Induced gamma-band activity is related to the time point of object identification

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Modelling the acquisition of syntactic categories

This research represents an attempt to model the child’s acquisition of syntactic categories. A computational model, based on the EPAM theory of perception and learning, is developed. The basic assumptions are that (1) syntactic categories are actively constructed by the child using distributional learning abilities; and (2) cognitive constraints in learning rate and memory capacity limit these learning abilities. We present simulations of the syntax acquisition of a single subject, where the model learns to build up multi-word utterances by scanning a sample of the speech addressed to the subject by his mother

Verbs as linguistic markers of agency: The social side of grammar

open4Basic grammatical categories may carry social meanings irrespective of their semantic content. In a set of four studies, we demonstrate that verbs—a basic linguistic category present and distinguishable in most languages—are related to the perception of agency, a fundamental dimension of social perception. In an archival analysis of actual language use in Polish and German, we found that targets stereotypically associated with high agency (men and young people) are presented in the immediate neighborhood of a verb more often than non-agentic social targets (women and older people). Moreover, in three experiments using a pseudo-word paradigm, verbs (but not adjectives and nouns) were consistently associated with agency (but not with communion). These results provide consistent evidence that verbs, as grammatical vehicles of action, are linguistic markers of agency. In demonstrating meta-semantic effects of language, these studies corroborate the view of language as a social tool and an integral part of social perception.openFormanowicz, Magdalena; Roessel, Janin; Suitner, Caterina; Maass, AnneFormanowicz, Magdalena; Roessel, Janin; Suitner, Caterina; Maass, Ann

From deep dyslexia to agrammatic comprehension on silent reading

We report on a case of a French-speaking patient whose performance on reading aloud single words was characteristically deep dyslexic (in spite of preserved ability to identify letters), and whose comprehension on silent sentence reading was agrammatic and strikingly poorer than on oral reading. The first part of the study is mainly informative as regards (i) the relationship between letter identification, semantic paralexias and the ability to read nonwords, (ii) the differential character of silent and oral reading tasks, and (iii) the potential modality-dependent character of the deficits in comprehension encountered. In the second part of the study we examine the patient's sensitivity to verb-noun ambiguity and probe her skills in the comprehension of indexical structures by exploring her ability to cope with number agreement and temporal and prepositional relations. The results indicate the patient's sensitivity to certain dimensions of these linguistic categories, reveal a partly correct basis for certain incorrect responses, and, on the whole, favor a definition of the patient's disorders in terms of a deficit in integrating indexical information in language comprehension. More generally, the present study substantiates a microgenetic approach to neuropsychology, where the pathological behavior due to brain damage is described as an arrest of microgenesis at an early stage of development, so that patient's responses take the form of unfinished "products" which would normally undergo further development

The role of Comprehension in Requirements and Implications for Use Case Descriptions

Within requirements engineering it is generally accepted that in writing specifications (or indeed any requirements phase document), one attempts to produce an artefact which will be simple to comprehend for the user. That is, whether the document is intended for customers to validate requirements, or engineers to understand what the design must deliver, comprehension is an important goal for the author. Indeed, advice on producing ‘readable’ or ‘understandable’ documents is often included in courses on requirements engineering. However, few researchers, particularly within the software engineering domain, have attempted either to define or to understand the nature of comprehension and it’s implications for guidance on the production of quality requirements. Therefore, this paper examines thoroughly the nature of textual comprehension, drawing heavily from research in discourse process, and suggests some implications for requirements (and other) software documentation. In essence, we find that the guidance on writing requirements, often prevalent within software engineering, may be based upon assumptions which are an oversimplification of the nature of comprehension. Hence, the paper examines guidelines which have been proposed, in this case for use case descriptions, and the extent to which they agree with discourse process theory; before suggesting refinements to the guidelines which attempt to utilise lessons learned from our richer understanding of the underlying discourse process theory. For example, we suggest subtly different sets of writing guidelines for the different tasks of requirements, specification and design

Type-driven semantic interpretation and feature dependencies in R-LFG

Once one has enriched LFG's formal machinery with the linear logic mechanisms needed for semantic interpretation as proposed by Dalrymple et. al., it is natural to ask whether these make any existing components of LFG redundant. As Dalrymple and her colleagues note, LFG's f-structure completeness and coherence constraints fall out as a by-product of the linear logic machinery they propose for semantic interpretation, thus making those f-structure mechanisms redundant. Given that linear logic machinery or something like it is independently needed for semantic interpretation, it seems reasonable to explore the extent to which it is capable of handling feature structure constraints as well. R-LFG represents the extreme position that all linguistically required feature structure dependencies can be captured by the resource-accounting machinery of a linear or similiar logic independently needed for semantic interpretation, making LFG's unification machinery redundant. The goal is to show that LFG linguistic analyses can be expressed as clearly and perspicuously using the smaller set of mechanisms of R-LFG as they can using the much larger set of unification-based mechanisms in LFG: if this is the case then we will have shown that positing these extra f-structure mechanisms is not linguistically warranted.Comment: 30 pages, to appear in the the ``Glue Language'' volume edited by Dalrymple, uses tree-dvips, ipa, epic, eepic, fullnam

Intonation development from five to thirteen

Research undertaken to date suggests that important developments in the understanding and use of intonation may take place after the age of 5;0. The present study aims to provide a more comprehensive account of these developments. A specially designed battery of prosodic tasks was administered to four groups of thirty children, from London (U.K.), with mean ages of 5;6, 8;7, 10;10 and 13;9. The tasks tap comprehension and production of functional aspects of intonation, in four communicative areas: CHUNKING (i.e. prosodic phrasing), AFFECT, INTERACTION and FOCUS. Results indicate that there is considerable variability among children within each age band on most tasks. The ability to produce intonation functionally is largely established in five-year-olds, though some specific functional contrasts are not mastered until C.A. 8;7. Aspects of intonation comprehension continue to develop up to C.A. 10;10, correlating with measures of expressive and receptive language development

TEI and LMF crosswalks

The present paper explores various arguments in favour of making the Text Encoding Initia-tive (TEI) guidelines an appropriate serialisation for ISO standard 24613:2008 (LMF, Lexi-cal Mark-up Framework) . It also identifies the issues that would have to be resolved in order to reach an appropriate implementation of these ideas, in particular in terms of infor-mational coverage. We show how the customisation facilities offered by the TEI guidelines can provide an adequate background, not only to cover missing components within the current Dictionary chapter of the TEI guidelines, but also to allow specific lexical projects to deal with local constraints. We expect this proposal to be a basis for a future ISO project in the context of the on going revision of LMF