-01

Full Text Available We analyze the social representations of violence against women from the perspective of city managers, professionals and health workers in rural settings of the southern half of Rio Grande do Sul. The study has a qualitative approach and adds a theoretical/methodological perspective of social representations. The data were generated by means of the associative method, question-stimulus of words and expressions emergence. The analysis of word association was performed with EVOC software, considering frequency and order of association with inducing terms. Participants recognize violence against women as gender destination that induces consent, resignation, guilt and fear, and results in naturalization and trivialization of this social phenomenon. We highlight the need to produce ruptures in established and traditional forms of health care, in the conservative and stereotypical views of violence, favoring access to friendly service and avoiding the reproduction of gender inequalities.

Hollywood’s Representation of Iran

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Abdollah Givian

2010-01-01

Full Text Available Dissimilarities among the reality and what is represented in media caused to efforts to explain how-ness and why-ness of what is called media representation of the world. Therefore, media representation has been on board in Cultural and Media Studies. Cultural Study presupposes that what should one focus on in exploring media texts are the underneath ideological and social elements, and their influence on the audience’s views. Hollywood, among other media productions, enjoys a distinguished, unique status in representing the world. The present study reviews “a discourse-within-a-discourse”. In the other words, Iran’s representation would be explored as a part of representing Orient (or Islam in the western media. Here, Hollywood –as a media-within-mass-media- represents American Media in general. Reviewing movies produced in Hollywood within which Iran is represented, she is represented as the “subaltern other”. Thus, it could be said that Hollywood generally works in the “neo-racist” theoretical framework. In this study, 3 theoretical traditions; namely the Cultural Studies, Post-Colonial Studies, and Film Theory have been applied. The central “representation” concept in the present study is a combined derivation of Michel Foucault and Stewart Hall’s theories. Then, Edward Said’s ideas in Post-Colonial Studies would be explored. And finally, Film Theory would help to apply the concept of representation besides the Post-Colonial Studies in Film Studies.

Attentional Processing and Recall of Emotional Words

OpenAIRE

Fraga Carou, Isabel; Redondo, Jaime; Piñeiro, Ana; Padrón, Isabel; Fernández-Rey, José; Alcaraz, Miguel

2011-01-01

Three experiments were carried out in order to evaluate the attention paid to words of different emotional value. A dual-task experimental paradigm was employed, registering response times to acoustic tones which were presented during the reading of words. The recall was also evaluated by means of an intentional immediate recall test. The results reveal that neither the emotional valence nor the arousal of words on their own affected the attention paid by participants. Only in the third exper...

Reading faces and Facing words

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Robotham, Julia Emma; Lindegaard, Martin Weis; Delfi, Tzvetelina Shentova

unilateral lesions, we found no patient with a selective deficit in either reading or face processing. Rather, the patients showing a deficit in processing either words or faces were also impaired with the other category. One patient performed within the normal range on all tasks. In addition, all patients......It has long been argued that perceptual processing of faces and words is largely independent, highly specialised and strongly lateralised. Studies of patients with either pure alexia or prosopagnosia have strongly contributed to this view. The aim of our study was to investigate how visual...... perception of faces and words is affected by unilateral posterior stroke. Two patients with lesions in their dominant hemisphere and two with lesions in their non-dominant hemisphere were tested on sensitive tests of face and word perception during the stable phase of recovery. Despite all patients having...

Neural Representation. A Survey-Based Analysis of the Notion

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Oscar Vilarroya

2017-08-01

Full Text Available The word representation (as in “neural representation”, and many of its related terms, such as to represent, representational and the like, play a central explanatory role in neuroscience literature. For instance, in “place cell” literature, place cells are extensively associated with their role in “the representation of space.” In spite of its extended use, we still lack a clear, universal and widely accepted view on what it means for a nervous system to represent something, on what makes a neural activity a representation, and on what is re-presented. The lack of a theoretical foundation and definition of the notion has not hindered actual research. My aim here is to identify how active scientists use the notion of neural representation, and eventually to list a set of criteria, based on actual use, that can help in distinguishing between genuine or non-genuine neural-representation candidates. In order to attain this objective, I present first the results of a survey of authors within two domains, place-cell and multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA research. Based on the authors’ replies, and on a review of neuroscientific research, I outline a set of common properties that an account of neural representation seems to require. I then apply these properties to assess the use of the notion in two domains of the survey, place-cell and MVPA studies. I conclude by exploring a shift in the notion of representation suggested by recent literature.

