Absence Of Context Research Articles

Enhancing the processing advantage: two psycholinguistic investigations of formulaic expressions in Chinese as a second language

Abstract The Holistic Hypothesis asserts that formulaic expressions (FEs) are processed more rapidly than non-formulaic expressions (non-FE items) by both native speakers (NSs) and L2 learners of English. This study utilized an acceptability judgment task and a self-paced reading task to investigate the online processing of FEs and non-FE items among bilingual speakers (L1 English, L2 Chinese) in both contextual and non-contextual conditions. Meanwhile, a familiarity rating task was employed to measure whether there is a familiarity effect in item processing. The results consistently provided support for the Holistic Hypothesis, indicating that learners of Chinese at each level exhibited faster processing of FEs compared to non-FE items, regardless of the presence or absence of context. However, the influence of item familiarity, rather than the proficiency effect, contributed to the improvement of L2 learners’ eventual processing abilities. Distinct patterns also emerged when comparing data from NSs and L2 learners of Chinese, highlighting L2 learners’ more pronounced processing advantage, characterized by faster response times (RTs) to FEs compared to non-FE items. Through an analysis of Chinese L2 data, this study sheds light on the interplay between the usage based approach and chunking within the cognitive approach to L2 learning.

Do gifted children without specific learning disabilities read more efficiently than typically developing children?

There are no published data on the written language skills of gifted children (GC). The objective of the present study was to evaluate reading abilities of GC vs. normative data from typically developing French children (TDC). Like English, French is considered to be an opaque language. GC completed the Wechsler Intelligence Scales and a battery of language tests. Only children with a score two standard deviations (SD) above the norm were included. GC with current or past academic difficulties or specific learning disorders were excluded. The GC's scores were compared with TDC's normative scores for language tests in a chi-square-test and corrected for multiple comparisons. Forty-five GC were included. The highest GC's mean scores were for the WISC's Verbal Comprehension Index (VCI) and the lowest for the Processing Speed Index (from more than two SDs to one SD higher above the TDC's normative scores). GC were between 1.3 and 4.7 times more likely than TDC to achieve a high score. After correction, the distributions of the GC's and TDC's scores differed significantly with regard to spoonerism, phoneme deletion, and rapid automatic naming (p < 0.001), word and sentence repetition (p ≤ 0.007), and the reading of meaningful text (p = 0.03). GC and TDC did not differ significantly for reading meaningless texts and spelling accuracy. As described in the literature, the GC in the present study had heterogeneous scores on the Wechsler Intelligence Scales. The GC performed better than TDC in assessments of the underlying skills of reading and when reading of meaningful texts. This advantage was lost in the absence of context, as shown by the lack of significant GC vs. TDC differences for reading meaningless texts and for spelling accuracy. Hence, GC presented a heterogeneous profile with regard to the underlying skills of reading and reading abilities. The present data should help to improve our understanding of GC's reading skills. In particular, it is now essential to determine which written language tests and which score thresholds are appropriate for identifying specific learning disorders in GC.

South African health sciences students’ perspectives on utilisation, constraints and future possibilities of mHealth and e-Learning

The global COVID-19 pandemic has added considerable complexity to the education and training of health care professionals as well as patient care. Literature suggests that e-Learning and mobile health (mHealth) technologies have great potential, but research studies are sparse, especially in low- to middle-income countries. The paper presents South African health science students’ perceptions of the importance, relevance, constraints and future possibilities of e-Learning and mHealth. Students from five universities participated in a modified Delphi. The first phase of student focus groups and interviews (n = 5), established baseline experiences and perceptions of e-Learning and mHealth during and post-COVID-19. These findings informed the design of an online survey (n = 155) for the second phase of the study. The majority of students were familiar with e-Learning, less so with mHealth; however most believed both to be a beneficial complement to theoretical and clinical teaching. Reasons for an integrated Learning Management System (LMS), also known as virtual learning environments, include increased flexibility, access and enhanced learning; and issues of anxiety, reduced interactivity, an absence of context and a lack of discipline- or profession-specific features as reasons against. The perceived importance of particular features of e-Learning and mHealth tools were highlighted. These findings will contribute to the redesign of online work-integrated curricula and the development of an inclusive, student-centred, health sciences-specific integrated and multi-modal LMS directed towards student-centred learning while addressing concerns around the digital divide and social justice.

