50,409 research outputs found

    What preschool children do and do not do with ungrammatical word orders

    No full text
    Akhtar [J. Child Lang. 26 (1999) 339.] found that when 4-year-old English-speaking children hear novel verbs in transitive utterances with ungrammatical word orders (e.g., Elmo the tree meeked), they correct them to canonical SVO order almost all of the time. However, when 3-year-olds and older 2-year-olds hear these same utterances, they waver between correcting and using the ungrammatical ordering. In the current study, we adapted this task for children at 2;4, using an intransitive construction. The major finding was that children corrected the noncanonical word order less than half as often as Akhtar's 2-year-old subjects who were approximately 4 months older. At the same time, however, children showed in several ways that they had some implicit understanding of canonical SV order; for example, they used the novel verb which they heard used in grammatical word order more often than the novel verb which they heard in ungrammatical word order, and they consistently used pronouns and the progressive -s auxiliary in appropriate ways. The current findings thus contribute to a growing body of theory and research suggesting that the ontogenetic emergence of linguistic categories and schemas is a gradual process, as is the emergence of categories in other domains of cognitive development. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved

    Phonographic neighbors, not orthographic neighbors, determine word naming latencies

    No full text
    The orthographic neighborhood size (N) of a word—the number of words that can be formed from that word by replacing one letter with another in its place—has been found to have facilitatory effects in word naming. The orthographic neighborhood hypothesis attributes this facilitation to interactive effects. A phonographic neighborhood hypothesis, in contrast, attributes the effect to lexical print-sound conversion. According to the phonographic neighborhood hypothesis, phonographic neighbors (words differing in one letter and one phoneme, e.g., stove and stone) should facilitate naming, and other orthographic neighbors (e.g., stove and shove) should not. The predictions of these two hypotheses are tested. Unique facilitatory phonographic N effects were found in four sets of word naming mega-study data, along with an absence of facilitatory orthographic N effects. These results implicate print-sound conversion—based on consistent phonology—in neighborhood effects rather than word-letter feedback

    Solving the word problem in real time

    No full text
    The paper is devoted to the study of groups whose word problem can be solved by a Turing machine which operates in real time. A recent result of the first author for word hyperbolic groups is extended to prove that under certain conditions the generalised Dehn algorithms of Cannon, Goodman and Shapiro, which clearly run in linear time, can be programmed on real-time Turing machines. It follows that word-hyperbolic groups, finitely generated nilpotent groups and geometrically finite hyperbolic groups all have real-time word problems

    The construction of Karen Karnak: The multi-author-function

    No full text
    This thesis is situated within the comparatively recent developments of Web 2.0 and the emergence of interactive WikiMedia, and explores the mode of authorship within a Read/Write culture compared to that of a Read/Only tradition. The hypothesis of this study is that the role of the audience has become merged with the author, and as such, represents new functions and attributes, distinct from a more conventional concept of authorship, in which the roles of audience and author are more separate. Read/Write and participatory culture, as defined by this study, is focused on collaboration, and includes the influences of D.I.Y. culture, Open-Source practices and the production of text by multiple authors. Multi-authorship presents a re-thinking of several concepts which support the notion of the individual author, since the focus of multi-authorship is not on attribution and ownership of a finished text, but on the continued malleability of a text. Modes of multi-authorship, demonstrated in the use of the pseudonyms Alan Smithee and Karen Eliot, represent declarative authors whose names signify multiple origins, whilst concurrently indicating a distinct body of work. The function of these names form an important context to this study, since primary research involves the construction of an experimental mode of multi-authorship utilising WikiMedia technology and the interaction of thirty nine participants, who are invited to create a body of work under the collective pseudonym Karen Karnak. The data generated by this experiment is analysed using aspects of Michel Foucault's author-function to identify and determine power structures inherent in the WikiMedia context. The interplay of power structures, including concepts such as identity, ownership and the body of work, affect the resulting mode of authorship and contribute to the construction of Karen Karnak, suggesting further areas of research into the emerging multi-author

