Search

Scientific literature, as the major medium that carries knowledge between scientists, exhibits explosive growth in the last century. Despite the frequent use of many tangible measures, to quantify the influence of literature from different perspectives, it remains unclear how knowledge is embodied and measured among tremendous scientific productivity, as knowledge underlying scientific literature is abstract and difficult to concretize. In this regard, there has laid a vacancy in the theoretical embodiment of knowledge for their evaluation and excavation. Here, for the first time, we quantify the knowledge from the perspective of information structurization and define a new measure of knowledge quantification index (KQI) that leverages the extent of disorder difference caused by hierarchical structure in the citation network to represent knowledge production in the literature. Built upon 214 million articles, published from 1800 to 2021, KQI is demonstrated for mining influential classics and laureates that are omitted by traditional metrics, thanks to in-depth utilization of structure. Due to the additivity of entropy and the interconnectivity of the network, KQI assembles numerous scientific impact metrics into one and gains interpretability and resistance to manipulation. In addition, KQI explores a new perspective regarding knowledge measurement through entropy and structure, utilizing structure rather than semantics to avoid ambiguity and attain applicability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study examined how working memory functions in the underlying mechanism of the lexical disambiguation process (in activation approach or in inhibition approach). We recruited sixty native Cantonese listeners to participate in two experimental tasks: (a) a Cantonese-version reading span task to measure their working memory (WM) capacity and (b) a standard cross-modal priming task to measure the lexical disambiguation time. The results revealed that (1) the underlying mechanism of the disambiguation process seemed favorable for an inhibition approach and (2) the frequency of the individual meanings of the ambiguous words and the numbers of their meanings might interact with the WM capacity during lexical access, particularly for the low-WM span group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rodd et al. (2016) report that recreational rowers' acquisition of sport-related terminology affected their interpretation of words that have both rowing-related and non-rowing-related meanings (e.g., crab). The extent to which the rowing- and non-rowing-related meanings were accessible to the participants depended on experiential factors, such as how long the participant had been a rower, and how long it had been since they last rowed. We present two experiments that attempt to replicate these findings with another group of hobbyists, namely video game players. Experiment 1 examined the differences in word meaning choice between gamers and non-gamers. Participation in video-gaming lead to participants generating more gaming-related word meanings in a word association task. Experiment 2 further examined the effects of video gaming experience on the lexical representation of gaming-related words. Participants who had spent more years as gamers were more likely to produce gaming-related word meanings in a word association task. The effect of time spent gaming was no longer significant when we took into account whether the participant engaged with video-game related media (such as YouTube channels or gaming-related message boards). This finding helps us to refine our understanding of the results reported by Rodd et al. (2016), suggesting that it may not be the time spent in an activity that affects the interpretation of ambiguous words, but rather the specific exposure to activity-related vocabulary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a self-paced reading study on German sluicing, Paape (Paape, 2016) found that reading times were shorter at the ellipsis site when the antecedent was a temporarily ambiguous garden-path structure. As a post-hoc explanation of this finding, Paape assumed that the antecedent’s memory representation was reactivated during syntactic reanalysis, making it easier to retrieve. In two eye tracking experiments, we subjected the reactivation hypothesis to further empirical scrutiny. Experiment 1, carried out in French, showed no evidence in favor in the reactivation hypothesis. Instead, results for one out of the three types of garden-path sentences that were tested suggest that subjects sometimes failed to resolve the temporary ambiguity in the antecedent clause, and subsequently failed to resolve the ellipsis. The results of Experiment 2, a conceptual replication of Paape’s (Paape, 2016) original study carried out in German, are compatible with the reactivation hypothesis, but leave open the possibility that the observed speedup for ambiguous antecedents may be due to occasional retrievals of an incorrect structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded to investigate lexical ambiguity resolution during sentence processing in 16 people with Parkinson’s disease (PD) and 16 healthy controls. Sentences were presented word-by-word on computer screen, and participants were required to decide if a subsequent target word was related to the meaning of the sentence. The task consisted of related, unrelated and ambiguous trials. For the ambiguous trials, the sentence ended with an ambiguous word and the target was related to one of the meanings of that word, but not the one captured by the sentence context (e.g., ‘He dug with the spade’, Target ‘ACE’). Both groups demonstrated slower reaction times and lower accuracy for the ambiguous condition relative to the unrelated condition, however accuracy was impacted by the ambiguous condition to a larger extent in the PD group. These results suggested that PD patients experience increased difficulties with contextual ambiguity resolution. The ERP results did not reflect increased ambiguity resolution difficulties in PD, as a similar N400 effect was evident for the unrelated and ambiguous condition in both groups. However, the magnitude of the N400 for these conditions was correlated with a measure of inhibition in the PD group, but not the control group. The ERP results suggest that semantic processing may be more compromised in PD patients with increased response inhibition deficits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When asked to indicate which items from a set of candidates belong to a particular natural language category inter-individual differences occur: Individuals disagree which items should be considered category members. The premise of this paper is that these inter-individual differences in semantic categorization reflect both ambiguity and vagueness. Categorization differences are said to be due to ambiguity when individuals employ different criteria for categorization. For instance, individuals may disagree whether hiking or darts is the better example of sports because they emphasize respectively whether an activity is strenuous and whether rules apply. Categorization differences are said to be due to vagueness when individuals employ different cut-offs for separating members from non-members. For instance, the decision to include hiking in the sports category or not, may hinge on how strenuous different individuals require sports to be. This claim is supported by the application of a mixture model to categorization data for eight natural language categories. The mixture model can identify latent groups of categorizers who regard different items likely category members (i.e., ambiguity) with categorizers within each of the groups differing in their propensity to provide membership responses (i.e., vagueness). The identified subgroups are shown to emphasize different sets of category attributes when making their categorization decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]