The processing of blend words in naming and sentence reading.

Science.gov (United States)

Johnson, Rebecca L; Slate, Sarah Rose; Teevan, Allison R; Juhasz, Barbara J

2018-04-01

Research exploring the processing of morphologically complex words, such as compound words, has found that they are decomposed into their constituent parts during processing. Although much is known about the processing of compound words, very little is known about the processing of lexicalised blend words, which are created from parts of two words, often with phoneme overlap (e.g., brunch). In the current study, blends were matched with non-blend words on a variety of lexical characteristics, and blend processing was examined using two tasks: a naming task and an eye-tracking task that recorded eye movements during reading. Results showed that blend words were processed more slowly than non-blend control words in both tasks. Blend words led to longer reaction times in naming and longer processing times on several eye movement measures compared to non-blend words. This was especially true for blends that were long, rated low in word familiarity, but were easily recognisable as blends.

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

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Haro, Juan; Ferré, Pilar

2018-06-01

It is not clear whether multiple unrelated meanings inhibit or facilitate word recognition. Some studies have found a disadvantage for words having multiple meanings with respect to unambiguous words in lexical decision tasks (LDT), whereas several others have shown a facilitation for such words. In the present study, we argue that these inconsistent findings may be due to the approach employed to select ambiguous words across studies. To address this issue, we conducted three LDT experiments in which we varied the measure used to classify ambiguous and unambiguous words. The results suggest that multiple unrelated meanings facilitate word recognition. In addition, we observed that the approach employed to select ambiguous words may affect the pattern of experimental results. This evidence has relevant implications for theoretical accounts of ambiguous words processing and representation.

Object Interference in Children's Colour and Position Naming: Lexical Interference or Task-Set Competition?

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La Heij, Wido; Boelens, Harrie; Kuipers, Jan-Rouke

2010-01-01

Cascade models of word production assume that during lexical access all activated concepts activate their names. In line with this view, it has been shown that naming an object's colour is facilitated when colour name and object name are phonologically related (e.g., "blue" and "blouse"). Prevor and Diamond's (2005) recent observation that…

Resolving Semantic Interference during Word Production Requires Central Attention

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Kleinman, Daniel

2013-01-01

The semantic picture-word interference task has been used to diagnose how speakers resolve competition while selecting words for production. The attentional demands of this resolution process were assessed in 2 dual-task experiments (tone classification followed by picture naming). In Experiment 1, when pictures and distractor words were presented…

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

OpenAIRE

Harvey, Denise Y.; Schnur, Tatiana T.

2016-01-01

Naming pictures and matching words to pictures belonging to the same semantic category impairs performance relative to when stimuli come from different semantic categories (i.e., semantic interference). Despite similar semantic interference phenomena in both picture naming and word-picture matching tasks, the locus of interference has been attributed to different levels of the language system – lexical in naming and semantic in word-picture matching. Although both tasks involve access to shar...

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

Science.gov (United States)

Harvey, Denise Y; Schnur, Tatiana T

2016-01-01

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

Influence of color word availability on the Stroop color-naming effect.

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Kim, Hyosun; Cho, Yang Seok; Yamaguchi, Motonori; Proctor, Robert W

2008-11-01

Three experiments tested whether the Stroop color-naming effect is a consequence of word recognition's being automatic or of the color word's capturing visual attention. In Experiment 1, a color bar was presented at fixation as the color carrier, with color and neutral words presented in locations above or below the color bar; Experiment 2 was similar, except that the color carrier could occur in one of the peripheral locations and the color word at fixation. The Stroop effect increased as display duration increased, and the Stroop dilution effect (a reduced Stroop effect when a neutral word is also present) was an approximately constant proportion of the Stroop effect at all display durations, regardless of whether the color bar or color word was at fixation. In Experiment 3, the interval between the onsets of the to-be-named color and the color word was manipulated. The Stroop effect decreased with increasing delay of the color word onset, but the absolute amount of Stroop dilution produced by the neutral word increased. This study's results imply that an attention shift from the color carrier to the color word is an important factor modulating the size of the Stroop effect.

When does picture naming take longer than word reading?

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Andrea eValente

2016-01-01

Full Text Available Differences between the cognitive processes involved in word reading and picture naming are well established (e.g. visual or lexico-semantic stages. Still, it is commonly thought that retrieval of phonological forms is shared across tasks. We report a test of this second hypothesis based on the time course of electroencephalographic (EEG neural activity, reasoning that similar EEG patterns might index similar processing stages.Seventeen participants named objects and read aloud the corresponding words while their behavior and EEG activity were recorded. The latter was analyzed from stimulus onset onwards (stimulus-locked analysis and from response onset backwards (response-locked analysis, using non-parametric statistics and the spatio-temporal segmentation of ERPs.Behavioral results confirmed that reading entails shorter latencies than naming. The analysis of EEG activity within the stimulus-to-response period allowed distinguishing three phases, broadly successive. Early on, we observed identical distribution of electric field potentials (i.e. topographies albeit with large amplitude divergences between tasks. Then, we observed sustained cross-task differences in topographies accompanied by extended amplitude differences. Finally, the two tasks again revealed the same topographies, with significant cross-task delays in their onsets and offsets, and still significant amplitude differences. In the response-locked ERPs, the common topography displayed an offset closer to response articulation in word reading compared with picture naming, that is the transition between the offset of this shared map and the onset of articulation was significantly faster in word reading.The results suggest that the degree of cross-task similarity varies across time. The first phase suggests similar visual processes of variable intensity and time course across tasks, while the second phase suggests marked differences. Finally, similarities and differences within the

Social interaction facilitates word learning in preverbal infants: Word-object mapping and word segmentation.

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Hakuno, Yoko; Omori, Takahide; Yamamoto, Jun-Ichi; Minagawa, Yasuyo

2017-08-01

In natural settings, infants learn spoken language with the aid of a caregiver who explicitly provides social signals. Although previous studies have demonstrated that young infants are sensitive to these signals that facilitate language development, the impact of real-life interactions on early word segmentation and word-object mapping remains elusive. We tested whether infants aged 5-6 months and 9-10 months could segment a word from continuous speech and acquire a word-object relation in an ecologically valid setting. In Experiment 1, infants were exposed to a live tutor, while in Experiment 2, another group of infants were exposed to a televised tutor. Results indicate that both younger and older infants were capable of segmenting a word and learning a word-object association only when the stimuli were derived from a live tutor in a natural manner, suggesting that real-life interaction enhances the learning of spoken words in preverbal infants. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

How two word-trained dogs integrate pointing and naming

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Grassmann, Susanne; Kaminski, Juliane; Tomasello, Michael

Two word-trained dogs were presented with acts of reference in which a human pointed, named objects, or simultaneously did both. The question was whether these dogs would assume co-reference of pointing and naming and thus pick the pointed-to object. Results show that the dogs did indeed assume

On the facilitatory effects of cognate words in bilingual speech production.

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Costa, Albert; Santesteban, Mikel; Caño, Agnès

2005-07-01

There is a growing body of evidence showing that a word's cognate status is an important dimension affecting the naming performance of bilingual speakers. In a recent article, Kohnert extended this observation to the naming performance of an aphasic bilingual (DJ). DJ named pictures with cognate names more accurately than pictures with non-cognate names. Furthermore, having named the pictures in Spanish helped the subsequent retrieval (with a delay of one week between the two tests) of the same pictures' names in English, but only for pictures with cognate names. That is, there was a language transfer but only for those translation words that were phonologically similar. In this article we first evaluate the conclusions drawn from these results by Kohnert, and second we discuss the theoretical implications of the facilitatory effects of cognate words for models of speech production in bilingual speakers.

The influence of spelling on phonological encoding in word reading, object naming, and word generation

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Roelofs, A.P.A.

2006-01-01

Does the spelling of a word mandatorily constrain spoken word production, or does it do so only when spelling is relevant for the production task at hand? Damian and Bowers (2003) reported spelling effects in spoken word production in English using a prompt–response word generation task. Preparation

Medical Named Entity Recognition for Indonesian Language Using Word Representations

Science.gov (United States)

Rahman, Arief

2018-03-01

Nowadays, Named Entity Recognition (NER) system is used in medical texts to obtain important medical information, like diseases, symptoms, and drugs. While most NER systems are applied to formal medical texts, informal ones like those from social media (also called semi-formal texts) are starting to get recognition as a gold mine for medical information. We propose a theoretical Named Entity Recognition (NER) model for semi-formal medical texts in our medical knowledge management system by comparing two kinds of word representations: cluster-based word representation and distributed representation.

Improved vocabulary production after naming therapy in aphasia: can gains in picture naming generalize to connected speech?

Science.gov (United States)

Conroy, Paul; Sage, Karen; Ralph, Matt Lambon

2009-01-01

Naming accuracy for nouns and verbs in aphasia can vary across different elicitation contexts, for example, simple picture naming, composite picture description, narratives, and conversation. For some people with aphasia, naming may be more accurate to simple pictures as opposed to naming in spontaneous, connected speech; for others, the opposite pattern may be evident. These differences have, in some instances, been related to word class (for example, noun or verb) as well as aphasia subtype. Given that the aim of picture-naming therapies is to improve word-finding in general, these differences in naming accuracy across contexts may have important implications for the potential functional benefits of picture-naming therapies. This study aimed to explore single-word therapy for both nouns and verbs, and to answer the following questions. (1) To what extent does an increase in naming accuracy after picture-naming therapy (for both nouns and verbs) predict accurate naming of the same items in less constrained spontaneous connected speech tasks such as composite picture description and retelling of a narrative? (2) Does the word class targeted in therapy (verb or noun) dictate whether there is 'carry-over' of the therapy item to connected speech tasks? (3) Does the speed at which the picture is named after therapy predict whether it will also be used appropriately in connected speech tasks? Seven participants with aphasia of varying degrees of severity and subtype took part in ten therapy sessions over five weeks. A set of potentially useful items was collected from control participant accounts of the Cookie Theft Picture Description and the Cinderella Story from the Quantitative Production Analysis. Twenty-four of these words (twelve verbs and twelve nouns) were collated for each participant, on the basis that they had failed to name them in either simple picture naming or connected speech tasks (picture-supported narrative and unsupported retelling of a narrative

A robust demonstration of the cognate facilitation effect in first-language and second-language naming.

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Sheng, Li; Lam, Boji Pak Wing; Cruz, Diana; Fulton, Aislynn

2016-01-01

The cognate facilitation effect refers to the phenomenon that in bilinguals performance on various vocabulary tasks is enhanced for cross-linguistic cognates as opposed to noncognates. However, research investigating the presence of the cognate advantage in bilingual children remains limited. Most studies with children conducted to date has not included a control group or rigorously designed stimuli, which may jeopardize the validity and robustness of the emerging evidence. The current study addressed these methodological problems by examining performance in picture naming tasks in 34 4- to 7-year-old Spanish-English bilinguals and 52 Mandarin-English bilinguals as well as 37 English-speaking monolinguals who served as controls. Stimuli were controlled for phonology, word frequency, and length. The Spanish-English bilinguals performed better for cognates than for noncognates and exhibited a greater number of doublet responses (i.e., providing correct responses in both languages) in naming cognate targets than in naming noncognates. The control groups did not show differences in performance between the two sets of words. These findings provide compelling evidence that cross-linguistic similarities at the phonological level allow bootstrapping of vocabulary learning. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Why does picture naming take longer than word reading? The contribution of articulatory processes.

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Riès, Stéphanie; Legou, Thierry; Burle, Borís; Alario, F-Xavier; Malfait, Nicole

2012-10-01

Since the 19th century, it has been known that response latencies are longer for naming pictures than for reading words aloud. While several interpretations have been proposed, a common general assumption is that this difference stems from cognitive word-selection processes and not from articulatory processes. Here we show that, contrary to this widely accepted view, articulatory processes are also affected by the task performed. To demonstrate this, we used a procedure that to our knowledge had never been used in research on language processing: response-latency fractionating. Along with vocal onsets, we recorded the electromyographic (EMG) activity of facial muscles while participants named pictures or read words aloud. On the basis of these measures, we were able to fractionate the verbal response latencies into two types of time intervals: premotor times (from stimulus presentation to EMG onset), mostly reflecting cognitive processes, and motor times (from EMG onset to vocal onset), related to motor execution processes. We showed that premotor and motor times are both longer in picture naming than in reading, although than in reading, although articulation is already initiated in the latter measure. Future studies based on this new approach should bring valuable clues for a better understanding of the relation between the cognitive and motor processes involved in speech production.

Selective Inhibition and Naming Performance in Semantic Blocking, Picture-Word Interference, and Color-Word Stroop Tasks

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Shao, Zeshu; Roelofs, Ardi; Martin, Randi C.; Meyer, Antje S.

2015-01-01

In 2 studies, we examined whether explicit distractors are necessary and sufficient to evoke selective inhibition in 3 naming tasks: the semantic blocking, picture-word interference, and color-word Stroop task. Delta plots were used to quantify the size of the interference effects as a function of reaction time (RT). Selective inhibition was…

Facilitation and interference in naming: A consequence of the same learning process?

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Hughes, Julie W; Schnur, Tatiana T

2017-08-01

Our success with naming depends on what we have named previously, a phenomenon thought to reflect learning processes. Repeatedly producing the same name facilitates language production (i.e., repetition priming), whereas producing semantically related names hinders subsequent performance (i.e., semantic interference). Semantic interference is found whether naming categorically related items once (continuous naming) or multiple times (blocked cyclic naming). A computational model suggests that the same learning mechanism responsible for facilitation in repetition creates semantic interference in categorical naming (Oppenheim, Dell, & Schwartz, 2010). Accordingly, we tested the predictions that variability in semantic interference is correlated across categorical naming tasks and is caused by learning, as measured by two repetition priming tasks (picture-picture repetition priming, Exp. 1; definition-picture repetition priming, Exp. 2, e.g., Wheeldon & Monsell, 1992). In Experiment 1 (77 subjects) semantic interference and repetition priming effects were robust, but the results revealed no relationship between semantic interference effects across contexts. Critically, learning (picture-picture repetition priming) did not predict semantic interference effects in either task. We replicated these results in Experiment 2 (81 subjects), finding no relationship between semantic interference effects across tasks or between semantic interference effects and learning (definition-picture repetition priming). We conclude that the changes underlying facilitatory and interfering effects inherent to lexical access are the result of distinct learning processes where multiple mechanisms contribute to semantic interference in naming. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

When does word frequency influence written production?

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Baus, Cristina; Strijkers, Kristof; Costa, Albert

2013-01-01

The aim of the present study was to explore the central (e.g., lexical processing) and peripheral processes (motor preparation and execution) underlying word production during typewriting. To do so, we tested non-professional typers in a picture typing task while continuously recording EEG. Participants were instructed to write (by means of a standard keyboard) the corresponding name for a given picture. The lexical frequency of the words was manipulated: half of the picture names were of high-frequency while the remaining were of low-frequency. Different measures were obtained: (1) first keystroke latency and (2) keystroke latency of the subsequent letters and duration of the word. Moreover, ERPs locked to the onset of the picture presentation were analyzed to explore the temporal course of word frequency in typewriting. The results showed an effect of word frequency for the first keystroke latency but not for the duration of the word or the speed to which letter were typed (interstroke intervals). The electrophysiological results showed the expected ERP frequency effect at posterior sites: amplitudes for low-frequency words were more positive than those for high-frequency words. However, relative to previous evidence in the spoken modality, the frequency effect appeared in a later time-window. These results demonstrate two marked differences in the processing dynamics underpinning typing compared to speaking: First, central processing dynamics between speaking and typing differ already in the manner that words are accessed; second, central processing differences in typing, unlike speaking, do not cascade to peripheral processes involved in response execution.

When does word frequency influence written production?

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Cristina eBaus

2013-12-01

Full Text Available The aim of the present study was to explore the central (e.g., lexical processing and peripheral processes (motor preparation and execution underlying word production during typewriting. To do so, we tested non-professional typers in a picture typing task while continuously recording EEG. Participants were instructed to write (by means of a standard keyboard the corresponding name for a given picture. The lexical frequency of the words was manipulated: half of the picture names were of high-frequency while the remaining were of low-frequency. Different measures were obtained: 1 first keystroke latency and 2 keystroke latency of the subsequent letters and duration of the word. Moreover, ERPs locked to the onset of the picture presentation were analysed to explore the temporal course of word frequency in typewriting. The results showed an effect of word frequency for the first keystroke latency but not for the duration of the word or the speed to which letter were typed (interstroke intervals. The electrophysiological results showed the expected ERP frequency effect at posterior sites: amplitudes for low-frequency words were more positive than those for high-frequency words. However, relative to previous evidence in the spoken modality, the frequency effect appeared in a later time-window. These results demonstrate two marked differences in the processing dynamics underpinning typing compared to speaking: First, central processing dynamics between speaking and typing differ already in the manner that words are accessed; second, central processing differences in typing, unlike speaking, do not cascade to peripheral processes involved in response execution.

Phonological Awareness and Naming Speed in the Prediction of Dutch Children's Word Recognition

Science.gov (United States)

Verhagen, W.; Aarnoutse, C.; van Leeuwe, J.

2008-01-01

Influences of phonological awareness and naming speed on the speed and accuracy of Dutch children's word recognition were investigated in a longitudinal study. The speed and accuracy of word recognition at the ends of Grades 1 and 2 were predicted by naming speed from both the beginning and end of Grade 1, after control for autoregressive…

The functional unit of Japanese word naming: evidence from masked priming.

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Verdonschot, Rinus G; Kiyama, Sachiko; Tamaoka, Katsuo; Kinoshita, Sachiko; Heij, Wido La; Schiller, Niels O

2011-11-01

Theories of language production generally describe the segment as the basic unit in phonological encoding (e.g., Dell, 1988; Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999). However, there is also evidence that such a unit might be language specific. Chen, Chen, and Dell (2002), for instance, found no effect of single segments when using a preparation paradigm. To shed more light on the functional unit of phonological encoding in Japanese, a language often described as being mora based, we report the results of 4 experiments using word reading tasks and masked priming. Experiment 1 demonstrated using Japanese kana script that primes, which overlapped in the whole mora with target words, sped up word reading latencies but not when just the onset overlapped. Experiments 2 and 3 investigated a possible role of script by using combinations of romaji (Romanized Japanese) and hiragana; again, facilitation effects were found only when the whole mora and not the onset segment overlapped. Experiment 4 distinguished mora priming from syllable priming and revealed that the mora priming effects obtained in the first 3 experiments are also obtained when a mora is part of a syllable. Again, no priming effect was found for single segments. Our findings suggest that the mora and not the segment (phoneme) is the basic functional phonological unit in Japanese language production planning.

Parallel language activation during word processing in bilinguals: Evidence from word production in sentence context

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Starreveld, P.A.; de Groot, A.M.B.; Rossmark, B.M.M.; van Hell, J.G.

2014-01-01

In two picture-naming experiments we examined whether bilinguals co-activate the non-target language during word production in the target language. The pictures were presented out-of-context (Experiment 1) or in visually presented sentence contexts (Experiment 2). In both experiments different

Hemispheric distribution of ERP components and word naming in preschool children.

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Licht, R.; Kok, A.; Bakker, D.J.; Bouma, A.

1986-01-01

Recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) at the left and right temporal and parietal sites of 61 children (aged 5.1-6.2 yrs) during a word-naming task. Ss were divided into fast and slow reading acquisition (RA) groups based on the number of trials they required to learn to read 4 words. Principal

Phonological inconsistency in word naming: Determinants of the interference effect between languages

OpenAIRE

Smits, E.M.G.; Sandra, D.M.J.; Martensen, H.E.; Dijkstra, A.F.J.

2009-01-01

Dutch-English participants named words and nonwords having a between-language phonologically inconsistent rime, e.g., GREED and PREED, and control words with a language-typical rime, e.g., GROAN, in a monolingual stimulus list or in a mixed list containing Dutch words. Inconsistent items had longer latencies and more errors than typical items in the mixed lists but not in the pure list. The consistency effect depended on word frequency, but not on language membership, lexicality, or instructi...

The Predictive Power of Phonemic Awareness and Naming Speed for Early Dutch Word Recognition

Science.gov (United States)

Verhagen, Wim G. M.; Aarnoutse, Cor A. J.; van Leeuwe, Jan F. J.

2009-01-01

Effects of phonemic awareness and naming speed on the speed and accuracy of Dutch children's word recognition were investigated in a longitudinal study. Both the speed and accuracy of word recognition at the end of Grade 2 were predicted by naming speed from both kindergarten and Grade 1, after control for autoregressive relations, kindergarten…

γ-oscillations modulated by picture naming and word reading: intracranial recording in epileptic patients.

Science.gov (United States)

Wu, Helen C; Nagasawa, Tetsuro; Brown, Erik C; Juhasz, Csaba; Rothermel, Robert; Hoechstetter, Karsten; Shah, Aashit; Mittal, Sandeep; Fuerst, Darren; Sood, Sandeep; Asano, Eishi

2011-10-01

We measured cortical gamma-oscillations in response to visual-language tasks consisting of picture naming and word reading in an effort to better understand human visual-language pathways. We studied six patients with focal epilepsy who underwent extraoperative electrocorticography (ECoG) recording. Patients were asked to overtly name images presented sequentially in the picture naming task and to overtly read written words in the reading task. Both tasks commonly elicited gamma-augmentation (maximally at 80-100 Hz) on ECoG in the occipital, inferior-occipital-temporal and inferior-Rolandic areas, bilaterally. Picture naming, compared to reading task, elicited greater gamma-augmentation in portions of pre-motor areas as well as occipital and inferior-occipital-temporal areas, bilaterally. In contrast, word reading elicited greater gamma-augmentation in portions of bilateral occipital, left occipital-temporal and left superior-posterior-parietal areas. Gamma-attenuation was elicited by both tasks in portions of posterior cingulate and ventral premotor-prefrontal areas bilaterally. The number of letters in a presented word was positively correlated to the degree of gamma-augmentation in the medial occipital areas. Gamma-augmentation measured on ECoG identified cortical areas commonly and differentially involved in picture naming and reading tasks. Longer words may activate the primary visual cortex for the more peripheral field. The present study increases our understanding of the visual-language pathways. Copyright © 2011 International Federation of Clinical Neurophysiology. Published by Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

The Role of Attentional Priority of the Agent in the Acquisition of Word Reference.

Science.gov (United States)

Grace, Janet; Suci, George J.

A study is undertaken to determine whether the nonlinguistic priority of the agent of an action facilitates the comprehension of word reference. The subjects were twelve male and twelve female infants at the one word stage of language production. The children were presented with three nonsense names (presented as part of a narration of a filmed…

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

Science.gov (United States)

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

2007-04-01

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

Fluency Effects on Brand Name Recognition and Preference

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Erz, Antonia; Christensen, Bo

2014-01-01

Existing research has not provided a clear understanding of processing fluency effects on memory. In a laboratory experiment with novel non-words, we found a recognition advantage of fluent non-words over moderately fluent and disfluent non-words. This advantage diminished when non-words were...... presented as novel brand names in different product contexts. We further tested a preference reversal in favor of disfluency and found that disfluent brand names (non-words) were equally disliked across different products contexts. A preference reversal could be observed when fluent names were preferred...

The facilitation effect of associative and semantic relatedness in word recognition

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Jakić Milena

2011-01-01

Full Text Available In this study we addressed three issues concerning semantic and associative relatedness between two words and how they prime each other. The first issue is whether there is a priming effect of semantic relatedness over and above the effect of associative relatedness. The second issue is how difference in semantic overlap between two words affects priming. In order to specify the semantic overlap we introduce five relation types that differ in number of common semantic components. Three relation types (synonyms, antonyms and hyponyms represent semantic relatedness while two relation types represent associative relatedness, with negligible or no semantic relatedness. Finally, the third issue addressed in this study is whether there is a symmetric priming effect if we swap the position of prime and target, i.e. whether the direction of relatedness between two words affects priming. In two lexical decision experiments we presented five types of word pairs. In both experiments we obtained stronger facilitation for pairs that were both semantically and associatively related. Closer inspection showed that larger semantic overlap between words is paralleled by greater facilitation effect. The effects did not change when prime and target swap their position, indicating that the observed facilitation effects are symmetrical. This outcome complies with predictions of distributed models of memory.

Young children's use of contrast in word learning: the case of proper names

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Hall, D.G.; Rhemtulla, M.

2014-01-01

Recent research has established that contrast can exert a powerful effect on early word learning. This study examined the role of contrast in young children's ability to learn proper names. Preschoolers heard a novel word for an unfamiliar stuffed animal in the presence of a second stuffed animal of

Situated conceptualization and semantic processing: effects of emotional experience and context availability in semantic categorization and naming tasks.

Science.gov (United States)

Moffat, Michael; Siakaluk, Paul D; Sidhu, David M; Pexman, Penny M

2015-04-01

It has been proposed that much of conceptual knowledge is acquired through situated conceptualization, such that both external (e.g., agents, objects, events) and internal (e.g., emotions, introspections) environments are considered important (Barsalou, 2003). To evaluate this proposal, we characterized two dimensions by which situated conceptualization may be measured and which should have different relevance for abstract and concrete concepts; namely, emotional experience (i.e., the ease with which words evoke emotional experience; Newcombe, Campbell, Siakaluk, & Pexman, 2012) and context availability (i.e., the ease with which words evoke contexts in which their referents may appear; Schwanenflugel & Shoben, 1983). We examined the effects of these two dimensions on abstract and concrete word processing in verbal semantic categorization (VSCT) and naming tasks. In the VSCT, emotional experience facilitated processing of abstract words but inhibited processing of concrete words, whereas context availability facilitated processing of both types of words. In the naming task in which abstract words and concrete words were not blocked by emotional experience, context availability facilitated responding to only the abstract words. In the naming task in which abstract words and concrete words were blocked by emotional experience, emotional experience facilitated responding to only the abstract words, whereas context availability facilitated responding to only the concrete words. These results were observed even with several lexical (e.g., frequency, age of acquisition) and semantic (e.g., concreteness, arousal, valence) variables included in the analyses. As such, the present research suggests that emotional experience and context availability tap into different aspects of situated conceptualization and make unique contributions to the representation and processing of abstract and concrete concepts.

Phase transition and fast agreement in the Naming Game with preference for multi-word agents

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Lipowska, Dorota; Lipowski, Adam

2014-01-01

We examine a variant of the Naming Game, where agents with several words communicate more often than single-word agents. Depending on the preference and dimensionality, the model either converges to a single-language state as in an ordinary Naming Game or remains in a disordered, multi-language phase. At the transition point separating these regimes, due to a percolation-like process, the model converges to a single-language state but much faster than in the ordinary naming game. We also show that the coarsening dynamics of the ordinary Naming Game is slower than expected due to stripe structures that sometimes spontaneously form during the evolution of the model. (paper)

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.

Phonaesthemes and sound symbolism in Swedish brand names

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Åsa Abelin

2015-01-01

Full Text Available This study examines the prevalence of sound symbolism in Swedish brand names. A general principle of brand name design is that effective names should be distinctive, recognizable, easy to pronounce and meaningful. Much money is invested in designing powerful brand names, where the emotional impact of the names on consumers is also relevant and it is important to avoid negative connotations. Customers prefer brand names, which say something about the product, as this reduces product uncertainty (Klink, 2001. Therefore, consumers might prefer sound symbolic names. It has been shown that people associate the sounds of the nonsense words maluma and takete with round and angular shapes, respectively. By extension, more complex shapes and textures might activate words containing certain sounds. This study focuses on semantic dimensions expected to be relevant to product names, such as mobility, consistency, texture and shape. These dimensions are related to the senses of sight, hearing and touch and are also interesting from a cognitive linguistic perspective. Cross-modal assessment and priming experiments with pictures and written words were performed and the results analysed in relation to brand name databases and to sound symbolic sound combinations in Swedish (Abelin, 1999. The results show that brand names virtually never contain pejorative, i.e. depreciatory, consonant clusters, and that certain sounds and sound combinations are overrepresented in certain content categories. Assessment tests show correlations between pictured objects and phoneme combinations in newly created words (non-words. The priming experiment shows that object images prime newly created words as expected, based on the presence of compatible consonant clusters.

Distinct patterns of brain activity characterise lexical activation and competition in spoken word production.

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Vitória Piai

Full Text Available According to a prominent theory of language production, concepts activate multiple associated words in memory, which enter into competition for selection. However, only a few electrophysiological studies have identified brain responses reflecting competition. Here, we report a magnetoencephalography study in which the activation of competing words was manipulated by presenting pictures (e.g., dog with distractor words. The distractor and picture name were semantically related (cat, unrelated (pin, or identical (dog. Related distractors are stronger competitors to the picture name because they receive additional activation from the picture relative to other distractors. Picture naming times were longer with related than unrelated and identical distractors. Phase-locked and non-phase-locked activity were distinct but temporally related. Phase-locked activity in left temporal cortex, peaking at 400 ms, was larger on unrelated than related and identical trials, suggesting differential activation of alternative words by the picture-word stimuli. Non-phase-locked activity between roughly 350-650 ms (4-10 Hz in left superior frontal gyrus was larger on related than unrelated and identical trials, suggesting differential resolution of the competition among the alternatives, as reflected in the naming times. These findings characterise distinct patterns of activity associated with lexical activation and competition, supporting the theory that words are selected by competition.

Interference of spoken word recognition through phonological priming from visual objects and printed words.

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McQueen, James M; Huettig, Falk

2014-01-01

Three cross-modal priming experiments examined the influence of preexposure to pictures and printed words on the speed of spoken word recognition. Targets for auditory lexical decision were spoken Dutch words and nonwords, presented in isolation (Experiments 1 and 2) or after a short phrase (Experiment 3). Auditory stimuli were preceded by primes, which were pictures (Experiments 1 and 3) or those pictures' printed names (Experiment 2). Prime-target pairs were phonologically onset related (e.g., pijl-pijn, arrow-pain), were from the same semantic category (e.g., pijl-zwaard, arrow-sword), or were unrelated on both dimensions. Phonological interference and semantic facilitation were observed in all experiments. Priming magnitude was similar for pictures and printed words and did not vary with picture viewing time or number of pictures in the display (either one or four). These effects arose even though participants were not explicitly instructed to name the pictures and where strategic naming would interfere with lexical decision making. This suggests that, by default, processing of related pictures and printed words influences how quickly we recognize spoken words.

Words, Names, Nature, Earth: On the Poetry of Pierre-Albert Jourdan

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Yves Bonnefoy

1989-11-01

Full Text Available An ambivalence toward language is present throughout the work of Pierre-Albert Jourdan. Words are associated with the closure of a grey world; they are always arriving late, after the fact; they are veils, masks, dreams detached from truth, knowledge, and immediacy. Yet, words and names hold out the possibility of hope; they can designate the presence of beauty in the world; they can mediate the encounter of self and other. The human word signifies itself through the substance of the world and the communion of beings. At the intersection of natural reality—the center of the real for Jourdan—and of language are found the garden, the earth, places of an ephemeral, haiku like presence where the natural opens itself to the human.

Phonotactic probability of brand names: I'd buy that!

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Vitevitch, Michael S; Donoso, Alexander J

2012-11-01

Psycholinguistic research shows that word-characteristics influence the speed and accuracy of various language-related processes. Analogous characteristics of brand names influence the retrieval of product information and the perception of risks associated with that product. In the present experiment we examined how phonotactic probability-the frequency with which phonological segments and sequences of segments appear in a word-might influence consumer behavior. Participants rated brand names that varied in phonotactic probability on the likelihood that they would buy the product. Participants indicated that they were more likely to purchase a product if the brand name was comprised of common segments and sequences of segments rather than less common segments and sequences of segments. This result suggests that word-characteristics may influence higher-level cognitive processes, in addition to language-related processes. Furthermore, the benefits of using objective measures of word characteristics in the design of brand names are discussed.

Finding the positive in all of the negative: Facilitation for color-related emotion words in a negative priming paradigm.

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Sutton, Tina M; Altarriba, Jeanette

2016-10-01

A study conducted by Sutton and Altarriba (2008) suggested that color-related emotion words (e.g., sad, envy) produce standard Stroop interference effects. Associations between emotion words and colors are culture specific, and may be the result of common phrases in a language (e.g., "feeling blue" in English), or a result of the manner in which color is used to signify information or meaning in a language (e.g., red often represents threat). In the present paper, the same stimuli were investigated in a negative priming paradigm in which participants were asked to name the ink color of a presented word. In this task, response times are typically slower in ignored repetition trials (i.e., the probe target is related to the prime distractor) than control trials. The results of Experiment 1 indicated that color words and color-related neutral words yielded negative priming; however, color-related emotion words yielded significant facilitation. In Experiment 2, the three word types were intermixed within the same block and the same results were obtained. The current study provides converging evidence that salient distractors cannot be ignored. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The Process of Word Formation and Phrase Structure of Android Application Names

OpenAIRE

Handayani, Heny

2013-01-01

Android is an operating system for mobile device, such as smartphones and tablet computers that was developed by Google. In this era, android is a popular operating system that is searched by people because of necessary of information. The process and structure of android application names are interesting to be analyzed since they have different structure of words in general. The purpose research is to describe and explain which word formation processes and phrase structure that are commonly ...

Words we do not say-Context effects on the phonological activation of lexical alternatives in speech production.

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Jescheniak, Jörg D; Kurtz, Franziska; Schriefers, Herbert; Günther, Josefine; Klaus, Jana; Mädebach, Andreas

2017-06-01

There is compelling evidence that context strongly influences our choice of words (e.g., whether we refer to a particular animal with the basic-level name "bird" or the subordinate-level name "duck"). However, little is known about whether the context already affects the degree to which the alternative words are activated. In this study, we explored the effect of a preceding linguistic context on the phonological activation of alternative picture names. In Experiments 1 to 3, the context was established by a request produced by an imaginary interlocutor. These requests either constrained the naming response to the subordinate level on pragmatic grounds (e.g., "name the bird!") or not (e.g., "name the object!"). In Experiment 4, the context was established by the speaker's own previous naming response. Participants named the pictures with their subordinate-level names and the phonological activation of the basic-level names was assessed with distractor words phonologically related versus unrelated to that name (e.g., "birch" vs. "lamp"). In all experiments, we consistently found that distractor words phonologically related to the basic-level name interfered with the naming response more strongly than unrelated distractor words. Moreover, this effect was of comparable size for nonconstraining and constraining contexts indicating that the alternative name was phonologically activated and competed for selection, even when it was not an appropriate lexical option. Our results suggest that the speech production system is limited in its ability of flexibly adjusting and fine-tuning the lexical activation patterns of words (among which to choose from) as a function of pragmatic constraints. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).

Spatiotemporal dynamics of word retrieval in speech production revealed by cortical high-frequency band activity.

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Riès, Stephanie K; Dhillon, Rummit K; Clarke, Alex; King-Stephens, David; Laxer, Kenneth D; Weber, Peter B; Kuperman, Rachel A; Auguste, Kurtis I; Brunner, Peter; Schalk, Gerwin; Lin, Jack J; Parvizi, Josef; Crone, Nathan E; Dronkers, Nina F; Knight, Robert T

2017-06-06

Word retrieval is core to language production and relies on complementary processes: the rapid activation of lexical and conceptual representations and word selection, which chooses the correct word among semantically related competitors. Lexical and conceptual activation is measured by semantic priming. In contrast, word selection is indexed by semantic interference and is hampered in semantically homogeneous (HOM) contexts. We examined the spatiotemporal dynamics of these complementary processes in a picture naming task with blocks of semantically heterogeneous (HET) or HOM stimuli. We used electrocorticography data obtained from frontal and temporal cortices, permitting detailed spatiotemporal analysis of word retrieval processes. A semantic interference effect was observed with naming latencies longer in HOM versus HET blocks. Cortical response strength as indexed by high-frequency band (HFB) activity (70-150 Hz) amplitude revealed effects linked to lexical-semantic activation and word selection observed in widespread regions of the cortical mantle. Depending on the subsecond timing and cortical region, HFB indexed semantic interference (i.e., more activity in HOM than HET blocks) or semantic priming effects (i.e., more activity in HET than HOM blocks). These effects overlapped in time and space in the left posterior inferior temporal gyrus and the left prefrontal cortex. The data do not support a modular view of word retrieval in speech production but rather support substantial overlap of lexical-semantic activation and word selection mechanisms in the brain.

Emotional Facilitation Effect in the Picture-Word Interference Task: An ERP Study

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Liu, Baolin; Xin, Shuai; Jin, Zhixing; Hu, Yu; Li, Yang

2010-01-01

In this paper, we aimed to verify the emotional facilitation effect in the picture-word interference task using event-related potentials. Twenty-one healthy subjects were asked to categorize the emotional valences of pictures accompanied by emotionally congruent, either centrally or laterally positioned Chinese words. For both the foveal and…

Lexical Retrieval is not by Competition: Evidence from the Blocked Naming Paradigm

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Navarrete, Eduardo; Del Prato, Paul; Peressotti, Francesca; Mahon, Bradford Z.

2014-01-01

A central issue in research on speech production is whether or not the retrieval of words from the mental lexicon is a competitive process. An important experimental paradigm to study the dynamics of lexical retrieval is the blocked naming paradigm, in which participants name pictures of objects that are grouped by semantic category (‘homogenous’ or ‘related’ blocks) or not grouped by semantic category (‘heterogeneous’ or ‘unrelated’ blocks). Typically, pictures are repeated multiple times (or cycles) within both related and unrelated blocks. It is known that participants are slower in related than in unrelated blocks when the data are collapsed over all within-block repetitions. This semantic interference effect, as observed in the blocked naming task, is the strongest empirical evidence for the hypothesis of lexical selection by competition. Here we show, contrary to the accepted view, that the default polarity of semantic context effects in the blocked naming paradigm is facilitation, rather than interference. In a series of experiments we find that interference arises only when items repeat within a block, and only because of that repetition: What looks to be ‘semantic interference’ in the blocked naming paradigm is actually less repetition priming in related compared to unrelated blocks. These data undermine the theory of lexical selection by competition and indicate a model in which the most highly activated word is retrieved, regardless of the activation levels of nontarget words. We conclude that the theory of lexical selection by competition, and by extension the important psycholinguistic models based on that assumption, are no longer viable, and frame a new way to approach the question of how words are retrieved in spoken language production. PMID:25284954

An fMRI investigation of the effects of attempted naming on word retrieval in aphasia

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Heath, Shiree; McMahon, Katie L.; Nickels, Lyndsey A.; Angwin, Anthony; MacDonald, Anna D.; van Hees, Sophia; McKinnon, Eril; Johnson, Kori; Copland, David A.

