Search

We evaluated the effects of a discrimination training procedure for establishing praise as a reinforcer for three children with autism spectrum disorder. After establishing two praise words as discriminative stimuli and two nonsense words as S‐deltas, we evaluated whether the stimuli then functioned as reinforcers by presenting each stimulus as a consequence for a new response. The results demonstrated that previously neutral praise words functioned as reinforcers and nonsense words did not. As in previous studies on establishing reinforcers, the effects were transitory, and praise words did not continue to function as reinforcers after repeated exposure without discrimination training. Recommendations are provided for future research and maintaining reinforcement effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Vocabulary learning in a second language (L2) encompasses crucial aspects, including single words and collocations. Research indicates that L2 learners can incidentally learn single words from captioned videos, but less is known about the incidental learning outcomes of collocations, let alone the differences in learning gains for single words and collocations under different captioned conditions, as well as individual differences that may account for such differences. Objectives: This study aimed to fill this gap by comparing the learning gains of single words and collocations while investigating the influence of vocabulary knowledge (VK) and working memory (WM) on the learning results within diverse forms of captioning conditions: full captions, keyword captions, and no captions. Methods: The study involved 129 young Chinese ESL learners who completed vocabulary tests assessing their meaning recall before, immediately after, and 2 weeks after the study, as well as tests for VK and WM. Results and Conclusions: The results showed that full captions are the most efficacious condition for enhancing both single word and collocation learning. The depth of VK, as well as phonological and complex WM, were significant factors in the learning of new language items. Takeaways: Different types of captioning (full or keyword) contribute differently to the learning of various language items. Individual differences in WM and depth of VK among learners should be considered when utilizing captioned videos for language learning. Lay Description: What is already known about this topic: The type of captions employed does influence incidental single word learning.Incidental collocation learning from captioned videos is worth to be investigated due to the essential role of collocation knowledge in L2 development and the limited classroom time.The breadth of prior vocabulary knowledge (VK) does impact the incidental learning of single words across different captioned conditions. However, the findings remain inconclusive.Working memory (WM) plays a vital role in single word learning. However, limited emphasis has been placed on the examination of how WM affects the incidental learning of collocations across various captioning conditions. What this paper adds: Different captioned conditions play different roles in the incidental learning of different language units: single word learning benefits most from full captioning, whereas both full and keyword captioning lead to significant improvements in incidental collocation learning.The depth of VK is a key determinant of both single word and collocation learning from captioned videos, but its impact is greater for collocations.The breadth of VK is more relevant to collocation learning than single word learning.Both phonological and complex WM play an important role in learning both single words and collocations, but their contribution is greater for collocations. Implications for practice and/or policy: L2 policymakers can incorporate short storytelling videos into the EFL curriculum to facilitate vocabulary learning among young learners and ultimately enhance their L2 proficiency.Teachers can strategically design and implement various types of captioned videos (full or keyword) as out‐of‐class extensive viewing activities, targeting different language components such as single words and collocations.Teachers should be mindful of individual differences (e.g., VK and WM) among learners when utilizing captioned videos for language learning, particularly when it comes to incidental collocation learning.Parents are encouraged to include short storytelling videos with captions as part of their children's home entertainment activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Recent research has documented individual differences in the reading profiles of skilled native English readers using a behavioural marker of holistic visual word processing (orientation sensitivity). A more holistic word reading profile is associated with a weaker correlation with phonological decoding for word identification. Interestingly, that is different from typical patterns in skilled reading in English. The current study aimed to further assess the underlying distribution of orientation sensitivity as a continuous measure in an unrestricted undergraduate population and to extend past findings to understand the role of phonological decoding in reading comprehension as a function of orientation sensitivity. Methods: A group of 137 SUNY New Paltz undergraduates completed an orientation sensitivity test to assess the overarching distribution. A subset of 55 SUNY New Paltz undergraduates completed additional reading‐related tests (phonological decoding and reading comprehension) on an online platform (findingfive.com). The relationship between orientation sensitivity and reliance on phonological decoding on reading comprehension was assessed using regression. Results: Results found that the distribution of orientation sensitivity was not normal and skews to the right, but is not bimodal, thus warranting the use of regression instead of group statistics. Lastly, those with relatively greater orientation sensitivity had a weaker relationship between measures of phonological decoding and a reading comprehension measure, as predicted. Conclusions: The results extended the finding of differences in reliance on phonological decoding to reading comprehension as a function of orientation sensitivity. These results help refine our understanding of orientation sensitive readers and potential alternative route to successful reading found in the general population. Highlights: What is already known about this topicOrientation sensitivity has been used as a measure of holistic orthographic coding.High orientation sensitivity was associated with a weaker correlation between sublexical phonological processing and word identification. What this paper addsRegression is a valid way to examine orientation sensitivity given the distribution of individual differences in the general population of skilled college readers.Greater orientation sensitivity was linked to a weaker correlation with phonological decoding at the level of comprehension, independent of reading skill. Implications for theory, policy or practiceSensitivity to orientation, and holistic orthographic coding, can be used to identify individual differences in readers who employ an atypical route to skilled reading that relies relatively less on phonological processing.This reading profile exists in the general population and is not necessarily linked to reading skill.Due to the decrease in reliance on phonological processing, understanding this naturally occurring reading profile could be relevant to understanding alternative routes to literacy for those with deficits in phonological processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existing abstractive text summarisation models only consider the word sequence correlations between the source document and the reference summary, and the summary generated by models lacks the cover of the subject of source document due to models' small perspective. In order to make up these disadvantages, a