Journal articles on the topic 'Lexical predictability'
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Çöltekin, Çağrı. "Using Predictability for Lexical Segmentation." Cognitive Science 41, no. 7 (November 17, 2016): 1988–2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12454.
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Vainio, Seppo, Jukka Hyönä, and Anneli Pajunen. "Lexical Predictability Exerts Robust Effects on Fixation Duration, but not on Initial Landing Position During Reading." Experimental Psychology 56, no. 1 (January 2009): 66–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1027/1618-3169.56.1.66.
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An eye movement experiment was conducted to examine effects of local lexical predictability on fixation durations and fixation locations during sentence reading. In the high-predictability condition, a verb strongly constrained the lexical identity of the following word, while in the low-predictability condition the target word could not be predicted on the basis of the verb. The results showed that first fixation and gaze duration on the target noun were reliably shorter in the high-predictability than in the low-predictability condition. However, initial fixation location was not affected by lexical predictability. As regards eye guidance in reading, the present study indicates that local lexical predictability influences when decisions but not where the initial fixation lands in a word.
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Lopukhina, Anastasiya, Konstantin Lopukhin, and Anna Laurinavichyute. "Morphosyntactic but not lexical corpus-based probabilities can substitute for cloze probabilities in reading experiments." PLOS ONE 16, no. 1 (January 28, 2021): e0246133. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0246133.
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During reading or listening, people can generate predictions about the lexical and morphosyntactic properties of upcoming input based on available context. Psycholinguistic experiments that study predictability or control for it conventionally rely on a human-based approach and estimate predictability via the cloze task. Our study investigated an alternative corpus-based approach for estimating predictability via language predictability models. We obtained cloze and corpus-based probabilities for all words in 144 Russian sentences, correlated the two measures, and found a strong correlation between them. Importantly, we estimated how much variance in eye movements registered while reading the same sentences was explained by each of the two probabilities and whether the two probabilities explain the same variance. Along with lexical predictability (the activation of a particular word form), we analyzed morphosyntactic predictability (the activation of morphological features of words) and its effect on reading times over and above lexical predictability. We found that for predicting reading times, cloze and corpus-based measures of both lexical and morphosyntactic predictability explained the same amount of variance. However, cloze and corpus-based lexical probabilities both independently contributed to a better model fit, whereas for morphosyntactic probabilities, the contributions of cloze and corpus-based measures were interchangeable. Therefore, morphosyntactic but not lexical corpus-based probabilities can substitute for cloze probabilities in reading experiments. Our results also indicate that in languages with rich inflectional morphology, such as Russian, when people engage in prediction, they are much more successful in predicting isolated morphosyntactic features than predicting the particular lexeme and its full morphosyntactic markup.
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Rück, Franziska, Carolin Dudschig, Ian G. Mackenzie, Anne Vogt, Hartmut Leuthold, and Barbara Kaup. "The Role of Predictability During Negation Processing in Truth-Value Judgment Tasks." Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 50, no. 6 (October 21, 2021): 1437–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10936-021-09804-0.
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AbstractIn experiments investigating the processing of true and false negative sentences, it is often reported that polarity interacts with truth-value, in the sense that true sentences lead to faster reaction times than false sentences in affirmative conditions whereas the same does not hold for negative sentences. Various reasons for this difference between affirmative and negative sentences have been discussed in the literature (e.g., lexical associations, predictability, ease of comparing sentence and world). In the present study, we excluded lexical associations as a potential influencing factor. Participants saw artificial visual worlds (e.g., a white square and a black circle) and corresponding sentences (i.e., “The square/circle is (not) white”). The results showed a clear effect of truth-value for affirmative sentences (true faster than false) but not for negative sentences. This result implies that the well-known truth-value-by-polarity interaction cannot solely be due to long-term lexical associations. Additional predictability manipulations allowed us to also rule out an explanatory account that attributes the missing truth-value effect for negative sentences to low predictability. We also discuss the viability of an informativeness account.
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Milberg, William, Sheila E. Blumstein, Donald Katz, Fellcia Gershberg, and Todd Brown. "Semantic Facilitation in Aphasia: Effects of Time and Expectancy." Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 7, no. 1 (January 1995): 33–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/jocn.1995.7.1.33.
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Two auditory lexical decision semantic priming experiments were conducted to examine the extent to which the automaticcontrolled processing dichotomy can characterize lexical access deficits in Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics. In Experiment 1, prime-target predictability was varied while the interval between prime and target (ISI) was held constant. In Experiment 2, ISI was varied while prime-target predictability was held constant. The pattern of semantic facilitation and inhibition results for Experiment 1 showed that Broca's aphasics were influenced by prime-target predictability, whereas Wernicke's aphasics were not. In contrast in hperiment 2, manipulations of ISI at 150 and 2000 msec did not affect patterns of semantic facilitation for either Broca's or Wernicke's aphasics. Taken together, the results of these two experiments suggest that Broca's aphasics use heuristic strategies more so than old and young normal subjects. In addition, they seem to have an automatic processing deficit affecting the level of activation of lexical entries, with a spared time course of activation. Wernicke's aphasics show a pattern of results consistent with the view that automatic processing is unimpaired in these patients, while they fail to use heuristic strategies in these tasks.
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Calvo, Manuel G., and Enrique Meseguer. "Eye Movements and Processing Stages in Reading: Relative Contribution of Visual, Lexical, and Contextual Factors." Spanish Journal of Psychology 5, no. 1 (May 2002): 66–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1138741600005849.
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The independent and the combined influence of word length, word frequency, and contextual predictability on eye movements in reading was examined across processing stages under two priming-context conditions. Length, frequency, and predictability were used as predictors in multiple regression analyses, with parafoveal, early, late, and spillover eye movement measures as the dependent variables. There were specific effects of: (a) length, both on where to look (how likely a word was fixated and in which location) and how long to fixate, across all processing stages; (b) frequency, on how long to fixate a word, but not on where to look, at an early processing stage; and (c) predictability, both on how likely a word was fixated and for how long, in late processing stages. The source of influence for predictability was related to global rather than to local contextual priming. The contribution of word length was independent of contextual source. These results are relevant to determine both the time course of the influence of visual, lexical, and contextual factors on eye movements in reading, and which main component of eye movements, that is, location or duration, is affected.
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Stone, Kate, Titus von der Malsburg, and Shravan Vasishth. "The effect of decay and lexical uncertainty on processing long-distance dependencies in reading." PeerJ 8 (December 17, 2020): e10438. http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.10438.
