When We Were Comrades Together: A Note on the Language of Assessment

From a psychoanalytic perspective, the assessor is seen as more than a gatherer of data; he or she is viewed as a source of information independent of the tests as well as a potential vehicle of change. To effect these functions, the assessor needs to pay close attention to the language he or she uses in interaction with the patient. In this article, I present a case and then discuss it in terms of the role of language in the assessor-patient relationship: specifically, how the language used facilitated the establishing of a working alliance, the promoting of a meaningful dialogue, and eventually led to a deeper understanding of the patient.     

The Contribution of Neuroimaging to the Study of Language and Aphasia

New structural and functional imaging methods continue to be developed at a rapid pace. In the last 25 years, advanced imaging techniques have provided insights into how language is represented and processed in the brain and how it can be disrupted by damage to, or dysfunction of, various parts of the brain. Imaging studies have also yielded new information regarding how individuals recover language after stroke. We briefly review the strengths and weaknesses of the various radiological methods currently used to study language and aphasia.     

When we were comrades together: a note on the language of assessment

From a psychoanalytic perspective, the assessor is seen as more than a gatherer of data; he or she is viewed as a source of information independent of the tests as well as a potential vehicle of change. To effect these functions, the assessor needs to pay close attention to the language he or she uses in interaction with the patient. In this article, I present a case and then discuss it in terms of the role of language in the assessor-patient relationship: specifically, how the language used facilitated the establishing of a working alliance, the promoting of a meaningful dialogue, and eventually led to a deeper understanding of the patient.     

Activation of emotion information in text among younger and older adults

The ability to represent emotions is an important capacity for the understanding of discourse. In the current literature, it is unclear whether older adults represent emotion information in the course of language processing, in particular as it relates to developing an adequate mental model of characters in narratives. We addressed this issue in two studies, one assessing emotion activation at the word level and the other at the mental model level. In the first experiment, subjects performed a lexical decision task in which words were drawn from both logic- and emotion-based categories. For both category types, priming was evident for young and old. In the second experiment, subjects read passages with emotion information that was consistent or inconsistent with the implied emotional tone. Both age groups showed an increase in reading time in response to inconsistent emotion information, indicating that the protagonist's emotional state was represented while reading. Results of these studies generally suggest age preservation in the activation of emotion information in language processing.     

Syntactic gender processing in the human brain: a review and a model

Despite the increasing number of neuroimaging studies of syntactic gender processing no model is currently available that includes data from visual and auditory language comprehension and language production. This paper provides a systematic review of the neural correlates of syntactic gender processing. Based on anatomical information from cytoarchitectonic probability maps it is argued that the left BA 44 plays a central role for the active use of gender information, e.g., for explicit decisions as well as for subsequent morphological encoding. The left BA 45 is involved in the strategic generation of morphological cues that facilitate gender processing. Model implications for aphasic patients with lesions including or excluding parts of Broca's speech region are discussed.     

Stress changes the representational landscape: evidence from word segmentation

Over the past couple of decades, research has established that infants are sensitive to the predominant stress pattern of their native language. However, the degree to which the stress pattern shapes infants' language development has yet to be fully determined. Whether stress is merely a cue to help organize the patterns of speech or whether it is an important part of the representation of speech sound sequences has still to be explored. Building on research in the areas of infant speech perception and segmentation, we asked how several months of exposure to the target language shapes infants' speech processing biases with respect to lexical stress. We hypothesize that infants represent stressed and unstressed syllables differently, and employed analyses of child-directed speech to show how this change to the representational landscape results in better distribution-based word segmentation as well as an advantage for stress-initial syllable sequences. A series of experiments then tested 9- and 7-month-old infants on their ability to use lexical stress without any other cues present to parse sequences from an artificial language. We found that infants adopted a stress-initial syllable strategy and that they appear to encode stress information as part of their proto-lexical representations. Together, the results of these studies suggest that stress information in the ambient language not only shapes how statistics are calculated over the speech input, but that it is also encoded in the representations of parsed speech sequences.     

Speech segmentation is facilitated by visual cues

Evidence from infant studies indicates that language learning can be facilitated by multimodal cues. We extended this observation to adult language learning by studying the effects of simultaneous visual cues (nonassociated object images) on speech segmentation performance. Our results indicate that segmentation of new words from a continuous speech stream is facilitated by simultaneous visual input that it is presented at or near syllables that exhibit the low transitional probability indicative of word boundaries. This indicates that temporal audio-visual contiguity helps in directing attention to word boundaries at the earliest stages of language learning. Off-boundary or arrhythmic picture sequences did not affect segmentation performance, suggesting that the language learning system can effectively disregard noninformative visual information. Detection of temporal contiguity between multimodal stimuli may be useful in both infants and second-language learners not only for facilitating speech segmentation, but also for detecting word–object relationships in natural environments.     

