An associative account of the development of word learning.

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Sloutsky, Vladimir M; Yim, Hyungwook; Yao, Xin; Dennis, Simon

2017-09-01

Word learning is a notoriously difficult induction problem because meaning is underdetermined by positive examples. How do children solve this problem? Some have argued that word learning is achieved by means of inference: young word learners rely on a number of assumptions that reduce the overall hypothesis space by favoring some meanings over others. However, these approaches have difficulty explaining how words are learned from conversations or text, without pointing or explicit instruction. In this research, we propose an associative mechanism that can account for such learning. In a series of experiments, 4-year-olds and adults were presented with sets of words that included a single nonsense word (e.g. dax). Some lists were taxonomic (i.,e., all items were members of a given category), some were associative (i.e., all items were associates of a given category, but not members), and some were mixed. Participants were asked to indicate whether the nonsense word was an animal or an artifact. Adults exhibited evidence of learning when lists consisted of either associatively or taxonomically related items. In contrast, children exhibited evidence of word learning only when lists consisted of associatively related items. These results present challenges to several extant models of word learning, and a new model based on the distinction between syntagmatic and paradigmatic associations is proposed. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Invented Spelling, Word Stress, and Syllable Awareness in Relation to Reading Difficulties in Children.

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Mehta, Sheena; Ding, Yi; Ness, Molly; Chen, Eric C

2018-06-01

The study assessed the clinical utility of an invented spelling tool and determined whether invented spelling with linguistic manipulation at segmental and supra-segmental levels can be used to better identify reading difficulties. We conducted linguistic manipulation by using real and nonreal words, incorporating word stress, alternating the order of consonants and vowels, and alternating the number of syllables. We recruited 60 third-grade students, of which half were typical readers and half were poor readers. The invented spelling task consistently differentiated those with reading difficulties from typical readers. It explained unique variance in conventional spelling, but not in word reading. Word stress explained unique variance in both word reading and conventional spelling, highlighting the importance of addressing phonological awareness at the supra-segmental level. Poor readers had poorer performance when spelling both real and nonreal words and demonstrated substantial difficulty in detecting word stress. Poor readers struggled with spelling words with double consonants at the beginning and ending of words, and performed worse on spelling two- and three-syllable words than typical readers. Practical implications for early identification and instruction are discussed.

The Contribution of Morphological Awareness to the Spelling of Morphemes and Morphologically Complex Words in French

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Fejzo, Anila

2016-01-01

The goal of this study was to explore the relationship between morphological awareness and the spelling of morphemes and morphologically complex words among 75 third- and fourth-grade Francophone students of low socio-economic status. To reach this objective, we administered a dictation comprised of morphologically complex words with prefixes,…

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.

The Role of Morphological and Phonological Awareness in the Early Development of Word Spelling and Reading in Typically Developing and Disabled Arabic Readers.

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Saiegh-Haddad, Elinor; Taha, Haitham

2017-11-01

The study is a cross-sectional developmental investigation of morphological and phonological awareness in word spelling and reading in Arabic in reading-accuracy disabled (RD) children and in age-matched typically developing (TR) controls in grades 1-4 (N = 160). Morphological awareness tasks targeted the root and word pattern derivational system of Arabic, in both the oral and the written modalities. Phonological awareness employed a variety of orally administered segmentation and deletion tasks. The results demonstrated early deficits in morphological awareness, besides deficits in phonological awareness, in RD children as compared with typically developing controls, as well as in word and pseudoword spelling and reading (voweled and unvoweled). While phonological awareness emerged as the strongest predictor of reading, morphological awareness was also found to predict unique variance in reading, and even more so in spelling, beyond phonological awareness and cognitive skills. The results demonstrate the early emergence of morphological awareness deficits, alongside phonological deficits in Arabic RD, as well as the role of morphological processing in early reading and spelling. These findings reflect the centrality of derivational morphology in the structure of the spoken and the written Arabic word. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A neurocomputational account of taxonomic responding and fast mapping in early word learning.

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Mayor, Julien; Plunkett, Kim

2010-01-01

We present a neurocomputational model with self-organizing maps that accounts for the emergence of taxonomic responding and fast mapping in early word learning, as well as a rapid increase in the rate of acquisition of words observed in late infancy. The quality and efficiency of generalization of word-object associations is directly related to the quality of prelexical, categorical representations in the model. We show how synaptogenesis supports coherent generalization of word-object associations and show that later synaptic pruning minimizes metabolic costs without being detrimental to word learning. The role played by joint-attentional activities is identified in the model, both at the level of selecting efficient cross-modal synapses and at the behavioral level, by accelerating and refining overall vocabulary acquisition. The model can account for the qualitative shift in the way infants use words, from an associative to a referential-like use, for the pattern of overextension errors in production and comprehension observed during early childhood and typicality effects observed in lexical development. Interesting by-products of the model include a potential explanation of the shift from prototype to exemplar-based effects reported for adult category formation, an account of mispronunciation effects in early lexical development, and extendability to include accounts of individual differences in lexical development and specific disorders such as Williams syndrome. The model demonstrates how an established constraint on lexical learning, which has often been regarded as domain-specific, can emerge from domain-general learning principles that are simultaneously biologically, psychologically, and socially plausible.

Evidence of an association between sign language phonological awareness and word reading in deaf and hard-of-hearing children.

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Holmer, Emil; Heimann, Mikael; Rudner, Mary

2016-01-01

Children with good phonological awareness (PA) are often good word readers. Here, we asked whether Swedish deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children who are more aware of the phonology of Swedish Sign Language, a language with no orthography, are better at reading words in Swedish. We developed the Cross-modal Phonological Awareness Test (C-PhAT) that can be used to assess PA in both Swedish Sign Language (C-PhAT-SSL) and Swedish (C-PhAT-Swed), and investigated how C-PhAT performance was related to word reading as well as linguistic and cognitive skills. We validated C-PhAT-Swed and administered C-PhAT-Swed and C-PhAT-SSL to DHH children who attended Swedish deaf schools with a bilingual curriculum and were at an early stage of reading. C-PhAT-SSL correlated significantly with word reading for DHH children. They performed poorly on C-PhAT-Swed and their scores did not correlate significantly either with C-PhAT-SSL or word reading, although they did correlate significantly with cognitive measures. These results provide preliminary evidence that DHH children with good sign language PA are better at reading words and show that measures of spoken language PA in DHH children may be confounded by individual differences in cognitive skills. Copyright © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

Investigation & Comparison in Some Aspects of Phonological Awareness Skill (in both Whole Word & Phonetic Methods in First Grade Female Students

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Ali Dehghan-Ahmadabad

2005-04-01

Full Text Available Objective: Phonological Awareness (PA is a extra linguistic skill and defined as individual awareness of constituent’s sounds of the word . This skill is a prerequisites of learning to Read. Many researchers suggested reciprocal relation between PA and Reading. This research determined level of PA-fundamental ability of reading-in normal first grade femal students of Isfahan & shahinshar to compare two current method of Reading that are used in educational system of Iran. Materials & Methods: The method used in this research is cross-sectional, descriptive-analytic and was done by 106 first grade female students who were normal and selected randomly in Isfahan & shahinshar cities. 51 students had teached by phonetic method and rest of them had teached by whole word method. The selection way of children was: this children had not any articulation, vision, reading, learning and cranial nerve disorders and this children investigated by Phonological Awareness test. scores of children by test calculated and this scores analyzed by t-test in Spss software. Results: The mean score of phonological awareness in phonetic method was 51.98 and in whole word method was 57.46. There was a significant differences between them in their scores (P=0.047. In addition,within subtests of phonological awareness task,mean score of first phoneme omission in whole word method was 4.84 and in phonetic method was 3.33. There was a significant difference between them in their scores (P=0.001. In the rest of subtests was no significant difference between them. Conclusion: Based on this study, a significant correlation could be found in Phonological Awareness between both group and in other hand, there was a significant correlation between scores of first phoneme omission in both groups (Whole word and Phonetic method.Based on importance of phonological awareness as a predictor of reading, we suggest more research in this outline must be done.

Dissociation between implicit and explicit manifestations of awareness in early stage dementia: evidence from the emotional Stroop effect for dementia-related words.

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Martyr, Anthony; Clare, Linda; Nelis, Sharon M; Roberts, Judith L; Robinson, Julia U; Roth, Ilona; Markova, Ivana S; Woods, Robert T; Whitaker, Christopher J; Morris, Robin G

2011-01-01

To determine whether people with dementia (PwD), and carers of PwD, show a processing bias to dementia-related words in an emotional Stroop task, and if so, whether the presence of such a bias is related to level of explicit awareness of the condition. Seventy-nine people with early stage Alzheimer's disease (AD), vascular or mixed dementia, and their carers, completed an emotional Stroop task. Time taken to colour-name dementia-related and neutral words was compared within and between groups. Additionally, as a comparison, ratings of the awareness of the condition shown by PwD were made on the basis of a detailed interview with each PwD and his/her carer. PwD and carers showed the same level of increase in response times to salient compared to neutral words. In the PwD this effect was unrelated to the degree of awareness that they demonstrated regarding the condition. The emotional Stroop effect in response to dementia-related words in PwD indicates that preserved implicit awareness of the condition can be elicited even where there is reduced explicit awareness. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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

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Goodrich, J. Marc; Lonigan, Christopher J.

2016-01-01

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

Auditory Processing, Linguistic Prosody Awareness, and Word Reading in Mandarin-Speaking Children Learning English

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Chung, Wei-Lun; Jarmulowicz, Linda; Bidelman, Gavin M.

2017-01-01

This study examined language-specific links among auditory processing, linguistic prosody awareness, and Mandarin (L1) and English (L2) word reading in 61 Mandarin-speaking, English-learning children. Three auditory discrimination abilities were measured: pitch contour, pitch interval, and rise time (rate of intensity change at tone onset).…

Syntactic Awareness and Arithmetic Word Problem Solving in Children with and without Learning Disabilities

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Peake, Christian; Jiménez, Juan E.; Rodríguez, Cristina; Bisschop, Elaine; Villarroel, Rebeca

2015-01-01

Arithmetic word problem (AWP) solving is a highly demanding task for children with learning disabilities (LD) since verbal and mathematical information have to be integrated. This study examines specifically how syntactic awareness (SA), the ability to manage the grammatical structures of language, affects AWP solving. Three groups of children in…

Awareness of the Public versus Private Accounting Divide, and Its Impact on the Career Path Preference of Accounting Students

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Crossman, H. Anthony

2017-01-01

This research assesses what knowledge upper-level accounting students possess about the distinctions between the public and private branches of accounting, as well as the influence such knowledge might have on their accounting branch choice. Overall, the study concluded that, before they were aware of the pros and cons of each career path,…

The Relationships among Verbal Short-Term Memory, Phonological Awareness, and New Word Learning: Evidence from Typical Development and Down Syndrome

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Jarrold, Christopher; Thorn, Annabel S. C.; Stephens, Emma

2009-01-01

This study examined the correlates of new word learning in a sample of 64 typically developing children between 5 and 8 years of age and a group of 22 teenagers and young adults with Down syndrome. Verbal short-term memory and phonological awareness skills were assessed to determine whether learning new words involved accurately representing…

Importance of speech production for phonological awareness and word decoding: the case of children with cerebral palsy.

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Peeters, M.; Verhoeven, L.; Moor, J.M.H. de; Balkom, H. van

2009-01-01

The goal of this longitudinal study was to investigate the precursors of early reading development in 52 children with cerebral palsy at kindergarten level in comparison to 65 children without disabilities. Word Decoding was measured to investigate early reading skills, while Phonological Awareness,

Contingency learning without awareness: evidence for implicit control.

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Schmidt, James R; Crump, Matthew J C; Cheesman, Jim; Besner, Derek

2007-06-01

The results of four experiments provide evidence for controlled processing in the absence of awareness. Participants identified the colour of a neutral distracter word. Each of four words (e.g., MOVE) was presented in one of the four colours 75% of the time (Experiments 1 and 4) or 50% of the time (Experiments 2 and 3). Colour identification was faster when the words appeared in the colour they were most often presented in relative to when they appeared in another colour, even for participants who were subjectively unaware of any contingencies between the words and the colours. An analysis of sequence effects showed that participants who were unaware of the relation between distracter words and colours nonetheless controlled the impact of the word on performance depending on the nature of the previous trial. A block analysis of contingency-unaware participants revealed that contingencies were learned rapidly in the first block of trials. Experiment 3 showed that the contingency effect does not depend on the level of awareness, thus ruling out explicit strategy accounts. Finally, Experiment 4 showed that the contingency effect results from behavioural control and not from semantic association or stimulus familiarity. These results thus provide evidence for implicit control.

Importance of Speech Production for Phonological Awareness and Word Decoding: The Case of Children with Cerebral Palsy

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Peeters, Marieke; Verhoeven, Ludo; de Moor, Jan; van Balkom, Hans

2009-01-01

The goal of this longitudinal study was to investigate the precursors of early reading development in 52 children with cerebral palsy at kindergarten level in comparison to 65 children without disabilities. Word Decoding was measured to investigate early reading skills, while Phonological Awareness, Phonological Short-term Memory (STM), Speech…

English Words and Phrases in Croatian: A Small-Scale Study of Language Awareness and Attitudes

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Marija Perić

2015-12-01

Full Text Available The focus of this paper is on language attitudes towards English words and phrases in the Croatian language. In order to prevent loanwords, linguistic purism has arisen as a theory about what languages should be like. The tradition of linguistic purism in Croatia has been shaped by various socio-historical factors. English may be viewed as a language of opportunity, or as a threat to the survival of other, usually minority and endangered, languages. In order to provide an insight into the use of English words and phrases in the Croatian context, a questionnaire about language attitudes and awareness was conducted on 534 participants. The aim of the questionnaire was to determine participants’ language attitudes and familiarity with English words and phrases. The results show that although people in Croatia generally like English, many of them are not familiar with English words, especially older participants and those with little or no knowledge of the English language. Moreover, the results indicate that the younger generation is more inclined towards English than the older generation; however, they are not as familiar with Croatian equivalents as they claim.

Environmental Awareness and The Role of Public Accounting Professional Bodies in Indonesia: A Brief Reflection

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Ria Sandra Alimbudiono

2014-03-01

Full Text Available This study aims to give an insight about environmental awareness from public accountant and the role of Indonesian accounting professional bodies in ensuring professional sustainability. A naturalistic method was  applied to get deep understanding about the perspectives of the boards of professional bodies as a representation from the condition of public accountants in general. Data collection methods used in this study were interviews and focus group discussion. The findings highlight a variety of perspectives on knowledge of environment, interest in environmental accounting and moral responsibility on environmental damage. This variation shows different levels of awareness and it is mainly caused by the lack of law enforcement and no mandatory standards on environmental issues. This condition will threat legitimacy of accounting profession and finally, be able to endangered professional accounting sustainability. Limitations are about the scope and sample,which provide insights of the boards of public accountant professional bodies on environmental accounting issues. Future studies should be done on other accounting fields such as environmental audit, environmental accounting and reporting and environmental costing.

Learning to Read Setswana and English: Cross-Language Transference of Letter Knowledge, Phonological Awareness and Word Reading Skills

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Lekgoko, Olemme; Winskel, Heather

2008-01-01

The current study investigates how beginner readers learn to read Setswana and English, and whether there is cross-language transference of skills between these two languages. Letter knowledge, phoneme awareness and reading of words and pseudowords in both Setswana and English were assessed in 36 Grade 2 children. A complex pattern emerged.…

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

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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…

Variation Patterns in Across-Word Regressive Assimilation in Picard: An Optimality Theoretic Account.

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Cardoso, Walcir

2001-01-01

Offers an optimality theoretic account for the phonological process of across-word regressive assimilation (AWRA) in Picard, a Gallo-Romance dialect spoken in the Picardie region in Northern France and Southern Belgium. Focuses on the varieties spoken in the Vimeu region of France. Examines one particular topic in the analysis of AWRA: the…

Word formation is aware of morpheme family size.

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Daniela Barbara Keller

Full Text Available Words are built from smaller meaning bearing parts, called morphemes. As one word can contain multiple morphemes, one morpheme can be present in different words. The number of distinct words a morpheme can be found in is its family size. Here we used Birth-Death-Innovation Models (BDIMs to analyze the distribution of morpheme family sizes in English and German vocabulary over the last 200 years. Rather than just fitting to a probability distribution, these mechanistic models allow for the direct interpretation of identified parameters. Despite the complexity of language change, we indeed found that a specific variant of this pure stochastic model, the second order linear balanced BDIM, significantly fitted the observed distributions. In this model, birth and death rates are increased for smaller morpheme families. This finding indicates an influence of morpheme family sizes on vocabulary changes. This could be an effect of word formation, perception or both. On a more general level, we give an example on how mechanistic models can enable the identification of statistical trends in language change usually hidden by cultural influences.

Improving awareness, accountability, and access through health coaching

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Liddy, Clare; Johnston, Sharon; Irving, Hannah; Nash, Kate; Ward, Natalie

2015-01-01

Abstract Objective To assess patients’ experiences with and perceptions of health coaching as part of their ongoing care. Design A qualitative research design using semistructured interviews that were recorded and transcribed verbatim. Setting Ottawa, Ont. Participants Eleven patients (> 18 years of age) enrolled in a health coaching pilot program who were at risk of or diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Methods Patients’ perspectives were assessed with semistructured interviews. Interviews were conducted with 11 patients at the end of the pilot program, using a stratified sampling approach to ensure maximum variation. Main findings All patients found the overall experience with the health coaching program to be positive. Patients believed the health coaching program was effective in increasing awareness of how diabetes affected their bodies and health, in building accountability for their health-related actions, and in improving access to care and other health resources. Conclusion Patients perceive one-on-one health coaching as an acceptable intervention in their ongoing care. Patients enrolled in the health coaching pilot program believed that there was an improvement in access to care, health literacy, and accountability, all factors considered to be precursors to behavioural change. PMID:25932483

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

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

2015-12-01

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

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

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Chetverikova Olena

2015-08-01

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

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

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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

The role of reference in cross-situational word learning.

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Wang, Felix Hao; Mintz, Toben H

2018-01-01

Word learning involves massive ambiguity, since in a particular encounter with a novel word, there are an unlimited number of potential referents. One proposal for how learners surmount the problem of ambiguity is that learners use cross-situational statistics to constrain the ambiguity: When a word and its referent co-occur across multiple situations, learners will associate the word with the correct referent. Yu and Smith (2007) propose that these co-occurrence statistics are sufficient for word-to-referent mapping. Alternative accounts hold that co-occurrence statistics alone are insufficient to support learning, and that learners are further guided by knowledge that words are referential (e.g., Waxman & Gelman, 2009). However, no behavioral word learning studies we are aware of explicitly manipulate subjects' prior assumptions about the role of the words in the experiments in order to test the influence of these assumptions. In this study, we directly test whether, when faced with referential ambiguity, co-occurrence statistics are sufficient for word-to-referent mappings in adult word-learners. Across a series of cross-situational learning experiments, we varied the degree to which there was support for the notion that the words were referential. At the same time, the statistical information about the words' meanings was held constant. When we overrode support for the notion that words were referential, subjects failed to learn the word-to-referent mappings, but otherwise they succeeded. Thus, cross-situational statistics were useful only when learners had the goal of discovering mappings between words and referents. We discuss the implications of these results for theories of word learning in children's language acquisition. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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...

[Intervention in dyslexic disorders: phonological awareness training].

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Etchepareborda, M C

2003-02-01

Taking into account the systems for the treatment of brain information when drawing up a work plan allows us to recreate processing routines that go from multisensory perception to motor, oral and cognitive production, which is the step prior to executive levels of thought, bottom-up and top-down processing systems. In recent years, the use of phonological methods to prevent or resolve reading disorders has become the fundamental mainstay in the treatment of dyslexia. The work is mainly based on phonological proficiency, which enables the patient to detect phonemes (input), to think about them (performance) and to use them to build words (output). Daily work with rhymes, the capacity to listen, the identification of phrases and words, and handling syllables and phonemes allows us to perform a preventive intervention that enhances the capacity to identify letters, phonological analysis and the reading of single words. We present the different therapeutic models that are most frequently employed. Fast For Word (FFW) training helps make progress in phonematic awareness and other linguistic skills, such as phonological awareness, semantics, syntax, grammar, working memory and event sequencing. With Deco-Fon, a programme for training phonological decoding, work is carried out on the auditory discrimination of pure tones, letters and consonant clusters, auditory processing speed, auditory and phonematic memory, and graphophonological processing, which is fundamental for speech, language and reading writing disorders. Hamlet is a programme based on categorisation activities for working on phonological conceptualisation. It attempts to encourage the analysis of the segments of words, syllables or phonemes, and the classification of a certain segment as belonging or not to a particular phonological or orthographical category. Therapeutic approaches in the early phases of reading are oriented towards two poles based on the basic mechanisms underlying the process of learning

Credibility and Accountability in Academic Discourse: Increasing the Awareness of Ghanaian Graduate Students

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Adika Gordon S. K.

2015-08-01

Full Text Available Drawing from a social constructionist perspective to written scholarly communication, this paper argues that training in academic writing for students in higher education especially in second language contexts should go beyond emphasis on grammatical correctness and paragraphing strategies, and also focus on the rhetorical character of academic discourse together with the mastery of its communicative protocols. Using the University of Ghana as a reference point, the paper reviews a selection of Ghanaian graduate students’ awareness of the protocols that govern academic discourses in scholarly writing, and in consideration of their unique educational and socio-cultural circumstances, the paper proposes strategies, from the pedagogical and institutional standpoints, aimed at increasing students’ awareness of the relevant communicative practices that engender credibility and accountability.

Unpacking Direct and Indirect Relationships of Short-Term Memory to Word Reading: Evidence From Korean-Speaking Children.

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Kim, Young-Suk Grace; Cho, Jeung-Ryeul; Park, Soon-Gil

2017-08-01

We examined the relations of short-term memory (STM), metalinguistic awareness (phonological, morphological, and orthographic awareness), and rapid automatized naming (RAN) to word reading in Korean, a language with a relatively transparent orthography. STM, metalinguistic awareness, and RAN have been shown to be important to word reading, but the nature of the relations of STM, metalinguistic awareness, and RAN to word reading has rarely been investigated. Two alternative models were fitted. In the indirect relation model, STM was hypothesized to be indirectly related to word reading via metalinguistic awareness and RAN. In the direct and indirect relations model, STM was hypothesized to be directly and indirectly related to word reading. Results from 207 beginning readers in South Korea showed that STM was directly related to word reading as well as indirectly via metalinguistic awareness and RAN. Although the direct effect of STM was relatively small (.16), the total effect incorporating the indirect effect was substantial (.42). These results suggest that STM is an important, foundational cognitive capacity that underpins metalinguistic awareness and RAN as well as word reading, and further indicate the importance of considering both direct and indirect effects of language and cognitive skills on word reading.

Sustainability and the Recycling of Words

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Miller, Donna L.; Nilsen, Alleen Pace

2011-01-01

With the mention of "sustainability" and "recycling," most people think about reusing paper, plastic, metal, and glass, but what the authors discovered when they embarked on a word-study unit is that the sustainability movement has also brought about the recycling of words. The authors were team-teaching a language awareness class taken by…

Komunikasi Word Of Mouth dan Keputusan Pembelian Batik Bangkalan

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Raniawati Rachman

2017-05-01

Full Text Available This research aims to examines the influence word of mouth communication, brand awareness, and community reception on buying decision of Batik Bangkalan using word of mouth communication, reception, and consumer behavior theory. This research has been done in Bangkalan Regency to 100 visitors of batik centers as respondents. Data were collected by questionnaires and analyzed by using multiple linear regression based on SPSS V21.0. The result shows that buying decision of Batik Bangkalan (Y is influenced simultaneously by word of mouth communication (X1, brand awareness (X2, and public receptions (X3. The influence of three variables on buying decision has been indicated by determinant coefficient (R² 60.7%. The most influential factors in buying decision of Batik Bangkalan Batik is brand awareness and public reception, while word of mouth communication did not influence on buying decision. It happens because X1 variable only to discuss, promote, and recommend. It does not reach level of persuading, inviting, and encouraging people to buy batik Bangkalan.

The word-length effect and disyllabic words.

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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.

The Longitudinal Contribution of Early Morphological Awareness Skills to Reading Fluency and Comprehension in Greek

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George Manolitsis

2017-10-01

Full Text Available The purpose of this longitudinal study was to examine the role of three morphological awareness (MA skills (inflection, derivation, and compounding in word reading fluency and reading comprehension in a relatively transparent orthography (Greek. Two hundred and fifteen (104 girls; Mage = 67.40 months, at kindergarten Greek children were followed from kindergarten (K to grade 2 (G2. In K and grade 1 (G1, they were tested on measures of MA (two inflectional, two derivational, and three compounding, letter knowledge, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming (RAN, and general cognitive ability (vocabulary and non-verbal IQ. At the end of G1 and G2, they were also tested on word reading fluency and reading comprehension. The results of hierarchical regression analyses showed that the inflectional and derivational aspects of MA in K as well as all aspects of MA in G1 accounted for 2–5% of unique variance in reading comprehension. None of the MA skills predicted word reading fluency, after controlling for the effects of vocabulary and RAN. These findings suggest that the MA skills, even when assessed as early as in kindergarten, play a significant role in reading comprehension development.

Word Decoding Development during Phonics Instruction in Children at Risk for Dyslexia.

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Schaars, Moniek M H; Segers, Eliane; Verhoeven, Ludo

2017-05-01

In the present study, we examined the early word decoding development of 73 children at genetic risk of dyslexia and 73 matched controls. We conducted monthly curriculum-embedded word decoding measures during the first 5 months of phonics-based reading instruction followed by standardized word decoding measures halfway and by the end of first grade. In kindergarten, vocabulary, phonological awareness, lexical retrieval, and verbal and visual short-term memory were assessed. The results showed that the children at risk were less skilled in phonemic awareness in kindergarten. During the first 5 months of reading instruction, children at risk were less efficient in word decoding and the discrepancy increased over the months. In subsequent months, the discrepancy prevailed for simple words but increased for more complex words. Phonemic awareness and lexical retrieval predicted the reading development in children at risk and controls to the same extent. It is concluded that children at risk are behind their typical peers in word decoding development starting from the very beginning. Furthermore, it is concluded that the disadvantage increased during phonics instruction and that the same predictors underlie the development of word decoding in the two groups of children. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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

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

2015-01-01

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

Space-Valence Priming with Subliminal and Supraliminal Words

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Ulrich eAnsorge

2013-02-01

Full Text Available To date it is unclear whether (1 awareness-independent non-evaluative semantic processes influence affective semantics and whether (2 awareness-independent affective semantics influence non-evaluative semantic processing. In the current study, we investigated these questions with the help of subliminal (masked primes and visible targets in a space-valence across-category congruence effect. In line with (1, we found that subliminal space prime words influenced valence classification of supraliminal target words (Experiment 1: Classifications were faster with a congruent prime (e.g., the prime ‘up’ before the target ‘happy’ than with an incongruent prime (e.g., the prime ‘up’ before the target ‘sad’. In contrast to (2, no influence of subliminal valence primes on the classification of supraliminal space targets into up- and down-words was found (Experiment 2. Control conditions showed that standard masked response-priming effects were found with both subliminal prime types, and that an across-category congruence effect was also found with supraliminal valence primes and spatial target words. The final Experiment 3 confirmed that the across-category congruence effect indeed reflected priming of target categorization of a relevant meaning category. Together, the data jointly confirmed prediction (1 that awareness-independent non-evaluative semantic priming influences valence judgments.

Beyond Words: Leader Self-Awareness and Interpersonal Skills

National Research Council Canada - National Science Library

Montgomery III, William H

2007-01-01

Being self aware and using interpersonal skills will be significant to leader success given the 2006 release of the Army's new mandate to create, develop, and nurture a different kind of Army leader...

Do good and poor readers make use of morphemic structure in English word recognition?

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Lynne G. Duncan

2011-06-01

Full Text Available The links between oral morphological awareness and the use of derivational morphology are examined in the English word recognition of 8-year-old good and poor readers. Morphological awareness was assessed by a sentence completion task. The role of morphological structure in lexical access was examined by manipulating the presence of embedded words and suffixes in items presented for lexical decision. Good readers were more accurate in the morphological awareness task but did not show facilitation for real derivations even though morpho-semantic information appeared to inform their lexical decisions. The poor readers, who were less accurate, displayed a strong lexicality effect in lexical decision and the presence of an embedded word led to facilitation for words and inhibition for pseudo-words. Overall, the results suggest that both good and poor readers of English are sensitive to the internal structure of written words, with the better readers showing most evidence of morphological analysis.