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To make sense of a sentence, a reader must keep track of dependent relationships between words, such as between a verb and its particle (e.g. turn the music down). In languages such as German, verb-particle dependencies often span long distances, with the particle only appearing at the end of the clause. This means that it may be necessary to process a large amount of intervening sentence material before the full verb of the sentence is known. To facilitate processing, previous studies have shown that readers can preactivate the lexical information of neighbouring upcoming words, but less is known about whether such preactivation can be sustained over longer distances. We asked the question, do readers preactivate lexical information about long-distance verb particles? In one self-paced reading and one eye tracking experiment, we delayed the appearance of an obligatory verb particle that varied only in the predictability of its lexical identity. We additionally manipulated the length of the delay in order to test two contrasting accounts of dependency processing: that increased distance between dependent elements may sharpen expectation of the distant word and facilitate its processing (an antilocality effect), or that it may slow processing via temporal activation decay (a locality effect). We isolated decay by delaying the particle with a neutral noun modifier containing no information about the identity of the upcoming particle, and no known sources of interference or working memory load. Under the assumption that readers would preactivate the lexical representations of plausible verb particles, we hypothesised that a smaller number of plausible particles would lead to stronger preactivation of each particle, and thus higher predictability of the target. This in turn should have made predictable target particles more resistant to the effects of decay than less predictable target particles. The eye tracking experiment provided evidence that higher predictability did facilitate reading times, but found evidence against any effect of decay or its interaction with predictability. The self-paced reading study provided evidence against any effect of predictability or temporal decay, or their interaction. In sum, we provide evidence from eye movements that readers preactivate long-distance lexical content and that adding neutral sentence information does not induce detectable decay of this activation. The findings are consistent with accounts suggesting that delaying dependency resolution may only affect processing if the intervening information either confirms expectations or adds to working memory load, and that temporal activation decay alone may not be a major predictor of processing time.
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Jurko, Primož. "Slovene-English Contrastive Phraseology: Lexical Collocations." ELOPE: English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries 7, no. 2 (May 28, 2010): 57–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.4312/elope.7.2.57-73.
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Phraseology is seen as one of the key elements and arguably the most productive part of any language. %e paper is focused on collocations and separates them from other phraseological units, such as idioms or compounds. Highlighting the difference between a monolingual and a bilingual (i.e. contrastive) approach to collocation, the article presents two distinct classes of collocations: grammatical and lexical. %e latter, treated contrastively, represent the focal point of the paper, since they are an unending source of translation errors to both students of translation and professional translators. %e author introduces a methodology of systematic classification of lexical collocations applied on the Slovene-English language pair and based on structural (lexical congruence) and semantic (translational predictability) criteria.
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Sereno, Sara C., Christopher J. Hand, Aisha Shahid, Bo Yao, and Patrick J. O’Donnell. "Testing the limits of contextual constraint: Interactions with word frequency and parafoveal preview during fluent reading." Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 71, no. 1 (January 2018): 302–13. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2017.1327981.
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Contextual constraint is a key factor affecting a word’s fixation duration and its likelihood of being fixated during reading. Previous research has generally demonstrated additive effects of predictability and frequency in fixation times. Studies examining the role of parafoveal preview have shown that greater preview benefit is obtained from more predictable and higher frequency words versus less predictable and lower frequency words. In two experiments, we investigated effects of target word predictability, frequency and parafoveal preview. A 3 (Predictability: low, medium, high) × 2 (Frequency: low, high) design was used with Preview (valid, invalid) manipulated between experiments. With valid previews, we found main effects of Predictability and Frequency in both fixation time and fixation probability measures, including an interaction in early fixation measures. With invalid preview, we again found main effects of Predictability and Frequency in fixation times, but no evidence of an interaction. Fixation probability showed a weak Predictability effect and Predictability–Frequency interaction. Predictability interacted with Preview in early fixation time and fixation probability measures. Our findings suggest that high levels of contextual constraint exert an early influence during lexical processing in reading. Results are discussed in terms of models of language processing and eye movement control.
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Staub, Adrian. "The effect of lexical predictability on distributions of eye fixation durations." Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 18, no. 2 (December 17, 2010): 371–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13423-010-0046-9.
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Lowder, Matthew W., Wonil Choi, Fernanda Ferreira, and John M. Henderson. "Lexical Predictability During Natural Reading: Effects of Surprisal and Entropy Reduction." Cognitive Science 42 (February 14, 2018): 1166–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12597.
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Liu, Zhifang, Wen Tong, and Yongqiang Su. "Interaction effects of aging, word frequency, and predictability on saccade length in Chinese reading." PeerJ 8 (April 1, 2020): e8860. http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.8860.
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Background It was well known that age has an impact on word processing (word frequency or predictability) in terms of fixating time during reading. However, little is known about whether or not age modulates these impacts on saccade behaviors in Chinese reading (i.e., length of incoming/outgoing saccades for a target word). Methods Age groups, predictability, and frequency of target words were manipulated in the present study. A larger frequency effect on lexical accessing (i.e., gaze duration) and on context integration (i.e., go-past time, total reading time), as well as larger predictability effects on data of raw total reading time, were observed in older readers when compared with their young counterparts. Results Effect of predictability and frequency on word skipping and re-fixating rate did not differ across the two age groups. Notably, reliable interaction effects of age, along with word predictability and/or frequency, on the length of the first incoming/outgoing saccade for a target word were also observed. Discussion Our findings suggest that the word processing function of older Chinese readers in terms of saccade targeting declines with age.
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Seyfarth, Scott. "Word informativity influences acoustic duration: Effects of contextual predictability on lexical representation." Cognition 133, no. 1 (October 2014): 140–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2014.06.013.
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Lowder, Matthew W., Gwynna Ryan, Jaclyn Opie, and Emily Kaminsky. "Effects of contrastive focus on lexical predictability during sentence reading: The case of not only. . .but also constructions." Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 74, no. 1 (September 9, 2020): 179–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1747021820949155.
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Previous research suggests that language comprehenders are sensitive to the presence of focus-sensitive particles—words like only and not that are effective at marking the focus of the sentence. In addition to signalling linguistic focus, these words can also establish a semantic contrast between the focused element and an alternate set. For example, the phrase not only the bride places linguistic focus on the bride and may also prompt comprehenders to anticipate a set of upcoming entities that stand in semantic contrast to the bride. We tested this possibility in an eyetracking-while-reading experiment that systematically crossed structure (focus vs. noun-phrase coordination) with predictability of an upcoming target noun (predictable vs. unpredictable). Whereas first-pass reading time showed a robust predictability effect for the coordination condition, the effect was eliminated for the focus condition. Later eyetracking measures revealed main effects of both predictability and syntactic structure. Overall, the results suggest that language comprehenders rapidly make use of the cue not only and may use this cue to begin anticipating a set of upcoming sentence continuations during online sentence processing.
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Fruchter, Joseph, Tal Linzen, Masha Westerlund, and Alec Marantz. "Lexical Preactivation in Basic Linguistic Phrases." Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 27, no. 10 (October 2015): 1912–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/jocn_a_00822.