Chinese NER with Softlexion and Residual Gated CNNs

The increment of accuracy and speed on Named Entity Recognition (NER), a key task in natural language processing, can further enhance downstream tasks. The method of residual gated convolution and attention mechanism is proposed to address the problem of insufficient recognition of nested entities and ambiguous entities by convolutional layers in the absence of context. It emphasizes local continuous features fusion to global ones to better obtain contextual semantic information in the stacked convolutional layer. Moreover, the optimized embedding layer with fusing character and lexical information by introducing a dictionary combines with a pre-trained BERT model containing a priori semantic effects, and the decoding layer in an entity-level method to alleviate the problem of nested entities and ambiguous entities in long-sequence text. In order to reduce abundant parameters of Bert model, during the training process, only the residual gated convolutional layer is iterated after fixing Bert layer parameters. After experiments on MSRA corpus, the result of entity recognition task in BERT-softlexion-RGCNN-GP model outperforms other models, with an F1 value of 94.96%, and the training speed is also better than that of the bidirectional LSTM model. Our model not only maintains a more efficient training speed but also recognizes Chinese entities more precisely, which is of practical value for fields required accuracy and speed.

What is behind a facial emoji? The effects of context, age, and gender on children’s understanding of emoji

This study aimed to evaluate the dimensional and semantic meanings of emoji in the absence of context as well as in a food-related context. The effects of age and gender on this perception were also identified in both situations. After a pre-selection task, 312 children (6–12 years) participated in a survey in which the dimensional and semantic meanings of emoji were evaluated in one of two situations. The dimensional meaning was reported as valence and arousal dimensions using a 100-unit visual analogue scale. The semantic meaning was measured by selecting child-friendly emotion terms in a check-all-that-apply question.The results show that the dimensional meaning of emoji was context-dependent. The evocation of a food-related context made emoji more extremely valenced, whereas no specific trend was identified for arousal. Gender and age influenced the dimensional meaning of emoji, but only for individual icons. Girls in the study rated specific neutral and negative emoji more negatively than boys. Younger children (6–8 years) perceived individual active emoji as more arousing than their older peers (9–12 years). Moreover, the semantic meaning of emoji was context-dependent, and specific groups of emoji also differed depending on the age of the participants. In this regard, secondary semantic meanings proved to be influenced by these factors, whereas main semantic meanings were stable. Multivariate analysis indicated that the associations established between emotion word categories and emoji were mainly influenced by valence and the power dimension rather than arousal.

A Deweyan Ethic for Human/Nonhuman Animal Relationships

Abstract In this article, I propose that the ethical work of John Dewey can better evaluate, enhance, and nurture human/nonhuman animal relationships. While Peter Singer’s utilitarianism and Tom Regan’s deontology are considered the dominant ethical theories in the field of animal ethics and have provided indispensable scholarship to the field, I argue that they cannot fully attend to the complexities of human/nonhuman animal relationships. Some of the shortcomings of Singer’s and Regan’s theories are the absence of context, the dichotomization of reason/emotion and human/animal, the calculative sterility of moral deliberation, and the problematic language of ‘rights.’ A supplemented Deweyan ethic—enhanced by care ethics and ecofeminism—can better attend to the ethical messiness of human/nonhuman animal relationships. I offer five characteristics of Dewey’s ethical work—naturalism, ethical pluralism, experimentalism, fallibilism, and meliorism—as an alternative way to evaluate and nurture these relationships.

Lip Reading using Convolutional Neural Network

Lipreading is that the task of understanding speech by analysing the movement of lips. instead, it can be represented because the method of secret writing text from visual info generated by the speaker’s mouth movement. The task of perception depends conjointly on info provided by the context and data of the language. Lipreading, conjointly called visual speech recognition could be a difficult task for humans, particularly within the absence of context. many apparently identical lip movements will turn out totally different words, thus perception is associate inherently ambiguous drawback within the word level. Even skilled lipreaders come through low accuracy in word prediction for datasets with solely a couple of words. machine-driven perception has been a subject of interest for several years. A machine that may browse lip movement has nice utility in varied applications such as: machine-driven perception of speakers with broken vocal tracts, biometric person identification, multi-talker coincidental speech secret writing, silent-movie process and improvement of audio-visual speech recognition normally. Here we've used Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) from deep learning. The advancements in machine learning created machine-driven perception attainable. Also, we've used MIRACL-VC1 Dataset for our reference. The accuracy of our project came dead set as 76%. Key Words: convolutional neural network, deep learning, lip reading, converting speech to text, open CV, keras.

