Functional MRI assessment of hemispheric language dominance with using a lexical decision task

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Ryoo, Jae Wook; Choi, Dae Seob; Cho, Jae Min; Park, Eui Dong; You, Jin Jong; Na, Dong Gyu; Kim, Sam Soo; Cha, Sang Hoon

2005-01-01

We wanted to compare the fMRIs (functional magnetic resonance images) obtained during a lexical decision task and also during a word generation task, and we wanted to evaluate the usefulness of using a lexical decision task for the visualization of the brain language area and for the determination of language dominance. Sixteen patients (9 women and 7 men) who had had undergone the Wada test were included in our study. All the patients were left dominant for language, as tested for on the Wada test. The functional maps of the brain language area were obtained in all the subjects during the performance of a lexical decision task and also during the performance of a word generation task. The MR examinations were performed with a 1.5 T scanner and with using the EPI BOLD technique. We used the SPM program for the postprocessing of the images. The threshold for significance was set at ρ <0.001 or ρ <0.01. A lateralization index was calculated from the number of activated pixels in each hemispheric region (the whole hemisphere, the frontal lobe and the temporoparietal lobe), and the hemispheric language dominance was assessed by the lateralization index; the results were then compared with those results of the Wada test. The differences for the lateralization of the language area were analyzed with regard to the stimulation tasks and the regions used for the calculation of the lateralization indices. The number of activated pixels during the lexical decision task was significantly smaller than that of the word generation task. The language dominance based on the activated signals in each hemisphere, was consistent with the results of the Wada test for the word generation tasks in all the subjects. On the lexical decision task, the language dominance, as determined by the activated signals in each hemisphere and the temporoparietal lobe, correlated for 94% of the patients. The mean values of the lateralization index for the lexical decision task were higher than those

Functional MRI assessment of hemispheric language dominance with using a lexical decision task

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Ryoo, Jae Wook; Choi, Dae Seob; Cho, Jae Min; Park, Eui Dong; You, Jin Jong [Gyeongsang National University College of Medicine, Jinju (Korea, Republic of); Na, Dong Gyu [Seoul National University College of Medicine, Seoul (Korea, Republic of); Kim, Sam Soo [Kangwon National University College of Medicine, Chuncheon (Korea, Republic of); Cha, Sang Hoon [Chungbuk National University College of Medicine, Cheonju (Korea, Republic of)

2005-07-15

We wanted to compare the fMRIs (functional magnetic resonance images) obtained during a lexical decision task and also during a word generation task, and we wanted to evaluate the usefulness of using a lexical decision task for the visualization of the brain language area and for the determination of language dominance. Sixteen patients (9 women and 7 men) who had had undergone the Wada test were included in our study. All the patients were left dominant for language, as tested for on the Wada test. The functional maps of the brain language area were obtained in all the subjects during the performance of a lexical decision task and also during the performance of a word generation task. The MR examinations were performed with a 1.5 T scanner and with using the EPI BOLD technique. We used the SPM program for the postprocessing of the images. The threshold for significance was set at {rho} <0.001 or {rho} <0.01. A lateralization index was calculated from the number of activated pixels in each hemispheric region (the whole hemisphere, the frontal lobe and the temporoparietal lobe), and the hemispheric language dominance was assessed by the lateralization index; the results were then compared with those results of the Wada test. The differences for the lateralization of the language area were analyzed with regard to the stimulation tasks and the regions used for the calculation of the lateralization indices. The number of activated pixels during the lexical decision task was significantly smaller than that of the word generation task. The language dominance based on the activated signals in each hemisphere, was consistent with the results of the Wada test for the word generation tasks in all the subjects. On the lexical decision task, the language dominance, as determined by the activated signals in each hemisphere and the temporoparietal lobe, correlated for 94% of the patients. The mean values of the lateralization index for the lexical decision task were higher than

The (in)dependence of articulation and lexical planning during isolated word production.

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Buz, Esteban; Jaeger, T Florian

The number of phonological neighbors to a word (PND) can affect its lexical planning and pronunciation. Similar parallel effects on planning and articulation have been observed for other lexical variables, such as a word's contextual predictability. Such parallelism is frequently taken to indicate that effects on articulation are mediated by effects on the time course of lexical planning. We test this mediation assumption for PND and find it unsupported. In a picture naming experiment, we measure speech onset latencies (planning), word durations, and vowel dispersion (articulation). We find that PND predicts both latencies and durations. Further, latencies predict durations. However, the effects of PND and latency on duration are independent: parallel effects do not imply mediation. We discuss the consequences for accounts of lexical planning, articulation, and the link between them. In particular, our results suggest that ease of planning does not explain effects of PND on articulation.

Concreteness and context availability in lexical decision tasks.

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Levy-Drori, Shelly; Henik, Avishai

2006-01-01

Three experiments were carried out to elucidate the origins of the concreteness (C) effect in a lexical decision task. The first experiment was a replication of the work of Schwanenflugel et al. (1988) and Van Hell and De Groot (1998), who presented the context availability (CA) hypothesis. In this experiment CA seemed to be a dominant factor. Familiarity (FAM) was not incorporated in the ANOVA, but a regression analysis and negative correlation between C and FAM in the groups matched on CA showed that FAM could explain the disappearance of the C effect. Experiment 2 controlled FAM and revealed a C effect, although concrete and abstract words were matched on CA. Experiment 3 controlled C and FAM and revealed a CA effect. The current data emphasize the importance of controlling FAM and CA in examining the C effect in a lexical decision task and support a revised version of the dual-coding theory.

Lexical Complexity of Decision-Making Writing Tasks: Form-focused Guided Strategic Planning

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Fatemeh Mahdavirad

2016-06-01

Full Text Available The present study is an attempt to investigate the effect of form-focused guided strategic planning on lexical complexity of learners’ performance in writing tasks. The twenty intermediate level participants of the study performed an unplanned and then a planned decision-making task. In the planned task condition, the participants were provided with form-focused guided strategic planning which contained detailed instructions about how to plan, by being instructed to focus on form. The guidance included an explanation of the necessary structural and lexical patterns employed to express the learners’ views while developing a comparison-and-contrast paragraph in each task. The results of the statistical analysis indicated that the participants produced a written product with a greater lexical complexity in their performance of the task in the form-focused strategic planning condition. The findings emphasize the importance of guided strategic planning as a task condition in syllabus design for task-based language teaching and the necessity of incorporating this task feature for accomplishing lexical complexity in decision-making writing tasks.

A Model for Evidence Accumulation in the Lexical Decision Task

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Wagenmakers, Eric-Jan; Steyvers, Mark; Raaijmakers, Jeroen G. W.; Shiffrin, Richard M.; van Rijn, Hedderik; Zeelenberg, Rene

2004-01-01

We present a new model for lexical decision, REM-LD, that is based on REM theory (e.g., Shiffrin & Steyvers, 1997). REM-LD uses a principled (i.e., Bayes' rule) decision process that simultaneously considers the diagnosticity of the evidence for the 'WORD' response and the 'NONWORD' response. The model calculates the odds ratio that the presented…

Effects of valence and origin of emotions in word processing evidenced by event related potential correlates in a lexical decision task

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Kamil Konrad Imbir

2016-03-01

Full Text Available This paper presents behavioral and event-related potential (ERP correlates of emotional word processing during a lexical decision task (LDT. We showed that valence and origin (two distinct affective properties of stimuli help to account for the ERP correlates of LDT. The origin of emotion is a factor derived from the emotion duality model. This model distinguishes between the automatic and controlled elicitation of emotional states. The subjects’ task was to discriminate words from pseudo-words. The stimulus words were carefully selected to differ with respect to valence and origin whilst being matched with respect to arousal, concreteness, length and frequency in natural language. Pseudo-words were matched to words with respect to length. The subjects were 32 individuals aged from 19 to 26 years who were invited to participate in an EEG study of lexical decision making. They evaluated a list of words and pseudo-words. We found that valence modulated the amplitude of the FN400 component (290-375ms at centro-frontal (Fz, Cz region, whereas origin modulated the amplitude of the component in the LPC latency range (375-670ms. The results indicate that the origin of stimuli should be taken into consideration while deliberating on the processing of emotional words.

Nonword Repetition Priming in Lexical Decision Reverses as a Function of Study Task and Speed Stress

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Zeelenberg, Rene; Wagenmakers, Eric-Jan; Shiffrin, Richard M.

2004-01-01

The authors argue that nonword repetition priming in lexical decision is the net result of 2 opposing processes. First, repeating nonwords in the lexical decision task results in the storage of a memory trace containing the interpretation that the letter string is a nonword; retrieval of this trace leads to an increase in performance for repeated…

Emotion words and categories: evidence from lexical decision

OpenAIRE

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

2014-01-01

We examined the categorical nature of emotion word recognition. Positive, negative, and neutral words were presented in lexical decision tasks. Word frequency was additionally manipulated. In Experiment 1, "positive" and "negative" categories of words were implicitly indicated by the blocked design employed. A significant emotion–frequency interaction was obtained, replicating past research. While positive words consistently elicited faster responses than neutral words, only low frequency nega...

Beyond the initial 140 ms, lexical decision and reading aloud are different tasks: An ERP study with topographic analysis.

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Mahé, Gwendoline; Zesiger, Pascal; Laganaro, Marina

2015-11-15

Most of our knowledge on the time-course of the mechanisms involved in reading derived from electrophysiological studies is based on lexical decision tasks. By contrast, very few ERP studies investigated the processes involved in reading aloud. It has been suggested that the lexical decision task provides a good index of the processes occurring during reading aloud, with only late processing differences related to task response modalities. However, some behavioral studies reported different sensitivity to psycholinguistic factors between the two tasks, suggesting that print processing could differ at earlier processing stages. The aim of the present study was thus to carry out an ERP comparison between lexical decision and reading aloud in order to determine when print processing differs between these two tasks. Twenty native French speakers performed a lexical decision task and a reading aloud task with the same written stimuli. Results revealed different electrophysiological patterns on both waveform amplitudes and global topography between lexical decision and reading aloud from about 140 ms after stimulus presentation for both words and pseudowords, i.e., as early as the N170 component. These results suggest that only very early, low-level visual processes are common to the two tasks which differ in core processes. Taken together, our main finding questions the use of the lexical decision task as an appropriate paradigm to investigate reading processes and warns against generalizing its results to word reading. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Lexical Decision and Oral Reading by Poor and Normal Readers

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Bon, W.H.J. van; Tooren, P.H.; Eekelen, K.W.J.M. van

2000-01-01

The primary goal of this study was to compare a paper-and-pencil version of the lexical decision task, which can be administered groupwise, with reading aloud a differently ordered list of the same words and pseudowords. Participants were first and second graders (“normal readers”) and students from

Cognitive Effort Requirements in Recall, Recognition, and Lexical Decision

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1985-05-01

that the amount of integrative processing required for an item is a function of its preexisting or baseline familiarity level . Low frequency words... Lockhart , Craik , & Jacoby, 1976). In the present study, increased effort, and possibly increased distinctiveness, does not influence hit rates, which are...ing of items. Second, a lexical decision task, which does not require elabo- rative processing , leads to an overall poor level of recall. Furthermore

The Chinese Lexicon Project: A megastudy of lexical decision performance for 25,000+ traditional Chinese two-character compound words.

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Tse, Chi-Shing; Yap, Melvin J; Chan, Yuen-Lai; Sze, Wei Ping; Shaoul, Cyrus; Lin, Dan

2017-08-01

Using a megastudy approach, we developed a database of lexical variables and lexical decision reaction times and accuracy rates for more than 25,000 traditional Chinese two-character compound words. Each word was responded to by about 33 native Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong. This resource provides a valuable adjunct to influential mega-databases, such as the Chinese single-character, English, French, and Dutch Lexicon Projects. Three analyses were conducted to illustrate the potential uses of the database. First, we compared the proportion of variance in lexical decision performance accounted for by six word frequency measures and established that the best predictor was Cai and Brysbaert's (PLoS One, 5, e10729, 2010) contextual diversity subtitle frequency. Second, we ran virtual replications of three previously published lexical decision experiments and found convergence between the original experiments and the present megastudy. Finally, we conducted item-level regression analyses to examine the effects of theoretically important lexical variables in our normative data. This is the first publicly available large-scale repository of behavioral responses pertaining to Chinese two-character compound word processing, which should be of substantial interest to psychologists, linguists, and other researchers.

Automatic Priming Effects for New Associations in Lexical Decision and Perceptual Identification

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D. Pecher (Diane); J.G.W. Raaijmakers (Jeroen)

1999-01-01

textabstractInformation storage in semantic memory was investigated by looking at automatic priming effects for new associations in two experiments. In the study phase word pairs were presented in a paired-associate learning task. Lexical decision and perceptual identification were used to examine

Novel Word Lexicalization and the Prime Lexicality Effect

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Qiao, Xiaomei; Forster, Kenneth I.

2013-01-01

This study investigates how newly learned words are integrated into the first-language lexicon using masked priming. Two lexical decision experiments are reported, with the aim of establishing whether newly learned words behave like real words in a masked form priming experiment. If they do, they should show a prime lexicality effect (PLE), in…

Visual-Attentional Span and Lexical ­Decision in Skilled Adult Readers

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Holmes, Virginia M.; Dawson, Georgia

2014-01-01

The goal of the study was to examine the association between visual-attentional span and lexical decision in skilled adult readers. In the span tasks, an array of letters was presented briefly and recognition or production of a single cued letter (partial span) or production of all letters (whole span) was required. Independently of letter…

Context effects in embodied lexical-semantic processing

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Wessel O Van Dam

2010-10-01

Full Text Available The embodied view of language comprehension proposes that the meaning of words is grounded in perception and action rather than represented in abstract amodal symbols. Support for embodied theories of language processing comes from behavioural studies showing that understanding a sentence about an action can modulate congruent and incongruent physical responses, suggesting motor involvement during comprehension of sentences referring to bodily movement. Additionally, several neuroimaging studies have provided evidence that comprehending single words denoting manipulable objects elicits specific responses in the neural motor system. An interesting question that remains is whether action semantic knowledge is directly activated as motor simulations in the brain, or rather modulated by the semantic context in which action words are encountered. In the current paper we investigated the nature of conceptual representations using a go/no-go lexical decision task. Specifically, target words were either presented in a semantic context that emphasized dominant action features (features related to the functional use of an object or non-dominant action features. The response latencies in a lexical decision task reveal that participants were faster to respond to words denoting objects for which the functional use was congruent with the prepared movement. This facilitation effect, however, was only apparent when the semantic context emphasized corresponding motor properties. These findings suggest that motor involvement during comprehension of sentences is not automatic. Rather, the results suggest that conceptual processing is a context-dependent process that incorporates motor-related knowledge in a flexible manner.

An investigation into kana reading development in normal and dyslexic Japanese children using length and lexicality effects.

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Sambai, Ami; Uno, Akira; Kurokawa, Suzuko; Haruhara, Noriko; Kaneko, Masato; Awaya, Noriko; Kozuka, Junko; Goto, Takashi; Tsutamori, Eishi; Nakagawa, Kazumi; Wydell, Taeko N

2012-06-01

This is the first study to report differences between Japanese children with and without dyslexia in the way string-length and lexicality effects are manifested when reading Japanese kana. These children were asked to read kana words and non-words consisting of either two or five kana characters. The results showed that the error rates of the normal Preschoolers and Primary-School children with dyslexia were higher than those of the normal Primary-School children. Further, the reading latencies of the normal Preschoolers, First-graders and dyslexics were significantly longer than those of the normal Second, Third and Fifth/Sixth graders. Moreover, reading latencies became shorter as the age of the participants increased. Both normal and dyslexic children showed significant effects of length and lexicality on reading latencies. However, the interaction between the length and lexicality was only seen in normal children from the Second-grade onwards. These results suggest that (1) normal First-graders reach a ceiling in terms of reading accuracy and that (2) as Japanese normal children become older, they become better at lexical reading processes, which leads to fluent kana reading, but that (3) the dyslexics, even at Fifth/Sixth grades, have not developed sufficient lexical reading processes. Copyright © 2011 The Japanese Society of Child Neurology. All rights reserved.

Category Priming in the Lexical Decision Task and Evidence of Repetition Effects.

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Sanza, James

Semantic priming is the process by which a subject performing a lexical decision task is prepared for a target word through the presentation of a semantically related word. Repetition of a given word at specific intervals is one form of priming that has been shown to reduce subject reaction time in word recognition tasks. A study was conducted to…

A dual-route perspective on brain activation in response to visual words: evidence for a length by lexicality interaction in the visual word form area (VWFA).

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Schurz, Matthias; Sturm, Denise; Richlan, Fabio; Kronbichler, Martin; Ladurner, Gunther; Wimmer, Heinz

2010-02-01

Based on our previous work, we expected the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA) in the left ventral visual pathway to be engaged by both whole-word recognition and by serial sublexical coding of letter strings. To examine this double function, a phonological lexical decision task (i.e., "Does xxx sound like an existing word?") presented short and long letter strings of words, pseudohomophones, and pseudowords (e.g., Taxi, Taksi and Tazi). Main findings were that the length effect for words was limited to occipital regions and absent in the VWFA. In contrast, a marked length effect for pseudowords was found throughout the ventral visual pathway including the VWFA, as well as in regions presumably engaged by visual attention and silent-articulatory processes. The length by lexicality interaction on brain activation corresponds to well-established behavioral findings of a length by lexicality interaction on naming latencies and speaks for the engagement of the VWFA by both lexical and sublexical processes. Copyright (c) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

An RT distribution analysis of relatedness proportion effects in lexical decision and semantic categorization reveals different mechanisms.

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de Wit, Bianca; Kinoshita, Sachiko

2015-01-01

The magnitude of the semantic priming effect is known to increase as the proportion of related prime-target pairs in an experiment increases. This relatedness proportion (RP) effect was studied in a lexical decision task at a short prime-target stimulus onset asynchrony (240 ms), which is widely assumed to preclude strategic prospective usage of the prime. The analysis of the reaction time (RT) distribution suggested that the observed RP effect reflected a modulation of a retrospective semantic matching process. The pattern of the RP effect on the RT distribution found here is contrasted to that reported in De Wit and Kinoshita's (2014) semantic categorization study, and it is concluded that the RP effect is driven by different underlying mechanisms in lexical decision and semantic categorization.

Lexical Complexity of Decision-Making Writing Tasks: Form-focused Guided Strategic Planning

OpenAIRE

Mahdavirad, Fatemeh

2016-01-01

The present study is an attempt to investigate the effect of form-focused guided strategic planning on lexical complexity of learners’ performance in writing tasks. The twenty intermediate level participants of the study performed an unplanned and then a planned decision-making task. In the planned task condition, the participants were provided with form-focused guided strategic planning which contained detailed instructions about how to plan, by being instructed to focus on form. The guidanc...

Emotion words and categories: evidence from lexical decision.

Science.gov (United States)

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

2014-05-01

We examined the categorical nature of emotion word recognition. Positive, negative, and neutral words were presented in lexical decision tasks. Word frequency was additionally manipulated. In Experiment 1, "positive" and "negative" categories of words were implicitly indicated by the blocked design employed. A significant emotion-frequency interaction was obtained, replicating past research. While positive words consistently elicited faster responses than neutral words, only low frequency negative words demonstrated a similar advantage. In Experiments 2a and 2b, explicit categories ("positive," "negative," and "household" items) were specified to participants. Positive words again elicited faster responses than did neutral words. Responses to negative words, however, were no different than those to neutral words, regardless of their frequency. The overall pattern of effects indicates that positive words are always facilitated, frequency plays a greater role in the recognition of negative words, and a "negative" category represents a somewhat disparate set of emotions. These results support the notion that emotion word processing may be moderated by distinct systems.

Lesions to the left lateral prefrontal cortex impair decision threshold adjustment for lexical selection.

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Anders, Royce; Riès, Stéphanie; Van Maanen, Leendert; Alario, F-Xavier

Patients with lesions in the left prefrontal cortex (PFC) have been shown to be impaired in lexical selection, especially when interference between semantically related alternatives is increased. To more deeply investigate which computational mechanisms may be impaired following left PFC damage due to stroke, a psychometric modelling approach is employed in which we assess the cognitive parameters of the patients from an evidence accumulation (sequential information sampling) modelling of their response data. We also compare the results to healthy speakers. Analysis of the cognitive parameters indicates an impairment of the PFC patients to appropriately adjust their decision threshold, in order to handle the increased item difficulty that is introduced by semantic interference. Also, the modelling contributes to other topics in psycholinguistic theory, in which specific effects are observed on the cognitive parameters according to item familiarization, and the opposing effects of priming (lower threshold) and semantic interference (lower drift) which are found to depend on repetition. These results are developed for the blocked-cyclic picture naming paradigm, in which pictures are presented within semantically homogeneous (HOM) or heterogeneous (HET) blocks, and are repeated several times per block. Overall, the results are in agreement with a role of the left PFC in adjusting the decision threshold for lexical selection in language production.

A further examination of word frequency and age-of-acquisition effects in English lexical decision task performance: The role of frequency trajectory.

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Juhasz, Barbara J; Yap, Melvin J; Raoul, Akila; Kaye, Micaela

2018-04-23

Word frequency is an important predictor of lexical-decision task performance. The current study further examined the role of this variable by exploring the influence of frequency trajectory. Frequency trajectory is measured by how often a word occurs in childhood relative to adulthood. Past research on the role of this variable in word recognition has produced equivocal results. In the current study, words were selected based on their frequencies in Grade 1 (child frequency) and Grade 13 (college frequency). In Experiment 1, four frequency trajectory conditions were factorially examined in a lexical-decision task with English words: high-to-high (world), high-to-low (uncle), low-to-high (brain) and low-to-low (opera). an interaction between Grade 1 and college frequency demonstrated that words in the low-to-high condition were processed significantly faster and more accurately than words in the low-to-low condition, whereas the high-to-high and high-to-low conditions did not differ significantly. In Experiment 2, an advantage for words with an increasing frequency trajectory was also supported in regression analyses on both lexical decision and naming times for 3,039 items selected from the English Lexicon Project (Balota et al., 2007). This was replicated in Experiment 3, based on a regression analysis of 2,680 words from the British Lexicon Project (BLP; Keuleers, Lacey, Rastle, & Brysbaert, 2012). In all analyses, rated age-of-acquisition also significantly impacted word recognition. Together, the results suggest that the age at which a word is initially learned as well as its frequency trajectory across childhood impact performance in the lexical-decision task. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Lexical decisions in adults with low and high susceptibility to pattern-related visual stress: a preliminary investigation.

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James M Gilchrist

2015-04-01

Full Text Available Pattern-related visual stress (PRVS is a form of sensory hypersensitivity that some people experience when viewing high contrast repeating patterns, notably alternating dark and light stripes. Those susceptible to PRVS typically have a strong aversion to such stimuli, and this is often accompanied by experiences of visual discomfort and disturbance. The patterns most likely to elicit symptoms of PRVS have a square-wave grating configuration of spatial frequency ~ 3 cycles/degree. Such stimuli are characteristic of printed text in which lines of words and the spaces between them present a high contrast grating-like stimulus. Consequently, much printed reading material has the potential to elicit PRVS that may impair reading performance, and this problem is now thought to be common in individuals with reading difficulties including dyslexia. However, the manner in which PRVS affects reading ability is unknown. One possibility is that the early sensory visual stress may interfere with the later cognitive word recognition stage of the reading process, resulting in reading performance that is slower and/or less accurate.To explore the association of PRVS with word recognition ability, lexical decision performance (speed and accuracy to words and pronounceable non-words was measured in two groups of adults, having low and high susceptibility to PRVS. Results showed that lexical decisions were generally faster but less accurate in high-PRVS, and also that high-PRVS participants made decisions significantly faster for words than for non-words, revealing a strong lexicality effect that was not present in low-PRVS. These findings are novel and, as yet, unconfirmed by other studies. We consider possible interpretation in terms of cortical activity and perceptual mechanisms.

Slower Perception Followed by Faster Lexical Decision in Longer Words: A Diffusion Model Analysis.

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Oganian, Yulia; Froehlich, Eva; Schlickeiser, Ulrike; Hofmann, Markus J; Heekeren, Hauke R; Jacobs, Arthur M

2015-01-01

Effects of stimulus length on reaction times (RTs) in the lexical decision task are the topic of extensive research. While slower RTs are consistently found for longer pseudo-words, a finding coined the word length effect (WLE), some studies found no effects for words, and yet others reported faster RTs for longer words. Moreover, the WLE depends on the orthographic transparency of a language, with larger effects in more transparent orthographies. Here we investigate processes underlying the WLE in lexical decision in German-English bilinguals using a diffusion model (DM) analysis, which we compared to a linear regression approach. In the DM analysis, RT-accuracy distributions are characterized using parameters that reflect latent sub-processes, in particular evidence accumulation and decision-independent perceptual encoding, instead of typical parameters such as mean RT and accuracy. The regression approach showed a decrease in RTs with length for pseudo-words, but no length effect for words. However, DM analysis revealed that the null effect for words resulted from opposing effects of length on perceptual encoding and rate of evidence accumulation. Perceptual encoding times increased with length for words and pseudo-words, whereas the rate of evidence accumulation increased with length for real words but decreased for pseudo-words. A comparison between DM parameters in German and English suggested that orthographic transparency affects perceptual encoding, whereas effects of length on evidence accumulation are likely to reflect contextual information and the increase in available perceptual evidence with length. These opposing effects may account for the inconsistent findings on WLEs.

Differential activity in left inferior frontal gyrus for pseudowords and real words: an event-related fMRI study on auditory lexical decision.

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Xiao, Zhuangwei; Zhang, John X; Wang, Xiaoyi; Wu, Renhua; Hu, Xiaoping; Weng, Xuchu; Tan, Li Hai

2005-06-01

After Newman and Twieg and others, we used a fast event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) design and contrasted the lexical processing of pseudowords and real words. Participants carried out an auditory lexical decision task on a list of randomly intermixed real and pseudo Chinese two-character (or two-syllable) words. The pseudowords were constructed by recombining constituent characters of the real words to control for sublexical code properties. Processing of pseudowords and real words activated a highly comparable network of brain regions, including bilateral inferior frontal gyrus, superior, middle temporal gyrus, calcarine and lingual gyrus, and left supramarginal gyrus. Mirroring a behavioral lexical effect, left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) was significantly more activated for pseudowords than for real words. This result disconfirms a popular view that this area plays a role in grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, as such a conversion process was unnecessary in our task with auditory stimulus presentation. An alternative view was supported that attributes increased activity in left IFG for pseudowords to general processes in decision making, specifically in making positive versus negative responses. Activation in left supramarginal gyrus was of a much larger volume for real words than for pseudowords, suggesting a role of this region in the representation of phonological or semantic information for two-character Chinese words at the lexical level.

The role of lexical variables in the visual recognition of Chinese characters: A megastudy analysis.

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Sze, Wei Ping; Yap, Melvin J; Rickard Liow, Susan J

2015-01-01

Logographic Chinese orthography partially represents both phonology and semantics. By capturing the online processing of a large pool of Chinese characters, we were able to examine the relative salience of specific lexical variables when this nonalphabetic script is read. Using a sample of native mainland Chinese speakers (N = 35), lexical decision latencies for 1560 single characters were collated into a database, before the effects of a comprehensive range of variables were explored. Hierarchical regression analyses determined the unique item-level variance explained by orthographic (frequency, stroke count), semantic (age of learning, imageability, number of meanings), and phonological (consistency, phonological frequency) factors. Orthographic and semantic variables, respectively, accounted for more collective variance than the phonological variables. Significant main effects were further observed for the individual orthographic and semantic predictors. These results are consistent with the idea that skilled readers tend to rely on orthographic and semantic information when processing visually presented characters. This megastudy approach marks an important extension to existing work on Chinese character recognition, which hitherto has relied on factorial designs. Collectively, the findings reported here represent a useful set of empirical constraints for future computational models of character recognition.

Effects of relative embodiment in lexical and semantic processing of verbs.

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Sidhu, David M; Kwan, Rachel; Pexman, Penny M; Siakaluk, Paul D

2014-06-01

Research examining semantic richness effects in visual word recognition has shown that multiple dimensions of meaning are activated in the process of word recognition (e.g., Yap et al., 2012). This research has, however, been limited to nouns. In the present research we extended the semantic richness approach to verb stimuli in order to investigate how verb meanings are represented. We characterized a dimension of relative embodiment for verbs, based on the bodily sense described by Borghi and Cimatti (2010), and collected ratings on that dimension for 687 English verbs. The relative embodiment ratings revealed that bodily experience was judged to be more important to the meanings of some verbs (e.g., dance, breathe) than to others (e.g., evaporate, expect). We then tested the effects of relative embodiment and imageability on verb processing in lexical decision (Experiment 1), action picture naming (Experiment 2), and syntactic classification (Experiment 3). In all three experiments results showed facilitatory effects of relative embodiment, but not imageability: latencies were faster for relatively more embodied verbs, even after several other lexical variables were controlled. The results suggest that relative embodiment is an important aspect of verb meaning, and that the semantic richness approach holds promise as a strategy for investigating other aspects of verb meaning. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Vocalization Latencies of Skilled and Less Skilled Comprehenders for Words Written in Hiragana and Kanji.

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Kuhara-Kojima, Keiko; And Others

1996-01-01

Finds that Japanese fifth graders' naming speed was a good indicator of the automaticity of the lexical access for both syllabaries and morphograms, but that skilled/less-skilled differences in vocalization latencies were greater for real words than for pseudowords for both hiragana and kanji. Discusses the applicability of C. A. Perfetti's verbal…

Differential activity in left inferior frontal gyrus for pseudo and real words: an event-related functional MRI study on auditory lexical decision

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Xiao Zhuangwei; Xu Weixiong; Zhang Xuexin; Wang Xiaoyi; Weng Xuchu; Wu Renhua; Wu Xiaoping

2006-01-01

Objective: To study lexical processing of pseudo words and real words by using a fast event-related functional MRI (ER-fMRI) design. Methods: Participants did an auditory lexical decision task on a list of pseudo-randomly intermixed real and pseudo Chinese two-character (or two-syllable) words. Pseudo words were constructed by recombining constituent characters of the real words to control for sublexical codes properties. Results: The behavioral performance of fourteen participants indicated that response to pseudowords was significantly slower and less accurate than to real words (mean error rate: 9.9% versus 3.9%, mean reaction time: 1618 ms versus 1143 ms). Processing of pseudo words and real words activated a highly comparable network of brain regions, including bilateral inferior frontal gyrus, superior, middle temporal gyrus, calcarine and lingual gyrus, and left supramarginal gyrus. Mirroring a behavioral lexical effect, left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) was significantly more activated for pseudo words than for real words. Conclusion: The results indicate that the processing of left inferior frontal gyrus in judging pseudo words and real words is not related to grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, but rather to making positive versus negative responses in decision making. (authors)

Lexicalization of idioms in urban fifth graders: a reaction time study.

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Qualls, Constance Dean; Treaster, Beth; Blood, Gordon W; Hammer, Carol Scheffner

2003-01-01

Idioms are an important aspect of language that comprises a sizeable portion of our vocabulary. However, lexical access research has largely been limited to understanding how literal words are accessed and processed in the mental lexicon. Adult data show that idioms are quickly accessed from the lexicon and are likely processed as long words [J. Verbal Learn. Verbal Behav. 18 (1979) 523]. The purpose of this study was to examine lexicalization of idioms in a group of school-aged children. Using a phrase classification design, this research tested the Lexical Representation Hypothesis [J. Verbal Learn. Verbal Behav. 18 (1979) 523] in 19 urban fifth graders (5 boys, 14 girls; M age=10.16 years). On a computer, the students classified 54 phrases, including 24 idioms (high, moderate, and low familiarity [J. Speech Hear. Res. 36 (1993) 728]), 24 grammatical control word strings and 6 unrelated foils as either idioms or nonidioms. The idioms were identified with 62% accuracy. Unexpectedly, the boys tended to show higher rates of accuracy than the girls. Response latencies were shorter on the idioms compared to the controls and high familiarity idioms were processed faster than moderate and low familiarity idioms. These findings provide developmental data for lexicalization of idioms and the relationship between lexicalization and familiarity. At the cocnlusion of this articel, the reader will be able to: (1). discuss the various theories of idiom access and processing, (2). discuss how lexical access relates to idiom knowledge in school-aged children, and (3). consider the association between lexical access and familiarity relative to idiom comprehension in school-aged children.

ERP correlates of letter identity and letter position are modulated by lexical frequency

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Vergara-Martínez, Marta; Perea, Manuel; Gómez, Pablo; Swaab, Tamara Y.

2013-01-01

The encoding of letter position is a key aspect in all recently proposed models of visual-word recognition. We analyzed the impact of lexical frequency on letter position assignment by examining the temporal dynamics of lexical activation induced by pseudowords extracted from words of different frequencies. For each word (e.g., BRIDGE), we created two pseudowords: A transposed-letter (TL: BRIGDE) and a replaced-letter pseudoword (RL: BRITGE). ERPs were recorded while participants read words and pseudowords in two tasks: Semantic categorization (Experiment 1) and lexical decision (Experiment 2). For high-frequency stimuli, similar ERPs were obtained for words and TL-pseudowords, but the N400 component to words was reduced relative to RL-pseudowords, indicating less lexical/semantic activation. In contrast, TL- and RL-pseudowords created from low-frequency stimuli elicited similar ERPs. Behavioral responses in the lexical decision task paralleled this asymmetry. The present findings impose constraints on computational and neural models of visual-word recognition. PMID:23454070

Contralateral white noise selectively changes left human auditory cortex activity in a lexical decision task.

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Behne, Nicole; Wendt, Beate; Scheich, Henning; Brechmann, André

2006-04-01

In a previous study, we hypothesized that the approach of presenting information-bearing stimuli to one ear and noise to the other ear may be a general strategy to determine hemispheric specialization in auditory cortex (AC). In that study, we confirmed the dominant role of the right AC in directional categorization of frequency modulations by showing that fMRI activation of right but not left AC was sharply emphasized when masking noise was presented to the contralateral ear. Here, we tested this hypothesis using a lexical decision task supposed to be mainly processed in the left hemisphere. Subjects had to distinguish between pseudowords and natural words presented monaurally to the left or right ear either with or without white noise to the other ear. According to our hypothesis, we expected a strong effect of contralateral noise on fMRI activity in left AC. For the control conditions without noise, we found that activation in both auditory cortices was stronger on contralateral than on ipsilateral word stimulation consistent with a more influential contralateral than ipsilateral auditory pathway. Additional presentation of contralateral noise did not significantly change activation in right AC, whereas it led to a significant increase of activation in left AC compared with the condition without noise. This is consistent with a left hemispheric specialization for lexical decisions. Thus our results support the hypothesis that activation by ipsilateral information-bearing stimuli is upregulated mainly in the hemisphere specialized for a given task when noise is presented to the more influential contralateral ear.

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

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Zhao, Li-Ming; Yang, Yu-Fang

2016-01-01

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

Coordination of Word Recognition and Oculomotor Control During Reading: The Role of Implicit Lexical Decisions

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Choi, Wonil; Gordon, Peter C.

2013-01-01

The coordination of word-recognition and oculomotor processes during reading was evaluated in two eye-tracking experiments that examined how word skipping, where a word is not fixated during first-pass reading, is affected by the lexical status of a letter string in the parafovea and ease of recognizing that string. Ease of lexical recognition was manipulated through target-word frequency (Experiment 1) and through repetition priming between prime-target pairs embedded in a sentence (Experiment 2). Using the gaze-contingent boundary technique the target word appeared in the parafovea either with full preview or with transposed-letter (TL) preview. The TL preview strings were nonwords in Experiment 1 (e.g., bilnk created from the target blink), but were words in Experiment 2 (e.g., sacred created from the target scared). Experiment 1 showed greater skipping for high-frequency than low-frequency target words in the full preview condition but not in the TL preview (nonword) condition. Experiment 2 showed greater skipping for target words that repeated an earlier prime word than for those that did not, with this repetition priming occurring both with preview of the full target and with preview of the target’s TL neighbor word. However, time to progress from the word after the target was greater following skips of the TL preview word, whose meaning was anomalous in the sentence context, than following skips of the full preview word whose meaning fit sensibly into the sentence context. Together, the results support the idea that coordination between word-recognition and oculomotor processes occurs at the level of implicit lexical decisions. PMID:23106372

The Metamorphosis of the Statistical Segmentation Output: Lexicalization during Artificial Language Learning

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Fernandes, Tania; Kolinsky, Regine; Ventura, Paulo

2009-01-01

This study combined artificial language learning (ALL) with conventional experimental techniques to test whether statistical speech segmentation outputs are integrated into adult listeners' mental lexicon. Lexicalization was assessed through inhibitory effects of novel neighbors (created by the parsing process) on auditory lexical decisions to…

Lexical decision performance in developmental surface dysgraphia: Evidence for a unitary orthographic system that is used in both reading and spelling.

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Sotiropoulos, Andreas; Hanley, J Richard

The relationship between spelling, written word recognition, and picture naming is investigated in a study of seven bilingual adults who have developmental surface dysgraphia in both Greek (their first language) and English (their second language). Four of the cases also performed poorly at orthographic lexical decision in both languages. This finding is consistent with similar results in Italian that have been taken as evidence of a developmental impairment to a single orthographic system that is used for both reading and spelling. The remaining three participants performed well at orthographic lexical decision. At first sight, preserved lexical decision in surface dysgraphia is less easy to explain in terms of a shared orthographic system. However, the results of subsequent experiments showed clear parallels between the nature of the reading and spelling difficulties that these three individuals experienced, consistent with the existence of a single orthographic system. The different patterns that were observed were consistent with the claims of Friedmann and Lukov (2008. Developmental surface dyslexias. Cortex, 44, 1146-1160) that several distinct sub-types of developmental surface dyslexia exist. We show that individual differences in spelling in surface dysgraphia are also consistent with these sub-types; there are different developmental deficits that can give rise, in an individual, to a combination of surface dyslexia and dysgraphia. Finally, we compare the theoretical framework used by Friedmann and her colleagues that is based upon the architecture of the DRC model with an account that relies instead upon the Triangle model of reading].

The influence of emotion on lexical processing: insights from RT distributional analysis.

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Yap, Melvin J; Seow, Cui Shan

2014-04-01

In two lexical decision experiments, the present study was designed to examine emotional valence effects on visual lexical decision (standard and go/no-go) performance, using traditional analyses of means and distributional analyses of response times. Consistent with an earlier study by Kousta, Vinson, and Vigliocco (Cognition 112:473-481, 2009), we found that emotional words (both negative and positive) were responded to faster than neutral words. Finer-grained distributional analyses further revealed that the facilitation afforded by valence was reflected by a combination of distributional shifting and an increase in the slow tail of the distribution. This suggests that emotional valence effects in lexical decision are unlikely to be entirely mediated by early, preconscious processes, which are associated with pure distributional shifting. Instead, our results suggest a dissociation between early preconscious processes and a later, more task-specific effect that is driven by feedback from semantically rich representations.

ERP characterization of sustained attention effects in visual lexical categorization.

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Clara D Martin

Full Text Available As our understanding of the basic processes underlying reading is growing, the key role played by attention in this process becomes evident. Two research topics are of particular interest in this domain: (1 it is still undetermined whether sustained attention affects lexical decision tasks; (2 the influence of attention on early visual processing (i.e., before orthographic or lexico-semantic processing stages remains largely under-specified. Here we investigated early perceptual modulations by sustained attention using an ERP paradigm adapted from Thierry et al. [1]. Participants had to decide whether visual stimuli presented in pairs pertained to a pre-specified category (lexical categorization focus on word or pseudoword pairs. Depending on the lexical category of the first item of a pair, participants either needed to fully process the second item (hold condition or could release their attention and make a decision without full processing of the second item (release condition. The P1 peak was unaffected by sustained attention. The N1 was delayed and reduced after the second item of a pair when participants released their attention. Release of sustained attention also reduced a P3 wave elicited by the first item of a pair and abolished the P3 wave elicited by the second. Our results are consistent with differential effects of sustained attention on early processing stages and working memory. Sustained attention modulated early processing stages during a lexical decision task without inhibiting the process of stimulus integration. On the contrary, working memory involvement/updating was highly dependent upon the allocation of sustained attention. Moreover, the influence of sustained attention on both early and late cognitive processes was independent of lexical categorization focus.

Language differences in the brain network for reading in naturalistic story reading and lexical decision.

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Wang, Xiaojuan; Yang, Jianfeng; Yang, Jie; Mencl, W Einar; Shu, Hua; Zevin, Jason David

2015-01-01

Differences in how writing systems represent language raise important questions about whether there could be a universal functional architecture for reading across languages. In order to study potential language differences in the neural networks that support reading skill, we collected fMRI data from readers of alphabetic (English) and morpho-syllabic (Chinese) writing systems during two reading tasks. In one, participants read short stories under conditions that approximate natural reading, and in the other, participants decided whether individual stimuli were real words or not. Prior work comparing these two writing systems has overwhelmingly used meta-linguistic tasks, generally supporting the conclusion that the reading system is organized differently for skilled readers of Chinese and English. We observed that language differences in the reading network were greatly dependent on task. In lexical decision, a pattern consistent with prior research was observed in which the Middle Frontal Gyrus (MFG) and right Fusiform Gyrus (rFFG) were more active for Chinese than for English, whereas the posterior temporal sulcus was more active for English than for Chinese. We found a very different pattern of language effects in a naturalistic reading paradigm, during which significant differences were only observed in visual regions not typically considered specific to the reading network, and the middle temporal gyrus, which is thought to be important for direct mapping of orthography to semantics. Indeed, in areas that are often discussed as supporting distinct cognitive or linguistic functions between the two languages, we observed interaction. Specifically, language differences were most pronounced in MFG and rFFG during the lexical decision task, whereas no language differences were observed in these areas during silent reading of text for comprehension.

Lexical gaps and morphological decomposition: Evidence from German.

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Schuster, Swetlana; Lahiri, Aditi

2018-04-26

On the evidence of four lexical-decision tasks in German, we examine speakers' sensitivity to internal morphological composition and abstract morphological rules during the processing of derived words, real and novel. In a lexical-decision task with delayed priming, speakers were presented with two-step derived nouns such as Heilung "healing" derived from the adjective heil "intact" via the verb heilen "to heal." These were compared with two sets of derived novel words, one with and the other without an intermediate verb; for example, *Spitzung "sharpening" from spitz "sharp" via spitzen "sharpen" (Experiment 1) and *Hübschung "beautifying" from hübsch "pretty" via *hübschen "beautify" (Experiment 2). The question was whether there would be a difference between the two types of novel words. Both sets were morphologically viable in terms of combinatory possibilities. Results indicated that extant and novel complex words activated their respective base forms; that is, Heilung, *Spitzung, *Hübschung all primed heil, spitz, hübsch. Both sets of novel words were then combined in a third (delayed priming) experiment, where again they primed their bases, but were nevertheless significantly different from each other. Items with real words in the intermediate position (*Spitzung) showed stronger priming effects. Controls that were only related in form or semantics did not prime; neither did structurally unviable pseudowords show priming. A final experiment (Experiment 4), comparing the two types of novel words (*Spitzung vs. *Hübschung) in a simple lexical-decision task, also revealed significant differences across these sets, suggesting that the lexical status of the intermediate derivation affects the processing of novel forms. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Lexical neighborhood effects in pseudoword spelling.

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Tainturier, Marie-Josèphe; Bosse, Marie-Line; Roberts, Daniel J; Valdois, Sylviane; Rapp, Brenda

2013-01-01

The general aim of this study is to contribute to a better understanding of the cognitive processes that underpin skilled adult spelling. More specifically, it investigates the influence of lexical neighbors on pseudo-word spelling with the goal of providing a more detailed account of the interaction between lexical and sublexical sources of knowledge in spelling. In prior research examining this topic, adult participants typically heard lists composed of both words and pseudo-words and had to make a lexical decision to each stimulus before writing the pseudo-words. However, these priming paradigms are susceptible to strategic influence and may therefore not give a clear picture of the processes normally engaged in spelling unfamiliar words. In our two Experiments involving 71 French-speaking literate adults, only pseudo-words were presented which participants were simply requested to write to dictation using the first spelling that came to mind. Unbeknownst to participants, pseudo-words varied according to whether they did or did not have a phonological word neighbor. Results revealed that low-probability phoneme/grapheme mappings (e.g., /o/ -> aud in French) were used significantly more often in spelling pseudo-words with a close phonological lexical neighbor with that spelling (e.g., /krepo/ derived from "crapaud," /krapo/) than in spelling pseudo-words with no close neighbors (e.g., /frøpo/). In addition, the strength of this lexical influence increased with the lexical frequency of the word neighbors as well as with their degree of phonetic overlap with the pseudo-word targets. These results indicate that information from lexical and sublexical processes is integrated in the course of spelling, and a specific theoretical account as to how such integration may occur is introduced.

LEXICAL NEIGHBOURHOOD EFFECTS IN PSEUDOWORD SPELLING

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Marie-Josephe eTainturier

2013-11-01

Full Text Available The general aim of this study is to contribute to a better understanding of the cognitive processes that underpin skilled adult spelling. More specifically, it investigates the influence of lexical neighbours on pseudo-word spelling with the goal of providing a more detailed account of the interaction between lexical and sublexical sources of knowledge in spelling. In prior research examining this topic, subjects typically heard lists composed of both words and pseudo-words and had to make a lexical decision to each stimulus before writing the pseudo-words. However, these priming paradigms are susceptible to strategic influence and may therefore not give a clear picture of the processes normally engaged in spelling unfamiliar words. In our two Experiments involving 71 French speaking literature adults, only pseudo-words were presented which participants were simply requested to write to dictation using the first spelling that came to mind. Unbeknown to participants, pseudo-words varied according to whether they did or did not have a phonological word neighbour. Results revealed that low-probability phoneme/grapheme mappings (e.g., /o/ -> aud in French were used significantly more often in spelling pseudo-words with a close phonological lexical neighbour with that spelling (e.g., /krepo/ derived from crapaud, /krapo/ than in spelling pseudo-words with no close neighbours (e.g., /frøpo/. In addition, the strength of this lexical influence increased with the lexical frequency of the word neighbours as well as with their degree of phonetic overlap with the pseudo-word targets. These results indicate that the activation from lexical and sublexical processes is integrated in the course of spelling, and a specific theoretical account as to how such integration may occur is introduced.

Fine motor skills enhance lexical processing of embodied vocabulary: A test of the nimble-hands, nimble-minds hypothesis.

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Suggate, Sebastian; Stoeger, Heidrun

2017-10-01

Research suggests that fine motor skills (FMS) are linked to aspects of cognitive development in children. Additionally, lexical processing advantages exist for words implying a high body-object interaction (BOI), with initial findings indicating that such words in turn link to children's FMS-for which we propose and evaluate four competing hypotheses. First, a maturational account argues that any links between FMS and lexical processing should not exist once developmental variables are controlled for. Second, functionalism posits that any link between FMS and lexical processing arises due to environmental interactions. Third, the semantic richness hypothesis argues that sensorimotor input improves lexical processing, but predicts no links between FMS and lexical processing. A fourth account, the nimble-hands, nimble minds (NHNM) hypothesis, proposes that having greater FMS improves lexical processing for high-BOI words. In two experiments, the response latencies of preschool children (n = 90, n = 76, ages = 5;1) to 45 lexical items encompassing high-BOI, low-BOI, and less imageable words were measured, alongside measures of FMS, reasoning, and general receptive/expressive vocabulary. High-BOI words appeared to show unique links to FMS, which remained after accounting for low-BOI and less imageable words, general vocabulary, reasoning, and chronological age. Although further work is needed, the findings provide initial support for the NHNM hypothesis.

Language differences in the brain network for reading in naturalistic story reading and lexical decision.

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Xiaojuan Wang

Full Text Available Differences in how writing systems represent language raise important questions about whether there could be a universal functional architecture for reading across languages. In order to study potential language differences in the neural networks that support reading skill, we collected fMRI data from readers of alphabetic (English and morpho-syllabic (Chinese writing systems during two reading tasks. In one, participants read short stories under conditions that approximate natural reading, and in the other, participants decided whether individual stimuli were real words or not. Prior work comparing these two writing systems has overwhelmingly used meta-linguistic tasks, generally supporting the conclusion that the reading system is organized differently for skilled readers of Chinese and English. We observed that language differences in the reading network were greatly dependent on task. In lexical decision, a pattern consistent with prior research was observed in which the Middle Frontal Gyrus (MFG and right Fusiform Gyrus (rFFG were more active for Chinese than for English, whereas the posterior temporal sulcus was more active for English than for Chinese. We found a very different pattern of language effects in a naturalistic reading paradigm, during which significant differences were only observed in visual regions not typically considered specific to the reading network, and the middle temporal gyrus, which is thought to be important for direct mapping of orthography to semantics. Indeed, in areas that are often discussed as supporting distinct cognitive or linguistic functions between the two languages, we observed interaction. Specifically, language differences were most pronounced in MFG and rFFG during the lexical decision task, whereas no language differences were observed in these areas during silent reading of text for comprehension.

L2-L1 Translation Priming Effects in a Lexical Decision Task: Evidence From Low Proficient Korean-English Bilinguals

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Yoonhyoung Lee

2018-03-01

Full Text Available One of the key issues in bilingual lexical representation is whether L1 processing is facilitated by L2 words. In this study, we conducted two experiments using the masked priming paradigm to examine how L2-L1 translation priming effects emerge when unbalanced, low proficiency, Korean-English bilinguals performed a lexical decision task. In Experiment 1, we used a 150 ms SOA (50 ms prime duration followed by a blank interval of 100 ms and found a significant L2-L1 translation priming effect. In contrast, in Experiment 2, we used a 60 ms SOA (50 ms prime duration followed by a blank interval of 10 ms and found a null effect of L2-L1 translation priming. This finding is the first demonstration of a significant L2-L1 translation priming effect with unbalanced Korean-English bilinguals. Implications of this work are discussed with regard to bilingual word recognition models.

Lexical Decision with Left, Right and Center Visual Field Presentation: A Comparison between Dyslexic and Regular Readers by Means of Electrophysiological and Behavioral Measures

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Shaul, Shelley

2012-01-01

This study examined the differences in processing between regular and dyslexic readers in a lexical decision task in different visual field presentations (left, right, and center). The research utilized behavioral measures that provide information on accuracy and reaction time and electro-physiological measures that permit the examination of brain…

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.

False memories and lexical decision: even twelve primes do not cause long-term semantic priming.

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Zeelenberg, René; Pecher, Diane

2002-03-01

Semantic priming effects are usually obtained only if the prime is presented shortly before the target stimulus. Recent evidence obtained with the so-called false memory paradigm suggests, however, that in both explicit and implicit memory tasks semantic relations between words can result in long-lasting effects when multiple 'primes' are presented. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether these effects would generalize to lexical decision. In four experiments we showed that even as many as 12 primes do not cause long-term semantic priming. In all experiments, however, a repetition priming effect was obtained. The present results are consistent with a number of other results showing that semantic information plays a minimal role in long-term priming in visual word recognition.

Semantic size does not matter: "bigger" words are not recognized faster.

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Kang, Sean H K; Yap, Melvin J; Tse, Chi-Shing; Kurby, Christopher A

2011-06-01

Sereno, O'Donnell, and Sereno (2009) reported that words are recognized faster in a lexical decision task when their referents are physically large than when they are small, suggesting that "semantic size" might be an important variable that should be considered in visual word recognition research and modelling. We sought to replicate their size effect, but failed to find a significant latency advantage in lexical decision for "big" words (cf. "small" words), even though we used the same word stimuli as Sereno et al. and had almost three times as many subjects. We also examined existing data from visual word recognition megastudies (e.g., English Lexicon Project) and found that semantic size is not a significant predictor of lexical decision performance after controlling for the standard lexical variables. In summary, the null results from our lab experiment--despite a much larger subject sample size than Sereno et al.--converged with our analysis of megastudy lexical decision performance, leading us to conclude that semantic size does not matter for word recognition. Discussion focuses on why semantic size (unlike some other semantic variables) is unlikely to play a role in lexical decision.