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Many previous studies have shown that predictable words are read faster and lead to reduced neural activation, consistent with a model of reading in which words are activated in advance of being encountered. The nature of such preactivation, however, has typically been studied indirectly through its subsequent effect on word recognition. Here, we use magnetoencephalography to study the dynamics of prediction within serially presented adjective–noun phrases, beginning at the point at which the predictive information is first available to the reader. Using corpus transitional probability to estimate the predictability of a noun, we found an increase in activity in the left middle temporal gyrus in response to the presentation of highly predictive adjectives (i.e., adjectives that license a strong noun prediction). Moreover, we found that adjective predictivity and expected noun frequency interacted, such that the response to the highly predictive adjectives (e.g., stainless) was modulated by the frequency of the expected noun (steel). These results likely reflect preactivation of nouns in highly predictive contexts. The fact that the preactivation process was modulated by the frequency of the predicted item is argued to provide support for a frequency-sensitive lexicon.
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Perry, Scott J., Matthew C. Kelley, and Benjamin V. Tucker. "Word frequency, predictability, and lexical class influence different aspects of Spanish tonic vowel production." Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 148, no. 4 (October 2020): 2474. http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.5146851.
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Bauer, Laurie. "Notions of paradigm and their value in word-formation." Word Structure 12, no. 2 (July 2019): 153–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/word.2019.0144.
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This paper explores the notion of paradigm within lexical structures, particularly, but not exclusively, morphological structures. It illustrates that the notion of paradigm includes rather more than is usually considered to fall under this heading. It also shows that, although most of the sub-types of paradigm can be found in both inflection and derivation, there are distinctions between paradigms in the two areas. In either case, their value is related to productivity and to predictability.
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Hermena, Ehab W., Sana Bouamama, Simon P. Liversedge, and Denis Drieghe. "Does diacritics‐based lexical disambiguation modulate word frequency, length, and predictability effects? An eye‐movements investigation of processing Arabic diacritics." PLOS ONE 16, no. 11 (November 15, 2021): e0259987. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0259987.
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In Arabic, a predominantly consonantal script that features a high incidence of lexical ambiguity (heterophonic homographs), glyph-like marks called diacritics supply vowel information that clarifies how each consonant should be pronounced, and thereby disambiguate the pronunciation of consonantal strings. Diacritics are typically omitted from print except in situations where a particular homograph is not sufficiently disambiguated by the surrounding context. In three experiments we investigated whether the presence of disambiguating diacritics on target homographs modulates word frequency, length, and predictability effects during reading. In all experiments, the subordinate representation of the target homographs was instantiated by the diacritics (in the diacritized conditions), and by the context subsequent to the target homographs. The results replicated the effects of word frequency (Experiment 1), word length (Experiment 2), and predictability (Experiment 3). However, there was no evidence that diacritics-based disambiguation modulated these effects in the current study. Rather, diacritized targets in all experiments attracted longer first pass and later (go past and/or total fixation count) processing. These costs are suggested to be a manifestation of the subordinate bias effect. Furthermore, in all experiments, the diacritics-based disambiguation facilitated later sentence processing, relative to when the diacritics were absent. The reported findings expand existing knowledge about processing of diacritics, their contribution towards lexical ambiguity resolution, and sentence processing.
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Plug, Leendert. "Informativeness, Timing and Tempo in Lexical Self-Repair." Language and Speech 59, no. 4 (August 3, 2016): 516–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0023830915618427.
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This paper presents a study of the temporal organization of lexical repair in spontaneous Dutch speech. It assesses the extent to which offset-to-repair duration and repair tempo can be predicted on the basis of offset timing, reparandum tempo and measures of the informativeness of the crucial lexical items in the repair. Specifically, we address the expectations that repairs that are initiated relatively early are produced relatively fast throughout, and that relatively highly informative repairs are produced relatively slowly. For informativeness, we implement measures based on repair semantics, lexical frequency counts and cloze probabilities. Our results highlight differences between factual and linguistic error repairs, which have not been consistently distinguished in previous studies, and provide some evidence to support the notion that repairs that are initiated relatively early are produced relatively fast. They confirm that lexical frequency counts are rough measures of contextual predictability at best, and reveal very few significant effects of our informativeness measures on the temporal organization of lexical self-repair. Moreover, although we can confirm that most repairs have a repair portion that is fast relative to its reparandum, this cannot be attributed to the relative informativeness of the two portions. Our findings inform the current debate on the division of labour between inner and overt speech monitoring, and suggest that, although the influence of informativeness on speech production is extensive, it is not ubiquitous.
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CHARLES-LUCE, JAN, KELLY M. DRESSLER, and ELVIRA RAGONESE. "Effects of semantic predictability on children's preservation of a phonemic voice contrast." Journal of Child Language 26, no. 3 (October 1999): 505–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s030500099900389x.
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We investigated the effects of semantic predictability on children's preservation of the /t/-/d/ phonemic voice contrast in American English. In Experiment 1, a total of 36 seven-, nine-, and twelve-year-olds produced minimal pairs differing in intervocalic /t/ and /d/ in semantically biasing and semantically neutral passages. The seven-year-olds preserved the phonemic contrast in both passage types. However, for the nine- and twelve-year-olds, total word duration and preceding vowel duration preserved the /t/-/d/ contrast, but this interacted with semantic predictability. The contrast was preserved in the biasing and not in the neutral passages. The production results from the older children replicated previous findings from adults, demonstrating that semantic predictability influences speech production at both a lexical and a segmental level. In Experiment 2, listeners identified the tokens produced in Experiment 1. The identification results suggested that differences produced by speakers may not necessarily have a functional role for listeners. An interactive activation framework is proposed to account for the semantic effects on older children's and adults' production. For the youngest children, however, we suggest that pragmatic compensation and task demands interact with the effects of interactive activation.
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Parshina, Olga, Anastasiya Lopukhina, and Irina A. Sekerina. "Can Heritage Speakers Predict Lexical and Morphosyntactic Information in Reading?" Languages 7, no. 1 (March 4, 2022): 60. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/languages7010060.
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Ample evidence suggests that monolingual adults can successfully generate lexical and morphosyntactic predictions in reading and that correct predictions facilitate sentence comprehension. In this eye-tracking corpus reading study, we investigate whether the same is true for reading in heritage language. Specifically, we ask whether heritage speakers (HSs) of Russian are able to anticipate lexical and/or morphosyntactic information of the upcoming words in the sentence and whether they differ in the predictions from monolingual children and L2 learners. We are also interested in whether the literacy level (i.e., Russian literacy experience or reading fluency in English) influences lexical and morphosyntactic prediction. Our results indicate that HSs as well as other groups were able to anticipate the specific lexical item, and the ability was contingent on the Russian literacy experience and reading fluency in dominant English as evident in some of the early and late eye-tracking measures. Similar to children and L2 learners, the word class and the verb number predictability affected reading times in HSs, but HSs were the only group to anticipate the number of the upcoming noun. We discuss findings in respect to the utility account of the bilingual prediction and divergent attainment trajectory of the heritage language development.