2015-01-01

In healthy controls, picture naming performance can be facilitated by a single prior exposure to the same picture (“priming”). This priming phenomenon is utilized in the treatment of aphasia, which often includes repeated picture naming as part of a therapeutic task. The current study sought to determine whether single and/or multiple exposures facilitate subsequent naming in aphasia and whether such facilitatory effects act through normal priming mechanisms. A functional magnetic resonance imaging paradigm was employed to explore the beneficial effects of attempted naming in two individuals with aphasia and a control group. The timing and number of prior exposures was manipulated, with investigation of both short-term effects (single prior exposure over a period of minutes) and long-term effects (multiple presentations over a period of days). Following attempted naming, both short-term and long-term facilitated items showed improvement for controls, while only the long-term condition showed benefits at a behavioral level for the participants with aphasia. At a neural level, effects of long-term facilitation were noted in the left precuneus for one participant with aphasia, a result also identified for the equivalent contrast in controls. It appears that multiple attempts are required to improve naming performance in the presence of anomia and that for some individuals with aphasia the source of facilitation may be similar to unimpaired mechanisms engaged outside the language network. PMID:26074801

Cognate costs in bilingual speech production: Evidence from language switching

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Mirjam Broersma

2016-09-01

Full Text Available This study investigates cross-language lexical competition in the bilingual mental lexicon. It provides evidence for the occurrence of inhibition as well as the commonly reported facilitation during the production of cognates (words with similar phonological form and meaning in two languages in a mixed picture naming task by highly proficient Welsh-English bilinguals. Previous studies have typically found cognate facilitation. It has previously been proposed (with respect to non-cognates that cross-language inhibition is limited to low-proficient bilinguals; therefore, we tested highly proficient, early bilinguals. In a mixed naming experiment (i.e., picture naming with language switching, 48 highly proficient, early Welsh-English bilinguals named pictures in Welsh and English, including cognate and non-cognate targets. Participants were English-dominant, Welsh-dominant, or had equal language dominance. The results showed evidence for cognate inhibition in to ways. First, both facilitation and inhibition were found on the cognate trials themselves, compared to non-cognate controls, modulated by the participants’ language dominance. The English-dominant group showed cognate inhibition when naming in Welsh (and no difference between cognates and controls when naming in English, and the Welsh-dominant and equal dominance groups generally showed cognate facilitation. Second, cognate inhibition was found as a behavioral adaptation effect, with slower naming for non-cognate filler words in trials after cognates than after non-cognate controls. This effect was consistent across all language dominance groups and both target languages, suggesting that cognate production involved cognitive control even if this was not measurable in the cognate trials themselves. Finally, the results replicated patterns of symmetrical switch costs, as commonly reported for balanced bilinguals. We propose that cognate processing might be affected by two different

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

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

1997-01-01

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

Language production in a shared task: Cumulative semantic interference from self- and other-produced context words

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Hoedemaker, R.S.; Ernst, J.; Meyer, A.S.; Belke, E.

2017-01-01

This study assessed the effects of semantic context in the form of self-produced and other-produced words on subsequent language production. Pairs of participants performed a joint picture naming task, taking turns while naming a continuous series of pictures. In the single-speaker version of this

Cross-modal priming facilitates production of low imageability word strings in a case of deep-phonological dysphasia

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Laura Mary Mccarthy

2014-04-01

Full Text Available Introduction. Characteristics of repetition in deep-phonological dysphasia include an inability to repeat nonwords, semantic errors in single word repetition (deep dysphasia and in multiple word repetition (phonological dysphasia and better repetition of highly imageable words (Wilshire & Fisher, 2004; Ablinger et al., 2008. Additionally, visual processing of words is often more accurate than auditory processing of words (Howard & Franklin, 1988. We report a case study of LT who incurred a LCVA on 10/3/2009. She initially presented with deep dysphasia and near normal word reading. When enrolled in this study, approximately 24 months post-onset, she presented with phonological dysphasia. We investigated the hypothesis that (1 reproduction of a word string would be more accurate when preceded by a visual presentation of the word string compared to two auditory presentations of the word string, and (2 that this facilitative boost would be observed only for strings of low image words, consistent with the imageability effect in repetition. Method. Three-word strings were created in four conditions which varied the frequency (F and imageability (I of words within a string: HiF-HiI, LoF-HiI, HiF-LoI, LoF-LoI. All strings were balanced for total syllable length and were unrelated semantically and phonologically. The dependent variable was as accuracy of repetition of each word within a string. We created six modality prime conditions each with 24 strings drawn equally from the four frequency-imageability types, randomized within modality condition: Auditory Once (AudOnce – string presented auditorily one time; Auditory Twice (AudAud – string presented auditorily two consecutive times; Visual Once (VisOnce – string presented visually one time; Visual Twice (VisVis – string presented visually two consecutive times; Auditory then Visual (AudVis – string presented once auditorily, then a second time visually; Visual then Auditory (VisAud �

Reduplication Facilitates Early Word Segmentation

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Ota, Mitsuhiko; Skarabela, Barbora

2018-01-01

This study explores the possibility that early word segmentation is aided by infants' tendency to segment words with repeated syllables ("reduplication"). Twenty-four nine-month-olds were familiarized with passages containing one novel reduplicated word and one novel non-reduplicated word. Their central fixation times in response to…

Comparison of single-word and adjective-noun phrase production using event-related brain potentials

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Lange, Violaine Michel

2015-01-01

stimuli varying in complexity -black and white line drawings, coloured line drawings, and arrays of drawings-in participants producing single nouns. Whilst naming latencies were similar for single noun production between visual stimuli conditions, ERPs differed between drawing arrays and single drawings...... in a time-window extending beyond early visual analysis. In a second experiment, different participants were asked to produce either single noun or adjective-noun dual-word phrases to black-and-white and coloured line drawings, respectively. Adjective-noun phrase production (2W) resulted in naming latencies...

Diminutives facilitate word segmentation in natural speech: cross-linguistic evidence.

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Kempe, Vera; Brooks, Patricia J; Gillis, Steven; Samson, Graham

2007-06-01

Final-syllable invariance is characteristic of diminutives (e.g., doggie), which are a pervasive feature of the child-directed speech registers of many languages. Invariance in word endings has been shown to facilitate word segmentation (Kempe, Brooks, & Gillis, 2005) in an incidental-learning paradigm in which synthesized Dutch pseudonouns were used. To broaden the cross-linguistic evidence for this invariance effect and to increase its ecological validity, adult English speakers (n=276) were exposed to naturally spoken Dutch or Russian pseudonouns presented in sentence contexts. A forced choice test was given to assess target recognition, with foils comprising unfamiliar syllable combinations in Experiments 1 and 2 and syllable combinations straddling word boundaries in Experiment 3. A control group (n=210) received the recognition test with no prior exposure to targets. Recognition performance improved with increasing final-syllable rhyme invariance, with larger increases for the experimental group. This confirms that word ending invariance is a valid segmentation cue in artificial, as well as naturalistic, speech and that diminutives may aid segmentation in a number of languages.

Language production in a shared task: Cumulative semantic interference from self- and other-produced context words

OpenAIRE

Hoedemaker, R.; Ernst, J.; Meyer, A.; Belke, E.

2017-01-01

This study assessed the effects of semantic context in the form of self-produced and other-produced words on subsequent language production. Pairs of participants performed a joint picture naming task, taking turns while naming a continuous series of pictures. In the single-speaker version of this paradigm, naming latencies have been found to increase for successive presentations of exemplars from the same category, a phenomenon known as Cumulative Semantic Interference (CSI). As expected, th...

Recurrent neural networks with specialized word embeddings for health-domain named-entity recognition.

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Jauregi Unanue, Iñigo; Zare Borzeshi, Ehsan; Piccardi, Massimo

2017-12-01

Previous state-of-the-art systems on Drug Name Recognition (DNR) and Clinical Concept Extraction (CCE) have focused on a combination of text "feature engineering" and conventional machine learning algorithms such as conditional random fields and support vector machines. However, developing good features is inherently heavily time-consuming. Conversely, more modern machine learning approaches such as recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have proved capable of automatically learning effective features from either random assignments or automated word "embeddings". (i) To create a highly accurate DNR and CCE system that avoids conventional, time-consuming feature engineering. (ii) To create richer, more specialized word embeddings by using health domain datasets such as MIMIC-III. (iii) To evaluate our systems over three contemporary datasets. Two deep learning methods, namely the Bidirectional LSTM and the Bidirectional LSTM-CRF, are evaluated. A CRF model is set as the baseline to compare the deep learning systems to a traditional machine learning approach. The same features are used for all the models. We have obtained the best results with the Bidirectional LSTM-CRF model, which has outperformed all previously proposed systems. The specialized embeddings have helped to cover unusual words in DrugBank and MedLine, but not in the i2b2/VA dataset. We present a state-of-the-art system for DNR and CCE. Automated word embeddings has allowed us to avoid costly feature engineering and achieve higher accuracy. Nevertheless, the embeddings need to be retrained over datasets that are adequate for the domain, in order to adequately cover the domain-specific vocabulary. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Primary phonological planning units in spoken word production are language-specific: Evidence from an ERP study.

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Wang, Jie; Wong, Andus Wing-Kuen; Wang, Suiping; Chen, Hsuan-Chih

2017-07-19

It is widely acknowledged in Germanic languages that segments are the primary planning units at the phonological encoding stage of spoken word production. Mixed results, however, have been found in Chinese, and it is still unclear what roles syllables and segments play in planning Chinese spoken word production. In the current study, participants were asked to first prepare and later produce disyllabic Mandarin words upon picture prompts and a response cue while electroencephalogram (EEG) signals were recorded. Each two consecutive pictures implicitly formed a pair of prime and target, whose names shared the same word-initial atonal syllable or the same word-initial segments, or were unrelated in the control conditions. Only syllable repetition induced significant effects on event-related brain potentials (ERPs) after target onset: a widely distributed positivity in the 200- to 400-ms interval and an anterior positivity in the 400- to 600-ms interval. We interpret these to reflect syllable-size representations at the phonological encoding and phonetic encoding stages. Our results provide the first electrophysiological evidence for the distinct role of syllables in producing Mandarin spoken words, supporting a language specificity hypothesis about the primary phonological units in spoken word production.

Learning disability subtypes and the role of attention during the naming of pictures and words: an event-related potential analysis.

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Greenham, Stephanie L; Stelmack, Robert M; van der Vlugt, Harry

2003-01-01

The role of attention in the processing of pictures and words was investigated for a group of normally achieving children and for groups of learning disability sub-types that were defined by deficient performance on tests of reading and spelling (Group RS) and of arithmetic (Group A). An event-related potential (ERP) recording paradigm was employed in which the children were required to attend to and name either pictures or words that were presented individually or in superimposed picture-word arrays that varied in degree of semantic relation. For Group RS, the ERP waves to words, both presented individually or attended in the superimposed array, exhibited reduced N450 amplitude relative to controls, whereas their ERP waves to pictures were normal. This suggests that the word-naming deficiency for Group RS is not a selective attention deficit but rather a specific linguistic deficit that develops at a later stage of processing. In contrast to Group RS and controls, Group A did not exhibit reliable early frontal negative waves (N280) to the super-imposed pictures and words, an effect that may reflect a selective attention deficit for these children that develops at an early stage of visuo-spatial processing. These early processing differences were also evident in smaller amplitude N450 waves for Group A when naming either pictures or words in the superimposed arrays.

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

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Hilte, Maartje; Reitsma, Pieter

2006-12-01

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

Tracking Eye Movements to Localize Stroop Interference in Naming: Word Planning Versus Articulatory Buffering

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Roelofs, A.P.A.

2014-01-01

Investigators have found no agreement on the functional locus of Stroop interference in vocal naming. Whereas it has long been assumed that the interference arises during spoken word planning, more recently some investigators have revived an account from the 1960s and 1970s holding that the

The intractability of non-word production difficulties in jargon aphasia: Insights from therapy

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Arpita Bose

2015-04-01

Full Text Available Severe word production difficulties remain one of the most challenging clinical symptoms to treat in individuals with jargon aphasia (JA. Although research has found a beneficial effect of phonological therapy in JA (e.g., FF in Bose 2013; GF in Robson et al., 1998, a lack of improvement in naming performance following this approach has also been reported (e.g., P9 in Leonard et al., 2008. Clinically, it is important to determine why some individuals with JA improve following phonological therapy when others do not. This research investigates the effect of phonological therapy on naming performance in JA and explores possible reasons for improvement or lack thereof (e.g., input/ output processing skills, ability to use and maintain cues. Methods Participant: AM, an 86 year old, English-speaking male, was 16 years post-stroke and presented with persistent, severe neologistic jargon, characterized by very high proportions of non-words and perseverations. Part 1: Effects of phonological cuing (initial phoneme vs. semantic cuing (semantically-related item on naming performance were tested on items from the Philadelphia Naming Test (Roach et al., 1996 to determine the most suitable course of therapy. Part 2: Using a single-subject multiple baseline design, Phonological Component Analysis (Leonard et al., 2008 was administered for three sets of words. In addition to analysis of therapy performance, naming accuracy was compared across three lists in three instances of a word being treated (i.e., 1st attempt without any phonological cues, 2nd attempt immediately after the phonological cues, and 3rd attempt after review of the phonological cues. Results and Discussion Part 1: Results showed a significant increase in naming accuracy following phonological cuing [χ2 (1 = 5.782, p = .01], whereas semantic cuing did not [χ2 (1 =.386, ns], thus motivating the implementation of a phonological therapy. Part 2: There was a significant difference in accuracy

Active learning for ontological event extraction incorporating named entity recognition and unknown word handling.

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Han, Xu; Kim, Jung-jae; Kwoh, Chee Keong

2016-01-01

Biomedical text mining may target various kinds of valuable information embedded in the literature, but a critical obstacle to the extension of the mining targets is the cost of manual construction of labeled data, which are required for state-of-the-art supervised learning systems. Active learning is to choose the most informative documents for the supervised learning in order to reduce the amount of required manual annotations. Previous works of active learning, however, focused on the tasks of entity recognition and protein-protein interactions, but not on event extraction tasks for multiple event types. They also did not consider the evidence of event participants, which might be a clue for the presence of events in unlabeled documents. Moreover, the confidence scores of events produced by event extraction systems are not reliable for ranking documents in terms of informativity for supervised learning. We here propose a novel committee-based active learning method that supports multi-event extraction tasks and employs a new statistical method for informativity estimation instead of using the confidence scores from event extraction systems. Our method is based on a committee of two systems as follows: We first employ an event extraction system to filter potential false negatives among unlabeled documents, from which the system does not extract any event. We then develop a statistical method to rank the potential false negatives of unlabeled documents 1) by using a language model that measures the probabilities of the expression of multiple events in documents and 2) by using a named entity recognition system that locates the named entities that can be event arguments (e.g. proteins). The proposed method further deals with unknown words in test data by using word similarity measures. We also apply our active learning method for the task of named entity recognition. We evaluate the proposed method against the BioNLP Shared Tasks datasets, and show that our method

Objective age of acquisition for 223 Italian words: norms and effects on picture naming speed.

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Lotto, Lorella; Surian, Luca; Job, Remo

2010-02-01

The present study provides a set of objective age of acquisition (AoA) norms for 223 Italian words that may be useful for conducting cross-linguistic studies or experiments on Italian language processing. The data were collected by presenting children from the ages of 2 to 11 with a normed picture set (Lotto, Dell'Acqua, & Job, 2001). Following the study of Morrison, Chappell, and Ellis (1997), we report two measures of objective AoA. Both measures strongly correlated with each other, and they also showed a good correlation with the rated AoA provided by adult participants. Furthermore, we assessed the relationship between the AoA measures and other variables used in psycholinguistic experiments. Regression analyses showed that familiarity, typicality, and word frequency were significant predictors of AoA. AoA, but not word frequency, was found to determine naming latencies. Finally, we present a path model in which AoA is a mediator in predicting speed in picture naming. The norms and the picture set can also be downloaded from http://dpss.psy.unipd.it/files/strumenti.php and from http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.

Cognitive, Linguistic and Print-Related Predictors of Preschool Children's Word Spelling and Name Writing

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Milburn, Trelani F.; Hipfner-Boucher, Kathleen; Weitzman, Elaine; Greenberg, Janice; Pelletier, Janette; Girolametto, Luigi

2017-01-01

Preschool children begin to represent spoken language in print long before receiving formal instruction in spelling and writing. The current study sought to identify the component skills that contribute to preschool children's ability to begin to spell words and write their name. Ninety-five preschool children (mean age = 57 months) completed a…

Naming "sensory equivalents" of established food products: Is the word wrong, or is it the world going wrong?

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Hyldig, Grethe; schmit, Viktor; Møgelvang-Hansen, Peter

Is a food name like Halal-Ham a blatant self-contradiction invented by unscrupulous manufacturers just to promote sales? Or is it an honest attempt to convey in a compact way the following subtle message: This is as close as you get to something that looks, tastes, and feels like ham without....... Starting from a review of 821 Danish regulatory cases concerning misleading food naming and labeling, we specifically address conflict scenarios that relate to the naming of innovative “sensory equivalents” to well-established food products. The arguments and assumptions put forward in real-life cases...

INVESTIGATION OF BRAND NAME-COUNTRY OF ORIGIN PREFERENCE IN FOUR DIFFERENT PRODUCT GROUPS WITH RESPECT TO CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION TENDENCY

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Volkan Doğan

2013-10-01

Full Text Available The aim of this study is to examine different preferences for brand name–country of origin shaped in line with levels of conspicuous consumption tendency and to determine Turkish consumers’ preferences for brand name–country of origin combinations in different product groups. The study was conducted in Eskisehir (Turkey with a sample of 413 people chosen through convenience sampling. The study data were collected with a questionnaire and face-face-to interviews. The participants’ preferences for brand name-country of origin combinations were determined separately based on four different product groups(hedonic, utilitarian, durable and non-durable. The study showed that, for all the four product groups, the participants preferred the products with a Turkish brand name and Turkey as the country of origin most, followed by the products with a French brand name and France as the country of origin. This finding suggests that, with respect to the four product groups in the study, Turkish consumers preferred domestic products over foreign products. Also, the participants who preferred French brand name-France as the country of origin for the hedonic product, French brand name-Turkey as the country of origin for the utilitarian product, French brand name-Turkey as the country of origin for the durable product and French brand name-France as the country of origin for the non-durable product were found to have highest tendency of conspicuous consumption in the corresponding product groups. In other words, as the level of conspicuous consumption increased, the participants tended to prefer French brand name-France as the country of origin for the hedonic product, French brand name-Turkey as the country of origin for the utilitarian product, French brand name-Turkey as the country of origin for the durable product and French brand name-France as the country of origin for the non-durable product.

Naming, word identification and reading comprehension: Why is there a correlation, and what can it be used for?

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Poulsen, Mads

There is a well-established correlation between students’ reading skills and how quickly they can name letters and pictures. Naming speed before formal instruction can even predict later reading skills. But the cause of the correlation is unclear. The talk will summarize a series of studies showing...... that 1) what is being named (letters or pictures) is important for the correlation with different reading subskills (word identification or reading comprehension), 2) that naming is particularly useful in the prediction of reading speed, and 3) that naming is important for early identification of reading...

Acquisition of linguistic procedures for printed words: neuropsychological implications for learning.

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Berninger, V W

1988-10-01

A microcomputerized experiment, administered to 45 children in the 2nd, 5th, and 8th month of first grade, manipulated three variables: (a) stimulus unit (whole word or letter-by-letter presentation), (b) nature of stimulus information (phonically regular words, phonically irregular words, nonsense words, and letter strings, which differ in whether phonemic, orthographic, semantic, and/or name codes are available), and (c) linguistic task (lexical decision, naming, and written reproduction). Letter-by-letter presentation resulted in more accurate lexical decision and naming but not more accurate written reproduction. Interactions between nature of stimulus information and linguistic task occurred. Throughout the year, accuracy was greater for lexical decision than for naming or written reproduction. The superiority of lexical decision cannot be attributed to the higher probability of correct responses on a binary choice task because only consistently correct responses on repeated trials were analyzed. The earlier development of lexical decision, a receptive task, than of naming or written reproduction, production tasks, suggests that hidden units (Hinton & Sejnowski, 1986) in tertiary cortical areas may abstract visual-linguistic associations in printed words before production units in primary cortical areas can produce printed words orally or graphically.

Semantic Interference in Immediate and Delayed Naming and Reading: Attention and Task Decisions

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Piai, Vitoria; Roelofs, Ardi; Schriefers, Herbert

2011-01-01

Disagreement exists about whether lexical selection in word production is a competitive process. Competition predicts semantic interference from distractor words in immediate but not in delayed picture naming. In contrast, Janssen, Schirm, Mahon, and Caramazza (2008) obtained semantic interference in delayed picture naming when participants had to…

Negative induced mood influences word production: An event-related potentials study with a covert picture naming task.

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Hinojosa, J A; Fernández-Folgueiras, U; Albert, J; Santaniello, G; Pozo, M A; Capilla, A

2017-01-27

The present event-related potentials (ERPs) study investigated the effects of mood on phonological encoding processes involved in word generation. For this purpose, negative, positive and neutral affective states were induced in participants during three different recording sessions using short film clips. After the mood induction procedure, participants performed a covert picture naming task in which they searched letters. The negative compared to the neutral mood condition elicited more negative amplitudes in a component peaking around 290ms. Furthermore, results from source localization analyses suggested that this activity was potentially generated in the left prefrontal cortex. In contrast, no differences were found in the comparison between positive and neutral moods. Overall, current data suggest that processes involved in the retrieval of phonological information during speech generation are impaired when participants are in a negative mood. The mechanisms underlying these effects were discussed in relation to linguistic and attentional processes, as well as in terms of the use of heuristics. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Gesture and naming therapy for people with severe aphasia: a group study.

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Marshall, Jane; Best, Wendy; Cocks, Naomi; Cruice, Madeline; Pring, Tim; Bulcock, Gemma; Creek, Gemma; Eales, Nancy; Mummery, Alice Lockhart; Matthews, Niina; Caute, Anna

2012-06-01

In this study, the authors (a) investigated whether a group of people with severe aphasia could learn a vocabulary of pantomime gestures through therapy and (b) compared their learning of gestures with their learning of words. The authors also examined whether gesture therapy cued word production and whether naming therapy cued gestures. Fourteen people with severe aphasia received 15 hr of gesture and naming treatments. Evaluations comprised repeated measures of gesture and word production, comparing treated and untreated items. Baseline measures were stable but improved significantly following therapy. Across the group, improvements in naming were greater than improvements in gesture. This trend was evident in most individuals' results, although 3 participants made better progress in gesture. Gains were item specific, and there was no evidence of cross-modality cueing. Items that received gesture therapy did not improve in naming, and items that received naming therapy did not improve in gesture. Results show that people with severe aphasia can respond to gesture and naming therapies. Given the unequal gains, naming may be a more productive therapy target than gesture for many (although not all) individuals with severe aphasia. The communicative benefits of therapy were not examined but are addressed in a follow-up article.

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

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

2006-12-18

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

Product-line extensions and pricing strategies of brand-name drugs facing patent expiration.

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Hong, Song Hee; Shepherd, Marvin D; Scoones, David; Wan, Thomas T H

2005-01-01

This study proposed an alternative to brand loyalty as the explanation for the continued price rigidity of patent-expired brand-name prescription drugs despite the increase in market entry of generic drugs facilitated by the 1984 Drug Price Competition and Patent Term Restoration Act. Study hypotheses were to test (1) whether market entries of new-product extensions are associated with market success of original brand-name drugs before generic drug entry, and (2) whether original brand-name drugs exhibit price rigidity to generic entry only when they are extended. The design is a retrospective follow-up study for the prescription drug brands that lost their patents between 1987 and 1992. The drug brands were limited to nonantibiotic, orally administered drugs containing only 1 active pharmaceutical ingredient. Information on patent expiration, entry of a product extension, and market success were determined from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.s Orange Book, First DataBank, and American Druggist, respectively. Market success was defined as whether an original drug brand was listed in the top 100 prescriptions most frequently dispensed before facing generic entry. Product-line extension was defined as the appearance of another product that a company introduces within the same market after its existing product. Drug prices were average wholesale prices from the Drug Topics Red Book. The relationship between product-line extension and market success was examined using a logistic regression analysis. The price rigidity to entry was tested using a panel regression analysis. A total of 27 drug brands lost their patents between 1987 and 1992. Drug brands that achieved market success were 16 times more likely to be extended than were those that did not (OR=16, 95% confidence interval, 2.12-120.65). The price rigidity to entry existed in drug brands with extensions (beta=2.65%, P new product-line extension introduced for an original brand helps the original price be

Neighbourhood frequency effects in visual word recognition and naming

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Grainger, I.J.

1988-01-01

Two experiments are reported that examine the influence of a given word's ortllographic neighbours (orthographically similar words) on the recognition and pronunciation of that word. In Experiment 1 (lexical decision) neighbourhood frequency as opposed to stimulus-word frequency was shown to have a

The paca that roared: Immediate cumulative semantic interference among newly acquired words.

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Oppenheim, Gary M

2018-08-01

With 40,000 words in the average vocabulary, how can speakers find the specific words that they want so quickly and easily? Cumulative semantic interference in language production provides a clue: when naming a large series of pictures, with a few mammals sprinkled about, naming each subsequent mammal becomes slower and more error-prone. Such interference mirrors predictions from an incremental learning algorithm applied to meaning-driven retrieval from an established vocabulary, suggesting retrieval benefits from a constant, implicit, re-optimization process (Oppenheim et al., 2010). But how quickly would a new mammal (e.g. paca) engage in this re-optimization? In this experiment, 18 participants studied 3 novel and 3 familiar exemplars from each of six semantic categories, and immediately performed a timed picture-naming task. Consistent with the learning model's predictions, naming latencies revealed immediate cumulative semantic interference in all directions: from new words to new words, from new words to old words, from old words to new words, and from old words to old words. Repeating the procedure several days later produced similar-magnitude effects, demonstrating that newly acquired words can be immediately semantically integrated, at least to the extent necessary to produce typical cumulative semantic interference. These findings extend the Dark Side model's scope to include novel word production, and are considered in terms of mechanisms for lexical selection. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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

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

2012-01-01

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

Self-Paced Segmentation of Written Words on a Touchscreen Tablet Promotes the Oral Production of Nonverbal and Minimally Verbal Children with Autism

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Vernay, Frédérique; Kahina, Harma; Thierry, Marrone; Jean-Yves, Roussey

2017-01-01

We investigated in a pilot study the effects of various types of visual mediation (photos, written words and self-paced syllabic segmentation of written words displayed on a touchscreen tablet) that are thought to facilitate the oral production of nonverbal and minimally verbal children with autism, according to the participants' level of oral…

Parents' Translations of Child Gesture Facilitate Word Learning in Children with Autism, Down Syndrome and Typical Development

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Dimitrova, Nevena; Özçaliskan, Seyda; Adamson, Lauren B.

2016-01-01

Typically-developing (TD) children frequently refer to objects uniquely in gesture. Parents translate these gestures into words, facilitating children's acquisition of these words (Goldin-Meadow et al. in "Dev Sci" 10(6):778-785, 2007). We ask whether this pattern holds for children with autism (AU) and with Down syndrome (DS) who show…

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

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Hung Hsieh-Chuan

2006-12-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Biomedical named entity recognition (Bio-NER is a challenging problem because, in general, biomedical named entities of the same category (e.g., proteins and genes do not follow one standard nomenclature. They have many irregularities and sometimes appear in ambiguous contexts. In recent years, machine-learning (ML approaches have become increasingly common and now represent the cutting edge of Bio-NER technology. This paper addresses three problems faced by ML-based Bio-NER systems. First, most ML approaches usually employ singleton features that comprise one linguistic property (e.g., the current word is capitalized and at least one class tag (e.g., B-protein, the beginning of a protein name. However, such features may be insufficient in cases where multiple properties must be considered. Adding conjunction features that contain multiple properties can be beneficial, but it would be infeasible to include all conjunction features in an NER model since memory resources are limited and some features are ineffective. To resolve the problem, we use a sequential forward search algorithm to select an effective set of features. Second, variations in the numerical parts of biomedical terms (e.g., "2" in the biomedical term IL2 cause data sparseness and generate many redundant features. In this case, we apply numerical normalization, which solves the problem by replacing all numerals in a term with one representative numeral to help classify named entities. Third, the assignment of NE tags does not depend solely on the target word's closest neighbors, but may depend on words outside the context window (e.g., a context window of five consists of the current word plus two preceding and two subsequent words. We use global patterns generated by the Smith-Waterman local alignment algorithm to identify such structures and modify the results of our ML-based tagger. This is called pattern-based post-processing. Results To develop our ML

Encouraging prediction during production facilitates subsequent comprehension: Evidence from interleaved object naming in sentence context and sentence reading

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Hintz, F.; Meyer, A.S.; Hüttig, F.

2016-01-01

Many studies have shown that a supportive context facilitates language comprehension. A currently influential view is that language production may support prediction in language comprehension. Experimental evidence for this, however, is relatively sparse. Here we explored whether encouraging

Language production in a shared task: Cumulative Semantic Interference from self- and other-produced context words.

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Hoedemaker, Renske S; Ernst, Jessica; Meyer, Antje S; Belke, Eva

2017-01-01

This study assessed the effects of semantic context in the form of self-produced and other-produced words on subsequent language production. Pairs of participants performed a joint picture naming task, taking turns while naming a continuous series of pictures. In the single-speaker version of this paradigm, naming latencies have been found to increase for successive presentations of exemplars from the same category, a phenomenon known as Cumulative Semantic Interference (CSI). As expected, the joint-naming task showed a within-speaker CSI effect, such that naming latencies increased as a function of the number of category exemplars named previously by the participant (self-produced items). Crucially, we also observed an across-speaker CSI effect, such that naming latencies slowed as a function of the number of category members named by the participant's task partner (other-produced items). The magnitude of the across-speaker CSI effect did not vary as a function of whether or not the listening participant could see the pictures their partner was naming. The observation of across-speaker CSI suggests that the effect originates at the conceptual level of the language system, as proposed by Belke's (2013) Conceptual Accumulation account. Whereas self-produced and other-produced words both resulted in a CSI effect on naming latencies, post-experiment free recall rates were higher for self-produced than other-produced items. Together, these results suggest that both speaking and listening result in implicit learning at the conceptual level of the language system but that these effects are independent of explicit learning as indicated by item recall. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

From word superiority to word inferiority: Visual processing of letters and words in pure alexia

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Habekost, Thomas; Petersen, Anders; Behrmann, Marlene

2014-01-01

Visual processing and naming of individual letters and short words were investigated in four patients with pure alexia. To test processing at different levels, the same stimuli were studied across a naming task and a visual perception task. The normal word superiority effect was eliminated in bot...

Attention for speaking: domain-general control from the anterior cingulate cortex in spoken word production

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Vitoria ePiai

2013-12-01

Full Text Available Accumulating evidence suggests that some degree of attentional control is required to regulate and monitor processes underlying speaking. Although progress has been made in delineating the neural substrates of the core language processes involved in speaking, substrates associated with regulatory and monitoring processes have remained relatively underspecified. We report the results of an fMRI study examining the neural substrates related to performance in three attention-demanding tasks varying in the amount of linguistic processing: vocal picture naming while ignoring distractors (picture-word interference, PWI; vocal colour naming while ignoring distractors (Stroop; and manual object discrimination while ignoring spatial position (Simon task. All three tasks had congruent and incongruent stimuli, while PWI and Stroop also had neutral stimuli. Analyses focusing on common activation across tasks identified a portion of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex that was active in incongruent trials for all three tasks, suggesting that this region subserves a domain-general attentional control function. In the language tasks, this area showed increased activity for incongruent relative to congruent stimuli, consistent with the involvement of domain-general mechanisms of attentional control in word production. The two language tasks also showed activity in anterior-superior temporal gyrus. Activity increased for neutral PWI stimuli (picture and word did not share the same semantic category relative to incongruent (categorically related and congruent stimuli. This finding is consistent with the involvement of language-specific areas in word production, possibly related to retrieval of lexical-semantic information from memory. The current results thus suggest that in addition to engaging language-specific areas for core linguistic processes, speaking also engages the anterior cingulate cortex, a region that is likely implementing domain

Effects of Ease-of-Pronunciation on Non-Word Memory and Product Judgments

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Erz, Antonia; Christensen, Bo

The ease or difficulty of pronunciation can affect judgments. We experimentally show that linguistic fluency has a direct effect on liking and a U-shaped effect on memory of non-words. We further demonstrate that the fluency of novel, fictitious non-word brand names affects novelty and performance...

Event-related potentials and oscillatory brain responses associated with semantic and Stroop-like interference effects in overt naming

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Piai, V.; Roelofs, A.P.A.; Meij, R. van der

2012-01-01

Picture–word interference is a widely employed paradigm to investigate lexical access in word production: Speakers name pictures while trying to ignore superimposed distractor words. The distractor can be congruent to the picture (pictured cat, word cat), categorically related (pictured cat, word

Cross- and trans-language morphology The lexicography of Indonesian names

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Dick van der Meij

2010-10-01

Full Text Available Different form many other name-giving possibilities in the world, in Indonesia parents are free to give their children any name they like. These names, many of which are auspicious in view of the child’s future, are often constructed by means of productive morphological procedures. Seven suffixes are followed through history and culture and their possibilities in making new names are explored. The suffixes concern the female –ingsih, –ingrum, –ingtyas, –ingdyah, –astuti, –wati, and the male –wan. Various ins and outs concerning these suffixes are explored and their attachments to various words from various word classes from Indonesian, Javanese and other language revealed. Cross-language name construction leads to trans-language creations that play a possible role in the constitution of Indonesian nation building. The procedures moreover seem to indicate trends away from the inclination to give children Muslim names.

Naming analog clocks conceptually facilitates naming digital clocks

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Meeuwissen, M.H.W.; Roelofs, A.P.A.; Levelt, W.J.M.

2004-01-01

Naming digital clocks (e.g., 2:45, say "quarter to three") requires conceptual operations on the minute and hour information displayed in the input for producing the correct relative time expression. The interplay of these conceptual operations was investigated using a repetition priming paradigm.

Children's level of word knowledge predicts their exclusion of familiar objects as referents of novel words

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Susanne eGrassmann

2015-08-01

Full Text Available When children are learning a novel object label, they tend to exclude as possible referents familiar objects for which they already have a name. In the current study, we wanted to know if children would behave in this same way regardless of how well they knew the name of potential referent objects, specifically, whether they could only comprehend it or they could both comprehend and produce it. Sixty-six monolingual German-speaking 2-, 3-, and 4-year-old children participated in two experimental sessions. In one session the familiar objects were chosen such that their labels were in the children's productive vocabularies, and in the other session the familiar objects were chosen such that their labels were only in the children's receptive vocabularies. Results indicated that children at all three ages were more likely to exclude a familiar object as the potential referent of the novel word if they could comprehend and produce its name rather than comprehend its name only. Indeed, level of word knowledge as operationalized in this way was a better predictor than was age. These results are discussed in the context of current theories of word learning by exclusion.

Task choice and semantic interference in picture naming.

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Piai, Vitória; Roelofs, Ardi; Schriefers, Herbert

2015-05-01

Evidence from dual-task performance indicates that speakers prefer not to select simultaneous responses in picture naming and another unrelated task, suggesting a response selection bottleneck in naming. In particular, when participants respond to tones with a manual response and name pictures with superimposed semantically related or unrelated distractor words, semantic interference in naming tends to be constant across stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) between the tone stimulus and the picture-word stimulus. In the present study, we examine whether semantic interference in picture naming depends on SOA in case of a task choice (naming the picture vs reading the word of a picture-word stimulus) based on tones. This situation requires concurrent processing of the tone stimulus and the picture-word stimulus, but not a manual response to the tones. On each trial, participants either named a picture or read aloud a word depending on the pitch of a tone, which was presented simultaneously with picture-word onset or 350 ms or 1000 ms before picture-word onset. Semantic interference was present with tone pre-exposure, but absent when tone and picture-word stimulus were presented simultaneously. Against the background of the available studies, these results support an account according to which speakers tend to avoid concurrent response selection, but can engage in other types of concurrent processing, such as task choices. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Auditory phonological priming in children and adults during word repetition

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Cleary, Miranda; Schwartz, Richard G.

2004-05-01

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

The Role of Geminates in Infants' Early Word Production and Word-Form Recognition

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Vihman, Marilyn; Majoran, Marinella

2017-01-01

Infants learning languages with long consonants, or geminates, have been found to "overselect" and "overproduce" these consonants in early words and also to commonly omit the word-initial consonant. A production study with thirty Italian children recorded at 1;3 and 1;9 strongly confirmed both of these tendencies. To test the…

Locus of Semantic Interference in Picture Naming: Evidence from Dual-Task Performance

Science.gov (United States)

Piai, Vitória; Roelofs, Ardi; Schriefers, Herbert

2014-01-01

Disagreement exists regarding the functional locus of semantic interference of distractor words in picture naming. This effect is a cornerstone of modern psycholinguistic models of word production, which assume that it arises in lexical response-selection. However, recent evidence from studies of dual-task performance suggests a locus in…

Speech monitoring and phonologically-mediated eye gaze in language perception and production: a comparison using printed word eye-tracking

Science.gov (United States)

Gauvin, Hanna S.; Hartsuiker, Robert J.; Huettig, Falk

2013-01-01

The Perceptual Loop Theory of speech monitoring assumes that speakers routinely inspect their inner speech. In contrast, Huettig and Hartsuiker (2010) observed that listening to one's own speech during language production drives eye-movements to phonologically related printed words with a similar time-course as listening to someone else's speech does in speech perception experiments. This suggests that speakers use their speech perception system to listen to their own overt speech, but not to their inner speech. However, a direct comparison between production and perception with the same stimuli and participants is lacking so far. The current printed word eye-tracking experiment therefore used a within-subjects design, combining production and perception. Displays showed four words, of which one, the target, either had to be named or was presented auditorily. Accompanying words were phonologically related, semantically related, or unrelated to the target. There were small increases in looks to phonological competitors with a similar time-course in both production and perception. Phonological effects in perception however lasted longer and had a much larger magnitude. We conjecture that this difference is related to a difference in predictability of one's own and someone else's speech, which in turn has consequences for lexical competition in other-perception and possibly suppression of activation in self-perception. PMID:24339809

Effects of Word Recognition Training in a Picture-Word Interference Task: Automaticity vs. Speed.

