1,720,962 research outputs found
Cherchez la femme! Cherchez Laura A. Janda!
Get PDFIn The Mohicans of Paris (1871), Dumas’s detective concludes at some point that a woman was necessarily involved in an investigated crime, leading him to famously exclaim: “Cherchez la femme!”, which is translated to English as “Look for the woman!” (Horn, 1991). One does not need to be an actual detective to reveal the purpose of the reviewed book Each Venture a New Beginning: Studies in Honor of Laura A. Janda. Needless to say, I do not want to imply in any way that Janda has committed a crime. Still, I find the expression rather apposite because the reader can definitely feel her presence rooted in all the selected articles of the present book. Editors Anastasia Makarova, Stephen M. Dickey, and Dagmar Divjak have compiled a volume of studies informed by and proceeding from the voluminous research contributions of Janda to cognitive linguistics, Slavic linguistics, and also general linguistics
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Bilingualism sculpts the core of the brain: an investigation of experience-dependent neuroplasticity induced by the variable use of two languages
Get PDFBilinguals need effective cognitive control mechanisms to handle the concurrent activation of two
languages. One of the consequences is that bilingualism has been shown to structurally impact
regions subserving cognitive control and language processing to provide a newly wired neural
architecture that can handle these mechanisms efficiently. However, the location, extent, and time
course of these adaptations vary across studies. The inconsistency has often been attributed to
differences in language use and exposure. This thesis extends these proposals and tests a
hypothesis, informed by neurobiological principles of experience-dependent neuroplasticity, that
the bilingualism-induced brain adaptations are non-linear. Using appropriate statistical methods,
three studies are run to investigate the effects of quantified bilingual experiences on grey matter
volumes of subcortical regions known to be affected by bilingualism. Structural MRI and
behavioural data from 115 bilinguals with a wide variety of bilingual experiences were collected.
The first study examines adaptations induced by bilingual experiences in the basal ganglia and
thalamus across the whole sample. The second study separately examines bilingualism-induced
changes of the caudate and the putamen in interpreters, translators, and non-professional
bilinguals. The results from these studies reveal that engagement in bilingual language use can
trigger region-specific grey matter increases, either sustained or followed by volumetric decreases,
depending on the quantity and quality of bilingual experiences. The third study examines brain
adaptations induced by different habitual code-switching practices, which impose different
cognitive demands. The results suggest qualitatively diverse volumetric trajectories in caudate and
thalamus for the different code-switching types. Overall, this thesis highlights that the various
constituent elements of bilingual experiences may impact the brain in dynamic yet systematic ways.
Crucially, the systematicity of the experience-dependent neuroplasticity can be unravelled if
bilingualism is treated as a dynamic set of demanding experiences which trigger non-linear
structural adaptations
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
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Landau-Kleffner syndrome and swearing
Get PDFLandau-Kleffner syndrome (LKS) is a rare form of epilepsy diagnosed as acquired aphasia alternatively as acquired verbal agnosia co-occurring with epileptic seizures. This article provides an overview of some relevant case studies of Landau-Kleffner patients and also some neuro-measurement studies of the neurophysiology of the disease. Recently there is no evidence whether the epileptic seizures in LKS are located in basal ganglia, limbic or subcortical circuits involved in swear words processing
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
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Prins of boswachter? Interpretatie van subjectanaforen in het nederlands als tweede taal
Get PDFThis study aims to investigate offline processing of subject anaphora in Dutch. An important parameter in this study is the difference between pro drop and non-pro drop languages. An experiment has been run to investigate whether 27 Czechs that speak Dutch as a second language are able to interpret the referent belonging to a subject anaphora as well as 27 native Dutch speakers. These anaphors occurred in short Dutch stories with or without a topic shift, a cognitively demanding process where anaphors point to different referents in the story. One can expect this to lead to misinterpretation, especially in the case of groups of language users, whose cognitive capacities are already somehow compromised, such as the elderly or non-native speakers of a language. For the purposes of hierarchisation of subject anaphors, the Givenness Hierarchy has been used. To be able to determine the type of anaphora, the algorithm derived from the Centering Theory has been used. The study shows that Czechs fail to interpret the right referent of subject anaphora in the stories without the topic shift significantly more than the native Dutch control group. This can be explained by the interference between pro drop and non-pro drop languages. A pronoun signals a topic shift in Czech, while in Dutch, pronouns express topic continuity. Czechs often also incorrectly interpret the anaphora in the stories with a topic shift, although here the difference with the control group was not significant. This could be explained by the low number of parameters which have been considered during the experimental design
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L2 acquisition and neuroplasticity: insights from the Dynamic Restructuring Model
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