Concurrent Correlates of Chinese Word Recognition in Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Children

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Ching, Boby Ho-Hong; Nunes, Terezinha

2015-01-01

The aim of this study was to explore the relative contributions of phonological, semantic radical, and morphological awareness to Chinese word recognition in deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children. Measures of word recognition, general intelligence, phonological, semantic radical, and morphological awareness were administered to 32 DHH and 35…

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...

Reading speed and phonological awareness deficits among Arabic-speaking children with dyslexia.

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Layes, Smail; Lalonde, Robert; Rebaï, Mohamed

2015-02-01

Although reading accuracy of isolated words and phonological awareness represent the main criteria of subtyping developmental dyslexia, there is increasing evidence that reduced reading speed also represents a defining characteristic. In the present study, reading speed and accuracy were measured in Arabic-speaking phonological and mixed dyslexic children matched with controls of the same age. Participants in third and fourth grades, aged from 9-10 to 9-8 years, were given single frequent and infrequent word and pseudo-word reading and phonological awareness tasks. Results showed that the group with dyslexia scored significantly lower than controls in accuracy and speed in reading tasks. Phonological and mixed dyslexic subgroups differed in infrequent and frequent word reading accuracy, the latter being worse. In contrast, the subgroups were comparable in pseudo-word identification and phonological awareness. Delayed phonological and recognition processes of infrequent and frequent words, respectively, were placed in the context of the dual route model of reading and the specific orthographic features of the Arabic language. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Predicting English Word Reading Skills for Spanish-Speaking Students in First Grade.

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Páez, Mariela; Rinaldi, Claudia

2006-10-01

This article describes the word reading skills in English and Spanish for a sample of 244 Spanish-speaking, English-learning (hence, bilingual) students in first grade and presents a predictive model for English word reading skills. The children in the study were assessed at the end of kindergarten and first grade, respectively. Data were gathered with 3 subtests of the Woodcock Language Proficiency Battery and a researcher-developed phonological awareness task. Results showed that, on average, children's English word reading skills were similar to monolingual norms whereas their Spanish word reading skills averaged 1 SD below the mean. English vocabulary, English phonological awareness, and Spanish word reading skills in kindergarten were found to be significant predictors of English word reading skills in first grade. Educational implications for screening language and reading skills and promising areas for targeted instruction for this population are discussed.

Executive Functioning Skills Uniquely Predict Chinese Word Reading

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Chung, Kevin K. H.; McBride-Chang, Catherine

2011-01-01

Eighty-five Hong Kong Chinese children were tested across both the 2nd and 3rd years of kindergarten (ages 4-5 years) on tasks of inhibitory control, working memory, vocabulary knowledge, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and word reading. With age, vocabulary knowledge, and metalinguistic skills statistically controlled, the…

Nursery Rhyme Knowledge and Phonological Awareness in Preschool Children

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Harper, Laurie J.

2011-01-01

Phonological awareness is an important precursor in learning to read. This awareness of phonemes fosters a child's ability to hear and blend sounds, encode and decode words, and to spell phonetically. This quantitative study assessed pre-K children's existing Euro-American nursery rhyme knowledge and phonological awareness literacy, provided…

What is specific and what is shared between numbers and words?

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Júlia Beatriz Lopes-Silva

2016-02-01

Full Text Available Reading and spelling performance have a significant correlation with number transcoding, which is the ability to establish a relationship between the verbal and Arabic representations of numbers, when a conversion of numerical symbols from one notation to the other is necessary. The aim of the present study is to reveal shared and specific mechanisms involved in reading and writing words and Arabic numerals in Brazilian school-aged children. One hundred and seventy two children from 2nd to 4th grades were evaluated. All of them had normal intelligence. We conducted a series of hierarchical regression models using scores on word spelling and reading single words and Arabic numerals, as dependent variables. As predictor variables we investigated intelligence, the phonological and visuospatial components of working memory and phonemic awareness. All of the writing and reading tasks (single word spelling and reading as well as number reading and number writing were significantly correlated to each other. In the regressions models, phonological working memory was specifically associated to word reading. Phonemic awareness was the only cognitive variables that systematically predicted all of the school skills investigated, both numerical and word tasks. This suggests that phonemic awareness is a modular cognitive ability shared by several school tasks and might be an important factor associated to the comorbidity between dyslexia and dyscalculia.

Toward Accountable Discrimination-Aware Data Mining: The Importance of Keeping the Human in the Loop-and Under the Looking Glass.

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Berendt, Bettina; Preibusch, Sören

2017-06-01

"Big Data" and data-mined inferences are affecting more and more of our lives, and concerns about their possible discriminatory effects are growing. Methods for discrimination-aware data mining and fairness-aware data mining aim at keeping decision processes supported by information technology free from unjust grounds. However, these formal approaches alone are not sufficient to solve the problem. In the present article, we describe reasons why discrimination with data can and typically does arise through the combined effects of human and machine-based reasoning, and argue that this requires a deeper understanding of the human side of decision-making with data mining. We describe results from a large-scale human-subjects experiment that investigated such decision-making, analyzing the reasoning that participants reported during their task to assess whether a loan request should or would be granted. We derive data protection by design strategies for making decision-making discrimination-aware in an accountable way, grounding these requirements in the accountability principle of the European Union General Data Protection Regulation, and outline how their implementations can integrate algorithmic, behavioral, and user interface factors.

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

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Vander Stappen, Caroline; Reybroeck, Marie Van

2018-01-01

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

Theology of Jesus’ words from the cross

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Bogdan Zbroja

2012-09-01

Full Text Available The article presents a theological message of the last words that Jesus spoke from the height of the cross. Layout content is conveyed in three kinds of Christ’s relations: the words addressed to God the Father; the words addressed to the good people standing by the cross; the so-called declarations that the Master had spoken to anyone but uttered them in general. All these words speak of the Master’s love. They express His full awareness of what is being done and of His decision voluntarily taken. Above all, it is revealed in the Lord’s statements His obedience to the will of God expressed in the inspired words of the Holy Scriptures. Jesus fulfills all the prophecies of the Old Testament by pronounced words and accomplished works that will become content of the New Testament.

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

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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.

Phonological Awareness Intervention for Children with Childhood Apraxia of Speech

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Moriarty, Brigid C.; Gillon, Gail T.

2006-01-01

Aims: To investigate the effectiveness of an integrated phonological awareness intervention to improve the speech production, phonological awareness and printed word decoding skills for three children with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) aged 7;3, 6;3 and 6;10. The three children presented with severely delayed phonological awareness skills…

Improving awareness, accountability, and access through health coaching: qualitative study of patients' perspectives.

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Liddy, Clare; Johnston, Sharon; Irving, Hannah; Nash, Kate; Ward, Natalie

2015-03-01

To assess patients' experiences with and perceptions of health coaching as part of their ongoing care. A qualitative research design using semistructured interviews that were recorded and transcribed verbatim.Setting Ottawa, Ont. Eleven patients (> 18 years of age) enrolled in a health coaching pilot program who were at risk of or diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Patients' perspectives were assessed with semistructured interviews. Interviews were conducted with 11 patients at the end of the pilot program, using a stratified sampling approach to ensure maximum variation. All patients found the overall experience with the health coaching program to be positive. Patients believed the health coaching program was effective in increasing awareness of how diabetes affected their bodies and health, in building accountability for their health-related actions, and in improving access to care and other health resources. Patients perceive one-on-one health coaching as an acceptable intervention in their ongoing care. Patients enrolled in the health coaching pilot program believed that there was an improvement in access to care, health literacy, and accountability,all factors considered to be precursors to behavioural change.

The attention schema theory: a mechanistic account of subjective awareness.

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Graziano, Michael S A; Webb, Taylor W

2015-01-01

We recently proposed the attention schema theory, a novel way to explain the brain basis of subjective awareness in a mechanistic and scientifically testable manner. The theory begins with attention, the process by which signals compete for the brain's limited computing resources. This internal signal competition is partly under a bottom-up influence and partly under top-down control. We propose that the top-down control of attention is improved when the brain has access to a simplified model of attention itself. The brain therefore constructs a schematic model of the process of attention, the 'attention schema,' in much the same way that it constructs a schematic model of the body, the 'body schema.' The content of this internal model leads a brain to conclude that it has a subjective experience. One advantage of this theory is that it explains how awareness and attention can sometimes become dissociated; the brain's internal models are never perfect, and sometimes a model becomes dissociated from the object being modeled. A second advantage of this theory is that it explains how we can be aware of both internal and external events. The brain can apply attention to many types of information including external sensory information and internal information about emotions and cognitive states. If awareness is a model of attention, then this model should pertain to the same domains of information to which attention pertains. A third advantage of this theory is that it provides testable predictions. If awareness is the internal model of attention, used to help control attention, then without awareness, attention should still be possible but should suffer deficits in control. In this article, we review the existing literature on the relationship between attention and awareness, and suggest that at least some of the predictions of the theory are borne out by the evidence.

The attention schema theory: a mechanistic account of subjective awareness

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Taylor W. Webb

2015-04-01

Full Text Available We recently proposed the attention schema theory, a novel way to explain the brain basis of subjective awareness in a mechanistic and scientifically testable manner. The theory begins with attention, the process by which signals compete for the brain’s limited computing resources. This internal signal competition is partly under a bottom-up influence and partly under top-down control. We propose that the top-down control of attention is improved when the brain has access to a simplified model of attention itself. The brain therefore constructs a schematic model of the process of attention, the ‘attention schema’, in much the same way that it constructs a schematic model of the body, the ‘body schema’. The content of this internal model leads a brain to conclude that it has a subjective experience. One advantage of this theory is that it explains how awareness and attention can sometimes become dissociated; the brain’s internal models are never perfect, and sometimes a model becomes dissociated from the object being modeled. A second advantage of this theory is that it explains how we can be aware of both internal and external events. The brain can apply attention to many types of information including external sensory information and internal information about emotions and cognitive states. If awareness is a model of attention, then this model should pertain to the same domains of information to which attention pertains. A third advantage of this theory is that it provides testable predictions. If awareness is the internal model of attention, used to help control attention, then without awareness, attention should still be possible but should suffer deficits in control. In this article, we review the existing literature on the relationship between attention and awareness, and suggest that at least some of the predictions of the theory are borne out by the evidence.

EEG and EMG responses to emotion-evoking stimuli processed without conscious awareness.

Science.gov (United States)

Wexler, B E; Warrenburg, S; Schwartz, G E; Janer, L D

1992-12-01

Dichotic stimulus pairs were constructed with one word that was emotionally neutral and another that evoked either negative or positive feelings. Temporal and spectral overlap between the members of each pair was so great that the two words fused into a single auditory percept. Subjects were consciously aware of hearing only one word from most pairs; sometimes the emotion-evoking word was heard consciously, other times the neutral word was heard consciously. Subjects were instructed to let their thoughts wander in response to the word they heard, during which time EEG alpha activity over left and right frontal regions, and muscle activity (EMG) in the corrugator ("frowning") and zygomatic ("smiling") regions were recorded. Both EEG and EMG provided evidence of emotion-specific responses to stimuli that were processed without conscious awareness. Moreover both suggested relatively greater right hemisphere activity with unconscious rather than conscious processing.

Using Six-Word Memoirs to Increase Cultural Identity Awareness

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Simmons, Nathaniel; Chen, Yea-Wen

2014-01-01

Guided by cultural identity theory (CIT), the authors offer the six-word memoir (6WM) as a storytelling vehicle to engage students in critical, reflexive (re)considerations of their cultural identities and positions. This activity's impetus is threefold. First, it recognizes the practical challenges of teaching and learning the important, yet…

How does interhemispheric communication in visual word recognition work? Deciding between early and late integration accounts of the split fovea theory.

Science.gov (United States)

Van der Haegen, Lise; Brysbaert, Marc; Davis, Colin J

2009-02-01

It has recently been shown that interhemispheric communication is needed for the processing of foveally presented words. In this study, we examine whether the integration of information happens at an early stage, before word recognition proper starts, or whether the integration is part of the recognition process itself. Two lexical decision experiments are reported in which words were presented at different fixation positions. In Experiment 1, a masked form priming task was used with primes that had two adjacent letters transposed. The results showed that although the fixation position had a substantial influence on the transposed letter priming effect, the priming was not smaller when the transposed letters were sent to different hemispheres than when they were projected to the same hemisphere. In Experiment 2, stimuli were presented that either had high frequency hemifield competitors or could be identified unambiguously on the basis of the information in one hemifield. Again, the lexical decision times did not vary as a function of hemifield competitors. These results are consistent with the early integration account, as presented in the SERIOL model of visual word recognition.

Word Length Effects in Long-Term Memory

Science.gov (United States)

Tehan, Gerald; Tolan, Georgina Anne

2007-01-01

The word length effect has been a central feature of theorising about immediate memory. The notion that short-term memory traces rapidly decay unless refreshed by rehearsal is based primarily upon the finding that serial recall for short words is better than that for long words. The decay account of the word length effect has come under pressure…

Is there pain in champagne? Semantic involvement of words within words during sense-making

NARCIS (Netherlands)

van Alphen, P.M.; van Berkum, J.J.A.

2010-01-01

In an ERP experiment, we examined whether listeners, when making sense of spoken utterances, take into account the meaning of spurious words that are embedded in longer words, either at their onsets (e.g., pie in pirate) or at their offsets (e.g., pain in champagne). In the experiment, Dutch

Reading component skills in dyslexia: word recognition, comprehension and processing speed.

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de Oliveira, Darlene G; da Silva, Patrícia B; Dias, Natália M; Seabra, Alessandra G; Macedo, Elizeu C

2014-01-01

The cognitive model of reading comprehension (RC) posits that RC is a result of the interaction between decoding and linguistic comprehension. Recently, the notion of decoding skill was expanded to include word recognition. In addition, some studies suggest that other skills could be integrated into this model, like processing speed, and have consistently indicated that this skill influences and is an important predictor of the main components of the model, such as vocabulary for comprehension and phonological awareness of word recognition. The following study evaluated the components of the RC model and predictive skills in children and adolescents with dyslexia. 40 children and adolescents (8-13 years) were divided in a Dyslexic Group (DG; 18 children, MA = 10.78, SD = 1.66) and control group (CG 22 children, MA = 10.59, SD = 1.86). All were students from the 2nd to 8th grade of elementary school and groups were equivalent in school grade, age, gender, and IQ. Oral and RC, word recognition, processing speed, picture naming, receptive vocabulary, and phonological awareness were assessed. There were no group differences regarding the accuracy in oral and RC, phonological awareness, naming, and vocabulary scores. DG performed worse than the CG in word recognition (general score and orthographic confusion items) and were slower in naming. Results corroborated the literature regarding word recognition and processing speed deficits in dyslexia. However, dyslexics can achieve normal scores on RC test. Data supports the importance of delimitation of different reading strategies embedded in the word recognition component. The role of processing speed in reading problems remain unclear.

Multilevel Cognitive Machine-Learning-Based Concept for Artificial Awareness: Application to Humanoid Robot Awareness Using Visual Saliency

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Kurosh Madani

2012-01-01

Full Text Available As part of “intelligence,” the “awareness” is the state or ability to perceive, feel, or be mindful of events, objects, or sensory patterns: in other words, to be conscious of the surrounding environment and its interactions. Inspired by early-ages human skills developments and especially by early-ages awareness maturation, the present paper accosts the robots intelligence from a different slant directing the attention to combining both “cognitive” and “perceptual” abilities. Within such a slant, the machine (robot shrewdness is constructed on the basis of a multilevel cognitive concept attempting to handle complex artificial behaviors. The intended complex behavior is the autonomous discovering of objects by robot exploring an unknown environment: in other words, proffering the robot autonomy and awareness in and about unknown backdrop.

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

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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.

Morpho-phonemic analysis boosts word reading for adult struggling readers.

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Gray, Susan H; Ehri, Linnea C; Locke, John L

2018-01-01

A randomized control trial compared the effects of two kinds of vocabulary instruction on component reading skills of adult struggling readers. Participants seeking alternative high school diplomas received 8 h of scripted tutoring to learn forty academic vocabulary words embedded within a civics curriculum. They were matched for language background and reading levels, then randomly assigned to either morpho-phonemic analysis teaching word origins, morpheme and syllable structures, or traditional whole word study teaching multiple sentence contexts, meaningful connections, and spellings. Both groups made comparable gains in learning the target words, but the morpho-phonemic group showed greater gains in reading unfamiliar words on standardized tests of word reading, including word attack and word recognition. Findings support theories of word learning and literacy that promote explicit instruction in word analysis to increase poor readers' linguistic awareness by revealing connections between morphological, phonological, and orthographic structures within words.

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

OpenAIRE

Huang, Furong; Anandkumar, Animashree

2016-01-01

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

PARADIGM OF ACCOUNTING CHANGE

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Constanta Iacob

2016-12-01

Full Text Available The words and phrases swop with each other and the apparent stability of a word’s meaning sometimes change in time. This explains why the generic term of accounting is used when referring to the qualities attributed to accounting,but also when it comes to organizing financial accounting function within the entity, and when referring concretely to keeping a double record with its specific means, methods and tools specific, respectively seen as a technical accounting.Speaking about the qualities of accounting, but also about the organizational form it takes, we note that there is a manifold meaning of the word accounting, which is why the purpose of this article is to demonstrate that the paradigm shift aimed at a new set of rules and if the rules changes, then we can change the very purpose of accounting.

Exploring Individual Differences in Irregular Word Recognition among Children with Early-Emerging and Late-Emerging Word Reading Difficulty

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

2017-01-01

Models of irregular word reading that take into account both child- and word-level predictors have not been evaluated in typically developing children and children with reading difficulty (RD). The purpose of the present study was to model individual differences in irregular word reading ability among 5th grade children (N = 170), oversampled for…

Reading component skills in dyslexia: word recognition, comprehension and processing speed

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Darlene Godoy Oliveira

2014-11-01

Full Text Available The cognitive model of reading comprehension posits that reading comprehension is a result of the interaction between decoding and linguistic comprehension. Recently, the notion of decoding skill was expanded to include word recognition. In addition, some studies suggest that other skills could be integrated into this model, like processing speed, and have consistently indicated that this skill influences and is an important predictor of the main components of the model, such as vocabulary for comprehension and phonological awareness of word recognition. The following study evaluated the components of the reading comprehension model and predictive skills in children and adolescents with dyslexia. 40 children and adolescents (8-13 years were divided in a Dyslexic Group (DG, 18 children, MA = 10.78, SD = 1.66 and Control Group (CG 22 children, MA = 10.59, SD = 1.86. All were students from the 2nd to 8th grade of elementary school and groups were equivalent in school grade, age, gender, and IQ. Oral and reading comprehension, word recognition, processing speed, picture naming, receptive vocabulary and phonological awareness were assessed. There were no group differences regarding the accuracy in oral and reading comprehension, phonological awareness, naming, and vocabulary scores. DG performed worse than the CG in word recognition (general score and orthographic confusion items and were slower in naming. Results corroborated the literature regarding word recognition and processing speed deficits in dyslexia. However, dyslexics can achieve normal scores on reading comprehension test. Data supports the importance of delimitation of different reading strategies embedded in the word recognition component. The role of processing speed in reading problems remain unclear.

Cross-lagged relationships between morphological awareness and reading comprehension among Chinese children

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Yahua Cheng

2016-09-01

Full Text Available The present study examined the developmental relationship between morphological awareness and reading comprehension using a two-year and four-wave cross-lagged design with a sample of 149 Chinese children (80 male and 69 female. We measured children’s morphological awareness, word reading, and reading comprehension from T1 to T4, in addition to phonological awareness, vocabulary knowledge, and general cognitive ability at T1 as control measures. Four plausible cross-lagged models were assessed and compared to examine the direction of the developmental relationships between morphological awareness and reading comprehension over time. Results found support for a reciprocal-causation model, that is, morphological awareness stably predicted subsequent reading comprehension, and the reverse relation was also found. Longitudinal mediation analyses revealed that word reading partially mediated the relationship between morphological awareness and reading comprehension in Chinese children. These findings extend our understanding of the relationship between morphological awareness and reading comprehension. The practical implications for these two developing skills in Chinese children are discussed.

Using Awareness Training to Decrease Nervous Habits during Public Speaking

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Spieler, Claire; Miltenberger, Raymond

2017-01-01

This study evaluated the effectiveness of awareness training for the reduction of three nervous habits that manifest during public speaking: filled pauses, tongue clicks, and inappropriate use of the word "like." Four university students delivered short speeches during baseline and assessment sessions. Awareness training resulted in…

Morphological awareness and early and advanced reading and spelling in Dutch

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Rispens, J.E.; McBride-Chang, C.; Reitsma, P.

2008-01-01

This study investigated the relations of three aspects of morphological awareness to word recognition and spelling skills of Dutch speaking children. Tasks of inflectional and derivational morphology and lexical compounding, as well as measures of phonological awareness, vocabulary and mathematics

Awareness Status of Chronic Disabling Neurological Diseases among Elderly Veterans.

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Tan, Ji-Ping; Zhu, Lin-Qi; Zhang, Jun; Zhang, Shi-Min; Lan, Xiao-Yang; Cui, Bo; Deng, Yu-Cheng; Li, Ying-Hao; Ye, Guang-Hua; Wang, Lu-Ning

2015-05-20

The awareness, treatment and prevention of chronic diseases are generally poor among the elderly population of China, whereas the prevention and control of chronic diseases in elderly veteran communities have been ongoing for more than 30 years. Therefore, investigating the awareness status of chronic disabling neurological diseases (CDND) and common chronic diseases (CCD) among elderly veterans may provide references for related programs among the elderly in the general population. A cross-sectional survey was conducted among veterans ≥60 years old in veteran communities in Beijing. The awareness of preventive strategies against dementia, Alzheimer's disease (AD), Parkinson's disease (PD), sleep disorders, cerebrovascular disease (CVD) and CCD such as hypertension, and the approaches used to access this information, including media, word of mouth (verbal communication among the elderly) and health care professionals, were investigated via face-to-face interviews. The awareness rates for CCD and CVD were approximately 100%, but that for AD was the lowest at word-of-mouth peer education.

Modeling and analyses for an extended car-following model accounting for drivers' situation awareness from cyber physical perspective

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Chen, Dong; Sun, Dihua; Zhao, Min; Zhou, Tong; Cheng, Senlin

2018-07-01

In fact, driving process is a typical cyber physical process which couples tightly the cyber factor of traffic information with the physical components of the vehicles. Meanwhile, the drivers have situation awareness in driving process, which is not only ascribed to the current traffic states, but also extrapolates the changing trend. In this paper, an extended car-following model is proposed to account for drivers' situation awareness. The stability criterion of the proposed model is derived via linear stability analysis. The results show that the stable region of proposed model will be enlarged on the phase diagram compared with previous models. By employing the reductive perturbation method, the modified Korteweg de Vries (mKdV) equation is obtained. The kink-antikink soliton of mKdV equation reveals theoretically the evolution of traffic jams. Numerical simulations are conducted to verify the analytical results. Two typical traffic Scenarios are investigated. The simulation results demonstrate that drivers' situation awareness plays a key role in traffic flow oscillations and the congestion transition.

Fascinating Children with Words through Tradebooks.

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Burke, Eileen M.

Through careful selection of trade books, teachers can promote children's awareness of language. This paper cites numerous trade books that may be used to help children develop appreciation of alliteration, onomatopoeia, rhythm, and rhyme, and it recommends a number of alphabet books, animal stories, and books in which word meanings, interesting…

Words can slow down category learning.

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

2011-08-01

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

L2 Learners' Recognition of Unfamiliar Idioms Composed of Familiar Words

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Kim, Choonkyong

2016-01-01

Most second language (L2) learners are aware of the importance of vocabulary, and this awareness usually directs their attention to learning new words. By contrast, learners do not often recognise unfamiliar idioms if all the compositional parts look familiar to them such as "turn the corner" or "carry the day." College-level…

ERP signatures of conscious and unconscious word and letter perception in an inattentional blindness paradigm.

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Schelonka, Kathryn; Graulty, Christian; Canseco-Gonzalez, Enriqueta; Pitts, Michael A

2017-09-01

A three-phase inattentional blindness paradigm was combined with ERPs. While participants performed a distracter task, line segments in the background formed words or consonant-strings. Nearly half of the participants failed to notice these word-forms and were deemed inattentionally blind. All participants noticed the word-forms in phase 2 of the experiment while they performed the same distracter task. In the final phase, participants performed a task on the word-forms. In all phases, including during inattentional blindness, word-forms elicited distinct ERPs during early latencies (∼200-280ms) suggesting unconscious orthographic processing. A subsequent ERP (∼320-380ms) similar to the visual awareness negativity appeared only when subjects were aware of the word-forms, regardless of the task. Finally, word-forms elicited a P3b (∼400-550ms) only when these stimuli were task-relevant. These results are consistent with previous inattentional blindness studies and help distinguish brain activity associated with pre- and post-perceptual processing from correlates of conscious perception. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Phonological awareness of children with developmental dysphasia and children with typical language development

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Čolić Gordana

2015-01-01

Full Text Available Phonological awareness is the ability of phonological processing of words. Children with developmental dysphasia manifest interference in the development of phonological abilities vital for the development of other language skills. The aim of this study is to investigate phonological awareness in children with typical language development and children with developmental dysphasia at preschool age. Phonological awareness is tested in 60 preschool children by a part of the ELLA test (Emerging Literacy & Language Assessment. The results showed a statistically significant difference in the tested elements of phonological awareness among children with typical language development and children with developmental dysphasia. The most significant differences are deletion of phonemes (p≤0.000, replacement of phonemes, as well as segmentation at the level of whole words (p≤0.000.

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

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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.

The problem of polysemy in the first thousand words of the General Service List: A corpus study of secondary chemistry texts

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Clemmons, Karina

Vocabulary in a second language is an indispensable building block of all comprehension (Folse, 2006; Nation, 2006). Teachers in content area classes such as science, math, and social studies frequently teach content specific vocabulary, but are not aware of the obstacles that can occur when students do not know the basic words. Word lists such as the General Service List (GSL) were created to assist students and teachers (West, 1953). The GSL does not adequately take into account the high level of polysemy of many common English words, nor has it been updated by genre to reflect specific content domains encountered by secondary science students in today's high stakes classes such as chemistry. This study examines how many words of the first 1000 words of the GSL occurred in the secondary chemistry textbooks sampled, how often the first 1000 words of the GSL were polysemous, and specifically which multiple meanings occurred. A discussion of results includes word tables that list multiple meanings present, example phrases that illustrate the context surrounding the target words, suggestions for a GSL that is genre specific to secondary chemistry textbooks and that is ranked by meaning as well as type, and implications for both vocabulary materials and classroom instruction for ELLs in secondary chemistry classes. Findings are essential to second language (L2) researchers, materials developers, publishers, and teachers.

Examining the direct and indirect effects of visual-verbal paired associate learning on Chinese word reading.

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Georgiou, George; Liu, Cuina; Xu, Shiyang

2017-08-01

Associative learning, traditionally measured with paired associate learning (PAL) tasks, has been found to predict reading ability in several languages. However, it remains unclear whether it also predicts word reading in Chinese, which is known for its ambiguous print-sound correspondences, and whether its effects are direct or indirect through the effects of other reading-related skills such as phonological awareness and rapid naming. Thus, the purpose of this study was to examine the direct and indirect effects of visual-verbal PAL on word reading in an unselected sample of Chinese children followed from the second to the third kindergarten year. A sample of 141 second-year kindergarten children (71 girls and 70 boys; mean age=58.99months, SD=3.17) were followed for a year and were assessed at both times on measures of visual-verbal PAL, rapid naming, and phonological awareness. In the third kindergarten year, they were also assessed on word reading. The results of path analysis showed that visual-verbal PAL exerted a significant direct effect on word reading that was independent of the effects of phonological awareness and rapid naming. However, it also exerted significant indirect effects through phonological awareness. Taken together, these findings suggest that variations in cross-modal associative learning (as measured by visual-verbal PAL) place constraints on the development of word recognition skills irrespective of the characteristics of the orthography children are learning to read. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Visual word learning in adults with dyslexia

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Rosa Kit Wan Kwok

2014-05-01

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

Learning word meanings: Overnight integration and study modality effects

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Ven, F. van der; Takashima, A.; Segers, P.C.J.; Verhoeven, L.T.W.