Lexical Complexity Development from Dynamic Systems Theory Perspective: Lexical Density, Diversity, and Sophistication

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Reza Kalantari

2017-10-01

Full Text Available This longitudinal case study explored Iranian EFL learners’ lexical complexity (LC through the lenses of Dynamic Systems Theory (DST. Fifty independent essays written by five intermediate to advanced female EFL learners in a TOEFL iBT preparation course over six months constituted the corpus of this study. Three Coh-Metrix indices (Graesser, McNamara, Louwerse, & Cai, 2004; McNamara & Graesser, 2012, three Lexical Complexity Analyzer indices (Lu, 2010, 2012; Lu & Ai, 2011, and four Vocabprofile indices (Cobb, 2000 were selected to measure different dimensions of LC. Results of repeated measures analysis of variance (RM ANOVA indicated an improvement with regard to only lexical sophistication. Positive and significant relationships were found between time and mean values in Academic Word List and Beyond-2000 as indicators of lexical sophistication. The remaining seven indices of LC, falling short of significance, tended to flatten over the course of this writing program. Correlation analyses among LC indices indicated that lexical density enjoyed positive correlations with lexical sophistication. However, lexical diversity revealed no significant correlations with both lexical density and lexical sophistication. This study suggests that DST perspective specifies a viable foundation for analyzing lexical complexity

Semantic Size Does Not Matter: “Bigger” Words Are Not Recognised Faster

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Kang, Sean H.K.; Yap, Melvin J.; Tse, Chi-Shing; Kurby, Christopher A.

2011-01-01

Sereno, O’Donnell, and Sereno (2009) reported that words are recognised faster in a lexical decision task when their referents are physically large rather than small, suggesting that “semantic size” might be an important variable that should be considered in visual word recognition research and modelling. We sought to replicate their size effect, but failed to find a significant latency advantage in lexical decision for “big” words (cf. “small” words), even though we used the same word stimul...

A dual-task investigation of automaticity in visual word processing

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McCann, R. S.; Remington, R. W.; Van Selst, M.

2000-01-01

An analysis of activation models of visual word processing suggests that frequency-sensitive forms of lexical processing should proceed normally while unattended. This hypothesis was tested by having participants perform a speeded pitch discrimination task followed by lexical decisions or word naming. As the stimulus onset asynchrony between the tasks was reduced, lexical-decision and naming latencies increased dramatically. Word-frequency effects were additive with the increase, indicating that frequency-sensitive processing was subject to postponement while attention was devoted to the other task. Either (a) the same neural hardware shares responsibility for lexical processing and central stages of choice reaction time task processing and cannot perform both computations simultaneously, or (b) lexical processing is blocked in order to optimize performance on the pitch discrimination task. Either way, word processing is not as automatic as activation models suggest.

Do handwritten words magnify lexical effects in visual word recognition?

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Perea, Manuel; Gil-López, Cristina; Beléndez, Victoria; Carreiras, Manuel

2016-01-01

An examination of how the word recognition system is able to process handwritten words is fundamental to formulate a comprehensive model of visual word recognition. Previous research has revealed that the magnitude of lexical effects (e.g., the word-frequency effect) is greater with handwritten words than with printed words. In the present lexical decision experiments, we examined whether the quality of handwritten words moderates the recruitment of top-down feedback, as reflected in word-frequency effects. Results showed a reading cost for difficult-to-read and easy-to-read handwritten words relative to printed words. But the critical finding was that difficult-to-read handwritten words, but not easy-to-read handwritten words, showed a greater word-frequency effect than printed words. Therefore, the inherent physical variability of handwritten words does not necessarily boost the magnitude of lexical effects.

The effects of associative and semantic priming in the lexical decision task.

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Perea, Manuel; Rosa, Eva

2002-08-01

Four lexical decision experiments were conducted to examine under which conditions automatic semantic priming effects can be obtained. Experiments 1 and 2 analyzed associative/semantic effects at several very short stimulus-onset asynchronies (SOAs), whereas Experiments 3 and 4 used a single-presentation paradigm at two response-stimulus intervals (RSIs). Experiment 1 tested associatively related pairs from three semantic categories (synonyms, antonyms, and category coordinates). The results showed reliable associative priming effects at all SOAs. In addition, the correlation between associative strength and magnitude of priming was significant only at the shortest SOA (66 ms). When prime-target pairs were semantically but not associatively related (Experiment 2), reliable priming effects were obtained at SOAs of 83 ms and longer. Using the single-presentation paradigm with a short RSI (200 ms, Experiment 3), the priming effect was equal in size for associative + semantic and for semantic-only pairs (a 21-ms effect). When the RSI was set much longer (1,750 ms, Experiment 4), only the associative + semantic pairs showed a reliable priming effect (23 ms). The results are interpreted in the context of models of semantic memory.

The Influence of Orthographic Neighborhood Density and Word Frequency on Visual Word Recognition: Insights from RT Distributional Analyses

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Stephen Wee Hun eLim

2016-03-01

Full Text Available The effects of orthographic neighborhood density and word frequency in visual word recognition were investigated using distributional analyses of response latencies in visual lexical decision. Main effects of density and frequency were observed in mean latencies. Distributional analyses, in addition, revealed a density x frequency interaction: for low-frequency words, density effects were mediated predominantly by distributional shifting whereas for high-frequency words, density effects were absent except at the slower RTs, implicating distributional skewing. The present findings suggest that density effects in low-frequency words reflect processes involved in early lexical access, while the effects observed in high-frequency words reflect late postlexical checking processes.

Heterogeneity in semantic priming effect with a lexical decision task in patients after left hemisphere stroke

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Candice Steffen Holderbaum

Full Text Available ABSTRACT Investigations on the semantic priming effect (SPE in patients after left hemisphere (LH lesions have shown disparities that may be explained by the variability in performance found among patients. The aim of the present study was to verify the existence of subgroups of patients after LH stroke by searching for dissociations between performance on the lexical decision task based on the semantic priming paradigm and performance on direct memory, semantic association and language tasks. All 17 patients with LH lesions after stroke (ten non-fluent aphasics and seven non aphasics were analyzed individually. Results indicated the presence of three groups of patients according to SPE: one exhibiting SPE at both stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs, one with SPE only at long SOA, and another, larger group with no SPE.

The Precise Time Course of Lexical Activation: MEG Measurements of the Effects of Frequency, Probability, and Density in Lexical Decision

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Stockall, Linnaea; Stringfellow, Andrew; Marantz, Alec

2004-01-01

Visually presented letter strings consistently yield three MEG response components: the M170, associated with letter-string processing (Tarkiainen, Helenius, Hansen, Cornelissen, & Salmelin, 1999); the M250, affected by phonotactic probability, (Pylkkanen, Stringfellow, & Marantz, 2002); and the M350, responsive to lexical frequency (Embick,…

Lexical polysynthesis : Should we treat lexical bases and their affixes as a continuum ?

OpenAIRE

Tersis , Nicole

2006-01-01

International audience; Polysynthesis in Inuit appears at both lexical and sentence levels. The analysis of a sampling of 3000 lexical entries and 300 affixes collected in Eastern Greenland (Tunumiisut) shows how polysynthesis works in lexical morphology and how phonetic wastage helps to obscure the motivation for some lexical forms and favors the development of homophones. Furthermore, the analysis of the full set of affixes reveals a number of formal and semantic similarities which relate a...

Lexical selection in the semantically blocked cyclic naming task: The role of cognitive control and learning

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Jason E. Crowther

2014-01-01

Full Text Available Studies of semantic interference in language production have provided evidence for a role of cognitive control mechanisms in regulating the activation of semantic competitors during naming. The present study investigated the relationship between individual differences in cognitive control abilities, for both younger and older adults, and the degree of semantic interference in a blocked cyclic naming task. We predicted that individuals with lower working memory capacity (as measured by word span, lesser ability to inhibit distracting responses (as measured by Stroop interference, and a lesser ability to resolve proactive interference (as measured by a recent negatives task would show a greater increase in semantic interference in naming, with effects being larger for older adults. Instead, measures of cognitive control were found to relate to specific indices of semantic interference in the naming task, rather than overall degree of semantic interference, and few interactions with age were found, with younger and older adults performing similarly. The increase in naming latencies across naming trials within a cycle were negatively correlated with word span for both related and unrelated conditions, suggesting a strategy of narrowing response alternatives based upon memory for the set of item names. Evidence for a role of inhibition in response selection was obtained, as Stroop interference correlated positively with the change in naming latencies across cycles for the related, but not unrelated, condition. In contrast, recent negatives interference correlated negatively with the change in naming latencies across unrelated cycles, suggesting that individual differences in this tap the degree of strengthening of links in a lexical network based upon prior exposure. Results are discussed in terms of current models of lexical selection and consequences for word retrieval in more naturalistic production.

Priming effects in early readers. A quantitative study of children's response times in visual lexical decision-making in their first and second language.

OpenAIRE

Fitjar, Camilla Lausund

2016-01-01

Master's thesis in Literacy studies This thesis investigates the effects of various conditions of open priming on children in a series of lexical decision tasks in their first and second language. The primes are related through meaning and/or form to the target words in the experiments. The five conditions used are same word priming, meaning-related, shared first syllable, shared last syllable or unrelated. In addition, the experiment consists of 50% pseudo-words. There are two experim...

When Wine and Apple Both Help the Production of Grapes: ERP Evidence for Post-lexical Semantic Facilitation in Picture Naming.

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Python, Grégoire; Fargier, Raphaël; Laganaro, Marina

2018-01-01

Background : Producing a word in referential naming requires to select the right word in our mental lexicon among co-activated semantically related words. The mechanisms underlying semantic context effects during speech planning are still controversial, particularly for semantic facilitation which investigation remains under-represented in contrast to the plethora of studies dealing with interference. Our aim is to study the time-course of semantic facilitation in picture naming, using a picture-word "interference" paradigm and event-related potentials (ERPs). Methods : We compared two different types of semantic relationships, associative and categorical, in a single word priming and a double word priming paradigm. The primes were presented visually with a long negative Stimulus Onset Asynchrony (SOA), which is expected to cause facilitation. Results : Shorter naming latencies were observed after both associative and categorical primes, as compared to unrelated primes, and even shorter latencies after two primes. Electrophysiological results showed relatively late modulations of waveform amplitudes for both types of primes (beginning ~330 ms post picture onset with a single prime and ~275 ms post picture onset with two primes), corresponding to a shift in latency of similar topographic maps across conditions. Conclusion : The present results are in favor of a post-lexical locus of semantic facilitation for associative and categorical priming in picture naming and confirm that semantic facilitation is as relevant as semantic interference to inform on word production. The post-lexical locus argued here might be related to self-monitoting or/and to modulations at the level of word-form planning, without excluding the participation of strategic processes.

Data latency and the user community

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Escobar, V. M.; Brown, M. E.; Carroll, M.

2013-12-01

The community using NASA Earth science observations in applications has grown significantly, with increasing sophistication to serve national interests. The National Research Council's Earth Science Decadal Survey report stated that the planning for applied and operational considerations in the missions should accompany the acquisition of new knowledge about Earth (NRC, 2007). This directive has made product applications at NASA an integral part of converting the data collected into actionable knowledge that can be used to inform policy. However, successfully bridging scientific research with operational decision making in different application areas requires looking into user data requirements and operational needs. This study was conducted to determine how users are incorporating NASA data into applications and operational processes. The approach included a review of published materials, direct interviews with mission representatives, and an online professional review, which was distributed to over 6000 individuals. We provide a complete description of the findings with definitions and explanations of what goes into measuring latency as well as how users and applications utilize NASA data products. We identified 3 classes of users: operational (need data in 3 hours or less), near real time (need data within a day of acquisition), and scientific users (need highest quality data, time independent). We also determined that most users with applications are interested in specific types of products that may come from multiple missions. These users will take the observations when they are available, however the observations may have additional applications value if they are available either by a certain time of day or within a period of time after acquisition. NASA has supported the need for access to low latency data on an ad-hoc basis and more substantively in stand-alone systems such as the MODIS Rapid Response system and more recently with LANCE. The increased level

Neural correlates reveal sub-lexical orthography and phonology during reading aloud: A review

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Kalinka eTimmer

2014-08-01

Full Text Available The sub-lexical conversion of graphemes-to-phonemes (GPC during reading has been investigated extensively with behavioral measures, as well as event-related potentials (ERPs. Most research utilizes silent reading (e.g., lexical decision task for which phonological activation is not a necessity. However, recent research employed reading aloud to capture sub-lexical GPC. The masked priming paradigm avoids strategic processing and is therefore well suitable for capturing sub-lexical processing instead of lexical effects. By employing ERPs, the on-line time course of sub-lexical GPC can be observed before the overt response. ERPs have revealed that besides phonological activation, as revealed by behavioral studies, there is also early orthographic activation. This review describes studies in one’s native language, in one’s second language, and in a cross-language situation. We discuss the implications the ERP results have on different (computational models. First, the ERP results show that computational models should assume an early locus of the grapheme-to-phoneme-conversion (GPC. Second, cross-language studies reveal that the phonological representations from both languages of a bilingual become activated automatically and the phonology belonging to the context is selected rapidly. Therefore, it is important to extend the scope of computational models of reading (aloud to multiple lexicons.

ERP measures of partial semantic knowledge: left temporal indices of skill differences and lexical quality.

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Frishkoff, Gwen A; Perfetti, Charles A; Westbury, Chris

2009-01-01

This study examines the sensitivity of early event-related potentials (ERPs) to degrees of word semantic knowledge. Participants with strong, average, or weak vocabulary skills made speeded lexical decisions to letter strings. To represent the full spectrum of word knowledge among adult native-English speakers, we used rare words that were orthographically matched with more familiar words and with pseudowords. Since the lexical decision could not reliably be made on the basis of word form, subjects were obliged to use semantic knowledge to perform the task. A d' analysis suggested that high-skilled subjects adopted a more conservative strategy in response to rare versus more familiar words. Moreover, the high-skilled participants showed a trend towards an enhanced "N2c" to rare words, and a similar posterior temporal effect reached significance approximately 650 ms. Generators for these effects were localized to left temporal cortex. We discuss implications of these results for word learning and for theories of lexical semantic access.

The Malay Lexicon Project: a database of lexical statistics for 9,592 words.

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Yap, Melvin J; Liow, Susan J Rickard; Jalil, Sajlia Binte; Faizal, Siti Syuhada Binte

2010-11-01

Malay, a language spoken by 250 million people, has a shallow alphabetic orthography, simple syllable structures, and transparent affixation--characteristics that contrast sharply with those of English. In the present article, we first compare the letter-phoneme and letter-syllable ratios for a sample of alphabetic orthographies to highlight the importance of separating language-specific from language-universal reading processes. Then, in order to develop a better understanding of word recognition in orthographies with more consistent mappings to phonology than English, we compiled a database of lexical variables (letter length, syllable length, phoneme length, morpheme length, word frequency, orthographic and phonological neighborhood sizes, and orthographic and phonological Levenshtein distances) for 9,592 Malay words. Separate hierarchical regression analyses for Malay and English revealed how the consistency of orthography-phonology mappings selectively modulates the effects of different lexical variables on lexical decision and speeded pronunciation performance. The database of lexical and behavioral measures for Malay is available at http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.

Evidence for a differential interference of noise in sub-lexical and lexical reading routes in healthy participants and dyslexics.

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Pina Rodrigues, Ana; Rebola, José; Jorge, Helena; Ribeiro, Maria José; Pereira, Marcelino; Castelo-Branco, Miguel; van Asselen, Marieke

The ineffective exclusion of surrounding noise has been proposed to underlie the reading deficits in developmental dyslexia. However, previous studies supporting this hypothesis focused on low-level visual tasks, providing only an indirect link of noise interference on reading processes. In this study, we investigated the effect of noise on regular, irregular, and pseudoword reading in 23 dyslexic children and 26 age- and IQ-matched controls, by applying the white noise displays typically used to validate this theory to a lexical decision task. Reading performance and eye movements were measured. Results showed that white noise did not consistently affect dyslexic readers more than typical readers. Noise affected more dyslexic than typical readers in terms of reading accuracy, but it affected more typical than dyslexic readers in terms of response time and eye movements (number of fixations and regressions). Furthermore, in typical readers, noise affected more the speed of reading of pseudowords than real words. These results suggest a particular impact of noise on the sub-lexical reading route where attention has to be deployed to individual letters. The use of a lexical route would reduce the effect of noise. A differential impact of noise between words and pseudowords may therefore not be evident in dyslexic children if they are not yet proficient in using the lexical route. These findings indicate that the type of reading stimuli and consequent reading strategies play an important role in determining the effects of noise interference in reading processing and should be taken into account by further studies.

Non-cognate translation priming in masked priming lexical decision experiments: A meta-analysis.

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Wen, Yun; van Heuven, Walter J B

2017-06-01

The masked translation priming paradigm has been widely used in the last 25 years to investigate word processing in bilinguals. Motivated by studies reporting mixed findings, in particular for second language (L2) to first language (L1) translation priming, we conducted, for the first time in the literature, a meta-analysis of 64 masked priming lexical decision experiments across 24 studies to assess the effect sizes of L1-L2 and L2-L1 non-cognate translation priming effects in bilinguals. Our meta-analysis also investigated the influence of potential moderators of translation priming effects. The results provided clear evidence of significant translation priming effects for both directions, with L1-L2 translation priming significantly larger than L2-L1 translation priming (i.e., effect size of 0.86 vs. 0.31). The analyses also revealed that L1-L2 translation effect sizes were moderated by the interval between prime and target (ISI), whereas L2-L1 translation effect sizes were modulated by the number of items per cell. Theoretical and methodological implications of this meta-analysis are discussed and recommendations for future studies are provided.

Is pupillary response a reliable index of word recognition? Evidence from a delayed lexical decision task.

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Haro, Juan; Guasch, Marc; Vallès, Blanca; Ferré, Pilar

2017-10-01

Previous word recognition studies have shown that the pupillary response is sensitive to a word's frequency. However, such a pupillary effect may be due to the process of executing a response, instead of being an index of word processing. With the aim of exploring this possibility, we recorded the pupillary responses in two experiments involving a lexical decision task (LDT). In the first experiment, participants completed a standard LDT, whereas in the second they performed a delayed LDT. The delay in the response allowed us to compare pupil dilations with and without the response execution component. The results showed that pupillary response was modulated by word frequency in both the standard and the delayed LDT. This finding supports the reliability of using pupillometry for word recognition research. Importantly, our results also suggest that tasks that do not require a response during pupil recording lead to clearer and stronger effects.

A Lexical Analysis Tool with Ambiguity Support

OpenAIRE

Quesada, Luis; Berzal, Fernando; Cortijo, Francisco J.

2012-01-01

Lexical ambiguities naturally arise in languages. We present Lamb, a lexical analyzer that produces a lexical analysis graph describing all the possible sequences of tokens that can be found within the input string. Parsers can process such lexical analysis graphs and discard any sequence of tokens that does not produce a valid syntactic sentence, therefore performing, together with Lamb, a context-sensitive lexical analysis in lexically-ambiguous language specifications.

Using Predictability for Lexical Segmentation.

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Çöltekin, Çağrı

2017-09-01

This study investigates a strategy based on predictability of consecutive sub-lexical units in learning to segment a continuous speech stream into lexical units using computational modeling and simulations. Lexical segmentation is one of the early challenges during language acquisition, and it has been studied extensively through psycholinguistic experiments as well as computational methods. However, despite strong empirical evidence, the explicit use of predictability of basic sub-lexical units in models of segmentation is underexplored. This paper presents an incremental computational model of lexical segmentation for exploring the usefulness of predictability for lexical segmentation. We show that the predictability cue is a strong cue for segmentation. Contrary to earlier reports in the literature, the strategy yields state-of-the-art segmentation performance with an incremental computational model that uses only this particular cue in a cognitively plausible setting. The paper also reports an in-depth analysis of the model, investigating the conditions affecting the usefulness of the strategy. Copyright © 2016 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

Lexical Discourse Analysis in Translation

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Al Khotaba, Eissa; Al Tarawneh, Khaled

2015-01-01

Lexical Discourse very often depend on lexis. Lexical Discourse analysis, however, has not yet been given enough consideration of the phenomenon of translation. This paper investigates lexical discourse analysis in translation from one language to another. This qualitative study comprises 15 text translated by M.A. students at the Department of…

Effect of lexical and syllable frequency in anomic aphasia

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Janeth Hernández Jaramillo

2012-09-01

Full Text Available Objective: this study compares the performance of two groups of participants with and without aphasia anomic in a lexical decision tasks (LDT and spelling, in relation to the effect of the variables of word frequency and syllable. Materials and methods: a prospective study with a 2x2x2 design, which administered the LDT, in which each she/he had to decide if it was a real Spanish word or not, pressing one of two keys. To the task of spelling, they had to spell orally each of words presented auditorily. Results: It was found that in the LTD, the experimental group made more errors in the high-frequency stimuli syllable while the control group had more errors in the low-frequency syllables. In terms of reaction times was evident that the experimental group took longer to solve the task than the control group. The spelling task performance showed no difference in groups or conditions (lexical frequency and syllable. Conclusions: similar than other researches in normalized population, the results of this study demonstrate the effect of lexical frequency facilitation and inhibition that generates high syllable frequency.

Investigating lexical competition and the cost of phonemic restoration.

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Balling, Laura Winther; Morris, David Jackson; Tøndering, John

2017-12-01

Due to phonemic restoration, listeners can reliably perceive words when a phoneme is replaced with noise. The cost associated with this process was investigated along with the effect of lexical uniqueness on phonemic restoration, using data from a lexical decision experiment where noise replaced phonemes that were either uniqueness points (the phoneme at which a word deviates from all nonrelated words that share the same onset) or phonemes immediately prior to these. A baseline condition was also included with no noise-interrupted stimuli. Results showed a significant cost of phonemic restoration, with 100 ms longer word identification times and a 14% decrease in word identification accuracy for interrupted stimuli compared to the baseline. Regression analysis of response times from the interrupted conditions showed no effect of whether the interrupted phoneme was a uniqueness point, but significant effects for several temporal attributes of the stimuli, including the duration and position of the interrupted segment. These results indicate that uniqueness points are not distinct breakpoints in the cohort reduction that occurs during lexical processing, but that temporal properties of the interrupted stimuli are central to auditory word recognition. These results are interpreted in the context of models of speech perception.

Lexical mediation of phonotactic frequency effects on spoken word recognition: A Granger causality analysis of MRI-constrained MEG/EEG data.

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Gow, David W; Olson, Bruna B

2015-07-01

Phonotactic frequency effects play a crucial role in a number of debates over language processing and representation. It is unclear however, whether these effects reflect prelexical sensitivity to phonotactic frequency, or lexical "gang effects" in speech perception. In this paper, we use Granger causality analysis of MR-constrained MEG/EEG data to understand how phonotactic frequency influences neural processing dynamics during auditory lexical decision. Effective connectivity analysis showed weaker feedforward influence from brain regions involved in acoustic-phonetic processing (superior temporal gyrus) to lexical areas (supramarginal gyrus) for high phonotactic frequency words, but stronger top-down lexical influence for the same items. Low entropy nonwords (nonwords judged to closely resemble real words) showed a similar pattern of interactions between brain regions involved in lexical and acoustic-phonetic processing. These results contradict the predictions of a feedforward model of phonotactic frequency facilitation, but support the predictions of a lexically mediated account.

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…

Attention training normalises combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder effects on emotional Stroop performance using lexically matched word lists.

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Khanna, Maya M; Badura-Brack, Amy S; McDermott, Timothy J; Shepherd, Alex; Heinrichs-Graham, Elizabeth; Pine, Daniel S; Bar-Haim, Yair; Wilson, Tony W

2015-08-26

We examined two groups of combat veterans, one with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (n = 27) and another without PTSD (n = 16), using an emotional Stroop task (EST) with word lists matched across a series of lexical variables (e.g. length, frequency, neighbourhood size, etc.). Participants with PTSD exhibited a strong EST effect (longer colour-naming latencies for combat-relevant words as compared to neutral words). Veterans without PTSD produced no such effect, t  .37. Participants with PTSD then completed eight sessions of attention training (Attention Control Training or Attention Bias Modification Training) with a dot-probe task utilising threatening and neutral faces. After training, participants-especially those undergoing Attention Control Training-no longer produced longer colour-naming latencies for combat-related words as compared to other words, indicating normalised attention allocation processes after treatment.

Lexical Sophistication as a Multidimensional Phenomenon: Relations to Second Language Lexical Proficiency, Development, and Writing Quality

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Kim, Minkyung; Crossley, Scott A.; Kyle, Kristopher

2018-01-01

This study conceptualizes lexical sophistication as a multidimensional phenomenon by reducing numerous lexical features of lexical sophistication into 12 aggregated components (i.e., dimensions) via a principal component analysis approach. These components were then used to predict second language (L2) writing proficiency levels, holistic lexical…

Differential impact of thalamic versus subthalamic deep brain stimulation on lexical processing.

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Krugel, Lea K; Ehlen, Felicitas; Tiedt, Hannes O; Kühn, Andrea A; Klostermann, Fabian

2014-10-01

Roles of subcortical structures in language processing are vague, but, interestingly, basal ganglia and thalamic Deep Brain Stimulation can go along with reduced lexical capacities. To deepen the understanding of this impact, we assessed word processing as a function of thalamic versus subthalamic Deep Brain Stimulation. Ten essential tremor patients treated with thalamic and 14 Parkinson׳s disease patients with subthalamic Deep Brain Stimulation performed an acoustic Lexical Decision Task ON and OFF stimulation. Combined analysis of task performance and event-related potentials allowed the determination of processing speed, priming effects, and N400 as neurophysiological correlate of lexical stimulus processing. 12 age-matched healthy participants acted as control subjects. Thalamic Deep Brain Stimulation prolonged word decisions and reduced N400 potentials. No comparable ON-OFF effects were present in patients with subthalamic Deep Brain Stimulation. In the latter group of patients with Parkinson' disease, N400 amplitudes were, however, abnormally low, whether under active or inactive Deep Brain Stimulation. In conclusion, performance speed and N400 appear to be influenced by state functions, modulated by thalamic, but not subthalamic Deep Brain Stimulation, compatible with concepts of thalamo-cortical engagement in word processing. Clinically, these findings specify cognitive sequels of Deep Brain Stimulation in a target-specific way. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Investigating lexical competition and the cost of phonemic restoration

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Balling, Laura Winther; Morris, David Jackson; Tøndering, John

2017-01-01

Due to phonemic restoration, listeners can reliably perceive words when a phoneme is replaced with noise. The cost associated with this process was investigated along with the effect of lexical uniqueness on phonemic restoration, using data from a lexical decision experiment where noise replaced...... phonemes that were either uniqueness points (the phoneme at which a word deviates from all nonrelated words that share the same onset) or phonemes immediately prior to these. A baseline condition was also included with no noise-interrupted stimuli. Results showed a significant cost of phonemic restoration......, with 100 ms longer word identification times and a 14% decrease in word identification accuracy for interrupted stimuli compared to the baseline. Regression analysis of response times from the interrupted conditions showed no effect of whether the interrupted phoneme was a uniqueness point, but significant...

Investigating Lexical Competition and the Cost of Phonemic Restoration

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Balling, Laura Winther; Morris, David Jackson; Tøndering, John

2017-01-01

Due to phonemic restoration, listeners can reliably perceive words when a phoneme is replaced with noise. The cost associated with this process was investigated along with the effect of lexical uniqueness on phonemic restoration, using data from a lexical decision experiment where noise replaced...... phonemes that were either uniqueness points (the phoneme at which a word deviates from all nonrelated words that share the same onset) or phonemes immediately prior to these. A baseline condition was also included with no noise-interrupted stimuli. Results showed a significant cost of phonemic restoration......, with 100 ms longer word identification times and a 14% decrease in word identification accuracy for interrupted stimuli compared to the baseline. Regression analysis of response times from the interrupted conditions showed no effect of whether the interrupted phoneme was a uniqueness point, but significant...

The comparative impact of lexical translation and lexical inferencing on EFL learners’ vocabulary retention

OpenAIRE

Nasim Shangarfam; Neda Ghorbani; Ehsan Safarpoor; Mahshid Maha

2013-01-01

The present study is an attempt to investigate the comparative effects of lexical translation and lexical inferencing techniques on Female intermediate EFL learners’ vocabulary retention. For this purpose, 90 female learners attending the Jahad Daneshgahi Center in Qom took a piloted sample KET test, 60 of whom were selected as homogenous learners. They were randomly divided into two experimental groups-one learning new vocabulary items through lexical translation technique and the other with...

Reading Polymorphemic Dutch Compounds: Toward a Multiple Route Model of Lexical Processing

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Kuperman, Victor; Schreuder, Robert; Bertram, Raymond; Baayen, R. Harald

2009-01-01

This article reports an eye-tracking experiment with 2,500 polymorphemic Dutch compounds presented in isolation for visual lexical decision while readers' eye movements were registered. The authors found evidence that both full forms of compounds ("dishwasher") and their constituent morphemes (e.g., "dish," "washer," "er") and morphological…

Processing of acoustic and phonological information of lexical tones in Mandarin Chinese revealed by mismatch negativity.

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Yu, Keke; Wang, Ruiming; Li, Li; Li, Ping

2014-01-01

The accurate perception of lexical tones in tonal languages involves the processing of both acoustic information and phonological information carried by the tonal signal. In this study we evaluated the relative role of the two types of information in native Chinese speaker's processing of tones at a preattentive stage with event-related potentials (ERPs), particularly the mismatch negativity (MNN). Specifically, we distinguished the acoustic from the phonological information by manipulating phonological category and acoustic interval of the stimulus materials. We found a significant main effect of phonological category for the peak latency of MMN, but a main effect of both phonological category and acoustic interval for the mean amplitude of MMN. The results indicated that the two types of information, acoustic and phonological, play different roles in the processing of Chinese lexical tones: acoustic information only impacts the extent of tonal processing, while phonological information affects both the extent and the time course of tonal processing. Implications of these findings are discussed in light of neurocognitive processes of phonological processing.

A Dynamic Model for Decision Making During Memory Retrieval

Science.gov (United States)

2015-10-26

a  knowledge  task  (pseudo-­‐ lexical  decision),  a  perceptual  task  (perceptual  identification),  and  an  episodic... lexical decision), a perceptual task (perceptual identification), and an episodic recognition task (recognition memory for occurrence of a test item...Topics in Cognitive Science, 4(1), 135-150. Cox, G. E., Kachergis, G., and Shiffrin, R. M. (2012). Gaussian process regression for trajectory analysis . In

Macrostructural Treatment of Multi-word Lexical Items

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Alenka Vrbinc

2011-05-01

Full Text Available The paper discusses the macrostructural treatment of multi-word lexical items in mono- and bilingual dictionaries. First, the classification of multi-word lexical items is presented, and special attention is paid to the discussion of compounds – a specific group of multi-word lexical items that is most commonly afforded headword status but whose inclusion in the headword list may also depend on spelling. Then the inclusion of multi-word lexical items in monolingual dictionaries is dealt with in greater detail, while the results of a short survey on the inclusion of five randomly chosen multi-word lexical items in seven English monolingual dictionaries are presented. The proposals as to how to treat these five multi-word lexical items in bilingual dictionaries are presented in the section about the inclusion of multi-word lexical items in bilingual dictionaries. The conclusion is that it is most important to take the users’ needs into consideration and to make any dictionary as user friendly as possible.

The Effect of Consuming Ambon Banana (Musa paradisiaca Var. Sapientum on Sleep Latency of Elderly Hypertension

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Selvi Ria Ristania

2017-08-01

Full Text Available Elderly hypertension often reported that their latency elongated was less compared to healthy elderly. The increase of latency impact on health, it causes susceptibility to illness, stress, confusion, disorientation, mood disorders, less fresh, decrease ability to make decisions. The aim of this research was to explain the effect of consuming Ambon banana on sleep latency of elderly hypertension in Mulyorejo, Surabaya. Time series one group pre-test post test design was used in this research. Affordable population in this research was elderly hypertension in RW 2 and RW 3 Mulyorejo Surabaya. Total sample was 15 respondents and taken by total sampling technique. The independent variable was consuming Ambon banana, and dependent variable was sleep latency of elderly hypertension. Every day the latency and blood pressure on elderly was monitored. Data was collected using questionnaire, and then analyzed using Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test. The result showed that consuming Ambon banana affect sleep latency (p=0.009.

Effects of valence and arousal on emotional word processing are modulated by concreteness: Behavioral and ERP evidence from a lexical decision task.

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Yao, Zhao; Yu, Deshui; Wang, Lili; Zhu, Xiangru; Guo, Jingjing; Wang, Zhenhong

2016-12-01

We investigated whether the effects of valence and arousal on emotional word processing are modulated by concreteness using event-related potentials (ERPs). The stimuli included concrete words (Experiment 1) and abstract words (Experiment 2) that were organized in an orthogonal design, with valence (positive and negative) and arousal (low and high) as factors in a lexical decision task. In Experiment 1, the impact of emotion on the effects of concrete words mainly resulted from the contribution of valence. Positive concrete words were processed more quickly than negative words and elicited a reduction of N400 (300-410ms) and enhancement of late positive complex (LPC; 450-750ms), whereas no differences in response times or ERPs were found between high and low levels of arousal. In Experiment 2, the interaction between valence and arousal influenced the impact of emotion on the effects of abstract words. Low-arousal positive words were associated with shorter response times and a reduction of LPC amplitudes compared with high-arousal positive words. Low-arousal negative words were processed more slowly and elicited a reduction of N170 (140-200ms) compared with high-arousal negative words. The present study indicates that word concreteness modulates the contributions of valence and arousal to the effects of emotion, and this modulation occurs during the early perceptual processing stage (N170) and late elaborate processing stage (LPC) for emotional words and at the end of all cognitive processes (i.e., reflected by response times). These findings support an embodied theory of semantic representation and help clarify prior inconsistent findings regarding the ways in which valance and arousal influence different stages of word processing, at least in a lexical decision task. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Ambiguity in the Acquisition of Lexical Information

OpenAIRE

Vanderwende, Lucy

1995-01-01

This paper describes an approach to the automatic identification of lexical information in on-line dictionaries. This approach uses bootstrapping techniques, specifically so that ambiguity in the dictionary text can be treated properly. This approach consists of processing an on-line dictionary multiple times, each time refining the lexical information previously acquired and identifying new lexical information. The strength of this approach is that lexical information can be acquired from de...

Assessment of Lexical and Non-Lexical Spelling in Students in Grades 1-7

Science.gov (United States)

Kohnen, Saskia; Colenbrander, Danielle; Krajenbrink, Trudy; Nickels, Lyndsey

2015-01-01

The main aim of this study was to develop standardised tests that assess some of the most important spelling skills for children in primary school: sound-letter mappings (non-lexical spelling) and word spelling accuracy (lexical spelling). We present normative comparison data for children in Grades 1-7 as well as measures of validity and…

Lexically guided perceptual learning in Mandarin Chinese

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Burchfield, L.A.; Luk, S.H.K.; Antoniou, M.; Cutler, A.

2017-01-01

Lexically guided perceptual learni ng refers to the use of lexical knowledge to retune sp eech categories and thereby adapt to a novel talker's pronunciation. This adaptation has been extensively documented, but primarily for segmental-based learning in English and Dutch. In languages with lexical

Lexical need as a two-way reality cognition tool

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Mark Kit

2014-09-01

Full Text Available Lexical need as a two-way reality cognition tool In this paper a concept of lexical need is introduced and its application in research of cognitive aspects of translation is discussed. Further discussion elaborates mechanisms of development of translator’s lexical space in the course of translation. Authors discuss the importance and special nature of low-frequency lexical units and difficulties encountered when studying their usage and suggest that the lexical need concept help these studies. Lexical need analysis can be also used to learn specifics of translator’s lexical space and then to take measures for selection of translators and improvement of their skills.

Predicting Lexical Proficiency in Language Learner Texts Using Computational Indices

Science.gov (United States)

Crossley, Scott A.; Salsbury, Tom; McNamara, Danielle S.; Jarvis, Scott

2011-01-01

The authors present a model of lexical proficiency based on lexical indices related to vocabulary size, depth of lexical knowledge, and accessibility to core lexical items. The lexical indices used in this study come from the computational tool Coh-Metrix and include word length scores, lexical diversity values, word frequency counts, hypernymy…

Lexical Resources and Their Application.

Science.gov (United States)

Gellerstam, Martin

This paper discusses computer-based resources for lexical data and their uses. First, the kinds of lexical data available are described, including those related to form (spelling, pronunciation, inflection, word class), meaning (definition/equivalent, synonyms/antonyms/hyperonyms, thesaurus classification), context (grammatical collocations,…

Reusable Lexical Representations for Idioms

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Odijk, J.E.J.M.

2004-01-01

In this paper I introduce (1) a technically simple and highly theory-independent way for lexically representing flexible idiomatic expressions, and (2) a procedure to incorporate these lexical representations in a wide variety of NLP systems. The method is based on Structural EQuivalence Classes

Lexical and articulatory interactions in children's language production.

Science.gov (United States)

Heisler, Lori; Goffman, Lisa; Younger, Barbara

2010-09-01

Traditional models of adult language processing and production include two levels of representation: lexical and sublexical. The current study examines the influence of the inclusion of a lexical representation (i.e. a visual referent and/or object function) on the stability of articulation as well as on phonetic accuracy and variability in typically developing children and children with specific language impairment (SLI). A word learning paradigm was developed so that we could compare children's production with and without lexical representation. The variability and accuracy of productions were examined using speech kinematics as well as traditional phonetic accuracy measures. Results showed that phonetic forms with lexical representation were produced with more articulatory stability than phonetic forms without lexical representation. Using more traditional transcription measures, a paired lexical referent generally did not influence segmental accuracy (percent consonant correct and type token ratio). These results suggest that lexical and articulatory levels of representation are not completely independent. Implications for models of language production are discussed.

Performance of a sample of patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), Alzheimer's Disease (AD) and healthy elderly on a lexical decision test (LDT) as a measure of pre-morbid intelligence

OpenAIRE

Serrao, Valéria Trunkl; Brucki, Sônia Maria Dozzi; Campanholo, Kenia Repiso; Mansur, Letícia Lessa; Nitrini, Ricardo; Miotto, Eliane Correa

2015-01-01

Objective: The objective of this study was to describe the performance of healthy elderly patients with aging-related pathologies (MCI) and patients with AD on a lexical decision test. Methods: The study included 38 healthy elderly subjects, 61 MCI and 26 AD patients from the Neurology Department of the Hospital das Clinicas, Behavioral and Cognitive Neurology Group. The neuropsychological instruments included the episodic memory test (RAVLT), subtests from the WAIS-III (Matrix Reasoning and...

Flexible recruitment of semantic richness: Context modulates body-object interaction effects in lexical-semantic processing

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Cody eTousignant

2012-03-01

Full Text Available Body-object interaction (BOI is a semantic richness variable that measures the perceived ease with which the human body can physically interact with a word’s referent. Lexical and semantic processing is facilitated when words are associated with relatively more bodily experience (high BOI words, e.g., belt. To date, BOI effects have been examined in only one semantic decision context (is it imageable?. It has been argued that semantic processing is dynamic and can be modulated by context. We examined these influences by testing how task knowledge modulated BOI effects. We presented the same stimuli (high- and low-BOI entity words and a set of action words in each of four action/entity semantic categorization tasks (SCTs. Task framing was manipulated: participants were told about one (actions or entities or both (actions and entities categories of words in the decision task. Facilitatory BOI effects were observed when participants knew that ‘entity’ was part of the decision category, regardless of whether the high- and low-BOI entity words appeared on the affirmative or negative side of the decision. That BOI information was only useful when participants had expectations that object words would be presented suggests a strong role for the decision context in lexical-semantic processing, and supports a dynamic view of conceptual knowledge.

Lexical priming in Alzheimer's disease and aphasia.

Science.gov (United States)

Arroyo-Anlló, Eva Maria; Beauchamps, Mireille; Ingrand, Pierre; Neau, Jean Philippe; Gil, Roger

2013-01-01

Lexical priming was examined in patients with Alzheimer's disease and in aphasic patients. Control participants were divided into young and elderly [cf. Arroyo-Anlló et al.: Eur J Cogn Psychol 2004;16:535-553]. For lexical priming, a word-stem completion task was used. Normal elderly participants had lexical priming scores that were significantly lower than those of young individuals. Analysis of covariance with age and educational level as covariates showed that the control participants, aphasic and Alzheimer patients did not differ significantly on the lexical priming task. Our results suggest that performance in the lexical priming task diminishes with physiological aging, but is not significantly affected by mild or moderate Alzheimer's disease or by fluent or non-fluent aphasia. Copyright © 2013 S. Karger AG, Basel.

Effects of visual familiarity for words on interhemispheric cooperation for lexical processing.

Science.gov (United States)

Yoshizaki, K

2001-12-01

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of visual familiarity of words on interhemispheric lexical processing. Words and pseudowords were tachistoscopically presented in a left, a right, or bilateral visual fields. Two types of words, Katakana-familiar-type and Hiragana-familiar-type, were used as the word stimuli. The former refers to the words which are more frequently written with Katakana script, and the latter refers to the words which are written predominantly in Hiragana script. Two conditions for the words were set up in terms of visual familiarity for a word. In visually familiar condition, words were presented in familiar script form and in visually unfamiliar condition, words were presented in less familiar script form. The 32 right-handed Japanese students were asked to make a lexical decision. Results showed that a bilateral gain, which indicated that the performance in the bilateral visual fields was superior to that in the unilateral visual field, was obtained only in the visually familiar condition, not in the visually unfamiliar condition. These results suggested that the visual familiarity for a word had an influence on the interhemispheric lexical processing.

Lexical need as a two-way reality cognition tool

OpenAIRE

Mark Kit; Elena Berg

2014-01-01

Lexical need as a two-way reality cognition tool In this paper a concept of lexical need is introduced and its application in research of cognitive aspects of translation is discussed. Further discussion elaborates mechanisms of development of translator’s lexical space in the course of translation. Authors discuss the importance and special nature of low-frequency lexical units and difficulties encountered when studying their usage and suggest that the lexical need concept help these stu...

Decomposition into Multiple Morphemes during Lexical Access: A Masked Priming Study of Russian Nouns

Science.gov (United States)

Kazanina, Nina; Dukova-Zheleva, Galina; Geber, Dana; Kharlamov, Viktor; Tonciulescu, Keren

2008-01-01

The study reports the results of a masked priming experiment with morphologically complex Russian nouns. Participants performed a lexical decision task to a visual target that differed from its prime in one consonant. Three conditions were included: (1) "transparent," in which the prime was morphologically related to the target and contained the…

Automatically Assessing Lexical Sophistication: Indices, Tools, Findings, and Application

Science.gov (United States)

Kyle, Kristopher; Crossley, Scott A.

2015-01-01

This study explores the construct of lexical sophistication and its applications for measuring second language lexical and speaking proficiency. In doing so, the study introduces the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of LExical Sophistication (TAALES), which calculates text scores for 135 classic and newly developed lexical indices related to word…

Age of acquisition effects in word recognition and production in first and second languages

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Andrew W. Ellis

2002-01-01

Full Text Available Four experiments explored the age of acquisition effects in the first and second languages of dominant Spanish-English bilinguals. In Experiment 1 (picture naming task and Experiment 2 (lexical decision task, an age of acquisition effect was observed in a second language acquired after childhood as well as in the first language. The results suggest that age of acquisition effects reflect the order of word acquisition, which may in turn reflect the state of the lexical network when new words are learnt. The results do not support the idea that age of acquisition effects reflect differences between words learned during some critical period in childhood and words learned later in life. In Experiments 3 and 4, the age/order of second language acquisition affected lexical decision latencies regardless of the age at which translation equivalents were acquired in the first language, suggesting that the age of acquisition effect is linked to the acquisition of word forms rather than meanings.

Lexical Complexity Development from Dynamic Systems Theory Perspective: Lexical Density, Diversity, and Sophistication

OpenAIRE

Reza Kalantari; Javad Gholami

2017-01-01

This longitudinal case study explored Iranian EFL learners’ lexical complexity (LC) through the lenses of Dynamic Systems Theory (DST). Fifty independent essays written by five intermediate to advanced female EFL learners in a TOEFL iBT preparation course over six months constituted the corpus of this study. Three Coh-Metrix indices (Graesser, McNamara, Louwerse, & Cai, 2004; McNamara & Graesser, 2012), three Lexical Complexity Analyzer indices (Lu, 2010, 2012; Lu & Ai, 2011...

Lexicalization patterns in Brazilian Portuguese

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Dorival Gonçalves Santos Filho

2016-10-01

Full Text Available Neolatin languages belong to a lexicalization pattern in which the verbal root expresses semantic primitives of MOVE and PATH, leaving MANNER or CAUSE to be expressed by an adverb or the gerund form. In German origin languages, on the contrary, verbs lexicalize the semantic primitives of MOVE, MANNER or CAUSE; as for the PATH, it is expressed by a grammatical element that is associated to the verb. Taking into consideration some of the concepts of event of move, guided by Cognitive Semantics, and an analysis of examples extracted from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings’ books, the present study aims at showing, at least, three lexicalization patterns in which Brazilian Portuguese fits in.

Lexical tone and stuttering in Cantonese.

Science.gov (United States)

Law, Thomas; Packman, Ann; Onslow, Mark; To, Carol K-S; Tong, Michael C-F; Lee, Kathy Y-S

2018-01-01

Cantonese is a tone language, in which the variation of the fundamental frequency contour of a syllable can change meaning. There are six different lexical tones in Cantonese. While research with Western languages has shown an association between stuttering and syllabic stress, nothing is known about whether stuttering in Cantonese speakers is associated with one or more of the six lexical tones. Such an association has been reported in conversational speech in Mandarin, which is also a tone language, but which varies markedly from Cantonese. Twenty-four native Cantonese-speaking adults who stutter participated in this study, ranging in age from 18-33 years. There were 18 men and 6 women. Participants read aloud 13 Cantonese syllables, each of which was produced with six contrastive lexical tones. All 78 syllables were embedded in the same carrier sentence, to reduce the influence of suprasegmental or linguistic stress, and were presented in random order. No significant differences were found for stuttering moments across the six lexical tones. It is suggested that this is because lexical tones, at least in Cantonese, do not place the task demands on the speech motor system that typify varying syllabic stress in Western languages: variations not only in fundamental frequency, but also in duration and intensity. The findings of this study suggest that treatments for adults who stutter in Western languages, such as speech restructuring, can be used with Cantonese speakers without undue attention to lexical tone.

Phi-square Lexical Competition Database (Phi-Lex): an online tool for quantifying auditory and visual lexical competition.

Science.gov (United States)

Strand, Julia F

2014-03-01

A widely agreed-upon feature of spoken word recognition is that multiple lexical candidates in memory are simultaneously activated in parallel when a listener hears a word, and that those candidates compete for recognition (Luce, Goldinger, Auer, & Vitevitch, Perception 62:615-625, 2000; Luce & Pisoni, Ear and Hearing 19:1-36, 1998; McClelland & Elman, Cognitive Psychology 18:1-86, 1986). Because the presence of those competitors influences word recognition, much research has sought to quantify the processes of lexical competition. Metrics that quantify lexical competition continuously are more effective predictors of auditory and visual (lipread) spoken word recognition than are the categorical metrics traditionally used (Feld & Sommers, Speech Communication 53:220-228, 2011; Strand & Sommers, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 130:1663-1672, 2011). A limitation of the continuous metrics is that they are somewhat computationally cumbersome and require access to existing speech databases. This article describes the Phi-square Lexical Competition Database (Phi-Lex): an online, searchable database that provides access to multiple metrics of auditory and visual (lipread) lexical competition for English words, available at www.juliastrand.com/phi-lex .

Lexical and articulatory interactions in children’s language production

Science.gov (United States)

Heisler, Lori; Goffman, Lisa; Younger, Barbara

2009-01-01

Traditional models of adult language processing and production include two levels of representation: lexical and sublexical. The current study examines the influence of the inclusion of a lexical representation (i.e., a visual referent and/or object function) on the stability of articulation as well as on phonetic accuracy and variability in typically developing children and children with specific language impairment (SLI). A word learning paradigm was developed so that we could compare children’s production with and without lexical representation. The variability and accuracy of productions were examined using speech kinematics as well as traditional phonetic accuracy measures. Results showed that phonetic forms with lexical representation were produced with more articulatory stability than phonetic forms without lexical representation. Using more traditional transcription measures, a paired lexical referent generally did not influence segmental accuracy (percent consonant correct and type token ratio). These results suggest that lexical and articulatory levels of representation are not completely independent. Implications for models of language production are discussed. PMID:20712738

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

Science.gov (United States)

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.

The time course of lexical competition during spoken word recognition in Mandarin Chinese: an event-related potential study.

Science.gov (United States)

Huang, Xianjun; Yang, Jin-Chen

2016-01-20

The present study investigated the effect of lexical competition on the time course of spoken word recognition in Mandarin Chinese using a unimodal auditory priming paradigm. Two kinds of competitive environments were designed. In one session (session 1), only the unrelated and the identical primes were presented before the target words. In the other session (session 2), besides the two conditions in session 1, the target words were also preceded by the cohort primes that have the same initial syllables as the targets. Behavioral results showed an inhibitory effect of the cohort competitors (primes) on target word recognition. The event-related potential results showed that the spoken word recognition processing in the middle and late latency windows is modulated by whether the phonologically related competitors are presented or not. Specifically, preceding activation of the competitors can induce direct competitions between multiple candidate words and lead to increased processing difficulties, primarily at the word disambiguation and selection stage during Mandarin Chinese spoken word recognition. The current study provided both behavioral and electrophysiological evidences for the lexical competition effect among the candidate words during spoken word recognition.

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 assessment of premorbid intellectual ability following right-hemisphere stroke: reliability of a lexical decision task.

Science.gov (United States)

Gillespie, David C; Bowen, Audrey; Foster, Jonathan K

2012-01-01

Comparing current with estimated premorbid performance helps identify acquired cognitive deficits after brain injury. Tests of reading pronunciation, often used to measure premorbid ability, are inappropriate for stroke patients with motor speech problems. The Spot-the-Word Test (STWT), a measure of lexical decision, offers an alternative approach for estimating premorbid capacity in those with speech problems. However, little is known about the STWT's reliability. In the present study, a consecutive sample of right-hemisphere stroke (RHS) patients (n = 56) completed the STWT at 4 and 16 weeks poststroke. A control group, individually matched to the patients for age and initial STWT score, also completed the STWT on two occasions. More than 80% of patients had STWT scores at retest within 2 scaled score points of their initial score, suggesting that the STWT is a reliable measure for most individuals with RHS. However, RHS patients had significantly greater score change than controls. Limits of agreement analysis revealed that approximately 1 in 7 patients obtained abnormally large STWT score improvements at retest. It is concluded that although the STWT is a useful assessment tool for stroke clinicians, this instrument may significantly underestimate premorbid level of ability in approximately 14% of stroke patients.

Understanding and Analyzing Latency of Near Real-time Satellite Data

Science.gov (United States)

Han, W.; Jochum, M.; Brust, J.

2016-12-01

Acquiring and disseminating time-sensitive satellite data in a timely manner is much concerned by researchers and decision makers of weather forecast, severe weather warning, disaster and emergency response, environmental monitoring, and so on. Understanding and analyzing the latency of near real-time satellite data is very useful and helpful to explore the whole data transmission flow, indentify the possible issues, and connect data providers and users better. The STAR (Center for Satellite Applications and Research of NOAA) Central Data Repository (SCDR) is a central repository to acquire, manipulate, and disseminate various types of near real-time satellite datasets to internal and external users. In this system, important timestamps, including observation beginning/end, processing, uploading, downloading, and ingestion, are retrieved and organized in the database, so the time length of each transmission phase can be figured out easily. Open source NoSQL database MongoDB is selected to manage the timestamp information because of features of dynamic schema, aggregation and data processing. A user-friendly user interface is developed to visualize and characterize the latency interactively. Taking the Himawari-8 HSD (Himawari Standard Data) file as an example, the data transmission phases, including creating HSD file from satellite observation, uploading the file to HimawariCloud, updating file link in the webpage, downloading and ingesting the file to SCDR, are worked out from the above mentioned timestamps. The latencies can be observed by time of period, day of week, or hour of day in chart or table format, and the anomaly latencies can be detected and reported through the user interface. Latency analysis provides data providers and users actionable insight on how to improve the data transmission of near real-time satellite data, and enhance its acquisition and management.

