Search

Piantadosi, Tily, and Gibson analyzed a large‐scale web‐scraping corpus (the Google 1T dataset) and reported that word length is independently predicted from average information content (surprisal) calculated by a 2‐ to 4‐gram model (hereafter, longer‐span surprisal) across 11 Indo‐European languages, namely, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, and Swedish. However, a recent article by Meylan and Griffiths suggested the importance of preprocessing for studies with large‐scale corpora and reanalyzed the same databases. After their preprocessing, the results in Piantadosi et al. were not replicated in Czech, Romanian, and Swedish. Additionally, a German‐specific study by Koplenig, Kupietz, and Wolfer showed that the strict analysis did not replicate the result in Piantadosi et al. for that language with the preprocessing suggested by Meylan and Griffiths in a large‐scale but less noisy database. These three studies provide evidence from 11 Indo‐European languages and one Afro‐Asiatic language, Hebrew, as relevant in this debate. However, we do not have evidence from other linguistic groups. This study provides evidence about Japanese based on a strict preprocessing of Google's web‐scraping database. The results show that Japanese word length can be predicted independently by 2‐ to 4‐gram surprisal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyzed a Japanese lexical database to investigate the structure of the lexical environment based on the hypothesis that the lexical environment is optimized for the functioning of verbal working memory. Our prediction was that, as a consequence of the cultural transmission of language, low‐imageable meanings tend to be represented by frequent phonological patterns in the current vocabulary rather than infrequent phonological patterns. This prediction was based on two findings of previous laboratory studies on verbal working memory. (1) The quality of phonological (phonemic and accent) representations in verbal working memory depends on phonological regularity knowledge; therefore, short‐term phonological representations are less robust for words with infrequent phonological patterns. (2) Phonological representations are underpinned by contributions from semantic knowledge; therefore, phonological representations of highly imageable words are more robust than those for low‐imageable words. Our database analyses show that nouns with less imageable meanings tend to be associated with more frequent phonological patterns in Japanese vocabulary. This lexical structure can maintain the quality of phonological representations in verbal working memory through contributions of semantic and phonological regularity knowledge. Larger semantic contributions compensate for the less robust phonological representations of infrequent phonological forms. The quality of phonological representations is preserved by phonological regularity knowledge when larger semantic contributions are not expected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study investigated the ways long-term memory contributes to short-term serial order memory of novel verbal sequences, focusing on long-term knowledge of bi-element frequency, that is, co-occurrence frequency of two consecutive elements in a linguistic environment. Participants performed two types of immediate serial recall of nine-element (nine-mora) sequences: low bi-mora frequency sequences where all eight associations between the nine morae were low frequency, and mixed bi-mora frequency sequences, with high-frequency associations for six of the eight bi-morae. Experiment 1 confirmed the bi-directional bi-mora frequency effect, meaning better recall performance for morae having high-frequency association with either the preceding mora (forward association) or the following mora (backward association). In Experiment 2, two temporal pauses were inserted in each list to disrupt high-frequency associations with the preceding mora or the following mora. The results showed that the bi-element frequency effect diminished when the high-frequency backward association was disrupted but the effect remained when the high-frequency forward association was disrupted. We discuss possible mechanisms underlying the asymmetric influence of temporal pauses on interactions between short-term memory and linguistic long-term memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, in order to investigate the potential of the novel polysaccharide sacran from Aphanothece Sacrum for development of atopic dermatitis (AD), we evaluated the potential of pretreatment with topical sacran to prevent the development of hapten (dinitrofluorobenzene: DNFB)-induced AD-like disease in mice. In the AD model mice, sacran markedly ameliorated AD symptoms such as scratching behavior and edema in ear. In addition, sacran significantly increased water content of the stratum corneum which regulates the skin barrier function. Furthermore, sacran significantly inhibited inflammatory cytokine and chemokine mRNA levels in the dermatitis skin as well as the IgE antibody level in serum. Sacran inhibited inflammatory cytokines mRNA production from Jurkat cells derived from human leukemia T cells after stimulation with phorbol 12-myristate 13-acetate/ionomycin. Meanwhile, sacran did not inhibit the proliferation of primary B cells stimulated with lipopolysaccharide. These results suggest that sacran has good anti-allergic effect on AD model mice, probably due to the amelioration of skin barrier function and suppression of immune responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To complete complex tasks, individuals must actively maintain task rules to direct behavior correctly. Failure to use task rules appropriately, termed goal neglect, has been shown across both vocal and manual response modalities. However, previous goal maintenance studies have differed not only in the response modality that they require, but also in the complexity of the stimulus-response mappings that participants must use during the task. The present study examines the effects of both response modality and stimulus-response mapping complexity, separately, on the rate of goal neglect in a modification of a classic goal maintenance task. Seventy-two younger adults were administered a shape-monitoring task, with three between-subjects response conditions: a vocal response with a simple stimulus-response mapping, a vocal response with a complex stimulus-response mapping, and a manual response with a complex stimulus-response mapping. Contrasting the rate at which task rules were neglected between response conditions showed that participants using complex stimulus-response mappings committed more frequent goal neglect than those using simple mappings, but that participants using vocal or manual responses did not differ in their rate of goal neglect once both responses required complex mappings. This suggests that the need to represent novel and complex stimulus-response mappings, of any modality, at the same time as novel task rules within working memory leads to some task rules being insufficiently maintained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many previous studies have explored and confirmed the influence of long-term phonological representations on phonological short-term memory. In most investigations, phonological effects have been explored with respect to phonotactic constraints or frequency. If interaction between long-term memory and phonological short-term memory is a generalized principle, then other phonological characteristics-that is, suprasegmental aspects of phonology-should also exert similar effects on phonological short-term memory. We explored this hypothesis through three immediate serial-recall experiments that manipulated Japanese nonwords with respect to lexical prosody (pitch-accent type, reflecting suprasegmental characteristics) as well as phonotactic frequency (reflecting segmental characteristics). The results showed that phonotactic frequency affected the retention not only of the phonemic sequences, but also of pitch-accent patterns, when participants were instructed to recall both the phoneme sequence and accent pattern of nonwords. In addition, accent pattern typicality influenced the retention of the accent pattern: Typical accent patterns were recalled more accurately than atypical ones. These results indicate that both long-term phonotactic and lexical prosodic knowledge contribute to phonological short-term memory performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidence supporting the idea that serial-order verbal working memory is underpinned by long-term knowledge has accumulated over more than half a century. Recent studies using natural-language statistics, artificial statistical-learning techniques, and the Hebb repetition paradigm have revealed multiple types of long-term knowledge underlying serial-order verbal working memory performance. These include (a) element-to-element association knowledge, which slowly accumulates through extensive exposure to an exemplar; (b) position–element knowledge, which is acquired through several encounters with an exemplar; and (c) whole-sequence knowledge, which is captured by the Hebb repetition paradigm and acquired rapidly with a few repetitions. Arguably, the first two are a basis for fluent and efficient language usage, and the third is a basis for vocabulary learning. Thus, statistical-learning mechanisms (and possibly episodic-learning mechanisms) may form the foundation of language acquisition and language processing, which characterize linguistic long-term knowledge for verbal working memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]