Turing Test and conversation

Ankara : Department of Computer Engineering and Information Science and the Institute of Engineering and Science of Bilkent University, 1999.Thesis (Master's) -- Bilkent University, 1999.Includes bibliographical references leaves 191-201.Saygın, Ayşe PınarM.S

Action comprehension in aphasia: linguistic and non-linguistic deficits and their lesion correlates.

Abstract We tested aphasic patients' comprehension of actions to examine processing deficits in the linguistic and non-linguistic domains and their lesion correlates. Twenty-nine left-hemisphere injured patients and 18 age-matched control subjects matched pictured actions (with the objects missing) or their linguistic equivalents (printed sentences with the object missing) to one of two visually-presented pictures of objects. Aphasic patients performed poorly not only in the linguistic domain but also in the non-linguistic domain. A subset of the patients, largely consisting of severe and non-fluent aphasics, showed a greater deficit in the linguistic domain compared with the non-linguistic domain and across the patient group, deficits in the linguistic and non-linguistic domains were not tightly correlated. Poor performance in pantomime interpretation was associated with lesions in the inferior frontal, premotor and motor cortex, a portion of somatosensory cortex, and the caudate, while poor reading comprehension of actions was associated with lesions around the anterior superior temporal lobe, the anterior insula and the anterior portion of the inferior parietal lobe. Lesion size did not correlate with deficits. The lesion results for pantomime interpretation deficits demonstrate that lesions in the frontal component of the human analog of the "mirror neuron system" are associated with deficits in non-linguistic action understanding. For reading comprehension deficits, the lesion correlates are brain areas known to be involved in linguistic tasks including sentence processing and speech articulation; the parietal lesion site may also correspond to a subpart of the human mirror neuron system. These results indicate that brain areas important for the production of language and action are also recruited in their comprehension. Similar findings have been reported in electrophysiological and neuroimaging studies. Our findings now also lend neuropsychological support to an embodied view of brain organization for action processing

Embodied perception : neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies of language, vision, and attention

In nature, organisms not only process what is in the environment, but also continuously use the sensory information gathered in planning and acting upon the environment. Thus a theory of perception which regards it as a passive, receptive process is not likely to provide a complete picture. Instead, we can view perception as intimately related to processes and brain areas which were traditionally viewed as motor or executive in nature. I have studied the neural substrates of human perception in different modalities and at different levels of complexity. There are three main research areas represented in this dissertation: 1) The sensorimotor neural bases of language; 2) Sensory and motor areas involved in biological motion perception; 3) Representations of visual space in higher cortical areas and their response properties. First, in neuropsychological studies, I have examined the extent to which language comprehension shares processing and neural resources with other complex non-linguistic skills. The results support a view of language as a system which has considerable behavioral and neural links with related non- linguistic skills and sensorimotor substrates. Second, I explored brain areas involved in the visual perception of actions represented with motion cues (point-light biological motion) in both neuropsychological and neuroimaging (fMRI) experiments. The results suggest that these stimuli are processed in not only posterior, motion- sensitive areas of the brain, but also in premotor areas in frontal cortex. Third, using fMRI, I have aimed to identify retinotopic maps in the human brain and to explore their functional properties. I found significant, well-defined retinotopic maps in multiple areas in the brain, including some which are not traditionally thought to be visual areas. Furthermore, retinotopic responses were affected both by the complexity of stimuli and by attention, with attention as important as visual stimuli in several areas. These experiments highlight the embodied nature of perception and show that perceptual processes show a great deal of flexibility to subserve a variety of goals, and rely on multiple levels of representations across multiple modalities, often times including significant involvement of motor or executive neural resource

Adverbs and Functional Heads in Turkish: Linear Order and Scope *

Our goal in this paper is to investigate the linear order and scope of adverbs and functional heads in Turkish, especially with reference to Cinque’s (1999) recen

Paradigm reanalysis and the representation of morphologically complex words in Turkish

In this paper we explore the idea that language change can inform psycholinguistic models (e.g. Bybee 2001a), arguing that recent developments in colloquial Turkish provide evidence bearing on the representation of morphologically complex words. Specifically, there are several instances in whic