multi‐domain attention pointer (MDA‐Pointer) abstractive summarisation model is proposed in this work. First, the model uses bidirectional long short‐term memory to encode, respectively, the word and sentence sequence of source document for obtaining the semantic representations at word and sentence level. Furthermore, the multi‐domain attention mechanism between the semantic representations and the summary word is established, and the proposed model can generate summary words under the proposed attention mechanism based on the words and sentences. Then, the words are extracted from the vocabulary or the original word sequences through the pointer network to form the summary, and the coverage mechanism is introduced, respectively, into word and sentence level to reduce the redundancy of summary content. Finally, experiment validation is conducted on CNN/Daily Mail dataset. ROUGE evaluation indexes of the model without and with the coverage mechanism are improved respectively, and the results verify the validation of model proposed by this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is the term used to identify those individuals with subjective and objective cognitive decline but with preserved activities of daily living and an absence of dementia. Although MCI can impact functioning in different cognitive domains, most notably episodic memory, relatively little is known about the comprehension of language in MCI. In this study, we used around‐the‐ear electrodes (cEEGrids) to identify impairments during language comprehension in patients with MCI. In a group of 23 patients with MCI and 23 age‐matched controls, language comprehension was tested in a two‐word phrase paradigm. We examined the oscillatory changes following word onset as a function of lexico‐semantic single‐word retrieval (e.g., swrfeq vs. swift) and multiword binding processes (e.g., horse preceded by swift vs. preceded by swrfeq). Electrophysiological signatures (as measured by the cEEGrids) were significantly different between patients with MCI and controls. In controls, lexical retrieval was associated with a rebound in the alpha/beta range, and binding was associated with a post‐word alpha/beta suppression. In contrast, both the single‐word retrieval and multiword binding signatures were absent in the MCI group. The signatures observed using cEEGrids in controls were comparable with those signatures obtained with a full‐cap EEG setup. Importantly, our findings suggest that patients with MCI have impaired electrophysiological signatures for comprehending single words and multiword phrases. Moreover, cEEGrid setups provide a noninvasive and sensitive clinical tool for detecting early impairments in language comprehension in MCI. Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) impacts functioning in different cognitive domains, although less is known about the comprehension of language. By examining oscillatory activity, we find evidence of deficits during language processing in MCI (compared with age‐matched controls) in the absence of overt behavioral performance decline. The deficits are at the level of retrieval for single words, as well as binding the meaning for multiple words. Our findings suggest that cognitive systems other than memory are impacted by MCI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies on parallel processing of words have demonstrated that the orthographic properties of multiple words can be processed simultaneously. However, whether parallel lexical processing (which requires attentional allocation towards a subsequent N + 1 word) is possible has been much debated. We examined this controversy in the Japanese language with the flanker lexical decision task and investigated whether the deployment of attention changed after priming with horizontal reading. Participants allocated to the priming group read short passages written in Japanese before the flanker task. The results showed that the parallel processing of a lexical property was observed after priming, which implicates that reading facilitates the attentional allocation to the right during the processing of a current word. The results suggested that strategies to allocate attention to the right are at work during reading. Furthermore, the current study points to the possibility that word processing during reading can be assessed by combining the priming procedure and flanker lexical decision task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies on parallel processing of words have demonstrated that the orthographic properties of multiple words can be processed simultaneously. However, whether parallel lexical processing (which requires attentional allocation towards a subsequent N + 1 word) is possible has been much debated. We examined this controversy in the Japanese language with the flanker lexical decision task and investigated whether the deployment of attention changed after priming with horizontal reading. Participants allocated to the priming group read short passages written in Japanese before the flanker task. The results showed that the parallel processing of a lexical property was observed after priming, which implicates that reading facilitates the attentional allocation to the right during the processing of a current word. The results suggested that strategies to allocate attention to the right are at work during reading. Furthermore, the current study points to the possibility that word processing during reading can be assessed by combining the priming procedure and flanker lexical decision task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to describe how humans represent meaning in the brain, one must be able to account for not just concrete words but, critically, also abstract words, which lack a physical referent. Hebbian formalism and optimization are basic principles of brain function, and they provide an appealing approach for modeling word meanings based on word co‐occurrences. We provide proof of concept that a statistical model of the semantic space can account for neural representations of both concrete and abstract words, using MEG. Here, we built a statistical model using word embeddings extracted from a text corpus. This statistical model was used to train a machine learning algorithm to successfully decode the MEG signals evoked by written words. In the model, word abstractness emerged from the statistical regularities of the language environment. Representational similarity analysis further showed that this salient property of the model co‐varies, at 280–420 ms after visual word presentation, with activity in regions that have been previously linked with processing of abstract words, namely the left‐hemisphere frontal, anterior temporal and superior parietal cortex. In light of these results, we propose that the neural encoding of word meanings can arise through statistical regularities, that is, through grounding in language itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The response process of problem‐solving items contains rich information about respondents' behaviours and cognitive process in the digital tasks, while the information extraction is a big challenge. The aim of the study is to use a data‐driven approach to explore the latent states and state transitions underlying problem‐solving process to reflect test‐takers' behavioural patterns, and to investigate how these states and state transitions could be associated with test‐takers' performance. We employed the Hidden Markov Modelling approach to identify test takers' hidden states during the problem‐solving process and compared the frequency of states and/or state transitions between different performance groups. We conducted comparable studies in two problem‐solving items with a focus on the US sample that was collected in PIAAC 2012, and examined the correlation between those frequencies from two items. Latent states and transitions between them underlying the problem‐solving process were identified and found significantly different by