Genomic tools for behavioural ecologists to understand repeatable individual differences in behaviour.

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Bengston, Sarah E; Dahan, Romain A; Donaldson, Zoe; Phelps, Steven M; van Oers, Kees; Sih, Andrew; Bell, Alison M

2018-06-01

Behaviour is a key interface between an animal's genome and its environment. Repeatable individual differences in behaviour have been extensively documented in animals, but the molecular underpinnings of behavioural variation among individuals within natural populations remain largely unknown. Here, we offer a critical review of when molecular techniques may yield new insights, and we provide specific guidance on how and whether the latest tools available are appropriate given different resources, system and organismal constraints, and experimental designs. Integrating molecular genetic techniques with other strategies to study the proximal causes of behaviour provides opportunities to expand rapidly into new avenues of exploration. Such endeavours will enable us to better understand how repeatable individual differences in behaviour have evolved, how they are expressed and how they can be maintained within natural populations of animals.

Exploring the Correlates of Impaired Non-Word Repetition in Down Syndrome

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Cairns, Peter; Jarrold, Christopher

2005-01-01

Non-word repetition, in which participants hear and repeat unfamiliar verbal stimuli, is thought to provide a particularly sensitive measure of verbal short-term memory capacity. However, performance on this task can also be constrained by hearing and speech production skills, and by an individuals' linguistic knowledge. This study examined real…

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

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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.

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

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

2016-12-01

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

Domain-specific and domain-general constraints on word and sequence learning.

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Archibald, Lisa M D; Joanisse, Marc F

2013-02-01

The relative influences of language-related and memory-related constraints on the learning of novel words and sequences were examined by comparing individual differences in performance of children with and without specific deficits in either language or working memory. Children recalled lists of words in a Hebbian learning protocol in which occasional lists repeated, yielding improved recall over the course of the task on the repeated lists. The task involved presentation of pictures of common nouns followed immediately by equivalent presentations of the spoken names. The same participants also completed a paired-associate learning task involving word-picture and nonword-picture pairs. Hebbian learning was observed for all groups. Domain-general working memory constrained immediate recall, whereas language abilities impacted recall in the auditory modality only. In addition, working memory constrained paired-associate learning generally, whereas language abilities disproportionately impacted novel word learning. Overall, all of the learning tasks were highly correlated with domain-general working memory. The learning of nonwords was additionally related to general intelligence, phonological short-term memory, language abilities, and implicit learning. The results suggest that distinct associations between language- and memory-related mechanisms support learning of familiar and unfamiliar phonological forms and sequences.

WORD LEVEL DISCRIMINATIVE TRAINING FOR HANDWRITTEN WORD RECOGNITION

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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

Adapting the Freiburg monosyllabic word test for Slovenian

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Tatjana Marvin

2017-12-01

Full Text Available Speech audiometry is one of the standard methods used to diagnose the type of hearing loss and to assess the communication function of the patient by determining the level of the patient’s ability to understand and repeat words presented to him or her in a hearing test. For this purpose, the Slovenian adaptation of the German tests developed by Hahlbrock (1953, 1960 – the Freiburg Monosyllabic Word Test and the Freiburg Number Test – are used in Slovenia (adapted in 1968 by Pompe. In this paper we focus on the Freiburg Monosyllabic Word Test for Slovenian, which has been criticized by patients as well as in the literature for the unequal difficulty and frequency of the words, with many of these being extremely rare or even obsolete. As part of the patient’s communication function is retrieving the meaning of individual words by guessing, the less frequent and consequently less familiar words do not contribute to reliable testing results. We therefore adapt the test by identifying and removing such words and supplement them with phonetically similar words to preserve the phonetic balance of the list. The words used for replacement are extracted from the written corpus of Slovenian Gigafida and the spoken corpus of Slovenian GOS, while the optimal combinations of words are established by using computational algorithms.

Nurturing a lexical legacy: reading experience is critical for the development of word reading skill

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Nation, Kate

2017-12-01

The scientific study of reading has taught us much about the beginnings of reading in childhood, with clear evidence that the gateway to reading opens when children are able to decode, or `sound out' written words. Similarly, there is a large evidence base charting the cognitive processes that characterise skilled word recognition in adults. Less understood is how children develop word reading expertise. Once basic reading skills are in place, what factors are critical for children to move from novice to expert? This paper outlines the role of reading experience in this transition. Encountering individual words in text provides opportunities for children to refine their knowledge about how spelling represents spoken language. Alongside this, however, reading experience provides much more than repeated exposure to individual words in isolation. According to the lexical legacy perspective, outlined in this paper, experiencing words in diverse and meaningful language environments is critical for the development of word reading skill. At its heart is the idea that reading provides exposure to words in many different contexts, episodes and experiences which, over time, sum to a rich and nuanced database about their lexical history within an individual's experience. These rich and diverse encounters bring about local variation at the word level: a lexical legacy that is measurable during word reading behaviour, even in skilled adults.

Toward Male Individualization with Rapidly Mutating Y-Chromosomal Short Tandem Repeats

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K. Ballantyne (Kaye); A. Ralf (Arwin); R. Aboukhalid (Rachid); N.M. Achakzai (Niaz); T. Anjos (Tania); Q. Ayub (Qasim); J. Balažic (Jože); J. Ballantyne (Jack); D.J. Ballard (David); B. Berger (Burkhard); C. Bobillo (Cecilia); M. Bouabdellah (Mehdi); H. Burri (Helen); T. Capal (Tomas); S. Caratti (Stefano); J. Cárdenas (Jorge); F. Cartault (François); E.F. Carvalho (Elizeu); M. de Carvalho (Margarete); B. Cheng (Baowen); M.D. Coble (Michael); D. Comas (David); D. Corach (Daniel); M. D'Amato (Mauro); S. Davison (Sean); P. de Knijff (Peter); M.C.A. de Ungria (Maria Corazon); R. Decorte (Ronny); T. Dobosz (Tadeusz); B.M. Dupuy (Berit); S. Elmrghni (Samir); M. Gliwiński (Mateusz); S.C. Gomes (Sara); L. Grol (Laurens); C. Haas (Cordula); E. Hanson (Erin); J. Henke (Jürgen); L. Henke (Lotte); F. Herrera-Rodríguez (Fabiola); C.R. Hill (Carolyn); G. Holmlund (Gunilla); K. Honda (Katsuya); U.-D. Immel (Uta-Dorothee); S. Inokuchi (Shota); R. Jobling; M. Kaddura (Mahmoud); J.S. Kim (Jong); S.H. Kim (Soon); W. Kim (Wook); T.E. King (Turi); E. Klausriegler (Eva); D. Kling (Daniel); L. Kovačević (Lejla); L. Kovatsi (Leda); P. Krajewski (Paweł); S. Kravchenko (Sergey); M.H.D. Larmuseau (Maarten); E.Y. Lee (Eun Young); R. Lessig (Rüdiger); L.A. Livshits (Ludmila); D. Marjanović (Damir); M. Minarik (Marek); N. Mizuno (Natsuko); H. Moreira (Helena); N. Morling (Niels); M. Mukherjee (Meeta); P. Munier (Patrick); J. Nagaraju (Javaregowda); F. Neuhuber (Franz); S. Nie (Shengjie); P. Nilasitsataporn (Premlaphat); T. Nishi (Takeki); H.H. Oh (Hye); S. Olofsson (Sylvia); V. Onofri (Valerio); J. Palo (Jukka); H. Pamjav (Horolma); W. Parson (Walther); M. Petlach (Michal); C. Phillips (Christopher); R. Ploski (Rafal); S.P.R. Prasad (Samayamantri P.); D. Primorac (Dragan); G.A. Purnomo (Gludhug); J. Purps (Josephine); H. Rangel-Villalobos (Hector); K. Reogonekbała (Krzysztof); B. Rerkamnuaychoke (Budsaba); D.R. Gonzalez (Danel Rey); C. Robino (Carlo); L. Roewer (Lutz); A. de Rosa (Anna); A. Sajantila (Antti); A. Sala (Andrea); J.M. Salvador (Jazelyn); P. Sanz (Paula); C. Schmitt (Christian); A.K. Sharma (Anisha K.); D.A. Silva (Dayse); K.-J. Shin (Kyoung-Jin); T. Sijen (Titia); M. Sirker (Miriam); D. Siváková (Daniela); V. Škaro (Vedrana); C. Solano-Matamoros (Carlos); L. Souto (L.); V. Stenzl (Vlastimil); H. Sudoyo (Herawati); D. Syndercombe-Court (Denise); A. Tagliabracci (Adriano); D. Taylor (Duncan); A. Tillmar (Andreas); I.S. Tsybovsky (Iosif); C. Tyler-Smith (Chris); K. van der Gaag (Kristiaan); D. Vanek (Daniel); A. Völgyi (Antónia); D. Ward (Denise); P. Willemse (Patricia); E.P.H. Yap (Eric); Z-Y. Yong (Ze-Yie); I.Z. Pajnič (Irena Zupanič); M.H. Kayser (Manfred)

2014-01-01

textabstractRelevant for various areas of human genetics, Y-chromosomal short tandem repeats (Y-STRs) are commonly used for testing close paternal relationships among individuals and populations, and for male lineage identification. However, even the widely used 17-loci Yfiler set cannot resolve

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

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Westbury, Chris

2014-10-01

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

Goodnight Book: Sleep Consolidation Improves Word Learning via Storybooks

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Sophie E. Williams

2014-03-01

Full Text Available Reading the same storybooks repeatedly helps preschool children learn words. In addition, sleeping shortly after learning also facilitates memory consolidation and aids learning in older children and adults. The current study explored how sleep promotes word learning in preschool children using a shared storybook reading task. Children were either read the same story repeatedly or different stories and either napped after the stories or remained awake. Children’s word retention were tested 2.5 hours later, 24 hours later and 7 days later. Results demonstrate strong, persistent effects for both repeated readings and sleep consolidation on young children’s word learning. A key finding is that children who read different stories before napping learned words as well as children who had the advantage of hearing the same story. In contrast, children who read different stories and remained awake never caught up to their peers on later word learning tests. Implications for educational practices are discussed.

Effects of Lexical Features, Textual Properties, and Individual Differences on Word Processing Times during Second Language Reading Comprehension

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Kim, Minkyung; Crossley, Scott A.; Skalicky, Stephen

2018-01-01

This study examines whether lexical features and textual properties along with individual differences on the part of readers influence word processing times during second language (L2) reading comprehension. Forty-eight Spanish-speaking adolescent and adult learners of English read nine English passages in a self-paced word-by-word reading…

Cross-situational word learning is both implicit and strategic.

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

2014-01-01

For decades, implicit learning researchers have examined a variety of cognitive tasks in which people seem to automatically extract structure from the environment. Similarly, recent statistical learning studies have shown that people can learn word-object mappings from the repeated co-occurrence of words and objects in individually ambiguous situations. In light of this, the goal of the present paper is to investigate whether adult cross-situational learners require an explicit effort to learn word-object mappings, or if it may take place incidentally, only requiring attention to the stimuli. In two implicit learning experiments with incidental tasks directing participants' attention to different aspects of the stimuli, we found evidence of learning, suggesting that cross-situational learning mechanisms can operate incidentally, without explicit effort. However, performance was superior under explicit study instructions, indicating that strategic processes also play a role. Moreover, performance under instruction to learn word meanings did not differ from performance at counting co-occurrences, which may indicate these tasks engage similar strategies.

Effects of repeated collaborative retrieval on individual memory vary as a function of recall versus recognition tasks.

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Blumen, Helena M; Rajaram, Suparna

2009-11-01

Our research examines how prior group collaboration modulates later individual memory. We recently showed that repeated collaborative recall sessions benefit later individual recall more than a single collaborative recall session (Blumen & Rajaram, 2008). Current research compared the effects of repeated collaborative recall and repeated collaborative recognition on later individual recall and later individual recognition. A total of 192 participants studied a list of nouns and then completed three successive retrieval sessions in one of four conditions. While two collaborative recall sessions and two collaborative recognition sessions generated comparable levels of individual recall (CRecall-CRecall-I Recall approximately CRecognition-CRecognition-I Recall , Experiment 1a), two collaborative recognition sessions generated greater levels of individual recognition than two collaborative recall sessions (CRecognition-CRecognition- IRecognition > CRecall-CRecall- I Recognition , Experiment 1b). These findings are discussed in terms of two opposing mechanisms that operate during collaborative retrieval-re-exposure and retrieval disruption-and in terms of transfer-appropriate processing across collaborative and individual retrieval sessions.

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.

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

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William Hayward

2014-04-01

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

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

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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.

Contextual diversity facilitates learning new words in the classroom.

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Eva Rosa

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

Selective activation around the left occipito-temporal sulcus for words relative to pictures: individual variability or false positives?

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Wright, Nicholas D; Mechelli, Andrea; Noppeney, Uta; Veltman, Dick J; Rombouts, Serge A R B; Glensman, Janice; Haynes, John-Dylan; Price, Cathy J

2008-08-01

We used high-resolution fMRI to investigate claims that learning to read results in greater left occipito-temporal (OT) activation for written words relative to pictures of objects. In the first experiment, 9/16 subjects performing a one-back task showed activation in > or =1 left OT voxel for words relative to pictures (P or =1 left OT voxel for words relative to pictures. However, at this low statistical threshold false positives need to be excluded. The semantic decision paradigm was therefore repeated, within subject, in two different scanners (1.5 and 3 T). Both scanners consistently localised left OT activation for words relative to fixation and pictures relative to words, but there were no consistent effects for words relative to pictures. Finally, in a third experiment, we minimised the voxel size (1.5 x 1.5 x 1.5 mm(3)) and demonstrated a striking concordance between the voxels activated for words and pictures, irrespective of task (naming vs. one-back) or script (English vs. Hebrew). In summary, although we detected differential activation for words relative to pictures, these effects: (i) do not withstand statistical rigour; (ii) do not replicate within or between subjects; and (iii) are observed in voxels that also respond to pictures of objects. Our findings have implications for the role of left OT activation during reading. More generally, they show that studies using low statistical thresholds in single subject analyses should correct the statistical threshold for the number of comparisons made or replicate effects within subject. (c) 2007 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

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

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Eckerth, Johannes; Tavakoli, Parveneh

2012-01-01

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

Word and nonword repetition in patients with Schizophrenia

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Alireza Farnam

2015-08-01

Full Text Available Introduction: The assessment of the verbal repetition is important in the study of acquired language disorders and neuropsychology. It is helpful in differential diagnosis of aphasia subtypes, auditory breakdowns, and working memory (WM performance. Though different linguistic disorders have been identified in patients with schizophrenia, very little is known about their verbal repetition ability. Methods: The present study was conducted in the inpatient ward of Razi Psychiatric Hospital, Tabriz University of Medical Sciences, Iran, during the year 2013. Participants were: 30 patients diagnosed with schizophrenia during the maintenance phase of treatment and 30 healthy people as control group. They were asked to repeat 15 words and 15 nonwords immediately. The stimuli were 1, 2, and 3 syllabic in Turkish language. Any incorrect repetition scored 1 and correct repetitions scored 0. Lexicalization errors were compared between groups too. Results: Both groups repeated words better than nonwords. Patients showed lower ability to repeat nonwords than controls, especially in 3 syllabics. There was no significant difference in the repetition of words between groups though it was better in controls. Patients with schizophrenia made more errors in both words and nonwords and lexicalization errors were twice more. Conclusion: Lower ability to repeat nonwords (than words in patients with schizophrenia may show the involvement of phonological loop of WM. More lexicalization errors may take place because of dis-inhibition.

To be so bold: boldness is repeatable and related to within individual behavioural variability in North Island robins.

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He, Ruchuan; Pagani-Núñez, Emilio; Chevallier, Clément; Barnett, Craig R A

2017-07-01

Behavioural research traditionally focusses on the mean responses of a group of individuals rather than variation in behaviour around the mean or among individuals. However, examining the variation in behaviour among and within individuals may also yield important insights into the evolution and maintenance of behaviour. Repeatability is the most commonly used measure of variability among individuals in behavioural research. However, there are other forms of variation within populations that have received less attention. One such measure is intraindividual variation in behaviour (IIV), which is a short-term fluctuation of within-individual behaviour. Such variation in behaviour might be important during interactions because it could decrease the ability of conspecific and heterospecific individuals to predict the behaviour of the subject, thus increasing the cost of the interaction. In this experiment, we made repeated measures of the latency of North Island robins to attack a prey in a novel situation (a form of boldness) and examined (i) repeatability of boldness (the propensity to take a risk), (ii) IIV of boldness, and (iii) whether there was a significant relationship between these two traits (a behavioural syndrome). We found that boldness was highly repeatable, that there were high levels of IIV in boldness, and that there was a negative relationship between boldness and IIV in boldness. This suggests that despite high levels of repeatability for this behaviour, there were also still significant differences in IIV among different individuals within the population. Moreover, bolder individuals had significantly less IIV in their boldness, which suggests that they were forming routines (which reduces behavioural variability) compared to shyer individuals. Our results definitively demonstrate that IIV itself varies across individuals and is linked with key behavioural traits, and we argue for the importance of future studies aimed at understanding its causes

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

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Lo, Shih-Yu; Yeh, Su-Ling

2018-05-29

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

Repeated-Sprint Sequences During Female Soccer Matches Using Fixed and Individual Speed Thresholds.

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Nakamura, Fábio Y; Pereira, Lucas A; Loturco, Irineu; Rosseti, Marcelo; Moura, Felipe A; Bradley, Paul S

2017-07-01

Nakamura, FY, Pereira, LA, Loturco, I, Rosseti, M, Moura, FA, and Bradley, PS. Repeated-sprint sequences during female soccer matches using fixed and individual speed thresholds. J Strength Cond Res 31(7): 1802-1810, 2017-The main objective of this study was to characterize the occurrence of single sprint and repeated-sprint sequences (RSS) during elite female soccer matches, using fixed (20 km·h) and individually based speed thresholds (>90% of the mean speed from a 20-m sprint test). Eleven elite female soccer players from the same team participated in the study. All players performed a 20-m linear sprint test, and were assessed in up to 10 official matches using Global Positioning System technology. Magnitude-based inferences were used to test for meaningful differences. Results revealed that irrespective of adopting fixed or individual speed thresholds, female players produced only a few RSS during matches (2.3 ± 2.4 sequences using the fixed threshold and 3.3 ± 3.0 sequences using the individually based threshold), with most sequences composing of just 2 sprints. Additionally, central defenders performed fewer sprints (10.2 ± 4.1) than other positions (fullbacks: 28.1 ± 5.5; midfielders: 21.9 ± 10.5; forwards: 31.9 ± 11.1; with the differences being likely to almost certainly associated with effect sizes ranging from 1.65 to 2.72), and sprinting ability declined in the second half. The data do not support the notion that RSS occurs frequently during soccer matches in female players, irrespective of using fixed or individual speed thresholds to define sprint occurrence. However, repeated-sprint ability development cannot be ruled out from soccer training programs because of its association with match-related performance.

Effects of Individualized Word Retrieval in Kindergarten Vocabulary Intervention

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Damhuis, Carmen M. P.; Segers, Eliane; Scheltinga, Femke; Verhoeven, Ludo

2016-01-01

We examined the effects of adaptive word retrieval intervention on a classroom vocabulary program on children's vocabulary acquisition in kindergarten. In the experimental condition, word retrieval was provided in a classroom vocabulary program, combining implicit and explicit vocabulary instructions. Children performed extra word retrieval…

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

Accentuate or repeat? Brain signatures of developmental periods in infant word recognition.

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Männel, Claudia; Friederici, Angela D

2013-01-01

Language acquisition has long been discussed as an interaction between biological preconditions and environmental input. This general interaction seems particularly salient in lexical acquisition, where infants are already able to detect unknown words in sentences at 7 months of age, guided by phonological and statistical information in the speech input. While this information results from the linguistic structure of a given language, infants also exploit situational information, such as speakers' additional word accentuation and word repetition. The current study investigated the developmental trajectory of infants' sensitivity to these two situational input cues in word recognition. Testing infants at 6, 9, and 12 months of age, we hypothesized that different age groups are differentially sensitive to accentuation and repetition. In a familiarization-test paradigm, event-related brain potentials (ERPs) revealed age-related differences in infants' word recognition as a function of situational input cues: at 6 months infants only recognized previously accentuated words, at 9 months both accentuation and repetition played a role, while at 12 months only repetition was effective. These developmental changes are suggested to result from infants' advancing linguistic experience and parallel auditory cortex maturation. Our data indicate very narrow and specific input-sensitive periods in infant word recognition, with accentuation being effective prior to repetition. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Stored word sequences in language learning: the effect of familiarity on children's repetition of four-word combinations.

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Bannard, Colin; Matthews, Danielle

2008-03-01

Recent accounts of the development of grammar propose that children remember utterances they hear and draw generalizations over these stored exemplars. This study tested these accounts' assumption that children store utterances as wholes by testing memory for familiar sequences of words. Using a newly available, dense corpus of child-directed speech, we identified frequently occurring chunks in the input (e.g., sit in your chair) and matched them to infrequent sequences (e.g., sit in your truck). We tested young children's ability to produce these sequences in a sentence-repetition test. Three-year-olds (n= 21) and 2-year-olds (n= 17) were significantly more likely to repeat frequent sequences correctly than to repeat infrequent sequences correctly. Moreover, the 3-year-olds were significantly faster to repeat the first three words of an item if they formed part of a chunk (e.g., they were quicker to say sit in your when the following word was chair than when it was truck). We discuss the implications of these results for theories of language development and processing.

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

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

2012-04-01

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

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.

How Iconicity Helps People Learn New Words: Neural Correlates and Individual Differences in Sound-Symbolic Bootstrapping

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Gwilym Lockwood

2016-07-01

Full Text Available Sound symbolism is increasingly understood as involving iconicity, or perceptual analogies and cross-modal correspondences between form and meaning, but the search for its functional and neural correlates is ongoing. Here we study how people learn sound-symbolic words, using behavioural, electrophysiological and individual difference measures. Dutch participants learned Japanese ideophones —lexical sound- symbolic words— with a translation of either the real meaning (in which form and meaning show cross-modal correspondences or the opposite meaning (in which form and meaning show cross-modal clashes. Participants were significantly better at identifying the words they learned in the real condition, correctly remembering the real word pairing 86.7% of the time, but the opposite word pairing only 71.3% of the time. Analysing event-related potentials (ERPs during the test round showed that ideophones in the real condition elicited a greater P3 component and late positive complex than ideophones in the opposite condition. In a subsequent forced choice task, participants were asked to guess the real translation from two alternatives. They did this with 73.0% accuracy, well above chance level even for words they had encountered in the opposite condition, showing that people are generally sensitive to the sound-symbolic cues in ideophones. Individual difference measures showed that the ERP effect in the test round of the learning task was greater for participants who were more sensitive to sound symbolism in the forced choice task. The main driver of the difference was a lower amplitude of the P3 component in response to ideophones in the opposite condition, suggesting that people who are more sensitive to sound symbolism may have more difficulty to suppress conflicting cross-modal information. The findings provide new evidence that cross-modal correspondences between sound and meaning facilitate word learning, while cross-modal clashes make word

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

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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.

Serial and parallel processing in reading: investigating the effects of parafoveal orthographic information on nonisolated word recognition.

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Dare, Natasha; Shillcock, Richard

2013-01-01

We present a novel lexical decision task and three boundary paradigm eye-tracking experiments that clarify the picture of parallel processing in word recognition in context. First, we show that lexical decision is facilitated by associated letter information to the left and right of the word, with no apparent hemispheric specificity. Second, we show that parafoveal preview of a repeat of word n at word n + 1 facilitates reading of word n relative to a control condition with an unrelated word at word n + 1. Third, using a version of the boundary paradigm that allowed for a regressive eye movement, we show no parafoveal "postview" effect on reading word n of repeating word n at word n - 1. Fourth, we repeat the second experiment but compare the effects of parafoveal previews consisting of a repeated word n with a transposed central bigram (e.g., caot for coat) and a substituted central bigram (e.g., ceit for coat), showing the latter to have a deleterious effect on processing word n, thereby demonstrating that the parafoveal preview effect is at least orthographic and not purely visual.

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

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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…

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

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Kuperman, Victor; Van Dyke, Julie A

2013-06-01

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

Analyzing repeated measures data on individuals nested within groups: accounting for dynamic group effects.

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Bauer, Daniel J; Gottfredson, Nisha C; Dean, Danielle; Zucker, Robert A

2013-03-01

Researchers commonly collect repeated measures on individuals nested within groups such as students within schools, patients within treatment groups, or siblings within families. Often, it is most appropriate to conceptualize such groups as dynamic entities, potentially undergoing stochastic structural and/or functional changes over time. For instance, as a student progresses through school, more senior students matriculate while more junior students enroll, administrators and teachers may turn over, and curricular changes may be introduced. What it means to be a student within that school may thus differ from 1 year to the next. This article demonstrates how to use multilevel linear models to recover time-varying group effects when analyzing repeated measures data on individuals nested within groups that evolve over time. Two examples are provided. The 1st example examines school effects on the science achievement trajectories of students, allowing for changes in school effects over time. The 2nd example concerns dynamic family effects on individual trajectories of externalizing behavior and depression. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved.

Visual determinants of reduced performance on the Stroop color-word test in normal aging individuals.

