Graph Theoretic Features of the Adult Mental Lexicon Predict Language Production in Mandarin: Clustering Coefficient

Department of Chinese and Bilingual StudiesRefereed conference pape

Lexical competition between words, the body, and in social interaction Noise Ratios Task design Dependent Variables

International audienceObjective: To differentiate the effect of compounding demands, both corporal and social, on a cognitive task requiring the retrieval of competing lexical items in speech production.Methods: Three experimental groups of adults (ages 18-35) were recruited to complete one of three tasks followed by a questionnaire designed to measure emotion contagion. Experiment 1 had participants in a sitting position to complete a picture naming task. The task consisted of 500 test pictures that included groups of visuo-semantic neighbors (e.g., deer, elk, and antelope) that would lead to greater lexical competition as seen in spoken errors and/or reduced reaction times. A signal-to-noise ratio, known as 1/f noise, was calculated from the picture naming reaction times and used as a descriptor of individual differences. In Experiment 2, participants performed the picture naming task while standing. A 1/f noise ratio was calculated for each participants’ movement tracked online using a Microsoft Kinect. In Experiment 3 participants performed the picture naming task while standing in the same room as an experimenter that recorded the participants’ errors as they were being made. Results: Spoken errors and slower reaction times increased with task complexity, as did the randomness (i.e., white noise) of the 1/f noise ratio. Participants that experienced less lexical competition, succeeded in maintaining greater periodicity (i.e., pink noise) within their 1/f noise ratio for both picture naming reaction times and bodily movement. Participants more susceptible to emotion contagion, as measured in the questionnaire, were more likely to compound the effect of lexical competition in Experiment 3 due to the presence of the experimenter.Conclusion: The ability to control cognitive demands lessons as complexity increases due to online maintenance of cognitive, corporal and social cues. Cognitive control can be seen in those participants able to maintain periodicity within their responses to external stimuli

Facial Expressions of Sentence Comprehension

International audienceUnderstanding facial expressions allows access to one's intentional and affective states. Using the findings in psychology and neuroscience, in which physical behaviors of the face are linked to emotional states, this paper aims to study sentence comprehension shown by facial expressions. In our experiments, participants took part in a roughly 30-minute computer mediated task, where they were asked to answer either "true" or "false" to knowledge-based questions, then immediately given feedback of "correct" or "incorrect". Their faces, which were recorded during the task using the Kinect v2 device, are later used to identify the level of comprehension shown by their expressions. To achieve this, the SVM and Random Forest classifiers with facial appearance information extracted using a spatiotemporal local descriptor, named LPQ-TOP, are employed. Results of online sentence comprehension show that facial dynamics are promising to help understand cognitive states of the mind

Genome-wide meta-analysis of 241,258 adults accounting for smoking behaviour identifies novel loci for obesity traits

Few genome-wide association studies (GWAS) account for environmental exposures, like smoking, potentially impacting the overall trait variance when investigating the genetic contribution to obesity-related traits. Here, we use GWAS data from 51,080 current smokers and 190,178 nonsmokers (87% European descent) to identify loci influencing BMI and central adiposity, measured as waist circumference and waist-to-hip ratio both adjusted for BMI. We identify 23 novel genetic loci, and 9 loci with convincing evidence of gene-smoking interaction (GxSMK) on obesity-related traits. We show consistent direction of effect for all identified loci and significance for 18 novel and for 5 interaction loci in an independent study sample. These loci highlight novel biological functions, including response to oxidative stress, addictive behaviour, and regulatory functions emphasizing the importance of accounting for environment in genetic analyses. Our results suggest that tobacco smoking may alter the genetic susceptibility to overall adiposity and body fat distribution.Peer reviewe

Constructing the Mandarin Phonological Network: Novel Syllable Inventory Used to Identify Schematic Segmentation

