Concrete Nouns Research Articles

Dissociating frequency and animacy effects in visual word processing: An fMRI study

In an fMRI investigation of the neural representation of word frequency and animacy, participants read high- and low-frequency words within living and nonliving semantic categories. Both temporal (left fusiform gyrus) and parietal (left supramarginal gyrus) activation patterns differentiated between animal and tool words after controlling for frequency. Activation patterns in a smaller ventral temporal region, a subset of the voxels identified in the animacy contrast, differentiated between high- and low-frequency words after controlling for animacy. Activation patterns in the larger temporal region distinguished between high- and low-frequency words just as well as patterns within the smaller region. However, in analyses by animacy category, frequency effects in these temporal regions were significant only for tool, not for animal, words. Thus, lexical word frequency information and semantic animacy category information are conjointly represented in left fusiform gyrus activation patterns for some, but not all, concrete nouns.

Communicating abstract meaning: concepts revealed in words and gestures

words refer to concepts that cannot be directly experienced through our senses (e.g. truth, morality). How we ground the meanings of abstract words is one of the deepest problems in cognitive science today. We investigated this question in an experiment in which 62 participants were asked to communicate the meanings of words (20 abstract nouns, e.g. impulse; 10 concrete nouns, e.g. insect) to a partner without using the words themselves (the taboo task). We analysed the speech and associated gestures that participants used to communicate the meaning of each word in the taboo task. Analysis of verbal and gestural data yielded a number of insights. When communicating about the meanings of abstract words, participants' speech referenced more people and introspections. In contrast, the meanings of concrete words were communicated by referencing more objects and entities. Gesture results showed that when participants spoke about abstract word meanings their speech was accompanied by more metaphorical and beat gestures, and speech about concrete word meanings was accompanied by more iconic gestures. Taken together, the results suggest that abstract meanings are best captured by a model that allows dynamic access to multiple representation systems.This article is part of the theme issue 'Varieties of abstract concepts: development, use and representation in the brain'.

TINDAK TUTUR DIREKTIF INTERAKSI GURU DAN ANAK PADA TAMAN KANAK-KANAK DI KABUPATEN GOWA

This study discusses the comparison of language style in novel Atheist by Achdiat Karta Miharja and novel Telegram by Putu Wijaya. The aims of this study are (1) to describe the embodiment of language styles in novels Atheist and novels Telegram, and (2) to describe the comparison of language styles in novels Atheist and novels Telegram. This research is a qualitative research using descriptive method. The approach used in this research is stylistic approach. Sources of data in this study is a text that contains the style of rhetorical language and figurative style of language. The results show that: (1) the style of language used in the novel Atheist is the style of language; Hyperbole, simile, metaphor, personification, antonomasia, and sarcasm. The style of language found in the novel Telegram namely; Hyperbole, simile, metaphor, personification, antonomasia, and metonimia. Based on the language style found, there are three types of word classes used as word choice in realizing the style of figurative language and style of rhetorical language, namely; Nouns, verbs, and adjectives. (2) The similarity between novels Atheist and novels Telegram is the similarity of hyperbola-style, personification, and antonomasia-forming structures. The difference between the novel Atheist and the novel Telegram lies in the metaphorical style marker which in the novel Atheist is a transitive verb, while in the novel Telegram is a concrete noun.

