Negation in context: evidence from the visual world paradigm

Literature assumes that negation is more difficult to understand than affirmation, but this might depend on the pragmatic context. The goal of this paper is to show that pragmatic knowledge modulates the unfolding processing of negation due to the previous activation of the negated situation. To test this, we used the visual world paradigm. In this task, we presented affirmative (e.g., her dad was rich) and negative sentences (e.g., her dad was not poor) while viewing two images of the affirmed and denied entities. The critical sentence in each item was preceded by one of three types of contexts: an inconsistent context (e.g., She supposed that her dad had little savings) that activates the negated situation (a poor man), a consistent context (e.g., She supposed that her dad had enough savings) that activates the actual situation (a rich man), or a neutral context (e.g., her dad lived on the other side of town) that activates neither of the two models previously suggested. The results corroborated our hypothesis. Pragmatics is implicated in the unfolding processing of negation. We found an increase in fixations on the target compared to the baseline for negative sentences at 800 ms in the neutral context, 600 ms in the inconsistent context, and 1450 ms in the consistent context. Thus, when the negated situation has been previously introduced via an inconsistent context, negation is facilitated

Les études visuelles et le tournant iconique

Comment l’étude d’une culture visuelle peut-elle répondre à l’intérêt croissant porté à la « présence » de l’image ? Ce souci phénoménologique pour la capacité de l’objet à déterminer sa propre réception ne pourrait-il pas s’associer à des approches qui mettent en valeur son potentiel politique ? Est-il possible de concevoir l’image à la fois comme « présentation » et comme « représentation » ?How can the study of visual culture respond to the increasing interest in the “presence” of the image? Can this phenomenological concern for the power of the object to determine its own reception be related to approaches that emphasize its political potential? Is it possible to conceive the image as “presentation” and “representation” at the same time

A study of flame development with isooctane alcohol blended fuels in a optical spark ignition engine

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel UniversityThe work was concerned with experimental study of the turbulent flame development process of alcohol fuels, namely ethanol and butanol, in an optically accessed spark ignition research engine. The fuels were evaluated in a single cylinder engine equipped with full-bore overhead optical access operated at typical stoichiometric part-load conditions with images captured using high-speed natural light imaging techniques (or chemiluminescence). The differences in flame development between the fuels was analysed to understand better the impact of high and low alcohol content fuels on combustion. Advanced image analysis, in conjunction with Ricardo WAVE simulation, allowed for the conclusion that the faster burning exhibited by ethanol was the result of the marginally higher laminar burning velocity providing a faster laminar burn phase and accelerating the flame into the turbulent spectrum thus reducing bulk flame distortion and better in-cylinder pressure development. Such physical reactions are often over-looked in the face of chemical differences between fuels. A further study into the variation of maximum in-cylinder pressure values was conducted focussing on iso-octane and ethanol. This study identified two phenomena, namely “saw-toothing” and “creep” in which cluster of cycles feed into one another. From this it became clear that the presence of high pressure during the exhaust process had a large influence on the following cycles. This is another often overlooked phenomenon of direct cycle-to-cycle variation whereby incylinder pressures during blowdown can dictate the duration, load or stability output of the following cycle. Finally the work investigated the impact on flame development of alcohol fuels when the overlap duration was altered. While the engine produced counterintuitive figures of residual gas, ethanol was confirmed as having greater synergy with EGR by displaying less impacted combustion durations c.f. iso-octane. Care should be taken however when analysing these results due to the unique valve configuration of the engine.Thomas Gerald Gray Charitable Trust Scholarship Scheme and from the School of Engineering and Desig

Is Modernity Multiple?

Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT), Fundação Millennium bc

Principles of factory cost keeping

The book is offered to those interested along cost accounting lines, with the hope that it may help to a clearer understanding of the true aims of this important branch of accounting science

Dealiasing techniques for high-order spectral element methods on regular and irregular grids

High-order methods are becoming increasingly attractive in both academia and industry, especially in the context of computational fluid dynamics. However, before they can be more widely adopted, issues such as lack of robustness in terms of numerical stability need to be addressed, particularly when treating industrial-type problems where challenging geometries and a wide range of physical scales, typically due to high Reynolds numbers, need to be taken into account. One source of instability is aliasing effects which arise from the nonlinearity of the underlying problem. In this work we detail two dealiasing strategies based on the concept of consistent integration. The first uses a localised approach, which is useful when the nonlinearities only arise in parts of the problem. The second is based on the more traditional approach of using a higher quadrature. The main goal of both dealiasing techniques is to improve the robustness of high order spectral element methods, thereby reducing aliasing-driven instabilities. We demonstrate how these two strategies can be effectively applied to both continuous and discontinuous discretisations, where, in the latter, both volumetric and interface approximations must be considered. We show the key features of each dealiasing technique applied to the scalar conservation law with numerical examples and we highlight the main differences in terms of implementation between continuous and discontinuous spatial discretisations

A Psychological Investigation of the Use and Interpretation of English Quantifiers

The work in this thesis is an investigation of quantifiers as they are used and interpreted in everyday language. Attention in the present work is paid to problems of proportion and emphasis, rather than to questions of the scope of quantifiers, which must account for a great deal of the literature on quantification in language. The literature reviews are accordingly restricted and do not address the question of scope. Experiments 1 to 5 are designed to answer questions about the way in which quantifiers relate to amounts or proportions. Experiment 1, in which subjects were invited to describe things in proportional terms, provides a large corpus of quantifiers and the proportions they are used to describe. Experiments 2 to 5 explore the effect of prior expectations on the meaning of quantifiers, and the effects of the use of quantifiers on the proportion which the speaker is believed to expect. These studies show that the proportions denoted by any one quantifier are influenced little, if at all, by prior expectations, a somewhat surprising finding. However, quantifiers do have various effects on the proportion which subjects believe the speaker to have expected in the situation she is describing. The second part of the thesis, and experiments 6 to 8, consider certain aspects of the meanings of quantifiers which are not related to amounts or proportions. Particular attention is paid to the way in which quantifiers can emphasise different subsets of the set which follows them in a piece of discourse. These differences in emphasis are assessed using a sentence continuation method. They are related to the idea of 'focus' which is used in later chapters. Finally, a computer program is used to illustrate one possible process which allows the various aspects of quantifier meanings to be assigned interpretation. The program, like the empirical studies, aims to discover and describe the effects of various quantifiers as they are used by human language users in descriptions of simple situations

Processing quantified noun phrases with numbers versus verbal quantifiers

Statements containing quantity information are commonplace. Although there is literature explaining the way in which quantities themselves are conveyed in numbers or words (e.g., many, probably), there is less on the effects of different types of quantity description on the processing of surrounding text. Given that quantity information is usually conveyed to alter our understanding of a situation (e.g., to convey information about a risk), our understanding of the rest of the quantified statement is clearly important. In this article texts containing quantified statements expressed numerically versus verbally are compared in two text change experiments to assess how the entire quantified noun phrase is encoded in each case. On the basis of the results it is argued that numerical quantifiers place focus on the size of a subset, whereas verbal quantifiers are better integrated with nouns leading to more focus on the subset itself