2015-01-01

According to the complementary learning systems (CLS) account of word learning, novel words are rapidly acquired (learning system 1), but slowly integrated into the mental lexicon (learning system 2). This two-step learning process has been shown to apply to novel word forms. In this study, we

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 ...

Phonological Processing and Word Reading in Typically Developing and Reading Disabled Children : Severity Matters

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de Groot, Barry; van den Bos, Kornelis; Minnaert, Alexander; van der Meulen, Bieuwe

2015-01-01

This chapter concerns the word reading predictive values and the dynamics of alphanumeric rapid automatized naming (RAN) and phonemic awareness (PA) in the general population of Dutch elementary school–aged children (grades 3 through 6). A composite index of word reading based on standardized tests

Developing Cultural Awareness

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İsmail Fırat Altay

2005-04-01

Full Text Available This paper aims at emphasizing the issue of teaching of culture in foreign languageteaching. In this respect, the reasons of teaching culture in foreign language classes arefocused on initially. So, the justifications of teaching culture are considered and explainedand by the help of a dialogue. Right after this, ways of developing cultural awareness is takeninto account. At this step, types of courses to develop cultural awareness are dealt with.Developing cultural awareness in class is another aspect to handle. Besides, ways ofdeveloping cultural awareness outside the class are worked on. Whether there are dangers ofusing culture in foreign language class is explained in dangers and problems part. In theconclusion, ideas of the writer on the subject as final remarks are clarified.

Universal and Language-Specific Constraints on Phonemic Awareness: Evidence from Russian-Hebrew Bilingual Children

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Saiegh-Haddad, Elinor; Kogan, Nadya; Walters, Joel

2010-01-01

The study tested phonemic awareness in the two languages of Russian (L1)-Hebrew (L2) sequential bilingual children (N = 20) using phoneme deletion tasks where the phoneme to be deleted occurred word initial, word final, as a singleton, or part of a cluster, in long and short words and stressed and unstressed syllables. The experiments were…

INTEGRATION OF GREEN ACCOUNTING INTO ROMANIAN ACCOUNTING SYSTEM

OpenAIRE

Mihaela Ungureanu

2012-01-01

The aim of this paper is to present the concept of green accounting, its emergence at an international level, its entry in the Romanian economic environment and, especially, the way it is understood and applied in Romania. It seeks the awareness of managers and accounting professionals on this issue, especially in the context of growing pressure for environmental protection, from the general public, media and investors. An essential role is held by the accounting profession and its relevant l...

Cognate Awareness in French Immersion Students: Contributions to Grade 2 Reading Comprehension

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Hipfner-Boucher, Kathleen; Pasquarella, Adrian; Chen, Xi; Deacon, S. Hélène

2016-01-01

Cognate awareness is the ability to recognize the cognate relationship between words in two etymologically related languages. The current study examined the development of cognate awareness and its contribution to French (second language) reading comprehension among Canadian French immersion children. Eighty-one students were tested at the end of…

Dissociating speech perception and comprehension at reduced levels of awareness

OpenAIRE

Davis, Matthew H.; Coleman, Martin R.; Absalom, Anthony R.; Rodd, Jennifer M.; Johnsrude, Ingrid S.; Matta, Basil F.; Owen, Adrian M.; Menon, David K.

2007-01-01

We used functional MRI and the anesthetic agent propofol to assess the relationship among neural responses to speech, successful comprehension, and conscious awareness. Volunteers were scanned while listening to sentences containing ambiguous words, matched sentences without ambiguous words, and signal-correlated noise (SCN). During three scanning sessions, participants were nonsedated (awake), lightly sedated (a slowed response to conversation), and deeply sedated (no conversational response...

Evidence for a Limited-Cascading Account of Written Word Naming

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Bonin, Patrick; Roux, Sebastien; Barry, Christopher; Canell, Laura

2012-01-01

We address the issue of how information flows within the written word production system by examining written object-naming latencies. We report 4 experiments in which we manipulate variables assumed to have their primary impact at the level of object recognition (e.g., quality of visual presentation of pictured objects), at the level of semantic…

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

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Chung, Wei-Lun; Jarmulowicz, Linda

2017-08-01

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

Preschool Phonological and Morphological Awareness As Longitudinal Predictors of Early Reading and Spelling Development in Greek.

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Diamanti, Vassiliki; Mouzaki, Angeliki; Ralli, Asimina; Antoniou, Faye; Papaioannou, Sofia; Protopapas, Athanassios

2017-01-01

Different language skills are considered fundamental for successful reading and spelling acquisition. Extensive evidence has highlighted the central role of phonological awareness in early literacy experiences. However, many orthographic systems also require the contribution of morphological awareness. The goal of this study was to examine the morphological and phonological awareness skills of preschool children as longitudinal predictors of reading and spelling ability by the end of first grade, controlling for the effects of receptive and expressive vocabulary skills. At Time 1 preschool children from kindergartens in the Greek regions of Attika, Crete, Macedonia, and Thessaly were assessed on tasks tapping receptive and expressive vocabulary, phonological awareness (syllable and phoneme), and morphological awareness (inflectional and derivational). Tasks were administered through an Android application for mobile devices (tablets) featuring automatic application of ceiling rules. At Time 2 one year later the same children attending first grade were assessed on measures of word and pseudoword reading, text reading fluency, text reading comprehension, and spelling. Complete data from 104 children are available. Hierarchical linear regression and commonality analyses were conducted for each outcome variable. Reading accuracy for both words and pseudowords was predicted not only by phonological awareness, as expected, but also by morphological awareness, suggesting that understanding the functional role of word parts supports the developing phonology-orthography mappings. However, only phonological awareness predicted text reading fluency at this age. Longitudinal prediction of reading comprehension by both receptive vocabulary and morphological awareness was already evident at this age, as expected. Finally, spelling was predicted by preschool phonological awareness, as expected, as well as by morphological awareness, the contribution of which is expected to

Preschool Phonological and Morphological Awareness As Longitudinal Predictors of Early Reading and Spelling Development in Greek

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Vassiliki Diamanti

2017-11-01

Full Text Available Different language skills are considered fundamental for successful reading and spelling acquisition. Extensive evidence has highlighted the central role of phonological awareness in early literacy experiences. However, many orthographic systems also require the contribution of morphological awareness. The goal of this study was to examine the morphological and phonological awareness skills of preschool children as longitudinal predictors of reading and spelling ability by the end of first grade, controlling for the effects of receptive and expressive vocabulary skills. At Time 1 preschool children from kindergartens in the Greek regions of Attika, Crete, Macedonia, and Thessaly were assessed on tasks tapping receptive and expressive vocabulary, phonological awareness (syllable and phoneme, and morphological awareness (inflectional and derivational. Tasks were administered through an Android application for mobile devices (tablets featuring automatic application of ceiling rules. At Time 2 one year later the same children attending first grade were assessed on measures of word and pseudoword reading, text reading fluency, text reading comprehension, and spelling. Complete data from 104 children are available. Hierarchical linear regression and commonality analyses were conducted for each outcome variable. Reading accuracy for both words and pseudowords was predicted not only by phonological awareness, as expected, but also by morphological awareness, suggesting that understanding the functional role of word parts supports the developing phonology–orthography mappings. However, only phonological awareness predicted text reading fluency at this age. Longitudinal prediction of reading comprehension by both receptive vocabulary and morphological awareness was already evident at this age, as expected. Finally, spelling was predicted by preschool phonological awareness, as expected, as well as by morphological awareness, the contribution of which is

Words, Words, Words: English, Vocabulary.

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Lamb, Barbara

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

Does Temporal Integration Occur for Unrecognizable Words in Visual Crowding?

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Zhou, Jifan; Lee, Chia-Lin; Li, Kuei-An; Tien, Yung-Hsuan; Yeh, Su-Ling

2016-01-01

Visual crowding—the inability to see an object when it is surrounded by flankers in the periphery—does not block semantic activation: unrecognizable words due to visual crowding still generated robust semantic priming in subsequent lexical decision tasks. Based on the previous finding, the current study further explored whether unrecognizable crowded words can be temporally integrated into a phrase. By showing one word at a time, we presented Chinese four-word idioms with either a congruent or incongruent ending word in order to examine whether the three preceding crowded words can be temporally integrated to form a semantic context so as to affect the processing of the ending word. Results from both behavioral (Experiment 1) and Event-Related Potential (Experiment 2 and 3) measures showed congruency effect in only the non-crowded condition, which does not support the existence of unconscious multi-word integration. Aside from four-word idioms, we also found that two-word (modifier + adjective combination) integration—the simplest kind of temporal semantic integration—did not occur in visual crowding (Experiment 4). Our findings suggest that integration of temporally separated words might require conscious awareness, at least under the timing conditions tested in the current study. PMID:26890366

(A Research on Professional Stress of Accounting Profession Staff andAccountings lecturers)

OpenAIRE

Yıldırım, Suat

2008-01-01

Nowadays, commonly used word “stress“ became the part of work life. Stress is inevitable in work life. Some jobs are more stressful than other jobs. Thinking that everybody lives in stressful condition, determining of stress level has vital importance. Due to this importance, in this study, stress level has been researched for Accounting Profession Staff and Accounting lecturers. To achieve this purpose, a survey was conducted on 73 Accounting Profession Staff and Accounting lecturers. In thi...

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

ISPC effect is not observed when the word comes too late: A time course analysis

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Nart Bedin Atalay

2014-12-01

Full Text Available The item-specific proportion congruency (ISPC effect is demonstrated by a smaller Stroop effect observed for mostly incongruent items compared to mostly congruent items. Currently, there is a continuing debate on whether conflict driven item-specific control processes or stimulus-response contingency learning account for the ISPC effect. In the present study, we conducted two experiments to investigate the time course of the ISPC effect with a stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA manipulation. Both negative and positive SOAs were used in order to manipulate the contingency learning between the word and the color dimensions. We also combined this SOA manipulation with a set size manipulation (Bugg & Hutchison, 2013 to moderate the contribution of contingency learning and item-specific processes to the observed ISPC effect. We expected that the change in the magnitude of the ISPC effect as a result of SOA would follow different patterns for the 2-item and 4-item set conditions. Results showed that the SOA manipulation influenced the ISPC effect. Specifically, when the word followed the color with a 200 ms delay, the observed ISPC effect was smaller, if at all present, than the ISPC effects in other negative and positive SOA conditions, regardless of set size. In conclusion, our results showed that the ISPC effect was not observed if the word arrived too late. We also conducted additional awareness and RT distribution analyses (delta plots to further investigate the ISPC effect. These analyses showed that a higher percentage of participants were aware of the ISPC manipulation in the 2-item set condition compared to the 4-item set condition. Delta plots revealed that the ISPC effect was smaller for fastest responses and increased as the responses got slower.

Overestimation of Knowledge About Word Meanings: The “Misplaced Meaning” Effect

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Kominsky, Jonathan F.; Keil, Frank C.

2014-01-01

Children and adults may not realize how much they depend on external sources in understanding word meanings. Four experiments investigated the existence and developmental course of a “Misplaced Meaning” (MM) effect, wherein children and adults overestimate their knowledge about the meanings of various words by underestimating how much they rely on outside sources to determine precise reference. Studies 1 & 2 demonstrate that children and adults show a highly consistent MM effect, and that it is stronger in young children. Study 3 demonstrates that adults are explicitly aware of the availability of outside knowledge, and that this awareness may be related to the strength of the MM effect. Study 4 rules out general overconfidence effects by examining a metalinguistic task in which adults are well-calibrated. PMID:24890038

The Relationship between Morphological Awareness and Morphological Decomposition among English Language Learners

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Kraut, Rachel

2015-01-01

Morphological awareness facilitates many reading processes. For this reason, L1 and L2 learners of English are often directly taught to use their knowledge of English morphology as a useful reading strategy for determining parts of speech and meaning of novel words. Over time, use of morphological awareness skills while reading develops into an…

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

Science.gov (United States)

Bonin, Patrick; Méot, Alain; Bugaiska, Aurélia

2018-02-12

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

Explaining Phonology and Reading in Adult Learners: Introducing Prosodic Awareness and Executive Functions to Reading Ability

Science.gov (United States)

Chan, Jessica S.; Wade-Woolley, Lesly

2018-01-01

Background: This study was designed to extend our understanding of phonology and reading to include suprasegmental awareness using measures of prosodic awareness, which are complex tasks that tap into the rhythmic aspects of phonology. By requiring participants to access, reflect on and manipulate word stress, the prosodic awareness measures used…

Recognition without Awareness: Encoding and Retrieval Factors

Science.gov (United States)

Craik, Fergus I. M.; Rose, Nathan S.; Gopie, Nigel

2015-01-01

The article reports 4 experiments that explore the notion of recognition without awareness using words as the material. Previous work by Voss and associates has shown that complex visual patterns were correctly selected as targets in a 2-alternative forced-choice (2-AFC) recognition test although participants reported that they were guessing. The…

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

Science.gov (United States)

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

2010-08-01

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

Effect of phonological and morphological awareness on reading comprehension in Hebrew-speaking adolescents with reading disabilities.

Science.gov (United States)

Schiff, Rachel; Schwartz-Nahshon, Sarit; Nagar, Revital

2011-06-01

This research explored phonological and morphological awareness among Hebrew-speaking adolescents with reading disabilities (RD) and its effect on reading comprehension beyond phonological and word-reading abilities. Participants included 39 seventh graders with RD and two matched control groups of normal readers: 40 seventh graders matched for chronological age (CA) and 38 third graders matched for reading age (RA). We assessed phonological awareness, word reading, morphological awareness, and reading comprehension. Findings indicated that the RD group performed similarly to the RA group on phonological awareness but lower on phonological decoding. On the decontextualized morphological task, RD functioned on par with RA, whereas in a contextualized task RD performed above RA but lower than CA. In reading comprehension, RD performed as well as RA. Finally, results indicated that for normal readers contextual morphological awareness uniquely contributed to reading comprehension beyond phonological and word-reading abilities, whereas no such unique contribution emerged for the RD group. The absence of an effect of morphological awareness in predicting reading comprehension was suggested to be related to a different recognition process employed by RD readers which hinder the ability of these readers to use morphosemantic structures. The lexical quality hypothesis was proposed as further support to the findings, suggesting that a low quality of lexical representation in RD students leads to ineffective reading skills and comprehension. Lexical representation is thus critical for both lexical as well as comprehension abilities.

Slow Mapping: Color Word Learning as a Gradual Inductive Process

Science.gov (United States)

Wagner, Katie; Dobkins, Karen; Barner, David

2013-01-01

Most current accounts of color word acquisition propose that the delay between children's first production of color words and adult-like understanding is due to problems abstracting color as a domain of meaning. Here we present evidence against this hypothesis, and show that, from the time children produce color words in a labeling task they use…

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

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Thiriot, Samuel

2018-02-01

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

Effects of semantic neighborhood density in abstract and concrete words.

Science.gov (United States)

Reilly, Megan; Desai, Rutvik H

2017-12-01

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

Developmental, Component-Based Model of Reading Fluency: An Investigation of Predictors of Word-Reading Fluency, Text-Reading Fluency, and Reading Comprehension.

Science.gov (United States)

Kim, Young-Suk Grace

2015-01-01

The primary goal was to expand our understanding of text reading fluency (efficiency or automaticity)-how its relation to other constructs (e.g., word reading fluency and reading comprehension) changes over time and how it is different from word reading fluency and reading comprehension. We examined (1) developmentally changing relations among word reading fluency, listening comprehension, text reading fluency, and reading comprehension; (2) the relation of reading comprehension to text reading fluency; (3) unique emergent literacy predictors (i.e., phonological awareness, orthographic awareness, morphological awareness, letter name knowledge, vocabulary) of text reading fluency vs. word reading fluency; and (4) unique language and cognitive predictors (e.g., vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, theory of mind) of text reading fluency vs. reading comprehension. These questions were addressed using longitudinal data (two timepoints; Mean age = 5;24 & 6;08) from Korean-speaking children ( N = 143). Results showed that listening comprehension was related to text reading fluency at time 2, but not at time 1. At both times text reading fluency was related to reading comprehension, and reading comprehension was related to text reading fluency over and above word reading fluency and listening comprehension. Orthographic awareness was related to text reading fluency over and above other emergent literacy skills and word reading fluency. Vocabulary and grammatical knowledge were independently related to text reading fluency and reading comprehension whereas theory of mind was related to reading comprehension, but not text reading fluency. These results reveal developmental nature of relations and mechanism of text reading fluency in reading development.

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

Science.gov (United States)

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.

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,…

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

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Sandberg, Chaleece; Kiran, Swathi

2014-01-01

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

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

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Abdullah, Nasarudin; Halim, Lilia; Zakaria, Effandi

2014-01-01

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

The management accounting vocational fallacy

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Bienkie Shuttleworth

2014-05-01

Full Text Available Rapid changes in highly competitive economic environments have created the need for sound financial management in organisations. In order to source sufficient numbers of skilled financial managers, specialised career guidance should be high on the agenda of educational and labour policy makers. While the chartered management accountant (CMA enjoys international status, not many studies have been conducted to measure South African students’ and accounting teachers’ awareness of the CMA designation. This article reports on the results of first-year accounting students’ perceptions of a career in management accounting as well as on the career guidance they received on how to become a CMA. It also reports on accounting teachers’ awareness of the management accounting designation. This study found that first-year accounting students and accounting teachers do not possess sufficient knowledge of the career opportunities in the management accounting field and of the route to follow on how to become a CMA. Recommendations are made for tertiary institutions and professional bodies to alleviate this information gap by distributing brochures and posters to accounting and career guidance teachers and by providing information sessions to them as well as to first-year accounting students on career opportunities in the management accounting field.

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

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Haro, Juan; Ferré, Pilar

2018-06-01

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

ITCA: Inter-Task Conflict-Aware CPU accounting for CMP

OpenAIRE

Luque, Carlos; Moreto Planas, Miquel; Cazorla Almeida, Francisco Javier; Gioiosa, Roberto; Valero Cortés, Mateo

2010-01-01

Chip-MultiProcessors (CMP) introduce complexities when accounting CPU utilization to processes because the progress done by a process during an interval of time highly depends on the activity of the other processes it is coscheduled with. We propose a new hardware CPU accounting mechanism to improve the accuracy when measuring the CPU utilization in CMPs and compare it with previous accounting mechanisms. Our results show that currently known mechanisms lead to a 16% average error when it com...

Dynamics of the Attentional Control of Word Retrieval: Analyses of Response Time Distributions

Science.gov (United States)

Roelofs, Ardi

2008-01-01

Since W. Wundt (1904) and H. J. Watt (1906), researchers have found no agreement on how goals direct word retrieval. A prevailing associative account (E. K. Miller & J. D. Cohen, 2001) holds that goals bias association strength, which determines retrieval latency and whether irrelevant words interfere. A symbolic account (A. Roelofs, 2003) holds…

Effectiveness of an Integrated Phonological Awareness Approach for Children with Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS)

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McNeill, Brigid C.; Gillon, Gail T.; Dodd, Barbara

2009-01-01

This study investigated the effectiveness of an integrated phonological awareness approach for children with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS). Change in speech, phonological awareness, letter knowledge, word decoding, and spelling skills were examined. A controlled multiple single-subject design was employed. Twelve children aged 4-7 years with…

Inattentional blindness for ignored words: comparison of explicit and implicit memory tasks.

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Butler, Beverly C; Klein, Raymond

2009-09-01

Inattentional blindness is described as the failure to perceive a supra-threshold stimulus when attention is directed away from that stimulus. Based on performance on an explicit recognition memory test and concurrent functional imaging data Rees, Russell, Frith, and Driver [Rees, G., Russell, C., Frith, C. D., & Driver, J. (1999). Inattentional blindness versus inattentional amnesia for fixated but ignored words. Science, 286, 2504-2507] reported inattentional blindness for word stimuli that were fixated but ignored. The present study examined both explicit and implicit memory for fixated but ignored words using a selective-attention task in which overlapping picture/word stimuli were presented at fixation. No explicit awareness of the unattended words was apparent on a recognition memory test. Analysis of an implicit memory task, however, indicated that unattended words were perceived at a perceptual level. Thus, the selective-attention task did not result in perfect filtering as suggested by Rees et al. While there was no evidence of conscious perception, subjects were not blind to the implicit perceptual properties of fixated but ignored words.

The missing link? Testing a schema account of unitization.

Science.gov (United States)

Tibon, Roni; Greve, Andrea; Henson, Richard

2018-05-09

Unitization refers to the creation of a new unit from previously distinct items. The concept of unitization has been used to explain how novel pairings between items can be remembered without requiring recollection, by virtue of new, item-like representations that enable familiarity-based retrieval. We tested an alternative account of unitization - a schema account - which suggests that associations between items can be rapidly assimilated into a schema. We used a common operationalization of "unitization" as the difference between two unrelated words being linked by a definition, relative to two words being linked by a sentence, during an initial study phase. During the following relearning phase, a studied word was re-paired with a new word, either related or unrelated to the original associate from study. In a final test phase, memory for the relearned associations was tested. We hypothesized that, if unitized representations act like schemas, then we would observe some generalization to related words, such that memory would be better in the definition than sentence condition for related words, but not for unrelated words. Contrary to the schema hypothesis, evidence favored the null hypothesis of no difference between definition and sentence conditions for related words (Experiment 1), even when each cue was associated with multiple associates, indicating that the associations can be generalized (Experiment 2), or when the schematic information was explicitly re-activated during Relearning (Experiment 3). These results suggest that unitized associations do not generalize to accommodate new information, and therefore provide evidence against the schema account.

Establishing student perceptions of an entrepreneur using word associations

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Jasmine E. Goliath

2014-05-01

Research purpose: To identify the image or perceptions that students have of an entrepreneur. Motivation for study: By establishing the image or perceptions that students have of an entrepreneur, insights could be provided into the factors influencing them to become entrepreneurs or not. Research approach, design and method: A qualitative projective technique, namely continuous word association, was adopted. Convenience sampling was used and 163 students participated. The words generated were coded into categories by searching for themes and words of a similar nature. The total words generated, the frequencies of recurring words, the number of different types of words, first words recalled and the average number of words recalled were established. Main findings: The students participating in the study have a good understanding of the general nature of an entrepreneur and entrepreneurship; an entrepreneur is perceived as someone who is a creative and innovative risk-taker, who owns a business involved in the selling of goods and services. Practical/managerial implications: Future entrepreneurs need to be aware that, in addition to several innate attributes, successful entrepreneurs have learned skills and competencies. It is also important that educators of entrepreneurship create a realistic image of what it is like to be an entrepreneur, and that both positive and negative aspects are highlighted. Contribution/value-add: By identifying the image or perceptions of an entrepreneur held by students, the marketing of entrepreneurship as a desirable career choice can be enhanced.

EEG neural oscillatory dynamics reveal semantic and response conflict at difference levels of conflict awareness.

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Jiang, Jun; Zhang, Qinglin; Van Gaal, Simon

2015-07-14

Although previous work has shown that conflict can be detected in the absence of awareness, it is unknown how different sources of conflict (i.e., semantic, response) are processed in the human brain and whether these processes are differently modulated by conflict awareness. To explore this issue, we extracted oscillatory power dynamics from electroencephalographic (EEG) data recorded while human participants performed a modified version of the Stroop task. Crucially, in this task conflict awareness was manipulated by masking a conflict-inducing color word preceding a color patch target. We isolated semantic from response conflict by introducing four color words/patches, of which two were matched to the same response. We observed that both semantic as well as response conflict were associated with mid-frontal theta-band and parietal alpha-band power modulations, irrespective of the level of conflict awareness (high vs. low), although awareness of conflict increased these conflict-related power dynamics. These results show that both semantic and response conflict can be processed in the human brain and suggest that the neural oscillatory mechanisms in EEG reflect mainly "domain general" conflict processing mechanisms, instead of conflict source specific effects.

EEG neural oscillatory dynamics reveal semantic and response conflict at difference levels of conflict awareness

Science.gov (United States)

Jiang, Jun; Zhang, Qinglin; Van Gaal, Simon

2015-01-01

Although previous work has shown that conflict can be detected in the absence of awareness, it is unknown how different sources of conflict (i.e., semantic, response) are processed in the human brain and whether these processes are differently modulated by conflict awareness. To explore this issue, we extracted oscillatory power dynamics from electroencephalographic (EEG) data recorded while human participants performed a modified version of the Stroop task. Crucially, in this task conflict awareness was manipulated by masking a conflict-inducing color word preceding a color patch target. We isolated semantic from response conflict by introducing four color words/patches, of which two were matched to the same response. We observed that both semantic as well as response conflict were associated with mid-frontal theta-band and parietal alpha-band power modulations, irrespective of the level of conflict awareness (high vs. low), although awareness of conflict increased these conflict-related power dynamics. These results show that both semantic and response conflict can be processed in the human brain and suggest that the neural oscillatory mechanisms in EEG reflect mainly “domain general” conflict processing mechanisms, instead of conflict source specific effects. PMID:26169473

Prevalence of Rhesus Negative Gene and Awareness of its ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

The prevalence of the Rhesus negative gene was 7.5%. Only 5% were aware of the implications of Rhesus status. The prevalence is comparable with previous reports, the use of anti-D immunoglobulin is advised when appropriate. Key Words: Rhesus negative, genotype anti-D immunoglobulin. Jnl of Medical Investigation ...

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...

Differential emotional processing in concrete and abstract words.

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Yao, Bo; Keitel, Anne; Bruce, Gillian; Scott, Graham G; O'Donnell, Patrick J; Sereno, Sara C

2018-02-12

Emotion (positive and negative) words are typically recognized faster than neutral words. Recent research suggests that emotional valence, while often treated as a unitary semantic property, may be differentially represented in concrete and abstract words. Studies that have explicitly examined the interaction of emotion and concreteness, however, have demonstrated inconsistent patterns of results. Moreover, these findings may be limited as certain key lexical variables (e.g., familiarity, age of acquisition) were not taken into account. We investigated the emotion-concreteness interaction in a large-scale, highly controlled lexical decision experiment. A 3 (Emotion: negative, neutral, positive) × 2 (Concreteness: abstract, concrete) design was used, with 45 items per condition and 127 participants. We found a significant interaction between emotion and concreteness. Although positive and negative valenced words were recognized faster than neutral words, this emotion advantage was significantly larger in concrete than in abstract words. We explored potential contributions of participant alexithymia level and item imageability to this interactive pattern. We found that only word imageability significantly modulated the emotion-concreteness interaction. While both concrete and abstract emotion words are advantageously processed relative to comparable neutral words, the mechanisms of this facilitation are paradoxically more dependent on imageability in abstract words. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

The ethical awareness of the leadership of South African business ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

12Key words: business ethics, ethical awareness, business schools, MBA. Background. 1Issues of .... of behaviour to become engendered among business students at a psychological level that determines their ...... of inconsistent corporate social responsibility perceptions', Journal of Marketing, 72: 77–91. Wines, W.A. ...

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

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Joshua Troche

2017-10-01

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

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

Science.gov (United States)

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

2017-01-01

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

The Importance of Phonological Awareness for the Development of Early English Reading Skills among Bilingual Singaporean Kindergartners

Science.gov (United States)

Dixon, L. Quentin

2010-01-01

To examine the relationship between phonological awareness (PA) and English word-level reading among a multilingual sample, a random sample of 297 Singaporean kindergartners, stratified by ethnicity (169 Chinese, 65 Malay, and 63 Indian), were tested on their PA, receptive vocabulary, and word-level reading skills. Singaporean kindergartners are…

Intentional forgetting of emotional words after trauma: a study with victims of sexual assault.

Science.gov (United States)

Blix, Ines; Brennen, Tim

2011-01-01

Following exposure to a trauma, people tend to experience intrusive thoughts and memories about the event. In order to investigate whether intrusive memories in the aftermath of trauma might be accounted for by an impaired ability to intentionally forget disturbing material, the present study used a modified Directed Forgetting task to examine intentional forgetting and intrusive recall of words in sexual assault victims and controls. By including words related to the trauma in addition to neutral, positive, and threat-related stimuli it was possible to test for trauma-specific effects. No difference between the Trauma and the Control group was found for correct recall of to-be-forgotten (F) words or to-be-remembered (R) words. However, when recalling words from R-list, the Trauma group mistakenly recalled significantly more trauma-specific words from F-list. "Intrusive" recall of F-trauma words when asked to recall R-words was related to symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder reported on the Impact of Event Scale and the Post-traumatic Diagnostic Scale. The results are discussed in term of a source-monitoring account.