performance groups. The groups with correct responses in both items were found more engaged in tasks and more often to use efficient tools to solve problems, while the group with incorrect responses was found more likely to use shorter action sequences and exhibit hesitative behaviours. Consistent behavioural patterns were identified across items. This study demonstrates the value of data‐driven based HMM approach to better understand respondents' behavioural patterns and cognitive transmissions underneath the observable action sequences in complex problem‐solving tasks. Lay Description: What is already known about this topic?: Process data of interactive problem‐solving tasks contains rich information about test‐takers.To extract underlying information from process data is a big challenge. ​ What this paper adds?: The hidden Markov model helps identify latent states underlying problem‐solving process.Different performance groups displayed different behaviour characteristics.A consistent behavioural pattern was observed across problem‐solving items. ​ Implications for practitioners: The use of HMM holds promise in better visualize and understand behaviour patterns in response process.HMM is potential in understanding cognitive transmissions underneath the observable action sequences. ​ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cerebellar deficit hypothesis of dyslexia posits that dysfunction of the cerebellum is the underlying cause for reading difficulties observed in this common learning disability. The present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and a single word processing task to test for differences in activity and connectivity in children with (n = 23) and without (n = 23) dyslexia. We found cerebellar activity in the control group when word processing was compared to fixation, but not when it was compared to the active baseline task designed to reveal activity specific to reading. In the group with dyslexia there was no cerebellar activity for either contrasts and there were no differences when they were compared to children without dyslexia. Turning to functional connectivity (FC) in the controls, background FC (i.e., not specific to reading) was predominately found between the cerebellum and the occipitaltemporal cortex. In the group with dyslexia, there was background FC between the cerebellum and several cortical regions. When comparing the two groups, they differed in background FC in connections between the seed region right crus I and three left‐hemisphere perisylvian target regions. However, there was no task‐specific FC for word processing in either group and no between‐group differences. Together the results do not support the theory that the cerebellum is affected functionally during reading in children with dyslexia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigations into the neural basis of reading have shed light on the cortical locus and the functional role of visual‐orthographic processing. Yet, the fine‐grained structure of neural representations subserving reading remains to be clarified. Here, we capitalize on the spatiotemporal structure of electroencephalography (EEG) data to examine if and how EEG patterns can serve to decode and reconstruct the internal representation of visually presented words in healthy adults. Our results show that word classification and image reconstruction were accurate well above chance, that their temporal profile exhibited an early onset, soon after 100 ms, and peaked around 170 ms. Further, reconstruction results were well explained by a combination of visual‐orthographic word properties. Last, systematic individual differences were detected in orthographic representations across participants. Collectively, our results establish the feasibility of EEG‐based word decoding and image reconstruction. More generally, they help to elucidate the specific features, dynamics, and neurocomputational principles underlying word recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: We introduce an approach for explicitly revealing changes between versions of a visualization workbook to support version comparison tasks. Visualization authors may need to understand version changes for a variety of reasons, analogous to document editing. An author who has been away for a while may need to catch up on the changes made by their co‐author, or a person responsible for formatting compliance may need to check formatting changes that occurred since the last time they reviewed the work. We introduce ChangeCatcher, a prototype tool to help people find and understand changes in a visualization workbook, specifically, a Tableau workbook. Our design is based on interviews we conducted with experts to investigate user needs and practices around version comparison. ChangeCatcher provides an overview of changes across six categories, and employs a multi‐level details‐on‐demand approach to progressively reveal details. Our qualitative study showed that ChangeCatcher's methods for explicitly revealing and categorizing version changes were helpful in version comparison tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One way to improve automatic speech recognition (ASR) performance on the latest mobile devices, which can be employed on a variety of noisy environments, consists of taking advantage of the small microphone arrays embedded in them. Since the performance of the classic beamforming techniques with small microphone arrays is rather limited, specific techniques are being developed to efficiently exploit this novel feature for noise‐robust ASR purposes. In this study, a novel dual‐channel minimum mean square error‐based feature compensation method relying on a vector Taylor series (VTS) expansion of a dual‐channel speech distortion model is proposed. In contrast to the single‐channel VTS approach (which can be considered as the state‐of‐the‐art for feature compensation), the authors' technique particularly benefits from the spatial properties of speech and noise. Their proposal is assessed on a dual‐microphone smartphone (a particular case of interest) by means of the AURORA2‐2C synthetic corpus. Word recognition results, also validated with real noisy speech data, demonstrate the higher accuracy of their method by clearly outperforming minimum variance distortionless response beamforming and a single‐channel VTS feature compensation approach, especially at low signal‐to‐noise ratios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food-related attentional bias refers that individuals typically prioritize rewarding food-related cues (e.g. food words and food images) compared with non-food stimuli; however, the findings are inconsistent for restrained eaters. Traditional paradigms used to test food-related attentional bias, such as visual probe tasks and visual search tasks, may not directly and accurately enough to reflect individuals' food-word processing at different cognitive stages. In this study, we introduced the boundary paradigm to investigate food-word attentional bias for both restrained and unrestrained eaters. Eye movements were recorded when they performed a naturalistic sentence-reading task. The results of later-stage analyses showed that food words were fixated on for less time than non-food words, which indicated a superiority of foveal food-word processing for both restrained and unrestrained eaters. The results of early-stage analyses showed that restrained eaters spent more time on pre-target regions in the food-word valid preview conditions, which indicated a parafoveal food-word processing superiority for restrained eaters (i.e. the parafoveal-on-foveal effect). The superiority of foveal food-word processing provides new insights into explaining food-related attentional bias in general groups. Additionally, the enhanced food-word attentional bias in parafoveal processing for restrained eaters illustrates the importance of individual characteristics in studying word recognition., (© 2023 The British Psychological Society.)