COMPARISON OF LANGUAGE STYLES IN NOVEL ATHEIST BY ACHDIAT KARTA MIHARDJA AND NOVEL TELEGRAM BY PUTU WIJAYA

This study discusses the comparison of language style in novel Atheist by Achdiat Karta Miharja and novel Telegram by Putu Wijaya. The aims of this study are (1) to describe the embodiment of language styles in novels Atheist and novels Telegram, and (2) to describe the comparison of language styles in novels Atheist and novels Telegram. This research is a qualitative research usingdescriptive method. The approach used in this research is stylistic approach. Sources of data in this study is a text that contains the style of rhetorical language and figurative style of language. The results show that: (1) the style of language used in the novel Atheist is the style of language; Hyperbole, simile, metaphor, personification, antonomasia, and sarcasm. The style of language found in the novel Telegram namely; Hyperbole, simile, metaphor, personification, antonomasia, and metonimia. Based on the language style found, there are three types of word classes used as word choice in realizing the style of figurative language and style of rhetorical language, namely; Nouns,verbs, and adjectives. (2) The similarity between novels Atheist and novels Telegram is the similarity of hyperbola-style, personification, and antonomasia-forming structures. The difference between the novel Atheist and the novel Telegram lies in the metaphorical style marker which in the novel Atheistis a transitive verb, while in the novel Telegram is a concrete noun.

Brain Evoked Potential Analysis of Second Language Acquisition from the Perspective of Neurolinguistics

The current researches on the foreign language vocabulary attrition mainly focuses on the nature, time and order of the attrition of foreign language vocabulary, but there are few experimental researches using new technological means. In this paper, students who are native Chinese speakers are taken as the subjects to conduct two behavioral experiments and event-related potential (ERP) experiments. The results show that subjects have the attrition of foreign language vocabulary. N1 and N400 effect are found in the results of the two experiments, in which both concrete nouns and abstract nouns show the weakening of N1 component and enhancing of the N400 component. In the trend of brain evoked potential, the amplitude of N1 becomes smaller while the amplitude of N400 becomes larger. These results indicate that foreign language vocabulary leave traces in the brain when it is extracted again, and English nouns appears attrition. As the most common word class in English, the attrition time of Chinese learners to this word class is short and the attrition even occurs within three months.

THEY AND ITS LEMMAS AS NON-BINARY THIRD PERSON SINGULAR PRONOUNS IN THE WASHINGTON POST

In recent years, it is found that pronoun they and its lemmas are used to refer to singular person to show that the person does not wish to be identified as one of gender binaries. This phenomenon occurs in The Washington Post having added singular they to their stylebook. Therefore this paper aims at elaborating how pronouns they, them, their, theirs, and themselves are used as singular ones in the articles of The Washington Post published in 2016. With the aid of corpus instrument software, this study qualitatively analyses a small corpus consisting of 100 articles. References of pronouns identified as singular are proceeded as the data source of this study and categorized into Crystal’s (2003) main classes of noun and Cobuild’s (2011) classification of indefinite pronoun. The study reveals that The Washington Post used they as singular with the references of proper noun which consists of names of people and organizations, common count concrete noun which consists of nouns denoting persons and a noun denoting things, common count abstract noun consisting of nouns denoting abstract entities, and 6 indefinite pronouns which are used to refer to persons. These references are found mostly to be non-referential, where gender is indefinite. However, some are found to be referential which are common count concrete noun child and proper nouns in the form of names of people. These references refer to individuals who identify themselves not in one of gender binaries, instead they are found to be used in a context regarding LGBT.

The feminine endings*-ayand*-āyin Semitic and Berber

AbstractThis paper examines the evidence for the marginal feminine endings*-ay-and*-āy-in Proto-Semitic, and the feminine endings*-eand*-ain Proto-Berber. Their similar formation (*CV̆CC-ay/āy), semantics (verbal abstracts, underived concrete feminine nouns) and plural morphology (replacement of the feminine suffix by a plural suffix with -w-) suggest that this feminine formation should be reconstructed to a shared ancestor which may be called Proto-Berbero-Semitic.

Cross-Situational Learning Is Supported by Propose-but-Verify Hypothesis Testing

When we encounter a new word, there are often multiple objects that the word might refer to [1]. Nonetheless, because names for concrete nouns are constant, we are able to learn them across successive encounters [2, 3]. This form of "cross-situational" learning may result from either associative mechanisms that gradually accumulate evidence for each word-object association [4, 5] or rapid propose-but-verify (PbV) mechanisms where only one hypothesized referent is stored for each word, which is either subsequently verified or rejected [6, 7]. Using model-based representation similarity analyses of fMRI data acquired during learning, we find evidence for learning mediated by a PbV mechanism. This learning may be underpinned by rapid pattern-separation processes in the hippocampus. Our findings shed light on the psychological and neural processes that support word learning, suggesting that adults rely on their episodic memory to track a limited number of word-object associations.