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van Boxtel, M P; ten Tusscher, M P; Metsemakers, J F; Willems, B; Jolles, J

2001-10-01

It is unknown to what extent the performance on the Stroop color-word test is affected by reduced visual function in older individuals. We tested the impact of common deficiencies in visual function (reduced distant and close acuity, reduced contrast sensitivity, and color weakness) on Stroop performance among 821 normal individuals aged 53 and older. After adjustment for age, sex, and educational level, low contrast sensitivity was associated with more time needed on card I (word naming), red/green color weakness with slower card 2 performance (color naming), and reduced distant acuity with slower performance on card 3 (interference). Half of the age-related variance in speed performance was shared with visual function. The actual impact of reduced visual function may be underestimated in this study when some of this age-related variance in Stroop performance is mediated by visual function decrements. It is suggested that reduced visual function has differential effects on Stroop performance which need to be accounted for when the Stroop test is used both in research and in clinical settings. Stroop performance measured from older individuals with unknown visual status should be interpreted with caution.

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...

Negative attentional bias for positive recovery-related words as a predictor of treatment success among individuals with an alcohol use disorder.

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Rettie, Hannah C; Hogan, Lee M; Cox, W Miles

2018-09-01

This study assessed relationships between clients' attentional bias (AB) for different types of stimuli and their treatment outcomes. Alcohol AB during detoxification has previously been shown to predict relapse, but further research was needed to clarify this relationship. The current study determined whether AB for recovery-related words would also predict treatment outcome. Participants were 45 clients undergoing alcohol detoxification, and a control group of 36 staff members. They rated words for personal relevance in four categories (alcohol-related, neutral, positive change-related, and negative change-related). Participants completed an individualized Stroop task containing their chosen words. They were also assessed on readiness-to-change, difficulties with emotion regulation, drinking problems, anxiety, and depression. Clients were interviewed at a three-month follow-up to determine their treatment outcome. As predicted, questionnaire measures did not predict clients' treatment outcome (p > .05). A logistic regression model indicated that the best predictor of treatment outcome was AB for positive change-related words (p = .048), with successful individuals having less AB for these words than for the other word categories. Although this finding was unexpected, it was supported by significant relationships between positive change-related interference scores and continuous measures of drinking at follow-up [i.e. number of units drunk (p = .039) and number of drinking days (p = .018)]. The results suggest that positive change-related words are a better predictor of treatment outcome than are either alcohol-related words or negative change-related words. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Analysis of genetic polymorphism of nine short tandem repeat loci in ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Yomi

2012-03-15

Mar 15, 2012 ... Key words: short tandem repeat, repeat motif, genetic polymorphism, Han population, forensic genetics. INTRODUCTION. Short tandem repeat (STR) is widely .... Data analysis. The exact test of Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium was conducted with. Arlequin version 3.5 software (Computational and Molecular.

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

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

2016-01-01

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

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

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Michael Inspector

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

Visual word learning in adults with dyslexia

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

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.

Individually variable energy management during egg production is repeatable across breeding attempts.

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Williams, Tony D; Vézina, François; Speakman, John R

2009-04-01

It is axiomatic that whole-animal metabolism, measured for example as daily energy expenditure (DEE), plays a central role in determining reproductive success and survival (fitness) in all organisms. Nevertheless, strong evidence for consistent systematic relationships between DEE and either individual traits (age, sex, body size), environmental factors (e.g. food availability, temperature) or 'fitness' traits (e.g. number of offspring, survival) remains far from compelling in birds and mammals. Recently, we suggested that female birds might utilise complex, individually variable energy management strategies to meet the metabolic demands of reproduction, generating a wide spectrum of effects on reproductive DEE, from overcompensation (net decrease in DEE) to additive effects (net increase in DEE). Here we show that this individually variable adjustment or 'plasticity' in energy expenditure associated with egg production is repeatable among individuals between successive breeding attempts in female zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata). Our study highlights the importance (a) of measuring 'plasticity' or change associated with transitions of physiological state (e.g. non-breeding to breeding) based on multiple measurements of the same individual, and (b) of extending consideration of how selection might drive the evolution of phenotypic plasticity per se to include physiological and metabolic traits.

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

Short-term and long-term collaboration benefits on individual recall in younger and older adults

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Stern, Yaakov

2011-01-01

A recent study of younger adults suggests that, compared to repeated individual recall trials, repeated collaborative recall trials produce better individual recall after a short delay (Blumen & Rajaram, 2008). Our study was designed to determine if such collaboration benefits would remain after a one-week delay, in both younger and older adults. Sixty younger (M age = 24.60) and 60 older (M age = 67.35) adults studied a list of words and then completed either two collaborative recall trials followed by two individual recall trials, or four individual recall trials. A five-min delay was inserted between the first three recall trials. The fourth recall trial was administered 1 week later. Collaborative recall was completed in groups of three individuals working together. Both younger and older adults benefitted from repeated collaborative recall trials to a greater extent than repeated individual recall trials, and such collaboration benefits remained after a one-week delay. This is the first demonstration of collaboration benefits on later individual recall at delays as long as 1 week, in both younger and older adults. Findings are discussed within the context of the negative effects of collaboration associated with group memory (collaborative inhibition) and the positive effects of collaboration associated with later individual memory (collaboration benefits). PMID:21264617

The Influence of Anticipation of Word Misrecognition on the Likelihood of Stuttering

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Brocklehurst, Paul H.; Lickley, Robin J.; Corley, Martin

2012-01-01

This study investigates whether the experience of stuttering can result from the speaker's anticipation of his words being misrecognized. Twelve adults who stutter (AWS) repeated single words into what appeared to be an automatic speech-recognition system. Following each iteration of each word, participants provided a self-rating of whether they…

Overcoming fixation with repeated memory suppression.

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Angello, Genna; Storm, Benjamin C; Smith, Steven M

2015-01-01

Fixation (blocks to memories or ideas) can be alleviated not only by encouraging productive work towards a solution, but, as the present experiments show, by reducing counterproductive work. Two experiments examined relief from fixation in a word-fragment completion task. Blockers, orthographically similar negative primes (e.g., ANALOGY), blocked solutions to word fragments (e.g., A_L_ _GY) in both experiments. After priming, but before the fragment completion test, participants repeatedly suppressed half of the blockers using the Think/No-Think paradigm, which results in memory inhibition. Inhibiting blockers did not alleviate fixation in Experiment 1 when conscious recollection of negative primes was not encouraged on the fragment completion test. In Experiment 2, however, when participants were encouraged to remember negative primes at fragment completion, relief from fixation was observed. Repeated suppression may nullify fixation effects, and promote creative thinking, particularly when fixation is caused by conscious recollection of counterproductive information.

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

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

2017-08-01

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

Lesser Neural Pattern Similarity across Repeated Tests Is Associated with Better Long-Term Memory Retention.

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Karlsson Wirebring, Linnea; Wiklund-Hörnqvist, Carola; Eriksson, Johan; Andersson, Micael; Jonsson, Bert; Nyberg, Lars

2015-07-01

Encoding and retrieval processes enhance long-term memory performance. The efficiency of encoding processes has recently been linked to representational consistency: the reactivation of a representation that gets more specific each time an item is further studied. Here we examined the complementary hypothesis of whether the efficiency of retrieval processes also is linked to representational consistency. Alternatively, recurrent retrieval might foster representational variability--the altering or adding of underlying memory representations. Human participants studied 60 Swahili-Swedish word pairs before being scanned with fMRI the same day and 1 week later. On Day 1, participants were tested three times on each word pair, and on Day 7 each pair was tested once. A BOLD signal change in right superior parietal cortex was associated with subsequent memory on Day 1 and with successful long-term retention on Day 7. A representational similarity analysis in this parietal region revealed that beneficial recurrent retrieval was associated with representational variability, such that the pattern similarity on Day 1 was lower for retrieved words subsequently remembered compared with those subsequently forgotten. This was mirrored by a monotonically decreased BOLD signal change in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex on Day 1 as a function of repeated successful retrieval for words subsequently remembered, but not for words subsequently forgotten. This reduction in prefrontal response could reflect reduced demands on cognitive control. Collectively, the results offer novel insights into why memory retention benefits from repeated retrieval, and they suggest fundamental differences between repeated study and repeated testing. Repeated testing is known to produce superior long-term retention of the to-be-learned material compared with repeated encoding and other learning techniques, much because it fosters repeated memory retrieval. This study demonstrates that repeated memory

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

Science.gov (United States)

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

2011-10-11

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

Evidence for Separate Contributions of High and Low Spatial Frequencies during Visual Word Recognition.

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Winsler, Kurt; Holcomb, Phillip J; Midgley, Katherine J; Grainger, Jonathan

2017-01-01

Previous studies have shown that different spatial frequency information processing streams interact during the recognition of visual stimuli. However, it is a matter of debate as to the contributions of high and low spatial frequency (HSF and LSF) information for visual word recognition. This study examined the role of different spatial frequencies in visual word recognition using event-related potential (ERP) masked priming. EEG was recorded from 32 scalp sites in 30 English-speaking adults in a go/no-go semantic categorization task. Stimuli were white characters on a neutral gray background. Targets were uppercase five letter words preceded by a forward-mask (#######) and a 50 ms lowercase prime. Primes were either the same word (repeated) or a different word (un-repeated) than the subsequent target and either contained only high, only low, or full spatial frequency information. Additionally within each condition, half of the prime-target pairs were high lexical frequency, and half were low. In the full spatial frequency condition, typical ERP masked priming effects were found with an attenuated N250 (sub-lexical) and N400 (lexical-semantic) for repeated compared to un-repeated primes. For HSF primes there was a weaker N250 effect which interacted with lexical frequency, a significant reversal of the effect around 300 ms, and an N400-like effect for only high lexical frequency word pairs. LSF primes did not produce any of the classic ERP repetition priming effects, however they did elicit a distinct early effect around 200 ms in the opposite direction of typical repetition effects. HSF information accounted for many of the masked repetition priming ERP effects and therefore suggests that HSFs are more crucial for word recognition. However, LSFs did produce their own pattern of priming effects indicating that larger scale information may still play a role in word recognition.

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 relationship between recognition memory for emotion-laden words and white matter microstructure in normal older individuals.

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Saarela, Carina; Karrasch, Mira; Ilvesmäki, Tero; Parkkola, Riitta; Rinne, Juha O; Laine, Matti

2016-12-14

Functional neuroimaging studies have shown age-related differences in brain activation and connectivity patterns for emotional memory. Previous studies with middle-aged and older adults have reported associations between episodic memory and white matter (WM) microstructure obtained from diffusion tensor imaging, but such studies on emotional memory remain few. To our knowledge, this is the first study to explore associations between WM microstructure as measured by fractional anisotropy (FA) and recognition memory for intentionally encoded positive, negative, and emotionally neutral words using tract-based spatial statistics applied to diffusion tensor imaging images in an elderly sample (44 cognitively intact adults aged 50-79 years). The use of tract-based spatial statistics enables the identification of WM tracts important to emotional memory without a priori assumptions required for region-of-interest approaches that have been used in previous work. The behavioral analyses showed a positivity bias, that is, a preference for positive words, in recognition memory. No statistically significant associations emerged between FA and memory for negative or neutral words. Controlling for age and memory performance for negative and neutral words, recognition memory for positive words was negatively associated with FA in several projection, association, and commissural tracts in the left hemisphere. This likely reflects the complex interplay between the mnemonic positivity bias, structural WM integrity, and functional brain compensatory mechanisms in older age. Also, the unexpected directionality of the results indicates that the WM microstructural correlates of emotional memory show unique characteristics in normal older individuals.

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

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Goh, Winston D; Pisoni, David B

2003-08-01

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

Word learning mechanisms.

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He, Angela Xiaoxue; Arunachalam, Sudha

2017-07-01

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

Individual differences and repeatability in vocal production: stress-induced calling exposes a songbird's personality

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Guillette, Lauren M.; Sturdy, Christopher B.

2011-11-01

Recent research in songbirds has demonstrated that male singing behavior varies systematically with personality traits such as exploration and risk taking. Here we examine whether the production of bird calls, in addition to bird songs, is repeatable and related to exploratory behavior, using the black-capped chickadee ( Poecile atricapillus) as a model. We assessed the exploratory behavior of individual birds in a novel environment task. We then recorded the vocalizations and accompanying motor behavior of both male and female chickadees, over the course of several days, in two different contexts: a control condition with no playback and a stressful condition where chick-a-dee mobbing calls were played to individual birds. We found that several vocalizations and behaviors were repeatable within both a control and a stressful context, and across contexts. While there was no relationship between vocal output and exploratory behavior in the control context, production of alarm and chick-a-dee calls in the stressful condition was positively associated with exploratory behavior. These findings are important because they show that bird calls, in addition to bird song, are an aspect of personality, in that calls are consistent both within and across contexts, and covary with other personality measures (exploration).

The Role of Repeated Exposure to Multimodal Input in Incidental Acquisition of Foreign Language Vocabulary.

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Bisson, Marie-Josée; van Heuven, Walter J B; Conklin, Kathy; Tunney, Richard J

2014-12-01

Prior research has reported incidental vocabulary acquisition with complete beginners in a foreign language (FL), within 8 exposures to auditory and written FL word forms presented with a picture depicting their meaning. However, important questions remain about whether acquisition occurs with fewer exposures to FL words in a multimodal situation and whether there is a repeated exposure effect. Here we report a study where the number of exposures to FL words in an incidental learning phase varied between 2, 4, 6, and 8 exposures. Following the incidental learning phase, participants completed an explicit learning task where they learned to recognize written translation equivalents of auditory FL word forms, half of which had occurred in the incidental learning phase. The results showed that participants performed better on the words they had previously been exposed to, and that this incidental learning effect occurred from as little as 2 exposures to the multimodal stimuli. In addition, repeated exposure to the stimuli was found to have a larger impact on learning during the first few exposures and decrease thereafter, suggesting that the effects of repeated exposure on vocabulary acquisition are not necessarily constant.

Baby's first 10 words.

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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.

Category learning in the color-word contingency learning paradigm.

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Schmidt, James R; Augustinova, Maria; De Houwer, Jan

2018-04-01

In the typical color-word contingency learning paradigm, participants respond to the print color of words where each word is presented most often in one color. Learning is indicated by faster and more accurate responses when a word is presented in its usual color, relative to another color. To eliminate the possibility that this effect is driven exclusively by the familiarity of item-specific word-color pairings, we examine whether contingency learning effects can be observed also when colors are related to categories of words rather than to individual words. To this end, the reported experiments used three categories of words (animals, verbs, and professions) that were each predictive of one color. Importantly, each individual word was presented only once, thus eliminating individual color-word contingencies. Nevertheless, for the first time, a category-based contingency effect was observed, with faster and more accurate responses when a category item was presented in the color in which most of the other items of that category were presented. This finding helps to constrain episodic learning models and sets the stage for new research on category-based contingency learning.

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.

Measuring Explicit Word Learning of Preschool Children: A Development Study.

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Kelley, Elizabeth Spencer

2017-08-15

The purpose of this article is to present preliminary results related to the development of a new measure of explicit word learning. The measure incorporated elements of explicit vocabulary instruction and dynamic assessment and was designed to be sensitive to differences in word learning skill and to be feasible for use in clinical settings. The explicit word learning measure included brief teaching trials and repeated fine-grained measurement of semantic knowledge and production of 3 novel words (2 verbs and 1 adjective). Preschool children (N = 23) completed the measure of explicit word learning; standardized, norm-referenced measures of expressive and receptive vocabulary; and an incidental word learning task. The measure of explicit word learning provided meaningful information about word learning. Performance on the explicit measure was related to existing vocabulary knowledge and incidental word learning. Findings from this development study indicate that further examination of the measure of explicit word learning is warranted. The measure may have the potential to identify children who are poor word learners. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.5170738.

Accounting for L2 learners’ errors in word stress placement

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Clara Herlina Karjo

2016-01-01

Full Text Available Stress placement in English words is governed by highly complicated rules. Thus, assigning stress correctly in English words has been a challenging task for L2 learners, especially Indonesian learners since their L1 does not recognize such stress system. This study explores the production of English word stress by 30 university students. The method used for this study is immediate repetition task. Participants are instructed to identify the stress placement of 80 English words which are auditorily presented as stimuli and immediately repeat the words with correct stress placement. The objectives of this study are to find out whether English word stress placement is problematic for L2 learners and to investigate the phonological factors which account for these problems. Research reveals that L2 learners have different ability in producing the stress, but three-syllable words are more problematic than two-syllable words. Moreover, misplacement of stress is caused by, among others, the influence of vowel lenght and vowel height.

The word frequency effect in first- and second-language word recognition: A lexical entrenchment account

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Diependaele, K.; Lemhöfer, K.M.L.; Brysbaert, M.

2013-01-01

We investigate the origin of differences in the word frequency effect between native speakers and second-language speakers. In a large-scale analysis of English word identification times we find that group-level differences are fully accounted for by the individual language proficiency scores.

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

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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

Hearing and saying. The functional neuro-anatomy of auditory word processing.

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Price, C J; Wise, R J; Warburton, E A; Moore, C J; Howard, D; Patterson, K; Frackowiak, R S; Friston, K J

1996-06-01

The neural systems involved in hearing and repeating single words were investigated in a series of experiments using PET. Neuropsychological and psycholinguistic studies implicate the involvement of posterior and anterior left perisylvian regions (Wernicke's and Broca's areas). Although previous functional neuroimaging studies have consistently shown activation of Wernicke's area, there has been only variable implication of Broca's area. This study demonstrates that Broca's area is involved in both auditory word perception and repetition but activation is dependent on task (greater during repetition than hearing) and stimulus presentation (greater when hearing words at a slow rate). The peak of frontal activation in response to hearing words is anterior to that associated with repeating words; the former is probably located in Brodmann's area 45, the latter in Brodmann's area 44 and the adjacent precentral sulcus. As Broca's area activation is more subtle and complex than that in Wernicke's area during these tasks, the likelihood of observing it is influenced by both the study design and the image analysis technique employed. As a secondary outcome from the study, the response of bilateral auditory association cortex to 'own voice' during repetition was shown to be the same as when listening to "other voice' from a prerecorded tape.

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

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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

The reliability of eyetracking to assess attentional bias to threatening words in healthy individuals.

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Skinner, Ian W; Hübscher, Markus; Moseley, G Lorimer; Lee, Hopin; Wand, Benedict M; Traeger, Adrian C; Gustin, Sylvia M; McAuley, James H

2017-08-15

Eyetracking is commonly used to investigate attentional bias. Although some studies have investigated the internal consistency of eyetracking, data are scarce on the test-retest reliability and agreement of eyetracking to investigate attentional bias. This study reports the test-retest reliability, measurement error, and internal consistency of 12 commonly used outcome measures thought to reflect the different components of attentional bias: overall attention, early attention, and late attention. Healthy participants completed a preferential-looking eyetracking task that involved the presentation of threatening (sensory words, general threat words, and affective words) and nonthreatening words. We used intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) to measure test-retest reliability (ICC > .70 indicates adequate reliability). The ICCs(2, 1) ranged from -.31 to .71. Reliability varied according to the outcome measure and threat word category. Sensory words had a lower mean ICC (.08) than either affective words (.32) or general threat words (.29). A longer exposure time was associated with higher test-retest reliability. All of the outcome measures, except second-run dwell time, demonstrated low measurement error ( .93). Recommendations are discussed for improving the reliability of eyetracking tasks in future research.

Rapid Word Recognition as a Measure of Word-Level Automaticity and Its Relation to Other Measures of Reading

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Frye, Elizabeth M.; Gosky, Ross

2012-01-01

The present study investigated the relationship between rapid recognition of individual words (Word Recognition Test) and two measures of contextual reading: (1) grade-level Passage Reading Test (IRI passage) and (2) performance on standardized STAR Reading Test. To establish if time of presentation on the word recognition test was a factor in…

Words, Words, Words: English, Vocabulary.

Science.gov (United States)

Lamb, Barbara

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

Repeated suicide attempts and suicide among individuals with a first emergency department contact for attempted suicide

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Fedyszyn, Izabela E.; Erlangsen, Annette; Hjorthoj, Carsten

2016-01-01

Objective: Emergency departments are important, albeit underutilized, sites for suicide prevention. Preventive strategies and interventions could benefit from a greater understanding of factors influencing the course of suicide risk after emergency department contact due to attempted suicide...... = 1.74; 95% CI, 1.22-2.49). The cumulative rates of repeated attempts and suicide deaths in the total sample were particularly high within the first week of the index attempt, reaching 3.6% and 0.1%, respectively. Conclusions: Preventive efforts need to target the period close to discharge from....... The aim of our study was 2-fold: to identify predictors of repeated suicide attempts and suicide and to investigate the timing of these events. Methods: Data from Danish nationwide, longitudinal registers were used in this prospective, population-based study of all individuals first presenting...

Long-term repetition priming with symmetrical polygons and words.

Science.gov (United States)

Kersteen-Tucker, Z

1991-01-01

In two different tasks, subjects were asked to make lexical decisions (word or nonword) and symmetry judgments (symmetrical or nonsymmetrical) about two-dimensional polygons. In both tasks, every stimulus was repeated at one of four lags (0, 1, 4, or 8 items interposed between the first and second stimulus presentations). This paradigm, known as repetition priming, revealed comparable short-term priming (Lag 0) and long-term priming (Lags 1, 4, and 8) both for symmetrical polygons and for words. A shorter term component (Lags 0 and 1) of priming was observed for nonwords, and only very short-term priming (Lag 0) was observed for nonsymmetrical polygons. These results indicate that response facilitation accruing from repeated exposure can be observed for stimuli that have no preexisting memory representations and suggest that perceptual factors contribute to repetition-priming effects.

Comparing Destination Image and Loyalty between First-time and Repeat-visit Tourists

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Mohamad M.

2014-01-01

Full Text Available The objective of this study was to investigate the difference between destination image and loyalty among first-time and repeat-visit tourists. The study was undertaken to examine aspects of underlying factors of destination image that influenced tourists’ willingness to recommend Malaysia to their friends and relatives as well as spread positive word-of-mouth to others. In addition, it was to ascertain the relationship between destination image and loyalty among first-time and repeat-visit tourists. The data was collected at Kuala Lumpur International Airport at the departure hall using self-administered questionnaires. 248 usable questionnaires were returned and analysed. The findings of the study revealed that both groups of tourists perceived Malaysia as providing a nature-based destination. The study also empirically proved that both first-time and repeat-visit tourists were willing to disseminate positive word-of-mouth and recommend Malaysia to their friends and relatives as a vacation destination to visit. However, there was a significant difference in destination loyalty between first-visit and repeat-visit tourists.

Individual differences in language ability are related to variation in word recognition, not speech perception: Evidence from eye-movements

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McMurray, Bob; Munson, Cheyenne; Tomblin, J. Bruce

2013-01-01

Purpose This study examined speech perception deficits associated with individual differences in language ability contrasting auditory, phonological or lexical accounts by asking if lexical competition is differentially sensitive to fine-grained acoustic variation. Methods 74 adolescents with a range of language abilities (including 35 impaired) participated in an experiment based on McMurray, Tanenhaus and Aslin (2002). Participants heard tokens from six 9-step Voice Onset Time (VOT) continua spanning two words (beach/peach, beak/peak, etc), while viewing a screen containing pictures of those words and two unrelated objects. Participants selected the referent while eye-movements to each picture were monitored as a measure of lexical activation. Fixations were examined as a function of both VOT and language ability. Results Eye-movements were sensitive to within-category VOT differences: as VOT approached the boundary, listeners made more fixations to the competing word. This did not interact with language ability, suggesting that language impairment is not associated with differential auditory sensitivity or phonetic categorization. Listeners with poorer language skills showed heightened competitors fixations overall, suggesting a deficit in lexical processes. Conclusions Language impairment may be better characterized by a deficit in lexical competition (inability to suppress competing words), rather than differences phonological categorization or auditory abilities. PMID:24687026

Individual differences in language ability are related to variation in word recognition, not speech perception: evidence from eye movements.

Science.gov (United States)

McMurray, Bob; Munson, Cheyenne; Tomblin, J Bruce

2014-08-01

The authors examined speech perception deficits associated with individual differences in language ability, contrasting auditory, phonological, or lexical accounts by asking whether lexical competition is differentially sensitive to fine-grained acoustic variation. Adolescents with a range of language abilities (N = 74, including 35 impaired) participated in an experiment based on McMurray, Tanenhaus, and Aslin (2002). Participants heard tokens from six 9-step voice onset time (VOT) continua spanning 2 words (beach/peach, beak/peak, etc.) while viewing a screen containing pictures of those words and 2 unrelated objects. Participants selected the referent while eye movements to each picture were monitored as a measure of lexical activation. Fixations were examined as a function of both VOT and language ability. Eye movements were sensitive to within-category VOT differences: As VOT approached the boundary, listeners made more fixations to the competing word. This did not interact with language ability, suggesting that language impairment is not associated with differential auditory sensitivity or phonetic categorization. Listeners with poorer language skills showed heightened competitors fixations overall, suggesting a deficit in lexical processes. Language impairment may be better characterized by a deficit in lexical competition (inability to suppress competing words), rather than differences in phonological categorization or auditory abilities.

Elevating Baseline Activation Does Not Facilitate Reading of Unattended Words

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

2009-01-01

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

A Heavy Heart: The Association between Weight and Emotional Words.

