The emotion potential of words and passages in reading Harry Potter:an fMRI study

Previous studies suggested that the emotional connotation of single words automatically recruits attention. We investigated the potential of words to induce emotional engagement when reading texts. In an fMRI experiment, we presented 120 text passages from the Harry Potter book series. Results showed significant correlations between affective word (lexical) ratings and passage ratings. Furthermore, affective lexical ratings correlated with activity in regions associated with emotion, situation model building, multi-modal semantic integration, and Theory of Mind. We distinguished differential influences of affective lexical, inter-lexical, and supra-lexical variables: differential effects of lexical valence were significant in the left amygdala, while effects of arousal-span (the dynamic range of arousal across a passage) were significant in the left amygdala and insula. However, we found no differential effect of passage ratings in emotion-associated regions. Our results support the hypothesis that the emotion potential of short texts can be predicted by lexical and inter-lexical affective variables

Local Temporal Regularities in Child-Directed Speech in Spanish

Published online: Oct 4, 2022Purpose: The purpose of this study is to characterize the local (utterance-level) temporal regularities of child-directed speech (CDS) that might facilitate phonological development in Spanish, classically termed a syllable-timed language. Method: Eighteen female adults addressed their 4-year-old children versus other adults spontaneously and also read aloud (CDS vs. adult-directed speech [ADS]). We compared CDS and ADS speech productions using a spectrotemporal model (Leong & Goswami, 2015), obtaining three temporal metrics: (a) distribution of modulation energy, (b) temporal regularity of stressed syllables, and (c) syllable rate. Results: CDS was characterized by (a) significantly greater modulation energy in the lower frequencies (0.5–4 Hz), (b) more regular rhythmic occurrence of stressed syllables, and (c) a slower syllable rate than ADS, across both spontaneous and read conditions. Discussion: CDS is characterized by a robust local temporal organization (i.e., within utterances) with amplitude modulation bands aligning with delta and theta electrophysiological frequency bands, respectively, showing greater phase synchronization than in ADS, facilitating parsing of stress units and syllables. These temporal regularities, together with the slower rate of production of CDS, might support the automatic extraction of phonological units in speech and hence support the phonological development of children. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.21210893This study was supported by the Formación de Personal Investigado Grant BES-2016-078125 by Ministerio Español de Economía, Industria y Competitividad and Fondo Social Europeo awarded to Jose Pérez-Navarro; through Project RTI2018-096242-B-I00 (Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades [MCIU]/Agencia Estatal de Investigación [AEI]/Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional [FEDER], Unión Europea) funded by MCIU, the AEI, and FEDER awarded to Marie Lallier; by the Basque Government through the Basque Excellence Research Centre 2018-2021 Program; and by the Spanish State Research Agency through Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language Severo Ochoa Excellence Accreditation SEV- 2015-0490. We want to thank the participants and their children for their volunteer contribution to our study

Multimodal Writing of University Students: The Case of Academic Posters

After having been marginalized for a long time as a second-class genre or “the poor country cousin of papers” (Swales & Feak, 2000), academic posters have recently received remarkable attention as a special multimodal genre that is indispensable for the membership of the academic community. In line with the currently growing interest in multimodal writing, the present study seeks to contribute to the limited body of knowledge on academic posters in two ways: first by investigating the textual and visual communicative strategies employed by novice multimodal writers to facilitate the comprehension of their multimodal texts and guide readers through their discourse and second by exploring the perceptions of those young multimodal writers towards that special genre. To accomplish the first objective, a corpus of 100 academic posters gathered from freshmen university students enrolled in a second language research writing course was compiled and analyzed textually and visually drawing mainly on the framework of D’Angelo (2016a) that distinguishes between interactive and interactional resources. To fulfill the second objective, a questionnaire was filled out by 66 students, and four interviews were carried out. Both quantitative and qualitative methods were used in the analysis. Descriptive statistics was employed in the multimodal analysis of the posters as well as the analysis of the questionnaire responses, and a qualitative thematic analysis was conducted to interpret the responses of the interviewees. The quantitative textual and visual analysis revealed a clear dominance of the interactive resources and, to some extent, a lack of making the best use of all the available visual resources. The analysis of the self-reported data unveiled that young multimodal writers hold quite positive perceptions towards the academic poster as a multimodal genre. Further, they tended to decode the interrelation between textual and visual resources as an illustrative or code mixing relationship where both text and visuals complement each other to communicate the intended meaning. The study has pedagogical implications relevant to introducing novice multimodal writers to the available semiotic resources