Toward a universal decoder of linguistic meaning from brain activation

Prior work decoding linguistic meaning from imaging data has been largely limited to concrete nouns, using similar stimuli for training and testing, from a relatively small number of semantic categories. Here we present a new approach for building a brain decoding system in which words and sentences are represented as vectors in a semantic space constructed from massive text corpora. By efficiently sampling this space to select training stimuli shown to subjects, we maximize the ability to generalize to new meanings from limited imaging data. To validate this approach, we train the system on imaging data of individual concepts, and show it can decode semantic vector representations from imaging data of sentences about a wide variety of both concrete and abstract topics from two separate datasets. These decoded representations are sufficiently detailed to distinguish even semantically similar sentences, and to capture the similarity structure of meaning relationships between sentences.

The Effect of Lexical Frequency in Modulating Translation Asymmetric on L2 Learners

Mao Cui, Eunhae Oh. 2018. The effect of lexical frequency in modulating translation asymmetries on L2 learners. Language and Information, 22.1, 57-71. The study examined response time in Chinese-English two-way translation in order to explore the role of word frequency in modulating translation asymmetries between forward and backward translation. 23 Chinese learners of English at two different proficiency levels performed a word translation task of 90 concrete nouns, one-syllable in English words and two characters in Chinese words. The results showed that there were asymmetries between the two translation directions, with backward translation taking significantly longer time than forward translation. Word frequency played a role in modulating the asymmetries in that translating high-frequency items, regardless of direction, took significantly shorter time than the mid- and low-frequency items. But backward translation displayed larger magnitude of sensitivity to the variation of frequency than forward translation. It was suggested that both forward and backward translation were conceptually-mediated with differing strength in the linking between the lexical items and their conceptual representations, being stronger with high-frequency items than mid- and low-frequency items. Conceptual activation is easier for high frequency items.

Gender congruency effects in Russian–Spanish and Italian–Spanish bilinguals: The role of language proximity and concreteness of words

Previous studies have shown that bilinguals perform a production task faster when the item is gender-congruent across their two languages than when it is not. The current study aimed to explore three factors that might modulate this effect: the similarity of the gender systems, the need to retrieve grammatical gender to perform the task, and the role of a semantic variable (concreteness) in the processing of gender information. In Experiment 1, Russian–Spanish bilinguals showed gender-congruency effects whether they translated concrete nouns in isolation or in noun-phrases. In contrast, the effect was restricted to noun phrases when they translated abstract words. In Experiment 2, Italian–Spanish bilinguals showed the gender-congruency effect regardless of the translation task. However, the effect was larger with concrete nouns in comparison with abstract nouns. These results are discussed in terms of the proximity of bilingual gender systems and the relationship between semantics and gender.

Grounding as a Side-Effect of Grounding.