Different Influences on Lexical Priming for Integrative, Thematic, and Taxonomic Relations

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Lara L. Jones

2012-07-01

Full Text Available Word pairs may be integrative (i.e., combination of two concepts into one meaningful entity; e.g., fruit - cake, thematically related (i.e., connected in time and place; e.g., party - cake, and/or taxonomically related (i.e., shared features and category co-members; e.g., muffin - cake. Using participant ratings and computational measures, we demonstrated distinct patterns across measures of similarity and co-occurrence, and familiarity for each relational construct in two different item sets. Overall, target RTs and priming magnitudes were consistent across the SOAs for both item sets. However, results of a standard lexical decision task with various delays between prime and target presentation further demonstrated distinct patterns among these three relations on some of the underlying measures influencing target word recognition (LSA, Google, and BEAGLE. These distinct patterns suggest different mechanisms of lexical priming and further demonstrate that integrative relations are distinct from thematic and taxonomic relations.

The Design of Lexical Database for Indonesian Language

Science.gov (United States)

Gunawan, D.; Amalia, A.

2017-03-01

Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia (KBBI), an official dictionary for Indonesian language, provides lists of words with their meaning. The online version can be accessed via Internet network. Another online dictionary is Kateglo. KBBI online and Kateglo only provides an interface for human. A machine cannot retrieve data from the dictionary easily without using advanced techniques. Whereas, lexical of words is required in research or application development which related to natural language processing, text mining, information retrieval or sentiment analysis. To address this requirement, we need to build a lexical database which provides well-defined structured information about words. A well-known lexical database is WordNet, which provides the relation among words in English. This paper proposes the design of a lexical database for Indonesian language based on the combination of KBBI 4th edition, Kateglo and WordNet structure. Knowledge representation by utilizing semantic networks depict the relation among words and provide the new structure of lexical database for Indonesian language. The result of this design can be used as the foundation to build the lexical database for Indonesian language.

Efecto de la riqueza semántica en distintos niveles del procesamiento léxico-semántico (Semantic richness effect at different levels of lexical-semantic processing

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Mauro Fragapane

2017-08-01

Full Text Available Semantic richness is a multidimensional construct that refers to the extent of variability of information associated with the meaning of a word. The Number of Features (NoF is a dimension of semantic richness that has been shown to have a major influence on lexical and semantic processing. Several studies have shown that concepts with a higher NoF allow faster lexical processing than those with a lower NoF. The current study is the first to use a NoF measure based on norms obtained from a sample of Spanish-speaking participants. The aim was to study the effect of this variable in visual word recognition. The sample included 90 young native Spanish-speaking adults. Three tasks were administered that require access to different lexico-semantic levels: lexical decision, concreteness semantic categorization (concrete/abstract, and domain semantic categorization (living/non-living. A semantic richness effect was found in lexical decision and domain semantic categorization tasks, with greater effect in the latter task. Results are interpreted within the framework of the General Domain Interactive Activation model.

Improving the functionality of dictionary definitions for lexical sets ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

2008) approach to the design of lexicographic definitions for members of lexical sets. The questions raised are how to define and identify lexical sets, how lexical conceptual models (LCMs) can support definitional consistency and coherence in ...

Syllable Frequency and Spoken Word Recognition: An Inhibitory Effect.

Science.gov (United States)

González-Alvarez, Julio; Palomar-García, María-Angeles

2016-08-01

Research has shown that syllables play a relevant role in lexical access in Spanish, a shallow language with a transparent syllabic structure. Syllable frequency has been shown to have an inhibitory effect on visual word recognition in Spanish. However, no study has examined the syllable frequency effect on spoken word recognition. The present study tested the effect of the frequency of the first syllable on recognition of spoken Spanish words. A sample of 45 young adults (33 women, 12 men; M = 20.4, SD = 2.8; college students) performed an auditory lexical decision on 128 Spanish disyllabic words and 128 disyllabic nonwords. Words were selected so that lexical and first syllable frequency were manipulated in a within-subject 2 × 2 design, and six additional independent variables were controlled: token positional frequency of the second syllable, number of phonemes, position of lexical stress, number of phonological neighbors, number of phonological neighbors that have higher frequencies than the word, and acoustical durations measured in milliseconds. Decision latencies and error rates were submitted to linear mixed models analysis. Results showed a typical facilitatory effect of the lexical frequency and, importantly, an inhibitory effect of the first syllable frequency on reaction times and error rates. © The Author(s) 2016.

Analysis of the Organization of Lexical Memory

National Research Council Canada - National Science Library

Miller, George

1997-01-01

The practical outcome of the project, Analysis of the Organization of Lexical Memory, is an electronic lexical database called WordNet that can be incorporated into computer systems for processing English text...

Lexical Density Of English Reading Texts For Senior High School

OpenAIRE

Nesia, Bersyebah Herljimsi; Ginting, Siti Aisah

2014-01-01

This study deals with the lexical density especially the lexical items of English reading texts in the textbook for senior high school. The objectives of the study are to find out the lexical density especially the lexical items which formed in the reading texts of Look Ahead textbook and the type of genre which has the highest lexical density of the reading texts. This study was conducted by descriptive method with qualitative approach. The data of this research were the English reading text...

Riding the lexical speedway: a critical review on the time course of lexical selection in speech production.

Science.gov (United States)

Strijkers, Kristof; Costa, Albert

2011-01-01

Speech requires time. How much time often depends on the amount of labor the brain has to perform in order to retrieve the linguistic information related to the ideas we want to express. Although most psycholinguistic research in the field of language production has focused on the net result of time required to utter words in various experimental conditions, over the last years more and more researchers pursued the objective to flesh out the time course of particular stages implicated in language production. Here we critically review these studies, with particular interest for the time course of lexical selection. First, we evaluate the data underlying the estimates of an influential temporal meta-analysis on language production (Indefrey and Levelt, 2004). We conclude that those data alone are not sufficient to provide a reliable time frame of lexical selection. Next, we discuss recent neurophysiological evidence which we argue to offer more explicit insights into the time course of lexical selection. Based on this evidence we suggest that, despite the absence of a clear time frame of how long lexical selection takes, there is sufficient direct evidence to conclude that the brain initiates lexical access within 200 ms after stimulus presentation, hereby confirming Indefrey and Levelt's estimate. In a final section, we briefly review the proposed mechanisms which could lead to this rapid onset of lexical access, namely automatic spreading activation versus specific concept selection, and discuss novel data which support the notion of spreading activation, but indicate that the speed with which this principle takes effect is driven by a top-down signal in function of the intention to engage in a speech act.

Riding the Lexical Speedway: A Critical Review on the Time Course of Lexical Selection in Speech Production

Science.gov (United States)

Strijkers, Kristof; Costa, Albert

2011-01-01

Speech requires time. How much time often depends on the amount of labor the brain has to perform in order to retrieve the linguistic information related to the ideas we want to express. Although most psycholinguistic research in the field of language production has focused on the net result of time required to utter words in various experimental conditions, over the last years more and more researchers pursued the objective to flesh out the time course of particular stages implicated in language production. Here we critically review these studies, with particular interest for the time course of lexical selection. First, we evaluate the data underlying the estimates of an influential temporal meta-analysis on language production (Indefrey and Levelt, 2004). We conclude that those data alone are not sufficient to provide a reliable time frame of lexical selection. Next, we discuss recent neurophysiological evidence which we argue to offer more explicit insights into the time course of lexical selection. Based on this evidence we suggest that, despite the absence of a clear time frame of how long lexical selection takes, there is sufficient direct evidence to conclude that the brain initiates lexical access within 200 ms after stimulus presentation, hereby confirming Indefrey and Levelt’s estimate. In a final section, we briefly review the proposed mechanisms which could lead to this rapid onset of lexical access, namely automatic spreading activation versus specific concept selection, and discuss novel data which support the notion of spreading activation, but indicate that the speed with which this principle takes effect is driven by a top-down signal in function of the intention to engage in a speech act. PMID:22144973

Neural signatures of lexical tone reading.

Science.gov (United States)

Kwok, Veronica P Y; Wang, Tianfu; Chen, Siping; Yakpo, Kofi; Zhu, Linlin; Fox, Peter T; Tan, Li Hai

2015-01-01

Research on how lexical tone is neuroanatomically represented in the human brain is central to our understanding of cortical regions subserving language. Past studies have exclusively focused on tone perception of the spoken language, and little is known as to the lexical tone processing in reading visual words and its associated brain mechanisms. In this study, we performed two experiments to identify neural substrates in Chinese tone reading. First, we used a tone judgment paradigm to investigate tone processing of visually presented Chinese characters. We found that, relative to baseline, tone perception of printed Chinese characters were mediated by strong brain activation in bilateral frontal regions, left inferior parietal lobule, left posterior middle/medial temporal gyrus, left inferior temporal region, bilateral visual systems, and cerebellum. Surprisingly, no activation was found in superior temporal regions, brain sites well known for speech tone processing. In activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis to combine results of relevant published studies, we attempted to elucidate whether the left temporal cortex activities identified in Experiment one is consistent with those found in previous studies of auditory lexical tone perception. ALE results showed that only the left superior temporal gyrus and putamen were critical in auditory lexical tone processing. These findings suggest that activation in the superior temporal cortex associated with lexical tone perception is modality-dependent. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Semantic Analysis of Verbal Collocations with Lexical Functions

CERN Document Server

Gelbukh, Alexander

2013-01-01

This book is written for both linguists and computer scientists working in the field of artificial intelligence as well as to anyone interested in intelligent text processing. Lexical function is a concept that formalizes semantic and syntactic relations between lexical units. Collocational relation is a type of institutionalized lexical relations which holds between the base and its partner in a collocation. Knowledge of collocation is important for natural language processing because collocation comprises the restrictions on how words can be used together. The book shows how collocations can be annotated with lexical functions in a computer readable dictionary - allowing their precise semantic analysis in texts and their effective use in natural language applications including parsers, high quality machine translation, periphrasis system and computer-aided learning of lexica. The books shows how to extract collocations from corpora and annotate them with lexical functions automatically. To train algorithms,...

The (null impact of pseudohomophones in lexical decision: No phonological activation in semantic dementia?

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Maximiliano A. Wilson

2014-04-01

The results in controls reproduce those found in literature (Braun et al., 2009. The general impairment and the lack of lexicality effect are also in line with current literature on svPPA and are likely explained by semantic impairment (Rogers et al., 2004. Interestingly, the novel result here is the absence of PsH effect in svPPA. This suggests that phonology is not correctly activated and that O-P mappings are also impaired in svPPA.

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.

Latency in Distributed Acquisition and Rendering for Telepresence Systems.

Science.gov (United States)

Ohl, Stephan; Willert, Malte; Staadt, Oliver

2015-12-01

Telepresence systems use 3D techniques to create a more natural human-centered communication over long distances. This work concentrates on the analysis of latency in telepresence systems where acquisition and rendering are distributed. Keeping latency low is important to immerse users in the virtual environment. To better understand latency problems and to identify the source of such latency, we focus on the decomposition of system latency into sub-latencies. We contribute a model of latency and show how it can be used to estimate latencies in a complex telepresence dataflow network. To compare the estimates with real latencies in our prototype, we modify two common latency measurement methods. This presented methodology enables the developer to optimize the design, find implementation issues and gain deeper knowledge about specific sources of latency.

Lexical richness and collocational competence in second-language writing

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Vedder, I.; Benigno, V.

2016-01-01

In this article we report on an experiment set up to investigate lexical richness and collocational competence in the written production of 39 low-intermediate and intermediate learners of Italian L2. Lexical richness was assessed by means of a lexical profiling method inspired by Laufer and Nation

Investigating the Usefulness of Lexical Phrases in Contemporary Coursebooks

Science.gov (United States)

Koprowski, Mark

2005-01-01

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

Multiple dimensions of relatedness among words: Conjoint effects of form and meaning in word recognition★

OpenAIRE

Pastizzo, Matthew John; Feldman, Laurie Beth

2009-01-01

Words can be similar with respect to form (viz., spelling, pronunciation), meaning, or both form and meaning. In three lexical decision experiments (48 ms forward masked, 116 ms, and 250 ms SOAs), targets (e.g., FLOAT) followed prime words related by form only (e.g., COAT), meaning only (e.g., SWIM), or form and meaning (e.g., BOAT). BOAT–FLOAT and SWIM–FLOAT type pairs showed reduced target decision latencies relative to unrelated controls when primes were unmasked, but not when they were ma...

Disfluency effects on lexical selection.

Science.gov (United States)

Medimorec, Srdan; Young, Torin P; Risko, Evan F

2017-01-01

Recent research has suggested that introducing a disfluency in the context of written composition (i.e., typing with one hand) can increase lexical sophistication. In the current study, we provide a strong test between two accounts of this phenomenon, one that attributes it to the delay caused by the disfluency and one that attributes it to the disruption of typical finger-to-letter mappings caused by the disfluency. To test between these accounts, we slowed down participants' typewriting by introducing a small delay between keystrokes while individuals wrote essays. Critically, this manipulation did not disrupt typical finger-to-letter mappings. Consistent with the delay-based account, our results demonstrate that the essays written in this less fluent condition were more lexically diverse and used less frequent words. Implications for the temporal dynamics of lexical selection in complex cognitive tasks are discussed. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

How to define a word in a lexical network?

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Dorota Sikora

2012-01-01

Full Text Available As underlined in Wierzbicka (1996: 239, a «linguistic definition is a scientific hypothesis about the concept encoded in a given word». The present paper focuses on the problem of what such hypothesis is about. Lexicon of any language is structured with a set of connections relating lexical items. That is to say that speakers of any language need to master not only separate words, but rather a cluster of connected senses. If so, then a lexical definition should lay out the concept the word lexicalizes in the way that gives access to the whole grasp of its conceptual, paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations. We discuss the topic of definitional structures developed in the context of the French Lexical Network (Réseau Lexical du Français.

Advanced LIGO low-latency searches

Science.gov (United States)

Kanner, Jonah; LIGO Scientific Collaboration, Virgo Collaboration

2016-06-01

Advanced LIGO recently made the first detection of gravitational waves from merging binary black holes. The signal was first identified by a low-latency analysis, which identifies gravitational-wave transients within a few minutes of data collection. More generally, Advanced LIGO transients are sought with a suite of automated tools, which collectively identify events, evaluate statistical significance, estimate source position, and attempt to characterize source properties. This low-latency effort is enabling a broad multi-messenger approach to the science of compact object mergers and other transients. This talk will give an overview of the low-latency methodology and recent results.

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

Science.gov (United States)

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.

Slovene-English Contrastive Phraseology: Lexical Collocations

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Primož Jurko

2010-05-01

Full Text Available Phraseology is seen as one of the key elements and arguably the most productive part of any language. %e paper is focused on collocations and separates them from other phraseological units, such as idioms or compounds. Highlighting the difference between a monolingual and a bilingual (i.e. contrastive approach to collocation, the article presents two distinct classes of collocations: grammatical and lexical. %e latter, treated contrastively, represent the focal point of the paper, since they are an unending source of translation errors to both students of translation and professional translators. %e author introduces a methodology of systematic classification of lexical collocations applied on the Slovene-English language pair and based on structural (lexical congruence and semantic (translational predictability criteria.

The effect of word length and other sublexical, lexical, and semantic variables on developmental reading deficits.

Science.gov (United States)

De Luca, Maria; Barca, Laura; Burani, Cristina; Zoccolotti, Pierluigi

2008-12-01

To examine the effect of word length and several sublexical, and lexico-semantic variables on the reading of Italian children with a developmental reading deficit. Previous studies indicated the role of word length in transparent orthographies. However, several factors that may interact with word length were not controlled for. Seventeen impaired and 34 skilled sixth-grade readers were presented words of different lengths, matched for initial phoneme, bigram frequency, word frequency, age of acquisition, and imageability. Participants were asked to read aloud, as quickly and as accurately as possible. Reaction times at the onset of pronunciation and mispronunciations were recorded. Impaired readers' reaction times indicated a marked effect of word length; in skilled readers, there was no length effect for short words but, rather, a monotonic increase from 6-letter words on. Regression analyses confirmed the role of word length and indicated the influence of word frequency (similar in impaired and skilled readers). No other variables predicted reading latencies. Word length differentially influenced word recognition in impaired versus skilled readers, irrespective of the action of (potentially interfering) sublexical, lexical, and semantic variables. It is proposed that the locus of the length effect is at a perceptual level of analysis. The independent influence of word frequency on the reading performance of both groups of participants indicates the sparing of lexical activation in impaired readers.

Diversity and Density: Lexically Determined Evaluative and Informational Consequences of Linguistic Complexity

Science.gov (United States)

Bradac, James J.; And Others

1977-01-01

Defines lexical diversity as manifest vocabulary range and lexical density as the ratio of lexical to gramatical items in a unit of discourse. Examines the effects of lexical diversity and density on listeners' evaluative judgments. (MH)

A functional near-infrared spectroscopy study of lexical decision task supports the dual route model and the phonological deficit theory of dyslexia.

Science.gov (United States)

Sela, Itamar; Izzetoglu, Meltem; Izzetoglu, Kurtulus; Onaral, Banu

2014-01-01

The dual route model (DRM) of reading suggests two routes of reading development: the phonological and the orthographic routes. It was proposed that although the two routes are active in the process of reading; the first is more involved at the initial stages of reading acquisition, whereas the latter needs more reading training to mature. A number of studies have shown that deficient phonological processing is a core deficit in developmental dyslexia. According to the DRM, when the Lexical Decision Task (LDT) is performed, the orthographic route should also be involved when decoding words, whereas it is clear that when decoding pseudowords the phonological route should be activated. Previous functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIR) studies have suggested that the upper left frontal lobe is involved in decision making in the LDT. The current study used fNIR to compare left frontal lobe activity during LDT performance among three reading-level groups: 12-year-old children, young adult dyslexic readers, and young adult typical readers. Compared to typical readers, the children demonstrated lower activity under the word condition only, whereas the dyslexic readers showed lower activity under the pseudoword condition only. The results provide evidence for upper left frontal lobe involvement in LDT and support the DRM and the phonological deficit theory of dyslexia.

Automatic detection of lexical change: an auditory event-related potential study.

Science.gov (United States)

Muller-Gass, Alexandra; Roye, Anja; Kirmse, Ursula; Saupe, Katja; Jacobsen, Thomas; Schröger, Erich

2007-10-29

We investigated the detection of rare task-irrelevant changes in the lexical status of speech stimuli. Participants performed a nonlinguistic task on word and pseudoword stimuli that occurred, in separate conditions, rarely or frequently. Task performance for pseudowords was deteriorated relative to words, suggesting unintentional lexical analysis. Furthermore, rare word and pseudoword changes had a similar effect on the event-related potentials, starting as early as 165 ms. This is the first demonstration of the automatic detection of change in lexical status that is not based on a co-occurring acoustic change. We propose that, following lexical analysis of the incoming stimuli, a mental representation of the lexical regularity is formed and used as a template against which lexical change can be detected.

Impact of Text-Mining and Imitating Strategies on Lexical Richness, Lexical Diversity and General Success in Second Language Writing

Science.gov (United States)

Çepni, Sevcan Bayraktar; Demirel, Elif Tokdemir

2016-01-01

This study aimed to find out the impact of "text mining and imitating" strategies on lexical richness, lexical diversity and general success of students in their compositions in second language writing. The participants were 98 students studying their first year in Karadeniz Technical University in English Language and Literature…

Lexical and metaphonological abilities in preschoolers with phonological disorders.

Science.gov (United States)

Costa, Ranilde Cristiane Cavalcante; Avila, Clara Regina Brandão de

2010-01-01

lexical and metaphonological abilities of phonologically disordered preschoolers. to investigate the influence of Phonological Disorder on the lexical and metaphonological abilities of a group of preschoolers and the correlation between them. participants were 56 preschoolers - 32 boys and 24 girls - with ages between 4 years and 6 months and 6 years and 11 months, divided into two different groups: the Research Group, composed of 28 preschoolers with Phonological Disorder, and the Control Group, composed of 28 preschoolers with normal speech and no oral speech-related complaints, paired to the research group by gender and age. All of the participants were initially assessed by the ABFW Test - Phonology. After that, they were assessed on their lexical and metaphonological abilities by the ABFW Test - Vocabulary and phonological awareness test: sequential assessment instrument, CONFIAS - identification tasks and, rhyme and alliteration production, respectively. regarding lexical ability, the preschoolers from both groups presented similar behavior. The disordered preschoolers presented the worst performance on the overall analysis of the metaphonological ability. Age had an influence on the performance of lexical ability for both groups and the metaphonological abilities only for the Control Group. Correlations were identified, mostly positive, good to moderate between lexical and metaphonological abilities. the influence of Phonological Disorder may only be observed on the metaphonological performance. Phonological Disorder did not interfere with the development of the lexical ability of this group of preschoolers. Positive correlations were identified between both abilities in the studied age group.

What Is Lexical Proficiency? Some Answers from Computational Models of Speech Data

Science.gov (United States)

Crossley, Scott A.; Salsbury, Tom; McNamara, Danielle S.; Jarvis, Scott

2011-01-01

Lexical proficiency, as a cognitive construct, is poorly understood. However, lexical proficiency is an important element of language proficiency and fluency, especially for second language (L2) learners. Lexical proficiency is also an important attribute of L2 academic achievement. Generally speaking, lexical proficiency comprises breadth of…

Lexical restructuring in the absence of literacy.

Science.gov (United States)

Venturaa, Paulo; Kolinsky, Régine; Fernandesa, Sandra; Queridoa, Luís; Morais, José

2007-11-01

Vocabulary growth was suggested to prompt the implementation of increasingly finer-grained lexical representations of spoken words in children (e.g., [Metsala, J. L., & Walley, A. C. (1998). Spoken vocabulary growth and the segmental restructuring of lexical representations: precursors to phonemic awareness and early reading ability. In J. L. Metsala & L. C. Ehri (Eds.), Word recognition in beginning literacy (pp. 89-120). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.]). Although literacy was not explicitly mentioned in this lexical restructuring hypothesis, the process of learning to read and spell might also have a significant impact on the specification of lexical representations (e.g., [Carroll, J. M., & Snowling, M. J. (2001). The effects of global similarity between stimuli on children's judgments of rime and alliteration. Applied Psycholinguistics, 22, 327-342.]; [Goswami, U. (2000). Phonological representations, reading development and dyslexia: Towards a cross-linguistic theoretical framework. Dyslexia, 6, 133-151.]). This is what we checked in the present study. We manipulated word frequency and neighborhood density in a gating task (Experiment 1) and a word-identification-in-noise task (Experiment 2) presented to Portuguese literate and illiterate adults. Ex-illiterates were also tested in Experiment 2 in order to disentangle the effects of vocabulary size and literacy. There was an interaction between word frequency and neighborhood density, which was similar in the three groups. These did not differ even for the words that are supposed to undergo lexical restructuring the latest (low frequency words from sparse neighborhoods). Thus, segmental lexical representations seem to develop independently of literacy. While segmental restructuring is not affected by literacy, it constrains the development of phoneme awareness as shown by the fact that, in Experiment 3, neighborhood density modulated the phoneme deletion performance of both illiterates and ex-illiterates.

Lexical variations in the Bible translations

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Barashkova Daria Sergeyevna

2018-04-01

Full Text Available The paper contains the comparative analysis of the Ostromir Gospels (1056-1057 and the Synodal translation of the Bible in order to identify lexical variations (alternatives. A source of the analysis are identic contexts from the Bible. Besides the author examines the materials of the others Old Slavonic written manuscripts. As a result of the comparative analysis some lexical options reflecting both synonymic and hyper-hyponymic relations and derivational variability were revealed.

Dual-Coding Theory and Connectionist Lexical Selection

OpenAIRE

Wang, Ye-Yi

1994-01-01

We introduce the bilingual dual-coding theory as a model for bilingual mental representation. Based on this model, lexical selection neural networks are implemented for a connectionist transfer project in machine translation. This lexical selection approach has two advantages. First, it is learnable. Little human effort on knowledge engineering is required. Secondly, it is psycholinguistically well-founded.

Lexical Sentiment Analysis in Slovenian Texts

OpenAIRE

VOLČANŠEK, MATEJA

2015-01-01

The goal of this thesis is to create a sentiment dictionary for the Slovenian language which can be used in lexical methods for automatic sentiment analysis. We start from a sentiment dictionary for the English language, translate it semi-automatically to Slovenian and curate its content. We test the performance of using the translated dictionary for automated lexical sentiment analysis on a corpus of 5000 manually annotated Slovenian news articles gathered from the main Slovenian news por...

Contrast of Lexical Motivation Between English And Chinese

Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (English)

周倩

2015-01-01

This thesis aims to make a contrast between English and Chinese in their lexical motivation in order to seek the source of form and meaning to further promote the study,explanation and application of lexical meaning.The contrast of lexical motivation is mainly discussed from three aspects:phonological motivation,morphological motivation and semantic motivation.Through the combination of diachronic study with synchronic study,the conclusion is drawn:the English lexicon is basically arbitrary while the Chinese one is highly motivated,namely,Chinese motivation is much more obvious than that of English for Chinese is an ideographic language and English is a phonemic language.

Contrast of Lexical Motivation Between English And Chinese

Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (English)

周倩

2015-01-01

[ABSTRACT]This thesis aims to make a contrast between English and Chinese in their lexical motivation in order to seek the source of form and meaning to further promote the study,explanation and application of lexical meaning.The contrast of lexical motivation is mainly discussed from three aspects:phonological motivation,morphological motivation and semantic motivation.Through the combinationof diachronic study with synchronic study,the conclusion is drawn:the English lexicon is basically arbitrary while the Chinese one is highly motivated,namely,Chinese motivation is much more obvious than that of English for Chinese is an ideographic language and English is a phonemic language.

Lexical influence on stress processing in a fixed-stress language.

Science.gov (United States)

Garami, Linda; Ragó, Anett; Honbolygó, Ferenc; Csépe, Valéria

2017-07-01

In the present study, we investigate how lexicality affects the processing of suprasegmental features at the word level. In contrast to earlier studies which analyzed the role of either segmental or suprasegmental feature in language processing our aim was to investigate the effect of the lexical status on the processing of violated stress pattern defined by linguistic rules. We have conducted a passive oddball ERP experiment, presenting a frequent CVCV word with legal (familiar) and illegal (unfamiliar) stress patterns. Former results obtained with pseudo-words in a similar paradigm enabled to assess the influence of lexical information on stress processing. The presence of lexically relevant information resulted in different ERP patterns compared to those obtained with pseudo-words. We obtained two consecutive MMN responses to the illegally stressed words while violating the illegal stress pattern with a legal one the deviant stimulus elicited two consecutive MMN responses as well. In the latter condition lexicality clearly enhanced the comparison of prosodic information between standard and deviant stimuli, as these components very completely missing when presenting pseudo-words. We interpret the results that lexicality acts as a filter since in the absence of lexical familiarity unfamiliar stress patterns are discriminated better. Our results highlight that even when stress is fully predictable, it is taken into account during pre-attentive processing of linguistic input. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

EBV Latency Types Adopt Alternative Chromatin Conformations

Science.gov (United States)

Tempera, Italo; Klichinsky, Michael; Lieberman, Paul M.

2011-01-01

Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV) can establish latent infections with distinct gene expression patterns referred to as latency types. These different latency types are epigenetically stable and correspond to different promoter utilization. Here we explore the three-dimensional conformations of the EBV genome in different latency types. We employed Chromosome Conformation Capture (3C) assay to investigate chromatin loop formation between the OriP enhancer and the promoters that determine type I (Qp) or type III (Cp) gene expression. We show that OriP is in close physical proximity to Qp in type I latency, and to Cp in type III latency. The cellular chromatin insulator and boundary factor CTCF was implicated in EBV chromatin loop formation. Combining 3C and ChIP assays we found that CTCF is physically associated with OriP-Qp loop formation in type I and OriP-Cp loop formation in type III latency. Mutations in the CTCF binding site located at Qp disrupt loop formation between Qp and OriP, and lead to the activation of Cp transcription. Mutation of the CTCF binding site at Cp, as well as siRNA depletion of CTCF eliminates both OriP-associated loops, indicating that CTCF plays an integral role in loop formation. These data indicate that epigenetically stable EBV latency types adopt distinct chromatin architectures that depend on CTCF and mediate alternative promoter targeting by the OriP enhancer. PMID:21829357

EBV latency types adopt alternative chromatin conformations.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Italo Tempera

2011-07-01

Full Text Available Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV can establish latent infections with distinct gene expression patterns referred to as latency types. These different latency types are epigenetically stable and correspond to different promoter utilization. Here we explore the three-dimensional conformations of the EBV genome in different latency types. We employed Chromosome Conformation Capture (3C assay to investigate chromatin loop formation between the OriP enhancer and the promoters that determine type I (Qp or type III (Cp gene expression. We show that OriP is in close physical proximity to Qp in type I latency, and to Cp in type III latency. The cellular chromatin insulator and boundary factor CTCF was implicated in EBV chromatin loop formation. Combining 3C and ChIP assays we found that CTCF is physically associated with OriP-Qp loop formation in type I and OriP-Cp loop formation in type III latency. Mutations in the CTCF binding site located at Qp disrupt loop formation between Qp and OriP, and lead to the activation of Cp transcription. Mutation of the CTCF binding site at Cp, as well as siRNA depletion of CTCF eliminates both OriP-associated loops, indicating that CTCF plays an integral role in loop formation. These data indicate that epigenetically stable EBV latency types adopt distinct chromatin architectures that depend on CTCF and mediate alternative promoter targeting by the OriP enhancer.

Typing pictures: Linguistic processing cascades into finger movements.

Science.gov (United States)

Scaltritti, Michele; Arfé, Barbara; Torrance, Mark; Peressotti, Francesca

2016-11-01

The present study investigated the effect of psycholinguistic variables on measures of response latency and mean interkeystroke interval in a typewritten picture naming task, with the aim to outline the functional organization of the stages of cognitive processing and response execution associated with typewritten word production. Onset latencies were modulated by lexical and semantic variables traditionally linked to lexical retrieval, such as word frequency, age of acquisition, and naming agreement. Orthographic variables, both at the lexical and sublexical level, appear to influence just within-word interkeystroke intervals, suggesting that orthographic information may play a relevant role in controlling actual response execution. Lexical-semantic variables also influenced speed of execution. This points towards cascaded flow of activation between stages of lexical access and response execution. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

COLLOCATION PHRASES IN RELATION TO OTHER LEXICAL PHRASES IN CROATIAN

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Goranka Blagus Bartolec

2012-01-01

Full Text Available The paper analyzes the semantic and lexicological aspects of collocation phrases in Croatian with tendency to separate them from other lexical phrases in Croatian (terms, idioms, names. The collocation phrase is defined as a special lexical phrase on a syntagmatic level, based on the semantic correlation of the two individual lexical components in which their meanings are specified.

Lexical competition in nonnative speech comprehension.

Science.gov (United States)

FitzPatrick, Ian; Indefrey, Peter

2010-06-01

Electrophysiological studies consistently find N400 effects of semantic incongruity in nonnative (L2) language comprehension. These N400 effects are often delayed compared with native (L1) comprehension, suggesting that semantic integration in one's second language occurs later than in one's first language. In this study, we investigated whether such a delay could be attributed to (1) intralingual lexical competition and/or (2) interlingual lexical competition. We recorded EEG from Dutch-English bilinguals who listened to English (L2) sentences in which the sentence-final word was (a) semantically fitting and (b) semantically incongruent or semantically incongruent but initially congruent due to sharing initial phonemes with (c) the most probable sentence completion within the L2 or (d) the L1 translation equivalent of the most probable sentence completion. We found an N400 effect in each of the semantically incongruent conditions. This N400 effect was significantly delayed to L2 words but not to L1 translation equivalents that were initially congruent with the sentence context. Taken together, these findings firstly demonstrate that semantic integration in nonnative listening can start based on word initial phonemes (i.e., before a single lexical candidate could have been selected based on the input) and secondly suggest that spuriously elicited L1 lexical candidates are not available for semantic integration in L2 speech comprehension.

Semantic Factors Predict the Rate of Lexical Replacement of Content Words

OpenAIRE

Vejdemo, Susanne; H?rberg, Thomas

2016-01-01

The rate of lexical replacement estimates the diachronic stability of word forms on the basis of how frequently a proto-language word is replaced or retained in its daughter languages. Lexical replacement rate has been shown to be highly related to word class and word frequency. In this paper, we argue that content words and function words behave differently with respect to lexical replacement rate, and we show that semantic factors predict the lexical replacement rate of content words. For t...

Evidence accumulation as a model for lexical selection.

Science.gov (United States)

Anders, R; Riès, S; van Maanen, L; Alario, F X

2015-11-01

We propose and demonstrate evidence accumulation as a plausible theoretical and/or empirical model for the lexical selection process of lexical retrieval. A number of current psycholinguistic theories consider lexical selection as a process related to selecting a lexical target from a number of alternatives, which each have varying activations (or signal supports), that are largely resultant of an initial stimulus recognition. We thoroughly present a case for how such a process may be theoretically explained by the evidence accumulation paradigm, and we demonstrate how this paradigm can be directly related or combined with conventional psycholinguistic theory and their simulatory instantiations (generally, neural network models). Then with a demonstrative application on a large new real data set, we establish how the empirical evidence accumulation approach is able to provide parameter results that are informative to leading psycholinguistic theory, and that motivate future theoretical development. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Competitive dynamics of lexical innovations in multi-layer networks

Science.gov (United States)

Javarone, Marco Alberto

2014-04-01

We study the introduction of lexical innovations into a community of language users. Lexical innovations, i.e. new term added to people's vocabulary, plays an important role in the process of language evolution. Nowadays, information is spread through a variety of networks, including, among others, online and offline social networks and the World Wide Web. The entire system, comprising networks of different nature, can be represented as a multi-layer network. In this context, lexical innovations diffusion occurs in a peculiar fashion. In particular, a lexical innovation can undergo three different processes: its original meaning is accepted; its meaning can be changed or misunderstood (e.g. when not properly explained), hence more than one meaning can emerge in the population. Lastly, in the case of a loan word, it can be translated into the population language (i.e. defining a new lexical innovation or using a synonym) or into a dialect spoken by part of the population. Therefore, lexical innovations cannot be considered simply as information. We develop a model for analyzing this scenario using a multi-layer network comprising a social network and a media network. The latter represents the set of all information systems of a society, e.g. television, the World Wide Web and radio. Furthermore, we identify temporal directed edges between the nodes of these two networks. In particular, at each time-step, nodes of the media network can be connected to randomly chosen nodes of the social network and vice versa. In doing so, information spreads through the whole system and people can share a lexical innovation with their neighbors or, in the event they work as reporters, by using media nodes. Lastly, we use the concept of "linguistic sign" to model lexical innovations, showing its fundamental role in the study of these dynamics. Many numerical simulations have been performed to analyze the proposed model and its outcomes.

Early lexical and phonological acquisition and its relationships.

Science.gov (United States)

Wiethan, Fernanda Marafiga; Nóro, Letícia Arruda; Mota, Helena Bolli

2014-01-01

Verifying likely relationships between lexical and phonological development of children aged between 1 year to 1 year, 11 months and 29 days, who were enrolled in public kindergarten schools of Santa Maria (RS). The sample consisted of 18 children of both genders, with typical language development and aged between 1 year to 1 year, 11 months and 29 days, separated in three age subgroups. Visual recordings of spontaneous speech of each child were collected and then lexical analysis regarding the types of the said lexical items and phonological assessment were performed. The number of sounds acquired and partially acquired were counted together, and the 19 sounds and two all phones of Brazilian Portuguese were considered. To the statistical analysis, the tests of Kruskal-Wallis and Wilcoxon were used, with significance level of prelace_LT0.05. When compared the means relating to the acquired sounds and mean of the acquired and partially acquired sounds percentages, there was difference between the first and the second age subgroup, and between the first and the third subgroup. In the comparison of the said lexical items means among the age subgroups, there was difference between the first and the second subgroup, and between the first and the third subgroup again. In the comparison between the said lexical items and acquired and partially acquired sounds in each age subgroup, there was difference only in the age subgroup of 1 year and 8 months to 1 year, 11 months and 29 days, in which the sounds highlighted. The phonological and lexical domains develop as a growing process and influence each other. The Phonology has a little advantage.

Lexical Modernization in Nepali: A Study of Borrowing.

Science.gov (United States)

Acharya, Jayaraj

1990-01-01

Focuses on the controversy among Nepali language specialists over the sources of lexical borrowing in Nepali. Lexical items currently are borrowed from both English and Sanskrit, and also Hindi/Urdu, Persian and Arabic. After reviewing Nepali history and language, the question of borrowing from different sources within different domains of…

Policy for the treatment of insulting and sensitive lexical items in the ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Keywords: policy, treatment, insulting lexical items, sensitive lexical items, dictionary, woordeboek van die afrikaanse taal, simplexes, compounds, expressions, general usage criterion, labelling, synonyms, metalanguage, collocations, editorial usage examples, citations, advisors, racist lexical items, neutral lemmas, ...

Speakers' assumptions about the lexical flexibility of idioms.

Science.gov (United States)

Gibbs, R W; Nayak, N P; Bolton, J L; Keppel, M E

1989-01-01

In three experiments, we examined why some idioms can be lexically altered and still retain their figurative meanings (e.g., John buttoned his lips about Mary can be changed into John fastened his lips about Mary and still mean "John didn't say anything about Mary"), whereas other idioms cannot be lexically altered without losing their figurative meanings (e.g., John kicked the bucket, meaning "John died," loses its idiomatic meaning when changed into John kicked the pail). Our hypothesis was that the lexical flexibility of idioms is determined by speakers' assumptions about the ways in which parts of idioms contribute to their figurative interpretations as a whole. The results of the three experiments indicated that idioms whose individual semantic components contribute to their overall figurative meanings (e.g., go out on a limb) were judged as less disrupted by changes in their lexical items (e.g., go out on a branch) than were nondecomposable idioms (e.g., kick the bucket) when their individual words were altered (e.g., punt the pail). These findings lend support to the idea that both the syntactic productivity and the lexical makeup of idioms are matters of degree, depending on the idioms' compositional properties. This conclusion suggests that idioms do not form a unique class of linguistic items, but share many of the properties of more literal language.

Lexical semantic access and letter access are involved in different aspects of reading

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Poulsen, Mads

). In this subset sample, both letter access and lexical access accounted for unique variance in reading fluency. The pattern of effects for lexical access did not change by controlling for serial rapid naming (RAN). Conclusions: The results suggest that letter access and lexical access are important for different......Purpose: This study investigated the effects of lexical access speed and letter access speed on reading fluency and reading comprehension. We hypothesized that 1) letter access speed would correlate with reading fluency but not comprehension, while 2) lexical access speed would influence reading...... comprehension. For readers who are struggling with recoding, most of the reading effort is probably tied up with recoding, leaving little to be explained by lexical access. Therefore we expected that 3) lexical access speed would primarily predict reading fluency for readers who were no longer struggling...

Selected Lexical Patterns in Saudi Arabian Sign Language

Science.gov (United States)

Young, Lesa; Palmer, Jeffrey Levi; Reynolds, Wanette

2012-01-01

This combined paper will focus on the description of two selected lexical patterns in Saudi Arabian Sign Language (SASL): metaphor and metonymy in emotion-related signs (Young) and lexicalization patterns of objects and their derivational roots (Palmer and Reynolds). The over-arcing methodology used by both studies is detailed in Stephen and…

Portuguese Lexical Clusters and CVC Sequences in Speech Perception and Production.

Science.gov (United States)

Cunha, Conceição

2015-01-01

This paper investigates similarities between lexical consonant clusters and CVC sequences differing in the presence or absence of a lexical vowel in speech perception and production in two Portuguese varieties. The frequent high vowel deletion in the European variety (EP) and the realization of intervening vocalic elements between lexical clusters in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) may minimize the contrast between lexical clusters and CVC sequences in the two Portuguese varieties. In order to test this hypothesis we present a perception experiment with 72 participants and a physiological analysis of 3-dimensional movement data from 5 EP and 4 BP speakers. The perceptual results confirmed a gradual confusion of lexical clusters and CVC sequences in EP, which corresponded roughly to the gradient consonantal overlap found in production. © 2015 S. Karger AG, Basel.

Morphological Cues for Lexical Semantics

National Research Council Canada - National Science Library

Light, Marc

1996-01-01

Most natural language processing tasks require lexical semantic information such as verbal argument structure and selectional restrictions, corresponding nominal semantic class, verbal aspectual class...

Factors influencing the latency of simple reaction time.

Science.gov (United States)

Woods, David L; Wyma, John M; Yund, E William; Herron, Timothy J; Reed, Bruce

2015-01-01

Simple reaction time (SRT), the minimal time needed to respond to a stimulus, is a basic measure of processing speed. SRTs were first measured by Francis Galton in the 19th century, who reported visual SRT latencies below 190 ms in young subjects. However, recent large-scale studies have reported substantially increased SRT latencies that differ markedly in different laboratories, in part due to timing delays introduced by the computer hardware and software used for SRT measurement. We developed a calibrated and temporally precise SRT test to analyze the factors that influence SRT latencies in a paradigm where visual stimuli were presented to the left or right hemifield at varying stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). Experiment 1 examined a community sample of 1469 subjects ranging in age from 18 to 65. Mean SRT latencies were short (231, 213 ms when corrected for hardware delays) and increased significantly with age (0.55 ms/year), but were unaffected by sex or education. As in previous studies, SRTs were prolonged at shorter SOAs and were slightly faster for stimuli presented in the visual field contralateral to the responding hand. Stimulus detection time (SDT) was estimated by subtracting movement initiation time, measured in a speeded finger tapping test, from SRTs. SDT latencies averaged 131 ms and were unaffected by age. Experiment 2 tested 189 subjects ranging in age from 18 to 82 years in a different laboratory using a larger range of SOAs. Both SRTs and SDTs were slightly prolonged (by 7 ms). SRT latencies increased with age while SDT latencies remained stable. Precise computer-based measurements of SRT latencies show that processing speed is as fast in contemporary populations as in the Victorian era, and that age-related increases in SRT latencies are due primarily to slowed motor output.

Factors influencing the latency of simple reaction time

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

David L Woods

2015-03-01

Full Text Available Simple reaction time (SRT, the minimal time needed to respond to a stimulus, is a basic measure of processing speed. SRTs were first measured by Francis Galton in the 19th century who reported visual SRT latencies below 190 ms in young subjects. However, recent large-scale studies have reported substantially increased SRT latencies that differ markedly in different laboratories, in part due to timing delays introduced by computer hardware and software used for SRT measurement. We developed a calibrated and temporally-precise SRT paradigm to analyze the factors that influence SRT latencies in a paradigm where visual stimuli were presented to the left or right hemifield at varying stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs. Experiment 1 examined a community sample of 1469 subjects ranging in age from 18 to 65. Mean SRT latencies were short (231 ms, 213 ms when corrected for hardware delays and increased significantly with age (0.55 ms/year, but were unaffected by sex or education. As in previous studies, SRTs were prolonged at shorter SOAs and were slightly faster for stimuli presented in the visual field contralateral to the responding hand. Stimulus detection time (SDT was estimated by subtracting movement-initiation time, measured in a speeded finger-tapping test, from SRTs. SDT latencies averaged 131 ms and were unaffected by age. Experiment 2 tested 189 subjects ranging in age from 18 to 82 years in a different laboratory using a larger range of SOAs. Both SRTs and SDTs were slightly prolonged (by 7 ms. SRT latencies increased with age while SDT latencies did not. Precise computer-based measurements of SRT latencies show that processing speed is as fast in contemporary populations as in those from the Victorian era and that age-related increases in SRT latencies are due primarily to slowed motor output.

Factors influencing the latency of simple reaction time

Science.gov (United States)

Woods, David L.; Wyma, John M.; Yund, E. William; Herron, Timothy J.; Reed, Bruce

2015-01-01

Simple reaction time (SRT), the minimal time needed to respond to a stimulus, is a basic measure of processing speed. SRTs were first measured by Francis Galton in the 19th century, who reported visual SRT latencies below 190 ms in young subjects. However, recent large-scale studies have reported substantially increased SRT latencies that differ markedly in different laboratories, in part due to timing delays introduced by the computer hardware and software used for SRT measurement. We developed a calibrated and temporally precise SRT test to analyze the factors that influence SRT latencies in a paradigm where visual stimuli were presented to the left or right hemifield at varying stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). Experiment 1 examined a community sample of 1469 subjects ranging in age from 18 to 65. Mean SRT latencies were short (231, 213 ms when corrected for hardware delays) and increased significantly with age (0.55 ms/year), but were unaffected by sex or education. As in previous studies, SRTs were prolonged at shorter SOAs and were slightly faster for stimuli presented in the visual field contralateral to the responding hand. Stimulus detection time (SDT) was estimated by subtracting movement initiation time, measured in a speeded finger tapping test, from SRTs. SDT latencies averaged 131 ms and were unaffected by age. Experiment 2 tested 189 subjects ranging in age from 18 to 82 years in a different laboratory using a larger range of SOAs. Both SRTs and SDTs were slightly prolonged (by 7 ms). SRT latencies increased with age while SDT latencies remained stable. Precise computer-based measurements of SRT latencies show that processing speed is as fast in contemporary populations as in the Victorian era, and that age-related increases in SRT latencies are due primarily to slowed motor output. PMID:25859198

The molecular basis of herpes simplex virus latency

Science.gov (United States)

Nicoll, Michael P; Proença, João T; Efstathiou, Stacey

2012-01-01

Herpes simplex virus type 1 is a neurotropic herpesvirus that establishes latency within sensory neurones. Following primary infection, the virus replicates productively within mucosal epithelial cells and enters sensory neurones via nerve termini. The virus is then transported to neuronal cell bodies where latency can be established. Periodically, the virus can reactivate to resume its normal lytic cycle gene expression programme and result in the generation of new virus progeny that are transported axonally back to the periphery. The ability to establish lifelong latency within the host and to periodically reactivate to facilitate dissemination is central to the survival strategy of this virus. Although incompletely understood, this review will focus on the mechanisms involved in the regulation of latency that centre on the functions of the virus-encoded latency-associated transcripts (LATs), epigenetic regulation of the latent virus genome and the molecular events that precipitate reactivation. This review considers current knowledge and hypotheses relating to the mechanisms involved in the establishment, maintenance and reactivation herpes simplex virus latency. PMID:22150699

Differential lexical predictors of reading comprehension in fourth graders

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Swart, N.M.; Muijselaar, M.M.L.; Steenbeek-Planting, E.G.; Droop, M.; de Jong, P.F.; Verhoeven, L.

The mental lexicon plays a central role in reading comprehension (Perfetti & Stafura, 2014). It encompasses the number of lexical entries in spoken and written language (vocabulary breadth), the semantic quality of these entries (vocabulary depth), and the connection strength between lexical

Lexical Borrowings in the ESL Classrooms in Malaysia

Science.gov (United States)

Thirusanku, Jantmary; Yunus, Melor Md

2013-01-01

This paper attempts to show the use of lexical borrowings in ten teaching materials used by the English as Second Language (ESL) teachers in the ESL classrooms in the National Secondary Schools in the Klang district in Selangor, Malaysia. It also discusses the general and pedagogical implications involved in using lexical borrowings. This paper…

CLEX: A cross-linguistic lexical norms database

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Jørgensen, Rune Nørgaard; Dale, Philip; Bleses, Dorthe

2009-01-01

Parent report has proven a valid and cost-effective means of evaluating early child language. Norming datasets for these instruments, which provide the basis for standardized comparisons of individual children to a population, can also be used to derive norms for the acquisition of individual words...... in production and comprehension and also early gestures and symbolic actions. These lexical norms have a wide range of uses in basic research, assessment and intervention. In addition, crosslinguistic comparisons of lexical development are greatly facilitated by the availability of norms from diverse languages....... This report describes the development of CLEX, a new web-based cross-linguistic database for lexical data from adaptations of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories. CLEX provides tools for a range of analyses within and across languages. It is designed to incorporate additional language...

LEXICAL ANALYSIS OF THE VERB COOK AND LEARNING VOCABULARY: A CORPUS STUDY

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Priyono Priyono

2011-07-01

Full Text Available English verbs have built-in properties that determine how they behave syntactically and generate appropriate meaning associated. With these inherent properties some verbs can fill in only in certain syntactic structures and some in others. The observation of the verb COOK using English corpus has revealed its lexical properties covering the area of syntax, semantics, and collocation suggesting uniqueness of its behaviours that are distinguishable from other verbs. Having found the lexical properties of COOK, this article concludes that the acquisition of lexicon should include lexical properties that reflect their level of competence. It also argues that the acquisition of lexical properties should be implicit, not through meta-linguistic knowledge. This would render early grammar teaching unnecessary. The acquisition of lexical properties should take place through subconscious process, not explicit grammar instruction. Many of these are grammatical aspects such as word order, sentence construction, grammatical and lexical collocations.

Probabilistic lexical generalization for French dependency parsing

OpenAIRE

Henestroza Anguiano , Enrique; Candito , Marie

2012-01-01

International audience; This paper investigates the impact on French dependency parsing of lexical generalization methods beyond lemmatization and morphological analysis. A distributional thesaurus is created from a large text corpus and used for distributional clustering and WordNet automatic sense ranking. The standard approach for lexical generalization in parsing is to map a word to a single generalized class, either replacing the word with the class or adding a new feature for the class....

The unique role of lexical accessibility in predicting kindergarten emergent literacy.

Science.gov (United States)

Verhoeven, Ludo; van Leeuwe, Jan; Irausquin, Rosemarie; Segers, Eliane

The goal of this longitudinal study was to examine how lexical quality predicts the emergence of literacy abilities in 169 Dutch kindergarten children before formal reading instruction has started. At the beginning of the school year, a battery of precursor measures associated with lexical quality was related to the emergence of letter knowledge and word decoding. Confirmatory factor analysis evidenced five domains related to lexical quality, i.e., vocabulary, phonological coding, phonological awareness, lexical retrieval and phonological working memory. Structural equation modeling showed that the development of letter knowledge during the year could be predicted from children's phonological awareness and lexical retrieval, and the emergence of word decoding from their phonological awareness and letter knowledge. It is concluded that it is primarily the accessibility of phonological representations in the mental lexicon that predicts the emergence of literacy in kindergarten.

Towards Controlling Latency in Wireless Networks

KAUST Repository

Bouacida, Nader

2017-04-24

Wireless networks are undergoing an unprecedented revolution in the last decade. With the explosion of delay-sensitive applications in the Internet (i.e., online gaming and VoIP), latency becomes a major issue for the development of wireless technology. Taking advantage of the significant decline in memory prices, industrialists equip the network devices with larger buffering capacities to improve the network throughput by limiting packets drops. Over-buffering results in increasing the time that packets spend in the queues and, thus, introducing more latency in networks. This phenomenon is known as “bufferbloat”. While throughput is the dominant performance metric, latency also has a huge impact on user experience not only for real-time applications but also for common applications like web browsing, which is sensitive to latencies in order of hundreds of milliseconds. Concerns have arisen about designing sophisticated queue management schemes to mitigate the effects of such phenomenon. My thesis research aims to solve bufferbloat problem in both traditional half-duplex and cutting-edge full-duplex wireless systems by reducing delay while maximizing wireless links utilization and fairness. Our work shed lights on buffer management algorithms behavior in wireless networks and their ability to reduce latency resulting from excessive queuing delays inside oversized static network buffers without a significant loss in other network metrics. First of all, we address the problem of buffer management in wireless full-duplex networks by using Wireless Queue Management (WQM), which is an active queue management technique for wireless networks. Our solution is based on Relay Full-Duplex MAC (RFD-MAC), an asynchronous media access control protocol designed for relay full-duplexing. Compared to the default case, our solution reduces the end-to-end delay by two orders of magnitude while achieving similar throughput in most of the cases. In the second part of this thesis

Lexical Borrowing in the Speech of First-Generation Hungarian Immigrants in Australia

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Anikó Hatoss

2016-09-01

Full Text Available This article reports findings of a sociolinguistic project which investigated language contact phenomena in the speech of first-generation Hungarian Australians living in Sydney. The research aimed to identify and analyze English lexical items borrowed into the spoken Hungarian of first-generation Hungarian–English bilinguals. This research had a mixed methods approach including a quantitative element (count of lexical manifestations by categories such as part of speech and a qualitative element in which the various lexical manifestations have been subjected to a linguistic analysis. The Hungarian National Corpus was used as a reference guide to determine the status of these phenomena in the lexicon of Standard Hungarian. The data were collected through semi-structured sociolinguistic interviews with 22 Hungarian Australians living in Sydney. The findings demonstrate that (a first-generation Hungarians are highly creative language users and integrate a large number of English lexical items into their speech. Most lexical borrowings belong to the derivational blends with the highest proportion of the nominal group. Lexical borrowings from English are morphologically integrated with Hungarian-derivational suffixes and inflectional case markings. This research provides original empirical data to better understand the various inter-language lexical manifestations in Hungarian–English bilingual contexts. The study adds to the relatively small body of research on Hungarian–English bilingualism in diasporic context and contributes to understanding lexical borrowing from a contact linguistic perspective.