Direction of Wording Effects in Balanced Scales.

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Miller, Timothy R.; Cleary, T. Anne

1993-01-01

The degree to which statistical item selection reduces direction-of-wording effects in balanced affective measures developed from relatively small item pools was investigated with 171 male and 228 female undergraduate and graduate students at 2 U.S. universities. Clearest direction-of-wording effects result from selection of items with high…

Words don't come easy

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Starrfelt, Randi

of reading, and with the use of functional imaging techniques. Extant evidence for (and against) cerebral specialization for visual word recognition is briefly reviewed and found inconclusive.                       Study I is a case study of a patient with a very selective alexia and agraphia affecting...... and object processing, may explain the pattern of activations found in our and other functional imaging studies of the visual word form area.                       Study III reports a patient (NN) with pure alexia. NN is not impaired in object recognition, but his deficit(s) affects processing speed...... reading and writing of letters and words but not numbers. This study raised questions of "where" in the cognitive system such a deficit may arise, and whether it can be attributed to a deficit in a system specialized for reading or letter knowledge. The following studies investigated these questions...

The Efficacy of Using Diagrams When Solving Probability Word Problems in College

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Beitzel, Brian D.; Staley, Richard K.

2015-01-01

Previous experiments have shown a deleterious effect of visual representations on college students' ability to solve total- and joint-probability word problems. The present experiments used conditional-probability problems, known to be more difficult than total- and joint-probability problems. The diagram group was instructed in how to use tree…

Compound words prompt arbitrary semantic associations in conceptual memory

OpenAIRE

Boutonnet, Bastien; McClain, Rhonda; Thierry, Guillaume

2014-01-01

Linguistic relativity theory has received empirical support in domains such as colour perception and object categorisation. It is unknown however, whether relations between words idiosyncratic to language impact nonverbal representations and conceptualisations. For instance, would one consider the concepts of horse and sea as related were it not for the existence of the compound seahorse? Here, we investigated such arbitrary conceptual relationships using a non-linguistic picture relatedness ...

The causal role of category-specific neuronal representations in the left ventral premotor cortex (PMv) in semantic processing.

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Cattaneo, Zaira; Devlin, Joseph T; Salvini, Francesca; Vecchi, Tomaso; Silvanto, Juha

2010-02-01

The left ventral premotor cortex (PMv) is preferentially activated by exemplars of tools, suggestive of category specificity in this region. Here we used state-dependent transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to investigate the causal role of such category-specific neuronal representations in the encoding of tool words. Priming to a category name (either "Tool" or "Animal") was used with the objective of modulating the initial activation state of this region prior to application of TMS and the presentation of the target stimulus. When the target word was an exemplar of the "Tool" category, the effects of TMS applied over PMv (but not PMd) interacted with priming history by facilitating reaction times on incongruent trials while not affecting congruent trials. This congruency/TMS interaction implies that the "Tool" and "Animal" primes had a differential effect on the initial activation state of the left PMv and implies that this region is one neural locus of category-specific behavioral priming for the "Tool" category. TMS applied over PMv had no behavioral effect when the target stimulus was an exemplar of the "Animal" category, regardless of whether the target word was congruent or incongruent with the prime. That TMS applied over the left PMv interacted with a priming effect that extended from the category name ("Tool") to exemplars of that category suggests that this region contains neuronal representation associated with a specific semantic category. Our results also demonstrate that the state-dependent effects obtained in the combination of visual priming and TMS are useful in the study of higher-level cognitive functions. Copyright (c) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Sound specificity effects in spoken word recognition: The effect of integrality between words and sounds

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Strori, Dorina; Zaar, Johannes; Cooke, Martin

2017-01-01

Recent evidence has shown that nonlinguistic sounds co-occurring with spoken words may be retained in memory and affect later retrieval of the words. This sound-specificity effect shares many characteristics with the classic voice-specificity effect. In this study, we argue that the sound......-specificity effect is conditional upon the context in which the word and sound coexist. Specifically, we argue that, besides co-occurrence, integrality between words and sounds is a crucial factor in the emergence of the effect. In two recognition-memory experiments, we compared the emergence of voice and sound...... from a mere co-occurrence context effect by removing the intensity modulation. The absence of integrality led to the disappearance of the sound-specificity effect. Taken together, the results suggest that the assimilation of background sounds into memory cannot be reduced to a simple context effect...

