Neural Correlates of Word Recognition: A Systematic Comparison of Natural Reading and Rapid Serial Visual Presentation.

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Kornrumpf, Benthe; Niefind, Florian; Sommer, Werner; Dimigen, Olaf

2016-09-01

Neural correlates of word recognition are commonly studied with (rapid) serial visual presentation (RSVP), a condition that eliminates three fundamental properties of natural reading: parafoveal preprocessing, saccade execution, and the fast changes in attentional processing load occurring from fixation to fixation. We combined eye-tracking and EEG to systematically investigate the impact of all three factors on brain-electric activity during reading. Participants read lists of words either actively with eye movements (eliciting fixation-related potentials) or maintained fixation while the text moved passively through foveal vision at a matched pace (RSVP-with-flankers paradigm, eliciting ERPs). The preview of the upcoming word was manipulated by changing the number of parafoveally visible letters. Processing load was varied by presenting words of varying lexical frequency. We found that all three factors have strong interactive effects on the brain's responses to words: Once a word was fixated, occipitotemporal N1 amplitude decreased monotonically with the amount of parafoveal information available during the preceding fixation; hence, the N1 component was markedly attenuated under reading conditions with preview. Importantly, this preview effect was substantially larger during active reading (with saccades) than during passive RSVP with flankers, suggesting that the execution of eye movements facilitates word recognition by increasing parafoveal preprocessing. Lastly, we found that the N1 component elicited by a word also reflects the lexical processing load imposed by the previously inspected word. Together, these results demonstrate that, under more natural conditions, words are recognized in a spatiotemporally distributed and interdependent manner across multiple eye fixations, a process that is mediated by active motor behavior.

Word skipping: effects of word length, predictability, spelling and reading skill.

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Slattery, Timothy J; Yates, Mark

2017-08-31

Readers eyes often skip over words as they read. Skipping rates are largely determined by word length; short words are skipped more than long words. However, the predictability of a word in context also impacts skipping rates. Rayner, Slattery, Drieghe and Liversedge (2011) reported an effect of predictability on word skipping for even long words (10-13 characters) that extend beyond the word identification span. Recent research suggests that better readers and spellers have an enhanced perceptual span (Veldre & Andrews, 2014). We explored whether reading and spelling skill interact with word length and predictability to impact word skipping rates in a large sample (N=92) of average and poor adult readers. Participants read the items from Rayner et al. (2011) while their eye movements were recorded. Spelling skill (zSpell) was assessed using the dictation and recognition tasks developed by Sally Andrews and colleagues. Reading skill (zRead) was assessed from reading speed (words per minute) and accuracy of three 120 word passages each with 10 comprehension questions. We fit linear mixed models to the target gaze duration data and generalized linear mixed models to the target word skipping data. Target word gaze durations were significantly predicted by zRead while, the skipping likelihoods were significantly predicted by zSpell. Additionally, for gaze durations, zRead significantly interacted with word predictability as better readers relied less on context to support word processing. These effects are discussed in relation to the lexical quality hypothesis and eye movement models of reading.

Recall of short word lists presented visually at fast rates: effects of phonological similarity and word length.

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Coltheart, V; Langdon, R

1998-03-01

Phonological similarity of visually presented list items impairs short-term serial recall. Lists of long words are also recalled less accurately than are lists of short words. These results have been attributed to phonological recoding and rehearsal. If subjects articulate irrelevant words during list presentation, both phonological similarity and word length effects are abolished. Experiments 1 and 2 examined effects of phonological similarity and recall instructions on recall of lists shown at fast rates (from one item per 0.114-0.50 sec), which might not permit phonological encoding and rehearsal. In Experiment 3, recall instructions and word length were manipulated using fast presentation rates. Both phonological similarity and word length effects were observed, and they were not dependent on recall instructions. Experiments 4 and 5 investigated the effects of irrelevant concurrent articulation on lists shown at fast rates. Both phonological similarity and word length effects were removed by concurrent articulation, as they were with slow presentation rates.

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

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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.

What Are the Costs of Degraded Parafoveal Previews during Silent Reading?

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Vasilev, Martin R.; Slattery, Timothy J.; Kirkby, Julie A.; Angele, Bernhard

2018-01-01

It has been suggested that the preview benefit effect is actually a combination of preview benefit and preview costs. Marx et al. (2015) proposed that visually degrading the parafoveal preview reduces the costs associated with traditional parafoveal letter masks used in the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975), thus leading to a more neutral baseline.…

Word-Length Correlations and Memory in Large Texts: A Visibility Network Analysis

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Lev Guzmán-Vargas

2015-11-01

Full Text Available We study the correlation properties of word lengths in large texts from 30 ebooks in the English language from the Gutenberg Project (www.gutenberg.org using the natural visibility graph method (NVG. NVG converts a time series into a graph and then analyzes its graph properties. First, the original sequence of words is transformed into a sequence of values containing the length of each word, and then, it is integrated. Next, we apply the NVG to the integrated word-length series and construct the network. We show that the degree distribution of that network follows a power law, P ( k ∼ k - γ , with two regimes, which are characterized by the exponents γ s ≈ 1 . 7 (at short degree scales and γ l ≈ 1 . 3 (at large degree scales. This suggests that word lengths are much more strongly correlated at large distances between words than at short distances between words. That finding is also supported by the detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA and recurrence time distribution. These results provide new information about the universal characteristics of the structure of written texts beyond that given by word frequencies.

Variability in word reading performance of dyslexic readers: effects of letter length, phoneme length and digraph presence

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Marinus, E.; de Jong, P.F.

2010-01-01

The marked word-length effect in dyslexic children suggests the use of a letter-by-letter reading strategy. Such a strategy should make it more difficult to infer the sound of digraphs. Our main aim was to disentangle length and digraph-presence effects in word and pseudoword reading. In addition,

Foveal and parafoveal retinal thickness in healthy pregnant women in their last trimester

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Demir M

2011-09-01

Full Text Available Mehmet Demir, Ersin Oba, Efe Can, Mahmut Odabasi, Semra Tiryaki, Erhan Ozdal, Hakan SensozEye Clinic, Sisli Etfal Training and Research Hospital, Istanbul, TurkeyPurpose: The inspection of foveal and parafoveal thickness in healthy pregnant women in the last trimester.Materials and methods: This study included 40 healthy pregnant women in their last trimester (study group: 40 women, 80 eyes and 37 nonpregnant women (control group: 37 women, 74 eyes. Visual acuity, intraocular pressure, slit lamp examination of anterior and posterior segments, and visual field examination with automated perimetry were performed in both groups. Foveal and parafoveal thickness in the four quadrants (upper, nasal, temporal, and inferior parafoveal and peripapillary retinal nerve fiber layer were measured by optical coherence tomography. There were no systemic or ocular problems in either group. Findings were analyzed with statistical software. A P value <0.05 was considered statistically significant.Results: Mean foveal and parafoveal thicknesses in the study group were: foveal 236.12 ± 27.28 µm, upper quadrant 321.31 ± 12.28 µm, temporal quadrant 307.0 ± 12.05 µm, inferior quadrant 317.0 ± 10.58 µm, and nasal quadrant 313.62 ± 14.51 µm. Mean foveal and parafoveal thicknesses in the control group were: foveal 224.62 ± 21.19 µm, upper quadrant 311.62 ± 12.71 µm, temporal quadrant 296.87 ± 13.78 µm, inferior quadrant 305.43 ± 13.25 µm, and nasal quadrant 304.93 ± 13.44 µm. Mean retinal nerve fiber layer thicknesses in the study and control group were 110 ± 12.4 µm and 108 ± 13.1 µm, respectively.Conclusion: Mean retinal thickness in pregnant women was higher than control group in all measurements. Statistically significant difference in thickness was only found in upper, temporal, and inferior parafoveal areas.Keywords: pregnancy, last trimester, foveal and parafoveal thickness, optical coherence tomography

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

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

2008-12-01

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

Identification of vowel length, word stress and compound words and phrases by postlingually-deafened cochlear implant listeners

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Morris, David Jackson; Magnusson, Lennart; Faulkner, Andrew

2013-01-01

Background: The accurate perception of prosody assists a listener in deriving meaning from natural speech. Few studies have addressed the ability of cochlear implant (CI) listeners to perceive the brief duration prosodic cues involved in contrastive vowel length, word stress, and compound word...... word stress, vowel length, and compound words or phrases all of which were presented with minimal-pair response choices. Tests were performed in quiet and in speech-spectrum shaped noise at a 10 dB signal- to-noise ratio. Also, discrimination thresholds for four acoustic properties of a synthetic vowel...... recipients’ ability to perceive brief prosodic cues. This is of interest in the preparation of rehabilitation materials used in training and in developing realistic expectations for potential CI candidates. Key Words: Cochlear implants, speech acoustics, speech intelligibility...

Is the word-length effect linked to subvocal rehearsal?

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Jacquemot, Charlotte; Dupoux, Emmanuel; Bachoud-Lévi, Anne-Catherine

2011-04-01

Models of phonological short-term memory (pSTM) generally distinguish between two components: a phonological buffer and a subvocal rehearsal. Evidence for these two components comes, respectively, from the phonological similarity effect and the word-length effect which disappears under articulatory suppression. But alternative theories posit that subvocal rehearsal is only an optional component of the pSTM. According to them, the depletion of the length effect under articulatory suppression results from the interference of the self-produced speech rather than the disruption of subvocal rehearsal. In order to disentangle these two theories, we tested two patients with a short-term memory deficit. FA, who presents a pseudoword repetition deficit, and FL, who does not. FA's deficit allowed for the observance of an ecological case of subvocal rehearsal disruption without any articulatory suppression task. FA's performance in pSTM tasks reveals as controls a phonological similarity effect, and contrary to controls no word-length effect. In contrast, the second patient, FL, exhibits the same effects as control subjects. This result is in accordance with models of pSTM in which the word-length effect emerges from subvocal rehearsal and disappears when this latter is disrupted. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Srl. All rights reserved.

Foveal vs. Parafoveal Processing in Anxiety: Broadened Spatial Attention for Threat Words

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Manuel G. Calvo

2011-01-01

Full Text Available El presente estudio investiga el procesamiento parafoveal de palabras de amenaza, de contenido emocional positivo, y neutras, en función de diferencias individuales en rasgo de ansiedad. En una tarea de decision léxica, palabras estímulo (prime fueron presentadas durante 150 ms parafovealmente (alejadas 2.2° del punto de fijación; Experimento 1 o fovealmente (en el punto de fijación; Experimento 3, seguidas por una palabra de prueba (probe, o bien las palabras probe fueron presentadas solas (sin prime; Experimento 2. Los resultados mostraron que las prime parafoveales de amenzaza facilitaron las respuestas a las probe de amenaza en los participantes con ansiedad elevada, en comparación con las palabras positivas y las neutras, y con los participantes con ansiedad baja. En contraste, cuando las prime fueron presentadas fovealmente, no se produjeron diferencias en los niveles básicos de activación de las probe aisladas (línea base de accesibilidad, ni tampoco en los umbrales de activación por el prime, en función del contenido emocional de las palabras o de la ansiedad de los participantes. Esto revela un sesgo en la atención encubierta a estímulos amenazantes en las personas con ansiedad elevada.

The effect of word length in short-term memory: Is rehearsal necessary?

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Campoy, Guillermo

2008-05-01

Three experiments investigated the effect of word length on a serial recognition task when rehearsal was prevented by a high presentation rate with no delay between study and test lists. Results showed that lists of short four-phoneme words were better recognized than lists of long six-phoneme words. Moreover, this effect was equivalent to that observed in conditions in which there was a delay between lists, thereby making rehearsal possible in the interval. These findings imply that rehearsal does not play a central role in the origin of the word length effect. An alternative explanation based on differences in the degree of retroactive interference generated by long and short words is proposed.

Comparison of reconfigurable structures for flexible word-length multiplication

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O. A. Pfänder

2008-05-01

Full Text Available Binary multiplication continues to be one of the essential arithmetic operations in digital circuits. Even though field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs are becoming more and more powerful these days, the vendors cannot avoid implementing multiplications with high word-lengths using embedded blocks instead of configurable logic. But on the other hand, the circuit's efficiency decreases if the provided word-length of the hard-wired multipliers exceeds the precision requirements of the algorithm mapped into the FPGA. Thus it is beneficial to use multiplier blocks with configurable word-length, optimized for area, speed and power dissipation, e.g. regarding digital signal processing (DSP applications.

In this contribution, we present different approaches and structures for the realization of a multiplication with variable precision and perform an objective comparison. This includes one approach based on a modified Baugh and Wooley algorithm and three structures using Booth's arithmetic operand recoding with different array structures. All modules have the option to compute signed two's complement fix-point numbers either as an individual computing unit or interconnected to a superior array. Therefore, a high throughput at low precision through parallelism, or a high precision through concatenation can be achieved.

Strong and long: effects of word length on phonological binding in verbal short-term memory.

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Jefferies, Elizabeth; Frankish, Clive; Noble, Katie

2011-02-01

This study examined the effects of item length on the contribution of linguistic knowledge to immediate serial recall (ISR). Long words are typically recalled more poorly than short words, reflecting the greater demands that they place on phonological encoding, rehearsal, and production. However, reverse word length effects--that is, better recall of long than short words--can also occur in situations in which phonological maintenance is difficult, suggesting that long words derive greater support from long-term lexical knowledge. In this study, long and short words and nonwords (containing one vs. three syllables) were presented for immediate serial recall in (a) pure lists and (b) unpredictable mixed lists of words and nonwords. The mixed-list paradigm is known to disrupt the phonological stability of words, encouraging their phonemes to recombine with the elements of other list items. In this situation, standard length effects were seen for nonwords, while length effects for words were absent or reversed. A detailed error analysis revealed that long words were more robust to the mixed-list manipulation than short words: Their phonemes were less likely to be omitted and to recombine with phonemes from other list items. These findings support an interactive view of short-term memory, in which long words derive greater benefits from lexical knowledge than short words-especially when their phonological integrity is challenged by the inclusion of nonwords in mixed lists.

Should title lengths really adhere to the American Psychological Association's twelve word limit?

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Hallock, Robert M; Dillner, Kari M

2016-04-01

The publication manual for the American Psychological Association (APA) suggests that title lengths do not exceed 12 words, yet journals do not prevent longer titles. Here, we examined title lengths in APA journals to see how many exceeded the APA's suggested limit. First, we conducted a systematic analysis of 235 articles in the current issues of 23 APA journals. A total of 52% of titles were more than 12 words long. Second, we examined articles from APA journals that were at least 50 years old to examine whether title lengths have changed over time. Our results suggested that the average title lengths have indeed increased with time. One of 2 courses should be taken. Perhaps science is becoming more complex that longer titles are needed in order to convey the primary message to the reader. If this is the case, then the APA's word limit should be increased. On the other hand, however, maybe editor and reviewers should try to enforce the current word limit to force writers to be succinct. Either way, editors should make their preferences clear so that the trend for longer titles does not continue unchecked. (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

Resolving prokaryotic taxonomy without rRNA: longer oligonucleotide word lengths improve genome and metagenome taxonomic classification.

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Alsop, Eric B; Raymond, Jason

2013-01-01

Oligonucleotide signatures, especially tetranucleotide signatures, have been used as method for homology binning by exploiting an organism's inherent biases towards the use of specific oligonucleotide words. Tetranucleotide signatures have been especially useful in environmental metagenomics samples as many of these samples contain organisms from poorly classified phyla which cannot be easily identified using traditional homology methods, including NCBI BLAST. This study examines oligonucleotide signatures across 1,424 completed genomes from across the tree of life, substantially expanding upon previous work. A comprehensive analysis of mononucleotide through nonanucleotide word lengths suggests that longer word lengths substantially improve the classification of DNA fragments across a range of sizes of relevance to high throughput sequencing. We find that, at present, heptanucleotide signatures represent an optimal balance between prediction accuracy and computational time for resolving taxonomy using both genomic and metagenomic fragments. We directly compare the ability of tetranucleotide and heptanucleotide world lengths (tetranucleotide signatures are the current standard for oligonucleotide word usage analyses) for taxonomic binning of metagenome reads. We present evidence that heptanucleotide word lengths consistently provide more taxonomic resolving power, particularly in distinguishing between closely related organisms that are often present in metagenomic samples. This implies that longer oligonucleotide word lengths should replace tetranucleotide signatures for most analyses. Finally, we show that the application of longer word lengths to metagenomic datasets leads to more accurate taxonomic binning of DNA scaffolds and have the potential to substantially improve taxonomic assignment and assembly of metagenomic data.

Resolving prokaryotic taxonomy without rRNA: longer oligonucleotide word lengths improve genome and metagenome taxonomic classification.

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Eric B Alsop

Full Text Available Oligonucleotide signatures, especially tetranucleotide signatures, have been used as method for homology binning by exploiting an organism's inherent biases towards the use of specific oligonucleotide words. Tetranucleotide signatures have been especially useful in environmental metagenomics samples as many of these samples contain organisms from poorly classified phyla which cannot be easily identified using traditional homology methods, including NCBI BLAST. This study examines oligonucleotide signatures across 1,424 completed genomes from across the tree of life, substantially expanding upon previous work. A comprehensive analysis of mononucleotide through nonanucleotide word lengths suggests that longer word lengths substantially improve the classification of DNA fragments across a range of sizes of relevance to high throughput sequencing. We find that, at present, heptanucleotide signatures represent an optimal balance between prediction accuracy and computational time for resolving taxonomy using both genomic and metagenomic fragments. We directly compare the ability of tetranucleotide and heptanucleotide world lengths (tetranucleotide signatures are the current standard for oligonucleotide word usage analyses for taxonomic binning of metagenome reads. We present evidence that heptanucleotide word lengths consistently provide more taxonomic resolving power, particularly in distinguishing between closely related organisms that are often present in metagenomic samples. This implies that longer oligonucleotide word lengths should replace tetranucleotide signatures for most analyses. Finally, we show that the application of longer word lengths to metagenomic datasets leads to more accurate taxonomic binning of DNA scaffolds and have the potential to substantially improve taxonomic assignment and assembly of metagenomic data.

Chinese Deaf Readers Have Early Access to Parafoveal Semantics

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Yan, Ming; Pan, Jinger; Bélanger, Nathalie N.; Shu, Hua

2015-01-01

In the present study, we manipulated different types of information available in the parafovea during the reading of Chinese sentences and examined how deaf readers make use of the parafoveal information. Results clearly indicate that although the reading-level matched hearing readers make greater use of orthographic information in the parafovea,…

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

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

2010-02-01

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

DFAs and PFAs with long shortest synchronizing word length

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De Bondt, M.; Don, H.; Zantema, H.; Charlier, E.; Leroy, J.; Rigo, M.

2017-01-01

It was conjectured by Černý in 1964, that a synchronizing DFA on n states always has a synchronizing word of length at most (n-1)2 and he gave a sequence of DFAs for which this bound is reached. Until now a full analysis of all DFAs reaching this bound was only given for n ≤ 4 and with bounds on the

See before You Jump: Full Recognition of Parafoveal Words Precedes Skips during Reading

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Gordon, Peter C.; Plummer, Patrick; Choi, Wonil

2013-01-01

Serial attention models of eye-movement control during reading were evaluated in an eye-tracking experiment that examined how lexical activation combines with visual information in the parafovea to affect word skipping (where a word is not fixated during first-pass reading). Lexical activation was manipulated by repetition priming created through…

Multiple Word-Length High-Level Synthesis

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Coussy Philippe

2008-01-01

Full Text Available Abstract Digital signal processing (DSP applications are nowadays widely used and their complexity is ever growing. The design of dedicated hardware accelerators is thus still needed in system-on-chip and embedded systems. Realistic hardware implementation requires first to convert the floating-point data of the initial specification into arbitrary length data (finite-precision while keeping an acceptable computation accuracy. Next, an optimized hardware architecture has to be designed. Considering uniform bit-width specification allows to use traditional automated design flow. However, it leads to oversized design. On the other hand, considering non uniform bit-width specification allows to get a smaller circuit but requires complex design tasks. In this paper, we propose an approach that inputs a C/C++ specification. The design flow, based on high-level synthesis (HLS techniques, automatically generates a potentially pipeline RTL architecture described in VHDL. Both bitaccurate integer and fixed-point data types can be used in the input specification. The generated architecture uses components (operator, register, etc. that have different widths. The design constraints are the clock period and the throughput of the application. The proposed approach considers data word-length information in all the synthesis steps by using dedicated algorithms. We show in this paper the effectiveness of the proposed approach through several design experiments in the DSP domain.

Multiple Word-Length High-Level Synthesis

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Dominique Heller

2008-09-01

Full Text Available Digital signal processing (DSP applications are nowadays widely used and their complexity is ever growing. The design of dedicated hardware accelerators is thus still needed in system-on-chip and embedded systems. Realistic hardware implementation requires first to convert the floating-point data of the initial specification into arbitrary length data (finite-precision while keeping an acceptable computation accuracy. Next, an optimized hardware architecture has to be designed. Considering uniform bit-width specification allows to use traditional automated design flow. However, it leads to oversized design. On the other hand, considering non uniform bit-width specification allows to get a smaller circuit but requires complex design tasks. In this paper, we propose an approach that inputs a C/C++ specification. The design flow, based on high-level synthesis (HLS techniques, automatically generates a potentially pipeline RTL architecture described in VHDL. Both bitaccurate integer and fixed-point data types can be used in the input specification. The generated architecture uses components (operator, register, etc. that have different widths. The design constraints are the clock period and the throughput of the application. The proposed approach considers data word-length information in all the synthesis steps by using dedicated algorithms. We show in this paper the effectiveness of the proposed approach through several design experiments in the DSP domain.

Does working memory change with age? The interactions of concurrent articulation with the effects of word length and acoustic confusion.

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Bireta, Tamra J; Fine, Hope C; Vanwormer, Lisa A

2013-01-01

The effects of acoustic confusion (phonological similarity), word length, and concurrent articulation (articulatory suppression) are cited as support for Working Memory's phonological loop component (e.g., Baddeley, 2000 , Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 7, 544). Research has focused on younger adults, with no studies examining whether concurrent articulation reduces the word length and acoustic confusion effects among older adults. In the current study, younger and older adults were given lists of similar and dissimilar letters (Experiment 1) or long and short words (Experiment 2) for immediate serial reconstruction of order. Items were presented visually or auditorily, with or without concurrent articulation. As expected, younger and older adults demonstrated effects of acoustic confusion, word length, and concurrent articulation. Further, concurrent articulation reduced the effects of acoustic confusion and word length equally for younger and older adults. This suggests that age-related differences occur in overall performance, but do not reflect an age-related deficiency in the functioning of the phonological loop component of working memory.

Affective priming of emotional pictures in parafoveal vision: left visual field advantage.

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Calvo, Manuel G; Avero, Pedro

2008-03-01

This study investigated whether stimulus affective content can be extracted from visual scenes when these appear in parafoveal locations of the visual field and are foveally masked, and whether there is lateralization involved. Parafoveal prime pleasant or unpleasant scenes were presented for 150 msec 2.5 degrees away from fixation and were followed by a foveal probe scene that was either congruent or incongruent in emotional valence with the prime. Participants responded whether the probe was emotionally positive or negative. Affective priming was demonstrated by shorter response latencies for congruent than for incongruent prime-probe pairs. This effect occurred when the prime was presented in the left visual field at a 300-msec prime-probe stimulus onset asynchrony, even when the prime and the probe were different in physical appearance and semantic category. This result reveals that the affective significance of emotional stimuli can be assessed early through covert attention mechanisms, in the absence of overt eye fixations on the stimuli, and suggests that right-hemisphere dominance is involved.

Syllabic Length Effect in Visual Word Recognition

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Roya Ranjbar Mohammadi

2014-07-01

Full Text Available Studies on visual word recognition have resulted in different and sometimes contradictory proposals as Multi-Trace Memory Model (MTM, Dual-Route Cascaded Model (DRC, and Parallel Distribution Processing Model (PDP. The role of the number of syllables in word recognition was examined by the use of five groups of English words and non-words. The reaction time of the participants to these words was measured using reaction time measuring software. The results indicated that there was syllabic effect on recognition of both high and low frequency words. The pattern was incremental in terms of syllable number. This pattern prevailed in high and low frequency words and non-words except in one syllable words. In general, the results are in line with the PDP model which claims that a single processing mechanism is used in both words and non-words recognition. In other words, the findings suggest that lexical items are mainly processed via a lexical route.  A pedagogical implication of the findings would be that reading in English as a foreign language involves analytical processing of the syllable of the words.

Semantic Preview Benefit during Reading

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Hohenstein, Sven; Kliegl, Reinhold

2014-01-01

Word features in parafoveal vision influence eye movements during reading. The question of whether readers extract semantic information from parafoveal words was studied in 3 experiments by using a gaze-contingent display change technique. Subjects read German sentences containing 1 of several preview words that were replaced by a target word…

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

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

2007-04-01

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

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.

Dependence of exponents on text length versus finite-size scaling for word-frequency distributions

Science.gov (United States)

Corral, Álvaro; Font-Clos, Francesc

2017-08-01

Some authors have recently argued that a finite-size scaling law for the text-length dependence of word-frequency distributions cannot be conceptually valid. Here we give solid quantitative evidence for the validity of this scaling law, using both careful statistical tests and analytical arguments based on the generalized central-limit theorem applied to the moments of the distribution (and obtaining a novel derivation of Heaps' law as a by-product). We also find that the picture of word-frequency distributions with power-law exponents that decrease with text length [X. Yan and P. Minnhagen, Physica A 444, 828 (2016), 10.1016/j.physa.2015.10.082] does not stand with rigorous statistical analysis. Instead, we show that the distributions are perfectly described by power-law tails with stable exponents, whose values are close to 2, in agreement with the classical Zipf's law. Some misconceptions about scaling are also clarified.

Spatial attention in written word perception.

Science.gov (United States)

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.

On avoided words, absent words, and their application to biological sequence analysis.

Science.gov (United States)

Almirantis, Yannis; Charalampopoulos, Panagiotis; Gao, Jia; Iliopoulos, Costas S; Mohamed, Manal; Pissis, Solon P; Polychronopoulos, Dimitris

2017-01-01

The deviation of the observed frequency of a word w from its expected frequency in a given sequence x is used to determine whether or not the word is avoided . This concept is particularly useful in DNA linguistic analysis. The value of the deviation of w , denoted by [Formula: see text], effectively characterises the extent of a word by its edge contrast in the context in which it occurs. A word w of length [Formula: see text] is a [Formula: see text]-avoided word in x if [Formula: see text], for a given threshold [Formula: see text]. Notice that such a word may be completely absent from x . Hence, computing all such words naïvely can be a very time-consuming procedure, in particular for large k . In this article, we propose an [Formula: see text]-time and [Formula: see text]-space algorithm to compute all [Formula: see text]-avoided words of length k in a given sequence of length n over a fixed-sized alphabet. We also present a time-optimal [Formula: see text]-time algorithm to compute all [Formula: see text]-avoided words (of any length) in a sequence of length n over an integer alphabet of size [Formula: see text]. In addition, we provide a tight asymptotic upper bound for the number of [Formula: see text]-avoided words over an integer alphabet and the expected length of the longest one. We make available an implementation of our algorithm. Experimental results, using both real and synthetic data, show the efficiency and applicability of our implementation in biological sequence analysis. The systematic search for avoided words is particularly useful for biological sequence analysis. We present a linear-time and linear-space algorithm for the computation of avoided words of length k in a given sequence x . We suggest a modification to this algorithm so that it computes all avoided words of x , irrespective of their length, within the same time complexity. We also present combinatorial results with regards to avoided words and absent words.

Word Length Selection Method for Controller Implementation on FPGAs Using the VHDL-2008 Fixed-Point and Floating-Point Packages

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Urriza I

2010-01-01

Full Text Available Abstract This paper presents a word length selection method for the implementation of digital controllers in both fixed-point and floating-point hardware on FPGAs. This method uses the new types defined in the VHDL-2008 fixed-point and floating-point packages. These packages allow customizing the word length of fixed and floating point representations and shorten the design cycle simplifying the design of arithmetic operations. The method performs bit-true simulations in order to determine the word length to represent the constant coefficients and the internal signals of the digital controller while maintaining the control system specifications. A mixed-signal simulation tool is used to simulate the closed loop system as a whole in order to analyze the impact of the quantization effects and loop delays on the control system performance. The method is applied to implement a digital controller for a switching power converter. The digital circuit is implemented on an FPGA, and the simulations are experimentally verified.

Axial Length Variation Impacts on Superficial Retinal Vessel Density and Foveal Avascular Zone Area Measurements Using Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography.

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Sampson, Danuta M; Gong, Peijun; An, Di; Menghini, Moreno; Hansen, Alex; Mackey, David A; Sampson, David D; Chen, Fred K

2017-06-01

To evaluate the impact of image magnification correction on superficial retinal vessel density (SRVD) and foveal avascular zone area (FAZA) measurements using optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA). Participants with healthy retinas were recruited for ocular biometry, refraction, and RTVue XR Avanti OCTA imaging with the 3 × 3-mm protocol. The foveal and parafoveal SRVD and FAZA were quantified with custom software before and after correction for magnification error using the Littman and the modified Bennett formulae. Relative changes between corrected and uncorrected SRVD and FAZA were calculated. Forty subjects were enrolled and the median (range) age of the participants was 30 (18-74) years. The mean (range) spherical equivalent refractive error was -1.65 (-8.00 to +4.88) diopters and mean (range) axial length was 24.42 mm (21.27-28.85). Images from 13 eyes were excluded due to poor image quality leaving 67 for analysis. Relative changes in foveal and parafoveal SRVD and FAZA after correction ranged from -20% to +10%, -3% to +2%, and -20% to +51%, respectively. Image size correction in measurements of foveal SRVD and FAZA was greater than 5% in 51% and 74% of eyes, respectively. In contrast, 100% of eyes had less than 5% correction in measurements of parafoveal SRVD. Ocular biometry should be performed with OCTA to correct image magnification error induced by axial length variation. We advise caution when interpreting interocular and interindividual comparisons of SRVD and FAZA derived from OCTA without image size correction.

Word frequency influences on the list length effect and associative memory in young and older adults.

Science.gov (United States)

Badham, Stephen P; Whitney, Cora; Sanghera, Sumeet; Maylor, Elizabeth A

2017-07-01

Many studies show that age deficits in memory are smaller for information supported by pre-experimental experience. Many studies also find dissociations in memory tasks between words that occur with high and low frequencies in language, but the literature is mixed regarding the extent of word frequency effects in normal ageing. We examined whether age deficits in episodic memory could be influenced by manipulations of word frequency. In Experiment 1, young and older adults studied short and long lists of high- and low-frequency words for free recall. The list length effect (the drop in proportion recalled for longer lists) was larger in young compared to older adults and for high- compared to low-frequency words. In Experiment 2, young and older adults completed item and associative recognition memory tests with high- and low-frequency words. Age deficits were greater for associative memory than for item memory, demonstrating an age-related associative deficit. High-frequency words led to better associative memory performance whilst low-frequency words resulted in better item memory performance. In neither experiment was there any evidence for age deficits to be smaller for high- relative to low-frequency words, suggesting that word frequency effects on memory operate independently from effects due to cognitive ageing.

Word-length effect in verbal short-term memory in individuals with Down's syndrome.