Creating a hypertext markup language document for an information server

This paper briefly overviews the World-Wide Web. It then provides a short tutorial on the use of the hypertext markup language to publish information on the web. Hypertext markup language is a special page-layout language that was developed to help make creating and retrieving information on the web consistent and efficient. Hyperlinks within hypertext markup language make the language especially powerful because they enable the browser to transparently retrieve images, movies, or audio files from virtually any computer on earth simply by clicking on an item displayed on the monitor.     

Redundancy and reduction: Speakers manage syntactic information density

A principle of efficient language production based on information theoretic considerations is proposed: Uniform Information Density predicts that language production is affected by a preference to distribute information uniformly across the linguistic signal. This prediction is tested against data from syntactic reduction. A single multilevel logit model analysis of naturally distributed data from a corpus of spontaneous speech is used to assess the effect of information density on complementizer that-mentioning, while simultaneously evaluating the predictions of several influential alternative accounts: availability, ambiguity avoidance, and dependency processing accounts. Information density emerges as an important predictor of speakers’ preferences during production. As information is defined in terms of probabilities, it follows that production is probability-sensitive, in that speakers’ preferences are affected by the contextual probability of syntactic structures. The merits of a corpus-based approach to the study of language production are discussed as well.     

Young children attribute normativity to novel actions without pedagogy or normative language

Young children interpret some acts performed by adults as normatively governed, that is, as capable of being performed either rightly or wrongly. In previous experiments, children have made this interpretation when adults introduced them to novel acts with normative language (e.g. 'this is the way it goes'), along with pedagogical cues signaling culturally important information, and with social-pragmatic marking that this action is a token of a familiar type. In the current experiment, we exposed children to novel actions with no normative language, and we systematically varied pedagogical and social-pragmatic cues in an attempt to identify which of them, if either, would lead children to normative interpretations. We found that young 3-year-old children inferred normativity without any normative language and without any pedagogical cues. The only cue they used was adult social-pragmatic marking of the action as familiar, as if it were a token of a well-known type (as opposed to performing it, as if inventing it on the spot). These results suggest that - in the absence of explicit normative language - young children interpret adult actions as normatively governed based mainly on the intentionality (perhaps signaling conventionality) with which they are performed.     

旅游商品多语言包装策略的作用机制和影响效果——基于选择通达模型的视角

多语言包装策略被广泛应用于促进旅游商品的销售。然而, 现有研究仅从消费者感知视角出发, 难以揭示多语言线索的复杂效应。本研究基于选择通达模型, 主要探讨(1)多语言包装策略导致消费者推断旅游商品是针对某类群体(即对比效应)还是广泛模糊的“国际市场” (即同化效应)的作用机制; (2)多语言包装策略对旅游商品购买决策的影响机制。本研究有助于扩展旅游商品和包装语言的相关研究, 为旅游商品营销提供重要参考。     

Effing the Ineffable: The Logocentric Fallacy in Argumentation

Words, just because they are words, are not inherently clear. The message they contain becomes clear to those who speak the language and are familiar with the issues and contexts. If the message lacks linguistic clarity the recipient of the message will typically make a query that will bring forth further information intended to clarify. The result might be more words, but it might also involve pointing or drawing, or words that utilize other modes such as references to context, history, and so on. If the ambiguity derives from an inconsistency between, say, words and behaviour, one may look to either mode for clarity. Communication, we must accept, actually occurs in messages, and our ability to transmit information may be limited by any number of factors. When we focus entirely on discursive aspects of communication we limit both the ways in which we receive and ways in which we transmit information. The logocentric fallacy is committed when language, especially in it's most logical guise, is seen to be the only form of rational communication.     

On the Meaning of Words and Dinosaur Bones: Lexical Knowledge Without a Lexicon

Although for many years a sharp distinction has been made in language research between rules and words—with primary interest on rules—this distinction is now blurred in many theories. If anything, the focus of attention has shifted in recent years in favor of words. Results from many different areas of language research suggest that the lexicon is representationally rich, that it is the source of much productive behavior, and that lexically specific information plays a critical and early role in the interpretation of grammatical structure. But how much information can or should be placed in the lexicon? This is the question I address here. I review a set of studies whose results indicate that event knowledge plays a significant role in early stages of sentence processing and structural analysis. This poses a conundrum for traditional views of the lexicon. Either the lexicon must be expanded to include factors that do not plausibly seem to belong there; or else virtually all information about word meaning is removed, leaving the lexicon impoverished. I suggest a third alternative, which provides a way to account for lexical knowledge without a mental lexicon.     