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Staub, Adrian. "The Effect of Lexical Predictability on Eye Movements in Reading: Critical Review and Theoretical Interpretation." Language and Linguistics Compass 9, no. 8 (August 2015): 311–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.12151.
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Slattery, Timothy J., and Mark Yates. "Word skipping: Effects of word length, predictability, spelling and reading skill." Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 71, no. 1 (January 2018): 250–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2017.1310264.
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Readers’ eyes often skip over words as they read. Skipping rates are largely determined by word length; short words are skipped more than long words. However, the predictability of a word in context also impacts skipping rates. Rayner, Slattery, Drieghe and Liversedge reported an effect of predictability on word skipping for even long words (10-13 characters) that extend beyond the word identification span. Recent research suggests that better readers and spellers have an enhanced perceptual span. We explored that whether reading and spelling skill interact with word length and predictability to impact word skipping rates in a large sample ( N = 92) of average and poor adult readers. Participants read the items from Rayner et al., while their eye movements were recorded. Spelling skill (zSpell) was assessed using the dictation and recognition tasks developed by Sally Andrews and colleagues. Reading skill (zRead) was assessed from reading speed (words per minute) and comprehension accuracy of three 120 word passages each with 10 comprehension questions. We fit linear mixed models to the target gaze duration data and generalized linear mixed models to the target word skipping data. Target word gaze durations were significantly predicted by zRead, while the skipping likelihoods were significantly predicted by zSpell. Additionally, for gaze durations, zRead significantly interacted with word predictability as better readers relied less on context to support word processing. These effects are discussed in relation to the lexical quality hypothesis and eye movement models of reading.
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Zhao, Sainan, Lin Li, Min Chang, Jingxin Wang, and Kevin B. Paterson. "A further look at ageing and word predictability effects in Chinese reading: Evidence from one-character words." Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 74, no. 1 (September 11, 2020): 68–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1747021820951131.
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Older adults are thought to compensate for slower lexical processing by making greater use of contextual knowledge, relative to young adults, to predict words in sentences. Accordingly, compared to young adults, older adults should produce larger contextual predictability effects in reading times and skipping rates for words. Empirical support for this account is nevertheless scarce. Perhaps the clearest evidence to date comes from a recent Chinese study showing larger word predictability effects for older adults in reading times but not skipping rates for two-character words. However, one possibility is that the absence of a word-skipping effect in this experiment was due to the older readers skipping words infrequently because of difficulty processing two-character words parafoveally. We therefore took a further look at this issue, using one-character target words to boost word-skipping. Young (18–30 years) and older (65+ years) adults read sentences containing a target word that was either highly predictable or less predictable from the prior sentence context. Our results replicate the finding that older adults produce larger word predictability effects in reading times but not word-skipping, despite high skipping rates. We discuss these findings in relation to ageing effects on reading in different writing systems.
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OLIVER, GEORGINA, MARIANNE GULLBERG, FRAUKE HELLWIG, HOLGER MITTERER, and PETER INDEFREY. "Acquiring L2 sentence comprehension: A longitudinal study of word monitoring in noise." Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 15, no. 4 (March 27, 2012): 841–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1366728912000089.
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This study investigated the development of second language online auditory processing with ab initio German learners of Dutch. We assessed the influence of different levels of background noise and different levels of semantic and syntactic target word predictability on word-monitoring latencies. There was evidence of syntactic, but not lexical-semantic, transfer from the L1 to the L2 from the onset of L2 learning. An initial stronger adverse effect of noise on syntactic compared to phonological processing disappeared after two weeks of learning Dutch suggesting a change towards more robust syntactic processing. At the same time the L2 learners started to exploit semantic constraints predicting upcoming target words. The use of semantic predictability remained less efficient compared to native speakers until the end of the observation period. The improvement and the persistent problems in semantic processing we found were independent of noise and rather seem to reflect the need for more context information to build up online semantic representations in L2 listening.
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Fitzroy, Ahren B., and Mara Breen. "Metric Structure and Rhyme Predictability Modulate Speech Intensity During Child-Directed and Read-Alone Productions of Children’s Literature." Language and Speech 63, no. 2 (May 10, 2019): 292–305. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0023830919843158.
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Temporal and phonological predictability in children’s literature may support early literacy acquisition. Realization of predictive structure in caregiver prosody could guide children’s attention during shared reading, thereby supporting reading subskill development. However, little is known about how predictive structure is realized prosodically during child-directed reading. We investigated whether speakers use word intensity to signal predictive metric and rhyme structure in child-directed and read-alone productions of The Cat in the Hat (Dr. Seuss, 1957), by modeling maximum intensity (dB) of monosyllabic words as a function of metric strength, rhyme predictability, and a set of control parameters. In the control model, intensity increased with lower lexical frequency, capitalization, first mention, and likelihood of a syntactic boundary. Metric structure predicted word intensity beyond these control factors in a hierarchical manner: words aligned with beat one in a 6/8 metric structure were produced with highest intensity, words aligned with beat four were produced with intermediate intensity, and words aligned with all other beats were produced with the lowest intensity. Additionally, phonologically predictable rhyme targets were reduced in intensity. The effects of meter and rhyme were not moderated by the presence of a child audience. These results demonstrate that predictability along multiple dimensions is encoded during reading of poetic children’s literature, and that metric structure is realized hierarchically in word intensity. Further, the manner by which predictability is encoded in word intensity differs from that previously reported for word duration in this corpus (Breen, 2018), demonstrating that intensity and duration present nonidentical prosodic information channels.
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ZHANG, Manman, Huilan HU, Zhichao ZHANG, Xin LI, Qiang WANG, Xuejun BAI, and Chuanli ZANG. "The effect of lexical predictability on word processing in fast and slow readers during Chinese reading." Acta Psychologica Sinica 55, no. 1 (2023): 79. http://dx.doi.org/10.3724/sp.j.1041.2023.00079.
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Carter, Benjamin T., Brent Foster, Nathan M. Muncy, and Steven G. Luke. "Linguistic networks associated with lexical, semantic and syntactic predictability in reading: A fixation-related fMRI study." NeuroImage 189 (April 2019): 224–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2019.01.018.
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Cutter, Michael G., Andrea E. Martin, and Patrick Sturt. "The activation of contextually predictable words in syntactically illegal positions." Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 73, no. 9 (March 12, 2020): 1423–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1747021820911021.