Science.gov (United States)

Kanno, K; Ikeda, Y

2002-11-01

Many studies have indicated that individuals with Down's syndrome (DS) show a specific deficit in short-term memory for verbal information. The aim of the present study was to investigate the influence of the length of words on verbal short-term memory in individuals with DS. Twenty-eight children with DS and 10 control participants matched for memory span were tested on verbal serial recall and speech rate, which are thought to involve rehearsal and output speed. Although a significant word-length effect was observed in both groups for the recall of a larger number of items with a shorter spoken duration than for those with a longer spoken duration, the number of correct recalls in the group with DS was reduced compared to the control subjects. The results demonstrating poor short-term memory in children with DS were irrelevant to speech rate. In addition, the proportion of repetition-gained errors in serial recall was higher in children with DS than in control subjects. The present findings suggest that poor access to long-term lexical knowledge, rather than overt articulation speed, constrains verbal short-term memory functions in individuals with DS.

Parafoveal-on-Foveal Effects of Emotional Word Semantics in Reading Chinese Sentences: Evidence from Eye Movements

Science.gov (United States)

Yan, Ming; Sommer, Werner

2015-01-01

Despite the well-known influence of emotional meaning on cognition, relatively less is known about its effects on reading behavior. We investigated whether fixation behavior during the reading of Chinese sentences is influenced by emotional word meaning in the parafovea. Two-character target words embedded into the same sentence frames provided…

Scale and time dependence of serial correlations in word-length time series of written texts

Science.gov (United States)

Rodriguez, E.; Aguilar-Cornejo, M.; Femat, R.; Alvarez-Ramirez, J.

2014-11-01

This work considered the quantitative analysis of large written texts. To this end, the text was converted into a time series by taking the sequence of word lengths. The detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) was used for characterizing long-range serial correlations of the time series. To this end, the DFA was implemented within a rolling window framework for estimating the variations of correlations, quantified in terms of the scaling exponent, strength along the text. Also, a filtering derivative was used to compute the dependence of the scaling exponent relative to the scale. The analysis was applied to three famous English-written literary narrations; namely, Alice in Wonderland (by Lewis Carrol), Dracula (by Bram Stoker) and Sense and Sensibility (by Jane Austen). The results showed that high correlations appear for scales of about 50-200 words, suggesting that at these scales the text contains the stronger coherence. The scaling exponent was not constant along the text, showing important variations with apparent cyclical behavior. An interesting coincidence between the scaling exponent variations and changes in narrative units (e.g., chapters) was found. This suggests that the scaling exponent obtained from the DFA is able to detect changes in narration structure as expressed by the usage of words of different lengths.

Choice of word length in the design of a specialized hardware for lossless wavelet compression of medical images

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Urriza, Isidro; Barragan, Luis A.; Artigas, Jose I.; Garcia, Jose I.; Navarro, Denis

1997-11-01

Image compression plays an important role in the archiving and transmission of medical images. Discrete cosine transform (DCT)-based compression methods are not suitable for medical images because of block-like image artifacts that could mask or be mistaken for pathology. Wavelet transforms (WTs) are used to overcome this problem. When implementing WTs in hardware, finite precision arithmetic introduces quantization errors. However, lossless compression is usually required in the medical image field. Thus, the hardware designer must look for the optimum register length that, while ensuring the lossless accuracy criteria, will also lead to a high-speed implementation with small chip area. In addition, wavelet choice is a critical issue that affects image quality as well as system design. We analyze the filters best suited to image compression that appear in the literature. For them, we obtain the maximum quantization errors produced in the calculation of the WT components. Thus, we deduce the minimum word length required for the reconstructed image to be numerically identical to the original image. The theoretical results are compared with experimental results obtained from algorithm simulations on random test images. These results enable us to compare the hardware implementation cost of the different filter banks. Moreover, to reduce the word length, we have analyzed the case of increasing the integer part of the numbers while maintaining constant the word length when the scale increases.

Optimal choice of word length when comparing two Markov sequences using a χ 2-statistic.

Science.gov (United States)

Bai, Xin; Tang, Kujin; Ren, Jie; Waterman, Michael; Sun, Fengzhu

2017-10-03

Alignment-free sequence comparison using counts of word patterns (grams, k-tuples) has become an active research topic due to the large amount of sequence data from the new sequencing technologies. Genome sequences are frequently modelled by Markov chains and the likelihood ratio test or the corresponding approximate χ 2 -statistic has been suggested to compare two sequences. However, it is not known how to best choose the word length k in such studies. We develop an optimal strategy to choose k by maximizing the statistical power of detecting differences between two sequences. Let the orders of the Markov chains for the two sequences be r 1 and r 2 , respectively. We show through both simulations and theoretical studies that the optimal k= max(r 1 ,r 2 )+1 for both long sequences and next generation sequencing (NGS) read data. The orders of the Markov chains may be unknown and several methods have been developed to estimate the orders of Markov chains based on both long sequences and NGS reads. We study the power loss of the statistics when the estimated orders are used. It is shown that the power loss is minimal for some of the estimators of the orders of Markov chains. Our studies provide guidelines on choosing the optimal word length for the comparison of Markov sequences.

Speech perception in older listeners with normal hearing:conditions of time alteration, selective word stress, and length of sentences.

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Cho, Soojin; Yu, Jyaehyoung; Chun, Hyungi; Seo, Hyekyung; Han, Woojae

2014-04-01

Deficits of the aging auditory system negatively affect older listeners in terms of speech communication, resulting in limitations to their social lives. To improve their perceptual skills, the goal of this study was to investigate the effects of time alteration, selective word stress, and varying sentence lengths on the speech perception of older listeners. Seventeen older people with normal hearing were tested for seven conditions of different time-altered sentences (i.e., ±60%, ±40%, ±20%, 0%), two conditions of selective word stress (i.e., no-stress and stress), and three different lengths of sentences (i.e., short, medium, and long) at the most comfortable level for individuals in quiet circumstances. As time compression increased, sentence perception scores decreased statistically. Compared to a natural (or no stress) condition, the selectively stressed words significantly improved the perceptual scores of these older listeners. Long sentences yielded the worst scores under all time-altered conditions. Interestingly, there was a noticeable positive effect for the selective word stress at the 20% time compression. This pattern of results suggests that a combination of time compression and selective word stress is more effective for understanding speech in older listeners than using the time-expanded condition only.

Kinematic Investigation of Lingual Movement in Words of Increasing Length in Acquired Apraxia of Speech

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Bartle-Meyer, Carly J.; Goozee, Justine V.; Murdoch, Bruce E.

2009-01-01

The current study aimed to use electromagnetic articulography (EMA) to investigate the effect of increasing word length on lingual kinematics in acquired apraxia of speech (AOS). Tongue-tip and tongue-back movement was recorded for five speakers with AOS and a concomitant aphasia (mean age = 53.6 years; SD = 12.60) during target consonant…

Examining the relationship between free recall and immediate serial recall: Similar patterns of rehearsal and similar effects of word length, presentation rate, and articulatory suppression.

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Bhatarah, Parveen; Ward, Geoff; Smith, Jessica; Hayes, Louise

2009-07-01

In five experiments, rehearsal and recall phenomena were examined using the free recall and immediate serial recall (ISR) tasks. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with lists of eight words, were precued or postcued to respond using free recall or ISR, and rehearsed out loud during presentation. The patterns of rehearsal were similar in all the conditions, and there was little difference between recall in the precued and postcued conditions. In Experiment 2, both free recall and ISR were sensitive to word length and presentation rate and showed similar patterns of rehearsal. In Experiment 3, both tasks were sensitive to word length and articulatory suppression. The word length effects generalized to 6-item (Experiment 4) and 12-item (Experiment 5) lists. These findings suggest that the two tasks are underpinned by highly similar rehearsal and recall processes.

Visual and linguistic determinants of the eyes' initial fixation position in reading development.

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Ducrot, Stéphanie; Pynte, Joël; Ghio, Alain; Lété, Bernard

2013-03-01

Two eye-movement experiments with one hundred and seven first- through fifth-grade children were conducted to examine the effects of visuomotor and linguistic factors on the recognition of words and pseudowords presented in central vision (using a variable-viewing-position technique) and in parafoveal vision (shifted to the left or right of a central fixation point). For all groups of children, we found a strong effect of stimulus location, in both central and parafoveal vision. This effect corresponds to the children's apparent tendency, for peripherally located targets, to reach a position located halfway between the middle and the left edge of the stimulus (preferred viewing location, PVL), whether saccading to the right or left. For centrally presented targets, refixation probability and lexical-decision time were the lowest near the word's center, suggesting an optimal viewing position (OVP). The viewing-position effects found here were modulated (1) by print exposure, both in central and parafoveal vision; and (2) by the intrinsic qualities of the stimulus (lexicality and word frequency) for targets in central vision but not for parafoveally presented targets. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Universal Lyndon Words

OpenAIRE

Carpi, Arturo; Fici, Gabriele; Holub, Stepan; Oprsal, Jakub; Sciortino, Marinella

2014-01-01

A word $w$ over an alphabet $\\Sigma$ is a Lyndon word if there exists an order defined on $\\Sigma$ for which $w$ is lexicographically smaller than all of its conjugates (other than itself). We introduce and study \\emph{universal Lyndon words}, which are words over an $n$-letter alphabet that have length $n!$ and such that all the conjugates are Lyndon words. We show that universal Lyndon words exist for every $n$ and exhibit combinatorial and structural properties of these words. We then defi...

Finding words in a language that allows words without vowels.

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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.

Searching for the right word: Hybrid visual and memory search for words.

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Boettcher, Sage E P; Wolfe, Jeremy M

2015-05-01

In "hybrid search" (Wolfe Psychological Science, 23(7), 698-703, 2012), observers search through visual space for any of multiple targets held in memory. With photorealistic objects as the stimuli, response times (RTs) increase linearly with the visual set size and logarithmically with the memory set size, even when over 100 items are committed to memory. It is well-established that pictures of objects are particularly easy to memorize (Brady, Konkle, Alvarez, & Oliva Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105, 14325-14329, 2008). Would hybrid-search performance be similar if the targets were words or phrases, in which word order can be important, so that the processes of memorization might be different? In Experiment 1, observers memorized 2, 4, 8, or 16 words in four different blocks. After passing a memory test, confirming their memorization of the list, the observers searched for these words in visual displays containing two to 16 words. Replicating Wolfe (Psychological Science, 23(7), 698-703, 2012), the RTs increased linearly with the visual set size and logarithmically with the length of the word list. The word lists of Experiment 1 were random. In Experiment 2, words were drawn from phrases that observers reported knowing by heart (e.g., "London Bridge is falling down"). Observers were asked to provide four phrases, ranging in length from two words to no less than 20 words (range 21-86). All words longer than two characters from the phrase, constituted the target list. Distractor words were matched for length and frequency. Even with these strongly ordered lists, the results again replicated the curvilinear function of memory set size seen in hybrid search. One might expect to find serial position effects, perhaps reducing the RTs for the first (primacy) and/or the last (recency) members of a list (Atkinson & Shiffrin, 1968; Murdock Journal of Experimental Psychology, 64, 482-488, 1962). Surprisingly, we showed no reliable effects of word order

An EMA Analysis of the Effect of Increasing Word Length on Consonant Production in Apraxia of Speech: A Case Study

Science.gov (United States)

Bartle, Carly J.; Goozee, Justine V.; Murdoch, Bruce E.

2007-01-01

The effect of increasing word length on the articulatory dynamics (i.e. duration, distance, maximum acceleration, maximum deceleration, and maximum velocity) of consonant production in acquired apraxia of speech was investigated using electromagnetic articulography (EMA). Tongue-tip and tongue-back movement of one apraxic patient was recorded…

Fovea sparing internal limiting membrane peeling using multiple parafoveal curvilinear peels for myopic foveoschisis: technique and outcome.

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Jin, Haiying; Zhang, Qi; Zhao, Peiquan

2016-10-18

To introduce a modified surgical technique, the "parafoveal multiple curvelinear internal limiting membrane (ILM) peeling", to preserve epi-foveal ILM in myopic foveoschisis surgery. Consecutive patients with myopic foveoschisis were enrolled in the present prospective interventional case series. The surgeries were performed using transconjunctival 23-gauge system. The macular area was divided into quadrants. ILM was peeled off in a curvilinear manner centered around the site that was away from the central fovea in each quadrant. Shearing forces were used to control the direction to keep the peeling away from central fovea. ILM at central fovea of about 500 to 1000 μm was preserved by this technique. This technique was performed in 20 eyes of 20 consecutive patients. Epi-foveal ILM was successfully preserved in all cases using the technique. Patients were followed up for more than 12 months. The mean postoperative logMAR visual acuity improved from 1.67 ± 0.65 preoperatively to 1.15 ± 0.49 (P = 0.015; paired t-test). Postoperative OCT examinations showed that full-thickness macular holes (MHs) did not developed in any case. Central fovea thickness decreased from 910 ± 261 μm preoperatively to 125 ± 85 postoperatively (P = 0.001; paired t-test). Fovea sparing ILM peeling using multiple parafoveal curvilinear peels prevents the development of postoperative full-thickness MHs in eyes with myopic foveoschisis.

Recurrent Partial Words

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Francine Blanchet-Sadri

2011-08-01

Full Text Available Partial words are sequences over a finite alphabet that may contain wildcard symbols, called holes, which match or are compatible with all letters; partial words without holes are said to be full words (or simply words. Given an infinite partial word w, the number of distinct full words over the alphabet that are compatible with factors of w of length n, called subwords of w, refers to a measure of complexity of infinite partial words so-called subword complexity. This measure is of particular interest because we can construct partial words with subword complexities not achievable by full words. In this paper, we consider the notion of recurrence over infinite partial words, that is, we study whether all of the finite subwords of a given infinite partial word appear infinitely often, and we establish connections between subword complexity and recurrence in this more general framework.

Word-length algorithm for language identification of under-resourced languages

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ali Selamat

2016-10-01

Full Text Available Language identification is widely used in machine learning, text mining, information retrieval, and speech processing. Available techniques for solving the problem of language identification do require large amount of training text that are not available for under-resourced languages which form the bulk of the World’s languages. The primary objective of this study is to propose a lexicon based algorithm which is able to perform language identification using minimal training data. Because language identification is often the first step in many natural language processing tasks, it is necessary to explore techniques that will perform language identification in the shortest possible time. Hence, the second objective of this research is to study the effect of the proposed algorithm on the run-time performance of language identification. Precision, recall, and F1 measures were used to determine the effectiveness of the proposed word length algorithm using datasets drawn from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Act in 15 languages. The experimental results show good accuracy on language identification at the document level and at the sentence level based on the available dataset. The improved algorithm also showed significant improvement in run time performance compared with the spelling checker approach.

Noninvasive Visualization and Analysis of the Human Parafoveal Capillary Network Using Swept Source OCT Optical Microangiography.

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Kuehlewein, Laura; Tepelus, Tudor C; An, Lin; Durbin, Mary K; Srinivas, Sowmya; Sadda, Srinivas R

2015-06-01

We characterized the foveal avascular zone (FAZ) and the parafoveal capillary network in healthy subjects using swept source OCT optical microangiography (OMAG). We acquired OMAG images of the macula of 19 eyes (13 healthy individuals) using a prototype swept source laser OCT. En face images of the retinal vasculature were generated for superficial and deep inner retinal layers (SRL/DRL) in regions of interest 250 (ROI-250) and 500 (ROI-500) μm from the FAZ border. The mean area (mm2) of the FAZ was 0.304 ± 0.132 for the SRL and 0.486 ± 0.162 for the DRL (P network at different retinal layers.

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

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

2015-01-01

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

Blue hypertext is a good design decision: no perceptual disadvantage in reading and successful highlighting of relevant information.

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Gagl, Benjamin

2016-01-01

Highlighted text in the Internet (i.e., hypertext) is predominantly blue and underlined. The perceptibility of these hypertext characteristics was heavily questioned by applied research and empirical tests resulted in inconclusive results. The ability to recognize blue text in foveal and parafoveal vision was identified as potentially constrained by the low number of foveally centered blue light sensitive retinal cells. The present study investigates if foveal and parafoveal perceptibility of blue hypertext is reduced in comparison to normal black text during reading. A silent-sentence reading study with simultaneous eye movement recordings and the invisible boundary paradigm, which allows the investigation of foveal and parafoveal perceptibility, separately, was realized (comparing fixation times after degraded vs. un-degraded parafoveal previews). Target words in sentences were presented in either black or blue and either underlined or normal. No effect of color and underlining, but a preview benefit could be detected for first pass reading measures. Fixation time measures that included re-reading, e.g., total viewing times, showed, in addition to a preview effect, a reduced fixation time for not highlighted (black not underlined) in contrast to highlighted target words (either blue or underlined or both). The present pattern reflects no detectable perceptual disadvantage of hyperlink stimuli but increased attraction of attention resources, after first pass reading, through highlighting. Blue or underlined text allows readers to easily perceive hypertext and at the same time readers re-visited highlighted words longer. On the basis of the present evidence, blue hypertext can be safely recommended to web designers for future use.

length-weight relationhip of freshwater wild fish species

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Dr Naeem

2012-06-21

Jun 21, 2012 ... Length-weight (LWR) and length-length relationships (LLR) were determined for a freshwater catfish ... Key words: Mystus bleekeri, length-weight relationship, length-length relationship, predictive equations. INTRODUCTION. Mystus bleekeri (freshwater catfish Day, 1877), locally ..... fish farmers, Aquacult.

Skipping Syntactically Illegal "the" Previews: The Role of Predictability

Science.gov (United States)

Abbott, Matthew J.; Angele, Bernhard; Ahn, Y. Danbi; Rayner, Keith

2015-01-01

Readers tend to skip words, particularly when they are short, frequent, or predictable. Angele and Rayner (2013) recently reported that readers are often unable to detect syntactic anomalies in parafoveal vision. In the present study, we manipulated target word predictability to assess whether contextual constraint modulates…

Factors That Influence the Difficulty of Science Words

Science.gov (United States)

Cervetti, Gina N.; Hiebert, Elfrieda H.; Pearson, P. David; McClung, Nicola A.

2015-01-01

This study examines, within the domain of science, the characteristics of words that predict word knowledge and word learning. The authors identified a set of word characteristics--length, part of speech, polysemy, frequency, morphological frequency, domain specificity, and concreteness--that, based on earlier research, were prime candidates to…

Blue hypertext is a good design decision: no perceptual disadvantage in reading and successful highlighting of relevant information

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Benjamin Gagl

2016-09-01

Full Text Available Background Highlighted text in the Internet (i.e., hypertext is predominantly blue and underlined. The perceptibility of these hypertext characteristics was heavily questioned by applied research and empirical tests resulted in inconclusive results. The ability to recognize blue text in foveal and parafoveal vision was identified as potentially constrained by the low number of foveally centered blue light sensitive retinal cells. The present study investigates if foveal and parafoveal perceptibility of blue hypertext is reduced in comparison to normal black text during reading. Methods A silent-sentence reading study with simultaneous eye movement recordings and the invisible boundary paradigm, which allows the investigation of foveal and parafoveal perceptibility, separately, was realized (comparing fixation times after degraded vs. un-degraded parafoveal previews. Target words in sentences were presented in either black or blue and either underlined or normal. Results No effect of color and underlining, but a preview benefit could be detected for first pass reading measures. Fixation time measures that included re-reading, e.g., total viewing times, showed, in addition to a preview effect, a reduced fixation time for not highlighted (black not underlined in contrast to highlighted target words (either blue or underlined or both. Discussion The present pattern reflects no detectable perceptual disadvantage of hyperlink stimuli but increased attraction of attention resources, after first pass reading, through highlighting. Blue or underlined text allows readers to easily perceive hypertext and at the same time readers re-visited highlighted words longer. On the basis of the present evidence, blue hypertext can be safely recommended to web designers for future use.

Memory for tonal pitches: a music-length effect hypothesis.

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Akiva-Kabiri, Lilach; Vecchi, Tomaso; Granot, Roni; Basso, Demis; Schön, Daniele

2009-07-01

One of the most studied effects of verbal working memory (WM) is the influence of the length of the words that compose the list to be remembered. This work aims to investigate the nature of musical WM by replicating the word length effect in the musical domain. Length and rate of presentation were manipulated in a recognition task of tone sequences. Results showed significant effects for both factors (length and presentation rate) as well as their interaction, suggesting the existence of different strategies (e.g., chunking and rehearsal) for the immediate memory of musical information, depending upon the length of the sequences.

The Word Frequency Effect on Second Language Vocabulary Learning

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Koirala, Cesar

2015-01-01

This study examines several linguistic factors as possible contributors to perceived word difficulty in second language learners in an experimental setting. The investigated factors include: (1) frequency of word usage in the first language, (2) word length, (3) number of syllables in a word, and (4) number of consonant clusters in a word. Word…

Direct lexical control of eye movements in reading: Evidence from a survival analysis of fixation durations

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Reingold, Eyal M.; Reichle, Erik D.; Glaholt, Mackenzie G.; Sheridan, Heather

2013-01-01

Participants’ eye movements were monitored in an experiment that manipulated the frequency of target words (high vs. low) as well as their availability for parafoveal processing during fixations on the pre-target word (valid vs. invalid preview). The influence of the word-frequency by preview validity manipulation on the distributions of first fixation duration was examined by using ex-Gaussian fitting as well as a novel survival analysis technique which provided precise estimates of the timing of the first discernible influence of word frequency on first fixation duration. Using this technique, we found a significant influence of word frequency on fixation duration in normal reading (valid preview) as early as 145 ms from the start of fixation. We also demonstrated an equally rapid non-lexical influence on first fixation duration as a function of initial landing position (location) on target words. The time-course of frequency effects, but not location effects was strongly influenced by preview validity, demonstrating the crucial role of parafoveal processing in enabling direct lexical control of reading fixation times. Implications for models of eye-movement control are discussed. PMID:22542804

High-Resolution Imaging of Parafoveal Cones in Different Stages of Diabetic Retinopathy Using Adaptive Optics Fundus Camera.

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Mohamed Kamel Soliman

Full Text Available To assess cone density as a marker of early signs of retinopathy in patients with type II diabetes mellitus.An adaptive optics (AO retinal camera (rtx1™; Imagine Eyes, Orsay, France was used to acquire images of parafoveal cones from patients with type II diabetes mellitus with or without retinopathy and from healthy controls with no known systemic or ocular disease. Cone mosaic was captured at 0° and 2°eccentricities along the horizontal and vertical meridians. The density of the parafoveal cones was calculated within 100×100-μm squares located at 500-μm from the foveal center along the orthogonal meridians. Manual corrections of the automated counting were then performed by 2 masked graders. Cone density measurements were evaluated with ANOVA that consisted of one between-subjects factor, stage of retinopathy and the within-subject factors. The ANOVA model included a complex covariance structure to account for correlations between the levels of the within-subject factors.Ten healthy participants (20 eyes and 25 patients (29 eyes with type II diabetes mellitus were recruited in the study. The mean (± standard deviation [SD] age of the healthy participants (Control group, patients with diabetes without retinopathy (No DR group, and patients with diabetic retinopathy (DR group was 55 ± 8, 53 ± 8, and 52 ± 9 years, respectively. The cone density was significantly lower in the moderate nonproliferative diabetic retinopathy (NPDR and severe NPDR/proliferative DR groups compared to the Control, No DR, and mild NPDR groups (P < 0.05. No correlation was found between cone density and the level of hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c or the duration of diabetes.The extent of photoreceptor loss on AO imaging may correlate positively with severity of DR in patients with type II diabetes mellitus. Photoreceptor loss may be more pronounced among patients with advanced stages of DR due to higher risk of macular edema and its sequelae.

A Text Steganographic System Based on Word Length Entropy Rate

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Francis Xavier Kofi Akotoye

2017-10-01

Full Text Available The widespread adoption of electronic distribution of material is accompanied by illicit copying and distribution. This is why individuals, businesses and governments have come to think of how to protect their work, prevent such illicit activities and trace the distribution of a document. It is in this context that a lot of attention is being focused on steganography. Implementing steganography in text document is not an easy undertaking considering the fact that text document has very few places in which to embed hidden data. Any minute change introduced to text objects can easily be noticed thus attracting attention from possible hackers. This study investigates the possibility of embedding data in text document by employing the entropy rate of the constituent characters of words not less than four characters long. The scheme was used to embed bits in text according to the alphabetic structure of the words, the respective characters were compared with their neighbouring characters and if the first character was alphabetically lower than the succeeding character according to their ASCII codes, a zero bit was embedded otherwise 1 was embedded after the characters had been transposed. Before embedding, the secret message was encrypted with a secret key to add a layer of security to the secret message to be embedded, and then a pseudorandom number was generated from the word counts of the text which was used to paint the starting point of the embedding process. The embedding capacity of the scheme was relatively high compared with the space encoding and semantic method.

Length, Lexicality, and Articulatory Suppression in Immediate Recall: Evidence against the Articulatory Loop

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Romani, C.; McAlpine, S.; Olson, A.; Tsouknida, E.; Martin, R.

2005-01-01

Influential models of short-term memory have attributed the fact that short words are recalled better than longer words in serial recall (the length effect) to articulatory rehearsal. Crucial for this link is the finding that the length effect disappears under articulatory suppression. We show, instead, that, under suppression, the length effect…

Phonological short-term memory impairment and the word length effect in children with intellectual disabilities.

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Poloczek, Sebastian; Büttner, Gerhard; Hasselhorn, Marcus

2014-02-01

There is mounting evidence that children and adolescents with intellectual disabilities (ID) of nonspecific aetiology perform poorer on phonological short-term memory tasks than children matched for mental age indicating a structural deficit in a process contributing to short-term recall of verbal material. One explanation is that children with ID of nonspecific aetiology do not activate subvocal rehearsal to refresh degrading memory traces. However, existing research concerning this explanation is inconclusive since studies focussing on the word length effect (WLE) as indicator of rehearsal have revealed inconsistent results for samples with ID and because in several existing studies, it is unclear whether the WLE was caused by rehearsal or merely appeared during output of the responses. We assumed that in children with ID only output delays produce a small WLE while in typically developing 6- to 8-year-olds rehearsal and output contribute to the WLE. From this assumption we derived several predictions that were tested in an experiment including 34 children with mild or borderline ID and 34 typically developing children matched for mental age (MA). As predicted, results revealed a small but significant WLE for children with ID that was significantly smaller than the WLE in the control group. Additionally, for children with ID, a WLE was not found for the first word of each trial but the effect emerged only in later serial positions. The findings corroborate the notion that in children with ID subvocal rehearsal does not develop in line with their mental age and provide a potential explanation for the inconsistent results on the WLE in children with ID. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Whole Word Measures in Bilingual Children with Speech Sound Disorders

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Burrows, Lauren; Goldstein, Brian A.

2010-01-01

Phonological acquisition traditionally has been measured using constructs that focus on segments rather than the whole words. Findings from recent research have suggested whole-word productions be evaluated using measures such as phonological mean length of utterance (pMLU) and the proportion of whole-word proximity (PWP). These measures have been…

Experience with compound words influences their processing: An eye movement investigation with English compound words.

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Juhasz, Barbara J

2016-11-14

Recording eye movements provides information on the time-course of word recognition during reading. Juhasz and Rayner [Juhasz, B. J., & Rayner, K. (2003). Investigating the effects of a set of intercorrelated variables on eye fixation durations in reading. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 29, 1312-1318] examined the impact of five word recognition variables, including familiarity and age-of-acquisition (AoA), on fixation durations. All variables impacted fixation durations, but the time-course differed. However, the study focused on relatively short, morphologically simple words. Eye movements are also informative for examining the processing of morphologically complex words such as compound words. The present study further examined the time-course of lexical and semantic variables during morphological processing. A total of 120 English compound words that varied in familiarity, AoA, semantic transparency, lexeme meaning dominance, sensory experience rating (SER), and imageability were selected. The impact of these variables on fixation durations was examined when length, word frequency, and lexeme frequencies were controlled in a regression model. The most robust effects were found for familiarity and AoA, indicating that a reader's experience with compound words significantly impacts compound recognition. These results provide insight into semantic processing of morphologically complex words during reading.

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

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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…

On power consumption issues in FIR filters with application to communication receivers: complexity, word length, and switching activity

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Havashki, Asghar

2009-10-15

channel estimation must be upheld, in particular at medium-to-high Channel Signal to Noise Ratios (CSNR). Furthermore, reducing the power consumption through word-length optimization, when realizing such estimators, is an attractive approach. Due to the characteristics of the input signal to such estimators, a special treatment of channel estimation error due to quantization of estimator filter coefficients is needed. In this thesis we investigate the impact of finite coefficient word length on channel estimator performance. A theoretical analysis of the increase in channel estimation error due to quantization of estimator coefficients is performed, and the behavior of this error in different fading environments and for different filter orders is studied. The power consumed in a channel estimator is also influenced by the switching activity in the input signal of the estimator. Characterizing the switching activity in the input signal, including how this activity changes in different environments, e.g., in the presence of noise, is a subject of the work performed in this thesis. In this study we give an expression for direct calculation of the correlation coefficient for the most significant bit in a signal, using the word-level correlation coefficient. We also derive expressions for accurately calculating the variance and word-level correlation coefficient for a correlated signal, when an additional noise of a given variance is added to the signal. This can be used to estimate the bit-level switching activity in a signal in the presence of noise, based on the Dual Bit Type (DBT) method. The impact the additional noise has on the switching activity of a correlated signal has also been studied. These results make it possible for a designer to model the actual input switching activity in different real life noisy environments, enabling realistic power consumption estimation. A study on switching activity reduction in estimator filters using a coefficient reordering method

Modeling the length effect: Specifying the relation with visual and phonological correlates of reading

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van den Boer, M.; de Jong, P.F.; Haentjens-van Meeteren, M.M.

2013-01-01

Beginning readers' reading latencies increase as words become longer. This length effect is believed to be a marker of a serial reading process. We examined the effects of visual and phonological skills on the length effect. Participants were 184 second-grade children who read 3- to 5-letter words

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

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

2018-06-01

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

From Grapheme to Phonological Output: Performance of Adults Who Stutter on a Word Jumble Task.

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Megann McGill

Full Text Available The purpose of the present study was to extend previous research by analyzing the ability of adults who stutter to use phonological working memory in conjunction with lexical access to perform a word jumble task.Forty English words consisting of 3-, 4-, 5-, and 6-letters (n = 10 per letter length category were randomly jumbled using a web-based application. During the experimental task, 26 participants were asked to silently manipulate the scrambled letters to form a real word. Each vocal response was coded for accuracy and speech reaction time (SRT.Adults who stutter attempted to solve fewer word jumble stimuli than adults who do not stutter at the 4-letter, 5-letter, and 6-letter lengths. Additionally, adults who stutter were significantly less accurate solving word jumble tasks at the 4-letter, 5-letter, and 6-letter lengths compared to adults who do not stutter. At the longest word length (6-letter, SRT was significantly slower for the adults who stutter than the fluent controls.Results of the current study lend further support to the notion that differences in various aspects of phonological processing, including vision-to-sound conversions, sub-vocal stimulus manipulation, and/or lexical access are compromised in adults who stutter.

Exploration in free word association networks: models and experiment.