As smart audio‐visual multimedia devices are developed for various applications, there has been a growing interest in effective human–computer interaction (HCI) interfaces for specific environments. There have also been great efforts to implement HCI interfaces into musical instruments, in which it would be possible to take intuitions, comfort and expressiveness into the musical instruments. However, most of the traditional HCI interfaces are not applicable because both hands are likely to be occupied while playing a musical instrument. In this environment, a lip reading method can be used. A lip reading method is a HCI method that analyses lip motion to recognise spoken words. In this study, a lip reading method is proposed with its application. As a specific example of the interface for musical instruments, the guitar effector application is presented. The proposed lip reading method uses a constrained local model instead of the conventional active appearance model for effective facial feature tracking. The proposed method also uses a dynamic time warping‐based classifier for word recognition which is effective for simple real‐time implementation of lip reading. The proposed lip reading method shows 85.0% word recognition accuracy on OuluVS database and is effectively applied to the proposed guitar effector application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by the success of bag‐of‐words in text retrieval, bag‐of‐visual‐words and its variants are widely used in content‐based image retrieval to describe visual content. Various weighting schemes have also been proposed to integrate different yet complementary visual‐words. However, most of these weighting schemes tend to use fixed weight for every visual‐word extracted from the query image, which may lose the discriminative information. This study presents a novel combining method which captures query‐specific weights for visual‐words in query image. The method mainly contains two stages. Firstly, in offline weight learning, the authors introduce a linear classifier to build a query‐category mapping table, and max‐margin learning to build category‐weight mapping table. Query‐category mapping table is used to map the query image to the most likely image class, and category‐weight mapping table is used to map image class to the weights of visual‐words. Secondly, in online weight mapping, the weights of visual‐words are determined efficiently by looking into the pre‐learned mapping tables. Experimental results on WANG database and Caltech 101 demonstrate that the proposed weighting scheme can effectively weight visual‐words of query image according to their discriminative information. In addition, comparative experiments demonstrate the proposed weighting scheme can obtain higher retrieval performance than other weighting schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the effect of computer-mediated corrective feedback types in an English as a foreign language ( EFL) intact class over time. The participants were 64 English majors who were assigned randomly into three treatment conditions that gave and received computer-mediated corrective feedback while writing (track changes, word processor, and track changes and word processor) and one control group that neither gave nor received writing corrective feedback. Students sat to a pre-test (week 1), immediate post-test (week 8) and delayed post-test (week 12) in writing. Results showed decrease in mean error and mean feedback in students' writing performance related to correcting 11 major error types on immediate and delayed post-tests, indicating that there was a significant effect for feedback type in favour of the group that used a combination of track changes and word processor. There was also a significant effect for the computer-mediated corrective feedback over the control group. Moreover, results showed that both mean error and mean feedback decreased significantly from pre-test to post-test (week 1-week 8), indicating that overall, there was a significant change over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous event-related potential studies have indicated that both a widespread N400 and an anterior N700 index differential processing of concrete and abstract words, but the nature of these components in relation to concreteness and imagery has been unclear. Here, we separated the effects of word concreteness and task demands on the N400 and N700 in a single word processing paradigm with a within-subjects, between-tasks design and carefully controlled word stimuli. The N400 was larger to concrete words than to abstract words, and larger in the visualization task condition than in the surface task condition, with no interaction. A marked anterior N700 was elicited only by concrete words in the visualization task condition, suggesting that this component indexes imagery. These findings are consistent with a revised or extended dual coding theory according to which concrete words benefit from greater activation in both verbal and imagistic systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diglossia in Arabic describes the existence and the use of two varieties of the same language: spoken Arabic (SA) and literary Arabic (LA). SA, the dialect first spoken by Arabic native speakers, is used in non-formal situations for everyday conversations, and varies from one region to another in the Arabic world. LA, acquired later in life when the children learn to read and write at school, is used for formal purposes such as media, speeches in public and religious sermons. Previous research showed that, in the auditory modality, SA words are processed faster than LA ones. In the visual modality, written LA words are processed faster than SA ones, the latter comparing with low-frequency words. This study analysed event-related potentials (ERPs) during the processing of high-frequency (LAHF), LA low-frequency (LALF) and SA high-frequency words (SAHF) in a visual lexical decision task. Faster reaction times were observed for LAHF, followed by SAHF and then by LALF. ERPs showed a modulation of the early components starting from the P100 component and of the late P600 component, supposedly related to memory processes. These findings, indicating that processing written SAHF words was largely comparable with processing of LALF, are discussed in the context of Arabic diglossia., (© 2022 The Authors. European Journal of Neuroscience published by Federation of European Neuroscience Societies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

Word clouds have become one of the most widely accepted visual resources for document analysis and visualization, motivating the development of several methods for building layouts of keywords extracted from textual data. Existing methods are effective to demonstrate content, but are not capable of preserving semantic relationships among keywords while still linking the word cloud to the underlying document groups that generated them. Such representation is highly desirable for exploratory analysis of document collections. In this paper we present a novel approach to build document clouds, named ProjCloud that aim at solving both semantical layouts and linking with document sets. ProjCloud generates a semantically consistent layout from a set of documents. Through a multidimensional projection, it is possible to visualize the neighborhood relationship between highly related documents and their corresponding word clouds simultaneously. Additionally, we propose a new algorithm for building word clouds inside polygons, which employs spectral sorting to maintain the semantic relationship among words. The effectiveness and flexibility of our methodology is confirmed when comparisons are made to existing methods. The technique automatically constructs projection based layouts the user may choose to examine in the form of the point clouds or corresponding word clouds, allowing a high degree of control over the exploratory process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on the diffusion of the development of information revolution in the workplace. He says that commentators must observe and analyse the emerging trends in predicting the development trajectory of any technology at work. He also mentions the excellence of social scientists in analysing the introduction of discrete systems including computer-aided design (CAD), computer-aided manufacturing (CAM), and word processing.