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Ehri, Linnea C.

First and second graders were taught to recognize a set of written words either more accurately or more rapidly. Both before and after word training, they named pictures printed with and without these words as distractors. Of interest was whether training would enhance or diminish the interference created by these words in the picture naming task.…

Listening to Puns Elicits the Co-Activation of Alternative Homophone Meanings during Language Production.

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Sebastian Benjamin Rose

Full Text Available Recent evidence suggests that lexical-semantic activation spread during language production can be dynamically shaped by contextual factors. In this study we investigated whether semantic processing modes can also affect lexical-semantic activation during word production. Specifically, we tested whether the processing of linguistic ambiguities, presented in the form of puns, has an influence on the co-activation of unrelated meanings of homophones in a subsequent language production task. In a picture-word interference paradigm with word distractors that were semantically related or unrelated to the non-depicted meanings of homophones we found facilitation induced by related words only when participants listened to puns before object naming, but not when they heard jokes with unambiguous linguistic stimuli. This finding suggests that a semantic processing mode of ambiguity perception can induce the co-activation of alternative homophone meanings during speech planning.

Contextual diversity facilitates learning new words in the classroom.

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Eva Rosa

Full Text Available In the field of word recognition and reading, it is commonly assumed that frequently repeated words create more accessible memory traces than infrequently repeated words, thus capturing the word-frequency effect. Nevertheless, recent research has shown that a seemingly related factor, contextual diversity (defined as the number of different contexts [e.g., films] in which a word appears, is a better predictor than word-frequency in word recognition and sentence reading experiments. Recent research has shown that contextual diversity plays an important role when learning new words in a laboratory setting with adult readers. In the current experiment, we directly manipulated contextual diversity in a very ecological scenario: at school, when Grade 3 children were learning words in the classroom. The new words appeared in different contexts/topics (high-contextual diversity or only in one of them (low-contextual diversity. Results showed that words encountered in different contexts were learned and remembered more effectively than those presented in redundant contexts. We discuss the practical (educational [e.g., curriculum design] and theoretical (models of word recognition implications of these findings.

Syllable frequency and word frequency effects in spoken and written word production in a non-alphabetic script

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Qingfang eZhang

2014-02-01

Full Text Available The effects of word frequency and syllable frequency are well-established phenomena in domain such as spoken production in alphabetic languages. Chinese, as a non-alphabetic language, presents unique lexical and phonological properties in speech production. For example, the proximate unit of phonological encoding is syllable in Chinese but segments in Dutch, French or English. The present study investigated the effects of word frequency and syllable frequency, and their interaction in Chinese written and spoken production. Significant facilitatory word frequency and syllable frequency effects were observed in spoken as well as in written production. The syllable frequency effect in writing indicated that phonological properties (i.e., syllabic frequency constrain orthographic output via a lexical route, at least, in Chinese written production. However, the syllable frequency effect over repetitions was divergent in both modalities: it was significant in the former two repetitions in spoken whereas it was significant in the second repetition only in written. Due to the fragility of the syllable frequency effect in writing, we suggest that the phonological influence in handwritten production is not mandatory and universal, and it is modulated by experimental manipulations. This provides evidence for the orthographic autonomy hypothesis, rather than the phonological mediation hypothesis. The absence of an interaction between word frequency and syllable frequency showed that the syllable frequency effect is independent of the word frequency effect in spoken and written output modalities. The implications of these results on written production models are discussed.

Parents' Translations of Child Gesture Facilitate Word Learning in Children with Autism, Down Syndrome and Typical Development.

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Dimitrova, Nevena; Özçalışkan, Şeyda; Adamson, Lauren B

2016-01-01

Typically-developing (TD) children frequently refer to objects uniquely in gesture. Parents translate these gestures into words, facilitating children's acquisition of these words (Goldin-Meadow et al. in Dev Sci 10(6):778-785, 2007). We ask whether this pattern holds for children with autism (AU) and with Down syndrome (DS) who show delayed vocabulary development. We observed 23 children with AU, 23 with DS, and 23 TD children with their parents over a year. Children used gestures to indicate objects before labeling them and parents translated their gestures into words. Importantly, children benefited from this input, acquiring more words for the translated gestures than the not translated ones. Results highlight the role contingent parental input to child gesture plays in language development of children with developmental disorders.

48 CFR 1910.004-70 - Brand name products or equal.

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2010-10-01

... 48 Federal Acquisition Regulations System 6 2010-10-01 2010-10-01 true Brand name products or... GOVERNORS ACQUISITION PLANNING SPECIFICATIONS, STANDARDS, AND OTHER PURCHASE DESCRIPTIONS 1910.004-70 Brand... below. (b) Citing brand name products. Brand name or equal purchase descriptions shall cite all brand...

The serial order of response units in word production: The case of typing.

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Scaltritti, Michele; Longcamp, Marieke; Alario, F-Xavier

2018-05-01

The selection and ordering of response units (phonemes, letters, keystrokes) represents a transversal issue across different modalities of language production. Here, the issue of serial order was investigated with respect to typewriting. Following seminal investigations in the spoken modality, we conducted an experiment where participants typed as many times as possible a pair of words during a fixed time-window. The 2 words shared either their first 2 keystrokes, the last 2 ones, all the keystrokes, or were unrelated. Fine-grained performance measures were recorded at the level of individual keystrokes. In contrast with previous results from the spoken modality, we observed an overall facilitation for words sharing the initial keystrokes. In addition, the initial overlap briefly delayed the execution of the following keystroke. The results are discussed with reference to different theoretical perspectives on serial order, with a particular attention to the competing accounts offered by position coding models and chaining models. Our findings point to potential major differences between the speaking and typing modalities in terms of interactive activation between lexical and response units processing levels. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

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

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

2015-01-01

Differences in processing nouns and verbs have been investigated intensely in psycholinguistics and neuropsychology in past decades. However, the majority of studies examining retrieval of these word classes have involved tasks of single word stimuli or responses. While the results have provided rich information for addressing issues about grammatical class distinctions, it is unclear whether they have adequate ecological validity for understanding lexical retrieval in connected speech which characterizes daily verbal communication. Previous investigations comparing retrieval of nouns and verbs in single word production and connected speech have reported either discrepant performance between the two contexts with presence of word class dissociation in picture naming but absence in connected speech, or null effects of word class. In addition, word finding difficulties have been found to be less severe in connected speech than picture naming. However, these studies have failed to match target stimuli of the two word classes and between tasks on psycholinguistic variables known to affect performance in response latency and/or accuracy. The present study compared lexical retrieval of nouns and verbs in picture naming and connected speech from picture description, procedural description, and story-telling among 19 Chinese speakers with anomic aphasia and their age, gender, and education matched healthy controls, to understand the influence of grammatical class on word production across speech contexts when target items were balanced for confounding variables between word classes and tasks. Elicitation of responses followed the protocol of the AphasiaBank consortium (http://talkbank.org/AphasiaBank/). Target words for confrontation naming were based on well-established naming tests, while those for narrative were drawn from a large database of normal speakers. Selected nouns and verbs in the two contexts were matched for age-of-acquisition (AoA) and familiarity

Using lexical variables to predict picture-naming errors in jargon aphasia

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Catherine Godbold

2015-04-01

real word errors when items were phonologically simpler (shorter, more dense and higher frequency neighbourhoods, higher usage (higher frequency and earlier age-of-acquisitionand less visually complex. Correct responses were also more likely to be elicited by high name agreement targets. The strongest contribution was from the phonology and usage components. Target-error overlap in non-word errors was predicted only by phonology, with phonologically-simpler items predicting lower overlap. These results demonstrate that output in jargon aphasia is modulated by properties of target items. Increasing activation in the system improves output in predictable ways. As well as predicting an item’s susceptibility to error (e.g., increased error rates for longer, low density, low frequency, late acquired, low name agreement and high visual complexity items, we could predict the nature of the error on the basis of target characteristics (e.g., non-word errors more likely for longer, low density, low frequency, late acquired, high visual complexity items. Increasing the strength of the signal reaching the phonological level reduces the rate of non-word error production but can result in lower target-error overlap, perhaps due to increased competition between activated phonemes. These findings are considered within the context of current models of single word production (e.g., Dell et al., 1997.

Subtle increases in interletter spacing facilitate the encoding of words during normal reading.

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Manuel Perea

Full Text Available BACKGROUND: Several recent studies have revealed that words presented with a small increase in interletter spacing are identified faster than words presented with the default interletter spacing (i.e., w a t e r faster than water. Modeling work has shown that this advantage occurs at an early encoding level. Given the implications of this finding for the ease of reading in the new digital era, here we examined whether the beneficial effect of small increases in interletter spacing can be generalized to a normal reading situation. METHODOLOGY: We conducted an experiment in which the participant's eyes were monitored when reading sentences varying in interletter spacing: i sentences were presented with the default (0.0 interletter spacing; ii sentences presented with a +1.0 interletter spacing; and iii sentences presented with a +1.5 interletter spacing. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Results showed shorter fixation duration times as an inverse function of interletter spacing (i.e., fixation durations were briefest with +1.5 spacing and slowest with the default spacing. CONCLUSIONS: Subtle increases in interletter spacing facilitate the encoding of the fixated word during normal reading. Thus, interletter spacing is a parameter that may affect the ease of reading, and it could be adjustable in future implementations of e-book readers.

Self-Judgments of Word Production Accuracy in Acquired Apraxia of Speech.

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Wambaugh, Julie; Shuster, Linda; Bailey, Dallin J; Mauszycki, Shannon; Kean, Jacob; Nessler, Christina; Wright, Sandra; Brunsvold, Jessica

2016-12-01

The ability to recognize one's own speech errors has long been considered a clinical feature of acquired apraxia of speech (AOS) despite limited empirical data supporting this notion. This study was designed to (a) investigate the ability of speakers with AOS to self-judge the accuracy of their own word productions and (b) examine the test-retest stability of a measure to quantify the self-judgments of speakers with AOS. Twenty-four speakers with AOS and aphasia repeated mono- and multisyllabic words. After each word, they indicated whether their production was correct or incorrect. This procedure was repeated 1 week later to examine performance stability. Percentage of incorrect word productions was stable for the group across times. Accuracy of judgments ranged from 64% to 100% at Time 1 and from 56% to 100% at Time 2. Inaccurate judgments of error productions (false positives) occurred much more frequently than inaccurate judgments of correct productions (false negatives). Error production was remarkably stable in our participants. As a group, the participants failed to detect almost one third of words produced erroneously. However, accuracy and stability of judgments over sampling times varied across participants. Findings suggest that error awareness might be a worthwhile target for treatment in some individuals with AOS.

Word learning in adults with second language experience: Effects of phonological and referent familiarity

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Kaushanskaya, Margarita; Yoo, Jeewon; Van Hecke, Stephanie

2014-01-01

Purpose The goal of this research was to examine whether phonological familiarity exerts different effects on novel word learning for familiar vs. unfamiliar referents, and whether successful word-learning is associated with increased second-language experience. Method Eighty-one adult native English speakers with various levels of Spanish knowledge learned phonologically-familiar novel words (constructed using English sounds) or phonologically-unfamiliar novel words (constructed using non-English and non-Spanish sounds) in association with either familiar or unfamiliar referents. Retention was tested via a forced-choice recognition-task. A median-split procedure identified high-ability and low-ability word-learners in each condition, and the two groups were compared on measures of second-language experience. Results Findings suggest that the ability to accurately match newly-learned novel names to their appropriate referents is facilitated by phonological familiarity only for familiar referents but not for unfamiliar referents. Moreover, more extensive second-language learning experience characterized superior learners primarily in one word-learning condition: Where phonologically-unfamiliar novel words were paired with familiar referents. Conclusions Together, these findings indicate that phonological familiarity facilitates novel word learning only for familiar referents, and that experience with learning a second language may have a specific impact on novel vocabulary learning in adults. PMID:22992709

The influence of orthographic experience on the development of phonological preparation in spoken word production.

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Li, Chuchu; Wang, Min

2017-08-01

Three sets of experiments using the picture naming tasks with the form preparation paradigm investigated the influence of orthographic experience on the development of phonological preparation unit in spoken word production in native Mandarin-speaking children. Participants included kindergarten children who have not received formal literacy instruction, Grade 1 children who are comparatively more exposed to the alphabetic pinyin system and have very limited Chinese character knowledge, Grades 2 and 4 children who have better character knowledge and more exposure to characters, and skilled adult readers who have the most advanced character knowledge and most exposure to characters. Only Grade 1 children showed the form preparation effect in the same initial consonant condition (i.e., when a list of target words shared the initial consonant). Both Grade 4 children and adults showed the preparation effect when the initial syllable (but not tone) among target words was shared. Kindergartners and Grade 2 children only showed the preparation effect when the initial syllable including tonal information was shared. These developmental changes in phonological preparation could be interpreted as a joint function of the modification of phonological representation and attentional shift. Extensive pinyin experience encourages speakers to attend to and select onset phoneme in phonological preparation, whereas extensive character experience encourages speakers to prepare spoken words in syllables.

Electronic Word of Behavior

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Kunst, Katrine

It is widely recognized that the transition from Word-of-mouth (WOM) to electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) allows for a wider and faster spread of information. However, little attention has been given to how digital channels expand the types of information consumers share. In this paper, we argue...... that recent years have seen a social media-facilitated move from opinion-centric eWOM (e.g. reviews) to behavior-centric (e.g. information about friends’ music consumption on Spotify). A review of the concepts of WOM and eWOM and a netnographic study reveal that the current definitions and understandings...... of the concepts do not capture this new kind of consumer-to-consumer information transfer about products and services. Consequently, we suggest an extension of those concepts: Electronic Word of Behavior....

Border collie comprehends object names as verbal referents.

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Pilley, John W; Reid, Alliston K

2011-02-01

Four experiments investigated the ability of a border collie (Chaser) to acquire receptive language skills. Experiment 1 demonstrated that Chaser learned and retained, over a 3-year period of intensive training, the proper-noun names of 1022 objects. Experiment 2 presented random pair-wise combinations of three commands and three names, and demonstrated that she understood the separate meanings of proper-noun names and commands. Chaser understood that names refer to objects, independent of the behavior directed toward those objects. Experiment 3 demonstrated Chaser's ability to learn three common nouns--words that represent categories. Chaser demonstrated one-to-many (common noun) and many-to-one (multiple-name) name-object mappings. Experiment 4 demonstrated Chaser's ability to learn words by inferential reasoning by exclusion--inferring the name of an object based on its novelty among familiar objects that already had names. Together, these studies indicate that Chaser acquired referential understanding of nouns, an ability normally attributed to children, which included: (a) awareness that words may refer to objects, (b) awareness of verbal cues that map words upon the object referent, and (c) awareness that names may refer to unique objects or categories of objects, independent of the behaviors directed toward those objects. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Evaluation of brand names of medicines: linguistic and format issues.

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Pires, Carla; Cavaco, Afonso; Vigário, Marina

2017-06-01

Focusing on the shape of brand names of medicines in the Portuguese market, the aims of this study were: to evaluate the number of words, syllables and letters, to identify the combinations of letters that are not found in Portuguese words and to characterize the use of capital letters in these names. A descriptive study was conducted using 474 randomized brand names of medicines, approximately 25% of all over-the-counter and prescribed medicines available in Portugal. The number of words, syllables and letters was automatically determined with a dedicated software. The combinations of letters that are not found in Portuguese and the use of capital letters were quantified through visual inspection. The 474 names were formed by 615 words. 74.5% of the words comprised three or less syllables, the most common number of syllables in the Portuguese words (91%). As recommended, 81% (n = 385) names were formed by just one word, 59.2% (n = 281) of the names were composed of 5-8 letters, and 83.1% (n = 394) presented the first letter in capitals or all letters in upper case. Contrary to recommendations, 22% of the names comprised combinations of letters that are not commonly found in Portuguese words. Given the current readability requirements, some of the Portuguese brand names of medicines should be reduced in length, adapted to the native language or capitalized. Equivalent studies are recommended in other European countries, because many brands of medicines are internationally marketed, while their development and approval should be beyond general marketing rules. © 2016 Royal Pharmaceutical Society.

Can the Relationship Between Rapid Automatized Naming and Word Reading Be Explained by a Catastrophe? Empirical Evidence From Students With and Without Reading Difficulties.

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Sideridis, Georgios D; Simos, Panagiotis; Mouzaki, Angeliki; Stamovlasis, Dimitrios; Georgiou, George K

2018-05-01

The purpose of the present study was to explain the moderating role of rapid automatized naming (RAN) in word reading with a cusp catastrophe model. We hypothesized that increases in RAN performance speed beyond a critical point would be associated with the disruption in word reading, consistent with a "generic shutdown" hypothesis. Participants were 587 elementary schoolchildren (Grades 2-4), among whom 87 had reading comprehension difficulties per the IQ-achievement discrepancy criterion. Data were analyzed via a cusp catastrophe model derived from the nonlinear dynamics systems theory. Results indicated that for children with reading comprehension difficulties, as naming speed falls below a critical level, the association between core reading processes (word recognition and decoding) becomes chaotic and unpredictable. However, after the significant common variance attributed to motivation, emotional, and internalizing symptoms measures from RAN scores was partialed out, its role as a bifurcation variable was no longer evident. Taken together, these findings suggest that RAN represents a salient cognitive measure that may be associated with psychoemotional processes that are, at least in part, responsible for unpredictable and chaotic word reading behavior among children with reading comprehension deficits.

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

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

2014-01-01

Background Differences in processing nouns and verbs have been investigated intensely in psycholinguistics and neuropsychology in past decades. However, the majority of studies examining retrieval of these word classes have involved tasks of single word stimuli or responses. While the results have provided rich information for addressing issues about grammatical class distinctions, it is unclear whether they have adequate ecological validity for understanding lexical retrieval in connected speech which characterizes daily verbal communication. Previous investigations comparing retrieval of nouns and verbs in single word production and connected speech have reported either discrepant performance between the two contexts with presence of word class dissociation in picture naming but absence in connected speech, or null effects of word class. In addition, word finding difficulties have been found to be less severe in connected speech than picture naming. However, these studies have failed to match target stimuli of the two word classes and between tasks on psycholinguistic variables known to affect performance in response latency and/or accuracy. Aims The present study compared lexical retrieval of nouns and verbs in picture naming and connected speech from picture description, procedural description, and story-telling among 19 Chinese speakers with anomic aphasia and their age, gender, and education matched healthy controls, to understand the influence of grammatical class on word production across speech contexts when target items were balanced for confounding variables between word classes and tasks. Methods & Procedures Elicitation of responses followed the protocol of the AphasiaBank consortium (http://talkbank.org/AphasiaBank/). Target words for confrontation naming were based on well-established naming tests, while those for narrative were drawn from a large database of normal speakers. Selected nouns and verbs in the two contexts were matched for age

How reading differs from object naming at the neuronal level.

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Price, C J; McCrory, E; Noppeney, U; Mechelli, A; Moore, C J; Biggio, N; Devlin, J T

2006-01-15

This paper uses whole brain functional neuroimaging in neurologically normal participants to explore how reading aloud differs from object naming in terms of neuronal implementation. In the first experiment, we directly compared brain activation during reading aloud and object naming. This revealed greater activation for reading in bilateral premotor, left posterior superior temporal and precuneus regions. In a second experiment, we segregated the object-naming system into object recognition and speech production areas by factorially manipulating the presence or absence of objects (pictures of objects or their meaningless scrambled counterparts) with the presence or absence of speech production (vocal vs. finger press responses). This demonstrated that the areas associated with speech production (object naming and repetitively saying "OK" to meaningless scrambled pictures) corresponded exactly to the areas where responses were higher for reading aloud than object naming in Experiment 1. Collectively the results suggest that, relative to object naming, reading increases the demands on shared speech production processes. At a cognitive level, enhanced activation for reading in speech production areas may reflect the multiple and competing phonological codes that are generated from the sublexical parts of written words. At a neuronal level, it may reflect differences in the speed with which different areas are activated and integrate with one another.

The Effect of Errorless Naming Treatment on Anomia in an Elderly Patient With Aphasia

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Atefe Yousefi

2015-10-01

Full Text Available Objectives: Anomia is one of the most common problems that aphasic patients and therapists are involved with it. Because of the disruptive effect of anomia on communicative efficiency of aphasic patients, this study aimed at examining the effect of errorless naming treatment on naming ability in an aphasic patient. Methods & Materials: The subject was selected using purposeful sampling method. This interventional single-subject study with ABA design was implemented on a 69-year-old woman with moderate Broca’s aphasia and phonological errors. The participant was a literate, right-handed Persian speaking patient with neither severe motor speech disorder nor significant auditory comprehension deficits. The patient underwent 10 sessions of treatment using errorless naming treatment protocol (Raymer et al., 2012. Based on this method, the patient was given multiple opportunities to rehearse the correct name of a picture supported by repetition and oral reading, while avoiding production of errors during training. Results: The effect size in confrontational naming task after intervention in this patient for trained and control words were 5.42 and 2.38, respectively. The linear trend line of correct responses percentage of trained and control words were 7.6 and 4.15, respectively. Improvements in the trained and control word sets remained at a higher level than baseline, one week later. Also improvements in Persian WAB and naming tests were noticed in posttreatment period. Conclusion: As a result of errorless naming treatment in the current study, the patient showed significant improvements in naming of trained words but generalization was not noticeable for control words. Based on this finding, this method might be useful as a therapeutic protocol in Persian speaking aphasic patients with anomia.

Tracking the time course of multi-word noun phrase production with ERPs or on when (and why) cat is faster than the big cat.

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Bürki, Audrey; Laganaro, Marina

2014-01-01

Words are rarely produced in isolation. Yet, our understanding of multi-word production, and especially its time course, is still rather poor. In this research, we use event-related potentials to examine the production of multi-word noun phrases in the context of overt picture naming. We track the processing costs associated with the production of these noun phrases as compared with the production of bare nouns, from picture onset to articulation. Behavioral results revealed longer naming latencies for French noun phrases with determiners and pre-nominal adjectives (D-A-N, the big cat) than for noun phrases with a determiner (D-N, the cat), or bare nouns (N, cat). The spatio-temporal analysis of the ERPs revealed differences in the duration of stable global electrophysiological patterns as a function of utterance format in two time windows, from ~190 to 300 ms after picture onset, and from ~530 ms after picture onset to 100 ms before articulation. These findings can be accommodated in the following model. During grammatical encoding (here from ~190 to 300 ms), the noun and adjective lemmas are accessed in parallel, followed by the selection of the gender-agreeing determiner. Phonological encoding (after ~530 ms) operates sequentially. As a consequence, the phonological encoding process is longer for longer utterances. In addition, when determiners are repeated across trials, their phonological encoding can be anticipated or primed, resulting in a shortened encoding process.

Tracking the time course of multi-word noun phrase production with ERPs or on when (and why cat is faster than the big cat

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Audrey eBürki

2014-07-01

Full Text Available Words are rarely produced in isolation. Yet, our understanding of multi-word production, and especially its time course, is still rather poor. In this research, we use event-related potentials to examine the production of multi-word noun phrases in the context of overt picture naming. We track the processing costs associated with the production of these noun phrases as compared with the production of bare nouns, from picture onset to articulation. Behavioral results revealed longer naming latencies for French noun phrases with determiners and pre-nominal adjectives (D-A-N, the big cat than for noun phrases with a determiner (D-N, the cat or bare nouns (N, cat. The spatio-temporal analysis of the ERPs revealed differences in the duration of stable global electrophysiological patterns as a function of utterance format in two time windows, from ~190 ms to 300 ms after picture onset, and from ~530 ms after picture onset to 100 ms before articulation. These findings can be accommodated in the following model. During grammatical encoding (here from ~190 ms to 300 ms, the noun and adjective lemmas are accessed in parallel, followed by the selection of the gender-agreeing determiner. Phonological encoding (after ~530 ms operates sequentially. As a consequence, the phonological encoding process is longer for longer utterances. In addition, when determiners are repeated across trials, their phonological encoding can be anticipated or primed, resulting in a shortened encoding process.

Elevating Baseline Activation Does Not Facilitate Reading of Unattended Words

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Lien, Mei-Ching; Kouchi, Scott; Ruthruff, Eric; Lachter, Joel B.

2009-01-01

Previous studies have disagreed the extent to which people extract meaning from words presented outside the focus of spatial attention. The present study, examined a possible explanation for such discrepancies, inspired by attenuation theory: unattended words can be read more automatically when they have a high baseline level of activation (e.g., due to frequent repetition or due to being expected in a given context). We presented a brief prime word in lowercase, followed by a target word in uppercase. Participants indicated whether the target word belonged to a particular category (e.g., "sport"). When we drew attention to the prime word using a visual cue, the prime produced substantial priming effects on target responses (i.e., faster responses when the prime and target words were identical or from the same category than when they belonged to different categories). When prime words were not attended, however, they produced no priming effects. This finding replicated even when there were only 4 words, each repeated 160 times during the experiment. Even with a very high baseline level of activation, it appears that very little word processing is possible without spatial attention.

Investigating the flow of information during speaking: the impact of morpho-phonological, associative, and categorical picture distractors on picture naming.

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Bölte, Jens; Böhl, Andrea; Dobel, Christian; Zwitserlood, Pienie

2015-01-01

In three experiments, participants named target pictures by means of German compound words (e.g., Gartenstuhl-garden chair), each accompanied by two different distractor pictures (e.g., lawn mower and swimming pool). Targets and distractor pictures were semantically related either associatively (garden chair and lawn mower) or by a shared semantic category (garden chair and wardrobe). Within each type of semantic relation, target and distractor pictures either shared morpho-phonological (word-form) information (Gartenstuhl with Gartenzwerg, garden gnome, and Gartenschlauch, garden hose) or not. A condition with two completely unrelated pictures served as baseline. Target naming was facilitated when distractor and target pictures were morpho-phonologically related. This is clear evidence for the activation of word-form information of distractor pictures. Effects were larger for associatively than for categorically related distractors and targets, which constitute evidence for lexical competition. Mere categorical relatedness, in the absence of morpho-phonological overlap, resulted in null effects (Experiments 1 and 2), and only speeded target naming when effects reflect only conceptual, but not lexical processing (Experiment 3). Given that distractor pictures activate their word forms, the data cannot be easily reconciled with discrete serial models. The results fit well with models that allow information to cascade forward from conceptual to word-form levels.

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.

Tracing the time course of picture--word processing.

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Smith, M C; Magee, L E

1980-12-01

A number of independent lines of research have suggested that semantic and articulatory information become available differentially from pictures and words. The first of the experiments reported here sought to clarify the time course by which information about pictures and words becomes available by considering the pattern of interference generated when incongruent pictures and words are presented simultaneously in a Stroop-like situation. Previous investigators report that picture naming is easily disrupted by the presence of a distracting word but that word naming is relatively immune to interference from an incongruent picture. Under the assumption that information available from a completed process may disrupt an ongoing process, these results suggest that words access articulatory information more rapidly than do pictures. Experiment 1 extended this paradigm by requiring subjects to verify the category of the target stimulus. In accordance with the hypothesis that picture access the semantic code more rapidly than words, there was a reversal in the interference pattern: Word categorization suffered considerable disruption, whereas picture categorization was minimally affected by the presence of an incongruent word. Experiment 2 sought to further test the hypothesis that access to semantic and articulatory codes is different for pictures and words by examining memory for those items following naming or categorization. Categorized words were better recognized than named words, whereas the reverse was true for pictures, a result which suggests that picture naming involves more extensive processing than picture categorization. Experiment 3 replicated this result under conditions in which viewing time was held constant. The last experiment extended the investigation of memory differences to a situation in which subjects were required to generate the superordinate category name. Here, memory for categorized pictures was as good as memory for named pictures. Category

Proper Names in Dialectal Idioms: Stages of Idiomatization

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Ekaterina S. Kogan

2014-06-01

Full Text Available The article deals with the functioning of proper names (both personal and place names and their derivatives in dialectal idioms. Based upon the criteria of the establishing of the idiomatic status of word combinations, traditionally used in contemporary lexicology, the author marks out four stages of the entry of units containing proper names and their derivatives into a regional idiomatic inventory: 1 word combinations with figurative meanings and transparent motivation easily decoded by every member of the local community (e. g., naryaditsa kak Anisya Klimovskaya ‘to be slovenly dressed’; 2 word combinations with a proper name localizing a nationally known idiom (e. g., zhelninsky telyonok ‘screaming person’; 3 word combinations including a name with a general meaning (e. g., Masha s Yashey ‘two inseparable persons’; 4 idioms with non-transparent motivation (e. g., tutursky pop ‘cuckoo male’. The analyzed data are retrieved from dialect dictionaries (including those of idioms and notes made by the Ural Federal University Toponymic Expeditions in Kostroma Region in 2011–2013.

Music reading expertise modulates hemispheric lateralization in English word processing but not in Chinese character processing.

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Li, Sara Tze Kwan; Hsiao, Janet Hui-Wen

2018-07-01

Music notation and English word reading both involve mapping horizontally arranged visual components to components in sound, in contrast to reading in logographic languages such as Chinese. Accordingly, music-reading expertise may influence English word processing more than Chinese character processing. Here we showed that musicians named English words significantly faster than non-musicians when words were presented in the left visual field/right hemisphere (RH) or the center position, suggesting an advantage of RH processing due to music reading experience. This effect was not observed in Chinese character naming. A follow-up ERP study showed that in a sequential matching task, musicians had reduced RH N170 responses to English non-words under the processing of musical segments as compared with non-musicians, suggesting a shared visual processing mechanism in the RH between music notation and English non-word reading. This shared mechanism may be related to the letter-by-letter, serial visual processing that characterizes RH English word recognition (e.g., Lavidor & Ellis, 2001), which may consequently facilitate English word processing in the RH in musicians. Thus, music reading experience may have differential influences on the processing of different languages, depending on their similarities in the cognitive processes involved. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Is visual attention automatically attracted to one's own name?

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Bundesen, C; Kyllingsbæk, Søren; Houmann, K J

1997-01-01

Subjects were presented with briefly exposed visual displays of words that were common first names with a length of four to six letters. In the main experiment, each display consisted of four words: two names shown in red and two shown in white. The subject's task was to report the red names (tar......, visual attention was not automatically attracted by the subject's own name....

Distinct ERP Signatures of Word Frequency, Phrase Frequency, and Prototypicality in Speech Production

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Hendrix, Peter; Bolger, Patrick; Baayen, Harald

2017-01-01

Recent studies have documented frequency effects for word n-grams, independently of word unigram frequency. Further studies have revealed constructional prototype effects, both at the word level as well as for phrases. The present speech production study investigates the time course of these effects for the production of prepositional phrases in…

Investigation of Bioequivalence Between Brand-name and Generic Irinotecan Products.

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Saito, Ken-Ichi; Inoue, Yutaka; Ikegami, Yoji; Nanbo, Izumi; Onozuka, Mari; Sano, Kazumi; Yoshida, Hisahiro; Sakamoto, Toshihiro; Tatebayashi, Emi; Fujita, Ken-Ichi; Sasaki, Yasutsuna; Kitazawa, Takaki

2016-11-01

To investigate bioequivalence among generic and brand-name irinotecan products. Products of Yakult and Daiichi-Sankyo (brand-name products), Sandoz, Nippon Kayaku, Taiho, and Sawai were compared with respect to their composition and antitumor activity. High-performance liquid chromatography demonstrated that related substances were within the acceptable range. The 3-(4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2,5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide assay revealed significant differences in cytotoxicity for four cancer cell lines among the products. The concentration of the active compound SN-38 was highest in Yakult's product (23.82 ng/ml) and lowest in Daiichi-Sankyo's product (8.96 ng/ml). MTT assay data were correlated with the SN-38 concentration, suggesting that it influenced differences in cytocidal activity among products. However, the SN-38 concentration was far lower than that of irinotecan (20 mg/ml), suggesting a negligible clinical effect. Metabolism of irinotecan to SN-38 or open-ring forms did not differ significantly among the products. The generic products showed equivalent efficacy and safety to the brand-name products. Copyright© 2016 International Institute of Anticancer Research (Dr. John G. Delinassios), All rights reserved.

Word production inconsistency of Singaporean-English-speaking adolescents with Down Syndrome.

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Wong, Betty; Brebner, Chris; McCormack, Paul; Butcher, Andy

2015-01-01

The nature of speech disorders in individuals with Down Syndrome (DS) remains controversial despite various explanations put forth in the literature to account for the observed speech profiles. A high level of word production inconsistency in children with DS has led researchers to query whether the inconsistency continues into adolescence, and if the inconsistency stems from inconsistent phonological disorder (IPD) or childhood apraxia of speech (CAS). Of the studies that have been published, most suggest that the speech profile of individuals with DS is delayed, while a few recent studies suggest a combination of delayed and disordered patterns. However, no studies have explored the nature of word production inconsistency in this population, and the relationship between word production inconsistency, receptive vocabulary and severity of speech disorder. To investigate in a pilot study the extent of word production inconsistency in adolescents with DS and to examine the correlations between word production inconsistency, measures of receptive vocabulary, severity of speech disorder and oromotor skills in adolescents with DS. The participants were 32 native speakers of Singaporean-English adolescents, comprising 16 participants with DS and 16 typically developing (TD) participants. The participants completed a battery of standardized speech and language assessments, including The Diagnostic Evaluation of Articulation and Phonology (DEAP) assessment. Results from each test were correlated to determine relationships. Qualitative analyses were also carried out on all the data collected. In this study, seven out of 16 participants with DS scored above 40% on word production inconsistency, a diagnostic criterion for IPD. In addition, all participants with DS performed poorly on the oromotor assessment of DEAP. The overall speech profile observed did not exactly correspond with the cluster symptoms observed in children with IPD or CAS. Word production inconsistency is a

What’s in a name depends on the type of name: The relationships between semantic and phonological access, reading fluency and reading comprehension

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Poulsen, Mads; Elbro, Carsten

2013-01-01

examined both components in naming tasks – with isolated letters (phonological) and pictures (semantic). Seventy-five Grade 5 students were administered measures of letter and picture naming speed, word and nonword reading fluency, reading comprehension, together with control measures of vocabulary....... The results showed that letter naming was a unique predictor of word reading fluency, while picture naming was not. Conversely, picture naming speed contributed unique variance to reading comprehension, while letter naming did not. The results indicate that phonological and semantic lexical access speed...

Is Retrieval-Induced Forgetting behind the Bilingual Disadvantage in Word Production?

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Runnqvist, Elin; Costa, Albert

2012-01-01

Levy, Mc Veigh, Marful and Andreson (2007) found that naming pictures in L2 impaired subsequent recall of the L1 translation words. This was interpreted as evidence for a domain-general inhibitory mechanism (RIF) underlying first language attrition. Because this result is at odds with some previous findings and theoretical assumptions, we wanted…

Tracing Attention and the Activation Flow of Spoken Word Planning Using Eye Movements

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Roelofs, Ardi

2008-01-01

The flow of activation from concepts to phonological forms within the word production system was examined in 3 experiments. In Experiment 1, participants named pictures while ignoring superimposed distractor pictures that were semantically related, phonologically related, or unrelated. Eye movements and naming latencies were recorded. The…

Towards the study of color naming in Portuguese: structure and meaning of constructed nouns and adjectives

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Margarita Correia

2013-08-01

Full Text Available Color naming is a central study subject in Lexicology, although its systematic morphological description in Portuguese is still lacking. In this study we describe the morphological and semantic aspects of complex nouns and adjectives constructed on the basis of the basic color terms from the Portuguese language. We focus on a description of the internal structure of these complex words, as well as on aspects concerning the productivity of the morphological processes, and attempt to associate those aspects with the referential capacities of the studied words. Lexicographical data were used, collected from the Vocabulário Ortográfico do Português, and the theoretical framework of this research is SILEX’s constructional model of Morphology. We verified that suffixation is the most productive process, followed by composition. Prefixation is rather unproductive. There are differences in the way that derived nouns and adjectives, on the one hand, and compounds, on the other, may name color tones and degrees of saturation. Derived words give rise to the naming of tones in a very imprecise manner, while compounds are much more effective and precise in the way they may name them, and composition is the most efficient resource available to denote degrees of brightness.

Reconciling phonological neighborhood effects in speech production through single trial analysis.