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Zhao, Xueru; He, Xianyou; Zhang, Wei

2016-01-01

People often express emotion in language using weight (e.g., a heavy heart, light-hearted, light humor, or heavy-handed), but the question remains whether these expressions of emotion are rooted in the body. Six experiments used a priming paradigm to explore the metaphoric relation between weight perception and emotional words. Experiments 1 and 2 investigated the influence of weight perception on judgments of emotional words and the influence of emotional words on judgments of weight, respectively. A significant difference between the consistent condition (e.g., lightness corresponds to positive words and heaviness corresponds to negative words) and the inconsistent condition (e.g., lightness corresponds to negative words and heaviness corresponds to positive words) was found in Experiment 1 but not in Experiment 2. Experiments 3, 4, and 5 were conducted to exclude potential confounds. Experiment 6 was a repeated-measures study that was conducted to verify the weight-emotion effect. The study confirmed that weight perception affected judgments of emotional words. The results contribute to the growing literature on conceptual metaphor theory and embodied cognition theory.

Reduction in gesture during the production of repeated references

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Hoetjes, M.W.; Koolen, R.M.F.; Goudbeek, M.B.; Krahmer, E.J.; Swerts, M.G.J.

2015-01-01

In dialogue, repeated references contain fewer words (which are also acoustically reduced) and fewer gestures than initial ones. In this paper, we describe three experiments studying to what extent gesture reduction is comparable to other forms of linguistic reduction. Since previous studies showed

Effects of dynamic text in an AAC app on sight word reading for individuals with autism spectrum disorder.

Science.gov (United States)

Caron, Jessica; Light, Janice; Holyfield, Christine; McNaughton, David

2018-06-01

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of Transition to Literacy (T2L) software features (i.e., dynamic text and speech output upon selection of a graphic symbol) within a grid display in an augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) app, on the sight word reading skills of individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and complex communication needs. The study implemented a single-subject multiple probe research design across one set of three participants. The same design was utilized with an additional set of two participants. As part of the intervention, the participants were exposed to an AAC app with the T2L features during a highly structured matching task. With only limited exposure to the features, the five participants all demonstrated increased accuracy of identification of 12 targeted sight words. This study provides preliminary evidence that redesigning AAC apps to include the provision of dynamic text combined with speech output, can positively impact the sight-word reading of participants during a structured task. This adaptation in AAC system design could be used to complement literacy instruction and to potentially infuse components of literacy learning into daily communication.

Picture-Word Differences in Discrimination Learning: 11. Effects of Conceptual Categories

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Bourne, Lyle E.; And Others

1976-01-01

Investigates the prediction that the usual superiority of pictures over words for repetitions of the same items would disappear for items that were different instances of repeated categories. (Author/RK)

Effects of a Word-Learning Training on Children With Cochlear Implants

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Lund, Emily

2014-01-01

Preschool children with hearing loss who use cochlear implants demonstrate vocabulary delays when compared to their peers without hearing loss. These delays may be a result of deficient word-learning abilities; children with cochlear implants perform more poorly on rapid word-learning tasks than children with normal hearing. This study explored the malleability of rapid word learning of preschoolers with cochlear implants by evaluating the effects of a word-learning training on rapid word learning. A single-subject, multiple probe design across participants measured the impact of the training on children’s rapid word-learning performance. Participants included 5 preschool children with cochlear implants who had an expressive lexicon of less than 150 words. An investigator guided children to identify, repeat, and learn about unknown sets of words in 2-weekly sessions across 10 weeks. The probe measure, a rapid word-learning task with a different set of words than those taught during training, was collected in the baseline, training, and maintenance conditions. All participants improved their receptive rapid word-learning performance in the training condition. The functional relation indicates that the receptive rapid word-learning performance of children with cochlear implants is malleable. PMID:23981321

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

Science.gov (United States)

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.

Practical Issues in Evidence-Based Use of Performance Supplements: Supplement Interactions, Repeated Use and Individual Responses.

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Burke, Louise M

2017-03-01

Current sports nutrition guidelines recommend that athletes only take supplements following an evidence-based analysis of their value in supporting training outcomes or competition performance in their specific event. While there is sound evidence to support the use of a few performance supplements under specific scenarios (creatine, beta-alanine, bicarbonate, caffeine, nitrate/beetroot juice and, perhaps, phosphate), there is a lack of information around several issues needed to guide the practical use of these products in competitive sport. First, there is limited knowledge around the strategy of combining the intake of several products in events in which performance benefits are seen with each product in isolation. The range in findings from studies involving combined use of different combinations of two supplements makes it difficult to derive a general conclusion, with both the limitations of individual studies and the type of sporting event to which the supplements are applied influencing the potential for additive, neutral or counteractive outcomes. The repeated use of the same supplement in sports involving two or more events within a 24-h period is of additional interest, but has received even less attention. Finally, the potential for individual athletes to respond differently, in direction and magnitude, to the use of a supplement seems real, but is hard to distinguish from normal day to day variability in performance. Strategies that can be used in research or practice to identify whether individual differences are robust include repeat trials, and the collection of data on physiological or genetic mechanisms underpinning outcomes.

Automatic activation of word phonology from print in deep dyslexia.

Science.gov (United States)

Katz, R B; Lanzoni, S M

1992-11-01

The performance of deep dyslexics in oral reading and other tasks suggests that they are poor at activating the phonology of words and non-words from printed stimuli. As the tasks ordinarily used to test deep dyslexics require controlled processing, it is possible that the phonology of printed words can be better activated on an automatic basis. This study investigated this possibility by testing a deep dyslexic patient on a lexical decision task with pairs of stimuli presented simultaneously. In Experiment 1, which used content words as stimuli, the deep dyslexic, like normal subjects, showed faster reaction times on trials with rhyming, similarly spelled stimuli (e.g. bribe-tribe) than on control trials (consisting of non-rhyming, dissimilarly spelled words), but slower reaction times on trials with non-rhyming, similarly spelled stimuli (e.g. couch-touch). When the experiment was repeated using function words as stimuli, the patient no longer showed a phonological effect. Therefore, the phonological activation of printed content words by deep dyslexics may be better than would be expected on the basis of their oral reading performance.

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.

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

Voice reinstatement modulates neural indices of continuous word recognition.

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Campeanu, Sandra; Craik, Fergus I M; Backer, Kristina C; Alain, Claude

2014-09-01

The present study was designed to examine listeners' ability to use voice information incidentally during spoken word recognition. We recorded event-related brain potentials (ERPs) during a continuous recognition paradigm in which participants indicated on each trial whether the spoken word was "new" or "old." Old items were presented at 2, 8 or 16 words following the first presentation. Context congruency was manipulated by having the same word repeated by either the same speaker or a different speaker. The different speaker could share the gender, accent or neither feature with the word presented the first time. Participants' accuracy was greatest when the old word was spoken by the same speaker than by a different speaker. In addition, accuracy decreased with increasing lag. The correct identification of old words was accompanied by an enhanced late positivity over parietal sites, with no difference found between voice congruency conditions. In contrast, an earlier voice reinstatement effect was observed over frontal sites, an index of priming that preceded recollection in this task. Our results provide further evidence that acoustic and semantic information are integrated into a unified trace and that acoustic information facilitates spoken word recollection. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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,…

Cross-situational word learning in aphasia.

Science.gov (United States)

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

2017-08-01

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

Modeling Polymorphemic Word Recognition: Exploring Differences among Children with Early-Emerging and Late- Emerging Word Reading Difficulty

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Kearns, Devin M.; Steacy, Laura M.; Compton, Donald L.; Gilbert, Jennifer K.; Goodwin, Amanda P.; Cho, Eunsoo; Lindstrom, Esther R.; Collins, Alyson A.

2016-01-01

Comprehensive models of derived polymorphemic word recognition skill in developing readers, with an emphasis on children with reading difficulty (RD), have not been developed. The purpose of the present study was to model individual differences in polymorphemic word recognition ability at the item level among 5th-grade children (N = 173)…

Psychometrically equivalent bisyllabic words for speech recognition threshold testing in Vietnamese.

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Harris, Richard W; McPherson, David L; Hanson, Claire M; Eggett, Dennis L

2017-08-01

This study identified, digitally recorded, edited and evaluated 89 bisyllabic Vietnamese words with the goal of identifying homogeneous words that could be used to measure the speech recognition threshold (SRT) in native talkers of Vietnamese. Native male and female talker productions of 89 Vietnamese bisyllabic words were recorded, edited and then presented at intensities ranging from -10 to 20 dBHL. Logistic regression was used to identify the best words for measuring the SRT. Forty-eight words were selected and digitally edited to have 50% intelligibility at a level equal to the mean pure-tone average (PTA) for normally hearing participants (5.2 dBHL). Twenty normally hearing native Vietnamese participants listened to and repeated bisyllabic Vietnamese words at intensities ranging from -10 to 20 dBHL. A total of 48 male and female talker recordings of bisyllabic words with steep psychometric functions (>9.0%/dB) were chosen for the final bisyllabic SRT list. Only words homogeneous with respect to threshold audibility with steep psychometric function slopes were chosen for the final list. Digital recordings of bisyllabic Vietnamese words are now available for use in measuring the SRT for patients whose native language is Vietnamese.

Comprehension of derivational morphemes in words and pseudo-words in semantic variant primary progressive aphasia

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Noémie Auclair-Ouellet

2014-04-01

The results of the word condition alone cannot rule out the possibility that errors in the svPPA group were caused by difficulty in understanding words rather than in processing derivational morphemes. However, the lexical context provided in this condition did not speed-up the performance of svPPA individuals as it did in the control group. Most importantly, results from the pseudo-word condition showed that in the svPPA group, the association between the morpheme and its meaning was not performed as readily and reliably as in the control group. These results support the involvement of semantic memory in morphological processing.

Visual imagery in autobiographical memory: The role of repeated retrieval in shifting perspective

Science.gov (United States)

Butler, Andrew C.; Rice, Heather J.; Wooldridge, Cynthia L.; Rubin, David C.

2016-01-01

Recent memories are generally recalled from a first-person perspective whereas older memories are often recalled from a third-person perspective. We investigated how repeated retrieval affects the availability of visual information, and whether it could explain the observed shift in perspective with time. In Experiment 1, participants performed mini-events and nominated memories of recent autobiographical events in response to cue words. Next, they described their memory for each event and rated its phenomenological characteristics. Over the following three weeks, they repeatedly retrieved half of the mini-event and cue-word memories. No instructions were given about how to retrieve the memories. In Experiment 2, participants were asked to adopt either a first- or third-person perspective during retrieval. One month later, participants retrieved all of the memories and again provided phenomenology ratings. When first-person visual details from the event were repeatedly retrieved, this information was retained better and the shift in perspective was slowed. PMID:27064539

Doing words together

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Fusaroli, Riccardo; Østergaard, Svend; Raczaszek-Leonardi, Joanna

In this paper we test the effects of social interactions in embodied problem solving by employing a Scrabble-like setting. 28 pairs of participants had to generate as many words as possible from 2 balanced sets of 7 letters, which they could manipulate, either individually or collectively...

Focal hand dystonia: individualized intervention with repeated application of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation.

Science.gov (United States)

Kimberley, Teresa Jacobson; Borich, Michael R; Schmidt, Rebekah L; Carey, James R; Gillick, Bernadette

2015-04-01

To examine for individual factors that may predict response to inhibitory repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) in focal hand dystonia (FHD); to present the method for determining optimal stimulation to increase inhibition in a given patient; and to examine individual responses to prolonged intervention. Single-subject design to determine optimal parameters to increase inhibition for a given subject and to use the selected parameters once per week for 6 weeks, with 1-week follow-up, to determine response. Clinical research laboratory. A volunteer sample of subjects with FHD (N = 2). One participant had transcranial magnetic stimulation responses indicating impaired inhibition, and the other had responses within normative limits. There were 1200 pulses of 1-Hz rTMS delivered using 4 different stimulation sites/intensity combinations: primary motor cortex at 90% or 110% of resting motor threshold (RMT) and dorsal premotor cortex (PMd) at 90% or 110% of RMT. The parameters producing the greatest within-session increase in cortical silent period (CSP) duration were then used as the intervention. Response variables included handwriting pressure and velocity, subjective symptom rating, CSP, and short latency intracortical inhibition and facilitation. The individual with baseline transcranial magnetic stimulation responses indicating impaired inhibition responded favorably to the repeated intervention, with reduced handwriting force, an increase in the CSP, and subjective report of moderate symptom improvement at 1-week follow-up. The individual with normative baseline responses failed to respond to the intervention. In both subjects, 90% of RMT to the PMd produced the greatest lengthening of the CSP and was used as the intervention. An individualized understanding of neurophysiological measures can be an indicator of responsiveness to inhibitory rTMS in focal dystonia, with further work needed to determine likely responders versus nonresponders. Copyright �

Repeating a searched-for word with an agreement token in "challenged interaction"

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Kristiansen, Elisabeth Dalby; Marstrand, Ann Katrine; El Derbas, Jalal

2017-01-01

the repeat, that seems to defer to others’ claims of epistemic authority and competence. The article contributes to conversation analytic studies of atypical interaction and deviance by describing how speakers in “challenged interaction” deal with competence as a practical problem. Data is in English, Arabic...

Benefits of Repeated Book Readings in Children with SLI

Science.gov (United States)

Rohlfing, Katharina J.; Ceurremans, Josefa; Horst, Jessica S.

2018-01-01

In this pilot study, we ask whether repeated storybook reading is also beneficial for word learning in children diagnosed with specific language impairment (SLI). We compared 3-year-old German learning children diagnosed with SLI to typically developing children matched on age and socioeconomic status (SES). One week later, children with SLI…

Rapid Statistical Learning Supporting Word Extraction From Continuous Speech.

Science.gov (United States)

Batterink, Laura J

2017-07-01

The identification of words in continuous speech, known as speech segmentation, is a critical early step in language acquisition. This process is partially supported by statistical learning, the ability to extract patterns from the environment. Given that speech segmentation represents a potential bottleneck for language acquisition, patterns in speech may be extracted very rapidly, without extensive exposure. This hypothesis was examined by exposing participants to continuous speech streams composed of novel repeating nonsense words. Learning was measured on-line using a reaction time task. After merely one exposure to an embedded novel word, learners demonstrated significant learning effects, as revealed by faster responses to predictable than to unpredictable syllables. These results demonstrate that learners gained sensitivity to the statistical structure of unfamiliar speech on a very rapid timescale. This ability may play an essential role in early stages of language acquisition, allowing learners to rapidly identify word candidates and "break in" to an unfamiliar language.

Repeatability of quantitative 18F-FLT uptake measurements in solid tumors: an individual patient data multi-center meta-analysis.

Science.gov (United States)

Kramer, G M; Liu, Y; de Langen, A J; Jansma, E P; Trigonis, I; Asselin, M-C; Jackson, A; Kenny, L; Aboagye, E O; Hoekstra, O S; Boellaard, R

2018-06-01

3'-deoxy-3'-[ 18 F]fluorothymidine ( 18 F-FLT) positron emission tomography (PET) provides a non-invasive method to assess cellular proliferation and response to antitumor therapy. Quantitative 18 F-FLT uptake metrics are being used for evaluation of proliferative response in investigational setting, however multi-center repeatability needs to be established. The aim of this study was to determine the repeatability of 18 F-FLT tumor uptake metrics by re-analyzing individual patient data from previously published reports using the same tumor segmentation method and repeatability metrics across cohorts. A systematic search in PubMed, EMBASE.com and the Cochrane Library from inception-October 2016 yielded five 18 F-FLT repeatability cohorts in solid tumors. 18 F-FLT avid lesions were delineated using a 50% isocontour adapted for local background on test and retest scans. SUV max , SUV mean , SUV peak , proliferative volume and total lesion uptake (TLU) were calculated. Repeatability was assessed using the repeatability coefficient (RC = 1.96 × SD of test-retest differences), linear regression analysis, and the intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC). The impact of different lesion selection criteria was also evaluated. Images from four cohorts containing 30 patients with 52 lesions were obtained and analyzed (ten in breast cancer, nine in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma, and 33 in non-small cell lung cancer patients). A good correlation was found between test-retest data for all 18 F-FLT uptake metrics (R 2  ≥ 0.93; ICC ≥ 0.96). Best repeatability was found for SUV peak (RC: 23.1%), without significant differences in RC between different SUV metrics. Repeatability of proliferative volume (RC: 36.0%) and TLU (RC: 36.4%) was worse than SUV. Lesion selection methods based on SUV max  ≥ 4.0 improved the repeatability of volumetric metrics (RC: 26-28%), but did not affect the repeatability of SUV metrics. In multi-center studies

Niche as a determinant of word fate in online groups.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Eduardo G Altmann

2011-05-01

Full Text Available Patterns of word use both reflect and influence a myriad of human activities and interactions. Like other entities that are reproduced and evolve, words rise or decline depending upon a complex interplay between their intrinsic properties and the environments in which they function. Using Internet discussion communities as model systems, we define the concept of a word niche as the relationship between the word and the characteristic features of the environments in which it is used. We develop a method to quantify two important aspects of the size of the word niche: the range of individuals using the word and the range of topics it is used to discuss. Controlling for word frequency, we show that these aspects of the word niche are strong determinants of changes in word frequency. Previous studies have already indicated that word frequency itself is a correlate of word success at historical time scales. Our analysis of changes in word frequencies over time reveals that the relative sizes of word niches are far more important than word frequencies in the dynamics of the entire vocabulary at shorter time scales, as the language adapts to new concepts and social groupings. We also distinguish endogenous versus exogenous factors as additional contributors to the fates of words, and demonstrate the force of this distinction in the rise of novel words. Our results indicate that short-term nonstationarity in word statistics is strongly driven by individual proclivities, including inclinations to provide novel information and to project a distinctive social identity.

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

Science.gov (United States)

Calvo, Manuel G; Eysenck, Michael W

2008-11-01

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

Auditory phonological priming in children and adults during word repetition

Science.gov (United States)

Cleary, Miranda; Schwartz, Richard G.

2004-05-01

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

Word level language identification in online multilingual communication

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Nguyen, Dong-Phuong; Dogruoz, A. Seza

2013-01-01

Multilingual speakers switch between languages in online and spoken communication. Analyses of large scale multilingual data require automatic language identification at the word level. For our experiments with multilingual online discussions, we first tag the language of individual words using

Repeated speech errors: evidence for learning.

Science.gov (United States)

Humphreys, Karin R; Menzies, Heather; Lake, Johanna K

2010-11-01

Three experiments elicited phonological speech errors using the SLIP procedure to investigate whether there is a tendency for speech errors on specific words to reoccur, and whether this effect can be attributed to implicit learning of an incorrect mapping from lemma to phonology for that word. In Experiment 1, when speakers made a phonological speech error in the study phase of the experiment (e.g. saying "beg pet" in place of "peg bet") they were over four times as likely to make an error on that same item several minutes later at test. A pseudo-error condition demonstrated that the effect is not simply due to a propensity for speakers to repeat phonological forms, regardless of whether or not they have been made in error. That is, saying "beg pet" correctly at study did not induce speakers to say "beg pet" in error instead of "peg bet" at test. Instead, the effect appeared to be due to learning of the error pathway. Experiment 2 replicated this finding, but also showed that after 48 h, errors made at study were no longer more likely to reoccur. As well as providing constraints on the longevity of the effect, this provides strong evidence that the error reoccurrences observed are not due to item-specific difficulty that leads individual speakers to make habitual mistakes on certain items. Experiment 3 showed that the diminishment of the effect 48 h later is not due to specific extra practice at the task. We discuss how these results fit in with a larger view of language as a dynamic system that is constantly adapting in response to experience. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Whole-word response scoring underestimates functional spelling ability for some individuals with global agraphia

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Andrew Tesla Demarco

2015-05-01

These data suggest that conventional whole-word scoring may significantly underestimate functional spelling performance. Because by-letter scoring boosted pre-treatment scores to the same extent as post-treatment scores, the magnitude of treatment gains was no greater than estimates from conventional whole-word scoring. Nonetheless, the surprisingly large disparity between conventional whole-word scoring and by-letter scoring suggests that by-letter scoring methods may warrant further investigation. Because by-letter analyses may hold interest to others, we plan to make the software tool used in this study available on-line for use to researchers and clinicians at large.

Errorless discrimination and picture fading as techniques for teaching sight words to TMR students.

Science.gov (United States)

Walsh, B F; Lamberts, F

1979-03-01

The effectiveness of two approaches for teaching beginning sight words to 30 TMR students was compared. In Dorry and Zeaman's picture-fading technique, words are taught through association with pictures that are faded out over a series of trials, while in the Edmark program errorless-discrimination technique, words are taught through shaped sequences of visual and auditory--visual matching-to-sample, with the target word first appearing alone and eventually appearing with orthographically similar words. Students were instructed on two lists of 10 words each, one list in the picture-fading and one in the discrimination method, in a double counter-balanced, repeated-measures design. Covariance analysis on three measures (word identification, word recognition, and picture--word matching) showed highly significant differences between the two methods. Students' performance was better after instruction with the errorless-discrimination method than after instruction with the picture-fading method. The findings on picture fading were interpreted as indicating a possible failure of the shifting of control from picture to printed word that earlier researchers have hypothesized as occurring.

Dynamic burstiness of word-occurrence and network modularity in textbook systems

Science.gov (United States)

Cui, Xue-Mei; Yoon, Chang No; Youn, Hyejin; Lee, Sang Hoon; Jung, Jean S.; Han, Seung Kee

2017-12-01

We show that the dynamic burstiness of word occurrence in textbook systems is attributed to the modularity of the word association networks. At first, a measure of dynamic burstiness is introduced to quantify burstiness of word occurrence in a textbook. The advantage of this measure is that the dynamic burstiness is decomposable into two contributions: one coming from the inter-event variance and the other from the memory effects. Comparing network structures of physics textbook systems with those of surrogate random textbooks without the memory or variance effects are absent, we show that the network modularity increases systematically with the dynamic burstiness. The intra-connectivity of individual word representing the strength of a tie with which a node is bound to a module accordingly increases with the dynamic burstiness, suggesting individual words with high burstiness are strongly bound to one module. Based on the frequency and dynamic burstiness, physics terminology is classified into four categories: fundamental words, topical words, special words, and common words. In addition, we test the correlation between the dynamic burstiness of word occurrence and network modularity using a two-state model of burst generation.

[Changes in the EEG spectral power during perception of neutral and emotionally salient words in schizophrenic patients, their relatives and healthy individuals from the general population].

Science.gov (United States)

Alfimova, M V; Uvarova, L G

2007-01-01

To search for EEG-correlates of emotional processing that might be indicators of genetic predisposition to schizophrenia, changes in EEG spectral power during perception of neutral and emotionally salient words were examined in 36 schizophrenic patients, 50 of their unaffected first-degree relatives, and 47 healthy individuals without any family history of psychoses. In healthy persons, passive listening to neutral words induced minimum changes in cortical rhythmical activity, predominantly in the form of synchronization of slow and fast waves, whereas perception of emotional words was followed by a generalized depression of the alpha and beta1 activity and a locally specific decrease in the power of theta and beta2 frequency bands. The patients and their relatives showed a decrease in the alpha and beta1 activity simultaneously with an increase in the power of delta activity in response to both groups of words. Thus, in the patients and their relatives, reactions to neutral and emotional words were ulterior as a result of augmented reactions to the neutral words. These findings suggest that the EEG changes reflect familial and possibly hereditable abnormal involuntary attention. No prominent decrease in reactivity to emotional stimuli was revealed in schizophrenic families.

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.

Reading Personalized Books with Preschool Children Enhances Their Word Acquisition

Science.gov (United States)

Kucirkova, Natalia; Messer, David; Sheehy, Kieron

2014-01-01

This study examines whether books that contain personalized content are better facilitators of young children's word acquisition than books which are not personalized for a child. In a repeated-measures experimental design, 18 children (mean age 3;10) were read a picture book which contained both personalized and non-personalized sections, with…

Combinatorics on words Christoffel words and repetitions in words

CERN Document Server

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

2008-01-01

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

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

Science.gov (United States)

Cilibrasi, Luca; Stojanovik, Vesna; Riddell, Patricia

2015-02-01

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

WordPress web design for dummies

CERN Document Server

Sabin-Wilson, Lisa

2013-01-01

Updated, full-color guide to creating dynamic websites with WordPress 3.6 In this updated new edition, bestselling For Dummies author and WordPress expert Lisa Sabin-Wilson makes it easy for anyone with a basic knowledge of the WordPress software to create a custom site using complementary technologies such as CSS, HTML, PHP, and MySQL. You'll not only get up to speed on essential tools and technologies and further advance your own design skills, this book also gives you pages of great case studies, so you can see just how other companies and individuals are creating compelling, customized, a

Word selection affects perceptions of synthetic biology

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Tonidandel Scott

2011-07-01

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

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…

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

Science.gov (United States)

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

2013-01-01

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

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

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Laura Barca

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

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

Science.gov (United States)

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

2013-01-01

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

An ERP investigation of visual word recognition in syllabary scripts.

Science.gov (United States)

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

2013-06-01

The bimodal interactive-activation model has been successfully applied to understanding the neurocognitive processes involved in reading words in alphabetic scripts, as reflected in the modulation of ERP components in masked repetition priming. In order to test the generalizability of this approach, in the present study we examined word recognition in a different writing system, the Japanese syllabary scripts hiragana and katakana. Native Japanese participants were presented with repeated or unrelated pairs of Japanese words in which the prime and target words were both in the same script (within-script priming, Exp. 1) or were in the opposite script (cross-script priming, Exp. 2). As in previous studies with alphabetic scripts, in both experiments the N250 (sublexical processing) and N400 (lexical-semantic processing) components were modulated by priming, although the time course was somewhat delayed. The earlier N/P150 effect (visual feature processing) was present only in "Experiment 1: Within-script priming", in which the prime and target words shared visual features. Overall, the results provide support for the hypothesis that visual word recognition involves a generalizable set of neurocognitive processes that operate in similar manners across different writing systems and languages, as well as pointing to the viability of the bimodal interactive-activation framework for modeling such processes.

