Statistical frequency in perception affects children’s lexical production

Children’s early word production is influenced by the statistical frequency of speech sounds and combinations. Three experiments asked whether this production effect can be explained by a perceptual learning mechanism that is sensitive to word-token frequency and/or variability. Four-year-olds were exposed to nonwords that were either frequent (presented 10 times) or infrequent (presented once). When the frequent nonwords were spoken by the same talker, children showed no significant effect of perceptual frequency on production. When the frequent nonwords were spoken by different talkers, children produced them with fewer errors and shorter latencies. The results implicate token variability in perceptual learning.     

An Applied Study Using the Analytic Hierarchy Process to Translate Common Verbal Phrases to Numerical Probabilities

This is an applied study of how to develop a standardized set of useful verbal probability phrases for communication purposes within an expert community. The analysis extends the previous research in two ways. First, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is used to assess the relative weights associated with the verbal phrases employed by a group of thirty financial strategy experts at a major Wall Street firm. Second, a quadratic least-squares technique is used to map these relative weights onto a subjective probability scale. The result was a consistent scaling of probabilistic phrases that the analysts prefer and actually use. This methodology can be used to minimize the problems associated with the use of probabilistic phrases by a group of experts who interact daily and who share assumptions, working knowledge and values. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Communicative functions of directional verbal probabilities: Speaker’s choice,listener’s inference,and reference points

Verbal probabilities have directional communicative functions, and most can be categorized as positive (e.g., “it is likely”) or negative (e.g., “it is doubtful”). We examined the communicative functions of verbal probabilities based on the reference point hypothesis According to this hypothesis, listeners are sensitive to and can infer a speaker’s reference points based on the speaker’s selected directionality. In four experiments (two of which examined speakers’ choice of directionality and two of which examined listeners’ inferences about a speaker’s reference point), we found that listeners could make inferences about speakers’ reference points based on the stated directionality of verbal probability. Thus, the directionality of verbal probabilities serves the communicative function of conveying information about a speaker’s reference point.     

基于属性掌握概率的认知诊断计算机化自适应测验选题策略

在认知诊断计算机化自适应测验(CD-CAT)中, 被试对每个属性的掌握概率更直接地反映了被试能力的当前估计值。因此, 基于被试的属性掌握概率来构建选题策略, 选择最能改变被试属性掌握概率的题目作为下一个测验项目, 这应该是一个值得尝试的方案。本文借鉴已有相关研究的数据生成模式进行探索, 模拟实验结果表明：假设属性间相互独立,在定长(长度为16)、变长(长度为16或后验属性掌握模式概率达到0.8)以及短测验(长度分别为4、6、8、10)的情况下, 基于属性掌握概率的选题策略PPWKL和PHKL有较好的分类准确率, 在题目曝光率, 题库使用均匀性等方面也有较好的表现; 与研究较多的PWKL、HKL等策略相比, 也略有优势; 当属性间存在不同程度的相关时, 在定长、变长以及较短的测验条件下, 基于PHKL和MI的测验对知识状态估计精度较好, 基于PPWKL和PHKL的测验综合表现占优。     

Eliciting Subjective Probabilities through Pair‐wise Comparisons

We propose and test a novel approach for eliciting subjective joint probabilities. In the proposed approach, judges compare pairs of possible outcomes and identify which of the two is more likely and by how much. These pair‐wise comparative judgments create a matrix of ratio judgments from which the target probabilities are extracted using the rows' (or columns') geometric means. In Study 1, subjects provided direct assessments of the likelihood of joint events (e.g., sunny days and stock market gains) and also made pair‐wise comparisons of the same joint events. Subjects in Study 2 learnt the distribution of hypothetical events pairs and provided direct and ratio estimates. In both studies, the ratio estimates were significantly more accurate than the direct estimates. The results suggest that it is possible to elicit probabilistic estimates without explictly asking for probabilities and that the pair‐wise approach is a candidate for complementing or replacing traditional elicitation approaches. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The curse of knowledge: first language knowledge impairs adult learners' use of novel statistics for word segmentation

We investigated whether adult learners' knowledge of phonotactic restrictions on word forms from their first language impacts their ability to use statistical information to segment words in a novel language. Adults were exposed to a speech stream where English phonotactics and phoneme co-occurrence information conflicted. A control where these did not conflict was also run. Participants chose between words defined by novel statistics and words that are phonotactically possible in English, but had much lower phoneme contingencies. Control participants selected words defined by statistics while experimental participants did not. This result held up with increases in exposure and when segmentation was aided by telling participants a word prior to exposure. It was not the case that participants simply preferred English-sounding words, however, when the stimuli contained very short pauses, participants were able to learn the novel words despite the fact that they violated English phonotactics. Results suggest that prior linguistic knowledge can interfere with learners' abilities to segment words from running speech using purely statistical cues at initial exposure.     

Using Ordinal Data to Estimate Cardinal Values

We investigate methods developed in multiple criteria decision‐making that use ordinal information to estimate numerical values. Such methods can be used to estimate attribute weights, attribute values, or event probabilities given ranks or partial ranks. We first review related studies and then develop a generalized rank‐sum (GRS) approach in which we provide a derivation of the rank‐sum approach that had been previously proposed. The GRS approach allows for incorporating the concept of degree of importance (or, difference in likelihood with respect to probabilities and difference in value for attribute values), information that most other rank‐based formulas do not utilize. We then present simulation results comparing the GRS method with other rank‐based formulas such as the rank order centroid method and comparing the GRS methods using as many as three levels of importance (i.e., GRS‐3) with Simos' procedure (which can also incorporate degree of importance). To our surprise, our results show that the incorporation of additional information (i.e., the degree of the importance), both GRS‐3 and Simos' procedure, did not result in better performance than rank order centroid or GRS. Further research is needed to investigate the modelling of such extra information. We also explore the scenario when a decision‐maker has indifference judgments and cannot provide a complete rank order. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Outranking Relations: Do They Have Special Properties?

Outranking relations are most often built using a concordance–discordance principle. Such relations are in general neither transitive nor complete. This is not to say that the concordance–discordance principle does not impose some ‘structural’ restrictions on these relations. We show why this question may be of some importance for analysing the various techniques designed to build a recommendation on the basis of such relations. These restrictions are studied for the ELECTRE and PROMETHEE methods.     

Lexicographic order preservation and stochastic dominance

Stochastic dominance concerns conditions on outcome probabilities that are necessary and sufficient for one act to be (strictly) preferred to another according to all preference relations that share certain properties, one of which customarily is an Archimedean property sufficient to entail existence of real-valued representations. We relax this assumption to permit linear lexicographic utility of finite and known dimensionality. In some situations, levels of the lexicographic hierarchy could correspond to explicit criteria or attributes. In our model, subjective probabilities emerge as matrix premultipliers of the outcome utility vectors. We thus obtain matrix probability generalizations of the familiar cumulative probability conditions for stochastic dominance.