A comparison of homonym meaning frequency estimates derived from movie and television subtitles, free association, and explicit ratings

First Online: 10 September 2018Most words are ambiguous, with interpretation dependent on context. Advancing theories of ambiguity resolution is important for any general theory of language processing, and for resolving inconsistencies in observed ambiguity effects across experimental tasks. Focusing on homonyms (words such as bank with unrelated meanings EDGE OF A RIVER vs. FINANCIAL INSTITUTION), the present work advances theories and methods for estimating the relative frequency of their meanings, a factor that shapes observed ambiguity effects. We develop a new method for estimating meaning frequency based on the meaning of a homonym evoked in lines of movie and television subtitles according to human raters. We also replicate and extend a measure of meaning frequency derived from the classification of free associates. We evaluate the internal consistency of these measures, compare them to published estimates based on explicit ratings of each meaning’s frequency, and compare each set of norms in predicting performance in lexical and semantic decision mega-studies. All measures have high internal consistency and show agreement, but each is also associated with unique variance, which may be explained by integrating cognitive theories of memory with the demands of different experimental methodologies. To derive frequency estimates, we collected manual classifications of 533 homonyms over 50,000 lines of subtitles, and of 357 homonyms across over 5000 homonym–associate pairs. This database—publicly available at: www.blairarmstrong.net/homonymnorms/—constitutes a novel resource for computational cognitive modeling and computational linguistics, and we offer suggestions around good practices for its use in training and testing models on labeled data

Identifying Metaphor Hierarchies in a Corpus Analysis of Finance Articles

Using a corpus of over 17,000 financial news reports (involving over 10M words), we perform an analysis of the argument-distributions of the UP- and DOWN-verbs used to describe movements of indices, stocks, and shares. Using measures of the overlap in the argument distributions of these verbs and k-means clustering of their distributions, we advance evidence for the proposal that the metaphors referred to by these verbs are organised into hierarchical structures of superordinate and subordinate groups

The Politics of Recitation: Ideology, Interpellation, and Hegemony

In this article, David I. Backer introduces the politics of recitation as a third realm for research on recitation pedagogy, in addition to process and product. Recitation is the pattern of classroom talk where a teacher asks a question, a student responds to the question, and the teacher evaluates the response. Research on classroom talk shows that this pattern is the dominant script in classrooms in the United States. Revisiting debates among critical theorists of schooling, particularly around the concept of hegemony, Backer argues that the politics of recitation is best understood in terms of interpellation, the concrete occurrence of ideological reproduction. He also maintains that recitation does not interpellate students into a particular category but instead teaches students to become interpellatable to any social category, independent of historical context. The article opens new possibilities for research into the connection between recitation and ideology and describes what liberatory pedagogy can look like

Neural correlates of the processing of co-speech gestures

In communicative situations, speech is often accompanied by gestures. For example, speakers tend to illustrate certain contents of speech by means of iconic gestures which are hand movements that bear a formal relationship to the contents of speech. The meaning of an iconic gesture is determined both by its form as well as the speech context in which it is performed. Thus, gesture and speech interact in comprehension. Using fMRI, the present study investigated what brain areas are involved in this interaction process. Participants watched videos in which sentences containing an ambiguous word (e.g. She touched the mouse) were accompanied by either a meaningless grooming movement, a gesture supporting the more frequent dominant meaning (e.g. animal) or a gesture supporting the less frequent subordinate meaning (e.g. computer device). We hypothesized that brain areas involved in the interaction of gesture and speech would show greater activation to gesture-supported sentences as compared to sentences accompanied by a meaningless grooming movement. The main results are that when contrasted with grooming, both types of gestures (dominant and subordinate) activated an array of brain regions consisting of the left posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS), the inferior parietal lobule bilaterally and the ventral precentral sulcus bilaterally. Given the crucial role of the STS in audiovisual integration processes, this activation might reflect the interaction between the meaning of gesture and the ambiguous sentence. The activations in inferior frontal and inferior parietal regions may reflect a mechanism of determining the goal of co-speech hand movements through an observation-execution matching process

Konjungsi Dalam Lirik Lagu-lagu Bob Marley and the Wailers Pada Album Survival

This research is entitled “Conjunction in the Album Survival by Bob Marley and The Wailers”. Conjunction is a word used to connect words, phrases, and clauses. Conjunction shows the relationship between sentence elements that they connect. The purpose of this research is to describe, identify, and analyze the forms, functions, and meanings of conjunction in the songs of Bob Marley and The Wailers in the Album Survival (1979). The method used in this research is descriptive. The identification and classification of the data are based on Payne (2011) and Algeo (2006) about forms and functions of the conjunction. Furthermore, there is an analysis of the data about meanings of conjunctions follows Hartford (2004) and ABA English (2014). The results show that the conjunctions found in the lyrics of the songs are: coordinate conjunctions and, but, for and coordinate conjunctions complex and then, and subordinate conjunctions are ‘cause, before, when, as, so, than, that, who, which, what, if, and no matter. The function of the coordinate conjunctions is to connect words, phrases, clauses and sentences, whereas the subordinate conjunctions are to connect clauses. The meaning of the conjunctions is as stated in the concepts used, they are in addition, time, contrast, result, purpose, etc. The investigation has been done through the library and field research. The data about conjunction in the songs are being collected from album Survival (1979) by Bob Marley and The Wailers. It is expected that this study can be continued by students of English Department and those who are interested in learning one of the aspects of English, in this case, conjunctions. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Pacifier overuse and conceptual relations of abstract and emotional concepts

This study explores the impact of the extensive use of an oral device since infancy (pacifier) on the acquisition of concrete, abstract, and emotional concepts. While recent evidence showed a negative relation between pacifier use and children’s emotional competence (Niedenthal et al., 2012), the possible interaction between use of pacifier and processing of emotional and abstract language has not been investigated. According to recent theories, while all concepts are grounded in sensorimotor experience, abstract concepts activate linguistic and social information more than concrete ones. Specifically, the Words As Social Tools (WAT) proposal predicts that the simulation of their meaning leads to an activation of the mouth (Borghi and Binkofski, 2014; Borghi and Zarcone, 2016). Since the pacifier affects facial mimicry forcing mouth muscles into a static position, we hypothesize its possible interference on acquisition/consolidation of abstract emotional and abstract not-emotional concepts, which aremainly conveyed during social and linguistic interactions, than of concrete concepts. Fifty-nine first grade children, with a history of different frequency of pacifier use, provided oral definitions of the meaning of abstract not-emotional, abstract emotional, and concrete words. Main effect of concept type emerged, with higher accuracy in defining concrete and abstract emotional concepts with respect to abstract not-emotional concepts, independently from pacifier use. Accuracy in definitions was not influenced by the use of pacifier, butcorrespondence and hierarchical clustering analyses suggest that the use of pacifier differently modulates the conceptual relations elicited by abstract emotional and abstract not-emotional. While the majority of the children produced a similar pattern of conceptual relations, analyses on the few (6) children who overused the pacifier (for more than 3 years) showed that they tend to distinguish less clearly between concrete and abstract emotional concepts and between concrete and abstract not-emotional concepts than children who did not use it (5) or used it for short (17). As to the conceptual relations they produced, children who overused the pacifier tended to refer less to their experience and to social and emotional situations, usemore exemplifications and functional relations, and less free associations