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

Science.gov (United States)

Berninger, V W

1988-10-01

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

Overt attention and context factors: the impact of repeated presentations, image type, and individual motivation.

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Kai Kaspar

Full Text Available The present study investigated the dynamic of the attention focus during observation of different categories of complex scenes and simultaneous consideration of individuals' memory and motivational state. We repeatedly presented four types of complex visual scenes in a pseudo-randomized order and recorded eye movements. Subjects were divided into groups according to their motivational disposition in terms of action orientation and individual rating of scene interest.Statistical analysis of eye-tracking data revealed that the attention focus successively became locally expressed by increasing fixation duration; decreasing saccade length, saccade frequency, and single subject's fixation distribution over images; and increasing inter-subject variance of fixation distributions. The validity of these results was supported by verbal reports. This general tendency was weaker for the group of subjects who rated the image set as interesting as compared to the other group. Additionally, effects were partly mediated by subjects' motivational disposition. Finally, we found a generally strong impact of image type on eye movement parameters. We conclude that motivational tendencies linked to personality as well as individual preferences significantly affected viewing behaviour. Hence, it is important and fruitful to consider inter-individual differences on the level of motivation and personality traits within investigations of attention processes. We demonstrate that future studies on memory's impact on overt attention have to deal appropriately with several aspects that had been out of the research focus until now.

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

Science.gov (United States)

Oppenheim, Gary M

2018-08-01

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

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.

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

OpenAIRE

Chen, Xuqian; Liu, Bo; Lin, Shouwen

2016-01-01

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

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.

Phoneme Error Pattern by Heritage Speakers of Spanish on an English Word Recognition Test.

Science.gov (United States)

Shi, Lu-Feng

2017-04-01

Heritage speakers acquire their native language from home use in their early childhood. As the native language is typically a minority language in the society, these individuals receive their formal education in the majority language and eventually develop greater competency with the majority than their native language. To date, there have not been specific research attempts to understand word recognition by heritage speakers. It is not clear if and to what degree we may infer from evidence based on bilingual listeners in general. This preliminary study investigated how heritage speakers of Spanish perform on an English word recognition test and analyzed their phoneme errors. A prospective, cross-sectional, observational design was employed. Twelve normal-hearing adult Spanish heritage speakers (four men, eight women, 20-38 yr old) participated in the study. Their language background was obtained through the Language Experience and Proficiency Questionnaire. Nine English monolingual listeners (three men, six women, 20-41 yr old) were also included for comparison purposes. Listeners were presented with 200 Northwestern University Auditory Test No. 6 words in quiet. They repeated each word orally and in writing. Their responses were scored by word, word-initial consonant, vowel, and word-final consonant. Performance was compared between groups with Student's t test or analysis of variance. Group-specific error patterns were primarily descriptive, but intergroup comparisons were made using 95% or 99% confidence intervals for proportional data. The two groups of listeners yielded comparable scores when their responses were examined by word, vowel, and final consonant. However, heritage speakers of Spanish misidentified significantly more word-initial consonants and had significantly more difficulty with initial /p, b, h/ than their monolingual peers. The two groups yielded similar patterns for vowel and word-final consonants, but heritage speakers made significantly

Medical Terminology: Root Words. Health Occupations Education Module.

Science.gov (United States)

Temple Univ., Philadelphia, PA. Div. of Vocational Education.

This module on medical terminology (root words) is one of 17 modules designed for individualized instruction in health occupations education programs at both the secondary and postsecondary levels. This module consists of an introduction to root words, a list of resources needed, procedures for using the module, a list of terminology used in the…

Increasing adolescents' depth of understanding of cross-curriculum words: an intervention study.

Science.gov (United States)

Spencer, Sarah; Clegg, Judy; Lowe, Hilary; Stackhouse, Joy

2017-09-01

There is some evidence that vocabulary intervention is effective for children, although further research is needed to confirm the impact of intervention within contexts of social disadvantage. Very little is known about the effectiveness of interventions to increase adolescent knowledge of cross-curriculum words. To evaluate the effectiveness of an intervention programme designed to develop adolescents' knowledge of cross-curriculum words. Participants were 35 adolescents aged between 12 and 14 years who were at risk of educational underachievement with low scores on a range of assessments. Participants received a 10-week intervention programme in small groups, targeting 10 cross-curriculum words (e.g., 'summarize'). This was evaluated using a bespoke outcome measure (the Word Knowledge Profile). The study involved an AABA design, with a repeated baseline, delayed intervention cohort and blind assessment. Intervention included both semantic and phonological information about the target words and involved the adolescents using the words in multiple contexts. Results were promising and participants' knowledge of the targeted words significantly increased following intervention. Progress was demonstrated on the Word Knowledge Profile on the item requiring participants to define the word (for the summer intervention group only). This increase in depth of knowledge was seen on taught words but not on matched non-taught words. Cross-curriculum words are not consistently understood by adolescents at risk of low educational attainment within a low socio-economic context. A 10-week intervention programme resulted in some increases to the depth of knowledge of targeted cross-curriculum words. © 2017 Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.

Hemispheric Lateralization in Processing Emotional and Non-Emotional Kanji Words

OpenAIRE

NAGAE, Seiji

2013-01-01

The purpose of this study was to investigate the contribution of both hemispheres to the processing of positive, negative, and non-emotional Kanji words in normal individuals. Right-handed subjects were asked to read aloud the Kanji word presented in the visual half-field. Results showed that responses to positive and non-emotional words were more accurate in RVF than those in LVF, but no difference was found fornegative emotional words. Reaction time results indicated that processing of nega...

Apraxia of Speech: Perceptual Analysis of Trisyllabic Word Productions across Repeated Sampling Occasions

Science.gov (United States)

Mauszycki, Shannon C.; Wambaugh, Julie L.; Cameron, Rosalea M.

2012-01-01

Purpose: Early apraxia of speech (AOS) research has characterized errors as being variable, resulting in a number of different error types being produced on repeated productions of the same stimuli. Conversely, recent research has uncovered greater consistency in errors, but there are limited data examining sound errors over time (more than one…

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.

Aging effects on ERP correlates of emotional word discrimination

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Molnar, M.; Toth, B.; Boha, R.; Gaal, Z.A.; Kardos, Z.; File, B.; Stam, C.J.

2013-01-01

ObjectiveTo explore age-, and valence specific ERP-characteristics of word-discrimination processes. Methods: A group of young (mean age: 21.26. yrs) and elderly (mean age: 65.73. yrs) individuals participated. The task was to respond to a word (target) with valence (neutral, negative, positive) and

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

Science.gov (United States)

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.

Spectrotemporal processing drives fast access to memory traces for spoken words.

Science.gov (United States)

Tavano, A; Grimm, S; Costa-Faidella, J; Slabu, L; Schröger, E; Escera, C

2012-05-01

The Mismatch Negativity (MMN) component of the event-related potentials is generated when a detectable spectrotemporal feature of the incoming sound does not match the sensory model set up by preceding repeated stimuli. MMN is enhanced at frontocentral scalp sites for deviant words when compared to acoustically similar deviant pseudowords, suggesting that automatic access to long-term memory traces for spoken words contributes to MMN generation. Does spectrotemporal feature matching also drive automatic lexical access? To test this, we recorded human auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) to disyllabic spoken words and pseudowords within a passive oddball paradigm. We first aimed at replicating the word-related MMN enhancement effect for Spanish, thereby adding to the available cross-linguistic evidence (e.g., Finnish, English). We then probed its resilience to spectrotemporal perturbation by inserting short (20 ms) and long (120 ms) silent gaps between first and second syllables of deviant and standard stimuli. A significantly enhanced, frontocentrally distributed MMN to deviant words was found for stimuli with no gap. The long gap yielded no deviant word MMN, showing that prior expectations of word form limits in a given language influence deviance detection processes. Crucially, the insertion of a short gap suppressed deviant word MMN enhancement at frontocentral sites. We propose that spectrotemporal point-wise matching constitutes a core mechanism for fast serial computations in audition and language, bridging sensory and long-term memory systems. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Word-of-Mouth Communication and Social Learning

OpenAIRE

A. Banerjee; Drew Fudenberg

2010-01-01

This paper studies the way that word-of-mouth communication aggregates the information of individual agents. We find that the structure of the communication process determines whether all agents end up making identical choices, with less communication making this conformity more likely. Despite the players' naive decision rules and the stochastic decision environment, word-of-mouth communication may lead all players to adopt the action that is on average superior. These socially efficient out...

Event-related potentials reflecting the frequency of unattended spoken words

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Shtyrov, Yury; Kimppa, Lilli; Pulvermüller, Friedemann

2011-01-01

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

Novel Spoken Word Learning in Adults with Developmental Dyslexia

Science.gov (United States)

Conner, Peggy S.

2013-01-01

A high percentage of individuals with dyslexia struggle to learn unfamiliar spoken words, creating a significant obstacle to foreign language learning after early childhood. The origin of spoken-word learning difficulties in this population, generally thought to be related to the underlying literacy deficit, is not well defined (e.g., Di Betta…

Repeatability and reproducibility of decisions by latent fingerprint examiners.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Bradford T Ulery

Full Text Available The interpretation of forensic fingerprint evidence relies on the expertise of latent print examiners. We tested latent print examiners on the extent to which they reached consistent decisions. This study assessed intra-examiner repeatability by retesting 72 examiners on comparisons of latent and exemplar fingerprints, after an interval of approximately seven months; each examiner was reassigned 25 image pairs for comparison, out of total pool of 744 image pairs. We compare these repeatability results with reproducibility (inter-examiner results derived from our previous study. Examiners repeated 89.1% of their individualization decisions, and 90.1% of their exclusion decisions; most of the changed decisions resulted in inconclusive decisions. Repeatability of comparison decisions (individualization, exclusion, inconclusive was 90.0% for mated pairs, and 85.9% for nonmated pairs. Repeatability and reproducibility were notably lower for comparisons assessed by the examiners as "difficult" than for "easy" or "moderate" comparisons, indicating that examiners' assessments of difficulty may be useful for quality assurance. No false positive errors were repeated (n = 4; 30% of false negative errors were repeated. One percent of latent value decisions were completely reversed (no value even for exclusion vs. of value for individualization. Most of the inter- and intra-examiner variability concerned whether the examiners considered the information available to be sufficient to reach a conclusion; this variability was concentrated on specific image pairs such that repeatability and reproducibility were very high on some comparisons and very low on others. Much of the variability appears to be due to making categorical decisions in borderline cases.

The word-length effect and disyllabic words.

Science.gov (United States)

Lovatt, P; Avons, S E; Masterson, J

2000-02-01

Three experiments compared immediate serial recall of disyllabic words that differed on spoken duration. Two sets of long- and short-duration words were selected, in each case maximizing duration differences but matching for frequency, familiarity, phonological similarity, and number of phonemes, and controlling for semantic associations. Serial recall measures were obtained using auditory and visual presentation and spoken and picture-pointing recall. In Experiments 1a and 1b, using the first set of items, long words were better recalled than short words. In Experiments 2a and 2b, using the second set of items, no difference was found between long and short disyllabic words. Experiment 3 confirmed the large advantage for short-duration words in the word set originally selected by Baddeley, Thomson, and Buchanan (1975). These findings suggest that there is no reliable advantage for short-duration disyllables in span tasks, and that previous accounts of a word-length effect in disyllables are based on accidental differences between list items. The failure to find an effect of word duration casts doubt on theories that propose that the capacity of memory span is determined by the duration of list items or the decay rate of phonological information in short-term memory.

Visual word recognition across the adult lifespan.

Science.gov (United States)

Cohen-Shikora, Emily R; Balota, David A

2016-08-01

The current study examines visual word recognition in a large sample (N = 148) across the adult life span and across a large set of stimuli (N = 1,187) in three different lexical processing tasks (pronunciation, lexical decision, and animacy judgment). Although the focus of the present study is on the influence of word frequency, a diverse set of other variables are examined as the word recognition system ages and acquires more experience with language. Computational models and conceptual theories of visual word recognition and aging make differing predictions for age-related changes in the system. However, these have been difficult to assess because prior studies have produced inconsistent results, possibly because of sample differences, analytic procedures, and/or task-specific processes. The current study confronts these potential differences by using 3 different tasks, treating age and word variables as continuous, and exploring the influence of individual differences such as vocabulary, vision, and working memory. The primary finding is remarkable stability in the influence of a diverse set of variables on visual word recognition across the adult age spectrum. This pattern is discussed in reference to previous inconsistent findings in the literature and implications for current models of visual word recognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, 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.

Improved word recognition for observers with age-related maculopathies using compensation filters

Science.gov (United States)

Lawton, Teri B.

1988-01-01

A method for improving word recognition for people with age-related maculopathies, which cause a loss of central vision, is discussed. It is found that the use of individualized compensation filters based on an person's normalized contrast sensitivity function can improve word recognition for people with age-related maculopathies. It is shown that 27-70 pct more magnification is needed for unfiltered words compared to filtered words. The improvement in word recognition is positively correlated with the severity of vision loss.

Depression reduces perceptual sensitivity for positive words and pictures.

Science.gov (United States)

Atchley, Ruth Ann; Ilardi, Stephen S; Young, Keith M; Stroupe, Natalie N; O'Hare, Aminda J; Bistricky, Steven L; Collison, Elizabeth; Gibson, Linzi; Schuster, Jonathan; Lepping, Rebecca J

2012-01-01

There is evidence of maladaptive attentional biases for lexical information (e.g., Atchley, Ilardi, & Enloe, 2003; Atchley, Stringer, Mathias, Ilardi, & Minatrea, 2007) and for pictographic stimuli (e.g., Gotlib, Krasnoperova, Yue, & Joormann, 2004) among patients with depression. The current research looks for depressotypic processing biases among depressed out-patients and non-clinical controls, using both verbal and pictorial stimuli. A d' measure (sensitivity index) was used to examine each participant's perceptual sensitivity threshold. Never-depressed controls evidenced a detection bias for positive picture stimuli, while depressed participants had no such bias. With verbal stimuli, depressed individuals showed specific decrements in the detection of positive person-referent words (WINNER), but not with positive non-person-referent words (SUNSHINE) or with negative words. Never-depressed participants showed no such differences across word types. In the current study, depression is characterised both by an absence of the normal positivistic biases seen in individuals without mood disorders (consistent with McCabe & Gotlib, 1995), and by a specific reduction in sensitivity for person-referent positive information that might be inconsistent with depressotypic self-schemas.

Diachronic changes in word probability distributions in daily press

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

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.

Visual Word Recognition Across the Adult Lifespan

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Cohen-Shikora, Emily R.; Balota, David A.

2016-01-01

The current study examines visual word recognition in a large sample (N = 148) across the adult lifespan and across a large set of stimuli (N = 1187) in three different lexical processing tasks (pronunciation, lexical decision, and animacy judgments). Although the focus of the present study is on the influence of word frequency, a diverse set of other variables are examined as the system ages and acquires more experience with language. Computational models and conceptual theories of visual word recognition and aging make differing predictions for age-related changes in the system. However, these have been difficult to assess because prior studies have produced inconsistent results, possibly due to sample differences, analytic procedures, and/or task-specific processes. The current study confronts these potential differences by using three different tasks, treating age and word variables as continuous, and exploring the influence of individual differences such as vocabulary, vision, and working memory. The primary finding is remarkable stability in the influence of a diverse set of variables on visual word recognition across the adult age spectrum. This pattern is discussed in reference to previous inconsistent findings in the literature and implications for current models of visual word recognition. PMID:27336629

Positive Emotional Language in the Final Words Spoken Directly Before Execution.

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Hirschmüller, Sarah; Egloff, Boris

2015-01-01

How do individuals emotionally cope with the imminent real-world salience of mortality? DeWall and Baumeister as well as Kashdan and colleagues previously provided support that an increased use of positive emotion words serves as a way to protect and defend against mortality salience of one's own contemplated death. Although these studies provide important insights into the psychological dynamics of mortality salience, it remains an open question how individuals cope with the immense threat of mortality prior to their imminent actual death. In the present research, we therefore analyzed positivity in the final words spoken immediately before execution by 407 death row inmates in Texas. By using computerized quantitative text analysis as an objective measure of emotional language use, our results showed that the final words contained a significantly higher proportion of positive than negative emotion words. This emotional positivity was significantly higher than (a) positive emotion word usage base rates in spoken and written materials and (b) positive emotional language use with regard to contemplated death and attempted or actual suicide. Additional analyses showed that emotional positivity in final statements was associated with a greater frequency of language use that was indicative of self-references, social orientation, and present-oriented time focus as well as with fewer instances of cognitive-processing, past-oriented, and death-related word use. Taken together, our findings offer new insights into how individuals cope with the imminent real-world salience of mortality.

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 prime-target pairs embedded within a sentence. The boundary technique (Rayner, 1975) was used to determine whether the target word was fully available during parafoveal preview or whether it was available with transposed letters (e.g., Herman changed to Hreman). With full parafoveal preview, the target word was skipped more frequently when it matched the earlier prime word (i.e., was repeated) than when it did not match the earlier prime word (i.e., was new). With transposed-letter (TL) preview, repetition had no effect on skipping rates despite the great similarity of the TL preview string to the target word and substantial evidence that TL strings activate the words from which they are derived (Perea & Lupker, 2003). These results show that lexically-based skipping is based on full recognition of the letter string in parafoveal preview and does not involve using the contextual constraint to compensate for the reduced information available from the parafovea. These results are consistent with models of eye-movement control during reading in which successive words in a text are processed one at a time (serially) and in which word recognition strongly influences eye movements. PMID:22686842

The Effect of Background Noise on the Word Activation Process in Nonnative Spoken-Word Recognition

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Scharenborg, Odette; Coumans, Juul M. J.; van Hout, Roeland

2018-01-01

This article investigates 2 questions: (1) does the presence of background noise lead to a differential increase in the number of simultaneously activated candidate words in native and nonnative listening? And (2) do individual differences in listeners' cognitive and linguistic abilities explain the differential effect of background noise on…

Get the story straight: contextual repetition promotes word learning from storybooks

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Jessica S Horst

2011-02-01

Full Text Available Although reading storybooks to preschool children is a common activity believed to improve language skills, how children learn new vocabulary from being to has been largely neglected in the shared storybook reading literature. The current study systematically explores the effects of repeatedly reading the same storybooks on both young children's fast and slow mapping ability. Specially created storybooks were read to 3-year-old children three times during the course of one week. Each of the nine storybooks contained two novel word-object pairs. At each session, children either heard three different stories with the same two novel name-object pairs or the same story three times. All children heard each novel name the same number of times. A four-alternative forced-choice task with pictures of the objects was used to test both immediate recall and retention. Children who heard the same stories repeatedly were very accurate on both the immediate recall and retention tasks. In contrast, children who heard different stories were only accurate on immediate recall during the last two sessions and failed to learn any of the new words. Overall, then, we found a dramatic increase in children’s ability to both recall and retain novel word-object associations encountered during shared storybook reading when they heard the same stories multiple times in succession. Results are discussed in terms of contextual cueing effects observed in other cognitive domains.

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

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

2015-01-01

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

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

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

2013-01-01

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

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...

Word-by-word entrainment of speech rhythm during joint story building

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Tommi eHimberg

2015-06-01

Full Text Available Movements and behaviour synchronise during social interaction at many levels, often unintentionally. During smooth conversation, for example, participants adapt to each others' speech rates. Here we aimed to find out to which extent speakers adapt their turn-taking rhythms during a story-building game.Nine sex-matched dyads of adults (12 males, 6 females created two 5-min stories by contributing to them alternatingly one word at a time. The participants were located in different rooms, with audio connection during one story and audiovisual during the other. They were free to select the topic of the story.Although the participants received no instructions regarding the timing of the story building, their word rhythms were highly entrained (R ̅ = 0.70, p < 0.001 even though the rhythms as such were unstable (R ̅ = 0.14 for pooled data. Such high entrainment in the absence of steady word rhythm occurred in every individual story, independently of whether the subjects were connected via audio-only or audiovisual link.The observed entrainment was of similar strength as typical entrainment in finger-tapping tasks where participants are specifically instructed to synchronize their behaviour. Thus speech seems to spontaneously induce strong entrainment between the conversation partners, likely reflecting automatic alignment of their semantic and syntactic processes.

The Activation of Embedded Words in Spoken Word Recognition

Science.gov (United States)

Zhang, Xujin; Samuel, Arthur G.

2015-01-01

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

[Emotional valence of words in schizophrenia].

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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

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

Word-level recognition of multifont Arabic text using a feature vector matching approach

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Erlandson, Erik J.; Trenkle, John M.; Vogt, Robert C., III

1996-03-01

Many text recognition systems recognize text imagery at the character level and assemble words from the recognized characters. An alternative approach is to recognize text imagery at the word level, without analyzing individual characters. This approach avoids the problem of individual character segmentation, and can overcome local errors in character recognition. A word-level recognition system for machine-printed Arabic text has been implemented. Arabic is a script language, and is therefore difficult to segment at the character level. Character segmentation has been avoided by recognizing text imagery of complete words. The Arabic recognition system computes a vector of image-morphological features on a query word image. This vector is matched against a precomputed database of vectors from a lexicon of Arabic words. Vectors from the database with the highest match score are returned as hypotheses for the unknown image. Several feature vectors may be stored for each word in the database. Database feature vectors generated using multiple fonts and noise models allow the system to be tuned to its input stream. Used in conjunction with database pruning techniques, this Arabic recognition system has obtained promising word recognition rates on low-quality multifont text imagery.

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

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

2004-07-01

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

Connected word recognition using a cascaded neuro-computational model

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Hoya, Tetsuya; van Leeuwen, Cees

2016-10-01

We propose a novel framework for processing a continuous speech stream that contains a varying number of words, as well as non-speech periods. Speech samples are segmented into word-tokens and non-speech periods. An augmented version of an earlier-proposed, cascaded neuro-computational model is used for recognising individual words within the stream. Simulation studies using both a multi-speaker-dependent and speaker-independent digit string database show that the proposed method yields a recognition performance comparable to that obtained by a benchmark approach using hidden Markov models with embedded training.

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

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

2010-01-01

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

40 CFR 1065.305 - Verifications for accuracy, repeatability, and noise.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

..., repeatability, and noise. 1065.305 Section 1065.305 Protection of Environment ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY... Verifications for accuracy, repeatability, and noise. (a) This section describes how to determine the accuracy, repeatability, and noise of an instrument. Table 1 of § 1065.205 specifies recommended values for individual...

Neural Response After a Single ECT Session During Retrieval of Emotional Self-Referent Words in Depression

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Miskowiak, Kamilla W; Macoveanu, Julian; Jørgensen, Martin B

2018-01-01

of their electroconvulsive therapy course in a double-blind, between-groups design. The following day, patients were given a self-referential emotional word categorization test and a free recall test. This was followed by an incidental word recognition task during whole-brain functional magnetic resonance imaging at 3T...... response may reflect early facilitation of memory for positive self-referent information, which could contribute to improvements in depressive symptoms including feelings of self-worth with repeated treatments....

Attentional Modulation of Word Recognition by Children in a Dual-Task Paradigm

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Choi, Sangsook; Lotto, Andrew; Lewis, Dawna; Hoover, Brenda; Stelmachowicz, Patricia

2008-01-01

Purpose: This study investigated an account of limited short-term memory capacity for children's speech perception in noise using a dual-task paradigm. Method: Sixty-four normal-hearing children (7-14 years of age) participated in this study. Dual tasks were repeating monosyllabic words presented in noise at 8 dB signal-to-noise ratio and…

Echolalia or functional repetition in conversation--a case study of an individual with Huntington's disease.

Science.gov (United States)

Saldert, Charlotta; Hartelius, Lena

2011-01-01

In this case study, we investigated the use of repetition in an individual with a neurogenic communication disorder. We present an analysis of interaction in natural conversations between a woman with advanced Huntington's disease (HD), whose speech had been described as sometimes characterised by echolalia, and her personal assistant. The conversational interaction is analysed on a sequential level, and recurrent patterns are explored. Although the ability of the person with HD to interact is affected by chorea, word retrieval problems and reduced comprehension, she takes an active part in conversation. The conversational partner's contributions are often adapted to her communicative ability as they are formulated as questions or suggestions that can be elaborated on or responded to with a simple 'yes' or 'no'. The person with HD often repeats the words of her conversational partner in a way that extends her contributions and shows listenership, and this use of repetition is also frequent in ordinary conversations between non-brain-damaged individuals. The results show that the conversation partners in this case cooperate in making the conversation proceed and evolve, and that verbal repetition is used in a way that works as a strategy for compensating for the impairment.