Phoneme Awareness, Vocabulary and Word Decoding in Monolingual and Bilingual Dutch Children

Science.gov (United States)

Janssen, Marije; Bosman, Anna M. T.; Leseman, Paul P. M.

2013-01-01

The aim of this study was to investigate whether bilingually raised children in the Netherlands, who receive literacy instruction in their second language only, show an advantage on Dutch phoneme-awareness tasks compared with monolingual Dutch-speaking children. Language performance of a group of 47 immigrant first-grade children with various…

Intervention for children with word-finding difficulties: a parallel group randomised control trial.

Science.gov (United States)

Best, Wendy; Hughes, Lucy Mari; Masterson, Jackie; Thomas, Michael; Fedor, Anna; Roncoli, Silvia; Fern-Pollak, Liory; Shepherd, Donna-Lynn; Howard, David; Shobbrook, Kate; Kapikian, Anna

2017-07-31

The study investigated the outcome of a word-web intervention for children diagnosed with word-finding difficulties (WFDs). Twenty children age 6-8 years with WFDs confirmed by a discrepancy between comprehension and production on the Test of Word Finding-2, were randomly assigned to intervention (n = 11) and waiting control (n = 9) groups. The intervention group had six sessions of intervention which used word-webs and targeted children's meta-cognitive awareness and word-retrieval. On the treated experimental set (n = 25 items) the intervention group gained on average four times as many items as the waiting control group (d = 2.30). There were also gains on personally chosen items for the intervention group. There was little change on untreated items for either group. The study is the first randomised control trial to demonstrate an effect of word-finding therapy with children with language difficulties in mainstream school. The improvement in word-finding for treated items was obtained following a clinically realistic intervention in terms of approach, intensity and duration.

On Disability Awareness Training Burcu Keten

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Burcu Keten

2012-03-01

Full Text Available In this paper, impressions on the Disability Awareness Training are presented which was organised by Middle East Technical University (METU Library and Documentation Center within the 48th Library Week celebration program. This training takes two hours and consists of two parts: “Attitudes and Behaviours” and “Models of Disability”. The aim of the training is to help to examine the at­titudes and behaviours about people with disabilities and to guide the attendees in how to communicate and work more effectively with them. After the positive feedbacks, it is decided to write a brief information on training. In this context, the creation and scope of Disability Awareness Training are explained and feedbacks of the participants are given with their own words.

Zone-Aware Service Platform: A New Concept of Context-Aware Networking and Communications for Smart-Home Sustainability

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Jinsung Byun

2018-01-01

Full Text Available Recent advances in networking and communications removed the restrictions of time and space in information services. Context-aware service systems can support the predefined services in accordance with user requests regardless of time and space. However, due to their architectural limitations, the recent systems are not so flexible to provide device-independent services by multiple service providers. Recently, researchers have focused on a new service paradigm characterized by high mobility, service continuity, and green characteristics. In line with these efforts, improved context-aware service platforms have been suggested to make the platform possible to manage the contexts to provide the adaptive services for multi-user and locations. However, this platform can only support limited continuity and mobility. In other words, the existing system cannot support seamless service provision among different service providers with respect to the changes of mobility, situation, device, and network. Furthermore, the existing context-aware service platform is significant reliance on always-on infrastructure, which leads to great amounts of energy consumption inevitably. Therefore, we subsequently propose a new concept of context-aware networking and communications, namely a zone-aware service platform. The proposed platform autonomously reconfigures the infrastructure and maintains a service session interacting with the middleware to support cost- and energy-efficient pervasive services for smart-home sustainability.

The effect of sign language structure on complex word reading in Chinese deaf adolescents.

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Lu, Aitao; Yu, Yanping; Niu, Jiaxin; Zhang, John X

2015-01-01

The present study was carried out to investigate whether sign language structure plays a role in the processing of complex words (i.e., derivational and compound words), in particular, the delay of complex word reading in deaf adolescents. Chinese deaf adolescents were found to respond faster to derivational words than to compound words for one-sign-structure words, but showed comparable performance for two-sign-structure words. For both derivational and compound words, response latencies to one-sign-structure words were shorter than to two-sign-structure words. These results provide strong evidence that the structure of sign language affects written word processing in Chinese. Additionally, differences between derivational and compound words in the one-sign-structure condition indicate that Chinese deaf adolescents acquire print morphological awareness. The results also showed that delayed word reading was found in derivational words with two signs (DW-2), compound words with one sign (CW-1), and compound words with two signs (CW-2), but not in derivational words with one sign (DW-1), with the delay being maximum in DW-2, medium in CW-2, and minimum in CW-1, suggesting that the structure of sign language has an impact on the delayed processing of Chinese written words in deaf adolescents. These results provide insight into the mechanisms about how sign language structure affects written word processing and its delayed processing relative to their hearing peers of the same age.

The effect of sign language structure on complex word reading in Chinese deaf adolescents.

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Aitao Lu

Full Text Available The present study was carried out to investigate whether sign language structure plays a role in the processing of complex words (i.e., derivational and compound words, in particular, the delay of complex word reading in deaf adolescents. Chinese deaf adolescents were found to respond faster to derivational words than to compound words for one-sign-structure words, but showed comparable performance for two-sign-structure words. For both derivational and compound words, response latencies to one-sign-structure words were shorter than to two-sign-structure words. These results provide strong evidence that the structure of sign language affects written word processing in Chinese. Additionally, differences between derivational and compound words in the one-sign-structure condition indicate that Chinese deaf adolescents acquire print morphological awareness. The results also showed that delayed word reading was found in derivational words with two signs (DW-2, compound words with one sign (CW-1, and compound words with two signs (CW-2, but not in derivational words with one sign (DW-1, with the delay being maximum in DW-2, medium in CW-2, and minimum in CW-1, suggesting that the structure of sign language has an impact on the delayed processing of Chinese written words in deaf adolescents. These results provide insight into the mechanisms about how sign language structure affects written word processing and its delayed processing relative to their hearing peers of the same age.

Prediction of Word Recognition in the First Half of Grade 1

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Snel, M. J.; Aarnoutse, C. A. J.; Terwel, J.; van Leeuwe, J. F. J.; van der Veld, W. M.

2016-01-01

Early detection of reading problems is important to prevent an enduring lag in reading skills. We studied the relationship between speed of word recognition (after six months of grade 1 education) and four kindergarten pre-literacy skills: letter knowledge, phonological awareness and naming speed for both digits and letters. Our sample consisted…

Awareness Status of Chronic Disabling Neurological Diseases among Elderly Veterans

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Ji-Ping Tan

2015-01-01

Conclusions: The awareness of CDND among elderly veterans was significantly lower than that of CCD. More information about CDND should be disseminated by health care professionals. Appropriate guidance will promote the rapid and extensive dissemination of information about the prevention of CDND by media and word-of-mouth peer education.

Between-Word Simplification Patterns in the Continuous Speech of Children with Speech Sound Disorders

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Klein, Harriet B.; Liu-Shea, May

2009-01-01

Purpose: This study was designed to identify and describe between-word simplification patterns in the continuous speech of children with speech sound disorders. It was hypothesized that word combinations would reveal phonological changes that were unobserved with single words, possibly accounting for discrepancies between the intelligibility of…

Combinatorics on words Christoffel words and repetitions in words

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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...

Discourse Bootstrapping: Preschoolers Use Linguistic Discourse to Learn New Words

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Sullivan, Jessica; Barner, David

2016-01-01

When children acquire language, they often learn words in the absence of direct instruction (e.g. "This is a ball!") or even social cues to reference (e.g. eye gaze, pointing). However, there are few accounts of how children do this, especially in cases where the referent of a new word is ambiguous. Across two experiments, we test…

Longitudinal Predictors of Chinese Word Reading and Spelling among Elementary Grade Students

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Yeung, Pui-Sze; Ho, Connie Suk-Han; Wong, Yau-Kai; Chung, Kevin Kien-Hoa; Lo, Lap-Yan

2013-01-01

The longitudinal predictive power of four important reading-related skills (phonological skills, rapid naming, orthographic skills, and morphological awareness) to Chinese word reading and writing to dictation (i.e., spelling) was examined in a 3-year longitudinal study among 251 Chinese elementary students. Rapid naming, orthographic skills, and…

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

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

2012-01-01

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

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

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

2015-01-01

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

Imageability and age of acquisition effects in disyllabic word recognition.

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Cortese, Michael J; Schock, Jocelyn

2013-01-01

Imageability and age of acquisition (AoA) effects, as well as key interactions between these variables and frequency and consistency, were examined via multiple regression analyses for 1,936 disyllabic words, using reaction time and accuracy measures from the English Lexicon Project. Both imageability and AoA accounted for unique variance in lexical decision and naming reaction time performance. In addition, across both tasks, AoA and imageability effects were larger for low-frequency words than high-frequency words, and imageability effects were larger for later acquired than earlier acquired words. In reading aloud, consistency effects in reaction time were larger for later acquired words than earlier acquired words, but consistency did not interact with imageability in the reaction time analysis. These results provide further evidence that multisyllabic word recognition is similar to monosyllabic word recognition and indicate that AoA and imageability are valid predictors of word recognition performance. In addition, the results indicate that meaning exerts a larger influence in the reading aloud of multisyllabic words than monosyllabic words. Finally, parallel-distributed-processing approaches provide a useful theoretical framework to explain the main effects and interactions.

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

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Fellbaum, Christiane; Hahn, Udo; Smith, Barry

2006-06-01

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

The Small Business Aspect of Bookkeeping/Accounting

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Schmidt, Gary D.

1976-01-01

Bookkeeping/accounting teachers must familiarize students with the concepts necessary for success in a small business; students should be aware of the various accounting services available to the small businessman and how to use them, and understand basic accounting terminology and systems and financial statements. Implementation suggestions are…

[Working memory, phonological awareness and spelling hypothesis].

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Gindri, Gigiane; Keske-Soares, Márcia; Mota, Helena Bolli

2007-01-01

Working memory, phonological awareness and spelling hypothesis. To verify the relationship between working memory, phonological awareness and spelling hypothesis in pre-school children and first graders. Participants of this study were 90 students, belonging to state schools, who presented typical linguistic development. Forty students were preschoolers, with the average age of six and 50 students were first graders, with the average age of seven. Participants were submitted to an evaluation of the working memory abilities based on the Working Memory Model (Baddeley, 2000), involving phonological loop. Phonological loop was evaluated using the Auditory Sequential Test, subtest 5 of Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities (ITPA), Brazilian version (Bogossian & Santos, 1977), and the Meaningless Words Memory Test (Kessler, 1997). Phonological awareness abilities were investigated using the Phonological Awareness: Instrument of Sequential Assessment (CONFIAS - Moojen et al., 2003), involving syllabic and phonemic awareness tasks. Writing was characterized according to Ferreiro & Teberosky (1999). Preschoolers presented the ability of repeating sequences of 4.80 digits and 4.30 syllables. Regarding phonological awareness, the performance in the syllabic level was of 19.68 and in the phonemic level was of 8.58. Most of the preschoolers demonstrated to have a pre-syllabic writing hypothesis. First graders repeated, in average, sequences of 5.06 digits and 4.56 syllables. These children presented a phonological awareness of 31.12 in the syllabic level and of 16.18 in the phonemic level, and demonstrated to have an alphabetic writing hypothesis. The performance of working memory, phonological awareness and spelling level are inter-related, as well as being related to chronological age, development and scholarity.

Word Domain Disambiguation via Word Sense Disambiguation

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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.

Semantic Neighborhood Effects for Abstract versus Concrete Words.

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Danguecan, Ashley N; Buchanan, Lori

2016-01-01

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

A Three-Year Longitudinal Study of Reading and Spelling Difficulty in Chinese Developmental Dyslexia: The Matter of Morphological Awareness.

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Tong, Xiuhong; McBride, Catherine; Lo, Jason Chor Ming; Shu, Hua

2017-11-01

In the present study, we used a three-time point longitudinal design to investigate the associations of morphological awareness to word reading and spelling in a small group of those with and without dyslexia taken from a larger sample of 164 Hong Kong Chinese children who remained in a longitudinal study across ages 6, 7 and 8. Among those 164 children, 15 had been diagnosed as having dyslexia by professional psychologists, and 15 other children manifested average reading ability and had been randomly selected from the sample for comparison. All children were administered a battery of tasks including Chinese character recognition, word dictation, morphological awareness, phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming. Multivariate analysis of variance and predictive discriminate analysis were performed to examine whether the dyslexic children showed differences in the cognitive-linguistic tasks in comparison with controls. Results suggested that the dyslexic groups had poorer performance in morphological awareness and RAN across all 3 years. However, phonological awareness was not stable in distinguishing the groups. Findings suggest that morphological awareness is a relatively strong correlate of spelling difficulties in Chinese, but phonological awareness is not. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Specific Character of Loan-Words Perception in Youth Ethnic Culture

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Lyubov Georgievna Fomichenko

2015-09-01

Full Text Available This paper presents the results of a sociolinguistic survey of students conducted on the basis of a corpus of interviews gathered at the Institute of Philology and Cross Cultural Communication, Volgograd State University. The experimental study was aimed at the recognition of loan-words belonging to different thematic groups by the undergraduates and graduates. The findings of the research may be referred to the solution of ecolinguistic problems as they are oriented to researching the language speakers' mental processes while assimilating foreign words. The analysis has shown that the students' foreign language competence may not only define the variety of associations referring to the loan-word meanings, but is also able to lead to false interpretations. The contrastive analysis of the findings in the junior and senior groups of students revealed that the quantity of zero reactions to the foreign words awareness was almost equal. However, the undergraduates' reaction to the semantics of imported words was more creative, which testifies to their willingness in exposing their linguistic skills. The involvement of students in some activities (business, IT, fashion, sport, entertainment is probably a significant motivating factor in assimilating foreign words, but the interpretation of loanwords in the sphere of politics and terminology is a problematic issue for the young native speakers of Russian.

Does neighborhood size really cause the word length effect?

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Guitard, Dominic; Saint-Aubin, Jean; Tehan, Gerald; Tolan, Anne

2018-02-01

In short-term serial recall, it is well-known that short words are remembered better than long words. This word length effect has been the cornerstone of the working memory model and a benchmark effect that all models of immediate memory should account for. Currently, there is no consensus as to what determines the word length effect. Jalbert and colleagues (Jalbert, Neath, Bireta, & Surprenant, 2011a; Jalbert, Neath, & Surprenant, 2011b) suggested that neighborhood size is one causal factor. In six experiments we systematically examined their suggestion. In Experiment 1, with an immediate serial recall task, multiple word lengths, and a large pool of words controlled for neighborhood size, the typical word length effect was present. In Experiments 2 and 3, with an order reconstruction task and words with either many or few neighbors, we observed the typical word length effect. In Experiment 4 we tested the hypothesis that the previous abolition of the word length effect when neighborhood size was controlled was due to a confounded factor: frequency of orthographic structure. As predicted, we reversed the word length effect when using short words with less frequent orthographic structures than the long words, as was done in both of Jalbert et al.'s studies. In Experiments 5 and 6, we again observed the typical word length effect, even if we controlled for neighborhood size and frequency of orthographic structure. Overall, the results were not consistent with the predictions of Jalbert et al. and clearly showed a large and reliable word length effect after controlling for neighborhood size.

Evaluating Accounting Software in Secondary Schools.

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Chalupa, Marilyn

1988-01-01

The secondary accounting curriculum must be modified to include computers and software. Educators must be aware of the computer skills needed on the job and of the accounting software that is available. Software selection must be tailored to fit the curriculum and the time available. (JOW)

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

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

2017-06-01

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

Is Morphological Awareness a Relevant Predictor of Reading Fluency and Comprehension? New Evidence From Italian Monolingual and Arabic-Italian Bilingual Children

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Mirta Vernice

2018-03-01

Full Text Available In this study, we examined the contribution of morphological awareness to reading competence in a group of Italian L1 and Arabic-Italian early L2 children, i.e., exposed to Italian before 3 years of age. Children from first to fifth grade (age range: 6–11 years old were tested on a range of morphological awareness and lexical tasks. Reading ability was tested through standardized tests of reading fluency and comprehension. Results showed that L1 children outperformed L2 on every measure of morphological awareness, as well as on reading tests. Regression analyses revealed that morphological awareness contributed to a different extent to reading ability across groups. Accuracy in the morphological awareness tasks was a significant predictor of word (and non-word reading fluency in L1 and L2 first and second graders, while only in L1 third to fifth graders, response times and accuracy to a morphological awareness task explained a unique amount of variance in reading comprehension. Our results highlight the critical role of morphological processing in reading efficiency and suggest that a training inspired by morphological awareness may improve reading skills also in bilingual students.

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

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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.

Accounting Research as a didactic tool for a accounting teaching

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Valeria Gisela Perez

2016-06-01

Full Text Available This paper develops a reflection about the importance of the research of accounting subjects in the professional accountants training, this importance is an attribute of research to increase the wealth of discipline under investigation, this can be converted into a skill and/or competence wich accountants are required to demonstrate in their professional practice.Furthermore, accounting is recognized by the authors as a science in constant development, being able to be investigated. This change in knowledge is an element that motivates professionals to be constantly updated, becoming this aspect (constant updating the skill and competence that research can bring to professional training in university classrooms.The reflection is based on the study of documents developed by prestigious authors in accounting theory, teaching and research.Therefore, this paper concludes that research is a useful tool for the professional accounting training, and rewards the important skills and competencies for professional practice; it can be conceived as well as a strategy for technical and educational activities that allows students to recreate knowledge, allowing future updates that will require their professional practice.Key words: Accounting research, university teaching, accounting education. 

Teaching Accounting Courses Online: One Instructor's Experience

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Dusing, Gregory M.; Hosler, Jonathan C.; Ragan, Joseph M.

2012-01-01

Accounting programs at colleges and universities across the country are offering more online courses, and in some cases entire degree programs. Given increasing enrollments in online accounting education, it is important that accounting educators become aware of the things that work and the things that don't work when delivering courses over the…

Survivable Impairment-Aware Traffic Grooming

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Beshir, A.; Nuijts, R.; Malhotra, R.; Kuipers, F.

2011-01-01

Traffic grooming allows efficient utilization of network capacity by aggregating several independent traffic streams into a wavelength. In addition, survivability and impairment-awareness (i.e., taking into account the effect of physical impairments) are two important issues that have gained a lot

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.

Acoustic Masking Disrupts Time-Dependent Mechanisms of Memory Encoding in Word-List Recall

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Cousins, Katheryn A.Q.; Dar, Jonathan; Wingfield, Arthur; Miller, Paul

2013-01-01

Recall of recently heard words is affected by the clarity of presentation: even if all words are presented with sufficient clarity for successful recognition, those that are more difficult to hear are less likely to be recalled. Such a result demonstrates that memory processing depends on more than whether a word is simply “recognized” versus “not-recognized”. More surprising is that when a single item in a list of spoken words is acoustically masked, prior words that were heard with full clarity are also less likely to be recalled. To account for such a phenomenon, we developed the Linking by Active Maintenance Model (LAMM). This computational model of perception and encoding predicts that these effects are time dependent. Here we challenge our model by investigating whether and how the impact of acoustic masking on memory depends on presentation rate. We find that a slower presentation rate causes a more disruptive impact of stimulus degradation on prior, clearly heard words than does a fast rate. These results are unexpected according to prior theories of effortful listening, but we demonstrate that they can be accounted for by LAMM. PMID:24838269

Semantic and phonological schema influence spoken word learning and overnight consolidation.

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Havas, Viktória; Taylor, Jsh; Vaquero, Lucía; de Diego-Balaguer, Ruth; Rodríguez-Fornells, Antoni; Davis, Matthew H

2018-06-01

We studied the initial acquisition and overnight consolidation of new spoken words that resemble words in the native language (L1) or in an unfamiliar, non-native language (L2). Spanish-speaking participants learned the spoken forms of novel words in their native language (Spanish) or in a different language (Hungarian), which were paired with pictures of familiar or unfamiliar objects, or no picture. We thereby assessed, in a factorial way, the impact of existing knowledge (schema) on word learning by manipulating both semantic (familiar vs unfamiliar objects) and phonological (L1- vs L2-like novel words) familiarity. Participants were trained and tested with a 12-hr intervening period that included overnight sleep or daytime awake. Our results showed (1) benefits of sleep to recognition memory that were greater for words with L2-like phonology and (2) that learned associations with familiar but not unfamiliar pictures enhanced recognition memory for novel words. Implications for complementary systems accounts of word learning are discussed.

Evidence for simultaneous syntactic processing of multiple words during reading.

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Joshua Snell

Full Text Available A hotly debated issue in reading research concerns the extent to which readers process parafoveal words, and how parafoveal information might influence foveal word recognition. We investigated syntactic word processing both in sentence reading and in reading isolated foveal words when these were flanked by parafoveal words. In Experiment 1 we found a syntactic parafoveal preview benefit in sentence reading, meaning that fixation durations on target words were decreased when there was a syntactically congruent preview word at the target location (n during the fixation on the pre-target (n-1. In Experiment 2 we used a flanker paradigm in which participants had to classify foveal target words as either noun or verb, when those targets were flanked by syntactically congruent or incongruent words (stimulus on-time 170 ms. Lower response times and error rates in the congruent condition suggested that higher-order (syntactic information can be integrated across foveal and parafoveal words. Although higher-order parafoveal-on-foveal effects have been elusive in sentence reading, results from our flanker paradigm show that the reading system can extract higher-order information from multiple words in a single glance. We propose a model of reading to account for the present findings.

Embracing the Future: What Can Accounting Graduates Expect?

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Corkern, Sheree M.; Parks, Sandra B.; Morgan, Mark I.

2013-01-01

This article informs accounting educators and graduates about key issues in the accounting profession of today, which has entered a new age, and accounting educators and advisors, old and new, must be informed about future prospects for students and make students aware of what they can expect as accounting graduates. Passing this knowledge to…

How Can One Learn Mathematical Word Problems in a Second Language? A Cognitive Load Perspective

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Moussa-Inaty, Jase; Causapin, Mark; Groombridge, Timothy

2015-01-01

Language may ordinarily account for difficulties in solving word problems and this is particularly true if mathematical word problems are taught in a language other than one's native language. Research into cognitive load may offer a clear theoretical framework when investigating word problems because memory, specifically working memory, plays a…

Phoneme Awareness, Visual-Verbal Paired-Associate Learning, and Rapid Automatized Naming as Predictors of Individual Differences in Reading Ability

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Warmington, Meesha; Hulme, Charles

2012-01-01

This study examines the concurrent relationships between phoneme awareness, visual-verbal paired-associate learning, rapid automatized naming (RAN), and reading skills in 7- to 11-year-old children. Path analyses showed that visual-verbal paired-associate learning and RAN, but not phoneme awareness, were unique predictors of word recognition,…

Survey of women's awareness about radiation

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Onishi, Keiko; Aomi, Yuki; Asada, Kiyoe; Kamiya, Masami; Mitsuishi, Haruko

2008-01-01

A project in a voluntary group 'Women's Energy Network' conducted two questionnaire surveys on Japanese women's awareness about radiation. The survey was conducted to investigate how women(non-experts) perceive radiation and radioactivity, what is their image about radiation, to what extent they are aware of the use of radiation in their daily life, and whether they find nuclear related information useful or not. The results of those surveys have led WEN to publish a booklet entitled 'Our Life and Radiation' to be used for public communication and to hold public forums in various cities in Japan. The first survey was conducted in 2001 to those living in big cities such as Tokyo and Osaka and to those living in the area where the nuclear power plant is installed. The response rate was 72.4% (1,028 out of 1,419). The second one was done in 2005 to those living in Tokyo and other big cities. The response rate was 84.7% (888 our of 983). It was derived from the two surveys that they were not so much aware of various applications of radiation for daily use (awareness rate was low), but they considered those information would be useful when it becomes available for them and they were interested in knowing about it. As for the image of radiation, about 80% have shown fear when they see or hear a word 'radiation'. This report provides the result of questionnaire surveys on women's awareness about radiation conducted by 'Our Daily Life and Radiation' project in Women's Energy Network. (author)

Invented Spelling, Word Stress, and Phonological Awareness in Relation to Reading Difficulties in Children

Science.gov (United States)

Mehta, Sheena

2016-01-01

The purpose of the current research is to assess the clinical utility of an invented spelling tool and determine whether invented spelling and word stress (supra-segmental level measures) can also be used to better identify reading difficulties. The proposed invented spelling tool incorporated linguistic manipulations to alter the difficulty…

Dynamics of the attentional control of word retrieval: Analyses of response time distributions

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Roelofs, A.P.A.

2008-01-01

Since W. Wundt (1904) and H. J. Watt (1906), researchers have found no agreement on how goals direct word retrieval. A prevailing associative account (E. K. Miller & J. D. Cohen, 2001) holds that goals bias association strength, which determines retrieval latency and whether irrelevant words

Contributions of syntactic awareness to reading in Chinese-speaking adolescent readers with and without dyslexia.

Science.gov (United States)

Chung, Kevin K H; Ho, Connie S-H; Chan, David W; Tsang, Suk-Man; Lee, Suk-Han

2013-02-01

This study investigated the relative contribution of syntactic awareness to Chinese reading among Chinese-speaking adolescent readers with and without dyslexia. A total of 78 junior high school students in Hong Kong, 26 dyslexic adolescent readers, 26 average adolescent readers of the same age (chronological age control group) and 26 younger readers matched with the same reading level (reading-level group) participated and were administered measures of IQ, syntactic awareness, morphological awareness, vocabulary knowledge, working memory, word reading, and reading comprehension. Results showed that dyslexic readers scored significantly lower than chronological age but similarly to reading level control groups in most measures, especially in the areas of syntactic skills. Analyses of individual data also revealed that over half of the dyslexic readers exhibited certain aspects of deficits in syntactic skills. In regression analyses, syntactic skills were the strongest predictors of ability in word reading and reading comprehension measures. This study highlights the uniquely important correlates of syntactic skills in Chinese reading acquisition and impairment. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The Influence of Spanish Vocabulary and Phonemic Awareness on Beginning English Reading Development: A Three-Year (K-2nd) Longitudinal Study

Science.gov (United States)

Kelley, Michael F.; Roe, Mary; Blanchard, Jay; Atwill, Kim

2015-01-01

This investigation examined the influence of varying levels of Spanish receptive vocabulary and phonemic awareness ability on beginning English vocabulary, phonemic awareness, word reading fluency, and reading comprehension development across kindergarten through second grade. The 80 respondents were Spanish speaking children with no English…

Does length or neighborhood size cause the word length effect?

Science.gov (United States)

Jalbert, Annie; Neath, Ian; Surprenant, Aimée M

2011-10-01

Jalbert, Neath, Bireta, and Surprenant (2011) suggested that past demonstrations of the word length effect, the finding that words with fewer syllables are recalled better than words with more syllables, included a confound: The short words had more orthographic neighbors than the long words. The experiments reported here test two predictions that would follow if neighborhood size is a more important factor than word length. In Experiment 1, we found that concurrent articulation removed the effect of neighborhood size, just as it removes the effect of word length. Experiment 2 demonstrated that this pattern is also found with nonwords. For Experiment 3, we factorially manipulated length and neighborhood size, and found only effects of the latter. These results are problematic for any theory of memory that includes decay offset by rehearsal, but they are consistent with accounts that include a redintegrative stage that is susceptible to disruption by noise. The results also confirm the importance of lexical and linguistic factors on memory tasks thought to tap short-term memory.

Behavioral and electrophysiological signatures of word translation processes.

Science.gov (United States)

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

2018-01-31

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

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

Science.gov (United States)

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

2016-01-01

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

The automatic visual simulation of words: A memory reactivated mask slows down conceptual access.

