EdGCon: Auto-assigner of Iconicity Ratings Grounded by Lexical Properties to Aid in Generation of Technical Gestures

Gestures that share similarities in their forms and are related in their meanings, should be easier for learners to recognize and incorporate into their existing lexicon. In that regard, to be more readily accepted as standard by the Deaf and Hard of Hearing community, technical gestures in American Sign Language (ASL) will optimally share similar in forms with their lexical neighbors. We utilize a lexical database of ASL, ASL-LEX, to identify lexical relations within a set of technical gestures. We use automated identification for 3 unique sub-lexical properties in ASL- location, handshape and movement. EdGCon assigned an iconicity rating based on the lexical property similarities of the new gesture with an existing set of technical gestures and the relatedness of the meaning of the new technical word to that of the existing set of technical words. We collected 30 ad hoc crowdsourced technical gestures from different internet websites and tested them against 31 gestures from the DeafTEC technical corpus. We found that EdGCon was able to correctly auto-assign the iconicity ratings 80.76% of the time.Comment: Accepted for publication in ACM SAC 202

Ratiu, I., Hout, M. C., Walenchok, S. C., Azuma, T., & Goldinger, S. D. (2017). Comparing visual search and eye movements in bilinguals and monolinguals.

Eye-tracking was used to compare bilingual and monolingual performance under varied cognitive demands during separate visual search tasks

Walenchok, S. C., Hout, M. C., & Goldinger, S. D. Implicit object naming in visual search: Evidence from phonological competition.

Visual search for objects is impaired by overlapping visual features. This study shows that under demanding search for multiple targets, overlapping phonological characteristics of objects' names can also subtly impair visual search performance

Sensitivity to Expectancy Violations in Healthy Aging and Mild Cognitive Impairment

In this study, individuals with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) were tested to see if executive dysfunction impacts their implementation of expectancy biases in a priming task. Young adults, healthy older adults, and individuals with MCI made speed-related decisions to sequentially presented word pairs. The proportion of category related (e.g., apple-fruit) versus coordinate related (apple-pear) pairs was varied to create different expectancy biases. When the proportion of category pairs was high (80%), the control groups showed an expectancy bias: Significant inhibition was observed for coordinate pairs compared with category pairs. The MCI group also demonstrated an expectancy bias but with much larger costs for unexpected targets. The findings suggest that individuals with MCI are inordinately sensitive to expectancy violations, and these findings are discussed in terms of possible executive dysfunction