Assessment of Working Memory in Individuals With Stuttering in Comparison With Individuals With Normal Fluency

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Aiswarya Liz Varghese

2018-05-01

Full Text Available It is common in literature to relate stuttering with some other deficit that interferes with communicative functions. Working memory comprises the system of human memory dedicated to both temporary storages of phonological detail and allocation of cognitive resources necessary for forming lasting memories. In this study we have analyzed the performance of individuals with stuttering on various working memory tasks. The aim of study is to compare the working memory abilities in individuals with stuttering and individuals with normal fluency on various working memory tasks. A total of 30 individuals with stuttering and 30 individuals with normal fluency in the age range of 18 – 40 years participated in the study. The Working Memory domain will be assessed using The Manipal Manual for Cognitive Linguistic Abilities (MMCLA which consists of auditory word retrieval, auditory letter and number recall, auditory word list recall, auditory delayed sentence recall, visual practice recall, visual letter and number recall, visual word list recall and visual delayed sentence recall. Results revealed that the individuals with normal fluency had superior performance compared to the individuals with stuttering. Hence, it’s helpful to understand the involvement of working memory in stuttering and incorporate working memory training along with the conventional fluency therapy.

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.

Do 'literate' pigeons (Columba livia) show mirror-word generalization?

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Scarf, Damian; Corballis, Michael C; Güntürkün, Onur; Colombo, Michael

2017-09-01

Many children pass through a mirror stage in reading, where they write individual letters or digits in mirror and find it difficult to correctly utilize letters that are mirror images of one another (e.g., b and d). This phenomenon is thought to reflect the fact that the brain does not naturally discriminate left from right. Indeed, it has been argued that reading acquisition involves the inhibition of this default process. In the current study, we tested the ability of literate pigeons, which had learned to discriminate between 30 and 62 words from 7832 nonwords, to discriminate between words and their mirror counterparts. Subjects were sensitive to the left-right orientation of the individual letters, but not the order of letters within a word. This finding may reflect the fact that, in the absence of human-unique top-down processes, the inhibition of mirror generalization may be limited.

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.

The Use of Iconic Words in Early Child-Parent Interactions

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Perlman, Marcus; Fusaroli, Riccardo; Fein, Deborah

2017-01-01

This paper examines the use of iconic words in early conversations between children and caregivers. The longitudinal data include a span of six observations of 35 children-parent dyads in the same semi-structured activity . Our findings show that children’s speech initially has a high proportion ...... are related to individual differences in the children’s cognitive skills. Our findings fit with the hypothesis that iconicity facilitates early word learning and may play an important role in learning to produce new words....

Weak evidence for increased motivated forgetting of trauma-related words in dissociated or traumatised individuals in a directed forgetting experiment.

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Patihis, Lawrence; Place, Patricia J

2018-05-01

Motivated forgetting is the idea that people can block out, or forget, upsetting or traumatic memories, because there is a motivation to do so. Some researchers have cited directed forgetting studies using trauma-related words as evidence for the theory of motivated forgetting of trauma. In the current article subjects used the list method directed forgetting paradigm with both trauma-related words and positive words. After one list of words was presented subjects were directed to forget the words previously learned, and they then received another list of words. Each list was a mix of positive and trauma-related words, and the lists were counterbalanced. Later, subjects recalled as many of the words as they could, including the ones they were told to forget. Based on the theory that motivated forgetting would lead to recall deficits of trauma-related material, we created eight hypotheses. High dissociators, trauma-exposed, sexual trauma-exposed, and high dissociators with trauma-exposure participants were hypothesised to show enhanced forgetting of trauma words. Results indicated only one of eight hypotheses was supported: those higher on dissociation and trauma recalled fewer trauma words in the to-be-forgotten condition, compared to those low on dissociation and trauma. These results provide weak support for differential motivated forgetting.

Ecological Panel Inference from Repeated Cross Sections

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Pelzer, Ben; Eisinga, Rob; Franses, Philip Hans

2004-01-01

This chapter presents a Markov chain model for the estimation of individual-level binary transitions from a time series of independent repeated cross-sectional (RCS) samples. Although RCS samples lack direct information on individual turnover, it is demonstrated here that it is possible with these

A Moist Crevice for Word Aversion: In Semantics Not Sounds.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Paul H Thibodeau

Full Text Available Why do people self-report an aversion to words like "moist"? The present studies represent an initial scientific exploration into the phenomenon of word aversion by investigating its prevalence and cause. Results of five experiments indicate that about 10-20% of the population is averse to the word "moist." This population often speculates that phonological properties of the word are the cause of their displeasure. However, data from the current studies point to semantic features of the word-namely, associations with disgusting bodily functions-as a more prominent source of peoples' unpleasant experience. "Moist," for averse participants, was notable for its valence and personal use, rather than imagery or arousal-a finding that was confirmed by an experiment designed to induce an aversion to the word. Analyses of individual difference measures suggest that word aversion is more prevalent among younger, more educated, and more neurotic people, and is more commonly reported by females than males.

iWordNet: A New Approach to Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence

OpenAIRE

Chang, Mark; Chang, Monica

2017-01-01

One of the main challenges in artificial intelligence or computational linguistics is understanding the meaning of a word or concept. We argue that the connotation of the term “understanding,” or the meaning of the word “meaning,” is merely a word mapping game due to unavoidable circular definitions. These circular definitions arise when an individual defines a concept, the concepts in its definition, and so on, eventually forming a personalized network of concepts, which we call an iWordNet....

A Few Words about Words | Poster

Science.gov (United States)

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

Visual half-field presentations of incongruent color words: effects of gender and handedness.

Science.gov (United States)

Franzon, M; Hugdahl, K

1986-09-01

Right-handed (dextral) and left-handed (sinistral) males and females (N = 15) were compared for language lateralization in a visual half-field (VHF) incongruent color-words paradigm. The paradigm consists of repeated brief (less than 200 msec) presentations of color-words written in an incongruent color. Presentations are either to the right or to the left of center fixation. The task of the subject is to report the color the word is written in on each trial, ignoring the color-word. Color-bars and congruent color-words were used as control stimuli. Vocal reaction time (VRT) and error frequency were used as dependent measures. The logic behind the paradigm is that incongruent color-words should lead to a greater cognitive conflict when presented in the half-field contralateral to the dominant hemisphere. The results showed significantly longer VRTs in the right half-field for the dextral subjects. Furthermore, significantly more errors were observed in the male dextral group when the incongruent stimuli were presented in the right half-field. There was a similar trend in the data for the sinistral males. No differences between half-fields were observed for the female groups. It is concluded that the present results strengthen previous findings from our laboratory (Hugdahl and Franzon, 1985) that the incongruent color-words paradigm is a useful non-invasive technique for the study of lateralization in the intact brain.

Words and possible words in early language acquisition.

Science.gov (United States)

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.

Children show right-lateralized effects of spoken word-form learning.

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Anni Nora

Full Text Available It is commonly thought that phonological learning is different in young children compared to adults, possibly due to the speech processing system not yet having reached full native-language specialization. However, the neurocognitive mechanisms of phonological learning in children are poorly understood. We employed magnetoencephalography (MEG to track cortical correlates of incidental learning of meaningless word forms over two days as 6-8-year-olds overtly repeated them. Native (Finnish pseudowords were compared with words of foreign sound structure (Korean to investigate whether the cortical learning effects would be more dependent on previous proficiency in the language rather than maturational factors. Half of the items were encountered four times on the first day and once more on the following day. Incidental learning of these recurring word forms manifested as improved repetition accuracy and a correlated reduction of activation in the right superior temporal cortex, similarly for both languages and on both experimental days, and in contrast to a salient left-hemisphere emphasis previously reported in adults. We propose that children, when learning new word forms in either native or foreign language, are not yet constrained by left-hemispheric segmental processing and established sublexical native-language representations. Instead, they may rely more on supra-segmental contours and prosody.

The brain's dorsal route for speech represents word meaning: evidence from gesture.

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Josse, Goulven; Joseph, Sabine; Bertasi, Eric; Giraud, Anne-Lise

2012-01-01

The dual-route model of speech processing includes a dorsal stream that maps auditory to motor features at the sublexical level rather than at the lexico-semantic level. However, the literature on gesture is an invitation to revise this model because it suggests that the premotor cortex of the dorsal route is a major site of lexico-semantic interaction. Here we investigated lexico-semantic mapping using word-gesture pairs that were either congruent or incongruent. Using fMRI-adaptation in 28 subjects, we found that temporo-parietal and premotor activity during auditory processing of single action words was modulated by the prior audiovisual context in which the words had been repeated. The BOLD signal was suppressed following repetition of the auditory word alone, and further suppressed following repetition of the word accompanied by a congruent gesture (e.g. ["grasp" + grasping gesture]). Conversely, repetition suppression was not observed when the same action word was accompanied by an incongruent gesture (e.g. ["grasp" + sprinkle]). We propose a simple model to explain these results: auditory and visual information converge onto premotor cortex where it is represented in a comparable format to determine (in)congruence between speech and gesture. This ability of the dorsal route to detect audiovisual semantic (in)congruence suggests that its function is not restricted to the sublexical level.

Semantic projection: recovering human knowledge of multiple, distinct object features from word embeddings

OpenAIRE

Grand, Gabriel; Blank, Idan Asher; Pereira, Francisco; Fedorenko, Evelina

2018-01-01

The words of a language reflect the structure of the human mind, allowing us to transmit thoughts between individuals. However, language can represent only a subset of our rich and detailed cognitive architecture. Here, we ask what kinds of common knowledge (semantic memory) are captured by word meanings (lexical semantics). We examine a prominent computational model that represents words as vectors in a multidimensional space, such that proximity between word-vectors approximates semantic re...

Generating descriptive visual words and visual phrases for large-scale image applications.

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Zhang, Shiliang; Tian, Qi; Hua, Gang; Huang, Qingming; Gao, Wen

2011-09-01

Bag-of-visual Words (BoWs) representation has been applied for various problems in the fields of multimedia and computer vision. The basic idea is to represent images as visual documents composed of repeatable and distinctive visual elements, which are comparable to the text words. Notwithstanding its great success and wide adoption, visual vocabulary created from single-image local descriptors is often shown to be not as effective as desired. In this paper, descriptive visual words (DVWs) and descriptive visual phrases (DVPs) are proposed as the visual correspondences to text words and phrases, where visual phrases refer to the frequently co-occurring visual word pairs. Since images are the carriers of visual objects and scenes, a descriptive visual element set can be composed by the visual words and their combinations which are effective in representing certain visual objects or scenes. Based on this idea, a general framework is proposed for generating DVWs and DVPs for image applications. In a large-scale image database containing 1506 object and scene categories, the visual words and visual word pairs descriptive to certain objects or scenes are identified and collected as the DVWs and DVPs. Experiments show that the DVWs and DVPs are informative and descriptive and, thus, are more comparable with the text words than the classic visual words. We apply the identified DVWs and DVPs in several applications including large-scale near-duplicated image retrieval, image search re-ranking, and object recognition. The combination of DVW and DVP performs better than the state of the art in large-scale near-duplicated image retrieval in terms of accuracy, efficiency and memory consumption. The proposed image search re-ranking algorithm: DWPRank outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithm by 12.4% in mean average precision and about 11 times faster in efficiency.

Shared perceptual processes in phoneme and word perception: Evidence from aphasia

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Heather Raye Dial

2014-04-01

Replicating previous studies, performance on the two word recognition tasks without closely matched distractors (WAB and PWM was at ceiling for some subjects with impairments on consonant discrimination (see Figures 1a/1b. However, as shown in Figures 1c/1d, for word processing tasks matched in phonological discriminability to the consonant discrimination task, scores on consonant discrimination and word processing were highly correlated, and no individual demonstrated substantially better performance on word than phoneme perception. One patient demonstrated worse performance on lexical decision (d’ = .21 than phoneme perception (d’ = 1.72, which can be attributed to impaired lexical or semantic processing. These data argue against the hypothesis that phoneme and word perception rely on different perceptual processes/routes for processing, and instead indicate that word perception depends on perception of sublexical units.

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

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

2017-01-01

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

Comparing Explicit and Implicit Learning of Emotional and Non-Emotional Words in Autistic Children

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Vahid Nejati

2013-02-01

Full Text Available Background: Explicit and implicit memories have different cerebral origins and learning approaches. Defective emotional words processing in children with autism may affect the memory allocated to such words. The aim of this study was comparing two types of (explicit and implicit memories during processing the two types of (emotional and non-emotional words in autistic children and their healthy counterparts. Materials and Methods: The present cross sectional study was conducted on 14 autistic children, who had referred to Autism Medical Treatment Center on Tehran, and 14 healthy children in kindergartens and schools across Tehran. For the explicit memory, a list of words was presented to the subjects of our study and they were asked to repeat the words they heard one time immediately and one time with delay. For implicit memory, the subjects were asked to identify the heard words among the presented words. Statistical analysis was performed using two-way analysis of variance. Results: The results showed that the normal children have higher efficiency in explicit and implicit memory than the children with autism (p<0.01. The two-way analysis of memory type and word type showed that the former affects memory significantly (p<0.05 while word type had no significant effect. Conclusion: Autistic children suffer from impaired memory. This defect is higher in implicit memory than in the explicit memory. It is recommended to apply rehabilitation, training, learning approaches and also explicit memory for interventions of autistic children.

The impact of task demand on visual word recognition.

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Yang, J; Zevin, J

2014-07-11

The left occipitotemporal cortex has been found sensitive to the hierarchy of increasingly complex features in visually presented words, from individual letters to bigrams and morphemes. However, whether this sensitivity is a stable property of the brain regions engaged by word recognition is still unclear. To address the issue, the current study investigated whether different task demands modify this sensitivity. Participants viewed real English words and stimuli with hierarchical word-likeness while performing a lexical decision task (i.e., to decide whether each presented stimulus is a real word) and a symbol detection task. General linear model and independent component analysis indicated strong activation in the fronto-parietal and temporal regions during the two tasks. Furthermore, the bilateral inferior frontal gyrus and insula showed significant interaction effects between task demand and stimulus type in the pseudoword condition. The occipitotemporal cortex showed strong main effects for task demand and stimulus type, but no sensitivity to the hierarchical word-likeness was found. These results suggest that different task demands on semantic, phonological and orthographic processes can influence the involvement of the relevant regions during visual word recognition. Copyright © 2014 IBRO. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Why Do Disadvantaged Filipino Children Find Word Problems in English Difficult?

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Bautista, Debbie; Mulligan, Joanne

2010-01-01

Young Filipino students are expected to solve mathematical word problems in English, a language that many encounter only in schools. Using individual interviews of 17 Filipino children, we investigated why word problems in English are difficult and the extent to which the language interferes with performance. Results indicate that children could…

Choosing words: left hemisphere, right hemisphere, or both? Perspective on the lateralization of word retrieval

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Ries, Stephanie K.; Dronkers, Nina F.; Knight, Robert T.

2015-01-01

Language is considered to be one of the most lateralized human brain functions. Left hemisphere dominance for language has been consistently confirmed in clinical and experimental settings and constitutes one of the main axioms of neurology and neuroscience. However, functional neuroimaging studies are finding that the right hemisphere also plays a role in diverse language functions. Critically, the right hemisphere may also compensate for the loss or degradation of language functions following extensive stroke-induced damage to the left hemisphere. Here, we review studies that focus on our ability to choose words as we speak. Although fluidly performed in individuals with intact language, this process is routinely compromised in aphasic patients. We suggest that parceling word retrieval into its sub-processes—lexical activation and lexical selection—and examining which of these can be compensated for after left hemisphere stroke can advance the understanding of the lateralization of word retrieval in speech production. In particular, the domain-general nature of the brain regions associated with each process may be a helpful indicator of the right hemisphere's propensity for compensation. PMID:26766393

KNOWLEDGE HUB: SPIRAL MATRIX THINKING AS A COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY FOR INDIVIDUAL AND GROUP LEARNING IN ONE DRIVE AND WORD ONLINE

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Наталья Валерьевна Комиссарова

2017-12-01

Full Text Available The article represents the modification of the Knowledge Hub communicative technique of teaching English and other disciplines based on the OneDrive\\Word-online cloud service. Specific options for the organization of group work and individual activities are considered. The article highlights the advantage and the efficiency of teaching and learning by the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device mode. The paper includes examples of organizing of mass support of the study of the course of English for Business and Entrepreneurship (MOOC-Coursera and of information technology of the Humanities program in the computer class and relying on BYOD mobile Internet access of students.

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

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

2016-01-01

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

Recurrent Partial Words

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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.

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

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

2016-01-01

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

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

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

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Choi, Wonil; Gordon, Peter C.

2013-01-01

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

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

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Wataru eTeramoto

2016-02-01

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

The SCA1 (Spinocerebellar ataxia type 1 and MJD (Machado-Joseph disease CAG repeats in normal individuals: segregation analysis and allele frequencies

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Cláudia Emília Vieira Wiezel

2003-01-01

Full Text Available Spinocerebellar ataxia type 1 (SCA1 and Machado-Joseph disease (MJD/SCA3 are autosomal dominant neurodegenerative diseases caused by expansions of a CAG trinucleotide repeat in the SCA1 and MJD genes. These expanded sequences are unstable upon transmission, leading to an intergeneration increase in the number of repeats (dynamic mutation. The transmission of the CAG repeat was studied in normal mother-father-child trios, referred for paternity testing (SCA1, n = 367; MJD, n = 879. No segregation distortion was detected. The CAG allele frequencies were determined in 330 unrelated individuals (fathers from couples tested for paternity. The allele frequency distributions did not differ from those previously reported for European populations. The estimated values for the statistic parameters indicating diversity at the SCA1 locus did not differ much from those reported previously for other STRs in the Brazilian population, while those for the MJD locus were close to or higher than the maximum values of previous reports. This shows that SCA1 and MJD are highly informative loci for applications in genetic and population studies and for forensic analysis.

Time-course of attentional bias for positive social words in individuals with high and low social anxiety.

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Yu, Hongyu; Li, Songwei; Qian, Mingyi; Yang, Peng; Wang, Xiaoling; Lin, Muyu; Yao, Nisha

2014-07-01

Although accumulating research demonstrates the association between attentional bias and social anxiety, the bias for positive stimuli has so far not been adequately studied. The aim is to investigate the time-course of attentional bias for positive social words in participants with high and low social anxiety. In a modified dot-probe task, word-pairs of neutral and positive social words were randomly presented for 100, 500, and 1250 milliseconds in a nonclinical sample of students to test their attentional bias. Non-significant interaction of Group × Exposure Duration was found. However, there was a significant main effect of group, with significantly different response latencies between the high social anxiety (HSA) and low social anxiety (LSA) groups in the 100 ms condition, without for 500 or 1250 ms. With respect to attentional bias, the LSA group showed enhanced preferential attention for positive social words to which the HSA group showed avoidance in the 100 ms condition. In the 500 ms condition, preferential attention to positive social words was at trend in the LSA group, relative to the HSA group. Neither group showed attentional bias in the 1250 ms condition. These findings extend recent research about the attention training program and add to the empirical literature suggesting that the initial avoidance of positive stimuli may contribute to maintaining social anxiety.

Selective Activation Around the Left Occipito-Temporal Sulcus for Words Relative to Pictures: Individual Variability or False Positives?

OpenAIRE

Wright, Nicholas D; Mechelli, Andrea; Noppeney, Uta; Veltman, Dick J; Rombouts, Serge ARB; Glensman, Janice; Haynes, John-Dylan; Price, Cathy J

2007-01-01

We used high-resolution fMRI to investigate claims that learning to read results in greater left occipito-temporal (OT) activation for written words relative to pictures of objects. In the first experiment, 9/16 subjects performing a one-back task showed activation in ?1 left OT voxel for words relative to pictures (P < 0.05 uncorrected). In a second experiment, another 9/15 subjects performing a semantic decision task activated ?1 left OT voxel for words relative to pictures. However, at thi...

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

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

2018-04-01

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

Processing of emotion words by patients with autism spectrum disorders: evidence from reaction times and EEG.

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Lartseva, Alina; Dijkstra, Ton; Kan, Cornelis C; Buitelaar, Jan K

2014-11-01

This study investigated processing of emotion words in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) using reaction times and event-related potentials (ERP). Adults with (n = 21) and without (n = 20) ASD performed a lexical decision task on emotion and neutral words while their brain activity was recorded. Both groups showed faster responses to emotion words compared to neutral, suggesting intact early processing of emotion in ASD. In the ERPs, the control group showed a typical late positive component (LPC) at 400-600 ms for emotion words compared to neutral, while the ASD group showed no LPC. The between-group difference in LPC amplitude was significant, suggesting that emotion words were processed differently by individuals with ASD, although their behavioral performance was similar to that of typical individuals.

Right-hemispheric processing of non-linguistic word features

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Baumgaertner, Annette; Hartwigsen, Gesa; Roman Siebner, Hartwig

2013-01-01

-hemispheric homologues of classic left-hemispheric language areas may partly be due to processing nonlinguistic perceptual features of verbal stimuli. We used functional MRI (fMRI) to clarify the role of the right hemisphere in the perception of nonlinguistic word features in healthy individuals. Participants made...... perceptual, semantic, or phonological decisions on the same set of auditorily and visually presented word stimuli. Perceptual decisions required judgements about stimulus-inherent changes in font size (visual modality) or fundamental frequency contour (auditory modality). The semantic judgement required......, the right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), an area previously suggested to support language recovery after left-hemispheric stroke, displayed modality-independent activation during perceptual processing of word stimuli. Our findings indicate that activation of the right hemisphere during language tasks may...

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...

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.

PopAffiliator: online calculator for individual affiliation to a major population group based on 17 autosomal short tandem repeat genotype profile.

Science.gov (United States)

Pereira, Luísa; Alshamali, Farida; Andreassen, Rune; Ballard, Ruth; Chantratita, Wasun; Cho, Nam Soo; Coudray, Clotilde; Dugoujon, Jean-Michel; Espinoza, Marta; González-Andrade, Fabricio; Hadi, Sibte; Immel, Uta-Dorothee; Marian, Catalin; Gonzalez-Martin, Antonio; Mertens, Gerhard; Parson, Walther; Perone, Carlos; Prieto, Lourdes; Takeshita, Haruo; Rangel Villalobos, Héctor; Zeng, Zhaoshu; Zhivotovsky, Lev; Camacho, Rui; Fonseca, Nuno A

2011-09-01

Because of their sensitivity and high level of discrimination, short tandem repeat (STR) maker systems are currently the method of choice in routine forensic casework and data banking, usually in multiplexes up to 15-17 loci. Constraints related to sample amount and quality, frequently encountered in forensic casework, will not allow to change this picture in the near future, notwithstanding the technological developments. In this study, we present a free online calculator named PopAffiliator ( http://cracs.fc.up.pt/popaffiliator ) for individual population affiliation in the three main population groups, Eurasian, East Asian and sub-Saharan African, based on genotype profiles for the common set of STRs used in forensics. This calculator performs affiliation based on a model constructed using machine learning techniques. The model was constructed using a data set of approximately fifteen thousand individuals collected for this work. The accuracy of individual population affiliation is approximately 86%, showing that the common set of STRs routinely used in forensics provide a considerable amount of information for population assignment, in addition to being excellent for individual identification.

Sticks, Stones, and Stigma: Student Bystander Behavior in Response to Hearing the Word "Retard"

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Albert, Avery B.; Jacobs, Holly E.; Siperstein, Gary N.

2016-01-01

The present study explored the prevalence of the r-word in schools and students' bystander behavior in response to hearing the word. In total, 2,297 students from 12 high schools across the country participated in this study. Results revealed the r-word was used frequently among high school students, most often toward individuals without…

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.

Science.gov (United States)

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

Instability of (CTGn•(CAGn trinucleotide repeats and DNA synthesis

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Liu Guoqi

2012-02-01

Full Text Available Abstract Expansion of (CTGn•(CAGn trinucleotide repeat (TNR microsatellite sequences is the cause of more than a dozen human neurodegenerative diseases. (CTGn and (CAGn repeats form imperfectly base paired hairpins that tend to expand in vivo in a length-dependent manner. Yeast, mouse and human models confirm that (CTGn•(CAGn instability increases with repeat number, and implicate both DNA replication and DNA damage response mechanisms in (CTGn•(CAGn TNR expansion and contraction. Mutation and knockdown models that abrogate the expression of individual genes might also mask more subtle, cumulative effects of multiple additional pathways on (CTGn•(CAGn instability in whole animals. The identification of second site genetic modifiers may help to explain the variability of (CTGn•(CAGn TNR instability patterns between tissues and individuals, and offer opportunities for prognosis and treatment.

Psychological and physiological responses following repeated peer death.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Judith Pizarro Andersen

Full Text Available Undergraduates at a university in the United States were exposed - directly and indirectly - to 14 peer deaths during one academic year. We examined how individual and social factors were associated with psychological (e.g., anxiety, depression, somatization and physiological (i.e., cortisol distress responses following this unexpected and repeated experience with loss.Two to three months after the final peer death, respondents (N = 122, 61% female, 18-23 years, M = 20.13, SD = 1.14 reported prior adverse experiences, degree of closeness with the deceased, acute responses to the peer deaths, ongoing distress responses, social support, support seeking, and media viewing. A subset (n = 24 returned hair samples for evaluation of cortisol responses during the previous 3 months.Ongoing psychological distress was associated with a prior interpersonal trauma, b fewer social supports, and c media exposure to news of the deaths (p's25 p/mg compared to individuals with one or two prior bereavement experiences (who were, on average, within the normal range, 10 to 25 p/mg (p<.05. Only 8% of the sample utilized available university psychological or physical health resources and support groups.Limited research has examined the psychological and physiological impact of exposure to chronic, repeated peer loss, despite the fact that there are groups of individuals (e.g., police, military soldiers that routinely face such exposures. Prior adversity appears to play a role in shaping psychological and physiological responses to repeated loss. This topic warrants further research given the health implications of repeated loss for individuals in high-risk occupations and university settings.