The Microstructural Treatment of Sub lexical Lemmas in Afrikaans ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

include synonyms and semantic oppositions. Since all Afrikaans descriptive dictionaries supply these lexical relations for lexical lemmas, there is no reason why they should be omitted in the articles of sublexicallemmas. Naturally the synonym or antonym for sublexical lemmas need not be sublexical as well,.

Increasing Statistical Literacy by Exploiting Lexical Ambiguity of Technical Terms

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Jennifer Kaplan

2018-01-01

Full Text Available Instructional inattention to language poses a barrier for students in entry-level science courses, in part because students may perceive a subject as difficult solely based on the lack of understanding of the vocabulary. In addition, the technical use of terms that have different everyday meanings may cause students to misinterpret statements made by instructors, leading to an incomplete or incorrect understanding of the domain. Terms that have different technical and everyday meanings are said to have lexical ambiguity and statistics, as a discipline, has many lexically ambiguous terms. This paper presents a cyclic process for designing activities to address lexical ambiguity in statistics. In addition, it describes three short activities aimed to have high impact on student learning associated with two different lexically ambiguous words or word pairs in statistics. Preliminary student-level data are used to assess the efficacy of the activities, and future directions for development of activities and research about lexical ambiguity in statistics in particular and STEM in general are discussed.

Improving the Functionality of Dictionary Definitions for Lexical Sets: The Role of Definitional Templates, Definitional Consistency, Definitional Coherence and the Incorporation of Lexical Conceptual Models

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Piet Swanepoel

2011-10-01

Full Text Available

ABSTRACT: This article focuses on some of the problems raised by Atkins and Rundell's (2008 approach to the design of lexicographic definitions for members of lexical sets. The questions raised are how to define and identify lexical sets, how lexical conceptual models (LCMs can support definitional consistency and coherence in defining members of lexical sets, and what the ideal content and structure of LCMs could be. Although similarity of meaning is proposed as the defining feature of lexical sets, similarity of meaning is only one dimension of the broader concept of lexical coherence. The argument is presented that numerous conceptual lexical models (e.g. taxonomies, folk models, frames, etc. in fact indicate, justify or explain how lexical items cohere (and thus form sets. In support of Fillmore's (2003 suggestion that definitions of the lexical items of cohering sets should be linked to such explanatory models, additional functionally-orientated arguments are presented for the incorporation of conceptual lexical models in electronic monolingual learners' dictionaries. Numerous resources exist to support the design of LCMs which can improve the functionality of definitions of members of lexical sets. A few examples are discussed of how such resources can be used to design functionally justified LCMs.

OPSOMMING: Verbetering van die funksionaliteit van woordeboekdefinisies vir leksikale versamelings: Die rol van definisiematryse, definisie-eenvormigheid, definisiesamehang en die inkorporering van leksikale konseptuele modelle. Hierdie artikel fokus op sommige van die probleme wat ter sprake kom deur Atkins en Rundell (2008 se benadering tot die ontwerp van leksikografiese definisies vir lede van leksikale versamelings. Die vrae wat gestel word, is hoe leksikale versamelings gedefinieer en geïdentifiseer moet word, hoe leksikale konseptuele modelle (LKM's definisie-eenvormigheid en-samehang kan ondersteun by die definiëring van lede

A cross-language study of perception of lexical stress in English.

Science.gov (United States)

Yu, Vickie Y; Andruski, Jean E

2010-08-01

This study investigates the question of whether language background affects the perception of lexical stress in English. Thirty native English speakers and 30 native Chinese learners of English participated in a stressed-syllable identification task and a discrimination task involving three types of stimuli (real words/pseudowords/hums). The results show that both language groups were able to identify and discriminate stress patterns. Lexical and segmental information affected the English and Chinese speakers in varying degrees. English and Chinese speakers showed different response patterns to trochaic vs. iambic stress across the three types of stimuli. An acoustic analysis revealed that two language groups used different acoustic cues to process lexical stress. The findings suggest that the different degrees of lexical and segmental effects can be explained by language background, which in turn supports the hypothesis that language background affects the perception of lexical stress in English.

The Contribution of Lexical Diversity to College-Level Writing

Science.gov (United States)

González, Melanie C.

2017-01-01

This article reports on a study that investigated the extent to which lexical frequency and lexical diversity contribute to writing proficiency scores on monolingual English-speaking writers' and advanced multilingual writers' academic compositions. The data consist of essays composed by 104 multilingual English learners enrolled in advanced…

Automatic processing of unattended lexical information in visual oddball presentation: neurophysiological evidence

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Yury eShtyrov

2013-08-01

Full Text Available Previous electrophysiological studies of automatic language processing revealed early (100-200 ms reflections of access to lexical characteristics of speech signal using the so-called mismatch negativity (MMN, a negative ERP deflection elicited by infrequent irregularities in unattended repetitive auditory stimulation. In those studies, lexical processing of spoken stimuli became manifest as an enhanced ERP in response to unattended real words as opposed to phonologically matched but meaningless pseudoword stimuli. This lexical ERP enhancement was explained by automatic activation of word memory traces realised as distributed strongly intra-connected neuronal circuits, whose robustness guarantees memory trace activation even in the absence of attention on spoken input. Such an account would predict the automatic activation of these memory traces upon any presentation of linguistic information, irrespective of the presentation modality. As previous lexical MMN studies exclusively used auditory stimulation, we here adapted the lexical MMN paradigm to investigate early automatic lexical effects in the visual modality. In a visual oddball sequence, matched short word and pseudoword stimuli were presented tachistoscopically in perifoveal area outside the visual focus of attention, as the subjects’ attention was concentrated on a concurrent non-linguistic visual dual task in the centre of the screen. Using EEG, we found a visual analogue of the lexical ERP enhancement effect, with unattended written words producing larger brain response amplitudes than matched pseudowords, starting at ~100 ms. Furthermore, we also found significant visual MMN, reported here for the first time for unattended lexical stimuli presented perifoveally. The data suggest early automatic lexical processing of visually presented language outside the focus of attention.

On advantage of seeing text and hearing speech

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Živanović Jelena

2011-01-01

Full Text Available The aim of this study was to examine the effect of congruence between the sensory modality through which a concept can be experienced and the modality through which the word denoting that concept is perceived during word recognition. Words denoting concepts that can be experienced visually (e.g. “color” and words denoting concepts that can be experienced auditorily (e.g. “noise” were presented both visually and auditorily. We observed shorter processing latencies when there was a match between the modality through which a concept could be experienced and the modality through which a word denoting that concept was presented. In visual lexical decision task, “color” was recognized faster than “noise”, whereas in auditory lexical decision task, “noise” was recognized faster than “color”. The obtained pattern of results can not be accounted for by exclusive amodal theories, whereas it can be easily integrated in theories based on perceptual representations.

Semantic relations and compound transparency: A regression study in CARIN theory

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Pham Hien

2013-01-01

Full Text Available According to the CARIN theory of Gagné and Shoben (1997, conceptual relations play an important role in compound interpretation. This study develops three measures gauging the role of conceptual relations, and pits these measures against measures based on latent semantic analysis (Landauer & Dumais, 1997. The CARIN measures successfully predict response latencies in a familiarity categorization task, in a semantic transparency task, and in visual lexical decision. Of the measures based on latent semantic analysis, only a measure orthogonal to the conceptual relations, which instead gauges the extent to which the concepts for the compound’s head and the compound itself are discriminated, also reached significance. Results further indicate that in tasks requiring careful assessment of the meaning of the compound, general knowledge of conceptual relations plays a central role, whereas in the lexical decision task, attention shifts to co-activated meanings and the specifics of the conceptual relations realized in the compound’s modifier family.

Lexical-Access Ability and Cognitive Predictors of Speech Recognition in Noise in Adult Cochlear Implant Users.

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Kaandorp, Marre W; Smits, Cas; Merkus, Paul; Festen, Joost M; Goverts, S Theo

2017-01-01

Not all of the variance in speech-recognition performance of cochlear implant (CI) users can be explained by biographic and auditory factors. In normal-hearing listeners, linguistic and cognitive factors determine most of speech-in-noise performance. The current study explored specifically the influence of visually measured lexical-access ability compared with other cognitive factors on speech recognition of 24 postlingually deafened CI users. Speech-recognition performance was measured with monosyllables in quiet (consonant-vowel-consonant [CVC]), sentences-in-noise (SIN), and digit-triplets in noise (DIN). In addition to a composite variable of lexical-access ability (LA), measured with a lexical-decision test (LDT) and word-naming task, vocabulary size, working-memory capacity (Reading Span test [RSpan]), and a visual analogue of the SIN test (text reception threshold test) were measured. The DIN test was used to correct for auditory factors in SIN thresholds by taking the difference between SIN and DIN: SRT diff . Correlation analyses revealed that duration of hearing loss (dHL) was related to SIN thresholds. Better working-memory capacity was related to SIN and SRT diff scores. LDT reaction time was positively correlated with SRT diff scores. No significant relationships were found for CVC or DIN scores with the predictor variables. Regression analyses showed that together with dHL, RSpan explained 55% of the variance in SIN thresholds. When controlling for auditory performance, LA, LDT, and RSpan separately explained, together with dHL, respectively 37%, 36%, and 46% of the variance in SRT diff outcome. The results suggest that poor verbal working-memory capacity and to a lesser extent poor lexical-access ability limit speech-recognition ability in listeners with a CI.

Exceptional Lexical Skills but Executive Language Deficits in School Starters and Young Adults with Turners Syndrome: Implications for X Chromosome Effects on Brain Function

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Temple, Christine M.; Shephard, Elizabeth E.

2012-01-01

TS school starters had enhanced receptive and expressive language on standardised assessment (CELF-P) and enhanced rhyme judgements, spoonerisms, and lexical decision, indicating enhanced phonological skills and word representations. There was marginal but consistent advantage across lexico-semantic tasks. On executive tasks, speeded naming of…

The Effects of Lexical Pitch Accent on Infant Word Recognition in Japanese

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Mitsuhiko Ota

2018-01-01

Full Text Available Learners of lexical tone languages (e.g., Mandarin develop sensitivity to tonal contrasts and recognize pitch-matched, but not pitch-mismatched, familiar words by 11 months. Learners of non-tone languages (e.g., English also show a tendency to treat pitch patterns as lexically contrastive up to about 18 months. In this study, we examined if this early-developing capacity to lexically encode pitch variations enables infants to acquire a pitch accent system, in which pitch-based lexical contrasts are obscured by the interaction of lexical and non-lexical (i.e., intonational features. Eighteen 17-month-olds learning Tokyo Japanese were tested on their recognition of familiar words with the expected pitch or the lexically opposite pitch pattern. In early trials, infants were faster in shifting their eyegaze from the distractor object to the target object than in shifting from the target to distractor in the pitch-matched condition. In later trials, however, infants showed faster distractor-to-target than target-to-distractor shifts in both the pitch-matched and pitch-mismatched conditions. We interpret these results to mean that, in a pitch-accent system, the ability to use pitch variations to recognize words is still in a nascent state at 17 months.

On stylistic automatization of lexical units in various types of contexts

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В В Зуева

2009-12-01

Full Text Available Stylistic automatization of lexical units in various types of contexts is investigated in this article. Following the works of Boguslav Havranek and other linguists of the Prague Linguistic School automatization is treated as a contextual narrowing of the meaning of a lexical unit to the level of its complete predictability in situational contexts and the lack of stylistic contradiction with other lexical units in speech.

Pathways from Toddler Information Processing to Adolescent Lexical Proficiency

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Rose, Susan A.; Feldman, Judith F.; Jankowski, Jeffery J.

2015-01-01

This study examined the relation of 3-year core information-processing abilities to lexical growth and development. The core abilities covered four domains--memory, representational competence (cross-modal transfer), processing speed, and attention. Lexical proficiency was assessed at 3 and 13 years with the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT)…

Tracking lexical consolidation with ERPs: Lexical and semantic-priming effects on N400 and LPC responses to newly-learned words.

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

2015-12-01

Novel words can be recalled immediately and after little exposure, but require a post-learning consolidation period to show word-like behaviour such as lexical competition. This pattern is thought to reflect a qualitative shift from episodic to lexical representations. However, several studies have reported immediate effects of meaningful novel words on semantic processing, suggesting that integration of novel word meanings may not require consolidation. The current study synthesises and extends these findings by showing a dissociation between lexical and semantic effects on the electrophysiological (N400, LPC) response to novel words. The difference in N400 amplitude between novel and existing words (a lexical effect) decreased significantly after a 24-h consolidation period, providing novel support for the hypothesis that offline consolidation aids lexicalisation. In contrast, novel words preceded by semantically related primes elicited a more positive LPC response (a semantic-priming effect) both before and after consolidation, indicating that certain semantic effects can be observed even when words have not been fully lexicalised. We propose that novel meanings immediately start to contribute to semantic processing, but that the underlying neural processes may shift from strategic to more automatic with consolidation. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Modulation of working memory updating: Does long-term memory lexical association matter?

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Artuso, Caterina; Palladino, Paola

2016-02-01

The aim of the present study was to investigate how working memory updating for verbal material is modulated by enduring properties of long-term memory. Two coexisting perspectives that account for the relation between long-term representation and short-term performance were addressed. First, evidence suggests that performance is more closely linked to lexical properties, that is, co-occurrences within the language. Conversely, other evidence suggests that performance is linked more to long-term representations which do not entail lexical/linguistic representations. Our aim was to investigate how these two kinds of long-term memory associations (i.e., lexical or nonlexical) modulate ongoing working memory activity. Therefore, we manipulated (between participants) the strength of the association in letters based on either frequency of co-occurrences (lexical) or contiguity along the sequence of the alphabet (nonlexical). Results showed a cost in working memory updating for strongly lexically associated stimuli only. Our findings advance knowledge of how lexical long-term memory associations between consonants affect working memory updating and, in turn, contribute to the study of factors which impact the updating process across memory systems.

Methodology for Calculating Latency of GPS Probe Data

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Young, Stanley E [National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Golden, CO (United States); Wang, Zhongxiang [University of Maryland; Hamedi, Masoud [University of Maryland

2017-10-01

Crowdsourced GPS probe data, such as travel time on changeable-message signs and incident detection, have been gaining popularity in recent years as a source for real-time traffic information to driver operations and transportation systems management and operations. Efforts have been made to evaluate the quality of such data from different perspectives. Although such crowdsourced data are already in widespread use in many states, particularly the high traffic areas on the Eastern seaboard, concerns about latency - the time between traffic being perturbed as a result of an incident and reflection of the disturbance in the outsourced data feed - have escalated in importance. Latency is critical for the accuracy of real-time operations, emergency response, and traveler information systems. This paper offers a methodology for measuring probe data latency regarding a selected reference source. Although Bluetooth reidentification data are used as the reference source, the methodology can be applied to any other ground truth data source of choice. The core of the methodology is an algorithm for maximum pattern matching that works with three fitness objectives. To test the methodology, sample field reference data were collected on multiple freeway segments for a 2-week period by using portable Bluetooth sensors as ground truth. Equivalent GPS probe data were obtained from a private vendor, and their latency was evaluated. Latency at different times of the day, impact of road segmentation scheme on latency, and sensitivity of the latency to both speed-slowdown and recovery-from-slowdown episodes are also discussed.

Evaluating Lexical Cohesion in Nigerian Newspaper Genres: Focus on the Editorials

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Zubairu Malah

2016-11-01

Full Text Available Applied linguists paying scholarly attention to newspaper genres have often argued that findings emerging from such studies would be of pedagogical significance because most of the newspaper genres share certain conventional features with school genres. Similarly, this study explored lexical cohesion in newspaper editorials, and it is understood that the findings could help learners in handling persuasive writings. The study sought to identify the dominant sources of lexical cohesion in the editorials, and also to examine how lexical cohesion is utilized to achieve coherence in the editorials. Drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL, the study applied Eggins’ (2004 model of lexical cohesion and analyzed 30 editorial texts of 20, 354 words drawn from three major Nigerian newspapers: The Guardian, The Nation, and Vanguard. The analysis revealed 2, 685 ties across 849 sentences. The data demonstrated that the major types of lexical cohesion in the editorials include: repetition (49.5%, expectancy relations (15. 8%, class/sub-class (11%, and synonymy (10.8%. It was further revealed that lexical cohesion devices, which formed into chains (586 and isolated ties (837, were utilized in building coherence in the editorial texts. It was finally shown how findings of the study could be beneficial in ESP, EAP, and EGP learning, especially in persuasive writings.

Some lexical aspects of Cape Muslim Afrikaans | Davids | Lexikos

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It looks at the role of the literary tradition of Arabic-Afrikaans and the Islamic religious education system at the Cape in this regard. Of particular interest are the changes which occur in the orthoepic nature and syntactical function of inherited and borrowed lexical units, by the affixing of lexical or grammatical morphemes, ...

The Spanish word tiempo: its omnipresence and conceptual, logical and lexical versatility

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Karlo Budor

2012-12-01

Full Text Available The common Spanish word tiempo corresponds to three English terms, each of them being a lexical equivalent based on a specific notion: (1 time – physical, astronomical, philosophical reference; (2 weather – geographical, climatological, meteorological reference; (3 tense: linguistic, lexical, grammatical reference. As far as universal and metalinguistic referential distinctions are concerned, all natural languages in fact present a considerable degree of variation ranging from inexistent or very vague to complete differentiation of these terms. In order to express these three types of specific references, some languages have a single word of general usage covering all its lexical acceptations. Therefore in such languages, Spanish included, different references can be distinguished only in part lexically. However, asemantic analysis of the Spanish word tiempo reveals its complexity as well as its conceptual, logical and lexical versatility. This is reflected in its capacity to combine in numerous lexical units, i.e. word compounds and/or phrases, endowed with different or specific semantic meanings. The repertory of these virtual and derived lexical forms appears to be practically unlimited, although their sphere of application and their boundaries are neither always very clear nor precise, which can be illustrated with the examples given in Spanish dictionaries.

Photosensor-Based Latency Measurement System for Head-Mounted Displays

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Min-Woo Seo

2017-05-01

Full Text Available In this paper, a photosensor-based latency measurement system for head-mounted displays (HMDs is proposed. The motion-to-photon latency is the greatest reason for motion sickness and dizziness felt by users when wearing an HMD system. Therefore, a measurement system is required to accurately measure and analyze the latency to reduce these problems. The existing measurement system does not consider the actual physical movement in humans, and its accuracy is also very low. However, the proposed system considers the physical head movement and is highly accurate. Specifically, it consists of a head position model-based rotary platform, pixel luminance change detector, and signal analysis and calculation modules. Using these modules, the proposed system can exactly measure the latency, which is the time difference between the physical movement for a user and the luminance change of an output image. In the experiment using a commercial HMD, the latency was measured to be up to 47.05 ms. In addition, the measured latency increased up to 381.17 ms when increasing the rendering workload in the HMD.

Lexical Variation and Change in British Sign Language

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Stamp, Rose; Schembri, Adam; Fenlon, Jordan; Rentelis, Ramas; Woll, Bencie; Cormier, Kearsy

2014-01-01

This paper presents results from a corpus-based study investigating lexical variation in BSL. An earlier study investigating variation in BSL numeral signs found that younger signers were using a decreasing variety of regionally distinct variants, suggesting that levelling may be taking place. Here, we report findings from a larger investigation looking at regional lexical variants for colours, countries, numbers and UK placenames elicited as part of the BSL Corpus Project. Age, school location and language background were significant predictors of lexical variation, with younger signers using a more levelled variety. This change appears to be happening faster in particular sub-groups of the deaf community (e.g., signers from hearing families). Also, we find that for the names of some UK cities, signers from outside the region use a different sign than those who live in the region. PMID:24759673

Categorical Perception of Lexical Tones in Mandarin-speaking Congenital Amusics

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Wan Ting Huang

2015-06-01

Full Text Available Previous research suggests that within Mandarin-speaking congenital amusics, only a subgroup has behavioral lexical tone perception impairments (tone agnosia, whereas the rest of amusics do not. The purpose of the current study was to investigate the categorical nature of lexical tone perception in Mandarin-speaking amusics with and without behavioral lexical tone deficits. Three groups of listeners (controls, pure amusics and amusics with tone agnosia participated in tone identification and discrimination tasks. Indexes of the categorical perception of a physical continuum of fundamental frequencies ranging from a rising to level tone were measured. Specifically, the stimulus durations were manipulated at 100 and 200 ms. For both stimulus durations, all groups exhibited similar categorical boundaries. The pure amusics showed sharp identification slopes and significantly peaked discrimination functions similar to those of normal controls. However, such essential characteristics for the categorical perception of lexical tones were not observed in amusics with tone agnosia. An enlarged step-size from 20 Hz to 35 Hz was not able to produce any discrimination peaks in tone agnosics either. The current study revealed that only amusics with tone agnosia showed a lack of categorical tone perception, while the pure amusics demonstrated typical categorical perception of lexical tones, indicating that the deficit of pitch processing in music does not necessarily result in the deficit in the categorical perception of lexical tones. The different performance between congenital amusics with and without tone agnosia provides a new perspective on the proposition of the relationship between music and speech perception.

The content of lexical stimuli and self-reported physiological state modulate error-related negativity amplitude.

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Benau, Erik M; Moelter, Stephen T

2016-09-01

The Error-Related Negativity (ERN) and Correct-Response Negativity (CRN) are brief event-related potential (ERP) components-elicited after the commission of a response-associated with motivation, emotion, and affect. The Error Positivity (Pe) typically appears after the ERN, and corresponds to awareness of having committed an error. Although motivation has long been established as an important factor in the expression and morphology of the ERN, physiological state has rarely been explored as a variable in these investigations. In the present study, we investigated whether self-reported physiological state (SRPS; wakefulness, hunger, or thirst) corresponds with ERN amplitude and type of lexical stimuli. Participants completed a SRPS questionnaire and then completed a speeded Lexical Decision Task with words and pseudowords that were either food-related or neutral. Though similar in frequency and length, food-related stimuli elicited increased accuracy, faster errors, and generated a larger ERN and smaller CRN than neutral words. Self-reported thirst correlated with improved accuracy and smaller ERN and CRN amplitudes. The Pe and Pc (correct positivity) were not impacted by physiological state or by stimulus content. The results indicate that physiological state and manipulations of lexical content may serve as important avenues for future research. Future studies that apply more sensitive measures of physiological and motivational state (e.g., biomarkers for satiety) or direct manipulations of satiety may be a useful technique for future research into response monitoring. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Planning and production of grammatical and lexical verbs in multi-word messages.

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Violaine Michel Lange

Full Text Available Grammatical words represent the part of grammar that can be most directly contrasted with the lexicon. Aphasiological studies, linguistic theories and psycholinguistic studies suggest that their processing is operated at different stages in speech production. Models of sentence production propose that at the formulation stage, lexical words are processed at the functional level while grammatical words are processed at a later positional level. In this study we consider proposals made by linguistic theories and psycholinguistic models to derive two predictions for the processing of grammatical words compared to lexical words. First, based on the assumption that grammatical words are less crucial for communication and therefore paid less attention to, it is predicted that they show shorter articulation times and/or higher error rates than lexical words. Second, based on the assumption that grammatical words differ from lexical words in being dependent on a lexical host, it is hypothesized that the retrieval of a grammatical word has to be put on hold until its lexical host is available, and it is predicted that this is reflected in longer reaction times (RTs for grammatical compared to lexical words. We investigated these predictions by comparing fully homonymous sentences with only a difference in verb status (grammatical vs. lexical elicited by a specific context. We measured RTs, duration and accuracy rate. No difference in duration was observed. Longer RTs and a lower accuracy rate for grammatical words were reported, successfully reflecting grammatical word properties as defined by linguistic theories and psycholinguistic models. Importantly, this study provides insight into the span of encoding and grammatical encoding processes in speech production.

Planning and production of grammatical and lexical verbs in multi-word messages

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Messerschmidt, Maria; Harder, Peter; Siebner, Hartwig Roman; Boye, Kasper

2017-01-01

Grammatical words represent the part of grammar that can be most directly contrasted with the lexicon. Aphasiological studies, linguistic theories and psycholinguistic studies suggest that their processing is operated at different stages in speech production. Models of sentence production propose that at the formulation stage, lexical words are processed at the functional level while grammatical words are processed at a later positional level. In this study we consider proposals made by linguistic theories and psycholinguistic models to derive two predictions for the processing of grammatical words compared to lexical words. First, based on the assumption that grammatical words are less crucial for communication and therefore paid less attention to, it is predicted that they show shorter articulation times and/or higher error rates than lexical words. Second, based on the assumption that grammatical words differ from lexical words in being dependent on a lexical host, it is hypothesized that the retrieval of a grammatical word has to be put on hold until its lexical host is available, and it is predicted that this is reflected in longer reaction times (RTs) for grammatical compared to lexical words. We investigated these predictions by comparing fully homonymous sentences with only a difference in verb status (grammatical vs. lexical) elicited by a specific context. We measured RTs, duration and accuracy rate. No difference in duration was observed. Longer RTs and a lower accuracy rate for grammatical words were reported, successfully reflecting grammatical word properties as defined by linguistic theories and psycholinguistic models. Importantly, this study provides insight into the span of encoding and grammatical encoding processes in speech production. PMID:29091940

Planning and production of grammatical and lexical verbs in multi-word messages.

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Michel Lange, Violaine; Messerschmidt, Maria; Harder, Peter; Siebner, Hartwig Roman; Boye, Kasper

2017-01-01

Grammatical words represent the part of grammar that can be most directly contrasted with the lexicon. Aphasiological studies, linguistic theories and psycholinguistic studies suggest that their processing is operated at different stages in speech production. Models of sentence production propose that at the formulation stage, lexical words are processed at the functional level while grammatical words are processed at a later positional level. In this study we consider proposals made by linguistic theories and psycholinguistic models to derive two predictions for the processing of grammatical words compared to lexical words. First, based on the assumption that grammatical words are less crucial for communication and therefore paid less attention to, it is predicted that they show shorter articulation times and/or higher error rates than lexical words. Second, based on the assumption that grammatical words differ from lexical words in being dependent on a lexical host, it is hypothesized that the retrieval of a grammatical word has to be put on hold until its lexical host is available, and it is predicted that this is reflected in longer reaction times (RTs) for grammatical compared to lexical words. We investigated these predictions by comparing fully homonymous sentences with only a difference in verb status (grammatical vs. lexical) elicited by a specific context. We measured RTs, duration and accuracy rate. No difference in duration was observed. Longer RTs and a lower accuracy rate for grammatical words were reported, successfully reflecting grammatical word properties as defined by linguistic theories and psycholinguistic models. Importantly, this study provides insight into the span of encoding and grammatical encoding processes in speech production.

Exploiting Lexical Regularities in Designing Natural Language Systems.

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1988-04-01

ELEMENT. PROJECT. TASKN Artificial Inteligence Laboratory A1A4WR NTumet 0) 545 Technology Square Cambridge, MA 02139 Ln *t- CONTROLLING OFFICE NAME AND...RO-RI95 922 EXPLOITING LEXICAL REGULARITIES IN DESIGNING NATURAL 1/1 LANGUAGE SYSTENS(U) MASSACHUSETTS INST OF TECH CAMBRIDGE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE...oes.ary and ftdou.Ip hr Nl wow" L,2This paper presents the lexical component of the START Question Answering system developed at the MIT Artificial

On the Relation between the General Affective Meaning and the Basic Sublexical, Lexical, and Inter-lexical Features of Poetic Texts-A Case Study Using 57 Poems of H. M. Enzensberger.

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Ullrich, Susann; Aryani, Arash; Kraxenberger, Maria; Jacobs, Arthur M; Conrad, Markus

2016-01-01

The literary genre of poetry is inherently related to the expression and elicitation of emotion via both content and form. To explore the nature of this affective impact at an extremely basic textual level, we collected ratings on eight different general affective meaning scales-valence, arousal, friendliness, sadness, spitefulness, poeticity, onomatopoeia, and liking-for 57 German poems (" die verteidigung der wölfe ") which the contemporary author H. M. Enzensberger had labeled as either "friendly," "sad," or "spiteful." Following Jakobson's (1960) view on the vivid interplay of hierarchical text levels, we used multiple regression analyses to explore the specific influences of affective features from three different text levels (sublexical, lexical, and inter-lexical) on the perceived general affective meaning of the poems using three types of predictors: (1) Lexical predictor variables capturing the mean valence and arousal potential of words; (2) Inter-lexical predictors quantifying peaks, ranges, and dynamic changes within the lexical affective content; (3) Sublexical measures of basic affective tone according to sound-meaning correspondences at the sublexical level (see Aryani et al., 2016). We find the lexical predictors to account for a major amount of up to 50% of the variance in affective ratings. Moreover, inter-lexical and sublexical predictors account for a large portion of additional variance in the perceived general affective meaning . Together, the affective properties of all used textual features account for 43-70% of the variance in the affective ratings and still for 23-48% of the variance in the more abstract aesthetic ratings. In sum, our approach represents a novel method that successfully relates a prominent part of variance in perceived general affective meaning in this corpus of German poems to quantitative estimates of affective properties of textual components at the sublexical, lexical, and inter-lexical level.

On the Relation between the General Affective Meaning and the Basic Sublexical, Lexical, and Inter-lexical Features of Poetic Texts—A Case Study Using 57 Poems of H. M. Enzensberger

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Ullrich, Susann; Aryani, Arash; Kraxenberger, Maria; Jacobs, Arthur M.; Conrad, Markus

2017-01-01

The literary genre of poetry is inherently related to the expression and elicitation of emotion via both content and form. To explore the nature of this affective impact at an extremely basic textual level, we collected ratings on eight different general affective meaning scales—valence, arousal, friendliness, sadness, spitefulness, poeticity, onomatopoeia, and liking—for 57 German poems (“die verteidigung der wölfe”) which the contemporary author H. M. Enzensberger had labeled as either “friendly,” “sad,” or “spiteful.” Following Jakobson's (1960) view on the vivid interplay of hierarchical text levels, we used multiple regression analyses to explore the specific influences of affective features from three different text levels (sublexical, lexical, and inter-lexical) on the perceived general affective meaning of the poems using three types of predictors: (1) Lexical predictor variables capturing the mean valence and arousal potential of words; (2) Inter-lexical predictors quantifying peaks, ranges, and dynamic changes within the lexical affective content; (3) Sublexical measures of basic affective tone according to sound-meaning correspondences at the sublexical level (see Aryani et al., 2016). We find the lexical predictors to account for a major amount of up to 50% of the variance in affective ratings. Moreover, inter-lexical and sublexical predictors account for a large portion of additional variance in the perceived general affective meaning. Together, the affective properties of all used textual features account for 43–70% of the variance in the affective ratings and still for 23–48% of the variance in the more abstract aesthetic ratings. In sum, our approach represents a novel method that successfully relates a prominent part of variance in perceived general affective meaning in this corpus of German poems to quantitative estimates of affective properties of textual components at the sublexical, lexical, and inter-lexical level

Lexical and Grammatical Collocations in Writing Production of EFL Learners

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Maryam Bahardoust

2012-05-01

Full Text Available Lewis (1993 recognized significance of word combinations including collocations by presenting lexical approach. Because of the crucial role of collocation in vocabulary acquisition, this research set out to evaluate the rate of collocations in Iranian EFL learners' writing production across L1 and L2. In addition, L1 interference with L2 collocational use in the learner' writing samples was studied. To achieve this goal, 200 Persian EFL learners at BA level were selected. These participants were taking paragraph writing and essay writing courses in two successive semesters. As for the data analysis, mid-term, final exam, and also the assignments of L2 learners were evaluated. Because of the nominal nature of the data, chi-square test was utilized for data analysis. Then, the rate of lexical and grammatical collocations was calculated. Results showed that the lexical collocations outnumbered the grammatical collocations. Different categories of lexical collocations were also compared with regard to their frequencies in EFL writing production. The rate of the verb-noun and adjective-noun collocations appeared to be the highest and noun-verb collocations the lowest. The results also showed that L1 had both positive and negative effect on the occurrence of both grammatical and lexical collocations.

Interaction between lexical and grammatical language systems in the brain

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Ardila, Alfredo

2012-06-01

This review concentrates on two different language dimensions: lexical/semantic and grammatical. This distinction between a lexical/semantic system and a grammatical system is well known in linguistics, but in cognitive neurosciences it has been obscured by the assumption that there are several forms of language disturbances associated with focal brain damage and hence language includes a diversity of functions (phoneme discrimination, lexical memory, grammar, repetition, language initiation ability, etc.), each one associated with the activity of a specific brain area. The clinical observation of patients with cerebral pathology shows that there are indeed only two different forms of language disturbances (disturbances in the lexical/semantic system and disturbances in the grammatical system); these two language dimensions are supported by different brain areas (temporal and frontal) in the left hemisphere. Furthermore, these two aspects of the language are developed at different ages during child's language acquisition, and they probably appeared at different historical moments during human evolution. Mechanisms of learning are different for both language systems: whereas the lexical/semantic knowledge is based in a declarative memory, grammatical knowledge corresponds to a procedural type of memory. Recognizing these two language dimensions can be crucial in understanding language evolution and human cognition.

Identification and Definition of Lexically Ambiguous Words in Statistics by Tutors and Students

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Richardson, Alice M.; Dunn, Peter K.; Hutchins, Rene

2013-01-01

Lexical ambiguity arises when a word from everyday English is used differently in a particular discipline, such as statistics. This paper reports on a project that begins by identifying tutors' perceptions of words that are potentially lexically ambiguous to students, in two different ways. Students' definitions of nine lexically ambiguous words…

Lexical effects on speech production and intelligibility in Parkinson's disease

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Chiu, Yi-Fang

Individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) often have speech deficits that lead to reduced speech intelligibility. Previous research provides a rich database regarding the articulatory deficits associated with PD including restricted vowel space (Skodda, Visser, & Schlegel, 2011) and flatter formant transitions (Tjaden & Wilding, 2004; Walsh & Smith, 2012). However, few studies consider the effect of higher level structural variables of word usage frequency and the number of similar sounding words (i.e. neighborhood density) on lower level articulation or on listeners' perception of dysarthric speech. The purpose of the study is to examine the interaction of lexical properties and speech articulation as measured acoustically in speakers with PD and healthy controls (HC) and the effect of lexical properties on the perception of their speech. Individuals diagnosed with PD and age-matched healthy controls read sentences with words that varied in word frequency and neighborhood density. Acoustic analysis was performed to compare second formant transitions in diphthongs, an indicator of the dynamics of tongue movement during speech production, across different lexical characteristics. Young listeners transcribed the spoken sentences and the transcription accuracy was compared across lexical conditions. The acoustic results indicate that both PD and HC speakers adjusted their articulation based on lexical properties but the PD group had significant reductions in second formant transitions compared to HC. Both groups of speakers increased second formant transitions for words with low frequency and low density, but the lexical effect is diphthong dependent. The change in second formant slope was limited in the PD group when the required formant movement for the diphthong is small. The data from listeners' perception of the speech by PD and HC show that listeners identified high frequency words with greater accuracy suggesting the use of lexical knowledge during the

Latency and User Performance in Virtual Environments and Augmented Reality

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Ellis, Stephen R.

2009-01-01

System rendering latency has been recognized by senior researchers, such as Professor Fredrick Brooks of UNC (Turing Award 1999), as a major factor limiting the realism and utility of head-referenced displays systems. Latency has been shown to reduce the user's sense of immersion within a virtual environment, disturb user interaction with virtual objects, and to contribute to motion sickness during some simulation tasks. Latency, however, is not just an issue for external display systems since finite nerve conduction rates and variation in transduction times in the human body's sensors also pose problems for latency management within the nervous system. Some of the phenomena arising from the brain's handling of sensory asynchrony due to latency will be discussed as a prelude to consideration of the effects of latency in interactive displays. The causes and consequences of the erroneous movement that appears in displays due to latency will be illustrated with examples of the user performance impact provided by several experiments. These experiments will review the generality of user sensitivity to latency when users judge either object or environment stability. Hardware and signal processing countermeasures will also be discussed. In particular the tuning of a simple extrapolative predictive filter not using a dynamic movement model will be presented. Results show that it is possible to adjust this filter so that the appearance of some latencies may be hidden without the introduction of perceptual artifacts such as overshoot. Several examples of the effects of user performance will be illustrated by three-dimensional tracking and tracing tasks executed in virtual environments. These experiments demonstrate classic phenomena known from work on manual control and show the need for very responsive systems if they are indented to support precise manipulation. The practical benefits of removing interfering latencies from interactive systems will be emphasized with some

The Emar Lexical Texts

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Gantzert, Merijn

2011-01-01

This four-part work provides a philological analysis and a theoretical interpretation of the cuneiform lexical texts found in the Late Bronze Age city of Emar, in present-day Syria. These word and sign lists, commonly dated to around 1100 BC, were almost all found in the archive of a single school.

Spatial attention during saccade decisions.

Science.gov (United States)

Jonikaitis, Donatas; Klapetek, Anna; Deubel, Heiner

2017-07-01

Behavioral measures of decision making are usually limited to observations of decision outcomes. In the present study, we made use of the fact that oculomotor and sensory selection are closely linked to track oculomotor decision making before oculomotor responses are made. We asked participants to make a saccadic eye movement to one of two memorized target locations and observed that visual sensitivity increased at both the chosen and the nonchosen saccade target locations, with a clear bias toward the chosen target. The time course of changes in visual sensitivity was related to saccadic latency, with the competition between the chosen and nonchosen targets resolved faster before short-latency saccades. On error trials, we observed an increased competition between the chosen and nonchosen targets. Moreover, oculomotor selection and visual sensitivity were influenced by top-down and bottom-up factors as well as by selection history and predicted the direction of saccades. Our findings demonstrate that saccade decisions have direct visual consequences and show that decision making can be traced in the human oculomotor system well before choices are made. Our results also indicate a strong association between decision making, saccade target selection, and visual sensitivity. NEW & NOTEWORTHY We show that saccadic decisions can be tracked by measuring spatial attention. Spatial attention is allocated in parallel to the two competing saccade targets, and the time course of spatial attention differs for fast-slow and for correct-erroneous decisions. Saccade decisions take the form of a competition between potential saccade goals, which is associated with spatial attention allocation to those locations. Copyright © 2017 the American Physiological Society.

Lexical access changes in patients with multiple sclerosis: a two-year follow-up study.

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Sepulcre, Jorge; Peraita, Herminia; Goni, Joaquin; Arrondo, Gonzalo; Martincorena, Inigo; Duque, Beatriz; Velez de Mendizabal, Nieves; Masdeu, Joseph C; Villoslada, Pablo

2011-02-01

The aim of the study was to analyze lexical access strategies in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) and their changes over time. We studied lexical access strategies during semantic and phonemic verbal fluency tests and also confrontation naming in a 2-year prospective cohort of 45 MS patients and 20 healthy controls. At baseline, switching lexical access strategy (both in semantic and in phonemic verbal fluency tests) and confrontation naming were significantly impaired in MS patients compared with controls. After 2 years follow-up, switching score decreased, and cluster size increased over time in semantic verbal fluency tasks, suggesting a failure in the retrieval of lexical information rather than an impairment of the lexical pool. In conclusion, these findings underline the significant presence of lexical access problems in patients with MS and could point out their key role in the alterations of high-level communications abilities in MS.

Roles of Time Hazard in Perceptual Decision Making under High Time Pressure

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Minju Kim

2011-05-01

Full Text Available The drift diffusion model (DDM has been successful in capturing the joint dynamics of accuracy and latency data in various perceptual decision making tasks. We evaluated how well the DDM describes dynamics of perceptual decision when subjects were under a varying degree of time pressure. We collected choice and latency responses from human subjects, who discriminated the size of a thin ring stimulus with a varying degree of uncertainty. The degree of time pressure was manipulated both by giving subjects an explicit instruction of different time limits across sessions (0.7 ∼ 1.2 s and by providing feedback to responses that were made later than those time limits. When fitted to the data of choice and latency, the three major variants of the DDM (with static bounds & gain, with time-varying bounds, and with time-varying gain showed a systematic pattern of latency-dependent prediction errors. Here we propose a new variant of the DDM, which adopts a ‘boundary for time hazard’ on the time axis in addition to the choice boundary on the choice-evidence axis in decision space. Our model did not exhibit the biased pattern of errors and was superior than the other models in goodness of fit to the data.

Measuring Lexical Diversity in Narrative Discourse of People with Aphasia

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Fergadiotis, Gerasimos; Wright, Heather H.; West, Thomas M.

2013-01-01

Purpose: A microlinguistic content analysis for assessing lexical semantics in people with aphasia (PWA) is lexical diversity (LD). Sophisticated techniques have been developed to measure LD. However, validity evidence for these methodologies when applied to the discourse of PWA is lacking. The purpose of this study was to evaluate four measures…

CUDT: A CUDA Based Decision Tree Algorithm

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Win-Tsung Lo

2014-01-01

Full Text Available Decision tree is one of the famous classification methods in data mining. Many researches have been proposed, which were focusing on improving the performance of decision tree. However, those algorithms are developed and run on traditional distributed systems. Obviously the latency could not be improved while processing huge data generated by ubiquitous sensing node in the era without new technology help. In order to improve data processing latency in huge data mining, in this paper, we design and implement a new parallelized decision tree algorithm on a CUDA (compute unified device architecture, which is a GPGPU solution provided by NVIDIA. In the proposed system, CPU is responsible for flow control while the GPU is responsible for computation. We have conducted many experiments to evaluate system performance of CUDT and made a comparison with traditional CPU version. The results show that CUDT is 5∼55 times faster than Weka-j48 and is 18 times speedup than SPRINT for large data set.

Lexical Competition Effects in Aphasia: Deactivation of Lexical Candidates in Spoken Word Processing

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Janse, Esther

2006-01-01

Research has shown that Broca's and Wernicke's aphasic patients show different impairments in auditory lexical processing. The results of an experiment with form-overlapping primes showed an inhibitory effect of form-overlap for control adults and a weak inhibition trend for Broca's aphasic patients, but a facilitatory effect of form-overlap was…

Genetic variants in RBFOX3 are associated with sleep latency

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Amin, N.; Allebrandt, K.V.; Spek, A.; Müller-Myhsok, B.; Hek, K.; Teder-Laving, M.; Hayward, C.; Esko, T.; van Mill, J.G.; Mbarek, H.; Watson, N.F.; Melville, S.A.; Del Greco, M.F.; Byrne, E.M.; Oole, E.; Kolcic, I.; Chen, T.; Evans, D.S.; Coresh, J.; Vogelzangs, N.; Karjalainen, J.; Willemsen, G.; Gharib, S.A.; Zgaga, L.; Mihailov, E.; Stone, K.L.; Campbell, H.; Brouwer, R.W.W.; Demirkan, A.; Isaacs, A.; Dogas, Z.; Marciante, K.; Campbell, S.; Borovecki, F.; Luik, A.I.; Li, M.; Hottenga, J.J.; Huffman, J.E.; van den Hout, M.C.G.N.; Cummings, S.R.; Aulchenko, Y.S.; Gehrman, P.R.; Uitterlinden, A.G.; Wichmann, H.E.; Müller-Nurasyid, M.; Fehrmann, R.S.N.; Montgomery, G.W.; Hofman, A.; Hong, W.; Kao, L.; Oostra, B.A.; Wright, A.F.; Vink, J.M.; Wilson, J.F.; Pramstaller, P.P.; Hicks, A.A.; Polasek, O.; Punjabi, N.M.; Redline, S.; Psaty, B.M.; Heath, A.C.; Merrow, M.; Tranah, G.J.; Gottlieb, D.J.; Boomsma, D.I.; Martin, N.G.; Rudan, I.; Tiemeier, H.; van Ijcken, W.F.J.; Penninx, B.W.J.H.; Metspalu, A.; Meitinger, T.; Franke, L.; Roenneberg, T.; van Duijn, C.M.

2016-01-01

Time to fall asleep (sleep latency) is a major determinant of sleep quality. Chronic, long sleep latency is a major characteristic of sleep-onset insomnia and/or delayed sleep phase syndrome. In this study we aimed to discover common polymorphisms that contribute to the genetics of sleep latency. We

Lexical bundles in an advanced INTOCSU writing class and engineering texts: A functional analysis

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Alquraishi, Mohammed Abdulrahman

The purpose of this study is to investigate the functions of lexical bundles in two corpora: a corpus of engineering academic texts and a corpus of IEP advanced writing class texts. This study is concerned with the nature of formulaic language in Pathway IEPs and engineering texts, and whether those types of texts show similar or distinctive formulaic functions. Moreover, the study looked into lexical bundles found in an engineering 1.26 million-word corpus and an ESL 65000-word corpus using a concordancing program. The study then analyzed the functions of those lexical bundles and compared them statistically using chi-square tests. Additionally, the results of this investigation showed 236 unique frequent lexical bundles in the engineering corpus and 37 bundles in the pathway corpus. Also, the study identified several differences between the density and functions of lexical bundles in the two corpora. These differences were evident in the distribution of functions of lexical bundles and the minimal overlap of lexical bundles found in the two corpora. The results of this study call for more attention to formulaic language at ESP and EAP programs.

Latency of Modern Vandalism

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Карина Анатоліївна Бочарова

2017-03-01

Existence latent crimes create a formation of wrong conception of its scales and condition. It causes faults in prognostication of criminality, in planning of its countermeasures. Latency of crimes connected with vandalism causes serious consequences either to state or to people.

Lexical Orthographic Knowledge Develops from the Beginning of Literacy Acquisition

Science.gov (United States)

Martinet, Catherine; Valdois, Sylviane; Fayol, Michel

2004-01-01

This study reports two experiments assessing the spelling performance of French first graders after 3 months and after 9 months of literacy instruction. The participants were asked to spell high and low frequency irregular words (Experiment 1) and pseudowords, some of which had lexical neighbours (Experiment 2). The lexical database which children…

Genre-dependent interaction of coherence and lexical cohesion in written discourse

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Berzlánovich, I.; Redeker, G.

2012-01-01

We investigate the interaction between coherence and lexical cohesion in expository and persuasive texts using seven encyclopedia texts and seven fundraising letters. We describe genre structure in terms of genre-specific moves and coherence structure with Rhetorical Structure Theory. For lexical

Pursuit Latency for Chromatic Targets

Science.gov (United States)

Mulligan, Jeffrey B.; Ellis, Stephen R. (Technical Monitor)

1998-01-01

The temporal dynamics of eye movement response to a change in direction of stimulus motion has been used to compare the processing speeds of different types of stimuli (Mulligan, ARVO '97). In this study, the pursuit response to colored targets was measured to test the hypothesis that the slow response of the chromatic system (as measured using traditional temporal sensitivity measures such as contrast sensitivity) results in increased eye movement latencies. Subjects viewed a small (0.4 deg) Gaussian spot which moved downward at a speed of 6.6 deg/sec. At a variable time during the trajectory, the dot's direction of motion changed by 30 degrees, either to the right or left. Subjects were instructed to pursue the spot. Eye movements were measured using a video ophthalmoscope with an angular resolution of approximately 1 arc min and a temporal sampling rate of 60 Hz. Stimuli were modulated in chrominance for a variety of hue directions, combined with a range of small luminance increments and decrements, to insure that some of the stimuli fell in the subjects' equiluminance planes. The smooth portions of the resulting eye movement traces were fit by convolving the stimulus velocity with an exponential having variable onset latency, time constant and amplitude. Smooth eye movements with few saccades were observed for all stimuli. Pursuit responses to stimuli having a significant luminance component are well-fit by exponentials having latencies and time constants on the order of 100 msec. Increases in pursuit response latency on the order of 100-200 msec are observed in response to certain stimuli, which occur in pairs of complementary hues, corresponding to the intersection of the stimulus section with the subjects' equiluminant plane. Smooth eye movements can be made in response to purely chromatic stimuli, but are slower than responses to stimuli with a luminance component.

Online Lexical Competition during Spoken Word Recognition and Word Learning in Children and Adults

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Henderson, Lisa; Weighall, Anna; Brown, Helen; Gaskell, Gareth

2013-01-01

Lexical competition that occurs as speech unfolds is a hallmark of adult oral language comprehension crucial to rapid incremental speech processing. This study used pause detection to examine whether lexical competition operates similarly at 7-8 years and tested variables that influence "online" lexical activity in adults. Children…

Predicting the Proficiency Level of Language Learners Using Lexical Indices

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Crossley, Scott A.; Salsbury, Tom; McNamara, Danielle S.

2012-01-01

This study explores how second language (L2) texts written by learners at various proficiency levels can be classified using computational indices that characterize lexical competence. For this study, 100 writing samples taken from 100 L2 learners were analyzed using lexical indices reported by the computational tool Coh-Metrix. The L2 writing…

An explicit statistical model of learning lexical segmentation using multiple cues

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Çöltekin, Ça ̆grı; Nerbonne, John; Lenci, Alessandro; Padró, Muntsa; Poibeau, Thierry; Villavicencio, Aline

2014-01-01

This paper presents an unsupervised and incremental model of learning segmentation that combines multiple cues whose use by children and adults were attested by experimental studies. The cues we exploit in this study are predictability statistics, phonotactics, lexical stress and partial lexical

Monitoring data transfer latency in CMS computing operations

CERN Document Server

Bonacorsi, D; Magini, N; Sartirana, A; Taze, M; Wildish, T

2015-01-01

During the first LHC run, the CMS experiment collected tens of Petabytes of collision and simulated data, which need to be distributed among dozens of computing centres with low latency in order to make efficient use of the resources. While the desired level of throughput has been successfully achieved, it is still common to observe transfer workflows that cannot reach full completion in a timely manner due to a small fraction of stuck files which require operator intervention.For this reason, in 2012 the CMS transfer management system, PhEDEx, was instrumented with a monitoring system to measure file transfer latencies, and to predict the completion time for the transfer of a data set. The operators can detect abnormal patterns in transfer latencies while the transfer is still in progress, and monitor the long-term performance of the transfer infrastructure to plan the data placement strategy.Based on the data collected for one year with the latency monitoring system, we present a study on the different fact...

How logical reasoning mediates the relation between lexical quality and reading comprehension.

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Segers, Eliane; Verhoeven, Ludo

The present study aimed to examine the role of logical reasoning in the relation between lexical quality and reading comprehension in 146 fourth grade Dutch children. We assessed their standardized reading comprehension measure, along with their decoding efficiency and vocabulary as measures of lexical quality, syllogistic reasoning as measure of (verbal) logical reasoning, and nonverbal reasoning as a control measure. Syllogistic reasoning was divided into a measure tapping basic, coherence inferencing skill using logical syllogisms, and a measure tapping elaborative inferencing skill using indeterminate syllogisms. Results showed that both types of syllogisms partly mediated the relation between lexical quality and reading comprehension, but also had a unique additional effect on reading comprehension. The indirect effect of lexical quality on reading comprehension via syllogisms was driven by vocabulary knowledge. It is concluded that measures of syllogistic reasoning account for higher-order thinking processes that are needed to make inferences in reading comprehension. The role of lexical quality appears to be pivotal in explaining the variation in reading comprehension both directly and indirectly via syllogistic reasoning.

Cascading activation from lexical processing to letter-level processing in written word production.

