2,203 research outputs found

    Linking language and emotion: how emotion is understood in language comprehension, production and prediction using psycholinguistic methods

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    Emotions are an integral part of why and how we use language in everyday life. We communicate our concerns, express our woes, and share our joy through the use of non-verbal and verbal language. Yet there is a limited understanding of when and how emotional language is processed differently to neutral language, or of how emotional information facilitates or inhibits language processing. Indeed, various efforts have been made to bring back emotions into the discipline of psycholinguistics in the last decade. This can be seen in many interdisciplinary models focusing on the role played by emotion in each aspect of linguistic experience. In this thesis, I answer this call and pursue questions that remain unanswered in psycholinguistics regarding its interaction with emotion. The general trend that I am using to bring emotion into psycholinguistic research is straightforward. Where applicable and relevant, I use well-established tasks or paradigms to investigate the effects of emotional content in language processing. Hence, I focused on three main areas of language processing: comprehension, production and prediction. The first experimental chapter includes a series of experiments utilising the Modality Switching Paradigm to investigate whether sentences describing emotional states are processed differently from sentences describing cognitive states. No switching effects were found consistently in my 3 experiments. My results suggest that these distinct classes of interoceptive concepts, such as ‘thinking’ or ‘being happy’, are not processed differently from each other, suggesting that people do not switch attention between different interoceptive systems when comprehending emotional or cognitive sentences. I discuss the implications for grounded cognition theory in the embodiment literature. In my second experimental chapter, I used the Cumulative Semantic Interference Paradigm to investigate these two questions: (1) whether emotion concepts interfere with one another when repeatedly retrieved (emotion label objects), and (2) whether similar interference occurs for concrete objects that share similar valence association (emotion-laden objects). This could indicate that people use information such as valence and arousal to group objects in semantic memory. I found that interference occurs when people retrieve direct emotion labels repeatedly (e.g., “happy” and “sad”) but not when they retrieve the names of concrete objects that have similar emotion connotations (e.g., “puppy” and “rainbow”). I discuss my findings in terms of the different types of information that support representation of abstract vs. concrete concepts. In my final experimental chapter, I used the Visual World Paradigm to investigate whether the emotional state of an agent is used to inform predictions during sentence processing. I found that people do use the description of emotional state of an agent (e.g., “The boy is happy”) to predict the cause of that affective state during sentence processing (e.g., “because he was given an ice-cream”). A key result here is that people were more likely to fixate on the emotionally congruent objects (e.g., ice-cream) compared to incongruent objects (e.g., broccoli). This suggests that people rapidly and automatically inform predictions about upcoming sentence information based on the emotional state of the agent. I discuss our findings as a novel contribution to the Visual World literature. I conducted a diverse set of experiments using a range of established psycholinguistic methods to investigate the roles of emotional information in language processing. I found clear results in the eye-tracking study but inconsistent effects in both switching and interference studies. I interpret these mixed findings in the following way: emotional content does not always have effects in language processing and that effect are most likely in tasks that explicitly require participants to simulate emotion states in some way. Regardless, not only was I successful in finding some novel results by extending previous tasks, but I was also able to show that this is an avenue that can be explored more to advance the affective psycholinguistic field

    Patterns and Variation in English Language Discourse

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    The publication is reviewed post-conference proceedings from the international 9th Brno Conference on Linguistics Studies in English, held on 16–17 September 2021 and organised by the Faculty of Education, Masaryk University in Brno. The papers revolve around the themes of patterns and variation in specialised discourses (namely the media, academic, business, tourism, educational and learner discourses), effective interaction between the addressor and addressees and the current trends and development in specialised discourses. The principal methodological perspectives are the comparative approach involving discourses in English and another language, critical and corpus analysis, as well as identification of pragmatic strategies and appropriate rhetorical means. The authors of papers are researchers from the Czech Republic, Italy, Luxembourg, Serbia and Georgia

    Embers of Autoregression: Understanding Large Language Models Through the Problem They are Trained to Solve

