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Highlights • We estimate twelve emotions from emails - six positive and six negative. • We propose a Markov chain model to capture the emotion dynamics. • An algorithm rates email senders from the most emotional to the least. • The guilty subjects expressed more positive emotions than the non-guilty. • The guilty subjects are not more joyous than the non-guilty.', Abstract Emotion is a crucial indicator of the mental state influenced by environmental cognition, health, and intention. Therefore, modeling emotional patterns from daily communications is useful and vital for behavioral studies. This paper presents an analytical system that combines psycho-linguistics, statistical modeling, and computational algorithms to extract, analyze, and rank users' emotions from their emails. A new category of twelve emotions is proposed to identify a balanced set of six positive emotions and their negative counterparts, respectively. A lexicon-based algorithm is proposed to extract emotions from individual emails at the sentence level by combining thesaurus and parts-of-speech. A Markov chain model is then proposed for the time-dependent emotion stochastic process. Statistical characterization of the Markov chain model provides insights from four aspects: repetition, revisits, steady states, and emotional stability. Finally, an algorithm is discussed to compute the relative ratings of user emotions and subsequently ranking them from the most emotional to the least. As the verification that the proposed system is able to distinguish detailed emotional behaviors caused by mental activities, the Enron email dataset is used to model emotional patterns from 22 executives who were deemed guilty in the court of law vs. 21 non-guilty. Our analysis demonstrates that the proposed system uncovers emotional patterns that are more distinct compared to the traditional emotion categorizations. It is also observed that the guilty subjects express more positive emotions in their emails compared to their non-guilty counterparts, while they are not more joyous than the non-guilty. Such insights have implications for employee risk assessment in organizations. The proposed approach can also be applied to other related areas such as mental health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper establishes the generalization that whenever agreement with the finite verb is controlled by a constituent that is not in a Spec–Head relation with the inflectional head of the clause, this agreement cannot affect person. A syntactic representation for person inside the noun phrase and on the clausal spine is proposed which, in conjunction with the workings of agreement and concord, accommodates this empirical generalization and derives Baker's Structural Condition on Person Agreement. The proposal also provides an explanation for the φ-feature agreement facts of specificational copular sentences. The paper places its findings on person vs. number agreement in the context of recent psycho- and neuro-linguistic investigation of number/person dissociation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the language and pragmatic strategies used by Akan herbal drug sellers to persuade would-be-buyers. It adopts the theoretical framework of Weigand's Mixed Game Model (MGM) and defines persuasion as a variable of competence-in-performance and language use as the basis of dialogic interaction. It investigates how sellers employ politeness, honorifics, humour, digression, personification, proverbs, metaphors and hyperbole in dialogic action games. The herbal drug sellers are grouped into three: (a) those normally plying on Ghana's major roads and at bus stations, (b) those who are on radio and TV and (c) those who advertise on radio and TV. We will discuss excerpts of five recordings in the Akan language and translated into English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the advent of learner-centered approaches to language learning and life skills education paradigm in psychology, language classrooms are conceived a fitting educational setting for life skills intervention. This study investigated reading strategies awareness, as a legacy of humanistic psychology and learner-centered movement, of language learners in relation to autonomy, problem solving ability, and reading comprehension achievement. Learning Autonomy Questionnaire, Problem Solving Inventory, Survey of Reading Strategies, and a Reading Comprehension Test Battery were used. Multivariate regression and follow-up SEM analyses showed no significant relationship between SA and autonomy but substantiated its predictive power for problem solving and reading comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main goal of this study was to explore the nature and structure of implicit theories of Spanish-speaking in-service teachers on learning to read. The study sample consisted of 591 in-service teachers from various Ibero-American countries (Spain, Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, and Ecuador). The study analyzed attributional structure or teacher beliefs on learning to read based on principal component analysis. Findings revealed that many of the implicit theories on learning to read held by the teachers correspond to the historiography analysis and representational structure identified in previous studies. Based on main component analysis with varimax rotation, a factorial structure was found to be formed by the seven main factors related to the constructivist, nativist, maturationist, social, repetition, corrective, and psycho-linguistic learning theories. Also, significant differences were found in the learning theories of the teachers depending on geographical and cultural context. Spanish teachers were more likely to be associated with the psycho-linguistic and nativist theories. Mexican teachers were more closely associated with the constructivist theory, and both Guatemalan and Colombian teachers tended to be linked to the repetition-based theory. Finally, Ecuadorian teachers tended to rely on the nativist theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the paradigm shift towards English as an International Language (EIL) has been generally accepted within the academic community, a valorization of native speaker norms continues to be prevalent among many non-native speakers (NNSs). Through data drawn from a qualitative questionnaire and proficiency assessment results (TOEIC), this mixed methods study investigates the degree to which native speaker models of communicative competence affect the linguistic self-confidence (LSC) and performance (LP) of 83 Japanese employees of a large, international corporation. Although the results were inconclusive for the latter inquiry, they show that participants who lack experience using English in international contexts have a greater tendency to valorize Native Speaker norms, a belief which, in