International audienceThe purpose of this study was to construct, measure, and identify a schematic representation of phonological processing in the tonal language Mandarin Chinese through the combination of network science and psycholinguistic tasks. Two phonological association tasks were performed with native Mandarin speakers to identify an optimal phonological annotation system. The first task served to compare two existing syllable inventories and to construct a novel system where either performed poorly. The second task validated the novel syllable inventory. In both tasks, participants were found to manipulate lexical items at each possible syllable location, but preferring to maintain whole syllables while manipulating lexical tone in their search through the mental lexicon. The optimal syllable inventory was then used as the basis of a Mandarin phonological network. Phonological edit distance was used to construct sixteen versions of the same network, which we titled phonological segmentation neighborhoods (PSNs). The sixteen PSNs were representative of every proposal to date of syllable segmentation. Syllable segmentation and whether or not lexical tone was treated as a unit both affected the PSNs' topologies. Finally, reaction times from the second task were analyzed through a model selection procedure with the goal of identifying which of the sixteen PSNs best accounted for the mental target during the task. The identification of the tonal complex-vowel segmented PSN (C V C T) was indicative of the stimuli characteristics and the choices participants made while searching through the mental lexicon. The analysis revealed that participants were inhibited by greater clustering coefficient (interconnectedness of words according to phonological similarity) and facilitated by lexical frequency. This study illustrates how network science methods add to those of psycholinguistics to give insight into language processing that was not previously attainable

Lexical competition between words, the body, and in social interaction Noise Ratios Task design Dependent Variables

International audienceObjective: To differentiate the effect of compounding demands, both corporal and social, on a cognitive task requiring the retrieval of competing lexical items in speech production.Methods: Three experimental groups of adults (ages 18-35) were recruited to complete one of three tasks followed by a questionnaire designed to measure emotion contagion. Experiment 1 had participants in a sitting position to complete a picture naming task. The task consisted of 500 test pictures that included groups of visuo-semantic neighbors (e.g., deer, elk, and antelope) that would lead to greater lexical competition as seen in spoken errors and/or reduced reaction times. A signal-to-noise ratio, known as 1/f noise, was calculated from the picture naming reaction times and used as a descriptor of individual differences. In Experiment 2, participants performed the picture naming task while standing. A 1/f noise ratio was calculated for each participants’ movement tracked online using a Microsoft Kinect. In Experiment 3 participants performed the picture naming task while standing in the same room as an experimenter that recorded the participants’ errors as they were being made. Results: Spoken errors and slower reaction times increased with task complexity, as did the randomness (i.e., white noise) of the 1/f noise ratio. Participants that experienced less lexical competition, succeeded in maintaining greater periodicity (i.e., pink noise) within their 1/f noise ratio for both picture naming reaction times and bodily movement. Participants more susceptible to emotion contagion, as measured in the questionnaire, were more likely to compound the effect of lexical competition in Experiment 3 due to the presence of the experimenter.Conclusion: The ability to control cognitive demands lessons as complexity increases due to online maintenance of cognitive, corporal and social cues. Cognitive control can be seen in those participants able to maintain periodicity within their responses to external stimuli

Database of word-level statistics for Mandarin Chinese (DoWLS-MAN)

International audienceIn this article we present the Database of Word-Level Statistics for Mandarin Chinese (DoWLS-MAN). The database addresses the lack of agreement in phonological syllable segmentation specific to Mandarin by offering phonological features for each lexical item according to 16 schematic representations of the syllable (8 with tone and 8 without tone). Those lexical statistics that differ per phonological word and nonword due to changes in syllable segmentation are of the variant category and include subtitle lexical frequency, phonological neighborhood density measures, homophone density, and network science measures. The invariant characteristics consist of each items' lexical tone, phonological transcription, and syllable structure among others. The goal of DoWLS-MAN is to provide researchers both the ability to choose stimuli that are derived from a segmentation schema that supports an existing model of Mandarin speech processing, and the ability to choose stimuli that allow for the testing of hypotheses on phonological segmentation according to multiple schemas. In an exploratory analysis we illustrate how multiple schematic representations of the phonological mental lexicon can aid in hypothesis generation, specifically in terms of phonological processing during reading Chinese orthography. Users of the database can search among over 92,000 words, over 1,600 out-of-vocabulary Chinese characters, and 4,300 phonological nonwords according to either Chinese orthography, pinyin, or ascii phonetic script. Users can also generate a list of phonological words and nonwords according to user defined ranges and categories of lexical characteristics. DoWLS-MAN is available to the public for search or download at https://dowls.site