Attention demands of spoken word planning: A review

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ardi eRoelofs

2011-11-01

Full Text Available Attention and language are among the most intensively researched abilities in the cognitive neurosciences, but the relation between these abilities has largely been neglected. There is increasing evidence, however, that linguistic processes, such as those underlying the planning of words, cannot proceed without paying some form of attention. Here, we review evidence that word planning requires some but not full attention. The evidence comes from chronometric studies of word planning in picture naming and word reading under divided attention conditions. It is generally assumed that the central attention demands of a process are indexed by the extent that the process delays the performance of a concurrent unrelated task. The studies measured the speed and accuracy of linguistic and nonlinguistic responding as well as eye gaze durations reflecting the allocation of attention. First, empirical evidence indicates that in several task situations, processes up to and including phonological encoding in word planning delay, or are delayed by, the performance of concurrent unrelated nonlinguistic tasks. These findings suggest that word planning requires central attention. Second, empirical evidence indicates that conflicts in word planning may be resolved while concurrently performing an unrelated nonlinguistic task, making a task decision, or making a go/no-go decision. These findings suggest that word planning does not require full central attention. We outline a computationally implemented theory of attention and word planning, and describe at various points the outcomes of computer simulations that demonstrate the utility of the theory in accounting for the key findings. Finally, we indicate how attention deficits may contribute to impaired language performance, such as in individuals with specific language impairment.

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.

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....

Assessing consumer expectations about pizza: A study on celiac and non-celiac individuals using the word association technique.

Science.gov (United States)

Pontual, I; Amaral, G V; Esmerino, E A; Pimentel, T C; Freitas, M Q; Fukuda, R K; Sant'Ana, I L; Silva, L G; Cruz, A G

2017-04-01

The word association (WA) technique was used to investigate the perception of two groups of consumers (72 celiac and 78 non-celiac individuals; 150 in total) to pizza dough (thick or thin) and the raw material used at the manufacture (cassava flour or rice flour). Different perceptions of the four stimuli were detected by Chi-square test (X 2 =314.393, ppizza dough made with cassava flour' was associated with the category "food/composition" and the stimuli 'pizza made with rice flour', 'pizza made with cassava flour' and 'thin dough' were associated with "positive feelings". The stimulus 'thick dough' was related only to the category "negative feelings". WA indicated that gluten-free pizza should have thin dough and us cassava flour or rice flour as the raw material. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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...

Noticing the self: Implicit assessment of self-focused attention using word recognition latencies

OpenAIRE

Eichstaedt, Dr Jan; Silvia, Dr Paul J.

2003-01-01

Self-focused attention is difficult to measure. Two studies developed an implicit measure of self-focus based on word recognition latencies. Self-focused attention activates self-content, so self-focused people should recognize self-relevant words more quickly. Study 1 measured individual-differences in self-focused attention. People scoring high in private self-consciousness recognized self-relevant words more quickly. Study 2 manipulated objective self-awareness with a writing task. People ...

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.

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

Reject/repeat analysis and the effect prior film viewing has on a department's reject/repeat rate

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Clark, P.A.; Hogg, P.

2003-01-01

Purpose: Achieving cost-effectiveness within the NHS is an old initiative but one that has again been highlighted by recent government policies (The New NHS-Modern and Dependable, Stationary Office, London, 1997). It has been reiterated that it is the responsibility of individual Trusts to devise means to provide such a service. Reject/repeat analyses have long been the primary tool used to assess the cost-effectiveness of radiography departments (Quality Assurance in Diagnostic Radiology, WHO, Geneva, 1982). This research paper examines an in-house initiative (viewing patients' previous films) commonly employed in other Health Trusts in order to reduce departmental repeat/reject rates. Method: Three hundred orthopaedic patients with hip, knee and ankle prostheses were included in a reject/repeat analysis. The aim was to investigate whether or not viewing patient's previous relevant radiographs would be advantageous to the practicing radiographer. This was done through an audit cycle consisting of two audit periods each lasting for 3 months. The primary audit period recorded the baseline repeat/reject rate, with the secondary audit period recording the repeat/reject rate under an experimental condition of viewing the relevant radiographs. Results: The baseline audit revealed repeat rates of 33% in orthopaedic patients with hip, knee and ankle prostheses. The availability of prior film viewing to the radiographer reduced this repeat rate to 10.6%. Conclusion: Prior film viewing dramatically reduced the department's repeat/reject rate by 22.4%. This provides scope for significant patient dose reductions as well as reducing departmental film expenses. This is an underestimated initiative and should be used appropriately in routine clinical practice

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

Emotional Valence, Arousal, and Threat Ratings of 160 Chinese Words among Adolescents.

Science.gov (United States)

Ho, Samuel M Y; Mak, Christine W Y; Yeung, Dannii; Duan, Wenjie; Tang, Sandy; Yeung, June C; Ching, Rita

2015-01-01

This study was conducted to provide ratings of valence/pleasantness, arousal/excitement, and threat/potential harm for 160 Chinese words. The emotional valence classification (positive, negative, or neutral) of all of the words corresponded to that of the equivalent English language words. More than 90% of the participants, junior high school students aged between 12 and 17 years, understood the words. The participants were from both mainland China and Hong Kong, thus the words can be applied to adolescents familiar with either simplified (e.g. in mainland China) or traditional Chinese (e.g. in Hong Kong) with a junior secondary school education or higher. We also established eight words with negative valence, high threat, and high arousal ratings to facilitate future research, especially on attentional and memory biases among individuals prone to anxiety. Thus, the new emotional word list provides a useful source of information for affective research in the Chinese language.

Prevalence of Huntington's disease gene CAG trinucleotide repeat alleles in patients with bipolar disorder.

Science.gov (United States)

Ramos, Eliana Marisa; Gillis, Tammy; Mysore, Jayalakshmi S; Lee, Jong-Min; Alonso, Isabel; Gusella, James F; Smoller, Jordan W; Sklar, Pamela; MacDonald, Marcy E; Perlis, Roy H

2015-06-01

Huntington's disease is a neurodegenerative disorder characterized by motor, cognitive, and psychiatric symptoms that are caused by huntingtin gene (HTT) CAG trinucleotide repeat alleles of 36 or more units. A greater than expected prevalence of incompletely penetrant HTT CAG repeat alleles observed among individuals diagnosed with major depressive disorder raises the possibility that another mood disorder, bipolar disorder, could likewise be associated with Huntington's disease. We assessed the distribution of HTT CAG repeat alleles in a cohort of individuals with bipolar disorder. HTT CAG allele sizes from 2,229 Caucasian individuals diagnosed with DSM-IV bipolar disorder were compared to allele sizes in 1,828 control individuals from multiple cohorts. We found that HTT CAG repeat alleles > 35 units were observed in only one of 4,458 chromosomes from individuals with bipolar disorder, compared to three of 3,656 chromosomes from control subjects. These findings do not support an association between bipolar disorder and Huntington's disease. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons A/S. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

The right posterior inferior frontal gyrus contributes to phonological word decisions in the healthy brain

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Hartwigsen, Gesa; Price, Cathy J; Baumgaertner, Annette

2010-01-01

There is consensus that the left hemisphere plays a dominant role in language processing, but functional imaging studies have shown that the right as well as the left posterior inferior frontal gyri (pIFG) are activated when healthy right-handed individuals make phonological word decisions. Here we...... used online transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to examine the functional relevance of the right pIFG for auditory and visual phonological decisions. Healthy right-handed individuals made phonological or semantic word judgements on the same set of auditorily and visually presented words while......IFG impaired reaction times and accuracy of phonological but not semantic decisions for visually and auditorily presented words. TMS over left, right or bilateral pIFG disrupted phonological processing to a similar degree. In a follow-up experiment, the intensity threshold for delaying phonological judgements...

Mood-congruent free recall bias in anxious individuals is not a consequence of response bias

OpenAIRE

Russo, Riccardo; Whittuck, Dora; Roberson, Debi; Dutton, Kevin; Georgiou, George; Fox, Elaine

2006-01-01

The status of mood-congruent free recall bias in anxious individuals was evaluated following incidental encoding of target words. Individuals with high and low levels of trait anxiety completed a modified Stroop task, which revealed an attentional bias for threat-related stimuli in anxious individuals. This group was significantly slower in naming the colour in which threat-related words were displayed compared to neutral words. In a subsequent free recall test for the words used in the modif...

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…

Strategies in Reading Comprehension: Individual Differences in Learning from Pictures and Words (A Footnote). Technical Report No. 300.

Science.gov (United States)

Levin, Joel R.; Guttmann, Joseph

In a recent experiment it was discovered that although many children learn uniformly well (or poorly) from pictures and words, others learn appreciably better from pictures. The present study rules out an alternative explanation of those data--which had been produced on a single learning task containing both pictures and words--by obtaining…

Selective activation around the left occipito-temporal sulcus for words relative to pictures: Individual variability or false positives?

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Wright, Nicholas D.; Mechelli, Andrea; Noppeney, Uta; Veltman, Dick J.; Rombouts, Serge A. R. B.; Glensman, Janice; Haynes, John-Dylan; Price, Cathy J.

2008-01-01

We used high-resolution fMRI to investigate claims that learning to read r !sults in greater left occipito-temporal (OT) activation for written words relative to pictures of objects. In tl e first experiment, 9/16 subjects performing a one-back task showed activation in >= 1 left OT voxel for word:

Impact of Depressive Symptoms on Memory for Emotional Words in Mild Cognitive Impairment and Late-Life Depression.

Science.gov (United States)

Callahan, Brandy L; Simard, Martine; Mouiha, Abderazzak; Rousseau, François; Laforce, Robert; Hudon, Carol

2016-03-22

Amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) and late-life depression (LLD) are associated with increased risk of Alzheimer's disease (AD). This is also true for aMCI with concomitant depressive symptoms (aMCI/D+), but few studies have investigated this syndrome. We aimed to clarify the association between cognitive and depressive symptoms in individuals at risk for AD by examining episodic memory for emotional stimuli in aMCI, aMCI/D+, and LLD. Participants were 34 patients with aMCI, 20 patients with aMCI/D+, 19 patients with LLD, and 28 healthy elderly adults. In an implicit encoding task, participants rated the emotional valence of 12 positive, 12 negative, and 12 neutral words. Immediately and 20 minutes later, participants recalled as many words as possible. They were also asked to identify previously presented words during a yes/no recognition trial. At immediate recall, aMCI participants displayed better recall of emotional words, particularly positive words. aMCI/D+ and control participants displayed better recall of positive and negative words compared to neutral words. LLD participants recalled more negative than neutral words. At delayed recall, emotional words were generally better-remembered than neutral words by all groups. At recognition, all subjects responded more liberally to emotional than to neutral words. We find that the type of emotional information remembered by aMCI patients at immediate recall depends on the presence or absence of depressive symptoms. These findings contribute to identifying sources of heterogeneity in individuals at risk for AD, and suggest that the cognitive profile of aMCI/D+ is different from that of aMCI and LLD. Future studies should systematically consider the presence of depressive symptoms in elderly at-risk individuals.

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.

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

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

Science.gov (United States)

Syrnyk, Corinne; Meints, Kerstin

2017-06-01

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

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.

Repeat Assessed Values Model for Housing Price Index

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Carini Manuela

2017-12-01

Full Text Available This study proposes an innovative methodology, named Repeat Appraised Price Model (RAV, useful for determining the price index numbers for real estate markets and the corresponding index numbers of hedonic prices of main real estate characteristics in the case of a lack of data. The methodological approach proposed in this paper aims to appraise the time series of price index numbers. It integrates the principles of the method of repeat sales with the peculiarities of the Hedonic Price Method, overcoming the problem of an almost total absence of repeat sales for the same property in a given time range; on the other hand, the technique aims to overcome the limitation of the repeat sales technique concerning the inability to take into account the characteristics of individual properties.

Eye movements and word skipping during reading: Effects of word length and predictability

Science.gov (United States)

Rayner, Keith; Slattery, Timothy J.; Drieghe, Denis; Liversedge, Simon P.

2012-01-01

The extent to which target words were predictable from prior context was varied: half of the target words were predictable and the other half were unpredictable. In addition, the length of the target word varied: the target words were short (4–6 letters), medium (7–9 letters), or long (10–12 letters). Length and predictability both yielded strong effects on the probability of skipping the target words and on the amount of time readers fixated the target words (when they were not skipped). However, there was no interaction in any of the measures examined for either skipping or fixation time. The results demonstrate that word predictability (due to contextual constraint) and word length have strong and independent influences on word skipping and fixation durations. Furthermore, since the long words extended beyond the word identification span, the data indicate that skipping can occur on the basis of partial information in relation to word identity. PMID:21463086

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

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.

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.

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.

The lateralization of motor cortex activation to action words

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Olaf eHauk

2011-11-01

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

Characteristics of Stuttering in Dutch-Speaking Individuals

Science.gov (United States)

Boey, Ronny A.; Wuyts, Floris L.; van de Heyning, Paul H.; Heylen, Louis; de Bodt, Marc S.

2009-01-01

Clinical diagnostic procedures to distinguish stuttering from non-stuttering individuals partially rely on the observation of characteristics of stuttered words or syllables. The purpose of this study was to examine the sensitivity and specificity of such a procedure, and to describe the observed characteristics of stuttered words. Methods…

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.

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

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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

Voice Onset Time for the Word-Initial Voiceless Consonant /t/ in Japanese Spasmodic Dysphonia-A Comparison With Normal Controls.

Science.gov (United States)

Yanagida, Saori; Nishizawa, Noriko; Mizoguchi, Kenji; Hatakeyama, Hiromitsu; Fukuda, Satoshi

2015-07-01

Voice onset time (VOT) for word-initial voiceless consonants in adductor spasmodic dysphonia (ADSD) and abductor spasmodic dysphonia (ABSD) patients were measured to determine (1) which acoustic measures differed from the controls and (2) whether acoustic measures were related to the pause or silence between the test word and the preceding word. Forty-eight patients with ADSD and nine patients with ABSD, as well as 20 matched normal controls read a story in which the word "taiyo" (the sun) was repeated three times, each differentiated by the position of the word in the sentence. The target of measurement was the VOT for the word-initial voiceless consonant /t/. When the target syllable appeared in a sentence following a comma, or at the beginning of a sentence following a period, the ABSD patients' VOTs were significantly longer than those of the ADSD patients and controls. Abnormal prolongation of the VOTs was related to the pause or silence between the test word and the preceding word. VOTs in spasmodic dysphonia (SD) may vary according to the SD subtype or speaking conditions. VOT measurement was suggested to be a useful method for quantifying voice symptoms in SD. Copyright © 2015 The Voice Foundation. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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.

WordPress Bible

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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

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

Science.gov (United States)

Thiriot, Samuel

2018-02-01

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

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

OpenAIRE

Vijay Mahajan; Eitan Muller; Roger A. Kerin

1984-01-01

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

WordPress for dummies

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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

Event-related potentials in response to emotional words in patients with major depressive disorder and healthy controls.

Science.gov (United States)

Liu, Hong; Yin, Hui-fang; Wu, Da-xing; Xu, Shu-jing

2014-01-01

Dysfunctional cognitive processing and abnormal brain activation in response to emotional stimuli have long been recognized as core features of the major depressive disorder (MDD). The aim of this study was to examine how Chinese patients with MDD process Chinese emotional words presented to either the left (LH) or right hemisphere (RH). Reaction time (RT) and the late positive component of the event-related potential were measured while subjects judged the valence (positive or negative) of emotional words written in Chinese. Compared to healthy controls, patients with MDD exhibited slower RTs in response to negative words. In all subjects, the RTs in response to negative words were significantly faster than RTs in response to positive words presented to the LH, as well as significantly faster than responses to negative words presented to the RH. Compared to healthy controls, MDD patients exhibited reduced activation of the central and left regions of the brain in response to both negative and positive words. In healthy controls, the posterior brain areas were more active than the anterior brain areas when responding to negative words. All individuals showed faster RTs in response to negative words compared to positive words. In addition, MDD patients showed lateralization of brain activity in response to emotional words, whereas healthy individuals did not show this lateralization. Posterior brain areas appear to play an especially important role in discriminating and experiencing negative emotional words. This study provides further evidence in support of the negative bias hypothesis and the emotional processing theory.

Individual differences in visual perception and memory

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Colizoli, O.

2014-01-01

There is substantial variation in perception and memory in humans. There are individuals who cannot see red at all, and there are individuals who hear colors and taste words. What determines the differences and similarities between individuals' perception and memory? Can we characterize the neural

Reduced sensitivity of the N400 and late positive component to semantic congruity and word repetition in left temporal lobe epilepsy.

Science.gov (United States)

Olichney, John M; Riggins, Brock R; Hillert, Dieter G; Nowacki, Ralph; Tecoma, Evelyn; Kutas, Marta; Iragui, Vicente J

2002-07-01

We studied 14 patients with well-characterized refractory temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), 7 with right temporal lobe epilepsy (RTE) and 7 with left temporal lobe epilepsy (LTE), on a word repetition ERP experiment. Much prior literature supports the view that patients with left TLE are more likely to develop verbal memory deficits, often attributable to left hippocampal sclerosis. Our main objectives were to test if abnormalities of the N400 or Late Positive Component (LPC, P600) were associated with a left temporal seizure focus, or left temporal lobe dysfunction. A minimum of 19 channels of EEG/EOG data were collected while subjects performed a semantic categorization task. Auditory category statements were followed by a visual target word, which were 50% "congruous" (category exemplars) and 50% "incongruous" (non-category exemplars) with the preceding semantic context. These auditory-visual pairings were repeated pseudo-randomly at time intervals ranging from approximately 10-140 seconds later. The ERP data were submitted to repeated-measures ANOVAs, which showed the RTE group had generally normal effects of word repetition on the LPC and the N400. Also, the N400 component was larger to incongruous than congruous new words, as is normally the case. In contrast, the LTE group did not have statistically significant effects of either word repetition or congruity on their ERPs (N400 or LPC), suggesting that this ERP semantic categorization paradigm is sensitive to left temporal lobe dysfunction. Further studies are ongoing to determine if these ERP abnormalities predict hippocampal sclerosis on histopathology, or outcome after anterior temporal lobectomy.

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

Certain manipulations, such as testing oneself on newly learned word associations (recall), or the act of repeating a word during training (reproduction), can lead to better learning and retention relative to simply providing more exposure to the word (restudy). Such benefit has been observed for written words. Here, we test how these training manipulations affect learning of words presented aurally, when participants are required to produce these novel phonological forms in a recall task. Participants (36 English-speaking adults) learned 27 pseudowords, which were paired with 27 unfamiliar pictures. They were given cued recall practice for 9 of the words, reproduction practice for another set of 9 words, and the remaining 9 words were restudied. Participants were tested on their recognition (3-alternative forced choice) and recall (saying the pseudoword in response to a picture) of these items immediately after training, and a week after training. Our hypotheses were that reproduction and restudy practice would lead to better learning immediately after training, but that cued recall practice would lead to better retention in the long term. In all three conditions, recognition performance was extremely high immediately after training, and a week following training, indicating that participants had acquired associations between the novel pictures and novel words. In addition, recognition and cued recall performance was better immediately after training relative to a week later, confirming that participants forgot some words over time. However, results in the cued recall task did not support our hypotheses. Immediately after training, participants showed an advantage for cued Recall over the Restudy condition, but not over the Reproduce condition. Furthermore, there was no boost for the cued Recall condition over time relative to the other two conditions. Results from a Bayesian analysis also supported this null finding. Nonetheless, we found a clear effect of word

Distant supervision for neural relation extraction integrated with word attention and property features.

Science.gov (United States)

Qu, Jianfeng; Ouyang, Dantong; Hua, Wen; Ye, Yuxin; Li, Ximing

2018-04-01

Distant supervision for neural relation extraction is an efficient approach to extracting massive relations with reference to plain texts. However, the existing neural methods fail to capture the critical words in sentence encoding and meanwhile lack useful sentence information for some positive training instances. To address the above issues, we propose a novel neural relation extraction model. First, we develop a word-level attention mechanism to distinguish the importance of each individual word in a sentence, increasing the attention weights for those critical words. Second, we investigate the semantic information from word embeddings of target entities, which can be developed as a supplementary feature for the extractor. Experimental results show that our model outperforms previous state-of-the-art baselines. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Mood-congruent free recall bias in anxious individuals is not a consequence of response bias.

Science.gov (United States)

Russo, Riccardo; Whittuck, Dora; Roberson, Debi; Dutton, Kevin; Georgiou, George; Fox, Elaine

2006-05-01

The status of mood-congruent free recall bias in anxious individuals was evaluated following incidental encoding of target words. Individuals with high and low levels of trait anxiety completed a modified Stroop task, which revealed an attentional bias for threat-related stimuli in anxious individuals. This group was significantly slower in naming the colour in which threat-related words were displayed compared to neutral words. In a subsequent free recall test for the words used in the modified Stroop task, anxious individuals recalled more threat-related words compared to low-anxious people. This difference was significant even when controlling for the false recall of items that had not been presented during study. These results support the view put forward by Russo, Fox, Bellinger, and Nguyen-Van-Tam (2001) that mood-congruent free recall bias in anxious individuals can be observed if the target material is encoded at a relatively shallow level. Moreover, contrary to Dowens and Calvo (2003), the current results show that the memory advantage for threat-related information in anxious individuals is not a consequence of response bias.

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.

Exploration in free word association networks: models and experiment.

Science.gov (United States)

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.

Association of heme oxygenase-1 GT-repeat polymorphism with blood pressure phenotypes and its relevance to future cardiovascular mortality risk: an observation based on arsenic-exposed individuals.

Science.gov (United States)

Wu, Meei-Maan; Chiou, Hung-Yi; Chen, Chi-Ling; Hsu, Ling-I; Lien, Li-Ming; Wang, Chih-Hao; Hsieh, Yi-Chen; Wang, Yuan-Hung; Hsueh, Yu-Mei; Lee, Te-Chang; Cheng, Wen-Fang; Chen, Chien-Jen

2011-12-01

Heme oxygenase (HO)-1 is up-regulated as a cellular defense responding to stressful stimuli in experimental studies. A GT-repeat length polymorphism in the HO-1 gene promoter was inversely correlated to HO-1 induction. Here, we reported the association of GT-repeat polymorphism with blood pressure (BP) phenotypes, and their interaction on cardiovascular (CV) mortality risk in arsenic-exposed cohorts. Associations of GT-repeat polymorphism with BP phenotypes were investigated at baseline in a cross-sectional design. Effect of GT-repeat polymorphism on CV mortality was investigated in a longitudinal design stratified by hypertension. GT-repeat variants were grouped by S (accounting for CV covariates. Totally, 894 participants were recruited and analyzed. At baseline, carriers with HO-1 S alleles had lower diastolic BP (L/S genotypes, P = 0.014) and a lower possibility of being hypertensive (L/S genotypes, P = 0.048). After follow-up, HO-1 S allele was significantly associated with a reduced CV risk in hypertensive participants [relative mortality ratio (RMR) 0.27 (CI 0.11, 0.69), P = 0.007] but not in normotensive. Hypertensive participants without carrying the S allele had a 5.23-fold increased risk [RMR 5.23 (CI 1.99, 13.69), P = 0.0008] of CV mortality compared with normotensive carrying the S alleles. HO-1 short GT-repeat polymorphism may play a protective role in BP regulation and CV mortality risk in hypertensive individuals against environmental stressors. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

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.

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.

Characterization of the peripheral blood transcriptome in a repeated measures design using a panel of healthy individuals

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

De Boever, Patrick; Wens, Britt; Forcheh, Anyiawung Chiara

2014-01-01

A repeated measures microarray design with 22 healthy, non-smoking volunteers (aging 32. ±. 5. years) was set up to study transcriptome profiles in whole blood samples. The results indicate that repeatable data can be obtained with high within-subject correlation. Probes that could discriminate b...

Correction of false memory for associated word lists by collaborating groups.

Science.gov (United States)

Weigold, Arne; Russell, Elizabeth J; Natera, Sara N

2014-01-01

Collaborative inhibition is often observed for both correct and false memories. However, research examining the mechanisms by which collaborative inhibition occurs, such as retrieval disruption, reality monitoring, or group filtering, is lacking. In addition, the creation of the nominal groups (i.e., groups artificially developed by combining individuals' recall) necessary for examining collaborative inhibition do not use statistical best practices. Using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm, we examined percentages of correct and false memories in individuals, collaborative interactive groups, and correctly created nominal groups, as well as the processes that the collaborative interactive groups used to determine which memories to report. Results showed evidence of the collaborative inhibition effect. In addition, analyses of the collaborative interactive groups' discussions found that these groups wrote down almost all presented words but less than half of nonpresented critical words, after discussing them, with nonpresented critical words being stated to the group with lower confidence and rejected by other group members more often. Overall, our findings indicated support for the group filtering hypothesis.

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\

Cross-situational statistically based word learning intervention for late-talking toddlers.