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We present an eye-tracking study testing a hypothesis emerging from several theories of prediction during language processing, whereby predictable words should be skipped more than unpredictable words even in syntactically illegal positions. Participants read sentences in which a target word became predictable by a certain point (e.g., “bone” is 92% predictable given, “The dog buried his. . .”), with the next word actually being an intensifier (e.g., “really”), which a noun cannot follow. The target noun remained predictable to appear later in the sentence. We used the boundary paradigm to present the predictable noun or an alternative unpredictable noun (e.g., “food”) directly after the intensifier, until participants moved beyond the intensifier, at which point the noun changed to a syntactically legal word. Participants also read sentences in which predictable or unpredictable nouns appeared in syntactically legal positions. A Bayesian linear-mixed model suggested a 5.7% predictability effect on skipping of nouns in syntactically legal positions, and a 3.1% predictability effect on skipping of nouns in illegal positions. We discuss our findings in relation to theories of lexical prediction during reading.
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Veldre, Aaron, and Sally Andrews. "Parafoveal preview effects depend on both preview plausibility and target predictability." Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 71, no. 1 (January 2018): 64–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2016.1247894.
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Recent studies using the boundary paradigm have shown that readers benefit from a parafoveal preview of a plausible continuation of the sentence. This plausibility preview effect occurs irrespective of the semantic or orthographic relatedness of the preview and target word, suggesting that it depends on the degree to which a preview word fits the preceding context. The present study tested this hypothesis by examining the impact of contextual constraint on processing a plausible word in the parafovea. Participants’ eye movements were recorded as they read sentences in which a target word was either highly predictable or unpredictable. The boundary paradigm was used to compare predictable, unpredictable, and implausible previews. The results showed that target predictability significantly modulated the effects of identical and plausible previews. Identical previews yielded significantly more benefit than plausible previews for highly predictable targets, but for unpredictable targets a plausible preview was as beneficial as an identical preview. The results shed light on the role of contextual predictability in early lexical processing. Furthermore, these data support the view that readers activate a set of appropriate words from the preceding sentence context, prior to the presentation of the target word.
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Schuster, Sarah, Stefan Hawelka, Nicole Alexandra Himmelstoss, Fabio Richlan, and Florian Hutzler. "The neural correlates of word position and lexical predictability during sentence reading: evidence from fixation-related fMRI." Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 35, no. 5 (February 10, 2019): 613–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2019.1575970.
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Brothers, Trevor, Eddie W. Wlotko, Lena Warnke, and Gina R. Kuperberg. "Going the Extra Mile: Effects of Discourse Context on Two Late Positivities During Language Comprehension." Neurobiology of Language 1, no. 1 (March 2020): 135–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/nol_a_00006.
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During language comprehension, online neural processing is strongly influenced by the constraints of the prior context. Although the N400 event-related potential (ERP) response (300–500 ms) is known to be sensitive to a word’s semantic predictability, less is known about a set of late positive-going ERP responses (600–1,000 ms) that can be elicited when an incoming word violates strong predictions about upcoming content (late frontal positivity) or about what is possible given the prior context (late posterior positivity/P600). Across three experiments, we systematically manipulated the length of the prior context and the source of lexical constraint to determine their influence on comprehenders’ online neural responses to these two types of prediction violations. In Experiment 1, within minimal contexts, both lexical prediction violations and semantically anomalous words produced a larger N400 than expected continuations ( James unlocked the door/laptop/gardener), but no late positive effects were observed. Critically, the late posterior positivity/P600 to semantic anomalies appeared when these same sentences were embedded within longer discourse contexts (Experiment 2a), and the late frontal positivity appeared to lexical prediction violations when the preceding context was rich and globally constraining (Experiment 2b). We interpret these findings within a hierarchical generative framework of language comprehension. This framework highlights the role of comprehension goals and broader linguistic context, and how these factors influence both top-down prediction and the decision to update or reanalyze the prior context when these predictions are violated.
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Roehm, Dietmar, Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, Frank Rösler, and Matthias Schlesewsky. "To Predict or Not to Predict: Influences of Task and Strategy on the Processing of Semantic Relations." Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 19, no. 8 (August 2007): 1259–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/jocn.2007.19.8.1259.
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We report a series of event-related potential experiments designed to dissociate the functionally distinct processes involved in the comprehension of highly restricted lexical-semantic relations (antonyms). We sought to differentiate between influences of semantic relatedness (which are independent of the experimental setting) and processes related to predictability (which differ as a function of the experimental environment). To this end, we conducted three ERP studies contrasting the processing of antonym relations (black-white) with that of related (black-yellow) and unrelated (black-nice) word pairs. Whereas the lexical-semantic manipulation was kept constant across experiments, the experimental environment and the task demands varied: Experiment 1 presented the word pairs in a sentence context of the form The opposite of X is Y and used a sensicality judgment. Experiment 2 used a word pair presentation mode and a lexical decision task. Experiment 3 also examined word pairs, but with an antonymy judgment task. All three experiments revealed a graded N400 response (unrelated > related > antonyms), thus supporting the assumption that semantic associations are processed automatically. In addition, the experiments revealed that, in highly constrained task environments, the N400 gradation occurs simultaneously with a P300 effect for the antonym condition, thus leading to the superficial impression of an extremely “reduced” N400 for antonym pairs. Comparisons across experiments and participant groups revealed that the P300 effect is not only a function of stimulus constraints (i.e., sentence context) and experimental task, but that it is also crucially influenced by individual processing strategies used to achieve successful task performance.
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Lückert, Claudia. "The lexical profile of modern American proverbs: Detecting contextually predictable keywords in a database of American English proverbs." Yearbook of Phraseology 9, no. 1 (November 1, 2018): 31–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/phras-2018-0004.
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Abstract Proverbs (as Time is money) are conventionalized expressions that are “equivalent to a sentence” and “express generalized experiences or value judgements” (Steyer 2015: 209-210). This study aims at describing the lexical structure of the proverb inventory and at identifying ‘proverbial keywords’ which may be assumed to play an important role in storing proverbs in the mind (Luckert 2018). A database of American English proverbs was compiled and content words were tested for their contextual predictability (with COCA as ‘normative corpus’ using a ‘goodness-of-fit’ test). The results suggest that 59.4 % of the word lemmas are significantly over-represented in the proverb corpus (i.e. ‘keywords’). This finding underpins the assumption that a considerable number of words are strongly associated with the proverb as a category. In the experimental part of the project it was tested whether the ‘keywords’ differ in how well they contribute to a strengthened memory representation of proverbs.
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Wedel, Andrew, Adam Ussishkin, and Adam King. "Incremental word processing influences the evolution of phonotactic patterns." Folia Linguistica 40, no. 1 (July 26, 2019): 231–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/flih-2019-0011.