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Buchwald, Adam; Falconer, Carolyn

2014-01-01

Descriptions of language production have identified processes involved in producing language and the presence and type of interaction among those processes. In the case of spoken language production, consensus has emerged that there is interaction among lexical selection processes and phoneme-level processing. This issue has received less attention in written language production. In this paper, we present a novel analysis of the writing-to-dictation performance of an individual with acquired dysgraphia revealing cascading activation from lexical processing to letter-level processing. The individual produced frequent lexical-semantic errors (e.g., chipmunk → SQUIRREL) as well as letter errors (e.g., inhibit → INBHITI) and had a profile consistent with impairment affecting both lexical processing and letter-level processing. The presence of cascading activation is suggested by lower letter accuracy on words that are more weakly activated during lexical selection than on those that are more strongly activated. We operationalize weakly activated lexemes as those lexemes that are produced as lexical-semantic errors (e.g., lethal in deadly → LETAHL) compared to strongly activated lexemes where the intended target word (e.g., lethal) is the lexeme selected for production.

Comparison of Sleep Latency and Number of SOREMPs in the Home and Hospital With a Modified Multiple Sleep Latency Test: A Randomized Crossover Study.

Science.gov (United States)

Beiske, Kornelia K; Sand, Trond; Rugland, Eyvind; Stavem, Knut

2017-05-01

Comparison of mean sleep latencies and number of sleep-onset rapid eye movement periods (SOREMPs) between modified multiple sleep latency test (MSLT) performed in the unattended home and in-hospital laboratory setting. A randomized crossover single-blinded design. Thirty-four subjects referred to MSLT for suspected hypersomnia or narcolepsy were included. Participants were randomized to perform modified MSLT in the unattended home or in the hospital first. Scores in the two settings were compared using Wilcoxon signed-rank test or exact McNemar test. Agreement between home and hospital categorized mean sleep latency and number of SOREMPs was assessed using simple kappa (κ) and proportion agreement. Agreement between home and hospital mean sleep latency was assessed using a Bland-Altman plot and an intraclass correlation coefficient. There was no difference between home and hospital assessment of mean sleep latency (P = 0.86). Two or more SOREMPs were found more frequently on modified MSLTs performed at home compared with those at the hospital (7 and 2, respectively; P = 0.025). Agreement was moderate for categorized sleep latency (κ = 0.53) and fair for categorized SOREMPs (κ = 0.39) in the 2 settings. Analysis of mean sleep latency using intraclass correlation coefficient showed a very good agreement between the two settings. Group mean sleep latency for home modified MSLTs seems to be reliable compared with that for the attended sleep-laboratory setting. Higher rate of SOREMP in the unattended home suggests that napping in a familiar environment facilitates the transition into REM sleep. Further studies are needed to assess the normal limit, sensitivity, and specificity for SOREMP at home before the clinical utility of home-based napping can be determined.

Temporal processing and long-latency auditory evoked potential in stutterers.

Science.gov (United States)

Prestes, Raquel; de Andrade, Adriana Neves; Santos, Renata Beatriz Fernandes; Marangoni, Andrea Tortosa; Schiefer, Ana Maria; Gil, Daniela

Stuttering is a speech fluency disorder, and may be associated with neuroaudiological factors linked to central auditory processing, including changes in auditory processing skills and temporal resolution. To characterize the temporal processing and long-latency auditory evoked potential in stutterers and to compare them with non-stutterers. The study included 41 right-handed subjects, aged 18-46 years, divided into two groups: stutterers (n=20) and non-stutters (n=21), compared according to age, education, and sex. All subjects were submitted to the duration pattern tests, random gap detection test, and long-latency auditory evoked potential. Individuals who stutter showed poorer performance on Duration Pattern and Random Gap Detection tests when compared with fluent individuals. In the long-latency auditory evoked potential, there was a difference in the latency of N2 and P3 components; stutterers had higher latency values. Stutterers have poor performance in temporal processing and higher latency values for N2 and P3 components. Copyright © 2017 Associação Brasileira de Otorrinolaringologia e Cirurgia Cérvico-Facial. Published by Elsevier Editora Ltda. All rights reserved.

Temporal processing and long-latency auditory evoked potential in stutterers

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Raquel Prestes

Full Text Available Abstract Introduction: Stuttering is a speech fluency disorder, and may be associated with neuroaudiological factors linked to central auditory processing, including changes in auditory processing skills and temporal resolution. Objective: To characterize the temporal processing and long-latency auditory evoked potential in stutterers and to compare them with non-stutterers. Methods: The study included 41 right-handed subjects, aged 18-46 years, divided into two groups: stutterers (n = 20 and non-stutters (n = 21, compared according to age, education, and sex. All subjects were submitted to the duration pattern tests, random gap detection test, and long-latency auditory evoked potential. Results: Individuals who stutter showed poorer performance on Duration Pattern and Random Gap Detection tests when compared with fluent individuals. In the long-latency auditory evoked potential, there was a difference in the latency of N2 and P3 components; stutterers had higher latency values. Conclusion: Stutterers have poor performance in temporal processing and higher latency values for N2 and P3 components.

Latency reduction in online multiplayer games using detour routing

OpenAIRE

Ly, Cong

2010-01-01

Long network latency negatively impacts the performance of online multiplayer games. In this thesis, we propose a novel approach to reduce the network latency in online gaming. Our approach employs application level detour routing in which game-state update messages between two players can be forwarded through other intermediate relay nodes in order to reduce network latency. We present results from an extensive measurement study to show the potential benefits of detour routing in online game...

Lexical and sublexical units in speech perception.

Science.gov (United States)

Giroux, Ibrahima; Rey, Arnaud

2009-03-01

Saffran, Newport, and Aslin (1996a) found that human infants are sensitive to statistical regularities corresponding to lexical units when hearing an artificial spoken language. Two sorts of segmentation strategies have been proposed to account for this early word-segmentation ability: bracketing strategies, in which infants are assumed to insert boundaries into continuous speech, and clustering strategies, in which infants are assumed to group certain speech sequences together into units (Swingley, 2005). In the present study, we test the predictions of two computational models instantiating each of these strategies i.e., Serial Recurrent Networks: Elman, 1990; and Parser: Perruchet & Vinter, 1998 in an experiment where we compare the lexical and sublexical recognition performance of adults after hearing 2 or 10 min of an artificial spoken language. The results are consistent with Parser's predictions and the clustering approach, showing that performance on words is better than performance on part-words only after 10 min. This result suggests that word segmentation abilities are not merely due to stronger associations between sublexical units but to the emergence of stronger lexical representations during the development of speech perception processes. Copyright © 2009, Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

Lexical evolution rates derived from automated stability measures

Science.gov (United States)

Petroni, Filippo; Serva, Maurizio

2010-03-01

Phylogenetic trees can be reconstructed from the matrix which contains the distances between all pairs of languages in a family. Recently, we proposed a new method which uses normalized Levenshtein distances among words with the same meaning and averages over all the items of a given list. Decisions about the number of items in the input lists for language comparison have been debated since the beginning of glottochronology. The point is that words associated with some of the meanings have a rapid lexical evolution. Therefore, a large vocabulary comparison is only apparently more accurate than a smaller one, since many of the words do not carry any useful information. In principle, one should find the optimal length of the input lists, studying the stability of the different items. In this paper we tackle the problem with an automated methodology based only on our normalized Levenshtein distance. With this approach, the program of an automated reconstruction of language relationships is completed.

Long-latency auditory evoked potentials with verbal and nonverbal stimuli.

Science.gov (United States)

Oppitz, Sheila Jacques; Didoné, Dayane Domeneghini; Silva, Débora Durigon da; Gois, Marjana; Folgearini, Jordana; Ferreira, Geise Corrêa; Garcia, Michele Vargas

2015-01-01

Long-latency auditory evoked potentials represent the cortical activity related to attention, memory, and auditory discrimination skills. Acoustic signal processing occurs differently between verbal and nonverbal stimuli, influencing the latency and amplitude patterns. To describe the latencies of the cortical potentials P1, N1, P2, N2, and P3, as well as P3 amplitude, with different speech stimuli and tone bursts, and to classify them in the presence and absence of these data. A total of 30 subjects with normal hearing were assessed, aged 18-32 years old, matched by gender. Nonverbal stimuli were used (tone burst; 1000Hz - frequent and 4000Hz - rare); and verbal (/ba/ - frequent; /ga/, /da/, and /di/ - rare). Considering the component N2 for tone burst, the lowest latency found was 217.45ms for the BA/DI stimulus; the highest latency found was 256.5ms. For the P3 component, the shortest latency with tone burst stimuli was 298.7 with BA/GA stimuli, the highest, was 340ms. For the P3 amplitude, there was no statistically significant difference among the different stimuli. For latencies of components P1, N1, P2, N2, P3, there were no statistical differences among them, regardless of the stimuli used. There was a difference in the latency of potentials N2 and P3 among the stimuli employed but no difference was observed for the P3 amplitude. Copyright © 2015 Associação Brasileira de Otorrinolaringologia e Cirurgia Cérvico-Facial. Published by Elsevier Editora Ltda. All rights reserved.

Long-latency auditory evoked potentials with verbal and nonverbal stimuli,

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Sheila Jacques Oppitz

2015-12-01

Full Text Available ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION: Long-latency auditory evoked potentials represent the cortical activity related to attention, memory, and auditory discrimination skills. Acoustic signal processing occurs differently between verbal and nonverbal stimuli, influencing the latency and amplitude patterns. OBJECTIVE: To describe the latencies of the cortical potentials P1, N1, P2, N2, and P3, as well as P3 amplitude, with different speech stimuli and tone bursts, and to classify them in the presence and absence of these data. METHODS: A total of 30 subjects with normal hearing were assessed, aged 18-32 years old, matched by gender. Nonverbal stimuli were used (tone burst; 1000 Hz - frequent and 4000 Hz - rare; and verbal (/ba/ - frequent; /ga/, /da/, and /di/ - rare. RESULTS: Considering the component N2 for tone burst, the lowest latency found was 217.45 ms for the BA/DI stimulus; the highest latency found was 256.5 ms. For the P3 component, the shortest latency with tone burst stimuli was 298.7 with BA/GA stimuli, the highest, was 340 ms. For the P3 amplitude, there was no statistically significant difference among the different stimuli. For latencies of components P1, N1, P2, N2, P3, there were no statistical differences among them, regardless of the stimuli used. CONCLUSION: There was a difference in the latency of potentials N2 and P3 among the stimuli employed but no difference was observed for the P3 amplitude.

Primary display latency criteria based on flying qualities and performance data

Science.gov (United States)

Funk, John D., Jr.; Beck, Corin P.; Johns, John B.

1993-01-01

With a pilots' increasing use of visual cue augmentation, much requiring extensive pre-processing, there is a need to establish criteria for new avionics/display design. The timeliness and synchronization of the augmented cues is vital to ensure the performance quality required for precision mission task elements (MTEs) where augmented cues are the primary source of information to the pilot. Processing delays incurred while transforming sensor-supplied flight information into visual cues are unavoidable. Relationships between maximum control system delays and associated flying qualities levels are documented in MIL-F-83300 and MIL-F-8785. While cues representing aircraft status may be just as vital to the pilot as prompt control response for operations in instrument meteorological conditions, presently, there are no specification requirements on avionics system latency. To produce data relating avionics system latency to degradations in flying qualities, the Navy conducted two simulation investigations. During the investigations, flying qualities and performance data were recorded as simulated avionics system latency was varied. Correlated results of the investigation indicates that there is a detrimental impact of latency on flying qualities. Analysis of these results and consideration of key factors influencing their application indicate that: (1) Task performance degrades and pilot workload increases as latency is increased. Inconsistency in task performance increases as latency increases. (2) Latency reduces the probability of achieving Level 1 handling qualities with avionics system latency as low as 70 ms. (3) The data suggest that the achievement of desired performance will be ensured only at display latency values below 120 ms. (4) These data also suggest that avoidance of inadequate performance will be ensured only at display latency values below 150 ms.

Subtle role of latency for information diffusion in online social networks

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Xiong Fei; Wang Xi-Meng; Cheng Jun-Jun

2016-01-01

Information diffusion in online social networks is induced by the event of forwarding information for users, and latency exists widely in user spreading behaviors. Little work has been done to reveal the effect of latency on the diffusion process. In this paper, we propose a propagation model in which nodes may suspend their spreading actions for a waiting period of stochastic length. These latent nodes may recover their activity again. Meanwhile, the mechanism of forwarding information is also introduced into the diffusion model. Mean-field analysis and numerical simulations indicate that our model has three nontrivial results. First, the spreading threshold does not correlate with latency in neither homogeneous nor heterogeneous networks, but depends on the spreading and refractory parameter. Furthermore, latency affects the diffusion process and changes the infection scale. A large or small latency parameter leads to a larger final diffusion extent, but the intrinsic dynamics is different. Large latency implies forwarding information rapidly, while small latency prevents nodes from dropping out of interactions. In addition, the betweenness is a better descriptor to identify influential nodes in the model with latency, compared with the coreness and degree. These results are helpful in understanding some collective phenomena of the diffusion process and taking measures to restrain a rumor in social networks. (paper)

Formalizing the Process of Constructing Chains of Lexical Units

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Grigorij Chetverikov

2015-06-01

Full Text Available Formalizing the Process of Constructing Chains of Lexical Units The paper investigates mathematical aspects of describing the construction of chains of lexical units on the basis of finite-predicate algebra. Analyzing the construction peculiarities is carried out and application of the method of finding the power of linear logical transformation for removing characteristic words of a dictionary entry is given. Analysis and perspectives of the results of the study are provided.

Latency in Visionic Systems: Test Methods and Requirements

Science.gov (United States)

Bailey, Randall E.; Arthur, J. J., III; Williams, Steven P.; Kramer, Lynda J.

2005-01-01

A visionics device creates a pictorial representation of the external scene for the pilot. The ultimate objective of these systems may be to electronically generate a form of Visual Meteorological Conditions (VMC) to eliminate weather or time-of-day as an operational constraint and provide enhancement over actual visual conditions where eye-limiting resolution may be a limiting factor. Empirical evidence has shown that the total system delays or latencies including the imaging sensors and display systems, can critically degrade their utility, usability, and acceptability. Definitions and measurement techniques are offered herein as common test and evaluation methods for latency testing in visionics device applications. Based upon available data, very different latency requirements are indicated based upon the piloting task, the role in which the visionics device is used in this task, and the characteristics of the visionics cockpit display device including its resolution, field-of-regard, and field-of-view. The least stringent latency requirements will involve Head-Up Display (HUD) applications, where the visionics imagery provides situational information as a supplement to symbology guidance and command information. Conversely, the visionics system latency requirement for a large field-of-view Head-Worn Display application, providing a Virtual-VMC capability from which the pilot will derive visual guidance, will be the most stringent, having a value as low as 20 msec.

Be aware of the rifle but do not forget the stench: differential effects of fear and disgust on lexical processing and memory.

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Ferré, Pilar; Haro, Juan; Hinojosa, José Antonio

2017-08-07

The aim of this study was to investigate the role of discrete emotions in lexical processing and memory, focusing on disgust and fear. We compared neutral words to disgust-related words and fear-related words in three experiments. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants performed a lexical decision task (LDT), and in Experiment 3 an affective categorisation task. These tasks were followed by an unexpected memory task. The results of the LDT experiments showed slower reaction times for both types of negative words with respect to neutral words, plus a higher percentage of errors, this being more consistent for fear-related words (Experiments 1 and 2) than for disgust-related words (Experiment 2). Furthermore, only disgusting words exhibited a higher recall accuracy than neutral words in the memory task. Moreover, the advantage in memory for disgusting words disappeared when participants carried out an affective categorisation task during encoding (Experiment 3), suggesting that the superiority in memory for disgusting words observed in Experiments 1 and 2 could be due to greater elaborative processing. Taken together, these findings point to the relevance of discrete emotions in explaining the effects of the emotional content on lexical processing and memory.

USING AUTHENTIC LITERARY WORKS FOR THE FORMATION OF LEXICAL COMPETENCE OF FUTURE GERMAN LANGUAGE TEACHERS

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Антоніна Палецька-Юкало

2014-10-01

Full Text Available The article deals with the advantages of use of authentic literary works as the main sphere of learning and improvement of foreign language vocabulary.The definition of lexical competence has been suggested. The possibilities for perceiving and analysis of such language phenomena as synonyms, antonyms, polisemic words, lexical links, linguistic clichés non-equivalent and emotionally colored vocabulary of authentic literary works as the basis of the formation of German lexical competence of future teachers have been grounded. The process of investigation has revealed that lexical contents of authentic literary works contribute to a comprehensive dictionary and learning connected speech structures, provide frequent repetition of lexical items, and create a sense of language.

THE INFLUENCE OF SYLLABIFICATION RULES IN L1 ON L2 WORD RECOGNITION.

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Choi, Wonil; Nam, Kichun; Lee, Yoonhyoung

2015-10-01

Experiments with Korean learners of English and English monolinguals were conducted to examine whether knowledge of syllabification in the native language (Korean) affects the recognition of printed words in the non-native language (English). Another purpose of this study was to test whether syllables are the processing unit in Korean visual word recognition. In Experiment 1, 26 native Korean speakers and 19 native English speakers participated. In Experiment 2, 40 native Korean speakers participated. In two experiments, syllable length was manipulated based on the Korean syllabification rule and the participants performed a lexical decision task. Analyses of variance were performed for the lexical decision latencies and error rates in two experiments. The results from Korean learners of English showed that two-syllable words based on the Korean syllabification rule were recognized faster as words than various types of three-syllable words, suggesting that Korean learners of English exploited their L1 phonological knowledge in recognizing English words. The results of the current study also support the idea that syllables are a processing unit of Korean visual word recognition.

Lexical Characteristics of Expressive Vocabulary in Toddlers with Autism Spectrum Disorder

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Kover, Sara T.; Weismer, Susan Ellis

2014-01-01

Purpose: Vocabulary is a domain of particular challenge for many children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Recent research has drawn attention to ways in which lexical characteristics relate to vocabulary acquisition. The current study tested the hypothesis that lexical characteristics account for variability in vocabulary size of young…

Lexical Development during Middle Infancy: A Mutually Driven Infant-Caregiver Process.

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Dunham, Philip; Dunham, Frances

1992-01-01

Mothers' utterances were measured during interactions with their 13-month-old infants and correlated with measures of infants' productive lexical development at 13 and 24 months. Correlations between maternal measures and infants' lexical development were lower for employed mothers than for mothers who were full-time caregivers. (BC)

The Interaction of Lexical Characteristics and Speech Production in Parkinson's Disease

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Chiu, Yi-Fang; Forrest, Karen

2017-01-01

Purpose: This study sought to investigate the interaction of speech movement execution with higher order lexical parameters. The authors examined how lexical characteristics affect speech output in individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) and healthy control (HC) speakers. Method: Twenty speakers with PD and 12 healthy speakers read sentences…

Acoustic-Phonetic Versus Lexical Processing in Nonnative Listeners Differing in Their Dominant Language.

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Shi, Lu-Feng; Koenig, Laura L

2016-09-01

Nonnative listeners have difficulty recognizing English words due to underdeveloped acoustic-phonetic and/or lexical skills. The present study used Boothroyd and Nittrouer's (1988)j factor to tease apart these two components of word recognition. Participants included 15 native English and 29 native Russian listeners. Fourteen and 15 of the Russian listeners reported English (ED) and Russian (RD) to be their dominant language, respectively. Listeners were presented 119 consonant-vowel-consonant real and nonsense words in speech-spectrum noise at +6 dB SNR. Responses were scored for word and phoneme recognition, the logarithmic quotient of which yielded j. Word and phoneme recognition was comparable between native and ED listeners but poorer in RD listeners. Analysis of j indicated less effective use of lexical information in RD than in native and ED listeners. Lexical processing was strongly correlated with the length of residence in the United States. Language background is important for nonnative word recognition. Lexical skills can be regarded as nativelike in ED nonnative listeners. Compromised word recognition in ED listeners is unlikely a result of poor lexical processing. Performance should be interpreted with caution for listeners dominant in their first language, whose word recognition is affected by both lexical and acoustic-phonetic factors.

FUNCTIONAL INTERACTION OF LEXICAL AND GRAMMATICAL FACTORS IN THE ENGLISH VERB SYSTEM

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Nina Sergeevna Kotova

2017-03-01

Full Text Available Purpose. The purpose of the research conducted is revealing the peculiarities of lexical paradigmatics influence upon the usage of aspect and temporal verb forms and the opposite impact as well, i.e. the influence of aspect and temporal verb forms upon the lexical meaning of this verb groups under specific conditions of functioning. The lexical paradigmatics is considered as the system of mutually contrasted semantic features of particular verb groups. In this case, we analyze the paradigmatics in the middle language hierarchy for each language level separately. Methodology. The research is conducted synchronically on the material of the contemporary English verb system. Interaction of lexical and grammatical factors in the English verb system is examined in a functional aspect. Such consideration gives a possibility to differentiate the intrasystem phenomena and phenomena of pragmatic character and expose the system-structural mutual relations of lexical and grammatical factors. The research material is the verb as massive word group. From the point of view of interaction of lexical and grammatical factors in the functional and semantic field representing aspectuality, we get interested in the meaning which realizes in the opposition ofatelicity – telicity(telicity correlates the action with the limit, and atelicity demotes the action irrespectively to its limit. The technique applied to the analysis of lexical and grammatical factors in the English verb system is complex combining descriptive and comparative and functional methods. Results. Interrelations and interdependency of lexical and grammatical paradigmatics create particular sustainability in using the lexical unit of this paradigm with aspect and temporal verb forms. In this case, the tendencies of the language sign developing and changing are expressed in the process of the mutual substitution and interpenetration of grammatical forms primarily under the influence of paradigmatic

Scalla: Structured Cluster Architecture for Low Latency Access

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Hanushevsky, Andrew; Wang, Daniel L.; /SLAC

2012-03-20

Scalla is a distributed low-latency file access system that incorporates novel techniques that minimize latency and maximize scalability over a large distributed system with a distributed namespace. Scalla's techniques have shown to be effective in nearly a decade of service for the high-energy physics community using commodity hardware and interconnects. We describe the two components used in Scalla that are instrumental in its ability to provide low-latency, fault-tolerant name resolution and load distribution, and enable its use as a high-throughput, low-latency communication layer in the Qserv system, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope's (LSST's) prototype astronomical query system. Scalla arguably exceeded its three main design objectives: low latency, scaling, and recoverability. In retrospect, these objectives were met using a simple but effective design. Low latency was met by uniformly using linear or constant time algorithms in all high-use paths, avoiding locks whenever possible, and using compact data structures to maximize the memory caching efficiency. Scaling was achieved by architecting the system as a 64-ary tree. Nodes can be added easily and as the number of nodes increases, search performance increases at an exponential rate. Recoverability is inherent in that no permanent state information is maintained and whatever state information is needed it can be quickly constructed or reconstructed in real time. This allows dynamic changes in a cluster of servers with little impact on over-all performance or usability. Today, Scalla is being deployed in environments and for uses that were never conceived in 2001. This speaks well for the systems adaptability but the underlying reason is that the system can meet its three fundamental objectives at the same time.

Lexical studies of indigenous personality factors: premises, products, and prospects.

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Saucier, G; Goldberg, L R; Institute, O R

2001-12-01

The rationale for lexical studies rests on the assumption that the most meaningful personality attributes tend to become encoded in language as single-word descriptors. We articulate some key premises of the lexical approach and then review a number of studies that have been conducted examining the factor structure of personality descriptors extracted from dictionaries. We compare lexical studies in English and 12 other languages, with attention to delineating consistencies between the structures found in diverse languages. Our review suggests that the Anglo-Germanic Big Five is reproduced better in some languages than in others. We propose some organizing rules for lexical factor structures that may be more generalizable than the contemporary Big-Five model. And, we propose several candidate structural models that should be compared with the Big Five in future studies, including structures with one, two, and three very broad factors, an alternative five-factor structure identified in Italian and Hungarian studies, and a seven-factor structure represented in Hebrew and Philippine studies. We recommend that in future studies more attention be paid to middle-level personality constructs and to examining the effects of methodological variations on the resulting factor structures.

Automatic latency equalization in VHDL-implemented complex pipelined systems

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Zabołotny, Wojciech M.

2016-09-01

In the pipelined data processing systems it is very important to ensure that parallel paths delay data by the same number of clock cycles. If that condition is not met, the processing blocks receive data not properly aligned in time and produce incorrect results. Manual equalization of latencies is a tedious and error-prone work. This paper presents an automatic method of latency equalization in systems described in VHDL. The proposed method uses simulation to measure latencies and verify introduced correction. The solution is portable between different simulation and synthesis tools. The method does not increase the complexity of the synthesized design comparing to the solution based on manual latency adjustment. The example implementation of the proposed methodology together with a simple design demonstrating its use is available as an open source project under BSD license.

Lexical Organization in Second Language Acquisition: Does the Critical Period Matter?

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Cardimona, Kimberly; Smith, Pamela; Roberts, Lauren Sones

2016-01-01

This study examined lexical organization in English language learners (ELLs) who acquired their second language (L2) either during or after the period of maximal sensitivity related to the critical period hypothesis. Twenty-three native-Spanish-speaking ELLs completed psycholinguistic tasks to examine age effects in bilingual lexical organization.…

Lexical Errors and Accuracy in Foreign Language Writing. Second Language Acquisition

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del Pilar Agustin Llach, Maria

2011-01-01

Lexical errors are a determinant in gaining insight into vocabulary acquisition, vocabulary use and writing quality assessment. Lexical errors are very frequent in the written production of young EFL learners, but they decrease as learners gain proficiency. Misspellings are the most common category, but formal errors give way to semantic-based…

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

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Moseley, Rachel L; Pulvermüller, Friedemann

2014-05-01

Noun/verb dissociations in the literature defy interpretation due to the confound between lexical category and semantic meaning; nouns and verbs typically describe concrete objects and actions. Abstract words, pertaining to neither, are a critical test case: dissociations along lexical-grammatical lines would support models purporting lexical category as the principle governing brain organisation, whilst semantic models predict dissociation between concrete words but not abstract items. During fMRI scanning, participants read orthogonalised word categories of nouns and verbs, with or without concrete, sensorimotor meaning. Analysis of inferior frontal/insula, precentral and central areas revealed an interaction between lexical class and semantic factors with clear category differences between concrete nouns and verbs but not abstract ones. Though the brain stores the combinatorial and lexical-grammatical properties of words, our data show that topographical differences in brain activation, especially in the motor system and inferior frontal cortex, are driven by semantics and not by lexical class. Copyright © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Both lexical and non-lexical characters are processed during saccadic eye movements.

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Hao Zhang

Full Text Available On average our eyes make 3-5 saccadic movements per second when we read, although their neural mechanism is still unclear. It is generally thought that saccades help redirect the retinal fovea to specific characters and words but that actual discrimination of information only occurs during periods of fixation. Indeed, it has been proposed that there is active and selective suppression of information processing during saccades to avoid experience of blurring due to the high-speed movement. Here, using a paradigm where a string of either lexical (Chinese or non-lexical (alphabetic characters are triggered by saccadic eye movements, we show that subjects can discriminate both while making saccadic eye movement. Moreover, discrimination accuracy is significantly better for characters scanned during the saccadic movement to a fixation point than those not scanned beyond it. Our results showed that character information can be processed during the saccade, therefore saccades during reading not only function to redirect the fovea to fixate the next character or word but allow pre-processing of information from the ones adjacent to the fixation locations to help target the next most salient one. In this way saccades can not only promote continuity in reading words but also actively facilitate reading comprehension.

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

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

2014-01-01

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

Acoustic and Perceptual Effects of Dysarthria in Greek with a Focus on Lexical Stress

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Papakyritsis, Ioannis

The field of motor speech disorders in Greek is substantially underresearched. Additionally, acoustic studies on lexical stress in dysarthria are generally very rare (Kim et al. 2010). This dissertation examined the acoustic and perceptual effects of Greek dysarthria focusing on lexical stress. Additional possibly deviant speech characteristics were acoustically analyzed. Data from three dysarthric participants and matched controls was analyzed using a case study design. The analysis of lexical stress was based on data drawn from a single word repetition task that included pairs of disyllabic words differentiated by stress location. This data was acoustically analyzed in terms of the use of the acoustic cues for Greek stress. The ability of the dysarthric participants to signal stress in single words was further assessed in a stress identification task carried out by 14 naive Greek listeners. Overall, the acoustic and perceptual data indicated that, although all three dysarthric speakers presented with some difficulty in the patterning of stressed and unstressed syllables, each had different underlying problems that gave rise to quite distinct patterns of deviant speech characteristics. The atypical use of lexical stress cues in Anna's data obscured the prominence relations of stressed and unstressed syllables to the extent that the position of lexical stress was usually not perceptually transparent. Chris and Maria on the other hand, did not have marked difficulties signaling lexical stress location, although listeners were not 100% successful in the stress identification task. For the most part, Chris' atypical phonation patterns and Maria's very slow rate of speech did not interfere with lexical stress signaling. The acoustic analysis of the lexical stress cues was generally in agreement with the participants' performance in the stress identification task. Interestingly, in all three dysarthric participants, but more so in Anna, targets stressed on the 1st

Subgroup differences in the lexical tone mismatch negativity (MMN) among Mandarin speakers with congenital amusia.

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Nan, Yun; Huang, Wan-ting; Wang, Wen-jing; Liu, Chang; Dong, Qi

2016-01-01

The association/dissociation of pitch processing between music and language is a long lasting debate. We examined this music-language relationship by investigating to what extent pitch deficits in these two domains were dissociable. We focused on a special neurodevelopmental pitch disorder - congenital amusia, which primarily affects musical pitch processing. Recent research has also revealed lexical tone deficits in speech among amusics. Approximately one-third of Mandarin amusics exhibits behavioural difficulties in lexical tone perception, which is known as tone agnosia. Using mismatch negativities (MMNs), our current work probed lexical tone encoding at the pre-attentive level among the Mandarin amusics with (tone agnosics) and without (pure amusics) behavioural lexical tone deficits compared with age- and IQ-matched controls. Relative to the controls and the pure amusics, the tone agnosics exhibited reduced MMNs specifically in response to lexical tone changes. Their tone-consonant MMNs were intact and similar to those of the other two groups. Moreover, the tone MMN reduction over the left hemisphere was tightly linked to behavioural insensitivity to lexical tone changes. The current study thus provides the first psychophysiological evidence of subgroup differences in lexical tone processing among Mandarin amusics and links amusics' behavioural tone deficits to impaired pre-attentive tone processing. Despite the overall music pitch deficits, the subgroup differences in lexical tone processing in Mandarin-speaking amusics suggest dissociation of pitch deficits between music and speech. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Human embryonic stem cell lines model experimental human cytomegalovirus latency.

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Penkert, Rhiannon R; Kalejta, Robert F

2013-05-28

Herpesviruses are highly successful pathogens that persist for the lifetime of their hosts primarily because of their ability to establish and maintain latent infections from which the virus is capable of productively reactivating. Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV), a betaherpesvirus, establishes latency in CD34(+) hematopoietic progenitor cells during natural infections in the body. Experimental infection of CD34(+) cells ex vivo has demonstrated that expression of the viral gene products that drive productive infection is silenced by an intrinsic immune defense mediated by Daxx and histone deacetylases through heterochromatinization of the viral genome during the establishment of latency. Additional mechanistic details about the establishment, let alone maintenance and reactivation, of HCMV latency remain scarce. This is partly due to the technical challenges of CD34(+) cell culture, most notably, the difficulty in preventing spontaneous differentiation that drives reactivation and renders them permissive for productive infection. Here we demonstrate that HCMV can establish, maintain, and reactivate in vitro from experimental latency in cultures of human embryonic stem cells (ESCs), for which spurious differentiation can be prevented or controlled. Furthermore, we show that known molecular aspects of HCMV latency are faithfully recapitulated in these cells. In total, we present ESCs as a novel, tractable model for studies of HCMV latency.

Lexical Access in L2 Speech Production: a controlled serial search task

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Gicele Vergine Vieira

2017-09-01

Full Text Available When it comes to lexical access in L2 speech production, working memory (WM seems to play a central role as for less automatized procedures require more WM capacity to be executed (Prebianca, 2007. With that in mind, this paper aims at claiming that bilingual lexical access qualifies as a controlled serial strategic search task susceptible to individual differences in WM capacity. Evidence in support of such claim is provided by the results of AUTHOR's (2010 study conducted so as to investigate the relationship between L2 lexical access, WMC and L2 proficiency. AUTHOR's (2010 findings indicate that bilingual lexical access entails underlying processes such as cue generation, set delimitation, serial search and monitoring, which to be carried out, require the allocation of attention. Attention is limited and, as a result, only higher spans were able to perform these underlying processes automatically.

Lexical Bundle Analysis in Mathematics Classroom Discourse: The Significance of Stance

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Herbel-Eisenmann, Beth; Wagner, David; Cortes, Viviana

2010-01-01

In this article, we introduce the lexical bundle, defined by corpus linguists as a group of three or more words that frequently recur together, in a single group, in a particular register (Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, & Finegan, 2006; Cortes, "English for Specific Purposes" 23:397-423, 2004). Attention to lexical bundles helps to explore…

Low-latency situational awareness for UxV platforms

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Berends, David C.

2012-06-01

Providing high quality, low latency video from unmanned vehicles through bandwidth-limited communications channels remains a formidable challenge for modern vision system designers. SRI has developed a number of enabling technologies to address this, including the use of SWaP-optimized Systems-on-a-Chip which provide Multispectral Fusion and Contrast Enhancement as well as H.264 video compression. Further, the use of salience-based image prefiltering prior to image compression greatly reduces output video bandwidth by selectively blurring non-important scene regions. Combined with our customization of the VLC open source video viewer for low latency video decoding, SRI developed a prototype high performance, high quality vision system for UxV application in support of very demanding system latency requirements and user CONOPS.

Evaluating lexical characteristics of verbal fluency output in schizophrenia.

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Juhasz, Barbara J; Chambers, Destinee; Shesler, Leah W; Haber, Alix; Kurtz, Matthew M

2012-12-30

Standardized lexical analysis of verbal output has not been applied to verbal fluency tasks in schizophrenia. Performance of individuals with schizophrenia on both a letter (n=139) and semantic (n=137) fluency task was investigated. The lexical characteristics (word frequency, age-of-acquisition, word length, and semantic typicality) of words produced were evaluated and compared to those produced by a healthy control group matched on age, gender, and Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Third Edition (WAIS-III) vocabulary scores (n=20). Overall, individuals with schizophrenia produced fewer words than healthy controls, replicating past research (see Bokat and Goldberg, 2003). Words produced in the semantic fluency task by individuals with schizophrenia were, on average, earlier acquired and more typical of the category. In contrast, no differences in lexical characteristics emerged in the letter fluency task. The results are informative regarding how individuals with schizophrenia access their mental lexicons during the verbal fluency task. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Integer-valued Lévy processes and low latency financial econometrics

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Barndorff-Nielsen, Ole; Pollard, David G.; Shephard, Neil

Motivated by features of low latency data in financial econometrics we study in detail integervalued Lévy processes as the basis of price processes for high frequency econometrics. We propose using models built out of the difference of two subordinators. We apply these models in practice to low...... latency data for a variety of different types of futures contracts.futures markets, high frequency econometrics, low latency data, negative binomial, Skellam, tempered stable...

Lexical Frames and Reported Speech

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Williams, Howard

2004-01-01

This paper addresses a problem of lexical choice that arises for ESL/EFL learners in the writing of research papers, critiques, interview reports, or any other sort of discourse that requires source attribution. The problem falls naturally into two parts. One part concerns the general lack of linguistic resources typically available (for various…

Impact of wave propagation delay on latency in optical communication systems

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Kawanishi, Tetsuya; Kanno, Atsushi; Yoshida, Yuki; Kitayama, Ken-ichi

2012-12-01

Latency is an important figure to describe performance of transmission systems for particular applications, such as data transfer for earthquake early warning, transaction for financial businesses, interactive services such as online games, etc. Latency consists of delay due to signal processing at nodes and transmitters, and of signal propagation delay due to propagation of electromagnetic waves. The lower limit of the latency in transmission systems using conventional single mode fibers (SMFs) depends on wave propagation speed in the SMFs which is slower than c. Photonic crystal fibers, holly fibers and large core fibers can have low effective refractive indices, and can transfer light faster than in SMFs. In free-space optical systems, signals propagate with the speed c, so that the latency could be smaller than in optical fibers. For example, LEO satellites would transmit data faster than optical submarine cables, when the transmission distance is longer than a few thousand kilometers. This paper will discuss combination of various transmission media to reduce negative impact of the latency, as well as applications of low-latency systems.

Using lexical analysis to identify emotional distress in psychometric schizotypy.

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Abplanalp, Samuel J; Buck, Benjamin; Gonzenbach, Virgilio; Janela, Carlos; Lysaker, Paul H; Minor, Kyle S

2017-09-01

Through the use of lexical analysis software, researchers have demonstrated a greater frequency of negative affect word use in those with schizophrenia and schizotypy compared to the general population. In addition, those with schizotypy endorse greater emotional distress than healthy controls. In this study, our aim was to expand on previous findings in schizotypy to determine whether negative affect word use could be linked to emotional distress. Schizotypy (n=33) and non-schizotypy groups (n=33) completed an open-ended, semi-structured interview and negative affect word use was analyzed using a validated lexical analysis instrument. Emotional distress was assessed using subjective questionnaires of depression and psychological quality of life (QOL). When groups were compared, those with schizotypy used significantly more negative affect words; endorsed greater depression; and reported lower QOL. Within schizotypy, a trend level association between depression and negative affect word use was observed; QOL and negative affect word use showed a significant inverse association. Our findings offer preliminary evidence of the potential effectiveness of lexical analysis as an objective, behavior-based method for identifying emotional distress throughout the schizophrenia-spectrum. Utilizing lexical analysis in schizotypy offers promise for providing researchers with an assessment capable of objectively detecting emotional distress. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Balancing Generalization and Lexical Conservatism: An Artificial Language Study with Child Learners

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Wonnacott, Elizabeth

2011-01-01

Successful language acquisition involves generalization, but learners must balance this against the acquisition of lexical constraints. Such learning has been considered problematic for theories of acquisition: if learners generalize abstract patterns to new words, how do they learn lexically-based exceptions? One approach claims that learners use…

Non-Selective Lexical Access in Late Arabic-English Bilinguals: Evidence from Gating.

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Boudelaa, Sami

2018-02-07

Previous research suggests that late bilinguals who speak typologically distant languages are the least likely to show evidence of non-selective lexical access processes. This study puts this claim to test by using the gating task to determine whether words beginning with speech sounds that are phonetically similar in Arabic and English (e.g., [b,d,m,n]) give rise to selective or non-selective lexical access processes in late Arabic-English bilinguals. The results show that an acoustic-phonetic input (e.g., [bæ]) that is consistent with words in Arabic (e.g., [bædrun] "moon") and English (e.g., [bæd] "bad") activates lexical representations in both languages of the bilingual. This non-selective activation holds equally well for mixed lists with words from both Arabic and English and blocked lists consisting only of Arabic or English words. These results suggest that non-selective lexical access processes are the default mechanism even in late bilinguals of typologically distant languages.

Lexical tonal discrimination in Zapotec children. A study of the theta rhythm.

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Poblano, Adrián; Castro-Sierra, Eduardo; Arteaga, Carmina; Pérez-Ruiz, Santiago J

Zapotec is a language used mainly in the state of Oaxaca in Mexico of tonal characteristic; homophone words with difference in fundamental frequency with different meanings. Our objective was to analyze changes in the electroencephalographic (EEG) theta rhythm during word discrimination of lexical tonal bi-syllabic homophone word samples of Zapotec. We employed electroencephalography analysis during lexical tonal discrimination in 12 healthy subjects 9-16 years of age. We observed an increase in theta relative power between lexical discrimination and at rest eyes-open state in right temporal site. We also observed several significant intra- and inter-hemispheric correlations in several scalp sites, mainly in left fronto-temporal and right temporal areas when subjects were performing lexical discrimination. Our data suggest more engagement of neural networks of the right hemisphere are involved in Zapotec language discrimination. Copyright © 2015 Hospital Infantil de México Federico Gómez. Publicado por Masson Doyma México S.A. All rights reserved.

The amblyopic eye in subjects with anisometropia show increased saccadic latency in the delayed saccade task

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Maciej ePerdziak

2014-10-01

Full Text Available The term amblyopia is used to describe reduced visual function in one eye (or both eyes, though not so often which cannot be fully improved by refractive correction and explained by the organic cause observed during regular eye examination. This developmental disorder of spatial vision affects about 2-5% of the population and is associated with abnormal visual experience (e.g. anisometropia, strabismus during infancy or early childhood. Several studies have shown prolongation of saccadic latency time in amblyopic eye. In our opinion, study of saccadic latency in the context of central vision deficits assessment, should be based on central retina stimulation. For this reason, we proposed saccade delayed task. It requires inhibitory processing for maintaining fixation on the central target until it disappears – what constitutes the GO signal for saccade. The experiment consisted of 100 trials for each eye and was performed under two viewing conditions: monocular amblyopic / non-dominant eye and monocular dominant eye. We examined saccadic latency in 16 subjects (mean age 30±11 years with anisometropic amblyopia (two subjects had also microtropia and in 17 control subjects (mean age 28±8 years. Participants were instructed to look at central (fixation target and when it disappears, to make the saccade toward the periphery (10 deg as fast as possible, either left or the right target. The study results have proved the significant difference in saccadic latency between the amblyopic (mean 262±48 ms and dominant (mean 237±45 ms eye, in anisometropic group. In the control group, the saccadic latency for dominant (mean 226±32ms and non-dominant (mean 230±29 ms eye was not significantly different.By the use of LATER (Linear Approach to the Threshold with Ergodic Rate decision model we interpret our findings as a decrease in accumulation of visual information acquired by means of central (affected retina in subjects with anisometropic amblyopia.

Cumulative latency advance underlies fast visual processing in desynchronized brain state.

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Wang, Xu-dong; Chen, Cheng; Zhang, Dinghong; Yao, Haishan

2014-01-07

Fast sensory processing is vital for the animal to efficiently respond to the changing environment. This is usually achieved when the animal is vigilant, as reflected by cortical desynchronization. However, the neural substrate for such fast processing remains unclear. Here, we report that neurons in rat primary visual cortex (V1) exhibited shorter response latency in the desynchronized state than in the synchronized state. In vivo whole-cell recording from the same V1 neurons undergoing the two states showed that both the resting and visually evoked conductances were higher in the desynchronized state. Such conductance increases of single V1 neurons shorten the response latency by elevating the membrane potential closer to the firing threshold and reducing the membrane time constant, but the effects only account for a small fraction of the observed latency advance. Simultaneous recordings in lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) and V1 revealed that LGN neurons also exhibited latency advance, with a degree smaller than that of V1 neurons. Furthermore, latency advance in V1 increased across successive cortical layers. Thus, latency advance accumulates along various stages of the visual pathway, likely due to a global increase of membrane conductance in the desynchronized state. This cumulative effect may lead to a dramatic shortening of response latency for neurons in higher visual cortex and play a critical role in fast processing for vigilant animals.

Usage labels network: an approach to lexical variation

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Danko Šipka

1994-12-01

Full Text Available The Problem of lexical variation is frequently addressed within the linguistic community. Its complexity and the broad implications of any possible solution have considerable appeal among theoretical linguists. Lexicographers, in their turn, have been forced to address it in order to provide dictionary usage information, which is normally done by means of dictionary labels such as: American English, obsolete, slang , etc. An insightful overview of the relevant lexicological approaches, as well as some lexicographis projects is provided in Lipka (1990. The most exhaustive sociolinguistic classification, however, can be found in Preston (1986. Lexicographis treatments of lexical variation have been addressed in numerous papers listed in Zgusta (1988.

Stuttering Frequency in Relation to Lexical Diversity, Syntactic Complexity, and Utterance Length

Science.gov (United States)

Wagovich, Stacy A.; Hall, Nancy E.

2018-01-01

Children's frequency of stuttering can be affected by utterance length, syntactic complexity, and lexical content of language. Using a unique small-scale within-subjects design, this study explored whether language samples that contain more stuttering have (a) longer, (b) syntactically more complex, and (c) lexically more diverse utterances than…

Lexical Link Analysis (LLA) Application: Improving Web Service to Defense Acquisition Visibility Environment (DAVE)

Science.gov (United States)

2015-05-01

1 LEXICAL LINK ANALYSIS (LLA) APPLICATION: IMPROVING WEB SERVICE TO DEFENSE ACQUISITION VISIBILITY ENVIRONMENT(DAVE) May 13-14, 2015 Dr. Ying...REPORT DATE MAY 2015 2. REPORT TYPE 3. DATES COVERED 00-00-2015 to 00-00-2015 4. TITLE AND SUBTITLE Lexical Link Analysis (LLA) Application...Making 3 2 1 3 L L A Methods • Lexical Link Analysis (LLA) Core – LLA Reports and Visualizations • Collaborative Learning Agents (CLA) for

Construction and Evaluation of an Ultra Low Latency Frameless Renderer for VR.

Science.gov (United States)

Friston, Sebastian; Steed, Anthony; Tilbury, Simon; Gaydadjiev, Georgi

2016-04-01

Latency - the delay between a user's action and the response to this action - is known to be detrimental to virtual reality. Latency is typically considered to be a discrete value characterising a delay, constant in time and space - but this characterisation is incomplete. Latency changes across the display during scan-out, and how it does so is dependent on the rendering approach used. In this study, we present an ultra-low latency real-time ray-casting renderer for virtual reality, implemented on an FPGA. Our renderer has a latency of ~1 ms from 'tracker to pixel'. Its frameless nature means that the region of the display with the lowest latency immediately follows the scan-beam. This is in contrast to frame-based systems such as those using typical GPUs, for which the latency increases as scan-out proceeds. Using a series of high and low speed videos of our system in use, we confirm its latency of ~1 ms. We examine how the renderer performs when driving a traditional sequential scan-out display on a readily available HMO, the Oculus Rift OK2. We contrast this with an equivalent apparatus built using a GPU. Using captured human head motion and a set of image quality measures, we assess the ability of these systems to faithfully recreate the stimuli of an ideal virtual reality system - one with a zero latency tracker, renderer and display running at 1 kHz. Finally, we examine the results of these quality measures, and how each rendering approach is affected by velocity of movement and display persistence. We find that our system, with a lower average latency, can more faithfully draw what the ideal virtual reality system would. Further, we find that with low display persistence, the sensitivity to velocity of both systems is lowered, but that it is much lower for ours.

Optimizing latency in Xilinx FPGA implementations of the GBT

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Muschter, S; Bohm, C; Baron, S; Soos, C; Cachemiche, J-P

2010-01-01

The GigaBit Transceiver (GBT) system has been developed to replace the Timing, Trigger and Control (TTC) system, currently used by LHC, as well as to provide data transmission between on-detector and off-detector components in future sLHC detectors. A VHDL version of the GBT-SERDES, designed for FPGAs, was released in March 2010 as a GBT-FPGA Starter Kit for future GBT users and for off-detector GBT implementation. This code was optimized for resource utilization, as the GBT protocol is very demanding. It was not, however, optimized for latency - which will be a critical parameter when used in the trigger path. The GBT-FPGA Starter Kit firmware was first analyzed in terms of latency by looking at the separate components of the VHDL version. Once the parts which contribute most to the latency were identified and modified, two possible optimizations were chosen, resulting in a latency reduced by a factor of three. The modifications were also analyzed in terms of logic utilization. The latency optimization results were compared with measurement results from a Virtex 6 ML605 development board equipped with a XC6VLX240T with speedgrade-1 and the package FF1156. Bit error rate tests were also performed to ensure an error free operation. The two final optimizations were analyzed for utilization and compared with the original code, distributed in the Starter Kit.

Glomerular latency coding in artificial olfaction.

Science.gov (United States)

Yamani, Jaber Al; Boussaid, Farid; Bermak, Amine; Martinez, Dominique

2011-01-01

Sensory perception results from the way sensory information is subsequently transformed in the brain. Olfaction is a typical example in which odor representations undergo considerable changes as they pass from olfactory receptor neurons (ORNs) to second-order neurons. First, many ORNs expressing the same receptor protein yet presenting heterogeneous dose-response properties converge onto individually identifiable glomeruli. Second, onset latency of glomerular activation is believed to play a role in encoding odor quality and quantity in the context of fast information processing. Taking inspiration from the olfactory pathway, we designed a simple yet robust glomerular latency coding scheme for processing gas sensor data. The proposed bio-inspired approach was evaluated using an in-house SnO(2) sensor array. Glomerular convergence was achieved by noting the possible analogy between receptor protein expressed in ORNs and metal catalyst used across the fabricated gas sensor array. Ion implantation was another technique used to account both for sensor heterogeneity and enhanced sensitivity. The response of the gas sensor array was mapped into glomerular latency patterns, whose rank order is concentration-invariant. Gas recognition was achieved by simply looking for a "match" within a library of spatio-temporal spike fingerprints. Because of its simplicity, this approach enables the integration of sensing and processing onto a single-chip.

HIV-1 Latency in Monocytes/Macrophages

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Amit Kumar

2014-04-01

Full Text Available Human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1 targets CD4+ T cells and cells of the monocyte/macrophage lineage. HIV pathogenesis is characterized by the depletion of T lymphocytes and by the presence of a population of cells in which latency has been established called the HIV-1 reservoir. Highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART has significantly improved the life of HIV-1 infected patients. However, complete eradication of HIV-1 from infected individuals is not possible without targeting latent sources of infection. HIV-1 establishes latent infection in resting CD4+ T cells and findings indicate that latency can also be established in the cells of monocyte/macrophage lineage. Monocyte/macrophage lineage includes among others, monocytes, macrophages and brain resident macrophages. These cells are relatively more resistant to apoptosis induced by HIV-1, thus are important stable hideouts of the virus. Much effort has been made in the direction of eliminating HIV-1 resting CD4+ T-cell reservoirs. However, it is impossible to achieve a cure for HIV-1 without considering these neglected latent reservoirs, the cells of monocyte/macrophage lineage. In this review we will describe our current understanding of the mechanism of latency in monocyte/macrophage lineage and how such cells can be specifically eliminated from the infected host.

How Logical Reasoning Mediates the Relation between Lexical Quality and Reading Comprehension

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Segers, Eliane; Verhoeven, Ludo

2016-01-01

The present study aimed to examine the role of logical reasoning in the relation between lexical quality and reading comprehension in 146 fourth grade Dutch children. We assessed their standardized reading comprehension measure, along with their decoding efficiency and vocabulary as measures of lexical quality, syllogistic reasoning as measure of…

The Challenge and the Opportunity of Lexical Inferencing in Language Minority Students

Science.gov (United States)

Shahar-Yames, Daphna; Prior, Anat

2018-01-01

Lexical inferencing from text is a powerful tool for vocabulary and reading comprehension enhancement. Lexical inferencing relies on the pre-requisite skills of reading and existing vocabulary, and is also linked to non-verbal inferencing abilities and reading comprehension. In this study, we examined whether Fifth-grade Russian-speaking language…

Comparing the Lexical Features of EAP Students' Essays by Prompt and Rating

Science.gov (United States)

Lavallée, Maxime; McDonough, Kim

2015-01-01

Previous research has shown that high frequency lexical items, such as AWL words and formulaic expressions, may differentiate between texts written by expert and novice writers (Chen & Baker, 2010; Hancioglu, 2009), and that lexical features related to breadth, depth, and accessibility differentiate among texts from L2 writers of different…

Lexical characteristics of expressive vocabulary in toddlers with autism spectrum disorder.

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Kover, Sara T; Ellis Weismer, Susan

2014-08-01

Vocabulary is a domain of particular challenge for many children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Recent research has drawn attention to ways in which lexical characteristics relate to vocabulary acquisition. The current study tested the hypothesis that lexical characteristics account for variability in vocabulary size of young children with ASD, applying the extended statistical learning theory of vocabulary delay in late talkers (Stokes, Kern, & Dos Santos, 2012) to toddlers with ASD. Parents reported the words produced by toddlers with ASD (n = 57; age 21-37 months) or toddlers without ASD (n = 41; age 22-26 months) on the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories. The average phonological neighborhood density, word frequency, and word length of each toddler's lexicon were calculated. These lexical characteristics served as predictors of vocabulary size. Findings differed for toddlers with and without ASD and according to subsamples. Word length was the most consistent predictor of vocabulary size for toddlers with ASD. Distinct relationships between lexical characteristics and vocabulary size were observed for toddlers with and without ASD. Experimental studies on distributional cues to vocabulary acquisition are needed to inform what is known about mechanisms of learning in neurodevelopmental disorders.