Science.gov (United States)

Alt, Mary; Meyers, Christina; Oglivie, Trianna; Nicholas, Katrina; Arizmendi, Genesis

2014-01-01

To explore the efficacy of a word learning intervention for late-talking toddlers that is based on principles of cross-situational statistical learning. Four late-talking toddlers were individually provided with 7-10 weeks of bi-weekly word learning intervention that incorporated principles of cross-situational statistical learning. Treatment was input-based meaning that, aside from initial probes, children were not asked to produce any language during the sessions. Pre-intervention data included parent-reported measures of productive vocabulary and language samples. Data collected during intervention included production on probes, spontaneous production during treatment, and parent report of words used spontaneously at home. Data were analyzed for number of target words learned relative to control words, effect sizes, and pre-post treatment vocabulary measures. All children learned more target words than control words and, on average, showed a large treatment effect size. Children made pre-post vocabulary gains, increasing their percentile scores on the MCDI, and demonstrated a rate of word learning that was faster than rates found in the literature. Cross-situational statistically based word learning intervention has the potential to improve vocabulary learning in late-talking toddlers. Limitations on interpretation are also discussed. Readers will describe what cross-situational learning is and how it might apply to treatment. They will identify how including lexical and contextual variability in a word learning intervention for toddlers affected treatment outcomes. They will also recognize evidence of improved rate of vocabulary learning following treatment. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Use of positive and negative words in scientific PubMed abstracts between 1974 and 2014 : retrospective analysis

OpenAIRE

Vinkers, Christiaan H; Tijdink, Joeri K; Otte, Willem M

2015-01-01

OBJECTIVE: To investigate whether language used in science abstracts can skew towards the use of strikingly positive and negative words over time. DESIGN: Retrospective analysis of all scientific abstracts in PubMed between 1974 and 2014. METHODS: The yearly frequencies of positive, negative, and neutral words (25 preselected words in each category), plus 100 randomly selected words were normalised for the total number of abstracts. Subanalyses included pattern quantification of individual wo...

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.

Contextual advertising using Google AdWords and Google AdSense

OpenAIRE

Mihok, Radovan

2008-01-01

The thesis introduces contextual advertising on internet using Google AdWords. The paper describes individual steps of an ad campaign (product choosing, ad types, keywords), its management and success evaluation (calculation of ROI and modified ROI).

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.

Evidence for preserved novel word learning in Down syndrome suggests multiple routes to vocabulary acquisition.

Science.gov (United States)

Mosse, Emma K; Jarrold, Christopher

2011-08-01

Three studies investigated novel word learning, some requiring phonological production, each involving between 11 and 17 individuals with Down syndrome, and between 15 and 24 typically developing individuals matched for receptive vocabulary. The effect of stimuli wordlikeness and incidental procedure-based memory demands were examined to see whether these may account for an apparent impairment in word learning in Down syndrome demonstrated in earlier research. Paired associate word and nonword learning tasks were presented, requiring participants to learn the names of novel characters. The nonword stimuli varied in the degree of wordlikeness in 2 studies. A third study investigated extraneous task demand. Across 3 studies, there was no suggestion of a word learning deficit associated with Down syndrome (η(2)(p) for the main effect of group of .03, .11, and .03, respectively), despite the level of phonological representation required. There was evidence that novel word learning by participants with Down syndrome exceeded that which their verbal short-term memory capacity would predict. Vocabulary acquisition in Down syndrome may not rely on verbal short-term memory to the same extent as in typically developing children, lending support to the suggestion that new word learning may be underpinned by an additional memory process.

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

Science.gov (United States)

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

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.

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

Neural correlates of the individual emotional Stroop in borderline personality disorder.

Science.gov (United States)

Wingenfeld, Katja; Rullkoetter, Nina; Mensebach, Christoph; Beblo, Thomas; Mertens, Markus; Kreisel, Stefan; Toepper, Max; Driessen, Martin; Woermann, Friedrich G

2009-05-01

Emotional dysregulation is a key feature of borderline personality disorder (BPD) with altered inhibitory functions having suggested as being crucial. The anterior cingulate cortex and further prefrontal brain regions are crucial for response inhibition. The regulation of emotions is ensured via inhibitory control over the amygdala. The present study aimed to investigate neural correlates of response inhibition in BPD by using an emotional Stroop paradigm extending the task to word stimuli which were related to stressful life events. Twenty BPD patients and 20 healthy controls underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while performing the individual emotional Stroop task. A block design was used with the following word type conditions: neutral words, general negative words, and individual negative words. The individual negative words were recruited from a prior interview conducted with each participant. While BPD patients had overall slower reaction times in the Stroop task compared to healthy controls, there was no increased slowing with emotional interference. Controls exhibited significant fMRI blood oxygenation level-dependent signal increases in the anterior cingulate cortex as well as in frontal cortex contrasting generally negative vs. neutral and individual negative vs. neutral conditions, respectively. BPD patients did not show equivalent signal changes. These results provide further evidence for a dysfunctional network of brain areas in BPD, including the ACC and frontal brain regions. These areas are crucial for the regulation of stress and emotions, the core problems of BPD patients.

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…

Scaling laws and fluctuations in the statistics of word frequencies

Science.gov (United States)

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.

Cognitive change in patients with Huntington disease on the Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status.

Science.gov (United States)

Beglinger, Leigh J; Duff, Kevin; Allison, Jessica; Theriault, Danielle; O'Rourke, Justin J F; Leserman, Anne; Paulsen, Jane S

2010-07-01

Huntington disease (HD) is a neurodegenerative disease associated with cognitive, motor, and psychiatric deterioration over time. Although there is currently no cure for HD, there has been a surge of clinical trials available to patients with HD over the past 5 years. However, cognitive measures have generally been lacking from these trials. A brief, repeatable neuropsychological battery is needed to assess cognitive endpoints. The Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status (RBANS) may be useful for assessing change in interventional studies or for clinical monitoring. A total of 38 patients with HD were assessed using the RBANS, other cognitive tests, and the standardized HD battery (Unified Huntington's Disease Rating Scale, UHDRS) at two clinic visits approximately 16 months apart. The RBANS Attention Index, as well as individual subtest scores on Coding, Digit Span, List Recognition, Figure Copy, and Figure Recall all declined significantly over this interval. Performance on the UHDRS cognitive tests (Symbol Digit Modalities; Stroop Color, and Stroop Word) also declined, as did functional capacity. Results suggest that cognitive changes were detected both on established cognitive tasks used in HD research and on the RBANS in patients with measurable functional decline. The RBANS provided additional information about other cognitive domains affected (e.g., memory) and may be a useful measure for tracking longitudinal change.

Maintaining confidentiality in prospective studies: anonymous repeated measurements via email (ARME) procedure.

Science.gov (United States)

Carli, Vladimir; Hadlaczky, Gergö; Wasserman, Camilla; Stingelin-Giles, Nicola; Reiter-Theil, Stella; Wasserman, Danuta

2012-02-01

Respecting and protecting the confidentiality of data and the privacy of individuals regarding the information that they have given as participants in a research project is a cornerstone of complying with accepted research standards. However, in longitudinal studies, establishing and maintaining privacy is often challenging because of the necessity of repeated contact with participants. A novel internet-based solution is introduced here, which maintains privacy while at the same time ensures linkage of data to individual participants in a repeated measures design. With the use of the anonymous repeated measurements via email (ARME) procedure, two separate one-way communication systems are established through ad hoc email accounts and a secure study website. Strengths and limitations of the approach are discussed.

Trends in standardized mortality among individuals with schizophrenia, 1993-2012: a population-based, repeated cross-sectional study.

Science.gov (United States)

Gatov, Evgenia; Rosella, Laura; Chiu, Maria; Kurdyak, Paul A

2017-09-18

We examined mortality time trends and premature mortality among individuals with and without schizophrenia over a 20-year period. In this population-based, repeated cross-sectional study, we identified all individual deaths that occurred in Ontario between 1993 and 2012 in persons aged 15 and over. We plotted overall and cause-specific age- and sex-standardized mortality rates (ASMRs), stratified all-cause ASMR trends by sociodemographic characteristics, and analyzed premature mortality using years of potential life lost. Additionally, we calculated mortality rate ratios (MRRs) using negative binomial regression with adjustment for age, sex, income, rurality and year of death. We identified 31 349 deaths among persons with schizophrenia, and 1 589 902 deaths among those without schizophrenia. Mortality rates among people with schizophrenia were 3 times higher than among those without schizophrenia (adjusted MRR 3.12, 95% confidence interval 3.06-3.17). All-cause ASMRs in both groups declined in parallel over the study period, by about 35%, and were higher for men, for those with low income and for rural dwellers. The absolute ASMR difference also declined throughout the study period (from 16.15 to 10.49 deaths per 1000 persons). Cause-specific ASMRs were greater among those with schizophrenia, with circulatory conditions accounting for most deaths between 1993 and 2012, whereas neoplasms became the leading cause of death for those without schizophrenia after 2005. Individuals with schizophrenia also died, on average, 8 years younger than those without schizophrenia, losing more potential years of life. Although mortality rates among people with schizophrenia have declined over the past 2 decades, specialized approaches may be required to close the persistent 3-fold relative mortality gap with the general population. © 2017 Canadian Medical Association or its licensors.

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...

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

Science.gov (United States)

Lee, Sung Hee; Hwang, Mina

2015-01-01

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

Repeat Guests’ Perception about New Facilities and Increased Price at Padma Hotel Bandung

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Reza Ashari Nasution

2012-01-01

Full Text Available In 2009 after one and a half year closed for reconstruction, Malya Hotel Bandung renewed,reopened, rebranded with new name Padma Hotel Bandung. The changes are not only aboutthe name but also the logo, the concept, the grade, and the facilities inside and outside room.This results in higher price to customers. At the opening, Padma Hotel Bandung has focusedtheir marketing promotion on Malya repeat guest . The management concerns about theguests’ perception about the additional price because they will be the main visitors to thehotel. Survey was conducted and the findings reveal that the guests’ perception about theoverall inside and outside room is really good. They agreed that Padma Hotel Bandung hasprovided better facilities compared to Malya Hotel. Some facilities have been identified toinfluence customers’ perception about the overall perception about new facilities. Related tothe increased price, the answer quite varies. The repeat guests stated their doubt about thefairness of the price. Even though, they wanted to come back due to emotional benefitscustomers can get from the new Padma Hotel.Key words: repeat customer, rebranding, customer perception, repurchase intention, servicemarketing

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

CERN Document Server

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

The inadequacy of Individual Educational Program (IEP) goals for high school students with word-level reading difficulties.

Science.gov (United States)

Catone, William V; Brady, Susan A

2005-06-01

This investigation analyzed goals from the Individual Educational Programs (IEPs) of 54 high school students with diagnosed reading disabilities in basic skills (decoding and/or word identification). Results showed that for 73% of the students, the IEPs written when they were in high school failed to specify any objectives regarding their acute difficulties with basic skills. IEPs from earlier points in the students' educations were also reviewed, as available. For 23 of the students, IEPs were present in the students' files for three time points: elementary school (ES), middle school (MS), and high school (HS). Another 20 students from the sample of 54 had IEPs available for two time points (HS and either MS or ES). Comparisons with the IEPs from younger years showed a pattern of decline from ES to MS to HS in the percentage of IEPs that commented on or set goals pertaining to weaknesses in decoding. These findings suggest that basic skills deficits that persist into the upper grade levels are not being sufficiently targeted for remediation, and help explain why older students frequently fail to resolve their reading problems.

Words as masks: About the importance of denial in management

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Agnès Vandevelde-Rougale

2017-03-01

Full Text Available This article draws on a socio-anthropological research, which questions the effects of managerial discourse on the individual by considering experiences of workplace bullying. It studies the observation that despite the gap between what management says and what management does, words of managerial discourse are still widely used, by managers and employees alike. French philosopher, ethnologist and psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni (1899-1989, reworking Freud’s concept of fetishism, showed in an article entitled “I know very well, but nonetheless…” that a belief can survive the denial (disavowal of reality. Recognizing fantasy as a fantasy is not sufficient to reduce its power over the individual. Based on a case study, the present article demonstrates that the paradoxical logic phrased by Octave Mannoni can help us understand how managerial discourse can exercise its influence on individuals, despite discrepancies between what is said and what is implemented in the organisations. It presents the hypothesis that words can work as “masks” do in some traditional tribes, thus being the means supporting a belief that sustains management authority.

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

Science.gov (United States)

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

2015-01-01

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

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

Science.gov (United States)

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

2017-01-01

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

The Inhibitory Mechanism in Learning Ambiguous Words in a Second Language

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Baoguo Chen

2017-04-01

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

Suprasegmental lexical stress cues in visual speech can guide spoken-word recognition

OpenAIRE

Jesse, A.; McQueen, J.

2014-01-01

Visual cues to the individual segments of speech and to sentence prosody guide speech recognition. The present study tested whether visual suprasegmental cues to the stress patterns of words can also constrain recognition. Dutch listeners use acoustic suprasegmental cues to lexical stress (changes in duration, amplitude, and pitch) in spoken-word recognition. We asked here whether they can also use visual suprasegmental cues. In two categorization experiments, Dutch participants saw a speaker...

Word 2010 Bible

CERN Document Server

Tyson, Herb

2010-01-01

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

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.

Attentional bias in high math-anxious individuals: evidence from an emotional Stroop task

Science.gov (United States)

Suárez-Pellicioni, Macarena; Núñez-Peña, Maria Isabel; Colomé, Àngels

2015-01-01

Attentional bias toward threatening or emotional information is considered a cognitive marker of anxiety, and it has been described in various clinical and subclinical populations. This study used an emotional Stroop task to investigate whether math anxiety is characterized by an attentional bias toward math-related words. Two previous studies failed to observe such an effect in math-anxious individuals, although the authors acknowledged certain methodological limitations that the present study seeks to avoid. Twenty high math-anxious (HMA) and 20 low math-anxious (LMA) individuals were presented with an emotional Stroop task including math-related and neutral words. Participants in the two groups did not differ in trait anxiety or depression. We found that the HMA group showed slower response times to math-related words than to neutral words, as well as a greater attentional bias (math-related – neutral difference score) than the LMA one, which constitutes the first demonstration of an attentional bias toward math-related words in HMA individuals. PMID:26539137

Attentional bias in high math-anxious individuals: evidence from an emotional Stroop task

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

MACARENA eSUÁREZ PELLICIONI

2015-10-01

Full Text Available Attentional bias towards threatening or emotional information is considered a cognitive marker of anxiety, and it has been described in various clinical and subclinical populations. This study used an emotional Stroop task to investigate whether math anxiety is characterized by an attentional bias towards math-related words. Two previous studies failed to observe such an effect in math-anxious individuals, although the authors acknowledged certain methodological limitations that the present study seeks to avoid. Twenty high math-anxious (HMA and 20 low math-anxious (LMA individuals were presented with an emotional Stroop task including math-related and neutral words. Participants in the two groups did not differ in trait anxiety or depression. We found that the HMA group showed slower response times to math-related words than to neutral words, as well as a greater attentional bias (math-related – neutral difference score than the LMA one, which constitutes the first demonstration of an attentional bias towards math-related words in HMA individuals.

How humans transmit language: horizontal transmission matches word frequencies among peers on Twitter.

Science.gov (United States)

Bryden, John; Wright, Shaun P; Jansen, Vincent A A

2018-02-01

Language transmission, the passing on of language features such as words between people, is the process of inheritance that underlies linguistic evolution. To understand how language transmission works, we need a mechanistic understanding based on empirical evidence of lasting change of language usage. Here, we analysed 200 million online conversations to investigate transmission between individuals. We find that the frequency of word usage is inherited over conversations, rather than only the binary presence or absence of a word in a person's lexicon. We propose a mechanism for transmission whereby for each word someone encounters there is a chance they will use it more often. Using this mechanism, we measure that, for one word in around every hundred a person encounters, they will use that word more frequently. As more commonly used words are encountered more often, this means that it is the frequencies of words which are copied. Beyond this, our measurements indicate that this per-encounter mechanism is neutral and applies without any further distinction as to whether a word encountered in a conversation is commonly used or not. An important consequence of this is that frequencies of many words can be used in concert to observe and measure language transmission, and our results confirm this. These results indicate that our mechanism for transmission can be used to study language patterns and evolution within populations. © 2018 The Author(s).

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.

Remember dax? Relations between children's cross-situational word learning, memory, and language abilities.

Science.gov (United States)

Vlach, Haley A; DeBrock, Catherine A

2017-04-01

Learning new words is a difficult task. Children are able to resolve the ambiguity of the task and map words to referents by tracking co-occurrence probabilities across multiple moments in time, a behavior termed cross-situational word learning (CSWL). Although we observe developments in CSWL abilities across childhood, the cognitive processes that drive individual and developmental change have yet to be identified. This research tested a developmental systems account by examining whether multiple cognitive systems co-contribute to children's CSWL. The results of two experiments revealed that multiple cognitive domains, such as memory and language abilities, are likely to drive the development of CSWL above and beyond children's age. The results also revealed that memory abilities are likely to be particularly important above and beyond other cognitive abilities. These findings have implications for theories and computational models of CSWL, which typically do not account for individual children's cognitive capacities or changes in cognitive capacities across time.

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...

Use of positive and negative words in scientific PubMed abstracts between 1974 and 2014: retrospective analysis.

Science.gov (United States)

Vinkers, Christiaan H; Tijdink, Joeri K; Otte, Willem M

2015-12-14

To investigate whether language used in science abstracts can skew towards the use of strikingly positive and negative words over time. Retrospective analysis of all scientific abstracts in PubMed between 1974 and 2014. The yearly frequencies of positive, negative, and neutral words (25 preselected words in each category), plus 100 randomly selected words were normalised for the total number of abstracts. Subanalyses included pattern quantification of individual words, specificity for selected high impact journals, and comparison between author affiliations within or outside countries with English as the official majority language. Frequency patterns were compared with 4% of all books ever printed and digitised by use of Google Books Ngram Viewer. Frequencies of positive and negative words in abstracts compared with frequencies of words with a neutral and random connotation, expressed as relative change since 1980. The absolute frequency of positive words increased from 2.0% (1974-80) to 17.5% (2014), a relative increase of 880% over four decades. All 25 individual positive words contributed to the increase, particularly the words "robust," "novel," "innovative," and "unprecedented," which increased in relative frequency up to 15,000%. Comparable but less pronounced results were obtained when restricting the analysis to selected journals with high impact factors. Authors affiliated to an institute in a non-English speaking country used significantly more positive words. Negative word frequencies increased from 1.3% (1974-80) to 3.2% (2014), a relative increase of 257%. Over the same time period, no apparent increase was found in neutral or random word use, or in the frequency of positive word use in published books. Our lexicographic analysis indicates that scientific abstracts are currently written with more positive and negative words, and provides an insight into the evolution of scientific writing. Apparently scientists look on the bright side of research

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

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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...

Parturition date for a given female is highly repeatable within five roe deer populations

Science.gov (United States)

Plard, Floriane; Gaillard, Jean-Michel; Bonenfant, Christophe; Hewison, A. J. Mark; Delorme, Daniel; Cargnelutti, Bruno; Kjellander, Petter; Nilsen, Erlend B.; Coulson, Tim

2013-01-01

Births are highly synchronized among females in many mammal populations in temperate areas. Although laying date for a given female is also repeatable within populations of birds, limited evidence suggests low repeatability of parturition date for individual females in mammals, and between-population variability in repeatability has never, to our knowledge, been assessed. We quantified the repeatability of parturition date for individual females in five populations of roe deer, which we found to vary between 0.54 and 0.93. Each year, some females gave birth consistently earlier in the year, whereas others gave birth consistently later. In addition, all females followed the same lifetime trajectory for parturition date, giving birth progressively earlier as they aged. Giving birth early should allow mothers to increase offspring survival, although few females managed to do so. The marked repeatability of parturition date in roe deer females is the highest ever reported for a mammal, suggesting low phenotypic plasticity in this trait. PMID:23234861

Depth of word processing in Alzheimer patients and normal controls: a magnetoencephalographic (MEG) study.

Science.gov (United States)

Walla, P; Püregger, E; Lehrner, J; Mayer, D; Deecke, L; Dal Bianco, P

2005-05-01

Effects related to depth of verbal information processing were investigated in probable Alzheimer's disease patients (AD) and age matched controls. During word encoding sessions 10 patients and 10 controls had either to decide whether the letter "s" appeared in visually presented words (alphabetical decision, shallow encoding), or whether the meaning of each presented word was animate or inanimate (lexical decision, deep encoding). These encoding sessions were followed by test sessions during which all previously encoded words were presented again together with the same number of new words. The task was then to discriminate between repeated and new words. Magnetic field changes related to brain activity were recorded with a whole cortex MEG.5 probable AD patients showed recognition performances above chance level related to both depths of information processing. Those patients and 5 age matched controls were then further analysed. Recognition performance was poorer in probable AD patients compared to controls for both levels of processing. However, in both groups deep encoding led to a higher recognition performance than shallow encoding. We therefore conclude that the performance reduction in the patient group was independent of depth of processing. Reaction times related to false alarms differed between patients and controls after deep encoding which perhaps could already be used for supporting an early diagnosis. The analysis of the physiological data revealed significant differences between correctly recognised repetitions and correctly classified new words (old/new-effect) in the control group which were missing in the patient group after deep encoding. The lack of such an effect in the patient group is interpreted as being due to the respective neuropathology related to probable AD. The present results demonstrate that magnetic field recordings represent a useful tool to physiologically distinguish between probable AD and age matched controls.

An English-French-German-Spanish Word Frequency Dictionary: A Correlation of the First Six Thousand Words in Four Single-Language Frequency Lists.

Science.gov (United States)

Eaton, Helen S., Comp.

This semantic frequency list for English, French, German, and Spanish correlates 6,474 concepts represented by individual words in an order of diminishing occurrence. Designed as a research tool, the work is segmented into seven comparative "Thousand Concepts" lists with 115 sectional subdivisions, each of which begins with the key English word…

Examining Word Factors and Child Factors for Acquisition of Conditional Sound-Spelling Consistencies: A Longitudinal Study

Science.gov (United States)

Kim, Young-Suk Grace; Petscher, Yaacov; Park, Younghee

2016-01-01

It has been suggested that children acquire spelling by picking up conditional sound-spelling consistencies. To examine this hypothesis, we investigated how variation in word characteristics (words that vary systematically in terms of phoneme-grapheme correspondences) and child factors (individual differences in the ability to extract…

Optimal viewing position in vertically and horizontally presented Japanese words.

Science.gov (United States)

Kajii, N; Osaka, N

2000-11-01

In the present study, the optimal viewing position (OVP) phenomenon in Japanese Hiragana was investigated, with special reference to a comparison between the vertical and the horizontal meridians in the visual field. In the first experiment, word recognition scores were determined while the eyes were fixating predetermined locations in vertically and horizontally displayed words. Similar to what has been reported for Roman scripts, OVP curves, which were asymmetric with respect to the beginning of words, were observed in both conditions. However, this asymmetry was less pronounced for vertically than for horizontally displayed words. In the second experiment, the visibility of individual characters within strings was examined for the vertical and horizontal meridians. As for Roman characters, letter identification scores were better in the right than in the left visual field. However, identification scores did not differ between the upper and the lower sides of fixation along the vertical meridian. The results showed that the model proposed by Nazir, O'Regan, and Jacobs (1991) cannot entirely account for the OVP phenomenon. A model in which visual and lexical factors are combined is proposed instead.

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 bias towards personally relevant stimuli: the individual emotional Stroop task.

Science.gov (United States)

Wingenfeld, Katja; Bullig, Renate; Mensebach, Christoph; Hartje, Wolfgang; Driessen, Martin; Beblo, Thomas

2006-12-01

The emotional Stroop task is a widely used method for investigating attentional bias towards stimuli due to mood or affect. In general, standardized stimuli are used, which might not be appropriate when investigating individual contextual frameworks. It was investigated whether words chosen to be related to individuals' personal life events would produce more pronounced Stroop interference (as an indicator of attentional bias) than stimuli without any personal relevance. Twenty-six nonclinical subjects, 20 female and 6 male, participated in the study. Mean age was 36.1 yr. (SD = 18.1). All were recruited by means of local advertising. Stimulus material consisted of four word types: personal words related to negative life events with and without current personal relevance, and negative and neutral words without any personal relevance. Words were presented in three blocks. Analysis of variance showed main effects for word type and blocks, with slower reactions in the personally relevant conditions than in the negative, or neutral conditions, and in response to the first blocks as opposed to the last. These findings indicate that regardless of the word valence, personally relevant stimuli evoke more pronounced Stroop interference than do stimuli without personal relevance.

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

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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

Food words distract the hungry: Evidence of involuntary semantic processing of task-irrelevant but biologically-relevant unexpected auditory words.

Science.gov (United States)

Parmentier, Fabrice B R; Pacheco-Unguetti, Antonia P; Valero, Sara

2018-01-01

Rare changes in a stream of otherwise repeated task-irrelevant sounds break through selective attention and disrupt performance in an unrelated visual task by triggering shifts of attention to and from the deviant sound (deviance distraction). Evidence indicates that the involuntary orientation of attention to unexpected sounds is followed by their semantic processing. However, past demonstrations relied on tasks in which the meaning of the deviant sounds overlapped with features of the primary task. Here we examine whether such processing is observed when no such overlap is present but sounds carry some relevance to the participants' biological need to eat when hungry. We report the results of an experiment in which hungry and satiated participants partook in a cross-modal oddball task in which they categorized visual digits (odd/even) while ignoring task-irrelevant sounds. On most trials the irrelevant sound was a sinewave tone (standard sound). On the remaining trials, deviant sounds consisted of spoken words related to food (food deviants) or control words (control deviants). Questionnaire data confirmed state (but not trait) differences between the two groups with respect to food craving, as well as a greater desire to eat the food corresponding to the food-related words in the hungry relative to the satiated participants. The results of the oddball task revealed that food deviants produced greater distraction (longer response times) than control deviants in hungry participants while the reverse effect was observed in satiated participants. This effect was observed in the first block of trials but disappeared thereafter, reflecting semantic saturation. Our results suggest that (1) the semantic content of deviant sounds is involuntarily processed even when sharing no feature with the primary task; and that (2) distraction by deviant sounds can be modulated by the participants' biological needs.