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Sadat, Jasmin; Martin, Clara D; Costa, Albert; Alario, F-Xavier

2014-02-01

A crucial step for understanding how lexical knowledge is represented is to describe the relative similarity of lexical items, and how it influences language processing. Previous studies of the effects of form similarity on word production have reported conflicting results, notably within and across languages. The aim of the present study was to clarify this empirical issue to provide specific constraints for theoretical models of language production. We investigated the role of phonological neighborhood density in a large-scale picture naming experiment using fine-grained statistical models. The results showed that increasing phonological neighborhood density has a detrimental effect on naming latencies, and re-analyses of independently obtained data sets provide supplementary evidence for this effect. Finally, we reviewed a large body of evidence concerning phonological neighborhood density effects in word production, and discussed the occurrence of facilitatory and inhibitory effects in accuracy measures. The overall pattern shows that phonological neighborhood generates two opposite forces, one facilitatory and one inhibitory. In cases where speech production is disrupted (e.g. certain aphasic symptoms), the facilitatory component may emerge, but inhibitory processes dominate in efficient naming by healthy speakers. These findings are difficult to accommodate in terms of monitoring processes, but can be explained within interactive activation accounts combining phonological facilitation and lexical competition. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Official Naming in Hå, Klepp and Time

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Inge Særheim

2012-08-01

Full Text Available Toponyms localize, reflect and give information about historical traditions and various phenomena in an area. They form part of the local heritage and culture. The relationship between place names, heritage and identity is often underlined in guidelines regarding official naming of streets and roads. In what way is heritage and local identity reflected in the road names of the three municipalities Hå, Klepp and Time (Southwest-Norway, and how is the special character of this area expressed in the names? More than half of the official road names in the three municipalities are either identical with a local toponym, or they consist of a word for ‘road’ and a local toponym (or an appellative describing the location. This shows that there is a strong commitment to base the official naming on local tradition and thus contribute to identity. Quite a few elements from the dialect, e.g. special pronunciation, grammatical forms or local words, appear in the names, especially in the road names from Hå, reflecting that the names are part of the local culture, and due to the fact that the dialect is unique. Consistency is a challenge, however; the same word is sometimes spelled in different ways in different names. It appears that, with some exceptions, cultural heritage and local tradition have been preferred principles and guidelines with regard to naming of roads in the three municipalities, due to a consciousness that heritage and tradition create identity.

Asymmetrical Switch Costs in Bilingual Language Production Induced by Reading Words

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Peeters, David; Runnqvist, Elin; Bertrand, Daisy; Grainger, Jonathan

2014-01-01

We examined language-switching effects in French-English bilinguals using a paradigm where pictures are always named in the same language (either French or English) within a block of trials, and on each trial, the picture is preceded by a printed word from the same language or from the other language. Participants had to either make a language…

The Effect of Colour-Word Interference on Children's Memory for Words.

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Malliet, Gineva M.

The Stroop color-word test involves a conflict situation in which subjects are asked to say aloud the ink color used to print a color word on a card. Interference occurs when the ink color is in conflict with the color word, such as 'red' printed in green ink. On the other hand, little interference occurs when asked to name the color words…

Effects of Word Frequency and Transitional Probability on Word Reading Durations of Younger and Older Speakers.

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Moers, Cornelia; Meyer, Antje; Janse, Esther

2017-06-01

High-frequency units are usually processed faster than low-frequency units in language comprehension and language production. Frequency effects have been shown for words as well as word combinations. Word co-occurrence effects can be operationalized in terms of transitional probability (TP). TPs reflect how probable a word is, conditioned by its right or left neighbouring word. This corpus study investigates whether three different age groups-younger children (8-12 years), adolescents (12-18 years) and older (62-95 years) Dutch speakers-show frequency and TP context effects on spoken word durations in reading aloud, and whether age groups differ in the size of these effects. Results show consistent effects of TP on word durations for all age groups. Thus, TP seems to influence the processing of words in context, beyond the well-established effect of word frequency, across the entire age range. However, the study also indicates that age groups differ in the size of TP effects, with older adults having smaller TP effects than adolescent readers. Our results show that probabilistic reduction effects in reading aloud may at least partly stem from contextual facilitation that leads to faster reading times in skilled readers, as well as in young language learners.

Brand name confusion: Subjective and objective measures of orthographic similarity.

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Burt, Jennifer S; McFarlane, Kimberley A; Kelly, Sarah J; Humphreys, Michael S; Weatherall, Kimberlee; Burrell, Robert G

2017-09-01

Determining brand name similarity is vital in areas of trademark registration and brand confusion. Students rated the orthographic (spelling) similarity of word pairs (Experiments 1, 2, and 4) and brand name pairs (Experiment 5). Similarity ratings were consistently higher when words shared beginnings rather than endings, whereas shared pronunciation of the stressed vowel had small and less consistent effects on ratings. In Experiment 3 a behavioral task confirmed the similarity of shared beginnings in lexical processing. Specifically, in a task requiring participants to decide whether 2 words presented in the clear (a probe and a later target) were the same or different, a masked prime word preceding the target shortened response latencies if it shared its initial 3 letters with the target. The ratings of students for word and brand name pairs were strongly predicted by metrics of orthographic similarity from the visual word identification literature based on the number of shared letters and their relative positions. The results indicate a potential use for orthographic metrics in brand name registration and trademark law. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).

Young toddlers' word comprehension is flexible and efficient.

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Elika Bergelson

Full Text Available Much of what is known about word recognition in toddlers comes from eyetracking studies. Here we show that the speed and facility with which children recognize words, as revealed in such studies, cannot be attributed to a task-specific, closed-set strategy; rather, children's gaze to referents of spoken nouns reflects successful search of the lexicon. Toddlers' spoken word comprehension was examined in the context of pictures that had two possible names (such as a cup of juice which could be called "cup" or "juice" and pictures that had only one likely name for toddlers (such as "apple", using a visual world eye-tracking task and a picture-labeling task (n = 77, mean age, 21 months. Toddlers were just as fast and accurate in fixating named pictures with two likely names as pictures with one. If toddlers do name pictures to themselves, the name provides no apparent benefit in word recognition, because there is no cost to understanding an alternative lexical construal of the picture. In toddlers, as in adults, spoken words rapidly evoke their referents.

Introduction Strategy for New Products with Positive and Negative Word-of-Mouth

OpenAIRE

Vijay Mahajan; Eitan Muller; Roger A. Kerin

1984-01-01

Existing innovation diffusion models assume that individual experience with the product is always communicated positively through word-of-mouth. For certain innovations, however, this assumption is tenuous since communicators of the product experience may transfer favorable, unfavorable, or indifferent messages through word-of-mouth. This paper examines a diffusion model for products in which negative information plays a dominant role, discusses its implications for optimal advertising timing...

Sound production treatment for acquired apraxia of speech: Effects of blocked and random practice on multisyllabic word production.

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Wambaugh, Julie; Nessler, Christina; Wright, Sandra; Mauszycki, Shannon; DeLong, Catharine

2016-10-01

This study was designed to examine the effects of practice schedule, blocked vs random, on outcomes of a behavioural treatment for acquired apraxia of speech (AOS), Sound Production Treatment (SPT). SPT was administered to four speakers with chronic AOS and aphasia in the context of multiple baseline designs across behaviours and participants. Treatment was applied to multiple sound errors within three-to-five syllable words. All participants received both practice schedules: SPT-Random (SPT-R) and SPT-Blocked (SPT-B). Improvements in accuracy of word production for trained items were found for both treatment conditions for all participants. One participant demonstrated better maintenance effects associated with SPT-R. Response generalisation to untreated words varied across participants, but was generally modest and unstable. Stimulus generalisation to production of words in sentence completion was positive for three of the participants. Stimulus generalisation to production of phrases was positive for two of the participants. Findings provide additional efficacy data regarding SPT's effects on articulation of treated items and extend knowledge of the treatment's effects when applied to multiple targets within multisyllabic words.

SSC 254 Screen-Based Word Processors: Production Tests. The Lanier Word Processor.

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Moyer, Ruth A.

Designed for use in Trident Technical College's Secretarial Lab, this series of 12 production tests focuses on the use of the Lanier Word Processor for a variety of tasks. In tests 1 and 2, students are required to type and print out letters. Tests 3 through 8 require students to reformat a text; make corrections on a letter; divide and combine…

Investigating the flow of information during speaking: The impact of morpho-phonological, associative and categorical picture distractors on picture naming

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Jens eBölte

2015-10-01

Full Text Available In three experiments, participants named target pictures by means of German compound words (e.g., Gartenstuhl - garden chair, each accompanied by two different distractor pictures (e.g., lawn mower and swimming pool.Targets and distractor pictures were semantically related, either associatively (garden chair and lawn mower or by a shared semantic category (garden chair and wardrobe. Within each type of semantic relation, target and distractor pictures either shared morpho-phonological (word-form information (Gartenstuhl with Gartenzwerg, garden gnome, and Gartenschlauch, garden hose or not. A condition with two completely unrelated pictures served as baseline. Target naming was facilitated when distractor and target pictures were morpho-phonologically related. This is clear evidence for the activation of lexical information of distractor pictures. Effects were larger for associatively than for categorically related distractors and targets, which constitutes evidence for lexical competition. Mere categorical relatedness, in the absence of morpho-phonological overlap, resulted in null effects (Experiments 1 and 2, and only speeded target naming when effects reflect only conceptual, not lexical processing (Experiment 3. Given that distractor pictures activate their word forms, the data cannot be easily reconciled with discrete serial models. The results fit well with models that allow information to cascade forward from conceptual to word-form levels.

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....

Production and Perception of Distortion in Word-Initial Friction Duration

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Jovicic, Slobodan T.; Kasic, Zorca; Punisic, Silvana

2010-01-01

The purpose of the present study was to investigate (a) the distortion in production of word-initial friction duration in fricative /[esh]/, and (b) the perceptual discrimination between typical (normal) and atypical (prolonged or lengthened) friction duration. In the first experiment 80 school aged children pronounced word /[esh]uma/, 40 of them…

The Relationship Between Confrontation Naming and Story Gist Production in Aphasia.

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Richardson, Jessica D; Dalton, Sarah Grace; Fromm, Davida; Forbes, Margaret; Holland, Audrey; MacWhinney, Brian

2018-03-01

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between picture naming performance and the ability to communicate the gist, or essential elements, of a story. We also sought to determine if this relationship varied according to Western Aphasia Battery-Revised (WAB-R; Kertesz, 2007) aphasia subtype. Demographic information, test scores, and transcripts of 258 individuals with aphasia completing 3 narrative tasks were retrieved from the AphasiaBank database. Narratives were subjected to a main concept analysis to determine gist production. A correlation analysis was used to investigate the relationship between naming scores and main concept production for the whole group of persons with aphasia and for WAB-R subtypes separately. We found strong correlations between naming test scores and narrative gist production for the large sample of persons with aphasia. However, the strength of the correlations varied by WAB-R subtype. Picture naming may accurately predict gist production for individuals with Broca's and Wernicke's aphasia, but not for other WAB-R subtypes. Given the current reprioritization of outcome measurement, picture naming may not be an appropriate surrogate measure for functional communication for all persons with aphasia. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.5851848.

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.

Word segmentation by alternating colors facilitates eye guidance in Chinese reading.

Science.gov (United States)

Zhou, Wei; Wang, Aiping; Shu, Hua; Kliegl, Reinhold; Yan, Ming

2018-02-12

During sentence reading, low spatial frequency information afforded by spaces between words is the primary factor for eye guidance in spaced writing systems, whereas saccade generation for unspaced writing systems is less clear and under debate. In the present study, we investigated whether word-boundary information, provided by alternating colors (consistent or inconsistent with word-boundary information) influences saccade-target selection in Chinese. In Experiment 1, as compared to a baseline (i.e., uniform color) condition, word segmentation with alternating color shifted fixation location towards the center of words. In contrast, incorrect word segmentation shifted fixation location towards the beginning of words. In Experiment 2, we used a gaze-contingent paradigm to restrict the color manipulation only to the upcoming parafoveal words and replicated the results, including fixation location effects, as observed in Experiment 1. These results indicate that Chinese readers are capable of making use of parafoveal word-boundary knowledge for saccade generation, even if such information is unfamiliar to them. The present study provides novel support for the hypothesis that word segmentation is involved in the decision about where to fixate next during Chinese reading.

Stress priming in picture naming: an SOA study.

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Schiller, Niels O; Fikkert, Paula; Levelt, Clara C

2004-01-01

This study investigates whether or not the representation of lexical stress information can be primed during speech production. In four experiments, we attempted to prime the stress position of bisyllabic target nouns (picture names) having initial and final stress with auditory prime words having either the same or different stress as the target (e.g., WORtel-MOtor vs. koSTUUM-MOtor; capital letters indicate stressed syllables in prime-target pairs). Furthermore, half of the prime words were semantically related, the other half unrelated. Overall, picture names were not produced faster when the prime word had the same stress as the target than when the prime had different stress, i.e., there was no stress-priming effect in any experiment. This result would not be expected if stress were stored in the lexicon. However, targets with initial stress were responded to faster than final-stress targets. The reason for this effect was neither the quality of the pictures nor frequency of occurrence or voice-key characteristics. We hypothesize here that this stress effect is a genuine encoding effect, i.e., words with stress on the second syllable take longer to be encoded because their stress pattern is irregular with respect to the lexical distribution of bisyllabic stress patterns, even though it can be regular with respect to metrical stress rules in Dutch. The results of the experiments are discussed in the framework of models of phonological encoding.

Characteristic sounds facilitate visual search.

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Iordanescu, Lucica; Guzman-Martinez, Emmanuel; Grabowecky, Marcia; Suzuki, Satoru

2008-06-01

In a natural environment, objects that we look for often make characteristic sounds. A hiding cat may meow, or the keys in the cluttered drawer may jingle when moved. Using a visual search paradigm, we demonstrated that characteristic sounds facilitated visual localization of objects, even when the sounds carried no location information. For example, finding a cat was faster when participants heard a meow sound. In contrast, sounds had no effect when participants searched for names rather than pictures of objects. For example, hearing "meow" did not facilitate localization of the word cat. These results suggest that characteristic sounds cross-modally enhance visual (rather than conceptual) processing of the corresponding objects. Our behavioral demonstration of object-based cross-modal enhancement complements the extensive literature on space-based cross-modal interactions. When looking for your keys next time, you might want to play jingling sounds.

Effect of word familiarity on visually evoked magnetic fields.

Science.gov (United States)

Harada, N; Iwaki, S; Nakagawa, S; Yamaguchi, M; Tonoike, M

2004-11-30

This study investigated the effect of word familiarity of visual stimuli on the word recognizing function of the human brain. Word familiarity is an index of the relative ease of word perception, and is characterized by facilitation and accuracy on word recognition. We studied the effect of word familiarity, using "Hiragana" (phonetic characters in Japanese orthography) characters as visual stimuli, on the elicitation of visually evoked magnetic fields with a word-naming task. The words were selected from a database of lexical properties of Japanese. The four "Hiragana" characters used were grouped and presented in 4 classes of degree of familiarity. The three components were observed in averaged waveforms of the root mean square (RMS) value on latencies at about 100 ms, 150 ms and 220 ms. The RMS value of the 220 ms component showed a significant positive correlation (F=(3/36); 5.501; p=0.035) with the value of familiarity. ECDs of the 220 ms component were observed in the intraparietal sulcus (IPS). Increments in the RMS value of the 220 ms component, which might reflect ideographical word recognition, retrieving "as a whole" were enhanced with increments of the value of familiarity. The interaction of characters, which increased with the value of familiarity, might function "as a large symbol"; and enhance a "pop-out" function with an escaping character inhibiting other characters and enhancing the segmentation of the character (as a figure) from the ground.

DINAMIC ASPECTS OF INTERNATIONALIZATION IN MODERN MEDIA WORD CREATION

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Ratsiburskaya Larisa Viktorovna

2014-12-01

Full Text Available In the context of globalization at the turn of XX–XXI centuries there are various manifestations of internationalization in the Russian language notified by linguists. Internationalization in modern Russian word-formation reveals itself in derivational activity of loan morphemes and models, as well as in the borrowing of new derivational morphemes. In modern mass media word creation well-known derivational affixes (the prefixes anti-, contr-, pseudo-, quasi-, super-, hyper-, ultra-, ex-, as well as some new derivational elements (the prefix mega-, the suffix -ing, -land, -wood, suffixed -gate are noted, and the author puts forward arguments to substantiate their morphemic status. "Ameroglobalization", and in particular the influence of the English language on the semantics of prefixes, contributes to the growth of word-building activity and productivity of the prefixes which are of Greek-Latin origin. The appearance of new word-building affixes in the modern Russian language is affected by active usage of the corresponding foreign morphemes in the journalists' word creation, in media texts and on the internet forums. Activization of foreign derivation elements in the media word creation is conditioned by sociocultural factors. Advertisement and mass media encourage the trend of using angloamericanisms and facilitate growth of word-building productivity of new affixes and new word-building models.

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.

Deep learning with word embeddings improves biomedical named entity recognition.

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Habibi, Maryam; Weber, Leon; Neves, Mariana; Wiegandt, David Luis; Leser, Ulf

2017-07-15

Text mining has become an important tool for biomedical research. The most fundamental text-mining task is the recognition of biomedical named entities (NER), such as genes, chemicals and diseases. Current NER methods rely on pre-defined features which try to capture the specific surface properties of entity types, properties of the typical local context, background knowledge, and linguistic information. State-of-the-art tools are entity-specific, as dictionaries and empirically optimal feature sets differ between entity types, which makes their development costly. Furthermore, features are often optimized for a specific gold standard corpus, which makes extrapolation of quality measures difficult. We show that a completely generic method based on deep learning and statistical word embeddings [called long short-term memory network-conditional random field (LSTM-CRF)] outperforms state-of-the-art entity-specific NER tools, and often by a large margin. To this end, we compared the performance of LSTM-CRF on 33 data sets covering five different entity classes with that of best-of-class NER tools and an entity-agnostic CRF implementation. On average, F1-score of LSTM-CRF is 5% above that of the baselines, mostly due to a sharp increase in recall. The source code for LSTM-CRF is available at https://github.com/glample/tagger and the links to the corpora are available at https://corposaurus.github.io/corpora/ . habibima@informatik.hu-berlin.de. © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com

Do age-related word retrieval difficulties appear (or disappear) in connected speech?

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Kavé, Gitit; Goral, Mira

2017-09-01

We conducted a comprehensive literature review of studies of word retrieval in connected speech in healthy aging and reviewed relevant aphasia research that could shed light on the aging literature. Four main hypotheses guided the review: (1) Significant retrieval difficulties would lead to reduced output in connected speech. (2) Significant retrieval difficulties would lead to a more limited lexical variety in connected speech. (3) Significant retrieval difficulties would lead to an increase in word substitution errors and in pronoun use as well as to greater dysfluency and hesitation in connected speech. (4) Retrieval difficulties on tests of single-word production would be associated with measures of word retrieval in connected speech. Studies on aging did not confirm these four hypotheses, unlike studies on aphasia that generally did. The review suggests that future research should investigate how context facilitates word production in old age.

Semantic facilitation in bilingual first language acquisition.

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Bilson, Samuel; Yoshida, Hanako; Tran, Crystal D; Woods, Elizabeth A; Hills, Thomas T

2015-07-01

Bilingual first language learners face unique challenges that may influence the rate and order of early word learning relative to monolinguals. A comparison of the productive vocabularies of 435 children between the ages of 6 months and 7 years-181 of which were bilingual English learners-found that monolinguals learned both English words and all-language concepts faster than bilinguals. However, bilinguals showed an enhancement of an effect previously found in monolinguals-the preference for learning words with more associative cues. Though both monolinguals and bilinguals were best fit by a similar model of word learning, semantic network structure and growth indicated that the two groups were learning English words in a different order. Further, in comparison with a model of two-monolinguals-in-one-mind, bilinguals overproduced translational equivalents. Our results support an emergent account of bilingual first language acquisition, where learning a word in one language facilitates its acquisition in a second language. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Words we do not say: Context effects on the phonological activation of lexical alternatives in speech production

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Jescheniak, J.D.; Kurtz, F.; Schriefers, H.J.; Günther, J.; Klaus, J.; Mädebach, A.

2017-01-01

There is compelling evidence that context strongly influences our choice of words (e.g., whether we refer to a particular animal with the basic-level name "bird" or the subordinate-level name "duck"). However, little is known about whether the context already affects the degree to which the

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.

Mental Imagery as Facilitator to Lexical Learning-Blocked and Random Trials

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Subhash Bhatnagar

2014-04-01

typical and atypical words from various lexical categories (Rosch, 1975. These stimuli were divided into treated and untreated groups. A PowerPoint presentation of each target lexical image was prepared with recorded directions. On each slide, the patient was cued with the object name and was directed to think about the perceptual-cognitive image of the pictured object but to refrain from naming it verbally. The patient practiced the pictured-objects, three times daily for six weeks without verbally naming objects verbally. Results The post-treatment assessment yielded a favorable impact of MI training on the naming of both typical and atypical words, after both random and blocked presentations. This learning further generalized crucially to the untrained words. Conclusion MI has proven to be facilitator for lexical learning and generalization. It involved the activation of the same neural circuitry or some vicarious circuitry that is associated with the verbal use of the lexicon. In our opinion, this circuitry activation assisted to link pictured objects to the sub-verbal mental representations. Further, we assumed throughout the study that the suppression of any would-be erroneous verbal attempts to name would help the patient remain focused and indeed would prevent the formation of unwanted, off-target circuitry, scaffolded off of disrupted verbal searching. Moreover, the improved writing that we observed may have resulted from some serendipitous generalization.

Word-Retrieval in Two Cases of Progressive Supranuclear Palsy

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Jennifer M. Gurd

1997-01-01

Full Text Available In this paper, we describe the detailed neuropsychological investigation of two cases of progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP and demonstrate word-finding difficulties associated with pervasive problems in word-retrieval. The pattern of deficits resembles that seen in Parkinson’s Disease (PD but is more severe, even in very mild PSP, and appears less amenable to cue facilitation. Performance on a variety of word-production tasks is compared, and experimental controls for motor effects on performance are included. The role of stimulus cues in speeded word-finding is addressed experimentally, as are central executive influences on task performance. This combines with functional brain-scan data from single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT which shows reduced frontal perfusion in one of the two cases.

Compounds in different aphasia categories: a study on picture naming.

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Semenza, Carlo; De Pellegrin, Serena; Battel, Irene; Garzon, Martina; Meneghello, Francesca; Chiarelli, Valentina

2011-12-01

This study investigated the production of compounds in Italian-speaking patients affected by different aphasia categories (i.e., Broca's, Wernicke's, and anomic aphasia) in a confrontation naming task. Questions of theoretical interest concerning the processing of compounds within the framework of the "lemma theory" as well as the role of morphological productivity in compound processing are addressed. Results indicate that all persons with aphasia retain knowledge of the morphological status of words, even when they fail to retrieve the corresponding phonological form (the "compound effect"). A difference was found among aphasia categories in the type of errors produced (omission vs. substitution) and in the position (first or second) of these errors within the compound words. In Broca's aphasia, the first component is omitted more frequently than the second one, but only in verb-noun compounds. Anomic and Wernicke's aphasia, unlike in Broca's aphasia, seem to retain sensitivity to morphological productivity.

Manipulating Objects and Telling Words: A Study on Concrete and Abstract Words Acquisition

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Borghi, Anna M.; Flumini, Andrea; Cimatti, Felice; Marocco, Davide; Scorolli, Claudia

2011-01-01

Four experiments (E1–E2–E3–E4) investigated whether different acquisition modalities lead to the emergence of differences typically found between concrete and abstract words, as argued by the words as tools (WAT) proposal. To mimic the acquisition of concrete and abstract concepts, participants either manipulated novel objects or observed groups of objects interacting in novel ways (Training 1). In TEST 1 participants decided whether two elements belonged to the same category. Later they read the category labels (Training 2); labels could be accompanied by an explanation of their meaning. Then participants observed previously seen exemplars and other elements, and were asked which of them could be named with a given label (TEST 2). Across the experiments, it was more difficult to form abstract than concrete categories (TEST 1); even when adding labels, abstract words remained more difficult than concrete words (TEST 2). TEST 3 differed across the experiments. In E1 participants performed a feature production task. Crucially, the associations produced with the novel words reflected the pattern evoked by existing concrete and abstract words, as the first evoked more perceptual properties. In E2–E3–E4, TEST 3 consisted of a color verification task with manual/verbal (keyboard–microphone) responses. Results showed the microphone use to have an advantage over keyboard use for abstract words, especially in the explanation condition. This supports WAT: due to their acquisition modality, concrete words evoke more manual information; abstract words elicit more verbal information. This advantage was not present when linguistic information contrasted with perceptual one. Implications for theories and computational models of language grounding are discussed. PMID:21716582

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

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Aryani, Arash; Jacobs, Arthur M

2018-05-31

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

Gene name ambiguity of eukaryotic nomenclatures.

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Chen, Lifeng; Liu, Hongfang; Friedman, Carol

2005-01-15

With more and more scientific literature published online, the effective management and reuse of this knowledge has become problematic. Natural language processing (NLP) may be a potential solution by extracting, structuring and organizing biomedical information in online literature in a timely manner. One essential task is to recognize and identify genomic entities in text. 'Recognition' can be accomplished using pattern matching and machine learning. But for 'identification' these techniques are not adequate. In order to identify genomic entities, NLP needs a comprehensive resource that specifies and classifies genomic entities as they occur in text and that associates them with normalized terms and also unique identifiers so that the extracted entities are well defined. Online organism databases are an excellent resource to create such a lexical resource. However, gene name ambiguity is a serious problem because it affects the appropriate identification of gene entities. In this paper, we explore the extent of the problem and suggest ways to address it. We obtained gene information from 21 organisms and quantified naming ambiguities within species, across species, with English words and with medical terms. When the case (of letters) was retained, official symbols displayed negligible intra-species ambiguity (0.02%) and modest ambiguities with general English words (0.57%) and medical terms (1.01%). In contrast, the across-species ambiguity was high (14.20%). The inclusion of gene synonyms increased intra-species ambiguity substantially and full names contributed greatly to gene-medical-term ambiguity. A comprehensive lexical resource that covers gene information for the 21 organisms was then created and used to identify gene names by using a straightforward string matching program to process 45,000 abstracts associated with the mouse model organism while ignoring case and gene names that were also English words. We found that 85.1% of correctly retrieved mouse

The Effects of Receptive and Productive Learning of Word Pairs on Vocabulary Knowledge

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Webb, Stuart

2009-01-01

English as a foreign language students in Japan learned target words in word pairs receptively and productively. Five aspects of vocabulary knowledge--orthography, association, syntax, grammatical functions, and meaning and form--were each measured by receptive and productive tests. The study uses an innovative methodology in that each target word…

How to Best Name a Place? Facilitation and Inhibition of Route Learning Due to Descriptive and Arbitrary Location Labels.

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Meilinger, Tobias; Schulte-Pelkum, Jörg; Frankenstein, Julia; Hardiess, Gregor; Laharnar, Naima; Mallot, Hanspeter A; Bülthoff, Heinrich H

2016-01-01

Establishing verbal memory traces for non-verbal stimuli was reported to facilitate or inhibit memory for the non-verbal stimuli. We show that these effects are also observed in a domain not indicated before-wayfinding. Fifty-three participants followed a guided route in a virtual environment. They were asked to remember half of the intersections by relying on the visual impression only. At the other 50% of the intersections, participants additionally heard a place name, which they were asked to memorize. For testing, participants were teleported to the intersections and were asked to indicate the subsequent direction of the learned route. In Experiment 1, intersections' names were arbitrary (i.e., not related to the visual impression). Here, participants performed more accurately at unnamed intersections. In Experiment 2, intersections' names were descriptive and participants' route memory was more accurate at named intersections. Results have implications for naming places in a city and for wayfinding aids.

How to best name a place? Facilitation and inhibition of route learning due to descriptive and arbitrary location labels

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Tobias eMeilinger

2016-02-01

Full Text Available Establishing verbal memory traces for non-verbal stimuli was reported to facilitate or inhibit memory for the non-verbal stimuli. We show that these effects are also observed in a domain not indicated before – wayfinding. Fifty-three participants followed a guided route in a virtual environment. They were asked to remember half of the intersections by relying on the visual impression only. At the other 50% of the intersections, participants additionally heard a place name, which they were asked to memorize. For testing, participants were teleported to the intersections and were asked to indicate the subsequent direction of the learned route. In Experiment 1, intersections’ names were arbitrary (i.e., not related to the visual impression. Here, participants performed more accurately at unnamed intersections. In Experiment 2, intersections’ names were descriptive and participants’ route memory was more accurate at named intersections. Results have implications for naming places in a city and for wayfinding aids.

Text-based language identification of multilingual names

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Giwa, O

2015-11-01

Full Text Available Text-based language identification (T-LID) of isolated words has been shown to be useful for various speech processing tasks, including pronunciation modelling and data categorisation. When the words to be categorised are proper names, the task...

Friends and foes in the lexicon: homophone naming in aphasia.

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Middleton, Erica L; Chen, Qi; Verkuilen, Jay

2015-01-01

The study of homophones--words with different meanings that sound the same--has great potential to inform models of language production. Of particular relevance is a phenomenon termed frequency inheritance, where a low-frequency word (e.g., deer) is produced more fluently than would be expected based on its frequency characteristics, presumably because of shared phonology with a high-frequency homophone counterpart (e.g., dear). However, prior studies have been inconsistent in showing frequency inheritance. To explain this inconsistency, we propose a dual nature account of homophony: a high-frequency counterpart exerts 2 counterposing effects on a low-frequency homophone target during the 2 main stages of naming: (a) a detrimental impact during semantically driven lexical retrieval; (b) a beneficial impact during phonological retrieval. In a study of naming in participants with chronic aphasia followed by computational investigations, we find strong evidence for the dual nature account of homophony. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved.

Napping facilitates word learning in early lexical development.

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Horváth, Klára; Myers, Kyle; Foster, Russell; Plunkett, Kim

2015-10-01

Little is known about the role that night-time sleep and daytime naps play in early cognitive development. Our aim was to investigate how napping affects word learning in 16-month-olds. Thirty-four typically developing infants were assigned randomly to nap and wake groups. After teaching two novel object-word pairs to infants, we tested their initial performance with an intermodal preferential looking task in which infants are expected to increase their target looking time compared to a distracter after hearing its auditory label. A second test session followed after approximately a 2-h delay. The delay contained sleep for the nap group or no sleep for the wake group. Looking behaviour was measured with an automatic eye-tracker. Vocabulary size was assessed using the Oxford Communicative Development Inventory. A significant interaction between group and session was found in preferential looking towards the target picture. The performance of the nap group increased after the nap, whereas that of the wake group did not change. The gain in performance correlated positively with the expressive vocabulary size in the nap group. These results indicate that daytime napping helps consolidate word learning in infancy. © 2015 European Sleep Research Society.

Semantic Coherence Facilitates Distributional Learning.

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Ouyang, Long; Boroditsky, Lera; Frank, Michael C

2017-04-01

Computational models have shown that purely statistical knowledge about words' linguistic contexts is sufficient to learn many properties of words, including syntactic and semantic category. For example, models can infer that "postman" and "mailman" are semantically similar because they have quantitatively similar patterns of association with other words (e.g., they both tend to occur with words like "deliver," "truck," "package"). In contrast to these computational results, artificial language learning experiments suggest that distributional statistics alone do not facilitate learning of linguistic categories. However, experiments in this paradigm expose participants to entirely novel words, whereas real language learners encounter input that contains some known words that are semantically organized. In three experiments, we show that (a) the presence of familiar semantic reference points facilitates distributional learning and (b) this effect crucially depends both on the presence of known words and the adherence of these known words to some semantic organization. Copyright © 2016 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

What's in a name?

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Whalley, Mark

2008-03-01

During a lesson with my A-level physics class, my school's head of English came into the lab and happened to notice the whiteboard. I had just started teaching a section on particle physics and was acquainting the students with the multitude of names found in the particle world. Among others, the board contained the words lepton, hadron, meson, baryon, photon, gluon, boson, muon, neutrino, fermion and quark. The head of English pointed out that none of the words on the board were intelligible to anyone else in the school. He added that the words themselves were utterly bizarre, although in fairness he did recognize the reference to James Joyce.

PRN 2002-X Draft: False or Misleading Pesticide Product Brand Name

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This notice provides guidance to registrants and distributors on pesticide product brand names that may be false or misleading, either by themselves or in association with particular company names or trademarks. It is a draft.

Spoken word production: A theory of lexical access

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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

Data mining for clustering naming of the village at Java Island

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Setiawan Abdullah, Atje; Nurani Ruchjana, Budi; Hidayat, Akik; Akmal; Setiana, Deni

2017-10-01

Clustering of query based data mining to identify the meaning of the naming of the village in Java island, done by exploring the database village with three categories namely: prefix in the naming of the village, syllables contained in the naming of the village, and full word naming of the village which is actually used. While syllables contained in the naming of the village are classified by the behaviour of the culture and character of each province that describes the business, feelings, circumstances, places, nature, respect, plants, fruits, and animals. Sources of data used for the clustering of the naming of the village on the island of Java was obtained from Geospatial Information Agency (BIG) in the form of a complete village name data with the coordinates in six provinces in Java, which is arranged in a hierarchy of provinces, districts / cities, districts and villages. The research method using KDD (Knowledge Discovery in Database) through the process of preprocessing, data mining and postprocessing to obtain knowledge. In this study, data mining applications to facilitate the search query based on the name of the village, using Java software. While the contours of a map is processed using ArcGIS software. The results of the research can give recommendations to stakeholders such as the Department of Tourism to describe the meaning of the classification of naming the village according to the character in each province at Java island.

Sensory experience ratings (SERs) for 1,659 French words: Relationships with other psycholinguistic variables and visual word recognition.

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Bonin, Patrick; Méot, Alain; Ferrand, Ludovic; Bugaïska, Aurélia

2015-09-01

We collected sensory experience ratings (SERs) for 1,659 French words in adults. Sensory experience for words is a recently introduced variable that corresponds to the degree to which words elicit sensory and perceptual experiences (Juhasz & Yap Behavior Research Methods, 45, 160-168, 2013; Juhasz, Yap, Dicke, Taylor, & Gullick Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 64, 1683-1691, 2011). The relationships of the sensory experience norms with other psycholinguistic variables (e.g., imageability and age of acquisition) were analyzed. We also investigated the degree to which SER predicted performance in visual word recognition tasks (lexical decision, word naming, and progressive demasking). The analyses indicated that SER reliably predicted response times in lexical decision, but not in word naming or progressive demasking. The findings are discussed in relation to the status of SER, the role of semantic code activation in visual word recognition, and the embodied view of cognition.

Age of acquisition predicts naming and lexical-decision performance above and beyond 22 other predictor variables: an analysis of 2,342 words.

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Cortese, Michael J; Khanna, Maya M

2007-08-01

Age of acquisition (AoA) ratings were obtained and were used in hierarchical regression analyses to predict naming and lexical-decision performance for 2,342 words (from Balota, Cortese, Sergent-Marshall, Spieler, & Yap, 2004). In the analyses, AoA was included in addition to the set of predictors used by Balota et al. (2004). AoA significantly predicted latency performance on both tasks above and beyond the standard predictor set. However, AoA was more strongly related to lexical-decision performance than to naming performance. Finally, the previously reported effect of imageability on naming latencies by Balota et al. was not significant with AoA included as a factor. These results are consistent with the idea either that AoA has a semantic/lexical locus or that AoA effects emerge primarily in situations in which the input-output mapping is arbitrary.

Basic East German Words, Terms, Names: Why Know Them?

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Mayer, Elizabeth M.

Terms basic to any understanding of East German culture and politics are defined in this paper. The items selected are grouped in five categories: (1) the state, (2) political and philosophical terms, (3) economics, (4) education, and (5) the family, ethics, and the arts. The author emphasizes semantic differences despite similarities to words in…

Receptive and Productive Vocabulary Learning: The Effects of Reading and Writing on Word Knowledge

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Webb, Stuart

2005-01-01

This study investigates the effects of receptive and productive vocabulary learning on word knowledge. Japanese students studying English as a foreign language learned target words in three glossed sentences and in a sentence production task in two experiments. Five aspects of vocabulary knowledge--orthography, syntax, association, grammatical…

Name-letter branding under scrutiny: real products, new algorithms, and the probability of buying.

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Stieger, Stefan

2010-06-01

People like letters matching their own first and last name initials more than nonname letters. This name-letter effect has also been found for brands, i.e., people like brands resembling their own name letters (initial or first three). This has been termed name-letter branding effect. In the present study of 199 participants, ages 12 to 79 years, this name-letter branding effect was found for a modified design (1) using real products, (2) concentrating on product names rather than brand names, (3) using five different products for each letter of the Roman alphabet, (4) asking for the buying probability, and (5) using recently introduced algorithms, controlling for individual response tendencies (i.e., liking all letters more or less) and general normative popularity of particular letters (i.e., some letters are generally preferred more than other letters).

[Old English plant names from the linguistic and lexicographic viewpoint].

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Sauer, Hans; Krischke, Ulrike

2004-01-01

Roughly 1350 Old English plant names have come down to us; this is a relatively large number considering that the attested Old English vocabulary comprises ca. 24 000 words. The plant names are not only interesting for botanists, historians of medicine and many others, but also for philologists and linguists; among other aspects they can investigate their etymology, their morphology (including word-formation) and their meaning and motivation. Practically all Old English texts where plant names occur have been edited (including glosses and glossaries), the names have been listed in the Old English dictionaries, and some specific studies have been devoted to them. Nevertheless no comprehensive systematic analysis of their linguistic structure has been made. Ulrike Krischke is preparing such an analysis. A proper dictionary of the Old English plant names is also a desideratum, especially since the Old English dictionaries available and in progress normally do not deal with morphological and semantic aspects, and many do not provide etymological information. A plant-name dictionary concentrating on this information is being prepared by Hans Sauer and Ulrike Krischke. In our article here, we sketch the state of the art (ch. 1), we deal with some problems of the analysis of Old English plant names (ch. 2), e.g. the delimitation of the word-field plant names, the identification of the plants, errors and problematic spellings in the manuscripts. In ch. 3 we sketch the etymological structure according to chronological layers (Indo-European, Germanic, West-Germanic, Old English) as well as according to the distinction between native words and loan-words; in the latter category, we also mention loan-formations based on Latin models. In ch. 4 we survey the morphological aspects (simplex vs. complex words); among the complex nouns, compounds are by far the largest group (and among those, the noun + noun compounds), but there are also a few suffix formations. We also briefly

Orthographic Facilitation in Chinese Spoken Word Recognition: An ERP Study

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Zou, Lijuan; Desroches, Amy S.; Liu, Youyi; Xia, Zhichao; Shu, Hua

2012-01-01

Orthographic influences in spoken word recognition have been previously examined in alphabetic languages. However, it is unknown whether orthographic information affects spoken word recognition in Chinese, which has a clean dissociation between orthography (O) and phonology (P). The present study investigated orthographic effects using event…

Cascaded processing in written compound word production

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Raymond eBertram

2015-04-01

Full Text Available In this study we investigated the intricate interplay between central linguistic processing and peripheral motor processes during typewriting. Participants had to typewrite two-constituent (noun-noun Finnish compounds in response to picture presentation while their typing behavior was registered. As dependent measures we used writing onset time to assess what processes were completed before writing and inter-key intervals to assess what processes were going on during writing. It was found that writing onset time was determined by whole word frequency rather than constituent frequencies, indicating that compound words are retrieved as whole orthographic units before writing is initiated. In addition, we found that the length of the first syllable also affects writing onset time, indicating that the first syllable is fully prepared before writing commences. The inter-key interval results showed that linguistic planning is not fully ready before writing, but cascades into the motor execution phase. More specifically, inter-key intervals were largest at syllable and morpheme boundaries, supporting the view that additional linguistic planning takes place at these boundaries. Bigram and trigram frequency also affected inter-key intervals with shorter intervals corresponding to higher frequencies. This can be explained by stronger memory traces for frequently co-occurring letter sequences in the motor memory for typewriting. These frequency effects were even larger in the second than in the first constituent, indicating that low-level motor memory starts to become more important during the course of writing compound words. We discuss our results in the light of current models of morphological processing and written word production.

