1,721,006 research outputs found
What bilinguals tell us about cognitive control: Overview to the special issue
No full textThe current special issue presents the state of the art on the topics of both bilingual language control and executive function, with a particular focus on how bilingualism and cognitive control interact. The contributions to this issue investigate the mechanisms that allow bilinguals to regulate their languages and address how different aspects of language processing might be causally related to cognitive control. Taken together, these papers suggest a more complex engagement and coordination of executive control networks than revealed in past research and a need to more fully characterise those aspects of bilingual language experience that contribute to regulatory processes
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Prior Language Knowledge, the Language Environment, and Cognitive Resources Set the Stage for New Language Learning in Multilinguals
Get PDFIn this dissertation, I investigated how cognitive resources as well as formal, and informal language experience impact language learning in two studies. In the first study (Chapter 2), I examined the learning of Spanish grammatical gender by Chinese international students who were studying abroad in the US. The goal of that study was to uncover whether being immersed in their non-dominant language (English) to varying degrees and having ambient exposure to other languages in their environment would impact new language learning and modulate the relationship between cognitive control resources and learning. For the learning of grammatical gender, individual differences in the international students’ degree of exposure to English predicted higher accuracy in learning. Moreover, international students’ active use of an additional Chinese language modulated the relationship between cognitive control and reaction times for learning and generalization of grammatical gender in Spanish. These results suggest that both the learners’ current immersion context, their past language knowledge, and their cognitive resources come to shape new language learning in a third language.In the second study (Chapter 3), I investigated whether prior knowledge of a tone language as an L1, individual differences in cognitive control and musical experience predicted the ability to perceive tones in a new language. Speakers of tonal native languages (Vietnamese or Bantu languages) and speakers of non-tonal native languages (English or Dutch) were asked to identify Mandarin tones. Critically, Vietnamese has a tone system that is similar to Mandarin because it uses the same two tonal cues as Mandarin (pitch height and pitch direction). On the other hand, Bantu languages are more dissimilar because they only use one of the tonal cues from Mandarin (pitch height). All participants had no prior knowledge of Mandarin, but all were L2 speakers of English, also a non-tonal language. L1 speakers of a tone system that was similar to that of Mandarin (Vietnamese) were more accurate in identifying the Mandarin tones relative to speakers of nontonal languages (Spanish or Dutch). However, L1 speakers of Bantu languages, which have a more dissimilar tone system to that of Mandarin, were less accurate in identifying Mandarin tones compared to speakers of nontonal languages. Higher levels of musical experience also predicted higher Mandarin tone identification, but only for Spanish and Vietnamese groups. Cognitive control abilities, as indexed by performance on the Simon task, did not predict tone identification. These findings are consistent with the claim that speech L2 perception is largely influenced by native language tuning to L1 phonetic cues and with previous research showing that experience tracking pitch in music confers benefits to tracking pitch in a linguistic context
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Catching the cognitive consequences of bilingual language processing on the fly: An approach to reframe the discussion about bilingualism
Get PDFAn aim of research on bilingualism is to understand how the brain adapts to the use of more than one language. Although several important discoveries and insights about the consequences of bilingualism have been generated over the last several decades, concerns about replicability have narrowed the scope of inquiry and discussion to the application of prescriptions about sample size and method. In this dissertation, I critique this approach and reformulate its value by placing it in the broader context of science as a discovery process, in which incremental understanding, methodological and analytical diversification, the framing of our questions, and even underpowered studies, are essential to advance. I propose that this necessitates research practices and tools that: 1) focus on examining variation in the relation between language processing and cognitive functioning; 2) allow us to identify meaningful interactions rather than main effects only; and 3) provide a rich characterization of the participant sample to identify bilingual phenotypes: the adaptive variety induced by the interplay between biology and culture. In seeking to apply this framework, I then present two empirical studies investigating the cognitive mechanisms that enable fluent language use, and examine the hypothesis that proficient bilingualism is characterized by the active engagement of a regulatory mechanism that adapts to the demands of the language environment. To test this, I examine individual differences in language production and cognitive control across four groups of proficient bilingual phenotypes who differ with respect to the interactional contexts of language use. In Study 1, the results suggest that lexical access is mediated by a systematic interaction between regulation of the dominant language and cognitive control, but that the manifestation of this interaction depends on whether bilinguals are immersed in a second-language environment, a context in which active regulation is required. In Study 2, the results further confirm that dominant-language regulation is not analogous to proficiency per se; rather, it may more adequately reflect the coordination of language-related and domain-general resources that interactively contribute to the accessibility of information in the language network. Together, these studies suggest that language regulation is a fundamental feature of bilingual brains that engages a combination of language-related and domain-general cognitive resources to enable proficient language use
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
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