L2 within-language morphological competition during spoken word recognition

ABSTRACT Bilinguals recognize words with shared morphology and phonology cross-linguistically (i.e., cognates) faster than words that do not have these characteristics. Moreover, higher phonological overlap in cognates enhances the effects, which suggests that phonology eases word recognition. However, it is currently unclear whether words compete purely morphologically before spoken word recognition within language and whether proficiency in the L2 modulates the degree of morphological competition. Spanish monolinguals and English L2 learners of Spanish with varying L2 proficiency completed an auditory lexical decision task in Spanish. Stimuli were phonological sequences of Spanish words prior to a recognition point (e.g., /mark/ in /marko/) whose activated cohorts were minimal pairs. Some pairs were morphologically related (e.g., huerto ‘vegetable patch’ versus huerta ‘vegetable garden’), whereas some others had no morphological relationship (e.g., marco ‘frame’ versus marca ‘brand’). Results showed that both groups processed solely phonological competitors in a similar way as they did with morphological competitors. Taken together, these findings suggest that morphological relatedness does not modulate either L1 or L2 spoken word recognition prior to a recognition point when speakers listen to words in absence of context. In addition, the findings suggest that the L2 recognition architecture is qualitatively similar to that of native speakers.

Putting Mutual Exclusivity in Context: Speaker Race Influences Monolingual and Bilingual Infants' Word-Learning Assumptions.

Previous work indicates mutual exclusivity in word learning in monolingual, but not bilingual toddlers. We asked whether this difference indicates distinct conceptual biases, or instead reflects best-guess heuristic use in the absence of context. We altered word-learning contexts by manipulating whether a familiar- or unfamiliar-race speaker introduced a novel word for an object with a known category label painted in a new color. Both monolingual and bilingual infants showed mutual exclusivity for a familiar-race speaker, and relaxed mutual exclusivity and treated the novel word as a category label for an unfamiliar-race speaker. Thus, monolingual and bilingual infants have access to similar word-learning heuristics, and both use nonlinguistic social context to guide their use of the most appropriate heuristic.

Optimal Matching for Observational Studies That Integrate Quantitative and Qualitative Research

A quantitative study of treatment effects may form many matched pairs of a treated subject and an untreated control who look similar in terms of covariates measured prior to treatment. When treatments are not randomly assigned, one inevitable concern is that individuals who look similar in measured covariates may be dissimilar in unmeasured covariates. Another concern is that quantitative measures may be misinterpreted by investigators in the absence of context that is not recorded in quantitative data. When text information is automatically coded to form quantitative measures, examination of the narrative context can reveal the limitations of initial coding efforts. An existing proposal entails a narrative description of a subset of matched pairs, hoping in a subset of pairs to observe quite a bit more of what was not quantitatively measured or automatically encoded. A subset of pairs cannot rule out subtle biases that materially affect analyses of many pairs, but perhaps a subset of pairs can inform discussion of such biases, perhaps leading to a reinterpretation of quantitative data, or perhaps raising new considerations and perspectives. The large literature on qualitative research contends that open-ended, narrative descriptions of a subset of people can be informative. Here, we discuss and apply a form of optimal matching that supports such an integrated, quantitative-plus-qualitative study. The optimal match provides many closely matched pairs plus a subset of exceptionally close pairs suitable for narrative interpretation. We illustrate the matching technique using data from a recent study of police responses to domestic violence in Philadelphia, where the police report includes both quantitative and narrative information.

Blockchain-Empowered Edge Intelligence for Internet of Medical Things Against COVID-19

We have witnessed an unprecedented public health crisis caused by the new coronavirus disease (COVID-19), which has severely affected medical institutions, our common lives, and social-economic activities. This crisis also reveals the brittleness of existing medical services, such as over-centralization of medical resources, the hysteresis of medical services digitalization, and weak security and privacy protection of medical data. The integration of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) and blockchain is expected to be a panacea to COVID-19 attributed to the ubiquitous presence and the perception of IoMT as well as the enhanced security and immutability of the blockchain. However, the synergy of IoMT and blockchain is also faced with challenges in privacy, latency, and context absence. The emerging edge intelligence technologies bring opportunities to tackle these issues. In this article, we present blockchain-empowered edge intelligence for IoMT in addressing the COVID-19 crisis. We first review IoMT, edge intelligence, and blockchain in addressing the COVID-19 pandemic. We then present an architecture of blockchain-empowered edge intelligence for IoMT after discussing the opportunities of integrating blockchain and edge intelligence. We next offer solutions to COVID-19 brought by blockchain-empowered edge intelligence from 1) monitoring and tracing COVID-19 pandemic origin, 2) traceable supply chain of injectable medicines and COVID-19 vaccines, and 3) telemedicine and remote healthcare services. Moreover, we also discuss the challenges and open issues in blockchain-empowered edge intelligence.