The impact of iconic gestures on foreign language word learning and its neural substrate.

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Macedonia, Manuela; Müller, Karsten; Friederici, Angela D

2011-06-01

Vocabulary acquisition represents a major challenge in foreign language learning. Research has demonstrated that gestures accompanying speech have an impact on memory for verbal information in the speakers' mother tongue and, as recently shown, also in foreign language learning. However, the neural basis of this effect remains unclear. In a within-subjects design, we compared learning of novel words coupled with iconic and meaningless gestures. Iconic gestures helped learners to significantly better retain the verbal material over time. After the training, participants' brain activity was registered by means of fMRI while performing a word recognition task. Brain activations to words learned with iconic and with meaningless gestures were contrasted. We found activity in the premotor cortices for words encoded with iconic gestures. In contrast, words encoded with meaningless gestures elicited a network associated with cognitive control. These findings suggest that memory performance for newly learned words is not driven by the motor component as such, but by the motor image that matches an underlying representation of the word's semantics. Copyright © 2010 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

Bilingualism affects 9-month-old infants' expectations about how words refer to kinds.

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Byers-Heinlein, Krista

2017-01-01

Infants are precocious word learners, and seem to possess systematic expectations about how words refer to object kinds. For example, while monolingual infants show a one-to-one mapping bias (e.g. mutual exclusivity), expecting each object to have only one basic level label, previous research has shown that this is less robust in bi- and multilinguals aged 1.5 years and older. This study examined the early origins of such one-to-one mapping biases by comparing monolingual and bilingual 9-10-month-olds' expectations about the relationship between labels and object kinds. In a violation of expectation paradigm, infants heard a speaker name hidden objects with either one label ('I see a mouba! I see a mouba!') or two labels ('I see a camo! I see a tenda!'). An occluder moved to reveal two objects that were either identical or of different kinds. Monolingual infants looked longest when two labels were associated with identical objects, and when one label was associated with objects of different kinds, showing that they found these outcomes unexpected. This replicated previous findings showing that monolinguals expect that distinct words label distinct object kinds (Dewar & Xu, ). Bilinguals looked equally to the outcomes regardless of the number of labels, showing no such expectations. This finding indicates that bilingualism influences young infants' expectations about how words refer to kinds, and more broadly supports the position that language experience contributes to the development of word learning heuristics. © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Context Representation and Fusion: Advancements and Opportunities

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Asad Masood Khattak

2014-05-01

Full Text Available The acceptance and usability of context-aware systems have given them the edge of wide use in various domains and has also attracted the attention of researchers in the area of context-aware computing. Making user context information available to such systems is the center of attention. However, there is very little emphasis given to the process of context representation and context fusion which are integral parts of context-aware systems. Context representation and fusion facilitate in recognizing the dependency/relationship of one data source on another to extract a better understanding of user context. The problem is more critical when data is emerging from heterogeneous sources of diverse nature like sensors, user profiles, and social interactions and also at different timestamps. Both the processes of context representation and fusion are followed in one way or another; however, they are not discussed explicitly for the realization of context-aware systems. In other words most of the context-aware systems underestimate the importance context representation and fusion. This research has explicitly focused on the importance of both the processes of context representation and fusion and has streamlined their existence in the overall architecture of context-aware systems’ design and development. Various applications of context representation and fusion in context-aware systems are also highlighted in this research. A detailed review on both the processes is provided in this research with their applications. Future research directions (challenges are also highlighted which needs proper attention for the purpose of achieving the goal of realizing context-aware systems.

Increased functional connectivity in the ventral and dorsal streams during retrieval of novel words in professional musicians.

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Dittinger, Eva; Valizadeh, Seyed Abolfazl; Jäncke, Lutz; Besson, Mireille; Elmer, Stefan

2018-02-01

Current models of speech and language processing postulate the involvement of two parallel processing streams (the dual stream model): a ventral stream involved in mapping sensory and phonological representations onto lexical and conceptual representations and a dorsal stream contributing to sound-to-motor mapping, articulation, and to how verbal information is encoded and manipulated in memory. Based on previous evidence showing that music training has an influence on language processing, cognitive functions, and word learning, we examined EEG-based intracranial functional connectivity in the ventral and dorsal streams while musicians and nonmusicians learned the meaning of novel words through picture-word associations. In accordance with the dual stream model, word learning was generally associated with increased beta functional connectivity in the ventral stream compared to the dorsal stream. In addition, in the linguistically most demanding "semantic task," musicians outperformed nonmusicians, and this behavioral advantage was accompanied by increased left-hemispheric theta connectivity in both streams. Moreover, theta coherence in the left dorsal pathway was positively correlated with the number of years of music training. These results provide evidence for a complex interplay within a network of brain regions involved in semantic processing and verbal memory functions, and suggest that intensive music training can modify its functional architecture leading to advantages in novel word learning. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Object representations in visual memory: evidence from visual illusions.