Lexical and Symbolic Meaning of Some Colors in Kazakh Language

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Shara Mazhitaeva

2012-10-01

Full Text Available . Colour is objectified in language by means of lexical units’ group - colour names, therefore colour namings attract a constant interest of the scholars who study mechanisms of categorizing the world around by the person, and they are one of the most investigated concepts in different languages. Colour namings are frequently analyzed in the works devoted to studying color as a special lexical category with great attention paid to a problem of conceptualizing colour space by the person. However a colour owing to certain psychological influence on consciousness of the person possesses the wide associative potential defined not only by specific features of perception but also to great extent, by a cultural heritage of all society including mythological and religious representations. The basic research object is both paroemia and phraseological units and lexical-semantic group of color namings of the Kazakh language.

Fault latency in the memory - An experimental study on VAX 11/780

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Chillarege, Ram; Iyer, Ravishankar K.

1986-01-01

Fault latency is the time between the physical occurrence of a fault and its corruption of data, causing an error. The measure of this time is difficult to obtain because the time of occurrence of a fault and the exact moment of generation of an error are not known. This paper describes an experiment to accurately study the fault latency in the memory subsystem. The experiment employs real memory data from a VAX 11/780 at the University of Illinois. Fault latency distributions are generated for s-a-0 and s-a-1 permanent fault models. Results show that the mean fault latency of a s-a-0 fault is nearly 5 times that of the s-a-1 fault. Large variations in fault latency are found for different regions in memory. An analysis of a variance model to quantify the relative influence of various workload measures on the evaluated latency is also given.

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.

Effects of lexical competition on immediate memory span for spoken words.

Science.gov (United States)

Goh, Winston D; Pisoni, David B

2003-08-01

Current theories and models of the structural organization of verbal short-term memory are primarily based on evidence obtained from manipulations of features inherent in the short-term traces of the presented stimuli, such as phonological similarity. In the present study, we investigated whether properties of the stimuli that are not inherent in the short-term traces of spoken words would affect performance in an immediate memory span task. We studied the lexical neighbourhood properties of the stimulus items, which are based on the structure and organization of words in the mental lexicon. The experiments manipulated lexical competition by varying the phonological neighbourhood structure (i.e., neighbourhood density and neighbourhood frequency) of the words on a test list while controlling for word frequency and intra-set phonological similarity (family size). Immediate memory span for spoken words was measured under repeated and nonrepeated sampling procedures. The results demonstrated that lexical competition only emerged when a nonrepeated sampling procedure was used and the participants had to access new words from their lexicons. These findings were not dependent on individual differences in short-term memory capacity. Additional results showed that the lexical competition effects did not interact with proactive interference. Analyses of error patterns indicated that item-type errors, but not positional errors, were influenced by the lexical attributes of the stimulus items. These results complement and extend previous findings that have argued for separate contributions of long-term knowledge and short-term memory rehearsal processes in immediate verbal serial recall tasks.

Effects of Lexical Modification on Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition of Iranian EFL Students

Science.gov (United States)

Negari, Giti Mousapour; Rouhi, Mahdieh

2012-01-01

The present article reports on the results of a study designed to investigate the effects of two types of lexical modification i.e., lexical simplification and elaboration, on incidental vocabulary acquisition of Iranian EFL learners.To this end, four versions of experimental texts containing 20 target words were created: baseline and simplified…

Lexical and age effects on word recognition in noise in normal-hearing children.

Science.gov (United States)

Ren, Cuncun; Liu, Sha; Liu, Haihong; Kong, Ying; Liu, Xin; Li, Shujing

2015-12-01

The purposes of the present study were (1) to examine the lexical and age effects on word recognition of normal-hearing (NH) children in noise, and (2) to compare the word-recognition performance in noise to that in quiet listening conditions. Participants were 213 NH children (age ranged between 3 and 6 years old). Eighty-nine and 124 of the participants were tested in noise and quiet listening conditions, respectively. The Standard-Chinese Lexical Neighborhood Test, which contains lists of words in four lexical categories (i.e., dissyllablic easy (DE), dissyllablic hard (DH), monosyllable easy (ME), and monosyllable hard (MH)) was used to evaluate the Mandarin Chinese word recognition in speech spectrum-shaped noise (SSN) with a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 0dB. A two-way repeated-measures analysis of variance was conducted to examine the lexical effects with syllable length and difficulty level as the main factors on word recognition in the quiet and noise listening conditions. The effects of age on word-recognition performance were examined using a regression model. The word-recognition performance in noise was significantly poorer than that in quiet and the individual variations in performance in noise were much greater than those in quiet. Word recognition scores showed that the lexical effects were significant in the SSN. Children scored higher with dissyllabic words than with monosyllabic words; "easy" words scored higher than "hard" words in the noise condition. The scores of the NH children in the SSN (SNR=0dB) for the DE, DH, ME, and MH words were 85.4, 65.9, 71.7, and 46.2% correct, respectively. The word-recognition performance also increased with age in each lexical category for the NH children tested in noise. Both age and lexical characteristics of words had significant influences on the performance of Mandarin-Chinese word recognition in noise. The lexical effects were more obvious under noise listening conditions than in quiet. The word

Pre-Attentive Auditory Processing of Lexicality

Science.gov (United States)

Jacobsen, Thomas; Horvath, Janos; Schroger, Erich; Lattner, Sonja; Widmann, Andreas; Winkler, Istvan

2004-01-01

The effects of lexicality on auditory change detection based on auditory sensory memory representations were investigated by presenting oddball sequences of repeatedly presented stimuli, while participants ignored the auditory stimuli. In a cross-linguistic study of Hungarian and German participants, stimulus sequences were composed of words that…

Optimizing latency in Xilinx FPGA implementations of the GBT

CERN Document Server

Muschter, S; Bohm, C; Cachemiche, J-P; Baron, S

2010-01-01

The GigaBit Transceiver (GBT) {[}1] system has been developed to replace the Timing, Trigger and Control (TTC) system {[}2], currently used by LHC, as well as to provide data transmission between on-detector and off-detector components in future sLHC detectors. A VHDL version of the GBT-SERDES, designed for FPGAs, was released in March 2010 as a GBT-FPGA Starter Kit for future GBT users and for off-detector GBT implementation {[}3]. This code was optimized for resource utilization {[}4], as the GBT protocol is very demanding. It was not, however, optimized for latency - which will be a critical parameter when used in the trigger path. The GBT-FPGA Starter Kit firmware was first analyzed in terms of latency by looking at the separate components of the VHDL version. Once the parts which contribute most to the latency were identified and modified, two possible optimizations were chosen, resulting in a latency reduced by a factor of three. The modifications were also analyzed in terms of logic utilization. The la...

Within-category variance and lexical tone discrimination in native and non-native speakers

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Hoffmann, C.W.G.; Sadakata, M.; Chen, A.; Desain, P.W.M.; McQueen, J.M.; Gussenhove, C.; Chen, Y.; Dediu, D.

2014-01-01

In this paper, we show how acoustic variance within lexical tones in disyllabic Mandarin Chinese pseudowords affects discrimination abilities in both native and non-native speakers of Mandarin Chinese. Within-category acoustic variance did not hinder native speakers in discriminating between lexical

Lexical retrieval : An aspect of fluent second language production that can be enhanced

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Snellings, P; de Glopper, Kees; van Gelderen, A.

2002-01-01

The efficiency of lexical retrieval, an essential subprocess of productive language skills, is crucial in fluent writing and speaking. We examine the feasibility of an experimental computerized training for fluent lexical retrieval in the second language in a classroom setting, applying techniques

Tune in to the Tone: Lexical Tone Identification is Associated with Vocabulary and Word Recognition Abilities in Young Chinese Children.

Science.gov (United States)

Tong, Xiuli; Tong, Xiuhong; McBride-Chang, Catherine

2015-12-01

Lexical tone is one of the most prominent features in the phonological representation of words in Chinese. However, little, if any, research to date has directly evaluated how young Chinese children's lexical tone identification skills contribute to vocabulary acquisition and character recognition. The present study distinguished lexical tones from segmental phonological awareness and morphological awareness in order to estimate the unique contribution of lexical tone in early vocabulary acquisition and character recognition. A sample of 199 Cantonese children aged 5-6 years was assessed on measures of lexical tone identification, segmental phonological awareness, morphological awareness, nonverbal ability, vocabulary knowledge, and Chinese character recognition. It was found that lexical tone awareness and morphological awareness were both associated with vocabulary knowledge and character recognition. However, there was a significant relationship between lexical tone awareness and both vocabulary knowledge and character recognition, even after controlling for the effects of age, nonverbal ability, segmental phonological awareness and morphological awareness. These findings suggest that lexical tone is a key factor accounting for individual variance in young children's lexical acquisition in Chinese, and that lexical tone should be considered in understanding how children learn new Chinese vocabulary words, in either oral or written forms.

Estimating latency from inhibitory input

Czech Academy of Sciences Publication Activity Database

Leváková, Marie; Ditlevsen, S.; Lánský, Petr

2014-01-01

Roč. 108, č. 4 (2014), s. 475-493 ISSN 0340-1200 R&D Projects: GA ČR(CZ) GBP304/12/G069 Institutional support: RVO:67985823 Keywords : neuronal activity * latency * information coding * inhibition Subject RIV: ED - Physiology Impact factor: 1.713, year: 2014

Prioritising lexical patterns to increase axiomatisation in biomedical ontologies. The role of localisation and modularity.

Science.gov (United States)

Quesada-Martínez, M; Fernández-Breis, J T; Stevens, R; Mikroyannidi, E

2015-01-01

This article is part of the Focus Theme of METHODS of Information in Medicine on "Managing Interoperability and Complexity in Health Systems". In previous work, we have defined methods for the extraction of lexical patterns from labels as an initial step towards semi-automatic ontology enrichment methods. Our previous findings revealed that many biomedical ontologies could benefit from enrichment methods using lexical patterns as a starting point.Here, we aim to identify which lexical patterns are appropriate for ontology enrichment, driving its analysis by metrics to prioritised the patterns. We propose metrics for suggesting which lexical regularities should be the starting point to enrich complex ontologies. Our method determines the relevance of a lexical pattern by measuring its locality in the ontology, that is, the distance between the classes associated with the pattern, and the distribution of the pattern in a certain module of the ontology. The methods have been applied to four significant biomedical ontologies including the Gene Ontology and SNOMED CT. The metrics provide information about the engineering of the ontologies and the relevance of the patterns. Our method enables the suggestion of links between classes that are not made explicit in the ontology. We propose a prioritisation of the lexical patterns found in the analysed ontologies. The locality and distribution of lexical patterns offer insights into the further engineering of the ontology. Developers can use this information to improve the axiomatisation of their ontologies.

Carpet or Carcel: The Effect of Age of Acquisition and Language Mode on Bilingual Lexical Access

Science.gov (United States)

Canseco-Gonzalez, Enriqueta; Brehm, Laurel; Brick, Cameron A.; Brown-Schmidt, Sarah; Fischer, Kara; Wagner, Katie

2010-01-01

Lexical access was examined in English-Spanish bilinguals by monitoring eye fixations on target and lexical competitors as participants followed spoken instructions in English to click on one of the objects presented on a computer (e.g., "Click on the beans"). Within-language lexical competitors had a phoneme onset in English that was shared with…

A Structural-Lexical Measure of Semantic Similarity for Geo-Knowledge Graphs

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Andrea Ballatore

2015-04-01

Full Text Available Graphs have become ubiquitous structures to encode geographic knowledge online. The Semantic Web’s linked open data, folksonomies, wiki websites and open gazetteers can be seen as geo-knowledge graphs, that is labeled graphs whose vertices represent geographic concepts and whose edges encode the relations between concepts. To compute the semantic similarity of concepts in such structures, this article defines the network-lexical similarity measure (NLS. This measure estimates similarity by combining two complementary sources of information: the network similarity of vertices and the semantic similarity of the lexical definitions. NLS is evaluated on the OpenStreetMap Semantic Network, a crowdsourced geo-knowledge graph that describes geographic concepts. The hybrid approach outperforms both network and lexical measures, obtaining very strong correlation with the similarity judgments of human subjects.

Lexical Access in Persian Normal Speakers: Picture Naming, Verbal Fluency and Spontaneous Speech

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Zahra Sadat Ghoreishi

2014-06-01

Full Text Available Objectives: Lexical access is the process by which the basic conceptual, syntactical and morpho-phonological information of words are activated. Most studies of lexical access have focused on picture naming. There is hardly any previous research on other parameters of lexical access such as verbal fluency and analysis of connected speech in Persian normal participants. This study investigates the lexical access performance in normal speakers in different issues such as age, sex and education. Methods: The performance of 120 adult Persian speakers in three tasks including picture naming, verbal fluency and connected speech, was examined using "Persian Lexical Access Assessment Package”. The performance of participants between two gender groups (male/female, three education groups (below 5 years, above 12 years, between 5 and 12 years and three age groups (18-35 years, 36-55 years, 56-75 years were compared. Results: According to findings, picture naming increased with increasing education and decreased with increasing age. The performance of participants in phonological and semantic verbal fluency showed improvement with age and education. No significant difference was seen between males and females in verbal fluency task. In the analysis of connected speech there were no significant differences between different age and education groups and just mean length of utterance in males was significantly higher than females. Discussion: The findings could be a primitive scale for comparison between normal subjects and patients in lexical access tasks, furthermore it could be a horizon for planning of treatment goals in patients with word finding problem according to age, gender and education.

Lexical processing and organization in bilingual first language acquisition: Guiding future research.

Science.gov (United States)

DeAnda, Stephanie; Poulin-Dubois, Diane; Zesiger, Pascal; Friend, Margaret

2016-06-01

A rich body of work in adult bilinguals documents an interconnected lexical network across languages, such that early word retrieval is language independent. This literature has yielded a number of influential models of bilingual semantic memory. However, extant models provide limited predictions about the emergence of lexical organization in bilingual first language acquisition (BFLA). Empirical evidence from monolingual infants suggests that lexical networks emerge early in development as children integrate phonological and semantic information. These findings tell us little about the interaction between 2 languages in early bilingual memory. To date, an understanding of when and how languages interact in early bilingual development is lacking. In this literature review, we present research documenting lexical-semantic development across monolingual and bilingual infants. This is followed by a discussion of current models of bilingual language representation and organization and their ability to account for the available empirical evidence. Together, these theoretical and empirical accounts inform and highlight unexplored areas of research and guide future work on early bilingual memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

Low-Latency Science Exploration of Planetary Bodies: How ISS Might Be Used as Part of a Low-Latency Analog Campaign for Human Exploration

Science.gov (United States)

Thronson, Harley; Valinia, Azita; Bleacher, Jacob; Eigenbrode, Jennifer; Garvin, Jim; Petro, Noah

2014-01-01

We suggest that the International Space Station be used to examine the application and validation of low-latency telepresence for surface exploration from space as an alternative, precursor, or potentially as an adjunct to astronaut "boots on the ground." To this end, controlled experiments that build upon and complement ground-based analog field studies will be critical for assessing the effects of different latencies (0 to 500 milliseconds), task complexity, and alternate forms of feedback to the operator. These experiments serve as an example of a pathfinder for NASA's roadmap of missions to Mars with low-latency telerobotic exploration as a precursor to astronaut's landing on the surface to conduct geological tasks.

Optimizing latency in Xilinx FPGA implementations of the GBT

Science.gov (United States)

Muschter, S.; Baron, S.; Bohm, C.; Cachemiche, J.-P.; Soos, C.

2010-12-01

The GigaBit Transceiver (GBT) [1] system has been developed to replace the Timing, Trigger and Control (TTC) system [2], currently used by LHC, as well as to provide data transmission between on-detector and off-detector components in future sLHC detectors. A VHDL version of the GBT-SERDES, designed for FPGAs, was released in March 2010 as a GBT-FPGA Starter Kit for future GBT users and for off-detector GBT implementation [3]. This code was optimized for resource utilization [4], as the GBT protocol is very demanding. It was not, however, optimized for latency — which will be a critical parameter when used in the trigger path. The GBT-FPGA Starter Kit firmware was first analyzed in terms of latency by looking at the separate components of the VHDL version. Once the parts which contribute most to the latency were identified and modified, two possible optimizations were chosen, resulting in a latency reduced by a factor of three. The modifications were also analyzed in terms of logic utilization. The latency optimization results were compared with measurement results from a Virtex 6 ML605 development board [5] equipped with a XC6VLX240T with speedgrade-1 and the package FF1156. Bit error rate tests were also performed to ensure an error free operation. The two final optimizations were analyzed for utilization and compared with the original code, distributed in the Starter Kit.

Role of working memory and lexical knowledge in perceptual restoration of interrupted speech.

Science.gov (United States)

Nagaraj, Naveen K; Magimairaj, Beula M

2017-12-01

The role of working memory (WM) capacity and lexical knowledge in perceptual restoration (PR) of missing speech was investigated using the interrupted speech perception paradigm. Speech identification ability, which indexed PR, was measured using low-context sentences periodically interrupted at 1.5 Hz. PR was measured for silent gated, low-frequency speech noise filled, and low-frequency fine-structure and envelope filled interrupted conditions. WM capacity was measured using verbal and visuospatial span tasks. Lexical knowledge was assessed using both receptive vocabulary and meaning from context tests. Results showed that PR was better for speech noise filled condition than other conditions tested. Both receptive vocabulary and verbal WM capacity explained unique variance in PR for the speech noise filled condition, but were unrelated to performance in the silent gated condition. It was only receptive vocabulary that uniquely predicted PR for fine-structure and envelope filled conditions. These findings suggest that the contribution of lexical knowledge and verbal WM during PR depends crucially on the information content that replaced the silent intervals. When perceptual continuity was partially restored by filler speech noise, both lexical knowledge and verbal WM capacity facilitated PR. Importantly, for fine-structure and envelope filled interrupted conditions, lexical knowledge was crucial for PR.

Lexical retrieval in discourse: an early indicator of Alzheimer's dementia.

Science.gov (United States)

Pekkala, Seija; Wiener, Debra; Himali, Jayandra J; Beiser, Alexa S; Obler, Loraine K; Liu, Yulin; McKee, Ann; Auerbach, Sanford; Seshadri, Sudha; Wolf, Philip A; Au, Rhoda

2013-12-01

We examined the progression of lexical-retrieval deficits in individuals with neuropathologically determined Alzheimer's disease (AD; n = 23) and a comparison group without criteria for AD (n = 24) to determine whether linguistic changes were a significant marker of the disease. Our participants underwent multiple administrations of a neuropsychological battery, with initial administration occurring on average 16 years prior to death. The battery included the Boston Naming Test (BNT), a letter fluency task (FAS) and written description of the Cookie Theft Picture (CTP). Repeated measures analysis revealed that the AD-group showed progressively greater decline in FAS and CTP lexical performance than the comparison group. Cross-sectional time-specific group comparisons indicated that the CTP differentiated performance between the two groups at 7-9 years prior to death and FAS and BNT only at 2-4 years. These results suggest that lexical-retrieval deficits in written discourse serve as an early indicator of AD.

Lexical Range and Communicative Competence of Learners in Bilingual Schools in Lower Austria

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Claudia Mewald

2015-04-01

Full Text Available Abstract This article discusses the impact of lexical range on the learners’ ability to communicate in English when taught as a foreign language in bilingual schools, and emphasizes the importance of explicit vocabulary instruction. It draws on data from classroom observation, lexis-retrieval tasks, written and spoken performance in bilingual (German-English and regular school classes at grades 5-8 in Austrian secondary schools. Results suggest that a wider lexical range results in better communicative competence and fluency and that breakdown of communication in spoken or written performance is more frequently caused by insufficient vocabulary rather than by lack of control or grammatical problems. Consequently, insights from cognitive linguistics, the Lexical Approach, and Lexical Priming are discussed to justify the concept of vocabulary instruction in contextualized units. Taking the scarceness of theoretical and practical concepts into consideration, the need for research on the explicit instruction of vocabulary and metacognitive strategies is fleshed out.

Small-molecule screening using a human primary cell model of HIV latency identifies compounds that reverse latency without cellular activation

Science.gov (United States)

Yang, Hung-Chih; Xing, Sifei; Shan, Liang; O’Connell, Karen; Dinoso, Jason; Shen, Anding; Zhou, Yan; Shrum, Cynthia K.; Han, Yefei; Liu, Jun O.; Zhang, Hao; Margolick, Joseph B.; Siliciano, Robert F.

2009-01-01

The development of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) to treat individuals infected with HIV-1 has dramatically improved patient outcomes, but HAART still fails to cure the infection. The latent viral reservoir in resting CD4+ T cells is a major barrier to virus eradication. Elimination of this reservoir requires reactivation of the latent virus. However, strategies for reactivating HIV-1 through nonspecific T cell activation have clinically unacceptable toxicities. We describe here the development of what we believe to be a novel in vitro model of HIV-1 latency that we used to search for compounds that can reverse latency. Human primary CD4+ T cells were transduced with the prosurvival molecule Bcl-2, and the resulting cells were shown to recapitulate the quiescent state of resting CD4+ T cells in vivo. Using this model system, we screened small-molecule libraries and identified a compound that reactivated latent HIV-1 without inducing global T cell activation, 5-hydroxynaphthalene-1,4-dione (5HN). Unlike previously described latency-reversing agents, 5HN activated latent HIV-1 through ROS and NF-κB without affecting nuclear factor of activated T cells (NFAT) and PKC, demonstrating that TCR pathways can be dissected and utilized to purge latent virus. Our study expands the number of classes of latency-reversing therapeutics and demonstrates the utility of this in vitro model for finding strategies to eradicate HIV-1 infection. PMID:19805909

Productivity of lexical categories in French-speaking children with cochlear implants.

Science.gov (United States)

Le Normand, M-T; Ouellet, C; Cohen, H

2003-11-01

The productivity of lexical categories was studied longitudinally in a sample of 17 young hearing-impaired French-speaking children with cochlear implants. Age of implantation ranged from 22 months to 76 months. Spontaneous speech samples were collected at six-month intervals over a period of 36 months, starting at the one-word stage. Four general measures of their linguistic production (number of utterances, verbal fluency, vocabulary, and grammatical production) as well as 36 specific lexical categories, according to the CHILDES codes, were computed in terms of tokens, i.e., total number of words. Cochlear-implanted children (CI) were compared to a French database of normally hearing children aged 2-4 compiled by the first author. Follow-up results indicate that, at the two-year post-implantation follow-up, noun, and verb morphology was significantly impaired. At the three-year follow-up, the cochlear-implanted group had recovered on adjectives, determiners and nouns, main verbs, and auxiliaries. The two groups differed significantly in processing locative adverbs, prepositions, pronouns, and verbs (infinitive verb, modal, and modal lexical), but individual variability within the cochlear-implanted group was substantial. Results are discussed in terms of recovery and developmental trends and variability in the acquisition of lexical categories by French children two years and three years post-implantation.

Are lexical tones musical? Native language's influence on neural response to pitch in different domains.

Science.gov (United States)

Chen, Ao; Peter, Varghese; Wijnen, Frank; Schnack, Hugo; Burnham, Denis

2018-04-21

Language experience shapes musical and speech pitch processing. We investigated whether speaking a lexical tone language natively modulates neural processing of pitch in language and music as well as their correlation. We tested tone language (Mandarin Chinese), and non-tone language (Dutch) listeners in a passive oddball paradigm measuring mismatch negativity (MMN) for (i) Chinese lexical tones and (ii) three-note musical melodies with similar pitch contours. For lexical tones, Chinese listeners showed a later MMN peak than the non-tone language listeners, whereas for MMN amplitude there were no significant differences between groups. Dutch participants also showed a late discriminative negativity (LDN). In the music condition two MMNs, corresponding to the two notes that differed between the standard and the deviant were found for both groups, and an LDN were found for both the Dutch and the Chinese listeners. The music MMNs were significantly right lateralized. Importantly, significant correlations were found between the lexical tone and the music MMNs for the Dutch but not the Chinese participants. The results suggest that speaking a tone language natively does not necessarily enhance neural responses to pitch either in language or in music, but that it does change the nature of neural pitch processing: non-tone language speakers appear to perceive lexical tones as musical, whereas for tone language speakers, lexical tones and music may activate different neural networks. Neural resources seem to be assigned differently for the lexical tones and for musical melodies, presumably depending on the presence or absence of long-term phonological memory traces. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Processing of Acoustic Cues in Lexical-Tone Identification by Pediatric Cochlear-Implant Recipients

Science.gov (United States)

Peng, Shu-Chen; Lu, Hui-Ping; Lu, Nelson; Lin, Yung-Song; Deroche, Mickael L. D.; Chatterjee, Monita

2017-01-01

Purpose: The objective was to investigate acoustic cue processing in lexical-tone recognition by pediatric cochlear-implant (CI) recipients who are native Mandarin speakers. Method: Lexical-tone recognition was assessed in pediatric CI recipients and listeners with normal hearing (NH) in 2 tasks. In Task 1, participants identified naturally…

The CLEO-III Trigger: Decision and gating

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Bergfeld, T.J.; Gollin, G.D.; Haney, M.J.

1996-01-01

The CLEO-III Trigger provides a trigger decision every 42ns, with a latency of approximately 2.5μs. This paper describes the free-running, pipelined trigger decision logic, the throttling mechanism whereby the data acquisition system can modulate the trigger rate to maximize throughput without buffer overrun, and the subsequent signal distribution mechanism for delivering the trigger decision to the front-end electronics. This paper also describes the multilevel simulation methods employed to allow detailed low-level models of trigger components to be co-simulated with more abstract system models, thus allowing full system modeling without incurring prohibitive computational overheads

Richness of information about novel words influences how episodic and semantic memory networks interact during lexicalization.

Science.gov (United States)

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

2014-01-01

The complementary learning systems account of declarative memory suggests two distinct memory networks, a fast-mapping, episodic system involving the hippocampus, and a slower semantic memory system distributed across the neocortex in which new information is gradually integrated with existing representations. In this study, we investigated the extent to which these two networks are involved in the integration of novel words into the lexicon after extensive learning, and how the involvement of these networks changes after 24h. In particular, we explored whether having richer information at encoding influences the lexicalization trajectory. We trained participants with two sets of novel words, one where exposure was only to the words' phonological forms (the form-only condition), and one where pictures of unfamiliar objects were associated with the words' phonological forms (the picture-associated condition). A behavioral measure of lexical competition (indexing lexicalization) indicated stronger competition effects for the form-only words. Imaging (fMRI) results revealed greater involvement of phonological lexical processing areas immediately after training in the form-only condition, suggesting that tight connections were formed between novel words and existing lexical entries already at encoding. Retrieval of picture-associated novel words involved the episodic/hippocampal memory system more extensively. Although lexicalization was weaker in the picture-associated condition, overall memory strength was greater when tested after a 24hour delay, probably due to the availability of both episodic and lexical memory networks to aid retrieval. It appears that, during lexicalization of a novel word, the relative involvement of different memory networks differs according to the richness of the information about that word available at encoding. © 2013.

A FIRST APPROACH TO THE LEXICAL PROFILE OF TELECOMMUNICATION ENGLISH: FREQUENCY, DISTRIBUTION, RESTRICTION AND KEYNESS

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Camino Rea Rizzo

2009-10-01

Full Text Available This corpus-based study is conducted to gain an insight into the lexis of Telecommunication English, with the aim of characterizing the lexical profile of this specialized language. The applied methodology integrates quantitative techniques and qualitative interpretations to perform an analysis from two different perspectives, and according to two parameters: restriction and keyness. The first approach is focused on the lexical behaviour and the extent that a word is restricted to the constituent areas of a domain, whereas the second approach is directed towards the extent that a word is significant in the domain, regardless of lexical category. The set of empirical and statistical data obtained contribute to map the lexical profile and will serve as a baseline for future studies.

Lexical Link Analysis Application: Improving Web Service to Acquisition Visibility Portal Phase III

Science.gov (United States)

2015-04-30

ååì~ä=^Åèìáëáíáçå= oÉëÉ~êÅÜ=póãéçëáìã= qÜìêëÇ~ó=pÉëëáçåë= sçäìãÉ=ff= = Lexical Link Analysis Application: Improving Web Service to Acquisition...2015 2. REPORT TYPE 3. DATES COVERED 00-00-2015 to 00-00-2015 4. TITLE AND SUBTITLE Lexical Link Analysis Application: Improving Web Service...processes. Lexical Link Analysis (LLA) can help, by applying automation to reveal and depict???to decisionmakers??? the correlations, associations, and

Capturing the Diversity in Lexical Diversity

Science.gov (United States)

Jarvis, Scott

2013-01-01

The range, variety, or diversity of words found in learners' language use is believed to reflect the complexity of their vocabulary knowledge as well as the level of their language proficiency. Many indices of lexical diversity have been proposed, most of which involve statistical relationships between types and tokens, and which ultimately…

Lexical selectivity in Danish toddlers with cleft palate

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Willadsen, Elisabeth

2013-01-01

. Methods: All participants were video recorded at 18 months of age during play interaction with a parent. The video recordings were transcribed according to the IPA and an individual consonant inventory was established for each participant. The video recordings were also analysed with respect to word...... productions establishing an observed productive vocabulary size for each participant. Results: At 18 months of age Danish toddlers with cleft palate showed marked lexical selectivity in their early words. The distribution of consonant classes observed at 11 months of age in a previous study of the children...... as it has been described for English speaking toddlers with and without cleft palate, even though some qualitative differences were found. Keywords: consonant inventory, lexical selectivity, early words, cleft palate....

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

Science.gov (United States)

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

2018-01-01

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

Genetic variants in RBFOX3 are associated with sleep latency

NARCIS (Netherlands)

N. Amin (Najaf); K.V. Allebrandt; A. van der Spek (Ashley); B. Müller-Myhsok (B.); K. Hek (Karin); M. Teder-Laving (Maris); C. Hayward (Caroline); T. Esko (Tõnu); J. van Mill; H. Mbarek; N.F. Watson (Nathaniel F); S.A. Melville (Scott); F.M. Del Greco (Fabiola); E.M. Byrne (Enda); E. Oole (Edwin); I. Kolcic (Ivana); T.H. Chen; D.S. Evans (Daniel); J. Coresh (Josef); N. Vogelzangs (Nicole); J. Karjalainen (Juha); G.A.H.M. Willemsen (Gonneke); S.A. Gharib (Sina); L. Zgaga (Lina); E. Mihailov (Evelin); K.L. Stone (Katie L); H. Campbell (Harry); R.W.W. Brouwer (Rutger); A. Demirkan (Ayşe); A.J. Isaacs (Aaron); Z. Dogas; K. Marciante (Kristin); S. Campbell (Susan); F. Borovecki (Fran); A.I. Luik (Annemarie I); M. Li (Man); J.J. Hottenga (Jouke Jan); J.E. Huffman (Jennifer); M.C.G.N. van den hout (Mirjam); S.R. Cummings (Steven R.); Y.S. Aulchenko (Yurii); P.R. Gehrman (Philip); A.G. Uitterlinden (André); H.E. Wichmann (Heinz Erich); M. Müller-Nurasyid (Martina); R.S.N. Fehrmann (Rudolf); G.W. Montgomery (Grant); A. Hofman (Albert); W.H.L. Kao (Wen Hong Linda); B.A. Oostra (Ben); A. Wright (Alan); J.M. Vink (Jacqueline); J.F. Wilson (James F); P.P. Pramstaller (Peter Paul); A.A. Hicks (Andrew); O. Polasek (Ozren); N.M. Punjabi (Naresh); S. Redline (Susan); B.M. Psaty (Bruce); A.C. Heath (Andrew C.); M. Merrow; G.J. Tranah (Gregory); D.J. Gottlieb (Daniel J); D.I. Boomsma (Dorret); N.G. Martin (Nicholas); I. Rudan (Igor); H.W. Tiemeier (Henning); W.F.J. van IJcken (Wilfred); B.W.J.H. Penninx; A. Metspalu (Andres); T. Meitinger (Thomas); L. Franke (Lude); T. Roenneberg; C.M. van Duijn (Cornelia)

2016-01-01

textabstractTime to fall asleep (sleep latency) is a major determinant of sleep quality. Chronic, long sleep latency is a major characteristic of sleep-onset insomnia and/or delayed sleep phase syndrome. In this study we aimed to discover common polymorphisms that contribute to the genetics of sleep

CpG methylation controls reactivation of HIV from latency.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Jana Blazkova

2009-08-01

Full Text Available DNA methylation of retroviral promoters and enhancers localized in the provirus 5' long terminal repeat (LTR is considered to be a mechanism of transcriptional suppression that allows retroviruses to evade host immune responses and antiretroviral drugs. However, the role of DNA methylation in the control of HIV-1 latency has never been unambiguously demonstrated, in contrast to the apparent importance of transcriptional interference and chromatin structure, and has never been studied in HIV-1-infected patients. Here, we show in an in vitro model of reactivable latency and in a latent reservoir of HIV-1-infected patients that CpG methylation of the HIV-1 5' LTR is an additional epigenetic restriction mechanism, which controls resistance of latent HIV-1 to reactivation signals and thus determines the stability of the HIV-1 latency. CpG methylation acts as a late event during establishment of HIV-1 latency and is not required for the initial provirus silencing. Indeed, the latent reservoir of some aviremic patients contained high proportions of the non-methylated 5' LTR. The latency controlled solely by transcriptional interference and by chromatin-dependent mechanisms in the absence of significant promoter DNA methylation tends to be leaky and easily reactivable. In the latent reservoir of HIV-1-infected individuals without detectable plasma viremia, we found HIV-1 promoters and enhancers to be hypermethylated and resistant to reactivation, as opposed to the hypomethylated 5' LTR in viremic patients. However, even dense methylation of the HIV-1 5'LTR did not confer complete resistance to reactivation of latent HIV-1 with some histone deacetylase inhibitors, protein kinase C agonists, TNF-alpha, and their combinations with 5-aza-2deoxycytidine: the densely methylated HIV-1 promoter was most efficiently reactivated in virtual absence of T cell activation by suberoylanilide hydroxamic acid. Tight but incomplete control of HIV-1 latency by Cp

Emotion, Etmnooi, or Emitoon?--Faster lexical access to emotional than to neutral words during reading.

Science.gov (United States)

Kissler, Johanna; Herbert, Cornelia

2013-03-01

Cortical processing of emotional words differs from that of neutral words. Using EEG event-related potentials (ERPs), the present study examines the functional stage(s) of this differentiation. Positive, negative, and neutral nouns were randomly mixed with pseudowords and letter strings derived from words within each valence and presented for reading while participants' EEG was recorded. Results indicated emotion effects in the N1 (110-140 ms), early posterior negativity (EPN, 216-320) and late positive potential (LPP, 432-500 ms) time windows. Across valence, orthographic word-form effects occurred from about 180 ms after stimulus presentation. Crucially, in emotional words, lexicality effects (real words versus pseudowords) were identified from 216 ms, words being more negative over posterior cortex, coinciding with EPN effects, whereas neutral words differed from pseudowords only after 320 ms. Emotional content affects word processing at pre-lexical, lexical and post-lexical levels, but remarkably lexical access to emotional words is faster than access to neutral words. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Lexical and metaphonological abilities in preschoolers with phonological disorders

OpenAIRE

Costa, Ranilde Cristiane Cavalcante [UNIFESP; Ávila, Clara Regina Brandão de [UNIFESP

2010-01-01

TEMA: competência lexical e metafonológica em pré-escolares com transtorno fonológico OBJETIVO: investigar, em um grupo de pré-escolares a influência do transtorno fonológico sobre as competências lexical e metafonológica e a existência de correlações entre ambas. MÉTODO: a amostra foi composta por 56 pré-escolares, 32 meninos e 24 meninas, entre 4:0 a 6:11 anos, que constituíram dois grupo: o Grupo Pesquisa, composto por 28 pré-escolares com transtorno fonológico e o grupo de comparação, com...

A Lexical Approach to Identifying Dimensions of Organizational Culture

Science.gov (United States)

Chapman, Derek S.; Reeves, Paige; Chapin, Michelle

2018-01-01

A comprehensive measure of organizational culture was developed using a lexical approach, a method typically employed within the study of personality. 1761 adjectives were narrowed down and factor analyzed, which resulted in the identification of a nine factor solution to organizational culture, including the dimensions of: Innovative, Dominant, Pace, Friendly, Prestigious, Trendy, Corporate Social Responsibility, Traditional, and Diverse. Comprised of 135 adjectives most frequently used in describing organizational culture by current employees of several hundred organizations, the Lexical Organizational Culture Scale (LOCS) was found to predict employee commitment, job satisfaction, job search behaviors, and subjective fit better than earlier scales of organizational culture. PMID:29922200

Achieving low latency and energy consumption by 5G TDD mode optimization

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Lähetkangas, Eeva; Pajukoski, Kari; Vihriälä, Jaakko

2014-01-01

and discussing on the consequent frame length limits. We then provide a description on how the achieved short TDD latency can further be utilized to enable remarkably low energy consumption. A numerical analysis comparing the battery life time of the suggested 5G TDD air interface and LTE is provided, showing......The target for a new 5G radio access technology is to support multi-Gbps and ms latency connectivity simultaneously at noticeably lower energy consumption and cost compared to the existing 4G technologies, such as LTE-Advanced. Extremely short air interface latency is required to achieve...... these requirements in a TDD-based local area network. In this paper, we discuss how the required short TDD latency can be achieved and further utilized in 5G physical air interface. First, we investigate the enablers and limits of TDD latency by analyzing the performance of OFDM in different channel environments...

On the influence of latency estimation on dynamic group communication using overlays

Science.gov (United States)

Vik, Knut-Helge; Griwodz, Carsten; Halvorsen, Pål

2009-01-01

Distributed interactive applications tend to have stringent latency requirements and some may have high bandwidth demands. Many of them have also very dynamic user groups for which all-to-all communication is needed. In online multiplayer games, for example, such groups are determined through region-of-interest management in the application. We have investigated a variety of group management approaches for overlay networks in earlier work and shown that several useful tree heuristics exist. However, these heuristics require full knowledge of all overlay link latencies. Since this is not scalable, we investigate the effects that latency estimation techqniues have ton the quality of overlay tree constructions. We do this by evaluating one example of our group management approaches in Planetlab and examing how latency estimation techqniues influence their quality. Specifically, we investigate how two well-known latency estimation techniques, Vivaldi and Netvigator, affect the quality of tree building.

[Impacts of biological and family factors on lexical and intellectual development in Mandarin-speaking children].

Science.gov (United States)

Niu, Jie; Chen, Yong-Xiang; Zhu, Li-Qi

2015-07-01

To investigate the impacts of biological factors (age and sex) and family factors (socioeconomic status and parenting style) on the early lexical and intellectual development of children in a longitudinal tracking study. A total of 38 Mandarin-speaking children aged from 18 to 24 months were surveyed using the Putonghua Chinese Communicative Development Inventory (PCDI), the Ages and Stages Questionnaire (ASQ), and a self-designed Questionnaire for Parents. All of the subjects were retested using PCDI and ASQ after 6 months. Biological factors accounted for 65% of the variance in lexical development, 10% of which was attributed to gender, in the first survey. After six months, the contribution of age decreased to 26% and gender had no significant impact. Lexical development could positively predict the intellectual development of children. When age and gender were controlled, it accounted for 22% of the variance in intellectual development. Family socioeconomic factors had no significant impacts on lexical and intellectual development. Children's recognition of people and objects around them with guidance of parents in parenting styles could positively predict the intellectual development of children six months later, which accounted for 10% of the variance. Biological factors play an important role in the early lexical development of children. However, the influence decreases with the increase of age (months). Biological factors, lexical development, and parenting style have a combined influence on children's intellectual development.

Where Is the Beat? The Neural Correlates of Lexical Stress and Rhythmical Well-formedness in Auditory Story Comprehension.

Science.gov (United States)

Kandylaki, Katerina D; Henrich, Karen; Nagels, Arne; Kircher, Tilo; Domahs, Ulrike; Schlesewsky, Matthias; Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, Ina; Wiese, Richard

2017-07-01

While listening to continuous speech, humans process beat information to correctly identify word boundaries. The beats of language are stress patterns that are created by combining lexical (word-specific) stress patterns and the rhythm of a specific language. Sometimes, the lexical stress pattern needs to be altered to obey the rhythm of the language. This study investigated the interplay of lexical stress patterns and rhythmical well-formedness in natural speech with fMRI. Previous electrophysiological studies on cases in which a regular lexical stress pattern may be altered to obtain rhythmical well-formedness showed that even subtle rhythmic deviations are detected by the brain if attention is directed toward prosody. Here, we present a new approach to this phenomenon by having participants listen to contextually rich stories in the absence of a task targeting the manipulation. For the interaction of lexical stress and rhythmical well-formedness, we found one suprathreshold cluster localized between the cerebellum and the brain stem. For the main effect of lexical stress, we found higher BOLD responses to the retained lexical stress pattern in the bilateral SMA, bilateral postcentral gyrus, bilateral middle fontal gyrus, bilateral inferior and right superior parietal lobule, and right precuneus. These results support the view that lexical stress is processed as part of a sensorimotor network of speech comprehension. Moreover, our results connect beat processing in language to domain-independent timing perception.

Inter- and Intralingual Lexical Influences in Advanced Learners' French L3 Oral Production

Science.gov (United States)

Lindqvist, Christina

2010-01-01

The present study investigates lexical inter- and intralingual influences in the oral production of 14 very advanced learners of French L3. Lexical deviances are divided into two main categories: formal influence and meaning-based influence. The results show that, as predicted with respect to advanced learners, meaning-based influence is the most…

Lexical preferences in Dutch verbal cluster ordering

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Bloem, J.; Bellamy, K.; Karvovskaya, E.; Kohlberger, M.; Saad, G.

2016-01-01

This study discusses lexical preferences as a factor affecting the word order variation in Dutch verbal clusters. There are two grammatical word orders for Dutch two-verb clusters, with no clear meaning difference. Using the method of collostructional analysis, I find significant associations

Bilingual visual word recognition and lexical access

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Dijkstra, A.F.J.; Kroll, J.F.; Groot, A.M.B. de

2005-01-01

In spite of the intuition of many bilinguals, a review of empirical studies indicates that during reading under many circumstances, possible words from different languages temporarily become active. Such evidence for "language non-selective lexical access" is found using stimulus materials of

SeLeCT: a lexical cohesion based news story segmentation system

OpenAIRE

Stokes, Nicola; Carthy, Joe; Smeaton, Alan F.

2004-01-01

In this paper we compare the performance of three distinct approaches to lexical cohesion based text segmentation. Most work in this area has focused on the discovery of textual units that discuss subtopic structure within documents. In contrast our segmentation task requires the discovery of topical units of text i.e., distinct news stories from broadcast news programmes. Our approach to news story segmentation (the SeLeCT system) is based on an analysis of lexical cohesive strength between ...

O campo lexical Economia em documentos do século XVIII

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Vanessa Regina Duarte Xavier

2010-01-01

Full Text Available This text aims to analyze the lexical field Economy in documents of Goiás from 1751 to 1753, that were submitted to facsimile and semidiplomatic editions, in desideratum of to enable greater contact with the originals and the confrontation of their image to their conservative lesson. In addition, notes on the historical context alluded in the corpus seek clarify it and to explicit the semantic relationships that motivated the grouping of lexical items in fields.

Designing a Lexical Database for a Combined Use of Corpus Annotation and Dictionary Editing

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Kristoffersen, Jette Hedegaard; Troelsgård, Thomas; Langer, Gabriele

2016-01-01

In a combined corpus-dictionary project, you would need one lexical database that could serve as a shared “backbone” for both corpus annotation and dictionary editing, but it is not that easy to define a database structure that applies satisfactorily to both these purposes. In this paper, we...... will exemplify the problem and present ideas on how to model structures in a lexical database that facilitate corpus annotation as well as dictionary editing. The paper is a joint work between the DGS Corpus Project and the DTS Dictionary Project. The two projects come from opposite sides of the spectrum (one...... adjusting a lexical database grown from dictionary making for corpus annotating, one building a lexical database in parallel with corpus annotation and editing a corpus-based dictionary), and we will consider requirements and feasible structures for a database that can serve both corpus and dictionary....

Attentional strategic control over nonlexical and lexical processing in written spelling to dictation in adults.

Science.gov (United States)

Bonin, Patrick; Collay, Sandra; Fayol, Michel; Méot, Alain

2005-01-01

We conducted four experiments to investigate whether adults can exert attentional strategic control over nonlexical and lexical processing in written spelling to dictation. In Experiment 1, regular and irregular words were produced either in a nonword context (regular and irregular nonwords) or in a word context (high-frequency regular and irregular words), whereas in Experiment 2, the same set of words was produced either in a regular nonword or in an irregular low-frequency word context. Experiment 3 was a replication of Experiment 2 but with increased manipulation of the context. In Experiment 4, participants had to produce either under time pressure or in response to standard written spelling instructions. Regularity effects were found in all the experiments, but their size was not reliably affected by manipulations intended to increase or decrease reliance on nonlexical processing. More particularly, the results from Experiment 4 show that adults can speed up the initialization of their writing responses to a substantial degree without altering regularity effects on either latencies or spelling errors. Our findings suggest that, although adults are able to generate an internal deadline criterion of when to initialize the writing responses, nonlexical processing is a mandatory process that is not subject to attentional strategic control in written spelling to dictation.

The many places of frequency: evidence for a novel locus of the lexical frequency effect in word production.

Science.gov (United States)

Knobel, Mark; Finkbeiner, Matthew; Caramazza, Alfonso

2008-03-01

The effect of lexical frequency on language-processing tasks is exceptionally reliable. For example, pictures with higher frequency names are named faster and more accurately than those with lower frequency names. Experiments with normal participants and patients strongly suggest that this production effect arises at the level of lexical access. Further work has suggested that within lexical access this effect arises at the level of lexical representations. Here we present patient E.C. who shows an effect of lexical frequency on his nonword error rate. The best explanation of his performance is that there is an additional locus of frequency at the interface of lexical and segmental representational levels. We confirm this hypothesis by showing that only computational models with frequency at this new locus can produce a similar error pattern to that of patient E.C. Finally, in an analysis of a large group of Italian patients, we show that there exist patients who replicate E.C.'s pattern of results and others who show the complementary pattern of frequency effects on semantic error rates. Our results combined with previous findings suggest that frequency plays a role throughout the process of lexical access.

Latency correction of event-related potentials between different experimental protocols

Science.gov (United States)

Iturrate, I.; Chavarriaga, R.; Montesano, L.; Minguez, J.; Millán, JdR

2014-06-01

Objective. A fundamental issue in EEG event-related potentials (ERPs) studies is the amount of data required to have an accurate ERP model. This also impacts the time required to train a classifier for a brain-computer interface (BCI). This issue is mainly due to the poor signal-to-noise ratio and the large fluctuations of the EEG caused by several sources of variability. One of these sources is directly related to the experimental protocol or application designed, and may affect the amplitude or latency of ERPs. This usually prevents BCI classifiers from generalizing among different experimental protocols. In this paper, we analyze the effect of the amplitude and the latency variations among different experimental protocols based on the same type of ERP. Approach. We present a method to analyze and compensate for the latency variations in BCI applications. The algorithm has been tested on two widely used ERPs (P300 and observation error potentials), in three experimental protocols in each case. We report the ERP analysis and single-trial classification. Main results. The results obtained show that the designed experimental protocols significantly affect the latency of the recorded potentials but not the amplitudes. Significance. These results show how the use of latency-corrected data can be used to generalize the BCIs, reducing the calibration time when facing a new experimental protocol.

Approaching the axiomatic enrichment of the Gene Ontology from a lexical perspective.

Science.gov (United States)

Quesada-Martínez, Manuel; Mikroyannidi, Eleni; Fernández-Breis, Jesualdo Tomás; Stevens, Robert

2015-09-01

The main goal of this work is to measure how lexical regularities in biomedical ontology labels can be used for the automatic creation of formal relationships between classes, and to evaluate the results of applying our approach to the Gene Ontology (GO). In recent years, we have developed a method for the lexical analysis of regularities in biomedical ontology labels, and we showed that the labels can present a high degree of regularity. In this work, we extend our method with a cross-products extension (CPE) metric, which estimates the potential interest of a specific regularity for axiomatic enrichment in the lexical analysis, using information on exact matches in external ontologies. The GO consortium recently enriched the GO by using so-called cross-product extensions. Cross-products are generated by establishing axioms that relate a given GO class with classes from the GO or other biomedical ontologies. We apply our method to the GO and study how its lexical analysis can identify and reconstruct the cross-products that are defined by the GO consortium. The label of the classes of the GO are highly regular in lexical terms, and the exact matches with labels of external ontologies affect 80% of the GO classes. The CPE metric reveals that 31.48% of the classes that exhibit regularities have fragments that are classes into two external ontologies that are selected for our experiment, namely, the Cell Ontology and the Chemical Entities of Biological Interest ontology, and 18.90% of them are fully decomposable into smaller parts. Our results show that the CPE metric permits our method to detect GO cross-product extensions with a mean recall of 62% and a mean precision of 28%. The study is completed with an analysis of false positives to explain this precision value. We think that our results support the claim that our lexical approach can contribute to the axiomatic enrichment of biomedical ontologies and that it can provide new insights into the engineering of

Towards Controlling Latency in Wireless Networks

KAUST Repository

Bouacida, Nader

2017-01-01

Wireless networks are undergoing an unprecedented revolution in the last decade. With the explosion of delay-sensitive applications in the Internet (i.e., online gaming and VoIP), latency becomes a major issue for the development of wireless

The effect of monitor raster latency on VEPs, ERPs and Brain-Computer Interface performance.

Science.gov (United States)

Nagel, Sebastian; Dreher, Werner; Rosenstiel, Wolfgang; Spüler, Martin

2018-02-01

Visual neuroscience experiments and Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) control often require strict timings in a millisecond scale. As most experiments are performed using a personal computer (PC), the latencies that are introduced by the setup should be taken into account and be corrected. As a standard computer monitor uses a rastering to update each line of the image sequentially, this causes a monitor raster latency which depends on the position, on the monitor and the refresh rate. We technically measured the raster latencies of different monitors and present the effects on visual evoked potentials (VEPs) and event-related potentials (ERPs). Additionally we present a method for correcting the monitor raster latency and analyzed the performance difference of a code-modulated VEP BCI speller by correcting the latency. There are currently no other methods validating the effects of monitor raster latency on VEPs and ERPs. The timings of VEPs and ERPs are directly affected by the raster latency. Furthermore, correcting the raster latency resulted in a significant reduction of the target prediction error from 7.98% to 4.61% and also in a more reliable classification of targets by significantly increasing the distance between the most probable and the second most probable target by 18.23%. The monitor raster latency affects the timings of VEPs and ERPs, and correcting resulted in a significant error reduction of 42.23%. It is recommend to correct the raster latency for an increased BCI performance and methodical correctness. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Telemetry System Data Latency

Science.gov (United States)

2017-07-13

latencies will be measured. DATS Network TM Antenna TM ReceiverMCS System IOPlex IOPlexIADS CDS IADS Client TM Transmitter Sensors Signal Conditioning...TIME Figure 1-2 Mission Control System (MCS) / Interactive Analysis and Display System (IADS) Overview IADS CDSIADS Client TELEMETRY SYSTEM DATA...Sim GPS Signal Combiner MCS system Oscilloscope IADS Client IADS CDS Figure 13-1 IADS Data Flow 13.2. Test Results The results of the data test at

Assessment of lexical semantic judgment abilities in alcohol ...

Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

2013-11-06

Nov 6, 2013 ... Keywords. Alcoholism; brain; fMRI; language processing; lexical; semantic judgment .... (English for all subjects) and hours spent reading one/both languages. ..... and alcoholism on verbal and visuospatial learning. J. Nerv.

Investigating Profiles of Lexical Quality in Preschool and Their Contribution to First Grade Reading

Science.gov (United States)

Murphy, Kimberly A.; Farquharson, Kelly

2016-01-01

This longitudinal study investigated profiles of lexical quality domains in preschool children and the extent to which profile membership predicted reading comprehension in first grade. A latent profile analysis was conducted to classify 420 preschool children on lexical quality domains, including orthography, phonology, morphosyntax, and…

A patient with aphasia using the nonsemantic lexical route for Kanji reading.