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AbstractListeners incrementally process words as they hear them, progressively updating inferences about what word is intended as the phonetic signal unfolds in time. As a consequence, phonetic cues positioned early in the signal for a word are on average more informative about word-identity because they disambiguate the intended word from more lexical alternatives than cues late in the word. In this contribution, we review two new findings about structure in lexicons and phonological grammars, and argue that both arise through the same biases on phonetic reduction and enhancement resulting from incremental processing.(i) Languages optimize their lexicons over time with respect to the amount of signal allocated to words relative to their predictability: words that are on average less predictable in context tend to be longer, while those that are on average more predictable tend to be shorter. However, the fact that phonetic material earlier in the word plays a larger role in word identification suggests that languages should also optimize the distribution of that information across the word. In this contribution we review recent work on a range of different languages that supports this hypothesis: less frequent words are not only on average longer, but also contain more highly informative segments early in the word.(ii) All languages are characterized by phonological grammars of rules describing predictable modifications of pronunciation in context. Because speakers appear to pronounce informative phonetic cues more carefully than less informative cues, it has been predicted that languages should be less likely to evolve phonological rules that reduce lexical contrast at word beginnings. A recent investigation through a statistical analysis of a cross-linguistic dataset of phonological rules strongly supports this hypothesis. Taken together, we argue that these findings suggest that the incrementality of lexical processing has wide-ranging effects on the evolution of phonotactic patterns.
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Reyes, Antonio. "Bush, Obama." Journal of Language and Politics 13, no. 3 (December 11, 2014): 538–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/jlp.13.3.08rey.
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This paper, framed under the scope of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), explains social processes by analyzing discourse practices. It proposes (para)linguistic variables employed in the creation of (in)formality in discourse in relation to two Aristotelian persuasive modes: Ethos and Pathos (Kennedy 1991). These modes of persuasion reveal different ways to convey a political message in the current U.S. political scene. This paper compares the stylistic differences in speeches given by George W. Bush and Barack Obama to justify escalating troops in the conflicts of Iraq (2007) and Afghanistan (2009), respectively. I propose (para)linguistic indicators of formality associated with Aristotelian modes at the level of linguistic choices (“lexical variables” [Schilling-Estes 2004] and “marked register usages” [Myers-Scotton 2001]), textual organization (structure and predictability), non-verbal communication (i.e. laughter; Jefferson, Sacks & Schegloff 1987), and intertextuality (Blackledge 2005; Fairclough 1992, 2003) by means of new voices (Bakhtin 1981) into the here-and-now moment of discourse.
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Carrol, Gareth, and Kathy Conklin. "Is All Formulaic Language Created Equal? Unpacking the Processing Advantage for Different Types of Formulaic Sequences." Language and Speech 63, no. 1 (January 29, 2019): 95–122. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0023830918823230.
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Research into recurrent, highly conventionalized “formulaic” sequences has shown a processing advantage compared to “novel” (non-formulaic) language. Studies of individual types of formulaic sequence often acknowledge the contribution of specific factors, but little work exists to compare the processing of different types of phrases with fundamentally different properties. We use eye-tracking to compare the processing of three types of formulaic phrases—idioms, binomials, and collocations—and consider whether overall frequency can explain the advantage for all three, relative to control phrases. Results show an advantage, as evidenced through shorter reading times, for all three types. While overall phrase frequency contributes much of the processing advantage, different types of phrase do show additional effects according to the specific properties that are relevant to each type: frequency, familiarity, and decomposability for idioms; predictability and semantic association for binomials; and mutual information for collocations. We discuss how the results contribute to our understanding of the representation and processing of multiword lexical units more broadly.
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Temirgazina, Zifa K. "Outbreak, surge or wave: how and what we say about the coronavirus." Neophilology, no. 24 (2020): 645–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.20310/2587-6953-2020-6-24-645-652.
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In the news language as a special media genre, changes in the lexical and semantic system of the language are very quickly manifested, reflecting the dynamics of social, political, and economic life. The research of news texts in critical eras is very relevant in terms of identifying trends in new vocabulary functioning. The pandemic is created a “pandemic” discourse in which new words are an important part of the lexical and semantic level of discourse. The study of neologisms in the active phase, at the very peak of functioning, allows us to comprehend the linguistic mechanism of new words formation, the external generation factor of which is extralinguistic reality. We establish that new words in the pandemic discourse appear in several ways: intralingual borrowing from highly specialized terminology (herd immunity, “cytokine storm”), foreign borrowing (coronavirus), as a result of metaphorization (wave, cover, crowned) and word-formation processes (corona, coronacrisis). Coronavirus is personified, it is presented as the evil of global and planet dimension, as a threat to humanity. We also reveal that the general emotional-expressive negativization of discourse determines the choice of native speakers from potentially possible extensions of the word semantics of meanings with negative evaluative connotations (crowned, burst). Semes of suddenness and intensity dominate in synonyms describing the coro-navirus spread. The metaphor of wave contains a predictability component, which predicts the possibility of the next coronavirus wave, its timing, and the degree of danger to people. The enrichment of common words with highly specialized medical terms can be named as a specific tendency of the “pandemic” discourse.
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Thierfelder, Philip, Gillian Wigglesworth, and Gladys Tang. "Orthographic and phonological activation in Hong Kong deaf readers: An eye-tracking study." Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 73, no. 12 (July 20, 2020): 2217–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1747021820940223.
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We used an error disruption paradigm to investigate how deaf readers from Hong Kong, who had varying levels of reading fluency, use orthographic, phonological, and mouth-shape-based (i.e., “visemic”) codes during Chinese sentence reading while also examining the role of contextual information in facilitating lexical retrieval and integration. Participants had their eye movements recorded as they silently read Chinese sentences containing orthographic, homophonic, homovisemic, or unrelated errors. Sentences varied in terms of how much contextual information was available leading up to the target word. Fixation time analyses revealed that in early fixation measures, deaf readers activated word meanings primarily through orthographic representations. However, in contexts where targets were highly predictable, fixation times on homophonic errors decreased relative to those on unrelated errors, suggesting that higher levels of contextual predictability facilitated early phonological activation. In the measure of total reading time, results indicated that deaf readers activated word meanings primarily through orthographic representations, but they also appeared to activate word meanings through visemic representations in late error recovery processes. Examining the influence of reading fluency level on error recovery processes, we found that, in comparison to deaf readers with lower reading fluency levels, those with higher reading fluency levels could more quickly resolve homophonic and orthographic errors in the measures of gaze duration and total reading time, respectively. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical implications of these findings as they relate to the lexical quality hypothesis and the dual-route cascaded model of reading by deaf adults.