Cascaded processing in written compound word production.

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Bertram, Raymond; Tønnessen, Finn Egil; Strömqvist, Sven; Hyönä, Jukka; Niemi, Pekka

2015-01-01

In this study we investigated the intricate interplay between central linguistic processing and peripheral motor processes during typewriting. Participants had to typewrite two-constituent (noun-noun) Finnish compounds in response to picture presentation while their typing behavior was registered. As dependent measures we used writing onset time to assess what processes were completed before writing and inter-key intervals to assess what processes were going on during writing. It was found that writing onset time was determined by whole word frequency rather than constituent frequencies, indicating that compound words are retrieved as whole orthographic units before writing is initiated. In addition, we found that the length of the first syllable also affects writing onset time, indicating that the first syllable is fully prepared before writing commences. The inter-key interval results showed that linguistic planning is not fully ready before writing, but cascades into the motor execution phase. More specifically, inter-key intervals were largest at syllable and morpheme boundaries, supporting the view that additional linguistic planning takes place at these boundaries. Bigram and trigram frequency also affected inter-key intervals with shorter intervals corresponding to higher frequencies. This can be explained by stronger memory traces for frequently co-occurring letter sequences in the motor memory for typewriting. These frequency effects were even larger in the second than in the first constituent, indicating that low-level motor memory starts to become more important during the course of writing compound words. We discuss our results in the light of current models of morphological processing and written word production.

Processing of Color Words Activates Color Representations

Science.gov (United States)

Richter, Tobias; Zwaan, Rolf A.

2009-01-01

Two experiments were conducted to investigate whether color representations are routinely activated when color words are processed. Congruency effects of colors and color words were observed in both directions. Lexical decisions on color words were faster when preceding colors matched the color named by the word. Color-discrimination responses…

Individual differences in the production of word classes in eight specific language-impaired preschoolers.

Science.gov (United States)

Le Normand, M T; Chevrie-Muller, C

1991-01-01

The production of word classes in eight 53-62-month-old specific language-impaired (SLI) children was described and compared with that of 30 normal 24-33-month-old children in the same play situation. SLI subjects and nonimpaired children were selected within specified mean length of utterance ranges (low MLU versus high MLU). Production of word classes by subjects was evaluated in order to determine (1) whether SLI children showed a similar or a different word-class profile among themselves and when compared with non-impaired children and (2) whether MLU related to word classes would be useful as a single clinical index in assessment of language acquisition. Results showed that scores of SLI children in production of word classes reflect important individual differences among subjects. In the high-MLU sample, all SLI children produced each word class relatively within the same range as the nonimpaired group. In the low-MLU sample two SLI children were very different in their word-class profile and individual differences were further confirmed by a discriminant function analysis. Correlations between MLU and word classes were significant in nonimpaired children for all variables except Questions and Onomatopoeia and were only significant in SLI children for Verbs, Prepositions, and Personal Pronouns. Such findings contribute support to the view that there is "deviant" pattern of language in SLI children and once again questions whether MLU is one of the best discriminating indicators to use in the clinical assessment of language organization.

Ukufundisa izicuku zeziqhakancu emagameni (Teaching click clusters in words

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Gxowa-Dlayedwa, Ntombizodwa Cynthia

2015-12-01

Full Text Available Some teachers find it uninteresting and difficult to teach isiXhosa phonemes and syllables to grade one to three learners. This has a negative impact as the literacy results are low because learners’ reading and writing skills are poor. The linguistics terms featuring in the title, namely; consonants, vowels and syllables as found in words facilitate reading, and thus improve literacy standards in every language. IsiXhosa is one of the eleven official languages in South Africa. Phonemes include clicks and/or click cluster and vowels. On the other hand, there are people who are interested in learning to speak isiXhosa, but the difficulties encountered during the pronunciation of clicks discourage many of them. This study believes that the knowledge of phonemes and syllables will boost the literacy standard in isiXhosa. Therefore, the purposes of this study are to show that clicks and click clusters are found in major word categories which are in life circles. Secondly, if words are divided into segments, it becomes easy to produce them in print and reading skills. Thirdly, reading is possible in every language, and most importantly, skills are transferable. The current study therefore, argues that the knowledge of phonemes and syllables facilitates reading and creative writing skills. The data used in this study were taken from a novel written by Sidlayi (2009. Few examples have been given by the researchers themselves with an objective to clarify some ideas.

Tracing attention and the activation flow in spoken word planning using eye-movements

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Roelofs, A.P.A.

2008-01-01

The flow of activation from concepts to phonological forms within the word production system was examined in 3 experiments. In Experiment 1, participants named pictures while ignoring superimposed distractor pictures that were semantically related, phonologically related, or unrelated. Eye movements

Novel names extend for how long preschool children sample visual information.

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Carvalho, Paulo F; Vales, Catarina; Fausey, Caitlin M; Smith, Linda B

2018-04-01

Known words can guide visual attention, affecting how information is sampled. How do novel words, those that do not provide any top-down information, affect preschoolers' visual sampling in a conceptual task? We proposed that novel names can also change visual sampling by influencing how long children look. We investigated this possibility by analyzing how children sample visual information when they hear a sentence with a novel name versus without a novel name. Children completed a match-to-sample task while their moment-to-moment eye movements were recorded using eye-tracking technology. Our analyses were designed to provide specific information on the properties of visual sampling that novel names may change. Overall, we found that novel words prolonged the duration of each sampling event but did not affect sampling allocation (which objects children looked at) or sampling organization (how children transitioned from one object to the next). These results demonstrate that novel words change one important dynamic property of gaze: Novel words can entrain the cognitive system toward longer periods of sustained attention early in development. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The Activation of Embedded Words in Spoken Word Recognition.

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Zhang, Xujin; Samuel, Arthur G

2015-01-01

The current study investigated how listeners understand English words that have shorter words embedded in them. A series of auditory-auditory priming experiments assessed the activation of six types of embedded words (2 embedded positions × 3 embedded proportions) under different listening conditions. Facilitation of lexical decision responses to targets (e.g., pig) associated with words embedded in primes (e.g., hamster ) indexed activation of the embedded words (e.g., ham ). When the listening conditions were optimal, isolated embedded words (e.g., ham ) primed their targets in all six conditions (Experiment 1a). Within carrier words (e.g., hamster ), the same set of embedded words produced priming only when they were at the beginning or comprised a large proportion of the carrier word (Experiment 1b). When the listening conditions were made suboptimal by expanding or compressing the primes, significant priming was found for isolated embedded words (Experiment 2a), but no priming was produced when the carrier words were compressed/expanded (Experiment 2b). Similarly, priming was eliminated when the carrier words were presented with one segment replaced by noise (Experiment 3). When cognitive load was imposed, priming for embedded words was again found when they were presented in isolation (Experiment 4a), but not when they were embedded in the carrier words (Experiment 4b). The results suggest that both embedded position and proportion play important roles in the activation of embedded words, but that such activation only occurs under unusually good listening conditions.

Corticospinal excitability during the processing of handwritten and typed words and non-words.

Science.gov (United States)

Gordon, Chelsea L; Spivey, Michael J; Balasubramaniam, Ramesh

2017-06-09

A number of studies have suggested that perception of actions is accompanied by motor simulation of those actions. To further explore this proposal, we applied Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to the left primary motor cortex during the observation of handwritten and typed language stimuli, including words and non-word consonant clusters. We recorded motor-evoked potentials (MEPs) from the right first dorsal interosseous (FDI) muscle to measure cortico-spinal excitability during written text perception. We observed a facilitation in MEPs for handwritten stimuli, regardless of whether the stimuli were words or non-words, suggesting potential motor simulation during observation. We did not observe a similar facilitation for the typed stimuli, suggesting that motor simulation was not occurring during observation of typed text. By demonstrating potential simulation of written language text during observation, these findings add to a growing literature suggesting that the motor system plays a strong role in the perception of written language. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

A fresh look at the predictors of naming accuracy and errors in Alzheimer's disease.

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Cuetos, Fernando; Rodríguez-Ferreiro, Javier; Sage, Karen; Ellis, Andrew W

2012-09-01

In recent years, a considerable number of studies have tried to establish which characteristics of objects and their names predict the responses of patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) in the picture-naming task. The frequency of use of words and their age of acquisition (AoA) have been implicated as two of the most influential variables, with naming being best preserved for objects with high-frequency, early-acquired names. The present study takes a fresh look at the predictors of naming success in Spanish and English AD patients using a range of measures of word frequency and AoA along with visual complexity, imageability, and word length as predictors. Analyses using generalized linear mixed modelling found that naming accuracy was better predicted by AoA ratings taken from older adults than conventional ratings from young adults. Older frequency measures based on written language samples predicted accuracy better than more modern measures based on the frequencies of words in film subtitles. Replacing adult frequency with an estimate of cumulative (lifespan) frequency did not reduce the impact of AoA. Semantic error rates were predicted by both written word frequency and senior AoA while null response errors were only predicted by frequency. Visual complexity, imageability, and word length did not predict naming accuracy or errors. ©2012 The British Psychological Society.

Semantic interference in picture naming during dual-task performance does not vary with reading ability

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Piai, V.; Roelofs, A.P.A.; Roete, I.E.C.

2015-01-01

Previous dual-task studies examining the locus of semantic interference of distractor words in picture naming have obtained diverging results. In these studies, participants manually responded to tones and named pictures while ignoring distractor words (picture-word interference, PWI) with varying

Letter-case information and the identification of brand names.

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Perea, Manuel; Jiménez, María; Talero, Fernanda; López-Cañada, Soraya

2015-02-01

A central tenet of most current models of visual-word recognition is that lexical units are activated on the basis of case-invariant abstract letter representations. Here, we examined this assumption by using a unique type of words: brand names. The rationale of the experiments is that brand names are archetypically printed either in lowercase (e.g., adidas) or uppercase (e.g., IKEA). This allows us to present the brand names in their standard or non-standard case configuration (e.g., adidas, IKEA vs. ADIDAS, ikea, respectively). We conducted two experiments with a brand-decision task ('is it a brand name?'): a single-presentation experiment and a masked priming experiment. Results in the single-presentation experiment revealed faster identification times of brand names in their standard case configuration than in their non-standard case configuration (i.e., adidas faster than ADIDAS; IKEA faster than ikea). In the masked priming experiment, we found faster identification times of brand names when they were preceded by an identity prime that matched its standard case configuration than when it did not (i.e., faster response times to adidas-adidas than to ADIDAS-adidas). Taken together, the present findings strongly suggest that letter-case information forms part of a brand name's graphemic information, thus posing some limits to current models of visual-word recognition. © 2014 The British Psychological Society.

Cross domains Arabic named entity recognition system

Science.gov (United States)

Al-Ahmari, S. Saad; Abdullatif Al-Johar, B.

2016-07-01

Named Entity Recognition (NER) plays an important role in many Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications such as; Information Extraction (IE), Question Answering (QA), Text Clustering, Text Summarization and Word Sense Disambiguation. This paper presents the development and implementation of domain independent system to recognize three types of Arabic named entities. The system works based on a set of domain independent grammar-rules along with Arabic part of speech tagger in addition to gazetteers and lists of trigger words. The experimental results shown, that the system performed as good as other systems with better results in some cases of cross-domains corpora.

The facilitating effect of positive emotions during an emotional Stroop task.

Science.gov (United States)

Liu, Xingyu; Yang, Yisheng; Jiang, Songxiu; Li, Jie

2018-05-08

Prior research has shown that negative emotions, even though task irrelevant, are capable of delaying a participant's response to the color in which a negative emotional word is presented, a phenomenon known as the 'emotional Stroop effect'. However, relatively little is known about whether positive emotions have a similar or an opposite effect. The current study sets out to confirm the facilitating effect of positive emotions on color naming, which is predicted by Barbara Fredrickson's 'broaden and build' theory. Our results indicate that positive emotions did facilitate such processing in both of the study's experiments. We also found a significant difference in early posterior negativity amplitudes between positive and neutral stimuli, which was related to the 'fast effect'. Overall, the study's findings suggest that positive emotions can be detected quickly and automatically, and that this kind of prioritizing facilitates the ongoing cognitive processing.

Input frequency and lexical variability in phonological development: a survival analysis of word-initial cluster production.

Science.gov (United States)

Ota, Mitsuhiko; Green, Sam J

2013-06-01

Although it has been often hypothesized that children learn to produce new sound patterns first in frequently heard words, the available evidence in support of this claim is inconclusive. To re-examine this question, we conducted a survival analysis of word-initial consonant clusters produced by three children in the Providence Corpus (0 ; 11-4 ; 0). The analysis took account of several lexical factors in addition to lexical input frequency, including the age of first production, production frequency, neighborhood density and number of phonemes. The results showed that lexical input frequency was a significant predictor of the age at which the accuracy level of cluster production in each word first reached 80%. The magnitude of the frequency effect differed across cluster types. Our findings indicate that some of the between-word variance found in the development of sound production can indeed be attributed to the frequency of words in the child's ambient language.

Spatio-temporal dynamics of word selection in speech production: Insights from electrocorticography

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Stephanie K Ries

2015-04-01

Our results suggest that the posterior inferior LTC is involved in word selection as semantic concepts become available. Posterior medial and left PFC regions may be involved in trial-by-trial top-down control over LTC to help overcome interference caused by semantically-related alternatives in word selection. The single-case result supports this hypothesis and suggests that the posterior medial PFC plays a causal role in resolving this interference in word selection. Lastly, the sensitivity to semantic interference of the post-vocal onset posterior LTC activity suggests the semantic interference effect does not only reflect word selection difficulty but is also present at post-selection stages such as verbal response monitoring. In sum, this study reveals a dynamic network of interacting brain regions that support word selection in language production.

A Semantic and Pragmatic Analyses of Igbo Names

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Key words: personal names, Igbo, semantic content, pragmatic content, structure. Background to the Study ... Igbo name is a story, a book or a dictionary itself. ..... the meaning (literal meaning) of some of the data structurally presented above.

Semantic category interference in overt picture naming

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Maess, B.; Friederici, A.D.; Damian, M.F.; Meyer, A.S.; Levelt, W.J.M.

2002-01-01

The study investigated the neuronal basis of the retrieval of words from the mental lexicon. The semantic category interference effect was used to locate lexical retrieval processes in time and space. This effect reflects the finding that, for overt naming, volunteers are slower when naming pictures

The Activation of Embedded Words in Spoken Word Recognition

Science.gov (United States)

Zhang, Xujin; Samuel, Arthur G.

2015-01-01

The current study investigated how listeners understand English words that have shorter words embedded in them. A series of auditory-auditory priming experiments assessed the activation of six types of embedded words (2 embedded positions × 3 embedded proportions) under different listening conditions. Facilitation of lexical decision responses to targets (e.g., pig) associated with words embedded in primes (e.g., hamster) indexed activation of the embedded words (e.g., ham). When the listening conditions were optimal, isolated embedded words (e.g., ham) primed their targets in all six conditions (Experiment 1a). Within carrier words (e.g., hamster), the same set of embedded words produced priming only when they were at the beginning or comprised a large proportion of the carrier word (Experiment 1b). When the listening conditions were made suboptimal by expanding or compressing the primes, significant priming was found for isolated embedded words (Experiment 2a), but no priming was produced when the carrier words were compressed/expanded (Experiment 2b). Similarly, priming was eliminated when the carrier words were presented with one segment replaced by noise (Experiment 3). When cognitive load was imposed, priming for embedded words was again found when they were presented in isolation (Experiment 4a), but not when they were embedded in the carrier words (Experiment 4b). The results suggest that both embedded position and proportion play important roles in the activation of embedded words, but that such activation only occurs under unusually good listening conditions. PMID:25593407

What factors predict individual subjects' re-learning of words during anomia treatment?

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

William Hayward

2014-04-01

Full Text Available A growing number of studies are addressing methodological approaches to treating anomia in persons with aphasia. What is missing from these studies are validated procedures for determining which words have the greatest potential for recovery. The current study evaluates the usefulness of several word-specific variables and one subject-specific measure in predicting success in re-learning problematic words. Methods: Two participants, YPR and ODH, presented with fluent aphasia and marked anomia. YPR’s Aphasia Quotient on the Western Aphasia Battery was 58.8; ODH’s AQ was 79.5. Stimuli were 96 pictures chosen individually for each participant from among those that they named incorrectly on multiple baselines. Subsequently, participants were presented with each picture and asked to indicate whether they could name it covertly, or “in their head.” Each subject completed a biweekly anomia treatment for these pictures. We performed separate statistical analyses for each subject. Dependent variables included whether each word was learned during treatment (Acquisition and the number of sessions required to learn each word (#Sessions. We used logistic regression models to evaluate the association of (self-reported covert naming success with Acquisition, and linear regression models to assess the relationship between (self-reported covert naming success and #Sessions. Starting with the predictors of covert naming accuracy, number of syllables (#syllables, number of phonemes (#phonemes, and frequency, we used backwards elimination methods to select the final regression models. Results: By the end of 25 treatment sessions, YPR had learned 90.2% (37/41 of the covertly correct words but only 70.4% (38/54 of the covertly incorrect words. In the unadjusted analysis, covert naming was significantly associated with Acquisition, OR=3.89, 95% CI: (1.19, 12.74, p=0.025. The result remained significant after adjustment for #phonemes (the only other predictor

Grammatical constraints on phonological encoding in speech production.

Science.gov (United States)

Heller, Jordana R; Goldrick, Matthew

2014-12-01

To better understand the influence of grammatical encoding on the retrieval and encoding of phonological word-form information during speech production, we examine how grammatical class constraints influence the activation of phonological neighbors (words phonologically related to the target--e.g., MOON, TWO for target TUNE). Specifically, we compare how neighbors that share a target's grammatical category (here, nouns) influence its planning and retrieval, assessed by picture naming latencies, and phonetic encoding, assessed by word productions in picture names, when grammatical constraints are strong (in sentence contexts) versus weak (bare naming). Within-category (noun) neighbors influenced planning time and phonetic encoding more strongly in sentence contexts. This suggests that grammatical encoding constrains phonological processing; the influence of phonological neighbors is grammatically dependent. Moreover, effects on planning times could not fully account for phonetic effects, suggesting that phonological interaction affects articulation after speech onset. These results support production theories integrating grammatical, phonological, and phonetic processes.

APPLIED MECHANICS REVIEWS, WADEX WORD AND AUTHOR INDEX, VOLUME XVI, 1963,

Science.gov (United States)

Author inDEX ) an IBM 1401 prepared mechanical index, extension of KWIC. WADEX usable for browsing and searching. This second WADEX is based on 8,000 titles of APPLIED MECHANICS REVIEWS (AMR), Vol. 16, 1963, an international critical review magazine. In WADEX, titles printed fully with author names, and as many lines used as necessary (60 characters per line). WADEX entry: word in title (except forbidden word) or author’s name. Alphabetically sequenced entries printed out of context. Words are single words or hypenated word pairs or ’Tagged Words’ (TW).

Examining the central and peripheral processes of written word production through meta-analysis

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Jeremy ePurcell

2011-10-01

Full Text Available Producing written words requires central cognitive processes (such as orthographic long-term and working memory as well as more peripheral processes responsible for generating the motor actions needed for producing written words in a variety of formats (handwriting, typing, etc.. In recent years, various functional neuroimaging studies have examined the neural substrates underlying the central and peripheral processes of written word production. This study provides the first quantitative meta-analysis of these studies by applying Activation Likelihood Estimation methods (Turkeltaub et al., 2002. For alphabet languages, we identified 11 studies (with a total of 17 experimental contrasts that had been designed to isolate central and/or peripheral processes of word spelling (total number of participants = 146. Three ALE meta-analyses were carried out. One involved the complete set of 17 contrasts; two others were applied to subsets of contrasts to distinguish the neural substrates of central from peripheral processes. These analyses identified a network of brain regions reliably associated with the central and peripheral processes of word spelling. Among the many significant results, is the finding that the regions with the greatest correspondence across studies were in the left inferior temporal/fusiform gyri and left inferior frontal gyrus. Furthermore, although the angular gyrus has traditionally been identified as a key site within the written word production network, none of the meta-analyses found it to be a consistent site of activation, identifying instead a region just superior/medial to the left angular gyrus in the left posterior intraparietal sulcus. In general these meta-analyses and the discussion of results provide a valuable foundation upon which future studies that examine the neural basis of written word production can build.

Embodiment and second-language: automatic activation of motor responses during processing spatially associated L2 words and emotion L2 words in a vertical Stroop paradigm.

Science.gov (United States)

Dudschig, Carolin; de la Vega, Irmgard; Kaup, Barbara

2014-05-01

Converging evidence suggests that understanding our first-language (L1) results in reactivation of experiential sensorimotor traces in the brain. Surprisingly, little is known regarding the involvement of these processes during second-language (L2) processing. Participants saw L1 or L2 words referring to entities with a typical location (e.g., star, mole) (Experiment 1 & 2) or to an emotion (e.g., happy, sad) (Experiment 3). Participants responded to the words' ink color with an upward or downward arm movement. Despite word meaning being fully task-irrelevant, L2 automatically activated motor responses similar to L1 even when L2 was acquired rather late in life (age >11). Specifically, words such as star facilitated upward, and words such as root facilitated downward responses. Additionally, words referring to positive emotions facilitated upward, and words referring to negative emotions facilitated downward responses. In summary our study suggests that reactivation of experiential traces is not limited to L1 processing. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Influence of Lexical Factors on Word-Finding Accuracy, Error Patterns, and Substitution Types

Science.gov (United States)

Newman, Rochelle S.; German, Diane J.; Jagielko, Jennifer R.

2018-01-01

This retrospective, exploratory investigation examined the types of target words that 66 children with/without word-finding difficulties (WFD) had difficulty naming, and the types of errors they made. Words were studied with reference to lexical factors (LFs) that might influence naming performance: word frequency, familiarity, length, phonotactic…

The visual-auditory color-word Stroop asymmetry and its time course

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Roelofs, A.P.A.

2005-01-01

Four experiments examined crossmodal versions of the Stroop task in order (1) to look for Stroop asymmetries in color naming, spoken-word naming, and written-word naming and to evaluate the time course of these asymmetries, and (2) to compare these findings to current models of the Stroop effect.

Effects of animation on naming and identification across two graphic symbol sets representing verbs and prepositions.

Science.gov (United States)

Schlosser, Ralf W; Koul, Rajinder; Shane, Howard; Sorce, James; Brock, Kristofer; Harmon, Ashley; Moerlein, Dorothy; Hearn, Emilia

2014-10-01

The effects of animation on naming and identification of graphic symbols for verbs and prepositions were studied in 2 graphic symbol sets in preschoolers. Using a 2 × 2 × 2 × 3 completely randomized block design, preschoolers across three age groups were randomly assigned to combinations of symbol set (Autism Language Program [ALP] Animated Graphics or Picture Communication Symbols [PCS]), symbol format (animated or static), and word class (verbs or prepositions). Children were asked to name symbols and to identify a target symbol from an array given the spoken label. Animated symbols were more readily named than static symbols, although this was more pronounced for verbs than for prepositions. ALP symbols were named more accurately than PCS in particular with prepositions. Animation did not facilitate identification. ALP symbols for prepositions were identified better than PCS, but there was no difference for verbs. Finally, older children guessed and identified symbols more effectively than younger children. Animation improves the naming of graphic symbols for verbs. For prepositions, ALP symbols are named more accurately and are more readily identifiable than PCS. Naming and identifying symbols are learned skills that develop over time. Limitations and future research directions are discussed.

Assessing the Usefulness of Google Books’ Word Frequencies for Psycholinguistic Research on Word Processing

Science.gov (United States)

Brysbaert, Marc; Keuleers, Emmanuel; New, Boris

2011-01-01

In this Perspective Article we assess the usefulness of Google's new word frequencies for word recognition research (lexical decision and word naming). We find that, despite the massive corpus on which the Google estimates are based (131 billion words from books published in the United States alone), the Google American English frequencies explain 11% less of the variance in the lexical decision times from the English Lexicon Project (Balota et al., 2007) than the SUBTLEX-US word frequencies, based on a corpus of 51 million words from film and television subtitles. Further analyses indicate that word frequencies derived from recent books (published after 2000) are better predictors of word processing times than frequencies based on the full corpus, and that word frequencies based on fiction books predict word processing times better than word frequencies based on the full corpus. The most predictive word frequencies from Google still do not explain more of the variance in word recognition times of undergraduate students and old adults than the subtitle-based word frequencies. PMID:21713191

Signal Words

Science.gov (United States)

SIGNAL WORDS TOPIC FACT SHEET NPIC fact sheets are designed to answer questions that are commonly asked by the ... making decisions about pesticide use. What are Signal Words? Signal words are found on pesticide product labels, ...

Interference of spoken word recognition through phonological priming from visual objects and printed words

OpenAIRE

McQueen, J.; Huettig, F.

2014-01-01

Three cross-modal priming experiments examined the influence of pre-exposure to pictures and printed words on the speed of spoken word recognition. Targets for auditory lexical decision were spoken Dutch words and nonwords, presented in isolation (Experiments 1 and 2) or after a short phrase (Experiment 3). Auditory stimuli were preceded by primes which were pictures (Experiments 1 and 3) or those pictures’ printed names (Experiment 2). Prime-target pairs were phonologically onsetrelated (e.g...

Word position and stress effects in consonant cluster perception and production.

Science.gov (United States)

Cilibrasi, Luca; Stojanovik, Vesna; Riddell, Patricia

2015-02-01

The aim of the present study was to investigate whether the saliency effect for word beginnings reported in children with dyslexia (Marshall & Van der Lely, 2009) can be found also in typically developing children. Thirty-four typically developing Italian children aged 8-10 years completed two specifically designed tasks: a production task and a perception task. Both tasks used nonwords containing clusters consisting of plosive plus liquid (e.g. pl). Clusters could be either in a stressed or in an unstressed syllable and could be either in initial position (first syllable) or in medial position (second syllable). In the production task, children were asked to repeat the nonwords. In the perception task, the children were asked to discriminate between two nonwords differing in one phoneme belonging to a cluster by reporting whether two repetitions were the same or different. Results from the production task showed that children are more accurate in repeating stressed than unstressed syllables, but there was no difference with respect to position of the cluster. Results from the perception task showed that children performed more accurately when discriminating word initial contrasts than when discriminating word medial contrasts, especially if the cluster was unstressed. Implications of this finding for clinical assessments are discussed. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Word Recognition during Reading: The Interaction between Lexical Repetition and Frequency

Science.gov (United States)

Lowder, Matthew W.; Choi, Wonil; Gordon, Peter C.

2013-01-01

Memory studies utilizing long-term repetition priming have generally demonstrated that priming is greater for low-frequency words than for high-frequency words and that this effect persists if words intervene between the prime and the target. In contrast, word-recognition studies utilizing masked short-term repetition priming typically show that the magnitude of repetition priming does not differ as a function of word frequency and does not persist across intervening words. We conducted an eye-tracking while reading experiment to determine which of these patterns more closely resembles the relationship between frequency and repetition during the natural reading of a text. Frequency was manipulated using proper names that were high-frequency (e.g., Stephen) or low-frequency (e.g., Dominic). The critical name was later repeated in the sentence, or a new name was introduced. First-pass reading times and skipping rates on the critical name revealed robust repetition-by-frequency interactions such that the magnitude of the repetition-priming effect was greater for low-frequency names than for high-frequency names. In contrast, measures of later processing showed effects of repetition that did not depend on lexical frequency. These results are interpreted within a framework that conceptualizes eye-movement control as being influenced in different ways by lexical- and discourse-level factors. PMID:23283808

Task choice and semantic interference in picture naming

OpenAIRE

Piai, V.; Roelofs, A.P.A.; Schriefers, H.J.

2015-01-01

Evidence from dual-task performance indicates that speakers prefer not to select simultaneous responses in picture naming and another unrelated task, suggesting a response selection bottleneck in naming. In particular, when participants respond to tones with a manual response and name pictures with superimposed semantically related or unrelated distractor words, semantic interference in naming tends to be constant across stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) between the tone stimulus and the pic...

IT IS TIME THE STERNUM GETS A NEW NAME

OpenAIRE

Munawwar Husain; Mohd Asrarul Haque; Mohammad Mojahid Anwar; Faiz Ahmad; Jawed Ahmad Usmani; Nema Usman

2015-01-01

Names of objects change over a period of time. New words come up to keep in line with innovations and technology. Neologism requires that the new word entrant should be concise, phonetically strong and resemble the function to which the word may be used. Internet language is the latest invention in which the word has been so abbreviated that at times the user is frightened that its continuous usage would finally obliterate the real word. To counter that threat old-timers adopt duality in acti...

Emotion word processing: does mood make a difference?

Science.gov (United States)

Sereno, Sara C.; Scott, Graham G.; Yao, Bo; Thaden, Elske J.; O'Donnell, Patrick J.

2015-01-01

Visual emotion word processing has been in the focus of recent psycholinguistic research. In general, emotion words provoke differential responses in comparison to neutral words. However, words are typically processed within a context rather than in isolation. For instance, how does one's inner emotional state influence the comprehension of emotion words? To address this question, the current study examined lexical decision responses to emotionally positive, negative, and neutral words as a function of induced mood as well as their word frequency. Mood was manipulated by exposing participants to different types of music. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions—no music, positive music, and negative music. Participants' moods were assessed during the experiment to confirm the mood induction manipulation. Reaction time results confirmed prior demonstrations of an interaction between a word's emotionality and its frequency. Results also showed a significant interaction between participant mood and word emotionality. However, the pattern of results was not consistent with mood-congruency effects. Although positive and negative mood facilitated responses overall in comparison to the control group, neither positive nor negative mood appeared to additionally facilitate responses to mood-congruent words. Instead, the pattern of findings seemed to be the consequence of attentional effects arising from induced mood. Positive mood broadens attention to a global level, eliminating the category distinction of positive-negative valence but leaving the high-low arousal dimension intact. In contrast, negative mood narrows attention to a local level, enhancing within-category distinctions, in particular, for negative words, resulting in less effective facilitation. PMID:26379570

What's in a name? Group fitness class names and women's reasons for exercising.

Science.gov (United States)

Brown, Theresa C; Miller, Bridget M; Adams, Bailey M

2017-01-01

The benefits of intrinsic exercise motivation are well recognized, yet extrinsically focused group-fitness class names/descriptions dominate the fitness industry. To explore the impact of how fitness classes are marketed, women (N = 389) were asked to indicate their preference for either intrinsically or extrinsically focused fitness classes based on title/description. Participants who favored intrinsic class names/descriptions were more likely to report greater interest/enjoyment, perceived competence, and greater effort and report exercising for health/fitness-related reasons. Those favoring extrinsic class names/descriptions were more likely to experience tension/pressure when exercising and report exercising for appearance/weight-related reasons. The results demonstrate the importance of wording when marketing fitness classes.

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.

Phonological Awareness and Rapid Automatized Naming Are Independent Phonological Competencies With Specific Impacts on Word Reading and Spelling: An Intervention Study.

Science.gov (United States)

Vander Stappen, Caroline; Reybroeck, Marie Van

2018-01-01

Phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatized naming (RAN) have been shown to be powerful predictors of reading achievement across many languages. However, literature remains unclear: (a) whether RAN is independent of PA, (b) about the specific influences of PA and RAN on reading and spelling, and (c) about the efficacy of a RAN intervention. This study aims to address these issues by means of an intervention design. Precisely, the objectives are (a) to determine whether training one competence involves or not an effect on the other, (b) to examine whether each intervention based on oral abilities (PA vs. RAN) could improve word reading and word spelling performances, and (c) to assess the efficacy of a RAN-objects' intervention. Thirty-six French-speaking second graders, from two Belgian elementary schools, were divided into two groups, and received either a PA- or a RAN-objects' intervention. Twenty-five-minute lessons took place at school twice a week over a period of 2 months. Both groups were compared on multiple experimental measures (PA, RAN, word reading, and word spelling), before and immediately after the intervention, and 6 months later. Results showed specific efficacy of the two interventions, with participants trained in one ability outperforming those from the other group on this specific ability at post-test. Moreover, the PA intervention revealed transfer effects on the sub-lexical processes of spelling, while the RAN intervention enhanced word reading speed. Finally, the results demonstrated the efficacy of a RAN-objects' intervention for the first time. These findings provide a new piece of evidence showing the independence of PA and RAN, each process influencing the acquisition of literacy skills in a different way. The efficacy and the specific transfer effects of both interventions open up new perspectives for prevention and targeted remediation of reading disabilities.

Named entity recognition in a South African context

CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

De Waal, AJ

2006-10-01

Full Text Available Named Entity Recognition (NER) is the process of identifying occurrences of words or expressions as belonging to a particular category of a Named Entity (NE).The aim of the project was to test the feasibility of a probabilistic NER system using...

Effects of language experience, use, and cognitive functioning on bilingual word production and comprehension

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Litcofsky, K.; Tanner, D.; Hell, A.G. van

2016-01-01

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions: Considerable research has investigated how bilinguals produce and comprehend words, focusing mainly on how bilinguals are able to select words from the appropriate language. Less research, however, has investigated whether production and comprehension

The role of metrical information in apraxia of speech. Perceptual and acoustic analyses of word stress.

Science.gov (United States)

Aichert, Ingrid; Späth, Mona; Ziegler, Wolfram

2016-02-01

Several factors are known to influence speech accuracy in patients with apraxia of speech (AOS), e.g., syllable structure or word length. However, the impact of word stress has largely been neglected so far. More generally, the role of prosodic information at the phonetic encoding stage of speech production often remains unconsidered in models of speech production. This study aimed to investigate the influence of word stress on error production in AOS. Two-syllabic words with stress on the first (trochees) vs. the second syllable (iambs) were compared in 14 patients with AOS, three of them exhibiting pure AOS, and in a control group of six normal speakers. The patients produced significantly more errors on iambic than on trochaic words. A most prominent metrical effect was obtained for segmental errors. Acoustic analyses of word durations revealed a disproportionate advantage of the trochaic meter in the patients relative to the healthy controls. The results indicate that German apraxic speakers are sensitive to metrical information. It is assumed that metrical patterns function as prosodic frames for articulation planning, and that the regular metrical pattern in German, the trochaic form, has a facilitating effect on word production in patients with AOS. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Naming game with biased assimilation over adaptive networks

Science.gov (United States)

Fu, Guiyuan; Zhang, Weidong

2018-01-01

The dynamics of two-word naming game incorporating the influence of biased assimilation over adaptive network is investigated in this paper. Firstly an extended naming game with biased assimilation (NGBA) is proposed. The hearer in NGBA accepts the received information in a biased manner, where he may refuse to accept the conveyed word from the speaker with a predefined probability, if the conveyed word is different from his current memory. Secondly, the adaptive network is formulated by rewiring the links. Theoretical analysis is developed to show that the population in NGBA will eventually reach global consensus on either A or B. Numerical simulation results show that the larger strength of biased assimilation on both words, the slower convergence speed, while larger strength of biased assimilation on only one word can slightly accelerate the convergence; larger population size can make the rate of convergence slower to a large extent when it increases from a relatively small size, while such effect becomes minor when the population size is large; the behavior of adaptively reconnecting the existing links can greatly accelerate the rate of convergence especially on the sparse connected network.

Bye-bye mummy - Word comprehension in 9-month-old infants.

Science.gov (United States)

Syrnyk, Corinne; Meints, Kerstin

2017-06-01

From the little research that exists on the onset of word learning in infants under the age of 1 year, the evidence suggests an idiosyncratic comprehensive vocabulary is developing. To further this field, we tested 49 nine-month-old infants by pre-assessing their vocabularies using a UK version of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Developmental Inventory. Intermodal preferential looking (IPL) was then used to examine word comprehension including: (a) words parents reported as understood, (b) words infants are expected to understand according to age-related frequency data, and (c) words parents had reported infants not to understand. Assuming parents are good assessors of their infant's early word knowledge, we expected a naming effect with IPL in condition (a), but not condition (c). As language research uses standard samples of words, we expected a discernible naming effect in condition (b). Results show clear IPL evidence of word comprehension for those words that parents reported their infants to understand (condition a). This agreement between methods demonstrates the usefulness of parental communicative developmental inventory in conjunction with IPL to assess infant's individual word knowledge. No naming effects were found for condition (c) and the lack of naming effects in (b) shows that pre-established word lists may not give a sufficiently clear picture of infant's true vocabulary - an important insight for researchers and practitioners alike. Statement of contribution What is already known on this subject? Most word comprehension research is mainly based on older infants (12, 15, or 18 months of age to 2-3 years and older). Some evidence of word comprehension for common and novel nouns in 6- to 10-month-olds. Existing evidence uses either only specific word groups or nouns combined with specific training and/or repetition procedures. What does this study add? Nine-month-olds display word knowledge independent of context and without repetitions of words

To plan or not to plan: Does planning for production remove facilitation from associative priming?