Science.gov (United States)

Rey, Amandine E; Riou, Benoit; Vallet, Guillaume T; Versace, Rémy

2017-03-01

How do we represent the meaning of words? The present study assesses whether access to conceptual knowledge requires the reenactment of the sensory components of a concept. The reenactment-that is, simulation-was tested in a word categorisation task using an innovative masking paradigm. We hypothesised that a meaningless reactivated visual mask should interfere with the simulation of the visual dimension of concrete words. This assumption was tested in a paradigm in which participants were not aware of the link between the visual mask and the words to be processed. In the first phase, participants created a tone-visual mask or tone-control stimulus association. In the test phase, they categorised words that were presented with 1 of the tones. Results showed that words were processed more slowly when they were presented with the reactivated mask. This interference effect was only correlated with and explained by the value of the visual perceptual strength of the words (i.e., our experience with the visual dimensions associated with concepts) and not with other characteristics. We interpret these findings in terms of word access, which may involve the simulation of sensory features associated with the concept, even if participants were not explicitly required to access visual properties. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).

Working memory and flexibility in awareness and attention.

Science.gov (United States)

Bunting, Michael F; Cowan, Nelson

2005-06-01

We argue that attention and awareness form the basis of one type of working-memory storage. In contrast to models of working memory in which storage and retrieval occur effortlessly, we document that an attention-demanding goal conflict within a retrieval cue impairs recall from working memory. In a conceptual span task, semantic and color-name cues prompted recall of four consecutive words from a twelve-word list. The first-four, middle-four, and final-four words belonged to different semantic categories (e.g., body parts, animals, and tools) and were shown in different colors (e.g., red, blue, and green). In Experiment 1, the color of the cue matched that of cued items 75% of the time, and the rare mismatch impaired recall. In Experiment 2, though, the color of the cue matched that of the cued items only 25% of the time, and the now-more-frequent mismatches no longer mattered. These results are difficult to explain with passive storage alone and indicate that a processing difficulty impedes recall from working memory, presumably by distracting attention away from its storage function.

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

Science.gov (United States)

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.

Lease Accounting in Australia: Further Empirical Evidence

OpenAIRE

Hassan, Salleh; Christopher, Theo

1998-01-01

Key words: Australia; Accounting standard; Efficient contracting; Lease accounting; Signalling The objective of this study is to examine the economic factors motivating Australian listed lessee firms to adopt capitalization of finance leases policy from 1985 to 1987 as permitted by the transitional provision of AAS 17. Capitalization is considered as the preferred accounting policy for finance leases compared to footnote disclosure. Adopting a joint efficient contracting and quality signaling pers...

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

Science.gov (United States)

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.

Orthographic Transparency Enhances Morphological Segmentation in Children Reading Hebrew Words

Science.gov (United States)

Haddad, Laurice; Weiss, Yael; Katzir, Tami; Bitan, Tali

2018-01-01

Morphological processing of derived words develops simultaneously with reading acquisition. However, the reader’s engagement in morphological segmentation may depend on the language morphological richness and orthographic transparency, and the readers’ reading skills. The current study tested the common idea that morphological segmentation is enhanced in non-transparent orthographies to compensate for the absence of phonological information. Hebrew’s rich morphology and the dual version of the Hebrew script (with and without diacritic marks) provides an opportunity to study the interaction of orthographic transparency and morphological segmentation on the development of reading skills in a within-language design. Hebrew speaking 2nd (N = 27) and 5th (N = 29) grade children read aloud 96 noun words. Half of the words were simple mono-morphemic words and half were bi-morphemic derivations composed of a productive root and a morphemic pattern. In each list half of the words were presented in the transparent version of the script (with diacritic marks), and half in the non-transparent version (without diacritic marks). Our results show that in both groups, derived bi-morphemic words were identified more accurately than mono-morphemic words, but only for the transparent, pointed, script. For the un-pointed script the reverse was found, namely, that bi-morphemic words were read less accurately than mono-morphemic words, especially in second grade. Second grade children also read mono-morphemic words faster than bi-morphemic words. Finally, correlations with a standardized measure of morphological awareness were found only for second grade children, and only in bi-morphemic words. These results, showing greater morphological effects in second grade compared to fifth grade children suggest that for children raised in a language with a rich morphology, common and easily segmented morphemic units may be more beneficial for younger compared to older readers. Moreover

Orthographic Transparency Enhances Morphological Segmentation in Children Reading Hebrew Words

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Laurice Haddad

2018-01-01

Full Text Available Morphological processing of derived words develops simultaneously with reading acquisition. However, the reader’s engagement in morphological segmentation may depend on the language morphological richness and orthographic transparency, and the readers’ reading skills. The current study tested the common idea that morphological segmentation is enhanced in non-transparent orthographies to compensate for the absence of phonological information. Hebrew’s rich morphology and the dual version of the Hebrew script (with and without diacritic marks provides an opportunity to study the interaction of orthographic transparency and morphological segmentation on the development of reading skills in a within-language design. Hebrew speaking 2nd (N = 27 and 5th (N = 29 grade children read aloud 96 noun words. Half of the words were simple mono-morphemic words and half were bi-morphemic derivations composed of a productive root and a morphemic pattern. In each list half of the words were presented in the transparent version of the script (with diacritic marks, and half in the non-transparent version (without diacritic marks. Our results show that in both groups, derived bi-morphemic words were identified more accurately than mono-morphemic words, but only for the transparent, pointed, script. For the un-pointed script the reverse was found, namely, that bi-morphemic words were read less accurately than mono-morphemic words, especially in second grade. Second grade children also read mono-morphemic words faster than bi-morphemic words. Finally, correlations with a standardized measure of morphological awareness were found only for second grade children, and only in bi-morphemic words. These results, showing greater morphological effects in second grade compared to fifth grade children suggest that for children raised in a language with a rich morphology, common and easily segmented morphemic units may be more beneficial for younger compared to older

Do handwritten words magnify lexical effects in visual word recognition?

Science.gov (United States)

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

2016-01-01

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

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

Science.gov (United States)

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

2012-03-01

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

Infant word recognition: Insights from TRACE simulations.

Science.gov (United States)

Mayor, Julien; Plunkett, Kim

2014-02-01

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

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

Science.gov (United States)

Franco, Ana; Destrebecqz, Arnaud

2012-01-01

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

INTEGRATION OF GREEN ACCOUNTING INTO ROMANIAN ACCOUNTING SYSTEM

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Mihaela Ungureanu

2012-03-01

Full Text Available The aim of this paper is to present the concept of green accounting, its emergence at an international level, its entry in the Romanian economic environment and, especially, the way it is understood and applied in Romania. It seeks the awareness of managers and accounting professionals on this issue, especially in the context of growing pressure for environmental protection, from the general public, media and investors. An essential role is held by the accounting profession and its relevant legislation, through the elaboration of standards and guidelines in order to support the efforts of changing the mentality of business environment. The companies are also concerned for the future and not only for the present and they understand that environmental investments are not unnecessary expenses that burden the activities, but long-term profits prerequisites.Understanding the concept is difficult without an agreement on its definition. Specialized literature presents different definitions, each author with his own interpretation and vision. This is why professional accountants' reluctance to adopt new ideas and practices of green accounting, this being an unknown territory to them and difficult to entered.

Brain basis of phonological awareness for spoken language in children and its disruption in dyslexia.

Science.gov (United States)

Kovelman, Ioulia; Norton, Elizabeth S; Christodoulou, Joanna A; Gaab, Nadine; Lieberman, Daniel A; Triantafyllou, Christina; Wolf, Maryanne; Whitfield-Gabrieli, Susan; Gabrieli, John D E

2012-04-01

Phonological awareness, knowledge that speech is composed of syllables and phonemes, is critical for learning to read. Phonological awareness precedes and predicts successful transition from language to literacy, and weakness in phonological awareness is a leading cause of dyslexia, but the brain basis of phonological awareness for spoken language in children is unknown. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify the neural correlates of phonological awareness using an auditory word-rhyming task in children who were typical readers or who had dyslexia (ages 7-13) and a younger group of kindergarteners (ages 5-6). Typically developing children, but not children with dyslexia, recruited left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) when making explicit phonological judgments. Kindergarteners, who were matched to the older children with dyslexia on standardized tests of phonological awareness, also recruited left DLPFC. Left DLPFC may play a critical role in the development of phonological awareness for spoken language critical for reading and in the etiology of dyslexia.

Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry across Eurasia.

Science.gov (United States)

Pagel, Mark; Atkinson, Quentin D; S Calude, Andreea; Meade, Andrew

2013-05-21

The search for ever deeper relationships among the World's languages is bedeviled by the fact that most words evolve too rapidly to preserve evidence of their ancestry beyond 5,000 to 9,000 y. On the other hand, quantitative modeling indicates that some "ultraconserved" words exist that might be used to find evidence for deep linguistic relationships beyond that time barrier. Here we use a statistical model, which takes into account the frequency with which words are used in common everyday speech, to predict the existence of a set of such highly conserved words among seven language families of Eurasia postulated to form a linguistic superfamily that evolved from a common ancestor around 15,000 y ago. We derive a dated phylogenetic tree of this proposed superfamily with a time-depth of ~14,450 y, implying that some frequently used words have been retained in related forms since the end of the last ice age. Words used more than once per 1,000 in everyday speech were 7- to 10-times more likely to show deep ancestry on this tree. Our results suggest a remarkable fidelity in the transmission of some words and give theoretical justification to the search for features of language that might be preserved across wide spans of time and geography.

Semantically Induced Distortions of Visual Awareness in a Patient with Balint's Syndrome

Science.gov (United States)

Soto, David; Humphreys, Glyn W.

2009-01-01

We present data indicating that visual awareness for a basic perceptual feature (colour) can be influenced by the relation between the feature and the semantic properties of the stimulus. We examined semantic interference from the meaning of a colour word ("RED") on simple colour (ink related) detection responses in a patient with simultagnosia…

The management accounting vocational fallacy

OpenAIRE

Shuttleworth, Christina Cornelia

2014-01-01

Rapid changes in highly competitive economic environments have created the need for sound financial management in organisations. In order to source sufficient numbers of skilled financial managers, specialised career guidance should be high on the agenda of educational and labour policy makers. While the chartered management accountant (CMA) enjoys international status, not many studies have been conducted to measure South African students’ and accounting teachers’ awareness of the CMA design...

36 CFR 1600.27 - Requests for an accounting of record disclosures.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... Requests for an accounting of record disclosures. (a) How made and addressed. Except where accountings of... for an accounting of any disclosure that has been made by the Foundation to another person... disclosures for which accountings are not required to be kept—in other words, disclosures that are made to...

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.

Understanding Electronic Word of Behavior

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Kunst, Katrine; Vatrapu, Ravi

2018-01-01

The widespread digitization of consumers’ daily lives entails a plethora of digital traces of consumers’ behaviors. These traces can be turned into meaningful communicative and observable content by the services that possess the trace data. While extant research has empirically showed this to have...... a significant impact on consumer choices we argue that the phenomenon is undertheorized. In this theoretical paper, we conceptualize this kind of observable behavior-based information as ‘Electronic Word of Behavior’ (eWOB) and define it as “published accounts of behavior, based on the unobservable digital...... traces of consumers’ behaviors”. We characterize eWOB as an instantiation of Digital Trace Data and situate it within the established concepts of Social Interactions and Electronic Word of Mouth (eWOM). By drawing on extant empirical research and constructs from Digital Trace Data, Social Interactions...

Position-aware deep multi-task learning for drug-drug interaction extraction.

Science.gov (United States)

Zhou, Deyu; Miao, Lei; He, Yulan

2018-05-01

A drug-drug interaction (DDI) is a situation in which a drug affects the activity of another drug synergistically or antagonistically when being administered together. The information of DDIs is crucial for healthcare professionals to prevent adverse drug events. Although some known DDIs can be found in purposely-built databases such as DrugBank, most information is still buried in scientific publications. Therefore, automatically extracting DDIs from biomedical texts is sorely needed. In this paper, we propose a novel position-aware deep multi-task learning approach for extracting DDIs from biomedical texts. In particular, sentences are represented as a sequence of word embeddings and position embeddings. An attention-based bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) network is used to encode each sentence. The relative position information of words with the target drugs in text is combined with the hidden states of BiLSTM to generate the position-aware attention weights. Moreover, the tasks of predicting whether or not two drugs interact with each other and further distinguishing the types of interactions are learned jointly in multi-task learning framework. The proposed approach has been evaluated on the DDIExtraction challenge 2013 corpus and the results show that with the position-aware attention only, our proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art method by 0.99% for binary DDI classification, and with both position-aware attention and multi-task learning, our approach achieves a micro F-score of 72.99% on interaction type identification, outperforming the state-of-the-art approach by 1.51%, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

WORD LEVEL DISCRIMINATIVE TRAINING FOR HANDWRITTEN WORD RECOGNITION

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Chen, W.; Gader, P.

2004-01-01

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

An Evaluation of Project iRead: A Program Created to Improve Sight Word Recognition

Science.gov (United States)

Marshall, Theresa Meade

2014-01-01

This program evaluation was undertaken to examine the relationship between participation in Project iRead and student gains in word recognition, fluency, and comprehension as measured by the Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening (PALS) Test. Linear regressions compared the 2012-13 PALS results from 5,140 first and second grade students at…

The utilization of activity-based cost accounting in hospitals.

Science.gov (United States)

Emmett, Dennis; Forget, Robert

2005-01-01

Healthcare costs are being examined on all fronts. Healthcare accounts for 11% of the gross national product and will continue to rise as the "babyboomers" reach retirement age. While ascertaining costs is important, most research shows that costing methods have not been implemented in hospitals. This study is concerned with the use of costing methods; particularly activity-based cost accounting. A mail survey of CFOs was undertaken to determine the type of cost accounting method they use. In addition, they were asked whether they were aware of activity-based cost accounting and whether they had implemented it or were planning to implement it. Only 71.8% were aware of it and only 4.7% had implemented it. In addition, only 52% of all hospitals report using any cost accounting systems. Education needs to ensure that all healthcare executives are cognizant of activity-based accounting and its importance in determining costs. Only by determining costs can hospitals strive to contain them.

How Many Words Do We Know? Practical Estimates of Vocabulary Size Dependent on Word Definition, the Degree of Language Input and the Participant’s Age

Science.gov (United States)

Brysbaert, Marc; Stevens, Michaël; Mandera, Paweł; Keuleers, Emmanuel

2016-01-01

Based on an analysis of the literature and a large scale crowdsourcing experiment, we estimate that an average 20-year-old native speaker of American English knows 42,000 lemmas and 4,200 non-transparent multiword expressions, derived from 11,100 word families. The numbers range from 27,000 lemmas for the lowest 5% to 52,000 for the highest 5%. Between the ages of 20 and 60, the average person learns 6,000 extra lemmas or about one new lemma every 2 days. The knowledge of the words can be as shallow as knowing that the word exists. In addition, people learn tens of thousands of inflected forms and proper nouns (names), which account for the substantially high numbers of ‘words known’ mentioned in other publications. PMID:27524974

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...

Relative speed of processing determines color-word contingency learning.

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Forrin, Noah D; MacLeod, Colin M

2017-10-01

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

Attention demands of spoken word planning: A review

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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.

The Activation of Embedded Words in Spoken Word Recognition

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Zhang, Xujin; Samuel, Arthur G.

2015-01-01

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

Repetition and masked form priming within and between languages using word and nonword neighbors

OpenAIRE

Dijkstra, A.F.J.; Hilberink-Schulpen, B.J.H.; Heuven, W.J.B. van

2010-01-01

If access to the bilingual lexicon takes place in a language independent way, monolingual repetition and masked form, priming accounts should be directly applicable to bilinguals. We tested such an account (Grainger and Jacobs, 1999) and extended it to explain bilingual ejects from L2 to L1. Dutch English bilinguals made a lexical decision on a Dutch target word preceded by a briefly presented word or nonword prime from Dutch (L1; Exp. I) or English (L2; Exp. 2). The prime was an orthographic...

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

P2-13: Location word Cues' Effect on Location Discrimination Task: Cross-Modal Study

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Satoko Ohtsuka

2012-10-01

Full Text Available As is well known, participants are slower and make more errors in responding to the display color of an incongruent color word than a congruent one. This traditional stroop effect is often accounted for with relatively automatic and dominant word processing. Although the word dominance account has been widely supported, it is not clear in what extent of perceptual tasks it is valid. Here we aimed to examine whether the word dominance effect is observed in location stroop tasks and in audio-visual situations. The participants were required to press a key according to the location of visual (Experiment 1 and audio (Experiment 2 targets, left or right, as soon as possible. A cue of written (Experiments 1a and 2a or spoken (Experiments 1b and 2b location words, “left” or “right”, was presented on the left or right side of the fixation with cue lead times (CLT of 200 ms and 1200 ms. Reaction time from target presentation to key press was recorded as a dependent variable. The results were that the location validity effect was marked in within-modality but less so in cross-modality trials. The word validity effect was strong in within- but not in cross-modality trials. The CLT gave some effect of inhibition of return. So the word dominance could be less effective in location tasks and in cross-modal situations. The spatial correspondence seems to overcome the word effect.

A Corpus-Based Lexical Study on Frequency and Distribution of Coxhead's Awl Word Families in Medical Research Articles (RAs)

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Chen, Qi; Guang-Chun, Ge

2007-01-01

We conducted a lexical study on the word frequency and the text coverage of the 570 word families from Coxhead's Academic Word List (AWL) in medical research articles (RAs) based on a corpus of 50 medical RAs written in English with 190425 running words. By computer analysis, we found that the text coverage of the AWL words accounted for around…

How word-beginnings constrain the pronunciations of word-ends in the reading aloud of English: the phenomena of head- and onset-conditioning

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Anastasia Ulicheva

2015-12-01

Full Text Available Background. A word whose body is pronounced in different ways in different words is body-inconsistent. When we take the unit that precedes the vowel into account for the calculation of body-consistency, the proportion of English words that are body-inconsistent is considerably reduced at the level of corpus analysis, prompting the question of whether humans actually use such head/onset-conditioning when they read.Methods. Four metrics for head/onset-constrained body-consistency were calculated: by the last grapheme of the head, by the last phoneme of the onset, by place and manner of articulation of the last phoneme of the onset, and by manner of articulation of the last phoneme of the onset. Since these were highly correlated, principal component analysis was performed on them.Results. Two out of four resulting principal components explained significant variance in the reading-aloud reaction times, beyond regularity and body-consistency.Discussion. Humans read head/onset-conditioned words faster than would be predicted based on their body-consistency and regularity only. We conclude that humans are sensitive to the dependency between word-beginnings and word-ends when they read aloud, and that this dependency is phonological in nature, rather than orthographic.

Dissociating speech perception and comprehension at reduced levels of awareness

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Davis, Matthew H.; Coleman, Martin R.; Absalom, Anthony R.; Rodd, Jennifer M.; Johnsrude, Ingrid S.; Matta, Basil F.; Owen, Adrian M.; Menon, David K.

2007-01-01

We used functional MRI and the anesthetic agent propofol to assess the relationship among neural responses to speech, successful comprehension, and conscious awareness. Volunteers were scanned while listening to sentences containing ambiguous words, matched sentences without ambiguous words, and signal-correlated noise (SCN). During three scanning sessions, participants were nonsedated (awake), lightly sedated (a slowed response to conversation), and deeply sedated (no conversational response, rousable by loud command). Bilateral temporal-lobe responses for sentences compared with signal-correlated noise were observed at all three levels of sedation, although prefrontal and premotor responses to speech were absent at the deepest level of sedation. Additional inferior frontal and posterior temporal responses to ambiguous sentences provide a neural correlate of semantic processes critical for comprehending sentences containing ambiguous words. However, this additional response was absent during light sedation, suggesting a marked impairment of sentence comprehension. A significant decline in postscan recognition memory for sentences also suggests that sedation impaired encoding of sentences into memory, with left inferior frontal and temporal lobe responses during light sedation predicting subsequent recognition memory. These findings suggest a graded degradation of cognitive function in response to sedation such that “higher-level” semantic and mnemonic processes can be impaired at relatively low levels of sedation, whereas perceptual processing of speech remains resilient even during deep sedation. These results have important implications for understanding the relationship between speech comprehension and awareness in the healthy brain in patients receiving sedation and in patients with disorders of consciousness. PMID:17938125

Infant word recognition: Insights from TRACE simulations☆

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Mayor, Julien; Plunkett, Kim

2014-01-01

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

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.

Time course of Chinese monosyllabic spoken word recognition: evidence from ERP analyses.

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Zhao, Jingjing; Guo, Jingjing; Zhou, Fengying; Shu, Hua

2011-06-01

Evidence from event-related potential (ERP) analyses of English spoken words suggests that the time course of English word recognition in monosyllables is cumulative. Different types of phonological competitors (i.e., rhymes and cohorts) modulate the temporal grain of ERP components differentially (Desroches, Newman, & Joanisse, 2009). The time course of Chinese monosyllabic spoken word recognition could be different from that of English due to the differences in syllable structure between the two languages (e.g., lexical tones). The present study investigated the time course of Chinese monosyllabic spoken word recognition using ERPs to record brain responses online while subjects listened to spoken words. During the experiment, participants were asked to compare a target picture with a subsequent picture by judging whether or not these two pictures belonged to the same semantic category. The spoken word was presented between the two pictures, and participants were not required to respond during its presentation. We manipulated phonological competition by presenting spoken words that either matched or mismatched the target picture in one of the following four ways: onset mismatch, rime mismatch, tone mismatch, or syllable mismatch. In contrast to the English findings, our findings showed that the three partial mismatches (onset, rime, and tone mismatches) equally modulated the amplitudes and time courses of the N400 (a negative component that peaks about 400ms after the spoken word), whereas, the syllable mismatched words elicited an earlier and stronger N400 than the three partial mismatched words. The results shed light on the important role of syllable-level awareness in Chinese spoken word recognition and also imply that the recognition of Chinese monosyllabic words might rely more on global similarity of the whole syllable structure or syllable-based holistic processing rather than phonemic segment-based processing. We interpret the differences in spoken word

Surviving Blind Decomposition: A Distributional Analysis of the Time-Course of Complex Word Recognition

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Schmidtke, Daniel; Matsuki, Kazunaga; Kuperman, Victor

2017-01-01

The current study addresses a discrepancy in the psycholinguistic literature about the chronology of information processing during the visual recognition of morphologically complex words. "Form-then-meaning" accounts of complex word recognition claim that morphemes are processed as units of form prior to any influence of their meanings,…

A Literature Review on the Determinants of Accounting Quality

OpenAIRE

DEMİREL ARICI, Nuray; KARĞIN, Mahmut

2017-01-01

Since accounting quality contains conceptually more than one dimension and measure, it is difficult to be stated with only one definition. However, International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) dealt with the concept from a utilitarian approach. In other words, if accounting provides useful information to users in their decision making process, then it is well-qualified. Qualitative characteristics that are useful in terms of accounting information need to be addressed in Conceptual Framewo...

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

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Li, Degao; Zhang, Fan; Zeng, Xihong

2016-01-01

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

HyCon: A Framework for Context-aware Mobile Hypermedia

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Bouvin, Niels Olof; Christensen, Bent Guldbjerg; Grønbæk, Kaj

2003-01-01

be sensed automatically and/or be provided by the user directly. When mobile, the user may obtain context-aware hypermedia support on a variety of small and medium sized computing platforms such as mobile phones, PDAs, tablet PCs, and laptops. This paper introduces the HyCon (HyperContext) framework......This paper introduces the notion of context-aware mobile hypermedia. Context awareness means to take the users' context such as location, time, objective, community relations, etc., into account when browsing, searching, annotating, and linking. Attributes constituting the context of the user may...

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.

EWOM and brand awareness impact on consumer purchase intention: Mediating role of brand image

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Maryam Tariq

2017-03-01

Full Text Available The basic purpose of this research is to analyze the impact of electronic word of mouth (eWOM and brand awareness on customer purchase intention with the mediating role of brand image. The research is conducted to analyze the full or partial role of mediator on the said relationship. This research is basically conducted on customers of mobile users of Rawalpindi and Islamabad. To check this relationship a total of 300 questionnaires were floated in four universities of twin cities, of which 262 questionnaires with a response rate of 87.33% were received back on which mediation analysis has been performed. The results show full mediating impact of brand image on Electronic Word of Mouth (eWOM and customer purchase intention relationship, while partial mediating role of brand image on relationship of brand awareness and customer purchase intention has been observed. This research will help marketers in implementing better marketing techniques for boosting customers purchase intention.

Accounts that matter and count

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Elkjær, Bente; Brandi, Ulrik

In the paper, we propose that professional accountability and textual enactments hereof can be understood within the field of organisational learning. This means that professional accountability is not only a matter of legitimate knowledge and a responsible identity but also of organising work....... In this pursuit, we are inspired by the dilemma in the literature on professionals as an occupational group safeguarding societal accountable knowledge, and professionals entering enterprises and the organisational professionalism that follows from these movements. We are aware that not all may accept...... that management consultants as professionals but stretching the case may, nevertheless, make us see similar issues for other groups of more acknowledged professionals. Taking professional accountability into work and enterprises makes it possible for us to highlight that professional accountability...

How African American English-Speaking First Graders Segment and Rhyme Words and Nonwords With Final Consonant Clusters.

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Shollenbarger, Amy J; Robinson, Gregory C; Taran, Valentina; Choi, Seo-Eun

2017-10-05

This study explored how typically developing 1st grade African American English (AAE) speakers differ from mainstream American English (MAE) speakers in the completion of 2 common phonological awareness tasks (rhyming and phoneme segmentation) when the stimulus items were consonant-vowel-consonant-consonant (CVCC) words and nonwords. Forty-nine 1st graders met criteria for 2 dialect groups: AAE and MAE. Three conditions were tested in each rhyme and segmentation task: Real Words No Model, Real Words With a Model, and Nonwords With a Model. The AAE group had significantly more responses that rhymed CVCC words with consonant-vowel-consonant words and segmented CVCC words as consonant-vowel-consonant than the MAE group across all experimental conditions. In the rhyming task, the presence of a model in the real word condition elicited more reduced final cluster responses for both groups. In the segmentation task, the MAE group was at ceiling, so only the AAE group changed across the different stimulus presentations and reduced the final cluster less often when given a model. Rhyming and phoneme segmentation performance can be influenced by a child's dialect when CVCC words are used.

Unification of behavioural, computational and neural accounts of word production errors in post-stroke aphasia

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Marija Tochadse

Full Text Available Neuropsychological assessment, brain imaging and computational modelling have augmented our understanding of the multifaceted functional deficits in people with language disorders after stroke. Despite the volume of research using each technique, no studies have attempted to assimilate all three approaches in order to generate a unified behavioural-computational-neural model of post-stroke aphasia.The present study included data from 53 participants with chronic post-stroke aphasia and merged: aphasiological profiles based on a detailed neuropsychological assessment battery which was analysed with principal component and correlational analyses; measures of the impairment taken from Dell's computational model of word production; and the neural correlates of both behavioural and computational accounts analysed by voxel-based correlational methodology.As a result, all three strands coincide with the separation of semantic and phonological stages of aphasic naming, revealing the prominence of these dimensions for the explanation of aphasic performance. Over and above three previously described principal components (phonological ability, semantic ability, executive-demand, we observed auditory working memory as a novel factor. While the phonological Dell parameter was uniquely related to phonological errors/factor, the semantic parameter was less clear-cut, being related to both semantic errors and omissions, and loading heavily with semantic ability and auditory working memory factors. The close relationship between the semantic Dell parameter and omission errors recurred in their high lesion-correlate overlap in the anterior middle temporal gyrus. In addition, the simultaneous overlap of the lesion correlate of omission errors with more dorsal temporal regions, associated with the phonological parameter, highlights the multiple drivers that underpin this error type. The novel auditory working memory factor was located along left superior

Documentation and Analysis of the ’Miscellaneous’ Account Category within the DoD Instruction 7220.29-H Depot Level Maintenance Cost Accounting System.