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Ben-Shalom, Asaf; Ganel, Tzvi

2012-07-26

Human visual memory is considered to contain different levels of object representations. Representations in visual working memory (VWM) are thought to contain relatively elaborated information about object structure. Conversely, representations in iconic memory are thought to be more perceptual in nature. In four experiments, we tested the effects of two different categories of visual illusions on representations in VWM and in iconic memory. Unlike VWM that was affected by both types of illusions, iconic memory was immune to the effects of within-object contextual illusions and was affected only by illusions driven by between-objects contextual properties. These results show that iconic and visual working memory contain dissociable representations of object shape. These findings suggest that the global properties of the visual scene are processed prior to the processing of specific elements.

The representations puerperal women have about the care they received during labor

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Laura Pinto Torres de Melo

2018-01-01

Full Text Available Objective: to describe the social representations puerperal women have about the care they received during labor and delivery. Methodology: this is a descriptive study, based on the Theory of the Central Nucleus, which was undertaken with 119 women in the postpartum period in a public maternity hospital, located in the city of Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil. The data were collected through the Free Word Association Test, which included as inductive stimuli: care, labor, delivery and care in labor and delivery. The data were transcribed and analyzed with Evoc software. Results: the structural analysis showed that the words “pain”, “happiness” and “guidance” ocurred more frequency as a central feature of the respective inducing terms. Conclusion: the results confirm that the moment of labor and delivery is crucial for nurses in the planning and implementation of adequate care during parturition insofar, as such measures lessen the impact of negative representations of childbirth.

Resolving the locus of cAsE aLtErNaTiOn effects in visual word recognition: Evidence from masked priming.

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Perea, Manuel; Vergara-Martínez, Marta; Gomez, Pablo

2015-09-01

Determining the factors that modulate the early access of abstract lexical representations is imperative for the formulation of a comprehensive neural account of visual-word identification. There is a current debate on whether the effects of case alternation (e.g., tRaIn vs. train) have an early or late locus in the word-processing stream. Here we report a lexical decision experiment using a technique that taps the early stages of visual-word recognition (i.e., masked priming). In the design, uppercase targets could be preceded by an identity/unrelated prime that could be in lowercase or alternating case (e.g., table-TABLE vs. crash-TABLE; tAbLe-TABLE vs. cRaSh-TABLE). Results revealed that the lowercase and alternating case primes were equally effective at producing an identity priming effect. This finding demonstrates that case alternation does not hinder the initial access to the abstract lexical representations during visual-word recognition. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Consonant/vowel asymmetry in early word form recognition.

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Poltrock, Silvana; Nazzi, Thierry

2015-03-01

Previous preferential listening studies suggest that 11-month-olds' early word representations are phonologically detailed, such that minor phonetic variations (i.e., mispronunciations) impair recognition. However, these studies focused on infants' sensitivity to mispronunciations (or omissions) of consonants, which have been proposed to be more important for lexical identity than vowels. Even though a lexically related consonant advantage has been consistently found in French from 14 months of age onward, little is known about its developmental onset. The current study asked whether French-learning 11-month-olds exhibit a consonant-vowel asymmetry when recognizing familiar words, which would be reflected in vowel mispronunciations being more tolerated than consonant mispronunciations. In a baseline experiment (Experiment 1), infants preferred listening to familiar words over nonwords, confirming that at 11 months of age infants show a familiarity effect rather than a novelty effect. In Experiment 2, which was constructed using the familiar words of Experiment 1, infants preferred listening to one-feature vowel mispronunciations over one-feature consonant mispronunciations. Given the familiarity preference established in Experiment 1, this pattern of results suggests that recognition of early familiar words is more dependent on their consonants than on their vowels. This adds another piece of evidence that, at least in French, consonants already have a privileged role in lexical processing by 11 months of age, as claimed by Nespor, Peña, and Mehler (2003). Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Learning Spoken Words via the Ears and Eyes: Evidence from 30-Month-Old Children