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Ludueña, Guillermo A; Behzad, Mehran Djalali; Gros, Claudius

2014-05-01

Free association is a task that requires a subject to express the first word to come to their mind when presented with a certain cue. It is a task which can be used to expose the basic mechanisms by which humans connect memories. In this work, we have made use of a publicly available database of free associations to model the exploration of the averaged network of associations using a statistical and the adaptive control of thought-rational (ACT-R) model. We performed, in addition, an online experiment asking participants to navigate the averaged network using their individual preferences for word associations. We have investigated the statistics of word repetitions in this guided association task. We find that the considered models mimic some of the statistical properties, viz the probability of word repetitions, the distance between repetitions and the distribution of association chain lengths, of the experiment, with the ACT-R model showing a particularly good fit to the experimental data for the more intricate properties as, for instance, the ratio of repetitions per length of association chains.

Neuromagnetic correlates of audiovisual word processing in the developing brain.

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Dinga, Samantha; Wu, Di; Huang, Shuyang; Wu, Caiyun; Wang, Xiaoshan; Shi, Jingping; Hu, Yue; Liang, Chun; Zhang, Fawen; Lu, Meng; Leiken, Kimberly; Xiang, Jing

2018-06-01

The brain undergoes enormous changes during childhood. Little is known about how the brain develops to serve word processing. The objective of the present study was to investigate the maturational changes of word processing in children and adolescents using magnetoencephalography (MEG). Responses to a word processing task were investigated in sixty healthy participants. Each participant was presented with simultaneous visual and auditory word pairs in "match" and "mismatch" conditions. The patterns of neuromagnetic activation from MEG recordings were analyzed at both sensor and source levels. Topography and source imaging revealed that word processing transitioned from bilateral connections to unilateral connections as age increased from 6 to 17 years old. Correlation analyses of language networks revealed that the path length of word processing networks negatively correlated with age (r = -0.833, p processing networks were positively correlated with age. In addition, males had more visual connections, whereas females had more auditory connections. The correlations between gender and path length, gender and connection strength, and gender and clustering coefficient demonstrated a developmental trend without reaching statistical significance. The results indicate that the developmental trajectory of word processing is gender specific. Since the neuromagnetic signatures of these gender-specific paths to adult word processing were determined using non-invasive, objective, and quantitative methods, the results may play a key role in understanding language impairments in pediatric patients in the future. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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

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

2010-11-01

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

Word frequency influences on the list length effect and associative memory in young and older adults

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Badham, SP; Whitney, C; Sanghera, S; Maylor, EA

2016-01-01

Many studies show that age deficits in memory are smaller for information supported by pre-experimental experience. Many studies also find dissociations in memory tasks between words that occur with high and low frequencies in language, but the literature is mixed regarding the extent of word frequency effects in normal ageing. We examined whether age deficits in episodic memory could be influenced by manipulations of word frequency. In Experiment 1, young and older adults studied short and l...

Assessing neglect dyslexia with compound words.

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Reinhart, Stefan; Schunck, Alexander; Schaadt, Anna Katharina; Adams, Michaela; Simon, Alexandra; Kerkhoff, Georg

2016-10-01

The neglect syndrome is frequently associated with neglect dyslexia (ND), which is characterized by omissions or misread initial letters of single words. ND is usually assessed with standardized reading texts in clinical settings. However, particularly in the chronic phase of ND, patients often report reading deficits in everyday situations but show (nearly) normal performances in test situations that are commonly well-structured. To date, sensitive and standardized tests to assess the severity and characteristics of ND are lacking, although reading is of high relevance for daily life and vocational settings. Several studies found modulating effects of different word features on ND. We combined those features in a novel test to enhance test sensitivity in the assessment of ND. Low-frequency words of different length that contain residual pronounceable words when the initial letter strings are neglected were selected. We compared these words in a group of 12 ND-patients suffering from right-hemispheric first-ever stroke with word stimuli containing no existing residual words. Finally, we tested whether the serially presented words are more sensitive for the diagnosis of ND than text reading. The severity of ND was modulated strongly by the ND-test words and error frequencies in single word reading of ND words were on average more than 10 times higher than in a standardized text reading test (19.8% vs. 1.8%). The novel ND-test maximizes the frequency of specific ND-errors and is therefore more sensitive for the assessment of ND than conventional text reading tasks. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

Scaling laws and fluctuations in the statistics of word frequencies

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Gerlach, Martin; Altmann, Eduardo G.

2014-11-01

In this paper, we combine statistical analysis of written texts and simple stochastic models to explain the appearance of scaling laws in the statistics of word frequencies. The average vocabulary of an ensemble of fixed-length texts is known to scale sublinearly with the total number of words (Heaps’ law). Analyzing the fluctuations around this average in three large databases (Google-ngram, English Wikipedia, and a collection of scientific articles), we find that the standard deviation scales linearly with the average (Taylor's law), in contrast to the prediction of decaying fluctuations obtained using simple sampling arguments. We explain both scaling laws (Heaps’ and Taylor) by modeling the usage of words using a Poisson process with a fat-tailed distribution of word frequencies (Zipf's law) and topic-dependent frequencies of individual words (as in topic models). Considering topical variations lead to quenched averages, turn the vocabulary size a non-self-averaging quantity, and explain the empirical observations. For the numerous practical applications relying on estimations of vocabulary size, our results show that uncertainties remain large even for long texts. We show how to account for these uncertainties in measurements of lexical richness of texts with different lengths.

Words, Words, Words: English, Vocabulary.

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Lamb, Barbara

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

Word Structures of Granada Spanish-Speaking Preschoolers with Typical versus Protracted Phonological Development

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May Bernhardt, B.; Hanson, R.; Perez, D.; Ávila, C.; Lleó, C.; Stemberger, J. P.; Carballo, G.; Mendoza, E.; Fresneda, D.; Chávez-Peón, M.

2015-01-01

Background: Research on children's word structure development is limited. Yet, phonological intervention aims to accelerate the acquisition of both speech-sounds and word structure, such as word length, stress or shapes in CV sequences. Until normative studies and meta-analyses provide in-depth information on this topic, smaller investigations can…

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

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

2017-03-01

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

An Analysis of the Time Course of Lexical Processing during Reading

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Sheridan, Heather; Reichle, Erik D.

2016-01-01

Reingold, Reichle, Glaholt, and Sheridan (2012) reported a gaze-contingent eye-movement experiment in which survival-curve analyses were used to examine the effects of word frequency, the availability of parafoveal preview, and initial fixation location on the time course of lexical processing. The key results of these analyses suggest that…

Computer game as a tool for training the identification of phonemic length.

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Pennala, Riitta; Richardson, Ulla; Ylinen, Sari; Lyytinen, Heikki; Martin, Maisa

2014-12-01

Computer-assisted training of Finnish phonemic length was conducted with 7-year-old Russian-speaking second-language learners of Finnish. Phonemic length plays a different role in these two languages. The training included game activities with two- and three-syllable word and pseudo-word minimal pairs with prototypical vowel durations. The lowest accuracy scores were recorded for two-syllable words. Accuracy scores were higher for the minimal pairs with larger rather than smaller differences in duration. Accuracy scores were lower for long duration than for short duration. The ability to identify quantity degree was generalized to stimuli used in the identification test in two of the children. Ideas for improving the game are introduced.

Scaling laws and fluctuations in the statistics of word frequencies

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Gerlach, Martin; Altmann, Eduardo G

2014-01-01

In this paper, we combine statistical analysis of written texts and simple stochastic models to explain the appearance of scaling laws in the statistics of word frequencies. The average vocabulary of an ensemble of fixed-length texts is known to scale sublinearly with the total number of words (Heaps’ law). Analyzing the fluctuations around this average in three large databases (Google-ngram, English Wikipedia, and a collection of scientific articles), we find that the standard deviation scales linearly with the average (Taylor's law), in contrast to the prediction of decaying fluctuations obtained using simple sampling arguments. We explain both scaling laws (Heaps’ and Taylor) by modeling the usage of words using a Poisson process with a fat-tailed distribution of word frequencies (Zipf's law) and topic-dependent frequencies of individual words (as in topic models). Considering topical variations lead to quenched averages, turn the vocabulary size a non-self-averaging quantity, and explain the empirical observations. For the numerous practical applications relying on estimations of vocabulary size, our results show that uncertainties remain large even for long texts. We show how to account for these uncertainties in measurements of lexical richness of texts with different lengths. (paper)

Word form Encoding in Chinese Word Naming and Word Typing

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Chen, Jenn-Yeu; Li, Cheng-Yi

2011-01-01

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

Sequence comparison alignment-free approach based on suffix tree and L-words frequency.

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Soares, Inês; Goios, Ana; Amorim, António

2012-01-01

The vast majority of methods available for sequence comparison rely on a first sequence alignment step, which requires a number of assumptions on evolutionary history and is sometimes very difficult or impossible to perform due to the abundance of gaps (insertions/deletions). In such cases, an alternative alignment-free method would prove valuable. Our method starts by a computation of a generalized suffix tree of all sequences, which is completed in linear time. Using this tree, the frequency of all possible words with a preset length L-L-words--in each sequence is rapidly calculated. Based on the L-words frequency profile of each sequence, a pairwise standard Euclidean distance is then computed producing a symmetric genetic distance matrix, which can be used to generate a neighbor joining dendrogram or a multidimensional scaling graph. We present an improvement to word counting alignment-free approaches for sequence comparison, by determining a single optimal word length and combining suffix tree structures to the word counting tasks. Our approach is, thus, a fast and simple application that proved to be efficient and powerful when applied to mitochondrial genomes. The algorithm was implemented in Python language and is freely available on the web.

Visual word learning in adults with dyslexia

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Rosa Kit Wan Kwok

2014-05-01

Full Text Available We investigated word learning in university and college students with a diagnosis of dyslexia and in typically-reading controls. Participants read aloud short (4-letter and longer (7-letter nonwords as quickly as possible. The nonwords were repeated across 10 blocks, using a different random order in each block. Participants returned 7 days later and repeated the experiment. Accuracy was high in both groups. The dyslexics were substantially slower than the controls at reading the nonwords throughout the experiment. They also showed a larger length effect, indicating less effective decoding skills. Learning was demonstrated by faster reading of the nonwords across repeated presentations and by a reduction in the difference in reading speeds between shorter and longer nonwords. The dyslexics required more presentations of the nonwords before the length effect became non-significant, only showing convergence in reaction times between shorter and longer items in the second testing session where controls achieved convergence part-way through the first session. Participants also completed a psychological test battery assessing reading and spelling, vocabulary, phonological awareness, working memory, nonverbal ability and motor speed. The dyslexics performed at a similar level to the controls on nonverbal ability but significantly less well on all the other measures. Regression analyses found that decoding ability, measured as the speed of reading aloud nonwords when they were presented for the first time, was predicted by a composite of word reading and spelling scores (‘literacy’. Word learning was assessed in terms of the improvement in naming speeds over 10 blocks of training. Learning was predicted by vocabulary and working memory scores, but not by literacy, phonological awareness, nonverbal ability or motor speed. The results show that young dyslexic adults have problems both in pronouncing novel words and in learning new written words.

Upper bound for the length of commutative algebras

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Markova, Ol'ga V

2009-01-01

By the length of a finite system of generators for a finite-dimensional associative algebra over an arbitrary field one means the least positive integer k such that the words of length not exceeding k span this algebra (as a vector space). The maximum length for the systems of generators of an algebra is referred to as the length of the algebra. In the present paper, an upper bound for the length of a commutative algebra in terms of a function of two invariants of the algebra, the dimension and the maximal degree of the minimal polynomial for the elements of the algebra, is obtained. As a corollary, a formula for the length of the algebra of diagonal matrices over an arbitrary field is obtained. Bibliography: 8 titles.

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.

emMAW: computing minimal absent words in external memory.

Science.gov (United States)

Héliou, Alice; Pissis, Solon P; Puglisi, Simon J

2017-09-01

The biological significance of minimal absent words has been investigated in genomes of organisms from all domains of life. For instance, three minimal absent words of the human genome were found in Ebola virus genomes. There exists an O(n) -time and O(n) -space algorithm for computing all minimal absent words of a sequence of length n on a fixed-sized alphabet based on suffix arrays. A standard implementation of this algorithm, when applied to a large sequence of length n , requires more than 20 n  bytes of RAM. Such memory requirements are a significant hurdle to the computation of minimal absent words in large datasets. We present emMAW, the first external-memory algorithm for computing minimal absent words. A free open-source implementation of our algorithm is made available. This allows for computation of minimal absent words on far bigger data sets than was previously possible. Our implementation requires less than 3 h on a standard workstation to process the full human genome when as little as 1 GB of RAM is made available. We stress that our implementation, despite making use of external memory, is fast; indeed, even on relatively smaller datasets when enough RAM is available to hold all necessary data structures, it is less than two times slower than state-of-the-art internal-memory implementations. https://github.com/solonas13/maw (free software under the terms of the GNU GPL). alice.heliou@lix.polytechnique.fr or solon.pissis@kcl.ac.uk. Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online. © The Author (2017). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com

Scale Length of the Galactic Thin Disk

Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

tribpo

thin disk density scale length, hR, is rather short (2.7 ± 0.1 kpc). Key words. ... The 2MASS near infrared data provide, for the first time, deep star counts on a ... peaks allows to adjust the spatial extinction law in the model. ... probability that fi.

Effects of age and hearing loss on recognition of unaccented and accented multisyllabic words

Science.gov (United States)

Gordon-Salant, Sandra; Yeni-Komshian, Grace H.; Fitzgibbons, Peter J.; Cohen, Julie I.

2015-01-01

The effects of age and hearing loss on recognition of unaccented and accented words of varying syllable length were investigated. It was hypothesized that with increments in length of syllables, there would be atypical alterations in syllable stress in accented compared to native English, and that these altered stress patterns would be sensitive to auditory temporal processing deficits with aging. Sets of one-, two-, three-, and four-syllable words with the same initial syllable were recorded by one native English and two Spanish-accented talkers. Lists of these words were presented in isolation and in sentence contexts to younger and older normal-hearing listeners and to older hearing-impaired listeners. Hearing loss effects were apparent for unaccented and accented monosyllabic words, whereas age effects were observed for recognition of accented multisyllabic words, consistent with the notion that altered syllable stress patterns with accent are sensitive for revealing effects of age. Older listeners also exhibited lower recognition scores for moderately accented words in sentence contexts than in isolation, suggesting that the added demands on working memory for words in sentence contexts impact recognition of accented speech. The general pattern of results suggests that hearing loss, age, and cognitive factors limit the ability to recognize Spanish-accented speech. PMID:25698021

Reading in Developmental Prosopagnosia: Evidence for a Dissociation Between Word and Face Recognition

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Starrfelt, Randi; Klargaard, Solja; Petersen, Anders

2018-01-01

exposure durations (targeting the word superiority effect), and d) text reading. Results: Participants with developmental prosopagnosia performed strikingly similar to controls across the four reading tasks. Formal analysis revealed a significant dissociation between word and face recognition......, that is, impaired reading in developmental prosopagnosia. Method: We tested 10 adults with developmental prosopagnosia and 20 matched controls. All participants completed the Cambridge Face Memory Test, the Cambridge Face Perception test and a Face recognition questionnaire used to quantify everyday face...... recognition experience. Reading was measured in four experimental tasks, testing different levels of letter, word, and text reading: a) single word reading with words of varying length, b) vocal response times in single letter and short word naming, c) recognition of single letters and short words at brief...

Word and face recognition deficits following posterior cerebral artery stroke

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Kuhn, Christina D.; Asperud Thomsen, Johanne; Delfi, Tzvetelina

2016-01-01

Abstract Recent findings have challenged the existence of category specific brain areas for perceptual processing of words and faces, suggesting the existence of a common network supporting the recognition of both. We examined the performance of patients with focal lesions in posterior cortical...... areas to investigate whether deficits in recognition of words and faces systematically co-occur as would be expected if both functions rely on a common cerebral network. Seven right-handed patients with unilateral brain damage following stroke in areas supplied by the posterior cerebral artery were...... included (four with right hemisphere damage, three with left, tested at least 1 year post stroke). We examined word and face recognition using a delayed match-to-sample paradigm using four different categories of stimuli: cropped faces, full faces, words, and cars. Reading speed and word length effects...

Line and word bisection in right-brain-damaged patients with left spatial neglect.

Science.gov (United States)

Veronelli, Laura; Vallar, Giuseppe; Marinelli, Chiara V; Primativo, Silvia; Arduino, Lisa S

2014-01-01

Right-brain-damaged patients with left unilateral spatial neglect typically set the mid-point of horizontal lines to the right of the objective center. By contrast, healthy participants exhibit a reversed bias (pseudoneglect). The same effect has been described also when bisecting orthographic strings. In particular, for this latter kind of stimulus, some recent studies have shown that visuo-perceptual characteristics, like stimulus length, may contribute to both the magnitude and the direction bias of the bisection performance (Arduino et al. in Neuropsychologia 48:2140-2146, 2010). Furthermore, word stress was shown to modulate reading performances in both healthy participants, and patients with left spatial neglect and neglect dyslexia (Cubelli and Beschin in Brain Lang 95:319-326, 2005; Rusconi et al. in Neuropsychology 18:135-140, 2004). In Experiment I, 22 right-brain-damaged patients (11 with left visuo-spatial neglect) and 11 matched neurologically unimpaired control participants were asked to set the subjective mid-point of word letter strings, and of lines of comparable length. Most patients exhibited an overall disproportionate rightward bias, sensitive to stimulus length, and similar for words and lines. Importantly, in individual patients, biases differed according to stimulus type (words vs. lines), indicating that at least partly different mechanisms may be involved. In Experiment II, the putative effects on the bisection bias of ortho-phonological information (i.e., word stress endings), arising from the non-neglected right hand side of the stimulus were investigated. The orthographic cue induced a rightward shift of the perceived mid-point in both patients and controls, with short words stressed on the antepenultimate final sequence inducing a smaller rightward deviation with respect to short words stressed on the penultimate final sequence. In conclusion, partly different mechanisms, including both visuo-spatial and lexical factors, may support

MOJIBAKE – The Rehearsal of Word Fragments In Verbal Recall

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

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

Modulation of brain activity by multiple lexical and word form variables in visual word recognition: A parametric fMRI study.

Science.gov (United States)

Hauk, Olaf; Davis, Matthew H; Pulvermüller, Friedemann

2008-09-01

Psycholinguistic research has documented a range of variables that influence visual word recognition performance. Many of these variables are highly intercorrelated. Most previous studies have used factorial designs, which do not exploit the full range of values available for continuous variables, and are prone to skewed stimulus selection as well as to effects of the baseline (e.g. when contrasting words with pseudowords). In our study, we used a parametric approach to study the effects of several psycholinguistic variables on brain activation. We focussed on the variable word frequency, which has been used in numerous previous behavioural, electrophysiological and neuroimaging studies, in order to investigate the neuronal network underlying visual word processing. Furthermore, we investigated the variable orthographic typicality as well as a combined variable for word length and orthographic neighbourhood size (N), for which neuroimaging results are still either scarce or inconsistent. Data were analysed using multiple linear regression analysis of event-related fMRI data acquired from 21 subjects in a silent reading paradigm. The frequency variable correlated negatively with activation in left fusiform gyrus, bilateral inferior frontal gyri and bilateral insulae, indicating that word frequency can affect multiple aspects of word processing. N correlated positively with brain activity in left and right middle temporal gyri as well as right inferior frontal gyrus. Thus, our analysis revealed multiple distinct brain areas involved in visual word processing within one data set.

Evaluation of Efficient Line Lengths for Better Readability

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Zahid Hussain

2012-01-01

Full Text Available In this paper the major findings of a formal experiment about onscreen text line lengths are presented. The experiment examined the effects of four different line lengths on the reading speed and the reading efficiency. Efficiency is defined as a combination of reading speed and accuracy. Sixteen people between the age of 24 and 36 participated at the experiment. The subjects had to read four different texts with an average line length around 2000 characters. The texts contained substitution words, which had to be detected by the subjects to measure reading accuracy. Besides objective measures like reading speed and accuracy, the subjects were asked to subjectively vote on their reading experience. The results from our objective measures show strong similarities to those of the work done previously by different researchers. The absolute reading speed grows when the line length grows from CPL (Characters Per Line 30-120. The measured reading efficiency, however, doesn\\\\\\'t grow steadily, although a growing trend can be seen. This is due to the fact, that the test persons found in average more substitution words from the 60 CPL text than they did from the 30 and 90 CPL texts. The reading speed seems to increase while the line length increases but the overall comprehension seems to peak at medium line lengths. As in the previous studies, our test persons also prefer the medium (60 and 90 CPL line lengths, although they perform better when reading longer lines. In the overall subjective opinion 13 out of 16 test persons selected the 60 or 90 CPL line length as their favorite. The literature doesn\\\\\\'t truly provide a scientific explanation for the difference between the objective performance and the subjective preference. A natural hypothesis would be that the line length that is the fastest to read would also feel most comfortable to the readers but in the light of this and the earlier research it seems like this is not the case.

Quantitative analysis of cone photoreceptor distribution and its relationship with axial length, age, and early age-related macular degeneration.

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Ryo Obata

Full Text Available PURPOSE: It has not been clarified whether early age-related macular degeneration (AMD is associated with cone photoreceptor distribution. We used adaptive optics fundus camera to examine cone photoreceptors in the macular area of aged patients and quantitatively analyzed its relationship between the presence of early AMD and cone distribution. METHODS: Sixty cases aged 50 or older were studied. The eyes were examined with funduscopy and spectral-domain optical coherence tomography to exclude the eyes with any abnormalities at two sites of measurement, 2° superior and 5° temporal to the fovea. High-resolution retinal images with cone photoreceptor mosaic were obtained with adaptive optics fundus camera (rtx1, Imagine Eyes, France. After adjusting for axial length, cone packing density was calculated and the relationship with age, axial length, or severity of early AMD based on the age-related eye disease study (AREDS classification was analyzed. RESULTS: Patient's age ranged from 50 to 77, and axial length from 21.7 to 27.5 mm. Mean density in metric units and that in angular units were 24,900 cells/mm2, 2,170 cells/deg2 at 2° superior, and 18,500 cells/mm2, 1,570 cels/deg2 at 5° temporal, respectively. Axial length was significantly correlated with the density calculated in metric units, but not with that in angular units. Age was significantly correlated with the density both in metric and angular units at 2° superior. There was no significant difference in the density in metric and angular units between the eyes with AREDS category one and those with categories two or three. CONCLUSION: Axial length and age were significantly correlated with parafoveal cone photoreceptor distribution. The results do not support that early AMD might influence cone photoreceptor density in the area without drusen or pigment abnormalities.

Sample Length Affects the Reliability of Language Sample Measures in 3-Year-Olds: Evidence from Parent-Elicited Conversational Samples

Science.gov (United States)

Guo, Ling-Yu; Eisenberg, Sarita

2015-01-01

Purpose: The goal of this study was to investigate the extent to which sample length affected the reliability of total number of words (TNW), number of different words (NDW), and mean length of C-units in morphemes (MLCUm) in parent-elicited conversational samples for 3-year-olds. Method: Participants were sixty 3-year-olds. A 22-min language…

English word frequency and recognition in bilinguals: Inter-corpus comparison and error analysis.

Science.gov (United States)

Shi, Lu-Feng

2015-01-01

This study is the second of a two-part investigation on lexical effects on bilinguals' performance on a clinical English word recognition test. Focus is on word-frequency effects using counts provided by four corpora. Frequency of occurrence was obtained for 200 NU-6 words from the Hoosier mental lexicon (HML) and three contemporary corpora, American National Corpora, Hyperspace analogue to language (HAL), and SUBTLEX(US). Correlation analysis was performed between word frequency and error rate. Ten monolinguals and 30 bilinguals participated. Bilinguals were further grouped according to their age of English acquisition and length of schooling/working in English. Word frequency significantly affected word recognition in bilinguals who acquired English late and had limited schooling/working in English. When making errors, bilinguals tended to replace the target word with a word of a higher frequency. Overall, the newer corpora outperformed the HML in predicting error rate. Frequency counts provided by contemporary corpora predict bilinguals' recognition of English monosyllabic words. Word frequency also helps explain top replacement words for misrecognized targets. Word-frequency effects are especially prominent for bilinguals foreign born and educated.

Automatization Aspects of Dyslexia: Speed Limitations in Word Identification, Sensitivity to Increasing Task Demands, and Orthographic Compensation.

Science.gov (United States)

van der Leij, Aryan; van Daal, Victor H. P.

1999-01-01

Ten students (age 10) with dyslexia were compared to 10 chronological-age controls and 20 reading-age controls. Response latencies of the students with dyslexia were slower when familiar words, letter clusters, and nonwords had to be named. A larger word-frequency effect and larger word-length effect indicate difficulty with increasing task…

Combinatorics on words Christoffel words and repetitions in words

CERN Document Server

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

2008-01-01

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

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

Science.gov (United States)

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…

Sequence Comparison Alignment-Free Approach Based on Suffix Tree and L-Words Frequency

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Inês Soares

2012-01-01

Full Text Available The vast majority of methods available for sequence comparison rely on a first sequence alignment step, which requires a number of assumptions on evolutionary history and is sometimes very difficult or impossible to perform due to the abundance of gaps (insertions/deletions. In such cases, an alternative alignment-free method would prove valuable. Our method starts by a computation of a generalized suffix tree of all sequences, which is completed in linear time. Using this tree, the frequency of all possible words with a preset length L—L-words—in each sequence is rapidly calculated. Based on the L-words frequency profile of each sequence, a pairwise standard Euclidean distance is then computed producing a symmetric genetic distance matrix, which can be used to generate a neighbor joining dendrogram or a multidimensional scaling graph. We present an improvement to word counting alignment-free approaches for sequence comparison, by determining a single optimal word length and combining suffix tree structures to the word counting tasks. Our approach is, thus, a fast and simple application that proved to be efficient and powerful when applied to mitochondrial genomes. The algorithm was implemented in Python language and is freely available on the web.

Word Domain Disambiguation via Word Sense Disambiguation

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Sanfilippo, Antonio P.; Tratz, Stephen C.; Gregory, Michelle L.

2006-06-04

Word subject domains have been widely used to improve the perform-ance of word sense disambiguation al-gorithms. However, comparatively little effort has been devoted so far to the disambiguation of word subject do-mains. The few existing approaches have focused on the development of al-gorithms specific to word domain dis-ambiguation. In this paper we explore an alternative approach where word domain disambiguation is achieved via word sense disambiguation. Our study shows that this approach yields very strong results, suggesting that word domain disambiguation can be ad-dressed in terms of word sense disam-biguation with no need for special purpose algorithms.

Word Prosody and Intonation of Sgaw Karen

Science.gov (United States)

West, Luke Alexander

The prosodic, and specifically intonation, systems of Tibeto-Burman languages have received less attention in research than those of other families. This study investigates the word prosody and intonation of Sgaw Karen, a tonal Tibeto-Burman language of eastern Burma, and finds similarities to both closely related Tibeto-Burman languages and the more distant Sinitic languages like Mandarin. Sentences of varying lengths with controlled tonal environments were elicited from a total of 12 participants (5 male). In terms of word prosody, Sgaw Karen does not exhibit word stress cues, but does maintain a prosodic distinction between the more prominent major syllable and the phonologically reduced minor syllable. In terms of intonation, Sgaw Karen patterns like related Pwo Karen in its limited use of post-lexical tone, which is only present at Intonation Phrase (IP) boundaries. Unlike the intonation systems of Pwo Karen and Mandarin, however, Sgaw Karen exhibits downstep across its Accentual Phrases (AP), similarly to phenomena identified in Tibetan and Burmese.

Forehearing words: Pre-activation of word endings at word onset.

Science.gov (United States)

Roll, Mikael; Söderström, Pelle; Frid, Johan; Mannfolk, Peter; Horne, Merle

2017-09-29

Occurring at rates up to 6-7 syllables per second, speech perception and understanding involves rapid identification of speech sounds and pre-activation of morphemes and words. Using event-related potentials (ERPs) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we investigated the time-course and neural sources of pre-activation of word endings as participants heard the beginning of unfolding words. ERPs showed a pre-activation negativity (PrAN) for word beginnings (first two segmental phonemes) with few possible completions. PrAN increased gradually as the number of possible completions of word onsets decreased and the lexical frequency of the completions increased. The early brain potential effect for few possible word completions was associated with a blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) contrast increase in Broca's area (pars opercularis of the left inferior frontal gyrus) and angular gyrus of the left parietal lobe. We suggest early involvement of the left prefrontal cortex in inhibiting irrelevant left parietal activation during lexical selection. The results further our understanding of the importance of Broca's area in rapid online pre-activation of words. Copyright © 2017 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Periodic words connected with the Fibonacci words

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G. M. Barabash

2016-06-01

Full Text Available In this paper we introduce two families of periodic words (FLP-words of type 1 and FLP-words of type 2 that are connected with the Fibonacci words and investigated their properties.

Long-Range Memory in Literary Texts: On the Universal Clustering of the Rare Words.

Science.gov (United States)

Tanaka-Ishii, Kumiko; Bunde, Armin

2016-01-01

A fundamental problem in linguistics is how literary texts can be quantified mathematically. It is well known that the frequency of a (rare) word in a text is roughly inverse proportional to its rank (Zipf's law). Here we address the complementary question, if also the rhythm of the text, characterized by the arrangement of the rare words in the text, can be quantified mathematically in a similar basic way. To this end, we consider representative classic single-authored texts from England/Ireland, France, Germany, China, and Japan. In each text, we classify each word by its rank. We focus on the rare words with ranks above some threshold Q and study the lengths of the (return) intervals between them. We find that for all texts considered, the probability SQ(r) that the length of an interval exceeds r, follows a perfect Weibull-function, SQ(r) = exp(-b(β)rβ), with β around 0.7. The return intervals themselves are arranged in a long-range correlated self-similar fashion, where the autocorrelation function CQ(s) of the intervals follows a power law, CQ(s) ∼ s-γ, with an exponent γ between 0.14 and 0.48. We show that these features lead to a pronounced clustering of the rare words in the text.

Working memory for pitch, timbre, and words

Science.gov (United States)

Tillmann, Barbara

2012-01-01

Aiming to further our understanding of fundamental mechanisms of auditory working memory (WM), the present study compared performance for three auditory materials (words, tones, timbres). In a forward recognition task (Experiment 1) participants indicated whether the order of the items in the second sequence was the same as in the first sequence. In a backward recognition task (Experiment 2) participants indicated whether the items of the second sequence were played in the correct backward order. In Experiment 3 participants performed an articulatory suppression task during the retention delay of the backward task. To investigate potential length effects the number of items per sequence was manipulated. Overall findings underline the benefit of a cross-material experimental approach and suggest that human auditory WM is not a unitary system. Whereas WM processes for timbres differed from those for tones and words, similarities and differences were observed for words and tones: Both types of stimuli appear to rely on rehearsal mechanisms, but might differ in the involved sensorimotor codes. PMID:23116413

Bag-of-steps : Predicting lower-limb fracture rehabilitation length

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Pla, Albert; López, Beatriz; Nogueira, Cristofor; Mordvaniuk, Natalia; Blokhuis, Taco J.; Holtslag, Herman R.

