1,720,999 research outputs found
The Role of Morphological Information in Processing Pseudo-words in Italian L2 Learners: It’s a Matter of Experience.
Full text linkThe mental representation of nonnumerical quantifiers: The Spatial-Linguistic Association of Response Codes (SLARC) effect
No full textHow quantifiers are represented in the human mind is still a topic of intense debate. Seminal studies have addressed the issue of how a subclass of quantifiers, that is, number words, is spatially coded displaying the Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes (SNARC) effect; yet, none of these studies have explored the spatial representation of nonnumerical quantifiers such as “some” or “many.” The aim of the present study is to investigate whether nonnumerical quantifiers are spatially coded in the human mind. We administered two typical comparison tasks to 52 participants: the first task involved nonnumerical quantifiers; the second task involved number words. Results showed a response-side compatibility effect for both number words and nonnumerical quantifiers, suggesting that both types of quantifiers are encoded in a spatial format; quantifiers referring to “small” quantities are responded to faster with the left hand and quantifiers referring to “large” quantities are responded to faster with the right hand. We labeled this effect for nonnumerical quantifiers as the Spatial-Linguistic Association of Response Codes (SLARC) effect. Notably, we found that the SNARC and the SLARC effects were strictly related to each other, namely the more a participant was sensitive to the SNARC effect in the number–word task, the more a SLARC effect was detectable in the nonnumerical quantifier task. These findings add evidence to the tendency of humans to align magnitude information on a mental line that is coded from left to right
Scalar implicatures in Chinese children with reading difficulties
No full textThis study investigates the derivation of scalar implicatures in Chinese children with reading difficulties (RD). Twenty-four children with RD (mean age 9 years and 8 months), 20 age-matched typical readers (mean age 9 years and 10 months), 20 six-year-old children and 20 five-year-old children were tested with the comprehension of sentences with scalar items yixie 'some' and suoyou 'all'. The pattern of children with RD was similar to that of six-year-old children but differed from that of age-matched typical readers in the comprehension of the sentences containing yixie that were pragmatically underinformative in the context. Interestingly, many children with RD and younger children, who accepted the sentences containing yixie that were pragmatically underinformative, rejected the sentences containing yixie that were true in a context supporting the literal (semantic) interpretation. These results support the view that the computation of scalar implicatures may be impaired in children with RD, due to a complex interplay of factors such as (at least) the lexical knowledge of the scalar term and processing/pragmatic limitations
Semantic and Pragmatic Abilities Can Be Spared in Italian Children with SLI
No full textSpecific language impairment (SLI) is a heterogeneous disorder affecting various aspects of language. While most studies have investigated impairments in the domain of syntax and morphosyntax, little is known about compositional semantics and the process of deriving pragmatic meanings in SLI. We selected a group of sixteen monolingual Italian-speaking children with SLI (mean-age 7;4) with a severe morphosyntactic deficit at the receptive and expressive level. We tested their comprehension of quantified sentences including all and some in order to establish whether they were competent with the logical and pragmatic meanings of these quantifiers. Children performed as well as their typically developing controls in understanding logical meanings. In comprehending pragmatic meanings, they obtained lower scores than age-matched controls but they were not different from language-matched children. However, differences in this ability correlated positively with age and with the ability to understand simple sentences in the SLI group. This suggests that aspects of the syntactic component might be involved in the development of this ability and that, despite their severe morphosyntactic deficits, children with SLI might catch up with their peers in deriving pragmatic meanings
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
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
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe 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
Between “Cost” and “Default” of Scalar Implicature: the Cost of Embedding
Full text linkTwo main points constitute a matter of debate concerning the phenomenon of Scalar Implicatures (SIs): the place of their derivation, which opposes a “recursive”/grammatically driven approach such as Chierchia’s (Chierchia, 2002&2006; Fox, 2003; Landman, 1998; Levinson, 2000) to traditional Neo- Gricean approaches that view SIs as genuinely post-grammatical/pragmatic processes that are added “globally”, independently of compositional semantics (Russell, 2006; Sauerland, 2005; Spector, 2003 a.o.); and the question of the processing cost of SI computation, which most of the experimental works on SIs have recently been focused on (Bott & Noveck, 2004; Breheny, Katsos, & Williams, 2005; Noveck & Posada, 2003). Orthogonal to this debate, our contribution is based on the assumption that SIs are derived locally (following Chierchia, 2006) and tests the effect of logical abstract properties of the context (e.g. monotonicity) on the computation of implicatures and their cost. Our main finding is that a “cost” is found only when implicatures are added despite the fact that they lead to a weakening of the overall assertion (namely, in Downward Entailing contexts): this loss in informativity, and not implicature computation per se, is interpreted as the source of this “cost”
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe 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
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