In relation to semantics, "grounding" has (at least) two relevant meanings. "Symbol grounding" is the process of connecting symbols (e.g., words) to perception and the world. "Communicative grounding" is the process of interactively adding to common ground in dialog. Strategies for grounding in human communication include, crucially, strategies for resolving troubles caused by various kinds of miscommunication. As it happens, these two processes of grounding are closely related. As a side-effect of grounding an utterance, dialog participants (DPs) may adjust the meanings they assign to linguistic expressions, in a process of semantic coordination. Meanings of at least some expressions (e.g., concrete nouns) include perceptual aspects which enable DPs to classify entities as falling under the expression or not based on their perception of those entities. We show how perceptual grounding of symbols can be achieved in a process of interactively adding to common ground. This requires that perceptual aspects of meaning can be updated as a result of participating in linguistic interaction, thereby enabling fine-grained semantic coordination of perceptually grounded linguistic meanings. A formal semantics for low-level perceptual aspects of meaning is presented, tying these together with the logical-inferential aspects of meaning traditionally studied in formal semantics. The key idea is to model perceptual meanings as classifiers of perceptual input. This requires a framework where intensions are (a) represented independently of extensions, and (b) structured objects which can be modified as a result of learning. We use Type Theory with Records (TTR), a formal semantics framework which starts from the idea that information and meaning are founded on our ability to perceive and classify the world, that is, to perceive objects and situations as being of types. As an example of our approach, we show how a simple classifier of spatial information based on the Perceptron can be cast in TTR.

An animacy hierarchy within inanimate nouns: English corpus evidence from a prototypical perspective

Existing animacy hierarchies, derived from either typological grammars or cognitive perception, appear to be elaborated exclusively within animate entities, leaving the inanimate nouns an undifferentiated class. However, it by no means indicates that all the inanimate nouns are equally inanimate without any hierarchic structure. According to the prototypical approach, animacy is a gradient hierarchy contingent on human egocentric assessment and interpretation. A thing's animacy depends on how much resemblance it bears to us, specifically, how many human prototype features it possesses. Based on this theory, our research investigated the animacy hierarchy within previously undifferentiated inanimate nouns. The method is to use predicate (typically finite) verbs as a linguistic externalization of human prototype features, which can then be quantified and weighted, based upon an actual corpus. The results attest to the presence of an animacy hierarchy of five inanimate categories. Collective nouns, spatial and temporal nouns, concrete nouns, psychological nouns, followed by other abstract nouns, rank in descending sequence along this hierarchy. Further syntactic exploration shows that this hierarchy can impact word order just as do existing animacy hierarchies. This study might shed some theoretical and methodological light on future animacy research.

A new set of tasks for the assessment of lexical disorders in Italian

A new set of tasks for the assessment of lexical disorders in Italian

Evidence for language-specificity of a BCI-based language training

Evidence for language-specificity of a BCI-based language training

Multimodal conceptual knowledge influences lexical retrieval speed: evidence from object-naming and word-reading in healthy adults

Multimodal conceptual knowledge influences lexical retrieval speed: evidence from object-naming and word-reading in healthy adults

Variation in accusative singular nominal forms in Ukrainian: a corpora-based research

The paper studies the variation between two forms of inanimate nominal forms in accusative singular for masculine declension in Ukrainian. With some nouns two forms are possible: the one coinciding with nominative (which is the default standard way for inanimate nouns in East Slavic) and coinciding with genitive (according to the pattern attested normally with animate nouns). The study is based on the General Regionally Annotated Corpus of Ukrainian (GRAC, uacorpus.org) that contains about 190 million tokens of standard-oriented literary representing all the regions of Ukraine since the beginning of the 19th century until the latest decades. It is found that the presence of the variation (that is of the genitive-like forms) is governed by the semantic properties of both nouns and transitive verbs that enter into the construction in question. The variation is present mainly with concrete nouns belonging to certain semantic fields (body parts, money, awards, documents and stationery, clothes, food, little objects and devices, weapon, transport) that are governed by verbs of acquisition, positioning, change of position, extraction, distancing, desire, search etc. Many such collocations are phraseologically bound (such as vterty nosa ‘to show advantage over somebody’, literally ‘to wipe somebody’s nose’). Normative dictionaries tend to exclude the use of abstract nouns in the form that coincides with genitive (such as hrex ‘sin’ and dux ‘spirit’), whereas the phraseologisms with these nouns are present in the text. The frequency of the form in question differs by regions in a way that corresponds to their spread in the respective dialects. This form is at its maximum in the central regions of Ukraine (the Kyiv, Cherkasy regions), in the south (the Kherson region and Crimea) and in the west (the Khmelnytskyi and Ternopil regions), and they are the less frequent in the east (the Luhansk and Donetsk regions) and in the north (the Sumy, Chernihiv and Rivne regions). The findings are illustrated with corpora examples and statistical data.

