From production to selection of interpretations for novel conceptual combinations: A developmental approach

This study looks at how combinations of two French nouns are interpreted. The order of occurrence of the constituents of two types of conceptual combinations, relation and property, was manipulated in view of determining how property-based and relation-based interpretations evolve with age. Three groups of French-speaking children (ages 6, 8, and 10) and a group of adults performed an interpretation-selection task. The results for the children indicated that while property-based interpretations increased with age, relation-based interpretations were in the majority for both combination types, whereas for the adults, relation-based interpretations were in the minority for property combinations. For the children and adults alike, the most frequent interpretations were ones in which the head noun came first and was followed by the modifier (the opposite of the order observed for English)

A Computational Model for Simulating Text Comprehension

International audienceIn the present article, we outline the architecture of a computer program for simulating the process by which humans comprehend texts. The program is based on psycholinguistic theories about human memory and text comprehension processes, such as the onstruction-integration model (Kintsch, 1998), the latent semantic analysis theory of knowledge representation (Landauer & Dumais, 1997), and the predication algorithms (Kintsch, 2001; Lemaire & Bianco, 2003), and it is intended to help psycholinguists investigate the way humans comprehend texts

Influence of Expertise, Coherence, and Causal Connectives on Comprehension and Recall of an Expository Text

Des experts et des novices en biologie lisaient un texte sur l’évolution des espèces dont les paragraphes étaient (ou non) accompagnés de 2 questions, l’une de rappel, l’autre de compréhension. Chaque paragraphe comprenait une phrase cible – conséquence, localement cohérente ou non cohérente, qui était précédée (ou non) par l’expression causale “c’est pourquoi”. L’ajout de l’expression causale et des questions augmente les temps de lecture de la phrase cible. Les informations relevant du modèle de situation sont mieux comprises dans les versions cohérentes (explicites) que dans les versions non cohérentes (implicites). Le connecteur causal tend à améliorer le rappel et la compréhension seulement dans les versions cohérentes (explicites). Dans la discussion, on souligne la nécessité de mieux examiner comment les experts, comparés aux novices, traitent les connecteurs causaux au cours même de la lecture.Experts and novices read a biology text whose paragraphs were or were not accompanied by questions. The Text paragraphs contained target sentences that were locally coherent or incoherent and preceded or not preceded by the cause-effect connective "That’s why". Connectives and questions during reading increased target sentence reading time. During reading, the coherent (explicit) text versions benefited from better comprehension of information related to the situation model, but not the recall of textbase-related information. The Connective tended to improve text recall and comprehension but only for the coherent (explicit) versions. More specific research on on-line processing should further examine how experts process causal connectives as compared to novices

Influence of Expertise, Coherence, and Causal Connectives on Comprehension and Recall of an Expository Text

Des experts et des novices en biologie lisaient un texte sur l’évolution des espèces dont les paragraphes étaient (ou non) accompagnés de 2 questions, l’une de rappel, l’autre de compréhension. Chaque paragraphe comprenait une phrase cible – conséquence, localement cohérente ou non cohérente, qui était précédée (ou non) par l’expression causale “c’est pourquoi”. L’ajout de l’expression causale et des questions augmente les temps de lecture de la phrase cible. Les informations relevant du modèle de situation sont mieux comprises dans les versions cohérentes (explicites) que dans les versions non cohérentes (implicites). Le connecteur causal tend à améliorer le rappel et la compréhension seulement dans les versions cohérentes (explicites). Dans la discussion, on souligne la nécessité de mieux examiner comment les experts, comparés aux novices, traitent les connecteurs causaux au cours même de la lecture.Experts and novices read a biology text whose paragraphs were or were not accompanied by questions. The Text paragraphs contained target sentences that were locally coherent or incoherent and preceded or not preceded by the cause-effect connective "That’s why". Connectives and questions during reading increased target sentence reading time. During reading, the coherent (explicit) text versions benefited from better comprehension of information related to the situation model, but not the recall of textbase-related information. The Connective tended to improve text recall and comprehension but only for the coherent (explicit) versions. More specific research on on-line processing should further examine how experts process causal connectives as compared to novices

Influence of Expertise, Coherence, and Causal Connectives on Comprehension and Recall of an Expository Text

Des experts et des novices en biologie lisaient un texte sur l’évolution des espèces dont les paragraphes étaient (ou non) accompagnés de 2 questions, l’une de rappel, l’autre de compréhension. Chaque paragraphe comprenait une phrase cible – conséquence, localement cohérente ou non cohérente, qui était précédée (ou non) par l’expression causale “c’est pourquoi”. L’ajout de l’expression causale et des questions augmente les temps de lecture de la phrase cible. Les informations relevant du modèle de situation sont mieux comprises dans les versions cohérentes (explicites) que dans les versions non cohérentes (implicites). Le connecteur causal tend à améliorer le rappel et la compréhension seulement dans les versions cohérentes (explicites). Dans la discussion, on souligne la nécessité de mieux examiner comment les experts, comparés aux novices, traitent les connecteurs causaux au cours même de la lecture.Experts and novices read a biology text whose paragraphs were or were not accompanied by questions. The Text paragraphs contained target sentences that were locally coherent or incoherent and preceded or not preceded by the cause-effect connective "That’s why". Connectives and questions during reading increased target sentence reading time. During reading, the coherent (explicit) text versions benefited from better comprehension of information related to the situation model, but not the recall of textbase-related information. The Connective tended to improve text recall and comprehension but only for the coherent (explicit) versions. More specific research on on-line processing should further examine how experts process causal connectives as compared to novices

Effect of Tuned Parameters on a LSA MCQ Answering Model

This paper presents the current state of a work in progress, whose objective is to better understand the effects of factors that significantly influence the performance of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA). A difficult task, which consists in answering (French) biology Multiple Choice Questions, is used to test the semantic properties of the truncated singular space and to study the relative influence of main parameters. A dedicated software has been designed to fine tune the LSA semantic space for the Multiple Choice Questions task. With optimal parameters, the performances of our simple model are quite surprisingly equal or superior to those of 7th and 8th grades students. This indicates that semantic spaces were quite good despite their low dimensions and the small sizes of training data sets. Besides, we present an original entropy global weighting of answers' terms of each question of the Multiple Choice Questions which was necessary to achieve the model's success.Comment: 9 page

Pertinence d'une approche psychologique de la vérité propositionnelle

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L'apprentissage d'un système fonctionnel

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