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Dorleijn, Margreet. "Can Internet Data Help to Uncover Developing Preferred Multilingual Usage Patterns? An Exploration of Data from Turkish-Dutch Bilingual Internet Fora." Journal of Language Contact 9, no. 1 (December 10, 2016): 130–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/19552629-00901006.
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This paper discusses the extent to which two characteristics of digital data make such data suitable for detecting preference patterns in code switching: an absence of paralinguistic disambiguation- cues and its extra-linguistic ‘context-freeness’. This paper reports on the exploration of a 219,536 word Dutch-Turkish digital data corpus compiled from bilingual internet fora. It describes both macro-sociolinguistic patterns of language choice as well as micro-linguistic contact features in bilingual data, comparing both macro and micro results with what is known from the sociolinguistic literature in general, and Turkish-Dutch code switching and contact linguistic literature in particular. The data are analysed qualitatively and quantitatively. Focus is on the analysis of densely bilingual data of the type that has been called in the literature ‘mixed language’ (Auer, 1999), ‘intimate switching’ (Poplack, 1980), or ‘unmarked switching’ (Myers-Scotton, 1983; 1993b). It is argued that data of this type of intensive language mixing should display a certain degree of predictability since it is generally perceived of as the most effortless way of speaking by its users. It is demonstrated that recurring patterns can be found in the data, both on the macro-level of language choice and the micro-level of lexical choice, as well as in code switching patterns, and lexico-semantic choices, and it is argued that in these patterns principles of transparency and frequency of exposure may be an explanatory factor.
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Radischeva, Viktoria O. "Linguocultural Analysis of Politicians’ Speeches Based on Speeches in German." Proceedings of Southern Federal University. Philology 2020, no. 4 (December 25, 2020): 37–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.18522/1995-0640-2020-4-37-46.
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Political discourse forms the attitude of people towards values, ideals and norms. Three important political features were analyzed. German political speeches update modern concepts of German linguoculture: responsibility, order, solidness, discipline, security. The study of texts of political speeches gives an idea of the linguocultural situation. The value of order lies in reliability, security, predictability of the future, and clear rules. Safety is defined as a sense of security, a lack of internal confusion, an idea of what needs to be done. The basis in the German sphere of concepts is the careful preparation for any activity, the elaboration and thought-out of all its details, the recording and detail of information, the systematicity and sequence of actions, the quality of the product of the activity. Lexical and grammatical features of political speeches are considered, which are used to effectively influence the interviewer and audience: use of modal schemes, passive voice, complement clause, «we»/«ours» pronouns. The main themes of political speech are economic growth, the need to unite to fight for a great future, the prevention of wars, peacekeeping.
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Linke, Maja, and Michael Ramscar. "How the Probabilistic Structure of Grammatical Context Shapes Speech." Entropy 22, no. 1 (January 11, 2020): 90. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e22010090.
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Does systematic covariation in the usage patterns of forms shape the sublexical variance observed in conversational speech? We address this question in terms of a recently proposed discriminative theory of human communication that argues that the distribution of events in communicative contexts should maintain mutual predictability between language users, present evidence that the distributions of words in the empirical contexts in which they are learned and used are geometric, and thus support this. Here, we extend this analysis to a corpus of conversational English, showing that the distribution of grammatical regularities and the sub-distributions of tokens discriminated by them are also geometric. Further analyses reveal a range of structural differences in the distribution of types in parts of speech categories that further support the suggestion that linguistic distributions (and codes) are subcategorized by context at multiple levels of abstraction. Finally, a series of analyses of the variation in spoken language reveals that quantifiable differences in the structure of lexical subcategories appears in turn to systematically shape sublexical variation in speech signal.
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Ševčíková, Magda. "Modelling Morphographemic Alternations in Derivation of Czech." Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics 110, no. 1 (April 1, 2018): 7–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/pralin-2018-0001.
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Abstract The present paper deals with morphographemic alternations in Czech derivation with regard to the build-up of a large-coverage lexical resource specialized in derivational morphology of contemporary Czech (DeriNet database). After a summary of available descriptions in the Czech linguistic literature and Natural Language Processing, an extensive list of alternations is provided in the first part of the paper with a focus on their manifestation in writing. Due to the significant frequency and limited predictability of alternations in Czech derivation, several bottom-up methods were used in order to adequately model the alternations in DeriNet. Suffix-substitution rules proved to be efficient for alternations in the final position of the stem, whereas a specialized approach of extracting alternations from inflectional paradigms was used for modelling alternations within the roots. Alternations connected with derivation of verbs were handled as a separate task. DeriNet data are expected to be helpful in developing a tool for morphemic segmentation and, once the segmentation is available, to become a reliable resource for data-based description of word formation including alternations in Czech.
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Dobrovol’skij, Dmitrij, and Elisabeth Piirainen. "Conventional Figurative Language Theory and idiom motivation." Yearbook of Phraseology 9, no. 1 (November 1, 2018): 5–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/phras-2018-0003.
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AbstractThe central point of discussion is how idiom motivation is reflected in the Conventional Figurative Language Theory. Most lexical units are motivated to a certain extent, i.e. they point to their actual meaning via the meanings of their parts, either parts of their structure or of their conceptual basis. Several types of motivation can be distinguished in the field of phraseology. Apart from the quite small number of idioms where no comprehensible link can be found between the literal reading and the figurative meaning that would allow for a meaningful interpretation of a given expression, all other idioms have to be considered transparent or motivated. Idioms form a very heterogeneous domain in terms of motivation. There are levels of motivation and semantic predictability both from the perspective of a speaker and from the perspective of the semantic structure of a given unit. In this paper, we present a typology of motivation that captures all types of transparent idioms. The typology of idiom motivation connects our theory to the Cognitive Theory of Metaphor and to the Construction Grammar approaches.
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Amengual, Mark, and Miquel Simonet. "Language dominance does not always predict cross-linguistic interactions in bilingual speech production." Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 10, no. 6 (July 16, 2019): 847–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/lab.18042.ame.
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Abstract The present study describes the results of two experiments that analyze the effects of language dominance on Catalan/Spanish bilingual speech production. We examined the acoustics of the Catalan [a]~[ə] alternation (a phonological process induced by lexical stress) and of the Catalan mid vowel contrasts /e/-/ɛ/ and /o/-/ɔ/ (two phonemic contrasts) in the speech of Catalan- vs. Spanish-dominant early Catalan/Spanish bilinguals from Majorca (Spain). The results indicate that, contrary to the analysis of the Catalan mid vowels, stressed and unstressed Spanish and Catalan /a/ yielded no significant difference as a function of language dominance. These findings suggest that unstressed vowel reduction, a phonological process, may be relatively easier to acquire than phonemic contrasts with a low functional load (/e/-/ɛ/, /o/-/ɔ/), perhaps because its predictability and high frequency may attract attention and/or relieve cognitive resources, which could be conducive to phonological learning. These findings demonstrate that language dominance effects in the production of phonemic contrasts, widely researched in the literature on early bilingualism, do not guarantee the same effects on the implementation of phonological processes.