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Mélanie Havy

2017-12-01

Full Text Available From the very first moments of their lives, infants are able to link specific movements of the visual articulators to auditory speech signals. However, recent evidence indicates that infants focus primarily on auditory speech signals when learning new words. Here, we ask whether 30-month-old children are able to learn new words based solely on visible speech information, and whether information from both auditory and visual modalities is available after learning in only one modality. To test this, children were taught new lexical mappings. One group of children experienced the words in the auditory modality (i.e., acoustic form of the word with no accompanying face. Another group experienced the words in the visual modality (seeing a silent talking face. Lexical recognition was tested in either the learning modality or in the other modality. Results revealed successful word learning in either modality. Results further showed cross-modal recognition following an auditory-only, but not a visual-only, experience of the words. Together, these findings suggest that visible speech becomes increasingly informative for the purpose of lexical learning, but that an auditory-only experience evokes a cross-modal representation of the words.

Development of Embodied Word Meanings: Sensorimotor Effects in Children’s Lexical Processing

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Michelle eInkster

2016-03-01

Full Text Available Previous research showed an effect of words’ rated body-object interaction (BOI in children’s visual word naming performance, but only in children 8 years of age or older (Wellsby & Pexman, 2014a. In that study, however, BOI was established using adult ratings. Here we collected ratings from a group of parents for children’s body-object interaction experience (child-BOI. We examined effects of words’ child-BOI and also words’ imageability on children’s responses in an auditory word naming task, which is suited to the lexical processing skills of younger children. We tested a group of 54 children aged 6-7 years and a comparison group of 25 adults. Results showed significant effects of both imageability and child-BOI on children’s auditory naming latencies. These results provide evidence that children younger than 8 years of age have richer semantic representations for high imageability and high child-BOI words, consistent with an embodied account of word meaning.

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

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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.

[Social representations of illness: Comparison of "expert" knowledge and "naïve" knowledge].

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Jeoffrion, C; Dupont, P; Tripodi, D; Roland-Lévy, C

2016-06-01

The link between social practices and representations is now well known. But while many studies have focused on the social representation of mental illness, in various populations, few studies have focused on the notion of disease/illness by comparing professionals and non-professionals health workers representations. Indeed, the disease is both a reality described, explained and treated by medicine; for those who are affected by a disease, it is an individual experience with psychological, social and cultural impacts. The social representation is determined by the structure of the social groups in which it develops; therefore, it is a form of knowledge socially shaped and shared by the members of a social group. Several theoretical extensions have been elaborated and particularly, the structural approach and the central core theory. These approaches sustain the arguments of a hierarchical organization of a social representation with a central core surrounded by peripheral zones. The central core is common and shared by the majority of the members of a given group, whereas the peripheral zones provide space for the individualization of the social knowledge. The main goal of our study is to highlight the social representations of disease in health professionals (HP) and in non-health professionals (NHP). The group of HP has been differentiated into three subgroups: "medical doctors", "nurses" and "pharmacists", while that of NHP in two subgroups: those submitted to a "long period medical treatment" and those "without treatment". Our aim is to show that there are different social and professional Representations of disease. The professional representations are specific social representations related to professional contexts. We formulate the following assumptions (a) that the social representations of HP and NHP will be articulated around a common central core. Nevertheless, we expect to find specific peripheral elements related to professional status, based on

Combinatorics on words Christoffel words and repetitions in words

CERN Document Server

Berstel, Jean; Reutenauer, Christophe; Saliola, Franco V

2008-01-01

The two parts of this text are based on two series of lectures delivered by Jean Berstel and Christophe Reutenauer in March 2007 at the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques, Montréal, Canada. Part I represents the first modern and comprehensive exposition of the theory of Christoffel words. Part II presents numerous combinatorial and algorithmic aspects of repetition-free words stemming from the work of Axel Thue-a pioneer in the theory of combinatorics on words. A beginner to the theory of combinatorics on words will be motivated by the numerous examples, and the large variety of exercises, which make the book unique at this level of exposition. The clean and streamlined exposition and the extensive bibliography will also be appreciated. After reading this book, beginners should be ready to read modern research papers in this rapidly growing field and contribute their own research to its development. Experienced readers will be interested in the finitary approach to Sturmian words that Christoffel words offe...