2016-01-01

This paper presents bag-of-steps, a new methodology to predict the rehabilitation length of a patient by monitoring the weight he is bearing in his injured leg and using a predictive model based on the bag-of-words technique. A force sensor is used to monitor and characterize the patient's gait,

Diachronic changes in word probability distributions in daily press

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Stanković Jelena

2006-01-01

Full Text Available Changes in probability distributions of individual words and word types were investigated within two samples of daily press in the span of fifty years. Two samples of daily press were used in this study. The one derived from the Corpus of Serbian Language (CSL /Kostić, Đ., 2001/ that covers period between 1945. and 1957. and the other derived from the Ebart Media Documentation (EBR that was complied from seven daily news and five weekly magazines from 2002. and 2003. Each sample consisted of about 1 million words. The obtained results indicate that nouns and adjectives were more frequent in the CSL, while verbs and prepositions are more frequent in the EBR sample, suggesting a decrease of sentence length in the last five decades. Conspicuous changes in probability distribution of individual words were observed for nouns and adjectives, while minimal or no changes were observed for verbs and prepositions. Such an outcome suggests that nouns and adjectives are most susceptible to diachronic changes, while verbs and prepositions appear to be resistant to such changes.

Semantic word category processing in semantic dementia and posterior cortical atrophy.

Science.gov (United States)

Shebani, Zubaida; Patterson, Karalyn; Nestor, Peter J; Diaz-de-Grenu, Lara Z; Dawson, Kate; Pulvermüller, Friedemann

2017-08-01

There is general agreement that perisylvian language cortex plays a major role in lexical and semantic processing; but the contribution of additional, more widespread, brain areas in the processing of different semantic word categories remains controversial. We investigated word processing in two groups of patients whose neurodegenerative diseases preferentially affect specific parts of the brain, to determine whether their performance would vary as a function of semantic categories proposed to recruit those brain regions. Cohorts with (i) Semantic Dementia (SD), who have anterior temporal-lobe atrophy, and (ii) Posterior Cortical Atrophy (PCA), who have predominantly parieto-occipital atrophy, performed a lexical decision test on words from five different lexico-semantic categories: colour (e.g., yellow), form (oval), number (seven), spatial prepositions (under) and function words (also). Sets of pseudo-word foils matched the target words in length and bi-/tri-gram frequency. Word-frequency was matched between the two visual word categories (colour and form) and across the three other categories (number, prepositions, and function words). Age-matched healthy individuals served as controls. Although broad word processing deficits were apparent in both patient groups, the deficit was strongest for colour words in SD and for spatial prepositions in PCA. The patterns of performance on the lexical decision task demonstrate (a) general lexicosemantic processing deficits in both groups, though more prominent in SD than in PCA, and (b) differential involvement of anterior-temporal and posterior-parietal cortex in the processing of specific semantic categories of words. Copyright © 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

Do handwritten words magnify lexical effects in visual word recognition?

Science.gov (United States)

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

2016-01-01

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

Statistical Laws Governing Fluctuations in Word Use from Word Birth to Word Death

Science.gov (United States)

Petersen, Alexander M.; Tenenbaum, Joel; Havlin, Shlomo; Stanley, H. Eugene

2012-03-01

We analyze the dynamic properties of 107 words recorded in English, Spanish and Hebrew over the period 1800-2008 in order to gain insight into the coevolution of language and culture. We report language independent patterns useful as benchmarks for theoretical models of language evolution. A significantly decreasing (increasing) trend in the birth (death) rate of words indicates a recent shift in the selection laws governing word use. For new words, we observe a peak in the growth-rate fluctuations around 40 years after introduction, consistent with the typical entry time into standard dictionaries and the human generational timescale. Pronounced changes in the dynamics of language during periods of war shows that word correlations, occurring across time and between words, are largely influenced by coevolutionary social, technological, and political factors. We quantify cultural memory by analyzing the long-term correlations in the use of individual words using detrended fluctuation analysis.

Short-Term and Long-Term Effects on Visual Word Recognition

Science.gov (United States)

Protopapas, Athanassios; Kapnoula, Efthymia C.

2016-01-01

Effects of lexical and sublexical variables on visual word recognition are often treated as homogeneous across participants and stable over time. In this study, we examine the modulation of frequency, length, syllable and bigram frequency, orthographic neighborhood, and graphophonemic consistency effects by (a) individual differences, and (b) item…

Long-Range Memory in Literary Texts: On the Universal Clustering of the Rare Words.

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Kumiko Tanaka-Ishii

Full Text Available A fundamental problem in linguistics is how literary texts can be quantified mathematically. It is well known that the frequency of a (rare word in a text is roughly inverse proportional to its rank (Zipf's law. Here we address the complementary question, if also the rhythm of the text, characterized by the arrangement of the rare words in the text, can be quantified mathematically in a similar basic way. To this end, we consider representative classic single-authored texts from England/Ireland, France, Germany, China, and Japan. In each text, we classify each word by its rank. We focus on the rare words with ranks above some threshold Q and study the lengths of the (return intervals between them. We find that for all texts considered, the probability SQ(r that the length of an interval exceeds r, follows a perfect Weibull-function, SQ(r = exp(-b(βrβ, with β around 0.7. The return intervals themselves are arranged in a long-range correlated self-similar fashion, where the autocorrelation function CQ(s of the intervals follows a power law, CQ(s ∼ s-γ, with an exponent γ between 0.14 and 0.48. We show that these features lead to a pronounced clustering of the rare words in the text.

Evaluating cognitive models of visual word recognition using fMRI: Effects of lexical and sublexical variables.

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Protopapas, Athanassios; Orfanidou, Eleni; Taylor, J S H; Karavasilis, Efstratios; Kapnoula, Efthymia C; Panagiotaropoulou, Georgia; Velonakis, Georgios; Poulou, Loukia S; Smyrnis, Nikolaos; Kelekis, Dimitrios

2016-03-01

In this study predictions of the dual-route cascaded (DRC) model of word reading were tested using fMRI. Specifically, patterns of co-localization were investigated: (a) between pseudoword length effects and a pseudowords vs. fixation contrast, to reveal the sublexical grapho-phonemic conversion (GPC) system; and (b) between word frequency effects and a words vs. pseudowords contrast, to reveal the orthographic and phonological lexicon. Forty four native speakers of Greek were scanned at 3T in an event-related lexical decision task with three event types: (a) 150 words in which frequency, length, bigram and syllable frequency, neighborhood, and orthographic consistency were decorrelated; (b) 150 matched pseudowords; and (c) fixation. Whole-brain analysis failed to reveal the predicted co-localizations. Further analysis with participant-specific regions of interest defined within masks from the group contrasts revealed length effects in left inferior parietal cortex and frequency effects in the left middle temporal gyrus. These findings could be interpreted as partially consistent with the existence of the GPC system and phonological lexicon of the model, respectively. However, there was no evidence in support of an orthographic lexicon, weakening overall support for the model. The results are discussed with respect to the prospect of using neuroimaging in cognitive model evaluation. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Effects of hand gestures on auditory learning of second-language vowel length contrasts.

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Hirata, Yukari; Kelly, Spencer D; Huang, Jessica; Manansala, Michael

2014-12-01

Research has shown that hand gestures affect comprehension and production of speech at semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic levels for both native language and second language (L2). This study investigated a relatively less explored question: Do hand gestures influence auditory learning of an L2 at the segmental phonology level? To examine auditory learning of phonemic vowel length contrasts in Japanese, 88 native English-speaking participants took an auditory test before and after one of the following 4 types of training in which they (a) observed an instructor in a video speaking Japanese words while she made syllabic-rhythm hand gesture, (b) produced this gesture with the instructor, (c) observed the instructor speaking those words and her moraic-rhythm hand gesture, or (d) produced the moraic-rhythm gesture with the instructor. All of the training types yielded similar auditory improvement in identifying vowel length contrast. However, observing the syllabic-rhythm hand gesture yielded the most balanced improvement between word-initial and word-final vowels and between slow and fast speaking rates. The overall effect of hand gesture on learning of segmental phonology is limited. Implications for theories of hand gesture are discussed in terms of the role it plays at different linguistic levels.

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

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Choi, Wonil; Nam, Kichun; Lee, Yoonhyoung

2015-10-01

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

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.

WORD LEVEL DISCRIMINATIVE TRAINING FOR HANDWRITTEN WORD RECOGNITION

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Chen, W.; Gader, P.

2004-01-01

Word level training refers to the process of learning the parameters of a word recognition system based on word level criteria functions. Previously, researchers trained lexicon­driven handwritten word recognition systems at the character level individually. These systems generally use statistical

The x-word and its usage : Taboo words and swearwords in general, and x-words in newspapers

OpenAIRE

Lindahl, Katarina

2008-01-01

All languages have words that are considered taboo – words that are not supposed to be said or used. Taboo words, or swearwords, can be used in many different ways and they can have different meanings depending on what context they appear in. Another aspect of taboo words is the euphemisms that are used in order to avoid obscene speech. This paper will focus on x-words, words like the f-word or the c-word, which replace the words fuck or cunt, but as the study will show they also have other m...

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

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Kamil Konrad Imbir

2016-03-01

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

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. PMID:25593407

Some words on Word

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Janssen, Maarten; Visser, A.

In many disciplines, the notion of a word is of central importance. For instance, morphology studies le mot comme tel, pris isol´ement (Mel’ˇcuk, 1993 [74]). In the philosophy of language the word was often considered to be the primary bearer of meaning. Lexicography has as its fundamental role

Reading laterally: the cerebral hemispheric use of spatial frequencies in visual word recognition.

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Tadros, Karine; Dupuis-Roy, Nicolas; Fiset, Daniel; Arguin, Martin; Gosselin, Frédéric

2013-01-04

It is generally accepted that the left hemisphere (LH) is more capable for reading than the right hemisphere (RH). Left hemifield presentations (initially processed by the RH) lead to a globally higher error rate, slower word identification, and a significantly stronger word length effect (i.e., slower reaction times for longer words). Because the visuo-perceptual mechanisms of the brain for word recognition are primarily localized in the LH (Cohen et al., 2003), it is possible that this part of the brain possesses better spatial frequency (SF) tuning for processing the visual properties of words than the RH. The main objective of this study is to determine the SF tuning functions of the LH and RH for word recognition. Each word image was randomly sampled in the SF domain using the SF bubbles method (Willenbockel et al., 2010) and was presented laterally to the left or right visual hemifield. As expected, the LH requires less visual information than the RH to reach the same level of performance, illustrating the well-known LH advantage for word recognition. Globally, the SF tuning of both hemispheres is similar. However, these seemingly identical tuning functions hide important differences. Most importantly, we argue that the RH requires higher SFs to identify longer words because of crowding.

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

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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.

A Demonstration of Improved Precision of Word Recognition Scores

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Schlauch, Robert S.; Anderson, Elizabeth S.; Micheyl, Christophe

2014-01-01

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to demonstrate improved precision of word recognition scores (WRSs) by increasing list length and analyzing phonemic errors. Method: Pure-tone thresholds (frequencies between 0.25 and 8.0 kHz) and WRSs were measured in 3 levels of speech-shaped noise (50, 52, and 54 dB HL) for 24 listeners with normal…

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.

Dissociations between word and picture naming in Persian speakers with aphasia

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Mehdi Bakhtiar

2014-04-01

Full Text Available Studies of patients with aphasia have found dissociations in their ability to read words and name pictures (Hillis & Caramazza, 1995; Hillis & Caramazza, 1991. Persian orthography is characterised by nearly regular orthography-phonology (OP mappings however, the omission of some vowels in the script makes the OP mapping of many words less predictable. The aim of this study was to compare the predictive lexico-semantic variables across reading and picture naming tasks in Persian aphasia while considering the variability across participants and items using mixed modeling. Methods and Results A total of 21 brain-injured Persian-speaking patients suffering from aphasia were asked to name 200 normalized Snodgrass object pictures and words taken from Bakhtiar, Nilipour and Weekes (2013 in different sessions. The results showed that word naming performance was significantly better than object naming in Persian speakers with aphasia (p<0.0001. Applying McNemar’s test to examine individual differences found that 18 patients showed significantly better performance in word reading compared to picture naming, 2 patients showed no difference between naming and reading (i.e. case 1 and 10, and one patient (i.e. case 5 showed significantly better naming compared to reading χ (1=10.23, p< 0.01 (see also Figure 1. A mixed-effect logistic regression analysis revealed that the degree of spelling transparency (i.e. the number of letters in a word divided by the number of its phonemes had an effect on word naming (along with frequency, age of acquisition (AoA, and imageability and picture naming (along with image agreement, AoA, word length, frequency and name agreement with a much stronger effect on the word naming task (b= 1.67, SE= 0.41, z= 4.05, p< 0.0001 compared to the picture naming task (b= -0.64, SE= 0.32, z= 2, p< 0.05. Conclusion The dissociation between word naming and picture naming shown by many patients suggests at least two routes are available

A Few Words about Words | Poster

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By Ken Michaels, Guest Writer In Shakepeare’s play “Hamlet,” Polonius inquires of the prince, “What do you read, my lord?” Not at all pleased with what he’s reading, Hamlet replies, “Words, words, words.”1 I have previously described the communication model in which a sender encodes a message and then sends it via some channel (or medium) to a receiver, who decodes the message

Words and possible words in early language acquisition.

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Marchetto, Erika; Bonatti, Luca L

2013-11-01

In order to acquire language, infants must extract its building blocks-words-and master the rules governing their legal combinations from speech. These two problems are not independent, however: words also have internal structure. Thus, infants must extract two kinds of information from the same speech input. They must find the actual words of their language. Furthermore, they must identify its possible words, that is, the sequences of sounds that, being morphologically well formed, could be words. Here, we show that infants' sensitivity to possible words appears to be more primitive and fundamental than their ability to find actual words. We expose 12- and 18-month-old infants to an artificial language containing a conflict between statistically coherent and structurally coherent items. We show that 18-month-olds can extract possible words when the familiarization stream contains marks of segmentation, but cannot do so when the stream is continuous. Yet, they can find actual words from a continuous stream by computing statistical relationships among syllables. By contrast, 12-month-olds can find possible words when familiarized with a segmented stream, but seem unable to extract statistically coherent items from a continuous stream that contains minimal conflicts between statistical and structural information. These results suggest that sensitivity to word structure is in place earlier than the ability to analyze distributional information. The ability to compute nontrivial statistical relationships becomes fully effective relatively late in development, when infants have already acquired a considerable amount of linguistic knowledge. Thus, mechanisms for structure extraction that do not rely on extensive sampling of the input are likely to have a much larger role in language acquisition than general-purpose statistical abilities. Copyright © 2013. Published by Elsevier Inc.

Parafoveal retinal cone mosaic imaging in children with ultra-compact switchable SLO/OCT handheld probe (Conference Presentation)

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LaRocca, Francesco; Nankivil, Derek; DuBose, Theodore B.; Toth, Cynthia A.; Farsiu, Sina; Izatt, Joseph A.

2016-03-01

In vivo photoreceptor imaging has enhanced the way vision scientists and ophthalmologists understand the retinal structure, function, and etiology of numerous retinal pathologies. However, the complexity and large footprint of current systems capable of resolving photoreceptors has limited imaging to patients who are able to sit in an upright position and fixate for several minutes. Unfortunately, this excludes an important fraction of patients including bedridden patients, small children, and infants. Here, we show that our dual-modality, high-resolution handheld probe with a weight of only 94 g is capable of visualizing photoreceptors in supine children. Our device utilizes a microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) scanner and a novel telescope design to achieve over an order of magnitude reduction in size compared to similar systems. The probe has a 7° field of view and a lateral resolution of 8 µm. The optical coherence tomography (OCT) system has an axial resolution of 7 µm and a sensitivity of 101 dB. High definition scanning laser ophthalmoscopy (SLO) and OCT images were acquired from children ranging from 14 months to 12 years of age with and without pathology during examination under anesthesia in the operating room. Parafoveal cone imaging was shown using the SLO arm of this device without adaptive optics using a 3° FOV for the first time in children under 4 years old. This work lays the foundation for pediatric research, which will improve understanding of retinal development, maldevelopment and early onset of diseases at the cellular level during the beginning stages of human growth.

Short-term retention of pictures and words as a function of type of distraction and length of delay interval.

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Pellegrino, J W; Siegel, A W; Dhawan, M

1976-01-01

Picture and word triads were tested in a Brown-Peterson short-term retention task at varying delay intervals (3, 10, or 30 sec) and under acoustic and simultaneous acoustic and visual distraction. Pictures were superior to words at all delay intervals under single acoustic distraction. Dual distraction consistently reduced picture retention while simultaneously facilitating word retention. The results were interpreted in terms of the dual coding hypothesis with modality-specific interference effects in the visual and acoustic processing systems. The differential effects of dual distraction were related to the introduction of visual interference and differential levels of functional acoustic interference across dual and single distraction tasks. The latter was supported by a constant 2/1 ratio in the backward counting rates of the acoustic vs. dual distraction tasks. The results further suggest that retention may not depend on total processing load of the distraction task, per se, but rather that processing load operates within modalities.

Vocalic and consonantal processing biases in early word-learning: Cross-language differences?

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Højen, Anders; Nazzi, Thierry

2010-01-01

Previous research showed that French-learning 16- or 20-month-olds could learn pairs of words that differed by a single consonantal but not vocalic feature. Danish has a richer vowel inventory than French, allowing for 31 phonological vowel contrasts, including vowel length and presence/absence o...

The Words Children Hear: Picture Books and the Statistics for Language Learning.

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Montag, Jessica L; Jones, Michael N; Smith, Linda B

2015-09-01

Young children learn language from the speech they hear. Previous work suggests that greater statistical diversity of words and of linguistic contexts is associated with better language outcomes. One potential source of lexical diversity is the text of picture books that caregivers read aloud to children. Many parents begin reading to their children shortly after birth, so this is potentially an important source of linguistic input for many children. We constructed a corpus of 100 children's picture books and compared word type and token counts in that sample and a matched sample of child-directed speech. Overall, the picture books contained more unique word types than the child-directed speech. Further, individual picture books generally contained more unique word types than length-matched, child-directed conversations. The text of picture books may be an important source of vocabulary for young children, and these findings suggest a mechanism that underlies the language benefits associated with reading to children. © The Author(s) 2015.

Abelian primitive words

OpenAIRE

Domaratzki, Michael; Rampersad, Narad

2011-01-01

We investigate Abelian primitive words, which are words that are not Abelian powers. We show that unlike classical primitive words, the set of Abelian primitive words is not context-free. We can determine whether a word is Abelian primitive in linear time. Also different from classical primitive words, we find that a word may have more than one Abelian root. We also consider enumeration problems and the relation to the theory of codes. Peer reviewed

Reading in developmental prosopagnosia: Evidence for a dissociation between word and face recognition.

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Starrfelt, Randi; Klargaard, Solja K; Petersen, Anders; Gerlach, Christian

2018-02-01

Recent models suggest that face and word recognition may rely on overlapping cognitive processes and neural regions. In support of this notion, face recognition deficits have been demonstrated in developmental dyslexia. Here we test whether the opposite association can also be found, that is, impaired reading in developmental prosopagnosia. We tested 10 adults with developmental prosopagnosia and 20 matched controls. All participants completed the Cambridge Face Memory Test, the Cambridge Face Perception test and a Face recognition questionnaire used to quantify everyday face recognition experience. Reading was measured in four experimental tasks, testing different levels of letter, word, and text reading: (a) single word reading with words of varying length,(b) vocal response times in single letter and short word naming, (c) recognition of single letters and short words at brief exposure durations (targeting the word superiority effect), and d) text reading. Participants with developmental prosopagnosia performed strikingly similar to controls across the four reading tasks. Formal analysis revealed a significant dissociation between word and face recognition, as the difference in performance with faces and words was significantly greater for participants with developmental prosopagnosia than for controls. Adult developmental prosopagnosics read as quickly and fluently as controls, while they are seemingly unable to learn efficient strategies for recognizing faces. We suggest that this is due to the differing demands that face and word recognition put on the perceptual system. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

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

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Rieth, Cory A; Huber, David E

2017-06-01

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

Web-based depression treatment: associations of clients' word use with adherence and outcome.

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Van der Zanden, Rianne; Curie, Keshia; Van Londen, Monique; Kramer, Jeannet; Steen, Gerard; Cuijpers, Pim

2014-05-01

The growing number of web-based psychological treatments, based on textual communication, generates a wealth of data that can contribute to knowledge of online and face-to-face treatments. We investigated whether clients' language use predicted treatment outcomes and adherence in Master Your Mood (MYM), an online group course for young adults with depressive symptoms. Among 234 participants from a randomised controlled trial of MYM, we tested whether their word use on course application forms predicted baseline levels of depression, anxiety and mastery, or subsequent treatment adherence. We then analysed chat session transcripts of course completers (n=67) to investigate whether word use changes predicted changes in treatment outcomes. Depression improvement was predicted by increasing use of 'discrepancy words' during treatment (e.g. should). At baseline, more discrepancy words predicted higher mastery level. Adherence was predicted by more words used at application, more social words and fewer discrepancy words. Many variables were included, increasing the chance of coincidental results. This risk was constrained by examining only those word categories that have been investigated in relation to depression or adherence. This is the first study to link word use during treatment to outcomes of treatment that has proven to be effective in an RCT. The results suggest that paying attention to the length of problem articulation at application and to 'discrepancy words' may be wise, as these seem to be psychological markers. To expand knowledge of word use as psychological marker, research on web-based treatment should include text analysis. Copyright © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Signal Words

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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, ...

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

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Itkes, Oksana; Mashal, Nira

2016-09-01

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

Finding words in a language that allows words without vowels

NARCIS (Netherlands)

El Aissati, A.; McQueen, J.M.; Cutler, A.

2012-01-01

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

Titles in highly ranked multidisciplinary psychology journals 1966-2011: more words and punctuation marks allow for the communication of more information.

Science.gov (United States)

Whissell, Cynthia

2013-12-01

Titles of articles in seven highly ranked multidisciplinary psychology journals for every fifth year between 1966 and 2011 (inclusive) were studied in terms of title length, word length, punctuation density, and word pleasantness, activation, and concreteness (assessed by the Dictionary of Affect in Language). Titles grew longer (by three words) and were more frequently punctuated (by one colon or comma for every other article) between 1966 and 2011. This may reflect the increasing complexity of psychology and satisfy readers' requirements for more specific information. There were significant differences among journals (e.g., titles in the Annual Review of Psychology were scored by the Dictionary of Affect as the most pleasant, and those in Psychological Bulletin as the least pleasant) and among categories of journals (e.g., titles in review journals employed longer words than those in research or association journals). Differences were stable across time and were employed to successfully categorize titles from a validation sample.

Don’t words come easy?A psychophysical exploration of word superiority

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Randi eStarrfelt

2013-09-01

Full Text Available Words are made of letters, and yet sometimes it is easier to identify a word than a single letter. This word superiority effect (WSE has been observed when written stimuli are presented very briefly or degraded by visual noise. We compare performance with letters and words in three experiments, to explore the extents and limits of the WSE. Using a carefully controlled list of three letter words, we show that a word superiority effect can be revealed in vocal reaction times even to undegraded stimuli. With a novel combination of psychophysics and mathematical modelling, we further show that the typical WSE is specifically reflected in perceptual processing speed: single words are simply processed faster than single letters. Intriguingly, when multiple stimuli are presented simultaneously, letters are perceived more easily than words, and this is reflected both in perceptual processing speed and visual short term memory capacity. So, even if single words come easy, there is a limit to the word superiority effect.

Eye movements during the handwriting of words: Individually and within sentences.

Science.gov (United States)

Sita, Jodi C; Taylor, Katelyn A

2015-10-01

Handwriting, a complex motor process involves the coordination of both the upper limb and visual system. The gaze behavior that occurs during the handwriting process is an area that has been little studied. This study investigated the eye-movements of adults during writing and reading tasks. Eye and handwriting movements were recorded for six different words over three different tasks. The results compared reading and handwriting the same words, a between condition comparison and a comparison between the two handwriting tasks. Compared to reading, participants produced more fixations during handwriting tasks and the average fixation durations were longer. When reading fixations were found to be mostly around the center of word, whereas fixations when writing appear to be made for each letter in a written word and were located around the base of letters and flowed in a left to right direction. Between the two writing tasks more fixations were made when words were written individually compared to within sentences, yet fixation durations were no different. Correlation of the number of fixations made to kinematic variables revealed that horizontal size and road length held a strong correlation with the number of fixations made by participants. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Don't words come easy? A psychophysical exploration of word superiority

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Starrfelt, Randi; Petersen, Anders; Vangkilde, Signe Allerup

2013-01-01

Words are made of letters, and yet sometimes it is easier to identify a word than a single letter. This word superiority effect (WSE) has been observed when written stimuli are presented very briefly or degraded by visual noise. We compare performance with letters and words in three experiments, ...... and visual short term memory capacity. So, even if single words come easy, there is a limit to the word superiority effect....

Cascaded processing in written compound word production

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

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.

Science.gov (United States)

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.

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

Science.gov (United States)

Sóskuthy, Márton; Hay, Jennifer

2017-09-01

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

A WORD-OF-MOUSE APPROACH FOR WORD-OF-MOUTH MEASUREMENT

OpenAIRE

Andreia Gabriela ANDREI

2012-01-01

Despite of the fact that word-of-mouth phenomenon gained unseen dimensions, only few studies have focused on its measurement and only three of them developed a word-of-mouth construct. Our study develops a bi-dimensional scale which assigns usual word-of-mouth mechanisms available in online networking sites (eg: Recommend, Share, Like, Comment) into the WOM (+) - positive word-of-mouth valence dimension - respectively into the WOM (-) - negative word-of-mouth valence dimension. We adapted e-W...

Word/sub-word lattices decomposition and combination for speech recognition

OpenAIRE

Le , Viet-Bac; Seng , Sopheap; Besacier , Laurent; Bigi , Brigitte

2008-01-01

International audience; This paper presents the benefit of using multiple lexical units in the post-processing stage of an ASR system. Since the use of sub-word units can reduce the high out-of-vocabulary rate and improve the lack of text resources in statistical language modeling, we propose several methods to decompose, normalize and combine word and sub-word lattices generated from different ASR systems. By using a sub-word information table, every word in a lattice can be decomposed into ...

Right word making sense of the words that confuse

CERN Document Server

Morrison, Elizabeth

2012-01-01

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

Spoken word recognition without a TRACE

Science.gov (United States)

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

2013-01-01

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

Smashing WordPress Themes Making WordPress Beautiful

CERN Document Server

Hedengren, Thord Daniel

2011-01-01

The ultimate guide to WordPress Themes - one of the hottest topics on the web today WordPress is so much more than a blogging platform, and Smashing WordPress Themes teaches readers how to make it look any way they like - from a corporate site, to a photography gallery and moreWordPress is one of the hottest tools on the web today and is used by sites including The New York Times, Rolling Stone, flickr, CNN, NASA and of course Smashing MagazineBeautiful full colour throughout - web designers expect nothing lessSmashing Magazine will fully support this book by by promoting it through their webs

Reading vocabulary in children with and without hearing loss: the roles of task and word type.

Science.gov (United States)

Coppens, Karien M; Tellings, Agnes; Verhoeven, Ludo; Schreuder, Robert

2013-04-01

To address the problem of low reading comprehension scores among children with hearing impairment, it is necessary to have a better understanding of their reading vocabulary. In this study, the authors investigated whether task and word type differentiate the reading vocabulary knowledge of children with and without severe hearing loss. Seventy-two children with hearing loss and 72 children with normal hearing performed a lexical and a use decision task. Both tasks contained the same 180 words divided over 7 clusters, each cluster containing words with a similar pattern of scores on 8 word properties (word class, frequency, morphological family size, length, age of acquisition, mode of acquisition, imageability, and familiarity). Whereas the children with normal hearing scored better on the 2 tasks than the children with hearing loss, the size of the difference varied depending on the type of task and word. Performance differences between the 2 groups increased as words and tasks became more complex. Despite delays, children with hearing loss showed a similar pattern of vocabulary acquisition as their peers with normal hearing. For the most precise assessment of reading vocabulary possible, a range of tasks and word types should be used.

INFLUENCE OF LENGTH OF SENTENCES ON THE FREQUENCY OF SPEECH DISFLUENCIES IN CHILDREN WHO STUTTER

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Leila Begić

2017-04-01

Full Text Available The main purpose of this study was to investigate whether the length of sentences has influence on the frequency of speech disfluencies for children who stutter. The participants included 30 children who stutter 19 male participants and 13 female participants, whose age ranged between 4 years and 8 months to 6 years and 11 months (56 to 83 months of age. Research was conducted in kindergartens and primary schools in Tuzla Canton in Bosnia and Herzegovina2 . The test consisted of 36 sentences. In relation to the length, sentences were divided into three groups: in the first group there were 9 sentences which included 3 to 5 words, in the second group, there were 14 sentences which included 6 to 8 words and in the third group there were 13 sentences which included 9 to 11 words. Testing was conducted so that the examiner was pronouncing one sentence after which the participant repeated the same sentence. Each participant was requested to repeat exactly what he/she had heard. Speech and language pathologist has recorded all speech disfluencies in all sentences. The results showed that the sentences containing 9 to 11 words had most effects on the overall dynamics of speech disfluencies in children who stutter. The results suggest that during the process of assessment and diagnosis of children who stutter, it should be required to assess the child's ability to use complex linguistic statements and to assess the frequency of disfluencies in relation to the complexity of the sentences. Precision diagnostics would provide guidelines for the treatment of stuttering in terms of implementation of approaches and strategies which include language treatment and gradually increasing the length and complexity of statements of children who stutter during speech.

Auditory word recognition is not more sensitive to word-initial than to word-final stimulus information

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Vlugt, van der M.J.; Nooteboom, S.G.

1986-01-01

Several accounts of human recognition of spoken words a.!!llign special importance to stimulus-word onsets. The experiment described here was d~igned to find out whether such a word-beginning superiority effect, which ill supported by experimental evidence of various kinds, is due to a special

Effects of providing word sounds during printed word learning

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Reitsma, P.; Dongen, van A.J.N.; Custers, E.

1984-01-01

The purpose of this study was to explore the effects of the availability of the spoken sound of words along with the printed forms during reading practice. Firstgrade children from two normal elementary schools practised reading several unfamiliar words in print. For half of the printed words the

The Developmental Lexicon Project: A behavioral database to investigate visual word recognition across the lifespan.

Science.gov (United States)

Schröter, Pauline; Schroeder, Sascha

2017-12-01

With the Developmental Lexicon Project (DeveL), we present a large-scale study that was conducted to collect data on visual word recognition in German across the lifespan. A total of 800 children from Grades 1 to 6, as well as two groups of younger and older adults, participated in the study and completed a lexical decision and a naming task. We provide a database for 1,152 German words, comprising behavioral data from seven different stages of reading development, along with sublexical and lexical characteristics for all stimuli. The present article describes our motivation for this project, explains the methods we used to collect the data, and reports analyses on the reliability of our results. In addition, we explored developmental changes in three marker effects in psycholinguistic research: word length, word frequency, and orthographic similarity. The database is available online.

Infants Track Word Forms in Early Word-Object Associations

Science.gov (United States)

Zamuner, Tania S.; Fais, Laurel; Werker, Janet F.