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Bybee, Joan L., Paromita Chakraborti, Dagmar Jung, and Joanne Scheibman. "Prosody and Segmental Effect Some Paths of Evolution for Word Stress." Studies in Language 22, no. 2 (January 1, 1998): 267–314. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/sl.22.2.02byb.
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This study reports on a significant negative association found in a cross-linguistic sample between the degree of predictability of word stress from a word boundary and the extent to which stress has segmental effects. In other words, in a given language the less predictable stress is from the word boundary, the more likely that the language will have vowel reduction in unstressed syllables, vowel lengthening in stressed syllables, and consonantal changes restricted to stressed or unstressed syllables. These findings are interpreted as part of a major diachronic tendency for stressed and unstressed syllables to become more differentiated in terms of duration as a cumulative effect of phonetic change, which in turn leads to the deletion of unstressed syllables, which renders stress unpredictable in some cases. A model of phonological representation that best accounts for the unidirectionality of this strong tendency is one in which stress, even while it is still predictable, is considered an inherent part of the word, and phonetic changes have a permanent and cumulative effect on lexical representation.
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Lau, Joseph C. Y., Patrick C. M. Wong, and Bharath Chandrasekaran. "Context-dependent plasticity in the subcortical encoding of linguistic pitch patterns." Journal of Neurophysiology 117, no. 2 (February 1, 2017): 594–603. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.00656.2016.
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We examined the mechanics of online experience-dependent auditory plasticity by assessing the influence of prior context on the frequency-following responses (FFRs), which reflect phase-locked responses from neural ensembles within the subcortical auditory system. FFRs were elicited to a Cantonese falling lexical pitch pattern from 24 native speakers of Cantonese in a variable context, wherein the falling pitch pattern randomly occurred in the context of two other linguistic pitch patterns; in a patterned context, wherein, the falling pitch pattern was presented in a predictable sequence along with two other pitch patterns, and in a repetitive context, wherein the falling pitch pattern was presented with 100% probability. We found that neural tracking of the stimulus pitch contour was most faithful and accurate when listening context was patterned and least faithful when the listening context was variable. The patterned context elicited more robust pitch tracking relative to the repetitive context, suggesting that context-dependent plasticity is most robust when the context is predictable but not repetitive. Our study demonstrates a robust influence of prior listening context that works to enhance online neural encoding of linguistic pitch patterns. We interpret these results as indicative of an interplay between contextual processes that are responsive to predictability as well as novelty in the presentation context. NEW & NOTEWORTHY Human auditory perception in dynamic listening environments requires fine-tuning of sensory signal based on behaviorally relevant regularities in listening context, i.e., online experience-dependent plasticity. Our finding suggests what partly underlie online experience-dependent plasticity are interplaying contextual processes in the subcortical auditory system that are responsive to predictability as well as novelty in listening context. These findings add to the literature that looks to establish the neurophysiological bases of auditory system plasticity, a central issue in auditory neuroscience.
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Roach, Daniel E., and Robert S. Sheldon. "Information scaling properties of heart rate variability." American Journal of Physiology-Heart and Circulatory Physiology 274, no. 6 (June 1, 1998): H1970—H1978. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/ajpheart.1998.274.6.h1970.
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Many chaos detection methods have proven inherently ambiguous in that they yield similar results for chaotic signals and correlated noise. The purpose of this work was to determine whether human resting heart period sequences have global properties characteristic of chaotic systems. We investigated the inherent global organization of heart period sequences by quantifying how the information content of the embedded sequences varied as a function of scale. We compared the information scaling characteristics of 60-min heart period sequences obtained from 10 healthy resting volunteers with those obtained from numerous periodic and chaotic control sequences. The information scaling properties of the heart period sequences were significantly different from those obtained for the controls, particularly at the coarsest scales ( P = 0.0003 vs. low-dimensional periodic controls; P = 0.0005 vs. low-dimensional chaotic controls; P = 0.0003 vs. low-dimensional periodic and chaotic controls). We also showed that nondeterministic components, such as large tachycardic (or bradycardic) events or aperiodic fluctuations, can lead to scaling characteristics similar to those observed for the resting heart period sequences. This, in addition to previous evidence from spectral, nonlinear predictability and lexical studies, favors an events-based approach to understanding heart rate variability.
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Delmonte, Rodolfo, and Nicolò Busetto. "Stress Test for Bert and Deep Models: Predicting Words from Italian Poetry." International Journal on Natural Language Computing 11, no. 6 (December 30, 2022): 15–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.5121/ijnlc.2022.11602.
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In this paper we present a set of experiments carried out with BERT on a number of Italian sentences taken from poetry domain. The experiments are organized on the hypothesis of a very high level of difficulty in predictability at the three levels of linguistic complexity that we intend to monitor: lexical, syntactic and semantic level. To test this hypothesis we ran the Italian version of BERT with 80 sentences - for a total of 900 tokens – mostly extracted from Italian poetry of the first half of last century. Then we alternated canonical and non-canonical versions of the same sentence before processing them with the same DL model. We used then sentences from the newswire domain containing similar syntactic structures. The results show that the DL model is highly sensitive to presence of non-canonical structures. However, DLs are also very sensitive to word frequency and to local non-literal meaning compositional effect. This is also apparent by the preference for predicting function vs content words, collocates vs infrequent word phrases. In the paper, we focused our attention on the use of subword units done by BERT for out of vocabulary words.
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Rubach, Jerzy, and Geert Booij. "Syllable structure assignment in Polish." Phonology 7, no. 1 (May 1990): 121–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0952675700001135.
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This study deals with syllable structure in Polish. The central theme is the question of when and how syllabification rules apply in the lexical phonology of Polish. In § i we lay the ground for our subsequent discussion by giving the basic syllable patterns of Polish. We also propose here a first version of the syllabification algorithm for Polish. In §2 we show that syllabification applies cyclically, because certain cyciic phonological rules make crucial use of information about the prosodic structure of their potential inputs. § 3 then shows that the syllabification algorithm has to apply both before and after the application of cyclic phonological rules on one cycle, and that syllabification is therefore a continuous process. In § we argue that the syllabification algorithm proposed in § i must be modified to enable us to predict whether a high [-consonantal] segment will surface as a vowel or as a glide. Since the distinction between vowels and glides is crucial for the application of certain cyclic phonological rules of Polish, this again shows that syllabification has to apply cyclically. § defends the hypothesis that resyllabification is restricted to Coda Erasure (and the subsequent syllabification of the desyllabified consonants). Again, the (un)predictability of the vowel/glide distinction plays a crucial role here. We summarise our conclusions in §6