1,154 research outputs found
Preliminary experiments on human sensitivity to rhythmic structure in a grammar with recursive self-similarity
We present the first rhythm detection experiment using a Lindenmayer grammar, a self-similar recursive grammar shown previously to be learnable by adults using speech stimuli. Results show that learners were unable to correctly accept or reject grammatical and ungrammatical strings at the group level, although five (of 40) participants were able to do so with detailed instructions before the exposure phase
Editors' Review and Introduction: Learning Grammatical Structures: Developmental, CrossâSpecies, and Computational Approaches
Human languages all have a grammar, that is, rules that determine how symbols in a language can be combined to create complex meaningful expressions. Despite decades of research, the evolutionary, developmental, cognitive, and computational bases of grammatical abilities are still not fully understood. âArtificial Grammar Learningâ (AGL) studies provide important insights into how rules and structured sequences are learned, the relevance of these processes to language in humans, and whether the cognitive systems involved are shared with other animals. AGL tasks can be used to study how human adults, infants, animals, or machines learn artificial grammars of various sorts, consisting of rules defined typically over syllables, sounds, or visual items. In this introduction, we distill some lessons from the nine other papers in this special issue, which review the advances made from this growing body of literature. We provide a critical synthesis, identify the questions that remain open, and recognize the challenges that lie ahead. A key observation across the disciplines is that the limits of human, animal, and machine capabilities have yet to be found. Thus, this interdisciplinary area of research firmly rooted in the cognitive sciences has unearthed exciting new questions and venues for research, along the way fostering impactful collaborations between traditionally disconnected disciplines that are breaking scientific ground
Models linking production and comprehension
To what extent are linguistic representations shared between production and comprehension? What is the nature of the links between production and comprehension processes? In this chapter, we provide an introduction to those models that incorporate explicit assumptions about the degree of sharing and review some supporting evidence. We show that full sharing of representations is uncontroversial only for semantics and syntax, while there is mixed evidence over the degree of overlapping at the level of phonological and phonetic representations. We then propose a taxonomy of productionâcomprehension links, ranging from longâterm to fastâacting. To conclude, we advocate more explicit theorizing about the relationship between language production and language comprehension
The interplay of within-species perceptual predispositions and experience during song ontogeny in zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata)
Master crossover functions for the one-component fluid "subclass"
Introducing three well-defined dimensionless numbers, we establish the link
between the scale dilatation method able to estimate master (i.e. unique)
singular behaviors of the one-component fluid "subclass" and the universal
crossover functions recently estimated [Garrabos and Bervillier, Phys. Rev. E
74, 021113 (2006)] from the bounded results of the massive renormalization
scheme applied to the..
Effects of patch size and number within a simple model of patchy colloids
We report on a computer simulation and integral equation study of a simple
model of patchy spheres, each of whose surfaces is decorated with two opposite
attractive caps, as a function of the fraction of covered attractive
surface. The simple model explored --- the two-patch Kern-Frenkel model ---
interpolates between a square-well and a hard-sphere potential on changing the
coverage . We show that integral equation theory provides quantitative
predictions in the entire explored region of temperatures and densities from
the square-well limit down to . For smaller
, good numerical convergence of the equations is achieved only at
temperatures larger than the gas-liquid critical point, where however integral
equation theory provides a complete description of the angular dependence.
These results are contrasted with those for the one-patch case. We investigate
the remaining region of coverage via numerical simulation and show how the
gas-liquid critical point moves to smaller densities and temperatures on
decreasing . Below , crystallization prevents the
possibility of observing the evolution of the line of critical points,
providing the angular analog of the disappearance of the liquid as an
equilibrium phase on decreasing the range for spherical potentials. Finally, we
show that the stable ordered phase evolves on decreasing from a
three-dimensional crystal of interconnected planes to a two-dimensional
independent-planes structure to a one-dimensional fluid of chains when the
one-bond-per-patch limit is eventually reached.Comment: 26 pages, 11 figures, J. Chem. Phys. in pres
Spatial language and converseness
Typical spatial language sentences consist of describing the location of an object (the located object) in relation to another object (the reference object) as in âThe book is above the vaseâ. While it has been suggested that the properties of the located object (the book) are not translated into language because they are irrelevant when exchanging location information, it has been shown that the orientation of the located object affects the production and comprehension of spatial descriptions. In line with the claim that spatial language apprehension involves inferences about relations that hold between objects it has been suggested that during spatial language apprehension people use the orientation of the located object to evaluate whether the logical property of converseness (e.g., if âthe book is above the vaseâ is true, then also âthe vase is below the bookâ must be true) holds across the objectsâ spatial relation. In three experiments using sentence acceptability rating tasks we tested this hypothesis and demonstrated that when converseness is violated people's acceptability ratings of a scene's description are reduced indicating that people do take into account geometric properties of the located object and use it to infer logical spatial relations
Higher order QCD corrections to charged-lepton deep-inelastic scattering and global fits of parton distributions
We study the perturbative QCD corrections to heavy-quark structure functions
of charged-lepton deep-inelastic scattering and their impact on global fits of
parton distributions. We include the logarithmically enhanced terms near
threshold due to soft gluon resummation in the QCD corrections at
next-to-next-to-leading order. We demonstrate that this approximation is
sufficient to describe the available HERA data in most parts of the kinematic
region. The threshold-enhanced next-to-next-to-leading order corrections
improve the agreement between predictions based on global fits of the parton
distribution functions and the HERA collider data even in the small-x region.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures, latex, extended journal versio
Intrinsic transverse momentum and the polarized Drell-Yan process
In this paper we study the cross section at leading order in for
polarized Drell-Yan scattering at measured lepton-pair transverse momentum
. We find that for a hadron with spin the quark content at leading
order is described by six distribution functions for each flavor, which depend
on both the lightcone momentum fraction , and the quark transverse momentum
\bbox{k}_T^2. These functions are illustrated for a free-quark ensemble. The
cross sections for both longitudinal and transverse polarizations are expressed
in terms of convolution integrals over the distribution functions.Comment: 25 pages, REVTEX 3.0 (3 figures included in separate LATEX file using
feynman.tex), NIKHEF-94-P1 (Revised version
Three Way Comparison between Two OMI/Aura and One POLDER/PARASOL Cloud Pressure Products
The cloud pressures determined by three different algorithms, operating on reflectances measured by two space-borne instruments in the "A" train, are compared with each other. The retrieval algorithms are based on absorption in the oxygen A-band near 760 nm, absorption by a collision induced absorption in oxygen near 477nm, and the filling in of Fraunhofer lines by rotational Raman scattering. The first algorithm operates on data collected by the POLDER instrument on board PARASOL, while the latter two operate on data from the OMI instrument on board Aura. The satellites sample the same air mass within about 15 minutes. Using one month of data, the cloud pressures from the three algorithms are found to show a similar behavior, with correlation coefficients larger than 0.85 between the data sets for thick clouds. The average differences in the cloud pressure are also small, between 2 and 45 hPa, for the whole data set. For optically thin to medium thick clouds, the cloud pressure the distribution found by POLDER is very similar to that found by OMI using the O2 - O2 absorption. Somewhat larger differences are found for very thick clouds, and we hypothesise that the strong absorption in the oxygen A-band causes the POLDER instrument to retrieve lower pressures for those scenes
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