2014-01-01

A central component of language development is word learning. One characterization of this process is that language learners discover objects and then look for word forms to associate with these objects (Mcnamara, 1984; Smith, 2000). Another possibility is that word forms themselves are also important, such that once learned, hearing a familiar…

Linear discriminant analysis of character sequences using occurrences of words

KAUST Repository

Dutta, Subhajit; Chaudhuri, Probal; Ghosh, Anil

2014-01-01

Classification of character sequences, where the characters come from a finite set, arises in disciplines such as molecular biology and computer science. For discriminant analysis of such character sequences, the Bayes classifier based on Markov models turns out to have class boundaries defined by linear functions of occurrences of words in the sequences. It is shown that for such classifiers based on Markov models with unknown orders, if the orders are estimated from the data using cross-validation, the resulting classifier has Bayes risk consistency under suitable conditions. Even when Markov models are not valid for the data, we develop methods for constructing classifiers based on linear functions of occurrences of words, where the word length is chosen by cross-validation. Such linear classifiers are constructed using ideas of support vector machines, regression depth, and distance weighted discrimination. We show that classifiers with linear class boundaries have certain optimal properties in terms of their asymptotic misclassification probabilities. The performance of these classifiers is demonstrated in various simulated and benchmark data sets.

Linear discriminant analysis of character sequences using occurrences of words

KAUST Repository

Dutta, Subhajit

2014-02-01

Classification of character sequences, where the characters come from a finite set, arises in disciplines such as molecular biology and computer science. For discriminant analysis of such character sequences, the Bayes classifier based on Markov models turns out to have class boundaries defined by linear functions of occurrences of words in the sequences. It is shown that for such classifiers based on Markov models with unknown orders, if the orders are estimated from the data using cross-validation, the resulting classifier has Bayes risk consistency under suitable conditions. Even when Markov models are not valid for the data, we develop methods for constructing classifiers based on linear functions of occurrences of words, where the word length is chosen by cross-validation. Such linear classifiers are constructed using ideas of support vector machines, regression depth, and distance weighted discrimination. We show that classifiers with linear class boundaries have certain optimal properties in terms of their asymptotic misclassification probabilities. The performance of these classifiers is demonstrated in various simulated and benchmark data sets.

Positive words or negative words: whose valence strength are we more sensitive to?

Science.gov (United States)

Yang, Jiemin; Zeng, Jing; Meng, Xianxin; Zhu, Liping; Yuan, Jiajin; Li, Hong; Yusoff, Nasir

2013-10-02

The present study investigates the human brains' sensitivity to the valence strength of emotionally positive and negative chinese words. Event-Related Potentials were recorded, in two different experimental sessions, for Highly Positive (HP), Mildly Positive (MP) and neutral (NP) words and for Highly Negative (HN), Mildly Negative (MN) and neutral (NN) words, while subjects were required to count the number of words, irrespective of word meanings. The results showed a significant emotion effect in brain potentials for both HP and MP words, and the emotion effect occurred faster for HP words than MP words: HP words elicited more negative deflections than NP words in N2 (250-350 ms) and P3 (350-500 ms) amplitudes, while MP words elicited a significant emotion effect in P3, but not in N2, amplitudes. By contrast, HN words elicited larger amplitudes than NN words in N2 but not in P3 amplitudes, whereas MN words produced no significant emotion effect across N2 and P3 components. Moreover, the size of emotion-neutral differences in P3 amplitudes was significantly larger for MP compared to MN words. Thus, the human brain is reactive to both highly and mildly positive words, and this reactivity increased with the positive valence strength of the words. Conversely, the brain is less reactive to the valence of negative relative to positive words. These results suggest that human brains are equipped with increased sensitivity to the valence strength of positive compared to negative words, a type of emotional stimuli that are well known for reduced arousal. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

From LZ77 to the run-length encoded burrows-wheeler transform, and back

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Policriti, Alberto; Prezza, Nicola

2017-01-01

The Lempel-Ziv factorization (LZ77) and the Run-Length encoded Burrows-Wheeler Transform (RLBWT) are two important tools in text compression and indexing, being their sizes z and r closely related to the amount of text self-repetitiveness. In this paper we consider the problem of converting the t......(r + z) words of working space. Note that r and z can be constant if the text is highly repetitive, and our algorithms can operate with (up to) exponentially less space than naive solutions based on full decompression.......The Lempel-Ziv factorization (LZ77) and the Run-Length encoded Burrows-Wheeler Transform (RLBWT) are two important tools in text compression and indexing, being their sizes z and r closely related to the amount of text self-repetitiveness. In this paper we consider the problem of converting the two...... representations into each other within a working space proportional to the input and the output. Let n be the text length. We show that RLBWT can be converted to LZ77 in O(n log r) time and O(r) words of working space. Conversely, we provide an algorithm to convert LZ77 to RLBWT in O(n(log r + log z)) time and O...

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

Science.gov (United States)

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

2016-01-01

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

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.

Word Pocket Guide

CERN Document Server

Glenn, Walter

2004-01-01

Millions of people use Microsoft Word every day and, chances are, you're one of them. Like most Word users, you've attained a certain level of proficiency--enough to get by, with a few extra tricks and tips--but don't get the opportunity to probe much further into the real power of Word. And Word is so rich in features that regardless of your level of expertise, there's always more to master. If you've ever wanted a quick answer to a nagging question or had the thought that there must be a better way, then this second edition of Word Pocket Guide is just what you need. Updated for Word 2003

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

Science.gov (United States)

Lo, Shih-Yu; Yeh, Su-Ling

2018-05-29

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

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

Science.gov (United States)

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

2015-12-01

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

WordPress Bible

CERN Document Server

Brazell, Aaron

2010-01-01

The WordPress Bible provides a complete and thorough guide to the largest self hosted blogging tool. This guide starts by covering the basics of WordPress such as installing and the principles of blogging, marketing and social media interaction, but then quickly ramps the reader up to more intermediate to advanced level topics such as plugins, WordPress Loop, themes and templates, custom fields, caching, security and more. The WordPress Bible is the only complete resource one needs to learning WordPress from beginning to end.

From Word Alignment to Word Senses, via Multilingual Wordnets

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Dan Tufis

2006-05-01

Full Text Available Most of the successful commercial applications in language processing (text and/or speech dispense with any explicit concern on semantics, with the usual motivations stemming from the computational high costs required for dealing with semantics, in case of large volumes of data. With recent advances in corpus linguistics and statistical-based methods in NLP, revealing useful semantic features of linguistic data is becoming cheaper and cheaper and the accuracy of this process is steadily improving. Lately, there seems to be a growing acceptance of the idea that multilingual lexical ontologisms might be the key towards aligning different views on the semantic atomic units to be used in characterizing the general meaning of various and multilingual documents. Depending on the granularity at which semantic distinctions are necessary, the accuracy of the basic semantic processing (such as word sense disambiguation can be very high with relatively low complexity computing. The paper substantiates this statement by presenting a statistical/based system for word alignment and word sense disambiguation in parallel corpora. We describe a word alignment platform which ensures text pre-processing (tokenization, POS-tagging, lemmatization, chunking, sentence and word alignment as required by an accurate word sense disambiguation.

ASSOCIATIONS BETWEEN MACULAR EDEMA AND CIRCULATORY STATUS IN EYES WITH RETINAL VEIN OCCLUSION: An Adaptive Optics Scanning Laser Ophthalmoscopy Study.

Science.gov (United States)

Iida, Yuto; Muraoka, Yuki; Uji, Akihito; Ooto, Sotaro; Murakami, Tomoaki; Suzuma, Kiyoshi; Tsujikawa, Akitaka; Arichika, Shigeta; Takahashi, Ayako; Miwa, Yuko; Yoshimura, Nagahisa

2017-10-01

To investigate associations between parafoveal microcirculatory status and foveal pathomorphology in eyes with macular edema (ME) secondary to retinal vein occlusion (RVO). Ten consecutive patients (10 eyes) with acute retinal vein occlusion were enrolled, 9 eyes of which received intravitreal ranibizumab (IVR) injections. Foveal morphologic changes were examined via optical coherence tomography (OCT), and parafoveal circulatory status was assessed via adaptive optics scanning laser ophthalmoscopy (AO-SLO). The mean parafoveal aggregated erythrocyte velocity (AEV) measured by adaptive optics scanning laser ophthalmoscopy in eyes with retinal vein occlusion was 0.99 ± 0.43 mm/second at baseline, which was significantly lower than that of age-matched healthy subjects (1.41 ± 0.28 mm/second, P = 0.042). The longitudinal adaptive optics scanning laser ophthalmoscopy examinations of each patient showed that parafoveal AEV was strongly inversely correlated with optical coherence tomography-measured central foveal thickness (CFT) over the entire observation period. Using parafoveal AEV and central foveal thickness measurements obtained at the first and second examinations, we investigated associations between differences in parafoveal AEV and central foveal thickness, which were significantly and highly correlated (r = -0.84, P = 0.002). Using adaptive optics scanning laser ophthalmoscopy in eyes with retinal vein occlusion macular edema, we could quantitatively evaluate the parafoveal AEV. A reduction or an increase in parafoveal AEV may be a clinical marker for the resolution or development/progression of macular edema respectively.

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.

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

Science.gov (United States)

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

1993-01-01

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

Brain activation during word identification and word recognition

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Jernigan, Terry L.; Ostergaard, Arne L.; Law, Ian

1998-01-01

Previous memory research has suggested that the effects of prior study observed in priming tasks are functionally, and neurobiologically, distinct phenomena from the kind of memory expressed in conventional (explicit) memory tests. Evidence for this position comes from observed dissociations...... between memory scores obtained with the two kinds of tasks. However, there is continuing controversy about the meaning of these dissociations. In recent studies, Ostergaard (1998a, Memory Cognit. 26:40-60; 1998b, J. Int. Neuropsychol. Soc., in press) showed that simply degrading visual word stimuli can...... dramatically alter the degree to which word priming shows a dissociation from word recognition; i.e., effects of a number of factors on priming paralleled their effects on recognition memory tests when the words were degraded at test. In the present study, cerebral blood flow changes were measured while...

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

Chinese Learners of English See Chinese Words When Reading English Words.

Science.gov (United States)

Ma, Fengyang; Ai, Haiyang

2018-06-01

The present study examines when second language (L2) learners read words in the L2, whether the orthography and/or phonology of the translation words in the first language (L1) is activated and whether the patterns would be modulated by the proficiency in the L2. In two experiments, two groups of Chinese learners of English immersed in the L1 environment, one less proficient and the other more proficient in English, performed a translation recognition task. In this task, participants judged whether pairs of words, with an L2 word preceding an L1 word, were translation words or not. The critical conditions compared the performance of learners to reject distractors that were related to the translation word (e.g., , pronounced as /bei 1/) of an L2 word (e.g., cup) in orthography (e.g., , bad in Chinese, pronounced as /huai 4/) or phonology (e.g., , sad in Chinese, pronounced as /bei 1/). Results of Experiment 1 showed less proficient learners were slower and less accurate to reject translation orthography distractors, as compared to unrelated controls, demonstrating a robust translation orthography interference effect. In contrast, their performance was not significantly different when rejecting translation phonology distractors, relative to unrelated controls, showing no translation phonology interference. The same patterns were observed in more proficient learners in Experiment 2. Together, these results suggest that when Chinese learners of English read English words, the orthographic information, but not the phonological information of the Chinese translation words is activated. In addition, this activation is not modulated by L2 proficiency.

The Effects of Target Word Properties on the Incidental Acquisition of Vocabulary through Reading

Science.gov (United States)

Reynolds, Barry Lee

2016-01-01

The primary aim of this investigation was to determine what combination of target word variables (frequency, patternedness, length, cognateness, lexicalization) could best predict the difficulty of incidentally acquiring vocabulary through reading. A group of adult English First Language (EL1) (n = 20) and adult English as a Foreign Language (EFL)…

Word learning mechanisms.

Science.gov (United States)

He, Angela Xiaoxue; Arunachalam, Sudha

2017-07-01

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

WordPress Bible

CERN Document Server

Brazell, Aaron

2011-01-01

Get the latest word on the biggest self-hosted blogging tool on the marketWithin a week of the announcement of WordPress 3.0, it had been downloaded over a million times. Now you can get on the bandwagon of this popular open-source blogging tool with WordPress Bible, 2nd Edition. Whether you're a casual blogger or programming pro, this comprehensive guide covers the latest version of WordPress, from the basics through advanced application development. If you want to thoroughly learn WordPress, this is the book you need to succeed.Explores the principles of blogging, marketing, and social media

Model of the Dynamic Construction Process of Texts and Scaling Laws of Words Organization in Language Systems.

Science.gov (United States)

Li, Shan; Lin, Ruokuang; Bian, Chunhua; Ma, Qianli D Y; Ivanov, Plamen Ch

2016-01-01

Scaling laws characterize diverse complex systems in a broad range of fields, including physics, biology, finance, and social science. The human language is another example of a complex system of words organization. Studies on written texts have shown that scaling laws characterize the occurrence frequency of words, words rank, and the growth of distinct words with increasing text length. However, these studies have mainly concentrated on the western linguistic systems, and the laws that govern the lexical organization, structure and dynamics of the Chinese language remain not well understood. Here we study a database of Chinese and English language books. We report that three distinct scaling laws characterize words organization in the Chinese language. We find that these scaling laws have different exponents and crossover behaviors compared to English texts, indicating different words organization and dynamics of words in the process of text growth. We propose a stochastic feedback model of words organization and text growth, which successfully accounts for the empirically observed scaling laws with their corresponding scaling exponents and characteristic crossover regimes. Further, by varying key model parameters, we reproduce differences in the organization and scaling laws of words between the Chinese and English language. We also identify functional relationships between model parameters and the empirically observed scaling exponents, thus providing new insights into the words organization and growth dynamics in the Chinese and English language.

Model of the Dynamic Construction Process of Texts and Scaling Laws of Words Organization in Language Systems.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Shan Li

Full Text Available Scaling laws characterize diverse complex systems in a broad range of fields, including physics, biology, finance, and social science. The human language is another example of a complex system of words organization. Studies on written texts have shown that scaling laws characterize the occurrence frequency of words, words rank, and the growth of distinct words with increasing text length. However, these studies have mainly concentrated on the western linguistic systems, and the laws that govern the lexical organization, structure and dynamics of the Chinese language remain not well understood. Here we study a database of Chinese and English language books. We report that three distinct scaling laws characterize words organization in the Chinese language. We find that these scaling laws have different exponents and crossover behaviors compared to English texts, indicating different words organization and dynamics of words in the process of text growth. We propose a stochastic feedback model of words organization and text growth, which successfully accounts for the empirically observed scaling laws with their corresponding scaling exponents and characteristic crossover regimes. Further, by varying key model parameters, we reproduce differences in the organization and scaling laws of words between the Chinese and English language. We also identify functional relationships between model parameters and the empirically observed scaling exponents, thus providing new insights into the words organization and growth dynamics in the Chinese and English language.

Phonotactics Constraints and the Spoken Word Recognition of Chinese Words in Speech

Science.gov (United States)

Yip, Michael C.

2016-01-01

Two word-spotting experiments were conducted to examine the question of whether native Cantonese listeners are constrained by phonotactics information in spoken word recognition of Chinese words in speech. Because no legal consonant clusters occurred within an individual Chinese word, this kind of categorical phonotactics information of Chinese…

WordPress for dummies

CERN Document Server

Sabin-Wilson, Lisa

2014-01-01

The bestselling WordPress guide, fully updated to cover the 2013 enhancements WordPress has millions of users, and this popular guide has sold more than 105,000 copies in its previous editions. With the newest releases of WordPress, author and WordPress expert Lisa Sabin-Wilson has completely updated the book to help you use and understand all the latest features. You'll learn about both the hosted WordPress.com version and the more flexible WordPress.org, which requires third-party hosting. Whether you're switching to WordPress from another blogging platform or just beginning to blog, you'll

Different Neural Correlates of Emotion-Label Words and Emotion-Laden Words: An ERP Study

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Juan Zhang

2017-09-01

Full Text Available It is well-documented that both emotion-label words (e.g., sadness, happiness and emotion-laden words (e.g., death, wedding can induce emotion activation. However, the neural correlates of emotion-label words and emotion-laden words recognition have not been examined. The present study aimed to compare the underlying neural responses when processing the two kinds of words by employing event-related potential (ERP measurements. Fifteen Chinese native speakers were asked to perform a lexical decision task in which they should judge whether a two-character compound stimulus was a real word or not. Results showed that (1 emotion-label words and emotion-laden words elicited similar P100 at the posteriors sites, (2 larger N170 was found for emotion-label words than for emotion-laden words at the occipital sites on the right hemisphere, and (3 negative emotion-label words elicited larger Late Positivity Complex (LPC on the right hemisphere than on the left hemisphere while such effect was not found for emotion-laden words and positive emotion-label words. The results indicate that emotion-label words and emotion-laden words elicit different cortical responses at both early (N170 and late (LPC stages. In addition, right hemisphere advantage for emotion-label words over emotion-laden words can be observed in certain time windows (i.e., N170 and LPC while fails to be detected in some other time window (i.e., P100. The implications of the current findings for future emotion research were discussed.

Different Neural Correlates of Emotion-Label Words and Emotion-Laden Words: An ERP Study.

Science.gov (United States)

Zhang, Juan; Wu, Chenggang; Meng, Yaxuan; Yuan, Zhen

2017-01-01

It is well-documented that both emotion-label words (e.g., sadness, happiness) and emotion-laden words (e.g., death, wedding) can induce emotion activation. However, the neural correlates of emotion-label words and emotion-laden words recognition have not been examined. The present study aimed to compare the underlying neural responses when processing the two kinds of words by employing event-related potential (ERP) measurements. Fifteen Chinese native speakers were asked to perform a lexical decision task in which they should judge whether a two-character compound stimulus was a real word or not. Results showed that (1) emotion-label words and emotion-laden words elicited similar P100 at the posteriors sites, (2) larger N170 was found for emotion-label words than for emotion-laden words at the occipital sites on the right hemisphere, and (3) negative emotion-label words elicited larger Late Positivity Complex (LPC) on the right hemisphere than on the left hemisphere while such effect was not found for emotion-laden words and positive emotion-label words. The results indicate that emotion-label words and emotion-laden words elicit different cortical responses at both early (N170) and late (LPC) stages. In addition, right hemisphere advantage for emotion-label words over emotion-laden words can be observed in certain time windows (i.e., N170 and LPC) while fails to be detected in some other time window (i.e., P100). The implications of the current findings for future emotion research were discussed.

The word concreteness effect occurs for positive, but not negative, emotion words in immediate serial recall.

Science.gov (United States)

Tse, Chi-Shing; Altarriba, Jeanette

2009-02-01

The present study examined the roles of word concreteness and word valence in the immediate serial recall task. Emotion words (e.g. happy) were used to investigate these effects. Participants completed study-test trials with seven-item study lists consisting of positive or negative words with either high or low concreteness (Experiments 1 and 2) and neutral (i.e. non-emotion) words with either high or low concreteness (Experiment 2). For neutral words, the typical word concreteness effect (concrete words are better recalled than abstract words) was replicated. For emotion words, the effect occurred for positive words, but not for negative words. While the word concreteness effect was stronger for neutral words than for negative words, it was not different for the neutral words and the positive words. We conclude that both word valence and word concreteness simultaneously contribute to the item and order retention of emotion words and discuss how Hulme et al.'s (1997) item redintegration account can be modified to explain these findings.

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

Science.gov (United States)

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

2015-08-26

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

Mathematical Tasks without Words and Word Problems: Perceptions of Reluctant Problem Solvers

Science.gov (United States)

Holbert, Sydney Margaret

2013-01-01

This qualitative research study used a multiple, holistic case study approach (Yin, 2009) to explore the perceptions of reluctant problem solvers related to mathematical tasks without words and word problems. Participants were given a choice of working a mathematical task without words or a word problem during four problem-solving sessions. Data…

Electrodermal responses to words in chronic low back pain patients: a comparison between pain descriptors, other emotional words, and neutral words.

Science.gov (United States)

Bonnet, Adeline; Naveteur, Janick

2006-10-01

This study examines the electrodermal reactivity of chronic sufferers to emotional words. The hypothesis that patients are over-sensitive to pain descriptors is tested. Electrodermal activity was recorded in 12 chronic low back pain patients and 12 healthy controls during passive viewing of words on a video monitor. These words were pain descriptors, other emotional words, and neutral words, in a pseudo-randomized order. A jingle was associated with the word occurrence. In chronic low back pain patients, skin conductance responses (SCRs) induced by pain descriptors or other emotional words were larger than SCRs induced by neutral words but they did not differ from each other. Patients presented SCRs, which were both larger and faster than those of controls, including following neutral words. There was no significant effect of word type in controls. Skin conductance level and the number of nonspecific fluctuations were larger in patients as compared with controls. The present electrodermal study suggests that chronic pain is linked to an increased reactivity to a wide range of stimuli. Emotional load amplifies the effect. This leads to recommend broad therapeutic management in chronic sufferers. Contrary to expectation derived from classical conditioning, patients did not prove over-sensitive to pain descriptors. This negative finding is discussed at methodologic, physiologic, and psychologic levels.

On universal partial words

OpenAIRE

Chen, Herman Z. Q.; Kitaev, Sergey; Mütze, Torsten; Sun, Brian Y.

2016-01-01

A universal word for a finite alphabet $A$ and some integer $n\\geq 1$ is a word over $A$ such that every word in $A^n$ appears exactly once as a subword (cyclically or linearly). It is well-known and easy to prove that universal words exist for any $A$ and $n$. In this work we initiate the systematic study of universal partial words. These are words that in addition to the letters from $A$ may contain an arbitrary number of occurrences of a special `joker' symbol $\\Diamond\

Effects of orthographic consistency on eye movement behavior: German and English children and adults process the same words differently.

Science.gov (United States)

Rau, Anne K; Moll, Kristina; Snowling, Margaret J; Landerl, Karin

2015-02-01

The current study investigated the time course of cross-linguistic differences in word recognition. We recorded eye movements of German and English children and adults while reading closely matched sentences, each including a target word manipulated for length and frequency. Results showed differential word recognition processes for both developing and skilled readers. Children of the two orthographies did not differ in terms of total word processing time, but this equal outcome was achieved quite differently. Whereas German children relied on small-unit processing early in word recognition, English children applied small-unit decoding only upon rereading-possibly when experiencing difficulties in integrating an unfamiliar word into the sentence context. Rather unexpectedly, cross-linguistic differences were also found in adults in that English adults showed longer processing times than German adults for nonwords. Thus, although orthographic consistency does play a major role in reading development, cross-linguistic differences are detectable even in skilled adult readers. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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

Science.gov (United States)

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

2009-01-01

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

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.

Effects of metric hierarchy and rhyme predictability on word duration in The Cat in the Hat.

Science.gov (United States)

Breen, Mara

2018-05-01

Word durations convey many types of linguistic information, including intrinsic lexical features like length and frequency and contextual features like syntactic and semantic structure. The current study was designed to investigate whether hierarchical metric structure and rhyme predictability account for durational variation over and above other features in productions of a rhyming, metrically-regular children's book: The Cat in the Hat (Dr. Seuss, 1957). One-syllable word durations and inter-onset intervals were modeled as functions of segment number, lexical frequency, word class, syntactic structure, repetition, and font emphasis. Consistent with prior work, factors predicting longer word durations and inter-onset intervals included more phonemes, lower frequency, first mention, alignment with a syntactic boundary, and capitalization. A model parameter corresponding to metric grid height improved model fit of word durations and inter-onset intervals. Specifically, speakers realized five levels of metric hierarchy with inter-onset intervals such that interval duration increased linearly with increased height in the metric hierarchy. Conversely, speakers realized only three levels of metric hierarchy with word duration, demonstrating that they shortened the highly predictable rhyme resolutions. These results further understanding of the factors that affect spoken word duration, and demonstrate the myriad cues that children receive about linguistic structure from nursery rhymes. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

THE SPECIAL STATUS OF EXOGENOUS WORD-FORMATION WITHIN THE GERMAN WORD-FORMATION SYSTEM

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Zhilyuk Sergey Aleksandrovich

2014-06-01

Full Text Available The article presents the properties of exogenous word-formation system taking into account the existence of two word-formation systems in modern German. On the basis of foreign research which reveal modern trends in German word-formation connected with the internationalization and the development of new European Latin language. The author defines key features of exogenous word-formation, i.e. foreign origin of wordformation units, unmotivated units, unmotivated interchange in base and affixes as well as limited distribution rules in combination with German word-formation. The article analyzes various approaches to word-division, as well as motivated and unmotivated interchange of consonants in bases and in affixes. Unmotivated interchange showcases a special status of the exogenous word-formation within German. Another item covered by the article is the issue of confix. The article has opinions of researchers about correctness of its separation and a list of its features. The author presents his definition of confix: a confix is a bound exogenous word-formation unit with a certain lexical and semantic meaning and joining other units directly or indirectly (through linking morpheme -o-, which is able to make a base. Moreover, some confixes are able to participate at word-combination and have unlimited distribution. So far, confix showcases the integration of exogenous word-formation and traditional German word-formation. The research proves the special status of exogenous word-formation in German. Its results can be used as a base for further analysis of co-existing word-formation systems in German and determination of their characteristic features.

Recalling taboo and nontaboo words.

Science.gov (United States)

Jay, Timothy; Caldwell-Harris, Catherine; King, Krista

2008-01-01

People remember emotional and taboo words better than neutral words. It is well known that words that are processed at a deep (i.e., semantic) level are recalled better than words processed at a shallow (i.e., purely visual) level. To determine how depth of processing influences recall of emotional and taboo words, a levels of processing paradigm was used. Whether this effect holds for emotional and taboo words has not been previously investigated. Two experiments demonstrated that taboo and emotional words benefit less from deep processing than do neutral words. This is consistent with the proposal that memories for taboo and emotional words are a function of the arousal level they evoke, even under shallow encoding conditions. Recall was higher for taboo words, even when taboo words were cued to be recalled after neutral and emotional words. The superiority of taboo word recall is consistent with cognitive neuroscience and brain imaging research.

Orthography-Induced Length Contrasts in the Second Language Phonological Systems of L2 Speakers of English: Evidence from Minimal Pairs.

Science.gov (United States)

Bassetti, Bene; Sokolović-Perović, Mirjana; Mairano, Paolo; Cerni, Tania

2018-06-01

Research shows that the orthographic forms ("spellings") of second language (L2) words affect speech production in L2 speakers. This study investigated whether English orthographic forms lead L2 speakers to produce English homophonic word pairs as phonological minimal pairs. Targets were 33 orthographic minimal pairs, that is to say homophonic words that would be pronounced as phonological minimal pairs if orthography affects pronunciation. Word pairs contained the same target sound spelled with one letter or two, such as the /n/ in finish and Finnish (both /'fɪnɪʃ/ in Standard British English). To test for effects of length and type of L2 exposure, we compared Italian instructed learners of English, Italian-English late bilinguals with lengthy naturalistic exposure, and English natives. A reading-aloud task revealed that Italian speakers of English L2 produce two English homophonic words as a minimal pair distinguished by different consonant or vowel length, for instance producing the target /'fɪnɪʃ/ with a short [n] or a long [nː] to reflect the number of consonant letters in the spelling of the words finish and Finnish. Similar effects were found on the pronunciation of vowels, for instance in the orthographic pair scene-seen (both /siːn/). Naturalistic exposure did not reduce orthographic effects, as effects were found both in learners and in late bilinguals living in an English-speaking environment. It appears that the orthographic form of L2 words can result in the establishment of a phonological contrast that does not exist in the target language. Results have implications for models of L2 phonological development.

Word aligned bitmap compression method, data structure, and apparatus

Science.gov (United States)

Wu, Kesheng; Shoshani, Arie; Otoo, Ekow

2004-12-14

The Word-Aligned Hybrid (WAH) bitmap compression method and data structure is a relatively efficient method for searching and performing logical, counting, and pattern location operations upon large datasets. The technique is comprised of a data structure and methods that are optimized for computational efficiency by using the WAH compression method, which typically takes advantage of the target computing system's native word length. WAH is particularly apropos to infrequently varying databases, including those found in the on-line analytical processing (OLAP) industry, due to the increased computational efficiency of the WAH compressed bitmap index. Some commercial database products already include some version of a bitmap index, which could possibly be replaced by the WAH bitmap compression techniques for potentially increased operation speed, as well as increased efficiencies in constructing compressed bitmaps. Combined together, this technique may be particularly useful for real-time business intelligence. Additional WAH applications may include scientific modeling, such as climate and combustion simulations, to minimize search time for analysis and subsequent data visualization.

Baby's first 10 words.

Science.gov (United States)

Tardif, Twila; Fletcher, Paul; Liang, Weilan; Zhang, Zhixiang; Kaciroti, Niko; Marchman, Virginia A

2008-07-01

Although there has been much debate over the content of children's first words, few large sample studies address this question for children at the very earliest stages of word learning. The authors report data from comparable samples of 265 English-, 336 Putonghua- (Mandarin), and 369 Cantonese-speaking 8- to 16-month-old infants whose caregivers completed MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories and reported them to produce between 1 and 10 words. Analyses of individual words indicated striking commonalities in the first words that children learn. However, substantive cross-linguistic differences appeared in the relative prevalence of common nouns, people terms, and verbs as well as in the probability that children produced even one of these word types when they had a total of 1-3, 4-6, or 7-10 words in their vocabularies. These data document cross-linguistic differences in the types of words produced even at the earliest stages of vocabulary learning and underscore the importance of parental input and cross-linguistic/cross-cultural variations in children's early word-learning.

Do word associations assess word knowledge? A comparison of L1 and L2, child and adult word associations

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Cremer, M.; Dingshoff, D.; de Beer, M.; Schoonen, R.

2011-01-01

Differences in word associations between monolingual and bilingual speakers of Dutch can reflect differences in how well seemingly familiar words are known. In this (exploratory) study mono-and bilingual, child and adult free word associations were compared. Responses of children and of monolingual

Word classes

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Rijkhoff, Jan

2007-01-01

in grammatical descriptions of some 50 languages, which together constitute a representative sample of the world’s languages (Hengeveld et al. 2004: 529). It appears that there are both quantitative and qualitative differences between word class systems of individual languages. Whereas some languages employ...... a parts-of-speech system that includes the categories Verb, Noun, Adjective and Adverb, other languages may use only a subset of these four lexical categories. Furthermore, quite a few languages have a major word class whose members cannot be classified in terms of the categories Verb – Noun – Adjective...... – Adverb, because they have properties that are strongly associated with at least two of these four traditional word classes (e.g. Adjective and Adverb). Finally, this article discusses some of the ways in which word class distinctions interact with other grammatical domains, such as syntax and morphology....

The Effect of the Length of To-Be-Remembered Lists and Intervening Lists on Free Recall: A Reexamination Using Overt Rehearsal

Science.gov (United States)

Ward, Geoff; Tan, Lydia

2004-01-01

In 3 experiments, the authors investigated the effects of to-be-remembered (TBR) and intervening list length on free recall to determine whether selective rehearsal could explain the previous finding that recall was affected only by TBR list length. In Experiments 1 (covert rehearsal) and 2 (overt rehearsal), participants saw 5- and 20-word lists…

Reading Big Words: Instructional Practices to Promote Multisyllabic Word Reading Fluency

Science.gov (United States)

Toste, Jessica R.; Williams, Kelly J.; Capin, Philip

2017-01-01

Poorly developed word recognition skills are the most pervasive and debilitating source of reading challenges for students with learning disabilities (LD). With a notable decrease in word reading instruction in the upper elementary grades, struggling readers receive fewer instructional opportunities to develop proficient word reading skills, yet…

Flexible Word Classes

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

• First major publication on the phenomenon • Offers cross-linguistic, descriptive, and diverse theoretical approaches • Includes analysis of data from different language families and from lesser studied languages This book is the first major cross-linguistic study of 'flexible words', i.e. words...... that cannot be classified in terms of the traditional lexical categories Verb, Noun, Adjective or Adverb. Flexible words can - without special morphosyntactic marking - serve in functions for which other languages must employ members of two or more of the four traditional, 'specialised' word classes. Thus......, flexible words are underspecified for communicative functions like 'predicating' (verbal function), 'referring' (nominal function) or 'modifying' (a function typically associated with adjectives and e.g. manner adverbs). Even though linguists have been aware of flexible world classes for more than...