Science.gov (United States)

Jongman, Suzanne R; Meyer, Antje S

2017-11-01

Theories of conversation propose that in order to have smooth transitions from one turn to the next, speakers already plan their response while listening to their interlocutor. Moreover, it has been argued that speakers align their linguistic representations (i.e. prime each other), thereby reducing the processing costs associated with concurrent listening and speaking. In two experiments, we assessed how identity and associative priming from spoken words onto picture naming were affected by a concurrent speech planning task. In a baseline (no name) condition, participants heard prime words that were identical, associatively related, or unrelated to target pictures presented two seconds after prime onset. Each prime was accompanied by a non-target picture and followed by its recorded name. The participant did not name the non-target picture. In the plan condition, the participants first named the non-target picture, instead of listening to the recording, and then the target. In Experiment 1, where the plan- and no-plan conditions were tested between participants, priming effects of equal strength were found in the plan and no-plan condition. In Experiment 2, where the two conditions were tested within participants, the identity priming effect was maintained, but the associative priming effect was only seen in the no-plan but not in the plan condition. In this experiment, participant had to decide at the onset of each trial whether or not to name the non-target picture, rendering the task more complex than in Experiment 1. These decision processes may have interfered with the processing of the primes. Thus, associative priming can take place during speech planning, but only if the cognitive load is not too high. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The Effects of Word Exposure Frequency and Elaboration of Word Processing on Incidental L2 Vocabulary Acquisition through Reading

Science.gov (United States)

Eckerth, Johannes; Tavakoli, Parveneh

2012-01-01

Research on incidental second language (L2) vocabulary acquisition through reading has claimed that repeated encounters with unfamiliar words and the relative elaboration of processing these words facilitate word learning. However, so far both variables have been investigated in isolation. To help close this research gap, the current study…

Whole-Word Phonological Representations of Disyllabic Words in the Chinese Lexicon: Data From Acquired Dyslexia

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Sam-Po Law

2005-01-01

Full Text Available This study addresses the issue of the existence of whole-word phonological representations of disyllabic and multisyllabic words in the Chinese mental lexicon. A Cantonese brain-injured dyslexic individual with semantic deficits, YKM, was assessed on his abilities to read aloud and to comprehend disyllabic words containing homographic heterophonous characters, the pronunciation of which can only be disambiguated in word context. Superior performance on reading to comprehension was found. YKM could produce the target phonological forms without understanding the words. The dissociation is taken as evidence for whole-word representations for these words at the phonological level. The claim is consistent with previous account for discrepancy of the frequencies of tonal errors between reading aloud and object naming in Cantonese reported of another case study of similar deficits. Theoretical arguments for whole-word form representations for all multisyllabic Chinese words are also discussed.

Narrative-Based Intervention for Word-Finding Difficulties: A Case Study

Science.gov (United States)

Marks, Ian; Stokes, Stephanie F.

2010-01-01

Background: Children with word-finding difficulties manifest a high frequency of word-finding characteristics in narrative, yet word-finding interventions have concentrated on single-word treatments and outcome measures. Aims: This study measured the effectiveness of a narrative-based intervention in improving single-word picture-naming and…

How does species name affect consumer choice? An analysis and implications for cabinet door marketers.

Science.gov (United States)

Joseph A. Roos; Geof Donovan; David. Nicholls

2005-01-01

Consumers choose products based on various tangible and intangible attributes. Previous research has shown that there is a difference between appearance-based and word-based evaluations of wood species. However, little research has been done on how this difference affects consumer choice. This study examined how the presence or absence of a species name affects a...

A Finnic holy word and its subsequent history

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Mauno Koski

1990-01-01

Full Text Available This article concentrates on a specific ancient holy word in Finnish and its subsequent development, hiisi. In the Finnish language region hiisi appears as an element in place names in over 230 villages established by the end of the thirteenth century, and at least a majority of these must have existed since prehistoric times. In Finland as well as in Estonia it is possible to demonstrate an earlier sacral function in places which contain hiisi as a component of their name, partly with the help of archeological discoveries, and partly with the help of oral folk tradition. It is particularly among the earliest settlement areas of Southwest Finland, Satakunta and Häme that hiisi features in the names of sacrificial sites or trees, in other words in the same areas where it features in the names of burial grounds. Names in which the hiisi element precedes a word meaning a lake, pond, or other water formation, occur particularly in the eastern Finnish dialect regions, as well as in the regions of Karelian, Olonets, Lydian, and Vepsian. In addition to its factual meaning of cult place, the Finnish word hiisi has come to denote a supernatural entity both in terms of its reference to a place and in terms of its reference to a being.

Cross-situational statistical word learning in young children.

Science.gov (United States)

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

2014-10-01

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

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

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Amy D Rodriguez

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

Relative speed of processing determines color-word contingency learning.

Science.gov (United States)

Forrin, Noah D; MacLeod, Colin M

2017-10-01

In three experiments, we tested a relative-speed-of-processing account of color-word contingency learning, a phenomenon in which color identification responses to high-contingency stimuli (words that appear most often in particular colors) are faster than those to low-contingency stimuli. Experiment 1 showed equally large contingency-learning effects whether responding was to the colors or to the words, likely due to slow responding to both dimensions because of the unfamiliar mapping required by the key press responses. For Experiment 2, participants switched to vocal responding, in which reading words is considerably faster than naming colors, and we obtained a contingency-learning effect only for color naming, the slower dimension. In Experiment 3, previewing the color information resulted in a reduced contingency-learning effect for color naming, but it enhanced the contingency-learning effect for word reading. These results are all consistent with contingency learning influencing performance only when the nominally irrelevant feature is faster to process than the relevant feature, and therefore are entirely in accord with a relative-speed-of-processing explanation.

What’s in a name? The effects of sound symbolism and package shape on consumer responses to food products

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Fenko, Anna; Lotterman, Henriët; Galetzka, Mirjam

2016-01-01

In the global market, consumers are exposed to multiple brand names in unfamiliar languages. Even meaningless words can trigger certain semantic associations. This phenomenon is known as sound symbolism, i.e., the direct link between a sound and a meaning. Sound symbolism helps consumers to form

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

Science.gov (United States)

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

2014-01-01

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

True and false memory for colour names versus actual colours: support for the visual distinctiveness heuristic in memory for colour information.

Science.gov (United States)

Eslick, Andrea N; Kostic, Bogdan; Cleary, Anne M

2010-06-01

In a colour variation of the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) false memory paradigm, participants studied lists of words critically related to a nonstudied colour name (e.g., "blood, cherry, scarlet, rouge ... "); they later showed false memory for the critical colour name (e.g., "red"). Two additional experiments suggest that participants generate colour imagery in response to such colour-related DRM lists. First, participants claim to experience colour imagery more often following colour-related than standard non-colour-related DRM lists; they also rate their colour imagery as more vivid following colour-related lists. Second, participants exhibit facilitative priming for critical colours in a dot selection task that follows words in the colour-related DRM list, suggesting that colour-related DRM lists prime participants for the actual critical colours themselves. Despite these findings, false memory for critical colour names does not extend to the actual colours themselves (font colours). Rather than leading to source confusion about which colours were self-generated and which were studied, presenting the study lists in varied font colours actually worked to reduce false memory overall. Results are interpreted within the framework of the visual distinctiveness hypothesis.

Excitatory and inhibitory priming by attended and ignored non-recycled words with monolinguals and bilinguals.

Science.gov (United States)

Neumann, Ewald; Nkrumah, Ivy K; Chen, Zhe

2018-03-03

Experiments examining identity priming from attended and ignored novel words (words that are used only once except when repetition is required due to experimental manipulation) in a lexical decision task are reported. Experiment 1 tested English monolinguals whereas Experiment 2 tested Twi (a native language of Ghana, Africa)-English bilinguals. Participants were presented with sequential pairs of stimuli composed of a prime followed by a probe, with each containing two items. The participants were required to name the target word in the prime display, and to make a lexical decision to the target item in the probe display. On attended repetition (AR) trials the probe target item was identical to the target word on the preceding attentional display. On ignored repetition (IR) trials the probe target item was the same as the distractor word in the preceding attentional display. The experiments produced facilitated (positive) priming in the AR trials and delayed (negative) priming in the IR trials. Significantly, the positive and negative priming effects also replicated across both monolingual and bilingual groups of participants, despite the fact that the bilinguals were responding to the task in their non-dominant language.

Current Trends in Name Giving among Bulgarians: A Study of the Names of Newborns in the Sofia Region

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Maya Vlahova-Angelova

2017-11-01

Full Text Available The article showcases a large-scale study of the modern Bulgarian anthroponymic system conducted by the Applied Onomastics section of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences Institute for the Bulgarian Language (IBL with the aim of revealing the current trends in the choice of personal names by the Bulgarians at the beginning of the 21st century. The study focuses on personal names of Bulgarians born in 2010 in the Sofia region, as extracted from the Unified System of Civil Registration and Administrative Services of the Population of the Republic of Bulgaria. The total number of births this year was 1,005, of which 51.5% were boys, 48.5% were girls. Statistical and linguistic analysis of names allowed to measure the popularity of both individual personal names and different name types. It shows the quantitative ratio between most commonly chosen names and those of a singular use in relation to the total number of anthroponyms in the corpus, and proves that the male names are more sustainable in terms of usage than female. The derivational and etymological analysis of personal names helped to identify the productive word-formation types of names and the so-called “unisex names,” to distinguish between the native Bulgarian and the borrowed foreign names, as well as to classify graphic and phonetic variants of the same anthroponym. A number of quantitative comparisons were made between certain categories of names, for example, between compound (two-stem personal names (such as Miroslav and simple names (such as Biser, showing the ratio of the two-component personal names (such as Anna-Maria to the rest of the anthroponyms. It was found that the Bulgarian anthroponymic system in the beginning of the 21st century is more open to the non-adapted foreign names (like Mishel, Nancy, shows wider usage of diminutive “unisex names” (Moni, Stephy, Toni, as well as the growing popularity of shortened forms used as official names (Alex, Boni, Pepi, and the

Cross domains Arabic named entity recognition system

KAUST Repository

Al-Ahmari, S. Saad

2016-07-11

Named Entity Recognition (NER) plays an important role in many Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications such as; Information Extraction (IE), Question Answering (QA), Text Clustering, Text Summarization and Word Sense Disambiguation. This paper presents the development and implementation of domain independent system to recognize three types of Arabic named entities. The system works based on a set of domain independent grammar-rules along with Arabic part of speech tagger in addition to gazetteers and lists of trigger words. The experimental results shown, that the system performed as good as other systems with better results in some cases of cross-domains corpora. © (2016) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.

Cross domains Arabic named entity recognition system

KAUST Repository

Al-Ahmari, S. Saad; Abdullatif Al-Johar, B.

2016-01-01

Named Entity Recognition (NER) plays an important role in many Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications such as; Information Extraction (IE), Question Answering (QA), Text Clustering, Text Summarization and Word Sense Disambiguation. This paper presents the development and implementation of domain independent system to recognize three types of Arabic named entities. The system works based on a set of domain independent grammar-rules along with Arabic part of speech tagger in addition to gazetteers and lists of trigger words. The experimental results shown, that the system performed as good as other systems with better results in some cases of cross-domains corpora. © (2016) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.

Extracting product features and opinion words using pattern knowledge in customer reviews.

Science.gov (United States)

Htay, Su Su; Lynn, Khin Thidar

2013-01-01

Due to the development of e-commerce and web technology, most of online Merchant sites are able to write comments about purchasing products for customer. Customer reviews expressed opinion about products or services which are collectively referred to as customer feedback data. Opinion extraction about products from customer reviews is becoming an interesting area of research and it is motivated to develop an automatic opinion mining application for users. Therefore, efficient method and techniques are needed to extract opinions from reviews. In this paper, we proposed a novel idea to find opinion words or phrases for each feature from customer reviews in an efficient way. Our focus in this paper is to get the patterns of opinion words/phrases about the feature of product from the review text through adjective, adverb, verb, and noun. The extracted features and opinions are useful for generating a meaningful summary that can provide significant informative resource to help the user as well as merchants to track the most suitable choice of product.

Extracting Product Features and Opinion Words Using Pattern Knowledge in Customer Reviews

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Su Su Htay

2013-01-01

Full Text Available Due to the development of e-commerce and web technology, most of online Merchant sites are able to write comments about purchasing products for customer. Customer reviews expressed opinion about products or services which are collectively referred to as customer feedback data. Opinion extraction about products from customer reviews is becoming an interesting area of research and it is motivated to develop an automatic opinion mining application for users. Therefore, efficient method and techniques are needed to extract opinions from reviews. In this paper, we proposed a novel idea to find opinion words or phrases for each feature from customer reviews in an efficient way. Our focus in this paper is to get the patterns of opinion words/phrases about the feature of product from the review text through adjective, adverb, verb, and noun. The extracted features and opinions are useful for generating a meaningful summary that can provide significant informative resource to help the user as well as merchants to track the most suitable choice of product.

Extracting Product Features and Opinion Words Using Pattern Knowledge in Customer Reviews

Science.gov (United States)

Lynn, Khin Thidar

2013-01-01

Due to the development of e-commerce and web technology, most of online Merchant sites are able to write comments about purchasing products for customer. Customer reviews expressed opinion about products or services which are collectively referred to as customer feedback data. Opinion extraction about products from customer reviews is becoming an interesting area of research and it is motivated to develop an automatic opinion mining application for users. Therefore, efficient method and techniques are needed to extract opinions from reviews. In this paper, we proposed a novel idea to find opinion words or phrases for each feature from customer reviews in an efficient way. Our focus in this paper is to get the patterns of opinion words/phrases about the feature of product from the review text through adjective, adverb, verb, and noun. The extracted features and opinions are useful for generating a meaningful summary that can provide significant informative resource to help the user as well as merchants to track the most suitable choice of product. PMID:24459430

Can You Say My Name?

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Erz, Antonia; Christensen, Bo T.

affect their judgments of people and objects. We extend this research by investigating the effect of phonological fluency on recognition and recall of novel non-word brand names in three laboratory experiments. The results provide us with a more fine-grained idea of fluency effects on memory of non...

Where Does the Delay in L2 Picture Naming Come from? Psycholinguistic and Neurocognitive Evidence on Second Language Word Production

Science.gov (United States)

Hanulova, Jana; Davidson, Douglas J.; Indefrey, Peter

2011-01-01

Bilinguals are slower when naming a picture in their second language than when naming it in their first language. Although the phenomenon has been frequently replicated, it is not known what causes the delay in the second language. In this article we discuss at what processing stages a delay might arise according to current models of bilingual…

EPONYMY BASED ON NAMES OF COMPANIES

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Éva Kovács

2016-03-01

Full Text Available As is generally defined, eponymy, one of the word-formation processes refers to the derivation of a name of a city, country, era, institution, or other place or thing from that of a person such as sandwich, wellington, mackintosh or cardigan. Eponymy can be classified in several ways, some refer to foods (Pizza Margaritha, diseases (Alzheimer disease, places (Washington, scientific laws (Archimedes’s principle and sport terms (Axel jump, whereas others indicate trademarks, brand names (aspirin, prizes, awards (Nobel Prize, inventions (Rubic’s Cube, ideologies (Darwinism, colleges, universities (Stanford University and companies (Ford. The present paper discusses eponyms which denote companies based on the name of their founder(s (e.g. Porsche, Siemens, Gucci, Campari, Cadbury, McDonald’s and Walt Disney, etc. by revealing what kind of a metonymic relationship is manifested in them. Cognitive linguists, such as Lakoff and Johnson (1980, Radden and Kövecses (1999 and Kövecses (2002 state that metonymy is essentially a conceptual phenomenon, in which one conceptual entity, the vehicle, provides mental access to another conceptual entity, the target, within the same idealized cognitive model. In fact, metonymy is part of our everyday way of thinking, and is grounded in experience. Common metonymies include PRODUCER FOR PRODUCT (Pass me the Shakespeare on the top shelf., PLACE FOR EVENT (Iraq nearly cost Tony Blair the premiership, PLACE FOR INSTITUTION (Downing Street refused comment., PART FOR THE WHOLE (She’s not just a pretty face., WHOLE FOR THE PART (England beat Australia in the 2003 Rugby World Cup final. and EFFECT FOR CAUSE (He has a long face.. Following the cognitive approach to metonyms, I tentatively suggest that the metonymy PRODUCER FOR THE PRODUCT can be observed in the case of car makes, products of famous fashion houses, cosmetics and drinks as is illustrated by examples like He’s bought a Ferrari. I ate a McDonald or

Stress Judgment and Production in English Derivation, and Word Reading in Adult Mandarin-Speaking English Learners.

Science.gov (United States)

Chung, Wei-Lun; Jarmulowicz, Linda

2017-08-01

For monolingual English-speaking children, judgment and production of stress in derived words, including words with phonologically neutral (e.g., -ness) and non-neutral suffixes (e.g., -ity), is important to both academic vocabulary growth and to word reading. For Mandarin-speaking adult English learners (AELs) the challenge of learning the English stress system might be complicated by cross-linguistic differences in prosodic function and features. As Mandarin-speakers become more proficient in English, patterns similar to those seen in monolingual children could emerge in which awareness and use of stress and suffix cues benefit word reading. A correlational design was used to examine the contributions of English stress in derivation with neutral and non-neutral suffixes to English word and nonword reading. Stress judgment in non-neutral derivation predicted word reading after controlling for working memory and English vocabulary; whereas stress production in neutral derivation contributed to word reading and pseudoword decoding, independent of working memory and English vocabulary. Although AELs could use stress and suffix cues for word reading, AELs were different from native English speakers in awareness of non-neutral suffix cues conditioning lexical stress placement. AELs may need to rely on lexical storage of primary stress in derivations with non-neutral suffixes.

Students' Demand for Smartphones: Structural Relationships of Product Features, Brand Name, Product Price and Social Infuence

Science.gov (United States)

Suki, Norazah Mohd

2013-01-01

Purpose: The study aims to examine structural relationships of product features, brand name, product price and social influence with demand for Smartphones among Malaysian students'. Design/methodology/approach: Data collected from 320 valid pre-screened university students studying at the pubic higher learning institution in Federal Territory of…

Online learning from input versus offline memory evolution in adult word learning: effects of neighborhood density and phonologically related practice.

Science.gov (United States)

Storkel, Holly L; Bontempo, Daniel E; Pak, Natalie S

2014-10-01

In this study, the authors investigated adult word learning to determine how neighborhood density and practice across phonologically related training sets influence online learning from input during training versus offline memory evolution during no-training gaps. Sixty-one adults were randomly assigned to learn low- or high-density nonwords. Within each density condition, participants were trained on one set of words and then were trained on a second set of words, consisting of phonological neighbors of the first set. Learning was measured in a picture-naming test. Data were analyzed using multilevel modeling and spline regression. Steep learning during input was observed, with new words from dense neighborhoods and new words that were neighbors of recently learned words (i.e., second-set words) being learned better than other words. In terms of memory evolution, large and significant forgetting was observed during 1-week gaps in training. Effects of density and practice during memory evolution were opposite of those during input. Specifically, forgetting was greater for high-density and second-set words than for low-density and first-set words. High phonological similarity, regardless of source (i.e., known words or recent training), appears to facilitate online learning from input but seems to impede offline memory evolution.

Brand names of Portuguese medication: understanding the importance of their linguistic structure and regulatory issues.

Science.gov (United States)

Pires, Carla; Vigário, Marina; Cavaco, Afonso

2015-08-01

Among other regulatory requirements, medicine brands should be composed of single names without abbreviations to prevent errors in prescription of medication. The purposes of the study were to investigate the compliance of a sam ple of Portuguese medicine brand names with Portuguese pharmaceutical regulations. This includes identifying their basic linguistic characteristics and comparing these features and their frequency of occurrence with benchmark values of the colloquial or informal language. A sample of 474 brand names was selected. Names were analyzed using manual (visual analyses) and computer methods (FreP - Frequency Patterns of Phonological Objects in Portuguese and MS word). A significant number of names (61.3%) failed to comply with the Portuguese phonologic system (related to the sound of words) and/or the spelling system (related to the written form of words) contained more than one word, comprised a high proportion of infrequent syllable types or stress patterns and included abbreviations. The results suggest that some of the brand names of Portuguese medication should be reevaluated, and that regulation on this issue should be enforced and updated, taking into consideration specific linguistic and spelling codes.

The effects of name and religious priming on ratings of a well-known political figure, President Barack Obama.

Science.gov (United States)

Williams, Gary A; Guichard, AnaMarie C; An, JungHa

2017-01-01

Priming with race-typed names and religious concepts have been shown to activate stereotypes and increase prejudice towards out-groups. We examined the effects of name and religious word priming on views of a specific and well-known person, President Barack Obama. We predicted that politically conservative participants primed with President Obama's middle name (Hussein) would rate him more negatively and be more likely to view him as a Muslim than those not shown his middle name. We also examined whether conservatives primed with concrete religious words would rate President Obama more negatively and be more likely to view him as Muslim than those primed with other word types. Furthermore, we predicted that those who mis-identify President Obama as Muslim would rate him more negatively than would those who view him as Christian. The results provided mixed support for these hypotheses. Conservatives primed with President Obama's middle name rated him significantly more negatively than did those in the control condition. This effect was not found for politically liberal or moderate participants. Name priming did not significantly affect views of President Obama's religious affiliation. Although not statistically significant, conservatives primed with abstract religious words tended to rate President Obama more negatively than did those primed with other word types. Religious word priming significantly influenced views of President Obama's religious affiliation; interestingly, participants primed with abstract religious words were more likely to think President Obama is Muslim than were those primed with religious agent or non-religious words. As predicted, participants who thought president Obama was Muslim rated him significantly more negatively than did those who thought he was Christian. Overall, our results provide some evidence that ethnic name and religious word priming can significantly influence opinions, even with a well-known and specific person.

Vocabulary Word Instruction for Students Who Read Braille

Science.gov (United States)

Savaiano, Mackenzie E.; Compton, Donald L.; Hatton, Deborah D.; Lloyd, Blair P.

2016-01-01

The association made between the meaning, spelling, and pronunciation of a word has been shown to help children remember the meanings of words. The present study addressed whether the presence of a target word in Braille during instruction facilitated vocabulary learning more efficiently than an auditory-only instructional condition. The authors…

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

Science.gov (United States)

Roembke, Tanja; McMurray, Bob

2016-04-01

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

Finding words in a language that allows words without vowels.

Science.gov (United States)

El Aissati, Abder; McQueen, James M; Cutler, Anne

2012-07-01

Across many languages from unrelated families, spoken-word recognition is subject to a constraint whereby potential word candidates must contain a vowel. This constraint minimizes competition from embedded words (e.g., in English, disfavoring win in twin because t cannot be a word). However, the constraint would be counter-productive in certain languages that allow stand-alone vowelless open-class words. One such language is Berber (where t is indeed a word). Berber listeners here detected words affixed to nonsense contexts with or without vowels. Length effects seen in other languages replicated in Berber, but in contrast to prior findings, word detection was not hindered by vowelless contexts. When words can be vowelless, otherwise universal constraints disfavoring vowelless words do not feature in spoken-word recognition. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Naming homographs in your second language: A study of response level effects

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Sandra, D.M.J.; Smits, E.M.G.; Martensen, H.E.; Dijkstra, A.F.J.

2006-01-01

Interlingual homographs are words from different languages that have identical spelling patterns but unrelated meanings, such as the English word ROOM which is identical in form to the Dutch word for ‘cream’. This paper focusses on the process of response selection in the naming of such homographs,

Semantic ambiguity effects on traditional Chinese character naming: A corpus-based approach.

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Chang, Ya-Ning; Lee, Chia-Ying

2017-11-09

Words are considered semantically ambiguous if they have more than one meaning and can be used in multiple contexts. A number of recent studies have provided objective ambiguity measures by using a corpus-based approach and have demonstrated ambiguity advantages in both naming and lexical decision tasks. Although the predictive power of objective ambiguity measures has been examined in several alphabetic language systems, the effects in logographic languages remain unclear. Moreover, most ambiguity measures do not explicitly address how the various contexts associated with a given word relate to each other. To explore these issues, we computed the contextual diversity (Adelman, Brown, & Quesada, Psychological Science, 17; 814-823, 2006) and semantic ambiguity (Hoffman, Lambon Ralph, & Rogers, Behavior Research Methods, 45; 718-730, 2013) of traditional Chinese single-character words based on the Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus, where contextual diversity was used to evaluate the present semantic space. We then derived a novel ambiguity measure, namely semantic variability, by computing the distance properties of the distinct clusters grouped by the contexts that contained a given word. We demonstrated that semantic variability was superior to semantic diversity in accounting for the variance in naming response times, suggesting that considering the substructure of the various contexts associated with a given word can provide a relatively fine scale of ambiguity information for a word. All of the context and ambiguity measures for 2,418 Chinese single-character words are provided as supplementary materials.

Express your social self: cultural differences in choice of brand-name versus generic products.

Science.gov (United States)

Kim, Heejung S; Drolet, Aimee

2009-12-01

This research examined cultural differences in the patterns of choices that reflect more social characteristics of a chooser (e.g., social status). Four studies examined the cultural difference in individuals' tendency to choose brand-name products (i.e., high-status options) over generic products (i.e., low-status options) and the underlying reasons for these differences. Compared to European Americans, Asian Americans consistently chose brand-name products. This difference was driven by Asian Americans' greater social status concerns. Self-consciousness was more strongly associated with the brand-name choices of Asian Americans (vs. European Americans), and experimentally induced social status led Asian Americans (vs. European Americans) to make more choices concordant with self-perception. These findings highlight the importance of considering external and social motivations underlying the choice-making process.

Gesturing more diminishes recall of abstract words when gesture is allowed and concrete words when it is taboo.

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Matthews-Saugstad, Krista M; Raymakers, Erik P; Kelty-Stephen, Damian G

2017-07-01

Gesture during speech can promote or diminish recall for conversation content. We explored effects of cognitive load on this relationship, manipulating it at two scales: individual-word abstractness and social constraints to prohibit gestures. Prohibited gestures can diminish recall but more so for abstract-word recall. Insofar as movement planning adds to cognitive load, movement amplitude may moderate gesture effects on memory, with greater permitted- and prohibited-gesture movements reducing abstract-word recall and concrete-word recall, respectively. We tested these effects in a dyadic game in which 39 adult participants described words to confederates without naming the word or five related words. Results supported our expectations and indicated that memory effects of gesturing depend on social, cognitive, and motoric aspects of discourse.

Words can slow down category learning.

Science.gov (United States)

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

2011-08-01

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

Origin names of gochu, kimchi, and bibimbap

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Hye-Jeong Yang

2015-12-01

Conclusion: Gochu, kimchi, and bibimbap have thousands of years of history and have been called with pure Korean name words. It was only that they were recorded in the form of hanja during the time written Korean was undervalued where people insisted borrowing Chinese characters to write despite written Korean being available. Thus, gocho (苦椒, chimchae (沈菜, and koldonban (滑董飯 are not the origin names. The pure Korean names used even by the people back then are the actual ones: gochyo (고쵸, dimchae (딤, and bubuimbap (부뷤밥.

Mojibake - The rehearsal of word fragments in verbal recall.

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Lange-Küttner, Christiane; Sykorova, Eva

2015-01-01

Theories of verbal rehearsal usually assume that whole words are being rehearsed. However, words consist of letter sequences, or syllables, or word onset-vowel-coda, amongst many other conceptualizations of word structure. A more general term is the 'grain size' of word units (Ziegler and Goswami, 2005). In the current study, a new method measured the quantitative percentage of correctly remembered word structure. The amount of letters in the correct letter sequence as per cent of word length was calculated, disregarding missing or added letters. A forced rehearsal was tested by repeating each memory list four times. We tested low frequency (LF) English words versus geographical (UK) town names to control for content. We also tested unfamiliar international (INT) non-words and names of international (INT) European towns to control for familiarity. An immediate versus distributed repetition was tested with a between-subject design. Participants responded with word fragments in their written recall especially when they had to remember unfamiliar words. While memory of whole words was sensitive to content, presentation distribution and individual sex and language differences, recall of word fragments was not. There was no trade-off between memory of word fragments with whole word recall during the repetition, instead also word fragments significantly increased. Moreover, while whole word responses correlated with each other during repetition, and word fragment responses correlated with each other during repetition, these two types of word recall responses were not correlated with each other. Thus there may be a lower layer consisting of free, sparse word fragments and an upper layer that consists of language-specific, orthographically and semantically constrained words.

Intentional forgetting reduces color-naming interference: evidence from item-method directed forgetting.

Science.gov (United States)

Lee, Yuh-Shiow; Lee, Huang-Mou; Fawcett, Jonathan M

2013-01-01

In an item-method-directed forgetting task, Chinese words were presented individually, each followed by an instruction to remember or forget. Colored probe items were presented following each memory instruction requiring a speeded color-naming response. Half of the probe items were novel and unrelated to the preceding study item, whereas the remaining half of the probe items were a repetition of the preceding study item. Repeated probe items were either identical to the preceding study item (E1, E2), a phonetic reproduction of the preceding study item (E3), or perceptually matched to the preceding study item (E4). Color-naming interference was calculated by subtracting color-naming reaction times made in response to a string of meaningless symbols from that of the novel and repeated conditions. Across all experiments, participants recalled more to-be-remembered (TBR) than to-be-forgotten (TBF) study words. More importantly, Experiments 1 and 2 found that color-naming interference was reduced for repeated TBF words relative to repeated TBR words. Experiments 3 and 4 further found that this effect occurred at the perceptual rather than semantic level. These findings suggest that participants may bias processing resources away from the perceptual representation of to-be-forgotten information.

BioWord: A sequence manipulation suite for Microsoft Word

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Anzaldi Laura J

2012-06-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background The ability to manipulate, edit and process DNA and protein sequences has rapidly become a necessary skill for practicing biologists across a wide swath of disciplines. In spite of this, most everyday sequence manipulation tools are distributed across several programs and web servers, sometimes requiring installation and typically involving frequent switching between applications. To address this problem, here we have developed BioWord, a macro-enabled self-installing template for Microsoft Word documents that integrates an extensive suite of DNA and protein sequence manipulation tools. Results BioWord is distributed as a single macro-enabled template that self-installs with a single click. After installation, BioWord will open as a tab in the Office ribbon. Biologists can then easily manipulate DNA and protein sequences using a familiar interface and minimize the need to switch between applications. Beyond simple sequence manipulation, BioWord integrates functionality ranging from dyad search and consensus logos to motif discovery and pair-wise alignment. Written in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA as an open source, object-oriented project, BioWord allows users with varying programming experience to expand and customize the program to better meet their own needs. Conclusions BioWord integrates a powerful set of tools for biological sequence manipulation within a handy, user-friendly tab in a widely used word processing software package. The use of a simple scripting language and an object-oriented scheme facilitates customization by users and provides a very accessible educational platform for introducing students to basic bioinformatics algorithms.

BioWord: A sequence manipulation suite for Microsoft Word

Science.gov (United States)

2012-01-01

Background The ability to manipulate, edit and process DNA and protein sequences has rapidly become a necessary skill for practicing biologists across a wide swath of disciplines. In spite of this, most everyday sequence manipulation tools are distributed across several programs and web servers, sometimes requiring installation and typically involving frequent switching between applications. To address this problem, here we have developed BioWord, a macro-enabled self-installing template for Microsoft Word documents that integrates an extensive suite of DNA and protein sequence manipulation tools. Results BioWord is distributed as a single macro-enabled template that self-installs with a single click. After installation, BioWord will open as a tab in the Office ribbon. Biologists can then easily manipulate DNA and protein sequences using a familiar interface and minimize the need to switch between applications. Beyond simple sequence manipulation, BioWord integrates functionality ranging from dyad search and consensus logos to motif discovery and pair-wise alignment. Written in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) as an open source, object-oriented project, BioWord allows users with varying programming experience to expand and customize the program to better meet their own needs. Conclusions BioWord integrates a powerful set of tools for biological sequence manipulation within a handy, user-friendly tab in a widely used word processing software package. The use of a simple scripting language and an object-oriented scheme facilitates customization by users and provides a very accessible educational platform for introducing students to basic bioinformatics algorithms. PMID:22676326

BioWord: a sequence manipulation suite for Microsoft Word.

Science.gov (United States)

Anzaldi, Laura J; Muñoz-Fernández, Daniel; Erill, Ivan

2012-06-07

The ability to manipulate, edit and process DNA and protein sequences has rapidly become a necessary skill for practicing biologists across a wide swath of disciplines. In spite of this, most everyday sequence manipulation tools are distributed across several programs and web servers, sometimes requiring installation and typically involving frequent switching between applications. To address this problem, here we have developed BioWord, a macro-enabled self-installing template for Microsoft Word documents that integrates an extensive suite of DNA and protein sequence manipulation tools. BioWord is distributed as a single macro-enabled template that self-installs with a single click. After installation, BioWord will open as a tab in the Office ribbon. Biologists can then easily manipulate DNA and protein sequences using a familiar interface and minimize the need to switch between applications. Beyond simple sequence manipulation, BioWord integrates functionality ranging from dyad search and consensus logos to motif discovery and pair-wise alignment. Written in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) as an open source, object-oriented project, BioWord allows users with varying programming experience to expand and customize the program to better meet their own needs. BioWord integrates a powerful set of tools for biological sequence manipulation within a handy, user-friendly tab in a widely used word processing software package. The use of a simple scripting language and an object-oriented scheme facilitates customization by users and provides a very accessible educational platform for introducing students to basic bioinformatics algorithms.

Recognising and Interpreting Named Temporal Expressions

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Brucato, Matteo; Derczynski, Leon; Llorens, Hectjor

2013-01-01

This paper introduces a new class of temporal expression – named temporal expressions – and methods for recognising and interpreting its members. The commonest temporal expressions typically contain date and time words, like April or hours. Research into recognising and interpreting these typical...... expressions is mature in many languages. However, there is a class of expressions that are less typical, very varied, and difficult to automatically interpret. These indicate dates and times, but are harder to detect because they often do not contain time words and are not used frequently enough to appear...

Effects of Nitric Oxide Production Inhibitor Named, NG-Nitro-L-Arginine Methyl Ester (L-NAME, on Rat Mesenchymal Stem Cells Differentiation

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E Arfaei

2010-04-01

Full Text Available Introduction & Objectives: Recently, the findings of some studies have shown that, nitric oxide (NO probably has an important role in differentiation of mesenchymal stem cells to osteoblasts. The aim of the present investigation was to study the effects of nitric oxide production inhibitor named, NG-nitro-L-arginine methyl ester (L-NAME, on rat mesenchymal stem cells differentiation to osteoblasts in vitro. Materials & Methods: This was an experimental study conducted at Hamedan University of Medical Sciences in 2009, in which rat bone marrow stem cells were isolated in an aseptic condition and cultured in vitro. After third passage, the cells were cultured in osteogenic differentiation medium. To study the effects of L-NAME on osteogenic differentiation, the L-NAME was added to the culture medium at a concentration of 125, 250, and 500 μM in some culture plates. During the culture procedure, the media were replaced with fresh ones, with a three days interval. After 28 days of culturing the mineralized matrix was stained using Alizarian red staining method. The gathered data were analyzed by SPSS software version 12 using one way ANOVA. Results: The findings of this study showed that in the presence of L-NAME, differentiation of bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells to osteoblasts was disordered and matrix mineralization significantly decreased in a dose dependent manner. Conclusion: This study revealed that, inhibition of nitric oxide production using L-NAME can prevent the differentiation of rat bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells to osteoblast. The results imply that NO is an important constituent in differentiation of mesenchymal stem cell to osteoblasts.

Source memory enhancement for emotional words.

Science.gov (United States)

Doerksen, S; Shimamura, A P

2001-03-01

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

Word final schwa is driven by intonation-The case of Bari Italian.

Science.gov (United States)

Grice, Martine; Savino, Michelina; Roettger, Timo B

2018-04-01

In order to convey pragmatic functions, a speaker has to select an intonation contour (the tune) in addition to the words that are to be spoken (the text). The tune and text are assumed to be independent of each other, such that any one intonation contour can be produced on different phrases, regardless of the number and nature of the segments they are made up of. However, if the segmental string is too short, certain tunes-especially those with a rising component-call for adjustments to the text. In Italian, for instance, loan words such as "chat" can be produced with a word final schwa when this word occurs at the end of a question. This paper investigates this word final schwa in the Bari variety in a number of different intonation contours. Although its presence and duration is to some extent dependent on idiosyncratic properties of speakers and words, schwa is largely conditioned by intonation. Schwa cannot thus be considered a mere phonetic artefact, since it is relevant for phonology, in that it facilitates the production of communicatively relevant intonation contours.

78 FR 69691 - Draft Guidance for Industry on Product Name Placement, Size, and Prominence in Advertising and...

Science.gov (United States)

2013-11-20

...] Draft Guidance for Industry on Product Name Placement, Size, and Prominence in Advertising and... entitled ``Product Name Placement, Size, and Prominence in Advertising and Promotional Labeling.'' When... promotional labeling and advertising for prescription human drugs, including biological drug products, and...

Is processing of symbols and words influenced by writing system? Evidence from Chinese, Korean, English, and Greek.