Investigating the role of exogenous cueing on selection history formation

© 2019, The Psychonomic Society, Inc. An abundance of recent empirical data suggest that repeatedly allocating visual attention to task-relevant and/or reward-predicting features in the visual world engenders an attentional bias for these frequently attended stimuli, even when they become task irrelevant and no longer predict reward. In short, attentional selection in the past hinders voluntary control of attention in the present. But do such enduring attentional biases rely on a history of voluntary, goal-directed attentional selection, or can they be generated through involuntary, effortless attentional allocation? An abrupt visual onset triggers such a reflexive allocation of covert spatial attention to its location in the visual field, automatically modulating numerous aspects of visual perception. In this Registered Report, we asked whether a selection history that has been reflexively and involuntarily derived (i.e., through abrupt-onset cueing) also interferes with goal-directed attentional control, even in the complete absence of exogenous cues. To build spatially distinct histories of exogenous selection, we presented abrupt-onset cues twice as often at one of two task locations, and as expected, these cues reflexively modulated visual processing: task accuracy increased, and response times (RTs) decreased, when the cue appeared near the target’s location, relative to that of the distractor. Upon removal of these cues, however, we found no evidence that exogenous selection history modulated task performance: task accuracy and RTs at the previously most-cued and previously least-cued sides were statistically indistinguishable. Thus, unlike voluntarily directed attention, involuntary attentional allocation may not be sufficient to engender historically contingent selection biases

Change blindness: eradication of gestalt strategies

Arrays of eight, texture-defined rectangles were used as stimuli in a one-shot change blindness (CB) task where there was a 50% chance that one rectangle would change orientation between two successive presentations separated by an interval. CB was eliminated by cueing the target rectangle in the first stimulus, reduced by cueing in the interval and unaffected by cueing in the second presentation. This supports the idea that a representation was formed that persisted through the interval before being 'overwritten' by the second presentation (Landman et al, 2003 Vision Research 43149–164]. Another possibility is that participants used some kind of grouping or Gestalt strategy. To test this we changed the spatial position of the rectangles in the second presentation by shifting them along imaginary spokes (by ±1 degree) emanating from the central fixation point. There was no significant difference seen in performance between this and the standard task [F(1,4)=2.565, p=0.185]. This may suggest two things: (i) Gestalt grouping is not used as a strategy in these tasks, and (ii) it gives further weight to the argument that objects may be stored and retrieved from a pre-attentional store during this task

"The Martial Islands": Making Marshallese Masculinities between American and Japanese Militarism

For over a century, the Marshall Islands have been entangled between the United States and Japan in their conquest of the Central Pacific; yet because of this, these islands have also been a place where multiple masculinities have converged, competed, and transformed each other. This is especially true around the site of Kwajalein Atoll, where terrain understood in Marshallese terms as female or maternal has been reshaped and masculinized through the semiotics of colonialism and militarization. This article focuses specifically on three local representations of masculinity: the knowledgeable but strategic Marshallese "Etao," symbolized by a creative and resourceful male trickster spirit; the heroic but paternalistic American "Patriot," as enacted via the perpetual battlefield of military and weapons-testing missions; and the adventurous but self-sacrificing "Dankichi," deployed in Japan during the 1930s and echoed nowadays in the long-distance tuna-fishing industry. Cross-reading Judith Butler and R W Connell, this is an exploration of the "theater" of these masculinities in relationship to one another, and the story of how different superpowers strive for domination by emasculating a third colonial site and its subjects

Neural Related Work Summarization with a Joint Context-driven Attention Mechanism

Conventional solutions to automatic related work summarization rely heavily on human-engineered features. In this paper, we develop a neural data-driven summarizer by leveraging the seq2seq paradigm, in which a joint context-driven attention mechanism is proposed to measure the contextual relevance within full texts and a heterogeneous bibliography graph simultaneously. Our motivation is to maintain the topic coherency between a related work section and its target document, where both the textual and graphic contexts play a big role in characterizing the relationship among scientific publications accurately. Experimental results on a large dataset show that our approach achieves a considerable improvement over a typical seq2seq summarizer and five classical summarization baselines.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, in the Proceedings of EMNLP 201