Making sense of infant familiarity and novelty responses to words at lexical onset

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Rory A DePaolis

2016-05-01

Full Text Available This study suggests that familiarity and novelty preferences in infant experimental tasks can in some instances be interpreted together as a single indicator of language advance. We provide evidence to support this idea based on our use of the auditory headturn preference paradigm to record responses to words likely to be either familiar or unfamiliar to infants. Fifty-nine ten-month-old infants were tested. The task elicited mixed preferences: familiarity (longer average looks to the words likely to be familiar to the infants, novelty (longer average looks to the words likely to be unfamiliar and no-preference (similar-length of looks to both type of words. The infants who exhibited either a familiarity or a novelty response were more advanced on independent indices of phonetic advance than the infants who showed no preference. In addition, infants exhibiting novelty responses were more lexically advanced than either the infants who exhibited familiarity or those who showed no-preference. The results provide partial support for Hunter and Ames’ (1988 developmental model of attention in infancy and suggest caution when interpreting studies indexed to chronological age.

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...

WordPress For Dummies

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Sabin-Wilson, Lisa

2011-01-01

The bestselling guide to WordPress, fully updated to help you get your blog going! Millions of bloggers rely on WordPress, the popular, free blogging platform. This guide covers all the features and improvements in the most up-to-date version of WordPress. Whether you are switching to WordPress from another blogging platform or just starting your first blog, you'll find the advice in this friendly guide gets you up to speed on both the free-hosted WordPress.com version and WordPress.org, which requires the purchase of web hosting services, and figure out which version is best for you. You'll b

Word 2013 for dummies

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Gookin, Dan

2013-01-01

This bestselling guide to Microsoft Word is the first and last word on Word 2013 It's a whole new Word, so jump right into this book and learn how to make the most of it. Bestselling For Dummies author Dan Gookin puts his usual fun and friendly candor back to work to show you how to navigate the new features of Word 2013. Completely in tune with the needs of the beginning user, Gookin explains how to use Word 2013 quickly and efficiently so that you can spend more time working on your projects and less time trying to figure it all out. Walks you through the capabilit

Comparing intermittency and network measurements of words and their dependence on authorship

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Amancio, Diego Raphael; Oliveira, Osvaldo N Jr; Fontoura Costa, Luciano da; Altmann, Eduardo G

2011-01-01

Many features of texts and languages can now be inferred from statistical analyses using concepts from complex networks and dynamical systems. In this paper, we quantify how topological properties of word co-occurrence networks and intermittency (or burstiness) in word distribution depend on the style of authors. Our database contains 40 books by eight authors who lived in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for which the following network measurements were obtained: the clustering coefficient, average shortest path lengths and betweenness. We found that the two factors with stronger dependence on authors were skewness in the distribution of word intermittency and the average shortest paths. Other factors such as betweenness and Zipf's law exponent show only weak dependence on authorship. Also assessed was the contribution from each measurement to authorship recognition using three machine learning methods. The best performance was about 65% accuracy upon combining complex networks and intermittency features with the nearest-neighbor algorithm of automatic authorship. From a detailed analysis of the interdependence of the various metrics, it is concluded that the methods used here are complementary for providing short- and long-scale perspectives on texts, which are useful for applications such as the identification of topical words and information retrieval. (paper)

Word 2010 Bible

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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

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

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Reyna L Gordon

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

Partial Word Knowledge: Frontier Words in the L2 Mental Lexicon

Science.gov (United States)

Zareva, Alla

2012-01-01

The study set out to examine the partial word knowledge of native speakers, L2 advanced, and intermediate learners of English with regard to four word features from Richards' (1976) taxonomy of aspects describing what knowing a word entails. To capture partial familiarity, the participants completed in writing a test containing low and mid…

Word Frequency As a Cue For Identifying Function Words In Infancy

Science.gov (United States)

Hochmann, Jean-Remy; Endress, Ansgar D.; Mehler, Jacques

2010-01-01

While content words (e.g., 'dog') tend to carry meaning, function words (e.g., 'the') mainly serve syntactic purposes. Here, we ask whether 17-month old infants can use one language-universal cue to identify function word candidates: their high frequency of occurrence. In Experiment 1, infants listened to a series of short, naturally recorded…

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…

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

Science.gov (United States)

Debruille, J B

1998-04-01

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

Oral-diadochokinetic rates for Hebrew-speaking school-age children: real words vs. non-words repetition.

Science.gov (United States)

Icht, Michal; Ben-David, Boaz M

2015-02-01

Oral-diadochokinesis (DDK) tasks are a common tool for evaluating speech disorders. Usually, these tasks involve repetitions of non-words. It has been suggested that repeating real words can be more suitable for preschool children. But, the impact of using real words with elementary school children has not been studied yet. This study evaluated oral-DDK rates for Hebrew-speaking elementary school children using non-words and real words. The participants were 60 children, 9-11 years old, with normal speech and language development, who were asked to repeat "pataka" (non-word) and "bodeket" (Hebrew real word). Data replicate the advantage generally found for real word repetition with preschoolers. Children produced real words faster than non-words for all age groups, and repetition rates were higher for the older children. The findings suggest that adding real words to the standard oral-DDK task with elementary school children may provide a more comprehensive picture of oro-motor function.

Ins-Robust Primitive Words

OpenAIRE

Srivastava, Amit Kumar; Kapoor, Kalpesh

2017-01-01

Let Q be the set of primitive words over a finite alphabet with at least two symbols. We characterize a class of primitive words, Q_I, referred to as ins-robust primitive words, which remain primitive on insertion of any letter from the alphabet and present some properties that characterizes words in the set Q_I. It is shown that the language Q_I is dense. We prove that the language of primitive words that are not ins-robust is not context-free. We also present a linear time algorithm to reco...

Remembering New Words: Integrating Early Memory Development into Word Learning

OpenAIRE

Wojcik, Erica H.

2013-01-01

In order to successfully acquire a new word, young children must learn the correct associations between labels and their referents. For decades, word-learning researchers have explored how young children are able to form these associations. However, in addition to learning label-referent mappings, children must also remember them. Despite the importance of memory processes in forming a stable lexicon, there has been little integration of early memory research into the study of early word lear...

English words structure, history, usage

CERN Document Server

Katamba, Francis

2015-01-01

How do we find the right word for the job? Where does that word come from? Why do we spell it like that? And how do we know what it means? Words are all around us - we use them every day to communicate our joys, fears, hopes, opinions, wishes and demands - but we don't often think about them too deeply. In this highly accessible introduction to English words, the reader will discover what the study of words can tell them about the extraordinary richness and complexity of our daily vocabulary and about the nature of language in general. Assuming no prior knowledge of linguistics, the book covers a wide range of topics, including the structure of words, the meaning of words, how their spelling relates to pronunciation, how new words are manufactured or imported from other languages, and how the meaning of words changes with the passage of time. It also investigates how the mind deals with words by highlighting the amazing intellectual feat performed routinely when the right word is retrieved from the mental dic...

Radial bisection of words and lines in right-brain-damaged patients with spatial neglect.

Science.gov (United States)

Veronelli, Laura; Arduino, Lisa S; Girelli, Luisa; Vallar, Giuseppe

2017-09-01

The bisection of lines positioned radially (with the two ends of the line close and far, with respect to the participant's body) has been less investigated than that of lines placed horizontally (with their two ends left and right, with respect to the body's midsagittal plane). In horizontal bisection, patients with left neglect typically show a rightward bias for both lines and words, greater with longer stimuli. As for radial bisection, available data indicate that neurologically unimpaired participants make a distal error, while results from right-brain-damaged patients with left spatial neglect are contradictory. We investigated the bisection of radially oriented words, with the prediction that, during bisection, linguistic material would be recoded to its canonical left-to-right format in reading, with the performance of neglect patients being similar to that for horizontal words. Thirteen right-brain-damaged patients (seven with left spatial neglect) and fourteen healthy controls were asked to manually bisect 40 radial and 40 horizontal words (5-10 letters), and 80 lines, 40 radial and 40 horizontal, of comparable length. Right-brain-damaged patients with spatial neglect exhibited a proximal bias in the bisection of short radial words, with the proximal part corresponding to the final right part of horizontally oriented words. This proximal error was not found in patients without neglect and healthy controls. For bisection, short radial words may be recoded to the canonical orthographic horizontal format, unveiling the impact of left neglect on radially oriented stimuli. © 2015 The British Psychological Society.

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

Science.gov (United States)

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…

Attention and gaze control in picture naming, word reading, and word categorizing

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Roelofs, A.P.A.

2007-01-01

The trigger for shifting gaze between stimuli requiring vocal and manual responses was examined. Participants were presented with picture–word stimuli and left- or right-pointing arrows. They vocally named the picture (Experiment 1), read the word (Experiment 2), or categorized the word (Experiment

Pericentral retinopathy and racial differences in hydroxychloroquine toxicity.

Science.gov (United States)

Melles, Ronald B; Marmor, Michael F

2015-01-01

To describe patterns of hydroxychloroquine retinopathy distinct from the classic parafoveal (bull's eye) maculopathy. Retrospective case series. Patients from a large multi-provider group practice and a smaller university referral practice diagnosed with hydroxychloroquine retinopathy. Patients with widespread or "end-stage" retinopathy were excluded. Review of ophthalmic studies (fundus photography, spectral-domain optical coherence tomography, fundus autofluorescence, multifocal electroretinography, visual fields) and classification of retinopathy into 1 of 3 patterns: parafoveal (retinal changes 2°-6° from the fovea), pericentral (retinal changes ≥ 8° from the fovea), or mixed (retinal changes in both parafoveal and pericentral areas). Relative frequency of different patterns of hydroxychloroquine retinopathy and comparison of risk factors. Of 201 total patients (18% Asian) with hydroxychloroquine retinopathy, 153 (76%) had typical parafoveal changes, 24 (12%) also had a zone of pericentral damage, and 24 (12%) had pericentral retinopathy without any parafoveal damage. Pericentral retinopathy alone was seen in 50% of Asian patients but only in 2% of white patients. Patients with the pericentral pattern were taking hydroxychloroquine for a somewhat longer duration (19.5 vs. 15.0 years, P Hydroxychloroquine retinopathy does not always develop in a parafoveal (bull's eye) pattern, and a pericentral pattern of damage is especially prevalent among Asian patients. Screening practices may need to be adjusted to recognize pericentral and parafoveal hydroxychloroquine retinopathy. Copyright © 2015 American Academy of Ophthalmology. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The effect of recall, reproduction, and restudy on word learning: a pre-registered study.

Science.gov (United States)

Krishnan, Saloni; Watkins, Kate E; Bishop, Dorothy V M

2017-08-04

length, with shorter words being better learned than longer words, indicating that our method was sufficiently sensitive to detect an impact of condition on learning. Our primary hypothesis about training conditions conferring specific advantages for production of novel words presented aurally, especially over long intervals, was not supported by this data. Although there may be practical reasons for preferring a particular method for training expressive vocabulary, no difference in effectiveness was detected when presenting words aurally: reproducing, recalling or restudying a word led to the same production accuracy.

Emotion Words: Adding Face Value.

Science.gov (United States)

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

2017-06-12

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

The impact of article length on the number of future citations: a bibliometric analysis of general medicine journals.

Science.gov (United States)

Falagas, Matthew E; Zarkali, Angeliki; Karageorgopoulos, Drosos E; Bardakas, Vangelis; Mavros, Michael N

2013-01-01

The number of citations received is considered an index of study quality and impact. We aimed to examine the factors associated with the number of citations of published articles, focusing on the article length. Original human studies published in the first trimester of 2006 in 5 major General Medicine journals were analyzed with regard to the number of authors and of author-affiliated institutions, title and abstract word count, article length (number of print pages), number of bibliographic references, study design, and 2006 journal impact factor (JIF). A multiple linear regression model was employed to identify the variables independently associated with the number of article citations received through January 2012. On univariate analysis the JIF, number of authors, article length, study design (interventional/observational and prospective/retrospective), title and abstract word count, number of author-affiliated institutions, and number of references were all associated with the number of citations received. On multivariate analysis with the logarithm of citations as the dependent variable, only article length [regression coefficient: 14.64 (95% confidence intervals: (5.76-23.50)] and JIF [3.37 (1.80-4.948)] independently predicted the number of citations. The variance of citations explained by these parameters was 51.2%. In a sample of articles published in major General Medicine journals, in addition to journal impact factors, article length and number of authors independently predicted the number of citations. This may reflect a higher complexity level and quality of longer and multi-authored studies.

Promoting Word Consciousness to Close the Vocabulary Gap in Young Word Learners

Science.gov (United States)

Neugebauer, Sabina Rak; Gámez, Perla B.; Coyne, Michael D.; McCoach, D. Betsy; Cólon, Ingrid T.; Ware, Sharon

2017-01-01

A proposed avenue for increasing students' vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension is instruction that promotes students' enthusiasm and attention to words, referred to as "word consciousness". This study seeks to investigate, at the utterance level, whether and how word consciousness talk is used in classrooms with young word…

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

Science.gov (United States)

Kuperman, Victor; Van Dyke, Julie A

2013-06-01

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

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

Science.gov (United States)

Kuperman, Victor; Van Dyke, Julie A.

2013-01-01

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

Cultural Image of Animal Words

Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (English)

邓海燕

2017-01-01

This paper,after introducing the definition and forms of cultural image,focuses on the detailed comparison and analysis of cultural image of animal words both in English and in Chinese from four aspects,that is,same animal word,same cultural image;same animal word,different cultural images;different animal words,same cultural image;different animal words,different cultural images.

L2 Word Recognition: Influence of L1 Orthography on Multi-syllabic Word Recognition.

Science.gov (United States)

Hamada, Megumi

2017-10-01

L2 reading research suggests that L1 orthographic experience influences L2 word recognition. Nevertheless, the findings on multi-syllabic words in English are still limited despite the fact that a vast majority of words are multi-syllabic. The study investigated whether L1 orthography influences the recognition of multi-syllabic words, focusing on the position of an embedded word. The participants were Arabic ESL learners, Chinese ESL learners, and native speakers of English. The task was a word search task, in which the participants identified a target word embedded in a pseudoword at the initial, middle, or final position. The search accuracy and speed indicated that all groups showed a strong preference for the initial position. The accuracy data further indicated group differences. The Arabic group showed higher accuracy in the final than middle, while the Chinese group showed the opposite and the native speakers showed no difference between the two positions. The findings suggest that L2 multi-syllabic word recognition involves unique processes.

Head First WordPress

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Siarto, Jeff

2010-01-01

Whether you're promoting your business or writing about your travel adventures, Head First WordPress will teach you not only how to make your blog look unique and attention-grabbing, but also how to dig into the more complex features of WordPress 3.0 to make your website work well, too. You'll learn how to move beyond the standard WordPress look and feel by customizing your blog with your own URL, templates, plugin functionality, and more. As you learn, you'll be working with real WordPress files: The book's website provides pre-fab WordPress themes to download and work with as you follow al

AARP Word 2010 for dummies

CERN Document Server

Gookin, Dan

2011-01-01

It's a whole new Word - make the most of it! Here's exactly what you need to know to get going with Word 2010. From firing up Word, using the spell checker, and working with templates to formatting documents, adding images, and saving your stuff, you'll get the first and last word on Word 2010 with this fun and easy mini guide. So get ready to channel your inner writer and start creating Word files that wow! Open the book and find:Tips for navigating Word with the keyboard and mouseAdvice on using the RibbonHow to edit text and undo mistakesThings to know

WordPress multisite administration

CERN Document Server

Longren, Tyler

2013-01-01

This is a simple, concise guide with a step-by-step approach, packed with screenshots and examples to set up and manage a network blog using WordPress.WordPress Multisite Administration is ideal for anyone wanting to familiarize themselves with WordPress Multisite. You'll need to know the basics about WordPress, and having at least a broad understanding of HTML, CSS, and PHP will help, but isn't required.

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.

Different Neural Correlates of Emotion-Label Words and Emotion-Laden Words: An ERP Study

OpenAIRE

Zhang, Juan; Wu, Chenggang; Meng, Yaxuan; Yuan, Zhen

2017-01-01

It is well-documented that both emotion-label words (e.g., sadness, happiness) and emotion-laden words (e.g., death, wedding) can induce emotion activation. However, the neural correlates of emotion-label words and emotion-laden words recognition have not been examined. The present study aimed to compare the underlying neural responses when processing the two kinds of words by employing event-related potential (ERP) measurements. Fifteen Chinese native speakers were asked to perform a lexical...

Attention and Gaze Control in Picture Naming, Word Reading, and Word Categorizing

Science.gov (United States)

Roelofs, Ardi

2007-01-01

The trigger for shifting gaze between stimuli requiring vocal and manual responses was examined. Participants were presented with picture-word stimuli and left- or right-pointing arrows. They vocally named the picture (Experiment 1), read the word (Experiment 2), or categorized the word (Experiment 3) and shifted their gaze to the arrow to…

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

Science.gov (United States)

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

2013-04-01

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

Modeling within-word and cross-word pronunciation variation to improve the performance of a Dutch CSR

OpenAIRE

Kessens, J.M.; Wester, M.; Strik, H.

1999-01-01

This paper describes how the performance of a continuous speech recognizer for Dutch has been improved by modeling within-word and cross-word pronunciation variation. Within-word variants were automatically generated by applying five phonological rules to the words in the lexicon. For the within-word method, a significant improvement is found compared to the baseline. Cross-word pronunciation variation was modeled using two different methods: 1) adding cross-word variants directly to the lexi...

Word aligned bitmap compression method, data structure, and apparatus

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Wu, Kesheng; Shoshani, Arie; Otoo, Ekow

2004-12-14

The Word-Aligned Hybrid (WAH) bitmap compression method and data structure is a relatively efficient method for searching and performing logical, counting, and pattern location operations upon large datasets. The technique is comprised of a data structure and methods that are optimized for computational efficiency by using the WAH compression method, which typically takes advantage of the target computing system's native word length. WAH is particularly apropos to infrequently varying databases, including those found in the on-line analytical processing (OLAP) industry, due to the increased computational efficiency of the WAH compressed bitmap index. Some commercial database products already include some version of a bitmap index, which could possibly be replaced by the WAH bitmap compression techniques for potentially increased operation speed, as well as increased efficiencies in constructing compressed bitmaps. Combined together, this technique may be particularly useful for real-time business intelligence. Additional WAH applications may include scientific modeling, such as climate and combustion simulations, to minimize search time for analysis and subsequent data visualization.

Acoustic-phonetic cues to word boundary location: Evidence from word spotting

OpenAIRE

Dumay, Nicolas; Content, Alain; Frauenfelder, Ulrich Hans

1999-01-01

This research examined acoustic-phonetic cues to word boundary location in French consonant clusters, and assessed their use in on-line lexical segmentation. Two word-spotting experiments manipulated the alignment between word targets and syllable boundaries. A perceptual cost of such misalignment was observed for obstruent-liquid clusters but not for /s/ + obstruent clusters. For the former clusters, the analysis of a corpus of utterances showed systematic variations in segment durations as ...

THE SPECIAL STATUS OF EXOGENOUS WORD-FORMATION WITHIN THE GERMAN WORD-FORMATION SYSTEM

OpenAIRE

Zhilyuk Sergey Aleksandrovich

2014-01-01

The article presents the properties of exogenous word-formation system taking into account the existence of two word-formation systems in modern German. On the basis of foreign research which reveal modern trends in German word-formation connected with the internationalization and the development of new European Latin language. The author defines key features of exogenous word-formation, i.e. foreign origin of wordformation units, unmotivated units, unmotivated interchange in base and affixes...

L2 Word Recognition: Influence of L1 Orthography on Multi-Syllabic Word Recognition

Science.gov (United States)

Hamada, Megumi

2017-01-01

L2 reading research suggests that L1 orthographic experience influences L2 word recognition. Nevertheless, the findings on multi-syllabic words in English are still limited despite the fact that a vast majority of words are multi-syllabic. The study investigated whether L1 orthography influences the recognition of multi-syllabic words, focusing on…

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

Science.gov (United States)

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.…

Understanding Medical Words

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... Bar Home Current Issue Past Issues Understanding Medical Words Past Issues / Summer 2009 Table of Contents For ... Medicine that teaches you about many of the words related to your health care Do you have ...

Finding Rising and Falling Words

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Tjong Kim Sang, E.

2016-01-01

We examine two different methods for finding rising words (among which neologisms) and falling words (among which archaisms) in decades of magazine texts (millions of words) and in years of tweets (billions of words): one based on correlation coefficients of relative frequencies and time, and one

Lexical availability of young Spanish EFL learners: emotion words versus non-emotion words

OpenAIRE

Jiménez Catalán, R.; Dewaele, Jean-Marc

2017-01-01

This study intends to contribute to L2 emotion vocabulary research by looking at the words that primary school EFL learners produce in response to prompts in a lexical availability task. Specifically, it aims to ascertain whether emotion prompts (Love, Hate, Happy and Sad) generate a greater number of words than non-emotion prompts (School and Animals). It also seeks to identify the words learners associate with each semantic category to determine whether the words produced in response to emo...

An exploration of the word 'palliative' in the 19th century: searching the BMJ archives for clues.

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Taubert, Mark; Fielding, Helen; Mathews, Emma; Frazer, Ricky

2013-03-01

Palliative care went through a significant evolution in the 20th century, but the 19th century has been seen my some scholars as the real turning point toward the more modern concept of hospices and palliative care. To investigate some examples of earlier uses of the word 'palliative', a literature search was conducted within the earliest available BMJ archive sections, the years 1840 to 1842. This provided a glimpse into how the word was used in the medical literature in Victorian times, mid-nineteenth century. Search results brought up a number of case reports, and the word was employed to describe medicines ('use of palliatives') as well as passive, non-active treatment approaches, probably best described as a watch-and-wait strategy. Of note is that the first recorded use of the word in the archives is by a surgeon. Some doctors associated the word palliative with there not being any prospect for cure and only for the relief of symptoms and greater comfort of the patient. There were, however, early reflections on whether palliative treatments may in some cases increase the length of patients' lives.

Essential words for the TOEFL

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Matthiesen, Steven J

2017-01-01

This revised book is specifically designed for ESL students preparing to take the TOEFL. Includes new words and phrases, a section on purpose words, a list of vocabulary words with definitions, sample sentences, practice exercises for 500 need-to-know words, practice test with answer key, and more.

Reduplication Facilitates Early Word Segmentation

Science.gov (United States)

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…

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

Science.gov (United States)

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

2012-06-01

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

Frequency Analysis of the Words in the Academic Word List (AWL) and Non-AWL Content Words in Applied Linguistics Research Papers

Science.gov (United States)

Vongpumivitch, Viphavee; Huang, Ju-yu; Chang, Yu-Chia

2009-01-01

This study is a corpus-based lexical study that aims to explore the use of words in Coxhead's (2000) Academic Word List (AWL) in journal articles in the field of applied linguistics. A 1.5 million-word corpus called the Applied Linguistics Research Articles Corpus (ALC) was created for this study. The corpus consists of 200 research articles that…

Hearing taboo words can result in early talker effects in word recognition for female listeners.

Science.gov (United States)

Tuft, Samantha E; MᶜLennan, Conor T; Krestar, Maura L

2018-02-01

Previous spoken word recognition research using the long-term repetition-priming paradigm found performance costs for stimuli mismatching in talker identity. That is, when words were repeated across the two blocks, and the identity of the talker changed reaction times (RTs) were slower than when the repeated words were spoken by the same talker. Such performance costs, or talker effects, followed a time course, occurring only when processing was relatively slow. More recent research suggests that increased explicit and implicit attention towards the talkers can result in talker effects even during relatively fast processing. The purpose of the current study was to examine whether word meaning would influence the pattern of talker effects in an easy lexical decision task and, if so, whether results would differ depending on whether the presentation of neutral and taboo words was mixed or blocked. Regardless of presentation, participants responded to taboo words faster than neutral words. Furthermore, talker effects for the female talker emerged when participants heard both taboo and neutral words (consistent with an attention-based hypothesis), but not for participants that heard only taboo or only neutral words (consistent with the time-course hypothesis). These findings have important implications for theoretical models of spoken word recognition.

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

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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.

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

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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

Teach yourself visually WordPress

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Majure, Janet

2012-01-01

Get your blog up and running with the latest version of WordPress WordPress is one of the most popular, easy-to-use blogging platforms and allows you to create a dynamic and engaging blog, even if you have no programming skills or experience. Ideal for the visual learner, Teach Yourself VISUALLY WordPress, Second Edition introduces you to the exciting possibilities of the newest version of WordPress and helps you get started, step by step, with creating and setting up a WordPress site. Author and experienced WordPress user Janet Majure shares advice, insight, and best practices for taking full

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

Science.gov (United States)

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.

Clusters of word properties as predictors of elementary school children's performance on two word tasks

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Tellings, A.E.J.M.; Coppens, K.M.; Gelissen, J.P.T.M.; Schreuder, R.

2013-01-01

Often, the classification of words does not go beyond "difficult" (i.e., infrequent, late-learned, nonimageable, etc.) or "easy" (i.e., frequent, early-learned, imageable, etc.) words. In the present study, we used a latent cluster analysis to divide 703 Dutch words with scores for eight word

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

Grounding word learning in space.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

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.

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

Science.gov (United States)

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

Activation of extrastriate and frontal cortical areas by visual words and word-like stimuli

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Petersen, S.E.; Fox, P.T.; Snyder, A.Z.; Raichle, M.E.

1990-01-01

Visual presentation of words activates extrastriate regions of the occipital lobes of the brain. When analyzed by positron emission tomography (PET), certain areas in the left, medial extrastriate visual cortex were activated by visually presented pseudowords that obey English spelling rules, as well as by actual words. These areas were not activated by nonsense strings of letters or letter-like forms. Thus visual word form computations are based on learned distinctions between words and nonwords. In addition, during passive presentation of words, but not pseudowords, activation occurred in a left frontal area that is related to semantic processing. These findings support distinctions made in cognitive psychology and computational modeling between high-level visual and semantic computations on single words and describe the anatomy that may underlie these distinctions

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

Situated Word Learning: Words of the Year (WsOY) and Social Studies Inquiry

Science.gov (United States)

Heafner, Tina L.; Triplett, Nicholas; Handler, Laura; Massey, Dixie

2018-01-01

Current events influence public interest and drive Internet word searches. For over a decade, linguists and dictionary publishers have analyzed big data from Internet word searches to designate "Words of the Year" (WsOY). In this study, we examine how WsOY can foster critical digital literacy and illuminate essential aspects of inquiry…

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

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Débora Mattos Marques

2016-10-01

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

Word-serial Architectures for Filtering and Variable Rate Decimation

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Eugene Grayver

2002-01-01

Full Text Available A new flexible architecture is proposed for word-serial filtering and variable rate decimation/interpolation. The architecture is targeted for low power applications requiring medium to low data rate and is ideally suited for implementation on either an ASIC or an FPGA. It combines the small size and low power of an ASIC with the programmability and flexibility of a DSP. An efficient memory addressing scheme eliminates the need for power hungry shift registers and allows full reconfiguration. The decimation ratio, filter length and filter coefficients can all be changed in real time. The architecture takes advantage of coefficient symmetries in linear phase filters and in polyphase components.

The Multisyllabic Word Dilemma: Helping Students Build Meaning, Spell, and Read "Big" Words.

Science.gov (United States)

Cunningham, Patricia M.

1998-01-01

Looks at what is known about multisyllabic words, which is a lot more than educators knew when the previous generation of multisyllabic word instruction was created. Reviews the few studies that have carried out instructional approaches to increase students' ability to decode big words. Outlines a program of instruction, based on what is currently…

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...

Blending Words Found In Social Media

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Giyatmi Giyatmi

2017-12-01

Full Text Available There are many new words from the social media such as Netizen, Trentop, and Delcon. Those words include in blending. Blending is one of word formations combining two clipped words to form a brand new word. The researchers are interested in analyzing blend words used in the social media such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Blackberry Messenger. This research aims at (1 finding blend words used in the social media (2 describing kinds of blend words used in social media (3 describing the process of blend word formation used in the social media. This research uses some theories dealing with definition of blending and kinds of blending. This research belongs to descriptive qualitative research. Data of the research are English blend words used in social media. Data sources of this research are websites consisting of some English words used in social media and some social media users as the informant. Techniques of data collecting in this research are observation and simak catat. Observation is by observing some websites consisting of some English words used in social media. Simak catat is done by taking some notes on the data and encoding in symbols such as No/Blend words/Kinds of Blending. The researchers use source triangulation to check the data from the researchers with the informant and theory triangulation to determine kinds of blending and blend word formation in social media. There are115 data of blend words. Those data consists of 65 data of Instagram, 47 data of Twitter, 1 datum of Facebook, and 2 data of Blackberry Messenger. There are 2 types of blending used in social media;108 data of blending with clipping and 7 data of blending with overlapping. There are 10 ways of blend word formation found in this research.

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

Science.gov (United States)

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

2017-11-01

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

Skilled deaf readers have an enhanced perceptual span in reading.

Science.gov (United States)

Bélanger, Nathalie N; Slattery, Timothy J; Mayberry, Rachel I; Rayner, Keith

2012-07-01

Recent evidence suggests that, compared with hearing people, deaf people have enhanced visual attention to simple stimuli viewed in the parafovea and periphery. Although a large part of reading involves processing the fixated words in foveal vision, readers also utilize information in parafoveal vision to preprocess upcoming words and decide where to look next. In the study reported here, we investigated whether auditory deprivation affects low-level visual processing during reading by comparing the perceptual span of deaf signers who were skilled and less-skilled readers with the perceptual span of skilled hearing readers. Compared with hearing readers, the two groups of deaf readers had a larger perceptual span than would be expected given their reading ability. These results provide the first evidence that deaf readers' enhanced attentional allocation to the parafovea is used during complex cognitive tasks, such as reading.

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

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Tatsuro Yamada

2017-12-01

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

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

Science.gov (United States)

Nakagawa, A; Sukigara, M

2000-09-01

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

Sonority and early words

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Kjærbæk, Laila; Boeg Thomsen, Ditte; Lambertsen, Claus

2015-01-01

Syllables play an important role in children’s early language acquisition, and children appear to rely on clear syllabic structures as a key to word acquisition (Vihman 1996; Oller 2000). However, not all languages present children with equally clear cues to syllabic structure, and since the spec......Syllables play an important role in children’s early language acquisition, and children appear to rely on clear syllabic structures as a key to word acquisition (Vihman 1996; Oller 2000). However, not all languages present children with equally clear cues to syllabic structure, and since...... acquisition therefore presents us with the opportunity to examine how children respond to the task of word learning when the input language offers less clear cues to syllabic structure than usually seen. To investigate the sound structure in Danish children’s lexical development, we need a model of syllable......-29 months. For the two children, the phonetic structure of the first ten words to occur is compared with that of the last ten words to occur before 30 months of age, and with that of ten words in between. Measures related to the sonority envelope, viz. sonority types and in particular sonority rises...