turn, negatively affects their linguistic self-confidence and attitudes towards the target language (TL). Supplementary data were also collected by interviewing the participants in person or by e-mail in order to discern deeper insights into this particular psycho-linguistic phenomenon, and responses indicated that employees with greater experience using English for their work were much more articulate in explaining or justifying the reasons for their attitudes towards native-speaker norms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Robert Craig's constitutive meta-model of communication reminds us that while communication scholarship may feel like discovery of communication's natural properties, it is also often (if not always) on a path to invention of new possibilities and reconstitution. The constitutive meta-model suggests that every theory of communication is also a design language for communication, and that design itself may be a path to theory development. Design inquiry can be conducted in all subdisciplines of communication, incorporating and contributing to widely disparate communication theories. Design work itself takes many forms, producing artifacts as diverse as individual messages, persuasive campaigns, interaction protocols, large-scale participation frameworks for public decision-making, and more. This special issue explores design scholarship in the field of communication, with five original essays representing different subfields and different theoretical approaches. In this introduction, we argue that design work is more than application of theory; design itself is a theory-building enterprise. It is a distinct form of inquiry that builds new knowledge, complementary to, but different in kind from, empirical and critical scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Connine, Blasko, and Hall (Journal of Memory and Language 30:234-250, ) suggested that within a 1-second temporal window, subsequent biasing information can influence the identification of a previously spoken word. Four experiments further explored this hypothesis. Our participants heard sentences in which an ambiguous target word was followed less than or more than a second later by a word biased in favor of either the target word or another word. Overall, the effects of the contextual biases on responding, measured using phonemic restoration and phoneme identification, were almost as large after 1 second as before 1 second. The implications of these results for defining the window of contextual effects are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cross-category harmony (correlations between basic word order and prefer-ence for suffixes or prefixes) has been proposed by several typologists and psy-cholinguists as a principle to explain some apparent crosslinguistic tendencies. This article attempts to test whether cross-category harmony has an observable influence on morphosyntactic change, and reviews cases of harmonization and disharmonization of affix order. The grammaticalization of associated motion prefixes in Japhug Rgyalrong, a verb-final language of southwest China, con-stitutes a solid case of development of a disharmonie construction out of a harmonic one, and runs counter to the idea that head ordering principles have a direct effect on language change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study is to determine the semantic model of the perception and the adoption of the units of language structure from the point psycho- linguistic formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Text is still the most prevalent Internet media type. Examples of this include popular social networking applications such as Twitter, Craigslist, Facebook, etc. Other web applications such as e-mail, blog, chat rooms, etc. are also mostly text based. A question we address in this paper that deals with text based Internet forensics is the following: given a short text document, can we identify if the author is a man or a woman? This question is motivated by recent events where people faked their gender on the Internet. Note that this is different from the authorship attribution problem. In this paper we investigate author gender identification for short length, multi-genre, content-free text, such as the ones found in many Internet applications. Fundamental questions we ask are: do men and women inherently use different classes of language styles? If this is true, what are good linguistic features that indicate gender? Based on research in human psychology, we propose 545 psycho-linguistic and gender-preferential cues along with stylometric features to build the feature space for this identification problem. Note that identifying the correct set of features that indicate gender is an open research problem. Three machine learning algorithms (support vector machine, Bayesian logistic regression and AdaBoost decision tree) are then designed for gender identification based on the proposed features. Extensive experiments on large text corpora (Reuters Corpus Volume 1 newsgroup data and Enron e-mail data) indicate an accuracy up to 85.1% in identifying the gender. Experiments also indicate that function words, word-based features and structural features are significant gender discriminators. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Different types of verb voice in a sentence were examined as a possible simple cue within the unimodel of persuasion (Kruglanski & Thompson, 1999). An experiment was constructed by inducing two levels of argument strength (strong vs. weak) fully crossed with three verb voice types in an independent groups design with 242 participants. Evidence was found consistent with the prediction that verb voice acts as a simple persuasion cue; the audience's enjoyment of reading the arguments was found to be a mediator of the relationship between verb type and message acceptance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: We performed a set of experiments dealing with the interpretation of novel Place–Food noun–noun compounds (NNCs) denoting fictive food products, in Danish. These were used in order to address concerns of linguistic theory, in particular the interrelation between semantics and pragmatics, psycholinguistics—investigating the role of sentential context for the interpretation of noun–noun compounds, and consumer oriented food labeling research. In the first experiment, a significant proportion of the novel NNCs was found to have a pre-contextually biased interpretation, in the majority of the cases conforming to what is usually considered the “default” interpretation for the studied type of compounds: FOOD ORIGINATING IN PLACE. In a subsequent experiment, this was however found to be easily overturned when sentential context supported what was initially found to be the least preferred interpretation. This contrasts with previous research comparing the role of such context on conventional NNCs. This suggests a qualitative difference between novel pre-contextually biased NNCs and conventional NNCs, and has implications for the semantics–pragmatics boundary, which we discuss. Furthermore, the three types of interpretations offered to the participants: ORIGINATING IN, RECIPE FROM and REMINDS OF, were shown to form an implicational hierarchy, which could explain the “asymmetric” preferences attributed to them by the participants in the experiments. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Despite a strong tradition of viewing coded equivalence as the underlying principle of linguistic semiotics, it lacks the power needed to understand and explain language as an empirical phenomenon characterized by complex dynamics. Applying the biology of cognition to the nature of the human cognitive/linguistic capacity as rooted in the dynamics of reciprocal causality between an organism and the world, we can show language to be connotational rather than denotational. This leaves no room for the various ‘code-models’ of language exploited in traditional linguistics. Bio-cognitive analysis leads to deeper insights into the essence of language as a biologically based, cognitively motivated, circularly organized semiotic activity in a consensual domain of interactions aimed at adapting to, and, ultimately, gaining control of the environment. The understanding that cognition is grounded in the dynamics of biological self-organization fits both the integrational model of communication and distributed cognition. A short discussion of the key notions of representation, sign and signification, interpretation, intentionality, communication, and reciprocal causality is offered, showing that the notion of ‘code’ is only misleadingly applied to natural language. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article refers to "The centrality of expressive indices," by Christopher Potts, and focuses on the presuppositional analysis of expressive language. Expressives are defined as lexical items with indexical, attitudinal, and shiftable presuppositions. The two lexical entries that are evaluated in this study are the familiar pronoun of "tu" in the French language and the ethnic slur of "honky." The analysis considers the context of the utterance, belief in the world relating to the descriptive term, self-fulfilling presuppositions, and dynamic effect of a speaker's attitude. Potts (2005) is mentioned.

This randomized group experiment compared the efficacy of 2 communication interventions (Responsive Education and Prelinguistic Milieu Teaching [RPMT] and the Picture Exchange Communication System [PECS]) in 36 preschoolers with autism spectrum disorders. Each treatment was delivered 3 times per week, in 20-mm sessions, for 6 months. The results revealed that the RPMT facilitated the frequency of generalized turn taking and generalized initiating joint attention more than did the PECS. The latter effect occurred only for children who began treatment with at least some initiating joint attention. In contrast, the PECS facilitated generalized requests more than the RPMT in children with very little initiating joint attention prior to treatment. These effect sizes were large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Subtle formal thought disorders are difficult to quantify. Their relationship to florid thought disorder is unknown.Aims: To assess the interrater reliability, sensitivity and factor structure of a new assessment instrument, the Thought and Language Index (TLI), and to determine if minor aberrations detectable in the speech of healthy individuals are related to the more severe formal thought disorders characteristic of schizophrenia.Method: Interrater reliability was evaluated by determining the intraclass correlation for the ratings by five assessors. Factor analysis of the TLI scores of 87 patients was performed, and TLI scores in matched patients and controls were compared.Results: The intraclass correlation was good for individual TLI items, and excellent for sub-scale scores. Factor analysis identified three groups of approximately orthogonal disorders. Mild speech aberrations were observed in healthy participants and in patients with schizophrenia. The prevalence of mild aberrations was correlated with the prevalence of definite formal thought disorders.Conclusions: The TLI is reliable and capable of detecting subtle disorders. Some mild aberrations occurring in the speech of healthy individuals appear to be attenuated forms of the florid disorders characteristic of schizophrenia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the psycholinguistic abilities of Papago Indian school children utilizing the 1968 edition of the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities. Data obtained were analyzed by a comparison of mean scaled scores using t tests for paired comparisons for the following groups: (a) ITPA normative and Papago, (b) first and third grade, and (c) segregated and integrated populations. A 3 way analysis of variance was also employed to evaluate interaction of children, grade, and school. Results indicated poorer performance of the Indians, especially on the auditory vocal tests, better performance of the Indians attending integrated schools, and the ineffective aspects of cumulative education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses a study which examined a pervasive and probably universal psychological principle generating recency effects. The principle of generating recency effects is a principle about which psychology already knows enough to predict confidently the temporal conditions of presentation and measurement under which recency should appear most strongly. An illustration presents the implications of the Ebbinghaus curve as it applies to the relative weighting of two competing communications presented and measured at varying intervals.

The article discusses the prevailing issues related to Psycholinguistics and Second Language Teaching. The two theories "audiolingual habit" and "cognitive-code learning" have no real conflict between them, as applied to language teaching. Making an opposition between rule-governed behavior and language habits is false. The conception of habit is more general than that of rule. Acquisition of knowledge about rules and the formation of the habits described by these rules, both are required for the learning of second languages. Application of psychological knowledge concerning the learning of language habits would definitely improve the language teaching procedures. Incorporation of situational meanings into language rules, where applicable, is a must and that the corresponding language habits must be made contingent upon these situational meanings. Language teachers need to be constantly reminded of cognitive habit-formation theory as they tend to develop, under the pressure of new fads and theories, a kind of professional panic and anxiety about their work.