Vowel bias in Danish word‐learning: processing biases are language‐specific

The present study explored whether the phonological bias favoring consonants found in French‐learning infants and children when learning new words (Havy & Nazzi, 2009; Nazzi, 2005) is language‐general, as proposed by Nespor, Peña and Mehler (2003), or varies across languages, perhaps as a function of the phonological or lexical properties of the language in acquisition. To do so, we used the interactive word‐learning task set up by Havy and Nazzi (2009), teaching Danish‐learning 20‐month‐olds pairs of phonetically similar words that contrasted either on one of their consonants or one of their vowels, by either one or two phonological features. Danish was chosen because it has more vowels than consonants, and is characterized by extensive consonant lenition. Both phenomena could disfavor a consonant bias. Evidence of word‐learning was found only for vocalic information, irrespective of whether one or two phonological features were changed. The implication of these findings is that the phonological biases found in early lexical processing are not language‐general but develop during language acquisition, depending on the phonological or lexical properties of the native language.     

语言标签和自我关联对新颖客体类别知觉的影响

类别知觉(Categorical perception)是人类最基本的认知活动之一, 探讨语言对类别知觉的影响是心理语言学领域的热门话题之一。在这个研究的3个实验中, 分别在高、低不同的语言标签表征强度下、高、低不同的客体自我关联程度下观察新颖客体类别知觉的过程。研究发现, 语言标签表征程度的增强可促进新颖客体类别知觉的右视野优势效应; 客体与自我关联程度的提高会促进左、右视野的类别知觉效应; 语言标签的表征程度和客体与自我关联程度同时增强时, 语言标签的作用依旧表现出来, 但与自我关联的影响产生权衡分配, 且其影响力并不足以产生右视野优势效应。     

Contributions of the Insula to Cognition and Emotion

Historically, the insula was considered primary gustatory cortex. Now it is known to play a more comprehensive role in the processing of sensory information, including acting as primary cortex for interoceptive information, including autonomic nervous system mediated changes. As such, it is critical for emotional feeling in accord with the James-Lange theory, a role previously ascribed to the limbic system. Neuroimaged abnormal grey matter volumes or activity levels in the insula have been associated with schizophrenia, eating disorders, anxiety and mood disorders, conduct disorder, autism, addiction, and chronic pain. The significance of these abnormal activity patterns remains theoretical. Neuropsychological studies have linked dominant insula injury with various symptoms of aphasia, but its exact role in language processing remains uncertain as most cases involve lesions that extend into perisylvian language zones. Functional neuroimaging studies have found insula hyper-activations, typically in conjunction with anterior cingulate cortex, for all manner of experimental tasks including those involving perception, intentional action, and consciousness. Such neuroimaged activity is unlikely to be task-specific, but rather reflective of generic changes in autonomic activity in response to salience, homeostatic incongruence, or cognitive challenge.     

The role of executive function in perspective taking during online language comprehension

During conversation, interlocutors build on the set of shared beliefs known as common ground. Although there is general agreement that interlocutors maintain representations of common ground, there is no consensus regarding whether common-ground representations constrain initial language interpretation processes. Here, I propose that executive functioning—specifically, failures in inhibition control—can account for some occasional insensitivities to common-ground information. The present article presents the results of an experiment that demonstrates that individual differences in inhibition control determine the degree to which addressees successfully inhibit perspective-inappropriate interpretations of temporary referential ambiguities in their partner’s speech. Whether mentioned information was grounded or not also played a role, suggesting that addressees may show sensitivity to common ground only when it is established collaboratively. The results suggest that, in conversation, perspective information routinely guides online language processing and that occasional insensitivities to perspective can be attributed partly to difficulties in inhibiting perspective-inappropriate interpretations.     

The Value of Symbolic Computation

Standard generative linguistic theory, which uses discrete symbolic models of cognition, has some strengths and weaknesses. It is strong on providing a network of outposts that make scientific travel in the jungles of natural language feasible. It is weak in that it currently depends on the elaborate and unformalized use of intuition to develop critical supporting assumptions about each data point. In this regard, it is not in a position to characterize natural language systems in the lawful terms that ecological psychologists strive for. Connectionist learning models offer some help: They define lawful relations between linguistic environments and language systems. But our understanding of them is currently weak, especially when it comes to natural language syntax. Fortunately, symbolic linguistic analysis can help connectionism if the two meet via dynamical systems theory. I discuss a case in point: Insights from linguistic explorations of natural language syntax appear to have identified information structures that are particularly relevant to understanding ecologically appealing but analytically mysterious connectionist learning models.