Lexical Conventions Research Articles

To Laugh or Not to Laugh: An Analysis of Humor in Sukumar Ray’s Abol Tabol

The paper analyzes the popular nonsense verses of the Bengali poet Sukumar Ray compiled as Abol Tabol (1923) to characterize the humor in them and assess their universality. While the colonial critique and satirical insinuations implicit in these poems have been pointed out and applauded in recent scholarly readings, the same does not account for their complex comicality. Ray’s (the spirit of whimsy) threads together the author’s preoccupations with inconclusiveness, rejection of grammatical and lexical conventions, aural suggestiveness, dialectic conciliation of contrary elements, intra-structural contingency, systemic autonomy, and linguistic play. By referring to existing theories of humor, especially Freud’s theory of “play,” and Ray’s own critical observations on language, the article reflects on the alternative way to enjoy these poems as Nonsense.

Audio-visual crossmodal correspondences in domestic dogs (Canis familiaris).

Crossmodal correspondences are intuitively held relationships between non-redundant features of a stimulus, such as auditory pitch and visual illumination. While a number of correspondences have been identified in humans to date (e.g. high pitch is intuitively felt to be luminant, angular and elevated in space), their evolutionary and developmental origins remain unclear. Here, we investigated the existence of audio-visual crossmodal correspondences in domestic dogs, and specifically, the known human correspondence in which high auditory pitch is associated with elevated spatial position. In an audio-visual attention task, we found that dogs engaged more with audio-visual stimuli that were congruent with human intuitions (high auditory pitch paired with a spatially elevated visual stimulus) compared to incongruent (low pitch paired with elevated visual stimulus). This result suggests that crossmodal correspondences are not a uniquely human or primate phenomenon and they cannot easily be dismissed as merely lexical conventions (i.e. matching 'high' pitch with 'high' elevation).

Toward an interdisciplinary approach to understanding sensory function in autism spectrum disorder.

Heightened interest in sensory function in persons with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) presents an unprecedented opportunity for impactful, interdisciplinary work between neuroscientists and clinical practitioners for whom sensory processing is a focus. In spite of this promise, and a number of overlapping perspectives on sensory function in persons with ASD, neuroscientists and clinical practitioners are faced with significant practical barriers to transcending disciplinary silos. These barriers include divergent goals, values, and approaches that shape each discipline, as well as different lexical conventions. This commentary is itself an interdisciplinary effort to describe the shared perspectives, and to conceptualize a framework that may guide future investigation in this area. We summarize progress to date and issue a call for clinical practitioners and neuroscientists to expand cross-disciplinary dialogue and to capitalize on the complementary strengths of each field to unveil the links between neural and behavioral manifestations of sensory differences in persons with ASD. Joining forces to face these challenges in a truly interdisciplinary way will lead to more clinically informed neuroscientific investigation of sensory function, and better translation of those findings to clinical practice. Likewise, a more coordinated effort may shed light not only on how current approaches to treating sensory processing differences affect brain and behavioral responses to sensory stimuli in individuals with ASD, but also on whether such approaches translate to gains in broader characteristics associated with ASD. It is our hope that such interdisciplinary undertakings will ultimately converge to improve assessment and interventions for persons with ASD. Autism Res 2016, 9: 920-925. © 2016 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Developing autonomy through awareness of textual features in academic texts

Research on ESL writing suggests that current pedagogical practices typicallytrain developing writers to submit their texts to their teacher for comments and “correction”, without opportunities to develop independent self-editing skills. These practices focus primarily on sentence-level grammar, vocabulary and mechanics. This study reports on an exploration into introducing university-level writers to online corpus tools to develop their ability to edit their own work. Ten native and non-native speaking participants analysed corpus materials and published journal articles relevant to their discipline to compare selected uses of grammar and vocabulary with their own texts. Insights from triangulated data sources (participanttexts, participant and teacher interview data) show how participants edited their work using the corpus tools. Benefits related specifically to awareness of lexical conventions and sentence structure.

Young children follow pointing over words in interpreting acts of reference

Adults refer young children's attention to things in two basic ways: through the use of pointing (and other deictic gestures) and words (and other linguistic conventions). In the current studies, we referred young children (2- and 4-year-olds) to things in conflicting ways, that is, by pointing to one object while indicating linguistically (in some way) a different object. In Study 1, a novel word was put into competition with a pointing gesture in a mutual exclusivity paradigm; that is, with a known and a novel object in front of the child, the adult pointed to the known object (e.g. a cup) while simultaneously requesting 'the modi'. In contrast to the findings of Jaswal and Hansen (2006), children followed almost exclusively the pointing gesture. In Study 2, when a known word was put into competition with a pointing gesture - the adult pointed to the novel object but requested 'the car'- children still followed the pointing gesture. In Study 3, the referent of the pointing gesture was doubly contradicted by the lexical information - the adult pointed to a known object (e.g. a cup) but requested 'the car'- in which case children considered pointing and lexical information equally strong. Together, these findings suggest that in disambiguating acts of reference, young children at both 2 and 4 years of age rely most heavily on pragmatic information (e.g. in a pointing gesture), and only secondarily on lexical conventions and principles.

Implantation d’un tri lexical respectant la particularité des noms propres

The computational treatment of multilingual language resources (as in the Prolex projet, cf (Grass et al. 2002)) should respect lexical conventions admitted by each language’s native speakers. These conventions may vary from one language to another, as in the case of alphabetical sorting algorithm. This algorithm must take a number of universal as well as language-dependent particularities into account, such as the distinction of upper- and lowercase letters, the sorting bi-directionality (from the left to the right or conversely), the role of diacritics (resulting either in variants of a letter, as é, è and ê in French, or in independent letters, as å in Danish or ą in Polish), the role of punctuation characters, the multi-character letters (as ch or ll in Spanish, or dzs in Hungarian) and the ligatures (as œ in French, or ß in German). We describe a Unicode-based sorting algorithm inspired by (LaBonté 1998) for proper names. In the particular case of the sorting of the proper names, three additional points are to be taken into account : the presence of numerical values (Arab numerals or Roman numerals), the variation of spelling of the ligatures and the permutation in the sorting of the multi-word units. Apart from the word list to be sorted, its input is a language-dependent code table which defines the language’s alphabet, the number of algorithm’s passes, the direction of each pass, and the order of letters or groups of letters in each pass. The implementation of the algorithm is done by a finite-state transducer which allows a fast assignment of sort keys to words. The algorithm proved correct for European languages such as English, French, and Polish, as well as for Thai. It outperforms other sorting algorithms, such as those implemented in Intex (Silberztein 1993) and Unitex (Paumier 2003) systems.

Information enforcement and learning with interactive graphical systems

This article describes two studies which assess the benefit of using the specificity principle as a criterion for choosing between alternative graphical representations in teaching and learning. The specificity principle was interpreted as a metric called the information enforcement metric. This is simply a ratio between the total number of states a representational system can support and the number of states or referents in the material being presented. The value of the metric is tested by comparing ratios for several representational teaching systems, with the learning outcomes achieved by subjects using interactive software based on those systems. Counting the states in a representational system is complex, however it is made more simple for some systems by using an intermediate representation. Results show that while the specificity principle is able to predict learning outcomes at a course grain of analysis, that is between systems which are highly expressive and those which are far more specific, between systems of similar specificity the principle interpreted in this way is not validated. A second study shows that students' difficulties in understanding lexical conventions are more pronounced in the least specific of the systems evaluated. This casts further doubt on the value of the specificity principle as a guideline for designing interactive graphical systems for teaching and learning. Several suggestions are offered for developments of this work.