Science.gov (United States)

Altani, Angeliki; Georgiou, George K; Deng, Ciping; Cho, Jeung-Ryeul; Katopodi, Katerina; Wei, Wei; Protopapas, Athanassios

2017-12-01

We examined cross-linguistic effects in the relationship between serial and discrete versions of digit naming and word reading. In total, 113 Mandarin-speaking Chinese children, 100 Korean children, 112 English-speaking Canadian children, and 108 Greek children in Grade 3 were administered tasks of serial and discrete naming of words and digits. Interrelations among tasks indicated that the link between rapid naming and reading is largely determined by the format of the tasks across orthographies. Multigroup path analyses with discrete and serial word reading as dependent variables revealed commonalities as well as significant differences between writing systems. The path coefficient from discrete digits to discrete words was greater for the more transparent orthographies, consistent with more efficient sight-word processing. The effect of discrete word reading on serial word reading was stronger in alphabetic languages, where there was also a suppressive effect of discrete digit naming. However, the effect of serial digit naming on serial word reading did not differ among the four language groups. This pattern of relationships challenges a universal account of reading fluency acquisition while upholding a universal role of rapid serial naming, further distinguishing between multi-element interword and intraword processing. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Naming names: the first women taxonomists in mycology

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Sara Maroske

2018-03-01

Full Text Available The transition from amateur to professional in natural history is generally regarded as having taken place in the nineteenth century, but landmark events such as the 1917 appointment of mycologist Johanna Westerdijk (1883–1961 as the first female professor in the Netherlands indicate that the pattern of change for women was more varied and delayed than for men. We investigate this transition in mycology, and identify only 43 women in the Western World who published scientific mycological literature pre-1900, of whom twelve published new fungal taxa. By charting the emergence of these women over time, and comparing the output of self-taught amateurs and university graduates, we establish the key role of access to higher education in female participation in mycology. Using a suite of strategies, six of the self-taught amateurs managed to overcome their educational disadvantages and name names — Catharina Dörrien (the first to name a fungal taxon, Marie-Anne Libert, Mary Elizabeth Banning, Élise-Caroline Bommer, Mariette Rousseau, and Annie Lorrain Smith. By 1900, the professional era for women in mycology was underway, and increasing numbers published new taxa. Parity with male colleagues in recognition and promotion, however, remains an ongoing issue. Key words: Amateurs, Fungi, Gender studies, History of science, Plant pathology

Word-of-mouth dynamics with information seeking: Information is not (only) epidemics

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Thiriot, Samuel

2018-02-01

Word-of-mouth is known to determine the success or failure of innovations (Rogers, 2003) and facilitate the diffusion of products (Katz and Lazarsfeld, 1955). Word-of-mouth is made of both individuals seeking out information and/or pro-actively spreading information (Gilly et al., 1998; Rogers, 2003). Information seeking is considered as a step mandatory for individuals to retrieve the expert knowledge necessary for them to understand the benefits of an innovation or decide to buy a product (Arndt, 1967; Rogers, 2003). Yet the role of information seeking in the word-of-mouth dynamics was not investigated in computational models. Here we study in which conditions word-of-mouth enables the population to retrieve the initial expertise scattered in the population. We design a computational model in which awareness and expert knowledge are both represented, and study the joint dynamics of information seeking and proactive transmission of information. Simulation experiments highlight the apparition of cascades of awareness, cascades of expertise and chains of information retrieval. We find that different strategies should be used depending on the initial proportion of expertise (disruptive innovations, incremental innovations or products belonging to well-known categories). Surprisingly, when there is too much expertise in the population prior the advertisement campaign, word-of-mouth is less efficient in the retrieval of this expertise than when less expertise is initially present. Our results suggest that information seeking plays a key role in the dynamics of word-of-mouth, which can therefore not be reduced solely to the epidemic aspect.

Analysis of naming game over networks in the presence of memory loss

Science.gov (United States)

Fu, Guiyuan; Cai, Yunze; Zhang, Weidong

2017-08-01

In this paper, we study the dynamics of naming game where individuals are under the influence of memory loss. An extended naming game incorporating memory loss is proposed. Different from the existing naming game models, the individual in the proposed model would forget some words with a probability in his memory during interaction and keep his conveyed word unchanged until he reaches a local agreement. We analyze the dynamics of the proposed model through extensive and comprehensive simulations, where four typical networks with different configuration are employed. The influence of memory loss as well as the population size on the performance of the proposed model is investigated. The simulation results show that (i) the stronger memory loss, the larger convergence time; (ii) as the strength of memory loss becomes stronger, maximum number of total words will decrease, while the maximum number of different words among the population remains almost unchanged; (iii) the maximum number of different words increases linearly with the increase of the population size and coincides with each other under different strength of memory loss. The findings in the proposed model may give an insight to understand better the influence of memory loss on the transient dynamics of language evolution and opinion formation over networks.

Psychometric characteristics of single-word tests of children's speech sound production.

Science.gov (United States)

Flipsen, Peter; Ogiela, Diane A

2015-04-01

Our understanding of test construction has improved since the now-classic review by McCauley and Swisher (1984). The current review article examines the psychometric characteristics of current single-word tests of speech sound production in an attempt to determine whether our tests have improved since then. It also provides a resource that clinicians may use to help them make test selection decisions for their particular client populations. Ten tests published since 1990 were reviewed to determine whether they met the 10 criteria set out by McCauley and Swisher (1984), as well as 7 additional criteria. All of the tests reviewed met at least 3 of McCauley and Swisher's (1984) original criteria, and 9 of 10 tests met at least 5 of them. Most of the tests met some of the additional criteria as well. The state of the art for single-word tests of speech sound production in children appears to have improved in the last 30 years. There remains, however, room for improvement.

[French norms of imagery for pictures, for concrete and abstract words].

Science.gov (United States)

Robin, Frédérique

2006-09-01

This paper deals with French norms for mental image versus picture agreement for 138 pictures and the imagery value for 138 concrete words and 69 abstract words. The pictures were selected from Snodgrass et Vanderwart's norms (1980). The concrete words correspond to the dominant naming response to the pictorial stimuli. The abstract words were taken from verbal associative norms published by Ferrand (2001). The norms were established according to two variables: 1) mental image vs. picture agreement, and 2) imagery value of words. Three other variables were controlled: 1) picture naming agreement; 2) familiarity of objects referred to in the pictures and the concrete words, and 3) subjective verbal frequency of words. The originality of this work is to provide French imagery norms for the three kinds of stimuli usually compared in research on dual coding. Moreover, these studies focus on figurative and verbal stimuli variations in visual imagery processes.

Cross-Language Transfer of Word Reading Accuracy and Word Reading Fluency in Spanish-English and Chinese-English Bilinguals: Script-Universal and Script-Specific Processes

Science.gov (United States)

Pasquarella, Adrian; Chen, Xi; Gottardo, Alexandra; Geva, Esther

2015-01-01

This study examined cross-language transfer of word reading accuracy and word reading fluency in Spanish-English and Chinese-English bilinguals. Participants included 51 Spanish-English and 64 Chinese-English bilinguals. Both groups of children completed parallel measures of phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, word reading accuracy,…

Advance Planning of Form Properties in the Written Production of Single and Multiple Words

Science.gov (United States)

Damian, Markus F.; Stadthagen-Gonzalez, Hans

2009-01-01

Three experiments investigated the scope of advance planning in written production. Experiment 1 manipulated phonological factors in single word written production, and Experiments 2 and 3 did the same in the production of adjective-noun utterances. In all three experiments, effects on latencies were found which mirrored those previously…

Does humor in radio advertising affect recognition of novel product brand names?

Science.gov (United States)

Berg, E M; Lippman, L G

2001-04-01

The authors proposed that item selection during shopping is based on brand name recognition rather than recall. College students rated advertisements and news stories of a simulated radio program for level of amusement (orienting activity) before participating in a surprise recognition test. Humor level of the advertisements was varied systematically, and content was controlled. According to signal detection analysis, humor did not affect the strength of recognition memory for brand names (nonsense units). However, brand names and product types were significantly more likely to be associated when appearing in humorous advertisements than in nonhumorous advertisements. The results are compared with prior findings concerning humor and recall.

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

Science.gov (United States)

Vales, Catarina; Smith, Linda B

2015-01-01

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

Assessing the Effectiveness of Monolingual, Bilingual, and "Bilingualised" Dictionaries in the Comprehension and Production of New Words.

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Laufer, Batia; Hadar, Linor

1997-01-01

Examines the differences in effectiveness of three types of dictionaries--monolingual, bilingual, and "bilingualised" in the comprehension and production of new words by learners of English as a foreign language. The study tested participants on the comprehension of target words and on their ability to use these words in their own sentences. (16…

Activation of semantic information at the sublexical level during handwriting production: Evidence from inhibition effects of Chinese semantic radicals in the picture-word interference paradigm.

Science.gov (United States)

Chen, Xuqian; Liao, Yuanlan; Chen, Xianzhe

2017-08-01

Using a non-alphabetic language (e.g., Chinese), the present study tested a novel view that semantic information at the sublexical level should be activated during handwriting production. Over 80% of Chinese characters are phonograms, in which semantic radicals represent category information (e.g., 'chair,' 'peach,' 'orange' are related to plants) while phonetic radicals represent phonetic information (e.g., 'wolf,' 'brightness,' 'male,' are all pronounced /lang/). Under different semantic category conditions at the lexical level (semantically related in Experiment 1; semantically unrelated in Experiment 2), the orthographic relatedness and semantic relatedness of semantic radicals in the picture name and its distractor were manipulated under different SOAs (i.e., stimulus onset asynchrony, the interval between the onset of the picture and the onset of the interference word). Two questions were addressed: (1) Is it possible that semantic information could be activated in the sublexical level conditions? (2) How are semantic and orthographic information dynamically accessed in word production? Results showed that both orthographic and semantic information were activated under the present picture-word interference paradigm, dynamically under different SOAs, which supported our view that discussions on semantic processes in the writing modality should be extended to the sublexical level. The current findings provide possibility for building new orthography-phonology-semantics models in writing. © 2017 Scandinavian Psychological Associations and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Attention, Exposure Duration, and Gaze Shifting in Naming Performance

Science.gov (United States)

Roelofs, Ardi

2011-01-01

Two experiments are reported in which the role of attribute exposure duration in naming performance was examined by tracking eye movements. Participants were presented with color-word Stroop stimuli and left- or right-pointing arrows on different sides of a computer screen. They named the color attribute and shifted their gaze to the arrow to…

Near or far: The effect of spatial distance and vocabulary knowledge on word learning.

Science.gov (United States)

Axelsson, Emma L; Perry, Lynn K; Scott, Emilly J; Horst, Jessica S

2016-01-01

The current study investigated the role of spatial distance in word learning. Two-year-old children saw three novel objects named while the objects were either in close proximity to each other or spatially separated. Children were then tested on their retention for the name-object associations. Keeping the objects spatially separated from each other during naming was associated with increased retention for children with larger vocabularies. Children with a lower vocabulary size demonstrated better retention if they saw objects in close proximity to each other during naming. This demonstrates that keeping a clear view of objects during naming improves word learning for children who have already learned many words, but keeping objects within close proximal range is better for children at earlier stages of vocabulary acquisition. The effect of distance is therefore not equal across varying vocabulary sizes. The influences of visual crowding, cognitive load, and vocabulary size on word learning are discussed. Copyright © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Word generalization by a dog (Canis familiaris: is shape important?

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Emile van der Zee

Full Text Available We investigated the presence of a key feature of human word comprehension in a five year old Border Collie: the generalization of a word referring to an object to other objects of the same shape, also known as shape bias. Our first experiment confirmed a solid history of word learning in the dog, thus making it possible for certain object features to have become central in his word comprehension. Using an experimental paradigm originally employed to establish shape bias in children and human adults we taught the dog arbitrary object names (e.g. dax for novel objects. Two experiments showed that when briefly familiarized with word-object mappings the dog did not generalize object names to object shape but to object size. A fourth experiment showed that when familiarized with a word-object mapping for a longer period of time the dog tended to generalize the word to objects with the same texture. These results show that the dog tested did not display human-like word comprehension, but word generalization and word reference development of a qualitatively different nature compared to humans. We conclude that a shape bias for word generalization in humans is due to the distinct evolutionary history of the human sensory system for object identification and that more research is necessary to confirm qualitative differences in word generalization between humans and dogs.

Word Generalization by a Dog (Canis familiaris): Is Shape Important?

Science.gov (United States)

van der Zee, Emile; Zulch, Helen; Mills, Daniel

2012-01-01

We investigated the presence of a key feature of human word comprehension in a five year old Border Collie: the generalization of a word referring to an object to other objects of the same shape, also known as shape bias. Our first experiment confirmed a solid history of word learning in the dog, thus making it possible for certain object features to have become central in his word comprehension. Using an experimental paradigm originally employed to establish shape bias in children and human adults we taught the dog arbitrary object names (e.g. dax) for novel objects. Two experiments showed that when briefly familiarized with word-object mappings the dog did not generalize object names to object shape but to object size. A fourth experiment showed that when familiarized with a word-object mapping for a longer period of time the dog tended to generalize the word to objects with the same texture. These results show that the dog tested did not display human-like word comprehension, but word generalization and word reference development of a qualitatively different nature compared to humans. We conclude that a shape bias for word generalization in humans is due to the distinct evolutionary history of the human sensory system for object identification and that more research is necessary to confirm qualitative differences in word generalization between humans and dogs. PMID:23185321

Gesture en route to words

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Jensen de López, Kristine M.

2010-01-01

This study explores the communicative production of gestrural and vocal modalities by 8 normally developing children in two different cultures (Danish and Zapotec: Mexican indigenous) 16 to 20 months). We analyzed spontaneous production of gestrures and words in children's transition to the two-word...... the children showed an early preference for the gestural or vocal modality. Through Analyzes of two-element combinations of words and/or gestures, we observd a relative increase in cross-modal (gesture-word and two-word) combinations. The results are discussed in terms understanding gestures as a transition...

Basic processes in reading aloud and colour naming: towards a better understanding of the role of spatial attention.

Science.gov (United States)

Robidoux, Serje; Rauwerda, Derek; Besner, Derek

2014-05-01

Whether or not lexical access from print requires spatial attention has been debated intensively for the last 30 years. Studies involving colour naming generally find evidence that "unattended" words are processed. In contrast, reading-based experiments do not find evidence of distractor processing. One theory ascribes the discrepancy to weaker attentional demands for colour identification. If colour naming does not capture all of a subject's attention, the remaining attentional resources can be deployed to process the distractor word. The present study combined exogenous spatial cueing with colour naming and reading aloud separately and found that colour naming is less sensitive to the validity of a spatial cue than is reading words aloud. Based on these results, we argue that colour naming studies do not effectively control attention so that no conclusions about unattended distractor processing can be drawn from them. Thus we reiterate the consistent conclusion drawn from reading aloud and lexical decision studies: There is no word identification without (spatial) attention.

MOJIBAKE – The Rehearsal of Word Fragments In Verbal Recall

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Dr. Christiane eLange-Küttner

2015-04-01

Full Text Available Theories of verbal rehearsal usually assume that whole words are being rehearsed. However, words consist of letter sequences, or syllables, or word onset-vowel-coda, amongst many other conceptualizations of word structure. A more general term is the ‘grain size’ of word units (Ziegler & Goswami, 2005. In the current study, a new method measured the quantitative percentage of correctly remembered word structure. The amount of letters in the correct letter sequence as per cent of word length was calculated, disregarding missing or added letters. A forced rehearsal was tested by repeating each memory list four times. We tested low frequency (LF English words versus geographical UK town names to control for content. We also tested unfamiliar international (INT non-words and names of international (INT European towns to control for familiarity. An immediate versus distributed repetition was tested with a between-subject design. Participants responded with word fragments in their written recall especially when they had to remember unfamiliar words. While memory of whole words was sensitive to content, presentation distribution and individual sex and language differences, recall of word fragments was not. There was no trade-off between memory of word fragments with whole word recall during the repetition, instead also word fragments significantly increased. Moreover, while whole word responses correlated with each other during repetition, and word fragment responses correlated with each other during repetition, these two types of word recall responses were not correlated with each other. Thus there may be a lower layer consisting of free, sparse word fragments and an upper layer that consists of language-specific, orthographically and semantically constrained words.

Mojibake – The rehearsal of word fragments in verbal recall

Science.gov (United States)

Lange-Küttner, Christiane; Sykorova, Eva

2015-01-01

Theories of verbal rehearsal usually assume that whole words are being rehearsed. However, words consist of letter sequences, or syllables, or word onset-vowel-coda, amongst many other conceptualizations of word structure. A more general term is the ‘grain size’ of word units (Ziegler and Goswami, 2005). In the current study, a new method measured the quantitative percentage of correctly remembered word structure. The amount of letters in the correct letter sequence as per cent of word length was calculated, disregarding missing or added letters. A forced rehearsal was tested by repeating each memory list four times. We tested low frequency (LF) English words versus geographical (UK) town names to control for content. We also tested unfamiliar international (INT) non-words and names of international (INT) European towns to control for familiarity. An immediate versus distributed repetition was tested with a between-subject design. Participants responded with word fragments in their written recall especially when they had to remember unfamiliar words. While memory of whole words was sensitive to content, presentation distribution and individual sex and language differences, recall of word fragments was not. There was no trade-off between memory of word fragments with whole word recall during the repetition, instead also word fragments significantly increased. Moreover, while whole word responses correlated with each other during repetition, and word fragment responses correlated with each other during repetition, these two types of word recall responses were not correlated with each other. Thus there may be a lower layer consisting of free, sparse word fragments and an upper layer that consists of language-specific, orthographically and semantically constrained words. PMID:25941500

Learning new meanings for known words: Biphasic effects of prior knowledge

Science.gov (United States)

Fang, Xiaoping; Perfetti, Charles; Stafura, Joseph

2017-01-01

In acquiring word meanings, learners are often confronted by a single word form that is mapped to two or more meanings. For example, long after how to roller-“skate”, one may learn that “skate” is also a kind of fish. Such learning of new meanings for familiar words involves two potentially contrasting processes, relative to new form-new meaning learning: 1) Form-based familiarity may facilitate learning a new meaning, and 2) meaning-based interference may inhibit learning a new meaning. We examined these two processes by having native English speakers learn new, unrelated meanings for familiar (high frequency) and less familiar (low frequency) English words, as well as for unfamiliar (novel or pseudo-) words. Tracking learning with cued-recall tasks at several points during learning revealed a biphasic pattern: higher learning rates and greater learning efficiency for familiar words relative to novel words early in learning and a reversal of this pattern later in learning. Following learning, interference from original meanings for familiar words was detected in a semantic relatedness judgment task. Additionally, lexical access to familiar words with new meanings became faster compared to their exposure controls, but no such effect occurred for less familiar words. Overall, the results suggest a biphasic pattern of facilitating and interfering processes: Familiar word forms facilitate learning earlier, while interference from original meanings becomes more influential later. This biphasic pattern reflects the co-activation of new and old meanings during learning, a process that may play a role in lexicalization of new meanings. PMID:29399593

Spatial attention in written word perception

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Veronica eMontani

2014-02-01

Full Text Available The role of attention in visual word recognition and reading aloud is a long debated issue. Studies of both developmental and acquired reading disorders provide growing evidence that spatial attention is critically involved in word reading, in particular for the phonological decoding of unfamiliar letter strings. However, studies on healthy participants have produced contrasting results. The aim of this study was to investigate how the allocation of spatial attention may influence the perception of letter strings in skilled readers. High frequency words, low frequency words and pseudowords were briefly and parafoveally presented either in the left or the right visual field. Attentional allocation was modulated by the presentation of a spatial cue before the target string. Accuracy in reporting the target string was modulated by the spatial cue but this effect varied with the type of string. For unfamiliar strings, processing was facilitated when attention was focused on the string location and hindered when it was diverted from the target. This finding is consistent the assumptions of the CDP+ model of reading aloud, as well as with familiarity sensitivity models that argue for a flexible use of attention according with the specific requirements of the string. Moreover, we found that processing of high-frequency words was facilitated by an extra-large focus of attention. The latter result is consistent with the hypothesis that a broad distribution of attention is the default mode during reading of familiar words because it might optimally engage the broad receptive fields of the highest detectors in the hierarchical system for visual word recognition.

Effects of Semantic Elaboration and Typicality on Picture Naming in Alzheimer Disease

Science.gov (United States)

Morelli, Claudia A.; Altmann, Lori J. P.; Kendall, Diane; Fischler, Ira; Heilman, Kennneth M.

2011-01-01

Purpose: Individuals with probable Alzheimer disease (pAD) are frequently impaired at picture naming. This study examined whether a semantic elaboration task would facilitate naming in pAD, and whether training either semantically typical or atypical stimulus items facilitated generalized improvement in picture naming and category generation…

Posture affects how robots and infants map words to objects.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Anthony F Morse

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

Dynamics of large-scale cortical interactions at high gamma frequencies during word production: event related causality (ERC) analysis of human electrocorticography (ECoG).

Science.gov (United States)

Korzeniewska, Anna; Franaszczuk, Piotr J; Crainiceanu, Ciprian M; Kuś, Rafał; Crone, Nathan E

2011-06-15

Intracranial EEG studies in humans have shown that functional brain activation in a variety of functional-anatomic domains of human cortex is associated with an increase in power at a broad range of high gamma (>60Hz) frequencies. Although these electrophysiological responses are highly specific for the location and timing of cortical processing and in animal recordings are highly correlated with increased population firing rates, there has been little direct empirical evidence for causal interactions between different recording sites at high gamma frequencies. Such causal interactions are hypothesized to occur during cognitive tasks that activate multiple brain regions. To determine whether such causal interactions occur at high gamma frequencies and to investigate their functional significance, we used event-related causality (ERC) analysis to estimate the dynamics, directionality, and magnitude of event-related causal interactions using subdural electrocorticography (ECoG) recorded during two word production tasks: picture naming and auditory word repetition. A clinical subject who had normal hearing but was skilled in American Signed Language (ASL) provided a unique opportunity to test our hypothesis with reference to a predictable pattern of causal interactions, i.e. that language cortex interacts with different areas of sensorimotor cortex during spoken vs. signed responses. Our ERC analyses confirmed this prediction. During word production with spoken responses, perisylvian language sites had prominent causal interactions with mouth/tongue areas of motor cortex, and when responses were gestured in sign language, the most prominent interactions involved hand and arm areas of motor cortex. Furthermore, we found that the sites from which the most numerous and prominent causal interactions originated, i.e. sites with a pattern of ERC "divergence", were also sites where high gamma power increases were most prominent and where electrocortical stimulation mapping

Formulation of EPICS record naming conventions in J-PARC linac and RCS. Build process of unique and standardized name

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Fukuta, Shinpei; Kawase, Masato; Kikuzawa, Nobuhiro; Watanabe, Kazuhiko; Sakaki, Hironao; Takahashi, Hiroki

2011-02-01

J-PARC (Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex) accelerator devices are controlled by the use of the software called EPICS (Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System). The unique name called an EPICS record is given to a control signal and data acquisition, Accelerator device control is achieved using the EPICS record. The requirement for the EPICS record name is 2 points; (1) no overlap of the EPICS record name, (2) the control contents can be easily imagined from the EPICS record name. To manage the EPICS record using relational database for the information management of the accelerator device in J-PARC, the naming structure is required so that a mechanical process can be performed easily. It was necessary to standardize the EPICS record name and the EPICS record structure to achieve these requirements. Therefore, we have formulated a guideline called 'EPICS record naming conventions' to decide to an EPICS record name uniquely and standardization. The abbreviated key word list of the accelerator devices and the control signal that compose the EPICS record name is appended to the EPICS record naming conventions. (author)

Semantic Feature Analysis (SFA in the Treatment of Naming Deficits: Evidence from a Malay Speaker with Non-Fluent Aphasia

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Mohd Azmarul A Aziz

2015-04-01

Full Text Available Introduction Semantic Feature Analysis (SFA is a treatment for lexical retrieval impairment in which participants are cued by providing semantic information regarding concepts they have difficulty with in naming tasks in an effort to facilitate accurate lexical retrieval (Boyle & Coelho, 1995. People with aphasia are commonly found to have naming deficits and speech-language therapists (SLTs face difficulties in providing an effective treatment method to treat this deficit. This study aims to examine the use of SFA to address naming deficits for nouns and verbs in a Malay patient (KM with non-fluent aphasia. Methods The following tests were administered to the subject pre- and post- treatment: 1 Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination (BDAE; 2 Malay Object and Action Test (MOAT; and 3 A series of comprehension and production assessments in Malay. Subject was asked to name 101 and 50 pictures from MOAT. The stimuli were coloured photograph pictures. Treatment and probe (untrained stimuli were selected from pictures that a subject could not name, yielding 40 nouns and 30 verbs. From these, 20 stimuli were randomly chosen as probe items and 20 as treatment stimuli (nouns, 15 treatment and 15 probes (verbs. For the treatment study, single subject A-B-A design was implemented. Three baseline sessions were completed prior to treatment initiation naming for both probe and treatment pictures. Subject attended once-weekly therapy sessions over 8 months. Probes assessing generalizations to untrained pictures were presented at 4th, 8th, and 12th and so on until the end of the programme. Results Results showed that KM’s ability to name trained and untrained picture stimuli improved for both nouns and verbs. KM demonstrated steady improvement in the SFA treatment of trained nouns and verbs: from 5% baseline accuracy to over 90% accuracy at treatment end for nouns and from 0% baseline accuracy to 90% accuracy at treatment end for verbs. Generalizations to

An Examination of the Effects of Electronic Word of Mouth on Consumers’ Purchase Decision: Through the Lens of Experience Good and Search Good

OpenAIRE

Zhao, Zichen

2013-01-01

The prevailing of the Internet facilitates consumers to share information, opinions and experiences of products and services online. This new form of word of mouth communication is called electronic word of mouth (WOM). Nowadays, electronic word of mouth plays an important role in the consumers’ information search during the decision making process. A large number of managerial and academic attentions have been drawn to the effects of electronic WOM on consumer’s purchase decision. Factors wh...

Internal Customer Satisfaction and Service Quality Toward Trust and Word of Mouth

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Sri Rahayu

2011-12-01

Full Text Available This study generally aims to analyze the influence of internal customer satisfaction and perceptions of service quality in creating trust and word of mouth in higher education service industry. In the process, this study aims to achieve a special purpose, which is to build constructs/ variables to measure internal customer satisfaction, so in the future it can be applied to universally in other institutions of higher education. The results of this study indicate that the internal customer satisfaction can be measured with three constructs, namely: service product, service delivery, and service environment. All of those variables have significant relationship with trust, which is significantly related to word of mouth. On the other side, communication, productivity and responsiveness are found to be significant in measuring the perceptions of service quality.The results also proved that the perception of service quality is significantly related to trust and word of mouth. This study is expected to contribute measurement tools of internal customer satisfaction in higher education. This research is also expected to enrich discussion on how to measure the internal customer satisfaction and service quality toward trust and word of mouth in higher education. Thus the higher education can continue to strive to provide educational service in accordance with the expectations of the customers.

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.

Reader, Word, and Character Attributes Contributing to Chinese Children's Concept of Word

Science.gov (United States)

Chen, Jing; Lin, Tzu-Jung; Ku, Yu-Min; Zhang, Jie; O'Connell, Ann

2018-01-01

Concept of word--the awareness of how words differ from nonwords or other linguistic properties--is important to learning to read Chinese because words in Chinese texts are not separated by space, and most characters can be productively compounded with other characters to form new words. The current study examined the effects of reader, word, and…

WORD ORIGIN HELPS EXPAND LEARNERS’ VOCABULARY A VOCABULARY TEACHING APPROACH

OpenAIRE

Li Jing

2012-01-01

Word origin (motivation) deals with the connection between name and sense, explaining how a word originated. With the knowledge of how words are originated, learners can grasp a word easier and thus expand their vocabulary more quickly. The introduction to word origin (motivation) by teachers can also help the learners gain interest in the process of learning and learn more about the cultural and historical background of the English-speaking countries. This paper tries to clarify this method ...

Standardizing Naming Conventions in Radiation Oncology

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Santanam, Lakshmi [Department of Radiation Oncology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO (United States); Hurkmans, Coen [Department of Radiation Oncology, Catharina Hospital, Eindhoven (Netherlands); Mutic, Sasa [Department of Radiation Oncology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO (United States); Vliet-Vroegindeweij, Corine van [Department of Radiation Oncology, Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, Philadelphia, PA (United States); Brame, Scott; Straube, William [Department of Radiation Oncology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO (United States); Galvin, James [Department of Radiation Oncology, Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, Philadelphia, PA (United States); Tripuraneni, Prabhakar [Department of Radiation Oncology, Scripps Clinic, LaJolla, CA (United States); Michalski, Jeff [Department of Radiation Oncology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO (United States); Bosch, Walter, E-mail: wbosch@radonc.wustl.edu [Department of Radiation Oncology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO (United States); Advanced Technology Consortium, Image-guided Therapy QA Center, St. Louis, MO (United States)

2012-07-15

Purpose: The aim of this study was to report on the development of a standardized target and organ-at-risk naming convention for use in radiation therapy and to present the nomenclature for structure naming for interinstitutional data sharing, clinical trial repositories, integrated multi-institutional collaborative databases, and quality control centers. This taxonomy should also enable improved plan benchmarking between clinical institutions and vendors and facilitation of automated treatment plan quality control. Materials and Methods: The Advanced Technology Consortium, Washington University in St. Louis, Radiation Therapy Oncology Group, Dutch Radiation Oncology Society, and the Clinical Trials RT QA Harmonization Group collaborated in creating this new naming convention. The International Commission on Radiation Units and Measurements guidelines have been used to create standardized nomenclature for target volumes (clinical target volume, internal target volume, planning target volume, etc.), organs at risk, and planning organ-at-risk volumes in radiation therapy. The nomenclature also includes rules for specifying laterality and margins for various structures. The naming rules distinguish tumor and nodal planning target volumes, with correspondence to their respective tumor/nodal clinical target volumes. It also provides rules for basic structure naming, as well as an option for more detailed names. Names of nonstandard structures used mainly for plan optimization or evaluation (rings, islands of dose avoidance, islands where additional dose is needed [dose painting]) are identified separately. Results: In addition to its use in 16 ongoing Radiation Therapy Oncology Group advanced technology clinical trial protocols and several new European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer protocols, a pilot version of this naming convention has been evaluated using patient data sets with varying treatment sites. All structures in these data sets were

Standardizing naming conventions in radiation oncology.

Science.gov (United States)

Santanam, Lakshmi; Hurkmans, Coen; Mutic, Sasa; van Vliet-Vroegindeweij, Corine; Brame, Scott; Straube, William; Galvin, James; Tripuraneni, Prabhakar; Michalski, Jeff; Bosch, Walter

2012-07-15

The aim of this study was to report on the development of a standardized target and organ-at-risk naming convention for use in radiation therapy and to present the nomenclature for structure naming for interinstitutional data sharing, clinical trial repositories, integrated multi-institutional collaborative databases, and quality control centers. This taxonomy should also enable improved plan benchmarking between clinical institutions and vendors and facilitation of automated treatment plan quality control. The Advanced Technology Consortium, Washington University in St. Louis, Radiation Therapy Oncology Group, Dutch Radiation Oncology Society, and the Clinical Trials RT QA Harmonization Group collaborated in creating this new naming convention. The International Commission on Radiation Units and Measurements guidelines have been used to create standardized nomenclature for target volumes (clinical target volume, internal target volume, planning target volume, etc.), organs at risk, and planning organ-at-risk volumes in radiation therapy. The nomenclature also includes rules for specifying laterality and margins for various structures. The naming rules distinguish tumor and nodal planning target volumes, with correspondence to their respective tumor/nodal clinical target volumes. It also provides rules for basic structure naming, as well as an option for more detailed names. Names of nonstandard structures used mainly for plan optimization or evaluation (rings, islands of dose avoidance, islands where additional dose is needed [dose painting]) are identified separately. In addition to its use in 16 ongoing Radiation Therapy Oncology Group advanced technology clinical trial protocols and several new European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer protocols, a pilot version of this naming convention has been evaluated using patient data sets with varying treatment sites. All structures in these data sets were satisfactorily identified using this

Standardizing Naming Conventions in Radiation Oncology

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Santanam, Lakshmi; Hurkmans, Coen; Mutic, Sasa; Vliet-Vroegindeweij, Corine van; Brame, Scott; Straube, William; Galvin, James; Tripuraneni, Prabhakar; Michalski, Jeff; Bosch, Walter

2012-01-01

Purpose: The aim of this study was to report on the development of a standardized target and organ-at-risk naming convention for use in radiation therapy and to present the nomenclature for structure naming for interinstitutional data sharing, clinical trial repositories, integrated multi-institutional collaborative databases, and quality control centers. This taxonomy should also enable improved plan benchmarking between clinical institutions and vendors and facilitation of automated treatment plan quality control. Materials and Methods: The Advanced Technology Consortium, Washington University in St. Louis, Radiation Therapy Oncology Group, Dutch Radiation Oncology Society, and the Clinical Trials RT QA Harmonization Group collaborated in creating this new naming convention. The International Commission on Radiation Units and Measurements guidelines have been used to create standardized nomenclature for target volumes (clinical target volume, internal target volume, planning target volume, etc.), organs at risk, and planning organ-at-risk volumes in radiation therapy. The nomenclature also includes rules for specifying laterality and margins for various structures. The naming rules distinguish tumor and nodal planning target volumes, with correspondence to their respective tumor/nodal clinical target volumes. It also provides rules for basic structure naming, as well as an option for more detailed names. Names of nonstandard structures used mainly for plan optimization or evaluation (rings, islands of dose avoidance, islands where additional dose is needed [dose painting]) are identified separately. Results: In addition to its use in 16 ongoing Radiation Therapy Oncology Group advanced technology clinical trial protocols and several new European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer protocols, a pilot version of this naming convention has been evaluated using patient data sets with varying treatment sites. All structures in these data sets were

Semantic Change Type in Old Javanese Word and Sanskrit Loan Word to Modern Javanese

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Hendy Yuniarto

2016-12-01

Full Text Available This research aims to describe type classifier of semantic change and to explain the factors causing semantic change. This research was conducted with a qualitative-descriptive approach. The research method is conducted by comparing the meaning of words from the Old Javanese and Sanskrit loan wordto Modern Javanese. The collection data is done by looking for words that the meaning suspected change in Old Javanese dictionary. Words meaning determined precisely by tracing to the Old Javanese text. Furthermore, words meaning are compared to present time meaning through Modern Javanese dictionary. In addition, searching Modern Javanese meaning are also using Javanese news on the internet pages. The analysis of this research is to classify Old Javanese words and Sanskrit loan words meaning that undergo change to Modern Javanese. It’s also explained why the change in the word meaning can occur. The result shows that, semantic change of Old Javanese words and Sanskrit loan words to Modern Javanese can be classified into seven types, involving widening, narrowing, shifting, metaphor, metonymy, pejoration, and euphemism. In addition, the result shows that semantic change can occur because of some factors. Psychological factor concerning emotive and taboo, and polysemy. religion spreading, the growth of science and technology, the socio-political development, and the needs of a new name.   DOI: https://doi.org/10.24071/llt.2013.160101

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.

By any other name: when will preschoolers produce several labels for a referent?

OpenAIRE

Deak, Gedeon O; Yen, Loulee; Pettit, Jeremy W.

2001-01-01

Two experiments investigated why preschool children sometimes produce multiple words for a referent (i.e. polynomy), but other times seem to allow only one word. In Experiment 1, 40 three- and four-year-olds completed a modi®cation of Dea! k & Maratsos' (1998) naming task. Although social demands to produce multiple words were reduced, children produced, on average, more than two words per object. Number of words produced was predicted by receptive vocabulary. Lexical insight (i.e. knowing th...

Grounding word learning in space.

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Larissa K Samuelson

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

Analysis of the structure of a product line of alcoholic beverages

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Agalarova, C.; Askadullina, A.; Tilburg, van A.

2012-01-01

AB This article deals with marketing decisions on the optimal product line of alcoholic beverages manufactured under the brand name «Praskoveyskoe». KEY WORDS Product line, turnover analysis, ABC-analysis, production of alcoholic beverages, policy to optimize a product line INTRODUCTION A product

The Self-Organization of a Spoken Word

Science.gov (United States)

Holden, John G.; Rajaraman, Srinivasan

2012-01-01

Pronunciation time probability density and hazard functions from large speeded word naming data sets were assessed for empirical patterns consistent with multiplicative and reciprocal feedback dynamics – interaction dominant dynamics. Lognormal and inverse power law distributions are associated with multiplicative and interdependent dynamics in many natural systems. Mixtures of lognormal and inverse power law distributions offered better descriptions of the participant’s distributions than the ex-Gaussian or ex-Wald – alternatives corresponding to additive, superposed, component processes. The evidence for interaction dominant dynamics suggests fundamental links between the observed coordinative synergies that support speech production and the shapes of pronunciation time distributions. PMID:22783213

Similarities between the target and the intruder in naturally-occurring repeated person naming errors

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Serge eBredart

2015-09-01

Full Text Available The present study investigated an intriguing phenomenon that did not receive much attention so far: repeatedly calling a familiar person with someone else’s name. From participants’ responses to a questionnaire, these repeated naming errors were characterized with respect to a number of properties (e.g., type of names being substituted, error frequency, error longevity and different features of similarity (e.g., age, gender, type of relationship with the participant, face resemblance and similarity of the contexts of encounter between the bearer of the target name and the bearer of the wrong name. Moreover, it was evaluated whether the phonological similarity between names, the participants’ age, the difference of age between the two persons whose names were substituted, and face resemblance between the two persons predicted the frequency of error. Regression analyses indicated that phonological similarity between the target name and the wrong name predicted the frequency of repeated person naming errors. The age of the participant was also a significant predictor of error frequency: the older the participant the higher the frequency of errors. Consistent with previous research stressing the importance of the age of acquisition of words on lexical access in speech production, results indicated that bearer of the wrong name was on average known for longer than the bearer of the target name.

Behavioral and electrophysiological signatures of word translation processes.