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    The widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) makes it important to recognize their strengths and limitations. We argue that in order to develop a holistic understanding of these systems we need to consider the problem that they were trained to solve: next-word prediction over Internet text. By recognizing the pressures that this task exerts we can make predictions about the strategies that LLMs will adopt, allowing us to reason about when they will succeed or fail. This approach - which we call the teleological approach - leads us to identify three factors that we hypothesize will influence LLM accuracy: the probability of the task to be performed, the probability of the target output, and the probability of the provided input. We predict that LLMs will achieve higher accuracy when these probabilities are high than when they are low - even in deterministic settings where probability should not matter. To test our predictions, we evaluate two LLMs (GPT-3.5 and GPT-4) on eleven tasks, and we find robust evidence that LLMs are influenced by probability in the ways that we have hypothesized. In many cases, the experiments reveal surprising failure modes. For instance, GPT-4's accuracy at decoding a simple cipher is 51% when the output is a high-probability word sequence but only 13% when it is low-probability. These results show that AI practitioners should be careful about using LLMs in low-probability situations. More broadly, we conclude that we should not evaluate LLMs as if they are humans but should instead treat them as a distinct type of system - one that has been shaped by its own particular set of pressures.Comment: 50 pages plus 11 page of references and 23 pages of appendice

    Short-term exposure alters adult listeners’ perception of segmental phonotactics

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    This study evaluates the malleability of adults' perception of probabilistic phonotactic (biphone) probabilities, building on a body of literature on statistical phonotactic learning. It was first replicated that listeners categorize phonetic continua as sounds that create higher-probability sequences in their native language. Listeners were also exposed to skewed distributions of biphone contexts, which resulted in the enhancement or reversal of these effects. Thus, listeners dynamically update biphone probabilities (BPs) and bring this to bear on perception of ambiguous acoustic information. These effects can override long-term BP effects rooted in native language experience

    Learning probabilistic patterns: influence of homophony, L1 and frequency

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    In this thesis, I investigate whether learners’ avoidance of alternation and neutralization, as well as learners’ exposure to their native language (L1), affect how they learn new morpho-phonological patterns. While the effect of individual factors on morpho-phonological learning has been widely studied, whether these factors have a collective effect on learning and interact with the frequency of variants in the input has been understudied. To explore whether there are any interactive effects of these factors, I modify the type of alternations, learners’ native languages, and relative frequency of variants across several repetitions of an experiment. I exposed adult English speakers to an artificial language in which plural forms were probabilistically marked by one of two prefixes. One of the prefixes triggered either a non- neutralizing or neutralizing alternation that could create homophony. I found that English speakers generally matched the relative input frequency to their output. However, learners avoided the construction that resulted in a phonological alternation, but only when it was infrequent. This finding suggests that though there is a tendency to avoid alternations, it depends on how frequent the relative variants are in the input. Moreover, English speakers were poorer at learning the neutralizing alternation than the non-neutralizing alternation, showing their bias against neutralization that can create homophony. Additionally, I replicated the same experiments with Korean speakers because there is abundant exposure to neutralization in their L1. I found that Korean speakers were successful at learning both neutralizing and non-neutralizing alternations, suggesting that having abundant exposure to neutralization can make new neutralization easier to learn. Finally, I argue for a model which implements the avoidance effect as a discounting of observations that trigger homophony in the training data, rather than requiring a special constraint penalizing neutralization in the grammar. This Discount model correctly predicts the different learning results between English and Korean speakers and provides a straightforward explanation for learners’ bias against neutralization and homophony. This approach places the locus of the bias in the learning process rather than in the grammar

    Computational creativity: an interdisciplinary approach to sequential learning and creative generations

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    Creativity seems mysterious; when we experience a creative spark, it is difficult to explain how we got that idea, and we often recall notions like ``inspiration" and ``intuition" when we try to explain the phenomenon. The fact that we are clueless about how a creative idea manifests itself does not necessarily imply that a scientific explanation cannot exist. We are unaware of how we perform certain tasks, such as biking or language understanding, but we have more and more computational techniques that can replicate and hopefully explain such activities. We should understand that every creative act is a fruit of experience, society, and culture. Nothing comes from nothing. Novel ideas are never utterly new; they stem from representations that are already in mind. Creativity involves establishing new relations between pieces of information we had already: then, the greater the knowledge, the greater the possibility of finding uncommon connections, and the more the potential to be creative. In this vein, a beneficial approach to a better understanding of creativity must include computational or mechanistic accounts of such inner procedures and the formation of the knowledge that enables such connections. That is the aim of Computational Creativity: to develop computational systems for emulating and studying creativity. Hence, this dissertation focuses on these two related research areas: discussing computational mechanisms to generate creative artifacts and describing some implicit cognitive processes that can form the basis for creative thoughts