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1984-12-01

34MISCELLANEOUS" ACCOUNT CATEGORY WITHIN THE DOD INSTRUCTION 7220.29-H DEPOT LEVEL MAINTENANCE COST ACCOUNTING SYSTEM by a. Steven Eugene Lehr CDecember 1984...PERFORMING ONG. REPORT NUMBER Maintenance Cost Accounting System 7. AUTHOR(&) S. CONTRACT OR GRANT NUMBER(@) Steven Eugene Lehr 9. PERFORMING ORGANIZATION...Availability Codes IS. KEY WORDS (Continue on reverse *ids It necessary and Identify by block number) Dvi Special Uniform Cost Accounting System DoD

Evidence for Morphological Recomposition in Compound Words using MEG

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Teon Lamont Brooks

2015-04-01

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

An Exploration of Students' Conceptions of Accounting Work

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Sin, Samantha; Reid, Anna; Jones, Alan

2012-01-01

This study, undertaken at an Australian university, investigates undergraduate accounting students' conceptions of accounting work and discusses the relevance of such conceptions for the work readiness of graduates. Findings based on a phenomenographic investigation show variations in students' awareness of the functional and human aspects of…

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

Mind Your Words: Positive and Negative Items Create Method Effects on the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire

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Van Dam, Nicholas T.; Hobkirk, Andrea L.; Danoff-Burg, Sharon; Earleywine, Mitch

2012-01-01

Mindfulness, a construct that entails moment-to-moment effort to be aware of present experiences and positive attitudinal features, has become integrated into the sciences. The Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ), one popular measure of mindfulness, exhibits different responses to positively and negatively worded items in nonmeditating…

Identifying Witness Accounts from Social Media Using Imagery

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Marie Truelove

2017-04-01

Full Text Available This research investigates the use of image category classification to distinguish images posted to social media that are Witness Accounts of an event. Only images depicting observations of the event, captured by micro-bloggers at the event, are considered Witness Accounts. Identifying Witness Accounts from social media is important for services such as news, marketing and emergency response. Automated image category classification is essential due to the large number of images on social media and interest in identifying witnesses in near real time. This paper begins research of this emerging problem with an established procedure, using a bag-of-words method to create a vocabulary of visual words and classifier trained to categorize the encoded images. In order to test the procedure, a set of images were collected for case study events, Australian Football League matches, from Twitter. Evaluation shows an overall accuracy of 90% and precision and recall for both classes exceeding 83%.

Words and possible words in early language acquisition.

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Marchetto, Erika; Bonatti, Luca L

2013-11-01

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

Scale-invariant transition probabilities in free word association trajectories

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Martin Elias Costa

2009-09-01

Full Text Available Free-word association has been used as a vehicle to understand the organization of human thoughts. The original studies relied mainly on qualitative assertions, yielding the widely intuitive notion that trajectories of word associations are structured, yet considerably more random than organized linguistic text. Here we set to determine a precise characterization of this space, generating a large number of word association trajectories in a web implemented game. We embedded the trajectories in the graph of word co-occurrences from a linguistic corpus. To constrain possible transport models we measured the memory loss and the cycling probability. These two measures could not be reconciled by a bounded diffusive model since the cycling probability was very high (16 % of order-2 cycles implying a majority of short-range associations whereas the memory loss was very rapid (converging to the asymptotic value in ∼ 7 steps which, in turn, forced a high fraction of long-range associations. We show that memory loss and cycling probabilities of free word association trajectories can be simultaneously accounted by a model in which transitions are determined by a scale invariant probability distribution.

Stroop effects from newly learned color words: effects of memory consolidation and episodic context.

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Geukes, Sebastian; Gaskell, M Gareth; Zwitserlood, Pienie

2015-01-01

The Stroop task is an excellent tool to test whether reading a word automatically activates its associated meaning, and it has been widely used in mono- and bilingual contexts. Despite of its ubiquity, the task has not yet been employed to test the automaticity of recently established word-concept links in novel-word-learning studies, under strict experimental control of learning and testing conditions. In three experiments, we thus paired novel words with native language (German) color words via lexical association and subsequently tested these words in a manual version of the Stroop task. Two crucial findings emerged: When novel word Stroop trials appeared intermixed among native-word trials, the novel-word Stroop effect was observed immediately after the learning phase. If no native color words were present in a Stroop block, the novel-word Stroop effect only emerged 24 h later. These results suggest that the automatic availability of a novel word's meaning depends either on supportive context from the learning episode and/or on sufficient time for memory consolidation. We discuss how these results can be reconciled with the complementary learning systems account of word learning.

Stroop effects from newly learned color words: effects of memory consolidation and episodic context

Science.gov (United States)

Geukes, Sebastian; Gaskell, M. Gareth; Zwitserlood, Pienie

2015-01-01

The Stroop task is an excellent tool to test whether reading a word automatically activates its associated meaning, and it has been widely used in mono- and bilingual contexts. Despite of its ubiquity, the task has not yet been employed to test the automaticity of recently established word-concept links in novel-word-learning studies, under strict experimental control of learning and testing conditions. In three experiments, we thus paired novel words with native language (German) color words via lexical association and subsequently tested these words in a manual version of the Stroop task. Two crucial findings emerged: When novel word Stroop trials appeared intermixed among native-word trials, the novel-word Stroop effect was observed immediately after the learning phase. If no native color words were present in a Stroop block, the novel-word Stroop effect only emerged 24 h later. These results suggest that the automatic availability of a novel word's meaning depends either on supportive context from the learning episode and/or on sufficient time for memory consolidation. We discuss how these results can be reconciled with the complementary learning systems account of word learning. PMID:25814973

Putting It All Together: A Unified Account of Word Recognition and Reaction-Time Distributions

Science.gov (United States)

Norris, Dennis

2009-01-01

R. Ratcliff, P. Gomez, and G. McKoon (2004) suggested much of what goes on in lexical decision is attributable to decision processes and may not be particularly informative about word recognition. They proposed that lexical decision should be characterized by a decision process, taking the form of a drift-diffusion model (R. Ratcliff, 1978), that…

Do you remember where sounds, pictures and words came from? The role of the stimulus format in object location memory.

Science.gov (United States)

Delogu, Franco; Lilla, Christopher C

2017-11-01

Contrasting results in visual and auditory spatial memory stimulate the debate over the role of sensory modality and attention in identity-to-location binding. We investigated the role of sensory modality in the incidental/deliberate encoding of the location of a sequence of items. In 4 separated blocks, 88 participants memorised sequences of environmental sounds, spoken words, pictures and written words, respectively. After memorisation, participants were asked to recognise old from new items in a new sequence of stimuli. They were also asked to indicate from which side of the screen (visual stimuli) or headphone channel (sounds) the old stimuli were presented in encoding. In the first block, participants were not aware of the spatial requirement while, in blocks 2, 3 and 4 they knew that their memory for item location was going to be tested. Results show significantly lower accuracy of object location memory for the auditory stimuli (environmental sounds and spoken words) than for images (pictures and written words). Awareness of spatial requirement did not influence localisation accuracy. We conclude that: (a) object location memory is more effective for visual objects; (b) object location is implicitly associated with item identity during encoding and (c) visual supremacy in spatial memory does not depend on the automaticity of object location binding.

Effects of a phonological awareness program on English reading and spelling among Hong Kong Chinese ESL children.

Science.gov (United States)

Yeung, Susanna S S; Siegel, Linda S; Chan, Carol K K

2013-05-01

This study investigated the effects of a 12-week language-enriched phonological awareness instruction on 76 Hong Kong young children who were learning English as a second language. The children were assigned randomly to receive the instruction on phonological awareness skills embedded in vocabulary learning activities or comparison instruction which consisted of vocabulary learning and writing tasks but no direct instruction in phonological awareness skills. They were tested on receptive and expressive vocabulary, phonological awareness at the syllable, rhyme and phoneme levels, reading, and spelling in English before and after the program implementation. The results indicated that children who received the phonological awareness instruction performed significantly better than the comparison group on English word reading, spelling, phonological awareness at all levels and expressive vocabulary on the posttest when age, general intelligence and the pretest scores were controlled statistically. The findings suggest that phonological awareness instruction embedded in vocabulary learning activities might be beneficial to kindergarteners learning English as a second language.

Banking Accounting Practices “Humanist”

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Nanang Shonhadji

2016-04-01

Full Text Available Humanism is a universal value that should be attached to all forms and operational activities of the bank because the bank’s main business is to provide service to humanity. The purpose of this study was to determine the humanist banking practice. The use of qualitative methods with a phenomenological approach that involve an account officer and marketing staff as key informants. In-depth interviews conducted to obtain comprehensive information. The results of the study informs that the banking practice in the lending and the funding activities were still oriented to material interests or to achieve maximum profit with unbalanced position. It caused the values of humanism in the form of truth and equitable negated by bank stakeholder. The results of this study also found that there are two forms of awareness is needed in the value of accountability in the process of funding and lending activities to customers humanistic were the awareness of responsibility to themselves and to God.

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.

Stroop effects from newly learned color words: Effects of memory consolidation and episodic context

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Sebastian eGeukes

2015-03-01

Full Text Available The Stroop task is an excellent tool to test whether reading a word automatically activates its associated meaning, and it has been widely used in mono- and bilingual contexts. Despite of its ubiquity, the task has not yet been employed to test the automaticity of recently established word-concept links in novel-word-learning studies, under strict experimental control of learning and testing conditions. In three experiments, we thus paired novel words with native language (German color words via lexical association and subsequently tested these words in a manual version of the Stroop task. Two crucial findings emerged: When novel word Stroop trials appeared intermixed among native-word trials, the novel-word Stroop effect was observed immediately after the learning phase. If no native color words were present in a Stroop block, the novel-word Stroop effect only emerged 24 hours later. These results suggest that the automatic availability of a novel word’s meaning depends either on supportive context from the learning episode and/or on sufficient time for memory consolidation. We discuss how these results can be reconciled with the complementary learning systems account of word learning.

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

Science.gov (United States)

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

Accounting Professionals’ Perceptions of Ethics Education: Evidence from Turkey

OpenAIRE

Ali UYAR; Ali Haydar GUNGORMUª

2013-01-01

The purpose of this study is to investigate accounting professionals’ perceptions of (1) importance of education phases and environmental conditions in development of ethics awareness, (2) approaches in accounting ethics education in university and professional pre-qualification, and (3) coverage of accounting ethics education. Data was collected from public accountants via an online questionnaire during November and December, 2011. The questionnaire was developed based on a review of earlier...

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 Syntax of Word Order Derivation and Agreement in Najrani Arabic: A Minimalist Analysis

Science.gov (United States)

Fakih, Abdul-Hafeed Ali; Al-Sharif, Hadeel Ali

2017-01-01

The paper aims to explore word order derivation and agreement in Najran Arabic (henceforth, NA) and examines the interaction between the NA data and Chomsky's (2001, 2005) Agree theory which we adopt in this study. The objective is to investigate how word order occurs in NA and provide a satisfactorily unified account of the derivation of SVO and…

Usage and efficacy of electronic dictionaries for a language without word boundaries

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Etsuko Toyoda

2016-09-01

Full Text Available There is cumulative evidence suggesting that hyper-glossing facilitates lower-level processing and enhances reading comprehension. There are plentiful studies on electronic dictionaries for English. However, research on e-dictionaries for languages with no boundaries between words is still scarce. The main aim for the current study is to investigate the usage and efficacy of e-dictionaries for Japanese language learners. This article reports the results of two studies concerning e-dictionaries: a survey study investigating the use of e-dictionaries (with a particular focus on e-glossaries that change a digital text into a hypertext by L2 learners of Japanese, and a comparative study examining existing e-glossaries to evaluate whether they provide the optimal level of support for reading Japanese e-texts. The results of the survey showed that learners have their preferred e-dictionaries (in most cases, e-word dictionaries in which the user can look up individual words, and that few learners are aware of the existence of e-glossaries. The results of further study revealed that existing e-glossaries have various functions, but lack some requisite information crucial to the target language. This study suggests that technical issues revolving around the lack of spaces between words may be a reason for the lag in usage and efficacy of e-glossaries for languages without word boundaries.

Grapho-Morphological Awareness in Spanish L2 Reading: How Do Learners Use This Metalinguistic Skill?

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Miguel, Nausica Marcos

2012-01-01

This paper contributes to the literature on the transferability of grapho-morphological awareness (GMA) for second language (L2) learners by analysing L2 learners' knowledge of morphology in reading. GMA helps readers to identify grammatical categories, infer meanings of unfamiliar words, and access stored lexical information. Previous research…

Bilingual Phonological Awareness: Multilevel Construct Validation among Spanish-Speaking Kindergarteners in Transitional Bilingual Education Classrooms

Science.gov (United States)

Branum-Martin, Lee; Mehta, Paras D.; Fletcher, Jack M.; Carlson, Coleen D.; Ortiz, Alba; Carlo, Maria; Francis, David J.

2006-01-01

The construct validity of English and Spanish phonological awareness (PA) tasks was examined with a sample of 812 kindergarten children from 71 transitional bilingual education program classrooms located in 3 different types of geographic regions in California and Texas. Tasks of PA, including blending nonwords, segmenting words, and phoneme…

Basic Auditory Processing Skills and Phonological Awareness in Low-IQ Readers and Typically Developing Controls

Science.gov (United States)

Kuppen, Sarah; Huss, Martina; Fosker, Tim; Fegan, Natasha; Goswami, Usha

2011-01-01

We explore the relationships between basic auditory processing, phonological awareness, vocabulary, and word reading in a sample of 95 children, 55 typically developing children, and 40 children with low IQ. All children received nonspeech auditory processing tasks, phonological processing and literacy measures, and a receptive vocabulary task.…

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.

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.

Science.gov (United States)

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.

Predicting growth in English and French vocabulary: The facilitating effects of morphological and cognate awareness.

Science.gov (United States)

D'Angelo, Nadia; Hipfner-Boucher, Kathleen; Chen, Xi

2017-07-01

The present study investigated the contribution of morphological and cognate awareness to the development of English and French vocabulary knowledge among young minority and majority language children who were enrolled in a French immersion program. Participating children (n = 75) were assessed in English and French on measures of morphological awareness, cognate awareness, and vocabulary knowledge from Grades 1 to 3. Hierarchical linear modeling was used to investigate linear trends in English and French vocabulary growth for minority and majority language children and to identify metalinguistic contributions to Grade 1 and Grade 3 English and French vocabulary performance and rate of growth. Results demonstrated a similar pattern of prediction for both groups of children. English and French morphological awareness and French-English cognate awareness significantly predicted concurrent and longitudinal vocabulary development after controlling for nonverbal reasoning, phonological awareness, and word identification. The contributions of morphological awareness to English vocabulary and cognate awareness to French vocabulary strengthened between Grades 1 and 2. These findings highlight the emerging importance of morphological and cognate awareness in children's vocabulary development and suggest that these metalinguistic factors can serve to broaden the vocabulary repertoire of children who enter school with limited language proficiency. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).

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

Science.gov (United States)

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.

Medical savings accounts make waves.

Science.gov (United States)

Gardner, J

1995-02-27

MSAs: the theory. Medical savings account legislation would allow consumers to set aside pre-tax dollars to pay for day-to-day healthcare costs. The accounts are to be backed up by a catastropic policy with a deductible roughly equal to the maximum amount allowed in the MSA. The aim is to reduce healthcare cost inflation by making consumers more aware of the costs of healthcare than they are under comprehensive policies and enabling them to shop for the lowest-cost, highest-quality care.

The Mediation Role Of Brand Preference On The Relationship Between Consumer–Based Brand Equity And Word Of Mouth Marketing

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Erkan YILDIZ

2016-09-01

Full Text Available The most important asset needed to achieve the competitive advantage is having a strong brand equity. In this study, the relations between the dimensions of consumerbased brand equity and those of word of mouth marketing were analysed. In addition, the mediating role of the brand preference was checked. The sample consisted of 1000 people living in Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir. The sampling method used was quota sampling. In the conclusions of this study, it was observed that: there are effects of brand awareness and brand association dimensions on the negative word of mouth marketing, perceived quality on the positive and negative word of mouth marketing, and brand loyalty on the positive word of mouth marketing. Brand preference has a partial mediation role in the relations between the perceived quality dimension of consumerbased brand equity and the dimensions of positive and negative word of mouth marketing

Signal Words

Science.gov (United States)

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

The Formation of Accounting Policies for Processing Enterprises in the Context of Adaptation of National Regulations to the International Standards of Accounting and Reporting

OpenAIRE

Rozheliuk Viktoriia M.; Denchuk Pavlo N.

2017-01-01

The article defines principles for preparation of accounting policies using both domestic and foreign experience, generalizes scientific and theoretical approaches, and improves the wordings of the concept of «accounting policy». The feasibility of conducting a preliminary assessment of efficiency of organizational activities through the use of the criteria generalized in the accounting policy has been substantiated, the legal and regulatory levels have been highlighted, taking into considera...

Developmental Constraints on Learning Artificial Grammars with Fixed, Flexible and Free Word Order

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Iga Nowak

2017-10-01

Full Text Available Human learning, although highly flexible and efficient, is constrained in ways that facilitate or impede the acquisition of certain systems of information. Some such constraints, active during infancy and childhood, have been proposed to account for the apparent ease with which typically developing children acquire language. In a series of experiments, we investigated the role of developmental constraints on learning artificial grammars with a distinction between shorter and relatively frequent words (‘function words,’ F-words and longer and less frequent words (‘content words,’ C-words. We constructed 4 finite-state grammars, in which the order of F-words, relative to C-words, was either fixed (F-words always occupied the same positions in a string, flexible (every F-word always followed a C-word, or free. We exposed adults (N = 84 and kindergarten children (N = 100 to strings from each of these artificial grammars, and we assessed their ability to recognize strings with the same structure, but a different vocabulary. Adults were better at recognizing strings when regularities were available (i.e., fixed and flexible order grammars, while children were better at recognizing strings from the grammars consistent with the attested distribution of function and content words in natural languages (i.e., flexible and free order grammars. These results provide evidence for a link between developmental constraints on learning and linguistic typology.

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.

Monolingual accounting dictionaries for EFL text production

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Nielsen, Sandro

2006-01-01

Monolingual accounting dictionaries are important for producing financial reporting texts in English in an international setting, because of the lack of specialised bilingual dictionaries. As the intended user groups have different factual and linguistic competences, they require specific types...... text production. The monolingual accounting dictionary needs to include information about UK, US and international accounting terms, their grammatical properties, their potential for being combined with other words in collocations, phrases and sentences in order to meet user requirements. Data items...... of information. By identifying and analysing the users' factual and linguistic competences, user needs, use-situations and the stages involved in producing accounting texts in English as a foreign language, lexicographers will have a sound basis for designing the optimal English accounting dictionary for EFL...

Monolingual Accounting Dictionaries for EFL Text Production

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Nielsen, Sandro

2009-01-01

Monolingual accounting dictionaries are important for producing financial reporting texts in English in an international setting, because of the lack of specialised bilingual dictionaries. As the intended user groups have different factual and linguistic competences, they require specific types...... text production. The monolingual accounting dictionary needs to include information about UK, US and international accounting terms, their grammatical properties, their potential for being combined with other words in collocations, phrases and sentences in order to meet user requirements. Data items...... of information. By identifying and analysing the users' factual and linguistic competences, user needs, use-situations and the stages involved in producing accounting texts in English as a foreign language, lexicographers will have a sound basis for designing the optimal English accounting dictionary for EFL...

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

Morphological Awareness and Its Role in Compensation in Adults with Dyslexia.

Science.gov (United States)

Law, Jeremy M; Wouters, Jan; Ghesquière, Pol

2015-08-01

This study examines the role of morphological awareness (MA) in literacy achievement and compensation in word reading of adults with dyslexia through an exploration of three questions: (1) Do adult dyslexics demonstrate a deficit in MA, and how is this potential deficit related to phonological awareness (PA)? (2) Does MA contribute independently to literacy skills equally in dyslexics and control readers? and (3) Do MA and PA skills differ in compensated and noncompensated dyslexics? A group of dyslexic and normal reading university students matched for age, education and IQ participated in this study. Group analysis demonstrated an MA deficit in dyslexics; as well, MA was found to significantly predict a greater proportion of word reading and spelling within the dyslexic group compared with the controls. Compensated dyslexics were also found to perform significantly better on the morphological task than noncompensated dyslexics. Additionally, no statistical difference was observed in MA between the normal reading controls and the compensated group (independent of PA and vocabulary). Results suggest that intact and strong MA skills contribute to the achieved compensation of this group of adults with dyslexia. Implications for MA based intervention strategies for people with dyslexia are discussed. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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

Science.gov (United States)

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.

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

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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....

Is vocabulary growth influenced by the relations among words in a language learner's vocabulary?

Science.gov (United States)

Sailor, Kevin M

2013-09-01

Several recent studies have explored the applicability of the preferential attachment principle to account for vocabulary growth. According to this principle, network growth can be described by a process in which existing nodes recruit new nodes with a probability that is an increasing function of their connectivity within the existing network. The current study combined subjective estimates of the age of acquisition (AoA) and associations among words in a large corpus to estimate the organization of semantic knowledge at multiple points in vocabulary growth. Consistent with previous studies, the number of connections or relations among words followed a power law distribution in which relatively few words were highly connected with other words and most words were connected to relatively few words. In addition, the growth in the number of connections of a word was a linear function of its initial number of connections, and the ratio of connections to any two words was relatively constant over time. Finally, number of connections to known words was a reliable predictor of a word's AoA. All of these findings can be shown to be consistent with the preferential attachment principle. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved.

Working memory biasing of visual perception without awareness.

Science.gov (United States)

Pan, Yi; Lin, Bingyuan; Zhao, Yajun; Soto, David

2014-10-01

Previous research has demonstrated that the contents of visual working memory can bias visual processing in favor of matching stimuli in the scene. However, the extent to which such top-down, memory-driven biasing of visual perception is contingent on conscious awareness remains unknown. Here we showed that conscious awareness of critical visual cues is dispensable for working memory to bias perceptual selection mechanisms. Using the procedure of continuous flash suppression, we demonstrated that "unseen" visual stimuli during interocular suppression can gain preferential access to awareness if they match the contents of visual working memory. Strikingly, the very same effect occurred even when the visual cue to be held in memory was rendered nonconscious by masking. Control experiments ruled out the alternative accounts of repetition priming and different detection criteria. We conclude that working memory biases of visual perception can operate in the absence of conscious awareness.

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.

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

Science.gov (United States)

Hilte, Maartje; Reitsma, Pieter

2006-12-01

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

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.

Perception and recognition memory of words and werds: two-way mirror effects.

Science.gov (United States)

Becker, D Vaughn; Goldinger, Stephen D; Stone, Gregory O

2006-10-01

We examined associative priming of words (e.g., TOAD) and pseudohomophones of those words (e.g., TODE) in lexical decision. In addition to word frequency effects, reliable base-word frequency effects were observed for pseudohomophones: Those based on high-frequency words elicited faster and more accurate correct rejections. Associative priming had disparate effects on high- and low-frequency items. Whereas priming improved performance to high-frequency pseudohomophones, it impaired performance to low-frequency pseudohomophones. The results suggested a resonance process, wherein phonologic identity and semantic priming combine to undermine the veridical perception of infrequent items. We tested this hypothesis in another experiment by administering a surprise recognition memory test after lexical decision. When asked to identify words that were spelled correctly during lexical decision, the participants often misremembered pseudohomophones as correctly spelled items. Patterns of false memory, however, were jointly affected by base-word frequencies and their original responses during lexical decision. Taken together, the results are consistent with resonance accounts of word recognition, wherein bottom-up and top-down information sources coalesce into correct, and sometimes illusory, perception. The results are also consistent with a recent lexical decision model, REM-LD, that emphasizes memory retrieval and top-down matching processes in lexical decision.

Ambiguous function words do not prevent 18-month-olds from building accurate syntactic category expectations: An ERP study.

Science.gov (United States)

Brusini, Perrine; Dehaene-Lambertz, Ghislaine; van Heugten, Marieke; de Carvalho, Alex; Goffinet, François; Fiévet, Anne-Caroline; Christophe, Anne

2017-04-01

To comprehend language, listeners need to encode the relationship between words within sentences. This entails categorizing words into their appropriate word classes. Function words, consistently preceding words from specific categories (e.g., the ball NOUN , I speak VERB ), provide invaluable information for this task, and children's sensitivity to such adjacent relationships develops early on in life. However, neighboring words are not the sole source of information regarding an item's word class. Here we examine whether young children also take into account preceding sentence context online during syntactic categorization. To address this question, we use the ambiguous French function word la which, depending on sentence context, can either be used as determiner (the, preceding nouns) or as object clitic (it, preceding verbs). French-learning 18-month-olds' evoked potentials (ERPs) were recorded while they listened to sentences featuring this ambiguous function word followed by either a noun or a verb (thus yielding a locally felicitous co-occurrence of la + noun or la + verb). Crucially, preceding sentence context rendered the sentence either grammatical or ungrammatical. Ungrammatical sentences elicited a late positivity (resembling a P600) that was not observed for grammatical sentences. Toddlers' analysis of the unfolding sentence was thus not limited to local co-occurrences, but rather took into account non-adjacent sentence context. These findings suggest that by 18 months of age, online word categorization is already surprisingly robust. This could be greatly beneficial for the acquisition of novel words. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. 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...

The Effects of Caffeine on Memory for Word Lists.

Science.gov (United States)

Erikson, George; And Others

Research has suggested that behavioral differences may account for the effects of caffeine on information processing. To investigate the effects of caffeine on memory for supraspan word lists, 107 college students (47 males, 60 females), divided into 12 groups by high and low impulsivity scores on the Eysenck Personality Inventory, participated in…

Memory and Attention Make Smart Word Learning: An Alternative Account of Akhtar, Carpenter, and Tomasello.

Science.gov (United States)

Samuelson, Larissa K.; Smith, Linda B.

1998-01-01

Used a modification of Akhtar, Carpenter, and Tomasello's (1996) task involving interpretation of novel nouns to test whether 18- to 28-month-olds' smart word learning derived from general attention and memory processes rather than knowledge about the communicative intents of others. Findings similar to those of Akhtar and colleagues suggest that…

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.

THE STAGES OF ACCOUNTING POLICIES FORMATION

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Sofiia Kafka

2017-03-01

Full Text Available In the article the research of the existing scientists’ approaches to the procedure of the company accounting policy formation have been done, their critical analysis has been made, the major groups of issues and problems raised in scientific works have been found out, and those ones, which require the further up-to- date refinement, have been identified: the formation of the stages in projecting of the accounting policy in accordance with requirements of legislation. For the purposes of study the methods of analysis and synthesis, systematic approach to study the process of developing the company accounting policy and logical method and simulation to systematize the information support of the processes mentioned have been used. As a result, a comprehensive approach to the formation of accounting policy has been worked out, the author's vision of the stages in projecting of the accounting policy and their contents has been also proposed and disclosed in details. Key words: accounting policy, accounting, elements of accounting policy, information support, financial position, simulation, reliable information.  

Feature Statistics Modulate the Activation of Meaning during Spoken Word Processing

Science.gov (United States)

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

2016-01-01

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

Reading front to back: MEG evidence for early feedback effects during word recognition.

Science.gov (United States)

Woodhead, Z V J; Barnes, G R; Penny, W; Moran, R; Teki, S; Price, C J; Leff, A P

2014-03-01

Magnetoencephalography studies in humans have shown word-selective activity in the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) approximately 130 ms after word presentation ( Pammer et al. 2004; Cornelissen et al. 2009; Wheat et al. 2010). The role of this early frontal response is currently not known. We tested the hypothesis that the IFG provides top-down constraints on word recognition using dynamic causal modeling of magnetoencephalography data collected, while subjects viewed written words and false font stimuli. Subject-specific dipoles in left and right occipital, ventral occipitotemporal and frontal cortices were identified using Variational Bayesian Equivalent Current Dipole source reconstruction. A connectivity analysis tested how words and false font stimuli differentially modulated activity between these regions within the first 300 ms after stimulus presentation. We found that left inferior frontal activity showed stronger sensitivity to words than false font and a stronger feedback connection onto the left ventral occipitotemporal cortex (vOT) in the first 200 ms. Subsequently, the effect of words relative to false font was observed on feedforward connections from left occipital to ventral occipitotemporal and frontal regions. These findings demonstrate that left inferior frontal activity modulates vOT in the early stages of word processing and provides a mechanistic account of top-down effects during word recognition.

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

Historical Account of Key Words in Non-Financial Report Titles (A review of FT 500 corporations from 1989 to 2007

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Caroline D Ditlev-Simonsen

2010-12-01

“responsib” to catch relevant versions are investigated.  The key words were initially applied by a few companies, and then grew in popularity. While “sustainab” and “responsib” are still growing in popularity, “environment” grew, peaked around 2002 and then reduced in frequency as a term in the titles. Based on business theories, the paper discusses alternative explanations for why corporations introduced the new key words in their non-financial reports. Whereas issuing non-financial reports can be understood from a legitimacy perspective, the introduction of new key words in the titles can be explained by a multitude of alternative theories.