Modulation of human extrastriate visual processing by selective attention to colours and words.

Science.gov (United States)

Nobre, A C; Allison, T; McCarthy, G

1998-07-01

The present study investigated the effect of visual selective attention upon neural processing within functionally specialized regions of the human extrastriate visual cortex. Field potentials were recorded directly from the inferior surface of the temporal lobes in subjects with epilepsy. The experimental task required subjects to focus attention on words from one of two competing texts. Words were presented individually and foveally. Texts were interleaved randomly and were distinguishable on the basis of word colour. Focal field potentials were evoked by words in the posterior part of the fusiform gyrus. Selective attention strongly modulated long-latency potentials evoked by words. The attention effect co-localized with word-related potentials in the posterior fusiform gyrus, and was independent of stimulus colour. The results demonstrated that stimuli receive differential processing within specialized regions of the extrastriate cortex as a function of attention. The late onset of the attention effect and its co-localization with letter string-related potentials but not with colour-related potentials recorded from nearby regions of the fusiform gyrus suggest that the attention effect is due to top-down influences from downstream regions involved in word processing.

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)

Maturational changes in ear advantage for monaural word recognition in noise among listeners with central auditory processing disorders

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Mohsin Ahmed Shaikh

2017-02-01

Full Text Available This study aimed to investigate differences between ears in performance on a monaural word recognition in noise test among individuals across a broad range of ages assessed for (CAPD. Word recognition scores in quiet and in speech noise were collected retrospectively from the medical files of 107 individuals between the ages of 7 and 30 years who were diagnosed with (CAPD. No ear advantage was found on the word recognition in noise task in groups less than ten years. Performance in both ears was equally poor. Right ear performance improved across age groups, with scores of individuals above age 10 years falling within the normal range. In contrast, left ear performance remained essentially stable and in the impaired range across all age groups. Findings indicate poor left hemispheric dominance for speech perception in noise in children below the age of 10 years with (CAPD. However, a right ear advantage on this monaural speech in noise task was observed for individuals 10 years and older.

Neuroimaging studies of word and pseudoword reading: consistencies, inconsistencies, and limitations.

Science.gov (United States)

Mechelli, Andrea; Gorno-Tempini, Maria Luisa; Price, Cathy J

2003-02-15

Several functional neuroimaging studies have compared words and pseudowords to test different cognitive models of reading. There are difficulties with this approach, however, because cognitive models do not make clear-cut predictions at the neural level. Therefore, results can only be interpreted on the basis of prior knowledge of cognitive anatomy. Furthermore, studies comparing words and pseudowords have produced inconsistent results. The inconsistencies could reflect false-positive results due to the low statistical thresholds applied or confounds from nonlexical aspects of the stimuli. Alternatively, they may reflect true effects that are inconsistent across subjects; dependent on experimental parameters such as stimulus rate or duration; or not replicated across studies because of insufficient statistical power. In this fMRI study, we investigate consistent and inconsistent differences between word and pseudoword reading in 20 subjects, and distinguish between effects associated with increases and decreases in activity relative to fixation. In addition, the interaction of word type with stimulus duration is explored. We find that words and pseudowords activate the same set of regions relative to fixation, and within this system, there is greater activation for pseudowords than words in the left frontal operculum, left posterior inferior temporal gyrus, and the right cerebellum. The only effects of words relative to pseudowords consistent over subjects are due to decreases in activity for pseudowords relative to fixation; and there are no significant interactions between word type and stimulus duration. Finally, we observe inconsistent but highly significant effects of word type at the individual subject level. These results (i) illustrate that pseudowords place increased demands on areas that have previously been linked to lexical retrieval, and (ii) highlight the importance of including one or more baselines to qualify word type effects. Furthermore, (iii

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).

More than words: Adults learn probabilities over categories and relationships between them.

Science.gov (United States)

Hudson Kam, Carla L

2009-04-01

This study examines whether human learners can acquire statistics over abstract categories and their relationships to each other. Adult learners were exposed to miniature artificial languages containing variation in the ordering of the Subject, Object, and Verb constituents. Different orders (e.g. SOV, VSO) occurred in the input with different frequencies, but the occurrence of one order versus another was not predictable. Importantly, the language was constructed such that participants could only match the overall input probabilities if they were tracking statistics over abstract categories, not over individual words. At test, participants reproduced the probabilities present in the input with a high degree of accuracy. Closer examination revealed that learner's were matching the probabilities associated with individual verbs rather than the category as a whole. However, individual nouns had no impact on word orders produced. Thus, participants learned the probabilities of a particular ordering of the abstract grammatical categories Subject and Object associated with each verb. Results suggest that statistical learning mechanisms are capable of tracking relationships between abstract linguistic categories in addition to individual items.

Word length, set size, and lexical factors: Re-examining what causes the word length effect.

Science.gov (United States)

Guitard, Dominic; Gabel, Andrew J; Saint-Aubin, Jean; Surprenant, Aimée M; Neath, Ian

2018-04-19

The word length effect, better recall of lists of short (fewer syllables) than long (more syllables) words has been termed a benchmark effect of working memory. Despite this, experiments on the word length effect can yield quite different results depending on set size and stimulus properties. Seven experiments are reported that address these 2 issues. Experiment 1 replicated the finding of a preserved word length effect under concurrent articulation for large stimulus sets, which contrasts with the abolition of the word length effect by concurrent articulation for small stimulus sets. Experiment 2, however, demonstrated that when the short and long words are equated on more dimensions, concurrent articulation abolishes the word length effect for large stimulus sets. Experiment 3 shows a standard word length effect when output time is equated, but Experiments 4-6 show no word length effect when short and long words are equated on increasingly more dimensions that previous demonstrations have overlooked. Finally, Experiment 7 compared recall of a small and large neighborhood words that were equated on all the dimensions used in Experiment 6 (except for those directly related to neighborhood size) and a neighborhood size effect was still observed. We conclude that lexical factors, rather than word length per se, are better predictors of when the word length effect will occur. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

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…

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

Science.gov (United States)

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

2017-04-01

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

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

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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

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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.

Repetition Blindness for Faces: A Comparison of Face Identity, Expression, and Gender Judgments

OpenAIRE

Murphy, Karen; Ward, Zoe

2017-01-01

Repetition blindness (RB) refers to the impairment in reporting two identical targets within a rapid serial visual presentation stream. While numerous studies have demonstrated RB for words and picture of objects, very few studies have examined RB for faces. This study extended this research by examining RB when the two faces were complete repeats (same emotion and identity), identity repeats (same individual, different emotion), and emotion repeats (different individual, same emotion) for id...

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...

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...

Independence of early speech processing from word meaning.

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Travis, Katherine E; Leonard, Matthew K; Chan, Alexander M; Torres, Christina; Sizemore, Marisa L; Qu, Zhe; Eskandar, Emad; Dale, Anders M; Elman, Jeffrey L; Cash, Sydney S; Halgren, Eric

2013-10-01

We combined magnetoencephalography (MEG) with magnetic resonance imaging and electrocorticography to separate in anatomy and latency 2 fundamental stages underlying speech comprehension. The first acoustic-phonetic stage is selective for words relative to control stimuli individually matched on acoustic properties. It begins ∼60 ms after stimulus onset and is localized to middle superior temporal cortex. It was replicated in another experiment, but is strongly dissociated from the response to tones in the same subjects. Within the same task, semantic priming of the same words by a related picture modulates cortical processing in a broader network, but this does not begin until ∼217 ms. The earlier onset of acoustic-phonetic processing compared with lexico-semantic modulation was significant in each individual subject. The MEG source estimates were confirmed with intracranial local field potential and high gamma power responses acquired in 2 additional subjects performing the same task. These recordings further identified sites within superior temporal cortex that responded only to the acoustic-phonetic contrast at short latencies, or the lexico-semantic at long. The independence of the early acoustic-phonetic response from semantic context suggests a limited role for lexical feedback in early speech perception.

Trends in standardized mortality among individuals with schizophrenia, 1993–2012: a population-based, repeated cross-sectional study

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Gatov, Evgenia; Rosella, Laura; Chiu, Maria; Kurdyak, Paul A.

2017-01-01

BACKGROUND: We examined mortality time trends and premature mortality among individuals with and without schizophrenia over a 20-year period. METHODS: In this population-based, repeated cross-sectional study, we identified all individual deaths that occurred in Ontario between 1993 and 2012 in persons aged 15 and over. We plotted overall and cause-specific age- and sex-standardized mortality rates (ASMRs), stratified all-cause ASMR trends by sociodemographic characteristics, and analyzed premature mortality using years of potential life lost. Additionally, we calculated mortality rate ratios (MRRs) using negative binomial regression with adjustment for age, sex, income, rurality and year of death. RESULTS: We identified 31 349 deaths among persons with schizophrenia, and 1 589 902 deaths among those without schizophrenia. Mortality rates among people with schizophrenia were 3 times higher than among those without schizophrenia (adjusted MRR 3.12, 95% confidence interval 3.06–3.17). All-cause ASMRs in both groups declined in parallel over the study period, by about 35%, and were higher for men, for those with low income and for rural dwellers. The absolute ASMR difference also declined throughout the study period (from 16.15 to 10.49 deaths per 1000 persons). Cause-specific ASMRs were greater among those with schizophrenia, with circulatory conditions accounting for most deaths between 1993 and 2012, whereas neoplasms became the leading cause of death for those without schizophrenia after 2005. Individuals with schizophrenia also died, on average, 8 years younger than those without schizophrenia, losing more potential years of life. INTERPRETATION: Although mortality rates among people with schizophrenia have declined over the past 2 decades, specialized approaches may be required to close the persistent 3-fold relative mortality gap with the general population. PMID:28923795

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

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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…

Reliability of the sliding scale for collecting affective responses to words.

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Imbault, C; Shore, D; Kuperman, V

2018-01-25

Warriner, Shore, Schmidt, Imbault, and Kuperman, Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 71; 71-88 (2017) have recently proposed a slider task in which participants move a manikin on a computer screen toward or further away from a word, and the distance (in pixels) is a measure of the word's valence. Warriner, Shore, Schmidt, Imbault, and Kuperman, Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 71; 71-88 (2017) showed this task to be more valid than the widely used rating task, but they did not examine the reliability of the new methodology. In this study we investigated multiple aspects of this task's reliability. In Experiment 1 (Exps. 1.1-1.6), we showed that the sliding scale has high split-half reliability (r = .868 to .931). In Experiment 2, we also showed that the slider task elicits consistent repeated responses both within a single session (Exp. 2: r = .804) and across two sessions separated by one week (Exp. 3: r = .754). Overall, the slider task, in addition to having high validity, is highly reliable.

Electronic Word of Behavior

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Kunst, Katrine; Vatrapu, Ravi; Hussain, Abid

2017-01-01

In this research in progress-paper, we introduce the notion of ‘Electronic Word of Behavior’ (eWOB) to describe the phenomenon of consumers’ product-related behaviors increasingly made observable by online social environments. We employ Observational Learning theory to conceptualize the notion of e......WOB and generate hypotheses about how consumers influence each other by means of behavior in online social environments. We present a conceptual framework for categorizing eWOB, and propose a novel research design for a randomized controlled field experiment. Specifically, the ongoing experiment aims to analyze...... how the presence of individual-specific behavior-based social information in a movie streaming service affects potential users’ attitude towards and intentions to use the service....

From HTML to List of Words (part 2

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

William J. Turkel

2012-07-01

Full Text Available In this lesson, you will learn the Python commands needed to implement the second part of the algorithm begun in the From HTML to a List of Words (part 1. The first half of the algorithm gets the content of an HTML page and saves only the content that follows the tags. The second half of the algorithm does the following: Look at every character in the pageContents string, one character at a time If the character is a left angle bracket ( we are now leaving the tag; ignore the current character, but look at each following character If we’re not inside a tag, append the current character to a new variable: text Split the text string into a list of individual words that can later be manipulated further.

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 ...

No specific role for the manual motor system in processing the meanings of words related to the hand

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Natasha ePostle

2013-02-01

Full Text Available The present study explored whether semantic and motor systems are functionally interwoven via the use of a dual-task paradigm. According to embodied language accounts that propose an automatic and necessary involvement of the motor system in conceptual processing, concurrent processing of hand-related information should interfere more with hand movements than processing of unrelated body-part (i.e., foot, mouth information. Across three experiments, 100 right-handed participants performed left- or right-hand tapping movements while repeatedly reading action words related to different body-parts, or different body-part names, in both aloud and silent conditions. Concurrent reading of single words related to specific body-parts, or the same words embedded in sentences differing in syntactic and phonological complexity (to manipulate context-relevant processing, and reading while viewing videos of the actions and body-parts described by the target words (to elicit visuomotor associations all interfered with right-hand but not left-hand tapping rate. However, this motor interference was not affected differentially by hand-related stimuli. Thus, the results provide no support for proposals that body-part specific resources in cortical motor systems are shared between overt manual movements and meaning-related processing of words related to the hand.

Lingua patientis: new words for patient communication and history taking.

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Weaver, Donald F

2017-11-01

The English language sometimes fails in its ability to describe the severity or complexity of medical symptoms and complaints. In frustration, patients (or families) occasionally create new words to convey the subtleties of their medical history. Although medicine has created a comprehensive technical lexicon for physicians, we have failed to develop a corresponding patient-centric vocabulary (lingua patientis) that provides more accurate symptom description. The social networking of lingua patientis words might enhance history taking and afford improved appreciation of disease impact on individual patients. The English language is renowned for its capacity for flexibility and adaptability - we need to exploit this capacity for the benefit of our patients.

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

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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…

Lexical categories in African languages: The case of adjectives word ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

An endeavor to establish typical lexical categories in individual languages as well as a typology of word-classes yields contradictory conclusions. In this paper we provide evidence to substantiate the existence of an independent and indispensable open category of adjectives in the Bantu language Nyakyusa. An argument ...

Finding Rising and Falling Words

NARCIS (Netherlands)

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

An fMRI study of concreteness effects during spoken word recognition in aging. Preservation or attenuation?

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Tracy eRoxbury

2016-01-01

Full Text Available It is unclear whether healthy aging influences concreteness effects (ie. the processing advantage seen for concrete over abstract words and its associated neural mechanisms. We conducted an fMRI study on young and older healthy adults performing auditory lexical decisions on concrete versus abstract words. We found that spoken comprehension of concrete and abstract words appears relatively preserved for healthy older individuals, including the concreteness effect. This preserved performance was supported by altered activity in left hemisphere regions including the inferior and middle frontal gyri, angular gyrus, and fusiform gyrus. This pattern is consistent with age-related compensatory mechanisms supporting spoken word processing.

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...

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.

Processing complex pseudo-words in mild cognitive impairment: The interaction of preserved morphological rule knowledge with compromised cognitive ability.

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Manouilidou, Christina; Dolenc, Barbara; Marvin, Tatjana; Pirtošek, Zvezdan

2016-01-01

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) affects the cognitive performance of elderly adults. However, the level of severity is not high enough to be diagnosed with dementia. Previous research reports subtle language impairments in individuals with MCI specifically in domains related to lexical meaning. The present study used both off-line (grammaticality judgment) and on-line (lexical decision) tasks to examine aspects of lexical processing and how they are affected by MCI. 21 healthy older adults and 23 individuals with MCI saw complex pseudo-words that violated various principles of word formation in Slovenian and decided if each letter string was an actual word of their language. The pseudo-words ranged in their degree of violability. A task effect was found, with MCI performance to be similar to that of healthy controls in the off-line task but different in the on-line task. Overall, the MCI group responded slower than the elderly controls. No significant differences were observed in the off-line task, while the on-line task revealed a main effect of Violation type, a main effect of Group and a significant Violation × Group interaction reflecting a difficulty for the MCI group to process pseudo-words in real time. That is, while individuals with MCI seem to preserve morphological rule knowledge, they experience additional difficulties while processing complex pseudo-words. This was attributed to an executive dysfunction associated with MCI that delays the recognition of ungrammatical formations.

Essential words for the TOEFL

CERN Document Server

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.

Approach bias for food cues in obese individuals.

Science.gov (United States)

Kemps, Eva; Tiggemann, Marika

2015-01-01

This study aimed to investigate the existence of an approach bias for food cues in obese individuals. A community sample of 56 obese women and 56 normal weight controls completed an approach-avoidance variant of the implicit association task. The obese participants were faster to respond to trials that paired food words with approach words, and trials that paired non-food words with avoid words, than the converse pairings, thus, demonstrating an approach bias for food. This bias was evident for both high caloric and low caloric food words, and was not attributable to a state of deprivation or feelings of hunger. By contrast, the normal weight controls did not show any such bias. The results are consistent with recent neurocognitive perspectives of obesity. At a practical level, approach biases for food may present a potential target for modifying (excessive) food intake.

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…

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

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Al Shammari Majid Jamil Ashur

2015-03-01

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

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

CERN Document Server

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

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

DNA Replication Dynamics of the GGGGCC Repeat of the C9orf72 Gene.

Science.gov (United States)

Thys, Ryan Griffin; Wang, Yuh-Hwa

2015-11-27

DNA has the ability to form a variety of secondary structures in addition to the normal B-form DNA, including hairpins and quadruplexes. These structures are implicated in a number of neurological diseases and cancer. Expansion of a GGGGCC repeat located at C9orf72 is associated with familial amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and frontotemporal dementia. This repeat expands from two to 24 copies in normal individuals to several hundreds or thousands of repeats in individuals with the disease. Biochemical studies have demonstrated that as little as four repeats have the ability to form a stable DNA secondary structure known as a G-quadruplex. Quadruplex structures have the ability to disrupt normal DNA processes such as DNA replication and transcription. Here we examine the role of GGGGCC repeat length and orientation on DNA replication using an SV40 replication system in human cells. Replication through GGGGCC repeats leads to a decrease in overall replication efficiency and an increase in instability in a length-dependent manner. Both repeat expansions and contractions are observed, and replication orientation is found to influence the propensity for expansions or contractions. The presence of replication stress, such as low-dose aphidicolin, diminishes replication efficiency but has no effect on instability. Two-dimensional gel electrophoresis analysis demonstrates a replication stall with as few as 20 GGGGCC repeats. These results suggest that replication of the GGGGCC repeat at C9orf72 is perturbed by the presence of expanded repeats, which has the potential to result in further expansion, leading to disease. © 2015 by The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Inc.

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.

Interactive language learning by robots: the transition from babbling to word forms.

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Lyon, Caroline; Nehaniv, Chrystopher L; Saunders, Joe

2012-01-01

The advent of humanoid robots has enabled a new approach to investigating the acquisition of language, and we report on the development of robots able to acquire rudimentary linguistic skills. Our work focuses on early stages analogous to some characteristics of a human child of about 6 to 14 months, the transition from babbling to first word forms. We investigate one mechanism among many that may contribute to this process, a key factor being the sensitivity of learners to the statistical distribution of linguistic elements. As well as being necessary for learning word meanings, the acquisition of anchor word forms facilitates the segmentation of an acoustic stream through other mechanisms. In our experiments some salient one-syllable word forms are learnt by a humanoid robot in real-time interactions with naive participants. Words emerge from random syllabic babble through a learning process based on a dialogue between the robot and the human participant, whose speech is perceived by the robot as a stream of phonemes. Numerous ways of representing the speech as syllabic segments are possible. Furthermore, the pronunciation of many words in spontaneous speech is variable. However, in line with research elsewhere, we observe that salient content words are more likely than function words to have consistent canonical representations; thus their relative frequency increases, as does their influence on the learner. Variable pronunciation may contribute to early word form acquisition. The importance of contingent interaction in real-time between teacher and learner is reflected by a reinforcement process, with variable success. The examination of individual cases may be more informative than group results. Nevertheless, word forms are usually produced by the robot after a few minutes of dialogue, employing a simple, real-time, frequency dependent mechanism. This work shows the potential of human-robot interaction systems in studies of the dynamics of early language

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

A Personalized Word of Mouth Recommender Model

OpenAIRE

Chihli Hung

2008-01-01

Word of mouth (WOM) has a powerful effect on consumer behavior. Manually collecting WOM is very time-consuming in the era of the Internet. An automatic WOM recommender model is useful for both marketers and consumers. There are many different product features and thus many consumer choices. Each individual consumer has different preferences and these preferences may be changed deliberately or unwittingly. However, most existing WOM recommender models do not adapt to user preferences. This stu...

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

Levels-of-processing effect on word recognition in schizophrenia.

Science.gov (United States)

Ragland, J Daniel; Moelter, Stephen T; McGrath, Claire; Hill, S Kristian; Gur, Raquel E; Bilker, Warren B; Siegel, Steven J; Gur, Ruben C

2003-12-01

Individuals with schizophrenia have difficulty organizing words semantically to facilitate encoding. This is commonly attributed to organizational rather than semantic processing limitations. By requiring participants to classify and encode words on either a shallow (e.g., uppercase/lowercase) or deep level (e.g., concrete/abstract), the levels-of-processing paradigm eliminates the need to generate organizational strategies. This paradigm was administered to 30 patients with schizophrenia and 30 healthy comparison subjects to test whether providing a strategy would improve patient performance. Word classification during shallow and deep encoding was slower and less accurate in patients. Patients also responded slowly during recognition testing and maintained a more conservative response bias following deep encoding; however, both groups showed a robust levels-of-processing effect on recognition accuracy, with unimpaired patient performance following both shallow and deep encoding. This normal levels-of-processing effect in the patient sample suggests that semantic processing is sufficiently intact for patients to benefit from organizational cues. Memory remediation efforts may therefore be most successful if they focus on teaching patients to form organizational strategies during initial encoding.

REPEATED SPRINT ABILITY AND RECOVERY PERIOD: COMPARISON OF TRAINED AND UNTRAINED INDIVIDUALS

OpenAIRE

Sultan

2016-01-01

The purpose of the study was to investigate the effects of training both in repeated sprint ability (RSA) and during the recovery after sprint. Soccer players playing in regional amateur league (n=14, age: 21.86±2.35 years, height: 180.14±4.54 cm, body mass: 72.57±5.03 kg, training age: 8.71±1.86 years) and students from faculty of sport sciences that played soccer in the past (n=13, age: 23.77±2.65 years, height: 178.54±4.67 cm, body mass: 74.54±10.52 kg) participated in this study as traine...

Relations among student attention behaviors, teacher practices, and beginning word reading skill.

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Sáez, Leilani; Folsom, Jessica Sidler; Al Otaiba, Stephanie; Schatschneider, Christopher

2012-01-01

The role of student attention for predicting kindergarten word reading was investigated among 432 students. Using Strengths and Weaknesses of ADHD Symptoms and Normal Behavior Rating Scale behavior rating scores, the authors conducted an exploratory factor analysis, which yielded three distinct factors that reflected selective attention. In this study, the authors focused on the role of one of these factors, which they labeled attention-memory, for predicting reading performance. Teacher ratings of attention-memory predicted word reading above and beyond the contribution of phonological awareness and vocabulary knowledge. In addition, the relations between four teacher practices and attention ratings for predicting reading performance were examined. Using hierarchical linear modeling, the authors found significant interactions between student attention and teacher practices observed during literacy instruction. In general, as ratings of attention improved, better kindergarten word reading performance was associated with high levels of classroom behavior management. However, better word reading performance was not associated with high levels of teacher task orienting. A significant three-way interaction was also found among attention, individualized instruction, and teacher task redirections. The role of regulating kindergarten student attention to support beginning word reading skill development is discussed.

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

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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

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Débora Mattos Marques

2016-10-01

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

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

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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

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

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.

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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.

A joint model of word segmentation and meaning acquisition through cross-situational learning.

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Räsänen, Okko; Rasilo, Heikki

2015-10-01

Human infants learn meanings for spoken words in complex interactions with other people, but the exact learning mechanisms are unknown. Among researchers, a widely studied learning mechanism is called cross-situational learning (XSL). In XSL, word meanings are learned when learners accumulate statistical information between spoken words and co-occurring objects or events, allowing the learner to overcome referential uncertainty after having sufficient experience with individually ambiguous scenarios. Existing models in this area have mainly assumed that the learner is capable of segmenting words from speech before grounding them to their referential meaning, while segmentation itself has been treated relatively independently of the meaning acquisition. In this article, we argue that XSL is not just a mechanism for word-to-meaning mapping, but that it provides strong cues for proto-lexical word segmentation. If a learner directly solves the correspondence problem between continuous speech input and the contextual referents being talked about, segmentation of the input into word-like units emerges as a by-product of the learning. We present a theoretical model for joint acquisition of proto-lexical segments and their meanings without assuming a priori knowledge of the language. We also investigate the behavior of the model using a computational implementation, making use of transition probability-based statistical learning. Results from simulations show that the model is not only capable of replicating behavioral data on word learning in artificial languages, but also shows effective learning of word segments and their meanings from continuous speech. Moreover, when augmented with a simple familiarity preference during learning, the model shows a good fit to human behavioral data in XSL tasks. These results support the idea of simultaneous segmentation and meaning acquisition and show that comprehensive models of early word segmentation should take referential word

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