Science.gov (United States)

Hashimoto, Kosei; Uno, Akira; Sambai, Ami; Mizumoto, Go

We report a patient with aphasia, caused by cerebral hemorrhage, who probably used the nonsemantic lexical route when reading words aloud. To investigate the mechanisms underlying her reading dysfunction, we analyzed her reading abilities using the Dual-Route Cascaded Model. Language tests resulted in low correct percentages for both reading comprehension and reading nonwords aloud, suggesting problems in the semantic system and the nonlexical route. Conversely, the patient showed high scores on the reading words aloud task. Although she failed to understand many inconsistent-atypical words in the reading comprehension test, she correctly read most words aloud, suggesting that she used the nonsemantic lexical route. In addition, the lexical reading route was analyzed in detail by using inconsistent-atypical Kanji words as stimuli. Finally, we analyzed her reading dysfunction compared with previous cases.

The Effect of Lexical Frequency on Spoken Word Recognition in Young and Older Listeners

Science.gov (United States)

Revill, Kathleen Pirog; Spieler, Daniel H.

2011-01-01

When identifying spoken words, older listeners may have difficulty resolving lexical competition or may place a greater weight on factors like lexical frequency. To obtain information about age differences in the time course of spoken word recognition, young and older adults’ eye movements were monitored as they followed spoken instructions to click on objects displayed on a computer screen. Older listeners were more likely than younger listeners to fixate high-frequency displayed phonological competitors. However, degradation of auditory quality in younger listeners does not reproduce this result. These data are most consistent with an increased role for lexical frequency with age. PMID:21707175

Syntax-driven semantic frame composition in Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammars

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Laura Kallmeyer

2014-01-01

Full Text Available The grammar framework presented in this paper combines Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar (LTAG with a (decompositional frame semantics. We introduce elementary constructions as pairs of elementary LTAG trees and decompositional frames. The linking between syntax and semantics can largely be captured by such constructions since in LTAG, elementary trees represent full argument projections. Substitution and adjunction in the syntax then trigger the unification of the associated semantic frames, which are formally defined as base-labelled feature structures. Moreover, the system of elementary constructions is specified in a metagrammar by means of tree and frame descriptions. This metagrammatical factorization gives rise to a fine-grained decomposition of the semantic contributions of syntactic building blocks, and it allows us to separate lexical from constructional contributions and to carve out generalizations across constructions. In the second half of the paper, we apply the framework to the analysis of directed motion expressions and of the dative alternation in English, two well-known examples of the interaction between lexical and constructional meaning.

Patterns of cerebral activation during lexical and phonological reading in Portuguese

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Senaha M.L.H.

2005-01-01

Full Text Available According to the concepts of cognitive neuropsychology, there are two principal routes of reading processing: a lexical route, in which global reading of words occurs and a phonological route, responsible for the conversion of the graphemes into their respective phonemes. In the present study, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI was used to investigate the patterns of cerebral activation in lexical and phonological reading by 13 healthy women with a formal educational level greater than 11 years. Participants were submitted to a silent reading task containing three types of stimuli: real words (irregular and foreign words, nonwords and illegitimate graphic stimuli. An increased number of activated voxels were identified by fMRI in the word reading (lexical processing than in the nonword reading (phonological processing task. In word reading, activation was greater than for nonwords in the following areas: superior, middle and inferior frontal gyri, and bilateral superior temporal gyrus, right cerebellum and the left precentral gyrus, as indicated by fMRI. In the reading of nonwords, the activation was predominant in the right cerebellum and in the left superior temporal gyrus. The results of the present study suggest the existence of differences in the patterns of cerebral activation during lexical and phonological reading, with greater involvement of the right hemisphere in reading words than nonwords.

An eye movement based reading intervention in lexical and segmental readers with acquired dyslexia.

Science.gov (United States)

Ablinger, Irene; von Heyden, Kerstin; Vorstius, Christian; Halm, Katja; Huber, Walter; Radach, Ralph

2014-01-01

Due to their brain damage, aphasic patients with acquired dyslexia often rely to a greater extent on lexical or segmental reading procedures. Thus, therapy intervention is mostly targeted on the more impaired reading strategy. In the present work we introduce a novel therapy approach based on real-time measurement of patients' eye movements as they attempt to read words. More specifically, an eye movement contingent technique of stepwise letter de-masking was used to support sequential reading, whereas fixation-dependent initial masking of non-central letters stimulated a lexical (parallel) reading strategy. Four lexical and four segmental readers with acquired central dyslexia received our intensive reading intervention. All participants showed remarkable improvements as evident in reduced total reading time, a reduced number of fixations per word and improved reading accuracy. Both types of intervention led to item-specific training effects in all subjects. A generalisation to untrained items was only found in segmental readers after the lexical training. Eye movement analyses were also used to compare word processing before and after therapy, indicating that all patients, with one exclusion, maintained their preferred reading strategy. However, in several cases the balance between sequential and lexical processing became less extreme, indicating a more effective individual interplay of both word processing routes.

Lexical Link Analysis Application: Improving Web Service to Acquisition Visibility Portal Phase II

Science.gov (United States)

2014-04-30

bäÉîÉåíÜ=^ååì~ä=^Åèìáëáíáçå= oÉëÉ~êÅÜ=póãéçëáìã= qÜìêëÇ~ó=pÉëëáçåë= sçäìãÉ=ff= = Lexical Link Analysis Application: Improving Web Service to...DATE 30 APR 2014 2. REPORT TYPE 3. DATES COVERED 00-00-2014 to 00-00-2014 4. TITLE AND SUBTITLE Lexical Link Analysis Application: Improving...vocabulary or lexicon, to describe the attributes and surrounding environment of the system. Lexical Link Analysis (LLA) is a form of text mining in which

Arbitration in crossbar interconnect for low latency

Science.gov (United States)

Ohmacht, Martin; Sugavanam, Krishnan

2013-02-05

A system and method and computer program product for reducing the latency of signals communicated through a crossbar switch, the method including using at slave arbitration logic devices associated with Slave devices for which access is requested from one or more Master devices, two or more priority vector signals cycled among their use every clock cycle for selecting one of the requesting Master devices and updates the respective priority vector signal used every clock cycle. Similarly, each Master for which access is requested from one or more Slave devices, can have two or more priority vectors and can cycle among their use every clock cycle to further reduce latency and increase throughput performance via the crossbar.

Cross-Lingual Lexical Triggers in Statistical Language Modeling

National Research Council Canada - National Science Library

Kim, Woosung; Khudanpur, Sanjeev

2003-01-01

.... We achieve this through an extension of the method of lexical triggers to the cross-language problem, and by developing a likelihoodbased adaptation scheme for combining a trigger model with an N-gram model...

Mechanisms of Kaposi's Sarcoma-Associated Herpesvirus Latency and Reactivation

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Fengchun Ye

2011-01-01

Full Text Available The life cycle of Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV consists of latent and lytic replication phases. During latent infection, only a limited number of KSHV genes are expressed. However, this phase of replication is essential for persistent infection, evasion of host immune response, and induction of KSHV-related malignancies. KSHV reactivation from latency produces a wide range of viral products and infectious virions. The resulting de novo infection and viral lytic products modulate diverse cellular pathways and stromal microenvironment, which promote the development of Kaposi's sarcoma (KS. The mechanisms controlling KSHV latency and reactivation are complex, involving both viral and host factors, and are modulated by diverse environmental factors. Here, we review the cellular and molecular basis of KSHV latency and reactivation with a focus on the most recent advancements in the field.

An Optimized WSN Design for Latency-Critical Smart Grid Applications

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Mounib Khanafer

2017-01-01

Full Text Available The growing popularity of the Internet of Things (IoT systems such as the smart grid, Body Area Networks (BANs, and the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS is driving Wireless Sensor Network (WSN systems to the limit in terms of abilities and performance. WSNs were initially designed for low power, low data rate, and latency-tolerant applications. However, this paradigm is changing because of the nature of the new applications. Therefore, instead of only focusing on power-efficient WSN design, researchers and industries are now developing Quality of Service (QoS protocols for WSNs. In addition to that, latency- and reliability-critical protocol designs are also becoming significantly important in WSNs. In this paper, we present an overview of some important smart grid latency-critical applications and highlight WSNs implementation challenges for these smart grid applications. Furthermore, we develop and evaluate two novel optimization models that solve for the optimum values of the end-to-end latency and power consumption in a clustered WSN given lower bounds on reliability and other network parameters.

Fundamental Tradeoffs among Reliability, Latency and Throughput in Cellular Networks

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Soret, Beatriz; Mogensen, Preben; Pedersen, Klaus I.

2014-01-01

We address the fundamental tradeoffs among latency, reliability and throughput in a cellular network. The most important elements influencing the KPIs in a 4G network are identified, and the inter-relationships among them is discussed. We use the effective bandwidth and the effective capacity......, in which latency and reliability will be two of the principal KPIs....

Clear speech and lexical competition in younger and older adult listeners.

Science.gov (United States)

Van Engen, Kristin J

2017-08-01

This study investigated whether clear speech reduces the cognitive demands of lexical competition by crossing speaking style with lexical difficulty. Younger and older adults identified more words in clear versus conversational speech and more easy words than hard words. An initial analysis suggested that the effect of lexical difficulty was reduced in clear speech, but more detailed analyses within each age group showed this interaction was significant only for older adults. The results also showed that both groups improved over the course of the task and that clear speech was particularly helpful for individuals with poorer hearing: for younger adults, clear speech eliminated hearing-related differences that affected performance on conversational speech. For older adults, clear speech was generally more helpful to listeners with poorer hearing. These results suggest that clear speech affords perceptual benefits to all listeners and, for older adults, mitigates the cognitive challenge associated with identifying words with many phonological neighbors.

Measuring the Latency of an Augmented Reality System for Robot-Assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Jørgensen, Martin Kibsgaard; Kraus, Martin

2017-01-01

Minimal latency is important for augmented reality systems and teleoperation interfaces as even small increases in latency can affect user performance. Previously, we have developed an augmented reality system that can overlay stereoscopic video streams with computer graphics in order to improve....... The latency of the da Vinci S surgical system was on average 62 ms. None of the components of our overlay system (separately or combined) significantly affected the latency. However, the latency of the assistant's monitor increased by 14 ms. Passing the video streams through CPU or GPU memory increased...... visual communication in training for robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery with da Vinci surgical systems. To make sure that our augmented reality system provides the best possible user experience, we investigated the video latency of the da Vinci surgical system and how the components of our system...

Beyond Auditory Sensory Processing Deficits: Lexical Tone Perception Deficits in Chinese Children With Developmental Dyslexia.

Science.gov (United States)

Tong, Xiuhong; Tong, Xiuli; King Yiu, Fung

Increasing evidence suggests that children with developmental dyslexia exhibit a deficit not only at the segmental level of phonological processing but also, by extension, at the suprasegmental level. However, it remains unclear whether such a suprasegmental phonological processing deficit is due to a difficulty in processing acoustic cues of speech rhythm, such as rise time and intensity. This study set out to investigate to what extent suprasegmental phonological processing (i.e., Cantonese lexical tone perception) and rise time sensitivity could distinguish Chinese children with dyslexia from typically developing children. Sixteen children with dyslexia and 44 age-matched controls were administered a Cantonese lexical tone perception task, psychoacoustic tasks, a nonverbal reasoning ability task, and word reading and dictation tasks. Children with dyslexia performed worse than controls on Cantonese lexical tone perception, rise time, and intensity. Furthermore, Cantonese lexical tone perception appeared to be a stable indicator that distinguishes children with dyslexia from controls, even after controlling for basic auditory processing skills. These findings suggest that suprasegmental phonological processing (i.e., lexical tone perception) is a potential factor that accounts for reading difficulty in Chinese.

Optimality Theory and Lexical Interpretation and Selection

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Hogeweg, L.; Legendre, G.; Putnam, M.T.; de Swart, H.; Zaroukian, E.

2016-01-01

This chapter argues for an optimization approach to the selection and interpretation of words. Several advantages of such an approach to lexical semantics are discussed. First of all, it will be argued that competition, entailing that words and interpretations are always judged in relation to other

Analysis of methods to determine the latency of online movement adjustments

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Oostwoud Wijdenes, L.; Brenner, E.; Smeets, J.B.J.

2014-01-01

When studying online movement adjustments, one of the interesting parameters is their latency. We set out to compare three different methods of determining the latency: the threshold, confidence interval, and extrapolation methods. We simulated sets of movements with different movement times and

Rein: Taming Tail Latency in Key-Value Stores via Multiget Scheduling

KAUST Repository

Reda, Waleed

2017-04-17

We tackle the problem of reducing tail latencies in distributed key-value stores, such as the popular Cassandra database.We focus on workloads of multiget requests, which batch together access to several data elements and parallelize read operations across the data store machines. We first analyze a production trace of a real system and quantify the skew due to multiget sizes, key popularity, and other factors. We then proceed to identify opportunities for reduction of tail latencies by recognizing the composition of aggregate requests and by carefully scheduling bottleneck operations that can otherwise create excessive queues. We design and implement a system called Rein, which reduces latency via inter-multiget scheduling using low overhead techniques. We extensively evaluate Rein via experiments in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and simulations. Our scheduling algorithms reduce the median, 95, and 99 percentile latencies by factors of 1.5, 1.5, and 1.9, respectively.

Lexical development of noun and predicate comprehension and production in isiZulu.

Science.gov (United States)

Nicolas, Ramona Kunene; Ahmed, Saaliha

2016-07-28

This study seeks to investigate the development of noun and predicate comprehension and production in isiZulu-speaking children between the ages of 25 and 36 months. It compares lexical comprehension and production in isiZulu, using an Italian developed and validated vocabulary assessment tool: The Picture Naming Game (PiNG) developed by Bello, Giannantoni, Pettenati, Stefanini and Caselli (2012). The PiNG tool includes four subtests, one each for subnoun comprehension (NC), noun production (NP), predicate comprehension (PC), and predicate production (PP). Children are shown these lexical items and then asked to show comprehension and produce certain lexical items. After adaptation into the South African context, the adapted version of PiNG was used to directly assess the lexical development of isiZulu with the three main objectives to (1) test the efficiency of the adaptation of a vocabulary tool to measure isiZulu comprehension and production development, (2) test previous findings done in many cross-linguistic comparisons that have found that both comprehension and production performance increase with age for a lesser-studied language, and (3) present our findings around the comprehension and production of the linguistic categories of nouns and predicates. An analysis of the results reported in this study show an age effect throughout the entire sample. Across all the age groups, the comprehension of the noun and predicate subtests was better performed than the production of noun and predicate subtests. With regard to lexical items, the responses of children showed an influence of various factors, including the late acquisition of items, possible problems with stimuli presented to them, and the possible input received by the children from their home environment.

Lexical development of noun and predicate comprehension and production in isiZulu

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ramona Kunene Nicolas

2016-07-01

Full Text Available This study seeks to investigate the development of noun and predicate comprehension and production in isiZulu-speaking children between the ages of 25 and 36 months. It compares lexical comprehension and production in isiZulu, using an Italian developed and validated vocabulary assessment tool: The Picture Naming Game (PiNG developed by Bello, Giannantoni, Pettenati, Stefanini and Caselli (2012. The PiNG tool includes four subtests, one each for subnoun comprehension (NC, noun production (NP, predicate comprehension (PC, and predicate production (PP. Children are shown these lexical items and then asked to show comprehension and produce certain lexical items. After adaptation into the South African context, the adapted version of PiNG was used to directly assess the lexical development of isiZulu with the three main objectives to (1 test the efficiency of the adaptation of a vocabulary tool to measure isiZulu comprehension and production development, (2 test previous findings done in many cross-linguistic comparisons that have found that both comprehension and production performance increase with age for a lesser-studied language, and (3 present our findings around the comprehension and production of the linguistic categories of nouns and predicates. An analysis of the results reported in this study show an age effect throughout the entire sample. Across all the age groups, the comprehension of the noun and predicate subtests was better performed than the production of noun and predicate subtests. With regard to lexical items, the responses of children showed an influence of various factors, including the late acquisition of items, possible problems with stimuli presented to them, and the possible input received by the children from their home environment.

Lexical exposure to native language dialects can improve non-native phonetic discrimination.

Science.gov (United States)

Olmstead, Annie J; Viswanathan, Navin

2018-04-01

Nonnative phonetic learning is an area of great interest for language researchers, learners, and educators alike. In two studies, we examined whether nonnative phonetic discrimination of Hindi dental and retroflex stops can be improved by exposure to lexical items bearing the critical nonnative stops. We extend the lexical retuning paradigm of Norris, McQueen, and Cutler (Cognitive Psychology, 47, 204-238, 2003) by having naive American English (AE)-speaking participants perform a pretest-training-posttest procedure. They performed an AXB discrimination task with the Hindi retroflex and dental stops before and after transcribing naturally produced words from an Indian English speaker that either contained these tokens or not. Only those participants who heard words with the critical nonnative phones improved in their posttest discrimination. This finding suggests that exposure to nonnative phones in native lexical contexts supports learning of difficult nonnative phonetic discrimination.

Lexical ambiguity resolution

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

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

1987-01-01

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

Lexical Reading in Dysfluent Readers of German

Science.gov (United States)

Gangl, Melanie; Moll, Kristina; Jones, Manon W.; Banfi, Chiara; Schulte-Körne, Gerd; Landerl, Karin

2018-01-01

Dyslexia in consistent orthographies like German is characterized by dysfluent reading, which is often assumed to result from failure to build up an orthographic lexicon and overreliance on decoding. However, earlier evidence indicates effects of lexical processing at least in some German dyslexic readers. We investigated variations in reading…

Significance analysis of lexical bias in microarray data

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Falkow Stanley

2003-04-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Genes that are determined to be significantly differentially regulated in microarray analyses often appear to have functional commonalities, such as being components of the same biochemical pathway. This results in certain words being under- or overrepresented in the list of genes. Distinguishing between biologically meaningful trends and artifacts of annotation and analysis procedures is of the utmost importance, as only true biological trends are of interest for further experimentation. A number of sophisticated methods for identification of significant lexical trends are currently available, but these methods are generally too cumbersome for practical use by most microarray users. Results We have developed a tool, LACK, for calculating the statistical significance of apparent lexical bias in microarray datasets. The frequency of a user-specified list of search terms in a list of genes which are differentially regulated is assessed for statistical significance by comparison to randomly generated datasets. The simplicity of the input files and user interface targets the average microarray user who wishes to have a statistical measure of apparent lexical trends in analyzed datasets without the need for bioinformatics skills. The software is available as Perl source or a Windows executable. Conclusion We have used LACK in our laboratory to generate biological hypotheses based on our microarray data. We demonstrate the program's utility using an example in which we confirm significant upregulation of SPI-2 pathogenicity island of Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium by the cation chelator dipyridyl.

Lexical analysis of the Code of Medical Ethics of the Federal Council of Medicine.

Science.gov (United States)

Andrade, Edson de Oliveira; Andrade, Edson de Oliveira

2016-04-01

The Code of Medical Ethics (CME) of the Federal Council of Medicine is the legal document that exposes the moral discourse of Brazilian physicians to society and the profession. It is a set of propositions based on which doctors say they are committed to values of conduct aimed at fair and proper professional practice. To verify through lexical analysis of the CME corpus if the goals presented in the arguments of the resolution that established the code are properly addressed in these regulations. This is a quantitative and qualitative study of descriptive nature, aiming at a lexical analysis of the CME. The lexical analysis was performed using a method of Top-Down Hierarchical Classification of vocabulary, as described by Reinert in 1987, assuming that words used in similar contexts are associated with a single lexical world. In addition to the analysis of results, an improved representation of the charts related with Factorial and Similitude Analyses was made. Six clusters were extracted, leading to the identification of three major branches: health care, professional practice and research. These branches revolve around the figures of physician and patient. The similitude analysis revealed a complementarity status between these two figures. The lexical analysis showed that the purposes contained in the resolution that established the CME were adequately represented in the document body.

A Python-based Interface for Wide Coverage Lexicalized Tree-adjoining Grammars

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Wang Ziqi

2015-04-01

Full Text Available This paper describes the design and implementation of a Python-based interface for wide coverage Lexicalized Tree-adjoining Grammars. The grammars are part of the XTAG Grammar project at the University of Pennsylvania, which were hand-written and semi-automatically curated to parse real-world corpora. We provide an interface to the wide coverage English and Korean XTAG grammars. Each XTAG grammar is lexicalized, which means at least one word selects a tree fragment (called an elementary tree or etree. Derivations for sentences are built by combining etrees using substitution (replacement of a tree node with an etree at the frontier of another etree and adjunction (replacement of an internal tree node in an etree by another etree. Each etree is associated with a feature structure representing constraints on substitution and adjunction. Feature structures are combined using unification during the combination of etrees. We plan to integrate our toolkit for XTAG grammars into the Python-based Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK: nltk.org. We have provided an API capable of searching the lexicalized etrees for a given word or multiple words, searching for a etree by name or function, display the lexicalized etrees to the user using a graphical view, display the feature structure associated with each tree node in an etree, hide or highlight features based on a regular expression, and browsing the entire tree database for each XTAG grammar.

Lexical Tones in Mandarin Chinese Infant-Directed Speech: Age-Related Changes in the Second Year of Life

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Mengru Han

2018-04-01

Full Text Available Tonal information is essential to early word learning in tone languages. Although numerous studies have investigated the intonational and segmental properties of infant-directed speech (IDS, only a few studies have explored the properties of lexical tones in IDS. These studies mostly focused on the first year of life; thus little is known about how lexical tones in IDS change as children’s vocabulary acquisition accelerates in the second year (Goldfield and Reznick, 1990; Bloom, 2001. The present study examines whether Mandarin Chinese mothers hyperarticulate lexical tones in IDS addressing 18- and 24-month-old children—at which age children are learning words at a rapid speed—vs. adult-directed speech (ADS. Thirty-nine Mandarin Chinese–speaking mothers were tested in a semi-spontaneous picture-book-reading task, in which they told the same story to their child (IDS condition and to an adult (ADS condition. Results for the F0 measurements (minimum F0, maximum F0, and F0 range of tone in the speech data revealed a continuum of differences among IDS addressing 18-month-olds, IDS addressing 24-month-olds, and ADS. Lexical tones in IDS addressing 18-month-old children had a higher minimum F0, higher maximum F0, and larger pitch range than lexical tones in ADS. Lexical tones in IDS addressing 24-month-old children showed more similarity to ADS tones with respect to pitch height: there were no differences in minimum F0 and maximum F0 between ADS and IDS. However, F0 range was still larger. These results suggest that lexical tones are generally hyperarticulated in Mandarin Chinese IDS addressing 18- and 24- month-old children despite the change in pitch level over time. Mandarin Chinese mothers hyperarticulate lexical tones in IDS when talking to toddlers and potentially facilitate tone acquisition and word learning.

Developmental Trajectory for Production of Prosody: Lexical Stress Contrastivity in Children Ages 3 to 7 Years and in Adults

Science.gov (United States)

Ballard, Kirrie J.; Djaja, Danica; Arciuli, Joanne; James, Deborah G. H.; van Doorn, Jan

2012-01-01

Purpose: Accurate production of lexical stress within English polysyllabic words is critical for intelligibility and is affected in many speech-language disorders. However, models of speech production remain underspecified with regard to lexical stress. In this study, the authors report a large-scale acoustic investigation of lexical stress…

Putting lexical constraints in context into the visual-world paradigm.

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Novick, Jared M; Thompson-Schill, Sharon L; Trueswell, John C

2008-06-01

Prior eye-tracking studies of spoken sentence comprehension have found that the presence of two potential referents, e.g., two frogs, can guide listeners toward a Modifier interpretation of Put the frog on the napkin... despite strong lexical biases associated with Put that support a Goal interpretation of the temporary ambiguity (Tanenhaus, M. K., Spivey-Knowlton, M. J., Eberhard, K. M. & Sedivy, J. C. (1995). Integration of visual and linguistic information in spoken language comprehension. Science, 268, 1632-1634; Trueswell, J. C., Sekerina, I., Hill, N. M. & Logrip, M. L. (1999). The kindergarten-path effect: Studying on-line sentence processing in young children. Cognition, 73, 89-134). This pattern is not expected under constraint-based parsing theories: cue conflict between the lexical evidence (which supports the Goal analysis) and the visuo-contextual evidence (which supports the Modifier analysis) should result in uncertainty about the intended analysis and partial consideration of the Goal analysis. We reexamined these put studies (Experiment 1) by introducing a response time-constraint and a spatial contrast between competing referents (a frog on a napkin vs. a frog in a bowl). If listeners immediately interpret on the... as the start of a restrictive modifier, then their eye movements should rapidly converge on the intended referent (the frog on something). However, listeners showed this pattern only when the phrase was unambiguously a Modifier (Put the frog that's on the...). Syntactically ambiguous trials resulted in transient consideration of the Competitor animal (the frog in something). A reading study was also run on the same individuals (Experiment 2) and performance was compared between the two experiments. Those individuals who relied heavily on lexical biases to resolve a complement ambiguity in reading (The man heard/realized the story had been...) showed increased sensitivity to both lexical and contextual constraints in the put-task; i

Latency transition of plasminogen activator inhibitor type 1 is evolutionarily conserved

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Jendroszek, Agnieszka; Sønnichsen, Malene; Chana Munoz, Andres

2017-01-01

relevance of latency transition. In order to study the origin of PAI-1 latency transition, we produced PAI-1 from Spiny dogfish shark (Squalus acanthias) and African lungfish (Protopterus sp.), which represent central species in the evolution of vertebrates. Although human PAI-1 and the non-mammalian PAI-1...

Planning and production of grammatical and lexical verbs in multi-word messages

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Lange, Violaine Michel; Messerschmidt, Maria; Harder, Peter

2017-01-01

to lexical words. First, based on the assumption that grammatical words are less crucial for communication and therefore paid less attention to, it is predicted that they show shorter articulation times and/or higher error rates than lexical words. Second, based on the assumption that grammatical words...... were reported, successfully reflecting grammatical word properties as defined by linguistic theories and psycholinguistic models. Importantly, this study provides insight into the span of encoding and grammatical encoding processes in speech production....

Latency requirements for head-worn display S/EVS applications

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Bailey, Randall E.; Arthur, Jarvis J., III; Williams, Steven P.

2004-08-01

NASA's Aviation Safety Program, Synthetic Vision Systems Project is conducting research in advanced flight deck concepts, such as Synthetic/Enhanced Vision Systems (S/EVS), for commercial and business aircraft. An emerging thrust in this activity is the development of spatially-integrated, large field-of-regard information display systems. Head-worn or helmet-mounted display systems are being proposed as one method in which to meet this objective. System delays or latencies inherent to spatially-integrated, head-worn displays critically influence the display utility, usability, and acceptability. Research results from three different, yet similar technical areas - flight control, flight simulation, and virtual reality - are collectively assembled in this paper to create a global perspective of delay or latency effects in head-worn or helmet-mounted display systems. Consistent definitions and measurement techniques are proposed herein for universal application and latency requirements for Head-Worn Display S/EVS applications are drafted. Future research areas are defined.

The effect of acute tyrosine phenylalanine depletion on emotion-based decision-making in healthy adults.

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Vrshek-Schallhorn, Suzanne; Wahlstrom, Dustin; White, Tonya; Luciana, Monica

2013-04-01

Despite interest in dopamine's role in emotion-based decision-making, few reports of the effects of dopamine manipulations are available in this area in humans. This study investigates dopamine's role in emotion-based decision-making through a common measure of this construct, the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), using Acute Tyrosine Phenylalanine Depletion (ATPD). In a between-subjects design, 40 healthy adults were randomized to receive either an ATPD beverage or a balanced amino acid beverage (a control) prior to completing the IGT, as well as pre- and post-manipulation blood draws for the neurohormone prolactin. Together with conventional IGT performance metrics, choice selections and response latencies were examined separately for good and bad choices before and after several key punishment events. Changes in response latencies were also used to predict total task performance. Prolactin levels increased significantly in the ATPD group but not in the control group. However, no significant group differences in performance metrics were detected, nor were there sex differences in outcome measures. However, the balanced group's bad deck latencies speeded up across the task, while the ATPD group's latencies remained adaptively hesitant. Additionally, modulation of latencies to the bad decks predicted total score for the ATPD group only. One interpretation is that ATPD subtly attenuated reward salience and altered the approach by which individuals achieved successful performance, without resulting in frank group differences in task performance. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Does Discourse Congruence Influence Spoken Language Comprehension before Lexical Association? Evidence from Event-Related Potentials

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Boudewyn, Megan A.; Gordon, Peter C.; Long, Debra; Polse, Lara; Swaab, Tamara Y.

2011-01-01

The goal of this study was to examine how lexical association and discourse congruence affect the time course of processing incoming words in spoken discourse. In an ERP norming study, we presented prime-target pairs in the absence of a sentence context to obtain a baseline measure of lexical priming. We observed a typical N400 effect when participants heard critical associated and unassociated target words in word pairs. In a subsequent experiment, we presented the same word pairs in spoken discourse contexts. Target words were always consistent with the local sentence context, but were congruent or not with the global discourse (e.g., “Luckily Ben had picked up some salt and pepper/basil”, preceded by a context in which Ben was preparing marinara sauce (congruent) or dealing with an icy walkway (incongruent). ERP effects of global discourse congruence preceded those of local lexical association, suggesting an early influence of the global discourse representation on lexical processing, even in locally congruent contexts. Furthermore, effects of lexical association occurred earlier in the congruent than incongruent condition. These results differ from those that have been obtained in studies of reading, suggesting that the effects may be unique to spoken word recognition. PMID:23002319

Structural Analysis of Lexical Bundles in University Lectures of Politics and Chemistry

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Hadi Kashiha

2014-01-01

Full Text Available Referred to as extended collocations, lexical bundles are considered as a main factor in building fluency in academic discourse; helping to shape meaning and coherence in a text or speech. For decades, lexical bundles have attracted considerable amount of attention in corpus-based research in English for Academic Purposes (EAP. While, the focus of the most of the studies on lexical bundles was to explore the use of these multi-word expressions in academic written registers such as research articles, academic spoken registers such as university lectures have not received that amount of attention from the scholars. In this vein, there is still an open question of how they are structurally different across disciplines. With these concerns in mind, this study aimed to explore how lexical bundles are used structurally in a 50291 words corpus of 8 university lectures across two disciplines: chemistry and politics. To this aim, the most frequent four-word bundles in the corpus were classified according to their grammatical types to see the possible disciplinary variations in their frequency of use as well as the structure involved in their use. Results of the analysis revealed that noun phrase and prepositional phrase fragments were the most common structures in the lectures of the two disciplines, accounting for more than half of the bundles in politics. University lecturers appear to apply a variety of structures in the use of lexical bundles often peculiar to the discipline in order to convey their disciplinary messages.  This would lead to the need to emphasize the instruction of the most common structures in that discipline in a way for the lectures to be as comprehensive as possible for the intended audiences.

Latency and Jitter Analysis for IEEE 802.11e Wireless LANs

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Sungkwan Youm

2013-01-01

Full Text Available This paper presents a numerical analysis of latency and jitter for IEEE 802.11e wireless local area networks (WLANs in a saturation condition, by using a Markov model. We use this model to explicate how the enhanced distributed coordination function (EDCF differentiates classes of service and to characterize the probability distribution of the medium access control (MAC layer packet latency and jitter, on which the quality of the voice over Internet protocol (VoIP calls is dependent. From the proposed analytic model, we can estimate the available number of nodes determining the system performance, in order to satisfy user demands on the latency and jitter.

Using Arduino microcontroller boards to measure response latencies.

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Schubert, Thomas W; D'Ausilio, Alessandro; Canto, Rosario

2013-12-01

Latencies of buttonpresses are a staple of cognitive science paradigms. Often keyboards are employed to collect buttonpresses, but their imprecision and variability decreases test power and increases the risk of false positives. Response boxes and data acquisition cards are precise, but expensive and inflexible, alternatives. We propose using open-source Arduino microcontroller boards as an inexpensive and flexible alternative. These boards connect to standard experimental software using a USB connection and a virtual serial port, or by emulating a keyboard. In our solution, an Arduino measures response latencies after being signaled the start of a trial, and communicates the latency and response back to the PC over a USB connection. We demonstrated the reliability, robustness, and precision of this communication in six studies. Test measures confirmed that the error added to the measurement had an SD of less than 1 ms. Alternatively, emulation of a keyboard results in similarly precise measurement. The Arduino performs as well as a serial response box, and better than a keyboard. In addition, our setup allows for the flexible integration of other sensors, and even actuators, to extend the cognitive science toolbox.

Working memory and planning during sentence production.

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

2014-10-01

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

Lexical Inferencing in Reading L2 Russian

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Comer, William J.

2012-01-01

This study describes how intermediate-level first language English readers of Russian as a second language deploy lexical inferencing and other strategies when reading informational texts. Fifth-semester students of Russian performed think-alouds while reading two texts; one written for the general adult reader, and the other meant for school-age…

The determinants of spoken and written picture naming latencies.

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Bonin, Patrick; Chalard, Marylène; Méot, Alain; Fayol, Michel

2002-02-01

The influence of nine variables on the latencies to write down or to speak aloud the names of pictures taken from Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980) was investigated in French adults. The major determinants of both written and spoken picture naming latencies were image variability, image agreement and age of acquisition. To a lesser extent, name agreement was also found to have an impact in both production modes. The implications of the findings for theoretical views of both spoken and written picture naming are discussed.

Targeting HIV latency: pharmacologic strategies toward eradication

Science.gov (United States)

Xing, Sifei; Siliciano, Robert F.

2013-01-01

The latent reservoir for HIV-1 in resting CD4+ T cells remains a major barrier to HIV-1 eradication, even though highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) can successfully reduce plasma HIV-1 levels to below the detection limit of clinical assays and reverse disease progression. Proposed eradication strategies involve reactivation of this latent reservoir. Multiple mechanisms are believed to be involved in maintaining HIV-1 latency, mostly through suppression of transcription. These include cytoplasmic sequestration of host transcription factors and epigenetic modifications such as histone deacetylation, histone methylation and DNA methylation. Therefore, strategies targeting these mechanisms have been explored for reactivation of the latent reservoir. In this review, we discuss current pharmacological approaches toward eradication, focusing on small molecule latency-reversing agents, their mechanisms, advantages and limitations. PMID:23270785

Cognitive status, lexical learning and memory in deaf adults using sign language

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Zahra Jafari

2013-05-01

Full Text Available Background and Aim : Learning and memory are two high level cognitive performances in human that hearing loss influences them. In our study, mini-mental state examination (MMSE and Ray auditory-verbal learning test (RAVLT was conducted to study cognitive stat us and lexical learning and memory in deaf adults using sign language. Methods: This cross-sectional comparative study was conducted on 30 available congenitally deaf adults using sign language in Persian and 46 normal adults aged 19 to 27 years for both sexes, with a minimum of diploma level of education. After mini-mental state examination, Rey auditory-verbal learning test was run through computers to evaluate lexical learning and memory with visual presentation. Results: Mean scores of mini-mental state examination and Rey auditory-verbal learning test in congenitally deaf adults were significantly lower than normal individuals in all scores (p=0.018 except in the two parts of the Rey test. Significant correlation was found between results of two tests just in the normal group (p=0.043. Gender had no effect on test results. Conclusion: Cognitive status and lexical memory and learning in congenitally deaf individuals is weaker than in normal subjects. It seems that using sign language as the main way of communication in deaf people causes poor lexical memory and learning.

Lexical-Semantic Reading in a Shallow Orthography: Evidence from a Girl with Williams Syndrome

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Barca, Laura; Bello, Arianna; Volterra, Virginia; Burani, Cristina

2010-01-01

The reading skills of a girl with Williams Syndrome are assessed by a timed word-naming task. To test the efficiency of lexical and nonlexical reading, we considered four marker effects: Lexicality (better reading of words than nonwords), frequency (better reading of high than low frequency words), length (better reading of short than long words),…

An Analysis of Lexical Errors of Korean Language Learners: Some American College Learners' Case

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Kang, Manjin

2014-01-01

There has been a huge amount of research on errors of language learners. However, most of them have focused on syntactic errors and those about lexical errors are not found easily despite the importance of lexical learning for the language learners. The case is even rarer for Korean language. In line with this background, this study was designed…

Detecting concealed information in less than a second: response latency-based measures

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Verschuere, B.; de Houwer, J.; Verschuere, B.; Ben-Shakhar, G.; Meijer, E.

2011-01-01

Concealed information can be accurately assessed with physiological measures. To overcome the practical limitations of physiological measures, an assessment using response latencies has been proposed. At first sight, research findings on response latency based concealed information tests seem

Reduced short-term memory capacity in Alzheimer's disease: the role of phonological, lexical, and semantic processing.

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Caza, Nicole; Belleville, Sylvie

2008-05-01

Individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD) are often reported to have reduced verbal short-term memory capacity, typically attributed to their attention/executive deficits. However, these individuals also tend to show progressive impairment of semantic, lexical, and phonological processing which may underlie their low short-term memory capacity. The goals of this study were to assess the contribution of each level of representation (phonological, lexical, and semantic) to immediate serial recall performance in 18 individuals with AD, and to examine how these linguistic effects on short-term memory were modulated by their reduced capacity to manipulate information in short-term memory associated with executive dysfunction. Results showed that individuals with AD had difficulty recalling items that relied on phonological representations, which led to increased lexicality effects relative to the control group. This finding suggests that patients have a greater reliance on lexical/semantic information than controls, possibly to make up for deficits in retention and processing of phonological material. This lexical/semantic effect was not found to be significantly correlated with patients' capacity to manipulate verbal material in short-term memory, indicating that language processing and executive deficits may independently contribute to reducing verbal short-term memory capacity in AD.

Lexical and perceptual grounding of a sound ontology

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Lobanova, Anna; Spenader, Jennifer; Valkenier, Bea; Matousek,; Mautner, P

2007-01-01

Sound ontologies need to incorporate source unidentifiable sounds in an adequate and consistent manner. Computational lexical resources like WordNet have either inserted these descriptions into conceptual categories, or make no attempt to organize the terms for these sounds. This work attempts to

Neural correlates of rhyming vs. lexical and semantic fluency.

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Kircher, Tilo; Nagels, Arne; Kirner-Veselinovic, André; Krach, Sören

2011-05-19

Rhyming words, as in songs or poems, is a universal feature of human language across all ages. In the present fMRI study a novel overt rhyming task was applied to determine the neural correlates of rhyme production. Fifteen right-handed healthy male volunteers participated in this verbal fluency study. Participants were instructed to overtly articulate as many words as possible either to a given initial letter (LVF) or to a semantic category (SVF). During the rhyming verbal fluency task (RVF), participants had to generate words that rhymed with pseudoword stimuli. On-line overt verbal responses were audiotaped in order to correct the imaging results for the number of generated words. Fewer words were generated in the rhyming compared to both the lexical and the semantic condition. On a neural level, all language tasks activated a language network encompassing the left inferior frontal gyrus, the middle and superior temporal gyri as well as the contralateral right cerebellum. Rhyming verbal fluency compared to both lexical and semantic verbal fluency demonstrated significantly stronger activation of left inferior parietal region. Generating novel rhyme words seems to be mainly mediated by the left inferior parietal lobe, a region previously found to be associated with meta-phonological as well as sub-lexical linguistic processes. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The Wnt Signaling Pathway Is Differentially Expressed during the Bovine Herpesvirus 1 Latency-Reactivation Cycle: Evidence That Two Protein Kinases Associated with Neuronal Survival, Akt3 and BMPR2, Are Expressed at Higher Levels during Latency.

Science.gov (United States)

Workman, Aspen; Zhu, Liqian; Keel, Brittney N; Smith, Timothy P L; Jones, Clinton

2018-04-01

Sensory neurons in trigeminal ganglia (TG) of calves latently infected with bovine herpesvirus 1 (BoHV-1) abundantly express latency-related (LR) gene products, including a protein (ORF2) and two micro-RNAs. Recent studies in mouse neuroblastoma cells (Neuro-2A) demonstrated ORF2 interacts with β-catenin and a β-catenin coactivator, high-mobility group AT-hook 1 (HMGA1) protein, which correlates with increased β-catenin-dependent transcription and cell survival. β-Catenin and HMGA1 are readily detected in a subset of latently infected TG neurons but not TG neurons from uninfected calves or reactivation from latency. Consequently, we hypothesized that the Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway is differentially expressed during the latency and reactivation cycle and an active Wnt pathway promotes latency. RNA-sequencing studies revealed that 102 genes associated with the Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway were differentially expressed in TG during the latency-reactivation cycle in calves. Wnt agonists were generally expressed at higher levels during latency, but these levels decreased during dexamethasone-induced reactivation. The Wnt agonist bone morphogenetic protein receptor 2 (BMPR2) was intriguing because it encodes a serine/threonine receptor kinase that promotes neuronal differentiation and inhibits cell death. Another differentially expressed gene encodes a protein kinase (Akt3), which is significant because Akt activity enhances cell survival and is linked to herpes simplex virus 1 latency and neuronal survival. Additional studies demonstrated ORF2 increased Akt3 steady-state protein levels and interacted with Akt3 in transfected Neuro-2A cells, which correlated with Akt3 activation. Conversely, expression of Wnt antagonists increased during reactivation from latency. Collectively, these studies suggest Wnt signaling cooperates with LR gene products, in particular ORF2, to promote latency. IMPORTANCE Lifelong BoHV-1 latency primarily occurs in sensory neurons

Learning new vocabulary during childhood: effects of semantic training on lexical consolidation and integration.

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Henderson, Lisa; Weighall, Anna; Gaskell, Gareth

2013-11-01

Research suggests that word learning is an extended process, with offline consolidation crucial for the strengthening of new lexical representations and their integration with existing lexical knowledge (as measured by engagement in lexical competition). This supports a dual memory systems account, in which new information is initially sparsely encoded separately from existing knowledge and integrated with long-term memory over time. However, previous studies of this type exploited unnatural learning contexts, involving fictitious words in the absence of word meaning. In this study, 5- to 9-year-old children learned real science words (e.g., hippocampus) with or without semantic information. Children in both groups were slower to detect pauses in familiar competitor words (e.g., hippopotamus) relative to control words 24h after training but not immediately, confirming that offline consolidation is required before new words are integrated with the lexicon and engage in lexical competition. Children recalled more new words 24h after training than immediately (with similar improvements shown for the recall and recognition of new word meanings); however, children who were exposed to the meanings during training showed further improvements in recall after 1 week and outperformed children who were not exposed to meanings. These findings support the dual memory systems account of vocabulary acquisition and suggest that the association of a new phonological form with semantic information is critical for the development of stable lexical representations. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Insights into failed lexical retrieval from network science.

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Vitevitch, Michael S; Chan, Kit Ying; Goldstein, Rutherford

2014-02-01

Previous network analyses of the phonological lexicon (Vitevitch, 2008) observed a web-like structure that exhibited assortative mixing by degree: words with dense phonological neighborhoods tend to have as neighbors words that also have dense phonological neighborhoods, and words with sparse phonological neighborhoods tend to have as neighbors words that also have sparse phonological neighborhoods. Given the role that assortative mixing by degree plays in network resilience, we examined instances of real and simulated lexical retrieval failures in computer simulations, analysis of a slips-of-the-ear corpus, and three psycholinguistic experiments for evidence of this network characteristic in human behavior. The results of the various analyses support the hypothesis that the structure of words in the mental lexicon influences lexical processing. The implications of network science for current models of spoken word recognition, language processing, and cognitive psychology more generally are discussed. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Behavioural and physiological effects of finely balanced decision-making in chickens.

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Davies, Anna C; Nicol, Christine J; Persson, Mia E; Radford, Andrew N

2014-01-01

In humans, more difficult decisions result in behavioural and physiological changes suggestive of increased arousal, but little is known about the effect of decision difficulty in other species. A difficult decision can have a number of characteristics; we aimed to monitor how finely balanced decisions, compared to unbalanced ones, affected the behaviour and physiology of chickens. An unbalanced decision was one in which the two options were of unequal net value (1 (Q1) vs. 6 (Q6) pieces of sweetcorn with no cost associated with either option); a finely balanced decision was one in which the options were of equal net value (i.e. hens were "indifferent" to both options). To identify hens' indifference, a titration procedure was used in which a cost (electromagnetic weight on an access door) was applied to the Q6 option, to find the individual point at which hens chose this option approximately equally to Q1 via a non-weighted door. We then compared behavioural and physiological indicators of arousal (head movements, latency to choose, heart-rate variability and surface body temperature) when chickens made decisions that were unbalanced or finely balanced. Significant physiological (heart-rate variability) and behavioural (latency to pen) differences were found between the finely balanced and balanced conditions, but these were likely to be artefacts of the greater time and effort required to push through the weighted doors. No other behavioural and physiological measures were significantly different between the decision categories. We suggest that more information is needed on when best to monitor likely changes in arousal during decision-making and that future studies should consider decisions defined as difficult in other ways.

Behavioural and physiological effects of finely balanced decision-making in chickens.

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Anna C Davies

Full Text Available In humans, more difficult decisions result in behavioural and physiological changes suggestive of increased arousal, but little is known about the effect of decision difficulty in other species. A difficult decision can have a number of characteristics; we aimed to monitor how finely balanced decisions, compared to unbalanced ones, affected the behaviour and physiology of chickens. An unbalanced decision was one in which the two options were of unequal net value (1 (Q1 vs. 6 (Q6 pieces of sweetcorn with no cost associated with either option; a finely balanced decision was one in which the options were of equal net value (i.e. hens were "indifferent" to both options. To identify hens' indifference, a titration procedure was used in which a cost (electromagnetic weight on an access door was applied to the Q6 option, to find the individual point at which hens chose this option approximately equally to Q1 via a non-weighted door. We then compared behavioural and physiological indicators of arousal (head movements, latency to choose, heart-rate variability and surface body temperature when chickens made decisions that were unbalanced or finely balanced. Significant physiological (heart-rate variability and behavioural (latency to pen differences were found between the finely balanced and balanced conditions, but these were likely to be artefacts of the greater time and effort required to push through the weighted doors. No other behavioural and physiological measures were significantly different between the decision categories. We suggest that more information is needed on when best to monitor likely changes in arousal during decision-making and that future studies should consider decisions defined as difficult in other ways.

Peculiarities of Creating Foreign Students’ Lexical Competence

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Aigul Eskermesovna Sadenova

2016-11-01

Full Text Available Teaching of vocabulary includes several aspects of teaching content: linguistic, methodological and psychological. Teaching of vocabulary is a process which is inextricably entwined with understanding relations between new words and phonetic and grammar aspects of the language. On the one hand, simultaneous learning of two languages complicates the tasks set to the students, but, on the other hand, it simplifies the process. The complexity is in the scope of vocabulary to be remembered, as well as in the differences between grammar structures used in Russian and Kazakh. The simplification is in the fact that students are fully aware that lexical competence is formed gradually, and that every language has its lexical base required at the initial stage, and that such base is to be developed for mastering a specific language. Before identifying the methods of vocabulary semantization in the course of teaching a language to foreign students, students shall be offered active vocabulary, used to express their ideas orally and in written form, and passive vocabulary, used to perceive oral and written information. It is not possible to teach semantics only. It is necessary to create paradigmatic, syntactic and associative relations. The formation of lexical skills is connected with the solidity of vocabulary retention. In order to ensure reinforcement of the vocabulary learnt, the students shall be offered exercises contributing to the development of their skills of using vocabulary in listening, speaking, reading and writing. All above mentioned types of vocabulary semantization constitute a unified whole. Different ways of semantization are set forth for methodological purposes, to facilitate the achievement of the desired result. Translation and non-translation techniques for vocabulary presentation, as well as some tips and exercises, are given. The use of basic vocabulary at elementary and advanced levels is suggested. Certain methods for the

A Lexical Approach to Passive in ESL.

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Marshall, Fred

Dissatisfaction with the standard transformational grammar approach to teaching passive voice sentences gave rise to the method developed. It is based on the framework of a lexical-functional grammar, which claims that both active and passive sentences are base-generated, and that both active and passive verb forms occur in the lexicon. It would…

Extensive Reading in Enhancing Lexical Chunks Acquisition

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Pereyra, Nilsa

2015-01-01

The purpose of this action research was to investigate the effect of extensive reading and related activities on the acquisition of lexical chunks in EFL students. Seven adult EFL learners with an Intermediate level volunteered to take part in the 16 week project following Extensive Reading principles combined with tasks based on the Lexical…

Comparison of middle latency responses in presbycusis patients with two different speech recognition scores.

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Kirkim, Gunay; Madanoglu, Nevma; Akdas, Ferda; Serbetcioglu, M Bulent

2007-12-01

The purpose of this study is to evaluate whether the middle latency responses (MLR) can be used for an objective differentiation of patients with presbycusis having relatively good (Group I) and relatively poor speech recognition scores (Group II). All the participants of these groups had high frequency down-sloping hearing loss with an average of 26-60 dB HL. Data were collected from two described study groups and a control group, using pure tone audiometry, monosyllabic phonetically balanced word and synthetic sentence identification, as well as MLR. The study groups were compared with the control group. When patients in Group I were compared with the control group, only ipsilateral Na latency of middle latency evoked response was statistically significant in the right ear whereas ipsilateral Na latency in the right ear, ipsilateral and contralateral Na latency in the left ear of the patients in Group II were statistically significant. Thus, as an objective complementary tool for the evaluation of the speech perception ability of the patients with presbycusis, Na latency of MLR may be used in combination with the speech discrimination tests.

On the frequency dependence of the otoacoustic emission latency in hypoacoustic and normal ears

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Sisto, R.; Moleti, A.

2002-01-01

Experimental measurements of the otoacoustic emission (OAE) latency of adult subjects have been obtained, as a function of frequency, by means of wavelet time-frequency analysis based on the iterative application of filter banks. The results are in agreement with previous OAE latency measurements by Tognola et al. [Hear. Res. 106, 112-122 (1997)], as regards both the latency values and the frequency dependence, and seem to be incompatible with the steep 1/f law that is predicted by scale-invariant full cochlear models. The latency-frequency relationship has been best fitted to a linear function of the cochlear physical distance, using the Greenwood map, and to an exponential function of the cochlear distance, for comparison with derived band ABR latency measurements. Two sets of ears [94 audiometrically normal and 42 impaired with high-frequency (f>3 kHz) hearing loss] have been separately analyzed. Significantly larger average latencies were found in the impaired ears in the mid-frequency range. Theoretical implications of these findings on the transmission of the traveling wave are discussed.

A template-free approach for determining the latency of single events of auditory evoked M100

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Burghoff, M [Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB), Berlin (Germany); Link, A [Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB), Berlin (Germany); Salajegheh, A [Cognitive Neuroscience of Language Laboratory, University of Maryland College Park, MD (United States); Elster, C [Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB), Berlin (Germany); Poeppel, D [Cognitive Neuroscience of Language Laboratory, University of Maryland College Park, MD (United States); Trahms, L [Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB), Berlin (Germany)

2005-02-07

The phase of the complex output of a narrow band Gaussian filter is taken to define the latency of the auditory evoked response M100 recorded by magnetoencephalography. It is demonstrated that this definition is consistent with the conventional peak latency. Moreover, it provides a tool for reducing the number of averages needed for a reliable estimation of the latency. Single-event latencies obtained by this procedure can be used to improve the signal quality of the conventional average by latency adjusted averaging. (note)

Standard-Chinese Lexical Neighborhood Test in normal-hearing young children.