Ease-of-learning judgments are based on both processing fluency and beliefs

ABSTRACTProcessing fluency influences many types of judgments. Some metacognitive research suggests that the influence of processing fluency may be mediated by participants’ beliefs. The current study explores the influence of processing fluency and beliefs on ease-of-learning (EOL) judgments. In two experiments (Exp 1: n = 94; Exp 2: n = 146), participants made EOL judgments on 24 six-letter concrete nouns, presented in either a constant condition (high fluency) with upper-case letters (e.g., BUCKET) or an alternating condition (low fluency) with mixed upper- and lower-case letters (e.g., bUcKeT). After judging words individually, participants studied the words and completed a free recall test. Finally, participants indicated what condition they believed made the words more likely to be learned. Results show constant-condition words were judged as more likely to be learned than alternating condition words, but the difference varied with beliefs. Specifically, the difference was biggest when participants believed the constant condition made words more likely to be learned, followed by believing there was no difference, and then believing the alternating condition made words more likely to be learned. Thus, we showed that processing fluency has a direct effect on EOL judgments, but the effect is moderated by beliefs.

Mixed metaphors: Electrophysiological brain responses to (un)expected concrete and abstract prepositional phrases

Languages around the world use spatial terminology, like prepositions, to describe non-spatial, abstract concepts, including time (e.g., in the moment). The Metaphoric Mapping Theory explains this pattern by positing that a universal human cognitive process underlies it, whereby abstract concepts are conceptualized via the application of concrete, three-dimensional space onto abstract domains. The alternative view is that the use of spatial propositions in abstract phrases is idiomatic, and thus does not trigger metaphoric mapping. In the current study, event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to examine the time-course of neural processing of concrete and abstract phrases consisting of the prepositions in or on followed by congruent and incongruent nouns (e.g., in the bowl/plate and in the moment/mend). ERPs were recorded from the onset of reference nouns in 28 adult participants using a 128-channel electrode net. Results show that congruency has differential effects on neural measures, depending on whether the noun is concrete or abstract. Incongruent reference nouns in concrete phrases (e.g., on the bowl) elicited a significant central negativity (an N400 effect), while incongruent reference nouns in abstract phrases (e.g., on the moment) did not. These results suggest that spatially incongruent concrete nouns are semantically unexpected (N400 effect). A P600 effect, which might indicate rechecking, reanalysis and/or reconstruction, was predicted for incongruent abstract nouns, but was not observed, possibly due to the variability in abstract stimuli. Findings cast doubt on accounts claiming that abstract uses of prepositions are cognitively and metaphorically linked to their spatial sense during natural, on-line processing.

Visually Grounded and Textual Semantic Models Differentially Decode Brain Activity Associated with Concrete and Abstract Nouns

Important advances have recently been made using computational semantic models to decode brain activity patterns associated with concepts; however, this work has almost exclusively focused on concrete nouns. How well these models extend to decoding abstract nouns is largely unknown. We address this question by applying state-of-the-art computational models to decode functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) activity patterns, elicited by participants reading and imagining a diverse set of both concrete and abstract nouns. One of the models we use is linguistic, exploiting the recent word2vec skipgram approach trained on Wikipedia. The second is visually grounded, using deep convolutional neural networks trained on Google Images. Dual coding theory considers concrete concepts to be encoded in the brain both linguistically and visually, and abstract concepts only linguistically. Splitting the fMRI data according to human concreteness ratings, we indeed observe that both models significantly decode the most concrete nouns; however, accuracy is significantly greater using the text-based models for the most abstract nouns. More generally this confirms that current computational models are sufficiently advanced to assist in investigating the representational structure of abstract concepts in the brain.