    Análisis global y local de la predicción mediante Potenciales Relacionados con Eventos. Aplicación al Trastorno del Espectro Autista

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    Bajo la perspectiva teórica de la codificación predictiva, el cerebro humano funciona como una sofisticada máquina que está constantemente evaluando las características de los estímulos percibidos y la relación existente entre ellos, con el objetivo de extraer nuevos patrones de diferentes niveles de abstracción para anticipar el siguiente evento. Esta dinámica automática de generación o modificación de las predicciones con el fin de dirigir la atención y ajustar la respuesta, es considerada uno de los procesos psicofisiológicos más fundamentales que existen, por lo que su alteración está relacionada con diversas patologías. El presente trabajo describe dos estudios desarrollados mediante EEG, en los que fueron analizados (i) la habituación y discriminación auditiva preatencional mostrada por un grupo de niños con TEA en comparación con uno control, y (ii) el establecimiento y actualización de las predicciones desarrolladas por un grupo de adultos sanos en paradigmas de diferente complejidad. Para conseguir estos objetivos, todos los sujetos registrados en ambos estudios recibieron una estimulación auditiva pasiva similar a la del tipo Oddball, aunque las características y la organización de los estímulos fueron diferentes en ambos experimentos. La estimulación auditiva presentada en el estudio de TEA estuvo compuesta por tonos generados electrónicamente o producidos por una cantante profesional, con el objetivo de investigar si la alteración en el desarrollo del lenguaje, típicamente descrita para estos niños, es causada por un déficit selectivo al procesar las características internas de la voz humana. Los componentes analizados para el estudio del TEA fueron el P1 y la MMN. Los niños con TEA presentaron una menor amplitud para los componentes P1 y MMN en comparación con el grupo control, lo cual sugiere una habituación y discriminación auditivas reducidas tanto para el sonido electrónico como el humano. Dado que la MMN también se ha relacionado con la codificación predictiva, los sujetos con TEA tendrían disminuida esta capacidad. El diseño experimental presentado al grupo adulto sano estuvo compuesto por dos paradigmas experimentales diferentes según el nivel de abstracción requerido para extraer un patrón: en un caso, la predicción dependía de las características físicas de los estímulos presentados (las frecuencias de los tonos) mientras que, en el otro caso, dependía de su organización (la dirección ascendente o descendente de las secuencias de tonos). Un componente similar a la MMN (“MMN-like”) y uno lento (posiblemente una Postimperative Negative Variation, PINV) fueron analizados con el objetivo de comprobar la hipótesis de la codificación predictiva. Los resultados obtenidos son detallados en dos artículos. Estos componentes registrados en población adulta fueron, primero, propuestos como una MMN y una Slow Preceding Negativity (SPN) y, posteriormente, reconceptualizados en el segundo artículo como un N1 tardío y una PINV. Ambos componentes se desarrollaban en la latencia de la MMN y el intervalo entre ensayos, respectivamente. Los resultados obtenidos en la investigación realizada en el grupo adulto, mostraron una mayor amplitud ante los ensayos desviantes y el paradigma más complejo, en ambos componentes analizados, lo que sugiere que están involucrados en el establecimiento y actualización de las predicciones basadas no solo en las características físicas de los estímulos, sino también en reglas abstractas. Además, tanto el N1 tardío como la PINV presentaron respuestas de diferente amplitud dependiendo del ensayo previamente presentado, lo que sugeriría una actualización continua de los ensayos, hasta donde sabemos, no descrita para estos componentes en la literatura previa

    Ditransitives in germanic languages. Synchronic and diachronic aspects

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    This volume brings together twelve empirical studies on ditransitive constructions in Germanic languages and their varieties, past and present. Specifically, the volume includes contributions on a wide variety of Germanic languages, including English, Dutch, and German, but also Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian, as well as lesser-studied ones such as Faroese. While the first part of the volume focuses on diachronic aspects, the second part showcases a variety of synchronic aspects relating to ditransitive patterns. Methodologically, the volume covers both experimental and corpus-based studies. Questions addressed by the papers in the volume are, among others, issues like the cross-linguistic pervasiveness and cognitive reality of factors involved in the choice between different ditransitive constructions, or differences and similarities in the diachronic development of ditransitives. The volume’s broad scope and comparative perspective offers comprehensive insights into well-known phenomena and furthers our understanding of variation across languages of the same family
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