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Liu, Chang; Liu, Sha; Zhang, Ning; Yang, Yilin; Kong, Ying; Zhang, Luo

2011-06-01

The purposes of the present study were to establish the Standard-Chinese version of Lexical Neighborhood Test (LNT) and to examine the lexical and age effects on spoken-word recognition in normal-hearing children. Six lists of monosyllabic and six lists of disyllabic words (20 words/list) were selected from the database of daily speech materials for normal-hearing (NH) children of ages 3-5 years. The lists were further divided into "easy" and "hard" halves according to the word frequency and neighborhood density in the database based on the theory of Neighborhood Activation Model (NAM). Ninety-six NH children (age ranged between 4.0 and 7.0 years) were divided into three different age groups of 1-year intervals. Speech-perception tests were conducted using the Standard-Chinese monosyllabic and disyllabic LNT. The inter-list performance was found to be equivalent and inter-rater reliability was high with 92.5-95% consistency. Results of word-recognition scores showed that the lexical effects were all significant. Children scored higher with disyllabic words than with monosyllabic words. "Easy" words scored higher than "hard" words. The word-recognition performance also increased with age in each lexical category. A multiple linear regression analysis showed that neighborhood density, age, and word frequency appeared to have increasingly more contributions to Chinese word recognition. The results of the present study indicated that performances of Chinese word recognition were influenced by word frequency, age, and neighborhood density, with word frequency playing a major role. These results were consistent with those in other languages, supporting the application of NAM in the Chinese language. The development of Standard-Chinese version of LNT and the establishment of a database of children of 4-6 years old can provide a reliable means for spoken-word recognition test in children with hearing impairment. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

PESQUISAS EM AQUISIÇÃO LEXICAL ATRAVÉS DA LEITURA

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Lucilene Bender de Sousa

2012-07-01

Full Text Available A aquisição de palavras através da leitura é um tema de pesquisa pouco estudado no país, embora seja objeto de estudo desde a década de 80 no exterior. Neste artigo, nosso objetivo é mostrar a relevância desse tema e o que já foi pesquisado sobre ele. Partimos da seguinte citação: “o vocabulário serve de ponte entre o processamento fônico no nível da palavra e o processo cognitivo de compreensão.”(KAMIL; HIEBERT, 2005, p. 4, que nos faz enxergar de modo mais claro a relação entre o conhecimento lexical e o desenvolvimento da proficiência em leitura. Refletir sobre essa relação também pode trazer mudanças interessantes no trabalho com leitura em sala de aula. Inicialmente, abordamos o que é contexto, qual é o seu papel na aquisição lexical e que tipos de informações ele pode fornecer; também identificamos fatores relacionados ao contexto que podem interferir no processo de aquisição lexical. Em seguida, descrevemos algumas pesquisas relevantes realizadas nessa área de estudo tanto em língua materna quanto em segunda língua, em períodos diversos, desde 1984 a 2005. Essa descrição busca revisar os resultados obtidos por essas pesquisas e as metodologias por elas utilizadas. Por fim, analisamos as características predominantes nos experimentos descritos e questões que ainda precisam ser investigadas dentro da aquisição lexical através da leitura.

Environmental Determinants of Lexical Processing Effort

OpenAIRE

McDonald, Scott

2000-01-01

Institute for Adaptive and Neural Computation A central concern of psycholinguistic research is explaining the relative ease or difficulty involved in processing words. In this thesis, we explore the connection between lexical processing effort and measurable properties of the linguistic environment. Distributional information (information about a word’s contexts of use) is easily extracted from large language corpora in the form of co-occurrence statistics. We claim that su...

A DISTRIBUIÇÃO GEOLINGUÍSTICA DO ITEM LEXICAL TOCO DE CIGARRO NAS CAPITAIS BRASILEIRAS

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Abdelhak Razky

2016-01-01

Full Text Available O léxico da Língua Portuguesa, há muito, tem sidotema de estudos de dialetólogos e geolinguístas brasileiros.Muitos são os trabalhos já publicados sobre a variedadelexical no Português Brasileiro (PB. Isso é constatado pormeio do grande volume de trabalhos publicados sob formade artigos científicos, dissertações de mestrado ou teses dedoutorado. Entretanto, dada a riqueza e diversidade queenvolve o tema, é praticamente impossível esgotar as possibilidadesde estudo do léxico de uma língua. Neste artigo,tomamos o léxico como objeto de estudo. A análise quefaremos se pauta na orientação geossociolinguística. Analisaremoso item lexical toco de cigarro, variante linguísticaque integra o campo semântico “Convívio e comportamentosocial” do Questionário Semântico-Lexical (QSLdo projeto Atlas Linguístico do Brasil (ALiB. Trata-se deuma abordagem geolinguística multidimensional que tempor objetivo a elaboração de uma carta lexical experimentalpara a visualização da variação diatópica, diastrática, diagenéricae diageracional do item lexical referido.Palavras-chave: Variação Lexical. Geolinguística Multidimensional.Atlas Linguístico do Brasil.

Ocular herpes simplex virus: how are latency, reactivation, recurrent disease and therapy interrelated?

Science.gov (United States)

Al-Dujaili, Lena J; Clerkin, Patrick P; Clement, Christian; McFerrin, Harris E; Bhattacharjee, Partha S; Varnell, Emily D; Kaufman, Herbert E; Hill, James M

2011-08-01

Most humans are infected with herpes simplex virus (HSV) type 1 in early childhood and remain latently infected throughout life. While most individuals have mild or no symptoms, some will develop destructive HSV keratitis. Ocular infection with HSV-1 and its associated sequelae account for the majority of corneal blindness in industrialized nations. Neuronal latency in the peripheral ganglia is established when transcription of the viral genome is repressed (silenced) except for the latency-associated transcripts and microRNAs. The functions of latency-associated transcripts have been investigated since 1987. Roles have been suggested relating to reactivation, establishment of latency, neuronal protection, antiapoptosis, apoptosis, virulence and asymptomatic shedding. Here, we review HSV-1 latent infections, reactivation, recurrent disease and antiviral therapies for the ocular HSV diseases.

Impaired Orthographic Processing in Chinese Dyslexic Children: Evidence from the Lexicality Effect on N400

Science.gov (United States)

Tzeng, Yu-Lin; Hsu, Chun-Hsien; Lin, Wan-Hsuan; Lee, Chia-Ying

2017-01-01

This study used the lexicality effects on N400 to investigate orthographic processing in children with developmental dyslexia. Participants performed a Go/No-Go semantic judgment task; three types of stimuli--real characters (RC), pseudocharacters (PC), and noncharacters (NC)--were embedded in No-Go trials. Two types of lexicality effects (RC vs.…

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

Science.gov (United States)

Kuperman, Victor; Van Dyke, Julie A

2013-06-01

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

Acoustic and Lexical Representations for Affect Prediction in Spontaneous Conversations.

Science.gov (United States)

Cao, Houwei; Savran, Arman; Verma, Ragini; Nenkova, Ani

2015-01-01

In this article we investigate what representations of acoustics and word usage are most suitable for predicting dimensions of affect|AROUSAL, VALANCE, POWER and EXPECTANCY|in spontaneous interactions. Our experiments are based on the AVEC 2012 challenge dataset. For lexical representations, we compare corpus-independent features based on psychological word norms of emotional dimensions, as well as corpus-dependent representations. We find that corpus-dependent bag of words approach with mutual information between word and emotion dimensions is by far the best representation. For the analysis of acoustics, we zero in on the question of granularity. We confirm on our corpus that utterance-level features are more predictive than word-level features. Further, we study more detailed representations in which the utterance is divided into regions of interest (ROI), each with separate representation. We introduce two ROI representations, which significantly outperform less informed approaches. In addition we show that acoustic models of emotion can be improved considerably by taking into account annotator agreement and training the model on smaller but reliable dataset. Finally we discuss the potential for improving prediction by combining the lexical and acoustic modalities. Simple fusion methods do not lead to consistent improvements over lexical classifiers alone but improve over acoustic models.

Metrical expectations from preceding prosody influence perception of lexical stress.

Science.gov (United States)

Brown, Meredith; Salverda, Anne Pier; Dilley, Laura C; Tanenhaus, Michael K

2015-04-01

Two visual-world experiments tested the hypothesis that expectations based on preceding prosody influence the perception of suprasegmental cues to lexical stress. The results demonstrate that listeners' consideration of competing alternatives with different stress patterns (e.g., 'jury/gi'raffe) can be influenced by the fundamental frequency and syllable timing patterns across material preceding a target word. When preceding stressed syllables distal to the target word shared pitch and timing characteristics with the first syllable of the target word, pictures of alternatives with primary lexical stress on the first syllable (e.g., jury) initially attracted more looks than alternatives with unstressed initial syllables (e.g., giraffe). This effect was modulated when preceding unstressed syllables had pitch and timing characteristics similar to the initial syllable of the target word, with more looks to alternatives with unstressed initial syllables (e.g., giraffe) than to those with stressed initial syllables (e.g., jury). These findings suggest that expectations about the acoustic realization of upcoming speech include information about metrical organization and lexical stress and that these expectations constrain the initial interpretation of suprasegmental stress cues. These distal prosody effects implicate online probabilistic inferences about the sources of acoustic-phonetic variation during spoken-word recognition. (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved.

Eloquent silences: A musical and lexical analysis of conversation between oncologists and their patients.

Science.gov (United States)

Bartels, Josef; Rodenbach, Rachel; Ciesinski, Katherine; Gramling, Robert; Fiscella, Kevin; Epstein, Ronald

2016-10-01

Silences in doctor-patient communication can be "connectional" and communicative, in contrast to silences that indicate awkwardness or distraction. Musical and lexical analyses can identify and characterize connectional silences in consultations between oncologists and patients. Two medical students and a professor of voice screened all 1211 silences over 2s in length from 124 oncology office visits. We developed a "strength of connection" taxonomy and examined ten connectional silences for lexical and musical features including pitch, volume, and speaker turn-taking rhythm. We identified connectional silences with good reliability. Typical dialog rhythms surrounding connectional silences are characterized by relatively equal turn lengths and frequent short vocalizations. We found no pattern of volume and pitch variability around these silences. Connectional silences occurred in a wide variety of lexical contexts. Particular patterns of dialog rhythm mark connectional silences. Exploring structures of connectional silence extends our understanding of the audio-linguistic conditions that mark patient-clinician connection. Communicating with an awareness of pitch, rhythm, and silence - in addition to lexical content - can facilitate shared understanding and emotional connection. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

The utility of a 5(th) nap in multiple sleep latency test.

Science.gov (United States)

Muza, Rexford; Lykouras, Dimosthenis; Rees, Kate

2016-02-01

This is the first study that aimed to look specifically at the utility of the 5(th) nap in the multiple sleep latency test (MSLT), a test used to assist in the diagnosis of narcolepsy. Data was retrospectively collected from the Sleep Disorders Centre of a Tertiary Hospital on patients that had a 5(th) nap during their MSLT from the 08(th) November 2011 to 12(th) November 2014. Fifty-three patients had a 5(th) nap performed out of 378 MSLT studies. In 16% of cases a diagnosis of narcolepsy was given directly due to the inclusion of the 5(th) nap on the MSLT. Here a 5(th) nap allowed diagnostic criteria of mean sleep latency 2 SOREMPS to be met. In 53% of cases the mean sleep latency increased due to 5(th) nap inclusion; the mean sleep latency of the first four naps was 5.6 vs. 6.7 after inclusion of the 5(th) nap. The 5(th) nap is not often performed within the MSLT studies. Our study shows that only a few patients may benefit from a 5(th) nap opportunity which also led to increase of the mean sleep latency at the expense of extra time, cost, labour and increased patient anxiety.

Lexical Specificity Training Effects in Second Language Learners

Science.gov (United States)

Janssen, Caressa; Segers, Eliane; McQueen, James M.; Verhoeven, Ludo

2015-01-01

Children who start formal education in a second language may experience slower vocabulary growth in that language and subsequently experience disadvantages in literacy acquisition. The current study asked whether lexical specificity training can stimulate bilingual children's phonological awareness, which is considered to be a precursor to…

Novel second language words and asymmetric lexical access

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Escudero, P.; Hayes-Harb, R.; Mitterer, H.

2008-01-01

The lexical and phonetic mapping of auditorily confusable L2 nonwords was examined by teaching L2 learners novel words and by later examining their word recognition using an eye-tracking paradigm. During word learning, two groups of highly proficient Dutch learners of English learned 20 English

Lexical morphology and its role in the writing process: evidence from a case of acquired dysgraphia.

Science.gov (United States)

Badecker, W; Hillis, A; Caramazza, A

1990-06-01

A case of acquired dysgraphia is presented in which the deficit is attributed to an impairment at the level of the Graphemic Output Buffer. It is argued that this patient's performance can be used to identify the representational character of the processing units that are stored in the Orthographic Output Lexicon. In particular, it is argued that the distribution of spelling errors and the types of lexical items which affect error rates indicate that the lexical representations passed from the lexical output system to the Graphemic Output Buffer correspond to the productive morphemes of the language.

Modeling the lexical morphology of Western handwritten signatures.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Moises Diaz-Cabrera

Full Text Available A handwritten signature is the final response to a complex cognitive and neuromuscular process which is the result of the learning process. Because of the many factors involved in signing, it is possible to study the signature from many points of view: graphologists, forensic experts, neurologists and computer vision experts have all examined them. Researchers study written signatures for psychiatric, penal, health and automatic verification purposes. As a potentially useful, multi-purpose study, this paper is focused on the lexical morphology of handwritten signatures. This we understand to mean the identification, analysis, and description of the signature structures of a given signer. In this work we analyze different public datasets involving 1533 signers from different Western geographical areas. Some relevant characteristics of signature lexical morphology have been selected, examined in terms of their probability distribution functions and modeled through a General Extreme Value distribution. This study suggests some useful models for multi-disciplinary sciences which depend on handwriting signatures.

A review of the methods for neuronal response latency estimation

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Levakovaa, Marie; Tamborrino, Massimiliano; Ditlevsen, Susanne

2015-01-01

Neuronal response latency is usually vaguely defined as the delay between the stimulus onset and the beginning of the response. It contains important information for the understanding of the temporal code. For this reason, the detection of the response latency has been extensively studied in the ...... by the stimulation using interspike intervals and spike times. The aim of this paper is to present a review of the main techniques proposed in both classes, highlighting their advantages and shortcomings....

Phase synchronization of delta and theta oscillations increase during the detection of relevant lexical information

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Enzo eBrunetti

2013-06-01

Full Text Available During monitoring of the discourse, the detection of the relevance of incoming lexical information could be critical for its incorporation to update mental representations in memory. Because, in these situations, the relevance for lexical information is defined by abstract rules that are maintained in memory, results critical to understand how an abstract level of knowledge maintained in mind mediates the detection of the lower-level semantic information. In the present study, we propose that neuronal oscillations participate in the detection of relevant lexical information, based on ‘kept in mind’ rules deriving from more abstract semantic information. We tested our hypothesis using an experimental paradigm that restricted the detection of relevance to inferences based on explicit information, thus controlling for ambiguities derived from implicit aspects. We used a categorization task, in which the semantic relevance was previously defined based on the congruency between a kept in mind category (abstract knowledge, and the lexical-semantic information presented. Our results show that during the detection of the relevant lexical information, phase synchronization of neuronal oscillations selectively increases in delta and theta frequency bands during the interval of semantic analysis. These increments were independent of the semantic category maintained in memory, had a temporal profile specific for each subject, and were mainly induced, as they had no effect on the evoked mean global field power. Also, recruitment of an increased number of pairs of electrodes was a robust observation during the detection of semantic contingent words. These results are consistent with the notion that the detection of relevant lexical information based on a particular semantic rule, could be mediated by increasing the global phase synchronization of neuronal oscillations, which may contribute to the recruitment of an extended number of cortical regions.

Phase synchronization of delta and theta oscillations increase during the detection of relevant lexical information.

Science.gov (United States)

Brunetti, Enzo; Maldonado, Pedro E; Aboitiz, Francisco

2013-01-01

During monitoring of the discourse, the detection of the relevance of incoming lexical information could be critical for its incorporation to update mental representations in memory. Because, in these situations, the relevance for lexical information is defined by abstract rules that are maintained in memory, a central aspect to elucidate is how an abstract level of knowledge maintained in mind mediates the detection of the lower-level semantic information. In the present study, we propose that neuronal oscillations participate in the detection of relevant lexical information, based on "kept in mind" rules deriving from more abstract semantic information. We tested our hypothesis using an experimental paradigm that restricted the detection of relevance to inferences based on explicit information, thus controlling for ambiguities derived from implicit aspects. We used a categorization task, in which the semantic relevance was previously defined based on the congruency between a kept in mind category (abstract knowledge), and the lexical semantic information presented. Our results show that during the detection of the relevant lexical information, phase synchronization of neuronal oscillations selectively increases in delta and theta frequency bands during the interval of semantic analysis. These increments occurred irrespective of the semantic category maintained in memory, had a temporal profile specific for each subject, and were mainly induced, as they had no effect on the evoked mean global field power. Also, recruitment of an increased number of pairs of electrodes was a robust observation during the detection of semantic contingent words. These results are consistent with the notion that the detection of relevant lexical information based on a particular semantic rule, could be mediated by increasing the global phase synchronization of neuronal oscillations, which may contribute to the recruitment of an extended number of cortical regions.

Fast response electromagnetic follow-ups from low latency GW triggers

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Howell, E J; Chu, Q; Rowlinson, A; Wen, L; Gao, H; Zhang, B; Tingay, S J; Boër, M

2016-01-01

We investigate joint low-latency gravitational wave (GW) detection and prompt electromagnetic (EM) follow-up observations of coalescing binary neutron stars (BNSs). Assuming that BNS mergers are associated with short duration gamma ray bursts (SGRBs), we evaluate if rapid EM follow-ups can capture the prompt emission, early engine activity or reveal any potential by-products such as magnetars or fast radio bursts. To examine the expected performance of extreme low-latency search pipelines, we simulate a population of coalescing BNSs and use these to estimate the detectability and localisation efficiency at different times before merger. Using observational SGRB flux data corrected to the range of the advanced GW interferometric detectors, we determine what EM observations could be achieved from low-frequency radio up to high energy γ-ray. We show that while challenging, breakthrough multi-messenger science is possible through low latency pipelines. (paper)

A Track Reconstructing Low-latency Trigger Processor for High-energy Physics

CERN Document Server

AUTHOR|(CDS)2067518

2009-01-01

The detection and analysis of the large number of particles emerging from high-energy collisions between atomic nuclei is a major challenge in experimental heavy-ion physics. Efficient trigger systems help to focus the analysis on relevant events. A primary objective of the Transition Radiation Detector of the ALICE experiment at the LHC is to trigger on high-momentum electrons. In this thesis, a trigger processor is presented that employs massive parallelism to perform the required online event reconstruction within 2 µs to contribute to the Level-1 trigger decision. Its three-stage hierarchical architecture comprises 109 nodes based on FPGA technology. Ninety processing nodes receive data from the detector front-end at an aggregate net bandwidth of 2.16 Tbps via 1080 optical links. Using specifically developed components and interconnections, the system combines high bandwidth with minimum latency. The employed tracking algorithm three-dimensionally reassembles the track segments found in the detector's dr...

Relation between derived-band auditory brainstem response latencies and behavioral frequency selectivity

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Strelcyk, Olaf; Christoforidis, Dimitrios; Dau, Torsten

2009-01-01

response times. For the same listeners, auditory-filter bandwidths at 2 kHz were estimated using a behavioral notched-noise masking paradigm. Generally, shorter derived-band latencies were observed for the HI than for the NH listeners. Only at low click sensation levels, prolonged latencies were obtained...

Low Latency MAC Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks Using Timing Offset

Science.gov (United States)

Choi, Seung Sik

This paper proposes a low latency MAC protocol that can be used in sensor networks. To extend the lifetime of sensor nodes, the conventional solution is to synchronize active/sleep periods of all sensor nodes. However, due to these synchronized sensor nodes, packets in the intermediate nodes must wait until the next node wakes up before it can forward a packet. This induces a large delay in sensor nodes. To solve this latency problem, a clustered sensor network which uses two types of sensor nodes and layered architecture is considered. Clustered heads in each cluster are synchronized with different timing offsets to reduce the sleep delay. Using this concept, the latency problem can be solved and more efficient power usage can be obtained.

Latency Performance of Encoding with Random Linear Network Coding

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Nielsen, Lars; Hansen, René Rydhof; Lucani Rötter, Daniel Enrique

2018-01-01

the encoding process can be parallelized based on system requirements to reduce data access time within the system. Using a counting argument, we focus on predicting the effect of changes of generation (number of original packets) and symbol size (number of bytes per data packet) configurations on the encoding...... latency on full vector and on-the-fly algorithms. We show that the encoding latency doubles when either the generation size or the symbol size double and confirm this via extensive simulations. Although we show that the theoretical speed gain of on-the-fly over full vector is two, our measurements show...

Multi-User Preemptive Scheduling For Critical Low Latency Communications in 5G Networks

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Abdul-Mawgood Ali Ali Esswie, Ali; Pedersen, Klaus

2018-01-01

5G new radio is envisioned to support three major service classes: enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), ultrareliable low-latency communications (URLLC), and massive machine type communications. Emerging URLLC services require up to one millisecond of communication latency with 99.999% success...... probability. Though, there is a fundamental trade-off between system spectral efficiency (SE) and achievable latency. This calls for novel scheduling protocols which cross-optimize system performance on user-centric; instead of network-centric basis. In this paper, we develop a joint multi-user preemptive...... scheduling strategy to simultaneously cross-optimize system SE and URLLC latency. At each scheduling opportunity, available URLLC traffic is always given higher priority. When sporadic URLLC traffic appears during a transmission time interval (TTI), proposed scheduler seeks for fitting the URLLC-eMBB traffic...

Ocular herpes simplex virus: how are latency, reactivation, recurrent disease and therapy interrelated?

Science.gov (United States)

Al-Dujaili, Lena J; Clerkin, Patrick P; Clement, Christian; McFerrin, Harris E; Bhattacharjee, Partha S; Varnell, Emily D; Kaufman, Herbert E; Hill, James M

2012-01-01

Most humans are infected with herpes simplex virus (HSV) type 1 in early childhood and remain latently infected throughout life. While most individuals have mild or no symptoms, some will develop destructive HSV keratitis. Ocular infection with HSV-1 and its associated sequelae account for the majority of corneal blindness in industrialized nations. Neuronal latency in the peripheral ganglia is established when transcription of the viral genome is repressed (silenced) except for the latency-associated transcripts and microRNAs. The functions of latency-associated transcripts have been investigated since 1987. Roles have been suggested relating to reactivation, establishment of latency, neuronal protection, antiapoptosis, apoptosis, virulence and asymptomatic shedding. Here, we review HSV-1 latent infections, reactivation, recurrent disease and antiviral therapies for the ocular HSV diseases. PMID:21861620

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

Science.gov (United States)

Zhang, Meichao; Lu, Aitao; Song, Pingfang

2017-10-01

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

Spoken word production: A theory of lexical access

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Levelt, W.J.M.

2001-01-01

A core operation in speech production is the preparation of words from a semantic base. The theory of lexical access reviewed in this article covers a sequence of processing stages beginning with the speaker's focusing on a target concept and ending with the initiation of articulation. The initial

Investigation of Koi Herpesvirus Latency in Koi▿

Science.gov (United States)

Eide, Kathleen E.; Miller-Morgan, Tim; Heidel, Jerry R.; Kent, Michael L.; Bildfell, Rob J.; LaPatra, Scott; Watson, Gregory; Jin, Ling

2011-01-01

Koi herpesvirus (KHV) has recently been classified as a member of the family of Alloherpesviridae within the order of Herpesvirales. One of the unique features of Herpesviridae is latent infection following a primary infection. However, KHV latency has not been recognized. To determine if latency occurs in clinically normal fish from facilities with a history of KHV infection or exposure, the presence of the KHV genome was investigated in healthy koi by PCR and Southern blotting. KHV DNA, but not infectious virus or mRNAs from lytic infection, was detected in white blood cells from investigated koi. Virus shedding was examined via tissue culture and reverse transcription-PCR (RT-PCR) testing of gill mucus and feces from six koi every other day for 1 month. No infectious virus or KHV DNA was detected in fecal secretion or gill swabs, suggesting that neither acute nor persistent infection was present. To determine if KHV latent infections can be reactivated, six koi were subjected to a temperature stress regime. KHV DNA and infectious virus were detected in both gill and fecal swabs by day 8 following temperature stress. KHV DNA was also detectable in brain, spleen, gills, heart, eye, intestine, kidney, liver, and pancreas in euthanized koi 1 month post-temperature stress. Our study suggests that KHV may become latent in leukocytes and other tissues, that it can be reactivated from latency by temperature stress, and that it may be more widespread in the koi population than previously suspected. PMID:21389134

Many Neighbors are not Silent. fMRI Evidence for Global Lexical Activity in Visual Word Recognition.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Mario eBraun

2015-07-01

Full Text Available Many neurocognitive studies investigated the neural correlates of visual word recognition, some of which manipulated the orthographic neighborhood density of words and nonwords believed to influence the activation of orthographically similar representations in a hypothetical mental lexicon. Previous neuroimaging research failed to find evidence for such global lexical activity associated with neighborhood density. Rather, effects were interpreted to reflect semantic or domain general processing. The present fMRI study revealed effects of lexicality, orthographic neighborhood density and a lexicality by orthographic neighborhood density interaction in a silent reading task. For the first time we found greater activity for words and nonwords with a high number of neighbors. We propose that this activity in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex reflects activation of orthographically similar codes in verbal working memory thus providing evidence for global lexical activity as the basis of the neighborhood density effect. The interaction of lexicality by neighborhood density in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex showed lower activity in response to words with a high number compared to nonwords with a high number of neighbors. In the light of these results the facilitatory effect for words and inhibitory effect for nonwords with many neighbors observed in previous studies can be understood as being due to the operation of a fast-guess mechanism for words and a temporal deadline mechanism for nonwords as predicted by models of visual word recognition. Furthermore, we propose that the lexicality effect with higher activity for words compared to nonwords in inferior parietal and middle temporal cortex reflects the operation of an identification mechanism and based on local lexico-semantic activity.

Opposite patterns of hemisphere dominance for early auditory processing of lexical tones and consonants

OpenAIRE

Luo, Hao; Ni, Jing-Tian; Li, Zhi-Hao; Li, Xiao-Ou; Zhang, Da-Ren; Zeng, Fan-Gang; Chen, Lin

2006-01-01

in tonal languages such as Mandarin Chinese, a lexical tone carries semantic information and is preferentially processed in the left brain hemisphere of native speakers as revealed by the functional MRI or positron emission tomography studies, which likely measure the temporally aggregated neural events including those at an attentive stage of auditory processing. Here, we demonstrate that early auditory processing of a lexical tone at a preattentive stage is actually ...

The preverbal locative NP in Lexical Functional Grammar

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Data is drawn from some of the findings of the study I conducted on the locative inversion constructions in Botswana in 2003. I explore an information structure analysis of the findings. I also propose an analysis within Lexical Functional Grammar (Henceforth LFG), a non-transformational theory which considers languages ...

Bilingual Children's Lexical Strategies in a Narrative Task

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Barbosa, Poliana; Nicoladis, Elena; Keith, Margaux

2017-01-01

We investigated how bilinguals choose words in a narrative task, contrasting the possibilities of a developmental delay vs. compensatory strategies. To characterize a developmental delay, we compared younger (three to five years) and older (seven to ten years) children's lexicalization of target words (Study 1). The younger children told shorter…

Dissociating Visual Form from Lexical Frequency Using Japanese

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Twomey, Tae; Duncan, Keith J. Kawabata; Hogan, John S.; Morita, Kenji; Umeda, Kazumasa; Sakai, Katsuyuki; Devlin, Joseph T.

2013-01-01

In Japanese, the same word can be written in either morphographic Kanji or syllabographic Hiragana and this provides a unique opportunity to disentangle a word's lexical frequency from the frequency of its visual form--an important distinction for understanding the neural information processing in regions engaged by reading. Behaviorally,…

Lexical Borrowings in Spanish: Function, Length, Genealogy and Chronology.

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Patterson, William T.

1986-01-01

A study reveals that lexical borrowing in Spanish, from a variety of languages including Latin, French, Italian, Greek, Arabic, Provencal, and Catalan, accounts for 41 percent of the basic Spanish vocabulary, with variation in source according to historical period. (MSE)

The naming of gender-marked pronouns supports interactivity in models of lexical access

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Albert Costa

2009-01-01

Full Text Available When a speaker names an object using a gender-marked pronominal form, the referent word corresponding to the target object has to be selected in order to access the grammatical gender. By contrast, the phonological content of the referent word is not needed. In two picture-naming interference experiments we explored whether the lexical selection of a referent word is affected by its phonological properties. In Experiment 1, Spanish participants named pictures using a sentence with a noun or a pronoun while ignoring words semantically or phonologically related. The results showed a semantic interference effect and a Phonological Facilitation Effect (PFE in both type of utterances. In Experiment 2 the PFE was replicated with Italian participants in a different pronominal utterance. The PFE suggests that the lexical selection of the referent word is facilitated by the presentation of a distractor word phonologically related. These findings are consistent with the predictions of interactive models of lexical access.

Optimized Interface Diversity for Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communication (URLLC)

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Nielsen, Jimmy Jessen; Liu, Rongkuan; Popovski, Petar

2017-01-01

An important ingredient of the future 5G systems will be Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication (URLLC). A way to offer URLLC without intervention in the baseband/PHY layer design is to use interface diversity and integrate multiple communication interfaces, each interface based on a different...... technology. Our approach is to use rateless codes to seamlessly distribute coded payload and redundancy data across multiple available communication interfaces. We formulate an optimization problem to find the payload allocation weights that maximize the reliability at specific target latency values...

Conflicts between domestic inequality and global poverty: lexicality versus proportionality

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Francisco García Gibson

2016-12-01

Full Text Available Current views on global justice often hold that affluent states are under at least two duties: a duty to reduce socioeconomic inequalities at home and a duty to reduce extreme poverty abroad. Potential duty conflicts deriving from resource scarcity can be solved in broadly two principled ways. The ‘lexical’ principle requires all disputed resources to be allocated to the weightiest duty. The ‘proportionality’ principle requires resources to be distributed between the two duties according to their relative weight (the weightiest duty receives the largest resource share, but the less weighty duty receives a share too. I argue that the proportionality principle is morally preferable. I show that it is sensitive to a number of factors that are intuitively relevant when solving duty conflicts: the number of affected individuals, the size of the benefits each individual could get, and the time it could take to eventually comply with the less weighty duty. Some argue that the lexical principle should nevertheless be preferred because domestic egalitarian duties are duties of justice, and they are therefore lexically prior to mere humanitarian duties to reduce global poverty. I reject this view by showing that duties of justice are not necessarily lexically prior to humanitarian duties, and that (even if they were duties to reduce global poverty can be regarded as duties of justice too.

Trial latencies estimation of event-related potentials in EEG by means of genetic algorithms

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Da Pelo, P.; De Tommaso, M.; Monaco, A.; Stramaglia, S.; Bellotti, R.; Tangaro, S.

2018-04-01

Objective. Event-related potentials (ERPs) are usually obtained by averaging thus neglecting the trial-to-trial latency variability in cognitive electroencephalography (EEG) responses. As a consequence the shape and the peak amplitude of the averaged ERP are smeared and reduced, respectively, when the single-trial latencies show a relevant variability. To date, the majority of the methodologies for single-trial latencies inference are iterative schemes providing suboptimal solutions, the most commonly used being the Woody’s algorithm. Approach. In this study, a global approach is developed by introducing a fitness function whose global maximum corresponds to the set of latencies which renders the trial signals most aligned as possible. A suitable genetic algorithm has been implemented to solve the optimization problem, characterized by new genetic operators tailored to the present problem. Main results. The results, on simulated trials, showed that the proposed algorithm performs better than Woody’s algorithm in all conditions, at the cost of an increased computational complexity (justified by the improved quality of the solution). Application of the proposed approach on real data trials, resulted in an increased correlation between latencies and reaction times w.r.t. the output from RIDE method. Significance. The above mentioned results on simulated and real data indicate that the proposed method, providing a better estimate of single-trial latencies, will open the way to more accurate study of neural responses as well as to the issue of relating the variability of latencies to the proper cognitive and behavioural correlates.

Does the reading of different orthographies produce distinct brain activity patterns? An ERP study.

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Bar-Kochva, Irit; Breznitz, Zvia

2012-01-01

Orthographies vary in the degree of transparency of spelling-sound correspondence. These range from shallow orthographies with transparent grapheme-phoneme relations, to deep orthographies, in which these relations are opaque. Only a few studies have examined whether orthographic depth is reflected in brain activity. In these studies a between-language design was applied, making it difficult to isolate the aspect of orthographic depth. In the present work this question was examined using a within-subject-and-language investigation. The participants were speakers of Hebrew, as they are skilled in reading two forms of script transcribing the same oral language. One form is the shallow pointed script (with diacritics), and the other is the deep unpointed script (without diacritics). Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while skilled readers carried out a lexical decision task in the two forms of script. A visual non-orthographic task controlled for the visual difference between the scripts (resulting from the addition of diacritics to the pointed script only). At an early visual-perceptual stage of processing (~165 ms after target onset), the pointed script evoked larger amplitudes with longer latencies than the unpointed script at occipital-temporal sites. However, these effects were not restricted to orthographic processing, and may therefore have reflected, at least in part, the visual load imposed by the diacritics. Nevertheless, the results implied that distinct orthographic processing may have also contributed to these effects. At later stages (~340 ms after target onset) the unpointed script elicited larger amplitudes than the pointed one with earlier latencies. As this latency has been linked to orthographic-linguistic processing and to the classification of stimuli, it is suggested that these differences are associated with distinct lexical processing of a shallow and a deep orthography.

Does the reading of different orthographies produce distinct brain activity patterns? An ERP study.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Irit Bar-Kochva

Full Text Available Orthographies vary in the degree of transparency of spelling-sound correspondence. These range from shallow orthographies with transparent grapheme-phoneme relations, to deep orthographies, in which these relations are opaque. Only a few studies have examined whether orthographic depth is reflected in brain activity. In these studies a between-language design was applied, making it difficult to isolate the aspect of orthographic depth. In the present work this question was examined using a within-subject-and-language investigation. The participants were speakers of Hebrew, as they are skilled in reading two forms of script transcribing the same oral language. One form is the shallow pointed script (with diacritics, and the other is the deep unpointed script (without diacritics. Event-related potentials (ERPs were recorded while skilled readers carried out a lexical decision task in the two forms of script. A visual non-orthographic task controlled for the visual difference between the scripts (resulting from the addition of diacritics to the pointed script only. At an early visual-perceptual stage of processing (~165 ms after target onset, the pointed script evoked larger amplitudes with longer latencies than the unpointed script at occipital-temporal sites. However, these effects were not restricted to orthographic processing, and may therefore have reflected, at least in part, the visual load imposed by the diacritics. Nevertheless, the results implied that distinct orthographic processing may have also contributed to these effects. At later stages (~340 ms after target onset the unpointed script elicited larger amplitudes than the pointed one with earlier latencies. As this latency has been linked to orthographic-linguistic processing and to the classification of stimuli, it is suggested that these differences are associated with distinct lexical processing of a shallow and a deep orthography.

Different decision deficits impair response inhibition in progressive supranuclear palsy and Parkinson's disease.

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Zhang, Jiaxiang; Rittman, Timothy; Nombela, Cristina; Fois, Alessandro; Coyle-Gilchrist, Ian; Barker, Roger A; Hughes, Laura E; Rowe, James B

2016-01-01

Progressive supranuclear palsy and Parkinson's disease have distinct underlying neuropathology, but both diseases affect cognitive function in addition to causing a movement disorder. They impair response inhibition and may lead to impulsivity, which can occur even in the presence of profound akinesia and rigidity. The current study examined the mechanisms of cognitive impairments underlying disinhibition, using horizontal saccadic latencies that obviate the impact of limb slowness on executing response decisions. Nineteen patients with clinically diagnosed progressive supranuclear palsy (Richardson's syndrome), 24 patients with clinically diagnosed Parkinson's disease and 26 healthy control subjects completed a saccadic Go/No-Go task with a head-mounted infrared saccadometer. Participants were cued on each trial to make a pro-saccade to a horizontal target or withhold their responses. Both patient groups had impaired behavioural performance, with more commission errors than controls. Mean saccadic latencies were similar between all three groups. We analysed behavioural responses as a binary decision between Go and No-Go choices. By using Bayesian parameter estimation, we fitted a hierarchical drift-diffusion model to individual participants' single trial data. The model decomposes saccadic latencies into parameters for the decision process: decision boundary, drift rate of accumulation, decision bias, and non-decision time. In a leave-one-out three-way classification analysis, the model parameters provided better discrimination between patients and controls than raw behavioural measures. Furthermore, the model revealed disease-specific deficits in the Go/No-Go decision process. Both patient groups had slower drift rate of accumulation, and shorter non-decision time than controls. But patients with progressive supranuclear palsy were strongly biased towards a pro-saccade decision boundary compared to Parkinson's patients and controls. This indicates a prepotency of

Extracting of implicit information in English advertising texts with phonetic and lexical-morphological means

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Traikovskaya Natalya Petrovna

2015-12-01

Full Text Available The article deals with phonetic and lexical-morphological language means participating in the process of extracting implicit information in English-speaking advertising texts for men and women. The functioning of phonetic means of the English language is not the basis for implication of information in advertising texts. Lexical and morphological means play the role of markers of relevant information, playing the role of the activator ofimplicit information in the texts of advertising.

ASL-LEX: A lexical database of American Sign Language.

Science.gov (United States)

Caselli, Naomi K; Sehyr, Zed Sevcikova; Cohen-Goldberg, Ariel M; Emmorey, Karen

2017-04-01

ASL-LEX is a lexical database that catalogues information about nearly 1,000 signs in American Sign Language (ASL). It includes the following information: subjective frequency ratings from 25-31 deaf signers, iconicity ratings from 21-37 hearing non-signers, videoclip duration, sign length (onset and offset), grammatical class, and whether the sign is initialized, a fingerspelled loan sign, or a compound. Information about English translations is available for a subset of signs (e.g., alternate translations, translation consistency). In addition, phonological properties (sign type, selected fingers, flexion, major and minor location, and movement) were coded and used to generate sub-lexical frequency and neighborhood density estimates. ASL-LEX is intended for use by researchers, educators, and students who are interested in the properties of the ASL lexicon. An interactive website where the database can be browsed and downloaded is available at http://asl-lex.org .

Evidence for the Modulation of Sub-Lexical Processing in Go No-Go Naming: The Elimination of the Frequency x Regularity Interaction

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Cummine, Jacqueline; Amyotte, Josee; Pancheshen, Brent; Chouinard, Brea

2011-01-01

The Frequency (high vs. low) x Regularity (regular vs. exception) interaction found on naming response times is often taken as evidence for parallel processing of sub-lexical and lexical systems. Using a Go/No-go naming task, we investigated the effect of nonword versus pseudohomophone foils on sub-lexical processing and the subsequent Frequency x…

Structural Analysis of Lexical Bundles in EFL English Majors’ Theses of an Ordinary Normal University in China

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Xixiang LOU

2012-11-01

Full Text Available A quantitative analysis has been made of 330 Chinese EFL learners’ theses the distribution of the three- to eight-word lexical bundles in them and a comparison has been made of the percentages of the four-word lexical bundles of different structural categories in Chinese EFL learners’ theses and the native English speakers’ spoken or written academic language. It is found that the three-to eight-word lexical bundles in Chinese EFL learners’ theses are on the decrease with the increase of the number of their component words. Chinese students’ English language data share with native English speakers’ spoken academic language data the ‘personal pronoun + lexical verb phrase (+complement clause’ lexical bundles and the ‘(auxiliary + active verb (+’ bundles, and  also share with native English speakers’ academic spoken language data the ‘adverbial clause fragment’ bundles, the ‘noun phrase with other post-modifier fragment’ bundles, the ‘anticipatory it + VP/adjective P (+ complement clause’ bundles, the ‘passive verb + PP fragment’ bundles and the ‘copula be + NP/adjective P’ bundles. A further analysis shows that the EFL learners’ English language in their theses is of more characteristics of written language and fewer characteristics of spoken language.

EOS Data Products Latency and Reprocessing Evaluation

Science.gov (United States)

Ramapriyan, H. K.; Wanchoo, L.

2012-12-01

NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS) Data and Information System (EOSDIS) program has been processing, archiving, and distributing EOS data since the launch of Terra platform in 1999. The EOSDIS Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAACs) and Science-Investigator-led Processing Systems (SIPSs) are generating over 5000 unique products with a daily average volume of 1.7 Petabytes. Initially EOSDIS had requirements to make process data products within 24 hours of receiving all inputs needed for generating them. Thus, generally, the latency would be slightly over 24 and 48 hours after satellite data acquisition, respectively, for Level 1 and Level 2 products. Due to budgetary constraints these requirements were relaxed, with the requirement being to avoid a growing backlog of unprocessed data. However, the data providers have been generating these products in as timely a manner as possible. The reduction in costs of computing hardware has helped considerably. It is of interest to analyze the actual latencies achieved over the past several years in processing and inserting the data products into the EOSDIS archives for the users to support various scientific studies such as land processes, oceanography, hydrology, atmospheric science, cryospheric science, etc. The instrument science teams have continuously evaluated the data products since the launches of EOS satellites and improved the science algorithms to provide high quality products. Data providers have periodically reprocessed the previously acquired data with these improved algorithms. The reprocessing campaigns run for an extended time period in parallel with forward processing, since all data starting from the beginning of the mission need to be reprocessed. Each reprocessing activity involves more data than the previous reprocessing. The historical record of the reprocessing times would be of interest to future missions, especially those involving large volumes of data and/or computational loads due to

Low Latency Audio Video: Potentials for Collaborative Music Making through Distance Learning

Science.gov (United States)

Riley, Holly; MacLeod, Rebecca B.; Libera, Matthew

2016-01-01

The primary purpose of this study was to examine the potential of LOw LAtency (LOLA), a low latency audio visual technology designed to allow simultaneous music performance, as a distance learning tool for musical styles in which synchronous playing is an integral aspect of the learning process (e.g., jazz, folk styles). The secondary purpose was…

Influence of ageing on carotid baroreflex peak response latency in humans

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Fisher, J.P.; Kim, A.; Young, C.N.

2009-01-01

The stability of a physiological control system, such as the arterial baroreflex, depends critically upon both the magnitude (i.e. gain or sensitivity) and timing (i.e. latency) of the effector response. Although studies have examined resting arterial baroreflex sensitivity in older subjects......, little attention has been given to the influence of ageing on the latency of peak baroreflex responses. First, we compared the temporal pattern of heart rate (HR) and mean arterial blood pressure (BP) responses to selective carotid baroreceptor (CBR) unloading and loading in 14 young (22 +/- 1 years......) and older (61 +/- 1 years) subjects, using 5 s pulses of neck pressure (NP, +35 Torr) and neck suction (NS, -80 Torr). Second, CBR latency was assessed following pharmacological blockade of cardiac parasympathetic nerve activity in eight young subjects, to better understand how known age-related reductions...

"The Purpose of This Study Is to": Connecting Lexical Bundles and Moves in Research Article Introductions

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Cortes, Viviana

2013-01-01

This article presents a group of lexical bundles identified in a corpus of research article introductions as the first step in the analysis of these expressions in the different sections of the research article. A one-million word corpus of research article introductions from various disciplines was compiled and the lexical bundles identified in…

Effect of squatting velocity on hip muscle latency in women with patellofemoral pain syndrome.

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Orozco-Chavez, Ignacio; Mendez-Rebolledo, Guillermo

2018-03-01

[Purpose] Neuromuscular activity has been evaluated in patellofemoral pain syndrome but movement velocity has not been considered. The aim was to determine differences in onset latency of hip and knee muscles between individuals with and without patellofemoral pain syndrome during a single leg squat, and whether any differences are dependent on movement velocity. [Subjects and Methods] Twenty-four females with patellofemoral pain syndrome and 24 healthy females participated. Onset latency of gluteus maximus, anterior and posterior gluteus medius, rectus femoris, vastus medialis, vastus lateralis and biceps femoris during a single leg squat at high and low velocity were evaluated. [Results] There was an interaction between velocity and diagnosis for posterior gluteus medius. Healthy subjects showed a later posterior gluteus medius onset latency at low velocity than high velocity; and also later than patellofemoral pain syndrome subjects at low velocity and high velocity. [Conclusion] Patellofemoral pain syndrome subjects presented an altered latency of posterior gluteus medius during a single leg squat and did not generate adaptations to velocity variation, while healthy subjects presented an earlier onset latency in response to velocity increase.

Document boundary determination using structural and lexical analysis

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Taghva, Kazem; Cartright, Marc-Allen

2009-01-01

The document boundary determination problem is the process of identifying individual documents in a stack of papers. In this paper, we report on a classification system for automation of this process. The system employs features based on document structure and lexical content. We also report on experimental results to support the effectiveness of this system.

Advanced techniques for the analysis of crisis stability, deterrence, and latency

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Canavan, G.H.

1997-12-01

Studies on crisis stability, deterrence, and latency are presented in chronological order, which also reflects their logical order of development, captures the main features of stability analysis; relates first strike, crisis, and arms control stability as seen from US and Russian perspective; and addresses questions such as whether uncertainty in damage preference or defense deployment can be destabilizing. It illustrates the problems with alternative metrics, latency and reconstitution, and deep unilateral and proportional force reductions.

Anger in brain and body: the neural and physiological perturbation of decision-making by emotion.

Science.gov (United States)

Garfinkel, Sarah N; Zorab, Emma; Navaratnam, Nakulan; Engels, Miriam; Mallorquí-Bagué, Núria; Minati, Ludovico; Dowell, Nicholas G; Brosschot, Jos F; Thayer, Julian F; Critchley, Hugo D

2016-01-01

Emotion and cognition are dynamically coupled to bodily arousal: the induction of anger, even unconsciously, can reprioritise neural and physiological resources toward action states that bias cognitive processes. Here we examine behavioural, neural and bodily effects of covert anger processing and its influence on cognition, indexed by lexical decision-making. While recording beat-to-beat blood pressure, the words ANGER or RELAX were presented subliminally just prior to rapid word/non-word reaction-time judgements of letter-strings. Subliminal ANGER primes delayed the time taken to reach rapid lexical decisions, relative to RELAX primes. However, individuals with high trait anger were speeded up by subliminal anger primes. ANGER primes increased systolic blood pressure and the magnitude of this increase predicted reaction time prolongation. Within the brain, ANGER trials evoked an enhancement of activity within dorsal pons and an attenuation of activity within visual occipitotemporal and attentional parietal cortices. Activity within periaqueductal grey matter, occipital and parietal regions increased linearly with evoked blood pressure changes, indicating neural substrates through which covert anger impairs semantic decisions, putatively through its expression as visceral arousal. The behavioural and physiological impact of anger states compromises the efficiency of cognitive processing through action-ready changes in autonomic response that skew regional neural activity. © The Author (2015). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.

LEXICAL AND SYNTACTIC PECULIARITIES OF AN ENGLISH NEWSPAPER ARTICLE

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SHISHKOVA DINA DMITRIEVNA

2015-01-01

Full Text Available The article considers pecularities of English journalese. The results of research on lexics, syntax, structure of newspaper articles and headlines are provided. The author uses ussues of “The Guardian” from 01.12.12 till 01.04.13 as research data.

LEXICAL AND SYNTACTIC PECULIARITIES OF AN ENGLISH NEWSPAPER ARTICLE

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Shishkova, Dina Dmitrievna

2015-09-01

Full Text Available The article considers pecularities of English journalese. The results of research on lexics, syntax, structure of newspaper articles and headlines are provided. The author uses ussues of “The Guardian” from 01.12.12 till 01.04.13 as research data.

Low-Latency Embedded Vision Processor (LLEVS)

Science.gov (United States)

2016-03-01

algorithms, low-latency video processing, embedded image processor, wearable electronics, helmet-mounted systems, alternative night / day imaging...external subsystems and data sources with the device. The establishment of data interfaces in terms of data transfer rates, formats and types are...video signals from Near-visible Infrared (NVIR) sensor, Shortwave IR (SWIR) and Longwave IR (LWIR) is the main processing for Night Vision (NI) system

Geographically Locating an Internet Node Using Network Latency Measurement

National Research Council Canada - National Science Library

Turnbaugh, Eugene

2004-01-01

.... The difficulties include accurate latency measure, network address translation (NAT) masking, service blocking, disparate physical configuration, dissimilar network hardware, and inaccurate and limited measuring tools...

A Study of the Relationship between Type of Dictionary Used and Lexical Proficiency in Writings of Iranian EFL Students

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Fereidoon Vahdany

2014-12-01

Full Text Available This study aimed at investigating the relationship between types of dictionaries used and lexical proficiency in writing. Eighty TOEFL students took part in responding to two Questionnaires collecting information about their dictionary type preferences and habits of dictionary use, along with an interview for further in-depth responses. They were also asked to write a composition to be evaluated on their lexical proficiency. According to the results, the most frequently used dictionary type was Bilingual (E-P Desk Dictionary (BDD and the least favored dictionaries were Bilingual (P-E Desk Dictionary (BDD2 and Bilingual (P-E Mobile Dictionary (BMD. Referring to dictionaries in search of meaning during reading-writing, and after speaking-listening were the most common habits of students. Additionally, a significant relationship between the type of dictionary and lexical proficiency in participant’s writing was found. There was also a correlation between skill in dictionary use and lexical proficiency in writing. These finding entail some pedagogical benefits to enhance learners’ lexical competence by modifying the type of learners’ preferred dictionary and their habits in dictionary use.

Acute Stress Induces Selective Alterations in Cost/Benefit Decision-Making

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Shafiei, Naghmeh; Gray, Megan; Viau, Victor; Floresco, Stan B

2012-01-01

Acute stress can exert beneficial or detrimental effects on different forms of cognition. In the present study, we assessed the effects of acute restraint stress on different forms of cost/benefit decision-making, and some of the hormonal and neurochemical mechanisms that may underlie these effects. Effort-based decision-making was assessed where rats chose between a low effort/reward (1 press=2 pellets) or high effort/reward option (4 pellets), with the effort requirement increasing over 4 blocks of trials (2, 5, 10, and 20 lever presses). Restraint stress for 1 h decreased preference for the more costly reward and induced longer choice latencies. Control experiments revealed that the effects on decision-making were not mediated by general reductions in motivation or preference for larger rewards. In contrast, acute stress did not affect delay-discounting, when rats chose between a small/immediate vs larger/delayed reward. The effects of stress on decision-making were not mimicked by treatment with physiological doses of corticosterone (1–3 mg/kg). Blockade of dopamine receptors with flupenthixol (0.25 mg/kg) before restraint did not attenuate stress-induced effects on effort-related choice, but abolished effects on choice latencies. These data suggest that acute stress interferes somewhat selectively with cost/benefit evaluations concerning effort costs. These effects do not appear to be mediated solely by enhanced glucocorticoid activity, whereas dopaminergic activation may contribute to increased deliberation times induced by stress. These findings may provide insight into impairments in decision-making and anergia associated with stress-related disorders, such as depression. PMID:22569506

Acute stress induces selective alterations in cost/benefit decision-making.

Science.gov (United States)

Shafiei, Naghmeh; Gray, Megan; Viau, Victor; Floresco, Stan B

2012-09-01

Acute stress can exert beneficial or detrimental effects on different forms of cognition. In the present study, we assessed the effects of acute restraint stress on different forms of cost/benefit decision-making, and some of the hormonal and neurochemical mechanisms that may underlie these effects. Effort-based decision-making was assessed where rats chose between a low effort/reward (1 press=2 pellets) or high effort/reward option (4 pellets), with the effort requirement increasing over 4 blocks of trials (2, 5, 10, and 20 lever presses). Restraint stress for 1 h decreased preference for the more costly reward and induced longer choice latencies. Control experiments revealed that the effects on decision-making were not mediated by general reductions in motivation or preference for larger rewards. In contrast, acute stress did not affect delay-discounting, when rats chose between a small/immediate vs larger/delayed reward. The effects of stress on decision-making were not mimicked by treatment with physiological doses of corticosterone (1-3 mg/kg). Blockade of dopamine receptors with flupenthixol (0.25 mg/kg) before restraint did not attenuate stress-induced effects on effort-related choice, but abolished effects on choice latencies. These data suggest that acute stress interferes somewhat selectively with cost/benefit evaluations concerning effort costs. These effects do not appear to be mediated solely by enhanced glucocorticoid activity, whereas dopaminergic activation may contribute to increased deliberation times induced by stress. These findings may provide insight into impairments in decision-making and anergia associated with stress-related disorders, such as depression.