An assumption in the reading literature is that access to semantics is gated by stimulus properties such as orthographic regularity or familiarity. In the electrophysiological domain, this assumption has led to a debate about the features necessary to initiate semantic processing as indexed by the N400 event-related potential (ERP) component. To examine this, we recorded ERPs to sentences with endings that were familiar and legal (words), familiar and illegal (acronyms), or unfamiliar and illegal (consonant or vowel strings). N400 congruency effects (reduced negativity to expected relative to unexpected endings) were observed for words and acronyms; these were identical in size, timing, and scalp distribution. Notably, clear N400 potentials were also elicited by unfamiliar, illegal strings, suggesting that, at least in a verbal context, semantic access may be attempted for any letter string, regardless of familiarity or regularity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated to what extent emotional connotation influences cortical potentials during reading. To this end, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during reading of high arousal pleasant and unpleasant and low arousal neutral adjectives that were presented at rates of 1 Hz and 3 Hz. Enhanced processing of both pleasant and unpleasant emotional compared to neutral adjectives was first reflected in an amplified early posterior negativity (EPN) starting from 200 ms after word onset. Later potentials (>300 ms), as analyzed in the slower 1 Hz condition, revealed facilitated processing selectively for pleasant adjectives that were associated with a reduced N400 and an enhanced late positive potential (LPP). Pleasant adjectives were also better remembered in an incidental memory test. Thus, emotionally relevant adjectives are processed spontaneously and selectively. Initially, emotional arousal drives attention capture (EPN). Healthy subjects may have a natural bias toward pleasant information facilitating late ERPs (N400, LPP) to pleasant adjectives as well as their superior recall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Words associated with perceptually salient, highly imageable concepts are learned earlier in life, more accurately recalled, and more rapidly named than abstract words (R. W. Brown, 1976; Walker & Hulme, 1999). Theories accounting for this concreteness effect have focused exclusively on semantic properties of word referents. A novel possibility is that word structure may also contribute to the effect. We report a corpus-based analysis of the phonological and morphological structures of a large set of nouns with imageability ratings (N = 2,023). High- and low-imageability nouns differed by length, etymology, prosody, affixation, phonological neighborhood density, and rates of consonant clustering. On average, nouns denoting abstract concepts were longer, more derivationally complex, and emerged in English from a different distribution of languages than did concrete nouns.We address implications for interactivity of word form and meaning as pertain to theories of word concreteness, lexical acquisition, and word processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the survey on what technologies English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) teachers tend to use and how these uses align with computer-assisted language learning research in the U.S. Findings have shown that 15% of teacher who responded that English Language Learners used the Internet in instructional activities. In response to the used of various hardware and software in 2003, teachers named word processing as the most often used software in their teaching practice. In addition, results show that teachers were implementing technologies for a narrower range of purposes in 2003 that in 1997.