Mimetics: Towards Understanding Human Actions Out of Context

Recent methods for video action recognition have reached outstanding performances on existing benchmarks. However, they tend to leverage context such as scenes or objects instead of focusing on understanding the human action itself. For instance, a tennis field leads to the prediction playing tennis irrespectively of the actions performed in the video. In contrast, humans have a more complete understanding of actions and can recognize them without context. The best example of out-of-context actions are mimes, that people can typically recognize despite missing relevant objects and scenes. In this paper, we propose to benchmark action recognition methods in such absence of context and introduce a novel dataset, Mimetics, consisting of mimed actions for a subset of 50 classes from the Kinetics benchmark. Our experiments show that (a) state-of-the-art 3D convolutional neural networks obtain disappointing results on such videos, highlighting the lack of true understanding of the human actions and (b) models leveraging body language via human pose are less prone to context biases. In particular, we show that applying a shallow neural network with a single temporal convolution over body pose features transferred to the action recognition problem performs surprisingly well compared to 3D action recognition methods.

Immediate online use of prosody reveals the ironic intentions of a speaker: neurophysiological evidence.

In social interactions, speakers often use their tone of voice ("prosody") to communicate their interpersonal stance to pragmatically mark an ironic intention (e.g., sarcasm). The neurocognitive effects of prosody as listeners process ironic statements in real time are still poorly understood. In this study, 30 participants judged the friendliness of literal and ironic criticisms and compliments in the absence of context while their electrical brain activity was recorded. Event-related potentials reflecting the uptake of prosodic information were tracked at two time points in the utterance. Prosody robustly modulated P200 and late positivity amplitudes from utterance onset. These early neural responses registered both the speaker's stance (positive/negative) and their intention (literal/ironic). At a later timepoint (You are such a great/horrible cook), P200, N400, and P600 amplitudes were all greater when the critical word valence was congruent with the speaker's vocal stance, suggesting that irony was contextually facilitated by early effects from prosody. Our results exemplify that rapid uptake of salient prosodic features allows listeners to make online predictions about the speaker's ironic intent. This process can constrain their representation of an utterance to uncover nonliteral meanings without violating contextual expectations held about the speaker, as described by parallel-constraint satisfaction models.

Recent and Radical: Excess, Absence, and Erasure in the Museum of Recent Art

Inaugurated in 2018, the Museum of Recent Art (MARe) in Bucharest has rapidly become one of the leading contemporary art institutions in Romania. Rivaling state-financed museums, MARe’s approach to exhibiting contemporaneity is dialectical, exchanging the conventional, chronologically determined museological method for anachronism. This approach provides a framework through which the perpetual theoretical correspondence between past, present, and future artistic practices is facilitated. Focusing on art that circumvented the official visual discourses of the communist regime and on art that emerged after the Romanian Revolution of 1989, MARe’s novel museological method has, however, been impaired by the museum’s failure to fully account for the country’s totalitarian history. The absence of context, an unethical silence that can be seen as a symptom of Romania’s unresolved tension towards its communist past, underpins both the conception of the museum’s building and that of its permanent collection. Impeding discussions of nationalization, coercive state mechanisms, and the imposition of Socialist Realism, MARe further limits the emergence of art historical narratives by reaffirming the traditional, hierarchical superiority attributed to fine art forms.

Signal-driven and expectation-driven processing of accent types

ABSTRACT This paper investigates neurophysiological correlates of prosodic prominence in German with two EEG experiments. Experiment 1 tested different degrees of prominence (three accent types: L+H*, H*, H+L* and deaccentuation) in the absence of context, making the acoustic signal the only source for attention orienting. Experiment 2 tested L+H* and H+L* accents in relation to contexts such as “Guess what happened today” triggering expectations as to how exciting the following utterance will be. Results reveal that prominence cues that attract attention, such as a signal-driven high level of prosodic prominence or a content-driven expression of excitement, engender positivities of varying latency. Furthermore, contextual expectations trigger prediction errors, e.g. deviations from an appropriate level of prosodic prominence result in a negative ERP deflection. Hence, the data suggest that the two core processes – attentional orientation and predictive processing – reflect discrete stages in the construction of a mental representation during real-time comprehension.