WordPress Top Plugins

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Corbin, Brandon

2010-01-01

Time flies when you're having fun. This is the right way to describe this WordPress Top Plugins book by Brandon Corbin. With real world examples and by showing you the perks of having these plugins installed on your websites, the author is all set to captivate your interest from start to end. Regardless of whether this is your first time working with WordPress, or you're a seasoned WordPress coding ninja, WordPress Top Plugins will walk you through finding and installing the best plugins for generating and sharing content, building communities and reader base, and generating real advertising r

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

NARCIS (Netherlands)

McQueen, J.M.; Hüttig, F.

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

Large-corpus phoneme and word recognition and the generality of lexical context in CVC word perception.

Science.gov (United States)

Gelfand, Jessica T; Christie, Robert E; Gelfand, Stanley A

2014-02-01

Speech recognition may be analyzed in terms of recognition probabilities for perceptual wholes (e.g., words) and parts (e.g., phonemes), where j or the j-factor reveals the number of independent perceptual units required for recognition of the whole (Boothroyd, 1968b; Boothroyd & Nittrouer, 1988; Nittrouer & Boothroyd, 1990). For consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) nonsense syllables, j ∼ 3 because all 3 phonemes are needed to identify the syllable, but j ∼ 2.5 for real-word CVCs (revealing ∼2.5 independent perceptual units) because higher level contributions such as lexical knowledge enable word recognition even if less than 3 phonemes are accurately received. These findings were almost exclusively determined with the 120-word corpus of the isophonemic word lists (Boothroyd, 1968a; Boothroyd & Nittrouer, 1988), presented one word at a time. It is therefore possible that its generality or applicability may be limited. This study thus determined j by using a much larger and less restricted corpus of real-word CVCs presented in 3-word groups as well as whether j is influenced by test size. The j-factor for real-word CVCs was derived from the recognition performance of 223 individuals with a broad range of hearing sensitivity by using the Tri-Word Test (Gelfand, 1998), which involves 50 three-word presentations and a corpus of 450 words. The influence of test size was determined from a subsample of 96 participants with separate scores for the first 10, 20, and 25 (and all 50) presentation sets of the full test. The mean value of j was 2.48 with a 95% confidence interval of 2.44-2.53, which is in good agreement with values obtained with isophonemic word lists, although its value varies among individuals. A significant correlation was found between percent-correct scores and j, but it was small and accounted for only 12.4% of the variance in j for phoneme scores ≥60%. Mean j-factors for the 10-, 20-, 25-, and 50-set test sizes were between 2.49 and 2.53 and were not

Word Durations in Non-Native English

Science.gov (United States)

Baker, Rachel E.; Baese-Berk, Melissa; Bonnasse-Gahot, Laurent; Kim, Midam; Van Engen, Kristin J.; Bradlow, Ann R.

2010-01-01

In this study, we compare the effects of English lexical features on word duration for native and non-native English speakers and for non-native speakers with different L1s and a range of L2 experience. We also examine whether non-native word durations lead to judgments of a stronger foreign accent. We measured word durations in English paragraphs read by 12 American English (AE), 20 Korean, and 20 Chinese speakers. We also had AE listeners rate the `accentedness' of these non-native speakers. AE speech had shorter durations, greater within-speaker word duration variance, greater reduction of function words, and less between-speaker variance than non-native speech. However, both AE and non-native speakers showed sensitivity to lexical predictability by reducing second mentions and high frequency words. Non-native speakers with more native-like word durations, greater within-speaker word duration variance, and greater function word reduction were perceived as less accented. Overall, these findings identify word duration as an important and complex feature of foreign-accented English. PMID:21516172

Learning words

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Jaswal, Vikram K.; Hansen, Mikkel

2006-01-01

Children tend to infer that when a speaker uses a new label, the label refers to an unlabeled object rather than one they already know the label for. Does this inference reflect a default assumption that words are mutually exclusive? Or does it instead reflect the result of a pragmatic reasoning...... process about what the speaker intended? In two studies, we distinguish between these possibilities. Preschoolers watched as a speaker pointed toward (Study 1) or looked at (Study 2) a familiar object while requesting the referent for a new word (e.g. 'Can you give me the blicket?'). In both studies......, despite the speaker's unambiguous behavioral cue indicating an intent to refer to a familiar object, children inferred that the novel label referred to an unfamiliar object. These results suggest that children expect words to be mutually exclusive even when a speaker provides some kinds of pragmatic...

Ontological Annotation with WordNet

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

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.

Word Translation Entropy

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Schaeffer, Moritz; Dragsted, Barbara; Hvelplund, Kristian Tangsgaard

This study reports on an investigation into the relationship between the number of translation alternatives for a single word and eye movements on the source text. In addition, the effect of word order differences between source and target text on eye movements on the source text is studied. In p...

Clusters of word properties as predictors of elementary school children’s performance on two word tasks

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Tellings, A.E.J.M.; Coppens, K.; Gelissen, J.P.T.M.; Schreuder, R.

2013-01-01

Often, the classification of words does not go beyond “difficult” (i.e., infrequent, late-learned, nonimageable, etc.) or “easy” (i.e., frequent, early-learned, imageable, etc.) words. In the present study, we used a latent cluster analysis to divide 703 Dutch words with scores for eight word

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.

The Effect of Culture Type on the Length of Persian Proverbs Compared to their English Equivalents

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Amir Mohammadian

2017-05-01

Full Text Available The interrelation of culture and language is to the extent that many classifications of culture are based on linguistic factors. In this article, high and low context cultures division is assessed on English and Persian as they belong to different cultural types. Forty Persian proverbs are contrasted with their equivalents in English to investigate whether there is a difference in the number of word forms used in each. In order to avoid linguistic differences which are effective in enumerating word forms, the second lines in linguistic glosses provided for Persian proverbs including a one to one correspondence of each word in English are used to count word forms. Results show that 70 percent of the Persian proverbs in the data are longer than their English counterparts. This shows that relative length of proverbs can be a distinguishing factor reflecting cultural types. The results not only confirm the applicability of this cultural division in the field of proverbs, but also a matter of tendency rather than a dichotomy in belonging to a high or low context culture is proposed. At the end, there are suggestions for further relevant investigations.

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.

Defining the Medical Intensive Care Unit in the Words of Patients and Their Family Members: A Freelisting Analysis.

Science.gov (United States)

Auriemma, Catherine L; Lyon, Sarah M; Strelec, Lauren E; Kent, Saida; Barg, Frances K; Halpern, Scott D

2015-07-01

No validated conceptual framework exists for understanding the outcomes of patient- and family-centered care in critical care. To explore the meaning of intensive care unit among patients and their families by using freelisting. The phrase intensive care unit was used to prompt freelisting among intensive care unit patients and patients' family members. Freelisting is an anthropological technique in which individuals define a domain by listing all words that come to mind in response to a topic. Salience scores, derived from the frequency with which a word was mentioned, the order in which it was mentioned, and the length of each list, were calculated and analyzed. Among the 45 participants, many words were salient to both patients and patients' family members. Words salient solely for patients included consciousness, getting better, noisy, and personal care. Words salient solely for family members included sadness, busy, professional, and hope. The words suffering, busy, and team were salient solely for family members of patients who lived, whereas sadness, professionals, and hope were salient solely for family members of patients who died. The words caring and death were salient for both groups. Intensive care unit patients and their families define intensive care unit by using words to describe sickness, caring, medical staff, emotional states, and physical qualities of the unit. The results validate the importance of these topics among patients and their families in the intensive care unit and illustrate the usefulness of freelisting in critical care research. ©2015 American Association of Critical-Care Nurses.

KAJIAN LITERATUR: MANAKAH YANG LEBIH EFEKTIF? TRADITIONAL WORD OF MOUTH ATAU ELECTRONIC WORD OF MOUTH

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Putu Adriani Prayustika

2016-12-01

Full Text Available Word of Mouth telah diakui sebagai salah satu strategi komunikasi yang paling efektif dalam transisi informasi perusahaan kepada konsumen. Perusahaan memanfaatkan komunikasi word of mouth untuk kepentingan pemasaran produk dan layanan. Namun, komunikasi WOM konvensional hanya efektif dalam batasan kontak sosial terbatas. Kemajuan teknologi informasi dan munculnya situs jaringan sosial online telah mengubah cara informasi ditransmisikan dan telah melampaui keterbatasan tradisional WOM. Komunikasi word of mouth dengan memanfaatkan teknologi ini sering disebut electronic word of mouth (eWOM, dimana komunikasi ini memanfaatkan media baru, seperti misalnya media sosial. Makalah ini akan membahas kajian literatur dari beberapa penelitian yang telah dilakukan sebelumnya dalam membandingkan efektivitas traditional word of mouth dan electronic word of mouth. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa secara umum dapat dikatakan dengan perkembangan teknologi seperti sekarang, eWOM jauh lebih efektif daripada traditional WOM.

Scientific word, Version 1.0

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Semen Köksal

1993-01-01

Full Text Available Scientific Word is the first fully integrated mathematical word processor in the Windows 3.1 environment, which uses the TEX typesetting language for output. It runs as a Microsoft Windows application program and has two-way interface to TEX. The Scientific Word is an object-oriented WYSIWYG word processor for virtually all users who need typesetting scientific books, manuals and papers. It includes automatic equation numbering, spell checking, and LATEX and DVI previewer.

Appraisal of space words and allocation of emotion words in bodily space.

Science.gov (United States)

Marmolejo-Ramos, Fernando; Elosúa, María Rosa; Yamada, Yuki; Hamm, Nicholas Francis; Noguchi, Kimihiro

2013-01-01

The body-specificity hypothesis (BSH) predicts that right-handers and left-handers allocate positive and negative concepts differently on the horizontal plane, i.e., while left-handers allocate negative concepts on the right-hand side of their bodily space, right-handers allocate such concepts to the left-hand side. Similar research shows that people, in general, tend to allocate positive and negative concepts in upper and lower areas, respectively, in relation to the vertical plane. Further research shows a higher salience of the vertical plane over the horizontal plane in the performance of sensorimotor tasks. The aim of the paper is to examine whether there should be a dominance of the vertical plane over the horizontal plane, not only at a sensorimotor level but also at a conceptual level. In Experiment 1, various participants from diverse linguistic backgrounds were asked to rate the words "up", "down", "left", and "right". In Experiment 2, right-handed participants from two linguistic backgrounds were asked to allocate emotion words into a square grid divided into four boxes of equal areas. Results suggest that the vertical plane is more salient than the horizontal plane regarding the allocation of emotion words and positively-valenced words were placed in upper locations whereas negatively-valenced words were placed in lower locations. Together, the results lend support to the BSH while also suggesting a higher saliency of the vertical plane over the horizontal plane in the allocation of valenced words.

Appraisal of space words and allocation of emotion words in bodily space.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Fernando Marmolejo-Ramos

Full Text Available The body-specificity hypothesis (BSH predicts that right-handers and left-handers allocate positive and negative concepts differently on the horizontal plane, i.e., while left-handers allocate negative concepts on the right-hand side of their bodily space, right-handers allocate such concepts to the left-hand side. Similar research shows that people, in general, tend to allocate positive and negative concepts in upper and lower areas, respectively, in relation to the vertical plane. Further research shows a higher salience of the vertical plane over the horizontal plane in the performance of sensorimotor tasks. The aim of the paper is to examine whether there should be a dominance of the vertical plane over the horizontal plane, not only at a sensorimotor level but also at a conceptual level. In Experiment 1, various participants from diverse linguistic backgrounds were asked to rate the words "up", "down", "left", and "right". In Experiment 2, right-handed participants from two linguistic backgrounds were asked to allocate emotion words into a square grid divided into four boxes of equal areas. Results suggest that the vertical plane is more salient than the horizontal plane regarding the allocation of emotion words and positively-valenced words were placed in upper locations whereas negatively-valenced words were placed in lower locations. Together, the results lend support to the BSH while also suggesting a higher saliency of the vertical plane over the horizontal plane in the allocation of valenced words.

Appraisal of Space Words and Allocation of Emotion Words in Bodily Space

Science.gov (United States)

Marmolejo-Ramos, Fernando; Elosúa, María Rosa; Yamada, Yuki; Hamm, Nicholas Francis; Noguchi, Kimihiro

2013-01-01

The body-specificity hypothesis (BSH) predicts that right-handers and left-handers allocate positive and negative concepts differently on the horizontal plane, i.e., while left-handers allocate negative concepts on the right-hand side of their bodily space, right-handers allocate such concepts to the left-hand side. Similar research shows that people, in general, tend to allocate positive and negative concepts in upper and lower areas, respectively, in relation to the vertical plane. Further research shows a higher salience of the vertical plane over the horizontal plane in the performance of sensorimotor tasks. The aim of the paper is to examine whether there should be a dominance of the vertical plane over the horizontal plane, not only at a sensorimotor level but also at a conceptual level. In Experiment 1, various participants from diverse linguistic backgrounds were asked to rate the words “up”, “down”, “left”, and “right”. In Experiment 2, right-handed participants from two linguistic backgrounds were asked to allocate emotion words into a square grid divided into four boxes of equal areas. Results suggest that the vertical plane is more salient than the horizontal plane regarding the allocation of emotion words and positively-valenced words were placed in upper locations whereas negatively-valenced words were placed in lower locations. Together, the results lend support to the BSH while also suggesting a higher saliency of the vertical plane over the horizontal plane in the allocation of valenced words. PMID:24349112

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

Science.gov (United States)

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.

1100 words you must know

CERN Document Server

Bromberg, Murray

2018-01-01

A Barron's best-seller for more than four decades! This brand-new edition has been expanded and updated with word lists and definitions, analogy exercises, words-in-context exercises, idiom indexes, a pronunciation guide, and more. It's the ideal way to strengthen word power!.

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

Science.gov (United States)

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.

Word encoding during sleep is suggested by correlations between word-evoked up-states and post-sleep semantic priming

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Simon eRuch

2014-11-01

Full Text Available To test whether humans can encode words during sleep we played everyday words to men while they were napping and assessed priming from sleep-played words following waking. Words were presented during non-rapid eye movement (NREM sleep. Priming was assessed using a semantic and a perceptual priming test. These tests measured differences in the processing of words that had been or had not been played during sleep. Synonyms to sleep-played words were the targets in the semantic priming test that tapped the meaning of sleep-played words. All men responded to sleep-played words by producing up-states in their electroencephalogram. Up-states are NREM sleep-specific phases of briefly increased neuronal excitability. The word-evoked up-states might have promoted word processing during sleep. Yet, the mean performance in the priming tests administered following sleep was at chance level, which suggests that participants as a group failed to show priming following sleep. However, performance in the two priming tests was positively correlated to each other and to the magnitude of the word-evoked up-states. Hence, the larger a participant’s word-evoked up-states, the larger his perceptual and semantic priming. Those participants who scored high on all variables must have encoded words during sleep. We conclude that some humans are able to encode words during sleep, but more research is needed to pin down the factors that modulate this ability.

Fundamental length and relativistic length

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Strel'tsov, V.N.

1988-01-01

It si noted that the introduction of fundamental length contradicts the conventional representations concerning the contraction of the longitudinal size of fast-moving objects. The use of the concept of relativistic length and the following ''elongation formula'' permits one to solve this problem

Does "Word Coach" Coach Words?

Science.gov (United States)

Cobb, Tom; Horst, Marlise

2011-01-01

This study reports on the design and testing of an integrated suite of vocabulary training games for Nintendo[TM] collectively designated "My Word Coach" (Ubisoft, 2008). The games' design is based on a wide range of learning research, from classic studies on recycling patterns to frequency studies of modern corpora. Its general usage…

Word Recognition in Auditory Cortex

Science.gov (United States)

DeWitt, Iain D. J.

2013-01-01

Although spoken word recognition is more fundamental to human communication than text recognition, knowledge of word-processing in auditory cortex is comparatively impoverished. This dissertation synthesizes current models of auditory cortex, models of cortical pattern recognition, models of single-word reading, results in phonetics and results in…

Cluster analysis of word frequency dynamics

Science.gov (United States)

Maslennikova, Yu S.; Bochkarev, V. V.; Belashova, I. A.

2015-01-01

This paper describes the analysis and modelling of word usage frequency time series. During one of previous studies, an assumption was put forward that all word usage frequencies have uniform dynamics approaching the shape of a Gaussian function. This assumption can be checked using the frequency dictionaries of the Google Books Ngram database. This database includes 5.2 million books published between 1500 and 2008. The corpus contains over 500 billion words in American English, British English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Hebrew, and Chinese. We clustered time series of word usage frequencies using a Kohonen neural network. The similarity between input vectors was estimated using several algorithms. As a result of the neural network training procedure, more than ten different forms of time series were found. They describe the dynamics of word usage frequencies from birth to death of individual words. Different groups of word forms were found to have different dynamics of word usage frequency variations.

The compressed word problem for groups

CERN Document Server

Lohrey, Markus

2014-01-01

The Compressed Word Problem for Groups provides a detailed exposition of known results on the compressed word problem, emphasizing efficient algorithms for the compressed word problem in various groups. The author presents the necessary background along with the most recent results on the compressed word problem to create a cohesive self-contained book accessible to computer scientists as well as mathematicians. Readers will quickly reach the frontier of current research which makes the book especially appealing for students looking for a currently active research topic at the intersection of group theory and computer science. The word problem introduced in 1910 by Max Dehn is one of the most important decision problems in group theory. For many groups, highly efficient algorithms for the word problem exist. In recent years, a new technique based on data compression for providing more efficient algorithms for word problems, has been developed, by representing long words over group generators in a compres...

Cluster analysis of word frequency dynamics

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Maslennikova, Yu S; Bochkarev, V V; Belashova, I A

2015-01-01

This paper describes the analysis and modelling of word usage frequency time series. During one of previous studies, an assumption was put forward that all word usage frequencies have uniform dynamics approaching the shape of a Gaussian function. This assumption can be checked using the frequency dictionaries of the Google Books Ngram database. This database includes 5.2 million books published between 1500 and 2008. The corpus contains over 500 billion words in American English, British English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Hebrew, and Chinese. We clustered time series of word usage frequencies using a Kohonen neural network. The similarity between input vectors was estimated using several algorithms. As a result of the neural network training procedure, more than ten different forms of time series were found. They describe the dynamics of word usage frequencies from birth to death of individual words. Different groups of word forms were found to have different dynamics of word usage frequency variations

Every Word Is on Trial: Six-Word Memoirs in the Classroom

Science.gov (United States)

Saunders, Jane M.; Smith, Emily E.

2014-01-01

Six-word memoirs are readily available through books, magazine articles, and on the Internet. This teaching tip explores how to use six-word memoirs to guide students through the writing process steps from developing and revising a concise memoir, to employing technology and imagery, to publishing final versions of their work online. Included in…

WordPress 3.7 complete

CERN Document Server

Król, Karol

2013-01-01

WordPress 3.5 Complete: Third Edition is a comprehensive and step-by-step tutorial packed with screenshots and examples to make it easy and quick to pick it up.This WordPress book is a guide to WordPress for online publishers and web developers. If you are new to blogging and want to create your own blog or website from scratch, then ""WordPress 3.5 Complete: Third Edition"" is for you. No prior knowledge of HTML/CSS or PHP is required.

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

Science.gov (United States)

Kim, Albert; Lai, Vicky

2012-05-01

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

ERP correlates of unexpected word forms in a picture–word study of infants and adults

Science.gov (United States)

Duta, M.D.; Styles, S.J.; Plunkett, K.

2012-01-01

We tested 14-month-olds and adults in an event-related potentials (ERPs) study in which pictures of familiar objects generated expectations about upcoming word forms. Expected word forms labelled the picture (word condition), while unexpected word forms mismatched by either a small deviation in word medial vowel height (mispronunciation condition) or a large deviation from the onset of the first speech segment (pseudoword condition). Both infants and adults showed sensitivity to both types of unexpected word form. Adults showed a chain of discrete effects: positivity over the N1 wave, negativity over the P2 wave (PMN effect) and negativity over the N2 wave (N400 effect). Infants showed a similar pattern, including a robust effect similar to the adult P2 effect. These observations were underpinned by a novel visualisation method which shows the dynamics of the ERP within bands of the scalp over time. The results demonstrate shared processing mechanisms across development, as even subtle deviations from expected word forms were indexed in both age groups by a reduction in the amplitude of characteristic waves in the early auditory evoked potential. PMID:22483072

Smashing WordPress Beyond the Blog

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Hedengren, Thord Daniel

2011-01-01

Smashing WordPress shows you how to utilize the power of the WordPress platform, and provides a creative spark to help you build WordPress-powered sites that go beyond the obvious. The second edition of Smashing WordPress has been updated for WordPress 3.1+, which includes internal, custom post types, the admin bar, and lots of other useful new features. You will learn the core concepts used to post types, the admin bar, and lots of other useful new features. You will learn the core concepts used to build just about anything in WordPress, resulting in fast deployments and greater design flexib

Smashing WordPress Beyond the Blog

CERN Document Server

Hedengren, Thord Daniel

2012-01-01

The ultimate guide to WordPress, from the world's most popular resource for web designers and developers As one of the hottest tools on the web today for creating a blog, WordPress has evolved to be much more that just a blogging platform and has been pushed beyond its original purpose. With this new edition of a perennially popular WordPress resource, Smashing Magazine offers you the information you need so you can maximize the potential and power of WordPress. WordPress expert Thord Daniel Hedengren takes you beyond the basic blog to show you how to leverage the capabilities of WordPress to

Build an Interactive Word Wall

Science.gov (United States)

Jackson, Julie

2018-01-01

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

[Emotional valence of words in schizophrenia].

Science.gov (United States)

Jalenques, I; Enjolras, J; Izaute, M

2013-06-01

Emotion recognition is a domain in which deficits have been reported in schizophrenia. A number of emotion classification studies have indicated that emotion processing deficits in schizophrenia are more pronounced for negative affects. Given the difficulty of developing material suitable for the study of these emotional deficits, it would be interesting to examine whether patients suffering from schizophrenia are responsive to positively and negatively charged emotion-related words that could be used within the context of remediation strategies. The emotional perception of words was examined in a clinical experiment involving schizophrenia patients. This emotional perception was expressed by the patients in terms of the valence associated with the words. In the present study, we investigated whether schizophrenia patients would assign the same negative and positive valences to words as healthy individuals. Twenty volunteer, clinically stable, outpatients from the Psychiatric Service of the University Hospital of Clermont-Ferrand were recruited. Diagnoses were based on DSM-IV criteria. Global psychiatric symptoms were assessed using the Positive and Negative Symptoms Scale (PANSS). The patients had to evaluate the emotional valence of a set of 300 words on a 5-point scale ranging from "very unpleasant" to "very pleasant". . The collected results were compared with those obtained by Bonin et al. (2003) [13] from 97 University students. Correlational analyses of the two studies revealed that the emotional valences were highly correlated, i.e. the schizophrenia patients estimated very similar emotional valences. More precisely, it was possible to examine three separate sets of 100 words each (positive words, neutral words and negative words). The positive words that were evaluated were the more positive words from the norms collected by Bonin et al. (2003) [13], and the negative words were the more negative examples taken from these norms. The neutral words

Words Do Come Easy (Sometimes)

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Starrfelt, Randi; Petersen, Anders; Vangkilde, Signe Allerup

multiple stimuli are presented simultaneously: Are words treated as units or wholes in visual short term memory? Using methods based on a Theory of Visual Attention (TVA), we measured perceptual threshold, visual processing speed and visual short term memory capacity for words and letters, in two simple...... a different pattern: Letters are perceived more easily than words, and this is reflected both in perceptual processing speed and short term memory capacity. So even if single words do come easy, they seem to enjoy no advantage in visual short term memory....

Voice congruency facilitates word recognition.

Science.gov (United States)

Campeanu, Sandra; Craik, Fergus I M; Alain, Claude

2013-01-01

Behavioral studies of spoken word memory have shown that context congruency facilitates both word and source recognition, though the level at which context exerts its influence remains equivocal. We measured event-related potentials (ERPs) while participants performed both types of recognition task with words spoken in four voices. Two voice parameters (i.e., gender and accent) varied between speakers, with the possibility that none, one or two of these parameters was congruent between study and test. Results indicated that reinstating the study voice at test facilitated both word and source recognition, compared to similar or no context congruency at test. Behavioral effects were paralleled by two ERP modulations. First, in the word recognition test, the left parietal old/new effect showed a positive deflection reflective of context congruency between study and test words. Namely, the same speaker condition provided the most positive deflection of all correctly identified old words. In the source recognition test, a right frontal positivity was found for the same speaker condition compared to the different speaker conditions, regardless of response success. Taken together, the results of this study suggest that the benefit of context congruency is reflected behaviorally and in ERP modulations traditionally associated with recognition memory.

Voice congruency facilitates word recognition.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Sandra Campeanu

Full Text Available Behavioral studies of spoken word memory have shown that context congruency facilitates both word and source recognition, though the level at which context exerts its influence remains equivocal. We measured event-related potentials (ERPs while participants performed both types of recognition task with words spoken in four voices. Two voice parameters (i.e., gender and accent varied between speakers, with the possibility that none, one or two of these parameters was congruent between study and test. Results indicated that reinstating the study voice at test facilitated both word and source recognition, compared to similar or no context congruency at test. Behavioral effects were paralleled by two ERP modulations. First, in the word recognition test, the left parietal old/new effect showed a positive deflection reflective of context congruency between study and test words. Namely, the same speaker condition provided the most positive deflection of all correctly identified old words. In the source recognition test, a right frontal positivity was found for the same speaker condition compared to the different speaker conditions, regardless of response success. Taken together, the results of this study suggest that the benefit of context congruency is reflected behaviorally and in ERP modulations traditionally associated with recognition memory.

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

Science.gov (United States)

Garcia, Danilo; Sikström, Sverker

2013-06-01

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

Usage of the word 'ether'

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Duffy, M.C.

1980-01-01

Confusion has been caused by scientists using the one word 'ether' to classify models differing from each other in important respects. Major roles assigned to the word are examined, and the nature of modern ether theories surveyed. The part played by the several meanings attached to the word, in the ether concept, is outlined. (author)

WORD-MAKING IN PRESENT-DAY ENGLISH.

Science.gov (United States)

SIMONINI, R.C., JR.

WORDS CAN BE STUDIED BY DESCRIBING THEIR ORIGIN INDUCTIVELY OR DEDUCTIVELY. EITHER WAY, A PRECISE DEFINITION OF ETYMOLOGICAL CLASSES WHICH ARE MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE IS NEEDED. PRESENT-DAY ENGLISH IS CLASSIFIED INTO--(1) NATIVE WORDS WHICH CAN BE TRACED BACK TO THE WORD STOCK OF OLD ENGLISH, (2) LOAN WORDS NEW TO THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE WHICH HAD…

An Item Response Theory-Based, Computerized Adaptive Testing Version of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory: Words & Sentences (CDI:WS)

Science.gov (United States)

Makransky, Guido; Dale, Philip S.; Havmose, Philip; Bleses, Dorthe

2016-01-01

Purpose: This study investigated the feasibility and potential validity of an item response theory (IRT)-based computerized adaptive testing (CAT) version of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory: Words & Sentences (CDI:WS; Fenson et al., 2007) vocabulary checklist, with the objective of reducing length while maintaining…

Preschool Children’s Memory for Word Forms Remains Stable Over Several Days, but Gradually Decreases after Six Months

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Katherine Ruth Gordon

2016-09-01

Full Text Available Research on word learning has focused on children’s ability to identify a target object when given the word form after a minimal number of exposures to novel word-object pairings. However, relatively little research has focused on children’s ability to retrieve the word form when given the target object. The exceptions involve asking children to recall and produce forms, and children typically perform near floor on these measures. In the current study, 3- to 5-year-old children were administered a novel test of word form that allowed for recognition memory and manual responses. Specifically, when asked to label a previously trained object, children were given three forms to choose from: the target, a minimally different form, and a maximally different form. Children demonstrated memory for word forms at three post-training delays: 10 minutes (short-term, 2 to 3 days (long-term, and 6 months to 1 year (very long-term. However, children performed worse at the very long-term delay than the other time points, and the length of the very long-term delay was negatively related to performance. When in error, children were no more likely to select the minimally different form than the maximally different form at all time points. Overall, these results suggest that children remember word forms that are linked to objects over extended post-training intervals, but that their memory for the forms gradually decreases over time without further exposures. Furthermore, memory traces for word forms do not become less phonologically specific over time; rather children either identify the correct form, or they perform at chance.

Encoding in the visual word form area: an fMRI adaptation study of words versus handwriting.

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Barton, Jason J S; Fox, Christopher J; Sekunova, Alla; Iaria, Giuseppe

2010-08-01

Written texts are not just words but complex multidimensional stimuli, including aspects such as case, font, and handwriting style, for example. Neuropsychological reports suggest that left fusiform lesions can impair the reading of text for word (lexical) content, being associated with alexia, whereas right-sided lesions may impair handwriting recognition. We used fMRI adaptation in 13 healthy participants to determine if repetition-suppression occurred for words but not handwriting in the left visual word form area (VWFA) and the reverse in the right fusiform gyrus. Contrary to these expectations, we found adaptation for handwriting but not for words in both the left VWFA and the right VWFA homologue. A trend to adaptation for words but not handwriting was seen only in the left middle temporal gyrus. An analysis of anterior and posterior subdivisions of the left VWFA also failed to show any adaptation for words. We conclude that the right and the left fusiform gyri show similar patterns of adaptation for handwriting, consistent with a predominantly perceptual contribution to text processing.

Dynamics of Semantic and Word-Formation Subsystems of the Russian Language: Historical Dynamics of the Word Family

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Olga Ivanovna Dmitrieva

2015-09-01

Full Text Available The article provides comprehensive justification of the principles and methods of the synchronic and diachronic research of word-formation subsystems of the Russian language. The authors also study the ways of analyzing historical dynamics of word family as the main macro-unit of word-formation system. In the field of analysis there is a family of words with the stem 'ход-' (the meaning of 'motion', word-formation of which is investigated in different periods of the Russian literary language. Significance of motion-verbs in the process of forming a language picture of the world determined the character and the structure of this word family as one of the biggest in the history of the Russian language. In the article a structural and semantic dynamics of the word family 'ход-' is depicted. The results of the study show that in the ancient period the prefixes of verbal derivatives were formed, which became the apex-branched derivational paradigms existing in modern Russian. The old Russian period of language development is characterized by the appearance of words with connotative meaning (with suffixes -ishk-, -ichn-, as well as the words with possessive semantics (with suffixes –ev-, -sk-. In this period the verbs with the postfix -cz also supplement the analyzed word family. The period of formation of the National Russian language was marked by the loss of a large number of abstract nouns and the appearance of neologisms from some old Russian abstract nouns. The studied family in the modern Russian language is characterized by the following processes: the appearance of terms, the active semantic derivation, the weakening of word-formation variability, the semantic differentiation of duplicate units, the development of subsystem of words with connotative meanings, and the preservation of derivatives in all functional styles.

Differential cognitive processing of Kanji and Kana words: do orthographic and semantic codes function in parallel in word matching task.