The Decision Tree Forest (DTF) is an architecture for information retrieval that uses a separate decision tree for each document in a collection. Experiments were conducted in which DTFs working with the incremental tree induction (ITI) algorithm of Utgoff, Berkman, and Clouse (1997) were trained and evaluated in the medical and word processing domains using the Cystic Fibrosis and SIFT collections. Performance was compared with that of a conventional inverted index system (IIS) using a BM25-derived probabilistic matching function. Initial results using DTF were poor compared to those obtained with IIS. We then simulated scenarios in which large quantities of training data were available, by using only those parts of the document collection that were well covered by the data sets. Consequently the retrieval effectiveness of DTF improved substantially. In one particular experiment precision and recall for DTF were 0.65 and 0.67 respectively, values that compared favorably with values of 0.49 and 0.56 for IIS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Affective startle modulation in the electromyographic (EMG), auditory startle evoked potentials, and visually evoked potentials (VEPs) were assessed while subjects evaluated pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral adjectives. Acoustic startle probes were presented at random time points 2.5–4.0 s after word onset. The visual P2 and P3 potentials were generally larger during processing of emotional than of neutral adjectives. In contrast, the late positive component was enhanced and was correlated with larger EMG startle responses and auditory startle evoked potential P3 amplitudes for pleasant words only. During internal cognitive activity, the startle reflex represents a measure of ”processing interrupt.” Thus the startle tone interrupted processing of particularly pleasant adjectives and caused re-alerting to environmental stimuli. Specific effects for pleasant material may arise from a ”positivity offset,” favoring responses to pleasant material at lower arousal levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In spoken dialogue, word sequences that span multiple user utterances may convey one meaning when they are interpreted together as a group and a different meaning when each utterance is interpreted in turn. Natural language processing methods that can deal with units that span multiple utterances are needed for such input. However, in order to enable a spoken dialogue system to respond quickly to the user, it is desirable that interpretations are determined on a per-utterance basis as each utterance is given. In order to satisfy both demands simultaneously in this paper we present an incremental speech understanding method and the ISSS algorithm that is one implementation of this method. The incremental speech understanding method that we propose involves concatenating speech recognition results with previously obtained recognition results, enumerating a list of speech understanding hypotheses that can be derived from these results, ordering these using a priority measure that combines both separate priority measures assigned by both the speech and language processing modules to determine the most probable understanding result. In practice, this is implemented using the N-best hypotheses from the speech recognition system; we avoid an exhaustive enumeration of understanding hypotheses, and adopt a beam-search in the ISSS algorithm that we formulate here. In addition, in order to evaluate the proposed method, we also present a new evaluation metric for speech understanding methods that takes context into account, and have evaluated our proposed method using data gathered from human–computer dialogues. We have compared the method to a speech understanding method that does not consider word sequences that span multiple utterances and show that our proposed method results in statistically significant improvements in speech understanding accuracy. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Comp Jpn, 36(12): 75–84, 2005; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/scj.20211 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the significance of programming language in library and textual processing. Different programming languages address different kinds of problems. To understand which are most suitable for library and information science, first define the kinds of programming problems these areas present. LIS programming divides into two classes, namely, problems that are similar to those of business and government, and those that are unique to library and information science. The former consist of front-office applications, such as word processing, spread-sheets and desktop computing, and back-office. Languages implement string processing through operators that manipulate strings within expressions. Functions or object methods perform additional string operations. External or callable libraries contain additional functions or object methods. Whether a programming language is suitable depends on how well that language processes text. A suitable language means smaller, simpler programs. Fewer errors occur. Programs are easier to enhance and maintain.

Examines how common or rare certain features were in word-processed business letters and if any of these features could determine the author or source. Analysis of the letter format, type style, point size of the font, margin spacing to ascertain the use of nonuse of the default margins for Microsoft Word and the default margins for Novell WordPerfect; Unexpected findings that could possibly lead to the identification of a source of typist.

Currently, there is widespread skepticism that higher cognitive processes, given their apparent flexibility and globality, could be carried out by specialized computational devices, or modules. This skepticism is largely due to Fodor's influential definition of modularity. From the rather flexible catalogue of possible modular features that Fodor originally proposed has emerged a widely held notion of modules as rigid, informationally encapsulated devices that accept highly local inputs and whose operations are insensitive to context. It is a mistake, however, to equate such features with computational devices in general and therefore to assume, as Fodor does, that higher cognitive processes must be non-computational. Of the many possible non-Fodorean architectures, one is explored here that offers possible solutions to computational problems faced by conventional modular systems: an‘enzymatic’ architecture. Enzymes are computational devices that use lock-and-key template matching to identify relevant information(substrates), which is then operated upon and returned to a common pool for possible processing by other devices. Highly specialized enzymes can operate together in a common pool of information that is not pre-sorted by information type. Moreover, enzymes can use molecular‘tags’ to regulate the operations of other devices and to change how particular substrates are construed and operated upon, allowing for highly interactive, context-specific processing. This model shows how specialized, modular processing can occur in an open system, and suggests that skepticism about modularity may largely be due to failure to consider alternatives to the standard model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study was to investigate the current knowledge, skills, and opinions of undergraduate dental students at the University of Jordan with respect to information communication technology (ICT). Dental students from the second, third, fourth, and fifth years were asked to complete a questionnaire presented in a lecture at the end of the second semester in the 2002-03 academic year. The response rate was 81 percent. Besides free and unlimited access to computers at the school of dentistry, 74 percent of the students had access to computers at home. However, 44 percent did not use a computer regularly. Male students were more regular and longer users of computers than females (p<0.001). A significant number of students (70 percent) judged themselves competent in information technology (IT) skills. More males felt competent in basic IT skills than did females (p<0.05). More than two-thirds acquired their computer skills through sources other than at the university. The main educational use of computers was accessing the Internet, word processing, multimedia, presentations, Medline search, and data management. More clinical students felt competent in word-processing skills (p<0.05) and many more used word processing for their studies (p<0.001) than did preclinical students. More males used word processing for their studies than females (p<0.001). Students used computers for personal activities more frequently than for academic reasons. More males used computers for both academic (p<0.01) and personal activities (p<0.001) than did females. All students had access to the Internet at the university, and 54 percent had access at home. A high percentage of students (94 percent) indicated they were comfortable using the Internet, 75 percent said they were confident in the accuracy, and 80 percent said they were confident in the relevance of information obtained from the Internet. Most students (90 percent) used email. Most students (83... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents instructions for authors contributing to the journal 'Language Learning.' Submission of manuscripts in four copies and must be word processed; Requirement of disks once an article is accepted for submission.