Word frequency effects in immediate serial recall of pure and mixed lists: tests of the associative link hypothesis.

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Saint-Aubin, Jean; LeBlanc, Jacinthe

2005-12-01

In immediate serial recall, high-frequency words are better recalled than low-frequency words. Recently, it has been suggested that high-frequency words are better recalled because of their better long-term associative links, and not because of the intrinsic properties of their long-term representations. In the experiment reported here, recall performance was compared for pure lists of high- and low-frequency words, and for mixed lists composed of either one low- and five high-frequency words or the reverse. The usual advantage of high-frequency words was found with pure lists and this advantage was reduced, but still significant with mixed lists composed of five low-frequency words. However, the low-frequency word included in a high-frequency list was recalled just as well as high-frequency words. Results are challenging for the associative link hypothesis and are best interpreted within an item-based reconstruction hypothesis, along with a distinctiveness account.

Linking somatic and symbolic representation in semantic memory: the dynamic multilevel reactivation framework.

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Reilly, Jamie; Peelle, Jonathan E; Garcia, Amanda; Crutch, Sebastian J

2016-08-01

Biological plausibility is an essential constraint for any viable model of semantic memory. Yet, we have only the most rudimentary understanding of how the human brain conducts abstract symbolic transformations that underlie word and object meaning. Neuroscience has evolved a sophisticated arsenal of techniques for elucidating the architecture of conceptual representation. Nevertheless, theoretical convergence remains elusive. Here we describe several contrastive approaches to the organization of semantic knowledge, and in turn we offer our own perspective on two recurring questions in semantic memory research: (1) to what extent are conceptual representations mediated by sensorimotor knowledge (i.e., to what degree is semantic memory embodied)? (2) How might an embodied semantic system represent abstract concepts such as modularity, symbol, or proposition? To address these questions, we review the merits of sensorimotor (i.e., embodied) and amodal (i.e., disembodied) semantic theories and address the neurobiological constraints underlying each. We conclude that the shortcomings of both perspectives in their extreme forms necessitate a hybrid middle ground. We accordingly propose the Dynamic Multilevel Reactivation Framework-an integrative model predicated upon flexible interplay between sensorimotor and amodal symbolic representations mediated by multiple cortical hubs. We discuss applications of the dynamic multilevel reactivation framework to abstract and concrete concept representation and describe how a multidimensional conceptual topography based on emotion, sensation, and magnitude can successfully frame a semantic space containing meanings for both abstract and concrete words. The consideration of 'abstract conceptual features' does not diminish the role of logical and/or executive processing in activating, manipulating and using information stored in conceptual representations. Rather, it proposes that the materials upon which these processes operate

Whole-word frequency and inflectional paradigm size facilitate Estonian case-inflected noun processing.

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Lõo, Kaidi; Järvikivi, Juhani; Baayen, R Harald

2018-06-01

Estonian is a morphologically rich Finno-Ugric language with nominal paradigms that have at least 28 different inflected forms but sometimes more than 40. For languages with rich inflection, it has been argued that whole-word frequency, as a diagnostic of whole-word representations, should not be predictive for lexical processing. We report a lexical decision experiment, showing that response latencies decrease both with frequency of the inflected form and its inflectional paradigm size. Inflectional paradigm size was also predictive of semantic categorization, indicating it is a semantic effect, similar to the morphological family size effect. These findings fit well with the evidence for frequency effects of word n-grams in languages with little inflectional morphology, such as English. Apparently, the amount of information on word use in the mental lexicon is substantially larger than was previously thought. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Jointly learning word embeddings using a corpus and a knowledge base

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Bollegala, Danushka; Maehara, Takanori; Kawarabayashi, Ken-ichi

2018-01-01

Methods for representing the meaning of words in vector spaces purely using the information distributed in text corpora have proved to be very valuable in various text mining and natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, these methods still disregard the valuable semantic relational structure between words in co-occurring contexts. These beneficial semantic relational structures are contained in manually-created knowledge bases (KBs) such as ontologies and semantic lexicons, where the meanings of words are represented by defining the various relationships that exist among those words. We combine the knowledge in both a corpus and a KB to learn better word embeddings. Specifically, we propose a joint word representation learning method that uses the knowledge in the KBs, and simultaneously predicts the co-occurrences of two words in a corpus context. In particular, we use the corpus to define our objective function subject to the relational constrains derived from the KB. We further utilise the corpus co-occurrence statistics to propose two novel approaches, Nearest Neighbour Expansion (NNE) and Hedged Nearest Neighbour Expansion (HNE), that dynamically expand the KB and therefore derive more constraints that guide the optimisation process. Our experimental results over a wide-range of benchmark tasks demonstrate that the proposed method statistically significantly improves the accuracy of the word embeddings learnt. It outperforms a corpus-only baseline and reports an improvement of a number of previously proposed methods that incorporate corpora and KBs in both semantic similarity prediction and word analogy detection tasks. PMID:29529052