ITCA: Inter-Task Conflict-Aware CPU accounting for CMPs

OpenAIRE

Luque, Carlos; Moreto Planas, Miquel; Cazorla, Francisco; Gioiosa, Roberto; Buyuktosunoglu, Alper; Valero Cortés, Mateo

2009-01-01

Chip-MultiProcessor (CMP) architectures are becoming more and more popular as an alternative to the traditional processors that only extract instruction-level parallelism from an application. CMPs introduce complexities when accounting CPU utilization. This is due to the fact that the progress done by an application during an interval of time highly depends on the activity of the other applications it is co-scheduled with. In this paper, we identify how an inaccurate measurement of the CPU ut...

Combine CRF and MMSEG to Boost Chinese Word Segmentation in Social Media

OpenAIRE

Yushi, Yao; Zheng, Huang

2015-01-01

In this paper, we propose a joint algorithm for the word segmentation on Chinese social media. Previous work mainly focus on word segmentation for plain Chinese text, in order to develop a Chinese social media processing tool, we need to take the main features of social media into account, whose grammatical structure is not rigorous, and the tendency of using colloquial and Internet terms makes the existing Chinese-processing tools inefficient to obtain good performance on social media. In ou...

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

Science.gov (United States)

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

2014-02-01

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

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

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.

Dynamical interplay between awareness and epidemic spreading in multiplex networks

OpenAIRE

Granell, Clara; Gomez, Sergio; Arenas, Alex

2013-01-01

We present the analysis of the interrelation between two processes accounting for the spreading of an epidemics, and the information awareness to prevent its infection, on top of multiplex networks. This scenario is representative of an epidemic process spreading on a network of persistent real contacts, and a cyclic information awareness process diffusing in the network of virtual social contacts between the same individuals. The topology corresponds to a multiplex network where two diffusiv...

Subjective Word-Finding Difficulty Reduces Engagement in Social Leisure Activities in Alzheimer’s Disease

Science.gov (United States)

Farrell, Meagan T.; Zahodne, Laura B.; Stern, Yaakov; Dorrejo, Jhedy; Yeung, Philip; Cosentino, Stephanie

2014-01-01

Objectives To assess the influence of subjective word-finding difficulty on Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients’ likelihood of engaging in social leisure activities. Design Analysis of data collected from the second cohort of the Multicenter Study of Predictors of Disease Course in Alzheimer’s disease. Setting Four study sites in the U.S. and France. Participants Individuals diagnosed with mild to moderate AD (N = 236) Measurements On separate questionnaires, patients were asked to 1) report whether had trouble finding the right word when speaking (subjective word-finding difficulty), and 2) rate their frequency and enjoyment of both social and nonsocial leisure activities. Objective language measures included object naming and verbal fluency. Measures of dependence, depression, cognitive status, age, sex, and education were also included as covariates in regression analyses. Results Over half (52%) of the sample reported word-finding difficulty, and subjective complaints were correlated with poorer verbal fluency scores. Subjective word-finding difficulty was uniquely related to social activity measures. Endorsers of word-finding difficulty reported reduced frequency and enjoyment of social leisure activities, controlling for covariates. In contrast, engagement in nonsocial activities was associated with higher age and depression scores, but was not related to word-finding complaints. These results were corroborated by the caregivers’ reports, and occurred above and beyond the effect of objective word-finding ability. Conclusion AD patients who are aware of increasing word-finding failures are less likely to participate in and enjoy socially-oriented leisure activities. This finding may have significant implications for clinical and health outcomes in AD. A failure to evaluate subjective language complaints could result in social withdrawal symptoms, thereby threatening the patient’s quality of life as well as increasing caregiver burden. Importantly

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…

Distributed context-aware systems

CERN Document Server

Ferreira, Paulo

2014-01-01

Context-aware systems aim to deliver a rich user experience by taking into?account the current user context (location, time, activity, etc.), possibly?captured without his intervention. For example, cell phones are now able to?continuously update a user's location while, at the same time, users execute?an increasing amount of activities online, where their actions may be easily?captured (e.g. login in a web application) without user consent. In the last decade, this topic has seen numerous developments that demonstrate its relevance and usefulness. The?trend was accelerated with the widespread?availability of powerful mobile devices (e.g. smartphones) that include a myriad of?sensors which enable applications to capture the user context. However, there are several challenges that must be addressed; we focus on scalability?(large number of context aware messages) and privacy (personal data that may be propagated).?This book is organized in five chapters starting with an introduction to?the theme raising the mo...

The Accounting Class as Accounting Firm: A Model Program for Developing Technical and Managerial Skills

Science.gov (United States)

Docherty, Gary

1976-01-01

One way to bring the accounting office into the classroom is to conduct the class as a "company." Such a class is aimed at developing students' technical and managerial skills, as well as their career awareness and career goals. Performance goals, a course description, and overall objectives of the course are given and might serve as a model.…

What are the key elements required for a successful and effective word of mouth tourism marketing campaign? – Case analysis

OpenAIRE

Piltonen, Anna

2016-01-01

The purpose of this thesis was to further study what are the key elements for successful and effective word of mouth marketing campaign in tourism. The objective was to identify the key elements by analysing a real life case provided for this thesis where a tourism board used word of mouth as part of their marketing campaign to increase awareness of the destination and drive tourism in the destination. The case was analysed with the support of secondary research conducted around the topics of...

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

Political versus managerial use of cost and performance accounting

OpenAIRE

Flury, Reto; Schedler, Kuno

2006-01-01

This article explains why it is impossible to use cost and performance accounting in public administration purely as an instrument for internal management. The authors report on a survey in Switzerland which highlighted the different expectations that politicians and managers have for cost and performance accounting. The authors warn that politicians and managers need to be aware of the conflicts arising from their different information needs. New cost and performance accounting systems need ...

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)

Between-Word Processes in Children with Speech Difficulties: Insights from a Usage-Based Approach to Phonology

Science.gov (United States)

Newton, Caroline

2012-01-01

There are some children with speech and/or language difficulties who are significantly more difficult to understand in connected speech than in single words. The study reported here explores the between-word behaviours of three such children, aged 11;8, 12;2 and 12;10. It focuses on whether these patterns could be accounted for by lenition, as…

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.

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

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

Science.gov (United States)

Lo, Shih-Yu; Yeh, Su-Ling

2018-05-29

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

The embodiment of beauty: Evidence from viewing Chinese concrete words and pictographs.

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Zhang, Wei; He, Xianyou; Zhao, Xueru; Lai, Siyan; Lai, Shuxian; Situ, Suiyan

2018-02-01

How is beauty embodied? According to the viewpoint of embodied cognition, the aesthetic processing of words or pictographs has roots in their referential archetypes. Four experiments tested whether the beauty of referential archetypes was routinely activated during the explicit and implicit aesthetic evaluations of the font structures of concrete Chinese words and pictographs in congruent or incongruent font colour. Results showed font structures of simplified Chinese words and pictographs were judged to be more beautiful when they referred to beautiful archetypes; and this pattern was reversed when they referred to ugly archetypes. Moreover, judgement was facilitated when font colour was congruent for Chinese words and pictographs referred to beautiful archetypes. For those referred to ugly archetypes, judgement was inhibited in congruent font colour but facilitated in incongruent font colour, suggesting aesthetic perceptions of the font structures of Chinese words and pictographs were derived from their referential natural objects. The spontaneous generation hypothesis of beauty is proposed to account for these findings. © 2016 International Union of Psychological Science.

Early prefrontal brain responses to the Hedonic quality of emotional words--a simultaneous EEG and MEG study.

Science.gov (United States)

Keuper, Kati; Zwitserlood, Pienie; Rehbein, Maimu A; Eden, Annuschka S; Laeger, Inga; Junghöfer, Markus; Zwanzger, Peter; Dobel, Christian

2013-01-01

The hedonic meaning of words affects word recognition, as shown by behavioral, functional imaging, and event-related potential (ERP) studies. However, the spatiotemporal dynamics and cognitive functions behind are elusive, partly due to methodological limitations of previous studies. Here, we account for these difficulties by computing combined electro-magnetoencephalographic (EEG/MEG) source localization techniques. Participants covertly read emotionally high-arousing positive and negative nouns, while EEG and MEG were recorded simultaneously. Combined EEG/MEG current-density reconstructions for the P1 (80-120 ms), P2 (150-190 ms) and EPN component (200-300 ms) were computed using realistic individual head models, with a cortical constraint. Relative to negative words, the P1 to positive words predominantly involved language-related structures (left middle temporal and inferior frontal regions), and posterior structures related to directed attention (occipital and parietal regions). Effects shifted to the right hemisphere in the P2 component. By contrast, negative words received more activation in the P1 time-range only, recruiting prefrontal regions, including the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Effects in the EPN were not statistically significant. These findings show that different neuronal networks are active when positive versus negative words are processed. We account for these effects in terms of an "emotional tagging" of word forms during language acquisition. These tags then give rise to different processing strategies, including enhanced lexical processing of positive words and a very fast language-independent alert response to negative words. The valence-specific recruitment of different networks might underlie fast adaptive responses to both approach- and withdrawal-related stimuli, be they acquired or biological.

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.

WordPress Bible

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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.

Explaining first graders’ achievements in spelling and word separation in shallow orthographies

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Liliana Tolchinsky

2015-02-01

Full Text Available We examine the explanatory weight of child-related and contextual factors on first graders’ achievements in spelling and separation between words. The participants were 215 kindergartners, 113 boys and 102 girls (M = 5 years 4 months, SD = 4 months from both monolingual and bilingual communities in Spain. They were native speakers of Spanish in the monolingual communities and bilingual Spanish/Catalan or Spanish/Basque speakers in the bilingual communities and had Catalan and Basque, respectively, as the language of instruction. The three languages have shallow orthographies. Children were first examined in kindergarten in a number of literacy related abilities (e.g., knowledge of letters, writing to detect predictors of spelling and separation between words that were, in turn, evaluated at the end of first grade of elementary school. All the participants were assessed in their language of instruction. The best explanatory models were those including interactions among child-level factors and between these factors and contextual variables. Only knowledge of writing in kindergarten appeared as the common explanatory factor for first graders’ attainments. Attainments in spelling were predicted by children’s level of literacy and knowledge of letters moderated by parent’s education; performance in word separation was predicted by phonological awareness and vocabulary knowledge moderated by parental education. Teaching practices affected spelling performance but not learning to separate between words.

The Role of Emergent Bilingualism in the Development of Morphological Awareness in Arabic and Hebrew.

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Schwartz, Mila; Taha, Haitham; Assad, Hanan; Khamaisi, Ferdos; Eviatar, Zohar

2016-08-01

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the role of dual language development and cross-linguistic influence on morphological awareness in young bilinguals' first language (L1) and second language (L2). We examined whether (a) the bilingual children (L1/L2 Arabic and L1/L2 Hebrew) precede their monolingual Hebrew- or Arabic-speaking peers in L1 and L2 morphological awareness, and (b) 1 Semitic language (Arabic) has cross-linguistic influence on another Semitic language (Hebrew) in morphological awareness. The study sample comprised 93 six-year-old children. The bilinguals had attended bilingual Hebrew-Arabic kindergartens for 1 academic year and were divided into 2 groups: home language Hebrew (L1) and home language Arabic (L1). These groups were compared to age-matched monolingual Hebrew speakers and monolingual Arabic speakers. We used nonwords similar in structure to familiar words in both target languages, representing 6 inflectional morphological categories. L1 Arabic and L1 Hebrew bilinguals performed significantly better than Arabic- and Hebrew-speaking monolinguals in the respective languages. Differences were not found between the bilingual groups. We found evidence of cross-linguistic transfer of morphological awareness from Arabic to Hebrew in 2 categories-bound possessives and dual number-probably because these categories are more salient in Palestinian Spoken Arabic than in Hebrew. We conclude that children with even an initial exposure to L2 reveal acceleration of sensitivity to word structure in both of their languages. We suggest that this is due to the fact that two Semitic languages, Arabic and Hebrew, share a common core of linguistic features, together with favorable contextual factors and instructional factors.

Effectiveness of a Phonological Awareness Training Intervention on Word Recognition Ability of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Science.gov (United States)

Mohammed, Adel Abdulla; Mostafa, Amaal Ahmed

2012-01-01

This study describes an action research project designed to improve word recognition ability of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. A total of 47 children diagnosed as having Autism Spectrum Disorder using Autism Spectrum Disorder Evaluation Inventory (Mohammed, 2006), participated in this study. The sample was randomly divided into two…

Imageability and Transparency in Morphological Awareness: A Study of How Third-Grade Children Made Lemonade from Lemon

Science.gov (United States)

Wolter, Julie A.

2014-01-01

Morphological awareness has been established as important to literacy success, and as such, it is critical to study factors affecting children's performance on measures of this skill. Morphological transparency, or the clarity of the sound and letter pattern relationship between base words and their associated morphological forms, has been found…

Validating a Questionnaire Assessing Knowledge and Awareness of ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Rwanda Journal Series F: Medicine and Health Sciences Vol. 2 No. 2, 2015. Validating a Questionnaire Assessing Knowledge and Awareness of Emergen- cy Trolleys: Revisions Required to Account for Variances in a Low Resource. Setting. Charles Twagirayezu1, Stephanie Taylor1, Julie Pfeffer1. 1University Teaching ...

From Word Alignment to Word Senses, via Multilingual Wordnets

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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.

Associating LIPS and SWOLLEN: delayed attentional disengagement following words in sex contexts.

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Oosterwijk, Suzanne; van der Leij, Andries R; Rotteveel, Mark

2017-09-01

With a series of three studies, using an adapted dot-probe paradigm, we investigated the elicitation of spontaneous affective meaning. Although it is well established that humans show delays in disengaging their attention from conventional affective stimuli, it is unknown whether contextually acquired affective meaning similarly impacts attention. We examined attentional disengagement following pairs of neutral or slightly ambiguous words that in combination could evoke sex, violence or neutral associations. Study 1 demonstrated slower disengagement following words that conveyed sex or violence associations compared to words that conveyed neutral associations. This pattern was only present for participants who were aware of sex or violence associations. Study 2 replicated these results in a large sample, but only for sex associations. Study 3 replicated the effect while instructing participants explicitly to expect sex and violence associations. Finally, two control studies countered reasonable alternative explanations for our findings. Together, these studies show that contextually driven affective associations can arise quickly with the potential to influence attentional processes. These findings are consistent with theoretical models of emotion and language that highlight the importance of context in the generation of affective meaning.

Language Play and Linguistic Hybridity as Current Trends in Hungarian Word-Formation

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Réka Benczes

2016-01-01

Full Text Available Hungarian literature on word-formation typically focuses on rule-governed descriptions of regular and typologically relevant patterns. However, there are plenty of other word-formation trends that usually go unnoticed in mainstream morphological research. The present paper will focus on two such trends: 1 rhyming and alliterating compounds such as pannon puma ‘Pannonian puma’ (a euphemism for Hungary’s economic performance, on the analogy of Asian tiger; and 2 creative prefixations such as meggugliz (‘to google’ and felhájpol (‘to hype’. Although these are seemingly two quite different patterns, in fact they share two significant traits. On the one hand, they are demonstrations of the fact that language users make full use of the creative possibilities in language and routinely play with sounds and meanings. On the other hand, they are also indications of the influential role of English in present-day Hungarian word-formation. It seems that language users are not only aware of the possibilities that this interference can result in but are also able to exploit these consciously. This crossing of language boundaries is becoming increasingly inevitable with the global spread of English.

Conditions associated with wandering in people with dementia from the viewpoint of self-awareness: five case reports.

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Yokoi, Teruo; Aoyama, Keiji; Ishida, Kie; Okamura, Hitoshi

2012-05-01

The conditions associated with wandering in people with dementia include purposeless activity, purposeful actions, irritation, and symptoms of depression. The words and actions of 5 people admitted to long-term health care facilities who often exhibited wandering behavior were observed, and the above conditions were studied based on our self-awareness model (consisting of "theory of mind," "self-evaluation," and "self-consciousness"). One person who had not passed the theory of mind task but had passed the self-evaluation task was aware of her wandering. However, she could not understand where she wanted to go or for what purpose. Four persons who had not passed the self-evaluation tasks were not aware of their wandering and had no purpose for their wandering.

Banking Accounting Practices “Humanist” (P.31-38

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Nanang Shonhadji

2017-02-01

Full Text Available Humanism is a universal value that should be attached to all forms and operational activities of the bank because the bank’s main business is to provide service to humanity. The purpose of this study was to determine the humanist banking practice. The use of qualitative methods with a phenomenological approach that involve an account officer and marketing staff as key informants. In-depth interviews conducted to obtain comprehensive information. The results of the study informs that the banking practice in the lending and the funding activities were still oriented to material interests or to achieve maximum profit with unbalanced position. It caused the values of humanism in the form of truth and equitable negated by bank stakeholder. The results of this study also found that there are two forms of awareness is needed in the value of accountability in the process of funding and lending activities to customers humanistic were the awareness of responsibility to themselves and to God. Keywords: Humanism, Bank accounting, Phenomenology,Qualitative

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.

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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...

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

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Michelle eInkster

2016-03-01

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

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

Word frequency and the attentional blink: the effects of target difficulty on retrieval and consolidation processes.

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Stefan M Wierda

Full Text Available BACKGROUND: When a second target (T2 is presented in close succession of a first target (T1 within a stream of non-targets, people often fail to detect T2-a deficit known as the attentional blink (AB. Two types of theories can be distinguished that have tried to account for this phenomenon. Whereas attentional-control theories suggest that protection of consolidation processes induces the AB, limited-resource theories claim that the AB is caused by a lack of resources. According to the latter type of theories, increasing difficulty of one or both targets should increase the magnitude of the AB. Similarly, attentional-control theories predict that a difficult T1 increases the AB due to prolonged processing. However, the prediction for T2 is not as straightforward. Prolonged processing of T2 could cause conflicts and increase the AB. However, if consolidation of T2 is postponed without loss of identity, the AB might be attenuated. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Participants performed an AB task that consisted of a stream of distractor non-words and two target words. Difficulty of T1 and T2 was manipulated by varying word-frequency. Overall performance for high-frequency words was better than for low-frequency words. When T1 was highly frequent, the AB was reduced. The opposite effect was found for T2. When T2 was highly frequent, performance during the AB period was relatively worse than for a low-frequency T2. A threaded-cognition model of the AB was presented that simulated the observed pattern of behavior by taking changes in the time-course of retrieval and consolidation processes into account. Our results were replicated in a subsequent ERP study. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: The finding that a difficult low-frequency T2 reduces the magnitude of the AB is at odds with limited-resource accounts of the AB. However, it was successfully accounted for by the threaded-cognition model, thus providing an explanation in terms of attentional control.

Word frequency and the attentional blink: the effects of target difficulty on retrieval and consolidation processes.

Science.gov (United States)

Wierda, Stefan M; Taatgen, Niels A; van Rijn, Hedderik; Martens, Sander

2013-01-01

When a second target (T2) is presented in close succession of a first target (T1) within a stream of non-targets, people often fail to detect T2-a deficit known as the attentional blink (AB). Two types of theories can be distinguished that have tried to account for this phenomenon. Whereas attentional-control theories suggest that protection of consolidation processes induces the AB, limited-resource theories claim that the AB is caused by a lack of resources. According to the latter type of theories, increasing difficulty of one or both targets should increase the magnitude of the AB. Similarly, attentional-control theories predict that a difficult T1 increases the AB due to prolonged processing. However, the prediction for T2 is not as straightforward. Prolonged processing of T2 could cause conflicts and increase the AB. However, if consolidation of T2 is postponed without loss of identity, the AB might be attenuated. Participants performed an AB task that consisted of a stream of distractor non-words and two target words. Difficulty of T1 and T2 was manipulated by varying word-frequency. Overall performance for high-frequency words was better than for low-frequency words. When T1 was highly frequent, the AB was reduced. The opposite effect was found for T2. When T2 was highly frequent, performance during the AB period was relatively worse than for a low-frequency T2. A threaded-cognition model of the AB was presented that simulated the observed pattern of behavior by taking changes in the time-course of retrieval and consolidation processes into account. Our results were replicated in a subsequent ERP study. The finding that a difficult low-frequency T2 reduces the magnitude of the AB is at odds with limited-resource accounts of the AB. However, it was successfully accounted for by the threaded-cognition model, thus providing an explanation in terms of attentional control.

Teaching Cultural Taboos and Taboo Language for Intercultural Awareness and Understanding

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Georgeta Rata

2017-11-01

Full Text Available The goal of the paper is to show that language can support social and intercultural competence of both students and teachers: one of the ways to do it is teaching cultural taboos and taboo language for intercultural awareness and understanding. The current state of the art in the field points to an increasing interest in the teaching of taboos. The material we analysed consisted in 238 offensive, vulgar and obscene English words that both students and teachers should know to attain social and intercultural competence. The method used is the descriptive one. The degree of novelty is rather high in our cultural area. Results show that there are 134 offensive (slang words and expressions (referring to the country of origin or to an ethnic group, to sex and sex-related issues (sexual orientation, to race, etc., 75 vulgar words and expressions (referring to sex and sex-related issues, to body parts, to people, etc., and 29 obscene words and expressions (referring to body secretions, to sex and sex-related issues, to people, etc.. There seems to be no research limitations given the lexicographic sources that we used. The implications of teaching cultural taboos and taboo language at tertiary level concern both the students and teachers and the organisation they belong to. The paper is original and relevant given the process of globalisation.

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

Science.gov (United States)

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

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

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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.

Learning and Consolidation of New Spoken Words in Autism Spectrum Disorder

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Henderson, Lisa; Powell, Anna; Gaskell, M. Gareth; Norbury, Courtenay

2014-01-01

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by rich heterogeneity in vocabulary knowledge and word knowledge that is not well accounted for by current cognitive theories. This study examines whether individual differences in vocabulary knowledge in ASD might be partly explained by a difficulty with consolidating newly learned spoken words…

Word learning mechanisms.

Science.gov (United States)

He, Angela Xiaoxue; Arunachalam, Sudha

2017-07-01

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

Inflation - Adjusted Accounting and Corporate Value Redefinition ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

This paper, therefore, addresses the twisty advocacy and seeming intricacy of Inflation-Adjusted Accounting Systems (IAAS), with a view to illuminating the translational hurdles. The results abundantly necessitate the expeditious consolidation of a more robust framework to fix impending inhibitors such as lack of awareness, ...

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

MANAGEMENT ACCOUNTING FOR A PORTFOLIO OF PROJECTS TO SUPPORT ORGANISATIONAL VALUE MAXIMISATION

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P.J. Viljoen

2012-01-01

Full Text Available

ENGLISH ABSTRACT:The objective of management accounting is to provide management with the financial information that will enable them to make decisions that will result in increased profitability of their organisation. The management accounting of projects in a portfolio as proposed in the literature often presents major problems that prevent the achievement of this objective. These problems include how to estimate value in financial terms during the pre-project phase of the project life cycle as well as the difficulties with financial control of the portfolio of projects as they are conducted. A few case studies are presented highlighting, current practice and the negative effects being experienced. A simple throughput accounting model for the financial management of a portfolio of projects, that could lead to better management decisions and increased profitability of organisations, is proposed.

AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Die doelwit van bestuursrekeningkunde is om bestuur te voorsien met finansiële inligting wat hulle in staat stel om besluite te maak wat die winsgewendheid van die onderneming sal verbeter. Die bestuursrekeningkunde van 'n portefeulje van projekte wat in die literatuur voorgestel word, het 'n aantal probleme wat die bereiking van hierdie doelwit verhinder. Hierdie probleme sluit in hoe om ramings van waarde in finansiële terme te doen tydens die pre-projek fase van die projeklewenssiklus asook die probleme met finansiële beheer van die projekportefeulje soos dit uitgevoer word. ‘n Aantal gevallestudies word aangebied wat huidige praktyke en die negatiewe effekte wat ondervind word toelig. ‘n Eenvoudige deursetverrekeningsmodel vir die finansiële bestuur van ‘n projekportefeulje word voorgestel wat kan lei tot beter bestuursbesluite wat die winsgewendheid van ‘n onderneming sal verbeter.

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

Science.gov (United States)

Saint-Aubin, Jean; LeBlanc, Jacinthe

2005-12-01

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

Early Prefrontal Brain Responses to the Hedonic Quality of Emotional Words – A Simultaneous EEG and MEG Study

Science.gov (United States)

Keuper, Kati; Zwitserlood, Pienie; Rehbein, Maimu A.; Eden, Annuschka S.; Laeger, Inga; Junghöfer, Markus; Zwanzger, Peter; Dobel, Christian

2013-01-01

The hedonic meaning of words affects word recognition, as shown by behavioral, functional imaging, and event-related potential (ERP) studies. However, the spatiotemporal dynamics and cognitive functions behind are elusive, partly due to methodological limitations of previous studies. Here, we account for these difficulties by computing combined electro-magnetoencephalographic (EEG/MEG) source localization techniques. Participants covertly read emotionally high-arousing positive and negative nouns, while EEG and MEG were recorded simultaneously. Combined EEG/MEG current-density reconstructions for the P1 (80–120 ms), P2 (150–190 ms) and EPN component (200–300 ms) were computed using realistic individual head models, with a cortical constraint. Relative to negative words, the P1 to positive words predominantly involved language-related structures (left middle temporal and inferior frontal regions), and posterior structures related to directed attention (occipital and parietal regions). Effects shifted to the right hemisphere in the P2 component. By contrast, negative words received more activation in the P1 time-range only, recruiting prefrontal regions, including the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Effects in the EPN were not statistically significant. These findings show that different neuronal networks are active when positive versus negative words are processed. We account for these effects in terms of an “emotional tagging” of word forms during language acquisition. These tags then give rise to different processing strategies, including enhanced lexical processing of positive words and a very fast language-independent alert response to negative words. The valence-specific recruitment of different networks might underlie fast adaptive responses to both approach- and withdrawal-related stimuli, be they acquired or biological. PMID:23940642

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

Science.gov (United States)

Yip, Michael C.

2016-01-01

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

Word learning emerges from the interaction of online referent selection and slow associative learning

Science.gov (United States)

McMurray, Bob; Horst, Jessica S.; Samuelson, Larissa K.

2013-01-01

Classic approaches to word learning emphasize the problem of referential ambiguity: in any naming situation the referent of a novel word must be selected from many possible objects, properties, actions, etc. To solve this problem, researchers have posited numerous constraints, and inference strategies, but assume that determining the referent of a novel word is isomorphic to learning. We present an alternative model in which referent selection is an online process that is independent of long-term learning. This two timescale approach creates significant power in the developing system. We illustrate this with a dynamic associative model in which referent selection is simulated as dynamic competition between competing referents, and learning is simulated using associative (Hebbian) learning. This model can account for a range of findings including the delay in expressive vocabulary relative to receptive vocabulary, learning under high degrees of referential ambiguity using cross-situational statistics, accelerating (vocabulary explosion) and decelerating (power-law) learning rates, fast-mapping by mutual exclusivity (and differences in bilinguals), improvements in familiar word recognition with development, and correlations between individual differences in speed of processing and learning. Five theoretical points are illustrated. 1) Word learning does not require specialized processes – general association learning buttressed by dynamic competition can account for much of the literature. 2) The processes of recognizing familiar words are not different than those that support novel words (e.g., fast-mapping). 3) Online competition may allow the network (or child) to leverage information available in the task to augment performance or behavior despite what might be relatively slow learning or poor representations. 4) Even associative learning is more complex than previously thought – a major contributor to performance is the pruning of incorrect associations

WordPress for dummies

CERN Document Server

Sabin-Wilson, Lisa

2014-01-01

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

Reading Self-Efficacy Predicts Word Reading But Not Comprehension in Both Girls and Boys.

Science.gov (United States)

Carroll, Julia M; Fox, Amy C

2016-01-01

The relationship between cognitive skills and reading has been well-established. However, the role of motivational factors such as self-efficacy in reading progress is less clear. In particular, it is not clear how self-efficacy relates to word level reading versus comprehension, and whether this differs in boys and girls. This study examines the relationship between self-efficacy, word reading and reading comprehension across the range of reading abilities after controlling for reading-related cognitive factors. One hundred and seventy nine children (86 males and 93 females) between 8 and 11 years old completed a self-report measure of reading self-efficacy together with measures of reading comprehension and word reading, working memory, auditory short-term memory, phonological awareness, and vocabulary. Boys and girls showed similar levels of attainment and reading self-efficacy. Reading self-efficacy was associated with word reading, but not with reading comprehension in either boys or girls. It is argued that this may reflect important differences between reading self-efficacy and more general measures of reading motivation and engagement. Reading self-efficacy is an element of reading motivation that is closely associated with a child's perceived attainments in reading and is less susceptible to the gender differences seen in broader measures.