    Contextual diversity, not word frequency, determines word-naming and lexical decision times

    No full text
    Word frequency is an important predictor of word-naming and lexical decision times. It is, however, confounded with contextual diversity, the number of contexts in which a word has been seen. In a study using a normative, corpus-based measure of contextual diversity, word-frequency effects were eliminated when effects of contextual diversity were taken into account (but not vice versa) across three naming and three lexical decision data sets; the same pattern of results was obtained regardless of which of three corpora was used to derive the frequency and contextual-diversity values. The results are incompatible with existing models of visual word recognition, which attribute frequency effects directly to frequency, and are particularly problematic for accounts in which frequency effects reflect learning. We argue that the results reflect the importance of likely need in memory processes, and that the continuity between reading and memory suggests using principles from memory research to inform theories of reading

    Author Co-Citation Analysis (ACA): a powerful tool for representing implicit knowledge of scholar knowledge workers

    No full text
    In the last decade, knowledge has emerged as one of the most important and valuable organizational assets. Gradually this importance caused to emergence of new discipline entitled ―knowledge management‖. However one of the major challenges of knowledge management is conversion implicit or tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge. Thus Making knowledge visible so that it can be better accessed, discussed, valued or generally managed is a long-standing objective in knowledge management. Accordingly in this paper author co- citation analysis (ACA) will be proposed as an efficient technique of knowledge visualization in academia (Scholar knowledge workers)

    A suggested programme for developing 4th year primary pupils’ performance in Mathematical word problems in Kuwait

    No full text
    This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The main objective of this study was to investigate the effect of using a suggested mathematical word-problem training programme on Primary 4 pupils' performance in mathematical word-problems. The study had a pre-post control group design. A treatment and a no-treatment group were exposed to pre-post methods of gathering data (a mathematical word-problem achievement test and a mathematical word-problem attitude scale). The treatment group was given direct and explicit training on how to solve mathematical word-problems, while the pupils of the no-treatment group received no such training; they were taught the same material they study at school. A "t" test was used to compare the means of scores of the control group pupils and those of the experimental group in the pre-post measurements. Results of the study revealed a significant improvement in the experimental group pupils’ performance in mathematical word-problems because they had attended the suggested programme. Results also revealed that experimental group subjects' attitudes towards mathematical word-problems underwent an exceptional change because they had attended the suggested programme. Their attitudes towards mathematical word-problems became more positive than before. In the light of the results of the study, some recommendations were made for improving mathematics teacher training programmes, for mathematics teaching, and for further research

    Word Activation Forces Map Word Networks

    No full text
    Words associate with each other in a manner of intricate clusters^1-3^. Yet the brain capably encodes the complex relations into workable networks^4-7^ such that the onset of a word in the brain automatically and selectively activates its associates, facilitating language understanding and generation^8-10^. One believes that the activation strength from one word to another forges and accounts for the latent structures of the word networks. This implies that mapping the word networks from brains to computers^11,12^, which is necessary for various purposes^1,2,13-15^, may be achieved through modeling the activation strengths. However, although a lot of investigations on word activation effects have been carried out^8-10,16-20^, modeling the activation strengths remains open. Consequently, huge labor is required to do the mappings^11,12^. Here we show that our found word activation forces, statistically defined by a formula in the same form of the universal gravitation, capture essential information on the word networks, leading to a superior approach to the mappings. The approach compatibly encodes syntactical and semantic information into sparse coding directed networks, comprehensively highlights the features of individual words. We find that based on the directed networks, sensible word clusters and hierarchies can be efficiently discovered. Our striking results strongly suggest that the word activation forces might reveal the encoding of word networks in the brain

    Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts

    No full text
    We 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

    Engulfing in word-hyperbolic groups

    No full text
    We examine residual properties of word-hyperbolic groups, adapting a method introduced by Darren Long to study the residual properties of Kleinian groups
    corecore