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Jost, Lea B; Radman, Narges; Buetler, Karin A; Annoni, Jean-Marie

2018-01-31

Translation is a demanding process during which a message is analyzed, translated and communicated from one language to another. Despite numerous studies on translation mechanisms, the electrophysiological processes underlying translation with overt production remain largely unexplored. Here, we investigated how behavioral response patterns and spatial-temporal brain dynamics differ in a translation compared to a control within-language word-generation task. We also investigated how forward and backward translation differs on the behavioral and electrophysiological level. To address these questions, healthy late bilingual subjects performed a translation and a within-language control task while a 128-channel EEG was recorded. Behavioral data showed faster responses for translation compared to within-language word generation and faster responses for backward than forward translation. The ERP-analysis revealed stronger early ( processes for between than within word generation. Later (424-630ms) differences were characterized by distinct engagement of domain-general control networks, namely self-monitoring and lexical access interference. Language asymmetry effects occurred at a later stage (600ms), reflecting differences in conceptual processing characterized by a larger involvement of areas implicated in attention, arousal and awareness for forward versus backward translation. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Culture-Bound Words of the Danube Basin Countries: Translation into English

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Chetverikova Olena

2015-08-01

Full Text Available Any course in linguistic country study or popular text translation is impossible without adequate understanding and presentation of culture-bound elements, which present one of the most difficult topics to deal with, especially in multicultural countries. Our investigation aims to show the problems, which appear when we deal with equivalent-lacking words related to culture. Sometimes equivalent-lacking words are associated with culture-bound words, the Ukrainian equivalent for them is “реалії” (derived from Latin realis, pl. realia. However, the term “culture-bound word” is of narrower meaning than the term “equivalent-lacking word”. A culture-bound word names an object peculiar to this or that ethnic culture. Equivalent-lacking words include, along with culture-bound words, neologisms, i.e. newly coined forms, dialect words, slang, taboo-words, foreign (third language terms, proper names, misspellings, archaisms. Comparison of languages and cultures reveals the various types of culture-bound words. Reasons for using them can be extralinguistic, lexical or stylistic. When translating culture-bound words a translator should be aware of the receptor’s potential problems, take into account his background knowledge and choose the best means of translation.

Prophetic sensing of Yahweh’s word

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Wilhelm J. Wessels

2015-07-01

Full Text Available This article focuses on Jeremiah 23:18, which implies that the prophet stood in the council of Yahweh (sôd to see and hear the word of Yahweh. In this verse, it seems that the senses of the prophet played a role in receiving Yahweh’s words. Verse 18 forms part of 23:16–22 in which Jeremiah warned the people of Judah not to listen to prophets who mislead them with optimistic messages. In this article, attention is given to the question whether standing in the council of Yahweh is a deciding criterion for receiving true words from Yahweh. The motif of the divine council is also investigated. An argument is presented that ‘sensing’ should be understood in the double sense of the word, namely sensory experience as well as the intellectual activity of understanding. It is argued that both meanings of the word sensing are necessary to determine the truth of Yahweh’s word.

Spatial attention in written word perception.

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Montani, Veronica; Facoetti, Andrea; Zorzi, Marco

2014-01-01

The role of attention in visual word recognition and reading aloud is a long debated issue. Studies of both developmental and acquired reading disorders provide growing evidence that spatial attention is critically involved in word reading, in particular for the phonological decoding of unfamiliar letter strings. However, studies on healthy participants have produced contrasting results. The aim of this study was to investigate how the allocation of spatial attention may influence the perception of letter strings in skilled readers. High frequency words (HFWs), low frequency words and pseudowords were briefly and parafoveally presented either in the left or the right visual field. Attentional allocation was modulated by the presentation of a spatial cue before the target string. Accuracy in reporting the target string was modulated by the spatial cue but this effect varied with the type of string. For unfamiliar strings, processing was facilitated when attention was focused on the string location and hindered when it was diverted from the target. This finding is consistent the assumptions of the CDP+ model of reading aloud, as well as with familiarity sensitivity models that argue for a flexible use of attention according with the specific requirements of the string. Moreover, we found that processing of HFWs was facilitated by an extra-large focus of attention. The latter result is consistent with the hypothesis that a broad distribution of attention is the default mode during reading of familiar words because it might optimally engage the broad receptive fields of the highest detectors in the hierarchical system for visual word recognition.

A dual-task investigation of automaticity in visual word processing

Science.gov (United States)

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.

Dissociating Word Frequency and Age of Acquisition: The Klein Effect Revived (and Reversed)

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Dewhurst, Stephen A.; Barry, Christopher

2006-01-01

The Klein effect (G. S. Klein, 1964) refers to the finding that high-frequency words produce greater interference in a color-naming task than low-frequency words. The present study used the Klein effect to investigate the relationship between frequency and age of acquisition (AoA) by measuring their influence on color naming. Two experiments…

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

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Michael Inspector

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

Beyond Phonotactic Frequency: Presentation Frequency Effects Word Productions in Specific Language Impairment

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Plante, Elena; Bahl, Megha; Vance, Rebecca; Gerken, LouAnn

2011-01-01

Phonotactic frequency effects on word production are thought to reflect accumulated experience with a language. Here we demonstrate that frequency effects can also be obtained through short-term manipulations of the input to children. We presented children with nonwords in an experiment that systematically manipulated English phonotactic frequency…

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.

The change of religion and the names

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John Kousgård Sørensen

1990-01-01

Full Text Available What actually happened at the time when Denmark was christianized? An important viewpoint to the topic is the nomenclature, both personal names and place-names. What happened to these in the missionary period? Can they be exploited as evidence about the change of religion? What happened to these and to the naming practices in connection with the introduction of Christianity? These questions are relevant, because several pre-Christian cultic words entered into the personal nomenclature which the Christian mission found in use on its arrival. The fate of the nomenclature in the period does suggest that the change in religion took place reasonably peacefully and gradually. There are, however, certain features about the place-names suggesting that there were local differences in the conduct of the mission.

Still Not Adult-Like: Lexical Stress Contrastivity in Word Productions of Eight- to Eleven-Year-Olds

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Arciuli, Joanne; Ballard, Kirrie J.

2017-01-01

Lexical stress is the contrast between strong and weak syllables within words. Ballard et al. (2012) examined the amount of stress contrastivity across adjacent syllables in word productions of typically developing three- to seven-year-olds and adults. Here, eight- to eleven-year-olds are compared with the adults from Ballard et al. using acoustic…

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.

Cross-cultural evidence for multimodal motherese: Asian Indian mothers' adaptive use of synchronous words and gestures.

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Gogate, Lakshmi; Maganti, Madhavilatha; Bahrick, Lorraine E

2015-01-01

In a quasi-experimental study, 24 Asian Indian mothers were asked to teach novel (target) names for two objects and two actions to their children of three different levels of lexical mapping development: prelexical (5-8 months), early lexical (9-17 months), and advanced lexical (20-43 months). Target naming (n=1482) and non-target naming (other, n=2411) were coded for synchronous spoken words and object motion (multimodal motherese) and other naming styles. Indian mothers abundantly used multimodal motherese with target words to highlight novel word-referent relations, paralleling earlier findings from American mothers. They used it with target words more often for prelexical infants than for advanced lexical children and to name target actions later in children's development. Unlike American mothers, Indian mothers also abundantly used multimodal motherese to name target objects later in children's development. Finally, monolingual mothers who spoke a verb-dominant Indian language used multimodal motherese more often than bilingual mothers who also spoke noun-dominant English to their children. The findings suggest that within a dynamic and reciprocal mother-infant communication system, multimodal motherese adapts to unify novel words and referents across cultures. It adapts to children's level of lexical development and to ambient language-specific lexical dominance hierarchies. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Tell Me Your Name and I'll Tell You How Creative Your Work Is: Author's Name and Gender as Factors Influencing Assessment of Products' Creativity in Four Different Domains

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Lebuda, Izabela; Karwowski, Maciej

2013-01-01

The main goal of this study was to examine the effects of authors' name and gender on judges' assessment of product creativity in 4 different domains (art, science, music, and poetry). A total of 119 participants divided into 5 groups assessed products signed with a fictional author's name (unique vs. typical, male vs. female) or in an anonymous…

Semantic interference from distractor pictures in single-picture naming: evidence for competitive lexical selection.

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Jescheniak, Jörg D; Matushanskaya, Asya; Mädebach, Andreas; Müller, Matthias M

2014-10-01

Picture-naming studies have demonstrated interference from semantic-categorically related distractor words, but not from corresponding distractor pictures, and the lack of generality of the interference effect has been argued to challenge theories viewing lexical selection in speech production as a competitive process. Here, we demonstrate that semantic interference from context pictures does become visible, if sufficient attention is allocated to them. We combined picture naming with a spatial-cuing procedure. When participants' attention was shifted to the distractor, semantically related distractor pictures interfered with the response, as compared with unrelated distractor pictures. This finding supports models conceiving lexical retrieval as competitive (Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999) but is difficult to reconcile with the response exclusion hypothesis (Finkbeiner & Caramazza, 2006b) proposed as an alternative.

9 CFR 590.1 - Meaning of words.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 9 Animals and Animal Products 2 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Meaning of words. 590.1 Section 590.1 Animals and Animal Products FOOD SAFETY AND INSPECTION SERVICE, DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE EGG PRODUCTS... words. Under these regulations, words in the singular shall be deemed to mean the plural and vice versa...

9 CFR 350.1 - Meaning of words.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 9 Animals and Animal Products 2 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Meaning of words. 350.1 Section 350.1 Animals and Animal Products FOOD SAFETY AND INSPECTION SERVICE, DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE AGENCY... CERTIFICATION SPECIAL SERVICES RELATING TO MEAT AND OTHER PRODUCTS § 350.1 Meaning of words. Words used in this...

English Shop Signs and Brand Names

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Parvaneh Khosravizadeh

2016-07-01

Full Text Available The present study tries to investigate the people’s attitude to the use of English words in TV commercials, brand-naming and shop signs in Iran and specifically in Tehran where due to the fact that it is the capital, more English might be used for the sake of foreigners. The widespread use of English shop signs and English brand names for recently produced goodsdrove the researchers to investigate peoples’ attitude as consumers from two aspects of age and education. To reach the research goal, a questionnaire was devised and distributed to 100 people at random selection probing their attitudes while considering two factors of age and education. The result of the research will mostly benefit sociolinguists and business marketers.Keywords: age, education, advertising, brand-naming, shop signs, globalization

WORD ORIGIN HELPS EXPAND LEARNERS’ VOCABULARY A VOCABULARY TEACHING APPROACH

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Li Jing

2012-12-01

Full Text Available Word origin (motivation deals with the connection between name and sense, explaining how a word originated. With the knowledge of how words are originated, learners can grasp a word easier and thus expand their vocabulary more quickly. The introduction to word origin (motivation by teachers can also help the learners gain interest in the process of learning and learn more about the cultural and historical background of the English-speaking countries. This paper tries to clarify this method of teaching from four aspects: onomatopoeia, word formation, cultural and historical background and cognitive linguistics.

Concreteness norms for 1,659 French words: Relationships with other psycholinguistic variables and word recognition times.

Science.gov (United States)

Bonin, Patrick; Méot, Alain; Bugaiska, Aurélia

2018-02-12

Words that correspond to a potential sensory experience-concrete words-have long been found to possess a processing advantage over abstract words in various lexical tasks. We collected norms of concreteness for a set of 1,659 French words, together with other psycholinguistic norms that were not available for these words-context availability, emotional valence, and arousal-but which are important if we are to achieve a better understanding of the meaning of concreteness effects. We then investigated the relationships of concreteness with these newly collected variables, together with other psycholinguistic variables that were already available for this set of words (e.g., imageability, age of acquisition, and sensory experience ratings). Finally, thanks to the variety of psychological norms available for this set of words, we decided to test further the embodied account of concreteness effects in visual-word recognition, championed by Kousta, Vigliocco, Vinson, Andrews, and Del Campo (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 140, 14-34, 2011). Similarly, we investigated the influences of concreteness in three word recognition tasks-lexical decision, progressive demasking, and word naming-using a multiple regression approach, based on the reaction times available in Chronolex (Ferrand, Brysbaert, Keuleers, New, Bonin, Méot, Pallier, Frontiers in Psychology, 2; 306, 2011). The norms can be downloaded as supplementary material provided with this article.

Semantic richness and word learning in children with autism spectrum disorder.

Science.gov (United States)

Gladfelter, Allison; Goffman, Lisa

2018-03-01

Semantically rich learning contexts facilitate semantic, phonological, and articulatory aspects of word learning in children with typical development (TD). However, because children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show differences at each of these processing levels, it is unclear whether they will benefit from semantic cues in the same manner as their typical peers. The goal of this study was to track how the inclusion of rich, sparse, or no semantic cues influences semantic, phonological, and articulatory aspects of word learning in children with ASD and TD over time. Twenty-four school-aged children (12 in each group), matched on expressive vocabulary, participated in an extended word learning paradigm. Performance on five measures of learning (referent identification, confrontation naming, defining, phonetic accuracy, and speech motor stability) were tracked across three sessions approximately one week apart to assess the influence of semantic richness on extended learning. Results indicate that children with ASD benefit from semantically rich learning contexts similarly to their peers with TD; however, one key difference between the two groups emerged - the children with ASD showed heightened shifts in speech motor stability. These findings offer insights into common learning mechanisms in children with ASD and TD, as well as pointing to a potentially distinct speech motor learning trajectory in children with ASD, providing a window into the emergence of stereotypic vocalizations in these children. © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Empowering production workers with digitally facilitated knowledge processes--a conceptual framework

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Hannola, Lea; Richter, Alexander; Richter, Shahper

2018-01-01

proposes a conceptual framework for empowering workers in industrial production environments with digitally facilitated knowledge management processes. The framework explores four concrete facets of digital advancements that apply to a wide range of knowledge processes and production strategies...

27 CFR 7.23 - Brand names.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-04-01

... 27 Alcohol, Tobacco Products and Firearms 1 2010-04-01 2010-04-01 false Brand names. 7.23 Section... Beverages § 7.23 Brand names. (a) General. The product shall bear a brand name, except that if not sold under a brand name, then the name of the person required to appear on the brand label shall be deemed a...

The benefits of a product-independent lexical database with formal word features

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Froon, Johanna; Froon, Janneke; de Jong, Franciska M.G.

Dictionaries can be used as a basis for lexicon development for NLP applications. However, it often takes a lot of pre-processing before they are usable. In the last 5 years a product-independent database of formal word features has been developed on the basis of the Van Dale dictionaries for Dutch.

Character-level neural network for biomedical named entity recognition.

Science.gov (United States)

Gridach, Mourad

2017-06-01

Biomedical named entity recognition (BNER), which extracts important named entities such as genes and proteins, is a challenging task in automated systems that mine knowledge in biomedical texts. The previous state-of-the-art systems required large amounts of task-specific knowledge in the form of feature engineering, lexicons and data pre-processing to achieve high performance. In this paper, we introduce a novel neural network architecture that benefits from both word- and character-level representations automatically, by using a combination of bidirectional long short-term memory (LSTM) and conditional random field (CRF) eliminating the need for most feature engineering tasks. We evaluate our system on two datasets: JNLPBA corpus and the BioCreAtIvE II Gene Mention (GM) corpus. We obtained state-of-the-art performance by outperforming the previous systems. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to investigate the combination of deep neural networks, CRF, word embeddings and character-level representation in recognizing biomedical named entities. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Teaching receptive naming of Chinese characters to children with autism by incorporating echolalia.

OpenAIRE

Leung, J P; Wu, K I

1997-01-01

The facilitative effect of incorporating echolalia on teaching receptive naming of Chinese characters to children with autism was assessed. In Experiment 1, echoing the requested character name prior to the receptive naming task facilitated matching a character to its name. In addition, task performance was consistently maintained only when echolalia preceded the receptive manual response. Positive results from generalization tests suggested that learned responses occurred across various nove...

Neural Pattern Similarity in the Left IFG and Fusiform Is Associated with Novel Word Learning

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Jing Qu

2017-08-01

Full Text Available Previous studies have revealed that greater neural pattern similarity across repetitions is associated with better subsequent memory. In this study, we used an artificial language training paradigm and representational similarity analysis to examine whether neural pattern similarity across repetitions before training was associated with post-training behavioral performance. Twenty-four native Chinese speakers were trained to learn a logographic artificial language for 12 days and behavioral performance was recorded using the word naming and picture naming tasks. Participants were scanned while performing a passive viewing task before training, after 4-day training and after 12-day training. Results showed that pattern similarity in the left pars opercularis (PO and fusiform gyrus (FG before training was negatively associated with reaction time (RT in both word naming and picture naming tasks after training. These results suggest that neural pattern similarity is an effective neurofunctional predictor of novel word learning in addition to word memory.

Neural Pattern Similarity in the Left IFG and Fusiform Is Associated with Novel Word Learning

Science.gov (United States)

Qu, Jing; Qian, Liu; Chen, Chuansheng; Xue, Gui; Li, Huiling; Xie, Peng; Mei, Leilei

2017-01-01

Previous studies have revealed that greater neural pattern similarity across repetitions is associated with better subsequent memory. In this study, we used an artificial language training paradigm and representational similarity analysis to examine whether neural pattern similarity across repetitions before training was associated with post-training behavioral performance. Twenty-four native Chinese speakers were trained to learn a logographic artificial language for 12 days and behavioral performance was recorded using the word naming and picture naming tasks. Participants were scanned while performing a passive viewing task before training, after 4-day training and after 12-day training. Results showed that pattern similarity in the left pars opercularis (PO) and fusiform gyrus (FG) before training was negatively associated with reaction time (RT) in both word naming and picture naming tasks after training. These results suggest that neural pattern similarity is an effective neurofunctional predictor of novel word learning in addition to word memory. PMID:28878640

Evidence for Morphological Recomposition in Compound Words using MEG

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Teon Lamont Brooks

2015-04-01

Full Text Available Psycholinguistic and electrophysiological studies of lexical processing show convergent evidence for morpheme-based lexical access for morphologically complex words that involves early decomposition into their constituent morphemes followed by some combinatorial operation. Considering that both semantically transparent (e.g., sailboat and semantically opaque (e.g., bootleg compounds undergo morphological decomposition during the earlier stages of lexical processing, subsequent combinatorial operations should account for the difference in the contribution of the constituent morphemes to the meaning of these different word types. In this study we use magnetoencephalography (MEG to pinpoint the neural bases of this combinatorial stage in English compound word recognition. MEG data were acquired while participants performed a word naming task in which three word types, transparent compounds (e.g., roadside, opaque compounds (e.g., butterfly, and morphologically simple words (e.g., brothel were contrasted in a partial-repetition priming paradigm where the word of interest was primed by one of its constituent morphemes. Analysis of onset latency revealed shorter latencies to name compound words than simplex words when primed, further supporting a stage of morphological decomposition in lexical access. An analysis of the associated MEG activity uncovered a region of interest implicated in morphological composition, the Left Anterior Temporal Lobe (LATL. Only transparent compounds showed increased activity in this area from 250 to 470 ms. Previous studies using sentences and phrases have highlighted the role of LATL in performing computations for basic combinatorial operations. Results are in tune with decomposition models for morpheme accessibility early in processing and suggest that semantics play a role in combining the meanings of morphemes when their composition is transparent to the overall word meaning.

Word 2010 Bible

CERN Document Server

Tyson, Herb

2010-01-01

In-depth guidance on Word 2010 from a Microsoft MVP. Microsoft Word 2010 arrives with many changes and improvements, and this comprehensive guide from Microsoft MVP Herb Tyson is your expert, one-stop resource for it all. Master Word's new features such as a new interface and customized Ribbon, major new productivity-boosting collaboration tools, how to publish directly to blogs, how to work with XML, and much more. Follow step-by-step instructions and best practices, avoid pitfalls, discover practical workarounds, and get the very most out of your new Word 2010 with this packed guide. Coverag

How strongly do word reading times and lexical decision times correlate? Combining data from eye movement corpora and megastudies.

Science.gov (United States)

Kuperman, Victor; Drieghe, Denis; Keuleers, Emmanuel; Brysbaert, Marc

2013-01-01

We assess the amount of shared variance between three measures of visual word recognition latencies: eye movement latencies, lexical decision times, and naming times. After partialling out the effects of word frequency and word length, two well-documented predictors of word recognition latencies, we see that 7-44% of the variance is uniquely shared between lexical decision times and naming times, depending on the frequency range of the words used. A similar analysis of eye movement latencies shows that the percentage of variance they uniquely share either with lexical decision times or with naming times is much lower. It is 5-17% for gaze durations and lexical decision times in studies with target words presented in neutral sentences, but drops to 0.2% for corpus studies in which eye movements to all words are analysed. Correlations between gaze durations and naming latencies are lower still. These findings suggest that processing times in isolated word processing and continuous text reading are affected by specific task demands and presentation format, and that lexical decision times and naming times are not very informative in predicting eye movement latencies in text reading once the effect of word frequency and word length are taken into account. The difference between controlled experiments and natural reading suggests that reading strategies and stimulus materials may determine the degree to which the immediacy-of-processing assumption and the eye-mind assumption apply. Fixation times are more likely to exclusively reflect the lexical processing of the currently fixated word in controlled studies with unpredictable target words rather than in natural reading of sentences or texts.

Meaningful Words and Non-Words Repetitive Articulatory Rate (Oral Diadochokinesis) in Persian Speaking Children.

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Zamani, Peyman; Rezai, Hossein; Garmatani, Neda Tahmasebi

2017-08-01

Repetitive articulatory rate or Oral Diadochokinesis (oral-DDK) shows a guideline for appraisal and diagnosis of subjects with oral-motor disorder. Traditionally, meaningless words repetition has been utilized in this task and preschool children have challenges with them. Therefore, we aimed to determine some meaningful words in order to test oral-DDK in Persian speaking preschool children. Participants were 142 normally developing children, (age range 4-6 years), who were asked to produce /motæka, golabi/ as two meaningful Persian words and /pa-ta-ka/ as non-word in conventional oral-DDK task. We compared the time taken for 10-times fast repetitions of two meaningful Persian words and the tri-syllabic nonsense word /pa-ta-ka/. Praat software was used to calculate the average time that subjects took to produce the target items. In 4-5 year old children, [Formula: see text] of time taken for 10-times repetitions of /pa-ta-ka, motæka, golabi/ were [Formula: see text], and [Formula: see text] seconds respectively, and in 5-6 year old children were [Formula: see text], and [Formula: see text] seconds respectively. Findings showed that the main effect of type of words on oral diadochokinesis was significant ([Formula: see text]). Children repeated meaningful words /motæka, golabi/ faster than the non-word /pa-ta-ka/. Sex and age factors had no effect on time taken for repetition of oral-DDK test. It is suggested that Speech Therapists can use meaningful words to facilitate oral-DDK test for children.

Prosody and Spoken Word Recognition in Early and Late Spanish-English Bilingual Individuals

Science.gov (United States)

Boutsen, Frank R.; Dvorak, Justin D.; Deweber, Derick D.

2017-01-01

Purpose: This study was conducted to compare the influence of word properties on gated single-word recognition in monolingual and bilingual individuals under conditions of native and nonnative accent and to determine whether word-form prosody facilitates recognition in bilingual individuals. Method: Word recognition was assessed in monolingual and…

The role of tone and segmental information in visual-word recognition in Thai.

Science.gov (United States)

Winskel, Heather; Ratitamkul, Theeraporn; Charoensit, Akira

2017-07-01

Tone languages represent a large proportion of the spoken languages of the world and yet lexical tone is understudied. Thai offers a unique opportunity to investigate the role of lexical tone processing during visual-word recognition, as tone is explicitly expressed in its script. We used colour words and their orthographic neighbours as stimuli to investigate facilitation (Experiment 1) and interference (Experiment 2) Stroop effects. Five experimental conditions were created: (a) the colour word (e.g., ขาว /k h ã:w/ [white]), (b) tone different word (e.g., ข่าว /k h à:w/[news]), (c) initial consonant phonologically same word (e.g., คาว /k h a:w/ [fishy]), where the initial consonant of the word was phonologically the same but orthographically different, (d) initial consonant different, tone same word (e.g., หาว /hã:w/ yawn), where the initial consonant was orthographically different but the tone of the word was the same, and (e) initial consonant different, tone different word (e.g., กาว /ka:w/ glue), where the initial consonant was orthographically different, and the tone was different. In order to examine whether tone information per se had a facilitative effect, we also included a colour congruent word condition where the segmental (S) information was different but the tone (T) matched the colour word (S-T+) in Experiment 2. Facilitation/interference effects were found for all five conditions when compared with a neutral control word. Results of the critical comparisons revealed that tone information comes into play at a later stage in lexical processing, and orthographic information contributes more than phonological information.

27 CFR 4.33 - Brand names.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-04-01

... 27 Alcohol, Tobacco Products and Firearms 1 2010-04-01 2010-04-01 false Brand names. 4.33 Section... THE TREASURY LIQUORS LABELING AND ADVERTISING OF WINE Labeling Requirements for Wine § 4.33 Brand names. (a) General. The product shall bear a brand name, except that if not sold under a brand name...

On streamlining the Ukrainian names of plants. Information 7. Spelling the names of plant varieties.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

В. М. Меженський

2016-07-01

Full Text Available Purpose. To analyse the practice of transliteration of the Ukrainian cultivar names and rendering foreign names by means of the Ukrainian language, as well as special aspects of cultivar names spelling in special literature. Results. Cultivar names as a special category require preservation of primary graphics or sound type in the other language. This can be achieved by direct inclusion of the original name to the Ukrainian text or by practical transcribing, but not by transliteration or translation. Otherwise, Ukrainian names should be transliterated for inclusion to the texts in Latin characters. Transcription/transliteration in both directions is performed from the source language, though, as practice shows, in some Ukrainian publications the Russian is wrongly used as an intermediary language. Some national scientific publications ignore the recommendations of the International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants that is not conducive to the success of scientific communication in the globalized world. Conclusions. The foreign names of plant varieties should be entered into the Ukrainian text keeping the original spelling or by means of practical transcription. The loan of foreign names is performed by transcribing directly from the source language; if the language doesn’t have the Latin alphabet, Latinized name transcription is acceptable. Recommendations of the International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants that concern graphic highlighting of the cultivar names in the text enclosing them in single quotation marks and writing each word of a cultivar name with a capital letter should necessarily be applied in the foreign-language publications and extended to the Ukrainian special literature, at least, in terms of the use of single quotation marks. Ukrainian names should be transliterated only in accordance with the regulations.

Morphology of the male and female personal names in the river Kosanica basin

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Jašović Golub M.

2017-01-01

Full Text Available This paper deals with the word formation modes used in construction of male and female personal names recorded in villages located in the river Kosanica basin which is the largest tributary of the river Toplica. Materials for this paper were collected in the period between 1996 and 2006. Recorded onomastic materials belongs to 40 Kosanica villages, from Kuršumlijska Banja, Samokov and Krčmar to southern Kosanica villages Dobri Do, Trn, Trpeze, Sekirača, Vasiljevac and Merdare. More than 2355 male and female personal names have been collected. Our paper has been concerned with morphology and word formation processes which are used in structuring of the male and female personal names in the examined area.

Handwriting generates variable visual input to facilitate symbol learning

Science.gov (United States)

Li, Julia X.; James, Karin H.

2015-01-01

Recent research has demonstrated that handwriting practice facilitates letter categorization in young children. The present experiments investigated why handwriting practice facilitates visual categorization by comparing two hypotheses: That handwriting exerts its facilitative effect because of the visual-motor production of forms, resulting in a direct link between motor and perceptual systems, or because handwriting produces variable visual instances of a named category in the environment that then changes neural systems. We addressed these issues by measuring performance of 5 year-old children on a categorization task involving novel, Greek symbols across 6 different types of learning conditions: three involving visual-motor practice (copying typed symbols independently, tracing typed symbols, tracing handwritten symbols) and three involving visual-auditory practice (seeing and saying typed symbols of a single typed font, of variable typed fonts, and of handwritten examples). We could therefore compare visual-motor production with visual perception both of variable and similar forms. Comparisons across the six conditions (N=72) demonstrated that all conditions that involved studying highly variable instances of a symbol facilitated symbol categorization relative to conditions where similar instances of a symbol were learned, regardless of visual-motor production. Therefore, learning perceptually variable instances of a category enhanced performance, suggesting that handwriting facilitates symbol understanding by virtue of its environmental output: supporting the notion of developmental change though brain-body-environment interactions. PMID:26726913

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

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Sandberg, Chaleece; Kiran, Swathi

2014-01-01

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

The influence of phonotactic probability and neighborhood density on children's production of newly learned words.

Science.gov (United States)

Heisler, Lori; Goffman, Lisa

A word learning paradigm was used to teach children novel words that varied in phonotactic probability and neighborhood density. The effects of frequency and density on speech production were examined when phonetic forms were non-referential (i.e., when no referent was attached) and when phonetic forms were referential (i.e., when a referent was attached through fast mapping). Two methods of analysis were included: (1) kinematic variability of speech movement patterning; and (2) measures of segmental accuracy. Results showed that phonotactic frequency influenced the stability of movement patterning whereas neighborhood density influenced phoneme accuracy. Motor learning was observed in both non-referential and referential novel words. Forms with low phonotactic probability and low neighborhood density showed a word learning effect when a referent was assigned during fast mapping. These results elaborate on and specify the nature of interactivity observed across lexical, phonological, and articulatory domains.

Ontological Annotation with WordNet

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

2006-06-06

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

Neighborhood Frequency Effect in Chinese Word Recognition: Evidence from Naming and Lexical Decision

Science.gov (United States)

Li, Meng-Feng; Gao, Xin-Yu; Chou, Tai-Li; Wu, Jei-Tun

2017-01-01

Neighborhood frequency is a crucial variable to know the nature of word recognition. Different from alphabetic scripts, neighborhood frequency in Chinese is usually confounded by component character frequency and neighborhood size. Three experiments were designed to explore the role of the neighborhood frequency effect in Chinese and the stimuli…

Distinct Patterns of Brain Activity Characterise Lexical Activation and Competition in Spoken Word Production

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Piai, V.; Roelofs, A.P.A.; Jensen, O.; Schoffelen, J.M.; Bonnefond, M.

2014-01-01

According to a prominent theory of language production, concepts activate multiple associated words in memory, which enter into competition for selection. However, only a few electrophysiological studies have identified brain responses reflecting competition. Here, we report a magnetoencephalography

9 CFR 351.1 - Meaning of words.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 9 Animals and Animal Products 2 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Meaning of words. 351.1 Section 351.1 Animals and Animal Products FOOD SAFETY AND INSPECTION SERVICE, DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE AGENCY... CERTIFICATION CERTIFICATION OF TECHNICAL ANIMAL FATS FOR EXPORT Definitions § 351.1 Meaning of words. Words used...

Actual Arabic loan-words of religious content (on the material of modern foreign words

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Al Shammari Majid Jamil Ashur

2015-03-01

Full Text Available Application of thematic classification of actual vocabulary as a whole to the formation of loan words allows to see the uniqueness of seperate groups of the vocabulary. English loan words prevail relating to the sphere of economy, science and technology, loan words from Arabic dominate from the religious vocabulary. Application of field approach to the analysis of actual religious Arabisms revealed both nuclear and peripheral components of the field. At the core of the field there are such Arabisms as Allah and Islam, which can be characterized as key words. However, in unifying the features of these words vary at a number of parameters. The word Allah has zero derivation productivity and at lexicographical description (as opposed to functioning in the language of the media is free of connotations. Arabism, Islam, by contrast, has a high derivation productivity and derived words can express evaluation. Lexicographic description of the Arabism Islam is also quite diverse stylistically and in contents. The core of the field “Muslim religion” also includes a number of words fixed in most modern dictionaries of foreign words. At the periphery of the field there are Arabisms that do not have high levels of frequency, but at the same time as an indicator of dominant Arabisms of religious content among topical Arabisms.

Asymmetric Switch Costs in numeral naming and number word reading: Implications for models of bilingual language production

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Michael eReynolds

2016-01-01

Full Text Available One approach used to gain insight into the processes underlying bilingual language comprehension and production examines the costs that arise from switching languages. For unbalanced bilinguals, asymmetric switch costs are reported in speech production, where the switch cost for L1 is larger than the switch cost for L2, whereas, symmetric switch costs are reported in language comprehension tasks, where the cost of switching is the same for L1 and L2. Presently, it is unclear why asymmetric switch costs are observed in speech production, but not in language comprehension. Three experiments are reported that simultaneously examine methodological explanations of task related differences in the switch cost asymmetry and the predictions of three accounts of the switch cost asymmetry in speech production. The results of these experiments suggest that (1 the type of language task (comprehension vs. production determines whether an asymmetric switch cost is observed and (2 at least some of the switch cost asymmetry arises within the language system.

[Developmental changes of rapid automatized naming and Hiragana reading of Japanese in elementary-school children].

Science.gov (United States)

Kobayashi, Tomoka; Inagaki, Masumi; Gunji, Atsuko; Yatabe, Kiyomi; Kita, Yosuke; Kaga, Makiko; Gotoh, Takaaki; Koike, Toshihide

2011-11-01

Two hundred and seven Japanese elementary school children aged from 6 (Grade 1) to 12 (Grade 6) years old were tested for their abilities to name numbers and pictured objects along with reading Hiragana characters and words. These children all showed typical development and their classroom teachers judged that they were not having any problems with reading or writing. The children were randomly divided into two groups, the first group was assigned to two naming tasks;the rapid automatized naming (RAN) of "numbers" and "pictured objects," the second group was assigned to two rapid alternative stimulus (RAS) naming tasks using numbers and pictured objects. All children were asked to perform two reading tasks that were written in Hiragana script: single mora reading task and four syllable word reading task. The total articulation time for naming and reading and performance in terms of accuracy were measured for each task. Developmental changes in these variables were evaluated. The articulation time was significantly longer for the first graders, and it gradually shortened as they moved through to the upper grades in all tasks. The articulation time reached a plateau in the 5th grade for the number naming, while gradual change continued after drastic change in the lower grades for the pictured object naming. The articulation times for the single mora reading and RAN of numbers correlated strongly. The articulation time for the RAS naming was significantly longer compared to that for the RAN, though there were very few errors. The RAS naming showed the highest correlation with the four syllable word reading. This study demonstrated that the performance in rapid automatized naming of numbers and pictures were closely related with performance on reading tasks. Thus Japanese children with reading disorders such as developmental dyslexia should also be evaluated for rapid automatized naming.

The Mechanism of Valence-Space Metaphors: ERP Evidence for Affective Word Processing

Science.gov (United States)

Xie, Jiushu; Wang, Ruiming; Chang, Song

2014-01-01

Embodied cognition contends that the representation and processing of concepts involve perceptual, somatosensory, motoric, and other physical re-experiencing information. In this view, affective concepts are also grounded in physical information. For instance, people often say “feeling down” or “cheer up” in daily life. These phrases use spatial information to understand affective concepts. This process is referred to as valence-space metaphor. Valence-space metaphors refer to the employment of spatial information (lower/higher space) to elaborate affective concepts (negative/positive concepts). Previous studies have demonstrated that processing affective words affects performance on a spatial detection task. However, the mechanism(s) behind this effect remain unclear. In the current study, we hypothesized that processing affective words might produce spatial information. Consequently, spatial information would affect the following spatial cue detection/discrimination task. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to remember an affective word. Then, they completed a spatial cue detection task while event-related potentials were recorded. The results indicated that the top cues induced enhanced amplitude of P200 component while participants kept positive words relative to negative words in mind. On the contrary, the bottom cues induced enhanced P200 amplitudes while participants kept negative words relative to positive words in mind. In Experiment 2, we conducted a behavioral experiment that employed a similar paradigm to Experiment 1, but used arrows instead of dots to test the attentional nature of the valence-space metaphor. We found a similar facilitation effect as found in Experiment 1. Positive words facilitated the discrimination of upper arrows, whereas negative words facilitated the discrimination of lower arrows. In summary, affective words might activate spatial information and cause participants to allocate their attention to corresponding

The mechanism of valence-space metaphors: ERP evidence for affective word processing.

Science.gov (United States)

Xie, Jiushu; Wang, Ruiming; Chang, Song

2014-01-01

Embodied cognition contends that the representation and processing of concepts involve perceptual, somatosensory, motoric, and other physical re-experiencing information. In this view, affective concepts are also grounded in physical information. For instance, people often say "feeling down" or "cheer up" in daily life. These phrases use spatial information to understand affective concepts. This process is referred to as valence-space metaphor. Valence-space metaphors refer to the employment of spatial information (lower/higher space) to elaborate affective concepts (negative/positive concepts). Previous studies have demonstrated that processing affective words affects performance on a spatial detection task. However, the mechanism(s) behind this effect remain unclear. In the current study, we hypothesized that processing affective words might produce spatial information. Consequently, spatial information would affect the following spatial cue detection/discrimination task. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to remember an affective word. Then, they completed a spatial cue detection task while event-related potentials were recorded. The results indicated that the top cues induced enhanced amplitude of P200 component while participants kept positive words relative to negative words in mind. On the contrary, the bottom cues induced enhanced P200 amplitudes while participants kept negative words relative to positive words in mind. In Experiment 2, we conducted a behavioral experiment that employed a similar paradigm to Experiment 1, but used arrows instead of dots to test the attentional nature of the valence-space metaphor. We found a similar facilitation effect as found in Experiment 1. Positive words facilitated the discrimination of upper arrows, whereas negative words facilitated the discrimination of lower arrows. In summary, affective words might activate spatial information and cause participants to allocate their attention to corresponding locations

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) modulation of picture naming and word reading: A meta-analysis of single session tDCS applied to healthy participants.

Science.gov (United States)

Westwood, Samuel J; Romani, Cristina

2017-09-01

Recent reviews quantifying the effects of single sessions of transcranial direct current stimulation (or tDCS) in healthy volunteers find only minor effects on cognition despite the popularity of this technique. Here, we wanted to quantify the effects of tDCS on language production tasks that measure word reading and picture naming. We reviewed 14 papers measuring tDCS effects across a total of 96 conditions to a) quantify effects of conventional stimulation on language regions (i.e., left hemisphere anodal tDCS administered to temporal/frontal areas) under normal conditions or under conditions of cognitive (semantic) interference; b) identify parameters which may moderate the size of the tDCS effect within conventional stimulation protocols (e.g., online vs offline, high vs. low current densities, and short vs. long durations), as well as within types of stimulation not typically explored by previous reviews (i.e., right hemisphere anodal tDCS or left/right hemisphere cathodal tDCS). In all analyses there was no significant effect of tDCS, but we did find a small but significant effect of time and duration of stimulation with stronger effects for offline stimulation and for shorter durations (tDCS and its poor efficacy in healthy participants. Copyright © 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

9 CFR 355.1 - Meaning of words.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 9 Animals and Animal Products 2 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Meaning of words. 355.1 Section 355.1 Animals and Animal Products FOOD SAFETY AND INSPECTION SERVICE, DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE AGENCY... IDENTIFICATION AS TO CLASS, QUALITY, QUANTITY, AND CONDITION Definitions § 355.1 Meaning of words. Words used in...