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Kawakami, A; Hatta, T; Kogure, T

2001-12-01

Relative engagements of the orthographic and semantic codes in Kanji and Hiragana word recognition were investigated. In Exp. 1, subjects judged whether the pairs of Kanji words (prime and target) presented sequentially were physically identical to each other in the word condition. In the sentence condition, subjects decided whether the target word was valid for the prime sentence presented in advance. The results showed that the response times to the target swords orthographically similar (to the prime) were significantly slower than to semantically related target words in the word condition and that this was also the case in the sentence condition. In Exp. 2, subjects judged whether the target word written in Hiragana was physically identical to the prime word in the word condition. In the sentence condition, subjects decided if the target word was valid for the previously presented prime sentence. Analysis indicated that response times to orthographically similar words were slower than to semantically related words in the word condition but not in the sentence condition wherein the response times to the semantically and orthographically similar words were largely the same. Based on these results, differential contributions of orthographic and semantic codes in cognitive processing of Japanese Kanji and Hiragana words was discussed.

WordPress web application development

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Ratnayake, Rakhitha Nimesh

2013-01-01

An extensive, practical guide that explains how to adapt WordPress features, both conventional and trending, for web applications.This book is intended for WordPress developers and designers who have the desire to go beyond conventional website development to develop quality web applications within a limited time frame and for maximum profit. Experienced web developers who are looking for a framework for rapid application development will also find this to be a useful resource. Prior knowledge with of WordPress is preferable as the main focus will be on explaining methods for adapting WordPres

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.

Effects of word frequency and transitional probability on word reading durations of younger and older speakers

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Moers, C.; Meyer, A.S.; Janse, E.

2017-01-01

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

Word of Jeremiah - Word of God

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Holt, Else Kragelund

2007-01-01

The article examines the relationship between God, prophet and the people in the Book of Jeremiah. The analysis shows a close connection, almost an identification, between the divine word (and consequently God himself) and the prophet, so that the prophet becomes a metaphor for God. This is done...

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.

Interference Effects on the Recall of Pictures, Printed Words, and Spoken Words.

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Burton, John K.; Bruning, Roger H.

1982-01-01

Nouns were presented in triads as pictures, printed words, or spoken words and followed by various types of interference. Measures of short- and long-term memory were obtained. In short-term memory, pictorial superiority occurred with acoustic, and visual and acoustic, but not visual interference. Long-term memory showed superior recall for…

Interference Effects on the Recall of Pictures, Printed Words and Spoken Words.

Science.gov (United States)

Burton, John K.; Bruning, Roger H.

Thirty college undergraduates participated in a study of the effects of acoustic and visual interference on the recall of word and picture triads in both short-term and long-term memory. The subjects were presented 24 triads of monosyllabic nouns representing all of the possible combinations of presentation types: pictures, printed words, and…

Professional WordPress design and development

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Williams, Brad; Stern, Hal

2014-01-01

The highest rated WordPress development and design book on the market is back with an all new third edition. Professional WordPress is the only WordPress book targeted to developers, with advanced content that exploits the full functionality of the most popular CMS in the world. Fully updated to align with WordPress 4.1, this edition has updated examples with all new screenshots, and full exploration of additional tasks made possible by the latest tools and features. You will gain insight into real projects that currently use WordPress as an application framework, as well as the basic usage a

Understanding the power of word-of-mouth.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Suzana Z. Gildin

2003-06-01

Full Text Available Word-of-mouth has been considered one of the most powerful forms of communication in the market today. Understanding what makes word-of-mouth such a persuasive and powerful communication tool is important to organizations that intend to build strong relationships with consumers. For this reason, organizations are concerned about promoting positive word-of-mouth and retarding negative word-of-mouth, which can be harmful to the image of the company or a brand. This work focuses on the major aspects involving word-of-mouth communication. Recommendations to generate positive word-of-mouth and retard negative word-of-mouth are also highlighted.

Visual attention shift to printed words during spoken word recognition in Chinese: The role of phonological information.

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Shen, Wei; Qu, Qingqing; Tong, Xiuhong

2018-05-01

The aim of this study was to investigate the extent to which phonological information mediates the visual attention shift to printed Chinese words in spoken word recognition by using an eye-movement technique with a printed-word paradigm. In this paradigm, participants are visually presented with four printed words on a computer screen, which include a target word, a phonological competitor, and two distractors. Participants are then required to select the target word using a computer mouse, and the eye movements are recorded. In Experiment 1, phonological information was manipulated at the full-phonological overlap; in Experiment 2, phonological information at the partial-phonological overlap was manipulated; and in Experiment 3, the phonological competitors were manipulated to share either fulloverlap or partial-overlap with targets directly. Results of the three experiments showed that the phonological competitor effects were observed at both the full-phonological overlap and partial-phonological overlap conditions. That is, phonological competitors attracted more fixations than distractors, which suggested that phonological information mediates the visual attention shift during spoken word recognition. More importantly, we found that the mediating role of phonological information varies as a function of the phonological similarity between target words and phonological competitors.

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...

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

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

2009-03-01

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

What's in a name? Word inflation, punctuation, abbreviation and cloud formation.

Science.gov (United States)

Schofield, Susie J; Schofield, Pieta G

2016-12-01

The title of a journal paper offers a crucial portal into any scientific field. It determines whether interested readers locate the paper and whether others have enough interest sparked to lead them to read the abstract. This article looks at authored journal paper titles in Medical Education over its first 50 years (n = 6357) of publication and Medical Teacher over its first 35 years of publication, revealing both trends in areas of interest and how those interests are worded. Word clouds per decade showed a shift from teaching to learning and from examination to assessment, and new foci on learning, patients, research and feedback in both journals. The average length of title in Medical Education peeked in the 2000s, dropping to 70 characters in the 2010s, with no titles being longer than 140 characters (the length of a tweet) in this last decade. Abbreviations were used sparingly. The use of humorous titles, although not common, has increased in recent years. The use of the colon showed a marked increase in the 1980s, dropping a little in the 2000s but resurging in the 2010s. Titles posed as a question increased steadily, appearing to plateau in the 2000s at 11%. The use of humour and questions suggests that the authors of these articles are submitting papers to be selected by the human rather than just the virtual eye. We also hypothesise that the use of humour may indicate a maturation of medical education as a subject. © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd and The Association for the Study of Medical Education.

Word Processing for All.

Science.gov (United States)

Abbott, Chris

1991-01-01

Pupils with special educational needs are finding that the use of word processors can give them a new confidence and pride in their own abilities. This article describes the use of such devices as the "mouse," on-screen word lists, spell checkers, and overlay keyboards. (JDD)

Automating Ontological Annotation with WordNet

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

2006-01-22

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

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

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Stephen Wee Hun eLim

2016-03-01

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

Exploring the word superiority effect using TVA

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Starrfelt, Randi

Words are made of letters, and yet sometimes it is easier to identify a word than a single letter. This word superiority effect (WSE) has been observed when written stimuli are presented very briefly or degraded by visual noise. It is unclear, however, if this is due to a lower threshold for perc...... simultaneously we find a different pattern: In a whole report experiment with six stimuli (letters or words), letters are perceived more easily than words, and this is reflected both in perceptual processing speed and short term memory capacity....... for perception of words, or a higher speed of processing for words than letters. We have investigated the WSE using methods based on a Theory of Visual Attention. In an experiment using single stimuli (words or letters) presented centrally, we show that the classical WSE is specifically reflected in perceptual...

Eye movements when reading sentences with handwritten words.

Science.gov (United States)

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

2016-10-17

The examination of how we read handwritten words (i.e., the original form of writing) has typically been disregarded in the literature on reading. Previous research using word recognition tasks has shown that lexical effects (e.g., the word-frequency effect) are magnified when reading difficult handwritten words. To examine this issue in a more ecological scenario, we registered the participants' eye movements when reading handwritten sentences that varied in the degree of legibility (i.e., sentences composed of words in easy vs. difficult handwritten style). For comparison purposes, we included a condition with printed sentences. Results showed a larger reading cost for sentences with difficult handwritten words than for sentences with easy handwritten words, which in turn showed a reading cost relative to the sentences with printed words. Critically, the effect of word frequency was greater for difficult handwritten words than for easy handwritten words or printed words in the total times on a target word, but not on first-fixation durations or gaze durations. We examine the implications of these findings for models of eye movement control in reading.

The Birth of Words: Ten-Month-Olds Learn Words through Perceptual Salience

Science.gov (United States)

Pruden, Shannon M.; Hirsh-Pasek, Kathy; Golinkoff, Roberta Michnick; Hennon, Elizabeth A.

2006-01-01

A core task in language acquisition is mapping words onto objects, actions, and events. Two studies investigated how children learn to map novel labels onto novel objects. Study 1 investigated whether 10-month-olds use both perceptual and social cues to learn a word. Study 2, a control study, tested whether infants paired the label with a…

Towards new information resources for public health--from WordNet to MedicalWordNet.

Science.gov (United States)

Fellbaum, Christiane; Hahn, Udo; Smith, Barry

2006-06-01

In the last two decades, WordNet has evolved as the most comprehensive computational lexicon of general English. In this article, we discuss its potential for supporting the creation of an entirely new kind of information resource for public health, viz. MedicalWordNet. This resource is not to be conceived merely as a lexical extension of the original WordNet to medical terminology; indeed, there is already a considerable degree of overlap between WordNet and the vocabulary of medicine. Instead, we propose a new type of repository, consisting of three large collections of (1) medically relevant word forms, structured along the lines of the existing Princeton WordNet; (2) medically validated propositions, referred to here as medical facts, which will constitute what we shall call MedicalFactNet; and (3) propositions reflecting laypersons' medical beliefs, which will constitute what we shall call the MedicalBeliefNet. We introduce a methodology for setting up the MedicalWordNet. We then turn to the discussion of research challenges that have to be met to build this new type of information resource. We build a database of sentences relevant to the medical domain. The sentences are generated from WordNet via its relations as well as from medical statements broken down into elementary propositions. Two subcorpora of sentences are distinguished, MedicalBeliefNet and MedicalFactNet. The former is rated for assent by laypersons; the latter for correctness by medical experts. The sentence corpora will be valuable for a variety of applications in information retrieval as well as in research in linguistics and psychology with respect to the study of expert and non-expert beliefs and their linguistic expressions. Our work has to meet several considerable challenges. These include accounting for the distinction between medical experts and laypersons, the social issues of expert-layperson communication in different media, the linguistic aspects of encoding medical knowledge, and

Emotional Scene Content Drives the Saccade Generation System Reflexively

Science.gov (United States)

Nummenmaa, Lauri; Hyona, Jukka; Calvo, Manuel G.

2009-01-01

The authors assessed whether parafoveal perception of emotional content influences saccade programming. In Experiment 1, paired emotional and neutral scenes were presented to parafoveal vision. Participants performed voluntary saccades toward either of the scenes according to an imperative signal (color cue). Saccadic reaction times were faster…

Nine Words - Nine Columns

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Trempe Jr., Robert B.; Buthke, Jan

2016-01-01

of computational and mechanical processes towards an anesthetic. Each team received a single word, translating and evolving that word first into a double-curved computational surface, next a ruled computational surface, and then a physically shaped foam mold via a 6-axis robot. The foam molds then operated...

The effect of word concreteness on recognition memory.

Science.gov (United States)

Fliessbach, K; Weis, S; Klaver, P; Elger, C E; Weber, B

2006-09-01

Concrete words that are readily imagined are better remembered than abstract words. Theoretical explanations for this effect either claim a dual coding of concrete words in the form of both a verbal and a sensory code (dual-coding theory), or a more accessible semantic network for concrete words than for abstract words (context-availability theory). However, the neural mechanisms of improved memory for concrete versus abstract words are poorly understood. Here, we investigated the processing of concrete and abstract words during encoding and retrieval in a recognition memory task using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). As predicted, memory performance was significantly better for concrete words than for abstract words. Abstract words elicited stronger activations of the left inferior frontal cortex both during encoding and recognition than did concrete words. Stronger activation of this area was also associated with successful encoding for both abstract and concrete words. Concrete words elicited stronger activations bilaterally in the posterior inferior parietal lobe during recognition. The left parietal activation was associated with correct identification of old stimuli. The anterior precuneus, left cerebellar hemisphere and the posterior and anterior cingulate cortex showed activations both for successful recognition of concrete words and for online processing of concrete words during encoding. Additionally, we observed a correlation across subjects between brain activity in the left anterior fusiform gyrus and hippocampus during recognition of learned words and the strength of the concreteness effect. These findings support the idea of specific brain processes for concrete words, which are reactivated during successful recognition.

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

OpenAIRE

Débora Mattos Marques; Aline Lorandi

2016-01-01

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

How Objective a Neutral Word Is? A Neutrosophic Approach for the Objectivity Degrees of Neutral Words

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Mihaela Colhon

2017-11-01

Full Text Available In the latest studies concerning the sentiment polarity of words, the authors mostly consider the positive and negative constructions, without paying too much attention to the neutral words, which can have, in fact, significant sentiment degrees. More precisely, not all the neutral words have zero positivity or negativity scores, some of them having quite important nonzero scores for these polarities. At this moment, in the literature, a word is considered neutral if its positive and negative scores are equal, which implies two possibilities: (1 zero positive and negative scores; (2 nonzero, but equal positive and negative scores. It is obvious that these cases represent two different categories of neutral words that must be treated separately by a sentiment analysis task. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study about the neutral words applied to English as is developed with the aid of SentiWordNet 3.0: the publicly available lexical resource for opinion mining. We designed our study in order to provide an accurate classification of the so-called “neutral words” described in terms of sentiment scores and using measures from neutrosophy theory. The intended scope is to fill the gap concerning the neutrality aspect by giving precise measurements for the words’ objectivity.

Finding Words and Word Structure in Artificial Speech: The Development of Infants' Sensitivity to Morphosyntactic Regularities

Science.gov (United States)

Marchetto, Erika; Bonatti, Luca L.

2015-01-01

To achieve language proficiency, infants must find the building blocks of speech and master the rules governing their legal combinations. However, these problems are linked: words are also built according to rules. Here, we explored early morphosyntactic sensitivity by testing when and how infants could find either words or within-word structure…

Visual recognition of permuted words

Science.gov (United States)

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

2010-02-01

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

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.

The Study of Synonymous Word "Mistake"

OpenAIRE

Suwardi, Albertus

2016-01-01

This article discusses the synonymous word "mistake*.The discussion will also cover the meaning of 'word' itself. Words can be considered as form whether spoken or written, or alternatively as composite expression, which combine and meaning. Synonymous are different phonological words which have the same or very similar meanings. The synonyms of mistake are error, fault, blunder, slip, slipup, gaffe and inaccuracy. The data is taken from a computer program. The procedure of data collection is...

Filaments of Meaning in Word Space

OpenAIRE

Karlgren, Jussi; Holst, Anders; Sahlgren, Magnus

2008-01-01

Word space models, in the sense of vector space models built on distributional data taken from texts, are used to model semantic relations between words. We argue that the high dimensionality of typical vector space models lead to unintuitive effects on modeling likeness of meaning and that the local structure of word spaces is where interesting semantic relations reside. We show that the local structure of word spaces has substantially different dimensionality and character than the global s...

Electric Symbols: Internet Words And Culture

OpenAIRE

Fraim, John

2002-01-01

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

Directed forgetting: Comparing pictures and words.

Science.gov (United States)

Quinlan, Chelsea K; Taylor, Tracy L; Fawcett, Jonathan M

2010-03-01

The authors investigated directed forgetting as a function of the stimulus type (picture, word) presented at study and test. In an item-method directed forgetting task, study items were presented 1 at a time, each followed with equal probability by an instruction to remember or forget. Participants exhibited greater yes-no recognition of remember than forget items for each of the 4 study-test conditions (picture-picture, picture-word, word-word, word-picture). However, this difference was significantly smaller when pictures were studied than when words were studied. This finding demonstrates that the magnitude of the directed forgetting effect can be reduced by high item memorability, such as when the picture superiority effect is operating. This suggests caution in using pictures at study when the goal of an experiment is to examine potential group differences in the magnitude of the directed forgetting effect. 2010 APA, all rights reserved.

Pictures Improve Memory of SAT Vocabulary Words.

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Price, Melva; Finkelstein, Arleen

1994-01-01

Suggests that students can improve their memory of Scholastic Aptitude Test vocabulary words by associating the words with corresponding pictures taken from magazines. Finds that long-term recall of words associated with pictures was higher than recall of words not associated with pictures. (RS)

WordPress all-in-one for dummies

CERN Document Server

Sabin-Wilson, Lisa

2013-01-01

Top WordPress guide, now fully updated for the latest WordPress release! This updated new edition comprises one of the largest collections of practical intermediate to advanced information on WordPress. Fully updated for the latest WordPress release, this in-depth book covers it all, from setting up your software to publishing your site, using SEO and social media, developing and using plug-ins, running multiple sites with WordPress, and more. Veteran author Lisa Sabin-Wilson is a top authority on WordPress, and she and her co-authors pack this book with essential and easy-to-follo

Learning to Read Words: Theory, Findings, and Issues

Science.gov (United States)

Ehri, Linnea C.

2005-01-01

Reading words may take several forms. Readers may utilize decoding, analogizing, or predicting to read unfamiliar words. Readers read familiar words by accessing them in memory, called sight word reading. With practice, all words come to be read automatically by sight, which is the most efficient, unobtrusive way to read words in text. The process…

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

Science.gov (United States)

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.

Arabic word recognizer for mobile applications

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Khanna, Nitin; Abdollahian, Golnaz; Brame, Ben; Boutin, Mireille; Delp, Edward J.

2011-03-01

When traveling in a region where the local language is not written using a "Roman alphabet," translating written text (e.g., documents, road signs, or placards) is a particularly difficult problem since the text cannot be easily entered into a translation device or searched using a dictionary. To address this problem, we are developing the "Rosetta Phone," a handheld device (e.g., PDA or mobile telephone) capable of acquiring an image of the text, locating the region (word) of interest within the image, and producing both an audio and a visual English interpretation of the text. This paper presents a system targeted for interpreting words written in Arabic script. The goal of this work is to develop an autonomous, segmentation-free Arabic phrase recognizer, with computational complexity low enough to deploy on a mobile device. A prototype of the proposed system has been deployed on an iPhone with a suitable user interface. The system was tested on a number of noisy images, in addition to the images acquired from the iPhone's camera. It identifies Arabic words or phrases by extracting appropriate features and assigning "codewords" to each word or phrase. On a dictionary of 5,000 words, the system uniquely mapped (word-image to codeword) 99.9% of the words. The system has a 82% recognition accuracy on images of words captured using the iPhone's built-in camera.

The Minho Word Pool: Norms for imageability, concreteness, and subjective frequency for 3,800 Portuguese words.

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Soares, Ana Paula; Costa, Ana Santos; Machado, João; Comesaña, Montserrat; Oliveira, Helena Mendes

2017-06-01

Words are widely used as stimuli in cognitive research. Because of their complexity, using words requires strict control of their objective (lexical and sublexical) and subjective properties. In this work, we present the Minho Word Pool (MWP), a dataset that provides normative values of imageability, concreteness, and subjective frequency for 3,800 (European) Portuguese words-three subjective measures that, in spite of being used extensively in research, have been scarce for Portuguese. Data were collected with 2,357 college students who were native speakers of European Portuguese. The participants rated 100 words drawn randomly from the full set for each of the three subjective indices, using a Web survey procedure (via a URL link). Analyses comparing the MWP ratings with those obtained for the same words from other national and international databases showed that the MWP norms are reliable and valid, thus providing researchers with a useful tool to support research in all neuroscientific areas using verbal stimuli. The MWP norms can be downloaded along with this article or from http://p-pal.di.uminho.pt/about/databases .

Remembering episodic memories is not necessary for forgetting of negative words: Semantic retrieval can cause forgetting of negative words.

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Kobayashi, Masanori; Tanno, Yoshihiko

2015-06-01

Retrieval of a memory can induce forgetting of other related memories, which is known as retrieval-induced forgetting. Although most studies have investigated retrieval-induced forgetting by remembering episodic memories, this also can occur by remembering semantic memories. The present study shows that retrieval of semantic memories can lead to forgetting of negative words. In two experiments, participants learned words and then engaged in retrieval practice where they were asked to recall words related to the learned words from semantic memory. Finally, participants completed a stem-cued recall test for the learned words. The results showed forgetting of neutral and negative words, which was characteristic of semantic retrieval-induced forgetting. A certain degree of overlapping features, except same learning episode, is sufficient to cause retrieval-induced forgetting of negative words. Given the present results, we conclude that retrieval-induced forgetting of negative words does not require recollection of episodic memories.

WORD FORMATION ON DRAGON NEST CHAT LANGUAGE

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Shavitri Cecillia Harsono

2016-11-01

Full Text Available Word formation is creation of new words, which sometimes changes a word’s meaning. Words can be formed from multi word phrases as well. In many cases vocabularies in language are formed from combination of words (Haspelmath 2010: 102. Word formation does not only involve changing physical form of the word itself, but also changing the meaning of said word. There are also instances where the physical form retain its original form while the meaning changes. The phenomenon is called semantic change (Stockwell-Minkova 2001:149. In this thesis the research proposed that the said phenomenon occur in virtual environment, such as in MMORPG. Multiplayer online games that feature fantasy setting virtual environment. For the purpose of this research, Dragon Nest South East Asia server was chosen as data source. The samples are taken from players perusing [World] communication channel. The result of the data analysis has shown that the phenomenon of word formation could occur in a virtual environment of MMORPG, specifcally in Dragon Nest SEA. There are two word formation processes found: processes that involve physical changes and processes that do not involve physical changes but rather innate meaning. It is done by both processing daily language vocabulary both physically and changing its innate meaning to create new words that suits the said virtual environment context. This fnding may influence future research on a fresh perspective and untilled feld.

Prefixes versus suffixes: a search for a word-beginning superiority effect in word recognition from degraded speech

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Nooteboom, S.G.; Vlugt, van der M.J.

1985-01-01

This paper reports on a word recognition experiment in search of evidence for a word- beginning superiority effect in recognition from low-quality speech . In the experiment, lexical redundancy was controlled by combining monosyllable word stems with strongly constraining or weakly constraining

Anticipatory coarticulation facilitates word recognition in toddlers.

Science.gov (United States)

Mahr, Tristan; McMillan, Brianna T M; Saffran, Jenny R; Ellis Weismer, Susan; Edwards, Jan

2015-09-01

Children learn from their environments and their caregivers. To capitalize on learning opportunities, young children have to recognize familiar words efficiently by integrating contextual cues across word boundaries. Previous research has shown that adults can use phonetic cues from anticipatory coarticulation during word recognition. We asked whether 18-24 month-olds (n=29) used coarticulatory cues on the word "the" when recognizing the following noun. We performed a looking-while-listening eyetracking experiment to examine word recognition in neutral vs. facilitating coarticulatory conditions. Participants looked to the target image significantly sooner when the determiner contained facilitating coarticulatory cues. These results provide the first evidence that novice word-learners can take advantage of anticipatory sub-phonemic cues during word recognition. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Processing of Color Words Activates Color Representations

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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…

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

Science.gov (United States)

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

2016-10-01

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

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.

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

Science.gov (United States)

Strori, Dorina; Zaar, Johannes; Cooke, Martin; Mattys, Sven L

2018-01-01

Recent evidence has shown that nonlinguistic sounds co-occurring with spoken words may be retained in memory and affect later retrieval of the words. This sound-specificity effect shares many characteristics with the classic voice-specificity effect. In this study, we argue that the sound-specificity effect is conditional upon the context in which the word and sound coexist. Specifically, we argue that, besides co-occurrence, integrality between words and sounds is a crucial factor in the emergence of the effect. In two recognition-memory experiments, we compared the emergence of voice and sound specificity effects. In Experiment 1 , we examined two conditions where integrality is high. Namely, the classic voice-specificity effect (Exp. 1a) was compared with a condition in which the intensity envelope of a background sound was modulated along the intensity envelope of the accompanying spoken word (Exp. 1b). Results revealed a robust voice-specificity effect and, critically, a comparable sound-specificity effect: A change in the paired sound from exposure to test led to a decrease in word-recognition performance. In the second experiment, we sought to disentangle the contribution of integrality from a mere co-occurrence context effect by removing the intensity modulation. The absence of integrality led to the disappearance of the sound-specificity effect. Taken together, the results suggest that the assimilation of background sounds into memory cannot be reduced to a simple context effect. Rather, it is conditioned by the extent to which words and sounds are perceived as integral as opposed to distinct auditory objects.

Emotion words and categories: evidence from lexical decision

OpenAIRE

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

2014-01-01

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

AUTOMATIC RETRIEVAL AND THE FORMALIZATION OF MULTI WORDS EXPRESSIONS WITH F-WORDS IN THE CORPUS OF CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN ENGLISH

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Prihantoro Prihantoro

2016-01-01

Full Text Available The research problems in this research are 1 how lexicogrammar takes role in determining polarity of F-Word1 and 2 how to formalize it for corpus processing. The data is obtained from the Contemporary American English Corpus (COCA. In this corpus, F-word is proven to be highest in frequency as compared to its distribution across corpora. Corpus methodology is applied by sending queries to retrieve F-Words to COCA interface. Tokens combination surrounding F-words resulted in the phrase and clause unit accompanying F-words, which are significant cues to determine F-word polarity. The polarity is later proven to be not necessarily negative. I also designed a computational resource to allow the retrieval of F-words offline so that users might apply it to any digital text collections.

Word Learning Deficits in Children with Dyslexia

Science.gov (United States)

Alt, Mary; Hogan, Tiffany; Green, Samuel; Gray, Shelley; Cabbage, Kathryn; Cowan, Nelson

2017-01-01

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate word learning in children with dyslexia to ascertain their strengths and weaknesses during the configuration stage of word learning. Method: Children with typical development (N = 116) and dyslexia (N = 68) participated in computer-based word learning games that assessed word learning in 4 sets…

Emotion Words Affect Eye Fixations during Reading

Science.gov (United States)

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

2012-01-01

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

Word-Form Familiarity Bootstraps Infant Speech Segmentation

Science.gov (United States)

Altvater-Mackensen, Nicole; Mani, Nivedita

2013-01-01

At about 7 months of age, infants listen longer to sentences containing familiar words--but not deviant pronunciations of familiar words (Jusczyk & Aslin, 1995). This finding suggests that infants are able to segment familiar words from fluent speech and that they store words in sufficient phonological detail to recognize deviations from a…

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…

Chinese translation norms for 1,429 English words.

Science.gov (United States)

Wen, Yun; van Heuven, Walter J B

2017-06-01

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

40 CFR 156.64 - Signal word.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... 40 Protection of Environment 23 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Signal word. 156.64 Section 156.64... REQUIREMENTS FOR PESTICIDES AND DEVICES Human Hazard and Precautionary Statements § 156.64 Signal word. (a... signal word, reflecting the highest Toxicity Category (Category I is the highest toxicity category) to...

Functional Anatomy of Recognition of Chinese Multi-Character Words: Convergent Evidence from Effects of Transposable Nonwords, Lexicality, and Word Frequency.

Science.gov (United States)

Lin, Nan; Yu, Xi; Zhao, Ying; Zhang, Mingxia

2016-01-01

This fMRI study aimed to identify the neural mechanisms underlying the recognition of Chinese multi-character words by partialling out the confounding effect of reaction time (RT). For this purpose, a special type of nonword-transposable nonword-was created by reversing the character orders of real words. These nonwords were included in a lexical decision task along with regular (non-transposable) nonwords and real words. Through conjunction analysis on the contrasts of transposable nonwords versus regular nonwords and words versus regular nonwords, the confounding effect of RT was eliminated, and the regions involved in word recognition were reliably identified. The word-frequency effect was also examined in emerged regions to further assess their functional roles in word processing. Results showed significant conjunctional effect and positive word-frequency effect in the bilateral inferior parietal lobules and posterior cingulate cortex, whereas only conjunctional effect was found in the anterior cingulate cortex. The roles of these brain regions in recognition of Chinese multi-character words were discussed.

Automatic Prompt System in the Process of Mapping plWordNet on Princeton WordNet

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Paweł Kędzia

2015-06-01

Full Text Available Automatic Prompt System in the Process of Mapping plWordNet on Princeton WordNet The paper offers a critical evaluation of the power and usefulness of an automatic prompt system based on the extended Relaxation Labelling algorithm in the process of (manual mapping plWordNet on Princeton WordNet. To this end the results of manual mapping – that is inter-lingual relations between plWN and PWN synsets – are juxtaposed with the automatic prompts that were generated for the source language synsets to be mapped. We check the number and type of inter-lingual relations introduced on the basis of automatic prompts and the distance of the respective prompt synsets from the actual target language synsets.

Is Natural Language a Perigraphic Process? The Theorem about Facts and Words Revisited

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Łukasz Dębowski

2018-01-01

Full Text Available As we discuss, a stationary stochastic process is nonergodic when a random persistent topic can be detected in the infinite random text sampled from the process, whereas we call the process strongly nonergodic when an infinite sequence of independent random bits, called probabilistic facts, is needed to describe this topic completely. Replacing probabilistic facts with an algorithmically random sequence of bits, called algorithmic facts, we adapt this property back to ergodic processes. Subsequently, we call a process perigraphic if the number of algorithmic facts which can be inferred from a finite text sampled from the process grows like a power of the text length. We present a simple example of such a process. Moreover, we demonstrate an assertion which we call the theorem about facts and words. This proposition states that the number of probabilistic or algorithmic facts which can be inferred from a text drawn from a process must be roughly smaller than the number of distinct word-like strings detected in this text by means of the Prediction by Partial Matching (PPM compression algorithm. We also observe that the number of the word-like strings for a sample of plays by Shakespeare follows an empirical stepwise power law, in a stark contrast to Markov processes. Hence, we suppose that natural language considered as a process is not only non-Markov but also perigraphic.

Sight Word Recognition among Young Children At-Risk: Picture-Supported vs. Word-Only

Science.gov (United States)

Meadan, Hedda; Stoner, Julia B.; Parette, Howard P.

2008-01-01

A quasi-experimental design was used to investigate the impact of Picture Communication Symbols (PCS) on sight word recognition by young children identified as "at risk" for academic and social-behavior difficulties. Ten pre-primer and 10 primer Dolch words were presented to 23 students in the intervention group and 8 students in the…

Three Dirty Words Are Killing Education

Science.gov (United States)

Jensen, Deb

2010-01-01

Three words used frequently in debates about education actually cloud the issues. Those words are standardization, rigor, and reform. Standardization is often confused with standards, though they are not the same thing. Similarly, rigor is confused with relevance, and reform with renaissance. Those three words are used because they sound tough and…

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

Science.gov (United States)

Apfelbaum, Keith S.; McMurray, Bob

2017-01-01

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

[Representation of letter position in visual word recognition process].

Science.gov (United States)

Makioka, S

1994-08-01

Two experiments investigated the representation of letter position in visual word recognition process. In Experiment 1, subjects (12 undergraduates and graduates) were asked to detect a target word in a briefly-presented probe. Probes consisted of two kanji words. The latters which formed targets (critical letters) were always contained in probes. (e.g. target: [symbol: see text] probe: [symbol: see text]) High false alarm rate was observed when critical letters occupied the same within-word relative position (left or right within the word) in the probe words as in the target word. In Experiment 2 (subject were ten undergraduates and graduates), spaces adjacent to probe words were replaced by randomly chosen hiragana letters (e.g. [symbol: see text]), because spaces are not used to separate words in regular Japanese sentences. In addition to the effect of within-word relative position as in Experiment 1, the effect of between-word relative position (left or right across the probe words) was observed. These results suggest that information about within-word relative position of a letter is used in word recognition process. The effect of within-word relative position was explained by a connectionist model of word recognition.