1,721,010 research outputs found
Emotional decoding in facial expression, scripts and videos: A comparison between normal, autistic and Asperger children
No full textASD subjects are described as showing particular difficulty in decoding emotional patterns. This paper explored linguistic and conceptual skills in response to emotional stimuli presented as emotional faces, scripts (pictures) and interactive situations (videos). Participants with autism, Asperger syndrome and control participants were shown facial, pictorial and video representation of six basic emotions (happiness, anger, fear, sadness, surprise, disgust). They were asked to identify the emotion and to individuate possible causes of the emotional state. A semantic analysis was applied to verbal reports, focusing on labeling and conceptualization. Log-linear analyses showed different representations across the participants as a function of emotion, pathology and presentation modality. Autistic participants were able to correctly decode primary emotions while showing difficulties with surprise. In contrast, Asperger participants performance was more similar to control subjects'. Finally, when situational correlates were provided, it was evident a "facilitation effect" for the representation of emotions. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd
Cognitive theory development as we know it: Specificity, explanatory power and the brain
Full text linkA commentary o
The fruitless effort of growing a fruitless tree: Early morpho.orthographic and morpho-semantic effects in sentence reading
Full text linkIn this eye-tracking study, we investigated how semantics inform morphological analysis at the early stages of visual word identification in sentence reading. We exploited a feature of several derived Italian words, that is, that they can be read in a “morphologically transparent” way or in a “morphologically opaque” way according to the sentence context to which they belong. This way, each target word was embedded in a sentence eliciting either its transparent or opaque interpretation. We analyzed whether the effect of stem frequency changes according to whether the (very same) word is read as a genuine derivation (transparent context) vs. as a pseudo-derived word (opaque context). Analysis of the first fixation durations revealed a stem-word frequency effect in both opaque and transparent contexts, thus showing that stems were accessed whether or not they contributed to word meaning, that is, word decomposition is indeed blind to semantics. However, while the stem-word frequency effect was facilitatory in the transparent context, it was inhibitory in the opaque context, thus showing an early involvement of semantic representations. This pattern of data is revealed by words with short suffixes. These results indicate that derived and pseudo-derived words are segmented into their constituent morphemes also in natural reading; however, this blind- to-semantics process activates morpheme representations that are semantically connote
Semantic transparency in free stems: the effect of orthography-semantics consistency in word recognition
Full text linkA largely overlooked side effect in most studies of morphological priming is a consistent main effect of semantic transparency across priming conditions. That is, participants are faster at recognizing stems from transparent sets (e.g., farm) in comparison to stems from opaque sets (e.g., fruit), regardless of the preceding primes. This suggests that semantic transparency may also be consistently associated with some property of the stem word. We propose that this property might be traced back to the consistency, throughout the lexicon, between the orthographic form of a word and its meaning, here named Orthography-Semantics Consistency (OSC), and that an imbalance in OSC scores might explain the "stem transparency" effect. We exploited distributional semantic models to quantitatively characterize OSC, and tested its effect on visual word identification relying on large-scale data taken from the British Lexicon Project (BLP). Results indicated that (a) the "stem transparency" effect is solid and reliable, insofar as it holds in BLP lexical decision times (Experiment 1); (b) an imbalance in terms of OSC can account for it (Experiment 2); and (c) more generally, OSC explains variance in a large item sample from the BLP, proving to be an effective predictor in visual word access (Experiment 3)
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Editorial: The variable mind? How apparently inconsistent effects might inform model building
Full text linkMorphological processing as we know it: An analytical review of morphological effects in visual word identification
Full text linkThe last 40 years have witnessed a growing interest in the mechanisms underlying the visual identification of complex words. A large amount of experimental data has been amassed, but although a growing number of studies are proposing explicit theoretical models for their data, no comprehensive theory has gained substantial agreement among scholars in the field. We believe that this is due, at least in part, to the presence of several controversial pieces of evidence in the literature and, consequently, to the lack of a well-defined set of experimental facts that any theory should be able to explain. With this review, we aim to delineate the state of the art in the research on the visual identification of complex words. By reviewing major empirical evidences in a number of different paradigms such as lexical decision, word naming, and masked and unmasked priming, we were able to identify a series of effects that we judge as reliable or that were consistently replicated in different experiments, along with some more controversial data, which we have tried to resolve and explain. We concentrated on behavioral and electrophysiological studies on inflected, derived and compound words, so as to span over all types of complex words. The outcome of this work is an analytical summary of well-established facts on the most relevant morphological issues, such as regularity, morpheme position coding, family size, semantic transparency, morpheme frequency, suffix allomorphy and productivity, morphological entropy, and morpho-orthographic parsing. In discussing this set of benchmark effects, we have drawn some methodological considerations on why contrasting evidence might have emerged, and have tried to delineate a target list for the construction of a new all-inclusive model of the visual identification of morphologically complex words
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Very early and late form-to-meaning computations during visual word recognition as revealed by electrophysiology
No full textWe used a large-scale data-driven approach to investigate the role of word form in accessing semantics. By using distributional semantic methods and taking advantage of an ERP lexical decision mega-study, we investigated the exact time dynamic of semantic ac-cess from printed words as driven by orthography-semantics consistency (OSC) and phonology-semantics consistency (PSC). Generalized Additive Models revealed very early and late OSC-by-PSC interactions, visible at 100 and 400 msec, respectively. This pattern suggests that, during visual word recognition: a) meaning is accessed by means of two distinct and interactive paths -the orthography-to-meaning and the orthography-to -phonology-to-meaning path-, which mutually contribute to recognition since early stages; b) the system may exploit a dual mechanism for semantic access, with early and late effects associated to a fast-coarse and a slow-fine grained semantic analysis, respec-tively. The results also highlight the high sensitivity of the visual word recognition system to arbitrary form-meaning relations.(c) 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved
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