Involutions defined by monadic terms

We prove that there are two involutions defined by monadic terms that characterize Monadic Algebras. We further prove that the variety of Monadic Algebras is the smallest variety of Interior Algebras where these involutions give rise to an interpretation from the variety of Bounded Distributive Lattices into it.Research funded by Fondecyt, project N 764-1987.     

Arithmetic based on the Church numerals in illative combinatory logic

In the early thirties, Church developed predicate calculus within a system based on lambda calculus. Rosser and Kleene developed Arithmetic within this system, but using a Godelization technique showed the system to be inconsistent.Alternative systems to that of Church have been developed, but so far more complex definitions of the natural numbers have had to be used. The present paper based on a system of illative combinatory logic developed previously by the author, does allow the use of the Church numerals. Given a new definition of equality all the Peano-type axioms of Mendelson except one can be derived. A rather weak extra axiom allows the proof of the remaining Peano axiom. Note. The illative combinatory logic used in this paper is similar to the logic employed in computer languages such as ML.The author wishes to thank Dr. Roger Hindley for proofreading this paper and for making some useful suggestions. This paper was presented at the 1986 Annual Conference of the Australasian Association of Logic in Auckland, 9–12 July, 1986.     

A representation theorem for languages with generalized quantifiers through back-and-forth methods

We obtain in this paper a representation of the formulae of extensions ofL by generalized quantifiers through functors between categories of first-order structures and partial isomorphisms. The main tool in the proofs is the back-and-forth technique. As a corollary we obtain the Caicedo's version of Fraïssés theorem characterizing elementary equivalence for such languages. We also discuss informally some geometrical interpretations of our results.     

Fuzziness of concepts and concepts of fuzziness

It has been a vexing question in recent years whether concepts are fuzzy. In this paper several views on the fuzziness of concepts are pointed out to have stemmed from dubious concepts of fuzziness. The underlying notions of the roles feasibly played byprototype, set, andprobability in modeling concepts strongly suggest that the controversy originates from a vague relation between intuitive and mathematical ideas in the cognitive sciences. It is argued that the application of fuzzy sets cannot resolve this vagueness since they are one sided,viz., defined on sets. An alternative definition based on classes (in the sense of axiomatic set theory) is proposed.     

Perceptions of speakers with minimal eye contact: Implications for stutterers

One hundred and thirty-three college students responded to percentage definitions of “good,” “minimal,” and “no” eye contact. They also judged their perceptions of a speaker with “little or no eye contact” on a semantic differential scale containing 60 polarized adjective pairs regarding personality traits. The majority of the student respondents defined an individual with “good” eye contact as looking at his/her audience/listener 90–100% of the time. This is a more stringent definition than other literature has indicated. Furthermore, speakers with little or no eye contact were judged less favorably on 70% of the items, which indicates that low eye contact adversely affects perceptions of a speaker's personality. Therefore, stutterers need to be made aware of the importance of and determinants of effective eye contact in communication. Also, the development of effective eye contact needs to be incorporated as a major goal in stuttering therapy.     

Problem structure and the use of base-rate information from experience

This article is concerned with the use of base-rate information that is derived from experience in classifying examples of a category. The basic task involved simulated medical decision making in which participants learned to diagnose hypothetical diseases on the basis of symptom information. Alternative diseases differed in their relative frequency or base rates of occurrence. In five experiments initial learning was followed by a series of transfer tests designed to index the use of base-rate information. On these tests, patterns of symptoms were presented that suggested more than one disease and were therefore ambiguous. The alternative or candidate diseases on such tests could differ in their relative frequency of occurrence during learning. For example, a symptom might be presented that had appeared with both a relatively common and a relatively rare disease. If participants are using base-rate information appropriately (according to Bayes' theorem), then they should be more likely to predict that the common disease is present than that the rare disease is present on such ambiguous tests. Current classification models differ in their predictions concerning the use of base-rate information. For example, most prototype models imply an insensitivity to base-rate information, whereas many exemplar-based classification models predict appropriate use of base-rate information. The results reveal a consistent but complex pattern. Depending on the category structure and the nature of the ambiguous tests, participants use base-rate information appropriately, ignore base-rate information, or use base-rate information inappropriately (predict that the rare disease is more likely to be present). To our knowledge, no current categorization model predicts this pattern of results. To account for these results, a new model is described incorporating the ideas of property or symptom competition and context-sensitive retrieval.     

Selective attention: effects of cuing on the processing of different types of compound stimuli

Pigeons in a matching-to-sample experiment received (a) element samples (one of two colors or vertical or horizontal white lines), (b) separated compound samples (a color and a line element presented together), and (c) unified compound samples (vertical or horizontal colored lines). In Phase I, test stimuli were the two elements from one dimension; the dimension tested varied randomly when the sample was a compound. Element samples were matched better than unified samples, which were matched better than separated samples. In Phase II, two samples preceded the tests. On EC trials, the first sample (S1) was an element, and the second sample (S2) was a compound; on CE trials this order was reversed. One element of the compound sample was always the one appearing as the element sample on that trial (e.g., S1 = red, S2 = red-vertical). This element also served as the correct test alternative (e.g., test = red+ vs. green) except on probe trials when the correct test was the other element appearing in the compound (e.g., test = vertical+ vs. horizontal). Accuracy varied as a function of sample sequence when the compound was separated (EC greater than CE on nonprobe trials and CE greater than EC on prove trials). This pattern was not observed when the compound was unified. The data suggest that the element in EC trials served as a cue that increased processing of the cued dimension and decreased processing of the noncued dimension of separated compounds. However, both dimensions of unified compounds seem to have been processed regardless of cuing.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)     

The role of the right hemisphere in the production of linguistic stress

Recent research has proposed a general prosodic disturbance associated with right hemisphere damage (RHD), one encompassing both affective and linguistic functions. The present study attempted to explore whether the ability to produce linguistic prosody was impaired in this patient population. Productions of phonemic stress tokens (e.g., Re'dcoat vs. red coa't) as well as examples of contrastive stress, or sentential emphasis (e.g., Sam hated the movie), were elicited from eight male speakers with unilateral right hemisphere CVAs and seven male control subjects. Two types of analyses were conducted on these utterances. Acoustic analysis focused on the correlates associated with word stress, namely changes in amplitude, duration, and fundamental frequency. The perceptual saliency of emerging cues to stress was also examined by presentation of test tokens to phonetically trained listeners for identification of stress placement. The patients as a group produced fewer acoustic cues to stress compared to the normal subjects, but no statistical differences were found between groups for either stress at the phrase level or at the sentence level. In the perceptual analysis, stress produced by the patient group was judged to be less salient than that for the normal group, although a high degree of variability was evident in both populations. The data suggest a spared processing mechanism for linguistic prosody in RHD speakers, thus mitigating against the view of a general dysprosody tied to RHD.