1,720,958 research outputs found
Pragmatics aid referent disambiguation and word learning in young children and adults
No full textHow do children succeed in learning a word? Research has shown robustly that, in ambiguous labeling situations, young children assume novel labels to refer to unfamiliar rather than familiar objects. However, ongoing debates center on the underlying mechanism: Is this behavior based on lexical constraints, guided by pragmatic reasoning, or simply driven by children's attraction to novelty? Additionally, recent research has questioned whether children's disambiguation leads to long-term learning or rather indicates an attentional shift in the moment of the conversation. Thus, we conducted a pre-registered online study with 2- and 3-year-olds and adults. Participants were presented with unknown objects as potential referents for a novel word. Across conditions, we manipulated whether the only difference between both objects was their relative novelty to the participant or whether, in addition, participants were provided with pragmatic information that indicated which object the speaker referred to. We tested participants’ immediate referent selection and their retention after 5 min. Results revealed that when given common ground information both age groups inferred the correct referent with high success and enhanced behavioral certainty. Without this information, object novelty alone did not guide their selection. After 5 min, adults remembered their previous selections above chance in both conditions, while children only showed reliable learning in the pragmatic condition. The pattern of results indicates how pragmatics may aid referent disambiguation and learning in both adults and young children. From early ontogeny on, children's social-cognitive understanding may guide their communicative interactions and support their language acquisition.the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DF
Die P600, Noradrenalin und domänenübergreifende Prozesse während des Satzverstehens
No full textAre processes of language comprehension and their neural substrate shared with other cognitive domains or specific to language? The present dissertation investigated different aspects of this question in three electroencephalography experiments, focusing on the P600 component of the event-related potential observed in response to incongruencies during sentence comprehension.
The first aspect of this question was how independent the language system is from other aspects of cognition. Study 1 revealed that processes involved in language comprehension – as reflected in the P600 – can be modulated by sustained attention, suggesting they reflect rather controlled aspects of sentence comprehension. Study 2 demonstrates that the P600 correlates with indices of recognition memory, indicating that the underlying processes also promote explicit memory formation in sentence reading. These findings underscore the idea that language comprehension is an active process that recruits more general executive resources.
A second question related to language specificity concerns how involved domain-general neural substrates are when processing language. Study 2 and 3 address this question by providing evidence suggesting that the P600 might reflect phasic release of norepinephrine from the locus coeruleus as a general response to salient and motivationally significant events. Study 2 corroborates this idea by demonstrating that the P600 is correlated with explicit memory effects which are argued to arise as a consequence of norepinephrine release. In line with this, study 3 revealed that the P600 amplitude can be predicted by pupil dilation, a non-invasive marker of norepinephrine. These results reveal a link between locus coeruleus and markers of language comprehension such as the P600, highlighting the involvement of domain-general neural systems in language processing.
Together, these findings support the notion that sentence comprehension recruits more domain-general cognitive and neural resources. Thereby, these results may inspire future research on the causal links between the P600 and norepinephrine as well as novel computational accounts of the P600. In conclusion, this work provides insights advancing our understanding of the neural systems underlying language comprehension.Werden Prozesse des Sprachverstehens und ihre neuronalen Grundlagen mit anderen kognitiven Domänen geteilt oder sind sie sprachspezifisch? Die vorliegende Dissertation untersucht verschiedene Aspekte dieser Frage in drei Elektroenzephalographie-Experimenten. Der Schwerpunkt liegt dabei auf der P600-Komponente des ereignis-korrelierten Potenzials, welches durch Inkongruenzen während des Satzverstehens hervorgerufen wird.
Wie unabhängig ist das Sprachsystem von anderen Bereichen der Kognition? Studie 1 zeigt, dass Prozesse, die im Sprachverstehen involviert sind und welche die P600 auslösen, durch anhaltende Aufmerksamkeit beeinflusst werden. Dies deutet darauf hin, dass diese Prozesse eher kontrollierte Aspekte des Satzverstehens widerspiegeln. Studie 2 demonstriert, dass die P600 mit expliziten Gedächtniseffekten einhergeht, was darauf hinweist, dass die zugrundeliegenden Prozesse auch die Bildung von Erinnerungen beim Lesen von Sätzen fördern. Beide Befunde unterstreichen die Auffassung, dass Sprachverstehen ein aktiver Prozess ist, welcher allgemeinere exekutive Ressourcen einbezieht.
Ist domänenübergreifendes neuronales Substrat an Sprachverarbeitung beteiligt? Studie 2 und 3 liefern Hinweise darauf, dass die P600 eine phasische Freisetzung von Noradrenalin im Locus caeruleus widerspiegeln könnte, welche als allgemeine Reaktion auf saliente und motivational wichtige Ereignisse fungiert. Studie 2 untermauert diese Annahme, indem sie zeigt, dass die P600 mit expliziten Gedächtniseffekten korreliert, welche mutmaßlich durch die Freisetzung von Noradrenalin entstehen. Studie 3 liefert Evidenz, dass die Amplitude der P600 durch die Erweiterung der Pupille – einem nicht-invasiven Korrelat von Noradrenalin – vorhergesagt werden kann. Beide Studien legen somit eine Verbindung zwischen dem Locus caeruleus und der P600 während der Satzverarbeitung nahe und damit eine Einbindung domänenübergeifender neuronaler Systeme in die Sprachverarbeitung.
Gemeinsam stützen die Befunde die Annahme, dass Satzverstehen domänengenerelle kognitive und neuronale Ressourcen rekrutiert. Damit regen sie sowohl zukünftige Forschung zum möglichen kausalen Zusammenhang zwischen der P600 und Noradrenalin als auch computergestützte Erklärungsansätze der P600 an. Abschließend liefert die Dissertation wichtige weitere Erkenntnisse zu den neuronalen Grundlagen des Sprachsystems
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe 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
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“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
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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