Beyond gender stereotypes in language comprehension: self sex-role descriptions affect the brain’s potentials associated with agreement processing

We recorded Event-Related Potentials to investigate differences in the use of gender information during the processing of reflexive pronouns. Pronouns either matched the gender provided by role nouns (such as “king” or “engineer”) or did not. We compared two types of gender information, definitional information, which is semantic in nature (a mother is female), or stereotypical (a nurse is likely to be female). When they followed definitional role-nouns, gender-mismatching pronouns elicited a P600 effect reflecting a failure in the agreement process. When instead the gender violation occurred after stereotypical role-nouns the Event Related Potential response was biphasic, being positive in parietal electrodes and negative in anterior left electrodes. The use of a correlational approach showed that those participants with more “feminine” or “expressive” self sex-role descriptions showed a P600 response for stereotype violations, suggesting that they experienced the mismatch as an agreement violation; whereas less “expressive” participants showed an Nref effect, indicating more effort spent in linking the pronouns with the possible, although less likely, counter-stereotypical referent

Content And Multimedia Database Management Systems

A database management system is a general-purpose software system that facilitates the processes of defining, constructing, and manipulating databases for various applications. The main characteristic of the ‘database approach’ is that it increases the value of data by its emphasis on data independence. DBMSs, and in particular those based on the relational data model, have been very successful at the management of administrative data in the business domain. This thesis has investigated data management in multimedia digital libraries, and its implications on the design of database management systems. The main problem of multimedia data management is providing access to the stored objects. The content structure of administrative data is easily represented in alphanumeric values. Thus, database technology has primarily focused on handling the objects’ logical structure. In the case of multimedia data, representation of content is far from trivial though, and not supported by current database management systems

Effects of time pressure on verbal self-monitoring

Wetensch. publicatieFaculteit der Sociale Wetenschappe

ClioPatria: A SWI-Prolog Infrastructure for the Semantic Web

ClioPatria is a comprehensive semantic web development framework based on SWI-Prolog. SWI-Prolog provides an efficient C-based main-memory RDF store that is designed to cooperate naturally and efficiently with Prolog, realizing a flexible RDF-based environment for rule based programming. ClioPatria extends this core with a SPARQL and LOD server, an extensible web frontend to manage the server, browse the data, query the data using SPARQL and Prolog and a Git-based plugin manager. The ability to query RDF using Prolog provides query composition and smooth integration with application logic. ClioPatria is primarily positioned as a prototyping platform for exploring novel ways of reasoning with RDF data. It has been used in several research projects in order to perform tasks such as data integration and enrichment and semantic search

Effects of time pressure on verbal self-monitoring: An ERP study

The Error-Related Negativity (ERN) is a component of the event-related brain potential (ERP) that is associated with action monitoring and error detection. The present study addressed the question whether or not an ERN occurs after verbal error detection, e.g., during phoneme monitoring.We obtained an ERN following verbal errors which showed a typical decrease in amplitude under severe time pressure. This result demonstrates that the functioning of the verbal self-monitoring system is comparable to other performance monitoring, such as action monitoring. Furthermore, we found that participants made more errors in phoneme monitoring under time pressure than in a control condition. This may suggest that time pressure decreases the amount of resources available to a capacity-limited self-monitor thereby leading to more errors

Determination and evaluation of clinically efficient stopping criteria for the multiple auditory steady-state response technique

Background: Although the auditory steady-state response (ASSR) technique utilizes objective statistical detection algorithms to estimate behavioural hearing thresholds, the audiologist still has to decide when to terminate ASSR recordings introducing once more a certain degree of subjectivity. Aims: The present study aimed at establishing clinically efficient stopping criteria for a multiple 80-Hz ASSR system. Methods: In Experiment 1, data of 31 normal hearing subjects were analyzed off-line to propose stopping rules. Consequently, ASSR recordings will be stopped when (1) all 8 responses reach significance and significance can be maintained for 8 consecutive sweeps; (2) the mean noise levels were ≤ 4 nV (if at this “≤ 4-nV” criterion, p-values were between 0.05 and 0.1, measurements were extended only once by 8 sweeps); and (3) a maximum amount of 48 sweeps was attained. In Experiment 2, these stopping criteria were applied on 10 normal hearing and 10 hearing-impaired adults to asses the efficiency. Results: The application of these stopping rules resulted in ASSR threshold values that were comparable to other multiple-ASSR research with normal hearing and hearing-impaired adults. Furthermore, in 80% of the cases, ASSR thresholds could be obtained within a time-frame of 1 hour. Investigating the significant response-amplitudes of the hearing-impaired adults through cumulative curves indicated that probably a higher noise-stop criterion than “≤ 4 nV” can be used. Conclusions: The proposed stopping rules can be used in adults to determine accurate ASSR thresholds within an acceptable time-frame of about 1 hour. However, additional research with infants and adults with varying degrees and configurations of hearing loss is needed to optimize these criteria

Object-based modelling for representing and processing speech corpora

This thesis deals with modelling data existing in large speech corpora using an object-oriented paradigm which captures important linguistic structures. Information from corpora is transformed into objects and are assigned properties regarding their behaviour. These objects, called speech units, are placed onto a multi-dimensional framework and have their relationships to other units explicitly defined through the use of links. Frameworks that model temporal utterances or atemporal information like speaker characteristics and recording conditions can be searched efficiently for contextual matches. Speech units that match desired contexts are the result of successful linguistically motivated queries and can be used in further speech processing tasks in the same computational environment. This allows for empirical studies of speech and its relation to linguistic structures to be carried out, and for the training and testing of applications like speech recognition and synthesis. Information residing in typical speech corpora is discussed first, followed by an overview of object-orientation which sets the tone for this thesis. Then the representation framework is introduced which is generated by a compiler and linker that rely on a set of domain-specific resources that transform corpus data into speech units. Operations on this framework are then presented along with a comparison between a relational and object-oriented model of identical speech data. The models described in this work are directly applicable to existing large speech corpora, and the methods developed here are tested against relational database methods. The object-oriented methods outperform the relational methods for typical linguistically relevant queries by about three orders of magnitude as measured by database search times. This improvement in simplicity of representation and search speed is crucial for the utilisation of large multi-lingual corpora in basic research on the detailed properties of speech, especially in relation to contextual variation.reviewe