Entry format for representation of analytical relations on the ES computer

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Katan, I.B.; Sal'nikova, O.V.; Blokhin, A.I.

1981-01-01

Structure and description of an input format for representation of analytical relations on the ES compUter as well as dictionaries of key words and system identificators for thermal-physical and hydraulic data are presented. It is shown that the format considered can be the basis at the formation of library of analytical relations [ru

Learning Word Embeddings with Chi-Square Weights for Healthcare Tweet Classification

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Sicong Kuang

2017-08-01

Full Text Available Twitter is a popular source for the monitoring of healthcare information and public disease. However, there exists much noise in the tweets. Even though appropriate keywords appear in the tweets, they do not guarantee the identification of a truly health-related tweet. Thus, the traditional keyword-based classification task is largely ineffective. Algorithms for word embeddings have proved to be useful in many natural language processing (NLP tasks. We introduce two algorithms based on an existing word embedding learning algorithm: the continuous bag-of-words model (CBOW. We apply the proposed algorithms to the task of recognizing healthcare-related tweets. In the CBOW model, the vector representation of words is learned from their contexts. To simplify the computation, the context is represented by an average of all words inside the context window. However, not all words in the context window contribute equally to the prediction of the target word. Greedily incorporating all the words in the context window will largely limit the contribution of the useful semantic words and bring noisy or irrelevant words into the learning process, while existing word embedding algorithms also try to learn a weighted CBOW model. Their weights are based on existing pre-defined syntactic rules while ignoring the task of the learned embedding. We propose learning weights based on the words’ relative importance in the classification task. Our intuition is that such learned weights place more emphasis on words that have comparatively more to contribute to the later task. We evaluate the embeddings learned from our algorithms on two healthcare-related datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that embeddings learned from the proposed algorithms outperform existing techniques by a relative accuracy improvement of over 9%.

The Relationships among Cognitive Correlates and Irregular Word, Non-Word, and Word Reading

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Abu-Hamour, Bashir; University, Mu'tah; Urso, Annmarie; Mather, Nancy

2012-01-01

This study explored four hypotheses: (a) the relationships among rapid automatized naming (RAN) and processing speed (PS) to irregular word, non-word, and word reading; (b) the predictive power of various RAN and PS measures, (c) the cognitive correlates that best predicted irregular word, non-word, and word reading, and (d) reading performance of…

Enrichment Effects of Gestures and Pictures on Abstract Words in a Second Language.

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Repetto, Claudia; Pedroli, Elisa; Macedonia, Manuela

2017-01-01

Laboratory research has demonstrated that multisensory enrichment promotes verbal learning in a foreign language (L2). Enrichment can be done in various ways, e.g., by adding a picture that illustrates the L2 word's meaning or by the learner performing a gesture to the word (enactment). Most studies have tested enrichment on concrete but not on abstract words. Unlike concrete words, the representation of abstract words is deprived of sensory-motor features. This has been addressed as one of the reasons why abstract words are difficult to remember. Here, we ask whether a brief enrichment training by means of pictures and by self-performed gestures also enhances the memorability of abstract words in L2. Further, we explore which of these two enrichment strategies is more effective. Twenty young adults learned 30 novel abstract words in L2 according to three encoding conditions: (1) reading, (2) reading and pairing the novel word to a picture, and (3) reading and enacting the word by means of a gesture. We measured memory performance in free and cued recall tests, as well as in a visual recognition task. Words encoded with gestures were better remembered in the free recall in the native language (L1). When recognizing the novel words, participants made less errors for words encoded with gestures compared to words encoded with pictures. The reaction times in the recognition task did not differ across conditions. The present findings support, even if only partially, the idea that enactment promotes learning of abstract words and that it is superior to enrichment by means of pictures even after short training.