Ilanah Fhima and Dev S. Gangjee, The Confusion Test in European Trade Mark Law, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019, 278 pp, hb £125.00.

Ilanah Fhima and Dev S. Gangjee, The Confusion Test in European Trade Mark Law, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019, 278 pp, hb £125.00.

I'll cry instead: Mu suppression responses to tearful facial expressions

Tears are a facial expression of emotion that readily elicit empathic responses from observers. It is currently unknown whether these empathic responses to tears are influenced by specific neural substrates. The EEG mu rhythm is one method of investigating the human mirror neuron system, purported to underlie the sharing of affective states and a facilitator of social cognition. The purpose of this research was to explore the mu response to tearful expressions of emotion. Sixty-eight participants viewed happy and sad faces, both with and without tears, in addition to a neutral control condition. Participants first completed an emotion discrimination task, and then an imitation condition where they were required to mimic the displayed expression. Mu enhancement was found in response to the discrimination task, whilst suppression was demonstrated in response to the imitation condition. Examination of the suppression scores revealed that greater suppression was observed in response to happy-tear and sad tear-free expressions. Planned contrasts exploring suppression to neutral faces revealed no significant differences between emotional and neutral conditions. The mu response to neutral expressions resembled that of the happy-tear and the sad tear-free conditions, lending support to the idea that ambiguous emotional expressions require greater sensorimotor engagement. This study provides preliminary evidence for the role of the mirror neuron system in discerning tearful expressions of emotion in the absence of context.

Entrepreneurial orientation and new venture resource acquisition: why context matters

Resource acquisition is vital for new venture survival and growth. However, surprisingly little is known about how the entrepreneurial orientation (EO) of the new venture affects its resource acquisition. Drawing on the resource-based view of the firm, we articulate a theory and treatment of EO that address this oversight and remedy for the routine absence of context among studies of EO. Accounting for the simultaneous effect of environmental dynamism and an opportunistic orientation (OO), a tendency among Chinese new ventures to imitate technology and profit through market information asymmetry, as important contextual variables reflecting the Chinese business context, we provide insights on the contingency effects of contextual variables. Results from a quantitative study of 361 Chinese new ventures show that EO positively influences resource acquisition. However, this relationship is context sensitive. In a low dynamic environment, OO negatively moderates this relationship. However, in a highly dynamic environment, OO exhibits no effect on the relationship between EO and new venture resource acquisition. Our results contribute to a resource-based theory of EO and reveal its context sensitivity. Our study is a step in moving the scholarship of EO forward and away from the performance debate towards greater predictive accuracy of EO and its systems of effects.

Environmental Role in Shaping Recollection

The core concern of this article is to unravel the underlying mystery of mental activities; it reveals how a writer tends to weave his thoughts and memories. The article aims at dealing with the bases of writer’s reasons and recollections appeared in journal. The analysis as such becomes significant to synchronize, acknowledge and recognize the basic causes behind the seemingly scattered and deviated thoughts but coherently correlated concepts of the writer. In order to achieve such importance and objective of this study, this qualitative research has implemented an outlook the nature / culture ambivalent aspect of the broad perspective, ecocriticism on shaping one’s perception as a tool. And the model text to be analyzed is “Reminiscences of a Journey to Greece” a journal prepared by Govinda Raj Bhattarai. After the investigation into this journal, the exploration elucidates that one’s encounter with the environment becomes the generator and stimulator of mental matters memoirs, concepts, ideas and emotions. Therefore, the key conclusion of this analysis is that one cannot generate ideas in the void or absence of context rather the external world becomes the bedrock to beget inner world the conceptions of the creator in journal.

Why Her Behaviour Is Still on Trial: The Absence of Context in the Modernisation of the Substantive Law on Consent

Two cases studies illustrate the paradox at the heart of the substantive law of sexual assault – that it is possible (i) for a woman who does not communicate her consent to be deemed to consent; and (ii) for a defendant to have a reasonable belief about a woman’s consent even though it is accepted that she did not consent, both of which undermine the concept of her sexual autonomy. In light of the research on rape myth acceptance (‘RMA’) which shows that RMA is one of the most consistent predictors of victim blame in sexual assault scenarios, this article discusses how sexual assault law reform in New South Wales in 2007, which introduced a ‘communicative’ model of consent, has been subsequently undermined by the decisions in two recent judge-alone trials. Options for reform are discussed in light of the community standards expected under a ‘communicative’ model of consent.