Different regions of the brain have to interact to perform language processing. Such neural integration processes can be studied by measuring synchronization of oscillations. Coherence is the best known algorithm to study synchronization between two sites of the cortex with regard to selected oscillation frequencies. Phase coherence quantifies phase synchronization, in particular. In addition, cross phase (or simply phase) gives information about the direction and speed of the spread of oscillations. We use a new method to study short-time phases between different sites of the cortex in order to explore transient neural networks during word processing. Particularly, processing of abstract and concrete nouns was investigated by dynamic phase analysis of the alpha1 frequency band (8–10 Hz). Abstract and concrete nouns turned out to induce different dynamic networks of information transfer. Whereas processing of concrete nouns excites a widespread network for about 800 msec, the interhemispheric interactions during abstract noun processing are restricted to 300–500 msec after word presentation. Further, the direction of cerebral information transfer differs for the two word categories. Additionally, it could be shown that the propagation speed of information is slower for concrete nouns than for abstract nouns. Hum. Brain Mapping 19:18–36, 2003. © 2003 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Magnetic brain responses recorded in the human magnetoencephalogram (MEG) distinguished between words with different semantics but carefully matched for frequency and length. Multiple recordings from a single subject showed that 100 ms following stimulus onset, significantly stronger neuromagnetic responses were elicited by words with strong multimodal semantic associations than by other word material. At this early processing step, there was a highly significant correlation (0.80) between the magnitude of brain responses to individual words recorded over parieto-occipital areas and their semantic association strengths. Subsequent to this early difference related to word meaning, additional differences in MEG responses emerged for words from different grammatical categories. Together, these results suggest that word meaning can be reflected by early neuromagnetic brain responses and before the grammatical information about the word is encoded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the significance of using word processing and World Wide Web (WWW) projects in a college Japanese language class. There were four computer-assisted Japanese language and culture projects conducted in a college-level third-year Japanese class. The impact of the projects assessed by student pre- and post-questionnaires reflective comments from students and the reflective observation notes of the instructor were being reported and described. The projects, which were provided by fourteen students who gave their feedbacks, include journal writing, creating a personal home page, a Japanese culture project using the WWW, and a collaborative class fiction using a discussion forum on the WWW.

Semantic priming effects (behavioral and electrophysiological) were compared in the visual and auditory modalities across three stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs; 0, 200, and 800 ms). When both prime and target were presented in the visual modality (the prime just to the left of a fixation point and the target to the right), there were N400 priming effects present across the three SOAs. However, the N400 in the O-ms SOA condition extended longer in time (800 vs. 500 ms) than in the other SOAs. When both the prime and target were presented in the auditory modality (the prime to the right ear and the target to the left), the largest priming effects were found for the 800-ms SOA. Moreover, there was a relatively early priming effect present in the 0- and 800-ms SOA conditions but not in the 200-ms condition. The results are discussed in terms of modality differences in the time course of word comprehension processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) associated with semantic relatedness were recorded in two auditory word recognition tasks. In the Memorize task, subjects listened to a List of words in anticipation of a subsequent recognition test. In the Count Nonwords task, subjects silently counted the number of nonwords occurring within a list of words. Within each list, target words were either semantically related or unrelated to the immediately preceding word. As in comparable visual tasks, the amplitude of a negative ERP component (N400) was significantly attenuated when targets were preceded by semantically related primes. This attenuation was greater in the Memorize than in the Count Nonwords task. These data are consistent with the view that the sensitivity of N400 amplitude to semantic relatedness is modulated by task variables that manipulate depth of processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We tested the hypothesis that psychopathy is associated with abnormal processing of effective verbal material. Criminal psychopaths and nonpsychopaths, defined by the Psychopathy Checklist, performed a lexical decision task ("Is it a word or not?") while we recorded reaction time and eventrelated potentials in response to letter-strings consisting of effective and neutral word and pronounceable nonwords. On the assumption that they do not rake efficient use of effective information, our primary prediction was that psychopaths would show less behavioral and eventrelated potential differentiation between effective and neutral words than would nonpsychopaths. The results were in accordance with this prediction. The lexical decision of nonpsychopaths were significantly faster, find relevant event-related potential components were significantly larger, to effective words than to neutral words. In sharp contrast, psychopaths failed to show reaction time facilitation or larger amplitude event-related potentials to effective words. We suggest that psychopaths extract less information from effective words than do other individuals. Possible implications of these and related findings for understanding the behavior of psychopaths are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the computerization of the Weighted Application Form (WAF). A discriminant analysis was performed on the application form responses of 281 nursing course applicants. Computer software was then developed incorporating the classification function from the discriminant analysis procedure. In the second part of the study 45 subjects were divided into three groups and entered eight sets of nursing course application form data, The 'computerized' group received instructions on how to do this from the screen, the 'written' group from a manual and the 'verbal' group verbally from the experimenter. Time taken to complete the cask and the number of errors made were recorded. Results indicated that group influenced time taken on the task and that group did not exert an influence errors made on cacti question. As a result of the experimental work and responses to a questionnaire, as concluded that the 'computerized' version of the software was the option that should he adopted for computer software involving the WAF. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the findings of a case study which describes the impact of word processing technology on the characteristics of typing jobs in an engineering consultancy. Examination of company documents and interviews with managers indicated that the decision to adopt this technology was influenced by pressures and people within the organization, rather than by external forces. Interviews with typists indicated that the change from copy typing to word processing had reduced task variety, meaning and contribution, control over work scheduling and boundary tasks, feedback of results, involvement in preparation and auxiliary tasks, and communication with authors. The change had increased pay and promotion opportunities, and control over typing quality. The overall pattern of skills and knowledge required by typists had altered. These changes were determined weakly and indirectly by the technology of word processing, and strongly and directly by management decisions about the way in which the typists' work was reorganized and controlled. Management felt that closer control over typing work would increase productivity. The new work organization achieved this control, but appeared to restrict the typists' ability to exploit fully the potential benefits of the new technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents state-of-the art information on speech and language development and skills in infants, toddlers, children, and adolescents with Down syndrome. Research is cited in the areas of early speech and language development, receptive and expressive language, auditory and visual reception, processing and integration as they relate to language learning, semantics, syntax, morphology pragmatics, and social interactive language. Research is also reviewed on oral motor strength and coordination, as well as oralmotor planning as they relate to articulation phonology, and intelligibility. Strengths and challenges, assessment, and intervention research are discussed in relation of each speech and language area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Signal words are commonly used in warnings to quickly communicate potential hazards. Current standards and guidelines define the terms DANGER, WARNING, CAUTION, and NOTICE as denoting decreasing hazard levels, respectively. This study examined whether definitions assigned to these words coincide with people's understanding of them. Seventy-two participants attempted to match published definitions to the terms. Additionally, they rated the terms on various dimensions (e.g., hazardousness, understandability). The results showed that people differentiate DANGER and NOTICE but less clearly discriminate between WARNING and CAUTION. The term DEADLY, a proposed higher level signal word, was perceived as connoting the greatest hazard. Implications for warning design are discussed. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers word recognition based on the existence of the transition between phonemes and characters with complete segmentation between phonemes and characters. A method is proposed which estimates theoretically the relation between the phoneme/character recognition score and the word recognition score. The word recognition score can be estimated by the evaluation formula based on the number of short-distance words in the dictionary for the case where the word dictionary is used. The traditional evaluation formula for the word recognition score, however, has a problem in that the accuracy of estimation is deteriorated rapidly with the decrease of the phoneme/character recognition score and the increase of the short-distance words. From such a viewpoint, this paper proposes a new evaluation formula with a higher estimation accuracy. In this paper, the sequence that can be generated based on the transition information is used as the item in the word dictionary. Then the number of items increases exponentially with the length, making it difficult to estimate the number of short-distance words. For this problem, this paper proposes an algorithm that calculates the number of short-distance words in a polynomial time. For approximately 5000 important words in Japanese, the estimated word recognition score for the phoneme recognition score of 90 percent is given approximately 72 percent by the proposed method and approximately 66 percent by the traditional method. It is approximately 78 percent by simulation. Thus, it is shown that the proposed method gives a better approximation than the traditional method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A context-free grammar, a stochastic grammar, and a context-free tree grammar have been used in the past in the synthetic approach to pattern recognition. However, since a pattern is primarily context-dependent, some top-down and bottom-up parsers have been proposed for context-sensitive language (CSL). Although the bottom-up version of the error-correcting parser for CSL has been known, it has a disadvantage in that it converts an input staring of length n into a string of length (n = ) k + n (k is the maximum number of consecutive deletions of terminal symbols). As a result, this paper proposes a top-down ECP (error-correcting-parser) for a context-sensitive language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Third- and fifth-grade children were presented a picture-naming interference task to examine the effects of printing words in mixed typecase on children's automatic word processing. Children who were skilled at using spelling-sound correspondence rules experienced approximately equivalent amounts of interference from mixed typecase and normal typecase printed words. Children who were poor at using spelling-sound correspondence rules, however, experienced less interference from mixed typecase than from normal typecase printed words. The results are discussed in terms of individual differences in the role of word shape as a recognition cue in children's automatic word processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vannevar Bush's famous article, "As We May Think" (1945), described an imaginary information retrieval machine, the Memex. The Memex is usually viewed, un-historically, in relation to subsequent developments using digital computers. This study reconstructs the little-known background of information retrieval in and before 1939 when "As We May Think" was originally written. The Memex was based on Bush's work during 1938-1940 in developing an improved photoelectric microfilm selector, an electronic retrieval technology pioneered by Emanuel Goldberg of Zeiss Ikon, Dresden, in the 1920s. Visionary statements by Paul Otiet (1934) and Walter Schürmeyer (1935) and the development of electronic document retrieval technology before Bush are examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There exists a large and growing population of non computer professionals utilizing word processing software on personal computers. Noncomputer professional users of word processing technology are sometimes referred to as intermittent users. The purpose of this research was to understand the word processing characteristics and needs of this important group of users. We developed a mode that describes their word processing performance and carried out two contorted experiments. We found that intermittent users behave bike experts when executing a very somali set of routine tasks but tend to be quite novice-bike in most other tasks. Their editing behavior can be described as non optimal and relatively stable. Help systems and interface design are important factors of word processing technology that improve the performance of intermittent users. Our study indicates that intermittent users prefer and perform better with a menu-driven interface, in addition, we found that even a rudimentary help system can be a great aid to the intermittent user. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Reading Research Quarterly is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)