Reading Self-Efficacy Predicts Word Reading But Not Comprehension in Both Girls and Boys

Science.gov (United States)

Carroll, Julia M.; Fox, Amy C.

2017-01-01

The relationship between cognitive skills and reading has been well-established. However, the role of motivational factors such as self-efficacy in reading progress is less clear. In particular, it is not clear how self-efficacy relates to word level reading versus comprehension, and whether this differs in boys and girls. This study examines the relationship between self-efficacy, word reading and reading comprehension across the range of reading abilities after controlling for reading-related cognitive factors. One hundred and seventy nine children (86 males and 93 females) between 8 and 11 years old completed a self-report measure of reading self-efficacy together with measures of reading comprehension and word reading, working memory, auditory short-term memory, phonological awareness, and vocabulary. Boys and girls showed similar levels of attainment and reading self-efficacy. Reading self-efficacy was associated with word reading, but not with reading comprehension in either boys or girls. It is argued that this may reflect important differences between reading self-efficacy and more general measures of reading motivation and engagement. Reading self-efficacy is an element of reading motivation that is closely associated with a child’s perceived attainments in reading and is less susceptible to the gender differences seen in broader measures. PMID:28144223

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.

Food Allergies: Being Aware and Planning for Care

Science.gov (United States)

Graville, Iris

2010-01-01

In recent years, parents and early childhood educators have become increasingly aware of food allergies in childhood. And since food allergies account for about 150 deaths a year, there is good reason to be concerned. The early childhood program can provide valuable learning for those without food allergies through explanations about why certain…

Spatial models for context-aware indoor navigation systems: A survey

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Imad Afyouni

2012-06-01

Full Text Available This paper surveys indoor spatial models developed for research fields ranging from mobile robot mapping, to indoor location-based services (LBS, and most recently to context-aware navigation services applied to indoor environments. Over the past few years, several studies have evaluated the potential of spatial models for robot navigation and ubiquitous computing. In this paper we take a slightly different perspective, considering not only the underlying properties of those spatial models, but also to which degree the notion of context can be taken into account when delivering services in indoor environments. Some preliminary recommendations for the development of indoor spatial models are introduced from a context-aware perspective. A taxonomy of models is then presented and assessed with the aim of providing a flexible spatial data model for navigation purposes, and by taking into account the context dimensions.

Effectiveness of Context-Aware Character Input Method for Mobile Phone Based on Artificial Neural Network

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Masafumi Matsuhara

2012-01-01

Full Text Available Opportunities and needs are increasing to input Japanese sentences on mobile phones since performance of mobile phones is improving. Applications like E-mail, Web search, and so on are widely used on mobile phones now. We need to input Japanese sentences using only 12 keys on mobile phones. We have proposed a method to input Japanese sentences on mobile phones quickly and easily. We call this method number-Kanji translation method. The number string inputted by a user is translated into Kanji-Kana mixed sentence in our proposed method. Number string to Kana string is a one-to-many mapping. Therefore, it is difficult to translate a number string into the correct sentence intended by the user. The proposed context-aware mapping method is able to disambiguate a number string by artificial neural network (ANN. The system is able to translate number segments into the intended words because the system becomes aware of the correspondence of number segments with Japanese words through learning by ANN. The system does not need a dictionary. We also show the effectiveness of our proposed method for practical use by the result of the evaluation experiment in Twitter data.

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

Science.gov (United States)

Holbert, Sydney Margaret

2013-01-01

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

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

Science.gov (United States)

Bonnet, Adeline; Naveteur, Janick

2006-10-01

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

On universal partial words

OpenAIRE

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

2016-01-01

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

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.

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.

Awareness of breast cancer in women of an urban resettlement colony

OpenAIRE

Somdatta P; Baridalyne N

2008-01-01

Background: Breast cancer accounts for 19-34% of all cancer cases among women in India. There is a high mortality due to late stage diagnosis as patients usually present at an advanced stage because of lack of awareness and non-existent breast cancer screening programs. Aim : To determine the awareness about breast cancer among women in an urban resettlement colony in Delhi. Settings and Design: A community based, cross-sectional study carried out in a resettlement colony in South ...

Baby's first 10 words.

Science.gov (United States)

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

2008-07-01

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

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

NARCIS (Netherlands)

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

2011-01-01

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

Word wins over Face: Emotional Stroop effect activates the frontal cortical network

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Shima Ovaysikia

2011-01-01

Full Text Available The prefrontal cortex (PFC has been implicated in higher order cognitive control of behaviour. Sometimes such control is executed through suppression of an unwanted response in order to avoid conflict. Conflict occurs when two simultaneously competing processes lead to different behavioral outcomes, as seen in tasks such as the anti-saccade, go/no-go and the Stroop task. We set out to examine whether different types of stimuli in a modified emotional Stroop task would cause similar interference effects as the original Stroop-colour/word, and whether the required suppression mechanism(s would recruit similar regions of the medial PFC (mPFC. By using emotional words and emotional faces in this Stroop experiment, we examined the two well-learned automatic behaviours of word reading and recognition of face expressions. In our emotional Stroop paradigm, words were processed faster than face expressions with incongruent trials yielding longer reaction times (RT and larger number of errors compared to the congruent trials. This novel Stroop effect activated the anterior and inferior regions of the mPFC, namely the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC, inferior frontal gyrus (IFG as well as the superior frontal gyrus. Our results suggest that prepotent behaviours such as reading and recognition of face expressions are stimulus-dependent and perhaps hierarchical, hence recruiting distinct regions of the mPFC. Moreover, the faster processing of word reading compared to reporting face expressions is indicative of the formation of stronger stimulus-response (SR associations of an over-learned behaviour compared to an instinctive one, which could alternatively be explained through the distinction between awareness and selective attention.

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....

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…

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

Science.gov (United States)

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

2015-01-01

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

Development of Morphological Awareness and Vocabulary Knowledge in Spanish-Speaking Language Minority Learners: A Parallel Process Latent Growth Curve Model

Science.gov (United States)

Kieffer, Michael J.; Lesaux, Nonie K.

2012-01-01

Despite acknowledgement of the limited English vocabularies demonstrated by many language minority (LM) learners, few studies have identified skills that relate to variation in vocabulary growth in this population. This study investigated the concurrent development of morphological awareness (i.e., students' understanding of complex words as…

Emotional regulation and bodily sensation: interoceptive awareness is intact in borderline personality disorder.

Science.gov (United States)

Hart, Nova; McGowan, John; Minati, Ludovico; Critchley, Hugo D

2013-08-01

Emotional dysregulation is a core component of borderline personality disorder (BPD). Theoretical models suggest that deficits in labeling physiological sensations of emotion contribute to affective instability in BPD. Interoceptive awareness refers to the ability to perceive changes in internal bodily states, and is linked to the subjective experience and control of emotions. The authors tested whether differences in interoceptive awareness accounted for emotional instability in BPD. Patients diagnosed with BPD (n = 24) were compared to healthy controls (n = 30) on two established measures of interoceptive awareness, a heartbeat perception task and a heartbeat monitoring task. Contrary to their hypothesis, the authors observed no significant differences in objective measures of interoceptive awareness. Their findings provide strong evidence against the notion that difficulties in emotional regulation in BPD are connected to differences in interoceptive awareness.

Predicting word-recognition performance in noise by young listeners with normal hearing using acoustic, phonetic, and lexical variables.

Science.gov (United States)

McArdle, Rachel; Wilson, Richard H

2008-06-01

To analyze the 50% correct recognition data that were from the Wilson et al (this issue) study and that were obtained from 24 listeners with normal hearing; also to examine whether acoustic, phonetic, or lexical variables can predict recognition performance for monosyllabic words presented in speech-spectrum noise. The specific variables are as follows: (a) acoustic variables (i.e., effective root-mean-square sound pressure level, duration), (b) phonetic variables (i.e., consonant features such as manner, place, and voicing for initial and final phonemes; vowel phonemes), and (c) lexical variables (i.e., word frequency, word familiarity, neighborhood density, neighborhood frequency). The descriptive, correlational study will examine the influence of acoustic, phonetic, and lexical variables on speech recognition in noise performance. Regression analysis demonstrated that 45% of the variance in the 50% point was accounted for by acoustic and phonetic variables whereas only 3% of the variance was accounted for by lexical variables. These findings suggest that monosyllabic word-recognition-in-noise is more dependent on bottom-up processing than on top-down processing. The results suggest that when speech-in-noise testing is used in a pre- and post-hearing-aid-fitting format, the use of monosyllabic words may be sensitive to changes in audibility resulting from amplification.

Maximum Entropy, Word-Frequency, Chinese Characters, and Multiple Meanings

Science.gov (United States)

Yan, Xiaoyong; Minnhagen, Petter

2015-01-01

The word-frequency distribution of a text written by an author is well accounted for by a maximum entropy distribution, the RGF (random group formation)-prediction. The RGF-distribution is completely determined by the a priori values of the total number of words in the text (M), the number of distinct words (N) and the number of repetitions of the most common word (kmax). It is here shown that this maximum entropy prediction also describes a text written in Chinese characters. In particular it is shown that although the same Chinese text written in words and Chinese characters have quite differently shaped distributions, they are nevertheless both well predicted by their respective three a priori characteristic values. It is pointed out that this is analogous to the change in the shape of the distribution when translating a given text to another language. Another consequence of the RGF-prediction is that taking a part of a long text will change the input parameters (M, N, kmax) and consequently also the shape of the frequency distribution. This is explicitly confirmed for texts written in Chinese characters. Since the RGF-prediction has no system-specific information beyond the three a priori values (M, N, kmax), any specific language characteristic has to be sought in systematic deviations from the RGF-prediction and the measured frequencies. One such systematic deviation is identified and, through a statistical information theoretical argument and an extended RGF-model, it is proposed that this deviation is caused by multiple meanings of Chinese characters. The effect is stronger for Chinese characters than for Chinese words. The relation between Zipf’s law, the Simon-model for texts and the present results are discussed. PMID:25955175

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

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Habekost, Thomas; Petersen, Anders; Behrmann, Marlene

2014-01-01

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

WordPress For Dummies

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Sabin-Wilson, Lisa

2011-01-01

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

Word 2013 for dummies

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

Mechanisms of masked evaluative priming: task sets modulate behavioral and electrophysiological priming for picture and words differentially

OpenAIRE

Kiefer, Markus; Liegel, Nathalie; Zovko, Monika; Wentura, Dirk

2016-01-01

Research with the evaluative priming paradigm has shown that affective evaluation processes reliably influence cognition and behavior, even when triggered outside awareness. However, the precise mechanisms underlying such subliminal evaluative priming effects, response activation vs semantic processing, are matter of a debate. In this study, we determined the relative contribution of semantic processing and response activation to masked evaluative priming with pictures and words. To this end,...

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

Science.gov (United States)

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.

Energy literacy, awareness, and conservation behavior of residential households

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Brounen, Dirk; Kok, Nils; Quigley, John M.

2013-01-01

The residential sector accounts for one-fifth of global energy consumption, resulting from the requirements to heat, cool, and light residential dwellings. It is therefore not surprising that energy efficiency in the residential market has gained importance in recent years. In this paper, we examine awareness, literacy and behavior of households with respect to their residential energy expenditures. Using a detailed survey of 1721 Dutch households, we measure the extent to which consumers are aware of their energy consumption and whether they have taken measures to reduce their energy costs. Our results show that “energy literacy” and awareness among respondents is low: just 56% of the respondents are aware of their monthly charges for energy consumption, and 40% do not appropriately evaluate investment decisions in energy efficient equipment. We document that demographics and consumer attitudes towards energy conservation, but not energy literacy and awareness, have direct effects on behavior regarding heating and cooling of the home. The impact of a moderating factor, measured by thermostat settings, ultimately results in strong variation in the energy consumption of private consumers. - Highlights: • We use a detailed survey of 1,721 Dutch households to measure awareness and conservation behavior in energy consumption. • Energy literacy and awareness among residential households is low. • 40 percent of the sample does not appropriately evaluate investment decisions in energy efficient equipment • Demographics and consumer attitudes affect behavior regarding heating and cooling of a home

Using Internet search behavior to assess public awareness of protected wetlands.

Science.gov (United States)

Do, Yuno; Kim, Ji Yoon; Lineman, Maurice; Kim, Dong-Kyun; Joo, Gea-Jae

2015-02-01

Improving public awareness of protected wetlands facilitates sustainable wetland management, which depends on public participation. One way of gauging public interest is by tracking Internet search behavior (ISB). We assessed public awareness of issues related to protected wetland areas (PWAs) in South Korea by examining the frequencies of specific queries (PWAs, Ramsar, Upo wetland, Sunchon Bay, etc.) using relative search volumes (RSVs) obtained from an Internet search engine. RSV shows how many times a search term is used relative to a second search term during a specific period. Public awareness of PWAs changed from 2007 to 2013. Initially the majority of Internet searches were related to the most well-known tidal and inland wetlands Sunchon Bay and Upo wetlands, which are the largest existing wetlands in Korea with the greatest historical exposure. Public awareness, as reflected in RSVs, of wetlands increased significantly following PWA designation for the wetlands in 2008, which followed the Ramsar 10th Conference of Contracting Parties to the Convention on Wetlands (COP10) meeting. Public interest was strongly correlated to the number of news articles in the popular media, as evidenced by the increase in Internet searches for specific wetlands and words associated with specific wetlands. Correspondingly, the number of visitors to specific wetlands increased. To increase public interest in wetlands, wetland aspects that enhance wetland conservation should be promoted by the government and enhanced via public education. Our approach can be used to gauge public awareness and participation in a wide range of conservation efforts. © 2014 Society for Conservation Biology.

fMRI responses to Jung's Word Association Test: implications for theory, treatment and research.

Science.gov (United States)

Petchkovsky, Leon; Petchkovsky, Michael; Morris, Philip; Dickson, Paul; Montgomery, Danielle; Dwyer, Jonathan; Burnett, Patrick

2013-06-01

Jung's Word Association Test was performed under fMRI conditions by 12 normal subjects. Pooled complexed responses were contrasted against pooled neutral ones. The fMRI activation pattern of this generic 'complexed response' was very strong (corrected Z scores ranging from 4.90 to 5.69). The activation pattern in each hemisphere includes mirror neurone areas that track 'otherness' (perspectival empathy), anterior insula (both self-awareness and emotional empathy), and cingulated gyrus (self-awareness and conflict-monitoring). These are the sites described by Siegel and colleagues as the 'resonance circuitry' in the brain which is central to mindfulness (awareness of self) and empathy (sense of the other), negotiations between self awareness and the 'internal other'. But there is also an interhemispheric dialogue. Within 3 seconds, the left hemisphere over-rides the right (at least in our normal subjects). Mindfulness and empathy are central to good psychotherapy, and complexes can be windows of opportunity if left-brain hegemony is resisted. This study sets foundations for further research: (i) QEEG studies (with their finer temporal resolution) of complexed responses in normal subjects (ii) QEEG and fMRI studies of complexed responses in other conditions, like schizophrenia, PTSD, disorders of self organization. © 2013, The Society of Analytical Psychology.

Knowledge of Conditional Spelling Patterns Supports Word Spelling among Danish Fifth Graders

Science.gov (United States)

Nielsen, Anne-Mette Veber

2017-01-01

Graphotactic knowledge and word-specific orthographic knowledge have been shown to account for unique variance in concurrent spelling skills beyond phonological skills in the early school years.The present study examined whether knowledge of spelling patterns conditioned by phonological context would add to the concurrent prediction of spelling…

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.

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

Science.gov (United States)

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

Constructible Assessment for Situation Awareness in a Distributed C2 Environment

National Research Council Canada - National Science Library

Seet, Alfred W; Teh, Cheryl A; Soo, John K; Teo, Leonghwee

2004-01-01

.... This method is an adaptation of the Situation Awareness Global Assessment Technique (SAGAT) by M. R. Endsley (1995) that takes into account specific constraints for use in a field exercise, such as minimizing the level of intrusiveness...

Dynamical Interplay between Awareness and Epidemic Spreading in Multiplex Networks

Science.gov (United States)

Granell, Clara; Gómez, Sergio; Arenas, Alex

2013-09-01

We present the analysis of the interrelation between two processes accounting for the spreading of an epidemic, and the information awareness to prevent its infection, on top of multiplex networks. This scenario is representative of an epidemic process spreading on a network of persistent real contacts, and a cyclic information awareness process diffusing in the network of virtual social contacts between the same individuals. The topology corresponds to a multiplex network where two diffusive processes are interacting affecting each other. The analysis using a microscopic Markov chain approach reveals the phase diagram of the incidence of the epidemics and allows us to capture the evolution of the epidemic threshold depending on the topological structure of the multiplex and the interrelation with the awareness process. Interestingly, the critical point for the onset of the epidemics has a critical value (metacritical point) defined by the awareness dynamics and the topology of the virtual network, from which the onset increases and the epidemics incidence decreases.

Dynamical interplay between awareness and epidemic spreading in multiplex networks.

Science.gov (United States)

Granell, Clara; Gómez, Sergio; Arenas, Alex

2013-09-20

We present the analysis of the interrelation between two processes accounting for the spreading of an epidemic, and the information awareness to prevent its infection, on top of multiplex networks. This scenario is representative of an epidemic process spreading on a network of persistent real contacts, and a cyclic information awareness process diffusing in the network of virtual social contacts between the same individuals. The topology corresponds to a multiplex network where two diffusive processes are interacting affecting each other. The analysis using a microscopic Markov chain approach reveals the phase diagram of the incidence of the epidemics and allows us to capture the evolution of the epidemic threshold depending on the topological structure of the multiplex and the interrelation with the awareness process. Interestingly, the critical point for the onset of the epidemics has a critical value (metacritical point) defined by the awareness dynamics and the topology of the virtual network, from which the onset increases and the epidemics incidence decreases.

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…

Competing spreading processes on multiplex networks: awareness and epidemics.

Science.gov (United States)

Granell, Clara; Gómez, Sergio; Arenas, Alex

2014-07-01

Epidemiclike spreading processes on top of multilayered interconnected complex networks reveal a rich phase diagram of intertwined competition effects. A recent study by the authors [C. Granell et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 128701 (2013).] presented an analysis of the interrelation between two processes accounting for the spreading of an epidemic, and the spreading of information awareness to prevent infection, on top of multiplex networks. The results in the case in which awareness implies total immunization to the disease revealed the existence of a metacritical point at which the critical onset of the epidemics starts, depending on completion of the awareness process. Here we present a full analysis of these critical properties in the more general scenario where the awareness spreading does not imply total immunization, and where infection does not imply immediate awareness of it. We find the critical relation between the two competing processes for a wide spectrum of parameters representing the interaction between them. We also analyze the consequences of a massive broadcast of awareness (mass media) on the final outcome of the epidemic incidence. Importantly enough, the mass media make the metacritical point disappear. The results reveal that the main finding, i.e., existence of a metacritical point, is rooted in the competition principle and holds for a large set of scenarios.

Accounting for Financial Instruments in an Uncertain World

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Pucci, Richard

the IFRS 9 endorsement process in the European Union. Attention is directed towards broadening our awareness of the interplay among diverse actors in the revision of international accounting standards. Ultimately, it is hoped that the thesis will broaden extant understandings of the manner in which......This thesis explores the response of the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) to the 2008 financial crisis. At the onset of the crisis, the international accounting standard on financial instruments, IAS 39, was blamed for exacerbating the ill effects of the economic downturn...... accounting standard-setters cope with multiple and conflicting interests which crystallize in times of crisis. The project contributes to the literature on accounting standard-setting by further explicating three pertinent issues; namely, (1) how agreements are reached in the critical moments of standard...

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

Science.gov (United States)

Debruille, J B

1998-04-01

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

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

Science.gov (United States)

Icht, Michal; Ben-David, Boaz M

2015-02-01

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

Ins-Robust Primitive Words

OpenAIRE

Srivastava, Amit Kumar; Kapoor, Kalpesh

2017-01-01

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

Morphological awareness intervention with kindergartners and first and second grade students from low SES homes: a small efficacy study.

Science.gov (United States)

Apel, Kenn; Diehm, Emily

2014-01-01

We investigated the efficacy of a morphological awareness intervention on the morphological awareness and reading skills of students from low-socioeconomic-status homes; we also examined whether the intervention was similarly effective for intervention students who differed in their initial morphological awareness abilities. The 8-week intervention was designed to increase awareness of affixes and the relations between base words and their inflected and derived forms for kindergarteners (n = 27) and first- (n = 22) and second-grade (n = 26) students. Students randomly assigned to the small group intervention were provided instruction four times a week, 25 min a day, whereas students assigned to the control group received "business as usual." Kindergarten and first- and second-grade students receiving the intervention showed statistically significant gains in morphological awareness with large effect sizes on most measures. Students in all three grades who received the intervention demonstrated nonsignificant gains in literacy abilities with null to small effect sizes. Further, students with low morphological awareness abilities at the onset of the study demonstrated similar gains from the intervention as their peers with typical morphological awareness abilities. Our results suggest that explicit morphological awareness instruction may produce gains of practical importance to young elementary students at risk for future literacy difficulties.

The Emergence of Visual Awareness: Temporal Dynamics in Relation to Task and Mask Type

Science.gov (United States)

Kiefer, Markus; Kammer, Thomas

2017-01-01

One aspect of consciousness phenomena, the temporal emergence of visual awareness, has been subject of a controversial debate. How can visual awareness, that is the experiential quality of visual stimuli, be characterized best? Is there a sharp discontinuous or dichotomous transition between unaware and fully aware states, or does awareness emerge gradually encompassing intermediate states? Previous studies yielded conflicting results and supported both dichotomous and gradual views. It is well conceivable that these conflicting results are more than noise, but reflect the dynamic nature of the temporal emergence of visual awareness. Using a psychophysical approach, the present research tested whether the emergence of visual awareness is context-dependent with a temporal two-alternative forced choice task. During backward masking of word targets, it was assessed whether the relative temporal sequence of stimulus thresholds is modulated by the task (stimulus presence, letter case, lexical decision, and semantic category) and by mask type. Four masks with different similarity to the target features were created. Psychophysical functions were then fitted to the accuracy data in the different task conditions as a function of the stimulus mask SOA in order to determine the inflection point (conscious threshold of each feature) and slope of the psychophysical function (transition from unaware to aware within each feature). Depending on feature-mask similarity, thresholds in the different tasks were highly dispersed suggesting a graded transition from unawareness to awareness or had less differentiated thresholds indicating that clusters of features probed by the tasks quite simultaneously contribute to the percept. The latter observation, although not compatible with the notion of a sharp all-or-none transition between unaware and aware states, suggests a less gradual or more discontinuous emergence of awareness. Analyses of slopes of the fitted psychophysical functions

Remembering New Words: Integrating Early Memory Development into Word Learning

OpenAIRE

Wojcik, Erica H.

2013-01-01

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

English words structure, history, usage

CERN Document Server

Katamba, Francis

2015-01-01

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

Surveillance indicators for potential reduced exposure products (PREPs: developing survey items to measure awareness

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

McNeill Ann

2009-10-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Over the past decade, tobacco companies have introduced cigarettes and smokeless tobacco products (known as Potential Reduced Exposure Products, PREPs with purportedly lower levels of some toxins than conventional cigarettes and smokeless products. It is essential that public health agencies monitor awareness, interest, use, and perceptions of these products so that their impact on population health can be detected at the earliest stages. Methods This paper reviews and critiques existing strategies for measuring awareness of PREPs from 16 published and unpublished studies. From these measures, we developed new surveillance items and subjected them to two rounds of cognitive testing, a common and accepted method for evaluating questionnaire wording. Results Our review suggests that high levels of awareness of PREPs reported in some studies are likely to be inaccurate. Two likely sources of inaccuracy in awareness measures were identified: 1 the tendency of respondents to misclassify "no additive" and "natural" cigarettes as PREPs and 2 the tendency of respondents to mistakenly report awareness as a result of confusion between PREPs brands and similarly named familiar products, for example, Eclipse chewing gum and Accord automobiles. Conclusion After evaluating new measures with cognitive interviews, we conclude that as of winter 2006, awareness of reduced exposure products among U.S. smokers was likely to be between 1% and 8%, with the higher estimates for some products occurring in test markets. Recommended measurement strategies for future surveys are presented.

Surveillance indicators for potential reduced exposure products (PREPs): developing survey items to measure awareness

Science.gov (United States)

Bogen, Karen; Biener, Lois; Garrett, Catherine A; Allen, Jane; Cummings, K Michael; Hartman, Anne; Marcus, Stephen; McNeill, Ann; O'Connor, Richard J; Parascandola, Mark; Pederson, Linda

2009-01-01

Background Over the past decade, tobacco companies have introduced cigarettes and smokeless tobacco products (known as Potential Reduced Exposure Products, PREPs) with purportedly lower levels of some toxins than conventional cigarettes and smokeless products. It is essential that public health agencies monitor awareness, interest, use, and perceptions of these products so that their impact on population health can be detected at the earliest stages. Methods This paper reviews and critiques existing strategies for measuring awareness of PREPs from 16 published and unpublished studies. From these measures, we developed new surveillance items and subjected them to two rounds of cognitive testing, a common and accepted method for evaluating questionnaire wording. Results Our review suggests that high levels of awareness of PREPs reported in some studies are likely to be inaccurate. Two likely sources of inaccuracy in awareness measures were identified: 1) the tendency of respondents to misclassify "no additive" and "natural" cigarettes as PREPs and 2) the tendency of respondents to mistakenly report awareness as a result of confusion between PREPs brands and similarly named familiar products, for example, Eclipse chewing gum and Accord automobiles. Conclusion After evaluating new measures with cognitive interviews, we conclude that as of winter 2006, awareness of reduced exposure products among U.S. smokers was likely to be between 1% and 8%, with the higher estimates for some products occurring in test markets. Recommended measurement strategies for future surveys are presented. PMID:19840394

The minimal energetic requirement of sustained awareness after brain injury

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Stender, Johan; Mortensen, Kristian Nygaard; Thibaut, Aurore

2016-01-01

of glucose has been proposed as an indicator of consciousness [2 and 3]. Likewise, FDG-PET may contribute to the clinical diagnosis of disorders of consciousness (DOCs) [4 and 5]. However, current methods are non-quantitative and have important drawbacks deriving from visually guided assessment of relative...... changes in brain metabolism [4]. We here used FDG-PET to measure resting state brain glucose metabolism in 131 DOC patients to identify objective quantitative metabolic indicators and predictors of awareness. Quantitation of images was performed by normalizing to extracerebral tissue. We show that 42......% of normal cortical activity represents the minimal energetic requirement for the presence of conscious awareness. Overall, the cerebral metabolic rate accounted for the current level, or imminent return, of awareness in 94% of the patient population, suggesting a global energetic threshold effect...

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

Science.gov (United States)

Malliet, Gineva M.

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

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

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Roelofs, A.P.A.

2007-01-01

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

Awareness of breast cancer in women of an urban resettlement colony.

Science.gov (United States)

Somdatta, P; Baridalyne, N

2008-01-01

Breast cancer accounts for 19-34% of all cancer cases among women in India. There is a high mortality due to late stage diagnosis as patients usually present at an advanced stage because of lack of awareness and non-existent breast cancer screening programs. Aim : To determine the awareness about breast cancer among women in an urban resettlement colony in Delhi. A community based, cross-sectional study carried out in a resettlement colony in South Delhi. Semi-structured interview schedule was used to collect information regarding breast cancer. Modified Kuppuswamy scale was used for assessing the socio-economic status. A total of 333 women were included. The mean age was 36 years+/-15.1 and 46% were illiterate. Only 185 (56%) women were aware of breast cancer; among them, 51% knew about at least one of the signs /symptoms, 53% were aware that breast cancer can be detected early, and only 35% mentioned about risk factors. Thus, awareness about breast cancer is low amongst women in this community. There is a need for awareness generation programs to educate women about breast cancer, propagation of correct messages and promote early detection of breast cancer.

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

Science.gov (United States)

Mani, Nivedita; Huettig, Falk

2014-10-01

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

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

Science.gov (United States)

Buz, Esteban; Jaeger, T Florian

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

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).

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).